skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point around the third year of my CS degree at Georgia Tech I went through a similar realization (I wonder if it's something about the curriculum): I understood that while I was smart, competent, and able to get through the curriculum with good grades, I was never going to be a "rock star" programmer. And, indeed, I realized I didn't want to become one, because it wasn't really my passion in life.

Do I think that means I finished my degree with the wrong major? No, not really. Like you, I'm interested in technology and I felt I could still contribute something worthwhile to that world. The understanding and ability to code are still things that have a huge benefit.

There are plenty of opportunities for people with that background as well -- from technical sales (on the more people-oriented side of the scale) to program or product management at software companies (on the more tech-oriented side). I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft, and while I don't code as part of my job, I feel like I wouldn't be able to interact with developers and testers nearly the same way if I didn't graduate with a degree in CS. You should look into positions like this and see if they sound interesting. Here's a great writeup by Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows division at Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.asp...

Long story short: Stick with CS. There will be plenty of opportunities to get further away from the technology if that's what you decide to do, but very few opportunities to get back into it if you let your skills wither while you're still in school.
I also know several lawyers who started with a degree in computer science. It may be a more common path than you'd think.
"Death March" projects
You ignore the qualifier at the end "high ratio of formatting ``business'' to textual content". With that in mind i certainly do not think your assertion is right. The average business memo has - or should have - very little formatting.
It's just because games are intentionally designed to keep the player engaged, but work isn't.
...and if the FOI won you wouldn't be able to get data anymore.

Under that license, right.

I don't understand what you're getting at with your second paragraph.

What I mean is that if government documents are subject to FOI requests, then it seems possible that there's a law about accepting data under a license which would conflict with that. I don't know that there is, but it seems possible. That would be an understandable reason having no bearing on the climate debate to delete rather than provide the data.
People With Passion Drive Innovation Success
The more I read about Dubai's "debt is illegal" policy, the more counter-productive it seems.

If you lose your job, the employer has to notify the bank. The bank freezes your accounts and you are prevented from leaving the country. Thus, you are left with absolutely zero way to ever pay off your debt.

What's the proper economics term for this? Something along the lines of a self-fulfilling negative spiral.
"Just stick to blogging. It’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to build stuff."

This reads differently if you remember the real author is blogger/writer Dan Lyons, not billionaire CEO Fake Steve Jobs.
Rajeev Jain - Indian Director of Photography - Cinematographer
Rajiv Jain ICS WICA is an Indian Cinematographer / Director of Photography based in Dubai ( UAE ), Nairobi ( Kenya ) and Mumbai ( India ). He brings years of professional films and video experience to every production. As Director of Photography he specializes in shooting television commercials and feature films in the 35mm motion picture film format. His body of work as DP covers 7 full length feature films, 5 Short Films, 1032 commercials, 6 TV Series, 43 music videos, 105 documentaries & infomercials. As a DOP and Camera Operator, Rajeev has a wealth of experience with specialty camera rigs, lens systems SFX techniques, Tyler helicopter mounts, cranes & jibs, probe and swing shift lens systems, blue/green screen, white limbo and HDTV. His freelance work has taken him to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. A graduate from the Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts ( Bhartendu Natya Academy ), Rajeev Jain brings energy, creativity and professionalism to every production.
crunchpad has never been sold. how much of it is vaporware is unknown.
The Future of Interface Design | UX Booth
Normally when I think of a ruby DSL, I think of a DSL embedded in a Ruby program (a DSL that is legal ruby syntax). In this case a jabs DSL file is not legal Ruby or javascript, but is turned into valid javascript by a Ruby program.

It is possible that the culture of Ruby does leads to Rubyists writing things like this.
These are good tips, but it doesn't eliminate the additional production time required to use sprites. You still have to combine all the images into one, then take time to position them where you want.

The tips speed up production with sprites, but it's still faster to produce sites without using sprites.
You may also want to add,

c) Data obtained with public money is considered non-proprietary.

I have spoken with several people who read about climate scientists seeming to hide or be reluctant to share information collected with public money interpret this as the scientist being evasive or untruthful. They are always surprised when I tell them that project scientist, particularly on large space and earth science projects, usually have proprietary access to the data for some number of years as payment for involvement in support of the project.
Yes, but he's talking about people who have no idea how to use Word properly. How would similarly "skilled" people fare with TeX? I mean, what, you don't need to be "careful" writing all that "/this is a level 2 heading" stuff into your ASCII document?
Although your comment is extreme, many people moved there to make lots of money and live like kings. Which they did.

