skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My summary of the link:

Possible solution to the Fermi paradox: there is no paradox. The normal approaches find that there should be a very large number of civilizations by plugging point estimates into the Drake Equation, but multiplying point estimates (as opposed to probability distributions) with each other gives you misleading results.

As a toy example, if you multiply nine factors together to get a probability of life per star, each of the factors a random real number drawn uniformly from [0, 0.2] and the point estimate for each being 0.1, then the product of the point estimates is 1 in a billion. This would translate to an expected 100 life-bearing stars, given 100 billion stars. But if you instead combine the probability distributions, you get a median number of 8.7 life-bearing stars (the mean is still 100).

Going through the literature to estimate reasonable prior distributions for different values in the Drake Equation, you get much more pessimistic estimates for the probability of life in the universe; the priors chosen by the authors suggest a 40% a priori chance for life only emerging once. We really might just be alone.
Yes. Windows 10 would be the last OS from MS. I think they confirmed it.
Further the trees that they polinate are "old world" plants:

The almond is a species of tree native to the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and North Africa.

The narrative that somehow pesticides are bad because they unatural is disingenuous as it forgets that every part of this system is artificial.
Ascendify | Senior Engineer / Team Lead - Scala | San Francisco, CA | FULLTIME, ONSITE | https://talent.ascendify.com/careers/jobs/team-lead-engineer...

Ascendify is a rapidly growing, silicon valley, venture-backed company based in downtown San Francisco that delivers talent solutions to large, global companies. Ascendify’s end-to-end talent platform leverages artificial intelligence to help enterprise companies attract, select, develop and grow talent.

The Shared Services Team Lead Engineer is a senior leader on the engineering team. Working as an individual contributor and leader of our shared services team. You will will help to shape junior engineers through the examples of your own code. You must be capable of working in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment, be self-motivated, results-driven and detail-oriented to achieve success. You are a technology champion and change agent.
Dope Discoveries – Issue 8
What are "end-to-end security features"? They mention it once but then never again.

As far as I know, the term end to end is about communications: an exchange between two or more parties, or endpoints, which can be encrypted "end to end". I'm afraid they just dropped it as another term nobody knows the meaning of, so we'll have to find a new term to describe why Signal and Wire are better than (non-PGP) email.
Hustle | Software Engineer | San Francisco and New York | ONSITE

Hustle is a peer-to-peer text messaging platform that provides organizations across the country with an affordable, efficient, and effective tool to reach their supporters. By facilitating two-way conversations, Hustle’s clients maintain genuine, personal dialogues with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people.

Our clients include Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, political campaigns (including the Bernie Sanders campaign last year) and dozens of universities. It's 48 times more effective than making phone calls.

See a recent article about us in The Hill: "Left Finds New Online Tools To Fight Trump": http://thehill.com/policy/technology/320195-left-finds-new-o...

We use JavaScript, React, React Native and Node.js through out our stack. It's a stack that heavily rewards generalists that just want to ship things.

Hustle was started by engineers from Facebook and MongoDB and is backed by top VC firms including Social Capital and Index Ventures.

Please apply on our site to learn more about us and our growing team of 34!

https://hustle.com/careers/
I don't have a CS degree and work at Amazon. I picked a specialty completely unrelated to academic CS that's generally welcoming of beginners (PHP development).

After getting a very entry level PHP job based on reading a few O'Reilly books, I spent a couple years getting progressively less shitty jobs with progressively higher pay and levels of responsibility. By the time I got an interview with Amazon, I was a legitimate PHP expert. I read a book on Amazon's leadership principles and worked through Cracking the Coding Interview to prep for my interview loop at Amazon, and I'm pretty sure only one or two of my interviewers knew I didn't have a CS degree -- the rest didn't look at my resume.

Now that I've been at Amazon for two years, I don't think any employer would care about my lack of a CS degree. I'm certainly happy to be making several times more than I did in my previous career (French teacher).
SEEKING WORK.

