skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been in the work world for a while, I feel like this is new to an extent. I feel like harsh competition to the level of people being willing to sabotage their own projects and so-forth, is a phenomena of a gradually intensifying market-driven pressure that has been unleashed on society through a variety of forces (take-over focused hedge-funds and investor, market-efficiency ideologies, etc).

But reference than anecdotes, I'll give references:

David Gordon documents how downsizing produces expertise in sabotaging other rather than efficiency:
http://www.amazon.com/FAT-AND-MEAN-Managerial-Downsizing/dp/...

The Gervais Principle perhaps summarizes the predatory new order.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

But the point is this a somewhat new order. Of course, competition-so-ruthless-it-produces-bad-behavior has been around forever. But some circumstances allow that truly blossom and I think can argue we have those circumstances now.
They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
Looks like the sysadmin has some math to do... Mirror?
You're going to have to get used to it. These kind of self congratulatory "I left great job X to start my own company" stories have been staples of HN since forever.
If you have lots of snow, then I would advise a sparse frame , imagine an outline of octagons and pentagons but not the internal triangles, more insulation would also be required.
This was worse in the 1990's during when the Dotcom bubble burst. People we worked with were mean to use because 'programmers are a dime a dozen, we get 500+ resumes a week for your job and can easily find someone to replace you who can work for a lower salary.' Mentality that management had towards us programmers.

It is odd that management claims there is a lack of qualified programmers out there when so many programmers are out of work and qualified. Me, I am told I am overqualified by companies begging the US government to raise the H1B Visa cap because there are not enough qualified programmers to hire. It is a form of bullying and a slap in the face of anyone qualified who wants to earn a decent wage and benefits but is called overqualified because of past salaries they had earned.

Working in an IT department other employees can abuse you, call you names, even physically attack you, and you cannot do anything about it. If you complain to your manager they write you up for 'communication problems'. The average non-IT employee cannot tell the difference between a Microsoft Windows bug or a bug in the custom software that is written and thinks you can fix a bug with Windows or Office, etc. When you tell them you don't have the source code to Windows or Office, they get mad at you. Management tells IT workers to lie to the other employees and tell them you are working on fixing Windows and Office bugs, which is basically lying.
Nice article. Personally, I am a big fan of Tamsyn. When I installed Debian earlier today, it was the first thing I downloaded after Xorg.
How does it counteract GP's point? The site copes poorly with resolution, scaling, etc.
The fact that it works fine for you could be irrelevant...
Then you should check out the work[1] done by the brothers Erik[2] and Petr[3] van Blokland, e.g. Guess who wrote the draft for the W3C specs of the .woff @font-face format? [4] A type designer.

[1] http://www.robofont.com/
[2] http://letterror.com/
[3] http://www.petr.com/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Open_Font_Format
This is the thing that has annoyed me the most about this whole thing. RTM has always meant "release to manufacturing and IT pros". If Microsoft wanted to change this fair enough but they shouldn't have called it an RTM if that isn't what they meant.
To be honest, I don't want to be contacted. I want to pick a job that looks interesting to me and one in which I could add real value.

In the current job market, that's how it's supposed to be, but I just can't see it. I'll keep trying, I'm just worried that the response rate of the companies I've applied so far is close to 5% only.

Thanks for your advice.
Android income report
sincere question - what do you value your time at?
I can't pretend to understand relativity well enough to verify that blog post's maths, but one of the notes caught my eye:

<quote>
2. Herein, as in most relativity texts, we ignore the travel time of light that prevents a remote event from being seen until after it has occurred. In principle a network of observers can be set up in locally inertial frames that momentarily co-move with the rocket, so that events can be detected by equipment right next to them, and the records subsequently compiled and analyzed.
</quote>

I could be reading that wrong, but the author seems to be suggesting that time's inherent inconsistency at relativistic speeds and distances can be mitigated with a "network of observers". I don't know if that's true, but "momentarily co-move with the rocket" sounds like it's ignoring an awful lot of relativistic acceleration of the measuring devices.
Ask HN: Looking for a previous link that had one page tutorials for languages
It was posted sometime in the last 1-3 months. Kind of like http://hyperpolyglot.org but better. You'd click on the language, and it'd be one page of "here's an if statement, here's an array, here's a subclass". I've been searching like crazy with no luck.
Canada's petroleum taxes are only "heavy" compared to the US. They're actually really thin compared to other G8 countries.
That they're doing this right now, as you're right to point out, only shows the forces and dynamics at play – that individuals and small groups always attempt to gain power for themselves. But the historic fact is that they were much more successful at achieving their goals before the rise of a central government. Feudalism did exist (almost universally), and for many more years than democracy has.
You're right that this is relatively new so we don't know how things will pan out. For example, will third party contributors be discouraged from helping if they don't get some form of compensation?
This is more about knowledge of the current conflict. I got one wrong but I did learn something - I didn't know most refugees were in fact going to Jordan. I thought they were heading north to Turkey.
This makes sense economically, but that doesn't address the difficulties we will face as oil becomes too expensive for common, important uses. Our fleet of oil-consuming vehicles won't magically convert themselves. The oil-backed electrical grid will take a hit. Food will become incredibly expensive (or more scarce) since the vast majority will come from far away, and have been transported via oil.
What do you use for MySQL development then? I usually find handwriting SQL queries to be obnoxiously verbose and I don't like the security implications of letting mysql listen on non-localhost interfaces (i.e. for an OSX administration tool).
John McAfee is alive
even bittercoating things is not necessarily bad. Sometimes it's good to take a pessimistic attitude and come out being pleasantly surprised, if you're the type of person who sees it as a challenge and not a discouragement. The litmus test is when the bittercoated thing turns out to work, does the person who delivered the skepticism come forward and congratulate you on a job well done?
> the military-industrial-intelligence-academic complex

