skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it was almost all transport and security and staff, not food. Although, they did have some good food (it ranged from public high school at worst to high-end corporate cafeteria at best; varied by base and time).

Surf and turf (although food safety required them to overcook steaks) one night a week. Ice cream. Generally a line with lots of choices for entree. Mostly it was frozen stuff from the equivalent of Sysco, but mid-range, not the absolute cheapest it could be.

An order of magnitude better than MREs or the meals at US bases.

Absolutely none of it was from Iraq or Afghanistan; there was some bought from approved vendors in Kuwait/UAE and trucked/flown in. Fresh fruit and veg for Afghanistan flew from Bahrain 3-5 days/week.

The big improvement was putting RO water purification in country, rather than trucking bottled water (used for all potable use) from far away. The standard unit of water was a 12-pack of 1.5L bottles, later a 24 pack of 20oz bottles, or one level up from that, a pallet (you could just call a guy and have him drop a pallet of water on base anywhere you wanted).
The problem with that is country borders. If China mandated safety then the factories just move to another country.
well hn traffic in general is much lower on weekends so I presume a lot of regulars miss the thread when it's posted on a weekend
You don't. You accept a certain level of free-riding as a better alternative to the suffering caused by poverty.
No advice as to whether you should do it, but if you do, stuff like this will be useful to cast your adventure as "legit" if you want to return to the standard world later. I'd definitely work on leaving a trail/portfolio of your work as you go.
If I think I know what you're talking about, the person in question is Alan.
It's definitely the case that what I'm talking about in the comment above is the ultimate objective of our hiring process, not its current state. But I think we're making good progress towards rationalizing hiring and even better progress at making the hiring process more comfortable for candidates.
The ideology that follows the footsteps and thoughts of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. But in my opinion It's corrupted in today's Turkey.
The ` and ' characters were in fact mirrored in the original ISO 646, where they were supposed to be used to overstrike accents onto other letters. The straight apostrophe comes from the ISO 8859-1 era.

There is no degree symbol because nobody ever proposed one during the standards process. Most of the punctuation came from what appeared on US typewriters at the time. Likewise pilcrow, paragraph, etc.

The first 32 characters are controls because one of the major proponents of the code was Teletype, a division of AT&T. Nobody understood what network protocols were going to turn out to look like and existing protocols were very heavy on in-band signaling. It was an attempt to eradicate the worst features of the Baudot code that was previously in use, where every character had multiple shift modes and multiple protocol interpretations.

The newline vs. carriage return thing is also an artifact of AT&T's involvement. Most US computing organizations didn't care about controls at all and wanted fixed-size records. European computing organizations wanted a single newline. The compromise in ASCII-1968 was that LF could be interpreted as CRLF if sender and receiver agreed, which became the Multics convention and thence into Unix and C.

7-bit because computers at the time universally used 6-bit characters and nobody thought the computer people would actually use the control characters, only the middle 64 characters of the code. (No lower case either.) IBM threw a wrench in the works when they went to 8-bit bytes with the 360 and others followed.

My attempt to tell the ASCII story several years ago: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6gxjm4UN7VjZnFmNlIzQmJoRDg/...
Yup, and it's used by everyone, especially execs, and acts as a swiss army knife. Yet the team is mostly leaving in droves because although it's quite useful, it isn't correctly measured and it doesn't bring home the bacon. So the project is sometimes wrapped up and repackaged by a customer-facing team to steal the glory and get bonuses, or teams put it under them and scale back perks/force us to use them vs other teams who want us to cater to them. So silo'ing, everyone wants the goods. I've contributed lots of infrastructure code that customer-facing teams use, gets who gets the large bonuses. Proposals to fix this and measure impact have been brought up and slapped down by managers. I'm leaving the group after wrapping up some stuff. Fortunately I have high perf scores. People make warm comments about how useful the project is, but at the end of the day, it's never going to give me a $200k bonus, so it goes in one ear, out the other.
I think a lot of people, especially @jangosteve, mistake freelancing for contracting.

