skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Or, if you want things that take a little effort to spot, you can see that I really, really like parenthetical statements (one English teacher of mine estimated that I used them 20x more than her reference sets... oh, there I go again)

And I thought I was the only one (I have the same habit). It does make Lisp seem more familiar, though (rather than "ack, too many parentheses!").

P.S. Was surprised you didn't give out your summoner name on the last article. You probably could've gotten enough free RP for Midnight Ahri or whatever.
I guess I know you? Glad to hear you found work through the JUG. I obviously am a recruiter and still lead that JUG, and it is a way to build credibility. You could call it opportunistic, or you could say it is a way of giving back to the community (if I were a true opportunist, I'd blast my open jobs to the group, talk about them at every meeting, etc - and I don't do that). But I could see how some might get that idea. It certainly hasn't hurt my business, but at this point I don't need the extra edge of credibility that JUG provides.

What is a reasonable fee? Good question! Perm placement fees range from 15-25% of base salary, but I wouldn't expect any engineer to pay that much. The key to think about is that even though an agent is getting some fee from the job seeker, there is nothing to prevent him/her from taking a few bucks from the hiring company as well - so in theory an agent could charge a low fee to the job seeker and a reduced fee to the hiring company, which would seem like a win?

Conflict of interest is something I also hadn't though about (glad a dialogue is starting and I don't pretend to have all the answers). I would think that in representing candidates (and not companies) there wouldn't be too many conflict situations.
For the record this is only the First Public Working Draft. A lot can and will change. We are looking for commentary to understand if we are on the right track
This is actually more than 1 year old, and it was already on hacker news..
Author here, happy to have direct dialogue with you as well as others that have contacted me. I'm easy to find if you'd like to talk.
Oh come on. It's a fine piece of entertainment, but it's hardly the second-best film of all time. Using the raw data like that is an immediate statistical fail, you should be using a high-pass filter of some sort.
3taps vs. Craigslist -- Who owns public data?
Your searches on Facebook to show up in activity log
It's about portability isn't it. Removes lock in. You can shop for a host for your social data but retain the data [in part] under your control. You get some leverage. It's commoditisation of social network as a service.
Damn, I felt giddy. Now everything on my screen feels tilted even though I'm not on Google anymore. Perhaps its time to shutdown and get out.
Actually - you can get a little circuit board to drive the slave clock without needing a master clock. It mounts to the back of the clock. See here (in German):

http://nebenuhrsteuerung.de/
Mysql Backups:

Ghetto solution is to find a service that will allow you to rsync files to them and take care of offsite backups etc themselves. Once you have done that it's a simple case of setting up mysqldump to create timestamped .sql files and setting that up on a cron job to rsync to the remote server via SSH (you need to generate a key pair and copy the public key to the other end).

If you are using characters from weird character sets you definitely want to make sure all of your unicode settings are correct which may take some trial and error and I've never entirely trusted mysql in this regard.

If you are paranoid you should have a separate job that automatically downloads and restores your backups after a period of time and runs a few test queries on the data. Of course the hard part is knowing what the results of these queries should be.

Of course the problem here is that this will chew up increasing amounts of your remote storage over time, so it depends if you can afford to delete backups of over a certain age.

You can also enable binary logging in mysqld and do incremental backups by writing the binary log to the remote host at certain intervals (I think this only works properly with InnoDB databases), though I have no practical experience doing this because frankly I've never needed to. Nightly dumps were always good enough so my boss wouldn't want me spending any more time on it.

That's the crux of the problem with working for a non tech company, most of the time once the solution is "ok" it's time to move onto something else so you never get a chance to really kick ass which is what you need to do to justify a high rate.

These are really commodity skills though, you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did). Alternatively if you had posted "Mysql backup solution needed" on eLance you would have probably had at least 20 offers to do the whole thing for $20 or so.
I don't mean to be condescending, but you're not thinking of a 'word' as in, a 'word' in computer architecture are you? I'm pretty sure a word doesn't have to be six characters, but i could be wrong...
i know thumbnails take up lots of space, but I don't remember titles.. i remember movie covers. Adding thumbnails would help immensely, it's an extra click away.. but still an extra click
The Quora Crisis: How Long Can the Center Hold?
I feel like I'm missing something. Caltrain charges different depending on where you get off or get on right? How would it know what to charge unless you tagged on/off at the particular stations?

