skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read HN, I sometimes feel that I must be the only person in the world who really liked my PhD. Doing one was by far the best life choice I have ever made. It not not gave me much practical knowledge that has formed the bedrock of my career, but it deeply enriched my mental life and gave me perspective on so many problems.

I did a very "traditional" English-style PhD in Applied Mathematics. I had a supervisor who helped me pick a topic, and gave me just the right amount of supervision. I was under no pressure to publish, and my scholarship did not require me to teach. I spent my days thinking about problems, being frustrated, experiencing small successes, experiencing small failures, managing my time, mismanaging my time, feeling completely inadequate, and slowly becoming an independent researcher.

Yes, my Doctoral studies were undertaken in an ideal situation, supported as I was by friends, my department, my supervisor, and most of all my family, but I can't believe that I am in such a minority.
I think the "900 different data formats" problem is something that will go away as we move towards better tools which cover all the standard use cases.

Gamedev is riddled with really smart people that reinvent the wheel all the time because they found a way to micro-optimize this or that. They get to do this because until recently, there was no "good enough" solution for a wide range of games (or the "solution" was priced with enough zeroes to make bill gates cringe).

But you saw how popular Unity got, and how fast. That's the games industry in a nutshell: ripe for solutions that work for more than just one studio.
What companies fit this mold? Do you work at one or worked at one in the past?
Did pulling the lever up not push the toast out?
Earlier posted on Tim's blog.

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/11/07/tools-of-titans-forew...
I think Palantir provides solutions to this problem
When you say "speed" are you talking about startup (getting the page to a usable state) or crunchy ongoing work?
They make toasters for oversized slices.
Buildings Printed by Robots – The Future of Architecture
As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app.

Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineering.
مواعيد بث مباريات كأس الجزائر عبر تلفزيون الجزائر
Is it just me or does this landing page suck? The top banner doesn't go all the way to the edges, logo is square but buttons are circular, grey icons on a black background, only black and white, etc, etc. Then you get this absolutely butchered review:

> I was with my husband at Smokey Bones

What is that?

> …The room was very noisy as it always is there because they have tv's going and lots of music and people always talk much louder to compensate for the noise.

I'll let this one slide

> I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to hear the server without any extra effort order my meal with smooth going.

With smooth going eh?

> My husband and my conversation was not strained

Glad to hear your husband were comfortable
Ironically, they use a somewhat unreadable font on their website.
Absolutely. I have a pair of these and they go everywhere with me. Movies, concerts, sports events--anything with loud sound--these are perfect. They're small enough to tuck away in my purse so I never forget them.
How Donald Trump Might Be Great for Uber
Once again showing that Google is many orders of magnitude above companies like twitter, aol and facebook in terms of reach, revenue, influence, data and more importantly, algorithmic AI. Just take a look at the top 10 sites and apps on the net, most are controlled by Google, not twitter, aol or the next aol, facebook.
I had a very similar experience with my PhD (also in applied mathematics), though my advisor basically let me pick my own problem to work on, which turns out to be a very tough thing to do.
Good password managers (KeePass) run locally and have no remote server to connect to. Mediocre password managers still store passwords encrypted.

If you get infected by malware then it could just grab the password as you type it anyway; if anything then using a password manager is slightly more secure, since browser integration goes over an authenticated connection that is harder for non-root applications to intercept.

If you were good at securing physical objects then you could just lock down the computer instead, and stop bothering with passwords.
I keep a keepass file in dropbox, and Minikeepass/dropbox client on my phone. I memorize the keepass password, can access any password from my phone, but I can also access my dropbox/keepass file from any computer if I lose my phone/it's unpowered/etc.
Breadth of experience often turns into strategy. Lack of experience tends to show up as when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. At this point in my career I've written production code in many languages/frameworks and was even a DBA at one point. I've also worked in many types of businesses. Now I can look at a given problem and provide a range of possible solutions. Sometimes those solutions do not involve writing any code at all.
"Democracy is something we've figured out now"

Really? I would love to learn more about this ideal society that has a perfect, working democracy?
No downvote from me, but if Germany hadn't started the war, others should have done so to stop us. (I would have preferred a clean Stauffenberg-style solution, of course.)
Map of gang territories in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley
Bruce Schneier does the same thing.

