skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is the number one reason people don't win hackathons (even if they have an amazing creation) - they suck at explaining.

I was at one recently where a guy showed off what promised to be a very interesting way of analysing data. He spent his 5 minute demo slot talking about how he rewrote a webserver in "Go"...

I mean, ok, from a geek point of view it's kind of interesting that he wrote an amazing server but a) this wasn't a server hackathon and b) he couldn't explain his way out of a wet paper bag.

At the last hackathon I went to, one losing team spent their slot arguing about why they couldn't connect their Macbook to the 800*600 projector used for demoing.
Ok, we all experience technical difficulties, but this team had sat through 30 minutes of presentations and at no point thought "Hey, we'd better make sure we don't waste time like these other teams - let me quickly Google how to set my external screen resolution."

Honestly, the biggest thing standing between you and victory is (probably) your inability to succinctly explain your idea in such a way that you will captivate the judges.
You're reading a meaning that isn't there. The author is not expecting scientists (or farmers) to be indecent, he is merely expecting them to be equally decent as non scientists (or non farmers). He's not surprised specifically that there is a positive correlation, he's surprised that there is a correlation at all.
Do you honestly read that question as asking if you believe in science in the same way as, for example, you can believe in reincarnation or God? A sentence can have more than one reading and generally a good approach is to discern the meaning as intended by the author rather than picking one that doesn't make any sense. Obviously It's asking whether you believe in science as a fundamentally important part of modern society, whether you believe in the worth of the scientific method and rationalism etc.
This is awful. I don't know how it was published in the WSJ. I can't tell if it's satire or not... I'm actually angry at her entitlement here.
I don't think your explanation is quite right. The proper distinction to make is between "Garret Jones Workers" (named after the economist who has studied them) and "Productive Workers".

The "Productive workers" are those who generate profitable production with their time - a factory worker producing widgets, a doctor treating patients, etc. 1 hour = 1 surgery = $500 (or whatever). These workers are best viewed as a cost center - if hourly revenue - hourly cost > 0, they are worth hiring, otherwise they are not. They can be low or high skilled - doctors are a great example of a highly skilled productive worker. Software developers working at an agency would be another.

The "Garret Jones Workers" are those who generate organizational capital. As a result of their work, the revenue stream of their company will increase. Hiring them is an investment - you need to look at (NPV(future revenue generated by the organizational capital they produce) - NPV(cost)) to determine if they are profitable. Examples of this include software developers building a product or a doctor improving business practices at his hospital.
Its won thing two complain about distortion off reality but another two ask four a record of history that accurately represent's what actually happened.

How much did you have to resist correcting the grammar of that sentence? Are you nitpicking over grammar where it isn't actually important? Do you need to "distort reality" to be a good grammarian now?

What is embarrassing in our world is people shying away from the discussion of unintentionally sexist language. The words we use shape the thoughts we have. The thoughts we have influence the words we use. It's a reinforcement cycle.

Rather than "grandfathers" what about "forebears"? Since we're not talking about parental relationships any father/mother/parent talk is misleading.

Rachel has a valid criticism. Portraying that criticism as "distort[ing] reality in order to be a good feminist" is disingenuous.
Sorry, but this is awful advice, and sets up a beginner for failure. Don't buy a crappy low-end acoustic. If you don't have much money, get a cheap playable electric first. Cheap acoustics are the #1 reason people quit playing guitar.
Thanks for the high praise! I hope that by the end of the year I've got 100 templates up for an even wider diversity of document needs. Who needs Word anymore?
I've heard the same argument time and time again when I was still working for an ISP and involved in spam-fighting back in the 90's.

Reality is, you have to totally ignore complaint after complaint about spam coming from your network before you end up on any blacklist.

Most common form of negligence often came from some management decision to let role accounts like abuse@ get handled by non-technical communication or support people with zero authority to escalate the problem. If that still happens in 2013, fuck them.

Bottom line is that only willful negligence or deliberate support to spammers can get you blacklisted. If you are in no hurry to remove spammers, don't expect Spamhaus e.a. to be in any hurry to un-blacklist you.
Agreed. I found manual labor jobs in many ways to be more rewarding than software.

