skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll second what timr says, I think a PHD in Bioinformatics is possibly a waste of your time. I got into the field in 2000 immediately after undergrad. Since then, I've been working in industry and did my masters in bioinformatics at a top notch school. I've always had a pretty good feel for where new technology is going, how things are going to advance, etc... but I called bioinformatics completely wrong. I really thought it was going to be much more important than it has actually been. Over the last year or so I started looking for a new job in the field and they are REALLY hard to come by (especially industry jobs in the US). In the end, I managed to get a good position (much more medical informatics that bioinformatics actually). I am very aware that I got super lucky. In fact, I was VERY close to pulling the plug on the whole field and trying my hand at a startup (mostly because I hang out here too much :)).

A few years ago, you could count on finding a job at one of the major Pharmas or in a software shop that serves one of them. But many of the pharmas are cash strapped and have been cutting "luxuries" like bioinformatics and software. My experience is that many biotechs are so small and narrowly focused, they often don't benefit from too much bioinformatics work. That leaves academia, but even there, the supply of PHD scientists is way higher than the number of jobs (this is actually a more general problem than in just bioinformatics).

I've often regretted that I didn't just go for a straight CS masters so that I could beef up some of those CS concepts you always avoid when your programming for fun.

I think you need to decide what your ultimate career goal is. If you want to be a PHD scientist getting grants and doing work at a university, then you have to go the PHD route. But if you think you want to work in industry, I would strongly urge a different route, one that doesn't paint you into a corner too much.
Does a blue screen accompany the freeze by any chance?
That's typical of trade schools, at least. Watch daytime TV and you will be inundated with commercials for expensive but worthless degrees for private schools.

My solution - make it easy to declare bankruptcy for student loans, but institute a student "dividend" program where, instead of getting loans, institutions get a percentage of the student's future earnings above a level which would be considered average for someone with the credentials that the student has before enrolling. Lenders then wouldn't get paid back for loans for rip-off schools, so they wouldn't make the loans, so the schools would have to change or close.
This may be a repeat appearance on the front page, but I welcome it any time!
No, just the way a beach ball doesn't show up on my iPod, which I have to reset every few days.
I think all of the designs look nice. If I were interested in that product, I'd buy it from a page that looked like any of those.

It would be nice to have some data on what actual users thought, though.
This title led me to believe this was about market-share not some publicity glitch.

Well I think they are dying! I mean I can't make fart noises with it - MeH!
Reality bites for young workers
What do you do when the work force doesn't need you anymore?
This is actually the thing that makes me wonder about all the data mining Walmart is supposed to be doing. If I buy a lot of something, shouldn't that mean that they'll be more likely to have it in stock, all else equal? Assuming that their data mining is actually working, I mean. With croissants, I can see where there might be physical issues (not enough capacity for baking them in the store or something), and not enough lost sales to justify the additional cost of rectifying it. However, for things like 2-liter bottles or 12-packs of cans, it's hard for me to understand why their software would allow them to routinely run out, every week, at about the same time. It seems like multiplying a single value in a database somewhere by just over one would fix this problem, but it just keeps happening, week after week, for years.
I didn't get to this in a timely manner due to a Christmas vacation, but I'll bite anyway.

I didn't know that Dylan was considered a LFM rather than a LFSP by its creators, but I do know that at least of them gets s-expressions and still thinks they're a bad idea. See Dave Moon's suggestion:
http://www.archub.org/arcsug.txt
It's probably a side effect of the fact that this was "Startup News" prior to it being "Hacker News".
I'm not, but two of my cousins are aerospace engineers, and hackers in the inclusive sense. I think a venn diagram showing the essential qualities of a really good engineer and a hacker would be nearly indistinguishable from a slightly elliptical circle.
Why (do) we fear world government(?)
I pay a fee to have access to my local university library. (As a graduate of said university I get half price, but full price (160GBP) is still reasonable.) This gives me book-borrowing rights, and reference access to printed copies of journals, (but not electronic access).
I prefer mutts ;) Too narrow a pedigree is not very interesting to me.
That's inflation. Actual prosperity raises the metric of "poor", instead. Today's poor in the US can all afford cars and big screen TVs (to a first approximation), but that doesn't mean they're not poor in comparison to others in the US.
Don't forget about profit. The company (i.e. shareholders) are making a larger profit from the marked up item. The money they earn will eventually be spent, and will have an environmental impact.

