skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like you, I went back to do a PhD after too many years in corporate IT. Based on my experiences, I was motivated to research MBSE as applied to business systems. I'm on the home run, ABD! Here's what I wish I knew before I started:

You don't need a high GPA, you need tenacity and perseverance and faith in your goals. And at the same time being able to take criticism, feedback and rejection.

You are not learning as for a BE or ME, you are creating new knowledge and sharing it with other academics with similar interests.

Postdoc and researcher positions are not well paid, very competitive and you need to have had some good papers published to even get a look in.

You must love reading, thinking and writing, re-writing and re-re-writing. This is where I still struggle. It's one thing to get things researched and implemented but another to write about it in a way that others will want to read. If your papers don't get cited, then it is hard to gain traction for researcher positions.

It helps to be a confident speaker at conferences, faculty seminars, etc. Thinking of it as an opportunity to market yourself to prospective future employers (as in universities and research labs).

My observation is that you either need to be in a good relationship or be willing to forego having one for 5+ years. Dating whilst doing a PhD is a huge distraction and could result in missing out on one or the other.

Finally, I think you need a Plan B. What you'll do if you don't like it, or like it but can't get a postdoc position.
Largest quantum computer yet: 14 qubits
Osborne 1 celebrates its 30th birthday
GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt Travels To Japan To Address Nuclear Crisis
Definitely. I used to see many stories that had long, in-depth analysis or insight into problems; stories that wouldn't find it onto the front page of any other site but HN. I remember being able to check HN front page once every morning and fill my instapaper queue with about 5 lengthy but interesting stories I could read throughout the day. Not so much anymore...
I've always imagined that this is why Quora mentions the voters for a question. Another aspect to that display of votes is that it shows up in the list of a users activities. Clicking on a profile could display the articles and comments that the user upvoted/downvoted. This would cause users who consider their reputation to be important to think twice before upvoting something less appropriate.
Have you thought about scaling the effect of an upvote based on the number of words that a comment has? Of course there are implementation details that you would have to worry about but I could see that encouraging longer more thoughtful commentary and penalizing snarky 5 word answers that garner easy upvotes.
This account is a blogspammer; it has no comment history, and the submission history consists of links to a single domain.
OT mentioned all the side costs of photovoltaic power, waste materials, pollution and so on, while stressing the simplicity of creating nuclear power.

So my remark simply was meant to draw attention to the waste products of nuclear power. Is it not logical to throw it into equation for nuclear power, too, if you throw it into the equation for photovoltaic power?
Update on japans nuclear crisis
With an IQ that high, perhaps he can explain what on Earth does IQ actually measure.
Not at all. I agree with Spolsky about needing two monitors for GUI work, but otherwise more screen real estate pretty much equates with shifting your focus between contexts, which in my experience is what kills productivity. Knowing what you are doing is the biggest boost to productivity.
I didn't mean to imply that reprocessing meant no waste: it means a lot less waste, that needs to be stored safely for a much shorter time. Also, since it allows you to use the fuel much more efficiently (without reprocessing, only a couple of percent of the usable fuel actually gets used; the rest ends up mixed in with the waste and is just stored without being used), it does solve the 50 year problem as well.

That said, I also didn't mean to say that we shouldn't consider all the impacts of nuclear power. But, as many others in this thread have commented, to be fair we should also consider all the impacts of other power sources as well.

As for a less power greedy way of living, I'm all for it, as long as I don't have to give up actual functionality. I'm all for having more efficient cars, but I'm not going to give up having a car; the freedom it gives me is too valuable to give up. (And no, living somewhere where I don't need a car to have that freedom is not an option. Been there, done that, prefer not to. Not everyone wants to live in that kind of environment.)
I should hope so. On the other hand, what else is there to say about it?
My initial reaction was to disagree with your suggestion: Your method would train people to predict how well a comment is going to be received and to vote based on that. I disagreed, because I don't want to read comments rated by the hive mind, in order to please the hive mind.

However, at a second glance, your idea could work. If people see diverse and insightful comments being voted up, perhaps the hive could learn to encourage creative and interesting comments.

Then again, this would incentivize upvoting comments with an existing positive score, and vice versa.

Perhaps the solution is to not display comment scores at all until you vote on a comment. (But order comments the same way they are ordered now.)
While I don't doubt that more screen real estate helps most programmers, it's not a hard-and-fast rule.

In the past few years my work environment would change from day to day (different offices and coffee shops) so I didn't have the luxury of lugging around large monitors and instead worked exclusively from my laptop's small display. As a result of this and my dislike for Mac OSX's default window navigation I set up my own hotkeys for switching between my most frequent applications (documented here: http://techiferous.com/2009/12/streamlining-your-workflow-wi... ).

