skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I understand either, but the empirical evidence is that I get a very low volume of replies but almost every one is from someone very well-qualified and worth interviewing. Like some of the other commenters, I think it is simply the quality of this community as a hacker-friendly environment (a testament to good work by pg and its members to keep it that way of course).
> We already have a problem with a massive, unreliable, insecure ecosystem of legacy C code

A ton of the world's software with the highest reliability requirements is written in C and C++.

Nuclear power plants? Yes. [1]

Joint Strike Fighter? Yes. [2]

Mars rover? Yes. [3]

Your Tesla? Yes [4]

US telephone systems. Stock exchanges. Bloomberg. Your cell phone OS (incl. many years before smartphones). The list goes on and on.

C and C++ are the most general and well-supported languages we have. They can solve problems on any architecture with a good tradeoff between efficiency and generality (over assembly) and predictable performance. Reliability and security requirements are up to the developer to impose on any language (see: the github PHP SQL injection search). C is not, in itself, a problem towards these goals and those who build upon C are always improving it [5].

[1] - http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/contrac...

[2] - http://www.jsf.mil/downloads/down_documentation.htm

[3] - http://compass.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/ws-slides/havelund....

[4] - http://www.pcworld.com/article/260883/tesla_cto_talks_model_...

[5] - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8ef0s5kh.aspx
The headline is a lie. If you follow the link trail, you'll find that the workers were on a construction site for a municipal biogas facility. If this is the most disturbing thing Matheij has ever seen, then he clearly knows very little about workplace safety. Accidents of this sort happen on a daily basis in the developed world.

Outsourcing is the key driver for workplace safety improvements in China. The worst working conditions are consistently found in factories producing goods for the local market. Working conditions in the major OEM factories routinely meets and exceeds western standards.

Chinese businesses that trade with the west are subject to a degree of scrutiny that simply doesn't happen within the country. International buyers are very keen to avoid being the centre of a PR disaster, so they're fastidious about safety and environmental health.

Corners do get cut in the developing world, but it's ludicrous to paint western buyers as the bad guys. They're working night and day to make sure that their contractors abide by the labour conditions set out in their contract, conditions invariably far higher than the norm in China.

If you want to improve working conditions in Chinese factories, keep buying Chinese made goods, but demand quality. You can't make an iPhone in a filthy shack.
lucky :)
I'd truly love some explanation of the downvotes. I fail to see where I am "violating the spirit of this thread."

Thanks.
Ask HN: Raising my rates as an offshore dev
I'm a brazilian resident, and I just got offered a job as a contractor for a NY company. Looking at some recent posts about salaries, the $35/hour they offered me pales in comparison with the $100+/year I've been seeing. I did some independent research, and it's not hard to find people charging $120+/hour. I suspect I'm being lowballed specifically because I'm not based in the US.

I like to think I have a good experience. I'm a Ruby/PHP/JS developer with 6 years of solid professional experience, plus 2 years studying before I got my first real job. Worked remotely at least at some capacity this entire time. I did a very technical interview with this company, and they seemed very impressed (as in "we do not see this all the time").

So my question is: how do I get better rates as an offshore dev? I'd rather not move to the US right now (Brazil is very cheap outside the capitals, and I'm saving money to move to Europe next year), but that's not completely out of the question. I've seen people suggesting to bill by the week instead of hourly, should I try that? I have some projects on my portfolio (I'm adding a couple of personal projects to that list this month), but I don't have much open source code, maybe I should work a little bit on that? Or are my rates already average based in my experience? I have difficulties evaluating my own skills, so maybe I'm asking too much.

Thanks in advance for your input!
Until github goes down, and then they run `git remote add friend ssh://coworkers-workstation//path/to/repo` and push code to each other until github comes back up.
the URL was changed to http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/
And the converse,

How many electrical engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. It'll be fixed in a driver patch.
Yup true . Seen it :-)
Probably because those areas of engineering are about making things that work.
In my experience Emacs with Quack (or with Geiser, or with both) indents exactly the same as DrRacket.

That's not to say there isn't some corner case where they differ, but it sounds like you're noticing more than that. Try Quack or Geiser.

