skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked for a word or phrase describing this phenomenon, but couldn't come up with one that quite fit. The closest we have is "Auxesis", which is defined as "a form of hyperbole that intentionally overstates something or implies that it is greater in significance or size than it really is" - but I don't think that quite covers it. We need a word that indicates "non-cognizant hyperbolic inflation" - when a more powerful word replaces a less powerful one in every day speech (like "awesome" or "amazing" replacing "good"), but the speakers don't do it on purpose - they just use the more powerful word as a matter of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change
From now on, any business that I create will be seeded with remote talent. Even if talent is local, the business processes will be optimized to allow seamless remote work. The benefits are just too great.

See 37 Signals and Art & Logic.

I'll grant that SV probably has the most favourable funding environment.

Case in point: recently I've been looking at art talent, and the difference in quality between paying market rates for Disney-quality talent vs. hitting up my professional network and friends is just astounding.
While a little off topic I think my typical research process goes like this:

- Hear or read about something that sounds neat

- See if there's a wikipedia article (I always cringe when
I hear some colleagues of mine say never, ever use it)

- Get a high level understanding of the topic from the wikipedia article...that usually leads to some other wikipedia articles + plain old Google searches...just fishing for whatever comes up
[I also search for TED talks, youtube videos and MOOCs related to the topic]

- Scribble stuff down on a piece of paper and structure it in a way that makes sense to me (sometimes it's just a list, sometimes a full blown mindmap)
...at this point I have a decent high level understanding...which basically means I could describe the topic to someone without stumbling (which I usually try at this point)

- From the high level understanding I usually also get: key terms for searches, intor level books/articles that are linked etc.

- At this point working at a university comes in handy because it lets me be behind the annoying paywalls at will...search Google Scholar or similar databases for the mined key words. Everything that looks remotely interesting...oh wait BEST TOOL EVER

- Zotero is sick good, comes as a FF plugin...great. If you search in scientific databases and the like a little icon pops up in the address bar of the browser indicating it identified the sources...click, mark everything -> it goes into your collection (with full text access)
[I order it by topic so for AI I might have Expert Systems and Rule Based, Fuzzy etc.]

- So basically I just wade through the databases and get everything that sounds interesting from the title into Zotero. Alays a good idea to get some "history of XYZ" or "XCY since author Y" sources

- Once done I read the abstracts and the conclusions and put a rough note what the articels are about. I also scan the sources to grow my collection of relevant articles (I mark what I don't think is relevant or move it into a special subcollection)

- I usually try to establish a history of the field with the major stepping stones, this is usually easy (sometimes not, worth a paper to make it easier for future researchers :P)

- If it's related to programming in any way I also search google or github directly for anything related. Code is good :)

[often there are tomes that are the de facto standards in their fields that serve as a massive source collection as well. Perfect example would be AI - A Modern Approach]
My Journey To Managing My Own WordPress Server
For most of them it's no problem, they're just selling their product or service in an additional way.

However, something like this is scary as it's basically one hit easy money laundering. Not a bad idea if you're running the service anonymously. You'll make a good profit for sure. Otherwise there could be substantial risks and it may be better off to shut it down before feds get involved.
What percentage of employees are total deadbeats like you describe? And what percentage are honest folks who would never do such a thing or even consider destroying their employer's property after being told they will be let go?

When you have a generous policy like this, you have to take the good with the bad. Personally, I feel that there are many, many good, decent folks who will benefit without screwing their employer for every deadbeat who will take gross advantage of the policy. In the case of the guy who smashed up the employer's equipment - what was the loss? $2,000? $5,000? Now what's that compared to the retained goodwill of hundreds or thousands of employees who are laid off over the lifetime of the company but leave with a positive impression because they weren't escorted around like a criminal?

