skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "[x]." returning a certain character when 7<x<256 is pretty strange. There's probably a reason for this, but I'm pretty new to the language.
To be fair, the part of Minnesota where Bob Dylan is from is indeed a cultural wasteland.
Life As Artists' Assistants
And for those who think the link is unrelated spam, it's not.

Description provided on spinroot.com: "Spin is a popular open-source software tool, used by thousands of people worldwide, that can be used for the formal verification of distributed software systems. The tool was developed at Bell Labs in the original Unix group of the Computing Sciences Research Center, starting in 1980."
I was looking for some long term solution that is not guilt-driven. Still, thanks for the link and I'll probably eat my words someday and try it out.
While some larger corporations might not let you through the HR filter

I've worked for quite a few large corporations i.e Fortune 50 and not a single one has done a police record check. Unless you are applying for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NSA or something similar it frankly is none of their business.
Another option is the approach detailed here:
http://fortran90.org/src/best-practices.html#interfacing-wit...
The 11 Phases of a Web Developer’s Career (As Illustrated by Memes)
Japan breaks China's stranglehold on rare metals with sea-mud bonanza
Speak for yourself ;). Erlang's conditionals are weird, by any mainstreamish standard. And that's ok, they're sorta cool once you get them.
How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room
If you hide it you risk being discharged a month, a year, or five years from now when your employer finds out

Long-term job security no longer exists. When you take a job, you are always at risk that it ends. For sure, this risk is real. He might get fired for hiding that detail. On the other hand, that likely means he wouldn't have gotten the job in the first place. Which is worse: getting a job for a couple years, building up savings, and then getting fired... or not getting any jobs and being long-term unemployed?

There are no easy answers here. We're comparing bads here. There are risks either way.

and then they aren't referenceable.

At 1 month, you just omit it.

At a year or 5 years, there are two cases. One is where the boss likes you but has (or feels he has) no choice. He probably didn't find you out or make the decision and he may want to help you out. You can discuss the reference issue and he'll probably be your ally.

If he's genuinely mad and won't give a good reference, then make him retreat to name and dates. Have lawyers on it if needed.

In the very-rare case that you need an affirmative good reference (default name-and-dates won't be enough) and he won't give it, then you have to go to extortion. That's an uncommon and ugly topic that I don't want to get into, but at 1-5 years, you have enough important knowledge to make that happen, unless he really hates you.
Hi,

I've had a felony for over 8 years now, and have been working as a developer almost the entire time. I've only been asked to disclose that information once, and I did. While the company had questions, they didn't seem to care very much (note: I don't recommend telling anyone. If you're a great employee and a mistake from your youth discounts you from a job, it's a lose-lose. But I did tell, so... ).

College? They cared. I would have had to sit through review boards and go through a lot of extra hoops. So I never went. That's right, I'm a felon with no college degree.

Life is harder. Your paper trail isn't worth anything, so you have to create your public image (link to the SO podcast about blogging?). Let your accomplishments speak for themselves. Be a part of the community. Give back to the community. Get to know people through helping others. Get jobs through recommendations. You may not be able to work at BigCo, I don't think I can. But so many companies are small, I've found it doesn't matter.

You won't ever have to lie on a resume if you build yourself up in the right way.

* And please email me, seriously, if _anyone_ has questions. So many mundane things are a felony, and people need to understand that it isn't a life ending label before they jump to permanent solutions. My probation officer told me, paraphrased "You'll be surprised who else has a felony. They will probably be inclined to give you a chance. So make sure you have a job next visit.".
Is this kind of thinking incorrect?
"you should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy; then you should sit for an hour"

Meditation is useless di per se; but let you understand the real value of time. This let you be more efficient in the remaining 23 hours and 40 minutes.
"Blackboards but no wifi? Why is technology unwelcome in this context? Are these important distinctions? I've no idea." +1
An A from Nabokov
There's a Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin breaks his dad's binoculars and is certain at the dinner table that night that his father knows. The anxiety gets to Calvin so much that after about 30 seconds (this is Calvin, remember) he breaks down and confesses. That would so be me in an employment situation where there was something I hadn't disclosed which could lead to dismissal.

Everything you have said on the Internet, ever, "could lead to dismissal". It's a risky world. You just gotta make the best decision you can at each point in time.
That one I hadn't seen before. It appears to use a similar technique, except much more simple. (not surprising, given that the GB has much less ram than the SNES.)
I chose once a month, because I understand people don't generally accept what I call meditation.

People, especially those who do not run, ask me what I think about when I go on (long) runs, since I'm a mid-distance runner.

