skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much do you pay software engineering interns?
I am curious to know the general salary a decent intern would expect to make. I know some SF startups offer up to $7000 a month for interns, but other places don't go more than $3000. I am looking for companies both in the US and Canada.
As I understand it, the designated time arrived and the canister was supposed to be open, but wasn't. A latch had failed. One or more of the payloads inside the canister started deploying themselves anyway, wrecking themselves and everything else inside the canister.

The telescope in question wasn't worth terribly much, at least compared to a Shuttle launch, which at the time cost at least $500 million, not including the cost of any payload, so even if the telescope hadn't been ruined, trying to rescue it wouldn't have made any sense.

There were some other satellites in the canister, however, and IIRC, the total value of all the satellites was nothing to sneeze at.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/lucius_annaeus_s...
To some extent, every patent lawyer specializes in technology. As for participating here... well, I'm a lawyer by vocation but a nerd by avocation. I like the discussions here, even though I'm at best an amateur coder.
Unfortunately, like most icon fonts, this looks like a blurry mess at 16x16px.
Runaway black hole provides evidence to support Einstein’s theory of gravity
Stanford is not an elite school, it's a status school with what many say is a huge amount of grade-inflation. Elite schools are ones like RPI, Bard, various sports schools (Michigan/Okla, UNC, etc.), and so on. The only "elite" quality Stanford has is its location and the presence of a few celebrities.
Why Not Venture Capital Philanthropy?
I too thought of that passage but also this from Watchmen:

"There are thermodynamic miracles, events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold; I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter, until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold, that is the crowning unlikelihood, the thermodynamic miracle. The world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget. I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come, dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg, the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."
That's a great initiative... well done!
Even when a patent is clear as day, it's not obvious on the face of it whether or not it's being used for trolling, or will be used for trolling. Trolling is all about who owns the thing, and what they want to use it for... not about how the patent was drafted. (At least not mostly about how it was drafted.)
Ad Networks Bypass iPhone Privacy Rules
There's no content in the article about which four patents are at issue or what their significance is. Anyone recognize these?

5,999,908 “Customer-Based Product Design Module”
7,133,834 “Product Value Information Interchange Server”
7,222,078 “Methods and System for Gathering Information from Units of a Commodity"
7,620,565 “Customer-Based Product Design Module”
Just empirically, it seems that examiners almost never use google.
No. For Valve many peoples' choice matters. My individual choice to purchase or not purchase TF2 is of negligible concern. Now, if my individual choice is indicative of a wider trend of people purchasing TF2, then maybe my choice would matter.

The problem with people arguing about DRM is that fundamentally most people don't seem to care. Video games are a billion dollar industry, but non-DRM'd games are not.

You can vote with your wallet, but the data seems to indicate that your wallet is too small to matter.
depends on what you mean.

you can build a monitor and computer in minecraft, you could specialize them to play minesweeper. I think you'd run into 300 block range problems (the world isn't simulated far away, you simply don't have enough room to wire up the redstone)

Alternatively, mods can screw around with block ids. you could provide number textures for blocks and a few special blocks. All that's left is to swap block types as the user interacts with the blocks.
s/b Salomon Brothers

You may now resume proving Lewis's point, that "People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck."
Taleb's books were ones of the most thought-provoking I have ever read. Made me think differently about a lot of things that I thought I knew.

I think though people don't talk about role of luck also because it's useless to talk about it - you can't say: "my lesson for you, my son, is - always be lucky". People try to find something that they can actually do - even though many of what they end up doing is futile.
His choice of career has fuck all to do with that, and neither does the conference.

It kind of does, though. According to Julia's account, this was not simply an isolated incident.

When she talked to the organizer, he admitted that this individual who behaved in a harassing way had shown a previous pattern of behavior of this type. Since the organizer knew of this, this behavior presumably took place at other events related to this professional community. It makes sense for this community to expel people who behave this way.
I'm not sure what your point is.

Yes, malware can be a lot more sophisticated now than it was in 1988. In many cases it doesn't need to be though. For example, there was a comparatively recent case of a botnet infecting Linux-based routers which lacked front end authentication[2](!!).

Exploitable software runs on many platforms.

The existence of the Michelangelo virus[1] doesn't really say much about the resilience of today's Windows to worms or viruses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)

[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/325434/
Small tip to kill procrastination and enhance productivity
one of the major reason for procrastination is that people focus on things they can't control. Conventional goal setting teaching praises focus on the goal or future achievements but there are too many things that could go wrong and affect the future and people intuitively know this (hence the procrastination or delay due to worry) but if they change their focus from the future or some other random variable (like hope) to something immediately controllable, then things like strong will, determination is not necessary for achievement.

