skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually going to suggest yes to you. OR at least you should start one. I, like you, cannot self-learn outside of work because my brain is done and needs to recharge. I, like you, read plenty and do the courses, but don't actually do the problems.

The real solution to your problem is to get another job. And I will disagree with some of the other posters that a PhD is required for ML because that is not necessarily true. I have a BS/MS in applied math and do research into how to apply ML into engineering automation problems for a fortune 50 manufacturing/eng company. Granted, we are not pushing the bounds of ML research. But we are looking at unsolved problems and using ML, control theory, robotics, etc to solve them.

This is what you want. And yes it is very math/algorithms heavy. Whenever we try to hire more people, HR sends us tons of BS cs guys that are sorely lacking the math background. Most of our hires are engineers (mech/ee/comp/aero) or oddballs with math/physics/ computational science like me.

So you can certainly look for other jobs (and if you want I will look at a resume to give more specific feedback). But if you already know that you don't have the background for controls and ML.. then go get it!

Here's the thing with CS or compEng PhDs. You don't have to finish them to get tons of valuable knowledge and move into the 'cool jobs' out there. But (per the rest of this HN thread) if you happen to get an awesome advisor and team relationship then you might as well finish.
very useful, even for non-economists.
How to implement smooth full-screen scrolling on a Commodore 64
Hi Andrew, you're right on multiple points, please let me not go TL;DR on this one:

- Referrals for the sake of taking advantage of your friends are rubish. I'm with you on that one. Like you, I know multiple referral-only platforms that went bankrupt already, many more will and I do not wish us to become one of them.

- JOBBOX.io started out as a pure referral-based mechanism, however, compared to other referral mechanisms, it was quite hard to push through a referral as you needed to write down a propper recommendation letter (we checked all of them) and your friend needed to apply. We launched on March this year and soon realised this was definitely not enough.

- We then implemented the "apply now" mechanism as a result of user feedback (http://blog.jobbox.io/listening-to-feedback-and-making-chang...). In order for an application to go forward the candidates needed someone who could refer them. Again, before the application was approved, our team did a "5-minutes check" just to make sure everything on the application made sense. This small step prevented "crappy" applications from being sent over to the employers.

- We realised that, from our 3 key users: employers, candidates and referrers, the candidates were the ones that we needed to focus on. So, we've re-built our entire homepage communication from being referral-oriented, to become candidate-oriented.

- Since then we've been shifting away from the referral-oriented communication and we're heading into a candidate-oriented one.

- What next? We're building core functionalities that support candidates, like talent advice, evaluation tools and job offers scoring. Still, we're keeping (and improving) the referral system as we believe that someone should get rewarded for making an on-target referral.

Sorry for the long reply but as I mentioned to @ftpaul early today, your comment deserved a proper reply as I agree with your argumentation, and wanted to give you a sneak peek into JOBBOX.io future.
It's only recently (2001?) that US stock prices moved to decimal from previous eighths of a dollar. The origin of this was spanish "pieces of eight" but not sure why it persisted so long. Maybe because it made the spread always at least $0.125 ?
snprintf is a standard function, but only as of C99.
Indeed it is, isn't it a nice result? :)

(to be thorough, you also need to show that re-rolling based on a single threshold dominates other strategies, but it's fairly intuitive and not too hard to prove)
Trolls Just Want to Have Fun [pdf]
TrackMaven Expanding Engineering Team Following Series B
mtourne: Doesn't look like you opened any issues on that last one (philipcristiano/etsdb). Are you sure you looked at it?
Try a holiday in India, Nepal or Morocco. Nothing has a set price. Its annoying at first, but after a while you may appreciate that you pay for what you value, not paying based on some price set by someone else.
I'm surprised you found that, I'm working on etsdb on hack days when I get the chance. It sort of works but shouldn't be trusted with production data.
You haven't done me the courtesy of answering my direct questions, which is a shame. Nonetheless, I'll answer yours. The term blockade itself without a modifier seems like the best term for it without going into details (you modified it twice in less than accurate ways: 1) labeling it as Israel's without mention Egypt's role in it and 2) calling it complete).

