skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alphalend (www.alphalend.com) - London - First non-founding developer(s)

=== TL;DR ===

We believe that banking should be driven by the latest and greatest technologies, not legacy systems. As technology evolves, banking processes should evolve in sync, not lag behind. That is our goal here at Alphalend: to supercharge consumer lending and revolutionise the industry’s standard practice . Technology moves fast… nothing you read below is set in stone and everyone who joins our team is expected to continually drive us to do better. If this sounds like you, please get in touch: contact@alphalend.com

=== Who are we? ===

We are a small, passionate and energetic team of exceptional people funded by some of Europe’s most respected angel investors. Our vision is to move banking into the 21st century. We have the plan, the backing and the skills to make it happen but we need additional talented devs to push us further and faster.

=== Who are you? ===

You are a leader: you imagine, share, collaborate and create. You have the skills and experience to improve and evolve our development strategy, but most of all you always want to keep learning. You relish the idea of joining a fast-growing company that is using cutting edge technology to redefine the world of retail banking. An understanding of IoC, its benefits and drawbacks, quality testing and experience working in early stage teams are the key skills required given our current setup. Our technology stack will evolve, however, so you should love to experiment, always striving to find the best means to achieve the goal at hand, and always be keen to explore new technologies that would improve our product.

=== What we offer: ===

Market-leading compensation

25 days holiday + public holidays

Whatever equipment you need to get the job done - you choose

Flexible working hours whenever possible. Occasional working from home

7th floor office with the best view of any office you’ve worked in, guaranteed

Opportunity to be our first non founding developer, take a key role in recruiting the team and evolving our development strategy

=== Technology: ===

Platform built on Symfony 2.4

Doctrine2 using MySQL on Amazon RDS. Doctrine migrations for DB updates.

PHP5.5 and Apache running on Amazon EC2

Testing with PHPUnit. Coverage currently around 30%, ideally you can help improve this. BDD lover? Please teach me!

Jenkins used for automated build and deployment

Git for version control

Lots of 3rd party APIs used to gather data (REST and SOAP)

Machine learning (fuzzy logic and neural networks) for the most intelligent risk assessment and pricing possible.

Extensive analytics driven marketing.

No legacy code, all written in the last 6 months

=== How we work: ===

Our development methodology is currently very agile and approaches continuous deployment. We regularly do several live deployments per day. A feature implementation would go something like:
Feature branch -> implement -> code review -> merge to development -> test on dev -> merge to master -> deploy to live.

=== Interested? ===

email us at contact@alphalend.com
Didn't deRaadt have to commit OpenBSD workarounds to TLB errata just a couple years back? I don't think he's making things up.
Right. 3 pm to 9 pm is much more reasonable. Give your brain a chance to rest.
There is a list of (some) languages here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialecting (NB. I would add Factor, Haskell, Io and Perl6 to that list)

I personally love how easy it is to write lucid & robust dialects in Rebol. Some examples of Rebol dialects...

* List comprehension - http://blog.revolucent.net/2009/04/dirt-simple-dsl-in-rebol....

* Cron/scheduler - http://softinnov.org/rebol/scheduler.shtml

* Excel - http://www.robertmuench.ch/development/projects/excel/dialec...

* PDF builder - http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/Misc/pdf-maker-doc.pdf

* GUI example (written in Rebol 2 VID) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7070349

* And a small ditty that I left on Reddit comment just to show what can be done - http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tw17i/rust_is_...
ITT: Rich people finding ways to avoid giving money to people directly.

I'd love some extra money. I would use it to fix up the emissions system on my car so I don't spend twice as much as I have to on gas. Then I'd use that to drive to where the jobs are and get one.

I might write fewer comments on Reddit once gainfully employed, but is that such a bad thing? It seems like half the problems on Reddit are from people having too much free time to troll and make low-effort comments.
From a developers perspective, we are often approached by entrepreneurs who have an idea where gold might be and if we (the developer) dig all the test holes then gosh, we get to keep part of what we might find. It's not an attractive proposition.

