skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was reading this, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that we no longer have paper encyclopedias. (For the most part. There are still some, but I think their very nature is different.) It's kind of depressing.

In 60 years, no one will write about Wikipedia articles in this key. Not just because it's digital, but because it's biased, full of edit wars and topic exclusions.
> What if it were at a funeral

Ask and ye shall receive.

Strippers and other scantily clad dancers are not unheard of at country-side funerals in Taiwan.

http://io9.com/5819625/in-taiwan-you-can-hire-a-stripper-for...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYxOBoHHJ9M

When I first came across this phenomenon years ago, I managed to find a thread on a mailing list (I think it was for East Asian studies) that included personal reports from researchers as well as some interesting suggestions about why they might do this. The consensus seemed to be that this was akin to how the Taiwanese might sacrifice a pack of the deceased's favorite cigarettes or a bottle of his favorite liquor at his funeral.

Such dance shows are also offered up as tribute to the deities at temple festivals. As bizarre as that is, I can't help but be amused by the thought of their gods appreciating a flagrant display of T&A. It sure turns the Hermetic motto "As above, so below" on its head, doesn't it?

> as part of a job interview

Taking a male job candidate to a strip club isn't unheard of in the US. In South Korea (and I presume other parts of East Asia), it's commonplace to go to hostess bars on the monthly hwaeshik outing with coworkers; sometimes they will continue the night at straight-up prostitution joints for sam cha. I wouldn't be surprised if job interviews were often conducted similarly to entice candidates. I know for a fact that Korean salespeople often seal deals by taking customers out for "entertainment".

To be clear, I'm not condoning any of these practices, just saying they're out there and probably more commonplace than you realize.
Ask HN: How should I gain project management experience?
I worked for Microsoft for a year as a Windows 7 trainer, finished my degree in computer science, then took a good job outside of IT as that was the best thing available.

How do I stop myself from de-skilling in IT, and gain the experience needed to be a project manager (or Program Manager) whilst working full-time in an unrelated industry?

I don't just want to halve my salary and go back into a server admin job to 'work my way up', but I can't afford to do huge courses in project management. What should I do?
Things Buddy Media Did Right
Good motivator.
Thank you! Please keep it mind; we want to hear from you (even if just to talk about programming).

We have experience in a number of different programming languages, different frameworks, etc.. The best approach is to send it first and we will try to find a way.

We are focusing on small problems that are affordable (starting from 10$) for you and that alleviate that work load you have.
> Which is why there should be a law.
> It's actually outrageous. There's a law to prohibit unsolicited telephone calls. But none for prohibiting companies from invading privacy by tracking online activity without explicit permission? Insane.

I think the difference is that you choose which sites to go to. If you dont go to them, you dont get ads, and you're not tracked. I would consider it more like CC TV, or Safeway cards.

> I have no tears for ad networks. They need to find a new business model or be fined into bankruptcy.

While there has been a lot of scumbaggery by some large advertising networks, I think there is a place for ads. Certainly given I read a lot of content for "free" which is supported by ads.

> > [Mozilla] exists to make the web a better place.
> If that were true, Mozilla would be lobbying for a law.

Try this: assume mozilla _is_ trying to make the web a better place, and now consider why they aren't lobbying for a law.

What I learned at Mozilla is that there are people there who have true vision about the future of the open web, tempered by a nuanced and pragmatic approach to ensuring it. I can't speak for them, but my impression is that destroying the ad industry is bad for the internet as a whole, and so not desirable.
No mention of UWIN? Shame on you HN.

http://www2.research.att.com/~gsf/download/uwin/uwin.html
Every problem is important, if you care about it. Too often we make a distinction between "important" work like curing diseases and "unimportant" work like making games.

But people like games, both making them and playing them. You might not enjoy solving "important" problems, you might just want to make games and have fun. Focus on what interests you, not what society deems "important," and you'll be much happier.
It's hard to compare since internships are usually paid by the hour (at least nominally) and we don't know how many hours/week they worked, but that seems right on line with what New York companies pay their interns. Perhaps on the higher end, sure, but nothing surprising.
Chittagong - rangamati - bandarban - cox's bazar &amp; St.martin - dhaka
Well, but isn't it hardwired in the nature of each living organism to survive at any cost and live as long as possible? Each creature, even the tiniest bug has some sort of defense mechanism built in, not to welcome others to kill it or eat it, but specifically to defend against such a behavior.

