skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to branch out past being "just" an engineer?
I've been building web apps for over 10 years. Generally I'm the guy everyone (managers, other devs, etc.) comes to ask the difficult questions. I've built a lot of user-facing stuff, can handle architecture etc.

I just get the feeling I could do more than just being an engineer, but all the jobs I hear about are just sw engineer stuff, or don't allow telecommuters (one of my very few must-have requirements)

Am I just lacking the connections to hear about more interesting opportunities? Any suggestions?
Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging standard practice ('rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments'). Only Ben really knows Ben's intention - and he didn't clarify it in either of the long comment threads on github. (If he did make explicitly misogynistic follow-up comments please correct me; I didn't see any myself.)

Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?
I was comparing against Indian English, but point noted.
Both. Vagrant creates a virtualbox vm and does the appropriate networking bits to let you ssh into it easily. Even does portforwarding so you can easily reach webservers on the vm on an easy to remember port # from the host (ie localhost:8080 is vm1, localhost:8081 is vm2, etc)
Those people are already far beyond the pale, but I was referring to more benign cultural explanations. A professor was fired for his "racist" suggestion that cultural differences could help explain the relative poor performance of Black Kenyans relative to Indian Kenyans in running local businesses.

The sad irony is that this man committed suicide over this, and that he was a committed liberal anti-racist. In this case the progressives had no compunction in sacrificing one of their own.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6705401
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/since-s...
I have a Linode. It's available anywhere. e.g During I code, my brother asks me to watch his soccer game, and I keep working from a soccer field with my IPad; http://instagram.com/p/dNcNfREmwT/
Vagrant is extremely useful. It basically allows to automate builds/deploys that require a non-host-OS setup.

By doing that, you also make your builds/deploys reproducible, by making all the dependencies explicit (in a human- and machine-readable way).
Security FYI:

This situation concerns RSA keys, not 128-bit symmetric keys; our problem is "factoring a really big number", not "guessing a really big number". A 128-bit RSA key can be broken in seconds.

RSA keys are commonly 2048 bits at the moment. NIST's rough rule of thumb is that a 2048-bit RSA key is equivalent in secureness to a 112-bit symmetric key; for 128-bit equivalence, you need around a 3072-bit RSA key. (2048 provides fine security for the next few decades at least.)

Edit:

You referred to "128 bits of entropy", which could be interpreted as "equivalent to a 3072-bit RSA key". I'm not accusing you of recommending insecure RSA key sizes, I just wanted to make a public service announcement. I've seen people make that mistake before.
You didn't fire him publicly. You only belittled him in public.

> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]

Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?

You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.
I think (i.e. infer from context) that they mean that in 2000, the people who were of an age to be getting PhDs[0] made up that percent of their age "group"[1]. On the axes, I'm assuming due to poor choice of sig figs that "0, 1, 1, 2, 2" represents "0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, ...", because that seems plausible.

But yes, that figure (all the figures in the article, really) could have used a bit of editorial guidance.

[0] vague!

[1] other people "of an age to be getting PhDs"? also vague!
Yeah, I'm sorry, but you guys have just proven everyone right in criticizing the node.js community as a bunch of arrogant, immature hotheads. What is it with this discussing of firing someone in public?

And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.

Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.
I can't take anyone seriously who believes the main reason for gage involvement is that the prospect of future wealth. It simply does not compute with:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...
Yes, similar. Also, the collectibility aspect is key to knowledge acquisition. Or, you could also go the Jade Cocoon route, which used genetic combination.
Obvious typo is obvious.
I'm sorry, but the entire notion that using masculine pronouns somehow implies sexism is complete bullshit.

That's how the English language works. "He" is used as both neuter and masculine. There is no "it" pronoun.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop fighting about this. Unless someone actually did something sexist, this is a linguistic bikeshed to end all bikesheds.

Childish community behavior aside, the entire argument is a moot point. There is NOTHING sexist about using "he".

If you feel otherwise, please, please educate me.
With so few customers (and no new ones allowed), it’s not surprising that the DC distribution system in San Francisco isn’t widely known, but it’s not a secret.

Regulated electric utilities like PG&E provide their services pursuant to tariffs, and this is no exception. See Tariff A-15, “Direct-Current General Service,” on the PG&E website:

http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_A-15.pdf

They just raised the rates, too.
Migrate Heroku app to AWS RDS Postgres database
Worth looking at: http://www.quora.com/Robert-Frost-Quora-user/What-are-Robert...
Well said. Anything comment that begins with "Obligatory" is usually worthless almost as bad as "This."
What kind of opportunities are you looking for? Management? Design?

