skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Optimizing career options
I will in not very long get a Ph.D. degree in physics. The degree has involved plenty of numerical work and statistics, and 80-90% of my work has involved programming in some way. I have a few programming courses from my undergrad days, but that's it. Recently, because of the scarcity of permanent research positions and the suck-ity of the quality of life before such a position becomes an option, I have considered making an effort to enter the tech world (preferably working for some software company or similar). I am taking concrete steps in this direction - learning new languages, taking on other programming tasks, trying to get involved with open source as well as reading up on theory. As of now, though, I cannot by any means consider my self a 'well-rounded' programmer. Still, I am 70-80% certain I will not pursue a further career in the academic world.

However, I now have the following dilemma: I might be able to get a post doc. in Oxford or at Caltech after my Ph.D. My question is then: Would it further a non-academic software career more to 1) Get a (programming-heavy) post doc. in one of these institutions or 2) Quit the academic world after my Ph.D. and apply for jobs? I have attempted to set up some pros and cons for the case where I continue with a post doc:

Pros:
-Have more time to develop my 'resume' - i.e. open source contributions, broader experience, filling in the holes.
-Have more time to actually decide whether I want to leave the academic world or not.
-Get a better overview of what options I realistically have.
-Get a well-known institution on my resume.
Cons:
-Two-three years of working with something that I as of now am leaning towards not working with anymore - feels like a 'dead end'.
-Lower salary than what I probably otherwise would get.

I suppose much of the question revolves around the "Get a well-known institution on my resume" and "Building a broader portfolio"-pros. How important are they?
New Bitcoin focused fund launchd today
Moving beyond window.onload()
Exhibit A: How fast Digg came back into the index, a smaller site would never have come back as fast.
It's really easy. As he said, the only real difference between a webpage and a FirefoxOS app is the manifest.

I made a small Pomodoro app (https://github.com/worldsproject/pomos) as a test for learning the Chrome Web Store and FirefoxOS markets.

Chrome disallows some things, in my case localStorage, and replaces it with their own alternative. While not major, I still had to make adjustments. I also had to define a window. Again, not minor, but these still keep it sufficiently different from a normal webpage.

Whereas with the firefox app, I just had to write a manifest, and it worked without any changes.

The Chrome store is a bit more refined though, it has better and more options for displaying promotional graphics, and looks better overall.
You're correct.

Bug is in 2.6.37-3.8.8, fixed in 3.8.9.

http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v3.8.9/kernel/events/core.c#L5331
I got the following (-O6 -fstrength-reduce). A single arithmetic shift is no good, so the code adjusts the value first.

movl	%eax, %esi
sarl	$31, %esi ; ESI = FFFFFFFF (-) / 00000000 (+)
shrl	$28, %esi ; ESI = 0000000F (-) / 00000000 (+)
addl	%eax, %esi ; offset to cancel invalid values
sarl	$4, %esi ; shift

It first generates an offset value in ESI: 15 if the value to divide was negative, or 0 if it was positive.

Then it adds this to the original value. This is the cunning part - well I think so anyway. It ensures that for the values where x>>4 would give the wrong value (i.e., -15<=x<0), x is made positive and smaller than 16, so that x>>4 gives the correct value of zero. For all other values, the bottom 4 bits don't affect the result of the division, so it's fine to offset them as well.

(Don't think I've ever seen VC++ generate anything like this, but I'd pretty much always have an explicit shift rather than a divide by 16 so maybe it does and I'd just never noticed. The choice of 16 usually comes from having some 4-bit field somewhere, and when dealing with bitfields you're best off using bitwise instructions.)
Presumably management can (and should) drill down. I suppose it stops middle managers from covering their asses with excuses like "Yeah, I said there was a risk of it all exploding, in paragraph 3 of Appendix II".

If they find out something important was left out, they know there was an attempt to hide it.
I mean, the fix consists in making sure that attr.config has all the 64 bits cleared -
on the 64 bit machines, int is 64bit, so u64 == int, and all the bits are correctly handled.
on 32 bit machines, int is 32bit, and the top 32 bit of attr.config is not cleared.

I may be wrong though, as I didn't scan through all the affected code.
That is the usual practice in countries like France, where new hires are on a trial basis for a period of one to six months (all other things being equal, the trial period only means that both the employee and the employer may terminate the contract at the end of the period with minimal administrative fuss).
I've always thought of it as "useful" / "not useful".

(What's the difference between thinking a comment is "wrong" and disagreeing with it?)
I stand corrected. It looks like 23andme is testing for just a few high-penetrance but uncommon mutations that are mostly only of interest to Ashkenazi Jews.
I get "* RuntimeError Exception: Connection adapter not supported: PostGIS" when trying to use groupdate.

