skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey no need to apologize, it is all good. What I meant by "go read grellas' comment" was "Ignore what I wrote, Grellas says what I should have said".

Yes the use of the 'legal' bit (which I threw in to keep the ravening hordes off 'but but are you saying you are ok with drug dealing/child pornography/whatever'. In my defense, it was late at night here (India) when I wrote that and it is too late to edit now.

My position in my original comment was "Within the law (see below for an alternative to this clumsy phrasing), I'd probably do almost any job in software, provided I were paid enough". The "enough" might be quite high.

As a thought experiment, take a sw job you'd find distasteful, and ask yourself if you'd take it if your pay was a million dollars a year. How about if it were a billion? If you are the rare human being who wouldn't work for the NSA, no matter what you were paid, then more power to you. I would gladly work for them if they rewarded me well, because I don't think the engineers at NSA are evil demons bent on world domination. By that logic, nobody should be a soldier, because the essence of that job is killing other people for dubious political causes. Yet the USA worships its service personnel ("Thank you for your service") to a far greater degree than most other countries (where being a soldier is "just" another job).

Grellas of course lays all of tis this out much better than I can. "proximate cause" is the phrase I should have used, but I am not a lawyer and wasn't even aware of the phrase.

So, yes I probably wouldn't work on something that has a pure unadulterated horrifying evil proximate effect( and no good aspects) to it. But that isn't saying very much since this kind of pure evil job probably doesn't exist outside a platonic ideal.

I was objecting to the broadbrush sanctimony in the article, and the use of (in my mind) silly examples.

The whole "legal" bit was clumsy phrasing on my part and you are right to call me out on it.

Cheers,
Dockerizing Ghost - Step 1
Article fails to explain why a dev would desire to become a PM. My best guess is an entry point to a management career in shops run by non-devs.

Edit: I imagine that's perfectly natural - when I was in backoffice IT I strongly desired to transition into project management so that I could transition into people management so that I could make meaningful decisions and get credit for them. It's probably the same in product companies except low-level devs will want to manage products so they can manage divisions so they can run big-name tech companies. Currently I'm working as a consulting dev in a small dev consultancy and I don't feel the same pull in that direction that I used to. I think maybe all we really need is to be taken seriously and to have some meaningful work.
A Wall Street Bank Initiated Coverage On Bitcoin and Identified a Fair Value
For me, it's because Medium is frequently poorly researched and/or written blogspam. The URL provides no context about who or what wrote it.
It'd be nice if the article went into detail about the particulars of what might be so indispensible about certain elements.

Why are rhenium, rhodium, lanthanum, europium, dysprosium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium, strontium, thallium, magnesium and manganese so irreplacable?

Is it catalytic reactivity, phase transition tempratures, crystal formation tendencies, quirks in solid state semiconductor chemistry?

Is the article light on details so that people don't develop cute ideas about cornering markets? What's the deal here?
i've used this for a while now--really useful debugging tool in my workflow. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

just wrap the offending module and get on with your life; and in those rare (for me) instances where you still get errors, this module supports chaining syntax--declarative syntax, to say the least:

fuckit(fuckit('imported_module'))
Ah bummer, looks like the QFC on Lake City Way closed a couple years ago... it'd been there forever! Looks like the one on 145th and 15th is still there though (but obviously that's not easily walkable from Lake City Way).

Good to see the neighborhood is perhaps up and coming?
Perhaps because it was the name of a child on the popular TV show "The Waltons" from 1971-1981?
Driving Is Going Out of Style
I'm fascinated by the beard thing. I know a few weeks ago I read a story on Facial Hair and attractiveness for men.

Between: Clean-Shaven, Scruffy, Heavily Scruffy, and full grown beard the one that women found most attractive was heavily scruffy. Same with men, they found heavily scruffy and full beard most attractive.

I wonder if linked in and dating sites will allow you to upload numerous photos and a/b test them.

Facial hair can have a big influence on how old you look. I myself look like I'm 17 when I shave (but I'm 27). At work people give me extra time for tasks, avoid giving me a walkie, and completely avoid training me on heavy machinery. While other employees are given more responsibilities and training on the 2nd or 3rd day. I wonder how different my life would be if I looked older? Or if I grew out a beard...
My never-ending acid trip
> The current state of the patent system is such that having been granted a patent legally supersedes in power the act of enabling technological advancement. That is to say that the power of the patent system has surpassed its social justification...

I'm not sure what your first sentence actually means, but there is not enough evidence to support the following sentence. I know it's a popular opinion around here, but really, it's because this place is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics.

There are studies that show how NPEs have beneficial effects (see work by Michael Risch, Jay Kesan, Anne Layne-Farrar etc.), and others showing their harmful effects are not as bad as media makes it look. The GAO report on NPEs, for instance, found that they are no big problem, really.

