skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your writing has a wonderful tone. Do you have a blog?
Becoming a programmer was a mercenary decision for me.

I dropped out of an Ivy League PhD program part way into my dissertation because I was pretty sure that finishing my doctorate in comparative literature and continuing down that career path would mean getting on food stamps.

Being a doctor or lawyer would have meant going to even more school, but it only took a couple months of reading to learn enough C# and JavaScript to get a job as a junior developer.
Code Guide by @mdo
Customize and Send Invitation ECards with Emoji,Text,Voice and Photo Effects
Of course I read it. Fascinating concept, but I'm unimpressed by Numenta's execution. Certainly the ideas of a single neocortical algorithm, a temporal feedback loop minimizing error, the relationship between the hippocampus and the rest of the memory-learn-predict-observe-correct cycle are inspired.
Alas, not being able to scroll with it is what turns me off.
A game engine for scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts (in Python)
Career: computational biologist

I was an English teacher, but I found myself thinking about death and the future daily. I went back to school for biology and learned how to program and an opportunity to study aging just fell into my lap.
Those are burps. That's just the way he talks! [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkztUo8G4gs
StackOverflow actively deletes content and does so without mercy. That's a more important part of the utility of its model than the mechanics of downvotes. And flagging costs nothing except a daily flag, and the reward for good flags is more flags.
Current job - spacecraft thermal engineer, currently taking a 3 month vacation.

It started when I first played halo CE. I decided I want to make massive space stations like halo and I realized that in the next 20-30 years that will hopefully be possible. Until then I am trying to gather all the tools and knowledge I need to lead the next chapter in space exploration and colonization.
This is the most important question here. (Thanks for the giggles it gave me. You made my morning.)
My son is 5 now. We intend to have more.

I'll probably stay at home forever. Taking care of the house and kids is one way I can show love to my wife. Though we might go into a semi-retired "make video games" mode in a few years (my wife tells me I'm a top-notch tester, and I have pretty good game design sense.)
Software Engineer / Wantrepreneur.

Playing games, wondering how a game gets on the CD.
Even though I loved it, a few years in game programming seemed like it was not "useful" enough. Transitioned to general software-, especially web-development. Started studying CS when the time came.

It's been almost 9 years since the first line of code and for now it seems like this will be the thing I do for some time.
If you are looking for a demo, http://rentever.com is powered by this framework.
Software Engineer

When I was 10 years old I was going to be a biologist.
When I was 12 years old I was going to be a microbiologist.
When I was 15 years old I was going to be a Virus Hunter for the CDC.

Then I went to college and got a glimpse of what that career choice would actually look like as opposed to what I had imagined it would look like. I decided I didn't want that after all.

Programming had just always been a hobby. At some point though I started making money doing it and realized that I could be happy doing this for the rest of my life. The rest as they say is history.
All of these things are different from communism because there are examples of success. e.g. there are plenty of good democracies/republics (Denmark/Finland/Sweden/Japan) and plenty of good nuclear plants (all the French ones), etc.
Career: Electrical Engineer/Embedded software development

My father. We grew up extremely poor in the midst of a civil war and he made extra income by fixing TVs and other electronics. I remember watching him measure voltages with his "old school" analog multimeter and watching the glow of the vacuum tubes and that heat and smell that emanated from those TVs.
Watching him work with electronics sparked my interest from a very early age and led me to my career path
I was a heating engeneer and liked it but during the winter it was so freaking cold, I couldn't feel my feet. That's when I decided I needed a job which can be done in an office where it is warm during the winter.

I went back to school, made a website with Frontpage for my first band (when I was 22 or something), that got me interested in computers. I self learned webstuff, later landed a job in web but decided to study computer science at a university to trully understand what I was doing. Now I am a Linux programmer in the car industry.

So basically I got cold feet.
It's actually usually not the employer, but the local dept of labor laws - for salaries employees, unless explicitly stated otherwise - your employer generally "owns" anything you do in your line of work, even on your own time. So for example if you work for a game studio, coming up with an idea for a game would auto-magically make it your employer's property, even if you did it on a sunday morning.

This is further reinforced by various employer-specific clauses in the hiring contract / code of conduct.

Its screwed up but its the world we live in.
You can scroll with a trackpoint. Hold the middle button.
Artroza TRATAMENTE NATURISTE
Currently a software engineer working in NLP and machine learning, with a bit of demo-quality front-end design recently. I started out as an electrical engineer, though.

When I was doing my undergrad, I didn't really like programming. I took many of the core CS classes, though, because I really wanted to do embedded development. I just wanted my degree to be electrical instead of computer engineering because I felt an EE was going to have an easier time getting a job in the rapidly imploding dot-com bubble. Plus, I actually liked the physical aspects better; one of my two backup plans was to become an electrician.

