skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At this point it's hard to believe anything anyone says. Perhaps Nadler was threatened or blackmailed.

Or maybe I've been watching too much House of Cards.
Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort.

As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.
That's exactly the problem, that the NSA has legal authorization to do this.

Jon Oliver had a perfect rebuttal to this statement the other night on "The Daily Show" which I will recite below:

"Mr. President, no one is saying you broke any laws. We're just saying it's a little bit weird you didn't have to." -Jon Oliver
I hope you're right! Cory Doctorow suggests the main problem for writers is obscurity not intellectual property theft and I think the same can be said about about traders. By the time we get successful enough for people to take notice so that the weight of money destroys the initial edge,, well I think that's a pretty happy place to find yourself. The trick is to find the next edge by then.
What we're really banking on is that an open-source approach can obtain results way beyond what you can do initially in walled-off closed-minded intellectual property cubby holes. And then, that the economics of being involved in the open-source project contnue to be biased towards collaboration as opposed to cutting and running with a snapshot. The value isn't in the code - it's in the process that produces and continues to innovate the code.
What about user exploitation... when are you going to combat that?
I'm sure OP already thought of that. Thanks, though, for your truly insightful suggestion. I'm sure you'll go far if you ever look for employment in a position that doesn't require you to state the obvious.
yeah

to cut straight to the chase

a special administrative region of the people's republic of china is actually more free than the USA.
Write a paper. Get it published. Easiest places are IEEE or ArVix.
There is no leftover pile of money. SCO's only "asset" is their interest in this lawsuit, and the fact that their lawyers are on the hook to ligitate it for them all the way to the Supreme Court (in the highly unlikely event that it goes that far), for no more cost to SCO.
Of course they don't listen to the recordings. They convert them to text and read them on the toilet. Or even better run them through the world's most powerful scanning software and extract useful tidbits to be examined later. The government saying they don't sit there with an old rotary phone and listen in, like some kind of 30's FBI G-man, is rather insulting.
Publications may help - and as folks like duked mentioned, there are some jobs that are actually "We'd really rather prefer a PhD but we might be able to swing it for the right person".

But honestly, if they mean PhD required? Odds are the answer is get a PhD. It's not just that its an exposure to the field thing, though that's part of it. A PhD is equal parts credentializing, expertise building and a cultural thing. It's possible that they need a PhD for things like competing for grants, and even if they don't, it's likely going to be an odd cultural fit.
I've been referring to the Django source nearly as much as the docs lately, and it's actually very pleasant to "unmask the magician", as it were.
The first bit is important: What people imagine a PhD is, and what a PhD actually is, are often disjoint. "Really, really likes the subject, and reads a lot" is necessary but not sufficient.
NZ is better than US, UK, Canada, or AU.
Presumably Americans don't care that much about Internet surveillance, given the representatives they have elected and the big giant "meh" that has come everytime an NSA or FBI story about aforementioned surveillance has been leaked.

Which is more risky for police state purposes, a PRISM system that requires at least corporate legal review for specific individuals, or a system that would tap into all Internet traffic?

Now, which of those have we known about for a longer time?
Snark aside, I think that is the 100% correct answer. It's unlikely the job actually requires a phd, they probably just need someone with skills equivalent to those of a phd holder.
HN has been especially frustrating for the last 2 weeks.

Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?
I'm not sure I'd really consider arXiv to be "published" in the peer-reviewed sense - it's a preprint service, and while that can attract attention, you need to get it in a genuine journal/conference (depending on your field as to which is the bigger deal).

Also, outside CS/Physics/Math, be aware that standards differ, and arXiv is often met with "...what?"
Overall, SF makes me feel like the standard of living for developers is really going down, not up. For all that the startup culture has produced, it has also encouraged lots of people to basically save no money and significantly reduce their living standards all for the sake of "doing a startup." I'm always shocked to hear so many stories of people living in near poverty to work on a startup idea which is, in total honesty, far from amazing.

I don't mean to come off the wrong way or as judgmental. But when I think of a software developer in SF, I don't think of someone with a nice house with a backyard. I think of someone in a cramped apartment, probably with roommates.
Mandarin is not widely spoken in Hong Kong-- locals speak Cantonese and Mandarin was not taught in school while HK was under British rule.
Bear in mind that the President is sworn to execute the laws, not modify them. The appropriate target of people's ire is Congress.
It isn't fair that activists are held to higher standard, but it is true. If you want to change the world, the world expects more of you. This isn't new. Occupy Wall Street may have had a point, but they allowed themselves to be marginalized due to more superficial aspects of the movement.