That's also not to say DrRacket is bad. It feels a bit slower to me when typing, than Emacs. But it has all the cool tools others mentioned. You can also use Emacs most of the time, and use DrRacket for the tools.
Well, to be fair, there's a fair amount of goofy Biblical quoting at the beginning. Really, that article is hilarious, you should read it. Complete with pseudo-information theory bullshit -- it's INCREDIBLY COMPLEX, says the title of one section--, artificial intelligence from the sixties (I guess if SHRDLU couldn't do it, then GOD must have done it), and just general obtuseness from a pair of pompous fundamentalists. Come on, the conclusion of this religious tract disguised as scientific paper is, literally, "we don't know why this happens, so GODDIDIT"! Got to laugh at that :)

Were the authors catholics, they'd be either hypothesizing the existence of a Prairie Dog Jesus, or contemplating whether to send missionaries. I can't decide on what would be funnier.
Wow, direct assignment is an order of magnitude faster than push (in my test, chrome 27 on windows 7). Can anyone explain why?
I had a few freelance gigs and a small stint as a permie at an agency back home but nothing near the kind of portfolio i have now. Luckily i was interviewed by people that appreciated the fact that i taught myself and i could demonstrate that knowledge.
From the article:

>At a hearing in March, Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) worried that without a proper definition, lawmakers will "impact adversely a bunch of people we should not be impacting." Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) warned that legislation targeting patent trolls could open the door to deny plaintiffs "their right to go to court in other tort situations."

It is interesting they "see" the problems with overlay broad statutes here, but with items such as the CFAA/SOPA/PIPA they fail to see just how overly broad a statute they have created/proposed.
You want the change to take a long time so that humans can evolve with it. Yes plant hybridization (e.g. to make fruit sweeter) is not as fast or easy which is why it's more in tune with evolution. Some things that genetic modification can do are impossible with the ancient methods.

Even if GM produced a plant that was truly superior and healthier in every way, there's no good way to trust it. There are too many instances of "oops, what we thought was good for you is actually bad for you" or "oops, we thought we could improve nature but we made it worse" to trust GMO, at least for the next fifty years or so. The plant that seems truly superior and healthier might end up killing enough insects or otherwise affecting them such to be worse all things considered.
Just from what you said, the solution 'seems' very simple: Compensate more. This may mean pay, equity, or being able to work on interesting problems. From my experience there are many extremely talented programmers in London, and these guys can work anywhere they want, including starting their own company or moving to the US.

Also 'coolness' is hard to define, I see many startups think cool is having some beanbags and a pingpong table, whilst working on a standard CRUD RoR app. To most talented engineers, they would much rather be working on interesting technical challenges. This is how hedge funds get them: squeezing a few millis out of an already optimal trading engine by whatever means possible is extremely fun. Same reason game companies, F1 and GCHQ can pay peanuts.
This sound like an amazing premise for a reboot of Green Acres.
The article moves away from its interesting proposition to just restate something bland about keeping scopes tight.

We can't build software as fast as we can think because we don't have the tools. What those tools should be is an interesting and important thought experiment.
By that logic, because the diffraction limit of the human eye is orders of magnitude away from being able to image a star, we cannot see stars.

For resolution, the question might be better stated: Can you tell the difference between

a) **

and

b) * *

The two images have the same aggregate intensity, but different morphology.

The ancients played the same game as a vision test with stars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar_and_Alcor
Yes, fair point, but I do think it's a red flag. On looking a bit further I see that yes, in fact, he is using a GET link to delete records: https://github.com/Paton/Saaave/blob/master/_views/browse.ph...

This is an actual, serious problem which I would note in a code review, as opposed to the int thing which cannot, as far as I can can tell, ever lead to an exploit or malfunction which would have been avoided by using a named escape function in this code. If anyone can think of a specific example to prove this wrong, please say so.
Coursera's hiring designers and engineers (frontend, infrastructure, analytics, mobile)! Join us in making a difference.

https://www.coursera.org/about/jobs

(I'm part of the team there =) )
Guaranteed income is the simplest way forward to this future in the age of wide-spread automation. Originally a conservative idea, it's unfortunately been dismissed as "conservative" has come to mean "member of the current elite".
with the bad pixels in my display i had to find the "artificial" one lighting up
This is absolutely right. "Oh you create search algorithms at Bing? Mleh. I find that Google's search algorithms are so much better." And you hear this from people who can barely use grep.

I think someone's work needs to evaluated on their own merit, or with one's own work, vs. some other genius's work.
ASCII being 7 bits made it easy to support a larger 8-bit character set that extended it on 8-bit systems, but that is not why ASCII is 7-bit and not 8-bit.

If ASCII where 8 bits to start with, we probably would have had zillions of incompatible extensions that used Control-N and Control-O (shift out and shift in) to switch into and out of 'non-ASCII' mode (here's an idea to sort-of improve upon HTML and XML: instead of < and >, use shift in and shift out to delineate nodes. That way, we wouldn't need that &lt; stuff)

Alternatively, the nine bit byte might have won the battle.
Ask HN: Is a Ph. D necessary for machine learning jobs?
I'm an undergrad majoring in CS, and I wanted to know if a Ph. D is necessary for machine learning/data mining jobs. I'm not sure if I want to go to graduate school; both personally, and since I transferred colleges midway (going to be a rising junior at a new school), so finding a new advisor to work with and all that jazz may not be enough to get into a top grad program for ML(given the time constraints).
Labor unions worked exceptionally well in the US: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/lab...

