skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. This is really an ad for the author's company.
In LISP, I would argue that the syntax is defined only partially by the concept of S-Expressions, but by the number of different kinds of atoms that can occur as the first atom in a free S-Expression. Well, all functions only define a single syntax form, but all macros define a new syntax form that should be counted separately.

Because of how LISP is structured, it is extremely tempting to have dozens of them for any reasonably-sized program.

In practice, in all LISPs, this number of syntax forms is quite high. In clojure it's somewhat less, but still a lot more than in "average" programming languages.
My father was telling me about how everyone was worried about Halloween candy containing marijuana now that it is legal in some states. Well, I looked up more information and it turns out there were no reports that any child actually received candy with marijuana in it. It was just a news story created upon the worry of some imagined scenario.
At least here in NYC, I see the same drivers driving for both UberX and Lyft. The only difference is that they have to attach the pink mustache in the front if they are responding to a Lyft order. In their mind, and mine, once I am in the cab, the company culture does not come afore as much as the human in the car. If he is talkative, he is - Uber or Lyft. If I am talkative, I am - wether Uber or Lyft. I have used both the services and I have had great conversations.

I find Uber and Lyft as great ways of being introduced to new cities. The drivers give me a shade of the city, that I might otherwise miss, just staying in business hotels and talking to the hotel staff, and business partners. I think of them as my "Lonely Planet" for X city.
Surprisingly good, thoughtful, experienced,
well informed, mature. Definitely get
the transcript and slides.

For some of the work, e.g., trademarks,
I would suggest getting those filed
earlier than "later-stage". Similarly
for the bookkeeping, tax planning and
taxes, accounting, employee benefits,
stock planning, where to put the
intellectual property
to lease back to the operating business,
etc.

Altman suggested each year, for the
first 10 years, assign another
3-5% of the stock to employees.
That sounds generous and like it
would create one heck of an internal
fight for stock.

Once an apparently wise adviser told
me, "Never give stock to an employee
who doesn't contribute directly to
earnings.".

For some more on leadership and culture, also
draw from the AVC.com blog user JLM's contributions
and links, often back to JLM's Web site,
at Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com. JLM
has long been
the most popular contributor
to that blog.

Altman seemed to want a fairly strict
organizational
hierarchy. He recognized that too little
hierarchical organization can be bad
but was not clear on just how much
a good hierarchy should do.

A strict hierarchy can lead to a lot
of goal subordination
(where a middle manager
works for their own interests
largely against the interests of
the company),
process and
formality over reality and progress,
fighting with people down the hall
instead of against problems inside the company
or competitors outside,
arrogance, fear that any effort at
innovation could have a lot of
downside with nearly no chance of
upside, fear that good success
could lead to jealousy and
attacks from above, narrowly
just managing the existing
business with no interest in
progress for new business directions
or even for the existing business, etc.

For how to get work done and evaluate
employees outside of just a strict
hierarchy, I'm entertaining borrowing
from other work. E.g., when someone
sees a problem, find a likely person,
or for a really big problem a person
and some assistants for a team, and
(a) have them investigate and
write a paper and give a presentation
describing the problem, its importance,
etc. If continue, then (b) have them
do some research and write a paper,
etc., on proposed solutions and give
a presentation. (c) If continue, then
have them write a paper, etc., planning
the implementation of the solution.
(d) If continue, then have them write a paper
on the implementation with budgets,
other resources, milestones, quality
control, due dates, progress
reporting, etc. (e) If continue,
then have them proceed as in (d).

At employee evaluation time, look
at the papers and, especially, the
completed projects.

I definitely intend to get the
transcript and slides. Apparently
Altman has learned a lot, somewhere,
in his own start-ups, watching
YC start-ups, somewhere.
Bench Is Hiring – Junior QA Engineer
This is a useful little piece of code, but it has risks if users are allowed to insert Javascript in something running elsewhere. That might happen if you're writing a multiplayer game where users can add content. Or using it in a browser-like environment. How much power does that Javascript have? How well is it sandboxed? What about buffer overflows?
Well, since you can't use the native javascript engine with a separate rendering engine, there's not much difference though is there?

