skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there any significant trend of people leaving academia for the tech world? I spent 4 years grinding away on cancer drug development. Between the billions of dollars it takes to commercialize such drugs and the single digit percentage that actually advance from human trials to clinical use, I wondered if the work I was doing was not going to be put to good use.

More importantly, I didn't feel like I was learning every day. Much of the work is absurdly repetitive.

I started learning how to build web applications and found it more mentally rewarding... but what are the ramifications of that for research? It's incredibly important but not seen as very exciting these days.
The Carbon Wallet
So... it's like a real world verbling?

https://www.verbling.com/
http://zinssmeister.co/it-ships-when-it-ships
> I remember reading about how Japanese advertizers would use Google queries in ads instead of URLs

That's happened in the UK as well, though (in my experience) more often with video adverts (e.g. movie trailers) than print advertising. It began with stuff like "AOL Keyword: harry potter" (was it "keyword"? can't remember, was definitely AOL), and mostly died after that, but have seen it with Google a few times.

And on the flip side, you seem to suggest that QR codes are a western thing - actually they were invented in Japan, and are much bigger in Asia than over here.
I think it's short term vs. long term. Investing in welfare (keeping children clothed, fed and in school) has long term benefits. Unfortunately, that's next to impossible for much of the world.

It's no different from the lottery system here in the US which is used by and marketed to lower income individuals. I don't think anyone says that buying lottery tickets is a "good" investment for a family.
Because first and foremost, we want to keep contractors happy. If they are paid well (by well I don't mean ripping clients off), they will come back and perform more work. Our long-term goal is to establish a trusted network of developers that always go that extra mile to satisfy clients - I must admit, so far, this approach has paid off in dividends. We're currently re-designing the landing page, and we will put client testimonials on that prove it.
How to efficiently write GWT Generators
260 days ago I posted a webapp I made on HN, listing all of the available remaining .io domains in order of most common words -- with 2, 3, 4, and 5 letter columns. It was completely free, but it got one upvote I think? The site is currently down, but if there's interest I can put it back online.
The promoted comment at the bottom makes a good point. It seems like this could be a recent change in direction. While it's possible that this was the intention all along (but Microsoft was intentionally or unintentionally vague with employees at various levels, and sent out this email to get rid of rumors), this seems an unlikely scenario.
The promoted comment at the bottom makes a good point. It seems like this could be a recent change in direction. While it's possible that this was the intention all along, but Microsoft was (intentionally/unintentionally) vague with employees (in general), and sent out this email to get rid of rumors, this seems an unlikely scenario.
I use Illustrator to make all my icons now, since I've switched to using SVG for high-res display support. Wouldn't try to use it for mocking up an entire site though; FW is much more suited to that. Working with Illustrator for large numbers of shapes and gradients is insanely inefficient. Illustrator is for precision work and advanced vector shapes, while FW is for throwing a bunch of (commonly shaped) shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, and for that there's none better.
Quick image creation and editing. Backgrounds, resizes, taking incoming files from designers and making them 'usuable', in whatever meaning that word takes at the time. Prototyping design (i.e. "good enough until we pay a designer" design), etc.
Wow, nicely played out. It's always interesting to meet online persona in real life.

OTOH I don't understand why he didn't take the job. He said it was fitting perfectly at first. The team liked him and the manager liked him.
Indeed, it is often beneficial to state your preferences up front instead of sputtering nonsense trying to be "diplomatic".

Everyone can interpret what I have to say about text editors much more usefully if I state up front that I love Emacs. The same goes for programming languages, frameworks, operating systems and math.
Not sure how well the site's font renders on other machines/browsers, but on Windows 7 Pro x64, Google Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m, your font renders with holes in it. Very odd.

Screenshot:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/Status%20%C2%B7%20...
(Scroll down to bottom area to see worst of it, like the title "How does this work?".)
It lets you make grid images like these: https://twitter.com/babatuba8
"Don't live there" is NOT that simple in the real world. How many people in North Korea want to live there? China? Germany during WW2? I'd guess that the majority of the world's population does not have a realistic chance to change what country they live in.
re: canvas stacking, check out http://kineticjs.com/
Conversely, I prefer PDF, because, particularly with LaTeX generated content, it just looks way, way better than HTML.
Your speculation explains it perfectly!
Estimating construction projects is much easier than software.

Roads? In any developed country, they are a known quantity. Their cost and time can probably be estimated to with a small delta, calculated by the foot (or metre). I think every single street in my city is pretty built the same way.

Buildings? Ask a developer in a new subdivision how long House Model B will take to put up after they've already built 5 of 'em. A new office tower? We've built a few of those.

