skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree unreservedly with this, it's probably worth pointing out for the benefit of those who haven't gone through the process themselves that bootstrapping cabal-install is a five-minute job (or less, depending on how many dependencies you need to compile). The barrier is that one needs to look up the instructions, and know that one should be looking looking something up, rather than it being in any way difficult or complex.

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal-Install
Assigned too many times to maintainance projects, I think I've deleted as many lines as I've written.
Quality is largely based upon how slow you want to download, what hits the stores and is somewhat popular tends to get up online.

Private trackers have most of the others solved as they tend to (always?) revolve around a seed to download ratio system where friends of mine have no problems filling their 100mbit connections.

I agree with your points though, a centralized no-hassle store has benefits over having to sort through public trackers it would be more convenient. Unless pirates start getting really good at social filtering.
Chrysler's Restructuring Plan is a Power Grab
South Carolina Gives Craigslist Ultimatum: Remove Prostitution Or Face Criminal Charges
But it's a D. There are other D's besides a Ph.D.: there's the Psy.D and others: (from Wikipedia)

The Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.) degree is an applied doctorate on the same level as (in alphabetical order) the D.B.A. (Doctor of Business Administration), D.D.S. (Doctor of Dental Surgery), D.Div. (Doctor of Divinity), D.M. (Doctor of Ministry), D.M.F.T. (Doctor of Marriage and Family Therapy), N.D. (Doctor of Naturopathy), D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathy), D.P.M. (Doctor of Podiatric Medicine), D.R.E. (Doctor of Religious Education), D.S.M. (Doctor of Sacred Music), D.S.W. (Doctor of Social Work), D.V.M. (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine), Ed.D. (Doctor of Education), M.D. (Doctor of Medicine), O.D. (Dr of Optometry) and other applied or specialty doctoral degrees. Most of these degrees do not require either a master's level thesis or a doctoral dissertation.
Hmm..not so black and white I think. He helped out Jeff and there was nothing malicious done. If I was in Jeff's position I would be thankful.
Why would this get down voted?
Talented Python developer for web startup
You should swap "Doctorate" out for "Terminal Degree."
One of his other insights in that article is gold too: who persists longest on the labor market? The folks who transparently don't have any business being hired. ("I cannot code a for loop in my language of choice.")

Given a cohort of 100 engineers with bell-curve distributed skills, after 6 weeks of equivalent effort in job searching, there is no reason to assume that the pool of engineers still out of a job would have bell-curve distributed skills (unless hiring decisionmakers are incompetent). Overlay several dozen cohorts like that and you get the labor market: a few good engineers who just graduated or just got married and moved to a new city, and a whole lot of wonderful people who are perhaps not as talented as you'd want on your team.
I don't understand how the attacker got his hands on the MD5'd password? Does Open ID expose that data to anyone?
"Fuck the God of War"
Student's Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspapers
TOP 10 “Not Your Average” iPhone Apps You Should Definitely Touch
Anodyne Therapy Works
Well, I won't actually be finished until a few hours from now after my exam, but close enough.
I have a bachelor's degree in computer science. I probably learned some topics better than I would have on my own, thanks to being forced to dig deeper for the class. But I was an avid self-studier of computer science, and I learned a whole lot on my own. For the amount of computer science knowledge I need to do my real world work so far, I'm not convinced getting the formal education made a noticeable difference.

That said, I really appreciate all of the other topics I learned in more breadth and/or depth while in college. I learned far more about psychology, linguistics, literature, history, etc., than I would have any time soon on my own. I enjoy reading, and enjoy learning a wide variety of topics, but I tend to hyperfocus on what I feel interested in at the time. I doubt I would have bothered to learn anything about Russian culture or listened to recordings of Jelly Roll Morton if I hadn't been required to for course credit... and I feel better about myself for having learned these things.
Coding is not necessarily part of a PhD (even in Comp Sci!) and programming well certainly isn't. No one will ever look at that code, inspect, test it, document it or complain when any of those things are missing

My rather opinionated thoughts on my 3 year failure of a PhD is here: http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-...

