skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When people are labeled geniuses, independent evidence is important, especially when they've become a cause célèbre.

Geniuses generally have a body of work to stand on, not just a friend/family/colleague opinion.
Forbes: The Hottest Startups of 2013
One of the main points why Amazon moved to Leipzig/Germany in the first place is, that it is only 25km / 15 miles to the next airport. This airport is also one of three global DHL hubs and the only global DHL hub in Europe. I would suspect they don't want to give up this position.
So you disregard my examples, declare that I need to "prove" things, and then proceed to tell me that you don't. Have a good day, Sir.
If caught.
That's how strikes have always worked. You hold the productivity of the factory at ransom. In this case, it's an especially steep ransom.
This Silicon Valley Class War Must Stop Fighting About the Wrong Things
The business of considering all military-age males as combatants is really not all that surprising to me. I live in New York and here, in some neighborhoods, the police consider all minority males 14-40 (I really have no idea of the top end) to be suspected criminals worthy of a random search while simply walking down the street. This is the way we treat people. We deem one group of people to be a threat and they immediately lose their rights.

Edit: I seemed to have forgotten that it is black and hispanic males in New York who are stopped.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
How would the NSA monitor retail purchases made with cash? I guess if they wanted to get all Bourne-happy, they could monitor flights out of NK, then send somebody out to watch Kim's flack go buy whatever in Beijing. (probably where he get's most of his crap) But you're getting pretty far outside the realm of SIGINT. I'm sure the NSA would LOVE to be able to track this stuff, but realistically speaking they can't.
IT pays well out of the gate but offers virtually no path for advancement --- not in the sense of "are there better titles to be had" (sure, "Senior IT", "Manager, IT", "Director, IT") but rather in the sense of technical challenges and opportunities for learning and specialization. 5 years down the road, developers are doing significantly better on compensation and have essentially boundless opportunities (including, if one burns out, doing IT work); on the other hand, having 5 years of IT on your resume and no degree means it can be very hard to get a job outside of IT.
Pepper spray is useless in a combat situation. Wind and other factors mean that it could benefit your enemy more than you (same with other chemical weapons). Also, why bother when we have flash-bang grenades, sonic weapons, and white phosphorous. Not to mention, in war deadly force is authorized under even the most trivial of circumstances. Why pepper spray a guy and take a risk when you can shoot him and not take a risk?
The first quote is from Yemeni officials, while the second is describing the Obama administration's policies.
I've been employed as a software engineer since age 19, and I'm almost 33 now. I've worked for companies like MetLife, Tommy Hilfiger, Yahoo!, and IMVU, and my lack of a degree has never been an issue.

It helps that I was always a hobbyist (I started playing with my dad's Commodore 64 when I was 6). For the most part, everything I learned I learned by building stuff. I dropped out of college when I was 19 because my financial aid fell through, and instead of continuing with my bachelor's degree, I decided to enroll in a 9 month program at a technical school. That allowed me to fill in some of the gaps that my own tinkering didn't really cover -- things like object-oriented programming.

After that, I got my first job programming online surveys in Perl, and I've been employed ever since. Getting your foot in the door is the most important thing. You only need to find one person who believes you can do the job, and if you're intellectually curious enough, you can easily learn by doing. My first job was with a small business that didn't have anyone doing any programming, so there was nobody to tell me I wasn't good enough during the hiring process, so I was able to fake my way into having a job that gave me the employment history to work my way into bigger companies and higher salaries.
Arms deal sets limits on cyber technologies
Your recollection is correct. He caught a lot of heat for a lot of things but most of the military stuff was just accepted. Perhaps not quite as much as it is now however.
Thanks for your feedback. (Author here.)

By my calculations (which I'll machine-check now with Maxima), the 30% and 70% speed-up claims are sound. First, let's fire up Maxima:

$ maxima
Maxima 5.30.0 http://maxima.sourceforge.net
using Lisp SBCL 1.1.8-2.fc19
Distributed under the GNU Public License. See the file COPYING.
Dedicated to the memory of William Schelter.
The function bug_report() provides bug reporting information.

Now let's calculate how much faster we made the row-copy code by unrolling its loop:

(%i1) orig_loop_speed: (1*row) / (157*cycle)$
(%i2) unrolled_loop_speed: (1*row) / (120*cycle)$
(%i3) unrolling_speedup: unrolled_loop_speed / orig_loop_speed, numer;
(%o3) 1.308333333333333

In other words, the unrolled-loop speed is 1.3 times the original-loop speed. That's 30% faster, right?

Likewise, how much faster did shaving those 1200 cycles make the tile-copy code?

