skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would assume they help keep track of / index the massive amount of government-sponsored agricultural research & data the DoA has generated. "[The Agricultural Research Service] has more than 2,200 permanent scientists working on approximately 1,100 research projects at more than 100 locations", to say nothing of historical data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Research_Service

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Agricultural_Library
User supplied sources, algo supplied news 
Show and tell about this new website that pulls news automatically from sources supplied by users.
Spray fits nicely in with Akka and I expect HTTP to just become another Akka feature (the way the new IO is, which included assistance from Spray devs IIRC). I wouldn't be surprised to see https://github.com/eligosource/eventsourced moved into Akka more directly at some point too.
It took some time to get used to, but now I don't even notice it. Totally worth the adjustment period. New people always seem to comment how orange/warm my screen looks.
These guys are a recruiting firm, so its in their interest to pump up the numbers. Here is a quora thread I used when I was trying to figure out my current market worth: http://www.quora.com/Salary-Comparisons/Silicon-Valley-Salar...
We are working on a fully composable frame and concurrency is done as follows (upper-case = Object, lower-case = property):

AsyncRun ( part SomeObject )

multiple items can run in parallel like this:

AsyncRun ( part SomeObjectA SomeObjectB .. )

synchronization:

AsyncSync ( part AsyncRun ( part SomeObjectA SomeObjectB .. ))

locking a property:

AsyncRun ( part AsyncLock ( lockName = "someName", part = SaveUser ( ... ) ) )

On main thread (for UI/UX):

MainThreadRun ( part SomeObject )
DJB still claims that qmail is exploit-free[1] as well as djbdns[2] and I think those are both 1-man shows.

[1] http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html

[2] http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html
> There is an economic benefit to specialization. I worry that gets forgotten when this debate comes up.

There is. But when you get too entrenched in a single line of thought, then you lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into that single line of thought.

Witness all the science geeks who only know how to build or calculate things (but may not have a broader concept of the why or what of what they're doing - maybe this is why everyone has a start-up looking for a problem), and all the humanities or business people who can't figure out basic technology or other problems.

If science people had a better understanding of the humanities, philosophy, etc..., and humanities people learned to solve problems, I do think society would benefit.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't specialize, only that we should explore outside of our comfort zone and world view...
A million times "no."

There is essentially zero chance that the potential employer will be in a frame of mind to evaluate your situation with anything resembling the degree of compassion or understanding you're looking for.

If anything they'll be hyper-attuned towards filtering out against: (1) unknowns and (2) risk. Your situation screams both (1)+(2), at very high volume. And even if they do hire you, most likely they'll have you in a "box" mentally, and see you as someone with high flight risk / limited growth potential.

As an alternative... perhaps you can see your next job as a an "escape" form your emotional condition. Perhaps as a kind of a role-playing game as it were. As in:

I'm just here for the paycheck, the routine, and the stability. I don't need these people as an emotional support network. Also, I'm confident enough that I can put on a different "hat" for 8 hours a day. Then deal with my internal situation in my spare time, on my own terms.

Also, you might be pleasantly surprise at what the change in scenery and daily routine does for your internal state. There's a lot[1] of neurophysiological research being done of late to the effect that putting ourselves "through the motions", e.g. smiling at others, being kind and helpful to them; and, when they ask that dreaded question -- "How are you?" -- answering with: "Nice of you to ask! I'm great! How are you!" even though we know they don't really mean it -- that these kinds of habits actually do end up, over time, influencing one's internal state in a positive way.

[1] no references handy -- but I'm pretty sure I've seen quite a few; and it fits my observations of my own mental state and of that of others close to me in this life, generally.
My Next Adventure in Journalism
> Assuming you are not operating dangerous machinery are you likely to be sued for simply allowing alcohol to be consumed?

Providing alcohol to your employees or permitting them to consume alcohol on the job or at a company-sponsored event creates a whole host of potential liabilities. Here are a couple of real-world examples:

http://www.riskandinsurance.com/story.jsp?storyId=533353814

http://www.mmdnewswire.com/faapuna-mac-manu-mahoney-law-grou...

If you believe that alcohol is a good way to create a "relaxed atmosphere" let me assure you: there's nothing relaxing about watching your insurance premiums skyrocket, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys, paying millions of dollars in damages and/or living with the fact that you were involved in an incident during which someone was seriously hurt or lost his or her life.
Boulder has been lagging somewhat, but starting to see averages approaching that range (the deleted comment mentioned $120K-ish). I also wish there was a way to measure the quality of pub/cafe conversation, because I feel like that has improved dramatically as of late.
Shame it doesn't really work so well here. It forms dark vertical stripes on the screen, making small text ugly and hard to read. Oh well, I'll just use my monitor's controls which allow lowering to 4000K.
LoL. There were exactly two political groups/parties to blame for the collapse of Northen Song dynasty and the following stagnation of everything in China.

