skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can't go to class for 4 hours a day or whatever, take notes, and do assignments, then how are you going to work for companies that require the degree and want to manage your time for 8 hours a day and give you tasks that might be just as menial? You chose your degree, you get to choose your classes, and for the core requirements, if the school is decent, you at least have the option of waiting to take it with a different teacher if they are that intolerable.

The ability to do tough work that you might not necessarily enjoy but must be done and do that consistently without stopping is exactly the reason companies require them. Of course they also want good talent that will contribute and make them more successful, but a large part of joining a company at first is training on menial tasks, working full time, and working well with others. It doesn't so much require that you have knowledge/skill, just the ability to learn the way the company does things, be absorbed into the culture, and be manageable. This also only gets you the smallest salary in the company, but it at least gets you your foot in the door so you can BE mentored and learn from others, just like you are supposed to be learning from your teachers/peers.

Many talented and driven people don't need that. They can find something that can make money and learn about how to accomplish that all on their own. However, although I am NOT one of those people, I assume that it is a rough road to take by depending solely on this talent. If you can tolerate getting a degree and showing that you can be obedient, you can make it a lot easier on yourself to gain more knowledge, talent, and resources by getting into a company easily. It's a big risk to depend only on yourself, because there is a lot of competition out there.
> Where was pre-Java 1.5's generic HashMap?

In java.util.Hashtable as implementation of the java.util.Dictionary interface, since version 1.1 back in 1997.

Implemented using s/interface{}/Object/g with ability to use any type as key, as long as, hashCode() and equals () are overriden.

Also allows for fine tuning of the capacity and load factor.

> Or closures?

In anonymous inner classes. A pain to use when compared with real closures, but doable nonetheless.
Inspiring even for novice like me.
Well, that's actually good to hear. A redesigned command prompt would make me reconsider Windows faster than flashy things that interfere with my ADHD :-)
Actually, the DSM (4, 5) does not have a diagnosis of "dyslexia". DSM 4 does have "Reading Disorder" (315.0), and other learning disorders. The terminology was changed in DSM 5 (see http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/Specific%20Learning%20Disorder...).

The term "dyslexia" is used in the DSM's description of reading/learning disorders but was considered too imprecise to be used as a diagnosis.

It's probably obvious to most reading here that the ability to manipulate abstract representations, e.g., rational thought, is necessary but insufficient for adequate real-world problem solving that individual and group survival depends on.

Emotional reaction is also an essential survival tool functioning as a built-in signaling or warning system. Reactions serve as an "alert", triggering responses, arousing attention, motivating problem-solving and accordingly, reasoned action. However, in an emergency (e.g., a distinct threat), emotional reactions can be translated directly to action as in "fight or flight" activation.

Emotionality becomes problematic when emotional information is not adequately integrated with cognition/rational processing. If a person can't reason about emotion, reactions are more likely to "take over", and "primitive" (aggressive, "overly emotional") behaviors occur.

"Dysrationalia" or failure of logical thought or problem-solving is too general a phenomenon to have diagnostic specificity. IOW many better specified conditions manifest forms of "executive dysfunction", which I guess is the idea you were getting at.
Well now that we have an anecdote, lets throw out the data.
>Is this really the best we can do

Perhaps in places like github. With central versioning systems where the server is under our control we simply run daemons that check the copyright. Each user can define how it should work for them. If copyright is not okay the user can either a) have the submit fail so he is notified that it needs fixing or b) let it be fixed automatically by the daemon.

This fixing also includes adding a copyright notice to new files that didn't have any. Nicely defined depending on the file type.

The implementation was a one time effort which now saves us from doing exactly what they are doing now. Manually going through thousands of files to fix a copyright.
> [the fourth amendment]

If a warrant is issued, the government has the right to search and seize under the forth.

My argument is that they may search for and/or seize the physical medium containing the data. If I encrypted that data — on a disk, a piece of paper, a network connection —, the question, I think, is why should I, a citizen, tell you, the government, the key with which I encrypted that data?

As a citizen, I am not required to speak just because it might (or even will) help a government investigation. Likewise, I don't see why I should be required to divulge a key. Especially if there isn't yet a crime that people know to have been committed.

In other words: [No person] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
Ask HN: Best book to read about the energy industry?
I want to learn more about the state of energy in the world. I'm fascinated with energy. Particularly why we're not using more renewable resources to supply our consumption. I'd love to do something energy-related with my life, but it's probably crucial to know why we're here before trying to 'affect change'.

What should I read?
FYI, that includes pg's thinking on the use of lisp for viaweb

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
A lot of the discussion here has been around Lua, but not around what they do with it.

