skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm feeling this, too. I was out in the valley recently and talked to a guy in his mid-to-late-20s who said that Apple's signing bonus for him was near 6 figures. This university position I'm considering doesn't pay that in a full year.

I guess it's like anything else, the talent at the very top of the scale (or at least perceived to be at the top of the scale) is going to command the most offers and most money. I think that would be fine with me, but the frustrating/infuriating part is it feels like an image game and NOT a meritocracy. The names on your resume (universities and workplaces) seem to matter more than your actual skills.

I've seen this at work, first-hand, too. It's hard to describe without giving away an identity, but one of my friends fell ass-backwards into Google as a semi-early employee (pre-IPO) and, on top of a sweet cash nest egg, has been rabidly recruited by everyone under the sun ever since, despite suspect engineering skill. Even went through YC. The snowball effect has been amazing to see up close.
How does having a domain-only SSL cert affect anything?
Using the Plan9 Plumber Utility (2013)
The estimates of stars seem reasonable; the estimates of Earth seem a bit ill-defined. (The study he links to discuses Earth-size planets, but there are many other factors that go into Earth's suitability for life.) The real issue though is in the "speculative" part:

> Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life... And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. "

1% sounds like a small number, but it's a bit ridiculous to just throw it out there and assume it's reasonable. It's a little bit like when a startup does a top-down estimate of revenue - "If we only capture 1% of the e-commerce market, we'll be worth billions!"

I think if you do a "bottom-up" style analysis of the likelihood of atoms forming a replicating growing organism, or that organism evolving to think intelligently, you would get a far smaller number, say in the range of 0.00001% to 10^-20 for each one.
Ask HN: Pre-mature baldness, self confidence and networking
Hey HN ,
I wanted to know if any of you suffer from pre-mature baldness. I am 28 but increasing getting bald since 18 and now almost bald.
This has greatly affected my self confidence and I feel like I missed prime years of my life. I used to keep myself alone just to avoid people. Now I'm getting better.

Yet I feel like I suck a lot at networking. How do I improve my network , meet new people, keep conversation going and keep people interested in me ?

Happy holidays!
Aha! The controversial "Standard Markdown" (is that what it used to be called?) has been renamed to "CommonMark", hopefully avoiding the controversy. (Controversial because Gruber didn't like them using the Markdown name in a standardization effort).

I'm glad. I hope to see implementations continue to spread.
A few months ago, working on a system, I noticed that the URLs seemed to be based directly on a fixed, sequential user ID. It was a system that, in this case, was being used by An Important Company You Have Probably Heard Of.

I was about to see what happened if I changed the number, when I realised that I am a foreign citizen in a country with notoriously unpleasantly drafted laws about computer security.

And then I stopped. It's almost certain that nothing would go awry, but the mere act of gently poking might be interpreted in an unfavourable light. Losing a work visa is very easy and I very much don't want to.
What do you mean by a decline in scientific progress? The rate at which science is done? Per capita? Do you perceive some kind of long-term trend? Spending per capita on R&D by the U.S. was moving upwards last I checked, maybe that was just in the Bush administration, but I'm missing the trendline here. And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out on that could be better parallelized with more funding?

What does "civilization" have to do with some trend in U.S. science funding, that probably doesn't exist? If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production has drastically increased? Why are cars so much safer now? If people don't want to spend money on science and technology, why do we spend more on education than any other nation? Why should we infer anything from state legislatures' funding of universities, from which the best and brightest move out of state, which make more sense to fund nationally?

I'm glad you've heard of words like "civilization," "civilized," "hoi polloi," and "fucking." Next time, try saying reality-based things with them instead of antiplatitudes pulled from thin-air.
> repetitive music makes us happy, but slightly unpredictable repetitive music keeps us really happy.

Chopin's music does this really well. He's always changing the expected chord right at the last second to throw you off and then eventually comes back to it. There's a good TED talk about it.
Yes, but the prophecy that Jesus fulfilled by being born of a virgin was from the Old Testament (Isaiah 7:14), not the New Testament. (the Old Testament was written in Hebrew)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+7%3A14&v...
@dsacco, thanks for a very clear direction where i should go. Did the same thing, Fixed the problems and thanked the guy :)

Thanks a lot for the answer.
Researchers develop 'security layer' for internet
I thought you were calling ME an idiot

Not at all. Until now I didn't realize you were a PHP developer.
I can't believe I have to say this to you, but suggesting there's a "strong correlation" between PHP developers and idiots is a complete insult. It's actually bigotry in action. To further suggest you held back a better solution because you assumed the PHP developer was too stupid to understand file hashing is both another insult and bad practice.