(if you could, everyone would just do that to get dynamic behavior using javascript in their apps as a scripting language)
SC Johnson: A Family Company – Cleaning Great Place to Work
Holy hell is that off-putting. I had a few coupons for Lyft but I'll pass.

I should mention, though, that you can have the healthy culture of driver respect at a place like Lyft with the professionalism of Uber. Sounds like the sweet spot to me.
agree, and their data is wrong. I have a number of sites that do 1000+ UV's per day and have compared traffic a number of different times. Not even close, to say the least.
I know. It's all bullshit what the guy writes, this essay and all the others on his site. This one here (http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/defense.html) is really something fierce.

That's why I said the unemployment crisis isn't caused by an oversupply of scientists - up to about 2004 most everyone with a PhD degree could find employment in industry. But this fellow Katz doesn't even mention industry. He is either ignorant or intentionally dishonest. There is no excuse for either.
Do you know the contexts your hashing requirement is likely to be used in, and/or may be adapted to?

The worst and most persistent security problems emerge when someone defends half-assery as acceptable because, take your pick, it's a quick hack / it's a personal project / it's a small project / it's not used for critical infrastructure.

Until eventually is one or more of the above are violated.

The primary advantage of MD5 is that the hashes are (slightly) shorter than those of other checksum methods. This makes it slightly more convenient to manually compare or transmit hashes.

My problem is that I happen to have used md5sum so often and for so long that it's wired into my own wetware and muscle-memory, and I'm not sure which of the alternative SHA sums I should use, and which of those are widely available. I honestly don't know the answer to that off the top of my head, and "what to use instead of md5sum" as a DDG or Google search doesn't turn up a clearly useful answer. "sha1 sha256 sha384 sha512 which to use" does better.

And locally I've got utilities for SHA 1, 224, 256, and 512 installed, that I can tell.

Looks as if SHA-2 and SHA-3, which include keylengths of 224-512, are considered secure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Hash_Algorithm

Then there are some openssl utilities. But let's not go there.
A Eulogy for the New Republic
The challenge (no complaint here, though I do believe it was down(modded?) merely because of disagreement and not for relevance or quality) was meant to incite more on topic discussion.

It's interesting I've never read the guidelines before now. Was refreshing to have taken a look, although it's mostly common sense and etiquette.
Potentially. Value types seem like a lock for 10, but reified generics have only been suggested as a research topic in Project Valhalla.
And the question with real estate is whether to leverage. And that would depend on if you want to spend the rental income now (like a retirement) or aim for higher capital appreciation (but back to work!)
Lyft offers the option to tip, if I'm not mistaken.
http://rebrickable.com - a tool to show you what LEGO sets you can build with the parts you have. It has a large collection of fan made creations, all with building instructions.
I began working as a student at a national lab two years ago after earning my bachelor's degree in physics. I was converted to staff nearly a year later. I'm now earning more than most of my professors back home and some of the postdocs here, although if the postdocs are converted (a difficult process), they're very likely to have a higher starting salary.

I feel very lucky to be a well-paid staff researcher at such a young age, especially since I don't have a graduate degree. I'm surrounded by older people with PhDs; most of the time, I feel like there's really nothing that really differentiates us.

However, and this might be my inferiority complex kicking in, sometimes I feel like I should go back to school and get my PhD. But then I read essays and articles like these, and I wonder if a choice like that would be stupid. Granted, I'd pursue some sort of computational physics in grad school, so I'd still leave with marketable skills.

Anyway, I don't know what to do. Just thinking out loud. If anyone has any advice, I'd appreciate it.
Sigh, it isn't a good time to be a scientist. Even if you are into computational biology (which I am). The "science" is amazing, and we can learn so much more with less than we could even when I started grad school a bit over ten years ago.

