skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: My wife wants to become a programmer and I need help
This is kinda personal, so I'm writing on a throwaway account.

I have been programming most of my life, and have a great job as engineering director at a small video games company. My wife (27) is tired of not making progress in her career and wants to become a programmer instead. She's always been interested in what I do, and honestly I'm pretty stoked about it. I know I can teach her anything she wants to know about programming. However...

It's been so long since I was new to programming that I don't remember what it was like to learn. It feels weird even writing that, but it's true. How can I help her succeed? She wants to take classes at community college, and I think that's great. But I also want to steer her in the right direction: I've interviewed dozens of college students that can't code their way out of a cardboard box, and I don't want that to happen to her. I remember what Jennifer Dewalt did (180 websites) receiving a lot of praise, and I definitely know the value of side-projects, but are there any other things we can do? I was thinking, for example, of teaching her binary/hex, all the common data types, and as much programmer lingo as I know before she starts classes so she has the vocabulary to talk about software.

I also want to make sure she gets skills in an area which will get her a job in the next two years. I suspect that web development and app programming are accessible areas for junior programmers looking for employment, but I don't really know what the entry-level of those areas looks like on a broad scale.

My other main concern right now is navigating the challenges of being female in this industry. That's something I know absolutely nothing about. I'd love if someone could help me figure out what to expect there.

If anyone has advice for us, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks HN!
The public library a few hundred feet from my residence heavily and ridiculously censors its internet access. The censorship is provided by a third party and getting a site whitelisted is practically impossible to achieve.
I don't think you've ever calculated just how much that cost is.

Lets say that you have a web service that is serving 30,000 requests per second, with a 1 Kb request size and a 4 Kb response size and you're setting up an elastic load-balancer setup that on average keeps 300 c3.xlarge instances open.

Do the math and you'll find that the cost on AWS, considering the instances used and the bandwidth, is over $80,000 per month. And that's a conservative example, since by my calculations that's about $1,000,000 per year and I know companies paying much more than that.

Don't know what startups you're thinking about, but from where I'm standing, for startups that's a recipe for burning cash.
We are indeed very transparent:
hub.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes-server
Interesting idea. The Apple example of the subtle arrow change is a great thing to be able to see.

Couple of bits of immediate feedback: the navigation breaks the forward/back button (it has no effect) and the lower Reddit examples highlight the footer changing where it doesn't.
Also, NoScript users will need to allow zidilife.com to view the article at all (a domain-specific authorization will not enable the popup though).
I would only feel self-conscious if people judged what I was doing all day. I didn't feel like I was being judged.

I always passed this one guy who had a separate monitor to watch some kind of anime. Another seemed to always have Netflix on. During the World Cup this summer, so many people had a window/monitor watching the games.

The culture was very much this: get your work done? cool. do whatever you need to continue getting your work done.
Docker: Continuous Delivery
I'd feel pretty cheeky helping a blind person if I was doing it just to get paid for it.

Similarly, I wouldn't help an old lady cross the street then ask for a pound.
I don't think the common claim is that it would be "evil" or malicious, but that it could be a threat, being both powerful and unpredictable.

The idea that I've often seen people mention, is the idea of a "paperclip optimizer", in which an AI superintelligence primarily optimizes for there being more paperclips, not taking into account side effects of this, which other people might find harmful. If I understand the idea correctly, which I very well might not, it is meant to suggest that if an AI superintelligence is created with a particular goal in mind, we would do well to be very careful when choosing the AI's goals.

It would I suppose be essentially a similar problem to that of a "literal genie". (Except harsher, because the AI would go through steps to accomplish the task, instead of just magically making the task so, and therefore would have more side effects?)
Create a daily reading list with calibre
Ask HN: Could you recreate Facebook?  Would you want to?
Let's say, the second you start reading this, you got warped back to your younger self in the year 2003. You keep your memory. Everything is the same except this time, Mark Zuckerberg was never born.

Could you, knowing what you know today, recreate Facebook? If so, how would you do it? If not, why not?

Also, knowing what you know about Facebook today, would you want to?
People don't necessarily want to be more productive, nor recognize when they're aren't.
Well:
"Does my socks match"
"Is this milk too old"
"which of the three cans in front of me is the coconut milk"
Only the imagination of the users sets the limit...
There comes a point where industry overhead buffers you.

What I mean by that is if the most cost effective big rig truck gets say 10MPG then that cost gets built into the market rate. If a new truck design gets 15MPG and costs more you can figure out the costs vs what's out on the market and see if it's an improvement.

