skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Possibly relocating to Mountain View, what to expect?
I've been talking with a company recently about a position I might be taking up with them. I'd be relocating from the Southwest. It's not a lock yet, but I want to know what to expect if/before I get an offer.

I'm curious what other HNers have experienced in terms of relocation packages, and what I should account for myself.

Bonus: How did the cost-of-living change affect you?
LTS is the default distro for a lot of server and VPS providers. Often the latest VM images will be rather...unstable, even putting aside the instability of the distro itself.
Great stuff, keep up the good work
Wow, I had used node+jsdom+jQuery to do scraping, which was a big step up from anything I had done previously. But after playing around with PhantomJS, I feel like I finally found the hammer in the toolbox after years of trying to pound nails in with duct-taped-together screwdrivers.
Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants)
Still the most under-discussed aspect of launching a new startup: getting the founding team right. Happy to see this network grow... slowly and healthy.
Adobe Aims For The Clouds With Latest Creative Suite
Ouch, please don't do this. You're mixing stuff up badly. The "special" video card slot throughout history has simply been a higher bandwidth interconnect relative to whatever else was there (well, in the AGP days it also had a primitive IOMMU for doing DMA into userspace). The integrated graphics on Intel parts, obviously, have the important distinction of sharing the memory controllers (and, I believe, the L3 cache?) with CPU work. That does hurt things under some loads, though many games are actually quite CPU-light these days.

"CUDA" is an NVIDIA trademark for their compute platform, it's not a special kind of technology. In fact Intel's i915 derived GPU works very similarly. In fact, Intel's AVX instructions also work along basically identical lines. They're all wide SIMD implementations of a bunch of parallel tasks(/threads/lanes/warps, the Industry terminology is a mess).

Honestly, I think rwmj is right: for a consumer gaming rig, it would be preferable to have an 8 core part without integrated graphics. The reasons that isn't going to happen aren't technical though: first, Intel needs to ship different binnings of these same parts into segments (Ultrabooks, tablets) where the graphics are required and where price is more constrained -- basically, they have to make these in large quantities anyway. Second (and relatedly) they already do make "lots of cores w/o graphics" variants, but they sell them into the low volume server market where margins are much higher. Selling an 8 core consumer chip would canibalize Xeon sales.
To quote someone who said it better than me:

"If you don't make at least a little money in the process, how can you be sure that you're creating value?"

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ux/traditional_capitalist_values/
Don't like 3D movies? You may have 3D Vision Syndrome.
"The only 40+ ones here are ... in top 1 percentile of programming"

Thanks. (Although I do like puzzles as much as the next HN member)
Having pre-submission pages (or anything leading to the submission of sensitive data) not be over HTTPS is more than just an issue of perception; for example, a network attacker can inject javascript into the unsecure form page and read/send off the credit card details before the form is even submitted.
The fact that they've spent 25% of their cash in one week doesn't really tell us how much they have spent in the past, nor if they are going to(or even likely to) spend as much in the next few weeks.

The reason is that these are one-off purchases. Burn rate is typically used for recurring expenses like office rent, salaries etc. For example, if your startup's burn rate is 100K/mo and has 1 million in cash, it will need another funding event before 10 months(if everything remains the same).

Regarding the purchases, I think Zuckerburg knows much more than we do. He has proved to be a very shrewd negotiator (see the IPO terms) and there seems to be more around this than has been let on, especially regarding the patents and chances of Google integrating Instagram into G+ and turning it instantly into a photosharing hub.
> That delay is /usr/bin/login searching the system logs
> so that it can display the date and time of your last login.

Normally Unixes (Linux included) use a pretty efficient binary file called wtmp for that, I'm surprised if OS X doesn't. Reading the last disk block of that file would contain the last login with overwhelming probability.

There has to be a lot of seeks even on a slow laptop rotating hd to get a 5 second delay, with 15 ms seek time
you get 333 seeks in 5 secs.
No, I'm not. I simply don't agree that there is a "bigger point" at all, nor that this is a slippery-slope that must be guarded.
If being looked at by a well dressed business man sets off your alarms as though you believe you are being cased, to the point where you feel you need to have your weapon hand at the ready - then screw that.

Screw this guard and every single mentality that supports him and people like him.

I am not a fan of the police state - and the last person I have any respect for is an armed civilian who believes himself to be some arm of the law.

Simply put, he is a hired thug for the bank. I give him no greater mind, or respect because he is wearing military like clothing. Here I went back and took this picture of him:

http://i.imgur.com/E0rjw.jpg

edit: and to be clear, if I were casing him - he would never know it. If I had bad intentions for him - clearly I would have used a moment like this where he was texting on his phone and oblivious to those around him to spring Operation Currency Liberation.
Heh. That was the easy part. Being able to get a PyObject back from the embedded Python interpreter and manipulate it in useful ways is the real trick. But at least it's a start. And it was pleasantly easy, due to two things: how easy it is to call C functions from Julia, and the fact that Python has made it trivial to be called from C code.