If management, I would suggest trying to lead teams and projects, and let your direct report know you want to move into a leadership role.
> I really wish all things like these were first written at terminal CLI apps first and that the GUIs were optional defaults that you could forego entirely.

I really wish all things like these were first written as public libraries and that the CLI/GUIs were optional defaults that you could forego entirely.

That way, you could write higher-level programs to automate tedious tasks, without having to write extra code that does the unnecessary work of wrapping around the CLI/GUI.
I like sql-mode but I also like doing things in the terminal. Using sql-mode in emacs is for developing queries, but psql is what I use to talk to a database of any consequence. A large part of that is so that I know what context I'm in. Slightly more cautious and consequence oriented when it's the production database with ten million rows of PII and less so when I'm programming.
Yeah, real private.
Netflix actually works through a special wine version now.

https://launchpad.net/pipelight

or (older)

https://launchpad.net/netflix-desktop
Ah I see, very cool. You mentioned something about Gtk and Cairo — do you ever interact with the VM graphically, or do you only use it as (what amounts to, I suppose) a networked Linux sandbox running inside OS X.

Also, how do you push code to the instance to run/deploy the code?
Neat, if you disregard the (justified? unjustified?) widespread suspicion of TPMs.

However, this only prevents an attacker copying the key to another machine. If the attacker has access to that key, then they have access to your machine. Not much stops them from installing malware and using your machine as a proxy for the session they want to establish to the endpoint (with the additional benefit of appearing to connect to that endpoint from your machine in any connection logs).

It should be noted that ssh, gpg-agent, and OpenPGP smart cards already provide the capability to store an SSH key on a removable smart card. Storing your key on a smart card provides the additional barriers that such a proxying setup would only work 1) while you have the card inserted, and 2) if you authorize that access by entering the PIN (optionally through an un-observable channel if you have a Class II or III reader). Of course such hypothetical malware would still be able to inject commands into a session once you log on to the endpoint, but it would be much harder to avoid your detection.

Of course, most modern machines come with a TPM (right? correct me if I'm wrong), while very few people have an OpenPGP smart card.
If you want a solution for secure ssh key storage that is based in hardware, I would look at using a GPG Card or other smart card solution. Smart cards are more portable, more standardized, and you're not dependent on physical possession of a particular hardware component.

The big caveat being that if you need FIPS 140-2 validation, you'd need a commercial smart card solution.
Fast and Furious Actor Paul Walker Killed in Porsche Carrera GT
My response to Gary North's article on bitcoins being a ponzi scheme
Technical management and being more involved in the direction of products is probably most in my alley. Thing is, I don't see much of a future with that regard with my current employer, so trying to do that there might be a bit pointless.
I still think someone from the Ripco crew were involved. They were mighty conveniently located. Maybe, someday, someone will spill the beans.
The guy who wrote the initial pull request should get some sort of medal for efficiency in trolling, it's not common that you can make this many alleged professionals look like idiots with a 3 character patch.
Looking through the closed pull requests it does not seem like rejecting typo pull requests is in fact standard practice. There are multiple accepted pull requests that merely fix typos. Additionally, if you look at the context of the full pull request he's commenting on, he completely ignores the dozen's of other comments on the issue, simply stating they're rejecting it because it's trivial.

I'm not saying he's necessarily sexist, but he clearly doesn't care about combating sexism. Is it really that hard to say "we're not accepting this because a typo is not a significant enough change." Calling the change trivial is literally calling out using ungendered language as trivial. I promise you it is not trivial to a lot of people.
With the new USB Power Delivery spec this can finally make sense to really start thinking about. Being able to power things that are "non-trivial" as far as power goes would make this go a long way. Imagine your sound system being powered off of a very clean DC power source, would be an audiophile's dream.

20V and 100W would make for a lot of nice options for powering things.
You can also make your own images with the data pre loaded. At one point I was creating/updating/destroying a lot of VMs via Vagrant so to speed things up I made my own images. Then instead of fetching the base precise-64 image and provisioning atop it I could start off with an up to date fully baked VM.

