skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That doesn't make any sense. According to the U.S. Gov't, Freedom of Speech is not an absolute right (review the deeply discussed Supreme Court cases on the matter, often summed up with the question: is it a right to yell fire in a crowded theater?). So if Freedom of Speech were an absolute value when applied to an opinion, it would then be absolutely acceptable for someone to yell fire in a crowded theater if they struck a match. Factually, there is a fire. But it doesn't make it safe to yell fire when the fire is of no grave danger.

Perhaps according to Anonymous, Freedom of Speech is an absolute right. Perhaps Anonymous would disseminate nuclear launch codes. The probability that Anonymous would ever be in a position to do so or to cause such an event to occur is effectively zero, for the explicit reason that the gov't hides those launch codes instead of just asking the nice people out there like Anonymous to not acquire them or disseminate them.

Now imagine if you know of a fact that the gov't is doing something highly illegal, such as grinding up old people, processing them into green wafers and feeding the masses with them. It's not your opinion that this is illegal, it is a fact. It is also a gov't secret. If freedom of speech were only to be applied to your opinion, you would not be legally allowed to divulge the information.

By no rational measure could freedom of speech be applied only to opinions.
Exactly, that's what I was saying. The only reason I'd want longer videos is so I can watch stuff which I legally can't, so the fact that they're allowing it now is not a great source of excitement to me.
As a former-25-year-old-man I'm offended by your sexism.
Thanks for the feedback. We have made edits to our post.

We'd like to apologize for any perceived age bias in the blog post. We merely wanted to provide information about the team that potential applicants would be working with. Our goal is to hire the best and brightest and obviously potential applicant's age is irrelevant and will not be considered in any way.
The whole quantum physics is just in such a dubious, uncertain stage. We don't know for sure whether its models are "real" or merely a useful tool.
On the Cruelty Of Really Teaching Computer Science[pdf]
voters do not make voting decisions based primarily on issues. In fact, there's some evidence that the causation often goes the other way.

Interesting, I'd like to read more about this. Can you point me to something (less than book-length) that would tell me more?

(I'm familiar with The Myth of the Rational Voter thing, but it sounds like you're going even a step farther than that)
This is fantastic. They've found a sweetspot between going no limit (Google Video) and YouTube as it was before.

I look forward to seeing my StarCraft 2 matches in one session. :)
That's an awesome idea, using a kind of market to decide the price/profit. You need some kind of reputation to make this work, you don't want any fool bidding and then not doing the work.
Oracle (or IBM) is profitable enough that they don't have to monetize Java at all.
I completely agree with you about nuclear power. I don't understand why people fail to realize the vast improvements in safety made over the last 20 or 30 years. I won't claim they're 100%, but I would live next to a reactor without any fear.

The GMO crops issue is a little more complicated though. The human body is extraordinarily complex and small changes in our environment and diet can create totally unexpected and undetectable chain reactions with results appearing decades later. I put enough effort into my health and well-being that I try to avoid anything that could negatively affect my body.

GMO crops might be worth the chances in 3rd world countries where starvation is an ever-present reality, but they will not be seen on my plate any time in the near future.
IT jobs will be where the skill is. Countries should enforce their education systems in order to avoid losing/forgetting their capabilites.
Saying that I have some sort of insecurity is an ad hominem attack. Just kidding!

No one is saying you can't admire a guy who free solos. What you did say was "Why not just tie yourself to a rope and have your Mommy pull you up?" Followed by "I remember seeing footage of some French guy climbing a rockface ... with no rope, no pitons, nothing. That is climbing." That seems an awful lot like redefining climbing to not include trad climbing (climbing with this sort of protection), and also seems a lot like judging whether people climb with risk or not.

You aren't getting down-voted because you expressed a controversial opinion, it's because you expressed it in a way that appeared to be rude. If you merely said:

>I don't get it, how is this different from a C-clamp?

>I remember seeing footage of some French guy climbing a rockface a thousand feet up swinging like a monkey, with no rope, no pitons, nothing. I admire that.

No one would have down-voted you. They would have explained that it is not a C-clamp (it's dynamic so it gets tighter when you fall) and that free soloing is certainly an exciting form of climbing.

Edit:

>But to your point, you actually could make an escalator the width of a gymnastic balance beam and with bumps, so that it would have adventure and risk, for those who seek that from escalator climbing.

Yes, they certainly could do that, and it may very well be a very exciting new sport. But it would not be rock climbing. It wouldn't even be similar to rock climbing. The most similar thing I can think of is perhaps via feratta climbing.

Ultimately you brought up the question of "Why do anything?" Why should you go outside when you can just watch TV? Why do you go to school when you can just lay in bed all day?
I would be too if I had sold for that much...

