skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great!

Please consider doing Tokyo someday. The only offline routing app for Tokyo today is MetrO, which doesn't include a map nor timetables.
I've never understood all the salary-to-hourly conversion formulas. In my experience, they are different markets and different kinds of workers. It sounds like this particular formula roughly equates a $100/hr contractor (working at fulltime) as a $100k/year employee. Other people say that you should take your salary (in thousands) and then double it to get your freelance hourly rate, but to me that seems ridiculous. $100/hr sounds great to a 50k employee, but 50k sounds laughable to a $100/hr contractor. Others say to take your salary (in thousands) and add 20% overhead, but that still seems pretty ridiculous.

At more senior levels, it seems swapped. Contractor rates seem to have a pretty strong resistance point around $120/hr (if you go by a recent hacker new survey), I think partly because if you go above that point, that's what agencies and consultancy firms and teams tend to charge. Meanwhile, salaries for the same general technical fields seem to go higher than that pretty easily. I'm seeing 130k - 150k pretty commonly in java enterprise positions, more when you figure in bonuses with big companies.

Seems like people at around that level would be well-served to switch to daily or weekly billing, but when you're working with larger companies or vendors, that's a pretty big switch for them. I've tried that approach with a Very Large company and was shut down pretty quickly.
AppleTV doesn't compete with Android so they don't care.

Well, there is GoogleTV, but it's doing way worse than Windows Phone, so they don't care.
One issue is that, a lot of things can change during the 3-4 years of a typical university education.

Back then, I made the choice of not pursuing computer science because I entered university soon after the dot-com bust. I came from a third-world country, and the general theme then was that there wasn't much of a future in software engineering, that unemployment rates amongst programmers were horrendous. Which was true, back in 2005.

Wound up getting a different engineering degree. Things didn't turn out too bad, but in hindsight, I really wished I did go for that CS degree.
> Right now, though, d3.js gives me 80% of my income. It's something I like, and I noticed a lot of demand

Very interesting.

If you don't mind my asking, what kind of work are you typically doing with d3? Visualising what kind of data and for what purpose?
Ok. Thank you for the information. So as other commentators are saying, Google did not let MS access the youtube API, so does this app still in violation of TOS rules? Interesting moves from behemoths, specially considering MS's reply.
Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup
Easy: shake hands, always. Hugging is for close family.

I suspect that if someone I were in business with tried to hug me, we'd not be in business for very much longer.
Fat lotta good it does you if you're dead.
Perhaps it's time to revisit what the definition of fiat is and how that contrasts with a cryptocurrency like bitcoin.

Definition of FIAT
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiat

1: a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort

2: an authoritative determination : dictate <a fiat of conscience>

3: an authoritative or arbitrary order : decree <government by fiat>
>So yes, it does matter a lot to them that these eyes are no longer seeing ads that they previously would have

Then why don't they give access to the Youtube videos and ads API to Microsoft? Microsoft has stated that they're happy to add Google's ads if given access.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889
I agree with the author that pushing kids into STEM for STEM's sake is stupid. In particular, there is no shortage of scientists, which is why they work insane hours and make fast food wages well into their 30's. We already have enough people wasting their 20's on a PhD who will never get a tenure track faculty job as a full-time researcher. The current job:gradstudent ratio is untenable.

Want to make science attractive and more effective? Cut grad student enrollments in half and triple grad student pay so that it is comparable to what other STEM grads make in the workforce; in this case, choosing science would not be a major financial mistake, even for the masses who never get a faculty job. Professors would have fewer students, enabling better mentorship and improved job outlook for each graduate. Increase pay for professors so that they make money comparable to other highly educated professionals. Endow faculty chairs at major universities and set a mandatory faculty retirement age so that deadwood profs aren't hogging positions needed by rising stars. Mandate open publishing.

These changes could be implemented easily if legislatures and funding agencies wanted them, but nobody seems to want that. If the government wants people in science, they should spend money making it a better career, not spend money to slap a coat of marking gloss on a relatively bleak situation.
These Aren't Your Little Brother's Drones — Or Big Brother's Either
If I was a betting man, I'd say this is almost certainly a preemptive strike against something that Apple plans to release.
Discussion of Google's takedown notice is here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715168
Yes, it is. The very start of a session is usually synchronous (authentication, etc), but after that it is async. Request/response commands have an id value to link the request to the response so it doesn't matter if other data arrives first.
@cloudnine : But then it is the same app (YT), and same functionality being accessed. SO why is Google adamant on showing ads for WP users?
Seems reasonable. Worth the discussion at least. Thanks for responding to my comments.
You don't need a monopoly, just market power. And how the market is defined can be an interesting issue on its own, so I imagine it would be conceivable that YouTube _would_ be found to have a monopoly on "community contributed videos", or something along those lines. Google is obviously trying to leverage YouTube to hurt a competitor's phone ecosystem, so this hardly seems far-fetched.
I wonder if Bill Gates was involved in this idea. He has the level of cunning needed to pull this off.

