skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The system needs to be redesigned, yet there is very little catalyst for it to be redesigned. People are still more motivated to turn their interests inward, to things like funding, publication lists, tenure, etc. The system is designed to reward those who selfishly work to maintain the status quo. This isn't me passing judgement on these people, just a realization that they are only doing what provides them with the greatest incentives. In a similar situation, I might do the same.

But it is also a realization that this isn't just a shallow local minimum. The lifestyle and security of many researcher are tightly coupled to getting funding out of this system, and thus is tightly coupled to following the rules of the system. Either some external force is going to have to shove this system aside, or the members of the community are going to have to collectively accept the pain of a governing body seeing the writing on the wall and attempting to regain control. With the system as entrenched as this, it would have to be a coup of epic proportions to unseat it. The only other option I can see is this system remaining in perpetuity.

I noted above that being in a similar position, I'd probably work this system the same way most everyone else does. I might provide the usual excuses as well: family, food, survival, lifestyle, etc. I don't know, because normally it takes a person being put under considerable pressure before they decide what is truly valuable to them, and to what degree they are willing to sacrifice one goal for another.

I took a third option while going through my undergraduate years; I decided to not even get involved. I am not saying this as a sanctimonious thumbing-of-my-nose at those who did; these people have my respect for being able to work around the flaws and not be driven mad by them. The allure of being able to work on interesting problems with smart people tempted me toward working to get involved in research, but the glimpses I caught of the politics, mechanisms and incentives chased me away. My significant other at the time was involved in a research effort in computer vision, and the amount of inanity she tolerated, and even in some cases manufactured, killed the desire for me.

Since then, I've been told by a number of people I have the mind and personality for research work. Even if that were true, I know I don't have the personality for all the bullshit that comes with it. My philosophy on this is the same that jwz suggests for people thinking of working at a public company: "sometimes the only way to win is not to play."
So in my proposed system "publish" maps exactly to "get linked by this or that prestigious review panel".

Everyone who replied me seems to have missed that. Basically, review panels become journals turned inside out. They don't host the content, but they do certify it.
Yes. I thought there was something in the US constitution about it.
I think he was being sarcastic. At least, I hope so. I hope the educated on Hacker News know that socialism is actually an established word with an established definition (equivalent to Communism) from Karl Marx..
What about alcohol?
While this may be true in your field, my impression is that this isn't true in general. Can you offer specific evidence? Here's a page offering a different view: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/item/toc.html
If cloaking were so bad for SEO, why does crap from Expert Sex Change come up every time I do a .NET-related search?
just tried it on my ubuntu 8.04 server.

> sudo apt-get install iotop
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package iotop
So it sounds like if you want to increase the level of growth of new neural connection you would risk losing some (many) of the old ones have have formed. That would be an interesting tradeoff. Definitely somewhere to tread lightly.
What's wrong with us turning half-Hispanic? Hell, I'm a white male -- we've had our... thousand or so years; let someone else have their day. I'd be far more worried about the education level of the future generations than the racial make-up.
Does programming lead to paralyzing perfectionism in other aspects of life?
For example, you might find it difficult to write/speak since you want to be as truthful as possible.

But communication that is flawless in a truth telling sense is hard. For example, get one verb tense slightly wrong and your sentence could be slightly misleading.

Moreover, people sometimes sacrifice flawless truth for simplicity.
You won't necessarily see another player on Eve if you go somewhere remote; it's easy to get lost as long as there isn't a large bounty on your head. But since it's non-sharded you can always chat to people, or go to somewhere there are a lot of people without switching servers. In other words, you are always in the same game universe for purposes of chat, personal vendettas etc. But that universe is not uniformly crowded by any means.

The only reason to switch servers in Eve is if you want to log on to the beta server and play with new ships/weapons that your main character can't use yet or that haven't been released yet.
Shouldn't there be a decent English word for hating foreigners instead of having to use some damn greek term!
On Hold And In Hell
Good programmer: "I can probably do it, but it will be hard."

Mediocre programmer: "I don't know how this could be done."

Bad programmer: "No problem."
http://youtube.com/edu

is also good. Only videos though, sometimes a link to additional material.

More courses (mostly European)

http://videolectures.net/

A simple search page:

http://ocwfinder.com/

EDIT: Another link added.
I do think there's some real hyperbole in this article. A 3% decline (that appears to be the figure cited in this article) may be a troublesome trend, but I'm not sure I'd call it "way down".

