skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The samples were taken from a random selection of 100 of the top 1000 firms. The real question is how to make that selection of 100 firms so that statistically the sample size is a representative sampling. The goal is not to determine whether or not the jobs are available to those folks who may have just been laid off. The goal is to determine just how many job opening do exist in the Fortune 1000 without needing to hit every single job board of every one of those 1000 companies... surely there is a statistician who can solve that one? ;-)
The most important thing: ANY source control is better than NO source control. It is 10,000 times more important that you pick one package, learn it, and USE IT than you pick any particular package. (Source control isn't useful until you've made it a routine part of the workflow.)

I use SVN, because that is what I got started on and that is what I know. It works fine, for allowing me to go back to known-good versions of the code, and for allowing stupidly easy Rails deployments through Capistrano. But really, any of the alternatives are probably just as fine.

[Incidentally, my repositories sits on a machine that gets backed up daily. That is, similarly, a good-enough-for-now solution. There are other alternatives: use a dedicated provider, put it on a machine other than the deployment machine, use distributed source control, whatever. Any of them works as long as the answer is not "source control on the same machine you spend most of your time on", and heck, that still captures a good deal of the source control benefit, come to think of it.]
FWIW, macports is linked to from http://macosforge.org/ - which is open source stuff hosted by Apple and worked on by Apple engineers for the most part.
From the link on your page:

"Yesterday we embarked on a research project to find current job openings. We started with 21 firms (with 18,839 open positions) and now we're up to data from 100 of them. (All Fortune 500)"

The chance that a random sample of 100 firms are all in the top half of the sample universe is 2^100 = about a decillion. Doesn't really look random to me.
Macports is better than nothing, but not by much. I admit it's a real blessing when it comes to something complex with a lot of dependencies - if it works, but a lot of the time it's more trouble than it's worth.

I've personally seen it delete the data during a postgres update, and it regularly runs roughshod over config files, etc. It screws up installs all the time, which can be a nasty surprise since it doesn't clean up after itself properly (this happened to me when it put a non-functioning ssh in my path, leading to a bit of panic when I suddenly needed it urgently). It can't clean up obsolete, well, anything without the "force" option, spewing spurious warnings all over the place .. except when it turns out they weren't spurious and you find out it deleted something critical. It's slow as hell to list what you do have installed. The maintainers are sloppy and non-working packages sit in the repos for weeks at a time (hello, Erlang).

Like I said, it's better than nothing, but I don't think anyone should use macports for anything that could conceivably store any data you care about. You will probably need to nuke /opt and re-build everything from scratch periodically, so make good and sure there's nothing in there that you care about. However, if you use it with caution and bear in mind the necessity of a periodic rebuild, it can be a big help.
The article's point: The job market is flooded, disadvantaging recent graduates without experience. Hence, we need to give newcomers more experience so they can compete.

This doesn't seem to help the situation. (1) Now, experienced people with families to support will (theoretically) be out of work longer, and (2) Raising the bar on "practical" experience raises it for everyone, still making jobs hard to get.
If "Beth" spent 10,000 hours honing a creative craft instead of slogging away in a frigging box packing line, then maybe yes indeed.

The "Beths" of the world may turn out to have been a great lost human potential suddenly liberated from manual labor by robots. Instead of a bunch of Beths sitting around lamenting the loss of factory jobs, in a generation there will be no Beths at all, they'll all be JJ Abrams instead.
And dont forget TV show /movie / gaming / random geek interest items...

See Buffy, Star Wars, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Merrilin etc
A good adviser is usually more important than the univ you're at, so talk to him, the univ and the other school to figure out what the best route might be. Moving with your adviser to a new school isn't uncommon, so there should be a way to achieve this.
You should have a talk with your adviser and discuss your options. If you don't feel comfortable talking with him about this, do you really want him as an adviser for the next several years?

If you really want to work with him, I would follow him. As a condition for moving to another university, I'm sure he could stipulate that he be allowed to bring in some people.

Perhaps you can just be a research assistant for a year.
Jon Harrop To The Rescue! Hey Jon! Hey.... Ah... disappeared...
Thanks, nice catch and that post needs to be changed... momentarily... The universe was truely from the Fortune 1000 from the list publish online... not the top 500 only...
Hm, I wonder if you are married...
You can see my confusion is somewhat born out by hitting this link... it is labeled 500 when actually it lists the top 1000...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/full_...
makes me want to learn lisp, but not until I'm speedy in python

LISP, you're next and I do expect to have my mind thoroughly blown when I 'get it'... I was thinking about code-emitting and meta programming in C#, and I realised that what you're really after is access to the AST... which I hear LISP lays bare..
If so, it obviously hasn't been that long, since it's only a water pistol ..
Another way to do it is to DFS or BFS a graph while marking nodes "visited" or not.