(%i4) copy2_speed: (1*tile) / (2893*cycle)$
(%i5) copy3_speed: (1*tile) / (1689*cycle)$
(%i6) copy3_vs_2_speedup: copy3_speed / copy2_speed, numer;
(%o6) 1.712847838957963

I'm willing to believe that I've screwed up here, but I can't see where. Can you show me?

Thanks for your help!
A "decentralized collective society" seems contradictory. I can't tell what you mean.
The Tech industry is one of the few industries where you can do very well without a degree. I know people off the top of my head making > $50k without a degree in the Midwest US. (so, say, $91K in San Fran using WolframAlpha's cost of living adjuster.)

Like most things there are some caveats.

It will be harder to get into the top tier tech companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc, hire people without degrees, but not nearly as much as other organizations on the other tiers. Similarly, there are certain high frequency low latency trading firms that won't look at your resume without some MIT connection.

Some places will hire you with no problem, but have rules that will eventually cap your salary. These are usually government offices, state-run universities, etc. (For example, I know of universities where no programmer without without a master's degree can get past tier XYZ)
I was thinking the same thing. He has to really have something awful on them - something so bad that they'd eat a ton of crow over it, and possibly lose their jobs over it. But it's still worth keeping under wraps.

The conspiracy theorist in me wishes that the X-files would do a movie on it, as we'd solve JFK and the aliens all in one wrap.
I'd be interested to see if they attempt to fake people who know him...
The parent comment implied that their workers have a de facto monopoly on filling boxes.

Which is indeed the case in the short term. However, quitting your job means not making your rent payment for a quarter of America, so the analogy still holds.

Management bargains collectively - why can't their employees do likewise?
The author very carefully avoids mentioning what web serial this was precisely, but from context I am pretty confident he is talking about Worm [1], for anyone who is interested.

[1] https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
Wanting to make your country a better place is evidence that you love your country, at least.
He starts out by saying that Anarchism is a truism. That is, we by default live in Anarchism and cannot escape it.

Then perhaps the discussion is really about what the world should be like in the future. If the discussion brings together Anarcho-* of all sorts to dismantle the current regime, it would be time well spent.

In the very least he helps us disassemble the (often conflicting) definitions so that we can better understand the origins and biases, thereby allowing us to reason more clearly about our reality.

But yeah, I get your point.
Agreed. But I have a hard time believing their priorities include dying young, in a grotesquely deformed body. I think they are plain lazy.
>Jewelry - maybe, but isn't it so desired for jewelry because it is scarce? You could make jewelry out of less noble metals.

You're right, people want it because it's shiny and rare. That makes demand for it. People can and do make jewelry out of other metals, but it's not as "prestigious". You highly underestimate how materialistic the majority of the world is.
Was that supposed to be funny or insightful in some way? It seems to me it's just a wannabe-elitist mocking elitism, interspersed with some horrible jokes.

"Television is also bad; perhaps not as bad as Twitter, but they both start with T, which rhymes with P and which stands for Pool."

Captured his arguments perfectly! Hilarious!
That may be, but people are not property. Or, well.. should not be.
Body of work? Perhaps you may have heard about his NSA leaks?
Iversity offers a free online course on Privacy, Cyber Security & Human Rights
"Of particular concern for western spymasters is the notion that technologies may end up in the hands of terrorist groups or hostile organisations and be used to thwart western surveillance operations or mount cyber attacks."
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/01/google-new...

A billion quid and 4500 employees. Seems a bit much for a country in which you don't make any profit, no?
Discover Meteor. (http://discovermeteor.com).
Agree entirely including BSD.
I just helped start LaunchCodeSTL.com with Jim McKelvey and a few others here in Saint Louis. Many of the people we talked to came from random backgrounds and the people who have shown they really want a tech job have been absolutely successful with it.
Wait, I can get fresh groceries from the interwebz soon? Sweet.
It is entirely possible to earn that much (and more) in London, outside of London - assuming you're not in a complete backwater that much should be possible.

I'd say rather than worrying about what technology you know, spend a bit of time focusing on the business side - how you find and attract clients, how you negotiate, what business areas you target etc. It is likely that the clients you are dealing with have unrealistic expectations of what engineering costs.
Kryder's law has been massively set back by the Thai floods: http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law#kryders-law
C+=: A feminist programming language
A patriot does for his country what its government will not, or cannot.
Either this or bullshit jobs.
If I were asked for a GPA or an SAT score at any job interview, I would walk as well. It's completely irrelevant, and highly dependent on the school you went to (is a 4.0 at DeVry better or worse than a 3.0 from CMU?)

