skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would be a very short-sighted thinking. ROI of making your toilets public feels like it would be much bigger than of any money spent on advertising. Here you have potential customers actually present in your store.

Also, for example I remember exactly where every McDonald's and KFC in my town's centre is only because I sometimes need them as an emergency toilet and/or free Wi-Fi provider. Guess what places come to my mind first when I'm hungry and in the area?
Very true. If anyone ever comes to the UK, I find McDonalds to be amongst the cleanest toilets!
Hi nikic. Thanks for the feedback! (I'm the author of that article). The O'Reilly editors made a few changes to the wording without my review that make it more ambiguous as to what features were introduced in what version. I agree as is it can be confusing. But the point is that the latest version of PHP provides all of these features. The variadic function statement was an error on my part and it has since been corrected in the article.
Ask HN: Is my career anxiety normal?
After spending 2.5 years working 60 hr weeks on a high-level project, the company riffed me on a Tuesday morning this January. I was let go off along with half the members of our skunk works team at Dysfunctional Corp (not real name of company) without warning.

By the time we walked back to our cubes from the meeting with HR, empty moving boxes were already waiting for us. It was one week before my 3X-th birthday and my first layoff experience having been in the workforce for ~10 years.

Stunned, relieved, devastated, etc were all the emotions that washed over me. This was my first ride on the proverbial emotional roller coaster.

Skipping to today, and I'm back on my feet with the help of my ever-supportive family. A late-stage startup hired me with comparable (if not better) compensation (and equity to boot). The place is brimming with enthusiasm and energy and relatively little of the dysfunction that was wearing on me at Dysfunctional Corp.

But something is different this time. I have a serious case of career anxiety. I have no visibility at my new gig yet. It's only been two weeks but it's going to take me many months to reclaim the career trajectory I had other the other company (I was inline for distinguished engineer).

The CEO and most engineering managers are younger than me. Even as Senior Soft. Engg. I'm at the lowest rung with no reports or clout.

Some of my college friends are now in managerial positions at the likes of Facebook and Amazon. Others
are pulling in $200K/year in gov't contracting. I'm not doing too shabby by comparison but I'm starting to experience career envy.

I'm really grateful for what I have and where I've been. But am I being disproportionately anxious about an arguably minor career setback?
I think the difficulty is in the computing power required to train the net, but there has been some progress in that area lately http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/02/distributed-neural-netwo...
Thanks for those comments. Agree with your points on the aesthetics and the need for simplicity of the product. We also agree with your points on the marketing side. Getting the site up sooner to get feedback like this helps a lot.
Tinkercoin: Buy Bitcoin with Credit Cards
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.5.9-1+sury.org~precise+1

Mt. Gox, Flexcoin, and Poloniex. What do they all have in common? It's not what you think. (:
But not abstractions are factually wrong, like you original premise was. Big words and complex sentence structures don't make up for that.
Facebook Wants to Build 11,000 Drones to Bring Internet to Africa
Do people with this condition manage to exist in the US? Does their insurance cover it? Are there ways to ensure that they get coverage? Things worth looking up if there's a tempting offer, because it might be worth your while. If it's not an offer that's worth the hassle, well, then, no, don't bother.

Point being, if it's a good enough offer, you might be able to make it work if you're not bent on rejecting it because of your general disdain for the US healthcare system (which I can certainly comprehend).
I realize the PHP API is a mess compared to highly curated and standardized offerings like Java, but growing up with it, it was very like C standard lib and other things of the time. I could often even guess functions without looking them up even though they had weird names and abbreviations.
I dunno, the Immigration minister there seems like he acted pretty well.

When he hired the cleaning lady, she showed proper documents and - if I'm reading this correctly - insisted she continued to have the right to work even when she didn't.

When he found out his mistake, he corrected it by letting her go and resigning.

Maybe the article's being too generous, but that seems like pretty above-the-board behaviour for what seems to be an honest mistake.
One million dollars in $100 bills is 10,000 bills. A bill is 0.010922 cm in thickness. That would be 109.2 cm. That would be a stack of bills just over 3 1/2 feet high if you made a single stack. You could probably fit a million bucks in a decent sized brief case and could definitely fit it inside a duffle bag. It doesn't take dump-trucks to steal a million bucks.
The $4 million dollar cronjob
The Pond at Mobile World Congress with Firefox OS
Quadcopter Free-Fall Testing From 4,000 Feet Is Destructive Fun
It's a new game in town: whenever someone says "big data", you reply "deep learning", someone says "mobile", you say "real time", someone says "sharing", you say "social", etc ...
Hi smithm9, I also do not know of any study that definitively "proves" that microfinance alleviates poverty. I think one reason is that it is hard to decouple the effects of microfinance from the many random events that determine household income in developing countries. Another reason is the high interest rates charged by most traditional microfinance programs.

