skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where to begin

Am I ready -
The biggest bit is actually having the confidence to do it and a CV good that will get you past both the gatekeeper (the agent) and the client checking CVs... That means you should have real experience across both multiple employers and multiple market sectors (retail, consultancy, banking for instance) before thinking about it.

Timing -

Never understood this one. Projects have different life cycles so require analysts before project managers before developers before testers.

Outside of the week between Christmas and New Year there are always some companies looking to start projects or requiring another contractor to fix a problem. In fact the only time I've found it difficult to get work is in April which supposedly is a boom period due to new financial years...

Bureaucracy -

The easiest way to find contracts is through agencies. To do that you need either a limited company or to use an umbrella. You don't however need to create this before you get a contract as you can get a company created in about 4 hours..

Getting an accountant

You need one but don't need 1 until you get that first contract. Crunch has a lovely interface and is a good site but frankly I don't think they would be that great if things went wrong as they haven't got many qualified accountants. Look at IPSE or Freeagent for many other possible options..

Registering for VAT

On the flat rate scheme you don't keep 5.5% but rather .2 *.145 or 2.6% as the 14.5 is taken from the income including VAT..

Expenses

You don't need to do anything until you have a contract (as I've continually said setting up a company can be done in 4 hours). You may need to wait before you get paid (although some agencies still pay weekly) but if that is the case you keep the expenses to a minimum, keep a record of them and take the money from the company as soon as it receives that money.

Finding your first client

The first client isn't the hardest. The second one is. Especially when your first client was a short term 3 month contract and they didn't renew you because the work was done.
With 1 3 month contract under your belt you then start looking for a contract as your money starts running out. That is when things are difficult.

And I'm out of time but just before I go

Mailing lists and communities

This is my real problem with this article. He doesn't seem to want to be a contractor. He wants to be a freelancer working for multiple companies on various projects. Perfectly acceptable but thats the world of code bunnies doing work for start-ups and advertising agencies rather than contracting in a consultancy firm or government department.
That's true. There are a large number of people that truly believe that if you have nothing to hide then you don't need privacy. Many believe that our security from terrorism is worth the trade off.

On that note, please can you post your last 6 months of bank account statements on github for us all to have a look at? I'm sure you won't mind us taking a look.
This is from their kickstarter page:

"The real challenge now is to deliver a sequel that we will all be satisfied with after 14 years of waiting. After much research and planning, we set the funding goal at this level believing it will make possible a fulfilling Shenmue experience."
I don't know. I also started to pronounce my name "wrong" when I was living in England to conform with how everybody else was pronouncing. I even have friends who just straight up used completely different names when living in English speaking countries to avoid the whole problem with no one pronouncing their names right.
How Soil Microbes Affect the Environment
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Comments on Alibaba Spinoff
Possible Pentagon destruction of evidence in NSA leak case probed
I wish games would move from Steam to the App Store, but it's not gonna happen. Valve has way more skin in that game and Apple have repeatedly shown that they're not going to compete over a medium dominated by expensive exclusive hits - as we watch Sony and Microsoft fight eachother into irrelevancy, this looks like a wiser and wiser strategy. They'll take their iOS game monopoly, but that's it.

The shareware spam site days are long gone. Numerous companies (including Apple) have been working to make checkout easy to implement on your own website. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a demo video/ad. It's easier than ever to target users (Google, Facebook). It's cheaper and easier than ever to make a simple product site. For a simple app, that might constitute a crippling amount of overhead, but if you anticipate making more than $10,000 in revenue (and thus risk sacrificing $3,000 to the Apple cut), it's probably worth investing a few hours in.
Suppression of dissent primarily, which is why the internet is and will increasingly be under legislative attack. It has served as one of the last bastions of anarchistic freedom of thought, which threatens the powers that be.

Said suppression only happens when you can reliably tie identities online to identities offline. Hence parallel construction, etc.
With Bitcode, Apple could change OS X into something like the old TAOS jit based OS. Except for a small kernel, all TAOS executables were intermediate representation files. This IR could be translated to real machine code at the same speed as disk access, and resulted in code running at 80-90% native speed on most platforms.

With software like that, Apple could become independent of any particular software architecture.

