skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doing well in infosec, should I follow an MBA? Yay or nay
I am a random european infosec guy, I get paid to break stuff and write reports (the typical consultant). I studied electrical engineering and converted my hobby into a full time job, now I am 30 and quite happy with my work. It's fun, well paid and deal with skilled people. I am not the sharpest of the sharpest but known in infosec.

I get ~100k€ in Europe, living in a affordable city. For the US crowd, that's not far from to the top you can get as technicalonly-nonmgmtatall in EU, if you are not doing your own business obviously. I know in the US you can go higher, yeah. I could also be making more if I started selling bugs but I simply don't want (or need it). Last offer in the US was ~130-140k USD a few months ago, but decided to stay in Europe.

I may have the chance of a full scholarship + reasonable monthly expenses to attend the 2 year MBA program at Stanford.
I am not allowed to work meanwhile (and have to justify any extra income, that would be deducted from the scholarship)

I don't feel that urge of being a serial-entrepreneur, especially if is not about sthg I really like. Neither obsess with creating the "next thing" so I can sell it. Nevertheless I am interested in business admin, economics, ventures...

Technical pay won't increase with the MBA. I'd say the purpose would be opening doors in mgmt positions in big corps. To start my own company I would probably just try directly. Also, my current technical offers in the US are similar to the median graduate MBA salaries, with the difference that I would finish the MBA in 3 years from now.

I have read regarding this topic inside and outside HN, still I not sure if it makes sense if I am not willing to sell my soul to a big corp for a daily job that I dislike. Other options are continuing in infosec as technical guy, or my own thing, or a big company as technical head of a sec department, etc.

So, yay or nay? Thanks!
Every month or so, my Comcast service goes down for at least 1/2 day at a time, but Comcast is currently my cheapest option. Many local businesses also rely on Comcast and when that happens, you can't pay by card. ATT used to be priced similarly but since they only let you subscribe for U-verse (DSL is no longer available for new customers), the price increased twofold for the same services (6mbps DSL VS 6mbps u-verse)
Show HN: Speck, atomistic system rendering with ambient occlusion in WebGL
It's still a positive predictor in general. It just means that, beyond a certain point, it's a negative predictor. Just like a GPA of 3.5+ is probably positively correlated with getting tenure, but maybe getting 4.0 is worse than getting 3.9.

Watch the actual video to get the real take away:

I think what it meant was that, everybody who gets hired at Google is pretty good. If I just had to pick someone off the street, I really want that contest winner, I got to take him every time. Or her. But if it's somebody who passed the hiring bar, then they are all pretty much at the same level. And maybe the ones used to winning the contest, they are really used to going really, really fast and cranking the answer out and moving on to the next thing. And you perform better on the job if you are a little more reflective. And go slowly and make sure you get things right. -- Peter Norvig.
Redacted font
Also, one should never take anything too personal. Even if the critique is somewhat mean, try to extract what the critique is about and move along.

You will learn to grow a thick skin, but also, to absorb any useful feedback from whatever source it might come from.
You'll want to use the latest Chrome browser. If you run into issues, post them here (preferably with errors from the console) and I'll try to address them.
Remember, kids: you will be downvoted for saying someone is wrong on HN.
This just smacks of defensive justification for lack of participation. "I don't do this and I don't want to do this, so I'm going to bash it and the people who do it so I can pretend I'm making a choice instead of just being lazy". It's a little bit like the folks who say, "I'm saving myself for marriage" when in reality they've never been on a date in their lives.

Pretending like people can't think in more than one mindset is an inaccurate model. I've never done an honest-to-goodness coding competition, but I can imagine someone who does code competitively to think very differently when they're competing vs. when they're designing/implementing a solution as a professional endeavor.

Someone would have to explain to me in much more detail how this "negative correlation" is established before I believe it.
Helpful Resources to Create Your Own Mobile Apps
> It is a shame that we prefer to immediately "invent" our solutions

Exactly, that is one of the reasons why I started to work on this: http://mvc.givan.se/
I like how you're insinuating that current Chinese students are acting entitled by wanting heating and air conditioning in their dorms. Whereas in Canada/US, heating/air conditioning in dorms is considered a basic :P We really are spoiled in the West.
Have you seen Ramen Girl?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0806165/ Not a fantastic movie, but lots of focus on the craft of cooking.
I agree that our voting system is very imperfect, but you can't argue with the results: The most prosperous, safest, healthiest, most free society in the history of humanity.

> the odds are against any form of profound change

Yet profound change happens over and over again. Segregation is now gone (and the black middle class has exploded in size) and women are now educated and work in greater numbers than men. Recently extreme conservative policies have been imposed on the nation. Or just look closely at a photo of the current President of the United States and see if you notice something surprising.

