skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really good read. Would love to hear some stories from other HN folks who have "escaped" from or "rebelled" against academia but are still pursuing academic interests...

Me personally, after deciding not to pursue a Masters degree in Bioinformatics, I realized that working in IT is also a (more lucrative but just as empty) sham. I've been focusing my time for the past year on learning new computational modeling on side projects, such as 1) contributing to QuantLib, open-source finance library with new option volatility surface curves, 2) parsing through PLoS Computational Biology papers and feeding any supplementary data from authors/research group to visualizations/statistics libraries and open lab notebooks wiki's; and verifying whether their assertions are truly statistically significant.

As the author noted, it is very hard to do the real research in academia unless you have a union-card of PhD. However working in industry even R&D, unless you have a PhD or are very lucky gets you most of the suckered into "technician" and mundane CRUD work. Not to mention the financial realities of having a family and setting down later in life vs. the idealistic dream of monastic academic research when you're younger.

What have you guys done to balance the two? Do you work on side projects while collecting the paycheck? Or do you work in R&D division or a research institute that allows you to take on novel research work? Or do you finance your research on your own or solicit grants/funding from other people (like David E. Shaw, Kickstarter or a "Hackerspace" that survives on membership fees)?
Great blog article, Greg. Very compelling for Wefunder's approach to crowdfunding.
There isn't a single definition of poverty that sees widespread use. Some of what you are saying is that people in the U.S. generally aren't destitute (which is major part of the broadest definition of poverty). Wikipedia seems to have a reasonable discussion of the issues:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
If you're having problems with MongoDB on large data sets, try TokuMX: http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokumx-for-mongodb/
TSV is nicer for output (on stderr/out or a logfile), so tends to crop op if you want to parse the output/logfile of something. I haven’t seen Excel in use at my workplace yet.
Some pretty silly lines in there:

Object {

boson1: "Reticulating Splines..."

boson2: "There's more Ajax in this loader than an epic greek poem"

boson3: "♬ Reunited and it feels so good"

boson4: "Are you there, Boson? It's me, Margaret."

boson5: "♬ Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet?"

exo1: ""Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan"

exo2: "Call me V'Ger"

exo3: "As far as we know, the universe is not Tail Call optimized."

exo-argon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Argon"

exo-bleu: "Detecting: Class H Planet Bleu"

exo-cheddarwurst: "Discovered: Class D Planet Cheddarwurst"

exo-daytripper: "Located: Class M Planet Day Tripper"

exo-dunebuggy: "Detecting: Class D Planet Dune Buggy"

exo-emanthaler: "Located: Class D Planet Emmentaler"

exo-hoth: "Investigating: Class K Planet Hoth"

exo-izod: "Detecting: Class D Planet Golf"

exo-lacoste: "Discovered: Class D Planet Lines"

exo-meangreenie: "Investigating: Class J Planet Mean Greenie"

exo-measels: "Located: Class L Planet Measels"

exo-mumps: "Investigating: Class L Planet Mumps"

exo-neon: "Detecting: Class J Planet Neon"

exo-polo: "Discovered: Class D Planet Colors"

exo-purplehaze: "Discovered: Class D Planet Purple Haze"

exo-tatooine: "Located: Class M Planet Tatooine"

exo-xenon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Xenon"

exo-ziggystardust: "Located: Class L Planet Ziggy Stardust"

neural-banana: "Orange you glad I didn't say banana (╯°□°）╯"

neural-boom: "♬ All we hear is, radio ga ga"

neural-can: "It's got what plants crave:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04"

neural-cat: "Cat Proximity: https://xkcd.com/262/"

neural-doge: "WONTFIX: Duplicate Doge joke"

neural-mona: "It's cool and all, but I'm more into his older stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vi...

neural-nes: "What's the fastest TAS you can complete for the I/O 2014 website?"

neural-pong: "Can you do this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IVASo0umU"

neural-rhex: "Awwww, he's a cute little guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI"

neural-ufo: "Teach the controversy!"

neuralfail0: "Hint: The eyeball follows the correct diamonds"

neuralfail1: "ಠ_ಠ You could scrape the code for patterns, but you should probably get back to work."

neuralfail2: "Hi HackerNews, I dare you not to complain about something involving Big O Notation."

planet1: "I think I can see my house from here."

planet2: "Our apologies to any visitors who suffer from Globophobia."

planet3: "TCP/IP is cool and all, but did I think "IP over Avian Carriers" would be way more fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers"

planet4: "-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--."

silicon1: "Little known fact: Silicon looks exactly like a beachball under a microscope"

silicon2: " wow↵ such structure↵ so crystalline↵ many atom↵ how connect"

silicon3: "FIXME: Remember to write a joke about silicon"

silicon4: "It's only a model."

