skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your suggestion that the deans are pro-college institution because they are deans doesn't necessarily follow. It actually is an ad hominem against the deans because you're trying to weaken the author's point by reducing the weight of a series of supporting claims made by the deans because you claim that the deans are acting out of self-interest (or interest of some educational-industrial complex of which they are a part) when they wrote these statements. Given that one side of this argument likes to frame the educational institution as bad (and sometimes go as far as saying the people in the institution are actively working to further its negative ends), it would be reasonable to interpret your first remarks as an ad hominem attack.

That said, your initial statement doesn't necessarily follow because it could also be the case that the deans became deans because they earnestly believe in the system they're helping to further, and that's why they became deans. Claiming the possibility of bias doesn't entail the presence of bias.
Ask HN: How did you learn distributed computing/systems?
please suggest any tutorials/vidoes/books or courses you used to learn and implement large scale distributed systems. I'm looking for something more practical with code/examples.
You don't need to. It's there, therefore it has value. Not at all like HN comments.
So, Nginx is supposedly more resource-efficient and easier to configure than Apache. But I assume Apache still has advantages or abilities that Nginx doesn't have.

When would you still pick Apache? I'd love to see answers here:

http://serverfault.com/questions/258980/what-does-nginx-lack...
Uhm "(if it didn't, it wouldn't be able to detect duplicate data across different accounts"

How about comparing a hash of the encrypted data?
I got a TI-86 my freshman year of highschool, taught myself the BASIC dialect, etc. Useful machine with a nice menu system (menus sit at the bottom of the screen, rather than modally filling the screen like a TI-82/83/84).

I fell in love with RPN at my first internship, where I noticed a lot of the (mechanical) engineers used HP-12 calculators for most everything. I later bought an HP-48 and, eventually, an HP-50G. To my mind, the HP graphing calculators are the Unix of the calculator world, while TI calcs are more like Windows. Most people use TI, but the HP calculators have a longer lineage, a great if somewhat noob-unfriendly interface, and more powerful hardware (75 MHz ARM processor, 2 MB of storage/512 KB of RAM, SD card slot, and the higher-quality HP keyboard).

I haven't used my calculator in a while, but I think that's largely because I'm working with operating systems at the moment and don't need to do more than integer arithmetic. I occasionally reach for my Android phone with the HP-48 app on it, but without being able to feel the keys under my fingers it is sadly lacking.
For what it's worth, I _really like_ the change. The almost unconscious thought of "does this comment deserve more karma than it already has" was useless, it's much better to decide whether it's a good or bad comment just on its own merits.
This kind of crazy promise sidelines real athletes working hard for many years. Many athletes working hard were in his shadow in the media. Media spots are very important for non-professional athletes as they depend on sponsorships and donations.

I find it very disrespectful.
In academia, it is common for professors' salaries to be listed in public databases that are searchable by anyone.

I don't particularly draw any conclusion from this; indeed, there is some debate as to whether this is a good thing overall. My impression is that it doesn't make much difference one way or another. In any case, it may be interesting to HN readers to know that this is the norm in the public sector.
Blow air after you remove the iron (not before), when the alloy is pasty or even full solid, to lower the temperature quickly. If it's a resistor or something like that, then don't bother, but with expensive semiconductors this is a good precaution.

If failure is absolutely no option, then hold the lead on the other side of the PCB (between the soldered area and the component) really tight with some mini-pliers, to prevent too much heat from reaching the component (some heat is leeched by the mini-pliers). But this is very tricky. Sometimes I also keep a finger on the component, to remove some more heat, but I got burned more than once, since I was daydreaming instead of paying attention. As a teenager, my finger tips were always burned from the rather brash soldering technique I was using. I'm a little more cautious now.

Blowing before you remove the iron is a bad idea - if not for making bad contacts (once the liquid has managed to wet the lead and the pad all around, there's no risk of cold joint anymore), then at least because there's a risk you may blow the liquid alloy away. :)

Cold solder joints can often be recognized if you know how to "read" the shape of the solidified alloy. It's not a foolproof technique, but it does reveal the more egregious mistakes. If the alloy makes a round cone-like shape, uniform, symmetric, without interruptions, if the alloy seems to "merge" into the pad and the lead (or seems to "wet" both surfaces), as opposed to appearing to repeal the metal ("non-wetting" material) then chances are the contact is good.
The "Buy Root Friendly" list: Android devices ordered by ease of root
Fog Creek has a "ladder" system based on some fairly objective criteria. Based on years of experience and certain assessments of project scope and skill level, each employee gets a number between 8 and 16 that determines pay. This means that compensation is based on performance.

Now, the only point of controversy is whether the employee and employer agree on performance. If there's a discrepancy there, at least there's something meaningful to discuss and, if the difference is irresolvable, then they should separate.

