skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"usually employers look for someone that codes like a robot"

Wrong. Usually employers look for someone to get the frickin job done without rethinking the problem. Classic example right now: I have PhD in Strategic Planning telling me to make the algorithm calculate the Economic Order Quantity when creating the Purchase Order. The Buyer immediately gave me 4 reasons why that will never work in the real world: the vendor will have to interrupt set-ups for plan changes, the bank will never approve that line of credit, the rev level may change before the end of the run, and oh, by the way, that many won't fit on the truck.

"...trying to get a plain ol’ developer position..."

You have an attitude problem. There's nothing "plain ol'" about what we do every day. While you were busy in your ivory tower for 8 years, someone had to keep the world moving.

"companies want the 20 year-olds to code quick and turn out an app with a 6-month lifetime"

On what planet? You were obviously too busy in college to actually find out what really goes on in the real world.

"6-8 years in graduate school under constant stress torn your ego into to pieces"

Poor baby. Get a job. Feed, clothe, and shelter a family. Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you. For those of us who have been doing this for years, earning a PhD sounds like a vacation.
This has been submitted a bunch of times. Every time I read this article, I think it has more to do with how a UC Davis degree is perceived in the job market compared to other computer science degrees than it has to do with the overall job market for computer science graduates.
Thanks for the reply and the explanation.

As far as I can see, that makes the Android about as open as Windows Mobile (with the exception of building it) and really nothing to get overly excited about.

But really, I'm the kind of guy who runs stock, distro-supplied, Linux kernels and don't mind hacking around in user-space only.
I only read the chapter about percentages of hires, which didn't seem very convincing to me. So firms only hire 2% of applicants, not a very meaningful number without further information. Maybe the rejects apply to all the firms with a robot script, which would inflate the supposed pool of available applicants.
You're right, it was probably unnecessary.

It's a pity though, cause the metaphorical meaning of living "room" is precisely what I meant.
Totally agree with you.

I for one don't want my browser knowing "who I am" - I prefer to let the applications I use know that.
Cucumber is one hot technology
Off topic question:

Can somebody explain to me whether there is a semantic difference between "..." and ".." above? I find this a baffling construction, moreso because both happen within the span of two words, but at the same time it seems unimaginable that it is an unintentional omission, because the cognitive load of typing out "..." is a one-time retrieval + motor command and should be automatized.

On the other hand, if the omission is a mistake then it means that it isn't automatized and there should be a reason for that as well. It is also possible that it is actually a formal punctuation mark in another language, which leads to comparable and competing access times with "...", in which case I have no knowledge.

If the ".." has indeed acquired actual, independent semantic significance it must be recent and I cannot find it; what would it be?
Even though you are screaming at your prospective employer, saying “yes I’ve done all the crazy stuff during the PhD, but now just want a job to code to feed my family”, they may not hire you not so much of over-qualification, but rather over-thinking.

Case in point, if you want a lower level position, remove the PhD from your resume. Stop over-thinking the problem. It's a perfectly valid solution to say you have a masters or bachelors instead so you can feed your family. Employers are perfectly valid in excluding PhDs if they are concerned about over qualifications costing more or leading to boredom.
1 million lines of code written and deployed into production.

I'll match that against anyone's degrees (including my own).
Ironically The Netherlands was meant to be the model for the USA, with all power local to the states and a stadhouder in Washington to manage things. Somehow the English model of land holding lords and a king in his white castle won out.
To think that the social welfare state is a natural outgrowth of churches setting up schools and hospitals is completely ridiculous. The two things couldn't be more opposite. Social welfare emerges as a result of the collapse of Christianity in a society. The Dutch will talk about how they don't think anyone should be without health care, but if they saw someone in need they wouldn't help them. I don't know which comes first, but people who believe in social welfare seem to believe they have no personal responsibility to help those in need. Look at the average giving of the Dutch or someone like Joe Biden who while talking constantly about compassion gave an average of $369 per year for the last decade. Social welfare leads to an almost complete lack of the personal compassion that is at the heart of Christianity.
BMW Roadster Z4 Sports Car Might Come to India
There are three of us working at the startup I work at, and we've all got PhDs; chemistry, chemical physics and computational mineralogy respectively.