The restrictions on shipments of goods into and out of Gaza vary pretty regularly, which is the main reason I found that term to be an instance of editorializing rather than informing.

Since what can cross into and out of Gaza changes so frequently, is it only sometimes a complete blockade? When massive shipments are allowed in, would the blockade have exited its status as a "complete" blockade? Then what level of restriction needs to be met before it resumes its status as a "complete" blockade?

If you aren't aware of the varying policies, exceptions, and pretty regular massive shipments of goods allowed during the blockade, you should be able to find plenty of instances with minimal Googling.

Note that I'm not calling it a "mild blockade" or a "partial blockade" or anything like that and I might even call it a "restrictive blockade" or even "very restrictive blockade." I don't seek to minimize the blockade, just to accurately represent it.
> _"Wealthier people would need to be willing to settle for housing and an environment of a much worse standard than they can afford, and poorer people would be unable to find housing that makes much difference."_

That is actually very easy to manage: don't make all houses in a neighbourhood the same. Make some to the standards of wealthy people, and others to the budget of poor people.

The apartment building I live in has some houses that are rentals, and others that are purchased. Some are bigger, others smaller. As a result, we've got reasonable diversity (though still whiter than the rest of the neighbourhood).

Of course addressing poverty is still a good idea, for this and many other reasons.
GoPro Tripods: Cool 3D Printed Alternatives
Next time start it off the top of the Green Building!
I actually know the founder and he really knows his stuff when it comes to health & fitness. Also: A lot of Canadian entrepreneurs are backing him (incl. Dan Martell, co-founder of Clarity.fm).

EMF might be an actual danger going forward, so I'm curious to where this project will go.
Why? It's my impression that foreigners are usually the most interesting people in any country.
All major startup hubs have those problems, especially as a foreigner.
I suppose it depends on the industry then... These are what we tend to call brainteasers in quant finance, and they're the type of problems you'll find in the book "Heard on the street" recommended above.
The Language of the System (2012)
It's a nice idea, and seems well executed. To be honest, and I hope this isn't too much of a downer:

a) I probably won't pay to evaluate it. It seems like the kind of app that would be perfect for a cut-down trial version.

b) I wonder how many people - especially this audience - really care about what's on their desktop. I know I barely ever see mine, because I run all windows maximised (or tiled). It's nice to have a good looking image for the brief period of startup/shutdown time during which I can actually see it, and I plump for the Mountain Lion-era space image because I think it's a lot more attractive than the recent mavericks/yosemite equivalents. But anything more, in my book, is overkill.
Its more or less the same model ebay has. Funnily enough, I rarely ever buy stuff from ebay that isn't on a fixed price with the "buy now" option.
> "they really don't speak English ;-)"

I had it on the tip of my tongue, but I did not want to sound too offensive; although I dread to say it, it is quite true; however, it's not uncommon to hear people at least trying.
This is a flying drone “grown” from fungus
you're talking about chunking: at first you try to remember everything, then as you gain experience you learn you can abstract certain items away to a general model of them (chunk) without having to remember the specifics of each individual item.
Do you Tweet? Then Mitt Romney has a big lesson for you
Have to agree - the name isn't great. When I hear 'kickback', I think corruption, not a legit business revenue stream.
Pfffff don't listen to old grumpy HN. Awesome app, just bought it. I like art and can't bother finding nice wallpapers for my desktop.
Micromax Canvas Selfie Smartphone Launched with 13MP Front-facing Camera
Thanks for the comment. Are you in any one of these circles within the Venn diagram? Any particular pain points that come to mind? Just exploring.
I wouldn't say that at all since you're not assuming people are going to do something wrong per-se, you're more willing to accept that a situation that looks normal is going to turn out differently and be aware of how you can avoid any driver who's going to do that stupid thing.
Productivity Changes You Need to Start Doing Today
Has anyone got any idea what the (relatively) big spike on October 4th 2014 was? A quick google revealed it's not some "World IPV6 day" or something (though there was something like that on 2011 which had a next-to-zero impact).

