skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice idea and app. Having a quick look at the code I had forgotten how much work needed to be done for old-skool Windows applications. They do give you great lean applications though which is something I miss.

I will always have a soft spot for small, lean single function applications. I guess it takes me back to my UNIX days. Some of my favourite more modern programs are SumatraPDF, uTorrent (the older 2.x versions) and Notepad2, lovely single exe programs that are self-contained. No installers and messy configs all over the place or in the registry.
The article links two to Markov chain analyses, at http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12011/ and http://math.uchicago.edu/~may/REU2014/REUPapers/Hochman.pdf .
IIRC the Taiwanese one is a Japanese railway. There's another one they installed during the invasion down to the North Korean border from Tonghua in Jilin province, China. (Then Japanese-occupied Manchuria) I believe that one is still operational - I took a ride on it about 2005/2006. The only other narrow gauge line in China is the late 19th century / very early 20th century French line from Haiphong in Vietnam to Kunming in Yunnan province, China. However, the Chinese government is just putting the finishing touches on a mega-direct (spare no mountain from tunnels, bridge every gorge) modern replacement... so this line is also about to close, circa right now.
Easy to me means not technically challenging. Over 90%+ of the enterprise integrations in my careers are tier 1 - 2 easy in the context of software engineering knowledge. It's usually a really convoluted form of "fill in the blanks in a form and pray it works."

But these are all complicated in that you could literally take the smartest person in the history of the world and make about the same rate of progress as if you had taken a pretty average person to do the same thing. These sorts of problems tend to be related to wicked problems. For example, there's a bazillion side effects to consider, meetings to be had about "what does this field mean to you actually?," and other things that are of business importance but are a complete snore to the programmer implementing them. You're not talking about whether to use singly or doubly linked lists or which datastructures to use in an integration almost ever, but you're talking about how well it will scale from the perspective of a business and how its own rules and patterns of use work.

Business algorithms might be something both hard and complicated of a topic, but unless your business is actually something technical such as algorithmic trading, scientific & technical research, etc. your business domain skill level is probably more about depth of knowledge than whether you're really smart or anything in itself.

Also, SOAP was a very popular "standard" but those of us stuck in the pits of writing tons of XML-RPC SOAP code for years knows that it was hardly ever more standardized in practice than "REST" is today.
From vqueue.h header:

* Copyright (c) 1991, 1993
*	The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

It's very much based on this:

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/sys/queue.h?anno...

Not very modern, in other words.
Thanks for the removal recommendation. Would you prefer that we remove the statements crediting your Amazon reading list as well?
Instagram for the Web is getting a redesign
Ask HN: Looking to partner with freelancers developers/designers
Hi All,

I'm a LAMP/Full stack developer and looking to partner with designers and developers.

I am back in school and cannot hold a full time position and would like to work on per-project basis.

I can help with development, server administration and web application vulnerability assessment.

If you are interested in exploring option or doing a test project to determine fit, PM me.

I'm located in Toronto, Canada (Eastern Standard Time)

Thanks!
Only in the corporate welfare system we have today (see Chevrolet bailout). Without corporate welfare in the forms of subsidies, bailouts, and regulations, companies like Telsa would be destroying the major auto manufactures. What old major companies would still be around without un-capitlistic like interventions from the government?
may I ask you how much you make with ads? ( just out of curiosity )
How to Get the Attention of Your ECommerce Customers Using Visual Communication
I understand this issue of maintaining motivation under conditions of artificial full employment was a problem under the Soviet system, but I'm not sure it is necessarily a problem in a post-scarcity economy. For one thing employment can be increased by reducing the work week. After all we went from 60 hour work weeks to 40 hour, even less in Europe where there are longer vacations than in the US. Education over the past century has gone from mostly primary only to mostly college, absorbing excess labor capacity.

I think the idea of 80% leeches living off the 20% productive is just wrong headed. What we will see is the general quality of life improved for everyone. Sure there will some that need to be entirely supported by the rest of us: the homeless, the mentally ill, the infirm, the elderly. The real danger is that the increases in productivity are being siphoned off by the rich and not being equitably distributed. Capitalism is inherently an unstable system tending towards monopoly and the destruction of the commons (pollution and the like) and must be reasonably constrained.
Worse, we seem to be eroding the nature of those entry level roles so that they don't teach the broader parts of a role.

Was I excited to get an analyst job right out of school for $28K/year (many years ago), after earning a math degree from a prestigious school? Uh, not really. But...

- Only about 50% of my job was actually excel nerf-herding

- The other 50% was a mix of research projects and building the department budget...this allowed me to meet everyone in the building and learn a little bit about how their area worked (and how the company made money)

- Better yet, I was one of three analysts in a 50 person marketing unit...so it was expected my next role would be outside of analytics and I was trained/coached accordingly. The company put less focus on my excel wrangling skills (low value) and more on me as a future program manager or senior tech (high value).

