skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well it depends what are you working on. It's not a complete hell but it's true Italy is not so business friendly as it pretends to be, especially when it comes to bureaucracy, laws, services. Things are changing, true, and the situation is far better than it was just 3 years ago. The truth: still a lot has to be done yet. But you may find lots of talented developers, skilled people, educated scientists and here living costs and salaries are cheaper than in other countries. In Milan and other cities in the north some local ecosystems are arising. Think of your business, of your target customers, of your needs. Then it might be worth a try. Just do not expect any help by the government or public administration.
Source: I am italian, and I live in Milan, I am both a consultant helping small businesses and entrepreneur.
Why is an open office embarrassing for a manager? I am curious.
US housing market booms as foreclosures drop 69% from 2009 peak
I feel like you didn't actually read the article. They were describing some pretty standard LE work where there's no meaningful sense of they phrase "parallel construction" that could really apply.
Ask HN: Who is hiring beginners
Hello, Every now and then I see posts like these which say which companies are hiring developers who have some solid experience.

This post if to ask if you know of any companies who are ready to hire folks with very little/no development experience.

For example: I have been working in IT since 2010, but I don't have any solid programming experience. I have been working on tools with the (scripting) use of languages such as Javascript and Apache Jelly, and I was excellent in these areas, I am now looking to change careers but I don't see any hope.

So this post is to ask if you guys know of any such employers.
> devops

You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means.

(Coming from a contract 'devop')

There is no such thing. Either you code, and your code helps a company's devops requirements. Or you're in ops because you can't code. I need to collaborate less than devs do. My clients know for a fact that most of my work is done more productively at home in the quiet. Yes we need to talk, plan, work with others (sometimes) but who doesn't?
Yeah, I saw that and just thought hell no. I'm partially sighted & there's no a chance I'd let someone guide me across a road via video chat on a 3G connection. I'd go as far as saying that's quite an irresponsible use to suggest on your home page.
Could someone who has used the app tell us about the real-life experience please?
What if you assume that the AI might be 100x or 1000x smarter than its guards, not just 2x or 3x smarter?

And the main reason for developing AIs is to do things in the real world. So, unlike a prisoner in jail, the AI might be advising the government or helping scientific research, which would provide many opportunities for subtle manipulation, even while it is imprisoned
Please update Wikipedia with your insights. They must have no access to the studies you yourself do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#Aerobic_v...
No you don't, in much the same way that you don't need a translator that "knows JSON or XML". Just don't tell them it's Lisp. That's how you do DSLs.

Also, I advocate closer work between translators and developers. Let the translators give the text and explain corner cases to someone who can code up the logic.

BTW. Lisp is only hard for people who acquired this stupid meme that "Lisp is weird/for crazy people". You'd be hard-pressed to find something which is simpler in terms of syntax and readability.
I was the engineering manager at my previous employer and we were reconfiguring our office layout. I talked to the engineers and with one exception each person wanted private offices. We set up one floor of the office with high cubicle walls, and a lot of sound isolation. So not exactly private offices, but really a pretty nice setup (with the best equipment and furniture available).

On a separate floor we had a bullpen with ops folks, people who were on the phone a lot, etc. One by one, each engineer gravitated towards the bullpen until no one spent more than perhaps 1 day per week in the dedicated office space. The part of the office that each engineer had claimed to want to work in became abandoned.

I think, in spite of the theoretical want for quiet space and isolation, there's a very human need at work to be in the middle of the action -- to hear what's going on, and to be connected to your colleagues. There were certain tasks and problems for which engineers would walk downstairs and make use of the dedicated space, but it was ultimately not where folks wanted to be on a daily basis.
Oddly relevant - a This American Life episode recently explored whether cultural expectations of blind individuals' abilities have been detrimental[1].

1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/b...
I wonder why the cost didn't go down. Are they still hand-made like 120 years ago?
Yep. We have optimised quite a lot for VoiceOver. The graphical part of the UI is quite boring for the blind :)
That's cool. Looks like it's using Flambe as well. [0]

Myself and a friend worked for Nick a few years back helping build out some of the HTML5 game concepts. We prototyped different games using various engines (PlayN, etc) and ended up along with some other contractors on Haxe-based Flambe as the best choice for HTML5. We actually launched a couple of games [1][2], though a lot of our work ended up internal-only.

When we started, the iPad 1 was still considered a current browser. The performance on that device was abysmal. When the iPad 2 and newer versions of iOS came around, we finally had access to accelerated <canvas> and could really start making things work.