I have personally known many people who have dramatically improved their living standards thanks to Zidisha loans. Here is one example: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/nbsarr/408.html (see the comment area for updates on the results of her loans).

Over and beyond measurable economic effects, I would argue that having access to the chance to raise affordable financing is transformative because it changes the way a person views the range of opportunities for advancement in life. For example, all Zidisha entrepreneurs know they can progress to raise up to $10,000 if they maintain a solid track record of repayments over time. Simply knowing that opportunity exists removes the ceiling people would otherwise put on their own ambitions. The result is intangible, but no less important because we cannot measure it.

We structured Zidisha as a nonprofit because our mission is genuinely philanthropic. Nobody is in it to make money. At heart, we are a cause-driven group of people and the nonprofit structure is a natural fit for that. Also, we do not want to be in a position where equity holders might oblige us to charge high fees to generate profits. Finally, our nonprofit status reinforces the message that lending through Zidisha is a philanthropic, not a financial investment activity.

Why do we accept donations to run our organization? We provide a valuable service to lenders in developing and maintaining the web platform and community that allows them to connect with the entrepreneurs they wish to support. We could charge lenders a fixed fee to cover the cost of this service, but we decided to structure it instead as an optional tip made while funding loans. The optional tip allows lenders who can afford more to donate generously.

Currently about half of our income comes from service fees paid by borrowers, and the rest comes from lender tips. We view both as payment for service we are providing, rather than a free handout.
I can't speak to the legality of the building codes where you live, but I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't have an outlet installed near the street to charge a car. It's pretty common for electricians to run conduit out to the street and install convenience outlets for things like landscape or sign lighting or powered gates.

EDIT: The electrical nerd in me had to see if someone has done this before, and yes, it would look like this: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/19974-NEMA-14-...

NEMA-14-50 is the kind of outlet used by RVs and Campers, so putting one outside is pretty much a solved problem.

Though as other commenter have mentioned, actually getting a parking space outside your house may be the biggest challenge!
This is probably just me but...

I often write code backwards using the IDE capabilities. Say I instantiate an object, I'd write "[[Foo alloc] init]" (most of that auto-completed), then use the keyboard shortcut to assign it to an appropriately classed and named local variable.

It just seems redundant to write all of "Foo *foo = [[Foo alloc] init]". For one you're typing the class twice - clearly redundant. Secondly, this is a temporary local variable, it doesn't need a custom name. It shouldn't have a custom name.

It's not so much about typing speed, more like a general dislike of redundancy.

The theorem is the more redundant the language, the more IDE help it requires. Objective-C is the worst I know. Although they're adding more and more layers to the compiler to make it less so.
It should be noted that there's a difference between the old-tech viscous coupling approach and the cutting edge dual-clutch sequential transmission.

The old-tech viscous coupling was lossy and difficult to control. Even when you can manually tell the trans to shift (as on a 2009 Mazda5), there is a time delay in the shifting, then you wait for the hydraulic system to confer torque and finally drive the wheels/engine brake.

The modern DCT that high-end cars are using is a direct mechanical connection and uses robotic shifting to do so instantaneously. Shifting is faster than a human can shift an H-gate, and the PID controls on gear selection have better programming etc. due to both the high end nature of the cars and the better systems they're being integrated into.

There is a world of difference between what we colloquially term an "automatic" (slushbox torque converter) and the modern DCT.
Gosh, it would be nice to have some sort of assurance that the group holding on to my monetary reserves met some sort of minimum level of competency in dealing with quantities of currency. Or, lacking competency, some guarantee that any bank screw-up wouldn't result in loss of funds from my account...I wonder why no one has thought of this before?

Oh, wait...

Seriously, if I was an economics or law professor today, I don't think I could come up with a better classroom to teach financial regulation than the mess that is the Bitcoin economy.
Painful mistakes made by programmers face by programmers
Yes white (the default, or any color you set) to transparent is definitely 'Colour to alpha'. Works great and you can repeat for multiple colours in the same image.
Headband could help brain commuicate with computers
Security is hard, especially computer security in the absence of trusted/trustable systems. (Yes, it's a deliberate devil's advocacy, but it should be said.) We should ask ourselves why the existing government banking systems are secure. In part, it's because nothing is simply trusted and everything is double checked. In part it's because criminals have tried all manner of things, giving the system a chance to develop collective experience dealing with all manner of attacks. In part, it's because the law makes it a poor economic choice to engage in many kinds of criminal activity.

