skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is going back to college really an option?
Hacker News:

Throughout my entire life I have always had digestion issues, especially around times of stress like the holidays and during final exams. This would, of course, negatively affect my performance in school and life in general. My parents always told me that I just had a nervous stomach and that I needed to find ways to relax.

As I enter college I don't really know what I want to major in, but I do know that I want it to have something to do with computers. Right around my fourth year as an undergrad school is awful due to inability to attend classes on a regular basis because of medical issues, my GPA is terrible, and I still do not have a major. It's around this time that my parents tell me that, rightfully so, I just need to pick something and go with it. During my next appointment with my guidance counselor I ask her, given my current transcript, what major I am closest to graduating with. After some time reviewing my academic “progress” she tells me that my best bet would be a degree in Law & Society (Pre-Law). I tell her to put me in those classes and that will be what I seek my degree in.

About a year after this I am diagnosed with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, specifically Ulcerative Colitis. I don't really know what this is and make a mistake that is apparently very common among individuals who are newly diagnosed IBD patients, assume that IBD and IBS are the same thing. I graduate with a degree in Law & Society, a minor in Computer Programming Technology, and a dismal GPA roughly a year after my diagnosis and it isn't until then that I begin to realize what UC is and how it has affected my life up until now.

Two years ago I had to have surgery to repair the damage caused by having the go disease for so long completely untreated. Now I am the point where I feel like a complete failure in life. I don't really know what to do. I hate my current job and going back to school in order to pursue another undergraduate degree in Computer Science would take 4 years due to when the classes I would need to take are offered. Any advice or words of encouragement would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
This can be taken one more notch up ridiculousness scale, if the confiscated nail clippers were just taken in the back, re-packed and then sold as you exit out of the security area. "Sir, if you wait half an hour you can come back and purchase your old clippers back"
I'm fetching jobs from my private API (would anyone be interesting in doing something with it?) from twentypeople.com and wanted to see if a real-timeish job (click&play kind of) search would make things smoother than these slow, old-school job sites. What do you think? Suggestions? Also, if you have a job, tweet me @mittermayr or contact me through the site and I'll add your job to our database, for free, no subscription, nothing, free free. I'll do all the work. Thanks guys!
Is it really 'grumpy' vs 'smart' and 'inquisitive'. You're rather close to making a value judgement here, to say the least.

He is clearly starting from a conclusion and looking for the evidence and/or complicated logic to satisfy his own conclusion. In discussions of inequalities you will always find evidence to support the 'but it should be equal stance', because

a) Egalitarian assumptions invalidate otherwise valid explanations (which as sherlock holmes/bayes have it means all other explanations are more likely)

b) The world is a big complicated place, with lots of unknowns and ambiguities

c) Positive feedback may have reenforced an inequality, exaggerating it and thus making it hard to explain the magnitude using only simple explanations.

In this argument, he is only smart in the sense that he is taking a socially acceptable/convenient position.
Thanks, listed here and added to the guide: http://lanyrd.com/2012/san-diego-hacker-news-meetup-jan/
Glad it helped! Let me know if any of this ends up helping you or if you have any questions.
Newcomb's Paradox and Free Will
Some people bring a cult-like mentality to the discussion of diversity and related issues. Dissent is not welcome, unpleasant facts and observations explained away often in contrived ways. Why is it so hard to imagine that maybe there are meaningful group variations within the human species?
Starbucks or Charbucks?
OK, lets use our imagination.

How about heart attack symptoms? Directions to the hospital? The phone number for your doctor (on his website, which you find by googling). How to safely use a chainsaw. What do when your toddler stops breathing. How to perform CPR. Drug contraindications. Where to call in a gas leak.
It's only a problem if you care about things like injustice, inefficiency, and wasted potential.
It is quite confusing since the .org devs are employees of Automattic, the Anti SOPA blog post is on wordpress.org ( by Jane Wells) YET the main register/referrer for wordpress.com is godaddy.

So you have .org with an anti-godaddy link and .com with a pro godaddy link...

ps. I understand godaddy eventually caved into a press release..but comon.
Chinese Smartphone Maker Passes Apple Globally, Targets U.S.
In a more physical sense, this is like detecting a machine that can determine from a photograph of your handbag whether it’s a cheap knockoff and whether or not you actually own that bag – as opposed to having stolen it, or having bought it from someone who did steal it.

