skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been done notoriously badly at Twitter, no offense if you are an employee. Sure it's gotten better since they switched to the JVM, but still scaling to that size has been done by hundreds of companies now. Once there are textbooks out describing the techniques, you are simply implementing known methodologies with perhaps a few customizations and tweaks. I don't really see much innovation there TBH.
The numbers make the problem clear

Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?
Are you sure it's feudalism? It seems to me that the problem is in the modern management methods and always expecting results and publications, and tying finance to that, which is very shortsighted. But maybe you could explain better what you mean and what's more feudal about current system than what it always had been.
I hope I am not sticking my head into the lion's mouth here, but here (https://gist.github.com/BiggerNoise/9334673) is a link to a gist of some code in one of our apps.

Cases have Tasks and Activities. Activities are always associated with a case, and may be associated with a task.

In the controller, when assigning a case, one would type:
AssignCaseCommand.new(params).execute!

The command class implements the Command pattern (the pretty well established name for interactors) and is a Composite as well.

BTW - the same command that assigns the tasks of a case is also used to merely assign a task. And, if we're just recording an activity, we would just use the create activity command.

I think it would be insanity to try and capture the rules associated with re-assigning tasks in the controller. (I am pretty sure that you would agree.)

--Minor Edit for clarity--
Companies like Twitter, Facebook, etc, regardless of what technology they invent that is of use for the public, often healthily contribute to the open source ecosystem. Twitter has contributed a lot to the Scala ecosystem, and Facebook to the PHP pseucosystem.

They also fund/maintain OS project they themselves use. Facebook, through their FriendFeed acquisition, obtained Tornado [1] and have maintained it very well since. I use Tornado every day.

I get your point but your anger is misplaced if you think the large "SV tech companies" don't "invent". You want tech companies that don't contribute anything to mankind? Look at purely closed source hardware companies.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/tornado
yes, I know. Though just because it's standard doesn't make it good.

It does offer good job security, however.
Federal open market operations are not really a neutral policy. First of all, they buy assets in quantities designed to move the market price to a desired level which is really no more market-based than subsidising or taxing a particular product to fix its price. Secondly, the Fed conducts its open market operations through "primary dealers": a select list of registered financial institutions that meet certain capital requirements and are therefore nearly always divisions of major banks. The raison d'etre for its monetary policy is the stability of this banking system, and its effect is a massive subsidy to that sector. The fact regular individuals and firms can subsequently acquire these bonds is moot; money gifted to the citizenry will also trickle through to others.

Risk free interest offered to select financial institutions and flat payments to citizens are both distortionary transfers of real wealth. The argument for the former is that under most economic circumstances it's pretty efficient and open market operations are also effective at moving excess cash out of the system. The argument for the latter in some circumstances, especially as a one off stimulus, is that it's potentially much more efficient at stimulating demand than QE and potentially rectifies other structural imbalances.
i don't want to be the buzz killer but there's rubymotion :)
My feelings are invalid and actually just an attack?
That's not how Wikipedia works. Everyone always thinks that readers should be made aware of their own service, so they're constantly editing promotional info into various pages.

At the very least, you should always disclose your affiliation with Zidisha when making edits:

<< COI (Conflict of Interest) editing is strongly discouraged. COI editors causing disruption may be blocked. Editors with COIs who wish to edit responsibly are strongly encouraged to follow Wikipedia policies and best practices scrupulously. They are also encouraged to disclose their interest on their user pages and on the talk page of the article in question, and to request the views of other editors. If you have a conflict of interest, any changes you would like to propose that might be seen as non-neutral should be suggested on the relevant talk page or noticeboard. >>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
Many of the recent 'goodbye acadaemia' that I've come across seem to be from people in molecular biology, which has a reputation for being a particularly competitive field for funding. I wonder whether academics in other fields are dropping out at a similar rate..?
We could debate the relative effectiveness of different forms of penalty, and the relative importance of punishment/deterrent, ongoing protection, and rehabilitation, but I'm not sure this is the forum for it.

However, let me be clear: if the facts in this case really are as I've seen reported, then I have no problem with taking people who did this, throwing them in a cage, and depriving society of their "productivity" for a while. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of productivity is about as welcome as the banking executives who command "competitive compensation packages" for running their organisations into the ground or the politicians who once elected proceed to legislate for the highest bidder.
> I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job.

Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. You ignore that many people derive satisfaction from doing fundamental research that has the potential to be widely used across the research community (and possibly, for product development, e.g. industry labs, some government labs). It is simplistic to dismiss academia as a feudalistic system. There are merits, demerits, and other nuances.

Also, there are, figuratively speaking, thousands of academic fields, each with its own system and culture. For example, academic jobs are plentiful for PhD graduates in these areas (in my experience): information technology/information systems (as opposed to computer science), management, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, etc.

A summary dismissal of academia as 'feudal', especially when such an assessment underlies 'advice' is an unnecessary exaggeration.
Here's an idea!

Step 1) Take away all money from everyone make big pile 'o cash.
Step 2) Give everyone an equal distribution of the big pile 'o cash.
Step 3) Wait one year.
Step 4) Scratch head over how some are now poor and other are super wealthy even after the great leveling.

Hmm no, maybe not such a great idea.

There is a finite amount of tangible goods that can be produced, money chases goods, markets react, prices rise. If everyone has a million dollars do you think someone will sell you his Ferrari for $200k ? No, because the value of the Ferrari does not reside within the dollar, it's only a medium of exchange used for easily trading goods and services.
I think you completely miss the point of why a lot of people do a PHD. The love of the subject.

Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.
I'm sure that comment meant something. I have no idea what.
The engine behind my blog
I guess it's time to dive a bit more on what technology stands behind my blog. In the previous posts I've talked about the reasons to start a blog, why I choose github pages to host it and now I will talk about Jekyll, the engine behind my blog.
It's worth noting that this guy is running a kickstarter campaign re: "A free, up-to-date, crowdsourced protocol repository for the life sciences". If we are sending tons of traffic his way, maybe we should send some to his kickstarter too.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881346585/protocolsio-...
Perhaps its just personality, but if I were to receive a stimulus debit card, I would use it to pay for one of my existing monthly expenses (T-mobile, gas, etc) and take my own funds I would've spent and save it.
UKRAINE
It is misleading to say "Oh women get paid the same for the same work in tech", which implies there is no sexism, while acknologing that there could be sexism which keeps women out of well paid jobs.
Interesting piece. This line:

More powerful programming languages rely less heavily on naming

... reminds me of section 1.1. of Compiling With Continuations:

The beauty of FORTRAN—and the reason it was an improvement over assembly language—is that it relieves the programmer of the obligation to make up names for intermediate results.

I remember going "Wha?" when I read that.
The difference is, distributing $100 million to the already-wealthy does not incur increases in aggregate demand (it might, in fact, decrease it), as the wealthy tend to lock up their funds in financial instruments (from bonds to stocks). And invest in a company (stocks) all you want, if there's no demand for what it's selling.... why are you investing?
Stickiness is economically bad. We can't fix sticky wages without changing people.
I use a few of the Xcode 4 Fixins (https://github.com/davekeck/Xcode-4-Fixins), which despite their name are mostly compatible with Xcode 5. I use DisableAnimations, FindFix, InhibitTabNextPlaceholder, TabAcceptsCompletion, and UserScripts (which I wrote).

A bit of work was required when Xcode 5 came along but from minor version to minor version they haven't needed much in the way of maintenance.
ZeldaVR Ports The NES Original to First-Person Oculus Rift
If I have to copy a large file (movies can be 10gb) to a computer first and then copy to it to the iPad, that is not a molehill, that's an major inconvenience, and a major time-sink. Of course, I fundamentally disagree that having to use a computer to get data onto another computer is a small inconvenience.
I remember hearing similar stories around recruitment. Women, on average would apply for job adverts only if they met around 90% of the job description requirements. Where men would generally just take the shotgun approach and apply with around 50% of the requirements.

Never really understood this "statistic" still dont. I do wonder if things have changed? I have a couple of girl friends in tech and have to do a fair bit of ego and confidence building before they work up enough balls to tell their bosses they are bored and need new responsibility and a raise to boot. Most guys I know just ask for more money in passing til it happens or they leave.

Disclaimer, I dont know shit about the inner workings of the female mind all I have is anecdote and the up most respect for girls/women in tech or otherwise.
Let your iPhone show you the way? The road is calling? All your music. Beautifully arranged?

Who writes this crap? Do they even read the copy back to themselves? Jesus. Lose the taglines!
Or an acquisition.
Surely you would consider at least some of Twitter's open source projects "creating technology": https://github.com/twitter
The 5.0 release notes are linked right from that announcement...
Twitter is one of the main contributors to Storm:

http://storm.incubator.apache.org/
I love the addition of SFTP, and I hope to buy the update soon.

