skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it okay to accept work in a language you haven't done before
What do you when your clients ask you do work you haven't done before, for example I can program in Javascript but not familiar with WordPress or PHP and MySQL, I have clients willing to pay to do WordPress sites and theme customization. I can do this with some time of learning but never done it to be honest. as a programmer I should be comfortable adapting to different languages though.

Is it my job as a freelancer to accept this and learn as I go with my career freelancing or happily decline? or what about if you get a job offer which the technology is something you haven't worked with what do you do in those situations? please inform me HackerNews.
I have not played in quite some time, but if you are looking at playing: after you get the rough hang of things, make sure you look for mods. Specifically bug-fixes. There's a (small) community around the `dfhack` tool that fix a lot of game-breaking bugs. Masterwork [1] is a comprehensive mod that lets you turn off some of the "flavor" in exchange for a more performant game (about 25% or so). For example, the default game has dozens of types of leather. Do you really care if your dwarf's mitten is made of cow leather or bull leather?

[1] http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0
I think a lot of this is a side-effect of it being socially unacceptable to have 10x (or more) pay differences between good and bad employees at tech companies. That sort of thing is tolerated on Wall Street, but not SV.

Prediction: SV business leaders will find a way to meaningfully tie pay to performance more than they currently can, and offer the best 3-5x what the average earn.

The current system is just too roundabout.
"The highest levels of government" and "Goldman Sachs" are pretty much interchangeable: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20001981-10391695.html
So Amanda Schull is a developer as well? "Now, mind you, these (and others) are our real engineers that we have signed contracts with."

Annnd again, their credibility is going down the toilet, that along with the fact that they keep claiming their male images are "no different" but refuse to show them.

Just wanted to use this to get some press for themselves, I guess, and it worked...
Fuck given
However, Monday Aug 5th is 3 days away and they still have zero details on how to use their service. Doesn't seem like the best business plan to me...
Exactly, it's pretty pathetic they're turning the sexism argument around to benefit themselves when they were the ones guilty of it in the first place...Hope more information comes out and this company is called on it.
This is executed very well. I love the natural language processing for diary entries.

However I think you need to change your pitch if you want more incoming traffic. At the moment this has an aura of creepiness and vainness to me and no chance of SEO (who googles for "track every moment of my glorious life in detail"?). You should configure this for whitelabelling and create a version for different markets.

This is just one idea because I knoe my wife would love it:

Dieters to track calories eaten each day and exercise done. Would be awesome to see energy counts of food eaten vs energy consumed by exercise done - maybe like a weekly comparison of energy in and out.
I did for quite a while actually. I loved the social browser concept, but the fact that I couldn't get extensions like lastpass to work in Rockmelt killed it for me and drove me back to vanilla Chrome.

I still wished them well though, their product was good and their customer support was great. I'm sad to see the brand go away, but I'm pleased for them that they got acquired. Hopefully they go on to do well at Yahoo!
And in open-sourcing it, they dilute their vision for their game. No thanks. (And I am a donor. I don't care about being given their code.)
Note the quotes around "unnatural". I used it only because it was the term used by the parent comment.

Honestly, nothing that you said has anything to do with reality. I challenge you to find one, single male in software development who will say that our industry is even moderately populated with attractive women. We all know that isn't the case. Attractive women don't flock to software development.

And while, yes, beauty is somewhat subjective, it is not 100% subjective across the board. A majority of people would, for example, say that Jenifer Aniston is far more attractive than, say, Sandra Bernhard.
I was imagining air behaving like water. If you send first projectile it'll slow down but move some water to the sides. Second will slow down less so it'll catch up with the first one but it will also push some water to the sides. Third also will catch up with the previous ones but each subsequent one will get farther as it travels through space punched out by previous ones.

I don't think it's practical in any manner but I think such brute-forcing stream of projectiles out of atmosphere by literally punching hole in it might be nice to look at.
What on earth about this is "reasonable?" How is this any different from other professional services? We're supposed to live in a free market society where customers have the choice to pay those "insane" fees if they want to. You're advocating that the government stick their noses into the business decisions of the private sector.

It's funny that this takes place at the site of the first tax rebellion.
This is not related to the Vagrant<->CoreOS topic but since Vagrant box image format is a packaged ovf image it shouldn't be too hard to port the CoreOS images to Vortex (https://github.com/websecurify/node-vortex).
Ahh another Gentoo distro. Never ceases to amaze me how people troll it and yet it keeps popping out in every nook and cranny.

https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay/

Must have been a good idea that no one got.
As of a few months ago, MA actually charges tax on SaaS sold to customers in MA - that's been pretty clear. (I got notices from a few of my SaaS providers and everything).
You guys pay 13% every time money exchanges hands? Does that include when you eat a restaurant, and if so, do you also tip the waiter?
I love the last line!

