skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a feeling in my soul that "social media" is going to move into a more organic space in a way that means the most to the advertisers (or governments) that want deep information about target demographics. What I mean by this is that as the companies grow (and thus move away from niche market into infrastructure), they become too large to retain meaning to end users in an important way. What I'm saying here might be a little too cerebral for 2am, but it's the same reason Google just doesn't have the granularity to capture the mom-and-pop advertising market like they want (and consistently cannot achieve, if you pay attention to their stream of product inventions and reinventions). Facebook has started to lose its appeal on an accelerating timeline, and I believe that companies like Facebook and LinkedIn -- that are desperate for growth curves and thereby "smoothing off" the niche market granularity in an effort to streamline the company to afford maximal growth -- are going to be a "yeah, I knew that chick in high school" kind of utility that contains cursory information, but really lacks the depth of social networking that is the sought-after distilled end product that everyone dreams about, where your close friends are able to keep up with you online in a fashion that closely resembles your real life social graph. This information and depth -- the kind that is highly marketable and extremely valuable to all kinds of enormous, information-hungry organizations -- will be contained in little "what app.net wanted to be" bubbles that all intermix through network APIs to other social media bubble companies.

Unless someone is capable of building a Facebook/LinkedIn that won't info grab and bother the shit out of every contact you've ever had, while maintaining that "niche market" feel for every user, and while keeping that "closely resembling real life social activity graph" feel.

Or maybe I'm just stupid.
If it were reddit, we'd already be on the subject of throwing feces.
Depends on if you mean off the shelf chips or not. If not then I would expect a second or third year EE student to be able to pull it off. It is way to simple for an EE undergrad senior project.

If you mean design and fabricate the chips then that is a bit more.
It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria. The real reason behind being in the office, 9 times out of 10 (made up internet stats), is because your manager doesn't know how to gauge productivity and thus uses the bum's on seat approach.

In my experience, having a technical manager means you're much more likely to get flexiable hours or remote working, where the manager knows they can check on your productivity by looking at commit history and project managment tools. Same deal might happen with non-technical managers after you have built a relationship of trust.

Exceptions exist of course, but most everyone else doesn't have a clue what they're doing, so they make sure you show up, tell you what to do, squeeze you on impossible deadlines, and basically make your life miserable. It's just the status quo where you have middle management trained to be managers without any real knowledge in their field they are managing.

That's not to say there aren't any advantages to the 9-5, just my personal opinion based on anecdotal experiences. :p
It's a very short article, with a list of benefits. Any potential problems are very briefly mentioned.

But these problems could be significant, and a discussion of them could have made the article much more useful and interesting.

For example: people do compare their performance against that of their colleagues. People do steal credit for work done by other people. How do managers deal with this? There's the potential for significant ill-will if Ann is picking up Bob's slack, but not getting the recognition for it. And if Bob is getting recognition for the work that Ann is doing it's worse. And if Ann's work is suffering, and she's told people and been ignored, and she's losing out, then it's even worse.

Management advice often feels superficial. It'd be great if people writing this advice started making more use of good quality research. I guess it'd be good if more good quality research was available too.
What the hell? That's 5.83 papers. How do you reproduce .83 of something?
You took an almost entirely unrelated story and made it about your political hobbyhorse. Please keep politics off HN.
It's not about the app, it's about the users and the data. Especially since Waze's tech relies heavily on user-generated data.
Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-p...

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Hm, good to know
I realized that by replying i'm probably encouraging you to continue posting this non-sense. I agree with Joachim below, this is barely related to the article.
Little Miss Geek inspires schoolgirls to pursue tech careers
> because customers cannot prove what technology stack is being used.

Morals aside, this is not typically the case. You can legally run GPL software as a service without contributing back, for example. The AGPL fixes this loophole but as far as I am aware is seldom used. (IANAL etc.)
Um, 6 papers out of 53, significant digits give you 11%. Not that difficult.
Couldn't one simply split countries up into smaller countries, if being a small country makes things better?
All the critiques of HFT are a century old. When telegraphy was invented, it was feared that the ticker-tape would create devastating waves of speculation, by speeding up the markets beyond human comprehension.

When markets went over to computerised trading, it was argued that the human element of open-outcry trading was vital in preserving a culture of honesty and integrity.

