skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. He makes honest, (edit: if pretentious) user-focused software.

2. He's very successful.

3. He has strong opinions.
U.S. and China Agree to Hold Regular Talks on Hacking
Thats exactly what Ive been doing. Every day isnt a party but I worry that the culture of software shops has changed in ways that I will never be happy in a software job again. And I hate pretending Im OK with stuff Im not OK with.

Its gotten to the point where no matter how much I lower my expectations, they are never low enough.
A friend helped out my startup, are they entitled to equity?
I've been working on my startup for quite some time now (over a year) and my friend, who is a designer, does somewhere between something like 30 hours of work to help out where I was lacking in some skill. No discussions or contracts have been made but I feel like its important to discuss expectations. Are they entitled to equity now?
"Also, yoga teachers are not supposed to do it for money. Read up on how Gurukuls worked."

Yeah I suppose you'll want to practice guruseva instead -- work for your instructor, such as cleaning his restroom, cooking, or going to the street begging for money on his behalf. No thanks, as much a traditionalist that I can be wrt yoga, some things are better the modern/western way.

"Yoga removed from its spiritual context is just a kitschy low grade thing"

No, yoga can be an awesome practice removed from any religion/spirituality. There's support from that even in traditional practices and texts. And if you get all dogmatic about this, I think you're doing it wrong unless you're practicing yoga associated with some form of Hinduism (most mantras are Vedantic chants, etc.). Get off my atheistic yoga mat :))

But I agree with the general stupidity of many commercial yogas. For one thing, heated rooms are a no-no, yoga has a purist approach as a biological and self-sufficient practice so it doesn't use any artificial support: no weights, stands, Pilates balls, etc., the ONLY thing you need is your own body (not just for the physical exercises / asanas, but all practices including meditation).
> "Neutered SRE", then. ;)

Hah! More like "respectful of the ability of our coworkers"

> Or, "Reliability Ombudsman".

I like this one. Might just use it.
Maybe you're learning now that the skills you learned and valued so much weren't really that valuable at all?
I knew something was making it look cheap and amateurish but I hadn't spotted it was that. Ugh.
I'll echo the sentiment that you wouldn't be too old, but question your approach. Why get the degree at this point? Why not continue to learn through self-study and demonstrate your ability through open source?

Unless you want to be a bonafide computer scientist (i.e. working towards a career in academia or otherwise pushing the boundaries of current knowledge of the field), it seems like pursuing a second degree may do little else but exacerbate the age concerns you're already having.

In my opinion you'd be better off starting somewhere as a junior programmer now and honing your craft on the job (as you'd have to do after finishing your degree anyway).
The assumption that you can distinguish good and bad engineers through their resume is flawed. Some of the better engineers I've worked with didn't go to school. Some of the worst engineers I've worked with got advanced degrees at reputable schools.

The biggest secret in software is that we simply don't know how to teach software. Half of all graduates in all relevant programs, at all universities, are simply unhirable. Talented, second-year interns are more valuable than the median graduate.

We know how to take talented students and make them better, but we don't know how to identify talented students early, and we don't know how to make untalented students even barely competent.
Ask HN: Algorithms for Writing Headlines / Short Narratives?
Does anyone know of any open source (or otherwise easily accessible) algorithms for automatically generating headlines or short stories from snippets of data?

Something along the lines of what Narrative Sciences does[1], but useable by a small software development shop.

Or perhaps just some papers or references for further study.

Thanks!

[1]:http://narrativescience.com/
I'd guess it's because he's successful, well spoken, and opinionated. His opinions are controversial enough to spark heated discussions, without alienating too many of us.
How employment markets work, and fairness, are not the same thing. It's not a misconception, it's a criticism.

And of course in the real world, wages are not based on supply and demand. They're based on leverage and BATNA.

Simply put, given two equal employees (hypothetically, if it were possible to measure this), it's not "fair" to give one $50k and one $300k. It's not about the prevailing wage, it's about the contribution relative to what is coming back.
>Corporate ethics wise it is more interesting why consumers want corporations to pay more tax as it effectively increases prices.

Because taxes (help) pay for the negative externalities that arise from the corporation doing business.

>A better question would be posed to our governments on tax reform and simplification. But we all know the loopholes exist somewhat intentionally, otherwise they would have been closed already. The fact they're not getting closed indicates that our perception of what a company should pay and what they're legally obligated is basically wrong.

