skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working at home now and really miss my old 20 minute bicycle commute. It's such a great way to start and finish the day, and separate work from life. Now I try to ride every morning, but it's too easy to just stay inside and start work. I'm considering moving to a co-working space full-time just to force myself to get on the bike. In my experience,

Commuting by car < Commuting by train < No commute < Commuting by bike
Wow, that's a wave of nostalgia hitting me! NOLF was also one of the funniest shooters I've ever played.
Yeah, but he disabled the device before refunding any money.
USCIS announces new measures to detect H1B visa fraud
I think the problem here is that they _disabled a home security product_ because the guy pissed them off. They can certainly fire the guy as a customer, and tell him to return the device for a full refund, but remotely disabling its ability to function is not only unprofessional, but irresponsible.

Regardless of that, the support rep's response comes off as petty and childish. There are much better ways to get out of that situation.

I'd never heard of this company before, but based on that one support interaction, I would never buy from them.
Computer programmers aren't the highest paid H1Bs.

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...
My very first project at Google [1] drove over $100M in revenue. Team of 3, wasn't intended to be revenue-facing at all, but it turns out that when you give a tool to the AdSales folks that shows the customers all the other queries they could be advertising on, they buy a whole lot of additional ads.

It's very easy to underestimate how small changes can add up at scale. Like another commenter said, Google makes about $80B in revenue. It's not hard to make a change to UI or ranking that impacts conversion rates by 0.125%. One of the changes I did for a later project would've lost a billion dollars for Google had it not been caught by A/B testing. Heck, a non-visible change I made (moving the results above the ads in DOM order, without changing styling, so that blind people didn't need to sit through ads before getting their results) was blamed for $50M in lost revenue before we ran an experiment and confirmed there was no effect. Marissa Mayer had done the exact same experiment 8ish years before and measured a $50M loss; the difference was that everyone was on dialup in 2002 but broadband in 2010, and so what was an unacceptable latency penalty that caused everyone to not click on ads had become an unnoticeable change.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-wonder-wheel-17093
No, he disabled the thing then told the customer that his only option was to return it to Amazon for a refund.

That's not at all the same narrative.
Fine to deny future service, denying past service is the problem here.
"offered"
Ask HN: Would you get a degree in something you know or something new?
Essentially I'm a jack of all trades, something I really want to escape and go more into specialization.

I'm leaving work to take a year or two off, finish school and then go back at it.

I'm reviewing WGU, and it fits perfectly in my plans to relocate to another country (Philippines), live cheaply and solidify my resume.

The thing is, I'm a bit confused at which step I should take.

What do you guys suggest?

1. Go the way of reviewing what you know, solidify my foundation w/ new certs and finally a degree. (e.g. IT/NetSec/Administration.)

or

2. Go into that Data Science/Database thing. I don't have any experience at all besides doing some simple copy/paste from tuts on the net and LAMP stacks for simple applications/hosted services.
This phenomenon has been fairly well studied in the academic literature, and you can sum it up to a variety of factors including productivity from co-location (Skype just won't cut it in some circumstances!), capitals flows (VC funding is only located in certain places), and other fuzzy things like quality of life and access to similar people. The emergence of "technopoles" led Richard Florida to call the globe not "flat" but "spiky." Consider also the case study of complex geographies and languages (not English!) in Brazil: http://codingplaces.net [full disclosure: Takhteyev was on my PHD committee]
[This][0] is an example of it but I suppose this is just the tip of the iceberg.

[0]: http://rea.tech/how-we-used-category-theory-to-solve-a-probl...
Yes, great analogy.

But Amazon can nuke accounts and disable "purchased" books, video, etc, at will. So there's a gray area. I think what Amazon does ought to be illegal, but hey.
And an uncompetitive job market for programmers
5 E-commerce tools every Small Online seller SHOULD be using in 2017
Thanks to psychology, there is a nice way of making it work for both sides (not in this particular case, of course — the damage is done).

Hardware companies should (and will, eventually) offer the devices for free and switch to subscription model.

Devices like these are not products, they are services. They are useless on their own without the operating backend, support and maintenance. If I am buying the device, I expect it to be working. If I am subscribing to a service, I know that it can be cancelled anytime.

