skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same boat here as a contractor. If I could take my own advice, it would be great.

My goal with new workplaces is to be reserved and act introverted until I have figured my colleagues out a bit. A few of my work places have been political minefields, and looking back, if I had only waited a month or so to get familiar with things, it would have been obvious where the landlines were laid, and I could have avoided them.

In the past I assumed, naively, that my colleagues MUST be reasonable people, so I acted as if they were. Most people are completely enjoyable to work with, however there are enough bad eggs out there, that if you are contracting or job hopping you are bound to run into them.

Working with a bad egg who you have rubbed up the wrong way can be a total nightmare since, IMO it is relationships that make or break a job. Its a shame, but I now assume people are volatile, unreasonable, and egomaniacs, and so I walk on eggshells around them until they prove me otherwise.

Yes, it shouldn't be that way, but I just want to work in peace!

My boss's ego is VERY easily damaged by confident females who behave as men do in the workplace. Ya, he is sexist and having cultural integration problems, but I probably could have toned it down a bit if I knew he interpreted my professional opinions as emasculating. Now he is a monster boss from hell constantly trying to put me in my "place". It would have been better for me if I just sucked it up and acted a little more cutesy and insecure at the beginning, so he wouldn't have felt so threatened(?) by me when I began.

The other posters are right. For me its gotten so bad at my current job, that I will probably never experience worse. Dealing with my boss for so long now, I have gone through all of the stages in reacting to the situation: denial, disbelief, mourning(it was supposed to be my dream job), thinking I must be crazy, being masochistically amused by it, reveling in the conflict, etc. Now that I have used all of my energy up and gotten used to the torment, it has become so obvious how meaningless and insignificant it is.

If you can manage to see that from the outset without having to learn it experientially, consider yourself lucky! The only reason I am able to view my situation as ridiculous and insignificant, is because I am so worn out, that that is my only remaining option!

Lesson learned. Startup "sabbatical" coming soon!
Oh, it's because USians hate giving. Totally makes sense.

Oh, wait. https://www.cafonline.org/pdf/World_Giving_Index_2011_191211...
A couple weeks is probably long enough. Time for the flood of new packages to come in and anything broken to get reported and fixed. It doesn't take that long as lots of people use testing.
Thanks for finding that link to the rebuttal. The original article certainly was sensationalizing every little point.
Is It Crazy to Think We Can Eradicate Poverty?
This is blogspam. The source[1] is linked right there in the article; please link to that instead.

[1] http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/2013/05/fact-of-ficti...
There is nothing wrong with completing tasks the most efficient way possible.

In this case, the copy/paste action was just the most boring task I could imagine. Please replace this phrase with "a boring task you cannot escape at best will". It's not really about Excel to phpMyAdmin.

I actually have seen a guy doing something like this before years. Thats why it came to my mind. This guy was not a competent programmer. I should have used a different example maybe. But it is not so easy to find a "boring task" which cannot be automated in todays dev world.

Disclaimer: maybe nothing "deep to say", but this is the story which came to my mind, when I wrote the post. In my opinion, Zen has nothing to do with fatalism as might be understood with this example. Go ahead, make things better. I am thinking about replacing this example, because it came back to me several times now.

In any case, thank you for taking the time reading it and asking this question.
No. It's not like saying that at all.

All it means is that you can trivially have any number of wallets and it's up to you how you use them. Same as with cash.
As someone who also meditates this made me laugh! Sometimes I find coding and meditation to be complementary, other times not really!
I've always wondered why so many of these usability niceties have been available yet neglected soooo long, while the language as a whole has progressed so much? There are plenty more of these, like interpreter history and adding pip to the stdlib.

On Windows it's even worse, newbies have to figure out how to get it in their path and hunt-down important libraries.
DragonRealms here. I spent more hours on that game than any since. Scripting ZMud was a strong early motivation to learn programming.
Want to innovate? Go remote
"Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."

So raise the IQ (didn't the western world "invent" this notion?) of a population so they can be replaced by machines (after all, what use does a government have for highly intelligent people but to put them to work)? Because evidently, this is happening in the western world as noted BI, hollywood, and the technologists of our day.

In a couple generations (60+ years), I think humanity might not be constrained by resources on this planent alone… after all, I think Elon and his partners/competitors are going to want to achieve 10x in a fraction of that time…
Voice commands and adorning one's face are both very physiologically charged acts.

