skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: So I'm being let go
After 10 years at my local newspaper (I'm 30 now) I think I will be facing the chopping block in the coming months. I'm nervous, scared, and somewhat excited.

Nervous because my whole adult life has been spent in between these walls. Scared because I don't have a degree and at 30 I'm competing with younger, new grads. Somewhat excited because it will force me out of my comfort zone.

I got married in June of this year so that adds extra pressure since I am now a provider. Luckily, I dont have any kids, yet, to have to worry about.

I've spend the last decade working with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and a suite of other tools. I've built banner ads for advertisers, booked online campaigns in various platforms Google DFP, Yahoo APT. I'm a jack of all trades master of none. I've always taken that as an insult rather than a compliment. I hear it as "your mediocre at a bunch of things...not really good at anything."

So HN, what advice do you have for a 30 year old who's about to embark on a new adventure?
The ones here being happy at this guy being indicted are the ones that defend economic libertarianism later for the sole reason that it allows them to pay less taxes, regardless of what's in the public interest. Disgustingly selfish.
As it stands, there's no law against price gouging. As morally questionable as his pricing is, there's nothing illegal about it. "Being a dick" isn't a criminal offense. Yet.
Isn't it glorious?!!?? But don't get fooled- last year was quite warm also, until....

BTW, "swampthinker" makes me think you live here on the North Shore.
Moving Mountains of Data to AWS [video]
Online Codes: unencumbered, locally-encodable Fountain Codes alternative
Also something similar

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Can you tell me where it says that? I've been looking for details as to when the investigation started but in the document it just lists all the bad things that have happened in the past.
Is there an explanation anywhere of what technical or other criteria they used to pick xorshift128+? I haven’t seen any from the handful of blog posts, etc. I’ve seen about the change. “[...] having understood the problem and after some research, we decided [...]” is hardly a persuasive analysis.

Were any professional experts on PRNGs asked for advice?
The alleged crimes would have been investigated under any circumstances. The question is, would the charges be filed if it weren't politically expedient?

That this question even has any legitimacy is troubling in and of itself.
It definitely is… but what's the extremely strong El Niño related to?
You could do that.

But it's not a part of a typical sentence.

You can also add implications by the gestures you make in between words. That doesn't make English complicated, that's just an irrelevant thing you can do.

Calling such a thing 'hugely important' is just wrong. I didn't miss the point, I think the point has no connection with actual speech.
Yup, we've had a few conversations with Avi, one of the Dabble founders; he's been helpful with advice and feedback.
I'll use an example that has been confusing for me. The contact list alternately shows some people in gray text and others in black while having a separate phone icon.

1) It was not immediately obvious to me that I have to select the name to msg. iMessage deals with this by having a specific messaging icon that makes it clear.

2) I was able to guess that the grayed out names meant no messaging but then again I tried to call multiple of these contacts and it does not seem to work properly in that that I can't seem to reach those people. Not sure if this is broken... Part of this is the legacy of Redphone/Textsecure so as Signal spreads as a single app across platforms, I'm hoping this issue somewhat goes away. [1]

3) It would certainly be nice to have the whole contact list be visible instead of just the known contacts with Signal/Textsecure/Redphone along with the ability to easily share an invite to others to use Signal via iMessage, email etc. (use the standard iOS share dialog) I'm willing to bet this gets a lot more people to see/use/invite others.

4) I would argue that groups/multi-device is the same abstraction in this case (each device would be a hidden subcontact) hence it should be possible to get multi-device support in short order if group support is already there.

I don't believe any of the things I've listed above have security implications but I could always be wrong. Maybe I'll file some tickets this weekend if I have some time.

I did some digging and found the link below. Requiring people to understand and handle an issue around a bloom filter is a bit much. That part should just work.