Using Google's pretense of "openness" against itself.
I liked this talk, aptly titled as "What you learn by doing". It reinforced the idea that side projects are very important and, that is what would allow to build a strong technical foundation. The story of Ankit and Akshay is certainly inspiring.
Blowing something up--even for only the sake of seeing what happens (exclusive of malicious intent)--is at it's core a scientific endeavor. From DNLee at the Scientific American blog[1]:

>I can’t name a single scientist or engineer, who hadn’t blown up, ripped apart, disassembled something at home or otherwise cause a big ruckus at school all in the name of curiosity, myself included. Science is not a clean. It is very messy and it is riddled with mistakes and mishaps.

I think it's time we start making a distinction between an explosion which is made with the motivation of violence and destruction, and just explosions.

[1]: http://goo.gl/8Lpp2
Sorry if that part wasn't clear, but people chose to go to this college for self-improvement or "life of the mind" or somesuch, and worrying about job skills was not a priority. My point is that even these idealists knew what they were getting into. Personally, I learned a lot before college and outside of class, and started work as a full-time software engineer two days after graduation.
> Is there a particular reason you chose iOS for your first releases over Android?

This article answers that question pretty well: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/18/wheres-twitter-music-for-an...

I personally think there's a huge opportunity there for skilled Android developers. After someone else does the market validation and first few releases, you can just steal all that work for free and make an Android app that does the same thing.
Programmer, artist, technical writer, etc.
To be as blunt as possible, if you take "blowing stuff up" off the table of inquiry then you are stunting intellectual curiosity by an enormous degree.

Lest we forget, the most prestigious prizes in all of science, the Nobels, were created by a man who invented explosives.
> Do you honestly think governments around the world are just going to stand around while people start ditching their currency systems?

Obviously this isn't true of every government, but America is a representative democracy: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The interests of its government and the interests of its people are one and the same.
Solution: Fist Bump
I donated, too, I believe the plan from the start to convert it into an educational trust.
Thanks for the feedback, these two ideas are interesting !
This is amazing. A pity it's not organized for vundle/pathogen, but that can be fixed.
> no, they couldn't do it without breaking the XMPP.

Why not? XMPP is pretty extensible, and Google's Jingle spec was open. Is there a technical reason that Hangouts had to be based on something other than Jabber?
This is what I was hoping Hangouts would be, almost. There's a couple things there I wouldn't expect Google to do, and that I wouldn't miss too much. But you're right, Apple is close and I just wanted Google to do exactly what they've done, without the complaints people have with syncing (which is something Google are awesome at anyway) and across devices. They came so close, but lack of SMS means it's not really uniting anything. It's just another option for a way to communicate with some, but not all people. So close, but so far.
I don't understand intrinsic value. Copper can be used in useful things that improve our lives, which I claim is what gives it its "intrinsic" value. Bitcoin improves my life in ways that other currencies can't, so doesn't it also have intrinsic value?
Sure government wields tremendous power, but to shut down all exchanges would require an even greater amount of cooperation between governments which seems unlikely. Granted, they can make it illegal to use Bitcoin in your country which effectively renders it useless (or at least very risky) to you, but I don't think that necessarily kills Bitcoin.
Maybe you just dont care. "Some amount of bullshit" does not include working a shop of 80 developers where you are the only one who speaks english in the office.

"Some amount of bullshit" does not include mostly flat salaries for 10 years across the board.

"Some amount of bullshit" does not mean disappearing health plans

"Some amount of bullshit" does not include your new job (youre a LEAD!) of sitting on the phone trying to talk to a team in India or China who have no idea what they are doing and will get you fired when they dont deliver anything

"Some amount of bullshit" does not include zero job training and the stripping of engineering culture where we train people from the ground up and theres a career path vs companies "only hiring seniors", so they can crap on them

"Some amount of bullshit" does not mean a total breakdown of development discipline in the name of test driven development, scrum, lack of design, phony QA cycles and end results that not even a mother could love.

This is supposed to be a profession. It is barely any longer what I would call a profession.
As I go through a store using this app, a storekeeper stops me, concerned that I'm just using his store for "showcasing". Luckily I'm able to explain to him how the app is helping me not buy many of his products. Once he learns this, he is much relieved and lets me go on my way.
I saw this with Aaron Swartz's death.
Everyone says this, and I have repeated the mantra, but I am curious how one would go about following a trail of bitcoin transactions. Lets say you intercept a drug deal, know the final bitcoin address that money goes into. So you have that info.

