skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without going into too much detail, my life kinda screwed up in my late teens (mostly by me), and I had few qualifications and wasn't really going anywhere.

I didn't have any degree and after a miserable period on the dole started work at a data entry place. I'd been interested in programming since my first ZX81, and started finding things I could do to optimise the data entry process. Naturally, the company loved this and I got promoted. I used that as a portfolio for my next, slightly more developer-like job, and then wrote their website and e-survey stuff for them and used that as a portfolio for the next job and so on. I had a very clear plan - work for a proper software dev company one day.

11 years later and I'm the best paid dev in the building, working for a large multi-national, with a fancy title and everything. And have been for a few years now.

You don't need to have a degree to prove you can do something, you just need to do it. Even with a degree it's all about drive and determination. So - if you want to get into programming then write plenty of your own stuff, or get into lots of Open Source, then get a list of firms in your area and ring them to try to get them to look at what you've done.

When I interview people these days, that's what I'm looking for - enthusiasm about their craft, not necessarily their credentials. We've hired some people with top class degrees who unfortunately think the learning stops there.

Think of a degree just as a short cut to an interview, if you happen to already have the degree. Oh - but stay away from big firms, you'll never get past a Human Resources department with enthusiasm alone.

The irony is that I'm now getting sick of being employed to write endless enterprise drivel, and now my ambitions are to do with starting out for myself. Hence reading lots of HN.
This is like saying "if you're talking about a CTR implementation tht forgets to make nonces unique, that's a buggy CTR implementation"

No, it isn't. The CTR counter is part of the implementation; the nonce is part of how CTR is used by the application.

(the counterspace always starts at zero, but that doesn't mean decryption or encryption does

If you're not encrypting starting from a counter of zero, you're not using a stream cipher. (Most likely, you're using a block storage cipher.)

And: that's not all I'm talking about.

Ok. I was just guessing, because you're claiming that an impossible bug exists and refusing to give any details.
The website doesn't say anything about how much you would like living in a particular country, which is entirely subjective. It just compares stats.
You're drawing irrelevant distinctions here. If it was the case that you'd have to code your own entire implementation of the CTR mode of operation to have these bugs, I'd see your point.
My favorite quote:

> Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman.
It's been called many things. Security people have self-esteem problems, so if they see something being praised, they start convulsing at the sight of this injustice and must immediately blog about it and argue on forums.

As someone who has actually read the code, my opinion is that yes it was special, but not because it was brilliant. It took a lot of resources, and although there was clearly a relatively high degree of skill involved for at least parts of it (finding 0days), there were not really any new techniques. So, I personally find it impressive because of the sheer amount of work that went into it.

I think it is more the principal of it that is noteworthy - if someone tried to make a movie plot about that a few years ago, we would have scoffed.

The reason that it was obviously a nation-state is because the number of people that worked on it, the amount of time they spent on it, and what the group would stand to gain (nothing), would not have been funded by any other entity. I won't go so far as to say it would be impossible to do by someone else, but that is improbable and really would not make much sense at all. Combine that with various external clues, and it is really obvious.
You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them. Those studies are considered a bit retro in the scientific community, for some reason.
Show HN: Arduino synthesiser using DS touch screen - Documentation & demo
If you ask me, "should developers avoid writing web applications in C because it's virtually always unnecessary and practically guarantees memory corruption vulnerabilities", what do you think my answer is going to be?
"So perhaps, the comparison should not be made country-wide."
I think this is key. Even when talking about small countries like Israel there is much inconsistency regarding the expected quality of living (compare Tel Aviv/Ha'sharon with most places in the Negev, even Be'er Sheva).

By the way, I know I'm being a little cynic here, but "experience 14.8% more of a class divide" is not necessarily a bad thing for an individual. I would argue that if you're on the better end of this divide and won't experience its implosion (i.e. people revolting) in your lifetime that it may be a plus.
The money in mobile apps sold through the app store to the general public, might be subsiding. But I believe the money in industry specific, in house apps designed to run on tablet like devices of various sizes is just starting to pick up.
Financial reporting for large multinational enterprises is decidedly non-trivial - of course each individual part is fairly simple when looked at in isolation but the complexities soon multiply up - especially as data is highly dimensional (at least 12 dimensions are common) and also hierarchical.
I don't use Facebook because I think it's social circle-jerking occupied by a majority of people who are only interested in inflating their own perceived image.
I'm an American in the UK, I'm not a fan of GBK. I much prefer Byron (small London chain), which I would consider a good burger by any standards.
Apple demoed the iPad with a set of apps specifically designed to take advantage of the larger area. Apple also released the necessary tools, allowing developers to follow their lead, long before the iPad was available. I don't believe that the aspect ratio would have matter so much as long as Apple set the proper example.