(Imagine using a C++ library from any other language like this. Wait, you can't.)
No, it does not make money. It gets me sympathy and condescending pats on the head. Everyone who thinks I should keep my sites out of idealism will not give me money and will not promote them. They tell me I am doing something wonderful. But they will not tell other people I am doing something wonderful and it is deserving of support.

At the moment, $1700 in donations (edit: and a few links/promos generating traffic) would convince me to keep it up for another year. That would not get me off the street but it would pay my taxes, pay the webhosting and domain name and help me and my kids eat properly for the next two weeks. In other words, it would alleviate some serious immediate stressors. But no one will blog about it and announce it to the world and tell people to support it or open their own wallet up. So I think I will try the e-book idea and then move on to other projects with an eye towards making money first and foremost.
This is an excellent suggestion that might actually solve whole lot of these issues.

I hope Apple engineers are looking at this thread.
First Ever Phila. Women In Tech Summit Brings Together 200 Technologists
Thankhub's Disclaimer. Should every site have one of these?
I've gotten a lot of his symptoms, and there might be another cause:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20064489-263.html

Bad blocks in the disk, causing the system to beachball frequently due to disk I/O failures when swapping out to disk.

The solution for me was to back up, reformat the disk and zero-ing out everything causing bad sectors to get remapped, and then restore.
But would you take bad-but-algorithmically-correct code over no code?
This happens to me with Amazon sometimes, when they ship from Nashua, NH to Nashua, NH.
To build that personal computing environment, they had to solve various problems, including compilation, drawings, text editing, and networking. To me, the set is sufficiently diverse to make full generalization probable. It may take a genius to apply this to other domains, but I'm confident it can be done. Once it is, your average programmer can begin to be 10 times more productive, or more.
Very nice write up, quite a few things that were new to me
Every touch-based Apple product targeted by apparent patent troll
This post is a couple of days old already but I'll add my concept for you. I've lost steam on this project but have a good deal of basics done if you want to pick it up.

Here is my description: http://jnorthrop.me/2011/11/8/take-my-idea-measure-any-exerc...

And here is the work in progress: http://wodwatts.com/

There are opportunities to extend this to smartphones and go "social" as well. I doubt it'll make anyone rich, but I would have said that about Instagram as well. Ping me if you're interested.
Why to stop looking for a technical co-founder—at least for now
I (more a product/designer person) just published an article on how I built Eisenhower.me without a technical co-founder (back-end developer) and how this minimum viable product finally led me to finding one with whom I am now happily working on the complementary Eisenhower iPhone app.
_Starter_ housing is in the $1.2 million range. Gas is $4.50-ish. State income tax for high tech folks is in the 9-10% range. State sales tax is 8.25%. Welcome to Taxifornia.
I only had the company incorporated in the BVI. We had a small sales office in London, and I was personally living in Russia at that time.

The reason I setup in BVI, was because it was reasonably easy, and because no annual reporting of accounts is neccessary (no more "accounting preparation panic" every year).

So our customers were not in the BVI, rather they were spread out over Europe.

If you have the option of living and starting a startup on a Carribean island, what's holding you back? :-)
Instead of doing "| bill 10.00", I'd do "from payment import bill; bill(10.00)".

Now the issue is implementing the payment library, just like you'd have to implement the 'bill' program.

Your argument is for composability, and while UNIX utilities are certainly a great example of that (which I use every day!), they're hardly the only. Perl, Python, Ruby, etc all have plenty of small libraries to solve specific problems.
Volcano 40 miles east of Mexico City rumbles back to life
Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter
This absolutely works, if you've developed an app you should definitely have a support/feedback form somewhere.

Just launched our second app and we decided to include this, and I think it's had a hugely positive impact on our ratings and reviews. Where people would have left a bad review before, now they're submitting feedback straight to us. It's also helped us prioritize some things after getting the same question repeatedly.

It's a little more work (we've been following up on all feedback), but it seems to go a long way.
That makes me very happy! Thank you.
How Estimize Nailed the Facebook Revenue Print 
The Estimize community of analysts, traders, corporate finance professionals and financial peanut gallery people continues to amaze me more and more every day. Our whole crowdsourcing experiment does as well.

But what happened today just takes the cake. Facebook filed its amended S-1 with full accounting for FQ1 2012. In the updated filing, Facebook reports 1.058B in revenue and EPS of 9 cents.

