skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I learned at college: physics, chemistry, optics, lots of heavy duty math - statistics, calculus, linear algebra, numeric computing, electrical engineering (analog and digital), how to write and publish, accounting, algorithms, a bit of management/business, and probably few other things I'm forgetting at the moment.

In my career I have done: computed cancer statistics for NIH, worked on a flight computer, done tons of avionics code, worked on a tank robot, computer vision, machine learning, and so on. Almost none of that would have been possible for me without at least a significant portion of the above skills. Chemistry comes in lowest, but it was still somewhat useful for the cancer stuff. And a tiny change in what jobs I had would have made the chemistry highly relevant (say, computational chemistry - tons of that going on around the beltway where I lived for a number of years). From here I can go most anywhere - finance quant jobs at 250K+, machine learning/big data, more computer vision, or what have you. You can .... write some more rails apps. If you are really good, sure, write the next rails, but I would say your options are far more limited than mine.

It's up to you and what you want to do, and what kind of potential you want to have available to you. University is not for learning a trade (by and large, medical school nonwithstanding); it's an opportunity to take in a lot of subjects at a depth you will never achieve on the job or part time (unless you have an ~170 IQ).

I'm sure people will post counterexamples to the above, and surely they exist; I argue simply that education == opportunity. If you have any kind of mind, 5 years of writing yet another rails app will start to bore you to tears. So, the question is, what will keep you from being bored? Inventing a new social app or such? Maybe school is less relevant. Taking on difficult intellectual challenges? It's pretty darn hard (not impossible, just very hard) to make your way without a strong math/science foundation. Also of note is how many people change their careers. Burn out in writing sw is pretty high. What skills will you have if in 5-10 years you want to be management, that CFO job starts to seem very interesting, and so on?

In short, I found my education exceptionally useful. You won't even be able to get an interview for many jobs, not because of snobbery (as is often claimed), but because there is no way you have the background to jump in and read original research in a new topic and deal with the math and algorithms in a sophisticated way. Only you can decide if that is of value to you or not.
Medical supplier marks up plastic rulers 1200%
If that's the takeaway you got from it, you probably needed the Twitter context to make sense of the point he was making. I suspect that's why he wrote it on G+ and not on CNet.

Or, maybe it was because his corporate overlords at CBS, where he is a political correspondent (spit!) would have had him skinned if he wrote it on their masthead.
Well, first, they aren't whistle-blowers:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/18/19024443-analysis....

That's fairly straightforward and it's getting tiresome hearing the term "whistle-blower", which is intended more for dog-food factory workers reporting the use of rotten horse meat, rather than people releasing gigantic, undifferentiated masses of state secrets.

Second, releasing data securely is so trivial that both of these guys must have had a specific reason for not doing so. I mean, a humanitarian impulse would have led them to use the dark net and other channels, but neither of these guys did so.

In Manning's case it could have been a simple matter of a personality disorder, which he clearly had:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/28/bradley-manning....

...in Snowden's case, being a sane, smart guy, he either thought he could get away with high crimes through a clever escape, or he was an agent for China, Russia, or even the NSA itself. There's no serious defense for either. And as has been said before, nothing that has been released is the least surprising to anyone paying attention.
For a fuller perspective on what my thoughts are on geek macho bullshit, you might care to read: http://bubs.co/if-you-ever-feel-alone-in-this (I agree that there is too much of it.)

And I should know better than to post any kind of general analogy as a way to illustrate a story here on HN with a bunch of smart people who'll punch holes in the technical impracticalities of such analogy... but yes, I took a negative word of "tired" and bent it to tell a story. Rest is important. Operating at 50% isn't good for the long haul.

I wasn't trying to suggest that being tired in a way that affects ongoing abilities to perform is a good thing. I just wanted to point out that if you just pop your head in to take a measurement of something, without the context of everything else going on, then that measurement might be off... ie, the investor seeing me as tired, without knowing it was because of the intensely productive and long week I had just come out of.
If you wanted to help your friends and family you would not work for murderers or their support staff. Helping friends and family means more than monetary income with walled gardens that consume the rest of society outside of it. It means furthering society, the health of it.

Go find a flower company or something, you can easily avoid work at SAIC or Boeing.
Hey, guess what? Someone called this into the police. I'm shocked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6144198
applied a bit go, never even heard back :)
Original w/o the non-value-add regurgitation: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2013/08/google-analytics-launc...
Interesting, didn't know that. I think some of the bad perception of Java/Flash pages is because most of them didn't access the DOM, they just dumped their own graphics on the page (AFAIK, you could even use AWT/Swing in applets).
We already know that a diet based on veggies, fruit, etc. is good for us. And we do know that fast food is bad. What we don't know is if the diet based on cocktails made with drug store supplies is good for us in the long term.

