skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For my favourite variation of this, see "Practical Linguistic Steganography using Contextual Synonym Substitution and a Novel Vertex Coding Method"[1].

Chang et al. use synonym substitution to encode hidden data into standard text, resulting in perfectly readable and sensible output afterwards. This is far less suspicious than someone keeping spam. Appendix B gives an example of how innocuous the output can be. The best part is that even when the attacker knows the system being used, it's still secure against an enemy (Kerckhoffs's principle).

[1]: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COLI_a_00176
No. The runner still has the same mass, so accelerating takes the same amount of energy as 1x gravity. It's like shifting to a higher gear on your bike.
What the hell? All that talk, plus a toolkit download, and not a word about responsible disclosure?

I'm not sure if I'd ever want SilverSky (the firm behind this) to have my money.
Dammit, how did I forget that. This is more important than anything I've written above. Make a hang glider that packs to 2.5 meters max and doesn't take an eternity to setup and break down (15 minutes max). The performance needs to be somewhere between a modern paraglider and an intermediate hang glider. It would be revolutionary to the sport.

Lack of such hang glider is #1 reason preventing willing people from hang gliding. The popularity of paragliding is proof of that (a paraglider packs into a big backpack). You can't store a hang glider in an apartment because normally it packs into a 5 meter long sausage bag. And I can't even go travel with my hang glider because where do I leave it when I sleep in the hotel? Too risky to leave it on top of car. A small package also allows flying at some ski resorts and other perks.

Designing this hang glider would be primarily solving a configuration problem – how to arrange all required components so that they are foldable and yet strong enough. You have 40 years of HG designs to get inspired from, and don't forget Princeton sailwing, that's an old, under-recognized concept imho.

By the way, hang gliders are small enough that you can truck-test them on the ground to make sure they're strong enough and have proper stability attributes. Unmanned flight testing should also be possible, though not done currently. HGMA even has a list of certification criteria online that you can use as a baseline. What I'm saying is that designing hang glider is easier than designing a Boeing. You do need to know what you're doing, but you don't need a team of PhDs in fluid dynamics and materials science. All important hang glider components are free to use, not covered by current patents.
Well, it does take 2 years less! Most people hiring PhDs in academia are aware that UK/European PhDs are going to have fewer publications, etc, than their US counterparts. It may be a bit harder to jump straight to a prize fellowship from a European PhD, but it happens quite a bit.

In the UK at my institution, there was only optional teaching load for PhDs, you knew you had funding for 3 years before you started and there weren't many taught courses, so you can dive straight into research.
Ok, previous sentence.

> If your code challenge involves a typically male oriented theme, such as sports, consider changing it to something else. Why not use something more neutral? I did a code challenge that involved ranking soccer teams, and while going over the code a developer at the company asked me if I needed the rules of the game explained to me.

Statement of fact, no "feminism" on display, no hint of anger that they asked her this question, this is merely explaining the situation. No "They only asked me because I am a woman" speculation.

> While it's a good thing to make sure the candidate understands what the problem is, companies need to be aware that these things carry extra cultural baggage and asking a female candidate if they understand a basic sports rule (or any other male dominated theme) comes across as belittling and sexist

Wherein she offers advice on why this might not be a good idea due to contextual baggage. A piece of advice as I mentioned in my previous comment.

> So.. the company asks a candidate if they understand the game, and just because the author of this post is female, she wildly speculates that they must only be asking her because she is female. This is ludicrous. Sounds like a feminist.

There is nothing she has written anywhere in any of these where she "wildly speculates that they must only be asking her because she is female" or says anything that indicates your rather pejorative use of "She must be a feminist".
7 Habits of Effective Web Designers
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
Honestly, if you have problems getting used to an IDE, you'll have a huge problem developing for Android anyway - it's a platform that's significantly different than any out there and learning the IDE is such a minor thing that developer hung up on that probably shouldn't be developing Android apps.

Also, you're not "forced" into anything - any Gradle compatible Java IDE will load and compile AS projects without a hitch (sadly, Eclipse Gradle support is really bad, hence the switch od IntelliJ platform).
The distinction is meaningless. It is always the case that the currently economically active part of the population pays for those who aren't active. [1]

If you prefer thinking in monetary terms (as most people do), think about somebody who has a retirement savings account. Their money comes out of payments that firms make (in the form of interest on bonds, or in the form of dividends etc.). This is money that could otherwise have gone to the employees of those firms.

To get an even clearer picture, think about it in real terms. Retirees use up real resources and services that are generated by the currently working population. So the current workers provide for the current beneficiaries, plain and simple. The movements of money that are used to reflect the movements of real resources is really just a thin layer on top, and it would be wise not to focus too much on the cosmetics of that thin layer.

