skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEEKING WORK - Technical documentation for Windows-based applications; U.S. based. Either remote or in-house as independent contractor.
Enjoy technology. Love writing.
Content analysis. Audience analysis. Native English.
Attractive work. Affordable prices.
M.S. Communications
william AT thebiggsgroup DOT com
An Open Letter to Science Students and Science Teachers
you don't think government spending benefits anyone but politicians? So for instance, medicare only benefits politicians?
I "learned" C by writing a smal runit/daemontools replacement. Most of the work was learning the features I needed from libc: http://uggedal.github.io/going/going.c.html
A number of ticketing systems, like Unfuddle and Assembla, include free git repos. Personally I prefer Github, but if you're already using such a system, might as well utilize its git hosting (for a backup if nothing else)
I'm a contractor also, front end, and my agency invoices for me. All I do is fill out a timesheet on work time. It's literally no different than a perm role, but I get 100k instead of the 50k - 60k I'd get for the same role as a perm.
1. Bootstrapping
2. Linguistics first
>We can't build software as fast as we can think because we don't have the tools

Actually, the real "problem" is that, as soon as we have the tools to easily solve something that before was difficult, we move the target a step farther. But that's also why programming is so interesting, and programmers are in such high demand, so I wouldn't really call it a "problem".
Playing devil's advocate here... but if you were so inclined you could accomplish the same with SVN.

Creating and hosting a repo locally (or offsite) is trivially easy, and though it might not be as friendly or natural as it would be with git on a daily basis, it's not impossible either.
An important lesson to new programmers
The control software for the Ariane rockets is written in Ada, which is apparently meant to be especially ‘secure’/predictable.

And promptly blew up the rocket.
I believe she worked on optimizers her entire career as a logician, scientist and manager rather than as an implementing programmer.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/witexhibit/wit_hall_allen....

http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm
not more important
I have two clients at the moment. One pays monthly, 30-45 days after invoice and sends me a paper check. The other pays me twice a month, 15-21 days out (weekly time submission), and it's direct deposit. Like clockwork. You would think it shouldn't make a difference but I can tell you that it does absolutely make a difference. It's just professionalism.

You're right also about liability and workers comp, though I believe every state is different. Some states are more friendly to small businesses of course. So it makes sense to get yourself an accountant, especially if you calculate the amount of hours it would otherwise take you to do that work. Those are hours you could be working.
Tear gas and Water cannons are the best non-lethal methods for crowd control available... honestly I think the turkish police are doing a good a job at controlling this as possible.

All the media and reddit pictures are from the side of the protesters, a few pictures of people who get knocked in the head with a tear gas container != cops beating and shooting innocent people as they would have you believe.

Also from empirical evidence as an American who spent two weeks in Istanbul last year I've found the city and police to be totally welcoming and open ... to include bar crawls around taksim, walking 20 miles on foot through every nieghborhood in the city, to visiting some of the holiest artifacts in Islam at topkapi palace.

I'd like to see the other side of this... I understand the government has been culling the ranks of the top military to weaken their influence and push the Islamist agenda.. I do, but that said, turkey is not syria or iraq, it is a large cosmopolitan and wonderful country I would hate to see it destroyed.

Edit: I'll add for reference if it matters I'm a large, shaved headed and tattooed, obviously american man, who was a solo traveler.
At my last job we were working on novel machine learning techniques and were hiring either recent CS grads or quite experienced programmers. The only PhD was our VP of engineering. I would say the organization was atypical though and even an in-progress PhD provides a significant boost to your chances of getting hired.
Temple Grandin's experience, while interesting, is another example of media hype concerning autism that misleads a great number of people into believing that all autistic people can or should aspire to use their disability in furtherance of some greater good. This is not so; if only they should be so lucky. Her experience is not representative of anything.
They aren't failing to see what they've created with CFAA/SOPA/PIPA. They know exactly what they're doing and occasionally feigning ignorance.
The use of C and C-likes by the JPL rather than Lisp is a sad story; it means robotics has not advanced as fast as it could have. http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Ask HN: Do you use Mind Maps?
If so,

what do you use them for?

how important are they to you? do you use them for personal as much as for work stuff?

Any mind mapping tools you recommend?
To a politician, problems are seen in light of helping their most valuable constituents (MPAA, Apple/MS/Google, etc.) and themselves.
It is not that the protesters support Assad it is that they don't think they should be getting involved in the conflict. They view Erdogan as wanting to create a modern Caliphate and with the power they already have, that getting involved in the Syrian conflict is the next step at expanding its influence.
AWS Service Health Dashboard down?
HTML5 Javascript APIs to keep an eye on
status.aws.amazon.com - down
amazon.com - down
amazon.co.jp - down
amazon.co.uk - up
Life in Metro City
> The headline is a lie.