(TAOS dates from the 90's and is hard to google, but is mentioned in some papers. And yes, the JIT translator could do that even on 90's machines.)
What I carry with me every day: dhh
Can't what you are saying be applied to all employees, and not just software engineers. If you aren't adding value that is greater than your pay then you will be fired.
"The JavaScript model of "call some callback when the currently-executing function returns" doesn't work,"

I can't prove it, but at this scale, I am guessing that the cost of constructing call frames to call into the callback will start to matter, too. Switching into an already-existing context is probably significantly cheaper. (Well, it's definitely significantly cheaper to switch into an existing C context than construct a Javascript call, but, that's sort of cheating. Or a low blow. Or something like that.)
What OS are you running on the Dell?
What about every other certificate issuer, whose up-front fees incentivize companies to not encrypt data in the first place?
More about password safe: https://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html
What if they hack your dropbox account and get a copy of the vault that way? They're not on your box, but now they can try to break into your vault.
I do too! It makes me feel better than other people when I latch on to meaningless (in context) technical details and then publicly pretend that that invalidates not just some of the other content, but ALL of it! That way I don't actually have to read or think anything, and as a bonus I can humblebrag about knowing the "true" definition of an engineering term that I just learned myself in my undergrad OS class last year, and I can go show off my awesomeness by posting about it on HN! This a really good approach to life in general, it scales to all sorts of interpersonal and professional situations. :)
When was the last time you tried it? Atom works fine on dell computer with Intel duo core 2 from 7ish years ago.
Sorry, you don't get to judge what's trivial. But keep acting otherwise if it makes you feel better.

But you aren't getting my point. As somebody who is not actually working to solve the problem, your peanut-gallery "you're doing it wrong" is basically irrelevant. E.g.: "Hey firefighters! Do you really have to use axes on that front door? You should just ring the doorbell and maybe leave a note. That's the polite thing to do." A firefighter might take tips on techniques from other firefighters, but will (and should) have very little interest in the shouted suggestions of random passers-by, and even less in what arsonists think they should do.

People unhappy with social progress are forever telling the people making that progress that they are doing it wrong. Here's a famous example:

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...

Note here that MLK actually took the time to reply to his fellow clergy, people also devoted, at least in theory, to making the world better.

Also, at least as far as my activism goes, I think convincing everybody would be nice but it's neither necessary nor practical. Consider this graph:

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...

If you compare it with the death rate, it suggests that progress was made on this issue not because most people change their minds, but because most of the people opposed to interracial marriage died off.

This is hardly unique to social change; Max Planck, one of the inventors of quantum theory, wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

So although I would like to change minds, I will settle for some amount of resentful silence. Because a) it reduces the direct impact of oppression, and b) it means that Planck's "new generation" will pick up the new truths. If I have to choose between civil rights and civil dialog, I'm generally going to pick civil rights.
By cyberwar he means that nation states were investing in state-of-the-art capabilities to use Computer Network Exploitation for the purposes of espionage and sabotage.

This has been happening since the 90s.

It is true that it has gotten consistently warmer on the internet. There is a term called "hybrid warfare" now that is being traded in the US defense sector.

Hybrid warfare means assymetric capabilities in tandem with ground forces: IO (intelligence operations) with kinetic operations.

IO itself is a broad category consisting of Military Deception (MILDEC), PSYOPS or Strategic Communication (propaganda operations), Electronic Warfare (to disrupt communication, coordination and execution), and Signals Collection for espionage (SIGINT).

The US now considers hybrid warfare the norm and deploys IO operations with every kinetic force. In Syria this meant hacking their air force and grounding their planes - in Ukraine it means winning the 'idea war' in neutral territories and providing morale and information support to civilians and the military alike.

Cyberwar continues to change, as does all war, with the advancement of technology, the capabilities of the parties, the state of the art, and the scale of conflicts. But we've had it now for a couple decades in one stage of evolution or another.
Everything vegans eat is already ready - can't get any faster than that.
Yeah, it does seem like our universe is an inverse black hole, with the big bang as the event horizon, and everything expanding inexorably out instead of in.
Ask HN: What Do Google Ad Solutions Engineers Do?
Just curious about what do Google's Ad Solution Engineers do (i.e. are they sales engineers? is there lots of travelling? etc.) and how do they differ from the normal Google SDE's?
Anyone know if this is this similar to the oscillation that many people think accounts for the surprising mass of the 125 Higg's reported at the LHC? I was surprised to read this as though it was something unique to neutrinos when I had heard that theory proposed before. (edit: mind you, I've only heard it as a possible explanation for Higgs bosons, whereas this is significant proof for neutrinos).

For anyone interested, I recently finished Don Lincoln's "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" and "The Large Hadron Collider" (they're kind of a series, although they have a lot of overlap). It's an excellent coverage of the theory and practice of particle physics, and although he doesn't cover the OPERA experiment at all,
Why do we really care what people carry every day?
I don't. I'll see if I can pull it together and get it online.
Ok, we changed the title to something generic. Suggestions for a better title are welcome, as always.
understanding asynchronous coding in JavaScript - e.g. callback hell, flow control, it's the tradeoff to efficient and scalable processing
Except that rc.subr is shell scripting alone. It's literally a shell script that gets sourced into another shell script (in this case, your initscript), which is - again - ordinary shell behavior. Yeah, you have to learn a couple of shell functions and variables, but that's not really that big of a deal for someone with even cursory knowledge of shell scripting.

