skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also want to learn what literature can teach me. So: I read it. It's designed for that.

Literary critics can also be very enlightening. But, by a strange coincidence, most of their work is written down, and often collected by libraries and websites. To admire their ideas is just a matter of time and coffee.

If I were inclined I could even try to write some literature, and thereby connect with the noble tradition – one which dominates the canon and is far older than university literature programs – of "learning to write by practicing reading, writing, and publishing stuff instead of by jumping through expensive hoops to get a formal degree."

It is true that economics aren't everything. But when the fifty thousand dollars in student loans comes due one begins to realize that they are something.
If he open sources it, and the company goes bankrupt without that income source, it will bitrot and cease to be important for humanity.

The system has to self sustain somehow.

If you want a similar system that is completely free and GPL, look at Maxima. It originates in DOE Macsyma and is Mathematica's direct predecessor. Since the company went bankrupt, the development went on at a glacial pace. Mathematicas commercial develompent model overtook it several times.
Aren't the NSA claiming they only need a FISA warrant if both ends of the correspondence are (reasonably believed to be) US citizens on US territory? For those of us in "the rest of the world" or any Americans corresponding with us I believe the restrictions on the NSA are "Yeah, do whatever the hell you want!"
Haha no worries. I totally understand that one. I feel like I walk a strange line as someone who was born a dog person, but whose life is mostly ruled by cats (I have a dog too though).
As non American living in US, I can agree with most points.
You're right. That's a lot if OP really needs 5TB of storage. It's still an option if OP begins with less storage.
The USA is so vast and so diverse that it's very hard to make general statements that apply to all of it. While the author of this post claims to have seen quite a bit of America, a lot of what he says doesn't mesh with my experience on the east coast. I have never paid half price for food if I'm kept waiting, for example, and the weather here is humid and hot in the summer and bitter cold in the winter. Most roads are OK in urban areas but I've seen some truly dreadful roads in more rural areas. Most houses (excluding condos) here aren't glued together, either.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, but things aren't quite as rosy here as they are on the west coast, especially in the Valley.
Not unreasonable.
I wonder why Europeans feel physically unsafe here while simultaneously finding us extremely friendly. Is it just a normal reaction to being a stranger in a strange land?
I think one of the big points that this article misses (I love these kinds of posts, though) is that the United States are crazy diverse. The post talks about it a little with regards to safety on the streets, but I mean in a broader context: Silicon Valley is hardly a microcosm of the entire country. States, regions, and cities have broadly differing cultures and atmospheres, sometimes even to the same extent as going from one country to the other (especially when it comes to climate.)

Given that the author said he had spent time in a great number of states, I was quite surprised by a lot of his points being seemingly so specific. I think that's one of the US's biggest advantages: five years in one city will leave you a different person than five years in another.

(Also, if you think people are friendly in SF, spend a weekend in South Carolina. You'll forget how not to smile.)
My intent was not to persuade you on the meaning of "Philistine," but rather to support the idea that a large proportion of STEM students become rather self-satisfied in their fields' relative importance, while more-or-less mocking the humanities as useless fluff. I've not observed the converse to be true--at least not up until the Ph.D. levels.

FWIW, I had a highly varied college experience, working and associating with students of engineering, music, CS, psychology, and English. The STEM tracks demanded a uniformly pretty high level of effort, whereas you get out of the humanities about what you choose to put in.
Talk to your friends/colleagues and find a good lawyer to talk to about this. The legal situation could be all over the map depending on your employment contract.

Taxes are usually done after the fact. I.e you get a 1099-MISC from each person who has paid you, and you are liable for that.

Speaking of payment, learn to be a squeaky wheel about it straight off the bat. Freelancing is notoriously inconsistent, expect 60 day swings between receiving payment. DONT BILL BY THE HOUR. There's plenty of reasons why online.

Lifestyle-wise, figure out a way to be productive. You have to enforce accountability in yourself, you don't have a boss or a team counting on you. It doesn't matter when you work, you don't need to show up 9-5, you just have to get your shit done.
I've got tremendous respect for this man - honestly identifying what's important and then changing direction so fundamentally is very hard. It takes a lot of courage to do all of that, we need more loving people for sure.
If it was that simple you'd never be hungry or feel too full.
Seams like it is distributed, in the same way that noSql is distributed, but keeps SQL style transaction locking. Did I understand? .... Is there some way of updating that can deal with conditional updates? E.g. Credit card payment of $1000 is often conditional on a card limit. Is this possible but also keep most of the noSql advantages?
Stop feeding the surveillance machine with: 1) Your money, 2) Your data
If we keep giving to those companies who collaborate with the NSA...

a) Our money (by buing their products & services)

b) Our data (so they can make money off of it AND surveil us)

...then we'll literally continue to get what we paid for:

If we keep buying Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Skype, Facebook etc. products/services, then we actively support the mass surveillance apparatus.