They were Yuanyou(元佑党人) the reformists, and Yuanfeng(元丰党人) the conservatives.

Damn.

Now, there is a similar case in US.

I hope this time, politicians can do much better than ruin all good things.
Scoreoff - easily organize pickup sports & group activities
And we circle back around to the original linked document, in its spirit what a scientist would find useful is can it generate specific falsifiable predictions that can be tested and evaluated, if so, its useful. Particle physics is on the border and depends on some pretty esoteric lab experiments, and that border has been exceedingly fuzzy over the past century or two so don't be too drastic about setting that border in stone... On the other hand the point the article is making about non-scientists is usefulness is defined as, lets talk about it, now was that fun or politically applicable (or at least acceptable) or plain old interesting, well then its useful. The claim is given the core difference in philosophical outlook the two are not going to see eye to eye on much of anything, and at best a rebuttal is sometimes they might agree coincidentally or its not really as bad as he claimed, etc.

To a scientist a language is useful if you can make certain predictions about proto-indo-european and what you'd probably find if you dug up an ancient city over there, and it turns out when you dig up that city and examine the writing on pottery the writing looks like ... whereas to a non-scientist a language is useful if you can get students to attend a lecture and write a term paper about it, and if the conference discussions are fun and interesting.

As an outlook on life its about as useful as asking whats better, music or artworks?
As Democrats seethe over GOP tactics, video over rules change goes viral
Because it's still part of the Republican caucus publicly agreeing to something, so hopefully they can influence some pressure on the Speaker / House.

But yes, this still needs to get through the house, and if it does we've just kicked the can to Jan.
Note that the recently identified "technical middle class" in British society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...
seems to capture the science side of the dichotomy. The lack of cultural capital of the technical middle class is a problem for their status, in traditional terms, whereas lack of scientific knowledge in other social groupings is not.

As Flanders and Swann put it, "One of the great problems in the world today is undoubtedly this problem of not being able to talk to scientists, because we don't understand science. They can't talk to us because they don't understand anything else, poor dears." http://www.nyanko.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/fas/anotherhat_first....
Core.async, a Clojure Library for Asynchronous Programming [video]
I think a part of the surprise is due to a lack of consideration for inflation. According to the BLS $120k in 2003 is ~$152k in 2013.
Tolerance for tolerance's sake eh? I don't think that endlessly and gratuiously chasing wealth is a healthy way to live, why should I change my opinion?
> Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra. It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context, string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.
I lament that I spent so much time "learning" in school and have so little to show for it. I know about different kinds of cloud formations, which extinct native American cultures lived where, the difference between the soil composition in different parts of the country, spectral lines in different gasses, etc. This is trivia.

The point is to learn how to 'learn'. Yes, memorizing endless facts can seem pointless, but the entire point of the classics is to gain a greater understanding of humanity in general, and to learn understanding.
That misses the point. Of course a refrigerator from today has more functionality built to it than refrigerator from 50 years ago. Of course we can build it much cheaper. The question, do we want to?

There is also Akerlof, who also won the "Nobel Prize". When people cannot recognize quality, they cannot buy it. Sure, every fool can compare "features". So when the producer is faced with a choice, build it 10% cheaper for half the quality, what do you think he is going to do? Most people won't know until it breaks.

It's also win for the producer. He can make two lines - one "consumer" line with half the quality, and the other "professional" line with the right quality, but two times as expensive. That's how modern market segmentation works.
You can use something like easy cron to schedule a call. Scheduling a call with a single http request example at

http://blog.kookoo.in/2013/09/scheduling-audio-conference-wi...
> The reasoning is that standing activates enzymes and gene expression

That's my point. That there are reasons why standing is better than sitting but the article got them mostly wrong.
Hm? Not up in arms, just politely noting an inaccuracy. It seemed unnecessary to pull out the Edward Said quotes.
I'm a bit surprised this isn't receiving more attention here. Thus a bit of context for those uncertain whether to click through:

In this email message to colleagues, Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir recounts the difficulties he faced in getting a visa to attend the 2013 Cryptologic History Symposium sponsored by the National Security Agency. Adi Shamir is the “S” in the RSA public-key algorithm and is “one of the finest cryptologists in the world today,” according to historian David Kahn.

Shamir's quoted message is concise and informative and well worth the read.

I find this extremely concerning. Science in the Americas continues to be sabotaged by politics. (And it is a further reflection that I had to consider the possible state-generated repercussions of using the word "sabotage" in my comment. (I.e. the keyword count is going high in this post).)

