skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dear Entitled Software Engineers,

Take a step back. You're living during one of highest periods of unemployment and economic depression in recent history, and you're complaining about being bombarded with job offers. Usually this is happening on LinkedIn, a website entirely about having a public resume that shows you are a good candidate to be hired.

That staffing recruiter who is emailing you probably didn't dream of becoming a staffing recruiter - they took the job they could get. Most staffing recruiters are a recent graduates who were recently un/underemployed. They're working in a cutthroat, sink or swim environment where 40% of their coworkers won't be there next month. If they don't make their numbers, they're gone. Most of the jobs they work on are impossibly hard to fill jobs in an industry they don't know anything about.

Those annoying staffing recruiters also provide liquidity in the labor market. Remember that 20K salary bump your new employer didn't blink at? That's because they know how hard it is to hire good software engineers and they understand the competition they face.

Remember that time you were constantly being proactive about your career, always checking to see if there might be something better out there? Yah, I don't do that either, but a good recruiter will.

Yes, there are terrible recruiters out there and many of them are annoying. But they do serve a purpose to both you and the companies you will work for.

With every good there is a bad. You're lucky enough to be in a position where thousands of companies are desperate to hire somebody like you. It could be worse :)

XOXO
Discussion: http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/william-shock... "William Shockley on what makes a person who publishes a lot of papers (and the superstar researcher system)"
161 years later, New York Times corrects its '12 Years a Slave' story
Very cool! I use cycle for this which only does averaging, which works okay but it's seriously old and clonky. I was wondering why someone hadn't done this already.
Do you know of a no-fee secured credit card that is easy for a foreigners apply for online?
> Yes, just like a non-FDIC insured bank

Are there such things? In practice, are they a significant portion of the banking market?
5000 checks and a few hundred hosts is a fairly tiny operation. At an order of magnitude above that you will start feeling real pain with Nagios.
Mobile Revenue from Pinterest is Up 224% YoY
The advantage of GrabCut compared to the parent article is that it takes both color difference and similarity into account rather than just difference. This is done by combining all that information into a very cleverly-laid-out Markov Random Field where making an energy-minimizing graph cut roughly corresponds to finding a better pixel classification.

The disadvantage compared to the parent is that it's a semi-supervised algorithm: it requires a bounding box to be drawn around the desired image. If you had a bunch of very similar images you could pre-generate the Gaussian Mixture Model that GrabCut expects and turn it into a supervised learning algorithm, but then you'd lose the major innovation of GrabCut compared to the graph cut methods discovered before it: you would not be able to re-run with the newest "best-guess" and be guaranteed that the energy would monotonically decrease. It would also fail spectacularly if it encountered something it hadn't seen before.
You seem to be lacking at least one of the virtues of a programmer.

http://threevirtues.com
Having a writing staff may get you part way there. Colbert is really smart and equally thoughtful and passionate, and I think these are the qualities that lead to his work never appearing "phoned in."

[disclosure, I guess: I once interned at The Daily Show and absolutely loved my experience, so I'm probably biased toward Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert]
I hear this a lot, but I don't see much (if any) evidence this was ever a prevailing view. The impression I get is a general distrust of any centralised service, whether it's a traditional bank or a Bitcoin web-wallet.
Ah yes. I never thought of that. Just much like eBay or AirBnB feedback I suppose, only with the potential of being much more mortifying!
Cryptocat, Now on iPhone
> Put it this way: USA has first world health care problems, china has developing world health care problems.

As one might expect of countries that are first world and developing world, respectively. When people complain about the US healthcare system, the implicit comparison is probably other first world countries.
You're better off going to a hotel in terms of cleanliness, and they are located all over midtown. I've never been refused from a hotel when I searched for or asked where the restroom was
This article is geared mostly to employees.
Since this is HN, what do foreigners launching startups do?
Disenfranchised: Why Are Americans Still Buying Into the Franchise Dream?
I have no CS education. I don't have any degree, or even a high school diploma. Most of those around me have had CS or related degrees, many from quite well-regarded programs, but there has been no apparent correlation to security awareness. To the extent they have an edge, it's in mathematical analyses and algorithm design/implementation[0], which are of limited direct use in most day-to-day things like noticing "this endpoint uses plain HTTP", "this isn't an HMAC, also serial numbers aren't secret keys", or "a 4-digit PIN is not a secure password".

[0] And even then, I've wondered more than once what the hell goes on in CS programs when I've found myself explaining concepts like entropy and the difference between speed and scalability.
Facebook Paper Update Pushes Virality by Sending Download Links With Articles
> The really crazy thing is that they seem to be reinventing the wheel so that they can lean on the optimized code a graphics library provides. I think that's flawed thinking to begin with.