A little more than a month ago we put Facebook up on Estimize, our first private company listing. We had no clue what would happen as there hasn’t been and still isn’t any type of baseline estimate from the sell side. The Estimize community of buy side and independent analysts was all on its own, with no spread to game or baseline scenario to use.

Because of how the site works, we needed to give a Wall Street estimate, so we made one up. We projected 25% YOY revenue and EPS growth. But as the last month went on, we saw the Estimize numbers diverging greatly from this.

And guess what happened. With no guidance what so ever, from the company or the sell side, the Estimize consensus nailed the revenue number, coming in at 1.07B. There were 14 estimates with quite a wide range of opinions, but average together the result was amazing.

Click through the image to see the results.
> a first-class citizen, has in fact set the mobile web back by years

Steve Jobs started it. Everyone will follow it to the bitter end.
Okay, maybe I didn't make it clear.

The problem isn't that people weren't learning new stuff. Everybody knew the newer languages - how else would they know they wanted to use them?

Unfortunately, not everybody can drop everything and re-implement a large system in a trendy new language.
SkyDrive is a threat to Dropbox
Facebook's Updated IPO Filing Shows Drop in Ad Revenue
Hi gruseom:

I'm the author of the original post.

There seems to be some serious (willful?) misunderstanding here about what is being proposed. Instead of adding something foreign, the class syntax that we've nearly got settled is sugar for what we usually write in JS, albiet under a dozen or so different patterns and library conventions. See: http://infrequently.org/2011/09/why-class-doesnt-mean-what-y...

I'm also not suggesting that length of debate necessitates action. The near-consensus on the committee for adding classes isn't my doing; I'm merely arguing that it's worth doing a smaller thing and debating what extensions to make in due time. And if you look at what's being added (again, I'm not sure you have a grasp on it in any way), it's clear that we are doing no harm with Max/Min classes.

Invoking Java to describe what's being proposed is purely a slur. Indeed, the arguments which I'm attempting to talk down are the ones which would drag a class proposal more towards Java (not less).

What's frustrating, in the end, is to see someone so obviously smart making such spurious arguments. Please read up before engaging further: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:maximally_mi...

Regards
The corollary of that is: Don't overestimate the benefit of physical presence. Sure sometimes you need to buy metal on the spot, but you could say the same thing about books and electronics.

Amazon's targeting the customer that can forcast his needs a few days in advance, and that's a very big slice of the market.
> this is really the kind of content that should be coming
> out of Google itself.

What does this blog post do which the official docs don't?

E.g., https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/sc...
I completely agree how hard it is to 'teach' a computer how to do a task.

I have shifted my focus from writing procedures for humans to writing programs for computers. when I'm done, I have a program the computer can run, and serves as a procedure that explains to humans just how hard the problem is- and exactly what compromises were made in the implementation.

the resulting program is much more thorough and thought out than the procedure I would have written.
AndEngine PhysicsEditor Extension
It could conceivably leak the key and/or data being sent. If the key is random, leaking it does not expose unrelated data; and if you're uploading via HTTPS, exposing the key does not even expose the protected data unless the attacker also has access to S3.

Data-dependent timings could conceivably allow a bad guy to deduce something about the data being sent.

Note that this is all highly speculative; I'm not convinced it's truly impossible, but it's one of those attack scenarios where "put a gun to the sysadmin's head" begins to look like a pleasant and trouble-free option...
Not this again, we already went through this a few weeks ago.

In-fricken-deed...

We have been through this problem again and again and again, in different OSes, at different times and with different things triggering the various problems.

It usually ends with a "neck-beard" saying with enough authority "look, really, they are doing it right even if it seems totally illogical to you and any brokenness is just your configuration, little man". Which is to say "you might not like senseless disk-thrashing but would you rather have your machine randomly freeze when it got out of memory?" And scratching a little more, it comes down to admitting that memory-allocation is a hard problem in its full generality and they don't teach you that in application-programmer-school, and further that the solutions to it that any of these OSes have are tuned-black-magic-split-the-difference-haphazard affairs.

Consider. Either the machine keeps all your information in memory it or keeps on-disk and in-memory and either way, the machine hasn't a clue what information is important to you, my friend. It's just data to it. It's not like the computer is intelligent or anything. Why do you think they call it "random-access-memory"? The problem of dividing up chunks of memory for application programs to use is as hard as dividing up that hard disk for large and small files to live in, EXCEPT that application programs expect to be handed a chunk of contiguous memory when they call malloc. Hard problem even with the powerful tools that have evolved for solving it over the years. So when a given memory management scheme works, it isn't really "fixed", it just has been tuned for the corner-cases that are shouting loudest on the help lines.

