skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK I almost got it (edit: rot13 isn't very good at scrambling one-variable equations, so read at your peril, spoilers ahead):

Jr'er ybbxvat sbe n svkrq cbvag bs "vs gur bccbarag pubbfrf gb erqenj orybj k, jr erqenj orybj uvf rkcrpgrq inyhr".

V gevrq gb qrevir gur sbezhyn sbe uvf rkcrpgrq inyhr n srj gvzrf naq nyjnlf tbg pbashfrq ba jurer V fubhyq hfr k, jurer (1-k) naq jurer 0.5, fb riraghnyyl V gevrq qrevivat gur fcrpvny pnfr jurer k=0.625 naq gung jnf rnfvre:

(1-0.625) [bqqf bs abg qenjvat ntnva] * (1 + 0.625) / 2 [rkcrpgrq inyhr va guvf pnfr] + 0.625 [bqqf bs erqenjvat] * 1 / 2 [rkcrpgrq inyhr va guvf pnfr]

Fb va trareny vg jbhyq or:

s(k) = (1 - k)(1 + k) / 2 + k / 2

Gur svkrq cbvag vf jura s(k) = k, be

(1 - k)(1 + k) / 2 + k / 2 = k

naq...

uggc://jjj.gvtre-nytroen.pbz/qevyy/(1-k)(1_k)/2_k/2=k/

Guvf tvirf n pybfr rabhtu nafjre? Fb V cebonoyl unir fbzr fznyy zvfgnxr ohg unir gur evtug vaghvgvba?

V arrq gb tb gb fyrrc, fb V'yy yrnir vg sbe gur vagrearg gb svaq zl fznyy zvfgnxr, nffhzvat gung'f jung vg vf, naq V pbafvqre zl rkcynangvba orggre orpnhfr vg erdhverf bayl uvtufpubby-yriry zngu :-)
A successful career switch depends mostly on your ability to support yourself with money throughout the process, your ability to be dedicated to your goal, and ability to do lots of hard work. There is a tremendous opportunity to make the switch to many other fields, but a switch to our field is a lot easier in regards to bureaucracy because many companies in our field tend to focus more on the value that you can provide and a lot less on your background (this also depends on physical location). I made a career switch myself about six years ago. I can hardly call it a career switch though because previously I didn't have a solid career; mostly I did odd jobs for a living.

In my experience it hasn't mattered that much where knowledge has been "downloaded" from (college, bootcamp, self-teaching, etc). What has mattered is maintaining this "downloaded" knowledge and having it always updated to keep up with current times. Also, having actual projects to show to employers has helped me tremendously (e.g. open source contributions, client projects, personal projects, etc).

I'm self-taught and work at a BIG-BRAND company now as a Front End Engineer and make a six figure salary in the SF Bay Area; no college degree whatsoever, just a high school diploma. My resume says "Education: self-taught" and I'm happy to explain what "self-taught" has meant for me in the past six years to any employer. I've been able to work with people from all kinds of backgrounds: devs from bootcamps, self-taught engineers, devs with degrees unrelated to CS, devs with BS and MS degrees in CS and other subjects, and from many more backgrounds.

I'm contacted by many other BIG-BRANDs and small companies all the time to interview with them, and before I even accept to interview, I make it clear that I don't have a CS background, and that I'm unwilling to waste each other's time white-boarding algorithms - usually they're fine with this as they can clearly see my experience and instead they focus on the value that I'm able to provide. Many times I come across companies that ass-u-me I'm incapable because I chose a different path than them, but I've learnt to ignore the ignorant, and instead I focus on improving my skills and bettering myself as a programmer and a human being.

Any path you choose will lead you to a similar result. That's the beauty and uniqueness of our industry. As a final note, don't bother with comparing your salary with other people's salaries when/if you make the switch, as it won't matter at all if your income will allow you to live a really good life.
Fun aside. Google wrote a backend to Mercurial so it could be stored on bigtable. They did a talk about it 7 years ago.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ri796Hx8las
"show vegetables/crops and hook this up to seasonal sales"

I've been noticing the market for local fresh food is pretty big. If you have a system that decentralises the growing it could used as a peer to peer sales or arbitrage where people buy others and re-sell.

