skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Base salary? Unless said 22yr old had done some significant research, had an awesome open source project, is an all star Phd, then I'm temped to call bullshit on this one, and your acquaintance is blowing smoke up your ass. $200k base salary puts you into Level senior staff engineer/director software engineer territory. Most college grads AFAIK are slotted at 3-4 slots slower. You're effectively saying the person your aware of was hired almost as a Director level engineer at age 22. Most high level Google engineers are promoted at this level because of the cross-functional aspects of their experience -- they've taken the lead on several mid to large projects and worked across many Google product areas/teams. Experience impossible to achieve in college.

To give you perspective, I've seen CEO and CTOs of acquired startups in the $50-100 million range can land at mid level engineering levels at Google. If incompetent people with no experience are landing director level jobs @ $200k base salary as a common practice at Google, I want in on this scam!
The negativity comes from the fact that this benchmark is useless and, at worst, misleading. True benchmarks are hard to get right. Running a bunch of stuff on a laptop isn't sufficient evidence of anything.

Kudos to making the benchmark opensource at least, but even from a quick peak, I wouldn't trust this at all. As others have mentioned, JRuby shouldn't be this slow. Odds are the benchmark is throwing away the JIT gains or the configuration is poor. Add that to the fact that there is no discussion of what a 'rails request' is or what version of Java is being used and there seems to be little to learn from this research.
Samsung Galaxy S4 is vulnerable to hackers
According to Israeli-Ben-Gurion University security researchers, the most popular and secure Smart phone Samsung Galaxy S4 is not “so-secure” from Hackers. The much-vaunted enterprise software Samsung Knox is the security software basically the “Container” in Samsung Galaxy S4 which prevents from unauthorized access but this container is vulnerable to hackers. They break the security breaches.
The reported security hole can get at your email, personal data, and other information which you would like to keep private. The container is supposed to by impervious to security violations, which includes the attempts of hackers to break into it. Samsung’s container runs a different yet unique execution environment for data and apps. This is supposed to prevent any applicatons that are run outside of the container from accessing the data
A lot of factors. An education system designed to produce worker-bees rather than independent thinkers. A stagnate economy (although this is improving) leading to high unemployment for young workers and people taking whatever job they can get. Social pressure to get into a prestigious university and eventually a well-established, large company. And for females, the pressure to get married before age 30.

Mind you--people in Japan are very smart. Science/math education is way better than in the US. But in the end, emphasis is on conformity and "not standing out too much" or "being different". This kills the spirit of innovation. I grew up in Japan but went to college in the US and work in NYC. Every time I go home, I feel like an outsider even though I spent 18 years of my life there.
I really enjoy programming in javascript too. I use it mostly for user interface development in web applications.
However, I try to avoid using it in large projects because I personally believe strongly typed languages are better suited for handling large code bases.
This is excellent. Extremely simple and fairly intuitive, I wish I had heard about it days sooner.

It's somewhat surprising to continuously encounter such (seemingly) simple projects/proof-of-concepts like this that fulfill a need many of us didn't realize we had. If you haven't yet, consider writing about how you came to the idea for this particularly iteration and the process of creating it. I know I'd enjoy reading something like that.
I'm just making a barely-educated guess, but I think the reasoning goes, the 'authorities' are the enemy. If in prison the currency is respect, yes you are disrespected if something of yours is stolen, but the "disproportionate response" of going to the authorities (read: the people who took your freedom) is orders of magnitude worse.

Prison isn't the most reasonable place. If the school bully steals your lunch money, your best bet is generally to stand up for yourself. After all, nobody likes a snitch.
Show HN: Ingredient Allergen Checker
I am currently running a start-up that creates nutrition facts labels, and in the data set we already have some allergen information.

As playing around with a side product, I created a quick interface where you can type in the name of any ingredient and it well tell you if it has milk, egg, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts, and soybeans (the allergens specified by the USDA)

Apologies as some data may not be 100% yet, but it is pretty close. Does anyone have any feedback on what type of features to augment this set?

https://www.menutail.com/allergen
Apologies for looking at everything through startup-colored glasses, but my first thought on reading this was that LA is going to have a hard time becoming a startup hub with attitudes like this. The hackers and designers that startups want to hire seem to be disproportionately likely to want to travel on foot or by bike. So they like to live in cities where you can do that, and dislike car-centric cities.

