skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where to work in NYC? (I'm a fresh comp sci grad)
Dear Hacker News,

I am graduating this Fall from NYU, bachelors in computer science, near perfect GPA. I want to stay in the city and with Silicon Alley and all, where is a good place to work?

My choices are

1. Google
2. Hot shot startups - Foursquare, Stack Overflow etc
3. Pivotal Labs

How do all these stack up? And what is important to keep in mind for the first job? I trust HNers more than my NYU career counselors!

Feedback/comments/suggestions please!
"Anywhere that easyjet flies to is probably a good spot, they're a dirt cheap carrier in Europe."

As always, this depends. When you can book well in advance then you'll usually get a good deal. If you fly on short notice or during busy times, however, you may pay the same prices as the old boy airlines.

Just as any airline EasyJet are masters of yield management. If they can sell you a ticket for 400 quid, they won't sell it for 40. Also, it's no frills whatsoever (OK, neither is any other airline nowadays).
The terse term is "overcome by events" (OBE), applied literally.
The down-swing in a business cycle is the time for everyone to resurrect their pet anti-trade theories.
London Stock Exchange delays Linux move by two months
Thanks for the info. I will definitely use the suggestion to choose one city as a hub.
Yes, I think they're probably more likely to open email than the average user. But my point was really that if you've got something that executives want to read, then email is most likely the format they want to read it in.

And depending on the specifics, I'm not sure there is a difference between "content" and "work stuff" for B2B
I beg to differ. I'll say it's on par with Steve Jobs'. To me, both relate their life stories, not self congratulations. You can argue the same with Steve's self-credit of the Mac with his newly acquired love for fonts.

His "A or B" at the end is where it resonants with me. As other hn reply points out, life is never not as black and white as he states, but nonetheless, it does give a good guidance. I wouldn't call it "hastily dashed off the night before".
It's kind of funny that people see PHP related to anything other than serving websites and they cringe.

As of 5.3 (and I won't say prior to that because even I don't believe it), PHP has become a nice utility language for just more than serving out wordpress.

Closures and the reference sweep GC level the playing field.
Cryonics As A Large Scale Enterprise
I grew up attending the Methodist Church (which up in Vermont didn't used to be quite the holy-rollers that they are in the South), and for a time in my youth was very religious.

I attended a Catholic school for middle school, and convinced myself that I would become Catholic one day. I expected that upon going off to college and being able to decide my own life that I'd covert quite soon.

Instead, I became a mathematician in more ways than just study, and began trying to generalize and abstract everything in my life. The oft-observed similarities of religions at their roots, but divergence at the "dos and don'ts" level gave rise to this conclusion:

In my being (indeed, in all beings, I should think) there is a place, a little box often marked "faith". There are a very large number of things you can put there, but the _important_ things that come out of it are always the same: be good to others, be good to yourself, be happy. Everything else attached to religions only serves to cloud those ideas. Though I could thus put anything into that box, it will always have the same result, and so for the moment, I leave it empty, and draw on the same lessons.

It's like there is an abstract class definition for faith, and I'm using a _very_ trivial implementation based on constants, because it's quite a bit faster and more efficient than the other options out there.
YouTube - Hitler Finds Out About Opera 10.60
Minor nitpick, the cdr implementation is (out of need, as far as I can see) terribly slow for larger datasets, it uses array_slice($this->getArrayCopy(), 1) .
Hi Damnit,

Just wanted to say that I exhibit much the same set of phenomena that you do. I don't ever finish anything I start, I always look for something new, I ride the wave of exhilaration that comes from sinking my teeth into some serious new intellectual problem, coding 18 hour days, and then give up entirely a week later and endlessly refresh HN. I quit jobs and relationships etc. all the time, and then strike up new ones which seem to be destined to last forever.

The difference is that it doesn't bother me so much. I'm quite happy with my life as it is. I think that the need for "production" and "accomplishing goals" etc. is largely a cultural artifact. It's not really important. I think it'd be incredibly boring to be doing the same job for a whole two years.

It stopped bothering me roughly around the time I started exercising (martial arts) and meditating (zazen), so perhaps that has something to do with it. But that's also the time I graduated from school, so maybe it was the newfound freedom that made me happier. Note that I didn't change one bit - I still am a start-only person. It's just that I'm comfortable with it now.

