skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need devs who will not only speak up but who can communicate

I spent a few years dealing with the asshole charlatan CTO, who I shit you not, was "discovered" while working at computer renaissance.

The major differentiator between him and the lead dev who never got his way, was that the CTO could calmly and credibly state his case. Even if that case was as ridiculous as "we need to rewrite all our systems to use UDP, TCP is making everything slow". When confronted with these kind of theories the lead dev would easily be goaded into hissy fits, that made him sound like an egotistical baby.

Everyone on this forum knows that blaming TCP for system slowness is total misdirecting bullshit. But the CEO doesn't know that, and if you present your case without savvy social skills you will lose every time. This lead dev proved it for several years. It sucks, but it is life.

Interestingly I happened upon this telling quote that I later learned through informal channels was attributed to the CEO

"I have 25 code writers that are absolute 'Rain Men', but I gotta have ONE 'Rain Man' with social skills to run the place."

In the context of that quote, some things that happened during my time at the startup make a lot more sense.
Great news for the NYC2 datacenter. I'm just waiting for the SFO to have this feature, among other things. One other critical feature I think should be implemented is the ability deploying instances to different physical hosts in master/slave setups, either automatically or manually[0].

[0]: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...
how would you measure said volume?

Make a lot of local measurements of small volumes, and add them up. (Yes, I know we can't actually do that with voids a billion light years away; but when the Tardis paper talks about "volume", as I read their math, that kind of measurement is what they mean.)

If you were to use light, surely it would take more time from an external reference frame to traverse (external chronometer) than it would within (internal chronometer)

This is true, but I do not think it means what you think it means. See below.

ergo meaning that the space is equivalently larger to the decrease in the time vector (as you can only convert space into time and vice versa)

This doesn't make sense to me. Can you give a reference or show some actual math?

I know that their hypothesis is that there's more space in the voids - but why could it not equally be the fact that there is less?

I didn't say there couldn't be less; I said that assuming that there was less would be inconsistent with their hypothesis (which is that there is more), so it makes no sense to combine that assumption with their hypothesis and expect a sensible answer.

that also depends on your premises

The "Tardis" paper assumes the same premises, so it seems reasonable to keep them when discussing the paper.
Welcome to yet another dead thread on Hacker News, flagged off the site by people too scared to discuss gender in the tech industry.
Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches
I am pretty sure this is a joke/troll. But there's no accounting for taste...
I can see your point but I can also see a clash with reality because a lot of successful mobile games are built with lua-based game engines. Maybe the clash is due to the fact bad code has nothing to do with the quality of the gameplay and rather simple game with a top-notch gameplay can be build with duct tape and bubble gum.

From my experience the tools which enable makers to create better gameplay are the tools which enable a very fast iterative development process (think live assets reloading, parameters tweaking without recompilation and ultimately code hotswapping).

Talking about strong typing it does help if you need to scale your simple game into something more complex. It also helps a lot if you are going to build something complex right from the start.

I think this link is absolutely relevant to both of our points:
http://elm-lang.org/blog/Interactive-Programming.elm
I don't agree with this part:

> In other words, if everyone implemented REST Hooks, server load for both the sender and receiver could be reduced by 66x.

No, the number of requests could be reduced by a factor of 66. I'm not saying that's not impressive, I'm saying that the polling requests that ended up resulting in no action are cheaper than actionable requests, so, server load will go down by much less than a factor of 66x. The amount of work is the same, just busywork is less.
Non-ugly rape joke from Louis CK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4hNaFkbZYU

And, yeah, great discussion man. You've got me thinking. ( =
According to Digitalocean the routing issue wasn't on their side. From what I could see, the cause of the latency was asymmetric routing. Some of my Amsterdam -> Amsterdam traffic had its return traffic sent via NY. This was resolved when they got more bandwidth and were able to disconnect Cogent some time last week.
At the bottom of the page I saw:

> An initiative by Zapier 2013.

Zapier is a company that makes money off sites having REST endpoints to push and pull data. It looks like Zapier would prefer that more sites have endpoints to accept push, and this marketing effort is a brand-campaign (think Public Service Announcement) to get more people to tailor their products to work with Zapier.

That explains why more emphasis was put on marketing, etc. The primary audience is not developers but PHBs and PMs to have sound bytes to parrot to developers.

(I'm not cynical, I work in advertising, most of my products already have 'REST hooks'...)
Been chewing on this since you made the comment, and I don't think I buy it. The "legal issues" angle is a dirty cop-out, and it ignores the issue at hand: he's being suppressed for holding an opinion.

Right now I'm looking at the Twitter search results and being reminded why I hate people in general. Should expressing this opinion get me fired? Should I be prohibited from occupying a position of hiring people because I am prejudiced to assume they are capable of what I'm seeing in those search results?

