skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't need more STEM graduates, we need economic incentives for STEM graduates including companies actually willing to take on and train green grads (everything requries a few years of very specific experience these days), willing to pay them good wages for part time work, willing to pay them good wages at all... etc. etc.

The problem is managers aren't scientists, few companies care about pure research and long term benefits coming from it, and nobody is willing to spend effort and resources training inexperienced average graduates any more.

It is also, in many ways, too easy to get a STEM degree by learning how to be a good University student as opposed to learning your subject well.

The core problem is university needs to be something special and uncommon, not something necessary. Most jobs have little to do with the University training that comes with them and there's not the budget for 1/3 of the population to do science.
I agree, the analogy is imperfect, because you don't pay interest unless you need to extend or maintain the code. It's only useful in a world where the codebase in question is under ongoing development, but those are the situations where I've used it. Naked calls work fine as an analogy in the case you describe.
There are a lot of writers out there. It hasn't gotten easier to make it big, even if the size of the check once you do is bigger. Google "death of the midlist" for more information about this trend.
I agree with the article on the idea that Turing didn't get jokes. Us hackers like jokes and can very well understand them. How can you do tricky crosswords and not get double meanings, etc.
“Openntpd is not vulnerable.”
There are advantages to this, at least temporarily. We can see who wants to censor the information. With a distributed network they would simply blend into the crowd.
NK hacking school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi93PWZ0bMI
C-c C-e fig TAB RET

C-c C-e means "give me a new environment"
3D-printing an artificial mind might be possible one day
Ayn Rand Reviews Children’s Movies
Certainly interesting--wish the article mentioned the Pearlian techniques. My issue is with the overstated claims, e.g.

"Statisticians have always thought it impossible to tell cause and effect apart using observational data. Not any more."

Maybe including "bivariate" in the paper's title could have helped.
Show HN: One Sentence Startup Pitches (Bot)
I never really investigated why, I think it's because I use melpa as my main package repository, but yasnippet loads lazily now. This is assuming the 'old' package didn't have this set up by default.
Not surprised when 1% of the country holds 40% of the wealth.
Part of the point is that if you own the product you get 100% (well, more like 95%) of the income, rather than the 10% you might get via royalties. 1000 sales for a nonfiction book is a solid year's income.
If you want freedom of the press, you should own the press. Today that may mean a distant web server or two, a printer, some paper, some ink. The samizdat was not built on the shoulders of some corporate behemoth.

Wherever you may live, don't expect Facebook to be your agent for freedom. On the contrary.
We didn't evaluate Android as we are long time Mac devs so we knew we could work fastest on iOS and Mac.

We are somewhat concerned about getting sherlocked, but I have no idea what to do about that other than push on!
Snow and ice does have an overall effect on climate, due to its high albedo reflecting light that would otherwise be absorbed and turned into heat.
You aren't offering any solution to other countries contributing to the development of new medicines.

India developed their Mars mission for $74 million dollars. That's a fraction of the US cost. Why can't they develop new medicines for a fraction of the cost? The idea is to increase research at a global level, and have everyone contribute.
How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids from How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning
I started by pursing "sales engineer", but then someone said the magic words "solutions architect" and it went from there.

Find the person who would be your boss if you switched, and start talking to them about it?

I don't think I have any other relevant anecdotes, my situation was pretty weird.
As 'blunder has mentioned elsewhere, you should use pluggable transports (try obfs3, scramblesuit, fte in https://bridges.torproject.org/options) when in mainland China. Don't use vanilla Tor bridges or vanilla Tor there.
> A recent mobile phone [...] has approximately the same computing power as Deep Blue...

Computing power doesn't mean a whole lot when the screen is just 4 inches wide and the only way to interact with it's proprietary non-multitasking OS is by poking it with your finger.

> Moreover, Apple's iPhone revenue (just the iPhone) is in the same ballpark as the revenue from everything sold by Microsoft.

Microsoft generally doesn't sell hardware, so I'm unsure how this comparison would be useful.

> As for the equipment rate of smart phones, it's steadily growing higher than PC equipment rates. [...] a smartphone is becoming [...] the main device they use to access the internet.

PC hardware's biggest customer is and always has been business. That's not being replaced by mobile. College kids aren't writing their papers on mobile devices in large numbers. Government agencies aren't switching to mobile devices for their data entry. So in that respect, "mobile is the future" didn't pan out because "the future" is generally expected to wholly replace the "the past" and that is certainly not happening.

> please, enlighten me.