Congressman: "That's no excuse. I've seen CSI. You can just go 'enhance, enhance, enhance' and find out anything about it."
As Martin says "Personally I find it troubling when software professionals, who ought to be good at logical thinking, can reach so easily for such circular logic."
Older discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512930
I was wondering that myself. I'm not so sure that putting something like this up that fast doesn't present dangers.
No. It's repercussions.
The point was that you don't need any law to demand money for something. Copyright may legitimize your demand (in some people's eyes) but you can demand anything for anything.

I demand you pay me $20 for the privilege of reading my posts. See, it worked fine. I have the same legitimacy as anyone else that asks for money. You can choose to pay it or not. There's no law that suggests I can charge you, but I can certainly ask and you can choose to pay, if you want.

It's a tricky nuance but it's still a nuance.
I'm a lot confused. Are you saying that people wouldn't notice if you replaced the whole Facebook site with a protest message, but if you offer a protest widget to "an audience that we can presume is largely ignorant to apathetic about SOPA", it will spread like wildfire? That doesn't make any sense to me.
What Exactly Is Freemium App Gaming?
For you, or for my elderly neighbor, who just has a bookmarked google page and knows of nothing else?

Note: This is actually true--I "fixed their computer" recently.
How to install Consolas font on Mac OS X
Why is it so hard to imagine that maybe there are meaningful group variations within the human species?

The worst things humans have ever done to each other have all centered around the notion of "meaningful group variations within the human species". Without hard science, it's a scary and dangerous place.
Why salesreps should think as businessmen to become salesmen
I'm guessing that Intel cut Motorola a really sweet deal to get them to sign an exclusive contract. The decision probably had little to do with Intel being a better platform, and more to do with cost per chip.

Let's face it - Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to Intel. They knew that they had to have a major win, or risk getting disrupted in the near future. So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to get an exclusive contract.

When you look at it, Medfield is 3 year-old desktop chip technology, which itself wasn't exactly new (the Atom had some improvements, but wasn't a radical departure from what preceded it). Intel isn't bringing anything new to the table - they just keep shrinking the same old chips, and reducing power requirements. At the core, they are still a PC chip company - they just figure out how to shoehorn those chips into smaller and smaller platforms.

The new ARM-based devices (such as Tegra 3) are actually much more innovative and better-suited to mobile devices than Medfield. I think that we will see a lot more innovation in chip design from ARM licensees going forward (such as the low-power 5th core on the Tegra 3), and this will eventually disrupt Intel from the bottom up.
How To Handle Downtime During Site Maintenance
Exaggerated title and claims attract impressions. News at 11.
Right now.

Bug 715549[1] tracks the process of updating the boilerplate contained in files across the project from the MPL 1.1 boilerplate to MPL 2.0. But you don't have to wait for that to happen before you can begin using the code[2] under the new license.

The MPL is forward-compatible with future versions of the license.[3] (Section 6 says "Netscape", but this is one of the rights the Mozilla Foundation obtained from AOL.)

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=715549

2. MPL-licensed code, of course

3. http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/1.1/#section-6
One should not need to be "libertopian" to find many of the actions of governments abhorrent.

I imagine you are OK with "sanctions" that cause children to starve and to watch their psychologically destroyed parents crumble under the (very much intended) pressure of the sanctions to overturn a dictatorship.

Over the past few decades, the US government has committed horrible atrocities against civilian populations of a variety of nations. Much of this was "indirect", its indirectness a virtue in terms of "economy of force".

There is absolutely no moral high ground enjoyed by governments compared to mafia or other criminal organizations, it's just a matter of how elaborate the propaganda effort has been to create the perception that the acts are just... and in many cases there is lots of doublespeak employed to prevent the brains of observers from drawing the obvious connection.

Torture is called "enhanced interrogation"

Disrupting a society with bombs is called "preserving the stability of a region".

Running secret assassination programs is called "covert operations"
I wasn't writing about designers specifically. I believe what I wrote applies equally well to coders or business guys.

And I think you're extrapolating from the 10% (or maybe even 1%) successful cases like Mint.com to imply that equity is worth more than cash, but remember that in most cases equity in a startup is worth absolutely nothing.
This is great. I hope other major players (Google, Facebook, ...) participate in this blackout in some way. Not everyone reads tech blogs and major TV outlets would not cover it since they are in support of SOPA. A little video stream on the main Google or Facebook landing pages would go a long way to help raise awareness.
The "Chaotic and Ungoverned" Explosion of News
My point was the app should never crash, for whatever reason. You need to handle failures gracefully.
I may be wrong, but I don't believe that membership provides journal access. It's not mentioned in the membership benefits and there are separate prices listed below for individual societies.
s/appreciate/ignore/g
It's only wasted potential if you're sure that a career in technology is superior to any other career or goal in life.

