skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seven chemical separations to change the world
>mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name".

And what's that to you?
Germany's Beer Purity Law Is 500 Years Old. Is It Past Its Sell-By Date?
What are they going to doing they can't sustain these profits in future quarters?
> Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?

Excellent. As we all know, the tech industry's biggest problem is a lack of insularity and out-of-control diversity and this strategy is sure to help.
When I get close to that line of thinking, thoughts such as those automagically revert it:

"If I'm going to die, I might as well finally help those old people at the asylum and see how that feels"

"If I'm going to die, I might as well travel without money through Europe"
I recently interviewed at Google and one coding interview had the most adversarial interviewer that I've ever encountered. It started with the interviewer complaining that he was busy. Everything from the language I chose to each line I wrote received complaints. By time we got past the first question, I thought maybe this was actually a behavioral interview in disguise to see how I'd deal with adversarial coworkers.

I got an offer from them, but I declined without hesitation. I interviewed at Facebook and that process was great. At least one of my coding interviewers did read/skim my github code beforehand. Woo, keep it up!
Reminds me of the Peachoid episode of House of Cards.
seems like it would be easy enough for them to disable the app over 20 miles an hour. but, what would the point of the app be then?
I still don't get why it is shipped by default with Capistrano. It simply has nothing to do with the tool for the vast majority of users, and the remaining users can install it themselves. Disappointing.
Higgs Bison or Niels Bohrson? Twitter Offers Names for Fermilab’s Baby Bison
Yeah and if Microsoft made tongue-in-cheek blog posts about IBM because they had something called "Project Officer" we'd all roll our eyes.
Could Cats and Dogs Feel the Same Emotions We Do?
I can think of several people who fit firmly into both. Moxie, for instance. I fail to see how these two categories are mutually exclusive.
Ask HN: How can a dummy like me learn algorithms?
I don't have a CS degree. I sucked at math in high school. I never took calculus. I need to learn the classic algorithms to frow as a programmer. I have found some resources on coursera and some books, but most require knowledge of proofs and other maths stuff I never learned. Can anyone point me to some resources for learning enough basic maths to then learn algorithms?

I realize that I probably sound like a complete idiot here. I genuinely want to better myself and I'm humbly asking for help.

TIA Alan
> Which is... right now.

As long as you have the right skills and live in the right area. I live in Dallas and want an embedded job. If it weren't for my clearance, nobody would give a shit about me.
Actually people often pay for the privilege of giving them the material.
Not really though, some do and they should be patched, but only a small subset of vulnerabilities end up with a complete backend compromise.

Things are fucked, but not that fucked.
The Firefox bug to restrict geolocation to secure origins is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1072859
Nonsense. Defense is plenty fun. Anyone can find a 0-day. The principles and some methods are the same crap as Schell et al did in MULTICS security evaluation they published decades ago. Same kind of stuff Burroughs was preventing in 1961. More interesting was when the old guard tried to build something that couldn't be compromised under any circumstances. Others tried to find and master key areas of the problem. The results were very interesting although not always fun to apply given they could be tedious. Even then, trying to automate that in tooling provided a whole new level of fun to distract one from the tedium. :)

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/friday_squid_...

Posted above in response to Schneier's call for INFOSEC after Snowden leaks. The title is both a parody on cryptography papers and a trick I used to make sure I can Google a link with a few, unique words. Still works haha. Anyway, that link covers both high-assurance and medium-assurance INFOSEC methods out of CompSci and Defense sectors. Skim through the titles and abstracts then come back to tell me if you still think defense is the boring part.

I mean, really, because I think people think that because "INFOSEC" as you see in mainstream is (a) bullshit or (b) boring. The real deal is constantly innovating, works more than it fails, and quite interesting. To me at least.
They show their web traffic towards the end which seems to point to 1.5-2mm daily users. I don't really have too much context for such numbers. But it seems like it was enough to pay their disgruntled writer $100k+ per year.
> There is also the argument that absent confusion, the third party is essentially looking to free-ride on the goodwill of the brand owner.

But can one consider that infringement? I would assume something like that to fall under a fair use doctrine in most jurisdictions.

Let’s say I invent a set of amazing tires for Audi cars (they only fit on an Audi car), and I sell them for half the price of a set of official Audi tires. I brand these tires as “AmazingTires for Audi”, with a disclaimer that I am not Audi, but a third party.