[1] http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21274348...
State of the Union.js
This is essentially the issue. Having a head start matters. A lot. I went through a phase where I played a lot of video games. I don't regret any of it, but I feel like if I was in a more rigorous high school and had exposure to advanced material I would have benefited from it.
mText2Speech iOS App – Translate instantly between languages
Global arms industry: West still dominant despite decline
It is. In one we have "the market" as the one who cares or not. On the other we have "the people".

The people will continue to care for and use computers, even if the hot new market is something else.
It just keeps getting better (or worse, depending on if you invested with him)...

In addition to failing to settle a huge short position, he managed to turn $1.12 million into $58,500 in 28 days.

> Contrary to SHKRELI' s representations to Merrill Lynch, MSMB Capital had failed to locate OREX shares to borrow in order to settle MSMB Capital's short sales. As a result, MSMB Capital failed to settle a short position of over 11 million shares of OREX, which Merrill Lynch ultimately closed at a loss of over $7 million. In addition to the losses in the Merrill Lynch account, MSMB Capital suffered over $1 million in other trading losses in approximately February 2011. Based on these trading losses, the value of
assets in MSMB Capital's bank and brokerage accounts, not including the OREX losses at Merrill Lynch, declined from more than $1.12 million on or about January 31, 2011 to $58,500 at the end of February 2011.
Definitely hear you! We are working on some performance improvements right now, if you contact us in app, we might be able to figure out what is happening with your data. 2500 rows and 20 columns should still be snappy!
What I'm curious is how this affects the Wu Tang Clan's album he bought?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/martin-shkr...
No, you have it wrong. It's not about the price increase percentage, it's about setting the price to what the market is willing to bear.

In this case the Market is Martin Shkreli, and what he's willing to bear is likely everything he owns.
No sense giving the defense any more reasons for appeal. Whether the guy is a scumbag or not, whether he has a lot of money or not, the criminal justice system should not be imposing undue burden or punishment based on public opinion regarding a matter that isn't even relevant to the case.

I won't lose any sleep when this guy goes to prison for a long time, but no sense doing nonsense that will only mildly inconvenience him and give potential grounds for appeal.
If you're experienced in ML or AI then most of the material in the book will seem pretty elementary. His thesis is interesting as he expresses an interest in unifying the various different approaches to the creation of an intelligent machine. I would recommend youtubing one of the talks he's given in recent months. He's basically been going around giving a 1 hour summary of the book.
Core marketing, accounting, finance, and microeconomics. In more or less that order. Others include behavioral economics/decision theory--or at least read Ariely or Thaler's book. Other possibilities include organizational behavior, negotiation, pricing, business strategy. One general comment is that, if you're just looking at a few courses, you'll probably get more out of in-person courses that have case studies and/or group discussions, role playing, etc. and just read a book to cover more lecture-oriented material (like microeconomics usually is).
You're making the common assumption that such a situation would be "the standing US military roughly as it exists now" vs "rebel citizens with only small arms". This scenario is unlikely to ever happen.

What would be more likely to happen is something like the Civil War where the army itself was also divided. Even more importantly, it is a lot harder to control an army when the targets are the people the army supposedly exists to protect. In a survey[1] of "300 U.S. Marine Corps soldiers" about unit cohesion when working with the UN, the final question asked:

46. The U.S. government declares a ban on the possession, sale,
transportation, and transfer of all non-sporting firearms. A thirty
(30) day amnesty period is permitted for these firearms to be
turned over to the local authorities. A the end of this period, a
number of citizen groups refuse to turn over their firearms.
Consider the following statement:

I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or resist confiscation of
firearms banned by the U.S. government.

(__) (__) (__) (__) (__)
Strongly disagree Disagree Agree Strongly agree No opinion

The results of that question suggests a "citizens vs army" scenario is very unlikely.

The results [...] with 88.0 percent responding,
revealed that 61.66 percent said they would refuse to fire on U.S. citizens,
whereas 26.34 percent indicated they would fire. This particular question,
unlike the others, elicited form 15.97 percent of the respondents with an
opinion, either heavier pen or pencil marks on their response or written
comments in the margin space. [...] The responses to this scenario
suggests that a complete unit breakdown could occur in a unit tasked to
execute this mission.