That said, some developers still haven't built interfaces taking advantage of the larger area, despite the different aspect ratio. One popular jailbreak app cough Cydia cough still loads an apologetic PSA almost 9 months after the release
5 Upcoming Web Apps for Designers
InspiredMag invited me to share with you the latest up-and-coming design startups. What follows is an overview of what I expect to be the top 5 design sites that will launch in 2011. If you want to be the first to try out these cutting-edge new websites be sure to read on…
Kinect developer Johnny Chung Lee leaves Microsoft for Google
> However, he also said that there was very little chance that one person could have put the entire attack together alone.

I think to make his case that more than one person was involved, he left some important points off his list: 1) finding four 0-days to exploit and gain escalation of privilege on XP/2000 and Vista/7 machines (how long would it take you to do that?) and 2) Knowing HOW to program the PLCs so that they screw up the centrifuges without being detected.

Sorry if your comment was entirely a joke. Too early; not sure.
Spice Mi-310 Andriod Mobile Price and Specifications | TECHGADGETSITE
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?
Elusive Forger, Giving but Never Stealing
This is basically spam. The post has very little information. In fact,you have to scroll past the ads to even see any content. Sure, some sites will hit you with a popup ad before you can view content, but this is okay if the article has value (and a word count which is greater than the total word count of the ads on the site.) This site has clearly been built for ads and probably driven by very cheap article writers.

Edit: I don't see why people spam hacker news. There's a relatively small segment of people on the web who are responsible for clicking on ads and buying from affiliates. Hacker news is not that sort of audience.

Edit: Edit: Yep, user has 1 Karma and one submission (guess which one?) No comments.
No, Facebook is what happens when you make something easy for Joe Public to grok.
On the impossibility of all form of exile, particularly literary
Aardvark's Ventilla: Start your company before you decide what product to build
it's fun that this answer is below the fold.
I wouldn't keep it.
Top small-scale renewable energy innovators
Preview: http://live.stagas.com
You had me at Hadoop.
I find ironic that the news page is scattered of "ads by google".
Launched: PlayNice.ly Bug Tracker API
So you want to work with us?
It can be done with nearly that exact degree. My B.A. is in Latin, but I was able to leverage that plus a good interview into an internship at a good company. I took that experience and got a job at a small software company as well as a spot in an M.S. program, which then led to better opportunities. It hasn't been a straight road, but it's gotten me where I wanted to go. I think your friend can do the same.
Make it free or fail (a real world HN test - week 1)
Where should web discussions live?
Satire: Ruby Rockstar for Hire Coverletter *fist pump*
Fail. This website doesn't calculate it just presents stats and it doesn't ask me about my life so it's not even a valid comparison.

More importantly it mutilates statistics. The unemployment rate for western countries is very different to the unemployment rate for 3rd world countries. Can't really compare them.
According to press release

“We’re working with AWS to provide an Elastic Beanstalk Ruby on Rails container that leverages the optimized Engine Yard stack which has been battle-tested by thousands of high-growth companies.” John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amaz...
As Zero mentioned, Galaxy Tab's count in Google's numbers. Google publishes numbers for devices that access the market, which is essentially every non-intentionally crippled device. They don't give the number just for smartphones, it just happens that it was overwhelmingly smartphones. The Nook might run Android, but unless the user roots it (which a vanishingly small percentage do) it doesn't operate as a normal Android device.
Huh - interesting. As far as we know we haven't received any bug reports from the Twitter team (although we have reached out to them - and they do have our contact information) regarding this issue. Additionally I don't think we've received any reports regarding selector performance regressions in 1.4.4. I'd definitely be curious to see what the issue is (and fix it for 1.5) but at least right now there isn't a whole lot for us to do (other than continuing to try and contact Twitter).
I send all my mail through raw, unadulterated, hand-typed SMTP. I compute mime attachments on my TI-85 and type them in on my clicky keyboard. I've taught my parrot to simulate the first 8 seconds of a fax machine handshake, and yet, without facebook, nobody would know!
People just aren't taking the right kind of classes. A math class which is a higher level than anything you have taken before is sure to teach you something. A writing class which is higher level than anything you have taken before (not as easy to measure, this is more due to a better quality instructor) is sure to teach you something. Along with a lot of writing is usually paired up with a lot of reading, which is also sure to teach you something. Outside of those areas...

It's the three R's; readin, ritten, rithmatic. Unfortunately, a lot of programs don't require those areas. People who aren't heavy into those areas in college should probably be going to a vocational school rather than a university.
Ditto. I have tried four or five and iSSH seems the best (but substantially better on the iPad then on the iPhone)
If you didn't know, that does not have some updates that pg makes on the fly. I have been managing hackerstreet.in, which uses that source, and I can tell it is outdated. Please actually see links before you are linking.
I don't have a degree, yet, I never found it an issue to get a job. How? I had my name all over the internet, patches, bug reports and quality code.