I think that putting yet another language and runtime in the OS kernel is a bad idea. It makes the amount of code to validate much bigger. I much prefer the Mill Computing approach to security, where "everybody works the same" including the kernel (see http://millcomputing.com/docs/security/ if you have not seen it already). That's also the idea behind many microkernels.

Although the Mill CPU embeds basic mechanisms in the hardware to make it easier, I believe this could be achieved on modern x86 or ARM as well with reasonable performance. You don't need privileged instructions to deal with packet routing or CPU throttling, you only need controlled memory access to specific regions of memory (e.g. device registers, buffers, etc). I see no reason why the scripts could not do their work from user-space, with kernel-controlled access to the regions of memory they need to operate. And the overhead in doing that is practically zero (basically, it's the cost of the TLB translations, which is paid for every single memory access anyway).

Obviously, you also need inter-process and inter-CPU synchro, interrupt handling, etc. But all these are already presented in a virtualised form to user-space.

Also, if you want the flexibility of a scripting language, you are willing to forego quite a bit of performance in the process. Is the cost of a user-kernel transition really that relevant in this scenario? And if it is, there are mechanisms to mitigate that cost, e.g. pooling requests, deferring, sending to another CPU, etc.

I'm a bit appalled by the way they measure the overhead (Section 5 of the article). They say that their CPU rethrottling code runs in "only" 8 microseconds. Well, if compared to the rescheduling interval, it may seem small, 8 microseconds in kernel code is actually a lot. It means 1/125 of a regular millisecond tick. All this just to change the frequency of the CPU?

In short, I agree with the objectives (making the OS more extensible and more flexible), but the way they did it seems dangerous and under-optimal.
It seems most of the spying (on unecrypted data) is done thanks to the Executive Order 12333. So your rights aren't even being violated because your Congress representatives said so - they are being violated because a single man decided that decades ago.

So how do we set things in motion to nullify the EO 12333?
Event: The Sales Stack: B2B Sales Basics for Technical Founders and Engineers
That is true, I almost put a caveat there that small startups (or schools) teach programming, while large companies teach software engineering, but nowadays most large technology companies have onboarding/mentoring process designed around that, as a lot of the processes tend to be company-specific.

> many acqui-hire employees themselves have to go through interviews at the acquiring company, finding themselves on the bottom of the pecking order at their new companies

Employees yes, from OP's wording I understood the question was in regards to the founder. An acqui-hirer is likely to sweeten the offer for the founding team, otherwise why even pursue an acqui-hire.
Erdos is an extreme case!

But for some people, given their talents, being part of making the iPhone might be a significant enough accomplishment to devote some serious time to.
He was obviously obsessed by .net and circles.
But what do you mean by "circles around Reddit" or "circles around something"? Like... g+ circles?
For me it could be one of the most important things.

As a manager and entrepreneur we had some people that were intellectually bright, masters of cognitive ability, but were miserable and made everybody miserable.

As bright as they were, they had their partners or children abusing them, or cheating. It was clear that they were not bright in other areas of their life.

The problem was when they projected their anger, frustration or cynicism on other members of the team.

This is a red line for me, I learned to never tolerate this and it is one of the best thing you could do for your team.

Emotions are addictive and contagious. It you let negative emotions of one member go against the team, soon the entire team will react and escalate(people work this way, hey he insulted me so I double the insult back and so on).

In lots of jobs, emotional intelligence is not that important, specially when you can "outsource" it from the workers to managers but on sales it is an essential ability.
> * Far lower CO2 emissions for long distance travel.

Yeah, except that electricity in Japan is mostly not nuclear, so you consume CO2 to produce electricity to run your trains anyway.

> Greater social interconnectivity between cities, enabling denser, richer industrial networks.

Most of the fabric of the industrial world in Japan is around Tokyo - that is the main point of the article, too, by the way. Most of the other cities in Japan are underdeveloped compared to Tokyo. Not sure where you get the idea the train is making things better for everyone.

> long distance travel isn't filtered overseas into the pockets of rich Arab dictators via oil purchases

Electricity is produced with petrol and gas in Japan mostly. You are feeding the same rich Arab dictators anyway.

> It serves as a good form of Keynesian stimulus

Yeah and we all know how well Keynesian stimulus works. It works as long as you spend, and then poof, nothing, and people get back to unemployment - it's a loss for everyone.
I feel like there should be some way to verify that logs have not been tampered with. For example, including a checksum of the file up until that point on each line. Unfortunately they could just be rewritten after the log has changed. The only real solution I can see is a dedicated logging server, giving true write-only or append-only access.
Realtor.com and Co Move to News Corp
Well, I disagree with his factual statement and I tried stating the reasons why.