When I got into a real job, though, I discovered real-world programming was more interesting than what I was forced to do in class. Additionally, I got introduced to the world of FPGA and CPLD programming. While my first position was hardware production support, I pushed to move towards signal processing. After 3.5 years I managed to switch programs.

Unfortunately, the program I switched to turned out to be a black hole. It was a DOD program that required special clearances to work on. I found out much too late that this effectively made me a prisoner of the program because getting people cleared was so difficult and expensive. Furthermore, I could say so little about what I was doing that I could hardly get interviews, let alone sound competent in the few I did get.

I took my current job out of desperation. I had been searching for over two years and basically took the first offer I was able to get, which was a small local company. It was a domain I had never worked in (NLP) in a language I had never worked in (Java). It has worked out pretty well, though I can't get as interested in NLP as I was in signal processing. Unfortunately, I think I am trapped again as I get recruitment pings about once every two weeks from my new world but can't get the time of day from companies in the old one I left reluctantly.
Statistically, downvotes correlate to comments that the community deems low quality. Throwing out buzzwords in lieu of clearly articulated views supported by rationales, reasons, and examples often falls in that category. So do comments that assume that people with contrary views lack reason.

Statistically, the way to avoid downvotes and earn upvotes is with thoughtful well-written comments that contribute to improving or maintaining the quality of HN.
Why not just use a micro kernel container like OSV from cloud outs? Same result with less effort
Flicks: Another name for pie menus. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
My daughter's dog Marla
Why do you consider the original Naxx to be a shitshow?

By the way, it can still be accessed, since it looks like for WoTLK they just copypasted the map around: https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V
This comment may not have much meat to it, but HP was famous for their excellent graphing calculators, which used RPN input format. They were fun to program as well and started many a young nerd of the 90's on the path to making software.
Got a degree in Physics when I was doing grad trips but had a conversation in the basement of a STEM dept in the northeast where I discovered that for people of my race they would have exactly one grad student and they would graduate them with a masters 7 years later(One of the kids from my school went and he has two masters they were ranked #1 at the time and I believe still are). At that point I decided grad school was too much of a risk. I worked in phones for 3 years, mostly technical support and I loved it it was easy for me. So I went back and did a degree in Computer Engineering which I loved and presented some really fun challenges and now I'm looking for something with smarter coworkers than my current government affiliated work.
but SHA-1 is considered not secure, so you can't just trust commit-id
Would love to hear any feedback or feature requests!
Mercury actually concentrates into little beads on cinnabar ore, and is not very reactive. I can imagine drops of it surviving for a few thousands years.
That was the point I meant when I said the the ultimate tooling a language needs is a runtime that is widely distributed.
Startup founder and now a CEO (which feels like the strangest job in the world). When I was working as a software engineer, I felt like I had a lot of excess energy that I wanted to put towards something that was mine. I am drawn to responsibility, because responsibility means that I'm in a position to make decisions that impact many people. It's thrilling and I enjoy being in the service of other people. Anyways, it's really hard to not have responsibility when you really want it, so I realized I had to leave and start my own thing to really get that.
Lenovo K80 Launch Rivals Asus Zenfone 2 with 4GB RAM and 4000mAh Battery
Taxation is theft!

Imagine a country of 5 people where 3 of them thought they were allowed to break into the home of the other 2 and take whatever they wanted and spend it on whatever they wanted.

But back to the OP, "failure to file taxes" usually can be settled for a fine. It seems unusual for jail. (Even though I know that taxation is theft, I still do what the crazy people with the guns insist I do.)
See blogpost by michaelochurch where he proves this.

Examples of users currently on rankban include larrys, eli_gottlieb, thinkcomp, DanielBMarkham, etc.

This is verifiable quite easily if you go into the comment history of these users. Take eli_gottlieb, for example. Sure, he often voices quasi-Marxist views, but why do his posts on technical things fall down so rapidly? Even below heavily downvoted trolls? Why did his post in 'Who wants to be hired?' so heavily sink to the very bottom?

Lastly, some users who have engaged with HN moderators via email were taken off of rankbans, so they have never denied that these rankban mechanisms exist, they generally remain silent when this is brought up, and try to force the conversation surrounding it to a private medium ("please email us at support@ycombinator.com", etc.)
Most of the revamps were done for Cataclysm.