What we're doing has very little to do with any of the science we perpetrated, though!
Clever, clever logo :)
Yeah, I don't have a college degree.
So the summary is that he got hacked because he reused an insecure password for his administrator account on SO. The guy who logged into his account seems to have broken ethical and legal obligations to the original website that he got the password from.
... great to see you excluding people WITH college degrees.
I'm in HS, so I had to vote for elementary.
Why The Boston Globe may be shutting down
If you're a person who doesn't need a university program, then you're a person who can get an incredible amount of value out of one as well. No school gives you anything, but you can take a hell of a lot out of a halfway decent program.
Ah, old memories... I remember reading this years ago. And recently while naming my blog too as 'The Tao of Programming' by myself, I thought it sounded vaguely familiar (but oddly, didn't think of Googling for it).

But reading this now, I realize this is more like a set of Zen koans than like Tao Te Ching itself. A little 'poetry' here and there like Tao Te Ching, but most parts are obviously inspired from koans.
>You will sometimes be bored, demotivated, or lonely. This is the normal human condition.

Having just moved to a new city myself, I can fully relate to this. The parent poster very concisely states the best way to go about it. Just live. Get out and do things. Life will happen.

I started doing tango classes on a whim and it has been very fun. I go to Borders and chat with people. I walk to the store. These are simple actions but I feel great doing them.
I use this feed: http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi which gets me full text of the article with links to the HN comments. Of course, I found it originally in the standard HN RSS feed.
What will we buy tomorrow?
Did bachelors at sydney uni and masters at the university of NSW. If i have a chance in future i would love to go to school in america. Have plans to do so if all goes well.
Why do central banks hold so much of it, then?
If you do hash+salt client side, then the final hash is your password essentially, which will be sent in the clear. Anyone sniff the already hashed password to login to your HN account without knowing your actual password.

What you didn't say but might have implied is:
If you have the server challenge the client with a different salt each time it would fix the problem.

Of course SSL also tells you the you are talking to the real server, challenge response doesn't really help that, nor does it stop some stealing your session id and posting as you.
It's best you learn either doing front end code and have friend do back end or vice versa!

No doubt will be a struggle find random developers to join you for your idea, unless you are already friends! If you got money you can always pay!
Doctorate is not PhD, MD, or JD. please correct your poll
Palm Pre aiming to be THE Facebook phone - social nets still mobile’s killer app
What is your basis for saying this?

There are a lot of arguments, citing a lot of studies, in this document. If nothing else, he has thought about this issue pretty thoroughly. If you disagree, something more than a snide remark about the quality of a UC Davis degree would be more convincing.
"but if they saw someone in need they wouldn't help them" -- this applies to Christians and non-Christians alike. Similarly, a Christian or non-Christian could easily help such a person as well.

Given the overall message of Christianity (read: Christ) then, by your definition, there should be no want or suffering in the world, but yet there is. You are free to believe what you want about the Dutch, but at the very least, you have to admit that they have created a society that attempt to provide some basic standard of health and social well-being to its citizens. Not the same can always be said for other "compassionate" Christian societies.
OK, to be more accurate, two minute skim to remind me of the salient points of something I've probably read 15 or 20 times.
The guy is all for harder sentences, more jail time, etc.
Criticizing judges on these matters is like telling experienced programmers they don't code well. They know what works and what doesn't. The numbers about rape and manslaughter are all out of context, we know nothing of the circumstances. And lastly, since when was putting people in jail longer an effective policy against crime?

Anyway, what I think the most important issue is that the people in positions of power (1) actually try to do the right thing and (2) that their views on what is right are not too skewed. Both of which are generally true in the Netherlands I believe.

