skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for sharing this. It's practical. And not pitying, condescending, etc. Just helping her with a weak point, something we all have, no matter who we are.

-- signed, underpaid female. :-)
Wget bug #217243: how to actually blacklist files files on recursive downloads?
Turing proved there's an uncountable set of numbers that cannot even be computed let alone represented
https://experiment.com/
Hi kanamekun, thanks for bringing up the point about Zidisha being a competing organization with Kiva. Do you think it would be better for readers if they were not aware of Zidisha as an alternative way of addressing the high interest rates charged by Kiva partners?
But you still have to give them your regular (read/write) credentials.
The answer is likely to be spread over a number of areas, collective bargaining being only one, and globalization of the labor market another, where wealth has gained power versus workers.

So the answer is "greed," but not more greed, as you say. Just stronger, more sophisticated, and more effective greed. Which is a distinction that might be lost on both sides for different reasons.
I understand your point. Startups can be be obscure in the same ways as research: Interesting idea, but turned out to be wrong. Interesting, and right, but no significant application in the broad world. Or not even a very interesting idea.

There's value to a system where plausible things get funded, even if only 1 turn out to pay for the 9 that suck.
Plyfe (www.plyfe.com) - NYC

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our NYC-based team. Plyfe works with Fortune 500 brands to help them reach their audiences across web, social and mobile. You will be joining the company as a core team member and as a lead developer with great growth opportunities. This is a full-time position based in our office on the lower east side.

We are building a platform to facilitate the creation and deployment of interactive media ad units. Our widgets are embedded across a brand’s digital properties (corporate sites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The widgets support interactive content including mini-games, social media actions, polls, and more. User interaction data powers analytics and reporting.

Role:
Your role is to work with the CTO and engineering team to help build our core technologies and expand our platform’s product offerings and reporting capabilities. An ideal candidate will contribute to all aspects of the development process: analysis, design, full-stack implementation, QA, and DevOps.

Requirements:
Our core technology stack is a Rails-backed API with a suite of Ember.js applications and some legacy Backbone.js, all continuously deployed to AWS-infrastructure (EC2, MySQL-RDS, Elasticache, ELB, OpsWorks). A collaborative, test-driven, agile development process facilitated by GitHub and Asana is central to our workflow, with frequent code-reviews and pairing sessions.

You should be extremely comfortable working with both Rails and Javascript frontend frameworks. A solid understanding of the various ‘fundamentals’ of web applications (databases, relational design, remote server administration, command-line scripting) is a must. Our preference is for candidates that are comfortable with learning, experimenting, and collaborating with new technology.

Some experience with social media APIs (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and/or AWS services would be good, but not necessary.

If you can show us code samples and talk us through what you’ve worked on (feel free to bring a laptop), we’d be happy to have you over. Remote candidates are also welcome to apply provided they can commit to availability during our office hours (10am-6pm EST). An overarching focus on robust, testable, quality code is our top priority.

Compensation and Perks:
Salary commensurate with experience + benefits (medical, dental, vision) + equity. We are offering a stress-free, friendly work environment with great work/life balance. Perks include open vacation policy, flexibility to work from home, equipment budget, office food & beverages, and more.
If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, WhatsApp wouldn't exist.
You're hacked – get over it
Could you please explain how it makes them $100 million richer?

They have $100 million more in money, but $100 million less in assets. Their net worth is unchanged. They are not richer, even when considered as a class.

(I think your comments could be improved if you made some of your thinking more explicit. I have difficulty following your lines of reasoning. Brevity has value, but also cost.)
So this provides essentially the same effect as the gold standard, no? The gold standard was an element of "stickiness" between money and gold, and sticky wages are between money and labor.
Agreed, especially on (1). I don't love the lack of explicit inputs.

We've got a convention that all Interactors must be commented to specify what inputs they take.
Yes, of course, that goal is utopian (well, I hope we don't follow the definition too closely and actually reach the dream). But the good thing is that they don't depend on time, money or anything else. It's a belief, and the people's mind will change over time.

