skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
London is a world of her own, my advice relates to her.

The only thing you need to be an IT Contractor in London (other than some skills) is confidence.

I worked a number of contracts over ten years in the finance sector in London. I never had a client pull a contract on me, I always left on my terms. On average I lasted two years until I moved on. Major Retail, Funds management, Investment banking was my progression.

My background was Java (I work almost exclusively with Clojure now, and love it). Java was the language of business in London and I presume it still is. If you want to get a well paid gig in a smart office for a bank or funds management firm then Ruby is not your friend. Why was I motivated to move towards Investment Banking? Well, I'm competitive and it's the hardest market to crack, and it pays a premium. That's it. If you want to stay pure to one language or another and not use your rare skills for the best economic result for yourself that's another choice.

The market is huge, once you've got a recruiter who likes you you'll be offered work fairly continuously.

My contractor rate was roughly double what I would have earned permanent. The contractors I worked with were no better or worse than the permanent staff I worked with, they just had the confidence to strap on their contractor pants and go to work. That. is. all.

Advice like this article is useful enough I guess, but in reality you either have the confidence to go for it or not, and once you have you will never imagine why you waited so long (as long as you've got the ability to land work and impress people).

IR35? Just move every couple of years.
Tax? Don't take the piss and HMRC will not bother you.
Accountants? Have a crap one for a while and swap.
Recruiters? Don't piss them about, realise they are all liars, but necessary. Find a good one and impress their clients.
Timing? There's a couple of luls towards Xmas and the EOY, but there are always projects looking to spend money.

It is all confidence, you either do it or you don't, all this other crap follows.
His book worth a read: "Cholesterol is Not the Culprit: A Guide to Preventing Heart Disease"

http://www.amazon.com/Cholesterol-Not-Culprit-Preventing-Dis...
Chinese Skip ‘Smelly’ Cabs in Favor of Free Rides with Uber
The author Trivers writes this paper about the functional aspect of trust, lie.. some emotions.. in evolution. He gives examples in biology which is quite interesting to read, though I find the paper long.

The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Trivers-Evolu...
You can easily neutralize the bad fats that you eat by ingesting baby seal oil pills daily. I buy them on amazon.
Lol, be advised this may cost you your job if you are serious and not bluffing. Get a good competing job offer before trying this. Or be willing to go unemployed (most engineers can risk this)

If you are serious, talk to your lawyer. Don't guess or negotiate randomly. In some states this boilerplate language is meaningless, in others not so much.

You could be a critical part of the acquisition, in which they bend. Or you could be a part of the product that was going to be redundant anyways and they will be glad of the excuse to let you go.
Completely!

If transitioning from PAYE to contractor life (filling in timesheets and other tedia) then the umbrella route is the way to go. You can focus on the job in hand and whatever comes of it. On subsequent contracts there is the opportunity to become your own book keeper and accountant, if you really can be bothered with such things instead of the coding you enjoy.

IMHO the chores of managing timesheets and getting paid are best left to other people, hence umbrella.

As for how much money is needed to get going, with umbrella companies there is an option to be paid early for a small fee, so long as invoices are being paid somewhere down the line. So you don't need to have six months of life savings and insurance stacked up somewhere. You can survive until payday without all that even if the experience is not fun. However, by not spending money you will have more when payday arrives.
Maybe the colleagues should start working in some kind of organization? Then they could get real political weight.
Posing Questions of Photographic Ethics
Heh, the idea of unionising IT folks often gives me a chuckle.
IANA engineer...

Only if the vehicles are self propelling from the ground, and if you refer back to trains really they are just pushing air in front of them, with some air escaping past them.

If there were not ventilation systems to allow the air behind the train to be filled, the train would need to work harder to essentially pull the air behind it.

At least, that's my understanding.

If the vehicles are not self propelling from the ground, and propel with air, like the original hyper-loop proposal, they are actually pushing air backwards to their direction of motion, which would stop any such forward moving air flow develop.
I don't think the commenter you're responding to was accounting for the possibility that the growth occurred in discrete jumps once per year.
Cash+the+Golden+Opportunity+of+Investment+in+Tata+Housing+Arabella
from plaque on the wall of arteries?
I personally feel developer is not about technology, but we should be aware of how in earlier times people behind the technology inventions have lived, worked to bring up great things what we are currently used. So my one of the oldest and my personal fav. is :

Digital Deli: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli

Currently out of print, but I own an copy.
If the company wants to hire you, they will want to negotiate a deal that works for both parties. Crossing out and signing might be a bit harsh, but there should be no problem saying to the employer that you disagree with some sections.
Its been done:

http://openpandora.org/

.. and its getting a new revision:

http://www.pyra-handheld.com/

This is exactly the device you describe - powerful, complete, can be used in Desktop or handheld (or embedded) modes, open source, open community, no walled gardens or other limitations placed on developers ..
New Screen Tech Promises to Make Smartphones Even Thinner and Lighter
Maybe just luck, along with good diet and exercise. He looks better than my grandpa did at 70.
Chrome bug resolved after 2.5 years. We can use datalist in extensions now
I've seen the crossing-out-and-initialing thing work.