As for the iPlantTrees, yes... This is what has been done in my hometown, Melbourne ~ http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au
Depends on what you are most hungry for. For me this past summer it was to have time off to study without interruption, I absolutely loved it. Also have a family, enjoyed having extra time and flexibility. Took a few vacations.

http://karlrosaen.com/learning-sabbatical/
Those are just simple tricks. the first one is 2, the second one, I haven't worked out yet, but it's x where 1/x = 1+x. Just transform those into something with the original in it (square the first, invert the second), then replace the infinite series with the variable you were looking for since you know they'll be equal.
Very interesting thank you. You may already be aware, but when I first saw the replies here mentioning Option ROMs I immediately thought of the thunderstrike EFI vulnerabilities for Macbooks. I've yet to actually mess with them, but apparently that was how they worked at least in the first generation, I haven't followed the research much further yet [https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike]. So since option ROMs, for obvious reasons, survived the "transition" to EFI, does this mean the same mechanism could be used in BIOS machines? At least this might also have implications for backporting peripheral drivers too (for whatever reason)...
Can somebody please explain to me why this got flagged?
Sorry, I meant for public cloud providers. You're right that Haystack would be fine for small files, but IIRC (and skimming the paper again [1]) it stores the entire photo inline in a single Needle. That's fine for photos, but not for people that want to say store a 5 TB single object (and for Facebook, they could just reject photos larger than say 100 MB). Still, good idea!

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi10/tech/full_papers/...
Honestly, this is a great pitch for your line of work. It sounds like you really enjoy it.
The "hold all of the <machine> in their head" is what I'm missing today. I wish there was something more modern along those lines my kid could grow into--essentially a C64 with HDMI. [edit] And a SD card slot!
Universities are pumping out like 50k CS students a year. Not boot camp grads, computer scientists already exposed to machine learning, advanced algorithms, databases, etc. I really don't see a tangible benefit of boot camps that only teach web development beyond short term web development jobs. This is just my own opinion obviously.
Worst thing about USB-c is that it seems like they have taken a dozen unique cables and replaced then with a dozen usb-c cables, that all look the same, but aren't.

Stories of cables not meeting spec, fried devices, daisy chain widgets that don't, the new TB3 chip not being compatible with the older TB chip, etc.
Doesn't scale. You don't have N brains to compose every representation.
>Nothing a new name can't fix!

If a new name catches on and puts the plethora of older names in the dust, then it CAN fix the "too many names" problem.

And Flux seems to have latched on well.
The funny thing is, so many people don't seem to realise that ordinary end-users will be, too. End-users care about performance. Not all of them necessarily understand that what they care about is performance, but it all contributes to the experience. Even back I need the 90s there was much statistical evidence that the slower a website was, the lower engagement it received.
Most sites already use countless tracking/social integrations so I don't consider this particularly harmful.

At least the AMP link limits my exposure to Google hosted static files instead of the usual (according to uBlock on the "normal" link) Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Optimizely, CNET, Adobe, Taboola, CBS, Tealium, Soasta, Netseer and ShareThrough.
I'm still willing to listen if you are willing to talk.
Why does it mean electrons "exist" in any sense instead of being a model that could explain the data? And if such objects did exist, why could they not follow classical mechanics?
I have no doubt that its a mess. I suppose I've just bought into the hype about what (U)EFI was supposed to be when it came along. Maybe one day it or something like it will make this all easier.
There's Maximite, which is VGA: http://geoffg.net/maximite.html
Let them start supporting free codecs and stop patent aggression, as well as allow FOSS (including other browsers) in their application store. Then we'll see how much they are friends of open source or not.

Oh, and you can add to that support for Vulkan on their platforms.
I've never heard that about Civilization! I like it because it's just fun and interesting to watch. Some episodes are inspiring in a way, particularly the Renaissance and 18th century ones.

