jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The point is that Facebook is based on trying to convince users to hand over as much private information as possible without making it seem like a bad thing (or even alerting them to the fact that everything they are doing is being recorded for the financial gain Facebook).

A lot of the 'lowest common denominator' people probably just see Facebook as a tool (or 'the internet'). They don't normally think about whether or not the hammer they are using is recording statistics on them from behind a two-way mirror, so why would they think the same thing of Facebook.

If a geek suggests that his parents should get an Apple computer because "It's 'just works' for my mom" it's not the same thing as Facebook because an Apple computer isn't monetized on the idea that Apple will coerce as much personal information out of your mom as is possible while trying to leave her as clueless as possible to the implications of doing so.
So...free is a meaningless concept?
Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS 1.2) only requires 7 characters and some must be alphabetic while some must be numeric. So "soccer1" is a perfectly valid, PCI compliant password that will be cracked in less than a minute (offline or online).

Section 8.5.10	Passwords must be at least 7 characters long.

Section 8.5.11	Passwords must contain numeric and alphabetic characters.
I'm confused about what you mean here. Are you saying that no individual can net a positive return from any endeavor?

Also, there's no reason to assume that a tuition fee would lower the obligations of the taxpayer in any way. Money is fungible. Neither side of the debate is questioning that university education will be paid for by the taxpayer.
I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to produce beautiful visualizations.

The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is hand-building your graphs in tikz.

The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.
I use a pair of vnc sessions so we can both work in our own space without latency, and also see and help with what the other person is doing. The vnc sessions are routed over ssh and via a server (to avoid nat problems). I use this mainly for pair-progamming, but it's also good for drawing / whiteboard stuff I suppose, you can run gimp or whatever in it.
Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data. Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers is a challenge.

It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand why things are the way they are, but I'd love to find some way of reconciling this issue. It's already killed a research project of mine before it started.
I think your first instinct was right. The Post-It logos made me think its officially related to 3M, but upon closer inspection I don't think it is.

I expect those logos or the entire website will be gone shortly.
So captured Congressmen and the cable lobby rebranded the much rumored Title X after activist groups started referring to it as "Title Xfinity."

Sen John Thune, a primary sponsor of this bill, has taken over $50,000 in political contributions between AT&T, Comcast, NCTA, Time Warner Cable, U.S. Telecom, and PACs associated with these groups.

We're not talking about a well-reasoned GOP alternative to "Obama's plan to regulate the Internet." This is a bill written by cable lobbyists to hamstring the FCC while throwing a bone to the American public.

Title II gives the FCC the authority it needs to prevent modern day monopolies from screwing up principles of net neutrality we've all enjoyed since day 1 of the Internet. These GOP plans should be viewed with a massive dose of skepticism, especially in light of the political contributions they've accepted in recent elections.
Torch is really cool. I wish I could use it more. Sadly it isn't supported on Windows.
> Did anyone ever really argue that we should abolish time zones in general?

As I said in response to another thread, yes. People argue to abolish timezones. An example from Vox: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/5/5970767/case-against-time-zones
Per their Kickstarter it says "Select 20 photos" so I guess there will be some sort of limit

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1306413684/flag-the-app...
>and fearers of sharia law

What is there not to fear about sharia law? Personally I'd be terrified of living under a legal system in which many of the basic rights I take for granted simply cease to exist, and in which my wife and any daughters I have are considered second-class citizens.
I've been in the same situation as you just 6 months ago. Was switching from freelance-to-fulltime. And blanked out at nearly every interview.

I did get hired in the end. When that was done, I also helped a few friends tweak the interview process at their startups/companies.

Over time, during my job hunt, I had to tweak stuff in order to get results. Basically try and observe what worked. Here's what worked.

* Find places that use your work (apps/libraries/articles)

If you have been writing software for a few years, there's a probability that you've written a few libraries or handy apps or really good blog posts. You can find people who are sharing links to these on Twitter. Checkout their workplace. If they seem interesting, apply. The tech interview will matter less to them because they've seen the value you provide.

* Write good cover letters/mails

Your application is your first point of contact. It has to be short, crisp and make them want to know more about you. My application email is usually just one or two sentences and then 4 links (github, resume, and a couple interesting projects). If you have interesting projects in multiple languages, change them to suit the company you apply to.

* Try to avoid any automated forms to apply to a job

They most likely end up in a blackhole at popular or larger companies. Find a person who works there and send him/her an email.

