skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused. What is setting you off?

That seems to be scanned, yes. Then you run a full page OCR engine to extract the text _with bounding rectangles_ and create a PDF with the page being the input image, embedding the OCR results as invisible text at the recognized positions.

It's something I do day in/day out in this line of business, requires no skill apart from a decent engine and a 'create your own PDF' library (iText/iTextSharp is cool, go and buy a license. Not affiliated, but I'm a happy user).
I think its the size of the burden. If you're creating a thing from scratch and are responsible for pretty much every single aspect of it from dev to sysadmin PLUS you have CTO responsibilities on top of that you just lose track of stuff and make the odd mistake.

"I'll fix that a bit later" becomes "I have no idea what code is there anymore nor even the time to contemplate it".

Perhaps.
I don't want to sound like a new age hippy here, but if you were to think of emotional capital as something you have to expend when you make hard decisions, I think managers have to expend a lot more emotional capital on decisions like this then they would like. And if they have to do that, it distracts them from other things.

So, to avoid expending that emotional capital, they create abstract rules and entities that they can point to and say "aww shucks, I wish we could give you more money, but This Other Thing won't let me" (whether that be HR, or a pay scale, or other things). It's usually phrased in a way to say that it's about promoting fairness or organizational principles or something like that, and it is to a point, but I think it's just as much about avoiding the hard work of managing.

The problem is that at a certain point, these abstract entities (HR and "the rules") gain more power than the managers themselves, and now the organization is incapable of doing what it needs to do because the structure it has put into place is more suited to protecting the status quo than it is to making hard but rational decisions.
Impact of architectural and design decisions. How hard to decipher certain code parts you are so proud about today are a year later - my experience is that people used to work on small projects or who change projects a lot generate hard to maintain/understand code.

Learning non-trivial codebase often takes much more time. I worked on bigger projects and someone who worked there only six months would not be allowed to do bigger or core changes.

Then there is domain knowledge (finance, healthcare, law, etc) if you do that kind of software. Six months is enough to learn surface in anything non-trivial and everything is much more effective if developer already learned that.

Of course, last two points are not really valid for small projects world.
This assumes that you are guaranteed a 10% - 20% raise with every jump, but my experience is that you operate within bands, and once you reach the top of your band, higher offers are rare. If you want to get higher offers you need to have been promoted to the next job level.

As an example, if you are a junior software engineer, you can only earn more as a senior software engineer, and again as a project manager, and again as a product / line manager.

And the only way you get promoted to the next band is by staying for a set amount of time at a company to get promoted. Outright offers from a lower job level to a higher one is rare without demonstrated ability to do the job.

So yes over the short term, jumping ship often is more lucrative, but you'll hit a glass ceiling and have difficulty breaking through to the next level.
So a friend of mine just shared a survey from a student of social sciences on Facebook. The survey is concerned with stress levels of kids between age of 13 and 16, and is targeted to them. The data is to be used as a basis for a bachelor's thesis.

The first thing I learned is that my friend actually took part in the survey by "putting herself in the mindframe of a 13-year-old and filling it in as the kid would". After a short discussion about how doing so turns the whole thesis into pile of nonsense, she (herself a graduate from a liberal arts college) told me that the survey author was actually one of the better student in that she actually made the survey - as most people fill the surveys themselves or just make the data up.

So things like these give me trust issues with all the "soft sciences". I do consider most of the sociology nonsense, because I seriously doubt that people who make up data for their thesis will suddenly turn into honest researchers after graduation. Yes, the "best research in social psychology" might be "as well-supported as anything in physics or biology", but I doubt it's more than a small part of research done, and mostly research from first principles (so there isn't much chance that the research you're basing your paper on is crap).
Yeah, this is a fairly common compromise, and even helps in the stupid cases where you can't give person A a job title higher than person B who will be mortified if they don't have the best sounding job title, but you still need to give person A a raise and a feeling of advancement (so glad I don't work at a place like this anymore). So you give them some variation on their current job title (it's not a promotion over you, person B!) and a raise, and call it a day.

It depends on how effectively bureaucratic the bureaucracy is. If all workers have to have a job title that's already in the database, and all job titles have an assigned salary, then you're out of luck.
I've been told that I would be in a entry-level position because I hadn't professionally worked with Python before, even though I had masses of experience in Perl, with Python being my free-time/side project language. Apparently I would be a "Senior Perl developer" but a "Entry-Level Python developer." (and this was at a start-up, not some big corp with an HR department)
Gotcha. Well they are certainly cheaper, but cost can't be all there is to it. And in the case of Zendesk (we use them at my company), Freshdesk's pricing is not that much cheaper ($25 vs $16, I just checked) - so is $9 per month that important? Plus I assume the lower price comes with a cost - product quality, broken English when you call support, and more. I don't have experience with calling either one of those companies, but from a consumer perspective calling some banks and TelCos I've had that experience.
Ask HN: What to do as a programmer about to go homeless
I'm a full stack freelance web developer with several projects all heavily delayed. Meanwhile I'm living overseas in a country where I don't know anyone (Vancouver, British Columbia), have $60 USD left in my bank account, and only have rent paid for another 2 days (at a hostel). Food here is pretty expensive and runs about $15/day even if you really try to save, especially if you don't have a permanent place for groceries.