The difference between us and any other animals is that we use our brains in extremely wise way. We colonized the world and technically are standing on the top of animal tree. It would be only logical to use that brain to solve human's nature biggest issue: how to live longer, or forever.

I want me and my family to live forever, because that's how much I love them and love my life. I am not certain whats after death. If you don't believe in existence of any nonphysical creations like spirits, soul, hell or heaven, then nothing exist after death, nothing. Your brain falls apart into dust and since your brain is you and your world, your world ends.

Another reason to keep people living longer is because medicine is constantly pushing the envelope. There are TEDs videos of scientists literally printing human liver and other elements of body. Truly science-fiction stuff, yet real.

I think in 100 years from now, we will be immortal. Of course that causes the biggest challenges ever, like how to feed everyone, how to accommodate people, etc, but there is tremendous improvement in those sectors happening as well, so most likely we will be ready.
Bandarban tour
I guess you have a point there. We are trying out an idea we had and the feedback is surprisingly good. Turns out there is room for type of tasks!

Regarding that self contained task: well, please do!
This is Hacker News; we try to stay civil, so I don't think many people are going to "hate" you for not using (understanding?) version control.

Then again, I don't think many people will take you or your project seriously after this, either. Many of us went past folders and tarballs for version control back in 1992, and personally, there's no way I'm going to touch an OS Kernel that is distributed in a zip file. That is not how you do open source -- for what it's worth, you may want to keep your tarballs to yourself: that'd serve the same practical purpose.
Not sure there are that many choices. Lua, Tcl, JavaScript are the ones I have used, designed for embedding.
He doesn't mention the soft lesson The Partner taught him: the health and financial well-being of the executives is incomparably more important than the company and--not that this rises to the level of concern--the well-being of any one employee or the entire lot of them for that matter.
This makes me wonder how long until there is a project that tries to reimplement the ios libraries, similar to what GNUstep is doing for Cocoa.

http://www.gnustep.org/
What are the good reasons for gender-segregated education? (I hope it's not offtopic since the article itself discusses this)
A bit OT, but we had a jazz band for our reception at indieconf last year, and it went over better than going cross-town to a nightclub. The jazz trio had an ipad propped up with their contact info - that was about as techie as it got. I don't think they'd have worn anything with XSLT on it, but I can check with them again for this year :)
Ask HN: who started something in 2012 which is already profitable?
I think we are all interested in reading some inspirational success stories for summer 2012!
I would really appreciate your responses, HN!
>he worked on problems that interested him

Yes, one can only engage with a problem that has personal relevance. Mostly people aren't engaged. They are notionally working on 'important problem X', but their real problem is how to please an authority figure or how to further a career. Which aren't interesting.

A study of history shows that objective progress is possible, so it follows that it must come about by lots of Feynman-like people working on their own apparently unimportant problems.

This can be explained by the way reality and our knowledge of it are structured. Solutions to problems typically have 'reach'. Thus in order to solve parochial problems people typically create fundamental theories which automatically apply to all sorts of other problems, including important ones.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch is a fascinating read which has a lot to say about this sort of thing.
I think that even though you're requiring payment, you need to show some free examples of code that you have written. You have to make people think "wow...that's really well-written code" before they'll hand you just anything to work on.

One of the most important things to me when delegating a task to a programmer is trust. I wouldn't ask just anyone to solve just any problem, so you should demonstrate to potential customers the kinds of things that they can ask of you.
You referenced Mike Bloomberg in the same thought and within the same context as you did Thomas Jefferson?

Thomas Jefferson's head would explode if he witnessed the dictatorial authority with which Bloomberg is attempting to control the most minute aspects of citizens' lives.

Madison and Jefferson did everything they could to allow people to be free from the control of government. They would both be tremendously saddened by how our individual liberties that they worked so hard to protect have been given away to politicians and a government bureaucracy that is lunging headlong toward mediocrity and undeniable unsustainability.

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the US in the early 1800's and wrote "Democracy in America", he noted the rugged individualism and lack of trust in anything from the government and the elite. He wrote that only in America could the culture and nature of the citizenry insulate itself from the inevitable erosion of democracy, "But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom".

That America no longer exists. The slow march of government toward tyranny that Jefferson tried to warn us about passed a point of no return a long time ago.
> I haven't seen many cross-platform issues with FORTRAN.

Most fortran floating around is cross-platform fortran, and that is quite easy to port. However, legacy systems are usually very much platform dependent. I was once hired to port something in Fortran from a System 3090 (or was it 390? That would be more than 20 years ago now) to an SGI workstation, and it took several weeks of full time work.

