skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For someone to become a effective creator of programs today, they need to learn

- a style of analytical thinking and formal reasoning

- syntax and semantics of 1 or more programming languages

- interpreting the debug and error reporting capabilities of their environment

- version control

- text editing

- one or more build systems

- a mental model of computing machines and networks

Outside of academic environments you need to learn all of these thing simultaneously. If we can collapse away a few of these things with minimal loss of productivity we make programming much accessible.
There is an increasing number of German universities which offer Master programs taught in English.

Here is a list of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service):

> https://www.daad.de/deutschland/studienangebote/internationa...
PS - Ideally I am looking for less than fulltime projects.
The underlying tech is bluetooth + web, but the user interface for this does not currently exist.
Same here with Infinite Jest. I've started and stopped like five times. And I always start from the beginning again because there's a lot of little things to keep track of you won't remember after four-five months.
Note that this sideproject was inspired by Hypermasher featured here earlier, I wanted to expand it to explore videos by topic.
While it would be nice to not have to answer any work emails after work hours, I'm not sure government is the right place to accomplish this. It would be better as a company policy to train people to not send work emails, rather than risk prosecution. Sometimes work emails after hours can be pleasant, e.g. we just closed another round of funding, or we just hit profitability.
As an example, US medicine staffing and pricing problems can directly attributed to the medicine school debt insanity.
New Communication and Workflow Platform
World’s top financial institutions make $66 million capital investment in new company Symphony Communication Services Holdings LLC which acquires Perzo Inc.
Today, Symphony Communication Services Holdings LLC, a secure communication and workflow technology company, announced its formation through a $66 million investment from a group of the world’s leading financial institutions. Through this unprecedented consortium, Symphony seeks to solve an industry-wide communication challenge by providing a platform for communities of financial services professionals to communicate securely and efficiently using compliant standards and end-to-end encryption.
Currently reading: The Humans, by Matt Haig.

Funny, insightful, perceptive. It's a really great book.
How do browsers know loading progress?
I started reading "Atlas Shrugged" after reading about Peter Thiel's libertarian views. I'm thoroughly enjoying it!
My first thought on reading the title was "so I should molest my employees' children while I appropriate their finances to offshore numbered bank accounts?"

A "cult" is not a good model for anything. Not only does it refer to a form of abusive relationship, but it also refers to a mindless follower dynamic. If I am founding a company to do innovative knowledge work, I do not want mindless followers. I want employees who are smarter than me in various ways, especially in areas that are my weaknesses, and I want them to apply themselves fully which means I need to pay them well or cut them in on ownership. Sure, maybe I could get a "bargain" on labor by hoodwinking people with image, but people wise up fast and I will have high turnover.

It's good to have a sense of mission and purpose, but that doesn't make something a "cult." The article contains some solid advice if you ditch the hyperbole.

It's also okay to have a company that demands a lot from its employees as long as its up front about that. An example would be SpaceX: apparently they are tough as hell to get into and they tell you up front that basically you'll have no life, etc., but lots of people want to work there because they believe in the mission. If I were in a different life phase / circumstance, I would work there knowing going in that I'm sorta gonna be joining the army for a while. (I'd also do it for the resume and the experience.) But I don't consider that a cult either, since the mission is real. They're actually building real spaceships that fly and stuff. To me "cult" means the mission is bullshit.
The State of C (1988)
Currently reading:

Where The Golden Apples Grow, Kage Baker

Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew, Ellen Notbohm

Atypical: Life With Asperger's in 20 1/2 Chapters, Jesse A. Saperstein

Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters

Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
How do I know the top 100 items listed as "Bus Stop" aren't someone's malicious raspberry pi hidden in the bushes, spitting out hundreds of URLs and varying the signal strength so they appear to be coming from different locations and...wait a minute. I think my phone just got DOS'ed.
Interview with the Darkwallet creator Amir Taaki. (starts at 15:23)
It's amazing they asked, because you got a clear indication that they will have no respect for your life. Good to know that early.

I mean, every startup I've worked with has behaved in some way like this. But there are extremes. I work for a large company now, and couldn't be happier. I work at least 2/3rds what I did at a startup, and I get paid more.

It's amazing. I never had a vacation that wasn't interrupted by tons of work while working at a startup. Never. Never had a vacation. Worked on Christmas multiple times.

I was shocked like hell I had my first vacation at big corp. Off for weeks, and no one emailed me once. I didn't even know what to do with myself.
Rule 2: Giving People a Chance to “Change the World” Is a Lousy Way to Recruit Employees

Have to say that I roll my eyes every time I see an HN article titled "X is hiring: Help change the face of Y forever"
This. I want to keep in touch with people which I WILL make mad
Just completed: Zero to One.