It doesn't matter if there's 10 or 10 million PHP developers, it's still insulting. You sell a product online, and you've now alienated a large developer community. I'll never recommend or sign up for tarsnap now.
Out of all those advanced civilizations in the universe, what fraction use electromagnetic radiation for communication? We are like ants waiting for other civilizations to communicate with us using pheromones.
"founders are middle managers in the VC-funded meta-company that now exists in the Valley."

I'm not sure I completely agree with this, but it's definitely a useful perspective to keep in mind. A lot of things look very different if you switch over to that way of thinking once in a while.

Both pieces of it, the founders are middle managers, and the Valley as meta-company.
That's a cool project. Performance is a fascinating topic.

However, in the real world, the number of requests per second a http daemon can perform is the last thing to worry about. If the web is slow, it's not because Apache used to be bloated with thread. It's because of bad architecture: centralization of services, latency in page builds time, size of static components, data store bottlenecks, etc...

Nevertheless, a very cool project. One I'll follow closely.
Epic surprise sock puppet video gift
No, it's rather that all idiots are PHP programmers; or rather, that PHP attracts idiots.

You can certainly be a non-idiotic PHP programmer, and there may certainly be just as many good PHP programmers as there are good programmers for any other language. But you, and they, are outnumbered by the bad "this is my first language and first project" programmers, who tend to adopt PHP for that purpose. and because of that, if you know nothing else about a programmer, knowing that they primarily program in PHP should tend to be Bayesian evidence against their programming skill/experience, just like knowing someone lives in India should tend to be Bayesian evidence against the likelihood of them being wealthy, or knowing someone likes {pop, classic rock, modern country} music should be Bayesian evidence against the diversity of their taste in music. It's not that there aren't tons of counterexamples; it's that there's this one huge overlapping subgroup that happens to have that property, and dominates any statistical effects. (Respectively, "people learning their first language"; "people born in poverty with no way out"; and "people who only listen to music provided by their single local radio station.")

Of course, if some other language were easier to learn than PHP, the dominating subgroup of "people who know 0.5 programming languages" would become attached to that language instead of PHP. So the fact that this group is attached to PHP is actually a point in favour of PHP as a platform. It's still a point against its statistical median user.
You're right, the human psyche is a difficult to test rigorously. However, mindfulness of the breath is simple can be done without priming the subjects to be "without judgment:" https://thebuddhistcentre.com/text/mindfulness-breathing

Controlling for this particular instance of framing seems doable.
> Most Go-ic? Maximally Go-ful? What's Go's equivalent to "Pythonic"?

Gophery
Ignition is fantastic and I'm continuously surprised how unknown it is amongst the engine folk at MSFC.
I saw an article here on HN once mentioning tech that generates power based on constant motion, &/or body heat. My thought would be to utilize that to power whatever chip would do this.

Sorry but I can't seem to find the story or I'd reference it.
The Web Is the Real World
I agree if the issue is critical that you want to get the fix out as soon as you can. I also agree with you that we don't really know the full background here, but I am concerned when this is being held up as a good way for a company to behave.

I can only speak for myself, but I never push any non-critical changes out on a customer facing application in less than a day. I like to think about what I have done overnight just to make sure I am not breaking something. Even doing this I have still managed to break things on occasion :)
This was posted on the daily wtf about a month ago: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-8k-bug
Some discussion there: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/comments/the-8k-bug

Another reminder to always test the edge cases (as though we needed another :) ).
Why fritter away all that money on fundamental scientific research when you can spend 2.5 billion for fucking Minecraft?
Playing devli's advocate so are Colleges are those also doomed?

Looking at this article makes me think of what if we made a course an open platform. Maybe take moodle or some other system and merge it with a wiki and create courses with it. Might be interesting.
Back in university, I did an introductory course in Smalltalk/Squeak as well as three seminars that used Smalltalk, two of which were group projects. (One chair was heavily invested into Smalltalk)

I won't use Smalltalk/Squeak professionally, and I've come to enjoy functional programming much more than OO programming (at least for non-UI tasks, which I generally enjoy more). That said, I do not regret learning and investing time into Smalltalk [1].

I'm dismissing the syntax-argument, as Obj-C has brought a Smalltalk-like syntax into the mainstream [2].

The one thing that I REALLY miss about Smalltalk sometimes is the ease of working with (stored) objects. You basically don't have to do anything. So much CRUD - just removed. I don't know how much time I wasted debugging or optimizing Hibernate-stuff in Java, or wrestling with CoreData in iOS.

With Smalltalks image, you just don't have to waste ANY braincycles on storing your data [3]. If you've created the object in memory, consider it stored. If you remove the last reference to it, consider it deleted. It's just so much more natural (for an OO program) than working with an ORM.

However, the image in Squeak was, in fact, the most difficult thing to get used to. The image contains not only your runtime, it is also your IDE. As an IDE, it had some good parts (similar to a browser where you can inspect any HTML-element, you can inspect any (visual) object with a right click), and after a while I was kinda OK with navigating the (not file-based) code. That said, it does neither rival a full-blown IDE nor Vim - the IDE always kept disturbing my flow somehow. And, with limiting your methods to a maximum of 7 lines of code, you're bound to use the IDE a lot.