It seems to me my best bet of making money is exchanging programming services for money as usual. How do I make this kind of trade last-minute?

Resume is in profile if that helps give advice. Also, this is a special case, but I have no one to borrow money from.
I've been using RunPee for a long time, and it's been fantastic. Yes, they broke it a couple of times, but whatever, seems fine now. If I have to get a new phone, the essentials I need are text, email, maps, and RunPee.
I was going to write a quasi-motivational post telling you to take some time off, raise your rates, and talk with your team. But, then I read your question over and focused on one paragraph.

I honestly thought I was super tough and I can take this on. I actually really just want to kill myself.

First, you are super tough and this 'Tell HN' is proof of that. When you hit your absolute limit, you reached out for help. That is amazing and everyone here should be proud of you.

Second, if the anxiety is so severe that you want to kill yourself, you have a choice. You can keep doing the same thing you are doing now. Or, you can make big changes. If you keep doing the same thing you are doing, unfortunately, this is only going to get worse. If you want to fix this, you need to make some big changes.

Other commenters have suggested some good changes already. I encourage you to follow their advice. However, my email address is in my profile. If you need someone to talk to, please use it. I can even send you my phone number, or my Skype ID so that if you ever need a friendly voice that likely doesn't know you and who will never judge you, you can reach out. Alternately, go check out http://www.7cupsoftea.com/.

I've felt this exact same way, where I was so anxious that my own death felt like the only way out. You're going through something horrible and posting here represents a herculean effort.

Now, this is an ugly topic to bring up and I don't expect you to answer this on a public forum, but do you have a plan for how and when you will harm yourself? If you do, this is a medical emergency. Please take steps to protect yourself. Unfortunately, in most places, if you tell a medical professional that you have a plan, you are immediately committed for observation. So, be careful, but also take extraordinary steps to care for yourself.

I'm sorry that I don't have a solution. The best I can offer is my support. Use my email address if you need it.
An IRC bot that responds to "YO"
>To be fair, all of the best decisions I've ever made have come out of "I feel that way" and all of my worst decisions have come out of "This is rationally correct".

You could hypothesize things are likely to be that way because there is no rational purpose to life - you do some stuff then die. If anything you could say a successful life is one where you enjoyed the ride which may be maximised by doing what feels right. I guess.
Want to contribute to open source? My IRC webchat
Yeah, I can really recommend reading "Delivering Happiness", it's an eye opener for company culture.
> This is not crawling, only scraping from an already rendered page. They really can't complain.

You may want to have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right
This is a great explanation. It's also called "golden-handcuffs".

In your 30's, I think you need to start thinking about exit-strategy (saving enough to live financially independent), rather than hopping to yet another job.

Then, you can job hop down in salary and do something more fun.
Posts without URLs are penalized, so you'd be better off posting this with a link to your site, then adding the text as a comment to the new thread.
Yo Developers API
Actually this may be an important factor as to why a lot of people don't experience flow as much as described in the article or by people like Carmack; they have day jobs, family life, 9-5 jobs, that kinda thing. Those things will pull you out of the zone; lunch breaks, stopping for dinner, other people distracting you, etc.

I think Carmack (and people like him) grew up in the proverbial basement, where they could spend hours and hours on end with their hobbies without any social obligations; this is where they developed that concentration, and that state of mind and environment is where they return to if they need to work on a big or complicated task.
Harp: Static web server with built-in preprocessing
A description would be great (especially when you run into ambiguously named projects or projects with similar names), but I'd also like to see something like download metrics and maybe even comments. The Sublime Text package manager [0] does a reasonably good job of this (sans comments, which leads me to think maybe it's a bad idea), which helps identify old & abandoned projects.

0: https://sublime.wbond.net/
Grep for video
I think you misunderstand the trouble one can cause through limited information. We can phish, we can gain access to some personal information.

Both of those pots of "gold" are threatening enough attack vectors.
This is known as the Dead Sea effect.
From a consumer's perspective all I see is a bunch of high end cell phones with very similar features and priced the same. Nevertheless, many people decide to buy the Samsung flagship phone over the Sony, LG or HTC.

Better economies of scale could be the reason if they decided to price their phones lower, but they don't. So that it's not the reason why people are choosing Samsung.