Combining both in one device and topping it off with this photo, http://s831.us/ZJFtkm, Glass was just begging to be lampooned.
A lot of those are going to be replacements for existing Macs, however. (Mac user since original 128k.)
I've actually been using this to convert large PDF files to HTML to be displayed in-browser. It's for my work, so I don't feel comfortable posting a link to the demo instance here.

It is definitely the best solution I've found so far. The outputted HTML / CSS / images look almost identical to the source PDF. That being said, there are a few issues still:

* One Gigantic (600kb) CSS file from a single PDF

* Hundreds of individual fonts

* HTML semantics are non-existent

These are all relatively easy to fix, I believe. I have found my own solutions to most of the issues in post-processing.

Kudos to you, coolwanglu. Also, I'd like to get in touch with you about lending a hand to fix some of the issues I've encountered.

Thanks for a cool piece of software!
Most biographies of Feynman are really hagiographies of Feynman, who was no doubt a great showman. Here's a collection of his letters, which, despite revealing some personal flaws, show that he is wiser and more vulnerable than we imagine. Really underrated in my opinion.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465023711/

(The letters to family and Wolfram is also there.)

Another good one, in my opinion, is a rather raw portrait made from the vantage point of a student towards the end of Feynman's life. It's the unvarnished details that reveal the ordinariness and greatness of that physicist dude.

http://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Rainbow-Search-Physics-Vintag...

I think Feynman really believed that anybody could become as (wise? accomplished? happy?) as he, and I think most books don't do justice to that dream of his, by making him out to be some kind of trickster god.
Other nice ones:

http://vimeo.com/22439234

http://vimeo.com/51454212 (founder of ReadItLater/Pocket)
For this simple reason the Linux Foundation should stop wasting further energy for UEFI. As a Linux user from the very beginning (since 1992) I won't buy any UEFI device for Linux in general even if Linux would be 100% supported. I won't buy an expensive WinRT tablet just to put Linux on it.

When the Linux Foundation was founded I was happy to have a strong organization behind Linux. But today they make me really angry for supporting a system of someone who considered Linux, and the Open Source movement in general, as enemy. UEFI proves that they don't have changed their mind.

LF, please stop your unrealistic UEFI dreams, and please focus on the interests of the Linux community. I believe that most Linux users want functional hardware alternatives which will likely remain free from DRM restrictions. I would appreciate that even at the cost of incompatibility with the internet. In that case we would have to build our own new Internet, free from spam etc.

There are so many good devices like Raspberry and Beagleboard Black. They are powerful enough to be used as a desktop workstation when using a small and efficient Linux distro. Why not even enhance them with an e-ink display to make them a cheap alternative tablet pc that everyone can afford?

By the way, for the price of a single UEFI WinRT tablet we could build a whole server cluster of RPis or BBB.
I do hear this a lot, and I have no comprehensive experience with Dvorak, but as far as I know there is no real support for the premise that Dvorak makes you type faster, at least. I'll buy that your fingers might not tire as easily.
Except cash isn't trackable. How are you going to do this in a world where undeclared wallets are illegal?
This could be quite useful to students or those that order a bulk number of books regularly.

I would include the word 'country' in the title.

You should have a bottom line conversion into a currency that is understandable to the user so they can see the overall price difference. I know you highlight the cheapest - but it should be shown to the user so they know what the saving is.

Some improvements do need to be made as some prices were blank / not pulled through but when I checked directly they were significantly cheaper than the one that was highlighted.
It depends on how you define sales and who you are selling to: So in a B2B company you can be a soft spoken Bill Gates, but perhaps in a consumer company you need a bit of a showboat like a Steve Jobs. But also some companies don't really "do sales" in the traditional sense — think of a utility or a conglomerate as two examples where sales isn't something you directly manage. Also you have to scale, so the real sales effort could be as much in the HR level of things in terms of doing recruitment as in the actually selling of services or products.
I did not imply civil wars can't happen in the USA. I said that its not happening right now.

China does not own that much American debt, and has not been accumulating in the past few years. They have maybe 1.2 trillion out of the 15 trillion:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_S...

China moving away from US currency implies they don't want to trade with us - unlikely. But if they did do this, they'd sell the currency on the global market, the cost of the dollar would go down, and US exports would likely boom due to increased competitiveness. In other words, it remains in China's interests to keep their US reserves. And in everyone's interest -- as far as the numbers show, the safest asset on earth (as crazy as it sounds) is US government debt.
> the x-axis represents the bios-minutes (now bios-percentage), the y-axis the actual average lengths of that minute (percentage) in seconds

I'm confused. The BIOS clock is inaccurate? Or does this refer to "the data provided by the underlying power management system"?

