skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a non-cs degree (film making) and I am a CS undergrad... Here in Brazil it is very hard to get a job without a diploma, no matter your resumé and past works.
Your rant just scared the hell out of me.

So what do you suggest we do mitigate the risks you mentioned?
AvantGo. I remember it well. And I remember thinking how cool it would be to have cell service built in one day.
> "N̶o̶t̶ to be pedantic, [...]"
And also to eat low calorie per ounce of weight or volume, and slow digesting foods like ruffage to give the feeling of fullness.
lol-price for installing software and strapping a webui if you ask me.
the original plug is $99.A wifi stick is $20 (their plug is $520).
Never sold a start up but I left a career in biotechnology for web programming. Have bounced around some small agencies with saas apps and code bases I would describe as corner case hack on top of corner case hack.

After the last one ended badly I started my own thing and am reaching out directly to find some customers who don't care about changing the world, they just need some solid web help but not a full time web person. I'll be honest, I'm not sure where it's going to go.

I did identify with some of your comments thugh. All the contract/fte job descriptions I see theses days are looking for experts in a wide range of technologies (frontend ninjas and backend rock stars ...) for jr to mid level positions. I just don't get it. When I was in the lab, even the sr research associates took several months before they had learned enough bout the way the group operated to take projects over in full. I started out of college, had a great mentor in the lab and it still took a year to learn stuff you can only learn on the job. Is programming different somehow? I dont think so but I didn't start dabbling in computers until later on in my twenties.

( note - anocedotal evidence of one) There is a weird dichotomy in tech. It seems that there are two perceptions I see. The first is that it is really hard and complicated (it is but no more so than analytical chemistry and LC-ms/ms) and the second is that everyone from jr level up should be figuring it out on their own from day one. I find this odd but I may not have worked for the most skilled companies in software development. What's frustrating is that no one else would call me back so I think for now, I'm going to go to focus on what I can do well and reach out to businesses in my area and see what they need done.

If you want to talk, my email is I my profile I don't know if I can help or answer your questions but I am happy to listen.
Haha, "Team OS/2" was up there on the insanity scale with Amiga advocates. The author described it as 'social media and conversational marketing', but I recall one magazine columnist who said something like "I stopped writing about OS/2 because I was sick of receiving death threats."
>Doesn't every criminal who is followed by a surreptitious police tail then get to claim the same reasonable expectation that nobody should have known about his specific transit from a drug corner to the stash house?

I think that this sentence reveals everything about your position: you aren't thinking in terms of citizens but rather in terms of criminals. And this reveals binary thinking that, fundamentally, cops are the good guys and anyone they are interested in are bad guys, and cops can and should use any and all tools in their power to track down and stop those bad guys.

This is a deeply problematic view to a lot of people here and elsewhere. We have all seen video of the police murdering the homeless; we have all seen video of police brutalizing bystanders and stealing/destroying their recording equipment. And for every concrete video, there are hundreds, thousands of stories of police bullying, abusing, and otherwise misusing their power. We have all heard of photographers being needlessly hassled, and the various abuses, mistakes, and humiliations that the TSA visits upon Americans and America's visitors every day. And that's just here in the USA. I have personally witnessed several instances of petty abuses of police power, physically assaulted for "mouthing off" to an OC Sheriff (I had a camera and would not give it to him, and he grabbed it and the strap and threw me down), and have a friend who was traumatized as a boy by an officer of the law.

One of the biggest problems with how policing is done is that police look for anything "out of the ordinary", and then act to discourage it. If your look or lifestyle is out of the ordinary, you're a target. If you are doing something on your property that is out of the ordinary, you're a target.

Intrusive, scary, brutal, arbitrary, conformist. And these are the people you want to give even more authority and power and control to?

No thanks. We already have police driving around with heavy weaponry in their vehicles, while elsewhere in the world somehow the police make due with a nightstick. They already passively scan license plates for DMV paperwork violations. There is no need to give them more power, more information, or more control over me, my information, or my life.
For what it's worth we don't consider candidates without a degree when we hire. It doesn't HAVE to be a CS degree - math or electrical engineering is close enough most of the time. But there's just so many job seekers without a degree and most of them are useless so we save a lot of time and effort simply ignoring those.
I've read about Bitcoin various times and I'm confused about what "mining" is. Maybe somebody could set me straight? Are Bitcoins currently generated by anybody who wants by solving difficult math problems? If so, is this CPU power being used for something, or just a way to tie the value of the currency to something tangible?
What is a dumpster?
http://extensions.gnome.org is really the killer feature of Gnome-shell. Its really unfortunate that it is not publicised more.

