skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether or not they understand Bayes, some groups of people are more concerned about what their posteriors will become proportional to whether they choose pizza and/or froyo.

In those cases, despite your information being generally probabilistically correct for your goal, the worst decision could be giving them something that they'll eat (and enjoy) or want to eat but can't. You're predicting for what to bring on a first encounter, and the best answer could be to bring nothing until you have better information.
Congress just passed a cyber-spying bill that will almost certainly become law
Mad Men feels like a sort of different case to me, because it's a show that very deliberately works on both levels. The episodes are self-contained enough that they work even if you haven't seen the whole series, but there are a lot of subtleties and dramatic ironies that you can only catch if you've seen the whole thing. It's hard to achieve that balance; my guess is that in the future most shows will aim one way or the other.
If you take a startup job out of school, make sure that they embrace pair programming. Work for a Pivotal Labs. Work for an Andres Camacho. Work for a Chad Fowler. Or an Ernie Miller.

Find the leaders that understand all programmers need training (especially around process and coding standards). Sell that on your passion and that you want to become good _quickly_.
Why is the text grayed out? Why cross post?
No, it doesn't. It says "If you would want them to hold the door open for you were the places switched, then hold the door open." Of course if I don't really care about it, then I'm free not to bother. If I would rather someone confronted me when my code is shit, rather than letting it slide, then that is how I treat everyone else too.

There is a strong argument to say the golden rule is really saying "treat others the way society tells you to" and some contend it should simply be "treat others the way they want to be treated".

Of course at that point you've lost the simplicity of the original phrase and the primary teaching implement of self interest.

Not to mention, at some point there are limits to the extent I am going to pander to someones wishes in how they want to be treated. I respect your right to self-identify as an attack helicopter, but I'm not going to bow my head as I approach to avoid your rotor blades.
Deflation is fatal to traditional currencies as regular principal payments quickly destroy most of the money.

Bitcoin does not operate on a debt model and is not susceptible to the kind of deflation that the most widely used currencies are.
> and because the greybeards at RedHat thinks it looks nicer with all the variables declared at the top.

Why do people always assume newer = better? Get the basics right. Yes, declaring your variables at the top does usually look nicer. It requires more code discipline, it often forces you to better decompose your code, but usually results in better code structure and readabilty.

C is not a language to program at scripting speed in the first place.
This is great for the industry. It's great to see people are seeing it less as a 'currency' and a technology with multiple uses. On the proviso it remains secure block chain technology will stay reputable which will give associated industries cred.
Tor is useless at preventing this kind of browser based tracking unless you're using a canned distribution like Tails.
I don't want to criticize too harshly, because I do think this analysis is generally good (if slightly unoriginal).

The problem is that these analyses always focus on how you, as a prospective employee, can extract the most value from the world. Optimizing cash vs equity or arbitraging location or whatever.

You can see it seep through all over the place in the language used. Sometimes it's subtle:

> I’ve told that anecdote to multiple people who didn’t think they could get a job at some trendy large company, who then ended up applying and getting in.

Waiting and hoping to "get in" is pretty weak. It implies that we're all just meat-sacks working away until some of us get lucky and manage to convince a fancy company to overpay us and let us extract a lot of value from them.

If you have value to contribute to the world (and you definitely do), then go figure out someplace where you can best contribute it. Stop worrying about the best way to take things from the world and figure out the best way put stuff in. The rest will take care of itself.
Congratulations! This will be the best blessing-in-disguise of your lifetime. :)
"Changes" are like simple heat. "Interventions" are changes calculated to reduce entropy.
There are plenty of window managers that don't draw title bars (or anything)

I use one that merges the title bar and the task bar! Like so

https://i.imgur.com/Zb5BoMf.png

> Even if there is, you need to think of Wayland as well.

I prefer not to.
Maybe I am a bit too much biased to Borland, but Microsoft MS-DOS compilers weren't that great, they were even the last MS-DOS compiler vendor to support C++.

They only started to have something worth buying with the 32 bit version of Visual C++ and Borland loosing their focus, until then not really.
You missed my point. It's not enough to model a persons bias, you also need to model what they know, when they learned it etc. This information flow has massive scaling problems.

100,000 agents is at least 1 million times easier than 100 million agents and you can't parallelize the problem very well due to speed of light propagation issues.

However, 100,000 agents is enough to do a lot of interesting research.
I was nodding along throughout this and pretty much agreeing that overall a big company makes sense for most people.

Then I got to the final footnote. That kind of Kafka-esque bullshit is what keeps me working in startups. I could not stand working in a culture where policies which are widely seen as unhelpful and ridiculous are still routinely inflicted upon employees.

