skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>" Freed from the pressure to teach industry-ready but highly transient skills, universities could be preserved as places to learn deep, ready for students who have a knack for academic work, or have become interested in the theoretical aspects of their practical work."

As a person who was immersed in academia (even to the extent of writing a peer-reviewed article and serving as an adjunct college instructor for a period of time), I had a slightly negative view of academia for that reason alone. It appeared to be a self-referential entity, where the only people reading your research papers are other researchers who are only interested in writing their own research papers. The 'outside world' doesn't quite respect your theoretical research fully (as you are not a productive member of society actually helping out other people), and the academic world itself doesn't quite care enough about you either (too obsessed with promoting their own theoretical research).

I think universities need to be more leaning towards vocational skills, or to make their research more "vocationally" relevant. That way, laymen will actually see a use for academics, instead of seeing them as prestigious eggheads. Theory has its place, but it has its place as a part of a vocational curriculum. Nothing more. I also support even more measurement of the quality of education, because without any level of accountability, you do not know whether what you're doing is actually working. I can write and teach all I want, but if I'm not sure if what I'm doing actually have any impact in the long term...then what's the point?

I left academia because I knew that adjuncting would be a dead-end job and that the administration prefers to hire them over that of full-time faculty, but it doesn't take a genius to suggest that low-paid teachers are definitely going to have a negative impact on a future curriculum, even on the measurable metrics. In fact, it is possible that adjunct instructors provide the "breathing room" that allows for the full-time faculty to continue to churn out research papers (although their replacements may wind up being more adjuncts). The fact that academia itself doesn't want to hire its own children suggest even further that academia needs to focus on vocational skills, so that academics can transfer out into a "post-academic" career.

As for me, I am still interested in the "theoretical aspects of [my] practical work". Maybe I may one day find a use for it. But I am unlikely to find an outlet for it within the the insular and corporate nature of present-day academia. For now, theory is just a hobby.
Windows: a software engineering odyssey
Norway is standard 3 months notice. So most Norwegian developers would be unable to apply for e.g. a remote work position the US without first quitting their old job. No hedging your bets, which means that you're in effect trapped in the Norwegian labor market.

The flip side of this is that it's very difficult to get fired, even if you're not very competent.
So Google quits because the problem is too hard? Clearly this is not the reason.
As someone who works in the industry, can you explain the good reasons for choosing 2020 as the estimate?

(As opposed to this: https://xkcd.com/678/ or just hopeful thinking)
>Even if a developer's job requires them to use Windows, they had an equal probability of another developer of having a job that allowed them the freedom to choose their platform/required them to use OS X.

In almost 40 years of experience, I never had the choice to chose the OS.
I use ES6 Modules to organize and structure a large codebase. If I write code for the browser I export it with a tool like Browserify.

Maybe the website http://superherojs.com/ will help with your question.
Essentially this. To quote the movie Fight Club:

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Punitive Damages are intended to prevent X from becoming too small.
Actualy transparency acts to bid up the going rate for the job you can see that effect in how CEO pay has increased.
Thanks for pointing that out - clipboard fail on my part. The hatchet wielding guy story is here (although this version says machete:

http://q13fox.com/2016/03/13/machete-swinging-attacker-shot-...
Style Guide for Writing Comparisons in Conditions
We've been using 2ndQuadrant for a few years and love working with them: http://2ndquadrant.com/en/support/support-postgresql/
Seems silly to me. Add complexity to the tax code to give an insignificant/unnoticeable break to one of the wealthiest demographics around. The existing financial incentives for open source contributions are probably two orders of magnitude greater than this.
> Perhaps you should develop some kind of mathematical model (say, some kind of proof calculus) for computing what is the smartest thing to do

Quick sanity check: should this logic be powerful enough to prove every true fact about natural number arithmetic? ;)
Yeah that's true, I never thought I would come to the time when I missed cubicles, but now I do.
Thinking of Travelling to Europe This Summer?
Cask upgrade – Helps Homebrew Cask users be up to date
Show HN: SongBranch – An interactive song lyric visualization experiment
Dotfile Management and Documentation with Org-Mode
Searle was the one who came up with the Chinese room argument to disprove strong AI. Searle empathically believes that humans do feel and that computers as we know them today are not capable of consciousness.