Always reading: Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon of Life.
You probably never build anything for Windows.
StatusPage.io (YC S13) is hiring a back ender in Denver, CO
StatusPage is a YCS13 company, currently 5 employees distributed throughout CA, CO, and NC, profitable, and lots of awesome work coming down the pipe. We’re hiring because we want somebody awesome to join the team, to hack on code and tend to boxen with us, and to grow the business and launch a new yet-to-be-announced-super-secret project. You must be located in (or willing to relocate/commute to) Denver, CO.
--

A little about you as a good candidate:

* Strong background with linux systems, running sites with real traffic, and lots of background work.

* Experience with Ruby or Python, PostgreSQL or MySQL. Cassandra or Riak would be fantastic.

* Battle-hardened ops scars, including on-call response, and a mean desire to sleep through each and every night

* Integration experience with third party services and APIs, and ability to build resilient systems that can handle external failures

* Experience with Node.js, websockets, or both, would be fantastic

--

We work with some of the best companies because they love our product. They’re also happy to pay us because we provide value for them. Some of our customers you may have heard of:

* (SaaS) Citrix, Box, Atlassian, Shutterstock, Kickstarter

* (Dev) New Relic, Parse, Travis CI, Iron.io, Librato

* (Universities) Harvard, U Chicago, U Toronto, UC Davis

* (Internal Comm) Kik, Dollar Shave Club

* http://www.statuspage.io/customers

--

A little about our current tech stack:

* Ruby / Rails / Postgres / Redis / Memcache

* AWS across 2 regions, using EC2 / ELB / S3 / CF / R53

* Making a move toward Cassandra across 3 data centers, reworking to be more realtime

--

A little about our company:

* 2 employees in San Francisco, 2 in Durham, and 1 in Denver

* Salary, benefits, equity, free lunch, all the things to keep you and your family afloat

* Travel to hang out and work with the whole team once per quarter

--

If you feel like you’re a good fit, send some information to hi@statuspage.io.
Currently Reading:

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (William Dalrymple)
Reading : After dark by Haruki Murakami

Read: No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald
Pluto Is a Planet Again, According to Harvard Astronomers
China Mieville, Embassytown, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/books/review/book-review-e...

"Language is the principal theme of “Embassytown,” a particularly deep-thinking entry in a tradition of using the speculative resources of science fiction to address how language shapes culture and society ... The drama of “Embassytown” develops as the Ariekei learn to lie and are beset by violent addiction to a new kind of speech. The resulting plague sends waves of change pulsing through the semi-sentient buildings and machinery of their city — an inspired Miévillean touch, grotesquely original (addicted houses try to grow ears) and yet also strikingly familiar to anybody who’s spent time in a neighborhood in steep decline."
Heartbreaking?
How we cut our dev/test costs by 64%
What makes "Capital in the 21st Century " compelling?
I feel you. Let's talk about our feels. Language butchers.
Another thought! From experience . . .

If you're worried about popping, make sure you drop out-of-order position packets. In my experience, the 33 ms of player input between normal packets is negligible. You get popping in theory, but you can't see it. I haven't seen any for a long time, and the smoothing Descent does is both predictive and minimal. But a position packet arriving 100 ms late . . . that's a pop. When I inherited this code, ships did a lot of jittering; when I eliminated out-of-order packets, it pretty much all went away.

YMMV, of course. Descent ships are slow by FPS standards.
> And indeed, it's easier for teachers to induce students to discuss a mathematical subject (which, if done properly, can do much to help promote understanding) than it is for that teacher to tediously grade math homework.

It's much easier to give rote problems and grade them mindlessly because it doesn't require you to engage the students in any way. Moreover, engaging your students requires you to actually know the mathematics more deeply than a textbook, and most high school math teachers don't come close to this.

> ..., someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation

I've met scores of engineers who can "dance" with triple integrals, and yet are still terrible at formulating or understanding the most basic of mathematical claims. But what do they do in their jobs? They certainly don't compute integrals all day.

Being good at mathematics requires practice, as does every pursuit, nobody is contending that. But what this author (and most critics of Common Core) don't understand is that knowledge of mathematical facts and rote symbolic manipulation skills is not equivalent to skill at mathematics. We do not teach our students mathematics so they can swim in triple integrals. We teach them mathematics to develop analytical minds. Rote computation does not do this, and thank goodness the standards writers are finally starting to acknowledge that.
> Obama doesn't get schools closed for him

That's true, but he does get roads completely shut down and large no-fly-zones set up wherever he goes, even it's just for a fundraiser.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tradgedy of the Whaleship Essex, often called the non-fiction version of Moby Dick.

