skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm getting a new job that involves machine learning. How do I kick ass?
Hi guys,

I've been a PHP web dev all my career and I got this new job that involves a whole lot of machine learning. They are using Java too which I'm very familiar but haven't done extensive programming in yet.

I want to kick ass at this job. I want to do great work and be proud of it instead of going home everyday feeling mediocre.

Please help me do good at my work. What advice/suggestions can you give me? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance!
UFO VISITS INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION
That's why we have things like browserid and oauth
Should you always trust your gut?
A lot of comments on the SE site make the same point: it's clear that such a person needs to wear a space suit of some type. And it's clear that it is possible to do with an elaborate vehicle. So the question really just depends on how elaborate you allow the suit to be.

If you allow active propulsion systems, then the answer is certainly yes - but your suit now becomes a vehicle and that's probably not in the spirit of the question.

If your constraint is "No (active) propulsion system", then you can redefine the question:

"Is it possible to build a passive wing system to make a (slow, 30ms^-2?) controlled descent into the upper reaches of the atmosphere for a mass of approx. 200kg (man+suit) and, if so, what is the minimum temperature that the exterior of such a construction will reach during its deceleration phase? Are there man-made materials that can withstand such a temperature?"

My feelings are a) yes, b) way too high and c) no. The precise answer is left as an exercise to the reader ;=)
Just curious - why did you add people you'd actively avoid in real life as friends on Facebook? I don't think I have, or have ever had, anyone in that category in my FB list.
The giveaway for me was where he linked the 'products' in "technically impressive new products" to the Windows Vista page..
I thought the point was they weren't tracking you across the web. Did they also have that capability?
Was absolutely fine for me on Firefox.
"The gut" is basically a pattern-recognition heuristic. It's right often enough to be useful, but only if you don't lose sight of the fact that it can fail.
HackerGames at hackerrank.com
Didn't they once make a miniature space shuttle glider?

I think that would be a lot more "fun" than jumping with just a super bulky spacesuit.

added: couldn't find the original one from years ago but here's something new

http://i.space.com/images/i/18008/original/dream-chaser-capt...
Small innovative Chinese outfits lack capital. There's big, government affiliated outfits with lots of capital, and outsourcing companies (like Foxconn, which is Taiwan run), but not a lot of capital for bootstrapped companies.

OK, I've heard that's changing, but it's not Silicon Valley.
> Better still is to use, 'passwd -d -l [user]',
> which will delete the password and then lock it.

Better yet, set PasswordAuthentication to "no"
Windows 8 (soon) available for download
During his talk yesterday at KRT conf he said he is releasing it into the wild early so that it can be truly opensource, with discussion over pull requests and code instead of 'prose' over specs. So ya, i would say it's a good time to show HN.
Shameless plug: I run a pitch-creation service at http://pitchremix.com, and I'd be glad to help you out.

--

Some general thoughts:

1. Always dumb down your language. Not necessarily 2nd grade English, but definitely avoid words like "multi-dimensional representation" and concepts like "binary or linear". Most educated people know what you mean by this, but it adds an extra level of unnecessary complexity to your pitch. I shouldn't have to think about what you mean by "binary taste systems". When you give me a two-sentence description of your company, I should know instantly what you do.

2. Once you've simplified your language, work on describing what you do in as straightforward terms as possible. There was a good article on HN a couple days ago about applying to HN; in it they nailed how to describe something like Google:

Google is a website. A user comes to the website and sees and text box and a submit button. He types in words into the text box and clicks on the button. Google then shows him a list of websites that contain the words he just typed in.

http://www.acunote.com/blog/2012/10/y-combinator-application...

Notice how it doesn't take for granted that the person knows what a "search engine" is. Obviously in this day and age, everyone knows what a search engine is. But they didn't 5-10 years ago. Today, everyone might not know what you mean by
"a matrix that helps make predictions" or a "multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes".