}
The Fierce Battle for the Soul of Bitcoin
Google Glass? Not the future of Wearable Tech...
Yup. It wasn't fun to type (using Ctrl-V in bash to input the raw control characters), but it works fine with the ASCII separators as well:

$ echo -n 'a^_1^^b^_2^^c^_3^^' |awk 'BEGIN{FS="^_"; RS="^^"} {print $1": "$2}'
a: 1
b: 2
c: 3
Actually, it's not just Huawei, it's pretty much all everything. Pretty much every router, telcom switch, storage system, etc. sold outside the United States comes with a support contract whereby the vendor's engineers can connect and manage the device.

Indeed, there's a recent legal case of a company selling stuff to Iran. The company said they weren't responsible, because it was resold by intermediaries. Yet, their support engineers were connecting in to manage the box.

The lede was really "here's what we saw", at least to the extent that we can reveal anything being bound by customer confidentiality agreements (which, frankly, isn't much, which kinda sucks for the reasder).
According to probability theory, if you have A (one single condition), and A+B (two different conditions), A will always be more probable to occur than A+B. Not seeing this is called conjunction fallacy, typically elucidated as the Linda problem. In this case, though, we have one known thing (Huawei has tech support accounts), and one unknown thing (the NSA have access to Huawei's tech support accounts).

Huawei accounts alone are already at risk of being abused by Huawei. We don't know if NSA has access to the accounts. But even if they did, it would still be more probable that Huawei's access would be abused than the NSA using Huawei's access.

(edited a few times for clarity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of...

> According to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), there are 1,138 statutory provisions[1] in which marital status is a factor in determining benefits, rights, and privileges. These rights were a key issue in the debate over federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

For 2012 he proactively spent good money to ensure LGBT should not get those benefits, rights and privileges. That is why people are upset with this and find it hard to let it slide or be a personal matter.
Wanna try again?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-hacked-email-a...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-power...
Wow, in 2005 they produced a hidden-camera series that outed "long-haired" men, revealing their names and addresses on national TV.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm
Ah, thanks! I'll go through this.
That's leaving a lot to his interpretation.

Chinese intelligence might be interested in something simply because they (correctly or not) deduce that American intelligence will be interested in it.
GNU ease.js
You can download and manually align separate captures to create a larger mesh but, no, Forge doesn't do this automatically yet.

On the roadmap, but won't be in the first version.
Because it was shipped about 48 hours after I wrote it, and I see details in it that are specific to my implementation.

In fact, if you use their iOS app(especially on the more memory-consuming devices like an iPad Retina)you'll notice that the app reproducibly crashes on all screens. Except one.
The wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. —Ben Horowitz

part of the war waged when running a startup is rejection: repeated, horrifying, relentless. there is no peace and the arrows fly. you can't always control your immediate response but you can train yourself to be braced for it, inured to it when it comes. eventually, with a lot of hard mental conditioning, you can find and appreciate the benefits of being rejected (fortitude, resilience, grim determination).

getting into YC is one of many paths to winning that war when you're ready. just turns out to be the most effective i can think of.
This is not true. Both Oracle and Postgres are ORDBMS and you can work with objects/nested collections and all kind of non-relational constructs.
Screenshot of HiDPI in action here: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/03/top-12-features-gnome-3-1...
> I was disappointed that Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q don't correspond (at least on the first ASCII chart I googled) to anything

I'm pretty sure every possible combination of 7-bits is assigned SOME name in ascii, and Ctrl-any-case-insensitive-letter is a defined 7bit value.

This chart says control-s is `DC3 (Device Control, X-OFF)` and control-q is `DC1 (Device Control, X-ON)`. Yup, that's what they do alright.

http://www.unix-manuals.com/refs/misc/ascii-table.html

Don't forget everyone's favorite control-G, BEL, useful sending beeps across the wire on old school IRC, BBSen, and chat services. Or, you know, telegraph machines or something.
The vast majority of rights that are bound to marriage in the us have nothing whatsoever to do with "the bedroom" but rather practical matters like visiting your chosen spouse in the hospital or not having your non-citizen spouse deported or receiving benefits if your spouse is killed while serving in the military. Another good example is the right to file taxes jointly which can have a huge impact on your joint income. Many of these things couldn't be covered by contract and even when they can technically be covered like allowing someone to make end of life decisions for you it costs money which opposite sex couples dont have to pay and contracts are frequently ignored by people like hospital staff who don't understand the law. When your partner is in the hospital suffering you shouldn't be stuck debating contract law with its staff and a single status, legal marriage, makes it crystal clear to all. While I do wish there was a code deprecation review committee in congress to eliminate things like financially favoring married couples at tax time practically speaking legally recognizing same sex marriage gets us much closer to equal treatment under the law much faster than debating each of those 1000+ rights individually. People in unrecognized same sex marriages are being actively harmed by their exclusion right now so IMO sitting around debating the perfect solution instead of moving forward pragmatically is harmful behavior.
Things I wish we had known about scaling
Once again there's no way to make a mistake with a prepared statement. The only way to do it is using poor practices like using half baked "sanitizing" functions which no competent developer will use.

