skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although this isn't the same in all disciplines, in those that have significant fieldwork components, graduate school can offer some amazing experiences for young people that are difficult (though certainly not impossible) to get elsewhere.

I did my MS and PhD in geology/geophysics and did a good amount of fieldwork, including 8 international field campaigns in places like the Lesser Antilles and Tibet. It's a cool experience to be 23 and send to Nicaragua with a ton of scientific equipment and run small team for a month or two. There are aspects of it that are like tourism, but you go off the backpacker circuit more and interact with the locals, and actually have inescapable intellectual challenges and responsibilities. It's also a bit less heavy than the Peace Corps.

This is pretty common in the earth sciences, although not required. Lots of people in the social sciences have analogous opportunities.

In any case, I think that the overall discussion in the article and in the comments here provide a good range of possible experiences and considerations. But I just wanted to add my piece because it hasn't been mentioned, and it was what really tipped the scales on going to grad school for me. And that was, for me, a great decision.

I'd also add that anyone with an interest in both earth science and coding will find that if they really learn the 'earth' part of the sciences, there are very many opportunities to use relatively simple computations to make advances that a lot of the field scientists haven't worked through yet, and lots of industry opportunities if you're into that as well.
I took more or less one of the paths described in the article (internship -> undergrad -> drop out -> startup -> startup -> startup -> research lab), and everything seems like a mess in its own way and I feel like why I'm not wrapping burritos now is out of luck/ meeting people along the way/ hacking my way through this mess.

At this point, I can't imagine going to academia or industry through traditional means, it's just too much of a mental drain to watch how expectations don't match reality in everything around me, despite being pitched constantly on otherwise.
Still hasn't become "not so bad" for me after many years.
Absurd. Don't think there is a need to remove his lectures ,which benefit the many in the student fraternity, from the edX or MIT OCW.
Don't CC the partner, that's just passive aggressive.

You can email your partner that you need (and feel an ethical obligation) to inform customers and employees asap, give him 24 hours to respond if he might have input to better the wording. Especially encourage a plan for your "public safety risk" customers.

Also, as you might be personally liable for employees salaries at this point, let them know asap.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720064
Your awesome, cheers for the tip. I've only had my iPad for a couple of months so I don't know many iPad tricks yet.
POODLE worked not only against SSLv3, but also against any TLS implementations that check padding in SSLv3's style (e.g., just checking the last byte, and ignoring the rest of the padding). SSL accelerators from F5 and A10 were vulnerable. Thus, many of the world's largest sites were vulnerable.
That's a fairly traditional approach for academic software: source made available but under a non-commercial/research-purposes style license, and a commercial license sold for commercial uses. It's been successful in some cases, mainly when active effort is made to sell the commercial product (e.g. through a spinoff company).

Just a standard GPL+commercial or AGPL+commercial dual-licensing route also works for some companies, without having to add on an explicit "non-commercial" restriction. Depends on the software and the market. MySQL made money doing that for years, for example. Qt also does something like that, although they further enhance the commercial version with closed-source features in the Enterprise tier (another common way of differentiating).
How will programmers preside unless they have role models to look up to?
Otherwise, what other kind of information are you looking for that would help clarify whether or not MIT's sexual harassment policies were violated or not?

Exactly what he did? "sexual harassment" is an extremely broad category. Was it a few sexist remarks, or something much worse?
Is it in the theme of Democracy to prevent citizens filming Police?
How to get featured on Slideshare
Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.
It does not compensate developers for working on mundane projects.

It does. That's not the sole reason why consultants make more, but that's a factor.

If you're a full-time employee, you expect your health insurance, HR, work supplies, 401k, office space, finding of work, and your career growth and promotion planning to be taken care of, and you're likely to leave if you're not getting it. If you're a consultant, you're taking on those responsibilities for yourself. That's a big part of why you charge a higher hourly rate. It's to include buying your own health insurance and having to manage your own career with no expectation that the people giving you work give a damn about your vector.

That's not to say that typical middle managers or companies actually care about the careers of most people under them, but they at least pretend to, and some actually do. It's part of the social contract that exists for an employee and not for a consultant. Of course, after being an employee for a while and seeing that part of the social contract ignored, many people decide that the job is too important not to do themselves and start managing their own careers... and some become consultants.
Was that stipulated in the scholarship?!
That sounds fine as far as what you have control over. After that, you're relying on the security of AWS. That means 2FA is your only line of defense in this case.

Your main points of failure are: AWS, your password manager (if you use one), your OS (if you have malware), and your internet connection.

For AWS, you can enable 2FA and optionally get a physical device that is not your phone. That would help, since your phone is something you carry around a lot and possibly lose.

