skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This feels like a lot of blog posts I write: the main content is probably there, in the author's head, but not enough of it was put on the paper. What we read instead is a slice of what I have no doubt in my mind to be a fantastic essay.

I have recently begun a love affair with Racket and for a reason I think that the author was ultimately trying to get at: the core syntax of any Lisp is a minimalist tree and the semantics are lambda calculus (and abstract algebra to help motivate types).

An REPL for Java could conceivably be written; AI is language agnostic; and plenty of languages let you eval generated code; but Lisps are a window into computation itself and it's very addicting.
What company is it that you work for?
US border guard fines Canadian $300 for possession of German chocolate
I want to pay for Google
Mute walk through videos aren't super-helpful, though having a "common tasks" or "hidden tricks" area in your website with auto-walk through could be helpful for complex tasks. If you could at least give some descriptive text so there is some narrative, I could see that being helpful for enterprise app support, where users are often required to move through dozens of screens to accomplish anything.

On the social side there are options, too. Allow people to share a browser tab and let others watch what they are doing (live, with chat [leverage Facebook!], would be best, but coming back to recorded sessions could be interesting, too). That could be used by companies doing remote training sessions (though FB probably isn't an option there [yet]).
Coral cache: http://mywiki.wooledge.org.nyud.net/FtpMustDie
You are saying this out of the research you have done yourself, right? And yes, I have done the research and also have experienced it first hand -- something that Stanford doctors could not do (and an army of 3 different specializations nonetheless) was cured using Homeopathy. Is this placebo effect?
"The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true."

Like books, for example? Or computers (not that cheap, but widely available).

I am not holding my breath on that device... My usual line of thinking: if it is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so herself? (Another one where that applies is the super memory mice).
Talk to as many prospective clients as possible, face-to-face, in the geographical area in which you want to work. Explore their problems and what you might do to solve them. The ideal contract will have you and the client fitting each other, limited experience and all, and the only way you will find this ideal opportunity is to get out there.

Keep in in mind that technical is only half of it. Communication in the other half. The client wants someone that they can talk to, feel comfortable with and trust. If the client and you are comfortable, you're a long way there, even with limited experience. So again, talk to people.

If you do get online work, great, but I think you will have a better chance of getting yourself established by starting locally. Also, only take work you can comfortably handle, especially when building a reputation. Don't get desperate and say yes to bad jobs. Clients value dependability over heroic efforts.
The question I think is, is that "good reason" a reason that was relevant as our brains were evolving millions of years ago, but is irrelevant now?

Our brains evolved in a way which maximized reproductive potential, and while having strong cognitive abilities was clearly favored to an extent, there was a constant tradeoff between larger brains and food/energy input. Now that we don't have the same critical food shortages, we can set our own objective functions. Ex, now most people would probably choose a brain with +50 iq points which required an extra 1000 kcals a day, but a few tens of thousands of years ago, those requirements would probably have been fatal...
ChristianMarks said in one of his comments that he believes the device has allowed him to overcome a bias in the valley against hiring older engineers. Why would he want to reveal the details of a device that if widely used could erode his advantage?

At first I wasn't going to mention this (lest it become the reason he doesn't share the details), but then I realized, here's a smart guy who has a device that makes him even smarter, so I figure he probably already knows. :)
its not just widely accepted.... hashing algorithms, due to the pigeonhole principle you just explained, by definition are full of collisions.

the only security relevant part is how hard it is to find them for use in various scenarios......

(this is why i really dont get why zfs ever did deduplication relying on hash only.... sure verify is an option, but it would be insane to use hash only....... unlessi am overlooking aomething statistical that makes it make sense (maybethe odds of a collision are fR less than the odds of total hardwarefailure ?still.....)
Yes, you're right: http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/self-publishing
What if you're using engineers to get better at some zero-sum game, e.g. high frequency trading, SEO or developing better weapons? When your competitors start using brain-boosted engineers too, you're back to square one, except everyone's wasting resources on brain-boosting and cannot afford to stop.
To be honest, I wish you had disconnected the device before writing your original comment, because it is a bit hard to follow :-)

But really, if you are capable of building such a device, wouldn't that make you very employable to begin with?
Not what I'm finding. I'm midcareer myself, trying to build up consulting work, but without coding experience (I've teaching myself to code). Clients seem most interested in what I can do, and how reliably. It feels slow starting, but I've only been at it a couple months and I'm seeing traction.

Mind, I don't worry much about rate just now. I'm more interested in the portfolio and the relationships. I figure if I can fill up my calendar, I can start to raise the rate.

