skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I expressed my concern very well. The point is is that you often cannot just depend on some built in to do your mathematics for you - stability, speed, and convergence depend heavily on the implementation that you use. There is a huge gulf between symbolic expressions and how we solve them on a computer. For example, all we really know how to solve is Ax=b - linear equations. Oh, we have special tricks for some nonlinear cases, but a huge part of computer math is getting your system approximated as Ax=b, and then solving for that. You can't just hand wave that away by throwing symbols in your code.

People will bring up various symbolic and other specialized math packages. Sure enough, they exist. And, they are dog slow. They are used to explore problem spaces, and to get the solutions to small problems. But when it comes to it, we reach for C++, for Fortran (and now, maybe Julia) to get performant code. If I want to type equations and get results, why wouldn't I already be using one of those systems, heavily optimized for math computations of that sort? If I am in a general purpose language, it is because I need to specify the system in great detail, and obscuring it with symbols like sum and integrate just doesn't work.

And, in case the larger point is lost, this is an example to illustrate the larger case - that we can't really obscure large parts of the computational model. In cases where we can, we already do so. For example, I don't write my own red-black trees, I count on STL to do it for me. v.insert (make_pair("name", "Roger")) is a great abstraction (albeit verbose). But even when it comes to using something like BLAS & LAPACK, I have to choose the representation and so much more. Dense vs sparse, etc. So please don't retort with some integral or other math equation that can be solved efficiently with default methods - that misses the point. CS since the 50s has been a study of how to abstract concepts away, and have a done a fine job of it. A few pictures doesn't magically make the remaining problems disappear.

edit:

I somewhat know what I am talking about here. In my Ph.D program (left it, didn't graduate, not claiming a PhD) in the 80s my advisor was advocating an expert AI system to resolve these problems. Any guess as to the result of that research? The hint is that no expert system is built into any of our heavy math systems today. And just this week I sat through a session where a researcher was presenting early work he was doing no a DARPA grant to, wait for it, same thing, basically.

It's a outrageous, tremendously hard problem, and we keep getting people announcing that they have solved it, they just don't quite have the code running yet. Okay. Show me, don't tell me. A point-click interface to inject a sqrt symbol into my code, or an image of a playing card, is so far from the mark, both from the triviality of it, and the distance between that and a hard problem.
I've never read an O'Reilly book but have obviously heard of them, are they generally effective at communicating more than general principles?

If I regularly read blog posts and essays written about Bitcoin, would this book be worthwhile? If not, what audience is this book targeting?
Just listened to a great podcast by 'The Freancer shows' - Weekly Billing[1].

They talked about requesting weekly billing which is paid upfront, eliminating collection issues.

[1](http://www.freelancersshow.com/the-freelancers-show-097-week...)
The combination is the best (apart from not crashing at all). I had heard that US airbags were bigger than European ones as they were designed to attempt to compensate for the lack of seat belt use (which was apparently common in the 90's).
Supreme Court revisits the question of software patents
That example is not an isolated incident and happens far too often. It has been part of the large corporations game plan for years now. They have found ways of using the patent system to attack small entities AND have used their deep pockets to drag out justice for the small entity.

Patent reform should focus on helping small and independent innovators, when in reality it is being driven by large deep-pocketed corporations.
Indeed. It reminds me of how Steve Jobs received credit for Jony Ive's designs[0]. Americans have been raised and convinced to believe that CEOs and business executives are the source of all creativity, and that their wealth is a logical result of that.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-would-annoy-jony-i...
This is also true with me...everything I've learned over the past few years has only gone to show me all that I don't know.

And I'm the type of guy that would be totally honest about my shortcomings but unfortunately it also seems like this thruthfulness is seen negatively by most employers (but just because I don't know right now doesn't mean I'm incapable of learning or don't have other skills that are similar and applicable to the new skill).
> How much of our economy is actually based on the kinds of small, plastic objects that can be printed?

Let me stop you right there.

3D printing is in its infancy. Much where plastics were in the 60's and 70's, where the car was at the turn of the century, and where the printing press was in Gutenberg's time.

I implore you, DO NOT make the mistake of underestimating this technology. I do not say this as a fanboy. I say this as someone who has watched production parts be built for aircraft out of titanium, printed from powder. Parts that are in aircraft engines flying right. now.

But it isn't just metals (laser sintering). Plastics. Food. Human cells! (3D printed kidney and bladder, respectively: http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidn... ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nqw1yjyKEs).

TL;DR You are going to be amazingly shocked at the advances this technology makes in 5-10 years.

