skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From someone who's tried and failed: performing a large amount of high-quality labor for cheap is not a sustainable business model in the West, and riding hype can make you oblivious to that fact.

That said, I do hope this team has some amazing trick under their sleeves that has eluded everyone else, because I do want this service to exist.
Tech Hub: Cambridge, Massachusetts
You're right, that's not a fair comparison.

(I'd guess the real cost of power from this is >$1.00/kWh btw since it will almost certainly not last 20 years...)
Portable USB Drive Bitcoin Wallets (M$ Windoze)
If you're trying to solve this problem in JavaScript and it's not a game then I think you're doing something wrong(ly).
So did they deliver?
For VOIP calls you don't need much bandwidth, but you do need low latency and low jitter. Both are pretty bad on cell-phone data connections, so it's rarely worth the bother.

However, these comments are about providing a wifi hotspot that routes over the data connection rather than VOIP.
When Exponential Progress Becomes Our Reality
Thanks for posting the bash source. It looked a lot like the GNU source, then I noticed at the top of it:

/* echo.c, derived from code echo.c in Bash.
Ask HN: Moving from Vietnam to US, is there any tech company I can work?
Hi guys. I'm now living in Vietnam, working for a Swiss-based IT company which providing mobile/online payment solution. I'm an expert in Javascript, NodeJS. I'm gonna move to San Francisco next year and I wonder that can I found a job in US? Is there any technology that doesn't require US-based graduated guys like me? Could you please suggest me some name I can apply to? Thank you very much!
If you visit the direct link: http://www.getmagicnow.com/access.php without adding an email address it still says that "You've been placed on the waiting list!". Simple error, but easy to fix so there is no confusion. Great service!
Bettir seems to be a product of the same company (Plus Labs).
I don't know if it'll be viable, though. A lot of services seems to be pushed toward encrypting traffic; wouldn't usefulness of multicast be diminished if those transmissions require unique keys for each user, even IPv6 is available for that?
ECL 15.2.21 released, new maintainer found
You can call the raw system call using, for example, kmc's syscall! macro: https://github.com/kmcallister/syscall.rs

I do wonder if it's worth it eventually for libstd to speak the syscall interface directly, instead of going through another language's standard library (and whatever bugs or design decisions that standard library might have).
Awesome. Simply brilliant.
They could make everyone happy by switching "hidden" to "extra"
Only Manhattan and the SF bay area. Forget everything else.
And yet another cool startup I'm going to have to wait to expand to the UK.

Good work guys, and I agree with everything that everyone else said about the simplicity of your landing page, and the controversial design decision to actually communicate information.
Glitz IMO.

Annoying glitz too if they include information in the videos that isn't in text form on their website. Videos play at one speed, I can't fast forward the video if I'm a faster "video-watcher" like I can with reading. And if I'm on a VPN I'd rather avoid loading the video altogether if I can avoid it, which is what my browser plugins are for.

Well, perhaps I could just watch the videos faster, interesting thought experiment.
That was my thought when I looked at index-old. It kind of makes it look like an early-mid 2000s website, as well as unfinished.
You'll probably have decent results with non-tech companies. I work for a large bank in SF and the work life balance is excellent, straight 9-5 job.
No.

We deforested entire continents getting our industrial revolution going. There aren't enough left to do it a second time. And if what I read is correct, it will take between 750,000 and 2 million years for reforestation to occur naturally.

> but there's definitely enough to get a pocket of civilization back on its feet.

What's "back on its feet"? You've watched too many movies.

The only metal such a people would ever use would be salvaged... no new iron works. No electricity, no internal combustion engines.

If civilization stumbles, it dies.
Kaggle[1] has data science competitions with cash prizes which any one can enter. They also have a jobs board, which lists a number of jobs that allow remote work[2].