Either way, I think it is a nice project. I would note that it is from 2008, as is custom.
Nice! working on something similar but not limited to Amazon stores only http://www.librarist.com/
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to be doing some traveling later this week & have been looking for some reading to take along!
I'm not really sure why, if at all, the origins of QWERTY layout matter.
Long range communication that travels faster than light should happen sooner than we can make ships that travel faster than light.

So if anything, we'll just get video-feeds from there, and just send robots.
It's an interesting genre, the time-lapse while pan in HD with hyperbolic music. But I'm just burned out on them. Something about these videos just seems overwhelmingly self important and cheesy.
Official Grand Theft Auto Playlists hit spotify and iTunes
If you’re an avid GTA fan like us, you will be pleased to hear that Rockstar have compiled an official set of playlists made available to iTunes and Spotify. The playlists gather a vast majority of the songs from each radio station featured in Grand Theft Auto IV, Episodes from Liberty City, San Andreas, Vice City and more.
>>But is vocational training adequate for a "career" that spans 40 or 50 years?

Not only that, but is vocational training adequate to create citizens equipped with the skills and knowledge to make them capable of analyzing the policy decisions voters in a modern democracy must consider? Some people will claim the traditional college system has failed in this regard, but they are confusing failure with lack of perfection. I'm sure not every citizen needs to go to college to have these skills, but I think most do, and this is especially important in regressive regions of the country.
I remember seeing your original post in December. One of the comments/suggestions was about the Ace editor (and not being able to choose a theme). I ended up making this on that day:

https://github.com/skratchdot/github-editor-theme.user.js

I have a few other user scripts that I like to use as well when browsing Github:

https://github.com/skratchdot/github-repo-filter-info.user.j...

https://github.com/skratchdot/github-repo-counts.user.js/

https://github.com/skratchdot/github-code-search.user.js/

https://github.com/skratchdot/github-get-missing-description...
> How old are those numbers?

Numbeo says it is up to date (April, 2013 for Houston data and May 2013, for Bangalore data). I feel that the (Bangalore) housing numbers are reasonably accurate because:
1. Data being crowd-sourced with no real incentive for contributors to lie;
2. Going by personal experience

> If you check out a property listing site: <http://www.magicbricks.com/propertyDetails/3-BHK-3000-Sq-ft-..., it says INR.60,000 which works out to approximately $1153.84 (around 52 rupees to a dollar). Obviously, numbeo.com has got the most important (housing) numbers wrong.

This is a texas sharpshooter argument. It is based on a single data point---which happens to be a 5-floor multi-storey apartment---which is hardly a representative sample of (single floor) 3-BHK apartments in central Bangalore. Claiming that numbeo has got housing numbers wrong by this one data point alone is ridiculous.
Theo de raadt already blasted Redhat and Ubuntu for instantly compromising and submitting to microsoft. Linux foundation non resistance makes no sense to me either since a lot of people who sit on the board are direct competitors to M$ you'd think they would want to save their companies from being at their mercy.

I'm waiting for when cloud o/s takes over that scans for pirate software/dissident behaviour or thought crime, and it becomes illegal to run your own operating system. There will be a Silk Road for computer hardware and guy's peddling BSD installs in dark alleys.
I can pretty much guarantee you Feynman didn't either -- when he was actually working with relativistic equations. The idea of a rest mass makes everything way, way simpler.

There was a Feynman quote in one of my physics texts that left a big impression on me -- basically saying that you shouldn't call yourself a physicist until you can understand the same physics using multiple models, gleaning insight from whichever is the most useful in context.
> That this situation is so common is a symptom of the fact that our cities and towns have been designed around driving.

I live outside Boston. Which was most certainly not designed for driving. And yet, my analysis holds there too.

> The geography of the US is a comparatively small factor, since (as you mention) most people here live in cities or suburbs.

I think you've taken what I said out of context. I went on to qualify that by saying those people, due to the lower overall population density, have a decent chance of knowing people in suburbs/rural areas that they visit.

> For these sorts of occasional needs, car sharing services work well.

In urban areas, yes. In suburb/rural areas, no. My friend had a similar dilemma, and her solution was to rent a car. Plausible, but is of varying pain depending upon use cases. Her use case was "I need a car infrequently but for long stretches of time."

> This assumes that the status quo doesn't already constitute legislating one group's cost/benefit analysis on everyone else.

No it doesn't. I said nothing about the status quo. I didn't even argue in favor of the status quo.