As to self-driving trucks, sure there are downsides. But, I suspect the net efficiency gains can offset them in most situations. Once most shipping companies switch the downsides will just be 'industry overhead' until their dealt with.
Bitcoin Has Been Getting Obliterated
Some ancedata to back up your point - I am exactly like that. However, I do appreciate an isolated space from time to time. Maybe the optimum is providing private spaces totaling, say, 1/3 of your staff. Then people can go use them whenever they want, but you're not wasting so much space.
Upvoted, though I don't like that idea. People tend to treat differently things they do for money and things they do for non-monetary rewards. In this particular case, I'm not sure which version would be better for the blind, but I think I'd prefer to help for free.

I'm interested in further discussion. Input from actual blind people would be really helpful here.
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Contact leah at hire4engineering.com for more details--I look forward to hearing from you!
It's a result of rampant corruption.

The government pretty much accepts that certain categories (say, dentists) hide a lot of their profits. Instead of fixing this, they decided to just assume you are hiding ~60% of what you declare and tax you accordingly.

A few years later they decided to just create a table of what each professional from each category should earn and if you declare less than that you can expect an extremely unpleasant visit which WILL find something wrong with your business.

Law-abiding people get crushed under this weight, while tax evaders just declare even less (or even operate completely outside of the law). Good people get punished, bad people don't. Going to the authorities to report these people can be successful, or unsuccessful, or frustrating, or very unhealthy. Feel like gambling?

After 10 years of this you start wondering if you're the idiot. You can become one of the "furbi", or keep trying to work in this broken framework, or leave.

I left.

Oh and the tax code is so byzantine you need to pay a professional even if you have an extremely small and simple business. And even they make mistakes. And you get to pay for those mistakes.
I've been playing with Caffe for recognising images. It's kind of mind blowing how well it works. Yet the networks I tested could "only" recognise photos, not drawings or anything abstract.

A human could easily attribute meaning to a drawing, even if the drawing was very abstract or she had never seen a similar drawing before. Whereas a deep networks seem to rely on visual similarity to things it has seen in the past, on a pixel level. The networks I tried could tell something was a cartoon, but not what the cartoon depicted, even if it's something simple like a face.

The deep networks I tried also really struggled with recognising different textures. Like closeups of sand, water etc, things that a human would instantly recognise. They could classify it as a texture but not what kind of texture.
Nice words and thanks for the book recommendation.
Yes, salaries are a variable, but even if salaries do rise in sync with inflation, that doesn't make inflation good. It's still bad.

Nope, we can't expect our salaries to rise along with inflation - not in today's insane world.

- http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
- http://www.theguardian.com/money/2011/nov/23/uk-household-earnings-fall

.. and whatever you'd feel like Googling up.

>> There are advantages to inflation. One is that it encourages people to keep their wealth invested in production

That's not an advantage. Inflation does punish saving (which is bad to begin with), but also encourages risky investments. The higher the inflation, the higher the return on investments you need to not lose wealth, and the riskier your investments, the more likely you're to lose them.

So no, that's not good. Purchasing power increases are good.

>> Another is that it discounts debt.

Yes, this is why governments keep lying to us that inflation is good for us. They're trying to manage their massive debts, but they'll ultimately fail.

How about just not using money you don't have, or money you can't afford to borrow? Oh but that would curtail politicians' crony-capitalist spending, so we can't have that.

>> The ideal would be a money supply that exactly kept pace with growth in production resulting in neither inflation nor deflation

You're basically suggesting that our purchasing power should not increase. That's just absurd.

>> Because mild inflation is not particularly harmful

So even you acknowledge that it is harmful, even if not to a large extent. But what do you get if there's 2% inflation for 10 years? It keeps compounding you know. How much of your purchasing power will you have lost by then?

>> deflation is really bad

No it's not. It's your purchasing power increasing. Everyone wants to get more for less, and that's what (price-)deflation means.
What?! I didn't mean to imply that everything on this list is necessarily relevant to modern lifestyle. It also says nothing about vaccination. The parent comment asked for how human lifestyle looked like in prehistoric ages, that's why I posted it. It also mentiones that our ancestors presumably performed a variety of different movements each day (climbing, throwing etc.) which I think is relevant. Maybe I should have removed the word "recommendations" to not step into prejudiced territory.
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" The goal isn't to prevent the development of potentially harmful technologies" - actually, the goal includes "avoiding potential pitfalls". One would assume that creating danger towards humanity would be a pitfall.
I am in agreement here with that - there are benefits to both types of spaces. I am surprised there are not more companies willing to just let people pick their workspace smartly, whether it is a private office or open office.
No the whole point of the argument is that the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese.
The Mod is a hackable sex toy
There's a similarity of sorts here to airline pilots. What separates the decent ones from the great ones is how they handle the rare cases. There's enough dreary repetition that it's easy to be unprepared when it counts the most.
I just use Vultr and install from a FreeBSD downloaded ISO. No modifications to the base install at all and works as expected.