If Snowden had been "crucified on a hill near Washington" (or even just stayed anonymous), it wouldn't have ended the NSA's spying but it would have definitely added force to his message. Focusing on his means may be a deflection, but he is somewhat responsible for allowing the deflection being as compelling as it is.
....fudge....
Please, somebody - who knows the URL (or the HN post) wherein the guy (IIRC, a lawyer) states the 10 things the government will do to reduce the fallout from this? I'm totally freaked out because the guy was right, down to the last step, so far. One of them was, "They'll admit to something not as bad" (as a method of deflection - and think about it, most people view "listening" as something that won't affect them directly, unless the NSA hired about 250k more employees just for this task), one of them was that the government will say they were within the law (which is contradictory, of course) - happened here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/16/u-s-government-denies-repor... and 2 more of the steps happened in the past few days. I want to find that article, so I can spread it to everyone know I know (about 10 people :)

Thanks
orokusaki
You'd have to be naive to think that every nation actually follows such laws. If they did, most jobs that intelligence agencies are supposed to conduct would be impossible.
4Chan's Time/sleep sort is beautiful
I'm with you - most of the units in my course could be passed by simply memorising formula and procedure.

I had a conversation with a final year electrical engineer with a high distinction average who had no idea what a relay was or how it was used, or how you'd power a motor from a microcontroller - something I'd expect high school level electronics students to know. He's great at calculations and exams, follows lab manuals and gets good grades, but (imho) would make a poor practicing engineer.
It's not obvious that applying for a job you're "underqualified" for is ever a good idea. But, it's a good way to start.
China doesn't have a huge problem with birth rate now. It just has a huge population.
> point 1)

I remember what a doubly linked list is but I wouldn't remember C well enough to pass the test. Does that make me a bad programmer?

> point 2)

Depending on the position, this might or might not matter. If you are modeling high level concepts in functional languages for example, does it really matter if you don't know what a logic gate is or how processes are scheduled?

> point 3)

Agreed.

I would say whatever questions you chose, it will only filter out for a certain type of programmer. Your questions are most likely targeted at C/C++ systems programmers.
Google is actually the NSA.
This shouldn't be a concern to countries because if they are in any way competent, they'd be securing their channels of communication regardless.
Kim Dotcom's Napkin Calculations on Cost of Surveillance Data Storage
Source: Dotcom's Twitter feed @KimDotcom (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom)

Despite what you might think of him, these calculations are interesting: obviously Dotcom's got a lot of experience in the data storage space. If he's right, it's incredibly cheap - little wonder it's tempting for the authorities. Anyone got views on these figures?

/// Tweet 1
"Pay attention to my next two #NSA tweets! They will blow your mind. This is based on my own research & analyzing public data."

/// Tweet 2
#NSA spy cloud has 40+M hard drives & 150 exabyte of capacity. Enough to store all (US networked) emails, sms, calls & chats for 38000 days.

/// Tweet 3
The #NSA stores daily: 10B emails 500TB + 3B sms 500GB + 5B chatmsgs 1TB + 1.8B calls 2PB + misc 1PB at a daily cost of USD 550,000. CHEAP!

/// Tweet 4
The cost of a single F-35 U.S. fighter jet is equivalent to 278 days of total #NSA surveillance storage cost, capturing EVERYTHING.
So how many customers did Zamfoo have? It looks like it's being managed by one person, who apparently doesn't have a great software dev environment...which means maintaining and improving the codebase on his own must have been a Herculean feat. Have to give him props for making it this far...
FWIW, I won't bother with anybody in my life that requires a degree for anything, even teaching. Having a degree for something is, IMHO, no better than having a JD Power & Associates award, which is not very valuable. Now, are there countless people with PhDs who are terrific and very intelligent? Yes. Are they terrific and very intelligent because they received degrees? No, and furthermore, they'll probably achieve less than their drop-out counterparts (e.g., Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) or their "bad student" counterparts (e.g., Albert Einstein). Even Napoleon Bonaparte dropped out of Berkley at age 22... just making sure you were paying attention :)
Aircraft Boarding Is A Microcosm Of A Broken Industry
4 Ways to be a Great Dad & Entrepreneur
AT&T was planning to connect every home in America with fiber by the year 2000. Then they were broken up and the project was impossible to complete. The current AT&T is nothing like the old one. It's not even fair to compare them
if people thought Beijing was polluted, wait till this happens. It will be a permanent fog/smog cloud hovering indefinitely over this plane. If the focus is on making sure that there are long term "green" goals of making sure people use human-powered transportation w/ large public transit systems like subways, trains, bussing systems, then there is potential for this to happen and be maintainable. Generally speaking the Chinese have done much better than than Indians have with their supposed democracy in moving their economy along. India on the other hand has been a general failure, especially in raising the general population into a better life-cycle. If china does this, and is successful, it will be a foundation for other large countries to follow.

