skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because you did doesn't mean its the standard way things are done, for the vast majority of jobs (especially those outside of Silicon Valley), it just doesn't work that way, for some jobs it may make sense to take your approach but this approach simply won't work as a blanket approach. I know firsthand from having been around tech managers and these are even people who have worked as programmers, and the resume means a lot to them as far as their first impression of a candidate.
Can someone in the know please comment on the prospects for bacterial life on Mars?

I know nothing about biology or astronomy, but the case for life on Mars seems extremely good. I'm basing this on:

* Repeated offhand comments by Neil deGrasse Tyson (admittedly not a scientific source)

* Articles in popular newspapers about "Mars Farts" (I haven't read any scientific publications on the topic)

* Relatively recent (2009) reports about AL84001 (again, as understood by a layman)

What are the accepted scientific opinions about those last two items?
This specific one? What about all the other predictions over the years?
Even in the case of Wisconsin, it looks like state residents can get a membership on a reasonably cheap yearly fee. Though I didn't see it mentioned, I'd assume this would include building access during normal hours. (Though perhaps that's a bad assumption?)

http://library.wisc.edu/visitors/borrow.html#wiscres

Informally, I checked the websites of a handful of state universities, and all had some way for residents to obtain borrowing privileges. It's far from a comprehensive survey, and I may be wrong in my assumption that borrowing privileges would allow normal building access. Still, at first glance it seems promising.
The telecommuting issue is separate from the "rest of the world" issue; the former is primarily a communication and culture problem, but the latter is all about concentration of talent around leading technical companies (primarily in the US).

There are indeed many people all over the world with programming knowledge; there are far fewer with experience on a technically sophisticated project. The latter class of talent is highly concentrated around the hotspots of sophisticated technical companies which, on average, keep their most important teams in the US.

If you are just reading and writing rows on a single instance of MySQL you can get all the talent you want from just about anywhere in the world. If you want to roll your own fault-tolerant distributed filesystem your options are (statistically) much more narrow, because anyone who can do that is likely to have been tempted by an offer to work at, e.g., Google in Mountain View.
I have lived in SF for 5 years, and seriously have no clue WTF you are talking about. The crime rate in SF is quite average as far as big cities go. You make it sound like some post apocalyptic hellhole.
There is a difference between a $400 tablet selling for $100 and a tablet made to sell between $100. Quality tablets won't be that cheap for quite some time, because it isn't really possible to get quality parts, assemble them, and ship them for that little.
Instance Variable Shelf
I agree with the author that hstore is very interesting, but the data structures are not the key selling point in the NoSQL space in my opinion. The most overlooked advantage to things like Cassandra and Riak are the fact that you have no single point of failure in the system. If an individual node fails, there is no operational impact.

Postgres does have (finally!) a nice replication story, so you have data protection on a second server, but the failover mechanics are much more complicated and you still have a single point of failure at the master/writer node. The story gets even more operationally complex when you talk about sharding and the fact that you now have to have a replica per master -- and it really needs to be the same size as the master if you want to be able to trust that you have enough capacity to fail over to it. Suddenly you need to have half of your database capacity sitting idle.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think Postgres is a wonderful database server. For the vast majority of applications it is the correct default choice. Very few applications ever get to the point where they need to scale further than they can get vertically on a single node and most can tolerate a few minutes of downtime to fail over to a backup server. Hand-wavy "sharding is easy" comments, however, ignore a lot of operational reality and that's dangerous.

Understand your use case. Understand the failure modes. Decide how available your datastore needs to be and how much data you need to support. Know the consequences of the choices you make.
Cassandra, Hbase -> Column Oriented! Not schema less!
Riak -> Actually a key/value store with link walking, you can just write map reduce for that document oriented feel! Again I won't bother writing a map-reduce job just to fetch out document with particular values.
Voldermort -> Distributed key value.

Again you are missing the point of maturity and a proven user base, and it's comparing apple with bananas! Try putting in same joins and relations in your NoSQL stores that you are bragging about and see how quickly they will lose scaling! Want an example? Neo4J!
> How junior?

I had one year of programming experience when I was hired at MyEdu. I was desperate for a job so I actually signed on as a member of the automated data collection team, which only involved writing lightweight scripts. After six months, though, I taught myself PHP and improved my JavaScript enough to move up to the web development team.

Other coworkers of mine at MyEdu had similar experiences with paths like manual data entry -> QA -> web developer / DBA (as junior roles), or automated data collection -> sysop + backend developer (junior role). I don't work there now, but I think it would still be fair to characterize the company as one willing to take a chance on someone who shows a burgeoning aptitude. [And there are direct hires into junior web dev roles also; promotion from within is highly valued but not the only route.]