Somehow it's not fair. A Christian or Atheist or (pre-1960s) homosexual sympathizer would present the same risks to a business as Dickinson did here. His views aren't considered progressive by any means, but 50 or 100 years ago neither would the views of an Atheist or a homosexual. I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer.

And I can't find that line. I can't say, without making an absolute judgement using a perfect computer and a perfect observation of the global state of the universe, whether the sympathizer was correct at the time, or whether Dickinson is somehow wrong now. All I know is that nobody appears to have been harmed except Dickinson, and I won't be hearing his opinions any time soon, and that's a crying shame.
Same for me i miss the How? part.

And i got oversold on an idea that sounds good but i have no clue how it works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook
One question based on discussion up thread.

With the current code, if the hardware was truly untrustworthy, it could do a brief analysis of upcoming CPU instructions, and if it sees that it is XORed with something, it could quickly XOR itself with that something in advance so that it can completely control the output of the function.

For sheer paranoia, wouldn't it make sense to mix the hardware entropy into the pool earlier in the function so that it malicious hardware would have to work harder to control the output? It could, of course, still take over. But logic to do so would have to be more intrusive than the XOR hack that I suggested, and so would be more likely to get caught.
It's largely a toss-up, as neither was fully Turing-complete. In principle Zuse's Z3 completed in 1941 was fully programmable, but no-one realised it at the time, and writing arbitrary programs on it involves using a hack which apparently wouldn't have been suitable for real use anyway. (Nonetheless, Zuse had started work on his high-level language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl during the war.) The earlier Bell Labs machines and the ABC weren't fully programmable either. Babbage's Analytical Engine would have been Turing-complete but had never been built. The old Computer Museum documentary Computer Pioneers - Pioneer Computers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C9538... is pretty good.
This is exactly how many creative agencies work. They have some artistic talent in house but often farm out dev work to freelancers. There's nothing wrong with it and yes, you can make good money doing it.
Basically anything around 8% is considered very good. We spent ALOT of time optimizing our sign up flow. We did hundreds of usability tests. I think the key was making it clear what the product would do and why they needed to complete each step. We tweaked language until nobody in a usability test seemed confuse. We removed any step that people didn't actually need.

We continue to focus on this. Even as we've grown we've maintained a free sign up rate of 15%
This is false: schools are not required to accept federal loans.

You miss my point: it's not about rejecting federal loans, it's about rejecting an applicant who does satisfy grade/work/references/funding criteria when there are openings, but the admissions personnel concludes admission still isn't a good idea. The mortgage industry knows what I'm referring to.
Other author here. Not depicted in this video are a handful of other pretty neat features that we demoed in a video a while back [1]. Namely in-browser test recording. In the past month or so we've also built test playback across additional browser targets including every major version of Internet Explorer from 6 to 11, and iOS Safari.

[1] http://vimeo.com/71709264
Thanks for writing this. I was thinking the same thing.

Most everyone has had this problem at one point in time. It seems to me that mom needs to teach her daughter to have a thicker skin...which is the EXACT same lesson I got from my parents.
I would not think interpolation would be that much easier than a creating a TIN. I have not looked at the dataset though, so it might be "pre-interpolated" (probably using a TIN if I had to guess), in which case this would be pretty easy with something like pyqgis on a flask server or whatever. The entire api could basically just be:

@app.route("/elevation")
def elevation():
fileName = "/path/to/raster/srtmRaster.tif"
fileInfo = QFileInfo(fileName)
baseName = fileInfo.baseName()
srtmRaster = QgsRasterLayer(fileName, baseName)
res, ident = srtmRaster.identify(QgsPoint(request.form['lat'], request.form['lon']))
return ident[0]

I can test this out and throw it on github with some polish if anyone is interested.
Indeed! Apropos is our friend.
My summary: This is a pattern to manage webhook URLs through an API rather than a web UI.

Did I get that right?
Chris, I think "drawn", not "drawed" is what you were looking for.

Also, nice find.
I was obviously referring to the starting lines:

> trigger alert

> (violence and rape references)

This is not Slashdot, you're supposed to read the article before commenting ;-)
What Startups Need to Know about Obamacare
TaskRabbit has made a recent shift into a B2B play, too, as they've never been sustainable. They also made a shift in company size laying off several staff members.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358282
Good point. For us (Zapier), we just waste a lot of time and resources polling. We talked to some of the SaaS services we integrate with and it is the same on their side as well. That is our motivation.
edX's Github repo, for those interested: https://github.com/edx/
man units
nice! did not know that.
Almost, but no cake. It lacked the details of how the NSA was ruining his life.
Interesting. I've just completed a library to run on Flask. Actually, it's an extension of flask_restful that allows for arbitrary nested resources, control over fields exposed the whole way down the tree etc. PUT/POST of deeply nested objects. I built it because I'm using SQLAlchemy and nothing quite supported how I wanted to do it. I've also used the helpers from flask_restless (with a bunch of modifications) to help with the loading / saving of SQLAlchemy object trees.

