skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chat_correct: shows the errors of a correct English sentence vs. an incorrect one
I documented my process to identify and monitor inconsistently failing tests
Team up with an agency or group of other freelancers. Then you can specialize and do what you do best(coding or design, for example). That way a higher percentage of your hours will be billed, you'll have less stress, work will be better, client will be happier and pay more, and you'll never leave a client on a limb if something comes up because there will be a team to pick up the slack. Source: did freelancing part time for 5 years and worked with 2 agencies for 2 yrs. latter was 10x better
Rich Hickey is one guy and this is what worked for him. That does not mean that his experience generalizes to all developers. Listen to lots of people, perhaps weight their opinions based on their success and your admiration of them, and then make your own decisions.
I have a book from 1968 where this was proposed as an inevitability by the 1980s. The same author (it was sponsored by the foreign policy association) assumed ray guns and antigravity were highly likely.
Making the Right Choice with IBM Watson Tradeoff Analytics
How to clean your Graphics card
I think it's a bit worse for some people, but yeah, I doubt it rises to the level of nicotine for anyone but the very edge cases.
Industrial jobs required a great deal of skill until they were broken down into easy tasks and each worker learned only one task. The work of imagining, planning, and creating the Industrial Revolution occupied the greatest minds of that time.

I find it difficult to imagine "assembly lines" for software, creating coding jobs within the reach of a 50 year old truck driver, but as the tools improve, who knows.
Your arrogance is showing. Sure, you could learn how to operate a lathe on an assembly line in a matter of weeks; in just the same way nearly any adult of average education could learn in a matter of weeks to write WordPress templates, or cobble together SQL queries, or etc. etc. To become a master machinist, the kind who can do anything with a lathe that a lathe can be asked to do? Years of dedication and expertise.
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft could write a privacy policy that lets them not follow the law, and expect that to matter to law enforcement. Until the law changes, there's not much that individual companies can choose to do about that.

At least they're at least saying that they will be transparent whenever they are legally allowed to do so, which is something.
why do you want to be a freelancer? Especially when you're a young dev with lots of energy and passion.
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea."

It's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

"The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing."

It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.
along the same lines, there's https://github.com/abiggerhammer/hammer which is a bit-oriented c parser combinator library for binary formats.
"Beware that an expert at X is not necessarily an expert about becoming an expert at X." - Peter Seibel https://twitter.com/peterseibel/status/471664135990566912
Yes, but if we could snap our fingers and educate everybody would the unemployment rate of the newly educated people halve? In other words, can the skilled labor market absorb the excess from the unskilled market without seeing a partially or fully compensating reduction in prices?

It's not impossible but I have my doubts.
>Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea.

It seems warm and fuzzy to think Sam, and the implicit company he keeps (the
ultra rich)--who are "leveraging not only their abilities and luck" but already
accrued wealth--can and will redistribute it. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday
will simply laugh at this prospect.

I'm not sure why Sam feels the need to call what most of the world is doing
worthless. I think it's crude and indicative of a narrow social and cultural
experience (which surprises me considering his position).

Believe it or not, there are cultures and groups of people who do not revere
technology the way most North Americans do.

Also, a good exercise for Sam (and others possessing a similar world view)
might be to think about how many "worthless" people and jobs it takes to
accomplish the things he does (including this blog post).
Fine, but how are you going to prevent abuse if the thing is easily copied and spread around the Internet (when home computers are powerful enough to run it)? Empathy has worked naturally, to the extent it has, because of our natural reaction to other physical humans. And, for however bad people have been treated despite this, flesh and blood human beings at least eventually die.

How are you going to prevent abuse? I understand all innovations have risk, but I think the potential for abuse is so incredibly bad, that it's not even worth going in this direction. Assuming there's any way to stop it, but there's no sense in not trying either.
where's the Demo?
In Australia, to call the Rescue Coordination Centre on HF, you HAVE to use DSC: http://www.amsa.gov.au/search-and-rescue/distress-and-safety...

> If a vessel wishes to conduct a radiotelephony communication with the network, it is necessary to make initial contact via a DSC call. For safety or routine messages a shift to a working frequency is normally required.

When I did my training, they pushed DSC very hard.

Nit: You mention ch16 as being for distress traffic only, but my radio handbook also lists it for carrying urgency and safety messages, and as a routine calling channel (and then you move to a working channel and get out of the way).