I'm presuming they are doing something good, and not considering all the cons that will ensue.
In other words, do what you love and do it well, and don't ever let "papers, please" get in your way.
Ya, I think parent hasn't been to DC before.
I did not get it.
Hacking the virtualised world
An awful lot of computer vision PhD's are going to have to spend an awful lot of time looking at and watching child porn to develop this system.
Facebook Made Me Do It
Do you think that Chinese are that stupid? They all know their wealthy elite send kids and wife to the US, why would they do that if China was better?
Mmm, can't agree with you there. There are significant, noticeable differences between American accents. Boston, NYC, Western PA, the South, Texas, Midwest, and California all have very obvious differences, on par with the difference between Cockney and other UK dialects.
Jay-Z's new album dropping as an app on Google Play
UoW has an atrocious ranking for engineering so I'm not surprised.
I can't speak much to AngularJS, I've never used it in a project and only spent a few hours playing with the demos. Even if I had, making single one line knocks at either framework is not going to convince anyone of the others value.

That said, I have a pretty large Ember app, I adopted Ember for my app when it was known as SproutCore 2 (before AngularJS was known). Both my app and Ember have gone through a very long, very painful maturing process. But it's finally in a really good place. Ember's patterns are the result of months (years really) of spinning, cycling, iterating and collaborating with developers using the framework. Seeing the process of evolution and open collaboration unfold in the community is just as exciting and thrilling as the state of the framework it's self.

My advice is to try them both and decide for yourself. The only thing I'd ask is please don't assume one is easier or better than the other with only a few hours of use. If you're planning to build a sizable app, please take the time to evaluate them both thoroughly and decide what's best for you.
There's an auto-patcher utility[1] they've developed--you basically give it your ROM file and specify the patch, and it'll generate an update file you can flash to enable it (as well another file you can flash to remove it).

There's also a utility mentioned on that page that provides a GUI for Windows that will automatically download patches and run the auto-patcher[2].

It's definitely not easy yet, but it's not too difficult to get through if you're used to this sort of thing.

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1719408

[2] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=31648393
It's already the law in Nevada; NRS 465.075  "Use or possession of device to obtain advantage at playing game in licensed gaming establishment"

http://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-465.html#NRS465Sec075
I like the choice and fear the graphic `simulacrum<1>' of the those otherwise real Matrix/Stuxnet metadata hunter-killers.

<1>SIMULACRUM (simulacra): Something that replaces reality with its representation.
"....the derealization of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality"
I feel the same way and it drives me nuts. When I bring this up many people flatout disagree: they either say that the new buildings will be just as expensive, or (in the bay area) complain about earthquakes. It's a very pressing issue really exacerbating the effects of income inequality, and the saddest part is how self-imposed it is.

This whole thing ordeal really makes me wish for mandatory economics courses: this is one of the simplest, clearest cases of supply and demand, but it's so rarely perceived as such.
You're not "that guy". The onslaught of political stories about NSA surveillance is so severe that the people who'd normally be piping up alongside you have given up.
My sister used to work for a loan modification company. The BoA horror stories were the worst.
Such as? Does it skip over K-maps or something?
Knockout is only about data binding as far as I know, whereas Angular and Ember are full stack SPA frameworks. Also, while I'm a knockout fan, dealing with observables is not ideal when compared with plain old javascript objects that Angular allows you to bind with.
Note that Cyanogen Mod has previously rejected features that would cost Google ad revenue because they don't want to anger Google.
> The Chinese government is worried, saying that the problem could affect social stability, and it has ordered schools, government agencies and state-owned enterprises to hire more graduates at least temporarily to help relieve joblessness. “The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

Tough situation...subsidizing an excess middle class can't be great in the long term. But what's the alternative? Order people to go work in the fields?
> China can and does easily suppress dissent.

Why do you feel the need to add "easily"? It is not easy at all.

Some dissident like the artist Ai Weiwei recently are playing all the time with the sensitive nerves of the regime but he managed to make himself famous enough, and to never crosses the red line too far as to get "suppressed". For instance, there is this picture of him giving the finger to Mao in Tiananmen square, but it is labelled "art".

With these guys trying the system all the time and the highly reactive web sphere, suppressing dissent is far from an "easy" job.
You are drawing a distinction that does not legally exist.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Morrison fo examples of cases where a law was not directly prohibited by the Constitution, but part of it was still ruled unconstitutional because there was no argument from the Constitution granting Congress the authority to pass that law.

