skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a fellow Brit and I've been running my web biz whilst travelling for about 5 years and totally reccomend that you do it. The visa's taxes, and banking thing can be tricky and is always changing but once you've made the jump it only gets easier. I have been running my online businesses whilst travelling around South East Asia and it totally rocks. mostly renting places in Thailand as a base (and once you have an address you can get a local bank account and other stuff) then because of the different visa rules you have to leave the country every 2-3 months anyway which I like as it sort of forces me to travel more and discover the other places around South East Asia that also support theis lifestyle, Bali, The Phlippines, Malaysia, Singapore, even places that are lesser developed like Laos still have solid internet connections and it is possiable anywhere. The obvious massive bonus is how far our britsh pound goes whilst living in these places. Still having an address (a famliy member or friend)in the uk is real handy also. So you are sort of registered as living in the Uk but travel alot. Then you can keep you existing english banks going.
The biggest tip I can offer is buy the plane ticket and everything else will fall into place.
Yes but if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion then we're all wearing unisex wipe-clean grey jumpsuits, on the basis that they're the most efficiently functional clothing.

The funny thing about high-end anything is that you buy it once and it's yours for the rest of your life, vs buying something cheap and replacing it every year (or 5 years or whatever). That Rolex is self-powering and can be repaired in a backroom workshop (quite literally at a 1930s tech level) and will last long enough to pass onto your kids. The Timex has to be replaced with a whole new unit, and damaged ones go into landfill. Manufacturing the Timex involves sweatshop labour and toxic chemicals for the semiconductors. Etc..
This is what I do and I find it very difficult to concentrate. If I can learn then so can anybody.

1. Set yourself very short-term goals. Goals that can be achieved in mere hours. Break everything up. That's not to say you can't work for solid days on one thing every now and again, but if you're like me it'll probably be the exception.

2. Actually goals are not what you should be aiming for. Becoming an autodidact is about building habits. Habits that ensure that you learn. Goals have to be set and will stress you out, habits ultimately become second-nature.

3. Don't force yourself to do something that you're losing interest in. Very few people would be able to manage that without ruining another part of their life.

4. If you're losing interest you should often just move onto the next thing. The trick however is to make sure that everything that you move to is difficult, worthwhile and requires you to learn something. You have to make sure that even though you're the same short-attention span kid that you used to be you're always learning something new. You can always go back at a later date when you're less bored by a topic.

5. Always do what you love. (Okay, this isn't strictly necessary, it's more of a sanity thing. You can't work as hard when you're not enjoying yourself. You will burn out.)

6. Write down everything you learn in as concise and clear a way as possible -- especially the things which have really blown your mind -- also, if it's code have examples you can look at. Every couple of days pick up one of your black books and skim it. It will jog your memory and is kind of fun, but remember that the point isn't to remember everything off by heart: the point is to know frames of reference and be able to pick things up again if you need them. You're not studying for a test.

7. Don't overdo it. If you're close to an emotional breakdown you need to stop and think about why you started. Find balance.
I would love nothing more than to have all my books in a digital format, but destroying the books in the process is horrendous.

There are better solutions for high speed book scanning that don't destroy the book in the process. http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-...
I do not like it when people use HN as their own personal blog.
You are so right. Seriosly, I would never, NEVER code on my Android phone. And why should I? It is a small device with a small display and small keys - I would not like to search for a specific line of code in a 2000 LOC document.. seriously.
I am a CS guy, so I have my laptop around me most of the time when I feel like I need to code something. That's far enough I think.
Possibly ;-)

Clearly condoning Racism/Sexism etc... in hiring can't ever be acceptable but there is a different perspective that could be applied here

You could argue that the poster is mitigating risk - because he perceives that there are opportunities (rightly or wrongly) in hiring certain minorities / sexes and therefore he believes that he's acting in his company's best interests by proactively screening them out
California, There It Went
Are you just using regular files?
Any reviews for Zoho CRM?
Not as impressive as the PayPal mafia but still surprised to see the likes of Valve on there.
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> Then again, I'm not sure how you're supposed to know which tests are the magic ones which will guide you to a solution, and the author conveniently trails off without telling us.

Oh ye of little faith: you just do it the same way you know which magic refactorings to apply once your code is working, to turn your test-passing ad-hoc spaghetti into a clean, maintainable design. :-)

> (I'm also not sure what happened to first sitting down with a pen and paper and figuring out the algorithm, instead of praying to the TDD gods that you might magically stub your toe on it.)