In most cases, that weighted a lot more than any degree I could've achieved.
Just for fun I integrated this morning Angular in my "work in progress" wiki.

http://simpliwiki.com/sandbox/AngularHello

Impressive!
MUMBLE - La sicurezza di Android - 2
Come potete leggere nel mio precedente post uno dei maggiori problemi che gli smartphone Android devono fronteggiare è la frammentazione delle versioni del sistema operativo.

Giusto per riassumere, la situazione del versioning di Android è la seguente...
Another fallacy: depression is caused by an external stimulus, some sort of abuse. Abuse and depression are common enough on their own to show that they aren't related. This is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most people to getting treatment for depression: they see it as admitting their life sucks, but know that they don't have terrible lives, so they live with the symptoms because, never understanding why they feel like crap all the time.
Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert?
Yahoo Turns To The Enemy To Simplify User Registration
The app is probably tuned to developed countries.

Within developed countries, the marginal utility of extra health care is close to zero. Spending more on health care is as likely to harm you as it is to help you. Since the benefit of extra spending is nil, it makes sense to focus on the cost.

As you note, once you get into the regime where marginal utility of extra health care is positive, this method of comparison makes little sense.
Judea Pearl disagrees.
I suspect that this website doesn't do caching on its comparison pages.
Get your friends to like our FB page & Get $100 
Next month, we're launching a game-based platform for deeply discounted deals. Ask your friends to like our FB (facebook.com/salesvote), of course only if they really do, and win $100 in 7 days. More info at salesvote.com or fb.com/salesvote
+1, iSSH on the iPhone.
To put into perspective check this fragment of interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE7k0_9k0VA#t=18m25s) by Peter Norvig. What he is saying is there is a trade-off between using open space vs. cubicles.
ohh, win, not get!
The author's rant is mostly crotchety nonsense, but it was worth it for the link [1] to Harry Plinkett's hilarious and spot-on critique of Star Wars Episode III.

[1] http://www.redlettermedia.com/plinkett.html
Is there a "cloud" environment in which designing your application like this isn't necessary?
"More men are not needed in childcare/teaching because women are naturally - from birth - better at the type of empathy and communication that is required in those fields."

If you empathise with someone, it is harder to cause them discomfort because it causes you discomfort also. Thus, someone with lesser empathy would be better at discipling children.

"I disagree that men are better at disciplining children than women are."

You can't have it both ways, Sarkozy. Which is it?
There is not actually survivorship bias in the DJIA, because changes to its composition are not retroactive. If an index member goes bankrupt, it will absolutely bring the index level down substantially.
Apparently they look like http://dhtml5.com/

shrug
How to Hire a Great Marketing Person
You've grown accustom to putting a nozzle into a fuel tank to replenish your car's energy store. That works best for internal combustion engines, but it's completely arbitrary to force electric cars to fit into that model. Battery swapping stations are the answer, at least for now. Heavy things are lifted and moved all the time with machinery like forklifts. Because a human can't lift them is not a reason to say it's impossible.
At a fundamental level people end up putting jQuery through a huge number of unknown situations (millions of users on even more web sites in even weirder browsers). While we certainly strive to have as few issues pop up as possible they seem to be an inevitability.

That being said we aren't satisfied with the number of regressions that currently pop up and have instituted a number of changes into our development process:

- Significant core rewrites now only occur during
major (1.x) releases.
- New features are only added during major releases.
- APIs are only added/removed/changed during major
releases (unchanged, we've always done this).
- Behavior of specific API calls are only
changed during major releases.

We've also changed our workflow. We're now doing minor (1.x.x) releases roughly every month and major (1.x) releases every three months. Thus we can still get a good flow of good features out in a consistent manner.

I should also mention that the jQuery core development team has many more people helping out now. Active participation has always been a challenge for the team (bug triage and fixing isn't very glamorous). We now have about 8 people who are entirely dedicated to bug triage, test case creation, and prioritization. These people work closely with the core dev team (which has recently more than doubled in size).

All of this will help to significantly improve the quality of releases (and has done so quite well with 1.4.4 - 1.4.4 was a very good release, better than 1.4.3. I suspect that if Twitter had issues with upgrading from 1.4.2 to 1.4.4 it was because they had issues with 1.4.3).
If you can use JDBC or SQL in your Java app with these Amazon solutions and not have to learn a new datastore API that's a pretty huge advantage.
8 Sure-Fire Tips for Creating Outstanding Web Content
With the millions of websites that are popping-up every single day, the web surfers are spoiled for content and could easily find the information that they are looking for from multiple source
Why not OpenID? Google is an openID provider if I remember correctly (probably not facebook though).
Mmh, I've never seen a "future" like that, it seems to me more of a "worker"...
You went to a technical school and got a technical degree. That's very different from going to university and studying the liberal arts.