However, there just aren't the jobs available for the number of people that are being trained. I'm somewhat lucky that I was a programmer first, molecular biologist second, so computational work was a no-brainer. However, it is still extremely difficult to find jobs past the post-doc stage, and that stage does last about 5 years longer than it used to. And post-docs get paid like crap for each of those years.

There are lots of career options available, but really, academia is still the place where science gets done. I know lots of people work in industry, startups, biotechs, pharma, etc. But unless you're developing a drug, you're probably trying to sell to academia. There are some great projects and good work being done, but with the lull in Federal funding, the long-tail of grant funding isn't there to support existing labs, let alone new ones.

Debating the reasons for all of this could go on for hours... and there are lots of reasons and enough blame to go around.

It's a great time for science, but a bad time to be a scientist. It was never lucrative, but it just isn't a viable profession for many.
I definitely haven't scrutinized this as much as you have, but I don't see the scandal here.

Docker Machine is separate from Docker. Once Machine was released, what was the point of talking about integrating the functionality into Docker?

They've repeatedly stated that they want Machine and Swarm to be totally separate tools.
That is neat. I had no idea that microdots had a history before they were used by spies. I thought that grainless film, where the photosensitive component is at the molecular level, wasn't developed until 1930. But the old collodion process used was grainless, although really slow, as in light-insensitive. As a process for making original photographs it was barely usable, but this is using it to make prints, for which light sensitivity is no problem.

This has steampunk potential.
This is very exciting to me! It's a great time to be interested in quantum mechanics.

Quantum computers would pave the way for the holy grail of computational physics and materials science: perfect QM simulations. Imagine performing a simulation on a computer that matches up exactly* with experiment. Now that would be exciting. You could actually develop new materials right from the comfort of your chair at Starbucks (SSHing into a supercomputer of course). Your simulations would even be more accurate than a lot of experiments because of the absence of environmental and experimental errors.

Recalling history, it's amazing to me how quickly the idea of a nuclear weapon went from conception to implementation. Also, it only took like 9 years to get a person to the moon. You basically had a bunch of the world's greatest scientists all gathered in one location with the motivation to get the task done. I wonder what would happen if a similar situation was applied to quantum physics research.

* Leaving out plenty of details here. Quantum computers can tackle the NP hard fermion sign problem, which is the current main obstacle in high accuracy QM simulations, but there are still some lingering questions about whether the process of inputting a particular system into a quantum computer is itself an NP hard task. Not to mention that some heavier elements require relativistic treatment, the fact that I'm talking about quantum chemistry rather than particle physics, and the fact that even with a polynomial time algorithm, quantum computers may still be too slow to simulate a large system in a practical amount of time. But I can dream.
This is why for CS and any one else really, it is absolutely crucial to save and become debt/mortgage free while things are good. Also, if possible have some fallback skills, either computer related or not.
Zuckerberg is in the relationship business. Free internet will increase communication and relationships. More relationships = more business for Facebook.Seems like a good idea to me.

Even if only a third of internet users are FBers, then increasing the users by 4.3 Billion will increase FB users by 1.4 Billion. Interesting to see the effort for old phones.
A lot of conclusions being made based on one Russian website's experience for one day.
Virginia Beach Locksmith Services – We Are Here for You
Yes. Do be a scientist. Don't be an academic.

Dropping out of academia was amongst the more difficult decisions I've made. Also amongst the best.

There are huge opportunities for scientists today. I'm a physicist. I've worked in computer-assisted surgery, medical physics, image processing, computer vision, genomics, computational physics and a few other things besides. It has paid well and let me do all kinds of interesting research that I would never have been able to touch as an academic.