I am curious as to how you have arrived at the peculiar belief that humans do not feel.
The assumption here is that salary is set by forces beyond the employee's control, and it's either fair or unfair. I would argue that everyone's salary is fair, b/c it's set at what the employee negotiated for. If you accepted a salary offer as-is, then that's what you get. If you feel your salary is unfair, then contact your boss and negotiate for more. I won't get into all the tactics of negotiation, but it works the same for salary as for a used car. It will help to have as much leverage as you can get, for example an open job offer at the salary you want.
Ask HN: Google Voice SMS Alternative in the UK?
Hello,

Is there anything like Google Voice that allows you to send/receive sms messages from the UK (for personal purposes, not business)? Currently, Google Voice only works in the US. Thanks!
I'm not so sure of that ... what's the upward mobility of a small 20 person factory that's probably owned by a family that has the top three jobs in the company? Vs a large company with 3000 employees?
Specifically: the heroism of Hogan sleeping with his best friend's wife while being secretly videotaped by his best friend, then suing the company that published excerpts from the video and winning in court - admiration for that should overwhelm his casual racism?

I think saying that he's a hero for hopefully taking down Gawker was meant as hyperbole, because Gawker is awful. Hogan was simply acting in his own interest at all times.
Half the people I know make racist or sexist remarks when they believe they are in a private setting. That doesn't mean they are going to do it in public or would take it any further than those private utterances.
I've heard a similar story about small self driving cars.

The cars would drive around using a random algorithm, then copy and tweak the algorithm of the longest running car when they crashed. The researcher left the room to let the cars work, only to come back and find that each of the cars had deduced that the perfect solution was to remain perfectly still. After all, if they didn't move, they couldn't crash!
Learn to Hack
I always assumed the animations were to mask existing delays. But wow, that iPhone is so fast and instant without them! Delays frustrate me when using a phone. I hope this fashion of artificial delays doesn't last!

It reminds me of old tape decks with the "soft" eject button. You'd be yanking the door because it opened so slowly.
Also check out Bob Martin's response: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/03/19/GivingUpOnTD...
For those that are interested, I'm basically using lyrics-fetcher to conduct the song searches (via http://makeitpersonal.co) and Springy for the core visualization.
Status App. Yet another video messaging app, but a cool one
Workers See Costs, Not Benefits, to Global Trade
Yeah, honestly, the government should just mark $X to be spent on open source donations / development as its simply less risk for similar results to a tax credit.
It seems like having dancers at after parties is a somewhat annual tradition for GDC. Here's [1] Nvidia doing it in 2013, and again [2] in 2015. Neither got any media attention that I can tell. Interesting how fast public opinion and involvement on stuff like this changes.

[1] https://twitter.com/daveoshry/status/317171771457552384

[2] https://archive.is/n3JPu
This is little more than hyperbole.

Animation is not 'extremely' important and never has been or how would we have survived all these years?

When done badly, modern motion animations are often distracting, annoying or so alien you wonder what just happened and if you just did something wrong but can't tell without doing the action again.

When done well, the only people who notice them are other designers, so are they really worth much?

That's why there's a hostile reaction.
> Oh and with an added contempt of court: a Judge ordered them to take it down and they refused

Not just that: a Judge ordered them to take it down and they published an article bragging about their refusal.
That's like a permanent "tutorial mode" though, why do we treat users as if they would never learn.
"Using Rust for an Undergraduate OS Course"[0] is an interesting reading about Rust, OS and C.

[0] http://rust-class.org/0/pages/using-rust-for-an-undergraduat...
It's been over 6 years now since my father passed away and still, every year, Facebook sends me a notification that it's his birthday. How many years without someone logging in before Facebook stops considering them a "user"?

I did try to memorialize the page, they wanted me to fax his ID and death certificate, not going to happen, so the page will sit out there forever or until they have a change in policy I suppose.
Glassdoor already has a bigger pool of salaries and a longer history - consider contributing there.
The only winning move is not to play - WOPR A.k.a. Joshua
Boeing unveils autonomous submarine
You think existing incentives for open source work could equate to $20,000/year? Two orders of magnitude is a lot.
I imagine Koreans didn't move to Virginia after the war.

