skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN: need advice/help
I'm a young hacker who's in a bit of trouble.

Without getting too long winded, I'm recently out of college and living in a home I inherited after my mother passed. I was lax about maintenance while in school (and take full responsibility for that.)

The city health department sent me a letter about my house's paint-job and I tried to comply.

Apparently my paint-job was insufficient, so they brought legal charges against me which resulted in 2 years of probation and 30 days of jail if I'm unable to fix it in 60 days. The obvious thing to do is hire a professional, but I'm completely out of money now. The court tacks on hundreds in fees, which has drained my account.

I've never run afoul of the law and this whole experience has made me terribly afraid. I never set out to hurt or bother anyone in the world - all I do is solve math problems and write software for fun.

My request is that if anyone has any sort of little programming work that I could do for some small amount of money, then I will do it. Posting this is extremely embarrassing for me, but I have very little options left and I'm really struggling.

I can be reached at scaredhacker@gmail.com. If this post is stupid or bothers anyone feel free to remove it, I'm sorry.
If your students are behaving like that then run of the mill cheating is the least of your problems. And I can't see how a thesis can be properly defended except in real time, we aren't talking about marking an exam here but getting the student to make it clear that he or she really does understand the work presented (in my case over a hundred pages of experimental design, execution, results, and interpretation) and can explain it and defend it against criticism.

Some universities still require PhD theses to be defended in public, for instance Oslo:
==== begin quote

The PhD degree is conferred on the basis of:

completion of the programme's educational component

the doctoral thesis

the doctoral examination

The doctoral examination consists of the trial lecture and the public defence of the thesis, also known as the disputation.

=== end quote
So I just bought a new Postbox license. Why should I buy and use your product instead? Convince me!
Three Strategies to Help You Get Unstuck in Graduate School
We're talking about absolute numbers so small that we can't have much confidence in the cause (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/125.full):

Between 1986 and 1996 a total of 21 cases of leukaemia were observed in Zhitomir occurring among children born during 1986. A total of eight cases were observed in the largely uncontaminated Poltava region.
That's a fair point. IIRC, FaceTime actually ran into patent trouble that kept it from being a P2P protocol, so they couldn't really open it up.
Talking Machines: Machine Learning in Neuroscience with Microsoft’s Sham Kakade
This is where I always thought HUDs would come into play. And yet, apparently, mostly, no...

One could probably have integrated this into Glass as well, but given the snail's pace of Android Auto (and the raging quality issues of Android in general), no yet again.

I would have loved a HUD manipulated through steering wheel controls. From what I've heard, this was too overwhelming for the previous generation of American drivers. I wonder if the next generation would fare better.
The sound of the engine made me drool. And being able to do it hands off... that's some damn fine engineering and software!
Stay beginners
As a former management consultant - yes, I did this.
That stance can also backfire in the form of "OK you're too busy to help me so I'll hire outside contractors to do it instead." which leads to a bigger mess to sort out later. I try to at least offer a partial solution.
Unfortunately, I think I'd have to assert and verify that for every corporation to truly prove it.

I'm not interested in spending my life doing that, but someone simply needs to show a counter-example to force me to drop the theory :P
Relevant now because:

In a little over a week, Snowden is to be awarded the prestigious Bjørnson Prize[1] by the Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson Academy.

He receives the award for his disclosures of the threat to free speech constituted by the electronic surveillance that he has revealed.

Snowden is invited to Norway to receive the prize. But no one can give a clear answer on what will happen to him, should he land at Oslo Airport.

[1]: http://blogg.bjornsonakademiet.no/uncategorized/a-prize-for-...
The word "belief" can cover all the ground between "buying into some grand vision for the world" and "belief that you'll get paid next week". When you're starting at square zero, it's useful to treat this whole spectrum as the same problem. Your kick-ass developer doesn't need to buy in some lofty delusion -- she simply needs to believe what you're working on is a stable, useful thing worth contributing to.
I know quite a few people who should be running :-)

The problem is - where to? A good start-up is hard to find.
Sometimes you just have to suck it up to pay the bills.
Let me ask you a honest and serious question. Would you start a software company and when it becomes successful, hire me on to be an equal partner?

If so, I would join your co-op. There is something to be said about being rewarded for taking a risk, but if you're willing to share that reward, I would think highly of you and gladly partake.
Why use firefighters at all in situations where there isn't the potential for a fire to happen? It seems like police and any needed EMT workers could handle the situation without needing bigger fire trucks that are more expensive to run and more disruptive to traffic. I'd think the police would also be closer to respond to such situations as they may already be on the street or in a nearby police vehicle.
America hasn't declined, and isn't declining.

