skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Summer Job in USA
First of all I would like to introduce myself - I am Minijus, 21 year old economics and politics student and web developer from Lithuania. I was reading HN for a while but never thought about registering, till now. I have been developing websites for past 6 years, still I am far from developer I would like to be. But I have good understanding of all major technologies used for web development. Moreover, I am able to make frontend designs, PHP, have worked with WP, Joomla, Prestashop, Opencart (mainly developing online commerce systems, templating and fixing). A year ago I have discovered twitter bootstrap, fall in love and till then I am using it. This would be short story about me.

This summer is likely to be very special for me and my girlfriend since we are going to USA with Work and Travel program. However, all the listed jobs are mainly for housekeeping. I do not state that housekeeping is disgraceful job, all the jobs are worthy to be respected. But what I would like to ask you guys is - how could I find contract for summer job as web developer/frontend designer in States. I am really looking forward to achieve this, since this would allow to travel more and experience more after the jobs are done. I fully understand that this story might sound quite risky for my employer, so I would gladly agree to start developing some projects immediately. Furthermore, I would agree to learn some new technologies until the summer if this would be the question whether I get job or no.

I will appreciate all advice and comments you will provide.
I don't know what you did, but i can easily change that by changing the default action for PDF files in preferences -> Applications.

I've been using PDF.js myself for i think a year now (Used to install it directly from their Github page), and it's a great reader if you aren't an heavy PDF user. I barely have to open a PDF, and when i do it's usually just text and images, not any fancy stuff. And i guess most computer users are just like me.
If you open PDFs all day, and are a power user, i guess that nothing can replace a good standalone reader.

It's still kinda slow, but it has done some incredible progresses in the year i've been using it. And i'm sure it will just get better and better.
You don't normally need a swap-drive on a storage node (if it needs to swap then something is wrong to begin with), but of course I don't know the details of what your nodes may do beyond dealing out files.

The main advantage of PXE-booting would be maintainability (rolling out upgrades by a simple reboot, etc.) but I assume at your scale you have that already figured out in one way or another.

Either way, thank you for all the insights that you keep sharing with the public!
These hands-on blog posts are priceless both in entertainment and education value. :-)
>> To be sure, Safari is invoking a system level PDF reader to handle inline PDFs. That's what gets you that silky performance and nice rendering.

Which, IMO, is the way it should be, and not just for PDFs. I'm impressed by the fact that Mozilla implemented a capable PDF reader in JavaScript, but I won't be using it. Firefox and Chrome are both trying too hard to duplicate everything my OS already provides: their own video codecs, audio codecs, image codecs, the Flash plugin (Chrome), now a PDF viewer, and so on. I'd rather just have my browser render HTML/CSS, run JavaScript, and that's about it. It doesn't have to implement anything else itself, all modern OS's should have everything required to display all the embedded content.
just a note, but you can do that in linux and afaik windows as well
You've made a classic argument about technology. This is an argument that has been around for a while. The parent poster is kind of enough to share that he has been an adult for a much shorter time than this argument has been around, in fact.

In that fact I think you might consider this as a counter-point to your position.

You see, your classic argument revolves around something like "new technology, old (adult) people". The situation he describes revolves is centered around new people - kid's, whose neurology is shaped by technology as they grow up. Kids are handed a smart phone at 12, before they have a full adults' ability to choose or at a point when they would choose differently than the adult they will become. That's fine assuming they emerge intact from the experience. The question is whether there is a point where neurology is going to "lose the race" to one or another stimulation system's ability to "addict" people. Humans are quite adaptable but technology is arguably changing at a faster rate. I claim we at least have to start measuring whether there is a problem rather than dismissing the question is something we (adults) shouldn't have to worry about (which is ultimately what your classic argument does boil down to).
i'm pretty sure he choice of typeface is part of the shut-in work.
Somewhat ironic considering you'd think banks would do a security assessment of the technologies they use.
I'd like to plug the simple English Wikipedia http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page as it's helped me recently with a few math concepts that I couldn't quite understand from the normal Wikipedia.
I'm assuming your gf is around the same age as you, so I kinda understand this addiction, as people your age literally grew up with cellphones.

But consider this - people who are older, in their 40's and 50's do it too. The thing that drives me crazy is people text/check email etc while crossing roads, often bumping into someone coming from the opposite direction (at least in NYC). People are glued to their tiny screen in meetings, while having lunch, while having family time, and even during yoga. Go to any outdoor event, there are flashes everywhere (night time I mean) ruining the experience. I used to get annoyed with noise pollution, but that pales in front of this "flash" pollution.

I wish there is a solution to this, but I'm afraid there might not be
Flawless, zero-latency voice recognition under those conditions is rather implausible. Otherwise though, an impressive vision of the promise of AR.

