skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My thinking is that public markets are shitty, so almost all of the value capture takes place way before a company is worth it,

In a public market, capitalism [generally] prices things appropriately so its hard to make a killing on it. But, you can still make money.

That is the basic function of a fair market and its important it continues to exist.
Thanks for backing up your claim with a citation to directly relevant research. I wish others in contentious threads could to the same.
Ask HN: (online) high school level education as an adult?
Hi HN!

My wife grew up in poor rural China and stopped attending school at a young age. She can read and write Chinese but only learned English a few years ago and is still at beginner level (she reads slowly for example). Therefore, despite being very intelligent, she has a limited general culture by Western standards (geography, mathematics, science, history, etc.). To give you an idea, until recently she thought that Africa was a country.

She has shown interest in learning and improving her general knowledge but I'm not sure how to help her. The thought of her attempting an undergraduate degree at college/university crossed my mind but I fear she isn't prepared for that yet. I know about Khan Academy but last I checked (a while ago) it was a bunch of YouTube videos without much structure and I believe she would need a bit more hand holding in the beginning.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!
That shadow demo is all pre rendered though right? Like stats of the art?
2016

Seemingly this is the year that Bit Coin stumbled.
Depends on the country
I'm a self-taught career changer and work for a team that has several new developers transferred from other departments.

It works out surprisingly well. The 2-3 experienced devs and myself do the harder development parts and the new developers are actually quite valuable as they contribute plenty to the code but also often explain some of the business considerations from other departments.
No. Everyone knows the meaning of the pause button (and the others), because the word "pause" was written above or below the fucking symbol on VCRs, tape players, etc, for DECADES. So no, manufacturers didn't just beat consumers over the head with it to the point it became learned.
I think he meant that young designers overstate the problem by saying it was "worse the clippy". I'm sure these folks you mention aren't so overstated.
Wow, what a crock of shit. How did this get to the top of HN?

- It seems the author has some problem with technical people but they never state what the problem is.

- The author identifies that technical people aren't strong on "Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc." What the shit? These are exactly what makes technical people so strong.

Maybe the author doesn't like the terse and functional communication method used by technical people; but if they can't handle technical people or understand why we talk that way then they are the problem.

- "we need to value non-code skills much more highly and explicitly." They never explain why you want to hire janitors with mathematics intuition, or brain surgeons who can also tap dance; but if you're a programmer then you damn well better be extrovert! I don't care if you can code just give me a nice conversation about sports and cars. Idiot.

- "But resumes, interviews, the whole hiring process is set up to focus on technical ability."

Actually a very tiny tiny portion of Silicon Valley hires on extreme programming challenges. The 99.999% rest of companies all over the rest of the world hire based on how much they like you in the interview - causing much frustration for people who are highly skilled and eager and ready to go for some job but got turned away because they were brogrammer enough.

- "Hiring devs is really hard". What? How? Because there aren't enough? Because of some other problem? Just stating shit out of the ether doesn't make it true. A bit of introspection and elucidation would go a long way.

- "Can't code? GTFO." If you were an engineer you'd be told to GTFO. If you were a pilot you'd be told to GTFO. If you were a surgeon you'd be told to GTFO. If you were an accountant you'd be told to GTFO.

The only places that don't tell you to GTFO are fast food and strip joints. I can see the author holds IT skills in high esteem.

This article is a pile of shit.
> You're asking people to prove a negative[1]. It's a common logical fallacy.

No, he's asking for proof that there has been a non-internal Bitcoin hack. That's a simple existence proof.

If he were asking one to prove a negative, he'd have to ask something like "prove that there have been no internal Bitcoin hacks" (which is likely easily refuted but beside the point).

(He may be implicitly claiming a negative proof, by implying that there isn't any evidence that these are non-internal hacks, and therefore they must be inside jobs. But that's merely asking others to disprove a negative, which is trivial with evidence.)
tradewars++ lord++

So many nights, dialing in at 12:01 to finally be able to run turns, and auto dial until you can get in.
The hamburger menus mean "show me more actions I can perform." Pretty simple if you ask me.
As a DBA I think if you have an installation of considerable size you really absolutely need one of those high salaried people. The rest - sure have juniors. But there is a reason people with a lot of experience demand a lot and that's because all of the little things we know make up for a lot of improvements and help when things go bad.
I don't know about what's common in UK politics, but striking down the Draft Communications Data Bill is just going to mean it's going to come back under the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bill as a subsection for the USA. You stop SOPA and it's coming back under the general defense funding bill.

You vote against that bill and your opponents are going to mention that you obstructed the funding of the armed forces -- and you did. It's just that there was nuance to the event, nuance that always gets lost when the varying disseminators of information go out to organize votes.

