skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love Thoreau. I'm a hiker. I'm learning to program. I really like computers and technology. But I rarely, if ever try to unite the two. Sorry, it just doesn't work.

One things computers try to do is make things scale, as I understand it; understand and organise things with massive computer power. I'm not saying this is a bad thing.

But Thoreau wanted the opposite.

I'm interested in how you paint yourself as a complex, multifaceted person (rightfully so!), but disagree with suggestions to apply lessons across facets. For example, one could also say that computers facilitate the act of "abstract[ing] away complexity," which seems very Thoreau-esque. One could say that, but I wouldn't -- at least seriously -- because it sounds ridiculously pretentious.

Anyway.

It's worth pointing out that Maciej is a very, very strong critic of Silicon Valley culture so I think you're missing context for his talk (hint: the "content curator" bit is complete sarcasm). Follow @Pinboard or @baconmeteor on Twitter to see what I mean.

He already tweeted about your post:

https://twitter.com/baconmeteor/status/384050096461336577
Work on a project that helps other people. Don't do it for personal gains. It's so easy to be passionate when you are doing something selfless.
really, as dividends ? I need to figure out how to do this.

does your (own) company also pay social security ?
Did you know Siri was developed with $150M of government funding?[1] The government sponsors a lot more than "basic" research. They also support the commercialization of technology through procurement, for example.

Why would government-sponsored software development be any worse than corporate-sponsored? Governments can sponsor multiple teams that compete with one another, after all. That's why "basic science" works even when the money comes from the government -- right?

I'd be interested to here from FSF folks on this. One of the biggest "problems" with our existing Silicon Valley model -- which despite what posturing Libertarians think is very, very heavily based on government support (DARPA, procurement, etc.) -- is basically that the public doesn't receive the full benefit of taxpayer-funded R&D. It's pretty much handed over to the private sector, who take all the profits.

This might possibly be a more profitable avenue for the Free Software movement to take. Advocate that taxpayer-funded research stay Free.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl...
I can see the advantages with the new engine pattern but I never understood the thinking behind the grid arrangement.
The first question I would ask is: what attacks are you trying to defend against? Can the attacker eavesdrop on the initial communication?

If so, the attacker has all the needed information.

If the initial channel is assumed to be protected against eavesdropping, why can't the same channel be used on follow-up communications or perhaps the initial communication used to set up a shared secret and use it to encrypt later communications.

So the main question would be: what is your goal with this algorithm? Simply to construct encryption schemes using hash functions? (since the reverse has been done - given a block cypher like AES you can construct hash functions, just not very good ones).
I live 60 degrees north (which is not north enough to be Northern Norway) and the winters do get quite dark. It also gets compounded if you live in a valley, which many/most in my part of the country do. And living near the coast, the climate is so mild that the winter sees little in the way of snow, which makes it even more dark since there is no snow to reflect the sunlight.
Please explain their engineering practices.
This is a pretty common complaint among recent college grads. In my experience (both from the hiring and getting hired side) just because you don't have x years of experience in y doesn't mean don't bother with applying for a job that requires it. A lot of times those requirements are based on pretty minimal communication between the hiring manager and the HR person, and represents a bunch of qualities that the hiring manager would like the job seeker to have, but that doesn't mean that they're not willing to interview someone who lacks some of them. Resumes from recent grads are often looked at in a different light and aren't held up to the same standards as someone with 10 years of experience behind them. Apply anyway, be totally open about what you do and do not know (don't try to BS anyone, in other words), and you can still get some of those interviews and might get one of those jobs. Alternately, they might interview you for the more experienced position, decide that they really do need that experience for that position, but also decide that they like you and offer you a junior position instead.
I'm reading this as a sarcastic riff on parent, but parent is right. Seriously, follow Maciej on Twitter. He'd die before seriously referring to someone -- especially Thoreau -- as a content creator.
> Why should Mars be any different?

Because Mars can 1) support a large human population, with industrial infrastructure, and 2) is situated closer to the majority of the resources of the solar system. It's a foregone conclusion that if humanity gets off the Earth, that Mars will be a future economic superpower.

(The middle of the Sahara and certain places underwater may also become settled for similar reasons: proximity to natural resources. K2, not so much.)

> solar power on Mars is pitiful, and there are no fossil fuels. Where does the power for industrial production come from?

The economics of solar power are completely different for Mars.