Things that would make such a deal more attractive:

- the entrepreneur has has a track record of finding gold

- the entrepreneur has already dug a lot of test holes and found some gold

- the entrepreneur actually funds the operation instead of asking the developer to "invest" 10s of thousands of dollars of development time

- the entrepreneur believes in the idea so much that they will give the CTO more equity than than he/she gets

These things are all hard for a college student to do. What you can do is try to learn coding enough to make a "minimum viable product" that proves there is demand for your product. Yes, this is really hard but business is really hard.

Start-ups often "pivot" i.e. you start out with the idea to sell widgets but you discover that people like the cool boxes they come in so you sell cool boxes instead. This is one of the reasons that the original idea is not that valuable - there is a good chance it will get abandoned by the time you are done.
*0xff/255

Simple but potentially dangerous right? :P
Generally you should assume that yes, it will count as work in whatever country you're currently in, and doing it on a tourist visa is often illegal.

In practice it will depend on exactly what you do, and where. E.g. I used to travel to US a lot on the visa waiver scheme, and was briefed by an expensive US immigration lawyer on how to answer immigration questions out of concern that if I were to answer the wrong thing I might get turned away even without actually ever doing anything wrong.

In the US the general rule is that if you visit without a business visa, you can not do "productive work". That is, you can go to meetings and take instructions from your employer or a client, answer e-mails (but work you may need to do to be able to answer it may in theory not be allowed), or negotiate a contract, but you can't work on a project. In practice US immigration is pretty flexible as long as you're not taking the piss or give them reasons for concerns, and never overstay. Other countries can vary substantially - some will see you as an income stream for their country, others will see you as a nuisance, and treat you accordingly.

When it comes to taxation, you should assume that yes, you have to pay local taxes unless you specifically know otherwise. In most countries there will be a time threshold and/or a matter of what work you do, and often you won't be able to stay long enough or do work that incurs taxation on the most basic business visas anyway. 3 or 6 months is a common threshold before being considered resident for tax purposes, but tax liabilities can be incurred before you're considered resident some places. In many cases there will be treaties in place that regulates which country you should be taxing to if you're ordinarily resident - or a citizen - somewhere else.

If you're a US citizen, you have the added complication that the IRS considers its jurisdiction over US citizens as global, and so you need to check the situation before you do work abroad, as the absence of a tax treaty regulating income taxes can in the worst case mean you'll get taxed twice.

And yes, our laws were written for this manner of work. People have been travelling across borders to work for centuries. There's an extensive amount of treaties and case law dedicated to handling this, and large numbers of lawyers specialising on giving advice on how to deal with this.
Beijing just sent a chilling message to Hong Kong’s umbrella revolution
Your main function is most likely pretty empty and that's the only place where you need to deal with hard failure. And that's the same in all languages. If you write in Python you don't just not handle exceptions either. Somewhere you catch them down and present them to the user in a good way.
He's probably referring to the fact that you have to use different arithmetic operators for int and float in OCaml, so
it would have to be 1.0 +. 2.0
One of the more interesting features to me was the "document zippers" that lets you programmatically navigate the doc as you might a tree structure in many functional languages.

In addition, the output is certainly more convincing at this time.
The MobilityBee Difference
I wish this happened in US. The fee part, not the paid to read part :)
It's really crazy how the students reacted to this when the fees were introduced. They were very low compared to the US, less than 1000 euros for an entire year yet the students responded with mass protests and vandalism. On university also had it's master key(ring?) stolen and had to spend a lot of money to redo every lock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_University#Protests_a...
another version: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/german-universi...

I basically think this is a very big news. It effects a lot of people. Though I think this only applies (and should) to domestic students.

In our country (India) .. the Right to Education Act was a hot topic this year.. it still has to go a long way.. but it can learn from Germany's example of doing away with the fees altogether in Public Universities. Young people are the driving force behind the economy. But many fail to live up to their potential due to economic constraints.

