skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3.5-4 years funding is the norm these days in the UK, and departments start to get fined if you go over 4 years. Masters are usually an entry requirement, normally done as an integrated undergrad masters, so I was 4 years undergrad and 4 years PhD. Undergrad programs here are also usually more focused on the subject that you're studying and don't have additional requirements. Go back a few decades and it was the norm to do 3 year undergrads and 3 year PhDs.

The only people I know who finished their PhD in 3 years were exceptionally good (not to mention lucky in their research) and wanted to move on for other reasons, such as leaving the country with a partner for a postdoc job.
This is true. One can draw their own conclusions about those who say such things, and why the risk element is elided when they say it...
While I don't wish to imply I am the world's most amazing person, I think I'm reasonably competent. I moved precisely for lifestyle reasons to Dublin, Ireland, and quite like it. While the cost of living is relatively high by European standards, it's far, far, cheaper than the bay, or west L.A. for that matter. I mostly wanted to live in a dense, walkable, European city, and Dublin has exceeded expectations in that regard.

I realize you probably weren't thinking of a European capital when you wrote it, but it does ring true that there are people for whom location is more important than maximum compensation.
Interesting graph showing digital sales as Christmas approaches
I'm currently working for a Dutch bank, and as far as I can tell, this is a specific exception for US citizens. There's also specific rules for doing business with countries the US doesn't like (Cuba, North Korea, Iran and a few others). Other countries don't get special exceptions.

That said, of course all countries try to catch tax dodgers, but they go about that in a different way than the US does.
Scientists re-create what may be life's first spark
Debt for a PhD? I work as a junior programmer and all of my friends who went to do their PhDs make a lot more money than I do(almost 10k pounds more/year). I actively considered quitting my job to become a PhD student purely because it pays so much better.
I don't quite see the pandering, but yes it is a stunt. Should we expect him to join up with PETA because he pardons a turkey once a year?
SpamMimic works by using a context free probabilistic grammar to derive its output. Each production of the grammar is translated into a Huffman tree based on the probabilities assigned to each variable or terminal symbol in the production.

For example:

S -> A(.25) | B(.75)
A -> aS(1.0)
B -> bS(.75) | b(.25)

You simply feed the mimic function an encoded message (as a binary string) until you consume all the bits. Of course you can also pad the bit string so that it always terminates on a terminal symbol.

I wrote a program not too long ago that took some inspiration from SpamMimic and linguistic steganography in general. For fun I used the comments from this thread as input to my program:

So why not send it as spam? The key here is hiding in this approximately 95% of HN.

So why not send spammer--not a spy.

For my favourite variation seems rather inefficient. It should be possible output
can be used already, and you just look for in spam thousands of people with it. 2.
Also send lots of receiving person and a Novel Vertex Coding and identify the
system being used, it's used to encoding and identify the fake spam. Appendix
B gives an enemy (Kerckhoffs's principle).

[1]: https://github.com/rw/tweetfs

Plainsight uses each byte of the

The encoded message is: 'meet at 3'
How accurate do you need? I have had great success in putting a proxy in place before your call out to Google to cache, remove addresses you don't think will geocode, and geocoding addresses you're happy with via free-sources first...
For the future, there's also the encrypt-then-MAC extension (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7366, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=972145), and probably some variant of a ChaCha20+Poly1305 AEAD (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-0..., https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=917571, already on Chrome AFAIK).

For now, AES-GCM is the best alternative.
I'm curious what you're doing that's substantially cheaper with Google Cloud DNS. The base pricing looks the same, except Google being $0.2/month and AWS $0.25/month per hosted zone. Also keep in mind that queries for "intra AWS"/ALIAS record queries are free on Route 53.
>And you know, these things are standard stuff that one would like to do for every project

And its totally stupid, and the stupid persists, because 'its standard' now. This is how stupid stuff becomes standard - people say "hey, this stupid stuff - its standard now".

You're using the argument that its a good thing to have to do all of that stuff with one tool .. really? (Besides, Make can do all of that - you just have to configure it to do so, like any other tool..)
$5k for an accountant to do your taxes is pretty high. I'm self-employed, and I'm paying EUR 500 per year to my accountant. More expensive ones cost EUR 1000. If the US tax system is so complex that it'd require $5000 in accountant work, that's certainly pretty extreme.
I know it sounds unrealistically pessimistic but it's very similar to my experience. Colleagues developing a host of awful conditions due to a terribly stressful environment. Doing a Ph.D. was my biggest regret.
And its different for Windows users who want to use Grunt, how exactly?
The discussion about this paper on r/MachineLearning is quite insightful and worth reading: http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2onzmd/deep...
My understanding is that a UK PhD will generally be weaker than a US PhD and would probably do a postdoc before being "equal", but by that point you really have to be looking at publication record to make a judgement.
It's really, really nice for making static layouts in IB, but as soon as you do anything dynamic — programmatic views, animations, etc. — the whole thing becomes a burden.

