skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Conversations are back and forth. They will make it obvious what they are passionate about by their answers. Start with easy questions. Talk to them about anything. Have you been to this kind of event a lot before? What did you think about the speakers? Be aware of what sparks them up.

I'm not trying to pitch people except when I am so I don't feel a lot of pressure to get people to instantly like me. I'd rather have a great conversation. The pitch comes after I know what their current needs are.
Ask HN: How to search for science research jobs in Europe?
I am a graduate student in the U.S. nearing the completion of my master's degree in applied mathematics. I am looking for jobs at the master's degree level that involve working on large data sets, doing machine learning, scientific computing, etc. I don't want to be a software developer, per se, but don't mind doing software development among other scientific tasks.

For comparison, I used to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as an assistant radar analyst. It was a very very good mix of theoretical work, algorithmic development, and plain software development. I'm looking for similar institutions in Europe that are looking to hire full-time employees at the master's degree level. I've considered CERN (and may still apply there) but it appears to be either too much purely experimental physics or plain software development for me.

How do I locate these kinds of institutions, and what processes should I undertake to find such a job in Europe? What kinds of things should I look for in terms of job security, visa issues (I am only a US citizen), etc? I have worked for an extended time in Paris once before and loved living there (it was as a visiting research assistant as part of my current grad program). I'm looking to replicate that experience but in a full-time, non-student position.
Agreed - it seems like more of a failed attempt at a namedrop, when more of the "blame" should be directed towards the public. If Times readers as a whole lose express interest in WikiLeaks while Assange is dealing with legal issues and many other whistleblowing sites (OpenLeaks.org as an example) haven't seem to been releasing any high-profile documents, isn't that just more the reason for the Times to focus efforts elsewhere?
Looks interesting. I use foobar on Windows and have been wanting something lightweight and simple on the Mac. Importing my >100 GB collection right now, no chokes yet.

Will this be on the Mac App Store? Price?
What we need is a poll topic along the lines of "I trust MongoDB with my web-startup data" or such. Measure some criticism.
That's actually the point. Archaeologists are always searching for information about ordinary life. There is tons of data on famous people, kings, leaders, warriors. But very little on day to day life.
I love the tech specs and I want to support my local B&N, so I think I'm buying this one.
Video: Python Fundamentals Training - Tools - Marakana
Its very nifty. Much appreciate someone taking on the behemoth that is iTunes.

I cant help but think of Audion when I see a paid music player on OSX. http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
He managed to do what apps like Songbird haven't been able to accomplish in years, finally I see a quick non bloated but feature rich music player on OSX.

The only missing thing if you ask, a quick way to set the song I am currently listening on auto-repeat, usually you just click the repeat button once more and it shows a "1" on it, it's better to avoid to have the user create a one song playlist for that.

Great work,

Mike
Thanks! Anyway I can get on some sort of email list?
This is a fair point, but that's the engineer's point of view. Looking at it from a product manager's perspective, why did so many decline to make the investment necessary to make touch work for the consumer? I would argue that they simply didn't perceive the enormous difference it would make (ie, that the risk was worth the reward). Faced with the engineering challenges you describe, they decided that there was just not enough difference between using a stylus and using touch to justify the cost. A small product change can still be very expensive to make.
I believe that Kindle is also available at most brick & mortar stores that Nook is (not B&N obviously).
The captions on this site are most excellent.
Idiot-proof companies
Right click a song (or selection of songs) in the sidebar. Click 'Add to queue'

edit: I couldn't find a way to import the album covers downloaded through iTunes.
Technically not true. If you want to publish for iOS you have to use a Mac, and there's an exception to that (PhoneGap Build).
One thing smartphone cameras still don't do for me is minimize the time between wanting to take a shot and taking a shot. This is one area I think consumer cameras could also be improved. Ideally I'd like one button for pictures, one for video -- mash it down, the camera powers on and figures out what to do as fast as possible.
> why does presentation need to be separated from content?

You can't think of any instance when you would want to access the content irrespective of the presentation?

