skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. I'm just finishing up my undergrad in molecular biology. I've been working in a lab doing research for the last year and a half, and it sucks. As an earlier comment had pointed out, the post-doc I work along side only makes $40,000/year. He's in his 50's and has at least 30 published papers on everything from cancer research to stuff the lab is doing now on BK virus. For the last year, he's been trying to find a different job, preferably in the private sector and that pays more, but hasn't had any luck. The work is repetitive and boring, yet you must constantly stay focused. While it may not seem like it, it's very easy to lose track of which tube you're adding a chemical to, or which chemicals you've already added.

The bureaucracy is ridiculous. My PI doesn't do any of the research along with us. He just sits and writes/revises papers and applies to grants all day. Most of the time, he has no idea how the experiments we're doing even work.

From my research experience and from the experience of others around me, I knew research was not the field to go into. That's why I'm working on a startup now and possibly going into an MBA program. Science is a great undergraduate major, just don't expect to be able to do anything with it when you graduate.

If you want to do research, at least in biology, don't get a PhD, get an MD.
Marc Andreessen's newspaper deathwatch.
great story would surely appeal to all HN readers
What Do Job Interviews Really Tell Us?
Actually thats exactly what I meant by a small startup. Just a couple guys coding something up in a couple of months. By the way, most YC companies start out that way too.
Actually, that's the last question that would enter my mind. First, I want to USE it, see if I enjoy it and _then_ fix any likely security issues, if at all!

That's just me, though.
The problem with this is that Hacker News isn't supposed to grow very big.
They do this in Michael Crichton's "State of Fear."
VeloCity - Incubator 2.0 or something completely new?
My feeling is that there are two diverging branches in "psychology"; one that should promptly rename itself to a sub-branch of neuroscience, and the other into a mixture of philosophy, history, and sociology. Who disagrees?

I can't wait to see this rebranching happen, but alas, it's the establishment.
From http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2275614130/

"Definition: Religiosity is measured using a three-item index ranging from 0-3, with 3 representing the maximum religious position. Respondents were given a +1 if they believe faith in God is necessary for morality; and +1 if they say religion is very important in their lives; and +1 if they pray at least once a day."
Come on, this is the kind of trolling I was hoping to avoid by coming here instead of reddit...
Anyone remember how quickly the gargantuan "Patriot Act" suddenly appeared just after the September 11th attacks? I know it sounds very tinfoil hat-ish, but I figure the "Patriot Act" was written long before those attacks that supposedly precipitated it.
Wait, you're not allowed to kill your wife after she has an affair with a cross-dresser? What is this world coming to?
Who, me? Heck, no! I'm not convinced that I ever did, although at certain times in my career I used to claim that I did in a half-hearted fashion. The thing is, when someone asks you why you're studying physics they expect a more conventional answer than "because I haven't gotten bored with it yet".

I once flirted with trying to find a role as a non-tenured "member of the technical staff"... I even did an experimental postdoc with that goal in mind. I eventually concluded that my enjoyment of doing science (as opposed to "reading and writing about science", which is rather more fun) wasn't really high enough to overcome the relatively low pay and the fact that I'd be subordinate to an academic bureaucracy throughout my entire career. In other words: if you like being a glorified postdoc, it may well be possible to do it forever, but you have to like it a lot to stay happy doing it for forty years.
+1, painfully true. :) This is, indeed, the technique, and I have seen this done more than once.
A Capitalist Jolt for Charity
Trying to Put New Zip Into Moore’s Law
Ok, I'll be the first person to admit I'm an idiot, but this stack trace doesn't make any sense. First, how am I to know this is actually from reddit.com? It's an image, so I can't grep through the trace. Additionally, it looks to me like the initial error refers to accout.py at line 68... maybe I'm blind, but I don't see that anywhere in the trace. I'm no python expert but I've looked at a lot of java stack traces and this makes no sense. Seriously. Why deliver this as an image? What sequence of events did you go through to get this result? Is it repeatable? If so, how?