I've been in London for 6 years, I've contracted for 5 of those (architect position at the BBC was "only available is it was full time". In hind sight, I shouldn't have taken it). I've been out of work for a total of 6 days in 6 years (took a week to get a contract after a 3 month holiday). I started my first contract within 6 days of landing in the country (nothing prearranged)

Freelancing is when you go from short term contract to short term contract, or you quote/bid for work. They can be 2-5 days a week, for maybe a month or less. For that I agree you need to pimp yourself like @jangosteve says, because you are moving so much. You are basically a 1 (wo)man consultancy.

I don't do this (except for my "on the side" mobile stuff). Too inconsistent.

But if you are a back-end dev (or front end, just to a slightly lesser degree) you can stay in the same place for _years_, or until you get bored of it. 3-6 months is a normal minimum, at least in the .net space which I'm in.

Unless you are useless. Then you're likely to get turfed out quickly.

Where I am at the moment, I've been there for 3 years (nearly). Last place I was there for 2 including some as a full timer. I've done moonlighting (apps, websites) at the same time. One of the guys I work with has been there for 8 years. I'm sure HMRC should have something to say about it, but no one is looking.

I'd normally want to move on after 2, just to keep fresh, but I do the same with FT jobs.

I'd be very hesitant about taking a FT position anymore. You can be fired with 1 months notice, and you get 4 weeks holiday, and maybe 75% of the wages _with tax removed before you get it_.

Contracting, I get no notice (this has only happened once when the customer literally ran out of money), but usually 28 days. I don't get paid if I'm sick, but I keep myself healthy and allow for 2 weeks sick and 6 weeks holiday a year. I have insurance to cover if I get REALLY sick.

I usually take closer to 8 weeks holiday a year. Sometimes between contracts, sometimes during them (usually during, but not at the same time)

For me, contracting is an easy way to work. The paperwork overhead with a system like freeagent is TRIVIAL if you have a half decent accountant (cough mine is great cough maslins.co.uk). Make sure you have a bit of a buffer in case you DO have issues getting work or a client pays late (if they pay late consistently, fire their arse)

So:
1. Get a limited company, and a good accountant
2. Get indemnity insurance (you need it anyway)
3. Get used to being called by recruiters who you'd like to slap with a fish
4. DO IT
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He's not presented in a positive or socially acceptable light. He's funny (to some) because he's transgressive.

People laugh at prison rape because those guys are bad so rape is okay.
You can do contract work if you want. It's what I do. Like others are saying it is harder. In the UK, I am not sure, but here it means you're responsible for more stuff. We have to buy our own health insurance policies or go without, for example. I'm sure you'd have to save your own taxes, instead of withholding. If you've never done that before, I assure you, it's really hard!

The contract rates are higher because they are paying for the: fact that in a few months you have to find a new job, so you're being compensated in advance for that, fact that there won't be benefits, fact that you are going to do a lot more work than a regular employee..

So, what's the good thing about contracting: Freedom. At least in the US, a 1099 employee can't be told: when to work, where to work, what to use for tools, etc. In practice, they can still ask you to "agree" to these things up front, but compared the level of control a regular employee is encumbered by, it is much less. This is US specific, not sure what the UK law is.

You get variety. Some people like the experience of working with lots of people and companies.

Finally, I guess the advice piece: you'll only be able to live off contract work if you are absolutely fearless and totally independent. You'll have to interview/find clients a lot. A client meeting is a bit less scrutinizing than a job interview, but you'll have a lot more of them, and your success will depend on finding work often
If you read carefully (it's a big comment, I know) you'll see that I agree with you; it's fine to hire for non-technical attributes.

What's not fine is a tacit understanding that candidates should be hired or negged based on arbitrary attributes, gut feel, or "would I enjoy having a beer with this guy".