Was there maybe a new phone or console (or an OS update released to either) released?
The presentation claims that it takes 4 hours to travel from Paris to Amsterdam by car. Well, the distance is 750 km so you need a pretty fast car for that and a big wallet to pay for the speeding tickets ..
Thanks ASquare, I'm actually in the midst of reading that one right now. It really breaks things down nicely!
If you agree to buy an item at an understood price, why do you feel like you're being ripped off?

Isn't fairness of price decided by the property owner that is offering their property up for sale? That is, they're deciding what it's worth to them, what is fair to them, such that they'd care to part with their property.
As an RC-FlyingThing hobbyist, this stuff interests me immensely. I'd love nothing better than to be able to fly something with a self-reconfigurable airfoil, and these technologies offer that to me .. the only issue I have is a non-wide general availability of nanowire ..
http://www.9atom.org
What is Microsoft BizTalk?
Yann's answer was in regards to machine learning specific research. If someone merely wants to work on hard computer science and engineering problems that require ML knowledge, a PhD is not required. Though it will definitely not hurt in any way.
Think flying things. This technology would usher in a new age of flight.
I think a clearer way to put it is this: The 23% number was measured across networks displaying ads on many sites. Some of those sites employ botnets to generate fake views, giving them much more than 23% fraudulent views, while other sites that don't do such things have 0% fraudulent views. The amount the advertiser is willing to pay is presumably set by their experience across the whole network, so if they were willing to pay $X per ad without fraud, they will pay 0.77 * $X due to fraud, which means that the honest websites get less than they deserve (based on the value they deliver) while the fraudulent websites get more than they deserve. So, the fraudulent websites are stealing from the honest ones, not stealing from the advertisers.
The reason maximizing EV isn't the answer is that you care about having a larger number than your opponent, not about having the largest number possible.

Imagine we play a die game where whoever rolls the largest number wins. Which die would you rather play with?

1-1-1-1-1-10^250 or 2-2-2-2-2-2

The first die has an EV of about 1.67e249, the second die an EV of 2. Yet, the second die will win 5 out of 6 games against the other one.

To solve the problem, you must find the Nash equilibrium of the game. That is, you must find a strategy which the opponent cannot exploit, no matter what he does.
InsideReCaptcha: Reverse-engineering the new reCAPTCHA
I get "The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store." when I try to buy it.

edit: Resolved!
Even quicker: Ctrl+` brings up a quick switch context menu that allows you to instantly switch keymaps, code styles, L&F and colors.
I can verify this is true. It is not extremely difficult to build a multinomial regression model and find "adversarial" images for this trained model. Of course, you're just taking me for my word on this, but you could very well try it yourself. You don't really need any special software outside the tools of SciPy and sklearn for instance if you use python.
That's _very_ interesting. I wonder if anyone got it running on ARM.
Great app, great work. I like anything that can automate beauty into my workspace.
Look up to these east campus kids!!
sorry, was only an accident.
Roughly speaking, it represents the transition from an adder to a multiplier. A 1.0 programmer is competent at "adder" tasks (scripts, bug fixes, features) but not yet ready for infrastructural work. A 2.0 programmer is highly competent as a multiplier. It goes from 0.0 (complete beginner) to 3.0 (global multiplier) but most (probably 99%) professional software engineers are between 0.8 and 2.2, with a median around 1.1-1.2.

This is more up to date than nostrademons's link:http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/gervais-macle...

Also, from Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-do-the-top-1-of-software-engineers...
I say that DDD sounds nice in principle, and in blog posts, and in books, but I have yet to see that magical fairy land be implemented in the real world.

Aggregates (and drawing their boundaries), especially when combined with domain models backed by an ORM must be one the more impractical programming concepts that I've met in my life.