In this scenario, you’re riding on the goodwill of the brand, and the brand owner might oppose. However logically I would assume something like this not to constitute infringement, as you are not actually damaging the brand (if the product is good) and there is no other way to describe your product without using the Audi brand name.
Some people call it procrastination, other people call it thinking. A little bit of procrastination is correlated with increased creativity. When people procrastinate too little or too much, they are less creative, but when they procrastinate just enough to get away from the problem but not too far away, then new perspectives pop up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-taugh...
A thought experiment, how quickly would goog react if every potential hire walked away, emailed old Laszlo and told him to stick his tests. Might push forward the seed change in hiring the industry needs...
This is very true. Exercise has more of an effect than the calories burned. It improves your health and you feel much better than when you had a sedentary life. As always the answer is that decreasing calorie consumption with moderate exercise is key to maintaining weight loss.

Just as exercising cannot offset massive overconsumption of food, massive underconsumption of food will make one that is dieting feel terrible, and thus not as likely to continue.

In addition the amount of exercise done is never going to really offset a sedentary job. Someone walking on their feet all day vs me being at a desk is going to consume much more energy than me even if I workout after work intensely for an hour. So I am still going to need to consume less than them. But if I did not do the hour of exercise, my body would break down from not being used, and my overall feeling of health would decline.
Six maps that will make you rethink the world
As for the origin of the quotation yes -- but it has been used to talk about scientific standards in Economy ever since it was coined -- there are even a couple of books with that exact name on the topic.
> Is that trust justified? Not on the scale of you, but on the scale of everyone working the helpdesk in your company.

Why did you hire that person, and then not train him correctly?
My Shuttleworth Fellowship – Application Deadline for $1M Is May 1
I'd say it's a good idea to get enough familiarity with code to be able to distinguish between good and bad code, and to be able to have a rough idea of whether something is well architected.

Spreading vision is an important nontechnical skill for a founder. I see this as distinct from but related to networking, being able to convince talented people to work for below market because they earnestly believe in the vision is crucial at early stages.

As a technical person working on a startup, I personally would appreciate a partner with more familiarity with the regulatory aspects of starting a business: filing paperwork, basic accounting, taxes, etc.

I also wish I had better Excel chops to better analyze data coming in (signups, revenue, expenses, etc), but am too focused on more technical areas to devote time to learn it.

I'm sure there are other skills that I'm forgetting in the moment, but that's a few anyway.
Exercising every 5 years isn't so bad.
Hmmm,

I wonder if we could create a simple little Web site people could post markets with virtual monopolies that that would like to see disrupted. It could act as an ideas board for entrepreneurs looking for fertile start-up areas.

It could be a simple post, but with the opportunity to flesh it out out with information on barriers to entry etc,potential market size etc.

You could post about blackboard. I could post about TES.com/jobs which has a virtual monopoly on advertising jobs in the UK teachers market, despite appalling service and ludicrous prices.
I have an "Elixir in the Wild" series of blog posts about people and companies using Elixir on my blog: http://blog.jordan-dimov.com/
Seven year Capistrano maintainer here. I'm the person who is responsible for Harrow, the gem plugin and the response to the issue linked at GitHub.

The point of separating the gem is so that we don't have to bump Capistrano's version, every time there's a change to what is effectively a first-party plugin. Sorry if the way I responded at GitHub was unclear.

It's a common theme of my maintainership of Capistrano that people have always asked for a web-based version, in the mailing lists, at user groups and meet-ups, more so since Capistrano 3 as we grow in popularity amongst teams who wouldn't normally have a Ruby toolchain installed on their machine.

That said, we have to strike a balance, Harrow was bootstrapped predominantly with money from my software development agency with some seed funding to see us through a smooth launch and get us the UX help we desperately needed to make a product we could be proud of (pro tip: don't let a bunch of ops guys write a Javascript app.), so we have to figure out if this is commercially viable, or whether it was a wasted endeavour, that puts me in the slightly uncomfortable position of what amounts to advertising baked in to open source tools.

As I wrote on my blog [1], it's a fine line to tread, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

[1]: lee.hambley.name/2016/04/24/seven-years-under-a-palm-tree.html
There are commonalities. IIRC, a diagnosis of autism requires significant impairment in all three of, and severe impairment in at least one of:

- social skills

- communication skills

- rigidity (reliance on routine)

That doesn't stop a wide variation in how those manifest in individuals, nor make the diagnosis meaningless.
I'm with you as far as the level of finance knowledge on these boards. It's not surprising coming from a world where actually making money in your business is an afterthought.