EDIT: This was a CNC mill conversion I performed ~2 years ago at a 3-day class in Michigan. Total cost to me was ~$3K for the mill, the parts, and the class. I didn't have the space for it, so I sold it to someone who consults to auto manufacturers. Its now on a production line as part of a process to build keyfobs for a major auto manufacturer.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jHg2yrWqd8

I understand its not technically 3D printing, but the manufacturing technology now accessible to your average person is incredible.
What types of bootstrapping would you suggest?
You guys all seem so altruistic. I never focus on titles. I focus on maximizing my income to effort ratio with a side of trying to do work that interests me. If someone wants to pay me more and call me a junior developer with no responsibility? That'd be just fine by me.
I'm really glad Andreas is writing this book, should be a great way for more developers to get involved. Crypto-currencies are unfortunately still a little too arcane and books like these help maturation.
If you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer­app or business, you will find this book essential reading. From the basic use of a bitcoin wallet to buy a cup of coffee, to running a bitcoin marketplace with hundreds of thousands of transactions, or collaboratively building new financial innovations that will transform our understanding of currency and credit, this book will help you engineer money. You're about to unlock the API to a new economy. This book is your key.

I hope this book has a very thorough section on securing your app, because that's probably the biggest problem that you'll face.
The Evolution Of Hacker News
I met with a "seeking technical cofounder" who's initial position was 'my idea is so amazing that they will be very lucky to get to be involved, they wet surprised when I said they will likely struggle to find one. What helped the most when I reframed it as 'the programmer has limited capacity and your asking them to work for free for you for a year'. He saw it didn't seem like such a good deal when put that way.
A little of both. I don't see it available on amazon yet.
Absolutely. If you're not replaceable, then you won't be able to take on cool new opportunities without leaving your team on a lurch. Always be automating yourself out of your own job and mentoring your successor.
What the author is alluding to is that centralized messages queues can cause catastrophic failure over[1].

Industry knowledge of how to distribute loads has improved significantly in the past 10 years. I wish the author would touch on some other options like using a load balancer with consistent hashing[2].

[1] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CatastrophicFailover.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing
Table of contents, possibly out of date but should give you a general idea of what's in it: http://pastebin.com/w9isSyer.
> The whole article sounds like a call for regulation based on a fear of change.

It's the opposite.

The article is hypothesizing that regulatory capture will lead to major policy fights against decentralized manufacturing. In fact, that's already the case due to widespread patents that prevent a lot of 3D printing competition -- beyond some recently expired patents, which subsequently allowed a tidal wave of new upstarts to come about (on Kickstarter and so forth). In case it's not clear, the article is not in support of an increase in corporate protection that they're (logically) presuming. One would assume the publication is full support of 3D printing having mass adoption and becoming freer.
I might be wrong, but I think make does not work the way you think it does: First of all files you write to disk are not actually written to the harddrive immediately there are several caches in between, secondly if make has to process a file in multiple steps it will probably use unix pipes and won't write out intermediary files to disk.
From the comment: "I can't say I'm cured, because there's a possibility I might relapse at some point in the future." Don't know how I could have stated that any clearer.

My particular diagnosis was treatable, but you're right in saying that many cannot be cured. I think your points are important to make, and I'm glad you made them.

In fact let me underscore a common problem. Many people who are treated for mental illness (especially Bipolar) often want to go off their medication without doctor supervision. Bad idea. If you need to find a better doctor, do that, but don't think you can tackle this stuff on your own.

I don't know if we are really disagreeing here. There is fantastic help for people with mental illness. Hopefully this discussion will continue, and as a society we can put an end to stuff like this: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/09/26/asdas-mental-pati...
Go unrelated, conflicts do your head in.

Client: 'What should we do now?'
You: We'll I've thought on this for ages, here's the answer but it's hard one knowledge from my startup, how much do I share?
Asked a buddy who ain't that smart on what he would do, if he could live 300 years.

He said: "I'd rob a bank, big time."

I asked why he would do that and he said that he could give the money to a trustee and sit his time and become rich afterwards.

So your story sounds legit to me. And I just asked for 300 years. Living 16.000 years like in the movie: "The man from Earth", was way out of his graspable zone. And he started arguing about god would kill you and so on...
I am CTO and 20+ years:
Difference is just the role assigned, sometimes 10K hours of hands on, mostly not.
Jr. dev is sometimes there just to fasttrack to manager roles.

A Sr. Dev. role is the one that people go to when an issue is not resolved for a period, one example is a month long intermittent bug. They are Sr. because Jr. ask for this bug to be assigned to Sr.. Sometimes Sr. do the real training new people.(I'll show you how it should work, go to X to show you how it works).

