skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you find a good professional (one thats good for me) and how long do you give it to expect results?

I have always had an issue with depression, but its been getting worse lately as basically friends have moved on (married, house, kids). I went to see my university councillor who, emotionally I felt just wanted me out the door and just gave general feel-good advice. I couldn't cope and then defacto dropped out of my fully-paid phd at Oxford.

Then my dad dragged me to the doctor who gave me some antidepressants, which I have to say worked amazing while I took them - much to my utter surprise. I expected the drugs to be overcharged placebo effect. They didn't make me feel happier, but I felt the relief that my "downs" were no longer so long or painful. The doctor recommended some therapy which ... didn't work for me at all. And was really expensive for an unemployed dropout. So I stopped them and stopped the medication being on a high, thinking I was better.

But now I'm realising I'm not. Your comment that "just thinking about suicidal thoughts is a sign something is wrong" struck a chord with me. I think I have a good CV, but I have found it impossible to get a job. My impression is that employers see a gap in work history, I say 'personal reasons' and they then thank me for my time. The cite lack of experience, but that's weird since I'm going for entry-level jobs.

So now I'd like to go back on the antidepressants, which seemed to do something, but without the associated therapy. I'm ambivalent about talking to people. It has to be someone I feel safe with, and whom I can relate to. Which seems to indicate friends, but lean on your friends too much, and they slip and slide away. Nobody likes a depressed friend. Least that's my experience.

Anyway, so how do you find a good professional? Just go down the list?
Here's to the crazy ones recited by Steve
Quick workaround: buy a number on Skype (or any other international service) and forward it to your Twilio number.
Isn't that the Perl culture? As someone who has seen a lot of Perl code, I'm serious.
1 minute and your Android will be SPAM free.
Aside from the fact that this has been tried and not yet worked (see Lenat's Cyc, for example), having to use the Turing Test as a measure of sapience is an artifact of having no idea what sapience is. If we knew (or, once we know) what algorithm produces consciousness, we can test for that directly, and it seems unlikely to me that a giant lookup table will have an internal experience of consciousness in the way that I do.
I have heard stories of how Microsoft would often commit several teams to build a product to the same spec: the team that got something market-ready first was handsomely rewarded...

This is how large companies should run projects. Bureaucracies often suck because they have a captive audience -- because they have no competition. Development teams can suck for exactly the same reasons.

In comparison to the potential impact of bad software in a large company, the cost of 1 or 2 extra development teams is chump change. I remember being in line at the airport to pick up a rental car, thinking, "The software this rental car company uses is clearly very bad. They won't be in business for much longer." I noticed a few years ago, that they were bought. Actually, I just looked it up and they were delisted in 2002.
The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson, has a highly entertaining historical fiction treatment of the Royal Society, Newton and other main characters.
I'd like to answer, but the question is a bit vague. What are you referring to with "that"?
Would have preferred something to enable more visually pleasing metaprogramming, like:

$closure = function() {

echo $this->foo;

};

$context = new \StdClass;

$context->foo = "Hello World";

$context->closure = $closure;

$context->closure();

Not sure if this will be possible in 5.4, but haven't seen anything on it. Right now, we have to do

$context->closure = $closure;

$temp = $context->closure;

$temp();

which is kinda ugly.
The end goal is for the user to have something that best suits their needs. For most people that might be an iphone. Many others are restricted to paying for things they don't want in order to have the things they absolutely require, while being denied the things they need. I hate to say it, but the things I could buy seven years ago suited my needs then much better than the things I can buy now suit my current needs. Computing began by requiring the user to know exactly how the computer worked. Later it merely encouraged and rewarded the user for knowing, like the person who can save a jpeg without pasting it into a Word file. Now it doesn't encourage the user at all and is making an effort at removing any difference between the person who knows and the person who doesn't. A computer can be easy to use without stifling the user; that's one reason Windows is so successful.

"I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity."

In what way? No one is trying to stop a company from selling whatever they want. We're just saying we don't like the trend computing is taking toward a world where as far as everybody is concerned, the devices they entrust their lives and fortunes to might as well work by magic.
I took "that" to mean "hard to read / cryptic code".
Why bother? Odds are that a call to sleep(500) vs. sleep(500 - bcrypt_time) is going to be subtly different depending on timer resolution for your platform and so on. An attacker might be able to bog down your system through other means such that the difference becomes statistically significant or such that bcrypt takes longer than 500ms, then you're not only worse off but you wasted the time it took to implement something that only sounded like it was going to be good enough.