Critiquing HFT is myopic, because it's based on a meaningless definition of "high frequency". HFTs are doing what traders have always done. There's a legitimate argument against speculation, but it's pointless to single out speculators that deal in the very short term. Singling out the newest technology is just a cheap shot, there's no fundamental difference between trading on a millisecond horizon or a minute or hour horizon.
Not everyone has a blazingly fast internet connection. I don't, even Hackernews loads slow for me at times.

If you want to scale, you'll have to reach me at some point and you won't reach me with a huge app that takes me 30 seconds to load.
Well I'm not super suprised if you actually treat your employees right that you don't have a lot of staff churn.

Removing abusing your employees, pay them resonably well, and give them something to do, and you've probably removed 90% of the reasons people move company, especially considering most employees know it probably won't be the case if they move elsewhere.

Truly well done if that's the case, it's a shame that such a thing seems to be the exception from my experience. :)
The Archive of All Possible Souls
Jason Njoku  SPARK provides $1 million to build Nigerian tech companies
Ask HN: Questions to ask a startup that is hiring?
I am currently in talks with a startup that approached me. They are profitable and have an interesting niche product. They're offering me more than what I make now. But, they do a lot of contract work (Service based). So income isn't steady. A few months ago they did a restructuring and let most of their people go so they could focus on bigger/more profitable projects.

What would be some important things to ask them before taking their offer? The president is very confident in his company and enthusiastic. But, it can be hard to 'see through it' to see how they really stand. I don't want to come on board only to have contracts dry up the next month.
They really are all in on mobile, aren't they?
He explains in this video that he will be posting behind the scenes content regularly over the new 18 months. That's what people get by funding the project. He seems serious about posting a lot of content and it sounds like it's one of the major reasons he did the Kickstarter.
Having worked in computer vision and robotics, I can attest to this.
There are 'proofs' that contain errors, just as there are science papers that reach incorrect conclusions.

Also, it's not necessarily easier to verify a proof than it is to repeat an experiment (or perform additional supporting experiments), especially for complex proofs which very few people know enough to completely understand (eg. of Fermat's last theorem, or the Poincare conjecture).
Yes, that's why I no longer consider pursuing PhD in CS. It's a waste of life to reproduce non-reproducible papers that is full of buzzword.

Hopefully, more journals and confs will follow the Open Access and Reproducible Research model like IPOL[1].

> Each article contains a text describing an algorithm andsource code, with an online demonstration facility and an archive of online experiments. The text and source code are peer-reviewed and the demonstration is controlled.

[1]http://www.ipol.im/
Have two mobile apps published? Nokia will give you a free Asha 501
You sound like a good recruiter.
Cool idea, but basically reinvents chunking, which NLTK already has (http://nltk.org/api/nltk.chunk.html). Keep up the writing and NLP research though :)
Yeah, sorry, I skipped over the 'notional' in your comment.
Yes

So HFT should expect to be manipulated by false news.

I bet they won't be to happy when that happens.
Yeah, this reminds me of the "interview" I did for SpiderOak. I had built and launched various products by myself by then, so my experience in Web apps was very prominent in my resume. They asked me to spend a few hours implementing a commenting FAQ system or something like that, which was pretty much just some CRUD views with CAPTCHAs etc.

I said I didn't really feel comfortable spending hours of work on something for an interview, but I did it anyway, because it sounded like an interesting company to work for. They took my submission, said something about "we'll see if we can arrange some compensation" and then never emailed me again.

A few weeks later, their FAQ section was updated with pages and a commenting system. Worst interview ever.
The possibility of CO2 causing global warming isn't 100% but it isn't very low either. It is the risk we are talking about, the risk of doing nothing and let the man made green house (if there is one) turn earth into an irreversible disastrous environment.
Most CO2 emitting energy sources are not sustainable anyway and many of them emit other proved pollution as well. There is really nothing lost to going green energy, other than the cost of having some CO2 emitting energy reserved there.
Add a touch of luxury with Rathwood garden furniture
Is this analysis a published scientific research?
Not to be too picky (am a mathematician too) but you ought to read about the history of the theory of "limit cycles" of planar vector fields and Dulac's "Theorem". Quite a lesson.

Edit: sorry, could not help writing this later (was on my iPhone before). The thing is that Dulac 'solved' an important part of one of Hilbert's problems. Was a 'proof' for about 60 years.
Click on the "I" and the "O"
Exactly. This should be the top comment. Are we just supposed to assume their work was true based on trust? Perhaps this 'study' was actually just a fleecing meant to show that we take too many studies to be true based on simple trust.
Not sure if this is normal but all good programmers I know and meet are a) not making boatloads as they will pick challenge and fun over making money usually b) not interested in retiring at all. Some of them over 30, some over 40, some over 50, but they all are not thinking about retirement even if they could.