Small groups of people often have some kind of consistency across the group, because the definition of the group self-selects for something. (e.g. the people who choose to attend a chess club tend to like to play chess) As a group grows in size, the makeup of the group tends to become more heterogeneous. Eventually, as the group becomes very large, the makeup of the group tends to resemble the makeup of the general population.

The military is a very large group of people, so the individual attitudes and politics of a soldier tends to resemble the attitudes and politics seen in the country in general. When considering a topic that is obviously politically controversial, you should expect that the people serving in the armed forces will be approximately as divided as the rest of the citizens.

[1] http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a293790.pdf
Cynical me has to wonder if this has less to do with stealing and more to do with getting the plebs riled up to the point they start wanting to shine a light on the whole ecosystem. Powerful people in government and industry are... well, not the kind of people who take lightly to having their loot threatened.

Note to self: if you ever take up stealing as a primary business, do it quietly and don't attract attention to your fellows.
I think you sum it up in your first sentence: an MBA involves the study of the discipline of business. It's distinct from the practice of actually running a business, and the courses/classes are almost always highly theoretical and research based. I have a masters in business and I can assure you that no company will let me manage shit, because the course didn't confer 'experience' unto me.

I'm sure that all competent managers of programmers respect the craft. I've met several managers who didn't respect programmers though, but my perception of them was that they weren't competent ;)
As soon as OP started talking about Go and Clojure and Core.async, I wondered if Scala.js would give him the same sort of benefits in this case as ClojureScript. But I don't know a lot about Scala.js yet and if you can actually run an actor system on the javascript frontend.
I use node.js and express.js for building this project.
Actually that is very "easy" to do, first you short sell some stock (naked short) for $1M, then the stocks value goes up by $8M. You are asked to cover your short and even after your $1M you are still left holding $7M in liabilities.
> The str/unicode fix was one of the driving factors for Python 3 to exist in the first place, and if you removed it, then what's the point?

The reason python 3 exists is that most python 2 code had latent unicode-related bugs that would only manifest when they were exposed to non-ascii data. The backwards-incompatible barrier between str and bytes was the solution the python 3 team chose for this problem; adopting utf-8 as the standard encoding would have been another solution which I claim would have been more backwards-compatible (essentially moving to the go/rust model, which prove that you don't necessarily need separate byte and character string types for correct unicode handling).
I find it very dangerous if anyone would capable of -or should have the power to- determine the standards that messages should adhere to. That is precisely the type of behavior that will once prevent a resistance from speaking out against its oppressor.

And we are not talking 0.1%, we are talking about a lot less than 1 in 1000 and that is important here. I strongly believe that taking freedom away, i.e. by prescribing what the standards are that messages should adhere to, will breed disrespect, anger, hate, feelings of oppression.

A mind virus does not ignite among happy, free people, it ignites among oppressed people. We should avoid oppressing people.
Seriously disappointing news.

Shkreli seemed like such an obvious troll in how he defended his price gouging by saying that a CEO's role is to maximize profit for the benefit of shareholders...and yet did so in such an unnecessarily obnoxious way that if he truly were the uber-capitalist, he would know that bragging and drawing attention to what an asshole you are does not achieve the true capitalist goal. I would've bet money that in a year, he would reveal that his act was just a trolling piece of noble performance art to raise awareness of how evil corporations could be.

I'm holding out hope that getting arrested and indicted is still all part of his greater plan, though if so, it's a bit more elaborate than it needs to be, IMHO :)
Show HN: Who's offering the biggest holiday discounts?
Why should I have to explain why I accidentally called someone by the name they went by for 65 years. It's not a contradictory view. It's a slip up. My response was literally a 5 second google search, went with the name in the title, and posted.

No malice, no motives, just a mistake. Stop reading so far into it.