Actually I disagree with you, even though what you say is correct in principle. On any given day, the vast majority of my workload revolves around working with other people’s code. So I may spend 7 hours trying to get a new library to compile or figure out why I’m getting an exception or how to get out of dependency hell and only 1 hour getting “real work done”.

For me, it’s exhausting to find a new library or API that loosely does what I need, only to find that I have to install a new language, new framework, new compiler, or even new package manager to use it. Developers have a tendency to copy other developers (even when the “normal” way of doing things is not ideal), so many libraries have no binary that I can test, and in fact no example of usage or up to date documentation.

Then there are subtleties with new libraries such as speed or memory usage. So perhaps a library that does exactly what you want runs at 1 frame every N seconds while the highly optimized function in a mainstream graphics library runs at many hundreds or even thousands of frames per second by utilizing concurrency or the graphics card.

So in fact when it’s all said and done, I tend to think more in transformations. I ask myself if I can express a solution slightly differently if it allows me to use an existing tool, then encapsulate it in a black box that has the same inputs and outputs as my ideal solution. Then my frustration is that other developers don’t seem to think this way. “Make one tool that does one thing well” has become the mantra and driven us into this fragmented ecosystem.

This is just an aside, but: The only truly general purpose language that has a syntax that doesn’t make me want to club myself over the head is probably MATLAB, but unfortunately their licenses are too expensive for me. So I have high hopes for Octave, and after that, maybe NumPy. So maybe one point we could agree on is that we shouldn’t need a graphics “library” in the first place. If we had a good mainstream concurrent language, then many of these algorithms become one paragraph code snippets and run with speed comparable to C or Java.

Edit: I wanted to give a concrete example. Low level languages like C are overly verbose in their implementations, by 10 or 100 times usually, because they try to leverage the wrong metaphors. Notice how compactly concepts like image compression can be expressed with the right ones:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/images/discrete-cosine-transfo...
To me, this article is not about running or a runner. It's about MS. Sadly, it doesn't really go into how MS affects the 2+ million people around the world, or why this story is important.

My best friend has MS. She's had it for half her adult life. She actually has it "good", in that she looks normal and can function through life virtually the same as most other people.

But there are some exceptions, such as the debilitating, random, lightning-like pain that strikes her. The occasional year or two when she can't walk without the use of a cane. The hot summers that make her body almost completely immobile and intensify pain. The fact that she can't dance for more than an hour or two before her cognitive ability reduces to basic motor functions. That there's basically no medication that helps her except for high-strength muscle relaxers that dull the symptoms.

But you know? Besides all that, she has it "lucky". She can run without falling down. She doesn't need a wheelchair or a breathing machine. She even just had her first child with her new husband. But there's the real possibility that at some point, like many other MS sufferers, even feeding herself could become an impossible task, to say nothing of caring for her own baby girl.

I am not this teenage girl, and I can't know how she feels. If it were me, I would be scared of the disease progressing more rapidly by pushing my system. But she's clearly decided that in spite of that she's going to run as hard as she can while she still has the ability. I hope she keeps running and wins every damn competition she can.
Jeep was actually my own guess as to the only US manufacturer to sell cars in any volume and they don't exactly sell very many... (e.g. in the UK in 2012 there were three times as many Porsche's sold as Jeeps).
Just dived into that too, looks pretty straight-forward.

Here is the comparison between KillWhite's method and gimp's color to alpha:

http://i.imgur.com/FGJE97r.png

Note that it adds transparency pretty much everywhere on the apple and alters it too much. (Reflection on apple is gone after blending with new background)
Is that site legit?
> Great code needs no comments.

Great code implementing a particular algorithm for a particular reason might want a comment (1) identifying the algorithm and providing a reference to a published description, and (2) identifying the reason the algorithm was chosen.

Great code that is clear and readable and well-fit to purpose can still, very often, benefit from comments. Not everything that might want to be made clear to readers of code can be expressed in the code.
> If you have bypassed PHP for alternative languages, or if you are a PHP veteran unaware of recent changes, you owe it to yourself to give PHP a second look.

I remember PHP as I would imagine one would remember child molestation and you're asking me to give him a call and apologize?

No.
A framework is a weasel word for a Massively Coupled System. The trappings of orthogonality and modularity are given lip service, while actually creating some of the most anti-modular footprints in human systems design history.
I want a lighting algorithm that handles static and dynamic geometry uniformly, with respect to lighting and shadows, and still manages to look "good enough", if not necessarily cutting edge. Does such a thing exist?

