Hacker News Reader

holdenkon How I Work from Anywhere in the World

There are corp jobs which pretty much require a lot of travel - doing developer relations has been a great way to see the world for me (and meet all sorts of cool developers).

holdenkon Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

Its called volunteer because there is mandatory service or conscription in other countries.

holdenkon Why is San Francisco trying to strangle its golden goose?

I'd encourage you to look at http://48hills.org/2016/02/16/five-myths-about-the-homeless-... :)

holdenkon Who's on call?

Nope is often a great strategy when asked to do something impractical. It's better when its followed up with an alternative, but stopping someone from building something terrible early on is much better than having them try to fix it after the fact.

holdenkon How and why I made a zine

Julia Evans' zines are the most entertaining way to learn about linux/unix internals I've encountered yet :)

holdenkon Aetna CEO Threatened Obamacare Pullout If Feds Opposed Humana Merger

So I agree the US health care system is pretty crap - but as a trans person it was still better than my options in my home province (and by options I mean option). I think we can all agree that there are corner cases for each system where they outperform the other.

holdenkon Ask HN: Considerations when asked to write a book?

I'd like to second O'Reilly having a good infra setup - compared to pushing around word documents working with the O'Reilly tooling people is awesome. If you get stuck with their build or asciidoc they have a tools support alias which gets back to you fairly quickly compared to other publishers.

holdenkon Ask HN: Considerations when asked to write a book?

If you forget to negotiate with them, and you go with O'Reilly, they are really good at sending free books for book signings to conferences which can be a really great chance to both get the word out and meet people that care about the tech you wrote about.

holdenkon Ask HN: Considerations when asked to write a book?

I've co-authored some Spark books and while the first one is hella out of date - the second one which was written against the 1.X APIs is only somewhat out of date and still selling really well.

holdenkon Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States

I'm not sure I agree with you - having a higher encounters rate need not be limited to simple neighborhood selection for policing (although there is likely bias there too) - rather simply choosing who to interact with may exhibit bias (e.g. is the police officer more likely to have an encounter with a black person even in a predominantly white neighborhood)?

holdenkon Tableau stock down almost 50%

Zeppelin is really neat, but still quite early stage (I can't even export notebooks :( ). For day to day use & teaching I've had good results with Jupyter + Spark

holdenkon Two Brothers Making Millions Off the Refugee Crisis in Scandinavia

Thanks for helping represent the refugees pro bono :)

holdenkon SystemML: Machine learning made easier (open source)

If anyone is interested in working on this (or other exciting Spark related things) @ IBM please reach out to me ( my HN username with the letter k removed at us.ibm.com )

holdenkon Ph.D. recipients in computing fields are primarily non-US residents in the US

PhD stipends tend to be much lower than industry pay.

holdenkon Ph.D. recipients in computing fields are primarily non-US residents in the US

I think that undergraduate degrees are generally viewed as the "next step" among many Americans and the ROI is generally viewed as a positive (regardless of it is or not). Also while you do need a work visa once your OPT has expired, PhDs can be used to get EB-2 or as part of EB-2 NIW or EB-1 applications which have much shorter waiting times than EB-3.

holdenkon Google takes legal action against Mississippi State Attorney General

For better or worse, the system isn't really set up for that. Under the current system you might want to look for a doctor that believes in "informed consent" and "harm reduction".

holdenkon Why HTTPS Everywhere isn't on addons.mozilla.org

So with the system of mirrors that is in place with distributing some open source software (e.g. debian, ubuntu, etc.) this is less true. A local mirror could selectively serve bad packages (and serve the correct packages to the verification bots).

holdenkon Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K.

I think its more that the industry standard among publishers is to demand the right of first refusal on additional books.

holdenkon Amazon’s holiday success and UPS’ holiday fail

Ah good catch, however the logic remains the same (they both avoid residential delivery surcharges for the respective carrier).

holdenkon Amazon’s holiday success and UPS’ holiday fail

Ah the joys of "SmartPost". SmartPost is popular for residential deliveries in a large part because it doesn't have the residential surcharge which other options do. SmartPost shipments also generally don't have guaranteed delivery dates so they may be more likely to experience delays during peak load time (e.g. this month).

holdenkon PredictionIO – A machine learning server

I got a similar message because I had a commit against the scala project :(

holdenkon Ask HN: Need a referral for good lawyer for E-2 visa

Anyone have any experiences with E-1 or NIWs?

holdenkon Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme

The SEC press release is at http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/137...

holdenkon Problems with the TSA

That was actually tried for a little while. Airports could opt-out of the TSA but still had to meet the screening guidelines. For example if you fly out of SFO you are going to be screened by not the TSA. As of 2011 however the TSA stopped allowing new airports to opt-out ( http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41391509/ ).

holdenkon Full text search indexing stemmer added to MongoDB core

>Personally, for a lot of use cases I prefer exact string matches over BS stem indexing.

Really? I've worked on a few search projects in different spaces (venues (aka places/stores), source code, and products) in the past, and while exact string matches are often a good sign of quality, stemming and other analyzers make huge improvements in recall (and when measuring transaction volume in A/B testing strict string matching performed substantially worse). Certainly if you throw out the exact match signal (i.e. only index stemmed) I've seen that result in a deterioration of quality. What sort of data do you work with?

holdenkon Carnegie Mellon SCS grads are tops in salary, says nerdwallet

I am not a lawyer, but it might be worth talking to one especially if you are in California and interested in moonlighting.

holdenkon Hitting 40 employees and going vanilla

Thats a really interesting find, although I'm not sure I like what I've heard of the netflix culture.

holdenkon Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

And we all know how awesome Amazon.com search is......

holdenkon Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

raver you say? Do you know of any good bay area raves?

holdenkon foo@bar.com is a real email address

Except some people fall back to the A record (see RFC 5321).