That said, regarding ZH and "gold manipulation": what's exhausting is their claim of the magnitude of the effects, as if precious metals prices would suddenly fly through the roof. For example, when some of the big silver banks were busted for price fixing--a story that ZH covered extensively-- what happened? No visible effect on silver prices. So, the conclusion drawn is that there must a bigger conspiracy.

I'm with some of the other commenters here. ZH is on the bleeding edge of financial news, but you have to untangle it from the hyperventilating. And the comment section is a cesspool.
Nitrogen = air. Around 77% of air is nitrogen, much of the rest of oxygen, then some CO2, and the rest is trace gases.

You don't get any improvement in most things by using pure nitrogen instead of air, unless one of those other gases was causing you a problem (in the case of tires, oxygen degrades the materials the tires are made of). The point of helium is that its molecules are much smaller and lighter than that of regular air so there's less friction. You don't get that with nitrogen. You would get it with hydrogen though (which is quite a bit smaller even than helium), though there's probably some other problem with H2 that prevents that.

And yeah, a vacuum should be ideal; the problem there is probably that atmospheric pressure, at 14.7psi (IIRC) is pretty significant, strong enough to hold your suction-cup-mounted cellphone to your car windshield, so you have to have a pretty robust hard drive enclosure to maintain that vacuum without crushing. Vacuum chambers are usually really beefy. It would be interesting to see a vacuum hard drive; I wonder if WD ever tried that, just to see what it could do. They probably just can't make it and stick with the regular 2.5" or 3.5" form factors. Maybe a double-height 3.5" size (with the internals being the same size as a regular 3.5" drive, the rest just being extra structure) would be possible.
> frankly wasn't really that diverse until rather recently with Merkel's high-volume immigration policies.

That’s not true.

The current influx of foreigners is about an order of magnitude smaller than the influx of foreigners from Turkey during the 70s.
Yes. Unless you're bad at it.

Likewise with driving.

It's not the actual manipulation-of-an-automobile part of driving. It's getting around the world in a timely manner, just like everybody else, instead of having to be interned in a bus for an extra hour.
- the idea that, if you can do something in 5 minutes or so, just do it rather than keep putting it on to do lists.

This seems so obvious now I've read it. When I think of how many small tasks I've never got around to doing it's embarrassing.
Should we be worried or glad that a potential future Skynet is written in C++?
> "ZH focuses on facts". Seriously?

Seriously, they do. They spin them in weird ways, though - I remember in 2007 (or early 2008), they had an article about "the bin laden trade" - someone bet $30M or so on a very improbably collapse -- Or so the article inferred based on highly irregular "put" purchase -- losing $30M if that didn't happen, or winning billions if it did.

The data was, in fact, factual. However, they failed to account for alternative explanations, e.g. that someone (probably a pension fund or a hedge fund) was moving a lot of money into the market, and was buying insurance -- a much more likely explanation for the same data.

They do stick to facts. It's their analysis that you should reserve your skepticism to.
That title sure promises a lot. I read all the way to the end and this is their solution:

1. Forgive yourself

2. Ignore your feelings about whether you're in the mood to work on it

3. Break it down into small steps

I would say #2 is easier said than done for an extreme procrastinator. But, decent article. Sometimes it's good just to hear that change is possible.

I would add to it that once you adopt new patterns they can set in and make productivity easier. It's sort of like drinking or other chronic problems.. It's rooted in your DNA and you do have to watch out for it creeping up on you, but the more successful you are the easier it gets.

In my case, making really granular todo lists and then crossing things off helped establish a rhythm. It showed me I could in fact accomplish a lot. It does take time to make and prioritize the list, but good prioritization is really important and totally worth it. Wunderlist helped a lot. Made it super easy to add things, prioritize in free moments, and constantly check it and "live by the list".

I would still let some high priority stuff live on top of the list for weeks sometimes, but I could forgive myself for those lapses more readily because I could see how overall better I was doing. And that vastly increased my chances of eventually tackling those big scary tasks as opposed to spiraling into a negative feedback loop.

As the article notes, it really is about emotional management. Todo lists would be useless without structuring them in a way that lets you build up emotional gratification and self confidence.
They should have used Yahoo! Auctions. Oh, wait...
Capistrano maintainer here, I gave a more comprehensive answer in this thread [1], I hope that answers some of your questions.