That's because you haven't stopped the factors behind the bill. There's a natural bureaucratic motive to being able to control citizens. There are police unions lobbying for this kind of stuff, unions who will make note that you voted against their favor.

Reddit got tired of SOPA and CISPA-esque stuff. They probably couldn't convert the PR injury into actual votes that mattered in the states that matter, so it's just noise anyway.
Is it possible to transmit energy as information, and if so at what efficiency? I can imagine some crazy sci-fi possibilities there... like Dyson Swarm type solar power satellites that beam power anywhere as a data stream.
Anyone Looking for a Wordpress or Ruby Dev?
Hey Guys!

So, instead of drop a web dev pitch here I'm just going to ask - what's a really great way to land some web development work as a freelancer?

Here's the thing. I've been doing it for about 3 years already, but I got spoiled since all my clients were based on referrals. Plus I was lucky because when I got in it my first clients were very well connected. So it just spread from there.

I decided to make a change for a while and work for a single company. I decided that that wasn't for me and I'm back again doing the freelance thing. But instead of going the slow route and building up referral clientele again I want to jump start the process with new solid clients.

And the rub is this - I moved to the middle of nowhere to focus on building a web application. I'm dead smack in between San Fran and LA - in silent hill. Thankfully I've got a decent cushion of money to live with for a while but it's not going to last forever! Otherwise the obviously easy thing to do is to go to dev and tech meet-ups (None in my area).

Anyway, your thoughts are warmly welcomed.
No. They tend to be blocked completely.
What China Gets Right About Relationships
Tryout ESP8266 it comes with hacker happiness.
i keep wondering - whether the combination of ES6/Typescript + immutable.js + lodash + d3 + asm.js makes for the true next generation of R like analytics tools.

The way that Periscope.io works is probably indicative of the direction of a JS based analytics/prototyping framework.

I suppose the first step needs to be a Jupyter notebook in ES6.
I can get on board with the idea that the hamburger is bad for developers because we want our users to use our app a specific way. If the button is in their face, they are more likely to click on it - makes sense.

I'm not convinced it's bad for users. I can't think if a single place where I would not prefer the extra screen real estate.
I really don't believe in the use of the hamburger menu. You can just as easily have the word "menu" in the same amount of space. For something as critical as a main menu, why introduce any possible confusion.
Did you read the article? Link between sleep / blue light and cancer rates. When dealing with billions of people, small forces can cause big numbers...

Clearly the HN hive-mind agrees with you that I'm being to hyperbolic, but downvotes aside I think there's a strong argument that this is so easy that even a very minor health benefit would mandate adding it to every device everywhere.
I Googled Lucky7Coin (the wallet that the article says its developer had placed an IRC backdoor into). Check this out:

https://github.com/alerj78/lucky7coin/issues/1

It's like a living Underhanded C competition.
just to re-iterate, the reference text #13 I.e. parallel distributed processing (vol. 1&2) are also an excellent introduction to the field, from its infancy.

contains a collection of papers by nn luminaries including rumelhart, Hinton etc. Very highly recommended.
More importantly, "..." has (at least; I don't know the exact timing here) a couple decades of history behind it as an indication of "more stuff is going to pop up when you click this item"-- it was used to indicate that a menu item was going to open a dialog prompting for more information at least as far back as Windows 3.1 on the Windows side and System 7 on the Mac side.

But, really, I don't care that much about what character we use as a menu button; I just wish we'd settle on one, for consistency's sake. And, when we do show a menu button, it shouldn't become a "kitchen sink" kind of menu (looking at you, Chrome)-- a menu button (without specific text or a more specific icon) should house global navigation and functionality, with more specific functionality placed in contextually appropriate locations within your app, where the user will actually find them.
The point of both of these has nothing to do with increasing the speed of javascript. It has far more to do with opening the web up to other programming languages in a meaningful manner.
That's why MS used the word "start" in their main menu for Windows.
A mod actually changed the title of a submission I made to include a swear word when I posted an asterisk-laden version of it [1]. So I think you are correct that there is not a swearing policy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8897764
I strongly disagree with this, and use the word MENU every chance I get. Because always bet on text: http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html

And also, I've seen A/B tests show that users prefer MENU text.
Will Robots save the future of work
Even if all this is true, that assumes that no competitors appear and undercut/outcompete Uber. There's no stickiness here - a competing car service would be just an app away.
All comes down to Monetization really.....If you dont find a good way to make a profit stock price will fall. Investors will only wait a certain amount of time before losing faith and interest.
The nature of this sort of conspiracy theory makes it impossible to disprove.

For example an identified backdoor and logs pointing to an external hack is exactly what you'd expect to see planted if this were a halfway clever inside job, right? So how do you possibly rule that out?
No, it wouldn't. Heck, firearms are a not-infrequent subject of civil forfeiture, so clearly people having firearms doesn't discourage the government from applying forfeiture.
> We desperately need new paths to success and we desperately need to lower the barriers to entry. Our current approach is so black-and-white. Can you code? Here's $70k+. Can't code? GTFO.