The author also cites the loss of diversity in graduate programs. All I have is personal experience: as an American in a PhD program in Engineering at Berkeley, I became very, very accustomed to being the only person in the room who spoke english as a first language. People who were born in California (or came up through the Californian educational system) are definitely a minority in these graduate programs (This is rare - Indians a not tiny minority in the grad programs at IIT. I doubt that French citizens a tiny minority at the École Polytechnique?). Personally, I think it would be a good trend for the US if 60% of the students in our graduate STEM programs had come up through our own educational system.

I read so much bile in both directions - and by throwing out the "xenophobe" accusation I think that the author of this post just added a bit more bile. I can understand why someone might start to equate criticism of the H1B program with xenophobes after glancing at some of the comments (and let's be fair here, there's often a tremendous amount of anti-americanism in these comments on H1B issues as well), but I insist that a person can reasonably want to see a higher percentage of US citizens in STEM programs in american universities, and should be able to advocate this without being called a xenophobe.
Too bad there aren't more visualization tools for sports stats...oh what, there is and I developed one: http://statplot.com :-)
I previously wrote the Rails tutorial RailsSpace, which is now out-of-date but was very well-received in its time (see the Amazon reviews at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321480791 --- ignoring the ones complaining that it's out-of-date :-). To remedy the perennial problem of outdated Rails tutorials, I'm currently working on an online Ruby on Rails tutorial book that will be up-to-date (and easy to update!) by design.

It'll be a couple months before I really get cranking, but I expect to be finished with the book by the end of the year. I'm also planning to make an extended screencast series once the book is done. You can follow the project's progress at http://railstutorial.org/.
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
20 PRINT "Its a Haiku!"
30 GOTO 10
Yes but the difference is their supply of money would be greatly diminished which would reduce their capacity for action. There is no reason to think that profits from 'guns and slaves' would increase. If anything they would decrease. Harder drugs? Than Heroin?
The meaning of life?
What's wrong with PDF? It's an open standard and displays beautifully on screen or in print. I can resize it to any size and it still renders perfectly (except for embedded bitmaps of course). I'd much rather read a book in PDF format on my screen then have to hope that a website renders properly at a size that is comfortable for reading.
That's actually not true. There is something fundamental about the scientific method. Namely, it's the learning algorithm; the only one that actually actually works (so far). Everything else is just variations on or approximations of this algorithm.

When you build a model and then do science (i.e. Hypothesis/Test/Explain loop) on the model instead of doing science on Nature, you learn a lot about your model. But you must be honest and admit that you have learned nothing about Nature. What you might have done is come up with hypotheses. But it's not enough. It's not science yet - it's just a complicated hypothesis. It doesn't count until you test it on Nature.

The point (and it's an obvious one, well-understood by most complexity researchers) is that your models need to enable you to falsify them by doing real, repeatable experiments on Nature, not on models. There's no point building a model of a complex system if the only experiment that can falsify it is so complex that it can't be done.

A lot of time is wasted this way - in many ways it's the nature of the beast (it's called "complexity" for a reason). Nonetheless, this is frustrating to scientists who think the resources spent on learning facts about models might be better spent on learning facts about Nature - the more radical likely being willing to trade all the modelling (and modelers?) for even a single properly verified fact.
Thanks, I've been using Linux for 13 years now and didn't even know the rename command existed; I was taught to use mv to rename files.
This has the same failings as a system of information distribution where an aristocracy is given the authority to decide what is and is not important and correct. This introduces all sorts of random factors having nothing to do with any sort of objective measurement of the publication.

Those random factors don't even have to be nefarious; an expert in an area may not have sufficient sub-domain knowledge to fully understand the work of another author. The hope is that the publication is clear enough that they can, but every publication has to make a trade-off about how much knowledge they assume the reader has.

Each of these random factors chisel away at the intended meaning of the certification. If enough of these accrete, you end up with something that tells as much about a potential publication as a GPA does about a high school student. But then, people depend on things like that for hiring and promotions as well. It would be a damn shame if this is really sufficiently optimal that everyone stops working for better.
Eh, I'm going to break with the theme here and just respond, because the last thing I want to do is give the wrong impression about emacs:

I'm not getting RSI. My fingers feel great. It just sort of fit in the haiku. Swap caps and ctl. Use emacs. M-x can-i-get-a-hell-yeah
Because Google lets big brands get away with murder. The bigger you are the easier it is to get away with paid links/spamming/cloaking/etc.
I long for the day when this becomes a concern for me.
Thanks, I had actually seen this site before, but it was one of the many I lost track of when my hard-disk controller died a couple years ago. It went goofy before it died and scrambled a lot of stuff on my hard drive so I couldn't recover it when I got a new computer.

EDIT: I'm not a total idiot, I was backing up most of my files, but I often forgot to back up my favorites list.
I do make less (around 10% less) in Canada than I did in the states. But then I pay almost half of what I paid for rent in San Francisco. Food was better and cheaper in San Francisco, but that's not my biggest expense. So I end up saving more overall.