Also: What crazy part of the world plays clutters ch16 with music?
How do they even sift through all the information they get? It has to be a LOT.
Why You Don't Split Your Innovation Teams by Stage
I wouldn't implement goto in a new programming language. Not because it's never useful, but because it's only very rarely needed, and it's very existence means that it's easy to misuse it. Programming languages should be minimalistic and rarely needed features should be cut away. I've read similar reasoning from Eric Lippert when he was still designing C# features (which is not the best example, as C# is rather bloated).

Of course, the "should we use goto" question is different from "should we implement goto in new programming languages".
One of the most notable differences between the Industrial and Information revolutions is that wealth from the former was underwritten by a surge in energy. Wealth from the latter depends on extracting greater value from (more or less) existing supplies. In other words, it's largely about the sudden redistribution of output, as opposed to a change in the underlying supply.

(Relatively) enlightened governing philosophies and new economic theories aside, the Industrial Revolution also involved a monumental uptick in the amount of raw energy humans had to work with. Until this point, the latent economic power contained within fossil fuels remained out of reach. Population and productivity were both effectively capped by the amount of energy we could actually extract from the environment (e.g., caloric, in the form of crops for people and livestock as well as wind for sails and mills, along with hydro small dams and rivers for transport).

Nascent capital markets and industrial processes provided real advantages in this energy-constrained world, but adding steam then oil to the process of industrialization is what really kicked growth into overdrive. This influx of energy (and the economic growth it supported) allowed countries like England to develop populations seven or eight times greater than the agricultural carrying capacity of its arable land in astonishingly short order. The ideas of Adam Smith were important, but wouldn't have gotten nearly as far is they didn't have actual steam trains and ships to carry the people who subscribed to them.

All that said, the transition we're going through now is far from complete. Like the early and painfully disruptive days of the Industrial Revolution, the current concerns about stagnation and wealth concentration may give way once we complete another energy transition. A world supplied by highly distributed, low-cost solar and stored energy arrays (batteries, compressed air, molten salt, etc.) could see an increase in the overall supply, in a fashion that liberates a critical mass of people from the more coercive aspects of the global economy. Tapping the sun directly may prove to be as transformative as tapping ancient deposits of carbon. Indeed, the pre-existence of the information layer may prove to be the thing that makes this possible, just as the process of industrialization had begun before the steam engine kicked it into overdrive.

The big question for the long-range optimists is how do we maintain social and stability and cohesion during the transition?
Well their focus to find intelligence is credible if you need a war. If their focus is to find emotional intelligence, which means sense and logic together, their apathy may still objectify objectives.
From the moment you started focusing on the result (becoming a better programmer) and you forgot to enjoy the journey (why would you ask if you should go through the lectures of a recent Coursera course if that's something you enjoy doing?) you failed.

In my opinion, do what you enjoy doing, nothing else matters as long as you enjoy what you're doing.
Dear Hacker News readers,

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like a discount code to try the course.

Also, please leave any comments or questions here. I'll be happy to address them.

Thanks!

Rob
I disagree with this:

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs"

That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the early industrial revolution, and it was able to export its unemployment. And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. The so-called Third World was summoned into existence. You can get some sense of this by reading Fernand Braudel's work, "The Perspective of the World"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_d...

The software revolution will be similar with some nations winning and many others losing.
Management/leadership is easy: just stop lying
Perhaps one reason that science is not believed by more people in the general public is that some public figures make a living by spreading misinformation about science. The public is not just in a state of tabula rasa neutrality before scientists begin communicating with the public, but rather the public has already been stuffed full of misconceptions by people who have something to sell to buyers who are ignorant of science.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-food-babes-war-on-ch...
Meetups, conferences, industry events - go to anything and everything where you're likely to either meet potential peers, or potential employers. I've landed every job I've had doing either this, or through word-of-mouth of my work.

Also, sink some time into SaaS business software, or developer tools. Both lead to meeting aforementioned peers and employers.
FWIW, just tried registering with "Mark Sugarmountain" and got "We require everyone to use their real name on Facebook. If you'd like to add an alternate name, you may do so after registration. Learn more."
The Food Babe’s war on “chemicals” heats up again
Show HN: Basket- Changing the way we do bookmarking
woah this is amazing! you should write a series of blog posts describing how you made it and share it with the world!
Kudos to Emma for being brave enough to speak out. I'm a guy, and never used to understand why I hear so many stories of victims keeping silent and doing nothing to prevent this kind of abuse from happening to others.