I have no idea why we consider them the same in America, but in most places, even though UIUC is a fantastic technical school, a degree in something called "Enterprise Systems Engineering" should not be considered a university degree. You simply didn't have that experience. And, yes, I'm sure it was horrible.

In my Anthro and other liberal arts classes, my homework was to read a famous literary work, study a movement, a people, a culture or an event and then be prepared to discuss it critically with my peers, often in classes with 5-8 students.

PS -- I need to add that there are definitely students of engineering who treat the curriculum as the science and discipline and art that it is. These students relish understanding the provenance of the discipline and the state of the art and spend all their time in it trying to master the art. It's just more obvious how to do that in the liberal arts because they groom you to do that. I think you have to be more self-aware and self-motivated in the engineering side of things.
I don't think any of the points that were mentioned in his post are relevant any longer (not that many of the issues that he mentioned were entirely relevant to begin with, mostly just excessive grandstanding over minutia).
'If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want to learn, go to a library.'

-Frank Zappa
I'm not sure why you would think that? The issue described in this blog post is relating to the performance of a particular CSS selector that jQuery implements - not really anything having to do with memory usage (and the memory usage of jQuery certainly isn't anything significantly above-and-beyond what a normal web application would use).
Painting with Light on Vimeo Video School
Well, the mini_magick documentation mentions that the spawn of a subprocess is the main point of that library:

"Using MiniMagick the ruby processes memory remains small (it spawns ImageMagick’s command line program mogrify which takes up some memory as well, but is much smaller compared to RMagick)"

Forking isn't always bad. See http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix
14 year old boy's Bubble Ball game tops iTunes free app chart
Keep in mind the fact that all you know about OS 10.7 is what was announced at the 'Back to the Mac' event--which was specifically highlighting aspects of iOS that are being carried into OS X.

I guarantee there're are lot of other improvements to be seen, come summer.
What, are you serious? Since 90% of my non-techie friends can figure out who's going to see what you write in walls, messages and photo comments, I'm pretty devastated to hear that 5 HN users find it a challenge.
What to Ask a Client Before You Start Their Project
We can’t really get started on a project until we know exactly what’s needed, what the client wants, and who the site is aimed at. In fact, in most cases we can’t even create an effective proposal until we know those things.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point
I'm not Thomas Ptacek, but I think his answer would be something to the effect of "to be really confident, get tens of thousands of dollars worth of code review before shipping." You may be prominent enough in the CL/hypothetical crypto-less platform community to get most of that for free, but that's the value of the validation needed.
Maybe the title should be "Segway Use Now Regulated in UK"
Picture of the Day: Skeletal Dust Structure of M51 Galaxy
Chart: iPhone Sales by Quarter
COO Tim Cook Opens Up About All Things Apple
The graph is titled (roughly) "500% rises follow inflation". It could just as easily be titled "500% rises are followed by inflation" from the same data.
Quote of the Day: Steve Jobs and Secular Hope
Truncation != Rendering. Truncating long strings by replacing middle by ... is pretty common.
The author is well aware that Facebook isn't for him.

> The fact is Facebook isn’t made for someone like me, who once handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.

[snip]

> But again, also: Not really for me. I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices.
Acer’s new tablets a step in phasing out netbooks
The difference is that sudont explained why one would conflate the two while the child only said "Do not do it" with no explanation.
Easy win too
Video & Slides out of synch?
I'm thinking the person you replied to knows a thing or two about "Awesome" on the web. I'm not sure he was old enough to have done much on or off the web in 1993.
>Just ask the Debian people that rebranded Firefox to IceWeasel.

Or the people who rebrand redhat as centos for that matter. I bet it takes a little more than a find-and-replace-in-project.
It's absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail.
Does adding "Login with Facebook" really increase signups that much? Anyone here with experience with that?

I'd imagine people are not so keen to share their FB-identity, even with sites like Flickr.
I think I saw the slides to this once. I don't have time to watch the video right now, but if it's the same presentation, he had a point about hashing a file and then uploading the file and the hash to the same web server for download.

I forget the exact words, but the point read something like, "Don't think you've accomplished anything worthwhile if you place the hash and the file on the same web server." I agree with that, but am guilty of doing it all the time (as are others).

Does anyone have a link to the raw slides (PDF)? I downloaded them once, but lost them.