Keep creating!
A stackoverflow like "proposals and voting" might work. Perhaps you'd want to make the proposing anonymous to get a vote based on the content of the proposal rather than on the person who proposed it.
This seems like an appropriate thread in which to mention Glenn Vandenburg's presentation on "Real Software Engineering". He's made this presentation several times over the last year; I happened to see it at the Ruby Hoedown in Nashville this summer. Highly recommended.

"Software engineering as it’s taught in universities simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn’t produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn’t produce systems at all.

That’s odd, because in every other field, the term ‘engineering’ is reserved for methods that work."

http://confreaks.net/videos/282-lsrc2010-real-software-engin...
For the sanity of anyone who may want to read this, link to the print version: http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=35058&...
Find something about your work that you're passionate about, rather than the work itself (you could call it being indirectly passionate). For me, I'm passionate about creating useful things. So long as I'm creating useful things at work I'm passionate about it.
One nice and free dataset which you can play with is the BestBuy open data. You can download the full catalog of products from BestBuy in JSON and XML format. http://developer.bestbuy.com Simply register for a key and you'll have access to the data.
NYT writer pats own back, backhands hubbie, agonizes over bad marriage. Enjoy
What does it mean to be a "scientist" in the US? Is it strictly a person in academia who is in the pursuit of research grants?

Does it also include private sector researchers and engineers?
It's a trap!

(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Here is a fundamental thing I've learnt about startups that is hugely important and massively over looked:

You need to be passionate about building a company, not an idea.

Because you will change the idea, and if your passion isn't in running a company you're dead. The groupon guy doesn't care about group buying, he cares about building a company with x culture etc.
What a pathetic article. I guess even the tech press doesn't recognize the difference between generic "IT" and upper-level developer/software engineer.

Sure IT support is being outsourced. When the employee doesn't need to actually know anything you might as well pay them as little as possible.
I got a package notification email, and was psyched until I realized it was the 24-pack of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese that I ordered from Amazon :(
I've known people who schedule email to go to co-workers late at night (but written during daytime) to make it look like they were up all night working.
Wow. No password is safe. If you have an 8 character password using 8 characters from a selection of 80 with a known salt the password would take just 16.5 hours to crack.

Much less if you assume a smaller character pool as most people don't use shift characters.
How about the opposite?

A company I turned down a job offer for has been contacting me every about every three months asking if I had changed my mind.

I just recently told them to please stop contacting me and I'll contact them if I change my mind in the future.

It felt a bit assholish asking them to stop contacting me like that, but I can't decide if that's just my personality having difficulty with it or if there was a better of way of telling them "No".
It's centered around how the planet moves (which is what an astronomer can see) instead of around how it's composed (for which we need to send a probe).

What does its composition matter? That won't help you distinguish anything. Indeed, to first approximation there are only three types of stuff in the solar system: "gas" (meaning hydrogen+helium), "ice" (meaning water, methane and ammonia) and "rock" (meaning... well, rock and metals). And there's planets made out of each; Jupiter and Saturn are gas, Neptune and Uranus are ice, and the inner planets are rock.

As for the "cleared the orbit" bit, check out wikipedia's article on "Dwarf planet"; talk of clearing the orbit is just shorthand for a genuine mathematically-defined criterion which Jupiter fits and Pluto doesn't.
Single readable page: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.computerworld.com...
I applied using that prompt (it showed up in the new tab window), and I haven't received one yet. UPS, and any other shipping company would have already stopped (I am on the east coast), so I am hoping I might get one tomorrow.

This would be the best christmas present!
But the big question is, can uploaders stitch together all those existing "1/9," "2/9" etc. videos so we can put that whole era behind us?

So was the original pre-June 11-minute limit a product of the MPEG LA rules where videos "12 minutes in length" (used to) have special rules and royalties? Or was that coincidental?
There are a lot of problems that can happen.

For instance if you complain about hygiene and the person has a medical condition that causes them to stink (don't laugh, this happens), you can be sued for discrimination. If the person had a thick accent and you didn't want to hire because of the communication issue (I've seen candidates rejected for this reason), they could decide that you're racist and sue you. If the candidate is older and you say a wide variety of things (that they are over-qualified, their skillset is dated, poor cultural fit, etc), you can be sued for ageism.

The upshot is that it is virtually impossible to figure out what comment will hit a hot button. And there are a lot of legitimate reasons to reject someone, which aren't illegal, that they can take as evidence of discrimination.

Even if it is an open and shut case that you're going to win, they can still make it cost a substantial amount of lawyer's fees. And you, personally, don't benefit from telling them this, so there is no percentage in going there.