When you bake pies, at the end of the day you're tired, covered in flour, and your feet ache, but you can point to a rack full of cooling pies and say "I did that today. 600 people are going to enjoy delicious pie today because I put in the work" - more than I can say most days working on software for a living.
Does anyone know how to 3D-print protein structures?
Any evidence to back that up? I haven't observed this at all.
What surprises me is the difference in nature between brazilian cities and the others. I would like to see one of those pictures of Porto Alegre, where there's almost one tree per person.
I refer you to http://asmjs.org/faq.html to understand the difference. Particularly the Question:
"Why not NaCl or PNaCl instead? Are you just being stubborn about JavaScript?"
> Obviously it's asking whether you believe in science as a fundamentally important part of modern society

Well, the answer to that is indeed so obvious that if that's what the author was intending, I can hardly believe he's asking it.
++

I play SC2. I'm on an iPhone. Your site is broken for me, and made it do I didn't download the app.
This just seems to boil down to well-run meetings vs. poorly-run meetings. Standups are meant to be light-weight meetings where everyone gets back on the same page. If that's not happening, then someone isn't running the meeting correctly.
Pinterest and the Power of Social Bookmarking: Tag Yourself (Web Design is Dead)
Care to point out exactly where and how you think these post doctorate researchers have got correlation and causation confused? Because at the moment your comment is looking fairly absurd.
This is why I don't allow them on my teams. You have a block or issue and you're going to passively wait until the next morning or whenever the next meeting is? No. Deal with it when it comes up, don't lose half a day.
Depends on the book.
Academy for Software Engineering - NY Public Schools
When did I say Spamhaus should go away?

Anyway, you're missing my point: Why on earth do you have to blacklist the entire ISP to deal with one customer? Presumably if you are certain that one specific customer is to blame, and you're demanding that customer be disconnected, you know which IPs the customer is using and you can block them. Or you are otherwise able to identify the customer, say through headers - in which case, you should filter those headers. Blacklisting the ISP should only be necessary if the ISP is intentionally helping its customer obscure their identity and disguising spammy/malicious traffic as normal traffic.

There is no excuse for punishing innocent web users and businesses for the actions of third parties, or for holding those innocents hostage in order to force their ISP to do something you want. The fact that the ISP later complained to the authorities suggests to me that this is exactly what happened. Is it really impossible from a technical perspective to do anything other than blackhole the entire ISP? I'll admit I'm not an expert on IPv4, but that seems implausible to me.

The problem with these policies and principles you're defending is that they can be equally applied to innocents in order to do harm. I'm not claiming I have some perfect alternative; I am merely pointing out that Spamhaus' means don't seem legitimate, even if their ends are legitimate. And in this case, the legitimacy of the ends can come into question as well.

There's a gray area between obvious spam (penis pills, etc) and obvious solicited mail (personal mails between individuals) - Twitter sends me emails regularly containing tweets by people I follow, because I have an account, but I never solicited that email. Is it spam? What if there are other people who do want those emails, even if I don't? Is it really appropriate to blacklist Twitter?

The Twitter example isn't a fantasy, either; Gmail automatically started sending those things to my Spam folder without my intervention, and I've seen it do that to other content in the past. Would you be happy if Spamhaus added the IP ranges of businesses and ISPs you interact with to its blacklists? What if they blacklisted your home ISP?
I like the theme but indeed this article misses out on so many opportunities to make a good case. The innovators they are picturing are the "corporate innovators", which is different from the young kids disrupting markets altogether. The former are evolutionary, the latter really shine when they're revolutionary, which often needs a new company to take over instead of a big corp reiventing itself.

But both are great drivers of human progress. If we only developed by leaps and bounds, revolutions, we'd be hard pressed to avance at all. I like the concept of slow hunches. These are the ideas that you breed in your head over years, decades. They often need to meet other slow hunches other people have been breeding to really shine. This is a slow innovation that startup culture completely misses out on. It's the foundation of scientific research, but it's also very much directly (albeit slowly) applicable to business. I have a few slow hunches of my own, which have been evolving over the last 5 years (I'm 23). They have spawned little ideas and projects already, but the main branches keep pivoting and growing because they're far from concrete yet to be even market tested or MVP-built.

I feel my best innovation comes about from deliberate mixing of areas of knowledge. And it seems to me every week I have a new interest. I want to understand painting, poetry, design, writing, statistics, politics and a lot more. There's all this breadth I don't yet have, and I feel that's what makes good innovators, they're generalists, and criss-cross the DNA of different areas to create new mutations all the time. Most suck. In this sense, I'll be so much better at 50.

It's also why I don't see myself calling software development my career in 20 years. I feel like I want to build a career that ages well, and though surely I'll be a better developer at 40, many market dynamics will be playing against me in the field of tech. If it's even relevant anymore in 2030. Maybe robot code-monkeys will do, at least CRUD and interface design, much better.