FWIW I'm not right wing and I'm a US/West minority (Hispanic). No problem with the language or topics in the series.
At places like Stanford or Berkeley and in an area like the San Francisco Bay Area, you're good. California in general, you're gonna be just fine.

Depending on your accent and skin color, you might want to stay out of the Confederacy.
This is true for basically any DBMS and massive amounts of initial inserts for a migration.
fantastic and super helpful reply, thank you for taking the time to write it!
Question is, how much did they give back to it?
Of course people can write and wear whatever they like. I am simply explaining why it smells like crackpottery, since it seems you thought it was only due to that one sentence.

And, for the record, anything aspiring to be a grand unified theory of mathematics has to go far beyond algebra.
Yeah, this should not be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 10 years. GPLv3 was incredibly divisive, both inside and outside the open source community.

Admittedly, for some people this may have been part of its intent- to draw more lines in the sand, to force out those that the FSF deems as having insufficient ideological purity. The FSF doesn't shy away from calling out its enemies- to my eyes, over the decades it has been far more concerned with condemning what it perceives as being evil, rather than promotion of what it perceives as being good.
And to SVN! https://lwn.net/Articles/194667/

It's not a bad decision; getting POSIX semantics to play well with modern expectations of a highly-consistent and highly-available distributed system is very difficult. But it's a work-intensive decision, and figuring out how to deploy NFS or Ceph at scale might be less work. Especially if Google's SVN/hg developers can work directly with the Bigtable developers on features, and GitLab's developers can't work directly with the S3 team (but can own their own Ceph or NFS stack).
Others have done this with libgit2 storage backends.
Anyone in Miami? Happy to go there too! :D
>>If one of the hosts delays writing to the journal, then the rest of the fleet is waiting for that operation alone, and the whole file system is blocked. When this happens, all of the hosts halt, and you have a locked file system; no one can read or write anything and that basically takes everything down.

I have seen similar issues where a GC pause on one server, freeze the entire cluster.

Is this one single monolithic file system? On the service side, can the code be asynchronous with request queues for each shard? This can help free up threads from getting blocked and serve requests for other shards.
Ask HN: How to get better at reading
I suppose I have a short attention span, but have always been envious of those who can dive deep into almost any book. For me to really sink into something I have to find myself extremely interested in the context of the book, otherwise I lose interest quickly. I often catch myself thinking about something else while reading and then realizing that I've read two pages and haven't absorbed anything.

Any tips on becoming a better reader?
Is there a reason you linked the 12e of the book? Is the 16e not the latest and greatest? It does seem like they just reprint every 2 years and increase the cost $30....
32GB DDR4 RDIMMs are not that expensive anymore. 8Gbit DDR4 is close to crossover now.
Weird, because on my iPhone 6, it works fine with no detectable performance issues at all.
Any book recommendations?
For what it's worth... it ran fairly fast with no hiccups on a Pixel phone. I never really looked into the specs for the phone so... good job Google for matching the performance of web browsing on a MacBook Pro.
Oh, but the polygonal "analysis" overlayed on that circular splotch with the drip marks as an alien's "handwriting" example is corny beyond words.

Correlating an arbitrary set of points on splashy drippy smears, and eureka! It's a symbol for the global landing sites across seven continents?

Yeah right. That leap in counter-intuitive conceptualization is on the level of bat shark repellant, or Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien spaceships, as used by Wil Smith and Jeff Goldblum.

Those ink spatters look like droplets sprayed by an airbrush, with no control exerted, leaving a disorganized sprawl of drip marks. Why the clustered focus of points in one area over another?

Cognitive dissonance and hand wavey science. But movies are movies.
I understand the family commitment, but could you travel for a shorter amount of time? Even spending one month somewhere else can have a profound affect.

