skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago I quit my job in academia to go work as a field delivery consultant for a large ERP firm. This whole thing was a ridiculous culture shock to me. I quit because I wanted to try something different -- it was different, all right.

For the first year or so I was doing some development work on the client side as well as requirements gathering and dealing with integration. I was cool with this, because I was doing something technical but wanted something that would flex my people skills as well.

At one point I was tasked with requirements gathering for a customer who wanted some custom work done to their installation of our product. They bought two weeks of my time to draft a spec, and no development -- my deliverable was basically to draft the SOW for the next consultant who was to write a technical design for someone else who was to write code.

I finished the spec, in spite of a client who really was extremely hard to deal with. The client sat on it for a few months and decided they wanted to revisit the issue, so I got on a plane again and spent two more weeks trying to tease some answers out of them so I could revise things.

The final specification amounted to approximately 95 pages including screenshot mockups. The spec went back to the home office, where our development team reviewed it and quoted something like three or four months' time to develop it, test it, and hand off back to the customer for acceptance testing. They planned for the invariable back and forth on that as well. This was in February of that particular year; they were looking at taking the feature live on January 1 of the following year.

The feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form.

After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something you write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.
Trust? Nobody has ever 'trusted' reviews by other people. They've used them to help make decisions, but 'trust'?

I use reviews to find the negatives of something, and then decide if that negative bothers me. Filtering out people with an axe to grind can be an art all in itself, but many people are pretty easy to spot.
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I'd concur. Especially since you can get actual barebones micro-atx servers for the cost of a nicer hard drive.
It might also be referring to COBOL's built-in support for binary-coded decimal arithmetic. Which would still be a pretty silly statement, since other languages can also do BCD with the appropriate library.
Thanks! I'll be accepting users later this month. Send a message to patrick at getvolta and I'll be in touch.
Ask permission from HN: can i steal your design?
i have an idea to combat the deteriorating link posts in sites like HN and reddit.

so i am working on the web site now but i suck at design, to be blunt.

so i was wondering if i have permission to steal the HN design.

or if a designer wants to contact me and help me out, that would also be great.
Presumably, had they not flinched, they would have starting June 30th. People are talking about how Apple waited until the 11th hour to relent.
When I see "ad hominem" hauled out on HN, I always think of the following from Daniel Davies: "There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world."
Many of the "geeks" I know like to talk about quarks, politics, theory of mind, nature of reality, etc, but few (none) really take those issues seriously, as worthy of inquiry, and most are content with letting Wikipedia supply their information and settle their disputes. Keep in mind that "anti-intellectualism" doesn't necessarily mean disinterested in intellectual topics; many anti-intellectuals are very interested in intellectual topics (consider Palin's ramblings about economics). Instead, it usually means not taking those topics seriously: not bothering to understand what's at stake, not bothering to understand what motivates the issue, and so on.
How would you make a tag-based filesystem without a database that wasn't literally SQL server or something?
I worked on a project once. It was COBOL but since COBOL wasn't quite good enough they introduced another custom programming layer on top of it...in COBOL.
WHOIS data isn't updated. It's a prank/hoax.

Registrant ID:INTEmi9x129pabgf
Registrant Name:Private Whois Service
Registrant Organization:Private Whois Service
Registrant Street1:*******PLEASE DO NOT SEND LETTERS******
Registrant Street2:****Contact the owner by email only****
Registrant Street3:c/o lulzsecurity.org
Registrant City:Nassau
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code:N4892
Registrant Country:BS
Registrant Phone:+852.81720004
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:bt7m7mf4df08f06a3b66@oqjij874d9300d54bd95.privatewhois.net
LulzSecurity.org was just registered today.
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All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom
<i>At this price, why would I want this instead of iPad? (serious question)</i>
I dislike apple and apple products, but I have the same question.

Even netbooks can do quite a bit more than they could when ChromeOS was announced, and often for less. I really don't see the benefit in only having chrome, even if Native Client can promise more functionality in the future.
One major hazard is consumer-grade Internet service that has onerous terms that prohibit running servers from a home connection, for any number of reasons. (Some would see this as cultural complicitness with “client/server as technosocial class division”, but the effect is similar regardless of how it's spun.) A related technical problem is the use of carrier NAT, which gets very tricky to traverse.