It's a huge conspiracy! So huge that everyone is in on it... except for you!!!
Right there, they have just assumed the audience is entirely male, entirely straight and entirely just as crass, rude and objectifying as they are.

Even if the app weren't also obviously sexist and offensive, those assumptions are.

(They are also insulting every man in the audience. I take personal offense that they assume I am as uncaring and lazy as they are.)
We've reached Peak SQL.
Their computer, their phone, their environment
A quick take on guerilla user-testing.
Get up, get your shit in the cloud, get out, meet the people you’re really working for.
In my country I'm not sure what the legal situation would be - as I understand it you can't just throw up a trailer park where you want. And a plot of land with permission for a permanent residence is worth about half the cost of a house. What's the legal situation in your country?

Have you ever invited girls home, and if so how did they react? I think your dome looks awesome and fascinating, but I don't know if everyone would be so enthusiastic?
Just yesterday I found this fellow Paul Elkins via YouTube. He makes some cool (smaller) shelters as well. Like this:

http://www.elkinsdiy.com/survival/rapid-coroshelter/
Those numbers seem wrong.

The Coalition plan likely involves VDSL2+, which is supposed to do 250 Mbps at the node, and 50 Mbps 1 km from the node, so likely 90%+ of the population would get 50-100 Mbps by 2016. 25 Mbps is the minimum, not the average.

And the NBN was supposed to do 1 Gbps within a few years. But the rollout might be slower.

Add to that that once FTTN is rolled out, it could be upgraded to FTTH/FTTP, for a lot less money, these numbers are really not as easy to compare.

Interesting point about the state of the existing exchanges, copper, etc..

The plan did make a brief comparison to other FTTN roll outs worldwide, e.g. AT&T uVerse. Wonder what problems they faced.
I think what's wrong with your approach is that you underestimated the difficulty of completely uprooting yourself. In most cases when people take time off, they come back to somewhere that they already have a network - they call people they used to work with, or went to school with, etc. Or, when they want to move somewhere else, they line it up in advance so that if it takes six months they aren't screwed (eg; get a job that will relocate you, transfer within a large company). You now have two strikes - one, absolutely no network, and two, a short employment gap. I think the lack of network is a bigger deal and you would be having basically the same problems if you'd started looking straight away when you got to NYC.
I live in the mountains of North Carolina: A temperate but very wet area.
Introducing The DigitalOcean Bug Bounty Program
Oh, man, President of a small European country! Think of all the fun I could have micromanaging infrastructural decisions, educational expenditures of a developing economy, etc.

It's like a Sim game, only it's all day every day for years.

Why would I want to do this again?
Real scientific progress does not happen overnight. It takes years of hard work. Sadly, modern day scientist are expected to constantly produce amazing results or face losing funding. And what do you think happens?
Yes, because the gas tax is not used only to discourage consumption, but to fund road construction and repair.[1]

The simple consequence of getting used to the idea of a tax revenue stream (because current and future spending depends on it), only to have that revenue stream be threatened (because of non-gas guzzling vehicles), leads to the blunt reaction of "hey, let's just tax them more".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
"The problem about folk music Is that it is written by the people"
In a certain sense this isn't first-generation. This is really a long-delayed second generation. Most of the gotchas of VR were examined over a decade ago, and this new kick at the can has come out of cellphone technology making the old systems viable.
Sometimes I want to run one-off queries from an administration interface. Output from the MySQL CLI is unreadable if the columns extend beyond the width of the terminal. Horizontal scrolling alone makes this an unacceptable replacement for phpMyAdmin.
This. I'm curious as to how the bathroom is laid out, where you go for any and all of those purposes.