It's a matter of your outlook on society. Do you have trust in the public, or do you target the worst-case scenario? This is the same thing as onerous requirements for getting welfare or unemployment payments. They are focused on the 1% or less who are trying to the game the system. In the process, they are hurting the 99% who just need a hand getting through a tough time. Why optimize for a 1% case?
Clinkle Gets Hacked, Revealing Child CEO Posing with Cash
I got it working, but it's a huge PITA. Since their broken site keeps redirecting you to login, you need to stop the page before it finishes loading that JS. And do this for each of the ~4 screens in the flow.

I'd recommend just calling them ;)
Perhaps there's an api you can use to do the heavy lifting like http://dev.maxmind.com/minfraud/ or http://www.subuno.com/developers.html
Selenium (browser automating) might be what your looking for.

The Boston PHP group had a talk this week on integrating
Selenium, phantomJS (headless browser) and Jenkins (continuous integration). Its php based talk, but at the end
he showed the javascript version of the same tests.

https://github.com/balancerockmedia/boston-php-automated-tes...
my advice to you is either decide to pursue this full time, eyes wide open with regard to the risks, both legal and financial...

or shut it down and return all the money.

you can't half-ass this kind of thing.
tl,dr: Facebook is finally starting to back away from their anti-anonymity stance. Wish the title had been more informative.
Ask HN: How did Flappy Birds suddenly become so popular?
'passionate' in this context means 'able to get to work on time is a reasonably presentable state'. It means nothing more.
That was true about ten years ago and before. Now East has a very inefficient, power-hungry, noncompetitive economy that starts to eat more money for social subsidies than it produces (Yanukovych himself decided recently to make the "pride" of Donetsk regions, state-owned coal mines private because of their unprofitableness). Crimea has been always unprofitable even with its lucrative tourism industry. East views its post-soviet industry as asset whereas West often sees its as liability and drag to the burning need of industry modernization.
I don't think you understood what I wrote. And I'll leave it at that.
Maybe wordpress is to blame, but the poor man can still handle HN traffic. Did it recently [1]. Disclaimer: it's my blog.

[1]: http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/handling-1-million-web-reque...
I like that. Even worse would be "an actuary who lives in SF."
Backup is irrelevant, you can always encrypt it and send to S3. As for safety, well, at least you're a considerably less visible and worthy target than Dropbox. And you can implement systems (e.g., stronger authentication) that Dropbox might disregard since they're targeting a less technical user base.

Personally, I use git-annex as my sync server, and all non-local transmissions are done over SSH using public key authentication, which is something that Dropbox will never implement.
Next post: Why I dropped HostGator.com and got <xxxx>
Dao Language for Scripting and Computing
Had zero experience with programming for the GPU, or with OpenCL. Took this as an opportunity to learn both. I was surprised both with how amazingly fast the GPU is, and how amazingly buggy the AMD OpenCL compiler optimizer is. (Found multiple bugs where it generates memory corrupting code.)
How to start, publish and fail in 3 weeks
Amazon Considering up to $40 Increase for ‘Prime’
Twitter Acquires More Than 900 Patents From IBM
Missing for 8 Days, Ukraine Activist Turns Up Alive, but Mutilated
Dropbox secure? A joke. One key to open all.
Your adversaries have experience making illicit transactions appear benign to trained eyes.

Assume money laundering will happen on your platform. Your priorities are (1) being in compliance with all applicable money transfer laws, e.g. registration and (2) working, within the confines of those laws and industry best practice, to minimise its frequency.

Today, if your service were to be used to launder money I believe you would be looking at asset forfeiture and jail time. That said, I think this business can be run profitably in a compliant way - it just takes planning and some expertise.
You don't have to write custom versions of any of those functions; just use the char pointer in the struct instead of a bare char pointer. Keeping track of the length of your strings gives an easy way to provide the 'n' in all of those 'n' functions, and has other advantages besides. But the use of such a struct in and of itself, of course, provides no guarantees of safety. There is no such thing in C anyway :)
I'd recommend Hadley Wickam's papers: http://vita.had.co.nz/

He is the prolific author of many R packages, which are more like little languages than libraries. His papers are both philosophical and practical, and informed by writing a huge amount of code.

