skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can only speak to electrical engineering and computer science since that's my field. I've been in the working world for 7 years, and here's what I've found...

First of all, I don't know any good engineers who are unemployed, regardless of their level of EE/CS degree. If you have an EE/CS degree, and you're having trouble securing a paycheck, this might not be the field for you. Sorry.

That said, if "getting a job" is your goal, a BS is all you need. A 5-year BS/MS program is a great deal if your school offers it. Otherwise, I'd look for a job with tuition benefits. I was able to get a Master's part-time at night, and it was completely paid for by my first employer. In my experience, an MS is definitely worth getting, as it will give you a slight salary increase, possibly a better job title, and is probably just expected at good companies.

A PhD in engineering is for teaching or being a research engineer (i.e. at a government/corporate lab or a university). I honestly believe you should only get an engineering PhD if you think (1) you're really smart, and (2) you can study at a top-tier university. If you're not an elite engineer, I don't see the point of a PhD. Work experience will look better on a resume than a thesis with an advisor no one's heard of. And a research job won't pay more, but it will require a bigger brain.
Yeah, there is the risk that the bidder is just messing around with me, so the deposit might be a good idea. Thanks for the tips about spreading the news, that will definitely help.
Link: http://sedo.com/auction/detail/iblab.com/142078_us__
Yeah yeah. Tired old argument rears its head.

It's a refreshing combination of hardware and software I'm keen to try out. It merges features of say Steam combined with a dedicated gaming machine. Some people don't want to screw around with buying individual hardware, and at the end of the day just want to switch on a machine and pick up where they left.
Yes and no.

Yes, you're correct. No, she's not interested. :P
I think your point is misdirected. It is virtuous to spend time with kids and save money as well. Your hippy friend may enjoy financial aid (not to mention social welfare) that the taxpaying middle class do not qualify for.
>It's a counter example in the context of a discussion about alternative ways to enforce (or not) rules, but not in a discussion about the complexity of the rules themselves.

I guess I'm trying to distinguish between rules (that are enforced) and standards or principles that are adhered to voluntarily, with the point being that you can in many cases reduce complexity in the rules by moving it somewhere else that doesn't require coercion to operate.

>As for enforcement, I agree it's interesting to look at examples of cooperative processes, but a relevant distinction is that breaking rules on the internet don't usually have consequences to other people.

I would think they generally would: If someone doesn't follow the standard then compatibility is impaired and the users of that software won't be able to interact fully or at all with users of software that does comply with the standard. That certainly negatively impacts them if they desire that compatibility, we just haven't chosen to make that negative impact illegal/punishable in most cases.

>When they do, we do get calls to "enforce" the rules, e.g. in the context of net neutrality.

Network neutrality is probably a bad example of "internet" regulation because despite the name it's really telecommunications regulation, which is a very different animal. The need for network neutrality comes from the existence of other telecommunications regulations: If (hypothetically) Uncle Sam didn't exclusively license the wireless spectrum or provide only select companies with massive subsidies and access to eminent domain to lay cable then there would be no call for network neutrality, but once the government steps in to establish a monopoly or cartel it then has to limit its power.

I would think the better example of your point would be Microsoft being hit with antitrust for breaking compatibility with Java in breach of the license.
Strawberries suffered the same sad fate.

I'm amazed at how huge, juicy, wonderful smelling, and almost completely flavorless strawberries have gotten over the decades.
I still buy them a couple times a year, and am always disappointed.
Who cares about the past? It's not like I'm going to go download an old version of SVN. That's why I disregarded that part.
A lot of the people with cars in Vatican City also want to drive in Rome. I suspect most would not like golf carts for that purpose, compared to a car.
Thanks for mentioning Lilly. His book on his studies of dolphins* was a good read when I picked it up a decade or so ago. The comparison of brain- to body-mass across humans, elephants, and dolphins was compelling, alone.

* http://www.amazon.com/Communication-Between-Dolphin-John-Lil...
The social gifting bit is nice, to save the hassle of accumulating attacks of $50 securities that cost more to track and redeem than they are worth.
Brewing logbook
Many of them aren't tightly coupled. In fact, I'd say rails is better on this front than anything comparable. Is it easier to use Mongo with Rails or Django? What about couchbase? Rails makes it very easy to make an ORM work well with rails and to replace ActiveRecord with it.

Better yet, what framework do you believe offers all of these things and does a significantly better job at decoupling than rails?
I've heard a lot of people say the Codeacademy lesson quality just isn't that good yet, so teaching people to use an API that will shoot them in the foot isn't going to help. And honestly, if they want to teach Twitter, they should just teach asking the user for a username and password and pretending to be a web browser, because that's the best practice for using it nowadays. Saw foursquare doing that the other day.
Anyone want to purchase blackhatsystems.com? I bought it for a project that never panned out. Email is in my profile.
I don't understand what you are saying. According to Apple's 2012 10K filing, both the iPhone and iPad lines independently, each year, net more than Sony's entire market cap.