Have you travelled much outside of your home country before?
Get involved with a local community organization, even if it's temporary. Whether it's the local homeless shelter, the local Rotary Club, or a religiously affiliated organization, the thing that recharged me the most during my brief 3-week break between jobs wasn't the hikes, the long drives, or extra gym time, it was spending time helping people who had a lot less than I did.

Now that I'm settled into my new job, it's the one thing that I'm still doing more regularly than going to the gym or going on hikes.
> he is beholden to the mainstream Republicans and religious right that got him elected

Just my opinion, but these are two groups that appear to have contributed less to Trump's success than to previous Republican candidates' (in the case of mainstream Republican politicians - actively attempting to thwart him). I think he is actually less beholden to these groups than past Republican presidents were.
Check out https://www.42.us.org/
I'm only 29 and have memorable experiences playing with my father's C64. I consider myself lucky that he introduced me to C64+BASIC at an early age. I will never forget it.

I think our family already owned a Gateway 2000 PC (66/90MHz, Win 95) by then, but I actually liked the C64 more. Second favorite was the Atari 1040ST, the PC came last.

The C64 is a crucial element that got me into programming/CPUs/Hardware. I went from BASIC to QBasic, then to VisualBasic 3, then 5. After that I got my own PC my father bought me Visual Basic 6, students edition. In retrospective, this has to be the best investment of 120DM (Deutsche Mark) ever made. It fueled my interest even more. I was finally able to write my own 'real' Windows programs. I suddenly had access to everything, from DFU dialups, window managment, Browsers (ActiveX!). It even introduced me to 2D/3D graphics because you can use DirectX/DirectDraw directly. All thanks to the Windows API and Visual Basic.

It took a long time until I finally got into Linux and C++, but I never regret that I was introduced to BASIC first, and was taught that GOTO is not evil.

PS: If you have kids and want to introduce them to programming, give them access to Blitz BASIC!
What is the best way to install kali or wifite on android galaxy note 3 ?
Doesn't stripe support bitcoin?
Are you American, or similarly to only have two and a half free days (yes, hyperbole) when you return to work? Then I'd recommend traveling anyway. I'd recommend either Europe or Southern Africa, three or four weeks if possible.

(if you're not essential for childcare or similar at home, and more important if you have not seen the world before).
In one of my first jobs out of college, I got assigned to figure out how to make the Tivoli Enterprise Console do something useful. They gave up on the IGS guys and picked me because I took a class that used Prolog in my sophomore year.

IBM bundled some ancient prolog dialect (copyright 1991 iirc) and the product was a mess.

But it was a great time... a coworker and I came up with a way to persist facts to DB2 and decode/standardize all sorts of fubar network device alarms. Good times.
I've been disappointed so much with the changes to firefox UI over the last couple of years, so it's great to have something positive. Reader is a resounding success with me, given the terrible low contrast, difficult to read, web design trends over the same time span.
> If you are in tech, maybe something more physical, cooking, woodworking,etc.

Second this. Spend vast amounts of time in front of a screen, woodworking provides much stress relief, even when you screw things up.
I've heard the working hours are terrible with 12-14 hours workdays not at all uncommon. Is that true? Is the work pressure very high?
Mgmt > Mgmt + Dev ?
Common Lisp was the first Lisp I tried. But I found the library ecosystem a bit disappointing. This was more than a decade ago, though. No idea if Quicklisp has made everything more lively.

Clojure is nice. I like the emphasis on functional programming, and a very clean set of basic data structures and operations on them. Plus lots of great libraries.

Nonetheless, being on the JVM seems both a blessing and a curse. And I would love if it was a lot more performant. Clasp is tempting: https://drmeister.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/why-common-lisp-f.... I wish concurrency was better.
So the issue is outdated ethics that no longer apply to the real world? And the solution is to ignore the ethics and somehow fix things? Seems like traditionalism self destructing.
>> conservative justices specifically to overturn the ruling that allowed straight people to get married

> Typical bluster from Trump.

