skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is only tangentially related, but since I'm posting under a throwaway (I've been on HN for many years under my main nick) and can't really ask anyone to upvote this, I feel that this is my best chance for someone to see it.

For the last few months I've been growing more depressed, more anxious, and more stressed. I love my job, but it requires a good deal of interaction with clients, which never fails to stress me out. Combine that with relationship nonsense and a general vicious cycle of pain (due to an injury causing chronic pain) and depression, and it's led to a situation where I'm spiraling out of control.

After many years of being fairly stable, I started self-harming again and ending up in these obsessive thought loops, culminating in thoughts of death and (occasionally) suicide. Now, I know myself well enough to know that I'm not going to commit suicide (I've been far worse than I am right now, and I've managed to pull myself away from that; I enjoy life entirely too much for suicide, even if things suck right now. I still have hope for the future, and that's not something I see changing.), but this is obviously not healthy. I know I need help, but I have a few problems:

Problem #1: I can't find a therapist I can actually trust and connect with. I have serious problems talking to people in real life, so I attempted online therapy; every one I tried was a complete and utter waste of hundreds of dollars. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call them scams, but I wouldn't feel bad about doing so. Regardless, text-based therapy would make a huge difference for me, and I just can't find anything that Doesn't Suck (TM).

Problem #2: I've been looking at treatment facilities to just go there, disconnect from the world, and focus on getting better. But I have a job, bills to pay (that can be dealt with by savings, assuming I have a job when I'm out), and responsibilities. I know about FMLA leaves of absence, but that requires you (!) to disclose your illness to your employee; given the massive stigma around mental illness, I really, really dislike that option. All of this, of course, means I feel even more pressure; even in treatment I would feel that pressure.

So, HN, what do I do? Problem #2 would be awesome to solve, but problem #1 is the big one; without ongoing therapy, any help I get isn't going to be sustained. I know there's a solution here, and I know I can get better. I'm optimistic about the future for many reasons, and I want to stop feeling like the sky is falling every 15 minutes.

Sorry for threadjacking, and thank you all.
What happens to the programmers who are closer to 40, but aren't managers?
They have a choice: a) continue earning a living doing what they do with ever-diminishing returns, regular holidays, time with the kids, or b) go it alone, and risk a hell of a lot more than the young. I read somewhere that YC tends to steer away from engaging with generally older people who's risks/dependencies are obviously an issue.

Would you want to hire someone older than yourself?
Absolutely. But only for the job that suits both me and them. I may want someone who really has the experience to do a specific task with authority, and that is more often than not a greybeard, or enthusiastic experienced (40+) peer.
Thank you! A direct link is so more user-friendly than putting a mandatory registration wall before a PDF.
Read a good portion of it, he is a good writer. Maybe that is the goal, the writing felt a bit Hunter S. Thompson gonzo style. Funny though that the more of a jerktoaster he became after being known, the longer he will be known, more than most. "I like what you've done with the character..."
Exactly what kind of "austerity" do you think is happening in Britain? Government spending has gone up. Saying something doesn't make it true.
Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
This story is a lesson on confirmation bias:

Professors that immediately decide that the student is wrong, and must be convinced otherwise.

The spreadsheet financial analysis that provided the expected results and therefore never checked for errors.

A single study that gave economists, and clearly an awful lot of politicians, the confirmation they needed to strengthen their resolve in the face of opposition.
Not necessarily. I've had some very good and well-intentioned clients in the past where they simply registered a domain through goDaddy and didn't know any better, or some other cheapass set them up.

I simply inform them in a candid way what the problem is, and if they're reasonable they'll probably switch services or find a way to accomodate. Otherwise if I detect a tendency for cheapness, then I know there either needs to be a longer discussion or that they are in fact a red flag.

Sometimes it's also a pretty good discussion early on to help to start getting the feel of the type of respect and consideration potentials clients may hold for the consultant's advice.
And he probably knows detailed stuff about things you have no idea about.

The guy has been an (excellent?) engineer, then a CTO and later on a CEO of a major multinational corporation. And AFAIK, he did each of his jobs vastly better than the norm.

Who are you with your pretentiousness?

Edit: With your original post you clearly displayed your ignorance in the open, the ignorance of not even being bothered to check the background of the person you are attacking for their background.

Am I ignorant of tech, because I barely know anything about electronics and bitcoin?
Sorry to hear about your past troubles.