Lastly, on conformity as mentioned in the original article: I would not even know what is meant with conformity. True, you will have to conform to store closing-times which is a silly rule that needs to be changed. But there are hardly any social norms, you may be openly gay, atheist or deeply religious and wear whatever you want. Just don't expect to be viewed as sympathetic when you dress ostentatiously (where would you be?).

'lack of inidividual initiative': Why should people be individually be burdened with taking care of social problems, when we have a government in place just for that task?
I finished high school, spent 1 year full time at university, then 5 years very part time whilst I started a business. It's 18 years since I started that business and I still don't have a Bachelors degree, but it would be wrong to conclude that just because I never completed it I didn't get anything from it. Similarly I recently met someone who nearly finished their PHD, but has abandoned that to start a business. I am sure she got a lot out of the work she did towards that PHD even if she didn't finish it.
In other words, the attack was nothing new or special: if you use the same password in many places, they're all in the same "pool". If one is compromised, they're all compromised. It's ironic (and stupid) that Jeff Attwood's OpenID — which is supposed to obsolete passwords — was compromised like this.

The lesson's simple: before you re-use a password think about what's in it's pool, and for fuck's sake use a unique password for OpenID and your password manager.
One thing I realized was that the PhD isn't what makes you the patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night. It is the brilliant theorist that makes you the PhD and the patent clerk by day.

This is true, at least in Einstein's case. Or, s/patent clerk/surfer/g, s/Einstein/Garrett Lisi/g But the romanticism has gone out of proportion.
The question is pretty clear, and the 'high school' result should show those that are currently IN college/university.
The single most important element of this package is the cabal-install tool. "cabal install HDBC" or "cabal install hsql" etc. will download, compile and install any library on hackage. Previously you had to 'bootstrap' cabal-install yourself, which wasn't a big deal for experienced users but was an annoyingly significant barrier for newcomers.
there's little that college gives you as a developer

I hear this fallacy a lot.

A lot of people seem to give it a pass and nod along with it, maybe because it makes them feel better or maybe because it seems like the politically correct thing to say in a room full of talented hackers, only some of whom went to college.

While you in no way need to go to college to be a developer, I think people should be highly skeptical of this claim.

Look at the claim this way. Given two people with equal skill and ambition:

* the first one spent four years learning computer science and software engineering in school while hacking

* the second one spent four years hacking

The claim is that those people more or less have the same skill set.

It just seems unlikely that there's "very little" that the computer science program gave to the developer. It certainly doesn't match what I've actually seen in-field.

Of course, I'm biased: I went to school for computer science. Does anyone actually have evidence to support the other side of the argument?
I read it as a trailing thought. Keyboards don't give us much expressiveness, but we make do. :P
Other: School of hard knocks.
Android is certainly more open than Windows Mobile. Do you have have access to source code for Windows? Is Windows source code licensed under a copyleft license, allowing anyone the freedom to modify and redistribute Windows as they please?

In this case, really the only thing "preventing" Android from being truly open and free/libre is the mobile carriers and their handset manufacturers. It's just a matter of an open operating system being distributed on closed devices, a la TiVo. The fact that I can build and install Android on my Openmoko FreeRunner, but not on my T-Mobile G1, proves that fact.
Unless you'd rather be in the working world than talking homework with a bunch of rich, naive kids.
Here is a list curated by David Nunez of Dorkbot Boston.

Upcoming Events:

* [04/24-05/10] Boston Cyberarts Festival
bostoncyberarts.org

* [05/06 7PM] UX Book Club: Boston, MA
Betahouse - 13 Magazine St, Cambridge, MA - 02139

* [05/07-05/08] Independent Game Conference East Boston ($)
http://www.igceast.com/

* [05/08 5PM] StoryBorders project launch
Cloud Place: 647 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02116
www.storyborders.org

* [05/09 8PM] Ensemble Robot Performance ($)
Axiom - 141 green street, boston
http://www.axiomart.org/

* [05/10 930AM] Art Salon Boston
93 forest hills st #3, jamaica plain, ma 02130
www.donnadodsonartist.blogspot.com

* [05/10 1PM] Iconography of Climate Change - Digital Silkscreen
Production Workshop (r)
Studio 9:43 @ The Distillery, 516 East Second Street, South Boston
RSVP: i...@ikatun.org

* [05/13 6PM] Mass Innovation Nights
http://massinnovationnights.com/products/announcing-may-2009...

