skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing is you can kinda coast if you want to. But in the UK at least you have to churn out at least 4 high quality papers every 6 years to be included in the "Research Excellence Framework", the assessment of the research quality of the university. Although you don't have to be included in the REF, it was used as a weeding point for redundancies at one of my previous universities (i.e. those who had been in the previous REF were exempt from being included in the redundancy pool; everyone else had to reapply for their jobs). So it does tend to hang over you, even if it's not a direct reason you might get fired.

My university is an ex-polytechnic, so it focuses a lot on teaching as well. You can quite easily get by just teaching - we have a few "just teachers", though they tend to be the older employees. New fulltime employees are expected to do a bit of everything, which is actually a lot better, IMO. If teachers are doing research and contributing to their field, they're reading current stuff and can incorporate that into their teaching. etc. etc. Lots of good reasons for it to happen.

Interdisciplinarians are also rewarded - one of the reasons I got my job in a tough environment (I do computer ethics) was because I had a strong background in computer science vs. most comp ethicists who come from philosophy. So it helps to be able to cover a few different things rather than just one very niche specialty subject as well.

Ultimately though I love my job. It's highly flexible, stimulating, varied work, I have great benefits, especially holidays, and the university is very supportive of family life.
Korea Policing the Net. Twist? It’s South Korea.
They have to due to requirements form various government agencies.
> features are not as important since all of the software here has the features we want and used for years!

No. No it does not. LibreOffice/OpenOffice still lack essential basics, the big one for me being style sheets (I believe iWorks fails at this as well). Yes, they have basic support for styles, but beyond the basics, they lack quite a bit. Maybe it's changed in the last year, but I've yet to see anyone note better support for styles.

At the same time, iWorks pales in comparison to Office 2011 for Mac. Take Word's full screen mode compared to Pages: Word is dramatically better.
So Kubuntu = KDE and Ubuntu = Gnome and never the two shall switch, ever

That's not true. It's pretty easy to switch them around or install both (or neither, in the case of Ubuntu Server): 'apt-get install ubuntu-desktop' versus 'apt-get install kubuntu-desktop'. Ubuntu shares the same underlying package repository for all variants.
That is not true, you can program such an unmaintainable mess in Scala that is just not possible in Java.
You don't have to implement every programming feature just because it exists.
That makes Scala inferior in reality.

In my opinion the reason why Scala will never be mainstream. There has to be a balance between features and simplicity.
Motorola Mobility to cut 4,000 jobs in restructuring
Comparing 4 Months at a Startup vs. 1 Year of Business School
For a number of reasons Bundler/rubgems does a far better job of reproducible builds.

1) Maven doesn't generate an equivalent of Bundler's lock file. It resolves the versions to be used on each build. If you have dependencies on snapshot versions then there's no way to ensure that all developers are using the same snapshot. OK, you can always specify versions explicitly, but then you lose the benefits of snapshots etc. Bundler's lock file allows you to easily check for newer versions(a gem at a time if you like) without losing reproducible builds.

2) Developers can't upload their jars to the central maven repository. There are gatekeepers. This means that the latest versions of many projects aren't in the central repository. For those projects you have to use their own specific repository. This leads to problem 3. With rubygems developers can upload gems straight into rubygems.org. Also, because most projects are in github and you can specify git dependencies with Bundler you're able to depend on any version of a project(regardless of whether or not it's been released to rubygems.org), all the way down to the commit level.

3) 3rd party repositories change and can be unreliable. This means a jar can become unavailable without any notice. In practice the only way to guard against this is to use a proxy repository like nexus or artifactory, yay, another server to maintain...
I never thought Skynet will attack the stock market first...
Only problem is the scala community is teeny tiny, tool support isn't there (There isn't an IDE with a scala plugin that fully supports scala), pure scala libraries tend to be unreadable and lack any solid documentation (looking at you scalaz, lift, and dispatch), and I think most importantly the scala compiler is SLOW.

I've written a bunch of production Scala code, and I'm glad to have gotten away from it. Obviously to each their own.
Aye, I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet. I want to offer a way of exploring entries but that relies on there being entries in the first place :)
So basically:

"Don't implement pull requests because it is much nicer than Linus' solution, so if you implement it then everyone's going to want to use it and then when you insist on not using it no one will want to play with you. :("

Seems a bit like a flawed argument to me.
with what definition of metal again?
Nevertheless, he is worth defending. There's more at stake than just the man. The things they do to Dotcom are indicative of the current involvement of US politics with the IP lobby. This relationship is having repercussions all over the world. Faced with a failing business model, IP companies are investing their ever-scarce capital into political rent-seeking, the consequences of which would be the destruction of privacy and creative freedom.
33 Creative Uses of Vertical Scrolling in Web Design | Creativeoverflow
> So...much...syntax.

Really?!