Usually it helps when you learn to consiously (on demand) get yourself into a more relaxed state/mood internally. I found that when I am in the relaxed state, this really smoothes some rough edges in how people perceive myself.
But isn't that exactly the thing about major releases? That compatibility may be broken. See also http://semver.org/
That is a good summary, but it is a little bit more complex than what you have stated. But your comment is helpful because this is exactly the understanding that Goldbloom has and it is incorrect in an important way.

The 23 entries that were submitted are for the public leaderboard set. The purpose of this set is so over the duration of the competition, competitors can see how they are performing relative to each other. These 23 submissions have no impact on the final prize winners.

A different data set, called the final data set is what actually determines the final prize winners. I submitted this file exactly one time. It was processed and scored by Kaggle and I followed the directions exactly as the competition admin stated. I did not check a checkbox because I did not believe it applied - I only submitted a single file and I recieved the 'all zeros' response from Kaggle's system as it said it would.

Also, the text Anthony quoted is not applicable to the Flight Quest competition either. This is the text that is used for the single phase competitions, not a two phase competition like Flight Quest.

If you haven't competed before I know the difference might not be clear. But if you read the response from the other competitors in the forum, you can see there is general agreement that the submission page is faulty for a two phase competition.
I was a mile away from the bombings and I'm a Brown graduate. It's seriously freaking me out.
Wow... This situation must be more common than I thought.

I've had a few jobs in my lifetime that left me with the feelings you posted here... The beatings will continue until morale improves.

These points:
- working for unethical people
- busting my ass while others sit and watch
- watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit

were ultimately the biggest reasons I've left jobs.

In one place I worked, we created software for the financial industry and sold it in regions, like such-and-such county or city. Then our office setup one of our systems and competed under the table with the regional customers around us.

Scummy. Ultimately, I left over this issue and it is still my favorite job I've had or will ever have. All because one guy got greedy.
Watch Steve Wozniak Talk Live from Lithuania [now finished]
constant work-prevention structure imposed by people who have never accomplished anything

I think this comment distills the essence of the problem the which gives people so much trouble. If your perspective is that of a maker/hacker then good work (which should be rewarded) is to make great things, things please people and improve their lives, and perhaps profit the company. If your goal is maximising profit for the company, sometimes good ideas will need to be canned or replaced by bad ones the customer wants, sometimes work will need to be stopped after much effort was put in, sometimes politics will override technical considerations. If your goal is maximising profit for the individual at minimal cost, you want others to do the work while you get the rewards, and neither the business nor other workers, nor their pet projects, are your concern - more fool them if they take the company propaganda as truth, believe they are living in a meritocracy, and don't realise the realities of workplace politics. From the perpective of a manager who has climbed the greasy pole to luxury while workers suffer horrible working conditions, who is the idiot?

I would argue that classifying people as idiots is not useful and obscures the real differences in outlook which produce this sort of friction. There are many other perspectives to work (not tied to specific roles like manager or programmer I hasten to add), and holding them does not make people idiots, in fact many others might view someone slaving away for a company in the misapprehension that they are improving the world as an idiot; both would be wrong. The best way to deal with this IMHO is to recognise that workplaces have a culture, which contains and controls many different aspirations, and if you find this culture toxic, you should change job if at all possible - it is very hard to change a company culture or the perspectives of other workers on their work. Also, work should not be your only passion if you want to remain sane.
You know what my opinion was always that finding competent, smart, interesting and passionate people are impossible to find, at least around me. I have just gotten use to completely relying on myself.

In a lot of ways other people can negatively impact your creative process by being a distraction. But at the same time, if you find someone where you can happily communicate with then maybe the ideas can pour out.
I think that it is. I've worked for a number of companies in north america but in the US people are basically expected to work long. If your co workers are working overtime to get more done then you should work overtime to get more done.

The latest company I was employed at there had me working ridiculous hours but this is completely anecdotal, I'm glad I have my life back.
GDP isn't your income, tax receipts are. Tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are about ~25%, so 100% debt/GDP is 4 years worth of debt, not 1.
There're lots of people who feel like you do.
So what is the alternative to lowering "consistently high public debt"? Monetize it? Default on it?

Debt in itself is not a problem if the growth rate is the same or decreasing as a proportion of the economy. At the current rate, some obligations would have to be forfeited, either to the direct creditors, or to those promised social services. Strangling the economy further with high taxes only makes the problem worse.

I think most of the damage from so-called "austerity" has been decisions taken with little warning and at the very last possible moment.
There is a lot of hate on copying. There is nothing wrong with copying as long as it is the right thing to do. If the world is moving to the direction of Google glasses, it would be insane not to copy.