Consider yourself enlightened.
How is any of this less transparent than pulling a level on a black box and hoping it gets counted?
Isn't it funny how we chastise companies for treating workers like replaceable cogs, and then we do the same in these discussions? If I need an expert in neurobiology, a glut of physics majors is unlikely to be helpful.
AUCTeX has the LaTeX-environment function (C-c C-e by default) that does even better than that (inserts the figure environment, offers to center, creates a label, a caption, etc.), and also handles all environments, plus there's no need to create the snippets.
The letter mentions "the problem at Salomon" that almost caused the firm to close. Does anyone know what that was?
Agreed it is an interesting theoretical question.

But, sometimes theoretical questions have shaky moral ground, and more importantly, put stupid ideas in stupid people's heads.

Adam and Eve is probably the classic example.
My advice would be "don't". There are quite significant potential legal ramifications for scanning other peoples infrastructure and thus you could land yourself in a lot of trouble if you're not careful.

This isn't to say that nmap (and it's ilk) are not useful diagnostic tools. But I'd recommend you leave the scanning to infrastructure you either own or have the owners consent - at least for now while you're still learning the tools.
Any particular reason why you aren't taking a job in the infosec industry directly? Compared to being a RoR dev, I think you could be paid much more and have more interesting work.

Helping manage secure dev practices for startups is of course very important, but I think that would be much easier to do if you're either in some kind of CISO or appsec management position in the company, or are part of a third party auditing/pentesting firm that deals with startups.
Sure Auctex does provides kb-shortcuts. But rather than using predefined keystrokes, I prefer to use my own. Besides, snippets can be used for commands/environments for which AucTex provides no shortcut or for things such as macros.
Then we should be saying we need more neurobiology grads.

But what's being said is we need more STEM grads.

74% of STEM grads don't work in their fields. That's not a small percentage.

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-130....
This is just a review, and as such it glosses over what has been reported elsewhere as the real reason Ghibli might not survive Miyazaki: the big man himself hoped to hand the reins to his own son, but the "young scion" failed short. Rather than look for alternatives, Miyazaki just gave up; which was a very Japanese thing to do.
what is the actual range of experience required to do the job of a solutions engineer?
On some level, that might be preferable because of the additional outrage it might generate.
I doubt it, because they then couldn't walk around whistling Dixie and deny knowing that their business partners needed something that most don't have.

Also, how do you underwrite insurance and remain ignorant of whether or not operating as a AirBnB "host" is legal?
I like this article, but I wish it would do more to point out that high-education low-wage workers, like adjunct university teachers, are usually in their low-wage jobs by choice, and their education gives them a lot more opportunities even if they don't take them. They are in a way very financially secure, since they could easily give up on academics and move into high-wage industry jobs (at least in the applicable fields). There are a lot of people who really want academic jobs anyway, so schools are happy to pay low.

Note: I'm an academic and I have a second job to supplement my income. I have often considered moving into industry where I would make 5-10x my teaching income.
I don't really see how this tells us anything interesting. You would see pretty similar results no matter where you scanned, with the exception of the Red Star OS stuff.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks Facebook is an "agent for freedom".
Here is Sam Altman on Twitter, in April 2014, during a YC interview period: "it's a little creepy when someone has a 35 year old looking face and 70 year old looking hands" [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/460215704302534657
My main gripe with yasnippet is that its feature list is pretty lackluster compared to some advanced vim snippet plugins like xptemplate.[1]

xptemplate has a bazillion features, and yasnippet is primitive in comparison. Just a simple example is that in xptemplate (and probably any respectable snippet plugin in vim) you can type a part of a snippet name, hit TAB, and it will expand the snippet whose partial name you typed (assuming there's no exact match). In yasnippet, you have to type out the full snippet name before it can be expanded. This is pretty annoying, especially for long snippet names.

There are tons of other examples of far more advanced functionality, such as a variety of snippet repetition and embedding features.

This comparative lack of features in yasnippet is pretty surprising, because emacs extensions are usually very feature rich, and everyone seems to love yasnippet. But I think that's because most emacs users don't know what they're missing.

And before someone says it, yes, I know yasnippet gives you the ability to embed eLisp code in it, so I could potentially write all the functionality I need myself. But that's really beside the point. I'm talking about built-in features, not the ability to code up the features myself.

[1] https://github.com/drmingdrmer/xptemplate
The attack surface becomes much, much bigger. It literally takes everything that's inherently insecure about elections to begin with and adds everything that's insecure about the internet and the post office as well.
I just used figure as an example. If there's no predefined keystroke or function available such as in the case of LaTeX macros that you tend to use frequently, snippets can be of use. Of course one can do without them, but they're definitely worth considering if you use emacs regularly.
Somewhat off topic, but to your question about why we don't value certain kinds of work...

Culture provides a kind of distributed wage-fixing. The free market fallacy gives people the idea that wages are optimized and reflect true economic value. But in reality employers pay as little as they can get away with.

