skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting hired into a faculty position (and often getting tenure, like at Harvard) are increasingly becoming more and more like show business... a really high ratio of qualified applicants to (scarce) positions ... and so what ends up being deciding factors are often seemingly arbitrary, subjective, or even unknown. "Fit" with the Department. "Significance" of the work. "General consensus" of the committee.

We can complain and complain but what this means from a practical point of view, for young and aspiring academics, is

1. If you really want it, don't give up. Keep doing good work and keep applying.

2. If you care more about making money, do something else. Like in show business and sports, the vast majority aren't getting super rich, aren't getting famous. They ARE however living their dream, doing exactly what they love to do.

3. You will need to make an impression above and beyond the objective "facts" that you list on your academic cv. You will have to be friendly. You will have to impress on intangibles. Scientists are often not good at this.

4. In today's environment academic Departments care about your potential to bring money into the University (in the form of research grants). You will need to hit this point.

5. Your motivation (and validation) has to come from within. If you depend on external reinforcement you will not succeed.

I see a lot of graduate students complaining about how difficult it is to get hired into a Faculty position these days, how difficult it is to get research grants, how difficult it is to get published in a decent journal. Not to be TOO much of a grumpy old man, but like any highly skilled endeavour, it should be difficult. 10,000 hours and all that.

Many, many young people end up in graduate school not because they are intensely focused on scholarly work, and intend upon one day being a Professor, because that's what they love to do, that's what they've always wanted to do (this however WAS the case for me) ... rather many, many young people end up graduate school because

a. they are in a holding pattern because they haven't yet attained their actual goal, which is getting into a professional school (law, meds, dentistry, mba, etc)

b. their grades are good and they "don't know what they want to do"

As a Professor, case a. doesn't bother me much, as long as they work hard, it can be a win-win for supervisor and student.

Case b. bothers me a lot. Advanced, persistent scholarly work is an intense, difficult, (rewarding) endeavour. If you're bored, or confused, please don't "try" graduate school. It's not a hobby. It's a very specific undertaking that is well suited to only a very small proportion of the population (even the population of "smart people").
+1 for doing it in Go. If concurrency is your objective, Go makes it easy... it's also very fast both to program in and to run.
Perhaps, but America is still operating under the context of two massive skyscrapers plummeting to the ground from an attack carried out with almost military precision. It's not as if Bush Jr. just woke up one day and decided that it was time to whip up some secret prisons. So if "context" is a defense then there's at least a little of it to spread around here as well.
Also discussed and illustrated in "The Curious Properties of a Molten Glass Blob Dropped in Cold Water" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5440179

The story linked is just a blog wrapper on a "Smarter Every Day" episode, which is definitely worth watching.

Smarter Every Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs
"Writing reveals holes in your thinking. When your ideas are written and looking back at you, they're a lot less convincing than when they're just in your head. Writing forces you to mature your ideas by thinking through counterarguments."

Totally agree.

I'd also add that writing publicly (blogging) forces you to evaluate and really consider your true convictions with regard to whatever it is you're writing. Because you're going on the record with something - for all to see. And there's bound to be people out there that disagree with you. If and when they come, will you still be proud of and confident in what you wrote? If not, reconsider your stands.
Great article. As a developer I have very similar feelings, I imagine there are more like me. Often the perceived barriers are very similar to the ones mentioned here (not feeling smart enough, not knowing where to start, etc.)

One nice project that came up on HN recently, but people may have missed, is codetriage (http://http://www.codetriage.com/) which I have signed up for, but have yet to take any action on. It provides a gentle run-way into contributing to projects on github, by emailing you issues from projects you have expressed an interest in helping out with. Even if you are not so confident in your coding skills, there is still plenty of helpful work to be done here. From the emails codetriage sends out:

Goals of Triage

Help share the weight of maintaining a project
Minimize un-needed issues
Prevent stale issues
Encourage productive communication
Teach good citizenship
To become a better coder
How To Triage?

First, carefully read over the issue, title, and description, if there are any comments read over all the comments, carefully. If a member of this repo is engaging actively there is no need to do anything, leaving a comment in the issue would just add to the clutter.

If the issue hasn't been updated in awhile, or if no one has commented consider the issue, if it is a bug try to reproduce it. If it is a pull request consider what an alternate implementation might look like. If there is something you don't understand about the issue and feel others will have that same question please leave your question in the comments. Be as descriptive as possible. Comments like "I don't understand this" are not helpful and counter productive. A better comment might be "Can you help me understand a use case for this?".

