skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
is this always so? when I was working for yahoo a few years back I got my little brother a internship. He did a whole lot of useful work; on his resume he brags that he replaced three temps, and he's not exaggerating... he really was more productive than three dudes from a well-known technical body shop.

I mean, I think the difference is more in the person than in the job. At yahoo, if my brother wanted to, he would have been able to skate by doing almost no real work at all... but he didn't. well, part of that was me pushing him a little... if I get you a job I expect you not to embarrass me. But I think he would have done useful things anyhow.

In my experience, yeah, you aren't always expected to accomplish much... but if you decide to do something useful anyhow, people almost never go out of their way to stop you. (they might not help you... but they won't stop you if you don't require anything of them.)

I remember my first programming job was littered with finished projects that were never put into production because that would have been work. (I converted our access billing system from a shared-file db that was crashing once a week because 300 people accessed the file over a NT share at the same time to an ODBC connected database... never implemented because the parent company was going to replace it anyhow. We continued repairing the database for the rest of the year I worked there.)

But enough of the shit I wrote had enough of an 'immediate need' (customer impacting seemed to be the line) to get implemented that I was pretty happy with the job.

Actually, that job was /really satisfying/ because so much was so obviously broken that a few small fixes on my end (a three line patch to apache to make dynamically configured mass virtual hosting work with our weird naming scheme/directory layout, and a few lines of c to make our pop3 redirector use a real db rather than a seperate file for each of our three million emails to determine where to redirect the user) made some really dramatic improvements to the service. Yeah, that was really, really fun. Honestly, I'm not sure I've been quite as productive since.

Part of it might have been that nobody knew what to do with. I was hired up from tech support (god, I sucked at phone tech support) to the NOC, but the rest of the NOC were network guys and i was hired as a programmer. (Hah. that was a laugh. I had read the white book in high school, and I taught myself perl while I was on phone support at night.) and the boss was some leathery EE who was great fun at first, then it was switched out to a MBA who wanted to be my friend, but otherwise pretty much let me do what I wanted as long as I didn't piss off the ops guys.

Funny story, I found one of the ops guys who worked with me at that job many years later, after the .com crash... working in a deli, and I hired him.
Yep, I've experienced it first-hand in the game industry - it's bizarre when it feels like you're the only one who notices what's really going on. But especially in the startup world it seems like you're pretty free not to go down that route. But maybe once you've had your fair share of failure it's the only thing left you feel you can be somewhat proud of, so you cling to it.
Author here, taking requests for clarification, suggestions for what to talk about next, etc.
Million Dollar Idea: Act 1 - Elevator pitches at MIT
The TAL team explore million dollar ideas in their various forms but start off featuring students at an MIT Entrepreneurship Competition
And if they turned you down? Then what? Eventually, after scores of weeks of silence, you'd start blanketing too.
Design-wise you may consider asking for a feedback on Forrst.
I wonder how much namespace pollution there is? I found at least one incorrect attribution due to identical names.
I said nothing regarding humour.
Job-based Comet communication
Are The Economics of the Web Making Us Stupid?
Whenever someone talks about how the internet is making us stupid, I tend to get a little skeptical.
free > paid

open > closed
What about real text or something other than just a canned webpage? Like, for example, the front page of the Times or something.
anamax, you clearly have some experience here. To add to your points: (1) I've never met an adminstrator that said that test scores were the ideal measure of a teacher, it's just that its the best they have. Furthermore, (2) the tests are made by teachers. If they don't like what is being tested, then change it.

When news came down the pipe that Virginia was going to have a "Standards of Learning" type exam for colleges, the first thing I did was jump on board to help scope (and my plan was to help author) the test (I was physics faculty). I'm no fool: if we're going to give the administration a vehicle this powerful, I'm driving.

On the other hand, when the Standards of Learning for K-12 schools were first implemented, a remarkable thing occurred in education: teachers started talking about teaching again. Until then, every conversation with them was about how bad the administration was, how difficult parents were, how unprepared and unmotivated the kids were, etc. When those tests went in the conversation turned to: how in the world am I going to teach all of this?

How in the world, indeed.

You are also correct that the way peer review is implemented leads either to back scratching or very poor morale. The way to do it is to get folks from one institution to review folks (as a team) from another. That would place a huge demand on the personnel, though, and I think you would have trouble getting it in place.
Venture Pimp: The Great Movie Experiment is strangely compelling
"Smart people" evaluate this prior to spending 4-5 years and a shitload of money trying to obtain a "Masters in Humanities".
This article is actually espousing the fillText (Canvas) rendering quality and not standard HTML text rendering.

