skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Besides being a door-opener for research jobs, pursuing a PhD is also a great chance for personal growth. You will be challenged on many, many levels and thus likely develop skills that you never knew you were lacking in the first place. In my view, the world becomes larger in grad school; you'll get to see so many hard questions and unknowns that your appreciation for existing knowledge will no doubt grow.

There may be jobs in industry that allow for similar growth, but they are certainly not the norm. It is easy to stay within one's comfort zone once one gets paid to do so.

In my (completely biased) opinion, doing a PhD is worth it for great and curious students that like to be challenged and that can afford 5 years, no matter what you plan to do afterwards (in fact, especially if you don't know what to do afterwards). You can always be a code monkey for 50 years after the PhD; it's hard to go the other way.
Heating /= electricity. Most houses are heated via propane or oil, you could take a small propane or oil heater and bring the largest portable propane tank you can muster, or bring your own oil supply. Finally, living surrounded by forest would provide a great supply of firewood for a wood stove.

I work in siding, we use expanded polystyrene foam as insulation. 1" provides an R-value of 5.0 (fiberglass, which is in the majority of homes is only between 3.1 to 4.3) add a silvered side over an air gap (IE place it over a stud wall) adds R1 and if you take your time you can get an air gap in front and behind of the insulation making it an R6. Which is a considerable R-value boost with very little material.

You could literally flat-pack build your house. Plywood, baton, insulation, baton, plywood. This would get you about an R-11 wall within 4-5". The 4 walls, ceiling and floor made this way would get you a 6" cube that you could easily fit it in a truck bed. You wouldn't have to abandon your shack should loggers come by.

Given that I've worked on houses that were literally drywall onto stud with drywall + aluminum siding exterior. You'd do better in winter in my shack than that house lol.
Definitely TOP SCHOOL though. I've met and worked with many PhD CS students from the lower end of the spectrum who were nothing more than book smart, in the worst way. I guess lower and mid tier schools just don't require real innovative thought out of their graduate students. They couldn't apply their knowledge in any way to solve any problem. Their graduate work was neither innovative in a scientific or practical fashion. They were relegated to business analysis & project management at a major corporation. Yuck.
> DINNER: Grilled salmon, roasted green beans, side salad

Aren't green beans legumes?
Yep. Certain parts of Canada are big on hydroelectric dams.
Best answer here. I used to run traffic to Groupon clones so I know all about their affiliate program.
The secret is building high converting landing pages and a strong backend. Then push the offer out to affiliates who can drive lots of traffic and sit back and wait for signups.
Hey iTunes 10, thanks for using 20% of my CPU even when *not playing anything*
There are actually several groupon clones out there. Some are growing, most are failing to get any traction.
shorter Economist:

Fake fun: ball pits. Real Fun: smoking and drinking at the office, office romances shading into sexual harassment. Why can't boys be boys?

"While imposing ersatz fun on their employees, companies are battling against the real thing. Many force smokers to huddle outside like furtive criminals. Few allow their employees to drink at lunch time, let alone earlier in the day. A regiment of busybodies—from lawyers to human-resources functionaries—is waging war on office romance, particularly between people of different ranks. Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, recently sacked its successful chief executive, Mark Hurd, after a contractor made vague allegations—later quietly settled—of sexual harassment. (Oracle, a rival, quickly snapped up Mr Hurd.)"
I don't care what they call it. Get rid of corn subsidies and let corn syrup-sugar compete against other sweeteners without Uncle Sam having his fingers on the scale.
I Married a Mad Man
Marketing Perl
My college roommates were obsessed with playing Final Destination in Smash without items and spamming cheap attacks to win. Guess that practice is more common than I thought.
Firefox: Adblock, Flashblock, Leechblock, Firefox Sync, Tab Kit, Copy Plain Text.

Edit: oh, also Readability.
I take your point and agree my post doesn't add much to the discussion and understand why it's voted down. But I disagree that any of the points you mention in your first paragraph help the case that Jefferson was not an utter hypocrite when it comes to notions of Liberty or Self-Reliance. And that was the point I was trying to convey.
Building a fast, lightweight REST service with Rails 3
Oh god. I don't think a change of name is what they need, but a change of product.
Not quite a mental calculation, but still in the spirit: One rough estimation I often find myself using is that a US dollar bill is six inches long. Using either folding or flipping, you can approximate most distances in the wave-your-arms-about scale. Be it thinking about a new physical device or ball-parking blinds at Home Depot, I use this all the time.
Google's stuff may be a lot more modular than Windows, but that's not to say that there aren't inter-dependencies. Google's web services all share just a few back-end technologies (MapReduce, GFS, BigTable) that are comparable to an OS kernel, with things like GMail and Docs hanging off like subsystems. But even things like Gmail, Docs, Calender, Search, etc. aren't even close to independent. The GMail people need to collaborate with the Docs people to handle attachments and the Calendar people to handle to-do lists and event invitations and the GTalk and Voice people to implement the voice and video chat and phone calling. The Picasa people need to collaborate with the the Google Earth and Maps people to handle geotagging, and the GWT (probably) people to deal with the web interface. The Android people need to collaborate with everybody who works on the front-ends of all the other products in order to develop mobile versions or integrate them more deeply in to the OS.

