skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the design industry - it has nothing to do with the fact that you were working at start ups before. A designer who was working at design firms would be in exactly your shoes.
Gingko is intimidating. It looks like a neat way to work

but when I see a big button called "try it now" (red flag), with testimonials (big red flag), no download (small red flag), and no mention of licensing, privacy, or cost (edit: it was just hidden), or... anything (big red flag). My experience tells me to avoid it, and to council everyone else to avoid it as well.

I don't want to be gouged, aggregated, or advertised to. I would love to use your tool. I just can't be sure you wont use that desire against me. I can't find anything on your site that will assure me that wont happen.

edit: AHA. I did find your pricing.

https://gingkoapp.com/p/pricing/

So at least you're mechanism of monetization is there.
Lots of people say it, even here on HN in the past. How many of them actually believe it is up in the air. I hope none of them...
PagerDuty seeks a Senior JavaScript/CoffeeScript Engineer
The Lion King and PC Gaming
I started out like you: college -> grad school, after I got my PhD I was already 30+ with no savings. Then I did a post doc in Switzerland...then I took a job in China. Now I've been to most of Europe and much of Asia (not S. America though, too far). Now travelling doesn't bring me much excitement, but I do enjoy a nice luxury bungalow treatment every once in a while.

I've even met some of the guys coding on beaches in Thailand or Bali, they are quite laid back and zen. I'm not sure I could do it though, I'm still very much an American (meaning, puritan/work ethic roots), and would feel uncomfortable being out of the office for too long.
I'd guess they have VoIP trunking to some upstream voice provider from their BTS. The carrier they have an agreement with might provide roaming outside their OpenBTS world, so using their SIMs could be part of such an arrangement.
I think it's rather telling about the US when statements like yours are interpreted without sarcasm.
Isn't SPDY's multiplexing supposed to be a general solution for performance issues from subresource loading?
If that was the concern, couldn't a clear message like "IsTumblrDown? is in no way affiliated to Tumblr" make it okay?
There are a few private ferry companies with international routes from the U.S... to Canada: https://cohoferry.com/

(Of course this is just trivia and should not distract from the real point, which is that air travel has no real competition for a great number of routes, and the US government is increasingly restricting other forms of travel anyways.)
Aha!
see, I didn't even notice that!
For the purpose of the demo, can the logout button be a bit more pronounced? Or don't redirect traffic from the home page to the chat room even if a user is logged in.
> By definition, average is in the middle of whatever distribution they follow.

Not necessarily the middle. In a skewed distribution, the average is still the sum of the samples divided by the number of samples, but it's not located at the middle (centerpoint) of the sample set.

> Maybe median would be a more appropriate point to measure against though.

You managed to get that exactly backwards. It's the median that's located at the middle of the distribution, not the mean. For a balanced distribution, they're the same, but for a skewed distribution, it's the mean that moves away from the "middle", not the median.
I think this is the more common failure mode - a lot of innovative work happens at big companies, but those innovations never make it to market because commercializing a product requires a large investment in, well, finding customers, and the innovators at big companies are not empowered to do this.

There is still a ton of innovative research work coming out of Microsoft, Intel, and even IBM, but typically instead of being commercialized and profited from, it languishes until the company shuts down the research lab and the scientists involved get jobs elsewhere.
Who's asking those questions?
It's an engineering perception test, like those math problems on billboards that are actually pre-screening interview questions.

I've been around that sort of text long enough to know exactly what I'm seeing and respond accordingly. They might be looking at it like that.
I sympathize with the author and his concerns about Tumblr's disregard for its users.

Having said that, companies have a legal responsibility to take "all steps necessary" to protect their trademarks. Unfortunately, this responsibility sometimes requires them to engage in seemingly nit-picky litigation.

An excerpt from chillingeffects.org [1]: If a trademark owner fails to police his or her mark, the owner may be deemed to have abandoned the mark or acquiesced in its misuse. A trademark is only protected while it serves to identify the source of goods or services.

I'm not saying that IsTumblrDown had negative intentions or that it blatantly obscured Tumblr's brand; I never had a chance to use the site, so I didn't see how the name was incorporated into it. I'm just saying that firms like Tumblr are sometimes under external pressure to be aggressive in enforcing their trademarks.

[1] http://chillingeffects.org/trademark/faq.cgi#QID418
Ask HN: How can a country defend itself from cruise missiles?
How do countries defend against things like cruise missiles? They seem to be quite a popular offensive weapon, but what kind of defensive mechanisms exist?

Can Patriot Missiles shoot down cruise missiles? What about some kind of electronic or GPS jamming to mess up the missile guidance system? Or are cities left to fire anti-aircraft weapons and hope they get lucky?
Yes,

"...there's nothing mystical about neural networks", yes, there's nothing "not statistical" in the reality of the construct (the NN classes are often given without reference to stat).