Like Mechanical Fish said: you have to hire like you mean it. That means, if there are nontechnical attributes you're screening for, you need to define them ahead of time and deliberately design a screening process that selects for them.
I helped a client write their own HN hiring letter.

They'd originally had corp-speak in there like "5y PHP Developer". "Must have BS in ..." and we rewrote their requirements to things developers would have to know how to use (PHP OO, SQL with X, Able to do Y in Z, etc) and a description of the challenges you'd have.

Despite having chopped out the arbitrary restrictions, we made the posting much tougher. Which is good, it was for essentially engineer #1 and they needed someone who'd let the founder be able to delegate.

Yeah, many of the posts here are much more exacting than "regular" job boards. They're written by the people doing the work rather than via an HR filter.
Yesterday I shut down the Piictu API. My Piictu story.
A little off topic, but I think people need to realize that when someone says they're a programmer, all they mean is that they write code.

I know a lot of my friends (especially the ones in tech heavy cultures like Google, Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox) easily forget that when someone says "I'm a software engineer," they mean they write code. It doesn't mean they've gone through the same coursework, can reduce 3-SAT to everyday problems, form intricate algorithms, or have written their own memory allocator.

Keeping this in mind might make conversations go smoother.
Twilio - San Francisco, CA

We're looking for a lead software engineer to work on the latest and greatest version of the Twilio API. We're also working on making sure the API can scale to 2015 and beyond, and porting more of our code to use services internally.

Day to day we work with flask-restful (our open-source Flask project), Chef, nginx, uwsgi, and a handful of other tools. Our team is always the one pushing the envelope to try out new, better infrastructure inside the company.

HTTP nerds especially welcome. Contact me - email is in my profile.
Probably one of the better critiques of Angell's statements is Derek Lowe, an R&D chemist in the pharmaceutical industry.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/12/03/marcia_angel...

I have no problem if someone disagrees with the pharmaceutical industry on a fundamental level (i.e. "there should be no profit in healthcare"), but if you start spreading misinformation and half-truths, I lose a lot of respect for that person.
The protest to protect the park is nothing more than a trigger. In fact there are even reports that suggest that there is some misinformation and there is no currently approved project to build a shopping center. Still not clear what the facts are since media is not doing its job.

Initial protest was quite small and not many people paid attention to it until the police used ridiculous level of force to disperse the protesters. That's the action that triggered mass protests all over the country.
Yes, there very much is. Take a cue from online marketing, which has been systematized heavily over the last 5-10 years: create a process you can measure; measure; correct over time.
I've always found this very interesting, especially their seemingly built-in vocabulary. It's definitely not news though as the blog suggests. I remember having heard about this for years. Here's a reference from 2005: http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/lds/meridian/2005/prairi....
Practicing Safe Sex with Third-Party APIs
More importantly for the future, UTF-8 is allows all of Unicode to be coded as an 8-bit extension of ASCII.
Direct assignment without using the calculated length property performs way ahead than others, at least in chrome http://jsperf.com/array-direct-assignment-vs-push/3
HN "hellbans" users who have karma that's below a certain threshold (0, I think) - the site looks normal to them, but no one else can see their posts. You can see the post if you turn on "show dead" in your profile.
There is one construct for repetition in Go. It's called "for".

parser = ParserNil;
for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
parser = ParserSeq(parser, ParserSeq(parseComma, parseInt))
}

PS. I'm a complete Go newbie. Don't take this code as the "one true Go way".
Exactly. Freelancing has a lot more control, but less money, and you bid on jobs like an agency would.

