skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with economic models isn't that they don't work, or that they're made up.

The problem is that economies, especially on a global scale, are so complex, they can't possibly be modeled with a few equations. To keep things reasonably simple, you need to make assumptions that may or may not be BS.

There's a reason economists, quantitative analysts, and people who come up with economic/financial algorithms often make a ton of money, why the algorithms are very closely guarded secrets, and why hedge funds and banks go to such lengths to develop their models.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that applying math and programming to something so dynamic as human behaviour on a macro scale is very difficult. Scientists and economists employ massive supercomputers, and entire teams of researchers to test their models. Not something that can be taught in an undergrad economics class...
> Wide angle prime: Samyang/Rokinon/Bower 7.5mm f/3.5 rectangular fisheye, 8mm f/3.5 Panasonic, 12mm f/2.0 Olympus

The focal lengths are there but the apertures are narrower than the most common full-frame wide-angle primes, e.g. 14mm f/2.8 or 24mm f/1.4. This means less light, and also, as discussed elsewhere, a much wider minimum depth of field on the m4/3 lenses, due to the smaller sensor. (I meant to say 'fast wide-angle primes' in my original post, my mistake).

> Long working distance macro: Olympus 60mm f/2.8, working distance 7.5" for 1:1 image

My understanding was that 7.5" was the MFD (the distance from the film/sensor to the subject), not the MWD (the distance from the front element to the subject), on this lens, but I haven't used it. This review seems to suggest a working distance of 90mm (~3.5 inches) at 1:1, but it may also be wrong:

http://savazzi.freehostia.com/photography/olympus60mm.html

If it does have a working distance of 7.5" at 1:1 that's very respectable -- up there with a 150mm, and not far below a 180mm full-frame macro.

> Fast super-telephoto: 100-300mm f/4.0-5.6 Panasonic

Again, the focal lengths here are good, and it's a zoom (try finding a 200-600mm zoom lens of any aperture for a full-frame camera), but the aperture is again a bit disappointing when compared to something like a 400mm f/2.8, both in terms of the amount of light it lets in and how shallow the depth of field is.

Don't misunderstand me -- there are a great range of lenses for both m4/3 and Sony NEX cameras, which cover the popular focal lengths and produce stunning results. They're also usually a lot cheaper (that Panasonic telephoto is around $600, vs. around $10,000 for a 400mm f/2.8 full-frame lens) and a lot lighter. But if you've already spent $10,000 on a 400mm f/2.8 for your full-frame camera (and are making money from it), you're probably going to want a lens that will give similar results before you go mirrorless, which I think was the author's point.
Can smartphones help you clean your house?
Hats off to that! Lots of the job postings on HN tend to make outlandish requests/offerings just because 'hey we got HN front page'. Some are downright shameful.

Also, in before the HN cabal muzzles this one.
Unfortunately, dishonesty sells. How did all the large megacorporations get to where they are now?

Not by being great programmers and free thinkers, but by being greedy businessmen and, later, buying tons of lobbyists.

This piece of shit company is ... well... just being a normal company.
Your what if scenarios are essentially game over. "Heaven forbid a virus" - uh, if an attacker is running arbitrary code in your security context, you've lost. Full stop.

Leave your desk and forget to lock it? Uh, then anyone that sits down keeps your user sessions. Unless you've configured things to prompt for passwords everywhere (like Vista UAC) then they have access to plaintexts you would.

Users aren't going to want to type in a password every time they open their browser. Non-sandboxed OSes can't really enforce any security there. And users hate re-entering passwords, this is why they are saving passwords in the first place.

You're arguing "yeah, but just because I logged in as root doesn't mean I want to be able to run root commands".

His response is correct.
Then you can compile it to C++, which, thanks to asm.js/emscripten, can be compiled to JS!
Why build 3d printers if they could be used to make guns? Why invent bitcoin if it could be used to fund terrorism?

You make things because they are interesting to make, and could have a positive impact in the world. Protecting yourself from "the bad guys" is a secondary (or even tertiary) concern, unless the very purpose of the thing is to protect people from bad guys (for example a military fort).
An interesting article, but the author missed one main DSLR advantage: full manual control. For a number of shooting situations, this control is essential to obtaining the desired results.
Dishonesty sells to 95% of the population, sure. That's the part of the population without critical thinking skills or the desire to fact check things they read. If you're selling a hairspray or something, being a bit dishonest is probably highly recommended.

The problem is these companies are trying to hire top notch talent - the 5% of the population that is least likely to be happy about dishonesty. Especially when it comes to a major decision like a new job. It's simply a mistake and the marketing is unneeded - if you're a YC company, the HN crowd has at least read your announcement in techcrunch and knows what you're trying to do.
I think it's mostly about the failure case. Calling the callback immediately can mean that certain algorithms will walk down the stack, invoking synchronous callbacks until they run out of stack space. Not great.

