skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm reading a lot of comments saying that it's not worth it to get a degree. I think that they're wrong, not necessarily because you'll have a hard time finding a job, but because you'll be missing out on a great life experience that will enrich your life and should give you some better tools for analyzing problems. These tools will come not only from CS classes, but also from humanities courses, and interactions with other students.

That said, I wouldn't recommend leaving your job to go to school full time either. Why not take night classes and get that degree over time? I think that, at least right now, in classroom is a superior experience to online, so I would probably go for some place that you can actually sit in a classroom. Even if it's just at a community college to start. I got my BS in Electrical Engineering, and didn't really like my curriculum. So, after I graduated and moved out to Boston, I found out that Tufts University offered classes that residents could audit cheaply. I took a few programming courses to plug holes left by my degree, and a philosophy course with Dan Dennett (because it was Dan Dennett and I had to).

Some of my favorite courses at university were not programming courses. Among my favorite courses were: Free Will, Literature, Nietzsche, Data Structures, Game Development, Differential Equations and Quantum Mechanics. You would miss out on most of those unless you are actively seeking them out.

There are also some soft-skills that come along with education, namely, being able to communicate well. This is one of the more important things when it comes to landing a job, at least for making it past the first level of filters. I've seen some awful cover letters and resumes, it helps a lot to be able to write well, and state things clearly.

Also, I'm not sure what you think the lifestyle of Silicon Valley is like, but for me, it's just a lot of hard work. Don't get me wrong, I love it here, but it's not particularly glamorous. Perhaps the biggest draw, well two biggest draws, would be that, first, you'll never (assuming we don't have another tech bubble burst on us) have trouble finding a job here, if you're a decent programmer. And second, that you'll regularly run into other programmers everywhere. If you're living some place where people look at you funny when you tell them that you build computer programs for a living, and would rather live in a place where people generally have a clue as to what you're talking about, this is a good place for that. Also, you probably won't have trouble finding a job here.
Philadelphia budget data visualization
This is a problem of terminology. "Interested in" doesn't necessarily imply "sexually attracted to".

Some people read "interested in" and put men and women, because they are interested in being friends with men and women.
interesting!

i saw this in one of the posts:
http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

looks like a good intermediate step.
Show HN: LiveNinja - a video chat marketplace to buy and sell expertise
Personally I can't wait to use this service. How can they afford the storage though? Is it sustainable?
3 Principles for the (Exciting) Future of Search
Is Facebook envy making you miserable?
FTA: Condon continues, “most individuals have no idea this is happening. Any post made by Facebook on your behalf is completely invisible to you, and only shows up in your friends’ & family’s news feed.”

That choice and the responses of people removing all their
previous "likes" suggests that this amounts to a
drive-by monetization rather than sustainable model.
That is paying for the iPhone, if you go with monthly-prepaid you can get a good plan for $30/mo or $40/mo
Well put. "Lean" is a great methodology in a lot of situations, but sometimes other approaches are necessary.
Anyone try portal 2 on Linux? How is the performance ?
Find your dream job
Essentially it boils down to "we as a government can't trust you, so we have to enforce these laws and you must comply or else you will face our enforcers".

Sadly, choice of 3 men overwrites choice of 3 million.

Trust is lacking, not only between governing body and sheep, but between sheep also, when sheep will start trusting each other, it will reflect on governing body.
Neat! Not great for applicants that they have to purchase a copy of Portal 2 on steam, but at least it should be fun. Also, I don't know if it's a good thing to require engineers to apply by playing a game - but I guess it might be good to identify people who would be a good cultural fit.
Well I'm interested in reusing my existing code and moving to a framework to increase flexibility and allow me to improve/update/change the site faster. I'd like this to be a small project of migrating my code into a framework.
MRI is the first language interpreter that I got deeply familiar with and it's a pleasure to read. It was really nice to be able to find the answer to questions like "how does Ruby decide when to trigger a thread switch" by spending just a few minutes going to the source.
I like these sort of recruitment teasers, mainly because if done well they self-select for exactly the kind of person you want.