* Don't panic and take it slow

It took me a couple months to find a place I'll be comfortable at. Offers will come and go. Pick the one you'll be comfortable with.

All the best. There are jobs waiting for you to find them :)
Your generalization applies to just about everyone. Most people don't have higher educations at all. And only a percentage of those get through the classes that weed weaker students out. But are those classes actually teaching or just cutting grades?

Hacker News users aren't exactly a representative sample of the population anyway (generally educated, probably middle class or higher and if not middle class, we probably have above average drive ambition).

Secondly, just because someone passes classes doesn't mean they're educated. I had friends who pumped and dumped for tests and couldn't remember any of it the next semester. Other people learn outside of school and we have no way to measure or give credit for that.

Clayton Christensen talks about the disruption of Harvard Business school in his book -> http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustainin...

You can't compare everyone to an 'elite' anyway. It's statistically unfeasible. We need critical thinkers who have a thirst for knowledge. Some people don't have the latter. Especially people who think they are already educated. Those are things we need in our society and a degree doesn't guarantee that people have them. Although we wish it did.
Thanks. How long until release? :)
This is the first thing that came to mind for me. I recently wrote a WSGI Python app that made use of chunked encoding, so that it could emit multi-hundred MB text files without loading them all into memory first, and one of the big hurdles was running into an error after having sent some data. In the end I had to implement a fancy Javascript check and keep some state in the app to check if there had been an error and the downloaded file was no good.
I agree. She's way off base. If you search for worldwide rankings of universities, although answers vary depending on the source, higher education in the United States is universally well-regarded and the only other country that can really be considered to be a competitor for the #1 slot in overall quality of higher education is the United Kingdom. If we're "failing to educate" then the rest of the world is also failing.

"The U.S. gets a lot of bad press for the failures of its education system, and some of the supporting data is frightening. A study by the Department of Education found that 30 million adults in the U.S. are functionally illiterate. Another Department of Ed report ranks the U.S. at 35 out of 57 countries for mathematics literacy among 15-year-olds.

But when it comes to higher education, no one on Earth does better than the U.S., according to a new study by Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher ed market. Its 2010-'11 annual World University Rankings is dominated by U.S. schools. They hold 72 places among the world's top 200, including all the top five. Great Britain is a distant second, with 29 universities making the cut." (from Forbes http://www.forbes.com/2010/09/16/world-best-universities-ran...)
Which algorithms do you use? Blind deconvolution is kind of a hard job to do properly, but there has been lots of advancements recently. I had the same idea to sell it as an app and I did some investigation on the subject a while ago.

I think it's OK to charge per photo. Most people have that one very important photo they want to fix and that's when they search for a solution and are willing to pay. On top of that you could sell a subscription or plugin for photographers.
Yeah, that's fair. I decided to become politically active because I have certain values, and I would like to live in a society that values the same things I do. e.g,. equality, high socioeconomic mobility, education, etc.

It didn't look like society would do those things on its own, and if I criticized it for not doing those things but didn't at the very least vote on issues and candidates, then I was a hypocrite.

Given the things that I value, the Democrats more often at least claim to represent them. In California at the time, I had to register with one of the two major parties, or my voting options would be seriously limited. Thankfully, this just got fixed during the last election cycle.

I'm totally disillusioned by politicians, though. The only candidate for any political office that I've had strong positive feelings about since I started voting was Brown, and that was mostly based on what I found of his track record and what I think this state needs.

So I chose a political party out of necessity, and because even though I consciously try to hold my convictions lightly, I do still have some.

But I would still feel an overwhelming urge to wash after shaking a politician's hand.
This advice is too generic. There are many, many applications where a persistent identity is required. What would happen if Hacker News had completely anonymous users? :P

A ticketing startup is a good example of a startup which could be used without a dedicated user account. But that's the minority.
I don't, yet, trust you. What are you doing to provide some confidence that my name & amazon wish list won't be sold...

I use a similar site for building computers.

www.pcpartpicker.com and I love these guys. I use to go straight to NewEgg but after finding pcpartpicker, I now go there first. I'm not sure how they monetize the site but they won me over by not requiring me to sign up.

I'm too lazy to create a one off email address just to see if the site is worth it or not.

Also, I couldn't tell from your site if it's possible to enter a SKU and have the site notify me of where I could purchase it and what price history there was on it which I think would be awfully cool.

As an example, I really want to purchase a festool router but these are considered the best-of-the-best and their price reflects this and so in a manual way, I've been watching their prices on a couple web sites for sales.

