skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People are taking you awfully literally here. I think the idea of only having to ever configure and trust 1 device is fantastic.

I guess people are thinking of the integration that is available today and how awkward it is, rather than the integration that can happen when everything ships with support for working with everything else.

Sure the software needed at the center of it doesn't exist, but there isn't any fundamental limitation on presenting device appropriate interfaces, it's just integration work.
The regulatory compliance varies from state to state. For example, ChemE doesn't require a PE in most (all?) states. Typically, regulatory compliance is only required when the work involves some sort of interstate commerce.

With all the leaks and concerns over privacy lately, I think we'll see some sort expansion of the laws covering PII sooner than later. So wether or not I agree with it, I think this will happen.
The data scientists I work with would strongly disagree. I've discussed this a bit on HN, and while the title is a bit nonsensical, it has come to stand for a mix of responsibilities.

Don't take my word for it, though--you should visit us and find out what data scientists do!
Parent United Online Acquires School-Focused Friend Finder SchoolFeed
Yes, I have to update to point people there. Apparently also the latest xcode is missing a bunch of stuff people might need and requires separate downloads of those pieces. I forget what but it's still annoying.
The US govt has basically thrown down the gauntlet to every hacker in the world and invited them to take a crack at the US. I hope the leak was worth it, for Obama's reelection campaign. Because it was incredibly irresponsible to boast about it, that is like a red rag to a bull.
You wasted 20 minutes ... what makes you think someone didn't waste 20 days pulling the image collection together. Occam's razor ;)
@ryan - great tool suggestions!

This process has been on the forefront of my mind quite a bit lately, as I am growing my company, Canyon Oak Partners (SEO/PPC/Design/Dev) and a supporting SEO Audit software offering (its in private beta).

At this point, the most important facet I wish to grow is the sales team. My partners and I are discussing the need and pros/cons of getting an office, as we all work remote right now. We also gather at my home (I have a spare bedroom as my office and we set up around the rest of the place) a couple days a week.

Our thoughts lean toward the social energy an office brings, but I love not spending the money on an office.

Do you have any advice on managing a remote sales team?
No. ...wait
NULL-terminated strings are understood to be the only acceptable way to pass around strings in C.

safercopy() will not be writing or reading garbage from memory, but the strings produced as output are not going to be well-formed unless the caller is being just as careful. e.g., safercopy gives me a string that I probably can't pass into printf, or to ANY C library for that matter.
> A HR professional can identify the candidates who don't come close to meeting the requirements of the job and filter them out.

In my experience this is mostly not true. Most HR people don't know tech so what the HR screen devolves into is cramming your CV with acronyms so you make it pass the HR grep filter.

> You will want to interview a decent number of folks for every position.

If you're bringing in more than five people for onsite interviews then (IMHO) you're doing it wrong. You're wasting your time and theirs and it's clear to me that you don't know what you're looking for.

At least Fred advocates phone/video screens (of 15 minutes) although he suggests 6-12 onsite candidates.

> Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the basics ...

This is true but I would go further: most people shouldn't interview. It's arguably a talent not a skill. At Google, it's viewed as every engineer's responsibility to do interviews and I disagree with this. Many of the stories of bad interview experiences can be attributed--at least in part--to people who just don't have the interest or talent in interviewing.

Anecdote: in one quarter I once took 10 people to lunch as part of their interview slate. In those lunches I just talked about the company, answered their questions, etc but didn't get into any technical discussions.

Of those 10 I predicted 8 wouldn't get offers, 1 would and 1 I was borderline. Actual results: 1 offer, 9 no offers putting me at 9-10 out of 10.

> If you connect to the candidate on LinkedIn, you can quickly figure out who you know that knows them.

What an incestuous world the NY/SF tech scene must be if this is true. Well it might be true if you're a veteran VC. I can't see it being true for anyone else.

Otherwise this is all straightforward good advice although it skips the most important step: how to determine if someone is a good fit and competent but that's a topic we'll probably argue about in perpetuity.
After chrome.exe and eclipse, the most memory consuming app on my Task Manager's process list is DWM. I think i can give up on some effects to gain more memory.
Why would he have liked J? I do not see how he would describe it differently from "a mistake, carried through past perfection". Also, slightly related: he may not have seen J, but http://www.dijkstrascry.com/node/90 shows that he can not have been totally unfamiliar with APL developments.
> Lewis (who seems credible to me) gives accounts of how German banks appear basically to have been taken advantage of (hence the "stupid money" comment) as customers for particularly ill-advised investments.