That's certainly not true. I'd be curious to see the reaction of you telling a woman who is satisfied with her life that she's wasted her potential.
Good idea. Changing my profile picture to the STOP SOPA one right now.
That's utterly ludicrous.
this comment cost $3629 american dollars.

$2500 (map pro) + $999 (apple display) + $50 (1 month of fios) + $50 (espresso machine) + $30 (coffee)
That's exactly it. It's like telling someone that my software is worth $1700 because that's what my laptop cost.
> Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to Intel.

Windows 8 stil hasn't shipped, won't ship for quite some time and won't run most current Windows PC software. Don't forget non-x86 Windows NT ran on MIPS, PPC, Alpha and Itanic (and i960, Clipper and SPARC, IIRC) processors and it mostly failed because it couldn't run software compiled for x86's.
What is more, the more barriers are removed the harder and more convoluted it gets to explain any such differences.

If we assume there aren't any differences between men and women, but speculate on what the world would look like with significant differences, what would the distributions be like (as compared to today).

On the reason why, I would say the level interest is very tied up with ability in any case. What is more innate ability probably causes interest. I don't think it is a scientific statement to say it is only a social phenomenon (or vica-versa).
FWIW, Hipchat's pricing is $2/month/user (so $16 for our 8 people), and Grove's is $25/month for up to 10 people. Not sure where you're getting $50. And yeah, for what we need, it'd take a lot more than an hour to set up. Not to mention explaining to our non-technical staff members how to set up an IRC client. That's why we picked Hipchat.
As for baking your time tracking / billing into "the bread," I couldn't agree more. You might like my app, Freckle, which makes it not only dead simple to use a timer or enter time by hand, but also has integration points for github & beanstalk:

http://letsfreckle.com/startups

(Not mentioned on the startup-oriented page: we also have budgeting, budget alerts, invoicing, etc. An iPhone-friendly mobile web UI and also native apps coming.)
I have similar thoughts. But also, it bothers me that the imbalances in tech are considered to be somehow more pathological or worse than the imbalances that exist in all kinds of other professions. We seem to be the only profession flogging ourselves over this issue (I'm sure there are some others, but I doubt there are many).

Are people in nursing worried about the field underperforming as a whole because it has so many women?
Just as stupid; to expect people not to sue you if you take someone else's intellectual property.
Edward de Bono once talked about how words become loaded with emotional connotations and value judgements to the point where it is hard to argue for or against certain positions.

Eg: You can make an argument for or against a mixture of two things in differing ratios, but the moment you use the words "balanced" and "unbalanced" to represent the two states, the it is harder to argue for the "unbalanced" side. Likewise for "core" vs "surface" (de Bono's example) Who would want to argue against balance, 'core', or in this case, "diversity"?(What are you, some kind of bigot?).

"Diversity" is automatically assumed to be a positive, before the argument on whether it is desirable begins, and there isn't a value neutral or value positive word that is its opposite.

Specifically in this post, there are plenty of value laden words - 'diversity', 'meritocracy' etc put together to slant in a particular direction. Not much solid argument or content there - the power of the argument comes instead from the values attached to the specific words used, which makes it a bit iffy - Martin is a gifted writer and clear thinker - this just isn't one of his better efforts.

[Due Disclosure: I know Martin from my days at ThoughtWorks. I respect him immensely and think he is a very impressive person, who has given me a lot of very useful advice on many occasions.]
In many cases it is worth far more to a company to get a solution out the door in 12 months at greater expense than to wait for a more cost-efficient team to finish in, say, 24.

I ask whether we can just take it as a given that large teams can get a given piece of software done more quickly than a small team. It may happen some of the time, it may not. But I have trouble granting it as axiomatic, for reasons that would require a blog post to list:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/08/bricks.html
Thanks for taking the time to respond here and elsewhere. You make some really interesting points, and I understand this topic much better now.
> Everyone wants an app nowadays

Every merchant wants an app, but their customers couldn't care less. Not that it affects your business model in any way.
Just like the punching bag, also made in China, that turned out to be stuffed with garbage instead of padding --