[1] Mostly children and retirees and, if you allow yourself to be honest about the reality of capitalism, the rich and powerful.
Excellent! Thank you. Cuts across the problems alluded to for those who want to hear the lectures whatever (it is their decision).
I don't know how to get on the radar of any companies. I'd love to be given a coding challenge.

Background: Received Math degree this past summer, 0 years as a full-stack developer. I had supporting coursework in CS, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with programming. All I want is an entry level job...
You usually get paid a stipend in the STEM fields, but it's probably well below minimum wage (we're talking the equivalent of $3-5/hour) with such a huge time commitment that earning money on the side is practically impossible. If you live in a city with a higher than average cost of living or you're just starting a family or have health problems (that university insurance can be pretty crappy as you transition from your parents' plan) you can very easily be forced to get student loans... Which you often can't discharge through bankruptcy even if not strictly used for tuition AFAIK.

I'm not sure about the humanities but with the disproportionate amount of funding focused on STEM (relative to number of graduate students) I wouldnt be surprised if some people did have to pay to get their PhD.
Yes, this work should get more attention (no pun intended). I still can't believe how clear Dr. Fehmi's writings are on types of attention, particularly this Open Focus... good stuff: imagine the distance between your eyes (gets me everytime even though i've practiced different types of meditation)
Wow, that sucks. Good luck breaking into a market full of idiots who can't recognize experience and expertise when they see it.
But that "problem" has to be equally true in any field of engineering you can care to mention.

Nobody goes back to raw materials for all needs, it's simply impossible. There's no reason it should be less so in software.

Many car companies chose to build their own engines, but not all of them do. I'm pretty sure that among those who do, they still don't manufacture all of their own engine components, or even the bolts used to assemble the engine, or the wires used to hook up the engine electronics, and so on.
Hey, I'm currently working on keepallthethings.com. It's not specifically for photos but it does work well for that use case(wanting to tag my photos in a way without duplicating them all over the place was my original drive for creating the site). There is no autosyncing though I am planning on out of browser upload tools in the near future.

I should warn it is very early days and there is still a lot to do and a long list of todos to complete but if you want to try it out send me an email(in my profile) and I'll set you up with a free account.
> This returns the zero value of the value type in the map if the key doesn't exist in the map.

Wow, that's quite horrible (for a static language, anyway). So if my map returns `0`, I can't really be sure whether that is the zero-value (no value at this key), or that the value that I queried actually is `0`.

> This returns true or false in ok based on whether the value exists, zero value for foo if it doesn't exist.

Better, but still unnecessarily error-prone.

> however, go does have the compilation requirement that the ok value gets used somehow, or it'll give you an unused variable compilation error.

OK, I can see how that could alleviate the problem in practice: maybe in most contexts, there aren't anything more sensible to use the `ok` variable for than to check its value. In that case, the programmer will be alerted if he tries to use the `foo` variable without checking `ok` first.
From my experience freelance at that stage is not an option at all, and the best option would be a beefed up github profile to show off your capabilities.
Great post, though I'm missing a definition of how do they mathematically define segregation. (Checking from the JS code, it seems to be an average over the shapes of the proportion of neighbor shapes which are like them.)

Also, the title confused me a bit as I expected something related to Flatland.

By the way, one of the two people behind this is Vi Hart, which has also made some brilliant videos featuring math, music, and brilliant silliness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794&list=UUOGeU-1Fig...
My takeaway from this article: if a client tells you he needs a hacker to do an "easy" job, tell him to do it himself. If he thinks it is easy he won't value your work anyway.

"I know it is easy, I mean, how hard can it be? It's just not my area, you know, so I think you should do it... but since it's easy, I won't pay you much and I won't appreciate your work. So when can you start?"
And much more damage to the wallet...
Oh, I though Android was a Google's product!?!
London software salaries are low compared to the Bay Area or Seattle. Comparable or a little bit lower than Toronto software salaries.

A couple of years ago Amazon would make a standard offer of 90k USD (~55k GBP at today's rates) to new graduates hired as SDE in Seattle, plus a 10k bonus if they stayed a year.

Of course there's differences like Amazon giving everyone only 10 paid vacation/annual leave days, 15 days being considered pretty good, annual bonuses aren't common at the larger U.S. companies, etc.

I personally think London is worth it, but the money difference is there.
This is purely UK vs US difference: From my experience, companies in the US can pay over $100k to fresh graduates. The same companies pay 30% less in the UK. So the $95k translates to $40k, which is what you'd expect.
So how would I do a watch task, recompile less and minify js when files changes?
These tools are there for a good reason.
Fully agree.

Native development is a pleasure in iOS and Windows Phone.

