skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I want a new career, what should I do?
I am in a unique situation among my group of IRL people in that I do not have a college degree and the two years of college I did have was for graphic design, not computer science... and I dropped out at the very end.

I fell into programming by mistake. I think I'm pretty good at it now (its been 12 years). I know a number of languages and would be considered "fullstack".

I also really hate what I do. I never wanted to get into this for money. I started making video games as a kid to fulfil my creative urge. I did this through shitty drawings and short stories as well. The computer stuff just happened to stick.

I held down various fulltime programming jobs over the last 10 years, and for the last two I've been freelancing. I am currently at a crossroads. I no longer wish to do what I am doing. I am on the good side of my 30s and feel the winds of change a-blowin'. I will never be a CTO, this is pretty clear to me. My options are maybe team lead at another soulless fulltime job, or continue the freelance thing. Either way the life is being sucked out of me and I'm in danger of getting burned out (again).

Does anyone have suggestions?
A lot of drugs are unpleasant to administer. It's difficult to think of something more unpleasant than injecting yourself with impure narcotics. Weed smells and tastes awful; stoners end up liking the scent only because it's associated with the experience.

Also, I think it's pretty easy to make all of those taste good, with the exception of tobacco (and menthol cigarettes take the worst of the bite out of that, too). Sweetened coffee, flavored dip, sweet mixers to go along with vodka, etc.
Indian man paralyzed after cop body-slams him for walking in wealthy suburb
how can an R package be "black boxy"? just look at the source. all the rf packages I am aware of (randomForest, party, and randomForestSRC) are well documented.
Forex Pip Crusher
Attention Samsung mobile phone division! Malignancy detected in TV division! Excise without delay!
What problem does this solve? Can't you just simply declare the "loosely coupled" methods as functions and call them wherever needed in vanilla javascript? Perhaps I'm missing something but judging by the examples, and assuming the messages are local to a particular process, I don't see why would you do this:

msngr.register({ topic: "Save", category: "Profile", dataType: "application/json" }, function (payload) {
console.log("Save profile information here");
});

msngr.emit({ topic: "Save", category: "Profile", dataType: "application/json" }, {
name: "Kris",
country: "United States"
});

Rather than:

function saveProfile(payload) {
console.log("Save profile information here");
}

saveProfile({
name: "Kris",
country: "United States"
});
I call myself 'full stack'.
1) DevOps (provisioning, load balancing, infrastructure design, code deployment, db backup strategies)
2) Backend Dev (primarily APIs these days)
3) Frontend (primarily AngularJS)
4) Database Administration
5) Internet of Things IoT setup, design and deployment.
6) Language agnostic.
7) System Architect

What I don't do is draw pretty pictures. Don't mind UI design but the moment we start discussing changing the look and feel and PSDs you get somebody else cheaper in to do that.
I've been writing posts about Rails on http://www.justinweiss.com for a little over a year now, and I've heard from so many people that are excited about Rails, that have bought all kinds of videos and tutorials and courses and bootcamps, but just can't build their own projects.

So, I wrote a book to help. It's not so much a Rails tutorial as it is a guide to programming, project management, and motivation, using Rails as a medium.

I'm happy to answer any questions you have!
It's a hammock plot.
I've lived in both, and... of all the differences, and problems with various formats and standards and things, this one is so far down the list that I've never even really thought about it.
> I see driverless cars removing the need to own a personal car (within urban environments). Some people unfortunately want the private space that a car provides to them.

It isn't that so much as... People will vandalise shared cars. Write on the walls, spill stuff and leave it, vomit, etc. This is less of a problem on manned public transport (e.g. buses, trains, etc) since there is an authority figure to limit it.

So best case scenario they install cameras to stop the vandalism, but that then means you're being watched all of the time which is a little uncomfortable, when in a legitimately driverless car you could have actual privacy in theory.

I think an employer provided driverless car system is believable. Essentially your employer scraps car parks, and then sends out its fleet of cars to pick up employees at home and brings them in. It is unlikely employees would vandalise the cars.
Surprised to see the oldest programming language is Makefile (1970) in this chart. It appeared earlier than C (1972). Is this correct?
If I had seen this story on The Onion, I would have laughed, and thought "that would never happen in the real world". But here we are. In the real world. My mind is blown. Just WOW.
Patterns Enhance Craft Step 3: A Few Good Solutions
>If you got free rebate coupons, gifts, etc. as rewards for opting in, would you still refuse it?

Yes
> Smart TVs are a good idea. Who doesn't want less crap plugged into their TV?

I don't. For the same reason I don't want all-in-one desktop computers -- the display is both a substantial portion of the expense and the part that gets outdated the slowest. So, I'd rather replace the parts that provide the content to display separately from the display.