Or so every HR department in the USA will tell you. And every lawyer they get advice from.
bit offtopic here: i have most of the videos from arsdigita(aduni) courses - all in .rm format. Would anyone know of optimized conversion to youtube compatible format?

uploading these lectures (with attribution) is something i would like to do.
Sure, those reasons are pretty obvious. If you want to familiarize yourself with the main reasons, check out the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Q&A/FAQ page at http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html

If you haven't read it, I really recommend spending a few minutes reading it. It doesn't just apply to the hiring process and there are cases for drug use, religious accommodations, acting on genetic information (really), etc.

I can certainly understand why people would prefer to send a generic rejection letter rather than list reasons, any of which may or may not trigger some clause in one of the relevant laws.
There's also a distrust of the companies that would run such operations, seeing as the Republican party is often anti-regulation/oversight. A bad combination when it comes to nuclear power, imho.
Good penmanship, by the way (date: 1988). Do young kids today get to practice their handwriting much?

Good stuff so far:
"By evoking the need for deep conceptual hierarchies, the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history."
"I think it's a big mistake to see science as deriving, almost mechanically from observations [...] scientists are affected by non-scientific aspects of their societies, i.e. traditions, commonly held beliefs, and politics"

It's neither a mistake nor inaccurate. Once you've observed, measured, calculated and concluded, you can involve all form of non-empirical disciplines you want, after all we are morally and emotionally bound beings. One thing we can't do however is hide from the truth the data has spoken. Those are usually very profound paradigm shifts, a crossroad between being comfortable with what was revealed, or choosing to be more at peace with one's oblivion and folkloric truths.

"Some questions, e.g.: should we perform stem cell research on embryos, should we eradicate mosquitoes, should we try to affect human sexual patterns leading to AIDS, etc. are scientific [...] i.e. they cannot be approached by handling equations alone in an objective matter."

If the approach can't be objective then the question isn't scientific. Granted, those are science related questions and have a dose of moral and ethics involved, but that's not what science is about.

Science isn't there to answer what you should or shouldn't do. It's there to provide you with facts on what would happen if you do it. Change your question should we eradicate mosquitoes into what would happen if we eradicate mosquitoes and we can talk science. Lets take out the tools, dust off old books, go in the nature, observe, measure, extrapolate, calculate and conclude. Then based on those conclusions we'll look at each other and our moral fiber will tell us, nah we should probably let the little scoundrel be.
Oh god, that's the worst deal of all time. A hundred bucks for the possibility that a rejected job candidate will say something nice about the rejection process? Put that hundred bucks into making your product better so people will talk about that, or improving working conditions for your existing staff so they'll talk about that, or hiring a PR company, or any of a million things before a lawsuit.
"It’s highly doubtful something like Rage HD is even possible on any Android device today." - Can someone explain why an iPhone is more powerful than "any Android" device?
Definitely agreed. On the other hand, the act of programming itself is not quite Computer Science either, it's rather a feature you get as a result of it. It's more like applied math in my opinion.

Dijkstra said: "Computer Science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes."
seems complicated enough

is there an annual fee?
Digitally resurrect dead actors?
Zuckerberg wasn't particularly passionate about Facebook in the early days. Now he seems to be on a possibly life-long mission.

There's no substitute for discipline and hard work, not even passion (though it may make it less painful).
How do you improve your focus?
The former is full of grounded-folks who went back for school to get MCSE/Oracle MCSE and dutifully do their work everyday and the latter is full of self-entitled jerks who think their CRUD applications are somehow original because it's in Python/Ruby?

Outsourcing is and has been a reality. Instead of complaining injustices, the market is always right; you just have to adapt.
are you on High and Forest?!
And screwed once again, this time by Target. Dammit. I don't really give a crap about that bookcase at this point.
absolutely. time and dignity are valuable commodities.
Perhaps we've touched on a fundamental difficulty here: maybe good economic policy isn't rooted in consequence or empirical datum, but instead morality.

For example, the proposition of a single-payer healthcare system essentially reduces to the question, ``should my neighbor be able to walk up to my house and demand a percentage of my income at gunpoint to pay for his healthcare expenses?''

Maybe the adoption of such a policy will deliver positive, scientifically-observable results for society-at-large, but (as far as I'm concerned) such a policy isn't moral in the first place and therefore shouldn't be adopted.

Maybe targeting only scientific validity in politics is a very misleading oversimplification.
No one said you can't use it as your "coolness test". If you expressed the opinion that free soloing is cooler than what this guy did, you wouldn't be getting down-voted. It's the fact that [seemingly] couldn't understand why anyone would want to do any sort of climbing that is in-between riding an escalator and free soloing mountains AND the fact that you did so in a subjectively rude manner.
I didn't attack ;) Just saying their age might play a part in their comments.
I don't think iPhone hardware is more powerful than Android hardware, but games support in the Android SDK is lacking.

Currently you need to use their weird NDK and wrap it with Java code. For example, there's no way to play audio without using the Java SDK.