My answer is that most of the time it is a form of meditation. I concentrate on my breathing, clear my mind, and sometimes I close my eyes for a few seconds to get "in the zone". It helps release and control stored up energy I may have that I feel causes tension, pressure, and anxiety.

Sometimes while running, I have thought up of solutions to problems that have been bothering me. The best way I can describe this "event" is that wakefulness that occurs deep in the night (past midnight) and you feel lucid and are productive in whatever it is you are doing.
Except that Minnesota actually is boring.
You didn't. Mirroring in this case refers to using git --mirror.

You're assuming it works like a traditional file system or block level mirror, but it doesn't. Corruption would in most cases have been caught. The weak (and accidental) link was relying on the server to give us a proper accounting of the current valid repositories.
I've got a passport, and have never run into any issues.
For those with sub to Safari, Scoring Points is available there:

my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780749453381
I think the most telling line in the article is "100% of the negative reactions were from people who had never started their own company."

If working for myself has taught me one thing, it is to be much less judgmental of other people's choices. Those who've never done it just cannot understand.
Naming Variables and Functions the Zipf way
To be fair it's not really that much more impractical than driving a HUM-V around in urban areas (which is frighteningly common), and definitely way cooler!

Does it have a built-in telescoping ladder - that could actually be quite a lot more useful than the firehose...
Not knowing enough about RAM makes me feel like I haven't done enough work in my life in CS. I want to know how this works! It's so cool!
Nothing wrong with being gay/lgbt. But in many states in the US you can legally be fired or denied housing on the basis of being lgbt.
What's different for you about being compared to other women instead of being compared to men, when they were considering who to offer the job?
Free Access To Dozens of Anonymous VPNs Via New University Project
>>The threat is still enough that Samsung have chosen not to try forking Android.

I can't think of anything great or innovative Samsung can after forking Android. It will let it die a sad and quick death by turning into an extended TouchWiz all over. I think Samsung knows that it's better to let Google do the dirty job.

As per Tizen, not sure about its potential. I think other OEMs, if tried together would a lot better, rather than just Samsung(or practically the only one and leading the push) would try for it, work fir it would be better. Samsung just going to make this mobile OS a bulky ugly mammoth. It looks like Bada I think. Doesn't feel elegant but what I used was not a final version. It was boot-up phase and haven't checked after that.

But this is not the case. It's Samsung and Intel and the rest - means just two of them. Nokia had a good opportunity. But then it's hardly in a situation to risk sth other than MS.

Anybody think I've got way on/off track here?

Naah, you are pretty fine. All one can do right now is speculate.
WTF is a Chief Integration Officer??
Thanks for posting this! I think there is a lot of true in it.
I don't see the word `corrupt` putting us that far afield than using `manipulate`.

Merriam-Webster defines corrupt as "to alter from the original or correct form or version".

You're probably getting downvoted for what's become a common attitude on HN: overly critical for no reason. At best, your only contribution was to correct "slightly misleading wording" (in your opinion).
The closest I am to being famous is this question on SO, to which I gave the #1 answer. I'd been waiting years to get that piece of trivia off my chest, and it was oh-so-rewarding. The answer was that you can use arrays like so: 5[arr], not just the usual way (arr[5])

Funny enough, several people gave interesting places where this kind of syntax is a good thing. Goes to show that even meaningless pieces of fun on SO still end of enriching the reader.
"* And please email me, seriously, if _anyone_ has questions."

You should provide your email address.
I wonder.. technically, not having a passport doesn't prevent you from leaving the country. You can get in a boat and take off. Leaving by plane is difficult, as well as legally entering another country.

Is it actually illegal to reenter the US as a citizen without a US passport? I would hope that as a US citizen you have a right to entry and visiting a US Consulate in another country would start the process regardless of whether you are a felon.
I found that this field has changed significantly in the past 15 years. I got my first job through getting caught hacking in high school. But today, there are so many more applicants who are qualified, and they are coming right out of college, that the pool is large enough where the government can enforce restrictions.
For the curious / lazy with youtube-dl, the video id is "Syo5sI-iOgY".
Tried it twice. Became so bored, that I just started sleeping.
It certainly can be, but it's not an open ecosystem. I hate when discussions dissolve into arguments over "open" just because the participants didn't have the same definition for the word "open" to start with, so I probably should have been more careful with using it. I was really just using it in direct reference to the OP's post, trying to say that "the relatively open ecosystem we had back in 2005" wasn't really that, at least in this context.