In your use case it's possible you'll never hit that failure scenario.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/SFredditors & http://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea is pretty friendly, check it out! There is also http://sf.funcheap.com/ . There are also singular startup & tech industry events and such that pop up all the time in SF. Usually although I find those through friends since I'm not actively looking, there is probably some directory website having it. Most of them seem to be scheduled through eventbrite, so you can just look at the eventbrite directory here: https://www.eventbrite.com/directory
not if you cast the second vote within a minute. the subsequent votes don't help as much as the second vote, which already gets it too far (where people on the first few pages in the main section can see it)
Nice timing, I spotted this Coursera course earlier, looks interesting. https://www.coursera.org/course/recsys
From a completely selfish standpoint, shouldn't you try fixing yourself first rather than "fixing" other people?
I second this strongly. I'd pay a lot more attention with a simple format. It's more respectful to the audience and makes you seem more professional.

Common objections:

But we're young and hip, we wanna look different from the big companies! - Doesn't matter. Still bad practice.

But we don't like labels. We want generalists. - Then specify that. Asking for a "ninja" or some other nondescript title is retarded.

But we want to say what we do! - That's what the post is for.

YC companies have the exclusive ability to post job ads on the front page. I highly doubt there's any reasonable justification for posting anything aside from a standard template. It's not like you need more help.
But one can implement those, they are language items.
Australia's employer-funded pension system has meant that we have around 1.5 Trillion in fully funded retirement funds which have decreased infrastructure funding costs locally and are invested internationally making Australia's superannuation sector a major player in international investments.
The government can't be counted on to fully fund retirement benefits without pillaging the pile of cash, as the example in most American states shows.
It's a brilliant idea and has been extremely successful.
http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/license.html

That's weird. It's dual-licensed with GPL 2, but the last paragraph seems to make visible attribution mandatory regardless of license choice.
Well, we don't have a framework for fixing a person, no state where a person is considered whole.

Imagine you're fixing a car. There's a (relatively) clear spec on when it's considered fixed, and you strive to get there. You can get there by following instructions, or you can get there by experimentation.

Without knowledge of what is considered fixed, you're making shots in the dark. A lot of people are, and you have a chaotic system.

Comming up with a framework for what a person should strive to be is technically a job for philosophy, but that's not working, is it? We seem to be naturally change averse, and a lot of philosophical works boil down to rationalizing what you are doing is right. Kant reads like the bible of irresponsibility (What is the "Kathegorischer Imperativ" exept absolving responsibility to a higher mandate?), and Nietsche reads like he's trying to give you a free pass for everything provided you're the Supermensch (and who doesn't class themselves that way?).

No, creating frameworks is a dangerous game, and I've stopped trusting anyone to do a proper job at it. All religions I know of failed at it to various degrees (look at that track record for gods sake! They're still being used to justify murder). Most philosophers had their ideas tried out (as far as that was viable), and those approaches again didn't work out perfectly.

And here we're sitting, no idea how to do things, but hellbent on doing something. It's amazing we figured out science, which is why we can figure out those problems easily. But philosophy? We don't seem to have progressed there.

So yeah, fixing people is about as futile (right now) as physics has been before the scientific method.
Yes, there seems to be some confusion here. Wikipedia[0] has a good explanation of depth of field. It's not the same as angle of view, which is what it seems to be getting confused with here.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field
Wait.for-ES6: End of Callback Hell, by ES6-Harmony generators (bleeding edge)
> Let's face it. Anything to not pay pensions and workman's comp.

Yup. All innovation is really just a way to screw over the honest, hard working individual. From the mechanical loom to the automobile to electronically switched telephone networks, all innovation in the modern era has been to screw over the worker.

You and me, let's start a society that gets rid of all those horrible, unemployment-inducing contraptions. Imagine - we will have 0% unemployment because all of the machines will be humans!
I don't think that it's true that promises are a superset of callbacks. Although, again, owing to the particular nature of javascript the implementations may be. A promise is like a go channel that can only be sent to once. A callback has utterly arbitrary behaviour: it can be called many times with many values in many contexts.

Promises and channels are synchronization primitives. Callbacks are not.
I'm considering doing this. Have you tried playing around with simple neural nets? Andrew Ng's machine coursera course is really phenomenal and drops you into doing neural nets using octave, which makes the understanding really easy. After doing it in octave, and writing some simple discriminators, I was able to really rapidly write neural nets in several languages - I even wrote one in python - a language I don't 'know' - to play around with in quantopian. Needless to say, the neural net lost a lot of virtual money, but I figured out why. =)
Tesla Model S not as environment research claims
Thanks very much for the insightful info, just what I was looking for. I expected that there would be much better full frame lenses, was just curious to know what the state of the art is.