Because you say so?

> If you follow the link trail, you'll find that the workers were on a construction site for a municipal biogas facility.

Thanks for pointing out the link. Link?

Also, such a facility will be somewhere in the chain of production and it is a fairly good example of the way the typical workplace in China approaches safety: not.

There are a few efforts underway to counteract this, the best one is probably the one initiated by Nokia. But there is nothing in that video that you could not witness in the very large majority of places involved in industry in China, specifically:

- no oversight

- no safety gear

- no safety procedures

- inherently unsafe environment

- not even the basics in place to safely provide power

And a whole host of smaller and less important elements.

It's not just corners that are being cut and the western buyers are the ones who have the most power. They are definitely not 'working day and night to make sure that their contractors abide by the labour conditions set out in their contract', that's only a very select few of them.

Yes, outsourcing is a key driver in improving workplace safety in China, but it's a drop on a very hot plate so far, with the few companies that practice this doing it largely in response to some very bad PR.

It simply shouldn't be possible to gain an edge over a competitor by cutting corners (and a lot worse than that, structural abuse is the more correct term). As long as that is a possibility this stuff will continue.

So indeed, keep buying Chinese goods. But demand they're made using a supply chain that insists on a certain minimum level of workplace safety and environmental controls.

The fact that factories/facilities churning out stuff for the locals are even worse is not in any way an excuse to tolerate these conditions.
It's been a while since I used Gentoo, but most of the serious users consider build-from-source as a feature and don't penalize portage for that. I believe your parent is referring to the sometimes annoyingly long dependency computation time of something like emerge -uDN world.
Hexagonal grids for games
I have favicon, and tile for windows 8 and neither works for wp8. I googled it but couldn't find anything regarding wp8 website tile.
Until you have lived with someone with autism I don't think it's for you to judge what I find frustrating about the condition and its wider implications. All of these articles are always about specific and positive circumstances, but they never disclaim that and people interpret them broadly.

You would also appear to have a rather narrow definition of "media." If a company's post on a public blog for reporters to pick up on isn't media (I think it is), then would that same post being relayed via Hacker News be?
In defense of that mindset creating something for personal use often involves 5% or less of the effort it takes to bring something to market. Or as an EE friend once said about his home built hot-tub if X went wrong then scolding hot water would shoot out of the pipes but it's not something I am worried about because I would freak out and pull the plug if Y or Z started to happen. Which transforms a huge fundamental flaw in the design to something that's not that important.
As someone who's been here for >6 years, I can say it has definitely experienced a drastic decline.
Very true, but most @2x PNGs are just vector icons that have been rasterized because people don't realize SVG support has landed in modern browsers.

Photos are a whole other ballgame.
workflowy is good- but i only use it when my mind is really overcrammed. for me, work stuff is personal stuff, so the answer to that Q is yes.

pen and paper tends to do the job better than any software solution.
Would a job board decrease the quality of candidates on average? I would guess part of the reason the quality of candidates is so high is because it's active readers/participants of HN that respond/post to the threads. Having a job board would invite many other people as it is easier to access (non-active participants may miss the 'Who's Hiring' thread but a job board would be harder to miss).

There are potential solutions to this, for example only allowing users with a certain reputation point threshold to access it (I believe StackOverflow's job board employs a similar system). Just something to think about...
The Rails Girls Summer Of Code project
Jordanian Government Blocks 216 Websites (Here is the List)
They did: https://gist.github.com/xxuejie/5023857
They see recruiter contacts as spam and resent that recruiters are paid to make placements with money that they presume would otherwise go to the developer. Additionally they detest people who cannot program but work in the technology industry.

I prefer to take the same approach as the $450k Rails dev and always provide a recruiter with good leads if I have them. I have placed friends in good positions because of this and have the option to do the same for myself when I am ready to do something different.
This article and concept makes no sense.

"moving to business model before finding product market fit can be the worst thing for your business" What??

Product-market fit is a fundamental part of the business model. Determining who your customers are, and why they would buy from you, is what you do when discovering your business model. You cannot separate it out. BTW strategy is such a vague concept that I don't know how it is even in the discussion.

Guessing, building an MVP first, throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks, before having a concept of what your business consists of, is what is/was broken about the startup culture. And, please stop this "but Twitter did it" nonsense. Unless "getting lucky" IS your strategy.
They could all be reasonably unrolled, so it's probably something else.
I expect the engine can more easily calculate the final required Array size and preallocate it upfront avoiding resize operation on each loop iteration. (which is anyway JS best practice when possible)
now unhellbanned by PG, yay
Thanks for the explanation, I wasn't aware of that. When they say it's a derivative, they probably mean closer to that herbicide then?