You could draw a parallel with ecology. 50 years ago, no one would care about the environment; resources were basically free, pollution was seen as "minor". A world were everyone cared about the planet was seen as utopian. After half a decade of fights, the minds have now switched to a different mind (at least in the western world): pretty much every single piece of electronic hardware you can buy has some notion of "we-are-green" to it. While it's not 100% eco-friendly (just take a look at how electronics are "recycled"), people's mind certainly have changed. The guys behind the Libre software movement certainly don't expect anything big happening in the next 10 years (remember that RMS has been fighting for the last 30 years), but things will change, you can be sure of it. Just take a look at the recent plans to to "take control back" on the internet infrastructures initiated by Europe and Brazil. Sure, technically the things will more or less remain the same; but the mindset is changing, and it will keep spreading.

> How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"

This is a really noble goal in itself, and Google can be praised as one of the biggest enablers in this field, seeing how much they have changed the domain. While I may not sound like it, I actually thank them for all they did to the tech world, and the end-users in general (with an extraordinary amount of stuff available as OSS). Actually, that goal is more or less what OSS tries to achieve, except that the target is not the end user but the developer: the goal is to make sure that developers don't reinvent the wheel again and again and again.

But that goal is orthogonal to what the Libre movement (FSF, OSM, Wikipedia) fights for. That goal can very well be accomplished with private companies: in the majority of cases, they help society by building better and more accessible "things", because that's a sure way to make money (with the notable exception of US telcos), and money is what they're here for. But that doesn't mean you are independent; it's quite the contrary in fact, because their tool is so easy and powerful to use that you just use them. This is what many people call a walled garden: you can live in a complete ecosystem, where everything works perfectly together... but once you start wandering around, you quickly realize that there are boundaries to what you can do [0]. The tech world is even worse than this description, because everything can change in 10 years; you can't expect all your belongings to remain accessible at the end of your lifetime.

The FSF doesn't want to build better software. There even was a post recently mocking their logos. They want to build software so that you don't need to depend on anyone else. If you don't depend on anyone else, you can do whatever you want.

[0] http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/i-dont-want-to-be-part-of-yo...
What's the tangible difference between opening iTunes and opening a file explorer app? Nothing. Both scenarios of file management require opening a program and moving files around. The name of the program is rather irrelevant. Even navigating to the device/app is maybe one more click than finding your phone's storage over a network share or when physically connected.

And you've only got to physically connect to iTunes once, after that you can just upload files over local wifi. You've constructed yourself a scenario where iOS is the loser for you, but for anyone with a Windows or Mac computer (what, 97% of the world?), "finding the iTunes computer" is not a difficult task.

How about we call a molehill a molehill instead of a mountain?
"John Maynard Keynes used the idea in his 1936 book, The
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to
lampoon the inherent silliness of gold mining, suggesting
that old coal mines could be filled up with bottles full
of banknotes, buried over with trash, then left “to
private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.”"

And it only took 51 years until we got Bitcoin...
> "I detest "oh that was just a poor example, but the general principle is..." kind of debates. If you can't produce a good example, you don't have a general principle." - DHH, March 3rd 2014

That's going in my quote book. Thank you DHH.
Sprint Accused of Overcharging Feds Millions for Wiretapping Expenses
> I was wrong, especially because I downloaded Putty myself from putty.org, whenever I happened to play with Windows machines, without thinking once that putty.org is not the official source.

If you had used duckduckgo, you would have known better:

https://duckduckgo.com/PuTTY

Official site. It's one of my favourite DDG features. It's just weird how Google doesn't have it.
Trying to become a successful academic seems about as insane as trying to become a rock star.

Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...

Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around the age of 30 their careers are just starting, with tenure being potentially a coin flip.

And it always traps the most brilliant people. That's the worst part.
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.

In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.

The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
Newly discovered galaxy mirrors conditions after the Big Bang
Who do you think that should be, and why do you think their systems would be more secure than Google's?

The security isn't the only point here. They transferred the data outside of the jurisdiction where our laws apply, and they're not allowed to do that without fulfilling conditions that they appear not to have satisfied.

Note that it is not within the power of PA Consulting to vary these conditions, whatever any contract says, nor are HSCIC above the law in this respect (though some of the relatively recent and dubiously worded get-out-of-jail-free cards like s251 might protect them to some extent).

What ambitions are you implicitly accusing Google of having? Do you think Google's going to tap into their customers' private files and sell them to a third party?

I'm not implicitly accusing them, I'm openly stating that I think they would do tap those files in a heartbeat if (a) it would help them to earn more from their advertising or other profit-generating activities, and (b) they thought they could get away with it.