LOCATION: India

REMOTE POSSIBLE: Yes. Prefer remote.

Codementor profile: https://www.codementor.io/vasudevram

Creator of xtopdf, PDF creation toolkit for Python.
Freelance developer, consultant and trainer for many years. Worked with many startups and a few large firms, US & India.

Skills: Python, C, SQL and database design, Unix & Linux, shell, awk, sed, etc., web dev (back end), REST, XML-RPC, PDF generation & text extraction, command-line utility dev (wrote IBM dW article on creating utilities, in C on Linux), Flask, MongoDB, SQLAlchemy, software design, testing. Ruby, Rails and Java earlier too.

Was team leader of a successful Windows C database middleware product, did a lot of Unix C work too.

Overview of xtopdf (my PDF toolkit for Python): http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf
xtopdf creates business reports & simple PDF ebooks. Supports 20+ input formats. Works on CLI, desktop and Web UIs, on Linux, MacOS and Windows.
SharedComputerActivation has been around for a while now and the C2R + Visio bug was fixed in mid 2016.
Goodfoot | Full-Stack Developer | New York | https://goodfoot.io/ | Onsite

Goodfoot builds video applications for the world’s largest companies. Millions of people communicate using our technology every day.

We are profitable, 100% employee owned, and developer driven. Our team of five leans heavily on React, and projects often include cutting edge server technologies - think time series databases, IPFS, and Deepstream - to offer features for a market with unique, large-scale challenges.

We focus on a stable of core products and often extend them to customer specifications. We have recently developed applications that use drones to assess disaster sites for insurance companies, distributed systems that move huge amounts of video data across high-security networks and web interfaces that give financial organizations real-time insight on what’s happening behind markets. We value elegance in implementation and invest heavily in the user experience.

The Goodfoot offices are the East Village, one of NYC's most historic and exciting neighborhoods and near many public transportation options.

We believe people do their best work when challenged, excited, and well-rested. Excellence in execution forms the bedrock of our organization, and we understand that developers, like professional athletes, need collaboration and support to perform at the highest level.

Email me with any questions at - johnwehr (at) goodfoot (dot) io - I'd love to hear from you.

Apply here: https://goodfoot.recruiterbox.com/
Surely this is a sort of top indicator.

I was at a social event recently and some remarkably non-technical people were talking about bitcoin. It reminded me an awful lot of the wall street adage about the shoeshiner/waiter/driver talking stocks...
Seems like a case of the hammer and the anvil -- get people used to paying actual license costs for shrinkwrap software, and not considering "we can pay for X seats and use X+250 copies" as one of the benefits of shrinkwrap over cloud.
I don't think it's just about whether they WANT to contact us. It's about us detecting them in some way, whether that detection is part of them contacting us or not.

There's all the questions around how we would know what to look for, of course.
If only you guys offered Remote work. I used to do marketing for Eros and was constantly pointing them towards what you guys have been doing over the past few years on the marketing front as a shining example of the right way to do digital marketing in the adult space. Would jump at this in a heartbeat, but alas I quite enjoy New Hampshire.
Why Some Men Don’t Work: Video Games Have Gotten Really Good
Fun fact, if you manage to replace the osk.exe (on screen keyboard) and flip the registry bit that loads it before the login screen, it will be executed as SYSTEM, with full disk and network access. It can also interact with the Winlogon window and stealthily phish the password of any user.

Heck, it can even self-delete before any user logs in.

Why programs before the login screen and the screen itself don't run in a sandboxed account is beyond me.

Every windows user with a laptop is running in local admin mode. I've demonstrated this for german TV by having a file less UAC exploit install osk.exe malware, then have this send the password of the next user logging in via SMS to the "attacker". The deleting itself (and remove any anti virus install).
Anyone have a source for a paper? This is good material but hard to follow in such a sparse format.
Ask HN: How to Interview DevOps Candidates?
Over the last year I have transitioned from a software developer into a DevOps role. Changes at the company have meant that some of the more senior members of the team have left and I'm a position of needing to interview their replacements.