The first one on that page is really good, and along with another paper of his got me explicitly thinking of organize my data in R using the relational model (a thing people with computer science backgrounds will know well).

It made me realize that R is actually a better SQL. It's a language for tables, or an algebra of tables.
Ha, thanks, I'm looking forward to the docs.

Re: fraud I've definitely been disillusioned that I can handle the tide myself, but OTOH I imagine fraud prevention is a lot like security- make sure the wall is higher than the water. I'll just have to figure out how to do that in a way that's safe, economical, and keeps the core idea behind the service working. It will almost certainly involve hiring people, or cutting off the influx of business down to- say- 5 cards a day.
SchemeSpheres v0.6 release
They aren't copies. This is like saying that every fps after quake is quake clone.
'Hackathon for Cuba' in Miami
My hypothesis:

* Companies don't have a good idea what they want or need

* Which leads to awful, tone-deaf, nonpredictive interviews

* And every startup founded is a net loss in filled jobs, which means hiring intensifies while people who the founders want to hire—people like them—get spread out ever thinner and would rather take investment to start companies than get back on the market. When eventually they need to hire too, their contribution to the problem grows.
pip install robotframework-selenium2library

test.txt:
*** Settings ***
Library Selenium2Library

*** Test Cases ***
Google The Night Watch
[Setup] Open Browser https://google.com
Title Should Be Google
Input Text q nightwatch
Click Button Google Search
Wait Until Page Contains The Night Watch
[Teardown] Close All Browsers

pybot test.txt

Still haven't found anything that beats Robotframework when it comes to test automation. It's not just for web testing, it has many ready made libraries and creating your own is really easy.

Check it out http://robotframework.org/
When you’re 90% done building your product, get ready for the second 90%
Agreed. As you get older too, you start to appreciate how much time is burned by working. It's good to work, just it shouldn't dominate your waking life.
Should I Pick jQuery?
Maybe a bit more: it probably also means interested in the work one is doing and find some enjoyment from doing it.
A passion for not being unemployed is the primary pursuit at many organizations. Unfortunately it is a very poor motivator, and leads to a lot of counter-goals.
> Putin's longing for USSR is overrated. I don't believe he gives a rat's ass about USSR.

I believe he gives quite a rat's ass about USSR. Remember that Putin saw USSR fall under his own eyes. He not only blames Gorbachev for the destruction for USSR, but basically considers him a traitor for things like not approving violence against occupied states during independence uprisings. Besides the sentiments for USSR, he also is aware that his political power is going to end in some, time, so he wants to be remembered for something big. And he believes that creating something that resembles USSR is that thing. That's why he cares so much about customs union and is willing to basically bribe other countries to join it despite lacking money for Russia itself. That's what happened with Armenia - he "bribed" the country by offering big loan and lower gas prices before it joined EU economic treaty, like Georgia, Moldova did. That's why he offered money for Ukraine in exchange not even for customs union, but just not signing EU economic treaty, which was already prepared and ratified by president of Ukraine.
Don't make the cubes green.
It's not burning fossil fuels and is siphoning energy out of natural cycles. Sounds green to me. Developing it impacts the environment, but I would imagine it's fairly comparable to the construction of wind power farms, etc.
It's kind of funny that you mention ERAC. Now I don't know anything at all about thier programming department, maybe it is a laid back punch the clock kind of place. But in terms of the bulk of thier operations they are one of those HR driven companies that recruiting, through promotion, evaluation, and compensation cultivates a cult-like atmosphere of total dedication to the job and the company.

They recruit right out of college, targeting especially athletes and fraternity/sorority members. They almost exclusively promote from within. They tie compensation very strongly to unit performance, in a competitive zero sum way. From trainees through regional vice presidents everyone works long hours with no extra compensation. They use an up or out system for promotions. Then if you thrive and preserve in the system you might make six figures after a decade or so -- at least when and if your numbers are good.