- The US has a higher share of global GDP than it did in 1890 / 1910, when it became the world's largest economy. It has the same share of global GDP as it did in 1980. That's despite a massive rise in GDP from emerging markets, former Soviet nations, etc.

- The US output on science, innovation, invention, is as high as it has ever been. US universities continue to be prodigious sources of output. US R&D expenditures are three times higher today (after adjusting for inflation), than in 1980.

- US manufacturing output is at an all-time high.

- The US still holds 40% to 45% of all global wealth.

- The US has one of the top five or six highest median incomes, and median disposable incomes. The strong dollar, much like during the 1990s, has returned a vast amount of purchasing power to US consumers and boosted incomes substantially versus the rest of the world. GDP just punched in at 3.7% growth, drastically beyond that of Europe, despite the strong dollar. While Europe and Japan have been mired in stagnation, the US has grown its economy substantially since 2007.

- Violent crime has been falling for basically 40 years.

- Reforms have begun around mass incarceration, with the prison population peaking and likely to begin a long-term decline. The war on drugs is ending. Equality on individual rights is far greater than it was 40 or 50 years ago.

- More people are covered by health insurance than at any other time in US history. That will continue to get better with gradual reforms and improvements in the system, including the ACA.

- Life expectancy for the US is at an all-time high, on par with Finland, Denmark and South Korea. Obesity has begun to finally decline, which will improve life expectancy rates further. Death by heart attack and stroke has plunged dramatically over the last 50 years. The US healthcare system is comparable to Canada in terms of quality and outcomes (but not cost) [1]. The US healthcare system is likely to improve a lot as the government bends costs down and broadens access.

- The poverty rate hasn't changed since 1980, and is similar to the late 1960s when the US was near the all-time peak of its economic power due to WW2.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthca...
I don't use Docker so I don't know how opinionated this issue is, but it paints a bleak picture of the project.

Breaking stuff after the 1.0 release should generally be reserved for major versions (i.e. 1.0 -> 2.0), and incorrect basic documentation and specs are embarrassing for a project of this size.

Is this just a case where the project has been adopted too soon and developed too fast? It seems like Docker still has maturity issues past version 1.0 (based on a number of other negative responses to the project I've read elsewhere as well).
> That it can use its power sources independently.

I would suspect that all hybrids can use their power sources independently, to some degree. But is that degree useful.

What you're calling a "hybrid" is really more of a "dual fuel" vehicle, not a hybrid. Because in your mind, if it can't run completely 100% off of EITHER power source at any one time, it's not a hybrid. But that's not how most of the world defines hybrid.
Nothing personal, but I'm calling bs on that statement of companies hiring the "best" in any position. The reality is that companies hire what they can afford and are willing to take a hit on productivity in the short term if it means getting a service or product out of the door. You can always make something better later but you can't make something if you have no one you can hire to get it done. As for women in programming, I would argue that I know more women programmers that are far better than me at the job despite my knack for teasing out oddities in bugs. My own talent doesn't always make up for solid performance. So that Cowboy Programmer schtick doesn't work when you're trying to get hired at any company that most of the Valley would consider boring.
> the "ones who put their ass on the line" (which doesn't include them? [not following your logic here]) a big reward.

The big reward is a big chunk of money. Employees very rarely make a lot of money after an acquisition.

> More generally, this is known as alienation of labor. Many humans, when they are reduced to pure commodities, don't feel too great about it and may begin to suffer mentally and physically as a result.

I never said that. People may not care about your big dream of saving the world and still be experts in their domain and be excited about the technical challenges that come with your idea. I've worked in many industries without caring at all for them (think finance, gambling, advertising) but I was still very stimulated by the technical problems to solve.

There is a big line between not drinking the kool-aid of "we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility." and alienation of labor.
So is every human organization.

The basic facts of life are that we're born, we eat, we sleep, we shit, we piss, some of us reproduce, and we die. All other meaning beyond that is socially constructed, from religion to power to currency and wealth to corporations, cults, voluntary associations, friendship, identity, and so on.

All history has been the story of one social illusion replacing another. For a couple millenia the church was dominant; for some period within that, it jockeyed with the kingdom. Starting in the 1800s, the nation-state became dominant; people have been increasingly losing trust in them since Vietnam. The traditional big corp died, as a source of allegiance, in the 1980s. Startups are moving in to fill a void - and, as productive organizations that rely upon peoples' consent for their existence, I think they're a lot better than many of their predecessors.
Right, but eventually the older backups (still containing Joe Public's data) will go away. Depending on how long you retain backups it may be anywhere from a few days to perhaps a few months but at least it will be gone from the live systems immediately.
It doesn't need multitasking/multi programming as a language feature because these are provided by GCD as a library.
Tesla has steering wheel (physical) controls that map to Radio, AC, etc.
Oh dear. You had one job, min!
How to set up your rails private pub instant messenger for https/ssl
Lavaboom has shut down
Totally false. Not only is there no such tie, Apple is preparing a Linux open source release.
It's a neverending parade of clowns who cannot piece together the entirety of evidence to make coherent, high-level explanations that derive in knowledge.