I mean seamless installation and control of desktop extensions from the browser? awesome!
Eh - I know there are an endless number of conversations on here about startups vs. corporate jobs but I'd say the conversation is way too generic to be at all meaningful. Ive flip-flopped from startups to corps and places in between. There is the same shit (or potential for shit) everywhere just in different packages.

- Startups can have just as much politics as corps - it really just depends on the actual folks you interact with

- Big corps can have incredibly interesting problems due to their scale and impact while startup work can be exciting because of the progressiveness of it - and in actual practice about 90% of what both groups do is usually pretty boring.

- Soulless work - I've found writing enterprise business software to be pretty much equivalent to building VC-powered social/local image-sharing flavor of the month apps in terms of being personally exciting. Mileage will vary.

Etc. - I could go on. Point being that if you take averages Id say startups are similar to big corps - the problems are just disquised in different packages. The real trick is trying to find unique scenarios/jobs that minimize the crap.
Yeah, mine never crashed too, unless I ran a DOS game. But even then, it crashed only a few times in a year. If I ran it on Windows, it would crash a few times a day.
I and a friend of mine launched http://www.brandonacademy.com

We'll be releasing frequent UX and content updates over the course of the next couple months as we develop new features and add more tutorials. Please feel free to make suggestions; all are welcome! :)
This is because even with the authorized biography there still isn't good source material for after his return.
Extravagant Cheating via Direct X
I find it utterly frustrating that a scientific seeming article would end with this conclusion:

"A single algorithm can trigger false-positive or false-negative results... if something is really real, then it should pass everything."

How you going to be so thorough about detecting a crappy photoshop job and then trip over your own words in the conclusion?
Here's three examples of poor security of banks (and another for one of the largest Forex brokers) from the past year.

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/20/hackers-snatch-6-...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/citibank-hacked/

http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-hdfc-banks-database-was...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Swiss-Forex-Marketplace-Compr...
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The House In Town Offers many unique pieces by designers all at amazing prices. Well worth a look
Comparing PHP and Rails to Node.js is not quite right, as PHP and Rails are application frameworks and Node.js is primarily a platform for creating application servers. There are a number of more analogous frameworks being written on top of Node.js, but none of them have reached a similar level of maturity and adoption yet.

I believe that the author is arguing that Node.js could reach a similar level of popularity as Rails if there were a framework that provided some of the ease of use for common use cases, such as creating typical CRUD apps. However, he also states that in order to displace Rails, such a framework would also need to offer some distinct advantages, such as better support for realtime.

Backbone, Ember, Knockout, etc. are client-side frameworks. They make it easier to structure complex client code, but they don't include a simple solution for creating a server or synching data among clients and servers.

It's still under active development, but I have been working on a full-stack framework on top of Node.js that is more like what the author was envisioning: http://derbyjs.com

Derby provides server and client rendering, and it automatically synchronizes data in realtime. The idea is to make writing realtime apps so simple that any app can take advantage of advanced realtime features, fast server-rendered page loads, and instant client-rendered page updates.
You could probably find a willing "I'm putting all of my life savings in Bitcoin because it is rapidly appreciating" type to do the deal, it's free money as far as they see it.
A good reason why lustig spends much of his talk discussing the chemistry of sugar metabolism.
I'm 20 and I've been working/interning at companies since high school. How did you manage to land a 6-figure job at 19?
Did you actually read the linked articles and the referenced links? They don't say what the AA claims they say. He makes scientific statements that can generally be inferred from the cited sources, but which the sources don't actually prove.

It would be like some guy saying that physical money is bad and referring you to a CBO publication about hyperinflationary currencies.
狐臭的最佳治疗药物
Applications now start maximized? Why the continual push for small screen sized low input phone paradigms for big screen rich input desktop interfaces? It doesn't make sense and it's incredibly limiting. We're trading rich desktops for phone interfaces? Why?
How can something be merely anecdotal and empirically evidenced at the same time?
The joke is less funny when you change the punchline and restrict it to resumes only but its still pretty funny.

Typography? Seriously? In the context of a resume I would gloss over typography but you mentioned it explicitly. Html/css does not play on the same level as text when it comes to kerning, ligatures, letter spacing, expansion/protrusion, etc. Can you do any of the things microtype does with CSS? Searching the issues of wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts. All of these are no brainers with latex. Wkhtmlpdf does not like negative letter spacing! That's something that my mom does with ms word to squeeze a little more text somewhere without a new line or margin change / page break. How does css/html handle the period after Dr. versus the end of a sentence? Multilingual resumes with different spacing requirements for different languages? Ie what is html/css method for \frenchspacing? Does html/css provide language aware layout decisions like babel/pollyglossia? Line breaking and hyphenation are notoriously horrible with html/css.