When I applied for software engineering jobs the recruiters ignored my 3 years of Java/Python programming for the PhD and my 4 years of embedded Java programming for research labs. All that counts is the time when you were delivering code to paying customers in a commercial setting :(
About 12 years ago or something, I used to chat on a 'talker'. Telnet talker.thevillage.something:8833 or similar. You had a login etc, and it was good fun.

So, I started learning about network programming etc, and built my own talker. Registration etc etc. I got quite a few people to register on it, and was surprised when I realized they were just using the same login details as they used on the 'main' talker we talked on.

So I logged in as one of them on the main talker and impersonated him... got banned for a bit. It really is surprising how easily this is done. (I was young, and foolish).

"Hey can you just try out this webapp for me? register here." <-- Always use a 'throwaway' login.
You sound very bitter about this.

For what it's worth, I have a PhD and was not a "rich kid" - I was fortunate enough to grow up in the UK at a time when the government gave grants to people who would not otherwise be able to afford a university education (I'm not sure if they still do this - I know a lot has changed).
It's a nice idea but I'm surprised they didn't try to find someone who has actually started a successful startup to write it. Or at least co-write it.

I mean, ReadWriteWeb watches a lot of startups so from that perspective I could see how they'd have a lot to offer. But at the same time there could be all kinds of processes going on internally that they know nothing about. Which is why it seems odd to me that they'd write a guid
He didn't. The attacker helped out with a site that didn't use OpenID and doesn't salt their passwords.

And Jeff used an insecure password on both the "evil site" and his Open ID provider.

The attacker only had access to Jeff's hash because he had access to a site that Jeff used.
Probably because it doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
Step 1: Come up with super cool crazy mysterious funny tech savvy lolol web 2.0-ish name.
So many pieces of truth in here. Most of them I internalized long ago, but still there is the odd one which I encountered recently. This time it's "Software rots if not used". It is indeed a mystery, but oh so true.
That's pretty weird, considering Japan probably has more 24-hour convenience stores than any country on Earth.

You must have been pretty far out in the "inaka". :)

http://jet.wikia.com/wiki/Inaka
One problem - I don't care about my local news. I care about tech news, national and supra-national politics, and other things that are topic based.

My interest in what's going on in my local area is pretty tiny - and limited to only a couple of limited areas (like when the %^&%^& tram system is going to be finished).
I commented about this blog couple of days back when this blog mentioned what seemed "the most important question in a R&D interview" or some crap.

couldn't get thru half of it. This time I didn't even read it.
Just want to post this comment here, so many of us who read comments know NOT to click and waste time!
A slick new co-working space for solo entrepreneurs in Cambridge
Rails founder touts framework stability, responds to critics
As someone just finishing Ph.D. that also had industry jobs, I can say most of what you say seems wrong. There indeed are plain old developer positions, consisting of e.g. making some frontend talk to some backend - most real-world corporate programming is like that.

"Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you" - this is exactly what you have to do in a Ph.D. program all the time - you have coauthors on papers that have to be shipped, and yours and their future depends on it.

In the corporate world, you also have to deliver, but at least what you're doing is well known to be possible. In academia you have a constant feeling that you might be against an impossible problem, and the results will never come together.

Plus in the corporate world, you can work 9am-7pm at most, rather than 11am-2pm as in grad school. And the pay is 4x higher. Now what sounds more like a vacation?

(Of course, here I was referring to a PhD in Computer Science. I don't know what's Strategic Planning, so I can't judge there.)
In college right now.
Walking away from credit cards
Generally the Dutch like their system, and I think it works pretty well for them. But as the article suggests, it works because they have such a communal spirit and sense of shared values. Americans have that individualist spirit and we are a very heterogeneous group with little in common beyond our love of freedom to roam and make a buck.