About the competent design, I don't see the Galaxy being superior to the HTC one or the Z2.
One big issue for me is that brands have become drastically less useful in predicting product quality.

Very few of the major brands that were big when I grew up in the '70s haven't thrown away their quality in favor of ... I'm not sure. Sony is a good example, even good through the '80s as well, as long as you didn't get something manufactured in Mexico with cold soldier joints, as my family back in SW Missouri did, fortunately they knew how to deal with that problem.

Today every purchase I make is proceeded by research, caution or whatever to make sure I'm still getting the same thing, or that the New And Improved version isn't significantly worse, or that the manufacturer hasn't thrown away quality in their new model.

For me, outside of some rare exceptions like Amazon, or some providers of higher end products, brand equity is all but dead. No amount of advertising can counteract the facts on the ground for someone who's been around long enough, and I'll bet even young whippersnappers are getting wise to this new scheme of things.
I think that's missing the point again. The point of a patent is so that the underlying technology is public. A patent system in fact does exactly what you suggest, which is to create a monopoly for a certain period of time so that the inventor can profit. But the existence of a patent implies that the formula for the cancer drug is out, and so other companies can use that to potentially create better versions or apply it to other areas.
It was one of a bunch of changes we rolled out a couple nights ago. Others include normalizing Blogspot urls to blogspot.com, recognizing subdomains for some additional sites, and fixing a bug where new users' votes weren't being added to their 'saved' list.
You didn't know about the field of Ethics? It's (IMVHO) one of the most important fields in Philosophy, and (again, IMHO) with the most practical applications in real life.

Before you rush off to study it (which I highly recommend, for anyone who has the chance / ability), it's not so much about learning better systems of ethics or learning about the many types of systems of ethics that have been thought up in the past, but it's about learning the arguments why they are/were wrong and how they break down in situations, and to carry these arguments. That's how a lot of fields in Philosophy work, and why it seems such a dry study of "arguing for argument's sake". The point is, by doing this, practice, you learn a lot of useful things along the way and sharpen your mind.

I do agree with the other poster that the featured article (while interesting to read), does seem to lack a bit in how it connects with actual philosophy of ethics.
The one advantage of having employees and partners involved with this is you have the opportunity to delegate more
Does anyone have a list of which states consider web/software/tech services to be subject to sales tax? I know Texas does [1], but haven't found an overall list.

[1] http://window.state.tx.us/taxinfo/taxpubs/tx96_259.pdf
I say just mailman.

Anyone from Mozilla, EcmaScript, GnuPG and thelike here?
Don't miss your monthly "password reminder" mail...

P.S. Just save ONLY a salted hash. Hash functions are designed to be one-way, so no one but you can re-store your password. EVER.
I don't think I have ever met anyone who generally meets those three conditions.
No, the merchant stops bidding for the as once you complete the purchase.
I came here to write this, too - it's a fascinating result (from a fascinating book - highly recommended). Humans, it seems, are just not well equipped to cope with reality. I think this shows through in many facets of life - essentially, much of it is much more random than people like to believe, and people really struggle with that.
There was a recent Reddit AMA with Yann LeCun's [1] where he comments on Torch7[slightly edited]:

Torch is a numerical/scientific computing extension of LuaJIT with an ML/neural net library on top. Torch7 is what is being used for deep learning R&D at NYU, at Facebook AI Research, at Deep Mind, and at Google Brain.

(At Facebook) We are using Torch7 for many projects (as does Deep Mind and several groups at Google) and will be contributing to the public version. We are using Torch for most of our research projects (and some of our development projects) at Facebook. Deep Mind is also using Torch in a big way (largely because my former student and Torch-co-maintainer Koray Kavukcuoglu sold them on it). Since the Deep Mind acquisition, folks in the Google Brain group in Mountain View have also started to use it.

Facebook, NYU, and Google/Deep Mind all have custom CUDA back-ends for fast/parallel convolutional network training. Some of this code is not (yet) part of the public distribution.

The huge advantage of LuaJIT over Python is that it way, way faster, leaner, simpler, and that interfacing C/C++/CUDA code to it is incredibly easy and fast.

Torch is maintained by Ronan Collobert (IDIAP), Koray Kavukcuoglu (Deep Mind. former s=PhD student of mine) and Clément Farabet (running his own startup. Also a former PhD student of mine). We have used Torch as the main research platform in my NYU lab for quite a while.

You could say that Torch is the direct heir of Lush, though the maintainers are different. Lush was mostly maintained by Leon Bottou and me. Ralf Juengling took over the development of Lush2 a few years ago.