I have my Android encrypted and I do feel safer, because I've got my 2-factor auth generator on it and now at the very least I feel safe about losing it. So why are we talking about a false sense of security, when an encrypted phone is factually more secure than one that isn't?
If by "Recognizes its mistake", you mean "have a majority of people who were not involved talk about how the other guys fucked up using the 'we' pronoun".

It sure is easy to point out your own flaws when you're in someone else's body.
My take from the data presented in the article is fully different: both of the "acceptably fast" techniques use JIT to make the executed code fast. And the author avoids to consider what the JIT does. JIT means that effectively, at the end, the JIT engine produced the native code. The same code your real compiler would produce. All the processing before that phase is just to allow the clumsy "too dynamic" languages to be able to balance between the "do at least something" and "do something fast enough" (the second happens after the "tracing" code detects something is repated often enough. And the code that is actually important has to be run as often as it can).

But if you write the code that is from the start less "dynamic," you can get the quality code without all the engines in between and all the overheads that are incurred.

The "asmjs" achieves the speed because it is a protocol which allows the JIT to simply compile the whole big chunk of program to the native code at once, without all the tracing etc. And to have such a code at the first place, you need some less dynamic language, like C, as the source.

On another side, the programmers don't like to have to be "too specific" but recently more languages that gain popularity demonstrate that the types can often be inferred in the compilation phase and that such a code can be convenient enough for a lot of developers but fast too.

So, no, I don't think that the future is in PyPy. It exists only because the Python language "specification" (and the reference implementation) is too clumsy to allow clearer type inference. In my opinion, the future is in the type inference and the real compilation, not the clumsy-big-overhead virtual machines. Obviously, the developments that actually move in the direction I like are obviously: asmjs, Swift and Rust. Disclaimer: I know I'm biased in preferring, whenever possible, the compiled code to the interpreted or the JIT-ed. YMMW.
Shellshock bug is another blow to open source http://bit.ly/1mGnkBm
Straight at the heart of open source software
http://www.straight.com/blogra/739401/homeless-vancouver-shellshock-bug-another-blow-open-source
I have more practical concerns. I might "trust" the company not to abuse or sell my data - but do I trust that they are actually competent enough to secure it? It is abuse by hackers which gain access to the data that I am worried about.
Why Japan's beaches are deserted despite the sunshine
>FYI, that includes pg's thinking on the use of lisp for viaweb

Yeah, I for one think this was equally flawed. People have made succesful and quickly iteratable web services/apps in all kinds of languages, including Perl and PHP.

Plus, one single data source like pg had is never that accurate, plus the fact he and Martin were already Lisp guru s helped them in their use of it.
41 awesome quotes about software testing
Perhaps someone could enlighten me, but even after reading this and several other articles about Shellshock I really don't understand why we should be so concerned.

As I understand it, user input somehow has to make its way to a shell for Shellshock to matter. I honestly can't imagine why 99.9999% of websites would ever do that—even without Shellshock, it sounds horribly insecure and dangerous to let user input anywhere near a shell.

Yes, I do know that cgi-bins are vulnerable, but is that surprising or concerning? I fully expect 1990s technology to be riddled with vulnerabilities.

Heartbleed was scary because modern, highly secure websites were vulnerable. Is that even remotely the case with Shellshock?
Shellshock bug is another blow to open source
The write up is so brief that it is really hard to tell what happened.
Using Google Street View to Document the Urban Decay of Detroit
Quite likely there's an option for this scenario (since it's incredibly common), but sometimes there isn't one, or what you want is not implemented/interesting/useful for other use cases... And then pain follows.
I would be partial to this thesis, but I find it to be more a failing of the media.

From Wikipedia: "In a democratic society, however, access to free information plays a central role in creating a system of checks and balance, and in distributing power equally amongst governments, businesses, individuals, and other social entities. Access to verifiable information gathered by independent media sources, which adhere to journalistic standards, can also be of service to ordinary citizens, by empowering them with the tools they need in order to participate in the political process."

People payed attention to the news during the Snowden disclosures. But it wasn't news worth paying attention to.

There's a good history of media partnerships with TLA agencies - I'm just going to leave some links. I'm willing to write about it but this time of night I'm not prepared to spend the time curating something comprehensive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html

[3] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/another-runaway-ge...

[4] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/04/former-l-times...

[5] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...

[6] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#Business_and_adop...

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary#Astroturfing

[9] http://www.globalissues.org/article/461/media-reporting-jour...

[10] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04...

