skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> programming for biology and medical research ... is just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood.

That is sooo spot on (left my bioinformatics job a month ago for the exact same reason).

What the author additionally misses is that when you have never programmed/developed as your primary means of making a living, you likely have never worked with people who do not consider programming to be scary voodoo magic, and thus you have missed out on a golden opportunity to learn from others who are better than you. If you value your skills, always try to be around people better than you, otherwise you will end up cut off from the rest in a dark corner writing silly musings like this one.

P.S. I guess you can interpret this comment as "Have read the article but ignored where it's from and who wrote it."
Ask HN: Where should I begin learning low-level computing, asm?
I'm not in any way interested in trying to become a professional software engineer (though that outcome wouldn't isn't objectionable), I just want to learn how a computer functions from its lowest levels to however high it can go, in that linear order. So I'd like to explore computer processing mechanics (just <i>what</i> is a processor doing and with what?) and assembly with that (near direct manipulation of memory and processor), followed by C, and so on.<p>Would the esteemed community at HN be willing to provide some direction and starting points for such a project? Comments even? I imagine the project trajectory may need to adjust to certain realities of computing. Thanks ahead of time.
I got bored with programming so I started to break out into more mathy things like machine learning and computational linguistics. It's the best of both worlds.
The analysts say this AFTER the company goes public.
Getting paid is only a form of acknowledgment that you worked, but it in no way denotes respect.

It simply says " to the best of our knowledge s/he did <insert type of job here/> work for the duration of this pay period.

I agree that some people do get respect in this industry, but too many of us are simply cogs in a wheel.
Shamefully, I don't subscribe to es-discuss. I just visit the archive pages every once in a while, and read the threads that look interesting.
Infographic: The Current State of Cloud Computing
I find the story shocking (Canada, WTF?), but I guess I am going to ask how this is HN news.

ADDENDUM: I almost didn't ask the above, except that the story seems to have so little intersection with the main HN themes.

After looking at the pictures, I retract my question. I'm put in mind of Heinlein and similar, commenting on anticipated de facto anarchy and societal implications including technological implications.

Only, per Heinlein, such was supposed to pre-dominate below the 49th parallel.
Prediction: Eric Schmidt replaces him
It reminds me of a quote from Alec Baldwin's character in 30 Rock:

"I'm 50. To put it in perspective, that's like 32 for ladies."

These numbers make it seem like this is pretty accurate. Men reach their expiry date way after women do, mostly because the male contribution to the event is a whole lot less physically taxing than the female contribution.
Exactly. TFA: "Attacks that may have previously resulted only in local elevation of privilege may now result in remote compromise."
Pingdom is notoriously unreliable and I base this on personal experience and experiences of others. False positives are the norm and it is garbage.
Am I the only one that noticed a big BETA sign on the site?

I remember the iPhone SDK beta license even prohibited developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books(same with iOS beta now,btw) and is restricted to people signing up for it.
Alas, "effect" is also a transitive verb: you can effect change, i.e. cause it to occur.
They do bounds checking and shader verification using ANGLE.

http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
That will break the free Google Maps v2 embedded in HTTPS websites (as per http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#ssl)

That aside, a good move. Seems Chrome team is the first browser team not affraid of stating openly, ``stick to standards and best practices, because we won't be piling hacks upon hacks for compatibility''. Yay :-)
If he thinks he can learn any programming language in a week, he's still ignorant about programming languages.

I challenge his knowledge of/about Haskell, Agda, etc.

Also, I am sure there are plenty of "old programmers" who are still excited about programming languages, and think they matter.
I wish my list for new reading was short. Amazon wishlist is near 1000 books now :(
"they can go to hell"

"people who tell you it is are just jealous that you have picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire"

As much as I get worked up by his writing, I think Zed Shaw always goes a little over the line...
Hah, i'd actually just unsubscribed from es-discuss earlier this week. I couldn't handle the deluge. I'll consider doing something similar.
This is the top story and lacks the (I'm not even sure this word is appropriate) flame-bait headline this one has.
If you are on a Mac, you must know that you should never put the `-i` option at the end:

$ ls | wc -l
5
$ rm * -i
rm: -i: No such file or directory
$ ls | wc -l
0
My own version of this, developed back in the 1980s, is: "Nothing can be made fool-proof, because fools can screw things up in ways you will never be able to imagine."
When writing engineering software be like Scotty
I can agree with that, but he confuses the point by saying:

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect.