On Android it feels like something Android team was forced to provide by upper management and do as little as they can.

Which given their reaction to alternative languages on the Android Team Fireside, might actually be true.
1. Possibly, but iPhone's screen is pathetic in sunlight, and it's speaker is probably not loud enough for variometer beeping. Also, not sure if it has enough battery power for 4 hours of such workload.

2. AoA is too low-level for me personally. I'd rather see my airspeed and glide ratio relative to the air. Hang gliders stabilize themselves at an optimal AoA if you stop providing inputs, but sometimes when I'm desperately trying to reach the landing field I want to know if I should increase or decrease the speed to get there (tradeoff between headwind penetration and sink rate).

Also, personally I'm not going to install anything requiring long wires. There's just too much hassle already in setting up a hang glider... I just want to put the whole device with any sensors in clean airflow and forget about it.

Oh, one more thing I would like is a G-force meter. I'm not supposed to exceed 4G positive on my glider, but I have no idea how it feels like. I'm not going to reach it with normal flying but once I start doing wingovers and loops, I would like to know the numbers I'm getting.
It's hell for those of us outside of the Unix ecosystem. I have MSYS on my Windows machine and make works only half of the time.

Also the learning curve is just not as easy, nor the files as readable. With Gulp and Grunt you are exploiting the fact that almost everyone can write a couple of lines of JavaScript. The only thing you are adding is an api composed of three to four functions.

If you look at make on the other hand, you'll need to learn quite a lot.

http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
You're right the term can mean anything, but I alluded to my meaning when I mentioned "ML problems".

Thanks for the tip about Hortonworks/Cloudera, I had never considered such a role but that's exactly what I want to be doing next year.
Well, let's find out. I came up with 35949340184
Actually, as a non-Java programmer who has been attempting to use Eclipse from time to time over the years, I can tell you that it's actually pretty good for Java. But just for Java. With that said, Android Studio is superior for me. If I'd known it's a Jetbrains thing from the start, I would probably go with it immediately. Eclipse also seemed like the 1st choice according to the Android developer docs at the time (I hope they update(d?) that), so that threw me off too.
Why Do Some People Not Celebrate Christmas?
Another similar article appeared two years ago:

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...

I think most interesting point is not covered in either of them: How much of this effort devoted towards human curation? The numbers are believed to be ~1100 full time employees and 6000 contract workers[1]. These are huge numbers compared to most competitors in the market. Assuming each correction to a map can take 15 mins on average, you can easily make 100,000 corrections a day. Again, assuming there are top 2000 cities in the world where most of the queries originates, this is about 100 corrections per city per day. This would guarantee Google maps best of the best freshness, precision and recall on most metrics. With about 10X-20X larger curation force plus algo engineering, likes of Apple or HERE have no chance. In a way this also shows Google's leadership wisdom. Maps are the most important thing on mobile and even on web. Most companies don't get this and provide minuscule budgets citing no potential revenues (for instance Ballmer cancelled Street View like effort at Microsoft). By the time they wake - if they wake up - it would be to only find that they have been outrun by such a huge gap that even a decade won't be enough to catch up.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/to-do-what-google-does-in-map...
Great move Max!

This is Omri (founder of Genomecompiler.com). I'm always amazed about how many biologists think their work is pipetting small amounts of liquids and performing massively low productivity experiments rather then their real work of increasing our understanding of nature and finding solution to real world problems (like disease, hunger, aging, running out of civilization critical commodities, etc) using the best available tools.

Robots aren't taking our jobs - they help us be more productive so a biologist Ph.D. might in the future get paid like a CS undergrad!
Show HN: Extract, validate and normalise UK postcodes
I think they had the options to target Universities or college students. The product connects college students to other students to for help with problems. It's mostly suited for the mathematics, engineering and computing faculties.

The big issue is, they didn't have anyone to do marketing for it or test the market to see whether it wants their service or not. They should of done a pilot system. Focused on one university in Beta mode, and then expanded. They were too fixed on selling it for 50K a piece.
Depends on capability.

Having 80 column text, a nice office type suite, lots of expansion options: test & measurement, industrial control, etc... made an Apple quite a nice machine.

In terms of entertainment, games, etc... yeah. Totally. Though I have to admit, many of the greater game experiences on an Apple are pretty darn great. But, there were a ton of things done on more capable machines with custom chips that were better. No argument.

But, when it came to getting shit done, making money?

I made a ton of money with an Apple computer. Money that was off the table with the Atari one, unless I was going to write a killer game. Plenty did.

But plenty more did things that were not so much entertainment too.

I love my Atari machine and spent long hours on it making it do all sorts of spiffy things with graphics and sound, and I really loved the bi-directional game ports. It is a nice machine.