1. Most Public Universities already run mostly upon Tax-Payers Money. So Burden is not that sudden, as one would think.

2. Expansions would be more scrutinized. We have to look at this in terms of Fixed and Variable/Recurring Cost.

3. Caution would be required on part of distributing the money corpus. Some colleges are in comfortable zone of the balance sheet, while some aren't. Those who are not, need to be looked after.

4. Students should still be charged for some "Extras" like Foreign Trips (optional in many colleges).

I would love to know the finer details of how German Govt is handling the economics around this decision. This could be a Epic Success or Epic Fail. The dice has been cast.
Coolblue - Rotterdam, NL - Full-time C# Developers of all levels (relocation offered) - http://goo.gl/yeVZKi

Hiring awesome developers.

We are in the process of a monstrous migration to C#. The application concerned is Vanessa, and Vanessa is big and complicated. We are not just migrating it, we’re building a completely new C# CRM meets ERP application from scratch. So no legacy code in our C# ;-). To do such a job in a very good way very very very intelligent developers are key.

Coolblue is: no hierarchy, crazy obsession for testable code, max intellectual freedom, growing ridiculously fast, loads of fun (we have our own gaming arcade and bar) and not to forget great technical expertise!

We're doing good, very good: we're an awardwinning company and we've set the standard for e-commerce in the Netherlands.

To be able to stay the best, we need the best. That's why I'm posting.

Wanna know more? http://goo.gl/yeVZKi

Hunger not satisfied? b.bloemsaat@coolblue.nl
I found pg's comments about "podcasting businesses" interesting, in light of this exciting podcast about creating a startup around podcasting: http://hearstartup.com/ --"...supposed to be in the podcasting business, and you like podcasting business, do those words even grammatically go together? The answer turned out to be no as Evan discovered."
Yes. See: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631
I go to Oakland University in Michigan and we are the only University in the state(country?) to charge no fees. Tuition is still high but that is usually set by the state.
How to Harness Your Brain's Dopamine Supply and Increase Motivation
To me, the problem is that downvoting is contextually vague, while the effect on HN is visually explicit. It would be one thing entirely if downvoting just affected the page ranking, but having it also act as a visual cue that "this person's opinion is not worth your time, so don't worry - we've made it difficult for you to read it" only serves to exacerbate a groupthink mentality. I don't think more downvoting would solve the problem, it would only make more comments illegible.

I've seen more than a couple of threads where an entire side of what I find to be an interesting (or at least worthwile) discussion is blotted out. It's annoying if you actually want to consider an entire thread and not just get spoon-fed the parts which correlate to consensus opinion. This is supposed to be a forum for intellectually thought-provoking or at least civil discussion, but the implementation of downvoting amounts to sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting down someone you don't agree with.
I feared that, but overall combined with programmatic context (e.g. iter, array or whatever) I've had the game come up very rarely.
You continue to miss the point.

Current systems are optimized for current constraints. When a constraint changes, the entire system changes.

You can keep saying "Physics! Physics!", but the entire point is that once you change the one input in the physics equations, you can change all the others to keep the balance.
Works on my machine. Maybe you have some bad plugin?
But the newspapers haven't scrapped the paywall. (And setting my user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" didn't dispel it :(
German Shepherd Puppies
"Law = A written order issued by your rulers. "

Don't be so obtuse. A law is a written order, adding the remainder is just an inflammatory accusation that undermines the public at large.

You may believe that the public or those governed by which ever particular law you select are too scared or ignorant and have the law imposed on them from outside interests but the greater numbers always win in the end. A particular rule of law may be arduous today and for many more consecutive days but one day the rule will change.

This is evident throughout history and will continue to be.
You should know things before buying LELO INA 2 or other rabbits
Impressive. I wish US would do the same.
Ask HN: Help becoming a one-man 'micropreneur'
I'm a recovering freelancer that recently picked up "Start Small, Stay Small"* from a thread here on HN and it really resonated with me.