Yes, startup "bullshit" also exists, but the difference is that it's totally possible to avoid that bullshit by picking a good startup to work at. I've never had anything like the experiences described in [1], despite working at 3 different startups. On the other hand, big company problems seem to be universal: it's not possible to find a big company without at least some arcane and employee-hostile policies. (For example, Google's blind hiring keeps me from ever considering working there.)

[1] http://totalgarb.tumblr.com/tagged/startupbullshit
> I seem to have missed the part of university where we were learning things not yet in published books.

You had an access to the teachers, who are all supposed to be active, well-connected, bleeding-edge researchers. You had a fair amount of their time allocated for you solely and more of that time for your class.

Now, it was 100% your responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge knowledge from them, to loiter around their laboratories, to get a summer job as a lab assistant, and all that. This is what universities are for.

> like society has done for every other field of human endevor?

What? When did it happen, exactly? The master-apprentice model is still alive and kicking in most of the professions. There are no alternatives to it. Dedicated pedagogues can teach you to read, write and count your fingers (on one hand). The rest must be passed on by the real professionals.
AFAIK, working at Google et. al. pays well, but for most people your career will cap out at senior engineer. At other big companies (banks, telecom, oil, etc) a good Google dev can climb the tech career ladder quickly and make more money, get more responsibility (if that's your thing).

Do you want to be a small fish at Google, or a big fish at Goldman Sachs?
You're comparing a currency + transaction network with a commodity. IMO, as long as people treat Bitcoin as a commodity it will not achieve its true purpose.
aka "ask not what your world can do for you, ask what you can do for your world"!
I immediately though about this XKCD post. Does they mention it in the article? Not going to say it's a ripoff, but I can't imagine that the didn't get inspired by it.
I tried for a while but am having trouble with the offsets (and possibly the correct edition of the DOI). The smartest way to get the offsets correct would be to copy the numbers from the image and cross reference them with the decrypted text. But who's got time for that? :)

Some Python code if anyone wants to play with it:

words = doi.replace(',', ' ').replace('\n', ' ').replace(' ', ' ').replace(':', ' ').replace('.', ' ').replace("'", ' ').replace('"', ' ').replace(';', ' ').split(' ')
words = filter(None, words)

def getcode(w, i, offset):
print w[i-offset][0],

for code in [89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480]:
getcode(words, code, 0)

I used http://www.constitution.org/usdeclar.txt and deleted the header and title.
$90k isn't unheard of in Seattle, either (that was my starting salary, in Seattle, 4 years ago). My alma mater published self-reported salary data and $80k was probably the median at the time. Granted, it was one of the best CS schools in the area.

Much of the east coast probably has >=$80k starting salaries as well. (Or at least, you'd expect the high salaries to be on the coasts.) Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.
> And the "sexism" debate was stirred by people who were only tangentially involved in Tech, like the PR person "Adria Richards". If you listen to actual women with actual Math, CS, or EE degrees, you'll hear a different story.

As someone whose listened to actual women with Math, CS, and EE degrees (and women who are working in technical roles without degrees in those fields, as both women and men in the field do), I disagree. You'll hear a mix of stories from those women, some positive, some as bad (or worse) than those from women "tangentially involved" in tech.

OTOH, I don't think that sexism in the tech industry would fail to be a problem if it only victimized women in non- (or less-)technical roles within the industry.
Save the Planet. Eat Ugly
Suicides are caused primarily by mental illness, and can be committed through many means other than firearms. Trying to stop suicides by removing firearms is a pointless endeavor, similar to trying to cure a cold by keeping the patient from coughing.
Homicides are similar in that one can commit homicide by many means other than firearms, though firearms allow doing so from a much greater distance; however, again, the root cause is mental illness, and attacking firearms is a waste of effort compared to trying to fix the root cause.
As for accidental deaths, they have nothing to do with suicides and homicides, and the solution there is to teach people how to not point the firearm at something they don't want to kill (among other safety rules, like not keeping the weapon loaded unless absolutely necessary).
Can you Beat Thirty?
I once faced the same situation, albeit with kids and a mortgage. Leverage your development background but get a project management certification and start leading some of those younger grads that will need your guidance. Not only will it offer job security, it could be a rather substantial boost in pay as well. That's the path I followed, prior to becoming an entrepreneur at least - where nothing is ever of any certainty, and, even then, I find myself dealing with it a lot better than I ever thought I would.
Beijing issues its second 'red alert' in history for deadly air pollution
What’s new in robotics? Australia’s $310K (AUD) firefighting bot
haha awesome!
Mobile Wallets in India: Growth Opportunities [Slide Deck]
Let us not forget that they can also "short" the stock and elect to call underwriter "greenshoe" in scenarios where the stock falls in price. They can make money in so many different ways
HN tries to discourage the us vs. them herd mentality that you're talking about. It's not about winning an argument, it's about having a discussion. There's no need to know how many other people agree with a particular comment, we should make up our own minds about it.
At OwnLocal, we like people who understand the news business and have some programming skills.