Naturally, this is not how you make the biggest of bucks, but it's a decent salary (with stock options for some positions) + work on a meaningful product + an enjoyable work environment. It's an especially attractive situation for people who are attempting a career transition like I was.

In the interest of not derailing the discussion too much, email me if you want to know more about my experience there. I haven't worked there since August but I worked there for over two years.

> And do you know if the hire remote for a probation period?

Remote work is normally unavailable to junior positions -- it's more of a trust-earned situation.
various NoSQL products
it's the ability to grow beyond a single server that's compelling.

You make it sound as if these products scale "magically". This is definitely not the case. There's quite a bit of massaging needed to make riak, hbase et al scale beyond certain thresholds - and you better pay close attention to their respective peculiarities.

How would you perform a query that cuts across servers and aggregates data from some of them?

That's actually not very hard to implement once you understand how it needs to be done. And you do need this understanding with any k/v-store, otherwise you'll be very sad when the magic stops working (as documented time after time for MongoDB).

Starting out with a known-good, mature store such as PostgreSQL can make a lot of sense when the trade-offs match your usage pattern.
You can use GPS and bedrock levels on the southern coast of Greenland to measure temperature if you want to, but I prefer to use a thermometer.
The important point (for me) is not how much money is being lost due to piracy, but whether the internet as it stands is destroying the music industry. Clearly it is not. The music industry, on the other hand, is currently bent on destroying the internet.
I grew up in a US college town. As a high school student (or any state resident I think) I could just go in and get a library card, and check out books. Anyone can get into the library, even without a card. Some caveats, it's a public university, and the main library was wide open, but there are also several small libraries strewn about campus (engineering, geology, chemistry, etc) that you may or may not have to swipe to get into. I think once you get a card, you can get in though, as I remember getting a card to getin into the earth sciences library for a high school project.
This is the most reasonable and fair analysis that I've seen of this issue on HN. What have we learned, after how many threads with 100+ comments have there been on this subject now? Everyone just seems to chime in with their one-bit comment, based on some generalization based on anecdote. Discussion would be a lot more direct and on-point if each thread about the intersection of startups and gender politics had this comment near the top.
I totally agree with just what your said, this post actually is meant for know your choices. I actually hate it when people make a lame excuse of using a NoSQL store when they don't need it and they don't know the consequences!
Thanks for the correction. That link worked when I checked...

Well, Chebyshev inequality always applies. It just might not be the tightest bound possible. Unless we know the distribution better, this is the best estimate (tightest bound that's provably correct given the single assumption about standard deviation)
Why not make your own film?
Just read the comments around and you will see the dogma people face on daily basis despite the huge databases of reddit!
You are right about the tone part, my apologies to the app author.
Yes another interesting python templating library, templet.py:

http://davidbau.com/downloads/templet.py

And some notes about the implementation:

http://davidbau.com/archives/2007/03/11/python_string_functi...
Come now. We know there's inequality, and we know there's bias. The question is always "is this particular outcome due to bias or some intrinsic difference?"

When we honestly can't tell and the outcome is important, I think it's reasonable to proceed as if the problem is bias. First, because to just assume it's natural differences and be wrong means you're screwing up people's lives and supporting an unfair system. And second, because historically we have fallen back on natural differences in ways we now realize are total bullshit.

See, for example, the Confederate Vice President's "Cornerstone Speech": "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

If you're going to call something cowardly, I'd favor people who argue for continuing the (favorable to them) status quo on the grounds that it's intrinsic to the universe. There's not much bravery in justifying a system that's working well for you.
In my experience, simply changing environments may cause an increase in productivity. Even if the new environment isn't strictly better, you still get a boost until you get acclimated. This might be crazy, but some sort of random rotation between various work environments might yield a sustained improvement in productivity.
IEEE Global History Network: Computers and information processing
I'm curious as to where you found the actual article referencing this particular data, as it was just presented a few days ago at the AGU conference, and I'm having trouble finding the (yet unpublished?) conference notes.

Alternatively, is this all an oblique way of saying both that the media sucks at reporting science and that scientists (and earth scientists in particular) need to be more approachable and accessible to the public? In which case, I agree with you 100%.

Lastly, what is your point, here? Nothing controversial has been reported. Temperatures in Greenland are rising. Marginal ice will melt when temperatures rise. Ice has mass and weight. When that ice goes away, the force its weight has exerted goes away. The Earth decompresses to reach a new energetic equilibrium. And now, their study has confirmed via GPS data that, indeed, things decompress when you stop compressing them. Unless you're arguing that they made up the GPS data out of whole cloth, why the total freak out?