Contracting is basically a full time job, but you own the company, can claim expenses / equipment / etc, and otherwise, it works like a normal paid job. You dont, EVER, bid on jobs, you get hired for a set period. Companies like this as it's an _operational_ expense not a HR expense, and chances are, they have a hiring freeze :)
'I 3D Printed a Gun' Documentary
See the output of

go tool 6g -help

The `-B` switch will disable bounds checks. You can use it like this:

go build -gcflags '-B'
Maybe you should read his post again if you don't understand why he's talking about Singapore. You're probably one of the people he's talking about, who think that Singapore is a model to emulate all around the world.
He's in the UK. We have health covered. He would have to have liability insurance tho, but it's not expensive (£300/year)
Too late, the protest is no longer about the park.
Better example is something like the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy (or really any big surface combatant in the USN); they can do real surgery.

I'd argue that Comfort and Mercy could do more good for US national security at sea, combined with LPD/LPH for cargo transport and personnel, than any other surface ships in the US fleet -- humanitarian missions probably improve security more than anything but the submarine nuclear deterrent.
Clone the homebrew repo. Use a cronjob or Jenkins or some such to periodically fetch updates to a server under your control. Modify homebrew and its setup script to use your repo (it's been a while since I did this but the Github URL for the homebrew repo used to be hard coded in one of homebrew's ruby scripts). Whenever setting up a new machine, use the modified setup script.

Periodically you can merge upstream into your clone to get updated recipes. (e.g., the aforementioned cronjob can mirror master from github to remotes/upstream/master in your repo, then separately you merge that into your master).

Your servers are now immune to github outages[1] and you can review recipe updates before your servers update to those recipes.

[1] unless of course the recipes you're using are hosted on github. But you could recursively mirror those sources too and modify the recipes as needed.

edit: I'm on a mobile device but I can provide further details the next time I'm in front of a keyboard in case this wasn't clear.
I assume a Dutch software engineer would not have problems living and working in London?
I'm currently living in a remote area that I really like, but it feals a bit 'dead'. I'm yearning to get back in to a more action-packed working environment.
You'll learn to feel every line of code you write

This is exactly how I felt when I started writing C.

I started out with .NET and Java. Both had quite high abstraction levels, and not much deep integration with hardware. I took my control statements, conditionals, and high-level object-based programming for granted -- I never WANTED to learn C. I took one look at K&R and was turned off by the insane amount of low-level work you had to do compared to Java or Python, even to write a simple character counter.

I came back to it. I was slow at first, I was confused, but I learned how to write in C. I learned how to control memory myself. I learned how to do my own text handling. I learned how to avoid buffer overflows and segfaults.

In many ways, it's like going from a Mercedes-Benz to a Miata. There's a lot less comfort, and you have to do a lot more of the shifting and oversteer yourself when the Benz used to do it for you, but you really feel yourself driving, and when you step back into the Mercedes, you feel numbed.

It's the same with C.
It doesnt show precisely, but the bumper is extremely low. I dont think he gut sucked underneath... he got pushed away in whichever direction -- we can't see because of the water. No?
That argument presupposes that people are not facing a real risk of starving to death if they are unemployed. I am not sure that is something that can be assumed.

When there is a gun pointed at your head, you do not have a real choice.
Turkeys prime minister may be increasingly authoritarian but he was democratically elected. He is not a dictator.
Off-topic, but if you manage a content site, and you cannot say with a straight face that your mobile site is objectively better for mobile devices in some way, GET RID OF THE MOBILE SITE.
We Americans may be allowed to own gas masks, but we are not allowed to wear them. I was at WTO `Battle in Seattle', protesters were
arrested for wearing them, individuals had their gas masks brutally removed then pepper sprayed in the face.
I hate to reply to a comment like this, but for anyone new to HN, these folks come out whenever Singapore is mentioned in a negative light. For a previous rendition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621371
System hacking detected! Querystrings are our last defense!
Personally, I get a little bit turned off by offers around £60k-£100k because I associate them with working in finance, which is something I don't want to do and I know a lot of folks I know also don't want to do that. Making subject lines or ads a bit more explicit and descriptive as well as offering those large sums might work just fine.
How are you describing the company and the current growth of the company?
This is not a crime.
I think it's still there.