Even if the "collaboration" in many of these instances is mostly limited to using an API published by the other group, there's still the need to make sure that those APIs are sufficient to accomplish the task at hand, and obviously Google's UI consistency between products is more than an accident. I think that to the extent that Microsoft's code is more tightly coupled than Google's or that of a desktop Linux distribution, it's mostly their own fault.
Chrome: Polyglot to help me learn hanzi, and ProxySwitchy to bypass the GFW
I follow a paleo diet strictly on weekdays, and for probably 75% of my calories on weekends. I've been doing this for a few months. I'm basically doing this as an experiment - the argument that we should eat what we evolved eating is compelling as a general principle.

I haven't lost or gained weight. My workouts haven't been much worse or much better. I don't notice a difference in energy levels, although I find it harder to ignore hunger now. My major impressions are that a paleo diet is expensive and inconvenient.

This is just my experience. The scientific arguments that I've seen made follow the general pattern of this article: neolithic foods contain chemicals (e.g. lectins, phytates, etc.) that are bad for our bodies.

These kinds of arguments are extremely unconvincing. Digestion and metabolism involves thousands of chemicals and reactions. Trying to piece together how it works is important, but a couple isolated components are not nearly enough with which to make judgements for your health.

Arguments from personal experience are even worse. If you "feel better" on the diet, are you sure it's the diet? Is it the placebo effect? Is it the fact that you are likely eating more fiber and nutrients? Is it a difference in blood sugar levels that you notice? Even worse, is the advice to cut out foods, and then test how those foods make you feel when reintroduced. Any change can easily be interpreted negatively. Also, your body has adjusted to the new foods (which quite likely caused their own painful adjustment period).

Good arguments would make actual health claims, such as
1. The chance that you develop heart disease will fall.
2. The chance that you develop cancer will fall.
3. The diet will prevent some other diseases (e.g. diabetes).
4. Some specific symptoms from some specific diseases will lessen.

Currently, this whole fad seems like a big echo chamber of people seeing exactly what they want to see.
This leaves about $90,000, a lousy $245 a day, for food, clothes, vacations, cable TV, and like that. You can walk into Nordstrom’s on Upper Michigan and spend that in a minute, and for stuff you really need. Really, I don’t know how these people get by; their adaptive skills, economical habits, and modest living style is an inspiration to all of us. Perhaps they are careful to tip no more than 15% at the Sizzler when they splurge.
check out this thread on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-and-disadvantag...
The paleo diet is, I think, 99% bullshit combined with 1% right-for-the-wrong-reasons. That 1% does make it worth a look, though, and I personally have lost about 15 lb in the last twelve weeks by (more or less) following it. My BMI is down from 27.4 to 25.7, and I fully expect to get back into ideal weight range within another month or so.

I went into it extremely skeptical of almost all the claims, but what I did buy was the claim that you feel a lot more full after eating a meal of meat and vegetables than you do after a meal rich in grains and potatoes. So I tried it, and lo and behold I find it quite easy to eat as much as I feel like of all the allowed foods and still consume only ~2000 calories a day.

I also find that I no longer have any craving for anything sweeter than fruit, whereas I used to be able to talk myself into milkshakes and brownies with excessive frequency. I think it's a blood sugar effect -- all the food I eat is low in GI so I'm not getting the blood sugar spikes I used to. This effect might be specific to me personally, though.

The fact that the diet supposedly replicates what our distant ancestors ate is important only in that it at least guarantees that you're eating a subset of foods that are nutritionally sufficient.

Other side effects? None that I've noticed, neither good nor bad. It's possible I've felt a little bit more tired, but I can't be sure... and in any case that's not unexpected if you're maintaining a 500-calorie-a-day deficit.

I should also mention that I'm not quite strict paleo because I eat moderate amounts of dairy -- I'll be damned if I'm giving up milk in my coffee. Speaking of which, I'll be damned if I'm gonna give up coffee, which is also non-paleo. And I'm not one to panic if a salad happens to have croutons, or my fish happens to be crumbed. But breads, potatoes, sugar and beans/legumes are out (I don't buy the logic behind exclusion of beans, but I never really liked beans anyway).