Here's a screenshot of the source PDF viewed in Preview.app on OSX with "Actual Size" zoom: http://cl.ly/1nr0
Exactly, which is basically what the author of the post is feeling.
Davis Sq.
Predicting entrepreneurial success: Got what it takes? - Aaron Patzer
I posted what I'm basically doing here: http://jonathan.com/aspects-messaging-model
Does it really take this long to get a "Master's in Humanities?" It only takes 3 years to get a law degree.
FWIW, my sister has what effectively has a "master's in humanities." It took her 18 months and she makes 6 figs working at some sort of think tank in DC, so I think the individual matters a lot more than the degree...
Parent feedback isn't worth nearly as much as you might think. Parents aren't in the classroom, they tend to get one side of things (their child's). Some parent's are objective and some aren't. This leads to plenty of horror stories about parents that assume all teachers are morons and their children are infallible, I've seen it first hand and it's really pathetic. The flip side of that would be the parents of my wife's former students. She has been teaching in poor neighborhoods and a significant percentage of the parents are illiterate. While these parent's are very happy with my wife and they request all their children (and cousins etc) have her, using their feedback to rate my wife as a teacher would be seriously flawed as they really don't have the ability to judge if the teaching is effective at all.
I have never been a fan of DRM but Ultraviolet does seem to be a step - even if it's only a small one - in the right direction. The inability to transfer content from one medium to another has been big pain point with DRM and at least this UV seems to be trying to address that.
All of the text is rendered with the canvas .fillText command and there are no bitmap images…everything is either text or drawn to the canvas with vectors.

The NYT doesn't use the canvas element for it's front page - which is what this test is all about (even though it isn't very explicit about it).
As the article illuminates, we're not even sure which aspect of teaching is important for it.
A/B testing with PHP launches
It looks like they were basing these comparisons on a Canvas based rendering of this PDF: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/529041/22860302-Yellowstone-NP.pdf
I have no idea, but if you figure 3-4 for a Bachelors, plus an extra 2 for the Masters, I assume 4-5 years of work.
These all look terrible to me. I guess you get used to OSX fonts...
http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html - it's not fully there, but it's a start.
An Open Letter to BlueHost
get a job that counts... work in your field

The guy had a Masters in English. Having an English degree does not necessarily mean you are qualified to be a writer or teacher.

Depending on where he lives (small town vs. big city), I think the options could be more limited than you think.
IDE's are good for getting mediocre productivity out of bad programmers.

No, that's what Java is good for.

IDEs are good for maximizing the productivity that any programmer gets out of Java. Otherwise the best Java programmers wouldn't use them.
Depends on the company, and your manager. Y! is still fundamentally a tech company and they've had a lot of really good people there over the years.

IBM or Lockheed Martin, probably quite a bit different. (I have in fact gotten in trouble for implementing something useful at one particular job I briefly held. It made people look bad, and I was written up for not staying in my lane.)
You might want to reduce the sharpening of the text in the next version of the home page too, some of the the edges look very jagged on my monitor. The actual home page layout is pleasingly simple and clear.
Brainiac disproved this at some point in the past:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D6NI_8-Zks
One way around this is to not provide the location / time of your wedding on the invitation. Instead, include a line on your invitation to the effect of "location / time will be provided upon RSVP".
Cocodot already does this cheap wedding invite idea well.
Also, Scott Johnson's story on the subject: http://www.myextralife.com/sitenews/gather-round-children/
Who's smarter? Money manager guy who does a good job of getting paid in a system that is universally regarded as broken and overpaying everyone involved to do a crappy job, or the professor who reinvents some area of science but only makes 90k?

Depends on your definition of smart.
(Review): The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development
The line `task "resque:setup" => :environment` in the rake file does the same thing. That way it will load the env on Heroku.
Metasploit owners Rapid 7 funds web app security testing project
Electronic Payment Fraud, Security and Risk Mitigation
But how do you know your evaluation is accurate? A colleague of mine was fond of saying that asking your average student what she thought of her teacher was like asking your average seven year old what she thought of her flu shot.

Even if you are exceptional in this regard, the average person will not do well. And I have read a lot of reviews in my life from college students.

Until you know the subjects well, you are only evaluating whether or not you liked it.
Anecdotal again, but every worthwhile programmer I've known does not use an IDE. But then as I say, a lot of this is semantics. My terminal, and my brain, is my IDE.
I don't want a relationship with Dell (for example) I just want to buy a computer.

I don't know. Back when I had a job which required me buying lots of hardware it was really nice to have the phone number to a sales person who knew my name. Most of the time it didn't add too much over using a web page, but occasionally I'd have to make a call and say something like "look I know your web page says the delivery time for Widget is 5-7 days, but I really need one this afternoon, can you help me out?" And most of the time they'd pull some strings and work something out and a courier would show up with the Widget I needed. I'd never get that sort of service if I didn't have a relationship with the salesperson at the company.
Then write documentation. Everything needs documentation. Sure, it doesn't pay that great, but neither does data entry, and it's at least in the field, and even if his degree was in comparative literature, he should be able to handle writing documentation for something.