As a bonus you can put them on a local http server and your whole team can download them. Just update the URL in your Vagrantfile.
Neither of those points suggests that deodorants, in themselves, are anything but useless. Instead, they suggest that paying attention to deodorant use makes sense even though deodorants are completely useless.
Sheep Owner Doxxed
Initial models did ship with a TPM, but current ones do not. Install Windows Vista or later via Bootcamp and it'll gladly tell you about the lack of any such chip.
It means, MOM has left Earth's sphere of influence, and it's now orbiting in a heliocentric (Sun-centric) orbit. Later in Sep 2014, when MOM comes close to Mars, its rocket motors will be fired again in order to move towards Mars orbit and get captured by Mars gravity.
The article makes brief mention of DC still being used in Chicago. Anyone have any links to such?
It's just me or there are some (a lot of) tension between Joyent and StrongLoop about the management of the project?
I prefer to think that this has to do with the fact that NASA got rid of Dan Goldin and his "faster, better, cheaper" approach to project management.

In space you can't afford to cut corners. You need three people to tighten a screw: one to set the torque wrench, one to tighten the screw, and one to write the protocol, saying that the screw has been tightened. NASA found out in the 1950s, they forgot and learned it again, and Elon Musk will take note eventually.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10894
Skype on Android has a permanent icon there. That team should be ashamed of themselves.
Xbox One. White
Maybe. But I think it's their way of saying "Skype is running and killing your battery."
Similar setup for me as well. I usually develop on my Linux desktop but I also have a MacBook Air. I'd go nuts if I had to actually configure Postgres or an MQ server on it (or even manually in a VM). With Vagrant I have the exact same VM for both machines and its setup via a single "vagrant up".

An even more extreme example is a testing VM I setup with 5 copies of Postgres installed[1]. No mucking about locally and it's one command to spin it up. Way better than manually setting it up and so much easier to share too.

[1]: https://github.com/jackdb/pgjdbc-test-vm
Ah, I wasn't meaning to tell you what the usage is in your country, just trying to make the narrow point about American English.

As an aside, do you mind if I ask, is there a narrative in India about protecting the Indian dialect of English, like you might get in Britain about vulgur Americanization, or in America about pretentious Britishisms?
Tempest in a teapot.

Most people using it will never come across this little storm.
Ha! I just checked down here to see if there were any more replies.

I'm basing the self-actualizing notion on the several posts in the last couple weeks I've seen here and the comments that followed. There's some kind of pervasive view here that if people just didn't have to struggle for the basic act of living, the world would be full of self-actualized people filling the world with the products of their new hobbies.

I agree with you that your outcome would be fine by me with the same caveat

> as long as they don't negatively affect the freedom and welfare of others

The problem we see today is that for people who've managed to figure out how to get their most basic needs taken care of for them, is that they don't subscribe to the need not to negatively affect the freedom and welfare of others.

My theory is that it's out of boredom and a lack of things to keep them otherwise occupied -- 'idle hands makes for the Devil's work' and all that.

Regardless, what lots of people want to be, is not an isolated island of self-fulfillment, but one that's fulfilled through interaction with other people -- even if that interaction is a negative one. However, parsing positive from negative interactions on a universal level is near impossible. One person's negative interaction, may be another person's deepest wish.
Congratulations to ISRO. I was up all night following ISRO's updates :)

Mission homepage: http://www.isro.org/mars/home.aspx

Here are some pics from ISTRAC (ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network) that was looking over the Trans Mars Injection, and the spacecraft itself: http://www.isro.org/mars/momimg.aspx

Here's a color picture of Earth captured by MOM last week: http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/Imagegallery/mom-images.aspx

Launch photos of PSLV-XL: http://www.isro.org/pslv-c25/Imagegallery/launchvehicle.aspx

Differences between NASA MAVEN and ISRO MOM trajectories: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/1122094...

Here's a nice animation detailing the trajectories of MOM and MAVEN, in their heliocentric and geocentric phases: http://sankara.net/mom.html

Before jumping to heliocentric orbit, ISRO did a series of interesting orbit-raising maneuvers to build necessary escape velocity to escape from Earth's sphere of influence. Here are the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission#Orbit_rais... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission#Mission_pr...

Now, MOM has left geocentric orbit and is now in heliocentric (Sun-centric) orbit heading towards Mars. MOM has now entered inter-planetary space. When MOM comes close to Mars in Sep 2014, its rocket motor will be fired to move spacecraft into Mars orbit and get captured by Mars gravity. During this journey, ISRO has planned for four mid-course corrections if needed.
Waiting for bitcoin to get boring
The problem with TPM is that the quality of the implementation varies, and the interface is vulnerable to attack. When you move away from first tier oems like HP and Lenovo, you find all sorts of wacky things, TPM chips that don't implement the TCG standard, removable modules, etc.

For the average person, a TPM with a technology like BitLocker is a good way to protect your data. If you have compliance requirements or real secrets to keep, you need to understand your implementation in detail.
> I am now fully convinced that this could have been done with better results by anyone other then the government.