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downmodded; all I did was answer the parent's question.
Showcase of Outstanding Agency Blogs
The password can be protected. The contents of what's protected by that password is not. So for instance, that you encrypted content with the password "ilikelittlechildren" can be protected. But that said content is thousands of instances of child pornography cannot be protected, and you can be required to (yourself) unencrypt the content even though you don't tell anyone your password.
My comment wasn't extreme. The fact that that kind of stuff happened at all is what's extreme.
Google's algorithm only "needs to be gamed" if your content is unworthy or undesirable.
Andrew Payne Wiki: Startup Equity For Employees
This is a pretty comprehensive explanation of the equity issues surrounding startups, thought I'd share...
The 17x17 challenge. "Worth $289.00. This is not a joke."
"A major multi-billion dollar retail partner has been [..] offering to sell the CrunchPad at a zero margin to help us succeed in the early days. They were also willing to pay for the devices on order instead of 30 days after delivery, a crucial cash flow benefit [..] Intel [..] has assisted us repeatedly with engineering and partner advice, and gave us pricing that was ridiculously generous [..] Other partners were eager to promote and sell the device for little or no benefit on their end other than “supporting the project.”"

Does anyone see a problem here? You think TechCrunch would be able to honestly report on these "partners" while being in such close relationship with them?
Found a pretty comprehensive explanation of the equity issues surrounding startups, thought I'd share...
An expat is generally used to describe a person who is living in another country for business. These people usually don't intend to stay permanently in the host country.
TeX is a maze of twisty Turing-complete code in a weird programming language nothing like anything else you've ever seen. LaTeX is a bunch of templates you can barely tune and certainly can't create unless you're a TeX wizard. ConTeXt is better but creating templates is still a pain. They all disrupt the flow of your document with meaningless \jibber{jabber}.

If I were planning to first-draft a long document and didn't want to be interrupted with nonsense, I would write it in markdown and render it to whatever output format using pandoc.
Monsters vs Aliens (1-Disc) [DVD] [2009]
I think he means that he doesn't want the CrunchPad to become like other HBR case studies, not that he hopes a case study isn't written about this story.
in ALL the comment, nobody even mentioned ChromeOS. I find it surprising. Am i the only one to think it may be related ? both being on the web os

"Crunchpad was canceled simply because google arrived on his market, and arrington decided to drop the ball". It seems a reasonable possible explaination, at least
Dress Up Your WordPress Theme In Under 5 Minutes Using jQuery
As someone who read it in April, I'm glad it's still being shared.
2010: The year of the microslice server
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html#tth_sEc2.7

At this point, it becomes clear that this makes no damn sense at all for most people. Who wants to add steps to their writing process, add a delay between when they make a change and when they see it, and learn all new software to do it?

And then there's the remark about conserving disk space, which might have made sense in 1999, but it's a worthless consideration now.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550719
While I agree with SEOBook that Demand Media and their ilk are the story of the year in large scale content production and optimization, I disagree that this necessarily ushers in a new generation of low quality content in the SERPS.

Long tail search results have always been about "good enough" content as opposed to superior content. Why? Because there isn't enough volume to support superior content production at the tail.

As a searcher, I don't care if I'm looking at good enough search results / content from a niche player, or from a big company like Demand Media.

And if Demand has found an efficient way to own a big chunk of the previously fragmented long tail of search, hurray for them.

You could almost make the case that one company with economies of scale is MORE likely to be able to afford to produce quality content for low volume queries than the thousands of displaced niche publishers.
Cantor visits Hilbert's Hotel
This was something I wrote a while ago, and I'm putting it here in response to the item about infinitely many monkeys and its connection to infinity.

Suppose I have a hotel with lots and lots of room. Every room has a number on the door, and every positive whole number appears as the room number of some room. Call them R1, R2, R3, etc.

I also have a very large number of delegates for
a conference. Each delegate is assigned a room,
and there are no rooms left unoccupied. Each
delegate keeps his or her room key with them at
all times. We'll call them D1, D2, D3 in the
obvious way.