I think this is similar in effect to website job boards like the joelonsoftware board or the hn jobs section, where the people who answer are likelier to share your vision and opinions.

In this case you'd have to have Portal 2 already, but anyway. Maybe they're looking for that :)
the steps for arch would be almost identical. the desktop entry specification is a standard that is used by arch as well:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_Entries

how much it integrates depends on what desktop environment you are using. gnome and kde are using the same desktop files as far as I know. So it should work. Haven't tested it though.

You could also use unity with arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unity
For users who truly care about their data, the review should have been done before launch.

But Mega isn't a site for governments or enterprises, it's for day-to-day users and file sharers. So I can't be too upset they decided to half-ass it and let the public fix their code.
> such things as "Islamic men interested in other men, living in Tehran,"

Do you know what this search will return? "0 results". Because nobody who is gay in Iran is going to put the fact that they are interested in other men on their facebook.
IBM made a laptop some years back that was powered by a fuel cell combined with batteries. It ran off of methanol, and although it was kind of bulky, this was back in 2005.

http://news.cnet.com/IBM-pours-a-shot-of-methanol-for-ThinkP...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/george-church-neand...
Really this is how it should work. It's a fairly safe default assumption that people are searching for recent information if the query matches a current news story.

As an example of the opposite: In the days right after the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, I happened to search for "japan tsunami", without quotes, in both Google and Bing.

The first page in Google was full of relevant news stories, with an extra link at the top to Google's own crisis assistance page.
The first page in Bing was full of stories about 10 or 20 year old incidents. As I recall it, there was nothing whatsoever about the 2011 event. It was almost disconcerting.

As an aside: why would the submitter use a readability.com link? That seems a bit rude to the original page, even though the article was tripe.
The main problem with using a VM is that you won't be able to open PSD files directly from your file browser. Having to switch to Photoshop and browse for the file would end up being a huge time sink in the long term.
Lilypads are quite a bit larger and more capable.

This little guy is only about 1" (25mm) in diameter with an 8k processor and 3 usable pins.

On the other hand, it is programmable straight from microUSB which is very cool and makes it more accessible. (Looks like she did a software USB implementation, I don't think that MCU has USB support.)
I don't care what you write, but if you go into it thinking that the dangerous stuff is in the primitives like the AES core, and if you just stick to the glue you'll be safe, you're gonna have a bad time.
That's the point. People make sweeping assumptions about the limitations of something, and then someone else changes the ground underneath those assumptions and makes the cconclusions invalid. DSL, for example, is not much more difficult in terms of capital equipment cost compared to dialup and it doesn't require running a new line to the home, but the bandwidth available is a thousand times greater than the previous "hard" limit of phone land line based networking.
New Asteroid Mining Company Aims to Manufacture Products in Space
From a CS/software standpoint, I don't see a great deal of personal difference between an aggressive industry position and PhD research. Both involve heavy overtime, intense focus, and uncertain futures.

Financially, of course, there is a difference, which will bleed out into other areas... but this is less important after your needs & small wants are covered.

Put another way, working 6-7 days/wk for 16 hour days in industry was not meaningfully different from doing research; actually, research was more pleasant IMO. In both scenarios you come home and zonk, but in one you have the freedom to go wander around, stare at the clouds, and think, without getting in trouble.
There's homeless in almost all of the suburban libraries I've been to in my area too, but at least in that area they're usually reading or chatting quietly instead of sleeping or bathing.