I agree there are many serious problems, but it's hardly hopeless.

EDIT: I realize my post said that the U.S. is the best at all those things. I didn't meant to be taken that literally; my fault. To be more precise, relative to most of humanity through most of history (i.e., not relative to goals and principles of freedom, prosperity, justice, etc.), the U.S. does exceptionally well. Regardless, the argument I was making doesn't rely on the U.S. being at the very top in everything.
There's probably someone out there willing to monkeypatch the ROM, if you ever want to fix that aspect of your implementation .. ;)
You could probably work around the same-clothes-not-clean issue by doing what service techs that deal with the public do: Get a patch sewn onto the shirt with your name on it.

People's minds are conditioned to think shirts with patches on them are uniforms.

You don't even have to use your own name. Thrift stores will sometimes have uniforms for sale with name patches still on the shirt. Aside from being comfortable with the sticker price, you'd just have to be comfortable using some other guy's name patch on your shirt.

For the record, I'd be cool with a patch that says "Peter Cooper".
Nah. That's how Facebook hired interns in The Social Network, so it must be a great strategy.
"higher education" is a term of art that refers to the same thing also referred to as postsecondary education, e.g., in US terms college/university education. Insofar as the relation to the common use of "higher" alone is inspired by a presumed total order, it is the chronological order in which various types of schools are attended in the normal course (in modern practice, this is less than perfectly strict.)
Stanford MBA is an incredible opportunity and you should definitely take it. Think about business school as a break from stressing about work. You get to spend two years with a bunch of very interesting people that will become your friends. Everyone is smart, ambitious and talented. It's s great learning, networking, and life development opportunity.
Dpaste – A minimal pastebin
This is looking at a correlation among people who were hired by Google, which is a fairly specific population, and one that's actually in part selected by the same variable being studied, which complicates things further.

There are a lot of possible mechanisms by which the correlation might've been produced, if it's valid. One is that winning programming competitions is anti-predictive of job performance (the interpretation this summary takes). But another is that Google puts (or previously put) too much positive weight on winning programming competitions in their hiring vs. other factors. If Google were, for example, more willing to overlook other weaknesses in people who had won programming competitions, or treated them more leniently in interviews, that would be another mechanism for producing a population of hires where those who won programming competitions were worse at their jobs.
I used to think PHP was good for templating, but then I learned about code-less templating engines like Jinja, and I'll never go back.

When you use a templating engine, you can change the backend entirely without messing with the template. You can also compile/optimize the display of data in the template more easily.

Some awesome person has made a Jinja2 lib that comes with Rust bindings, which looks cool (though I haven't tried it yet): https://github.com/jroweboy/jinja2-c
If you watch the video linked in the post it makes more sense.

Contest winners are pretty good employees, but the best employees usually aren't contest winners. Cranking out solutions fast is good for winning contests but not as good for writing great code. If you can win a contest, writing code quickly is probably a pretty big part of your skillset which you'll probably use in your job too, and that skill is negatively correlated with writing excellent code.

Still _good_ employees, just not the best.

In a similar vein, students graduating with 4.0 GPAs are often not the best employees because quite often dedication to grades means neglecting the social growth and other non-graded activities, learning, and experience available at universities.
Generatingfunctionology (1989) [pdf]
NVMe, the fast future for SSDs
I prefer the long style so I can cut-n-paste the text into Notepad++ all at once instead of 7 or 8 pages.

Then I can save it to read later, control the text size and width, and not go insane from blinking ads in my peripheral visiion.
I wonder how this compares to trekking poles.
Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion
I've had really good experiences with ShareLaTeX

https://www.sharelatex.com

https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
Congrats on completely ignoring how the Fed no longer publishing M3 data[1], therefore concealing all aggregate money supply, would completely distort[2] any later inflation numbers provided (such as the percentage you just listed).

1. http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/discm3.htm

2. http://mises.org/library/death-m3-fifth-anniversary
Only people with complaints or axes to grind tend to post in forums. So if you're just reading forums, you'd think that Comcast was the spawn of Satan. I've had Comcast in the Bay Area for the last 5 years. No problems at all to report. Their prices are outrageous, of course, but the product has been good.

* Internet service has been rock solid, never a problem
* Runs at close to advertised speeds
* Comcast adopted native IPv6 before other ISPs even knew what it was
* TV service has been probably ~99% reliable

Only complaint: When TV service went down once or twice, their phone support ability was utterly incompetent.

Basically, as long as you never have to interact with them in any way, Comcast is great.
Trekking poles increase your overall metabolic exertion, but make walking feel easier because your whole body (e.g. arms and shoulders) gets thrown into the motion.