While I certainly wouldn't tell anyone not to point out problematic employer actions in the development industries, but it can be instructive to see what it's like out there for some of your peers.
David MacKay is Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He's been in this role since 2009. Without hot air is excellent.

Look at this page [1] which shows the rough average consumption of a household in the uk, including non electrical consumption.

http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
> Your own server which adds its own data limits and pricing restrictions.

And potential reliability issues too. The storage infrastructure of something like dropbox will (or at least should) be massively redundant to reduce to near-zero the risk of people losing data due to hardware fault.

With something like OwnCloud you need to provide your own live redundancy and backups if your data is important enough to need them.

Having said that I'm looking at using OwnCloud for myself, and might suggest the group I work for use it too if my experiments with it show it to match out needs. But do be aware of what else services like dropbox provide that you need to manage and support yourself when replacing them with an in-house service.
LaTeX was not built for the web
Interesting! Your quadrant approach reminds me of an article I had read some time ago, about a framework to spend time on different categories (Work, Play, Fit, Push) and the idea of planning one task for each category the week before on a weekly calendar.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3008409/dialed/how-schedule-your-...
bwahahahahah that's awesome:

I will take a look later. Much much later. Because I'm Ukrainian and we have revolution right now. Sorry

And then the supportive comments. <3 open sores software.
Dropbox overloked safety of data a lot.
> OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions.

There's some pretty huge caveats in the above statement from the article.

I switched to ownCloud for a while and then switched back to Dropbox. I switched back to Dropbox for a couple reasons.

First, ownCloud is written in PHP and the code (and the plugins you could add on) looked pretty janky. The UI was better than the usual open source fair, but still janky. Second, the trouble of having to worry about maintaining backups[1] for the ownCloud data store and server redundancy made the $10 a month I pay Dropbox look a lot more attractive again.

And finally, a lot of iOS apps integrate with Dropbox specifically. I didn't include this as an official third item, because fuck vendor lock-in, but it is nice to have when you're in a walled-garden environment like iOS.

In the end, I decided that I was better off overall sticking with Dropbox and doing a better job of encrypting particularly-sensitive data that resides there. Dropbox has had some security incidents and stability issues, but they've always responded to them in a manner I would consider sufficient.

I'm paying Dropbox for it's service (SaaS, after all), not it's storage. I'm paying them to worry about keeping things up and running. Not because I can't do it myself, but because I want to devote my limited time to other things.

1. Let me explain. I still do backups on the client side with a mix of Time Machine, CarbonCopyCloner, and tar. So my data's safe.

But I still need to worry about backing up the ownCloud instance, as well. Because if that gets munged up, I can't use ownCloud anymore without reinstalling and reconfiguring it. With Dropbox, they worry about the back end, so that I can focus on other things that I want to focus on.
Well, FreeBSD 9.0 merged those patches into its OpenSSH. Perhaps that was what was floating in the back of your mind?
I don't know, these are pretty good answers. My concerns: the law, fraud, and finding a balance between this and my full-time job, in that order. Overarching theme- how to make this work while minimizing my personal risk.
Just because someone is older doesn't mean they aren't up to date and require retraining. Or just because someone is young they are up to date and willing to work for peanuts. Making stereotypical broad statements like those are not going to win friends and influence people.
Other than just for the financial compensation, why would you ever enter a career choice willingly that you didn't give a shit?
ART is now the default Android runtime on AOSP
Do you think? :-)
From what I heard growing up, Noyce was pretty much just like Elon.
The only time I use "let me know how I can help" is usually when I've approached the boundaries of what I can do. For me this phrase means: I've hit a roadblock, I need you to do something before I can proceed!
This is a very insightful comment.

I'm a passionate programmer but I've felt kind of like a fish out of water for most of my career.