But something similar happened to me, and I was shamed and pressured to keep quiet. And this happened to me when I worked at Google, which probably has a better culture and environment than most other places.

I wasn't sexually harassed, but I was mistreated by my boss in many other ways. On several occasions, he asked me to fabricate data when he was under a deadline or wanted to impress someone, he pressured me to write glowing reviews for him and negative reviews for people he didn't like, and he told me I was acting "like a pussy" when I said no. He also threatened me with negative performance reviews if I didn't comply, and banned me from meetings where I presented my work.

What hurt even more was what happened when I tried to get help.

I talked to my coworkers. A few of them had similar things happen to them, but were afraid of looking like tattletales and what would happen if our boss found out. A few said this hadn't happened to them, but although they believed it given other experiences with him, he was our boss so I should suck it up. Another person said he had already spoken to my boss's boss about it, and that boss had told my boss what he had said.

I tried talking to my VP. I asked for a meeting in an email, and explained the situation. My VP said he was busy for the next month, but we could meet later... When we eventually met one month later, he said I should talk to my boss's boss about this instead of him, and immediately asked if I had anything else to discuss.

I talked to HR. The HR representative said she would look into it by talking to some of my coworkers discreetly. When I talked to her again a month later, she said she'd had the chance to work with my boss on some projects, he'd happened to mention his "intuitive sense as a leader" about issues in my life and that I hadn't been performing well recently, and she asked if I was sure I wasn't retaliating for other reasons? She told me that if I was unhappy, I should leave the company. (I asked my coworkers, she hadn't talked to any of them.)

Other people I talked to were skeptical that this could happen, despite concrete evidence I had of my boss's abuse. (I heard responses like "maybe there's a reason for it we don't see.") I can understand caution around my claims (we should all be "innocent until proven guilty"), but that I was so blatantly ignored and met with distrust made for a dark time.

I see a few people in this thread accusing Emma of not doing even more. Given what's happened to me and how it's only hurt my career (I get questions when interviewing for new positions about why I left Google, and while I could tell the truth, I'm pretty sure it would only make me look like a paranoid troublemaker), and how I've seen others remain silent, it's far more than I and most people ever will.
>You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code.

Yes, but that's because the art of application programming is (mostly) stuck in the "alchemy" era of science. There is precious little systemization of knowledge, processes, and names. All of these frameworks are actually memes competing for mind-share to be an answer to this need. Of course, having one periodic table for software would be better than having 10 competing ones.

Is the inherent complexity of the ordinary programming task (building, deploying, monitoring reactive FSMs mediating user communication) is roughly the same as chemistry? Too early to tell, but I think not.
This particular set of exploits has little to do with collecting information. This seems to be directly related to command and control operations, including over systems that aren't connected to the internet.

There are a pretty scary set of discovered exploits.
My advice: if you start learning about history don't stop.
I worked in manufacturing before getting into software development and always had one or two female coworkers (sometimes even as my superior) and never experienced sexism among my coworkers.
My girlfriend drives semi for a living and in the first 3 years of driving truck never experienced it either until recently when a store owner at a place she deliveTA to said something along the lines of "they let women drive trucks blah blah". I was completely floored that someone could think and say such things. It was the type of situation like you described where you wouldn't think that a business owner could say such things but it happens and it's terrible that it does.
The standard was created by the ISO JTC1/SC 27 Working Group 5 (Privacy and Identity Management). It seems like mostly an European effort, which certainly isn't limited to Great Britain. Europeans usually take privacy very seriously.
It always fascinates me when those who are self-styled representatives of the public good fail to see how their empathic desires inevitably become infantilization and then outright jealousy.

Academics didn't just wake up and exploit musical genres as the vector of teaching dialectics. That was an act of desperation after a grand collapse of academic influence in the late 1970s.

Once the public learned that the academic class would 1. Rush to their defense, 2. Could weave up tales of oppression with little proof and 3. Could convert those tales into public spending programs, the public gamed the academics. The more exotic the abuse, the more hush money poured in. Once the oil shocks happened and the USD became fiat, the academic class had hit diminishing returns: now we could export inflation, now ANYONE can rabble rouse for profit, not just the learned.