I am using Postgresql with Postgis.

Is there a workaround?
I'm not sure if I'd say he did too much due diligence, or not enough due diligence.
I've set up my own local dev environment on a couple machines. If you're talking about a dedicated server, I haven't ventured there yet. In due time, though, I will.
Java is a damn memory hog, but for server-side kind of stuff, not really slow.
I just tried it on a 64bit machine and it works.
UN urges people to eat insects to fight world hunger
I always have this in my head:

http://xkcd.com/810/
The pop up window of your site is quite annoying
I just ran the exploit on a 64bit machine and it worked as expected, I got root privileges.
You have to click the invite email and attach your account rather than just going to the panel.
Did they give any indication of how they're going to solve it?

Hopefully something as 'simple' as USD charges getting sent to my GBP account, taking a forex hit along the way. I'd rather that than the red tape of setting up a US account.
Nature on climate change and biodiversity loss
Offer HN: Javascript code-read
If you can only see US and Canada your account isn't beta activated, when this happened to me I emailed support and they responded with a new beta key within the hour.

Stripe really is great, it's easy to implement onsite & doing away with merchant accounts. The first site I built with it has been happily taking live orders for over a week with no problems.
It's increasingly possible to write Rust code without needing the runtime at all; this is what's enabling the current effort to rewrite the runtime from C++ to Rust itself. However, there are some restrictions imposed if you choose to shed the runtime: no use of garbage-collected pointers, and concurrency will be either unavailable or somewhat restricted (i.e. mapping tasks to OS threads rather than green threads).

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/3608

Writing the Go runtime in Go would require the similar ability to do without all the services that are currently provided by the runtime. That is, unless you want your runtime to recursively require itself to infinite depth. :) I'm sure it's theoretically possible, but considering that two of the language's largest selling points are concurrency and memory safety via GC, a theoretical runtime-less dialect of Go would be so near to C that it might not really be worth the effort.
Let's acknowledge that people are being idiots about this, then.
Using bit fields in C#
If drones are illegal, then only criminals will use them
It's more akin to saying "Antibiotics for every cold and allergy needs to die", which, is true.

The other poster said the meme needs to die, not all preventative medicine.
Its the cheapest phone in the "Unlocked Phones" category and doesn't have a network.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?bbn=2407749011&qid=136...
Gonzo video with PhoneGap's Andre Charland and Brian LeRoux
Bunnie is one of the most interesting people on the internet.
His naming conventions are splendid.
DHLs hidden dev page, not so hidden
Xively Actually Connects Things In The Internet Of Things
But sometimes we discover the math to support we discover the physics. Knowing the physics alone is less useful (but not useless) than knowing the underlying mathematical relationship of the physics.
y'know, we're supposed to have a common single market here in EU (and especailly within the eurozone). But it just seems like there is all these little examples of it not being a single market. ☹
Except that Java code typically runs as fast or faster in the JVM than compiled Go code[1]. Of course, Go is still new and gc and gcc-go will be optimized further.

But Java bytecode execution is definitely not slow and usually within 2x the execution time of a C implementation, which is faster than the vast majority of other language implementations.

[1] At least in the language benchmarks game. Yes, I know that microbenchmarks are not representative, etc. etc. etc. (Until your favorite language is faster ;).)
This is less amenable to a rainbow attack than cracking RSA. When cracking RSA you have to factorise a number N into P.Q, so you only have to check up to sqrt(N). With this, you have to get 3 numbers, and check up to N/3.
Writing a Vi-like Graphics Editor in Racket
Javascript primitives (number, string, boolean) are always copied, the remaining (object, function) are passed by reference (arrays are objects). Similar to Java.
I would like to hear more about the technical implementations from the author on how he managed to improve performance. He mentions: "Due to the complex nature of the system this script could take up to three minutes to scan nodes and process the results" but how does Go solve this complex system that Python couldn't? 3 minutes to 1 second is a superb improvement.

The second paragraph reads like: replacing a relational DB with a (in memory?) key value store resulted in more throughput. He implemented it in Go, but he could have implemented it in any other language.

What I want to know is how he convinced management to use Go? Where did he find the programmers? I work in a similar environment and I don't see my firm adopting Go any time soon, although I wished they had as I'm a big fan of Go and believe it has a place especially server side processes (e.g. algo trading, market data feeds) where concurrent connections are prevalent.
It's not that hard to port it to 32 bits, just hang on week or two. I'm just too lazy.