I'm working for the same company that I was working for in the U.S. So that might explain why my income is pretty consistent.
Computer Science is one of the places where dead tree publication is going the way of the dodo pretty soon I think.

The flag day for this, as alluded to in another thread, will be when fund-raising and faculty appointments stop being closely tied with dead tree publications. There's been ample time for that transition to happen, but not all the interested parties seem so motivated to change things.
I've just finished my PhD, so I'm an expert in a very small field.

Yes, it is true that I've read a good paper that I do not care whether it is peer-reviewed, on arxiv, or just on a homepage. As long as it is of good quality and there is a way to cite it, I'll probably cite it in one of my own articles.

However, and I'm not saying this out of defense for the current system, you must understand that the system is also in place to filter out some of the complete and total crap some people dare to call research. I've reviewed articles that made my toes curl, because of bad grammer, bad presentation, or just duplicating another article with 10% of the article changed.

Already at the moment there are so many journals and magazines that I have to keep track of that I simply don't have the time to search the web or dig up things on arxiv.
I simply have to trust some system to filter out the good articles.
I'm not sure about a need for "flawless truth" but after being immersed in code for hours I do have trouble socializing and being on a less intense level with people. I find I'm inclined to be more introverted unless I've had time to unwind, or to want to discuss topics with more detail, stuff that's better discussed one-on-one than in groups.

But the same can be true if I'm deep into writing a new song as well, so maybe it's a problem moving from the specific to the general without time to switch modes?
I wasn't claiming it was a replacement, just that it, well, exists. Other proprietary areas don't have any open source competition where the target audience has even less overlap with "programmers".
we've had our... thousand or so years; let someone else have their day.

I'm sure you formulated that opinion of an independent mind, and you're certainly entitled to it, but...can you imagine that it is not your place (or anybody's place) to advocate the ethnic cleansing of any group, even your own?
So fund-raising is easy for your startup, right?

Wait... You don't have a startup? But you had one just 10 minutes ago!?

:)
It's possible that some forms of programming education--I don't say all forms--lead people to simply disregard issues of quality applicable to other domains. "If it compiles, it's okay" is not a sufficient basis for saying that an argument about public policy, for example, is valid. I think I see quite a few examples of invalid reasoning about value-laden factual matters with policy implications in online discussion, perhaps precisely because people with programming educations were early adopters of online technology, and sometimes set the tone for how online discussion is conducted.

Perhaps there are examples both of your concern and of mine here on HN.
What's the hurry?
The algorithms in the java libraries (weka et al) are horrendous. If you look you'll just get more confused, especially at the lack of tests. R-project isn't much better.

I'd recommend writing your own. You won't really understand this stuff until you can.

Spend some time honing an algorithm and ruthlessly simplifying it until you inherently get it, and could write it in your sleep. Then write it again. Most algorithms can be distilled down to very small snippets of code if you really care.
At what point does a casual conversation become illegal collusion?

Edit: Alex Rampell, CEO of TrialPay, says this:

don't worry about that. you have to control the market
and the market has to be big enough to cause economic damage if it is controlled. VERY hard to make an anti-trust case stick.
I have gotten into doing this sort of work (the scientific computer modeling part, not the "cargo-cult" interpretations thereof). Popper was the first person I went back to reread when I got into it. This is very important to understand (and so simple).

However, I disagree with the author that this type of work could be dispensable. You have to test your theories in order for them to be scientific, but you have to know exactly what experimental results your theories predict. These complex systems are too important to stop studying, and they're too complex to use "simpler" methods.
If you're prone to becoming paralysed with perfectionism, you're likely to suffer in your programming at least as much as in other aspects of life.
One thing to watch out for would be whether or not such drugs would induce mania, as some antidepressants do.
First U.S. Rehab Center for Internet Addiction Opens Its Doors
Link to hacker news discussion when this video was first posted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763165
The map mentioned in the article: http://www.softhook.com/sanfran.htm

It's, um, not very helpful, actually; seems like it could be done a lot better. Maybe use the yelp api to average user ratings across the city?
If 5 grams is 4 joints, I'm either a lightweight, or I've been doing it wrong. I think I'd be able to roll 4 joints in "1" gram.
Ralph Osterhout: Invention Is the Mother of Creativity
I've never really had an office job, and I am having a very hard time believing this. Can I get a corroborating account or two?
"Tony Hsieh the CEO of Zappos does"

After seeing the tense on this, I guessed that this article must have been written before Amazon bought them. I was right.