Bridges? Choose one of the three designs. It's not like you're going to bother trying to invent a new kind.

Your particular piece of software? Unfortunately, still much more like a unique little masterpiece than a construction project, and much more difficult to forecast.
The key problem with math is that the learning keeps going and at some point, every single person fails to either have the ability or time to learn more math. Everyone becomes "bad at math" relative to other people. This same thing doesn't happen with reading because once you are a pretty good reader you feel like you have mastered it.

3 examples:
1) Kid who never completes pre-calc. "can't do math"
2) Adult who gets through calc, but doesn't go any further "can't do math"... like an engineer
3) Math PhD. who gets stuck on something they can't solve.

Person 1 and 2 are both stating they can't do math, and both people are relatively right. Relatively being the key word.

If we rephrased the way math is taught, it would never be labeled as math at all. This would box people in to saying things like "I don't do calculus" which would be correct in many cases, whereas it would be alarming if someone said "I can't add".

Really, whether people say "I don't do math" or "my bad" doesn't really matter and being stressed over it is probably just as ridiculous as saying those things.
> It's how you minimize costs, and any smart seller that realizes you're not going through the bidding process jacks up the price to milk you for all you're worth.

Honestly, I rarely get more than one or two bids when I'm looking for someone to work for me. I've been around long enough to have built relationships with vendors for various tasks. I know about how much I expect something to cost and if the bid comes in significantly higher or lower then the vendor and I talk it over and negotiate either a lower price or a changed scope. They don't jack up the price because the cost to acquire customers is very high. I'm guessing I saved 100 hours last year by not putting every last task out for bid.
Actually, it does get one banned. It happened to me once and it was the most nerve wracking experience trying to figure out what exactly happened and why i was separated from my favorite site.

I came up with the following simple :-) hack: When there is a need to open a bunch of HN links (either saved tab sessions or more importantly when restoring a crashed browser session), I disconnect the network connection. Once all the tabs are launched, I turn the network connection back on and refresh each tab when i get around to reading it.
I was just curious.

Putting people in boxes isn't the most horrible thing in the world, ya know? It can help you come to positive solutions (not only negative ones). Like giving money to women over men because the evidence shows that the net benefit for the entire community is larger.

That's just my opinion. I don't claim others are wrong, but I do claim that I'm right :).
it can't, that's why you need a trusted hub

clients can only tell that the message they received from the hub was actually from the hub and was not observed by anyone but the hub. there's no way to tell a message from client A to client B wasn't tampered with or observed before the hub delivered it
The more the merrier!

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/versioned...
10 plus power women who rock innovation
How about some older software: http://jalbum.net/en/ ?
PR firms LOVE Wikipedia...
One reason the few times I have posted on thedailywtf I used a name completely divorced from anything I have done on the net.

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you.
I am always blown away by the fact that we are terrible at estimating and are convinced that it is something that is just not possible, instead of acknowledging it as a skill that we simply have not developed.

Consider, restaurants have to build in an estimate of how much service they expect at a given location. Before it even opens. Once open, they have to keep a steady supply of estimates tracking against how stocked the supplies should be. Do we truly think this is a skill people just have? Or one that is developed and has been refined through the years?

My personal belief is that we are too busy learning to program, such that we never dedicate time to learn to estimate. This works for the stars that can keep pace programming at the top of the field forever. However, as soon as things adopt a maintenance perspective, being able to estimate the amount of work you will have becomes key.
Interesting. I didn't know that. Sorry for the error, I'm not an expert in this subtle stuff. Barely even conversant to be honest.

On those architectures with weaker models the real simpler thing to do is to make the singleton thread-unsafe for initialization.
Since the whole system turns on having a hardened system which can distinguish honey from true passwords, it seems like you could get a significantly improved level of security by replacing it with a hardened system that hashes passwords with a secret, long pepper, which vastly increases the amount of time necessary to crack even trivial passwords.

The alarm trip is nice, but if you assume that you have a
hardened black box that you can put data into and get data out of, you could use that to increase the complexity of the given hashes to a degree that they would be uncrackable (offline) in the first place, and standard throttling (and alarming) makes online brute-force attempts trivially detectable and blockable.

Assume that you have a user whose password is "1234", and the salt is "5678". Let's assume the system is naive and uses SHA1 for hashing.

Given these two pieces of information, that password is trivially crackable. Not a problem. However, let's now assume that we take our password and feed it to our black box, which hashes it with a 1024-bit pepper, and feeds the resulting hash back to the web app. Assuming the pepper's secrecy is protected, the password's complexity is now so ridiculous that even with all the computing power in the world, you wouldn't be able to brute-force the hash for the password "1234" before our sun explodes.