Imagine two societies. In the first, its generally accepted that people in any position, including nurses and receptionists and customer support people, can create immense business value if they accel at their jobs. A customer service agent who makes big impacts on retention could expect to make a six figure salary. Others who are less useful might make minimum wage.

Now imagine another world where the general social consensus is that your job title implies a ceiling on how much value you can bring to an organization. In this world a programmer can make millions but a customer service rep is capped at $25 or so per hour. General belief is that if you want to make more you can't just create more value, you have to get a different job title.

In the first world, corporations have to compete for every employee, and overall compensation costs are higher. In the later world, only the top slice of jobs are subject to market forces, and costs go down. It also has social side effects that appeal to the ruling class, but that's another story.

I would argue that businesses who think this way are actually leaving money on the table, and that by removing title-based compensation caps, you have a more accurate picture of the economics of your business and can harvest more value, but most people don't seem to think that way.
The problem with the technical debt concept is that it implies there's this debt-free way of doing things. Like there's some sort of platonic form of "good" code that everything must aspire to, and good teams write code that doesn't have debt.

What I've actually seen in practice is that "technical debt" mostly means "things I wouldn't have written that way." It has very little to do with the code and more to do with the philosophical leanings of the commenter.
If you deal with legitimate US companies like Coinbase, then yes, it does. Bitcoin is now seen with some degree of legitimacy by the US government and the parts of the US public that are aware of it.

Bitcoin, like anything else built on strong cryptography and/or decentralization (Tor, BitTorrent), is of course still used for nefarious purposes including money laundering and funding of criminal enterprises. But the legitimate use likely outweighs the illicit use. And the bulk of the illicit use is primarily for what I would consider very minor crimes (like buying drugs for recreational use in one's own home).
^^ Anyone care to provide comment on why this is getting down voted?
Whether you like watching animation or not, Studio Ghibli ones will open your eyes. From the iconic Totoro, to the classic Spirited Away, each one with different themes, told via simple, animated scenes that aren't as fancy or pretty as the Pixar or Disney ones, but are works of art. They also provide good insight into Japanese culture.
He's lucky he didn't also catch a case for ripping people off through Bitinstant. While no one knows the total of orders that they failed to deliver, it's likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A class action suit was filed against the company before it folded. I'm guessing a big chunk of the stolen money went into this guy's pocket.

Curiously, it looks like he's also asking for donations on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CharlieShrem/status/546367889625079808
Can you trust what your brain tells you?
If a Liberty Mutual policy's premiums specifically take said activity into account, their actuaries must have considered that activity in the process of putting it to paper, yes? At which point (it seems to me) calling it 'abuse' is begging the question.

If (and I think this more likely) Liberty Mutual, Ms Pfeffer, or both have failed to correctly consider the implications of their contract, then this becomes a question of civil law (perhaps of reasonableness?) that's difficult to answer without access to said document and a good legal opinion.

The possible implications for the homeowners insurance industry (and for the Airbnb ecosystem) might be interesting, but meaningfully (if tacitly) assigning fault is outside the practical scope of a public discussion, don't you think?
Do you see his reply below? Do you still think his comment was a good one? Sometimes I can't believe the people commenting here. This guy is a self-proclaimed troll that you are defending!
Nice! Thanks for uploading this, I have a similar playlist that I use for working.
I disagree. I have willfully acquired technical debt on many occasions by writing code in a hacky way which, given more time, I wouldn't have chosen.

Technical debt is a great metaphor for explaining this to non-tech stakeholders. They understand that choosing to rush a feature out now will lead to slower development (paying back the debt) later.
You're being trolled by SFJulie1.
Definitely agreed, if you've got kids Totoro and Spirited Away are good excuses to become introduced to Miyazaki's work.

If you like the anime film of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, it's worth checking out the manga drawn by Miyazaki between 1981 to 1994, over a thousand beautiful B&W pages [1]

It is a very sophisticated work that stands on its own and really deserves more attention. He is a very talented illustrator and painter.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Nausicaä-Valley-Wind-Box-Set/dp/142155...
Just trying to wrap my head around what you're saying. Are you in favor of this because it can also cover you from legal scrutiny for mistakes made while providing care?
Reddit thread on /r/Bitcoin:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pu0b2/american_jus...
I don't know about that. Unless you're explicitly a FinTech company, most of the business folks aren't necessarily well-versed in options markets.
Anyone running an online business will tell you that words are valuable. Text is the primary way we communicate with our customers. Carefully chosen words can have a massive impact on revenue. The author possesses a valuable skill but is not fairly compensated for it. What's going on?

She's not actually using that skill to increase revenue of some business?
This is such an excellent analogy and easy for me to understand as I am aware of how options work. Writing options is never a good act if it is naked (unlimited downside, limited profit). So what about buying a naked option (limited downside, unlimited profit) and what would that look like with code? A careful and well tested codebase to begin with that ends up paying off it's investment?
This is a bad business plan. Sure, they make a lot of money now, but they are curing all of their customers. Soon they won't have any left.