If an API is the sole source of a service, and, even worse, if it's the sole source to access data that users put into a system (e.g. feed history for essentially all feeds, facebook posts, etc), you're totally dependent on that API making enough money to justify its existence based on the whims of the people who make that decision. Luckily there's google takeout this time, but some data is still being lost. One benefit of usenet was that everyone could have a copy of everything, though there's many privacy tradeoffs there (in the modern social networking sense).

Anyway, it's not really a novel argument, just the same "dangers of monoculture/single-point-of-failure" point that has been made many times.
Why not consider forming a startup rather than finding a job?
Attention to detail has never been my strong suite ;)

felonyquestions@hush.ai

Sign up anonymously, I'm certianly hiding behind this account as well.
Freelance.

Been freelancing for close to 13 years and no one has done a background check on me ever. I'm not an ex-con, but if I was one I doubt any of my clients would ever know or care.
Don't live a lie
As for the integrated stack problem, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Enthought Python Distribution [1]. I've used it on both Windows and Mac. It includes all the important libraries for linear algebra, matrix computation, and visualization (SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, etc.). So it is a great replacement for Matlab, which probably falls short of any programming language known to mankind.

[1] http://www.enthought.com/
Show HN: fffocus.com, a minimalist pomodoro timer for your browser homepage
Hi everybody, check out this minimalist pomodoro timer I whipped up this weekend:

http://fffocus.com

- click the title and identify your next action

- click the circle to start the timer. The default time is 25 minutes

- click again to pause the timer, or double click to reset it

- if you navigate away from the page and come back, it should keep track of the elapsed time

Now you can set fffocus.com as your browser homepage, and have a constant reminder to stay on task. It's all driven driven by a static html page and a bunch of object-oriented Javascript, using Knockout.js, HTML5 local store, and some other goodies.

Code is up on Github: http://github.com/dylanized/fffocus

Love to hear any feedback, especially bug reports (this is untested in IE!). Happy fffocusing!!
One thing you said is "I don't actively engage in or create any new projects outside of classwork and giving advice to other developers. I am kind-of stagnant and it is depressing."

Change that. Write some new and useful things, publish the code on GitHub, and run them on one of the free/cheap hosting services.

That's part of your problem: No recent achievements. Create some!
I figured everyone in hacker news would of being all over the arbitrary code execution. Never got any attention when I posted it though :(
I've worked for several startups in the Bay Area, and only one did anything resembling a background check. Although they wouldn't have found anything, I think something bad in my past I'm long removed from wouldn't have been a barrier. Most small company and startup jobs are founded on relationships rather than forms and policies, which is the way it should be.

If your personality, character, ambition, shared vision, portfolio or code samples, work history, or profile in the developer / startup community is well-known, I think your conviction not only wouldn't be insurmountable, I don't even think it would be a blip on the radar. If it ever was, it might even make you cool with the right founders/team.

That said, when the company you're working for gets big, you will have already likely signed something giving them blanket permission to look into you, and during an investor or acquirer's due diligence, I guess it's possible it could come up... which would suck if it's right before an equity cliff or something.

Another idea: I've also done 1099 contract work for big health insurance companies as a contract developer. Salaried employees had multiple background and credit checks because they were working with HIPAA Protected Health Information... so was I, but I not only made more money than the salaried employees, I didn't do an application, interview, background check, etc.

I think 95% of it is your attitude going in. In your head, you're probably thinking that felony convictions are the only thing on the potential employer's mind, so you're self-conscious about it. Find the right type of employer, concentrate on the relationship and the opportunity together, and it shouldn't be a concern at all. (IANAL, TINLA)
For deployment, it's also important to have something like nginx in front of Gunicorn to buffer requests from slow clients. Otherwise, this sort of thing can DoS your server pretty bad:

http://ha.ckers.org/slowloris/
i get what you mean. everyone has their preference and thier right to it.

an analogy would be like a runner taking a taxi during a marathon.
I never claimed it was a backup, only that it wasn't completely susceptible to user error as was surmised in the comment I replied to.

However, regarding the backup question, an rsync backup would have been just as damaging to the anongit mirrors as git --mirror was. The whole point to git for KDE is that that "distributed" part of the VCS would help handle backups. And it has, that part has not really been in question.

The 'luck' came in where there happened to be an anongit mirror that was fully synced up so that we didn't have to crowdsource repo restoration, which saved a lot of time and anguish.

Had we at KDE ensured that the git repository being synced to an anongit mirror was fully consistent we wouldn't even be speaking about this: the git.kde.org repos would be shut down until the box could be restored and we'd have any of 5 easy backups to choose from to restore the repositories (the rest of the files on the box would be restored from the normal backups used).