I also agree that the language is probably the least of their worries. I can understand reluctance to change a system when it works perfectly, but this obviously doesn't work perfectly. Sounds like a good project for challenge.gov IMO.
xkcd has a history of doing stuff like this. Take the "Dream Girl" comic, for instance. In one of its panels, it featured an innocuous set of coordinates and dates. As it turned out, they were a hidden invite for a meetup a few months into the future. Nothing about them was explained beforehand: it was up to the readers to figure it out. I've come to expect that every detail in an xkcd comic probably has some meaning.

http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/10/01/the-meetup/
I didn't realize the logo until I went back and looked for a link (the first time I gave up after mousing over a few of the links above the blog header).

The logo looks like a header for the sidebar; having never been to "Work for Pie" I'm not familiar with their logo.

It would help if:

- their logo on the sidebar had a solid background

- their logo was on the tab for the blog instead of the generic WP logo (I don't know how hard this is to do, but frankly this looks sloppy)

- they had a small "Work for Pie" + logo link above the blog header
There is no money for politicians or lobbyists in straightforward laws.

Every store in MA has their own opinion about what foods are taxed and what aren't. Candy-yes, gum-no, ice cream at a grocery store - no. Ice cream in a cone - yes.
> still JSON was designed as data format

While I don't think that comments belong in JSON, I don't agree JSON is designed as "data and not code" format. Trees of tokens are actually the natural format for writing code (also known as Abstract Syntax Trees, AST) and the data/code distinction is really, really blury when those two meet together, so it's only to be expected that people will end up coding in JSON (what are the 'build definition' files for various build tools / package managers, if not very simple programs)?
I wrote a fucken compiler. Do you know what a compiler is? I took a compiler course in school and 5 assembly language courses.
I just updated the wiki to add she's an awesome developer.
I used to have over 200 in Chrome until I discovered OneTab. Now I have 289 tabs in OneTab plus 20 regular tabs.
> The 'cruelties' of the Soviet period are directly related to the cruelties of the world at large, such as preparations for WW2.

This statement is so generic, that it's very hard to argue about it. "World at large", "directly related" - what do mean by those exactly?

Pre-Gorbachev era was certainly safer to live in than Stalin era. But I would argue that "cruelty" was actually one the pillars of the Soviet system. Totalitarian system couldn't survive without the excessive use of force. That's why it's called "totalitarian". Less cruelty leads to less control, and finally leads to collapse of the system. Foreign intervention had very little to do with the collapse of USSR.
I applaud what you're doing, by the way. I didn't mean to attack or offend & I apologize for my tone earlier.

Based on what I've read in the past few months of my research, it seems as though there's a subset of people with ADHD who don't have much success with standard approaches. I don't have more information about that group, but I do think I may belong to it. The theory I've developed about myself is that I have a set of negative habits that reinforce each other and essentially make up a sort of support system for themselves. An example would be habits that contribute to disorganization also contribute to those related to poor time management and vice-versa. I suspect that without a "proper" support system, these habits can be overcome, but with only marginal success and only over a long period of time. I'm building my own system to augment my support system; it's meant to operate as a sort of digital nanny that I'm not able to ignore. I'd love to talk to some of your ADHD users if you're willing/able to put me in touch with them. I'm not trying to convince them to use what I'm building (especially since it'll be a long while before it's available for others), but just looking to understand their situations further and discover how Beeminder has helped them. My email address is crawford.comeaux@gmail.com if you'd like to discuss further.
Relevant infrastructure seems less likely to be developed and maintained if an insignificant number of people use it.
If anyone's interested in discussing this project further, my email is crawford.comeaux@gmail.com.
actually i have pretty much abandon my "normal" life to pursue a dream by creating a software tool to make people more free.. and that before all of this that its happening right now..

i were very worried, not just because of governments, but also by the way companies are doing things and the way the cloud movement is heading to..

also im not based in US, the government snooping its just one part of the problems that we have.. that i wished to solve back than..

i hope that by the end of this year, this tool will get available, and it can be clear what we can do with it..
but i think that when the time comes, it will be clear that im making my part..

Those are times we should not be so selfish anymore, and have to make a stand.. we need to find our ways through the XXI century.. and that is not by copying or using the same weapons of the XX century.. i think that is one part of the problems we are facing.. we need our XXI century identities,
we need to shape a new century.
I have no idea what you are trying to say for all Americans, but as an American, I'm pretty sure you're not speaking for me.
This has disturbing implications for the rest of the country. What happens if the developers of Massachusetts just roll over and give the state hundreds of millions of dollars of extra revenue? What message does that send to other states?
I like the this room on Turntable, electronic chill - http://turntable.fm/chill_or_be_chilled2
They're not collecting everyone's phone records or location data at all times, that's absolutely untrue.