I don't agree that programmers are a dime a dozen in technology companies and that they get no respect. I also don't agree that a programmer would be happier running an fast food joint. Finally, I don't even agree that using programming in another profession as a "secret weapon" is necessarily going to be interesting. For instance, if medical records were all in a portable format, we could do all sorts of interesting analysis on them. However, there's about a decade of boring and painful 1970s style database programming needed before that's even possible.
Why the hell would Eric Schmidt want a job like that?
Immigration critical parties are gaining more and more popularity (as an example, Swedish Democrats and True Finns).
Hack for a cause at (H)Activate London
Shrimp: A Simple Sinatra-ish PHP clone
I'm almost certain Silverlight's Pixel Shaders don't run on the GPU. I have no proof of this other than that they're pretty slow, hence my conclusion.
I can also support their claims with some preliminary research I've done. When I have free time, I've been poking at the security of shader compilers -- both the translation that's done in Webkit and the compilers in drivers -- and things are pretty bad. Don't have much to show for it yet (a couple non-exploitable crashes/bugs), but I think future research will prove very fruitful.
Absolutely. I love digging and brainstorming, although I am sure there are many people who are much more experienced/talented on http://hnofficehours.com
>they both gave you free hardware, you've got to learn their technology stack just to try it out

They don't, and there are lot of people, especially worldwide where Macs are less common and are much more expensive. Learning something is an investment of your free time, whereas hardware needs cold cash. Not exactly equivalent or comparable especially when not in the first world.
Scala vs. Ruby
How to (Fucking) Hire Developers
Schools May Punish Students for Off-Campus, Online Speech
To be honest I don't think there is a sharp division line between VPS or IaaS. They at least intersect. If you try to differentiate, usually you will find definitions that VPS is more like dedicated server, just that it is virtual. So they have the same pricing model - longer term (at least month), pay in advance, often not automatically provisioned. In IaaS you are are charged per actual use, usually in hour intervals. You have API to automatically create new or shut down instances when needed (scale up and down) ... and theoretically you have infinite computing resources available.
You evidently haven't seen the massive codebases from the Mozilla or Webkit camps, or the huge number of vulnerabilities therein in recent years. IE is a huge piece of shit, but MS has done a lot for web security. Mind you, I think Google's efforts have been more fruitful, but writing off MS's effort is silly.
Would it be possible to add jobs location in the RSS feed?

Thanks, a great idea.
Boxee records your viewing habits and times.
Disastrous Implications of New Apple Patent for Blocking Cellphone Video
Delete stories button, or maybe downvote button equals this delete behaviour.

Reloading the front page will not show stories that I've deleted.

That way my valuable front page slots will be full of stories that I have upvoted, or forgot to vote, or that simply are new :)
Ask HN: Specific Intel. Prop. question for Employed Programmers
Note: Posting from a new account for obvious reasons.

Dear HN,
I need clarification on a specific Intellectual Property (IP) issue as it pertains to employed programmers and their part-time million-dollar startups.

Background:

* I'm a Programmer working at Software company (not in California).

* Any IP I create is encumbered by a set of textbook (typical) employment clauses that assign all employee-created IP to the company.

* I wish to scale up my part-time startup endeavors. I've had a few moderate successes so far, but have a new great idea and need to resolve the IP issues before making any real, documented progress.

I just finished reading a book on this topic, and after pouring through the postings on HN and elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to proceed is to be open with my employer and get their waiver of IP ownership.

My Question:
So, I would like to be open with the company and get permission before working on my next big idea.

I have a very good relationship with the company executives, and I can see the following scenario unfolding:
Scenario:

1) I send an email to a manager in which I state my interest in pursuing a side business. I specifically state my concern over IP ownership issues and my honest assessment that these activities are unrelated to the business's current or foreseeable future concerns.

2) I receive an email response acknowledging and approving this outside work.
My question: Does this email (from a C-level executive) constitute a waiver of the company's IP rights generated in the course of my outside work?

Summary: As a programmer seeking permission to freely own IP generated outside my employer's business activities, does a company exective's acknowledgement and/or approval of these activities (after I've specifically stated my concerns over IP ownership) constitute a legal waiver of the company's claims to the IP?
The FT Escapes The App Trap
Speaking of job boards, I kinda wish someone would build a scraper that scraped dice and/or monster and excluded all CyberCoders and other recruiters submissions. Is there anything like that out there?
Are you a hot dog stand or a hotel?
Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art

Programming isn't an art.

Programming is a craft.

The difference is that you can use a craft to make art, but crafting isn't always artistic.