The problem exists because of the international tax framework, and getting the governments of all the jurisdictions involved to reform the tax system is harder than a single country unilaterally doing so - especially when it greatly benefits some countries at the expense of others.
This video may help to understand the paper more vividly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYWgrjWQx60&feature=youtu...
That, or bottom-up big-tent coalitions that can stitch together a bunch of fragmented groups. (For all their many faults, the Republicans had this formula perfected in the 80's and early 00's.)
I have always liked Friedman's negative income tax proposal for exactly this reason.
Staring at traffic for 4 hours a day is no way to treat oneself.
Employers will always have the upper hand because in the western world discussing/knowing salaries of peers is considered taboo( I never understood this as somebody who comes from the east where asking friends and peers their salary is very normal). Level the playing field. Discuss your salary more openly and you will see things get fairer( if that's a word). Not all will make the same but you will get to what you deserve very quickly. It also helps by letting you get an idea of what you need to do to get to the next level. Would love to hear the communities thoughts on this somewhat contrarian view.
Sorry, I should've made that clear - I missed out the word "chain" in the sentence about Turkish ice cream.
After many years in the garden what still blows my mind is what one little seed can do.

Surviving all manner of obstacles (rains,winds,infections,insects etc) and totally self sustaining in many cases requiring little help from my end. It is very satisfying to watch over time.

Now if only the software I build ever achieves that fine level of engineering...
Yeah, wealth-building activities that are truly valuable to society probably should remain incentivized by the possibility of great wealth. It's not the only incentive but it's one that works well.

What about most economic activities, though? Trinket selling, farming, programming CRUD apps, fishing, working at grocery counters, the duller parts of research, etc. Technology is already automating many of these things away and replacing them with more fulfilling work, or maybe not replacing them in the sense that new jobs are there but the workers have to be retrained. How badly do we need a human incentive structure for tasks that can and will be automated?

Also, where can I work with people who care about my intellectual freedom and sanity? (Not a rhetorical question; if you know of any, please do tell!)

I think you are right in that, if people who care about intellectual freedom can achieve it en masse, we will have found a great balance.
Sorry you're right about the Ottomans, I'd just woken up and seen this in the morning.
That's odd because their graduate developer scheme pays 32k
Suppose for a moment that Google really is as benevolent as you believe. You yourself admit that they do have a lot of power. In a democracy, we try not to put too much power even in the hands of an elected official. Isn't it a problem that so much power resides with a corporation? Should society trust Google's good intentions?

But I even have doubts about Google's benevolence. What, a company that adopts a "don't be evil" motto is less likely to be evil than a company that doesn't? I'd be suspicious of a person that feels the need to declare that he'll do his best not murder anyone. By adopting the motto, Google had acknowledged the fact that corporations do tend to do evil. But is it because they intend to do so? Do chairmen and CEOs wake up in the morning all giddy about doing some evil or naughty, harmful, mischief today? Even Bernie Madoff didn't start out like this. And yet, corporations do evil in spite of people's best intentions. So Google said: we'll try to be careful. That's actually not bad, because I hope that that slogan makes the Google executives aware of the temptations and pitfalls that await all big firms. But I do not for a second believe that Google's executives are so much better than all other good people running large corporations that actually do evil. Because, hey -- power corrupts.

Nobody likes getting up one day and realize they've become a Bond villain, so they don't: that is, they just don't realize it. Also, nobody really is an actual Bond villain (well, Hitler). Even good people do bad things. My point is, people do need a little help from the outside to protect them from themselves, and with that much power, Google needs a lot of help. Google has become a big problem.
Not true again. My masters is in Information Science, I have written code for a long time.
This is interesting background, but you should reconsider revealing this kind of information about him publicly unless you've got his permission. It's really none of our business what his GPA was or whether he did well at his first job.
> the Trek writers took a little inspiration from JMS's pitch and then went an entirely different direction with it.

Agreed. It was a minor dick move, but a far cry from a creative rip-off. DS9 goes its own direction (influenced heavily by BSG's Ronald Moore), and stands on its own two feet.

> liking one won't translate into liking the other.

Not necessarily, but I do think they're cousins, in that they both take galactic politics seriously (the miscellaneous Trek one-offs notwithstanding).
>Doesn't have anything to do with individual freedom.

Generally 20th century enterprises employed millions of factory workers as machines in a giant productive machine, with the benefits going to the founders/owners/etc. Socialist movements were an attempt to capture this value for the people creating it. Which would presumably mean you didn't have to work as much.

As a casual reading of history will tell you, it didn't work.

>In the 21st century, you there is little valid reason to coordinate production centrally

I wholly doubt that decentralized manufacturing solutions benefit from economies of scale as well as their centralized kin. (Assuming you're talking about 3D Printing/etc/all.)

>Sounds like a market economy to me.