Indeed. My current project for one client is building a user interface. I just spent nearly a week writing a design spec -- though some might call it a math paper -- to prove that all those transformations I'm planning to do to get from a user-friendly description of the situation to a hardware-friendly one are actually going to work. The TDD gods would no doubt consider me a heretic, but I suspect that I'll somehow avoid eternal damnation (as long as I write some tests later, of course).
I also wouldn't advise destroying books. I have lots of books which are quite old and rare, and may be valuable in themselves as historical artefacts.
Ah, but as developers our opinions don't matter at all. It's all about what our end-users want, and they clearly don't wan't to install Silverlight. The fact that it's 10x easier for me as a C# guy to write my thing against Silverlight has exactly zero bearing on my decision to build a product in it. Users won't install it, so it's just bad business to build software for it.

And yes, naturally, if the other thing was the accepted thing, I would be happy to accept it and not the other one. Like I say, there's no bias against one or the other. I (and seemingly everybody) simply don't want both.
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How can I learn to parse a Starcraft 2 replay?
It seems this has a lot to do with binary. My preferred language is PHP. I want to learn how to do this, could anyone tell me how can I get started?
That's the same thing as racism. Every racist ever has told himself that he's 'mitigating risk for the company' by not hiring minorities.
The skills and techniques required are very very different between the fields though; my PhD was in natural language processing but I don't have the first clue about machine vision, for example.

Hell, I was working on parsing biomedical text -- meaning I don't really have much of a clue about speech processing, machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering or most of the other subfields of linguistic computing.

Of course there's plenty of room for cross-fertilization, but that's true across comp sci as a whole. Thinking of all of these things as being part of some coherent topic called AI is more of a historical legacy than a useful category.
Place where Europe began: Spiral cities built on remote Russian plains by Aryans
I'm not sure I understand this. Correct me if I am wrong, but you want to hire children to do real-world jobs, in possible contravention of child labor laws in about a zillion different jurisdictions worldwide, and then you are going to pay them in a "virtual currency" which is either a) not transferrable to legal tender, and thus essentially worthless, or b) transferrable to legal tender, in which case you now have to deal with banking laws in about a zillion jurisdictions?

Is that the pitch?
I really need to visit the states if beer is that cheap over there.. :)

On a sidenote, to add something on-topic: So a fresh graduate (with a strong resume, granted) in Seattle makes 130% of my 5 years experience salary in one of the biggest cities in Germany. I cannot believe the cost of living is that much higher, so - wow, I'm impressed.
When I said communist, I meant it with an obvious context to China - essentially not meant to say a communist society(as in socialism) but instead a communist single-party government.

Similarly for Singapore. I understand China to be a lot more capitalist than India for example.
It is true that Japan and a lot of european countries have done better with democracy, however they typically have a lot homogenous populations - very unlike of bigger countries like the US, China and India and also unlike some smaller countries like Singapore.

Even then there is little reason to believe if a communist form of government would not have done better in these countries also.
Also, there's something strange with the USA row in this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave
You and your job
Funny that ten years ago some of our website visitors complained about requiring javascript to use the site ;-)
Personally I would gladly pay a prospective employee let's say 2-4 hours worth of consultancy fee to come over and code a simple example test, or preferably do a minor thing as a consultant (let's say a few days work). That is if I have screened them before for basic qualification. It would set the scene for a good future relationship and might help encourage the person to take the job.

It's also good to start out with consultancy before actually hiring someone to screen and to set up expectations of level of delivery - consultants work harder and have a more professional attitude than a straight-up employee. Though I don't know if the transition from consultant to employee is that easy, I've certainly preferred to stay a consultant and seen no benefit in becoming an employee.
... I like the fact that 15 places above this post, currently, is this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754357
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Now I am getting visions of a bunch of Ladies huddled in a bunker somewhere while hordes of Creeps throw themselves against the doors and windows. Sort of Resident Evil style.

Terrifying. :|
If you have spare dev cycles, I'd say it's in your better interest to build a software product that will make you money.