I think you should just enjoy it, if you can.
I wish you would have split up "Nonreligious/Atheist/Agnostic/etc" because I'm non-religious but not an atheist or agnostic. Rather, I'm just completely uninterested.
I know in the grocery store (in the US) where I worked in high school, this was incorrect. The store was responsible for sticking the change, the armored truck was responsible for collecting the receipts, and the vendor was responsible for stocking the product. Granted, this is the most complex case and relies on the abnormal relationship that vendors have with supermarkets, but I would suspect that it represents a nontrivial percentage of machines.
True enough. High speed rail is another option to be considered by the way.
Photographer detained by police, BP employee after taking picture on public road
Jane Street Capital - these guys are the place to be for doing ML/functional programming in the real world.
Sounds like a case of the blind leading the blind. If you figure you may need an MBA, it doesn't seem you'd be best suited to coaching startups, since that is part of the aim of angel investing. If they all turn out to be dud, then you're not really getting a complete picture. Perhaps it'd be quicker, cheaper and easier to study some existing successful and non-successful startups.

Furthermore, his suggestion to go out and deliberately lose say $5,000 on gambling just doesn't seem like sound business advice to me. Though if anyone does want to throw away $5,000 I'd be happy to talk to them, heh.
Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression
Microsoft's .NET at ten: big hits, strange misses
Now I am not the biggest Dawkins fan (I think he is abit of a science zealot - which has it's place but is still uncomfortable) but you're being unfair.

He is at least soundly scientific; especially in evolutionary biology.

He may dress it up in fancy words, sure.
Ironically, the Mashable article is written by a woman, though who knows how much control she had over the list and title.
Television/film casting is like that. Being from Los Angeles I had dabbled in "extra" work a bit (still have my expired SAG card! :) Casting agents always need certain looks or skills, e.g. someone tall with red hair that can horseback ride, or has a running car older than 1970. Stuff like that goes out in casting calls, and the best they can do is ask people to work their social network in the traditional way, i.e. family or friends they might know etc. Come to think of it Hollywood in general is pretty low tech...
Out of all the possible combinations of human DNA, I wonder what the "perfect" human individual would look like.

He or she is hiding there, somewhere, in the probability space of all possible combinations.

Must be lonely.
It is a 10-day silent meditation, so you can't read or write or speak to anyone for the entire 10 days. This means that you are stuck inside of yourself, with no distractions, for 10 days. What happens is a lot of your problems come to the surface and you are forced to deal with them, and meditation helps you to deal with them. After the course, I have been able to use meditation to better understand myself, and my thoughts, and to deal with anxieties and problems that come up in my life. Email me if you have questions about it.
That 10% is the difference between a hobby and a product.
Heathrow has the highest airport taxes in the EU. Fly into Frankfurt or Amsterdam instead. You can take the eurostar from there or Paris to London. I've had good luck using tripadvisor.com to find hotels. Stars are fairly meaningless when most people are more concerned about the location and price. (I believe you get a star for onsite drycleaning even if you are in a shitty neighborhood)

And if you want to start and end a trip in 2 different cities talk to a travel agent. The sites are fairly good for single destination returns. Anything more complex needs a human being. I've always found the prices to be about the same.
I appreciate the correction and you did it in a courteous manner. I am not native speaker and I was a little confused by the mistake. Bad grammar can mislead those of us that are learning. Also, it is understood that everybody makes mistakes and it is not a critique on the person that made the mistake.
Get real, there will be leaks of business data if this goes throught. Indian administration is already very corrupt at all levels.
Like flash this was another stumbling block for anyone that wanted to make a browser and I am glad to see if fall. I got more then one request to add ActiveX to Arora.

"South Korean regulators realised the rules were preventing businesses from offering services to smartphones."

I wish it had been because of all of the existing browsers that don't support ActiveX on the desktop, but I'll take browsers on the smartphone as the reason.
College Prowler essay competition a follow the rules to win
The College Prowler essay competition is a popular essay competition in the United States. Unlike other competitions, this one does not require major eligibility criteria. However, there are rules which need to be adhered. With the proper guidelines you will be able to take part in this competition.
Apple apologizes to his customers
In other words you have no data or facts of any kind. Any instances of organized economic espionage as a policy by the Indian Government from before the days of the BlackBerry? I thought not. "Get Real" isn't an argument.

Any instances of corrupt bureaucrats (they exist, sure) using an Intelligence Agency to expedite their corruption by intercepting Multinational Communications? Any instances of non blackberry spying on Multinationals, hacking into their computers etc(like what happened with Google in China)? Do tell.
She clearly stipulated that he only had permission to reproduce some parts of her work

Where?

From the article -

JB: "I'll answer your question, but I'd like your permission to post the exchange on my website. Deal?"

Eleanor: "absolutely!"

From the update: "For those of you who were concerned, I did eventually hear from Eleanor. She said she didn't feel annoyed or offended that I had posted her remarks, she did understand where I was "coming from," and she appreciated that I took the time to deal with her."