To help save time, I'll cut to the chase. The act of breaking-down tasks or goals into manageable time frames could help reduce the friction between thought and action.

I don't know the best ways to do this but I have tested on a few people and know that when done right, the result is nothing short of magical.

Making use of a stop watch or online count down timer to break your daily tasks into smaller time frames would do the trick just fine.

To help spark your imagination, consider what the ford assembly line did to car manufacturing skills and how de-complication of goals through breaking-down of large goals into small time blocks could affect the world.

Thanks for reading, do share your thoughts.

Just thought I'd share the main idea(s) from a book on productivity I wrote some years back but have no plans on publishing it anytime soon.
The value of ECC memory has little to do with how long your computer runs or how frequently data is accessed. Restarting a computer won't prevent the problems that ECC corrects. ECC memory is designed to detect and repair memory corruption caused by electrical/magnetic interference or problems with the memory hardware.
Is the Business Plan Really Dead?
In "The Luck Factor" Richard Wiseman talks about the personality characteristics that are associated with luck.
Agreeableness and conscientiousness are not (contra this saying, which gets attributed to all and sundry) but extroversion, [lack of] neuroticism, and openness are.
> Kids that have grown up with an XBox of PS3 aren't going to want to fiddle with drivers or find out how to patch their game using the "Downloader App" or endlessly wrestle with DRM.

Have you used Steam? It patches games automatically and you don't have to fiddle with DRM. My Steam client keeps dozens of games perfectly current without asking me. This is part of why everyone loves it: specifically because it makes it as close to painless as you're going to get.

Also, I'm guessing that a good number of current PC devs/gamers grew up playing a Nintendo console, and they still migrated over, somehow.
They definitely have a physical effect, but does that effect 'treat' depression any better than, say, atropine?

(http://www.medicalobserver.com.au/news/antidepressants-vs-ac...)

The current understanding is that the difference between SSRIs and active placebos is very small. When you take into account how many negative results have gone unpublished, it starts to look plausible that SSRIs have no psychiatric benefit beyond patients knowing 'I took a pill' and 'it has side effects'.
Great PR move from Oracle. Playing bad cop, good cop. I think this is purely about getting some love from the crowd that critized them for the Google suit.
Offers are ALWAYS subject to due diligence checks.
Would you rather write ClojureScript or real Clojure though?
let this be a lesson to you: run windows update frequently for maximum security.
There are engineers in New York and some remote engineers
Did you read the blog post? The guy was rebuffed multiple times and turned up his verbal offensiveness each time, finishing off by describing his daughter as a slut.

Discouraging men from speaking this way - in a professional community - to women who are their peers, is hardly equivalent to "setting rules where men can only speak when spoken to".

Hitting on woman = fine.

Turning up the verbal heat when she's already turned you down = obnoxious.
Can't wait to do a

steam install halflife2episode3
It seems there are 3 main factors in success (or lack thereof):

Luck, working smarter, working harder.

Luck is a major factor for everyone, but you can't control it. You can certainly influence working smarter, but it is often a matter of juding in hindsight what was smart rather than determining it before hand. Working harder is much more under our control than the others.

It is important to acknowledge luck. This helps use be humble in our successes, not be too devestated in our failuers, and be compassionate to those less fortunate. It is also just plain true.

It is also important to try to work smart - creating a startup, writing a novel, etc at least has a chance of creating huge rewards and even changing the world...the odds of changing the world from inside the sweatshop you mention are close to nil.

But it is how hard we work that we can mostly control, and there is some truth to Goldwyn's quote...it just isn't all of the truth.
Critical feedback up front:

Before signing up, please note that the demo video (which looked pretty, and I should have paid more attention to) when played in Chrome never successfully exited for me, i.e. the sign up elements continued to be hidden (yea, made sure it wasn't full-screen). I tried zooming in and out, pausing and playing the video. I did not investigate the DOM. A refresh restored the initial state and after signing-up I haven't revisited to play with it more.

Signing up felt a little like "hunt for the link that leads to the behavior I want". After clicking "Sign up with Facebook" at the bottom left and then telling Facebook I didn't want to give your app all of the requested permissions it aborted, but when I initiated Sign Up from the Login link at the top right, chose to use Facebook, and denied the app requested permissions, it rolled along.