Wait WHAT?! How is that bad? Who does this benefit other than people that want to do a job that they're not actually qualified for? "Can you do this thing or not" is a pretty fair test of if you deserve the job!
Pretty much. I’m all for the hamburger icon becoming more recognizable (it doesn’t hurt), but the text “MENU” will always be the better alternative :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906754 56+ comments
For me, the first step would need to be a good tabular data library, like R's data.frames or Python's Pandas. Doing any kind of subsetting/selecting/slicing/joining on nested objects is a nightmare.
I understand that it works in browsers. My point is about the HTML Standard disallowing it.
Play/Pause as an on/off toggle is still contextual within the music app. The play button is always going to be in the same place, and the pause button not much farther away. Music apps have also started displaying triangles over the album art.

Hamburger menu is an abstraction. Part of the blame here is on operating systems and their branded menu's (think Windows Start or OSX Apple menu). There's no standard to it, which is why native apps are a lot easier to navigate because they conform to what the user expects. That fragmentation grows when you divide by the user's browser, device, etc. It's just not standard and not contextual enough to be a standalone icon.
1,500 Groups Urge Congress to Oppose the TPP
I expected a fluff article by a high level JavaScript programmer buying into all the optimistic promises of WebAssembly.

Instead, this is actually one of the best articles I've read about WebAssembly. The author approaches it from a C/C++ background and investigates what it means to write applications from that mindset, revealing the huge limitations of asm.js. Then the author turns to WebAssembly and gives a sobering look of how immature that project still is.
There's also an oversupply of companies trying to create essentially the same product. If we could cut back on that we'd have a glut of programmers. It's just a bigger version of the work expanding to fill the time budget.

Just in my city the last two months I saw job openings for two different companies trying to organize people giving away stuff for free, and neither of those companies were Craigslist, Freecycle or the Buy Nothing Project.

On each project I've been on I've spent upwards of 20% of my time recreating a variation on software I had at another job, and I think I care more about reuse and force multipliers than the vast majority of people. And when I'm using libraries, I feel like I'm working a lot harder than I should have to.

Fred Brooks claimed an Amdahl's Law style effect with additional programmers, and I don't think he's wrong (at least not about that). If everyone on a team of 10 started needing to do 10% less work, we could just about put off hiring two more people to complete our deliverables.

Where I do think he's wrong is his use of a Surgical Team as the ideal for programming. One person in charge and a bunch of people assisting. I think that given the world has largely rejected that section of an otherwise brilliant book, that people generally agree with me that Fred had this part dead wrong. I think rather we should work like professional athletes do in team sports, and we would get about 3 times better at what we do.

I was a cyclist when I was younger, and for a time it was popular for pros to write books or articles with advice. I was surprised to learn that a professional athlete isn't crazy better than me at any one thing. It's the fact that they're 20% better at half a dozen things (including genetics), and the multiplier makes them be able to go twice as far and half again as fast. Dedication, mastery, and a small team of people looking out for them, not just mutant genes or dumb luck.

As programmers, what do we study to raise our game? How computers work. To me this is like a quarterback or a sprinter learning how cleats are made to make him a better, or a cyclist how carbon fiber frames are built. Did I do that? Sure, and it's useful, but not as useful as understanding how your own body functions. By comparison computer programmers know almost nothing about how human brains work, and all of our output comes from them. We don't even have our eye on the target.

Basically, to be a professional athlete, you have to understand human physiology to a degree most people know nothing about. You have a team of people whose job it is to explain it to you and keep you working well within its limits. Do athletes get better by gritting their teeth and keeping at it? Sure, that's only one part of a greater whole. If you listen to some developers, that's all we need to do. Tough it out, white knuckle style. Effort measures all. People who complain about how the design of the code base makes it hard to remember are invalidated, called whiners or told to sack up.

As long as that's our pattern we'll never raise our game much.
Do you see the recurring pattern here?!
What is your problem? You act like you're retaining some purity of the forum when really you're just complaining about what you don't like. Nobody is hurting because I'm writing what I'm observing directly from society today.
People keep making this argument, but forgetting that context exists in the environment as well. In the context of charades, you're playing a game. It's something that's ongoing.

Now if we took out all the stop signs and replaced them with a pause symbol with yellow and black text (thus erasing the existing contextual clues we use for stop signs), we'd see how clearly context matters to symbol recognition.
Expanding on this a bit.

Everything was relative on the Amiga. The only thing absolute was AbsExecBase at 0x4. You get a pointer to this library and then, from there, you can locate more libraries by calling FindLibrary() (or something like that).