I have been freelancing very informally over the last few years but I find myself totally unable to progress. My contract work has fizzled out and I haven't been able to get the energy or passion together to replace it with more. I've gone through numerous cycles of trying to love freelancing followed by total burnout & disillusionment. Put simply, I feel like I'm stagnating.

I'm a good all-round web developer and communicator so I would like to draw on this and work on my own stuff. I love the freedom of freelancing and I can't see myself working for somebody else (nor would my CV allow for it at this stage). Due to unfortunate family circumstance I'm living back in the family home which gives me the opportunity to try things while still living rent-free so I'd like to grasp that.

I'm sure there are many others here on HN that are making their living via their own software so I'd love to get some advice and resources to help get me motivated and broken-in?

- For those who didn't have breakaway successes upfront, how did you get started and, in particular, motivated?

- How did you generate ideas and then focus on them?

- How did you fail? What ideas didn't work and how many of them did you have?

- What resources did you use? Lectures, classes, sites, books, blogs etc.?

* http://www.startupbook.net/
yep the title its a bit misleading, makes you think that you guys where doing something illegal lol, but it was just an ordinary check, thats all
The fees were really laughably small by U.S. standards, but fees, once implemented, seem to turn into a "slippery slope." So, as much as I like to mock my German students for complaining about having to pay €200 per semester, I think they were right to protest and "nip it in the bud".

For instance, the University of California is formally tuition-free for in-state residents (edit: is this correct?), but over the last several decades, the required "campus fees" have grown from zero to $12,972 per year (UC Berkeley). (Perhaps someone could find a nice graph of the required fees vs time from 1960 until today.)
Find the Best Vibrator of the Year Revealed
Zimbabwean Special Dispensation Permit (ZSP) Full Details
I was looking forward to getting told which web sites I visited recently. What a bummer...
Is price significant for public/state universities as well in US?
Investigating Ebola: How contact tracing will work in Texas
No they didn't have SLAT/EPT then. That came in with the i-series processors. The processors were knee deep in errata and buggy as hell.

As they are now: http://www.intel.co.uk/content/dam/www/public/us/en/document...

Intel don't do a good job of design or engineering really. That's going to sting, I know.

I'd love to see 64 bit SPARC make a comeback TBH. Proper hardware contexts/threads, more registers, a decent MMU etc.
when presented with the choice between .... bunch of people in the first camp and a bunch in the second camp.

This is a VERY narrowed perspective.

Unless these behaviors are constant across all areas of one's life, they only tell you what one's priorities are.

Because someone may sacrifice short term for long term gain in their career, while at the same time sacrificing long term gain for short term satiation when it comes to food or health.

So truly what can be said about this marvelous developer, and about his ability to hold on for long term outcomes, when she refused a Google buyout offer and took her company public, when at the same time she pushed back starting a family, eating healthy, and working out.

My point is NO-ONE belongs to one camp and one camp only. You and I, and all others belong to both camps.
Yep, it seems only to change a small memory range. I'm guessing this means this isn't highly exploitable, but contains at least some risk of leaking private information. Can anyone with more experience with this specific APIC stuff comment? Could you get different data each time or only the same small range?
If you don't fight hard going from 0€ to 1000€, then you don't have any chance resisting a raise from 1000€ to 50000€ in the next decade. Just look at what happened to, once affordable, education in USA and do the opposite.

In Germany we like to get something in return for the tax we are paying to the state.
Sounds like fun. I wonder though what 'intellectual freedom' means? It can't, for instance, mean 'disagree with the premise that testable code is the highest good' for instance.
If you take a look at the home page [1], he says he's having problems with the cairo pdf library not supporting things he wants, so that may be the source of this (he does mention letter spacing specifically).

1. http://www.sile-typesetter.org/index.html
Full Stack Development – Visualizing with D3, and Deploying with Dokku
Unbranded / Free holiday retail and event-space for startups
No but iOS shares a lot of code and APIs with OS X, which simplifies Apple's development.