Given that Mars is about 1/10th as massive as the Earth, launching from its surface to space is vastly cheaper. In fact, the reduced gravity on Mars is forgiving enough that we can contemplate building a space elevator there with materials that are currently commercially available.
This looks great. One issue popped up: a 403 on http://startbootstrap.com/templates/business-frontpage.html
1. Seriously? I'm retiring my Samsung Series 7 Slate for a Surface Pro 2 just because of the Bluetooth keyboard on the Slate. It's a good keyboard for sure, but being separate it needs a cover, so uses far too much space in my bag, and I'm tired to death of fucking about with it every time I need to type something (which is all the time).

Also, in 2 you're obviously talking about Surface Pro. Pro 2 is hugely improved. And in 5 you're doing little more than stating a personal opinion.
Another is that, according to the BBC website, "Upmass: 6t" for Dragon versus "Upmass: 2.7t" for Cygnus - a shade under half as much cargo carried to orbit.
Providing accommodations with employment seems like a slippery slope. You are a little mistaken about "no tax benefits to people who rent apartments anywhere in the US" though. There are some states that allow state tax deductions or credits for rent - Massachusetts is one of them. That only reduces your state tax liabilities though, not federal.

(And for what it is worth, California actually does have a renter's credit. Unfortunately, to qualify your adjusted gross income must be less than $35,659 as a single filer, or $71,318 for a married couple filing jointly.)
What? This doesn't even begin to make sense, just like the article says in the beginning -- Americans are an hour off for the majority of the year, and it doesn't seem to be harming anything.

If there's any kind of special Spanish fatigue, I can't believe it has anything to do with their timezone -- it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta, and staying up late. Spaniards don't work late because of anything to do with the natural setting of the sun, it's the fact that they take a three-hour "lunch"!

Yet somehow the article neglects to mention this at all...
To me, it's a clear blend of both of the giant tech monoliths (and more, really) and a satire of the entire tech culture where the next sharing app is raising obscene amounts of money for an exit to a handful of monoliths.
This is going to be a long one.

I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007 for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against.
I'm now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid (80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.)

I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..
Thanks for this. My digestion of this was that "Mars has a competitive advantage over earth with its low gravity, and a competitive advantage over orbit because of the proximity to resources, which could make it incredibly important for large scale industrial production." Hadn't thought of it that way.
American Islander is indeed returning to San Diego. But sister ship American Spirit is steaming purposefully SSW... I wonder why... :-)
> Any sufficiently useful closed-source program will be cloned into open source in today's environment.

That is a parasitic and unsustainable model. Even if you could find enough volunteers to copy the work of every bit of successful commercial software, that original design and development work still needs to be funded.

Other commenters have noted the quality situation of many of the cloner projects out there. Even cloning takes work and sustainable, quality work needs remuneration.
It's interesting how many unmanned resupply crafts there are for the ISS now. Russian Progress, European ATV, Japanese HTV and the Dragon. Now what is really needed is something manned to complement the Soyuz. SpaceX is aiming for it at least.
> But we do require vaccines for people who touch our food in most places.

Haha wow, you are seriously overestimating the background checks and vaccination polices for individuals who work at grocery stores.
I agree about @davidsrose -- he loves to teach and share knowledge.
That's pretty much correct. Dividends are tax free (at least in the UK) and you can structure things so your corporation tax is minimised (maximising various allowances, taking a cut of VAT you charge, buying lots of equipment, etc etc).

You just need a decent accountant who understands how to play this game...
Picking a name that conflicts with a major trade mark seems like a bad idea.
This is what must have Microsoft scratching their heads. Google has done just about nothing with QuickOffice. The Google Drive Document app for Android sucks, as does Blogger. There is no good offline editing in productivity apps for Android other than QuickOffice, which edits microsoft document formats, so it doesn't integrate cleanly with Web-based editing in Drive. It's a mess!

And yet, it seems like nobody cares. Google gets away with completely crap productivity apps.

Maybe nobody is seriously trying to displace enterprise PCs with tablets yet. But this has to start biting them in the ass someday soon.
This is really awesome, thank you for sharing this! In particular it's great to see the "Simple Sidebar" [0] example — I was just about to have to build one of these, so having a complete reference to work from is really helpful.

[0]: http://startbootstrap.com/templates/simple-sidebar#
Some people like large tomes. Others like pithy aphorisms. We all have our different ways to learn.
The Talk That Wasn’t
>Rock star is just a label they slap onto the job description ...

... often to arouse the ego of possible candidates.

I can't imagine why any recruiter wouldn't see the deliberate attempt at patronising candidates when they advertise "Looking for a Rock star programmer." Oh, hang on ... I know why: appealing to and strongly arousing ego is one of the quickest way to get responses.

The team matters more than the individual. Hiring with overt calls to rock stars is surely going to damage communication and collaboration with the current team.
Compare the UK manufacturing sector to the Spanish. The only reason that we are not (yet) in much worse straights than Spain and Italy is because we are the place to route the money through.