AbsExecBase is the ultimate proof of the old adage "Any problem in computer science can be solved with an additional layer of indirection".
As an alternative, try my IPsec/L2TP VPN auto setup script [1] on GitHub. Part of the script was adapted [2] for use in Streisand.

1: https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn

2: https://github.com/jlund/streisand/commit/fea4a9545bfa066db3...
Asm.js is okay, but with WebAssembly we will see more and more websites be a binary blob. (I am not speaking about C++ to WebAssembly, but Java/C#/Typescript/CoffeeScript/Dart/etc to WebAssembly). Instead of transpiling their languages to Javascript they will compile it as WebAssembly. This will be a tipping point. Is going back to MSNv1 or AOL style times is a good thing? In the end it's a real threat for the open web. Well let's hope this will never happen. Google will have the power to regulate them, by lowering their site rank.
The bigger picture here is the context, a music app - or an activity that's ongoing. The controls are grouped together, always in the same place.
I like how the Foundation tutorials have the hamburger button with the word "Menu" next to it. That's how I've implemented it on all my recent websites. It's not that much text and removed ambiguity.
Maybe different glyphs should be presented to different user communities.

Why show me something meaningless because native Chinese speakers don't grok it? Show me (US male) what I get and show them what they get.
Exposed Ice on Rosetta's Comet Confirmed as Water
He seems to be as completely baffled by the possibilities of virtual reality as the rest of us are. The most interesting thing I mined out of this conversation is Herzog's feeling that life already is a virtual reality. As I now turn my head from left to right and see the tables and objects around this room I suddenly feel the unreality of lived existence. Now I imagine wearing a virtual reality helmet, playing a simulation of a person, who then puts on a virtual reality helmet and proceeds to load up a similar game himself, and so on, ad infinitum, as I fall into a fractal abyss of perception/experience/unreality. I pop the helmet off in a panic and suddenly realize that I'm back in the game, but this time the game's main hardware is my head itself. I'm anxious but excited for what will emerge from the VR and AR revolution.
Many people would seek out such devices... but many people can still be a small minority of your target market. If the economics makes sense to have two different builds they'll do it, if it doesn't then you'll get one size fits all. Also, consider how many people that buy these devices also use cloud services available for these devices where even fourth amendment protections are likely null/void. In some ways/shapes/forms it makes the device encryption backdoor already moot for many.
I live in Suzhou. And use gmail via Mail.app and iOS Mail daily. Other than around certain anniversaries, it's never been blocked for me. I do visit SH regularly -- it's right beside me -- and haven't had trouble. But YMMV. The GFW might just like me.

I wonder if it might be because I'm using Google's Apps for Business (i.e., our own domain). In my experience the GFW is much more lenient if it thinks what you're doing is work related.
Papers, Please: Auditing SSH Access at Spreedly
Doesn't even need an economic study. Just some back of the envelope math. Free daily lunch would probably be about $10-$15 per person (especially if ordered in bulk). There are about 250 working days a year (50 weeks * 5 days) so that's only an extra 4k a year in expenses (and perks can be written off as a business expense and not incur income tax expenses). Free daily lunch sounds much better as a perk than a few extra grand salary.
Javascript, Python, Elm, Clojurescript, Arduino, FPGAs
I really wonder if this isn't a case of people in different places being really different.

For instance, people here in the US say particular generalizations about "the Europeans" all the time, but there's a world of difference between the cultures of Spain, England, Sweden, Latvia, Greece, and Moldova (and Russia, which is part of Europe geographically).

So when you say some police chiefs like armed citizens, I really wonder where those chiefs are. I'm willing to bet good money the chiefs of NYPD, Chicago PD, LAPD, etc. are not among those chiefs. However, I can certainly see some police chief in some pop. 30k city being like that; I can also see the police in a random small city like that not having any real problems with police misbehavior; we're likely judging ALL police nationwide for actions of a lot of police who seem to mostly be in cities. Are the cops in rural North Dakota known by the people there to shoot unarmed people or beat people or steal from them?

Note also that I'm not claiming that it's only a small number of police that are bad cops; I think it varies by jurisdiction, and I think they stick up for each other and that a few obviously bad ones in a department probably indicate the entire department is bad (much like the old saying, "one bad apple spoils the entire bunch"). But not all police departments are the same, and again it seems we usually hear about problems in cities.
K&R is definitely not 'modern C'.

I recommend "C Programming: A Modern Approach" by K. N. King combined with "21st Century C" recommended already.
I played it straight a healthy amount of time. Now I am high enough because of the road motion, I can see the webpage moving upwards.

This is an amazing game. Really nicely build. Is it open source?
Based on my experience as a government contractor I have to say I think the government taking taxpayers money and funding open source infrastructure would be a terrible idea. What the government should do however is release all software it develops or pays to have developed from scratch as FOSS excluding sensitive defense systems and the like of course.