The public became smarter than the academics and they haven't been forgiven since.
So why didn't the other guy turn back?
If you're Valve, then neither, because you likely have enough T applicants to not have to settle for a | or a __.
Lightroom vs Photoshop really depends on the type of retouching being done. Lightroom is powerful, but also optimized for efficient workflow over being able to do everything.
I've said it on many other similar threads: Avoid freelancer.com, odesk.com, elance.com, etc. like the plague. You will not make the kind of money you need to sustain a successful freelance consultancy on any of those platforms.

I suggest the following (roughly in order of precedence):
* Local networking groups for new businesses (new businesses need new websites. Easy sell.)
* Give talks at local tech meetups (and in the about me section of the talk, mention that you're a freelance web developer. Make sure to follow with a really amazing presentation, and you'll probably get a couple leads after your talk)
* Have an online portfolio where you list your past work with as many details about the work as possible (don't break your NDAs or anything, of course).
* Join gun.io and look for work there. It looks very similar to freelancer.com and similar, but the clients on Gun know that they have to pay for quality work, and in my experience, they're willing to do so.
* Contribute to an open source project related to the kind of freelancing that you want to do. For instance, I'm a PHP developer and I do a ton of work with Drupal. I've gotten almost every job through the Drupal community.

The contribution to open source bullet point is last, despite it being the most successful for me, because it's not always possible to give an open source project the level of involvement that is needed. It's also not as much of a sure-fire thing, whereas the other ones are.
Japan’s protest movement mixes men’s rights with anti-consumerism
Not just mixed drinks: Prohibition killed decent American beer & wine as well, and led to decades of industrialized, homogenized mediocrity that we are still recovering from.
Y Combinator Stories – A Collection
what are you using this cluster for? mathematical data processing?
There's an episode of Star Trek TNG where Wesley Crusher is playing with some nanobots and he accidentally sets them free (or fails to turn them off?), and they go on to replicate, evolve and develop an emergent intelligence (at plot speed). Fortunately for the intrepid crew of the Enterprise, the nanocloud are benevolent enough to forgive their attempted destruction at the hands of a mission bent scientist and go off to explore the universe.

Anyway, that's not likely any time soon, but advancing technology advances the scale of mistakes that an individual can make without asking the rest of humanity what they think.
I would assume SamA knows this. "Worthless" jobs are typically jobs that are actually valueless, but we continue to irresponsibly support their existence. My favorite example is break bulk shippers before the widespread adoption of containerization. Unions negotiated deals where workers would basically just stand around and get paid regardless of the complete lack of need.

The jobs you mention could eventually get to the point where they are actually worthless, ie: robot fast food workers, but I don't think anyone is arguing we're there yet.
Or perhaps "well rounded"
On the contrary, they're the most enthusiastic and willing participant http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/us/report-indicates-more-e...
2015 Yearly Free Horoscope for All Zodiac Signs
Hyperloop Is Coming
Not sure I agree. At least around where I live (Boston) the older style ("Dark Ages" in the parlance of TFA) bars are also serving $10-$20 mixed drinks, they're just not as good.

For instance, a Dark Ages bar you'll be paying $15+ for a bird bathed style "martini" which is simply chilled vodka (martinis are not vodka, and they should have a measurable amount of vermouth) or you're paying the same for a proper 3-4 oz sized craft cocktail.

This article wasn't talking about cocktails vs slugging shots of straight liquor, rather it was talking about how wretched the state of mixed drinks themselves became.
Yes, I'm already planning to add a button to "remove" recommendations.

The recommendations algorithm is based on some heuristics to detect how similar are two users. Nothing "generic". I'll describe it in detail if you are interested.

Now I'm trying to get information about why the HN submission is invisible...

EDIT. The submission was flagged by users. Weird.

Two Chromes - one is in Desktop category and the other is in Mobile.
Why is it so common to fear developments obsoleting jobs? Wouldn't it be just awesome to automate everything? No jobs at all? I could easily fill several lives with interesting things, no need for a job. Granted, the transition period may be quite tough.
No, I don't think that educating more people will make educated people worth as little as uneducated people are now. Educated people are (on average!) more productive, so the economy will be larger and the average paycheck should go up.
I can get all the great beer I want in the US. At this point, if people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem.
Also, I hate to be "that guy", but spelling and grammar are both important if you're going to be selling $x0000 projects (and you should be). In this post alone, I noticed "wandering" and "tide to a platform". It's important. Always write as if a client is going to read it, because it's very possible that they will.