skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that anyone really thinks science is a good job.

You rarely talk to anyone who says "I want to make a lot of money so I'm going to be a researcher!"

Normally people (want to) become scientists because they are passionate about science.

The problem is that science is not highly valued, especially academically. We live in a society that values trading commodities, and science isn't easily commoditized. The closest thing we can come to a commodity in science is papers, and maybe patents in the commercial world.

The shame is that science is a public benefit. In our whole history, nearly everything is ephemeral, but the things we have learned and understood and documented have persisted. Technology can be good or bad, but (well founded) science is knowledge, and it's only ever good as it lets us better understand.

We live inefficiently as long as we focus on letting people live comfortable lives only when they have something they can restrict access to and barter in exchange for that opportunity.

There are people out there that would like to do science, who would like to further our understanding of the world and universe we live in, who don't do so only because they need to
help produce something that people will pay for.

In my opinion, we should pay for education and a fair income for any person who wants to practice academics. Sure, you can save luxurious salaries and budgets for the superstars, but make it such that everyone who has the capability and desire to do so can work in science, or possibly other academic pursuits, that they will have a wage that will let them have a home, healthy food on the table, support a family and live a comfortable, if modest life. The condition being that all of your results are made available to the public for free and you might get called to teach.

I think of it kind of like being in the military. Enough money gets spent on the military, TONS of money gets spent on the military, and for much of it, the public sees minor benefit. But you know that when you join, that at least while you're serving, you are going to be guaranteed to have a place to stay, food to eat, health care, education options. Nearly anyone who is fit can join.

If you could do the same for science, I think that would be great. Our governance would need to change first though, and our culture. I don't trust that government employed scientists give good results over lies to promote an agenda. At least in our current private economy you have conflicting interests that can act as oversight.

But as automation and technology supply more of our needs with less labour, we're losing more and more jobs. This leads to people without jobs. If there are people in that group that are smart enough to be scientists, there's always room for more science.
I built a niche website about Cockapoo dogs monetised with an ebook http://www.cockapoo.me

Why?

200,000 searches per month on goggle UK + moz keyword difficulty of 31% = opportunity
You'll probably want to check out http://zinc.rs
500 MHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of permanent storage

In other words, way nicer than the computer I originally played Doom on. I bet they don't even have to reduce the screen size to make it run smoothly!
I strongly disagree with you, but I didn't downvote you. There are people on HN who downvote things they disagree with.
Finally! I hadn't used Rust for two weeks, and when I downloaded the nightly last night, code from two weeks ago was breaking. Feature stability will help.
Article is paywalled, unfortunately. Have things dramatically improved at Box over the last year or so, since they delayed the IPO? Or is it just that the market is better for them? I'm really curious whether they do enough to validate their existence as a multi-billion dollar business alongside the several other cloud storage options out there (DropBox, iCloud, Amazon Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc). I'm sure their product is good, but is it IPO good?

I'm not much of an investor, so I won't be investing in their stock directly either way, but I do have to wonder just as a thought experiment.
Thanks for the feedback -- that wasn't clear and I'll update the example and text to be clearer.
Managing Conversations Online Is a Puzzle of Picking Platforms
Hamburg is burying the Autobahn and putting parks on top
What are some good technology projects to donate to in 2015?
As part of my new year resolution, I tend to donate (a small) something to a particular project. Last year it was OpenSSH, especially because I read that it was one of those important projects that doesnt get any support.

The year before it was Wikipedia and Wikileaks.

What are some technology projects that are worth supporting this year ?
P.S. Yes- I also donate to other humanitarian causes. This question is going to be only around technology projects. If the technology in question is related to a humanitarian cause, then so be it.
Ask HN: Ok, well, im in my first year of a neuro PhD. I returned to school to beat the credential creep and partly to change careers. I have burning questions, but the funding is just not there at my uni. Also, as it is a career change, my grades aren't the best, as I lack the foundation in neuro (was EE before). What now?
Writing Strongly Typed Procedures in Typed Racket
1. A lot of developers are missing something in the brain that allows them to feel empathy.

2. Coding is all mental (don't tell that to your hands). So, when you question a developer's code, it's kinda personal. Some take this hard. Too hard. So they build up a defensive barrier.

3. Developers are treated as a commodity by people with business degrees. This feeds the notion that they need to be perceived as the best (or at least towards the top). If that means not letting a newb show them up, well, so be it.
What are you talking about? Doom never used any GPU since there weren't any in the PCs. It was banging bytes to the frame buffer. Doom could be faster on PC because one byte was one pixel. On Amiga, one had to use bitplanes which killed performance unless one could use the Blitter.
I wish people would break this out by discipline for exactly the reason you mention.

