skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
mismanaged by completely clueless and yet highly paid executives

Not all management is necessarily clueless and incompetent. Alan Mulally was a brilliant engineer and manager at Boeing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mulally ). He was recruited to come in and essentially fix Ford. He doesn't need to work. He is already a multimillionaire from working at Boeing. The reason management is well paid is because you need a way to motivate the very small group of managers that are qualified for the job. If you are worth millions - why would you ever take a job that pays one dollar a year and makes the entire world hate you? Well because if they do pull this off - the stock will recover and everyone will make a lot of money. And management could be credited with saving the industry. I know this is hard to imagine but every executive manager I have known worries about their employees and how their decisions effect the community and world they live in.

I've known a number of engineers who have been laid off, including myself and it almost always comes out as a huge improvement to the individual. Anytime you leave a failing company and enter a company which is hiring it's likely to be a big big improvement.

The real question, assuming it's unavoidable with a democratic congress and president incoming, is how do we make sure the US tax payer doesn't get screwed. We shouldn't be giving ANYTHING away. I agree with you there.

I've worked for a number of big businesses and know some upper management personally. I've also worked two union jobs and come from a town that was/is mostly union labor. I can tell you that the unions of today that I saw are corrupt. Management is rarely corrupt - but since managers have greater influence it gets far more media attention. I don't know and can't think of the last time I've heard anyone that I respect say anything positive about unions. This is coming from someone who lived within 20 miles of a Chrysler plant for the majority of my life. The responsibility to fix the current situation lies with management. The blame lies with unions and the management of the past.

The efficiency and good work of American labor has never been in doubt.

Unfortunately this is in doubt. Unions do not recognize efficiency or good work. I agree most employers recognize this, but Unions prevent it. Ask any above average teacher, police officer or UPS employee.

(And for the record - yes this is entirely my opinion - I don't claim otherwise. My conclusions are my own and at best anecdotal++, but none the less they are still my conclusions)
yeah but Mono is never up to date when it comes to the current state of .NET and there are tons of compatibility issues... it's a losing battle. I just don't see the point when there are tons of other good alternatives that are fully open (not to mention more mature).
Vint Cerf: A better network for outer space
Not anymore. At least in my experience, people think you are either a naive dreamer or a burnout that can't get a real job, especially if you work with computers/internet. I just tell relatives and new people I meet that I don't know what I want to do after school.
Yup. The takeaway from our post is simple: if you're working with people from successful companies, mention them. If your lead engineer was a high-ranking team lead at Google, that carries more weight than if his latest work was, let's say, managing the database for a potato factory in Ohio.
You ask a good question and I'm getting sick of people voting down posts (like yours) they merely don't like than those that are actually wrong. That is not the HN way but it's rapidly becoming so, sadly.

Join me in voting up all people who make sensible posts (even if you disagree with them) and who are being voted down by newbies abusing the points system :)
Yeah I don't think ESPN.com is getting many pageviews from this crowd.
Computer History Museum announces the 2008 Fellow awards recipients
Yup, that was the idea.

I just added MIT License [1] to the source.

Everything is in one self-contained HTML file (sans images). Feel free to improve it :).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit_license
With Fusion on a 2.8Ghz iMac, I don't see any particular slowdown running WinXP vs running native.
I know it's the alarmist thing to say, but it's starting here.

While there have been flurries of "poor" content accruing a decent set of points in the past, I'm now starting to see a lot of downvoting occurring. Previously, downvotes were used on spam, offensiveness, or flat out "wrong" comments - whereas now it appears to be an indicator of opinion. This shift demonstrates how significant the "new wave" of HN users is.
When you say "much of the world," which regions are you familiar with that have this stigma? I'm curious.
Why not? Not disagreeing, genuinely curious what your thoughts are.
1.5% FreeBSD?! I love this place.

I bet Windows is still the majority since HN is probably a big work-time hangout for the corporate drones ;)
I'm also curious if it knows which IDs registered as which OSes.

