skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I guess my biggest concern is the viability of pursuing a PhD in economics without having a previous degree in econ."

It's hard to say without knowing more about your background, but many have done it before. A degree in econ is useful but by no means necessary.

You should probably worry more about your math training (have you taken real analysis or another course with real proofs?) than your econ training. I had three calculus classes and linear algebra. The first week of classes the professors were talking about quasiconcavity and the Bellman equation. I was lost. I worked 80-90 hours a week the first year in order to catch up.

"Also, it seems to me that the general market for energy economists is very strong, and will remain that way for quite some time. Do you think that's accurate?"

I have no specific data, but yeah, the market for economists in most fields is strong. Our program is not highly ranked, yet almost all of our PhD's are able to get tenure track jobs with reasonable teaching loads. To my knowledge environmental/energy policy is a hot field right now, particularly if you can bring in grants.

"as far as I can tell economics is the field that most closely aligns with this in the context of energy and the environment"

You should also consider PhD programs in agricultural economics or environmental economics. Highly-ranked economics programs often have a theoretical/mathematical focus that doesn't fit with what you want to do. I know from experience that energy isn't fully respected in economics departments.
Certainly true. In this case it seems like since it's meant to be an "everyman" font it would be more useful to have it be in lowercase too, and include numerals etc.

I'm guessing they decided writing 26 letters was about the limit of the average attention span online - having to do it twice, along with 0-9 and a basket full of symbols probably would result in lots of incomplete forms.
I tried a ton of window managers (Divvy [1], Spectacle [2], Alfred worflows, scripts) over the years, but the most advanced, most easy to use and fastest solution is Moom [3].
It's extremely flexible, configurable, have nice design and clever tricks. It has far more features that all of the above. I'm not searching the perfect window manager anymore.

[1]: https://mizage.com/divvy/

[2]: http://spectacleapp.com/

[3]: http://manytricks.com/moom/
I vaguely remember that church numerals (or was it some other encoding ?) have been used to minimize conditional jumps in code. If someone is familiar with how that works, would love to hear.
In my experience companies won't share what the percentage is of the stock you are getting. They just say you are getting X number of shares and won't tell you anything else. How do you verify what they are saying is correct?
I switched from W to dBm at the last minute, so there might be mistakes. Anyway, I think it ends up being feasible, because you have some play with transmit power, the noise floor, reflections, and a better antenna, which will all change your number by a few 10s of dB in whatever direction you choose.

Definitely not the worst startup I've seen on HN. I think they can make something useful, since their goal is quite modest.
Very nice, it's so convincing my first reaction was to use the left-right cursor keys to change the selected menu option! (that would be a cool enhance by the way).

kudos!
For business-related products, it's also helpful to gain exposure in the industries you're in. For instance, if you're launching a product that might serve both the healthcare and legal sectors, any type of exposure there not only proves legitimacy for potential customers, but to investors as well.
> "Hosting your code on GitHub is senseless because anybody can take your code down at a moment's notice"

While I agree with the sentiment, this statement is a bit extreme. Especially since it's a distributed system so you're not exactly losing your work. Also, you can get it back online if you jump through the flaming hoops. In reality there is no better option for hosting OSS code right now than GitHub.
Okay, so let's look at it as an investment.

Take an established company. If you invest in this company and it has problems, not only could your investment vanish, but you may also be out of a job. There's a lot of risk there for you as an employee that isn't there for the average investor. To me it seems the thing to do is accept the options but cash them as soon as possible while still being smart about it.

Take a startup. You have the same problem as above, but the startup is much, much more likely to fail and those failures are likely to be more catastrophic. If you're not comfortable with that level of risk you just shouldn't do it at all. If you are, then I think you have to take the same approach as with the established company: sell as soon as you are able to sell.

And this is, in fact, what my ex and I did. She worked for a startup. She received options when she started and as bonuses. We were given a few liquidation opportunities (stocks sold to private investors through the company) but otherwise were not allowed to sell while she still worked there. During those opportunities we sold the maximum we were allowed to sell (which was always some percentage of our holdings).

This got our money out of the high risk investment and doing other things. In the long run, the company ended up going public and we could have done much better by holding out, but we still did quite well and reducing our risk at the time was the smart move.

I am not a financial advisor, this is not advice, blah blah blah...
The risk profiles and the investment profiles of most investors are completely different from those of most employees, so there is no way that equity has (proportionally) the same value for employees and investors.