Specifically to address your point about having "nothing to do with the tool for the vast majority" there may be some sense to that. We first built a pure, pure literal web front end for Capistrano, it turns out something that limited is not that useful, however when you boil the problem down in to:

- Management of secrets, variables, keys, etc

- Tasks that can be combined with sets environment specific config and re-used

It turns out to be fairly universal. https://xkcd.com/927/ springs to mind, if we'd built another custom web front end for another specific tool it would be nearly useless. As it is we've got customers who have cut their monthly spend on testing/monitoring services from 800$ to $160 and have a better, more consistent experience.

It's all relative, frankly my company invested a lot to build this and I personally truly believe it in, and after 18 months intentional slow-burn to make sure it worked well for the people who did use it, it's time to test the water and see if we can bring the product to profitability.

If we can't I'm almost certainly going to have to cease working on FOSS due to business and family commitments, given my love for FOSS that's something I'd rather not do!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11596602
> I'll routinely get 6-10 requests in one day

I get that in a good month, and 90% of them are clueless and inappropriate.
They have a page specifically noting what they support:

https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/cloud-servers-with-mana...

Speaking as an ex-Racker, yeah, if your infrastructure isn't listed on that page and you have something like Tomcat running or Cassandra, or Headless VirtualBox an dedicated box, it was best effort. If you want externalized customized support for that client outside the standard tech stack supported by Rackspace, you need to bring in an external MSP, consultancy, or FTE willing to take on your tech stack and provide an SLA, and pay for it.
My company, which is a tech company, pretty much does exactly what the author describes as his preferred process: "I strongly prefer code reviews and evaluation of my public code samples and am just not interested in discussing why manhole covers are round or in reliving college coursework from 15 years ago." It's one of the reasons I wanted to work for them, and I think this kind of approach has the potential to be a competitive advantage. It takes more time to evaluate a candidate (though not unreasonably more) but opens up a much wider field of people and—from what I can tell—selects for better fit.
Are your confusing nutritional calories with physics calories? When people talk about diet, of course they are talking about calories obtained from digestion, not combustion engines.
Rule #1 do not complain about down-votes, if you mind too much about them you will get gun-shy or putting filter. I have enough down votes but it still stings a bit, once past the initial sting, you will realize that people are politically and ideologically vested, irrespective of left or right, they will piss on your parade if you shake their world view and honestly, I may be one of them.

Say what you want to say respectfully and do not worry about votes.
The real reason you procrastinate: You fundamentally don't want to be doing whatever task it is that you're avoiding, and while it might be the logically "correct" thing to do, that doesn't mean you want to do it. What we want and what we are pushed into doing are not always aligned. News at ten.
Wonder if they wouldn't be better off going private again
How Many IT Professionals Are There in Ukraine, Really?
Pursuing the career of your choice, for the purpose of making profit, is also a human right.
"condition: salvage"

Damn
Things we learned by visualizing our work hours
This is 100% worth reading. From ZH authors:

> Regarding, the actual content of Bloomberg's platform giving voice to a disturbed individual, former drug dealer and alcoholic, we find it particularly amusing as it "accuse" Zero Hedge of being intent on generating profits.

> Coming from Bloomberg we find this not only entertaining but somewhat hypocritical.

> Incidentally, the chart above may explain why none other than our "competitor" Bloomberg decided it was its mission to voice a grievance of a disgruntled former employee who admitted it was his intention to "destroy" Zero Hedge.
I tried this with Google and got the "Well... bye" response. I was contacted by a recruiter who said she "specializes in finding candidates who are already employed". As I guess it goes with Google, she didn't even have a position in mind, she just wanted to put me in the generic hiring funnel. Now, I'm not even a developer; I'm a researcher with a PhD in computer engineering, and a BS in physics. I've taken 1 algorithms course in my life, and that was over 10 years ago.

So she asks me, "How much of your time to I spend writing code?" I tell her, maybe 10%-20%. And then she jumps right into asking algorithm complexity questions and generic trivia: what is the average run time of quicksort, what is 356 in binary, estimate 2^20, etc. I was getting some of them right, some of them wrong, but eventually I had to stop her and say "Look, I don't really know what is going on right now. You told me you were contacting me based on my experience, but now you're asking questions that don't have anything to do with what I do. It sounds like the role you're trying to fill doesn't align well with my experience." That was pretty much the end of the conversation.

It's not even that I feel like I shouldn't get vetted. I should! But do it based on what I know. Ask me linear algebra trivia, or how robotics algorithms work and their time complexity, or ask me about topology or statistics or machine learning. Why are you grilling me on sorting algorithms?

I think if it works anywhere, it's going to be at smaller shops, where they don't have a line of candidates stretching around the block.