That part of the story is correct, IMHO. There are a lot of stories around it.
Pushing upstream is absolutely the best way to get things more widely used, but unfortunately changes to the defaults often get strong pushback from long-time users. It's a very politicized process; if improving Emacs itself were easier the Starter Kit never would have existed.
Hi,

It's great you are sharing your thoughts as you go from 'zero' (as you say) to coder! I am planning on sharing your blog with a friend who wants to learn to code. It would be inspiring for her.

Just a small suggestion about the blog - the previous/next links to my brain are opposite of how they should be. Previous should take me to your older posts. Next to the newer ones. They are doing the opposite. Might confuse my friend and others.
I would like to outsource development but can't break the mental barrier
I've outsourced all kinds of things. From accounting to graphics sound production for games. Code: Never. Why? I have a mental block preventing me from taking that step. How are you doing it.

I've hired many in-house programmers in the past. I've had the good, bad and ugly experience. As a coder myself, I recognize that in some of the bad cases I should have been more involved in the hiring process. Too busy running other aspects of a manufacturing business at the time.

I've also seen productivity issues first hand. Hell, I have productivity issues of my own. We are only human.

And, lastly, I've had work flat out stolen. After about six months I let go a marketing manager who had been in charge of developing our website. He went to work for a competitor and had them hire my (freelance) web developer to duplicate all of the internal and external functionality that we spent a year developing and fine-tuning.

I am no-longer in manufacturing. My new world is 100% software-based. And I have tons of projects I'd like to tackle. I can't do it all myself or in-house. But, when I think about the idea of outsourcing development I get images of my past experience that are keeping me from pulling the trigger.

I keep reading about people doing this here on HN and other sites. I can't, from my current vantage point, possibly imagine hiring someone clear across the world to, effectively, hand them my ideas and have them built. This isn't a case of American egocentrism at all. I am very well travelled, multi-cultural and speak a few languages. No issues there. I guess it boils down to trust.

How do you do it? Does one just jump in to it with a degree of innocence and hope for the best?
Well I explain all the many reasons this is the wrong way to think about it in the end.
NPR news has an interview today on this subject, if you would like further info.
Same here. Just flashes the picture really fast in the latest stable release of Chrome under Windows 7. Works beautifully in the latest Firefox though. Windows IE isn't supported at all apparently (I tried IE 9).

Are the developers willing to share some insight into how this works? The picture selection is right on and there seems to be a good number of pictures at that.
Hopefully this will increase the quality of their mobile apps.
Databases in Song
Certainly "never produced any code" was hyperbole, but "contributions" is being pretty generous. Hobbling together some random scripts nobody has ever used isn't really contributing. Most of what he has tried to contribute has been rejected.
There is Diaspora, if privacy is really what users want then, why haven't we seen a massive conversion to Diaspora?

While I agree that privacy is not "really what users want", the lack of a massive conversion to Diaspora is not indicative of anything. There was an article a week or two ago where an investor pointed out that Facebook is a natural monopoly. What they were talking about is basically that, now that most people are on Facebook, they're not going to pick up and walk out for another social network.

You might. Your friends might. But you post on HN, too.
It is funny to see this because a few years ago in college I mused with the idea of using bubbles for buttons on screens and drew up some plans I had. I didn't have the tech or the time to bring it about, but I am glad someone else has. The issues I came up with was how to build a small pneumatic motor that would fit in a device, not make much noise, work quick, and not drain all the power fast. I hope they can do it becasue tactile feedback would be nice. =)
10,462 entries over 4.5 years – what I have learned tracking my time
How To Know When It's Time to Bring in an IT Consulant
The median salary for an HR Manager is $78,000 according to glass door .http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/hr-manager-salary-SRCH_KO0...

You're looking at 65 employees at $100 a month to make that pay off.

For most companies between 4 and 65 people, outsourcing HR is a big headache reducer. Having worked at companies with outsourced HR, I can tell you it's not amazing, and it could be way better. But HR is a cost of doing business, and not something you should be trying to do yourself as a young business.
The actual cost of that HR manager to the company would be much greater than their salary if you consider all the overhead. Even if you manage to find someone for dirt-cheap, you'll still need an internal system for managing everything, which won't be free.
> Here are all the details we’ve gleamed so far,

:twitch:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gleam

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/glean
Agreed - never quite settles to actually show anything, just keeps asking me to hold still even though my hand's off the mouse...
You are trying to shove the future into a present-day sized box.

If things were working correctly, there wouldn't be any need to take your phone out of your pocket to have it drive the laptop.

And the laptop needn't be useless if the phone isn't around, it should just be able to advertise its screen and keyboard to the phone, so that a user that wants to push text at the phone can use the laptop to do it (without messing around with much of anything).
I'd say I feel the same way about Ron Paul - he brings a refreshing perspective to politics, but he's certainly not right on everything.