So actually getting devices to call home to the “personal cloud” seems like it would be harder to make happen, and more importantly, harder to make reliable, because you can't use economic power to force at least one side to act in a convenient manner. This would drain the life out of any attempt at “you don't have to think about it very much”.
The Intersection of Awesome
> while picking on the small guys because they could

Are you suggesting that Apple wasn't approving new updates from smaller players because they didn't follow a policy that wasn't in effect yet?
I think the column line depends on either the compiler or a setting somewhere. When I wrote COBOL, the comments were in columns 72 to 80.
I trust Yelp/Urbanspoon reviews the same way I trust Amazon reviews: By reading them and looking for clues that the reviewer is real and has astes and concerns similar to mine. I gloss over uncritical reviews, whether they're real or not; a review that says "everything was great but the fries" I'll put stock in.

It's possible that astroturfers could start taking that into account, but it's hard to imagine. The kind of people who stuff Yelp reviews generally have personality quirks that would prevent them from allowing any negative feedback.
Yandex and Mail.ru IPOs I would guess.
hey the link is changed
WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation widens | AlterNet
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The Gyan hub is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.
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No, I didn't downvote based on the misspelling of Hendrix's name, it was basically a joke. But the joke wasn't really funny, and it wasn't really insightful.
Agreed - best of luck to you, but honestly, if somebody sent this to my company, I would be slightly flattered and then the cynic in me would note that there is basically nothing specific to FF on the site except for the URL, page title and one mention in the last paragraph. So, for all I knew, they could be sending the exact same thing to any number of other companies with these three fields filled in from some key-value store (with the sub-domain as the key).

Not saying this is you... just that this is what some people might think.
I worked for a company that did a website in COBOL instead of using PHP or ASP.NET when they already had developers that did both.
Anonymous tells NATO to back off
Maybe it only seems stupid.
Have you looked at the competition? Like http://www.goplanit.com ?
From the article:

Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.

Granted, with vague language like that, its hard to perceive exactly what the author is arguing. His use of the word "obesity", however, implies heaviness as well as bigness. I was pointing out that the Smart is probably nearly as heavy as my Elantra, despite being smaller.

In fact, from a strict efficiency perspective, an Elantra is much more efficient than a Smart. For the same mileage, you gain the ability to carry a substantial amount of extra passengers and cargo. The increased size of the Elantra is quite useful, and goes directly against the inefficiency argument the author makes.
This the worst of these targeted resumes so far.

Actual design is really mediocre, there's no portfolio, there's no example of a completed project, there's not much about why he actually wants to work at the target company. The entire thing is basically an HTML5 animation and he wants a frontend UI gig, presumably focused on actual interfaces, not animations.
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I don't bother with 5 star or 1 star reviews. Too much emotion to be sensibly reviewed.

Three stars provide a nice balance. Things like "food was good, but service was slow." I find more valuable than a 2 paragraph review about how a waiter spilled a glass of water and only comped one entrée or a five paragraph review that can be summarized as "I love this place more than breathing."
Yeah, there are two types of reviewers:

1) I review every place I go.

2) I want to punish/warn people about a bad experience.

The first type is way more useful, since there is no way to tell whether one person's bad experience is typical or not.
the domain is lulzsecurity.com - which is just fine, not lulzsecurity.org. almost certainly a prank.
GitHub.com is giving away 500 free 30 day Micro accounts. Coupon Code: "WWDC11"
GitHub.com is giving away 500 free 30 day Micro accounts. Coupon Code: "WWDC11"
New Users, Repos, and Orgs API
Turntable.fm Bookmarklet
This is an abomination. This patent clearly fails the obviousness test (that is, if somebody is capable of reading the patent all the way through without being disgusted and embarrassed for the "inventors"). Unfortunately, most of the software patents are like this: the Patent Office is clearly failing us. Math formulas are not patentable, and software is just that: math.

Seems like our only hope is if somebody powerful and famous, with a big software patent portfolio, can sacrifice it for the good of the industry and advocate for banning software patents. Steve Jobs and his position against DRM in music comes to mind as a similar move. Wouldn't it be great if leaders of the industry get together and petition/lobby for this change? One can only dream...
Help the iOS dev community to innovate with Inter-App communication
The important sentence is:

"Obviously it would be nicer if Scala supported union types as primitives, but at least this construction shows that the Scala compiler has all the information it needs to be able to do that. "

Which means the compiler can do this but need syntactic sugar to make it more accessible.
I heard the same thing, 1st hand, from one of the folks behind Launchbox Digital. As far as I can tell, it's not a rumor, it's dead-true.