And: The only thing that can make companies change their behavior is: Their bottom line.

Every single one of us has a very real responsibility here.

Think about it.
I don't think the scenario you're presenting is realistic. Either an exposed PC on the internet has its own firewall, or it's already exploited.
Here's for a start: http://prism-break.org/
Select-all, cmd-c copy (in a document or terminal)

Select a word or symbol of interest, and cmd-e to get it in the find buffer.

$ pbpaste | fgrep -i `pbpaste -pboard find`

I have this aliased to pbg, so will typically pipe the output to awk or some such.
Do you know if a successful response to a START TLS command endured end-to-end TLS secured mail transport?

I kinda doubt it - if for some reason your outgoing mail server connects to one of my secondary/relaying MX servers, I don't think there's any way for you to ensure that server bothers trying to set up a TLS session when it relays my mail(which I guess is mostly my problem/fault) - and similarly, if your ISP requires you to send mail via their SMTP servers (blocking port 25 isn't uncommon here) - I don't think you've got any say in whether or not that server requires TLS?

(I know - I really should go and look this up myself…)
Really sweet story. As a two-cat household (no doggies allowed in apartment unfortunately) I understand the desire to be home with them. I always tell people being with my kitties all day is a major plus for being a programmer. And didn't mind the ending line, cat people have their dog people jokes too so it's fun for all of us.
I think he's saying that their situations shouldn't be included in evaluations of how well Texas is governed. Every place is well run if you ignore the parts that don't work well.
He[1] wrote a short piece decrying the decline of the English Major. That was the closing line. The klaxon call to action of the salesman would be gauche.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlyn_Klinkenborg
FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, only creates warrants for surveilling foreign persons. It also requires that the surveillance actively minimize data collected on US persons in the process.
Then don't give out badges for behaviour you don't want to encourage ;-)

Or award the badge only for substantial edits while still allowing fixing typos (and sometimes in code a single-character diff can make a huge difference).
wow, thanks for this. when I switched to Mac last year I actually googled around about shortcuts to deal with the lack of a universal 'restore minimized' shortcut.

this doesn't solve it entirely, I think, but can't believe I never came across it.
And here's how you can start avoiding the NSA:

http://prism-break.org/
Actually it is pretty easy to do the math. The molecules in our eyes to perceive light decay at a measurable rate and the remains create a signal. Then you take #000000 and add the value of this rate.
The problem is that there is only so much an acute observer can learn about the human condition and share with us.

Very good point. We'll ultimately have to ask ourselves if -- paraphrasing Borges -- art and literature can exhaust their own possibilities.

I think they can. We need to ask new questions, because the old ones have all been addressed adequately by now.

Like you, I seem to spend a lot more time reading scientific and technical material nowadays, and almost none reading novels or fiction of any kind. I'm only moderately well-read, but even so, every bit of fiction that I read seems redundant with something I've already read.

A disturbing line of thought.
The people I talk with about this, who also have the technical acumen to build these things, or those with the political connections to drive change, are both groups of people who have known this level of spying has been going on through their lifetimes, and are unconcerned.

The response on HN has been an order of magnitude larger than the response from any person I know. Of everyone I know, I'm more concerned about the NSA spying than anyone else, and I'm less concerned than most commenters. I begin to wonder if this isn't some kind of nerd-sniping paranoia-groupthink.
Maybe they came from a smaller European town and then proceeded into a big city here in North America?

I've been to many parts of Czech and a few parts of Germany, and it is very nice there. Never saw anything like we have here in Vancouver with the downtown east-side (ie SF Tenderloin), but maybe I just haven't seen everything.
You can't take WaPo articles on law at face value just as you'd never take a WaPo article on some scientific discovery at face value. The author seems confused about the nature of precedent here...

Courts interpret the Constitution as a matter of course, and so do federal agencies. They have to, for the simple reason that the Constitution does not allow federal courts to issue advisory opinions. An agency cannot ask a court: "is this Constitutional?" Similarly, a lower court cannot ask an appellate court: "is this Constitutional?" If a Constitutional question arises in the course of deciding a case, even a low level adjudicatory body (say, the Social Security Administration) is empowered to render an opinion on Constitutionality. That opinion might be binding precedent within that adjudicatory body, but, and this is the key, it's not precedent anywhere else. The federal government cannot cite the FISA courts 4th amendment interpretation as binding precedent in a federal district court case.