Apple understands that different devices need different UIs but can share code and core APIs.

Microsoft thinks that different devices should have the same UI but hasn't previously managed to share code and APIs.
YPlan Looking for Python Developers in NYC and London
YPlan is looking for some full time Python Developers to join our back-end team in both NYC and London. The back-end team here is responsible for the API that the apps talk to, the internal CMS, the various websites, the event partner site, and programming support for the data science team, so basically everything code that isn't a smartphone app.

The team and business are growing rapidly and we are looking for top notch developers to
help us develop and improve our tech stack. You will get to work on a variety of problems and technologies, help shape the future direction of our tech, and have plenty of room for taking on more responsibility over time.

A little more about YPlan....

Here at YPlan, we're on a mission to make your nights out more spontaneous. We’re obsessed with going out, but more than that, we’re keen on providing an easy, slick, no-nonsense way to discover entertainment. Well, that, and office nerf gun wars. Maybe an occasional ping pong tournament or three.

If you are an experienced and hungry over-achiever, love mobile, are motivated by the idea of being a key part of what Forbes says is "One of the 7 hottest global startups of 2013" - this key role may well be for you.

You can find more details about the open positions here:-

http://boards.greenhouse.io/yplan/jobs/17848#.VCwFHytdU7Q

http://boards.greenhouse.io/yplan/jobs/17847#.VCwFMStdU7Q

http://boards.greenhouse.io/yplan/jobs/27465#.VCwFQCtdU7Q

In addition, please feel free to e-mail Martin Duncan @ martin.duncan@yplanapp.com if you want to hear more.
The iPhone 6 Review-AnandTech
Yeah but you are one person. Each of us has to make the decision. That's the root of all sorts of effects, like mob psychology or flash mobs or civilization.

So as a billionaire, do you spend your legacy on abandoning the kids and chilling at the neighbors, or staying and tending to the problems here?
Whilst tuition fees in Ireland have not really risen - registration fees have gone from €200 to €3,000 over the 08-14'recession. In the UK fees have also risen. Finland and Denmark are free. I'm not that familiar with Southern or Eastern Europe.

I think free third level institutions are important but I'm not opposed to the "free now tax later after certain pay threshold" education systems like Australia.

Also [image] this: https://i.imgur.com/SXNtYyi.jpg taken from corrosponding reddit thread is also relevant. It illustrates tuition fees in Europe.
Is Coding Art?
[video] WebGL multi-devices (beloola.com)
Scan the Internet for Autonomous Systems that can perform IP spoofing
I ran a scan of the internet to find out which AS permit IP spoofing. It sends ICMP ping messages with the original destination in the payload, and tests the response: if the source address is non routable (like 127.0.0.1), then the AS clearly allows IP spoofing. Results are pretty interesting. Read the full post here (or if tl;dr, scroll to results plot at the end) http://meat.pisto.horse/2014/10/find-autonomous-systems-with-ip-spoofing.html
I was raised in the midwest and this comment really resonated with me. Most of us make fun of these people as "backwards rednecks", but most every backwards redneck I have met has been genuinely happy and led a pretty care-free life. I left KY to seek out my fortune, but sometimes I think I might have left it there instead.
I think he's talking about the fact that OCaml has separate operators for floating point (i.e. in his example, you'd use 1.0 +. 2.0).
I implement high-performance software systems in C++ as my day job. The software has to compile and run on Linux, Solaris, and AIX. The same code is 2x slower on AIX (Power) and 3x-5x slower on Solaris (Sparc) than on Linux (x86). So say whatever you want about theoretical differences in architectures, but in the real world Sparc and Power systems are absolutely not competitive, both on price (absolute $$, and per CPU) and performance (per CPU - they do have more cpu cores, usually).
That's from three and a half years ago and refers to a different state.
Building a Foundation for Growth: Earning Your Right to Grow
A Path to Full-time Open Source
Footnote typesetting is abominable, too.