Example definition of a resource:

class JobList(resty.ResourceList):
model = models.Job
deep = dict(disciplines=dict(drawings=None))
query_options = subqueryload_all('disciplines.drawings')

I know have a really easy to configure api that plays very nicely with Restangular. It's very simple - totally not rest complete, but sufficient for my needs.
ITS A DECENT IF SOMEWHAT FLUFFY ARTICLE WITH AN UNFORTUNATELY ANTAGONISTIC HEADLINE.
</ironic-caps>
Time is money your researched and found talent that business what to use. So ethical yes. Sustainable probably. In business trust and dependablity are as important as price. Your providing a layer of that. If the contractor doesn't deliver you chase down the solution untilt he customer is happy, that adds value. Ask for referals, do more networking at small business functions get more clients before you quit. Get business cards hand them out to everyone you meet. PWC, E&Y all offer consulting services and they are billion dollar businesses. Will you get in an incubator probably not, but who cares. I would take about 20% of you profits and invest them in new marketing methods until your big enough to fund/work on a product or Saas(if you want a scalable business). Also, look for ways to sell reoccuring services to your clients with a markup(Hosting, backup services) Ask your clients where their pain points are and find more thigns to sell them. Build a service business then automated the most time consuming tasks.
Look into DePaul. They have decent distance learning and are accredited. The distance learning is like a second classroom that is remote (instead of like a MOOC). They record the lecture of the day and post it in the evening. If you have any tests, you often need to find a proctor. They also have restrictions on who can be a proctor (you can't just find a teacher friend).
SAAS Marketing Help/Opinion
I need some help and opinion from folks who either run or use SAAS/Web based Marketing applications.

Being relatively new (circa one year) to Digital Marketing, I'm still learning the ropes and as such, I've created a service called Octopus (octopus.org) to help myself and marketers. The goal of the service, with the help of other Marketers/Developers, is to list Marketing apps as well as make them searchable and discover-able.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on the site and whether you think it would be useful.
It's not really about high end schools. Harvard, Yale, and MIT can turn down anybody they want because they have a million overly qualified candidates. They can be selective and still fill their all of classes ten times over.

But if tiny community colleges start turning people away when they have half empty classrooms, there will be a lot of negative press.
Note that I didn't say anything about the programming quality of the resultant games. Gameplay is a matter of design quality. We can build tools that help us make better games, but they have nothing to do with programming tools (tools that help us make games, better.)
> The one salient point of the piece was the fact the teacher did not respond properly after the harassment occurred. We can all agree on that.

I agree with that if it is true, but the email is so sparse in details about the events so we have no idea if the teacher even was present when this happened.
I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer.

Well, a homosexual sympathizer in a hiring position 60 years ago would have been more inclusive in their choices for candidate. A bigot in the 21st Century would be be more exclusive.

He is not being suppressed for holding an opinion. He is perfectly entitled to hold that opinion. And Business Insider is perfectly entitled to fire him to avoid being associated with an opinion that does not match their company values.
It's about Mel Gibson's horrible phone call...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm3YrTk7qTY
The only use of randomized address space I know is to mitigate other attack vectors (stack smashing and other arbitrary code execution exploits). So it would just make exploiting an other vulnerability easier, it wouldn't be a vulnerability on its own. So it's still a bit far fetched conspiracy-wise as far as I'm concerned.
Been using Anonymous Pro for years, love it.
kaltai quite specifically called you out for the trope "you're so thin-skinned!". Quoth you:

> But I also think we shouldn't be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way
Hey Steve!

> See the confusion in this thread. If it were a link to a spec, nobody would be confused.

We definitely had a little confusion in the thread, I think that was mostly because we put too much marketing on the homepage for this audience, but the absence of a proper spec could have definitely contributed. We're correcting some of this.

This is all about adoption of some sort of subscription-based HTTP callback: at this point in time any flavor will do. We have no doubt that a formal spec will pop up someday (and that would make us very happy!).

> Furthermore, what about PubSubHubbub?

PubSubHubbub always seemed a little heavy and was a departure from APIs that weren't XML/ATOM based (meaning most JSON API providers wouldn't touch it). Not saying I agree with it, but that is the feedback we got.

> Finally, polling is great for 99% of use cases (I can make up statistics, too)

We posted the numbers driving our stats on the homepage. They are not made up and come straight for our Elasticsearch cluster. I'm happy to elaborate on them!
I know it's not exactly an unknown command, but I didn't know about "sort" until last week.

It's freaking fast and convenient, sorts hadoop reduce results like a champ.
Mining interesting data around your name.
To respond to dos1 (who is [dead]), no chrome plugins are in use in the current video. We're rendering the desktop of the VM executing the test directly purely with Canvas and JS.

