laarc

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.)

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

I think pg is correct, however.

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.

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.

Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

Best of luck! Happy holidays.

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.

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.

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.

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.