I regard organisations like Google (and other big data miners like Facebook) as some of the most dangerous entities on the planet today. They respect little other than money, and they have consistently not just pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour but IMHO (and apparently in numerous other people's opinion and indeed in the law's opinion in many places and on many occasions) stepped far over the line. They can continue to do this because the regulators who should be reining them in are toothless and because they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists who exemplify just about everything that makes those professions unpopular.

I do very little with Google services myself, by deliberate choice, and I sure as hell do not consent to anyone breaching their duty of confidentiality regarding my medical records and giving them to Google either.
Keep saying this and things like it. I read somewhere about a company that paid top dollar for its field. They had lower employee turnover than any other company in their industry. This saved the company scads of money in terms of hiring costs and had other benefits that are hard to readily quantify in terms of money but which do impact the bottom line (such as employees who had been there for years and years and had deep niche knowledge).

The thing we need to do is inform folks that screwing women (or anyone) over comes back to bite you. It isn't advantage to "take advantage" of anyone. The real costs are non-obvious and may be somewhere down the line but they do exist.

Have an(other) upvote. :-)
And could help nab activists, 'traitors', foreigners, whistleblowers... As far as woes in the world go, child abusers are far down the list, recent years have reminded us.
SEEKING WORK - Remote / South America / Travel Ok

I'm just putting together a team of two developers and a designer/UI guy. We'll be running a Python/node.js web development shop (Django, Flask, Tornado, express, etc). Our team is focused on MVPs, prototypes and the first cycle of your product (blog, landing page, website, call to action/sign-up/request invite, crowdfunding site, etc).

If you want to chat just drop me a line: ccarpenterg@gmail.com (Cristian / UTC -3)
Elmo raising awareness for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
Trying to raise awareness for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. All boys with this fatal disease need all the help you can give :)
In many ways, I'll describe two.

The newly created money is worth more when it's new. When the average person finally receives the money, the value is worth less through inflation.

Secondly, the rich can borrow money from the fed at 0%. Then they can buy bonds from the government and receive interest on that. How does the average person do that?
DRM Coffee
What if, for most people without high aptitude and an expensive education, opportunity and social mobility is mostly a myth?

If you really believe in social mobility, would you support a 100% estate tax?
> Concerns are useful when they're genuinely sharing functionality between classes - not just for splitting up "Big Bags O' Methods".

Hmmm. I'd say it depends.

Of course having concerns (a fancy word for modules IMHO) shared between classes is great. But i've also found cases where separating a god class' behaviour into different concerns helped a lot. The important thing in those cases was recognizing and avoiding dependencies between different concerns, so instead of ending up with a god class split across many files of inter-dependant code (i.e. worse than before), you can end up with a "god" class split into its minimal "core" part and a couple of concerns that only depend on that core part but not between each other. Yes, you could still call that a god class, as it will have a very fat public API, but at least you can reason about what it does in terms of different concerns, so you gain something :)
You can write a superficial clone of any web app. But can you handle 8000 tweets/sec in real-time? The innovation is in the back-end.
Downloading software safely is nearly impossible on windows.

The amount of hyperbole in this thread is amazing, but so far your comment represents the absolute peak of it.

I hope you're proud. It's quite an achievement.
Paving New Roads at Human Demand
I just made a career jump from a pure play mobile DMP to an established, self-service mobile DSP looking to explore its data assets. I share my motivations for the move and would love to hear feedback - plus, always looking to connect with other individuals in the space!
If the Fed instead decided to hire poor citizens to dig ditches and build roads at a flat rate of $12/hour, the effect would be obvious to everyone - "they're distorting the minimum wage labor market! driving honest Walmarts out of business! businesses won't be able to find anyone for $7.25/hour, they'll have to pay more!"

Every right-wing commenter in the world would immediately see that this is wealth redistributing socialism and needs to be stopped instantly.

It's the same if you decide to pay rich people for their bonds. Only, you know, it helps rich people instead. You bought a million dollars of bonds last year, this year you can sell them for $1.1 million. The profit goes straight into the pockets of... people who can afford to buy a million dollars of bonds.
Unit Testing with State Machines
Not Just for Coders: 9 Ways to Use GitHub For Creative Work
I don't think the judgement was that the money was wasted, but that the money would be spent immediately by the poor, and the rich wouldn't do much with it.