And you're ignoring the subject under discussion: Porting a working system comprised of multiple parts in multiple languages (COBOL, Fortran, ASM, REXX, ....) is a much harder than the sum of porting individual programs - which is why emulation + terminal scraping is the cheaper, more robust solution.
I'm curious about "female Dave".

Would a group or women react differently if the conference jerk was female? I'd guess the answer is "No", but then I've never experienced that situation.

I have experienced the male version of this, and unlike the author of the article I never see this kind of show-off behavior as a "call to arms", unless that means fighting the urge to wing something heavy at someone's head.

Perhaps there's a selection bias here, but when I see this happen the people around me tend to concur that "helpful jerk" is being an unhelpful douche.

It seems that when enough guys get together there often ends up being some amount of dick-size measuring; is there something similar when groups of women gather?
^This disturbs me :(
I'm a doc, teaching myself python specifically because it's painfully obvious that we (docs) need more and more programming skill to do real medical research. My current project is shaping up to be a multi-year effort to hunt cancer (tissue micro-arrays to assess novel antigens). So this article threw me for a loop in the first sentence.

The article is still relevant though, in my mind. There's no external motivation to write a parser. But how else could one reasonably build a research database? I suppose someone could manually go through the clinical database and transfer info into a research database for 500 patients. But what about the next 10 studies of 500 patients? It seems unimportant in the near term, but in the long-term having someone on the project who can talk to the computer is going to make or break it.
So not liking Pixar means I'm like this "Armand White" guy that doesn't like anything? Did you even notice that I gave TWO examples of things I consider better (old Disney, Nightmare before Xmas)?

The rest of your argument I find no much logic in it: "Our human brains are puny and weird, and programmed to only enjoy one kind of story. Or rather, it's pretty weird that we enjoy any kind of story at all; why would we want to waste our time hearing about made-up stuff that never happened? But we do enjoy it... though only for a fairly narrow range of stories with a fairly narrow range of structures"

WHere did you got that impression from? We like a great variety of storytelling modes and stories. Only the more naive like just bland, cookie cutter repetitions of the same narrow range of stories and structures (action blockbuster crap, the nth romantic comedy, etc).

In film, for example, we dont just have heroic/feel good/suggary Spielberg movies (the real movie Pixar equivalent if there ever was one). We have people from Scotchese and Copolla to Fincher and Riddley Scott, to Burton and Woody Allen, to Tarantino and Waters and Jarmoush...
It's not quite what you describe, but Ivan Vučica is currently working on a GSoC project to implement a subset of UIKit with parts of Quartz and CoreAnimation in GNUstep.

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2012/i...

"This proposal covers implementing a flexible animation API compatible with a certain popular existing desktop and mobile platform, as well as adding APIs compatible with a popular mobile platform. This will allow extremely user-friendly interfaces, as well as allow development or porting of applications that use CoreAnimation or UIKit API on platforms that don't yet support it."
The claim is that there is a notable difference in group dynamics.
Certification and ability are different things. Contrary to popular belief, certification does not magically endow somebody with abilities, it only (slightly) raises the chances that person possesses necessary abilities. However there are a lot of people perfectly capable of teaching without certificates, and, unfortunately, plenty of people with certificates totally incapable of doing so.

Looks like the author of the article was either incapable or unwilling or unprepared to perform one of the basic teaching functions - ensuring that jerks do not disrupt the process for the rest of the group. It may stem from inexperience - well, that's what experience is for. One doesn't need masters or certificates to learn such things though, it's perfectly available to any common person.
It's too bad many of the toughest problems in companies are more typically on the integration level, which requires domain knowledge and context of the project itself. To solve these problems don't require brains, but time and communication.

I feel this service is targeted toward people who have simple one-off "puzzle" problems ie. write me a quick recommendation algorithm for a data structure of this format.

I'd be interested in seeing some case studies to see what exactly are the types of problems you are solving. "Small programming task" is a bit too vague for me.
From what I understood, it seems like Dave wasn't asking questions to better understand the material. His intent was to stump the instructor of the class, validating his mastery of the material.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873560

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850591

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542213 <- Book review
Aha! Give me back my "foo:bar"s!
The article has incorrect premises and arguments in it. It is easy to believe the CS community is more male-friendly and at the same time disagree with the author of this article. Your somewhat common assumption that the commenters here see women in CS without nuance actually slows down integration of women into CS and open source.
I have learned (hopefully learned!) to only use this style of learning when I am one-on-one with an instructor, and never in a classroom full of peer students.