And once again, you don't need HMAC to store salt outside the hash. You just don't. HMAC doesn't dictate where you store your salt. You're bundling these two things together as if they're inseparable, but they're two completely separate things.
Because CSV actually has three special characters. The field separator is ',' (or tab for TSV). The record separator is '\n' (or "\r\n"). And the quote/escape character is '"'. Commas or newlines which are part of a quoted string are data rather than control characters. Quote characters can be escaped by preceding them with a second quote character. There is an RFC that describes this.

You could use ESC (\x1b) to escape itself and either of your delimiter characters, but of course now you've gotten back all that complexity you were trying to avoid by using non-printable characters.
Take a look at this work by jooq:

http://blog.jooq.org/2014/03/21/java-8-friday-java-8-will-re...

You may be able to utilize a lot of their code for converting the lambda bytecode.. or not. Anyway it's interesting to see how they're dealing with the problem you've run into.
You won't even get them with 14.04LTS out of the box, but expect a PPA to fill the void once released.

Really looking forward to the final 14.04 Ubuntu GNOME release next month. I have really grown to love GNOME 3 as my desktop of choice.
Only works with Android 4.4!
As someone who didn't obtain a PhD, I found this article pretty interesting. However we can't all be Freeman Dyson. I think that credential inflation means that the time is coming when more jobs will require a PhD, not less.

Of course it's remotely possible that our society will reject the PhD due to rapidly rising educational costs, but I don't think that's going to happen.
That private API is called a service layer, and without it, your code devolves into copy/paste spaghetti.

We live in an age when having a complementary iOS/Android app for your site is not the exception anymore. Without a service layer you'll have coupled your services with your web pages. Connecting your server with your apps will be quite painful. You don't want that.

Done right, your service layers keeps your code simple, secure, and easy to debug, even if it's web-only. I'd argue that anything else is just due to lack of experience.

A service layer also makes the work on a project more parallelizable in terms of number of developers that can work together on it, each focusing on their part of the puzzle, without breaking each other's code all the time.
Sounds like that would work well - it's the approach ElasticSearch has taken with their APIs and they're generally very nice to use.
Probably for some version of done - download VisualSfm and give it a shot yourself if you want: http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ or for a purely mobile approach try http://seene.co/
Firewalls can (and should) block outbound connections, as well. (Although trying to ultimately clamp down on this in any normal business environment where humans want to web browse is a battle you will ultimately lose if you are trying to completely stop all of it.)
The challenges of the current Dutch generation twenty somethings
I seriously doubt this claim that the network costs will be at all significant.
>When you hang out in places like HN it seems like everyone has this insane drive to succeed and be the best and conquer the world. The truth is that lots of (most?) people are happy getting their paycheck and going home every day. They don't want more responsibility, they don't want to climb the corporate ladder, they don't want to disrupt any industries, they just want to watch their kid play softball.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Being around these sites can make it feel like the first category's what I'm "supposed" to be doing but I feel more like the second category occasionally. Startups sound like more stress than they're worth sometimes. I'm not sure what route I'll try to go once I graduate, really.

I was a bit surprised at the strange conclusions they offered at the end.
It's worth calling and talking to your sales rep about this. I've found AWS to be surprisingly accommodating with pricing.
I was just thinking that, the micro EC2 is now becoming more and more devalued as the higher ones get closer to it's price per performance. I was hoping for us to be able to spin up Beanstalk apps a little cheaper though and it is the cheapest server option and $50/app vs Heroku is a bit expensive since it requires the ELB. I wouldn't mind it all if they had a way to deploy multiple apps using the EC2 servers and ELB you setup though.
i think it's only recently that applications started moving away from using multiple windows towards using multiple tabs in a single window.

I think the number-of-actions to get to a particular window (or even another app) is too high in Gnome. Why is the task/app switching bar a mouse-move or windows-key + another click away? The task list should be visible on your screen at all times if you choose, because there are very few apps that actually effectively utilize the full-screen.