[1] http://www.kaggle.com/

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=remote&sitesearch=www.kaggle...
Great service, guys, but beware of the first waves of fraud.
I too have no active social media accounts save HN. I do try to read thing critically, but I do not have enough knowledge to do so. I have no interest in, and do not follow news, but I must admit this is not the way of a citizen.

Could a Wikipedia for news be a solution? But even then, it is very easy for a few to come together and hijack the thread.
Generally no, other than the fact that it is complex--complexity itself is a sin. Always has been, always will be, though it can be forgiven.

Anyways, what's the issue with the System V version, other than not handling newlines?

Also, what is the purpose with the Plan 9 loading the thing into a buffer first, other than perhaps to get the benefit of an all-or-nothing write? I suspect weirdness with the Plan 9 file handling but am not certain.
Cool service, but you should really make it more obvious that it's only for the USA.
Those of us who program in shells that are not broken do not need echo to do tricks for us.
> Do you find videos actually useful or are they just glitz?

If I'm legitimately interested in a service and want to know how it works, sure, but if I just want a quick overview to decide if I'm interested I'd rather have something simple like some text and images.
Great site, and exciting service.

One little nitpick: the blue chat bubbles on the site gave me the impression you'd be using iMessage for supported phones instead of SMS. (This matters to me just a bit because I have a limited number of SMSes per month.) I totally get why you would just stick to SMS.

Still happy to use your service, but it did create just the tiniest bit of initial dissapointment.
> There's also coal -> oil, if you've got some hydrogen handy.

Which only works if you already have a technological civilization. The Germans were able to do this because they already had a large industrial base.

The South Africans were able to do this because they had an industrial base, and could find expertise internationally if needed.

If you're living with 19th century technology (16th century?) you don't get to do coal-to-oil.

These problems simply aren't solvable in the situation we're talking about, and you seem to mistake the fact that you can think of solutions for them with 21st century technology means they are universally solvable. That's not even close to true.

If civilization stumbles, it dies.
And yet... At the end of the story, all three participants (recruiter, company, and candidate) have failed to get what they want.

Somehow, this does not come across as a fantasy being played out, more of a cautionary tale.
What's the difference between a flamewar topic or a controversial topic? This seems like a conversation killing policy to me, at least assuming you're exercising it as intended.
I attended the conference today and it was awesome! An amazing opportunity to hear from and meet so many amazing women.
The AD/LDAP support on Windows Server is pretty amazing, and I really like their administration interface.

As for the rest, well--let's just say I'm trying my damnedest to migrate one of our products off of Windows hosting, because frankly the impedance mismatch for testing and automation is just so much lower on 'nix. Also, the licensing is an issue.
I hate to say this (& will be downvoted), but our obsession with reductionist thinking blinds us to the actual causes of cancer. Just like unit tests blind the programmer from how the system works.

From a holistic perspective, cancer is caused by an acidic, low oxygen environment or "stagnant energy". Emotional well being, energy work, & massage therapy has also been anecdotally reported by practitioners to cause cancer to remiss.

Now before you criticize me for "lack of studies", please understand that studies do a poor job in complex environments. Just like it's been elusive to study programmer effectiveness due to high variability of conditions, the human body living in a specific environment, with specific habits is highly complex & variable. It's foolish to assume that we can account for all of the variables when we don't know what we are missing.

About the bias, I can only say that these are anecdotal accounts. Some things seem to make sense, such as a health in environment, emotions, diet, physical body, spirituality, etc. would contribute to the body acting in healthier ways. A purely reductionist philosophy will not accept such factors unless these attributes can be isolated. However, how can such a complex system with unknown unknowns be tested?

---

Edit: I know, I committed blasphemy by criticizing a purely reductionist technique. Go ahead and downvote me due to your religious (or financially sponsored) conviction ;-)

I'm happy to debate as well...

---

Edit2: Given I'm already at -4, I doubt anybody will be willing to answer such a basic question. Oh well, lol. I'm disappointed...
AIUI, you're basically asking for a (free) open relay. There are very good reasons why those are pretty much non-existent nowadays. Good luck.
They just ignored me.
I'm curious to know how they can cover the entire US.

