skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?"

Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for the academic field of computer science if the undergraduate curriculum focused on how to use current tools like Eclipse or Ruby on Rails or Angular.js. Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.
Video: Writing Command Line Code with Elixir
I think it's a small percentage but there are a few for sure. In my last position, I worked with a few comp-sci grads who were "not programmers" (their words) and had really no interest in programming. They just wanted to play with technology and kind of strategize around it.
At redhat, it would likely be more like:

# ipa user-del bstevens
I agree you should have a plan. I think it's important not to avoid doing things outside of your comfort zone because you may miss a lot of opportunities that you couldn't have planned for.
The phrase "[the] sharing economy" continues to grate. It's the "renting economy".

A bunch of entities, through technological means, enable people to efficiently make parts of their capital rentable.

There's no sharing involved, here.
It's more than just dealing with hackers. It's the overall scope of having to be responsible for critical work under heavy scrutiny. Most companies have a myriad of technologies...that isn't just the domain of startups. In fact, normally, startups have much more specialization. If you work as a coder at a big company, you might have to know Java, C++, .NET, PHP, Oracle, SQL Server, plus a million other things like old mainframe, COBOL, lisp, assembly, Ruby, Python...it depends on the job.

In a startup, you can say 'we only support Chrome and FireFox' and often no one will question it. But in a big corporation, you don't often get to pick which things you 'won't learn'. Some companies still use freaking IE6 (some very VERY big companies) so if you want your jQuery to work with their app, you'd better know why using anything higher than 1.11.x is a bad idea in general.
Unless I'm missing something, the point he's making about holding onto keys hasn't much to do with the algorithms you're using.
Your criteria discuss the demand-side of the equation as a prospective employee, but not the supply-side as the employer, which can't pay a higher salary due to a highly-constrained or non-existant budget.
TFA annoyed me much less than those hand-wavy evo-psych essays do. Actually the evolutionary stuff made sense, if one assumes that mites inhabiting different animal species are themselves different species, which do not or cannot interbreed. Maybe other research has indicated that?
Linux Command-line Journey Day-3
I have an MIS degree, and generally, you're correct. They're light on technology, though I did learn some basics. I already knew a lot of that already, though... what I learned the most from were the Accounting, Marketing, and Business Management classes I took.
France's 35-hour working week under threat
"Project does not exist"
Many of those costs are directly related to suburban car culture. When you take the subway anyway, risks are much lower.

I would argue that people drinking enough to incur liver damage are doing so not because alcohol is addictive but because they have other psychological issues for which alcohol is the only effective relief. In which case, if it weren't for alcohol, they'd do something else. You can't make the whole world a padded cell.
Finally got my side project (a SSL add-on for Heroku) launched: https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl - It had been kicking around as half finished for almost 6 months.

"Worth It" is a tough one as it's still mostly losing money even though people constantly complain about how expensive it is.
It isn't deeply empirical, but this article provides some exposition on it:

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee...
He's not saying they won't be the most expensive group, just that promoting a healthy lifestyle will possibly reduce the amount of later life care and support they would need.

For example, if we promote healthier eating habits, we might reduce the amount of late life treatment needed for obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
The problem with the word capitalism is that there are at least four definitions for it. The meaning usually depends on where you are coming from in the political spectrum. The author should have used "the current system" instead of the word "capitalism". But you know, nowadays the trend is to blame everything on capitalism, and it sells really well, so as long as people keep buying it we will keep seeing that word around.
Are you seriously suggesting that he put a banner on his blog asking his users to monkey around with experimental flags just so they can read text on the page?

While I'm personally technical enough to deal with wackiness like this when I come across it, most people are not. Given that, maybe a better solution would be to choose a font that the most popular browser on the most popular operating system can render out of the box. That's why I pointed it out.
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Alex Tabarrok has been discussing this passionately on the Marginal Revolution blog:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/fer...

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/04/deb...
For this kind of thing, it's easiest to bulk-load them into SQLite and do your exploration and early analysis in SQL
So, let's at least try to do this in good faith...what makes you think it's technically impossible?
The first paragraph says it all:

>According to Alan Morrison of PwC, "The new analytics is the art and science of turning the invisible into to visible...It's about detecting opportunities and threats you hadn't anticipated, or finding people you didn't know existed who could be your next customers. It's about learning what's really important, rather than what you thought was important. It's about identifying, committing, and following through on what your enterprise must change most."
I'm floored by the amount of people with "fancy" titles from supposed "consulting" companies in the link discussion.

