skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That article is more than a decade old! Much water has flown under the bridge since then. Fast forward to 2012, the "developed world" itself is conceding there are also many problems with this "green revolution" approach, that it is no longer appropriate to continue with this monocultural, faddish fixation of "technological, scientific solution always saves the world". For e.g:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1029447...

/rant

Meanwhile all aspects of food and water, both of which are a fundamental human need, has been heavily commoditised and abstracted out of our view all the way to reductio ad absurdum levels in modern discourse. It is going to take several unmitigated disasters before nuanced views around this topic will even gain traction.

/rant
When you're clinging desperately to the bleeding edge of social innovation, you can't allow yourself to be confined within the mundane strictures of the English language.
I would imagine that many Infosec positions would be safe, as there are regulations in place that mandate many aspects of security, including, what functions have to be performed to keep an entire data center/telecommunications site from being shut down due to noncompliance, the qualifications a person must have to perform these duties, the minimal number of people that can be on shift, etc...

It's funny, when the American people think about government cut backs, they think about getting rid of $500 hammers, congressmen getting 200k a year for pension after serving a couple of years, programs with multiple redundancies, and high ranking federal employees making 200-300k a year to do almost nothing.

When the government actually makes cutbacks, it's always the military, education, research, or middle class employees that get fucked.
I was feeling similarly for a long time except on one point: I think you are really wrong about taking a different path being futile. Your reason for not starting something new because you won't compare to people who have been doing it for years is not a good reason. There are tons of people who have been doing their job for years and are just plain not good at their job at all. Aim for their jobs for now. If you pick something else you want to do you are definitely going to end up being better than they are if you bust your ass. And they have jobs. So what is stopping you from beating them? Nothing.

You said you view yourself as more hardworking and intelligent than most people, even some very successful friends. Well part of the gift of being intelligent is that you have the capability of retooling yourself and picking up something new. You also have the other component for being able to do that as well, being hardworking.

Things are guaranteed to not get any better if you don't do anything, and your reasons for not doing anything are not good ones. If you are a smart, hardworking person and you set a reasonable goal for yourself there should be nothing holding you back barring your own motivation.

Finally, if you actually do decide to get moving in a direction, print this out and put it on your wall:

http://casnocha.com/2010/11/the-30-steps-to-mastery.html
Almost 3 years ago something flipped in my brain. I felt similar to you for many years before that. At the time I was obese, so I worked on that first. Eight months later I was still overweight but significantly stronger and healthier.

During that time I saw how I had limited myself at work because I didn't feel confident enough to ask for more. During my annual review at work, I made it clear that I felt undervalued. My employer eventually responded, but it was too late. I had already started seeking a new job.

I interviewed at a few places and I took the highest offer, even though it was the least interesting work. That job allowed me to work from home and gave me a lot of solitary time to reflect. Even though I've been programming for my whole life and I earned a great salary, I had never gone to college. It was a regret I had held for many years. For the first time it was possible to go to college, because of the flexible hours allowed by my job as a telecommuter. So at 34 years old I started taking classes at my local community college.

Fast forward a year and a half, I quit work and transferred to one of the top computer schools in the country (top 5 in EE, CS, and CompE.) Sometimes it feels strange to be 15+ years older than my classmates, but then I remind myself that it's never too late to achieve my goals.

The last couple years have been the best years of my life. I have no more regret because I am doing everything I can to realize my potential. It's never too late.

TLDR: Be honest with yourself. Reflect, Analyze, and have the confidence to pursue your dreams.
Try it, as it depends on the applications you use. Some members of the jetbrains family didn't run on OpenJDK for a long time. The ones I use do now.

That said, if your platform lacks an installer and -more importantly- an updater, OpenJDK is not a good alternative. There's no reason to assume it is any more secure than the Oracle package except for the lack of additional toolbars.
Canonization of Aaron Swartz - First Martyr in Church of Singularity?
No, it really is not. The two are wildly out of proportion.

You can simplify any crime imaginable and any punishment imaginable to declare the combination of the two "an eye for an eye", as you have just done here, does not make such a declaration legitimate.
"You are actually now arguing that either she was incompetent because she picked bad expert witnesses or she had bad judgement in how hard she prosecuted."

I didn't say that or imply it. On the other side. I have heard that Aaron had access to the documents. I have heard that MIT is an open access type of campus. I have heard things that claim that the prosecutor's case was in error. But, I have heard little about the validity of the case. I guess that the prosecutors reviewed the CFAA laws and other similar cases.