Quote:
I write my passwords down. There's this rampant myth that you shouldn't write your passwords down. My advice is exactly the opposite. We already know how to secure small bits of paper. Write your passwords down on a small bit of paper, and put it with all of your other valuable small bits of paper: in your wallet.
Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
That's probably one of the worst comments it is possible to make for the quality of the discussion right now.
Yes, the no-politics experiment has ended (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), but this comment is not great for HN in any case. When discussing controversial topics, the bar is actually higher for civility and substantiveness, and we need to especially avoid introducing flamewar topics without anything new to say as the guidelines ask of us. We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139936.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: assuming the factual part of your comment is true, it isn't really off topic in an already-highly-politicized thread. I was reacting to what seemed like an injection of partisan politics, but there seems to be a reasonable connection between the two subjects, so we've put this back. The bit about making comments more civil when topics are divisive is still important, so please be mindful of that.
That's perfect! Thanks for the link. I'm surprised that it's possible to emulate a hard drive through the floppy port - I never heard of such a product back then. I'd have assumed it would have to be done through the SCSI port. But that's part of the fun of it, getting to look at those old machines again now that we have the Internet.
5 Things Security Can Learn from Operations' Transition into DevOps
Don't forget there's protocols like UDT available, too. HPC field particularly has been doing TCP alternatives either on UDP and custom (eg Active Messages) for a long time to help tackle some of issues you get with TCP.

http://udt.sourceforge.net/
I'm an infrastructure engineer that's now working in the security space. What myself and others have found is security appears to be slightly behind ops in terms of adapting to the changing world of software deliver. I've highlighted a few key areas that I plan on expanding. Thoughts? Comments? Have I missed the marks?
I am ok with my competitors using the same Adwords or other marketing tools I use so I am not sure why this would be different.
Bitbucket private repos
With irregular pieces on this and other toasters I have used, part of one piece of toast can block the further vertical motion of the carriage at the top portion of its linear range.
> a few minutes later

If you were lucky.
"Being surrounded by PhD when you're only a grad"

Same thing is happening to me, just started my PhD in one of the leading robotics labs, and I feel like I don't belong there. It's beginning to cause insomnia and depression, or symptoms of those.
I've given this a lot of thought. I went through this at Google, and in fact it was one of the things that prevented me from having a more "illustrious" career there (entirely my fault, not Google's).

I felt that I was surrounded by people far smarter and more knowledgeable than me. All the time. My team [1] had amazing machine learning experts, C++ gurus, and so on. I felt inadequate. This hurt my career progression (mostly because of self-doubt) and my general happiness in life.

Until I got my hands on this very interesting project that involved designing an instruction set for a custom CPU, implementing a VM, a code generator for the instruction set, a server that did all this on the fly, and some infrastructure around the whole thing. I have written CPU emulators in the past for fun [2], so this was not particularly challenging - it felt like a really exciting project to work on, but at all times I was confident in what I was doing.

Then one of my teammates, whom I really looked up to, asked me how had I pulled that off. She was in awe, amazed - exactly how I felt about her incredible machine learning antics!

And that's when I understood why I had impostor syndrome, and so did so many people at Google: Google hires really good engineers, but it hires them from very different backgrounds. So you're likely to be surrounded by people who make things you consider impossible black magic seem easy, but crucially, you don't notice that the things that feel easy to yourself are seen by them as impossible black magic!

Understanding this actually let me get over my impostor syndrome pretty much entirely. I later left Google to join Improbable and had a fresh start, which I used to consciously avoid falling back into these negative patterns. Although I'm surrounded by the smartest people I've ever worked with, to the point where I still ask myself "how the hell did I manage to get here?" from time to time, I've largely succeded in avoiding falling in the impostor syndrome trap again :)

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/an-update-on-our-w...
[2]: http://gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html
[3]: http://improbable.io
Ask HN: Should I attend a Bootcamp with a CS degree?
Since graduating with a CS degree, two years ago, I have been unable to find a job. All I've done was make a website for someone, some personal projects, and a 2-month contract at a startup (Node.js developer) in NYC. I have about 7k (minus whatever taxes I'll have to pay) left over (only used it for public transportation, food, and paying my parents) from that contract. I did try to network by volunteering and meetups, but that led to no-where. I am located by NYC. I did get about two interviews since the contract ended, but I can't put my finger on why I didn't pass (one was for a QA position). There were absolutely no technical questions. The salary I'm targeting is $65k to $70k. I'm really lost on what to do next. Studying CtCI won't help, since I've never even been asked anything like that in an interview. Do I even need more projects after my contract and previous personal projects?