DO have screwed something up with their configuration if they need to make so many changes to make it work. No other VPS provider I have used that support FreeBSD (or OpenBSD for that matter) require any changes to the default install.
I imagine a call center is a lot more noisy than the average open plan office, though. The open space I work in sounds a lot like a coffee shop (a few muted voices, but not much else)
AI is already dangerous with its recommendation engines shaping our lives and used for decision making in lot of unethical places we don't know about. Every technology has a dark side. It does not need to reach human level intelligence or beyond it.
This post is written by Ilya Sutskever, who has co-authored some of biggest breakthroughs in machine learning the last five years. Which do you think is most likely: a) That he has a naive understanding of machine learning and neuroscience, or b) that this was written informally, and without guarding against every possible way it can be misinterpreted. Please be a little charitable when interpreting other peoples writings.
> The algorithms are usually statistical which by definition makes them prejudiced.

Okay, maybe they are "prejudiced" if by prejudiced we mean making decisions based on statistical heuristics. I still don't see how that's a problem if they're rooted in fact.

> The algorithms can only be accurate to who you are, not what you want to become.

Actually, the best advertising is aspirational. It's easy to sell a fat guy a cake, but it's even better to sell him on the prospect of no longer being fat (ie. a gym membership).
Good question, I'd like to see the answer from more knowledgeable firearms enthusiasts.

Likely because partly what is considered a "good" handgun advances with the state of the art, partly modern insurance and regulatory requirements drive up modern manufacturing costs, and partly because of market dynamics for the use cases a handgun is put to. If you were mass manufacturing a mid-19th century handgun, with no improvements in its tech or metallurgy, without having to pay for the operational insurance and regulatory overhead costs, and it was accepted by the firearms-purchasing public in the same per capita adoption rates as back when it was originally produced, I can easily see it being a lot less expensive. But the purchasing public seems to seek specific characteristics in modern firearms, these characteristics don't appear to align with "use old tech", and this tends to set a floor price from what I can tell as a casual user.

Interestingly, replica mid- to late-19th century handguns sell for around the $600+ USD mark in the US, for the enthusiast market. Well-cared for, lightly-used firearms are reasonably close to quality as new for most non-enthusiast level users, and even many enthusiast users. So if inexpensive is what you are looking for, a used firearm from a trusted user goes for roughly half to 2/3 of new prices these days.
Gamification. "Internet points" have a way to boost one's self-esteem while not perverting as much as monetary rewards do. Even though I totally want to help for free, I'd personally like to look every now and then and see how many people I've helped over time, just to boost my feelings of self-worth.
I would probably be a holdout for the private office. I've been opting to work from home as much as I can from my quiet home office rather than go to the office. My colleagues are all very responsive via email/IM so that helps a lot when we need to converse.
Scary isn't it. They have an AI AND a time machine...
Give Me All Your Bitcoins
Economist: Counter-terrorism, Going dark
Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles
I run officesnapshots.com, where the majority of the photos in the blog post are from, and what you have described is the exact direction office designs are heading. Europe has been moving this way for a while and the US is (finally) beginning to as well.

The idea is to offer a variety of places where employees can work and let them move between them freely depending on what needs to get done.

Need privacy? Work in this private room. Need to collaborate? There's a room for that too.

Much of the pushback from developers on Hacker News regarding open floorplans seems to be that their offices default to 'open office' rather than 'private office'. But given that many tech companies are founded by developers and technical people, and this hasn't changed yet, I suspect companies just aren't trying to optimize for individual developer productivity.
Sigh - I just realized that and I'm one of those people who hate it when sites break the back button :( What's happening on reddit which is that since it's just a very simple pixel difference when the content shifts down everything reports changed. It's probably a bad site for the current implementation. Some others like https://page-watch.com/#/i/AWd is probably a better example.