The last such approach that I remember was Doom 3's stencil shadows, but it handled only direct lighting. Now that people are used to approximate indirect lighting, we get these huge piles of hacks and we have to reinvent them for every new art style...
They can compute more than 7 transactions per second, but it is at present a hardcoded artificial limit (one of many) because if the network tried to sustain e.g. 100 TPS like an actual bank, the block chain would balloon in size to terabytes very quickly, and since every Bitcoin client needs every transaction in history, that would force most people to abandon it.
Oh that's really interesting -- thanks for explaining it!
Excuse me, but what is your line of work? What programming language do use and in what field exactly?
Do you ever email about this data or put it into spreadsheets on Google's servers?
Apple CarPlay Infotainment System Runs on BlackBerry’s QNX
Read all of the post.

I was expecting some enlightenment at the end or something useful for me, but nothing. This stuff is mandatory for each and every programmer who writes web-apps and I wouldn't call them web-programmers if they wouldn't know these basics.
School uses flying DRONE surveillance to stop students from cheating in exams
People keep saying that "Europeans don't drive much" but there are quite a few models from European manufacturers with very high ranges - over a 1000 miles. And they seem pretty popular with the people I know who have (and need) company cars.
HackerTable NYC
Startup myths and obsessions (in UK)
I think a deposit insurance scheme could work very well if all (remaining) big players came together and decided collectively to create one. It would be widely publicised and it would be made very clear that no one should trust a bitcoin bank that is not part of the scheme. Such a scheme would have to include mandatory auditing of finances, QA and security.

So what I'm proposing is industry self regulation. That said, I doubt that any deposit insurance scheme could ever be large enough to cover losses of such enormous proportions as we have seen in recent weeks. The hope would be that utterly incompetent adventurers like Mt. Gox would never pass the audit.
I don't know the details, but I think this arises from the rate at which blocks are discovered and the amount of space each transaction takes within a block. 7 tps is actually pretty high. All of paypal only does about 100 tps.
As a frequent traveler by road in India, at transit towns I rent hotel rooms just to use a clean restroom and to get a decent shower. With such a service I believe this is solving a practical problem and cost effective in my case.
Yes, some state (rather than federal) banks are not FDIC insured. (Also, credit unions are a lot like banks and are not FDIC insured, but most of them are CUA insured, which is functionally the same thing.)
But governments limit other forms of speech such as hate speech. Or what about false advertising claims? Or holocaust deniers or people who claim vaccines don't work?

And yes, photos can be photoshopped but in that case I think they should be treated separately. Similarly, sketches and stories can all be works of the imagination without an event happening. A (genuine) photo or a movie is a capture of an actual event, not an invention.
In addition to what petit_robert pointed out about the Mt. Gox theft being orders of magnitude larger, you're assuming the densest available US currency and that it's conveniently pre-packaged for easy shipment.

What we're actually talking about, however, is like being able to teleport into a bank anywhere in the world, wave a magic wand which converts everything on the premises into tightly packaged $100 bills, and teleporting back out of the country. In the real world, running out the door with a bunch of duffel bags and people shouting tends to attract a lot of attention and make escape a lot harder than closing a network connection.
Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer retiring after 18 years
Japan to regulate Bitcoin trades, impose taxes
It isn't very clear to me which Nagios plug-ins are considered standard, and perhaps that sort of confusion is what creates all the FUD surrounding Nagios.
You should also consider the culture these myths create. It forces women to depend on one-another for a significant portion of the time, which, among other things, is a good anti-rape mechanism.

Certainly, these are crazy and superstitious, but given the realities of the times they come from, many of them were a net benefit to their rural society (or have minimal impact) - which is how they've survived to this day.

We have better knowledge now, and we should embrace it, but someone isn't necessarily stupid for following these rules.
"Sexy" yet Ugly dude weight loss approach
I don't understand how so many people in that thread can be OK with this happening. Saying "at least you didn't lie to us" when your money is stolen is hilarious. I'd rather keep my money under my mattress than use bitcoin for anything right now.
Moving to Ghost and why I dislike Tumblr and Svbtle
You don't necessarily have to have two simultaneous sound sources. For example, if I want to connect a bluetooth headphone to listen to music, without PA I would need to edit my alsarc file and restart Firefox so it picks up the new sound card.
> Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps by some artificial limits. These were put in place to stop people from ballooning the size of the block chain before the network and community was ready for it. Once those limits are lifted, the maximum transaction rate will go up significantly.