How can there be any question of mobile game hardware surpassing hardcore gaming in profitability in the next console generation when it has already occurred?

If you're Activision or Blizzard, sure, the money is still in selling $60 titles. But in terms of hardware manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft, the ship has sailed.
There is much that I disagree with in this comment. And that's ok! Disagreement about this sort of thing is good! It's how we can have real discussions about what works and what doesn't about the cultures we create. I'm going to attempt to respond in depth in a followup comment but I wanted to go ahead and start by saying this this comment is FAR FAR better than your first because it actually addresses the issues that Shanley brought up.

In your original comment you ascribed motivations that are simply not true. Rather than discussing the merits of her essay you simply assumed that she didn't get a job so her thoughts could be dismissed without serious engagement. This was pretty patronizing. But anyways thanks for following up with a much more substantive explanation of your thoughts. I will attempt to do the same.
Tasty bananas are to be had, you just have to look for them outside your typical grocery store. Many Mexican carnicerías carry a smaller species of banana that's more prevalent in Central America, and it's much tastier than the banana you're likely familiar with.
Google? Targeting interests is a solved problem.
Interesting, since some signal boosters are pretty much carrier agnostic, boosting any of the various 3G bands, I wonder how that plays out. Can Boost Mobile give permission even though the booster also boosts signals in the AT&T bands?

And why do the carriers even care if the signal is getting better for their customers? We already have interference requirements that cover problems with interference. Sigh.
I'd love to see a third party service that would deal with having your wallet (or card info) stolen - it would automatically cancel all your cards, sort out billing issues in the meantime, replace all your other cards, etc. Idea for a startup?
If they were an independent company and didn't have any revenue history to go by I think they would be worth more. Part of the Pinterest valuation would be speculating on how much they could generate through various forms of advertising.
I'm like this too. It's awe-some power, but the downside is that serializing my ideas into language is, in the words of Bjork, "like trying to put an ocean through a straw." It's extreme enough in my case that I often sound completely retarded when speaking. Don't get me started about my many adventures in interview land. -.-

Feynman on the distinct modes of thinking that people possess:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y
Chrome app launcher developer preview
The cost of healthcare doesn't have much to do with nurses, it is drugs and machines and surgeons.
Go hang around sea lions next time. Their social structure is a lot of fun to watch and they really look like water-oriented dogs.
College is not the only source of pre-determined differentiation.

The fact that you went to Hacker School is also indicative of superior financial position and accreditation. Hacker School is a very well known and respected program that is (anecdotally) incredibly hard to get into. Moreover, since it is in NYC and is effectively equivalent to a full-time job, doing it necessitates a large amount of savings or a really generous network.

Hacker School is about as close as a training program can get to emulating the inhibiting factors of "top colleges."
I don't want to veer into minutiae, but I think you underestimate how much someone can save in the amount of time it takes to get a PhD. Say, 5 years on the PhD, at $50k savings/year, gets you to $250k by itself. Add in investment earnings from that, and you top $300k. ($400k was a bit optimistic.)

But that's aside from the actual point. It's not even about what the Googler does after they've done 5 years. That kind of money is enough to do whatever the hell you want to kind of money. You want to read papers all day? You can do it full time and pay yourself a graduate student's stipend for life, without having to worry about pleasing the dictates of your advisor, academic fads, TAing, and internal politics. Even the lucky students who become professors still have to apply for funding and teach students, on top of producing popular research to get tenure: with route 2), you never have to apply for funding, and you can choose how much time you want to devote to teaching and what kind of teaching you want to do.

It's fair to quibble with the actual numbers, but the point is that money buys you a hell of a lot. The fact that someone might not save, or pathologically continue slaving away at the corporate behemoth they hate once they've saved enough, doesn't change that possibility.
Complicated business logic, validation outside of a single object, workflows...
I'm pretty sure that not understanding plants is not a problem that industrial agriculture has.
According to the author's update, it will cover core.logic - http://blog.fogus.me/2013/02/08/moar-joy/
Ask HN: Are there any decent-paying jobs in robotics?
Hi all!

(Using a throwaway account here) I am a software engineer, working in a factory. My job is to write software that control the assembly-line tooling robots.

The problem is that, I am horribly underpaid. I make about $15,000, which is low even by our third-world standard. I have had a lot of trouble finding jobs here as well.