Love the concept and everything else about the idea!

Another idea is if you can find users who all want to buy the same thing and see if you can leverage this to get volume discounts. I recently been playing with a site called massdrop that attempts to pull this off.
His argument is that the concept of equality will vary by application and a default implementation adds very little. For example, does it make sense to test equality on a filestream? Probably not, but it's there and it purports to have some meaning.

This of course, only makes sense in the post-generic world of .net +2.0 so he does excuse their presence as a vestige of 1.1.
How strange. I was just thinking about doing this as a toy project earlier today.

I honestly don't share the OP's hatred of Haskell syntax, nor do I find it categorically worse than lispish languages. It's entertaining that he's gone from capital letters to the sigils (":"). Both tend to be controversial and which is better is more a matter of personal taste than anything.

I agree with another commenter that the lack of pattern matching syntax is something of a deficiency, and I was also troubled over how I'd do this. A "plambda" operator is one possibility that I was considering, though it feels like it's a really hackey embedding of MLish in lispish:

(plambda fname
((pattern-1a pattern-1b ...) (stuff))
((pattern-2a pattern-2b ...) (stuff)))

Also, rather than a preprocessor I was thinking of implementing the whole thing in Template Haskell---not because it's easier, but really because I expect the opposite: I figured it'd be a good way to really bite off a big chunk of TH and get good at it.

EDIT: It occurs to me that one could just use a variant on cond to implement pattern matching, e.g., "cond-argv":

(define (fname a b) (cond-argv
((a1 b1) (stuff))
((a2 b2) (stuff))))
Have a look at elastichosts.com - they provide VPS on KVM so basically you can run any OS you want.

(I have no benefit from advertising this specific provider)
"Go with the flow" - it's ok for being friendly, but crap for making the life you want to live
"Run away from a fight" - A knife fight sure, but in grade school and in metaphor it's pretty bad advice.
"Smart is sufficient" - it's not even necessary
I used PC-BSD (which kind of is to FreeBSD what Ubuntu is to Debian) for a while on my laptop. I really liked the system as a whole, but I had some issues with wireless support, and found KDE a bit sluggish (very low RAM on my laptop). But it's certainly worth a try - if you can get everything to work right, it's a very nice system.
It might also be interesting to setup something where you just post tagged questions and then people can look at the tags that they know about and answer them.

I guess that would basically be an HN Opzi. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/opzi-a-quora-for-the-enterp...)
I don't think that exercise, in itself, would make anyone perform worse at physics. While writing about why your values are important to you could very plausibly increase your confidence, I don't see how writing about why other people might care about things you don't value would decrease your confidence or performance.
He does use Firefox, for sites that don't work in w3m.

My setup on Linux is pretty similar, and I use w3m a fair bit, especially for reading documentation--it's fast, and for text-heavy sites suits me better than a graphical browser.

That said, doing without a 'normal' browser entirely seems a bit masochistic/text-obsessive to me too.
Why are "wait for marriage" and "wait for kids" bad advice?
Production for a datacenter CPU is not the same as production for datacenter + enthusiast-grade consumer CPUs like Zen 3 currently achieves, unfortunately. Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume, although it probably means next generation will be 10nm all the way.
IMO this is the most widely trusted standard benchmark: http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp. However not everyone publishes benchmarks and there are a number variations for different workloads to consider.

If you are replacing an existing system I would recommend narrowing the field of candidates and trying a few options with your existing workload.
Everyone has the same Internet?
Your misconception comes from people showing up on the OpenBSD mailing lists with a prideful hostile attitude intending to prove how much they know, when in fact, they haven't done their homework correctly or completely.

I can believe this happens, but De Raadt wasn't asked to resign from the NetBSD core team by new users who hadn't done their homework correctly or completely; it was a consensus decision of some of the world's most experienced BSD developers who had worked with him extensively. (Of course, it's possible some/much of the fault lies with them.)
In the cases of some public servants, like police officers, that is not a direct parallel as they are not spending a lot of time in the office. Public servants performing their duty in public should be subject to the scrutiny of the public. Even if you are a government employee working at a desk in a public building you should be subject to the same. I admit it is just not feasible to allow any and all private citizens access to buildings, or to mount cameras as they desire, but there is a perhaps a better solution? Surveillance tapes available upon request?
The penalties for such very rarely involve loss of liberty.

Right, but the penalties for resisting arrest (or fining) do.

