skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huh, C++ is "back"? It never left! It has still been powering some of the most complex, important and widely-used software systems the whole time, even if it doesn't get the hype of languages like Java or Ruby.
Ruby 2.0.0 Release Plan (02/24/13)
Slice Data builds machine learning applications for non-technical users to help their businesses more effectively capture and retain customers. We're very early-stage - pre-Series A and just started selling our product this summer - but we already have a good set of customers (Fortune 500s down to SMBs) and hit profitability early on. We're also very fortunate to be backed by some top-tier investors including Andreessen-Horowitz and Sutter Hill.

We've been able to do this while keeping the team small - we're comprised of folks from MIT, Berkeley, Google Research, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and Yahoo Research - but we're always keeping an eye out for great people. On the technology side, we manage a sizable amount of valuable/confidential business and web crawled data. Given the traction, we're now looking for folks strong in engineering and statistics who want to get in early and grow with the company.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Analyze and understand customers' data and pain points to develop new product features and new products

- Build predictive models using sophisticated algorithms to help customers prioritize and succeed

- Develop data mining algorithms to extract useful signals from the web and other data sources

QUALIFICATIONS

- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Math or related fields

- Ideally experience with analyzing data sets, formulating data problems, and building machine-learned models

- Familiarity with Python, Java, or R preferred

CONTACT

- https://www.slice-data.com

- hiring@slice-data.com
- Chrome alarm extension to alert me when 1 hour of work has passed after which I get away from the computer for a few minutes.

- StayFocusd Chrome extension to prevent me from going into social networking sites while I'm working

- "...knowing that all the \"other stuff\" I have to do is done. Inbox clear, no meetings about to happen, etc."

- Knowing when I'm too tired to keep working efficiently

- Being away on IM/IRC except for work

- Keeping work conversations to IM/IRC as much as possible

- "...shutting out every around me. Headphones on, music loud." I prefer music without vocals, e.g., electro

- Using http://www.gunnars.com/ to minimize eye fatigue

- Knowing Emacs well to improve code editing speed

- Having unittests to validate my changes quickly

- Using screen or tmux to quickly switch between shells while maintaining a full screen for each...code, shell, unittests, Python shell, database shell

- Using Xmonad to quickly switch between Desktop workspaces while maintaining a full screen for each

- Avoiding the mouse as much as possible, even on the browser (Vimium extension)

- Using the ThinkPad nipple when I do have to use the mouse

- I don't use an external monitor at all. I find the constant neck motion to switch between them tiring and distracting. The combination of screen, Xmonad and Gnome notifications allows me the same application throughput with less distraction and without sacrificing screen space.

That's just off the top of my head. There's probably a lot more. Maybe I should write a blog post about it.
A great book that explores this subject in more depth is Matthew Syed's book "Bounce - The myth of talent and the power of practice".
Personally, I would love this and I'll probably reserve one after Christmas.

To make a real splash they'll need to push the price down to $49 IMHO, and teenagers will go wild. Then have an expensive version for the grown-up tablet market, "a Kindle without the Kindle".

If they can push the price down enough, in the long run, this is the future of gadget cases.
Fireworks (and I think photoshop) has a slice tool. So you coud slice them into rectangles and export them all at once.

One big TIFF is an insane way to package icons for the web. Also why use TIFF over PNG?
Interestingly, this is exactly compatible with what Andrea Dwork writes about in "Mindset" [1]: people whose identity evolves around being "smart" or "talented" are often less willing to take on risks or big projects than those who have grown up being praised for their efforts.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck...
Cannabis is a "gateway drug" because it is illegal ... we've known this for a while, and cannabis abuse has generally fallen in countries that legalize its consumption.
Living on my bicycle for a year instead of going straight to graduate school.

I bicycled across the US each summer for two years, and the next summer took a full year off. I rode from Seattle to Maine, down to Florida, over to California, and all the way north to Alaska. It was the classic "find yourself" adventure of a 20-something. It has grounded me in everything I have ever done since.

Facing a grizzly at four feet, alone in the middle of the Yukon, really does put everything else in perspective for the rest of your life.

Programming: Build something that people use, and start freelancing. I am not a full-time programmer, so I could have gone the rest of my life only programming for my own intellectual satisfaction. But I watched my dad pass away never having polished any of his projects, and that made me commit to releasing code. Programming has been much harder, but much more satisfying, since I made that decision.