Now when I am presented with an option of hooking up more monitors to my laptop I decline because my inter-app workflow is so streamlined on (and optimized for) my tiny laptop screen.
Exploration, with a menu I can explore and see what is there. Search only means I can randomly type stuff in and see what happens but I never know the extents of the system.
To be honest, you're probably right. Unless comment padding was universally down voted, there'd be lots of it going on, defeating the point. And sometimes valuable things like corrections are at loggerheads with a minimum word count.
Thank for this insightful comment. Do you think, online form would work to count a relatively small section of the population, such as New York City?

The problem with online submissions is that it's quite difficult to uniquely identify people online,

Does the census form ask the social security number of the person? Social Security number would uniquely identify individual online or offline.

and a large portion of the population doesn't use computers.

According to this
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=it_net_us... over 75 per cent of the population is online. And this is probably more in New York City with easy access to internet cafes.

It's also expensive to go through records of people who submitted both online and mail-in forms with slightly different entries and determine what is and isn't a duplicate.

My proposal is for online form only.

The Census doesn't get to assume that everyone uses a Google account that's tied directly to their real-life identity, and they need assurance that their software is extremely secure.

Again, can this be solved with asking social security number of people submitting their forms?
From what I've seen, people with solid research track record can do well at entry level. But as you say, to become the director of some research group, you will need sales, marketing, negotiation and politics skills.
I don't know about the Facebook comments system because I avoid it wherever possible, but at least with the Twitter reply button, it prepends the ever-popular @OP.

In short, a Twitter conversation can be replayed, or stitched together after the fact. From what I'm seeing with this thread, it doesn't appear that is possible with the Facebook comments (though I know that they DO have the '@' reference, sort of.)
Using IQ to measure intelligence is like using your penis-length to measure how good you are in bed.

Sure, having a penis-size less than half the average might be a strong indicator of being bad in missionary, but anything above average doesn't necessarily mean better than average, and in fact might be counter-productive at the other extreme.
Look at http://gamedev.net - they've grown their community from a few active users to more than a hundred thousand and the quality only increased. They had to go through a period of significantly decreased quality as the community grew, and faced all the same problems as HN. I believe a combination of the following changes would fix things: (from most to least important):

- Upvotes need to be weighed by karma, and karma of exemplary members of the community needs to be seeded by you (and other exemplary members). This way cliques of mean/non-insightful users can upvote each other to their heart's content without making any appreciable difference in their karma value.

- The above would fix the quality of articles on the front page, not just the quality of comments. Our most successful blog post to date was "will the real programmers please stand up" (http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm...) which is at best a provocative rant. The actual technically insightful content isn't nearly as successful. TechCrunch mastered the art of linkbait headlines. Weighed upvotes will solve this problem.

- Anonymity breeds animosity. If I don't know someone it's much easier for me to say mean, dumb things (see: YouTube). The solution is somewhat controversial, but I strongly believe the downsides of threaded discussions strongly outweigh the upsides (ability to carry on multiple discussions at a time). Removing the ability to have threads will force people to pay attention to who they're talking to and have a coherent discussions instead of snarky oneliners.

- Moderators need to be able to lock down threads that are getting out of control.

- When the article is off the front page, the discussion quickly dies off with it. There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue the conversations. This encourages people to get to know each other and participate in a coherent discussion that spans beyond 24 hours.
The restriction isn't for commenting, only voting. "Big Name" would have to stick around 6 mo. to a year to vote. Shouldn't be a problem if site quality (the key draw) remains high.
How to communicate effectively in a startup
Who are the users of this commenting plugin - the site owner, the reader, or the commenter?
This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my assessment. Compare the average Metafilter comment to the average YouTube comment. You'd have a difficult time making the case that there wasn't a discernible difference in quality between the two.
With respect, the meta of late has been extraordinarily aggravating, and I do think it is a problem here.
Hey, when I joined it was called "Startup News".
uh, I totally disagree with both you and the blog author that quality of comments is higher. Yes, 80% of the trolling from before needed to be eliminated, but at least there was discussion and disagreement about the topics covered.

The majority of the comments on techcrunch are now the most bland, content-free statements you could imagine ("this is good!"), and the spammers are still around, only now they get to post links to their site from an account that links back to their facebook page. victory?
The waiter situation is not very comparable because the payoff is instant. You collect enough each night to pay the fees. Thus the situation is more akin to renting a booth to sell your wares. You pay rental for access to a crowd that is buying things (food and wait services). Furthermore, the risk is low. If payback is not as much as you expected after the first night, you can move on with only one nights rent lost.

