skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things that seems suspect to me about this article is the conflation between "STEM" and "Computer Science / Software Engineering / Computer Engineering".

No where in the article is "STEM" defined precisely, but the author clearly notes that is NSF number includes health-care workers, psychologists and social scientists. Even if we replaced "STEM" with "Engineering" in the entire article, it's still a fallacy to say "there are 0.3 million engineering jobs, and 11.7 million engineering graduates -- there can't possibly a shortage of engineers." I wouldn't automatically assume that someone with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering or Civil Engineering is qualified to work at <insert software company here>[0], in the same way that I would be completely unqualified to be hired run an oil field or draft up a plan for my city's mass transit system. Sometimes people do have extra skills atop their degree that lands them in a job outside of their field, but that's not true for everyone.

If anything, I think the whole "STEM shortage" sounds like a plea to US post-secondary institutions to make their CS/EE/CE/SE graduating classes bigger -- perhaps at the expense of other STEM programs.

Edit: [0] I'm assuming a software company small enough that it's not doing city planning on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were Civil Engineers working at the likes of Microsoft and Google, trying to figure out the master plan for their main campuses, but that's not my point.
Facebook and Shutterstock giving advertisers more options 
Advertisers on Facebook will shortly be getting some new options for sprucing up their ads with high-quality stock photographs from Shutterstock. All of Facebook’s more than 1 million active advertisers will get integrated access to millions of photos and illustrations (over 25 million, to be exact) for use in their Facebook ads.
why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if they could replace them with cheap young tech workers?

Because young workers are not a substitute for old workers.

You could argue that four fresh graduates are a substitute for a single good senior dev, but in many cases even that is not true. Thus, old guys continue to find good jobs for good money.

This worry is as old as software. The cheap hordes will replace you. It used to be cheap hordes from overseas, and now it's cheap hordes fresh out of school. They're on there way. But somehow they never seem to arrive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism_(international_re...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neorealism_(international_relat...

In both cases, the international relations sense of the term.
Perfect for the majority of student uses:

http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator/...

Aside from playing Ti 8* games. I'm not sure what engineers need in a calculator so I can't comment on that, but in my use case (nearly a decade ago) I could have gotten one of these and been just fine. I got a TI83 because it was the standard issue.

In my own personal use (scientific calculators for hobbyist purposes) I've switched to Casios since they just have outright nicer displays than the selection of HPs and TIs at Fry's and they cost a bunch less.
How is that a problem? One of the best practices with truecrypt is to not use passphrases but randomly generated key files. Than all you can resort is crypto implementation weakness and bruteforcing the key.
You might benefit from reading this: http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-summer/stand...
Yes. So if you want to scrutinize the budget, you should prioritize by cost / value instead of by cost alone.
Not really, influx does not automatically imply lack of shortage. I think there is a common impression of quite the contrary: a demand bubble, at least in my local SFBA tech scene. Replacement may not be happening because of a demand spike and/or other reasons having to do with cheap young tech workers not being the right fit, or not being perceived as a right fit, etc.
When it comes to security, your default position should always be one of extreme scepticism. Believing "what has been given to us" is what got us in this mess to begin with.
I rather think that the holocaust would have been a touch more complete had the Nazis had access to big data.
Not to say this is okay, but those huge historic engineering projects usually cost more than just a single life.

Every time I see a cathedral or dom tower ... :)
"Direct access" was taken directly from the slides but misunderstood as editorializing by Greenwald.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42134_Greenwald-_We_...
I hope these companies aren't delusional enough to think that even if they win this one, and are allowed to say how many NSL's they receive, they would score some kind of "big win" with us, the public.

This will barely register on my radar, if they don't take serious steps in not just fighting the government more aggressively over the mass spying (they should be fighting to declare NSL's and mass data collection unconstitutional, for starters), but also in securing their services end-to-end.

So even if we can't trust them anymore per se (which we won't), we could still probably use their services if they adopt that.
On the HP calculators the separator would usually be the enter key. I think the old ones displayed just the top entry of the stack, on the newer ones with bigger display you see the stack with each entry on one line.
It's not the $7, but the principle
I struggle to believe that our current models of advertising can in any way lead to overall societal efficiency. We can do much better.
The Guardian didn't backtrack but the Post did add some hedging language. Still, PRISM is something. From the reporting so far it seems to be some kind of program that requires technology to be installed at each service provider.
There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator.