I suppose it sucks to be doing "junior" work, but you know something? At this stuff, I _am_ junior. If my background and experience and whatnot mean something to a client, then it will show in the work and relationships. They'll be that much more willing to find a rate that works for both of us as I get busier. But I certainly don't bother talking about them, because they have nothing to do with the relationship I'm proposing.

Now if we're only talking about a coding _job_, no. I doubt could get one, and don't know how quickly I could grow the salary if I did. But I think even that might be be in a different position in a year or so.
Really? That's great. Can you give me a quick list of ten sustainable companies that can demonstrate 100% through the chain sustainability in the way that I described?
I get the no ads part - but this article is ignoring that tracking tools may be an essential component of search engine effectiveness.
You might be amused to browse Chrome's implementation of FTP, which has separate modules for each of the different types of FTP servers you might encounter, as each emits the "ls -l" output in a different way and that is (I guess) the only way to get file sizes.

http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=net/...
see all the "directory listing" files.

The unit tests are full of scary cases like

// Tests for "ls -l" style listing in Russian locale (note the swapped
// parts order: the day of month is the first, before month).
Facebook IPO Is Nigh, Should You Buy?
The Adobe of HTML5 is... Adobe: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/
Modafanil works to cut Adderall withdrawal symptoms for most people. And Modafanil withdrawal is nothing more than being unusually tired, but not miserable.
"Not a single drug can help you in the long term, you have to develop the abilities yourself."

What is your proof of this claim? As with most generalizations, I doubt there is one.
CityGrid PHP Amazon EC2 AMI for Rapid Local Web App Development
Ideal resolution of displays ("Why 4K TVs are stupid")
Steven – are you posting debit or credit txns? If crediting, would PayPal mass payments work for you?
Time and time again I resort to FTP to transfer files between computers that won't talk to each other via system-provided file systems. Mac<->Windows file sharing is so unreliable that I don't even try to use the system any more and just go straight to FTP. But yeah I hate the protocol itself.
Related, I have recently been thinking about Star Trek economics. I don't know much about Star Trek, except that they don't use money. Yet there seem to be differences in "wealth", at least in that some get to be commanders of huge space vessels, whereas others are confined to low level jobs on said vessels.

Presumably there is the notion of "only ability counts", but what happens once genetic engineering levels everybody's abilities? It seems to me from then on the logical conclusion is that in a Star Trek universe mankind would become a super organism spawning individuals according to need. The individual would necessarily be transcended.
"Keep in in mind that technical is only half of it. Communication in the other half."

Technical, imo, is about 20% of it. Communication, presentation, professionalism and responsiveness are the other 80%. I recently had a friend bring on two contractors for a project. One senior - years of tech - sr level by any measure - and one juniorish.

The sr guy spent all his time refactoring stuff that didn't need it, ignoring established tickets, not answering phone calls, ims and emails in a timely fashion, and missing deadlines. The jr level guy checked in every few hours, did the work on time and answered every question the client had.

Guess which one the client wants back for more projects? The technical stuff - you can learn that quickly. And in fact, much of that changes or is 'new' anyway so you can't be expected to be an expert at everything. You can be expected to be professional. Acting the part, and being available when a client needs you, is about 80-90% of the business.

That's not to say you should lie/fake credentials and such - you will be found out if you lie about stuff eventually, either by the client or someone in their network. My point is generally, with most client/projects, it matters less whether you're an SQL expert or CSS guru and more about whether you show up when you say you will, and deliver what you promise.
Are Banks now sending out 1099s for Airline Miles awarded?
the association of witch doctors recommends ... water!
There is a rule of thumb that has me served well in the past. Whenever I try to estimate the time for a project I literally program it in my head. This gives me a feel how long it will take for a certain module.

Then I double the result.

It's always closer to the amount of time I really need in the end. For some reason I'm always off by half. And I have heard of others with the same problem using this approach.
FTP is definitely outdated, and there are better uses in many circumstances. But I find some of these criticisms a bit odd.

The client listening was largely solved by 'passive' mode, and just about every server and client supports this now.

The firewall and NAT interaction is awkward, but most modern firewalls can deal with this automatically (as long as there's no SSL involved)

And yes, the RFC is 20 years old. But so are many RFCs for long-established veteran protocols that we use all over the net.

In many cases I'd be happy to see FTP replaced (all those anonymous FTP servers may as well be HTTP now), but it's really not that bad.
> The LIST command is Maximum Bullshit. And I'm not even touching the subject of opening a data connection to send the list itself. Did you know that the specification doesn't tell anything about WHAT should be sent as the list?