Imagine if, instead of HTML and CSS, web pages were delivered as pre-rendered PNGs. Make a list of all the different things that would break. That's why presentation should be separated from content.
How does this compare with Sendgrid's parse api?
Using dots to indicate what number we mean with our glyphs doesn't scale. So we need an intermediate notation to bootstrap the process.
New nanotube battery technology leads to fast recharges
Using a tripod would have made this article irrelevant, nobody ever actually uses a mini-tripod when shooting with their phone.
The KIPP program seems to work very well. I believe it's because it creates a cult-like environment, and I mean this in the best and most impressed way. It keeps poor opportunity kids (chosen by lottery) in school from very early to very late as many days as it can, loads them with homework, promotes group cohesiveness, and generally drills in the schools messages. Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick.
It sounds like it's a bug in the version of JunOS (Juniper's router operating system) that they're running that is the cause of this.
Speaking as someone who develops addons for these, it's much easier to take my C libraries and wrap them for cinder/openframeworks, then it is to either JNI or create an IPC layer (usually via OSC, http://www.opensoundcontrol.org) into processing, too. Yay laziness. :)
Most of the achievement gap actually comes from parenting, not schools. And of the portion of the gap that comes from schools, most of it comes from the differences within individual schools, rather than the differences between schools. (In other words, a kid taking high-level classes in a low-income school is probably getting a better education than a kid on the bottom track of a high-SES school.)

While I'd like to believe that startups could help, I find it fairly unlikely. Most entrepreneurs I see in the education space don't seem to be experts in education theory/research, so most of the time their products seem to be only making things worse. And if the general public were well-educated enough to tell the difference, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem to begin with.
I wonder if free education would help?

At any rate I am still more concerned with inequality than with relative mobility within quintiles. There is always going to be a larger number who stay than those who move, and the numbers here are not as bad as the author makes them seem
content and presentation should be separate so that:

- the browsers can cache presentation instead of loading it every time

- presentation only has to be defined once, instead of every time it's used

- presentation can change based on factors like screen size

- accessibility features, like high-contrast themes, are not possible with tightly coupled presentation logic

if your presentation and content are so tightly coupled that it's easier to inline everything, you're doing it wrong.
I can see this hurting productivity, kinda like turntable.fm. Still totally awesome though!
Exactly the same for me. When I have already reached the decision to stop receiving emails those words would be an even stronger indicator that "quitting" is exactly what I want!
Training or filtering? A proper answer to this question requires its own blog post :)

Long story short, Mailgun does have a spam filtering system: if you enable it for your domain, we'll put all your traffic through a cloud of SpamAsassin machines. Those machines themselves need to be re-trained every once in a while and we do that ourselves without providing any APIs to control that process because, frankly, we believe we can do it better. The spam score along with "Mailgun spam verdict" is POSTed into your route handler - I will update the blog post to include this: thank you for reminding!
I've been using prefetching on chrome for a few days now on a heavily trafficked image site, it appears to the user that clicking next is instant as the next image is already rendered.

Example of code is here.

http://grahamholborn.com/prerender.js

example in action(chrome only, open chromes task manager, once you hover over image it will run prerender.

http://www.diftl.com/random
I find myself struggling with this constantly as I develop iOS apps. There's something about the programmer's brain that gets obsessed with the details, and doing it the "right way", and tweaking for completely insignificant performance gains, and just loves researching all the minutia.

You need to Get It Done. Especially if you're dealing with consumer software, you need to get something infront of the customer, because in 6 months everything may have changed!

If you have the luxury of working on corporate software where you have loose deadlines, open budget, and no competition, well go ahead and comment all your code and research all your best practices. It might even be worthwhile, because there's a much better chance that code will still be around in 8 years. If you're a startup, forget it, your product will likely be defunct in 6 months.
I'm not sure it was particularly premature for the original use case, which was writing hypertext documents. HTML inherited the idea of structure/style separation (though initially implemented in a sort of half-assed way) from previous document markup languages, like SGML and LaTeX, where it had gotten a decent numbers of years of exercise, and worked fairly well. I mean it still works pretty well in LaTeX, though not perfectly.
While I agree that improving access to education and opportunities for all is a big part of the remedy, I do have to take a disagreement with the author's initial statement that wealth ratios aren't worth considering.

Expensive education may be one part of the gap that appears to be widening, but as wealth disparity grows, so does power disparity. Money can't buy you happiness, or even 'true' friends perhaps, but it can buy you influence and it can keep people following you. This can let the wealthy 'open' job and experience opportunities where others might not be so fortunate.
Because binary in fundamental. You can pick any higher base you want, but everyone understand binary, so it's useful for transmitting information.