Freelancing has let me ease into using my technical knowledge professionally, while maintaining my day job as a high school teacher.
The craziest ideas are usually "frighteningly ambitious" ones, I guess. So, it's easy to understand that these are the ones you, guys, like most.
Darn, I had this idea like 5 years ago. Oh well, at least now it's real and I didn't have to make it myself.
Really man? Alcohol by far!
Is there a demo? I know you liken it to Github's, still it would be nice to see the real thing. I'm currently implementing autocomplete through jQueryUI and this is something I'm interested in.
I would imagine few rogue machines connected somehow to outside internet and sharing blocks on iranian intranet. something like this. But yeah - it would be more dificult to deal with transactions which involve coins "from outside", but it should be fine for coins "from inside"
I'm not sure why you believe marijuana users are likely to endanger others. How many have you met? Police officers say marijuana users tend to be the easiest people to arrest -- they're less likely to fight or cause problems than drunk people or meth heads.

The biggest effect this will have on our society is the dismantling of the Mexican drug cartels and the ending of the War on Drugs. This will obviate the need for hundreds of deaths and hundreds of thousands of arrests each year. A large percentage of the US population will no longer be criminals for recreationally using an intoxicant less harmful than any legal intoxicant, including alcohol.
Thanks for the feedback! Lot of people complained they cannot figure out how to play, so a gameplay video is now accessible from the page:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUoJOdtulA4
The tradeoff 'niche appeal vs. universal acceptance' is a feature, not a bug.
My girlfriend is a violinist and violin pedagogue. Everybody has always called her gifted but she has resisted every time and said: it is all about having the gift to be able to do 4 hours of intense practice each day from an early age.

Not everybody has the ability to practice this hard.
There's a metaphor that's going to get me hit with a couch pillow in here somewhere.
The lack of user-defined tags and attributes (ignoring data-* for a minute because it's different) is what makes HTML such a more pleasant document/markup language than XML.

XML schemas are hard because allowing people to define an ad-hoc ordered hierarchical parsing structure is hard, so most people don't do the schema part (or ignore the schema in the real world) resulting in ambiguity in the rules about what sort of constructs are allowed in the document or what they mean, resulting in XML formats that aren't really interchangeable.

HTML5 relieves this by having only one markup format that's actually specified with a real common understanding instead of a multitude of formal and informal markups. Evidence that the world needs more than one markup format is thin on the ground, what most people need is the ability to locally distinguish between and identify things, and class and id are complete and minimal for that job.
GZIP will compress your html for the journey from server to browser if a) it is enabled on the server and b) the browser can handle it.

Almost any modern combination should work fine.

OK - there is a cpu overhead for the server but if bandwidth is the issue then it sure beats any attempt at minifying the HTML
Cannabis is the "gateway" drug, because once it's legalized, legalization and research efforts for many other substances will begin. The floodgates will have been broken.

Already, we're seeing research into using meth against the flu [1] and ectacy used to fight PTSD.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KDIzE_...
It's pretty simple. Use a regex to eliminate whitespace and then gzip. Be sure to set the proper headers if you gzip.

I eliminate whitespace with the following PHP code:

preg_replace(['/\t+/', '/>\s+</'], [' ', '><'], $html);
omg, so many intelligent people reinventing the wheeeeeeeeel...
makes me sad.
You have to look at it from a purely pragmatic perspective.
Everyone who wants cannabis, even teenagers, can currently get it very easily. Growing up, everyone knew it was easier to get than alcohol(drug dealers don't check ID).

In the states that are considering legalization, the vast majority of possession arrests end up with the charges dismissed or a civil fine anyway. So from a purely logical perspective, spending a ton of money on arrests that will only result in the charges getting dropped anyway makes no sense.
In fact, the Peano axioms are enough to represent the natural numbers, and they are much less general than ZFC. The construction with finite ordinals in ZF(C) constructs a model for it within ZF(C).

If you prefer something else than set theory, you should still be able to construct natural numbers satisfying the Peano axioms. In other words, any reasonable axiomatization of mathematics will give you the naturals.
You're not being dumb. You just sound similar to, say, a graduate student doing theory who hasn't been outside in a while. :)
Ok, so what were the predictors of failure?

IMO, if you can talk about these features/predictors, they are true predictors. Otherwise, if people can game the system if they knew these features, I'd think they're more artifacts about your current process than attributes of failing startups (and if it turns out that these features are actually causative of failure, rather than just predictive, everyone can be a better startup too).
Why would people act like idiots or endanger others just for smoking pot? There are many places where you can use cannabis without any punishment and people are still normal.

Gateway drug to what? Just because one drug have been used before another doesn't mean that the first drug automatically will make you want the second drug.
Can't wait to see it come to Android--I'd even change into whatever model they support first, as I think this back screen would see far more use from me than my smartphone ever does. Now if only it could support Wacom, and if that wasn't crappy like the Galaxy Note, that'd be my dream phone.