Now your passwords are mathematically protected against breach, which is arguably more valuable, since it means that the attacker can't take my email address and my six honeywords + real password and plug them into various sites trying to get a hit - those other sites won't know which are the honeywords, and won't trip any alarms when the wrong ones are used, but given the tiny quantity of passwords to try, attackers are sure to get hits. Why not just prevent them from ever discovering a usable password in the first place?

Or, if you wanted the honeypot aspect to be preserved, make your black box take a password, perform some transformation on it, then hash it. For each user, we'll generate and store (in the black box) a one-time pad that we use to transform (/encrypt) their password, then hash it. Password complexity isn't affected, but without the pad, the original password is unobtainable. My bad user uses a 4-character password "abcd" which maps to "hvz5", which I then hash. An attacker who steals the hash list can brute-force "hvz5" easily, then attempt to log in with it, and my system can detect an that the attacker is attempting to log in with a transformed (and thereforce, obviously derived) password and raise the alarms. The system allows for detection of compromised logins without ever risking exposure of the user's actual password to an attacker.
> In the physical world, if you don't agree to the laws of a country, don't live there. It is that simple.

No, it's not that simple. Your statement shows no empathy and lacks context. Is it that simple to leave North Korea? If I tried to leave the US now, they'd shoot me. I'd need to have arrangement with the country I'm immigrating to, pay a bunch of fees, etc. And why should I, a peaceful human being, have to leave when a single entity claims such vast areas of land? It's unfair and people's blind (probably tribalistic) acceptance of that idea is sad.
I went through this exact issue with a junior employee moved to my team to do some analysis that required a basic understanding of medians/means and a little intro stats.

It took about 8 weeks of tasks with incremental mathematical challenges to overcome this, and at least reach the point where he could do his work, and apply the fundamentals learned to solving more complex problems.

In the end he "could do math", the real issue was he had never "put any work into math".
Interesting. Years ago I wanted to do a side project and ended up acquiring the "words.io" domain name. I was also able to snag the wordsio.com as well to avoid some confusion.

Maybe this will get me to actually do something with it.
"I can't do math [at a university level]..."
Nature and capitalism share a structural characteristic: both require equilibrium or over-production to self-sustain. Any sustained deficit and the organism or economic entity suffers catastrophic failure.

It is absolutely possible to undermine the business model of a company like Facebook by winning a marginal piece of their business away from them.

Economists are so fervently engaged in trying to eliminate cash-flow/economic/business cycles because deficits have non-linear consequences when they manifest.

With that, instagram had only one possible exit strategy to execute and they did.
One thing that wasn't mentioned in the article is that he had to embed a metal block into the plastic so that the gun was detectable on an x-ray machine. This was to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988.

Could someone who had a printer and the downloaded file skip that part? Yes. But they could possibly be fined and jailed for up to 5 years.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-102/pdf/STATUTE-102-Pg3...
I didn't go to MIT, so I may just be talking out my ass here, but here goes.

While I think this is a good step in the right direction, there is no technological solution for the real problem:

AVERAGE USERS ARE IDIOTS

They use dictionary passwords. They write them down on post-it notes. They re-use passwords.

Try as we may to enlighten people. They are still stuck in their ways. The only thing we can really attempt to do is force people to add complexity (#1).

Security is only as strong as its weakest link. I'm glad that companies take my security seriously, and I hope this idea catches on to strengthen that security. But it's only a small step overall.
Indeed there is something wrong with someone saying "I can't do math..." but it is not what the author identifies.

In blunt summary, the author says "you may not be able to do the specific math you claim, but don't worry I'll teach you." In my experience this is not at all what the complaint is saying and the solution "I'll teach you" is not at all what they are looking for. The comparison to illiteracy is completely off-target.

In my experience, "I can't do math" is simply "I don't know" in disguise. Ask most children: "what's 300 times 248" and you get a knee-jerk "I don't know". Ask also "what's a balloon made of"; "I don't know". Same goes for many other questions that appear to them to have a definite answer. We excuse children for saying this, but it becomes less and less acceptable as an answer because we learn of tools for finding the correct answers.