I hope the Zappos culture lives on, even though they got bought by Amazon. They've been a great example for aspiring entrepreneurs.
respectfully debunk racist ideas

The problem, of course, is that not every idea can be debunked, because some of them are true. And when you start with the conviction that you're bound to "debunk" everything, and can't, it gets ugly. Here's a racist comment:

Africans are, on average, less intelligent than Japanese.

Now, you're just not going to want to get into that argument, because it's unwinnable. The only way to win it is to avoid it, or to start throwing imprecations around. This is a serious dilemma for the anti-racist side of the argument, because they are believers in equality--and when you believe in something that doesn't exist, it's religion.
Not to mention that it's completely broken in Chrome on linux. The only thing I could do to read it was click on the document and use the down arrow or page down button. I should've googled the name before submitting the scribd link I guess. Next time.
But is there really a difference then? Hosting the content is a tiny proportion of the work involved in running a journal.

If you're going to go through all the effort required to peer-review and certify work, why wouldn't you also throw up a website and collect the papers you certify?
@hc: This is so true. In my opinion "scientific method" is actually undefined. Just checked Wikipedia to confirm that "scientific method" itself has become a bloated academic field with countless versions; it is not used by practicing researchers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
One day, carefully designed massive-multiplayer online games will provide better experimentation than agent-based modeling used now in economics. This article illustrates that EVE online is already one step closer to it, since they can introduce "governmental" policies and immediately see the impact on their ingame economy. Very neat!
I try to equivocate intelligently, in an attempt to be more precise and accurate in what I say. I end up equivocating a lot. It works well for me, though of course I only get to experience it (and judge it) from the "inside".
I did not exactly mean it like that. You see more and more magazines and journals offering their accepted publications online first.
It will not be long before that will become the main mode of how people learn about these articles.
Eye candy is a critical business requirement
The Force Behind Star Wars: Turning Design Ideas into Reality
when you train a computational model on half of your dataset and test it against the other half (which the author claims is Not Sufficiently Scientific), how is that qualitatively different from training it on all your data, and then "testing it on Nature" by gathering some more and checking your results? i am reminded of searle's chinese room argument.

> this is frustrating to scientists who think the resources spent on learning facts about models might be better spent on learning facts about Nature - the more radical likely being willing to trade all the modelling (and modelers?) for even a single properly verified fact.

there is no getting rid of models. neither science nor any other human activity i am aware of is capable of verifying facts about the physical world.
That's not a haiku
But I still rather like it
Are others checking?
There is no economic damage requirement if you engage in explicit price or output fixing (which could be a verbal agreement). See: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/04/ftcdojguidelines.pdf

"Types of agreements that have been held per se illegal include agreements among competitors to fix prices or output, rig bids, or share or divide markets by allocating customers, suppliers, territories, or lines of commerce. The courts conclusively presume such agreements, once identified, to be illegal, without inquiring into their claimed business purposes, anticompetitive harms, procompetitive benefits, or overall competitive effects."

Obviously small players aren't worth prosecuting but that's a different question.
I'll just chip in an "aye" and leave it at that.
Elsevier sends you a draconian form by default. If you tell them that you're a PhD student and want to retain copyright and later publish your article in your thesis, then they will send you a new form.
That form lets you keep the copyright, keep the right to publish this on your homepage, keep the right to publish this later on paper, et cetera. It takes some courage, some pushing and patience, but you will get it.

This is one of my papers, note that it explicitly says on the webpage that I have the copyright: http://bit.ly/PBKqx
It more a list of resources with a catchy but misleading title.
Is there a use for unrefined ore in the game other than refining it? Must refined ore be produced by refining unrefined ore? If not, then all you've noticed is that ore refining is a crappy choice of career. If so, then I think you found an arbitrage opportunity -- buy up refined ore and wait for the price to rise, assuming the market is pricing unrefined ore properly.
Linode allows you to upgrade disk or RAM independently. Sounds like it's closer to what he wanted.
I do not like to quench the excitement about Canadian immigration opportunities for skilled workers, but you guys really need to check the recent "improvements" in that process. Namely, the list of skilled workers has been recently (Feb, 2008) reduced to a couple dozens professions (http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/apply-who-ins...).
In particular, you really need to be a Cook or a Woodcutter with one year experience, to qualify now. Just my $0.02.
the guy behind RestMS is the same guy who designed and created AMPQ. I think that maybe it might be you who fails to understand, this isn't IRC buddy. That statement could be incorrect, but so what? At the end of the day this article proposes a standard that shows a way to create soft realtime webclient <-> server messaging that can handle all of the common problems this domain experiences. In all honesty, in my world the implications of this are ground breaking.
The actor who plays the Apple guy is Justin Long.