For all the doubters here, notice the enormous number of comments generated already. Even though we are (rightly) scared about some of the aspects of glass and ubiquitous AR, we sure are collectively fascinated by the idea.
The future is made of Glass
Clojure/West is looking pretty special, and I'd like to thank Fogus for putting the Confo together. I (and I think many others) expected maybe 20 or 30 people to be interested. Instead it turns out nearly a hundred are!

I'm particularly excited about hearing Nada Amin (who works on many neat things, included type related ones at EPFL - home of Scala) will be giving a really fun talk on nominal logic programming. Expect brain melting of the best kind!

Finally, going off topic just a bit, if there are any overly ambitious students looking at this thread - the Clojure community is putting together the list of project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2013 - http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Project+Ideas. I'd like to see quite a few enhancements to core.logic! Of course we're equally excited about core.typed, ClojureScript, better tooling for beginners and more! Please, feel free to post your own ideas.
Sharypic – A collaborative photo sharing platform
> Please take your time machine and go [to] early 2010... Chrome's PDF viewer... fact is, Chrome is the browser that liberated the world from Acrobat Reader.

Fact check:

August 31, 2006: "Current versions of Safari are able to access PDF documents in a number of different ways. It can display the documents inline (in the Web browser window) without the use of a plug-in, it can use the Adobe Preview plug-in to display documents inline with added controls, or it can pass PDF viewing duties off to another application like Adobe Reader or Apple's own Preview.app."

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10327228-263.html

"Google Chrome ... was released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and as a stable public release on December 11, 2008."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
Continual rotating background image with jQuery
And skiing in Starseige: Tribes, a bug with the jumping code. They had to reimplement it for all the following games.
Would have been a much more powerful response if he'd left out that last paragraph. In two sentences he reinforced every incorrect stereotype of France as a third-world chickenshit bureaucracy that any Americans might have held.
Exiting applications is now considered advanced, hacker-level stuff.
Serious question: what took so long?!
Forget Silicon Valley: Focus On Customers, Not Investors
Is this an AMA now?
The fraud issues at least would require a good engineering team.
Script to (1) log into remote box, (2) connect to MySQL db
Trust your instincts.

It turns out that when you think that someone's not good, you're almost always right.

Pretty excellent advice. Ever since I've started my company, I've really learned to trust my gut. It's almost always right, I just have to be aware enough to listen to it.
I've been using this for a while in Firefox beta, and it's generally really good.

I have two small problems with it, which perhaps won't be too hard to fix:

1. PDFs of old academic papers that are just strung-together CCITT (fax) compressed monochrome scans. Preview.app, Adobe Reader and Chrome resample those to give a readable quasi-anti-aliased effect. PDF.js makes the text jaggy and spindly and hard to read.

2. No back/forward navigation.
The POV porn industry is going to love this.
Gaston: [tossing the book aside] Belle, it's about time you got your head out of those books and paid attention to more important things. Like me. The whole town's talking about it. It's not right for a woman to read. Soon she starts getting "ideas", and "thinking"-

Did she really need to be looking at the homeless guy pissing in the alley? Was she going to have a formative moment in her life by watching a cab drive by? Would this be the sunset that changed her life forever? Would both of you looking in different directions while walking down the street really be so much different than her looking down at her phone (outside of your perceived interpretation of her doing so)? Is watching a waiter approach another table better time spent than seeing what a friend is doing elsewhere in the world?

Some people are just more into knowledge and consuming information than they are in their surroundings and being around other people. Women are also more likely to keep their social gameface on. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that; there's plenty of space in this world for them. I'd also like to take a minute to suggest that she may have been on the autistic spectrum disorder or had OCD or anxiety issues that she didn't tell you about, and being on her phone made her feel "safe". Again, not a flaw, just as the perceived threat of technology encroaching on your relationship is not a flaw.

We all get inspiration/validation/education from somewhere, and when we're connected to so many different venues of information in one place, it's much more likely those revelations will come from digital exposure than what's right in front of us at that very moment. If you honestly told her how it made you feel and not just an extended "Stop, it's rude", and she continued to do it - that to me signals that she didn't care or that maybe the ASD/OCD/anxiety things aren't so far off. It has very little to do with technology and everything to do with what type of person she is and how compatible that type is to yours. Relationships are about balance and being on the same page, not blaming someone one's character for their demise.
As it happens, you have the choice to sense and respond to traffic, or have synchronized traffic signals in a complex grid like a city center. You can't really have both.

To have synchronized signals in a city-wide two-dimensional grid of intersections, you must ignore the fact that some intersections have many cars and some have none. If you give up on the idea of synchronizing traffic, then you can have traffic sensors and working pedestrian crossing buttons.