Then maybe you should consider other profession, as there are other languages out there much more verbose, like Ada for example.
It's an image by Scott Foresman (the company) and released into the public domain: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Galleon_(PSF).png
"Now you're just attacking a straw man, aren't you? :)"

Watch for this on ShitHNSays...
How to botify this? The easiest I can think of is to keep polling for the most downvoted comment ... any fancy information retrieval effort is bound to generate false positives.

And oh yes ... I see what you are thinking, HN Hall of Shame - handles with get most downvotes/week ranked in reverse sorted. Reverse gamification. It obviously needs to be like a leaderboad. And obviously has to have a REST api. Now you want "web-scale" -- Node.js+MongoDb+HTML5 charts ...
It's better to use different good tools, rather than one bad tool. And by the way, since when is Maven SCM? AFAIK Maven just pollutes SCM with it's dumb release plugin.
Ask HN: iOS Promo Code Printing Service
Does anyone know of a service provider that will create individual business cards (or other print media) for iOS promo codes?

I'm envisioning having standard company or app information on one side of the card and the unique iOS promo code on the opposite side.
I'm not offended, but I'm disappointed by the style and content of the discussion, yes. There is no question that narcan had the intention to insult anonymously without contributing anything.

Sorry, at the time you posted this I had already taken the 4chan reference out because it was bound to be misunderstood. Let me clarify: 4chan has a bad rep, but its quality is rapidly improving. For example, people are there getting more friendly and helpful, whereas HN seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Even childish "gotcha" type responses are now rewarded by HN moderators.

I do have a Twitter account, but as you probably guessed I don't use it that much. I know about the RSS feed, but that does not address my point. In fact, that's where my disappointment comes from. narcan-style responses seem to work in distorting the subject. My criticism was actually about two things: the lack of source links and the 140 character limit.

> These quotes can be self contained without knowing when and which thread they were said.

That's your opinion and a valid one at that. We disagree, but that's why we have discussion threads.

> The twitter format doesn't work for you. We see that. That doesn't mean that this is a "poor execution" and that it could be improved.

I didn't mean to shit all over the idea. It's good. The quotes are well picked. It's not a startup, I didn't mean to launch into a 10 point critique on execution. It could be improved for users like me, it's perfect as it is for users like yourself. And that's all equally OK, the entire thing was blown way out of proportion.
Compared to Python's

print('hello world')

Or even HQ9+'s

H
and? if you ask people who never bought a keyboard what keyboard is best the methodology might not be the best...
XKCD's perspective: http://xkcd.com/664/
Google has a new favicon
New Site Helps Users Find Apps for Retina Display MacBook Pro | The Mac Observer
Obligatory Oatmeal Cartoon:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email_address
Born and lived in Paris 28 years and score 97% on the test ;-) .
You can tell an article is going to be worthless when it begins with a pleonastic "so".
Sadly the gif seems to just be a single image and never changes?
Yep, definitely agree with those 3 additions.

I've thought long and hard before about how to supplant a current legacy system that's taken root like an old oak tree in a financial services company. I honestly don't know how.

For example, a Life Insurance Administration System in a small insurance company. First, let's make some broad assumptions to make things easier:

1. The system will be "go-forward" only. i.e. we will not convert current policies onto the new system.
2. The system will NOT support any current product lines, but at launch will only support new product X, which is still in the product planning stages.

Given those 2 assumptions, how much customization will the new system require? The answer that everyone hopes for when they buy the software from the vendor (and the story the vendor sells) is, very little. The reality is that the system that goes live is usually very, very customized OR it ends up being very under utilized and simply interfaces WITH THE LEGACY SYSTEMS to meet the requirements of the product team, the regulatory bodies, the actuaries, etc. etc.

So what's a legacy system hating hacker to do?

The only way I could see legacy replacement being feasible is if big corp X decided that they were going to do full in house system development, and then market the core or the resulting system to their competitors. This isn't unheard of, and has been done in the past, but is pretty rare. The trend over the last 20+ years has been to out source virtually all of IT and buy off-the-shelf, vendor supported software to administer daily business. The argument, that big corp X is not in the business of software development is difficult to argue against. Alas, the end result is vendor lock-in, increasingly expensive services contract, and stagnant systems that are impossible to pry your business loose from.

The in-house/out-source cycle is fairly common in big financial services/health care corporations, usually on about a 4-8 year schedule.

I suspect the HN audience is not particularly interested in legacy systems development, or how one's insurance policy is administered. But, the next time you notice how large your insurance premium payment is, or complain about bank fees, or drug dispensary fees, etc. etc., stop and think for a second about what that money is paying for. In the case of insurance (which is the industry I'm familiar with), I'd argue that for a low-risk client, that a large percentage of your premium goes to administration of some sort.
This is not what i would call a 'review'. It's a performance comparison between these four packages and nothing else. If the only thing that matters to you is how fast your .doc opens it's fine, but i guess for most people things like compatibility and UI are more important...
It is a good idea to have a specific place, but it doesn't matter much what it is. It could be "firstlast.com", or "username.github.com", or "blogname.org" -- the only mistake is NOT having a place to publish yourself.
Reward Early Feedback With Features
>> puts focus on the content ...

