skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they have a wrong mindset to begin with: they believe learning to program should be relatively easy and have an obvious and relatively simple path to mastery

The masters of every subject say stuff like this, and it's really just a type of myopia of the craftsman. I work in manufacturing and people tell you shit like this all the time.

Imagine a 19th Century Car Driver:

"People who think learning to drive should be relatively easy are missing the mastery required for match-rev shifts, air-fuel mixture, spark management - not to mention the intricacies of debugging your carburetor on the side of the road."

Programming will continue to be made more accessible, as is the apparent trend. Nearly no developers know what's really going on under the hood except people who specialize in assembly, CMOS, etc.
Well do you want to? Will you enjoy it? Will you indeed build a network that everyone is always talking about?
Some people just thrive in an environment like that and can use it to their advantage. It gives them leverage. They're work it. If that kind of resonates with you then there's no doubt going to college might make some great things happen.

Otherwise I'd just cut every corner possible and get the diploma in like 2 years.

Personally schools just make me feel sick. And truly sick too. Since leaving school I've never been sick once. No need to skip school I guess.
Oh and the whole "college is nothing like HS, THIS IS THE REAL DEAL" crowd. Gosh. No! They'd tell me the same stuff in primary school about middle-school. By the first year of middle school I was begging my mom to let me home-school myself. Wish had more courage to actually drop out of that.

Got no clue what's financially better. If you can thrive there do go! And leverage the hell out of it.

But whether or not you go do continue academia-level self-studying. There's little excuse not to.
> Common usage of CSV is US-ASCII, but other character sets defined
> by IANA for the "text" tree may be used in conjunction with the
> "charset" parameter.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6657.txt

https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-se...
Isn’t this the heart of the problem, though?

Raw text is a limited medium, and working at the level of plain text analysis rather than semantic analysis does limit how much our tools can achieve. The UNIX philosophy of having many small, text-based tools and chaining them together represents a common platform, but it’s also a least common denominator platform.

As long as we allow that glass ceiling to remain, the best our tools will ever do is push it incrementally higher, one tiny step at a time. If we want to make big leaps, we’re going to have to sacrifice some of that generality so we can use more powerful but specific tools. Unfortunately, that means that any new programming language wanting to take on the established standards needs not only a compiler/interpreter, but also the rest of the ecosystem: a comprehensive tool chain, ample library coverage, documentation and training resources, and so on. It is also, almost inevitably, going to need some standardised way of bridging the gap to today’s established languages for interoperability and backward compatibility purposes.

This is why I think the view that programming languages should be designed optimally for humans is short-sighted, and I suspect most of the big success stories in the coming years will be languages that were designed with clean semantics and easy parsing in mind. Those languages will better support building that surrounding ecosystem, and a good language with a good ecosystem is more practically useful than a slightly better language with a limited ecosystem.
Perhaps someone more experienced can clarify, but is the gist of this article basically sacrificing perfect forward secrecy for more performance?
I didn't read the original reports, but who started the "dragnet" talks? You? The premise is still true; this woman and her family were questioned due to the keywords they were searching. Someone did piece together her family's searches, and that got them a knock on their door by an SUV team, and the FBI was involved.
Palantir's Prism API
Who cares. I mean, despite this not being software, "ship early and iterate" still applies. They've now hired 5 professionals to help them out.

In any case, whenever something related to diet comes up on HN, it seems like no one really knows anything anyway. If nothing else, this project is interesting because of him putting his own body on the line, for a litmus test on current health recommendations.
Think of it like this: you still have model+controller at the server side (REST interface), the whole HTML+Javascript thing is the view layer. This view layer happens to be modeled using the MVC pattern, which is a pretty smart move if you are writing complex user interfaces.

For example, if you are mimicking a spreadsheet, it is very handy to have the presentation layer modeled in MVC instead of writing all the old-fashioned-jQuery-spaghetti-code way.
But how shocked are you that it turned out also not to be pictures of fireworks (seeing as you posted the article that speculated facebook photos were to blame)?
[If it were ILLEGAL], the company doing the hiring would just give a different reason for declining you.

"We found a better qualified candidate."

or

"We decided to go with the internal candidate."

or, and this one is ironclad in the case of these sorts of contractors...

"We can't meet your salary expectations."

This type of government contractor generally makes FAR more than most companies would be willing to pay.