The way you worded your response was basically, "If it was an error why are you a bigot?"
It was created long before .format and is better in some cases for i18n where simplicity is best.
Umm, you know how short sales work right? You're borrowing shares to sell them at current prices and then have to return the shares later. If the price rises, you are out the difference between what you sold at and what you repurchase at for when the call to cover comes in.
You can try install it in local machine for more details...
I didn't realise JS's Math.random() really wasn't quite so random...
It's actually very easy to do that.
That's right, though it's a bit more difficult. Lots of sites use the User-Agent header to determine how to render a page, and may not render it at all if it's an unexpected value. Pages that allow you to install addons to your browsers also use this string to figure out if you're really running the target browser.
I really wonder what kind of filter bubble one must live in to write "those stuck on Windows" on a place like HN.
> The whole point of cat is to concatenate files.

Yes.

> So you want cat to error out if one of the files that was passed has a different encoding.

No. I expect it to read bits from stream A until it is exhausted and then read bits from stream B until it is exhausted. All the time just writing the ones and zeros read to the output stream (of bits). And no, a byte does not have to be "8 bit" (http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_by_b...).
Depends on lots of factors, maybe 15 years ago the green card backlog wasn't high or the category under which he would have applied - if EB-1, it is quick as in 6 months, EB-2 - 7 - 8 years (India) etc.
Your own community can't agree if drag is trans.
But apart from being "Internet compatible", it makes little sense to move from ascii only to utf-8. It only makes sense if you're already trying to deal with stuff that doesn't fit in ascii. Don't get me wrong, I think ascii was a terrible hack (I seem to recall one of the designers called it his biggest mistake/regret - and that they should've gone with some kind of prefix-encoding).

But the thing with unicode-everywhere is that it's more beginner friendly: you can have unicode in your variable names, and strings without giving it another thought.

$ cat u.py
from __future__ import print_function
å="æ"
print(å)
$ python2 u.py
File "u.py", line 2
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3'
in file u.py on line 2, but no
encoding declared;
see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
for details
$ python3 u.py
æ

Sure, the explanation of what's wrong is right there in the
error-message, but it seems a bit of an unnecessary hurdle for people to
get around to write important programs, that ask you to type in your
name, and then prints out the name ten times ;-)
Maybe they're not selling razors there that violate P&G's patent inside the US only to markets outside the reach of the US patent? I don't know which product lines are actually in violation of the patent.
Great, so they told us to "embrace DRM on the web if you want plugin-free Netflix!", and then we got both the DRM and a Netflix plugin.

Such a deal.
Yelp killer? Let me know when Facebook has a dedicated app on your smartphone that doesn't require login which searches for businesses in a map view, with pictures, ratings, and reviews.
https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo... ?

But seriously, "OBC currently offers two implementations of PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus, as a means to validate transactions".
You're right that O(1) access is pointless, and UTF-8 is fine. But there are space optimizations on the Python string object which make it so it doesn't waste that much space. Basically, it dynamically selects LATIN-1, UCS-2, or UTF-32 (or you could call them UCS-1, UCS-2, UCS-4, but there isn't really any such thing as UCS-1, and UCS-4 is an obsolete name for UTF-32).

>>> import sys
>>> def charsize(x):
... return sys.getsizeof(x + x) - sys.getsizeof(x)
...
>>> charsize(b'A')
1
>>> charsize('A')
1
>>> charsize('\xff')
1
>>> charsize('\uffff')
2
>>> charsize('\U0010FFFF')
4
That's actually not always true. Any application running on node.js is using the V8 engine as it's serverside backend, and might thusly be affected. There are also a handful of applications that do clientside encryption. (MEGA comes to mind, someone here should chime in with a better example.) Just because the use case is uncommon doesn't make it invalid.
SynTouch Is Giving Robots the Ability to Feel Textures Like Humans Do
Google Indexing HTTPS pages by default
Gillette Sues Dollar Shave Club for Patent Infringement
An Omega boar bristle brush goes for <$10 CAD in my neighbourhood drug store. They also stock Proraso shaving soaps/creams, a container of which lasts me a good 1.5-2 years. Boar bristle brushes require a bit of prep to use, see https://www.reddit.com/r/wicked_edge/wiki/brushes#wiki_boar_.... I just throw it in the sink for a soak before I hop in the shower.