Then ask, how many of these things are true for bitcoin? Then perhaps ask, could I provide these things, and make money while doing so?
What they have in common is a bunch of keen individuals rushing in to cash in on the hype but in the process releasing some of the worst financial systems (if you can call them that) which I've ever seen because they don't follow the same strict regulations and testing processes that the rest of the financial industry have to go through.
It didn't crash Chromium for me. Arch Linux, Chromium 28.
A patent details the key concepts, it's not like downloading a project from github and building it. With something mechanical, even more so. There won't be CAD files of the device uploaded with the patent, let alone tooling designs to produce the device. So there's plenty of reverse engineering to do even if the patent is expired.
I made a comment on an earlier thread about the security properties of hot/cold wallet and the security properties of separating the matching and settlement systems. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7340505) This incident is an example of the Bitcoin community's best practices "working." They lost 12.3% rather than 100%. That's actually a considerable accomplishment in Bitcoin, but not a success condition for most people who deal with money.

If they had the settlement processed asynchronously on a different system, likely with human interaction, they'd be able to say "Hmm, it seems like account #944325 has convinced us to schedule a withdraw of $250,000 more money than he has on deposit. Well that would be a really bad idea, now wouldn't it. Denied. Now I think I'll sip a cocoa while leisurely planning my review of our withdraw scheduling code."
> TN Visa

> Processing time: Weeks

Actually for Canadians the visa is usually given at the border at time of entry. I applied at the US embassy in Bangkok and it didn't take more than a couple of days.
I've struggled with that for a long time but in the end how is an image of a child being raped different from an image of a man being killed ? Both depict equally heinous acts.
Really? Look at the documentation page. The first thing you see is a huge chunk of text with absolutely no highlighting to guide you. Most people would just skim their eyes over that, and my attention gets drawn to the list of MIME types because it looks different.

Compare these two screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/Kzdphar.png
http://i.imgur.com/CQnU8aG.png

A simple bold tag immediately draws focus and ensures that the huge majority of people who view the page get the important message. That's not being hard to please, it's just common sense.
The bots are getting better and better!
This is such a deeply unsustainable practice it would be incredibly foolish to make any long term plans based on it. Special EV charging points (with the dedicated parking that comes with them) will disappear the moment more than a handful of EVs are used. It's just not feasible to install charging points at every parking space, and once the demand for those spaces that exist outstrips supply the resulting politics will almost certainly either kill them completely or result in them becoming expensive quickly.
So friggen true: "If social networks are eating the world, then they are serving up fast-food-style, processed connections."
The first bulletin point: “Doesn’t scale at all.” I wonder how much traffic is sending to his blog right now. Just in 1 hour we DDoS-ed his blog with HNers visiting his blog.
Despite the "rivalry" between me and Colbert for the title "Greatest Living American". I have a lot of respect for Colbert. He is an entertainer but he is a political activist. John Stewart who is more famous and better paid is a Comedian Journalist, but Colbert is a Activist Comedian.

Colbert is the kind of critical thinker we need more of in politics.

-Brandon Wirtz (Former Greatest Living American)

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-goo...
How would you parse lists and tables from a website? e.g. parsing an online schedule in order to use the data in a responsive mobile or native app?

Random site example: peoplewhodance.net/events/NYE/schedule.html
OPT is time of work that she gets for her studies, Some people wait until they are done with their studies to use that time. If you use it during your studies (in an internship) you'll run out of time by the end, there is new legislation that will let her get an h1b easier coming from an F1.
I don't think that's really true about Polymer. It's still just a framework for creating custom elements. What features are you thinking of to compare to Dojo?

The big difference that I see is the template binding portion of Polymer which allows you to define an elements markup with data-binding template sort of like Angular.
As some one who's almost entirely oblivious to the trappings of cryptocurrency... is it not possible to trade on sites like this with a local wallet? Or do you have to keep a balance with them separate from your wallet?

It's invalid logic to assume that because some bitcoin sites have been hacked, all of them will be, but at this point it seems pretty clear the entire community needs to be a little more careful. Until that happens I don't think keeping a balance with a service like this makes sense.
Let's not suggest this is just a race condition. Sure, it's a race condition, but whats the maximum damage you can do? c * your current balance, where c is a low number (10 is a very optimistic guess), since at some point the race concludes and you can't exploit it further.

But apparently they didn't even check or put a proper constraint into the database that your balance should be positive (and if you do find a negative balance, shut the system and investigate). Now that's not a "pretty stupid race condition", it's reckless.
I love stuff like this that talks about web basics in precise detail. Too much of the stuff out there for beginners glosses over the basics of the web. In the midst of receiving tons of info about HTML & CSS & Javascript & whatever scripting language beginning devs have trouble knowing at all times what level of the stack they are operating at, what's the execution context. Can I write Javascript here? Can I write Ruby/Python? Does it have to be interpolated? This stuff is seemingly simple but is actually so complicated when you're thrown into the ocean that beginners have trouble keeping track of it.