The hyper defensive "anything that mentions temperatures changing at all is an AL GORE CONSPIRACY!!1!" really doesn't speak well of the scientific mindset of AGW denialism. The pop sci piece here doesn't even mention AGW, but we've already had 2 (current count) people come in and go into shit-flinging mode to discredit it.
I don't think language flamewars are very interesting - especially ones based on political rather than technical grounds - so let's just say that I should have qualified my statement with "in my opinion" and leave it at that.

Re: the original point, I have the impression that Nvidia has been more active in engaging universities and that's probably a better explanation for why their cards were used rather than AMDs.
That probably depends on how the plates are aligned around Antarctic.

Post-glacial rebound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound) is lifting Finland every year, but we don't really see many earthquakes here because the edges of tectonic plates are quite far.
Good, but dated and preachy (TL;DR humans make life too controlled and easy, and then they pay for it, how dare they, serves them right, harrumph, etc.).

I am more interested by the continued bleating of friends for new ideas and the continued rejection of ideas throughout it than by the predictions of a worldwide communication network. 'News' aggregators and commenting systems, a hundred years ago.

Makes me wonder if mining old sci-fi stories for things to build would be worthwhile.
So what are the actual salaries they are offering in Austin? The HN post says 150k but that's roughly the SF rate anyway.
They just want to be submissive, raise a family and let their man take care of everything difficult and challenging.

Whoa there. I can't think of any position in this debate that can be strengthened by such a contemptuous statement.

Not to mention oxymoronic. "Raising a family" isn't "difficult and challenging"? Egad.
>Explain how immigration is essential to the development and progress of economies, educate people on the implications of immigration.

I'd say that if you want to fix high-skilled immigration, that's exactly the argument you should not make.

What you should do is make an argument that appeals to American culture and sensibilities. Most Americans have ancestors who suffered--some a little, some a great deal--to come to America This is such a strong part of American culture that one of our major holidays, Thanksgiving, basically got it start from the spirit of gratitude that comes from surviving the horrors of trying to immigrate to the New World.

So an argument that boils down to "we're so awesome, how dare you make us bust our balls to become Americans" is going to rub a lot of voting Americans the wrong way. Especially when coupled with a condescending Vivek-Wadhwa-style "you Americans couldn't possible grow your economy on your own, so you should be grateful we immigrants want to come at all." Most Americans expect immigrants to be grateful for the opportunity to come to America, not the other way around.

So, as I said, make an argument that appeals to American culture and sensibilities. In my opinion, the biggest problem with skilled immigration is that 1) H-1B is tied to employment, and 2) so many H-1B visas are consumed fradulantly. So fight against H-1B fraud by insisting on strong enforcement of immigration law. Very few Americans will argue with that, and it will help open up H-1B slots.

And push for H-1B to be decoupled from employment, using the (accurate) argument that the current scheme is basically indentured servitude, a concept that most Americans (as part of our founding mythology) know is a Bad Thing. If H-1B wasn't tied to employment, you wouldn't need a Startup Visa. You wouldn't need the permission of an employer to move to the U.S. And it wouldn't matter (as much) if your green card application took years.
Having used both OO systems, I far prefer Lisp's with so much more flexibility.

But I agree that Ruby is a very good language.
It is not a replicable model to assume your work will not be reproduced online and to assume you can politely ask someone to remove it if it has been.
Their natural imperative is to raise children and nurture them - not to do startups.

Hello, naturalistic fallacy! How surprising that you came to visit when a bunch of dudes are talking about what they think women should do!
I would not call what you said an "innocent comment". It's spreading a meme and idea that has frequently been used to keep half the population as second class citizens.

You have part of a point about my "only" comment. However there is no evidence that women (and not men) want to naturally raise children. There is no evidence that there is anything "unnatural" about a woman (or man) who doesn't want children.
Looks good. I like how's it's layered on top of d3.

But "interactive" means you can interact. These charts seem to be almost entirely passive. Sure, you can build a UI that refreshes the chart with new data or new parameters, and you can read off values corresponding to the mouse pointer position in the chart. A truly interactive chart would let you zoom in and out (ie., change the resolution of the X axis), select ranges of values and so on. To truly support the claim for interactivity you should include a few interactive examples.

One last nitpick: The technically precise word for this kind of thing is chart, not graph.
This was the thread that I needed:
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1605909
the implied premise is wrong..