* [05/17 9AM] Flea at MIT
Albany and Main St., Cambridge, MA
http://web.mit.edu/w1mx/www/swapfest

* [05/18 7PM] Boston Media Makers Drinkup
http://bostonmediamakers.wordpress.com

* [05/19 7PM] Upgrade! Boston - lili + honglei
Studio for Interrelated Media, Massart, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
http://turbulence.org/upgrade/archives/05_19_09Yang.htm

* [05/21 7PM] The Boston Arduino Users Group May Meetup
Somerville, MA 02144
http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Arduino-Users-Group/calenda...

* [05/23 7PM] The Boston Robotics May Meetup
Somerville, MA 02144
http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Robotics-Meetup-Group/calen....

* [05/26 7PM] dorkbot-boston 200905

* [06/30 7PM] dorkbot-boston 200906
Axiom Gallery
And you oh-so-effectively refute it.
Don’t Call the Gravedigger - Newspapers Aren’t Dead (Yet)
Congrats on starting early, I only wish I was rockin' the startup world in the mid nineties when I was in HS.
The flavour of the 37Signals comments was very harshly against 37S, these are mildly to strongly in favour of HN.

Yet, here we have a recent, real example of a moderator account on a popular site cracked because a different site wasn't salting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595655
Especially considering that job applicants submit resumes to lots of firms. I think Joel has an article about this, how every firm thinks they hire "the top 2%" because they get 50 times more resumes than they actually hire. But a lot of job applicants and recruiters are spamming their resume to lots of different employers in the hope of just getting one "hit." So it works both ways.
lol pwnd
1 million lines of code written and deployed into production.

Just curious. Any favorite ones that we can see? (Applications/Source Code)
I wish there was some way to stop posts from this blog showing up on my feed >_<. grr...
Pre-planning is hard. Let's go shopping.

Anyway, when in Rome, do as the romans. Hard if they have weird customs, I agree.
Doctorate is accurate. While PhD is technically a "research doctorate" and MD and JD are "professional doctorates", all three are types of doctorate degrees.

PhD (Doctor of Philosophy)
MD (Doctor of Medicine)
JD (Juris Doctor)
Be on twitter; Boston geek events get the word out through their twitter networks most of the time. You missed the most recent BarCampBoston, but the @BarCampBoston twitter account is supposed to be announcing interesting events. @02139now is a Central Square updates account (there's a network of these for other nearby areas).

I'd go to http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/ when the next event happens, July 15th. It's very much a networking event, and it's been drawing huge crowds the past couple of times. Business / tech / investor mix.

Information Superhighway is a geek party that usually happens once a month. May's hasn't been announced yet, monitor Tim Hwang's upcoming feed (or network on twitter) to find out when the next will be: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user/256314/ - 40-60 hackers / designers / academics.

I'll second the recommendation for OpenCoffee (and browsing Meetup.com in general). Every Wednesday morning at Andala coffee house. 5-20 startup folk. http://www.meetup.com/OpenCoffee-Cambridge-Meetup/

I'd check http://www.marksguide.com for other professional events, and I generally browse http://upcoming.yahoo.org for social stuff.

Feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you'd like to connect.
AEC in web development. AEC stands for "Attestation d'Etudes Collegiales". It's like a College diploma, but only in one field (web development; no philosophy courses or things like that).

More info (french) : http://www.cmaisonneuve.qc.ca/iti/aec_web-commerce/aec_web-c...
The layout of their web site is a symptom of the problem, but absolutely not the problem itself. The problem is the economics of news delivery, plain and simple.

