skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the header picture in the article is terrible. of course that kind of "open office" is awful.

1) looking at your (single) monitor, you have 4 to 5 people inside your field of vision. talk about distraction city.

2) no desk space. bad for ergonomics, and no "thinking space" either.

3) no personal space. stretch our arms to your sides, and you'll whack your coworker's head.

talk about cramming them in like sardines. i run my office as an "open plan" but we have a good 1.5 meters separating people, and people are either facing wall, or window. (not facing each-other)
Sigh.

What I wrote about the Google i/o fail applies just fine here.
http://www.michaelw.net/google-io-fail/

This is a classic case of optimizing the wrong problem.

The notion of first-come first-served makes almost no sense in an oversubscribed internet queue. It’s one thing to serve the first person standing in line outside a store, it’s another thing to pretend that this is meaningful when the queue is 100,000 people around the world all of whom were all in line at 10:00:00am.

It would have been more fair, less annoying and generally less embarrassing to formally recognize that this is effectively a random lottery. As such, have everyone pre-register over a period of days or weeks and then on the magic day, randomly select winners.

My rant appeared to help. I received an invite a month later.
Why do you say so? Crashplan lets you have your own clientside keys that never leave your computer.

Crashplan does dedupe and compression but has UNLIMITED storage/bandwidth for one price.
Having worked with both php and javascript I can definitely see how the syntax alone with node.js would be a breath of fresh air to someone used to PHP. Modern frameworks like Laravel do a lot of good to smooth things out but PHP's implementation of anonymous functions, for instance, feels like such a kludge compared to javascript.
Yep, this is a hard problem. I wasn't super enthusiastic about the verbosity of option types when I first started programming OCaml, but almost two years later I'm quite convinced that they're the right way to do things. I really don't think there's a whole lot of downside, and being able to basically just not think about a large and hard-to-identify class of bugs is incredibly freeing.

This may not cover your use cases, but for cascading errors you can often write code something like the following:

match
foo_err ()
>>=? bar_err
>>=? baz_err
[... etc ...]
with
| Error e -> Log.error e
| Ok result ->
[...]

This ends up working pretty well when you're working with pure functions because there's not anything to unwind, but you're right that it doesn't solve all problems.

If you're interested in talking to more people about this kind of thing, the Core mailing list might be a good place to try: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/ocaml-cor...
50's-60's in the US Military Industrial Complex seem like one hell of a period. Just think of the SR-71, first Keyhole satellites, Apollo - so much innovation over a couple of decades. It just seemed like an era with no imposed limits, a technological free for all where anything is justified in the name of beating the commies.
What kind of insurance?
I'll do it for free. In fact, I will pay YOU for the privilege of helping you out.
I wouldn't name and shame them. Then any company seeing you do that would be fearful if they're late on a payment they'll be embarrassed publicly. If they pay you in 90 days I don't think it's too sleazy. My condo board used to prioritize bills by late fees (or lack thereof). Just the way it is.
Same, I'm wondering what kind of bug makes that happen.
Yes, every particle crossing the copper can create an anomalous signal that can switch a 0 to 1 or visa versa. If you have enough of those, the program(s) will eventually crash. On the processors themselves the L1/L2 caches are vulnerable, but beyond that, the ROM could also get corrupted making hard resets impossible even after a crash.

Fiber optic cables aren't immune to this either :
http://misspiggy.gsfc.nasa.gov/tva/meldoc/cabass/rad.htm
I don't understand your problem with a basic income guarantee. You say that it is unhelpful, but it is a very clear description of the mechanics of redistribution. It is much easier to explain a "basic income" to my mother than a "negative income tax" -- and yes she understands that anything provided by the government must be paid for by taxation.

The unconditional aspect of a basic income allows individuals to accumulate capital. Many welfare systems require recipients to sell their cars, property, and maintain bank accounts at a near zero balance. They also clawback employment earnings at punitive tax rates of 50-100% (often higher than the top-marginal rate). Since welfare is often very low, those supplementing their income are often driven to working under-the-table for cash. This creates a welfare trap that keeps poor people poor.

Means checking requires an expensive bureaucracy, is paternalistic, and I think unnecessary.

If you read the research results for the Canadian and US experiments you will find that people want to work, even with a basic income. The slight negative incentives that were discovered can be attributable to two basic factors:
1. some women chose to stay home to care for children or elderly family members -- this has an obvious societal benefit, and
2. if the experiment is conducted in a non-saturation site (i.e. one fraction of the population gets a basic income while the other does not) then there will be an economic distortion affecting low income workers. Employers are driven to employ those without a basic income, who are more desperate for work. The same would happen if you tried to enforce a minimum wage on half the population. Employers would hire those without a minimum wage.