[1] http://fastml.com/yann-lecuns-answers-from-the-reddit-ama/
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=harpjs#!/story/sort_by_date/0/harp...
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=videogrep#!/story/forever/0/videog...
Great use for RunPee: finding out if any movie has extra scenes after the credits.
Show HN: GitHub-based DNS Hosting
> As someone responsible for $xxxxxx monthly spend in online advertising, it clearly works. We measure it pretty much from end to end.

Do you know how much profit you would have earned without the advertising? How do you determine that (if you can say)?

That is, without the ads, some customers would purchase more or more profitable products; some would purchase the same, and some would purchase less. But how would it net out -- and more interesting to me, how do you measure that?
Having recently started to explore the Amazon Route53 API I can see a lot of value in using it:

* Anycast DNS handling located in multiple regions.

* Good API for accessing it.

But the barrier to entry is high for many, and the volume-based pricing might put people off.

On that basis I thought a middle-layer of glue might be useful, so I created https://dns-api.com/

Using Github webhooks you can trigger updates of your DNS in a simple manner, allowing near instant updates.
To Make Yourself More Productive, Simplify
Just how much JavaScript is needed for a console 2048?
Show HN: A minimalist's web clipping (Chrome extension)
Value objects and aggregates in Active Record
This is why I prescribe well practiced rationality leavened with empathy. The problem is not emotions being a tie-breaker per se. The problem is when people aren't clear about which feelings are involved.

Most commonly, people tell themselves they are acting "to protect" when they are really acting out of hate and aggression.

Also, I don't think it should be excused when someone is confronted with their contradictions, but they deny what they are doing anyways. Sometimes I think that that is my biggest problem with humanity.
I agree that establishing causality is very difficult and especially when it comes to the advertising business.

Nevertheless, my point is that when it comes to high end Android phones it is starting to look like a commodity market. So in my opinion the only way to explain Samsung's success is either their ad spending or sheer luck, which may as well be a really good explanation.
You founded the company. So take control.

Set 6 pm as the going-home time for EVERYBODY. If something is late because of this, that means the company should not have made commitments it can't keep (and you should take a strong interest in not making the same mistake again).

As someone said, don't answer the phone past a certain time. Most phones have some kind of do-not-interrupt mode. Use that. If people have an emergency, at the very least they can call and leave voicemail.

How about bringing a refrigerator and some beers into the office? Lead by example. If you're drinking beer at 2 pm, that tells everyone else this is the kind of startup where drinking beers at 2 pm is OK. People who are too uptight to deal with that will leave: let them.

It's _your_ startup. Run it the way _you_ think is best. What's stopping you?
This is before my time, but I have heard from a few people that there were a few, at least one Hindi classic movie [1] back in the 70's that had a running time of 255 minutes and this movie was screened with two intermissions, understandably.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mera_Naam_Joker
LangApp Russian – Free Android app to practice Russian
"I just want to earn decent money and be able to do what I want to do whenever during the day."

"Beers at 2pm? Sure!"

You may want to recalibrate your expectations. I mean, this sounds a lot like you want your cake and to eat it too. What do you consider decent money? If you want to do whatever you want whenever and have beers at 2, you may have to settle for a considerably smaller income than you consider "decent".
The startup roller coaster has gloomy and unhappy parts to it and also exhilarating parts to it.

Remember to have fun. Make it fun. Hire fun people.

Learn how to say no to business that isn't strategic but will bring in quick cashflow. Obligatory Jobs story

"“He said he was very impressed with what I had done, and that he agreed about the potential for the future, but ‘frankly I’m not interested in working with you on this.’ I asked why. He said: ‘You have to understand. This is something that nobody in the world yet understands. I can’t be distracted. I’m trying to make the best hammer I can make, the best hammer in the world. You can use my hammer to tear something down, or you can use it to build something up. I really don’t care what you do with my hammer. I just want to make the best possible hammer. And what you are doing is a wonderful bit of construction, but to me it’s a distraction.’"

The dev deathmarch needs the hours. But you dont have to be there tracking down production bugs at 1 am. Leave early and show your gratitude by springing for paid long weekend vacations to vegas or whatever.
this isn't similar at all...
Additionally, the reason why we have weird typeclasses is that they cut such a wide swath of abstraction that you usually can recognize common functions for various types and minimize the number of things you must memorize.
"But if we're not working hard and all night, our competitors who are will end up taking our clients"
Five ways Apple could push headphone technology forward
You're doing it wrong.

Go to work at 10, say a stupid but inspiring quote of the day.

Go to lunch at 12. Then hit the course at 3.

That's how you do it. In other words: Delegate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901612

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7898318
As much as I love the exploration of blind spots that we all have, I am a little queasy on the implied distinction of programmers into "functional" and "non-functional."

That is, it seems sad that we have programmers that would shun or pick tools strictly on their paradigm. And, knowing that such exist, it seems somewhat obvious that some massive blind spots would emerge.