Can anyone recommend a SFTP backup provider?

My Arq backups are designed to be worst-case. I have other, local backup options in case of failure. I was using Glacier, but I ran into Arq3 sync problems and I need to re-upload all my data. Glacier is very slow from where I live. I assume SFTP will be a bit faster.
Meetup Hacked
Worrying about the giant lawsuits is the wrong angle.

Any time MegaCorp 1 accuses MegaCorp 2 of stealing its stuff, it's going to be expensive to resolve. Even if you draw the line at "copyright, not patent" MegaCorp 2 is just going to push the line that much further in how closely they can copy MegaCorp 1.
Ask HN: What should a search result page look like?
Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing... The SERP is the meat of those sites. What would your dream SERP look like?
you need to watch the WWDC 2012 session 211 with teaches NSOperationQueue for touch processing

http://pupuweb.com/wwdc-2012-session-211-building-concurrent...
I was looking at Arq the other day and couldn't find if it had a bootable backup feature (like CC Cloner). Anyone know something about this?
A color space is good for transforming colors along lines orthogonal to its axes. In RGB, you can't easily find another shade of a given hue. In HSV, this common task is trivial.
OH, god, this is incredibly stupid. This is not the way to fix the economy. The primary real value of money is that it reduces friction in trade so you don't have to jump through multiple complicated hoops to trade, say, your coding skills for a steak dinner. You trade your coding skills for money and then take money to the restaurant instead of going to the steak dinner maker and asking what he wants and then finding someone who will give you that in exchange for coding.

Money symbolizes value. Other than lubricating trade, which has real value, in itself, it doesn't really "do" anything. You can't eat it. You can't build a house out of it. If burning it to keep warm makes some kind of economic sense, then the economy is seriously fubarred.

This kind of financial manipulation does not fix any of the underlying issues that lead to financial problems. Financial problems grow out of real problems. I can testify to that first hand: I am deeply in debt and homeless due to medical problems, in essence. I am fixing my medical problems. As my medical problems resolve, my expenses come down and my productivity goes up. My debts are slowly being paid down.

We need to fix real problems, underlying root cause problems. This kind of superficial manipulation is not a fix.

Oh, god, no. I can't believe I am seeing this stupidity being taken seriously.
I found that APL/Q/J and vim share the same required mindset. If someone loves one, it is likely he/she will like another.
But three is a gender distribution that is of the charts.
DConf 2014 publishes schedule, opens early bird registration
I do realize that isn't the best link, but you can at least see the full session title there.
Since it looks like this was pretty popular, I'll make one for Javascript too. Meanwhile, check out the original LearnXinYminutes.
Yes, but that (basic income) is not the point of this proposal. The idea is that you have a lot of people that are un-employed or under-employed, but shouldn't be, which is where we are today. This is a tool to a) get them a job and b) (by driving down un-employment) increase their wages. If this tool does it's job, then they won't need a basic income anymore - they'll be earning it at their new job.
If you don't need a turnkey solution I'd just go with a cheap server provider like OVH/Online.net/Hetzner and set up an SFTP server there.
Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale is that mid-career scientists will bring larger and more research grants (and will do so faster after arriving) than junior scientists. Essentially, let someone else take on the "risk" of the new faculty members and we poach the proven ones.

It's a jungle out there people. If you care about salary and upward mobility for god's sake don't go into academia.

PS I am a full professor at a large research oriented university in north america. Most of my contemporaries from high school and undergrad who have spent similar numbers of years amassing expertise in their chosen fields, but in the private sector, are now making approximately 5x to 7x my annual salary (not including their annual bonuses).
with slack in the economy, it’s possible to have an economic free lunch.

TANSTAAFL[1].

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL
"What technology has twitter invented?"

http://twitter.github.io/ currently lists 101 public repositories. Highlights include a SPDY library for iOS, Zipkin (a distributed tracing system), flockdb (a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database), Finagle (their own highly concurrent RPC system)... a TON of stuff.
I was going to comment that HSL/HSV can be useful for generating colors that work well, but... the real problem is not luminance as much as the HSL values we commonly use. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages where CIELAB L* is shown as a better representation. Though it's not perfectly matched to the human eye even so.
> Surely you clever people can think of forms of punishment/deterrence less destructive to both the individual and society as a whole.