I am saying that the case should have proceeded forward. I would have liked have heard from both sides. Others say she should be fired and that the case was invalid.
Someone once told me a nice metaphor for life. It goes: life is like a big, big river. Everyone starts at different points in the river - some start further upstream, some start further down. No matter who you are though, there are always people who started usptream from you. You'll see them cruising down the river, laughing and splashing, like it's second nature. And it's easy to be jealous of them, even to become fixated about the part of the river they saw and you didn't. So you try and swim up the river to get back to where they started from. Of course that doesn't work, because the current is far too strong, so you just end up tiring yourself out, and when you get too exhausted to keep going, you look around and realise you're in exactly the same place as when you started.

You can do that for as long as you want. Ain't gunna do anything except tire you out. Eventually though you can accept the place you started in the river, and let the current take you down-stream. That's when you start living - when you accept the limitations of how you started in life and open yourself up to your own unique possibilities of your life adventure.

Also, my dad was 42 when he started university. He became a lawyer. Granted, university in my country was cheap at the time, and granted, he would be more comfortable now if he'd started earlier. But he made a good start, and it was better than sitting around and resigning himself to being unqualified.

On that note, I want to stress: it is never too late to re-qualify. And it's always worth it. Don't be embarrassed, don't come up with reasons why you'd never be successful - just go for it. Give it a shot. It'll work out in the end.
There's a saying "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."

You can't change the past so you can only learn from it. I sense that you're not fully ok with who you are yourself and where you come from, and that leads you to the fallacious conclusion that you're somehow not good enough.

The question is, what is your identity built on? Is it things that are internal to you and which don't depend on other people's opinions, or is it things that are external to you, leaving you wide open to judge yourself?
Others have written more eloquently than I, but just a couple of data points.

I'm in my early 40's right now and have recently gotten interested in a couple of technical subjects and have been learning at my own pace. I gotta say, these last few months of doing so have felt extremely rewarding. It doesn't seem to matter so much that other people out there are more experienced and also younger. There are also plenty of people that don't know a darn thing about what I'm learning. What is mattering is that it is interesting to me.

Ten years ago I think I compared myself to others a lot more, at least in a debilitating sense. So it might be something that calms down over time.

Also, there's one other trick that I've done in the past that has helped a lot. Sometimes we have those black cloud moments where it seems like things won't get better. Next time you're in a moment like that (or now, if it applies), promise yourself to take a mental snapshot of who you are right now. And promise yourself that if (when) you experience a moment of feeling better, you will remember that snapshot, and talk to that version of yourself, and reassure that version of you that things really did get better.

First time I managed to do that, I experienced that future black clouds were much, much easier to deal with - because I had proven to myself that they were just illusions.
Yes, if 1) VP9/Daala are significantly better, and 2) they don't come out much later than h265. VP8 failed on both accounts compared to h264. To see why, read: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 (not an unbiased source admittedly, but the technical analysis is accurate).
>> When deployed behind an enterprise firewall the powerful resource oriented architecture unlocks the new paradigm in enterprise data management, which is superior to traditional extract-transform-load (ETL) and data warehousing approaches.

Bingo, sir. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-02-22/
My favorite of the comparisons is this one:

https://soundcloud.com/alacrion/joco-v-glee

Jonathan Coulton in the left ear, Glee in the right ear.
"At the same time, once in a while, you have to stand for something in your life."

I agree with you there. A posting on a newsboard might not be the best way to show your principles, though.
Patent pending or not, there's clear evidence of prior art, and the patent will most likely be rejected. I can file a patent on about anything from the wheel on up, and for the period between filing and rejection, I can claim that the wheel is patent pending - it still doesn't give me much further protection.
Wait, now I'm confused. I thought data wanted to be free and copyright laws were archaic and meant to be broken? Someone set me straight, quick!
Ask HN: great resources about customer service
I am looking for advice on how to up my game in terms of customer service/support for a micro-startup. In other words, if it's advice for big companies with lots of resources, it may, or may not be relevant. I'm looking for books/sites/whatever on how to deliver the best possible support on a very tight budget, and how to "institutionalize" it in the sense of training people up in a system.
Why are authenticity tokens not tied to a specific form and the originating session? Is there a technical reason?
> Suggested retail $549.99

What does that even mean? Google doesn't sell the Nexus 4 for $550 or anything close to that.
Nations without borders.
United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
But 10 years is plenty time to bring the budget in line with GDP growth