I'd encourage you to look at our jobs page: http://ownlocal.com/jobs
At my BigCorp employer, Senior Engineer starts at like, maybe $140k total compensation, on the low end. I don't know where the author is drawing these $250-350k minimum figures from, but it feels like "thin air."

That being said, a startup in my area would pay 50-70% as much.
Layers accumulate over the years (rhythmite I think it's called), vegetation can take over, natural decay.
Since this sparked quite an interest, I have created a mailing list and wiki. For more information about idea, you can read here http://inspiratron.org/blog/2015/12/18/starting-an-effort-to... where you can find the links to mailing list and wiki. I believe that would be the more appropriate place to collect all efforts that currently exist, index them and maybe try to integrate them and make them interoperable. Please join the mailing list.
> attending RSA

Colbert, during his talk[1] at RSA:

If you're attending this conference, it is your business to prevent
security breaches, and that means learning enough about hacks,
exploits, and leaks to scare your clients into hiring you again
next year.

[very subdued "ha-ha-only-serious" laughter]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7gGtVScrQo
I like Haskell but I see no future in terms of widespread adoption for it.

The aim isn't necessarily widespread adoption, so much as the ability for people who know it to use professionally. It's way past merely "production ready", but reputation is a lagging indicator and so most programmers are stuck doing Java...

Since the goal is to avoid {success at all costs}, getting 25% market share is probably not possible. 1 percent would be a start.

The problem, economically speaking, is that Haskell and Clojure engineers are massively underpaid, when you consider that an average Haskeller would be Principal+ at any Java shop. That's because the Java and C++ people can create bidding wars every year and spike their salaries, whereas using a better but more niche language makes that career strategy untenable.

Haskell's laziness isn't as much of an issue as people make it out to be. You can have strictness any time you need it, so it's more akin to an opt-out model than laziness being forced upon the programmer. It is correct to observe that high-performance applications frequently have a lot of strictness annotations, and the argument can be made that high-performance Haskell (while it can be close to C in performance) isn't "idiomatic"... although that claim is true of all high-level languages (even Java). High-performance Clojure ends up being full of '^' characters for type annotations, and high-performance Haskell ends up being full of '!' characters for strictness.
Pivotal is pretty awesome, definitely on my list of "seems cool, bro" companies. A lot of the criticisms I've heard hardly are a concern for me because everything I've known is that they're so busy coding they're hardly able to mess around taking submissions from others outside the company.

And to be a little cheeky, Pivotal (compared to Pivotal Labs, not the same but still) is nowhere near a "start-up" company by most definitions. They're planning for an IPO and are pulling in many millions in revenue like Cloudera and HortonWorks, it's hardly possible to keep these plans from being kept under wraps.
Those people got motorbikes.
The one thing I always tell anyone on the job hunt, which few ever seem to take me up on: Informational Interviews.

These are informal "can I take you out to coffee?" talks with people in your industry to see what they are working on, what is happening with them, what is going on in the industry. Every job I have ever gotten is through informal meetings with people I have met through my network (whether its the current newspaper, your friends, parents, relatives, or other).

At the end of every one I ask: "Is there anyone else you think I should talk to?" and "Do you currently have any opportunities at your company for me?". Rinse repeat.

I guarantee investing in 30 informational interviews will yield huge dividends vs. 30 career fairs, a personal pitch deck, starting a blog, dusting off your resume, or God Forbid: applying to jobs through Linkedin.
When you graduate from school with debt and no savings it is a good idea to maximize your initial salary. You can live on ~70% of it while building yourself a financial cushion for a while. Then, if you want to go to a startup later, you are in a better position to handle the risk of its failure and already used to spending less money. (Or you can stay with big companies and get a nice lifestyle boost after your emergency fund is established.)
http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/06/17/measuring-gender-diversi...

> Technology companies are generally considered to be some of the most sought-after employers in the world. We have an inherent “home field advantage” when it comes to recruiting the largest and richest talent pools of our most critical position: software engineers. However, despite this advantage, our data indicates that software engineering teams in tech have proportionally fewer women than several non-tech industries; namely healthcare, retail, government, education, and nonprofits. For example, a typical software engineering team in a healthcare company is likely to be 32% women, compared to 20% in technology. While these non-tech industries employ significantly fewer software engineers versus technology, their teams tend to exhibit greater gender parity.