On paper the UK has the worst economic exposure in the OECD and produces very little indeed.

We are little more than a service economy for banking at this point, and UK banking has the lion's share of our total debt, dwarfing what is owed by the public sector. Luckily we are considered the stable place, so people continue to put their money here, but I suspect that is more of a confidence trick than anything else.
Good luck with it! Portland's a great place to be learning. I don't want to imply that women have to learn programming in women-centric spaces, but I bet you might enjoy checking out PyLadies and Flux too if you haven't yet:

http://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-PDX/events/140264752/

http://fluxlab.io/
9 months of engineering for a core piece of tech.

Wrote the first commercial application for it within a month or so.

Doing great so far.
Blog about topics that would be useful to managers or owners of these kinds of companies.

Once a month, do an in-depth training webinar on a topic they could use.

Then offer your new prospects an easy to understand consulting package - i.e. $1500 month gets them unlimited support plus X many hours of your time. Offer low, medium and high-end (custom) packages.
Good luck. Don't let anyone kick you down. I learned how to program in a week in 1988 (and I'm still learning to program).
That doesn't match my experience as a professional programmer; there are many types of programmer out there. :-)
Really useful. Thank you.
Congrats! It really good idea to make starter templates. Your project creating big value and can have good future if you add templates regular.
Head wounds aren't very fashionable. Needs lesson in statistics.
RoyalCMS: flexible website management
RoyalCMS is a content management system that allows complete flexibility.
Is this supposed to be parody?
Hm. This does not quite agree with my experience.

A few years back, when I lived in Madrid, I noticed that this city has an insane grind. To me it looked as if the culture there started off with a "begin work early, have siesta, end work late" setup, but at some point along the way they lost the siesta part.

Many Spaniards work really hard all day, all week, then (at least the young ones) party just as hard all weekend. Repeat ad infinitum.

Don't know about the time zone though. That seems dubious.
The Sahara lacks a CO2 atmosphere, it also lacks substantial quantities of subsurface ice.

Besides which, about 4 million people live in the Sahara today, despite many of the surrounding countries being some of the poorest and least developed on Earth.

The point of living on Mars is not to find the most convenient place possible to live. That would not be Mars, nor would it be the Sahara, nor would it even be Copenhagen, Dubai, or the Netherlands (where 10 million people live on land that used to be under the sea). But people live in those places even so because it turns out there are compelling reasons to live there. Just as, I believe, there are compelling reasons to live on Mars (much more so than in living in the Sahara).

Edit: most people living in the developed world today are swaddled in the embrace of a vast web of advanced technology and industry. The hammer used to build the home down the street was mined and forged an ocean away. The phone you use every day contains components developed and manufactured across a handful of continents. The food you eat could come from next door or across the world. But that web of technology and industry is familiar to us, whereas one involving living on Mars is alien and implausible to our sensibilities. But over the course of decades and centuries as technology advances, as industry develops, as the unusual becomes more commonplace, maybe people will start to view life on Mars in a similar fashion. Maybe it won't seem so impractical when the bounty of martian agriculture feeds substantial populations, when martian industry is a multi-billion dollar or multi-trillion dollar business, when cities full of people exist on Mars, and so on.
> We operate on a kind of tiering system, technicians,
> sysadmins, and engineers. Sysadmins and engineers are
> generally the ones entering tickets, and the
> technicians the ones working them. Generally,
> but not always.

Right. In general, a sysadmin or a engineer ("someone else") decides what should get worked on, and enters it into the issue tracker. The technician is not involved in this decision making process: They just pull tasks and work to complete them.

To pull Markovitz' article back into this, the sysadmins and engineers are (I assume) able to push back on the business, providing a reality-check when plans are unrealistic, and they are the ones he's suggesting should not work off of a simple to do list.
This article ignores the fact that one region in Spain (the Canary Islands) operates on the "correct" time zone. I have lived both in the Canaries and in mainland Spain and I can tell you that there is no appreciable difference in the attitudes described by the article. Spain's problems (if indeed they are problems) are cultural and cannot be attributed to hours of sunlight.

This is clearly just an example of the Spanish parliament looking for a scapegoat for the woeful state of the Spanish economy.
That's a shame, I could really use some tj delivery. It is always a hassle to go and find parking (at least in the city).
Facebook Admits Its Ads Are Too Annoying
Your enthusiasm as great. But be aware by saying you think this is something you can do in a week you are telling the world you think programming is a semi-skilled job.