I'm comfortable interviewing developer candidates, but having never interviewed anyone for a DevOps position, I'm not sure what the best approach is to ensure that I do a good job identifying qualified candidates.

Should I quiz candidates on their knowledge of networking, on DNS, on tools like strace, etc? Is there a place for quizzing about general Linux knowledge, e.g. "what is grep used for?" I will give candidates an in-office software project to complete: a simple Python program or Bash script, but should I also give them contrived DevOps problems to solve? For example, "deploy this app to this VM"? Or "figure out why this application can't connect to its database."

Any tips or anecdotes about interviewing DevOps candidates, or about being a DevOps candidate, would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
The man who went on a hike – and never stopped walking
This would be a lot more digestable if it didn't harp on about how much better it is than Tex math. I'd prefer a spec that stood its ground and pushed its own merits.
> Nothing is stopping languages from allowing both

Nothing stops pigs from flying either... hypothetically, but they don't, and languages don't, so debating what they could do is rather pointless, they don't.

> how often is code made worse because you have to write multiple Max implementations

Similar situations occur quite often.

> I doubt that there's many instances where such repetition is necessary, or can't be mitigated with wrapper functions.

That they have to be mitigated is the point, I don't have to do stuff like this at all in a dynamic language, things just work.
This yields TRUE for as.character(NA). Not what we want. Anyway, as it seems I'm alone here I retreat to silence. :-)
Binti | San Francisco, CA | Full-Stack Generalists and Data, DevOps, and Security Leads | Full-time, onsite, will transfer H-1B | $100K – $140K, 0.05% – 0.4%

Binti makes software for foster care and adoption agency staff to improve their daily workflow so they can make better-informed decisions and spend more of their time actually helping people. Our mission is to find a safe, loving, and stable family for every child.

Binti's software is used by private adoption agencies in 30 states. We're in the midst of expanding into serving government foster care agencies and are close to reaching two-thirds of the foster care families in the state of California.

We have sustainable revenue, fanatical customers, and ample seed funding from top investors like First Round, Kapor, and Lowercase. We work together in SF and are growing rapidly.

Binti's main SaaS web product is a conventional monolithic Rails/Postgres app that delivers value in heaps and heaps, and remains super fun to hack on. We're building the monolith up higher and higher, and looking forward to soon chipping off a service or two (perhaps in Elixir?). We're using Kubernetes/Google Cloud.

https://binti.com/binti-careers
I presume this is the Solidity they're talking about, for anyone baffled by this: https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/
How is the p-value a log-likelihood ratio?
Elephant 2.0. – nature's invisible information architecture
Okay, so I know Windows probably doesn't actually work this way, but from a user interface perspective... what's the rationale on giving an App permanent access to the user's home folder directories? Don't most well behaved apps have a file open / folder open dialog, which should be able to grant access to files at runtime? If the file opening dialog is provided and controlled by the operating system (I realize many, many legacy apps work differently in Windows) then the OS can silently grant permissions at the time of open, rather than letting apps either have free reign or no access at all.

I feel like this is the expected behavior anyway; Power Users may run utilities that need to touch the whole system, but most regular users are doing pretty good to juggle more than a handful of open files in their mental model of the machine while they're using it. The idea of file permissions is already pretty foreign to the average end user. Applications already have a designated area (%APPDATA%) where they can store their temporary files and things, so perhaps the documents folders should be more locked down by default.
FrameWorks Institute is an interesting nonprofit organization — they "empirically identify the most effective ways of reframing social and scientific topics." In other words, replace the misleading metaphors with better ones.

http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/mission.html

For a practical intro, see "How to build a metaphor to change people's minds"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-build-a-metaphor-to-change-peo...
Hands-On Scala-Native at Scala Days Copenhagen 2017
----
Nudge is hiring Account Execs in New York
----

Native content is the future. All brands are adjusting their marketing communications to content and in turn native. This is a ground floor opportunity to come in and drive the sales of Nudge.