And it really doesn't help when more experienced devs, or non-web programmers shame people about web dev being dead simple because it's not. It's a different kind of programming, it may even be easier than writing C and managing memory explicitly and not having garbage collection. But if it is easier, it's only easier once you've mastered it and have a really strong grasp of what is happening at all times. Until you get there, it's easy to get lost in the endless list of technologies you must be familiar with to write even a simple web application. And I know this because I see it in beginners that I have taught and/or worked with.
It was a long time ago, but I remember it being totally routine, no queues and no uncertainty. She should go to her school's immigration office, I'm sure they'll be able to walk her through the application and explain any other options while they're at it.
Imagemagick is good for command-line processing. http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/masking/#alpha
Computational Investing: A Brief Intro
RSA maximized their profits up $10 million by selling their customers out to the NSA, and that cost them some serious long term goodwill and reputation. Were their shareholders happy about that piece of financial calculus?
Yes, it does. With H1B visa, you cannot work for more than 40 hours and it has to be with a single employer.
Why are "journalists" saying that uber is part of the "sharing economy"?
Some of you software guys looking to move into hardware might appreciate this simple shortcut, at least for PIC programming. Obviously this is a general approach. If you're looking to streamline your HW dev process, feel free to reach out.
Would a really simple way to do this be to make a 4096x4096 square image, with 0,0,0 at the top left and 255,255,255 at the bottom right, then just go along from left to right incrementing by one (in base-256, essentially)?
"Do you use map files for debugging unminified JS?"

No its even simplifier than that, and it has to do with how the browsers JavaScript engine reads the JS files. Well at least modern browsers. When I generate my html file with the include JS lines, I make sure to put the minified version first, then the unminified files to debug.

If the unminifed version contains the same function, the browser will use that instead of the minified one. So when an error comes up, the browser will point to the unminified JS file in the stacktrace.
Yes, at least the H-1B does prohibit earning income from any other 'projects' other than your sponsored job, with the exception of capital gains/interest from holding assets.
meh, no websockets?
World tilts with dance fever
It's not as hard as these hacks make it seem.

Not checking for negative balance??? It doesn't get much more freshman CS than this.
Correction:
New mantra: "Move fast, break things, and lose hundreds of millions of _other people's_ dollars by being reckless."
Ok, that makes it clearer.
> However, in the short term he is still being very successful in making the West look feckless with its total shock that this happened and complete unpreparedness for it. It is simply not a credit to our foreign policy wonks that they are apparently so narcissistic that it appears they are unable to comprehend the idea that Putin would actually do this,

What military advisers were unprepared for this to happen? I'm betting they (US military) planned for this months ago as a hypothetical if the Ukraine moved closer to the the EU.
Both my comment above and the label on the chart refer to "current dollars."
This is exactly what Erlang would excel at implementing. Not that one couldn't do it wrong in that language as well. Same goes for Go and Clojure and a number of other languages with advanced concurrency features.
I got my bank account with just my passport.
In windows it is generally needed to disable some services to get some performance back.

About the copy-cats, I think Ubuntu tablet is a better way to the hybrid tablet/desktop, for the simple reason of not having market/store restrictions about it. It is still not released to production, or even finished as the Win8 is. But I think in the long term it will be much better.
Which I'd imagine would be illegal for more than one reason... but then this is one of the costs of an unregulated currency (not saying that makes it good or bad, just that it's there).

It's also why I don't understand maintaining a balance with a service like this. Unless you're doing very small trades, the 0.2% fee plus the network charge for a withdrawal seems like a small price to pay to be mostly safe from this kind of thing.
I just realized you're saying I should give them a price even if I plan to give it away for free. That's smart. Thx.
Being a man, I don't need to use their restroom to pee. I can do it standing up right in the middle of their restaurant.
One of the coolest approaches I've seen does some cool inference on fully connected Conditional Random Fields via high-dimensional filtering. Amazing results.

http://vladlen.info/publications/efficient-inference-in-full...
If the subject is so shameful and taboo that the women mentioned in this article can't even dry their sanitary rags in the sun, do you really see them boiling a menstrual cup in the family's cooking pot once a month to sterilize it?
Corollary: Even if you take every reasonable legal precaution, there's still a possibility that you can be held liable once the class action lawsuit is filed.
How about describing it in words? Or merely thinking about it? Should those be crimes too? How about cartoon or CG depictions? And who gets to decide which of these things sends you to prison?

I'm not trying to be a smartass, and I actually upvoted your comment, but you do seem to have completely missed the point of Hitchens' speech.
Favorite business advice "quote"? / paraphrase.

Be like a butterfly, taking some nectar but not damaging the flower. Not not like the mosquito, a parasite.
Robot Choreography and the Smart Future of Responsive Architecture
The negation step seems superfluous. The edge detection filter can't detect edges in a regular photo but can in a negative?