The bigger point, though, is that if your only goal is to have terse daemon configuration with a minimum of boilerplate, you can already do this with shell scripts. Even if you decide that shell scripts are the spawn of the devil and ought to be burned on the stake (which, honestly, isn't all that unreasonable of a decision), it's quite possible to implement the same functionality using Ruby or Python or Perl or C or Go or Rust or Erlang or Lisp or PHP or COBOL or MIPS assembly or whatever-the-hell-else you feel like writing init "scripts" in (with some exceptions; FreeBSD and NetBSD, for example, apparently launch initscripts with 'sh' instead of following the OpenBSD and GNU/Linux approach of calling initscripts as executables).

The biggest point, though, is that because of this, if your only goal is to have terse daemon configuration with a minimum of boilerplate, you can have that without having to learn at minimum two languages (one to write your initscripts and one to do all the rest of your day-to-day administration tasks). You just learn shell and you're done. With systemd, you still have to learn shell scripting for even systemd-related tasks (let alone non-systemd-related tasks) plus a new DSL that looks like INI but isn't quite INI. I guess that's tolerable coming from, say, the Windows world (where you're learning DOS batch language and PowerShell and VBScript and INI and Lord-knows-what-else), but that's double what a seasoned Unix admin requires in a non-systemd environment, which is pretty significant.
Maybe an Apple intern could sit in front of a computer that runs ImageMagick's compare utility. However, it stands to reason that Apple would be left with a choice between hiring two interns and not having an intern write their production code. Or maybe Apple could have the intern work on automating a visual testing process so that builds break when they break other browsers.

But I never said anything about "automating" since even manual testing would be a QA improvement.
If only I had heard of this article earlier. I actually downloaded the source code to a bunch of these tools to see if they properly implemented their crypto...

That said, even PassWord safe has some issues. As the article points out, it computes an HMAC over the unencripted contents instead of over the encrypted ones. Encrypt-and-MAC isn't broken like MAC-then-encrypt but its still not as ideal as Encrypt-then-MAC.
You are welcome and thanks.

My advice is that you think about the app store as a distribution channel and use something like Paddle to sell online so you aren't only relying on the mac app store.
You know, it's funny how it's 2015 and we're just dripping with raw power on our developer machines, yet, open a few hundred kilobytes of text and accidentally invoke a handful of O(n^2) algorithms and blammo, there goes all your power. Sobering.

Edit: We need a type system which makes O(n^2) algorithms illegal. (Yes... I know what I just dialed up. You can't see it, but I'm giving a very big ol' evil grin.)
In then sense of "arbitrary code [...] if someone MitM the connection" it certainly is not.
There are plenty of interesting electronic technologies offering programmability at a reasonable price :

Xmos is offering low cost microcontroller family where you can program your digital peripherals in c. So are others.

Cypress is offering programmable analog chips. Very versatile.

There are extremely low cost fpgas.

To is offering an mcu with programmable wireless protocols, currently only by them but maybe there's hope.

For users interfaces, the phone offers a great users interface, if made accessible like simblee promises.

So basically there are lots of option available but what is missing is ease of use and maybe options to combine them together.
I have verified that the CryptoRandom class is part of a standalone library with (1) should be thread-safe since it cannot dictate how it will be used by callers; (2) the authors clearly intended this library to be thread-safe (based on "thread-safe" comments in its source code).

And in all likelihood it is thread-safe - but that's due to being lucky - not competent.

The larger issue is that we have a widely-used crypto software which is clearly (1) not designed well; (2) not implemented well.

How much trust one is willing to place into current and future versions by the same author(s) is up to you.
The problem is that it's usually not true that you can have confidentiality without integrity, because of chosen ciphertext attacks.
Also in your first year you receive an extra 1% - if you would normally pay 14.5%, in the first year you would only pay 13.5% back.
Might want to poke around here for tutorials geared at devs coming from other languages: https://strongloop.com/node-js/node-js-get-started-java-php-...
> Do you genuinely believe that I would be obligated to return or dispose of the book in this scenario? If so, then I applaud you for consistency, and I can only say that I find that belief very bizarre.

I believe we should. I think we rarely do (including myself). The terms were clear. I'm not arguing my point in the hope that we all stop using ad-blockers, I'm arguing my point in the hope that we we can realize that there's a bit of bad behavior on our part as consumers as well (that there's bad behavior from purveyors of ads or that it started with them I believe and accept as fact, but I don't think that entirely alleviates our culpability).