With the internships, there is certainly not an instant pay off. You pay and receive nothing during which you work to benefit the first. No one is paying you for months on end. There are no nightly tips.
U.S Developing Mobile Phone Panic Button for Democracy Activists
Gumroad / Pencil Icon PSD
Excellent opening to a talk. Disses Chuck Norris and plugs Army of Darkness. Win!

The talk itself is also very informative. I can't wait till I can use parameter defaults... oh I have wanted those in JS forever...
It does not work as of right now.

Don't fix the code - get rid of it. You should not be sniffing browsers anyway, there are too many unusual cases.
Heh... it might be more cost effective to invest that money in developing an easy way of desalinating sea water.

Limitless supply and less transportation costs. You could also make a ton of money by building them in the shores of desert countries and selling them the water (Sahara, Arab peninsula, etc...)
Another possible angle - as Thomas points out, researchers with "reputation" don't need this.

But what about up and coming researchers? Where do they "earn their rep" in the current system? I could see this maybe taking off as a way for not-yet-reputable researchers to document their history/trackrecord, in much the same way as developers can use their github repos as documentation of their programming history. Maybe in a few years time we might see junior security researchers listing their Vularb account on their resumes...
This is a fairly classic problem of forum scale. If people don't have an investment in their profile and what it stands for, they won't care about that persona, and you quickly fall victim to the Law of Anonymity.

Number of suggestions to solve it:

1) Put a real value on user accounts. Charge $5 for them, or otherwise make them hard to get -- perhaps invite-only from users with a certain rating -- so that they are felt to be valuable.

2) Active editing. Assigning a numeric value to everything a user does only goes so far: eventually there has to be a consequence for their posts (greater than it going grey). It's OK to ban users who are all noise, after a fair warning.

More controversially:

I think threads re-ordering themselves make it incredibly difficult to follow a conversation. Because comments move around, when you return to a thread you either have to re-read or re-skim multiple comments that you've already read. The alternative is to treat threads as one-shot jobs. Visit once, don't come back. That's death to conversation, and conversation is the heart of a community.

It's this reason, I suspect, people don't often post meaty comments in threads once they already have a good few comments in them -- they know they'll never get the traction of upvotes to stay near the top, so why bother? The fix:

3) Flat threads. Don't rearrange, don't indent. Show scores if you will, but don't order based on them. The longest-lived web communities, the ones with the best conversations, from the Well to Metafilter, all have this in common.
The Shootout's C implementations do occasionally turn into a festival of SSE intrinsics and the associated unrolling. Some benchmarks, anyway.

Still, not using SSE when it's available is dumb and perhaps all the other languages need to start playing, too. A little tricker in Python, of course....
Alan Turing’s Patterns in Nature, and Beyond
Solving the HN comment problem.
In theory you should be able to AOT compile python now, with type inference. There are cases where the types are not inferable, as there are cases where the programmer does not provide type hints. But I think an approach similar to clojure's where types are inferred when possible, type hints can be provided optionally, and runtime reflection is used as a fallback when the type cannot be determined ahead of time is a good approach. You generally don't worry about types in clojure any more than you worry about types in python; you only add type hints in performance-sensitive code in cases where the compiler can't figure out the types on its own.
I never found a good usecase for onenote's tags - yes, you can mark them as contacts or addresses, and there are handly shortcuts for that - but what is the use?
How do you, for example, just view all elements tagged "contacts"? Or even just pages that have those tags? After all is said and done, it is probably easier to just type in the tag name as part of the data and let the search engine handle it.

(EDIT: cancel that, I'm an idiot. I just found a big honking "Find Tags" button right on the main ribbon that I'd completely overlooked before.)

I never understood the appeal of storing the entire freaking notebook in a single file either. When I started using onenote, I used the webcam recording feature as a sort of video diary, and this completely broke down my backup scripts (I put everything on amazon s3, which doesn't support diffs.)

/ end rant

Back to your comment, I don't quite understand what you mean by the online spreadsheet integration. Could you elaborate? I mean, the contacts integration with Outlook is pretty cool, but is virtually useless with anything else in the universe. What is the advantage here?
Show HN: Computing made easy - From a visual spec sheet to a simple interface
Take it step further and show 4 different smiley faces, a la 37signals.
This somehow reminds of a productivity study done with factory workers (sorry couldn't find a source of sime kind, so this if from memory). They had to carry out relativly simple manual labor taks, the goal of the study was to analyze if there is a link between productivity and brightness of the workplace. After increasing the brightness in the factory productivtiy was rising. So the brightness was increased again and again to find the optimal lighting. Some day workers were showing up wearing sunglasses. The actual reason why productivity rose wasn't the brightness but the attention those blue collar workers were getting from the scientist carrying out the study.