> In the US, I can rarely tell if the buttons are just props or if they actually do anything.

It turns out that in many places, especially those that have synchronized signals, the pedestrian buttons are what might be called "placebo buttons". I'm sure you can guess what that means.
FYI, the page was blocked by my workplace in the brief period between reading it and re-visiting it after reading the comments here.
In the year 2013 it is difficult to remember why Rails was such an explosive breath of fresh air, back when it burst onto the mainstage in 2004/2005. The essay that I think best captured the switch in popularity, from Java (and EJBs and Struts, etc) to Rails, was "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts" by Bruce Eckel, written in December of 2005. He wrote:

"One of the basic tenets of the Python language has been that code should be simple and clear to express and to read, and Ruby has followed this idea, although not as far as Python has because of the inherited Perlisms. But for someone who has invested Herculean effort to use EJBs just to baby-sit a database, Rails must seem like the essence of simplicity. The understandable reaction for such a person is that everything they did in Java was a waste of time, and that Ruby is the one true path."

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312
Russian Military to Develop Anti-Meteorite Defenses
Care to name names? Inquiring minds, and all that...
Hackers take aim at key U.S. infrastructure
Right. And those products already exist e.g. GoPro.
Well, I dunno where you live. I'm in TX and I see this happen a lot:

According to Texas Criminal and Traffic Law section 101.31, possession of more than one quart of liquor or more than 24 12-ounce beers in a dry area is evidence of intent to sell alcohol.

I've lived in two dry cities in TX, BTW.
Compared to Django I find the Ruby tool chain to be much more polished. Getting things working on Django requires a lot of tweaking and tinkering.
For the sake of argument, how is this different from self funding? Ramen profitable isn't profitable, and not taking seed is just preventing you from paying yourself.
Some of the best writers I know are ones whose style is deceptively clear and simple. When reading something poorly written, like this comment, you have to spend some some effort extracting the meaning from the words. These good writers are effective because they manage to minimize this--reading something simple and clear takes less mental effort and makes the content more approachable and appealing, largely subconsciously.

My favorite example of a writer like this is Stallman. Whether I agree with or disagree with any of his particular essays, they are always immensely readable. His arguments are completely unobfuscated and easy to follow. His work is worth reading if just to see how complicated legal and technical ideas and arguments can be beautifully decomposed.

Now, this is certainly not the only way to be a great writer. Perhaps it is not even a way to be the greatest of writers. But it is very effective and, importantly, relatively subtle. It is so subtle, in fact, that I think many people do not recognize how much especial skill it takes and good it actually is.

This sort of skill is particularly important for something like the law which is inherently complex and tends to attract people very comfortable with such complexity. Exposing it simply is crucial. More relevantly for HN, this sort of skill is at least as useful for technical topics. It's certainly something everybody here should think about when writing.
3D graphics library for .NET
Number one is no per user fees
It's the age old set of trade-offs between buy and build.

Build it all yourself and it takes forever, but you understand it all.

Buy it from somebody else, and you get it quickly, but you're at their mercy for efficient understandable code.

No language or framework is immune. Enjoy your java.
Yes but the masses don't care if it's open or closed source.
I am a person who loves being social but gets in shut-in cycles. I once took 4 months and backpacked in the woods of Canada in an extreme cycle.

Several points bothered me in this story, as it was a combination of honest observations and immature conclusions.

1) Life takes time, you need to be at peace with being young and not having all the solutions.

2) The author seems to suffer from observing the image of Silicon Valley success without actually experiencing it.

Most people fail, most projects go unfinished, most beyond that never make enough money to sustain a company.

A successful product is the evolutionary result of 10,000 products before it that failed, went unfinished, or were unprofitable. Even the best of the Valley didn't sit down, bang out some brilliant code, slap a business strategy on top, then cash a billion dollar check. They worked long and hard through repeated failures, with sometimes B and C squad talent, slowly carving away at the block of ideas until a product appeared. Then after that, they spend months or years compiling a business strategy and altering the product to become palatable to enough customers to gain a profit.

It takes a team of imperfect people and a lot of time to make even a passable product. Even finishing a unprofitable product is an massive achievement in itself.

It worries me at the end that the author again seems to come to a single conclusion that he believes will bring both success and happiness. That may never come, or it may be that the author never makes a lot of money or never is the best in the field.

This was the most painful part of growing up for me -- accepting that you live in a sea of talented individuals, and you are in no way, the most talented among them. You learn to reach out, form a team, and that great things come from hard work and diligence as much or more so than from natural talent.
I think you're wrong on one point: you constantly repeat how different and strange you are from everyone else. You're really not. As you mentioned at one point: you didn't want to go out and play, but the teacher forced you to do so. This is very common behavior, and teachers are forcing children every day to go out and play.