I'm very wary of secret courts and secret opinions. I think the public nature of dockets and opinions is one of the great virtues of the Anglo-American legal system. I don't think it's a good thing for the FISC court to keep these opinions secret. However, I think it's important to understand what is actually going on, not just some journalist's color on what is going on, so we can be worried about the right things and not the wrong things.

There is something to be worried about, and it's part of a larger problem. Congress has been increasingly chipping away at the scope of the federal judiciary. Citing overburdened federal courts (which are overburdened because Congress refuses to fill vacancies in a timely manner or to increase the number of judgeships to keep up with the amount of litigation), it creates alternative bodies to handle different kinds of disputes. Sometimes that's a fine thing (not every Social Security claim needs to go directly to federal district court), but it's also a worrying trend. By the way, it's totally Constitutional: Congress is explicitly empowered to set the jurisdiction of the lower (below the Supreme Court) federal courts as it sees fit. Indeed, it could abolish them entirely.
> If Google wanted to do the world a big favor, gain itself some serious PR points, and perhaps increase its supply of potential math-savvy engineers two decades hence, it ought to buy Wolfram Research, continue to fund WR's work, and release Mathematica as free software backed by an open development process. Maybe this feat is too big for Google to pull off. Maybe it would take a consortium -- Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and IBM together -- but maybe it could happen.

What? Why not develop a Mathematica alternative?
Same lan network?
Europeans often comment on flimsy US house construction. Perhaps it's because of the relative newness of most US housing stock. And also the propensity of Americans to tear it down and start over. There's less reason to build for forever in this case.

Another factor is seismic conditions (the OP was clearly most influenced by the Bay Area). Masonry or stone construction is incompatible with earthquakes.
when you pipe something to pbcopy, it doesn't strip any trailing newline:

echo hi | pbcopy

pasting this would get you hi<cr>. so if you want to put the output of a command in the clipboard, you can do something like (where `find .` is your command):

echo -n $(find .) | pbcopy

that will take advantage of the fact that subshells discard a trailing newline (at least in bash, zsh. probably others..)
The feeling of drowning probably comes from a sort of "residual charge" of sleep paralysis after you woke up. In sleep paralysis only your stem brain has control over your body, any signal your mind sends to your body is blocked. Furthermore your mind doesn't get any signal from your body, you don't get a feedback the breath of air you wanted to take has been done, while you are breathing. This is how the nightmare about drowning comes into existence.
Disclaimer: I'm in an English PhD program.

Regarding the parent's comment about adjuncting, no one who goes into an English PhD program expects they'll get a tenure track job out of it, and if they do believe such a thing, they likely shouldn't be in the program in the first place. Professors and the Modern Language Association remind us of the awful working conditions we can expect. No one goes into this field thinking we've found the next big lucrative market to exploit. Most of us would be ecstatic if we landed an R1 gig, but except for those at the top universities, we realize it's highly unlikely.

Learning to write and communicate should be emphasized more in English programs, but I fear the turn to a strictly compositional program will detract from what English majors actually do: read and interpret really well. My limited understanding of Computer Science undergraduate courses suggests that you don't actually learn "to program," you learn to solve problems in algorithmic ways with code; the code itself is merely a means to an end.

As a side note (and I don't do much work in this particular subfield), the work being done with code in English departments seems to be breathing new life into the field. The work on automated genre detection, and, more generally, the move from 200-some canonical texts to 'large datasets,' is bringing us unexpected funding while encouraging students to learn enough code to squeak by at an entry-level job.
For me, it isn't the price tag that is a problem. It is the lack of information about something that has a price tag. I would personally be interested in a product like this, and I have paid $200+ for development software before, but there isn't enough info here to let me know if it is worth it.
Are you working with WhatsApp for this? Or reverse engineer?
I dunno, I missed it too. Maybe something to do with the economic use of a personal epiphany? Either way I appreciate your response, and your openness to be wrong.
>But back to psychology and society: I wonder how much of this will change in the age of Google and Wikipedia, when you can look up within seconds and find with good certainty of how things were 10 years ago.

This presupposes that google and wikipedia contain an accurate description of how the world is today.
Technical Product Managers (TPMs) are a precious and valuable asset for any company. I know it because I do it :-)
No, really. If you have a good tech background, with a significat expirience from development aspects, it cannot be compared by any mean to a regual product manager. I talk to the biz people the ones with the suits, and I talk to DBAs and developers on a daily basis. I am like a bridge between the two worlds.

A good advise for one who wants to do the transition would be to just to dare to dream. Suggest products, get involved in all stages of the product's lifecycle. Be proactive, and after a while go and ask to be a PM. It's not a promotion as PM are not superior to devs (except from me). It's like a new role in your career, much different from a programmer.