If you have $5 Million in the bank and I give you $2K. The money I've given you won't change your spending habits. There is no purchase you have put off due to lack of money.

If you have $100K in the bank it's more likely you'll spend it, but not a guarantee.

If you are living paycheck to paycheck like roughly 3/4 of the country (http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/) then that $2k will most likely get spent. Just because it's spent doesn't mean it's wasteful.

That spending will reflect things they are living without because they can't afford it. A more reliable car. A second car so their SO has a better opportunity to work. A computer. In the case of some low end works it could mean equipment and/or space to open their own business. Better/More food. An evening at the movies. Painting the house. These are all things they can't/won't take on debt for, but could do with a windfall.
Good point, and I agree, I also enjoy working with people who can admit when they just don't know something. It shouldn't be so hard to do, there is a nearly infinite amount of stuff each of us doesn't know -- especially when it comes to forward looking challenges we just haven't started thinking concretely about yet. My favorite response when asked about such things is "I'm not sure; we'll burn that bridge when we get to it".

This topic is even more relevant for software over other types of knowledge, IMO, keeping in mind the Knuth quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it".

Even when I'm pretty sure that task XYZ can be completed relatively easily using language A, framework B and API C, I still won't answer in complete absolutes unless I've worked on the compiler for A, written a fair amount of B, and previously exhausted all the functionality of C.
Actually we're the problem. The 1980's represented the rise of the computer age and a massive acceleration in automated production. The trend is long term and shows no sign of stopping.

TLDR; As computers replace manual labor the boss pays less out less of his profits for labor and we have an economy where the rich get richer. Once upon a time profit growth equated to wage growth but modern computer technology has changed this.
I've spent more time thinking about clean architecture and design than most and the conclusion that I've come to is while Ruby gives you all the tools to write clean code and great architecture, it doesn't offer the best tools to do that job.

Ruby and Rails feel best as a prototyping platform for getting something out the door fast, proving a concept, and not worrying so much about correctness or maintenance.

I don't think if you are doing a lot of TDD and larger systems that piling on more Ruby and Rails is the right answer. I think once you know what you are working with, a well designed language with a compiler is a huge help and would remove a ton of useless tests and stuff that you end up writing in Ruby by hand.

This very likely leads to an API driven system with an API written in a strongly typed, compiled language like C#, Java, Scala, Haskell, or Go and writing your front end in whatever makes the most sense for your team.

At that point you get the benefits of a nice rapid development platform like Rails for your front end, and a fast, testable, API written in something else using all the clean code architecture you want.

The trick is, you do everything ugly in Rails or PHP or whatever in your initial prototype and you might not even write tests. You just ship working code until your prototype has proven a business case. Then, you move it towards something with lower TCO over time. Make the investment in your code when it makes sense to invest in it and use the best tool for the job at each step.

You probably never need to leave the standard Rails MVC stuff on most projects unless they are wildly successful and/your long term needs change. Even then, you can probably keep the rails front end stuff and just talk to an API and be very happy.
We've been using MapBox and are pretty happy with it. They are filling a much needed niche for businesses that are not big enough to be able to afford the $10k google license. We have had good success leveraging their tools for non profits and small to mid size businesses.
We're working on adding Google Login at the moment. You can install the App version from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable-docs/iljoj... , although it doesn't support offline at the moment.
User Acquisition and Growth Articles
From the end of the article:

"The helicopter money policy ... distributes resources directly to citizens, with no limits on how they can spend it"

If the purpose is to jump-start spending, then perhaps there should be one modest restriction on how you spend a stimulus check: an expiration date.

Instead of issuing checks, the government could issue prepaid debit cards with a relatively short expiration date. (I believe some of the 2008 stimulus money was distributed via debit card, but the bulk was direct-deposited.)

For the vast majority of people, a debit card with a short expiration date would lead to their spending the money within that span; a small minority might go through the trouble of converting the debit card amount to cash and saving it, but probably not nearly as high a percentage as if it came as a check or a direct deposit.
> It only becomes a problem if the Fed overpays for the assets.

Which is precisely what happened. Many of the toxic assets that are now on the fed balance sheet would have been close to worthless (if not completely worthless)
Hashrocket helped me build transparentrees
They did a killer job.
I have wasted many hours of my life+productivity on HN, but this one URL (which I found on HN) has more than made up for it.

Employees, take it to heart.

Employers, you have been warned.