My question is: are there any good, well-paid jobs in the robotics market out there, or should I consider transitioning to another field, like web development?
They have said that during the time they are being offered the most money by the best search engine. That's easy. But Google keeps paying more which means Mozilla is after the highest bidder.
The poker example is a great one. Years ago when I first started to learn to play a friend of mine told a similar story more succinctly.

When you sit down at a table if you can't pick out the sucker, it's you.

Pick your table, pick your game, do whatever you have to to slant the odds in your favor. If you're the sucker get up and move. Don't let your pride get in the way. Back when I started playing poker I could sit at tables in LV and do pretty well. As poker became popular LV became a much harder place to play. The quality (and recklessness of the player went up), so I quit playing.

The last time I played was on a business trip in Phoenix. After a couple of hands a woman already at the table and I realized we were the top ones at the table and just stayed out of each others way while drunk businessmen and golfers emptied their wallets :)
A recent quick-look intensity image is here:

http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/latest/HMI_latest_I...

The sunspot group referred to in the article is near the right-hand edge in this 4Kx4K pixel image.

If you zoom to the full-resolution of the image, you can see curved features in the space between the two large sunspots that trace some of the magnetic fields referred to in the article. When these field lines become tangled, they store energy, which can be released suddenly if the field is reconfigured.

Our planet would fit easily inside either of these two sunspots.
Ok so before the development, there is obviously the idea. Ideas aren't normally just thought of out of nowhere...they usually come in the form of a solution to an existing problem. So there you have some thinking behind what a possible solution is (pre development). This person (x) then must think about what the best way to go about the solution is--is it mainly going to be done through a mobile application, website, or product? From there, x must do his/her due diligence is determining whether or not the idea has been done before and the general feasibility behind the idea. FINALLY s/he approaches a developer (y) about creating an MVP. Person y doesn't just blindly do the MVP--x must sell y on the idea and the way they will execute it. This is all pre-development.

Now let's assume y agrees. While y is building the MVP, x has to be making initial plans as to what to do with this MVP-- apply to an accelerator, go straight to investors, go to potential customers/clients to try and gain initial business, etc. Whether it is in the form of an application or a pitch, there is a lot of work and strategic thinking that has to go into these crucial initial stages. Work is being done on both ends at all times, or at least this must be the case if any combination of founders want to succeed.

X forms the business strategy, Y develops. If both do their due diligence, there is a great foundation there that is built for success.
As someone attempting to get into systems programming - thank you! Very insightful article - maybe it would deserve a punchier headline though.
That's not for voice recognition, it's to replace the headphone SPEAKERS because it's so windy on the bridge. The thing sits on the bone just in front of your ear. It's a really funny sensation but works well.

But I assume the same system would work in reverse.
I think you pasted the wrong thing! Here's GoPago: http://www.gopago.com/
There is "unlimited" and there is "reasonable and customary so let's not waste energy metering it".
Why WordPress.com for education is a big fat fail
"Unconscionable" contracts are legally void, so to some extent, yes.
I don't think the physical headphone port would be the concern - it'd be the battery usage, wireless performance, size/weight constraints, all the additional electronics, extra testing, and games having to support multiplayer sound, etc.
I'd say most people who would be in a position to work at stripe (eg. ~5% of the programming population in the bay) are probably already in enough demand such that they aren't compelled to work for drastically reduced or nonexistent wages.
Ah but you see - there's too much competition for short, sharp comments!

I try and own the high value long comments. Although I relapse ever so often and move back towards the short/sharp side - winning a high volume competition is very alluring.

It's probably why reddit/stackoverflow/wikipedia/HN exist.
I'm working on something more similar to the Backblaze Storage Pod (in fact, originally based from their 2.0 design) for my employer. We played around with the hardware from their set up and decided to go a different route. It looks like we'll be getting 48 drives in 4U, but I'm sure we'll have some teething issues as we start to get our first few boxes up & running. 72 drives in 4U sounds like a lot of fun- I'm guessing SuperMicro SAS backplanes. Is there room in the box to make it self-sufficient or is it JBOD?
Nate Silver has a similar point[1], and claims that he has been successful by choosing fields that were not already saturated with excellent players. Baseball prediction was waiting to be cracked wide open with modern statistical techniques. It would now be much, much harder to make meaningful gains, you'd be competing with a host of competent firms who have years of experience and have long since claimed all the low-hanging fruit. The competition in online and even professional poker matches used to be much looser, until enough people started getting serious about it that the field narrowed to exclude merely above-average players.

To the OPs point, If you want to compete in a well-established academic field, you have to be really freaking good. Want to be an experimental physicist? You see the competition out there: they write books and appear on TV shows, or at least have tenure and get grant money. Are you really one of those guys or gals? On the other hand, there's interesting stuff out there that is just waiting for someone with a modicum of intellect and desire to revolutionize it. The challenge lies in finding (or creating) such a field and exploiting it at the right time. I think this can be done in academia or in business alike, business is just much more flexible and forgiving of mistakes.