I'm trying to say that the ability to write clearly is a valuable and marketable skill. Granted, it doesn't always get the pay it deserves, but people /will/ pay you for it because it /does/ add value to the business.
The cross-species part is complete bull. No way species evolving on different worlds will have compatible genetic machinery.
That dupe is in the original data as well.
Agree. It's a bit far from downtown but it's on the subway and gives you easy access to the startup community in the Central/Kendall area with better cost of living.

Definitely stay in Cambridge, though. To get cheap living on the Boston side you have to live way out on the Green Line, which will make it a royal pain to get to meetups and other technology events.

I am in Dallas right now wrapping up Tech Wildcatters, but I'll be back in Boston in August. Feel free to email me.
You (and those that upvoted you) seem to thing that this is a problem. May I ask why?
You're right. The author may have been better to argue that Huxley is scoring higher than Orwell, but not by much. Our problem is that both of them are scoring as high as they are. Apparently, there are powerful people in the world who have taken these novels not as warnings but as textbooks.
Cloud Computing More Than Just Pricing and Packaging
The problem with that is sci-fi and dystopian novels need clear black and white issues to discuss, otherwise it loses it's bite. In order to dissect and understand societies flaws, you really have to isolate the behaviour and then take it to it's logical extreme.
But was she the beast she was claimed to be? http://www.cwporter.com/grese4.htm
Never Use $_GET Again
hah. well, I've never seen that, but I imagine I have massive selection bias (I mean, if you are a 'by the book' company, you are pretty much going to bin my resume right off... there's no "education" section.)

The only time I've gotten in trouble for 'getting out of my lane' is when I started to take over someone else's project, but didn't finish, which seems reasonable to me.
When I was attending university there was the added issue of not having anywhere to use the mouse in the first place. Sure I could maybe use it on top of the laptop case itself but at that point it's so restrictive the track pad is easier. Had there not been as many people as possible packed into a lecture hall, or the classes built with tiny desktops designed for a notepad and pen then it may not have been an issue but other than the newest buildings on campus the facilities really didn't support a laptop/mouse combo.
Looks very promising for vertical searches! Though I can get similar results in Google, I do no think it is this easy to tag, and on top of that share it with friends.
Hope I will get an invite to try this out. Good luck!!
I've long felt that the best ways for teachers to get what they deserve is for them to open themselves up to real evaluation. Pre-test/post-test. Once this happens, the true stars will be able to command quite a premium. Although the teachers fear such a day, I believe the perceptive administrators fear it more because they will enter into bidding wars for the top teachers, and lose their jobs if they don't get and keep them.

Perhaps the answer will lie in something like The Teaching Company attracting the best and brightest teachers and selling their lectures for the expository parts of instruction, and your average teacher will be reduced to a glorfied Teaching Assistant (TA).
Indent by two spaces.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
stackoverflow, huddle, lovemoney, livedrive, toptable, playerio, justgiving
great story!
Internet security quietly reaches a milestone
I believe this is specific to Desjardins; I've used three of the major Canadian banks over the years and have not seen this.
So in the spirit of the article, what would you say are negative things about running a startup for you? Or is it all roses?
How is this a privacy threat? All the information in the torrent is totally public, and existed for everyone to see on the internet before this .torrent file was created. Google's cache certainly has copies of all the data too.

What does running for office have to do with this? If you put some sort of compromising information on to the internet, that was probably a bad idea. If that's the case, then you have nobody to blame for your failed political career but yourself. But this .torrent file is just another copy of that information...there are probably another 10-20 other, unique copies out there.

Edit: also, it's not like this torrent makes any of the data easier to access...it's actually probably much easier to just go to someone's facebook page and look at it than it is to download multiple gigabytes of data, most of which will be useless.
> after scores of weeks of silence, you'd start blanketing too.

Actually I wouldn't, but my situation is probably different than most people just looking for a job. I wouldn't let it get to weeks of silence. I'd just move on.
I dont want to signup if I dont know what your product does. I personally go away from sites that ask you to first sign up, then you may see what it is all about.
FTA: "Accessing a user's page from the list will also enable you to click through to friends' profiles - even if those friends have made themselves non-searchable."

I see your point about it not being a "leak" exactly, but I think there's something to be said for it exposing how ineffective Facebook's privacy controls are. Then again, anyone who expects to prevent something from being public information after telling it to all their friends isn't thinking things through.
Writing documentation is a skill that requires more than a good command of the English language. The technical writers that I've hired in the past didn't even have English degrees, but were excellent at what they do.