3. Now that you've described what you do in as simple terms as possible, tell me

a) why this is a problem and
b) why you are the solution

--

Hopefully that was helpful.
It strike me at odds that IBM "lost". Sure it's not controlling the desktop market but in terms of revenue they're very well of. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+revenue+vs+micros...
Very well said.

Articles like this reduce games to some grey, by the numbers marketing exercise. The reason so many games on the app store sink like a rock is because they just plain aren't enjoyable experiences and treat their players very cynically. It's totally disappointing that micro transactions, sneaky psychological tricks and nagging the player at every stage is so actively encouraged in the mobile space.

Gameplay and designing experiences for the player is seen as some sort of afterthought.

Games can be such a wonderful immersive medium, but it's hard to get lost in another world while there's a bright bouncing icon asking for your credit card or facebook details every three seconds. Mobile games really could be so much better than this.

I for one would love to see more focus on building great things and less on monetization. Long live the indies and hats off to people like yourself who are out there pushing things forward.
IOS app promoters can now measure downloads with AdWords
Hi. Congrats on your new job!

As far as advice/suggestions, please consider sharing a few more specifics, so the community may better understand where you're coming from.
It strikes me at odds when he says that IBM "lost". Sure they're not controlling the desktop market but in terms of revenue they're very well of. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+revenue+vs+micros...
Most sites have messy codebases, news at 11.
Anecdatapoint: I've seen a handful of people post this link on Facebook. All of them are promoting something. So far I've seen no other users post it.

FB's job is to keep the average user (who won't put much effort into sanitizing their wall whatever they clicked on in the past) happy while getting enough money out of their userbase as a whole to stay in business and keep the stockholders happy. It's not their job to keep the promotors who use FB as a tool happy.
I normally lurk so I don't know why I can't reply to your most recent, so replying here.

Agree on your criticism of my loose word of the term saves. I don't agree with your reasons on why people don't buy gold though - most would have no idea what spread is and how it works. From my experience of trying to convince my friends and family to save something in gold - they just find the idea totally foreign of buying a metal that doesn't earn income...even if said income is not keeping up with inflation.

Interesting perspective on the boxes. I only have one so don't know about increasing/decreasing availability - I know there is a waiting list for the ones at my bank in the city. I find the price very reasonable for the value I obtain from it (150/year).

So what are your thoughts on storing that apartment cash then? I am a goldbug but am interested in other thoughts on preservation of purchasing power.
I don't understand how they can do it without access to Apple's internal database, which I believe Apple won't share with Google.
In the past few years, I have spoken to local middle school kids (7th or 8th grade) at their "career day". They are all totally fascinated with what I do, because kids nowadays (yes I know I sound old) live their whole lives online and surrounded by technology.

The school where I visit is really average, some rich kids some poor kids, all kinds of backgrounds. The format of this career day is that each class period somebody will come and talk to the class that is somewhat related to the subject - so I usually end up speaking to a math or computer class. In a class of 25, there are probably one or two kids who already know some limited programming (or have made a website). Almost everybody that age is online (all Facebook, a handful of Twitter) and plays console video games. Probably about half have cell phones.

When they ask me questions, it's usually about how to steal their friends' Facebook passwords, conceal their browsing history, or build their own video game. I do spend some time talking about privacy, reminding them that their behavior online can stay around forever and that they should be careful who they are talking to online.
There's only one exchange rate
Another factor to include is that as time goes on everybody adds more friends and more likes so the available consumable stream space is divided among more posts. So this also contributes significantly to lessening the number of people who see your posts.

But who knows what special sauce is in FB algos. If I were them I would certainly distinguish between companies, news/blogging, musician/art and image macro posters. Those all have very different usages and annoyance levels.

Probably the interaction rate is factored in, but that also gets spread thinner and thinner. Obviously God and George Takei are winning the game, so the game isn't unwinnable.
Losing orbital velocity via friction with the atmosphere is the main problem. The ISS orbits the earth at 7.7km/s [1].