If you are looking for the real problems with the basic income, it is easy to find. The cost to raise everyone above the poverty line is _very_ high. One would have to consider the size of the family unit receiving funds and adjust for economies of scale. Nevertheless, it could be done. By contrast, a basic income at the rate of many existing welfare systems would be very affordable and would result in many collateral savings such as reduced health care and administration costs.

Also, despite the cost of a basic income, it has the support of many Nobel-prize winning economists because it increases utility. I have not yet seen a model for optimal income taxation that does not point to a negative tax / basic income. See, for example, textbooks on public economics or the classic paper by Mirrlees,

http://www.econ.yale.edu/~dirkb/teach/pdf/mirrlees/1971%20op...
Wow.

I shouldn't have clicked on this link. Now, not only I feel underpaid, but I also feel incredibly confused. How will I find people willing to pay me $400 an hour, for more than six months? I mean, mm I really reading about 800k per year? I had no idea I could one day bill that much. I honestly thought this type of annual income was reserved to large corp CEOs, hedge funds people, lawyers, and the like. Turns out I was wrong.

Time to switch from distributed systems and databases to finance and SEO, and cryptography (& crypto sound very interesting!) fast!
There is so much I never knew about the about uri scheme...
TBH I would recommend not doing any textbook learning. This aplies to most enterprises, not just finance, but your 'domain expertise' comes from work experience in that domain. Hence the obvious chicken/egg problems, so the best way to crack it is to hustle your way into getting ANY contract in that domain. You may have to exaggerate, do 'boring' work, undercut, whatever, but once you got 1 contract under your belt, then you can position yourself for the more desirable ones.

I have to ask if actually want to work in finance, or just want more money. If it's the latter, then all you may need to do is sell yourself better (see my other comment); the rates in finance are not what they used to be, and unless it's a highly specialised skill, pretty much most enterprises pay the same range for similar roles.

If you actually want to work in a deep speciality in finance (which also are the most interesting roles), then get a contact close to that target, and then hustle your way in. In both cases you still need to sell yourself.

Also, if your not in a major financial center, then move.
I did not answer the poll, since I rarely do consulting these days. But when I do (short gigs, usually <50h), I charge $125/h.
Agreed - there is no one "true" solution, as is the case with many things.

There are times when I value the (semi) privacy of my cubicle for getting into a focused flow for hours. At this time, I do not want to be interrupted.

At other times, I value being able to take my laptop into a conference room with a bunch of other developers.

Each layout has its own strengths. When interpersonal communication is paramount (i.e. a new project getting started, lots of unknowns, trying to define who's going to do what, etc.) then the conference room approach works.

When I have a well-defined feature to implement, the hunkered-down approach works well.
Works when I do it, in Chrome. If it's failing in Firefox, my guess is it's an issue related to the JS history API, which differs slightly between the two (and is generally a giant pain in the ass to use correctly.)
There is an ongoing petition to the European Union ("Citizen initiative") for basic income: https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/REQ-ECI-2012-000028...

"On January 14th 2013, the European Commission accepted our European Citizens’ Initiative hence triggering a one-year campaign involving all countries in the European Union."

"If we collect one million statements of support for Basic Income from the 500 million inhabitants of the European Union, the European Commission will have to examine our initiative carefully and arrange for a public hearing in the European Parliament."

http://basicincome2013.eu/ubi/
Jesus, I'm busting my balls going back to school for engineering to make $40 an hour. Looks like I'm working towards the wrong goal.
I think you misread the poll. The highest bracket is $150+/h, it doesn't even go near $400.
Show HN: Use github pages themes in 5 seconds in your local machine
> I know a guy with enough college credit for four degrees. It was incredibly difficult for him to get a job as he got older.

There has been a lot of research gone into what makes someone financially successful and the current line of thinking seems to be that soft-skills, like stick-to-itiveness, are the primary factors. Someone who matches the description of your acquaintance doesn't exactly remind me of someone who is has a predisposition for success. Perhaps that has been his failing in the job marketplace and not the lack of a degree at all?
VCs already do this.

0) VCs with technical/operating background. I'd put a lot of faith in e.g. pmarca's evaluation of a team.
1) EIRs
2) Outside advisors
3) Portfolio companies (you do some pre-screening, then have your existing portfolio CEOs meet with the founders of non-competitive new ventures. It's win/win, because the portfolio companies may have some useful business relationship, or if the founders can't raise, might be a good hire.
Learn and be well: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml_book.pdf