Unfortunately, the data available is limited in a big way: there is no data at all on demand letters that trolls like Lodsys send. There's an act that would help track these things too (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/11/patent-reform-2013-d...), and that's the one I'm really looking forward to. That data would give a much clearer picture of the NPE situation.
It would be nice if we could live in a world where Amtrak didn't cost as much or more than flying in a plane (source: travelling between Minneapolis and Milwaukee from 2007-2012).
I'm more interested in simply highlighting the whole truth rather than making a value judgement. The truth is that Mandela was a pragmatist in regards to tactics. When bombing fast food restaurants was tactically viable his organization did that. When the situation changed, he advocated an alternative approach.

"If the oppressor uses violence, the oppressed have no alternative but to respond violently." - Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom, p.537)

"If the state decided to use peaceful methods, the ANC would also use peaceful means. It is up to you... not us to renounce violence.” p.537

Looking at things tactically, it's a question of where your opponent is vulnerable: internally or externally. Pacifism is necessary to create the perception of legitimacy needed to mobilize external political support.
23andMe Provides An Update Regarding FDA’s Review
What makes you think that? What kind of job?
It's not so much that I'm looking for nonprofits myself. I challenge the notion that anyone is really doing anything to improve public education if they are just another private company, with a profit motive, having access to student data.

I have rarely seen companies continue to serve students well when there is a profit motive involved. People should get paid well for their work, I have no issue with that. But I am wary of where the profit motive leads ed tech initiatives.
> It's rarely the language that has any actual effect on the end result.

Implementing HN in APL is left as an exercise for the reader.
I like the opposite approach, where broken code is explicitly removed. vigil (https://github.com/munificent/vigil) attempted to do this
I never knew "Dylan" (my name) didn't exist until the 80s or so (Apparently).
Why is this? Was the name popular because of Bob Dylan?

p.s: Oh I see, apparently it's a Welsh name (should've known, Dylan Thomas...) I'm too tired to think.
Ugh. Don't do it. Someone find me an article on how to go from PM back to dev.
Probabilistic Programming in Quantitative Finance
I work at Google, as far as I know no one uses these. I never have, although I considered using one when I didn't have any accommodation for the night (I ended up staying with a friend).

That said, people do not work long hours. Only very few people consistently working more than 45 hours a week. Napping is not going to reduce your workload, it's just a lifestyle choice that most people choose not to make. Similarly, people take breaks either to socialize with other employees, or because they can't handle working solidly for 3-4 hours.
This was a really fun process I actually started once Ghost went to Open Beta.

I finally took the time to actually replace my blog today, though.

Please let me know if you have any questions or I can assist in any way.
Microsoft leads disruption of largest infected global PC network
Missing a typo on a website is trivial, but it leads to wondering if they missed something more important. You don't want to see your investment impact the Moon 10x faster than it was supposed to because somebody misplaced a decimal point.
He said sane.
I'm not saying that having a bug is something to be ashamed of. I am pointing out that the page is making a big deal out of a small issue, in order to argue a bigger point: operating system development is hard. The whole page screams with: "look how hard this is!".

The lesson conveyed in my post should be that this author is making it look harder than it actually is, and if you want to write an OS, you shouldn't feel like it's an unsurmountable task. But by all means, stamp and destroy it.
Then use a local storage one, like password-safe (Win & Mac. password-gorilla for Linux). Combine that with spideroak, dropbox, google drive or whatever file syncing utility you want.
If you don't want to sell anything (an app), and you don't want people to pay you for your skills (a job), I see two possible routes: a) have very high quality content on your blog behind a paywall, b) have very high quality content on your blog along side some types of ads. In either of those scenarios, you are going to need a very large amount of traffic in order to sustain yourself long term.
So 3 days in a row of "why bitcoin is a bubble" are unique stories for hn? Considering the fact that I'm barely making it in the middle class, made a bad decision, warned others about it, and like millions of other blogs have a donation bitcoin address (NOT even a paypal donate button).

This is HN, not Reddit, we don't recoil in snarkery or condescendence at people who try to self help or plug their startups.

Judging from your past comments on other articles, you're quite the negative one. So, enlightened being, what have you built to make your status so much higher than ours?
I am currently interning at a defense contractor and I do more than the full time people. So I am confident in my skills to get a full time job.
It was a great read, indeed.

And yet, it was locked by SE mods as out of topic. While I love Stack Exchange and I'm thankful for the value it brought in so many ways, this policy of locking reasonable and valid questions is just upsetting.
My wife and my brother pickup my packages for me from my local UPS store where I have a mailbox. Don't even need a key; they both know the owner personally.
It doesn't sound like the beard so much as him appearing too young before and the beard making him appear older.