Nonetheless, that does appear to be what's happening. Politically, economically. Muzzled speech in the U.S. and in Canada. Etc.
Two things:
1) The article is from March. If they are shilling, they are not doing a good job.
2) The article is the mobile version. The call to action is probably visible on their main site.
What's really incredible is that Maryland didn't get attendance points for just showing up. They got the points for completing hacks. So over the last 6 weeks, 160 hackers completed hacks at the official MLH events.
How to turn a developer into a founder: Advice from those who’ve done it
The Syllabus – Startup Accounting 101
I agree with Omidyar here. Not that I'm particularly interested in sports and entertainment: when I read the paper on line, I go straight to whatever I'm interested in (often politics, econ, etc..). Nevertheless, I thing one of the goal of this new venture is to make sure as many people as possible are aware of what's wrong with political powers. A gross restatement of their objective would be: make sure the people feeding on Fox News get another source of information, a reliable one. So they're practicing a foot-in-the-door technique: provide quality journalism for popular topics, and hope that when people browse their site, they will be more likely to stumble on important news they would otherwise have missed.

More generally, I'm very excited and hopeful about this project. It is a truly innovative experiment in an aging industry, and I hope it succeeds. For the first time in my life I'm considering subscribing to a newspaper..
The fact that it came to this point isn't enough?
The story is like from a movie
Your life, under constant surveillance
Interesting. I'm attempting to do pretty much the same thing in C: http://github.com/reginaldl/librinoo
The House has enough Democrats and swing Republicans to pass a bill to avoid the default and reopen the gov't, the problem right now is even the Republicans (who control the house) can't agree on a bill to put up for a vote (or at least agree on one that will pass the democrat controlled senate). There's literally nothing to vote on.

If the Senate agrees on a bill and it gets put up for a vote in the House it will probably get through with all the dems and enough Republicans to pass.
The entire worth of all bitcoins is just north of $50 billion. It wouldn't be very difficult for any soveriegn to gain control of 25% of that market.

Whether government created bitcoins is a moot point, knowing the answer to this question doesn't mean anything. The question is whether bitcoins provide a superior environment for transacting business when compared to alternatives.
How Stride Got Its First 1000 Customers
Just my two cents, but if you know your core functionality, you can try to meet your stakeholders and build a relationship before the sale.

For my b2b saas product, I pitched the product to local businesses just to see how it would work. They gave some valuable feedback to change the product, then I cold e-mailed prospects.

As much as I don't like buying templates, the cold e-mail template from appsumo really worked well for me

http://www.appsumo.com/sumo-email-templates/
Yes, if what you ask us to imagine were what happened, then you'd be right. It didn't, however, so you are not.

The difficulty of the phrase is not relevant to how long it might take to learn, because of how cryptography works. That is, a 60 character phrase is much harder to crack than a 58 character phrase. So, the difference between "password" and "this is the password I'm going to use from now until the end of eternity" is cryptographically large, but trivial, memorization wise. So while the difficulty of the phrase to crack just jumped into "not gonna happen" land, the difficulty of the memorization of the phrase moved from instantaneous to 5-10 minutes.

If his wife learned a much more cryptographically complicated phrase it still would not have taken her longer to remember, making the specific phrase completely irrelevant. Two months is laughable, "taught it to my gf" is doubly laughable, and "gf (basically a wife)" is off the laughable charts.
The assertion that TrueCrypt "has now managed to fix all the problems cited by Red Hat Legal (relayed by Tom Callaway)" is false (I'm not Tom Callaway but I am confident he would agree with me on this). The points I mention in the license-discuss posting yesterday
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/201...
were applicable (as far as I can remember) to earlier versions we looked at and as to which we raised concerns to TrueCrypt.

As I noted in that posting, TrueCrypt did change some things in response to the barrage of criticism, but not enough.
I realise this article is from a recruiter and grains of salt etc., but if these salaries are accurate because of limited supply in the SV area, then I really hope this further opens the way to remote working, particularly from other parts of the US and Canada. I suspect there is a largely untapped pool of senior-ish people out there that would be fine to work with remotely. The tools are getting pretty good although I freely admit there is still some ways to go.