I learned to weld when I was 7. I can make art or patch up a broken plow. A real welder can make a boat because all his seams are water tight, and cam patch body work because his seams are so smooth. 27 years of welding as a hobby or for bits of maintenance and I am not a welder.
> For those who are keen to travel to Mars: may I suggest a stint in the Peace Corps first, or on a nuclear submarine, or a tour in Antarctica. If that's not ambitious enough, please try attempting to terraform a desert, or establishing a colony under the ocean or on top of K2, or constructing a city that's mostly buried underground.

Actually, it would be like signing up for a Peace Corps tour in Antarctica, first travelling there for 6 months on a tiny 4-man nuclear submarine, then arriving to build then live in an underground city where the outside atmosphere is more rarefied than at the top of K2 and drier than most deserts.

> it's basically a hostile shithole

The only reason we think the Earth is so great is that we evolved to live there. Otherwise, it would be a shithole at the bottom of an annoyingly deep gravity well and annoyingly dense corrosive atmosphere.

Technology changes everything, though.
Computer Science -Questions/Recommendations for a Bachelor Thesis 
Hello.
For my last year in my bachelor i have to choose a thesis from a given list of essays including software development,research, programming,neuron networks,clustering etc etc.After considering lots of stuff like things that i know how to do, things that i would like to do and the list of essays ,i still dont know what to choose.
The thing is i am a beginner in this field and thus not really able to tell which field of computer science is thriving and interesting thats why i need some opinions and suggestions.

PS.What is your opinion on an essay having to do with desinging and developing parallel sorting and clustering data algorithms in a cluster environment using a myrinet 2Gbps network.(the title might not be exact but i think it draws the picture).

Thanx for hearing me out
We have plenty of engineers in spain (me being one).

http://capitalsocialenespanol.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/st...

http://capitalsocialenespanol.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/gr...
Can a Surface RT run device drivers for full on Windows? It doesn't run regular Windows programs except ones compiled for it: Office.
Thanks! This is awesome. I'm always looking at the official examples whenever I start a new project. This is so much better.
In every university cantina in Spain you will find a multiple-course lunch. Better yet, (at least in Madrid) every institute has its own cantina, so you can decide between different lunch options: "Wanna go to physics today?", "No, I'll eat at the Ophtamologists".
You can see it? Won't load for me.

Or is that what you meant, that having a site that won't load will ruin your business.
Why did paypal buy braintree?
Jacquesm: Did you have any feedback on featurekicker or in general about making better product decisions? Would luv to get your insight.
It's not my project. I am not involved with this project, in any way. I just shared this project, because I found it very useful. Glad everyone liked it.
Why not steer the FSF troops towards advocating direct government funding for free software projects and services like a public cloud?

"Government funds" come out of people's paychecks. What you're asking for is that everyone be forced to contribute to projects that you approve of, regardless of whether those people value those projects or not. I can't see a valid reason why someone that doesn't know about, need or want "free" software should be obligated to pay for it. What about their own needs, desires, goals and concerns? People need to be left free to keep the money they earn so that they can better their lives and pursue the things that matter to them.

I really like sports cars - I like them a lot. I think they're inspiring to look at, fun to drive, and I could make the argument that there are a lot of people, ranging from children to the elderly, that feel the same way about them. Each of us would love to own, maintain, collect, restore and design new sport cars. Generally speaking, love of these things is connected with all sorts of other interests, including science, math and engineering, art (sculpting, photography, etc.) Just like software, albeit to a lesser extent, sports cars have have some arguable "public benefit" (i.e., a concrete benefit for a finite, delimited subset of individuals in society).

Now imagine that we came up with some kind of government program would shower sports cars on anyone that applied for them. Why should my aunt - who barely drives - be forced to subsidize my sports car hobby, at the expense of her own desire to travel on a cruise ship to Alaska while she still can? (She is 79 years old.)

At this point, maybe you'd say, "Well, software benefits everyone far more than cars do. After all, even people that don't use computers at all benefit from the improved efficiency (lower prices, increased quality, etc.) that computers bring to our economy. So all we're doing here is recouping costs from free riders."

I don't have the space to do much more than to hint at the answer. This is by no means exhaustive, but one fundamental issue is this:

When you say, "benefit," what do you mean? In my view, a thing is not ultimately beneficial to a person unless they come to see for themselves how it is a benefit to their lives, via their own independent judgement. Sure, identifying what's good for other people is fine. But then insisting that they agree with you if and when they do not actually agree subverts their independent judgement, which is the very thing required to produce and select the things needed to improve their own lives. No one should be compelled to eat a meal that wipes out their olfactory bulb and tastebuds.
According to the Wikipedia article, the Dragon's cargo capacity to the ISS is 3.3t. 6t is for separate "DragonLab" missions.