You are out of your mind. Absolutely, 100 percent out of your mind.
I was most definitely not trying to say "psychiatry". Mental health counseling and cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown to be non-quack mechanisms that are practiced by non-MDs. These revolve around talking about and modifying one's thought process patterns, and do not involve prescribed medication, unlike psychiatry.
MIMO: a working group of French ministries to certify a LibreOffice release
The outcry here is less about whether copyrights are being respected, than about whether copyrights are being respected by people who insist that you must respect copyrights.
Yes, we guarantee funding for all patients on our site by leaving profiles posted until they are fully funded. Also, we give our partners permission to pre-treat a patient in the event they need immediate care, so long as we've already accepted the profile. We then reimburse the partner for the cost of treatment once the profile is fully funded. In the event we have more profiles than we can fund (never been the case so far) we will accept and post the lowest-cost, highest-impact profiles first. However, we can do a pretty good job of avoiding this situation by growing our partners (and thus our volume of potential patients) at a rate that corresponds with the speed at which donor demand is increasing.
As a non-violent person, I feel dismissed and alienated by violent engineers.
Aggression isn't sexism (while you could argue their first one was). I'd say both themes appeal to males more, but I don't view this as being nearly as uninviting.
Depends on who you ask, Hacker News isn't a hivemind.

If you were to ask Fox though, I'm sure they'd insisted that copyright laws are important and should never be violated.
Agree. However, I have doubts on Assange's credibility.
Although I am inclined to believe what Assange had said, Assange absconded bail which was posted by his friends and supporters.
I'd look for an old Macbook that you can actually upgrade (many you cannot). I'm still loving my 2008 Macbook 4.1. It's got a 2.4 Ghz processor, upgraded to SSD and 6GB of RAM and new battery (~4hrs runtime).

Check for refurbs and upgrade via Other World Computing. Not saying to go back as far as I am (for instance, my machine can't run Mountain Lion.)

I've run this computer hard - my first Mac after decades of PCs and I wouldn't go back. But do watch out for newer Mac models that can't be upgraded.
This one [1] is hard to believe as it's a low-exposure night shot. I was under the impression they lacked the technology to do that even in B/W back then, no?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/IHt7ypS.jpg
I freaking love OXO products. Why? When you browse the kitchen utensil aisle at target you have a choice:

Do you go for the cheap ass $1 dishbrush or do you splurge and get the awesome OXO brush? Time and again I think OXO does a great job at delivering a quality product that puts up to all the crappy abuse I dish out.

Most large corporations wouldn't even bother with an article like this. OXO is simply trying to stay true to their roots. I respect that.
If the entire cast and crew of Glee were pirating JoCo's tracks I doubt he would care, this is not that.
... I don't even... What?

How did you get that you need a tablet to use IE10? It's available in all Windows 8 installations, and there's a Tech Preview out for Windows 7 too.
So, clearly you're someone who doesn't use any hyperboles in his
day-to-day life ... Anyway, here's just a sample of the comments about Ortiz here on HN:

"Great to see Ortiz's office crash and burn"

"Carmen Ortiz needs to go. She's a publicity hound"

"Do not google "site:nl 2 girls 1 cup". Should you so google, do not click. You have been warned. But I should add, even if you so click, the result is less obscene than Carmen Ortiz!"

"This woman has ZERO principle or sense of morality"

"Someone needs to be held accountable. Ortiz is someone."

"Ortiz is obviously disgusting"

"It's unfortunate that by demonizing Ortiz, we play right into the hands of those who appointed her"

"I support the demonization of Ortiz purely on the level of revenge."
This article does raise interesting points, and Nate Silver does stretch the power of Bayesian statistics a little bit. However, the crux of his argument for Bayesian statistics is that it provides a process by which we can approach truth asymptotically.

The beautiful thing about bayesian probability is that the first experiments conditional probability is the next experiment's bayesian prior. We acknowledge the epistemological fact that our initial understanding of the world is flawed, and correct it from there.
So it's three years later and people are still getting back to this "Bla bla brogramming is bad"? I thought that cargo was long gone.

I just don't understand the point of this article. Brogramming was a fad, it made some people feel like part of a "crew", it upset way more and it was quickly buried away. So what's the point of bringing it back today only for the sake of the Klout team telling us it took them THREE YEARS to "move past brogramming"?
And yet those systems still have a point, one which is more important that protecting the innocent.
I'm 55 and currently barely scraping by on temp jobs and freelance gigs. As I look back at all the mistakes and missed opportunities, mainly caused by obvious glaring faults of my own, or in what in retrospect could be considered very dumb decisions, I certainly feel some regret. Lack of focus, maybe ADD long before people knew it existed, quitting great jobs to start a failed business or non-profit or to work overseas. Going to grad school, then skipping classes and homework to spend all night on personal projects that never really amounted to anything, getting mediocre grades, then eventually dropping out. Not able to make up my mind what I want to do for a living.

But then I see my loving wife of 30 years who has put up with me, two kids in college who call me up for advice (not necessarily taking it, but it's the thought that counts) and a high school kid who talks to me and laughs at my jokes, good health, a decent if small home, and many, many, many friends from all the places I lived, and not really even one real enemy.