Using some kind of active braking system ("retro rockets") before hitting the atmosphere might help, but its hard to imagine it being portable. You'd need fuel, pumps, guidance and control systems to run it. As you say, your suit becomes a spaceship.

Edit: I'm not sure whether collision with orbiting junk would be a significant risk. Most of it is very small, and as far as I know the chances of being hit only really rise if you spend a lot of time in orbit.

[1] http://www.esa.int/esaHS/ESA7YL0VMOC_iss_0.html
That only applies to sites which require user accounts for being usable. Also using existing logins simplifies this step quite a bit.
I'm not a designer but that font look a bit to sharp.
It's useful stuff.

What I'd really like to see, though, is a tutorial for using SSH keys from a thumbdrive in a way that doesn't depend on Gnome or KDE.
Seems the "secure your ssh" articles which contain snippets from "man ssh_config" is returning every week now on HN.

Jesus Christ people, if you need an article to use a simple tool like dont even bother.
Are these by any chance built around the Allwinner A10?

The specs seem to match the dime-in-a-dozen Allwinner A10 Chinese tablets/phones/set-top-boxes/...

I have 3 of these A10 devices, and the performance isn't that bad. It's also not great, but it's sufficient for all the things I tried with it.
Ask HN: Macbook Air vs Mac Book Pro vs Ultrabook, help me choose.
I'm planing to buy a new portable computer and can afford to buy a really good one. I'm considering buying a mac book Air, mainly because of the portability and mobility.
I however need a very robust computer with some a giod battery and a descent screen size, the macbook Air screen however seems to be too small for that. What would you recommend me to do? the only reason why I'm considering an Ultrabook is, I've been working with PC's all my life and have never used any Apple products. At the other hand, the Macbook pro looks very robust. Can you please advise?

computer used for:
coding, ftp'ing, office tasks (emails, word processing...etc).

I'd like to write some iphone apps at some point, so a Mac mini + Ultrabook is also an option.

p.s. french native speaker, sorry for any "funny sentence" there.

Thanks
I think that's because in the weakly typed language used, TRUE is a constant with a value of 1.
I'm not even sure what "compatibility" means in this context. You can run executables for one on the other? But you can swap out the OS on the Pi, so... I'm just confused.
The A10's right there in the photo...
ssh doesnt depend on Gnome or KDE, what are you talking about?

These articles are spam. They are collections of snippets from various man pages and other older resources on the internets. If you think theyre useful, go back to the study room, youll not advance your skills by expecting "tutorials" on how to use ssh without kde(!?). Your asking the wrong questions, and will be led down a fruitless path.
It's bad API design. Yeah, I get it, you read your docs properly and would never make that mistake. But most programmers are not as gifted and good API design is about mitigating inevitable human error.
"ssh -i /path/to/key" seems like it would do what you want, which makes me think I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve.
I'd agree with your last sentence if you substituted 'goldbugs' for 'paperbugs' :)

Some history for you:
A USD until 1971 represented a thing. It was redeemable for a specific weight of gold. After Nixon shock it become a concept. It is now only backed by the 'idea' that someone will exchange their goods or services in the future for the paper you hold - or the full faith and credit of the USG if you prefer. The value of the USD is only in the prices placed on the goods. If someone refuses to trade an item with you for your USD then what value is the dollar? If you also read up on Triffin's Dilemma, you will understand why the US must run a perpetual trade deficit - to provide lubricating dollars for world trade. So there are many many many more dollars in circulation than can lay claim to physical goods in this world. Eventually all paper money returns to its intrinsic value (Voltaire!). When it happens to the USD, it's going to be a doozy!
Where I grew up in the urban Midwest, they were called English units (despite everyone knowing that England is metric). Kind of reminded me how the French call French horns English horns.
Your tone is not acceptable here.
Oops! My bad, thanks for pointing it out. Well that explains the pricepoint then :)
In case you want something hackable, check out Olimex.com.
I'd go for the Ultrabook + Mac Mini. This comes from an anti-Apple person. But I owned a Mac Mini to make iPhone apps. Then it came the wonderful Apple's programmed obsolescence and I got cut out. Apple's products are way to expensive for what they offer. Not that they are not good, but not amazing as some people would say. I now stand against Apple because of they restrictive policy. Every single things they do makes me feel like they only want your money and that they want to rule the world. Every single thing.