> It's also hard to isolate a "program" in Smalltalk -- it's all one big heap of code, you may have added methods to Object, who knows what.

This hasn't been my experience at all. If you use some sort of versioning (we used SVN), you'll have to separate your code from your workspace. I don't remeber it to be any harder than it is in a traditional environment (do a diff before you check-in to make sure you've cleaned up everything and if your code/unit tests use any non-code files, make sure to check them in as well).

[1] In fact, I'd recommend anyone who is serious about becoming a good programmer to learn several (>3) distinctly different programming languages (i.e. Java and C# are too similar to count). And Smalltalk is really different, not only syntax-wise but conceptually a lot of stuff will broaden one's horizon.

[2] Thankfully, it's being replaced by Swift now. I've worked with it in the last 3 weeks, but I'm more happy to see the C-stuff go and functional programming concepts arrive than the Smalltalk-stuff removed.

[3] Well, for a certain scale at least... not feasible for Big Data, but sufficient for your average mobile or desktop app.
To further suggest you held back a better solution because you assumed the PHP developer was too stupid to understand file hashing is both another insult and bad practice.

It wasn't a better solution. It was one of many alternatives which came to mind; but I offered them the best solution (serve the graphs from a PHP script) and the easiest solution (run a cron job to delete the old graphs).
The download URL should be HTTPS, but at least they informed the digests.
Idiomatic.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomatic
I use whois privacy on my domain because it is for my personal site and I'd rather random people not getting my home address, especially since sometimes people get angry with me and will try to find data about me.
Demanding a degree to "qualify" to discuss things that ought to be patently obvious to smart people is a good example of Loyalist thinking.
That seems different to me. There's lots of scifi and speculation about contact between civilizations of vastly different technological development. But the idea here is that the expansion of a civilization happens so quickly that it consumes all the resources around it before other civilizations get a chance to exist at all. No malevolence ("superpredators") required.

The probability that a new civilization is born after the light from the expanding one has arrived, but before their colony ships have, is very small, so therefore we should expect that whenever our civilization was born and whatever the benevolence of the aliens, when we look into the sky we should see no sign of them.
It used to be true; the 1.x series used actual Maven code. But that was years ago.
... and that's fine, because it's a personal site and it's unlikely someone will need to contact you urgently to report a problem. The tradeoffs would be different if you were a company providing a service to a large number of customers.
I would guess that a broader idea applies to all fields of aesthetics. A thing is beautiful when it has the right combination of familiarity and surprise. It fits well with te idea of the brain as a pattern-matching machine.
I'm not sure I do either. It does make quite a lot of sense, but then you get the "how do new things get adopted" problem. I would probably weigh much more heavily to it if I was a manager at a large company.
"Lunatic and Legend are far far far more likely options, which require no appeal to supernatural claims."

I respectfully disagree. I believe that Jesus is exactly who He said he was -- the Great I Am -- God in the flesh. I have staked my life and all of eternity on Him, and I am fully confident of who He is, and of His faithfulness to His promise to me, that all who believe in Him freely receive eternal life.
Agree. It matters because nothing undermines scientific integrity and productivity like financial insecurity.
The band Underworld has some old techno inspired by Glass. Dark, minimal. Very good if you like that kindof stuff. 'Second Toughest in the Infants' album-era.
Yeah. This is a pretty common bug I've seen elsewhere.
Richard Feynman – The Last Journey of a Genius
Seems to be trying to fit Haskell into Go, which is probably not what you want to do. What exactly do "sum types" get you that a more direct implementation does not? This may be a case where the simplified example isn't describing the problem very clearly.

Instead of using interfaces for simple "tagging", have them do something useful to all the types in the system, for example return the value (identity or the operation): http://play.golang.org/p/bDbzb_ItfZ
This gets you a shorter, more idiomatic representation which is easier to follow and doesn't rely on an eval function.

It also allows you to later add in type-checking:
http://play.golang.org/p/WkEWF0rg-P
or even further down the road, automatic casting of bool to int:
http://play.golang.org/p/YfCTcoPwuh
I'm a PHP programmer too. I've also been a C, C++, Pascal, WFL, COBOL74, 68k assembly, etc. etc. etc. programmer for the last 30ish years (and paid off and on for it for almost 20 now, by all kinds of different places). I also founded a local developer group, and I certainly wasn't the least knowledgeable guy there when it comes to application security.