Then I wonder. Would I have been as happy if I had gotten that fancy degree? Kept that job that would have had me away on 6 week business trips twice or three times a year? If I'd not followed my dreams, even though they didn't pan out?

When I die (and at 55 it starts looking a lot closer), although I never amounted to much, maybe I'll have friends and family saying goodbye as I slip away and it will seem more important at that moment than a big job and major accomplishment. At least I can feel that maybe the world is happier and nicer a little bit because I was here. I smiled at people and they smiled back and there were two more smiles added to the world happiness account. Maybe it turned out OK not focus on career and DOING BIG THINGS.

Maybe nothing has stuck for you so far, because you haven't found what would really make you happy. Please, keep looking. Be open. Cultivate positive relationships. Help other people who are suffering. Make the world cleaner, nicer, safer, brighter, more fun, even if just through a kind word to the person sitting next to you at Starbucks, or picking up a piece of litter and dropping it in a trash can.

And if you do want to turn things around, it's definitely not too late, if you want to try again. I've had at least two great chances since I was 40. The only reason I'm not doing them now is because I ended up moving on because they weren't really what I wanted. Maybe they'll be what you want.

Most of all, don't let the world's idea of what is worth doing define how you evaluate your life. They have no idea what constitutes true happiness for you. Only you can know that, and sometimes it takes a while to find out.
Awesome! Thank you. Please let us know if we can provide any info for the matching request: chase@watsi.org.
JoCo is an artist with massive geek cred (sells songs from his own site DRM free, tours with John Hodgman, sings about code monkeys and other geeky things).

Glee is part of News Corp.

:)

More seriously, JoCo is aware of the unfavorable legal situation given that his work was a cover. But the way he sees it, it'd be nice if he got something from Fox. Attribution, for example -- credit for his arrangement of the song. Glee/Fox was unwilling. I do not know why.
That's absurd. There's no way the melody would fall under the mechanical license for the lyrics. Why would it?

The lyrics and musical arrangement are clearly distinct entities.
> but I'm not sure of the proper way to describe the new arrangement of the song.

To me it doesn't seem like a new arrangement of the song because it sounds absolutely nothing like the original, he basically copied the lyrics only, even the cadence was different. If I write a melody to someone's spoken word poem, is that a new arrangement?
Oh, that's straightforward. In a truly mathematical context, modulo isn't really an operator per se.

You can say,

10 = 7 modulo 3

Which is kinda, "10 = 7, except someone may have added some number of threes to each" - so, "10 = 7, but for the threes"
Forget same ballpark, those are not even in the same fucking sport as lynching.

Being mad and wanting someone to be fired are not even reprehensible in the slightest. In any other profession if you fuck up, that's just what you would expect, but apparently some of you people think anyone working for the government is an untouchable perfect angel who must never be insulted nor fired.
I agree with you there :) To be fair though, after seeing 2 weeks of posts on HN focused on demonizing an individual, I felt I needed to say something.
> Efforts taken at this point to turn things around would be futile

That's the depression talking. Others have said this, but I'll pile on because it's true: talk to a therapist.

I know what you're thinking: no therapist can possibly help you. You're so much smarter than any therapist. You've thought this through, and you haven't been able to figure out the answer, so a therapist won't be able to either.

You're wrong. Here's why. You're a geek, so you're used to thinking about every challenge as a problem with (at least potentially) a solution. Depression isn't like that. It's not a problem with a solution, it's something that happens to you that you need to learn how to manage. You can't fix depression any more than you can fix getting sleepy or having to go to the bathroom. What you can do is learn how to deal with it. And a good therapist can help you with that. It's not an easy process, but it's well worth the effort. You'll still get depressed, but it will hurt less.
Modern farms are high tech operations run by highly knowledgeable experts. In fact, the line in the article "...while farming might seem like an odd place for tech investment.." is laughable. Many farmers in New Zealand, for example, have android tablets in their tractors feeding their GPS coordinates back to base, and giving them live information about rainfall for that paddock, etc. Every cow's hereditary is tracked, and individuals that produce interesting variants of milk are tested and studied.

So, the problem with the SaaS model is that selling to farmers is a lot like selling to a demanding enterprise customer. They know what they want, they have specific requirements and the benefits of a well-matched solution will pay for itself. That isn't, generally, where you want to be if you're looking to scale out a SaaS platform.

Be interesting to see how it goes.
Well it seems like the main concerns are the fact that nobody got JoCo's approval before moving forward and there does not seem to be any attribution.

I don't entirely agree with the outrage but the fact that this is done by Fox who are real jerks about their own copyright really sets off the hypocrisy alarm.