[1] "The Signal and the Noise"
That's optimizing for mutual benefit. not the same as stuffing.
Apple's presumed console competitor hasn't even been released so it's premature to say what games won't play on it. They already pay game developers more than Microsoft and Sony combined.

My argument is not that people don't want to play CoD. My argument is that even Activision wants Apple and come in and kill the current console paradigm. They don't want to keep making 30% of $60 games that sell 10 million copies when they could be making 70% of a $10 game that moves 50 million copies.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the Socket.IO 1.0 release brings, if it ever actually arrives...
Definitely check out "dry farmed" tomatoes if you can find them when the season rolls around. They are grown with less water, and tend to be smaller with a more intense flavor.
More like 4MB for $20. I have some in my desk.
What I find funny is that everyone wants to be different but we are all different and thats what makes us the same. Also shut-ins are ironic in that they will never meet each other, therefore missing the people that they might possibly get along with best.
You're forgetting that you get a lot more out of the same horsepower on a console than you do out of a PC. You're not running a full blown OS that requires a few gigs of ram and a bunch of hardware cycles, nor are you writing to a really high level API. Game makers are writing to one set of hardware that they can really optimize for. A Steambox would not significantly higher hardware to achieve the same level of graphical performance.

This is why consoles are still producing pretty good looking games with 512 MBs of ram.
Did anyone else's pulse race when they saw the phrase "encodes other information"?
Unless the idea is novel and non-obvious and sufficiently detailed for a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use it; or you have signed some sort of agreement. You can do what you want.
it's frustrating to see your new contribution made when your buddy is working for Google and writing software that millions of people use every day—and getting paid well for it.

I don't think the average grad-student could work at Google instead. My personal experience is that Google keeps having its recruiters call me periodically, and then rejecting me for even internships after interviewing.

I don't even get the questions wrong anymore, so I feel like I just somehow suck, despite being a CS grad-student at a well-regarded institution.
Part of the problem is that the tomato growers have been very successful in protecting their racket. When someone tries to sell a better-tasting tomato, the Florida Tomato Committee keeps it off the market.
A factoid about brains: we can attach a given type of input (say, visual input) to any one of a variety of brain regions X Y Z, and each such region is capable of learning that type of input. But these regions are unlikely to all be similar.

So even though, for example, we all seem to understand English, it's quite likely that different peoples' understanding of the various aspects of the language can arise through architecturally distinct brain regions. As you say, there is a veneer of similarity that hides how differently different people actually experience the world.
And yet their tomatoes taste like shit. I disagree.
They have to wait for the trees to mature.

(which I realize is obvious, but if you have to wait 10 years or whatever, you can't exactly just switch back)
They just target a market you are not part of.
Ah, right, because doing anything financially sub-optimal is delaying adulthood.
This comes up pretty much every time pg posts an essay. Just click the footnote link, read it, then hit back.

Alternatively, people could provide a link back to the place in the essay and use the :target CSS selector to highlight the footnote link to make finding their place easier.
The same crap gets blasted around internally by the disconnected execs, "magical" systems, etc.
Their official mission statement:

> Our mission is to end loneliness.

This is oft reported elsewhere in describing Grouper: https://www.google.com/search?q=grouper+mission+end+loneline...

It made me think it was just a site for meeting people, not necessarily dating. But it is exactly that: a group dating site. I was confused by its non-datey name, and their "sex in the bathroom" article which seemed incongruous with ending loneliness. You can fuck strangers while being utterly alone, and I think most people experienced with healthy relationships would agree that dating/sleeping around out of loneliness is an unhealthy way of getting out of it.
Do like writing grant proposals? Because in the biological sciences that is what you will be doing, and you will be competing against other smart folks which results in a 6% chance of a successful proposal. Then you can do some research while drafting journal articles, teaching undergraduates, and working for tenure by serving on a bunch of committees.

In short, there is very little research in the above Ph.D. in academia career.
FYI, you have a typo on one page. If you go here: https://www.trustegg.com/Learn_more_about_TrustEgg_child_tru... and then choose "Earn market rate of return", you say at one point "marketing rate of return". I assume you meant "market rate of return"
Tons of people like to play with stocks. The educated elite buy mutual funds.
The Truth about a Failing Startup
The internet has really been on a downhill course since September, 1993, with all the newbs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
"Most forums degrade over time, but we don't think that's inevitable. We're determined to keep this site good, because we use it ourselves."

http://www.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

Keep up the good work.
Wow, this makes me actually reconsider this. Perhaps Google might find a way around this?
Why Arabs Lose Wars
So now it's a problem that a product behaves in exactly the way it's described?