I get that you didn't intend it as an insult, and you probably didn't have people like me in mind when you made that comment. However, the relatively recent "PHP programmers are stupid" thing has so turned me off to any kind of programming discussion that I now habitually avoid any discussion of programming at all -- for the first time in all my years as a programmer.
Any examples/PR links?
I upload my non-Kindle ebooks to Google Books and use the app to do all my note taking and highlighting.
You should get some help anxiety thing. I have seen people let ego / pride decide. There is no shame asking for help when you need it.
There are numerous tools that work on text files without knowing a specific structure. Some tools are more sophisticated with their knowledge of formats and can do more with the text files. Binary files don't allow for this extremely useful range of functionality.
Yes, this! Rust (and by proxy, Servo) shows the most promise out of everything listed on that recent "Mozilla Projects" link.

I will hopefully be able to contribute back to Rust a bit once I'm a bit more skilled with it.
This really only shows that Kim is in it for himself, just like with his previous ventures. The post gives Mega exposure (good for him), plus it frees up the XBOX network (also good for him), which I'm sure he is playing today since apparently at one time he was one of the highest ranked players in the world.

Don't think of it as anything other than self interest.
This entire thread in the media is playing out exactly as I would predict. CNN is putting this story as its lead headline, but in any other context a DDOS attack on gaming networks would be a forgettable article buried a couple headlines below some others. This story is so exciting for news networks because "hacking" is on people's minds, especially after The Interview -- and xbox and sony, two companies distributing it, are hacked? CNN loves that. Pageviews!

(Hey, wasn't there another story today? About the NSA? Employees arbitrarily querying data of their neighbors? Hmmm...)

It's frustrating to watch the story develop and feel powerless, despite knowing this is going to end in legislation restricting freedom on Internet usage. I find comfort in the fact that the fundamentals of network theory will resist such an attack. In the words of John Gilmore [0], "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Any to pass anti-Internet legislation will be an exercise in futility.

[0] http://www.toad.com/
> Could something like Smalltalk work in such a way that the "image" is a series of files and folders, so if something goes nuts we can do what we always do and poke around in the data?

Well, speaking for Squeak: The image is just a file. You can open it and poke around in it.

I don't recall why I had to do it exactly (did some meta-programming with Smalltalk at university... maybe my program overwrote some fundamental functions in Object or similar), but I don't remember it to be terribly complicated.

Definitely not as simple as opening a JSON file, but not as hard as decrypting the assembly of a compiled C-program or analyzing the memory of a crashed program.
I'm learning javascript, so this sort of issue doesn't really make sense to me, but I gather this is a specific issue with C and it has to do with how large integers are handled. Fair enough, but I'm actually quite curious how you should solve this kind of problem in a low level language and why.
When something is easy at the hardware level but there is no easy way to express it in programs, it suggests a failure of the abstraction. Or more positively, room for improvement. I'd love to see some way that this can be expressed elegantly in C.
It would be a little more clear if they compared it to L20n[1] (their internal Mozilla browser localization API) and how this is going to bring those open standards to browsers.

Let's get deeper than money classes.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/L20n/FAQ
Ever heard of tor?
Making money is one measure of profitability, another is reducing risk, something businesses aren't good at measuring. If there's two star systems instead of one colonized and the risk of one star system being wiped out by catastrophe is 1 in 1 million, then the risk of 2 being wiped out is only 1 in a quadrillion. A similar logic is behind why some people want to colonize the Moon or Mars. And when something has been successfully executed once, it's a lot easier for it to be done again, whether it's colonizing the rest of the planets in the solar system or the rest of the stars in the Orion spur.
Possibility 5) There’s only one instance of higher-intelligent life—a “superpredator” civilization (like humans are here on Earth)—who is far more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level.

If we're the most advanced civilization right now, that will be us in a few million years. We're kind of dicks.
The power of the almighty equal sign
I've worked in big companies, small companies, start-ups, and in places with no managers at all.

Basically, any time you have a couple of monkeys and a banana in the same room, you're going to get politics. That's the way humans appear to be wired.

On the other hand, there are degrees of meritocracy, from the soul-crushing bullshit you get as a leaf-node in a high-tech behemouth (that is to say, none), to the hardscrabble and pragmatic existence you might find in a start-up (you can do the job . . . and you're the janitor? "You're fucking hired, here, have a Aeron and a keyboard and a soda, and don't stop typing").
Tor doesn't necessarily help you.

If you're accessing a system a certain way (i.e. accessing certain parts of an application), then your traffic abruptly stops and a Tor exit node IP picks back up, you're hosed.
I would hope that on modern compilers on modern architectures, this would be done with zero branches. That is the case in a quick test on my machine (gcc 4.6.3).
You might start with Discipline and Punish, a history of the western (in particular, the French) penal system, drawing many parallels to educational, military, and medical institutions as they are all facets of an overarching technology of power that has emerged over the past couple of centuries.

Be warned: it will illuminate White Collar Hell like nothing else.
73.6% of statistics are made up. I had to look that up: http://www.businessinsider.com/736-of-all-statistics-are-mad...