The question is whether copying is their long term strategy, which would mean that they are constantly being reactive to the market. In some industries, a wait and acquire approach is better like pharmaceutical industry since R&D is so expensive. This does not seem to work well in high tech industries but baidu (by being in china) is more insulated than other companies in the US or Europe.

I hope that Google glass would be a lesson to all to put innovation to the heart of their company's strategy.
There are current reports that the suspects are Chechyan, not the missing guy. Way too early to know who they are, even for the police.

http://globalgrind.com/news/411-sunil-tripathi-missing-brown...
Kepler finds two Earth-sized exoplanets in a star’s habitable zone
Show HN: We made a book about startup accelerators.
The AP just reported that they are from Russia. https://twitter.com/AP/status/325196873486962688

Update: AP now reports the suspect is Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev
https://twitter.com/AP/status/325198361428893698
Debian 7 to be released on the first weekend in May
Yeah in Postgres you can check for the existence of a column in a table. If it exists/doesn't exist you can drop/add the column. Obviously "ALTER TABLE x ADD COLUMN y" isn't idempotent, but the whole SQL statement around it can be idempotent.
The right way to do it would be for the FBI to have a secure crowdsourcing platform that volunteers can work on after major criminal or terrorist incidents. Volunteers should be required (as a condition of volunteering) not to discuss their results with other people.

Only the raw classification and identification data is valuable here. The feedback cycles created by public discourse and news media are terribly flawed and often very harmful. It would be much better to use an automated back end to process the data, seek further verification and then ultimately bring it to the attention of human investigators.
SMTP errors and reply codes, explained
I think the repetition and the talking heads don't have to be a bad thing, it's just that the news outlets mix their presentation styles.

Business/Sports have already been broken out into their own channels by most outlets, due to different viewer demographics, which is also nice because they have very different presentation styles. News outlets also need to figure out what they're doing on their main channel, or break it up further.

* Are they delivering summaries of today's important events around the world like a nightly news program? If so most viewers will watch for one cycle, and you can deliver them a high quality, well produced report.

* Are they focusing on a 'live' breaking news event? If so maybe they should just be silent and listen to the police scanners, with occasional narration. Every 15 mins you could give an update "this is what we know so far" for people just tuning in.

* Are they doing the whole talking-head thing where experts/politicians are being interviewed and debates are happening? If so you could have 30-60 minutes per topic for today's news.

IMHO, all of these are best suited with different presentation styles... news presenter vs narrator vs debate moderator. Unfortunately they're trying to do all three, which just doesn't work.
They're saying it was two Russians now on WCVB. Not sure how credible that is yet. On the other hand, the mere existence of that information on Punditpress is a good reason to doubt its accuracy.

Update: It's semi-official now (on WCVB): the two men were apparently from Chechnya.
Integrating Font Awesome With Bootswatch
I feel this is horrible way of morphing the two pics, the lips are totally different in proportions, that is the hardest thing to morph. Any wrong assumptions can get someone killed, please refrain. Calm down people.
The report’s details only accentuate the slavish copying. Using your voice to control the glasses and search the web? Check. Gesture control? Baidu totally has that too.

To be a devil's advocate: how else are you going to control the glasses if not by voice and gesture? Of course it remains to be seen how /if it copied as a design but many companies have worked and are working on computerized glasses. IIRC, Microsoft and Apple also filed patents. Microsoft filed them in 2011 according to http://phandroid.com/2012/11/24/microsoft-patents-google-pro...
Average salaries?
Yeah, but it's a non-trivial thing to encode in a manner which is realistic in terms of the game mechanics and feels 'in universe'. For one, they are supposed to have a finite response time, so you have a chance to finish off your target before you get destroyed. CONCORD ships used to just be extremely strong and a fixed number would spawn, until people figured out how to tank their damage. Then they would escalate until the target was destroyed, but you could with a large enough ship do a lot of damage before they killed you. Now you get blapped to 0 health by one shot from their guns, but recently there was a technique found which allowed you yo warp around fast enough to evade them indefinitely (though it was hard to do anything else in the time). I'm not sure how that was fixed.
True. 35% may be a bit low, however, but I agree with everything else. On my first job, I didn't follow these guidelines. That's a mistake I won't commit again.