So as long as you don't look like a teenager you shouldn't have problems.
I had not realized that Dennis Ritchie was dead, so I think he made his point about which person dominated the popular media, even if both were of similar importance.

Both were important people, but the kind of work they did definitely affected who would be more familiar with them.

Steve probably did as much as anyone to promote *nix, even if it was BSD, FWIW.
You're saying that it's fine to target your bombings at children and women if you're fighting to end something like apartheid?

Wow.
"Article fails to explain why a dev would desire to become a PM."

(in most companies) more money, power, autonomy. Except in very early stage startups, it is the rare developer who has more of any of this than even the lowliest PM. e.g: I think Vic Gundotra makes more money, and has more power at Google than most (all?) engineers there.
Ok, so you perceive it to be more spammy with lower quality content than HN or other sites. What other sites are at the top of your pyramid? Also, are you a dev?
I have to guess the jump is just coincidental, but who knows... Maybe because all us tech folk are basement dwelling, D&D playing, bearded outcasts, it fit some sort of subconscious stereotype. It'd be interesting to try blue hair or thick geek glasses and whatnot.
Does this fix circular import for me...?
That's cute. Now find me one instance of the white apartheid government intentionally bombing innocent civilians like Mandela's ANC did.
To the best of my understanding, Clever provides access to read-only data from the SIS. It does NOT provide a mechanism for education vendors to write data back into the SIS (an extremely important aspect of the problem in this ecosystem).

While the SIS stores core student data, there is a lot of missing functionality that could be supplemented well by products specializing in a particular niche (eg school lunch tracking, alerting, progress reporting, special education documentation, medicaid reimbursement, etc). However, schools feel unable to use these products since SISes generally disallow information write-back, arguing that accepting data from 3rd party vendors makes the database unstable and violates their end-user license agreement with the district.

Clever has helped with the easy problem, but the harder one is no closer to being solved.
Additionally, being able to code and being able to manage people and being able to manage products/projects are all different skill sets.
8 months worth of work for only $20k? This doesn't sound like a successful experience - more like you were highly over worked and under paid.
It probably would have been more beneficial to have marketed your services for 80 hours and be able to land a $20k project as well as a lasting client.
I've never worked at a product company per se, but that is exactly why I aspired to transition into project management back when I worked in corporate IT. Can't blame folks for wanting the money and the power after they see how things are for the Vics in their companies.
By Erik Voorhees, creator of SatoshiDice. That probably deserves mention in the title.
"Don't silence KeyboardInterrupt or SystemExit. We aren't monsters." Hahahahha
Fun stuff. My mom said she chose my name (Joshua) largely because she didn't know of anyone else with the same name, yet the year I was born just happened to be the height of its popularity. I thought it was kind of odd that 10% of my graduating high school class had the same name (seriously!)
Having any ethics whatsoever is "political correctness" now? I don't think you know what that word means.
For me, I think it rather raised my curiosity than quenched it. For a few nights, this is rather impressive.
red leather yellow leather
red leather yellow leather
red leather yellow leather
When you have to demonstrate your software in front of Very Important Clients in ten minutes and you can't afford to have a single error popping up.
So does that make the millions of illegals in the country an under-underclass?
I love that you folks - in contrast to so many other catering companies - are transparent with your pricing!

Come to NYC?

(question: what are our options in NYC? Besides seamless, which basically means we eat from the same 3 places every week?)
Its good Spotify is finally going to get to do this (to bad licensing negotiations took an entire year to iron out though). I'll be looking forward to hearing exactly how similar this is to the service Pandora already offers (although I doubt it will sway me back away from Google Music).
I really like your question about the impact if they can't fill the position. It seems like a tough one to get away with, though. It could come off as too cocky, or as too much of a salary negotiation setup. Does this one go over ok? What kinds of responses have you gotten?

Also, on feedback: have you ever gotten useful feedback from an interview that didn't result in an offer? I've tried, but rarely gotten anything, and even then it was so vague as to not really be useful.
> But there currently is no such competitor.

It depends on what you define to be a competitor. There are many money transfer services, many of which aren't cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has to compete with each of them.

> But, there has to be enough value in Bitcoin the coin for Bitcoin the protocol to work for money transfers.

The argument was that the value is de minimis because BofA Paybuddy is willing to transfer money (change some numbers) for 0.5%

> The value doesn't have to be captured for Bitcoin to be a success. Bitcoin isn't a business.

It needs to be captured if you are considering it an investment.
Let me get this right. Your logic is that intentionally bombing and killing mothers and children at civilian shopping malls are perfectly okay as long as apartheid exists.

Did I get that right?
I'm referring to the maxim often repeated by Alan Kay that "[point of view|context|a change of context] is worth [40|80] IQ".
The problem I have with this download a copy approach is that it's not a great backup (not automatic, not easy to find individual things to restore, etc).

