skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Disclaimer: I'm part of that 1% she is talking about, since I'm tenured faculty in Mathematics at University of Washington, with "Harvard" on my resume due to my first job being there. http://wstein.org]

The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less."

Such entitlement. I got into UC Berkeley (1995-2000) where I received $13K/year to live on from them (for TA'ing), and I made it work by having a roommate, being frugal, and getting some student loans (the minimum I needed), which I paid off within 2 years of graduation. It sucked, but I had to just be lean and deal with it, and reminded myself that I was a student.

Also, there is a naive and incorrect (in math at least) assumption in this article that the only difference between a graduate student from a top-10 university and a top-100 university is the name of the university where they graduated. There may be some truth to this for undergraduates, but for graduate students---who spend between 4 and 10 years busting their ass full-time on their research area---the situation is completely different.

The author thus seems to discount the possibility that the very best students who go to graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. are often be the best job candidates. Harvard/Berkeley/etc. gets the best potential grad students in the first place -- I was on the grad admissions committee in math at Harvard for years, and we would make offers to the top (or so) American students, and pretty much get most of them. These were extremely strong enthusiastic students who had invested often a decade of their lives into mathematics already; the education these students then got at grad school was by top researchers. In research, learning from the masters is often critical to becoming one, since the habits, tricks, ideas, intuitions, etc. are very hard to convey in writing.

Also, not everybody gets into graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. via "inherited wealth". At least I didn't -- I was an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, and got into Berkeley entirely by being crazy in love with doing mathematics and also relatively good at it. The undergrad institution definitely matters in grad school admissions. However, being sufficiently good regularly gets around being from a non-top-10 university.

The article reminds me of this quote -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos: "André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters."
Sometimes I look at app game markets and think, "Wow, humanity is burning a lot of cycles on perfecting distraction... that doesn't seem safe."

Usually I just load up HN or Total War to forget about it...
TextSecure is getting rid of ENCRYPTED SMS/MMS, not SMS/MMS capability all together. So from a lay-person's perspective, I don't see what the major change is. They can still use TextSecure as their texting app, while occasionally being able to communicate securely with contacts that also use TextSecure Protocol clients. SMS/MMS just isn't being used as a secure transport anymore.
Ummm, `(map (lambda (x) (try-3 x)) …` could just be written as `(map #'try-3 …)`
A shocking amount of oil is destined for storage at sea
Very disappointing. In various parts of the world, data is not always available and SMS is. :(
Those are two rare exceptions and you're right they don't desugar.
I used Conkeror for a couple years as my main browser and really enjoyed the experience. Combined with a tiling window manager (Awesome WM in my case) it made for a really fun computing environment. I felt really cool being able to navigate through the web without touching my mouse.

Like all interfaces, it was better at some things and worse at others, when compared to a more traditional browser. Ultimately, I don't think I was more or less productive with it. Sometimes I do wish I was still using it regularly, especially after I've spent a few hours in emacs.
I'll wager the majority of Google hires are from the same few CS programmes, Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc.
Your thinking is flawed. But if you just want to chase the current job market then put your hours into ASP.NET.
Definitely do the tour. I walked away from it with a respect for Coors. They have some great environmental practices, they run AC Golden pretty much independently, which produces some awesome microbrews, and they've kept at least some identity with the company that Adolf Kors started.

When you're in the tasting room, ask for Colorado Native, which is sourced locally and only sold in Colorado, and Batch 19.
Because, as we all know, politics plays no part in faculty hiring, and who you know, who your advisor was, who your drinking buddies were, have no bearing on those decisions, and it is all dependent solely on the objective merits of your work and expertise.
I didn't realize professors could make so much money:

http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/#req...
The author seems to view the hiring statistics she cites as evidence of "bias", but I didn't see any attempt to control for the actual quality of the applicants. I.e. You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.
I think it is brewed in Golden (they do most of their beers for the US there). As I mentioned elsewhere, the tour is well worth it. Ask about AC Golden and try Colorado Native and Batch 19.
I've learned through experience that decoupling the link between your brain and your mouth can change your life and make you a better person.

Years ago on HN I discovered the No Complaining Challenge[1]. I took the challenge, and continued it far beyond the 21 days, because it took me about 6 months to go 21 straight days without complaining. It took me some number of weeks to realize that the "let it all out" and "get it off your chest" thing is a myth that makes things worse rather than better. I discovered that I needed to reprogram my brain to complete the challenge. And the amazing thing to me was the discovery that it is indeed possible for me to program my brain, and to change how I think. It made me a better person, and I still years later strive not to complain. Recently I've also begun working hard not to judge other people, and let people be who they are.