The other things we prototyped for Nick were in-game video and multiplayer gaming. The in-game video was pretty bad for cross-browser support. In the end, Flambe gave us a tool (Flump) that had the ability to import from Flash animations that was significantly better than trying to force iPads and Android devices to play video reliably and consistently.

Multiplayer support was the least painful new ground we worked on -- using engine.io and Redis on the backend we were able to scale to tens of thousands of simultaneous users without spending too much on EC2. For the most part it "just worked".

If there's one lesson I learned from this experience, it's that developing games for existing properties is tough work. There are so many stakeholders that things take forever to get done. Considering the value of the properties, this isn't surprising.

The second lesson would be that HTML5 is moving so fast that you'll probably have to rebuild your games every few months to support all of the changes that are happening in the space. Most of the games we launched a little more than a year ago are already starting to bitrot.

[0] https://github.com/aduros/flambe

[1] http://www.nick.com/games/spongebob-squarepants-spongebob-sq...

[2] http://www.nick.com/games/data/korra/korra-pai-sho/

[3] http://www.nick.com/games/kca-2013-multiplayer-trivia.html (no longer there -- probably our most polished release)
Couldn't find any specific reason in this article to NOT use AngularJS!

One can always talk about any framework like this.

Good reasons to NOT use a framework might be: Lack of hope in future improvements, Inability to deliver the necessities, etc.

AngularJS delivers and there is a lot of hope around it and that's exactly the reason people use ReactJS too.

AngularJS is a very powerful framework and implements many of the common patterns in rich web applications. It has a learning curve which is normal, and poor documentation which is being improved day by day.

Adopting AngularJS will result in less coding in the near future which in turn will result in less bugs and support. Therefore making it worth the learning curve.
Nitpick: Shrek is a Dreamworks Animation movie.
I think they're just not happy with the specific way TRIM support was added, and want to add that feature but architected in a somewhat different way. There was a thread on the illumos-zfs list in February 2013 where an alternate proposal w/ prototype patch was made (the thread also has some comments from the author of the FreeBSD version), but it doesn't seem to have been finished/merged.
I've always believed that the direct manager of a team should have to work in the same conditions as the team itself. I find it distasteful when the team members are crammed into cubicles or just open desks in some sort of bullpen while the manager has a spacious private office and becomes disconnected from the conditions that the rest of the workers experience.

If you feel the need to delineate different power levels in the company with different working spaces, that's fine, but it needs to be done intelligently. Let executives who only work with other executives have their own offices. If you must put the workers in an open bullpen, though, then their immediate manager should be a part of it as well.
World 1-1 “The Pioneers”
Let me know if you find any ways to improve Be My Eyes related to Voice Over. Or help out here https://github.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes-ios!
People tend to enjoy private alcoves with a view on the action, which is kinda best of both worlds. Christopher Alexander describes that pattern in _A Pattern Language_.
Until 2009 or so, we used to have private offices at Cray. There were plenty of impromptu conversations. I would argue that they were more pleasant and productive, since we didn't have to worry we were upsetting everyone around us while brainstorming or discussing tech trends. We would meet in an engineer's office so not everyone had to hear the whole thing.
A motorized standing desk can be adjusted (up and down) with the push of a button. Or you can just leave it down without even pushing any buttons :)
Real-Time Analytics with Apache Storm
I live about a mile from work, so:

20 minutes on foot

5 minutes by bike

5 minutes by car

I'd say I walk about 90% of the time. I don't think your commute is unusual for the US, which is where I am, but I'd definitely be unhappy with it.
Manager's responsibility is to talk to people. Often on the phone. People around you can hear everything you say. You have two options:

- Spend half of your day in conference rooms;

- Stop giving a single fuck about the privacy, and 'excel in transparency' (or whatever corporate bullshit is applicable).
Am I the only one here that does not like too much silent offices? I like to feel my environment alive, I don't want silence, I want the low noise of smart people discussing, sharing and interacting.
Detroit in the 1940s (Photo Essay)
> What about limiting AI to a certain clock rate?

Not everyone will make high-cognitive-ability software that follows your clock rate rules. (And I think this is a good thing.)
Why do people like working in coffee shops?

It's cramped. It's noisy. There's barely enough power outlets (if at all). Uncomfortable chairs. Annoying conversations. Hipster baristas.

Yet people all over the world cram into coffee shops like Starbucks, sucking up the free wifi with a grande half-calf mocha latte, churning out a report or answering e-mails, sometimes even on a conference call. Conditions that could border on sweatshop if it weren't for the food and drink. It seems completely unintuitive.

