skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your examples seem slightly wack:

"For example in engineering you would have chem eng at one end and maybe mechanical or something at the other"

OK, I don't know from engineering, but mech is pretty high up there. The low prestige engineers are probably civil engineers, not mechs.

"Doctors would have a scale that goes from, say, brain surgeons to (just guessing) podiatrists."

Fun fact: the low end of prestige is probably GP's. Podiatrists are specialists, and there's prestige in that. Some of them even perform surgery, which is worth considerable prestige. Very high prestige goes to medical researchers. ("Research" is a high prestige modifier to many fields. Consider engineers vs. research engineers.)

"In the military it would go from (probably) fighter pilots or Delta Force to basic infantry."

These actually depend on the individual military service, aside from certain generalities (combat people are higher prestige than support people, command is higher prestige than staff). As a result, infantry would actually be higher prestige than, for instance, mechanics or supply.

Army, I couldn't speak for. I know Rangers and Special Forces and Airborne are higher prestige than "leg infantry", and the cavalry were high prestige in their era, but I can't say for sure.

Navy is hard to say, since there's a rivalry between aviators, surface guys, and submarine guys. But all three of those can be unrestricted line officers, and that's the higher prestige track since it leads to command. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say the aviators have the edge--they command the biggest ships, and ever since WWII it's been demonstrated fact that the real power of the Navy lies in its air.

Air Force is run by the pilots, obviously. Combat pilots over cargo pilots.

Believe it or not the highest prestige component of the Marine Corps is probably the infantry. Everything else is there to support the infantry. Added to this is that every Marine is trained as a light infantryman, and every Marine officer is trained to command a rifle platoon. The Marine Corps doesn't really operate on these terms much, as they simply consider the entire Corps to be the best part of the military.
Yep. Watch a Formula 1 team replace major components after a crash.
While the first two ones are really obvious, the last three are often known but rarely applied truly. Virgin employees can think "We're a company also building spaceships". I found this article interesting and useful.
Nothing special. To me, it feels awesome to read about what he has done and it's inspirational. I just wanted to share it.
Some of the longer transatlantic passages in the 19th century took around a hundred days.
Living like a college student
Nicely done site, but I would say that immediately your site should tell what makes your framework stand out from the crowd.
And to the "Mall Rated" badges: (not from Jeep, obviously)
http://www.google.com/images?q=mall+rated
Visit http://tronsoundtrack.com/ do 'View Source'
Kevin Flynn ASCII art hidden in source
Admirable, but note that JavaScript is quite different than Java. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245062/whats-the-differen...
Way more useful than the maps version, thanks for this!

Feature request: to further mimic google instant, would it be possible to add autocomplete? Also, note that when the autocomplete box appears on google instant and you press the down arrow to select the result, you can then press the right arrow to do a "I'm feeling lucky".

Maybe you could add some additional keyboard shortcuts to instant image search, such as selecting results with the keyboard. Ideally I would want to select a result with the arrow keys and hit enter to go to it.

As most people here, I try to avoid the mouse.

Thanks again for this, funny thing is that I don't use the original google instant (as it does not work with the key bindings experiment) but your image search is something that I probably will.
I don't think Chem Es have any more prestige than any other major. They may net a higher salary, but that doesn't mean anything. My Chem E friend makes more than me, but he works in a plastics factory monitoring gauges all day with no design work involved. That doesn't seem very prestigious.
Their spam filter's what needs the most work. A faster and nicer interface would come next in priority, yes, but it was the torrent of spam that lost me.
> I'm a little surprised to see that none of their crew have actual space experience.

Maybe it'd be better. If we want to send large numbers of people to Mars for mining or colonization eventually, picking a more random group of people might be preferable. I dunno.
Well he has Indianized English Grammatical style.
The Register article linked by the blog post ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_caffeine_expl... ) is more informative than the blog post itself.

To me, it looks like the blogger makes a few wrong assumptions: He confuses Google Instant with Google Realtime. He assumes that "something like database triggers" is actually very much like database triggers and could be e.g. used to check the integrity of the data. He goes wildly off on a tangent with Internet DOM.
Array dereferencing in is the trunk and will be available in 5.4.
I just had a flashback to a number of seized and broken rusty bolts. The horror.
Yahoo Mail has just gotten worse over the years and I finally switched to Gmail. I'd get "Error Code 14" a few times month. Search was constantly broken and you had to contact their tech support to get it reindexed. No HTTPS support (after logging-in). Can't send email through another mail server. Yahoo Mail has become like the Detroit car companies - they've fallen behind the competition.
Sex, Lies And Tiger Woods
Days of Reflection for the Man Who Defined Singapore
PHP is an okay language. I'd never choose it by myself, but most of the time it is bearable. The language is not the problem though - it's the people.