For that, I use CloudPull from http://goldenhillsoftware.com and it's by far the best Google backup tool I've found. I've tried gmvault, fetchmail, offlineimap, and pretty much every thing in between.

CloudPull supports Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Drive/Docs. The app backs up Google accounts in the background and all the data is available in standard file formats.

Anyway, I don't think enough people know about it. If you want a useful automatic backup of your Google life, give it a whirl. It's one of my favorite pieces of software.
Imap. Simplest solution might be:

* download & open up thunderbird

* Add 2 accounts: your existing gmail account, and your new outlook.com account

* select all email in the inbox of your gmail account, ctrl+c [this will take a while]

* open the inbox (or other folder) of the outlook account, ctrl+v

Personally, the largest migration I've done using this method was ~1GB, but should work for larger accounts as well. Hope this helps!
Well, the answer to "should I make x final" is always "yes" in Java, so you don't really have to think too hard about that either. :-) `final` really should have been the default setting for all methods, classes, and local variables, but unfortunately inheritance was still in vogue when Java was created, and the benefits of immutable values weren't as well understood or appreciated either (or maybe they just figured the C & C++ programmers they were trying to win over would hate it).
In a lot of ways, comparing syscalls like stat and Java methods is apples and oranges. System calls are at the very bottom of the stack, where userspace interacts directly with kernelspace, so they must return all error information, otherwise there would be no other way to get it from userspace. So it's not really examplary of C language style that syscalls behave this way. Syscalls are not designed to obscure what's really going on by putting a friendlier interface on it; at some level you need the truth.

Having said that, though, there are aspects of C that could lend it to writing robust code. The concepts are concrete, for one thing. Despite the fact that high-level languages are designed to be easier to understand, I suspect that concrete concepts are inherently easier to grasp than abstract ones (and it doesn't hurt that concrete concepts don't leak). What C contributes is a concise and eloquent syntax for telling the machine what to do, with little waste. Some people argue that it's dangerous to control the machine directly without the compiler being able to watch over you; but not having extra annotations for strong typing and such makes it easy to see what's happening, and I think that concision and transparency is key to writing robust code.
If it isn't such a big deal then why isn't everyone doing it?

Most people aren't selling web apps or licenses that you can just revoke after the transaction turns out to be fake.

The only way to make transactions faster is a fundamental change in the bitcoin protocol.
Effective exercise of leadership is more like a dance than doing steps. Rather than doing one step correctly, try to dance to music.

There is no ONE correct solution for every situation. Sometime peaceful non-violence is required, sometimes using high tech solution is appropriate to make things more productive, and sometime military force is required to defend one self.

Rather than standing behind one principle, try addressing the concerns of relevant parties.

Leadership is granted by those people who lead you and those whom you lead.
yes, there is. Imagine yourself on an airplane on your way to doing that million dollar demo to investors. And some bozo decided to do a last minute change to log something inconsequential that actually started throwing an error. Now your demo page looks like "Oops! We screwed up!". You have no time to debug this. So you just plugin in this module and see if it still good enough for your demo. If it does, you saved yourself a million dollars. If it doesn't...
>Tools for C are powerful, mature, and available on near every platform.

If only this was true for embedded platforms! I have no tools at my disposal aside from a vendor supplied debugger. No pre-existing test infrastructure exists, what we have we have had to build up ourselves.

One of C's last remaining strongholds is in embedded, and the tooling in this world is atrocious! (Though some of the instruction and performance profiling tools are beyond amazing!)

Rigorous coding standards and a heavy reliance upon code reviews keep a code base clean and sane, sort of like on any other project written in any other language!
These articles are almost as bad as the "how to become a CEO." First answer, why? Because of the desire for power over others? Weak, lame, not in the spirit of being a hacker. Flat management everyone, screw the PMs. Where's the book on how to bury your PM 6 feet deep?
Ask HN: Finding charities than needs web apps
I am trying to build my Web App development skills (MEAN stack) and thought that helping a charity create their app would be a nice and fulfilling way of doing this. Only thing is I don't really know where to get started: which charities need it, if charities even need one, how to get in contact, ...
The EFF supports this bill and has a nice summary: https://www.eff.org/cases/six-good-things-about-innovation-a...
"great working conditions" for me implies that I don't find the work odious. No amount of free soda can make up for having to work on a shitty or immoral product.

This is a luxury afforded me by the decent amount of decently well paid work available to an engineer. I might have less moral freedom if I couldn't feed my family.
In all but small companies, I think devs have little to no contact with the other product/project stakeholders. For those devs who would like to be in a position to influence/interact with the stakeholders, being a PM would eliminate some of the constraints/WTFs devs often feel. Well, not always eliminate necessarily, but minimize them, or at least provide some transparency into the part(s) of decision-making process(es) outside the devs' sphere of influence.