Also, there are some very good Ultrabooks.
Website was fine loading for me in Chrome.
At least 2 years ago, twisted did not use libevent, it was mostly pure python except for a very tiny piece of code (and optional stuff of course).

I am sure you could write a libevent-based reactor, but twisted was started a long time ago (10 years ? The twisted book in o'Reilly was published in 2005), before libevent existed I think.
Ask HN: Is the focus of the young minds returning to the JVM?
Young people, Innovative people are comming back to the JVM after the rise of Clojure and Scala. Could this lead to the JVM return for the innovative rising thinker companies and startups? Keeping in mind that most of the Established IT cos (IBM, Google, Twitter etc) are based on the JVM, could this lead to the young people adopting the JVM as THE platform?
It instantly applies for all users. "passwd -d" must be done for each user, which means you might forget it sometimes.
[Ask]: Thinking about selling (not-so-small) website. Suggestions on a broker?
Hi. In the last three years I have launched and run a website that now has 200k+ visitors a month, 1k$+/month in Adsense, 2k$ in affiliate sales.

Real facebook fans, relationships with the companies that supply the products we review, good writers....

But it's taking all my spare time away and family life is suffering (especially because I am about to embark in another biz adventure).

I am evaluating selling it, but would like to speak with a professional first to see what it's possibly worth.

Anybody who can recommend a good broker?
This was a bit of nonsense from Silver.

"A truly sophisticated trader, for instance, could make bets in the actual stock market, buying up certain stocks in industries that might be expected to perform well under a Romney presidency (for instance, those of oil or coal companies) while shorting those that would probably benefit from Mr. Obama’s remaining in office (for example, certain health care stocks or green-technology companies). "

Come on. Gambling $18k for an instant 100% return in a couple of weeks should be disavowed in favor of these vague stocks that are guaranteed to react to a Romney win? And how long will it take for them to move?
http://latonas.com/
What do you mean?
We just display data from twitter stream. You can use their stream if you want to
IO performance on these CPUs is fairly poor, so gigabit is unlikely to actually be worthwhile.
A very good work, but a lot to do remains as far as I can see.
The space shuttle descent was basically unpowered (it made an initial burn in orbit to put it on a path into the atmosphere, then after that it was just using thrusters to control orientation), so it's very much possible.
"Now the problem that I face and would like to solve eventually is video editing storage and retrieval."

There are a few solutions out there that address this issue. But they are in the B2B space, mainly positioned to large advertising agencies and production companies, and priced accordingly. AFAIK, there isn't a fantastic consumer-oriented (or even prosumer-oriented) solution in the market.

I'm actually surprised that Apple hasn't tried to address this problem, as an adjunct to its video editing software and its cloud service. Maybe it's looked into the problem and didn't find it big enough to warrant the sky-high IRR it probably requires of a project. But the idea could make sense for a startup.

I imagine you could position this tool to videographers, sure, but also to the growing number of people trying to turn semi-pro at YouTube and other video sites. If your solution is good enough, Google seems like a likely acquirer; these days it's allocating a lot of resources toward building tools to help its prosumer YouTube producers.
The cubox does http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox and a few others.
Sorry for the off-topic. I was rejected by your review process more than 14 days ago. I've then sent you an email asking on clarification and my reasons why I think I should be approved. But I haven't got anything back from you guys. Do you have any guidelines I could read on what you expect from freelancers?