Perhaps a small New England state could pull it off (and they do try) but to engineer a Dutch system from Washington is asking a bit much. The author perceptively observed that Dutch don't trust government any more than we do, but have a strong sense of communal responsibility to each other. That is only possible on a small scale, I think. After all, they only have 16m people on a tiny piece of land.

When I lived in Holland some years ago, one of locals pointed out this irony: "You Americans have only two political parties but can't agree on anything, while we Dutch have dozens but pretty much see eye-to-eye on everything."
It's perhaps worth pointing out that this software is for detecting the presence of any old face, not for detecting a particular face, such as you or Osama Bin Laden.
Yes, but if you're interested in developing a startup, you might (I do) find it interesting to consider local population as an audience worth targeting - given how the print media is failing it. [that's the relevance I see for HN]
Habilitation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habilitation
I attended a networking event recently where I was pitching to a guy who had a high rank in our local university's IT program and is respected as an entrepreneur also. Anyway, he was challenging me on everything I was saying (which I thanked him for at the end), and one question was: "If what you are doing is so great, why aren't the big boys already doing it."

My first response was that the key is to do it better, which he acknowledged. The second was that if I was the founder of Google standing in front of him 10 years ago, telling him that I was going to create "another search engine", he would have asked me exactly the same question. His response was: "Well, wasn't that guy working on his doctorate?"

My response was "and...?" He looked at me like I was an idiot. What I should have said was "Sure, doctorates are great and I could get one, but I don't want one. I'd rather spend my time creating wealth than creating a piece of paper that will make me more qualified to create wealth for someone else." Apparently "that Google guy" felt the same way, only it took him longer to make that decision. As an aside, my Bachelor's degree was one of the best investments of my life, so I'm not arguing against formal education here.

He also derided my location as if some guy from a small town in Ohio couldn't build anything worthwhile. Yes, I know pg's thoughts on location and there is some merit to that, but the assertion he made is a bit too over the top for me.
Litmus - 17 Windows browsers on your Mac
Micro-Frameworks: Big Things in Small Packages
The "Big Picture" is the exception. It's generally awesome:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

And they reached an agreement with the last union this morning: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jkzBYoal_s...
I have a bachelor's degree and, thank God, my school was (and is) committed to need-blind admissions and gives every student a financial aid package that covers 100% of their calculated need.

Without their generosity, it would have been very difficult to pay $40k/year to go there.
Amazon releases the rumoured large-screen Kindle
Got a B.Eng (Hons) and MSc (Distinction), the first one was a joint degree between CS and Electronic and Electrical Engineering and the last was straight up CS.

Its interesting to see the number of PhD's here. Always considered doing one but was put off when told that I had to defend my PhD 4-5 times a year and the PhD I was offered sounded very interesting but not quite my cup of tea (it was Planning in AI)

For the PhD's out there, was the experience worth while? Did you enjoy it?
And therein lies the real advantage, I think. I may be unschooled, but I am educated. Unfortunately, it's taken me the better part of fifty years to get there. These days my own abilities are severely restricted by Lewy Body Dementia, so I spend my time and energy mentoring young folk -- and none of them will hear me say that a liberal eduction is a waste of time. (And yes -- Jelly Roll, the Cabster and even His Royal Hipness hisself are part of the program.)
Right, detecting who is in a picture would be "face recognition". Good point though.
This article also completely ignores the fact that you can use OpenID to log into HN which bypasses this issue altogether.
I've seen really good AND really bad developers with and without degrees. It really does seem to be more the person than the training.

Successful people without college degrees tend to take a few more years to move up the development food chain, they're basically opting to do on-the-job training.

Successful people with college degrees tend to have a stronger foundation in theory, which is useful; whether or not people want to admit it.

I don't believe they have the same skill sets, but they both bring something to the table.