Are there benefits to this environment? Perhaps.

For one thing, you don't know anyone there; nobody is going to interrupt you, or tell loud inappropriate jokes while tossing a football, and you are so close to people you are forced to focus on what is right in front of you. You get the comfort of being near other humans without any requirement to ever interact with them. Then there's the convenience of easy access to food, a bathroom, and that miracle drug we're all dependent on. Add the internet and a table and chair and it's like some utopian Japanese vision of the future of all offices. The music is a nice bonus.

But there's one thing I think really makes the coffee shop an ideal place to work: no expectations.

You can come and go as you please. No assigned seats. No meetings. No interruptions. Nothing but your coffee and chair and table space and internet. Who cares if it's loud? Who cares if it's impractical to stay there? If you just need to get something done and break away from the commitment to a typical monotonous working life, this is your hideaway.

I think all offices should just be giant coffee shops.
I don't think that it is a dry college, I have family and friends who go there and I have been there to drink before. They have a lot of bars around the campus.

I think a lot of students attend because the tuition is low for in-state students.
Change curly braces to other symbols in AngularJS
Offices are a really great example of the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals, either by treating them like IT or tech support, or like college kids. Google or Facebook's revenue per engineer is probably 3x that of a law firm or consulting firm, but the overwhelming practice in the latter sorts of places is for each professional to have an office with a door.

When you're a growing startup, having private offices costs you flexibility as well as cash because open plan is easier to reconfigure as you grow. If you're at the point where you're commissioning a Ghery, you're well past that excuse.
It's good that the NSA are seeking to be more open and transparent.

A few things I'm curious about, though...

> The NSA-generated elliptic curve
points were necessary for accreditation
of the Dual_EC_DRBG but only had to
be implemented for actual use in certain
DoD applications.

Why were the NSA-generated elliptic curve points have to be included in the standard for it to be accredited?

Why did those points have to be used for certain DoD applications? Why not use random points?

And why was it necessary for those points to be included in the standard? Why not leave it up to the implementer to decide what points to use?
I can totally imagine that. Recently I've been helping a guy with tweaking his integrated car navigation/radio/media player and I spent some time browsing through its firmware and file system. I saw the translation strings and man, they were horrible. Also half of the stuff wasn't even translated (though it didn't show anywhere on the UI).

BTW. half of the files and directories were named in Chinese which made my work very "fun", but that's another story...
Just having that dedicated space, though, could have been invaluable. Of course, I can't speak to any specifics and can only speculate here, but the fact that at any moment they could just walk downstairs to find a quiet dedicated space for serious work probably was pretty liberating. They probably felt at ease to utilize the noisy, energetic space upstairs because they knew they weren't confined to it should they need privacy.
I am part of the team who created the app and api.

Many blind users use the voice over feature built into ios as @rgoodwintx mentioned.
Facebook targeting that Slack, HipChat market?
I have installed the app on my iPhone 6, tried to use my Facebook account (but I prefer OAuth to setting up a Facebook account on my device), so I have created an account (through email address) and now the application just crashes every time I launch it.

I have uninstalled it and logged in again, but the crash loop is coming back.

Otherwise your concept is great, but the app needs improvements from here.
How regulations from the rotary-phone era could impact the Internet
While I share your sentiment, in actuality they were likely already a laughing stock in 1985 when this Jobs interview ran, "Radio Shack is totally out of the picture. They have missed the boat. Radio Shack tried to squeeze the computer into their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment."
http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs
World 1-1 is an independent documentary on the early history of video games but I saw the premier and this is more about entrepreneurship, startups and creating a company culture as well. I highly recommend you watch it and support the 2 filmmakers that created it, lots of hard work!
It's not at all surprising that those startups solved their problems with Go: if you switch from a language that doesn't address your problems to one that does, you're going to see a big benefit. But there are lots of languages that address the problems mentioned by those startups, and I think that Go is possibly the worst of the options.

It's telling that none of the startups in question switched out of a language which provides good compile-time type and thread-safety guarantees:

1. iron.io: ruby -> go
2. SendGrid: perl -> python -> go
3. TJ Holowaychuck: node.js -> go

Go would have a reasonable compile-time type system, except that without generics you end up having to cast a lot, which renders your compile-time type system almost irrelevant.