But in the way that people present them or think about them, there is tendency for them to be seen or used as indeed "black boxes"(per the gp) or mystical constructs.

A NN might indeed be a good fit for a given class of problems and its the mechanism might be revealing for said problems. But the external impression that their development gives, that their development is that of a "thinking process", is kind of a weakness for the field.
I think it has more to do with the intent behind the project.

Startups are businesses, and the intent behind them is typically to make money.

Research projects don't intend to make money. Or, they do, but as a fairly low priority.

It seems to me that research projects typically come across as "cooler" or more interesting because they don't exist to earn money, they exist to see if something cool could be done. To me, it seems that the reason a large number of startups are uninteresting is because they're attempting to piggyback on existing success (hence the X for Y stuff).
Academia is one of the few places where the bell curve should be applied diligently...because you want the students to see some sort of top to aspire to.
Somewhat related, the recently launched Bay Area Bike Share system has a not-too-well-publicized API at http://bayareabikeshare.com/stations/json
AP Statistics needs a graphing calculator or a computer. I think a calculator is a more realistic option. At my school, you could buy a TI-83 or TI-84, or you could check it out from the library for the year, so it didn't have to cost you anything.
Do you have any statistics? I've seen cases where an article's premise has been taken apart with anecdotes and people upvote/support those also. Not often but I've seen it happen.
There's always a choice. Give feedback that you feel this is not the right way to start off and that you hoped to work on solving a real problem. If this is not going to happen, you feel it is a waste of both of your times to blindly follow business theatrics that have been repeatedly proven to hold no value.

The other point is group dynamics do need some outlet for hazing to keep things fun.
Pretty easy puzzle, if they were looking to hire a puzzle solver instead of say a PHP programmer. Some people hang their intellectual self esteem hat on simple trick logic puzzles, a skill which doesn't require a great deal of intelligence, so much as time and willingness to practice puzzles.
As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat".

Software brings the real value to hardware.
Not better in the general case; most machine-learning algorithms do worse than the naive solution ("throw a Bayes net at it") in most applications, but then have a niche where they excel.

If I recall, Numenta's model is said to excel in the case where the data it's being trained on is similar to the kind the human brain tends to process: sensory data with temporally-local "features" (letters on a page, instruments in a song), where the features form a hierarchy (shapes->letters->words->sentences, frequencies->notes->chords->riffs->melodies, etc.)
So sorry to hear that.

US always learns from its mistakes and comes up with a new way of bringing peace! </sarcasm>
How To Make Your Next Vacation Count
The font URL is not requested until after the CSS containing it, so there should still be a (smaller) delay and FOUC.
SPDY should be enabled for both screenshots in the article.
Zig Zag was meant to represent a very general set of data structures, if you're interested in documents then you, probably, would have a more specific interest in his (very long running) Xanadu project - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu - which in some ways is very similar to OP's stuff - http://youtu.be/En_2T7KH6RA?t=3m27s
God, I feel that puritan work ethic. Living in Buenos Aires was difficult for that reason.
So what can we do? I honestly ask.

I'm sick of hearing such news, and as a community of "hackers", at least we should be able to have a minuscule influence. Yet I can't think of something better than running a TOR node.
Stack rank has not always been acknowledged publicly. Anyways, its fairly well known that the process is necessarily political, at each level.
How about in his 30s then?
> How do countries defend against things like cruise missiles?

Cruise missiles are designed to resist efforts to thwart them. If GPS is available and reliable, it's used, but if not, such a missile switches over to inertial guidance and terrain matching. A modern cruise missile is a formidable threat.

> Can Patriot Missiles shoot down cruise missiles?

Not with any reliability. Cruise missiles are too fast and too stealthy.

> Or are cities left to fire anti-aircraft weapons and hope they get lucky?

That's about it.
Fair use applies to trademarks, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use_%28U.S._trademark_law...

Specifically see this paragraph:

A nonowner may also use a trademark nominatively—to refer to the actual trademarked product or its source. In addition to protecting product criticism and analysis, United States law actually encourages nominative usage by competitors in the form of comparative advertising.[citation needed]
Home of the brave, land of the free
Make $377,000 trading Apple in one day
> Ask HN: What's the difference between a cool research project and a startup?

The outcome. If the outcome is a success, that was the plan all along. If the startup fizzles out, it was really an interesting research project.
I don't know. Should we table this discussion?

(Noting that some words, like "to table" have the opposite meanings in British and American English. When Americans say "table" the British say "shelve" and when the British say "table" the Americans say "put forward" or "propose.")
It's been used many times to strand people of interest to the FBI/CIA in order to put pressure on them to become informants.