I went through several of the videos and didn't see any with comments yet. I noticed that you're not linking back to the comments on the original site, and can understand there being several reasons for that, but I do wonder if there will be any integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ for the comments that originate in mixy.tv? Do they get re-posted to those other services, with hashtags for Twitter, so that followers from those services are tempted to join mixy.tv and become part of the fun?

Besides crowd-sourced tagging and filtering, are there any plans to create recommendations?

Since I am not following anyone else that is using mixy.tv yet, is the "People I Follow" link supposed to show people I follow on other social networks, and will I also be able to follow people just through mixy.tv in case we're coming from different walled gardens?

One feature request would be to enable bookmarks within videos, with their own urls, so users can comment on specific points in the video, and link directly to the frame they're talking about.

Finally answering your questions:

Overall the site looks clean, the layout after signing in makes sense.

I'd like to thank your service for revealing this video to me:
http://mixy.tv/posts/ea5c3e/this-dude-loves-his-job-best-cot...

However, I need some help seeing the added value in general over my current means of finding videos. It appears the primary means to find videos is either manually searching or from the people I already follow.

By the way, is the List functionality enabled? The dialog says I created one, but then I can't find the list I created.
Unlike the situation with the PS3, the next generation of consoles are not going to be as powerful as their PC counterparts. And the current generation consoles have got keyboards and mice available, but have not imploded the PC gaming market. The future of gaming is going even more multi-platform anyway, as that is one of the few ways a game developer can avoid the whims of the games hardware market.
Lists/Maps require extra tables which means more scripts, more migrations, more backups, more worry.

With MongoDB all I have to do is add Map<String,String> myMap to a Java class and that's it.
As much as I hate it (I'm a PC gamer..hate not having a mouse), the consoles have taken a big chunk out of the PC gaming market. That's just fact, whether you or like it.

The "entire world" doesn't really matter. If some dude in Somalia has money to buy a PC game, he probably has money to buy a console.
I don't think you necessarily need a fulltime sysadmin - contract sysadmins do exist (hi!) and systems like Chef can be readily understood by most developers.

If I was moving a start-up from Heroku to self-managed hosting (which could even just be Linode VMs!) I'd include time to train them on what I was doing, and why, and I'd probably stay on retainer for emergency support.

Personally, I'm also more than happy to chat to local start-ups informally and share my experience. (And if anyone in Scotland, particularly the Edinburgh area, wants to take me up on that, my email's in my profile blurb.)
Implementing a ruler widget in Qt
I am not sure of any of that, btw.

First there are a lot of foods that don't spoil that way (i.e. beginning to rot), such as fresh fruits, fresh veggies, grains, etc. Those are still relatively friendly to transport to market.

Secondly I have taken cheese, dry salami (salted, fermented meat), etc., backpacking and it is fine without refridgeration after a week even in the summer. These may sweat some of their fat but that's not the same as spoiling.

Third, I don't think meats spoil as quickly after slaughter as a lot of us think. I once accidently left a fresh/micro-slaughtered/micro-butchered roast in the back of my car and discovered it three days later. Cooked it and it still tasted fresher than anything I had ever bought at a supermarket. I don't know what the supply chains look like at the supermarket but I doubt they are very short.......

Edit: I could understand the argument that many of the things we would buy at our grocery store would have spoiled on the way to a local market. But if most food would have spoiled on the way to a local market that would have made cities fundamentally untenable. And yet London was a city of about two million people at that time.
And why are all these companies ignoring the fact that there is a shortage of Ruby and Python developers because most college students are learning Java?

I'll answer your other question as it seems to have been ignored:

I don't think anyone is actively ignoring these other great languages. It has more to do with inertia. Once a company invests X in their software (where X can be 100K to 100M), they're reluctant to throw that away when it works. We as engineers may like the hot new thing, but the company having paid for the hot old thing isn't just going to throw it out because you don't like it anymore. :)

This is why we had the Y2K problem from a massive investment in COBOL. We'll have other issues from a massive investment in Java over the next few decades as well. It is what it is. Learn Java. Learn Play. Learn Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, whatever you want to learn. You'll be learning all your career. The more languages you know, the better a developer you will be. Embrace it now, forever will it dominate your destiny.
So they should give back to chance? How does one do that? It may be a nice turn of phrase, but sound like completely meaningless if one takes a minute to think about it.

One should be charitable because it's human to be compassionate to your fellow human being, not because being successful automatically puts you in debt to the God of Chance, which debt should be repaid or else. And not because by being successful you stole your success from somebody else.
Yes. My father does research in this area. Specifically, inferring the health of vegetation (among other attributes of land cover) from statistical analysis of satellite imagery.