For your password manager, if you're using a cloud-based manager, you could easily be vulnerable. Who knows if those services are really as secure as they say.

For your OS, you certainly need to have excellent anti-malware software, as well as good security practices (no Java enabled in your browser, up-to-date plugins, no running of unknown/pirated programs or games).

For your internet connection, you should get an HTTP Everywhere-like plugin for your browser. You can't do a whole lot else.
Agreed.

That said, IANAL but:

> He's stopped paying most employees and arbitrarily pays vendors.

That's questionable, and probably illegal. In many jurisdictions, your company will have to pay fines for late salaries. Also, in case of bankruptcy, salaries take precedence over debt and payments to vendors. Even if your company hasn't entered bankruptcy yet, these payments will be scrutinized. So, besides the obvious moral issue, paying vendors before paying the salaries makes no financial sense.

> I promised every employee I'd find a way to personally pay them if the company didn't.

Why? It sounds like you're volunteering to be the fall guy.
Seriously, what the fuck it is with these assholes trying to pass laws that were struck down elsewhere? It happened with video game violence laws, it happened with marriage equality, and it's happening with this now.

It really should be a fineable/jailable/fireable offense to propose and pass legislation that is illegal on its face.
There is an assumption within your comment that these different market segments ought to be served by a single transportation company. If Uber wants to come along and take the "cream", let them. If that means traditional taxi companies go out of business, or have to change their business model and cater to a different segment, then so be it. That's competition, and competition is a good, healthy thing. It keeps us strong. A market that doesn't allow this is dysfunctional.

If some of these segments are unprofitable and cannot be served by regular businesses, then that's good for us to realize! That encourages us to have the discussion we ought to be having, which is: should we provide these services in pursuit of a social goal? And what are the services worth?

I would be much more in favor of cities contracting with private companies to provide a service than passing regulation to require it. Requiring a service by regulation hides the true cost of the service and causes it to be borne in random places and in random ways through price increases. It's like a hidden tax.

There should be a clear dollar cost for these services in the budget, and voters should be able to inspect the costs and decide what's reasonable. Requiring private companies to provide the service through regulation does not promote a transparent democracy, since voters cannot easily determine the cost, and indeed the actual cost may be hard to determine.

For example, if the city wishes there to be a certain number of vehicles available for the disabled, then a reasonable and fair approach is to ask private transportation companies to bid on a contract to provide that service. The city should be satisfied paying the lowest bid for that service. If the lowest price is viewed as too high, then this is a signal that either some political debate is needed regarding the budget for such things, or that the resources should be spent on another social goal which provides value more effectively.

Far too many different issues are bundled together in the discussions of taxis. We ought to unbundle them. [Edit: Sorry for reposting my comment. There seems to be some kind of issue that's preventing me from editing my comments in minor ways like I usually can.]
I'd argue that the 'consultingish' part is as hard as the startup's main business itself, if you add the human factor.

On one hand, you have your ideas, your product or whatever you're working on – which, by definition, isn't working all that great. On the other hand, you have a client (or more than one), who's willing to pay right now (usually you can negotiate something upfront) or at least just one invoice away. Plus you are able to charge a nice amount, certainly better than you'd make as an employee and better than going broke.

Somewhere down the line, you'll get more work. Maybe from the same client, maybe it's a referral. Do you turn them down now, that you've achieved the required runway? It's hard if you are a sole founder, it is much harder if you have more than one. Harder still if they are married, or with children or, god forbid, have a mortgage.

The consulting (there's no ish unless it is a somewhat minor customisation of an existing product or parts of it) path is a very slippery slope. It should not be taken unless the other option is death. And only after all founders are on the same page.

It's easier to set a goal when everyone is going broke, than when the money has started rolling in. There's nothing in the world that's more blinding than a bank deposit.
Friends don't let friends get PhDs
To delete a project you simply delete the directory using your OS file manager. This is not a common operation and your file manager likely has options for undo and such that are OS specific.
That's why I won't use any OS that's not Unix-like.

grep for this and that in this directory. Brilliant!
>I'm wondering if a simple Bayesian filter might do the trick for the vast majority of Internet trollery.

Not actually possible because "trolling" so often isn't in the actual words as it is the context. For example, presenting an intentionally poorly-reasoned argument designed to infuriate people. Or for instance, it is possible to appropriate the rhetoric of "social justice" and construct a troll that is indistinguishable from a legitimate statement, the only difference is the context, e.g. used by an oppressor rather than the oppressed. Finally, in many communities it is acceptable as part of the in-group to flame the out-group, but not vice-versa. One person's "eat shit and die" is acceptable, the other person's is not.