I would hope so. Command economies are generally a bad idea.
I've argued this before. People usually tell me I'm living in a bubble and that the general public is too lazy for this to work.
Coincidentally, I do have funding and am debt free. What would you do?
I'm using a Dell xps 1640 (1080 res, 8gb, 128gb ssd) for the past 4+ years. With the SSD it's silent and runs cool for the most part.

I do graphic design.

For extra storage I use a DLink dns320 with a fan mod so it's cooler and also silent.
CMake Tools for Visual Studio
You have to adapt this formula to a post-revolution country where nobody trusts nobody, nobody knows what they want, people have bizzare ideas that have nothing in common with reality (think religions), and there is no political rallying point to stitch groups around.
Spoiler: Curious what other people did here. My approach on each step was to simply "test" some code to see what happened before attempting to solve the puzzle. I tested `@xzoor.isTrue(0)` just to see... not very creative but it works for finding the lying guard.

I used the same approach to test the last puzzle (#ship) and did:
`for n in @numans
n.board(@vehicle)
@vehicle.fly(#3127)`
which ends the game (even though this doesn't satisfy the puzzle).
It depends how good/wanted he is.

I live in Scotland near Edinburgh, my first dev job I was earning £13k. It isn't super easy to break into development in the UK but within a year that had about doubled and that and learnt enough to be able to jump ship, which I did.

Now years later, I've happily earning more than the London average by contracting. I ate shit early on because I wanted to get somewhere in an economic time where the young are being screwed. I think it was probably worth it, but only until your experience and talent matures a bit.
> I Wasn't Prepared for Work

Some people just aren't cut out for the business world. Centuries ago they might have become monks or clergy.

These days they exit academia with a master's degree or Ph.D., try unsuccessfully to fit into the business world, then retreat back to academia and eventually become associate professors or professors.

It's very easy to spot these types of people in interviews. I generally pass on them because it's been my experience that in the business world they are rudderless. They are very smart, but they often don't understand why companies pass on them.

On the other hand, in this case, it may just be the four-hour commute. No job is worth traveling four hours in a car each day, unless it's the only one you can find and you're supporting a family. If that's not the case, find something closer, or move. San Francisco isn't the only place that creates software.
That's great, but I would say many young people today, their passions include surfing the net all day, playing video games, listening to free music. Not exactly a great way to build/create value.
I recently put out the first release candidate of a Visual Studio extension adding syntax highlighting and IntelliSense for CMake. Please let me know if you have any feedback or have found any bugs that need to be fixed.
Blast it with beams of microwaves from a fleet of satellites heating the cold downdrafts. Covered in PopSci 10 year ago. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2003-07/how-destroy-to...

Considering that there are on average 1,300 tornados in USA per year moving people consistently is just too much resource drain.
Thanks for making me feel fortunate for working where I work, doing what I'm doing, with the team I'm a part of, HN.
At home I use a $249 Samsung Chromebook and RDP into either a Mac Mini or Dell Windows PC.

If WWDC brings a Macbook Air with at least a 1080p display, I'll switch to that.
Many people seem to be comparing Musk's statements with the current California HSR plans, but the wikipedia page makes launch loops sound quite unsuitable as an HSR alternative, e.g.:

+ "provides a relatively low 3g acceleration"

+ "for safety and astrodynamic reasons, launch loops are intended to be installed over an ocean near the equator, well away from habitation"

etc.

Some of the enormous advantages of HSR are the ease with which it can be seamlessly be integrated into urban infrastructure, its ability to directly serve city cores, the low trip overhead for passengers (30s from local subway train to HSR seat!, no advance reservations necessary), the ease with which it can serve multiple markets with a single trip (because the cost/overhead of an intermediate stop is quite low), and its high energy efficiency.

This make it quite different from air travel, and launch loops are more like extreme versions of air-travel in many ways (though without the flexible routing of airplanes, apparently).
I up voted this reply. Good point.
The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense.

It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used).

Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company.
I hope not. I just started my MSSWE program at 36. If I didn't enroll in an academic program, family life and full time work would keep me from making the transition.
Assange and Stallman overlap on a lot of this content really. Stallman is about liberating technology and Assange is about liberating information.

I think it's clear that this is the future Google wants. If they occasionally have to hand over documents to the government, that's just the price of optimizing the lattes for the rest of us. If you don't like personal information lying in the hands of third party corporations and powerful officials, you have a first world problem.