PHP breeds mediocrity in such a superb way, it's rivaled only by Visual Basic. It attracts many dumb people and, chances are, you will meet many of them on your new job.I won't go as far as telling you to stay clear of the job - just have that in mind when deciding.
Visualization for C++ code metrics, specialized for C++, would be interesting. The C++ code metric visualizations I've seen have hooked into visualization front-ends designed for Java code.

P.S. This probably isn't a weekend project, but you might get something useful done in a week.
Relativity: The special and general theory
From the article: "The irony is that The Exile was always far harder on America than Russia and, by the end, was probably more widely read by Russians than Americans."

Perhaps that's part of the reason The Exile was allowed to continue for so long.
Thanks for the link! I'm alright with being "out of a job"... I telecommute with most of my clients anyway. It's just difficult for me being physically separated from a population conducive to creativity and filled with professionals who network and meet up on a regular basis. To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I moved to Idaho over a year ago from the Chicagoland region and being within a 1-2 hour drive from multiple meetups and networking events... So it's really the networking scene I'm missing desparately and being able to really keep a finger on the pulse of what's up and coming and where the web technology is moving.
brooklyn, wadup
The Danger of Assumption
I've often wondered about the meaning of the word "Hello". We all know what it's used for, but it's hard to pinpoint an exact definition for it.
Programming languages are tools of the trade and no different than tools in any other field. If it's a good job then it is a good job. If the job requires you to work with PHP, then that is a lesser consideration that is barely worth mentioning. Good coding can be done in any language even crusty COBOL or LISP. After you learn the PHP syntax, then you won't think about it anymore. In a few weeks time, you'll be surprised that you were worried about something so trivial as the programming language used.
Commonly Misheard Expressions to Avoid in Your Writing
In the context of this particular thread of the meta-narrative w/r/t the impedence of the distribution of control throughout the legal/cultural/informational network by widely recognized but contextually barren pop-culture touchstones, one can understand Arrington's outburst as a performative reference aimed at the distracted postmodern crowd, with little relation to the original semiotics of the sampled media. </pomo>
Clever technique produces HDR videos using two dSLRs
That is how they define an impression in their reporting but they are still payed on a click basis.
Writing concurrent programs in Common Lisp
A better title might be "This is reverse engineering" :) Ah good old times..
We do. $10/month gets you a pro account that removes the ads.
Very cool, but the most complex part, the engine, is still left as one piece.

This is like saying "oh, look I've split my program in to many source code files to make it less complex" and yet one of the files is 20KLOC.
The evidence seems to clearly show that Microsoft Russia is colluding with the Russian government to sustain a fraudulent case against the environmental group.

I hope the NYT report results in pressure on Microsoft, Redmond to stop ignoring what their Russian subsidiary is doing. They need to put an end to Microsoft participation in the "the persecution of civil society activists."
I guess this would be a great case for Ubuntu desktops with in the cloud backup/software.

Treat the workstation as a dumb terminal and be ready to discard it if needed.

But I guess the computer sophistication required to do this is currently beyond the abilities of the targeted people.
Online still hasn't trumped university for me. In university it's practically impossible to not meet people that are very different from yourself, from completely different backgrounds, with polar opposite views from yours.

On the internet, simply because of the nature of similar people congregating, it's hard to avoid groupthink and meet people who are wildly different than you.
Not quite correct, the paywall is coming in 2011, which will likely kill NYT as a source of news for me.

But for now, a free account still gives you access to the content.
Did he say they should be forced to block by the law or was he making a strong moral argument that they should block? My impression is that both FB and CL were (possibly inconsistent) moral arguments and not so much about the right to free speech.
And a contact field, sometimes I wish I could talk with someone who commented something I posted, but it's difficult to get in contact.
Nice! I wasn't expecting that, fun surprise :-D
The problem with feedsync and trying to serialize knockout.js to disconnected clients is conflict handling. Secondly, you have to worry about potentially divergent states if messages are lost in-transit (depending how robust your needs are.)

That being said, you could hack something together with a very optimistic approach using knockout.js and socket.io (to gracefully degrade if websockets arent available.)
Is there anything InDinero does for $99/mo that Mint doesn't do for free other than the cashflow projection? That's the thing that keeps me from spending the money to give it a real try (I'd need the $99/mo plan for even just the number of monthly transactions in my PayPal account, let alone all bank accounts, and I'm just a single entrepreneur). I already use Mint.
Here's where he lost me and his credibility shattered:

To fully utilize HTML5, I’ll need to know Javascript. And apparently, Javascript is similar and simpler than Java.
The point I've been trying to make is that simplicity/great-design has a context and that context is missing in the original source. Everyone here seems to be adding context, but I have to take their word for it because they are not presenting it with any supporting facts. e.g., a reference to where the British army claims to be sticking with a 10yr old version of the land rover, to avoid having to deal with computerized engine management system malfunctions in hostile situations.