Nudge is a native content platform that helps brands understand the impact of their content. The full toolkit ranges from analytics to distribution optimization to attribution.

We even have a CommonSenseBot, a bot that checks content for anything impacting performance.

More info here:
http://giveitanudge.com/account-executive-nudge/
I am also using Hews, but it has some missing features, like editing a comment you just wrote.

For just reading, it is probably the best.
I have a po'-mans version of this: I print everything to PDF.

From PDF, I can grep/grok/sed/convert to my hearts content.

So okay yeah, my po'-mans document/information-organization-system consists of a bit of muscle memory and judicious use of ^-R to get to the ol' grep. But .. true fact .. if you do the info-management at the command line, it scales.

GUI's don't, whether they're web or otherwise.
What is up with the background music for app demo videos these days? These cute, jaunty, almost childlike melodies all seem the same to me and I'm trying to think of where I first heard the trend. Was it Apple in the late 00s?
The story of human evolution in Africa is undergoing a major rewrite
1. Thanks, and thanks again. Blood, sweat, and tears. But you've just made it worth it. 2. Video: Coming up next! Stay tuned :) 3. API: It's in fact in our plan too, will reply you in detailed tomorrow (Our devs are asleep by now, time difference prob sry) 4. iOS/ Surface: Yup, will be heading there but only after our current web version is stable and good to go. Thanks for suggesting tho :)
We Recorded VCs’, Analyzed How Differently They Talk About Female Entrepreneurs
That's only True if you constantly make unpopular opinions, such that they outweigh your regular ones. There are all sorts of neutral comments that can be made, a point a piece..
How are these token actually used after purchase? For example BATs. How are they tied to Brave, technically speaking?
0xDEADBEEF how I miss you.

Yea, I knew it was on purpose, but it had the unintended consequence of masking bugs that would only show up in release builds.
Materialistic on play store has both of those functionalities. I'm commenting with it now.
Read other people's code. Soon you will realize that even the people who you look up to the most will have their fair share of mistakes and ugly hacks. Nobody's perfect.
Cliperado | Senior Engineers | Amsterdam | FULL TIME , ONSITE, SALARY: €48k-€60k, cliperado.com - Senior backed engineer - Senior frontend engineer
Cliperado is looking for great engineers, who like to think about why and what they are building and iterate over the solution a couple of times. To make something that actually makes sense, both from a user and from a technical point.

Cliperado wants to make it as easy as possible for user to understand a service and creators to educate their users.

If you’ve ever created an online service, you know how much work it is to put screenshots in your documentation. You know it makes your service way easier to understand, reduces your churn and even increases signups. But it is just too much manual labor to keep the shots up to date.
We are creating a solution to fix this and it is coming along pretty nicely.
Our stack includes PHP, Python, VueJS, MySQL, Docker, Selenium, Browser Extensions, Bugs, Performance Issues and a sense of humor.

If you have any questions or you are interested - Please reach out to me arjen@cliperado.com
"end to end" has been a term in common use in language since the 1800s meaning complete coverage. look it up on the oxford english dictionary for more details.
this is essentially how the sandbox works on macos from what I understand. 90% of applications should work fine for this. Some though like antivirus (as an example) can't really do so.
Linux has had the same issue for the longest time: You need root or a capability to set the time, but any program you run can wipe your entire home directory.
In the context of a London vs Paris comparison, there isn't a contracting market in Paris.

French companies don't hire individual contractors directly. It's part of the culture.
Will be fixing it next up, thanks for the feedback.
TowerView Health | Philadelphia, PA | Full-Time and Contract | Remote and In Office | Front-End Engineering | http://towerviewhealth.com

TowerView Health is a rapidly growing startup in Philadelphia looking for a passionate, user-focused front-end engineer/contractor to help us scale up our software platform for medication management.