For instance, I use a Mac at home, and I use Linux via VNC on Windows at work (though I don't visit HN from there, others might come here from work). So technically I could be using any of the 3, and if I really wanted it to "count" I'd consider myself a Mac user.
The latest flat aluminum Apple external keyboards are the best I've ever used, and I've been a keyboard snob for decades.
We live in an unbelievably conservative time right now.
Lawyer wrote it, and we consulted with him on it. We don't want to be doing anything ugly in our TOS (that said if anyone sees anything that looks out of place in there, email feedback@viviti.com so we can take a look!)
I switched from Linux to Mac in 2003. I had a laptop stolen, and really liked the idea of a slick PowerPC laptop running Unix. I figured if I didn't like OS X, there were several PPC linux distributions I could choose from. It turns out, I liked Unix, and OS X served my needs better than Linux (all of the Unix utils plus significant commercial application support. Three more Macs later, I don't even think about it when buying a laptop.

I've seen fink mentioned above, but I prefer MacPorts.

Its great to see where things have come in the last few years.
While not pertaining to relatives or holidays, here's my experience as pertains to the social pull of various careers.

Graduate student.

0: "I'm a grad student." 1: (Deadpan/barely impressed.) "Oh. You must be really smart." 0: "Don't worry. I'm not."

Analyst at a pharmaceutical consulting company.

0: "I'm a consultant." 1: "Oh." (Isn't everyone?)

Quantitative trader/developer at a hedge fund.

0: "I'm a trader." 2: "Oh." ++

Unemployed.

0: "I'm a treasure hunter." 1: WTF? OR "I'm asking what you do for a job, not..."

Working for a startup.

0: "I'm starting a tech company."
1: "Oh, cool!"
0: (Excited.) "Yeah, it's fun. I'm using a ridiculously powerful programming language called Lisp. It looks like this." (Points to some monstrosity of a macro such as ONCE-ONLY.)
1: "Uh, yeah..."

++ The use of 2 here is not a typo. Finance is not nearly as "sexy" as I thought it would be before going in, and the standard-error descriptor is, in fact, appropriate.
Pft. Can't stand this guy's stuff -- it's unadulterated linkbait. Thank god we don't have FreelanceSwitch articles popping up in here yet.
Web Design from the Gut
He can buy an unlocked developer handset from Android Market without these issues.

I still think the Apache2 license will have them claiming closed-source stuff is not part of "Core Android", but it's a step forward.
Bit of both, depending on which part of the process - you might say we played leap frog?
Now that you say that, until recently I resisted calling myself an entrepeneur, it does have a lot of negative connotations. I'm past that and now I probably should try and drag some of them along with the dream, they'll be kicking and screaming - at first anyway - but it's a whole lot better than grinding my teeth.
The best part of Mac OS X? The Cocoa text subsystem has a pretty wide set of built-in Emacs commands (including even c-U prefix), which you can customize.

See http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.... .
SimpleDB is a service, whereas CouchDB stands alone. So you can install CouchDB locally, mess around with it and hack on the source.

Aside from that, CouchDB has views, which add another layer of indirection when reading the data. You break your data up into separate documents, where each doc is a collection of values that should be updated together (atomically). Then you use views to transform your docs to the way your data is displayed. (For example, you could store a blog post and each comment as separate documents, and have a view that returns a post and all its related comments together.) SimpleDB doesn't have this complexity.
And that's exactly it. Some people are rendered as "labor" and others are rendered as "management", and their paths diverge significantly after age 40, not based on competence, but on social connections.
Windows has also evolved into not a bad operating system. It gets a lot of bad press, but, as far as I can tell (I run linux) it is a quality piece of software.

Basically, MSFT realized that they need to compete, so they are doing so.
if you not experiencing any problems with your dell, then i would suggest that you stick to it. you already have the software needed and it will cost you when you have to buy everything again for your mac.

i switched to mac because i got tired of using cloned (home-made PCs) that failed 3 times in a month. i decided to get something more "robust". my choices were either Thinkpad or Mac. Thinkpad is as expensive as Mac and has the boring Windows (used Windows for years prior to the switch), so i decided to get a mac and explore the new OS.
It isn't always black and white.