But things were already being nerfed in Wrath -- For example, a Gnomeregan corpse run was of several minutes while an ICC corpse run lasted a few seconds.
The HP-01 is the one and only watch I would ever wear. Sure it's big and clunky but it's so freaking cool, in a nerdy way. The $1k+ price tag is the only thing that has detered me. This is the ultimate gift for the nerd who has everything.
Terrible news. Kathmandu is only 40 mi away from the epicenter. That city is extremely dense (1mm+ population) with poor infrastructure. Hope the damage isn't too bad.
No, but lunch at a good nearby restaurant paid for by the interviewer is a considerate offering. If the level of interest is high enough that man-day or more project submittal is asked of the candidate, at least put some skin in the game along with candidate in terms of time. Time is money. "The only thing I have in this life is time, and you are wasting it." -Andy Grove
Found few more sites;

Hacker News Trending @ http://hackersnews-abhi003.rhcloud.com/

http://sidebar.io/ | http://lamernews.com/ | http://www.echojs.com/
Check the OP's past submissions. You are in for a treat!
That's true, but a latency based test should still let you figure out which zone you need to run in. But everyone would need to do the test for themselves.
Maybe it's a reference to the sound the buttons make.
I've been playing with a project to do this. The first major obvious problem is anything that uses dlopen won't necessarily get all that it needs.
>I joke about other stuff that (hopefully) doesn’t offend people.

Everything you do will offend someone love. Trying to please everyone will always be met with failure. I thought we learned this 100's of years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo
Ted demonstrated that at the NPUC (New Paradigms for Using Computers) workshop that he hosted at IBM Almaden Research Center in the 90's, running on OS/2 at the time.

You're right: "modern" desktop software has no idea how to handle two pointing devices, so the gui and apps would have to be redesigned from the ground up to really take advantage of two trackpoints.

It's a shame it never took off (and that IBM didn't rewrite OS/2 from the ground up to support multiple input devices ;). You can imagine what the multi-trackpoint would be called, given that a single trackpoint is called the "keyboard clit".
That a person holds an opinion contrary to yours with regard to what constitutes a victimless crime in no way implies a lack of understanding. In the case of tax evasion it simply is a manifestation of a different set of values in regard to citizenship and the role of government.
I started tinkering with computers at 10, became an IT tech. at 15..and eventually started programming at the same time. I got my first professional job at 17.

Now I own my own software company (been doing this for 5 years).
Interesting parallel to the flowing rivers is mercury in the best known Chinese tomb:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/flowing-rivers-mer...

Speaking of using robots to investigate mysterious tunnels in tombs, one of the most publicized one must be the discovery of doors in a tunnel within the Great Pyramid: http://www.sciencealert.com/robot-captures-first-images-of-g...
I once had an interview for a job while I was already employed. They asked why I wanted to leave my current job, I told them I didn't and that I liked my job, but I also look for better opportunities. My interviewer seemed incredulous at this concept, and thought I was wasting her time. Does she only want to hire unemployed or unhappily employed people? So dumb.
And this is where things are kind of funny. You are, of course, correct in a major especially static sense. However, for many programs it is entirely conceivable that the IDE can tell you all of the members available on all objects that are actually passed to said function. Or, inverted, check that all of the necessary items are available on any item you call it with.

Now, in dynamic languages this is typically done at runtime. That is kind of the whole point of dynamic runtimes; that you can hook into them. Curious what all properties are available on the object represented by a given symbol? Essentially, ask it.

However, as computers get more and more powerful, this can be done by simulation statically for many programs. No, not all. Just many. Is it enough, though?
No need to cat first. Command line utilities can act on files directly:

grep -v 'null}' data.json | ....
The next young crowd is always fickle, looking for the next hip thing to escape from the established path. That makes social networks inherently unstable over time. And that's why Facebook is always on the lookout for any new breakaway social network and will pay dearly to bring it under their umbrella.
Agreed. Nerds in generally tend to make a lot of ... odd ... short term decisions. Perhaps time to admit that a lot of what we do all day is "annoying" while balancing that with the fact that we're some of the best-paid people on the planet.

Enjoying that economic windfall while doing what's all but scientifically provable as a half-assed job raises issues around quality and ethics. (Something as a community we're also a bit famous for tiptoeing around...)
Maybe I'm just dense, but I don't see where the double standards apply. Are you referring to the Chinese, or the Aussie?
Carnival Cash: The Cult of Seniority
Dell have a middle mouse button, but their pointing stick is far less accurate.
CSE worried about how its use of Canadian metadata might be viewed
Simple pipeline prettied up a little.

curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jorin-vogel/7f19ce95a9a842956358/raw/e319340c2f6691f9cc8d8cc57ed532b5093e3619/data.json |
cut -d, -f1,6 |
cut -d\" -f4,8 |
awk -F\" -e 'BEGIN {print "name,creditcard"};
{if (NF==2) print $1 "," $2}' \
> 20150425.csv
That, and being built like a tank.

It pissed Ted off that other cheap knockoff laptops aped his trackpoint design without getting it right, which gave it a bad reputation: they were missing the crucial patented pressure => speed transfer function, which had a plateau at fine predictable positioning speed, a smooth slope to another faster plateau within eye tracking speed, and then a high quick movement peak.

At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).