I suppose this could be mitigated by training your own bayesian filter based on your ingroup and your outgroup separately, based on who you designate your ingroup via social network or something. Sort of like "if I flame an outgroup, I won't be punished for doing so by people who consider me part of their ingroup."
Honestly, because I never have cash when I need it.

The other problem comes down to social skills. The driver is not supposed to accept tips, so you have to do some bargaining to give them money. Then you wonder: is it worth getting the driver in trouble for this small amount of money? Is this tip an insult? Should I give more? Is it too much? Am I making a scene? It's all a little overwhelming for me.

I do much better when the tip is a line item on a credit card receipt.
There's been a warning in 'man rand' for as long as I can remember. The man page on OSx has "bad random number generator" in the NAME.

The amazing thing is that they're still being used.
This is consistent with our experience running hundreds of Kaggle competitions: for most classification problems, some variation on ensembled decision trees (random forests, gradient boosted machines, etc.) performs the best. This is typically in conjunction with clever data processing, feature selection, and internal validation.

One key exception is where the data is richly and hierarchically structured. Text, speech, and visual data falls under this category. In many cases here, variations of neural networks (deep neural nets/CNN's/RNN's/etc.) provide very dramatic improvements.

This study does have a couple limitations. The datasets used are very small & form a very biased selection of real-world applications of machine learning. It doesn't consider ensembles of different model types (which I'd expect to provide a consistent but marginal improvement over the results here).
Well the material is covered by http://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-intellectual-property/ so it presumably can be redistributed. A quick google search reviews a number of mirror sites, several of which ( http://ocw.internet-institute.eu/ ) for example, still host lewin videos.
The Eternal Recurrence of PaaS – Literate Infrastructure
Here's the policy online:

http://web.mit.edu/policies/9/9.5.html

Here's the overview of sexual harassment:

> Sexual harassment may take many forms. Sexual assault and requests for sexual favors that affect educational or employment decisions constitute sexual harassment. However, sexual harassment may also consist of unwanted physical contact, requests for sexual favors, visual displays of degrading sexual images, sexually suggestive conduct, or offensive remarks of a sexual nature.

As to why MIT doesn't get into more detail...that's kind of the modus operandi for these kinds of internal, non-criminal investigations. I don't know what you're reading into this, but perhaps you think the professor has been harshly punished for a few ambiguously sexist remarks, and you think seeing them would vindicate him? Perhaps. But it's also possible that the professor did something egregious, and it may not be helpful to air that out (especially if it means reproducing offensive photos that were allegedly sent).

So when is conduct benign enough that the University could just publish, and when is it not? That's a difficult decision. But for the most part, if the purpose of a press release is to explain why online materials are no longer online, it's not necessary to get into the nitty gritty of the findings of the investigation. If the professor wants to publicly fight the investigation, then it'd be more appropriate for the university to reveal the damning information it has.
Any advice for someone who is about to finish a PhD in CS? Like pro/cons of doing a postdoc vs. going straight to the industry, or best way to migrate to the industry?
Are you suggesting that no action can be taken against anyone by anyone for any reason until a court proves the charge?

I'd settle for "proven by anyone, anywhere", honestly. (In general, obviously not relevant to this instance!)

Society is way too trigger-happy about believing any amount of muck about a person regardless of how flimsy the accusations may be, especially given the current media climate. Not judging someone badly until whatever attack on their character is reasonably proven (empirically, not legally) is the only decent thing to do.

All that said, even if there was photographic evidence, timestamped logs released to the public so that there was no doubt he did what he was accused of, pulling down educational content because of that strikes me as a terribly backwards thing to do.
> If a language makes it easy to conflate nil and absence, to write code that does not reliably distinguish between success and failure, then bugs are sure to follow.

This is why after working on large apps in Ruby and Python, I strongly prefer Python. Accessing a non-existent key in a Ruby dictionary returns nil, whereas in Python a KeyError exception is thrown.

If you store nil in a Ruby dictionary, then you can't test for membership unless you use hash.fetch.
B-Link: Smart Turn Signals and Safety for Bikes
I'm not entirely sure I understand how things are any better in either world. Especially if you are approaching the problem with the idea that you will have no failure conditions, things are going to be tough. Prohibitively so.
Those first two suggestions are good. The last one, not so good.

First, it's not very random. As you point out, it will often just be zero. If zero is acceptable to you, then just initialize it to zero. If you need something reliably different then you can't count on uninitialized memory to deliver it.

Second, it will trip diagnostics in tools like Valgrind, which you'll have to either silence or ignore.

Third, and this is a real fun one, any C program which reads from uninitialized memory is non-conforming, which means that the compiler is allowed to assume that it never happens. For an example, let's say you wrote some code to flip a coin "randomly":

int uninitialized;
if((uninitialized % 2) == 0) printf("heads");
else printf("tails");

The compiler would be within its rights to eliminate both branches of the if statement. It would, in fact, be within its rights to start a game of nethack upon encountering such code (as early versions of gcc did when encountering a #pragma statement) or make demons fly out of your nose (a common example of what C compilers are allowed to do with such things, albeit one that's somewhat difficult to implement).