P.S. I also don't trust programmers who write (enterprise) books for a living.
That said, it's something that may work better in some cultures rather than others. (Not to pigeonhole Indian culture; I mean completely in general.)
I would have liked to see a loop combined with a gyroscopic chair, so no person is actually upside-down. It also seems like these are the sorts of things you are supposed to just build without university approval ala Real Genius.
> I haven't checked the exact circumstances of the 'drone' being near a aeroplane, but if it was more than 50m away from the 'vehicle' at all times, it would appear that what happened was not forbidden.

Even if they hadn't been operating beyond the Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) conditions (they were apparently at 700ft, CAA accepts VLOS to be below 400ft), I wouldn't be surprised if the aircraft was in breach of other rules, such as operating an FPV/Surveillance aircraft over a congested area, or within an aerodrome traffic zone.

> The rule requiring line of sight is interesting, as it forbids what seems a likely common use - looking where you can't see.

I think you'd be surprised at how much of a "non-issue" this is (excuse the awkward grammar). UAVs are my profession and I do a lot of surveillance and data acquisition work, and I can't remember ever _needing_ to fly out of VLOS. Real time video feeds give you a great view of what is going on in front of the camera, but not of what is happening around the aircraft. As advanced as UAVs have become they are not infallible and, as unlikely as it may seem, you should be prepared for your flying blender to fall out of the sky at any moment.

We were operating just a few days ago and the crew list was: pilot, pilot's spotter/assistant, payload operator, and three spotters. This may seem like overkill but a 7kg object falling from 50m can do some serious damage, and that is assuming the blades stop spinning on the way down.
The mass media are just champfing at the bit to write the story "Drone brings down Airliner" at some point on the horizon. The predictability of an event is directly proportional to the # of humans who are involved in the telling of that events' story. So, one of these days, we're going to see a damaged airliner, and the real facet of this current event is that we - who choose to use this technology - must be prepared for the eventuality that the story-tellers stories become reality.
I love it. I buy a lot of used blu-ray discs for $0.01 or $0.99, with the $2.99 or $3.99 shipping fee of course to compensate for the overly low price. Ultimately I find incredible bargains versus paying $12-$20 for the same disc new. The ratings make it easy to find sellers that are reputable to buy used discs from. I also personally find this to be far less chaotic than digging through eBay.
I wonder how they compare to existing services, like Veriship, which has pretty much the same messaging, and payment model? That is, how does MyKickback differentiate its self from existing audit services?
Sounds very similar to law school and the legal profession. For some reason, law attracts lots of sociopaths.
Doesn't appear fun? Stop thinking for a minute!

I want to ride it. My son would love to ride it.
Definitely needs option too offline cache and not use the net connection, I do not want to have my cable trickle saturated by downloading hi-res images indefinitely in the background!
I still use C++ because it not only allows me to write high performance code, but also allows me to easily express high level ideas without worrying about too much overhead. I can write generic algorithms in terms of monoids and semigroups and I can write device drivers. I do a lot of signal processing at work, so sometimes these high-level and low-level concepts exist side-by-side in the same codebase.

Edit: I should mention that by no means to I think C++ is perfect. Very few other languages, however, give you the amount of low-level control, and the tools to build cheap, powerful abstractions, like C++ does.
Really? The Elton John & Bernie Taupin song made it sound wonderful!
Not knowing the rate of ad fraud does make things worse, but is not necessary to explain why it's a problem. Even if the ad fraud rate was absolutely uniform across all websites, there would be a deadweight loss. The ad fraudsters are extracting money from someone.
While French slideshow felt more like full of marketing and "we are amazing", this one is talking numbers and facts! Thank you for sharing this amazing presentation.
Chrome experiment turns Wikipedia into a virtual galaxy
Nice app, would be great if it worked better with multiple monitors in different orientations though!