Seneca also talks about how to train your brain to make yourself happier[2].

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-ferriss/no-complaint-exper...

[2] "Letters from a Stoic" is a good place to start. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/93900-epistulae-morale...
So your point is that python can make your first billion but you need Go to make your second billion?
I don't get the thing about cost of living. New Haven is not expensive, neither is NJ commutable to Princeton, nor Philadelphia. Chicago's cost of living is right at the national average. Durham's is probably below. Etc.
Wild-Winter Whodunnit – Climate Change Over the U.S. With a Slow Jet Stream?
I do not know. I suppose even if I did, it's one of those things nobody is supposed to discuss. I overheard talk here and there about raises, but since it didn't pertain to me, I ignored it.
No matter how smart you are, there are always going to people somewhere smarter than you. You should not look at this as a tragedy.
A screenshot would do wonders for the conversion rate on that homepage.
Not if it's done over the internet in America.

GCHQ sees everything though. You might as well shag in parliament.
You can always use `map`, `and` and `and_then`.
Terence Tao is a great mathematician - accepted. But I wish journalists would use a fraction of the space they use for hyping Terence Tao to write about the mathematics he does.
I met, and married, a schizophrenic on Craigslist
This was the best article, not just regarding academia, but describing the issue of privilege and its destructive effect on the "american dream" - that I think I have seen since the 2009 crash.

We have a controversy about wealth inequality and it seems that would be a natural result of a cycle of power simply being passed down generation by generation.

I think the opposite of that, a meritocracy, is what we want - but maybe what we have is inevitable in a money and status obsessed culture. I don't know if the culture is a cause or result of the systems we have that tilt the scales so far in favor of the elite over the non-elite, but one or the other would have to be addressed in some way.
>You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.

Then, I think we have to continue reasoning, why do those grad-students grow up and find they can only acquire tenure-track jobs by jumping to lower-tier institutions, where their own academic "children" will be considered inferior?
[off topic - My experience with XUL] Time ago I had to work in a project to give maintenance to AtMail... And it had an interface made in XUL. It was one of worst experience I had in software. The error, of course is that XUL was made to build browser components, not website user interface specific to firefox. Just remembered it now...
Relative percentage of up and down days in the stock market over 50 years [pdf]
BTCBookmarks.com – collection of high quality Bitcoin related websites
Every time I sit down to solve a problem with code, I feel dread. Every time I even think about strapping on my skates, I feel so much dread that my stomach hurts.

I think that dread cannot be decoupled from hope. And that this is especially true for folks with higher developmental potentials.
Beware of Trivial Inconveniences (2009)
I think so, but it's hard to accurately remember that sort of thing in hindsight. I definitely remember thinking tablets in general were cool, and hoping Apple would finally make one worth using. I find smartwatches profoundly uncool and can't see regular people buying them, although I certainly could be wrong.
Ask HN: How do you perform code review?
Hi.

As a developer, I know the importance of code reviews and I would like to be better at it.
I have been working in different companies and I could see that there was not a consistent approach with it.

I could see different behaviors that code reviewers do, such as:
- Leaving comments in a commit or a pull request
- Leaving comments in their task tool (e.g. Jira, Trello)
- Making the code review in isolation
- Making the code review with the developer that made the changes
- Making the code review with another developer that did not touch that code
- Gathering multiple people in a room and letting the developer to walk through their changes.
- Printing the code on paper (yes, I have also seen that..)
- Strict code review
- Soft code review, always accepting it

I know that there is not a unique way to do it,and you should use common sense in different cases but I was curious to know how do people in HN perform code reviews, what are your best practices(and why), what is the worse code review that you have received and what is the best one.
thanks for the tips, guys.

i actually spotted a Colorado Native pack at the Safeway here, i'll grab it in the next few.
I think part of the problem is that hiring bars are unrealistically high. Pulling numbers out of my ass for illustration, it's like companies that control 10% of the software engineering jobs all only want to hire the top 5% of software engineers. They can't all get their way, so the top 5%[1] bounces between these companies whilst the companies whine about "talent shortages".