Well it's a good thing that just about every FTP server in existence supports the MLSD command then.
In a sense you have built a portfolio of connections. You spent 4 years developing relationships, building your communication, and getting to know people in the industry. Your experience shows there are many ways to approach this but I would say experience is definitely a prerequisite for any freelancer. Weather you spend time building a portfolio or an amazing network of connections in this industry, you gotta put in the time.
Frankly, it's a pretty goofy article. The variables it cites aren't even relevant for printed books. If the Thor decision had an impact on publishing, it was to encourage faster turnaround at the printing facilities and development of just-in-time processes across the whole industry, from acquisition to retail.

It is very hard to argue that anything has actually gotten worse as a result of Thor, from the perspective of authors, publishers, retailers, or consumers.
I don't care how old you are, or where you live (well PST to GMT+5 is ok). We span from 30 to 50 years old in our developer team. If you are good at a combination of (any combo will do): Java, Google app engine, python, Django, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, dev/ops, Linux sys admin, QA, Wordpress (themes/plugin building/php); well, then I have open positions. Half time to full time. Working from home.

Will post these new positions at the end of the week, but here is where you can find us, and where these positions will be posted: http://www.akvo.org/web/jobs
both work fine for me. what browser are you using?
A $99 Zeo comes with an API and will let you do exceedingly simple biofeedback; the manufacturer is quite helpful, too. (I was going to work on a waking study using the hardware, but ended up not having time).

There's also the EPOC Emotiv.
The real problem here is that cell phone networks were originally (and to a large extent still are) designed with assumptions that clients will play nice. Even the carriers' contracts with other vendors are structured this way.

As an example, on certain carriers I've worked with, the carrier paid per-request for a network assisted location lookup. Access to the location service was enforced with "secret" IP address and port pairs per allowed application. This "secret" information was compiled into every approved app and was trivially enumerable by brute force or discoverable via decompilation. If I had created a malicious app that used the same port as the carriers' branded navigation software, I could incur trivially incur costs in the $xxx/hour range. Their only recourse would have been to disable that port, and with it, navigation for all their customers (until they could issue an update, which would again be vulnerable to the same attack). They could also kick my phone off the network, but if a worm was every released they'd be screwed.

Mobile networks weren't and still aren't built for general use. Like the internet at large, as time goes on they'll have to improve as false assumptions they've made are accidentally or maliciously violated.

If (relatively) few phones with undesirable behavior can take you down, you're doing it wrong.
The evidence is much more strongly in favor of amphetamine being actually poisonous (neurotoxic) than ritalin. Even then, it only happens at higher higher than a certain, not really well known dosage.

You might like playing around with Neuro-Programmer 3. You can get substantially similar or even stronger effects to EEG neurofeedback with simple audio brainwave entrainment. I actually question the value of EEG neurofeedback not combined with audio brainwave entrainment, which serves the purpose of teaching people what different brainwave states feel like. http://www.transparentcorp.com/products/np/index.php You can hook up an EEG to it to. Or build your own for a few hundred, http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/, but the signal processing is actually the hard part. Among the cheap commercial EEG products I've tried, only the NeuroSky Mindwave filters out facial movements well, but it's one sensor is not really useful for doing much of anything.

The kind of meditation that helps with ADD is concentration meditation, where starting Vipassana, when you focus intently on watching your breath, is a concentration meditation.
I don't think mastery is a bit. It is much more an analog signal that requires exponential energy input as you move from the initial state to the maxed out state. As a result, even though I've done Java and Python stuff for 10+ years, I still wouldn't rank myself more than a six or seven out of 10 on them. I've used JavaScript since very soon after it was released, but I would still only five myself a four or five on it. I don't learn much about programming from Python but am very efficient. JavaScript is still teaching me new things (projects like node.js have helped!).

For me, the more interesting question is: what am I learning from this language. This tends to follow the inverse curve: I learn a lot early on, but a language's impact on my programming reduces over time. Learning a new paradigm obviously increases that much more that learning a fifth variant on a paradigm I've used for umpteen years.

Of course, different people have different motives. Some may want to be the best 3D programmer out there. That path looks different than my "I want to be an incredibly valuable, generalist programmer". My path let's me work on lots of different types of projects, but I'll never understand AI like Peter Norvig.

In the end, look at your real goals, keep track of your progress, and adjust course as necessary to keep moving in the direction you want.
That's a high dosage, to the level where I expect it is neurotoxic. I think you might be more of the exception than the rule... some withdrawal is to be expected, though not necessarily as strong as OP.
FTP is like religion: poorly designed at inception, implemented a thousand different ways and accepted as normal only because it's ubiquitous.
The ethical problem in my mind is that by taking brain boosting meds you are taking a health risk.