It's a brilliant, engrossing read > http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17780.In_the_Heart_of_the...
Fair enough ;-)

I'm fairly old fashioned, though. I still cringe when I hear actresses described as "actors", for example. Just because you have gendered names for the same job it doesn't make one inferior.
I've turned down jobs that promote "monthly massages", "beer fridays", "gaming evenings", and other perks like the article mentions because when you step back and look at it they're trying to replace your life outside of work with excuses why you shouldn't leave work. Bind your job to your necessities and leaving becomes so much harder.

This isn't always the case, especially in larger companies. Sometimes perks are just perks.
One Jump Ahead: Computer Perfection at Checkers - Jonathan Schaeffer

The Number Mysteries - Marcus Du Sautoy
DevOps here! Very much this. You can use Jenkins with Packer Builder and a configuration management tool of your choice to build an AMI for each code deployment (AMI generation costs nothing except for the space of the AMI). Need to scale 100 instances in <5 minutes? EASY.

What you don't want to do is attempt to scale, and you can't reach Github, or you overwhelm your configuration management tool, etc. Your AMIs should be built so they need almost nothing from external resources before being ready to serve requests.
Took ages to load, didn't even finish loading by the time I left.
Read:
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales (This was a great read),
The Painter by Peter Heller (Interesting novel),
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (Good ideas and content, repeats a lot)

Currently reading:
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham,
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine,
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Edit: reformatted for clarity.
Sorry — I didn't mean to imply that dev folk don't bootstrap!

What I meant, and expressed poorly, was that dev-ish folk tend to not have some of practices in their toolbox that you can use to validate cheaply (e.g. by knowing how to assess markets well, or knowing how to interview potential customers in a non-directive way, or indeed the ability to talk to customers at all, etc).

We also have a tendency to want to build things because, y'know, that's what we do ;-) We also tend to want to build things really, really well for that awesome future place where we have millions of users. So we over-engineer for where we are now, and the learning we need now.

Because of both of these issues I think folk with a dev background find themselves in a position where VC is the only route forward — when if they'd taken a different approach earlier on they could have continued bootstrapping and avoided VC money until later / forever.

Does that make sense?
In a just world we could sue inkjet printer manufacturers for selling something that is so clearly not fit for its intended purpose.
5 Psychology Studies That Can Help Growth Hackers Achieve Results
There is even some overlap between COBOL programmers and the Github generation: https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=language%3Acobol finds 75 repos containing COBOL right now.
You mean 50% say half-a-dozen and the other half say six?
Teens Take on Drone Collision Avoidance, Cyber Bullying, and More
I've had several phones with this design. One of them was made of clear plastic so you could see the components inside... and had some LEDs that lit up when it rang. But my favorite was just a plain old version that I hacked apart and installed the components into a shoe.
Ask HN: What still remains to be solved in terms of Graphics Programming?
I was watching the Brigade3 Engine real time demo and it blew me away. Real time path tracing (working) has been implemented. It was my dream to be a part of its development. What still remains to be solved in terms of Graphics Programming?
Build a new AMI on commits from your repo (Jenkins can do this). AMI generation has no cost except for the storage space you use.
Giant data set, big collaborative effort, spreadsheets and calculations are available online, and enjoyably written. Most economics texts I've found to be extremely dry, mostly theoretical (minimal or short-term real world data), and/or have their calculations hidden in some excel-based black box that will never be seen by anyone else.
I don't remember reading about Ayn Rand in Zero to One. Could you tell me where? (Hoping the Kindle version wasn't abridged or something)
Read: Expanse Series by J.S.A. Corry (decently diverting space opera)

Reading: Galaxy Formation and Evolution
While at least some of the advice is solid ("give each employee just one job" is really just a special case of "make it clear who is responsible for the outcome, not just the process"), Thiel is either making a truly trivial argument -- your employees should be more than mere clock-punchers -- or is recommending a dangerous path for most companies. In my experience -- and, like many in tech, I have more experience with this than I or portfolio care to remember -- highly-insular, self-regarding companies are usually total failures, for the usual Kool-Aid-related reasons.

Such companies, whether startups or established firms, inevitably end up focusing on aspects of their business (prestige, culture, a particular product mix, a particular technology or implementation, internal politics) that are irrelevant or actively-damaging to their profitability and external relations. In short, they end up believing their own press, and stop falsifying their assumptions. SWOT analyses become elaborate exercises in self-justification, failures to hit revenue or profit targets are handwaved away, and exogenous causes for short-term improvements are taken as proof that the company is run by brilliant minds who are no less than the weltgeist on horseback.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Survivorship bias is a powerful fallacy, and far more organizations starve from narcissistic self-regard than feast out on their good looks. Rather than cultic insularity, successful companies should constantly have their antennae out, alert for unexpected opportunities and dangers, especially if they clash with the company's stated "culture" or mission. (This sounds trivial, but it's very difficult in practice -- CEOs tend to be very psychologically invested in their cultures; lower-level employees are frequently unwilling to bring concerns up the line; managers often have political incentives to hide, mitigate, or redirect bad news; and it can be hard to separate the usual employee grousing from objectively-genuine concerns.)