I'd rather replace my Chromecast for new functionality than replace my TV.
Using something as a reference is different to copying

"we definitely took CBInsights as reference" is the phrase they used.
Aspose Maven for NetBeans – New Plugin Released
Never underestimate the level of OCD in good finance/office management people. :)
What do you do to help keeping blogs alive?
It should be called, full heap developer. /snark

It's a pretty generic term watered down by its lack of concrete meaning. There are probably going to be a couple of hundred varying opinions and fifty or so disagreements about what it means before this post disappears off of the front page.

To me this makes it a meaningless term and one I don't feel bad poking fun at. It's a term used by managers and start-ups to get more for less from a single developer. We used to call "full-stack" developers, "generalists." Before that... I don't know, "whiz kids?" "Good with computers?" "Geeks?"

Many people agree that it means someone who knows how the whole technology stack works from keyboard and screen down to the processor. That used to be just, "programmer," but I suppose there is quite a bit more going on these days. I have my suspicions that few people actually know, "what's going on from keyboard and screen down to processor." Install just one software package on your machine and try to figure out how many dependencies it has, how many different languages and run-times, and "APIs" it uses. Then there's the operating system itself (often in the case of application developers). I think what we're really agreeing on is that "full stack developer" is a term for people who are capable of figuring out what broke when things go wrong and have a broad-enough range of experience to fix it.
If you do all your shopping in brick-and-mortar stores that only carry expensive Samsung and LG TVs, I'd believe that. But there's a wealth of "dumb" TVs available online and even in big-box stores like Best Buy and Walmart.

I'd say if someone is savvy enough to know they don't want a "smart" TV, they will know where to look for a good deal.
I haven't heard many arguments against dozens. In fact, there are some groups that specifically argue for duodecimal systems. I'd be interested to hear your position in more detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Advocacy_and_.22doze...
Apple Watch Programming Guide Offers Tips on Leveraging Wearable
The full stack applicant only needs to know a slightly wider view than what the interviewer knows, which in situations with job ads full of stereotypes and cliches isn't very much. If the ad asks for a rock star ninja full stack expert, make an arduino blink a led, draw a pix of your cat in cubist style, bring both to the interview, its all good. In those situations its usually WAY more important to have gone to the same school, and match demographically.
You say that "same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page sizes" is the important thing, but it's the result of using that particular ratio that is important, when you take a page of 1/2 the area by cutting across the long dimension, the aspect ratio is maintained.

If you aren't worried about maintaining the aspect ratio for 1/2 pages, you can maintain any arbitrary aspect ratio as you scale up and down (but you don't get the 'easy' scaling to half or double areas).

That's where the imperial fluid analogy comes in, there is convenience derived from having it be base 2.
Technically, it's the people who bought the smart TVs that screwed up..
Do corporate MOOCs have a future? – free whitepaper
Agreed. I like the sort of informal feel to it, calling back to a sketch.

I'm a big fan of the parallel lines chart, and this one is well executed. The data labels are unobtrusive, appearing on hover to let you dive in. The data set is coordinated with navigation on the timeline above using the principle of object constancy [0]. I really like that you can click a language to pin it; you can focus on a few languages and watch their evolution over time by scrubbing the line chart. (I don't like that if a pinned language falls off the chart at one point in time it isn't restored when you go back to a time that it's on the chart.)

I like the idea with the small multiples below, but I wish there was less wasted space; it's hard to see very many at one time. There's not really a need for full-blown small multiples here - vertically-aligned sparklines would be more effective. If they were in the same table as the parallel lines it would allow a deeper exploration of the data.

[0]: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/
I disagree. A design patent for a user interface would do the trick. So would some clever copyright registrations.

http://adlervermillion.com/user-interface-design-patents/

Not every lawyer knows/understands IP and user interface design. But if you find a lawyer who specializes in the two, and you lay the groundwork before your design is copied, you should have a strong legal position when the copycats arrive.

For an early-stage startup, it may not make sense to sink a ton of $$ into design patents. But companies with more revenue/capital should think about it.
Obviously it means the stack YOU ARE USING, not all kinds of alternative wild technologies that are out there. If you are using something that depends on a database somewhere in the stack, then knowing how to administer that database is definitely something a 'full stack' developer, in that context, would need to be able to do.
What is it about stream processing that doesn't fit your needs? I do research and development on a streaming system, so I'm very interested to hear about how you need to use your data.
Bring back the dumb TV
When I read the article my first thought was... So go to war. Don't be proud that you bootstrapped and they got funded. Go to war.