And yes indeed, it is "funny" how just getting the "simple stuff" to work is a hard problem. IE you can find lots of simple examples where the standard solution seems fail terribly.

Angry how your 100 GB memory machine isn't faster? Look under the hood and you'll find Scotty from Star Trek shouting "Captain, I'm allocating your memory as fast as I can Sir..."
I agree with your point that turn around time for feedback is slower in mobile apps. I think the problem is that in the web its easier for users to communicate with you. The communication channels available for mobile app users are very limited. Appstore is where users are ranting about the apps.

We have built a way for users can directly talk to the developer inside mobile apps. Check it out at http://appstark.com
Respect. Great Article.
And the purpose of this is for what?
>It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department,

A lot? Some? Very little? Unless you have some backup here, the whole "HERP DERP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS FINANCED BY THE DOD" is wearing pretty thin.
I think they also have a big Chicago warehouse. We get the same thing living in Atlanta, and it blew away a bunch of clients that were down here working on a project that we could just drive to McMaster and get something within an hour at will-call.

I like Amazon alright, but I love McMaster. Hope they can keep it going.
Why the Super Mario Movie Sucked
>You're wrong. All I was communicating was that libertarianism is a minority of ideologies and thus since most people (including libertarians) tend to down vote comments that support ideologies they disagree with, libertarianism is often under-represented.

If that's "all you was communicating", then you phrased it badly.

"most people are not libertarian, AND SO they down vote comments that don't fit their ideology".

AND SO explicitly states that the reason people vote down post they disagree with is because they are not libertarians.

What you probably WANTED to write --which is made clear only by your subsequent clarification-- is:

"most people are not libertarian AND SO libertarian comments (as well as comments of other marginal ideologies) are voted down more".

Not the same at all.
This guy seems to be of the opinion that the software should be completely isolated from the deployment operating system.

I know that's a common view and wrapping as much of the site as possible up in a virtualenv certainly has a lot of advantages. But ultimately, your software is going to have to interact with the OS, at some level, otherwise, why do you even have an OS? So the question is: where do you draw the line? He seems to draw it further down the stack than most people (no system python, for instance) but he doesn't give his opinion on, for instance, using the system postgresql.

Anyway, I personally would draw the line further up the stack than him, but take things on a case-by-case basis, and I don't really consider it an "anti-pattern."

With regards to fabric vs. puppet, I understand the advantages of puppet when you have a complicated, hetrogenous deployment environment. But the majority of projects I've worked on have the operations model of a set of identically-configured application servers back-ended against a database server. For this configuration, what does puppet give you? If the author's argument is that the site may eventually outgrow that model, well, I can see puppet becoming necessary, but why not cross that bridge when you get to it?
Long-time Python user here.

For a lot of my projects I write a shell script which builds all of the application dependencies (including services) into a project directory and run them all from there.

It takes a little bit of work to get going --- especially when building a new service for the first time --- but I like that it side-steps language-specific packaging tools (particularly the half-baked Python ones) and lets me pin an applications dependencies and port to various environments (develop on Mac, deploy on Unix) almost exactly. Integrating with Puppet/Chef is just a matter of breaking up the shell script into pieces.
I'm using a circa 2007 core 2 duo. I genuinely see no improvement in CPUs since then in price/performance.

Is there a reason I should upgrade my kit that I'm missing?
See if your ideas have wings not legs
Teetering must be the marketing term they chose... the phenomenon in play has been known as metastability for as long as I've been a digital designer.

And generally speaking, it's something you want to avoid in your designs, not only because of the unpredictability of the final output (whether it resolves to a 1 or 0), but also because of the uncertainty in how long it will take to resolve.

But it seems perfect for generating randomness. Neat idea. The real trick here is that it's only theoretically unpredictable. In real life, due to "imperfections" in fabrication, the inverters will be biased to resolve one way more frequently. So you might end up with a 60/40 split, for example.

I see they do address this in the article, and have added some "conditioning" to eliminate the bias... I bet it's described in a patent somewhere.
Maybe it was 5 minutes, but at age 9 everything seems bigger (and take longer!).
France's Presidential Election: Three Things to Know
Latest Facebook user and revenue stats
This is why I embrace being a cynic and a nihilist. :)
It can be useful to engage open source projects of this size on other grounds - I can't speak for Chromium, but with many significant projects, a patch with some code is less than useful if there's been no discussion around it.
When I'm job hunting?

Yea, I'd say so. After you've intrigued me with the job itself, then I'd go looking at who you were as a company, then probably back to the job description once more to make sure everything fit together.

Not that potential hires shouldn't "care" about who you are - they should. But first and foremost they should care about what the job position is, and do they fit that role.