Cults that try to adapt reality to themselves are suicide pacts; cults that adapt themselves to reality become religions.
Thanks for the clarification. I apologize for adding 'NASA-level'. I did parenthesize it, though. Also, since 'standards' are usually intended to ensure quality, I assumed that you were implying that the Indian space program may not be up to it.
> Theres an OOP way to do this now with DirectoryIterator and RecursiveDirectoryIterator.

OT: Iterators aren't OO.

First of all they don't work with objects/methods: we're forced to write a for/while loop, which is procedural programming. This also prevents abstraction and composition. Functions like "array_map" don't have these problems.

Second, they break encapsulation since they not only expose their elements, they also expose their internal mechanisms like "next", "rewind", etc. Again, array_map and friends win here.

Third, since they're a massive case of 'sequential coupling' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_coupling ), and since objects are passed by reference, we must ensure that nothing we call in our loop body upsets the ordering (eg. by performing its own loop across the same iterator). This destroys encapsulation and modularity, and makes polymorphism and concurrency dangerous.

Just because something uses the "class" keyword doesn't mean it's OO.
Last read: Hard to Be a God

Reading: The Karamazov Brothers
Compared to other housing developments the Olympic Village in Vancouver has been an expensive failure that has only just recently (four years later) sold off the last of it's overpriced units. I think it's reasonable to compare that to other developments built at the same time, rather than simply saying "it's better than nothing" because "nothing" wasn't really the alternative.

I can't knock the Skytrain line to the airport or the road improvements to Whistler, which are lovely conveniences for Vancouverites but which cost taxpayers in St John's a good deal of money (and which would have been done with federal money regardless) but it doesn't change the fact that the Olympics were a lousy way to get things done (the short platforms on the Canada Line are an example of the corners cut to meet the artificial deadline involved.)

So what we can say is that in a country with an effective, robust democracy, the Olympics were still an expensive, inefficient way of promoting public infrastructure. Sadly, they may have been "better than nothing" given our ongoing neglect of that infrastructure, but surely the lesson there is to improve our democracy, not volunteer to have a gun held to our head by the IOC.

The hosting of the Olympics by any city is prima facie evidence of democratic failure, and I would hope that no Canadian city will ever again act as host without a national vote posing the question, "Do we want to spend twice as much money on bribes and security as it would take to build a few useful infrastructure improvements, or do we want to give 1/3 the amount we would otherwise spend to the host city to build themselves a new LRT/highway/whatever if they promise to never put themselves forward as host for the five ring circus again?"
Something to note regarding recent US and Indian history - During the cold war, India supported Russia (Not much of real support, mostly supporting in words and buying technology from Russia in turn). So US ended up supporting Pakistan and China. Pakistan continuously tried different ways to discourage India's development.

Not sure if all that had any major effect on the cold war, but it certainly had serious repercussions in current Middle East wars and soured US relationships with India.

With China and Russia as a threat now, US may be trying to appease India to balance out the powers here. Plus India no longer closely associates with Russia.

Seperately, India is trying to stand up on its own feet with a strong economic growth and there is political and public will to support India's growth with the rise of Modi, AAP and the young educated/worldly generation.
Hi brudgers,

Livyy was predominantly conceptualized for business professionals, freelancers and students. However, as stated before, we are a convenience based business and anyone could find themselves utilizing our service depending on their situation.

Apple offers a well-known, simple product line-up.
More than half of our survey participants stated they own a MacBook. Out of the ones who don't, 46% said they found themselves in need of one during this year. The best part? 87% voted they would have rented one during those times.

Shipping to LA would be around $36. The issue of a MacBook not being returned in working order would be handled at that time and is a procedure thoroughly spelled out in our Rental Agreement.

It all depends. Until Livyy has a physical presence in LA, we may not be able to. However, for a person looking to rent sans credit check and a hefty deposit, we would be the 2,100-mile-away better option for them.

This is a fairly fresh concept. None of our survey participants have rented a MacBook before. However, there are thousands of business professionals, freelancers and students in Atlanta that could be presented with the need to rent one. All we have to do is be available to them.

Again, no other company offers access to a MacBook (or any other laptop computer) as fast and simply as Livyy would. If such a service exists in your area, the process is most likely lengthy and costly. Anyone with a MacBook can experience the problem of being without it.
Right, but that's a school he's actually speaking at, not just a random school in his general vicinity.