Santorum adds nothing to the debate but repetition of the narrative that's already going on. I should add to this that no one ever likes the same tactic they use to be used against them - in this case having Stallman define an extreme position to maintain a more pragmatic narrative.

All considered, I'm glad both Stallman and Paul are doing their thing - even if I don't agree with them much of the time.
Yep, it was based off of this story (disclosure: I sit next to the reporter)
This sounds like a dream job.
Not true.

A number of years ago a friend of mine took the largest 10 software companies by revenue, and broke out their software revenue according to whether it was from sales of software, or from consulting.

Microsoft was the only one who made more from sales than consulting. Every other one made more from consulting. Generally at least an order of magnitude more.

I am sure that a similar exercise today would produce similar results.

This fact strongly suggests that copyright protection is not essential for the livelihoods of most software developers.
Apple announces next-generation Macbook Pro with Retina Display
A quote I like from Stallman himself more than any of Gandhi's: "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when
not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to
learn this particular lesson."
Cool pitch for hiring a designer
SocialCam is a cancer
So I was sitting in my living room as my wife asks me if I want to watch this video of a big pimple. She knew she couldn't stomach it herself. I obliged and was disgusted and entertained for about 3 minutes.

After watching it I let my wife know that "WTF Pimple" would be posted to her Facebook feed/timeline/whatever. To her shock and dismay she checked and promptly deleted it.

Unfortunately, other friends and family aren't so keen on what SocialCam does as they watch videos through their site.

The world becomes a worse place when I see that my uncle watched a video of a hot yoga instructor or that my cousin watched a video about laser hair removal. (These were made up to protect the actual victims who inadvertently shared their viewing).

I've seen the HN/startup community really get behind SocialCam because of how many users they've got to add their FB app. They went viral. Yay for them.

But seriously, it sucks.
I was forced to spend about 48 hours recently unexpectedly writing 32 pages; the document you've seen. Somebody has told me it reads like "Confederacy of Dunces". Note: I don't know if that's true. I've heard of the latter book but I haven't read it.

The 32 pages might provide a better jumping-off point for what I'd like to say than my original idea. I'd never have gone public about some issues but the decision has been made for me. And it felt right to write about some of the things that had happened.

So after I deal with the Kiralys (James, Grace, Thomas, and Kenneth) and hopefully after I recover from an illness, I'll look at the current document and see if I can shape it into something worthwhile.

The family history would go into it (possibly back to 1850). I'd add incidents from the lives of each of the Kiralys, more about Twisted Time, myself, and our peers, and a narrative that tries to make sense of it all; families, abuse, love and hate, success and failure, and the role that religion plays in our lives.

The Kiralys aren't going to like the idea much. But I think the project might work out. And after the events that you can presently read about at http://details.wikidot.com/ I am not sobbing on the ground, heartbroken by their sadness.

They're likely to try to take actions related to this. And I still face the first court hearing in a few days and there's no attorney. But if the current version is spread around a bit I don't think they'll be able to stop it.
The thing is that "less-than-rigorous exercise" is true in many areas of ML. Take for example neural nets, which are very popular and successful, even among real expert's there a lot of 'magic' behind why they really work. SVMs are loved partially because they work well, but also they are very sound from a theoretical standpoint, if you know the math you can show that it will work, this is not necessarily true with many other successful techniques.

Interesting side note for ensembles: 'averaging' is usually not one of the best methods for blending results. More successful approaches include using either a perceptron or a simply training a linear model to find appropriate weights for predictions from each individual model. I've even had a case where simply picking the MIN of each set of predictions worked surprisingly well for a particular problem.

The above btw is something that I think a "Data Scientist" should know, and is well out of the scope of a software engineer who just plugs values into prepackaged algorithms. A "data scientist" should be able to read papers [1] that explain these things, which is more than many software engineers do.

Now I'm not a data scientist, but while I can't write an SVM from scratch, when I'm working on data mining problems I am reading several academic papers a week. I really think we're looking at two sincerely distinct areas of expertise and it's not too lofty to look at someone who has to read academic papers to do his job as a "scientist".

[1] http://www.edscave.com/docs/Blending_Methods_AusDM2009.pdf
Corporate aren't going to buy this.
Just like bad star trek movies, corporate users only buy every other edition.

Right now MSFT is trying to get corporate to switch from XP->Win7 in 3-5 years they will be looking to move Win7->Win9
Been there, didn't had an awful experience but it wasn't good either, the guy I worked with was a D time manager but I was able to agree to a fixed fee.

Still, a 2 month project became 6 months of constant delays. Can't say being a dev helped, in fact I think being a designer or a biz-dev guy would've been better since we tended to discuss a lot about what to use here and there: the guy was a better coder but I had more experience, and so while he always went for the "just works" solution I for obvious reasons tended to go to the solution that was more future-proof and less of a pain to upgrade.