I feel as though I could run at least 100% more effectively if I found the right organisation that harnessed this passion. The work wouldn't even need to be mega exciting - just the right combination of process, tools, culture etc.

I think I do OK for my clients, but the high notes I hit are on my own projects and freelancing work.
You need to talk to a lawyer ASAP. Patio11's cites can help you with the background, but if your business is taking off, you need to square it with the legal side of things before the feds come knocking.
Pre-paid debt wolves prowling?
New tactic from the pre-paid card guys? (ffrees a uk company). Received an unsolicited card trough the mail. When calling to cancel it I was told I would have to 'activate' the card in order to pass security before being allowed to cancel. It's a security measure you understand. I assume this would cost me at least one monthly charge. Any experience out there? It's a Visa debit so I must be able to go directly to them right?
VCs invest $74M Across 40 Bitcoin startups in 2013
Good point.

Check out https://github.com/scriby/browser-harness-bootstrap-tests for a full example. Browser harness itself is just a conduit between node and a browser - you need to provide the test framework yourself (mocha, vows, etc.).
I have the $30/5GB plan, and couldn't get auto payment to work via the web site after several tries. Finally I resorted to calling 611. Whatever the customer service agent did to my account finally made it stick.

Most large companies simply have no way to escalate a real bug report.
What would that be?

Am I being dense?
Landz: set down a solid base for new Java backend engineering
Yes, Ukraine has one of the largest IT outsourcing economies in Europe. That may be far from the start-up world of Silicon Valley, but that somewhat affects the US IT industry.
I think you're probably overstating the difference in software quality/challenge/interest factor between Flashy New Startup and Boring Megacorp.

Many of the really "hot" startups we see are actually quite boring from a technology standpoint. Snapchat? Uber? Airbnb? They're all variations on a dull web app that sends messages to [mobile] clients. Even at someplace like Square, I'd bet most of the code is cumbersome kludges connecting legacy banking infrastructure with their slick API.

Conversely, someplace like Enterprise is probably trying to solve more interesting problems than you might think: How do you balance supply and demand for your fleet across hundreds of locations? How do you optimize maintenance costs? Can you use GPS and in-car diagnostics to monitor cars in the field?

I know everyone here likes to imagine that startups are filled with super-genius Stanford CS grads implementing cutting-edge algorithms, but I think that's pretty far from reality. Whether it's a startup or a BigCorp, most of the work is going to be boring LOB applications.
This seems more like backstopping his cover as super brainwashed/patriot militaristic tote the party line nonsense while he secretly steals all their dox
Carreta Bate em Diversos Carros em Campinas-SP 31/01/14 
Seis pessoas ficaram feridas no acidente, na Rodovia Dom Pedro, em Campinas. A pista ficou interditada por cerca de dez minutos e um longo congestionamento se formou nos dois sentidos
His definition isn't what's relevant--it's the legal definition of "money transmitter" that matters. Under the legal definition, the money transmitter rules can apply to businesses that exchange cash or cash-equivalent goods like gift cards.
I'm surprised there's yet another JS implementation of the webdriver protocol. I wonder what was lacking in the existing frameworks from the author's perspective?

disclaimer: I work on https://github.com/admc/wd and https://github.com/jlipps/yiewd, which are other webdriver clients for Node
If you knew it was wrong in the first place, why post it?
There's a bit of linkbait to the title, and perhaps that is what you are reacting to.

But calling him a "pedant" is not accurate or fair.
You can minimize surprise by always immediately crashing. There will be a slight learning curve, but rather quickly a user will never be surprised by your UI again.
I was also looking to host my own cloud service. I tried OwnCloud (2 weeks ago) and I was fascinated by it... Well until it failed me and lost my test data. There is a major bug in it (try renaming a directory by changing one letter from small to capital).

That being said, I started using BitTorrentSync which is a peer to peer sync and I am happy with it so far and I am still testing it.