This is exactly how we did it in my algorithm course. Our teacher showed that quite a lot of graph algorithms can be implemented as a simple variation of a generic DFS or BFS, so the advantage of doing it this way is that you can reuse the same base code.
You're a PhD student. The default answer is that you can do whatever you want, and administrators will make things work.

I've seen this play out in three different ways: (a) student gets new supervisor, (b) student moves to new university, (c) student stays at old university but keeps the same supervisor in spite of the supervisor moving to a new university (depending in your institution, it may be necessary to get a new "official" supervisor for paperwork-filling-out purposes).

As other people have said, talk to your supervisor.
In a few years, naming the product "Teensy" will seem ironic.
So here is the methodology:
1. Hit the site above.
2. Randomly pick a company from the list... for instance:
3. Pick Paychex Systems... company 921 on Fortunes list...
4. On their site they list 137 job openings...
5. Add that to the total...
6. Repeat until you have a representative sample size

Question: Using an appropriate random number generation between 1 and 1000, what is the sample size required to then estimate the total job openings on the 1000 sites?
Only 900% sure? Look, it's a big decision, and there's no room for this kind of wishy-washy fence sitting. I'd wait until you are at least 2000% sure before doing anything you might otherwise regret.
I was just about to look for a brain for my robot. Excellent! The only concern I have is that the AVR is soldered down; it won't do unless there is a socket.
Quick Weight Loss Diet strategy
Spend a few minutes each night planning out your next day. Get some form of daily schedule and use it regularly. Plan your workouts and, if possible, your meals. This will help you to get the most out of the limited amount of free time you have each week.
To make sense of this question, you have to know that the original submission linked to: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7tf8p/what_is_t...

I linked to the reddit discussion both because both the question the resulting discussion on reddit was interesting.
Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights?
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I semi-agree.

I have been an autodidact all of my life, and poor (and occasionally homeless) most of my adult life. I'm still young.

I've been learning partially via online video lectures (specifically MIT's OCW) and course materials since they first started popping up a few years ago, and I've learned a great deal - however, I feel that I would have learned much more if I was in a situation where I was always very close to being able to interact with other people learning the same stuff in person. Not to mention that there are other benefits.

In fact, I'll probably be pursuing college after completing my next gig, which is 4-5 months down the road - mainly because the type of stuff that I'm very interested in (like friendly AI and cognitive science) are only really moving in colleges - I'd be put directly in contact with more people with more interests doing more relevant stuff once I sludged past the undergrad part.

It's not that I can't keep learning and applying my knowledge on my own, it's that I think I may have hit a point where it's just not as efficient (for my purposes) anymore.
MIT has a whole directory of openly available stuff at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm
VMWare Is Dead, Which Affects EMC Somewhat
OK, I am exaggerating somewhat. VMWare is still very much alive. However, the economic crisis came at precisely the wrong moment for the company. Had it been in its present position in 2004, it would have taken off, captured significant market share and built a lasting advantage over competitors. However, companies are scaling back their tech spending on all fronts.
This is the same question as animal rights. Of course neither robots or animals are human or sentient. But doesn't killing them have a scarring effect on us? And is that enough to outweigh the efficiency benefits of treating them as objects?
Awesome! How do you use it in Linux?
They are good for some type of applications that are similar to document based (e.g facebook, flickr, HN news), but for others, web apps are terrible (twitter, photo editing, making phone calls).

I'd like to know why you think this is true.

That observation may be true today, but it is getting less and less true every day. The evolution of technology infrastructure over the past decade has been in the direction of making web applications more and more powerful. (Javascript, Flash) The overarching trend points to web apps taking over the domain of desktop apps inch by inch.

Name any popular desktop app and I can more likely than not point to some company or other porting it to the browser.
Good article. One thing that struck me, though, was the nature of the jobs both workers in the Smith family had:

"Metrostudy, the housing market research firm where he worked as a staff consultant"

"His wife, Kimberly, earns about the same at a retail marketing firm"

In other words, they both had these kind of meta-jobs which don't actually do much of anything productive, just kind of massage the system. This kind of job just doesn't seem like it has much of a reason to exist long term, to me at least - they're both kind of dependent on trying to influence/predict imperfect markets. Well, those markets are rapidly becoming more perfect, information-wise anyway - we see the beginnings of this process in Amazon reviews.