Management I do see though; I know some (including myself) who came back but most stay there for whatever reason.
What's better than a steering wheel?
Pick a paper on NLP. Measures of document relevance and summary quality are not black and white, especially when you account for the ways the authors munged their test sets and scores.
Cardiff Coffee Network 4 June 2013 All Welcome
The Model S may not be the best at everything, but it appears to be the best overall car you can buy right now. It just scored an almost unheard of 99/100 from Consumer Reports (I believe the Civic got in the high 70s to mid 80s this year)
Wow, that's sad. Are we really so blind when it comes to cancer research?

I recall that oncology journals usually have a ludicrously high impact index (as ludicrously as 5 digit IIRC); that means there are a lot of citations, which is an indicator that there is a lot of research going on. And with a lot of research going on, well, you can expect a lot of false positives. So, I'm wondering, could this be a case of cherry-picking or some kind of selection bias? It wouldn't be difficult to select a lot of bogus-sounding research and test it.
App gold rush is over
After decades of publish-or-perish sweatshop science I'm sure the great shining archive of scientific truth is sort of like an inbox with no spam filter.
Nature wrote an editorial justifying the situation, you can read it here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e...
Joking aside, the authors of these studies have highlighted the low statistical power of research in a number of fields (see also http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html), which is a serious issue that often leads to over-interpretation. It's as if researches willing to publish more are rushing hasty studies out the door.

It's a good thing that people can measure these things and ring the alarm
With critical 0-day exploits circulating, Microsoft and Adobe report fixes
> We are currently in a state of paralysis with respect to educating decision-makers within applied software development because the arguments made for one language or another are small incomparable islands that admit only buzzwords.

In my experience, decision makers don't want to be educated about the benfits of your favorite language. They want to use a 'full stack' supported solution that has corporate backup and industry acceptance. They want to be able to hire someone to take over your code when you leave.

In the end, you can compute anything compuatble with any Turning complete programming language, although some are more elegant than others at certain problems. Human psychology will lead you to desire what you don't have, which in this case is your ideal niche language for solving your current problem at your shitty job. In the end languages are just tools and decision makers are providing you with the tools you are to use to do the job which minimizes their risk and maximizes their return.

And if your language is so great and will solve all your problems in an elegant and productive way, then make something with it and start a successful company. Then, if you make it for 20 years, wait for the articles saying how 'uneducated' you are having used it and you should be using some university ressearch language based on n-th level hyper-metalogics because you can write fib in 21 symbols.
Introducing Verge Video
Acceptance and compassion.
Warren Buffett Shared Some Great Career Advice
Well, it's been a common enough movie plot (cf. Casino Royale where the Antagonist engineers terrorist attacks on high-profile companies whilst short-selling their stocks).
This is neat!

The article gives an example which I find a bit confusing.

>I ran it on this sentence -

> “Swayy is a beautiful new dashboard for discovering and curating online content.”

>And got this result -

> This sentence is about: Swayy, beautiful new dashboard, online content

That misses "discovering" and "curating", which I think are the most important parts of that sentence.
No. I don't expect my prospective clients to pay me for the honour of me coming to sell our services, so why should there be an expectation for me to pay a prospective employee? Were this the case, there'd be an entire profession called "interviewee", whereby you go from interview to interview to interview wasting all and sundry's time while being paid.

Poor idea.
Show HN: Find profitable niche in App Store and Google Play Market
Hi,

This is my brand new project which helps indie iOS/Android devs discover the most profitable phrase niches in Apple App Store and Google Play Market for their apps and monitor position of their apps in markets.

Please give me your feedback :)

Regards,
Wiktor
This was really hard to read... I had to give up.

Did the Oracle vs Google case prove that APIs aren't the new patent?
Lessons From The Yahoo Weather App
I actually never said that VCs were human garbage. Some of them are, some are not. I tend to think that most are not, but that many of the "cool kids" are.

My direct experience (which is not with VCs) is that the VC-darling startups are mostly run by human garbage, which raises questions about who funds them. Does this mean there are probably some horrible VCs? Yes, absolutely. Does it mean that all VCs are that way? Of course not. There are plenty of good ones out there, too.