Oh, I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure most of them can piece it together, but they deliberately don't because that isn't the answer they want. The big money denialists certainly understand the big picture, but it's tactically more effective for them to attack the small bits in order to engender doubt in people who actively want to believe the scientists are wrong.
Of course.

Now, would you rather hire the dummy who has no clue how to get shit done but believe in your "LinkedIn for puppies" or the expert who will take you there without caring for your idea?

This post makes it sound like it's a requirement that employees believe deep down in their soul in your idea, while it is not at all required to do a good job.
Right. I'd definitely share the video feeds not only with the 911 dispatchers, but with local fire, police and EMT workers, so everyone is on the same page and could provide additional insight from their knowledge of the area and/or specific people.
Have you driven a Tesla for any period of time?
Ok, you don't like XMonad or Haskell, fine. I use XMonad daily. It has a giant pile of contributed modules, it's extremely flexible and used by a reasonable amount of people. I can give you one reason for not i3, ratpoison or dwm: as far as I know, they are all manual tiling WM (no notion of "master" window like XMonad). They're still tiling WMs, but of a different breed.
Wharton Crowdfunding Study
The article was a reasonably persuasive argument for why Python should be your first language. Maybe someone should write "Why I want Swift to be relevant to non-Appleheads".
There was a good discussion last night at the SF Microservices meetup about how early we are with containerized applications. The company I work for, Giant Swarm, provides a containerized stack solution and we run people through a short survey when they sign up for our shared cluster offering. The survey shows that about 15% of companies (at least for peeps showing up on our site) have some type of containerized application in production. That's not a big number. Yet.

The problem being described in this issue is one person's experience with Docker, but I've heard similar stories from others about similar projects in the past. Looking at you, OpenStack. Yes, things are breaking fast with Docker - I've experienced them myself. Yes, new companies and offerings are joining the ecosystem daily - which can be maddenly confusing for users trying to understand the technologies. This creates a sense of instability when so much is going on at once.

I think the problem is that, when new ways of doing compute things spin up, they become highly disruptive to both the people using older technologies AND the companies developing the new technologies. Given the new way of doing things usually gives an advantage to those using them, the challenge comes from trying to put those technologies into production before they are finished, all the while keeping an eye on shareholder value.

I call this the "problem cloud". It's really a people problem though, so maybe it should be called "problem people". :)
And just underneath it: "Westergren himself ran up a $500,000 debt on "maxed-out cards" while he paid bills and as many salaries as he could afford."

Having never run up that kind of debt I don't know how easy it was for Westergren to do that. But it seems to be a lot of operating cost and wages were being covered by personal debt the founders took out during this time. That or he lived a rather lavish lifestyle.

While I hate the dishonesty and treatment towards employees it seems like Pandora was guilty of, I think some of the numbers are hyperbolic and while the situation was really, really bad, its not as bad as your comment made it out to be.
Obviously it's not the whole picture, but I think the most quantitative answer is that the human resources field is one of the most female-dominated out there (source: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf).
Small companies sell better and cheaper products than big businesses, but somehow people have never heard about them, and that's because of "advertising". Sure, buddy. You keep telling yourself that.
> Especially since LA county has a higher poverty rate than the rest of the country. [3]

Hate to nickpick but this should be "rest of the state." since this is what the article says instead of country.
Amazon's Failed Fire Phone Was Too Creepy for Customers
Why would we counter inflation from China with QE?
I think the whole language around 'cults' is shifting in large part because of startups and in particular the work of Peter Thiel and Steve Newcomb:

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/
http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr...

Steve Jobs obviously stands in a class all his own.

I'd think of it this way, startups and tech disrupt easy things first then harder things. The Newspaper industry was easy pickings, tech devoured it. Now it's working on eating the taxi industry[Uber,Lyft], the auto Industry[Tesla], and the monetary & financial system[Bitcoin]. Once it devours money, which has been the traditional exclusive comport of governments, government itself will be next. After that . . . Religion.

This pattern makes sense, pioneering West was often driven by a religious sentimentality. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Maybe we will start calling them NRE's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_religious_movement
>which feels like the range that a good email client could easily be worth.