I still haven't heard anything about it actually being used there, but would that seem at all reasonable to you? A police force that uses tear gas and don't want to kill people, would they plausibly use such a derivative for the same purpose?
No... Developers are really easy to impress. Show them something that will save them time and effort to make something and they will flock around it. You give them a tool that "automagically" does something tedious they used to do and makes it easy and they will be there in a heartbeat with their wallets open.

The python in javascript on the client side is a neat hack, but it's not solving any known problem for the mass of developers here. If this showed examples of performance and gained improvement over alternatives and it would sell better here. Right now though, it pushes the idea that javascript isn't good enough and we should be using something else in the browser (see DART, CoffeeScript, etc and related flame wars).
what
Dicking around in a country or region's political and economic affairs can certainly lead people there to hate you. You certainly can't think the US didn't have its hands mucking about the middle-east before 9/11.
http://www.businessinsider.com/absurd-laws-of-singapore-2012...

>Singapore also differs from the United States where penalties are determined by a judge;breaking certain laws in Singapore can come with mandatory decisions that still include cane beatings.

At least attempt some research
As I understand it, this was in part specifically because they turned off the protection the language provided.
> "caused muslims to hate us"

Well, that's a few simultaneous fallacies.

But, yes, your policies led to the 9/11 attackers deciding to attack you. Is this not blisteringly obvious?

> and that therefor we should change them???????????

Oh gosh no, change? Not mid-stream.
I saw a statistic claiming there are about 5 graduate students for every professor in the American graduate schools. Unless you want to really pursue the academic path, maybe a phd is not worth it.
>The United States has some of the strongest personal liberties in the world.

Adorable. Try actually exercising them and get back to us.
Sorry, but I don't agree with that at all. You're propagating the myth that contracters are supposed to be shit hot developers, the 1%, and that's simply not true. While it might be true to a degree in the US, it certainly isn't in the UK. Most contracting positions in the UK are for bog standard .net / Java developers doing grunt work, not hit-the-ground-running/take-over-the-project developers. An average/reasonably-ok developer with 5 years experience is fully qualified to contract in the UK, and shouldn't expect any serious downtime.
Here are the rules by US state:
http://www.anapsid.org/cnd/mcs/maskcodes.html
Myths of Radicalisation
Please understand I am writing this kindly -- the issue is that you are not an experienced enough freelancer.

You can compensate for this if you have the marketing and client management skills to get an aspirational rate, but if you don't, you need to be so good that you not only can see your way through a project in a conversation but see the potential traps and talk through them with the client confidently.

I believe that you can get this experience quickly -- good luck!
No, that's absolutely not what I'm saying. Ideally it should be a relationship of mutual benefit. Dedicating yourself to your job doesn't mean you give up your work/life balance (definitely NOT what I mean), it means you're focused on your actual work while you're AT work, not distracted by side-projects, startup ideas, and anti-productive pursuits.

I'm dedicated to work at work, but I leave at 6 and I leave it behind. I don't distract myself with side-projects at home, either. When I'm at home, I'm dedicated to everything you speak of.

All I was saying is that side projects and startup ideas shouldn't be your focus while you're employed and at work. In my experience with having side-projects, I've been miserable by not being able to dedicate enough time to the side project, while my actual work suffered for distraction and time wasted. I prefer to have one pursuit in my work, and a life in my own time, and not mix them.
Exploring the floating-point performance of modern ARM processors
For those without showdead on; it seems that Brian (not-D) Foy was hellbanned for his comments.

It seems obvious that he is a disgruntled ex-employee so you should take his statements with a grain of salt, but since I don't see any reason for hellbanning him for that (maybe he got too many flags?,) so I'm reposting them there.

------------

I am not Brian D Foy so stop maligning his name. Brian D Foy doesn't work for Booking and he never has.

Booking tries to keep the big names you mentioned happy so that they don't spill the beans. These names get the best development projects and the big money. One of their job responsibilities as a senior developer is to advertise and say good things about the company. I concur with you that they play this game well. In fact open praise in developer forums about the company is a sure way to land good bonus.

They make tonnes of money but none of that is shared with the developers although they put up with the grunge work of fixing one of the worst Perl code in the industry patched up by people who left in a hurry.

I speak for those who are going to leave their family, friends at home with the hopes that they would be doing good work based on the big names working there only to find that the reality is totally different.

The treatment meted out to the rest of the developers is shameful and you know it and the Perl blog mentions all the pain points.

The expats do not know the local employment laws of Netherlands and Booking.com fully exploits this to the hilt.

And the truth can be found out easily from people who left the company and who currently do not get a direct/indirect monetary benefit of saying good things about the company, and given that you are recruiting for them and get approximately thousand Euro atleast for every successful lead, it disqualifies you.