Market research is important, don't get me wrong - even if (when?) advertising is completely ineffective, companies still need to know what customers want. But it just seems to me that in the long term, these kind of jobs are against the technological tide.
I have been blogging about free education for almost 3 years on my Free Science Online (http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com) blog. Check it out! I have collected hundreds of courses in math, physics, engineering, computer science, and other topics.
But there is a downside, too. I have read statements from the field of high energy physics that everybody understands everybody else except the native english speakers because they tend to use the whole english language and not just the globally comprehensible subset. So hiring a creative writing major to do your international correspondence might be the wrong choice, you want someone who predictably writes simple english .
My XP laptop died permanently a little over a year ago, and there was a Vista Toshiba at Best Buy for $1100 on a model that was $1400 most other places. Maybe there'd have better value elsewhere, but I needed something immediate so my work wouldn't be delayed and I got it.

Vista: Not so bad. I'd love to see it less bloated with MS processes running invisibly, and I'd like to see it change the order things boot in so I turn it on and get up and running faster.

Second issue: Some driver issues and some poor backwards compatibility with programs that run fine on XP, which is quite ugly.

But beyond that, it's a good OS and a legit upgrade over XP. The UI is faster/better once you adopt to the learning curve. Security is legitimately upgraded, and I haven't been infected with any viruses or spyware, and I play around with random applications all the time. I like that I can easily stop non-MS programs from updating themselves without my blessing. Being able to choose giving a program default "Run as Administrator" vs. leaving it less privileges is really good.

Vista's not enough of an upgrade over XP to be worth buying, especially considering all the good SP2 did. But everyone I know that's run Vista for at least a couple months came around on it, unless the drivers thing bit them. The Vista-hate is a bit overblown, though Windows 7 does look like a legit upgrade.
I didn't like that it did not show some small computation like counting of 1 bits or any other trivial computation.
The guy also posted another ticket, although it's a lot less interesting: http://code.google.com/p/blackgold/issues/detail?id=1#c0
You're using a web-based app right now ...
Very cool stuff unalone, you're consistently one of my favorite commentators here. I'd toss out there that science and philosophy also shatter paradigms, but I'm with you on art. From your description of Finnegans Wake, I'll add it to my things to read list - thanks.
Fold a piece of paper into a triangular prism.

Color and write text on it.

Turn so appropriate color is facing outward

Voilà.
One day, long 2 years ago, one of my website's users did a whois on my DNS name, found my phone number there and called me (in the middle of the night) to tell me he had a problem with his account.
Guess I didn't hide my phone well enough :-P
Heh, I didn't have a problem with the floating picture but then I realized that I am reading the page with the browser super-wide (on my 30inch LCD).
The boards you're suggesting use a lot more power and provide a lot more computation power than the AT90USB162. This has 21 I/O lines. You could drive H-bridges for five stepper motors off of it, or a 14-digit LCD display, or an 8-digit LCD display and a 3×3 keypad, etc. It doesn't have an ADC but with a little external electronics you could easily use it to digitize signals from e.g. thermistors or pressure sensors or tilt sensors. You can run it from USB power, and USB power adapters are cheap and widely available. You can generate voice-quality audio using PWM, although I don't think you have enough CPU power to synthesize voice in real-time; you'd have to be reading it off a flash chip or a network or something.

If you want to build a white-LED-driven stroboscope to check your engine timing, or get fault codes out of your OBD-II, or sound an alarm when the air conditioner is on and the window is open, or control your five-axis robot, etc etc etc., something like this is ideal.

Atmel has a set of application notes for the chip at http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/app_notes.asp?part_id=4097 that show some example things you can do with it.
Zuckerberg: Facebook’s “intense” year
Please go work in some other industry.
HN can get too wide
I'm not exactly sure why this occurs, but often times threads are disgustingly wide requiring me to scroll horizontally 2 or 3 screens to read one line. I usually move on to the next submission when this happens. It really shuts me off.

I'm not sure if it's caused on the user's end, via special tags they might be using, or whether it's to do with the design of HN, but it's very irritating. I often want to read the discussion but can't stand the back and forth scrolling.

I don't mean to complain, but I'm sure this is an issue that has brought frustration to other users.

Thanks.
http://www.nist.gov/dads/ - Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures is also amazingly awesome.
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The word you're likely looking for is 'sapient.' According to the wikipedia, 'Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectively.'

I think there's a pretty clear case for the ability of animals to feel emotions, and feel pain. Whether they're a human like intelligence is another matter.
Does the US even have a system for vocational training? Over here in germany we have this system where you go to a university if you want an academic education, but if you want vocational training you go to a company and then get an accredited vocational degree after two or three years where you work at your company like 80% of the time and visit a specialized public school for the rest of the time.
So if I want to be a computer scientist, I go to the university, but if I want to be a carpenter or network admin, I just get a vocational degree in carpentry or network administration.
The system has some problims with things like adapting to change, but still seems better than a college or nothing approach.
The article seems to be based on the premise that "we're bootstrapped, here's the essentials" ... but you're paying to submit to angel investors. Why? If you're able to bootstrap your company, you don't need angel funding (a later vc round, maybe).