My feelings about this suit are complicated. Look, Al Capone was nabbed on tax fraud, rather than the harder-to-prove but more vicious shit he did. If the Greenspan suit starts a process that puts an end to VC note-sharing and co-funding and social-proof calls-- against the spirit of the law, but hard to prove on an individual basis-- then I'm all for it.
I have been in discussions about this with one of my friends working in academic materials research. Its amazing the amount of work today done by scientist at universities writing code without very basic software development tools.

I'm talking opening their code in notepad, 'versioning' files by sending around zip files with numbers manually added to the end of the file name, etc.

This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the 'reproducible results' problem. Often times, the software I've seen is 'rough' to be kind. Most times its not even possible to get the software running (missing some really specific library or some changes to a dependency which haven't been distributed) or its built for a super specific environment and makes huge assumptions on what can 'be assumed about the system.' This same software produces results which end up being published in journals.

If any of these places had money to spend, I think there could be a valuable business in teaching science types how to better manage their software. Its really unfortunate that outside of a few core libraries (numpy, etc.) the default method is for each researcher to rebuild the components they need.

I'm surprised about only 11% of results being reproducible. It seems lower then I'd expect. I agree we don't want to optimize for reproducibility, but obviously there is some problem here that needs to be addressed.
In terms of "where do they go?", I would think that a reasonable amount of "older" programmers move into management or other more strategic positions in the production chain, where they are not actually doing any of the coding, but are still working on software projects.

I'm in my late 30s and have spent the last few years transitioning more into product management. I'm still coding sometimes, but less and less. In fact, I am pleased that a lot of my coding has gone back to being recreational (outside of work).

I'm reaching a point in my career where I feel that my skills and knowledge are put to better use helping other junior programmers do their work better, rather than doing the work myself.

Besides, no matter how much experience and knowledge I have, there will always be a 20 year old who is willing to work twice as many hours for half the pay, and they will eventually get to more or less the same result I would. Why would I want to compete against that?

I'd rather be that 20 year old's boss or advisor, and help him/her work smarter and learn faster..

And my clients and employers seem to agree..
The concept reminds me of Charles Stross "Antibodies", first story of the Toast collection, available free here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...

Quick and worthy a read.
I guess saying "11% of 53 papers" was cooler than saying "6 out of 53". Meh.
Hm, okay, this appears to depend strongly on the connector. For the UK, 130g[0] seems to be a common weight, whereas with the Europlug, you can get 18g[1] (I somewhat doubt that this weight is correct, but, well).

Still an annoying item I have to carry with me that provides absolutely no other value.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Micro-USB-Mains-Charger/dp/B...

[1] http://www.amazon.de/mumbi-Universal-mini-Ladegerät-1000mA/d...
It should not be the top comment. The original article is an explanation of WHY this was done. If a comment is posted explaining why the study was a bad idea or should not have been published despite this explanation THAT should be the top comment.
Yeah, while I'll happily argue against keeping hours or working from home where appropriate, one of the bigger issues is that some of people arguing for this are lazy or disorganized.

On the plus side, these people are going to be the same whether they're in your office or not, thus I've never actually believed keeping them in the office will serve any real benefit, you need employees you can trust, either way.
Was just inspired to add goat herding as a skill. Please endorse me for it: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=22023530&trk=tab...
> "those authors required them to sign an agreement that they would not disclose their findings about specific papers"

I don't know why this doesn't cause a huge stir in the scientific community. Seems like everyone is fine with people sweeping their negative data under the rug. Shameful is a very mild word for that.
Seems like they want to cover ground by buying every single startup that is successful and remotely related to social networking. This is where the startup economy falls and monopolies go bad.
The main thing I struggle with is the confidence to actually manufacture something; I can sketch a schematic, but I've never produced a PCB.
Yes. Of the fields I've implemented algorithms from papers in, computer vision seems to be particularly adverse to discussing the (often critical) downsides of their algorithms. Often its something like "Camera calibration isn't exactly perfect? Well this scene reconstruction technique simply wont work."
The problem is not that research is not reproducible. Researchers are humans and full of biases. The problem is too much emphasis is put on novelty vs. reproducibility. It took a long time for software engineers to recognize the value of testing/validating vs. creating new code. In the same way the research world needs to put new emphasis on reproducing/validating results.
Yeah, my guess is they used that form to imply 11% of all cancer research is unreproducible. But in ironic fashion, they can't show their own data and thus we can make no broad claims about it.
The Onion releases fartscroll.js
> It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria

How often does this happen where you're not working with a single other person? Another developer, QA, designers, product managers...

I can see if you're working on your own startup, but if you're on a team of people it's very unhelpful to have any one person just go off on their own for days a time.