While I can see and agree with the point that people are making, I would just prefer if they were substantiated.
Five Reasons I Wouldn't Have Invested in Zynga
With regards to point 4, for some people, never ever criticizing people or losing one's temper can require a lot of effort.
"... it's not like you can re-use your client side javascript on the server. ..."

nodejs and jsdom perhaps? "jsdom + jQuery in 5 lines with node.js" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665999
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09...
I used some GP to find optimal ranges for sensors meant to detect malware on computers. The sensors were things like process and thread counts, memory usage, disk activity, etc... but there were around 40 total sensors and very large ranges of data seen on computers running normally and computers with some kind of malware running in the background. The detection software built with the GP results worked pretty well. It was just a project I did for a reverse engineering class in college.
Orignal source:

Java Programmers are the Erotic Furries of Programming

http://lukewelling.com/2006/08/03/java-programmers-are-the-e...
haha i came here to post just that...

Java is infinitely simpler than Javascript.
I addressed that. Do you not appreciate that when a bank freezes an account for fraud that it too is "keeping the money for itself"? Indeed, this is the appropriate course of action until a better determination of whether or not fraud is involved is made, whether you're Chase or PayPal.

Let me be more clear: what, precisely, makes you believe that when paypal freezes an account due to suspected fraud that it is more likely actually due to nefarious purposes on their part than when Chase or Bank of America or any other bank takes exactly the same actions for exactly the same reasons?
In this case, Linux really does mean freedom.
These Cells Will Self-Destruct in Five ... Four ...
Play Sea Assault online at y3 Games club
Save your ship by shooting enemy Helicopters and Submarines.
I think in Germany, if the cops don't like you they can decide to search your body for drugs. Including some unpleasant possible hiding places on a naked body.
To be fair, a lot of college programs will teach computer programming first through a language like C or Java. Those that experience programming for the first time in college can then jump from C to PHP or Python easily.

Of course, I did it to the other way. PHP/Python --> C, and that wasn't that bad either. The big thing he needs is to learn the overall concepts using a good language; the choice of language here is not that big of a deal.
FC Chelsea - skeetr@email.cz
gasp what about erlang?!

i like erlang :(
Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk? 
I have a lot of personal and company information on 2 of my laptops (Windows 7 and a MacBook). This includes bank account information, private keys, passwords and proprietary source code. I'm always paranoid about my laptops being physically stolen while I'm traveling or if my office is robbed. To help put my mind at ease (somewhat), I've been looking into whole-drive encryption. Incase my laptop does get stolen, I can be sure the thief does not get my data.

It looks like there are 2 solutions out there for Windows - TrueCrypt and Microsoft's Bitlocker. I can't use Bitlocker because my laptop doesn't have a TPM chip, which I'm told is required to encrypt the boot volume. TrueCrypt looks like the only option available right now for Windows.

Also, it looks OS X does not have built-in whole-drive encryption like Window's Bitlocker. Luckily TrueCrypt also has support for OS X.

What do you use to protect your data? Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of (besides loosing your password)?
I think this is the case in Russia because the odds of the government shaking you down, taking all your stuff and then throwing you in some awful prison are about the same whether what you're doing is perfectly legitimate or totally illegal.
Can programming language names be trademarks?
CNN? Well done.
My favorite eXile article of all time has to be "Embrace the Pain" : http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7347&IBLO...
How to Write A Book
HN: Let's ask Mythbusters to test some hacker myths
Come with ideas to what hackermyths needs to be busted.
yes .. because I can. My macbook was stolen out of my flat this year and it was a good feeling not to have to worry about the data.

don't get why you would encrypt your whole disk though. the home is all I need encrypted.
I think it's great that you're doing this. Personally, I'm not a big fan of Java (although there are many, many people who like it), but I will say that the one thing you can do that will give you the best odds of actually learning Java is to make an Android app. Even if you don't have an Android phone, you can build and test everything in the simulator.

I firmly believe that the best (and maybe only) way to learn programming by yourself (and get good at it) is to get yourself a good book or tutorial (like this one http://pragprog.com/titles/eband3/hello-android) and set aside an entire weekend Friday-Sunday to go through the entire book (and actually type out all of the code).