Can you easily reference your bibtex CV and include a list of your publications in html/css? A list of publications is a must for academic/research jobs. Can you easily change the reference format if you decide to pivot to a new industry that expects a different style than your previous industry?

Easily compute lengths of strings on the fly to use a consistent indent? Ie so that your city column consistently shows up in the same place after you include a new job with a date string that is longer than previous jobs. One of the default cv packages on CTAN can draw lines of different lengths depending on how long you were in a position. How do you do date calculations in html/css? Can you then take the length of date and do calculations relative to the margin/font/line hight? (I think its moderncv)
I don't need any units in my resume but I bet a lot of fields have a need to use units in accomplishment descriptions in their resumes. What is the html/css equivalent of siunits?

How does html/css handle page breaks? What is the css/html equivalent of widow/orphan control? When a resume with a list of long publications goes many pages how does wkhtmlpdf update headers/footers that reference page numbers and section titles? Can it use a different header footer on pages 2+?

More generally would you recommend printing a book with html/css? And if not what publishing/document layout features do you think are relevant to a book but not resumes? If you are such a fan of wkhtmlpdf why did you use itext for your resume?
The current encoding of bitcoin on the wire allows for division to 8 decimal places, but there is discussion around improving the encoding sooner, rather than later. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Divisibility_extension
You're getting downvotes because you're complaining about an innovative, cool thing on hacker news that couldn't deal with the traffic. Just try it later.

Edit: I didn't downvote your comment.
Because they don't work.

Even if you are out to build your home, the estimates given out to you are only going to good enough to win the contract from you. Nothing more.

If you have ever built a home, you would have realized that the project generally went way out of budget and time. You can go back and look at what you had planned and estimated. You will also see that your execution was pretty close to the plan. But a lot of other things went wrong. It rained and all the sand got washed away. The cement company suddenly increased their prices. Something new came in, and suddenly you though a new bath fit was better than the old one. Things slip out of your hand one thing at a time.

Workers get sick, attrition happens and all other sort things go wrong. And this is with things like construction, where not much thinking effort is required.

Programming is more harder, The iterations of analyse, build, test, feedback, analyse... Take time, mistakes happen, you need to read, research etc.

Unless you are a robot and work without any intelligent inputs and outside dependencies. No estimate ever has made sense.
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Evidence to refute which assertion and to refute which arguments offered in favor of that assertion?
> But you're also ignoring another useful characteristic of bitcoin: coins cannot be counterfeited, unlike any other currency. They are crytographically ensured.

That's not a useful feature for me. Receiving counterfeit currency is very low on my list of concerns in life. It is a useful feature for governments, who would no longer need to ensure its currency isn't being counterfeited, but governments don't like this currency for a number of other reasons.
Keyboard shortcuts aren't always the right way
Get Current URL With PHP
Another example is Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I strapped myself for another grimace filled ride, but Jim absolutely shattered all my expectations and prejudices with his tenderness and onscreen chemistry with Kate Winslet.

... and then built them right back up again by starring in a series of inane flicks immediately after.
No more April fools posts, emails or calls. Please.
OK, now that it is nearly over.

I find this whole April fools thing very high on the moronic-behaviors scale. Yes, I have a sense of humor but no, I don't appreciate the mass-interruption-by-stupidity that this randomly-selected date brings with it.

The fact is that, for whatever reason, there are people who's emails and calls you just don't ignore. Your father-in-law might be such a person. And, if he decides that it is OK to call you in the middle of you being in flow with a dumb-as-fuck April fools joke he is going to cost you valuable time and focus. I'm using the father-in-law example as just one possible case. It could be your mother, a trusted co-worker, your wife, girlfriend, neighbor, anyone.

It could also be equally-moronic posts on HN or other forums that you might hold in high regard. Perhaps you take a break to disconnect a little before getting back into the thick of it. And, instead of having a chance to read through interesting stuff you get snagged by dumb "ja, ja, April fools!" traps.

OK. Again. Fully into pranks and having fun. But, usually, when they are in-person, they happen at an appropriate time and when the "victim" will not be adversely affected by your actions. More importantly pranks happen at random and not in rapid proximity.

The problem with April 1st is that a good chunk of society decides that it is OK to be a complete moron for a day. One joke might be OK. But get hit with four or five in a day and you are not going to be a happy camper.