package main

func main() {
slice := []string{"first", "second", "third"}
println(slice[1])
slice = slice[0:2]
println(slice[2])
}

Compile with

go build -gcflags -B wat.go
./wat

Output

second
third

Without the `-B` you'll get a runtime panic. I'm on Go 1.1. (Maybe it's removed in tip?)
Our first hire came from one of these :)
This is a fair point, but it brings to mind another point I didn't really understand till the last couple of years. Learning about how compilers work is just as important. Building a small lisp compiler was a life-changing experience for me in terms of going one level deeper, as much as understanding C was. For those who've never written lisp before, the reason I recommend a lisp compiler is that lisp compilers are the simplest to write, and the most expressive in terms of runtime strategy since lisp syntax mirrors a compiler's IR (intermediate representation). I think this is just as important in todays world because languages like Ruby and Javascript are both directly inspired by lisp. We also live in a world where Clojure is seeing a steady rise, for once a Lisp with large potential for significant commercial adoption.

I can highly recommend the book Lisp in Small Pieces, $93 on amazon, and worth every penny. Walking through the building blocks and design decisions of a language changes the way you code. Every language you look at winds up being internally translated into your own IR whether you've written a compiler or not. Understanding the inner workings of a compiler however adds depth.
Then they ask for more H-1Bs
"One thing that is clear: some at Morgan Lewis knew what McAleese was doing. He told the firm's then-general counsel that the company he invested in was going to sue Apple, and he sent a follow-up note after the lawsuit was filed."

Since it mentions people in specific positions at Morgan Lewis and a particular follow-up note, I assume it's the part of proceedings.
If you are fresh out of college, go for it, get a couple of roommates. otherwise, no.
You entirely miss the point. He's holding up Singapore as a shining example of the end-state of affairs that the government of Turkey is trying to emulate. Since we don't have a word for it yet, or we haven't learned it, we're saying "Singaporification" as a placeholder. People might have said "Nazification" before the word "fascism" was well defined.
> A much smaller global population... is the only solution

If we can overcome resource and energy scarcity, I don't see why we couldn't support an arbitrarily large population comfortably. Unemployment is not a reason to downsize the population, it just means we're outgrowing or current economic system.
Hey, are you seriously defending 3 9's of uptime? That's abysmal.

Github, if they're honest about their 12 month uptime levels would be lucky to be a single 9 service. Their uptime is Terrible with a capital T. But you know what? Until there's something better everyone is going to keep using them, right?

Great services with values that are hard to find become damn near irreplaceable even with terrible uptime. This is an obvious place to compete; if you made a github clone that simply stayed online you could win market share during every downtime. However cloning github would not be trivial.

And therein lies the problem and the answer to why we accept their terrible uptime levels. They give us something we can't get elsewhere: social coding and easy centralization.
pionar obviously has an interest in disbelieving, for whatever weird reason
Artistic Originality
Note e.g. at http://www.nbim.no/en/Investments/Market-Value/ the billions they talk about ( '4,182 billion kroner' ) are European long scale billions, so US short scale trillions.

The number of $734 billion you give would be milliards (or thousands of millions) in the long scale version.

Journalists often don't bother making the conversion, causing a 10^6 error when talking about trillions, for example.
All-up cost for 100LL (to power the early small Army drones) was insane, since it was in small quantities. Like $20-30/gal all-in, which is why they tried to switch to JP8/Jet-A drones as fast as possible.

IIRC, the Kingdom of Kuwait actually donated a lot of the Jet-A/JP8, mogas, and diesel fuel used by the US in Iraq. But KBR charged about $2.50/gal to truck it from Kuwait to Iraq. It was about $1.50 to bring it from Turkey. Gas was subsidized by the Iraqi government and sold for $0.10/gal on the civilian market at official gas stations, but they had 4-8h long lines (which were dangerous targets), so a lot of people paid about $1/gal to guys with plastic bottles by the side of the road.