This "house" is missing a lot of viable (standard) infrastructure to be considered what we usually call a house in North America. It's closer to that of a very small travel trailer, or a tent. All in all I still love the idea.
"It can't get any worse", kmfrk murmured to himself, as he downloaded the update.
As with most economic policies, the degree to which it is implemented correctly is not linearly related to the quality of its outcomes: often one hole in correct implementation can torpedo the entire thing. In this case, providing a basic income is incompatible with open-borders immigration policy (i.e., limiting immigration to those who are likely to create more wealth than the cost of a basic income).

On top of that, this is almost irrelevant to the discussion of basic income. This is not a problem with basic income, but simply "differences in expected income across countries". The higher expected income that the US produces ALREADY has the effect of drawing immigrants from poorer countries here, and we already have a system in place to prevent this from happening (too) en masse. This has been happening for over a century. I don't see why providing a basic income would appreciably increase this effect, or why the "flocking in droves" issue would suddenly become insurmountable when we've already been dealing with the same issue (without ruining the economy) for decades.

Note that I'm discussing economic soundness here. It's totally possible that the vagaries of the American political system may prevent a key part of any economic concept from being implemented correctly, in which case all bets are off, of course.
On the other hand, maybe a team that was previously going to take some lazy, stereotypical sexist copout will now stretch themselves to do something novel, or even interesting instead.
I love it! I especially like that it is in fact a closer to a proper dome rather than a flat faceted solid since the panels are flexible. It reminds me of an igloo.

We get a fair amount of snow, so if I went about this, there would probably be a frame underneath. There are plenty of tutorials on the web for the assembly of geodesic structures.

This touches on another project that didn't quite take off called the "Icopod" http://eksith.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/icopod

The idea was very similar, but I think the original designer became disinterested and moved onto other things. The fact that you provided exact shapes and sizes makes me more hopeful.
The problem I see is that if the public donate several times to projects which don't work out, by the time the true domain experts get around to setting up a Kickstarter, the public are already tapped out.
Where I would say that peak oil is about exactly the points you raised, and has nothing to do with running out of oil. The "peak" refers to the point where oil becomes so expensive that demand wanes and production starts to decline.
Did J. L. Borges predict the functional programming vs. OO debate in 1941?
Old quote: "All of the press hype actually only made convincing them [prospective employees to join] harder to do... there's some sort of weird anti-correlation between press hype and ease of
convincing an A-level engineer that your technology is real."
Using a Toll Free Number as a Marketing Tool
IT and suicide. A topic that should be discussed.

I had my best friend kill himself on May 31, 1999 when he couldn't find a job and unemployment was running out. He was the best C++ programmer that I knew at the time. He worked at a Startup called Polygon that was mismanaged and abused their employees and then fired them all.

I did all I could to help him find a job, but nobody wanted to take a chance and hire him.

I had many friends I made working IT jobs end up killing themselves because they couldn't find work. Mostly Generation-Xers.

I got suicidal myself sometimes over how management had abused me and treated me. They didn't seem to think I was a human being, just some subhuman third class person they could treat like dirt. Had I worked at a company that treated me a different way I would not have gotten sick and ended up on disability from the stress.
Not just that. Most corn production heavily depends on oil-based inputs, such as fertilizer, fuel for machinery, and natural gas for drying and storage. Corn from the same county will become much more expensive, even without transportation costs.
Bravo! Fantastic attempt (thinking way outside the box), with interesting results (low cost, rapid construction). Great step in the tiny house concept.

Not sure how to reconcile the shape with societal expectations, as we're trained to expect 3+ rooms with rectangular layout (even "tiny homes" adhere). Does look a bit tight inside, at least for usable floorspace juxtaposed with headroom. Cost is impressive (low), but might need something of a sales pitch to motivate living in the 4-digit expense.

I'm most impressed that you did it. Would love the opportunity to try it myself (alas, priorities).
Yes, because it's more economical and better for the environment to improve efficiency. There is a good correlation between economic efficiency and what's good for the environment. Right now it is more harmful to the environment to manufacture new electric cars and the batteries that they use. It's also more expensive. There are many other large, well-established companies besides new, small, green-initiative companies trying to improve battery efficiency and the environmental impact of said batteries because it's better for business.

Interestingly enough, nuclear power is much more efficient, cheaper, and safer than fossil fuel based power, yet the United States has not built any new nuclear power plants in about 40 years because of environmental regulations. If we built newer, safer, more efficient nuclear power plants, we would be able to retire the older, not-as-safe, less-efficient nuclear power plants - and the price of electricity would go down making it more affordable to use electric cars all while using less fossil fuels!

(Long-term storage of spent nuclear material is also incredibly safe. There are a bunch of lies floating around that it's not because they suit the other side's story. Also, economics will will encourage the development of technology to find usage for the material rather than keeping it in storage for the next X number of years.)