I used to have a bookmark for a site that documented a bunch of really egregious abuses of the no-fly list and there was a pretty consistent pattern - american citizen or permanent resident leaves the country for vacation or to see family and mid-trip is placed on the no-fly list, usually stranding him in an inhospitable country. Some of the people so stranded reported that they were then approached by US government agents that said if they would just 'cooperate' with them everything would be cleared up in no time at all. The people who told these stories always refused the offer.

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the bookmark and with all the publicity this ruling is getting, google is flooded on all the keywords I can think of.
I'd be surprised if a quality candidate were confused by base64 encoding.
nice relevant post. congrats
It doesn't depend on where you are. The "explanation" at the end of the article is misleading. If you are sited next to a door you will "see" that your door closes before the other. But as you know the distance between the doors you can make the correction and calculate the exact time when the other door closed. After the correction you will realize that both doors closed at the same time in spite you don't "see" them closing at the same time.

You will have the same effect sitting at the other door. If you are sitting in between you must apply the corrections to both doors, and then you will realize that they really closed at the same time. The only point were you "see" at the same time that both doors close is in the middle, and obviously after the corrections you will realize that they really closed at the same time.

The important thing is your velocity. Let's suppose that you are traveling (very) fast with the ladder, holding it at the middle point. You will first "see" that the back door closes (and reopen) before the top of the ladder get to that point. Then you will see that the front door closes (and reopen) after the bottom of the ladder passed that point. But you still have to make the corrections because both doors are far away. Even after the corrections the back door close and reopens before the front door close and reopens.

If you hold the ladder form one extreme you will "see" essentially the same things, and after the corrections you will be sure that never were both doors closed at the simultaneously. An important detail is that the difference of time between the reopening of the back door and the closing of the front door doesn't depend on where are you holding the ladder. After the corrections you will get the same time interval.
> Programmers would sit down and start coding, before even understanding the requirements, let alone specifying how the system should work.

Don't you think that's a bit of a generalization? I can tell you right now, lack of clear requirements and specifications does not directly correlate with lack of formal education in computer science.
Agreed. The battery life was surprisingly short, given the epaper screen and the lack of any features. The UI was a product of a completely deranged mind. The only way to get to some really common settings is to press dozens of random buttons, like game cheat codes. It doesn't even have the ability to sync the clock from the phone network, so I constantly had to reset the clock (!). The idea is good, but the implementation sucks badly in every single dimension.
You've never been actually poor. Poverty is not having either travel nor nice things.
I would love something like this that can help me learn other accents of my own language (English), or other languages (French, perhaps), and evaluate my performance.
The best approach IMO is to reply to a C&D with a response like, "We'd be quite happy to work with you to ensure there is no customer confusion. I have started by reviewing the site and trying to make this clear. Do you have any other suggestions?"
What would that look like? The peek[1], but with an e-ink screen?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_(mobile_Internet_device)
Life On Earth Started On Mars, Say Scientists
This is a weird statement: I ate at a ramen restaurant a couple of nights ago. It was quite healthy, I think I had pork, egg, spinach and seaweed in mine. There are plenty of good ramen restaurants branded from Japan. It is not the best food, but it is not the worst food either.
There a nice book on "evil design patterns" called Evil by Design [1]. It's interesting knowing how we are manipulated (and how we can manipulate others, not necessarily for bad reasons) through design.

1- http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Design-Interaction-Lead-Temptatio...
My experience at DeveloperAuction shows that some companies actually view it as a point of pride that they reject 19 out of 20 Engineers they interview and that it's near-impossible to pass their rigours technical screening. It seems almost seems like they are trying to "trick" people into failing by asking obscure questions that have little relevance to the job at hand.

Of course, what they fail to account for, is the incredibly cost of hundreds of hours spent talking to candidates & administering these silly challenges or the fact that Google's interview data proves that such such logic questions have little predictive value on future on-the-job performance.

I was actually really impressed recently by Stripe's technical interview process - outlined on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-is-the-engineering-...
As it is, your comment is appealing to people's scepticism, but not offering an argument of any kind. It would help if you gave an example or two of these "legitimate questions".
Spotify also does, most of the time. It does occasionally fail, which is really embarrassing when I'm listening to Carly Rae Jepson on the train and I drop my phone.
I got it on my first guess, but it's still completely unrelated to the problem at hand.

The "25 horses" question is much less useful, but gives you an idea of how the candidate approaches a problem. Getting the right answer is great, but seeing that someone understands the concept of combinatorics or some kind of process of elimination is much more valuable.

