skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm 25, have a few years of experience in this industry, and I don't see any of the things you're describing. I'm working for my 3rd company now, and I've always had hardware provided, my own desk, and since moving to silicon valley have always made over 80k.

I have a friend right now being courted by 3 companies right out of grad school, all of which are offering over 100k, plus bonuses.

Where are you seeing this?
This article makes some big leaps. It says in the fourth paragraph: "Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security." It seems to imply that this is mostly because of wasteful TSA-like spending.

The Department of Homeland Security's FY11 budget authority was around $56 bil. The TSA only accounted for 14% of that money. [1]

Just for perspective -- top 5 slices of DHS's FY11 pie: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (20%), U.S. Coast Guard (18%), Transportation Security Administration (14%), Federal Emergency Management Agency (12%), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (10%).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of the TSA... I think we all feel a little silly as grownups waiting around in a security line in our socks. But I don't think all the hand waving about "security theater" is really justified. And there are probably quite a few things that fall under "homeland security" that aren't so controversial. Disaster response? Maritime search and rescue? Enforcement of fisheries conservation regulations? Border protection?

[1] All numbers from DHS's "FY 2011 Budget in Brief"
You missed out the part where this is ahead of their goal. Instead of wasting money by trying an ambitious big-bang transition with according requirement for additional staff and support, they've purposefully planned out a gradual, and orderly transition.

As for "spending public money on a dubious cause", they're spending roughly as much as before, but they're spending it in the local economy instead of sending it to the US, before you even count any other benefits.
I am not sure that I'm 100% against this idea, but the situation in California makes me really hesitant about direct democracy of that form. I'd like to think we could implement something like it that incorporates lessons learned, but I'm not too optimistic. If the CA situation went nationwide I'm afraid we'd basically be stuck in this do-nothing gridlock indefinitely.
I definitely agree with your point about stack traces - I've used var x = function(){} for some projects, but have found in practice that named functions are very much worthwhile when dealing with stack traces?

What's the benefit of var x = function x(){}? Is it just illustration that functions can be assigned to variables?
I wouldn't say never, but I agree there will be smaller booms and busts for a while, at least until all 21 million Bitcoins are made so there is no more mining, and until Bitcoins starts to be used in regular stores.
How does it work? "the latest algorithms being discovered at leading academic institutions" reads like marketing fluff to me.
I was confused because I didn't see any "exactly how they did it" in the linked article.

Better link: http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-17-awesome-investors-in-our-40...
That's alright. I keep hearing a lot about how hard it is for a company to sponsor someone and, given the short notice, I was struck surprised by it.
Time to Get Busy
This Steve Jobs memorial website can be yours today for only $10 million
re: deciding not to stay, I would imagine it would be structured like employer funded MBA programs where you can leave at any time, but then have to pay back a pro-rated portion of your tuition and expenses.
If you want maximum inches of shelf space, then The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth is your best bet.

Myself, I love slim books that are high density yet well written. The C Programming Language by K& R and The AWK Programing Language by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan are good examples. These books are just a joy to read.
This is an ... interesting choice of article to share the news about the HIV vaccine advancing to human trials.
hi edw519,

I think that presentation is an important skill for anyone to have in a professional environment. I need to be able to communicate with my teammates, and they need to be able to communicate with me.

That's one of our criteria for hiring where I work - can you communicate with us?

You might be insanely brilliant, but if you can't stand up and talk with us about your brilliance, it doesn't do us much good when wiring your stuff into our stuff.

We also need a decent amount of 'fit' on our team. Fit for us more or less means "cares about the software, cares about reliable software doesn't get into arguments over unimportant stuff, feels relaxed with us, takes showers". Nothing too outre, I don't think. Interpersonal conflicts is something we really - really - don't need. We have enough challenges in the technical arena. :)
Hogan.js, compiler for mustache templating by Twitter
It would be awesome if that "Call Now" button was implemented with Twilio Client to directly call someone.
The biggest privacy scandal of 2011: Location, location, location
Lacking knowledge or experience.
Yes, the civilian flight instructors in the US, I imagine they are probably still alive. What's your point?
Would be great if hotels used these and let you decide the temperature of your room before you arrive.
Suppose just 5% of the potential jurors believe, say, that it should not be illegal to kill an abortion doctor, or to beat up someone who dares to be homosexual in public, or to beat up someone who dares to flirt with a white woman while being black, and so on.

If you have a jury of 12 and require a unanimous verdict for conviction, then 46% of randomly chosen juries will not convict people for the aforementioned crimes no matter what the evidence, because they will include at least one person who believes those acts should not be criminal.