In conclusion, it's not a miracle and it's not nearly as amazing as its most far-out proponents claim, but if you need to lose some weight it's worth trying out for a couple of weeks to see what happens (maybe your body chemistry is different to mine, so it might not work for you). If you don't need to lose weight I wouldn't recommend it, because frankly it's hard to eat enough paleo food to maintain weight while physically active. When I've lost enough I think I'll reintroduce grains at breakfast and maybe lunch but keep the paleo dinners.
The thing about fun is that is only really fun when you aren't supposed to be doing it. Corporate mandated fun rarely is.
I have no links, but I can tell you what I heard from my grandfather. Basically, yes, they took guns to school. Everyone did. It wasn't considered abnormal at all. They never had any problems with school shootings either. I guess if everyone has a gun, you'd end up dead pretty fast if you tried to start anything. After school, they'd go hunting and try to shoot something for dinner that night. If they couldn't get anything, their family might go without dinner that night.

I believe he lived in a fairly rural area though. I assume things were different in the cities.
Consumer Spending & the Economy
>Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information.

it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then.

So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything.

Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness.

I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!
Research in pure CS is likely going to be math oriented. Do you like the algorithms and proofs in your classes? Do you like them well enough to do them for a nice fat chunk of your life? Do you like them well enough to go into significant debt (unless you have bank already)?

More important than that though: Is there a particular subject within CS that you are INCREDIBLY passionate about?
In my case I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do a PhD so I went for a Masters first. After finishing a Masters I didn't feel as though I did "real research". To an extent I feel research given to M.S students is not as interesting and will have to be much smaller in scope due to length of time a M.S student has. It seems to me the only way to really know whether you like research is to be in a PhD program doing research. Although this isn't a great answer because it requires investing a lot of time. Thats my experience at least.
Edit: Site's back up.
"Let's try it and see what happens" really is the core of science, all the complicated shit is just figuring out the most useful "it" to try and being extra certain that the "what happens" really was due to the "it" that you tried.

Foregoing science would mean deciding whether it works based on what your astrologer or the most recent "expert" says, rather than whether it can actually be observed (apparently) working.
You are mixing two variables here. If you get 100 calories from orange juice vs. coca-cola, then yes, they are the same. If both John and Dave are receiving enough protein prior to the coca cola/whey protein, then they will burn the same amount of calories as well.
How about Jefferson's own ideals?
Not true for me. I'll often have a beer or two at lunch. The company itself has developed a high-end beer day tradition every week. I've noticed very little difference in my productivity... except that I'm a bit more relaxed and probably able to focus slightly better.

Of course there is a line to walk between a couple of beer and the three martini lunch.
I did an MS in CS with a thesis. I was not at a top tier university. I would recommend going on for the MS at least. It was fabulous in its own right, well worth the delay entering the workforce.

It was also a great way to figure out that I did basically enjoy CS research, but I'd need to feel a real burning sensation to spend the time on the PhD and get hired at the Google lab. Tenure-track seems to be for masochists only.

After the MS I took a fairly good job, then 18 months later moved on to a top tier company. You can probably go right to a top-tier after CMU and a master's.
Emacs is suggesting improvements? I want that extension!
This is not true. There is plenty of PhD work being done in things like AI, distributed systems, databases, programming language design, programming language runtime design, and many other topics that are not mathematical.

There is plenty of work involving math, if you like, but there is a lot more to computer science than linked lists and finding strings inside strings.
I've also started to notice "organic evaporated cane juice" appearing on ingredients lists.

Nice try. So that would be... sugar?
at the very least, it seems like it should be an option. I mean, sure, you are right that some people are probably depending on their zipcar, and would prefer to keep getting charged (and have it go to collections) than to have the account canceled... however, how long will zipcar keep the account active, really? I mean, collections on that sort of thing have got to have way less than a 50% success rate, so if they leave your account active for another month (I'm assuming zipcar is pre-paid) they aren't getting paid much for that last month. It might be better from their perspective to take an approach more like mine.

However, I think for most of us, the zipcar account isn't such a huge deal (I can always hit avis, enterprise, or get a cab if it's an emergency and I don't have friends.) I know, personally, that I'd really prefer to have my zipcar account (if I had one) terminate upon non-payment, rather than hit collections.

This is an issue I've thought a lot about; right now, my policy is to warn and then shut you off, in fact, one of the reasons I use paypal is that I can only ask you for money. I can't pull. This makes billing mistakes on my part much less of a big deal. For most of my customers, I think this is probably the right thing. But yeah, it probably would be good to allow them a choice.