Yeah, I had the working distances confused on the 60mm macro: I just tested mine and it focuses to about 3.5" from the lens, 7.5" from the focal plane.

I agree completely with your conclusion: it's all about tradeoffs and which works best for your needs. I've sure been delighted with the m4/3 lenses I have, and the size and weight and low cost figure into that. But of course if I needed more light gathering and shallow depth of field and were using it to make money it would be a different story.
For even less fun, there have been numerous incidents of consumer accesspoints/routers hardcoding NTP servers by IP address[1][2].

[1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20060408150213/http://people.free...
(OP here.) I agree that code examples would be better than intangible statements; I included a few samples in early drafts of this post, but ultimately concluded they made it too long.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to make components reusable or that we shouldn't use abstractions. Rather, we should introduce reusable components when they're actually reused rather than just used once. Component re-use should be introduced into a program lazily.

In the Minecraft example, once I add the Cat class, I would go back and refactor the Dog and Cat classes to inherit from Pet. The point I'm trying to make in the blog post is that I wouldn't do that until I had actually written at least two classes that I knew would be inheriting from the Pet class.
And also useful feedback for other YC companies that are queuing up job posts.

There have been previous discussions about the state of some YC job ads (though I can't find them right now), so this isn't the first time people have felt compelled to say something.

edit: Link to previous job post discussions (I know there are others but can't dig them up).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230892
Tim Berners-Lee is correct.

If I leave my desk to go to the bathroom for a few minutes then I take my chances with any malicious actors with access to my hardware, sure, we can call that "game over".

But that scenario doesn't make much sense in reality - if someone is that close and has such a malicious intent, why don't they simply hit me with a 5 dollar wrench[0]?

Whoever happens to be feeling malicious in my office ought to have to act out their malice deliberately - and not simply to be able to click a single button to retrieve all my personal passwords.

[0] http://xkcd.com/538/
Hello modern day luddite!
That might be the message to us, but the way this news article (press release, rather) is written, the majority of the population will think Snowden is a hacker that circumvented the movie-level-sophistication systems of the NSA. Also see the friendly reminder at the end, that Snowden just took all kinds of material without first-hand experience of the systems described therein.
> The fact that it's so rare only lowers the chance that it's being used incorrectly: someone savvy enough to set up a 410 knows enough to mean it.

I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premise. I fairly often come across cases where obscure options are mainly used by those who don't understand them, and in the absence of data I wouldn't assume that the same couldn't be the case for HTTP responses.

Exponential backoff is a quite reasonable compromise for those kind of situations.
Thanks, people need to learn the difference between concurrency and parallelism ffs, I'm tired of explaining the difference all the time.
I don't know if this is still true, but at one point in time you needed to have installed the exact same version of MinGW that Rust itself was compiled with. That meant, for example, that you couldn't rebuild Rust with a newer version of MinGW.

Also, and this isn't really a Rust problem so much as an LLVM one, I believe exception handling was broken on Windows for some time. Presumably this is fixed now, but I haven't actually checked recently.
I share your disagreement with the piece. Not everyone needs or wants to be "fixed". It took me years to realise that the best I can do for others is not to listen for a solution to "help" them, but listen just to listen.
Mobile Safari does not support WebGL (except in Apples i-ads)
Buckmeup: The First Freelance Marketplace With a Merit-Based Pricing Algorithm.
The people you refer to as "haters" are usually just professional software developers. As professionals, they don't stand for the unjustifiable inferiority exhibited thoroughly by PHP and JavaScript. So of course they'll speak out against such programming languages.

And contrary to your beliefs, what they say does have an impact. We wouldn't see so much emphasis on web development using languages other than PHP and JavaScript if what you were saying is true.
I tend to agree but if the consequence is less money for the companies to hire people then extending social welfare needs to cover for the lack of jobs available. I can imagine a lot of positive side effects if this happens.
Link to original article:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x2z14gw8017ezbg/for%20reddit.pdf

(Via reddit:
http://en.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/1kc8mw/request_linea...)

The Gallant lab at UC Berkeley did something somewhat similar about 2 years ago.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMA23JJ1M1o

From what I understand, both reconstructions involve setting up models of brain activity for vision, learning the parameters by machine learning from patients, and then using Bayesian inference to determine what is being seen.

While incredibly cool, we are still a long way from reading thoughts, and even longer if we're not allowed to learn the parameters for that subject first. Right now, we can only kinda reconstruct what someone is seeing, but that's really not much better than a camera.
hm, reconstruction of the feline visual cortex is a bit more advanced than I thought:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLb9EIiSyG8
BTW here's the OP's Github repo:

https://github.com/mrcoles/javascript-piano
I'd like to read this but I am not going to switch back and forth between the article and the comment to figure out what "that's just sad" refers to.
Simon Marlow on lightweight threads vs. events (2010)
I agree with this (particularly since it's anonymous), but piling on seems kind of mean.