As Doc Searls put it recently (and I'm paraphrasing): If you came to me today with a business model where you would cut down lots of trees to make paper, create content to print on this paper on huge presses, and deliver this content 12 to 24 hours after it was written to its consumers at their homes once or twice a day, I'd call you crazy.

So, the longer as the Globe keeps their presses running, the more their ultimate demise is sealed.
The point is that it doesn't differentiate between people who simply never finished/went to college, like me, from people who are still in college, which is an interesting data point.
Not without my customers' permission.

But now that you mentioned it, I'll work on putting up some of my favorites that I own. Stay tuned...
On the one hand, an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the idea of having a cheap labor pool to hire from some day.

On the other hand, I believe there is a danger in devaluing the relationship between education, effort, and wages. With 0 wage growth over the last decade, the American public is becoming cynical about the idea that you can work hard to improve your situation. If industry can always import someone a little more desperate or naive into indentured servitude the moment there is any wage pressure, what incentive is there to improve your skills or education?

Considering the potential impact on macro-economic conditions, this might be a net negative for an aspiring entrepreneur.
Diesel.com: So weird
this video comes from Diesel.com, the rise and fall of Pete and meet puppet. the weirdest form of branding.
But it doesn't apply to Christians and non-Christians alike. Conservatives and especially Christians give far more time and money to help those less fortunate.

"Finally, the single biggest predictor of whether someone will be charitable is their religious participation.

Religious people are more likely to give to charity, and when they give, they give more money: four times as much. And Arthur Brooks told me that giving goes beyond their own religious organization:

"Actually, the truth is that they're giving to more than their churches," he says. "The religious Americans are more likely to give to every kind of cause and charity, including explicitly non-religious charities.""
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2682730

You're misunderstanding Christianity. Jesus said: "For you always have the poor with you" Matthew 26:11. Christians don't believe that its possible to eradicate poverty. In fact we believe that society will continue to grow worse until the end. The point is not to build a utopia, it is to personally help those you see in need.
i live in boston. other than occasionally flipping through a dead copy in a coffee shop, i never by a newspaper. i consider boston.com more or less a tabloid site, or a good place to answer "what was with the fifty police officers storming the common yesterday?" type questions.

among many others, i do read nytimes.com quite often. it's a pretty well laid-out online newspaper.

too bad they won't share with their subsidiary.
Tough one. I'm a high school dropout, so I had to check Elementary School. Now, I've taught at colleges (electronics and linear mathematics), but I've never actually attended one as a student. Some lives are weirder than others, I guess.
I thought maybe my reading level was drastically sub-par. ;)
Is that supposed to be an argument?

Or is your argument that all people who go to college are "rich and naive kids" as you implied earlier in the thread?

You're exposing a pretty huge chip on your shoulder.
Not terribly. For the same reason we make fun of liberal arts majors -- not thinking of what sort of job they get when they get out -- we have to consider (ack! gasp!) our post-graduate careers.

FWIW, it sounds like the author here was really applying for the wrong job.
I didn't see the point of a good portion of that response because the author kept referring to the past. It was only after 6 paragraphs that he started tackling the current model, and he does that by not only describing the issues surrounding it ambiguously ("fair amount"), but also by using the past as an argument:

> I would argue that the economic consensus model in the Netherlands is quite recent in historical terms, and that even today, it contains a fair amount of conflict.

> In 1982 the Dutch state...

And the 4 paragraphs later he ends with:

> These changes are worth noting, but they came about only after extremely difficult struggles that took decades.

Some of the social issues he raises are interesting, but overall I feel that this is a poor response.
Other: Homeschooled kindergarten through the end of highschool when I started doing freelance web development. Two years after I began freelancing I got my current job as a software developer for a small startup.
To believe in social welfare is to acknowledge that everyone has a responsibility to help those in need, and that the state should enforce that responsibility.