The question was "I want to store password[s] in encrypted form." The answer should have been immediately -- "you don't encrypt passwords, you hash passwords using a well known, established, and tested cryptographic hashing algorithm + a salt, damnit!"
The documentation has actually been going through a clean-up lately. For example, http://php.net/manual/en/function.crypt.php#refsect1-functio...

Do you have any specific examples of bad security advice in the documentation? I can try to raise hell with the doc maintainers and maybe even suggest an amendment.
But one of the unix philosophies is to use plain text. To have everything as a C function means everything needs a new API
#4 is a tough one. I don't think this is only true of startups. To some degree it happens everywhere. Anecdotally I have seen a relatively large swath of technical teams in my years consulting. Most teams are not diverse and I have seen some interesting cultures develop. Most managers will hire people that they like on some level. Its just the nature of people. If a hiring manager doesn't like you you probably wont get the job unless you have a niche skill that justifies him putting up with not liking you. I don't think it is good or bad, but generally just the way things are. One place(a large oil and gas pipeline) I consulted had a manager who ruled with an iron fist and over the course of about 5-6 years(which was the average tenure of the team) the team evolved into a group of very passive people. I actually know someone who left that team after 6 months because he couldn't deal with the managers style. However the 7 people who did were happily there and that team was not very diverse: all 40-ish year old males from India.(I am not making the implication that East Asian males are passive. Just this team of them was as the managers style curated that)
Kind of getting off topic, but big companies who do not do serious security end up on the news. Startups generally do not until they big companies.

Companies who take security seriously may even do daily scans. I have a major client who does penetration testing EVERY DAY. And all source code is security scanned by multiple third parties before it is released....AND you have to make sure that your code is bullet proof beyond that, because you not only have to pass the security scanners but also you have to be aware that if your company gets hacked, and they can point to code YOU wrote, you are in deep trouble.
"in Washington state, N.P.R. found, offenders even get charged a fee for a jury trial — with a 12-person jury costing $250, twice the fee for a six-person jury."

Is that legal/constitutional?
From the article: "The findings could lead to the development of robots that can gather and herd livestock, crowd control techniques, or new methods to clean up the environment."

A simple robot sheepdog that gathers flocks of real ducks was demonstrated 16 years ago. Several related robots have been demonstrated since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tefXVXscNDM (video from 1998)

The 1998 robot sheepdog was developed using a simulation model of flocking behaviour, and found to work on real flocks first-try.

This new work adds a neat trick of heading for the most outlying flock creature if it gets too far away. This is a nice extension.
don't worry, you will get your shares

As a partially mitigating effect, the places too incompetent to get you your shares are usually the places too incompetent to succeed enough that your shares matter.

I once told this to a boss. "If you can't get my share paperwork, it won't matter because you won't enough of your stuff together to succeed." I never got that paperwork.

As practical advice, you should still follow-up and demand all the paperwork and not accept excuses for it. The company fulfilling its contractual obligations to its employees is not a distraction from their real work. If they can't find the time to do this, start looking elsewhere immediately.
> All these things come down to that everyone should give up most of the things they want, and listen to "what's best".

I don't think so. The parent was pointing out that suburban living requires a subsidy from elsewhere to support business as usual. This is more a question of equity than of someone imposing their will about some idealized way of living.

> I've yet to see someone make the point that there are solutions, such as using electric self-driving cars as public transport, will work. Assuming of course, the price can be made low enough.

First, transportation is relatively small potatoes compared to the costs of sewer and water systems. The marginal cost of bringing sewer and water to a suburban / exurban home tends to be quite a lot more than the average cost of supplying those services.

Second, I'm a huge proponent of self-driving cars, but they will not solve land use inefficiency. The biggest gains from self-driving cars will be from higher fleet utilization (think car share), and those gains will be best realized in higher density areas. If everyone in the suburbs still has their own car servicing their single-occupant commute, self driving cars really do nothing from an efficiency perspective.

> Maybe I'm a horrible human being, but I have a family, and I want space (incl. a garden), NOT living in a big city, and a car. I do not think this is too much to ask. Solutions (and politics) should focus on how to make that possible, not on how to prevent it.