(In theory you could argue that it was prohibited under the 10th. But the arguments made by the court would apply regardless of the presence of the 10th.)
Write cover letters. I almost never read resumes. I read every cover letter.

Any hiring manager that says you shouldn't write cover letters is someone you should be suspicious of working for.
Most of the Django projects I've worked on, people tended to make their own admin panels with things like Bootstrap and Foundation. Django's core team have made their goals clear for the next admin, extensibility and adaptability. https://github.com/twoscoops/django-admin2
I have worked with e-book authors in creating systems to mitigate piracy of their books.

Even if you know who gave out the book that the pirates were able to get, it doesn't make them automatically guilty. In one case, the brother of a customer was the culprit... the author was actually surprised because from the looks of the evidence, it was someone who he trusted that "leaked" the book.

Sure, the person could have lied and blamed his brother, but the author trusted him enough to believe the story and accepted the apology from the brother.

Anything involving DRM starts to make things get hairy. I can understand the want of the authors to protect their contents that they worked hard on producing. But I also understand how the real customers don't like DRM. In the end, DRM was ditched and a subscription model was created. Both the author and the users were happy with that resolution.
Dude wants to build a space robot. That should be physics/cs/math.
It is painful to try to learn something when different articles all say how to do a hello world differently. It doesn't matter the reasons why, it is just harder. I get it now, but don't make it like it is easy for someone to learn.
It's not really a fair comparison for several reasons. Namely that to match Ember's functionality, you have to add several libraries to your AngularJS app. Eventually you'll reach the point where you've effectively got the same size in several libraries, as opposed to one. This is the same argument the Backbone guys use to make and it's stupid.

If you don't need that level of functionality, then fine, don't pick up the framework with a few extra KBs. But keep in mind that with any luck, your app will start to grow. When it does you'll need to scale and perhaps you'll discover there was value in using a more functional framework.
I had hoped from the headline that they would be doing something subtle, like replacing some capital "A"s with Greek "Alpha"s, or replacing a single-character "ü" with separate "u" and "combining umlaut". But visible changes that mess with, not just the text formatting, but the actual words of the text, are unacceptable.
Ask HN: Who advises your startup/consulting corp on finance and taxes?
I'm in the SF area and would love suggestions for somebody who can competently consult on things such as s-corp vs. llc fillings, write-offs due to travel, etc. I have a two person freelance consulting group.
Actually the shooter initially pled guilty. Dept. of Justice looked at these "questions" and concluded they are junk.

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/mlk/part2.php#over
You sound a bit defensive. The title of the post is "Building a Modern Computer from First Principles". It's a book; the author doesn't claim equivalence to a computer engineering degree. The areas of study you've listed are gaps a motivated student with appropriate background can fill through self-study or other means. Depending on your chosen career after graduation, you're likely to have some gaps of your own. I don't mean to compare your curriculum to the book, but to make the point that there is always more to learn.

As some of the responses have stated the book appears to (because I haven't read it, yet) motivate (i.e. motivate as professors do as part of the introduction to a course: why are we learning this? how may we apply this? what should we learn next?) topics the reader may want to study deeper.
If one is designing a whole server architecture from the ground up, it's possible to directly connect smart components directly, maybe even using different buses, to each other and have the main processor issue only high-level commands to the components themselves, mainframe style.

One of the things that plague x86 servers is that they are overgrown PCs. A machine designed to be a web or Samba server could be very different from a machine designed to run Windows, even if, from the application's point of view, it's just a regular server, with all the exotic stuff nicely hidden under the OS, within its device drivers.

It'll be fun to see what gets invented in this space.
> I remember what a doubly linked list is but I wouldn't remember C well enough to pass the test. Does that make me a bad programmer?

Unless the position was for a C role, Most people would accept psuedo code, or help you along with enough syntax to get you through.
This DRM actually changes the content by rewriting the text, not unlike Microsoft Word's grammer checker/corrector tool. I would be very surprised if publishers and authors would go for this. Clumsily changed sentences could ruin a good book.

I have always assumed that publishers embed an ID somewhere in the Mobi or EPub files (they are just HTML, you could insert all sorts of things that would never be displayed) since it is trivial to remove the DRM from them.
I think that they can't rack up debt because nobody in their right minds will lend them money. They will just pay less to existing creditors.
And another comment...

I've always wondered if companies like Apple, Google, etc do text watermarking of company-wide confidential emails. Everytime I see an e-mail in the full text posted to Techcrunch, I imagine someone just got busted...