We need to be careful about "less capable" in this context though. While I didn't spend the same hours on that Apple in the same way, because the simpler design didn't require it, I did spend them getting lots of things done for people, and for myself. Often somewhat boring things, compared to fun graphics and sound, but important things. The software was there, storage etc...
Silversky disclosed this to the Yik Yak team on December 2nd.

The original source appeared on their blog on Friday, December 3rd after Yik Yak had released an update to the App Store.

https://www.silversky.com/blog/yik-hak-smashing-the-yak
There are existing services that provide services similar to what you request. Just Google for "track your competitors".

Is there anything specific that you need that current services don't provide?
My vote is for bash scripts. If you are in Windows then you can use babun or preferably get off Windows.
Amoeba Management
I totally agree, and yes please answer these questions, as I'd be interested to know the differences in quality among the respective teams, their methods for evaluating edits and how they perceive each other.

Right now you can use Google Maps on your phone to add a missing place. This place will be approved (usually within an hour) by an Anonymous account bearing the "G" logo. Now while the POI may not display unless you are actively searching for the place or it's specific category, it will still appear on the map. This makes it even easier to crowd the map with useless information. I am sure it's an insult to those who painstakingly edit the map in MM with accurate information, only to be denied be an LE who knows nothing, and then seeing the useless entries like people's houses and spam get added immediately. What is Google's reasoning behind this?
If you want something like grunt but simple you can try the thing I made which is called 'bild'.
Yeah, they used all the money on themselves. A free learning period so to speak. But, I wouldn't want to do that with investors money, reputation might hurt them in the long run.

One of the guys is a product manager at Google now, another moved back to his home town. Only one of them is still doing the startup thing.

They definitely got a lot of experience, this only counts if they learnt from their mistakes. Which, I really hope they did.
After relying on Google Maps a lot for many years living in the US, I have (maybe unsurprisingly) noticed that it doesn't work nearly as well in Europe. As in, I'd zoom in on central Stockholm and search for something common, like the name of a restaurant, and Maps would promptly swoosh me to Nicaragua where it found a place with that name. It's doing stuff like this so often that I rarely use it anymore.
I think part of the goal with Eventual Consistency is that it lets you attack the underlying issues in a qualitatively different way.

Relying on the DB, your options are constrained by your choice of relational tables and rows, and further affected by your DB vendor and configuration. When you lift the conflicts out to a higher layer of abstraction, you can do something more object-oriented, leveraging some of the same tools you'll need anyway to deal with other inconsistencies and quirks.
So what is Plan9's alternative to SSH?
SSL seems even worse than SSH in terms of algorithms that you have to negotiate, and thanks to misconfigurations you can end up in a situation with no shared ciphers (if server accepts only RC4 and client rejects RC4 for example).

Maybe tinyssh could qualify as an alternative...
Women over 40 too old for Zillow?
The author of the post refused to avail himself of other peoples' help

Chris. Please stop following my posts around the internet and spreading lies about me. Last time we talked chat was like that:

ifesdjeen: i don't want anyone to fix my problems)
bitemyapp: I don't give a fuck what you want.

(sic.)

There were several occasions on both IRC, and Mailing Lists when people were like:

x: ifesdjeen: that's all functorial
ifesdjeen: functorial?
x: ifesdjeen: and dont you know that

Or:

x: just write a function of that type for fmap
x: thats YOUR problem now isnt it

Yes, I didn't know what functorial is. And yes, it happened more than once.

Please, stop spreading these lies. I have explained you more than once that I'm not posting things to Haskell Mailing List and try avoiding asking questions on IRC due to 2 reasons:

1. When I have a more complicated question (such as thunk leak detection, monadic order traversal, implementing StateT instances to allow state to be handled transparently in concurrent apps), these questions take more than 2 minutes to answer. And both you and other people couldn't answer them (see your email from several month from now). And I do not blame you or them for that.

2. When a beginner comes with a simple question, he gets based by "experts"

So there are no questions you can ask and be happy: hard ones get ignored (by everyone including you). And easy ones make (some) "experts" talk with condescending tone.

Yesterday, 5 people wrote me a DM saying that I should ignore you, because your behaviour has been known to be offensive and bad even since the days you've been doing Clojure.

As for everyone else, please don't get offended if anyone happens to say you something condescending or offensive on IRC or Mailing List. People are people. But it doesn't mean you _have_ to keep posting your questions if you don't feel sure you're welcomed there.

p.s. it's also not like Chris is hearing this for the first time. I've said same thing on Twitter and on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/hmmqkp/alex_p_s_blog_language_is_not_imp...
I had to stop halfway through because the pretentiousness was overbearing.