Disclosure: My highest level of education is High School. I dropped out of college in my second semester to go work as a programmer. Over the years, I've hired lots of developers for various companies, and worked with hundreds of developers as well - with and without degrees.
LifetimeLOC = LOCWritten + LOCDeleted

Think about it. In order to write 300 good lines of code, you probably wrote 1,000 lines of code before refactoring. Same thing, just that someone else put in all the refactorable lines before you got there.
You're not adding anything to the conversation. If you had said, "Yea I don't have a college degree and I've taught myself six different programming languages and I'm working on x, y and z right now," that would have been a (marginally) better response to the parent than what you wrote.
Remind HN: New York City HN Meetup today at 6pm (free beers)
I'm in New York City for the week - just flew over from Switzerland and am organizing a small meetup today for all hackers/entrepreneurs. I posted last week and a lot of you said you were coming, so this is just a reminder!

Starting at 6pm.

NewsCred will buy the first few rounds of beer!

Looking forward to meeting all NYC HN members and other interesting startuppers.

Location:

Lunasa Bar 126 First Avenue (Bet 7th & St Marks) New York, NY 10009
True, though I can't see who posted the blog sadly from my Google Reader feed. If I could, then I just wouldn't click them :(.
Prison Awaiting Hostile Bloggers
I'll consider getting one of these things when TAOCP looks decent in it.
This sound about right?

Add a column named 'salt' to USER, then the PASS column=PASSWORD(salt+'text');
This was discussed at length a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593020
I personally wouldn't characterize Asimov's writing as anything near awful. It's simple, yes-- but only enough to bring a layman sensibility to the most esoteric and abstract of concepts.
You guys are so goddamn geeky! <3
Other = Law (J.D.)
Large Screen Kindle Revealed
My research is complete: Shane Fitzgerald is a dick.
My password is a hash created by 1Password. Plus this is a low value account.
The title is "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage ". And 95% of it is how H1-B is indentured labor. I am no smart guy but I know how to see through plain BS.
I hope there is a way to disable auto-rotation for reading in bed. That is a big pet peeve with my iphone.
Corrections to post:

1) Palin's password was not compromised directly. Instead, the backup "private security questions" had answers which were in the public domain -- such as "name of your high school" -- to a sufficiently dedicated adversary. (There are four in Wasilla. Sort of narrows the search space a bit versus trying to brute force a password, right?)

2) This doesn't prove OpenID is a good idea, at all. Let's review facts: the site which was compromised uses OpenID and presumably an OpenID provider which has bulletproof security. The problem with this is that, for most users, the vulnerability is not the strongest provider but the weakest one, since they share credentials everywhere. Equivalently, you could say that the weakest link is the user. (Even on an Internet where EVERY site used OpenID, most users would fall for a compromise-anywhere-compromise-everywhere phishing attack.)
I agree a PhD is not a vacation (I left my PhD program) but I think you are missing edw519's point. As an employer, why would you want to hire someone who thinks of the job as a step down, as just a "plain old developer position". Instead find someone who might not have the PhD-theoretical-type skils but is excited about the job and really wants to help deliver a higher quality product.
Lame Mac malware
Interesting !!
Ask HN: Why no love for PHP? 
I'm curious as to why I rarely see PHP articles on Hacker News.

Is it because PHP isn't considered a "serious" language, and is mostly the realm of "designers" and "script kiddies"?

Do the developers who visit this site all code in Ruby, Erlang or Objective-C? Are PHP developers a minority in this community?

I play with Ruby & Objective-C on my own time, but at work it's an all PHP shop. We primarily use the Zend Framework, and honestly it's pretty good (good enough for IBM...). With the recently announced build tools, and some of the classes we've developed on top of ZF, I can develop just as quickly in PHP as I can with RoR.

PHP is also fairly popular with successful startups. Larger sites like Digg, Flickr and Facebook are using at least some PHP to scale to fairly massive traffic; even Wufoo (a site which I feel represents what so many of us here are trying to achieve in essence) is written in PHP.