To your virtual items example:

What determines scarcity and cost? Or more accurately: what is the input into the product to create it?

There are two options here: the items is simply marked up for no reason (i.e. the server releases them rarely for no reason at all), and then the profit situation takes hold.

The other option is that the virtual items are priced correctly, so what makes them rare? (If they were not rare, and priced correctly, then their value is zero.) Usually what makes them rare is the human time spent on making/finding them. Which means that their cost is basically wages, and no different from a real item.
UK housewives rule in online time
Use Opera, then right click on the page and choose: Reload Every > 1 minute, etc...
>There are 10,000+ apps in AppStore and only 10 that can occupy the top 10 slots. That gives the average developer a whopping .1% chance at any given time to be in the golden goose category.

It gives the average developer a 0% chance to have a golden goose, but a good developer has a somewhat better chance.

The problem is that people tend to overrate their own abilities. I guess quitting your job and going for something like this is an effective, if risky, way to find out for sure.
Massive Aircraft Carrier made of Lego, 200,000 bricks, 350LB
Germans create 'future hotel'
Celestial Show Set for New Year's Eve
+1: The Monty Hall Problem Never Gets Old :)
Microsoft getting ready to lay off 17% of staff
I did an aero undergrad, ended up in the nuclear field (running reactors & such). While I'm not a strict software "hacker", I mess around enough to hold my own here. So yes, there are others!
Do I think people should be able to have a burning stick in their mouth that increases their risk of getting cancer (which will drive my insurance costs up as well, potentially) and even more so to people who are unfortunate enough to be stuck in an enclosed area with them (e.g. waiter/waitress in a non-smoke-free resturant/club)? No, not at all. If governments didn't make so much money off the cigarette taxes, I'm sure they would be illegal by now.

Eat Doritos? Until they're shown to be poisonous or something, sure.

Skydive? Sure, just not over houses or heavily populated areas.
I should know better on a thread of mostly Zune users eh? ;) Truthfully, my iPhone acts up sometimes. The browser randomly crashes, and I'll occasionally need to reset when it freezes. It's nothing bad enough to cause me to want to switch, but it does happen.
"Is this a common view?"

It's not something most people would be willing to admit to in public, but I do think that it's pretty common. The vast majority of people only care about things that either directly affect them, or fit into the tribe/team/us-not-them slot. The only way to have a mass movement is to directly appeal to self-interest, or to hijack the team slot.

Since environmental disaster due to global warming or species extinction is at least decades off, environmentalists who want environmentalist goals to be achieved have, as I see it, three choices:

They can say that disaster is nearly upon us in the next 3-10 years. This is likely to backfire in 3-10 years, of course.

They can try to hijack the team association by making environmentalism into a pseudo-religion. This has more potential, but more downside, since if it goes too far it could result in a cultural mood that discourages solutions civilization needs, like higher-density energy and high-yield agriculture.

Lastly, they can just try to build things that people would rather use, and which are better for the environment, such as the subject of this thread, the Tesla.

It seems to me that productive people who are worried about the environment would be best served by doing that last, since it has more leverage potential, and since there are already a lot of people working on the first two.
I'm not a hacker and I've always felt very welcome here. As others have suggested, definitely lurk around a bit to see what the norms are.
The Ultimate Bubble?
Ask HN: How to upload lots of data?
I've got monthly 10-30gb lumps of data I need to upload to S3 for parallel analysis on EC2. It takes days to upload it on my connection, and my ISP will get mad eventually.