I know reddit bashing is super-fashionable right now, but really. Am I being dumb? It's well within the realm of possibilities. But this doesn't pass the sniff test.
Bobby and You - Cavett, Pt. 2
most atheists seem to think morality is a religious idea. like dawkins.
As for its authenticity, it was on reddit/programming a few days ago - http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/69ftg/comments/ - and apparently one of the reddit guys caused it.
Ok, I stand corrected. If spez did it, it's legit. Kudos.
Interesting. I wonder how much time it takes for people to go from loving to hating a startup. My guess is that there's a press release (love), news of growth (love), news of funding (love), news of more growth (love, high expectations), news of significant market share (trite two-sides-of-the-story-but-ends-on-a-cautionary-note article), report of a glitch (hate). The rest of the cycle is on its way for Facebook. On that note, I wonder when a major newspaper will do a trite, two-sided, cautionary-note style article on YCombinator. YC will probably have to score a few more homeruns first (or do something akin to gaining a lot of market share), but it'd be interesting to guess what that article will say.

As a pros and cons rundown made less unacceptable by its hackneyed turns of phrases, it'll probably start by mentioning the same pros it's talking about now. The cons might be...I don't know, male/female ratio, underrepresenting minorities, ageism, discrimination in general as an advantage of being an entrepreneur, expectations placed on entrepreneurs, something like that. I'd like to point out that I don't know what the demographics of YC look like, and don't really care. As far as I can tell, they look like Caltech's.

But newspapers do, and they get pissed off very easily about this sort of thing.

It'd be cool to measure the time elapsed between the first confirmation of a billion-dollar acquisition of a YC startup (measured by the opening of champagne bottles) and the first hater article. This timeframe could be measured to track to gauge the stage of the newspaper industry's decomposition. That is, the degree to which journalists are upset about the amount money founders made reflects how badly paid these journalists are, and the extent to which good journalists have been driven away to other industries.

I'd also venture to guess that the first hate article will appear in the New York Times Style section.
Random plug: I recently released Rims for URL shrinking:

http://ri.ms
I will admit, we do see 37Signals blog posts on here just about every other day on every topic imaginable. Sometimes I wonder if they do more writing than working on their own products.

So it's no surprise that they'd write a post about liking writers. After all, it's just human nature to like someone that closely reflects one's self.
one word: VALUE.

In your case that translates to which features translate to the maximum number of users.
New York Times Discovers Chicks on the Web
Real programmers don't test
Summary: Don't test at the end of coding, test as you code.

Duh?

(A fine article, I guess I didn't realize there are people who don't code that way...seems sortof self-evident to me.)
“Ranger" Supercomputer Marks New Era for Petascale Science
http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo/2008/02/y-combin...
Isn't that Bowles' point in "Raving Fans"? Definitely the right way to go.
The Art of Ware-How to win in the software world
Can you elaborate a little on these devious ways?
The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur
Who said anything about "style, semicolon placement" &c? I got the impression that when they said "a good writer", they were more specifically requiring a good rhetorician. (Also, how often do, say, fiction writers say things that aren't patently false? At least some writers' worths are absolutely uncorrelated with stating the "patently false", so you can't say it holds for "good writers" in general.)

The thing about good writers is that they understand communication at a higher level than most people, because they practice it consciously rather than subconsciously. Therefore, a good writer is necessarily a good learner (the read-side of communication), and, assuming no specific mathematical-related learning difficulties on either side, would probably become a better programmer than the "actual" programmer.
What is Topology?
I find the 37 Signals Dear-Abby brand to be annoyingly oversold, too. But you're unfairly narrowing the definition of writing to make the point sound ridiculous. Obviously good writing involves more than correctly placing semicolons (though come to think of it, punctuation is probably about as important in code, mutatis mutandis, as it is in natural language).