Should I spend all my saved up money on a Bootcamp?
Point taken, but this is more a reflection of the fact _GHC_ is used as a playground for every new PL idea.

Haskell itself has no extensions, and you certainly don't need any extension to get what I was talking about above.
Why not put it in your wallet? Don't you normally have that with you?
Yeah the programmer MOS would have been great experience. Especially since the GI Bill benefits were pretty paltry in the 80s-90s (though college was way cheaper!).

I totally agree that the negotiation required to get a specific MOS is well above the ability of most 20-year-olds. That sucks about the recruiter lying about the school being full.
I have one and I only handle it when I am cleaning my shower. Coincidentally, I cleaned my shower head last month as more than a few ports had clogged up. I soaked it in vinegar for an hour, pushed a pin through the calcium encrusted ports and scrubbed it with an old, HARD bristled toothbrush. No crustaceans were observed.

One note: Hard bristled toothbrushes(stiffer than 'Firm') are THE BEST for cleaning small parts. Not so good for brushing your teeth unless you don't like enamel.
I'm from Germany and I was horrified when I learned about the working conditions in the USA.

2 weeks holiday a year and no paid sick leave.

On the other hand, I haven't met any dev that makes 100k a year, haha.
Cut thinner slices; the toaster doesn't need 'fixing'.
Top Albums of 2016: METACRITIC
Hard to tell exactly what this entails, but there is a very functional low-cost solution already on the market called the Pocket Talker (https://www.amazon.com/Pocket-Talker-Ultra-System-Headphone/...)
Why So Many Machine Learning Implementations Fail?
Ironically, many of their pages are in French, which Chrome then calls on a Google service to translate to English.
Angular as used in production at Google – gift of the year?
In real estate, developing with MLS data.

- There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas.

- You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data.

- MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.
Big Bother is Watching
I do recall that. Still scary that we even had that in place.
It's really cute how the author added $ to insert a debugging break into the source. Instead of "debugging by printf", which is a bit tedious in brainfuck, this is driving your debugger by editing the source code. Bravo!
Just because people are not actively starving to death does not mean they are not going hungry, skipping or skimping on meals due to a lack of cash flow; I encourage you to look more deeply into food security (for lack of a better entrypoint, the University of California recently did a study as part of the "Global Food Initiative" and concluded 42% of its students are food insecure). Maybe food isn't an issue in your world, or in my life, but remember: we are the kind of people who sit around and read Hacker News and are the kinds of people whose professions and in some cases hobbies either directly or indirectly have massive effects on other people's lives by undermining the need for not just their job, but all jobs similar in nature to their job; we will have "the last jobs" :/.
In some parts of the US its just fine, but in other its not.

Sometimes it depends on other factors... Look at the city I am in right now, Omaha. If you appear to be white it is just about the safest city in the country. But if you have dark skin, run for your life.
Definitely not.

The OP's point is that wealth is created and bestowed by society. The rebuttal is that it is an interaction between skills and environment, which may or may not involve other humans.

The Amazonian hunter has a form of wealth with no dependence on other humans. And yet it is as fragile as the rich person's wealth once you change the environment. To that rebuttal I would add that merely bestowing riches on people does not generally result in wealth. The classic case in point being that lottery winners generally wind up no better off than they were previously, and this reversion is surprisingly quick.

What human society and industry has done is create the possibility of great wealth. Untold wealth. Wealth undreamt of in the past. Aristocracy in Elizabethan times would envy the average US citizen today. And not for the technological marvels that we would normally list - topping the list of things they would wish that they had is that our medical care lets us expect to see our children grow up, and our dental care means that we do not regularly go through a level of pain that they took for granted.

But wealth remains an interaction of skills and environment. It is not merely granted by society.
Guy Steele's, Sean Parent's C++ talks and Alex Stepanov's A9 course.
That wasn't the purpose of the war. Here's Lincoln, 1862: "I would save the Union. … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it."
How did you change?
On the plus side, when we reach a point where a child can be raised with no interaction with live adults...