I run Windows. But I have half a dozen SSH sessions open to Linux boxes, and I do my development exclusively under Cygwin (which is sufficient, 99% of the time, to develop for other *nix systems).

And I have a Powerbook sitting on my desk running OS X.
The reason management is well paid is because you need a way to motivate the very small group of managers that are qualified for the job.

Wrong. There is not a "very small group" of people who are qualified to be CEOs at F-500 companies. There is a very small group of people who have enough connections to finagle their way into an F-500 CEO position, and that is why these positions pay so well. "CEO talent" is not some rare natural gift that very people have. The percentage of people who have the necessary talents isn't huge, but it's on the 1-10% order of magnitude, and there are plenty of capable people-- small-business CEOs, public-sector executives-- who would do a stellar job of it, given the opportunity. By and large, those people are not pulling down million-dollar salaries.
So you can tell an obese person "hey, you'll probably die from this" and they do nothing, but offer them a few bucks and suddenly they shed pounds?

Apparently so. And I guess it's not much different than the people who can't do retirement planning. For some reason, many people are intensely focused on the short-term, and can't look ahead - even to save their own lives.
Hey, I'm in the same situation as you. Look for my email in my profile if you want to work together -- or at least bounce around ideas.

I've got 3 weeks of nothing planned until school re-starts, and by then, who knows.
"Higher Order Perl" book now available free online (PDF is 2nd ed.) -- kudos to Mark Jason Dominus
Laughing, throwing stones and getting drunk.
No, the fact that by the time they're eligible for the draft, and of the 10-15 taken every year, there's usually little to differentiate the top picks from the worst. What separates them is anyone's guess. That's Gladwell's point.
I was trying to do that by saving locally, but FireFox refuses to allow getImageData on an image loaded from the filesystem by a web page loaded from the filesystem, with an NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR

Anyway, I will now try with your set-your-own-image version.
Might want to use iWork (Word->Pages, Excel->Numbers, PowerPoint->Keynote) instead of the Mac version of Office. I have Office 2008 for Mac, but rarely use it. It's much easier to use iWork or Office 2007 for Windows through VMWare Fusion.
Now, you're arguing with yourself. If it's the "system" that's getting "rated", then there's even less reason to assume a team knows what they're doing when they're picking a specific QB.

And that's the interesting bit of logical jiu-jitsu going on here. The teams picking first are the ones that are usually the worst to begin with. Selecting higher just doesn't help them to improve their lot when it comes to the QB position.
From the description, your algorithm sounds like it would hit this case very quickly:

A polygon overlaps another polygon and improves fitness by N.
It gets mutated and fitness goes down, so that is not kept.
The polygon stays in a local maxima position, when one mutation lowering fitness might allow much better fitness in future.

Yet the images look like that doesn't happen - have you deliberately avoided it, or isn't it a problem in practise?
Top 10 Website Tips - Get the max from your site
I drink a lot of tea, but mostly just buy varieties off of Adagio. Don't really mix and match. Perhaps I should.
The British just drink the cheap Lipton crap largely. They had to, as tea wouldn't remain green on that long of a voyage.
Say you're starting a business or have a descriptive one line: 'making a ___ site'.

"Startup," "Entrepreneur" etc. is a loaded term. I think Australia & The States are almost opposites in their reaction to these terms. I'm not born Australian (5th year), & the term doesn't describe me, so maybe I'm not the ideal person to advise here.

But I wouldn't venture further then 'starting a business.' I certainly wouldn't describe myself as an entrepreneur. Australians like to tear the tall trees to shreds. & that'd be like calling yourself a revolutionary poet.
The rumor seems to be that Mac hardware runs Windows the best, so if you intended to change nothing else about your workflow, it still seems like that's the machine you want.

Having said that, there are some favorites I use, such as "vim" and Xcode, and SCFinderPlugin (for Subversion integration into the Finder, similar to TortoiseSVN on Windows).