You really want a technical question so that you can see someone CODE the solution, or better yet, give them some task to do that's apropos - that part of the argument is fair. In past companies we've done all three, weeding out terrible candidates with the coding questions, weeding out mediocre candidates with thought-process questions, and selecting only the best with a programming simulation.

(echo 'ZW5naW5lZXJpbmdAcm9ja3RoZXBvc3QuY29t' | base64 -D if you're curious, and the answer to the horse problem is 7 IIRC)
Adding other languages and American English is on the roadmap, never thought about other accents of English though.
I do not have a subscription and it is working fine for me ... maybe has to do with location/article quota?
Now's my chance to start http://isIsTumblerDownDown.com
The original AT&T was an official government monopoly so the very existence of Bell Labs was in part a tax it payed to avoid problems. As I recall it also wasn't allowed to do things like sell UNIX(TM) for serious money prior to the United States v. AT&T 1982 consent decree ... which I notice is the same year UNIX System III was released.

Xerox, though ... well, a good book on that is Fumbling the Future: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp... ... which is still in print after it's 1988 debut.

That isn't even an example of disruptive innovations almost never happening in established companies, Xerox just wasn't doing that sort of thing to begin with. Well, they bought Scientific Data Systems at the top in 1969 and fumbled that by the middle of the '70s....
Hopefully the recent news articles about Google's data-driven analysis of these techniques will start moving things in the right direction... there is ZERO predictive value to many of these questions, and they bring with them a tremendous - and unaccounted for - cost around interviewing & rejecting qualified people.
Yeah. Some defaults are mildly annoying on all phones. Very true.

Every Android that I've seen (incl. Nexus 4) tend to stop playing, if you remove a physical cable. Not nice. Especially if your headset is old and sometimes looses connection for a millisecond or two...

But much much worse, is when the Bluetooth is disconnected/connected. The thing stops playing. And upon connecting resets position to the start! And starts playing! So if you are listening to a 70 minutes chapter of an audiobook, suddenly you have to search for a precise minute in the chapter. A bit frustrating. And even dangerous, as you might have been driving a car at the time.

... sometimes makes me wonder just how many car crashes could have been prevented by a slightly better designed interface of Google Music ...
IANAL, only an entrepreneur, but this should surprise no one even passingly familiar with trademark law. Failure to enforce your trademark's registration can expose you to claims that your mark is no longer "in use." Sure, this guy might be 100% innocent, but it won't matter when someone less innocent comes along and uses the fact Tumblr didn't enforce their trademark against this other guy to be annoying.

It's easier to just shoot an email to your attorneys and have send a C&D than it is to enter into a more protracted, ad hoc conversation. It costs virtually nothing to do this. Some associate at the firm types it up using one of a bajillion templates, sends it out with a partner's name attached, and bills the client for <30 minutes worth of time.

You, too, can hire an attorney and pay them a few hundred dollars to reply! Or you can try replying yourself.

C&Ds are not legally binding, of course, and the recipient can choose to comply, respond, or ignore as they see fit. Because of how trademark law works I wouldn't recommend "ignoring" since the complaining party is pretty much obligated to escalate matters.

For example, a friend of mine created a parody website of a world-famous newspaper and predictably received a C&D. This was more than just the trademark: it repurposed content, used the same typefaces, mimicked the same layout, etc. They agreed to let him use it after he replied and agreed to include a prominent disclaimer up top stating that "<Newspaper> trademarks used with permission of <Newspaper Corporation>" and explaining that this was a parody.

I don't know if the OP tried to do this, but I will say turning to the "court of public opinion" as a first course of action makes this outcome somewhere between incredibly unlikely to impossible.

Tumblr isn't trying to be evil -- you're using their name, after all -- they're just trying to take care of it in the most time-efficient manner possible. The #1 most time-efficient manner is sending a C&D. For folks whose infringements are minor and inconsequential, it's likely that the #2 most time-efficient manner is to let them use the name in the domain with a prominent disclaimer and an explicit, albeit revokable, license.
Particularly installer scripts that are run by the trendy technique of

curl -L http://www.example.com/some/cool/thing/install.sh | bash

Particularly risky if the protocol is not https. Even worse when the right-hand command is "sudo bash"
Then why not handle it like Jack Daniels?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/this-c...
Per the article - fostering a system that allows for taking big risks and possibly failing, but showing a track record over time of succeeding is much more beneficial to a company than yearly or half yearly cycles producing a number that has to fit a curve starting with comparing you against the peers in your group. Projects, life circumstances, and many other factors can have a one time effect.

Also, yes, Windows and Office are cash cows. MSFT is a company of 90k+ people, they aren't all working on the cash cows. There are individuals trying to create new products, enter new markets, etc. It is a complicated ecosystem. I'm pretty sure it was new HR and HR policies along with Bill relinquishing control that spurred a change in dynamics.