Huge amount of people go through similar experiences to yours. Others start to lapse into an experience like yours and get scared - they go the other way and try to force social behavior on themselves, often becoming bullies or the kid you mentioned who hurt himself trying to show off to you.

So my advice (since you're obviously not posting something publicly and expecting to get away without advice shoved at you) - stop worrying about 'normal'. Stop trying to fit in or not fit in. There are no points to be won by having social interactions. Social interactions are so you can learn, experience and enjoy. Approach them like this, and walk away when it's not working and try again. Everyone is doing the same thing, social interactions are breaking everywhere, you just don't see it so much from a distance because people cling to the precious few social interactions which have actually worked for them.

Since you're trying to put things in terms of programming: if your program doesn't work/is slow because you're looping over the wrong thing, try again with a different loop, try a different data structure. You don't need to avoid 'if' loops in the future because they didn't work once. You don't need to keep trying to use an 'if' loop because its 'normal to use an if loop'. Excuse the terrible metaphor.
Somewhat unfortunate name?
Basically used for food service. You want a system that supports multiple modifier groups per item, of which some may be required for the order. So for instance, if you order a steak, the required modifier group would be "doneness: rare, medium rare, ...", but you could also have optional additional modifier groups available such as "allergies", "togo/for here", etc.

It's actually a quite interesting mapping exercise. I spent a couple of days watching how my friend handled his customers, and what they ordered. This was important because it comes down to decisions like do I make the menu item "Large Coffee" or "Coffee" with a size modifier group. The latter may make most sense to the developer parts of our brains, but it was completely the wrong thing for my friend, with the former, he could just stab "large coffee" and move on... Workflow trumps "correctness" in some sense.

I'm only familiar with the modifier system in BreadCrumb, which works okay, but would really benefit from conditionals, since modifier groups may have the same label, but have different pricing schemes. For instance, lattes had different price differentials between sizes than chai lattes, so two size modifier groups had to be created with those different price differences. It's not so bad until you go to create a new group, and try to find the right modifier for "Large" since you've now got 5 of them to account for all your menu differences.
Jaywalking, I do this every day. Even stepping off the curb before the walk light turns.

Not stopping completely at a stop sign.

Sharing a cat photo you found online. Doubly so if you rehosted it (imgur, Instagram, etc). Sharing stuff on the internet, even without shades of piracy, is fraught with copyright problems.

Speeding. I'd be very surprised if you drove at or below the speed limit all the time, every day.

Not speeding - there are minimum speed statutes in some jurisdictions.

Not in the US, but in other jurisdictions like Japan and France, taking a random picture on the street where someone is identifiable.

The list goes on, and on, and on...
The French show up to work for that long, but what do they accomplish?

As http://www.ibtimes.com/us-labor-department-statistics-vindic... points out, the per hour productivity of French workers in manufacturing is only 78% of the per hour productivity of US workers. And going to the statistics linked in that chart, I note that French workers receive 144% of what US workers do per hour. (I looked for both India and China in the stats, but failed to find them.)

So yes, he's exaggerating. But he has a point. French workers do less and receive more than US workers. If I were a manufacturer, I wouldn't want to run a French factory either.
Are stored files guaranteed to stay on US soil?
I didn't have any issues at all enabling my foxit reader plugin for firefox. I actually had to specifically enable pdfjs in about:config to get it to run.
Smart Companies Fail Because They Do Everything Right
DCVS is a fantastic advance. Git isn't the best example of that, though. IMO, the UX problems of Git have everything to do with its internal model of revision history, not the structure of the internals. But I still pine for http://monotone.ca
The third paragraph is talking about that factory, but he's clearly generalizing to French workers. He uses the word "French" three times in four short sentences.
RESS: a system for building mobile optimized rails apps
The service is surprisingly decent for very simple trusts of their target market, but it costs 89 basis points (0.89%) for the assets under management, which is quite a lot for such simple trusts. Then again, given the modest sizes of the trusts that they will be managing, 0.89% is probably not much.
> Stuff like this reminds me that at some point people really did give damn and that you can still buy quality if you're willing to look.

I agree with this, but it's getting pretty hard. I've got an HP Laserjet 4 -- It's a brute; A beautiful work of functionality which I expect to be able to hand down onto my children when I pass. Hopefully somebody is still making consumables for it then.

There are now 20x more products in the same inflation-adjusted price bracket, but most are over-featured and over-marketed garbage.
Actually, that's your clue that the entire book should be ignored.
Not only that, but being able to render via js would (and thus avoid calling out to any plugin code) would be able to take advantage of sandboxing too I imagine.
Is Android good yet?