From what I recall, you can measure the level of photosynthetic activity in an area given the reflectivity of the land (and, I would think, some basic model of what type of vegetation is present in the area)

One example from his research: the fall of the Soviet Union had a statistically significant impact on weather patterns in Kazakhstan (the breadbasket of the USSR) because the land usage changed so much with agricultural policies before and after the fall.

Quick link to the research overview page:
http://globalmonitoring.sdstate.edu/research.php
Can you explain what this means: because now the wealth is being allocated more efficiently

It's kind of beyond the scope of this conversation, but the basic concept is called 'utility maximization'. It's hard to measure utility directly, but we can infer it by examining the opportunity cost - ie, the value of other alternatives foregone in favor of the option I prefer. Where a consumer's preferred product/service is unavailable or unaffordable, other goods are substituted, but these have lower utility. If rising consumer incomes cause people to switch from one good to another, the abandoned good is known as an 'inferior good'.To the extent that resources are dedicated to the production of something that people don't actually want, it's inefficient. It would be better if those resources were dedicated to the production of superior or ideal goods, of the kind that people buy because they already maximize utility.

This general field is called 'price theory.' Please appreciate that I can only sketch the crudest outline within a single paragraph.

If we add more competitors to the pizza arena, how does that grow the overall pie of wealth?

Greater choice leads to more efficient outcomes. You like cheap pizza served fast, so you get a slice for only $3 and don't waste money on linen tablecloths, which you consider a foolish affectation. I like nice service, so I pay $10 to spend a half-hour being seated and served by a waiter. You save money by not paying for services you don't want, I spend it locally instead of driving to the next town for a sit-down meal, which is what I actually want (as opposed to the drive, which costs me $3 in gas and mileage expenses). We both get what we want, pizzeria owners make money money, which they in turn spend on the goods and services they need, and you have a nice virtuous circle.

Now, you could say that there's money wasted on pizza marketing or too many entrants for all pizzerias to survive, so some will go out of business. All true, but those are short run phenomena. Over the long run, the result is greater efficiency. This pattern of short-term fluctuations between equilibria is the business cycle. What you're looking for is optimality, not necessarily growth. Again, all this is drastically oversimplified.
Where to Buy the Best Outdoor Power Equipment
patch isn't entirely auto-generated, there are reporters and editors working for them
The argument "since most don't care - you shouldn't either" is flawed. If you are sure something is right - it doesn't matter how many care to do what's right.

> Video games are a billion dollar industry, but non-DRM'd games are not.

It only should increase the incentive to avoid buying DRMed games, and specifically support those who aren't scared to release theirs DRM free.

For example look at the latest Humble Indie Bundle. Linux users pay highest average for the set. It shows that they encourage developers to produce Linux games more than users of other OSes (obviously since Linux games scene is lacking). You can argue, that Linux games market is miniscule, and if so, why even bother to send your message in such form? But you still see people showing appreciation, and developers can take note of this.
How low can Facebook go?
No matter how it is modified to fit the context, that is not how it's taken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_tolerance
LINQ and the Reactive Extensions to C and C++
because of http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com/
The authors makes it sound like after designing the UX, the implementation will become trivial. I think this is a bit naive because most serious applications go through many iterations of UX. Some of these changes will be small and not require significant re-plumbing, but others will necessitate a lot of behind-the-scenes churn.

My point is that it's better to design the plumbing of an application with some longer-term considerations than just "what do we need to implement that UI wireframe."

Minimal viable products are cool and all, but let's not use that as an excuse to write something that will need to be thrown out wholesale to add that big traction-building feature.
MongoDB's relatively simple approach involves continuing to use the old shard as an authoritative source (and committing updates to it) while shipping data in the background, then pushing the additional changes across and marking the new shard as "master."

Such an approach wouldn't be horribly difficult to implement in SQL using a copy table and write triggers - almost identically to how SoundCloud's Large Hadron Migrator allows writes to occur over a MySQL InnoDB table that's locked for migration (but even simpler because the table schema can't conflict afterwords).

The entire problem is admittedly nontrivial, since if the application happens to be writing data to the shard under migration too quickly (or the shard being migrated to dies), the server can end up in a situation where the new shard is never able to catch up and become a master. However, the easy solution (give up and retry later) is Good Enough for most situations (and is pretty much how MongoDB works).
Am I the only one who initially read this as "Don't Eat Fortune Cookies," and didn't realize my mistake until going back to read the rest of the title?

Anyhow, it was a very great and inspiring read.