OK, how about getting all their personal information and putting it on a public website?
It's obviously not creating more wealth first order. If that money frees up demand that wouldn't have otherwise been expressed, and people providing for that demand would otherwise have been out of work, it can create more wealth. The degree to which that would happen is an open question, so far as I'm aware.
Ask HN: How do you take time off work?
Working on large projects can be hectic. Everybody needs a break once in a while! What do you do during your break?

This thought emerged while writing the following article on my blog — http://arsalanbashir.com/blog/reinvent-being
Relativity shakes a magnet
Bing Better Than Google At Tracking 12 Digit Fedex Tracking Numbers
;)

Well then the title worked! The idea is to disguise a serious textbook that teaches the material and understanding, but not make it look like a non-serious text so as not to scare off the reader.
A good starting point is that it should not exist. The ideal is for the computer to guess so well that it just takes me there. Or to use an updated-as-I-search dropdown (that lets me use arrow keys) 95% of the time.
The love of the subject is a given. The article states as much. The whole point of the article is that the rewards of an academic life are not presently commensurate with the risks and sacrificies it entails.

The pay "in a certain field" is irrelevant; the article is about pay and working conditions in academia.
118 For Boston
Ensures too great a flexibility to the Organization and imposes too much precariousness and insecurity on the upcoming students.

In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff.

http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
i wish it was just the money. when i went into the university i was hoping to find people like me. it attracts bright minds, but it doesn't encourage them in any sort of way. a bright mind in that system is worth "almost" the same as the average joe who studied enough to pass through the system. so we're there, scattered, with no means to find each other. some of them do so anyway, it's what keeps them put up with the rest of the bs. some of them end up like me, pretty much alone, and then eventually lose interest.

i'm not saying the average joe shouldn't get into the university, i'm not even saying the others should get preferential treatment, but what benefit is it to be packed in basics classes that you don't need to anyway? you don't get to skip classes you already know, you have to sit through them, and waste your time. you take away time that could be used to teach the less gifted. you fill a spot which is valuable in the beginning, at the end not so much, because most will have dropped out by then.

i believe that we need to get away from the notion that everyone should study exactly the same. i don't see how it makes sense at all. and the same goes for phd's. which is essentially a pretty static period of underpaid work.

but that would take effort wouldn't it?
I'm curious about what areas of academia are more or less affected by these trends. I'm planning on starting a PhD program this year in computer science (emphasis on graphics research), and I had been under the impression that the state of funding was not so dire in CS as it is in the other sciences (the sciences that are more science than engineering), but I'd certainly be interested in any perspectives about academia in my field in particular.
This looks extremely interesting, I have a 5 year old daughter that I want to see the playful side of mathematics before she hits the typical US Maths curriculum. One of my guiding documents has been "Lockhart's Lament" [1], but trying to figure out how to make that a reality for her has been difficult for someone like me with so little time! I am going to check this out tonight!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Lament
I think many people would feel the same way. We usually see 25% rates offered for small loans for new members, which are only held for a short time. For example, a new borrower may request $50 at 25% interest and hold it for one month, and total interest payments would be $1.04. Even then many lenders normally opt to fund the loan at less than the rate offered.
My rent is about $12,000 a year. I guess the missing factor is that Palo Alto is cheaper than San Francisco (though certainly not cheap! :D).
The first cloud based collaborative cyptomoney mining service
Not just you. I'm procrastinating on one of those too-damn-hard math problems right now!
To be fair, there are a few grey areas in the law as it currently stands in the UK that might be relevant if we're arguing about government permission. The main one is probably s251 NHS Act 2006, which grants the Secretary of State for Health certain powers to set aside the default confidentiality rules for specific medical purposes. I'm investigating whether those powers are a relevant factor in this case, but so far I've found no verifiable information either way.
Auxiliary Businesses
Can't we fix that by redistributing computing and robotics power?
How a 2-man startup got 1000 signups in their first week with no product
Kinda reminds me of the 'Cats on ship' submission and the Bismarck reference. That (and the Tirpitz) was arguably a failure as well, trying to 'build big'.

I agree, estimating how things would've turned out is .. next to impossible. And 'Look what this thing can do!' was proven to be irrelevant in a good number of cases.
One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research

It's also a false allure: the problem is that fundamental research requires funding, and the OP is pointing out that he can't get it. He'll be in essence locked out of research and not make a lot of money at it.

This is like saying, "One of the allures of acting is the prospect of being famous and sleeping with lots of fans." On the one hand it's true; on the other, it's very unlikely.