I've never heard of it causing a problem, but I've definitely heard of it not working.
not constrast; it's analogous, in lower dimension.

Sponge has infinite area and 0 volume.
Sierpinski's triangle has infinite perimiter and 0 area.
DPDK is great because it means telling to the customer "you keep your network, just buy a server with this card and we promise you unreal throughput".

If you really want maximum throughput with RDMA, I think the best is to go InfiniBand.
its a very very context dependent situation.
On the Role of Assemblies
Really cool stuff. Seems like you found a good way to hand off most of the hard stuff to AWS and only do a few key things yourselves to make the experience better. As such I think Empire has the potential to be a viable option for many companies, which is something I rarely say about a PaaS project :)
Any half decent employer that isn't willing to negotiate is just going to say that. They risk losing a hire if they say that though, so some will be willing to negotiate. If you try to bluff them, it almost certainly won't work because nobody wants a troublesome employee with a big ego, so if your going to walk because of the non-compete, you better mean it.
I did it once, they said sign or don't come on board. If you are bluffing, yes, go ahead, you probably have nothing to lose. Microsoft, I know, would laugh if you pulled that.
have you tried it? how is the performance at the singapore dc?
Do you buy a product at the cheapest price/at best price from a reputed seller?
Why? Interested in your reasons. One plausible one is that trusting an author you know can be more practical than examining every line of a massive open source code base. Could that be a reason? Others?
It's the same thing. Imagine that you need one blob of paint for every tick-mark on the real axis. Infinite blobs of paint. (The resolution, in both scenarios, is that the size of a blob is not constant, and goes to infinitesimal)
Muffin: a Python web framework based on asyncio
I used to be a die hard fan of this game in my early teenage days and now Ruby is my most favorite. It would be a lot of fun building this game and connecting to some of my old memories. Thanks Nikolay.
Sinapps beta 2.0
Heroku isn't cheap. And to run a small PaaS like alternative there are many many more solutions that are way better and faster and more secure than Cloud Foundry.
Hell I mean did you even read the requirements of Cloud Foundry, it takes a hell lot of everything just to manage a few boxes.
Also CF comes from Pivotal, listen to the talks they made, they say, start out small, however starting out small with CF is just impossible.

And OpenShift ist great, especially Origin M5 which is coming, soon tm.
The image Internet problem, how you are killing original content
I'm also in the same boat as yourself. I live with my girlfriend and our 3 yr old kid, but currently only I have income from my full time job as ICT operator.

I recently got hired for another job through my own company so I work there 1 night each week. I'd like to quit my full time job and try to get more freelance jobs, but because of our kid and poor finance situation I feel I can't do such a risky move yet. Luckily my gf supports me and is very positive to me starting for myself once she finishes the education and gets a job.

And as others has mentioned, on many nights after the kid is asleep, I also end up in the decision of "Free-time vs work on project".
Many nights I feel exhausted and just want to relax, but then I get upset with myself for not working with the projects which I should finish already! Hehe

I like reading about other people in the same boat so please keep us updated if such a community arises.
Definitely not (I'm french).
(approximate) logarithmic spiral of discs whose radii are the harmonic sequence?

(Awarded 1 point of 10 for being unable to specify the precise piecewise-linear spiral function)
I really hope this bitcode feature isn't going to cause a lot of trouble for app developers. Up until now, the app you built on your machine (and tested on your devices) is the app you submitted and which is running on your customers machines.

In the future, when your app crashes on customer's machines and doesn't on yours, how are you going to debug much less explain this to apple and have them fix the issue for you?

This is especially scary when you consider the turnaround time of ~2 weeks before your new build becomes available in the app store for you to test.
I wasn't comparing regular soda to diet soda, I was comparing having diet soda to not having diet soda. Diet soda affects gut flora and insulin levels. Calories are not the whole story.
good read, love the part on how to choose among the factories by meeting directly with their boss(es)...

If this is the norm for other type of factories in China, I don't mind settling there too
What do you guys think about the fact that the current head of the FDA (edit: I am referring to M. Taylor, deputy commissioner of food and vet.) has spent a lot of his career working with Monsanto?

On one hand, we want someone running the FDA who has experience with the food industry. (Just as we would probably prefer having a manager who has spent time in the trenches coding).

On the other (tin foil hat) hand, has the food industry placed a 'friend' in charge of the people that should be regulating them?
Not everyone ones: American citizens who compete with immigrants for jobs. Or H1B immigrant's compete for overall quota spots with other immigrants, so those lose.
Learning the Lisp syntax takes (quite literally) 2 minutes. Getting used to the Lisp syntax however...
My thought is, first sit with your family, explain them what you are going to do and how things will be go in the long run. Only when they understand and with their support you will be able to fully focus on your company and it's growth.
Of course, and then that smart thing that you did a few years ago but don't quite remember now suddenly belongs to the company. Way to go there!

I'm really not sure how you can think this is a decent way to phrase things just because 'this is standard practice'.
Blockchain Tech Can Save Banks $20B a Year
"As a consultant, accounting is a cost centre."

While I can't claim to know every jurisdiction, this is a very naive way of looking at things. Situations in which I was first-hand witness to people making (lots of) money from knowing the books well (i.e., much better than if someone else would do it):

- subsidies (like for 'innovation')
- in case of a tax audit - some junior accountant who gets tasked with the small clients at a firm isn't going to be able to defend some stuff as well as someone with skin in the game
- on bankruptcy or when talking to a bank

And I'm sure there are more.
It's the "letting go ebook" from Leo Babauta : http://zenhabits.net/lg/
For some other helpful intros to Cassandra data modeling, check out [0], [1], and [2]. I've been working on trying to automate the process of coming up with a good data model for systems like Cassandra. You can see some pretty early results here[3] although there's been a lot of progress since then which will hopefully be shareable soon.

[0] http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/basic-rules-of-cassandra-da...

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/nkorla1share/cass-summit-3

[2] www.ebaytechblog.com/2012/07/16/cassandra-data-modeling-best-practices-part-1/

[3] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2602624
He means multiple instances - for scaling horizontally when traffic increases.
Well for starters, ARM has runtime-selectable endianness, so if Apple had felt any reason to do so, they would have used a big-endian ABI by now.

This article covers the practical tradeoffs of little and big-endianness well: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-bi...

The tl;dr is that little-endian was a smart performance optimization in the early microprocessor days when nearly all arithmetic was effectively bignum arithmetic (because the ALUs were only 4 or 8 bits wide), but that doesn't really matter now, so we're stuck with little-endian despite big-endian having some small developer productivity benefits.

The thing is, little-endian won pretty much everywhere outside of network protocols, so almost all of the common data formats store words in little-endian format as a performance optimization. By going big-endian, you'd be both forced to eat a byte-swapping performance hit on every load or store to these formats, and you'd break a tremendous amount of software that assumes it is running on a little-endian architecture. Dealing with those headaches would absolutely not be worth the trouble for the almost insignificant benefit of slightly easier to read hex dumps, or the slightly more useful benefit of string comparison via memcmp that could be better performed by dedicated SIMD instructions anyway.
"The Reason is Dust" would make a good album name.
Relax. Take a break. Watch Mad Men. Specifically this episode http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1484414/?ref_=ttep_ep13
What are the alternatives really? I'd love to get rid of KeePass, it's GUI is awful, it really doesn't support OS X (unless some really technical person installs it). I'm unwilling to use commercial closed, cloud based password databases.
As someone who's worked in banking tech, I can assure you the banks know that the infrastructure and tech they have isn't cheap to run, and that it could be done cheaper. The problem is that the immense complexity that exists in these environments makes it so incredibly complex and costly to migrate that it's almost impossible to do. One of the biggest banks in Australia has spent over $1 billion [1] on upgrading its core banking system and it's still not done.

It's not just the tech. It's not just the account data. It's complex business rules, it's reporting (internal and external), it's legislative requirements, it's integration with thousands (not exaggerating) of other systems internally, up to hundreds externally, it's about legacy products from 30 years ago which are still on the books, etc.

[1] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/256341,cba-goes-real-time-as-p...
I have actually seen both crossing-and-initialing work, and, more often than that, simply not signing: take the paperwork, say you need to read it, and "forget about it". You can often slowroll things like this for awhile.
Agreed. I think people sometimes use "syntax" to mean the entire package—code as data/data as code, immutability, functional transformation over data structures as opposed to mutation of objects and so on and so forth.

The syntax is literally,

(verb arg1, arg2… argn)

and you're more or less done. The other stuff, however…
I am stoked to see my work on the front page of HN! Let me know if you have any questions. I've lurked on this forum for a long time, but rarely post.
Correct. I think Gordon just used the wrong word as he's a hardware rather than a plastics guy :)
I spent four years as a contractor between 1997-2001 and all my work was sourced from recruitment agencies. Remember that the recruiters have no idea about anything technical. They match the buzzwords from your CV against a company and if they look close enough will forward it to the company. I once had a recruiter call me up to ask what 'API' was. Not sure he was capable of understanding it was a generic term and not a specific technology.

Use them to find companies to work for but apart from that you should ignore their advice. Be willing to work for a lower than standard rate for the first job in order to get some experience on the CV. If you work somewhere and you really impress them, become indispensable then you can up your rate when the contract is renewed. Make sure you keep contact details for other contractors so when looking for a new contract you can ring around to find out who is hiring.
Show HN: Facebook Flat – Chrome Extension
Shotgun blast: open source software is easier to read. Is the quality higher? Depends: there are some terrible vendors, and there are some very shoddy open source security projects. Open source software, with a couple of exceptions, are rarely audited professionally. Widely used open source projects get shaken out for memory corruption and XSS. They do not as a rule get thoroughly evaluated for cryptographic flaws.

A more precise way to state my preferences:

I trust _crypto_ from Microsoft, Apple, or (especially) Google more than I trust _crypto_ from a developer I've never heard of before. I do not as a rule trust rando closed-source projects.
Highway1 (http://highway1.io) is doing a great job of helping startups figure out how to get their manufacturing strategy set up. The advice and insight the two companies I worked with in their most recent cohort (Spinn Coffee and Game of Drones) received was absolutely essential to getting off the ground, so I'm expecting to see more of this kind of incubator/accelerator in the future.
Could someone on HN point me to a good article or vidoe on blockchain tech?
Yeah, it does sound weird but it does happen in the UK :)
> Assuming I were to sign and return without enumerating any specifics THEY WOULD OWN the IP to anything I've done previous to this?

ianal, but fwiw here's an interesting tidbit I've picked up from lawyers in the past, when in a similar situation: they don't necessarily think of it as "we will own your IP." Instead it's "we will CLAIM to own your IP." The point being that it's not some absolute uncontestable ownership. You're always free to claim ownership yourself, despite anything stated in writing.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting because my non-lawyer brain thinks in terms of things I own and don't own, end of story. But the legal department thinks in terms of arguing ownership and resolving disputes in front of a judge.
Can't stop wondering what the next improbable "black swan" will be. The discovery of aliens or some the other unknown unknowns?
The YouTube channel [1] where this video comes from is a treasure trove for the intellectually curious, and it's one of my favourite things on the internet. The guy behind it, Ben Krasnow, is an engineer at Google. From explaining and demonstrating (reverse) spherification to encoding information in fucking fire and picking it up with his oscilloscope, this channel will interest and delight most folks who enjoy HN for hours.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCivA7_KLKWo43tFcCkFvydw
Awesome! Please finish this up I have always been so intrigued on game design, especially fighting games.
man ethtool
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Install Linux on a MacBook Air
Sounds like a startup opportunity to build what they need.
Show HN: PersistJS – Persistent Data Structures with ImmutableJS
It worked, thanks!
Insiders dominate pretty much every major government agency of consequence that deals intimately with the private sector.

Treasury, SEC, FDA, FCC, etc. They're all stocked full of cross-overs, that go from private to public and back or vice versa.

I don't think there's anything tin foil about it at all. It's de facto how the system works. I don't think it guarantees how a person will regulate, but it does probably trend toward heavy bias.
If you check that submission you'll notice that it's on the European version of ars, while this is on the US edition. It seems the two publications are not aligned.
End of Life of an App
The Raspberry Pi is really a tablet system on a chip mounted on a breakout board. You can get $50 tablets easily. Some are even cheaper.[1] There are various USB to GPIO devices.[2] If you need a display and user input, it may be easier to start with a low-end tablet than with a Raspberry Pi. The main problem is 1) getting Android out and a more developer friendly OS such as Ubuntu Touch in, and 2) finding a tablet which is a USB master. (Phones are usually USB slaves. Laptops are usually USB masters. Tablets come in both flavors, plus the new "USB on the Go", which allows the master and slave to switch.)

A nice product package would be a low-end tablet with some general Linux distro pre-installed and a USB to GPIO device, priced around $75. That would be useful for when you want a little machine with a UI to control something. Anything like that on the market?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GART8LE/?tag=twup-20
[2] http://numato.com/8-channel-usb-gpio-module.html
I would also recommend not using Crunch. They're OK if you stay on the beaten path, but if you start veering off it their juniors don't have a clue. It was a painful experience for me.
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hey, no problem. send me a pull request! ;)
Git v2.4.4
Dude looks like he's 30 years younger.
Perhaps think of it as "joint-ownership"? You and your husband might both "own" your house/apartment.
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YC: you probably want to run this by your legal counsel. By posting your open ended 506b filling for a proposed growth equity fund on Hacker News (which you own), you are engaging in general solicitation and advertising, which requires a 506c filling. You don't want to end up like Goldman Sachs when they tried to offer the Facebook pre-IPO fund to their private wealth clients. The SEC shut them down.
It's funny how "focusing on core competencies" usually reduces the set of core competencies gradually till all that left is management.