It sounds like you're a little older than a person who would be debating going to college, though. I had a coworker that trained me at my current job who only had a few classes at a community college. Being hired a decade after him, it was required that I have a bachelors degree. Things have changes rapidly in the past few decades in terms of HR expectations at larger companies. I'm not trying to detract from your advice, because I think you're absolutely correct. I'm just wondering if you would be able to replicate your success today.
How does this have any relevance to HN? Practically every university gets bomb threats during exams...
Former US Marine: President Obama should be tried for treason
Unless that's the only job you can actually find. Not a nice position to be, but it always happens to someone, since there are more people that jobs in many parts of the world.

Or would it be better those people "choose" not to have any job just because they find their current one is shitty? If everyone had that attitude in 19th century, we would still work 16 hours a day, without fighting for change.
I have to agree. Someone out there benefits from every single bad thing that happens out there: securities fraud, child abuse, cancer, money laundering, murder, etc, etc.

Using the same logic, nothing should ever get better because those who benefit from "bad things" will never allow them to be stopped.
I'm even more amazed that there is demand for dogecoin then. I see the value of LTC and others but what is the USP of dogecoin?
How does the NSA offer amnesty anyway? Is it not the Justice Department that would bring charges in this situation? It's like the family of a murder victim offering amnesty to the murderer... it's not really up to them.
Common sense experiences a severe decline at most schools during finals.
If BART is that important to the bay area, perhaps the people working for it should get paid more? I mean, most of us don't go to work out of charity.
Serious answer: Yes, experience matters more than credentials.
Similarly (and this isn't just a rumor), if you leave your mouse on top of a related video on YouTube, once you click it the load is almost instantaneous.
Aside from self-realization and discipline, the only way anyone gets out of an addiction is if the transformation is inside rather than enforced constraints. Being on HN isn't the problem, it's the side effect. The real problem lies on what you're currently working on: it is not worthy enough to warrant your time and passion that you'll forego any type of "new news" because you're so consumed on what you're doing.

Find value in what you're doing, or find something more desirable and valuable. You'll break out of your addiction naturally.
Wouldn't that just encourage vote spamming?
Yes you are right, it is better to speak clearly rather than apply too general and broad labels.
If there is one thing that we should all be taking away from the Snowden episode, it is the fact that all human activities are utterly arbitrary. We decide to live in a free society, and then we do the things necessary to live in that society as we have defined it should be.

The definition keeps changing. One minute, its just not a free society unless you can keep slaves, the next minute its not a free society unless women vote, the next .. well, you get the point. Society is only as good as it declares its intentions and then carries them out; nowhere, alas, in the entire miasma of American law, is there the requirement that one has to always try their best to do well, and to operate on the principle of the greater good - in face of all opposition.

This too, is arbitrary, and the point where it becomes reality instead, is when an individual voice in the crowd stands up and says "this is how things should be!", gaining a little more volume than everyone else, and getting a bit more agreement, in the face of all the worlds cannibalism, that it might be good to cook things slightly differently.

Snowden, and others out there working in their own, utterly non-arbitrary ways, are always going to be necessary to remind us that just when you think you are safe, because status quo, the new safe realm is the as-yet completely unexplored ..
The Stegosaurus Tail: when "The Long Tail" grows spikes.
It's a character reference from a co-worker, not a declaration of objective fact.

>It seems people have forgotten that there are a ton of freely available computer security tools out there that any body can take and do a lot of damage with.

I used to think that sort of thing would be noticed pretty quickly at the NSA. Nowadays, I am not so sure.
The same way they have the authority to tap everyone's phones: they are one and the same with the unchecked military power of the United States with carte blanche to di whatever they want from spy on ex-lovers, to imprison people in solitary for years before trial, to lie openly to congress without repercussions.
Sounds to me like the difference between IT and IS. You're either "the IT guy" or you work in IS doing real things. Not just rebooting a managers PC and installing printer drivers.
I really don't understand why they're allowed to redefine terms like this.

Shouldn't the media be calling them out?
Hm, national patriotism seems shortsighted in the post-modern age. Can we please be global patriots in the age of Internet and global communication and commerce?
Probably why he has been compared pretty frequently to Daniel Ellsberg -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
Integers.
Mandatory bicycle helmet law in New Zealand
> Snowden differs from many of the whistleblower ilk in that there is nothing to dislike about his character (yet).

... and because the leaks related to issues that outraged most people. It's easy to understand the concerns regarding spying, and most people have a visceral negative reaction. It's much more difficult to elicit that type of response to, say, human rights violations that don't directly affect most Americans.

In this case, I think that the media is siding with the people (more viewers / ad revenue). If this were any other type of leak, without the same populism, the media most likely wouldn't be as "friendly". There is dirt, but it hasn't been brought to light because it wouldn't sell well (who wants to bash the guy who told us that the NSA is spying on us?)
By that metric, an abacus is a computer. This is not a workable definition for the discussion at hand.
The Information A History, A Theory, A Flood. is the book that I wanted to write and then I found out it existed and the author did a better job than I probably could have.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...

