skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@Dave: You will never be the person you thought you could have been. You will only be wildly different. And often, wildly, differently . . . successful, as you've shown the world. The same is true for all of us - we're never what we thought we'd be but we dream up new stuffs along the way. Retrospect and all that. It's too easy to look back but all the action is in the future. Look forward and be there.

I find I have the same self-crisis about once a week and maybe more often now. Nobody on HN knows me. I haven't shaped anything in the industry. Even if I'm ultimately successful by my own standards, nobody will probably know. I don't care. My stealth agenda won't make me rich or famous or even worth noticing. I just want to fundamentally change the way we test software and the way we think about quality ("the 'q' word" - ugh). Nobody's gonna care about that until a change happens that nobody now thinks is worth pursuing. It doesn't mean that it's not worth accomplishing, though. But that's who I am.

You, sir, are not I. You are known and have accomplishments. You're already living the dream. Well . . . some dream. Not mine and I guess not yours. But the point is that you're already doing your thing. Damn the torpedoes! Go as fast and as hard and as broadly (and as whatever you like) as you can in the way you'd like to most. Nobody's going to lift a finger to stop you. People will likely complain one way or another after the fact but at the end of the day all you have left is your life and your loves and there's no other way to measure your success than those things you hold closest to you.

Don't give up!
How do you configure Firefox to make Duck Duck Go the default search engine?
I was surprised by the lack of documentation comment in the article. I own four useful Clojure books, and along with effective web searches, any roadblocks are quickly jumped over.
The creator of http://anynewbooks.com/ is an HN regular - so hopefully he'll comment - and that service is similar to yours. I'm pretty sure he only uses Amazon affiliate links to make it pay.
Does Google regularly hold campaigns to help other kinds of employees to improve their lives? E.g., I imagine (random example), Google has a number of Jewish employees. Does Google engage in public campaign agains antisemitism, which is a real problem in some countries? Are there public Google campaigns for other equality issues, such as woman rights, religious minority rights, dissident rights, etc.?

Frankly, this is the first such campaign I hear about, and if indeed it is the only one - I tend to view it as cynical marketing exploitation of the political hot topic of the day rather than genuine attempt to improve lives of Google employees. However, if I am wrong and Google is regularly engaging in public political campaigns for the human rights causes and this is just another example - all power to them. However, it would be interesting to see the list of such campaigns - anybody knows one?
Actually Keen's proposed remedy for this is quantitative easing except that the money goes to people. Everyone gets, say, a $50k voucher. If you are in debt, you have to use it to pay down your debts. If you are not in debt, you can deposit it and use it to buy things.
How about a bus company owned by the richest man in the country lobbying against homosexuality being included within sex education in schools and then privately bankrolling a referendum, as happened in Scotland. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/693172.stm
Hej! Always great to see Danes down in the valley. I lived in CPH for three years, interned at Podio for some time, and have been rooting for the Danish startup scene since. While I can't offer much in the way of networking or a place to sleep (new to the Valley myself), I'd love to meet and get mocked for my Danish again ;)
Check out http://hn-books.com/ created by this forum's own DanielBMarkham
So failure is going to industry and creating technology that makes money and benefits millions. While success is to lock themselves away in a university teaching the next generation of smart people that the only thing they should aim for is to create the next generation of ......
Hey timaelliott,

As benjaminsull mentioned, I wrote "for starters" and "at least!" ;)
When you're in SF/Bay Area and trying to compete with the likes of LinkedIn, Yammer, etc, you're constantly bumping into that top 5%.
In other words, Google is part of the world -> improve the world -> Google improves. The same argument is valid for any effort to improve the world.

The argument that shareholders shouldn't care, would only have some weight if it was a insignificantly small improvement, not likely to positively the company visibly.

So it comes down to how big gay marriage is. And I believe many people take it for granted. Gay marriage is not just a small detail, it's huge. It'd improve the livinghood of a huge percentage of people, Google included, enormously. It's not about just a fancy ceremony, or legal rights to inheritance. It's an important door to better tolerance. And tolerance is huge.
Victoria "booming" is a pretty extraordinary claim. I'm in Vancouver, and there is at least some startup activity, but I can't think of much in Victoria. Maybe from a non-tech perspective it looks that way, but look at the companies in both locations and see which are hiring. It's probably the most objective way of finding out which is "booming".
Why "before it's too late"? Why should an older person no longer be capable of learning C?
I prefer using w3af over BurpSuite. Full source is a good thing.
Universities are still extremely expensive, just with the people (grad students and post docs) who do most of the actual science getting very little of the money. It's just extremely unfair and calling it a "pyramid scheme" is charitable.