And here is the effect: If Sr. dev. has the tile to go w/ role, has to train and fix strange bugs, they use their position to KISS. Sadly, in most orgs, Sr. dev. is a role, not a title, it's just as common that Jr. dev. has a higher org. rank.

A role test: so lets say you want to add another 3rd party library. Who'll fix the bugs? Now you know who the Sr's are.

These roles are not new, this is very old: "Fools ignore complexity; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it."
I was under the impression that clang is not waiting for standardization to implement this stuff (indeed, C frameworks on OS X already ship module.map files). Am I wrong?
You're just explaining variance. But since no more than a handful of his 100+ posts made it to the front page, it seems pretty clear that they are not what HN selects for.
>Is "Saddlesore Galactica" one of the worst episodes ever?

No, and the graph in no way show that. From around season nine, episodes are mostly rated between 6.5-7.3, with a fair amount lying considerably lower than that and only a few outliers in the other direction.

But as a 6.5'er, "Saddlesore Galactica" is a solid "poor" episode, like many, many others. But there are a substantial amount of episodes well below that one, and they are also scoring considerably lower.

The clip shows are the truly "worst", despite having all the best punchlines. So one could argue that objectively they are the best. But that is also a poor argument.
>Patent reform should focus on helping small and independent innovators, when in reality it is being driven by large deep-pocketed corporations.

That is right. I am also wondering all the time about the focus of patent reforms: so called patent-trolls. But as annoying they might be, the whole case looks very much like a diversionary tactic to distract from the real problems of the system.
This is "just" a scheduled hard fork that went bad. The developers made a backwards incompatible change to the protocol and presumably, a sizable part of the network forgot or refused to update their client.

While altcoins are more vulnerable to 51% attacks, 51% attacks do not result in hard forks. Hard forks can only happen when two or more incompatible clients are simultaneously used by the network participants.

51% attacks are easier to pull off during hard forks because the network's hashing rate is essentially split between the chains but there is no evidence that such an attack has occurred.
> at the end of the day it's just a toy.

I'd say VR headsets are as much of a toy as Otto Lilienthal's hang gliders. As such, sure, they won't do much more than cool games. But the future is obvious: they're a first step into the Matrix, and from there to fully fledged Mind Uploading. (It may not help us develop the necessary technology —though it may help us figure out crucial neurological facts. But it will give us a glimpse of what is to come.)

Not to mention, VR will probably help us get to AR, which will surely have an even bigger impact.

At this point, we're not looking at a toy any more, but at a Prophecy.
When they advertise for a senior position it mostly means they want to have someone able to get things done on their own without creating problems down the road. Experience is generally a better indicator of this than domain knowledge[1]. There's very little reason not to apply for a job you think you can do regardless of the requirements. Just don't be surprised if you're filtered by HR for not having the correct buzzwords.

The best way to actually get a job is to go out and meet people. Meetups, user groups, conferences are all good. Talking to other developers directly generally gives you a more accurate picture of what it's like to work somewhere and what's actually required. As a bonus if they like you and pass on your resume you avoid getting HR filtered.

[1] Software design and maintenance are language/domain portable and are difficult to teach without direct/repeated exposure to examples, which comes over time. Unless the domain is about specialized knowledge (e.g. security) it's generally faster to teach someone the quirks of your business than it is to teach them how to design software and deal with them making mistakes.
FBI Labels Dissertation on Animal Rights a Threat to National Security
I agree with you, but it is also important to understand when these things are important to the business.
Anyone taking on similar work, eg just plans to do the initial MVP work but lines up a standard equity stake as part of their contract?

I've heard of deals where say I discount my rate by X in exchange for Y% equity. Would love some rule of thumb numbers of what X and Y are.
How does it work in general terms?
I'm not particularly surprised. Details about board member resignations are often fairly sensitive. Agreed that it'd be nice to know the details, though.
I had this idea that Amazon was this huge corporation that I'd never be able to get through to a human with. I spawned a bunch (4 actually) of instances in some region and forgot about them. Due to their bad ui (at the time), I couldn't see them when I logged in so I ended up getting charged heavily for them. Called up and they refunded me. Turns out I never terminated the instances. Just stopped them. Next month, I get billed again. Given the misunderstanding on my part, they more than happily refunded me and renewed my free year of the micro instance.