The problem is that I don't want to drop $40 sight unseen. I still haven't come across an email reader that doesn't suck, and $40, hell $10, is a lot of money to basically throw away if the program doesn't work out for what you need.
seconded, for people who want to sacrifice some convenience for control µmatrix may be a better choice.
This is such an awesome resource!!!! {Edit: I say this as a writer and not as a 3D animator / designer. I apologize for sounding very fan-boy about it, but I do really appreciate this.}
The idea that everyone can and should work at a company where they really believe in the mission or culture of that company seems at least somewhat idealistic and naïve.
Warning stickers on cigarettes are mandated by law.
FaceTime was prevented from being open sourced by a patent troll. Continuing to repeat misinformation about this in threads like this is not a reflection on Apple, and is clearly irrelevant to whether Swift will be open sourced.

Pay attention to Chris Lattner and his track record if you want a realistic view of whether the open source promise is likely to be kept for Swift.
For a perspective of what it's like for children who are currently living in a meltdown zone, see the contrast with this article: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life-in...
Except for the part where he specifically mentioned Swift's ARC as something to expose Intro students to vs. Python's garbage collection?
You can't make baseless accusations of shillage on HN. We've detached this subthread and marked it off-topic.
Icinga Open Source Enterprise Monitoring
I'm 32 and male. I'm from the practical scene, not the car scene.
The same can be said about Windows, yet both the European Union and the United States accused Microsoft of abusing their monopoly by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. This antitrust against Google is really similar.
Rental?
Sockpuppet votes and comments are not allowed on HN. We ban accounts that do this.
It's more of an observation in regards to what seems to be the CCP's end goal of lifting all of China's people out of poverty. It's been sacrificing services like healthcare and education to get their economy up and running, but it seems to only benefits only a few of China's citizens. So, I just wonder if the CCP has given up on the goal of socialism to communism.
Black Duck Open Hub Maintenance Window
I have also heard that the first time the FaceTime engineers found out the protocol was going to be open sourced was when Steve announced it live on stage to the world.

I'm not happy with what happened to FaceTime but I don't think Swift is in the same boat. It seems to have the backing of all the relevant parties and shouldn't face any hurdles like the patent stuff that sank FaceTime. And they gave a hard deadline for themselves to stick to. I'm pretty optimistic about it happening.
Inside the world of pirate radio – UK
Please don't take threads down well-trodden paths to flamewars.

Detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127640 and marked off topic.
The Need for Privacy Policies in Mobile Apps – An Overview
> i punch it at full throttle to 65mph every time i use an
> on-ramp. i bought a performance car to use it as advertised.
>
> perfectly legal, and appropriate, when traffic permits.

It's not perfectly legal. Look up reckless driving or exhibition of speed laws. If you have a modern performance car and you do this in front of a cop, you're very likely to get a ticket. (An older car's full throttle might be too slow to concern a police officer and the laws are vague to allow the police officer's discretion.)

One can't legally use a performance car as advertised on public roads.

> in fact, if you don't, you're probably a shitty driver

I think you just mean you have to be at appropriate speed for a safe merge, but is full throttle really required? Unlikely.
I'm extremely excited about posts/libraries like these. They really show off the unique powers of Rust in a way that's a bit more compelling than "Rust is just C++14 with a bit stronger guarantees and more clean semantics."

Also worth noting, and something I missed when I read the draft of this post: this isn't just an implementation of a lock-free structure: it's a whole library, Crossbeam[1] that helps you implement your own lock-free structures.

> In general, it’s possible to take lock-free algorithms “off the shelf” (the
> ones on the shelf generally assume a GC) and code them up directly against
> Crossbeam in this way.

1: https://crates.io/crates/crossbeam
Since most mail programs I usually just try for a few days and move on from, I'm not really willing to drop $10 (I know that's almost nothing) on something just to try it out. Highly recommend adding a trial version.
This is actually a clever marketing trick by Elon Musk. You cannot upgrade a Roadster, and you cannot upgrade the P70 models either.

Tesla has been pretty unclear about their modularity and upgrades. Be careful when reading marketing material: these marketing slides open your imagination but aren't necessarily filled with the truth. They've kept things vague to help stir our imaginations... but don't go dropping $70,000 on vague promises.

When Tesla starts actually making modular cars, we'll know the details. Until then, treat these promises as marketing and/or vaporware. I'm sure Elon Musk is going to push his company to actually deliver on his promises, but sometimes engineers can only do so much.
Had nothing to do with smarts, I just had been using computers and started to teach myself programming at 11 years old.
Yes, the advertising industry is made up of magicians who make people desire things they don't want.

Why is it you don't believe THAT's the happy accident and byproduct, while diffusing information is the main mechanism?

If you'd ever tried to convince someone to buy something they don't want, you'd have a good idea about how likely that scenario is.

Have you ever bought something you didn't want?