Overall universities are just extremely inefficient. Where does all the money go to?

The person in the article who went into an administrative job may have been onto something.

Part of the problem is also the biology/chemistry bubble.
In the 90ies these areas expanded extremely and now they are downsizing to more reasonable levels again.

With CS degrees they would be better off.
Would he really say 12 words where one of them isn't "fuck", though?
Honest question, when will LGBT support incest? Having relatives covered by insurance would be great. We could abort if we conceive or adopt if we want children.
It doesn't help that they show you a 'do this in the background' option but it's always grayed out.
Maybe so and maybe not. But when I first saw the Greenpeace rankings, I was astonished that they awarded HP points for using large quantities of recycled raw materials to create consumable plastic parts explicitly designed to deter re-use, and for planning to do even more of this in the future.
I always wonder that given how efficiently the trees pick up the nucleotides of Cesium that there isn't a logging program in place where trees are logged, then processed into charcoal, and then run through a power plant where the burned by products are post processed to remove the Cesium.
How Do I Get PayPal Card – About How to Setup My Account 
The PayPal is the leading credit card provider in the financial section round the globe. The company had took many decades to have them establish as the leading credit card provider in the financial community and is the leading source of payment for online purchases.
Perhaps this alludes to all copies of DNA in a human body, which is much larger than 851MB.
Seeing as you can remove said code via apt, you'd likely win them over compared to the alternative of being told to install compilers or some other non package managed software bundler like cpan/rvm/npm that can't be canned and easily deployed.
So the examples given where these:

>> Import statements, exception handling, try/catch blocks, loop generation

What "high-level language" are you using where this stuff isn't necessary?
I really really really hope they do succeed. I have seen my friends N9 and its an absolutely amazing phone....except that nobody (except hobbyist's) develop for it
"In both places the caliber of student was high, and I was rather disappointed to find university less so."

I have to say that my experience in a similar situation (many years ago) was similar and I agree.

But in your other comment where you said this:

"tens of former and current Stanford attendees while at Google"

You are taking a group of "Stanford attendees" who ended up with jobs at google. So I'm wondering to what extent that group is representative of Stanford attendees and not google's hiring practices. Was there a difference that you could tell with those working at google who didn't go to Stanford?
I used to have that opinion.

Than I realized I'd do anything if it helped me enjoy life more.

I mean honestly, when my sleep starts getting shitty I start changing things in my life. Quitting jobs, taking breaks from relationships, creating new ones, trying new programming languages, anything.

Burnout can be fucking terrible, and I will give up every possession I have before I endure that again.
The whole 'top journals' concept may not be the best thing to use as a metric.
Think of it as a matter of communication. Everyone (or at least almost everyone) is lobbying for 'good stuff,' so it's not a particularly useful statement to make all by itself.

> Further, I would think that even when objectiveness is implied it would be that the speaker thinks it should be universally held, not that it necessarily is.

Hence the two not being synonymous. Perhaps I simply happen to know an unusually large number of people who believe that moral correctness implies a convincing argument.
Companies _already_ implicitly do stuff like this when they donate to e.g. the Salvation Army, an org which itself has an anti-gay agenda. It's "OK" in that it is legal and it is probably not unethical.

Is it be morally right? That depends, but public opinion in the US and in many (but obvs not all) other industrialized nations suggests that it is wrong.

Shareholders can and should vote with their feet if a company takes a position they don't like. Ostensibly that's one of the levers available to you in our glorious free market economy, amirite?

You might alienate religious people, but when I consider the merits of this particular topic, screw 'em. There's no reason their views (a choice) should trump other people's basic human rights.
Xbox Kinect Bundle Raffle Giveaway
What next?
HN,

I have spent the last 10 years or so, chasing an ideal. I am passionate about technology. I am discouraged everyday by the lack of innovation in my former/part time line of work. I see great minds here and wonder what greater things could exist in the life saving world if it was approachable. I am a self taught programmer but, I have been busy carrying bullets and writing 5 paragraph orders for the past 10 years. I have been in the real world for 7 months now, and I am only just now getting to the point were I can prioritize my actions based on desire and not need. I was lucky to find a company that is developing a technology that I think is worth while, but is crippled by bad leadership and bad financial practices.

My question is how do I find intelligent people that will help me help my brothers while forcing me to be smarter and more focused. Where do you find people that challenge you and help you get to your next level on your road map of life? Is there a community for the intelligent war fighter? Is there a company that makes a difference that wants shakers not followers?