This isn't perfect, but the gossip-driven salary-discovery system is even more imperfect and has the same problems.
As a PhD and researcher that occasionally sees articles on HN in my field, I can tell you that correctness of a comment's content can be independent of comment karma. I have seen 100% correct posts downvoted to oblivion with highly rated 100% incorrect responses by users playing some sort of formal debate game nonsense. In my pre-HN-bankruptcy account, I used engage and try to correct these discussions, but really it's just not worth it and once I see it starting I just skip the thread. Since that's how it works for posts related to my field, I have to assume the same holds for others that are not my field.
Having used the Aoyue I found that it is not nearly as nice and does not keep temperature nearly as well as a nice Hakko soldering iron. The Hakko FX-888[1] (replacement for the Hakko 936) is absolutely fantastic. I used to own a Hakko 936 until it got stolen and it was by far the best soldering station I have ever owned.

[1]: http://www.hakkousa.com/detail.asp?CID=49&PID=4800&P...
On the face of it, the security of DropBox encryption seems comparable to that of a padlocked room - where the key to the padlock is kept hidden in a safe place.

Except the key is actually kept under the doormat, because people keep going in and out and keeping it elsewhere is just too inconvenient.

If you told someone a room like that had military grade security, you would be called a liar. No matter how fancy the padlock. Without knowing the details of DropBox's setup I'm going to refrain from calling them liars, but this all seems pretty fishy to me.
It might make sense for Amazon, but as a consumer I don't find it a compelling discount.
Perhaps Peter Thiel's real master plan is to increase the value of an education by convincing a lot of people that they shouldn't go to school, and thus increasing scarcity of those getting degrees. AmIright?
The Bleak Financial Numbers From The MySpace Sale Pitch Book
Hi - thanks for the feedback. Yeah, our company's registered name is Tyrant, and we never got round to changing it in GS.

Good point on the mobile piece, it's something we are looking to do in the near future.
Is SEO snake oil?
I guess since I tend to shoot more talking-headish stuff, that's why I haven't noticed a diff. Good perspective.
Or grab a networked tuner like the HDHomeRun. It does OTA and unencrypted cable. Watching 1080i over 802.11n works well.

There's also DVRs for Linux like XBMC/MythTV and a couple for Mac too.
Let's imagine they randomly meet people at the gate ;-)

Anyway, this is so wrong on so many levels I am astonished it's happening.
IBM Open Sources Maqetta; WYSIWYG HTML5 UI authoring
But it does benefit you, personally: by not having your information out there in public, you can claim whatever you want when you go into salary negotiations, and the hiring company has no way of knowing that you'd be perfectly happy with a significantly lower salary. Generally, whichever side has less information public about them is at an advantage in negotiations.

Unfortunately, this leads to a prisoner's dilemma situation where each individual worker would be better off if everyone shared their salaries, but each individual worker is slightly better off if they don't share their salaries.

FWIW, my first programming job only paid me $32k a year. But I was straight out of high school (no college), and I thought it was a princely sum because I was getting paid more than my Ivy-League grad high school teachers were getting.
Your Tools Are Your Crutches. Pick Only The Best
You are able to access the data from elsewhere once you've "uploaded it".

But wait, that never happened because it was a dup.

That means they can, and will, decrypt somebody else's data to serve your request. Cute, huh?
Distributed systems are just parallel systems in which any operation can fail.

There's a lot of boxed strategies you can use and literature you could read, but understanding the above is half the battle. Therefore I'd recommend anyone starting out to brush up on concurrency first.
Exercise balls put your back into a C position and put pressure on your sacrum, neither of which are natural. Standing desks are hard to use for the first weeks, and then completely natural thereafter. Humans and their ancestors have been standing and walking for millions of years.
Though you have to pay your own taxes -- probably 30%, in the end -- and your own medical.
A public school is about 40k to 50k over 4 years, before living expenses. In CS, internship salaries are large enough to break-even over 4 years.
The thing is they still treat Hulu like it's cable / network TV with a crippled DVR. The most recent 2-4 episodes for a lot of content, and they randomly drop episodes with little warning.

Granted, I watch a lot of Hulu content, but mostly it's amine that's not on cable TV. I also have a full cable TV subscription (HBO etc) even though I watch vary little content. I would pay 100+$ a month to watch Hulu without commercials and an extra 100+$ a month to add the missing cable content. Technically there is nothing preventing them from making a lot of money off me, but instead they added a pointless hulu+ subscription which literally added less than 6 hours of content I have any interest in seeing.
Ways for entrepreneurs to get international press
I'm interested to find out what people think of this article, especially those who sell SEO services
Encryption keys would be different for different users.
Probably not intentionally, but that is where the larger markets are. You can only sell so much to young men programmers.
I have to say, this is simply brilliant!
My first programming job paid $75k in 2007. It was not at some big name firm but a run-of-the-mill ad agency and I was doing PHP web dev. It was in SF and I had just graduated from UC Berkeley about six months prior to hire.