Personally I don't mind as long as they're not obviously using libraries as a home. Libraries are precisely there for people to sit in, even if the people are a little smelly.
Server side iframe injections via Apache Modules and SSHD backdoor
The author addresses this in the article. The claim is that the battery chemistry itself hasn't improved, just our ability to keep it stable has which has allowed us to explore ideas that were previously not feasible due to a limitation with charging/discharging electronics. The assumption that there is little to no further progress to be made in this area (charging or chemistry). So, while battery technology may be improving, it will continue to improve slowly or not improve at all as there's a limit to how much more improvement we'll get from better charging/discharging circuits. Whether that's a valid claim is debatable, I guess, but I share the same opinion personally.

Now, we could see a super capacitor or something like that one day which may change things, but so far those have yet to materialize.
ابراج يوم الخميس 2013/1/24 - حظك ليوم الخميس 2013/1/24 abraj
Awesome. Just donated.
Man, every time great new technology comes along you guys have to come in and bust it all up with your logic and reason :)
The slides are from 2002. Finance data for the last ten year of Mitsubishi:

http://tinyurl.com/bxb2kal

Doesn't appear to be promising.
I agree with OP if your timeline is the next few years, but there is still a ton of headroom between, say, lithium polymer and the theoretical maximum for specific energy (the speed of light squared).

Obviously nuclear batteries are going to be a long time coming (I'm not even aware of any theoretical way to make, say, a fission reaction release electrical rather than thermal energy), but if you expand on the definition of "battery" a bit from something you just plug in to recharge to something that maybe requires being physically swapped out and reprocessed, there are some very promising avenues of research.

The one I'm most excited about is the vanadium boride-air cell, which has a practical energy density on par with diesel fuel. The catch is that is likely impractical to make one that can be recharged by simply reversing the current through it, so it would require a network of reprocessing plants and battery-exchange facilities.
haha, this is awesome!
Google Stock Goes Up +6.25%
The WordPress ecosystem is increasingly hostile to commercial developers.
Might as well just VirtualBox step and just install Windows instead of Ubuntu...
This has a longer path to success, years in some cases

Do you know of shorter paths to success, that take less than years?

An underserved market is an opportunity, not a competitive advantage by itself. Your competitive advantage would be the ability and permission to talk directly to that market in a way that they would listen.

That's the point of Nathan's post.
Energy stored in a capacitor is equal to:

1/2 * c * v^2

Where c is the capacitance in farads, and v is the voltage. That will produce a value of joules. Note that the capacitor is rated for a given voltage, so that goes in as v.

Converting watt hours to joules goes like this: A watt is one joule per second, so a watt hour is 3600 joules.
I seem to recall that somebody HAS written a BitCoin miner in JS. It was even posted at HN. Can't find it now though.
During the cold war, the same could be said of Washington D.C. Even now, a surprise SLBM salvo can turn DC into a smoldering crater before you can say "get the president to the bunker".

It's prohibitively expensive to move a city, especially if the justification is "if we get really f-d, then we'll be a little less f-d".

The U.S.'s defense against an attack on D.C. was the assumption of a rational enemy, nuclear hardened command and control bunkers very far from shore, nuclear hardened ICBM silos very far from shore, continuously airborne nuclear bombers, and very stealthy SSBNs.

Really, South Korea's strongest defense is that an invasion by the North would instantly kill enough US troops to guarantee massive US retaliation against all military bases in NK, and would instantly kill enough civilians that China wouldn't retaliate as long as no US troops crossed the DMZ. Hopefully this is a big enough threat that a significant number of high-level and mid-level military leaders would stage a coup d'etat rather than follow orders to invade SK.

Edit: one would hope that the U.S. and China already have negotiated how much retaliation China will tolerate in response to various acts of war by NK. One would also hope that these details have been leaked to NK.
http://mavrck.com/blog/2013/01/ive-evaluated-php-frameworks-...

A recent writeup (not by me).