Obviously, I realize they can't, I just wonder how often their answer to the query is "Sorry, we can't do this".

Overall, I think it's a great idea but the fact that it's bottlenecked by humans will make it very, very hard to scale (and you can already see this as the web site has a big banner saying the service is currently restricted due to high demand).

Still, it's clear from the testimonials so far that these guys have their heart in the right place and they really want to achieve maximum user satisfaction. Kudos!
Hammurabi isn't relevant to modern jurisprudence in any way that older legal codes wouldn't also be; we have inherited nothing from mesopotamian culture. People still refer to him today because for a time he was popularized as the man behind the earliest known, written legal code, but that's purely a question of journalism. Today we have even older mesopotamian legal codes, but they haven't been publicized the way Hammurabi was.

And I responded to you saying that Hammurabi was the beginning of civilization, which is even more ludicrous.
This is about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475631

You asked a year ago:

>You say it's used all the time -- so how about you give an example of a "lazy" solution to a problem in, say, C?

but I was just reading that old thread now, so replying here.

short-circuit evaluation would be an example in C, because the programmer can ask the compiler to do something, but at run-time it won't do it if the results aren't necessary - it just won't execute despite the programmer explicitly writing those instructions.

e.g. in the condition if (is_prime(a) && is_something_hard_to_compute(a)) then even though you're calling the function is_something_hard_to_compute() about a, at run-time if it's not necessary for the result, then purely out of laziness it won't get called. (i.e. if the first test returns false.)

this meets the condition you asked about.

reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-circuit_evaluation
Customer Retention Cost and CRC Ratio
This comment inspired me to write this utility: https://github.com/brson/rustle

It installs Cargo applications without requiring an existing Rust install. Instructions for installing exa are on the README.

Since I wrote it in a few hours, using it may set your hard drive on fire.
Your logic is off. Punishments are a response to crimes as part of the definition of "crime".
The very fact that Apple has 800M credit cards on file is the reason why they know better than offering a service like this.

Even if 10% of their users started using their service to require "magic", there is no way in hell even a company like Apple could scale an operation like this that's bottlenecked by humans.
> I'm curious to know how they can cover the entire US.

Because they're just using other services to get you what you want.. i.e. flowers, groceries, pizza, etc. - they just call a florist/supermarket/pizza joint/etc. local to the requester.

What examples of requests can you think of that can't be served anywhere in the US?
Are you using something like Twilio TaskRouter behind the scenes?
> CA state law requires you have a Privacy Policy

Who does that apply to? Companies based in CA? Companies doing business with anyone in CA?
Towards AI-Complete Question Answering, Using Deep Learning
1. Go to any web development agency that sells to companies.

2. Show them a small portfolio of relevant work. The code should be clean and should solve a problem.

3. Tell them your availability. Something regular like 20 hours per week is probably more desirable, but some will take what they can get.

4. Invite them to "try before they buy" on a small paid gig. Ramp up size of projects as you gain trust.

5. If you are able to say things like "I am able to talk to customers and develop bespoke applications that solve their problems in an elegant way", expect to dictate your own terms and get rewarded handsomely (at least for someone not doing sales).

6. If the agency compares you to low-paid offshore programmers, you're talking to the wrong agency.

Keep in mind that most good agencies have more work than they can handle -- their bottleneck is on the "good and reliable developer" side.

Also note that they work may be incredibly boring -- but certainly no more boring than "sales clerk" or "security guard", and also certainly more lucrative.

> I am indeed a halfway decent programmer

Ask someone who pays programmers if they agree with this assessment. Most programmers I know tend to self-evaluate themselves a bit on the high side. Some folks may find that they have some programming idiosyncrasies that make their code less than ideal for anything other than personal projects that they themselves will maintain.
Does cancer occur in healthy ecosystems? Maybe big data & reductionism is an incomplete approach...