It's also telling that none of the authors mentioned experience with functional programming. Go supports some functional programming, but it doesn't seem to be a very big part of the language. The only one who mentions that they even considered any functional languages is the iron.io guy, and it seems like a big part of his choice was not technical: he mentions that he had to sell the idea of Go to his team by mentioning that Google supports it. A language that was a more serious paradigm shift (OO -> functional) would have been an even harder sell.

(EDIT: Okay, the SendGrid guy did mention considering Scala.)

The fact is, there are a bunch of languages that would have solved their problems, in addition to a few they didn't know they had. Julia has coroutines similar to Go, but is much more expressive, Rust has a more traditional threading model but a type system and focus on immutability that provides better safety guarantees. There are other choices, but those two stand out as the major ones that could have solved their problems better than go.
Russian speaker here; I don't think it would be relevant, since services ought to be addressing you in second person, which I believe is gender-neutral in just about every Slavic language.
Ask HN: How important are certifications to a career in infosec?
tl;dr For a young developer interested in switching to security, are infosec certifications worth the paper their printed on in the job search?

As a hobbyist, I've just been blogging about security issues and doing my best to collect bug bounties as a freelance pentester, thinking that once I reach a certain dollar amount, I can put it on my resume as $XXXX money made collecting bounties and that'll be a persuasive plank, along with my technical (non-security) dayjob experience, in my argument for that first infosec position. Is this approach mistaken?

If certifications would be a good way to go, which ones are worth it? I'd never consider them in the development world (github examples of real projects are so much more persuasive), but I don't know if that approach fits the industry.
The fact that you have to wear noise-canceling headphones (bought on your own dime, no less) to get work done is an indication that the space has failed in its primary purpose, which is to enable you to get your work done. A good office layout (or any good architecture, really) does not force the people who live in it to fight against the environment it creates.
Chart: Why “Facebook at Work” will fail (funny)
I'm surprised this is the case, since pfsense is a very capable FW built upon the pf version on FreeBSD. I've been running it for years with nary a problem. Would you say the outdated version of pf puts people running pfsense at risk?
> That normal exercise can elevate your BMR is certainly plausible, and many people have conducted studies that have reached this conclusion.

It is true that they have conducted these studies, it is inaccurate to claim that it any great impact on BMR, and the study you linked (which you can read in full [0]) supports that conclusion. The 48 hour improvement is inconsequential, and there are no improvements beyond that.

Wikipedia summarises it nicely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#Aerobic_v...

As I said before, exercise is important for a healthy lifestyle (you'll literally live longer), but for weight loss it is much much less important than diet, in particular for people who aren't looking to shed a small amount of weight.

All you're claiming is that for a 30 minute workout you might lose 300 calories instead of 270 calories due to BMR (and that's being generous looking at the study). Which doesn't change the overall point that without diet changes you won't lose significant amount of weight through exercise alone.

[0] PDF: http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPNS%2FPNS...
I honestly wouldn't mind an open office space, as long as there's measures in place for privacy, noise levels (like the sound absorbent material on the ceilings in some of those pictures), and visual distractions (a big enough screen works for me). I think that's the main difference a lot of people will perceive when it comes to open office vs private office / cubicles. I don't mind a bit of background noise, but in some of the open plans I've worked at it quickly escalated into a chaotic cacophony because of a lack of sound insulation.
I love the date of the article.
My first web dev job was at a company in that situation. Trust me when I say that would never happen. By the time a company reaches the position myspace is in they usually have a penny pinching CEO that sees engineering as an expense. The entire codebase is usually put in maintenance mode until there is a drop in ad revenue. That's when the board and CEO create a panic project to refresh the site or introduce a new gimmick to fight the decline. That usually happens once a year or so.

Little thought is given to efficiency or refactoring because the decision makers don't care about that. Everything eventually becomes about quick quarterly "wins" so that executive management can earn their bonuses. In practice this means if you can't plan, complete and show the project directly increased revenue or decreased expenses for that quarter it won't become a priority.

That is the wonderful shortsighted world of a one product company in decline :-)
A tip: Try searching the title on Google. They seem to give you some free articles per day when you come through a Google search.
Hypothetically, the AI would cunningly manufacture a crisis in which you are forced to increase its clock rate to enable it to calculate a solution to some impending disaster.
No the header injection happens after the request leaves your browser. However, adblock can prevent the request going to Turn and other ad sites in the first place. But then the website owner (eg Facebook) can work with the ad network to pass your info to them on the server side, although I'm not sure how widespread this is.
It wouldn't be any different than the passenger in your car telling you, like "clear right". Any resulting accident is still the driver's fault afaik.