Landscape images resized to fit screens in portrait orientation look really bad.
This is awesome. I'm always looking for ways to discover high quality images for wallpaper use. I actually wrote this thing that auto-grabs the latest Shorpy.com image and sets it as your wallpaper: https://github.com/nicksergeant/shorpypaper.
This would be an amazing use to it.
The Ukraine is trying to join NATO? That seems like a recipe for disaster, why not let Russia have a buffer zone of countries it controls..
> The way most other languages handle it is that the list literal construct just creates a list, and if you want something else then you need to explicitly convert. > For example, in Python:

> x = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13] # this is a list of integers

> y = set([1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]) # this is a set of integers

Actually, that's not the best way to do it:

y = {1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13} # this is a set of integers without creating a list first.
z = set(1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13) # so is this

In C++ {} is syntactic sugar for "Create an initializer_list with these values," which is what happens when it's assigned to an "auto" variable. Not surprising at all. If you want a different type, you need to specify the type that you want.

Maybe it's confusing to beginners and people who don't take the time to learn the language, but C++ isn't catering to those people.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of "gotchas" in C++, I just don't think the two you've posted are very bad.
Those whom the government wants to protect luckily don't know about VPN.
What do project management tool user statistics reveal?
In spite of the somewhat whimsical title, it's an interesting paper, and
the lead author has published a fair amount.

http://buckels.psycstudies.com/about-me/publications/

Maybe this is a better link to the paper?:
https://pdf.yt/d/XgRRo4fT7qzp9bic
While address space is huge, RAM isn't infinite. Our embedded Linux runs out of memory quite often. Or if the swap space fills up on a server with a disk.

I've spent many hours chasing corrupted memory due to someone not checking malloc() fail.

I chased code that boiled down to assert( ptr=malloc() );
Guess what happens when NDEBUG is defined?
It's presumably by train since the estimates are written on train tracks.
This is my first app on the Mac App store, and my first Swift app. It was something to scratch my own itch. I wanted to be exposed to more art and knew that the best way was to have it right in front of me on the computer, so I collected public domain art and made an app to periodically display a random work as the wallpaper. So far my favorite artist discovered this way is Giovanni Battista Piranesi, for his etchings of Rome. My girlfriend describes the app as "Pandora for art." Once there are enough users, I have plans to roll out a collaborative filtering system. (Slope one-based? Tips there would be great)

I'm interested in hearing about the experience others have had with the Mac app store. I've been giving away promo codes, and that seems to have helped sales by word-of-mouth. Although the app appeared on the daily "Top Paid" and "Top Grossing" chart for its category, that happened with only low double-digit purchase counts. It seems there are fewer people using Mac app store than the iOS store.

Feedback is welcome, and I still have a few free codes left if anyone would like to try it without buying. I set the price point at $5 because it covers my costs (AWS mostly), it's less than an art museum admission, and it is about the same as a Starbucks coffee (hopefully within impulse range for many).
Magic moments, mail cycle and human touch
A look back at open source in 2014
The social benefits from free software are positive externalities and thus not naturally dealt with by the free market. Compare with the negative externalities of air pollution, for example.
U.S. Risks Losing Its Lead in Synthetic Biology, Expert Says
Sorry, I was aware my comment might come across as too negative, but still thought it might offer useful feedback and a kicking-off point for conversation. I agree that a whole slew of "this is crap" posts is the last thing anyone wants, and I would never post something consisting solely of that, but a series of "this is great" posts is almost as worthless.
Am I the only one who has a serious problem with the idea of handing my phone to a police officer?
Ask HN: Where to have generic contract drawn up?
I need to have a generic contract put together for some freelance work. Does anyone have any recommendations for services or people who are affordable.
Have you lived in Paris? Everyone I talk to tell me parisians* are dicks. I don't get how an entire city can be full of only arrogant bastards. Is that really the case?

*or however it's written.
Agree with dingdingdang to have some caching, or some core set of wallpapers or something.

Also seems to be bugged when clicking the "Next artwork" menu item - keeps on showing the same image every other time, although the title does change to something random.