Avoid the pain and burn the CPU cycles for all code paths. If you find that bcrypt takes up proportionally too much CPU, reduce the work factor by 1 until it's acceptable. Keep in mind that the vast majority of logins will be legitimate. For the small number that aren't and persist with failed attempts, let their IP get banned then you don't need to spend any CPU cycles dealing with them -- in this case, it would be fine to sleep an arbitrary amount of time and then display the banned notification.
The Hacker News (THN) wishes its readers a very Happy Diwali
Glad to see it on HN! Thanks for the positive feedback :)
Button Party - Instant sound button creator (e.g. Sad Trombone)
How to make money online
I bought a physical copy of The Witcher 2 Premium Edition from play.com and paid €35 I think it was. This included shipping, a physical making of dvd, a physical soundtrack cd, a physical map, a brass coin, physical strategy guide book and more. My point is I got a lot of physical stuff for the price where steam users got digital versions which should have been a lot cheaper to produce. Yet steam charged €45 (since been reduced to €39.99) for the digital version of the premium edition.
That is by far not the norm for code written nowadays by CPAN authors who are aware of advances in the art. Have as an example the code in the very first module featured on frepan.org at the moment: https://metacpan.org/source/ALEXMV/Module-Refresh-0.17/lib/M...
No, I don't think they've signed an LoI with the other company yet.
I didnt have a way to test it besides just seeing if it didnt brake anything, and it didnt, so its pushed up to prod. Let me know if this fixes the issue for you. I also looked up the param and it does in fact seem like the solution you where looking for :) Thanks for experimenting with tubalr!
There's already an international symbol for touchscreens: fingerprints.
It sounds like a good deal to me. I would (uninformed opinion):

- call everyone you know to find someone experienced who can advise you through this

- get an experienced laywer to review the deal, and also talk to a good tax laywer

- tell them you need 3 weeks before signing: you need to get an LLC and your internal agreements on paper before signing something.
I don't remember what it was specifically about your post that set me off, and rereading it, you didn't deserve the treatment. I'm sorry. As I mentioned, it's reading different comments, then coming to yours, something lights the spark, and I went into flamewar mode. Not fair to you (or anyone, really).

> What does annoy me is that people can't put out a "negative" view of PHP without raising the sort of rant you just posted here.

It's not comments negative to PHP. It's comments negative to people who use PHP. All too often I read people quip about "If I'd be forced to use PHP for my projects — which, luckily, I'm currently not" or they get all scotsmans and say things like "No real programmer would choose to use PHP these days...". And this seems to have every. Maybe it's bias. I've grown so accustomed to it that I look for it, and start seeing it where it doesn't occur.

And I completely realize I'm not helping matters any.

I love learning new languages, learning their quirks. And I can't fathom how an intelligent person can casually insult people simply for their tool choice.

Thank you for being as gracious as you have been. I've been nothing but a dick.
It's definitely nice that closures are real objects, but I don't see the justification for the bindTo() method. Take this, for example (from the article):

$app->get('/', function() use ($app) {
$request = $app['request'];
});

The use keyword is good for importing anything from the current context into the closure. However, I'm not sure it's a good idea in this case because it seems unnecessary - which makes the example a bit of a straw man: The $app object already knows about itself, so why not do the simpler and more loosely bound version:

$app->get('/', function($app) {
$request = $app['request'];
});

then when calling the closure, the object just has to do this:

$closure($this);

That way you don't have to remember to "use ($app)" every time you define a closure (and I'm also not wild about overlapping variable names from different contexts).

Now we have the new bindTo() method which results in yet more extra code:

$boundClosure = $closure->bindTo($context);

Granted, you could define a general bindTo mechanism once per class implementation, and being able to use $this inside the closure is nice, but I'm not sure this justifies an addition to the language's complexity when a perfectly fine method has been around that does the same thing (and with less code).
> On the other hand, I have heard stories of how Microsoft would often commit several teams to build a product to the same spec: the team that got something market-ready first was handsomely rewarded, and the teams that didn’t got reassigned to wash Bill Gates’s car.

Apple did this for iPhone; two teams, the leader of one became a senior vice president, the leader of the other makes thermostats.
I think there are two very different sides to perl culture. About ten years ago I worked on a OO Perl project which was ~10k lines. It had coding standards, test suites, documentation, and was easy to maintain and bring new engineers into.

The other side is hacked together scripts. Which have their place, but are often a mess.
I wouldn't call it "advice", but I've observed that there are some stabilizing factors.

Body chemistry is important, but the most effective measure (exercise) is also affected by cycles: sometimes I exercise for months, sometimes I don't move a finger for months. It's easier to take care of what I eat/drink/smoke, at least for me.

The other thing that works is routine. But not trying to control every thing I do or I don't. Working on something or writing, learning English, playing the guitar regularly, even half an hour a day results in progress. Progress makes confidence.

And solid confidence is the best thing to lean on.

Hope it helps.
Jonathan Ive - Tribute to Steve Jobs
Seriously? Did you even look at the pages in question?