Programming is writing, so good programmers are good writers by definition. I think the relationship between writing code and writing prose is a rich and interesting one. For example, each involves a great deal of reworking and editing before it is gotten right. Each requires the ability to think clear thoughts and to organize and express them. Each is about communicating to others (even when the only 'other' is yourself later on).

I've observed that programmers whose writing I have difficulty following tend to be programmers whose code I have difficulty following. The converse is also the case. So I think the point is a good one, even if I wouldn't express it the same way. And of course it doesn't mean I would hire Andrew Sullivan or Paul Graham to write me a binary tree - oh wait :)
Incredible India, NPE
You beat me to it while I was busy making the same point. I prefer to assume that you started at least 13 minutes before I did :)

I like your second paragraph very much. A guy who'd been teaching programmers at a technical college for a long time told me that the only predictor he ever found for programming aptitude was a combination of math and English skills. Neither one in isolation was correlated with success, but if you were good at both then you were more likely to do well at programming.
Of course, that's mostly pylons code. The only information I glean from here is:

1. FreeBSD 6.2

2. Pylons

3. /home/ri/hgreddit
The article treats unit tests and code as one task, a reasonable idea to make sure programmers actually are testing before "done" means "done". But the article also seems to conclude that unit testing and a few "high level tests" are all it takes. That's almost true, but they've left out a big one: regressions.

A project can be burned, and burned badly, if it doesn't have a regression test suite to demonstrate clearly what the code is supposed to be doing. The main reason for regressions is to catch unintended consequences...where adding Feature A wasn't supposed to fark up features B and C, or a bug marked "fixed" 3 months ago is suddenly back. Another really important reason is documentation: new programmers on a project can learn a program surprisingly quickly by examining a set of well-designed (canonical) regression tests.
Ask YC: What's the best program to sync mobile contacts?
Anyone who has ever bought a new cell phone knows the pain in transporting contacts.

What's the best program to sync mobile contacts (or back the data up) Universally, across carriers/ handset?

(Maybe Loopt and Xobni should join forces to sync mobile info)
Is URL submission via bookmarklet broken?
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbrockerhoff.net%2Fbb%2Fviewtopic.php%3Fp%3D2417%232417&t=Solipsism%20Gradient

The title keeps going into the URL field, and then when I submit, I keep getting redirected to news.ycombinator.com/mismatch, with the message:

"Dead link: users don't match."

Submission via http://news.ycombinator.com/submit works fine.
The Snowball Effect -- on the MacBook Air and the product design process
Adobe pushes DRM for Flash
Check out the new page and vote some of those stories up in order to help get them to the front page.
I think each of the three sites listed has a slightly different focus. Slashdot has a wide "nerd" focus, from computers to astronomy, and typically seems to follow major industry happenings. HN is focused on the boot strapping entrepreneur-hacker. programming.reddit seems more interested in actual programming, techniques, languages, etc. Sure, they all overlap the same general market, but each one caters to a different niche. I think as more communities pop up, catering to more and more niches, we'll notice less 14 year olds because they will be spread more thinly, but they'll still be there.
Comment of the Day: "Google Docs is Chock Full of Fail"
State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2: The Technologies
Interesting comment/rant on RWW's article about Google Apps
Sorry. Re-read the "book's" "chapter" again. He's not making any qualifications as you are. He's saying, "Hire the best writer," which is utter namby-pamby rubbish. Between two otherwise identical candidates, sure, hire the best writer. If you define "good writer" so that it correlates perfectly (by whatever means) with intelligence and problem-solving, then maybe hire the best writer.