If Caltrain has monthly passes for unlimited rides (I have no idea if they do or not), I agree swiping should not be necessary- especially since I think Muni's monthly pass allows you to just get on/off a train without swiping on the train itself (if the station doesn't have a turnstile).
"Decentralized" don't mean outsourced vs self-hosted. It just means there isn't a central/core part of a network that everything relies on. Outsourcing of decentralized systems is very popular (see: email, web hosting, DNS, etc.)
How long can Quora's echo chamber keep going, as people keep sucking up to each other?
>"I seriously doubt that."

I think you'd be surprised. Though, I also think you'd be hard-pressed to find people who have watched both films (I've only seen one, and it isn't The Avengers). And there's a reason for that: most people don't want to watch a three-hour, epic drama from 1972. Ask people who haven't seen either film which they'd rather see, tonight, and I'll bet they choose The Avengers. Why? Because if you haven't seen GF2 by now, it probably doesn't interest you. So on some level, these rankings speak to the current Zeitgeist.

I can't understand the vitriol directed at these rankings. Sure, there is a definite bias towards modern films in the imdb rankings, but it is what it is. I don't think that it's any different than some crotchety old movie critic telling me which films I should like best.

The fact of the matter is, there is no objective measure of "best". Scan these comments. I can find examples to agree with and disagree with in nearly every single one. But they are all saying the same thing: "This list is wrong!" Based on that, I don't think you or I would have any more success curating a list of movies. This list is as good as any.

Anyway, great tool.
Congrats on your first project.
Useful features:
1. Detect whitespaces in count
2. Count of a specific word/character in the text
It's even more annoying when you buy an 8-ride pass, but forget to scan off on one of the rides -- your 8-ride pass becomes invalid requiring you to call their customer support line to have it fixed. I've ridden trains from all over the world, yet the caltrain is the first train that requires me to call a customer support line to fix a ticketing problem.
Ask HN: How do I generate leads?
Hi,

Thanks to the community for inspiring me. It's my first time trying to build something commercial. I'm developing a web service for real estate agents to create a listings page with a few simple click.

http://signup.mintspaces.com/

I'm trying to generate some leads and am wondering if there are any experts who can give some pointers.

My basic strategy is to visit real estate forums, google search real estate agent websites and reach out to them and try to get them to sign up. My marketing skills aren't the best so I hope someone with more experience can help me out.

Thanks!
Well, that depends. I think scammers targeting the Bitcoin community have found some really useful purposes for untraceable corporations that don't actually require bank accounts.
"Aren't those turnstiles exactly the solution?"

Yes and no, CalTrain has really open stations, unlike something that was designed to be a commuter rail they are a hold over from the time when it was a traditional passenger railroad (with stations, tickets purchased on board, etc). So in order to achieve this you'd need a lot of work at all the stations and that is money that CalTrain doesn't have.

They are getting funds to 'upgrade' as part of the high speed rail project (same right of way) and that may allow them to do something more organized.
This is the key. Representing the best interest of the job seeker and not just driven by the fee paid by the client. Ideally, the recruiter's ethics would make them want the best for their candidates, but in the end the fee is what is driving them. Agents represent the talent and not the team/studio/etc.
My experience with quality designers on dribbble is that they don't take on very small jobs. They get hit up a lot so you have to appear worthwhile ($$$). Here is the email I used to reach out and got 8 responses contacting 12 designers:

---

Hi [name],

I'm the co-founder of [startup]. I saw your work on Dribbble - impressive! We are looking to do a design overhaul and I wanted to chat to see if this is something you would be interested in.

Would you have some time this week to jump on a skype call?

Thanks

---

Your project could be too small for them to respond. Have you considered 99designs or using Elance, Odesk, etc?
Congrats on getting to beta.

Off the bat:
1st page seemed opaque; didn't state what the product does. "promote and spread through social media and networks"

Spread what? Social media are types of networks and networks itself is a generic term used as suffix to have any meaning. Using both "promote" and "spread" is also redundant as they mean the same thing. I normally would have exited the site at this point.

On inside page, the example flyers I saw were pictures with titles only, no additional info, which do not constitute flyers to me. Nice pictures though.
Thanks all for your input. It seems cash is the way to go...
Indeed, browser also implement things like CSP - and we need browser to also support additional security measures that enhance the API
The only problem is that this is all coming out when I'm on vacation :)

By the way, I'm subscribed to your new mailing list. I don't think it includes updates about new articles that appear on your blog. Is there a separate (non RSS) way to subscribe to your blog? If it is I'm missing it (admittedly, didn't have much time to look since I'm on vacation).
On the other hand, if Steve had spent more time with his kids maybe they would have been worse off.
I did? Nevermind, just saw where I did!
I suggest that, whenever you make a post like this, you indicate WTF the software does, like this:

We're pleased to announce version 0.1 of Tent, <insert description of WTF Tent is>.