Can you provide a reason why collecting business records against the spirit of the law, or am I just supposed to take your word for it? Who, specifically, voted for and wrote the law that says this? What court agrees with them? There's a process in place for what you're talking about, and why hasn't that process been worked through?

You said, and I quote, "Because governments inevitably expand and abuse their power." If this is true, then there is nothing you can do to stop it (that's what the word inevitable means). Do you not think this is true?

You just take what you've read, and extrapolate it ten times over. It's making an open debate impossible. You're harming the process. Stop it.
The problem with this kind of argument is that it is based on an inherently sexist worldview - that attractive women are good for nothing more than being attractive. Which is obviously bullshit.

Also I don't know where you all work but where I work engineers + 'looking professional' (however the fuck you even define that) barely ever mix.
we'll be announcing details tomorrow via FB and Twitter...
I hear things are good for BoA. They've got a fancy new tower in Times Square.
Ask HN: Do you use ASL to protect your web server?
We're in the market for a low cost and preferably open-source WAF to protect our marketing website that also allows customers to signup to our service. The only comprehensive solution I can find is ASL which includes a hardened kernel and many other features although it does seem targeted more at web hosting services. Does anyone have any experience with ASL or have you found modsecurity with the core/commercial ruleset sufficient?
Hey guys,

The ABI Hub is an awesome coworking space and startup incubator in Manchester, NH. http://abihub.org/

I've been going there for a few months and moved to NH at the beginning of the year. It has been awesome.

There is a technology scene ready to bloom in Manchester. Also, the cost of living is about 50% of Boston's.

For those who aren't from around here, NH doesn't have unfair taxes :)
I don't care about points (this thread is off the front page, nobody paying attention here but me and you, maybe mpyne if he's bored), but linking to a laughable opinion about pictures of fireworks (sorry 'explosive devices') being the cause of the whole visit was enough to make me think you were linking to it because you agreed with it. Coming here and defending it as 'more plausible' when the evidence didn't match up bothered me enough to keep this going.
Come back in 11 years and see if Minecraft is still so much bigger than DF. There's a difference between UIs crafted for hooking new users and those designed for long term use by experts.

Basically: you're starting the equivalent of a "vim vs. IDE" flame war, and adding just about as much value.
You're still going to have the "who can you trust" problem. If you're worried about a compromised disk controller then you ought to be worried about a compromised BIOS or TPM too.
Nope http://pastebin.com/Y9F1PYLM
Throw all the software services into the harbor!
There is a FAQ here:
http://www.mass.gov/dor/docs/dor/law-changes/faqss-computer-...

Per question 23, it appears that adding a computer to a LAN is an example of a taxable service.
Totino's Microwave Elevator
The interesting thing is that, when they speak, these guys sound like planners who would be happy to delegate some of the work involved in realizing their grand vision. That's obviously not how they're operating.
> Sadly, it does not give intellectual people the right to be judged by others with above room temperature IQ

The closest English precedent for that was not the "jury of one's peers" but the "benefit of clergy".
Lisp programmers think "data is code and code is data, both are the same thing and they're interchangeable". As it happens to actually be. I point to GEB [0] for more detailed discussion of this, but let me give you a few examples which point out that the distinction between code and data is mostly meaningless.

- Ant build descriptions that look suprisingly like executable Lisp code if you replace "<tag> ... </tag>" with "(tag ...)".

- Musical notation which is obviously code for humans playing instruments (it even has loops, I think, AFAIR from my music lessons; don't know about conditionals; if it has them, maybe it's Turing-complete? (ETA it would seem it is[3])).

- Windows Metafile format for bitmap and vector graphics which is basically a serialized list of WinAPI calls [1].

- "fa;sldjfsaldf" - the "not code, just data" example from [2] that happens to be "a Teco program that creates a new buffer, copies the old buffer and the time of day into it, searches and then selectively deletes". Oh, and it's also "a brainfuck program that does nothing, and a vi program to jump to the second "a" forwards and replace it with the string "ldjfsaldf"".

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Metafile

[2] - http://www.c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?DataAndCodeAreNotTheSameThing

[3] - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/136085/is-mus...
Yes. Move to a VPS provider that has never been down.
The fallacy that modern cannabis is more potent now than it was in the 1960's is based on flawed methodology.

In the 1960's cannabis researchers didn't have access to the old world drug varieties found in Nepal, Tibet, Afghanistan, et al. The cannabis which was widely available in the 1960's was mostly low grade hemp type varieties which found its way to the "New World" by way of Spanish mariners who brought cannabis sativa varieties to Mexico for use in ship's riggings and sails.

The common misconception that "hemp" contains no psychoactive compounds, or negligible amounts of it, is patently false, as those Mexican progeny of the old Spanish strains of cannabis were quite popular among the counter-cultural hippies of the 1960's and 70's.