[1] Should be noted that it isn't the entire group, since some will choose to work for organizations outside this group because the work is more interesting or fulfilling.
First-rate people hire people that went to the same group of first-rate schools they did. Also, why wouldn't second-rate people hire second-raters? According to that quote, no one hires second-raters. It really doesn't make much sense.
Even native English speakers have trouble understanding ATC comms. The sound quality is poor and it's a very specialized vocabulary. But with practice it becomes much eaier because there is a very limited repertoire of things that the controller is likely to say, and once you know what those are it becomes a lot easier to decipher.
Haven't read the post, but a precision on Kyllo: extrasensory searches are fine if we're talking about doing it with commonly available tools. Binoculars are fine, helicopter-mounted infrared cameras aren't. The idea being that people _expect_ the public to have certain things but not others.

Now I imagine that most ways to get vitals would be pretty intrusive and require non-common (as in, not in use by everyday people) hardware, but generally speaking Kyllo only invalidates a certain class of instrument
I agree, there is a company in my city that will hook a device up to the car battery and place it in a discrete location. They mostly deal with fleet management but some of their business is from spouses tracking each other.
There a "funny" story about a wife bringing in a vehicle that her husband had brought in earlier.
Indeed. In addition, living frugally is not rocket science. I left graduate school around $2k ahead of coming in, and mine was in an area with higher costs of living than most of the ones mentioned. I shared my run-down apartment with three other people, ate cheap, and generally had a fantastic time.

If you want to insist on a private apartment, grad school isn't the place for you.
Weekendje weg met originele arrangementen van Weekenddesk
The lack of polymorphism and parameterized types makes Go the C of 2010s. This practically means that in a few years we will have someone, somewhere, creating Go++ and the story will repeat itself.
Intelligence and talent isn't a cultural thing and it's not tied to social status either.

The 99% of us knows perfectly well that getting in and getting access to the network is the ral value and so those who get in tend to be mostly from those who could afford the right path for their kids.
Jon Ronson: inappropriate tweets and online shaming (Justine Sacco reflections)
I'm one of those people who used to use text secure, but didn't like installing google or cyanogenmon on my phone. So I would always have to self compile, but gave up recently cause I don't have any friends to text secure with :(
I agree that Apple could withstand the watch being a total flop (for Apple) without any real trouble, and they'll probably outsell other smartwatches by a comfortable margin. But I have a really hard time imagining it reaching anything like the same scale as, for example, the iPad, or staying sustainable over the long term. Apple is good at taking market segments where there's demand for a good product, and existing products are lacking, and finally getting it right. I just don't see that demand for a watch.
RC4 is a stream cipher, not a block cipher.
Exactly why I believe that the original wording is a bit inadequate. Plenty of people in very small companies are still focused on career advancement in general.
Princeton is an expensive city that's where it's optimal to live if you attend Princeton.
Per US News and World Report, Harvard and UCB are #2 in math, a hair below MIT and Princeton (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...). Harvard certainly has a very strong reputation in math, including the hardest/most famous first year undergraduate course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 (i.e. one that might be attractive to TA for).

Disclaimer: my first job was being a sysadmin and programmer for an applied math group at MIT.
"occasionally being able to communicate securely with contacts that also use TextSecure Protocol clients."

"Occasionally" is not what I desire. Being abroad and not being able to use data due to huge roaming fees leaves me vulnerable something like 80-90days a year. Leaking metadata is still better than leaking the contents which is why I'm feeling rather skeptical about this decision
> It seems indicative of nothing, not quality, especially not readability nor maintainability.

It's not meant to be indicative of any of those things (though I'd argue, all else being equal, maintaining an application with more LOC is harder than one with less).

It's indicative of complexity and scale. A programmer can read through an entire 500 LOC program and will know everything about the program. This becomes much more difficult for a 50K LOC program and outright impossible for a 5 million LOC program.

Taking a 50K LOC program and bringing it down to 10K (regardless if that's by refactoring, removing unneeded code, or rewriting in a new language) makes it much easier for each developer to know/understand a larger portion of the program.

Prior to my current job I had only worked on relatively small applications (<25K LOC) and I was blown away by the difference between working on things like that and working on something measured in the millions.

[And in this specific context I doubt it would be on the front page of HN if somebody took 500 lines of C++ and rewrote them in a hundred lines of Go, i.e. knowing the LOC is useful to determine if this was a meaningful undertaking or not]
If you're the best you can tell when someone's the best. If you're pretty good you might be able to tell if someone is pretty good, and definitely cannot tell if they're the best. If you're not that good you'll take anybody. Seems pretty straight forward.
Because grad schools produce more (graduating students) than they consume (hiring faculty).
Three Hackers Charged with one of the largest data breaches in US history
Off topic, I love the idea of SageMathCloud, check out http://www.jasymchat.com

A different take on Computer Algebra.
I will add some of my own anecdotal evidence to your anecdotal evidence. I have yet to meet a single person in life that has admitted they they had it easier or an advantage. I've always believed that was because for the most part everyone works hard, some just get larger rewards for that hard work.