I'd add:

Fourth - say no to overtime, even if it's paid. Unless you're really in desperate need for money, think for a copule of minutes and you'll realize that your time (which you can use to do a ton of interesting things, and in fact is ultimately the matter life is made of) is usually more valuable than your money.
Venture capital funding for Southern California firms falls 42%
Tern.js: Flows of Energy
State of APIs - where are we now and what are the trends
Educators call for better services for kids with learning disabilities
_why should read up on Majorana
Oh, I don't know who either of the two is, I was just remarking that they look similar. Can someone clarify?
Very true. My client was always talking about how much better development could move forward if we worked with a bigger agency, so I stopped stalling it and let him spend a bit of his money to learn firsthand how much "better" everything gets. Afterwards I fixed everything they broke (paid by the hour of course) and haven't heard complaints since.
"I don't go to meetings, don't make reports, and don't write timesheets."
Can this please be taken down?

AP just confirmed the name of the second suspect and it's not one of those above.

You're smearing innocents.
I'm Portuguese, and the amount of people here that think that "if the financial crisis in the US didn't happen we wouldn't have a problem" is mind-boggling.

Because apparently having your debt rise from 50% to 70% of GDP in 7 years without recessions or crisis (2000-2007) [1] and running a budget deficit that never went below 3% [2] isn't a sign of a problem...

[1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ds22a34krhq5p_&#...

[2] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ds22a34krhq5p_&#...
HAPIfork smart fork hits Kickstarter
I especially like lucian303's one, which I'll reproduce for those who don't have the appropriate setting:

> The 8 hour workday was fought for and won for a reason. To expect more, an employer would be unprofessional. To accept more, except when compensated or in extreme circumstances, makes the engineer unprofessional. One comes to soon realize this. (See The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin.)) Most companies, especially startups, don't. It's sad to think that the culture values high stress, long work hours with the inevitable diminishing return, and literally anything, no matter how unhealthy, to get workers to be slaves. At the same time, a lot of these companies have mediocre health and dental benefits with high cost to the employee.

> Yeah, companies don't give a shit about you. And why should they? Corporations exist to make money. That's all. Your health, while in the long-term helps this goal, in the short-term it doesn't. The shorter the lifespan of the company, the less they care. This is easily observed.

> The question is, why do you give a shit about your company?
user coffeejunk has since posted one to dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575823
> First - don't care at all about your job.

Maybe it is counter intuitive but I think healthy dose of this keeps me more productive and more focused on the job.
While at work I always try to keep somewhere in the back of my mind Bertrand Russell's quote: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important". It helps.
People actually watch Glenn Beck!? That would explain alot!
I've got a friend working on the same thing :p
You keep banging on this drum as if you're going to somehow name and shame big businesses for making perfectly reasonable business decisions.

Please understand that a web browser is just a software tool like any other. You don't install a web browser at your business so you can say you use some bleeding edge shiny. You install a web browser to get some useful job done. Much of the time, that involves accessing in-house systems. Some of the time, maybe it involves accessing the external WWW, perhaps to research or buy something. Supporting the latest browsers so everyone can spend even longer playing on-line games or posting on Facebook is, shall we say, not a business priority.

Now, please understand that perhaps the single most important attribute for most large businesses with significant IT operations and mostly non-technical staff is predictability. If everyone is running on a stable software foundation, then tools can be built on top of that foundation. If everyone is running the same version of their end user software, then help desk staff can provide canned step-by-step guides to doing things, or remotely access someone's machine to fix a problem or guide a user through a new process for the first time. If every server in a group is running the same operating system distribution then you only have to keep track of one set of security patches and apply them uniformly. And so it goes on.

In this context, it is entirely reasonable that businesses "refuse to run modern browsers". Your modern browsers do stupid things like moving the goalposts every six weeks (or every few months if you jump through special hoops to use a laughably named long-term support version). Your modern browsers include new technologies that introduce security and privacy risks we didn't have before. Your modern browsers break backwards compatibility and won't run the $5,000,000 bespoke CRM package on our intranet any more! And in most cases, your modern browsers offer no business benefit compared to the tried and tested tools already in use.

In short, while you may wish that everyone ran the latest shiny new browser, there are very good reasons why many big businesses don't. If you think the guys running IT for those places somehow didn't notice that there are other options or just can't be bothered to upgrade or suffer from "intellectual sloth" then you really have no idea how things work at that level at all.
"He's on Linkedin, Lemon, he might as well be dead"

I think this post does a good job of calling out low-ball offers from startup founders. In some ways it speaks to just how many developers are really on the market and how much funding is washing around for 'hustler' startup founders.

But, sir, if you don't want to receive recruiter emails, get off Linkedin.

Startup idea: I'll start a company where people set their own price to be contacted. Would you like to join our team?
Why web-design in Photoshop was even a thing to begin with, I still wonder.