Things to do as a student: study modern statistics hard. Being a card-carrying Bayesian is like the secret handshake to an unlimited world of really cool stuff these days. There's a childhood friend of mine who's (finally) finishing his PhD in psychology, and when we reconnected a few years ago we were amazed that we could meaningfully talk to each other about our work because we both spoke the same statistical language. It really is a universal grammar, and anyone in any field who speaks it fluently has a world of opportunity waiting for them, from finance to fisheries.
Correct: you are offered the option to tip post-ride.
*jaw drops to the first floor
Brad Templeton: Attending the World SF convention by remote telepresence robot
Mostly Menus Launches First Ever Flip Book Menu Based Search Engine
A subset of F# can be used (more or less) as a terser C#. Functional languages make writing correct programs easier. I don't think modifiability of an existing program depends on the language as much from the quality of the code. F# is not difficult, just a bit different.

Functional languages seem to have this odd halo around them that for some reason they are thought to be obscure and non practical. It's probably due to a historical baggage. If Ruby was originally picked up by compiler experts and language afficionados and the only resources that one could find were references to topics in those domains I bet people would be saying the same thing about it.

The main problem for adoption IMO is not language complexity, but rather lack of educational resources that display how easy and nice it's to do simple things on the language.

But since the simple things are so nice and easy it's really straightforward to do something a bit more complex and most of the published examples focus on these more advanced things.
cool i didnt know that. thanks for that.
How fast can you type Emojis?
Elastic Search for Stack Exchange
interesting, good point. i suppose that means a flaw was i was only thinking about humans and not about all the life here
just season 1...
Thanks. So far, it all looks fine.

For me, it has been some fun math
and software. I'm gathering some
initial data and should go live
soon. Then if people like the work,
I'll be in good shape.

Just checked with my ISP: Can
upgrade to 25 Mbps upload speed
with a static IP address for
$89 a month. That 25 Mbps is
a lot: If users really like my
work, enough to half fill that
24 x 7, it adds up to millions
a year in revenue. Less expensive
to start than a pizza carryout,
and makes money even when
I'm asleep.

I'm borrowing at least two of
PG's points: (1) At first
don't try to please 1 million
users only a little but
try to please 100 users a lot.
Then they will tell others and
will have 1000 users and 10,000
users. Then expand to another
100 users .... (2) Initially,
don't be afraid to do work that
does not scale. So, I'm following that:
For the data, the 'business model'
has that gathered, in a way that
will scale, automatically
as a by-product of the usage, but
that will work well only with a lot
of usage. In the meanwhile, I will
will just insert good data by hand!

From the lectures in Sam Altman's
course at Stanford, just completed,
what I'm doing looks fine except
I'm a solo founder, who's done all
the work, thus, knows all the work,
has no co-founder disputes,
owns 100% of the business, and has
meager burn rate. The burn rate
is so low that by the time the business
qualifies for equity funding, it will
likely also be profitable enough
for me to buy lots more servers,
in a spare bedroom, upgrade my
house circuit breaker to 200 A,
put in a window A/C, get some
UPS units, put my emergency
electric generator on a pad in
a small shack just out back
and have it kick off when the
UPS says so, get a new SUV
and Corvette, and keep growing.
Outsource bookkeeping, accounting,
taxes, and legal, and grow.
Maybe be like the Canadian
romantic matchmaking service
Plenty of Fish, long just
one guy, two old Dell servers,
ads just from Google, and
$10 million a year in revenue.

Sure, if we were four co-founders,
all married, with all four
wives pregnant and wanting
a new, two bath, three bedroom
house, with a nice backyard,
in a nice neighborhood, and
a new SUV, for her, with
a baby car seat, a play pen,
a bassinet, a crib, a stroller,
two washing machines, help
with the housework, a GYN,
OB, pediatrician, GP, dentist,
dermatologist, optometrist,
swimming instructor, etc.,
then, sure, we'd be desperate
for equity funding! But,
not me!

Looks fine so far.

$10 million a year is a lot
for a mathematician on Wall Street.
Very cool!