Validation is done using Roslyn, Scripts are executed currently with FluentAutomation + scriptcs.
This project is super cool, but I'm even more hopeful for Rust eventually being a much more complete replacement for C++ and even C for embedded projects. It's already pretty easy to run outside the runtime by not using the standard library[0], though you can't take advantage of a lot of Rust's niceties if you do so. There's discussion of what it might mean to have the standard library but not the runtime[1], which could be really nice for embedded projects.

0: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/test/run-pas...
1: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-August/0051...
Thanks for the clarification, I agree gathering data from everyone is useful, as long as decisions are then taken by someone competent in the field (be it branding or systems architecture).

I'm not sure about this new Yahoo logo - there are some nice points (the bigger O at the end to imply an exclamation, the simplicity), but the tilted !, kerning and new font are pretty awful and it does look like the CEO had a hand in designing it on a weekend. I just visited the yahoo home page to see it - the exclamation animating in for no reason is particularly grating, and the positioning of the logo is also amateur (it should hang on the left over the nav below for balance), so I can't really see the process employed as Yahoo as anything but a failure here.

It's a shame this article focussed so much on the process rather than the end result, but I think he just assumed the end result was clearly, objectively bad.
Lots of them seriously won't leave, though.

The tech market is incredible in Seattle (where I live) right now and I know plenty of smart devs who put up with bullshit all the time.
If you guess a wrong address, the process crashes.

With a fork-based server, you don't care much about that. Every time you connect, you get a fresh new process - with the same addresses as the older copies even.

So brute-forcing those is more viable than a browser where you probably won't have more than 1 or 2 attempts per user.
"graduates of the IDF's elite cyber security unit" - hmm...no thanks.
When I think of automation tests, I think pain. Cumbersome tooling, hackish test frameworks.

The HTML5 dev environment, plus some virtual machines to run the tests in, might fix some of the longstanding issues and make automation tests palatable. We'll see.

The fluent syntax to write the tests looks nice as well.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding; one can glean only so much from a demo video. We'll know more when they actually have something to play with.
They should bribe some of those actresses to make a movie with them, and give them 100% free membership for life :)
Wow, I use it (almost) daily. Especially useful with the '-u' flag or uniq.
A story can be posted a second time on HN by using "Show HN"?

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360474
It is completely ethical, and is the foundation of many business models across different industries (think general contractor for construction hiring subcontractors for plumbing, electrical, or tile work).

It is scalable as long as you are not the bottleneck. For example, if you are the only one meeting with clients and drawing up contracts, you will find yourself stretched pretty thin doing that. Imagine 50 clients all asking for status updates at the same time.

I would explore the possibility of standardizing your services and prices, and making it a self-serve model so clients can sign up and manage their projects through an app or website. Then you can free yourself up to just do marketing.
Off-topic, but....

Wait, what? I recently read Mark Musa's translation of the Commedia, and that doesn't make any sense at all. The hottest places in hell are reserved for various forms of fraud, IIRC.

The only link I can find about the quote with more information is:

http://whatwillmatter.com/2011/11/observation-the-hottest-pl...

"In the Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil, on their way to Hell, pass by a group of dead souls outside the entrance to Hell. These individuals, when alive, remained neutral at a time of great moral decision. Virgil explains to Dante that these souls cannot enter either Heaven or Hell because they did not choose one side or another."

As I recall, those are the only souls whom Dante doesn't identify and have a little chat with.
That was actually a really interesting article. I think it really helps that they were able to come up with a really good set of ads that worked perfectly with the audience on the adult websites. That's always the goal, but execution is never quite as easy as it seems :)
That's only true if the sympathizer never heard a candidate say "I fucking hate gays". I'm not sure how I feel about your last paragraph yet.
I predicted that "Wash your hands" wouldn't work. I'm sure a higher percentage of porn visitors are dudes, and dudes don't want to click on other dudes, generally.
(Computing History) The TX-2 Triumvirate
Yes. A Twitter user pointed that to me. Fixed now.
Upgrading your old Ember.js application.
When you say hash tree do you mean Merkle trees? What research are you referring to?

Git uses the Merkle tree scheme. It just creates a binary listing of a directory, which the SHA1 of each file in it, and then takes the SHA1 of that dir object. Is there something insufficient about that?
Where To Find London Tech Events, Meetups and Hack Days
She dictated texts to her boyfriend to type up? In my view, this is far more degrading than a "get me a sandwich" joke.
> VB is a fine language to get children interested in programming.

If I had to take a Visual Basic class, I would've taken up woodworking as a career. Seriously, what the hell? It's awful.
I suggest Envy Code R [http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...]

It's not a bitmap font, but has a sharp, clean look.