Do you acknowledge that geography plays a big role in the viability of cycling as a primary mode of transportation? From your response, I can only assume that you don't. If my assumption is right, then I suggest we focus the conversation on that.
Disruptions: New Motto for Silicon Valley: First Security, Then Innovation
Exactly. Would it have been as interesting if they all said "global warming"?
If you're looking for a specific pilot program for the affordable care act, how about the Massachusetts law? It's not quite as popular as medicare, and it looks like MA residents don't think the law is perfect, but they also seem to prefer it to not having it at all[1]. I don't think anyone who is serious is saying it is a failure.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/...
Yes, SVG is the perfect tool for this, and I bet there is no visualization library remotely as awesome as D3 for the desktop: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery
Can we please stop this?

Journalistic summaries, focusing on certain aspects, are not, never have been and never will be fucking “blogspam”. This complaining is annoying.
When an insurance company goes banktrupt, the owners don't suffer. The customers suffer.
Apparently you need "real research" before claiming it's more efficient to put the vowels on the home row rather than scattering them everywhere. It's a good thing that semicolon is right there though, it's totally used more frequently than the letter E.
This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size?

I don't know if responsive design is "hard" or not, but I observe that on the web, fixed widths are still incredibly common, and even major sites break easily. I visit Google, and if my window size is not at least one thousand pixels, the Sign In button is clipped and not initially visible. This would simply be considered a bug in a desktop app.

Besides, I always thought that layout was one of the weakest parts of HTML and CSS - witness the endless parade of hacks to achieve equal height columns.
For people interested in alternate mobile keyboards:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-minuum-keyboard-projec...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/24/kalq/

http://www.swype.com/

http://ok.k3a.me/
Good point. Using those terms, doing it around business units seems to be more harmful than doing it around an entire nation (or even just a state). Tying to a business/company means people themselves are artificially tied to a particular company when they might be better suited (talent/skills/lifeneeds) to be at a different company.
Except there would be no practical need for human intervention for space exploration either.. it was automated long before many other industries down on the Earth.
Thanks for the link to your analysis. Should give it a read :)
Let go of doing everything yourself: the power of online-collaboration
Along the same lines (same choice of backing track too in fact):
"View from the ISS at Night": https://vimeo.com/45878034
Chrome just gives me a warning. I verified this on Chrome 26 and Firefox 20, both work fine.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=180007 describes the issue, specifically mentioning raw.github.com, which I am using. I would guess you are using newer-than-stable browsers?
When those young people get old, they will have paid their fair share. The transition is of relatively minor importance.
While I was watching I couldn't tell (on some parts) how it was different from just filming. I understand there are probably differences with quality but beyond that? Not saying it wasn't good just might not be my thing.
call it "needless news aggregation and page view grabbing" then. on a site like hn, that acts as aggregator, one should always link the original source, not some third party piggybacking. those sites fight for page views, so the original creator should be rewarded.
Hey Justin66. Not true at all! Large corporations have to grapple with this and spend a fortune managing health care for employees. The interesting question is what % more might they pay in payroll type tax to move this onto the state.
Are you sure it was Dvorak that saved you the wrist pain? Also, every time you have to type on Qwerty, maybe it feels like doing finger gymnastic because your fingers aren't used to it?

For what is worth I've been finger typing on Qwerty for the last 11 years and I've never had wrist pain. My average is about 90 WPM when doing relaxed typing and over 120 when I stretch myself, and I never felt the need for going faster.

My main problem with Dvorak, that often goes unmentioned: it saves you finger stretches ONLY if you're typing English words, being optimized for English and my native language isn't English.

The keyboard for my native language is still Qwerty. The Dvorak-equivalent on the other hand is completely different from normal Dvorak.

Maybe Qwerty needs a replacement, but Dvorak ain't it.
Building Excel in the Browser
RubyMotion: Year One
Uh, I’m not saying the future isn’t now. I am saying that uploading one’s mind (in whatever form that will take place) will require much much more energy and complexity than currently available. In fact, I’d go so far to say that we find a way around relativity before we find a way to remodel the human brain – it is just so mind-boggingly complex, based on such difficult-to-simulate physics, that I don’t think it will be done any time soon.

And I fully agree with you on solar power, it is a wonderful thing, though Germany is possibly not the brightest place to put the largest installation in terms of energy output…
Could they really make the journey listed (San Fran to New York) with just 45 litres (~12 gallons) of ethanol with that vehicle?
That's pretty impressive whether or not it lives up to the safety considerations.