Besides what other comments already mentioned (liquidation preferences and portfolio diversification), one must also take into account that (1) investor's equity is safe, while the employee's isn't (if you're fired before the vesting begins), and (2) investors have much more say at influencing the company's future (via more board seats and more voting rights). Also, most employees have much less capital than investors, so the monetary equivalent of the NPV of equity would be much more meaningful to them than to the investors (given that most people are risk-averse).

All in all, as an employee, I would value equity between 4-10 times less than the investors would.
Do you think you could start a class action lawsuit on this basis? If companies aren't going to bother to stand up to this, and individuals don't have the money to do so, then short of actually fixing the law, class action suits seem the only (legal) way forward. But proving that a significant enough portion of takedowns are illegal might be difficult.
Yes. I think it should consist of two independent modules. The first would be the basic mechanism for creating the plugin, walking the node, and doing the text conversion, which would just be a function you could pass in. Then it would have a build step to make Chrome and FireFox extensions.

Or maybe you would want to pass in a series of regexp replacement pairs there, but even that is too limiting, I think. You might want to do something based on information about the whole node, not just the regex

Then the second module would be the good-enough natural language processor. You'd have an API for nouns, one for verbs, etc.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Indeed, there are a couple of key things to note:

1) JWST has not been launched, yet.

2) SOFIA's wavelength coverage is different that JWST's or anything else that is in the pipeline.

So, really, they are complimentary observatories.
That's a great point. So many sites - including TC/VB - are the same folks all the time. And they might be keeping up with startup news, but they aren't potential end users.
Caution: while this works great on Linux, on OSX, a USR1 will kill dd, and a SIGINFO will get you the block counts.
Physicists Launch Campaign To Rebuild Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower
It's best to be flagged today. NSA is just gonna think I'm an average joe who read the news, and not the terror lord that I am.
I think that much of it comes down to community management. (e.g. preventing trolls from taking over, continuing discussion threads)
The difference between an employee and an investor is that the investor puts their eggs in many baskets, and an employee puts all of their eggs in one basket. So investors get diversification of risk while employees do not. Therefore consistently accepting low probability but potentially high return choices on average works out well for investors and not for employees. And in fact investors push this way - their incentive is always to "swing for the fences" because their business model is based on the one or two investments that work out which pay for the failures.

If you are considering working for a startup, the value of your equity should not be a primary consideration. Instead you should be so deciding because you enjoy the fact that the organization is small, you can have an impact, competence can result in rapid promotion, you have the opportunity to learn many skills. If you want to be in it for THOSE reasons, then seriously consider it.

When you are in any negotiation you should make all decisions about equity from the point of view of never expecting it to be worth a dime - because it probably won't be - but be ready to trade salary in excess of your actual needs for it because you recognize that the person on the other side is trying to reward you, and rewarding people like you with money makes the company less likely to succeed.

If you work from those principles, then you are likely to choose a job which is a good fit and where you have a good impact. If you instead work from everything as a straightforward economic transaction then startups can't consistently reward you like an established company will.

But I can see you jumping up and down about the potential payoff from equity. If you are a person whose day to day life can be motivated by that, then go off and read http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for... and decide whether you are ready to start your own company now, or want to gain skills before doing it in a bit. Seriously, the difference between "last founder" and "first employee" is so huge that people who can derive their day to day motivation from equity should be founders.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I have worked for a number of startups, been paid out non-life changing amounts more than once, and have never tried being a founder.)
I knew something had changed but was unsure of the details. Thanks for the correction.
How'd you manage to get that domain name? Did you have to buy it off someone else?
Seriously, it's time for the entire tech industry to publicly announce an embargo for everyone who has worked in the NSA from 2015-01-01 onwards.

This gives those who want to get out a fair opportunity to do so, and those who still are in after the date... well fuck you very much.
I run a very minimalistic environment without a DE. I use XMonad as a WM. My only graphical applications are Firefox and Zathura.

With wireless on, while browsing the web, powertop shows around 5.2W. This is with a pretty bright screen. With reasonable usage, you can go well past 5 hours. Note this machine has a tiny battery in comparison to the 13 inch model.

I believe things could be even better (-0.5W) if I used another driver for the Broadcom wireless card (currently using the stock one in the kernel), as it doesn't support power management. Besides, on X11 the keyboard and the trackpad do not sleep properly.

Best hardware I've seen in this regard was a X220, and a Nokia N9. But the Mac is extremely good. If one cherry picks hardware for Linux like Apple does for OS X, the experience can be very good these days.
Is it possible that LJ used to host tails ISO images or tor bundles under linuxjournal.com/content/linux ? The original article doesn't provide much more than a single source page with very little context. The whole source page is about flagging tor users.