There are many, many sub-committees that have to
convene. In fact, every possible sub-committee.
Someone decides that each sub-committee should get
its own room, so someone else spends a sleepless
night drafting an assignment of each committee to
a different room.

We now show that there is a committee that has been left out.

Consider the committee C that is made up as follows.
For each delegate Di, if they are on the committee that
convenes in their room, leave them out of C. If they
are not in the committee that convenes in their room,
put them in C. C is the committee of those delegates
displaced when their room is used.

Ask - where does committee C meet?

If C convenes in Rn, then let's consider Dn, and ask
if they are on C.

If Dn is on C, then they are displaced when C meets.
But that means they are not on the committee meeting
in Rn, which is C. That's a contradiction.

So Dn must not be on C. Hence Dn is not displaced when
C meets, so they must be on the committee in Rn, which
is C. So they are on C. Another contradiction.

So C can't meet anywhere.

So we have shown that any assignment of committees
to rooms must omit at least one committee.

If we now think about the collection of all possible
committees, we can see that every time we try to
assign them to rooms, at least one must remain
unassigned. We can never pair off committees to
rooms.

As with cups and saucers, if whenever you pair them
up you always, always have a saucer left over, there
must be more saucers than cups.

So in some sense, there must be more committees than
hotel rooms.

And this is true, even though there are infinitely
more hotel rooms.

Like in Vegas ...
Styling your text has absolutely nothing to with writing. Consider that if you're writing with pen and paper you're not styling your text, you're just writing. A good writing tool should facilitate focusing on writing (no distractions) and augment the organization of your writing- that's about it.

Presentation is a whole other step that you get to when you've actually written something worth reading.
Startup Love: What Great-Grandparents Knew About Running a Startup.
No, intellectual property and trademark legal protection happen automatically, without needing to do anything formal. It looks like he did little more than say "help build it, and we'll be partners".
They moved to Dubai to participate (willingly or unwillingly) in a bubble, basically.
P2P using TCP&Ruby
It requires very little thought or effort. It completely distracts the part of my brain that I believe is responsible for worry, stress, anxiety, etc. and it's endlessly entertaining. I like it precisely because it isn't a job. I can start when I want, I can stop when I want, and I don't have to think much while I'm doing it.

I'm a web programmer and I really do love my job, but the ultimate laziness and distraction of video games are tough to beat, even though I know that developing my career and building useful tools will give me a lot more long term satisfaction than virtual-knifing some 13 year old in Arkansas.
In what meaningful sense do Google or Amazon have peer-reviewed and transparent data sets?

Please be specific.
If you're combining images into one at any point, then there's probably a better way to do it. If you design from the beginning with CSS sprites in mind, you should always be working from your spritemap image. Then it's a matter of time spent positioning vs. time spent managing the images themselves in your document, which I've found to be pretty even.

I really didn't touch on this as much as I would like in the post. Would a process post on this be of interest to you?
So all 9,000+ PhDs here also are in politics?
http://www.petitionproject.org/
"Public-funded science should run from a public wiki or source control system where the scientists are the only authors but the public at large are readers."

The IPCC report is free and public, for exactly this reason. It's quite plain from their arguments that few "skeptics" ever actually look at it.

"Yes, I know that will drive some scientists mad compared to the current secretive system but it's time to let some daylight in, folks. You'll never, ever win an argument with an honest skeptic if you're keeping secrets."

Riiight. Because the politicians and lobbyists who advocate for the "skeptics" are paragons of honesty and openness. Those dirty scientists could learn a thing or two.

(I have to say...your comment is the most brazen example of black-is-white, up-is-down spin I've ever seen on HN. Bravo.)
Please don't post ads on Hacker News.
Fordet Grove
Fordet Grove
4230 Birch Bay Lyden Rd.
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Phone: (360) 371-7011
That was the critical mistake. Always own all of your IP. If you sub out anything you need it in a contract. When he agreed to jointly own IP with fusion garage he essentially lost control.

It looks like the Crunchpad just runs fusiongarage software. Maybe they just didn't like the terms to run their software on the device. This seems like a strong possibility.
One can easily estimate the cost of a query in a relational database via EXPLAIN.

What relational databases do is decouple such implementation details from semantics, enabling higher levels of abstraction and therefore reasoning. Similarly, I'm happy to abstract the low-levels details of dictionaries in Python and not code my own hash table from scratch, or to use a compiler and not write assembly language. And while there are inevitable corner cases where hand-coded logic will outperform what a system can guess, handicapping yourself for a few extra cycles is something routinely (and rightly) derided in most programming circles.