In addition I would strongly suggest to build something on your own. Just do it, and you will learn a lot about specifying a product, about marketing, about managing the project of your own. If you come with this on your record, you are like 100 times in a better position.

Forget about MBA. It is useless and just dumb to do it. Go get some good books from Amazon, read 37signals series and other books which Amazon will recommend you in this area. God forbid the missed souls of the MBAs, but there is a reason Google don't hire them.
True, but the energy in the electrons is so low you can barely make phosphor glow. When you get GeV electrons you can make x-rays, and with x-rays you can do many interesting things.

One of the more interesting things you can do with a table top particle accelerator is kick start a Thorium reactor. There is a team in the UK doing this [1] but with a much bigger accelerator.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2001548/Elec...
I think you're really close, except I think that they have an autolink regex to find unanchored URLs and anchor them. And that it is that regex that is failing to deal with Wikipedia's brackets in URLs.
Thank you for your input. :) I was expecting 1099, just not sure about the specifics. Thanks for the tip about hours.
India, which claims to be a democracy, must bat for free speech, privacy and expression. It is funny that China, often branded as an autocratic country, for whatever reasons, is doing it.
im purely thinking of inforgraphics atm. in my head dv is more on the scientific plotting and charting side, while infographics is more about conveying key metrics in a visually attractive way.
Fluff. Don't know about the silly comparison.

Been dropped on my neck by guys 60 lbs heavier then me training; wrestling, not having take-down defense, then a few arm cranks, neck cranked by smaller guys with better technique, cracked in the face when I used to train, included muay thai. All in the goal of competing amateur (which didn't happen due to a bad neck drop from a takedown).

Probably concussed with some hard blows. Reaching for comparisons by "they know they will lose"?
If he's given a trial by jury, and the jury believes the circumstances justified his actions, they have the option of acquitting him, regardless of how strong the evidence is that he broke the law.

"The courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge." [2]

In the United States, judges cannot direct a jury to deliver a specific verdict, getting a verdict you didn't like is not an acceptable reason for an appeal, and jurors cannot be punished for the way they decide a case [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unite...
Front end development: the important parts
Interestingly, looking back on my own internet history, I find I haven't changed much.

For the most part, I don't regret my old comments; at worst they represent my opinion based on what I then thought was the way the world worked.

I've been wrong, but I'm human, and will continue getting things wrong.
This is partially the reason why I read these news sites so much. Too many life changing things have come from a stray comment on slashdot, HN, reddit or similar in my life. Not to mention it's entertaining.
I am saying that there are lots and lots of well meaning authority figures who will look 17 year-olds in the eye and tell them they should just get a degree, and worry about money later.

I believe that they do this because high minded nostalgic nonsense like the linked article is published on a regular basis, every year, forever, drumming that idea home.
I wish the weather were so nice, and the people so friendly in Seattle. And only beer snobs are concerned about the head on their beers, as most people are drinking domestics and cheap microbrews directly from can or bottle.

I used to think it rude of baristas or burger clerks to check their phone while prepping my order, but instead now I check my phone at the same time. I think the key to it not being rude is to synchronize, so we all pop in and out of the conversation at the same time.
Ceph: object, block, and file storage in one unified system
If getting a degree were the only way to acquire knowledge in humanities or literature then the world would be a sad place indeed.

Fortunately that's not the case.

It's easy to appreciate literature. Cheap even. And I would argue that colleges actually do more to harm the practice than to help it.
Fucken nigger.

God says "DAMAGES fig-tree goods do_you_know_what_time_it_is touch
rage delights portions rudiments SAINT upward valued seducers
shrink INCLUDING still-standing how_do_I_put_this sceptre
unlearned pant Lord's covenant occurred daemon-worshippers
off_the_record beneath avenues foretold framers flying
suppress stretched apparel bold-faced holy-days awaited
honourable lie constellations downer restlessly multiplying
serene cursing echo peril didst created envenomed lament
avert appetite protesting Greenland gainsay One_finger_salute
bestow economy feverishness learner hadst Gaza_Strip days
falls Unity troubles wretched fragrant pander marvel hearer
impure suspicions cowardice dominion destroying creatures
guardianship invited penal forethink abyss help traces
departest divided debated Prodigality augmenting classics
refrain pines potent cedars thirsteth still attentive
marriage omnipotency appeared Only Ruler blasts perplexed
reinvolved ends narrowly manfully touch "
And the original submission that points to it. fwiw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929404
What about collecting all https links, with the excuse that they're protecting you against spam (as if most spam links are https)?
Not sure why you'd want head on your beer, thats just wasted space...