@DINKDINK: I like to understand the context in which LJ got flagged that's all. My understanding is that a NSA agent would find a "tor" tag associated to my IP which would help them look for communication channels in case they wanted to investigate me. I also didn't see anything flagging me as an "extremist" like the news reports.
This is disgusting. Is this the start of a war between 'the normals' and 'the weirdos'? On the basis of what I know of people who work at GCHQ, they'd like nothing more than to launch a tactical carpet bombing of 'those alternative hippy people who think their Linux thing is so great' ..

I mean, seriously. Is it really coming to this, NSA/GCHQ apologists? You really think the fascist security apparatus is so great? They're targetting people who commit nothing more than highly advanced, technical, free speech. Is this not shocking as hell? How anyone can continue to defend this apparatus is beyond me ..
From the linked article: "The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service"
Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad

The NSA does an awful lot of hiding things. It might therefore be reasonable to conclude that it is bad and should, at the very least have its funding cut.
May NSA should be flagged as extremist as well?
I haven't met anyone IRL that was not surprised by the extent of the revelations thus far. The prevalence of this "lack of surprise" opinion in online discussions (esp on reddit) seems disproportional to my personal observations, albeit in a rather limited sample size.
Well onion2k's premise was that you wanted to make millions in software. If that is your #1 priority, then working in finance is probably your best bet (unfortunately, IMO).

Working for a "pure" software company is great advice if you are optimizing for overall happiness, but not so much for maximizing your income.
>Seriously, it's time for the entire tech industry to publicly announce an embargo for everyone who has worked in the NSA from 2015-01-01 onwards.

I agree. I know some people who work/worked at GCHQ, who have just done their first non-security related startup. I'll be boycotting everything they do.
I think you're overestimating the NSA's capability to cross-reference your actions and compare them to "what people like me should typically do".

My point is, you should not change your behaviour to be a lesser target to the NSA. You'd just quickly become super paranoid. Instead you should live your live exactly the same, and if the NSA tries to make your live bad, that's the moment when you call them out on it - after all, it's the NSA that is behaving out of line. So they should change, not you.

Oh, and http://defundthensa.com/ , sure.
What is that you prefer from awesome?
Awesomely, google have a copy of it:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:436bNO2...
I'm definitely into this.

I've had a prototype of my [Mac GIFs app](https://github.com/orta/gifs) partially written in Swift. Will be signing up for this.
Amazon Fire Phone Carousel Explained
Software engineering doesn't resemble anything like solving brain teasers on a white board while your boss watches over your shoulder.

No other engineering discipline does this, and software didn't do this until everyone started copying Google.

In fact an HR guy from Google basically said that interviews were useless. [1]

>Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

Everyone else is copying Google assuming they are doing it right, but they're not. Once Google selects potential candidates and weeds out the people who lied on their resumes with basic questions, they'd probably do just as well hiring a random selection.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
Geobin: RequestBin for geographic data
I have Kaiser. It's vastly simplified because the people paying for my care are the same people who are providing my care. They also seem to have a real "get you up and running so you can get back to work" kind of attitude, which meshes well with my own values.

I mean, consider for a moment how much of a pain in the ass it is to get an insurance claim on your house or your car or whatever filled. Multiply that by the complexity of medicine, and... yeah. You can see how it would get complex fast.

Maybe this is an area where horizontal integration is the order of the day?
نتيجة الشهادة الاعدادية الازهرية 2014 برقم الجلوس  alazhar.gov.eg
"The way to get selected to submit or comment appears to be ryans buddy or that buddies buddy. Its a really misogynistic way to do it and minoritys and women seem to be under represented."

Quick anecdote to rebut this, I was 'selected' to submit.

I don't know Ryan, other than I know who he is. I don't know anyone that knows Ryan (I don't think). Like pretty much everyone reading this comment, I am pretty sure he has no idea who I am. I follow him on Twitter, he doesn't follow me.

I was 'selected' because I hit Ryan up on Twitter with a quick link to our product, he took a look and decided it was interesting enough for PH, so gave me permission to submit. It was that simple.

Granted, I certainly don't tick any diversity boxes, but I think it would be a stretch to suggest that my ethnicity, gender, or sexuality had anything to do with my selection.