This is not meant to infer that all hemp varieties are good sources of THC, etc, but is indicative of the variations of genetic expression found within cannabis, be it cannabis indica, cannabis ruderalis, and cannabis sativa.

Any stoner can tell you that cannabis sativa has the ability to impart euphoria, much the same as the other two main strains of cannabis.

These "Old World" varieties, predominantly Cannabis Indica, have been continuously cultivated to produce hashish for millenia, and as natural selection shows, they were able to selectively cultivate increasingly potent varieties to get to the point where the varieties they have been growing are the source of the most potent genetics found in cannabis today.

Of further note is the supposition that consuming one gram of cannabis per day is enough to render unconsciousness for the greater part of a 24 hour period. This is nothing other than hyperbole, as I can consume 1 gram, or more, of high quality hashish per day while still maintaining my faculties and simultaneously easing my medical conditions, and not many cannabis varieties are as potent as top grade hashish.

Those 15% "Dutch" varieties are not of "Dutch" origin, they are indubitably of Himalayan origin, and hybridized by Dutch growers.

(Hawai'i resident here, thankful for medical cannabis laws)
I know you're right on FW. I believe DMA was designed in because they recognized that the CPUs of the time weren't powerful enough to move uncompressed full-resolution video from around. I don't know about Thunderbolt, but I'd expect you're right.
"Singleton is upset that the technology industry did not lobby more strongly against the tax, and he worries it will hurt Massachusetts"

It occurred to me I've been a developer for 13 years and have no clue who's got my back if the government starts to target my business unfairly. What kind of industry lobbies or trade groups are even out there to fight a law like this?
I'm familiar with that man. That more or less is my definition of entertainment. I think somebody with money and who did it right (billboards on major roads surrounding but not necessarily in front of the court house, never approaching individuals in any way) could get into some interesting legal battles.

Do it right and it is plainly free speech; if I were to write/publish a book instead of design/rent billboards it would be very unambiguously legal. The entertainment comes in the form of seeing how they would try to stop me.
Looks like Boston needs another tea party or LAN party? I don't know but something has to be done. It seems like this industry has been attacked unfairly as of late.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-agains...
The more interesting thing (I reported on it too) is the level of organization. If you read the paper, they have things set up more like an affiliate ad network than a cyber-criminal clubhouse. There are official rankings, contests, regular software updates, FAQs and how-tos, etc, many of them very nicely presented.

Of course the usual caveats apply to this kind of thing, but the presence of malware isn't interesting — the way it's being done is.
I feel that not enough people realize that this has so many uses than just recovering a lost phone.
A perfect analogy! Toady's baby is legally blind, is very dumb, is very slow, speaks 4 languages in different contexts but none fluently, is very ugly, and is not fun for 99% of people who play with it.

There are cures for all of these problems, but he refuses to treat or allow anyone else to treat his baby.
AFAIK CoreOS is based on ChromeOS which uses some parts from Gentoo. That doesn't mean Gentoo was ever a good idea for general-purpose PCs or servers.
Careful it may be considered terrorism these days.
Well... we have Ethernet over power line, so why not USB? ;)
I especially like the idea of cannibalizing old HDDs (with bad spindles but good controllers) to become microcontrollers in new projects.
Supreme Court orders California to free thousands from crowded prisons
NH has no sales tax and no state income tax. Of course you have much fewer "services" than MA. For example MA has a 19 member Commission on the Status of Women - which of course needs an executive director. And the executive director needs an assistant.
Open source games are rarely very good. There are exceptions (looking at you NetHack), but this is the one area where "give away software, sell support" does not seem to work. Then again, I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.
Thanks, I've sent this note to the Lifecycle guy and I'll get you a response.
No, it does not impact companies that might pre-install Linux, unless they perform their market research by picking random anecdotes from web forums.

They lose exactly 0% of Windows market by offering another option in Operating System (in fact, I tend to avoid hardware that only does Windows as it tends to be crap, so it might actually be a gain).

If you remember people bitching about Linpus Lite because it wasn't people's favourite distro, you remember wrong.
Let me ask around. It's handled by a group that isn't ASP.NET.
For as long as your product is relevant and your positioning doesn't collapse. Tweaking things to keep up doesn't necessarily require full time effort when it's small and the markets don't shift that much.

Waking up and doing nothing for a few weeks or months doesn't hurt. Making sure you're still relevant in Google, Amazon, App store or whatever your channels is about the same as poking around in your e-trade account and managing some stocks.

If you keep the business small and automated, it's not as unlikely as it sounds. Tech needn't be bleeding edge. The economy is huge and there's a place for solving all kinds of tiny problems. You can still love the business and give it whatever you want, but it doesn't have to own all your creative and mental output.
Well put, regarding my own conjecture.
North Korean Android tablet comes with built-in TV tuner and tourists can buy it