> Well, I'm explicitly telling you that I don't consent, so unless I'm lying, it's pretty clear that I do not consent.

I have no problem with you withholding your consent. I have a problem with that consent being part of a deal and you withholding it while still accepting what it was being traded for.

I'm still not understanding your argument that you feel justified in taking something when you know you aren't supposed to have/use it. I can lay it out in myriad different ways, with different goods, difference services, but in the end, I think they are all the same thing. There's a trade going on, and if you aren't fulfilling your side, you have no right to the goods of the other side. That you've received the goods makes no difference to me. I may have fruit in my hands at the store while approaching the counter, but they aren't mine until I've paid. If I choose not to pay, it's my responsibility to return ownership to the store (or in the case of a non-tangible good, to not utilize it). Your consent matters only as to whether you want to complete the trade. You consent has no bearing on whether you have right to goods after you've chosen not to trade, at least not legally, or I would submit, morally.
Yes. Solve problem for local business. They are now your client. Continue solving problems for them while you build your client list.

This is how small businesses grow.
I am a very thick skinned person, I like people joking about me and like to joke about others, but let's get not confused about Linus, he's quite a character, I personally really like him (as far as I know him, basically his internet persona), but I can perfectly understand how it doesn't fit with a lot of people.

I find the following phrase hilarious:

>> I find people who think open-source is anti-capitalism to be kind of naive and slightly stupid.

Now, even if I find it particularly funny, I'm not sure if that's the best face for open source, maybe someone less confrontative and more politically correct would be better suited, but he is who he is, and his contribution to open source, well, need no explanation.

Even so, I wonder if Linux and open source in general would benefit from having a more friendly / approachable face and have Linus in the technical side of things.

It's not something that's easy to change though because it wasn't a decision, it's something that just is.
They are probably not bad movies, and the high-way action scene is amazing, but I'm not really sure there was anything to those movies other than that.

When the first movie was so mind blowing (which it probably isn't today) then some good special effects a great action scene or two and mediocre story is not going to look like decent action movie, but more like an atrocity.
I like Atom! However, sadly a simple regex search can kill it in 5 seconds.
So, the biggest thing that can't be worked around is that the number type in Javascript doesn't support arbitrary-length integers. That means that you can't blindly trust numeric IDs for resources (though it'll take you a while to hit them)--instead, you'll have to do things like specify string versions of those id's. Twitter ran into this, I believe, and it's something to be aware of.

The other disadvantage of using Node is that the ecosystem is still not completely agreed on what to use--for my 0.02USD, I'd look into HAPI + Swagger.

Also, if you don't know about promises or generators, you're going to write really really ugly Node code. That said, it's pretty easy to pick up.
And also for Forward Error Correction (FEC) on Optical Transport Networks.
Reasons the video world is moving to js-based delivery
I had a video editing app in the Mac App store since the MAS launched. It made high five figures for the first two years and then trailed off, mostly due to me neglecting it for more lucrative (and time consuming) consulting work. Also, it was heavily based on the deprecated QuickTime API, so it had a definite shelf life and upgrading it for each new iteration of OS X was fraught with all sorts of woes. Not to mention being trapped in 32-bits due to QuickTime being a 32-bit only framework (not QTKit).

But, in its hey day, it did really well. It even beat iMovie for a few weeks. Though now I am sitting here almost five years later and I have no idea who my customers are, beyond the handful that went out of their way to contact me.

I had some down time this past spring, so I rewrote the entire thing from the ground up using AVFoundation. I haven't launched this new version yet because I'm waiting to finish the iOS version to launch both within the same time frame. However, I won't be putting the OS X version on the Mac App Store for a few reasons:

- I want to know who my customers are

- I want to be able to contact my customers

- Sandboxing restrictions are workable, but not a good customer experience imho.

- Lack of paid upgrades isn't viable for an app not everyone needs

- MAS seems way neglected

So now I'm going to be going with Paddle (http://paddle.com) since it sort of replicates that experience really well and the guys there are super responsive. Maybe I'll change my mind down the road, but not likely.
Well LastPass has had a breach now twice but the integrity of their password database is still holding strong. If you're using Dropbox to share your password database, LastPass having a breach shouldn't be of any concern. I'm fairly certain Dropbox has been broken into more times than LastPass ever will be.

As someone who works in the security industry, I use LastPass and recommend it to everyone. It's no less safe than anything else + Dropbox (I really recommend against using Dropbox... use something like SpiderOak. Dropbox is not meant to be a secure file store) and the convenience is outstanding. Convenient security that everyone uses is much better than inconvenient security that no one uses. And something + Dropbox is pretty inconvenient once you're used to LastPass.
Interview: How to Write Secure Software, Guaranteed