> versus showing some more advanced mathematical formulas

We aren't trying to teach them math, or show off. It's about setting a method of communication.
the "test it out" button doesn't do anything other than show a toolbar at the top. Chrome Unstable 16 on Linux.
I like to think the whole problem with web development is that it is popular. Almost all of the exclusive web design/script people I have met are essentially terrible at what they do - I think this happened because the web is so popular and so new that the good engineers and designers are so few and far between that their direction is diluted by the masses. Hopefully it will right itself over time.

Ultimately the tools will mature to the point where what the data representation is beneath them will mean nothing to these kinds of consumers. (e.g. how you save your photos as .jpg, .tga or whatever and usually care less about the details).
Agreed. Selling anonymous data (in this case to security companies, etc) is a great way for this kind of free service to pay the bills.
Sort of. The only way to tell if a person made a request is if you control all the nodes that this person is connected to. If you do not control even one node that a person is connected to, there is always the possibility that the request came from this other node, not the real node. This is because the difference between making a request for something on your behalf and making the request on someone else's behalf looks exactly the same as far as another node is concerned.

This is how freenet works. Of course, in freenet there is a time to live associated with each request so it will die eventually if, for example, the searched for item is not present on the network at that time. You could figure out that it's from a particular node by seeing what the time to live is from that node, but small amounts of random variance in time to live values can effectively ensure that both requests don't live forever and that it is suitably difficult to determine the origin of the requesting node.

Now, it is certainly possible with enough concerted effort to find out what a user is doing with some statistical probability that a user is looking at something, but you can rarely be absolutely sure.
Something not mentioned in the notes is the addition of ndb to the python library. Located in google/appengine/ext/ndb directory. I am definitely liking the direction it is going rather than how the original db module works.
The article has other flaws as well, but the one I disagree most strongly with is:

"But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard. (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.) Whatever the systemic injustices, it's also quite clear to everyone ... even parasitic leeches of investment bankers ... that their salaries only come as the result of frantic effort."

Here's what I think is missing from that paragraph. I've tried to label each logical fallacy, but I could be fallacious (hah!) in my labelling. Argue to the point, I'm not interested in getting the fallacy names just perfect. (Here's a source if you want one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy )

1. How can she attack hard work and intelligence? She doesn't state what metric she is using, but I assume it's what she starts the next paragraph with: "one's parents to confer such enduring advantages is obviously unfair." If hard-working well-educated parents teach their children to be hard-working and well-educated, that does not prove hard-working poorly-educated parents cannot. "Hasty generalization" fallacy?

2. What justification does she have to write off "systemic injustices" with a summary "whatever"? Should that not have been the focus of the article? "Straw man" fallacy?

3. Why are investment bankers singled out? "Ad hominem" fallacy?
With subtitles: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/ZEURQew49NcH/inf...

(feel free to translate into other languages)
Oh my god, that's exactly what I meant. Thanks.
I thought the number was awfully low. I can get it right, it appears the number is 44% Android, 27% iOS in the smartphone market.

http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/comscore-android-cl...

So the strength of my original point is reduced.
Thanks for the description.

Though one company's spam is another company's ham, so I wonder if this would work well enough across all your clients?
As a single master system, MongoDB doesn't allow the data on different nodes to become inconsistent or go into conflict. The idea is that avoiding this prevents developers from having to worry about (and clean up) conflicting data from different nodes.

The description above left out an important part of the process that occurs in this situation, but it is documented: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Replica+Sets+-+Rollbacks . Note that the data that has been rolled back is saved to a file so that it can be applied again if so desired.

As mentioned here, if you don't like that behavior, you can use write concerns, and require W=2 (or more) and wait for the writes to be replicated. Of course, there's a performance cost to doing that, but you can choose.
I suspect that Google will eventually do what Facebook did, and allow you to choose your own URL.

With FB a standard profile link looks like facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxxxxx but can be changed to facebook.com/your.name.here
In this age of rich webapps, the markup is just there to launch javascript. There's nothing particularly wrong with that IMHO.
David Brooks wrote once "the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them" And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family are treated as if they were positively un-American.
Always admired Ryan Carson's work. Awesome job out there.
Agreed. A place standard PnS cameras might still be desirable is in conditions where you don't want to risk destroying your phone, e.g. in water, caving, etc. But that's gotta be something like 5% of the size of the original market.
It's hard for me to think of another reasonable person I disagree with more frequently than Megan McArdle.

Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.

Nobody reasonable begrudges anyone who is wealthy for creating commensurate value. The issue is with wealth that accumulates to those who don't, like CEOs who run their companies into the ground or bankers who crash the entire economy.