What I am waiting for is a foundation focused on privacy. Our digital lives should be no one's rummage sale. The foundation would create software to make social networking truly controllable and private. No ability to read my private messages, no mandate to make money from me, no personalization, no backdoors.
Don't do this unless you're prepared to return to work after the sabbatical (which I assume you don't).
I'm going about it a different way: work hard while I'm young and save (i.e. invest) as much as I can so that I can retire early. My current retirement age goal is 45.
The field of "p versus np" is seldom being touched by researchers, since no one wanna spend his/her time on an unknown ending research program. What I mean maybe one could hardly find a published paper in recent years. What do you expect the author to cite? If you want to get an overview about the paper, you may watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYWgrjWQx60&feature=youtu...
Those are far more structured forms of socialization. Food causes people to sit down and face each other as they eat but aside from that they can talk about whatever they want to.
No, the argument you're making is irrational.

You're a $100k/yr FTE dev. A VP above you makes $200k/yr. You believe that VP should be making $50k/yr. But your position isn't improved at all if they do. You're still making $100k/yr, and someone else is taking the $150k/yr premium.

So you say, "no, I should get a share of that $150k/yr premium." Well, OK, why aren't you? What you're saying is that you're worth more than $100k/yr. You already have a way of demonstrating that: demand a raise, then start interviewing.

The flip side of this, if it helps make the point clearer: you're a $100k/yr dev. The VP at your company is already making $50k/yr. This is good how? By any logic you could employ in the above scenario, you're worth more than $100k/yr in this scenario too.

What other people in your firm make is an orthogonal concern to what you make. Clinging to the belief that pay equity is an important part of your compensation is as likely to harm you as help you; stipulating that we are all especially high-functioning professionals, the notion of pay equity is part of what puts a ceiling on what you earn now.
I think the women liking money thing is more about social status, power and strength than actual money. A girl I date found it hot that I interview and had a vote in the hiring process for example.
So your problem with obamacare is there will no longer be any uninsured.
How to overcome Silicon Valley
I'm not a PHP dev, but I have heard that mysql_real_escape_string is not a preferred method of preventing SQL injection anymore?
Nope, anything involving drawing, they can do. Just make sure you put at least a little bit of effort into verifying that your winning bit is authentic and not stolen, because that's been a huge problem with contests I've watched there.
1. That isn't a slippery slope. A slippery slope is where once you start something, you can't stop it as it slowly erodes. In essence, once you start something down a slope, it will roll all the way to the bottom.

There is nothing about what you have said that demonstrates this is a slippery slope.

Maybe you meant to make the argument that once something is okay, you start down the path to everything being okay. This would be false, since outcomes, reactions, and viewpoints of previous things are raised when new things happen.

It's not a court where once a ruling has been issued, that is the rule.

2. I'm really trying to understand your concern here, but, as written, seems to boil down to "if everyone is a bad person, bad things can happen". Since I assume this is not what you are trying to say, could you elaborate a bit?
Legally or morally? I would say so morally. Legally is anyone's guess but you'd be crazy to take the advice of anyone other than a lawyer on that question.
SEEKING WORK - Remote or in-person (Austin, TX). We are looking to ramp up for the second half of 2013. We currently have bandwidth of 190-225 hours/month. We specialize in backend utilizing Django web development (web sites & web applications) and increasingly full-stack development.

We help non-technical founders get their ideas off the ground.

Email: theo@rebuiltbits.com
Yup. Look at his work ex with VS, DX3D, C# and his visceral hate towards Microsoft after getting successful is telling. I get it, he is a developer who has to be in know of all the technologies but maybe he developed those strong opinions after getting successful, and especially after looking at his former boss's comment that he was average at Vivisimo and shined afterwards at Tumblr etc. I can respect everything he has done and his posts/opinions, but finding his resume on here I was compelled to comment.
"I'd rather deal with a hundred of regular politicians and their regular small-time stupidity"
That doesn't work in a revolutionary country. What you get is a hundred of gangs.
The specific technical answer in our case is: if we have a headcount cap, I don't know what it is.
[Show HN] Realistic WebGL Moon w/ map generated using Clementine spacecraft data
A company whose incentives are aligned with its consumers truly has the power to not "be evil". Google was not that company. It doesn't mean that company is impossible.
Good point - Little Boy's design was not even tested prior to its detonation.
I have something JUST like this that runs on CMUSphinx... And the feature set is not as impressive yet -- I wonder if I should keep developing it
I don’t quite follow the logic of driving being “faster”. In my experience, public transportation can be highly productive time for certain activities like reading, while driving is very limited in the activities you can safely do (though I used to have a tape in my car to help me practice singing scales, so there are some safe options).
It's not aimed at the general public though, only those who would create IP, businesses, etc. but otherwise than through established economic engines (businesses and companies).
Don't blow up the spot. You're gonna ruin it for yourself.

You forgot to mention the dreaded rain 6 months of the year. Cold, wet, miserable.
If you already have an undergrad degree get a masters not another 4year degree. It's a little harder than an undergrad degree but not all that much.