I mean, every major desktop environment (including non-Linux) have this right. I think this issue is definitely something you can ignore by getting used to it but it's still an issue. I really feel like Gnome makes "different and new" a higher priority than UX.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team crowdmapping in Guinea after Ebola outbreak
Hey, I'm a day late I know but just saying hi also as I'm also in the youtube world. I'm the creator of SocialBlade.com (youtube/etc stats site) & we have a contract with Maker... or I guess now Disney to refer people into their MCN through our site. Just catching up on HN now after being at Playlist Live this past weekend.
It is always possible. Name one case where it isn't, and I'll tell you how it's possible :)

Web frameworks should handle input (routing, request fields, url query) and output (templates). That's it.
He's arguing for compartmentalisation[1]. This is how most religious people handle clashes between religious beliefs and the world: some topics are tagged for a religious worldview (whose defining feature is unassailable dogma), other topics aren't. In his case there's probably a jagged line that separates his professional duties to LGBT people in the tech community vs his political act against other LGBT people via Prop 8. People who are at the intersection (rarebit) threaten this world view, and the best he can do is handle them case by case[2] while trying very hard not to draw more general conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psycholo...

[2] https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/
The problem with VR is that the friction point occurs as soon as you have to put something on your face.

This isn't so bad if you're a gamer, or you're at home and wanting to experience some entertainment (similar to wearing headphones). But I can't see this style of VR changing the computing landscape the same way mobile computers have.

So if Facebook comes up with VR that doesn't involve covering your eyes, that's great. But that has little to nothing to do with what they acquired in Oculus.

The fact that every VR example given by Facebook so far sounds super contrived (seeing a virtual doctor, really?) doesn't give me hope that they know where VR can be really effective — a small subset of entertainment.
hurray for competition! <3 amazon and google.
OSDev brags about minimum resources. That's what losers do who can't find a use for modern technology. I use lots of memory to make my code simpler. I like it like it is.

God says...
ouch manufacturing failure_to_communicate to_infinity_and_beyond
oh_come_on bye it's_hopeless you_don't_say surprise_surprise
computers
If I ever start thinking that it's too late to start learning new things and working on new problems, this interview should set me straight. Wise words.
More details:

http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/sheppard/inner_oort_cloud/

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=46852
To clarify, in 1.13 JSON will be a communication protocol for queries. It's not intended to be used by the end user, but by the client drivers. You can use it as an end user, but it isn't nearly as nice as native language drivers.

The change is meant to simplify driver development, packaging, and improve performance. Protobuf is worse than JSON in almost all of these categories.
Small yes. Large bill wasn't so easy. Once I had an excess $40 added to my bill after a network attack. I was able to down to $10 after a few emails back and forth. Another time I had something low like $10 and they credit me right away without problem. Depends on how large your bill...
You really think a guy like that is going to stop and be content? He founded Armadillo after all he'd done.
David Brin: Why Transparency Will Save Privacy (2013)
Well, I bought a 3-year reserved heavy utilization plan just a couple of hours before these news went live. My pain is about 2 orders of magnitude less than yours, though. I wonder if you can contact someone at Amazon and ask for some kind of discount.

Anyway, what a massive drop in price and what a swift reaction from Amazon. Competition can really do wonders. I just hope we won't be seeing drops in the level of service.
Hm, question is how to get to the root of the blog now to see all the posts...
wow
such structure
so crystalline
many atom
how connect
While this is generally true for many of Google's activities, had Linux not been available they could probably have used a BSD-licensed kernel for a mobile OS, as Apple have done.
You can find a CSV parser that gets nearly all, if not all, the corner cases right for just about any language.

The problem is that the data you will be given to parse, by some third party agency, will quite likely not have been produced in such a way to get all the corner cases right.

As anyone who routinely has to parse such data is unpleasantly aware of. So now you've got to manually fix data, or have a parser that _doesn't_ get the corner cases 'right' but instead uses heuristics to try to get what was intended out of your particular idiosyncratic and illegal data.
Having a PhD I would not say it is worthless, but I suspect if I had spent the same amount of time just working I would have gained just as much. Of all the problems science faces the 'need' for a PhD to join the science 'union' is pretty low down - things like pervese incentives and rewarding academic gamesmanship over quality are much more of a problem.
The morse code (-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--.) translates to "BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP".
And why would this be so much harder to scale than just normal MMORPG physics, which it is? The headset just lets you look at the rendering in a new way.
confusing title, I was expecting golang
it's probably priced assuming 40hrs/week usage, not 168hrs/week usage.
Hasn't OS X become "linux on the desktop". Homebrew is there for a lot of the main packages and its easy to bring up virtual machines with whatever flavor of Linux distribution one wants for more particular needs. If you already have Apple hardware, I feel OS X is a great compromise. A great mainstream OS with a lot of support for good GUI apps plus great support for a lot of linux software. What's your reason's for wanting to move away from OS X?