See here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
It is surprising that on a news site focused around entrepreneurial capitalism in technology, the majority of the commenters are statist by default. Have you not heard libertarian/free market arguments on this topic or have you found them unconvincing?
"traditional" US cars - so massive SUVs and trucks with 7.0L V8 engines are not popular because of their sheer size(a car which is "normal" by US standards, like Dodge Ram, can barely fit on an average UK street), fuel economy and insurance - people buy cars with tiny engines like 1.2/1.6L partially because they are more efficient,but also because owning a car with a >2.0L engine would make your insurance and road tax huge(and I am saying that as a person who used to own a 4.4L V8 car in the UK).
Also I'd argue one shouldn't be considered an expert programmer until they've been forced to maintain lots of legacy code. It's an incredible lesson in what not to do, knowing when to comment and when not, proper naming, which things to optimize "prematurely" based on your experience-based predictions of how your application will scale, how to organize code in support of a growing codebase, etc.
Tesla already has a leasing program in the US, and in fact I suspect they would prefer all their customers to lease the vehicles (certainly if you go to their website you won't see a sticker price on the front page for the Model S - you'll see a monthly lease price after rebates, etc).
Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure to review for improper simplifications.
My (completely pulled out of thin air) opinion is that there is no way that startups populated by young, hip developers can build a proper system for handling money. You need to have a baggage of a thousand bizarre things how these systems can be violated, unless you want to repeat the same mistakes - and that comes with time and experience.

There are literally at least hundred thousand developers who have worked for 20+ years on financial systems - the industry employs a lot of them. If you're going to be storing money of other people, picking up a random such guy - even completely mediocre, boring one - would at least bring up the many issues that are taken for granted in 'that world' but nonobvious if you're not from the financial industry.
The limit here is one of design: each block is currently limited to X MB, each transaction takes Y bytes, and each block is designed to happen every Z minutes; for Bitcoin's current values of 1MB (expected to be raised at some point if the size becomes a limit), something like 1k, and 10 minutes, that works out to 7 transactions per second.

Altcoins which have chosen blocktimes of say 1 minute will be able to do more transactions per second, and ones which lift the 1MB cap likewise.
I am only so familiar with Bitcoin, but why not have an additional wallet per user of the exchange? That way its not possible to exceed the funds of that wallet.
> Moreover, unless they screwed up their corporate formalities, the individual shareholders should be protected from this type of loss.

Corporate formalities alone don't prevent piercing the corporate veil.
Look, the thing is that if you massively increased the money supply as a percentage of the overall money in circulation, without any corresponding rise in productivity and population, then sure, you are going to have a bad day.

However, this does not mean that any increase in the money supply will have negative consequences. For instance, if you do not increase the money supply at all and the output and population increase, then you have major problems as well.

In this case we are talking about levels that are easily absorbed by the economy, which is not equivalent to an economy that uses silver for coinage finding more silver than they have in circulation.
> ... its actually good sense.

It's only "good sense" if, and this is a big if, (a) we have a strict scientific understanding of what we mean when we say "unclean" and (b) we know that we have literally no other way of mitigating this "uncleanliness."

Just as surgeons learned to sterilize themselves and their equipment once they had a scientific understanding of infection, we now have lots of scientific understanding of human menstruation and cleanliness. We should therefor look upon those that insist that women be treated as "unclean" and kept away from the village water supply and temple the same way we'd view a surgeon that insisted that there was no need to wash up before operating.
Why Adwords is Broke
Universities and large schools prices go up and up, so does the amount of loan assistance. Where in the heck does all that money go if not to these people?
Huh. Seems last week's discussion links to a .html URL which immediately redirects.

Thanks!
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll be sure to check them out.
On the plus side, Bitcoin isn't regulated like a nation-state's currency, and the vast bulk of fiduciary institution law that nations have doesn't apply (or simply isn't applied) to Bitcoin exchanges. So when a mistake like this happens, nobody has to go to jail.

On the minus side, $50,000 of innocent people's money just got stolen, and nobody is going to jail.
What is wrong with the offerings currently available in the lower price points? I am really trying to understand the desire to wait on a car that is essentially vapor ware at this point.

With batteries being the constraining cost I do not see how they are going to have a low end car with any real range beyond 100 or so. I just don't see the math.

I am seeing Leafs popping up all over, they may have hit their price threshold for that to occur in my area (US). It fits the commute profile of a large number of people, I would suspect that is true for those here.
This is terrible, a lot of us are waiting and dont even know if we'll get audited, to make things worst the DOL did not process any perm petitions during the government shutdown. Please see this petition to improve the procesing time: https://www.change.org/petitions/department-of-labor-dol-to-...
Former NAACP president moves to venture capital
Apple’s Spaceship designer discusses Jobs’ involvement and Stanford influence
Photos of Kim Jong-un’s Worldly Possessions
If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
Yup, never claimed anything but - but it's big enough that automation is essential, lest you descend into some variety of lovecraftian horror-scape.
I'm not aware of an obsession with menstruation in any major variant of Christianity.