They are reproductions of the originals, and maintain the original fonts and orthography. This includes the long s, as well as certain ligatures (like ct), and has absolutely nothing to do with their choice of OCR software. In fact, there's no indication that OCR software was used at all.
Better Safe Than Sony [Free webinar]
We don't really need the money, we each have other incomes that we're comfortable on. This was a speculative side-project.
This isn't a problem with the tutorials. It's a problem with the freshness of those tutorials.

If you are really worried about this, write a blog post (or several) that show people how to properly code Perl.
Whats funny is that without professional intervention, most people would find themselves with a dead horse in a few weeks. Million dollar or not.

How would I treat a million dollar race horse? I don't know, feed it hay?
Actually, there is a name for both sides:

There is the CPAN, which is obviously what it is;

And there is the DarkPAN, a term describing all the internal projects in companies, or small tools hacked together by people who don't know or care about the CPAN.
I think Bezos is in Steve Job's league. Not so much in terms of design awareness of devices, but in terms of design awareness of markets and information ecosystems. Amazon has had disruptive success after success in establishing themselves as the middleman. Clearly, this is not an accident.
I'm talking to a good lawyer today, they already have the LoI.
I tried to keep the title short and attention-grabbing. Note how one of my solutions basically say: "We need to write a perl clone of Python Tutorials."

Also, more importantly, this task is so huge that a single person trying to solve it on their own is doomed. It needs to be a community thing.
Green-card lottery software skipped key test, gave false hope to 22k applicants
Do most Asian cultures create the environment for innovators and disruptors to succeed?

If not, are US cultural values being imparted too?
Does this mean Patio11 needs a UK salesperson for appointmentreminder.org now? :-)
It won't happen. Asian cultures are too deferential to authority.
North Face Windwall Jacket, Triclimate Jacket
Why workers are losing the war against machines
US's most powerful nuclear bomb being dismantled
There are loads of people in Britain who don't think the UK is in Europe. ☺
Nowadays unis get ranked partly on what % of their grads are in employment x number of months after graduating, so its important to them to get graduates placed in jobs. I've come across a Computer Science department having a careers contact, who emails out vacancies to students. Maybe you might get somewhere by contacting unis and trying to get these careers contacts? (assuming a few of them do this?)
It's not a tutorial as such, but the Modern Perl book is up to date:

http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/

Unfortunately you can't create your own set of tutorials from it, and it doesn't rank highly in Google.
On a related note, the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html.
Goto is Not Evil, Okay?
They have technology and customers.
Nice article, thanks for posting. Money quote:

The more we buy into consumerism as a lifestyle, the less we are able to see clearly and become independent, as our social stature begins to depend on our consumerist successes.

The slavemasters here are ourselves, or more accurately our subconscious desires (to be popular, sexy and powerful) as interpreted and channeled by the market.

On this subject, I would strongly recommend Adam Curtis' BBC documentary series 'The Century of the Self' which documents the rise of consumerism and the psychoanalytical theories underpinning it. It really opened my eyes to the many parts of our culture that I'd considered eternal that are in fact entirely C20th creations.

I don't think it's actually available legally, but your favourite torrent site can certainly find it. 'The Power of Nightmares' is another of his masterworks. There's a complete Curtis archive torrent out there, which is probably among the most informative single downloads in existence.
Well, that code starts out with the following procedure:

====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8

BEGIN {

# Turn on the debugger's symbol source tracing
$^P |= 0x10;

# Work around bug in pre-5.8.7 perl where turning on $^P
# causes caller() to be confused about eval {}'s in the stack.
# (See http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=35059 for more info.)
eval 'sub DB::sub' if $] < 5.008007;

}

====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8====>8

As someone with a 2-digit number of years of experience in 4 different programming and casual experience with about 4 others, I couldn't for the life of me have figure out what that code does, if some hadn't commented it.

The rest of the code looks a bit like PHP by the way, except uglier (not trying to flame here, just my opinion).

Maybe some day someone will be able to explain why anyone in their right mind would voluntarily choose to program in Perl, if not because of prior experience with the language, or some form of religious beliefs. The 'look at the xyz CPAN modules!' argument doesn't really cut it for me.
Glad to hear that. It should be noted that the UK voice will also probably be chosen by parents in other Commonwealth countries besides the UK because of the way the letter "Z" is pronounced "Zed", not "Zee".
So keep enough in your account to deal with those bills. Really, you should know how much your monthly utility bills are, and budget for them.

All I'm hearing are excuses to make changing your situation someone else's responsibility.
Tips Master Billiard Game Trik | Waloetz Go Blogg
> but I don't see the justification for the bindTo() method.