Nobody has said this, and you're lapsing into victimhood thinking. But here's a couple of other things to keep in mind. First, the US didn't really have a taste for suburbs the way we do now until WWII. And this was very much the result of government planners stepping in and telling people how they should live. We (planners) poured money into a freeway system that in many places primarily displaced minority and poor residents to ferry predominantly middle-class white people from new suburbs, through formerly integral neighborhoods, to central business districts. We (the country by way of our politicians) backed this up with home mortgage lending programs that basically required returning GIs to live a suburban lifestyle.

We already have a solution on how to make widespread suburban living possible--it requires money and energy, just like any other relatively inefficient system. I don't think people who have a taste for it are bad people. However, neither do I think the societal benefits of suburban living are so intrinsically great that we should continue a wealth transfer. Put another way, the externalities of suburban living should be better internalized.

Finally, far be it for curmudgeonly me to suggest to anyone how to raise children, but I'll just point out that the desire to isolate children from society in a suburban enclave is not a value universally shared throughout the world. Here are some young men describing their experiences growing up in the suburbs of Toronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU
Yeah, I attempted to do that (politely) with my first post. Though I made a few mistakes (it's password_hash() not hash_password()). As the discussion grew on, I became less nice.
130% of market. When you're working as an engineer at a startup, too much is out of your control. You have to have a lot of trust in the people steering the ship to take on that risk.
I didn't verify that he had an MIS degree... but MIS is definitely not the same thing as Computer Science or Engineering. If this is true it's a fairly disingenuous and manipulative article.
IME large corps always go for the "quick wins". They get external companies in to tell them the things their employees already told them about, and then it's a box ticking exercise to race through that list before their next progress meeting...
Unless, of course, better late life health allows people to work longer or contribute more to the economy in some way. In which case the impact on Medicare of healthy 65 y/o might not be so bad.
Yet-another-whining-about-college-education. Frankly, this is the most appropriate place to scream, "get a job, man."

I never understanding these complains about how bad college education is. We talking about America here, the land of individualism, of self-interest, of self-discovery. It seems like everyone expects 5-year-old kids to pace their studies. Yet, funnily, if it's college, the professors have to decide what the students need for "real world." What gives? So elementary pupils know what they need to learn, but college students (aka 18+) do not?

On a closely related note: half of all technology workers have no formal education, the article said. Wait, if those workers can learn by themselves, can't our precious, innocent, poorly taught college students get off their behinds and study those, too? Rather than whining about how their professors are not familiar with, you know, "real-world" experience, why not focus on what they are familiar with? Can you go out to a real world and expect those to know the greatest and latest algorithms and languages and formal definitions, their pros and cons and applications? Or how, says, Windows applications and AJAX applications are similar and different. Or a thousands of those long-term researches that businesses just can't afford to do. No. That's why we need professors and researchers.

Geez. Get a job, will ya?
Losing Ground
New Chip Alert: The ESP8266 WiFi Module (It’s $5)
>> "MD5 is fine as long as your database doesn't get leaked and is the subject of offline cracking (like adobe)"

Wow. So MD5 is fine as long as it isn't needed to protect the data. Looks like a typical PHP discussion thread: plenty of misconceptions, a mix of of bad and plain stupid advice with a pinch of SQL injectable code. Silly PHP developers.
You don't think this stuff gets cross-referenced with databases that contain racial classifications, and that this influences decisions farther down the line?
>nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can't log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It's not ideal, but I'm not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through real battles with real jobs on the line.

You make an interesting point, though I'm not sure that learning these lessons has to happen at a big company. I'm currently an engineer at a startup, but I came here from a small company—a ~30 person digital agency—where we were dealing with a lot of what you mention quite regularly. Because we had so many applications in production for a diverse range of clients (some at fairly large scale), and a small team of developers, the sorts of challenges you mention came at us much faster than they appear to arrive for us at my current company, which is focused around one product.

The fact that the dev team at my agency was small meant that, when facing issues like this, we were flying by the seat of our pants, learning as we went along and jumping between roles, and learning was happening very quickly. I've come to realize, after having left, that the range of experience I had in the small-team agency environment was, I think, extremely valuable.
In the 2D/3D world, the rubble just fell off the wall and landed next to it. It's only strange because it fell in the direction that the player character doesn't normally perceive.