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi

[12] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/heroes-error?pag...
Hi...I write a wrapper tool, hopeful easy to use,
and now just upload & download twice function.

https://github.com/daineseh/py-transfer.sh

ex1: Upload a file to http://transfer.sh

$./pt.py -u /home/something/file1

# and output a link for download:

https://transfer.sh/19Xwp/file1

ex2: Upload multiple files to http://transfer.sh

$./pt.py -u /home/something/file1 /home/something/file2 /home/something/file3

# and output some link for downloads:

https://transfer.sh/19Xwp/file1

https://transfer.sh/19Xwp/file2

https://transfer.sh/19Xwp/file3

ex3: download multiple files from http://transfer.sh

$./pt.py -d https://transfer.sh/19Xwp/file1 https://transfer.sh/1fn4k/file2

# Print downloads information:

Download ./file1 done.

Download ./file2 done.

ex4: download multiple files and specify path from http://transfer.sh

$./pt.py -d https://transfer.sh/19Xwp/file1 https://transfer.sh/1fn4k/file2 -w /home/user/

# Print downloads information:

Download /home/user/file1 done.

Download /home/user/file2 done.
There's a hilariously sad current bandwagon effect going on about the user Unidan, a "reddit-famous" biologist who, after a petty argument with another user, turned out to have less credentials than he claimed and to have manipulated votes using sockpuppets.

This is possibly the most hated guy on Reddit right now. Not whoever started the whole boston bombing witchhunt. Not someone who actually did anything harmful. Just a guy who got "unfair karma". And unlike with the boston bombing, there is zero self-awareness about how idiotic this whole thing is (and how common it is for anyone remotely popular on that site to manipulate votes in some way). It's a sad display, and I cannot imagine what this would turn into with more concrete monetary incentives.
Honestly the premise, the model and database matter a whole lot more than the language. The premise is the most important as how it's presented to everyone is determined by it. The model is only to help you get your head around it; users don't (and shouldn't have to) care what you do in the backend. The database will dictate what you choose to store and how often.

Even rubbish code, in any language, can survive for a lot longer by shifting the spotlight of scrutiny to the biggest bottleneck, the database. Which will also be the deciding factor in reducing growing pains.
There were cases of Ebola here in Johannesburg in 1996 [1]. Seems like we did a good job of containing it then, since no other cases have been reported since.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease#mediaviewer...
I'm having this same issue now with MyFitnessPal, so it could be an app bug. Annoying, seems to just add the most recent data.
Seems to me they have serious issues in their NY location. Most of my droplets are in the european datacenters and they've been pretty solid, I have one or two in NY and they've seen regular outages.
>> There are no species that were present on Earth a billion years ago that are still present in the same form, i.e. able to interbreed with their forebears.

> That's not really a useful basis for conclusions about the outer limits for either species in general or any particular species, as sexual reproduction itself may only be around 1 billion years old (from what I can tell, that's the age of the oldest fossil evidence), but, in any case, the oldest animal species seems to be around a 445 million years old, which is a sizable fraction of the time that multicellular life has existed on earth.

First, you have simply confirmed what I said above, while simultaneously attempting to deny its evidentiary basis.

Second, let me explain something to you, something you very clearly do not understand. You are trolling. You have nothing constructive to offer this discussion, you offer no evidence or productive arguments of your own, and you are constantly restating the terms of the argument to suit yourself. If I offer a guess about the future based on statistical probability, you reinterpret that clearly stated guess as a statement of fact about the future, and call it false. But in point of fact, probabilistic guesses about the future are neither true nor false.

You have yet to argue against what I have actually said -- instead you argue against a series of straw men of your own fabrication.

Stop trolling -- it's not constructive, it's a waste of time, and it makes you look inexperienced and narcissistic.
It's a figure of speech. See how people use it:

http://news.gnod.com/search?f=run+circles+around
The issue is whether the person with an MBA can apply their learning to provide value to a startup.

What's that Einstein attributed quote?

In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.

I believe the same is true of CompSci graduates as not all are capable of taking their learning and figure out how to apply it to get things done. But for us as technical people, it's easier to spot those who cannot.

One of the things I focus on when interviewing is whether they are passionate about their craft, have an interest in their trade. There's a huge difference between the CompSci graduate who studied because of a love of computer science and programming, and the one who did it because they are motivated by an above average salary.

With MBAs, it's extremely hard to determine those who care about the theory and craft, those who will theorise and adjust the application of their knowledge and experience. If the motivation was merely "My salary will be $(n)k greater" then they are likely to apply the formula they learned without caring about how it applies in the given case.

Not all MBAs are bad, but we are poorly qualified to separate the good from the bad. And given that the bad choice could be an early employee, a bad mistake here could be the end of the company.