- Ah yes...and we were sufficiently small, I had to learn how to pull my own data (SQL and some light SAS scripting)

The net result? Pretty much everyone in my 10 person class of recruits amounted to something, professionally. Most are manager/director level, about half technical, half business.

The same company today splits the same work into a couple of specialist teams, consolidated across the company, with minimal cross training. You don't join as talent, you join as an Excel monkey. And dang it, we're gonna make you a very productive Excel Monkey. No need to learn the other stuff.

The results have been disappointing...
Without reading the explanation, immediately my roommate and I figure out how to do it via the linux terminal by pausing the main thread. It seems so obvious, don't know why I wasn't doing this myself.... since I have the same problem as the OP.
'Techies' already know that technology is not god. I don't criticize computers for not dissolving class disparities for the same reason that I don't criticize an amortization table for not solving poverty. This doesn't make me some sort of uncritical devotee to the church of technology. I never had the premise that technology would solve all problems to begin with.
Pretty normal for the BSD kernels. A lot of the very basic datastructures are defined as macros. For instance, here's queue.h: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/sys/queue.h?revisio...
Bruce is the kind of in-the-dome thinker that america needs right now. More domes and more Bruces!
I built the site; until today I made approximately ZERO dollars. Today I've seen 20k+ hits, and made $60.
Intel Capital Launches $125M Fund to Invest in Women and Minority Entrepreneurs
But do you really think that tuitions in the US reflect the actual cost of operation of colleges?

I certainly won't defend the cost of a college degree in the United States, but that's not my point. I object to this being called "free" since the cost is merely transferred from the individual getting the education to that country's taxpayers.

If I were a German taxpayer, I'd likely be fine with helping support such a system....if used by my fellow Germans (longtime residents or new immigrants). Subsidizing foreigners who will likely leave the country after graduation? Not so much. It strikes me as rather parasitic.
Neat proposal. It's worth mentioning that it can't be implemented in the current bitcoin implementation, yet the alpha sidechain introduced here happens to add exactly the bits it requires to work, namely time locked transactions and a more plausible malleability fix.

Which means if you find/build another altcoin with similar capabilities, you can start exchanging testnet coins with those altcoins using the very approach you describe today.

I don't believe that's a happy accident, but rather one of those core reasons for getting sidechains off the ground, as it provides a clear path toward finally building all the insane stuff people have been dreaming about for years.
Rapid Local Development with Vagrant, Docker and Node.js
Do-able
>Devices that now rely on cloud computing for much of their functionality, like smartphones, could become self-contained objects, capable of memory-intensive things like voice recognition and language translation without calling on external computers.

As far as I understand it those things do not at all need large amounts of RAM.

Not to mention how shoving a million DRAM chips into a server has absolutely no impact on how you would cram more memory into a phone.
Likely not in the US, since that is illegal in the States. (I assume that you're in Europe!)

I would say to make the change and pioneer the field. Once you make it, turn around and claim that VC space to help those who come after you.
Not in the UK. I guess you don't have debt collection agencies where you are or anything like bailiffs.

EDIT: Oh, and you're misusing the term "strawman". I was asking questions about your post, not positing an argument for you.
Wine? What about SIGSTOP?
Well, I run fullscreen windowed, so something on one of my other two screens just take the focus. The game is still visible and is just paused.
As a child, I would pour over Calvin and Hobbes for hours. In a world full of people that I could never relate to, I felt like I could relate to those comics.
It doesn't seem to do anything at the moment though.

https://github.com/goshakkk/nsa_panel/blob/master/app/contro...
The Dawn of Virtual Reality – Adventures in Consumer Technology
NYU gouging students and spoiling admins [pdf]
It wasn't technologists that overthrew King James II and declared the supremacy of Parliament, founded the United States, freed the slaves, pushed for universal suffrage and civil rights, etc. It won't be technologists that end the war on drugs, bring marriage rights to everyone, implement universal healthcare and basic income, etc.

Having gone to engineering school, I used to have the same arrogance for superior role of engineers in society. As I have gotten older, I have come to realize that while engineers are important, other people play very important roles in progress.
Ok! So I was a fool felt happy seeing a "Thankyou" message after every transaction or signup :/

Well, thank you!
iOS 9 Download and iOS 9 Jailbreak Status
Deep-rooted dislike or not, it is certainly disregard. Using that word, and in those ways, shows disregard for how a person of African descent might feel who reads that comment.
I ask whiteboard coding questions not because I care if the applicant can do some trivial task, but basically to gauge familiarity. Someone who writes code in a language every day for their current job should not have any trouble expressing a simple algorithm on a whiteboard. It's a screening question, and for someone who knows what they're doing, it shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes. Once that's out of the way, I talk about their body of work, problems they've solved, etc.