<rant>

for whomever wondering how tzs comes up with the numbers, he probably models this problem as a binomial distribution, e.g., Bin(12, 0.05). while binomial distribution is a good approximation for this case, i think hypergeometric is better, since it's not 5% anymore as soon as you choose one juror.

</rant>
I may be remembering the Google study and/or something else from about that time frame. I have a vague recollection now of both Google's opinion and and something else that had at least some degree of separation from Google.

Thanks very much for the informative response. I'll have a look at these (as soon as I talk myself down sufficiently from my guilt over my price-motivated Seagate purchase ;-).

In part, I also pushed the button on Seagate (despite the 1 TB "click of death" episode from a few years ago) because a recent WD laptop HD purchase went rather bad with incessant parking that is apparently inherent to the model's firmware. I finally fixed that on the XP Pro machine it lives in by finding and setting to run on start-up:

http://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/ [1]

But not before SMART reported significant aging for the drive. Which rather pissed me off. (I should pull it and RMA it -- 5 year warranty.)

So, that helped lead me to Hitachi. Then the price inflation, plus the news that WD is buying Hitachi, and I figured I'd give Seagate another go.

I hate purchasing consumer electronics, these days.

--

1. Which I found at about the same time I learned I could tweak the relevant settings manually -- so, I went with the pre-packaged implementation.
MIR seemed to have broader coverage of evaluation metrics for IR systems, better coverage of UI related concerns such as interface design, better coverage of Multimedia retrieval and better coverage of web-search.

I liked intro to IR better for almost everything else. For the size of MIR, the coverage of things like LSI, Clustering and Probabilistic Models seemed shallow in comparison.
Unfortunately, the public perception of vaccaines as a procedure that confers total immunity against a disease is somewhat flawed. HIV, like influenza, is extremely prone to mutation. It is the main survival advantage of these bugs. Once you think you have a good grasp, they slip right through your fingers.
That's why I said "eventually", the user-base isn't quite there yet. I could see people just keeping $50-$100 in Bitcoin permanently to use for small transactions, much like I always have $100-$200 in cash in my wallet for small purchases, or $1000-$3000 in my bank account just as a buffer.

I don't see that happening anytime soon though with the huge volatility.
There's a reason no-one else is discussing this angle; this thread isn't about you.

The tactic you're employing here and on every other money thread is so common that Wikipedia has a name for it: "coat-rack arguments".

You're using HN threads about money transactions as coat-racks for comments that are nominally germane (ie, "Bitcoin allows low-cost and regulation-free &c and ...") but really about your personal drama ("... and that's what I'm trying to do with my [totally unrelated scheme]").

I hope you're starting to notice that HN people aren't going to let you keep doing this without calling you on it, and that off-topic comments are therefore a poor promotional vehicle for your pet controversies. Either way, please stop.
Mobile apps for Bitbucket
If I had thought it through, I might have been able to offer white lies to cover the questions they asked. As it was, they didn't ask me anything so nice as "do you have a problem with the law in question"; they asked several questions related to that, including "do you have any feelings about drug legalization".

They didn't just ask if I could return a guilty verdict, either -- they asked if I would return a guilty verdict based on the law as explained by the judge if I felt that the facts supported the verdict. To be honest, I did answer yes to this one, although I did feel a twinge and my hesitation was palpable.

As for not knowing whether you'll say "guilty" or "not guilty", that's fair. They did describe enough of what the charges were that I find it hard to believe that I would convict, unless I exercised my power of "jury expandification", which would require me to convict them of the charge presented if I felt that they were guilty of other crimes, to make sure that the defendant received some punishment.
Right. The fact that this is getting all the way to human trails is huge - millions could be saved each year, and they're concerned about less heavy metals than you'd find in a can of tuna.
In that case, go write up an article about your viewpoint and post that to HN. Don't just comment on any semi-almost-kinda-related article.
No Boys Allowed: Women Innovate Mobile Accelerator
> They're associated, rather than "linked" because, well, they're both immigration driven by a labor shortage.

Most people understand that I'm talking about the political process, said process being how the US makes changes in immigration law.

The advocates of "high skill immigration" are asking for different changes to said law than the advocates for low skill plus "forgiveness". However, they're putting both sets of changes into a single package.

As to the "labor shortage", I've done farm labor and other "jobs that americans won't do". The "shortage" is a combination of wage-busting and unwillingness to pay for the relevant automation.