If a policeman stops you and gives you a ticket for jaywalking, that's not an offence for which you can wind up in prison. But if you try to run away instead of being given the ticket, the policeman can do whatever it takes to catch you and restrain you.

Otherwise, the whole ticketing system wouldn't work at all.
I think equating Wave to a 'big' risk is a bit much, financially there was no risk. All they lost was face.

Also Chrome and Android are not successes, Google Adwords is a success, MS Office is a success, MS Windows is a success. The key ingredient to a success for a company is some MONEY. Anything else is just showing off.

I'm still very disappointed with the follow through on Wave and Buzz, a bit of PR and a few man years of engineering is pretty minor compared to the profit they make. The 'oh well, it didn't work, we're giving up' attitude Google has been displaying recently is pretty disconcerting.

We may all hate MS, but at least they tend to follow through with some serious chops when the going gets tough (I'm thinking Silverlight rather than Danger).

I'm actually getting a little worried about Google's follow through on certain projects, as an external company I wouldn't be putting any investment in any of their new products given their recent track record.

I'm also not keen on Google 'competing' in the 'oh, we'll make money through search advertising' way they're doing recently. It's stifling innovation in certain markets imo.

Actually, rereading my post, I really don't agree with Paul very much.

On the other hand, I still think they're great, if a worrying monopoly. It could be worse though, Google could be run by Zynga.
Good observation, particularly using Amazon as an example. As a former employee, I just nodded my head.
He actually argues quite the opposite in [1] (see footnote, pg 33) - a good read in itself. The quote you're probably referring to is this:

"a science is said to be
_useful_ if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of
wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life" (emphasis mine).

And Hardy's response (excerpt):

> It is sometimes
suggested that pure mathematicians glory in the uselessness of
their work, and make it a boast that it has no practical applications.

> I am sure that Gauss’s
saying (if indeed it be his) has been rather crudely misinterpreted.
If the theory of numbers could be employed for any practical and
obviously honourable purpose, if it could be turned directly to the
furtherance of human happiness or the relief of human suffering,
as physiology and even chemistry can, then surely neither Gauss
nor any other mathematician would have been so foolish as to
decry or regret such applications.

[1] http://www.math.ualberta.ca/mss/misc/A%20Mathematician%27s%2...
I found this article to be insightful re the economic impact: https://www.economist.com/business/2020/03/21/much-of-global...
How long until the most remote and poorest populations in the world can access jobs and the worlds collective knowledge on the internet?

That’s a much better question to ask, mr negative.
So, at the moment we've got a virus spreading, not even particularly vile (which is of course not an excuse not to contain it etc.). Flu-like virues is something people are fairly familiar with, it's impressive how we've got the genome sequences and strains classified so fast. However, some people have warned/predicted that would happen, you could dismiss this as a hindsight, but still, pandemics are something people can foresee and know how to deal with.

Even more insteresting question, IMO is: how do we prepare for some event we can't even think of?

Is there a good framework for brainstorming and thinking about potential events threatening the whole civilization? Any low hanging fruits (in terms of preparedness and knowledge)?
Not only the equipment - the real problem is a shortage of qualified personal (read: doctors and nurses) that can take care of people in dire condition. You can build as many respirators you want, if there is no one them to operate them and to stabilize sick people your approach will fail.

You need a doctor/experienced medical professional per 3-4 people in ICU condition. The math does not look good.

To think that people here forego social isolation protocol and celebrate 'Corona parties' is an incredible display of ignorance. The number of younger patients with a medical condition and elderly people is very high, and once (note: we will see if our isolation procedures are good enough) the pandemic patients overflow the hospital system we will see that the events in northern Italy can happen everywhere. Their undertakers can't bury/burn their dead fast enough.

Areas in southern France ask German hospitals to take in patients, the army is active and is building tents around the region in Basel. To make things worse, there are more and more infections with hospital personal in the southern Germany, and the chain of infection are not really clear.

[sources: friend of mine one of the strategic Corona boards in Germany]
Speaking as one of the people that phrase is probably pointed at, I don't begrudge the choice of words at all.

Lately there's been a big thrust in my industry to do just what you're worried about, and now that I've started to get an inkling of what's going on under the hood with predictive modeling tools over the past couple years it's starting to worry me.

And I'm starting to find their sales pitches to be even more condescending. "Don't worry about how this works or what it's really doing. Just pretend it's magic." It doesn't speak well for the vendors' opinion of their customers, and it leaves a lot of room open for legitimate technology to morph into silicon snake oil.