skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wear contacts, and sometimes, if one of my eyes is irritated, I only wear one. It takes about half an hour for my brain to adjust to using only one eye (my vision is bad enough that I essentially cannot use an eye without a contact).

It amazes me that after this happens, I stop noticing the problem. I don't realize that I can't see in 3D up close[1]. Then, I will attempt to do something that requires stereo vision, and I will just fail. I've missed card swipes by about a foot, without being able to tell it was a problem until it happened. I once got a bunch of friends to cover one eye and try to swipe a card, and they had similar experiences, not noticing they were going to fail until the did.

[1] Stereo vision only works within a few feet of your eyes. Further out, you use other cues to construct a 3D model of what you are seeing.
His assumption that these works must be public domain is questionable. It is true that US government works are generally not subject to copyright in the US, but that is when they are works of government employees producing the works within the scope of their employment.

There are two big limitations on this. First, if the government work incorporates outside copyrighted work, only the parts authored by the government employee operating within the scope of his employment are public domain.

Second, this only applies to government employees. It does NOT apply to contractors. What happens with copyright of works produced by contractors under a government contract is determined by the terms of the contract.

The Curiosity project is largely run at JPL. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech. Almost all JPL employees are neither government employees nor government contractors. They are Caltech employees.

To figure out the copyright status of works authored by JPL employees, we'd need to look at their employment contract with Caltech, and with Caltech's contract with NASA.
(I worked on the GeoFire library)
GeoFire converts the latitude-longitude coordinates of a data point to its geohash, and stores the data in Firebase at the geohash. The properties of geohashes and Firebase play nicely together to make it easy to implement localized search and location querying.
> Hence, eye strain is not an issue.

There are other subtle effects like fish-eye that are lead to a disoriented feeling when I take off the Oculus.

Think of it this way: your cortex is always learning. Always. So if you present visual input that is subtly different (eye-spacing, fish-eye / pin-cushion, lag) for long periods your brain will learn that. Take it away and you've effectively got mild (hopefully reversible) brain damage wrt the physical world.
There are plenty of people (beyond Jeff Dean), who make $200k+ writing code in the bay area. I'm not really sure where you are getting your data from, but $150k is actually a bit low for a senior developer.
I can't easily. The free quota is pretty high on their. (5000 calls), For development I'd work off a few test cases that you save the response on, then if you get something working decide if 5000 calls a month will fill your needs.
Haven't seen this mentioned. The phones are region locked only until activated with a SIM from that Region. This way phones have to be used in there home market. I suppose this is for controlling exports from UK or South America to US.

A side... Sprint Iphones SIM SLOT are technically unlockable by Sprint but only to regions/carriers not the US.
As one of the vocal ones(tm), even I would say Google is fantastic if you get allocated onto the right team. This obviously occurs most of the time or the place would be out of business.

What led to me becoming one of the vocal ones is what happens when allocation fails and there's really no resort other than trying to fit in doing something completely uninteresting or leaving. Google seemingly does not acknowledge that the allocation process is in any way flawed.

My mistake was I should have insisted on an allocation upfront as a condition of accepting the offer made to me. After acing the interview, all the power was in my hands and I failed to make use of it.
In the fart-room ... I mean ... kitchen.
The correct thing to do would have been to publish the article as open access. That means nobody has to pay to read it. It costs a small extra fee from the authors to the journal to make it open access forever.
BikeStation (UK) For all things bike in Yate
At this point I consider Calico to be a part of Google (although separately incorporated). Not sure about you but I definitely see "extending the average life expectancy of the human population" as a difficult problem.

But even discounting this (naysayers will cry foul at the fact that it technically is a separate company), I think organizing the world's information is certainly an extremely difficult problem. And certainly one that Google is attempting to solve in more ways than search.

Also - self driving cars? Certainly you will agree that is not trivial.
their search is pretty amazing though. i think we forget that at times.
Thanks for your reply , we are looking to make some SaaS based web application. Well a few searches in google about CRM resulted in knowledge of salesforce dominance in the market and a dishearted me.
Vancouver wasn't that expensive of a place to live before the Chinese started buying up all of the real estate. Also, many of these offices were planned before 2008, when the Canadian dollar was much weaker than today. Also, Vancouver IS a nice place to live, it has mild climate, nice mountains, and its quite a bit more international than the bay area (i.e. large Chinese and Indian populations). Where else can you live in North America where China Town is basically everywhere?
I don't disagree, but solving the root problem is way off in the future.
New York apartments can have very little storage space when I was looking for a studio some had one small closet and no bathroom storage at all. People I know use them for out of season sports stuff and clothes, especially couples where two people are sharing one small closet.
I've been a regular user of Mendeley, not for recommendations--that's what journal TOC alert services are for--but just for managing my bibliographies and preprint PDFs. I'm allergic to Endnote and I got tired of Zotero's sluggish speed (not that I've tried using it in a few years). Mendeley has been a nice replacement.