There is a bigger trend here though. As several recent studies have shown, people in their 20s are turning against cars. So a city that favors cars at the expense of pedestrians and bicycles is also one that favors the old at the expense of the young.
Thanks for the feedback, Steve. I agree, that was a bit trashy of me. I am somewhat new to posting on HN and I am trying to figure out what draws attention and discussion.
"Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled"

Probably the most damning line in the piece. It was indeed a year marked by cryptocurrency mania, NSA scandals, and worst of all, mediocre tech. Anyone think 2014 is going to be any different?
Low barrier?! Giant companies like Yahoo, staffed with large teams of search technology pioneers, have been scared out of search competition. Google touts its massive custom infrastructure. The arms race between Google and SEO creates a massive pollution backwash of false quality signals on the web, that make things way harder for any upstart which lacks Google's decade-plus of proprietary know-how and billions in hardware.

And that's before considering the contractual defaults across software (Firefox/toolbars/bundleware) and subsidized hardware (Android), that few people change. (Many don't even know it can be changed, or don't even know the difference between "Google" and "the Internet"!)

Those are all big barriers to entry, even if they've been earned by excellent technology and business strategy.
You should check out http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ where they test on hardware and in the cloud
Flashing green light for cars means stop if you are safely able to( again laws in Europe ).

Not sure for pedestrians but by logic this applies to them as well. Logically a flashing don't walk signal to someone who hasn't started walking over the crossing means Stop. What else could it mean?? Run over the road or cross as fast as possible. Definitely not as that would increase accident probability.

http://www.walkinginfo.org/faqs/answer.cfm?id=16
Do you have any sources/further information on their numbers?
>And you may have noticed now that your iPhone supports background processing it reboots a lot more often?

Are phones spontaneously rebooting?
Alan Turing's Body
As a Rubyist who has had a hard time understanding the draw of Scala, I don't understand why I would use this library/framework. The Ruby and Java/Scala/etc communities seem to have vastly differing definitions of "tiny". Compare this to the source code of Sinatra[1]. Sinatra is very easy to navigate, and it's implemented completely in just 5 files (could technically be more, base.rb is a little over 2k lines). While Scalatra here is a seeming explosion of libraries, tools, and the usual multi-nested Java directory structure.

From the little I do know about Scala, it seems to me like you should be able to make a full Sinatra clone in Scala in as many lines and files as Sinatra, or less.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is this: If Scalatra is supposed to be "Tiny" why is it so big and complicated?

[1] https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra
Sure that's the right choice when confronting a possibly desperate criminal, but realize this: you are hiding behind a system. If you are a white male then this is often the default choice because most systems in this country were designed by us for us. If you grew up as a black male in America then you will probably think twice about involving the authorities because past experience shows a lower base probability of it working out in your favor.

More generally, working out issues directly with other human beings is a core skill that will serve you through your whole life. Institutions and systems might be there to keep the peace, but they are big, slow and calcified to do things a certain way. As an empathetic individual you are much more empowered to work things out with other individuals by gauging their perspective and where your mutual interests lie. As the article describes, prison is a microcosm of this where you may literally live or die by your ability to navigate these waters, but make no mistake, you can use these skills every single day of your life, and geeks are often some of the worst in this area.
The thing is, those are all I/O bound operations and in the case of the databases most of the code you're benchmarking is native extensions, so I would expect the difference to be negligible.

Testing whole Rails apps really does seem like the best way to get good data. The interesting speedups are likely going to be in places like string matching / string copying and other places that don't involve network access.
No, he was crossing with the green light, but started after the pedestrian signal started flashing red. Provided he still got through on the green, I don't think this should even be illegal!

The fine for a car going through a red light is only ~$500 in California.
You should try to broaden your arsenal of social interactions. Sure, tattling and beating people to death have their place, but there are one or two other methods for resolving conflicts as well.
Thanks!

I do this every year. Last year, I experimented with Meteor.js and made a Christmas forest: http://kaledos.lekevicius.lt (sorry, in Lithuanian). Made that in about 10 hours - idea, design, development. It's a fun thing.

This year I did the same. You couldn't have heard about it days sooner, because it did not exist yesterday, just yesterday I wrote "rails new christmas_2013". And I have no intention of maintaining it: next year it will be another thing made in a day (:
To all the Android users -- isn't this only an iPhone issue? The author seemed to mention it coming from the original, and persisting to the latest, but doesn't mention it affecting the Android (unless it has been edited).
Living in a society is about being able to reason with others.

Instead of trying to skirt issues and involve authorities in hopes to solve problems, it usually is better to confront the person themselves.

Your example went straight to an extreme. It doesn't have to be theft, or murder, or an assault that makes you "upset" at them. Maybe you feel wronged because they said something in public that you wanted private.

Authorities have their place, but many problems can be solved by not involving them. I'd also say that many more problems are caused because people didn't want to confront one another.
Software for Sorting Out Child Support
I think so. It seems like cryptocurrencies are getting to the point where they're being utilized (as opposed to being used mostly for speculation) in consumer-facing businesses.