In any case, they don't need to tell you that it's because you worked for BAH for instance.
You mean like the meaningful trials on the amount of salt, sugar and fat now common-place in fast food, Or growth hormones in factory-farmed meat, or....?
> let your advertisers run JavaScript in ads without letting them inject script tags pointing to external URLs

How would you do that? That's equivalent to the halting problem. There is an infinite number of ways to assemble code that will execute arbitrary code, which can can assemble code that will execute arbitrary code, which ...
What is Bob meant to do in this case? The program certainly isn't going to be shut down because an employee at a contractor has some objections.
Unless they also invented time travel, the CEO's actions didn't help with the accident in question, and so don't disqualify it from being "selfless".
Good for them, lets hope more follow.
I remember the Netherlands had so few criminals that it had to shut down several prisons and lay off hundreds of staff members and started importing criminals from other countries like Belgium on a contract basis because of the lack of people to incarcerate. [1]

This is the country where you could just drive into its capital and buy every strain of cannabis you can possibly imagine and different strains of psilocybin magic mushrooms without so much as a howdy and an ID if you looked younger than 18.

[1] http://vorige.nrc.nl/international/article2246821.ece/Nether...
Oh god, we're living in a sci-fi book. Welcome to City 17, it's safer here and we have soylent vending machines.
I would love to know the answer too. Or may be nginx should fix the way it executes the encryption algorithm.
What if my dependency depends on something else and that something else breaks things when it's updated? Is there a decent way to lock all dependencies recursively?
Fulltime, Palo Alto - funded Series A

http://www.refresh.io
paul at refresh.io

Title: "Rather Impressive Java Developer"

Our current dev team is pretty awesome and we're looking to add to it. Currently we have a few PhD's, few ex-googler's, some tech book authors, couple of ex-linkedin, ex-microsofties, and stanfords, and a bunch of startup vets like Trulia and dealer.com. Heck we even have the guy who wrote the Java testing framework TestNG ( http://www.testng.org ) and the guy who wrote Mailinator ( http://mailinator.blogspot.com ). And we're only up to 7 people. But we want an 8th and maybe a 9th.

Job Description:
Someone we want to work with. Someone who will make us smarter and better and, in return, someone we can make smarter and better too. Someone who will help us make our company and its products great.

Our technology includes:
Java. Thousands of threads (Mailinator guy keeps adding more, TestNG guy keeps removing them). Tons of data, tremendous data analysis, fuzzy logic, machine learning, natural language processing. We use Mongo and we're having no problems with it - because we're careful. We treat every superfluous database access and every unnecessary network call like its a small insult to our users. And gosh darn it, we love our users.

Simply, we are building a product that fetches and analyzes massive amounts of data to improve our user's lives (see the website for a more specific description, or better yet, email me)

Job Requirements:
You know Java (or at least you're willing to learn it) - but hands-down you know some computer language cold. You know it well enough to hate parts of it but yet probably understand why they're there. You get why algorithms are important and know when to implement them and sometimes, when its better to just do it the easy way. You understand that startups experiment a lot - and consequently discover amazing things occasionally, but throw away code far more often.

The static credentials on your resume are great but honestly, its the dynamic stuff we're more interested in.

You've done stuff. You're proud of the stuff you've done. You can show us - heck, you can't wait to show us. It might be an iphone app, or an open source project, or a thread-safe cache-invalidation scheme, or a javascript game, or maybe you launched a startup. Either which way - you built something - start to finish. You can deliver.

The interview:

We love solving problems and every interview question we ask is based on something we've actually had to code. So we sometimes get rather excited to find a smart person willing to solve a problem a new way with us on a whiteboard. You should think this way too - you don't rate interviews as being easy or hard - you rate them as being boring or fun. And we definitely shoot for fun. Right answers aren't the point - finding a good attack vector on the problem is.

Our CTO's take on getting your resume Silicon Valley ready: http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-get-your-resume-...
Why don't they just do A-rounds for YC companies? Wouldn't that be the most obvious, and potentially profitable, play?
The police police report says the employer (singular) noticed the searches (plural) made on a workplace computer and reported to the FBI. The context is a case where the wife searched for "pressure cooker", and the husband for "backpack" at the same time.

Has it been established that both the husband and the wife worked for the same company?

No need to respond, the police department is claiming this unnamed company that the wife or possibly the husband works for says that it was "the employee" who made both searches at the workplace on the company owned computer.