In the 3D/4D world, the rubble fell off the wall and landed next to it.
MIS programs are glorified IT training--which is fine, if you're good at what you do. University of Houston runs a decent degree program in MIS, and they can place graduates.

Had the author wanted us to actually feel bad for them, maybe they should've linked a github.
What the fourth dimension is depends entirely on what order you put the dimensions in :)
I saw that -- but then a bunch of "titles" came in and flooded the discussion with the worst possible advice. I mean, seriously, have these guys been living under a rock? This is (well, should be) common sense by now.
LeapMotion VR Developer Mount
This is awesome.

With Isobuild and Cordova, you'll be able to add a camera package
to your app and use one simple Camera.takePicture() API to take a
photo, and then type one command to build your app not just for the
browser, but for the iOS and Android app stores too.
Personal anecdote:

I've worked 5 years in 3 startups, 5 years in 2 large development teams, and my experience has shown that there are, percentage wise, better developers working in startups. This is in Austin, so it may not reflect the valley, but the absolute best programmers I've worked with are trying their hands at startups. There's a sweet spot of people aged 28-35 that are really skilled developers that still have an appetite for risk that are working in startups.
Heh. And they all probably get paid a heck of a lot more than I do too. Oi. :]
Why is there a peak at 3 am for legal? It looks like an statistical error to me, unless it has something to do with conference calls and people starting their workday in Europe.
I'm disappointed nobody suggested XOR

/s
love your username. Now, to what degree do you also agree that it is ethically impermissible to use advertising to "monetize" traffic that you garner by telling people it's free? Is it really free? Is it really honest? What do you think about my take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 ?

I typically include this quote when I critique the use of advertising on HN since a lot of people here live off of advertising:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
It's a very popular language. It's got a lot of developers at all levels.
I suspect a lot of the people who view servers as cattle probably haven't had to maintain bare metal hardware, or do serious ops work. It makes sense that you wouldn't get attached to an EC2 instance--most of the "fun" [sic] has been taken out of it.
"Do not use MD5" is repeated often in the discussion.

But are the weaknesses in MD5 relevant to hashing someone's 17 character password?

The problem with MD5 is that it's possible to alter a document such that the forged document still has the same digest. This is a problem for digital signing.

That doesn't seem directly relevant to password hashing. Nobody wants to find some 596 character string which has the same MD5 hash as your 17 character password, even if it does work in its place.

Your password isn't a document that is being digitally signed by its hash for the sake of certifying its authenticity. Nobody is even supposed to store that document!

(Someone tell me where I went wrong, if so.)
In the game? No. The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line.
To pass any decent CS course you need to at least be able to program, but outside of maybe a few group projects the programs that you write won't be very large so you don't have to be an expert in TDD, version control or any frameworks.

In the UK at least once you get into the 2nd/3rd year of the degree you get to select a larger number of the modules that you study. So it's possible to choose modules with lower programming content which might be focused on theory or on business type subjects.

Most universities here offer a sister degree to CS which is focused on business computing/project management and has substantially less programming.
Silly engineer, English is just another name for "Pre-Law".
I work as a C++ developer, but damn, C++ has the ugliest lambda syntax ever.
I actually saved this before the grand-daddy of bad advice was posted. http://www.cryptofails.com/post/87697461507/46esab-high-qual...
Not to mention that encryption means being able to take some input and generate what appears to be a random sequence of characters,numbers etc, but being able to transform it back to plaintext/original format by using the corresponding decryption key.

Indeed too many people there failed.
Startups have many advantages, but they're not necessarily productive or efficient places.

So true. There's a lot of ranting and wailing on HN about 'MBA types' and 'managers', but having moved to a large company, I love having project managers. In the wrong company they can descend into ugly hierarchies, but when you get it right a PM can handle talking to other departments/customers and managing expectations, allowing you to focus on actually doing the work. Few startups manage that.
Very nice and performant. What's the secret?
The Role of Trust in the Stellar Network
What's your definition of 'reptile'? Just asking...for no particular reason...
> The answer should have been immediately -- "you don't encrypt passwords, you hash passwords using a well known, established, and tested cryptographic hashing algorithm + a salt, damnit!"

Your answer is as wrong as anything posted on that discussion.

The correct answer is that you don't encrypt passwords. You also don't hash passwords with a salt.

Instead, you use a key derivation function such as PBKDF2, bcrypt, or scrypt.