The description should preferably indicate not just what it does at a low level, but why you'd want to use it. In this context, the description on the documentation page, "Tent is a social layer over HTTP using JSON.", doesn't motivate Tent's existence particularly well. Something like this would be more instructive:

Tent <why Tent exists> by adding a social layer to HTTP.
"as markets become more efficient trading opportunities, as you point out, vanish. So smaller amounts of arbitrage need to be leveraged with larger amounts of cash to get the same return."

This is contradictory. If there is only one offer of 100 shares at an arbitrage price you take it and the arbitrage is gone. You can't leverage more money to get higher returns, you're done. Market=efficient wipe hands and walk away.
That's because it is the only hypothesis that the evidence available to us can support. It may eventually turn out not to be right, but it's more wrong to claim something else based on the evidence we have right now.

Similarly, it might turn out that our understanding of electricity is wrong and it's really faeries playing tricks on us. But we have no evidence of faeries, so that is not a good explanation of electromagnetism.
If you want to implement a vulnerable cryptosystem, do it in pure Javascript. Concessions to the broken cryptography of the last 20 years have no place in a forward-looking browser security standard.

Similarly: the industry has grown accustomed to interfaces like PKCS#11, and indeed from looking at the threads on the W3C Web Crypto mailing list, it's clear that PKCS#11 was a major influence on this proposal. But the industry has manifestly failed to enable the deployment of sound cryptosystems for 20+ years. Cryptographers have come up with new interfaces, like Keyczar and Nacl. Why aren't forward-looking standards adopting those instead of perpetuating mistakes from the '90s?

Ordinarily, you wouldn't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. But this is security and you don't get to say that here.

As a developer and someone who has spent the last 8+ years dealing with the security challenges of other people's web software, I think the goal of interop with existing crypto is counterfeit. It would be extraordinarily difficult for a browser standard to capture the gory details of every widely deployed cryptosystem. You don't have a shot at "very good" interop.

Meanwhile, if we could just solve the problem of getting applications a trusted cryptographically secure binding between client and client-data-stored-on-server, there's a lot of interop problems we could solve "out of band". Part of what makes interop hard is getting the details of CTR counter byte order right, sure. But another part of what makes interop hard today is just providing the baseline level of security required to make the trust model work.

More people need the trust model to work than need support for backwards crypto systems. That's the problem that should get tackled first.
New study affirms that fewer copyright restrictions benefit the economy
It's just... more tilted?
The scarcity of iPhones at launch is a fabrication. The primal human instinct to be lured by scarcity even trumps rational minds.
AFAIK, companies don't get to just keep unclaimed gift cards money. They have to give it to the government.

But now that I think about it, I'm not sure how never-expiring gift cards work..
Why is this a service and not a .js file?
I cannot run my own mail server without significant extra expense, because the assholes who run Spamhaus decide every Comcast IP must be blocked. So over the last 10 years or so, it's become much harder to keep email decentralized--you either need to use an existing service, or pay out the nose for a "business-class" connection which hopefully won't be blocked.
What's the great thing about clojure then? I've been hearing a lot about that as well.
While this might be true, it's still interesting to look at planets that WE could inhabit, after having evolved on earth.
I don't understand why this is so complicated. Why is there a controller on the train checking tickets? In Tokyo and NYC, you just go through a turnstile after swiping your card. You swipe your card again when exiting at your destination station. I never thought it was that complicated.
Why those two? Why clojure? I kind of know the advantage of Node.js (real-time).
But you haven't protected those applications from Javascript attacks, because you've left virtually all of the glue to bind HMAC to AES (if the developer knows to do that) or to set the parameters for AES-CBC or AES-CTR (if the developer knows to do that) and to perform secure key exchange and avoid key reuse (if the developer knows to do that) to higher levels, like Javascript.

Avoiding attacks on Javascript crypto is a very strong argument for a browser crypto standard --- but that standard has to be a high-level envelope interface for the argument to hold water.
A debugger. Sounds interesting. What exactly would that be doing? How would you use it in a product?
This seems like it'd be useful for using private forks of gems on Heroku, since you could just check that app key into your Gemfile. Right? Or am I misreading this.
My favorite patio11 word is "motivational", although it's possibly a really new one.

Pet example: "They paid me motivational sums of money".

(Oh, and yes Patrick, you're starting to develop a serious cult following).
The TLD is .is, in case you thought it was .js.
Ha, I never thought of it that way. Makes you wonder if Einstein was a prick dad ;)
If you put two people on the exact same problem, sure. But, software systems are made up of LOTS of problems, a large amount of which can be solved in parallel.

