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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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?
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.
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.)