Secrets of a JavaScript Ninja I enjoyed. Nothing that was like "ZOMG!" but it did help me think better about my JS code. http://www.manning.com/resig/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Tartt Has a new book out I haven't read, yet, but her other books have been great. especially http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-History-Donna-Tartt/dp/1400...

Then neither a tutorial nor book, but pretty helpful: Bookmarking the comments of people like Paul Graham. Since he usually makes insightful comments on interesting articles, it works as a sorta hackish "Best Of" link https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
No rubber duck? Here's a virtual one.
You sure it's not so you can bring up the post/status later and finish typing it in case you lost it from closing your browser etc. Or moving to a new device to finish it?
You do realize that the system of property doesn't apply to actual objects? My house doesn't become green if I write so in the deed. The system of property is a set of obligations imposed on people, not things. Much like the social contract.
As long as I'm not able to log in on my smartphone AND laptop at the same time all of this whatsapp api will be kind of useless in my opinion.
I want to chat with whatsapp on my computer,that's sure,but I don't want to re-register every time I switch from phone to computer or vice versa.
By that logic, James Clapper would be charged for lying to congress by now.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
There should be a website where this kind of articles are collected!
Not general-purpose computers, no, but how were they not computers?
Sorry, but wut? We're talking about systems that utilize the 6809 processor. This CPU is a general-purpose processor, used in quite many video game machines. What does an abacus have to do with anything?
I'm not a freelancer, but I have hired freelancers. You didn't say where you are based, but in London a normal day rate is anywhere between £350 - £550.

If you're a good PHP dev then don't talk that down—your client doesn't care what's cool at the moment. They're more interested in getting something that works and delivered on time.

If I wanted to be a freelancer that earned £1000 per week, I'd start by just telling people my day rate is £200 per day. Then use whatever personal connections, friends of friends, to find work and use that to build a early network of clients. The freelancers I've hired in the past are generally through personal recommendations so think about people who come into contact with your target market and approach them to see if they're willing to put a good word in for you.

If you're looking to be trained then you're likely to have more fun getting a permanent job where they're willing to invest money to train you.

Obviously, this is unlikely to happen over night so may not be the solution to your current problem.

Good luck.
Maybe it's hard to get a job at Google without a degree (at least, if you're not a software security person). Don't work at Google. There's an industry full of small software startups and an open war for talent right now; start your career at one of the shops smart enough not to pay attention to college records. For every successfully-executed role in your resume, it becomes progressively more and more insane to screen you out based on your degree. Since the starting state on screening by degree is already "pretty crazy", it doesn't take long to make college irrelevant.

But again, to make that work, you need to be serious enough about your craft that you can demonstrate ability clearly.
There will be no deal for Snowden. The headline is vastly misleading.
> A U.S. drone mistakenly targeted

Drones aren't autonomous. They don't target anything. Weapons officers do.

Besides being plain wrong and bad reporting, dehumanizing (attributing it on the drone) shifts responsibility and makes it seem like problem is solvable by "fixing" drone or by grounding them.
There was a good BBC Panorama on this with the UK Amazon Warehouses. Very tough targets for low pay.
He could configure sharepoint AND backup systems. May not seem like much but in a federal government department that's like being Jesus and, I don't know, Buddha at the same time.
Not white males.
Don't take this as critical, but as a professional freelance developer, $1600US (~$80K/year) is someone operating at a junior level.

A professional freelance developer with 20-30 clients should be billing $3000 to $5000 per week (US$150K - US$250K per year), and may even have a junior level developer working with/for them.

The key is time management. If 10 companies have you on contract staff @ $500/mo guarantee with an hourly of $125 (meaning you're guaranteeing them up to 4 hours/mo with the rest billable @ $150/hour), you're earning $5000/mo just being available, and you've only "guaranteed" 40 hours a month.

The client is paying for immediate response and your skill set.
Maybe I'm only biased because I only know 'real' anarchists and 'real' skin-heads, so when I hear these terms I don't think about the negative connotation.

Still I think the right way to overcome this is spreading information, not changing name.
No, it encourages to upvote things in new, but most things in new, shouldn't be upvoted by definition, right? It is supposed to funnel to the main page.

If you're curious, don't forget about other ways of ranking the homepage like https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
I would hire any developer who could point to his or her prior work. Build something I can see for fun, contribute to open source. I would ask you why no degree in the interview just so I don't hear something like "I ain't into no book learning."

One more bit of advice. Own the "no degree" mystic. Make me believe it was by choice, not by happenstance.
Do you not think you should at least try to sanitise data on insert?