I thought "colored" == "not white" was common knowledge, but if you want a specific definition, take Virginia:

For the purpose of this act, the term “white person” shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_...

Colored explicitly includes "Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay".

As for whether I believe human populations can rapidly rebound, the answer is yes. I believe this because so many human populations have actually done this. I've cited many examples and they in addition to suffering poverty and oppression far worse than any in the US, they also satisfied your criteria of having Jim Crow laws applied to them in the unlikely event that they were permitted to enter the US.
Charming. "We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."

I missed the part which explains why I'm not allowed to read it? I don't see what a TV license fee (which I don't pay anyway as I don't watch TV) has to do with a website.

The bizzare thing is someone made this exact complaint about BBC Future, whose situation is legally identical to BBC Travel, and in response they simply made it accessible (it now carries a banner).

http://halfblog.net/2013/01/16/why-is-this-bbc-website-not-a...
http://www.bbc.com/future
Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He's also investigating the best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take some time, but he's at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require Oracle products.

I'm not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things that are making them reconsider:

* A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need.

* difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws.

I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people, each of whom didn't understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on how UTF8 works.

* license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it.

* it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries.

* Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server.

* there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can't be done in Postgres.
For those who don't know: this is a satirical post.

It's kind of funny, I guess.

But I didn't assume it was a farce. I was genuinely excited to see the implementation, because there is something unique about the transparency and interaction you can have with an excel workbook. It's almost like a GUI for a lisp REPL. Even if I am too dumb to understand the actual c code, I can see the relevant numbers being crunched, how they relate, and more.

So... "good one. you got me."

But even as I sit here as the butt of the joke, I find myself wishing your link had been sincere.
What's the legal situation with these academic research papers? Am I allowed to implement an algorithm from a research paper and then either sell the software or release it as open source?

I assume other academics are allowed to reimplement methods in order to reproduce the result and to compare to their own methods. Can I do the same as a learning exercise?
> Some companies do set wages as confidential info.

This is unlawful in many jurisdictions, including California and the United Kingdom.
This is great and so much clearer than osdev wiki. I've wanted to learn os development for quite some time and I think this is where I'll start.
This.

My first reaction to the news is that it is a clear evidence that PostgreSQL is now fully on par with Oracle in terms of everything average IT companies need to be concerned with. If I were Oracle and my product is still ahead of PostgreSQL at least in some areas, I wouldn't be so upset.
As a user I can't stand motion in UIs. Even Google's new buttons that show ripples when you click are disconcerting.

To any UX designers reading - if you put more motion in your design I will avoid your software.

(And yes, not everyone's the same)
Most of western Europe is around 60k, vs 110k for US. I'd call that a large margin.
Reaching zen in a weekend. Over archiever.
> Then we try to pass a law to prevent what they did from happening again, hopefully this time learning from our mistakes and making the law against it airtight.

We have evidence in countries like North Korea that government can keep total power and control against their population for a very long time.

I know you don't intend it to be, but your response seems kind of like a "things will sort themselves out so let's not worry ourselves". It's this sort of apathetic response to wrongdoing that is the precursor to many evils in history.
> Self-selection ruins the data.

Exactly. This is the issue that people who say "doesn't Glassdoor already do this?" minimize, and miss the point of why public salaries would be amazing in terms of improving labor markets.

I think for anyone who is big into "free markets", there is an unresolved tension between "it's better if we let things continue as they are" and "a market always operates better when it has more information". I don't understand why so many staunch advocates for free markets easily opt for the former.
Full Transcript of TIME’s Interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook
1/2. Yes there are. Network devices, file systems... most of the things that could be abstracted are done. However, take into account that every device has its special quirks and configurations. Only very generic devices can have generic drivers. But once you get to specific devices, you need specific drivers that can deal with special features and non-standard communications. See for example the number of vendors of ethernet drivers (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/net/et...). And that is just a small part of the code.