I didn't get much sense of scale. It's hard to tell how big a skiier would be in comparison to the mountain. Could there be an option for third-person view with an average-height skiier model?

I see you want to add trees, i guess that would also help alleviate this.

Is it possible to pan the view when viewing the whole resort? I kept trying to get "just the right view".
I think this will be about as revolutionary as Silverlight was.
People have been searching for the applications of quantum computers -- excluding the adiabatic QC's associated with D-Wave, which are somewhat in a different class. I found this part of the article very interesting regarding applications:

"[Mathias] Troyer has spent the past three years looking for an answer—a 'killer app' for quantum computing that would make the development costs worthwhile. The two classic examples, code-cracking and searching databases, are not good enough, says Troyer. Shor's algorithm will require thousands of qubits to do any serious factorization, he says, and there are other forms of encryption that a quantum computer would do nothing to solve. And although quantum computers may search databases faster, they are still limited by the time it takes to feed the data into the circuit, which would not change.

"Troyer thinks that a much more fruitful application for the near future is the modelling of electrons in materials and molecules—something that quickly becomes too difficult for today's supercomputers. At first, this, too, seemed a long shot. His early estimates suggested that it would take a quantum computer as long as 300 years to simulate the molecular dynamics of even a small molecule—such as the iron sulphide inside the ferredoxin proteins that are involved in nitrogen fixation in plants. “Clearly, that was on the border of being science fiction,” he says. But by rewriting the software, he brought the figure down to 30 years—then to just 300 seconds. “Just like in classical computing, where one has to sit down and optimize the algorithm,” he says, “the same is needed for a quantum algorithm.”
I look forward to reading this!

However, I am reading the first part of the first section (explaining the basis vectors of a linear space), and see this:

http://i.imgur.com/Qizuw0K.png

That makes no sense to me, shouldn't it be more like this?

http://i.imgur.com/iKpKgSa.png

Maybe I am just not familiar with the notation, though...
Lyft even called the fares "donations" until roughly 6 months ago.
I agree. I always say 'work to live, don't live to work', which is my way of saying the same thing.

I liked this as well: 'I had been dreaming all my life, but I felt like I was finally free to dream'. This is where I am at in life right now, and it is beautiful.
Netflix Burned by Express.js
End of the Road for “Endophenotypes”?
Show HN: Here's the Bad Version of My App
The problem you'll have is that you have a lower career ceiling than a PhD. Staff do get paid significantly better than post-docs (especially when benefits are included, which postdocs don't get). However, if postdocs move on to independent researchers, they will have a much higher ceiling in terms of career progression, salary, and external funding opportunities (consulting, etc).

You just have to ask yourself if the "prestige" is worth it to you. You'd be taking a salary hit for 3-5 years for the degree and 3-5 years after that for postdoc, and then after that, you'd probably not be able to find a job. From what I've heard, physics is a hard field to find work in, and you'd be over-qualified to do the job you currently have.

It's a tough call. Going back, I probably would have still gone the PhD route, but I'd have been much more selective in projects, etc... and family is a big factor.
facebook has actually been extremely aggressive about enforcing real name policies in the last year especially; my extended facebook circle includes many transgender folks who have been complaining loudly about being forced to revert their profiles to previously used names, and facebook does indeed require documentary proof of identity if it is challenged
As a side question, how can you tell how many writes a regular drive has sustained? Say, like the one in my desktop or laptop?
I think it's great that they are going to officially support iOS again.

Coincidentally I submitted a new version of my own browser app to the AppStore, on the same day they made the announcement.
I added support for the new Firfox sync protocol - it took me forever to get it working and now it's kind of redundant :-/

Anyway, if someone is interested in the source:
https://github.com/graetzer/Foxbrowser
I went to the school where he teaches and never had any student mention his name with a shred of respect or have anything positive to say about him. I would take his points with a huge grain of salt.