IGjDf1e4eQxWyBFArYM8HgvCuns6p+GbfHoE3SPxYV59kXnA12BWdMr6D5eAAFgtBSX+/Yi+vLxMmEiszkwHLCA=
Odd, nearly everyone I know pronounces it "sequel" (including "my sequel" and "sequel server". The only people I interact with who spell it out are people who don't really know what it is, so it's kind of a warning flag when someone says it that way.

Is this wishful thinking on your part or a regional (Boston) thing?
I was chatting to my mid-80's grandmother only recently when she casually mentioned that she had all her (still relatively healthy) teeth removed before her wedding, essentially as a benefit to her husband-to-be as the above post suggests.

My grandmother made it sound like it was a standard thing to do here in Australia in the 1930s/40s - whereas I'm still shaking my head.
Being able to just walk away/disappear is worth more than the cost of paying for the drinks. Bundling the first round of drinks to make that easier seems like a great idea.
This is a good post. I had similar credentials coming out of school last year (but I did graduate with a CIS degree). I have a strong (maybe stronger than CS) background in finance, but I love programming. I was hired in less than a month as a PHP Dev (I have ~ 3 years PHP experience), making a decent living. Most of my interviewers seemed to be looking for a strong grasp of the fundamentals (particular languages didn't really matter as much as understanding OOP concepts and SDLC stuff), as well as a desire to learn and get better. I completed a lot of programming logic tests - mainly a bunch of pseudocode - during my interviews, which I assume tell a lot more about the quality (or potential) of a programmer than writing an actual program.

I can't be sure that any of this is true... It's just what I took away from a recent, similar situation.
Yep, this is the French version, albeit we also have larger ones:

http://photo.europe1.fr/infos/faits-divers/eboueur-proprete-...
No, int is the same size on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux:
sizeof(int) == 4
sizeof(long) == 4 (32-bit), 8 (64-bit)
sizeof(long long) == 8
"Why was the contest only between Romney and Obama?"

This is why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post#Effect_on_p...

"Why do you have to be uber wealthy to run in a country ruled "by the people"?"

Because of the logistical costs of running an election. Though, technically, you don't need to be uber-wealthy, you just need enough donors. Obama is not that wealthy.

"The U.S's primary problem seems to be that it has transformed into (or perhaps always was) a corporate run oligarchy. Except it walks around saying it's a democratic republic..."

It's not an oligarchy. There's a perception that wealth is what give people a political voice but that's only true up to a point. Yes, you need money to run a newspaper, buy campaign ads, or higher a lobbyist, but that's true in any country (that allows those things.) But the fact is that politics is quite a bit more subtle. US politics is driven primarily by groups of extremely dedicated voters who vote narrowly on an a small range of cultural issues which they perceive as moral issues and upon which they cannot compromise: guns, abortion, marriage. This leads to some ridiculous factionalism, which means subtler issues get ignored.
It's good to see that they've found something useful to do with the resources previously committed to Reader.
Only it's the reverse. Java runs faster than Go.
Show HN: I Redesigned the WordPress Post Admin
Inspired by Ghost (which got a lot of feedback on here) I thought I would try to redesign the WordPress Post Admin page. I'm intrigued to find out what people think.
Michelangelo phenomenon
$45 million in cash stolen? That's chump change
I sure hope so, that man inspired me to be the engineer/hardware hacker I am today.
Are there any usefull resources for learning the statistic methods needed for A/B test evaluation for beginners?
save you from dying of hunger

The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it.

So stop spreading disinformation

I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.

Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
unfortunately this is so true.
Compile everything to MSIL (or Java) bytecode. Apparently the time saved on syscalls and on not using some of the hardware memory protection features is enough to compensate for the type-safety overhead, so it's not even slower.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
Generally, maybe. My friend had this surgery recently and she had to fight (her insurance company) for it.
I think you have a good background for a junior developer job, and I think you'd be a good hire for the right kind of company, most likely a smaller one that's interested in helping develop your skills. If you're not getting good feedback, you're probably applying for the wrong types of companies, or through the wrong venues, such as a recruiter or HR. You might get further by networking, blogging, and continuing to release projects on Github.
Awesome. Congrats on the job. It's nice to hear from someone who was in a similar situation (fairly) recently.
He was still doing philanthrophic stuff well before stepping down, and it was that much easier to do because he'd stuck with making MS a success first. One can have multiple passions in life, and still prioritize attention to each.
New Internet Startup, Directory..
Sure. I would hire myself ;)

I was in the same boat in 2006. Non-CS degree and was learning html/css and PHP.

Now I do mostly Ruby, JS and system admin at startups.

Be humble, work hard and try to learn as much as possible.

Without a CS degree, I know its easy to feel like an impostor sometimes but carry on, dont give up!