Go to the VC community and raise a ton. You have proof of a strong product and yet you are not capitalizing on first mover advantage. You are asking these guys to copy you and trump you.

Go to war. Raise. Build. Grow. Expand. Offer more things free to limit competitor entry points. Offer even better metrics. Go to war.

Good luck.
This just in: Humans almost certainly drink water, and have for at least the past two millennium.

haha, but in all seriousness, I always thought when people said "medieval people didn't drink water" that they really meant "medieval people didn't drink as much water, or drank dirty water".

There was a lecture I watched from someone who explained the Medieval period as "everyone drinking beer because the water was so filthy" and the Enlightenment as "everyone drinking tea because the beer was so intoxicating" and the Industrial Revolution as "everyone drinking coffee because tea wasn't strong enough".

I laughed at that and considered the whole idea of Medieval peoples drinking beer instead of water as mostly hyperbole.
This reminds me of Android's terrible UI for opting in to GPS snoop recording^H^H^HGoogle Location Services: You can either (disagree) OR (agree and not answer again). It is not possible to to disagree once and for all! It's like they're trying to catch you off guard.
I've heard it called a parallel coordinates or parallel lines chart.
Yup, so in Mandarin you have a vague hint as to how to pronounce each word, based on writing. Same goes for English.
Yes, it's called a monitor. There are plenty of monitors that have hdmi inputs and a standard audio jack output for connecting to a set of speakers.
Kill Switches 'cut Thefts' of Smartphones in London, New York and San Francisco
I did this around October of last year out of necessity and started doing it because I wanted to in January. So far it's going quite well. Here's roughly what I did:

First, read everything patio11 and Brennan Dunn have written on the subject.

Start here:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

and here:

http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/

Get yourself a website. Don't spend a lot of time building this, just on the content. It's stupid easy for developers to get sidetracked working on their own site and rebuilding it in Hot New Technology X every two weeks; don't bother. I recommend Squarespace as it makes it easy to setup & change content as well as track some basic metrics. Make sure it's very clear what you do. Separate it out into Articles for SEO, a Portfolio, and a page about working with you. Write articles about things you're very, very good at and at the end plug yourself.

For examples, I have:

http://<domain>/articles/

http://<domain>/portfolio/

http://<domain>/app-development/

Regarding a portfolio, there is no reason you cannot include the programming you did as part of a larger project. Just make sure that you accompany each entry in the portfolio with what your responsibilities were and how you contributed and why it was a success. Link back to other key members of the project, too; they'll appreciate it.

Next, I set up something to drive traffic to my website. Think of something interesting that would make a potential client say, "Oh, that's pretty cool!", or that other developers find useful to increase your clout.

For me that was RunSwift (removed link to avoid looking like another plug).

I plug my Twitter & Website there. It gets several hundred hits a day and drives a small percentage back to my website. It also gets me a few followers on Twitter a week which as been good for building a professional network (albeit slowly).

Finally, I joined a co-working space. These exist out outside of the big tech hubs. And there are people in them who are building technology projects and struggling to find developers. I joined Tigerlabs (https://tigerlabs.co) here in Princeton, New Jersey and just from talking to new people around my desk I had a new client sign a contract within two weeks.

I wouldn't take any of this as set in stone as I believe that being successful in this game involves a lot of trial and error in the beginning. But, this is what worked for me though so hopefully it can be of some use!

Feel free to reach out, email is in the profile.
Yeah, I'm not on board with all the FairTax tenants. For one, the sales tax should be progressive based on product type (range from basic necessities to luxury).

Savings and DYI are a good thing long term. Maybe not so much for the inflationary consumer based system that the banks and megacorporations benefit from.

The pre-bate, which is similar to a basic income should help offset the regressive nature. In fact, I think it could replace most welfare programs.
What appealed to you about programming that made you stick around for 10 years?

What happened last time you were burned out and what did you do to bounce back?

I can't give suggestions on your next passion, but clearly something needs to change, and you seem like a fairly smart/driven person to make it happen.
You immediately lost my interest when it promted me to login via Facebook and provided no alternative. As a remote software developer, this could be interesting but requiring Facebook makes it a non starter. I don't imagine I'm the only professional in the world without a Facebook account either.
The community needs to stop being so imprecise with language. "Developer" is a broad category, and I shouldn't have to figure out from the context of the discussion what "developer" means. In fact, I often run into discussions where the context isn't there.
Seems a bit weird to me that university has copyright over homework done by students (which is my understanding because otherwise this DMCA would be baseless). It hasn't been the case at my university.
This doesn't strike me as unreasonable, given that they likely maintain the same syllabus for a number of years, and having multiple solutions for academic assignments out there in the wild will encourage less diligent students to neglect their own education.