By not crappy, I mean something feeling quite close to writing on paper, such as the old HP TC1100 (can't get rid of mine). I wonder if there's any new tablet that feels as good.
Did you interview? Presumably you spoke to previous interviewees. Any difference in questions that you noticed?
Generally speaking, I expect that legal cannabis will tend to cut down on alcohol use, and I would tend to see this as a good thing.

Cannabis tends to be less addictive than alcohol, it's pretty much impossible to kill yourself with an overdose, and people intoxicated with it tend to overestimate how impaired they are rather than underestimate it like with alcohol.

I've seen a bunch of different studies using different methodologies to come up with various rankings of drugs by degree of harm [1][2][3], but every one of them rates cannabis as safer than alcohol.

EDIT: I expect that the "gateway drug" effect is due to people finding out that pot is much less dangerous than they are led to believe. People have always heard that using illegal drugs would kill them, then find that their friends are using it safely and assume that all illegal drugs are similarly safe.

[1]http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/family/drug-ranking.htm
[2]http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/4/e000774.full
[3]http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...
My First Customer is Now Dead
I'm in general agreement. I think a study of the history of opium in China should be undertaken by anyone who thinks there is no possible bad outcome of this.
does it have enough oomph to play 10 GB mkv?
why you believe marijuana users are likely to endanger others

Driving stoned?
Very true, and if you want to be more specific my definition only works for finite duration continuous time signals with finite second moment. I use this definition as it also works well for understanding other transforms such as the Laplace transform.
Feel free to excise XML from any buzzword by claiming the X doesn't stand for XML, it's a free variable. "Our X is JSON"
IMDb page views affect jobs
Looks awesome, but I wish they showed me photos of the actual case details (side view - does it make the phone much thicker, and bottom view with charger)
> it just seems inevitable that there will be more people abusing it, using it as a gateway drug and causing negative affects on society

Do you have a shred of evidence to support this claim?
Tips for rails asset pipeline
RuuviTracker - open-source GSM/GPS tracking device
Which? Claim Millions Of Britons Are Struggling Financially
Stanford bioengineers increase packet size of cell-cell communication by 40,000x
I believe he was correct at the time, he removed them once people started using them for parsing directives. (JSON hasn't always been frozen)
Actually, for me marijuana was a gateway drug: it led to a tobacco habit that lasted 40 years. :(
Bullshit. Most of those people don't give a fuck whether zero is odd or even, they just want to buck the system. It's like those anti-tax nuts who claim their social security # doesn't belong to them, but to some 'straw man' identity, because the name on the social security card is in all caps.
Sorry for the late reply... that is what I was implying. They are offering this to sell more storage space.
I have three theories.

1. They are taking jobs at very early stage start-ups or starting their own companies as that culture seems to be more prevalent at many of the top schools. On the other hand your typical university is much more focused on the traditional get a job at mega corp scenario.

2. In my limited experience working with recently graduated interns I've found that the ones from "top schools" tend to be worse. They seem to have a chip on their shoulder that certain things are beneath them, give up easier, and are hyper sensitive to feedback. Students from more normal schools seem to have much less mental baggage in those regards.

3. The info graphic is BS and however they collected their numbers was flawed.
Window management on OSX is utterly hideous if you're used to a proper tiling WM.
It already is if you watch [American] TV.

I uh, guess it's anecdotal... I watched several hours of TV while at home with my parents over the holiday. I honestly think every show they were watching on CBS had a pot reference in it and it was light hearted and didn't even put it in a bad light. It's a long running joke on shows. Late night TV is inundated with guests who talk and joke about using it.
I don't understand your tone. I never said memorization is "bad" or that I "love" critical thinking skills.

I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.
Acting like someone using cannabis and alcohol is the same thing is just ignorant. I didn't and couldn't have written, eh, maybe half of my media center/library project while drunk. I think it's quite well written and it was all done during my... leisure time.

The misinformed FUD is disappointing. DARE won't even try to demonize cannabis like that anymore.

>it just seems inevitable that there will be more people abusing it

Sigh, "it just seems inevitable" == "I am just repeating the same thing I've heard and believed forever without looking into it". See, Portugal.

edit, If the anti-drug people who have no context want to judge and downvote based on inaccurate out-dated stereotypes, so be it. Surely downvoting me will make me realize just how much of a loser I am.
Wow! Cool, Thank you, I'll try to use it on my projects!
I suspect the mayor's goal was to eliminate driver confusion, not to prevent this article from being written.
You had 5 years :)
Driving drunk? Driving tired? Driving while talking on the phone? Driving stoned?