As with most things, it's easy to get sucked in and blow $100s on your setup, but you don't have to. I spent <$50 to get started.
Crypto as I know it doesn't allow performing an authenticated key exchange between two entities without neither a pre-shared secret nor a trusted third party (CA) [1]. Anyone who promises anything like that is either selling snake-oil or hiding some requirement. DANE still requires trusted third parties, I'm not sure why it's better than the current model.

[1] There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles, but it's not really practical when you make it secure and not secure when you make it practical.
We've been tracking prices across hundreds of retailers for much of 2015, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's Amazon. This list is a subset showing the realtime prices from dozens of merchants on some popular items.

Walmart is a close second and will regularly outprice Amazon on certain items.
I browse with cookies disabled by default, and when I ran the browser test it said this:

Are Cookies Enabled?
No

one in x browsers have this value
3.94

...so according to the EFF's data, almost 1 in 4 people also browse with cookies disabled? I thought I was in an extreme minority, and I know I come across a TON of sites that don't work without cookies or localStorage enabled (which is understandable for when you need to log in or if it's a more "app"-y thing, but for just reading content it's a ridiculous requirement).
>"The null hypothesis would posit independent events with equal probability (the chance of an above-average and below-average year are equivalent)."

Why should that be the null hypothesis? Is that a theory someone subscribes to? That would be a theory of no trends and no auto-correlation in temperature. I doubt you will find someone espousing such a theory, so why should we make something no one believes a null hypothesis? If you can find someone claiming that, I am interested in the reasoning.
Hopefully it never is. One person's dick may have another person's respect. umm... figuratively.
Yes, I could do that. But as it is, I'm no worse off than anyone else with Python2 codebases.

I used to use the future imports and the things you're suggesting but since my job is Python2.x I stopped. I prefer to just keep my head there all the time. If I were to migrate to CPython3 instead of PyPy4 as I've done, it would be a wholesale move. Employer moves, I move. The underlying incentives aren't there though at the moment for either of us.

I'm certainly not going to push my employer into something that isn't in their best-interests (or mine, work for nothing). If anything, they need to move to PyPy for the same reasons I did.

Py3 needs a bigger ecosystem than 2.x, needs an answer to PyPy4's CPU performance and removal of the GIL, and convince employers it's better than CPython2 and/or PyPy4.
Those are 4 potentially insurmountable tasks.

The best thing to do is start removing features rather than adding them, such as this 4th string formatting method in 3.6. It (Python3) is just very unappealing.
Really great article. In particular the comparison of top job per state in 2000 vs 2014 was pretty mind-blowing.

It also echoes what I have been hearing a lot -- despite tons of new developers and people interested in a career in coding, its becoming increasingly difficult to find solid, competent developers.

Lots of opportunity for innovation in the education space imo.
nah man, it's Blonde, Brunette, Redhead...
Pngwolf png optimizer
len("\u0301") == 0 is extremely surprising.
Price gouging may be perfectly legal in the drug price context, but it gives cause to re-examine a whole range of implicit assumptions re: how capitalism is allowed (encouraged?) to operate vs how well it delivers benefits to society.
As long as we agree that sovereignty and legitimacy are two different things.
Show HN: Intelligent Algebra learning site with humor, social, and gaming spects
Can't recursion do multithreading whereas iteration cannot?
I always thought it meant sore loser, but if someone interprets it differently then it's a trip to the HR office. :/
"enterprise grade code"

What does that even mean? I read that and think to myself "cowboy generated spaghetti code with more bugs and more technical debt".