That's why it's a platitude. It gets bantered about by developers as an explanation about why we just can't go any faster (hiring people is a lot of work after all), but in reality they CAN go faster with more people working on the various problems that make up the system.

Of course there is a point of diminishing return. The management costs come into play. The communication inefficiencies. The process issues. Those can be largely solved with good leadership, however.

It's a rule that is only true when it's true, which doesn't make it that useful to me. I've grown teams on multiple occasions from one or two developers to much larger numbers. While productivity may not have increased linearly, it sure made the projects go much faster. Hell I'd argue that doubling a two person team more than doubled productivity just because the external drags tends to be more distributed which reduces the context switching developers are having to do.

I think there are many more shades of grey that inexperienced founders just don't recognize when they're bound to that idea.
Here's a possible solution -- since they still have the paper ticket mechanism, we should only have clipper handle the bulk purchases (8-ride or monthly pass). Currently, when you buy one of these bulk-ride tickets, you have to specify the zones that you'll be traveling in. Then users would only need to tag once when boarding the train.
You can compile invokedynamic into reflection pretty easily. Obviously you lose the method call optimization, but you can keep the syntatic sugar.

I would be very surprised if the backports folks didn't offer this within a few months.
I understand your skepticism, but look at the current model. You have recruiters representing candidates and companies, yet they are only financially motivated by whether a transaction happens (whether or not that is in the best interest of the job seeker). If you don't bother with recruiters, you certainly wouldn't bother with an agent. But I'm surprised you quickly dismiss a concept where you would have true representation. If you feel you can go it alone and don't need the help, more power to you. Some people change their own oil and mow their own lawns too, and some don't. Personal preference.

You could argue all recruiters are opportunists to some degree. But if I do my job and do it well, someone gets a job they want and a company grows. It's a win win (except for the company that loses the employee).
Yes, forgetting to tag off sucks, but a conspiracy to nickel and dime you? Really?
How exactly is caltrain a monopoly? And if it is one, fares pay less than 50% of their revenue, with a large fraction coming from government grants. So it would be a government supported monopoly on those tracks, where a private service is probably not cost effective.
So be glad that the government is subsidizing keeping you off the 101.
Maybe I am very wrong on this issue. The arguments outlined below demonstrate that given a set of axioms or properties, there is only one consistent way to define (-1)*(-1).
Other easter eggs include "do a barrel roll", "recursion", "let it snow" (then click and drag around the results page), "zerg rush". Well those are my favorites, here are more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google%27s_hoaxes_and_e...
Yuk... PHP. Sounds icky. Hehe. I've also been thinking of going into Node.js, but the advantages of Node compared to RoR is just not that big. The only big difference is the real-time aspect, which is relatively easy to implement with Pusher in RoR.

What do you say?
Octave dev demands money to release bugfix that he already wrote
Thanks for the thoughtful answer. That makes a lot of sense. One of the reasons that we started this company is that we know how much applying to jobs can suck. Our business is helping companies hire better, through better process management and analytics. The obvious tension here is that companies need to be efficient, but I personally think the best recruiting is done at the human level - that is, recruiting shouldn't be a cattle call or a stack of resumes.

So when we've hired in the past, we want to make sure there's a good fit on both sides, and this is one way we've found that really works.

If you have any other suggestions on how companies could do a better job hiring designers, I'd love to hear it.

And congrats on the new job :)
What problems isn't it solving for you?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3369509

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3192047

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2418817
That's a mix of complete nonsense and meaningless truism.

Sure, imaginary numbers are based on the axioms for real numbers. But using other axioms ("number line" is a visualization aid appropriate for grade school, not for a serious mathematical discussion) would most definitely NOT allow us to solve exactly the same physics and engineering problems, or have the same outcomes for the same problems.
The smiling, fedora-wearing bloke in Boston MBTA marketing materials is named Charlie; the system's CharlieCard is named after him. The reference is to a 1949 song in which a man named Charlie is forever trapped on the subway because he has no money to pay the exit fare which was then in place (and was phased out in no small part due to this song).

Bottom line: this sort of thing has long been known to be a pain in the ass and it snagged me once: JR and other Japanese railways require you to ticket in and ticket out. This is probably because tickets to different destinations have different fares, and so the police can harangue you if you use a 140-yen ticket to take a 400-yen ride. My first train ride in Japan I lost my ticket and thought nothing of it, until I saw the machine wouldn't let me through.