But, the corollary to that, is that a different incubator program may be emerging to fill the LD gap. I'm not sure how much of what I was told was "not for public dispersal" versus "already widely known" though, so I'll defer to say any more... Just keep your eyes and ears open, I expect there will be more news in the area at some point, regarding incubator(s).
You are doing 20 requests to external Javascripts and 8 requests to external stylesheets according YSlow. "The page has a total of 61 HTTP requests and a total weight of 637.2K bytes with empty cache".

When I read about performance issues I just wondered why you are including all this stuff. That's why I prefer optimizations in the first place before reinventing the wheel ;)
That's odd. Usually Facebook has public pages for stuff. Maybe they think public events is a bit of an oxymoron, since non-Facebook users can't be marked as attending.
The important sentence is:
"Obviously it would be nicer if Scala supported union types as primitives, but at least this construction shows that the Scala compiler has all the information it needs to be able to do that. "
Which means the compiler can do this but need syntactic sugar to make it more accessible.
What is LulzSecurity and why should I care about this? (Seriously, never heard of them.)
And since we're on the subject, don't forget RTP Hackers & Founders:

http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/

And also, Triangle Tech Talk:

http://triangletechtalk.com/
Why does the most obvious and logical course of events require justification?

Obviously because what you've written is non-obvious ;)

Enough people "hack" by using simple password-reset forms[1]. Whilst I have no doubt that there are plenty of worringly-competent hackers out there, I'd bet that there are also lots of less competent hackers. Taking this through to its logical conclusion: I'd rather know about some of them than give up and know about none of them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack
French Government Creates Its Own Giant Patent Troll
Regardless of whether you believe apps like this have a legitimate purpose, it demonstrates a disturbing aspect of the walled garden model. The government doesn't have to specifically prohibit an app it doesn't like, it just has to "encourage" the gatekeeper to remove it.
My gut instinct looking at this is that it is really hard to believe you held a senior position as a student; it seems even weirder that you held a senior position at a university - an institution which doesn't have anywhere near the turnover of the private sector.

Also, a senior engineer after only 2 years in your current position and just out of college?

I'm sure it's true and good for you, but I know a lot of people will notice it and wonder.
Too bad meetup is pretty pricey for the organizer. The lowest rate is $12/month if you prepay for 6 months.

http://www.meetup.com/help/How-much-are-the-Organizer-Dues-t...
They've been apparently behind a large portion of the almost daily Sony hacks.
It's in the basement of the building, I think that's where they derived the name.
Comments from someone who doesn't do hiring:

* You're not going to get hired at any place that automatically processes resumes. Fog Creek would drop this resume, too. Boutique designer shops are a better bet, but keep this in mind.

* If I understand you correctly, printing this on an ordinary office printer may cut off your contact information. This is not a good thing, consider repeating it somewhere in the middle of the page. Also consider starting the text a little further from the margin.

* Drop the "objective". It says little, and you're not following the traditional format anyway.

* Are you sure you want to list education before experience? "Senior software engineer" probably beats "B.S.".

* Consider adding specific examples to the experience section, e.g. "I made employer.com/coolfeature".

* "UW - RIVER FALLS...": all caps draws a lot of attention. Consider switching to lower case or Title Case.

* "TECHNONOGY", "deterining": ouch. ;-)

* I'd expect the SQL thing under library/platform proficiencies; "architecture design" might be better placed there as well.

* "Team / Project management": you can drop the second cap

* "Page 1 of 2" is fine, but I assume you will usually print this front and back?
I teach philosophy at a university. Whenever we discuss basic issues about the mind, my computer science students are always dismissive about any and all positions that don't simply say "the brain is a computer, the mind is software." It turns out that this is a pretty naive and simplistic way of thinking about the issue; but that's the "easy" way for them to frame the problem, and they often think that, because computer science is difficult subject, this response must be pretty good.
I can't wait. Btrfs has been lingering in "almost ready" state for a while and it seems like the only thing that will kick things to the next level is the threat of it actually being used.
> To solve the anonymous review problem, its time to inject real identities into recommendations.