I often wish we had something akin to autolayout for CSS.
This would be much more powerful with wet paper codes, I suspect. A problem with it is that the changes are all forced, so it likely has a huge impact on the statistics of the text.
Experience de vie – De la bouteille à la souris (French)
I don't understand where the misdirection is in what I said. It's not like I'm actually suggesting to debate whether MLK should be forgotten: I'm making a point through comparison.

MLK being dead plays to the strength of this analogy, because Lewin is retired. Removing his lectures on OCW, recorded 15 years ago, is like refusing to read or watch MLK because of his moral failings. The issue with the MOOC on MITx, where he participated as late as last year, is different, and I would agree with barring his participation on the platform in case the transgressions are serious enough. But if you look over the discussion, it is the removal of the static, non-dynamic, incredibly popular and famous lectures on OCW that strikes many people as unjustified.

P.S. Feynman was a creep, and anyone who thinks that fact should cause people to stop reading his justly famous textbook and prefer that others "step up" is, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot.
Using Smart Lock on the Chrome OS Dev Channel
IBM show POC of social login attack [video]
PM Abe says Apple to build big R&D centre in Japan
Just got linked to this, feel it's probably already been on HN and I missed it last week but couldn't find any submissions so posting in case it hasn't been.
This one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/06...
People basically are racist by default. We fear the different, the other, we seem to be wired that way. Society is training us to be tolerant, it is training us to be better.

Secondly, if your happiness in the place you spend half your waking hours is contingent on the people there not making you feel marginalised/belittled/stupid/irrelevant/worthless, and you have had bad experiences previously, I think it's reasonable for a key decision parameter to be "do I think the employees here are better than that"
Where are you based? I found out the French government has a program to help companies doing things for higher education - my own startup targets middle and high school, so unfortunately I don't think I can benefit it. The thing is detailed here [0], unfortunately it's in French. I'd be glad to help if I can, drop me an email if you're interested (address in my profile).

[0] http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/fileadmin/aap/2014/...
> If you went out and hired 15 people before you even knew what you were building, you've created a broken company.

Funny thing is that you got your first round of investment, before you even knew what you were building.

What?
Well, it's pretty, but its resolution is not very high. If you zoom in enough you'll see that it doesn't take into account particular mountains and valleys, such terrain features are too small for it. Compare it to http://www.canadarasp.com/RASPtable.html for example (Vancouver area).
mybudget.com.au
> "race" (as you guys call it)

Do you know better term to describe "it"?
Thanks!

However, in this list I tried to focus on actual games:

- capturing parts of a real scientific phenomena,

- AND actually playable (you can play for fun, not "for classroom only").

[OK, maybe "Parable..." is here a stretch, but I could not resist adding it.]

(And, for example consider Falstad's applets as one of my biggest inspirations ever - especially the Ripple Tank and the 1D Quantum Mechanics; but also electric circuits are very nice, and inspired things like iCircuit!)
why ? are you an old afro american ? I thought they don't read.. hacker news. /s
This is a really excellent summary. I'd like to add though, that the 'people stuff' you mention - which I think you are spot on about - continues after the PhD; and furthermore it is a fact of life in nearly every other mildly competitive sphere you might decide to participate in, in nearly any area of personal or professional life.

One of the most important lessons I learned was how to spot different kinds of pathological personalities from a distance.

This is a really, really painful - but invaluable - skill to acquire and I am firmly convinced it can only be learned through the school of hardest-knocks.
There are a couple factors at play here. First off, the average programmer is, honestly, not very good. The can just barely make anything useful, good luck having it also be well designed and coded, secure, robust, fast, etc. Second, programming is like wizardry to most non-programmers, it's hard enough for a professional software developer to judge another, it's nigh impossible for J. Average Businessperson to do so, even if they have a dire need for software development. In the average case you might have some contract go out which ends up being won by some enterprisey line of business app development house who poops out some horrible cobbled together tool based on Excel, MS Access, and a winform app somewhere in there to glue things together, and then bills the customer for 6 or 7 figures (I'm not even joking). Compared to that, your average startup is the dream team.