On the flip side, such techniques will make some people a lot of money, so ignore or downvote my concerns...
I understand that but you still need a one to one mapping between customers and request, even if that request is not ultimately implemented by the person who picked up the phone.
This is half correct. If you are the primary contractor, you need sales. If you subcontract to an agency (or something similar), you just need to be able to "sell" to other programmers. The rate is not nearly as good, but it's still _really_ good compared to "sales clerk".
The idea, the execution and the simplicity of the web site are all astonishing !
You could just distribute the executable you get when you run `cargo build`. rustc / cargo statically link the Rust standard library into the app, so it should work fine on a machine without Rust installed. It'll still dynamically link C libraries.

One catch is that (especially if you're using C libraries other than libc, but sometimes with libc) you'll need to worry a little bit about forwards- and backwards-compatibility of those libraries. It's somewhat safer to find a semi-old distro like Ubuntu 12.04, build there, and see if it works everywhere newer.

This is kind of a pain, and the long-term answer is to get Rust into the distros so that they can build software written in Rust. (This doesn't require rustc being installed on any machine other than the builders.) In the short term, a cross-distro package generator for binary crates sounds like a maybe-fun project....
Sure! http://brianbeck.com/images/magic-times.png

The first couple responses were pretty slow, sounds like they were getting absolutely hammered with requests. I could have done it a lot faster myself for sure, seems promising though!
I'm pretty sure that the OP would be coming in on a J visa as an exchange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-1_visa
I just see a white screen, this site isn't loading for me.
How come you removed the part of the FAQ that mentioned your fee? I think everyone knows you have to charge one and we're totally cool about it. Did you just feel that subject was best saved for later in the signup process, or did you want to keep the door open for alternate means of revenue?
I also wish for perf measurements, cpu, memory usage etc. How shorter is it from GNU ls (even though exa is still new)? Also I wish you didn't attempt to add complex layout to a ls-like program. I don't know why all low-level utilities have formatting logic in them, in GNU ls, IIRC, it was 30% of the code !
Looks like the FB lab opened access to the tasks database for training. Also, when did Mikolov move leave Google for Facebook?
Why is this so hyped? I'm sick of this broken market bullshit. Computing has jumped the shark.
Edamame, some sushi rice, and escolar sashimi which I've never tried before. (edit: some kinda soup as well)
I must say I am disappointed that the Female Founders Conference did not address the challenges that women of color face in tech. Not a comment, nothing.
Green Dino Powered by IBM Watson
Have you considered diversifying your skills? Mobile and big data, for example, are areas with lot more demand than there is supply.
Thanks. I keep seeing traveling advice pop up. And Im the position for it so I probably should travel asap
The untapped $140 trillion innovation for jobs market
So your question is how are they going to scale to meet the demands of the 300 million people in the US?

Isn't that the fundamental question all business must face? When the first McDonald's opens in a town do they worry and say "How on earth will we meet the demand of the WHOLE town?"

Problems like that are good to have.
I think the most important aspect of pricing is that your stated prices are itemized. That way you'll build trust with users.

As for pricing, perhaps a flat rate per request ($1?) that comes with up to 5 minutes of operator time for free. Then any time past 5 minutes could be billed in 5-minute blocks, perhaps $2 each (base price) and tiered up by order price (I dunno, maybe $3 for $500+, $5 for $2500+, $8 for $15000+). Also, you could charge predefined flat rates for any aspects of the order that can be automated.

Again, the important thing is that you're clear about what you're charging and why.

Great idea!

EDIT: changed suggested prices (redid math)
In college I worked as an overnight security guard. The only demand that job made was that I was in a certain building for 8 hours and stayed awake. Seriously, the turnover from guards fired for sleeping was a real issue, so just being awake was a big plus. Beyond that, I could read, study, whatever. Ideal for school. Coding during that time was possible, but you might not have internet access.
No.