I really like their customer service and hope it stays how it is. I think if Walmart or insert big box company here did stuff like that, people would shop there more. Look at Nordstrom's with their insane refund policy (in the customer's favor). I think Costco does something like this as well, but I'm not a cardholder.
I was hoping you would hire Nick too so that he'd have more time to work on the code. I've been trying to get some changes to the spam filter through for a while. :)
You're mistaking what home 3d printing is now to what home 3d printing will be in 10-20 years. Technologies such as Selective Laser Sintering and the like can use a much more versatile set of materials, such as metal and ceramic, to create a wider range of products. Also, 3d printers can use non-petroleum based plastics, like Polylactic Acid, which are renewable. Yes, much like the microwave didn't replace the conventional oven, 3d printing isn't going to totally destroy retail. It is, however, going to make things a lot more interesting.
Yeah, all those Structure-Editors and Node-Editors and Meta-Node-Editors and all those years and still more and more simple text-editors keep winning. My personal impression is that developers are actually moving away from those uber-tools, IDEs even and move toward vim plus shell tooling...
You have a problem if yours does not.
What's missing from this is that Google's culture is designed to eliminate work-life balance by making as much of life as possible focus around work. A significant part of the compensation for Google employees is in the form of good "free" meals (including dinners), lots of services, entertainment, etc., all without leaving the Google campus. Would be interesting to see how the results are different from similar surveys done at a company like Microsoft that doesn't have such an all-encompassing work environment.
Does anyone know anything about whitehatsec?
> HN is the slowest site in my bookmarks, by FAR

You must not use reddit.

(I'm allowed to say that since it's partly my fault reddit is slow)
I concur, as a driver you're probably more likely to bump your key when turning which could be especially bad in some areas/speeds/locations.
> When it is better to "own" old IP than to make new one, the system is strangling innovation, nothing else.

Nailed it with that one. That's exactly why companies like Microsoft and IBM [1] fight so hard to keep the current patent system, or even make it worse. They have so much more to gain by rent-seeking with their old bogus patents than by creating new ones (especially if the new ones would have to be put through much more rigorous filtering), since they're not really the innovators in the tech industry anymore.

[1] - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/20...
This is assuming the mechanic is using their CAD workstation to design the part. However, what will most likely happen is that the mechanic will subscribe to a 3d printing service, much like they do already for keeping their automotive diagnostic readers up to date. That service will have the 3d models already made, so that one part of an assembly can be printed on an as-needed basis.
Antique? Try right tool for the right job. That's far more a distinction.
Journalism in America: Digital resurrection
> if some rule like "enabled for 24 hours after the car is run" would be appropriate

There are pressure sensors, such as those used to determine if the passenger airbag should be enabled/disabled. That should be the reference for both driver and passenger; if seat = occupied, trigger airbag if collision detected, regardless of engine status, ignition switch position, etc

If only automakers could update this sort of logic over the air...
Your comment got me thinking about my personal situation.

I switched to development about half a year ago. Before that, I worked in the industry 7 years as a game designer, producer and created a startup (even found some seed investment) which gruesomely failed.

So, I'm confident that I have the skills that you listed, but calling myself a senior?...
At the very least, a log of title and content changes by moderators would be useful.
You quibble about the term 'offer', but surely you could 'find' or 'discover' something for the men.

And do you tell the women they are going to need to learn to interact with men as part of a professional programming job? Are they only ok with that if they are in the majority?
I hope that you are still going hang out here to write oneliners.
"it could be the beginning of a second industrial revolution"
Understatement of the century.
Are there any Bitcoin for dummies books?
If you fix a bug that produces an incompatible block chain it must be forked, or at least that is the only way I have seen it happen so far.
Not quite. Those so called patent trolls are the thorn in the side of the large corporations. Even after a small entity succeeds in obtaining a patent and has their innovation copied by a large corporation and opens a dialogue with the large corporation, he/she is shunned and told to get lost. One large corporation (Apple) is at least honest about it and tells the small entity we can't take you seriously until you initiate a patent infringement suit [1]. The reason is rather simple: it is their most cost effective way of weeding out those they do need to worry about from those they can ignore.

[1] http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/05/01/is-patent-litigation-re...
Olden but Golden Days
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDA0t49AaZ4
This is pretty great. Frightening how I've been spending a ton more on Uber recently after the fare reductions.

Also, don't forget to click 'Show all trips' on the table and reload to see better results.
Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator
Has there ever been a point when Rilke would make the front page? The only comparable moment I remember was when Tarkovsky made the front page for a bit, but that was an extraordinary aberration.
Your First Erlang Program (in Style)
Apple Credential Phishing via appleidconfirm.net
Without being an expert in the area, but having some detailed knowledge in the field, it honestly sounds like hype. The statement that it wasn't mentioned anywhere, before is bogus. Take a look at the source [1] that describes how NAD actually has an effect on telomeres.

They really suggest using regular supplements on that url, which I'd call bullshit! I can't tell, if it's the editors fault, a missunderstandin, or if they really mean that. That's because I've no access to the real paper.

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleoti...