skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been YEARS since I've seen that video last. God bless YouTube :-).

A guy named Adam Bailey, who did a pretty good look at the Atari Landfill site in the mid-2000s, approached the band about the video. While the video is cool, it is actually fake. It was filmed in Texas using games with E.T. labels printed for them.

This makes sense, as Atari dumped the games in 1983 but the landfill was in use until the 90's. Any digging should have a fair amount of debris. There is 7 years of trash to get through, not to mention the poured concrete.
What about being made into listening devices? That would require turning on the microphone and transmitting the signal without the user noticing. Is that possible?
I don't think anyone has bothered to try explaining what is wrong with this data (in this thread).

The link discusses there are some response-bias models. For instance, maybe people always lie +5k. You can figure that out. Maybe you assume it's really a function of f(x)*base_salary and do something structured based on their salary as the bias.

It's, of course, perfectly fine to interpret this kind of survey as the response of those in the population that decided to take it. In this case, it's readers of hacker news who filled it in. I certainly wouldn't do that, I only registered to post this comment... anyway.

You could also try to validate this data against any other survey data, or by cross-linking LinkedIn data with mortgage data for a true dataset.

"And that's data science, bro."
I've lived at home for a year. Since my mother, father, and grandparents (3 homes) are within 30 miles, I end up doing a lot of lawn mowing, appliance maintenance, and obviously IT work for them, in addition to housecleaning (on an epic scale), etc. In return I've had a year to learn a bunch of new tech without job pressure.
Wow. Just when you think America is just like countries you know, something like this comes along.
I don't think it's necessarily silly, for a few reasons.

First, the salary is completely guaranteed. Short of getting laid off or the company failing completely, you'll get your salary; bonuses can be canceled at most companies and may even be quite unpredictable. Stocks may have a vesting schedule and are subject to the financial markets. Google might be a little more predictable in this way, but many companies aren't.

For instance, how comfortable would you be choosing a bigger mortgage on the basis of your bonuses and stocks rather than your salary? Chances are it's your base salary which will really determine how much of a house you'll buy, because you don't want to foreclose because your bonus one year wasn't as high as you had hoped or the stocks went down. Even if your salary were a guaranteed $260k, you couldn't afford a $1M home by most conventional wisdom (median SF home price as of 2013).

Second, as a result of the foregoing, I've noticed many companies are extremely hesitant to give huge base salaries to developers. It is therefore interesting to see how frequent it is for people to have salaries of $200k+.
I agree with you, but I think most bus factor considerations are about poaching/the developer leaving =)
I feel badly for his family and coworkers. :(

Make sure you let your family know how much you care about them. Also make sure they will be taken care of in case you're suddenly gone. Firstly by picking up enough term life insurance to cover your dependents' needs until adulthood. Secondly by writing up a will and giving it to someone you trust. [1][2]

We joke about "getting hit by a bus" and a project's "bus factor"[3] but it really does happen. It could happen to you or to a critically important person on your project team. Make it a policy to have all critical info recorded in some systematic way. You don't have to get all iso9000 but you should, at the very least, have everyone do a brain dump into a wiki once a month and keep it in a central location (along with the password file, list of client info, etc.)

-

[1] DIY will: http://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Own-Last-Will-and-Testamen...

[2] Reasonably priced template: http://www.legalzoom.com/legal-wills/wills-overview.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
I had to delete a few million files in bash once. 'find' didn't work. I used perl to overcome the issues.

opendir D, "."; while ($n = readdir D) { unlink $n }
This would suck. I got a crappy CS degree from a nobody college, got average (3.5) gpa, got out in 3 years and didn't get any internships my first two years (though I tried) so I've just been doing my own stuff for a year.

I'd hate for the job market to be even harder for fresh CS grads not out of an Ivy League or state school. Most of my graduating class just gave up and went for cheaper masters programs, I figured I'd learn more on my own (and I was right, I learned half a dozen new languages, and a lot of the practical parts of development like regexes, sql, unix commands and sysadmining, etc).
Glass and facial recognition
A couple of weeks ago, one of the VPs in my company suddenly passed away. A day of vomiting and diarrhea, followed by hospitalization, and shortly after that, gone.

He was 43 years old. Incredibly active, healthy and fit guy. He died of a very rare staph infection. By the time he was diagnosed, it was too late.

I think the lesson is that life is really short, and you never know when it will end. So you better make the most out of the time allotted to you, and the fact that you don't know how long you have left should only fuel your efforts.

R.I.P. Andrew.
I think the creativity argument is bull. I would bet that the reason why there's a difference between the groups of diagrams is the depth of knowledge in neurons. Undergrads, who I believe we can safely assume have less in depth knowledge of neurons, memorize the physical shape of neurons because their cursory knowledge of neurons. On the other hand, professors have a much more depth (and specialized) knowledge of neurons and therefore may not even know what the neuron as a whole looks like (you could probably get a few PhDs just by studying the signalling mechanism across the neuron membrane). I'm guessing this because for example Figure 22 looks suspiciously like a circuit diagram.

For example, one wouldn't expect an EE/Physicist (the professors) who works on designing MOSFETs (neuron transmitters) to be able to draw a wiring diagram (neurons) that the MOSFETs would be used in, even though that EE/Physicist might be called a chip designer.

Of course, a simpler answer is that professors are busier than undergrads so they just put less time and effort into drawing these diagrams. So Occam's Razor?
Median is more informative than the mean with this sort of thing
Why would Amazon or Google adopt such a system
I could imagine laws requiring that personal data be controlled by the subjects.

it would likely be difficult to use, insecure...
Who says? How can you assume this?

and offer no clear benefits
Some would consider the ability to keep your information private at will a benefit. Others would consider the ability to sell said information a benefit.

the lack of scale would make it even harder to do anything interesting
Lack of scale? An individual's data would be controlled by that individual, but the system would scale across all of humanity. I don't think you're thinking big enough -- I'm not talking about each person running his personal EC2.
What about when the socioeconomic game is rigged against you and has been for most of the last 400 years of American history?

I mean, yeah, poverty is without question a factor--but stopping there feels disingenuous to me. Why are they poor? is then a relevant question, and I think that "because of the racism of old white men" is not the worst explanation I've heard.
This so called "bus factor" has always bugged me. Documentation is good, but talk of untimely death by bus is silly.

The reference to untimely death by bus strike is an example of macabre geek humour; not a serious suggestion that the greatest threat to developers is posed by motorized mass transportation.

Most often developers leave projects -- and especially open source projects -- for far more banal reasons: They move to a different position and don't have the time or inclination to continue maintaining their old code.
Not VanillAE - Scrumptious boilerplate for App Engine
SEO agencies are dying and so are SEO "experts", it's an industry that is now 95% bullshit. There was a time when optimizing worked because site structure and content was very poor. This is no longer the case, the web has evolved and most sites are already SEO "friendly" right out of the box.

It's such simple stuff that no expertise is typically required. Google is essentially emulating the end user, so cater to the user instead of chasing Google's tail. It's Google's job to figure out what the good content and relevant links are, literally and financially, so plan for the long term and let them figure it out.

ps. There are some markets such as large e-commerce/products/multi-location/etc that do need expertise especially if they messed it all up, but most consulting consists of "make friendly urls" and "write good content that people actually want to see".
This is quite bad. I have uninstalled FB app and will no longer be using it till this is fixed.

Also uninstalled WhatsApp!
As someone trying to get into freelancing out of college, it really blows without a portfolio, and can take years to make one, and most of my freelancer friends left 9-5 (more like 6-10) jobs in the industry to do freelance, and used their years of experience and connections from the job as a jumping off point.
Can someone explain to me his rationale for having websites mailed to himself?
You can build a log historgramme, too.
I'm lost, your father was involved?
That was actually my mistake, sorry! It was in fact median, not mean.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...
A professor of mine was fond of pointing out that the textbook images of neurons were all of rat neurons. Many human cortical neurons have a structure called an apical dendrite which isn't depicted in undergraduate neuroscience textbooks. He was really obsessed with those apical dendrites.
I didn't see it as creativity either. Professors who have probably had to draw a lot of neurons over the years have naturally developed a symbolic representation of the object, which is common in many fields.
RMS is legendary for not getting up before the crack of noon. "Breakfast" is for "mornings". he has neither.
3.30am, Turkish capital. Hundreds of university students left their dormitories, passing through the working class neighborhood to join other protestors in front of the parliament building.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...!
I don't know that there is any need to be so dramatic. "Key developer gets a new job" is pretty much the exact same contingency plan.
My prayers go out to the family and his colleagues. I was just watching the Kickstarter video about Oculus yesterday.
> If it weren't for some sense of pride, things would never be fixed.

I tend to think that those with the most outward expressions of that pride don't want things fixed.
Basically you just go to the 300k option and click the up arrow to the left.
If they've already got the job offer, it wouldn't be all that different from what we have now as far as competitiveness for your job.
http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/

https://www.pwdhash.com/
As someone with a strong background in Biology who took several AI classes at an Ivy League school, I found many of my CS professors models oversimplified neurons to absurd levels.

Teaching CS students to use perceptron that can't even change its own behavior is like teaching MechEs to built rockets out of Legos. Sure you can do some cool things with them, but the sooner you move on, the sooner you can make some real progress.

After 2 AI winters, I'm happy to see that many schools like Berkeley are finally starting to combine their neuroscience and AI labs.
So how do you handle slow clients? since Heroku doesn't do any caching and Unicorn is designed to server fast clients only.
The best evidence we have so far indicates that this is a very bad idea.

Do we have evidence that indicates the alternative is any better? There's nothing that says both options can't be terrible.
Yes, it's hard to maintain free healthcare and free education like in Northern or Western Europo when Greeks pay little or no tax.

As I understand it unemployed Greeks receive free health care for up to one year. After that period, patients must pay for their own treatment. That's still more than many places in the US.

The fact that public education is (often?) so bad that private tutor schools are needed to enter university doesn't change the fact that education is mostly free in Greece.
"Oh developers are in such high demand! Everyone come to the Bay!"

"Whatever. Just tell me your offer."

"Really? No wonder you think there's a talent shortage."

Hacker News is somewhat prey to its own delusions.
There has got to be a better way. Here in AZ they have limited this due to accidents and death of innocent bystanders. Maybe there is a way to pin the car and catch them more silently, with all the tech we have maybe the cops can get some sort of GPS/trackable weapon. Of course they have to be close enough or have it already installed. Either that or a better notification system where vehicles may be so people in that area are on the lookout and the road clears almost like the O.J. chase.
Not necessary. Engineers are usually smarter to not to think that way.
Is this page a substitute for a facebook profile? :-)
God bless RMS!
Same here. I typed in a word and kept typing without numbers until it registered from very weak to strong. But a simple brute force would make short work of such a "source" password.
It's a reaction to the observation that the most valuable immigrants, the ones that we want most, have options elsewhere and are going elsewhere. So, shouldn't we lower the barriers to entice said valuable immigrants?

College-educated is just an easy metric to approximate this distinction.
I suppose the difference here is that there is no password file, like with KeePass. You are re-generating all your passwords with the knowledge in your head.
I'm Turkish. Let me try to shed some light on what's going on.

What started as a small protest to prevent the demolishing of a park to build a mall on it turned into full-blown riots after some stunning displays of brutality by the police. The commentators are saying that the Turks had lots of pent-up anger over the years and this allowed them to let it all out. The result is the largest series of riots Turkey has seen in recent years. At least in my lifetime, and I'm 28. I don't live there right now, but my Facebook feed is full of updates from friends and sometimes it moves faster than I can follow. There's lots of people, especially in Istanbul and the capital city of Ankara, but also in others including Izmir, Bursa, Antalya and my hometown, Adana.

And it means fuck-all.

People on the Internet - Reddit, especially - are sensationalizing the hell out of it and blowing it out of proportion, saying the government is about to fall. The reality? The government has not even acknowledged what is going on. Prime Minister Erdogan probably received some updates from his staff and then went to bed. He must be up now having his breakfast. He knows his regime is not in any danger, especially since he gutted the military over the past decade. The irony is that those same people who cheered his efforts to eliminate the military's influence in politics (saying it's "undemocratic") are the ones who are protesting on the streets now. I want to ask them, "how does it feel when you destroy your own insurance against fascism, idiots?" But it doesn't really matter. Hindsight is 20/20.

I certainly hope I'm wrong. But regardless of what happens, I know one thing: if there's a Hell, Erdogan will burn in it.
Ah yes, engineers, we so smart! Gimme a secret smart-club handshake. No way we'd fall victim to something so silly as that.
This is really sad and a great loss to the community over in Santa Monica. With this sort of thing happening so infrequently in tech, it makes events like these all the more of a loss, for our entire industry.

Condolences to the family and Oculus team.
That's a very interesting concept
Passwords produced are only ten or eleven characters long - pretty good, but they could be longer.

Edit: A recent Ars Technica article[1] suggests an 11-character minimum. Ending with 0 or ! like this doesn't really add a whole character to the search space.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-mi...
Your first sentence is deeply meaningful.

The rest is all gunk -- it's basically his equivalent of his Facebook friends list.
You might think the line is dated and artificial, but so long as that line determines where taxes go, it does matter.
Keeping Your Latchkey Kid Safe
> Edit 2: Honest question, how can I delete my account on HN?

In your profile settings, you will find two boxes marked "maxvisit" and "minaway". If you set those to a small value (like 1) and a large value (like say 602430), and then ALSO set "noprocrast" to "yes", you'll basically be unable to use your account.
Media is censoring the events. Only information channel is twitter. Right now , on the bosphorus bridge that connects asia and europe: https://twitter.com/tunaarman1/status/340667624432205825
95% agree with exactly this. I am more or less done with consulting personally for this reason. In fact as of last month I actively quit my consulting job and moved to South East Asia to work on development and start up ideas full time without any distractions and without crazy living costs.

I can't remember the exact link at the moment but I remember reading something from patio11 where he was saying that the reality is that unless you have absolute mega $$$ to spend then every SEO you can afford is going to give you advice like the above because so much of the industry is based on bullshit and regurgitated blog posts that someone came across.

All of the good ones are already off doing their own thing or are simply out of your price range.

The one thing I do disagree with is that there is no longer advice that goes beyond the level that you just described. Believe me when you get to a certain level of this it goes way beyond that. Go and ask 90% of SEOs how to map out the ideal IA of a large dynamic website for example.
Aside from fashion, I think a tie generally reminds people of their own posture. I'm prone to some heavy slouching day in and day out but a tie quite literally keeps me straight (a bent tie feels... displeasing).
Dunno about listening devices, but certainly tracking devices: Remember this from a few years back - http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten - a guy retrieved all information his telco had on him under some kind of freedom of information laws, and he threw it all up online. Someone then took the data, mashed it up with his public tweets/posts and made this cool interactive map/visualisation showing exactly what he'd been up to.
The argument is that the police should never be involved in a high-speed chase because it threatens the safety of the general public and often ends in tragedy like this.
Huh. I thought he had a free-libre cell phone at some point.

Anyway, one can buy a throwaway cell phone in cash, and power it down when not in use, I thought. Like drug dealers do.

Still surveillable, but no more than any borrowed phone.
Summary in english

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...!
Algorithm predicts how popular a tweet will be
There are some absolute gems in this.
Not really. "Key developer gets a new job" means they are still available for you to ask questions to, get help locating passwords/keys from, and so forth. In the "key developer gets hit by bus" scenario, you don't have that luxury.

The idea isn't so much about being hit by a bus as "what would we do if a key contributor were to vanish off the face of the Earth with no notice or warning?" If the specific idea of the Death Bus seems too grim, feel free to replace it with another deus ex machina that would have the same effect (alien abduction, Christian rapture, surprise release of a new season of Firefly, etc.).
Where Are You in SoMo (Social-Mobile Marketing)?
It is possible, and it is done. I believe American law enforcement needs a warrant to do it.
I had the exact same thought! I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality [1] and Harry Potter and the Natural 20 [2], so at least I have an excuse.

[1] http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

[2] http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-N...
Beware the framing argument. If privacy advocates get stuck arguing about whether people "should" worry about terrorists, they are going to lose, because people do worry about terrorists. They've demonstrated it repeatedly in polls and elections.
I had an impression that Google/Microsoft provided much less compensations compared to those financial/HFT/etc.. shops on Wall St. or similar.
Dare I point out that his personal preferences in ties are the topic RMS spends the most amount of text on?
I think HN is excessively critical of Stallman, but to be fair, this is a thread about his personal preferences.
Genius or not, is he a misanthrope? Yes, he has a splendid list of cool things he's done, and he's a luminary.

But why compile a list of things that basically says, "I generally don't like people, the things most people do or have, or the silly rituals most people enjoy."

I can respect his opinions, but he comes across as very condescending...

That said, I do admire how much of a diehard he is about his beliefs. Not many people actually "walk the walk" when it comes to not owning a cell phone in today's age...
> a small protest to prevent the demolishing of a park to build a mall

isn't it just a tip of the iceberg of what's recently going on in Istanbul? resettlements, demolishions of old architecture to replace with commerce, etc. I remember a local complaining about it when I've been there 2 years ago, since then I've heard more and more about how they are destroying neighborhoods. shame, it's an amazing city.
Copy as Curl
I guess, no chance to request significant rise, right? Unless you move to other company.
Just because he wrote some code that was used so widely doesn't make him more significant than a janitor who cleans after you, or the "gang" member who was evading the brutal cops for a chance for his freedom. The sooner we realize people are equal because they're human fucking beings the greater hope for humanity to avoid its imminent demise.
"I refuse to own a tie" is a fact, not an opinion.
Much of the following discussion is an opinion.

He's not a "minimalist", he is a freedom activist. He believes ties impinge on freedom.

The passenger does not run the train software. The train owner can choose what kind of software they want to use. RMS's trains (of which he has none) do not run non-free software.

RMS has thought deeply through these issues for decades, you aren't going to discredit him with 5 minutes of snark.

> he seems to have a very negative view of almost all other people.

And yet he dedicates his life to improving theirs, even though he could easily accumulate a few million dollars and retire. I'll take enemies like him over friends to make an effort to personally attack strangers for having a principled lifestlye, any day.