You get all the advantages the author talks about, with none of the disadvantages that the commenters here point out. You get income, and you get something concrete you can point to when it comes time to interview for your next job:

"I built and designed somerandomthing.com from scratch. It's built on the mZungu stack and handles peak loads of 14k requests per second. Check it out when you get a chance. It pays my rent."
> 4) Buy there the more expensive license,
> with which you have to type in the license
> key whenever you do a reinstall (well, of
> course, why not paying more to have it
> harder to use).

it'll be MUCH more expensive. The list price of non-oem non-upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium is $199.99 as opposed to the OEM version which is ~$90 if you buy it on the web.

I would assume that the hardware vendors get better prices from MS, say, $70, but what they are going to refund you is more like $30 or something.

So even if (and that's a huge if) you can get your OEM license refunded, you still have to pay a huge premium to get that clean installation.
So are insurance companies who charge more to males "sexist" or to younger drivers "ageist"? Undoubtedly, there are some racist idiots hiding behind the policy of mitigating risk, but I can't believe some don't have reasonably logical, if tasteless, motivations.
In what possible way could his work fit the guidelines for awarding the prize, as described in the will of Alfred Nobel?
Again, I only referred to a communist form of governance, not the market. I understand China to have a communist form of governance (single party) and a capitalist market.

India is definitely a lot more socialist than China and even the US. My guess is also that US is more socialist than China now, but this was not the case 20years ago - this also is indicative of the strengths of a communist form of governance.
I never said anything about working from home. I said $12 per hour isn't real copywriting.
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The truth is that a lot of the sites that you use on a regular basis -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, last.fm, your bank, your webmail provider, etc. etc. etc. -- all rely on different kinds of AI for parts of their functionality.

You are exposed to and using AI all the time.
You had clear evidence of why you hired #2 instead of #1 - your issue should be with your company not standing up to this and actually fighting and winning the case.
Test-tube baby pioneer wins Nobel Prize in medicine
Yes. On a mac too. I'm a netflix subscriber and NF requires Silverlight.
Also, too bad Alphonse didn't include a test such as:

@Test
public void stringContainsNewline() throws Exception {
assertThat(wrap("ab\ncd e", 4), equalTo("ab\ncd e"));
}
Genetic algorithms work pretty well for obvious reasons.
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A quick idea that could avoid the "why bother" and originality issues.

There is a 25m x 4m swimming pool here, with about half a million 2cm x 2cm blue tiles (http://imgur.com/UdzbE.jpg). Imagine that for a cost of printing a tile, one could put a tiny picture of their face in this pool.

Why would anyone do that? This is a 5+ star mountain resort located half a mile from several 2014 Winter Olympics sites. Those who play the tile game shall get a lifetime discount on resort's accommodation and services.

Advantages are simple: participants get discounts, those who stay here have a more fun swimming experience, and the resort gets clients and promotion (even if the effort is unsuccessful in the end).

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated w. the resort.
Does anyone here know if the Jurassic Park infrastructure was ever documented anywhere, based on the nuggets of information in the books and films?

I realise that wouldn't have much real world value, but it would be fun to read through.
If people don't have rent money they don't have the time to work on open source as they are too busy working (i.e. in a short-term job unrelated to developing software). So the advice only applies to people who are financially stable but also have spare time such as students.
What struck me is the guy was coding to pass his tests only, not thinking about the right way to code the algorithm.

It's like coding by taking stabs in the dark until every degenerate case you thought of is handled correctly. There's still no understanding of the problem or even a hope of a "proof" that what you did was correct.

Is this the future of software development? No wonder software is crap.
"Anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now. And it's because they sat there that they were able to do it."
Race is an issue but we African Americans need to stop thinking everything revolves around it.

We can stop thinking about racism when 80% marriages are inter-racial.
I have it installed but disabled. I don't want another flash-like product to gain traction, but occasionally I have to visit MSFT sites that require it.
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Salman is a premier TED candidate as he is "doing it" and it will be interesting to hear what he is dreaming about for this space.

Stupendous choice Alexis.
Did it ever occur to you that these people you have encountered (how many? 1? 2?) who cry excuses could just be stupid and/or jerks, and that people of all backgrounds can be stupid and/or jerks? Or perhaps it is your hiring practice that needs working on.

Racism and sexism (though you seem to throw women in as a second thought with little to do with the rest of your article, which is about racism) are issues, and it's writing like this that helps to make it an issue.