Unless he (or she) is working as a game dev, he is grossly underpaid. (Even if he is doing game dev he'd be underpaid, just the standard for pay would be much lower for his industry.)
Oh, I see. He's running sloccount on the resulting file. My mistake.
Consider a hypothetical scenario for the person on the other side of the table:

You are hiring up an engineering team and hope to hire up a team of 10 engineers paying 100k/yr each. So far you've hired 9 people at 100k and are working on filling that last slot. You find someone perfect but he has a competing job offer and is asking for 110k/yr instead of just 100. He's no better than the other 9 people you have already hired.

In a situation with relatively secret salaries it might make sense to go ahead and pay the 110k. It's only a 1% increase in your yearly budget which probably isn't a deal breaker.

But in a situation with relatively public salaries you're in a bad spot. You can either not hire him thus prolonging your search, or you can hire him and face potential moral/teamwork problems. Maybe you can hire him and bump everyone else's salaries up to 110k but a 10% budget increase might not be feasible. So the company is a bit screwed in this situation. And to the extent that the companies success is also the success of individual employees the individual employees might be a little screwed too.

I've made this scenario simpler than what reality would generally look like but the same principal holds.

In nearly every situation in which I've had insight into engineer's compensation I know for a fact that fairness has always been a top priority. But it's worthwhile to see that it sometimes can't be the only priority and to understand how the salary taboo fits into this.
The thing about golf is that practicing six hours doesn't mean you got six hours of practice- you need to play rounds, which take several hours but are only really ~30 minutes of "golf practice" at most...golf is interesting because the athletic prerequisites are minimal compared to most other sports, but this doesn't mean that 10,000 hours is sufficient. I don't doubt that he'll be near-pro level after the 10,000 hours, but I do doubt that he will be good enough that it will be really worth the complete dedication of these six years. He'll be scratch+ for sure, but until you get close to that level, it isn't easy to predict who will have the ability to step up to the true professional level, and who will lose a ton of money traveling on minitours with little chance at ever reaching a PGA/Nationwide tour level (i.e. what most mean when they say "pro").

My perspective on this is based on my experience in playing tennis for 10,000+ hours (not apples-to-apples, obviously, but still relatively close) and becoming good enough to know that there would be absolutely no point in trying to play full-time professionally, because I was too slow to ever reach a level where I could make money while touring.
There's a lot more money in golf, but it also is a lot more expensive (many golf mini-tours pay prize money out of the sizable entry fees they charge...$1k/tourney entry fee is common for small pro golf tourneys) and there's a lot more marginal pro-level players around for the golf tournaments since there aren't nearly as many physical factors in golf as there are in tennis.
Ask HN: What is a reasonable salary for an image processing engineer?
I've been interviewing for jobs in image processing as a researcher/developer and I'm always asked what are my salary expectations. Now I've been interviewing for entry-level jobs for people with a Master's or a Ph.D (I have a Ph.D in CS) and I'm not sure what a reasonable estimate is. I live in British Columbia, Canada and the cost of living is pretty high here. I estimate a reasonable range to be between $70k - $75k but I'm always low-balled to $60k - $65k as a counter-offer. Can somebody advise on what a reasonable range is? Assume there are no additional benefits to the salary package. The basic responsibilities are to develop computer vision/ image processing algorithms in C/C++ with an aim towards later porting them onto FPGAs with the camera sensor. I'd appreciate any comments/advice/links to resources.
I'm wasting a lot more time figuring out the comments than before. The points would guide you to the really important ones (factual corrections, context, valid rebuttals), now I have to skim everything and can't tell whether there's a consensus or not.
Or you can look at actual data:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151031.htm

Average salary for a software engineer is $90k, for California $103k (this excludes "programmers" who just implement fully spec'd code).
Really depends on where you work. There are some managers that make $47k in some parts of the US and live very comfortably.

Aside from that, contracting can help get bump your salary up. Fresh out of college I was making less than $47k and then easily tripled my salary within a year of contracting (although I was working insane hours and basically used all of my allotted overtime hours). It isn't always great for mental health or work/life balance, but it can be a great shot in the arm in terms of providing needed work experience and money.
It does. I use it to check quick c questions. It works kind of like gdb's 'p' command, but you can also execute c code by putting it in braces.