If you're creating value, the wealth society has given you is probably a bargain for society; if you're not, it's an inefficient allocation of resources, a symptom of a systemic fault that hurts everyone else.

It's actually rather more worrying if what they're giving their children is a strong education and an absolutely ferocious work ethic. An aristocracy that simply bequeaths money and social position to its children will eventually fall. And aristocracy that bequeaths the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else is self perpetuating.

Strong education + ferocious work ethic + skills to earn money seems like a weird definition of meritocracy to me, especially given that later in the article we acknowledge that this combo doesn't actually seem to be getting good results. A strong education does not necessarily imply you know how to apply it, and there's certainly a long history of people without that advantage succeeding. The dirty secret of working long hours is that much of it is either for show or spent doing shit work. And the 'actual skills' in question are still very frequently having the right connections.

Don't tell me it got hostage to the wrong ideology--tell me why all those professors we paid millions of dollars to study economics couldn't provide a convincing rebuttal to that ideology in advance of the crash. Don't tell me that regulators were stupid or bankers got greedy until you first explain to me why tens of thousands of very well educated people, most of them graduates of colleges and professional schools that had aggressively winnowed them based on intelligence, barely outperformed a bunch of upstart micks, third-generation coupon-clipping WASP dimwits, and central bankers who still worshipped the barbarous relic of the gold standard?

I... what?
It may be that parenting is more important (though I'd want to see some data there -- there's was a recent study showing that for poor children attending preschool was a very good predictor of life success; this would seem to argue counter to your assertion), but I don't see how that refutes the point. "Parenting" is not something subject to public policy, in the general case. School is. We can pass laws to make schools better. If it works (even partially), then we should. No?
Compact cameras are still terrible in that regard; you can only get that 'off to photo taken in 0.3 seconds' with SLRs today. It's thus not really a valid argument for compact digital cameras still having relevance.
Not too surprising, really. Due to privacy laws, asking for information about a hospital patient these days is like asking the NRO for the source code to the latest spy satellite.
Most likely the records will never be discovered. Possibly they will be the last remaining evidence of humanity's existence, out lasting our civilization, the last living human, and perhaps even the surface of the earth. In that sense, I find it interesting and in fact comforting that even millions, perhaps billions of years after humanity has been erased, we will have at least left a tiny crumb hinting at our past.
The guys behind behind Zencoder released the same thing more than a year ago: https://www.thismessagewillselfdestruct.com
Hightech Halloween
How Joshua Foer trained his brain and became a world-class memory athlete
Electnext matches you to political candidates based on beliefs, not on party
I didn't actually mean the kids performed better, I meant that the data and analytics about performance were better than anything else
Loved it. Though at first I thought it would hook up to rdio api rather than go throughout dumping library onto a central Mac. On another note I like these screen casts, keep em coming.
You're right, this is where per-mailbox spam filtering kicks in. But for that to work you need to create a programmatic mailbox (we have APIs for that) which allows us to collect your spam&ham datasets.

We do have a few customers who're using per-mailbox spam training via our "Beta API access" program, but we have not made the decision to launch it as a product yet. If this is something you may be interested in, reach me via email in my profile.

Thanks.
Free education generally means that there are fewer placements. In countries where university used to be free you had to excel to be accepted, so many students left school with only the opportunity to enter the trades or an apprenticeship. Once universities charged fees, they could open up to a broader range of students. This may leave us where we are now - with people with degrees and heavy loan payments but maybe it's just a transition period we have to go through, where students start to become directed more into areas that actually suit them rather than the default bachelor degree. I'm not convinced on either method and would like to see a balance in between, and better funding for apprenticeships.
Did anyone else dig into the quotes section for "Messages from Earth"? (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/greetings.html)

This one made me chuckle because all I could think about was the Simpsons Halloween episode where the aliens have cookbooks about cooking humans:

"Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time."
Not true, as per the scientific method you only want to test typically along one dimension (in this case sensor quality).

If the cameras are subject a random motion which causes blur greater than the blur caused by low-light conditions then the results are meaningless as the random motion is independent of the variable being tested.
Yes, Rust-Oleum is a faulty product. It was pulled from the shelves at Home Depot for this reason.
c.f. also non-work-related internet use in general, bathroom breaks, staring out the window and thinking, and other productivity-killing pursuits on "company time" ;)