Let's not get over our heads and consider ourselves artists because we can code...
Honestly, I wouldn't use it. A related idea that I might use is a goal tracker of sorts. Something that helps me visualize the steps I need to take each day/week/month/year to reach my major and minor goals in life, preferably keeping me motivated along the way. If you made it useful to me as an individual and started getting enough users, then maybe you could add a social component where people congratulate each other on their achievements. But I don't think starting with the social component is going to work.
Be careful though. Once I drank a cursed potion of willpower and wound up lying on the couch for an entire weekend.

On second thoughts it was twelve margaritas.
And alas, "affect" is also a noun.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affect#Noun
The shader verification isn't perfect (e.g. mishandling unicode), though, and is only syntax deep -- if you find bugs in the compiler based around, say, too many function calls nested together (e.g. foo(bar(baz(...))) ) then it will go through ANGLE with no changes. It's a good effort, but needs a lot of work. I've been fuzzing it off and on for that reason.
Im not sure that a graph showing the number of google searches for facebook indicates anything. When's the last time you googled facebook to log in to your account?
WebGL can be the alternative to Flash games on the web. The performance can be better and the graphics more advanced.
Credit where credit is due: IE9 beat us to this.
But that's also the best way to becoming careless about typing "rm".

And the day you will be ssh'd on another computer, you may forget that you are using a command which is really deleting.
And "affect" is also a noun, although rarely used.

affect: the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily
changes; also : a set of observable manifestations of a
subjectively experienced emotion
<patients … showed perfectly normal reactions and affects — Oliver Sacks>

(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affect)

But it's still a good rule of thumb.
I still have doubts about that claim. Didn't Chernobyl release clouds of radioactive fallout over Europe?
It was allegedly offered to him before: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10769458?nclick_check=1

Of course, he was CEO of Google then. Now, not so much. I can see him wondering if a career in politics would work. I'm sure he's got enough cash not to care about the finical hit.
There are a lot of non-native-English HN participants, and I think this sort of language pedantry 1) accomplishes nothing, as OP will likely still use the wrong word, and 2) discourages those who lack confidence in their language skills from posting what may be very insightful comments.
If I think about it I really don't want to expose ring0 code (gfx drivers) to the web.
>Almost an incidental issue, but the technician's training was obviously somewhat lacking.

Maybe, but if she could do that, then so could an end user. Better it be caught as early as possible. Some places actually have testers who try to mess up assembling prototypes, seeing what could be put together wrong, before it is sent to production. And with final prototypes to see what still needs work before actual users get their hands on it.
Job board for hackers Direct link.
One of my first tasks after being given root access at my first n?x job at an ISP was "clear off all of the DNS stuff on $main_server since we have $dedicated_dns_server now".

So I merrily started mv-ing things to a scratch directory that we could wipe in 6 months if we didn't need anything from it.

Unfortunately, the zone file directory was NFS mounted from* $dedicated_dns_server. With pass root set.

I think I took all of A through to K of client zones offline before we noticed.

I'm just very very glad I decided to do it as an mv rather than an rm, since it meant all I needed to do was copy things back.

Not that I really learned my lesson that time; it took a couple more semi-disasters before I got sufficiently paranoid to be reasonably safe as root.
Direct link: http://jobs.usethesource.com/jobs
Instant Company
Right. On the flip side, if this data is based as the other article a while ago, on facebook's advertiser's data, then it's not including mobile views.
Sorry about the short notice.

We're planning on holding these more often. It may be Hacker Dojo, it may be a spinoff. I'm thinking September though for the next one, depending on how this goes.
I liked jgc's response to people trying to recruit him to the 'anti-warming' side:

"I've received yet another email indicating that the author thinks I don't believe man is responsible for global warming. This comes about because of an insidious sort of tribalism that has turned conversations about climate change into a 'you're either with us or against us' situation."

This has been my experience as well when I try to discuss the science. People want me to come out as either 'pro-Warming' or 'anti-Warming' and I'm not either. I'm interested in the systems problem that global climate represents.
It probably depends on how we are defining "learned". Does it mean memorizing all the functions in language x's stdlib? Is it learning the grammar of the language? Is it coding a project of x many lines of code? Have you learned a language when you can write a compiler / interpreter for that language?

The concept of "learning" a language is so hopelessly ambiguous it has almost no meaning to me.

I would say that I know enough of many languages to use them professionally, but I have deep knowledge of very few.
Years of Security Neglect - Solved in 24 Hours of Panic?
It has to be targeted at a much younger demographic where congratulating oneself doesn't carry such a negative impression.

Regards
I might agree with you if the position actually had any credibility anymore. However...being a government organization with only $8 million in funding, Schmidt would barely be able to keep the lights on.
I'm sure it indicates something.