Next, come up with an idea of moderate complexity that you think would be fun/useful/maybe profitable (e.g. not a game, maybe a client for some web service like Twitter or Shopify) and spend a couple of weeks working on it until it works. Then you'll be a programmer!

P.S. This is the method I used to learn Ruby on Rails and iPhone development, and now I do both of them for a living :)
Test whether caffeine really is improving productivity or concentration.
I use TrueCrypt to protect my laptop. No chances in speed that I've noticed and as far as I understand it, it's quite secure. 30+ randomly generated password gets me in and it's a lot easier than you think to memorize and type quickly. I always feel like I must have made a mistake but can't remember the last time my fingers got it wrong. To me, it's kind of a no brainer. 3 extra seconds before boot is the only thing it takes to make sure my stolen laptop couldn't lead to stolen credit card numbers, accounts, business docs etc.

I've got no experience with Bitlocker, but I'm a huge fan of TrueCrypt.
Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
Private Ubuntu Cloud
First off, I'd like to throw Bitlocker back in the ring and tell you that boot volume encryption is relatively unimportant for the threat model you propose, specifically untargeted data at rest.

Boot volume encryption/verification is designed to protect you against attackers who would replace your boot image with a one that contains a rootkit or keylogger. This threat model requires serious forethought and planning on the part of the attacker. He is likely targeting you or your company and he wants to do it steathily. Under this kind of threat, you really need the entire company to adopt an extremely high level of operational security. (Remember your security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.) Usually, this kind of paranoia is reserved for three letter agencies.

I should mention that Truecrypt doesn't protect against this threat either. At some point, there needs to be an unencrypted bootloader, which can be attacked. Hardware boot volume verification would verify that the bootloader has not been modified, which is what TPM tries to do.

Unless the encryption is implemented poorly (which in Truecrypt and Bitlocker is not) an attacker with access to your boot partition cannot attack your data partition without additional information (like your password).

On OS X, I've heard good things about PGP Whole Disk Encryption. I don't know if Truecrypt can handle Boot Camp (PGP WDE can), if you care about that at all. On Linux, I use dm-crypt + luks
I keep all of my passwords encrypted in 1Password, and I have one encrypted folder on my Mac with all of my sensitive documents in it. I didn't want to encrypt my entire hard drive or even my entire home directory because of the performance hit.
Good point. On Windows I have my data lying around in a few places (including a separate partition). I guess I want total peace of mind - for example, I don't want to worry about any data lying around in the hibernation files, crash dumps, /tmp etc.
I also have a password manager (KeePass) but I'm not as disciplined about keeping all my files in one place. Also, as I said in my earlier comment, I want to make sure everything on the hard disk is secure, include any system temp directories.
I think he's thinking right. He's a business guy, but realizes that he needs to have some control over his product. Even if he gets someone else to write his app, he'll still be able to follow the code if he knows the language a bit. Who knows, maybe he'll like java and writing code that he'll become a coder who like business. There are too many languages out there, my philosophy is to pick one and get working. There are too many people who will pick faults in anything and everything you pick. Hard part is making a decision...now the next hard part is following thru with your commitment. I'm picking up Java right now, I find the Dietel Java: How to program 7e pretty good text. Very wordy, but that means it explains the concepts very well. Of course, I find myself skipping over the commentary unless I don't quite understand a concept. Either way, Good luck to you.

Sean
"Easily had an IQ between 250 and 300"
This is extremely interesting, I wonder if serious breakthroughs in human longevity are on the near horizon. Directly related to this article, it turns out exercising probably keeps your telomeres "young" too: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercis...
If the authorities are corrupt enough, they may opt for keeping the Linux boxes until they find the pirated Microsoft software.
Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.
It has always stymied me why Russia is so messed up when almost every Russian I meet seems to be great and cynical. Maybe Russia being messed up makes the Russian people great... And maybe unlike Americans Russians can conceive of corruption in government....so. Maybe you couldn't have one without the other.
OS X has FileVault which encrypts the home folder. I don't think I have any personal data outside of it. But I do use TrueCrypt too.
Governments are clients far bigger than NGOs. Their choice is not surprising, considering who they are.
His webpage provides a nice list of projects: http://bellard.org/

I agree with the poster, Fabrice Bellard is one of those amazing people that should be better known but has been too busy quietly writing everything.
Excellent points. I said earlier that I wanted a no-brainer solution where I don't want to think / worry about where my applications or, even the OS decides to store my personal data - this is why whole-drive encryption looked attractive. However, an attacker would need some planning to get to that sort of data out - a common thief would probably not have that kind of skill anyway.
I'd say that being a startup founder is less about code hacking abilities and more about hacking real-life (product, market, customer, code, whatsit.)

Personally I'd go with GeneralMaximus.