And what's fantastic about funded startups from the perspective of a software muggle is that not only might they have a product already in existence that you can check out and find reviews from other customers but they've also been given the stamp of approval by investors, investors who are likely far more knowledgeable than the average software consultancy customer. Just look at the Obamacare website debacle as a case in point of how incredibly difficult it is to a: find a quality development shop who can actually deliver what you want, and b: do so within reasonable budget and time constraints. And the difference between finding a good development shop and a poor one isn't merely a better quality product, it's a factor of maybe 2x or more in development time (which is, of course, tremendously valuable) and a factor of 10-100x in cost.
What is the reason for many trams being high floored and non-accessible?
Show HN: HandmadeGooods – handmade passport covers with custom prints
Except, of course, that the pyramids are a marvel of workmanship and engineering probably built by a relatively small force of skilled workers. Their construction methods are about as far from "brute-force" as you could possibly get.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/pyra...
Download DoulCi Bypass Acativater for iPhone 5 – Bypass iCloud Activation
Coding is still too complex for the majority, frankly case sensitive period laden thirty character identifiers and the like still boggle my mind, who thought this was a good idea? The the prevalence of tricks and such, macros and what not, all which confuse many more than they help.

If we want programming to go mainstream we really need to have a near total visual environment. Yeah it won't be efficient but in today's world most won't notice. The people who write the tools may be encumbered with the text laden language but why should programming be solely confined to a text world?
A book cannot change my life :)
It's different in the way that it's trivial to use npm to install grunt and run builds on Windows, but not trivial to get a Makefile to run (if you don't want to resort to running cygwin bashs all the time).
Got further than I did. I got about 1/4 way through, skipped to the conclusion, then WTF at the salary.
Matter of fact, at least over here (NL), people aren't even allowed to live in low-rent housing if they earn more - there's even a movement that wants to raise low-rent house prices if the people living in them are earning more than they did when they moved in. Of course, that is also so that the cheaper houses become available for people moving into a house of their own for the first time (young families).

But at the same time it causes the wealth-based segregation as you state, with all the associated side-effects.
> As far as I know, nothing prevents Lewin, or others, from hosting the videos of his lectures elsewhere.

Doesn't MIT hold the copyright?
If you are asking that question, you most probably should not get a PhD.

You either want to or need to but never should.
The title of the article is just a big click bait. Of course it's not worth it using Grunt/Gulp when you are running one task at a time.
Hi HN! I made this. Here's some info on how I came up with this.

Firstly, it's an online store where you can buy leather covers for your passport. All covers have beautiful and unique prints. They are long durable and nice.

I've submitted only 30 different designs right now, so if you have any comments - you are welcome.

I plan to add a feature in the future where user can upload a custom image that then will be manufactured as a cover. What do you think about this?

I'd like to monetize this by selling these goods. And I included 25% discount for this launch.

Hope this helps!
I continue to be amazed at the degree to which "no actual harassment happened" is the strong default belief for so many people here, despite the fact that a thorough investigation has already happened and decided otherwise. A group of smart people (led by MIT physics professors who are friends of the accused, for goodness sake) looked at the evidence and concluded that serious harassment occurred. Doesn't that merit at least a bit of a Bayesian update?

I'm similarly amazed that the existence of examples of false accusations is taken as a more salient fact than the overwhelming weight and history of cultural indifference toward sexual harassment (or even approval). False accusations are the "man bites dog" story: they get attention because they're so far from the norm.
The lectures themselves were a fantastic resource. I had been watching them in order, and was about half way through his 801 physics course. They are extremely entertaining and very well presented. He even addresses the issue of sexism at a few points in the lectures, and is clearly extremely popular with his students.

It's a shame he overstepped boundaries in another way, leading to the removal of a really seriously good resource. On the other hand, one can understand MIT's point of view, given the facts. It would be very wrong of them not to remove his online course and allow the platform to continue to be misused in this way.

I hope that Lewin or a colleague will release a statement, since at the moment there is such an enormous scope in the possibilities regarding the accusations. It could cover anything from otherwise polite, oblique references to students' appearances in a photo, to something overtly sexual and predatory. All kinds of sexual harassment are wrong and unwarranted, but some kinds are much more serious.
Lazy Expert Syndrome
I gave a talk at the Elasticsearch usergroup about that topic and evaluated a few solutions. I think Postgres fulltext falls into the interesting spot of being "just there" if you are using PG already and being very robust. It has a visible ceiling, but if you are okay with that, go with it. (take care that PG does not implement UTF-8 full but UCS-2, but does not refuse UTF-8, as I pointed out in the original post)

If you get started with building a secondary system for searching anyways, I wouldn't recommend it.

Also, don't use MongoDB fulltext, it's just broken.
Can this be layered on top of a PGP signed and encrypted email message?

I wouldn't really that stenography by itself to secure anything.

Sure its a good diversion.
A lot of it is encapsulated in my talk at a neo4j meetup: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/5179-private-social-net...