I want to be a writer. I'm using article writing as a platform for all my expression and creativity. Want to understand something better? Write as best as I can about it, then edit, cut, edit. Like when it's said that you should always write all software as if it were open source (commenting, modularity, extensibility, docs), I write my thoughts as if they were published. I want to hone the craft, and eventually, as the decades pass, have a respected career for writing insightful articles where I wouldn't for writing old-man's code (Though I'm pretty sure I'll actually pay my bills with software still.)
I'm finding the (published and peer reviewed) "claims" of these post doctoral researchers somewhat more plausible than your comment on the internet I'm afraid, which I'm sorry to say is coming across as pretty weak.
To edit several files of one type in one call:

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
*_EDITMSG | *MERGE_MSG | *_TAGMSG)
/usr/local/bin/vim "$@" ;;
*.md | *.txt) /usr/local/bin/mmdc "$@" ;;
*) /usr/local/bin/subl -w "$@" ;;
esac
That was just the worst example. Most of the other examples ranged from more or less useless to actively harmful.

As I said, the problem is that the reasoning and goals become too easily separated from the activity. And then before you know it you've got cargo cult behavior on your hand.

Wouldn't you know it, the instances where standups were used effectively was when the team had a lot of experienced people who knew how to work well. A methodology that is only effective for people who already know how to work well is not a good methodology in my book.
Actually, work hasn't been like that at all throughout human history. Work as we know it comes with civilization. And civilization started 5000-8000 years ago. Homo sapiens have existed for 200,000 years.

Before civilization, it wasn't something to be completed that someone else was willing to pay for. You can't really think life as a hunter gatherer would be dull? And there was no boss.

Quote from wikipedia: Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures.
This is what I originally thought referly was offering. How many others thought this?
I can connect you to http://www.deskgen.com/ who might be able to help?
I think the idea that the "true innovators" are a bunch of kids with no experience is massively counter-productive. If you look at the real innovators in computing (not Zuck) over the last 50 years, you'll see that the ripest period seems to be 30-40. Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded what became Oracle. Bradeen was 39 and Brattain 45 when they invented the transistor. Bill Hewlett and David Packard were 26 and 27 when they founded HP, but the company achieved its real successes during the war when they were in their 30's.

The reason I say it's counter-productive is that it tends to upend a very fruitful social structure: younger people learning how to innovate under the direction older, experienced people. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie didn't invent Unix one day between their college classes. They joined Bell Labs after getting advanced degrees, worked on a system (Multics) implemented by older, more experienced people, and gained the expertise they needed to innovate. You can't really develop expertise as a young kid, and expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation.

And to tie in to the organizational management angle in the article: who would you rather have in your organization? John Carmack circa 1991 (when he founded id software), or John Carmack circa 2013?

If this seems counter-intuitive in the context of the current Silicon Valley youth worship, ask yourself: what are the young kids at Twitter, Facebook, etc, really building? The answer is: lifestyle and entertainment products. Without demeaning the value of those products, I'll say it's not a contentious assertion that young people have some significant insight into lifestyle and entertainment as an industry, but that doesn't mean they're particularly innovative.
Since when was that a defence?

You circumvented COMPUTER SECURITY on a GOVERNMENT WEBSITE. This is how the judge will see it.
> ... what's the difference if it's online?

The difference is that if it's not online, then it's purely interpersonal; a social, private, ephemeral (as in not recorded) sort of activity. But if it's online it's like publishing something in public; it's broadcast to a large number of strangers and it's recorded for a long time. Big difference, I would say.
" the decision, made quite early in its life, to prefer callback-based APIs to promise-based ones."

Rewind to the point when nodejs was being designed. In that world, in the context of javascript, callbacks were the only real pattern that existed. XHR? callback. Doing something in the future? callback.

If you imagine node trying to leverage the javascript ecosystem, callbacks were a no-brainer.
Two years ago I had to deal D&B's flagship product, which came packaged in a Java applet. I remember one day I upgraded to the latest version of Java(a security patch) and it broke their tool. After contacting them they said the only solution was to downgrade to the Java version with a known security hole...
Yes, let's note that this blogpost had the "humor" tag. While there's truth to it, he seems to poke fun at economists' pseudoscientific use of mathematical models.

That said, there's endless case studies throughout history where bosses bleed people down to minimum subsistance, and even below that. And their subordinates may fight back and win things like 40 hour workweeks. (Consider, what is a boss? An order-giver whose commands you obey the whole day. Some understandably call this wage slavery. The morality of bosses turns out to be pretty flexible, depending on how much of a fight they encounter.)

Of course, some privileged people do well despite being subordinates. In those cases, their managers use a lighter touch because they're trusted to act in their boss's interests, even when arguing against the boss in technical matters. (The main function of professional codes, explained in Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds". http://disciplinedminds.com)
No problem. I sent a tweet to @erichocean -- is that you? If you want, let's chat about algo options next week when everyone is back in town.
Looks like it keeps switching rules, but I've seen some rule 30 behavior in the animation. http://archetyp.al/other_pages/cae.js
Its obvious to me too, but I'm pretty sure there are some fairly deep layers of anti-science sentiment in some demographics. Also I think its possible to be extremely in favour of science and its mode of thought, and conversely perhaps more wary.
> Ok, I want to fund a project, not propose it. How do I do that?