But yeah, for many of us, especially for pre-paid services, the assumption is that if I stop paying you, you will just cut me off. considering how many subscriptions I have (and the difficulty of canceling some of them) I think that's quite reasonable. Hell, I periodically change my credit card number to make sure all the 'package deals' I get when I sign up for stuff I actually want from someone shady, like, say, a bank, get canceled.
You would not find it insane if you had spent a lot of time in the southern USA.

For a "guns-in-school" story just Google "University of Virginia John Davis shot".

The TL;DR; is that on November 12, 1840, a rowdy bunch of college students were drinking and shooting (as usual), and rode up to a professor and shot him. While tragic, this eventually paved the way for really, really entertaining college admissions tours that often feature a full re-enactment of the scene.
How to win $50k in 11days, 1hour, 20min & 37seconds?
Our company has entered the GE competition and we are ranked 7th out of 2,224 teams globally (the top 3 teams are questionable).

We need about 5k+ more votes in 11days, 1hour and 20min (~1vote/3.168min) to win $50k seed cap. Currently, we have 2,018 votes (2.1%), but clearly these are not enough. We set up a dinky page (www.highsmithenergy.com/vote) to help people of my parents age through the voting process, but something a bit more is necessary.

Technically, we can't pay anyone for voting, but we can pay (if we win) for consulting us on how to get these 5k votes... and we'll need some engineers to help us build out if we do.

Thought of no better community to turn to. All and any ideas encouraged here or infohighsmithenergycom.
As a current college student sending out a lot of cover letters and resumes at present, I have to say I sure wish that the resume was obsolete.

I definitely try to supplant it personally with my online branding / presence, but right now people still use resumes a lot for some positions. I have enough good, sexy things to put on a resume that I don't mind, per se, but...

What I have 150% observed from my painful process at the moment is just how very, very ripe for disruption this whole horrible 'job application' process is. So many terrible software solution providers out there, with so little innovation or competition apparently going on to make their products more usable, less painful, etc. I can't imagine that they are doing so much to help make things simple for HR on the back-end, either.

If this was a subject that I was really passionate about, I'd definitely be trying to start a start-up there... would probably help if I could code half decently, too, but the point remains valid. I don't find it sexy, but it's a big opportunity. Happy to vent in more detail and help someone who is inspired though.
The PR/Marketing types have not gotten the memo that the internet is a game changer with respect to such age-old trickery as rebranding the same product under a different name. If the FDA approves the name change you can be sure there will be whole websites announcing that corn sugar=HFCS thus defeating their goal. When someone searches google for corn sugar it will say "did you mean High Fructose Corn Syrup?"

In Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" he goes into why HFCS might be worse than table sugar because fructose is processed in the liver. (HFCS is 55/42 fructose/glucose but sugar is 50/50). But I agree that sugar is bad too.

Finally, the reason HFCS was invented was because of the corn subsidy and sugar (cane and beet) tariffs created the market conditions. Drop the subsidies and tariffs and sugar will take back a lot of the market share.
Why Ergonomic Work Space is Important to Maintain Your Productivity
Sucrose from sugar cane is more expensive than sucrose from beets, so the manufacturer is making sure people know it was made from sugar cane rather than beets.
It's unfortunate that editorializing is so strongly discouraged here that people shy away from even briefly summarizing the topic of the link.

For those whose curiosity has been piqued by the title: the article is about exactly what adambyrtek's comment suggests - nothing more, nothing less. Cooking bacon. That's it.
Depending on latency, I'd move all my storage to the cloud (ok, realistically I'd have a SSD for a local cache & apps, but you get the idea).

I never, ever want to worry about where my GB's of photos and music and videos are again.

I'd run my own black-box recorder in my car, which would auto-sync all my trip data - including video - when I got home.

I'd run CCTV around the house and stream the data 24/7, at high res so faces would actually be recognizable in the footage.

I'd expect the strain monitors in every joint in my house to be recording their levels with the cloud based application which will alert me anytime any reach unacceptable thresholds.

I'd except my radar-based climate control system to be able to tell me the air temperature and wind velocity of every single cubic inch of air in my house over the past week, and compare with trends over the last year by looking at my cloud stored data.

Finally, I'd be able to prove to my wife that yes, I really did say I'd be late home from work tonight by playing back that "conversation" we had where I yelled "Oh yeah, I'll be late home next week" when I was walking out the door a week ago :)
Make a persuasive video pitch, add geekery, put it on Reddit. Flawless Victory.

Make the check for my fee payable to...

n.b., do be careful or someone like 4chan might get wind of it and decide to hack / game the system in order to have something strange win to prove their ability to manipulate the online attention economy.
Absolutely brilliant. Read this.
Yeah, the main good thing I see coming out of the backlash against HFCS alone is that it might reduce the inertia of getting rid of corn subsidies, which are helping cause sugar's blight on Americans' diet.
Plus it's easier than going after ethanol.