I've chosen a handful of graphical 3rd party software that has made the Mac infinitely nicer than its out-of-the-box config. DragThing is probably the most significant, so I can ignore Apple's horrid Dock and create truly useful docks.

It is also very important to take OS differences with a side of salt, because many things that people gripe about simply aren't set in stone (so you can't discount an entire platform because of them). For instance, who cares if someone doesn't like "the Mac way" to use the keyboard for X, Y and Z, because the OS lets you change key mappings.
There's nothing wrong with using the arrows to express agreement or disagreement. I personally prefer the discussion to be a little polarized, because it seems like we put in a lot more effort into our words in that case.
[SF] Justin.tv is hiring network engineers, sys admins, and flash developers!
This is the internet. Surely something with a consistent bias is the lesser evil compared to an unknown bias.
Did not read you comment yet, but does this markup have to break the layout of the page? Makes the discussion not so nice to follow with too long rows.

I remember someone else also complaining about this lately... Why is the PRE-tag used here and how can I get around this?
It also does this for me with OmniWeb (WebKit based). It probably is something fairly fundamentally wrong in the CSS or HTML, that hopefully can be highlighted with something like a CSS validator?
I use Windows Server 2008. It's an excellent operating system. It's very fast, very stable (has never crashed), e.t.c.

And above all I can run 90% of all the apps in the world (I'm guessing over 90% apps are for windows).

If you want to use Linux, run it in a VM on Windows; or use Cygwin for basic apps.
Pretty ironic that as soon as I came home after posting this question, my Dell greeted me with a blue screen.
There are 10-15 QBs taken every year out of 250 picks. The question is whether where they were picked correlates with future success. I see no evidence to support that correlation.

Otherwise, we're taking about a very limited skill set (i.e. it translates to nowhere else on the field). The reason so many QBs are picked high isn't because their talent deserves it. It's because teams overvalue the position AND there are few QBs deemed worthy enough to even be considered.

New England is actually an interesting case study of what it means to take a QB who may not have the typical skillset, but if you place them in the right environment, they can be a true star. The point is: Their success argues strongly against the role of a high pick for the position.
If they're trying to sell themselves as a reasonable alternative (let alone superior), yes, I do.
You are ignoring the huge difference between "teams are choosing the optimal QB" and "teams make decisions no better than random". The decision is neither perfect nor random.
On Downsizing: Running a company is a lot of responsiblity
Tux3 acting like a filesystem
I'll agree with that, no need to knock what others are doing in making the suggestion though, but you're right, he could have at least added some of his own content
The book--which has been mentioned favorably on HN before--can be thought of, basically, as: "Perl meets SICP".

Which provides tangible support for my notion that Perl can be viewed as a kind of blue-collar Lisp :-)
"I write computer programs. No I can't fix your computer"
Cmd-Left, Cmd-Right are the traditional Mac keys, or you can use Emacs-style Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E.

iPhoto preferences, General. "Connecting camera opens: No application"
Recently I've tried not to say any variant of programming or development or engineering on anything (web, mobile, desktop), nor that I've majored in computer science from the moment I started college. What inevitably happens if I do say so is family and friends of family end up asking me to work on their website|fix their computers|help them with something barely tech-related like their car's satellite radio, and usually for too little money. I never understood why, since I never ask for favors from them, but shrug.

I'd be glad to help some of them out when I have the time and interest, but there is no way in hell I want to churn out a full out custom inventory system for their business for $200. And yes, someone has actually asked me for that at that price before. My jaw just dropped.
Read Richard Dawkins.
Mandatory mention that the classic SICP ("Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs") aka The Wizard Book, by Sussman and Abelson, is also available free online from MIT Press, here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Lecture-videos, from courses using the book at MIT and from Berkeley, can also be found online.

There's also at least one blog of someone going through the book and sites where the problems have been implemented in languages other than Scheme.
You should try other teas, like green, white or even red. I always hated the normal black tea and had to use sugar or milk with it, but now I drink several cups of green tea a day.
I'd only be more efficient on Linux because it doesn't support WoW.
OpenCL for parallel programming, set for Snow Leopard
Channeling Richard Cornuelle for Cancer Research
I have a very rare type of cancer (300 U.S. cases per year). Obviously, there is not much money for research. Furthermore, those with the disease tend to feel isolated. This project was my attempt to solve both problems.