Since Soylent is designed to be a drop-in replacement for all our food intake, I have issue with it not having gone through trials before it's marketed as a mass product.
It's not implausible that the employer's tip led to a full trawl of the family's stored online history. Which, with what I'm sure is a shockingly high false positive rate, found cause for suspicion.
Yes, this is definitely psy-ops. Don't drink the water, either; it has fluoride in it.
Well, look on the bright side--today we all got to learn about the base rate fallacy.
Armed Agents Raid Animal Shelter For Baby Deer
We also can't disprove that it was the Roswell aliens that secretly control the Trilateral Commission that were behind the whole story.
I think you're dead on with the "boo-hoo god forbid I'd have to sort my trash, raise my own kid, pack my grocery bag, carry my luggage mentality."

Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag.

The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.
Massive amounts of CO2 primarily. Also dioxins, but there are ways to combat that they may be be employed.
They already did through their acquisition of Tweetdeck and it hasn't lead to any such action from Twitter in the years since.
SEEKING WORK - remote or cologne/germany

specialized in complex web applications

-> php, redis, couchDB, rabbitmq, backbone.js

checkout my profile for details: http://pelim.github.io/
When I saw the ads in my state for Booz-Allen-Hamilton jobs requiring clearance a few months ago I knew that it was spook work, but thought nothing of it at the time... (I refuse to relocate, it's telecommute or I go freelance)
I wonder if Ed Snowden responded to those same advertisements?
Google 'pressure cooker' - get a visit by the NSA
Good point. I failed to mention that the coding exercise is done sitting at a computer with an IDE.
So, there's Chris Sacca's 'LOWERCASE Capital' and now 'Initialized Capital'.

Can 'ALL CAPITAL', 'MiXeD Capital', 'trailinG capitaL', and 'CamelCase CapitalPartners' be far behind?
FYI: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/33411/what-are-the-pro...
Show HN: A reference to the Windows registry
It's irritating how little information you can find about the Windows registry on Google. I have found no other centralised source for the registry, except maybe for Microsoft's TechNet, which I believe is not too detailed or broad. So along with two others I decided to create the first website dedicated to describing the registry and related topics. From the wiki's about page:<p>Our goal as a community is to create a comprehensive and complete reference for the Windows registry. We will constantly add to a database of keys and values, and we will also include other helpful information on such things as defining terms used in the registry and describing registry tools.<p>If you want to talk to the three of us, ircs://irc.n0v4.com/hkey
It's not a popular opinion at all, but that's how I feel about the Imperial units of measurement. I get the benefits of metric, but Imperial just feels more... poetic?

It could also be just familiarity with what I grew up with, I suppose.
Tutor Matching Service: Working With Colleges To Increase Academic Success
This is not new, but rather wider-spread and with newer technology backing the paranoia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
It's irritating how little information you can find about the Windows registry on Google. I have found no other centralised source for the registry, except maybe for Microsoft's TechNet, which I believe is not too detailed or broad. So along with two others I decided to create the first website dedicated to describing the registry and related topics. From the wiki's about page:

Our goal as a community is to create a comprehensive and complete reference for the Windows registry. We will constantly add to a database of keys and values, and we will also include other helpful information on such things as defining terms used in the registry and describing registry tools.

If you want to talk to the three of us, ircs://irc.n0v4.com/hkey
Amazing.

Has anyone used this? Does it reference symbols across files? I imagine it would be rather expensive to actually have a compiler front-end running live in the cloud across my project.
It's possible that the public does understand the issue and disagrees with you.

Disagrees based on what? Labeling someone as traitor doesn't constitute a rational counter-argument to concerns regarding privacy and government checks and balances in this case. Such argument should start with something like "I feel these programs are necessary because" and end with something that doesn't involve ultra-generic buzzwords.
What does it mean to be "A Google Company? "Woodside would prefer that people not call it the Google Phone: “People don’t associate Google with phones,” he says. “Motorola’s the brand that resonates to consumers.”
Well Bob didn't feel the need to act on his supposed objections so I guess it wasn't that objectionable to him. Kinda says a lot about Bob.

Not that this is a real situation anyway. The majority of the US agree with these programs.
> The state will license and regulate private cannabis farms and then sell the marijuana at pharmacies

Curious why this is troubling... I can understand arguments for limiting government regulation, but I'm okay with cannabis being regulated much like alcohol is. Does this go beyond that? I don't have much knowledge of the inner workings of alcohol regulation, so it's hard for me to compare.
We'll just have to sail to a new continent and then throw barrels of McDonalds Cheeseburgers off the nearest port into the ocean.
Wow, that first one is great, thanks. I'm saving that for future reference. Japan seems a hotbed for hard database problems.
There is no way any of our systems could handle some of that, and its mostly not our fault - trying getting access to change stuff on medical database software or imaging equipment. It isn't possible.
Just FYI: Typing "pressure cooker " into google search autocompletes to "pressure cooker bomb"
Sorry. Didn't see this thread till now. I really appreciate the write-up.