I ordered a second line to at least avoid pissing off my primary ISP, but I'd rather it was a lot faster. I don't think I can't get yipes, cogent, FiOS, or any of that good stuff where I am (60614), and it's not worth it for me to get a T3 (yet). It seems like I should just be able to drop off a USB drive somewhere that's got bandwidth to spare (any time of day.. I don't care), or maybe there's some multi-megabit upload technology I'm not aware of, or maybe somewhere to do a cheap mid-tower server colo with easy physical access somewhere in Chicago?

P.S. The data is already heavily compressed.
P.P.S. I want to do it on the up and up.. I'm not going to sneak it onto someone else's connection.
And a lot of founders/small business owners post here too. Most are technical, but some are non-technical.
Shameless Plug (my nephew is a cyborg)
This shameless plug is for my nephew James, who was diagnosed with diabetes when he was 3. James has entered a video contest for his Omnipod insulin pump. His video is posted on YouTube. Part of the scoring is based on how many views his video has. Can you take 2 minutes to watch his video? The theme of the contest is how the Omnipod makes diabetes a smaller part of life. Right now, one of the competing videos has over 16,000 views. We would really appreciate your help!

Here is the link to his video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcNLVTvY96w

Oh yeah, the prize he's going for is a MacBook Pro. And to make it even more relevant, his insulin pump is some very cool tech. My nephew is a cyborg.
Billionaire Blowups of 2008
Ask YC: With startups starting to implode what happens to the user data?
What happens to the social graphs, blogs, and other information that is held online? Does it get liquidated to the next buyer? Where does all the data go? For example Pownce has been liquidated. Where does the social graph and microblogs go?
Researchers Create Web Skeleton Key With 200 PS3s
You don't think the mortgage market had anything to do with it? As far as I know, the problem is not that CDOs trade at a discount to their underlying value; it's that the underlying value has dropped.
It's part of a series that gets published over a week. #2 is up now. http://www.slate.com/id/2207350/entry/2207352/pagenum/all
Part 2 is out today: http://www.slate.com/id/2207350/entry/2207352/pagenum/all
Agreed.. this is always worth re-reading every few months. It's a fantastic read.
Yeah, I think you're right on the money.

Whatever the mixture is, it's a good one. I've always thought YC was impressive for it's ability to have spirited discussion without the constant holy wars that tend to erupt when you get a lot of smart people in a room.
One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom
"For all I know, my brain is making this all up,"

If you're going that far, why not take another step: for all you know, the entire context that convinced you that you have a 'brain' is something your mind made up, too. Ultimately, there is nothing that you can't be wrong about.
Don't blame Community Reinvestment Act for the subprime mess
Firefox 3 also doesn't clear what zoom setting you like for each site on Tools -> Clear Private Data. https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/288236
Yes there is, depending on the type of job he's hired for with the vouchers, and whether the voucher covers parts as well.
A former alcoholic once told me that when he stopped drinking the sight of a wine bottle was enough to make him drunk.
It's a bit more complicated than that: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...
Rumor: Marissa Mayer, Google’s 19th Employee, To Leave
What document format for resumes do you (demand) from potential employees?
It seems to me one should accept formats such as PDF, HTML, text, RTF, etc. but not word processer-specific formats. Yes, no?
Is not each birth an independent random event, and thus the likelihood that they would have a boy, given that they already have a girl, simply 50%?
things ... which are better for the environment, such as ... the Tesla.