(And $5/month are worth much more these days than $99 once. If you can keep the customer that long, of course).
Forum feedback, like HN feedback, is too extreme, and unless your product is exclusively marketed at the HN crowd, such feedback will be close to useless. You might have a big problem, for example, non-hackers can not write e-mails in Ubuntu, while HN-crowd are worried about battery life. So instead of taking one hour to fix the e-mail problem for thousands of users, you spend thousands of man-hours to marginally improve battery life to please a handful of users.
Nexiona | Frontend and backend developers | Barcelona (Spain) | REMOTE (only Europe) | http://nexiona.com

About us:

* Software development company focused 100% on professional IoT

* Young company but growing very fast (currently 17 people expecting 30 before the end of next year)

* HQ in Barcelona, office in UK and looking forward to open on GE, FR and US very soon

Positions:

* Backend/frontend developers, product manager, system administrators... Open positions and apply details: https://goo.gl/EiiXGY (We are open to spontaneous applications for other positions)

* Keywords: iot, rabbitmq, mongodb, python, flask, elastic, graphite, extjs, javascript, node.js, ansible, raspberry pi, arduino, embedded, docker, cloud, agile, scrum, etc.

* Interview = culture [1h] + technical interview [1h] + coding project presentation [1h] + onsite interview [1h]

Final notes:

* g33k p30pl3 and nice atmosphere

* remote work but fully connected with workmates

* one week every 4-6 we spend time together in our Barcelona office
"Denying service" in those cases is not conducting any further sales/etc with them.

It's not remotely disabling things they've previously bought from you.

That's quite a different kettle of fish.
Reinvented Stanley's Parable essentially... Except procedural.
A quick view of the system he uses comparators and function generators to create signals for the x/y/ball/paddles, which in case of the ball hitting the x/y axis limit are equal to the lowest or highest of the x/y axis triangular signal which will signal a 'hit'. But this was looked at in a glance and it is quite a lot more complex and mostly goes beyond mis simple analogue electronic knowledge.

See the link on the form post for the schematics and some example readouts of the signals.
Zhou Enlai
How the world’s blackest black is getting blacker
It's an app, so virtual device, I guess.
> have wanted to say - "You know what? Take your business elsewhere"

"Take your business elsewhere" would be Garadget issuing a refund from their end and then disabling the device.
If taken at face value, that's what their FAQ suggests. I'm partially reposting a comment I made above, since you seem to be the only other person here who is thinking along the same lines as I am.

2) Where can I use Amazon Cash?

We have partnered with thousands of stores across the country, including CVS Pharmacy®, Speedway, Sheetz, Kum & Go, D&W Fresh Market, Family Fare Supermarkets, and VG's Grocery with more retailers coming soon. A directory of all participating stores can be found at www.amazon.com/cash.

Are they saying you can also spend your 'Amazon dollars' at those stores? Assuming the answer is 'yes', it means Amazon is looking to get a slice of that sweet sweet payment intermediary industry pie. But more importantly, they get these retailers' data for cheap and can figure out exactly where the marginal price for it lies. Think about it. These retailers might be paying Visa 2.5% transaction processing fees. Along comes Amazon who offer, say 2% fees (which might be roughly the rate they've negotiated for themselves with large payment processors).

Using CVS as an example:

Amazon start offering CVS customers varying rebates / fixed percentage discounts like: anything you buy from CVS with 'Amazon Bucks' only deducts 95% of your sales docket total from your 'Amazon not a bank account'. CVS will want their money either at point of sale or, at the very latest, through an end of day reconciliation. So in the interests of 'fraud protection' they will need to provide sales data to Amazon for those purchases. This is bad for CVS because:

- Amazon would be able to see what CVS customers are buying, for what price and in what combination. That would make it pretty easy for Amazon to gradually pick off CVS customers.

- I imagine Amazon would probably loss-lead for a while until they've become the dominant form of payment. If a large enough percentage of CVS' sales were settled in Amazon bucks (which Amazon can incentivise through rebates and discounts, hence the initial loss-lead), it puts Amazon in a position where they can 'tax' one of their retail competitors by jacking up 'transaction processing' fees.

I might be totally misunderstanding the situation here, and it's just a case of the FAQ being poorly worded. Otherwise, large retailers who sign up to this are committing a fatal strategic mistake (although I imagine the bean-counters would love it, not realising the long-term implications).
I'm not sure what the case law on this is, but if you form a contact to supply X and the X you supply is broken, it's not unreasonable for you to demand a working X is provided as per the contract (specific performance).

Also, bricking someone's device remotely* and giving them only the option of a refund is dangerously close to criminal damage of their property.

* Although in this case it sounds like they blocked it on their side rather than remotely killing the device.
Snapchat (2011 - 2018). My its soul rest in peace in Instagram.
Yeah, he bricked the device and then told him his only option was to return and refund through Amazon.