If you can reproduce the issue or you believe it is a good pull request, add a comment and say why you think that is. Try to stay positive while triaging issues, ask questions before you :-1: something. If you do decide to :+1: or :-1: on an issue, leave a comment as to why you feel that way. Issues are for social coding, if you help someone make better issues, you're helping the community.

If the issue goes stale, leave a comment asking if it is still a problem. If you get no response for a number of days, you can leave another comment suggesting to the repo owner that they should close the issue.

Go forth and make the world a better place

My point is - I love the idea about contributing with design, but don't write off helping with code issues either! You may surprise yourself! Also worth bearing in mind other areas that may be lacking people-power - for example if you are multi-lingual, translations are another great way to contribute....
I thought HFT was now based on FPGAs and ASIC circuits ... how could this compete in terms of latency/processing ?
Dear future generations,

Clueless middle class Western programmers on Hacker News believed everything some guy in prion said and thought they understood national security realities better than the president of the US.

And they made a bunch of brave comments. Much karma was exchanged.

Love, 2013
> As you may well be aware, HFT is a scourge on the world's economy, and it's a game only the biggest and best-connected players benefit from.
This is the line peddled by the popular press but it isn't true. HFT works to reduce spreads, which benefits both buyers and sellers.
Dish Network attempts $25.5 billion Sprint merger
Good points. To be more precise, I think that an open source approach to system research and design can be hyper-competitive versus closed-door secret-squirrel development run by a committee looking for short-term wins. This project benefits me firstly because I get feedback on my initial scratchings and maybe even collaboration on areas outside my comfort zone. And it could well enable me and others to avoid having to work for the sociopaths.

I am biased in thinking that monitoring the market and trading at low latency isn't fundamentally a bad thing, and shouldn't be taxed because others are too lazy to do the same thing. I certainly think that hft has been used by evil people to front-run unknowing third-parties, often in collaboration with middle men and women who turn a blind eye to the morality of their business models.
No discount on product upgrades for existing customers ;(
Just want to point out that you could implement similar behavior in Haskell:

{-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-}

class Concatable a b where
concat' :: a -> b -> a

instance Concatable [a] a where
concat' l xs = l ++ [xs]

instance Concatable [a] [a] where
concat' l xs = l ++ xs

a :: [Int]
a = [1,2,3]

b :: Int
b = 4

c :: [Int]
c = [4]

-- Main> concat' a b

-- [1,2,3,4]

-- Main> concat' a c

-- [1,2,3,4]
Show HN: BeepEvery - A web app that beeps to your will
I just sent my congressman an email outlining that I would like to see everybody given a trial and either deported or moved to a federal prison.

I would recommend that others reach out to their representatives and do the same. I imagine that if we, the people, do not make any noise about this then we are going to get more of the same.
The Daily Mash is the UKs version of The Onion.
This was my weekend project and pretty much my first dive into really using Javascript.

Suggestions, comments and insults appreciated.
This is how I see it: http://i.imm.io/12Y11.jpeg
I do - but a 'proper' long term investor that cares about the price in 20 years time.

The quoted exchange price is an average of the buy/sell offers available, there is no guarantee if you try and trade that you will pay that amount. Especially if you are shifting large blocks of stock.

There is nothing wrong with "short term predicting" but it isn't investing. It is often a very easy way to lose money, "bad" doesn't just mean morally so.
It comes down to time horizons, how much you want to make, and how many people are also trying to predict that event. You can correctly predict that event and still not make money as it is already priced in.
On a recent Shop Talk Show episode, Chris Coyier mentions that he had a conversation with Jason Scott that archive.org has notes around saying that when person X passes away, they post file Y, because they are the only person that cares about the copyright of said file.

It seems that they are willing to skirt copyright information if no one is likely to challenge it.

And society is better for it.
Hope your product is in line with the HN's audience - but having said that, many HN users (I believe) are interested in startups in general, so I find it interesting to see what areas people are trying to innovate. I posted a link to my project (http://www.sideprojectors.com) and received a few hundred signups. I found them more than sufficient to do my beta testing.

It's not really the initial post that matters, but what you do with them after your launch. Even if you get say, 100 users, they are GOOD 100 users! (better than zero!) and if you believe in your product and continue to iterate + get feedback from them, I'm sure you can take your product quite far. Of course, you'll need to do many other things.
That might have something to do with the fact that we have problems to deal here. The prisoners at Guantanamo might seem like a bigger deal if we did not have millions of prisoners who were never tried by a jury in the USA. We might actually care about this particular Obama campaign promise if there were not so many other broken promises.
Numba is great for numerical expressions, but I'd be surprised if it works for trickier bits.

For example, consider the problem here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.1817

Ultimately I needed to run a math formula on some surfels and connect an edge in a graph if the formula came out True. Following that I had to prune a bunch of edges in the graph. In 2009 (when I did it), I had to drop down to c++. (Admittedly, this was also partly due to a lack of a good python graph lib.)

I'd be very surprised if Numba is helpful with something like that - the branching and complex data structures don't seem like a great fit for it.
What Games Are: The Shady Side Of Games
If you wind up using Privoxy, it can take the place of all the other add-ons you mentioned, except https-everywhere. And it works transparently for all browsers.
Isn't the barrier to HFT the fact that you need enough capital so that your profits cover the cost of co-located servers and FPGAs in the exchange datacenter, without which you have a latency handicap? (in addition to, of course, coming up with good algorithms)
Learning to Observe
My largely uninformed guess: Music is so massively rewarding because it trains/fuzzes our pattern matching engines, in a particularly effective and advantageous way that cannot be found "in nature". This is the same reason why jokes/humour are so enormously valued by the brain.

It also explains why only nerds like listening to breakcore.
I've had some very similar stories, including a few consulting jobs and numerous introductions to people I otherwise would never have met. You never know who may read your writing.
Yes, I am aware of that trend and considering a switch. I'm personally more used to R is all, but if I found collaborators I'd jump to where the code base goes.

The only other factor is I find R pretty aligned with haskell having a somewhat functional pedigree, so that code translates pretty nicely between a rapid hack at the problem to the more robust approach.
I'm not arguing that it is right in any way - just that the "if we just X it won't require any cost/effort" was a slightly naive PoV. My wording may not have made that clear.
It would be really interesting to read your writeup on MySQL Galera usage.
Actually Gorilla glass is chemically treated for better resistance
Its pretty impressive and I love the use of flatUI :), but I can't see any Custom Subdomains?
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0/10.1 Specifications Leaked
You only gave 50% off ONE product so that you could mention it in the title. Not cool.
But most companies won't bother with differencing, that's the problem.
Further: Given a big enough of a profit it is easy to turn a blind eye. That simple fact is a massive problem for humanity going forward. Greed before humanity is now a reality.
Thanks! I've wanted an excuse to use it for a while :-) Sorry, that was my mistake. I meant 'Custom URLs.' So like http://fry.io/@google There is plans for custom subdomains but that's in development. I've updated the title accordingly.
Firstly, Osama (not Usama) Bil Laden.

Secondly, 11 years without trial or even a concrete charge against "an accused terrorist" would be something USA and its citizens would be appalled about if Russia or China did so to their "terrorists".

Thirdly, I am against hunger strikes when they can be avoided. Simply because they can turn political and in turn can be abused. Gandhi did abuse it a bit. Indian politicians and activists do it a lot. But eleven years of being held without solid evidence or being charge is just fucked up. This is being done out of desperation and fatigue rather than ideology.
Yep, I've tried it, and it looks promising, and simple to use :)
I've read the "quick" installation, which is not quick at all ^^
I've subscribed to git rss feed, and I will follow the development process a bit before trying out the installation on own dedicated, and maybe even try developing the simple "client" interface for our needs using the API provided if the backend proves to be stable and good.
He will be classified as a criminal when and if the courts convict him as one. Until then what he did is irrelevant to his tenure due to the concerns raised by potatolicious.
Money basically buys you happiness up until the point it gets you out of poverty. After that, the money/happiness ratio seems to flatten out (ie, poverty causes much unhappiness).
50 Peculiar U.S. Laws You Won't Believe Exist
Semantic is really just a buzz word. People say their projects are "semantic" all the time. The word is becoming meaningless. I can see how it's a wiki... It's a database people can edit. Not sure how it's semantic.
Sorry to burst your bubble but high-frequency trading is only viable and necessary for market makers.
The end result of any type of algorithm you think of is always a curve-fitting function of existing data.
Yes, but the chemical treatment works by setting up the same kind of internal stresses - IIRC, it replaces the Sodium atoms in the glass with Potassium, and it's the size difference that does the magic.
I don't think mainstream US and UK economics is dominated by Keynesianism. A good example is the current debate about cutting spending. The Uk has conservatives in power and they are cutting spending which is deflationary. The US has democrats in power and they aren't cutting spending but maybe even increasing it which is inflationary. Keynes would definitely recommend to increase spending or at least not cut it while Hayek the opposite.
People like to guess a pattern (i.e. "from the first 5 secs I think the song will go like this and I'll like it") and like when they're right. That's also why we tend to like more songs we've already heard several times (even though we didn't like them a lot in the beginning).

Summary of the article: http://tldr.io/tldrs/516bfd54649fcf9e0a000de0/why-does-music...
Maybe one situation where this is a good idea is when the current "designer" is even worse than you are. In that case you add value through your design skills and you're the lead designer in a designer-free company.

Obviously that only works if you know the company isn't actively looking for a real designer, in which case your work will disappoint.
Honest questions: what's to stop that person from calling themselves a JavaScript developer? Why shouldn't he/she? What in the words "JavaScript Developer" imply professional ability?

It's hard for me to imagine how this person learning a little jQuery, and calling themselves a developer, somehow saturates what master craftsmen of JS/jQuery do.

1) They won't be stealing contract jobs from the master craftsmen, as a quick look at each person's portfolio would reveal who the better developer is.

2) They won't be stealing full-time work from the master craftsmen, as the phone interviews and in-person would quickly whittle away the new developer.
I manage a few decently sized blogs for authors and bloggers. From all the checking I've done for these buttons, only Email To A Friend, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ are worth doing.

The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+).

I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.
The values of social media and blogging for academics
Calvin: "People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance."

Hobbes:"You misspelled Weltanschauung."
By my understanding, their layers are pretty hamstrung. That they have them is something, but their arguments for presentation of evidence, fair trial, rights as stated in the Geneva convention, and so forth, are for the most part unsuccessful - usually falling to a simple response of "the national good" which comes back to the circular argument "present evidence of that risk to (inter)national interests", "we can't do that, it would be a risk to (inter)national interests".

Right now they still have "enemy combatant status" and are not in a position where they can push their defence any further or be helped by their own governments and/or legal systems (if said systems would in fact help: some would, some wouldn't). If they were freed without charge then they have a case for unfair detainment (where now any such claim will be replied to with "they haven't been charged yet, that might change") and if they were charged there would be something for them to try make a case against (where now it is someone's un-evidenced word against their's, neither side having much legal standing so the people holding the keys "win").
Show HN: Datalanche
Hi boothead, just curious what you do when you run into the inevitable performance issues that can't be ameliorated with libraries like NumPy?

Is Cython or PyPy useful, or do you use Python more for prototyping, and rewrite some portions in C?
The text on this page is barely readable in Windows/Chrome.
I've been blogging for about a year now, and I have been getting a consistant growing readership. The best advice I ever read about blogging was have a scheduled post.

I do one post every friday, even if I have very little going on.

I still write blog posts throughout the week, but it's only when I want too.

My Friday post is a have-to commitment I've made. It makes it easier for my readers to know when to come to my site.
I don't agree. Radio in the early 20th century in the United States was not regulated, and operated in the unregulated fashion you described, and it was a failure. What has really changed in the intervening century? Spectrum interference is still as much of a problem now as it was back then.
So charge him with a crime already and we can get on with this removing-tenure business.

Except you can't - because he didn't violate international nor domestic law. He never waterboarded anyone, nor did he order the waterboarding of anyone.

He worked on legal justifications for the use of torture, which is not an area of international law that's well defined. He didn't make policy nor law, he spun law so that it fit existing policy.

I won't disagree that what he has done is despicable, but what exactly would you charge him with that would actually stick?
By putting it on FPGAs maybe. Stage one is to get a robust process for measuring and researching latency - I'm in Australia and US data is bouncing into my mac via a lousy connection and a tcp port in 250 millsecs on average. There's a long way to go.
I suspect that if you can keep within a bulls roar of the low-latency crowd the big gains will be on the algorithm processing side. Algorithms still add up a few million numbers every time they recalculate a moving average - there's better ways to do it.
Why the web will be a global gaming platform
Mine wasn't a launch per se, but a Chrome extension I had been working on. I thought it was right up the HN crowd alley, but I only got a few hundred hits and maybe 10 downloads. I posted it in hopes of getting some feedback (positive or negative) which didn't really work out.
Wait a minute, your page saves to 1.28MB, and you only have 133 words in your article. This gives you 10kb of download per word. The article you’re pointing to is only 4kb per word.

Pot calling kettle?