How is a Tesla Roadster better for the environment?
Thinking about this - I bet it's a Leap Year issue (some dumbass set a "days in the year" upper bound at 365 days) and since it was first released in 2006, this would be the first time it has occurred.
Android Market paid apps are weeks away
almost certainly some time-related software glitch. so microsoft will be able to fix it with a patch, and everybody will be happy again.

this reminds me of the first year i was using windows 95. i just happened to be awake one night at 2:00am when the daylight savings time change kicked in, and the computer dutifully changed the time to 1:00am. cool, i thought. then, an hour later, when it was 2:00am, once again it reset the clock to 1:00am. and so on, and so on ...

microsoft issued a patch a few days later, and all was well.
While everything else is shrinking, US moves to #1 spot in wind power
Why Load Testing Ajax is Hard
It's all PDF, Doc or plain text from my experience. Would be cool to see more requests for HTML resumes so markup-obsessive web developers could use microformats, etc.
If you expect decent computer skills, and you're just having humans read them, you shouldn't need to specify. If the candidate can't figure out to send you something you can be reasonably expected to read (sorry, MS Word.doc is included, but .docx isn't), that's good enough reason to disqualify them (from all directions - .docx, TeX, etc).

If they're good enough that you'd ignore that, you probably don't need the resume anyway.
67%. The percentage of having one boy and one girl is 50%, "one of them is a girl" eliminate the condition of having two boy.
This is old news. Caused yesterdays stock drop. And please don't spread trash news articles like this around.
A $3 billion buried treasure found via Google Maps?
I am pretty sure that was implicit in my comment. I have read the Lewis piece, which is a great way to get an overview from the perspective of the half-dozen folks willing to give Lewis an interview. I'm not saying that this was entirely due to government intervention -- just that the giant tax incentives, aggressive government market manipulation, and $100B+ portfolios long mortgages and short puts created by government agencies.
That's the same reasoning I have. P(B|A) = P(B) for independent variables.
The correct answer is 2/3 though. Check the Monty Hall problem for the explanation (this kind of problem is well known for having confused famous mathematicians like Erdös himself).
That is a pretty deep cut, especially for a company which is profitable and has a warchest of several tens of billions last time I checked. (Full disclosure: shareholder.)

Do we have any evidence that this is, you know, true? Because if not, the rumor that I have $7 million worth of 10,000 yen notes stashed in my carry on luggage is also a fact. Please, let it be a fact.
And there we are, religious experience (loss of selfishness and making one with the environment) is hyperactivity of neuron circuits.

And at the opposite end, we have autism, with no empathy towards others since their "circuits" are inoperative
Stop spreading trash like this around.
I would love it if they would make a properly annonimized version available for research. (Social graphs in particular) Not likely to happen any time soon, though. Specially after the AOL search data debacle.
On the other hand, if a couple told you they had five kids, at least four are boys, you would say to yourself, "it's not very likely that any couple would have five boys", and you would be correct...
Extremely unlikely. $20 billion in cash + equivalents on hand, 40% operating margins -- they don't need to do layoffs right now, and they'll benefit much more if they ramp up hiring instead.
The name of the website itself doesn't exactly inspire confidence in its accuracy.
Take a random parent with two children. You ask them if at least one is a boy and they say yes. The probability that the other is a girl is 66.6%

Take another random parent with two children. You ask them if the oldest child is a boy and they say yes. Now the probability that the other is a girl is 50%.

This confuses people. (The point is the second scenario gives you more information since it's a subset of the first.)
Yes, BBBBB is rare. But BBBBG is just as rare (at least statistically. In practical terms, I suspect that having four boys in a row would be too exhausting and irritating, so they'd have given up by then).
It's a great question, with all the data that people willingly share online now, there's little thought to what happens to it if it's not cared for/looked after. What is the companies legal obligation once they no longer have a need for the data? Do they destroy it? Who checks on this? Or do they simply drop it into an xls spreadsheet and auction it off to a spam house...
It is not too difficult to implement Comet on news.yc. But, the limitation I have is the maximum request I can make to the server. It is impossible for my web app to request to the news.yc server every single minute just to detect the change. And, eventually, the server will refuse the web app request.

The only possible way to implement this technique is to create an iframe that will contain news.yc and refresh the iframe every single minute automatically using javascript. Then, the request will be made from your IP instead of my server. But, I believe that news.yc will refuse your request to the server eventually.