Startups do not produce jobs..especially web 2.0 statups

What produces jobs is middle-income Americans who have disposable income to buy products..ie product demand.

in fact we should reverse the 30 year trend of tax breaks for the 1% and transfer those tax breaks to middle-income Americans
How to make a 2D Platform Game – part 1
"use as a desktop in the post-PC era". Isn't a desktop computer pretty much a definition of a PC?

I doubt that this is the peak. With muscle cars, there was no need for more muscle. With desktop computers you can easily see use cases for more "muscle" and that need will keep the growth going on.
It takes less than 30 seconds to understand what a torrent or Reddit is. Or does CK not know how to find and understand (read) basic information?
Why not all three branches instead of just executive or just legislative?
A Footnote on Inappropriate Cloud Use [pdf]
True. But I think it's interesting to see the perspective of a non-techie on what large scale software project management failure looks like from the outside.
However, the fact that the patterns of behavior aren't random does clue you in that there are systemic factors involved, which can be analyzed and tested. Yes, every person makes an individual decision based on countless variables but that doesn't mean you can't make reliable conclusions based on the aggregate.

This is like the reverse of the probabalistic fallacy that the 100th coin flip will be affected by the fact that the previous 99 flips landed on heads. If you know for sure that your coin isn't biased the probabilities on the 100th flip is 50/50 but gosh, at that point wouldn't you question your assumptions and take a closer look at the coin?
For those who don't know the reference, those words are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.
Her first link ("women earn more than men in their 20s") goes to an article that ascribes the difference to a larger number of women at that age having degrees - ie, all else being equal, women earn less than men for the same job. Her second link ("women choose to downshift") links to an opinion piece that provides no citations for any of its claims. Her third link ("Women are choosing children over startups") links back to her own blog and again provides no substantive citations.

If someone's going to make blanket assertions like this then they ought to be able to back them up. She hasn't.
There's the fairly well-established Hawthorne Effect[1] when applied to measuring productivity in others, but I'm not sure how well it would apply to self-analysis since you actually know the details of what you're studying.

Quoting:

Changing a variable usually increased productivity, even if the variable was just a change back to the original condition. However it is said that this is the natural process of the human being to adapt to the environment without knowing the objective of the experiment occurring.

Unless you're measuring against some concrete metric though, there's potential for misinterpreting a feeling of increased productivity vs actually achieving it. Also, you may be more motivated since you know you're measuring your output.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
I believe you're not understanding what the author did. He did not attempt a recent history temperature reconstruction of the Greenland ice sheet via GPS measurements of bedrock rise. Going by the news article, the result was simply that the bedrock rose in response to a compressing force being removed, with zones experiencing heavy ice loss experiencing a commensurate rise in bedrock.
I was working on being better with Lisp and learning Ruby at the same time I was working on some of my thesis code. I initially was going to do it in Ruby but found the variants of syntax offputting - I needed to get functionality down, not remember the exact !@# symbol or syntactic construct. Binary bindings proved to be difficult, since there was a 1.8/1.9 split going on; I had to do some jury-rigging with my Mac.

I got tired of the duct-taping and syntax, then rewrote it in Lisp. Almost no problems comparatively. I'm wholly certain if I was a Rubyist coming in, the issues would have been transparent.
I think the only reason this article was so popular and generated so many comments was the clever marketed headline
In your first link, and also the link submitted, she states that women do better than men in school. I don't see where she gets this information (she doesn't cite any study that I can find), and I'm curious about the claim. Is it simply that men have a wider range of grades in school so there are many more in the failing range that brings down the average, whereas women have a smaller range with fewer women failing so the average is higher? Is it even measured in terms of grades? I only wonder because in my experience, my peers who did the best in school were mostly male (however, the ones doing the worst were also mostly male). Then again, maybe my peer group is just an exception to the norm?
finally, since they lauched this I was waiting for someone to post it here
On the e-ink screen? I don't think that will turn out too well.
Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
I've done Ruby for about 7 years and can tell you that after a while, things fall in place, including (most of) the syntax. For me, the most annoying thing is trying to create and pass around functions -- the syntax for that just isn't as easy as in CL or even Python. Having first class functions and a good function-passing syntax would be a nice addition to Ruby 2.0.

But yeah, marketability notwithstanding, I slightly favor Lisp.
Exploring new lands on Intel CPUs (SINIT code execution hijacking)
> "All trademarks are the property of their respective owners"

This is another piece of folk-law voodoo, in that, one, it is not required by any law, and, two, it does not make anything legal that would be illegal otherwise.
I suggested this to a lawyer I respect once and he suggested I write a program to do my programming.

We discussed the concept in depth, and it might be more complex than you realize. Templates are one thing, but you probably can't "mixin" different clauses without generating legalese based on inter-clause dependencies...