Don't read uninitialized variables. It's the law!
HN readers in the Montreal area will have a chance to listen to the talk in person at the McGill colloquium:

Scaling Deep Learning, Wednesday, December 10th, 2:00PM-3:00 PM at the McGill University M1 amphitheater of the Strathcona building at 3640 University Street.
You can read about it here: http://web.mit.edu/policies/9/9.5.html
How does Transcriptic stack up in terms of price? Is it prohibitively expensive for lots of stuff or is it a viable option?
Is it just me or is this site showing a blank white page?
Every time someone describes themselves as a leader and organizes their life around "leading," I do a double take. I feel most of these type of personalities are too self centered and difficult to work with. It becomes obvious that they will be blind sided.
Amazon to resurrect kozmo.com's idea with 1-hr delivery in NYC
A nice reminder of the days when hardware was far simpler and in some ways more "idiot-proof"... accessing undocumented device registers on a modern system could in the worst case cause irreversible damage, e.g. by overvolting various components including the CPU.
I know, the goal is to prepare.
Barron's Cover: Tech Stocks - Sizing Up the New Bubble
You can run any linux window manager directly on os x... of course you're stuck running only *nix programs then
For a relatively common example of where you want portable pseudo-randomness, many games generate "random" worlds with a known PRNG algorithm and expose the seeds to the player. Players can then share interesting worlds with other players by simply sharing the seed. They can also generate "personalized" worlds by using their name or other meaningful text as the seed.

Of course, it's completely reasonable to expect such games to bring their own PRNG implementation for that.
Don't take it so literally. In this case "profit" is just synonym for "goal".

See: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/profit
>Balderdash. There's a trivial way to get drivers on the road during bad weather without surge pricing: you tell them that if they don't work during bad weather, the won't be allowed to work during good weather

Honest question: how well does that actually work in practice? Do cabbies generally fear the prospects of turning down have-to-takes? When was the last time one faced any consequences for nope-ing right past a black person? And would it even be practical?

And how well does this "vinegar" strategy work to improve supply generally? Would you prefer a world in which grocers had to maintain constant produce prices through the year to the current one in which they charge more as the seasonal supply contracts?
Here's the eDreams documentary on kozmo on youtube if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY8WoDKUKP8
A few more interactive things to add to that list:

Interactive tutorial on sequent calculus:
http://logitext.mit.edu/logitext.fcgi/tutorial

Math and Physics applets, mostly on wave mechanics (Java)
http://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html

Ancient Greek Geometry
http://sciencevsmagic.net/geo/

Dragonbox (iPhone game to teach algebra to kids)
http://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2012/06/dragonbox/
If all bureaucrats knew how to program, then we would only need a fraction of the bureaucrats we have now. What would they do?

The point of bureaucracy is not to be efficient, it's to give jobs to people who otherwise would be flipping burgers or mopping floors, but are too educated for that. See hyper-bureaucratic countries like France for a vision of this.

I'm on the side of basic income for everyone to avoid this problem and reclaim efficiency in administrative processes, but in our judeo-christian cultures not working is considered a bad thing®, and thus this idea has a hard time gaining traction.
I agree with you. Every time I try explaining this to people, there will be at least one guy who will claim he has read Derrida and understood all his great mysteries, but that plain language can't explain those mysteries ... you need some powerful new language to do so.

Its so ridiculous. Its like this self-contained world of hysteria. They have no useful output that effects the world outside their narrow hysteria. No one outside the hysteria can criticize the hysteria because by not praising the hysteria you are immediately one who doesn't possess the sophistication to produce critiques.

Its pretty much indistinguishable from some sort of fundamentalist religion where the proponents just live in a sealed chamber and are immune to reason. Imagine physicists talking in really technical garble, but never producing any models that actual predict real phenomenon. That's what its like.

Post modernism seems to produce nothing useful but documents for other post modernists to study.
FoxConn is trying to get robots to make iPhones. They are close but the precision isn't quite there. Will millions of workers be replaced in the next decade?

http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/195556-foxconns-robot...
Hold on, wait for me! I have to get my pitchfork.

Okay.

Reading now...

Sigh, I'm putting my pitchfork back, false alarm.

The old law got struck down [1] because the Constitution. The new one stipulates that it's only illegal in situations where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy [2]. Damn it, I can't get offended about this.

[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-26/news/chi-supre...
[2] http://politics.suntimes.com/article/springfield/state-eaves...