The real lesson that needs to be taught is:

Your worldview of can/can't do math is wrong. Doing math is learning what tools to use after we've broken down our question to its core...kind of like everything else.
I wonder what the motivation was to communicate this to employees now (knowing it would "leak"), versus just waiting until their event on 5/21. The rumor has been widespread for a while now, and I don't think two more weeks would have done much damage.
They're less efficient and more difficult to learn, but they are serviceable for everything FW is used for.
IE Zero-Day Exploited in Watering Hole Attack Campaign
We've noticed that, it is very odd indeed. We're going to get that fixed ASAP, thanks for the report + screenshot.
I'm surprised GitHub Pages isn't mentioned in the "official homepage" part. Easiest way by far to make a profesional looking project website.

http://pages.github.com/
Android apps in Scala, iOS apps, and Play Framework for web services
This blog post is the story of how 6 University of Waterloo "Winterns" managed to build the EatIn Suite - which consists of 3 web services, 2 web apps, and 2 mobile apps - in just 3 weeks. EatIn is an internal food-rating platform that allows company employees to rate and comment on the food provided by LinkedIn.
I think being able to interpret common mathematical writing in your area of expertise is a valuable skill. I think this is what is meant by "understanding math".

I don't know much about anything but signal processing, but I am able to read and understand vector/matrix notation and differential equations. This enables me to read most papers published in signal processing. Just like being able to at least roughly read most C-derived programming languages, this is a valuable skill.

I have seen coworkers "not understanding" my work because it involved problem descriptions in mathematic notation. Frankly, it annoys the hell out of me.
I was under the impression that MSFT did it for, or was pressured by the game developers - EA would love if MSFT could make it so that their games are always online to prevent reselling products and reduce piracy.

That being said, I can imagine that it is still a possibility for game developers to use this tactic on the Xbox, just not a requirement. Doesn't seem like MSFT would gain much for wanting to force an always online connection.
I understand what you are saying but it's a pretty safe bet on today's internet that a browser is capable of handling a PDF.

An online service such as http://www.extractpdf.com/ does a pretty good job of taking the PDF link and extracting the text.
Perhaps to try to avoid every headline after the 5/21 event being "XBox will work offline!" instead of whatever Microsoft wants them to focus on.
the devs at thumbtack.com maintain a blog w/ 2-3 excellent posts on the subject. i liked these because the authors clearly have experience in all three aspects of split-path testing: (i) the engineering (how to implement? eg, via template-switching middleware); (ii) the analysis (probability theory); (iii) test config--identifying orthogonal features suitable to test.

so there's that plus the app they use. Of all the A/B-test metrics apps i know of that are named in honor of 1980's bands, thumbtack's has the best name, "ABBA"
Every time I have given a "I do not know, I have never done anything like this before, it will require research, it may take a few days or it may take a few weeks" the response from the manager asking has always been:

"So can you do it by X". Where X seems to be totally arbitrary from a dev perspective.

I have never had a manager say "Ok, get to it and keep me informed".
If you say something will take an hour, you're almost guaranteed to be wrong, at best you might fall somewhere near that, but you're almost certainly not going to take exactly an hour.

I think that estimating in best case / worst case ranges is useful for two reasons. First it lets you convey uncertainty. Instead of just double a number you made up, you can let people know where you're very certain (narrow range) and totally guessing (wide range). The second valuable thing about ranges is that you can use them to make estimate about projects as a whole. If a project contains a lot of uncertainty, it's results are likely to be uncertain.

We use this technique at LiquidPlanner to generate more realistic schedules, which is pretty damn cool.

The second best thing to do when estimating is update your estimates whenever they change. If you learn something that is going to affect a ship date, speak up!
Bidding is the best way to get rid of the best contractors, because most of them won't want to invest significant time to compete with others for the jobs, so what you're left with are the most desperate or mediocre ones. And even those will realize in long-term that it's just not worth their time or either leave or perform poorly.

So in my experience, bidding doesn't do any good, to either party.
Coinbase grew 15x in the past 3 months
I Am Not This Body
> "Build as much as you can by x" makes more sense than "How long will it take to build all of Y?".

As a developer this makes total sense and I love it.

The problem is when the rest of the company that exists outside of the development world (i.e. creating new things), like sales and marketing, is that they would rather the whole company align under the "build all of Y" type of scenario because it makes their jobs fantastically easier. At the expense of the devs, of course.

As "agile" development practices continue to spread, I am hopeful that this re-framing of development around short development iterations and continuous delivery begins to transform the processes of the "clients" of development teams as well.
My solution to this: research. When I don't know how long something will take, I go find the basic ingredients, talk to people with experience and get back to management in an hour.

I find it's not necessary to push back like that on every project, and the more discovery about these things you do, the easier it gets.
This doesn't try to solve any of those problems - it's basically a honeypot system to detect when a password file has been leaked and logins are being extracted (and used) from it.
A High School Network, Unreal Tournament, and Pickles