I don't think the copywriters in the media agencies I worked at had English degrees either.

I've only hired one English major in my career, and that was as a software developer. He was -much- better at writing code than he was at writing prose.

Frankly, a lot of people don't know what field they belong in when they first graduate. I have a social sciences undergrad and an MBA, and I've been "out of my field" doing technology for 90% of my career. Most of my friends in the tech industry also don't have engineering or CS backgrounds. A lot of them have diverse backgrounds like poli.sci, etc. And most of us started our careers doing stuff like "admin assistants" etc.
I'm not pro drugs per se, I just think that a lot of the research and theory is fascinating. For example, check out these two videos from last year's Horizons conference.

http://vimeo.com/10931182 (Alicia Danforth - Little Pieces of a Big Dream: Participants’ Stories from a Cancer Anxiety Study with Psilocybin)

http://vimeo.com/10918637 (Bob Wold - Suicide or Psychedelics)

Both videos are a lot more intellectually interesting than 99% of the stuff that gets posted on HN. In fact they're both a lot more compelling than the average TED talk.

Or check out this podcast by the founders of Erowid, The Role of Drug Geeks in Society:

http://www.matrixmasters.net/archive/Erowid/026-ErowidDrugGe...

I realize this stuff will never be popular on HN because it's just too long and it's somewhat difficult to fully grok, but nevertheless I think there is a lot of really cool stuff out there.
I've learned something useful from every job I've had, whether I was underemployed or not. He (the author of the article) can probably learn a lot about organizational behaviour being an admin assistant. He can also take that time to think about what he really wants to do as a career. Your first few jobs (or the degree you have) don't define what you end up doing in the long term. You really have to play it by ear.
Forget yourself. Go befriend a lonely kid, or play chess with elderly people in a retirement home. Or help out at a food bank. You'll discover what an awesome person you really are.
Hazing is a good word for it. It's as if we're all plagued with a tiny bit of masochism.
Sounds great! I'd love to be able to register for a gmail account and then immediately be able to start processing incoming mail.
You're too focused on bureaucratic nonsense (unions vs. administration vs. state vs. local vs. federal government.)

In fact, it seems like you're just taking it as a given that unions are the problem and everything will be made better if you take away the teachers' first amendment rights to assembly and petition for redress. Which has nothing to do with teaching students, which is the problem at hand.
Hacker Hues: Color Code your HN by Article Quality
Hello Hacker News,

As my first Javascript project, I've decided to write a greasemonkey script that color codes Hacker News stories according to story quality. You can find it here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/82390

The quality metric I have chosen is points/comments. I find that popular stories with few comments are usually very meaty articles, such as this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1441801

However, popular articles with tons of comments are stories that everybody has an opinion on, such as articles about politics. Even if you haven't studied a particular area of political policy, you can repeat your tribe's official stance on that policy. And many people do.

This metric isn't perfect as "review my startup" and "Ask HN" threads tend to get a lot of comments without necessarily being of low quality. But it is a decent approximation.

This script allows you to save time by drawing your eye to the "good" (2-5x points/comments) and "great" (5x+ points/comments) articles, while avoiding the editor flamewars, discussions on atheism, and why America should be more/less like Europe.

Please let me know what you think! Like I said, this is my first Javascript program and I am open to criticism and ideas for future projects.
Actually I did read the article, but I must have missed or forgotten the details of that section.
Just two Chinese ISPs serve 20% of world broadband users
Yes, of course, I guess I was just trying to say that rails is optional, not required, and that resque is a pretty nice general purpose job queue.
Most people weren't publishing as computer scientists but rather electrical engineers and/or mathematicians.

At least that's my assumption. CS is a pretty young field after all.
Not all men want to be free; most just want fair masters.
maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don't want a relationship with companies

Ding ding ding. Especially when said relationship is just a thinly veiled excuse to upsell us, sidesell us, and/or nickel and dime us. Call it squeeze-fatigue.

Further, no one has a 'relationship' with a company anyway, that's just marketing speak. It's business, not personal, and companies won't hesitate to do what's in their best interests at the expense of customers (or employees), unlike a real friend or family member that you have a real relationship with. Businesses don't make sacrifices for their customers the way real friends do sometimes.

Just because businesses won corporate personhood way back when doesn't actually make them people you can have an honest, agenda-free relationship with.

Using relationship in this context is just marketing koolaid.
Not getting contacted back can many times also be a fault of the company hiring. Sometimes it takes weeks to hear back, sometimes they want you to stop by tomorrow while you clearly wrote you're on the other side of the country.

Just another indicator not to take job hunt too personal and making sure to look into every opportunity available.
It's not surprising. It's just disgusting when they try to justify themselves by ripping teachers and other public servants who they rely on all day, every day.