------------

The Netherlands has employee friendly policies. After three years in a company, employees automatically get an "indefinite" contract. An "indefinite" contract ensures that the employer cannot kick out the employee on a whim unlike in the US.

Good Dutch companies give out indefinite contract to the expats at the beginning of their employment itself but not Booking.com.

Booking.com gives out a 1 year contract to start with and after every 2 years kicks out its developers and gets new ones. So the frequent hiring you see is one of the side-effects of this cheap policy. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the big names Curtis "Ovid" Poe mentioned jumps on this mailing list to say - "not me", but the truth is this is their cheap game.

So after two years the delta of ones career capital can be summed up as:

1. experience in copy pasting code and cargo culting which would translate to nothing when you try out for another job.

2. no monetary benefit. Booking has the most underpaid developers in the industry. Those bonuses they promise never come. Given how expensive Amsterdam is, one wouldn't have saved up a penny after two years and if you have a family you might end up in debt.

In short one is ruining his/her best two years without any increase in career capital or monetary standing.
Advice for College Grads from Two Sociologists
This document is easily longer than the combined length of the contract and mortgage documents I signed to buy my house. In fact, I believe it is several times longer than any single document I have ever signed.
As a fellow sibling of a severely autistic individual, I concur on all points. The word, which connoted a depressingly debilitating constellation of symptoms in cognition, communication, and perception when my sister was diagnosed, has been redefined year by year inside and outside of the psychiatric community until it means very little, subject to self-diagnosis based on perceived social anxiety among high-performing, high-IQ individuals who are able to initiate conversations, appreciate comedy, lie convincingly, have relationships, and master smalltalk.

She will never take part in the debate about whether an 'Aspie' gets to call themself 'ASD' or 'Autistic' or 'HFA', because she is not able to understand or speak about such topics; She will never be able to campaign against the 'neurotypicals' efforts to create a cure or prevent the condition from occurring. She will never be able to read how Jenny McCarthy cured her son of his seizure disorder or decide whether it constituted autism or speculate about thiomersal.

People like her are not able to speak up for themselves, and they've been quietly robbed of a word for their conditions. In some circumstances, this is extremely problematic; Seeking help from the state hinges on such words. The 24/7 caretakers that have been required since my family reached the breaking point has only been possible with a lawyer and a series of lucky breaks in state funding & local politics - with 2013's definition of 'Autism', the planets might not have aligned the same way.

Autism was never a terribly precise syndrome. Mental health is full of '6 out of 10 symptom' checklists; I like to visualize them as 'constellations' rather than clouds, because they exist on their own - we just draw the lines along things that seemed to be clustered. It is the particular looseness of the Autistic Spectrum that's allowed linguistic creep. I don't assert that early-childhood regression, severe cognitive disabilities, barely-lingual, no eye contact, compulsive behaviors, self-harm, stimming, problems with loud noises, and seemingly random inappropriate decisions like disrobing or running into traffic or poking a stranger or trying to enter an interesting-looking house are the canonical Autism. However, they constitute something, something almost completely different than many of the people I meet who claim to be autistic, and the language has progressively failed us in description.
People (and countries) can change, especially when people who are interested in changing a country gravitate to power. The only guarantee of our freedoms in a modern civil society is our continued vigilance and active participation in it.
The problem is more complex than that I believe. I can say that my experience with mathematics has been very similar up until a certain point during my undergraduate years when money became really tough for me. All the stress and uncertainty ate me up and I ended up feeling a lot like his later self much earlier than at a run-of-the-mill job. There simply aren't enough spots in academia and during graduate school a big portion of people like us don't get paid enough to get by. I'd say most of us burn up before they get to the end.
"I find it somewhat odd that, given git's emphasis on distributed version control, we see so many git users have centralized themselves quite heavily on GitHub."

It isn't odd. Almost nobody understands distributed version control, and fewer actually need it.

A big part of the reason that GitHub is popular is that git is way too complicated for most people to use. They don't understand the CLI or the concepts, and need a shiny web UI to abstract the (admittedly terrible) interface.

Most people need branching, merging and committing to a canonical repository. Even the groups that could theoretically benefit from distributed repos (larger, far-flung organizations), tend to be hamstrung by the complexity that they introduce, and therefore in practice tend set up a small number of canonical repositories...just like every other version control system, but more complicated and confusing.
I found my current position on a Who's Hiring post back in March 2012. I love my job and couldn't ba happier.
> .. allows for simulating some otherwise impossible effects (i.e., bold face).

A better example is underlining.
http://www.hevanet.com/cristofd/dbfi.b
When Trick Questions Become False Memories : Neuroskeptic