You don't end up with 50% women in other industries with basically the same role without some sort of reason.
"one in x browsers have this value" "6193830.0"

"User Agent" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.80 Safari/537.36"

OK then. I suppose this implies I was the 6193830-st person to run it from a desktop like mine.
Why slippery fishes can kill startups
I did quite a lot of research on salaries in the London area 2 years ago. Starting wage for a programmer out of school was around 3-3.5K€ per month. Some places paid up to 4K per month (90th percentile). 25th% percentile was 2.5K€ per month. I have heard that starting wages have gone up a bit in the last few years. Your numbers for the UK are more typical outside of London, though.

Of course nothing like Bay area salaries, even though London is ridiculously expensive. Some Googling seems to indicate that the cost of living in SF is about 25% higher than London, so real earnings are quite a bit higher there for programmers it seems.
I am pretty sure no matter how high the salary you can't prevent flattering the ego as a mean to corrupt someone: "It's not about the money, it's about who I am and I am important enough to them they need to corrupt me. They need me. They owe me now.". Or something along those lines.
> It's simply too alien for your typical CS grad

In my university, Programming 101 (mandatory) was (and is) Haskell. For context, there is typically a mix of experience among the class - some will have programmed seriously before, but others will have only studied math.

I had already studied Java, but I found Haskell a delightful re-introduction (it was my first exposure to functional programming) and I see its value as an educational tool.
Dave Di Pietra on WooCommerce to WooCommerce Migration Using Cart2Cart
When did I say it's OK to take advantage of anyone? Of course it's not. All I said is I'm willing to take a $10k-$20k pay cut to work at a start-up I find fulfilling instead of going to work at Google. Why do you think this trade is unfair?
Regardless of what happens, trust yourself that you have what it takes to make it.

Spend some time to think about what you'd like to be over the next few years and most importantly, know what you're good at and what you're not so good at. List 10 strengths and 10 weaknesses and include both technical and non-technical skills.

Don't dwell on negative thoughts that tell you that you're not good enough. Sure, people with degrees might have an easier ride to get noticed but it's not impossible for you. Be creative. Make a portfolio. Proactively reach out to prospective employers. Learn something on your own. Take an online course.

People who tell you shit like "you're mediocre at a bunch of things.. not really good at anything" aren't worth listening to. Take it with a grain of salt, learn from it but move on. There are plenty of advantages to being a generalist rather than a specialist. But it really depends on what YOU want to do with your life.
The increase in the purchasing power of the US dollar relative to the Canadian is surely having an impact here, particularly the large increase over the past year, from 1.12 to 1.39.

In the 90s, when Canada's currency was low, there was similar talk of brain drain amongst highly educated professionals.

USD to CAD chart for the past five years: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CAD&view=5Y
More-or-less yeah. You'll have a much better time in life with this worldview I think.
Ask HN: What's the value of Hacker News points/karma?
I finally got over 500 points a while back (earning the ability to downvote comments), and more recently posted a few things (I'm on vacation, if that explains it). It's neat when stuff gets on the front page (or that kind of upvote velocity). I like that. I also like getting points. It's a way of keeping score. I can look at someone's profile and think, "Wow, they have contributed 10 times the value that I have." and get the sense that they're an old pro, while others might seem more like peers or new to the site.

But aside from that, what's the value in the points? Does anyone care? If anything, I've seen myself get over-confident and think that what works on one site works on another, or that my reputation or credentials mean anything to another site - and so it might even hurt me elsewhere. Is there any privileges you get beyond the ability to downvote comments with enough points?

TL;DR - What's the value of Hacker News points?
That name - the Yule Log - seems familiar, and brings up some vague but soothing memories for me. I believe it was an early Internet (i.e. circa 2000, "Web 1.0") web page that displayed the same kind of fireplace-log setup. Gave me some serene, hypnotic peace in the midst of the excitement of programming in Borland Turbo-C!
I leave when I encounter that. Its the only viable solution when the other party in the relationship isn't reasonable.
Endor Holocaust Question
I went thru a round of something like this, where I had been a developer+copywriter+editor+salesman for en early internet biz.

While I have a degree related to my field, I found that the network I had built up over the years, thru sales and communicating with people while editing and fact checking, was the path to my next bit of employment.

tl;dr: don't forget that 10 years of relationship building!
What makes you think that there is an unlimited number of mass media platforms?

And what do you think their responsibility actually is? I thought they had rights to say whatever they want and responsibility is optional...
Because it doesn't matter how many people agree with you. The only important thing is what you are actually saying.
Revealing the data behind VC fintech investment
Well remember, the pigeonholed part is in terms of the crap work.

And I would say that in your first several years, you really don't want to be an "expert" in anything, cause you likely haven't had exposure to enough different things.
Yeah, you can encrypt Bitcoin and so secure it with a passphrase, which can be memorized and all hard copies thrown away. Then you can distribute the files in hundreds of places, and not have to secure them.

I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a scheme more secure than that. If the crypto fails, Bitcoin is going to be worthless anyway.