Instead of contributing to the problem, work on a solution. Work out why people are crying sexism/racism in your hiring practices or workplace. Maybe they have a point that you can't see? Take those you feel are unfairly accusing you through the court procedure rather than settling.

But don't just anonymously bitch at us.
Having read many similar accounts of interviewing at Google I can't help but believe the two companies share the same hiring sentiment: they'd rather leave more qualified engineers on the table than risk hiring a bad one. If I were the OP I wouldn't (and it doesn't seem like he does) feel bad about it but instead use it as a determinant in viewing one's granularly-acquired skillset in contrast to the skillset involved in working at one of these gigantic companies. Its a good perspective to have regardless of if you end up working for them or not.
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Is it fast enough for real-time modification of the data? What if I want to do image recognition and want to ad, let's say sunglasses, to the person's face?
I'm not a computer scientist, but I would like to point you to the MIT OpenCourse site (http://ocw.mit.edu/). Or any number of similar sites. Or even algorithm competitions like ACM ICPC/Topcoder.
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EpicWin (the geek productivity app for iPod/iPhone) has launched a dev blog
You're right. Rejection is hard, and people are terrified by it (why do you think cosmetic surgery is so prevalent?)

And yet, rejection usually consists of a simple and benign "no".

Why are we so sensitive to the word no? Can this be healthy, that we would hide in the shadows all our lives than ask for what we want and need?

The amazing thing about Rejection Therapy is that people are more likely to give you what you ask for than you can imagine. The world is yours for the taking, but you have to create opportunities and ask.

I agree with Thomas S. Monson when he said "In reality, we are all travelers - even explorers of mortality", and taking risks where rejection is a real possibility is necessary to personal exploration and conquest.
"consultants work harder and have a more professional attitude than a straight-up employee" - citation needed
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Two great books that really impacted me, both about the horrors of bad research:

"Good Calories, Bad Calories", by Gary Taubes, on nutrition and health.

"The Blank Slate", by Steven Pinker, on human nature.
Get a cake-by-mail shop integrated/affiliated ("Like this cake? You could be eating it. Click here to order.") and you might become rich.
Maybe so. One of my pet peeves on HN is people being so concerned about avoiding the appearance of self-promotion that they leave out specific information that would help the conversation.
No, not at all. But I'm weary of seeing this cast as a noble, altruistic desire to help society, rather than a businessman's desire for wealth, power and glory.
Numpy does have a lot of C code compared to most python packages, but I don't think that's the right way to look at it. If numpy was only about something being in C instead of python, it would not be that interesting.

But numpy brings you abstractions on top of python which are useful and even more high level than python, and that's what is interesting: abstractions which do make your code faster (when applicable, of course).

From the blog's profiling posts, a lot of time seems to be spent into MDCT and polyphase decoding: both could be coded quite efficiently in numpy (I hope to add MDCT itself in scipy, actually).

About being part of python: I don't think it would be a right move (and has been given up from both python and numpy), because numpy is quite big, and depends on quite hairy dependencies if you care about speed. I don't think it is fair to say that numpy is a language extension - numpy feels more natural than say twisted from a python integration POV. But I am a numpy developer, so maybe not the best judge.
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>Why would I want something produced by a human when I can instead get something produced by a robot to within 0.001" tolerances?

The problem here is you're thinking like a technical person. You don't buy a Rolex to keep time. You buy a Rolex to let women around you know you can afford to buy a Rolex. Same goes with a Ferrari or Bruno Maglis or any of the other conspicuous brands.
State of Virtacore
Yeah, Dropbox's challenge was/is excellent.
Nice post.

I've always thought that the people who gave a damn were the ones who instinctively understood that energy given is not energy given away. It's energy given and kept.

Those who appear to not give a damn are the ones who think that if you expend energy on your customers, you lose that energy and become weaker. Ironically, they become weaker by not expending that energy.

A programmer going the extra mile by writing great customer facing software is like lighting a candle lighting another candle. At the moment they touch, both become brighter and then you have twice the light.

Thanks for the great examples. I love Zappos and hipmunk, too.
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Cool. My problem has been finding a room for two months with an internet connection - often there's a minimum period. It's not so bad if you like living with people, but if you live alone...

The idea about the net cafe is a nice one though - maybe I'll try that next time! :-)
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It's about respect.

If someone feels more aligned with a gender they weren't born with - and they feel the need to do something about it, then they deserve to be have their needs respected.
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