As has been pointed out elsewhere on this page, it may be bluster from Trump himself, but his VP is one of the most virulently anti-queer politicians on the national scene. Pence is going to have a large role in picking out the cabinet, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's also extremely influential in picking Scalia's successor as well as any other judicial appointments that come up.
I'm 34 and am going through a very rough patch (for me) right now. I feel like I literally have nobody to turn to for help. It's so hard. I've never been able to make friends easily, and the few I have made seem to have been easy for me to get because they're already so social and likable. So I end up not being a primary focus. :(
email is judah dot meek at gmail.com. I'd be happy to help out any way that I can. I also recommend the http://www.reactiflux.com/ community as a source of answers.
I'm talking about learning modularly. Children can categorize things they've never seen before by inventing labels on the spot, they're not limited to selecting from a preexisting set (e.g. a lion is a "big cat"). They can recognize novelty and ask questions if nothing they know quites fit.

As a human, you are able to learn the general concept of leg and understand it, even if it is in a context you have never seen before and an object you've never seen or never seen used in that way before. Everything you learn, is also as part of a set of relations. Each of individual concept modified in a precise manner as you learn something new about any of them. A big part of human intelligence, from the simple naming of things, to the highest levels of science is taking parts of things you know and putting them together in novel ways.

In Neural nets this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02799 is in line of what I mean.
It makes me wish I (cliche!) knew then what I know now. I'd have picked (and hopefully been able to recognize) better people to try to follow so I could have lasting relationships. The only person I speak to with any regularity from my high school days isn't somebody I feel I could call with this, and they live four states away anyway.
The greatest part is doing whatever captures your imagination in the moment. Lists and project plans are important even for personal projects, but the freedom to follow my thoughts for days and weeks on end is amazing.

I'm wrapping up a self declared sabbatical right now. Most of it was traveling and reading history books on the country I was in. There were a couple career inspired prototypes (web and mobile). Now I'm on a a coursera and reading kick for stats, probability, and ml.

Enjoy the "break"!
Not to mention second order effects undercutting first order ones.
The crazy thing is that working in a tech startup I feel like I've lost more friends than any other part or time in my life.

Long hours (which have paid off and I have no regrets about) have caused me to become distant and not reach out to friends. At times turn down friends when they want to have causal drinks or just meet up. Now that things have calmed down a bit at work I find it challenging to just reach out to my old friends and rekindle those friendships. I try but it's not the same. I thought this was normal.

I think it's important to be vigilant and not lose our friendships. This reminds me to try harder, I think without friends and people life isn't as enjoyable.
This is absolutely the best feature of RSS for me. Rather than have to open a browser, discover the quirks of its navigation and then page backwards and forwards through articles. RSS gives a sane way to skim through those things and focus on the interesting parts.

Plus keeping up with podcasts which tend to be published less often than articles.
Prolog predates Perl by 15 years.
>In the final years of my 20s, I learned how easy, and how lonely, it can be to keep to yourself

It's not that bad, honestly.

It's probably better to choose activities which have a higher engagement between two people for actually forging close relationships. Most of the stuff mentioned puts the focus on something else (preacher, yoga instructor, movie). Those things don't leave time for adding bits to an ongoing conversation. You don't learn anything about the other person doing those things with them other than the fact that they like to do those things.

For nerds, D&D, table-top games, card games, etc. succeed here. It's pretty difficult to not interact with other people doing those things even though the focus is not necessarily the other person.
At least you know your own boxes will be still there in a few years too. AWS pretty sure, Azure, who knows, GCE, anyones guess. Sure they are paying people to post in hackernews today but further out such support is likely to go the way of any other Google service that has proven successful and scaled. Complete and utter silence. At least you can reach out to AWS. Ever had a bug in appengine or Android? You are on your own.
On my last project I had to use Celery. In the end, I had to look inside the source... having done the same with Python + Django I was apprehensive.

In the end I shouldn’t have been, it was a pleasant surprise. It's great 4.0 has come out.

Almost every Django developer will touch celery at some time, if your organisation can support development please do, it's not just an important piece of software, but well put together too.