Granted, face-to-face is still necessary sometimes. I fly down to SF once a quarter to meet with my long-term client. They get a break on salary and I get to work at home so everyone's a winner.
I'm not an expert, but to me it seems that every recent account of west vs. east vastly overestimates how awesome China was, just for shock value. This article seems to claim that Europe didn't surpass China until the 1800s. Why then did math, astronomy and other sciences, and natural philosophy not originate in China, but centuries earlier in Europe (with a loose definition of "originate", I know Europeans were not the first)? Most of Chinese philosophy seems to me to be mostly about society and the duty of men etc. I'm sure China excelled at organizing an efficient society with a comparatively huge population, but that doesn't mean that they were on the cusp of something bigger. Perhaps they were at a local optimum as a society. And while Europe was worse off early on, it allowed the region to discover math and science AND make USE of it. China had a big fleet, but cancelled the project. China invented printing but it did not push literacy. China invented gun powder, but they didn't use it to gain a military advantage. Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to understand or extract it. China is a sea of lost opportunities, it's not as simple as blaming it on opium and intervening western powers.

edit: it seems that further down this article gives more explanations and actually states that China was in stagnation from 1200 onwards. However, there are many other articles and books making the argument I'm trying to refute. For me, the interesting part of the article is:

Perhaps the root problem was the absence of a new world rich in resources to exploit and helpless because of technological backwardness.

Perhaps the root problem was the lesser weight attached to instrumental rationality as a mode of thought

Perhaps the root problem was the absence of dissenting hidey-holes for ideological unconformity.

Perhaps the root problem was the fact that the merchants and hand-manufacturers of China's cities were governed by landlords appointed by the central government rather than governing themselves.

Perhaps the root problem was that large-muscled animals like oxen and horses turned out to be powerful productive multipliers for temperate rain-irrigated wheat-based agricultural but not for sub-tropical paddy-irrigated rice-based agriculture

Perhaps the root problem was some combination of these.

Perhaps the root problem was one or a combination of any of a host of other possibilities over which historians will struggle inconclusively (but thoughtfully and fruitfully) for the rest of time.
Pornography is so creative that I find it hard to have one algorithm that can detect it all. Looking for features certainly wouldn't catch the more weird stuff.

Maybe a good approach is an image lookup, trying to find the image on the web and seeing if it appears on a porn site, or a pornographic context.
Isn't this common sense?
The primary reason the House has been a deal-stopper so far is more because of Boehner's resistance to bring bills to the floor unless they would be supported by a majority of the House Republicans regardless of whether they'd pass a floor vote.

It's assuming (IMO correctly) that it will be too politically difficult for Boehner to prevent the Senate's bill from coming to the floor of the House and being voted on.

In the House vote, it's likely the most conservative House members will still vote against it, but there should be more than enough votes for it to be passed (with the House votes coming from moderate Republicans + all/nearly all Democrats).
"It remains unclear whether the Senate bill can muster enough votes in the Republican-led House to pass before the 17 October deadline."

The US has actually defaulted a couple of times. During the War of 1812 (duh, war) and in 1979 (glitch?!?). About half the debt limit raises have had other terms ("dirty").

I should mention debt limit and paying service on the debt are separate things and the US still has enough income every month to service the debt, but they tend to get put together to add to the stress.
Taking it even further... who knows if PG was even wrong with his suggestions. It is possible that 360scope (minus the alien) would have been just as successful as Reddit (with the alien). I don't know at which stage this suggestion was made though. At some point it becomes dangerous to make an arbitrary name change.
UMD earned 666.66 merit points.

I report, you decide!
I think this upper end is a lot more interesting than the mean. I'd love to see data on what the distribution in the upper percentiles of software engineers and engineering managers looks like, especially compared to traditionally high-paying professions like finance, law, medicine, etc.
> However, in most cases threads are no more complex than callbacks, actors [...]

You are mixing the two concepts. The distinction is between threads/actors vs callbacks. Not threads and callbacks vs actors.

If you disregard isolated heaps and memory an actor is just a thread plus a queue. Other threads write to the queue and the threads gets messages from queue and executes them.

The real distinction is callbacks vs threads and actors thought. And I agree with original point. Callback-based concurrency is more complicated and more challenging to write than threaded-based concurrency.

> Also, in lots of languages multi-core != concurrent. You can have 10,000 actors using a single core. In fact writing a scheduler that can efficiently distribute actors between different cores is probably where the complexity Doron Rajwan refers to lies.

What do you mean by multi-core? Languages don't come with cores, hardware does. Do you mean that CPU-bound units of concurrency (threads, actors, processes, co-routines) can be dispatched onto multiple CPUs if those exist? Yeah some languages (or more precisely their runtimes and libraries) can't do that. Like Python has the GIL so CPU bound threads can't work. But threads work great for IO bound threads.
I responded to this kind of argument here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6558509
The story was not exactly what I expected....Facebook itself is not making that kind of profit, that is the findings of a third party that ostensibly is surveying advertisers on their CPM and what I'm guessing is their estimated revenue per click...how is the latter measured per advertiser?