Socialism is not the same as Marxism, and has at this point been widely adopted throughout most of the world.
Factories that satisfy their markets won't magically become safe and clean, much like the ones in the now "developed word" during the industrialization phase weren't.
#include is actually a very simple beast, once you realize that it's much easier to digest.
> To find this project ASK the people you're trying to reach. Listen. Then find a young person who's game. Ask them if they'd make a project with Racket and write a blog post about it.

Good point. This would probably be easier if schools like Northeastern had programs for technology in music/arts.
You can live as comfortably as you want (I do) but the catch is that you'll probably have to be without children. Anecdotally, everyone I know with families tends to move outside of SF because for the price of a 2 br apartment, you can get a mortgage on a nice house.

There are affordable areas to live ($800-$1200 / br) but you'll have to be quite patient in your search and be open about where you'd like to live.
Cartoon Tattoozed
Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley
To Be (http://tobe.us) is a new way to collage the Internet with images, music, and video. Our users create everything from personalized notes and mixtapes to private sketchbooks, all using HTML5. To Be launched in Japan last month, but our team is in NYC (the East Village).

We have an amazing, expressive app built with Ember.js and Rails. It looks nothing like any web application you've worked on before. Get in touch if you don't believe us.

We need an experienced JavaScript developer (or Ruby developer eager to learn Ember) to help us launch To Be in the US. Ideally someone comfortable with JavaScript, Rails and Postgres. Someone to worry about browser paint speeds, and not to worry about old browser support. To optimize CSS transitions and HTTP responses, not to optimize cubicle space. To move our tested, object-oriented codebase forward.

Come work with us, and push the limits of what browsers and the web can be. Email hello@tobe.us with the words “Interested Developer” in the subject and a link to code
you are proud of in the body. You can also learn more at: http://tobe.us/developer

This is a full-time salaried position in New York City, with the opportunity for equity and leadership in a young company.
Yes. Well-meaning regulation and a licensing raj come at the cost of economic growth, which is what will enable China to eventually afford the safeguards richer countries can take for granted. For unrelated reasons, I've been reading for the past few days through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations - there are some really fascinating entries, but what's equally fascinating is how the most awful revolting horrifying British or American occupations like gong farmer or breaker boy or hurrier (and even some of the not-so-bad occupations like Herb Strewer or linkboy or ice man or leech collector or knocker-up) were made 'obsolete' by increased economic growth, even in cases like knocker-up where one might naively think it was actually technology we can thank (because mechanical clocks certainly existed and could've been used to replace the knocker-up, it's just the knocker-up was cheaper).
One of the most untold stories about the Windows design
Why only Huffington Post publication? They're widely known for alt-medicine and anti-science, and anyone reading science/medicine should rightfully be wary of anything on HuffPo, which has often lent it's publicity and support to anti-scientific groups.

Also, don't you mean it's more than a two dimensional spectrum, as one dimensionality would be a single point, not a line.

And, even if you did mean two dimensional, I think you're being unfair to the DSM-IV/DSM-V which does not literally define Autism Spectrum Disorders as falling on a two dimensional spectrum, but just uses the word to figuratively explain the variety inherent in the diagnosis. They include multiple levels to the spectrum which alone make such a spectrum "3d" and thus more 'cloud-like' without ever having to resort to calling the APA and it's Diagnosis manual as wrong.

Although, I bet calling the APA wrong garners more page views...
More on the Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/sets/721576336477...

San Francisco: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7315/8798020541_80aa618bab_o.p...

Manhattan: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8136/8808603540_e298c96fd3_o.p...
Because a autistic person don't look directly to you don't mean is not looking at you. Is very common to them of see "away" and pay attention to thing in front or in a side.

The problem is, is VERY hard to decipher what a autistic person is doing and why.
There are few things in the world as useless as a nuclear weapon nobody else knows you have. All of the game theory, and that is where the advantage comes from, derives from the fact people will go to extremes to keep themselves from getting nuked even once. Keeping a Doomsday Device a secret defeats the whole point.
Very interesting – thanks.
Downcoted you by accident, sorry.
> Long term, if political freedom doesn't bring wealth, then what is the bloody point?

Seriously? You think that everything a government should strive to guarantee is a means where the end is wealth? You don't think that equality, freedom to criticize questionable government practices (even those that improve GDP), or anything else should be a goal in itself?
Curated Videos for Web Designers
Random factoid:

Printing is a whole different ball of wax. As the printing process involves layering inks to achieve colors, the ability to create different colors is a function of that printers ability to lay down ink, so typically the color gamut of the printer will be "lousy" at its highest resolution (as low as 8 colors) and at a smaller "effective" resolution will cross the point where it can print all the colors you would expect. This second number is often referred to as the 'screen resolution' not because of CRT screens but because of silk screen printing. So early HP printers would have a "resolution" of 300 DPI but a screen resolution that was closer to 120 dpi.