I'm very interested in this, too. I've just begun using elance to find FreeBSD coders. I have a six-figure budget for various projects in the next three months. I would love to have some great projects coded and returned to the community, but finding vetted, high-quality FreeBSD coders hasn't been easy (on myself as an executive.) It would be most helpful if an organization, like the FreeBSD Foundation , were able to offer me an avenue to fund projects of interest to my organization (and the community.)
I'm just burnt out on that sound. To my ears they lack personality and expressiveness. They have a full sound, they're radio-friendly and they "play like an electric!" so I get why they're so popular and why so many new guitarists walk out of Guitar Center with one, but to me they're the Yellow Tail Shiraz of acoustic guitars.
Absolutely correct. It would defeat the purpose to only be able to view it after registering.
Actually, this is a very good question.

The vast majority of people have not done the experiments themselves. We actually do 'take it on faith' about a lot of things, like the earth is spherical, the earth travels around the sun, how gravity behaves etc. etc.

We also think people from former times were idiots for believing the Sun went around the Earth -- even though both would appear identical to casual observation.

We take it on faith from others in an appeal to authority. I, personally, have done very few basic experiments and my numbers differed wildly from the expected number (I suck at experiments).

Science, natural philosophy, has completely divorced itself from the whole of philosophy and any other kind of thinking.

Science is able to describe my friend's physical attributes in some detail, but science can not describe our friendship -- the faith and trust that goes into it doesn't fall within the purview of science, but it's nevertheless a reality that we all deal with.

Equations are simply abstractions to model the real, physical world. When our mental shorthand substitutes those models for the real thing in our thinking we get into problems.
You're forgetting the job vacancies that are filled when the married women leave the workforce.
Sounds really cool!

We usually just use PyMOL [1] in our lab, but it looks like BioBlender takes PyMOL, Blender, and a few other structural biology and builds on top of both of them.

It looks like the biggest contribution from BioBlender is that it takes properties such as electrostatic potential and combines it with Blender's physics engine to better simulate movement when creating molecular animations. Most of our work usually involves just examining the 3D structure of a protein, so I don't usually create animations, but this is definitely a really useful tool to do so if any lab might ever need to do something like that.

We really do need more people dedicated to just purely better visualization software in the biological community. A lot of interesting hypotheses often start from just rotating around 3D structures, and making it easier to do so can only help.

[1]: http://pymol.org/
Easy enough to say, not always easy in practice. If "the boss" has political sway then it's never going to happen. I worked in an environment that considers itself "very agile", because it "does standups". Any suggestion that it's being done wrong makes you look confrontational.

I was there because the money was good. Motivationally it was about as effective as being micro-managed on a waterfall project.
I hate it when I google how to recover some password only to find hints on how to reset it.

Yes I know that not all passwords can be recovered because of hashing etc, but please don't talk about recovering when all this really does is reset the password.
Im actually going to compete this year. Usually I sign up, get busy, then ignore the challenge, however I want to see how I match up with the rest of the world when it comes to solving hard problems in a set amount of time using good data structures. Its also always good to stay sharp so that you can do well in interviews when you need to (never know!).
No, everyone "without an idea" had plenty of ideas, just hadn't yet settled on one.
I see it as a sexist comment if you're incredibly sensitive to any claim that men or women might have trivial motivations. It's unfortunate, but stereotypes don't just come into existence with precedent.
Careful! There are legitimate toolbars that will helpfully prefill forms, sometimes even hidden fields. I've been bitten by this in production.
"expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation". May Be. But many a times, being naive (and inexperienced) may make one to see and think differently.
[Show HN] Get Similar Music- LastFM & YT API Mashup
I have been wanting to get into bioinformatics, but there's something I miss coming from webdev: the ability to create something over a few weeks. I don't mean I want to discover something new, and I'm not sure I'd want to get into research at all. I wanted to be able to experiment and see stuff show up on a screen related to the structures and formulas I'm learning. Some fun and practical, even if not very useful (games?), project I can tackle while learning bioinformatics. Is there such a thing?
When I worked at 1600 Plymouth and Google was looking for more space I was surprised they weren't building on the empty lot across the street. Then I walked over there between a gap in the fence and walked around. About ever 15 - 20 yards was a test well. Looking at the superfund data it was in the process of being 'remediated' which was a program where steam gets pumped into the ground to migrate chemicals out.

Part of the legacy of the 'silicon' part of silicon valley.
They could do it themselves but it's more valuable for them to pay you (or someone who already knows how) to do it than it is to learn & do it themselves.

It's that gap - that allows value to be extracted from the job.
Accelerator Model with the greatest probability of success?
Remember when HN was for people who didn't correlate having a good job with being a good person?