That's the purpose of good design. Design has but one purpose, to serve the UX. That's it. Anything else is just vanity.

When there's an obvious focus on "design", then the UX is harmed. I put design in quotes because we all know what I'm talking about, design that is more about artistry than utility. Real design is much different from art. While great design can be artistic, design is all about purpose and not that nebulous "What's the purpose of art" type of purpose, but actual utility. Getting something done. Solving a problem.

The Drudge Report is considered by many on the internets to be a terrible "design" yet it's exceptionally well designed for what it does: it allows people to get a very fast listing of headlines curated by someone with a specific point of view. The purpose is precisely clear -- it's a place to browse headlines and perhaps visit links. Going to the Yahoo page, by contrast, I'm left wondering what the heck the purpose of yahoo is. Presumably, it's a news homepage, but it's incredible badly designed because the purpose of the page isn't really clear. It looks like Yahoo hired rejected Naver (http://www.naver.com/) designers and told them to ruin the Yahoo homepage as much as possible while maximizing ad pixels.

Anyway, I know I'm rambling a bit, but I think the "look" of wikipedia could be improved slightly, but the design (at least on the consumer facing (not the editor) side is effective. I especially appreciate the mobile version of Wikipedia. It's a constant companion while I'm out and about and it's fast, crisp and gets me the information I need.
Since when does a private, invitation-only beta count as "shipping"?
What do you mean with “style sheets”?

iWork very clearly has paragraph styles (plus character and list styles), just like Office. I really can’t imagine LibreOffice not having styles. That’s such a basic and central feature, something an office application absolutely has to get right.

I personally find Word to be inflexible and inelegant. It has a byzantine and bizarre UI. The newer versions improved that somewhat but not much. It may have many more features than iWork (though that’s kind of irrelevant if those features are only nice to have and not definitely needed) but I’m simply in love with the straightforward simpleness of iWork.

If you absolutely need a feature iWork doesn’t have you are obviously screwed and have to use something else – but if not I find iWork vastly superior, especially Keynote but also Pages. (Numbers is excluded from that – it’s slow and annoying.) I think the developers of iWork were mostly able to strike the right balance about which features to in- and exclude and made many sensible choices. Your pet feature might not be there – but that’s just how it is. Great software will never be able to please everyone.

Office certainly tries to please everyone and I would argue also succeeds at that – but it’s also not great software.

I agree with you, though, that the emphasis this comparison puts on performance is terribly misguided. Features and how they are executed do matter so much more than performance in most cases.
hard refresh if you don't see it at first
Absolutely. Ironically, the last time I encountered the MUMPS language, I was also dealing with a whack of COBOL systems.
The advantage of these systems is that you recreate them using nothing but basic, generally available tools and your memory.

Keepass, on the other hand, is useless unless you have the database file with you.
What Would You Do if you had 100 Extra Years of Life?
See Scala's case classes (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/258) - just move your 20% logic somewhere else.
There's also the issue of the vendor having effective control of the legacy system. When IBM is the only one with expertise to actually change your 30-year-old mainframe setup (as opposed to just keeping it running) they have a lot of leverage over any transition process. "Nice database you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it" ends up being the implicit scenario.
Awesome poster. Please put it up for sale somewhere!
Tesla and Toyota- Waterfall Vs Iterative Collobaration?
Needs links really.
It really sucks that we have to go to such lengths to make the services we use that are "secured to industry standards" un-hackable.

I die a little inside every time some site emails me my own password.
Yeah they should have removed the texts, but as a long time parisian I can recognise Paris with only a gutter or a window frame, it would have made the test more meaningfull.
Drunken-hipster, a WebSocket-aware HTTP(S) reverse proxy
How  to Engage Optimism in Software Design
I used to own my domain:

http://sergiotapia.com

But I forgot to pay for it after the year expired (kept putting it on the backburner) and now one of those sleazy domain squatters has it and wants to sell it for 1500$.

Really regret it, it was a good domain name for me and potential clients could easily find my developer blog and portfolio.
Mexican drug lieutenant's Facebook pics show him chummy with new president
The ability to call random external programs during the build of your project is not a feature, it's a bug. Likewise the ability to lay out your source arbitrarily. Your project's build is not a unique and special snowflake; it can build the same way as every other project, the way that has already been tried and tested by millions, the way that any developer will immediately understand.