Depends what you understand as "can be raised". Seems to me that there is the potential for such persons to become mentally unstable or tuned to a highly different set of ethics than we are. If a person is only raised by robots, how do they learn dealing with actual humans?
I don't see it as a non-sequitur. If you find that quote offensive in some way, you presumably approve of the Talibans treatment of women.
10 Tech Movies to Get You Coding Again
I'm not sure I'd call the genocide of indigenous Americans "vastly more humane" than what other societies have done.
> behind lock and key

Uhhh..
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Condescending much?

There is a sophisticated and voracious readership of English in India. And it has given the world many great writers with unparalleled output in English - see http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/index.php/JLCMS/article/viewF...

And the writer RK Narayan, with his distinct characters and humorous stories, is the Indian response to Wodehouse. PGW is read, as he is all over the world, for his humo(u)r, wit and brilliance.
They are fairly similar, however we just don't know much about what happened to Armenians, which doesn't diminish what they endured or how bad things were done to them.
I never understood this argument. It's not like advertisers are going to say "Oh, everyone is unblocking ads. Let's stop using 'sponsored content' then!"

They are going to continue with both sponsored content AND ads. I'm just cutting off one side.
I think you got this one nailed.

It feels very...Chopra. I don't know. Maybe the content makes up for it, but I would be very wary of proceeding.
It would probably be better to include this backup code in your will or some other paperwork filed with your lawyer. Your wallet can be stolen pretty easily.
Regarding tyranny of the majority: I think there are a lot of HN users that could tell you about CA Proposition 8 how tyranny of the majority might be used in all seriousness in that context.

Edited to correct Proposition 13 to Prop 8.
For sure. The focus on "your cell phone battery" is a bit narrow. But I guess just a simple to understand example.
Isn't DuckDuckGo Bing behind the scenes, though? That doesn't seem that much better to me.

It would be nice to have a truly independent, startup search engine but it's a really big task for a fresh company to tackle.
Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results.

In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for "gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it was back then.

"learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.
I love organ music; but you have to listen to it live. The low notes don't come across properly on recorded media (also you don't feel your chest resonate).

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, one of the most famous pieces of organ music ever, played on an organ built in 1730 (and, if I read the history right, it was actually specified by Bach):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA

You can hear the recording simply outright fail on the low notes. The organ has a 32-foot pipe, which produces 16Hz notes. The reocrding simply doesn't do it justice; if you ever get the chance, listen to it live; it's an almost transcendent experience.

There are, however, apparently two organs in the world with 64-foot pipes (8Hz!) and several more which can synthesise an 8Hz subharmonic using smaller pipes, but I haven't found a recording I trust of it yet.
Well Google made a lot of money from ads. They invested heavily in infrastructure, engineers and buying whatever could enhance their reach. Android, Google docs, YouTube, Adclick. All insanely valuable acquisitions. Can't say the same about other big tech companies.

It's a great time to be Google
I disagree. Software with that level of popularity doesn't disappear.
SEEKING FREELANCER - San Francisco, CA. Remote OK

We are looking for help to layout our prototype printed circuit boards (PCBs). Requirements:

- Experience laying out multi-layer PCBs, with RF (cellular), audio and other digital signals (SPI, USB, I2C, …).

- Worked on boards from concept to production.

- Experience creating and managing footprints for Kicad.

- Experience working with multiple PCB fabrication houses and diverse design rules.

- Experience troubleshooting prototypes, implementing reworks.

- Capturing and documenting layout decisions to the team.

- Familiarity with git for version control.

- Familiarity with Kicad Stepup would be a bonus!

We could use little or a lot of help, depending on your availability and interest.

Please contact us at founders@okio.io, Subject: Kicad Layout Engineer Freelancer, and include some examples of your work (Gerbers, PDF and/or photos of boards you laid out).
Despite all the hand waiving about accuracy of the claims or the efficacy of CDN fronted caching, etc etc, it is good to see more initiatives around saving (especially mobile) bandwidth use. After moving from EE into full stack js I've been blown away as the duplication present
How is this on the top of HN? It's barely clear what these actually be like or how they work? Am I missing something?
Thanks for the insight. I don't disagree your point per se. If war could be accomplished without further harming those citizens then I might agree. Or if war brought about positive change then maybe you could justify the means. But sadly we've seen time and time again that destabilising governments through instigating war - even horrible despotic regiems like the aforementioned - usually ends up with more long term conflict.

I should add that I'm against starting wars but not against retaliating, even ending the war, if and when required.