(All that said, I really do hope Zotero does well, since it's open-source and not owned by a major commercial publisher.)
I wouldn't say that Christianity has "historically" been particularly well factored from a separate system of laws, unless you mean to start history with the Enlightenment. The seat of power in Constantinople for centuries was a shifting alliance of Emperors and Patriarchs, and the law that was enforced was not really separated into secular and church law, but more like negotiated spheres of influence of each leader's representatives. The same goes for most of Western Europe's history, which involves a very long shadow cast by the Pope, and an extensive role for the Catholic Church in comprehensively ordering society and the operation of courts—in many places and eras there was essentially no distinction between canon law and civil law. This is because, exactly as you say, religion has traditionally been considered an integral foundation for the state in Christian countries.
Why would you mention UWa and UBC and not...U Toronto, which is actually internationally ranked in computer science?
I worked at a review site and have decided that if I ever open a restaurant I will name it 'null' or 'NullPointerException.' The hilarity that would ensue from this would be priceless.
Ask HN: online identity verification service
Anyone know a good service provider for online identity verification service? I have looked at jumio, but they require subscription, which is not suitable for startups as startups are trying to grow their user base.

Anyone know a good online identity verifications service?

Thanks.
yeah... that's lame. NASA should take a cut. in fact, new decree.. all sales from academic papers should go to NASA. agreed?
Make it into a rule that anything funded with govt money must be dual published: an open access version, and a journal version that helps the scientists' CVs

The usual counter-argument is "the journals won't take that, they want exclusive rights or nothing!", but given that a lot of research is funded directly or indirectly with public funds (i.e. a grant or just working at a public university), then that argument seems weak
Here's a random reference for (top-notch) junior developers / fresh graduates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448448
Not to be cruel, but I don't understand how you've used Git for years without understanding what the index is. There's more than a few learning resources for Git online to satisfy your curiosity. Anyway, to give an abbreviated explanation:

The index is a staging area for your commits. When you use `git add`, changes in the working directory are staged (prepared) for the next commit. If you pass the `-a` flag to `git commit`, Git will stage all changes to files that it is already aware of. (Recall that new files are untracked and must be manually added to the index the first time they're committed; `-a` won't add those files because Git doesn't already know about them.)

Why have a staging area instead of just creating a commit directly from all the changes in the working directory? It's basically a sanity measure for organizing commits if you're ever anything less than a perfect developer. If you make a bunch of changes and later realize that there's more than one "unit of work" represented in those changes (however you choose to define those units), you can selectively add files to the index to create commits that make sense. You can even use the interactive mode of `git add` to selectively stage changed sections within a single file. If you care about the benefits of sensible commits -- bug hunting with bisection, ability to run `git revert` to undo a logical unit of work -- then the index is your friend.

A few random pages on the index that I pulled up:

[0] http://www.gitguys.com/topics/whats-the-deal-with-the-git-in...

[1] http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Interactive-Staging
What happens to these developers after a few years in the industry? Is there an invisible salary ceiling they hit faster than developers in non-SV areas? Or does it increase at the same rate as developers in non-SV areas? I don't live in SV so I'm curious how high a typical senior dev salary is if the junior dev salary is already so high.

EDIT:
I just looked up Software Engineer III in San Jose on salary.com. The median is $108k and the upper 90% is $130k. So how can the salary for someone who just graduated be 100k+? Is that just for google and facebook? And all other companies in SV pay much less?
"New graduates can command $100,000 a year in Silicon Valley. Hired has found that bumping the offer up to $120,000 gives you access to 30% more candidates."

This is something many people on HN have been saying for a long time in response to the question of whether the US needs to create more H-1B visas: companies have a hard time finding qualified employees because they don't want to pay enough. It's nice to see the numbers quantified in this way (even though this is only anecdotal evidence from a single recruiting firm).
Microsoft’s Mobile Platforms Suffer From Flagging Developer Interest
Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions
Sudan’s Internet Back Up After A Day In The Dark
> The Curiosity project is largely run at JPL. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech. Almost all JPL employees are neither government employees nor government contractors. They are Caltech employees.

Somewhat tangential to your main point (because, as you correctly note, only works by government employees within the scope of employment are categorically not subject to copyright), the employees are employees of a firm contracting with the government and working on that contract; that's the usual meaning of "government contractors". So its a non-standard use of terminology to say that they aren't government contractors.
Thanks for your thoughts. I think you're right that taking payments and comparing it to a normal software model is a little unfair.