The problem is there are a lot of people who didn't do the work but were around for it. They went to all the meetings, they can tell the war stories, they know the jargon, but they just didn't write the actual code.

As for your question about github profile, the problem is that you can't really tell how much work someone did themselves. I'm sure you wouldn't misrepresent your work on github, but people do. People outright lie. They are probably not even being malicious about it, they just don't have a good sense of their own coding ability and feel like if they just post something that they "could have" written.

One applicant who I really liked really struggled writing code on a whiteboard. He described some projects that he had built himself for university, and that sounded really interesting and reasonably complicated. So I took a look through those, hoping that he was just having a bad whiteboard day. But unfortunately it just confirmed, he was smart, creative but just didn't have a lot of practice writing programs. The code was a mess, it did bizarre and roundabout extra steps to do simple things, and from the timestamps, represented months of work for things that should have taken days. I did admire that he was tenacious and didn't give up, and in the end he build something cool but just didn't have enough practice to write production code without supervision. I would have wanted to hire him for an internship, but that wasn't was we were looking for.
They realize that this product is far from being a reality and calling it anything other than "the Machine" would imply they are farther along in R&D or even production than they are.
We changed the baity title to a representative sentence from the article.
Urban Engines Wants to Help You Leverage All Forms of Transit
1. Unless the company specifically reached out to you to fill a critical vacancy, you're likely facing an uphill battle to circumvent the hiring process they've already established. It doesn't hurt to ask for an alternative, but your reluctance will be noted.

2. If you think a company is doing their hiring wrong, do you really want to work for them?
I've run the vice gauntlet in the past, and the two biggest issues were legal and investors unwillingness to tie their names/funds to the product.

Have you considered how you might moneitize the existing user-base?

You might look at the group who does Ashley Madison [1]. They are filing for a big IPO in the UK.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-15/adultery-w...
So you agree with them?
The hipster is dead, and you might not like who comes next
It's a screening question. If you make an ASCII spiral that doesn't mean you're qualified, but if you can't do that then you're certainly not.
I suspect it's useful to visually signal that the call can fail, and make it obvious what's happening; after all, the "throws" annotation is at the target site, not on the caller end.

You need to prefix anything that throws with a "try":

func mightThrow() throws {
try mightAlsoThrow();
}

Other than that, it looks exactly like C++ exceptions: Propagation happens along the chain of functions marked as "throws", until a "catch" handler intercepts it.

"try" is an expression, by the way, so you can do things like:

let line = try file.readline()

There's also a "try!" statement that throws a runtime exception if the inner statement throws.
I use Varidesk. Its a ~35 pound adjustable platform you place on top of a normal desk. There are handles on the side so you can easily change the height to a few settings.

Specifically, I got the Varidesk Pro Plus 36:
http://www.amazon.com/VARIDESK-Plus-Height-Adjustable-Standi...

Had to watch for a few things: is the keyboard platform the same height as their monitor (ideally, no). Would monitor/keyboard/mice cables get crushed if you keep the desk down? Can it support two 24"+ monitors?

It's incredibly durable (it'd won't tip over short of putting your entire weight on it in the elevated position). Use it for 2-3 hours/day (with a compression mat I got from costco for $20).

There are a couple models, and none are that cheap ($300-$400), but I've had back pain and poor posture all my life so I figured I'd invest what is typically 1 month of my living expenses into this.
> Can you be any more Apple fanboy, McRed?

No personal attacks in HN comments, please.
Part of their training is to write statements that can be interpreted multiple ways. This allows them to distance themselves from problematic interpretations (crucial for career survival) while claiming credit for popular interpretations, as well as raising the chance that their writing will be cited by others in the field (crucial for career progression). It also signals professionalism in their field - who would want to rely on someone so incautious as to write plainly?
Looks exactly the same to me. Split test?
You mean for those few FOSS projects that both get plenty code review and fix those bugs? Sure those probably are better off than average proprietary. Much worse than proprietary niche that's quality-focused. Yet the community isnt outraged enough to use low defect processes to prevent the next set. Further, that both FOSS and proprietary focus on getting features out quickly with few review ensures plenty of bugs in both.