Sadly the articles describing a lack of STEM graduates and the ones describing how shit being a scientist is both paint all science with one brush.
Yeah, while that's kinda true, it's also incredibly hard to patch bugs. Contributing to Net::HTTP means dealing with a whole lot of stuff that you don't have to when contributing to a random project, and (as I'm sure you know, hahah) it's easy to use my custom patched random gem with Bundler, whereas I have to wait a year to get my Net::HTTP fix.
It looks like this prototype is based on the Oak Ridge MSR experiment, which ran successfully for years didn't it?
15 years ago $1200-$1500 was what me and friends got at MIT. (And in many ways I was living like a king.)
Maybe computer science may not be considered "hard science"? but that level of salary for CS PhDs is not uncommon in tech firms.
Python is a prime example of a rotten standard library.

Take urllib/urllib2 (use requests instead), unittest (use py.test or nose), os (too low-level, hence arcane usage) or time as examples (use pytz for anything serious), and of course Tkinter.

Take all of the modules that solve minor/niche tasks that could easily have been put in a seperate library (e.g. wave), that are usually a bad idea to use (e.g. pickle), that contain some copy/pasteable functions the authors deemed useful as comments (itertools), have documented bugs with copy/pasteable workarounds (csv).

Oh, and the way they do exceptions is a mess.

Oh, and don't try to read the Python standard libraries source code. It's ugly.

No, standard libraries should constrain themselves to providing a good foundation for library designers.

(I still like Python, and use it a lot.)

(Since you mentioned Go. One thing that I love about Go is that everything interaction with the underlying OS goes through the syscall package. Also, their designer went for more minimalism. And they didn't have to worry about design mistakes they made 25 years ago. Python is old. I'm not a fan of Gos compatibility promise: it means Go 1 will rot away too. But they're in a much better starting position.)
I feel like this is the moment that so many devs who have observed rust over the past couple of years have been waiting for. I for one am looking forward to diving in.
Don't do this with kidney beans.

http://www.dadcooksdinner.com/2010/09/slow-cookers-and-red-k...
ARM is well supported, and has been for quite some time. Where did you read that there was no ARM support?
I'm of two minds about this. I like supporting new ideas, but I've found that the quickest way to build the confidence of a new engineer is for them to have something succeed. So I do think there's a balance that has to be struck between supporting whatever they want to try and guiding them towards things that will give them their first taste of success.
Congratulations to the rust team! Committing to 1.0 is a scary step :).
"I realize that many people who do successful start-ups say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. But they’ve also become different people, and they are not the same people they would have been if they had decided to pursue another course. They have different sets of relationships, different skills, different attitudes, and different desires. They really have no idea what kind of person they otherwise would have been become."
Thanks for sharing this. I often shared the original Cluetrain Manifesto[1] in the early days of people developing websites to promote a business or a cause, and it's still important to think about two-way conversations over just building a soapbox for one's own point of view. But, yes, now as the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto look back on how online communication has developed, we all realize that there is a greater danger from eavesdroppers than most authors (other than Clifford Stoll) wrote about at first.

[1] http://cluetrain.com/
Yes, this is a big deal. I tried looking into Rust a couple of months ago, but the speed of change meant that blog posts and tutorials from just weeks before were sometimes completely broken.

Getting to 1.0 means that the ecosystem has a chance to grow properly which means "lesser" coders such as myself have a chance to learn and get involved.
An Interview with Albert Einstein
The last week has been extra intense. We set the date for alpha around the time we thought we'd be able to ship everything we needed, and we hit those deadlines! But that meant that the past seven days has seen a _lot_ of stuff land.
Start a startup and go on academic leave permanently to pursue your dream? "I left to found a company and never went back, I've been too busy." sounds pretty good to me. But you should obviously get more opinions than my 2 minute consideration of your situation.
Are we considering this more humane because the creatures are smaller? You're still trapping hundreds of living beings into a tiny container. Don't get me wrong -- I eat meat and consider it ultimately a natural part of life. I just don't understand why flies are somehow okay to trap and confine, but cows aren't.
No, jitter is not a problem. It is more than a stretch to go from "jitter as a theoretical problem" to "jitter as an actual problem" - it is absurd. Don't even give this credence.

The only way to make jitter audible is to do it deliberately, to the extent that the DAC would have difficulty even locking to it. At that point, it would likely end up dropping samples, and we're not really talking about digital audio any more.

Audio marketing has been using crap like "digital jitter" as one of their snake oil sales tools for as long as digital audio has been commonplace. Don't give it even the slightest amount of publicity.
This is actually a major gripe of mine when reading papers - not enough effort to communicate the math so it's readable. It's really frustrating to decipher a paper when there's a lot of hand waving. It's 10x worse when buzzwords or unimportant relationships are also included.
Towards Better Creative Feedback
Title is misleading, as the article recommends not soaking beans in cold water.