I'm not seeing where she "clearly stipulated that he only had permission to reproduce some parts of her work."
Similar to Lisp2Perl

http://www.hhdave.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Which implements Lisp on Perl.
Please, don't ever try to be funny on hacker news. People are too smart for this kind of shit.
Probably much more than 50%. I've never heard my grandparents speaking any italian at all, but I guess they could understand it to some extents.
Italian as a language started to spread among middle/lower classes only in the 60's when most of the people bought TV sets for their living room.
I still use my regional language (a variation of venetian) everyday with family and friends.
"I don't think there's really much of an analogy between programming languages and food."

Programming languages are cultural, not technical, artifacts. For reasons why one language is used by more programmers at a given point in time than another you need to turn to sociology. Lisp has some clearly superior technical ideas, which is why it has continued to be used and expanded for the last 50 years, and why all the other languages you mention (Python, Ruby, ML) drew ideas there. On the other hand, a language like Perl (and as Python and Ruby will eventually be) is briefly popular, but has no compelling technical features or metaprogramming facilities for people to continue to use and expand it when another shiny new language comes along.
Intergalactic Computer Network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A number of pay per click affiliates found that by including an opt-in to a list during the sales process they were able to make sales again and again and again. Shifting from short term to long term profitability. Why make one sale to a client when you could make several?
because all of us need to believe in something

Numerous studies have shown that this is not correct.

You are right in the sense that it is impossible to live life as a pure empiricist - at some point you have to take some things on trust, and probably on faith.

But a deity faith is not required. :)
What do you do when your website is blocked by Google Malware Warning?
In a not very beautiful day, you visit your website and may suddenly see this warning "This website at www.MyWebsite.com (example) has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preference". This is not a fictitious scenario; we have seen this problem hurt businesses time and time again and it just happened with our client a few days ago.
Yeah, this code actually really illustrates the difference between writing crappy code in PHP and writing something elegantly using everything the has come in in the past few versions.

I have seen quiet a few PHP bashing comments recently that while true of older versions are much less true of 5.3, I mean there is still the same old nitpicks about the parameter orders and the amount of built in functions in the standard namespace but it is defiantly heading in the right direction.
Huh? Everyone has to make the choice between being clever or kind. The point of the talk wasn't "make the right choices and you'll end up a billionaire." The point of the story was the quality of your life, your own happiness, and your real worth is determined by the choices you make, not what gifts you have because, as Jeff pointed out, they're just gifts after all, you didn't earn them.

His implicit point was an average intelligent person with average wealth can be just as satisfied with his/her life as a highly intelligent, highly gifted billionaire provided they both made quality choices about how they lived their life.

Edit: clarified last sentence.
Well, not much that can be done about caching proxies. Regarding DNS, have you been able to look at whether the IP's from failed requests show up on the new IP shortly after? I.E perhaps browser-pinning from open sessions?
A Very Scary Fireworks Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space
Buy Marshall  Microphone
Marshall Electronics MXL USB Microphones is for sale at GigaSonic.com.
April fools day was a while ago.

"What is ultimately and urgently needed, then, is a dozenalization of the SI base units of the metric system."

Right. And that after calling 'decimal time' a limit case of absurdity by decimalist agitators ? (iirc it was just a marketing stunt by swatch).

What's this then, a limit case of absurdity by duodecimalist agitators ?

It's funny, but nobody in their right mind is going to switch to base 12 any time soon.

Hard to tell if these guys are serious: http://www.dozenal.org/index.php?u=31

I hereby propose we switch to base 11, prime numbers are so much more interesting than all these composites.
BCS manages to survive vote of no confidence
There is no fundamental right to being paid for your work. If you want to be paid, you have to do work that people are willing to pay for. Otherwise I could just dig a hole in front of your front door and ask you to pay me for it.
I see, Indian government hires only super humans, who never ever take a bribe. http://www.google.com/search?q=india+bribe
This material sounds oddly familiar...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury#Red_Mercury_as_a_ba...
You've equated coping copyrighted works with witholding changes to a GPL program based on the observation that they're both illegal.

No, I've compared people offering products under a set of conditions and then people breaking those conditions to use those products. JB offered his products under the conditions that people pay him for the privilege and GPL authors offer their products under the condition that people abide by the GPL. Why do we get to ignore JB's conditions and yet have to abide by the GPL?
So this is why tube display signs broke this weekend
BAA plans another big investment in Heathrow's IT
Ok. I got taken in by the 'energy stored in chemical bonds' bit.
Some people do BSD because they actually want corporations to actively use their instead of "shitty version that corporations wrote from scratch".

Yes, and some people make their artistic works available via Creative Commons or public domain. But others enforce their copyrights, just like some software authors provide their works under the GPL. The BSD license or a "clash of cultures" isn't an excuse to ignore the GPL.
Richard Dawkins' faithful optimism has always bothered me. Even if our species is so special, how does that make us, the individuals, lucky? What good does it do us?