> There aren't enough left to do it a second time.

Why do you think it would take an amount of resources comparable to the first time? We know what we're doing now so there will be much less fumbling around AND we would have an abundance of high-grade feedstock left over from the pre-fall civilization.

> What's "back on its feet"?

"Back on its feet" = a level of sophistication in resource extraction capable of facilitating resource use beyond recycling, i.e. the ability to avoid the exact scenario you described.

To make things more concrete, let's call it the level of sophistication required to build and fuel primitive fission reactors. I think that even you will agree that by that point fears of energy scarcity would be bunk.

> You've watched too many movies.

If you can't imagine "shortcuts" to take on the path to re-industrialization I would hazard a bet that you don't have training in the relevant industrial chemistry. Here's a fizz-buzz level self assessment to check if you're going all Dunning-Kruger: name one or more plausible post-apocalyptic alternatives that would be used in place of the WSGR and Haber processes.

> The only metal such a people would ever use would be salvaged... no new iron works.

Why do you think that salvaged metal could not suffice for bootstrap purposes?

Hell, you don't even need to make your own mining / refining / manufacturing equipment, you just need to patch up the stuff that got broken in the commotion.
Great play here. Why did you choose Indiegogo over kickstarter?
That actually doesn't seem very good. If I'm craving sushi as 7pm, getting delivered at 9:15 isn't really going to do it for me.
Most likely you are getting downvoted for casting about a line of unscientific quackery. General hacker objections to this have _nothing_ to do with "religious (or financially sponsored)" bias, nor groupthink, unless you consider the scientific method groupthink.
Here's the 31 line (not sloc) echo in sbase [0].

[0] http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/echo.c
> at least where I come from

Where are you from?

> Anyway, based on what I constantly hear on HN, freelancing may be overrated.

You and I must be reading a different HN. Running your own agency or consulting business if you're not a sales-oriented person may not be the best thing, but subcontracting to an agency is hardly sales-oriented.

Freelancing with an orientation towards very low-end commodity-type of gigs is fantastically bad. Don't do it. Focus on connecting with an agency that does programming work with businesses with revenues that would make your desired wages be a rounding error.

> I find it difficult to compete against Indian or Bangladeshi programmers, even when I can clearly provide much higher quality.

Hmmmm... Based on this comment, you might be limited by geography. If you are in the US, there are trivial things you can do that make it so that you are not competing against Indian or Bangladeshi programmers.

That said, even if you are in some far-off place and need to work remotely, good programmers are not easy to come by. The "cost" of being remote and unknown is that people who are looking for good programmers are often not willing to spend the time separating the wheat from the chaff. The solution to this is to do some quality work, post in on GitHub, and then show your work to agencies.
If you're not a US citizen, then I suspect your problem will be getting the proper work visa, not the lack of a degree from some US university. How is it that you can move to San Francisco? We need more information.
> Can you explain why such a thing can be called a farce?

Mostly because people were to choose between two options both of which meant that Crimea would secede from Ukraine (the first one meant outright separation, the second a disguised one).

But there are other things which made it a farce: an armed occupation of the parliament building and forcing of the MPs to vote for the referendum[1][2], the haste with which the referendum was held (two weeks notice, not allowing for the sides to prepare arguments for and against the cessation), lack of public debates discussing pros and cons of the cessation, the fact that the "referendum" was not approved by the Ukrainian parliament, growing evidence that the outcome of the "referendum" had already been decided elsewhere[1][3].

I could go on, but if you're really interested in an example of a cessation referendum which was not a farce, consider the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and compare its particulars with the Crimean one, side by side.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcCqrzctxH4

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUH-A3IF3h0

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_%22For_the_Return_of_Crim...
They'll find a price point that matches the demand with their ability to supply. The premium involved in using this service is already substantial, so it's not going to be an everyday thing for everyone.
I mean this as a genuine compliment: this is an obvious idea...that was hiding in plain sight.

Good job on seeing it.