Semper
For undergraduate, UW is primarily a school for work class locals; we were not rich enough to go to nice prep schools and then afford the tuition of a nice Ivy league school. But then Seattle is also a fairly sophisticated upper-middle class city, so why not make the school in your backyard very good? That tuition is rising sucks; I paid $800 a quarter when I started in '93, and could get by mostly paying my own way; that is obviously no longer possible. But it is still relatively affordable if you live at home as well as a first-class research institution, Seattlites still want to send their kids there while UW is getting increased attention from China/India/the rest of asia (UW always did actually, 90% of the international students hail from somewhere in Asia). As a working class school, UW is definitely elite, but compared to other much elite schools for the elite then ya, UW is not Stanford.

I rarely interact with other people from UW CSE, this is the case even in Seattle as its just not a very big program. However, I do know a couple of UW CSE graduates where I work today (Beijing China).
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

-- Teddy R.
Why on Earth are you asking that here, on a HN thread about Google and gay marriage, instead of just googling it?

Oh. Now I get it. You're a homophobe, and by the new account, a coward.
foxblot does use amazon affiliate links
The concern I would have with inertial navigation over long distances is the possibility of drift. You might have good resolution over short distances, but what about hours and hours? What if your vectors are not quite right, or you get drift in your gyros (and LR gyros are prone to drift in certain circumstances)?
Tech sector salaries in Vancouver are shockingly low while costs of living are nearly on par with San Francisco. It's a really bad deal.
But combustion engines operate somewhere around 50% efficiency? (i dont remember exactly, but I remember it being pretty bad). So the 10-20% lost through the road and the (presumably) small amount lost through electric, battery-less cars may actually be less overall than from combustion engines.

I am assuming that electric engines dont generate much heat if they dont have batteries and assuming that roads dont have the power on unless theres a car nearby.
It used to be that most UW CSE grads went down to Intel, these days many are off to Google; I'm sure some of them even make their way to Microsoft, but its not a large program so its not like you would see many around outside some otherwise obvious places.

Coolness about Whitman. Walla Walla doesn't get enough love.
Especially since Apple and Microsoft has been supportive of this issue way before Google was.

Also you know Tim Cook being gay and all.
> But in your other comment where you said this:
> "tens of former and current Stanford attendees while at Google"

I stated that rather poorly. I am interning at Google in Mountain View for the Summer, but not all of the Stanford attendees I have met and spoken with at length are working there, though most at Google are certainly bright.

Regardless of whether they are working at Google, Facebook, hacking away in a SOMA loft, or hunkered down in their parents' garage all of them have been highly intelligent and fun to be around. Whether that's more representative of who I choose to befriend with than the university's admission practices is another question altogether ;)
> A good portion of why people like to mock PHP is due to the way people end up using the language rather than the language's ugly parts.

Are you really going to trot out that old lie?

Why not read this, instead? http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
Stackoverflow.com is really good at discussing these kind of issues, and the question has beeen asked and answered many times already as I found out with a bit of googling.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/761194/interface-vs-abstr...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/479142/when-to-use-an-int...

More discussions can be found in Related questions.
Spreading the "Don't be Evil" That's the Google I like.
Javascript is just Scheme with a C-like syntax and a limited number of bad design decisions (like automatic semicolon insertion and the == operator). PHP is a never-ending fountain of bad design decisions, because its core devs continue to make new ones.
While this is true, the article also highlights the fact that many STEM PhDs are forced to work outside of their field, forcing them to throw away years of education. And also consider the statistic that a recent American Chemical Society survey indicated that 38% of new PhD chemists were unemployed.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not blaming you. I think a lot of people, if not most, are insecure or at least unsure about their accomplishments.

I feel that it's not really discussed: you might receive kudos from the family, but they're often outside your domain, so "it doesn't count". You might have some kind of role model: "I want to be like that guy", but that guy rarely looks back to acknowledge your accomplishments. (and he's probably looking up to somebody else too) If anybody does, it's mostly people "lower than or equal to" you that do: at best your peers, at worst people who don't really know what they're talking about.

So it's hard to see yourself in the proper referential…
> This is exactly right. As soon as I see that blog theme, I recognize it as 'this is gonna be a good article.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batesian_mimicry

Such a signal is vulnerable to knockoffs.
This illustrates very common problem with people trying to criticize PHP.

First you demand some "foundations". But if you look on virtually all existing popular languages, none of them were designed exactly in the form they are now. Java had tons of changes and additions, Python had object model change and now has new version that changed so much that it's not even backwards compatible, etc. etc. Does it mean they lacked "sane foundations"? No, it means requirements changed, so did they. PHP changes too. You want formal definition of PHP? But what would be the benefit of it? Who would benefit from it existence? Without answering these questions it is hard to expect anybody would create it.