Some very useful insights. I'm currently working on the same for myself.
A couple recommendations:

- "2-5 years experience Java" - There are vastly different ways to use Java, so someone like me would be in the 2-5 years of equivalent experience for things like Android, Swing or JavaFX development. JavaEE has progressed immensely and while the cool kids aren't using it, annotation-based development has led to the same sort of "convention-over-configuration" style programming and a lot of code generation from a fairly small amount of code. You don't have to generate 10 classes and interfaces for each EntityBean (EJB1 and EJB2) anymore.

- "... tools like Ant" - Managing dependencies in Java can be a real headache, so you want to specify a tool-chain that has dependency management. Say something like "Ant+Ivy" or "Maven". For integration with Hudson/Jenkins, Maven is superior but either will work.

- "OO Architecture" needs to be melded with an MVC/MVP pattern for big projects. These architectural patterns help immensely with testing and code management (plus watch for package tangle in Sonar).

- What's the rest of your tool-chain? You left a lot of holes and it's not clear from your ad which technologies you use and which you want to use. For comparison, here is my toolchain (I could give you more detail but not here):

- JavaEE
- WildFly
- PostgreSQL
- CouchDB
- Maven
- Jenkins
- Sonar
- Nexus
- Vagrant
- Ansible
- JUnit and plugins (XmlUnit, DBUnit, etc)
- Selenium2 (on the grid server and managed by Jenkins)

- "Amazon experience" is not very specific. I think we'll all assume you mean AWS, but there are APIs for running shops and for using mechanical turk.

Hope this helps!
It means that every piece of the code must be examined by a human. That's expensive.
I never thought of this before, but the first 4 digits of my credit card number revealing the issuing bank seems insecure to me. That's not a fault of the op's program, of course.
For a slightly different perspective on this, I work for a very small (<25 people) defense contractor in the MD/DC area, and coming from a civilian government position, it is a breath of fresh air. The management has cultivated relationships with people in the prime contractors and government leadership that recognize that people are not commodities and that the work we do is valuable. The sequester has had very little/no effect on our work, if anything our projects and budgets are expanding.

I also have met many people that work at or formerly worked at places like SAIC, Booz etc. that hated every minute of it and described it exactly as you did, so YMMV. Also, the line of work I and my company are in is slightly "unique", so we may be somewhat insulated from the problems facing contracting at the moment. Regardless, it isn't all horrible out there, and I would much sooner switch to another contracting position or move somewhere completely different than ever take a government position again.
Could still be a scapegoat coverup. I mean, why would a company be monitoring it like that?
Similar to the Florida plate, A55 RGY

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/florida/assorgy-story

For some reason Florida plates use 2 oranges now...
He is really into Haskell. Would love to see some practical example from him.

ps:he can speak for hours.
Sacrificing security in exchange for a minor performance boost. How does your domain score with https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ after disabling those various ciphers?

Please read this discussion thread from 2 years ago for a discussion on the pros/cons of this approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2759596
Nice presentation! What age-group are you targeting?
John Carmack talks at length about Haskell in this keynote. Definitely worth watching if you're interested in that stuff.
Cage match : AngularJS vs Ember.js (video)
Yeah, if there was more context needed I certainly didn't have it. Specifically it was the fact that he said pretty clearly that authorities visiting after viewing a facebook photo of fireworks was "the most likely conclusion", which irked me.

I thought that statement was irresponsible for a reporter to make in the face of so few verified facts about the incident or circumstances that preceded it.
Link to that diff? Her medium blog reads...

Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.

Nothing overt about USG watching Google's query IO. I don't think it's a stretch to confuse the FBI with the JTTF, nor that it's a huge leap between the efforts taken against her family and "someone [...] [piecing] together things people do on the internet." Everything she said happened, you just interpreted it incorrectly and started us down the wrong conversation.

Frankly, I think it's pretty telling that we're so on edge about how we are interpreting these findings.
You still stand by the part where you accused her of perpetrating a hoax?
Second this. My bank does also splits the entry fields for the digits when there is a specific format, and it's a real PITA.

For those not on a ipad now, what happens is when trying to tap 5 digits in a row for 4 digit field: the keyboard disappears at the fourth tap, and the fith tap misses it's target and lands on the page.