That being said, the margins are low no matter how you slice it. It's hard to run a business on thirty or forty bps, before risk and marketing. And, recall that PayPal almost collapsed because of risk.

It's a volume business as you say and you need a ton of volume for it to make sense. I am not saying that Stripe, Braintree, Balanced, etc, are bad businesses. In fact, I think they're very impressive exactly because they operate in an extremely tough, highly competitive, razor-thin margin business.

It's interesting that you point to PayPal in the way you do. I would agree that they have a small part of the ACH and card networks. I would also argue that the parts that they do have are very lucrative. They make the vast majority of their money through charging too much for ACH and through their foreign exchange fee. Ultimately, most of the ACH network's transactions aren't going to go through third parties no matter what you do.

Comparing the growth potential of an independent sales organization like Braintree and Stripe with a card network like VISA or Mastercard is an apples/oranges comparison. If you can create a payments network that meets the three criterion for a a good system - ubiquitous, perceived to be secure, and successfully transmits value - then god bless. I think you'll have 14-16% CAGR. I'm not sure anyone can do that though - and many have tried. I'll eat my words by being so categorical but talk about a schlep business.

I think you're absolutely correct that if a processor could intermediate itself and become a consumer brand, that it could be the next Google. In general I am skeptical that one company will win. I think there will be a ton of large, public, companies in this space but between different processors, pay by GMail, Square moving in to this space, MasterCard's Simplify, etc, I am not sure that there will exist a monolithic winner that will get to that size.
The logical solution is to fall into the arms of Apple or their equivalent in a given industry.

In many areas, Apple doesn't exist (even with a different name). Worse, sometimes they exist, but only for a brief time as the company strip-mines the goodwill that a given product has to extract more profits and then fall back to "industry rest-state".

Customer preference to control manufacturers' behavior is a model that rarely works.
> “Hiring Google engineers is generally a really bad idea. If you work at Google you have access to an entire set of tools and technologies that you won't have in a smaller startup environment.”

This seems like a sensible and underrated assertion. I have no idea if it's more true for Google than other large startups...but yeah, great companies have great toolsets...that's in part why they're great. But that infrastructure isn't available elsewhere and an engineer's reliance on that isn't easily tested. It seems akin to my experience in journalism, that some very accomplished reporters have had very accomplished support staff (researchers, fact-checkers, handlers), but may flounder when forced to do that work themselves.
Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause.

Disagree strongly. Solving interesting problems, improving my skill set and my career, and doing good work for the people immediately around me is enough for me. Negative cause (e.g. working for an unethical company, or in the war industry) would be a problem; but the difference between neutral and positive means little to me. I'm older, though (30).

When I get to ownership level, perhaps starting my own thing, I'll care a lot about macroscopics. However, most of us start out as employees and there's more than enough rewarding in mastering the micro-scale stuff. As long as I'm not being asked to do anything wrong, I'm not going to get emotionally involved in how a company affects the world until I'm an owner; until that point, it's just a distraction.

Macroscopics, in my observation, just mean more Kool-aid; and there are just as many good people at companies doing less sexy (macroscopically speaking) but still important things. In fact, I worked (briefly) for one of those "change the world" startups-- a New York ed-tech that's devolved into being a sidekick to mainstream publishers-- and it was all marketing bullshit; the rank-and-file believed in it, but the executives were the most unethical people I've ever met (and that includes drug dealers).
It must've been the limit on H1B's and Canada's friendlier immigration climate.

But here's a point of reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448448 Important to note that this is offered to a top-of-the class undergraduate, the average is likely to be substantially lower.
keep in mind, these are ivy league heavies, not local state school middle-of-the-pack undergrads.
There was also a trick to hide Newsstand in a folder without jailbreaking, before that became a feature. Doesn't matter to almost all users. I'd say the main factors for determining whether something is "crapware" are (a) the inherent odiousness of the software/bookmark/etc., (b) the difficulty of avoiding it, and (c) the level of technical justification for making it unremovable...

For Pizza Hut: (a) very odious, because it's pure marketing, irrelevant to the normal use of the device, and adds no useful functionality, since most users probably don't want a Pizza Hut bookmark, or could easily add one if they did; (b) requires switching completely to a new browser; (c) none, since a user is very unlikely to accidentally delete the bookmark and then be at a loss for how I get it back.

For Apple apps: (a) not much, since the apps are well designed and using Apple services with Apple's phone is a normal use case that applies to most users; (b) generally can be entirely avoided by moving to a folder, although it isn't always possible to replicate their functionality in third party apps, which is unfortunate (the previous inability to do so with Newsstand is essentially an implementation defect, since it was treated as a folder itself); (c) some, since although all apps ought to be redownloadable from the App Store, system apps are sort of a holdover from the original iPhone OS, and most new Apple apps have been put on the App Store, even things like iBooks.