Those of us who cover the dry beans in water, bring to a boil, drain, soak in warm water, drain again, then cook as required by the recipe are vindicated later in the article. That's when it mentions that the fermentable oligosaccharides responsible for bean-related flatus are largely removed by that method.

If you're going to soak uncooked beans in water cooler than pasteurization temperature for any length of time, it would be wise to inoculate your water with a safe fermentation bacterium, such as by adding a blob of yogurt. That will reduce the amount of internal fermentation that happens later, and if you opt to sprout the beans instead of cooking them, the safe bacteria may be able to outcompete any pathogenic bacteria that may have remained on the surface of the dry beans.
I commented on the story, but I'll reiterate a point I made here.

Coding is all mental. When you question how or why a developer wrote a bit of code, it's like you're questioning their intelligence. Some developers find this hard to take and they build up a defensive posture because of it.
This hits just way too close to home to keep a straight face :-(

If anyone on HN has any questions/doubts/need details, AMA. I'm a Life Sciences Post-Doc at a major US university. I'll try my best to answer (no personal details please).
There is a really good article here :http://projectwordsworth.com/the-paradox-of-the-proof/. That is from May 2013; the situation is basically unchanged since.
SpaceX's Elon Musk to Reveal Mars Colonization Ideas This Year
Nobody asked you how good he was as a web designer.
Source Center for American Progress... Politically motivated.
Yes, I will talk about that with my supervisor.
"We determined your sleeping schedule based on your computer and mobile usage. Since you are below the recommended hours suggested and may be tired behind the wheel, we are raising your rate 40% effective immediately."
Until recently I've always worked in life-critical systems (bugs == death). Harshness was never required. Unceasing scrutiny was. As you say, criticism/analysis and harshness are different things. Probably some of the best leadership I ever witnessed was the lead engineer of a project walking around to each person and seriously asking "and what are you doing today to excel". You were expected to have an answer. It's never enough to just do your job, but it is enough to recognize your current limits, sometimes fail, and have a plan to improve. I try to apply that attitude every day, now over 20 years later (I'm guessing posting on HN does not go under that column, so back to work for me!!!)
I agree. This applies to the startup world as well. Ask someone who isn't in your target audience for feedback, and they'll say X and Y is bad. Ask someone who actually needs it, and they'll say they love it.
Because why not? It fits within the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) after all.
er, please don't reuse a well known term (peer to peer) to mean something completely different, notably a centralized company
Shipping is better for the confidence. And if you build a prototype that makes it into the product, boy does that raise the confidence level.
You're completely right, but the main problem is that there's no longer any sort of guaranteed end-game for academics. A relatively low income really isn't that much of an issue if you're guaranteed that income for life and don't have to worry about finances and you're doing something you love.

But today's young scientists and researchers aren't guaranteed anything -- they're lowly paid and most likely will not get any decent lifelong faculty position. And settling for being, say, an adjunct lecturer means you'll be paid less than a high school teacher in many cases (with no pension and very minimal benefits to boot).
I have a similar issue with a philosophy that I'm creating.

There are some barriers. Off the top of my head...

1. The reader has to care enough to expend time & energy to understand the concepts

2. The reader comes in with an Existential Context that may have to be suspended or expanded. This is tricky because Existence is a fractal of nuance and it's difficult to know when there's a misunderstanding. Conversations & isolating examples help.

3. The reader has to be willing to adopt the new Existential Context while reading the works.

4. The more ridged & complex the context, the more the reader has to deny self.
I assumed no such thing. I merely assumed that the power of subliminal or unconscious suggestion is more the aim of marketing than engagement with the rational/critical faculties of the customers in an attempt to meet their internally generated needs. In addition, that often the purpose of marketing is to induce consumption on an irrational basis rather than a rational one. The resulting "intrinsic/social value" would then have been manufactured by the marketing process rather than having arisen from reasoned value judgments or needs met by the product but individually arrived at by the customers. To see that activating these mechanisms is the purpose of marketing requires a simple survey of the history of marketing and marketing literature.

This, again, in no way precludes people from activating their rational faculties and rejecting those messages. But in those cases simple repeated exposure is often enough to win them over.

Your assumption seems to be that consumers, or at least the vast majority of them, critically engage with marketing material. Psychological literature definitively doesn't bare out such an optimistic conclusion. So such an argument seems to me at the very least scantly informed, but more than likely simply an apologia for a cognitive bias that is pro-marketing and pro-classical liberal notions of human agency.
I generated $1000/month selling pens to writers, moms, artists and creative . The project is called Humble Pen. It is a side project. By partnering up with artists from around the world would hep me promote the brand. It also changed lives. Win-win situation!

www.humblepen.com
I think that crates.io still has a ways to go before the situation is ideal. Discoverability of libraries is the first pain point to look at. After that, I'd like to see crates.io automatically parse an uploaded package's docs (thank you, rustdoc!) and host them on the site itself.
Congrats to the Rust team on all their hard work paying off.