Would not recommend CodeIgniter, last time (~1 year ago) I used it it was a pain to get a proper ORM working with it.
Agile Billing
Turning corporate stock profiles into tamagotchi
Don’t believe everything you read
Embedable miners have been done before.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.msg130817#msg13...
This is something I've been wondering about after seeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P17LPYnAAg - they seem to be able to use a signal relay that works on a long range with both the control and video channels. So it's possible with some equipment, but not sure if it's custom built or off the shelf.
You said even after 10 mins the ads keep coming up. But does it keep coming after days?

Is it completely broken that it gets repeated OR it only happens for a few hours after the purchase has been made?

How would you know in the case of a SAAS app, whether someone is registered as a trial user vs. paid user, so you are supposed to stop?
U.S. government invites hackers to work on 'Civic Hacking Day'
I recommend CodeIgniter
Simple, fast, and did I mention simple?
This title is misleading since one of the steps is 'install Windows.'
> I like these sort of recruitment teasers, mainly because if done well they self-select for exactly the kind of person you want.

In this case, 20-30 year old males.
There are UHF radio modems that are commonly used for radio telemetry for amateur UAVs (typically RC planes or multi-rotors), transmitting on 900MHz or 433Hz using spread-spectrum technology.

Based on HopeRFs HM-TRP module, they present a serial port, either TTL, or as a virtual COM port over USB using a (defacto-standard) FTDI USB to serial chip. You can use two serial, two USB, or one of each - the radio modem in them is identical, it's just the presentation that differs.

Line-of-site range depends on the data rate, but is in the region of 1 - 2km, but up to 24km is possible with amplification. The data rate is up to 128kb/s.

Lots of technical details can be found on the ardupilot wiki[1].

They were designed as a lower cost, longer range alternative to Xbee [2]. Xbee support ZigBee, multipoint, mesh and other protocols, but not the 433MHz frequency legal in Europe.(900MHz is fine for the US, but the alternative, 2.4GHz, is the same frequency commonly used for spread-spectrum radio-control, so risks interference or reduced range.)

They can be purchased in the US for $75 a pair [2]. Clones can be found can be found from Chinese suppliers for less than $40 a pair [3].

[1] http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/3DRadio

[2] http://www.digi.com/xbee/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBee

[3] http://store.diydrones.com/category_s/13.htm

[4] Try: http://RCTimer.com, http://AliExpress.com, http://GoodLuckBuy.com and search for 3DR
The USPS is a public service. The public service is subsidized via direct mailings. If everyone opted out of direct mailings(or if direct mailings were opt-in), the USPS would continue to operate, only they would either charge much more to deliver posts, or they would be granted more subsidies from the taxpayers.
Some good thoughts here and as the founder of countless failed startups I can totally relate to the message.

However, over the years I've come to the conclusion that "Finding Customers" is what you do when you are a contract designer or developer. I've reframed this concept into "Validate the value proposition". Yes, this is kind of like "finding customers" but redirects the focus to doing what you really need to do and that is "prove in some quantitatively valid manner that your target market will in fact purchase and use your app".

The big problem with this approach is that developing a "quantitatively valid methodology" is tricky and will be different for every startup and market. That said though, if you can figure out a way to do this it will greatly enhance your chances of both securing angel and VC funding and of being successful.

I love talking about this stuff though and greatly appreciate the efforts of people like lian who take the time to write down their thoughts.
WpXtreme 1.0.0 beta 3 is here
I'm working from random statistics for London that I found on the internet, so please forgive me if this doesn't apply.

You seem to be paying average - average+10k (for all, not just senior) developer salaries, yet you specify senior programmer. At this level, you're only going to be attracting mid-level talent. There could a problem with your recruitment targeting, which could mean you're not getting ideal people in the door to begin with.