3. Interesting? A lot. You get to learn how do low-level parts of your system work, deal with complex structures and interactions between kernel/hardware/userspace and.

But the most interesting thing is the programming ability you need. You have to really understand the code, be able mentally follow the execution paths (which are not simple, believe me) and write as few bugs as possible. Why? Because you don't have many tools. No debuggers, no unit tests... My main debugging tool is a set of debug macros that print to the kernel log. Debugging is a real pain in the ass and crashes can lead to a system restart, so I have to try to get it right as soon as possible.

I hope that also answers the "fun" part ;)
F# vs. Clojure: new paradigms for old platforms
I think all X => JS programming languages should support webpack loaders with commonJS module system for smooth transitions from one language to another.
Thanks

I wonder what's the cost of the extra bureaucracy around contracting more or less
Justin Searls' "The Failures of Intro to TDD" is relevant to this discussion: http://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2014-01-25-the-failures-of-...
Nobody would ever think that. This comment, and especially the last sentence, doesn't belong on HN.
Anyone have screenshots of the orbital GUI?
Yes, it would be lovely if one could:

import 'MyModule' from 'MyModule.scala.js'

easily from Webpack, etc.
Yes, I have a WebAPI module written in C# that calls into an F# module for some file processing. From the C# project's perspective, the F# assembly is just another assembly with static methods. It was a great use case for me to highlight the benefits of mixed paradigm programming. By making the WebAPI module state based, it made certain operations easier, while the F# module can do the heavy lifting of processing the data.

You can also do a pure WebAPI module in F#.
Motion design almost always makes things worse. Latency is cumulative, and I already have latency sources in the chain, so the maximum acceptable time for an animation to slow me down is 0ms. This can be accomplished by asynchronous animations that run in the background without forcing me to wait for them to finish before I can continue, like the animations in Gnome 2's window manager Metacity. But motion designers almost never do that, because if people aren't forced to wait they might not notice the animation, and then the motion designer would lose status.
Ordinarily, you decide when and how to interact with your photos. I sometimes choose to spend a few minutes looking over collections of photos of dead loved ones; it's often painful and makes me feel vulnerable and it's not something I would want sprung on me while I'm in the office, for example.

If Facebook's only purpose was to show you random photos from your past, then the "just don't use it" argument would fly. However, Facebook is trying to be the primary way that people interact with their friends and families. For many people, the option becomes, "interact with your friends and family online and sometimes have painful memories thrust in front of you at inopportune moments" vs "don't interact with your friends and family online".

I've chosen the latter - I don't use Facebook.

They're probably working on it. Do they really still not have a way to opt out of that? Seems like the obvious solution would be to set it up as opt-in.
Simple and powerful charts for JavaScript
Nice job, Bob Dylan's songs are fun to watch on this
Which shareholder? The guy in it for the long haul or the guy looking to flip the stock in a quarter. If Bezos had maxed profits on selling books, the market cap might have been the same as Borders at its peak. The key question is whether the projects are positive on some npv basis. Given bezo's track record, I see no reason to believe otherwise. Short term shareholders might disagree though.
So your airway is less than 6mm? OK, had no idea you were that much of an edge case. You're literally breathing through a coffee stirrer.
That's a small fraction of a percentage of the overall number of publications. It might work in big cities where there's prestige to be had in owning a publication, but there aren't hordes of rich people looking to lose money over bad investments for the sake of putting their names on a masthead.
> no immediate plans to pursue the public markets to raise capital

Corporations raise capital by selling bonds, by reinvesting profits, by getting money from VC's and through other means. That companies rely heavily on public markets to raise money is a mythology promulgated by people like the quoted Nasdaq employee. The percentage of capital raised by corporations that has been done via initial or secondary offerings as opposed to other means has been miniscule. That is not new either, it has been that way since the 1940s, and even before that.
Honestly this is why so many people like a person like Donald Trump. They crave an alpha leader: strong, unafraid, confident. Which he definitely is. He's 180 degrees from the thoughtful, intellectual, politically correct yet fundamentally dishonest and self-serving leaders we've had for the past 30 years. It's in our primal pack psychology from when we all lived in tribes.