Looking forward to watching Rust expand into almost every corner of the development world: web, applications, systems, embedded, safety-critical, games, hard real-time, on so on!
Yes, you want your people to be productive, if they're afraid to come to with questions for fear of criticism, chances are greater they will sit spinning their wheels for longer, accomplishing less.
He will be doing a workshop:

RIMS Joint Research Workshop: On the verification and further
development of inter-universal Teichmuller theory
(in Japanese)
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/2015-03%20IUTeich%...

March 9-20 2015
Not to mention Douglas Prasher (shuttle bus driver for a toyota dealership)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

I'm a chem phd driving for lyft while I'm running my nonprofit science outfit. Some of my passengers have told me there are others out there.
There's a surprisingly large number of coders who believe themselves much better than they are. Giving them useful feedback, no matter how supportive or positive, is extremely difficult.
I strongly disagree with that assertion; while I readily agree that some parts of the standard library are less maintained than others, as a consumer of many third-party components, I can say without a doubt that items in the core library are generally better maintained (from a security perspective) and easier to deal with.

The ease of installation has nothing to do with the desire for core components. Core components generally bring certain expectations/guarantees about security, reliability, and support.
Charlize Theron Negotiated a $10MM Paycheck After Sony Hack Revealed Unequal Pay
And you think they're going to be able to buy this contraption?
Wake me when we get there
I can see 3 reasons why CloudFlare is protecting the site of LizardSquad, first 2 of which are really bad reasons:

1. Perhaps their logic is, if they protect LS's site, perhaps LS is less likely to attack services behind CloudFlare in fear of taking out their own site in the processes. I am not saying that CloudFlare does this out of fear of LS, perhaps they just think it's a sound business practice.

2. CloudFlare directly and significantly benefits from the illegal activity of LS and other DDoS organizations. DDoSers are the boogyman, and CloudFlare protects people from the boogyman, for money. The more boogyman attacks are there, the more people flee to the protecting arms of CloudFlare.

3. CloudFlare has the attitude that they are simple an ISP, or a router of traffic, and they are not responsible for any of the content on the sites they "distribute." This is a good position legally to take. As my friend, a prosecutor, jokingly points out, "everything is illegal." So, some country or another would be able to find something objectionable about almost every single site on the internet, and CloudFlare want's to be treated like an ISP, not responsible at all for any of that stuff.

But let's say the content in question wasn't a DDoS site, but a child porn site, would CloudFlare be so adamant in their stance, I don't think so. Even ISPs quickly disconnect their customers from the internet when clear and easily verifiable allegation of child porn, piracy, fraud, or bonnet operations are presented to them.

Basically, CloudFlare is not responsible for LS, but they should be a good Net citizen, and drop them voluntarily. That being said, they are not going to for reasons # 1 and 2.
As a totally honest question, what about WebDAV is so bad that you'll never touch it and instead wen this route?
This seems to support the original comment that "what people actually mean when they say this is 'go work in technology or engineering'."
I think the stdlib is not the way to go. Give me an example of any ecosystem where the standard library is the defacto best solution?

But would agree that the only thing Rust might need are officially supported crates, while keeping the language itself fully separate.

The language is then completely free of the hastles of maintaining a stdlib that probably isn't used by most people anyway. But at the same time officially supported packages give developers and newbs a place to start, and the community some confidence that libx will be maintained in the future. I really think this solution is the best for seperation of concerns and maximizing developer productivity and efforts.
This is true in every sector of work. People are motivated by success. As a marketer who manages a team of 8 (including myself), I've been trying to learn to a) give context into why I might be poo-pooing something and b) a few ideas for other directions we could go.

Part of the job of being a mentor and manager is to guide them in a helpful way to greatness. Allowing them to work on whatever they want to work on is no way to build someone's confidence and skills, let alone a business.
I don't really care to continue this line of debate too much longer, and it may have already gone too far, as HN is not a political debating forum.

But I am very skeptical of anything reported in any of the big media outlets[1]. Off course you have to get your news somewhere, I am just very sensitive to the background narrative, be it Western, Russian or Korean.

So the "party" line I am speaking about is how certain countries are always branded as the "bad/corrupt/terrorist" countries, but from first hand experience many of these countries are inhabited by people just going their own way. And the Western / Russian / whatever media very quickly forgets their own transgressions and that of their countries.

[1] http://themindunleashed.org/2014/10/german-journalist-blows-...