My guess is that when you are beeing monitored (no pun intended) productivity will always rise. Especially if you get a fancy curved surface display like in the microsoft study.
Next Target Of Anonymous Is Sony
I'd love to comment on the article itself that the Facebook comments system is a barrier to entry, but then I'd have to enable the Facebook platform and risk losing my SSL on my account every time I log in.
Somebody may be interested in gossip, "IT celebrities" and cheap-prediction stuff, but why they started it here? There are lots of sites offering exactly that.

For me the only solution is to allow down-voting submissions by top contributors - because the lack of good comments is a byproduct of the lack of good submissions..
Doesn't the GPL only require you to release the code if you publicly release the software binaries? I was under the impression that if you only released the results (aka his research and papers) you aren't required to make the source open.
True, but with open source at the end of it you have the right to continue using what you created. In this other case, you are gifting the value of your work to the corporation irrevocably and retain no rights.
just want you to know that I have seen this - going to reply to it later today when I have a moment to read through it all!
Wreckage from Air France jet found in Atlantic
He's licensing the code to you under the GPL. He's free to use his own code however he likes.
for (i <_- style="color: #afeeee; font-weight: bold;" span="span" _="_" _20="_20" to="to" _1="_1">val customer = new Customer(i)

??

It took me a minuet to figure out that was a bug in the HTML page, and not some obscure scala syntax i haven't seen yet ;)
This is probably 300 comments too late, but I mocked up a solution:

http://i.imgur.com/nY4X4.png

It's something I've suggested before, getting rid of downvotes and replacing them with flags.
The reply from the Facebook employee was interesting. "While I think you have some interesting points about missing features, overall this post is sullied by its sulky, immature tone. [...]"

On the one hand, I wish all companies let their employees be human and respond as such. On the other hand, it feels like if you're going to engage, you should ignore the insults and address any valid points. Here it just looks like two parties trading jabs while dancing around any real issues.
I'm making an assumption here, but maybe the original folks who made up HN are voting less. so you might have newer people doing more voting, and they may not understand the quality of comments before upvoting.

similar to how google looks at more than just keywords in a document before it ranks it highly, maybe you can weight each vote. a vote cast by an early HN user isn't so binary, maybe in reality it counts as 2 or 3 votes while we call it "+1" there is a weight to their vote based on how long they've been on hn and their karma?
I haven't been to GameDev.net in a while, but I certainly remember some fantastic, stimulating discussion in the game design forum. The fact that there were teenagers making threads about how to create an MMO didn't really detract from that.

I really agree with your last two points. I don't think there are any examples of a large community effectively self-moderating; you need someone willing to ruthlessly delete the crap.

I'm thinking about it, and I can't really see any advantage of the Reddit-style format over a traditional forum if you're trying to build a thoughtful community. In online terms, there's only been one non-forum where I've really felt part of the community, and that's a slow-moving blog with a smallish group of great regulars.
Allow every user to have downvote suggestions. Allowing people to suggest that a comment should be downvoted allows those with sufficient privilege to hone in on the bad comments and it lets other users be more involved. Possibly, track a user's 'discernment' level - increase it when a suggestion is acted upon. Use this to weight how much that user's suggestion effects a comment's "downvote-suggestion rank" as it is shown to the trusted users. Promote users to trusted status when their discernment reaches a certain point. This discernment level would both measure a user's interest in maintaining the site as well as predict how good they would be at it.

Maybe even do this in general (for up and down votes): all users cast only suggestion votes. Trusted users cast the real votes.
pg: allow more people to downvote. For example I have 409 points of karma, yet I do not have the right to downvote.

Or perhaps assign more weight to upvotes/downvotes from members with a high karma, than those with a lower karma.
I agree. The problem is that people don't seem to understand that:

Smartest Man in the World Espouses Virtues of Eugenics

Chris Langan is the World’s Smartest Man. That’s not an
opinion, it’s a statement of fact. Mr. Langan’s IQ is
nearly 200. Oh, and he’s spent 20 years being a bouncer at
a bar.

http://onemansblog.com/2007/11/06/smartest-man-in-the-world-...
World becoming a better place with such code available for public to be built up on and not only to military in homing heads. I guess it is one point for "Make something free that was initially available for pay?" Just like "plenty of fish" doing...
http://www.vti.mod.gov.rs/vti/lab/e-tv.htm
Is it possible that one problem is that the downvote is not 'granular' enough? Downvoting a comment could signify that the voter thinks one or more of the following

a) It's a stupid comment
b) It's a mean comment
c) It's a troll
d) I disagree with it (despite user education, it seems that people downvote for this reason all the time)
e) I dislike the commenter (ad hominem)

Perhaps explicit options to flag a comment as a) stupid, b) mean or c) a troll would give you enough data to help solve the comment quality issue.