> The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”
Many systems in China depend on your Chinese name and identification number. Suffice it to say, foreigners who work in China don't have either of these: a made up Chinese name is not meaningful or legal (China also lacks any kind of kana), a passport number is not a "valid" ID number and changes every 10 years anyways. I don't get to use many online services accordingly, and every year there is some problem with how they handle my last name (MC DIRMID, there is a freaking space after the MC in my passport, causes all sorts of problems).
Food groups with decreasing levels of total phytoestrogens per 100 g are nuts and oilseeds, soy products, cereals and breads, legumes, meat products, and other processed foods that may contain soy, vegetables, fruits, alcoholic, and nonalcoholic beverages. Soy products contain the highest amounts of isoflavone, followed by legumes, meat products and other processed foods, cereals and breads, nuts and oilseeds, vegetables, alcoholic beverages, fruits, and nonalcoholic beverages. Decreasing amounts of lignans are found in nuts and oilseeds, cereals and breads, legumes, fruits, vegetables, soy products, processed foods, alcoholic, and nonalcoholic beverages.

from here - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16898863
Hi, ToothlessJake; thank you for your comment. I understand why you might consider people like me as opportunists. However, as I get older, I care less about the abstract goals of "justice/altruism" and more concrete goals of helping out friends and family.

Perhaps you and I have a different perspective on quality of staffing. Too often, I find a lot of people in academia/life sciences research/NGO's have a propensity to feel or appear to others that they are altruistic or making a difference. But when push comes to shove, the same "altruistic" person will resort to the same old Machiavellian tactics for personal gains that's commonly seen everywhere.

Best way IMO to establish a fair society and company is to make everyone as informed as possible how you will be exploited and lied to; and I find that honest attitude to be more prevalent in BigCo vs. startup's where management appeals more to the "startup" culture to manipulate people to do more work and take less pay.
All of them allow you to serve an iframe. and there you are king.
I expect most regulars fit that description, if by "low karma post" you just mean one that hovers around 1 point (that is, one that is neither upvoted nor downvoted).

FWIW, looking at my own history ( I post fairly often ), I find that the vast, vast majority of my posts get either no votes at all, or maybe 2-3 upvotes, a few here and there get a downvote or two, and a small handful get 3-10 upvotes, and a very few here and there get major upvotes (10 or more, up to maybe a hundred or so).

Other than "celebrity" posts who always get massive upvotes (pg, etc.) I'm guessing it's that way for most people.

Now, if you want to find people who have lots of posts that are highly upvoted AND lots of posts that get lots of downvotes... that I'm not so sure about. I can think of one or two people here on HN who are occasionally "controversial" who might, but I'm not sure I want to name names, as it might come off as insulting to suggest such a thing. :-)
I had an MI MOS in the Army, and I don't miss the invasive ness of background checks one bit. Do you want to have your past pried open to get a TS clearance? Are you ok with lie detectors and random urine tests? Do you do any illicit drugs? Are you trans? For the right kind of person, sure, but some people can't/won't subject themselves to that.
Awesome story man, props to you for taking a leap of faith. Slightly questionable morals living out of the hackerspace, but it sounds like its working out for you. Best of luck with your site and everything!
Right, I think ObjC is too much for a 12 year old with no programming experience. (Frankly, IMO, anything with manual memory management is probably too much.) So I'm curious if HN'ers suggest other ways to get something going without writing it in ObjC.
If you're going to accept all characters by default, be prepared to sanitize the outputs for every use, not just your website.

Maybe you will output a data dump for someone else to print mailouts. Or you'll share the user database with a vendor's web forum. Or payment processing. Or any SaaS.
I pay him. Although the first time we met he told me his goal was to make me 10x his fees back in profits and he accomplished that pretty handily. :)
Not at all shocked. I liked Declan's post because it posited a more plausible scenario than the article's "FBI is monitoring my Googles". Declan posted it for the same reason. You apparently don't follow him on Twitter and expect his Google+ feed to give you full insight into his thoughts. Oops.

I anticipate any number of people will try to jump on the fact that the FBI didn't literally respond to a Facebook photo and have decided to simply quietly and not-so-quietly make fun of those people.

Here's my original post, which I stand by 1000% now, which is easy to do since it's been entirely vindicated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141113
It would be a good idea to make the phone screen more rigorous. Use some etherpad clone-du-jour and have them write code in the phone screen. This way you'll filter out the bozos more efficiently.

You shouldn't expect somebody hired for an entry-level Java position to even know Java. I mean, at least if you're trying to hire somebody who'd be good, they'll have experience in other languages, and the cost of them catching up on Java is miniscule compared to the cost of them catching up with your codebase, with being a professional programmer in general, and it's certainly less than the cost of searching for somebody who's not quite as smart and talented but has better Java-specific knowledge. If you find somebody who has weak knowledge in _everything_, they might still be okay, but if you find somebody who has fairly good knowledge of other aspects of programming (be it another language, or data structures, or HTML or web programming or some protocols and such) then it's a sign that they're not dumb and are worth considering. You should be comfortable simulating how quickly they'd pick up Java when starting.