Typical shortsighted focus on profits this quarter, without a sustainable business model.
So can someone clarify this for me? It sounds like he didn't actually do any money laundering, but sent money on behalf someone who was accused of being a money launderer? 2 years seems pretty harsh for that.
That's irrelevant when the entire purpose of directory servers is to propagate signed and published information.
The only way he's going to get out of this is on a technicality, and that is extremely unlikely. If he does get off they have the attempted murder charges. He's looking pretty finished before the trial even starts.

Does this leak taint the jury?
borrow money and hire an expert contractor and fire them and claim the credit and reap the rewards.
He's saying that it's not in the public interest for his patients medical issues to be easily available.
Dynamic delivery of all content to all users on all devices
12 Web Apps in 12 Weeks Challenge (Or how I finally learned Rails)
Is there any sort of phone app or comparable tool that will act as a dead man's switch and automatically log you out if you get more than a couple feet from your computer?
The point is that instead of countless people writing their thoughts in Facebook messages or status updates, because it feels easy and free, freedom would be better served by people owning blogs and other personal channels of expression.
It also allows coercion and vote buying, as does any remote system where someone can be looking over your shoulder.

The "pulling a level on a black box" is so obviously a massive source of fraud I wonder how the people pushing the systems can do so with a straight face. The best system I've used has ballots on hard card stock where you draw lines to indicate votes. 3 columns, 2 sides, it can cover a lot. You then personally put the ballot into an optical reader, but critically the paper ballot remains for recounts etc.
I'm thinking it's more about ensuring the patient gets medical privacy. Medical information in the wrong hands can wreak havoc.
My favorite part of that memo was the P.S. This is wise advice for any person.
Could someone more skilled than me in English explain the sudden "Whorfer" ending to the paper on page 103? It makes no sense to me.
The Baker Electric is the car that Grandma Duck drives. I remember being surprised as a teenager many years ago when I discovered that there actually had been a car that looked like Grandma Duck's car.

http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GCXP5M_grandma-ducks-car
How about a product that kills people: Therac-25, any other prominent examples of failures?

Or destroys the users' financial well-being: software they use to run their small business, or invest their retirement?
Or more likely, India develops the drug and give it away freely in India while still charging Americans the $84,000? I think it's because to sell the drug in the US costs billions of R&D even if it's done in India. There's no shortcut.

I personally am happy the market supports these massive and risky R&D to occur based on windfalls for successful drugs. There's no known better model to encourage the necessary investment. Also, keep in mind, this is a treatment which is overall lowering the cost of this disease very significantly. It results in spending a fraction of the cost of chronic care for Hep C. But yes the bill hits all at once instead of over 20 painful years for the patient.
That may well be the case. HN has a community of zealots for just about any programming or tech related thing (pro-Apple, anti-PHP, anti-C++, pro-functional, pro-javascript, you name it). That doesn't mean criticism (or support) automatically comes from a place of zealotry. In this particular case the parent comment in this thread didn't read at all like religious zealotry against mongoDB to me.

I suppose one might infer from it notion of a default assumption that developers are all zealots about their particular technology choices. I'm not sure such an assumption itself is terribly bad to have, honestly. Sometimes I think that if my only insight into the world of technology came from startup job postings and HN, I ought to be forgiven for thinking that the entire industry is a kind of elaborate and humorous play on role-playing game mechanics ("Ruby Dev" <==> "Developer/Ruby" class/skill combo), which are notorious for producing fanatical devotees of one combination or another.
In startups, technical debt by your definition has more to do with not having enough time/resources to spend on the problem. Code philosophy is the first thing that goes out the door.
The 'problem' they are trying to solve in this article, where open records requests mean that all such video is public -- makes it clear that what you are asking for is basically universal surveillance of everyone, available to everyone.

Which, of course, is where we seem to be headed anyway, and I think a significant portion of the audience on HN has no problem with it or is in favor of it.

I think it's distressing.
They didn't cast Turing at all, it was a historical fiction movie about a guy named Tom Jericho who sort of fills Turing's role. The historical context is mostly accurate, but it's not supposed to be a movie about Turing.
It was harsh, doubly so because nobody at the time knew what the money laundering rules for bitcoin were supposed to be.

They were trying to bring down Silk Road, and this guy was accused of buying/selling bitcoins for a major Silk Road dealer. This isn't about banking, it's about the war on drugs.
They really should, just like Uber should get insurance for their drivers. Even if you ultimately have the end providers bearing the premiums, Uber and AirBnB are in a much better position to negotiate premiums and coverage at scale.