I will agree that PHP is a bit of a mess (backslashes for namespaces?), and that the internet is full of the wrong way to use it; however, there certainly are talented developers writing quality software in PHP. Is there no interest in that here?

Apologies if this is a rehash of a tired topic; I poked around for a few minutes and didn't see anything relevant/recent.
The old traditional path I suppose . . .

Years ago, began hacking on home computer (not a PC, but something called a C64, for the curious). Went to college, wrong major, quit . . . bounced around, bad jobs. Started doing some db hacking in Excel (don't ask).

Decided to make more than $8 an hour, went back to college, got a BS in comp sci. Loved undergrad this time around, jumped into internships and co-ops with companies as an undergrad.

Finished undergrad with a good GPA and did well on GREs, realized I could go to grad school via research assistantship. Cool. Hung out with really smart hackers there. Finished year 1 with absolutely zero interest in staying for PhD (never found really good research/advisor match, would probably do differently now). Finished 2nd year, got a job out in the IT industry, escaping grad school with a MS in comp sci.

Almost all my really relevant experience in breaking into the industry came about by internships or deep project work at the undergrad/grad level (usually not classes, but research efforts on the side). These days, I get the impression you can get all the same experience without college. Beware that some big industry players will hold the lack of a CS degree against you (this seems mainly to be a "getting in the door" problem).

Mainly, I got into industry by really enjoying coding and grabbing every opportunity to do so where someone was willing to pay me for it. Everything else was a means to that end.
As someone who has been in the real world for 30 years (after 20 years of schooling), I know most of what I say is fairly accurate.

I really don't mean to pick on you (or anyone else), but inaccurate claims about that with which you are not familiar deserve response.

"There indeed are plain old developer positions..."

Of course there are. And for everyone of those, there is someone else changing the world.

"this is exactly what you have to do in a Ph.D. program all the time"

Fair enough.

"In the corporate world, you also have to deliver, but at least what you're doing is well known to be possible."

Not my experience. "Do x, y, and z by the first of next quarter or you're out of business." You frequently don't know if what you're trying to do is possible. But you have to do it anyway. This happens all the time.

"you can work 9am-7pm at most..."

If only.

I admit that my "vacation" remark may have ruffled some feathers, and I love what I do, but it would be my dream come true to quit work and go back to a college PhD program. I know I'm not alone in this.

AFAIC, work is to make a living, education is what we live for.
That's how it is in rural America (Midwest, the South) also.

You need a large population to support 24 hour consumerism.
No.
My experience in a PhD program made me more employable. Last year, when looking for a job, I got interest and offers from industry positions as a direct result of the skills I learned while pursuing a PhD (in Computer Science). As kurtosis here mentions, you often learn real practical skills while doing research. I interviewed for developer positions, and no one suggested that I wasn't practical. We talked about development I'd done.

The article's use of the "plain ol' developer position" phrase suggests that this person had a different problem. God forbid they said that in an interview... They were apparently not interviewing for jobs they actually wanted.

If you actually want the job, you'll be interested in it, you'll explain why you're a good fit, and you probably won't describe it as a "plain ol'" anything, even in jest, even to yourself. Otherwise, why waste the time?
10 years ago: " Midgard Web Application Server 1.0.0 released"
The source code is on github: http://github.com/igrigorik/rb-pagerank/tree/master
> completed (i.e., met all requirements and passed)

That sounds 'formal' to me, in the sense of either you have a degree or you don't. I took Italian in college, and having lived here a number of years, probably speak it well enough to teach it, know the grammar well, etc... but I don't have a degree in it.

Whatever though... these things are kind of pointless. I think it's best to do what you want in life and get on with it and not worry too much about what other people do.
Highschool.

I've actually done all bar a few units of a Bachelor's Degree (Engineering), but quit and went travelling for a few years instead