In the photography business people talked about 'lines' which was the smallest width line you could have in contrasting colors on the film that the film could reproduce. Hence those test patterns you saw of groups of lines in standard image targets.

CRTs used a shadow mask, a way of blocking the electron beam around the different colored phosphors. You were limited to 1/3 to 1/4 the shadow mask resolution as you needed at least three phosphor patches to reproduce colors.
This is not the right test. Retina doesn't mean a single pixel would disappear.

I think the real test would be to draw a curve of one pixel thickness and be able to see a smooth curve and not a pixelated one.
Right. So instead of directing our ire at the government which is using the gps-tracker with remote-controllable microphone to spy on you, we should be angry at Google because the government happens to use them to accomplish this end? If Google closed up shop tomorrow, the government would not stop doing this!

I'm sorry but in no way does Google deserve scrutiny over the FBI/CIA/DoJ.
Ah ok, I was trying to locate it via the browser.

Next time I better checkout and do a proper grep.
Indeed. Just to verify that it's not just a difference in (string)representation, something like:

print(9**32-(9**32-5))

Also works (brython returns 0, python2&3 return 5)
Even in Canadian protests the police have been caught sneaking in trouble-makers with rocks and black ski-masks. If they didn't create the panic they wouldn't get paid for solving it.

Considering that the Turkish government is trying to make the protestors look bad so they have justification for going overboard in their earlier treatment of them, it's more likely that plain-clothes police officers looted those stores and overturned the cars.

When something violent and destructive happens, look at who did the last such thing.
"Reliability and security requirements are up to the developer to impose on any language"

This is a common fallback in these discussions, but it is misguided. Yes, you have to work to make software secure in any language; no, this does not mean C is equivalent. In C, you still need to worry about high-level problems like SQL injection, while simultaneously having to worry about low-level problems like integer overflows, dangling pointers, etc.

That critical systems have been written in C or C++ is not relevant -- it does not mean that it was a good idea to do so.
It is hard to judge whether or not this is a case of facilitated communication just by that photo, it could just be that the whole family was posed for the photo for the article.
What we need, I think, is international agreement on what those tariffs should be.
As clarified below, not necessarily: it has nothing to do with the quantity of money being created.

However, I would also like to point out that some inflation is desirable in order to prevent hording of cash and that the informational value of money is improved by giving everyone a floor on income. Basically, when the optimization function of our economy only takes into account the preferences of the rich and the government, we create many inefficiencies in the production and distribution of goods and services. When we instead redistribute money such that everyone has at least some, the economy is more efficient and production changes to match. If more people want to buy simple clothing and the price rises more people will make simple clothing and the price will fall again.

This is the hypothesis I have heard for why raising the minimum wage doesn't lower employment (the experimental result which perhaps most clearly demonstrates the flaws in modern macroeconomic models.) People who receive minimum wage spend it on other goods that are produced employing more people who earn minimum wage.
> It's the fusion of authoritarian quasi-fascist rule with capitalism

Were the two ever separate?
I'm getting fucking old. Everything looks slightly blurry.
Getting your Facebook News Feed in PHP – The Basic Sauce
On my Linux system the rendering is just fine[1] using the infinality patches for freetype[2] and subpixel rendering.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/22emWiZ.png

[2]: http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-rendering-...
What are these "less freedoms" exactly?

You know, free elections, the right to arm yourself, the right to buy chewing gum.

Singapore is pretty creepy under the surface and reeks of covert oppression, at least to my American eye. It seems to work for them, but I wouldn't want to live in a place like that, clean streets or not.
What you really want to say is not "learn C", but "learn computer architecture, algorithms and programming language semantics", C just happened to be the most convenient medium for this for a long time, but today there are perhaps better choices, like Go and I really hope C will finally go away one day, while people will still have to understand things like indirect addressing, hashing, pass-by-value vs. pass-by-reference an so on and so forth.
We can, however, stop buying products made in such dangerous factories

How do you know what factories are dangerous?
Not exactly. A good primer on multi-stage design was published in a magazine called "The Progressive" in 1979.

http://www.progressive.org/images/pdf/1179.pdf
I found my current gig through the August 2012 thread, so yes.

It was immensely useful to me in the many months before I picked up and moved to California because it gave me a great sense of what kind of companies were actively hiring, what sorts of skills were most in demand, and what kind of compensation was available. Now as an engineer helping out with recruiting I find it's a great way to get the attention of candidates with more unorthodox backgrounds. It's especially helpful for companies located outside of S[FV] since we don't have the same critical mass of local personal developer contacts to hire from.

I'd second that the thread should be the first Monday of the month.
You've just broken my heart. My timing's basically based on two 9 AM drives that hit traffic/construction, but took no more than 45 minutes.

I start tomorrow.