The trick to either is the committment to quality/security is real, each commit is reviewed before acceptance, and independent verification is possible. With proprietary, the confirmation can come from a trusted third party, several third parties (mutually suspicious), or source provided to customers (but still paid).
According to the BBC article cited in the post, 50% of foreign students wind up staying in Germany. Germany suffers a fair amount of brain drain to the US. They're more than happy to have some of our more enterprising students by way of compensation. Certainly, there would be a financing issue if huge numbers of Americans head over for a free ride, but we're a long way from that point.
My issue is with the stupid charms menu that pops up. Windows allows you to disable it for the top-right corner, but you need to purchase Start8 to remove it from the bottom-right corner.

I shouldn't be required to purchase a 3rd party application to tweak a stupid setting easily. Having to code a solution and work with the Windows Registry is hell and something that most people won't bother doing.

If your business strategy is "there's a cheap $5 3rd party app that fixes that!" - you deserve to go out of business.
Google cards are getting interesting. Is this the new target for SEOers to aim for, to get their site feature as one of the cards?
But that's actually the name of the product!
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/systems-research/themachine/
Win8.1 even with ClassicShell is just okay. Windows XP and 7 were great. I understand for lite users Win8 is fine. But Win8 have like 5 different system settings dialogs and pages and it's a total mess. It feels like Microsoft either really doesn't get it or simply doesn't care that ModernUI doesn't work & look that great on desktop. I will definitely wait how the Win10 launch unfolds and how mature it is. If everything's goes wrong Win7 will last until 2022 when the official update-support ends.
Thanks for answering. That's way more than I expected!
At our office we have Haworth Planes Height Adjustable [1], which I like and many others that visit inquire about them. They are premium but they will last, cost is ~$1,200 [2]

Pro-tip, get the wheels; everything should be on wheels, makes all the difference.

[1] http://www.haworth.com/home/resources/design-tools/image-sea...
[2] a reseller has one on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Haworth-Planes-Height-Adjustable-Desk/...
Show HN: A convenient drop-in replacement for android.util.Log
Data point:

I often end up with many (read, ~100? Varies widely.) tabs open.

I work like a priority queue. When I'm reading something, and see something interesting as a link, I open it in a new background tab and keep reading the current thing. Then go to the most interesting/relevant/time-sensitive tab I have open and read that. Repeat. ( while not que.isEmpty(): que.pushAll(que.popBest().getChildren()) ) This adds up quickly.

For example, with HN I tend to browse the entire front pages (active / standard) / my user threads before I actually start reading links / comment pages. And when I'm reading a comment page I tend to open comments to reply to in a new tab to get back to them later.

Ditto, if I'm coding something unfamiliar I often find myself looking up things recursively. Oh, here's two options to do thing A I need to do. Oh look, option A requires things B and C. Oh look, B requires D. This is sounding too complex, close tabs for things A/B/C and try option 2 instead. Etc.

Realistically, I only need at max two or three tabs actually loaded at once most of the time - but at the same time I want things to be loaded before I get to them, and I do not want to lose data from unloading pages. Lazarus helps, but there are pages that still lose data on reloads.
Right, which is why it needs to be on everything I send to the IRS, or that my employer (or their agents such as payroll companies) send to the IRS concerning me.

But I don't see why it needs to be on things my employer (or their agents) send to me. Sure, SSN is not some highly classified secret, and it is on enough things it does not need to be on that having it on W-2 probably doesn't noticeably cause any extra harm. I'm just curious if it actually needs to be there.

If I'm doing my tax return on paper instead of electronically, and need to physically attach a copy of my W-2, I can fill in the SSN field, just like I filed in the SSN field on the top of the 1040. Having the SSN on the form then, when it goes to the IRS makes sense so that they can match it up to the 1040 if it becomes separated from it accidentally [1].

If I'm doing my tax return electronically, the IRS uses the W-2 information they get from my employer (or its agents) electronically. The paper W-2 is really just to let me know the pay and withholding numbers so I can fill out my returns.

[1] Well, maybe not. It did back in the days when they actually looked at the physical W-2, but now I believe they get an electronic copy even if the taxpayer is not filing electronically, and so I don't think they look at the attached W-2. In fact, I vaguely recall the last time I filed a paper return being told not to attach my W-2, although I'm not certain of that.
Great video. Enjoyed his reaction:)
I'm a software engineer and I took a total of two cooking courses and with lots of practice, I became a better cook.

$1500 is essentially a weekend cooking class...twice. Learning to cook was by far the most challenging yet the most fun I've ever had. With the exception of the immersion circulator (I own a Polyscience one), none of these things really help. If you want to be a good cook, learn to cook. I never understood the need for "smart" devices when cooking is largely based on experience. Sure, this oven will help me cook medium rare steaks well, but will it taste good? I make medium rare steaks on a frying pan and I can make it consistently well. Cooking is practice, it doesn't require some expensive device.
How to create logical gates (XOR, AND, etc) using water:
http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html

And more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics