laarc

Probably recruitment. It makes a lot more sense when viewed from the perspective of a researcher who's considering whether to join the NSA.

None of us want patents, and the whole system is absurd. But at one time, it was considered prestigious to be named on a patent. And prestige is a powerful force. Part of the burden of working at a secret agency is that your work is secret.

E.g. This employee will be able to take credit for this work after they leave: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

(Better not try to convert any programs that use loops into a program without loops.)

Thank you. Apparently I'm blind.

Not really. Readers here tend to judge by merit rather than origin.

I was hoping to read this, but the encumbered download process prevented that.

jpg2000 is unfortunately encumbered by patents. I was going to use it for a certain project a long time ago, but had to abandon the idea due to that. It's a shame, because many of the ideas in jpg2000 are very valuable for the world.

In my experience, they're usually more talented than their counterparts who have degrees. That seems to become less true with time, though.

It's true. My first role was to work an unpaid intern for a year. Then my first salary was $20k, followed by $35k only after working there for a couple years. It was going to be $30k but I was able to negotiate.

I think pg is correct, however.

You know, when I saw your original comment, it was so helpful that I wanted to respond to you and say thank you, but I suppressed my instincts because I thanked someone else, and it felt like the community would react badly to me saying "Thank you so much!" to every single person.

But now I see that the community actually downvoted your comment rather than rewarded it. Darn.

For what it's worth, and even though this reply is very late: Thank you so much for your time and for the thoughtful and helpful reply. The links, specifically, were the reason it was helpful to me.

It seemed promising to do some experiments with sewing a BP sleeve into a shirt, then setting up an Arduino to trigger it to inflate/deflate. It should be possible to record the result digitally. It'd be slightly uncomfortable, but even if it's only once per hour, it's still better than zero per hour. The noise would be annoying, but I have some ideas for how to make it quiet. But would anyone actually want such a thing?

Thanks for batting around the idea with me, and for the valuable references. I didn't know there was any other way to measure BP than the old-fashioned way.

You know, I didn't expect this to be on his Wikipedia page. My apologies for not doing the most basic of searches. (The topic was uncomfortable enough to want to avoid it, but I still should've checked.)

Thanks!

It should be socially acceptable for Internet Archive to ignore robots.txt.

They have to respect it because we, collectively, say so. Obeying robots.txt is the minimum acceptable behavior for any robot, short of the Asmiov laws.

But archiving is different. I've been running into "Site was not archived due to robots.txt" more and more frequently. Often these are articles from ~2011 and earlier which the author no doubt would have wanted to be archived.

Trouble is, robots.txt is also the only thing that people really bother to set up. Maybe there's a way right now to indicate "Sure, archive my site please, and ignore my robots.txt." But if there is, it's not really common knowledge, and it's kind of unreasonable to expect every single website on the internet to opt-in to that.

On the flipside, it seems entirely reasonable that if someone really wants to opt out of archiving, that they explicitly go and tell Internet Archive. Circa 2016, Internet Archive is the only archive site that seems likely to persist to 2116. It's a shared time capsule, a ship that we all get a free ticket to board. If someone wants off, they can say so.

But right now, large swaths of the internet simply aren't being archived due to rules that don't entirely seem to make sense. There are excellent reasons for robot.txt, but opting out of "Make this content available to my children's children's children's children" seems perhaps beyond the scope of the original spec.

Would you feel ok with the Archive ignoring your robots.txt, or would you feel annoyed? If annoyed, then this is a bad idea and should be rejected.

But if nobody really cares, then here's a proposal: Internet Archive stops checking /robots.txt, and checks for /archive.txt instead. If archive.txt exists, then it's parsed and obeyed as if it were a robots.txt file.

That way, every site can easily opt-out. But everyone opts-in by default. Sites can also exercise control over which portions they want archived, and how often.

An accusation this serious should be accompanied by evidence, or dismissed.

I was hoping the product would pivot to passive blood pressure monitoring. I want my blood pressure to be recorded every few seconds, logged and cross-referenced against what I did, ate, and drank. For correlation purposes, knowing those things can be as simple as snapping a photo.

Smart people apparently claim that blood pressure is one of the most reliable indicators of how long you'll live. If so, then it's always seemed strange it's (almost) never measured.

Databases are usually sharded by the first letter of the username. Devs like to start their usernames with a number, which causes problems.

Also, usernames are injected into their code. Therefore they must be valid identifiers. Don't name yourself exit() or ret, or you'll crash their servers. Naming yourself nop will give you a distinct advantage relative to other players, however.

I don't know.

I wanted to give you a status update of what new users currently experience. Or at least what I'm experiencing.

After creating an account, I was redirected to the front page with no notification about whether it succeeded or failed. No emails have arrived. When I try to create it again, I get "username already taken" and "email already taken", so something worked. But when I try to log in, I'm redirected to the front page with no notifications. In other words, login is failing.

To clarify, this isn't a complaint. Congratulations on launching, and apologies if you're already aware of these issues.

Edit: This is similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10724699 but I'm unable to log in after clearing cookies. I get "Couldn't sign in. Check username/password" for a correct password.

This paper introduces the Bayesian program learning (BPL) framework, capable of learning a large class of visual concepts from just a single example and generalizing in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from people.

This is one of the most exciting and readable papers I've come across.

Does anyone know if the code is available anywhere? Can we reproduce their results? I can think of a dozen applications for such an ability.

The company has said that ads targeted at logged-out users - or people who view tweets without a Twitter account - would bring in $2.50 in average revenue per user (ARPU). Its logged-in user base brings in more than $4 in ARPU.

What's the time scale? $2.50 per user per year seems high. Per lifetime, it seems low.

I take the opposite view: it's wonderful that it happens. Most professions have very few choices regarding tools. Having hundreds or even thousands of options is simply delightful.

How'd you make the artwork in less than five hours? It's pretty good! Pixel art is currently beyond my abilities, which I need to fix. Whatever your process is, I was hoping to osmose it, if possible. Any pointers to start building this skill?

Your game is neat. Does there happen to be a github repo somewhere? Also, how'd you like Phaser?

I needed this for my projects. Thank you.

I'm not sure, to be honest.

That would be an interesting Ask HN question. I think a lot of people would like to know.

One reason the financial sector might be easier for H1B visas is that they sometimes treat their employees very poorly. But I know of good companies as well, so it depends entirely on the company.

Ah, I see. In that case, the financial sector may be the way to go. They're always looking for people to improve throughput, and there are a variety of fun tasks to do related to low latency market data processing.

I would say your best bet is to focus on skill. If you can dive into a large C++ codebase and solve a crash, you're skilled, and people will find your contributions helpful once you're there. So that's really not such a high bar to aim for.

In terms of experience, this tends not to matter too much. Use a talent agency to place you in the field. They will take a chunk of whatever value you would have otherwise pocketed in salary. But it's a way of getting in to the industry that I know from experience works. It's much more effective than trying to send resumes or cold call managers, which is why it might have seemed like "experience" is a necessary requirement.

Experience is just a proxy for skill, so if you have skill, you're fine. A portfolio is helpful, and I'm sorry to say I can't think of specific projects that you might like to work on. But I know that if you can optimize a trading company's firewall-to-firewall time, you're highly valuable to them.

Hey, Jacques. I wanted to say that I'm happy you're still around HN. Thanks for sharing a lot of interesting stuff, and experiences regarding business and life in general.

I was just thinking how emptier HN would have felt without all that over the years, so...

Best of luck! Happy holidays.

Perfect. Thanks!

Hello. Nice work. I noticed that your submission isn't getting much attention, so I wanted to let you know it's common for Show HNs to languish even though they're worthy. So don't give up or feel bad about it. There are just so many Show HNs that it would be hard for them all to be seen.

I would try resubmitting it closer to peak time, and perhaps put together a landing page with screenshots and tell your story there. I'd personally love to read a breakdown of your experiences and challenges you overcame.

(Also, submitting text rather than a URL causes your submission to fall off the front page faster. This is to dissuade people using HN as a blog.)

Best of luck, and welcome to HN! I look forward to seeing more of your work.

C++ might not be necessary. It's possibly a harmful career choice. I speak from experience, but others would disagree.

It could be good to focus on one axis: personal career value, or affecting the world and helping people. They seem to rarely line up.

If you want career value, try Node or C#. Both will put you in a position to get a high salary job for a long time to come. C++ won't unless you're willing to move around the world.

If you want to do something useful for many people, one way is to find an open source project you like and start trying to contribute. If your contributions are rejected, move on and try a new one.

If you want to start something new, focus on what's fun for you and pursue that. If you go into it feeling like a bunch of people are counting on whatever you're making, you'll risk burning yourself out. That's just my experience though.

Good luck.

As for an effective A* algorithm, bidirectional A* turns out to be both rugged and efficient.

Basically, grab some graph paper. Put your left index finger on start. Right index finger on end.

Move your fingers towards each other, avoiding obstacles as you go.

Wherever they happen to meet, the path formed by the trail of both your fingers combined is the path to use.

That's the general idea. It's important to trace from both simultaneously, otherwise you run into some degeneracies.

Does anyone know of some resources for implementing PCA? I need it for some research regarding graphics.

It is a huge pain to use rlwrap to edit Lisp. Someone, please write a "lispwrap" program which solves this pain point once and for all.

(Trying to figure out how to reply without sounding like I'm challenging an idea or putting someone on the defensive... All I can think of is: Thank you for the reply. Know that I respect everyone's viewpoint, and that we're only trying to chase a mystery.)

If someone who you thought you could trust is now actively threatening your freedom (or access to a substance, which is also a form of freedom), you take action to prevent this.

So I've spent five minutes mentally putting myself in that situation, and... I don't know. Am I just a coward? It's important in the abstract sense to fight for freedoms, and perhaps in the literal sense when one system (i.e. country) is at war with another.

But the idea of taking a bat to someone's head for betraying my trust in them is... Well, that's really the question to explore, right? How could someone actually do that, let alone approve of someone else doing that? The question is far too pointed, though. Just trying to understand.

Setting aside personal bias: Kudos for admitting that. It takes a lot of courage to put your beliefs out in the open, or even to talk about the beliefs of a group you once identified with.

I feel that most of us would've supported violence against those cooperating with law enforcement.

Could you help me understand that mindset?

It seems like violence is one reason we as a species took hundreds of thousands of years to discover (or at least to harness) the scientific method. For the first time, we're now in a position to detect a big rock headed straight for Earth, and then actually have any nonzero chance of doing something to change the situation. Studying history, one plausible hypothesis we're in this situation might be: Funnel all of the smartest people together, and figure out a way to let them work together for a very long time on the same kinds of problems.

And to let smart people work together, it's necessary to have systems in place to suppress violence. In short, law enforcement. There have been abuses of power, but on the whole, law enforcement seems like one of the main reasons we're well-off today.

So that's where I'm coming from. I'm not trying to be overbearing or say X is bad and Y is good -- I apologize if I'm failing.

It's just the opposite: I'm interested, and open-minded, to understand how various intelligent people could conclude "It's us or them, and if you're cooperating with law enforcement, you deserve violence." Would you help me to understand the community's viewpoint? Was there any nuance, or is it as simple as "they are traitors, therefore X" mindset? There must be something if so many intelligent people somehow started to believe this, right?

If someone reading this feels like replying anonymously, make a new HN account using Tor. Your reply will be marked [dead] to begin with, but those of us with showdead enabled will see them. The community can now vouch for dead-but-thoughtful comments, which makes them visible to everyone.

This is the type of topic that usually devolves into a flamewar, but maybe thoughtful conversation has a chance.