Jim Crawford says it better than I:
http://antinatalism.blogspot.com/2008/02/richard-dawkins-bli...
and so does David Benatar:
http://vorosh.blogspot.com/2008/03/optimism-delusion.html
The point is not whether individuals take bribes. Of course some do.

The subject under discussion is your implication that the request for decrypted BlackBerry data (which is being driven by the Intelligence agencies and the Home ministry) is done so with an intention to facilitate such bribery by intercepting multinational communications.

US senators are bribed too. That doesn't mean that the CIA , the DHS or the NSA makes it their business to facilitate such corruption or that any anti terrorism policy adopted by the US government is automatically targeted towards benefiting such bribe takers.

The latter accusation would need more proof then "Well in my ignorant paranoia I think this would happen" . Do you also believe that the US Govt brought down the Twin Towers? After all not everyone in the US Govt is a superhuman patriot who would never work against his own country? After all many foreigners think (with good reason) that the US is a very warmongering country. Is that a good enough rationale?
You could spend the first $1000 to fly to another country where they don't have such silly restrictions.
much thanks. I suppose the answer is to break it into the smallest chunks possible when making an estimation.
Happy to see PHP be taken more seriously around here. Trust me, we're not all moronic programmers using register globals, magic quotes, and other abominations originally available in PHP.

This is a pretty cool project.
Can you point us to an example of you speaking a few sentences of unprepared material - let us decide.

I find accents hard to pick up but fascinating. I can just about make out the accent differences between my (town-sized) city and the next one though as there is a specific inflection that differs.
Currency Risk In A Business
Okay, I'll bite. One of my webapps (http://todoneapp.com) has 100 active users a week. How do I monetize it?
Great insight. Sounds like HAPO (help a producer out) might work. Clearly not just LA because there's also NYC.
YouTube hackers use cross-site scripting vulnerability
BP Oil Spill[Image]
Ask HN: anyone using VoIP as a cell phone replacement?
I would like to be free of a cell phone plan. I spend most of my time -- and make most of my phone calls -- within range of a broadband wireless network. I would ideally like to make most of my calls over VoIP, with the option to fall back on a cell network using pre-paid minutes when necessary.

With so many new devices supporting both Wi-Fi and a cell network, it seems like it should trivial to do this, but I can't seem to find any good information about it. Most of what I see are older posts that say: "it's not quite ready yet. This will happen soon."

Has anyone successfully ditched their cell phone plan in favor of VoIP? If so, what devices work well for it? What obstacles or annoyances are there to overcome?

If not, why not? What problems remain unsolved?
SlackHut
Create cool content people will stay around for

And that's the hard part. You might as well have said "Write a best-seller," though the barrier of entry is a bit lower.
I'm sure it's a lot easier to have "fun" at work when you have a money-printing machine in the basement and you have time to play and experiment with new things.

If Google wasn't insanely profitable right now, I bet it would be a lot more stressful environment.
First eBay seller to be prosecuted for false bidding
The fact that it's interpreted makes it a little unrealistic to directly deploy a whole web application with it. However, the sandboxing and embedding features look really cool.
Not being able to release fusion energy in a "controlled" fashion hasn't stopped it being a popular energy source for some applications.
Lloyds Bank cuts 650 jobs, including back office
End of the decline for Internet Explorer?
In the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, and the Orbis Tertius," Borges writes about a short discussion of base 12, which he calls (at least in translation) duodecimal. This is interwoven with a discussion of the 1001 nights, which I found odd, so I wondered what 1001 base 12 was.

It turns out to be a rather unremarkable number: 1729.

Given the time that the story was published, it is possible that Borges, who was fascinated by mathematics and always encoding maths concepts into his stories, had read the anecdote about the Hardy-Ramanujan number, and hid it purposefully in the story.

Edit: anyone interested in reading more about how Borges incorporated mathematics into his stories might find this book worthwhile

http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Librar...
I think the awards are designed to keep people from leaving for startups, not to motivate people to do better work.

Once an employee has a certain amount of financial security and a track record of making things happen (traits shared by a number of Google employees), the employee might be motivated to leave for a startup where there is an opportunity for a big payday. The Google awards provide an opportunity for a big payday while staying at Google.
Robert Anton Wilson

Schrödinger's Cat trilogy especially
That's easy to say when you have a few billion in the bank. But most people simply don't have the liberty of choice at all, their lives are driven by requirements, not by freedom of choice.

Freedom of choice is for the most part an illusion, it is only true freedom if you determine what's on the menu. To be able to choose 'left' or 'right' when you want 'straight', 'down', 'reverse' and so on as valid choices but you don't have them because of the constraints placed on you by every day life is a false kind of freedom presented in those limited choices.

So, in practice, your average billionaire has more (many more) choices available to him than those lower on the financial ladder. The reason Jeff Bezos had the choice to give that speech or not is not because he's particularly happy, but because he's rich.