Let's not pretend that Garadget is somehow being magnanimous here.
Everything we sell will be made to order from fresh ingredients. Sugar is only traditionally used in a few noodle cuisines (eg. Thai) and customers can opt out of any ingredient they wish. Likewise significant lipids are really only present in meats, oils, cheeses and coconut milk. Again, Thai is a strong contender. Calorie counting is transparently supported for those who want to do the numbers. Launching in Asia, for Asia, nothing we sell will likely come close in calories to an average US serving of anything.
Shell from vi
Because I can't work anywhere. It may be theoretically possible but business in the UK is pretty traditional in a lot of ways and just won't consider anything else.

Fortunately I live in the East Midlands, where there's a developer talent shortage, and I'm pretty good at my job, so whenever I want to change something seems to come up.
I'm not sure what annoys me the most in this story, that the developer tracks users and punish customers that s/he doesn't like or that some people are "buying" "cloud" based software with no understanding that this means they are denied control and ownership of said software and that it will stop working the instant the company folds the servers.

Foucault's "Surveiller et Punir" (Watch and punish) makes me wonder how cloud and smartphone are not so different from being locked up in a jail.
Yeah, negativity/hate is not a reason to force your customers to refund their purchases. This is basically illegal, atleast in Sweden if not the EU since this voids the functionality of the product with an intent to discriminate against a group of people.

Its also a dick move just in the casual way.
Context Scout is hiring a front end dev to help build its virtual assistant
> But people often say "FPS" to mean specifically "games like Quake and whatnot". Under that definition, shallow gameplay is part of what makes a game an FPS.

You can still have deep games that are Quake-like, Half-Life being the canonical example. Deus Ex can be played, like Fallout, in third-person so I'd say it's disqualified.

Why is HN turning into reddit with random downvotes and no discussion? Must be the weird gaming crowd.
SEEKING WORK - Remote or Padua, Italy

- Web development - modern development, from draft idea to production (full stack)

- Asp.net WebApi, MVC

- React + Redux + RxJs, BackboneJs + MarionetteJs, Javascript (ES6), Coffeescript

- Sql, DB design, Nosql (Redis, Azure storage)

I’m the author of the popular library Rotativa (create PDF in .Net) - 150K downloads to date:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Rotativa - https://github.com/webgio/Rotativa

I just bootstrapped in production my personal startup SaaS project, RotativaHQ. It’s a distributed cloud service designed for scalability, reliability and performance: https://rotativahq.com

I have plenty of experience with helping companies (and startups) overcome difficult problems and deliver their ideas to market.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/giorgiobozio/

http://stackoverflow.com/users/212398/giorgio-bozio

https://github.com/webgio

Contact me, we can chat on skype or hangouts:

email: giorgio.bozio [at] gmail.com

skype: giorgio.bozio
I was a kid then, and if I hadn't been given an explanation of how the loans worked, I would have looked it up. I was borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, and I wasn't about to screw that up.

I always look up the terms of any loans I take, including student loans, car loans, credit cards, etc. Honestly, is that too much to expect?
Wow, that's very presumptive of you.

I lived for several years without a bank account and throughout that time I always had a home and a shipping address. Millions of people in the US don't have bank accounts. Not because they are vagrants or homeless but simply because they live too close to the margins to afford the potential economic chaos that having a bank account can cause.
how do people get by with 70K in london?
USB Canary
You can still leak information from your backtested time series by choosing WHICH algorithm to use out of a large pool of algorithms. You'll get regression to the mean because you optimized for a noisy signal (backtesting performance) of future earnings.
Speed Up Development ReactNative with Gulp
Building a sustainable biz and not raising VC
El Salvador, Prizing Water Over Gold, Bans All Metal Mining
Hey everyone, it's been a while since I've posted in here ️

I've had a blog post brewing for a while that I've been desperate to share with this community in particular.

I believe too many people are "doing a startup" for a quick win to be successful and happy. It's what I did with my last company.

I see so many founders raising VC and angel money for businesses that would probably just be amazing organic businesses.

I just wanted to share with you what we're doing with Sanctus, why we're happy that we're building a sustainable business that has no intention to sell or raise VC and why playing "the long game" has transformed my world-view on business.

It feels like there is a band of people who are starting to focus on building awesome 'lifestyle' businesses or just bootstrapping and actually making money from day one.