But, I do like to see YC implement this feature.
It might be house-cleaning. I think some companies are doing layoffs right now that don't really need to because it's one of the few times where you can get rid of a lot of dead wood and come out looking prudent rather than in trouble.
Most interesting to me:

"We are also trying a new fabrication technology for making chambers – rapid prototyping investment casting from http://www.proivc.com/ . This is more expensive than the spun-pipe based chambers we have been using, but it frees us from the limits of standard pipe sizes, and makes changing nozzle dimensions easier. The surface finish is rougher than we had hoped, and there was some slight ovaling in the chamber, but it is still promising. We haven’t fired them yet."
The Air Force’s Rules of Engagement for Blogging
Yeah, unless they have a lot of yard work they need done. Anyway, {BBBBG,BBBGB, BBGBB, BGBBB, GBBBB} is less rare.
Yeah, this is a famous puzzle. The answer is supposed to be 2/3, because what the question is asking you to do is consider all the parents in the world where at least one of the two children is a girl. Then you're left with 3 possibilities, BG, GB and GG.

If you phrase the question like that, everyone will get the right answer. The reason people get it wrong is that people don't normally talk like that. Imagine you're at a party, and someone tells you they have two kids, and "one of them is a girl." Clearly, they mean that the other is a boy, which means the answer is 100%.

But the most intuitive way of interpreting the question is that you know that a specific child is a girl, say because the person brought one kid to the party, who turns out to be a girl. With this interpretation, the obvious answer of 50% is in fact correct.

You often hear the complaint that people don't understand math. In this instance, however, an equally valid way of explaining what's going on is that mathematicians don't understand people.

This criticism applies partially to the normal game-show version of the Monty Hall problem, but I think there the wording is genuinely ambiguous regarding the host's behavior, and my answer would be "not enough information."
No Layoffs at Microsoft, and a Round-up of other Recent Comments: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2008/12/no-layoffs-at-microsoft...
If this is mostly MSN, maybe they're just getting ready to replace that unit with a company they're aiming to buy :-)
Yes. It would be nice if <blockquote> was supported.
I agree with your thoughts on this. Its always easier to layoff people and point to the economy
I don't see how you can scale the solution. To actually load test you'd need thousands of browser instances, which is not practical.

For example auto-complete has a built in delay of about half a second for each keystroke. So how do you load test that? The fastest you can go is two requests per second if you use a real browser.
The best mind since Einstein - Richard Feynman's biography
That is a good point, but I'm not sure. I have talked to a lot of Microsoft people in the past, and asked them a lot about Microsoft, and I would be extremely surprised if they had that much dead wood.

Especially because as they get bigger, their demand for 90th percentile types rather than 99.99th percentile types grows.
You know what, it sounds like the author just read Fooled By Randomness and watched DHH's talk at Startup School 07, and then did a Jeff Atwood.

This would've been interesting a year ago, somewhere closer to the height of excitement about web2.0, multimillion venture rounds and crazy valuations. Not now, a couple of months after the collapse of the capital markets.
It depends. Sometimes it's just mothballed/destroyed. Sometimes the acquirer keeps running the service as-is (that's what happened with kiko.com). Sometimes the user data is sold off to the highest bidder.
The problem is most of the people that filter through the resumes are HR folks, in one case I heard of one dropping a resume because the IT candidate didnt' have "TCP/IP experience" on their resume, so the format matters less than the content in this case. Still, .doc is the standard, I write mine in Open Office, but test it in MS Office since that's what they'll open it with. I always have a PDF on hand as well, but when you're searching for a job you don't want to be the one sub'ing a resume in a format they're not expecting.

Of course when I review resumes I prefer text, with extra credit if it was written with vi!
I'm surprised they've stuck with the tagline "Experience the Social".
You wouldn't have the 1,000 paying customers without the 1,000,000 eyeballs to get them with then. It's not like it costs Weebly much to run those websites, and they essentially act as free SEO for their pay service.
That's a good point and there a lot of people who are very good at math, but hate word problems with a passion.
Interfaces for Staying in the Flow