I finally got the irony of this old joke after working a few years at Kaleida, a joint venture of Apple and IBM. It was like having dysfunctional parents who were forever fighting with each other, but staying together for the sake of the children.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

At Kaleida, I gave a ScriptX demo to Lou Gerstner that involved throwing a bouncing eyeball around the screen for navigating and controlling the application, but he wasn't very impressed by the practical applications. After the demo, I realized I must have used the wrong eyeball.

What good is it having a right brain and a left brain, if they don't talk to each other?

http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/WWDCScriptXDemo.mov

http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/DreamScapeDemo.mov
Thanks to you both... that means a lot!

Funny thing is I started a few blogs anonymously, and they never really took up, and I stopped all of them within weeks of starting. But I keep coming back here because, well, a man is weak, and those upvotes mean something, that somebody read it and enjoyed it.

Somehow that "pays" more than the dollars I could have gotten consulting for the same amount of time it took to write it...
Thoughts on ReactJS and Flux and the Future of the Web UI
That mercury is designed to kill anyone who enters. It's probably the source of a lot of myths surrounding raiding ancient tombs, and it's found across the globe, most prominently in China. These guys knew someone would come for their treasure someday.
Just a few thoughts:

1. Clojure is a general purpose programming language. Just because it isn't used much for desktop GUIs doesn't mean it's not usable for that. What percentage of Java/Scala development is used for GUIs?

2. Clojure in iOS isn't just available via ClojureScript. There is also RoboVM, though it doesn't support REPL-driven development, if I understand it correctly.

3. I am very interested in what React Native can do. For me, the key questions about using it are: Can you create applications that fit will into the UX idioms of the host platform? What happens when something goes wrong? Do the various levels of indirection make debugging much more difficult? Do you still have access to the full platform? If not, then only certain classes of applications can be implemented using React Native.
I know where to go the next time this happens. The Starbucks at 17th and Bristol in Santa Ana, CA still took your order, as if everything were normal. Cashier punches in the order so the barista can work on it but instead of telling you how much you need to pay, cashier tells you "our system is down, this one's on us."
Most of those rely on lots of features of the client. Such as environment destruction.

I also play on Molten, and they are pretty selfish. It's a cash cow.
You have to make quite a few more assumptions as well. If they were logical and told the truth, the conversation would be more like:

Bernard: Cheryl told me it's the 17th.

Albert: Cheryl told me it's in August.
They have a reason to group with you for the reasons provided above: quest-item sharing, XP sharing + party bonus, crush quests faster, round-robin looting for non-quest drops, etc.

Forming parties is necessary for optimal play and I never had an issue with forming them. If someone else is in the cave smacking the same quest rats you are, then it was common to send/receive an unsolicited party invite, then split the party as you split ways with a `/wave`.

What about the RPG in MMORPG? It's too easy to relinquish all social decisions from players including the decision to party with someone or not.

But then again, maybe people don't communicate as much in WoW anymore and zone spontaneity is dead and Blizzard removed the LFG (Looking For Group) channel. I haven't played since vanilla WoW. I'm sure the game is much different now that the 1-60 experience isn't part of the game anymore, so we're coming from different places.
Career: Programming/Creating a startup.

I was an Arabic linguist at the NSA, and would input certain numbers I'd hear into a tool. Whenever I heard a specific one, I was supposed to add 9 to it and put that number into the tool. This drove me insane, because I kept asking why I had to add 9 myself, instead of the program just doing it (since I could describe the rule myself). I started putting in trouble tickets every few months, but they were all ignored. At one point, I just decided I was going to fix it myself, and approached the guy who made the tool and asked him for permission to modify the program to fix it. He handed me the O'Reilly Perl Cookbook, and said to go to town on it.

I ended up finding out in the code how to fix the problem within the first day, and started thinking about other ways I could improve the program to make our lives easier. I made all sorts of improvements, and my cubicle neighbors saw this and asked if there was any way I could make a tool for simplifying their manual process. I got to work on it, and quickly whipped out something that stored all of their entries for later review. The big problem at the time was that I didn't have any basic knowledge of CS -- I didn't even know what a database was, so I built a system of just storing all of the text in flatfiles and using Perl's Tie::File to turn the files into dynamic arrays.

I started making program after program, and what drew me to my career was walking by someone's computer and seeing the program I built on their desktops as they were working. Eventually, the entire division of 80-90 people were all using my programs for their day-to-day, and I had to quickly learn a lot of hard lessons about putting things into production.

So, in short, I think the big reason I chose my current career was that I always loved building things that people not only wanted to use, but thanked me for building them because of how much easier it made their lives. There is nothing more satisfying (to me) than building something useful and having people who use it think you're a modern day magician.
It was originally on GitHub and I moved it to Bitbucket after GitHub decided they do not want to host release files.
THE GREATEST PHOTOSHOPPING EVER?