Which was a while ago (April), I'll be doing a new one soon with what we have learnt since then. My main learning is around Mark Granovetter works on "the strength of weak ties" when it comes to job hunting and recruitment. That and the concept of triadic closure are really useful when trying to build technology that maps the recruitment process from first principles.
yeah...it splices based on estimates on where what color fits into the print. I have done it manually before just by feeding a new color in at the desired time.
Awesome-advent
How Perfect Offline Wallets Can Still Leak Bitcoin Private Keys [pdf]
Allen gives $100M for new Seattle institute to unravel cells
There is cpu for plan9. It's a remoteshell does does mount the local filesystem, so you can continue to work.

I don't think tinyssh is less complex, as it is compatible.
Interesting but if the recipient's ISP classify it as spam, the mail may never reach its mailbox.
I know literally nothing about this science, so that paper had me concerned about the following question:

Given a visual face recognition door lock or similar system. If I want to break such a door lock, can I install that system at home, train it with secretly taken pictures of an authorized person, and evolve some kind of key picture with my home system until I can show it to the target door lock and fool it into giving me access?

OK this is a very simplified way to put the question, but is that something this paper would imply to be possible (in a more sophisticated way)?
It would seem a much more honest argument to me if MVCC were being compared to another implementation of consistency management, rather than compared to NO IMPLEMENTATION at all.
But if OP use S3, he’s not running the OS himself, right?

Otherwise it sounds reasonable to keep compilers away from the production servers.

On that note, what are some good schemes for installing self-compiled software to a server? For example, let’s say I run Ubuntu on my servers. On dev host X I have compiled a specific version of Ruby on Rails. Then I want to install that version of Rails to production server Y. I could make a .deb package, but I get a feeling there are other good alternatives as well?
There's a test version online at the moment here - https://kerstman.herokuapp.com/

While it asks for a signup it's just looking for a valid unique email so you can use pretty much anything. The matching stage is the only point where emails are actually dispatched
That is quite good actually
Ask HN: What could we do today with a 1,000,000X increase in computing power?
I was recently discussing Ray Kurzweil with friends. Many of his arguments extend out Moore's Law, speculating about what these future computers will power. I argued that Moore's law alone doesn't get us "intelligence" without the discovery of algorithms (or other mechanisms) that power intelligence in organisms. If we could mimic fungal intelligence with today's resources, then we would just need more resources to make a super human (or super fungal) like brain. But since we can't, Moore's Law isn't predictive of anything and all Ray's timelines are bunk.

I think Kurzweil is working backwards. AI is coming. How do I predict it using current trends? I think we should go the other way: Here are the trends. What do they predict?

So here is the question: What are the things we could do with a 1,000,000X increase in computing power that don't depend on unrelated future discoveries. What programs are just waiting for more power? Are our current evolutionary algorithms or some other AI approaches constrained in this way? Any less AI-ish programs constrained this way? What could they do if they weren't?
In normal job, you can quit without forfeiting a few years of work, and needing to wait 0.5-1.5 year for another work opportunity. Plus, you can deal without recommendation from your previous boss. In academia, no matter how but it turns, you can't.

Power to say "I quit" at expense lesser that many years, is a great power you don't realize.
Suave UI – UI Framework for AngularJS
Not very familiar, but shouldn't those tools write to stdout?
Amazon Tests Bike Messengers for One-Hour Delivery in New York City
To his credit, the author acknowledges PostgreSQL is not his strong suit. As a pg fanatic myself I think there is a lot of negativity toward SQL in general that is more fairly leveled at MySQL and Oracle in specific.
Google App Engine has 30 flaws
I think that happened despite the entrenched business interests who both used government subsidy to get going, then have fought regulation tooth and nail to be able to gouge the customer. Remember, Apple had tried to do a phone before the iPhone. And they listened to the wireless providers about what it should be, and it was awful.
> I always loved the "everything is an object" approach

Which sadly isn't at all what Plan9 does, in the usual "worse is better" way of Unix. Objects would allow a bit more versatility than the "everything is a file, usually one with plain UTF-8 text" approach.
(And actually, Windows is closer to an object world with COM, as evidenced by e.g. the core model of PowerShell)

Of course, an object-model has a hard time when the rest of the world and the net is talking in files, you're also much more likely to create a walled garden.

As for simplicity, I can understand that regarding systems like Smalltalk (or possibly lisp machines), although Oberon serves as a prime counter-example here. It did inspire the Acme editor, and here you can see that if your basic text model is objects, not just a byte-stream, some extensions are easier to do (different fonts, syntax highlighting, widgets).

And yes, I'm aware that the usual response to that was and is "you don't need that". Milages obviously do vary.