At the mid-level, you should expect a high failure rate on simple tasks. You're dealing with people who wound up on the job market after getting a bunch of experience. This means that a lot of them were fired, came from untenable/poorly managed companies which went under/downsized, or were working under such unbearable conditions that they quit. Employed devs trade up - unless your pay packet, benefits or feel-good factor (eg if you're an NGO, charity, working on 'real' problems, etc) give your company an edge, you're not dragging people away from jobs where they're encouraged to develop their skills, work under good conditions and understand software engineering processes. Job postings regularly ask for ridiculous and irrelevent things, so a lot of the employed devs who read your job ad and apply will not meet the criteria you specify. I know it's a huge generalisation, but the best devs are usually only on the market a couple of times in their lives, and they're quickly snapped up by companies at a premium and kept happy with various incentives. Tl;dr: you should be prepared for most candidates that you interview to not be appropriate for the job you've posted.

Thirdly, there's a problem with your, ahem, problem. It's not a great problem, imo because there's a fair amount of nuance to it. I'd want to shine by giving a good solution - vaguely remembering that a value in Pascal's triangle can be derived from combinations or permutations or something similar I'd spend some time trying to figure out if there's some algorithm "n!/(n+k)! - no, that's not it...", then I'd try to do it in-place calculating only half of the triangle, and then probably wind up using two rows of half length to calculate the numbers there. I'd be trying to impress you by coming up with a solution with more useful properties (memory boundedness, complexity, speed) than "returns the row of pascal's triangle". You're probably not even hiring people for their comp sci experience.

Maybe you just wanted to vent, or to advertise here - that's ok, but keep in mind that you're going to have to quickly reject unsuitable candidates and quickly pick up suitable ones, that it's just a numbers game, and that this is why most companies that offer mid-range compensation are "always hiring". The problem isn't too hard as such, it's perhaps a little undirected. Also, some people just interview terribly.

Dunno, just some food for thought.
> i don't understand this mindset

maybe I can explain better?

Good research takes time and intense focus. I.e., you want to be able to have a total focus when your mind is fresh. That is not going to be doable after you've already worked your 8-9 day (maybe if you're in the 1% of humans who can do that, but I'm talking about the common case). This is going to get worse in the case of having a family.

I'm not going to comment on your father, since I don't know him, don't know his research, and don't know his field. :-) But I know that I've been... less impressed... with part-time PhD research than with full-time PhD research. There are ways to manipulate your situation into a less conflicting one, that is true, but that depends on the employer and the university.

> pushed the current boundaries of human knowledge further away from anything applicable, interesting, or worth spending 6 years of your life on.

That's just your opinion, ne? Why should academics do anything that is applicable? Isn't it industry's role to take this research and channel it into something practical (or ignore it if its not)? A surprising amount of effort has been expended over the years in software that have been avoided by some basic attention to the research literature.

But that leads us down an entirely different discussion, one I don't think is really resolvable here and now.
I was doing something similar but end it up ditching the whole thing since I'm running CS6 on Wine without any problems (except a buggy lasso tool):
https://gist.github.com/4610671

It checks for the VM state and waits the system to be ready, so you can turn off the vm if you want. Feel free to adapt to your needs.
It's more than enough for urban use where the car will sit still for most of the night and have plenty of breaks during the day.
>>FTFY. Labor is a market exactly like any other. If I buy Chevrolet for years and then suddenly switch to Ford because they offer a better deal was I "poached"? Such a nonsensical concept.

It's more like Ford figures out who owns a Chevrolet, and contacts them saying "psst, don't you hate your Chevy? Why don't you buy a Ford instead, we're so much better!" I don't know about you, but I find that sort of thing very creepy and unethical.
What qualifies as "big data" though? Is it a terabyte? A petabyte? Or is it just a buzzword?
12 years of startup experience in 35 minutes
Meet Mark Landis, One of the Most Prolific Art Forgers in U.S. History
Play to your strengths. Play to your strengths.
GitHub unblocked in China after former Google head slams its censorship
What percentage of 20-30 year old males do you believe have played Portal (2), saw this posting, had the inclination to download the mod, and the inquisitiveness and persistance to actually complete the puzzle/test?

Rarely is a filter perfect, but this is likely a lot better than taking a random sample from the population :)