People are usually more honest when speaking anonymously -- not the other way around. It may help with astroturfing and flaming temporarily, but competitors and trolls will always find a way around real identity online.
More importantly the domain was bought today.

Last Updated On:09-Jun-2011 09:42:00 UTC
Expiration Date:09-Jun-2012 09:13:59 UTC
The other catch with the ex-girlfriend/boyfriend is that they are not really after bank details so the Barclay's email won't interest them as it would the professional criminal... The problem with the canary is that it is trying to tailor a trap to someone without knowing much about them.

Which is another reason why the IP-based approach works better.
Panasonic to Build World’s Greenest Town
JQuery Pure: Call for contributors
It's not as easy as you'd think to sell a $399 tablet with no marketing budget.

See: The surprise in this thread being expressed that Asus' tablet has been available for sale for months.
The more I have been studying, the more it has been coming to me that knowledge must not be an end to itself. This is because there is an infinite amount of knowledge out there (care to catalogue the shapes of grains of sand on Earth?), but only a very small subset of it is useful (for example, the fact that sand consists mostly of SiO2 represents much more useful knowledge than the above-mentioned detailed catalogue of shapes). Knowledge is an attempt to describe complexity, and since complexity of the Universe is enormous, the amount of knowledge that can be gathered is enormous as well. So one must not seek knowledge indiscriminately.

The traditional academic way of teaching material to students has been to cultivate the idea that knowledge (academic knowledge in particular, something that went without mentioning) is of tremendous value in and out of itself. I disagree with this (see my argument about grains of sand). Some kinds of knowledge are more valuable than others.

Now that we all agree with this, the question becomes what is it that we value. The problem is that people define value in different ways. Some talk of spiritual value (which I find to be complete nonsense -- an artifact of a runaway brain process). Some talk of some "eternal" value that will benefit humanity in a very long term (but I tend to be skeptical of claims that cannot be measured). The bottom line is that this is not an argument about knowledge but an argument about either values or priorities. Given a choice to know (for example, whether or not a killer will come to your house tomorrow) or not to know, most sane people would choose "know". The "intellectualism" the author espouses is the type of intellectualism that relies on emotional thinking to instill the belief that we have a "duty" to know even things that are of little measurable value. I am sorry, but I prefer to see numbers first.

Ironically, the reason why becoming a scientist is not a great life decision compared to, for example, becoming a lawyer, a businessman, or even a computer programmer, is that science does a poor job measuring its own impact (i.e. it is ironically not empirical enough), despite of the fact that it claims to be based entirely on our ability to measure and on the empirical method. In other words, science, while denying religion for the most part, itself relies on this religious-type thinking that knowledge possesses some mystical value in itself (it doesn't).

Small edit: I wish there were more good scientists, not less. I think the value of scientific contribution is enormous. I only think that our current way of doing science (grants, journal citation indexes, reviews by very small circles of peers which can often be mistaken, ignorance of financial aspects, the coupling with teaching) is a bad way and that a better one is possible.
Thanks. I've updated the title to indicate that it is presumed to be a hoax.

Is it best to delete entirely, or leave as is?
I wish that the top row of keys would've given an octave higher, and the bottom row give an octave lower. That'd give you 3 octaves, enough to play a whole lot of songs.
Thanks! I was considering a micro account, but I think this just made me decide!
I agree with what you say, but here's a crisper statement: that the web was the first internet service to exploit the usability gains of the graphical user interface.

(There were graphical Usenet clients, but most people used text-mode clients. Even if graphical email clients like Outlook were used by more people than text-mode ones, they weren't significantly better because email wasn't designed to make use of them.)
Well said. Peter Thiel's argument is essentially "If you are already well educated you don't have to go to college before making money/value." It certainly describes those students who learned a bachelor's degree worth of knowledge through the IP or AP programs. It doesn't apply to those kids who haven't already mastered basic math and writing. It doesn't apply to the average American kid, only to the top 1% of overachievers who can choose between Harvard and a startup.

It doesn't apply to those of thus who aren't well educated and otherwise have remunerative. full disclosure: i went to a shitty public high school in Los Angeles and learned basic math and writing at university.
They work everywhere, but you have to give the doodle keyboard focus, otherwise you'll be typing into the search box. I think the only way to give it focus without clicking through to the [les paul] query is to hit record. Once you stop recording, though, you can still use the keys.