Explains and motivates the use of autoencoders (and sparsity constraints) and restricted Boltzmann machines, too.
PhD vs Startup
The problem isn't for Google, it's for the receiving mobile devices.
Some economists look at basic income as a theoretically superior alternative to minimum wage, i.e. with a basic income you would not need a minimum wage at all. I think the idea is that the supply of labor exceeds the demand, which necessitates a minimum wage. The basic income solves this by reducing the supply of labor. This post (and parent thread) talks about it a bit more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657604
Being able to settle is something only the guilty should find relieving.
I'd just like to add that I definitely think I've seen the light and believe that this is the way forward, I just don't think that having nullable values is a dealbreaker when it comes to memory safety, because even if you don't have nullable values you still have huge problems to deal with in your code to make your system robust.

exception safety, maybe, but that's a superset of memory safety?
The git log could be a gold mine for researchers studying how CS students learn CS concepts and programming techniques. It could also be used to detect cheating.
That's not going to happen: I endorse your Excel AES implementation immediately. If a pure spreadsheet AES works for your project, go ahead and use it!
I use http://plnkr.co and apart from the outrageous amounts of memory it can consume it's pretty good.

Features I like about Plunker:
- Multiple files
- Great code editor (ACE)
- Streaming collaboration mode (so others can follow along)
- Versioning

Features I want:
- Test endpoints (echo and/or redirect to a resource would be fine)
- Github integration: able to save and load assets to and from github
- Add Javascript librarie references from CDN (jsbin does this best)
- Unit test support (some do this but it could be better)
- Easily self-hosted for use on an offline laptop
- Mobile previews
- Better search (find me all the fiddles/plunks that include calls to angular.extend)

OK, I want these things to turn into lightweight IDEs and REPLs.
Apple 1 from 1976 signed by Wozniak sells for $650,000
Although I think the API itself has a severely misguided design, the concept underlying the Web Crypto standard is a good one, and I agree it's worth encouraging.

Of course, the post we wrote in 2011, years before Web Crypto, agrees with you too.
How Samsung Became The Biggest Electronics Company In The World
I concur. I've been very happy with the price and features, but the ever increasing amount of RAM (the larger your backup, the larger its RAM use) is worrying.
"If you’re an Idea Person, lock yourself in a room for a couple of months and teach yourself the basics of the relevant technologies. For example, if you’re doing a web app, learn Ruby on Rails. Build something."

Alas, I learned this after my first failed venture. Now I'm a developer and love it.

Note to all awesome business people that think they can kill it if only they had a developer... Go learn to code. At the very least you will learn something to throw under your project management belt. An even better outcome will be that you figure out if the venture is actually worth the trouble- It will happen a lot quicker than if you are trying to manage the idea with another person.
I feel many of my upper division projects would have benefitted from having the ability to branch and try a new approaches safe in the knowledge they could be easily abandoned if they failed to bear fruit.
The smiley face in that comment is doing a lot of work.
Was placed in such a situation many years ago by an old boss before I struck out on my own. Never, EVER again. My workload was more than the regular employees, and definitely more than hourly contractors/consultants.
That's good to hear. I must have been hearing stories from the 80s.
Never being seven years.
"Someone has to make it rain"

this made me laugh!
Perhaps because nobody can seriously expect Apple to commit to openness (this is the company that forbids open source licenses in its app store), where Google was already using an open protocol?
We have better ways of baiting links than telling generalist software developers things they don't want to hear about cryptography.

http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/
>It's basically like a mafiosi loan shark giving you a desperately needed loan, then threatening not to make any loans to you in the future because you don't have the means to pay it back, forcing you to do whatever they ask of you.

Fixed that for you
Have you considered Crashplan? I've had positive experiences with it. The only downsides are that the client program uses a ton of RAM and there's no API.
>If you want to make $200/h+ and your a decent hacker, my advice would be to perfect selling yourself.

so... my understanding? your first line explains why this selling is so hard:

>Often it may go through several different agencies because one isn't on the preferred list and get marked up at every stage.

The thing is? if you are on that 'preferred list' you essentially have a licence to print money, because it's goddamn difficult to get on those lists. I've seen consulting companies that are run out of some guy's house with no assets sell for substantial money because they had somehow gotten on to a preferred vendor list at a large company. As you point out, at that point you get to act as a gatekeeper, and impose significant markup on all labour.
The nightclub analogy is appropriate. The truth is that the idea person isn't even necessary. It's easy enough for two technical co-founders to play that role, the rare exception being an idea person with unique experience in a niche industry.

The idea person who invests a few months in learning a language is infinitely more attractive to a technical type. Nobody wants to be in a partnership, knowing that someone is depending on them 100% to accomplish the overwhelming majority of the work involved.

PS- What's up, Michael. :) ~CJS
Twitter and downstream services at times both add and strip URL redirects. (That's probably what the 'unwind' gnip process is doing: following redirects to find the real destination.)

Are you sure all clicks from all clients would have visited your shortener, as opposed to skipping it using metadata about its final destination?