If there's really some step that needs to be done in your builds that isn't covered by the existing plugins, you can write your own (it's not hard) and then at least that step is happening in a structured, testable way. But if you're doing something unique to a single project, you shouldn't be doing it in the build system.
OK I didn't know enough about this format to look in it for the fonts. But I zoomed in as far as I could in Evince and everything stayed smooth so I just assumed it wasn't bitmapped.
Modern humans may have picked up key genes from extinct relatives
"Did Maven folks include every possible scenario in markup?"

For me the main point of Maven is that you keep things simple and standard. By not deviating from a standard Maven web project structure and avoiding dependencies or build phases that need special care, I have projects that are simple to develop, build and package.

I am trying very hard to just depend on good behaving Maven dependencies and to stick to simple solutions. No more special build phases for code generation, no more crazy stuff. If I need some special build phase then I am probably doing it wrong.

The result of that is also that my projects are super simple. By avoiding special build phases I can pretty much load up a project in any IDE and just hit Run.

To me that is the true power of Maven. For that reason I don't want to look back at Ant or any of the fancy super flexible Groovy/Scala/Ruby build tools.

So contrary what many people think, Maven forces you to keep things simple. And I think that is a good thing in any project :)
Intellij Idea + Maven seemed pretty good, last time I had to write production Scala. I couldn't get it working with the fast background compiler daemon, which would have really helped.

Agreed on the readability though.
So store it in Dropbox and have a copy on a USB Key you carry with you (along with a portable version[1] of Keepass)

Also, on the same subject, it's the "all you need is your memory" bit that makes me smile. If you could rely on your memory then why would you need to have these hashing functions in the first place? (:

[1] http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/keepass_portable/
Normally that's just un-thinking control. Although if they're hiring from "the park bench," as the article says, then there might be a minimum personal hygiene standard that dressing up might maintain as a side effect.
Minimising downtime for schema changes with PostgreSQL
So you want to be an ethical hacker?
posting... they are calling it posting
Just because there are more verbose languages, it doesn't take away from how verbose Java is.
How to Change Careers, Is the Market Rigged, and More
Funny, considering that the term placebo actually means:

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/placebo?s=t)

1.	med control group See also placebo effect an inactive substance or other sham form of therapy administered to a patient usually to compare its effects with those of a real drug or treatment, but sometimes for the psychological benefit to the patient through his believing he is receiving treatment

Emphasis mine.

You seem to have an axe to grind on this subject, like some of the more hardcore atheists. The deep irony of that is that you believe with fervour and passion and faith that people who believe with fervour and passion and faith are stupid. Epic fail.

Develop a critical thinking habit, not a reflexive opposition habit. Your life will be better for it.
Also known as "Fuck it, support it forever or burn bridges!"
The Problem with Shopping
That, and maybe combined with outsourcing companies being mostly Indian because of the last decade, and really good at sourcing.
I don't believe it either. I've never seen any evidence that forcing people to wear a tie has a long-term effect on their behaviour.
Your marketing might need some work. All I know about Fitocracy is that it's a forum, with some kind of "show people how many hours you've exercised" thingie. I don't remember any kind of questionnaire thing, or being given any kind of tailored workout program or dietary regimen.
Fusion: The quest to recreate the Sun’s power on Earth
This slide deck doesn't go into enough detail and I think the Arianne 501 section is not entirely correct; if you're interested in this topic, I enjoyed reading Space Systems Failures [1].

My spouse used to work as a EE in the aerospace industry and I collected some awesome stories from her. The degree of cultural pathology there is difficult for outsiders to comprehend.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Space-Systems-Failures-Disasters-Satel...
What you're describing are the exact same mechanisms that led US companies to outsource to India, but working in reverse.
Great post. I didn't understand the role of controllers and directives but this explained them well with a thoughtful walk through.

The idea of wrapping distinct chunks of logic in separate directives that can then be sprinkled around the DOM declaratively is great.

In my view this is a welcome alternative; in my (maybe limited) experience, many other JS frameworks have you writing substantial amounts of glue code (i.e. bug-magnet code) to achieve comparable things.
Tiny Transmitters Could Kill QR Codes
Figure what? What date it is? I usually use a calendar.
I am also an advocate of releasing early as that will help you getting some feedback from the users. Of course you need to reach a certain point in order to do that. Also like the poster.
Here in Finland (population 5 million) the government is preparing to allocate ca. 1500 million euros to order a country-wide medical patient database from Accenture, who are the local representative for Epic Systems [1] and Epic's MUMPS-based [2] medical information systems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

[2] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx
I can't know how will this turn out eventually but I really hope for this (or something like this) to be a turning point for the music industry.

I love music, I really do, but at some point I became so disgusted by the way the industry works that I almost stopped caring. There surely is a better way to distribute music which would allow musicians to earn more money and the consumer to spend less at the same time by leaving out labels and distributors.