But if I have to choose between Bill Shakespeare and an MIT grad for a programming position, guess who I'm hiring, despite 37signals' crappy, abbreviated, unsupported advice?
They would be awesome, however they're backwards. 9 out of 10 are likely to fail, averaged across industries. Perhaps more.
This is an ad hominem attack on the free market. "It wasn't born in freedom and democracy", therefore it must be bad. She makes the laughable assumption that the majority of people know what's good for them. 2004 election proves otherwise.
Painful lesson in OLPC mesh networking for Mongolians
Ask YC: Best Linux distribution for PPC? Looking for something lightweight.
Looking to run rails dev environment: browser, ruby, and various rails dependencies.

Can anyone recommend a solid Linux distribution that runs nicely with Power PC Macs? What desktop environment?

Right now I'm thinking Debian with as few of packages as possible.
Would be interesting to see where China is...
Cracking open a Toshiba HD-A30 HD DVD player
Missed one: hgreddit => Mercurial.
account.py was included at the very bottom of the stack trace. The trace didn't include the offending line, though, which is kinda confusing.
I'm pulling the emergency "send it back to reddit" handle on this story/thread!
Sun Opens Startup Program to Early-Stage Companies in Canada, France and Germany
Ask YC: Can Hackers and Non-Hackers co-found?
There have been many debates over this on HN.

For every Steve Jobs and Apple, there is Bill Gates, Brin and Page, Zuckerberg and a host of others.

What's the final conclusion and what's the data say?
http://www.uncov.com/2007/12/13/zoho-show-is-why-you-need-a-...

http://www.uncov.com/2007/10/17/zoho-db-software-as-a-disser...

http://www.uncov.com/2007/10/16/zoho-s-ajax-spreadsheet-is-a...
Uncov as a reference. Boy, what has the world come to! Regardless, the arguments Uncov has against Zoho's spreadsheets are equally applicable for Google's spreadsheets too!
What about a more economically-inspired system?

Add a karma cost to actions affecting the headlines (submitting and voting on content). Make users think a little more about how they vote, and when submitting make them put some amount of karma on the line which, if the submission is useful, will easily be earned back.

The karma for all of this must come from somewhere, as it does now. For people such as myself with a pretty low level of participation, maybe this would also be an incentive to speak up more often and submit some interesting material.

I don't know, it's not a complete thought, maybe some folks can improve it.
What a disgustingly bourgeois article; check out this quote:

"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
Bullshit!

Of course politicians use certain tools to control the emotion of the people (start a war, raise the price of beer, whatever), but that has nothing to do with free markets. The movie just mixes together totally unrelated things and claims a connection - in that way actually doing the same thing it proposes: showing shocking pictures to make people believe anything.

So who is Naomi Klein, a Super-Communist? I haven't read her books, and now I guess I never will.
Shameless plug, but I enjoy writing natural, intuitive explanations of math & programming topics. Try this intuitive guide to e if the true meaning of that constant has eluded you:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-guide-to-ex...

Sometimes you need to "forget" what you know and come at things with a beginner's mind.
Why is a guy who confessed to having killed almost a dozen people not in jail or, at least, being questioned?
Web 2.0 blah aside, if this guy is really hiring high school graduates from poor backgrounds instead of elite (by Indian standards) college graduates, that in itself is worthy of praise.
Yeah, Debian.
You might be able to outsource more than you think. I've had to learn the hard (read: expensive) way that putting my sweat into a site is only worthwhile when the piece that I'm building is unique to the internet. Everything else has been done before, done better and is available for cheap or free.

Are you building a storefront? Shopify.com might take care of 99% of your work.
Managing invoices? Use BlinkSale.com.
Getting stuck on unending CSS issues? Use an open-source CSS framework.