I'm just confused as I have plenty of experience under my belt and I could tackle almost any problem you throw at me.
Total nonsense. The Chilean people are the foundation for Chile's success today and they would have succeeded just as well (or better!) without meddling from the US. And with a lot less death.

Most of the destabilization that happened in Chile was a direct result of US meddling. It's talked about right in the article this thread is about.
didn't you already asked this question yesterday?
The Quantified Teacher: How Much Time Do You Spend on the Following?
Kendall Square boom times squeeze out start-ups
According to what I saw, there were 2 of the last million tweets from canada, Toronto with 5.5 million people had 0 tweets, this seems highly improbable, perhaps Canada has some sort of privacy laws that prevent their data from showing up?
Build Your First JavaScript Library
Answer the question as stated: it depends. Can he get back to the space station by tether or suit rockets?

(sorry)
The Wall : A Javascript plugin for Mootools
Why Google+ Profile Sitemaps Is Privacy Issue
A quick view on WordPress, Mantis and Jenkins plug-in API
I’m preparing a plug-in API proposal for TestLink, and thought that the best way to learn how to write a good plug-in API would be by looking at other application’s plug-in API’s. This post contains information that I gathered for creating this new API, but that may also be useful for other programmers. I used WordPress, Mantis and Jenkins in this study. Let me know if you find any mistakes or if you have any other suggestions.
Chekku: Check your software dependencies from Ruby with ease
Perhaps half the reason they kept asking about the business model / trying to compare it to Dropbox was that they were trying to evaluate whether they had a potentially billion dollar + company on their hands, or a niche nice little side business.

It has been discussed in detail in one of PG's essays [1] about how it's only the big wins that matter to them these days and trying to determine whether the company has the chance to become that big is all part of the problem.

The fact that you didn't get into Y Combinator shouldn't have stopped you continuing with your idea. It is a problem that needs a solution and your solution may have ended up being a multi million dollar idea which would have given you both great success. The problem is, the start up space these days and incubators in particular are on the hunt for the billion dollar ideas - thus they can gamble on many, for the few successes to help break even.

At the end of the day, you guys seem really switched on and the effort / level of detail you went through suggests you are capable of success - just potentially you need to re apply with a bigger idea next time, after reading PG's 'Black Swan' essay to understand what they're wanting to hear you pitch.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
It never had a chance to work. The US intervened the instant the socialist president was elected and never let up. Even with all that meddling, their plan was working incredibly well.
" " "fun" " "indeed" "
Javascript Interfaces: Putting The Java back into Javascript
I know there are a thousand tutorials on each of these topics, but it's nice to have them all in one place.
But that world is too small and conservative in regard of language adoption.
1995, When CD-ROMs and Microsoft Ruled | Wired Business
Nightmare On Database Street: 5 Database Security Horror Stories
Very nice talks specially Jessica Livingston.
What measurable results? Do you have the results of a parallel universe where the US minded its own business so we can compare? Read up on the subject, Chile was doing better before the US got involved and took decades to recover from the intervention.
Changing the font to "Segoe UI Light" goes a long way.
Justice for Tamils Under Sri Lankan oppression
Justice for Tamils Under Sri Lankan oppression
REST-based Web Services - Introduction to MS SharePoint with .Net - Part 15
Getting Kids Into Electronics With Hummingbird
Two is better! I have enough physical background to understand these papers but I'm not an expert in the subject. And I have to do my real work, so I have enough time to read two or three papers, but I don't have time to read 1000 of them.

I saw the webpage only for a few minutes, and most of the links look like special edition books and conference proceedings. I couldn't find the information I was looking for.

Calorimetric measures are extremely difficult to do correctly, so I would like to see:

) One paper in a well known journal, to be sure that an independent expert in the subject has read it thoughtfully.

) One clear description of the experimental setup, so I could try to convince some friends to reproduce it.
Thanks for the help here on this one! Dumb people will now know just how dumb they are before making misinformed assumptions. Really helpful.
Tax Policy Center - Romney Study - It’s not mathematically possible