We help chronically ill patients manage complex medication regimens in their home. We partner with pharmacies that send patients customized pre-sorted medication trays that insert into our custom-designed smart pillbox. Our pillbox can sense when medication is removed and send patients and/or their caregivers automated reminders. Explainer Link: https://youtu.be/vWaBJVrSOiE

Our patients love us because we take away the complexity of managing medications and our customers love us because we keep patients healthy and out of the hospital. We sell to health insurance companies and hospital systems and are poised to scale to over 25K patients in the next 2 years. We've been recognized by Forbes and the Medical Design Excellence Awards, and are committed to providing patients peace of mind when it comes to their medication.

Experience in/with: Angular 1.x, Node, React, HTML, CSS

Projects we want to build:
* data visualization dashboards for nurses to target their care to patients
* easy-to-use web apps to streamline medication filling and reconciliation
* internal operations tooling to create seamless experiences for our patients

We're a small, flexible team looking for someone able to own projects from start to finish.

Shoot me an e-mail at hareesh@towerviewhealth.com if you have any questions or just want to learn more about the company.
I'm pretty sure that all ASCII alphanumeric characters have been widely used in at least subscript format in science, engineering and maths. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to find use of most, if not all, greek letters used as subscripts too in STEM literature

So I'd say subscript characters definitely fall into category "characters that are in actual use".
Interpreting neurons in an LSTM network – YerevaNN
Seeking work.
location: Argentina.
remote: yes.
Technologies: python, nodejs, react/redux, angular, angularJS, mysql, postgresql, mongodb, ionic, react-native.
Friend of mine is a model in NYC. She PM'd me last week asking about putting money into Ethereum. Now she's not stupid by any means, but she's pretty far from the demographic typically associated with cryptocurrencies. Was kind of eye-opening to me about how far the hype is reaching right now.
Yeah I guess I assumed that basically every modern car can go at least 120km/h
My experience with placement services is that none of these people seem to work with remote candidates, and many have a narrow focus on the Bay Area. They are also high-friction (since now you just need to interview and go through the process of 8 placement services instead of cutting out the middleman and just applying to the 8 place you'd like to work) and pretty restrictive in their interpretation of candidacies.
> That's the big disadvantage to the topological method I talk about (developed by Vladimir Arnold); it can only prove stuff about the general nth-degree formulas, whereas Galois theory can prove stuff about specific polynomials (e.g., that x^5 – x – 1 is unsolvable in radicals).

Can these topological methods be generalized to arbitrary fields?
> I think there is a difference between having your medical data accessed by some Bulgarian cyber mafia and having it accessed by Google.

Not if the Bulgarian cyber mafia hacks Google to steal that data. Okay, Google has super-ultra security and it's never been hacked (a false statement), but even so, how many companies have Google's security? I think you can barely count them on one hand. I completely expect drug cartels, for instance, to hack into organizations holding user data any time they want. If Google is easily allowed access to this data, then a dozen other companies with much weaker security will also be allowed access to it.
Codelitt Incubator | UX/UI Designer | Remote OK https://www.codelitt.com

We’re looking for a UX/UI designer to join our design team. 3D chops a plus, but not required.

We are a product incubator and corporate skunkworks/R&D lab. We develop scalable technology solutions on platforms such as Web + Mobile, Machine Learning, AR/VR, and AI/Robotics. You'll have the opportunity to stretch your design disciplines, learn from peers, and educate peers. You'll work with the latest and greatest of bleeding edge tech, have a diverse team, and we allow a lot of autonomy. We also offer 20% time to work on whatever you're passionate about (open source, pet project, etc).

We allow remote, but the Americas (north & south) or Europe working hours are required.
(Please no agencies/recruiters)

Shoot us your CV and portfolio to vincent [at] codelitt.com and cody [at] codelitt.com
Back in the day there was a website where you could fill in a few details and it would create a bitcoin clone including downloadable source. What value do bitcoin alts offer? Hardly anything. Your position is just absurd to say that Ethereum and what is buildable on top of it are valueless. This comment, at the top of a hn thread is a great example of slashdoting of the hn community. It's both weird and educational to watch it happen.