Oh, you meant driving while impaired/distracted? Yes, that is always a bad idea. Which is why it is of course illegal.
It would be an interesting control if you re-interviewed YC companies 6, 12, 24 months out from YC, to calibrate the interviews. I guess you can just watch the video of the interviews of the successful or unsuccessful startups.
Samsung adds Multi-Window despite threat from Google
Yaml is not good for configuration files because it is not easily human-editable. It seems "easy" but meaningful whitespace is a cluster-fck.

Edit: I have been looking for reasonable configuration file formats for a while. Json actually has pretty bad human-readability at any scale because of its quoted key-values. Yaml is easily readable but when a user tries to change anything, things go to hell. The humble ini-file has won so far. It's limited and not fully standardized but it is human readable and human writable. I'd love see something better but human readability/writable is going trump all sorts of cleverness.

Edit2: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML "The specific number of spaces in the indentation is unimportant as long as parallel elements have the same left justification and the hierarchically nested elements are indented further."

Yeah, a user of your software is going to be able to understand when they mess up on that rule, riiiight. Screw Yaml.
Ask HN: How effective is monthly "Seeking Work" post?
I value the monthly "Who is Hiring" and "Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?" posts, because I am hoping to build a second career as a programmer in the next few years.

I am wondering how effective the "Seeking Work" posts are. For example, this month's post has 79 people "Seeking Work", and only 10 "Seeking Freelancer" posts. This makes it seem as if there are 8 times as many people looking for freelance work as there are jobs being posted, but I recognize that many people may contact these freelancers without it being visible on HN.

Can anyone comment on how effective these "Seeking Work" posts are?
I'm wondering whether it is going to be possible to use this for reading. Because right now in the video it looks more like a screensaving feature with the pictures.
Which is much, much safer than driving drunk. Even then, it will be illegal drive while under the influence of marijuana. This is basically a Wont someone think of the children! type argument.
This is definitely an issue, however at some point the right of the people to appropriate their culture outweighs the right of the artists to control their creations. I think when your work has been in the wild for 28 years, it's time to let go.
Richard Branson wrote about a year ago in his personal blog post, "Time to End the War on Drugs,"

http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/time-to-end-the-w...

"Ten years ago the Portuguese Government responded to widespread public concern over drugs by rejecting a 'war on drugs' approach and instead decriminalized drug possession and use. It further rebuffed convention by placing the responsibility for decreasing drug demand as well as managing dependency under the Ministry of Health rather than the Ministry of Justice. With this, the official response towards drug-dependent persons shifted from viewing them as criminals to treating them as patients."

I found this interesting, because the factual outcome that Branson reports for this policy change is "Now with a decade of experience Portugal provides a valuable case study of how decriminalization coupled with evidence-based strategies can reduce drug consumption, dependence, recidivism and HIV infection and create safer communities for all."

I would like to see a policy change that reduces drug use, especially by young people whose brain structures are still forming. I have seen too many people in my generation, and in the generation of my children, who appear to have used "only" marijuana among the drugs that are currently illegal in the United States, and who yet "burned out" and have basically become losers. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. There are a lot of interesting trade-offs involved in attempting to ban selling and using a substance that is relatively easy to produce and to trade, just as we found when the United States tried Prohibition of alcohol in years after World War I. The current system of drug regulation in the United States does not appear to be working to achieve its stated goals. If an approach like that now found in Portugal--correctly characterized as "decriminalization" rather than as "legalization"--can both reduce burden on the law-enforcement system and reduce use of drugs, I think that approach would be worth trying in the United States.

AFTER EDIT: To reply to the first comment posted below, asking for study citations, one study,

Fu, Q., Heath, A. C., & Bucholz, K. K. (2008). A twin-family study of suicidality and illicit drug use in young people. Samuel B. Guze Symposium on Alcoholism.

http://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

is particularly interesting for having a "genetically sensitive design" (it is a study of the offspring of co-twin parents). Marijuana use increases suicide risk for young people, controlling for other factors that raise suicide risk.

More generally, cannabis use increases risk for psychotic symptoms.

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=10228...

The review article

Bava, S., & Tapert, S. F. (2010). Adolescent brain development and the risk for alcohol and other drug problems. Neuropsychology review, 20(4), 398-413.

doi: 10.1007/s11065-010-9146-6

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2988999/

provides a good overview of current research on adolescent brain development and abnormalities observed during neurological studies of marijuana users.
I think they cheat initially by remembering the company name, e.g. calling an entire team "the Airbnbs" or something, until they get to know the people individually. So it's at least 66 groups vs. 150 people. The company names or nicknames are usually also way more distinctive than the ~10 guys named John or Jack or Mike in every group.
Already, we're seeing research into meth stopping major diseases and ectacy used to fight PTSD

Oh no! Research!?! Oh, the humanity!