But it wasn't built by the government. Do you think Obama asked for a username field?

It was built by a private contractor ie. your usual capitalist, profit-oriented enterprise IT company.
Here is my ~/.psqlrc:

\pset pager
\pset null 'NULL'
\timing
\encoding unicode
SET search_path=public,postgis

The first line turns off paging, since I dislike how paging causes previous queries/results to disappear after I press q.

The second line is like the article's.

`\timing` shows how long each query took to run.

I honestly don't remember why/if `\encoding unicode` was necessary. Playing nice with my terminal? Writing to a file with `\o`?

The `search_path` line is because I often install PostGIS objects in a `postgis` schema, and this lets me reference them without a prefix. If there is no `postgis` schema I get a warning when I start psql, but that's no bother to me.
Mankind is gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also.
Great response from StrongLoop, it was ridiculous over-react from Joyent to publicly pull out the pitchforks.
Doesn't look like he did; they appear to be inferring it because he considered the one word change trivial. While I disagree with his call I can't believe how quickly this blew up into a PR storm.

I'm shocked that such an unprofessional blog post made it to the Joyent company blog. It's destroyed what respect I had for them.
The contributor also had not signed a CLA, and the commit message did not follow the guidelines.

Ben should have been more explicit in his initial post about his reason for denying the commit. Isaac shouldn't have merged the pull, which violated the guidelines. The community shouldn't have raised their pitchforks without first seeking an explanation.

Everyone involved could use a dose of professionalism.
You can export and import certs between devices, the UI is just awful. Possibly more awful than all the PGP UIs, if such a thing is possible.

Certainly you can't drive this flow from the website alone. The best you can do is point your users at various browser-specific instructions.
I thought I had a sudden floaters spike. Very worried for a second.

Who still does that ?

/me summon printfriendly.com
Yeah for sure the english language couldn't possibly itself be influenced by sexism. That's just how it works. We should just accept it.

The pronoun itself isn't sexist it's the reason behind it's use. Beyond indicating (possible) differences in biological sex, what purpose does using a gendered pronoun serve? It doesn't add information, it merely reinforces gender norms.

http://www.english.wisc.edu/rfyoung/336/gender.pdf
I guess it's similar to launching and placing satellites in right orbit, or parking orbit?

ISRO's launch vehicle PSLV-XL placed MOM in a parking orbit on Nov 5, 2013 and then ISRO did a series of orbit-raising maneuvers to bring MOM closer to Trans Mars Injection point. This post at The Planetary Society gives an idea about the orbits traversed by MOM:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/congrat...
some good points there; the tech demo is currently using a flexible eink display powered with a beagleboard. Heart rate monitor is difficult and we are licensing the software that optimises down to everybeat for athletic applications.It's an attempt, should make a lot of progress.
We went through a similar situation. Signed an LOI for 8 digits. Went through 6 weeks of DD and the deal fell through because of the board.

I have never been so disheartened in my life.

You really have to ask yourself - why you started the company? My co-founder and I decided we didn't want to be in the business forever, but had to get to cash flow positive to make it easier to get board approval by pre-IPO companies.

We hustled to cash flow positive in 6 months and we're acquired 9 months later.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. Keep your head up. We found it really valuable to be open with people you trust and talk through things. Happy to chat by phone or grab coffee if you need someone to talk to.
A gap in coverage is not as much a problem any more, thanks to the ACA.

edit: Hey downvoter, let me educate you - the worst thing about a coverage gap used to be the potential to have an illness classified as a preexisting condition, and then to never be able to get private insurance coverage again. The ACA prohibits that practice by insurers as of next year. Here, I even dug up a pre-ACA article on the practice for you, served up on a silver platter: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/17/business/fi-revoke17

edit 2: You know what, prospective downvoters can kiss my butt. Sorry that you don't like the health care reform law. It may be a total mess, but it's no worse that it was before. The only people that are pissed off are healthy, young people (hello, HN) that are paying next to nothing for individual coverage that is garbage. Get sick or old and then tell me how bad the ACA is.
Your english teachers are pretentious and ignorant, then.

The singular "they" dates back to at least the twelfth century.
You're in luck - Chang'e 3 launches tomorrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3), and assuming it doesn't blow up en route to orbit you'll probably hear more about it (especially as it's forecast to be the first spacecraft in decades to make a soft landing upon the Moon).
Officials say ObamaCare site 'performing well' on improvements deadline day
Jean Paul II did the Second Vatican Council? Right. And Linux Torvalds invented the C programming language.