(my page is at http://champions.chordomafoundation.org/jbn)
It's rather unfortunate that you need to pay for Mac hardware just to run bash, don't you think?
I think what they meant was, "Not everybody wants to develop things for only their current OS".
The fucker stole my hat.
There's still a consideration of how much disfavour and future problems it may bring.
> So the price jumped from like $650 to $2,8000.

Wow, what kind of Mac are you buying for that kind of money:)
Does anyone know of large production websites that use CouchDB extensively?
My father who was entrepreneur himself used to say: "Never start a company. If you really want money then go to work for the goverment".

Because high level of bureaucracy here in Russia it's really hard to start a company in a real sector. And it's hard to find a VC for tech startup. It's depressing. I even thought about moving to some other country on Phd postition and part time working for start up... but it's seems too extreme =(
A tortoise? What's that?
I have a very rare type of cancer (300 U.S. cases per year). Obviously, there is not much money for research. Furthermore, those with the disease tend to feel isolated. This project was my attempt to solve both problems.

(my page is at http://champions.chordomafoundation.org/jbn)
I can see the point in terms of avoiding table locking etc. but I still don't see it (not that it is pretending to be) as a silver bullet - surely you would still want to maintain your relational data structure and then have it write to couch db when appropriate for read access, almost like a denormalized view onto your relational data.
Install the Stylish Firefox extension and add a whitespace: pre-wrap rule for pre tags on this site.
I take it you mean
http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/
?

If so yeah great resource.
Spaceball Football's Fantasy Player Rankings For Week 15
This is getting far afield of the original critique. The point there was that scouts do a good job in selecting QBs, especially for picking the best QB (first!) in a given draft. There is very little evidence to support that claim.

Surely, selecting the top college QBs in the country isn't random. But selecting among that echelon appears to be, especially for the transition to the NFL game.
The picks from 1990 to 1999:

1990 - jeff george - fair?
1991 - dan mcguire - BAD
1992 - david klingler - BAD
1993 - bledsoe - GOOD
1994 - shuler - BAD
1995 - MCNAIR - GOOD
1996 - Tony Banks - BAD
1997 - Jim Druckenmiller - BAD
1998 - Manning - GOOD
1999 - Tim Couch - BAD

At best I would say the #1 qb pick has been 50/50 historically.
Daily Routines
"hacker-ish"

Now that is a hard to define word.
Except that WoW runs fine on all three platforms...
for real when I was living in england all I did for exercise was play drums at practice and a few times a week at shows and I was in the best shape of my life. Even now when working out/running I find it hard to stay in shape programming all day.
I tell them I'm starting a business. I explain in fairly vague terms what pain I'm trying to alleviate.

Family and friends usually get it and they are very excited and supportive (of course, some family members are artists and independent contractors so 'startup' probably sounds less risky than it should).

Not surprisingly, it's the bigco lifers we run into at holiday parties, who were always too afraid to take the plunge, that say 'I know a guy who's hiring if you want a job.' I tell them something like 'thank you for letting me know, but my plate is full with my business'...what I really want to say is 'I'm not *ing unemployed, you jackass, and I'm working harder than you ever have or will!"
Possibly, though I'm not sure, given that there are a number of bloggers who blogged their journey through SICP -- Googling the two terms, SICP and blog, gets me these blogs, among others:

http://www.michaelharrison.ws/weblog/?p=46

http://goose77programming.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.ht...

http://www.kendyck.com/archives/2005/04/24/index-of-solution...

And those are just a few from the first page of Google results...
I too have noticed that being passionate about what you're doing, and getting that message across positively, really helps turn skeptical attitudes around.
Siong, did you take the HIST120 class yet? It look at Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Very interesting, of the three I was a biggest fan of Buddhism.