You can also follow the trail back arbitrarily far getting address after address. How does this net you anyone more information? How would you 'convert back' into a human name or address?
It actually is very interesting move to pull. The reply is just so elegant, it is beautiful. They were being strangled by Google, there are no Google apps on MS platforms (WP or OS). And on a day of Larry Page's rheotoric about being friendly to each other. This is Oh Snap moment.
The title of the article is incorrect, charges are not being dropped.

Diversion is a plea bargain in which you plead guilty to the charges and receive probation. If you meet probation terms such as random drug testing and so forth, then your conviction record is "erased". Sometimes how this is handled procedurally is the signed guilty plea is held in a separate file and not entered into the main system, and at the end of diversion the file stays in the separate file if you have complied with all terms, or is entered into the main system if you haven't complied with all terms.

Calling this "dropping charges" couldn't be further from the truth - this is a forced guilty plea. Since she "signed the agreement", the matter is over - she has admitted to charges and is legally guilty and has received probation, and that's the end of it.
I'm starting to wonder whether there should be a version of Godwin's Law for Hacker News: As any thread mentioning PHP progresses, the probability of a poster mentioning "A Fractal Of Bad Design" approaches 1.
> Why no Android support?

See http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/18/wheres-twitter-music-for-an...

Personally, I'm happy with the Google Maps app. Its biggest issue seems to be that no one is aware of its extensive directions capabilities, particularly for public transit.
Thanks. I'm not so much looking for an article, though. I've started asking this in each "new app" thread on HN that pops up. Eventually I'll post a compilation so we can see what real developers from lone devs to teams actually have to say.
Perfect example of stacking the deck in your favour. If Google says no, they look like hypocrites who aren't practising what they preach. Very gutsy move Microsoft, well played.
I suspect that this year Apple will soon release hardware and software that will leverage all those iTunes credentials to provide something similar.

However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :)

The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!
It is a strange world we live in when making Drano bombs at a high school is compared to the work of Alfred Nobel.
Regis University offers an online BS in CS. I don't think it is a top 15 school, but it is ABET accredited. The only problem is tuition is $410 a credit hour, so they estimate a total cost of anywhere from 10k to 50k. http://regis.edu/CPS/Academics/Degrees-and-Programs/Undergra...
MSN is dead, Microsoft migrated users over to Skype.
Even if all the online exchanges close down, there will always be people willing to exchange Bitcoins for cash with their friends and family.
.. isn't WWDC soon?

Wait for the product refresh, if you can!
This seems like such an obvious thing for Facebook to do - any guesses as to why they haven't?
PackageKit, AppStream and Listaller – A status report
>If I were to shut down every bitcoin exchange (either through extreme legal, violent or economic means), I'd easily kill bitcoin overnight, mostly through destroying trust and inciting fear in adopters than from actually stopping exchange.

Like the RIAA, MPAA and US government did to bittorrent?

Yes, such an event would impact the exchange rate and perhaps even the liquidity of bitcoin to some degree, but it is not possible to destroy its utility.

I am the guy with the nuke. As a citizen of a representative democracy I would vote against any politician who favored the abolition of useful technology. Even if I disagree with the politics of that technology.
I know that in this unfair world, we should be happy enough that her life has been spared and that she can live the life of an average teen, whether it's in science or not. But in my Hollywood version of life, this day will be a poignant flashback 10 years later when Kiera invents cold fusion.
Engineering is not computer science.

A sane engineer don't pick technology based on what is most theoretically pure, but based on what can deliver on the requirements on time and on budget.

If you are building a simple CRUD style application, for example, there's likely nothing in your technical requirements that precludes PHP in any way. Then the question turns to ease of deployment and maintenance, operational costs, cost and availability of developer time, and there PHP tends to score quite well, not least because there's a huge pool of relatively skilled engineers that know it.

I personally prefer Ruby and don't like writing PHP at all, but I'd be a horrible engineer if I wrote it off in situations, where, e.g., it is hard to hire Ruby developers at a reasonable price, or there's a lot of existing PHP knowledge within a team that is already in place.
Twice.

Sorry. You just made me laugh out loud.
We get requests for PHP all the time. In Urs' presentation today, the audience response at I/O was the strongest for three things specifically - open signups for GCE, sub-hour GCE billing, and GAE support for PHP.

Slamming PHP is akin to slamming the x86 instruction set. It's besides the point. There are so many large "apps" that effectively use PHP as asm; we need to have a solution for customers that want to run open source CMS:es and CRM:s, for example, and this is all Wordpress, Drupal, SugarCRM, MediaWiki, Joomla etc.