The new array syntax, closures, binding ... I'm surprised you're not seeing the pattern. All of these features are borrowed from JavaScript. Absolutely fine by me. I already spend most of my time in JavaScript anyway. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone, hence the changes.
For Nottingham related events, google "Nott Tuesday"
How to A/B Test Web Forms
Lumia has 1400 MHz CPU while N9 seems to have 1 GHz.
That's precisely the reason why the CLI parallel falls over, in my opinion.

A CLI is an interface that lets the user communicate using the the computer's language.

Siri is an interaface that [attempts] to let the user communicate using their own language.

It's a fundamental difference I think. Indeed the only thing that Siri and CLIs have is that they are non-graphical.
The press release naturally doesn't mention it, but I'd guess this was done at least in part because the release of the back issues for free public access became a fait accompli with: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709

People have been pressuring them for years to make these open-access, arguing that a non-profit society dedicated to spreading public knowledge ought to at least make the very old historical articles freely available to the general public.
Keys for Successful Negotiation
Whoa.

Might there be an inkling of a hope that they'll go in with this one?
It's interesting to see some concrete data about the size of the educational market for iOS - and I only see this growing in the future.
Patriot Act Turns 10
Great "About Us" page design..Bobbleheads
Why Economic Models are Always Wrong
Indeed,

I supopse that wouldn't have made nearly such a compelling headline.
Preguntas Frecuentes Acerca de C�mo Hacer Crecer El Pene
Very nice way of adding custom commands to Siri - add a custom contact with a number of a Twilio front-end that forwards the sms as xml to a web service.
750ft deep crater, 150 mile blast radius.
I think that people are still willing to pay for PC games as a service. That's what massively multiplayer games are effectively doing. These days, you can often download the game client at the cost of the bandwidth to do it ("free" in the eyes of many), but you pay for access to the servers that are maintained for the players, and you may also pay for expansions.

There are pirate servers, of course, but those suffer from instability, as well as the high probability of disappearing once Big Company X goes after them. That's not a risk that many players want to take, given the time investment that is often made in such games; so they pay to play.
The Psychology of Music and the 'tuneR' Package
It's amazing. I started a new job and their paycheck provider screwed up, so I wound up with paper checks. I couldn't afford the delay in mailing them to USAA, so I tried the app deposit method. Take a pic of front, take one of back (after writing a few lines 'deposit only' yada, yada), and it was deposited instantly.
When I worked with Photoshop, after a while most of the time was spent in a shitty point and click batch instructions editor, it should have been a text file in Vim.
Literally the only hard part there are the magic variables, which one can look up easily as long as one knows that they're all listed under `perldoc perlvar`. (Though i'd like to mention that he should've used `use English;`.)

Either way, my point still stands. I took an entirely random and fresh piece of code and aside from one tiny well-documented bit, all of it is easily readable and most importantly: Extremely different from the code example used in that study.

The rest of your comment does not merit discussion because you've your prejudices and are content with them.
Balmer: Developers, Developers, Developers

It's what you can focus on for the long term when founders and early employees control enough of the company to ignore Wall Street's quarterly timeline.

Bootstrapping has long term payoffs.
Thinking out loud... I think one of the problems is that on-campus careers events feel like bubbles. There isn't an obvious incentive for undergrads outside of London to travel to the event.

Some kind of representation at Universities themselves would solve this. Whether that is a small presence at a careers fair representing an annual SMR event in London, or perhaps (even better) a visiting speaker from a startup telling their startup story and to promote the actual idea of working for a startup.

As others before me have suggested, I think the barrier to getting students to the event isn't just about event logistics and promotion, but about culture and perceptions about startups too.

Does the startup route even cross their mind to begin with?
Indeed, launching without SMS is really frustrating as this is what most people will be interested in
I probably sound like a broken record on HN, but this is surely a big part of the problem - living costs in London. Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London, due to ridiculous accommodation and transport costs. I think that startups should locate somewhere much cheaper but still attractive to grads, somewhere north. Examples - Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle.
I'm aware of Modern Perl and recommend it for every novice, but as you mention, it is not a tutorial and thus doesn't have much to do with what the average newbie is looking for. It's also not readable on the web.
I have no connection to ING Direct other than as a customer, but I love this feature and use it /all/ the time.

I just don't ever have to pay careful attention to my precise balance, since the interest on a day or two of being $50 "overdrawn" is trivial. And every now and then when some huge auto-bill hits or a check I forgot about gets cashed, it simply clears instead of creating a multi-hour hassle for me to clear up.
Creating Print-Quality Typography in the Browser
Those both sound very interesting. I'll see if there are any BBC archives available, but you're probably right that they no longer exist legally except at absurd price points.

There is a lot of literature around how consumerism and debt driven lifestyles detract from our ability to live life in a more meaningful way, but I find solutions lacking. It is my goal to eventually discover better ways of structuring our lives and perhaps society to improve the quality of life in the modern world, without eliminating the positive aspects of a competitive culture and technological progress.