Many of these problems have been fixed in Android 2.3, but it takes ages for updates to ship out to the majority of devices (a good chunk of devices still don't have Froyo).
Yet it is still very hard to find and hire good developers and system admins.
Yea I don't think lines would work ;) If bloatware was bad, just imagine. Short/Long contributions refers to the short term and long term implications of contributions from software developers. Company produces product to solve problem. Product contributions in no particular order or coherence: 1) Long term smart growth-focused architecture 2) Long term product strategy 3) Short term code quality (bug count) 4) Short term, feature suggestion & consumption ratio 5) Customer vs. Company/Product satisfaction rating to solve problem 6) Software's Resource Utilization 7) Customer speed-to-solution average, etc, etc.
negative effects of the minimum wage in practice are quite small

True, but I don't know of any economist that disputes it. Yet when approached from a political angle, minimum wage is sold as an unalloyed good to help the most disadvantaged. The size of the effect might not be the biggest, but the degree to which it is contradicted in political discourse is extreme.

I have seen no evidence in the last decade that Democrats are particularly opposed to free trade deals per se

Well, Clinton was of course no worse than GWB, and possibly much better. But if you step outside the politicians themselves and look at the citizens, well, I hear a lot of chatter about ideas like "fair trade", which is simply stupid.

In the broader field, which classical Keynesianism was thoroughly discredited by the 70s, I have to admit that more recent refinements aren't so easily discarded (although I do disagree with them). Even so, the Democrats have been trying to pretend that these ideas are all there is, spouting multiplier values as if there's any evidence behind them, and not acknowledging any of the market-based arguments (viz Austrians and Chicagoans) that would explain both the crisis itself, as well as the failure of the government policies. Democrats are to the economic crisis as Republicans are to climate change.
Agree, so very strongly. Got about 4 weeks into a client project with Drupal and scrapped it in favor of Django. I've been continually mystified every time I see folks singing its praises, but you bring up a fair point, it provides a lot of out of the box functionality. Extending or changing that functionality just turns out to be a nightmare.
Translation :

We are breaking up, except this time, it's not me, it's you

-Kicking ass and taking names
I think you need to re-read the lawsuit.
Re: honking. Don't travel to SE Asia; you'll be horrified.
It's an E72
It's specially insulting when said "engineers" build things like Sharepoint...
In graduate school, I was once tangentially involved in a group conversation regarding whether or not another grad student was a dick. A few things were mentioned, and then one of my coworkers said, "Yeah, and he's a republican". Everyone nodded, the question having been resolved to their satisfaction. I still remember thinking how ugly that sounded. How out of keeping it was with the spirit of inquiry that should guide science.

This wasn't an isolated incident. I've watched political debates with coworkers where I was shocked at the number of emotional outbursts and lack of charity for the other side. I've had a student complain to me that they couldn't stand an otherwise good biology professor because of their snide political comments about conservatives. Do you think that republican student was more or less likely to go into biology as a result of hearing Bush jokes once a week?

I'm one of the 32% that are independent, and grant that the republican party is part of the problem. Having taught evolution, it's completely bizarre to see republican candidates attempting to weasel around questions about its validity every election cycle. It's equally bizarre to listen to my republican parents' evidence-free opinions on climate change and science funding. But the people here who are trying to pretend that science doesn't occur within a social context and that the republicans are 100% responsible for this problem are just as baffling to me.
dude, there are many people that are doing things that are not web related, or simple crud, or a simple iphone app and are more interesting and complex.

Please. Your assumption that if you are a software engineer you are probably just doing some CRUD app, is flatly wrong.

And I agree with Locke1689, anybody that equals IT with actual software (or system) engineering is ignorant of the space.
Let's not go into healthcare itself. But I think you've touched on another important matter that I tried to introduce elsewhere, but hasn't been caught up yet.

I think that we must be careful to keep science and policy separated. Even if we are to grant that a certain point of science is correct, it does not necessarily lead to acceptance of a point of policy.

For example, it is well known that at the margin, minimum wage laws increase unemployment amongst the least skilled workers. But it doesn't automatically follow that such a policy should not be followed; perhaps with a proper safety net, those bottom-rung folks can be motivated into improving themselves. Likewise (and even more controversially), even if climate change is as serious as some claim, it does not necessarily follow that all efforts must be pursued: it may be that the cost of fixing it exceeds the cost of the expected damage.

It's just too easy to say "we have this problem, thus we must do something". The values that drive our actions are different from the science that allows us to understand the world.
I like the 'monospace' font that comes with ubuntu by default. Not sure what's the actual font name there.

I tried many fonts on Windows and on Linux, but at the end none of them really satisfied me.

Then I realized the default Ubuntu monospace font really looks good. I don't have any complaint about it.
Be passionate about creating value.