It seems like a "good deed never goes unpunished"-type situation. YC partners are both independently wealthy and brilliant. They could choose to do anything they wanted with their time, or nothing at all, and they'd still be fine. Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody. The selection process for getting into YC is the most open you'd ever find anywhere. The paperwork is open-source for heaven's sakes! Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
autocomplete is good for google as it tends to limit the search terms people use. instead of expressing your search needs you pick from a predefined list. less terms used = better search caching and less SEO effects.
Thanks for the report, will fix it ASAP. Apparently this issue is affecting other Django users as well:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2610088/can-djangos-auth-...
Calling the NSA: "I accidentally deleted an e-mail, can you help me recover it?"
A nice thought and practically the same thing that Google does. You hand in your privacy, but you get services back in return.
Battery life. It's a big advantage to some people. Maybe most people are OK charging every day, but a big minority aren't.

Camping, multi day festivals, unplanned promiscuity, overnight business trip to someplace with different sockets. 24+ hr traveling (EG London to Sydney). Even outside of these, people ask for chargers all the time.

Trade off is worth it to some people. Especially if they rarely do the things e-ink is is bad at like games and videos.
Well it's obviously both. Why are they fighting against it now and not before? Because they fear losing customers. So how do they win or keep the customers? With "PR battles" such as these.

I'm sure they want to win these cases, but they wouldn't do this in complete secret, would they? They want the public to know about it, hoping this way it gets them to gain a tiny bit of trust back.
> Microsoft and Google are to sue the US government to win the right to reveal more information about official requests for user data.

Totally irrelevant, because:

We know for a fact that the NSA has installed hardware at all these companies (Microsoft/Skype, Google, Apple, Facebook, AOL, Paltalk, etc.). They don't need to put in any official requests for user data to get the data.

Furthermore, we also know that 75% of all communication data is being intercepted/covered by the NSA (today! Work in progress...). Why would any official requests for user data be relevant, given these circumstances?
Very true. Americans are taught what to think, not how to think.
Yup, voice records are generated via Google speech API.
Voice recognition is webkit speech input, only supported in Google Chrome.
The application itself uses AngularJS.

This thing wouldn't have been possible without Google really.
Am I the only one that see that as an obvious trap ?

We just realized that any data going through the wire should be considered as directly provided to state agencies, and now we're excited to be able to put our private data on chinese servers ? I genuinely first thought it was a joke.

If you regularly watch your server logs, you know your ssh servers are continuously tried for bruteforce. And if you often run "whois" against attacking IP, you know that since last year, most of those attackers are chinese.

Of course, nothing allows to say those attacks are made by government rather than individuals (China is the biggest country in term of population, after all), but that's enough for me to decide not to elect this country as the place where I put my data (and yes, I try as much as I can to not store anything in US too).
If it wasn't for Wal-Mart, there would be a Wal-Mart shaped niche in the economy and whatever filled it would look a lot like Wal-Mart.
You are right, robotic accents is not helpful (but hilarious though).

This app is mainly aimed at fixing the incorrect pronunciation of words, rather than the accent. If I ever get to add real human voices, then it will be even better.
Depending on what your current background is (need to know a bit of math, very basic complex numbers, etc), when I started out to learn DSP, this tutorial helped me loads:

Yehar's DSP Tutorial for the Braindead http://yehar.com/blog/?p=121

It was an ASCII textfile when I read it, back in 1999, doing demoscene stuff, someone had coded a speech synthesizer in a 4k demo. So I had to email that guy to ask them "WAT??" and he answered explaining me basics like how to set up the Soundblaster with a streaming circular buffer, then sent me to read this tutorial, and explained loads of other stuff.

I also dug a lot of interesting things from the music-dsp mailinglist and many articles on Harmony-Central.com. That site still exists, but I can't find any of the old articles and tutorials related to digital synthesis any more. That's where I first read about Karplus-Strong physical modelling of stringed instruments. I think they were in a section called "Music & Computers" or something, but nowadays that place seems like a weird sort of blog/forum combo. I always had the feeling that the DSP section of Harmony-Central was only a small part of the site's intended purpose, does anyone have an idea where those articles went? (come to think of it, I don't think I've simply tried old versions on archive.org yet)
> Help help am badly in need of sponsorship who can help me out

That's your pitch? People should invest in someone who can't be bothered to explain what he's planning to do with their investment?
I'm sure it was very tough for them, but this is why I wanted the tech companies to be allied against mass surveillance or censorship in all countries (if they thought getting revealed to the public would cause them to lose customers later). But instead some of them (cough Microsoft), would've much rather shut the door behind Google, in China for example, just for an extra percent in market share (which they never got).