So for instance, say the people that take these meds end up living 5 years less on average due to side effects of the drugs but are for instance able to read 2 times fast, remember thing better and only need 5 hours of sleep a day. Naturally because they're on average better they will get better jobs, more promotions and so on. So the people that choose not to trade in years of their life end up getting screwed (in relative terms) and (taken to the extreme - say 50 years down the road) will be second class citizens.

To a very minor degree this happens with caffeen, but when you put things in the equation like amphetamines and provigil it gets a lot scarier.

If I was taking amphetamines and provigil in college I know for certain I would have graduated with a lot higher GPA and I probably would have done a lot more in college. But what would have been the cost? I don't know.. and know one really can say; I wasn't willing to take that gamble. Why should the person that was willing to gamble his health get rewarded for it?
Looking at the actual research it seems the improvements were typically on the order of 10%. So this isn't going to turn Homer Simpson into Einstein.

I wonder how this compares over the long term to just working an extra 20 minutes per day, or even just drinking a cup of coffee.
http://gidsy.com
I guess I'm a young person, but I agree with what you're saying here. Thoughts from the other side of the divide.

I think it's universally true that young people don't have the benefit of experience (by definition) and so they regularly get into trouble. If they would wise up and listen to their elders, things would likely go better. There are a lot of "older" technologists out there who are still doing innovative things and schooling the youngsters in how to do things right.

On the other hand, and this depends completely on the individual, some older folks are...well, old. Meaning that they've gotten stuck in a particular way of thinking and doing things, and they've become so accustomed to it that they can't open up to a new perspective.

Sometimes - and I'm certainly guilty of this - young people spout off all kinds of craziness that should be rightly ignored. But sometimes, from the mouth babes, as the saying goes.

From the younger generation to the older: what I've observed really helps are when the senior engineers step into a mentorship role. That often means slowing down and being less productive, but if you're willing to coach, us youngsters can learn pretty fast (and we have to, in order to be relevant). In fact, if any of us think the tech market is competitive now, just wait another 30-40 years. It's going to be much tougher and much more competitive. Certainly more people will code, but it won't be as unusual as it is today (outside our Bay Area bubble).

So, there's no magic bullet. But it's a fact of life that older people are generally expected to be more mature, and so have to endure the foolishness of us young people. Until we (hopefully) get smart enough to listen.
Part of the deal is, you don't need very many people to do cool stuff anymore. Instagram is serving probably around 20 million users right now with 7 employes. Facebook is serving 800 million users with 2000 employees. Even if there are 1000 awesome startups, each one of them may only ever need 20 employees.
wow these guys http://brmlab.cz/ are doing some really cool stuff
It's more income. So ... more taxes. Think of it like the grocery bag tax in the affluent suburbs. We do need more "investment" in schools ... so this is a win for society, right?
Start a community site regarding something you're passionate about. Blog, forum, etc. Make it clear within that community that you're a web developer and always be clear about the sort of projects you can help with. You need to be in it for the long haul because it won't take off for a while but will help you later. That worked for me at one point many years ago. An alternative would be to become entrenched within another community that is already established. Make sure you're passionate about the topic at hand (sport, hobby, etc) or you'll stand out as an imposter.

Build a personal site - nothing crazy and nothing that is difficult to update or requires constant maintenance to stop it looking dead (e.g., blog component or 'latest news').

Make sure friends and family all know exactly what you do and that you're looking for work. They'll keep an ear out for opportunities. Sometimes they might be over-enthusiastic, but any lead has value. If your work queue is empty, you can handle a few time-wasters or painful jobs to get your start.

Major charities will usually turn down offers of unpaid online work (they want donations) so try for smaller ones. Or community sports groups. Companies may be wary of someone without a portfolio but given your spare time, you can afford to design a concept to prove your ability - no obligation to them. There is a line re: 'work for free or full-rate, but never for cheap', so you might have luck doing some charitable freebies rather than cut-price for small businesses.

Remember that the little jobs will often be the most painful, so don't give up when the early projects drag out. Always be building in your head a picture of how long certain types of tasks take you. Track it manually if you need to - concept design, cut to HTML/CSS, etc.

Business networking can help. Many areas have little small business organisations that will have get togethers or advisors.

Especially look to connect with marketing people who work for small businesses with suppliers/sponsors/etc and marketing freelancers who need a go-to web guy. Make an initial contact through an unrelated interest rather than going in with a sales pitch immediately IMO. If you are a strong programmer, speak with small graphic designers who likely farm out their backend work. Or if you're a designer, try to get a feel for which IT companies want a designer they can tap either as a contractor or someone directly in contact with their client.

(Me: Web developer about to complete a 14th year in business, now with two employees. Started by working on the side during an on-the-job traineeship. All work is now just word of mouth; have never advertised, barely bothered networking, etc.)