I hope this post can start what I think is a well-needed discussion
The idea of representing a large corpus in a compressed form and learning both concepts as well as semantics about that corpus is facinating to me. A tree like the one described in the article measures semantic distance, much like a character trie does. What data structure support storing or calculating conceptual distances? I've read about word2vec and the mechanics behind the training process but never how that looks in memory or when serialized to disk.

Also, is there a link between the sematic and conceptual distance between two terms, does anyone know?

It would surprise me if there was such a correlation, because the concepts of "near" are different in the semantic and conceptual world. Then again, it would be facinating if there was.
It's a real person who gave you real money and is wasting their time with the defective product sold to them as well.
The "Garadget controller" (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/softcomplex/garadget-ga...) looks like a physical device to me.
C is definitely not Algol.

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-- C. A. R. Hoare, Turing award lecture in 1981,
> I think so too but couldn't work out how. It needs something extra on top to give you a reason to work through the puzzles I think.

I've been thinking on these lines recently too, and maybe the game could be to allow others to experience the fun you're having in building these rules and watching the outcomes? Letting them author the rules, and watch the outcomes. Or letting them manage and upgrade the bots, sorta like an overlord who doesn't actually chop wood etc.

This is kind of a nebulous idea (and definitely not new), but spawns from the fun I've been having the past few weeks in writing a bunch of simple rules for cities to attack, ally, trade with each other. Watching kingdoms evolve, alliances form and break, funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun. It might not be as fun for a passive observer, but as the author of the rules, the feedback loop of making changes and watching the emergent outcomes was pretty neat (kinda like programming, heh). But it is a scary path to go down, if the intention is to market it as a game, because it doesn't look or sound like any "real" game.

On a different note, Dwarf Fortress is ripe with such emergent outcomes. On another different note, Robocode is quite fun where you author bots and rules and watch how the bots fare against each other.
> On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls

As with any "scares", it took place largely in the media (even there not that much, maybe the odd op-ed and tech/talkshow) while in on-the-ground reality nobody cared and everyone either directly got eagerly and excitedly "into it" or asked their "tech-savvy neighborhood youth" to hook them up with warez or music or in any event back up /digitize their existing collections. (Apart from your typical cautious disposable-income-middle-classer who actually enjoyed regularly investing some of their funds into their ever-growing legal collection of CDs/DVDs/etc) The "scares" initiative really only began in earnest as movies became a feasible target and the music industry must have been much more focused on not sharing the music industry's fate (ie "almost die, then be 'rescued' on breadcrumb terms by Apple")
It sounds like a fun challenge. Someone sign me up please. The average downsides of wealth are far better than the average downsides of being poor.

I understand where this article is coming from though and it does a good job of making the point it intends to.
Very large retailers do negotiate their fees but there's only so low they can go because different parts of the fee go to different entities along the chain (visa/mc, banks, merchant providers, etc.)
I have a pretty unique email address (you'd probably guess it) but somehow I once ended up on the LA Bar association mailing list.
There was a company called Kiko[0]. They made it into YC back in 2007 I think. They were basically building Google Calendar. After a year of work Google unveiled their Google Calendar and they had to sold their business. PG wrote about it in one of his essays[1].

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kiko#/entity

[1] http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html
A deeper knowledge of physics wouldn't offer much new insight into psychology.

A deeper knowledge of psychology and/or sociology can help you predict someone's behavior. Instead of assuming utility maximizing "rational" agents, you may be able to more accurately model human behavior.
I know someone who was a remote worker from the early 1990s until a year or two ago. He was working from home in the Bay Area for a while, and moved somewhere else to get a lower cost of living.

Well, he pulled that off for a long time, but eventually he got laid off and couldn't find remote work. It's actually harder to find remote work now than it used to be.

So, he settled for a local job with a lower salary than he was used to, because the alternative was moving at least 100 miles away.

The bottom line is that living in an area with a high concentration of tech companies gives you a much better chance of finding work (both on-premise and remote) when your current job is no longer viable. If you work remotely, you need to be aware of the risks.
Indeed. Take Brexit. Government economists stated as fact that there would be 400,000 job losses following a vote to leave (note: the vote, not actually leaving itself). Absolute bloodbath. Reality: the economy grew.

Everyone knows economists say what they're paid to say, which is why they're so often ignored. Oddly, the people who tend to understand that best are often the ones derided as the "uneducated" voters and the people who continue to cling to their faith in economic modelling despite all the evidence it's worthless are often the "educated".
The Java push was mainly driven by the uncertainty of Objective-C's adoption.

Once it was clear developers were ok with using Objective-C, Java Bridge was shown the door.