I can tell you growing up from a small high school without any prestige there was very much a hard cap on how many students from our school a Harvard(or other top institutions) would except. To the point where top students would bargain with each other about which schools to apply to so they didn't steal someone else's acceptance offer on a 3rd choice etc.

Secondly, the tech world has been a glaring example of while one can use Harvard's selections as a signal to find talent, there are many, many, many exceptions to that rule. And your comments are quite sad to read in light of that new information.
How Apple Pay Will Work with Apple Watch
The first book every software developer should read
The Importance of Setting Client Expectations
Swift looks a bit like "Go++" to me, at least on a purely syntactic level. I expect Apple to open source it sooner rather than later, at which point it will become a viable option to develop web-based services in.
Comes with a great command-line tool.
Tvylor Wallets - Kickstarter Campaign for RFID Protected Wallets
I really like the emacs inspired interface. I would use conkeror for everything if it worked with noscript.
I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish. Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I think it was a bullet I dodged. Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position at some even less than average school in the middle of nowhere would not have worked out as well.

And funny enough, I looked at the list of faculty at the university I was at, to see where they came from. All from high end school Harvard, Purdue, Cornell etc, just like the article mentions.

The policy it seems is hire up, graduate down. Unless of course they are in the top university then they hire from peers.
Your friend overpaid for that service. You can purchase an OBD-II dongle that records this information for $80 and $20/mo. So, $100 for 1 month.
You forget about taxes. By the time of exit the fair market value of the stock likely greatly exceeds option grant strikes to founders creating a massive tax liability in the form of capital gains. Likely in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars range.
Let's be honest- the 'rigor' that people bring to engineering decisions is oversold.
Digital Ocean ToS Change: Promotional credit limited to 12 months
Link: https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/

> Promotional Credit

> 5.8 As of March 6, 2015, redemption of promotional credit is limited to 12 months from the date of issue (unless otherwise stated), at which time the credit will expire. Upon redemption, promotional credit expires after 12 months unless otherwise defined in the terms of the promotion. For instances where promotional credit was issued or redeemed prior to March 6, 2015, that credit will expire on March 6, 2016.

> 5.9 Only one promotional code is permitted per customer, and may be redeemed only by “new users,” defined as users who are within 30 days of launching their first Droplet.

Tl;dr: Grandfathered accounts with existing credit from promotions will have their credit expire in 12 months.
Productivity, Here I Come FREE Book
For me, an year ago, TextSecure's primary selling point was that it wasn't reinventing the wheel, but was layering above the already existing network. Something very resembling how one installs an OTR plugin for their XMPP client, except for being an app (since, unfortunately, I have yet to see an mobile messaging app with a sane plugin system).

I've perceived their own proprietary data transport as progressive enhancement that enables to cut the costs, not as a primary option. I.e. SMS transport being the core option, not a fallback. Personally, haven't bothered to use data transport at all - it was unable to handle multiple identities anyway.

Sadly, I was mistaken.
> The brokers would then just mark up their prices when they decide to sell to the little guys?

Why would you think the brokers aren't already charging the absolute maximum that the little-guy market will bear? Because they're all such fundamentally decent people?
Because these universities produce more students than tenure-track positions?
So, if you don't mind a question: What do your grad students do about the fact that for whatever reason, they are largely not headed for the tenure track? How do you advise them about their careers?

The only story that I know about that: A professor of trombone at the nearby state university started telling his students that he was happy to teach them, but that there were no jobs for trombonists. He lost his job, but he felt that he shouldn't build his success on the false hopes and eventual failure of his students.

In my own experience, as a grad student at a second tier university, when I fully realized that tenure track was not in my stars, I shifted my own focus to preparing as well as I could for an industry career. My advisor accepted my decision, but admitted that he had no advice for me. That was 20+ years ago. I was fortunate to have two industrial scientists as role models: My parents. Continuing with my PhD might have been a mistake, but I'm living with it OK.

One thing he did, to his credit, was to start bringing in all of his former students who were in industry, to give talks. That was his own idea, but a few other profs began to follow suit.

Another question: If your students are headed into job markets where publications don't matter, how do you maintain your own publication record?