They're easier on the legs, harder on the whole body. (Assuming we're talking about trekking across level ground here.)
Mine is. I don't know about the rest of the country, though.
A good way to get started (for me) was to quantify how much time I was actually wasting. I started using RescueTime[0] and realized how many hours I was wasting on sites like Reddit and HN. Just being able to see that was a good motivator - but it wasn't enough on its own. I then started using StayFocusd[1] to limit my time on sites that don't contribute to my happyness/etc.

After a couple weeks of StayFocusd, I was very rarely spending more than my allotted one hour from 8am-7pm on those sites. And I realized. I'm not missing out on anything. I have spent 10 hours less browsing those sites in the last week and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything. Instead, I had 10 more hours of my life to do things like read books, exercise, and get things done.

[0] https://www.rescuetime.com/

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...
Unfortunately, after a redesign, CrunchBase data is no longer open and requires you to be a part of an organization to use the API.

I had used the data myself. However, I found a few holes in the data, so it's fine that I cannot use it anymore. "Triangulate to figure out when the initial investment was made" is flat out impossible to do with any accuracy.
Almost all of the programming competitions are individual, one of the most prestigious (ACM ICPC) though is a team based programming contest.
> Someone would have to explain to me in much more detail how this "negative correlation" is established

I think it's just a statistical correlation they found in the hiring data.
Breast Attitudes in North and South Korea
I have always thought it is more about networking and being in contact with the right people to be able to do great things. From that perspective I know is a no-brainer, thanks!
Brickyard Blues: Chicago's brick salvagers (1999)
Lilly the nerdy best friend from Princess Diaries is now a Reverend??
For the majority of these competitions, the programmer you described would have zero points. If you don't get 100/100 on a task, you get no points. The IOI is a notable exception.
The Naturalness of Bitcoin: Genetic Code Analogy
I think a good start to solving this problem would be to come up a basket of statistics of alumni while comparing that to the cost of the school and the cost of living while going there. It would be far from perfect, but you can't improve what you can't measure.
I'm seriously in love with Guy Martin and watched that episode. I happen to live just a few minutes away from Rourke, who helped make the bike for Guy. Jason and his team are amazing people if you're looking for bike advice.
> especially low-level stuff like kernels, bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.

First of all, the unknown unknowns are much worse from the kid who went to school. Wanna know why? Because the autodidact is definitely better equipped to repair a gap. Its ridiculous to think a 4 year degree can teach a gapless understanding of computers-- do you really expect a 22 year old to have a gapless understanding of any field?

The most important thing a CS degree can teach someone is how to learn more, and at least in my experience it dramatically falls short. Never encouraged to read source. Never encouraged to implement an assignment in another language. The message to me and my peers is clear: learn java and go work for Epic or another dead-end enterprise place.

Last semester I did a hackathon and some of the competitors were 4 kids that clearly did nothing outside of class. My group implemented a mobile app and responsive website. We learned NONE of that in any class. They implemented a GUI desktop application in java with eclipse. (It astounds me how many people can come out of my CS program and the only way they know how to compile their projects is via a green button.)

Second of all: your lack of knowledge about low level stuff is entirely on you. You can learn that anywhere. The problem is that 20 year olds, whether they're in uni or not, think that the high level world of rails and Python is more interesting than bits and bytes. I have never formally learned about the specifics of any of the *nix kernels, Unix tools, python arthimetic, C macros, and more. But I do know about them, because it interests me.

Maybe it just doesn't interest you.
I work at the intersection of many STEM fields at a prestigious university. I think very little important research is coming from universities anymore. The paper publishing factory, again credentialing, has taken over. I think we need a renaissance in STEM but strongly believe this will happen outside of academia.
maybe because we often assume our hands are dirty? that could be part of the reason for the hot warm/moist towels?
It's better than that. By the time Lewis & Clark got to the West, they saw massive herds because of the recent smallpox epidemics wiping out most of the apex predator: man.
> Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

Untrue. Its also reasonable if you assume that the legal system outside of the prosecutor works perfectly, and therefore, independent of the prosecutors actions, no innocent defendant will be convicted. With that assumption, a high conviction rate means that the prosecutor is serving the public interest by not charging the innocent.

Of course, reality deviates from this in a number of ways, most critically in the high rate of plea bargains and the lack of evidence testing in the case of plea bargains.
I have refused to do a couple of time pressure hacker rank challenges as part of a job interviews recently, as it is not how I work on a day to day basis. I was good at these sort of things fresh out of university 15 years ago. I have never had to implement any algorithm under time pressure in my professional career.
Since the federal reserve stopped reporting M3 data, we don't know the actual inflation levels, and haven't known them since 2005 [1].

On another note, we need a Godwin's law for "Conspiracy Theory". As soon as someone mentions the word, it's likely to set up a appeal to ridicule fallacy, such as used in the parent.