I'm sure this isn't news to you but I thought you could use the reminder - I know I need it frequently. We who can do anything often try to do everything.
Hey, if open source works someone will write emacs with arc eventually. Vim too.
To be fair, its not like drugs come up and ruin peoples lives. Losers just take drugs on their way down.
Competition is good for consumers and I think its about time that Silicon Valley had a run for it's money. I'm pleased also that he turned down the offer (though of course we don't know what the offer was!) as he is obviously wanting to build his business. Too many people build to sell these days instead of building to last
blog posts

They aren't blog posts. They're "chapters" in a "book". Your confusion is completely justified, though. People who would try to pass off blog-style entries as chapters in books should not discuss "good writers" much less try to determine what exactly good writing signifies.
Yes this is a [pic] but it is also a Picture of the Year:  Soyuz TMA-11 on a train
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TMA-11

I think it will be a while before any greater spacecraft is engineered.
The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch
Sure, but it depends on personal circumstances.
but that has nothing to do with free markets

The connection they make is that Milton Friedman was the one making the (for the authors) convenient connection between shock and change. The "crisis - real or perceived" quote sounds pretty condemning.

You are right to point out that this is not an argument against his economic policies (which are assumed to be bad), but against how he suggested they be implemented.
Aussie team claims 5Gbps wireless breakthrough
Ad hominem attack? How is it an ad hominem attack? An ad hominem attack means you can't argue with the thesis so you personally attack the person putting forth the thesis in attempt to discredit the logic of the arguement by attacking the credibility of the person making it.

"It wasn't born in freedom and democracy, therefore it must be bad."

That's nowhere near an ad hominem. And basica logic would tend to indicate that if there are 2 sets of mutually exclusive, bad and good value conditions, "not good set" would tend to leave "bad set" as the only remaining possibility.

Also when you say, "She makes the laughable assumption thta the majority of people know what's good for them", you kind of tend to implicitly agree with her thesis. It's almost like you're suggesting that everybody is an idiot, therefore everyone needs a big-brother type group making problems and then exploiting the resulting panic to shove solutions down everyone's throat because left to their own devices, people don't know any better.
"... missed one: hgreddit => Mecurial ..."

And Paste. The most interesting thing I saw was the bug that caused it found right at the bottom:

"... unindent does not match any outer indentation level (account.py, line 68) ..."

This is such a pain with Python (having to line the indentation up) and is so trivial. Wonder how it got through testing? They do testing on reddit don't they?
Good point. A few years back I was keeping track of this site that kept track of all the "executive orders" that were being signed post 9.11.

The first half year later they had a thorough analysis of each executive order.

Soon so many executive orders, each more disturbing than the last, were being signed that they gave up analyzing them completley and just had quick summaries.

Then soon they couldn't keep up and just listed them with links to info obtained by freedom of information orders.

In 2004, they were "executive ordering" at the rate of about 30,000 new pieces of "emergency legislation" per year and the site just shut down, unable to keep up.

NOW YOU JUST KNOW that dude from Texas isn't penning 30,000 pieces of legislation per year. Heck - with all the vacationing, it's a wonder he even gets to sign it all.

Seems like you're right - all these things were prepared way in advance, just waiting for an opportunity.
You know, for a guy whose post-history seems like a random sampling of Yahoo News and Economist articles, most of which have nothing to do with anything interesting, you're a bit snobby. If I had the power to "pull the emergency send it back to reddit" handle on your stories, well, your submissions would be reduced by 80%.
I've worked for two non-hackers who sold a successful start-up. They had very differing skills. One done the accounts. One was a saleman. Neither was completely in charge.

In the case of Jobs and Woz, its easy to see that they have differing skills. However, Jobs had to offer a very complimentary set of skills because he couldn't contribute directly in the creative process.
Her main thesis is that free market capitalism is bad. She doesn't try to disprove that free market capitalism is good. Instead, she attacks the character of famous proponents of it, by suggesting that they forced their will upon the unwilling populace. That's ad hominem.

I neither agree nor disagree with her about this last part, because I don't know enough about it. But I give her the benefit of the doubt.

The only way her argument could be not an ad hominem is if there was a causal link between the merit of the idea she is attacking and the populace's willingness to accept it. All I was trying to say is that there is no such link. I am not offering any solutions; just pointing out bad logic.