Then again, you won't find me arguing that someone is entitled to cheap golf, to mention one of the arguments for low skill immigration.
Are you outside of the US? Reluctantly, we decided to target the animation to US users because there is unfortunately little that foreign citizens can do to stop SOPA.
"I don't remember anymore - running 11.0a now. I'm using nightly builds since ~2009"

Likewise. I also have several extensions enabled and generally have 30+ tabs open all the time, sometimes many times that. I have had an odd crash but very rarely.
Disagree. People are pretty used to the notion of getting a new flu vaccine every year. Even if some hypothetical HIV vaccine required semi-annual doses, people would line up around the block for it.
GitHub robot that removes trailing white space in your code
Now this ad from "EthicalOil.Org" is something special. Realy good people who care - well.

You have to know, that for the industrial isolation of oil from sand a lot of energy is needed. So much, that they (Energy Alberta) want to build a nuclear power plant right next to the tar sand fields.

Do they realy care? I don`t think so.
Facebook Vindicated in Irish Privacy Audit
Whoops! Thanks for the feedback! That's an old page that was supposed to be replaced on our latest redesign.

The simplest explanation is pattern matching: we analyze customer and transactional data to understand how different customers behave. Using this understanding we can make predictions for how each user will behave in the future.

We use all of that analysis to power actions - take actions on the right user at the right time, optimizing for CLV.

Here's more: https://www.custora.com/home/customer_lifetime_value
Let Over Lambda, 50 Years of Lisp by Doug Hoyte

It is one of the most challenging and inspiring technical books I have ever read, covering macros in great depth.
Ah ok, thanks for the heads up. You're also not the first person to ask for vim keybindings - will add to my todo list
Please switch the videos around... without reading the text I looked at the first video and thought "ok, that's pretty basic and seems to be causing problems because the whole device moves when you apply pressure". The bottom video gave a completely different idea and actual usage presentation was awesome.

Otherwise, I like it :) you don't even need full multitouch device for that kind of stuff sometimes. I had loads of fun with touch screens you can buy from ebay for ~15£ for a 7" transparent one. Just plug in via usb and treat it as another pointer device.
http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/
Here's one: choose our legislatures like we choose our jurys.
There have been quite a few articles over the last decade pointing out that the creation of DHS as a whole has been quite a waste of time and money with little benefit.

Katrina showed many of the problems with FEMA, though it seems to have improved since then. I'm not sure why enforcement of fisheries conservation belongs under DHS, and as someone who does a good bit of offshore fishing I'm not very happy with they way they over-regulate/enforce on recreational fishermen who would have a hard time making a dent in most populations while (seemingly) turning a blind eye to commercial efforts destroying them.

Others I don't have any insight into, but it seems that DHS has mostly the creation of a huge number of bureaucrats who's major responsibilities involve insuring that the money allotted is spend so that the same or more can be requested for the next fiscal year, with the actual agencies under it getting a smaller piece of the pie and more barriers to actually doing work than before.
In the US they do not re-check ID's at the gates.

Your boarding pass is scanned by a barcode reader, and the computer does seem to pick up invalid passes, but I don't think that is the point.

The TSA has made some kind of a big deal about only allowing "ticketed passengers" into the gate areas. However, their check of this comes down to ensuring you have a piece of ID that matches the name on a piece of paper you bring from home.

To use an example from the story, you could have 20 people who are not travelers each smuggle a component of a bob through security (a portion of a liquid, ptex, etc.) and then give those components to a single flyer with a valid ticket (who would have presumably gone through security with NO contraband at all, so as not to burn his identity if he accidentally went through a line with an alert agent).

There is also the simple matter of basic vulnerability testing. If you have to spend $500 on a ticket to get a trip through the TSA line, it's very costly to test the edges of the system. If you can go through the line 4x per day at 3 different airport terminals, or multiple airports that are in close proximity to each other, then you can easily run 100 test scenarios in a week about how the lines are managed, processed, etc.

As an example, I travel frequently and don't like dealing with the full-body scanners. In most airports at the busy times they "randomly" select some passengers to just go through the metal detectors because the body-radiators are slow. With about 80% accuracy I can watch how the lines are being handled and time my fiddling around with items on the xray belt to be "randomly" selected to skip the full body scanner. It takes a few cycles of observation to start to see the patterns though.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/aids-research-canadi...

For those that don't appreciate the fear-mongering around 'genetically modified viruses'.
This seems like a bad idea. At the same time we're (hopefully!) keeping the information away from the bad guys, we're also handicapping those who could be building us protection from it.

the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would probably withhold some information — but only if the government creates a system to provide the missing information to legitimate scientists worldwide who need it.

I'm concerned with how they might determine who is "legitimate", and who "needs it".