There's also the question of plagiarism. As an undergrad, I'd often post my work on my site when I handed it in. I stopped this practice when I got a 0 on a major bit of coursework (cost me a grade boundary in my degree...), as their software found it online, on my site, and they refused to view my work as anything but plagiarism. This action potentially saves students from the same fate.
I've done some extensive analysis of number systems (almost enough to write a book on the subject) and come to the conclusion that the best are senary (6) and quaternary (4). Six has all the benefits of twelve, save the extra divisor of 2 (and thus 4), but that is easily remedied by use of the square (36) when required. Quaternary may seem an odd choice, but the square is 16, so one naturally learns hexadecimal without doing hardly any extra work --you just pair up the digits.

If your curious, duodecimal and octal come in after these and decimal falls to fifth place, which is fitting since its main advantage is divisibility by 5. :-)
Well...

CP/M (circa 1974) had a command line prompt like this:
"C>"

Windows (circa 2014) has a command line prompt like this:
"C:>"

Basically the same after 40 years. Forty ... years. Same old totally obsolete "drive letter" file system architecture.

Although the comparison is to be obviously taken with a grain of salt, it is clear to old-timers like me that Windows has been ultra-conservative with advanced software technologies (modular filesystems, ZFS, etc...) and this has hurt tremendously the evolution of OS software "for the masses".

It does not require a big leap of faith to believe that we could have had a far more advanced <consumer> OS if Windows had not existed.

Quite a pity.
Show HN: SaaS Customer Health Calculator
Take an 'interests' test.

I love programming. 15 years for me. People like you make my life a living hell. Find something you enjoy.
Calvin and Hobbes action figures and the Disney XD Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.
Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2015, 10:24 a.m.
My view of the point of this story: Copying a design is efficient business. Implementing someone else's idea instead of creating your own is lazy and lacks integrity. Profiting from someone else's work, without attribution or mutual agreement is stealing, is unethical and lacks integrity. Apologizing for acting wrongly is an act of integrity. So is ceasing one's unethical behavior.

The rules are: Take responsibility for your potential and for your actions. Don't be lazy. Don't steal. When you act wrongly, acknowledge it, stop it, fix it.
Luxon is over 500 times faster than MongoDB for timeseries data
I don't think I could get through all 6 books again. I did read all of the prequels and "Dune 7" but they were utter crap (not written by Frank Herbert but based on his notes).

Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune are worthwhile. But the sex-witches-fleeing-the-machines combined with everybody's a Kwizatz Haderach got a little tiresome. (I now picture Oprah gleefully shouting, "You're a Kwisatz Haderach... and you're a Kwisatz Haderach... everyone gets to be a Kwisatz Haderach!"
You write that the A4 numbers "seem completely arbitrary".

While they might seem to be arbitrary, they are obviously not the least bit arbitrary.

The base size A0 has an area of exactly 1 square meter. Each subsequent size is constructed by taking half of the previous, so for A4 it's 1/16th of a square meter, or 0.0625 sqare meters, 625 square centimeters, which is 21.0 cm x 27.9 cm (approximately).

In order to have both the halving property and the self-similarity the aspect ratio has to be sqrt(2), and therefore you can't have nice little round numbers for the sides.

If I have to choose between self-similarity and nice round numbers, I'll take self-similarity, thank you.
I love the Normal, Low, and High modifiers.
You really should specify what type of help you are looking for.
Also, start your title with Ask HN:
> re-litigating apartheid

In case you missed it, the legal practices in the US depend on previous court cases.

> U.S. corporations should not enjoy immunity for their purposeful assistance, technological or otherwise, in gross human rights violations (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/eff-files-amicus-brief...)

A positive ruling on this case, which presents to the courts not only a racist and violent but also a clearly stigmatized political system, would affect greatly how courts would behave towards companies collaborating with similar governments in the present time.

Furthermore, are you kidding me? IBM should be absolved of responsibility for aiding and abating severe human rights violations? Stop giving money to ACLU too, then. https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice-human-rights/mandel...
Composing a domain workflow with statically checked invariants
I am considering [1] replacing my last TV (a 50" Panasonic reference plasma) with another reference monitor, but sadly plasma is no longer an option, unless I strike right. this. very. second.

[1] http://homonculus.net/2015/01/27/so_i_may_have_to_buy_a_new_...
In hairless man, arthritis drug spurs hair growth – lots
Which also lets you caclulate the weight of a document (say for shipping):

Standard printer paper is 80g/m2: A1 = 40g, A2 = 20g, A3=10g and A4=5g.

Or, alternatively, crumple up A4 sheets for quick 5g weights.