Thanks!
NBA commissioner shares ‘mind-boggling’ plans for Oculus Rift virtual reality
Well, for what it's worth, I'm legally blind (I have enough sight to read a computer screen up close, but not enough to drive). And I have totally blind friends who like the idea of a paid service like this. (I personally know the guy whose blog post I referenced in the addendum to my first post.)
I'm suggesting you just listen to what they're saying and swiftly conclude that everything they say makes sense (because you're not an idiot).
The idea is interesting but I would not recommend to anyone to go to airport with this.
Interesting. It sounds like he used binary. I wonder how different bases affect how well the network can learn things like sorting?
We do not have all the details from that article. It might have been causing headaches or double vision for example. Partial resection was likely very good here. It's generally very slow growing. If it had grown to cause trouble later nuclear surgery could have been a more appropriate option at that point. The craniotomy approaches are what have those percentages you outlined, loss of vision, smell, or taste, as well as difficulty with speech can be complications depending on the approach used. Basically the brain has to be moved away and that causes trauma to nerves as well as which facial muscles need to be cut depending on the approach.

This new approach is intriguing. Expected anatomy would have a wrinkle of the dura near there which should lead to relatively small risk of CSF leak following micro surgery. This could prove to be a very good and more common approach in fifty years.
reposted on openrev.org - let's see if we can answer all the questions

http://www.openrev.org/paper/harvard-university-entrance-exa...
Shame on you, The Economist. They say spies must be able to spy. But if spies rely on terrorists voluntarily using breakable codes, this principle doesn't count for much. All you can achieve is making the rest of us vulnerable to hackers.

Just two weeks ago they strongly criticised Sony for failing to use encryption to protect data and for storing passwords in a file helpfully named "Passwords". Although they don't spell out how to protect data in a retrievable fashion — nobody ever does — technology companies would essentially have to take a few cues from Sony's security policy.

And WHEN terrorists do again succeed, perhaps with the help of encryption, what would the new Rumsfeld's do? RSA encryption is essentially y=x^k mod n. Symmetric encryption is essentially a sequence of substitution, permutation, and addition. The whole internet is in code and compressed to have maximum entropy, like the ciphertext that results from encryption. It is, by design, indiscernible.

The only way to stop terrorists using encryption is to destroy the Internet itself.
Beacon Navigation at the Consumer Electronics Show
RadioShack could make a comeback if the Heathkit resurgence ever comes to fruition: http://www.heathkit.com/

They should partner with them!
They tried to do this, at least over here (North SF bay). The local RS has (had?) Arduino and Propeller kits. At crazy prices, sure, but there have been a couple of "Dammit, it's Sunday and I need to finish this thing by Monday morning" saves for me.
Bear in mind that the giants of our industry are built on open floor plans. So, in "real world" numbers they do hold up fairly well.

I fully accept that there are confounding variables. But, I can't help but also accept that open plans are not the doomsday device that they are often painted as. They are yet another of the many variables that go into how a company is running.
Crossing the street? Really??
Can some of you comment on the encrypted transaction comments and encrypted messages feature?
Getting a woman to talk (about herself)
Interestingly, there's also the Yiddish: nu? Which itself likely comes from German or Russian
And the reason the argument is absurd is that of course the room doesn't understand Chinese; it's a lookup table! No Chinese speaker interacting with the Chinese room for any reasonable period of time would think it held a Chinese speaker, because all it accepts are questions, and it answers the same question the same way every time. Of course, Searle would say that the set of rules in the room is defined to be such that a Chinese person would think they were interacting with a Chinese speaker, but the very setup of the system prevents this from being possible. The thought experiment is fundamentally incoherent.
I especially liked the name-dropping of 9/11 toward the end, and the emotional appeals to the heroism of fighting Germany and Japan.
Well how are you so sure of that ? You must have verified or modeled it somehow I guess. Wait... you haven't.
Artist Tests Color-Blind Correction Glasses
Running ps in a jail will show the processes in the jail only.

Processes in the jail will only see network interfaces and other devices that have been explicitly exposed to the jail.

As others have said, it's like a vm with no virtualization overhead. You can set up jails with the entire Freebsd fs hierarchy so it runs like another host with its own users. Note that even the root user in a jail is not the same as the real root user. You can then use pkg to install packages within the jail too.
Yes; also, if the person is in the car, they're risking their own life -- not so if they're hundreds of miles away.
Because Comcast has no stake in Hollywood?
I think I helps when the odds are low that suspects will be carrying firearms. In north America the odds are much higher that police will have a confrontation with armed suspects --and of course NaM police have greater legal protection when discharging a weapon.