1. http://mises.org/library/death-m3-fifth-anniversary
If a prosecutor thinks they will lose a case and the defendant rejects all plea deals, the prosecutor will sometimes dismiss the case citing lack of evidence. Preventing an accused person the ability to be found not guilty.
Sadly, IIRC, the ICPC/IOI/TCO/GCJ/etc don't have drinking components.
Please don't belittle victims of crime by describing their experience as "just another case of gamers taking their competition offline".

Not what I intended at all. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had written "yet another case"; my point was that this was not like most swattings and readers shouldn't pattern-match and assume they know what was going on.
> It implies a future where people are more productive, produce more, and earn more. It's not just an implication, but fundemental economics.

College degrees do not correlate with productivity. The earning power of degrees is almost entirely driven by proximity and access to higher-paying jobs. Productivity simply has nothing to do with it.

> College is not a zero sum competition; everyone can be winners and get degrees.

I believe Thiel is arguing that college experiences are becoming a cultural binary -- either you have a degree or you do not.

I read Thiel's commentary as: if you're a zero in that system, you lose out on future opportunity; and to become a one in that system, you need to conform (in the manner of social norms.)
A shame neither was brought to the table, eh?
Accent detection is almost certainly thousands if not millions of calculations. So is white guy detection + overcharging for auto ride, let alone nice shoe detection plus upsell, emotion detection, or any of the thousands of things salespeople do every day.
Yeah, this might be an instance of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox - correlations after selection/conditioning may be different than before.

Not well known, but relevant to a lot of the stuff about Google's hiring in particular (eg I wasted a lot of time explaining to people 2 years ago or so that Google's HR guy saying that intelligence didn't matter to their hiring decisions != intelligence doesn't matter to job performance (it does, as has been demonstrated many times), because Google was already selecting for <1% of the population.)
Google keeps proving itself as a king of hyping. Their employees periodically make sound statement regarding to winning programming competitions as not being a good indication of effective employees but they only consider hiring those who can crack programming competition questions during their short interview session. Good for you if you want to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
>The most prosperous, safest, healthiest, most free society in the history of humanity.

The USA? That's a laughable claim.
assuming it works in the first place.
This is really interesting. Here in Brazil we have a strong "japanese food" industry, obviously inclined to our western way; it's always amusing to see how important it is for the people who created it in the first place.
I got lost too, they do present it nicely, but using it is not as easy as I expected. So I had to abandon it. I like Bourbon quite a bit.
Considering that playing office politics is a key part of being "good on the job", I believe the sensationalized title. The top programming contest folk I knew were as socially awkward as they were brilliant.

Based on my (admitted small) social circle, this means they excel at algo trading firms. A lot of trading teams I know of are headed by former Putnam/ICPC/IOI/IMO/etc. top rankers. The politics there are simple: did you make money?
M3 might help you make predictions about inflation but you don't need it to measure it.
http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks...

http://matt.might.net/articles/cripple-your-technology/

He blocks reddit and other time sinkholes, uses a tablet or phone to waste time on those sites as you can put it down or move it out of your workspace if you don't want to be distracted.
It didn't appeared to me with NoScript defaults. Thank you.
The unclear CP vs. CA case in CAP
I served four days a week for three months, with the ominous threat of being "extended" one day a week for months more on end to finish a murder trial (which we ultimately were not). My employer paid my salary for the duration. If it had not, I would have been excused for "financial hardship."

One of the most frustrating aspects of the grand jury process is that the ADAs instruct you on the elements of the law after you've heard the evidence, and tend to do so poorly. By the time they've even told you that they're charging trafficking, and what that means specifically, it's often inconvenient to bring someone back to testify as to gross vs. net weight, that sort of thing. For one charge, the ADA read aloud a very long paragraph from the statue, of which only one sentence was relevant.

I also found that some jurors leaned heavily on "probable cause" as an excuse to be sloppy. The bar is lower, it's not like we're convicting the guy, and besides, do you think the cops didn't do their job?

That said, most of the cases were strong. There was little doubt that the accused performed the action. Most of the doubt was whether the action satisfied the elements of the crime. Out of hundreds of charges, we only returned a "no bill" (declined to indict) on one. However, I strongly believe that we incorrectly returned a "true bill" (voted to indict) on two charges.

The experience was educational, but not one I'd wish to repeat. Most of my co-jurors look back on it much more negatively than I do.

Edit: I should add that the ADA was very unhappy with the one "no bill" that we returned, incredulous that we could come to the conclusion that we did.
There is a wrinkle to the UK situation nobody mentions. BT has a monopoly and guarantees in place that ensure return on investment. BT OpenReach, the monopoly division, is more profitable than most U.S. cable companies, including TWC.