If they would've started standing together on these issues, and get a lot more allies, they could've started to have a chance against the governments' demands for censorship, and try to win the public on their side, too. But no, instead they decided to backstab each other for a tiny piece of the market, thinking it's an "opportunity" to get rid of a competitor, rather than a long term catastrophe waiting to happen.
I used to commute nearly an hour each way on the tube in London, and read endlessly. Until someone asked me about the books I'd read lately and in could barely recall then story lines. Yes at the time I was engaged and was enjoying the story and act of reading, but it just didn't go in to my mind in the same way that reading at home or on the beach does.

So I stopped reading and started cycling.
Much better use of my time, and I was forced to spend that time with my thoughts (and watching my safety on the road) I was better off mentally than when I was kidding myself that I was being productive.

I'm not saying you can't read or work on a commute, but it did not work for me in the slightest.
Also, remember the initial reaction of the NSA partner companies when they were confronted about their mass surveillance activities for the first time?

They lied straight to our faces and thought we would just accept that and continue to buy and/or use their stuff.
CloudDS - another datastore
It would be really useful to replay what user said, or even better, replay incorrectly pronounced word and then correct pronunciation. Right now there is no good way for user to correct mistakes, even if it's clear that there is a mistake.
I wish I had been more familiar with emacs. specifically org-mode.
Summary:

1. Start Early
2. Adapt to Your Customers
3. Have Fun
4. Pay attention to Twitter
5. Deploy at Will!
6. You Don't Need an Office
7. Hire Through Open Source
8. Trust your Team
9. You Don't Need Venture Capital
10. Open Source Whatever You Can
Facebook Joins the American Government Plans to Hijack the Syrian Revolution
and you are trying to hang your hat on a technicality that does not exist.

God, no, I'm just running with the thing and I'm appreciative of you taking the time to respond in detail.

Your argument is about the domain name itself rather than the content.

That's exactly right. That and some woolly idea that that the notion of 'confusion' figures in some important way in trademark law.

So when you brought up 'nominative use' I thought doesn't the whole confusion thing come up? Does it come before or after the test for nominative use?

If there was some possibility of confusion

To me, it seems at least conceivable that that's confusing. Maybe tumblr runs such a service, as a status indicator. It is, as you said, a statement of fact - you know, if you can't get to tumblr, please check istumblrdown and we'll tell you what's going on. So I have a harder time getting my head around the idea that istumblrdown is obviously unaffiliated with tumblr the way walmartsucks isn't affiliated with walmart. The EFF page you linked talks about confusion as well and I think that's, err, the source of my confusion.
Ah, I forget hacker news has an American biased perspective, where ramen just means cheap crap you get in packets, not the fancy stuff we have in Asia.

And of course, ramen in Japanese just means "Chinese noodles", plenty of people in china eat them everyday in china and they are just fine. Imagine if some Chinese poster said "Yeah, careful with using that white bread as a currency unit. It sure is cheap, but it's the kind of food that will mess up your health long-term".

Isn't that weird o first glance?
>> Microsoft and Google are to sue the US government to win the right to reveal more information about official requests for user data.

> Totally irrelevant ...

Irrelevant only to people who don't understand politics. The NSA isn't asking for cooperation from these companies because they actually need it, but because it provides political cover. In the * * itstorm that will surely result from future revelations of spying on U.S. citizens, the NSA can honestly say, "These companies cooperated in data collection."

> Why would any official requests for user data be relevant, given these circumstances?

As is often said, you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you.
As a non Chinese living outside of China and with no plans to ever travel there I'd rather let Chines government read my data than my own government.
Someone would stop you somewhere and ask WTF are you woman doing without your man, wait a minute, are you really a woman? Bang. Better be safe than sorry.

Also I dont believe it is very common with burkas in Syria.
This is worth reading and share it has many info that many in the west do not know as mainstream media do not mention such facts.

The post concludes:

"An alternative to facebook must be created, a one that does not carry American government and Zionist agenda, a one that respects Islam and all religions, a one that respect free speech even if it is coming from Al Qaeda media arm. A one that can the public turn-to to get news not found on mainstream media, and the public should organize to crowd fund such platform."
Gazprom, Sudan oil interests, Bilderberg group member and generally being a jerk.
People can respect or not what they want. If culture flows from the grass roots this is a part of it. The question is what role the state has to play in this.

Either the state must enforce respect for whatever groups should be respected (you? gay rights advocates?) or they must remain neutral. I don't really see a viable third way. If the state must remain neutral (and hence same with public schools) then the state has no reason to say people must respect you for your political views any more than the other side.
I am OK off these days, but have never really considered myself rich, but I go months without checking my bank account or even credit card bill. I don't need to as I simply know that I am spending less than I earn. Even at university when I had £5000 too live on in London, I rarely checked.