Maybe HN can have a "Post April Fools jokes here" thread. It's OK to go and visit links and have some fun if you are interested and, more importantly, when you are interested. Hell, you can even marvel at the creativity behind some of these jokes. All without getting sucked into them accidentally.

OK. There. Off my chest. Done.
Yeah, I remember (perhaps too fondly) selling software on Handango and the others in middle school and the amazing experience of getting my first royalty check from them ($500--an almost inconceivable amount of money at the time).

I remember Codewarrior and the Palm OS SDK less fondly (the GUI toolkit was sort of maddening), but still, those were the days.
I see Android users are the heir apparent to the OS Persecution Complex.

EDIT: I just realized that what I wrote could be viewed as condescending, and I don't mean it be that way. It just saddens me that people can get so attached to a machine. Dogs, cats, and other pets I can understand, but a machine cannot make you happy, it can only help you be more productive, and I don't believe productivity directly leads to happiness. Socializing with other people is the surest means of acquiring happiness and "fanboy-ism" is inherently anti-social.
In California at least one ticket was verified by closed circuit video of the person buying it.
If you can be fired on the spot, for any damned reason, you will never feel that stability.
There is no requirement for any number of coins to be in the system. The amounts are infinitely divisible. You could start the economy with 1 bitcoin, and break it into 7 billion fractions for everyone to share..and if all those are lost, you could do the same with the last 1 bitcoin again.
Choosing not to develop for IE makes perfect sense if you're building an app. Here's my own little anecdote:

In the last 4 months or so I've written around 10k loc for a JS app. and probably 3x that many lines of combines CSS and HTML. Number of hours troubleshooting differences between Firefox and Chrome? I'd say about 8. So one developer day's worth of work to sort out some minor issues with vendor prefixed css. I've gotten to the point now that I routinely go days without testing in FF, and when I do fire it up.... everything just works.

My estimate that supporting ie6+ would have put my progress back by about 2 months. On top of that is the ongoing technical debt of continuing to support IE.

I don't want to say goodbye to potential IE customers and that's where Chromeframe comes into play. Chrome frame is AMAZING. Takes about 60s to install. Allows you to create your own install procedure i.e Your_Site -> Install_Chromeframe -> Your_Site. Doesn't require a browser restart and no admin rights needed. Wow.

Of course if you're just building a regular website then sure suck up the few hours it takes to make it work in IE and bill 2x for the trouble.
A few other ideas to play with: you might go through a book like Programming Language Pragmatics by Scott and implement various kinds of languages and language features. Understanding how various language features map to the bare metal can be very illuminating. The second is to play with various backends. I was crazy about learning ISAs and computer architecture back then. Finally, you can play with "middle end" ideas: IRs, program analyses and optimizations. Once you get past the book stage, there is a HUGE literature on compiler analyses and optimizations.
Mashable CEO Conan O’Brien Steals and Tests Apple iTV
Kickstarter’s mission creep
Actually I'm not an American, I'm Australian. I used to think the constitution obsession was naive nationalistic pride, but I've come to respect it.

It would be best if pragmatism could rule the day. However, that presupposes that decisions are being made for the benefit of the country rather than for political and personal reasons. Even up to the highest levels of office, I just don't think that is a standard politicians are living up to. I'm not sure any human is capable of it.

The constitution provides an anchor point to restrict the government, especially during turbulent times. I think there's incalculable value in that, even though it's slowly being eroded. Sure, the Patriot Act slipped through, but how many more would have without it?

Being bound by a 200 year old document isn't ideal, but it's better than the alternatives.
Man, dropped out because of calculus? Calculus is awesome! It powers most of the physics that are of interest to the lay person.

To each their own, I guess.
Persistent red-black tree in Lisp
I buy and sell bitcoins for cash from people on craigslist. No identifying information is given. Guess its not the "only way."
The CPU cycles are contributing to global warming, and are a means for controlling the rate at which new coins are mined. Unless you have a large dedication to hardware tuning and a decent amount of real money, attempting to mine is of no use unless of course your heater is broken and you need your computer to keep you warm.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining
Agave syrup has the benefit of being vegan; normal refined sugar is processed with bone meal. People have various different reasons for wanting 'alternative' sugars. Attempting to move away from refined sugar because it's 'bad' is just one of them.
IBM takes on a gigantic computing task to find the universe’s origins
Dropped something else to have CS degree
It took ten minutes for you to call the police, track your phone, give the tracking information to police, and for the police to find and apprehend the suspects? That seems astonishingly fast -- how did that all go down?
That's specifically the question Diamond is looking for an answer to.

We're staring down several of his modes of failure.
The winter that wasn't (Canadian version)