I want to stress that this is the larger point here: It's possible in some ways to corrupt a git repository and have its subcommands not notice. You must use the provided git-fsck (directly or indirectly) before backing up a git repository, especially if you don't use git for the backup, or use git-clone --mirror.

The error wasn't that we weren't doing backups, the error was that we were making corrupted backups. tar | /dev/tape will do this to you just as badly if you get the right FS corruption.

COW snapshotting filesystems can help (if they have no bugs) but the KDE sysadmins were working under the errant assumption that git would make the integrity check in situations where that wasn't true, not that backups are simply not required.
And it's cross-platform, too.
Clickable: http://fffocus.com
I'd look for jobs in academia, non-profits, or startups, where the conviction itself won't be as much of a bar. I'd personally go with startups -- for most roles at most startups it won't be an outright disqualification. Most startups are too stupid/lazy/rushed to do a background check anyway, but if you get caught later, it's worse than if you disclosed it up front, in many cases (haha MIT admissions director who lied on her resume...)

The worst would be low-skill jobs involving trust (e.g. bank teller); the easiest would be high skill jobs involving no trust (game developer or working on open source software). Sysadmin is in the middle. Security positions require more trust, but would also tend to be more forgiving of computer crimes background.

In the long run, for a federal crime, your best bet is a Presidential pardon (not as hard after you've served time, I think, with a long period of productive work experience since then); that's one thing that sucks about fed vs. state crime. If the law itself is challenged later, that could be a route too.

(IANAL.)
Very interesting. I keep a complete list of "textual UML" tools aimed at rendering different kinds of UML diagrams from a textual notation. Take a look: http://modeling-languages.com/uml-tools/#textual
Edit: I guess I've been banned.
What does that mod do out of curiosity?
That means the real problem is people only read comments at the top. The solution is simple: put every new comment at the top. If someone makes a good comment, it's more likely someone else will read it.
Consider looking for positions at computer security companies. It's an entirely respectable field with a... "training dilemma". Good pay, in need of developers, pragmatic about the background of people who end up in the field. A lot (most? all?) of security professionals start out at least on the grey side of hacking.
That's because it was a repost. Give me a minute or two and I'll find the one that made the front page.

EDIT: Found it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891879
I've tried meditating few times, but I'm too impatient for it. I can sit quietly, focusing only on my breathing for 10-15 minutes and then I just have to do something.
Depends on where you live. In this guy's case, it looks like he lives in a smallish Montana town, so yeah, it's pretty likely that his local fire department is volunteer-run, and joining it would be an alternate way to get this experience. Could be more commitment than he wants, though, since you typically have to take training courses, not to mention actually commit to responding to fires and other calls (a large percentage of fire-department calls are medical responses rather than fires). That's a bit different than just buying a truck. On the plus side, that could itself be interesting, and would be the way to go if you wanted to really learn to operate firefighting equipment.

Some numbers [1]: about 70% of U.S. firefighters are volunteer while 30% are career jobs, but the vast majority of the volunteer firefighters (94% of them) serve communities with under 25,000 people. Medium-sized towns and above typically have a professionally staffed department.

[1] http://www.nfpa.org/displayContent.asp?categoryID=955
Does anyone remember the two-seater firetruck arcade game? That thing ruled.

edit: this! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Truck_(video_game)
Specifically not on point....the qualification at the beginning in particular.
Thanks for the comment about the link!

Also, I like what you've done with your inline comments. For my project we don't just use it for "improvements" but for suggestions, general comments, questions, etc...a whole range of taggable purposes for which you'd be highlighting that section in the legislation. So you'd highlight first, name a purpose second, then type your content.

We wouldn't collect any info on the visitor other than what they provide ("I don't want to see _____" would remove posts marked as such).
next time, when you realize that you are bored, try repeating for yourself "bored, bored, bored, bored, ...". You can apply it to whatever else that may be bothering you: "sleepy, sleepy, sleepy, sleepy, ..."
meditation during the day helps me sleep at night. sahaj samadhi, learned through http://www.artofliving.org/us-en. 20 min sessions. i go in and out of habit.
And after using a John Carmack quote to back that up. ROFL.
Yeah, I don't understand the down votes honestly. We've seen this - not just a few months ago.

Why is it ok to post again? Should I have provided the HN link?
The idea seems good but the implementation could lead to cramped living and this in turn leads to sanitation and social issues.

People need space - forcing them to live in small areas will not work out well.
Being 'bored' is the best part - setting a time to do 'nothing' during the day. There's always something to do, something to see, someone to talk to, but there's rarely 'nothing' to do.