I come from a frugal family, so I always consider before I buy something. But even for larger purchases I just know what's in my savings roughly and go for it. It helps that while I've not been commanding very high wages, I have been employed consistently since I left university 14 years ago.
Thanks for the link to the book!
Cybercriminals are using the Tor network to control their botnets
They didn't really backtrack. Maybe on some kind of semantic definition of "direct access", but not on the whole thing.

They even wrote later from new leaks, how Microsoft was having a "team play" with the NSA to give them a lot of data from Skype, Outlook.com and Skydrive, in an almost "direct access" kind of way:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
facebook has deleted many facebook pages that support the revolution but oppose US intervention and the planned US sticks against Syria and support the revolutionary fight against bashar regime among them “We are All Syria” page which has 500,000 fan, this makes facebook part of the US conspiracy to install a new puppet regime as a replacement yo Bashar Al Assad Regime who is now expired as a sold puppet.
> you have to question every fact presented and go dig

Isn't that true of every assertion of "fact"? Perhaps it's because I'm British. Our press make no attempt to hide their political views.
Mental bandwidth is not just purely down to the decisions you make for yourself, do you think working in McDonald's is not a stressful way to spend your day? These days I have a pretty high stress job, but I know which rile I'd rather be doing.

You also have to remember that for many people in a service role, that might be the only job they could find and they don't have the chances we do to pick and choose roles based on interesting projects.
Personally I think, in the US, Yoder v. Wisconsin (holding the Amish had a right to see to education in line with their religion) was one of the greatest decisions of the Supreme Court, right up there with Brown v. Board. In doing so, the court affirmed that the Amish religious way of life is deserving of protection and the state may not use the education system to destroy that, even if that means that children raised in such households will have fewer career opportunities.

Our country is pluralistic. That means that we must afford those we disagree with a right to exist as cultural groups. Religion is a deep part of culture and it is closely tied to a way of life.
In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. In Germany I'm not hearing a lot of "mind training matters" noise out of education either.
I'll give it a try to remove/lessen my German accent.. :-)

Btw: Yes, my email address ends in .de - your registration form seems to think I mistyped and suggests that I change that to .net. Intentional, even for valid TLDs?
Thank you for the detailed information.

The only feedback the user gets is a score for the current phrase, and highlighting of the words that he has mispronounced.

For example: If the phrase was "Where is the closest hospital?" but you said "Where is the closest clinic?", the application would highlight correct words in green and incorrect ones (hospital in this case) in orange/red depending on the word distance of "clinic" to "hospital")

When I say "word distance" I mean Levenshtein Distance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

I never thought about giving basic information about English phonology, but you make a very valid point. I will look into this further, and please let me know about any detailed resources about this subject.
Tencent is one of the biggest Internet companies in China, with loads of cash. Espionage will not be my primary concern because common sense dictates you should not put sensitive information in the cloud, and if you have to put it out, use encryption.

My concern is this type of services can be taken away from us anytime, even in US, google and yahoo already shut down a number of services that they don't think useful/profitable
I'm not sure I would go as far as saying it's impossible to have private communications on the Internet.

It's impossible right now for the masses, because they've decided they can trust these 3rd parties. So we never really put much thought into adopting "Trust No One" type of services. But having such services is probably doable, and now that we know these companies can't actually be trusted, perhaps we'll start using them.

Again, the main reason we didn't have private communications through 3rd parties, is because we thought we could trust those 3rd parties. But that has changed now.
The kind of free trade you're talking about is better for buyers but as I'm an employee and not an employer, I'm more concerned about the sellers market. Complete, unrestricted labour movement means all wages average out. I'd rather not be getting paid the average between the lowest paying employer out there and the highest, so I'm all for setting up boundaries between them.
Wow, this is so much nicer than PDFs. Thanks for the example.
Isn't the real story here the CPUC's attempt to breach the veil of corporate limited liability?
When I read about the language TI-BASIC in the above article, it reminded me of my old TI-99/4A computer[0], which I got from my dad to learn programming. This computer also included a TI-BASIC language, I wonder if they are in any way related, except of course from being a BASIC language created by Texas Instruments. It would be cool if old TI-99/4A games would be playable on "modern" TI graphic calculators.

I still have two TI-99/4A computers in my cellar, for nostalgic reasons :)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
It might be in your best interests to secure an opportunity to renegotiate the wages you receive, either with the firm you currently work for or any of the numerous ones which would be happy to take your call.
Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately currently neither webkit-speech-input nor Web Speech API supports recording of the user voice input.

I will look for alternative solutions though.