The absolute best devs I have ever worked with were non-CS dropouts. Learned a ton from those guys.

You will do fine!
If anyone is interested, I've posted some of my observations using the Peak https://gist.github.com/cheeaun/5517132
It's not by any means "less verbose than Python".

Can you write any program in Go that cannot be written in less lines (often half) in Python?
How to Read Picasa 3.9 Database and extract faces data
Well said! I am in complete agreement. Why are we blaming tools when it's the presenters fault themselves for not being able to present? If your staff can't articulate his/her idea properly, train them. Not everyone knows everything right off the bat.
The US has for many decades been either the most powerful entity in the world, or close to being such. As such, it has both been one of the greatest forces for good in the world and one of the greatest forces for evil. That latter point should not be forgotten, even by those who think -- as I do -- that the evil is far outweighed by the good.
The big thing is not this phone, it's the chip.

The chip(MT6250) is a processor for feature phones which includes 260 mhz arm7 cpu,8Mbyte
of ram , dsp,bluetooth,2.5G and All kinds of IO. It can run games on a touchscreen phone.

And it costs $2 in large volumes. This is much less than many microcontrollers who offer much less capability. And with such performance and memory , it can support much better languages and tools, faster time to market, and more complex systems, for cheap.

Also , this chip uses 2 different silicon pieces(one for processor and one for ram), for very low cost, instead of what we do today: build different stuff on the same silicon piece and compromise performance and cost and development time along the way. This could open the way to a lot of innovation.
Of course with that fantastic price you get: http://i.imgur.com/qBes7dk.jpg

And no, that's not a Blade Runner screencap. That's Beijing.
Until about three weeks ago I had no idea one of the engineers on our team was even talking about the web server/engine component when he was talking about "Engine X" and as far as I could tell we were using something called "N Jinx".

A lot of cross-purpose conversations were had. I assumed he had written some component of his own called engine X.
what type of network does tracfone use? gsm? cdma?
Analysis: just how big is Jackson’s Smaug?
Garbage Collection in Java (part 3)
DemoJS 2013
I thought this was already know, been using in a pet project for a few years, though I don't use numbers near infinity and with that you have to give the chap credit as it is due. Shame it is not a prime number of pages as well and simpler in explanation.

Maybe for his next paper he could do:

"Every even number greater than five is the sum of three primes and one" Though one is a funny prime and with that I did not say four primes too keep the peace. Can reference his previous paper and with that get two papers for less than 134 pages compared to only one proof for 133 pages.

No I can't say what my pet project is, not everybody does lottery tickets ;).
If you want to approach physics from a mathematical background I strongly recommend Peter Szekeres' book 'A Course in Modern Mathematical Physics'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0521829607/ref=redir_mdp_mob...
"Excellent tooling"; from the article.

What does he mean? I've searched the Go websites but it seems all Google gives you is the Go compiler and a tour.
Simple Things Make Me Happy
OTOH, if those living "sheltered lives" do not have this "melodramatic" sense of purpose and passion for changing the world, then who will help those being killed, raped, enslaved, etc?
CVE-2013-2094
I hope you’re not suggesting that that phone cost less than $8 to make. Products get sold at a loss, all the time. Often, prices are lowered because the product just didn’t work out (like the HP Touchpad) or it’s replaced by a newer model. Other times, it’s part of the strategy (like the Kindle Fire or Gilette safety razors).
Well, I don't know the ins and outs, but that's what came from the ministry of Finance, IMF and OECD economists. I suppose they know what they're talking about. IIRC France state spendings represent more than 40% of GDP.
I would definitely take it under consideration. What financial degree do you possess? I'd imagine with your previous education that you would be well suited in the financial industry (whether it be stock trading, banking or even healthcare).

The only bit of advice I would suggest is that you consider the technology stacks used by such (or other large) companies. I'd definitely look at acquiring experience with a VM framework (ex. .NET or Java) as you can benefit from that knowledge using multiple programming languages and many companies prefer such experience.

Alternatively you should also consider doing some certifications - especially for junior roles. The next best thing to employed experience is freelance/consultation experience. I personally prefer if candidates do have experience freelancing as it indicates a certain level of competence in multiple areas (project management, planning, delivery, communication etc.). If you are good enough as to bill for your time, then so should any company planning on hiring you :)
A million dollars makes me happy :)
JSF 2.2 Stateless views explained
Its an unlocked GSM handset - so you just need a sim card.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_C139
Minimal explanation (allegedly by author "sd") at: http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/121616/semtex.c
Go here - https://www.digitalocean.com/ - and pony up the $5.

Then go here - https://library.linode.com/ - and start getting familiar.