Neither situation is great, but there's a big difference.
CSS for vector based country flags flag-icon-css
Evernote sells Business Socks?
Dual-Platform App Strategies: Interview with Google-Ventures-backed Apportable
Or track the seen items, then start back at the beginning and fetch pages till about a page worth of unseen items accumulates?
So as LoNG as you resign after being caught, no harm, no foul.
Probably nowhere.

Vancouver is a delightful place to live, though personally I don't see the "Chinatown everywhere" as a merit. It's just a beautiful, cultured city that is very livable.
after Mendeley I'm not going anywhere near something like this. and seriously, isn't the web itself the best publishing mechanism ever invented? why are we trying to fit everything into a single service provider model? academic makes webpage using awful html and notepad with copies of their articles. other researchers track the people they're interested in. RSS? not my !@##@ problem, use a site checker plug-in. it's free, extendable and has no lock-in risks. the root cause problem here is academic promotion incentives almost force you into publishing behind paywalls.
> Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.

Working on monetization isn't, AFAIK, what Google engineers do, that's what Google business folks do.

Google engineers work on things like natural language processing for conversational search, or predictive algorithms for identifying information needs in advance and providing them at the right time without requiring an active search -- and that's just for Google's fairly prosaic mainstream products, not the GoogleX/Calico/etc. moonshot kind of work.
Yes. I believe you have to stay a year to keep the bonus, but everyone I know who graduated from Stanford last year was offered >100k salary, 100k signing bonus, and some stock (I think per year the stock was about 25k at current market value).

Even non-CS majors. If they studied a quantitative field, can code, and cleared the dev interview, they got that offer.
You can also use water for holding your pressurized structures together: bolt some pipes to your structure, bury them, pour liquid water through the pipes and into the soil, let it freeze, and you've got anchors made of ice.
So Australian's won't be able to import them for the ~$100 saving.

(US price ~$740 in AUD, Aus ~$880)
Fohr a dollah fifty at the public librahry.
Dolphin couldn't possibly ship with those games though, as the project doesn't have any such distribution rights. You're expected to provide your own game dumps.
Probably just a sign that this page is hand coded!
Consistency vs Extremity
Leading to people like me writing books explaining these painfully obvious things that nobody seems to know. (https://leanpub.com/nightowls)

Most of my readers who write in say something to the effect of "Oh mai god, my <superior>[1] needs to read this!" I'm not sure if they ever do pass it on, but that's the feedback I get :)

[1] <superior> is usually a mother, a wife/girlfriend, or boss.
Possibly a lot of traffic structures, since vehicles and transportation may be largely computer-controlled by then, which would re-shape any related infrastructure that has "just made sense" to us in recent history
Product management is a dark art
thats looking very nice sir, having done something similar i know it its a lot harder to do that it looks. very good job.

a point on these is traction may build really slow and you might have to hang in there for many months, but try to keep at it!
I'm not really sure what the point the author was trying to make. vCenter is not a cutting edge piece of software when you compare it to modern cloud offerings like AWS or even OpenStack. vCenter is, however, very good at what it does, and in many ways does a lot of things that new cloudy offerings will probably never do.

One thing I can say about Thuan, having worked for him at VMware for a long time, he always tried pushing things. My guess is Uber saw that and figured he'd make a good fit.
Saw you are trying it out. Awesome! Sorry the documentation is a bit weak right now, we had people wanting it so we got it out, rather than getting all the docs complete.
How? Lower prices. Tuition+Fees used to hover around 10k total at public institutions.
Well, I'm being a little facetious. I do understand what the index is and what it's used for (but not why it's called the "index" instead of, say, the "stage"). What I don't understand is why the index exists as a separate abstraction. You could have the exact same effect by, for example, doing a git stash, and then popping changes out of the stash into your (now clean) working directory. The WD in effect plays the role of the index, and you get the same result, but with fewer abstractions, fewer commands, and less confusion.

But I hold Linus in high enough regard to take very seriously the possibility that the index is a reflection of some deep wisdom that I have missed. That's the real reason I raise this every now and again.
I'm sincerely sorry things didn't work out in your case, varelse. I don't know your backstory, and it wouldn't be my story to tell even if I did.

But I do know it makes me sad whenever I hear that we have any attrition, regretted or otherwise. And I know as an eng manager I try to put myself out there for /any/ engineer who wants a hand, or even just a sympathetic ear. Some cases are just unfixable, but I like to believe we still can repair a good number of them.

I hope things worked out better for you wherever you landed next.