If the 'somewhere' happens to be a link (i.e. the 'view on github' link on the left if right below the '4' when the keyboard is displayed) you get out of the page, and have to start over again. Trying to enter important information is stressful enough, getting out of the page every pack of digits and start over all again is a punishment in itself.
OK, here's one to do with "just" sort, awk and uniq ;)

http://naa.gov.au/naaresources/govhack-2013/PassengersArriva...
My university could definitely utilize this service. It can be such a pain to find an affordable tutor in the bay area!
Tried something similar, and received a similar response. Lost interest and moved on to other things.
> Programming will continue to be made more accessible, as is the apparent trend

Of course it will become easier over time...just like everything. Consider John Carmack and what he did when writing Doom, Wolfenstein, etc...I can almost guarantee you when he was programming, programming was A LOT harder than what it is today. But the difference there is nothing more than time. Even if it's getting easier over time, my main point still stands.
You can actually upload .reg files to the wiki to create a skeleton page for whoever to fill in. To simplify things quite a bit, we made it require Win95 .reg format, But even Regedit 5 will export to that. The bot that does this is written in Go, and is available here: https://github.com/Efruit/wikireg

Oh, and I did the graphics. Comments, complaints, pointers, etc. would be much appreciated.
An Inbox API for Everything
...also, what are you using for the python interpreter?
As Ivan just pointed out to me privately, I meant "is the stack machine model revisited", not "queue". Queue and stack machines are quite different things. But the rest of the argument holds.
I would suggest most of us are engineers, not scientists.

And, on that note, I would say that learning to build robust systems is important. I split my time between CS and EE at college, and in many ways the EE stuff was more useful because after a certain point it wasn't enough to create an amplifier with a few transistors - you had to design an amp that did common-mode rejection, handled noise, dealt with normal tolerances of parts, and so on.

Exceptions are a way of building robust code (not the only way). I would say I'd want that mode of thinking taught. Very, very few graduates are actually going to go on and do original research into algorithms or teach. An engineering education goes a long way in my book.
According to your depiction of Uruguayan parties the "Partido Nacional" is more centrist than the "Patido Colorado". I'm not sure if I agree with that.
The National Retail Federation has a different monthly layout that helps solve the year over year retail sales comparison problem.

http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=392
Google has acquired quite a few properties that haven't well integrated into their ecosystem. I still am baffled youtube doesn't use Google+ comments or +1 ratings.
What kind of company has a web search triggered alert that trawls for terrorism related keywords and secretly reports you to the police? They should have said who the employer was so people can avoid working there.
Well then since you do have an opinion about software patents, define software patents.

The problem is not the list that you mentioned above. In fact I can refute every one of them. The problem is that there hasn't been a concerted effort to define a software patent. Hardware patents are easier to define. They are that thing you build according to a patent claim. Software is neither a material thing nor a concept. It actually runs in a computer and more or less controls it. It is an invention. But the boundaries of the claim are difficult to discern. Most of that is because software patents are a few decades old whereas hardware patents are more than a hundred years old. Hardware patents have run through their paces and "debugged" so to speak of glitches in the system. Hell, all software is new. So software patents are even newer.

But you still have to define software patents.
All American technologists are supporting the surveillance state, indirectly but tangibly. Would you ask all of us to give up our careers and skills completely?

There is no point in sacrificing yourself when there is nothing to actually be gained by doing so.

If somebody could organize a general strike of enough of the civillian workforce (especially engineers) until the NSA is banned, that would be worthwile. If a few of us quit sporadically, there will be no gain; it will just be a loss.

So, I wouldn't blame the individual engineers that work in the defense industry and end up contributing to these projects more directly. Nor do I blame the poor folk who end up getting a job screening me at the TSA checkpoint (violating the 4th Amendment is literally their job), though I used to be mad at them. We are all victims. Collective action could accomplish something, but individually, we only each have one life to live; we can't just throw it away for nothing in return.
Yeah, but you won't get all the nutrients you need from that, and probably won't feel full unless you eat a bunch.
All The Consumer Internet News In 30 Seconds Daily
You're proving his point, you know.
Are you really under the impression that there are people out there who believe recycling is immoral and will lead to countless deaths?
definitely could of gone

Pet peeve of mine; it's "could have gone".
On the first of every month you drag it so that the number 1 lines up with the current day of the week
Yes, alcohol is freely sold everywhere, the only restriction is for minors (under 18, not 21).

There are worries about discrimination, and pharmacies telling who their customers are (since every sale is registered under your ID).

For comparison, cigarettes and alcohol are anonymous (you might be asked to show an ID, but it's not stored anywhere).
There's a very stable C compiler out there: Ken Thompson's 1990s rewrite of Dennis Ritchie's 1970s original. Unfortunately it wouldn't solve OpenBSD's problem, being too stable to have caught up with C99 and C++. But I find it interesting to see where Ken and Dennis took their language while the standards committee wasn't watching.

http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/2c