The NSA stuff is concerning, but I get the impression that businesses are working on creating secure and trustless infrastructure.
It says there are founders from 22 countries in the latest batch. How does that work as far as visas go? Do founders simply need a tourist visa?
Good luck to them. It's not often people get to go somewhere new(ish) and try out a new model of society.

I think a society based on Rand and/or libertarianism is a terrible idea, likely to be brutal and darwinistic and to degenerate into feudalism. I also think that this isn't really a model for a society based on these ideals - lets face it, the people who are going to be going there are a wealthy subset, not representative of much.

But good for them for trying.
> The internet really just likes to hate on FB for whatever reason. You don't here the same about Twitter, whose stock is outperforming FB despite making less money.

I don't know about "the internet," but most of Hackernews's top-rated comments for the Twitter IPO were skeptical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689742
Bank of India acknowledged ‘Dogecoin’ as a Virtual Currency
I don't think this is a serious question here. On the other hand, I think it's an intriguing question in general.

There is nearly no way for a PI (head scientist) to cite everything that they say. Knowledge at the forefront is cobbled together from little whispers, tastes of failed experiments, hearings-ons from colleagues, intuition, guesses and literally decades of thinking. And so when speaking abstractly (as these videos are), they are often less wrong than anyone else (Clapper, this is how you use that term...). If you were to press them on specifics, they would become mostly correct and dig up where they got that nugget of wisdom, though simultaneously losing much of the power of generalization. In that sense - the generalities are always slightly suspect, but of far greater quality than anyone else's generalities. And usually the generalities you'd like to hear about from the cutting edge are those that there is no consensus about anyway.

So in that respect, I'd say the generalizations of cutting edge scientists are usually the least wrong, rarely perfect, always insightful, and nearly impossible to source. They are the tenuous 'hypothesis' writ large to which their career is attesting. Citation of such is nearly a moot point, as no generalizable experiments yet exist.

On the other hand it'd be a great resource if they listed to the side a paper or review about some of the stuff they just spoke of. It'd be trivial for them to name a paper or two that they find dominating their perspectives here.
I've been praying for something like Ejecta and CocoonJS that is both cross-platform and open source. I always imagined that the canvas API should translate rather easily to native graphics mode, but it is probably not that simple.
I have a far off request. I remember reading a good long read quite some time ago.

It was of a hacker that was sent to prison, I think federal prison.

He goes into a lot of detail about how life is inside there and how you have to behave, I remember him advising to fight for your stuff even though you're going to lose since if not you'll become "their bitches" or something of the sort.

If I remember correctly (might be far off) the website was mainly black and orange.

He also mixes in his experience with drugs, I think psychedelic mushrooms or so.

I was quite a long article but quite catching, by any chance anyone remembers what I'm talking about?

I read it at least 3, 4 or 5 years ago.
I think the framing of this is a little off—from what I understand from friends living in LA, ridiculous ticketing is endemic, for minor traffic infractions to jaywalking. Their perception is that large swaths of the police force are basically being repurposed as tax collectors.

It makes sense, it generates a ton of revenue and isn't subject to many of the traditional political procedures. I'd be curious if any LA locals agree or disagree with that assessment?
I don't think I've ever visited the 'saved stories' page, well it is interesting to see my own upvote history.
Ah, cool. I did not see that. That makes much more sense.
Are Park Avenue’s rich NYC’s worst tippers? These doormen say ‘YES’
Well, it would be nice to get more reuse out of mobile code. Having to write a mobile app twice is a bit of a hassle.
Why does it need my credit card number during trial period?
Well, when you stretch a metaphore this far, you have to lie some.
actually javascript kind of sucks for mobile dev - unless of course you are a company pushing javascript for mobile dev.
As a Brit living in London the whole idea of 'jaywalking' is hilarious. It's totally ridiculous to force pedestrians to always use lights & pelican crossings. Assuming everyone has a bit of common sense (don't walk in front of a moving car) I can think of absolutely no reason why these ridiculous laws even exist. A huge number of hours are saved in London every day by everyone not having to wait for a green man.

And a $197 fine?! WTF? Glad I'm not living in LA, I could rack up thousands of dollars in a few hours if walking as one does in London.
Flashing don't walk is there to signal new pedestrians to not start walking and let the existing ones to finish the crossing.

http://www.walkinginfo.org/faqs/answer.cfm?id=16
> Moreover, I think many people are upset with the scope of Google's punishment. De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different, and is in my opinion unwarranted.

If the impact wasn't significant, it wouldn't be a disincentive to engage in black hat SEO.