Then you proceed to focus on some obscure bug that 99.9999% people couldn't care less about, with implication that since this bug is not fixed whole language is crap. I don't even know how to address this - do you seriously expect this be taken as an argument?
Google left out incest.
We have a company-provided mail setup so this isn't it at all. It's just the classic HR department liking lilac-colored Comic Sans for their email text problem.
I blogged about Pharo 2 yesterday http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/07/shoutout-and-thanks-to-ph...

Pretty gutsy of the developers to be willing to toss old code and some backwards compatibility in order to have a modern Smalltalk.

Pharo is very cool, and well worth the time to experiment with it.
> Does Google engage in public campaign agains antisemitism, which is a real problem in some countries?

Hmmm, anti-semetism is one thing, but it isn't illegal to be Jewish in Singapore.
Does anyone want to fund a startup called Gate Corporation? http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3067/what-is-the-st...
American corporations (in particular) have an economic interest in keeping employees healthy for one very important reason: they pay for their employees' healthcare.

It makes financial sense to demonstrate to health insurance providers that you're trying to keep your employees healthy, so that insurance premiums don't increase and so that you reduce time away from work due to illness.

Regarding commute options, they also benefit the company because employees can be healthier, happier and spend more time in the office if local traffic is reduced. In addition, commute campaigns are often driven by incentives from state and local governments. Whenever someone is stuck in a traffic jam, the opportunity to be productive is being lost.

(And as others have pointed out, there's not much evidence to suggest that sexual orientation is a lifestyle choice)
This is a pretty surprising move, at least to me. In Singapore it's not even legal to engage in homosexual sex, and there's no recognition of same-sex unions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_same-sex_unions_...

Pushing for gay marriage in a place where gays aren't even legally allowed to have sex is jumping right into the deep end. (I should clarify that the gay community here is nonetheless pretty active anyway, and there haven't been crackdowns in a long while. Homosexuality is pretty much tolerated as long as the sexual acts are kept private.)

All in all it's a strange move for a multinational corporation to make, considering how sociopolitical the issue is. Our government is very keen on having dynamic foreign firms set up shop here, but maybe not so keen once they take stances opposed to legislative policy. Google has established a big enough office (and datacenters) here to possibly not want to risk hurting relations (in my uninformed view).

I'd guess it's a hoax, taking all these factors into account, and the lack of an official press release.
Why would it make you upset that people have to choose between their personal beliefs and owning Google stock? This is the entire idea of the free market. There's absolutely no coercion at play.

I understand being upset about what your government does. You can't easily escape being part of that. Anyone who doesn't like what Google is doing is free to disassociate themselves in an instant.
about:config -> browser.search.selectedEngine
It's illegal. Every storage unit I've rented has had a clause preventing any sort of sublease.
What's wrong with filtering input? If you expect a number, what's wrong with telling the user "strawberry pie" is not a valid value?
Issues of social equality are every employers immediate business, and most shareholders are not driven by the lobbying positions that companies hold, but rather a desire to profit. Also, if disagreeing with a company's positions meant having to sell your shares, then shareholder meetings would be even more boring than they generally are.
Oberon, Go, Common Lisp, Matlab/Octave for some problems, R for some others, APL/J/K for others.
> Goldman wasn't obligated to put up a shingle reading "We are losing our appetite for CDOs, and so can't take your money if you think they're still a great investment."

They are obligated if they are fiduciaries.
> Does Google engage in public campaign agains antisemitism

Well, regarding some of the search results for "Jew", they did put up this explanation: http://www.google.com/explanation.html
I actually did take Vitamin D and 5-HTP for quite sometime (still take 5-HTP), and it did help me a little bit. My problem was the fact that every time I go outside to head to work/school, it's either raining, cloudy, foggy, or a combination of the three. And I used to love rain and fog when I lived in California, but it didn't last for 6+ months at a time.

Waking up in the morning during the winter has been the worst part. I have always been an early riser, but when I just moved here, for about a year I could barely get up at 9am.
There's no bullshit except in that code. If you use by-ref assignment and later try to re-use the same variable name, that's what you get. That's what by-ref binding is designed to do. If you don't understand it, re-read the manual on PHP references. It's not PHP fault if somebody doesn't use language properly.
It may be all well and good to crucify ten thousand people, but unless there is a plan in place for the aftermath we'll still have a broken system ... and a lot of bodies, figuratively speaking.