Edit: Of course, there _are_ a lot of fresh graduates who are scrubs that can't code, signed up for the video games or the money, and thought they'd just focus on grades and they just suck in general. People with general Java background knowledge who just don't know that Java has exceptions are one thing, people who mess up the exception-throwing syntax or forget about checked exceptions are another. What kind of person are they -- did they go to film school or did they go to "films"? People who went to film school will know what their professors told them to know, people who went to films might not have looked at Java specifically but will have a bunch of other knowledge about programming that they looked at outside of class.
I don't think it'd come close. Here's my napkin calculations:

Let's say you pay $5CPM - $5 for every 1000 views. Let's say every viewer stays on the page for a minute, and every viewer is able to provide 10 MHash/s, which I think is pretty generous for a Javascript based miner. That means you get a minute of 10,000Mhash/s for $5. The Mining Factor 100 is currently 0.17 USD/24h@100MHash/s (http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/). That works out to be about $0.0047 in return for that $5. My numbers are probably off, but I think it's still a couple orders of magnitude from being profitable.

Even if everyone was running a top-of-the-line GPU, and you were able to squeeze 500Mhash/s out of everyone, it'd still just be about $0.24 for every $5 spent.
You might not expect that, but people people still try. I can only speak of my New Zealand education but I didn't learn what a macronutrient was until I was 21 and researched it myself.
Un poema amor
Un poema amor, poemas de amor, poemas amor
The wife's search was irrelevant, as the report states the search was for "pressure cooker bombs" not "pressure cooker". So we really have no idea who searched for that one.
The "original report", the Catalano blog post on Medium, overtly said that the US Government was monitoring her family's Google searches, and she followed that up on Twitter with a direct accusation that the FBI was behind it, followed by a "correction" that it was "the JTTF".

That original report has now been debunked. But it won't be retracted. Print a retraction and the NSA wins.
But let's be clear here. It's from a search that was performed on an employer owned computer from a recently released employee. This is an entirely different narrative than the one insinuated in the original blog post. I'd say the premise was fundamentally flawed to begin with seeing as how she presented zero evidence and only anecdotes from her husband.
The security code on the backside could use some improving on how it looks. Other than that, this is a really cool idea!
$39M sounds very low for a fund that wants to do A-rounds. They'd be out of money after about 5 companies.
What if gluten phobes are eliminating the wrong thing?
Tuenti frases
Tuenti frases, frases tuenti
I assumed it was the ironic sense—it was intended to be clever but just ended up being a bug.
that looks pretty sweet; I was just complaining the other day about the lack of a robust accessories market for non-iOS devices, because a given retail store can devote three feet of shelf space to iOS cases/chargers/whatever and cover ~30% of people who have a mobile device, whereas if they have three feet of android accessories, it probably covers much less of the market.

(though people who have samsung devices, given the market penetration that samsung has, are probably in better shape than others in this respect)
Thanks man! I do feel bad about the hackerspace so I plan on donating and getting a membership when I get more money. It is an awesome group of people that I genuinely enjoy being around so I would like that place to stay open and free for everyone else the way it was for me.
Don't forget UnionPay either then :)
Hopefully it helps. If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an email.
Regardless of your opinion of 'should they' or 'shouldn't they' regarding Soylent, there is no doubting the disruptive nature of the project.

At least there seems to be some transparency in the discussion and the results. That's a lot more than can be said about some of the bullshit claims about how things are 'good for us' because the peddler in question lacks enough morals to broadcast falsehoods.

Allow me to post a link to a website based on humor that recently talked about the problem: http://www.cracked.com/article_19485_5-outrageous-lies-compa...

Those of you that like eating, nobody is trying to take your fork away. Those of us that would like the option of popping a food pill that eliminates what we consider a hassle, this takes us one step closer.

Or maybe this is the next big Fanboi war: Apples versus PC (Personal Concoctions).
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8
Andrew Gelman's response to Jessica Tracy's response --Academic drama..
To be clear, I stood by that post as well (and was really surprised at all the flack you were getting for making a wildly rational argument). I just thought Declan's post only added even more valueless speculation to the conversation.
Do I understand properly that you're still seeking an angle in which the USG or some agent of it got access to this family's Google searches?
First bitcoin group buy deal opens today at coin forest
I believe PG has said that YC won't do follow-on rounds for YC companies due to the signaling effect that would have for outside investors. Then again, I know some YC partners invest in YC companies independently, so it seems like something of a grey area.