Google searches are usually somewhat correlated to real-life trends.
You realize the US is facing an enormous labor shortage in the coming decades as the baby boomers retire?
GoDaddy unveils its take on cloud computing
This is spot-on, and is a very succinct way to express it. Thank you.
The fact that this site is not transmitted through TLS is mildly amusing.
Thanks for the comment. It's a good idea, try to do a sweep of users who've decided not to engage but the problem is getting them to respond. We send an automated email reminder 1 week after registering to prod people, and have offered online surveys but the response rate is terrible. Still, since we do have email addresses (and their avatars, names, geo location, etc.) we could do a better job of tailoring this query.

>you need everyone on the team on it or it doesn't really work?
We tried to strike a balance, the app does work standalone but you're right: the experience is better with a team. I think several apps (Kik, What's App) have set the expectation that it's ok to automatically scan their phone book and identify which users already have the app installed. So far, we've decided not to do this. Feels slimey, but so easy to do.

But your second suggestion is to make it easier to invite others, easier to build a social graph? Yup, we should rethink the UX in that regard.
Please, tell me what my words mean.
Sorry, It looked pretty good on my windows machine - though totally broken on IE.

I'm not a coder or designer, used Themeforrest and a lot of sweat to get the site working. What are your suggestions for fixing the fonts? (dumbed down for a mech. engineer)
They have a point, but coming from the company that invented ActiveX, I find it rather funny :)
Exactly!

It's not about being "the lab's IT guy", writing content management systems for a pharmaceutical company, or parsing medical records. This is just another boring programming job.

Some real life examples. I know a social science university teacher whose undergrads are dabbling in statistical and field data-entry software, and it is getting them into amazing projects. Another example: a friend, comp-sci grad, moved to linguistics and is now a rockstar, researching natural language parsers, big data and statistics.

They're social scientists/linguists undergrads first, programmers second, but programming plays a vital role in their academic career.
Develop Windows 8/Metro Style Applications Today with Metro Dynamis
I agree as well. That quote reads as a case of "grass is greener on the other side." People who make Augmented Reality software get respect. People who make accounting software don't.

To generalize, doing interesting things with user interface brings respect. Behind the scenes and office software doesn't. (and I mean strictly outside our "techie" circles)
I agree with this, but I guess I don't know who he thinks needs this advice. I assumed his advice was for the programmer lackey who wishes they had a more interesting job. I would assume a biophysics PhD in this day and age probably already has been exposed to programming, maybe even in Python. I mean, my sister has an MPH and she had to take SAS programming courses, and she graduated 8 years ago. It's 2011, not 1979... most people realized computers were pretty important decades ago.
A good way to figure out if you are doing something that you shouldn't in your application is to use the new StrictMode API: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-gingerbre...
I agree with what he meant, but I dislike his use of the word "only." I hate to be really anal, but that kind of thing always sticks out in writing to me.

"Hard distinctions make bad philosophy." as John McCarthy (of Lisp and AI fame) would say.
Oracle is open about wanting 'billions of dollars' in damages from Google
Yes, at least one of the earliest. It's much older than slicehost. When I signed up for them some years ago, there weren't alternatives.
This should really help with "getting in the door" without relying on a resume. Also builds cred. before the interview.

Besides those, getting in front of 100 companies at once should boost your valuation :)
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. Some people have asked to track future achievements, which are exactly what you suggested, goals.
I also get the blips which are visible on my graphs.
And how long before police deploy such blockers routinely during operation?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999171

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047495
The requirement for your argument is that the original poster of this side topic understands the differentiation between a noun and a verb.

Otherwise your generalization is aptly put.
Thank you! Took a lot of nit-picking and swearing at the computer, but glad it paid off.
But gpu accelerated 2D Canvas should provide that alternative, 3D games are another matter entirely.
Major point for an IPO:
SEC regulation requires businesses with more than $10 million in assets and over 499 shareholders to go public.
Hasn't this already been covered here?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2661209
Thanks for the feedback. We've tried blasting out email surveys, but the response rate has been terrible. I like your idea of in-app guided educational walk thru's.

There's a good UI design pattern website, here:
http://mobile-patterns.com/edu
ok.... seems like I can't enter numbers into irb ;p you are right 99.99% would be about an hour a year.
As far as handling filled positions, I think only direct links to job openings should be allowed and the posts should go down when the provided URL 404s.

As far as upvoting is concerned, I don't think it should be allowed. Promoting a job is only a useful task to the person hiring for the position, and helpful people who aren't applying for jobs. It would actually be in the applicants best interest to downvote jobs they find interesting, because that would lead to fewer applicants to said job.