And there are a LOT of startup companies building in PHP, believe it or not. PHP on the server is akin to Javascript on the client. You can argue that Erlang or Go is better, fine, but the reality is that most web sites are PHP. And similar to what happened with V8, there is a significant industry effort in just accepting this and making PHP run faster and better. We don't want you to compare GAE/PHP with GAE/language_X. You should compare GAE/PHP with [other platform]/PHP, and see if you like what we've done. And we're doing some cool stuff with it. We are working to support PHP code better than any alternative. We expect PHP developers to love it. But we're not doing it in order to advocate (or not advocate) PHP per se. You don't like PHP? Then move along, there's nothing to see here.

And as for the "small $5-6 dollar sites" (or free), that doesn't matter. Many of the apps running on GAE are within the free tier, which is one of the great things about the platform. So that's not news. Part of the GAE vision has always been to offer a place on the web to run small web apps for free.
we're a PayPal customer and we've got a dedicated account manager that responds pretty quick and provides great communication.
@iamshs where you found info that Google forbidden MS to use YouTube API? I only read that MS said that Google didn't help them and that they don't have access to metadata. But I never found direct wording "forbidden MS to use YouTube API" or similar.
Can you share with info where somebody from MS says that Google forbidden them to use YouTube API?
No it really isn't. At least not for me. Slooooow as all get out even with every tweak I could find. I hate the interface too.
Right, so here's the problem in a nutshell: You can produce as many STEM graduates as you want, but those STEM jobs are going to continue to be unfilled because the job offers don't come with a a market-clearing salary.

STEM graduates (both undergrad and grad) wake up the day after graduation and start looking for a job. What do they find? Well, if they are smart (and, they probably are, because they just graduated with a STEM degree) and have one or two other skills outside the STEM degree, they find that there are people who are willing to pay them an incredible amount of money to do "not-science" and a middling amount of money to do "is-science." There are actually plenty of US-born STEM graduates created each year who leave their field to do something more lucrative.

Take a look as these statistics from the American Physical Society: http://www.aps.org/careers/statistics/index.cfm

Almost a third of people graduating with a Bachelor's in Physics work in some field that is unrelated to science, technology, math or engineering! In other words, by just paying market-clearing salaries, we could increase the number of physics graduates entering the workforce each year by a whopping 50%! That could happen tomorrow, not twenty years from now when today's kindergarteners finally get through the pipeline.

Pushing more students into a STEM track won't reduce the number of unfilled STEM positions: It will reduce the average salary of the STEM graduates who leave for other fields. With enough pushing, you might, maybe, one day push the salary low enough that graduates remain in STEM. Or, you could just increase the salary of those unfilled STEM positions.
Ruby and Default Arguments
Microsoft Lync has an XMPP gateway role as well. Unfortunately, Lync Online (Office 365) lacks this ability.
Here[1] is the link to the original article, which shows sources.

Here[2] is an article in Runner's World which discusses some studies and provides more links to balance the story.

tldr; The headline of the article is sensationalized.

[1] http://articles.elitefts.com/training-articles/women-running...

[2] http://www.runnersworld.com/health/how-does-endurance-traini...
Yes. They committed an illegal act; now they are being sued over it.

They're being sued in civil court because this would be laughed out of criminal court.

So yes, this is a HIPAA violation, probably of unprecedented size and scope.

You don't have any idea whether or not this is a HIPAA violation, so stop pretending like you do.

1. The law makes clear exceptions for information gathered during the course of an investigation.

2. Health information is supposed to be encrypted in transit or at rest, so if the company was in compliance, there's a distinct possibility that the data isn't even accessible.

The government routinely intercepts information that it can't use
in court because of the way it was obtained. They use it as a starting
point. If someone has told their psychiatrist that they were embezzling
funds, for example, and this was in their records, they could use that
information to know where to begin looking and prosecute a crime that
they would not have otherwise known about.

Citation?

I'll leave it to the courts to determine the outcome, but I predict this is the last we hear of this.
Sorry, I cannot even take that comment seriously.
This article is either pseudo-science at best and sexist garbage at worst. I'll be generous and call it the former.

See, I've done 9 Ironmans, and coached several athletes doing them as well, so I know a thing or two about cardio. And I know a heck of a lot of women who regularly do them as well. This just in: they are not fat. Many were heavier when they started, some of them turned lean-and-mean, while others slimmed down and toned up.

Women: yes, run. Yes, bike, yes, swim. Do crossfit. It's good for you, just like you thought it was.

There is an OLD saying that says "diet is for weight control, exercise is for fitness". What this guy is describing is people who are increasing their calorie load (particularly the carb part of it) proportionally to their calorie needs. So they don't lose weight.

Mid-aerobic exercise increases metabolic rate specifically because it tunes your body to better metabolize FAT. That's how getting fitter works. You can oxidize more fat over a period of time. More fat oxidation means more ATP means more fitness/speed/endurance/whatever. All of that takes calories.
I wonder about the morality of this move. They basically replicating venmo exactly. I know it's legal if there isn't a patent, but it sure feels bullyish to me.