Even then, not every instructor (or a person who effectively serves as an instructor) can stand this. Here I have to trust my people's judgement and sometimes I do misjudge. I recall one of my colleagues and coworkers with whom I could not maintain a meaningful oral conversation because we would misunderstand each other's verbal styles, however we were able to efficiently converse over email. This is certainly impossible in a classroom.
Struggling Logitech Bites Bullet, Lays Off 450
The work we now consider 'important' is the work that has, according to our best guess, the highest likelihood of solving important problems in future.

Our best guess may be wrong, as the future is hard to predict. But the future is not so unpredictable that we should stop thinking about where best to direct our efforts.

Maybe someone working on Farmville will cause an important advance, as an unpredictable side effect. We can't rule that out. Even a job that seems 'unimportant' can have beneficial and unpredictable windfalls, and that's wonderful.

But we should still try and direct our efforts as best we can, and work on problems that we think are important.

That seemingly trivial pursuits sometimes bear fruit, doesn't mean that all pursuits are equally worthwhile.
Assuming you're serious, please, please research how evolution works. Evolution doesn't predict that a species will spontaneously give birth to another similar species - really the opposite, in fact. Almost all people who "deny" evolution do so because they've been misled about what it means.
A couple of random thoughts about Dave:

A) Having participated in plenty of female majority online groups, my experiance has been that, yes, a single guy can have inordinate power. He is often deferred to and supported by a bevel of cooing ladies who seem oblivious to the power dynamic underlying the whole thing.

B) It is possible that Dave was not trying to be a jerk at all. Maybe he was just nervous around the ladies and subconsciously going into braggart mode in hopes of impressing someone and getting a date.
It's like rhizome said, "Here, on Reddit".
Define profitable, it's extremely easy to build something that generates revenue.

The difficult part is to build something that provides enough revenue to support 1+ employees, office space, etc
> There is a high probability you won't ever be paid for your work, and if you are paid, it is often way more than you actually need.

Way less you mean? Getting paid way more than you actually need is the part of why people start a business isn't it? :P
If you say so. There are more and greater issues to this video than mentioning a penis.
He means important in the cultural sense. Someone defending, say anything in the bill of rights is likely doing something culturally important. Killing prostitutes was important to Jack the Ripper, but it's detrimental to civilization.
Are you making an independent observation (ie, you were at the workshop and observed Dave) or repeating what was in the writeup?

Also, I'm genuinely curious: how do you tell the difference? What's the difference between Dave's (presumed) "stump the instructor to validate ego" questions and my "push the edges of my understanding, which may happen to stump the instructor if they haven't thought about it, and which may confirm to me that I've understood things correctly" questions?
It would also be a good way to invest in the Rework philosophy.
That's the silliest statement I've read all day.
I don't know who you are, and have never read anything you have written before.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to reply to my initial opinion of your message. Your problem is that your message reads a lot like "I cured a horrible disease (I don't know what you had), which modern medicine failed to cure, by eating at good restaurants".

Your problem is that this message sounds very close to the anti-modern medicine claims of groups like homeopaths. I do not know what your cure is, but trying to work with, rather than (apparently) against modern science-based medicine might help.

Apologises if this message just ends up telling you nothing, or something you have heard too many time before.
Neal Stephenson wants to revolutionize sword fighting video games
They should be separate but equal.

The horror - they even have segregated bathrooms!
Indeed. "Engaged with" doesn't ever describe a marriage proposal in any case, so it's hard to imagine a native speaker being confused. (The idiom is "engaged to".)
It didn't seem to make much difference when Posner endorsed Keynes as "the best guide we have to the [recent economic] crisis"; I don't expect his comments will make much difference to discussion of the patent system. In both cases, you have too many actors invested in a different view.
Beware of posts like this from what is basically a new account with only as much karma as this post has received.

Sharks and all that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4017843

(Am I paranoid much?)
Rms has his bag stolen in Argentina
It is fascinating how rapidly discussion descended from single anecdote into gender-wide generalizations (always negative, of course) and single possible reasons why everything is wrong with the world? Impossibility of maintaining reasonable discussion about this topic without such things invariably appearing almost immediately and descending the whole discussion into a blame-fest is depressing.
They shut down a blog with no legal justification. They shut down Megaupload with no legal justification. What both have in common is that it seems they did so at the request (or demand?) of the RIAA/MPAA, and they are left with the burden of finding legal justification, which they can't.

Seems this Justice Department is decidedly lacking justice.