I do like your writing style though.
What about Scala?
following up, finished reading it awhile ago, but finally wrote up a review... So here were my thoughts

http://www.mayerdan.com/2009/01/cryptonomicon_book_review_1....

up next Snowcrash
RedBubble paints a rosy picture
I'd say both wrt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
Job titles rarely delineate what the job actually entails. When I worked at the 2nd largest hotel chain, they only had 8 guys in market research and about 12 in database marketing. These 20 people determined what hotel customers wanted, what franchise owners wanted, how much cash to keep liquid for priority club reward points, which customers to contact during direct mail campaigns, and wielded technology & math like you wouldn't believe.

I never thought these marketing guys did anything productive either until I worked side by side with them. These guys eat & sleep statistics and dream of k-means clustering and p-values all day long. My boss coauthored a paper about lifetime value of an average hotel customer with a university professor. Sometimes it's hard to judge a marketing job title until you've actually experienced the real thing.

I was hired to automate their data scrubbing and SAS models. They had 3 full-time programmers to help marketing research with the 30 terabytes of customer data they had collected over the last 10 years or so.
Google fakes out Hotmail for Chrome support
While the news is not that earth shattering the war of words between Matt Cutts and MS that followed is definitely amusing and goes to show the Microsoft philosophy and understanding of the web.
I've spent some time pondering various methods of constructing
a physical Turing Machine off and on for a couple years now,
ever since I was introduced to them through mjd's Perl Quiz of
the Week (http://perl.plover.com/qotw/r/024). However, all of my
designs were deliberately non-electronic in nature. Personally,
I find electromagnets, motors, and relays to all be
aesthetically acceptable in this pursuit, but using a
microprocessor to build a physical Turing Machine just somehow
strikes me as... unappealing.
Praise $deity! When I read this headline I thought your experiment had gone horribly wrong and you'd cooked your adviser in boiling water! Again!
Microsoft's Photosynth, the best thing to happen to photography since the digital camera.
Not really. Further shrinking of that board is constrained by the number of I/O pins required, whose size cannot shrink because of the limitations of human solderers.
One of my college friends has an MA in creative writing and a PhD in physics. So send all your work his way :)
Why VisiCalc was not patented.
Doubtless.

Colleges can be very useful. Access to lectures is only one of the ways they do what they do. That particular aspect, well you can do that without them.

I'm not saying this replaces colleges. Just saying that this also helps people become educated.
Sure, I'll try to add it.

I don't personally use Scala: what reference would you like to see? http://scala-tools.org/scaladocs/scala-library/2.7.1/ or is there something better?
But a billion dollars could buy you more spare time to try to understand Finnegans Wake.
Young entrepreneur Martin Schaedel (23) dies in plane crash
Martin you will be missed. You where to young and too good to leave this planet so soon.
Google Chrome spoofs Safari user agent to make Hotmail work
They only ship one JVM, and it's a JDK. OS X ships with javac et. al.
Che Guevara's book, Guerrilla Warfare, is quite good.
The US has different levels of degrees. Most of the colleges and universities that you hear about offer bachelors degrees as the first degree (generally a four year degree). Other colleges, especially so-called community and junior colleges will offer 2 year associates degrees in more vocational subjects such as nursing. And then there are other purely vocational schools that offer training that lasts less than a year (usually for-profit schools).

One of the biggest differences between the US and German system is that almost all American students attend the same type of high school, which theoretically should prepare you to go to a university and the curricula are usually general. Also it's important to know that the US system is mostly controlled on the local level, rather than the federal level for public schools, so a school in one city can be very different than a school in another city or state.
Facebook Tech Talk: Mark Zuckerberg on Memcached
You should put an example on the PhoneFinger page (like the Otis example). I really wanted to see it in action when I clicked on to the page.
3) Many people getting a college, medical, or law degree should realize that if they're not at the top of their class, it's not necessarily guaranteed for them to get a great job. For a less prestigious university, it's even more so the case.

If you get an MD you are pretty much guaranteed a job, even if you go to a Caribbean school. As long as you can get a license, someone will hire you.
So does Firefox plugins, I don't see anyone leeching out against that. It's a weird puritan view.

Flash is as standard as you can get and air is just an extension off that allowing you to do more stuff off line.
mostly the second. A study showed that people who get into Harvard/Yale/Princeton and instead go to state school make almost as much money as they would have otherwise.
Read http://muxtape.com/story to get a little more background.