And beyond that, it seems silly to try to protect in this way. I've got to believe that anyone skilled enough to be able to use the information would also be skilled enough to get himself onto the staff of a "legitimate" researcher, thereby getting the information.
Does socket.io handle these issues? Does Now.js?
> Unfortunately, the researchers will likely be dismayed as nearly all vaccines are toxic to the body thanks to the rather large amount of heavy metals present in vaccines.

Get this crap off of here. I'm surprised they didn't mention autism.
If I were in the music/entertainment industry I would want my employers to stop throwing money away on senseless legal action and legislature to cripple the internet, and start thinking of new models to generate revenue working with these tools.
Or reading between the lines, your family are lumbered with third rate devices because of your ideological geeky fanaticism.

This is all reminiscent of the "Linux will take over the desktop" advocacy of 8 or 9 years ago. People with knowledge of "the real world" just roll their eyes heavanwards and find someone interesting to talk to.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte.

If you ever need to give a presentation or write a report that uses any graphs or charts, this book gives simple guidelines that makes the visual information as clear as possible.
I'm not sure how compelling my argument is... but if I have nothing to hide then why does anybody need to look? For example does the TSA seeing everybody naked actually improve security?
I'm a fairly experienced programmer and JS still drives me up the wall. The implicit casting and inconsistent operator overloads have led to many unhappy visits to Stack Overflow to see just WTF my browser is doing. I can't imagine the experience being any better for newbie programmers! Even simple things, like bitwise operators, are basically broken unless you take care to ensure that your variables are coerced to whole numbers, because all numerics are f%!#^&ing floating point numbers...

Given that the language is such a mess, I think it would induce a new programmer to compartmentalize their JS learnings as a bunch of special case hacks instead of discovering broad language principles that are applied consistently across the language.
Don't Underestimate Beachhead Strategy
You make excellent points.

But the counterargument is that the point of having a jury is to protect people from the power of the government. If we want to say that a jury is there solely to evaluate the evidence, then I suspect that a judge sitting without a jury will likely do a better job.

But if the point is protect from the power of the government and avoid the risk of a corrupt judge, then nullficiation must be an available tool, and like any other tool it is only useful when it is known to exist.

Perhaps the answer to your concern about balancing is more education rather than less. Perhaps juries (at least in cases where one side requests it) should be informed both that nullfication is an option, and also that, as you said, it should only be applied when "not only would there be an injustice in applying the law to the case at hand, but that there has been a breakdown of the system".
Define "most".

If you're talking about the most humans across the world, then your lifestyle (as is mine) is leagues above that.

If you're talking about being in-touch with the "middle class USA" even then you're a quite a bit off on your numbers (single with a family of 4 income = lots of disposable income).

I admire your intention, but the outcome of your goal setting may not be what you have in mind. Perhaps the best way to stay connected is to do the things most humans do - settle down with a spouse/partner and have/adopt child(ren)... you can't know it until you live it.
Seasonal flu vaccaines are possible because the FDA has well established procedures for giving fast-track approval for this particular catagory of drugs. Normall it takes many years to gain approval for a new drug, or even an iteration of an existing drug. In addition, new HIV strains do not arrive in predictable yearly 'waves' like influenza does, new strains arise randomly within the infected population.
How to hire rockstars
First, I won't stop; certainly not because you and your colleague say I should.

Second, I didn't post an advertisement, or a job offer, or a discussion about a random topic. I posted a federal lawsuit about money transmission that is directly related to Bitcoin's purported goals and the title of this article.

Enough people have contacted me, some of whom read Hacker News, and some of whom do not, who fully support what I am doing, that I believe your viewpoint to be both in the minority and in this particular case, incorrect besides.
No distribution needed - 46% is 100% - (100% - 5%)^12, as if you were rolling a die 12 times. The population is large enough that the effect of removing 11 people from it should be negligible.
In the United States two people look at your boarding pass: the TSA (at the entrance to security screening), and the airline (while boarding the plane).

The TSA also checks your ID. In most airports, the TSA is NOT online and merely looks at the printed boarding pass to make sure the name matches what is on your ID, your flight is for today, etc. In most cases the airline does not bother checking ID again, assuming that the TSA checked it.

You would not get on a plane with a fake boarding pass, but you do get into the secure area.

Because IDs are not checked by the airline, forging a boarding pass would allow you to board a plane with any name you want on the ticket -- the name on the ticket doesn't have to be your "real" name (it doesn't have to match your photo ID). This means that the TSA's various "no fly" lists, which are just lists of names of people that they've compiled that are "too dangerous to fly", are easily defeated.