I'm all for having a cleaner, safer environment. But until people get over their "not in my backyard" emotions, and get rid of harmful environmental regulations, then we are forced to use the technology that those people dislike.

Why am I familiar with all of this? I'm a merchant mariner. A lot of us work in the energy sector. I'd rather lose those jobs (higher competition for my job and less money) due to self-dependance on nuclear energy while having a cleaner, safer environment.

Have you seen the YouTube videos of tests where they crash jets into walls used in nuclear facilities or trains into nuclear containers? The United States is pretty large, we can build those nuclear power plants in places were they will be safe from the environment (unlike Japan which doesn't have much space to choose from).
Grocery stores adding tech features to stay competitive
Looks like you nailed it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/world/middleeast/kerry-say...
So do you live in this or is it just a workspace? EDIT: Duh, the title says "live in", so I guess you do :) Maybe I read too fast but I didn't see anything about cooking, bathroom needs, and showering, so I got confused.
Realistically serious full-sims are going to be facing a lot of problems. Light-sims that can play on an XBox gamepad and thus won't require the full keyboard should fare much better, and likewise sims that fit nicely onto a standard flightstick+throttle controller.
It wasn't (all) Ballmer's fault
Any concerns about living surrounded by all that polystyrene blueboard? Either indoor air quality or flammability? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene#Fire_hazards
Why limit this to Air terrorism attacks then? If the first World Trade Center attack [1] had succeeded in bringing the towers down the casualties would have been far worse. Or if the terrorists had smuggled a nuke into New York it would have been even worse than that.

As it stands 9/11 is actually a worse terrorist attack than can ever be achieved with the use of airplanes again, see Flight 93. So it doesn't make sense to consider these sorts of hypotheticals when talking about changing air security policy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing
Came here to comment the same thing, I can almost blindly type these things out, but the change in the format has caught me out a few times.

My portable GPS unit by default has the ABC layout keyboard, that is just as annoying to use when you are used to QWERTY!
A marxist critique of community college.
Loved this post.

I think my favorite part was "I have iterated on this idea a bit." where you post the fails.

It can get discouraging looking at all the beautiful stuff posted and thinking it just sprang out of nothing. Clearly this is neat because you put a lot of work into making it so.

Thanks for taking the time to write it up and share it.
Looks great!

Key question: do the ladies like it?
I like how the plastic panels overlap to prevent leaking as framed geodesic domes often have leaking problems.
Ask HN:  Non-traditional background--am I employable, and, if so, how?
I have sort of an odd career path, and have a college teaching job for this year, but after that, I'll be jobless. I am considering changing careers completely, and have some interest in technology, so I thought I'd ask here.

This is where I am today, career-wise:

- Early 40s
- Ph.D. in a bioscience. Minimal publication record.
- ~10 yrs college teaching (assistant prof).
- Authored many (>50) PowerPoint presentations.
- Comfortable speaking in public and teaching; have been told I'm good at it.
- Enjoy writing, discussion, ideas, creativity.

Here's my programming experience (self-taught):

- Python (~7 yrs). I've written some desktop applications, one of which, w/ ~20k LOC, I've put a serious amount of work into.
- SQLite (basic), as well as a number of Python 3rd party libraries for plotting, Excel, etc.
- Created a website for an artist in HTML/CSS (using Notepad).
- No web app or mobile app ability (yet).
- Authored multi-part video tutorial online for a development tool, which got positive feedback (~300 good comments).
- Done some contracting work for custom data analysis and file doctoring scripts for a small biotech company.

I have no clear sense what sort of (good) options I might have in the IT world, given my background.

Suggestions welcome (obviously anything would be a rough estimate, but I don't mind). Thanks!
It doesn't need a reason why, and doesn't care if we understand it; it just works.

It also gets happily stuck and dies in a local optimum, being the simplicistic algorithm it is. We are moving (further) into a world where people stand for nothing, have no thoughts worth mentioning, and would do anything for money no matter how and where from; maybe we don't need to understand that, but it's pretty hard to unsee once you did.
It's annoying to me that we have to register to read this entire article.
> Hykes wants to create a standard means of moving software applications across the internet and the world’s private company networks, from machine to machine to machine.

Nobody's paying for advertisement of scp scripts.
The underlying theme in this post, from what I gather, is "Male programmers are often treated poorly by their peers, so female programmers should have nothing to complain about when they are treated poorly."

This is denial of the very real sexism in our industry.
Sean’s Outpost Announces Satoshi Forest, Nine-Acre Sanctuary for the Homeless
I might write more on the subject at a later time. For now, I'm a bit more (hopefully understandably so) focused on lining up discussions about what's next. :)
Yep, RTM is basically also known as a 'Gold' release or essentially the same thing end users will get - minus marketing materials and other assorted items that come along with a final consumer release.

They should not have called it RTM if it wasn't really RTM.