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/n74vq/so_i_bought_a_2...
All valid points but then youtube is doing something that allows them to detect even derived work albeit they do have access to the full video so that might not work for everyone. At the very least with a registration based system it's clearer who "owns" what.
New Collection of Home Furnishings at The Garden Gates
New Collection of Home Furnishings at The Garden Gates<p>The Garden Gates, one of the fastest growing online retailers has unveiled new collection different elements of home furnishings and home decor. Especially in current times when home is becoming a favorite place to relax, renew and reenergize. Chad, the co-founder of The Garden Gates said that though people spend half of their life at work place and the rest half at home, and despite everyone is looking for spending quality time at home; they often ignore the importance of the home furnishings at home for comfortable living. Home decor and home furnishings has a lot to do with the quality of life people have at their homes. He added further, as a matter of fact, the home decor and home furnishings have profound impact on the way people live, feel and do the things in their life. For a lot of people home is an expression of who they are and they express their individuality by home decor and home furnishings. Variety of home and garden products make a home truly a home. He narrated some of the features of the new collection of Aidan Gray collection of indoor furniture and home furnishings.<p>In the recent times, it is seen that home furnishings is becoming very personal and individual centric. Everybody has its own taste and preference when it comes to the home furnishings. A variety of home furnishing and home decor products have paved their way into homes as element of decoration and embellishment. Nonetheless, one thing which is very personal is the bedroom furnishing is a part of overall home furnishing. Bed linens and bedding accessories are essentially adding aesthetic value to the bedroom decor and thus finally the home decor. The Garden Gates Bella Notte store of linens and bedding products has also seen new members in the family. The team said that it is their constant endeavor to add new things to the Bella Notte linens and bedding category.<p>The Garden Gates also revamped their entire website and gave a new look to for the better visuals. Home furnishings and home decor products now look great in the new look of this innovative online retailer. The Garden Gates team believes that new collection of the home furnishings would surely embellish and enhance the beauty quotient of home. Home furnishings and home decor assists in creating comfy and cozy home for finest living. Home fragrances are also a part of home furnishings. Those who wish to know more about new collection of home furnishings and home and garden products may please take a look at www.thegardengates.com. Surely, you would be fascinated by the collection of home furnishings.
The Implications of Google's "Search+"
I find it exceedingly hard to believe that Google would be brought down as a repercussion of Google. It's very unlikely that any widespread, powerful websites (like Google or Facebook) would be taken down, because removing them from the ecosystem would prompt an enormous user reaction. Say what you will about the intelligence of those involved with SOPA, they know about how much they can rock the boat.
Good point. The misunderstanding is rooted in a fundamental difference between physical objects and ethereal "content".
Why are we having this debate? Shouldn't we focus on developing awesome software?
"So for child porn, we are able to design a machine that is able to detect child porn. You can detect certain colors that would show up in pornography, you can detect flesh tones."

AFAIK, this is complete BS! I was quite up to date with research in this field till about 5yrs ago and the systems are still in their infancy. If you put an automated system to automatically detect pornography, the false alarm rates would be very high. And differentiating child porn from regular porn is also extremely hard.
I agree with your premise if this algorithm was enforced by threat of lawsuit. An alternative would be that, instead of lobbying&lawsuits, the RIAA/MPAA pay Google to implement such a thing and in return also grant them immunity/amnesty. [insert ridicule for how Big Content would never do such a thing]
I have a friend who got his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and now works as a iPad App developer. I had a boss that got his degree in Nuclear Engineering and went off to found his own online business (he now works as a developer at the company that bought his company). I've worked on code with team members that barely graduated from High School, and they were good coders. Don't about what degree you end up getting, if you want to program teach yourself. If your good at something people will begin to take notice, regardless of what your resume says.
...there's nothing wrong with being extra critical of rhetoric that's historically dubious.

Yes there is. It biases our thinking.

Here is a non-controversial example of this: "Millikan measured the charge on an electron...got an answer which we now know not to be quite right...It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..."

(The narrative comes from Richard Feynman.)

If we look on some hypothesis extra critically, and others only reasonably critically, we will bias our views towards the beliefs which we apply less scrutiny to.

(See also this discussion, where I defend a paper claiming to prove the existence of ESP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068699 )
DOJ's Microsoft prosecutor: Google is a monopoly
If we keep going with your excellent point, it's not hard to see a hypothetical argument for aiming to make everyone in the world equally interested in everything.

Proponents of this theory in tech jobs don't seem to understand this. They just see that if the numbers don't add up to a perfectly even split, there's something nefarious going on.
The demographics of social gamers are closer to gambling than gaming
Rob "CmdTaco" did some analysis - http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/

John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480

Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.