> There is no reason that a response of this magnitude by Google is justified

Yes, there are reasons. The reasons are "specific deterrence" and "general deterrence".
Inside the empty bubble of SXSW Interactive
melling isn't complaining that we hear so much about Facebook, but asking: Why are there so many articles proclaiming Facebook is dead?
FaceRig | Indiegogo
Firefox OS, Chrome OS and now Ubuntu throwing their weight behind HTML. Nice!

Curiously, iOS have sort of taken the other path, beginning with only HTML apps and then drifted away somewhat.
Cryptolalia, for creating Cicada 3301 ciphertext puzzles
'of the far left'? Yes, because rewriting history is mainstream these days. Emma Goldman is smug in her grave.
It's embarassing when libertarians (mis) use terminology taken from Ayn Rand that they don't understand.
Can you talk more about this? I have some cousins who moved there who reported feeling very safe (and they were coming from Switzerland...). I had a contractor there for a while and the main issue he had with high prices was on imported electronics due to tariffs. Otherwise, everyone I've spoken to has said housing, food, etc are very affordable. What's the issue with education, IE: funding? access?
mine does. usually while doing something like switching active apps when one is using the camera.
I wonder if we'll ever see these sites offered a forwarding service - you choose a submission and pay a fee and you get a randomly generated forwarding address which lets you send an email to the people who up voted that story (without learning their email address)
In some of the most popular squares / blocks there shouldn't even be car traffic during popular hours. It makes no sense to reserve 80% of the commons 60% of the time for hugely inefficient users of the space.

Take Times Square, why should thousands of pedestrians have to wait extra time to cross, or even just have less breathing room to stand around, so that cars with one to four people in them can have a more direct route to wherever they are going? Let them go around.
> Mr Johnson deserves credit for putting his ideas into practice, which is just as important, if not more important, than theory.

You can't separate theory from practice. You need both and they need to be integrated.

In this particular case, we have a guy masquerading as a fan of Ayn Rand and setting up a boondoggle in Chile for greater fools to invest in. He would have done better to actually read and understand the author he attempts to parrot.
There's often a countdown timer as mentioned in the article. You know exactly how much time you have until it's a solid "Don't Walk". Usually, I will pass several people already in the crosswalk at my normal walking speed.
When pedestrians have accidents they get a bit flustered and apologise. When cars have accidents people die.

It's not that unreasonable to have a different law for cars than for pedestrians.
I try to write long articles explaining Emacs workflow over at http://www.masteringemacs.org. You may be interested in my latest post on discover.el.
There are probably a lot of lets-try-this-play-and-scala-thing afternoon projects up on github, many of which will just keep the default configuration and never be worked on again.
Meet the secret accelerator that many of the best startups have gone through
Or, alternatively, why not actually foster dialogue between left-wing and right-wing anarchists and help the two groups realize that they're often not as far apart as they think? Seems to be working quite well over at http://c4ss.org/ .
That is a really good point. I'll try and implement this today.
Flashing reds are based entirely off of how long it takes an "average" person to cross. As a relatively tall young adult, I walk much faster than the "average," so I can frequently make it across by walking even if it's been flashing red for a few seconds. Furthermore, the "Don't Walk" sign becoming solid is timed to correspond to the yellow lights appearing for the parallel traffic, so the opposing traffic won't start moving for a few seconds after the "Don't Walk" signs appear.

(Disclaimer: This is based on Raleigh, NC's traffic lights. I don't know what level this is standardized at.)
Should every city gravitate towards catering to startup culture? Will we witness large major metro areas trying to move swiftly with regards to policy decisions, attempting to outdo each other? Interesting times.
No, this is not at all my experience in Los Angeles, and certainly not with LAPD.

I've gotten tickets here, but one was on the freeway from CHP, and the other was in Burbank (which is a different city and police department). In Burbank the officer was explicitly waiting for someone to do what I did, which kind of annoyed me.

But in Los Angeles itself, LAPD has left me completely alone. I joke that unless you're actively stabbing someone in front of them, they have better things to do.

Parking is another matter. There's a parking enforcement department, and they are quite aggressive, 24 hours a day.
> This topic is interesting because it shows how much in a monopoly status google really is in in controlling where traffic goes on the net.

Does it? I mean, is there any reason to believe that Rap Genius is typical in their degree of dependence on Google here?
He doesn't get free healthcare, he gets socialized healthcare that he pays for with taxes. It's not a gift out of magic, it's a political and economical choice.
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w...
When pedestrians have accidents they get a bit flustered and apologise.

Ask yourself with what object do fast late crossing pedestrians have the most problems with? ( hint: it's heavy )