Another option would be to simply email the given address and state your complaints. For example that you may have been interested (if you were), but felt mislead by the posting.
I'm generally of the opinion that the more people you love, the more people you can love--it's a skill like any other.

I think it's a shame that more people don't try to get to know others better; everyone has a life and a history, and it's quite fascinating to hear the stories of how another has come to intersect your path in life.

The trend that distresses me most, though, is that we've forsaken modeling people (which is bad) to instead simply bowing to statistics to do our reasoning for us (which is worse). Treating people as knowable agents using a flawed model is still more respectful of the human condition than saying "Well, they tend to do this given that, so, um, yeah."

People are not robots, but they also sure as hell aren't dice.
It looks like NSA is the real security threat. So much data readily accessible.
There's nothing "snarky" about pointing out stupidly and inexcusably broken programming language features.
What if you aren't broken?
Oh, I'm not logged in as root, which is why it bothers me. Heck, I don't even have root to my computer at work (which is almost never more than a very mild inconvenience).

Look, this ain't some high brow crypto discussion. It's a complaint that passwords show up in plaintext on the screen. We're trained all the time to not look when people type them in, they're covered with dots on forms, and we don't leave them lying around for anyone to see.

Sure some people do, but not everyone can be saved from themselves. But it sure as heck feels wrong, and this is by and large an interface problem, not a security problem.

Finally, someone else noted that the passwords actually not actually saved as plaintext, removing the real fear that the passwords can be gotten if the hard disk is merely read elsewhere. So it's not even a security risk, so long as no one makes an add-on that can grab those passwords in plaintext, which would be darn near insane.

(Am I the only one who thought key rings and such existed to mask the password so no one but the authorizing runtime ever saw the password as plaintext? (As in an app points to the key store and then another trusted program handles the actual password transaction so the first app never has to know it.) I can't be the only person who thought there was something more clever at work, I hope? Chances are I'm just too trusting.)
I understand it. I've formerly been employed at a BigCo during a 6 month period when the entire IS department was in the throes of an architectural analysis paralysis. If you've never seen an abstract factory factory factory, then you could be forgiven for thinking the only people that invoke YAGNI are slackers that want to be lazy.
Unfortunately, dishonesty sells. How did all the
large megacorporations get to where they are now?

Not by being great programmers and free thinkers,
but by being greedy businessmen and, later, buying
tons of lobbyists.

This piece of shit company is ... well... just being
a normal company.

Citation needed.
Many people have been tweeting similar headlines with the #FalseMedium hashtag. Some of them are pretty great. My favorite so far:

kftaba ‏@kftaba 23 Aug
How living out of my Tesla made me more productive #FalseMedium

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23falsemedium
Why I switched back - confessions of a former OS X user
OS X native app wrapper for Sony Music Unlimited web app
Come now, at least give credit for writing style. The author put good effort into writing their piece, whether or not you agree with the conclusions.
Perhaps, but part of the reason for making a post like this is to bring attention to the format. We can cut them some slack, but being 17-22 doesn't require linkbait job posts. Plus, it's not like it requires so much experience to understand why linkbait is not in your favor on Hacker News. Some of the linkbaitiest titles are the ones I see consistently reposted - it doesn't work and it's somewhat annoying.

A really good format would be, as another commenter said:

{YC Company} {Season Number} is looking for {Job Title}. Join us!

Bam. Doesn't that just look better? Sexier? More appealing and respectful? You don't have to be 25+ to get that, it just has to be introduced.

So, now that it's the top story on HN, and has been introduced, let's maybe try to codify it for future job postings?
Simple is harder to achieve than complicated. Linux vision is a 1970's main frame. My vision is a modern commodore 64. I am more impressed by a good 20,000 line operating system than a good 50,000,000 line operating system. The C64 was 20K of 1-3 byte instructions. My operating system is 130,000 lines. There is no need for another Linux. I make sure to be distinct. Mine is just for one architecture. When I write code, I want minimal abstraction. When looking at code, the number of things you have to go look-up is minimized with my style. I can't stand when people make stupid-ass macros and shit. Keep minimal abstraction.

Do you really want to clusterfuck things so you can play two video games at once?

I don't do SMP. Only I allow real-time multicore with simple master-slave. Nobody else can do a multicored flightsimulator. If you break tasks in tiny pieces, it's too inefficient. Do a simple test of how many adds you must do to break even with multicore. I have lower overhead than anybody else.
I chose that example precisely because it makes sense to have a Pet class that holds common code between Dogs, Cats and Chickens. When the code only contains Dogs, though, the Pet class is unnecessary, even if you plan to introduce Cats at a later date.
i'm not talking that YC job, I'm talking about this post replying to the YC job.