Non-devs would just say "I want X" and then get something like X, but be ok with it.
Not only is there a lack of evidence from the plaintiffs, Yelp has mountains of evidence proving the opposite.
Retina Macbook Pros with Large SSD's
From what I understand, the degree is more or less a structured way to become really versatile in RapidMiner. The relationship between the software development team and those teaching the degree is very close ( http://rapidminerresources.com/index.php?page=training / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidMiner ). Therefore I suspect the core motivation for those choosing this degree is to reach a high level of proficiency in that particular software by studying with one of its developers, and earning on the way an MSc from a state university. It is a legitimate university, but don't expect any employer going wild about it.

Just as a disclaimer: I have not relationship with ITB or RapidMiner. A while ago I played around with the software because some of the tutorials are really interesting and very accessible for someone like me who lacks a deep statistical understanding(i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXIKydgGbYk).
Right which is why they are just asked to read in a given file and print out the contents slightly formatted, not make a full CSV parser.

Most people can't open a file and read in the contents, forget parsing the contents just reading them in is where most people fail.
In embedded product development, C and C++ is King.
Tech hiring: Best house in a bad neighborhood?
lispm, I see that your very proud of Germany. Just be careful not to be too proud. Nobody is perfect, and nobody can prosper alone.
We agree that corporations aren't going to buy this ... but they'll also worry that Windows 9 will be patterned more after Windows 8 than 7/XP.

There used to be corporations that were in the opposite release cycle, but Vista effectively killed that for Microsoft.
Something as low tech as having a predefined map of {location : picture} would do it. Break up the screen into a grid of NxN quadrants, like 20x20. Then just find 400 pictures with a finger near each quadrant. Translate cursor to a quadrant x,y; look up picture. Done.
No idea. I upvoted; that has been part of the debate here at least for months.
* So far Macbook Air/Pro getting upgraded

* A new Macbook Pro with Retina/Thunderbolt is introduced. No Ethernet or Firewire jacks.

* "PowerNap" Macbook updates while sleeping.

* Siri integrates with Open Table, Yelp and Yahoo. Big time "EyesFree" integration with Car manufacturers.
Funny thing about this comment is your ability to do desal is pretty equivalent if you have 1 mile of coastline or a thousand :)

One great thing about the ocean: if you pull out some water, you don't have to wait long for it to be replenished!
Data Jam Generates New Ideas For Using Energy Data
All the images are listed here:

http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json

There are around 900 of them! I'd have used Amazon's Mechanical Turk...

Very cool effect, I also wasted way to much time playing with it :)
What I really like about LCTHW (after reading K&R and then just not doing anything with it) was starting you out using the tools and best practices right from the beginning. Make and valgrind up front. It got me over the hump of syntax&language --> actually using.
I think you can buy a cheap blu-ray player with internet access for not much more than that. No keyboard, but you can still watch YouTube, Netflix etc with basically no set up required.
Google Nexus 7 Tablet Confirmed By ASUS Representative
Quick Office: Google all set to give Microsoft tough competition.
I think you hit upon the gist of it which is that users don't care. The same could be said about users' general complacency about the tracking/storage Google does.

Users are generally right, it doesn't matter in most cases. No harm is being done... yet.

The general trend is toward services that do not make privacy optional and that require the users to accept a narrower range data collection and advertisement policies in order to use the service.

In time (maybe in 5-10 years) getting on the internet will require accepting terms that basically give up lots of privacy and anonymity. (My other prediction is that we'll see the return of interruption ads that cannot be skipped for nearly all content, or every 7 or 8 minutes during a typical internet usage setting).

The above is why investors are paying so much money for shares of Google and Facebook. Both are a combination of internet gatekeeper and data collector. Both are awaiting the right moment so they can enter the "last mile" business. In the meantime, the fact that users don't care is just gravy.

Incidentally, the most relevant consequence of this in today's world is that both firms are happy to do whatever powerful governments want. Facebook and Google are destined to become the next Halliburton and Ratheon as cyber warfare and terrorism loom large as threats to security and government finds itself horribly data-poor compared to private firms.
I wonder if people who own their own properties could gain a modest advantage by mentioning that in the AirBnB listing. Possibly not enough AirBnB users know about or are worried about the distinction, but I'd personally be more willing to rent from someone if the description assured me that it wasn't an unauthorized-sublet type situation.
Pingdom launches new control panel
That's what I assumed. If I just moved my mouse a couple pixels I usually got the same pointing image back. I think they just divided it up into regions and then load the appropriate image for each region.

However, if that's all they're doing, it seems odd that it takes so long to load... Maybe some of that's just a built-in delay to keep from constantly cycling images from someone who's bumping the mouse.