(It might be worth testing with a unique, 200-returning terminal URL.)
Good article, also instead of just knowing how many % of people bounced, you should know WHY the heck they left your site. A nifty tool that I ran into that helps with it: http://www.inspectlet.com/
I've had it work well with two environments. On the same host, different ports. Then have ngnix rout to the active port, and have a second Dns that nginx routes to the inactive one. Push to the inactive one, verify, swap the ninx config.
Migrations are forward/backward compatible and can be applied whenever. This is really the only tricky part.
Static content on CDN with different urls(hash in name or folder per deploy)
SVMs may still be useful as a classifier sitting on top of a deep model. Plugging the features learned during unsupervised pre-training into an SVM instead of a neural net is perfectly valid.

Lower layers of the "deep" model are (typically) performing non-linear dimensionality reduction. i.e. generating a set of high-level features which make subsequent classification easier than it would have been on the raw input data.
A Backbone.Marionette tutorial [2012]
Mostly the latter, though I was tired of writing business applications and looking to move into something, broadly, in the domain of scientific research. Which is not terribly straightforward with only a B.S., but seems to be pretty much impossible without one. So for the moment, I'm still on the job hunt in this area.
Forgot to mention that the specialised learning will naturally happen on the job, when your speaking daily with the experts. Though a bit of wikipedia learning can't do you wrong just to talk around the subject.
Photoshop is Just the Beginning
One reason is because, operational experience or not, VC partners all sit on the boards of companies, most of which fail, and so have a front-row seat for their implosions.
Or cut it down to two steps:

0. Found a startup

1. Get acqui-hired

After all, as they say, "startups are the new grad school".
Everyone here has read A Colder War, right?
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
Who are these CS students who need their hands held to such a degree? A simple, You should consider using version control for your projects. Try git or subversion. It will come in handy later in your career at the beginning of an introductory programming class should be all that's necessary. A CS curriculum doesn't teach students how to touch-type either, nor should it.

I'd suggest to people doing hiring that the candidates who haven't even heard of version control (which some other posters have mentioned interviewing) are ones that you don't want to hire. You should be glad to have the easy selection criterion.
AFW, Automating host-based firewalls with Chef
I think he's referring to the discussion in the comments, where some posters are saying that it should top out at $400+, not $150+.
Cool. What's the use case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill#Fixed_memory_method...
Matasano's claim is that JavaScript is fundamentally "doomed" for crypto. You are saying that it is possible to engineer a JS crypto app properly, but almost nobody does.

There's a big difference between a technology being fundamentally broken and engineers simply not using it correctly.

This same sort of problem applied to PHP years ago. The default behavior of the language made it easy to write horribly insecure code, and many developers did. But it has always been possible to engineer a PHP app in a secure manner. You just had to work a bit harder at it in the past.

You are absolutely correct that most people don't write secure JS code today. But the web is an evolving platform, and as standards and engineering awareness improve, this will change.

The need for better in-browser crypto standards is clear. In spite of this, Nadim has proved that it is possible to build secure JS apps today. It is specious to simply dismiss his contributions because most other engineers don't write secure code.
May your SEO be blessed.
Facebook unpublished page posts have been really successful for me once you get the targeting down. I've had success with lookalike audiences, as well as with targeting one precise interest + one partner category.
Or, you know, don't say anything. If nothing comes to mind, then maybe there is nothing important to say.
Two kinds:

1. Professional Indemnity

2. Public & Product Liability

As I understand it, one of them gives my clients assurance that they can collect from me if I mess up; the other protects them from lawsuits arising from stuff I wrote. And I'm buggered if I know which is which -- just that I needed both.
We have mesothelioma and car insurance meta tags, but they're encrypted in such a way that you can only see them if you finish all 48 challenges. Why not sign up and see how you do?
You didn't really ask them to make a choice, though. You gave them an opportunity to signal courage and self-sacrifice and probably some other things.
I've found myself in a rather unique position contracting/consulting for a single customer. Basically I charge $8333.33/month whether I work or not. Some months there are only a few days, and others I'm quite busy.

While I could probably juggle other things on the side, I take the extra time to spend with my kids. But as they will both be in school next year I'm thinking of upping my game a little.

Basically I specialize, networking monitoring type apps.. When things on the wire needed to be decoded and made sense of. I've always wondered if there is much out there contracting for that (protocol analysis, etc).
I've taken math classes up to Linear Algebra, (so basically what was required for a CS degree) and I still count on my fingers sometimes. In fact I think that math got more intuitive and "mentally pliable" the more abstract it got, but for some reason I'm still pretty hopeless with arithmetic. I also have trouble with telling right from left. Is it really the case that using fingers for arithmetic can hold a person back from learning higher math? Not trying to be snarky, genuinely curious.
TOMORROW - The Bluths are back! @arresteddev goes live at 12:01am PT.