For transparency, here is the conversation that lead to my 'selection': https://twitter.com/phixx/status/469208498597679105

And here is the outcome: http://www.producthunt.com/posts/alleyoop

Disclaimer: I like shiny new things, and PH scratches that itch for me.
I think it only applies if you would access the http://linuxjournal.com/content/linux/ prefix according to the article.
I agree, it's not a deal-breaker. It's just that freezing something into a language forever because it's easier for someone just starting out feels wrong. Once you're familiar with the language, you have to deal with the ugliness forever.
I can see only positives. You don't pay when there is no revenue. You fire him when revenue gets really good. He gets cash faster than with equity, potentially no need to beg for salary raises in future.
If you're going to do a thought experiment you need to think a little deeper. Most home owners would be able to pay off their mortgages and own their homes. All student debts would be easily paid off, and then some. Much inequality (outside the 1%) would vanish temporarily, since the difference between 1 million and 1 million and a small amount of savings isn't that much.

People would try to spend their money, resulting in much more demand, bottlenecks, and shortages. Of course this leads to inflation, but it also means the recession is over. Businesses would run out of everything and try to expand to try to meet supply, but their suppliers would raise prices too, maybe too high to make a profit. It would be a chaotic situation and people on fixed incomes would be screwed once the money runs out. It's hard to plan a business under these circumstances, but I'm sure some people would be smart enough to figure out a good plan.

So this is not "back where we started." It's a big reset that changes just about everything and probably a big disaster if it's sprung onto people without warning.

On the other hand, if properly planned and at a smaller scale, it could have some good effects. Giving an equal amount of money to everyone would work better than giving it to banks.
Boiling milk? No thanks, boiled milk tastes funny.

You should remember that not everyone live in the same hot climate as you where milk generally don't go bad immediately, and that there are plenty of people around in cooler climates that have stomachs that usually can handle milk without problem.
I haven't even finished the article yet, but this sentence is the best sentence ever written in a technical article associated with a video: "If you prefer watching over reading then here’s the session video"

I love that I don't have to go spend time watching something that I could read, and later "Ctrl+F" inside.
Why not link directly to the article than that slow feed site?

http://valleywag.gawker.com/what-happens-when-a-healthcare-s...
I expected to see XKCD-style graph, like this: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11350/xkcd-st...
Don't think its this is just limited to java

(Stop writing classes - python)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0
Assumptions in this post:

>Who reads xkcd?... In the process, we've scraped 20,000+ xkcd tweets

>Although Twitter doesn't contain gender data for tweeters, we were able to identify the gender of each user by their first name.

>We again applied fuzzy string matching to match a reference set of time zones/countries/continents to each tweeter's self-reported time zone.

>We had to make one critical assumption here - namely, that people will tweet shortly after reading.

>We measured this on Twitter by defining: Popularity = # of Followers Likability Ratio = # Followers / # Following

The likability one takes the cake though. Celebrities would be popular and likable. So would people who bought fake followers. People who like to follow a lot would be unlikeable.
On the plus side, it looks like you can get a Twitter card for your app using a tracking link without paying for a Twitter app install campaign.
>Is it possible that LJ used to host tails ISO images or tor bundles under linuxjournal.com/content/linux ?

Are you implying that if LJ did, that the NSA listing them as an "Extremist" website is then valid? How is protecting your privacy extremist?
NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum"
Docker 1.1.0 released with .dockerignore support
Not a good analogy. You can design interviews and measure outcomes. The goal is not to eliminate coding if it is relevant for the position, you need to do it right. There are people who spend their life designing and validating tests, don't ask a busy engineer to wing it. Companies could use an unbiased computer-based test as a first pass. This way, candidates can prepare and feel they are getting a fair chance. In the second pass the interviewer can focus on higher level problems and soft skills.
Selling access to public property wouldn't be profitable if taxpayers weren't subsidizing below-market access to the property in the first place.

Edit: which isn't to say I endorse what these companies are doing. It just seems like another example of how governments (and SF is worse than most) try to fix perceived problems by creating one-off rules, but in doing so create broken incentive structures which lead to new and very real problems. Then they layer on more rules to fix those problems, and the cycle continues.
You would have a valid point if the name you chose was even tangentially related to what your project does.
Built an intern fort in the office!
Great idea!

Being Berlin based I am really curious on how tough the interviews are gonna be.

The interviews I have had here were not challenging at all. The technical problems did not even reach the difficulty of qualification round problems in Google's Code Jam.
How I Turned an Idea Into a Hit iPad App
I'm surprised more people don't find xkcd author's obsession with his ex more disturbing, especially when he makes passive aggressive comments about it in his comics.

I also personally don't find the formula of 'ha ha some science reference I know of!' or graphs in comic form to be humorous.