Here's an excerpt from my most recent cint repl session:

cint> {long x = 84bfaad645e2e33f; double * p = &x;}
Warning: Illegal numerical expression 84bfaad645e2e33f FILE:(tmpfile) LINE:1
cint> {long x = 0x84bfaad645e2e33f; double * p = &x;}
cint> p p
(double*)0x100809480
cint> p *p
(double)(-8.31870270613823687e-286)
150th Anniversary of the Civil War (Word Cloud)
Are you being funny or are you implying results can be linear?

Have you ever seen personal bests charts? Save specific cases of breaktrhoughs, it plots very logarithmic for everybody. That is diminishing returns, more or less.
Are government salaries merit based or tenure based?
When working for the federal government everyone knows everyone else's salary. So it can be done, and is generally less corrosive than hidden salaries.

As long as people are happy with their own pay, they really don't care what anyone else is making. In a large company, an incompetent making $5k/year more (because he's been there longer, or does some task no one else wants to learn how to do) isn't going to turn a happy employee into someone who wants to get out immediately.
A couple thousand in grants would have paid half your yearly bill at CWU. Besides, if you get a decent job, it should not take that long to pay off $20k of student loans.

I ended up going to a private school with tuition of around $30k/year. I got $16k/year in merit-based scholarships based solely on my work in HS... as a white, middle-class male. So I got stuck with 50% of the bill; my parents were kind enough to help with half of that. School-mandated co-op jobs (total of 1 year of them, in my case) definitely helped with the rest--that's part of the trade-off. By going to a well-known but more expensive school, I probably had an easier time getting good internships, which in turn helped pay off the higher tuition.

I think university is entirely worth it if you can realistically afford it. I met amazing people, learned some very interesting things that I would not have been exposed to if I were self-taught (Mentor Graphics software licenses are not cheap), and yes, got a piece of paper that says I hung around a certain school long enough to be given a Masters degree. I've got about $30k in debt. It's doable.
Cheap non-stabilized soldering irons are not for electronics. Use them for rough work such as soldering tin cans - and then get the largest baddest iron you can find. Or just use them as a generic focused source of solid heat - when the heat blow gun is too unfocused.

For electronics, use a soldering station, which is basically an iron that's stabilized and allows you to control the temperature.

Or use a soldering gun, but this is a bit of an acquired skill, and tends to fry sensitive CMOS devices (or anything that doesn't like EM fields and pulses). I still prefer the gun for regular components, but I'm probably old school.
Yeah, and also reencoding from a lossy format always leads to quality loss, that's why the format is called lossy.
Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 Released
100% agree. I think the core of our problem is that downvote is used differently everywhere else, and so people have an expectation when they come here that simply isn't true.

Naturally, the other end of that is a problem too, wherein people upvote for all the wrong reasons. I all too often see an comment that is wrong, but perhaps clever, and is upvoted highly. The most interesting aspect, I think, is that if you put a well-reasoned explanation of why the comment is wrong, you'll often see the trend reverse -- the wrong comment will start getting downvotes, and the correction will start getting upvotes. This might SEEM right, on first blush, but it also isn't.

The thing that irks me most though, is perhaps the hero-worship. I think if we were able to hide usernames until after we'd voted, then we'd almost certainly have better results. I cringe every time pg posts a one-liner that adds nothing to the conversation; Not because it isn't perfectly within his right to do so, but because I know it's going to be upvoted to the sky.
It's possible, why I only released a few thousand. I have another 24k in another list. What would you suggest to get those to people?
Keep the offer at 100K. If he's no better than the others, you can find another one. If you keep missing out on hiring because other companies pay more, then you need to raise your standard salary, because all your other engineers will jump ship within a year or two.
> What makes Harvard Harvard is that not anyone can go there.

That's part of it, but it's not the main thing. What makes Harvard Harvard are the resources, professors, environment, culture, history, reputation, and other students.

That not everyone can get in is largely a consequence of the school's limited resources. It's also a consequence of high admission standards, and those can't be replaced however it's already the case that Harvard cannot accept all qualified applicants.
Gyroscope Chicken
You will be able to use them without those prefixes as soon as the W3C agrees on the final implementation of a standard and as soon as the respective browser implements said standard perfectly.

Browser prefixes are actually a great idea that save us from the madness of the old days (like browser hacks) and there is nothing bad about them.
If you are interested in ergonomics, don't use a laptop keyboard in your office; not on a desk, or on a chair on a desk.

There's simply no way to use the laptop keyboard, and have the screen at the right height.

Use the laptop to drive your big display, and connect your keyboard and mouse to it.
The ergonomics of a laptop alone are bad.
Its great to have a laptop for travelling, but if you care about your body, use a better setup for your office.
View a powerpoint presentation: Option (or Option-Space for fullscreen)

My macbook air's measly 64 GB cannot accomodate a seperate powerpoint app, so I use the builtin preview features. It works great.