Nobody debates that NoSQL systems are great for hand-tuning corner cases like these. It's the idea that they are a viable alternative to the relational model that is so objectionable, as it's a step backwards in abstraction.
Waterloo, Fastest (Internet) Town in the Midwest
Is that a bad thing (on a per-person level)? Again, many people made out great.
If somebody dumped a million dollars in a pile in your bedroom, would that fact alone make you more desirable to women?

Of course not. What would make you theoretically more desirable: You might stop caring so much about individual women once you're well off. You might have more free time to socialize. You might dress nicer. You might cook more or get yourself a nicer place.

That's what makes you more desirable. That's all achievable without the money. You don't need to be rich, you just think you do.
I'll pick on Google, and use memory.

1) Google is notorious for peer-reviewing code.

2) IIRC, Google also has some functional/provable code

In general, large, critical datasets are routinely processed by businesses. Businesses who use separate testing groups, code reviews, and tiger teams to validate each others' work. None of this is new information (at least to me)

Of course, transparency doesn't extend beyond the organization's walls in many instances. If you thought I was saying that it did then I mis-communicated.
Linux Mint 8 - Review and Commentary - Linux Critic
I want to live comfortably without having to work all the time, and my version of living comfortably involves a lot of the finer things in life.

As far as European vs. American (or in my case, Canadian) goes, one of the major differences that I'm aware of is the amount of vacation time that the average working stiff gets. I get 3 weeks per year plus stat holidays. My understanding is that most Europeans get a lot more than that. If you want a lot of time off of work while still maintaining a good standard of living you need to be a 'high-value' employee here in North America.
You're explaining why your opinion or guess or hunch or prediction or whatever you want to call it is likely to be correct. i don't dispute it, nor do I suggest I hold a different opinion.

However, I am suggesting that your opinion/hunch/prediction is unfounded. Meaning, it is speculative and not based on some specific factual evidence in hand.

For example, if you heard about the pricing from a buddy that is working on the apple.com web site you would be passing evidence along.

I'm not suggesting you shouldn't be speculating along these or any other lines. I just found it interesting that you would mention unfounded rumours in the same comment as sharing your own speculations about what Apple might or might not do.
The Christmas retail season is here already. It is far too late to "come to an agreement before Christmas".

Even assuming that all the manufacturing, the shipping, the wholesaling, et cetera are done and the product is sitting in the back of the stores waiting to go out tomorrow -- which I seriously doubt -- there's the little question of marketing. There's just no time for it before Christmas, in a crowded market filled with companies grasping for marketshare. The ad space is sold. The magazines have gone to press. So nobody on Earth is going to know about the CrunchPad before Christmas, let alone want one, except for Techcrunch readers and their Twitter followers. Any plan to sell a lot of CrunchPads within a few weeks of launch necessarily relies on the pre-release marketing that has been performed by Techcrunch. But that has just been blown sky high. Are many Techcrunch readers going to be fool enough to buy the product, even if a BUY link appears tomorrow? Even putting aside all notion of reader loyalty, I don't like spending money on products that turn out to have been built by unreliable companies with legal threats hanging over them.

You're gonna need a better conspiracy theory. How about "the Chinese secret service loved the CrunchPad so much that they placed an order for 1 billion units and demanded an exclusive..."
"The point isn't that there's something wrong with using the no-argument constructor for Random."

This point was never mentioned in your original post. Instead ran off and started talking about seeding issues which was completely not related to the original topic.

If your problem was creating a new instance every time you get a random number it seems extremely trivial to remedy that (using Random or SecureRandom).

Random rand = new Random();
for( int i = 0; i < 10000; i++ ) {
numbers[i] = rand.nextInt( x );
}

That seems very obvious if efficiency is your issue here!

"To be clear: I wasn't objecting to lucifer's suggestion of using nextInt and nextBoolean."

This was NOT even close to clear from your original post. It read like your were saying don't use this method because of issues with seeding.

My problem was you were handing out worse advice without any justification because your original post could be misinterpreted as I did. It sounded like you preferred people call Math.random() which was leading them back towards the user unfriendly version Math.random() which is the source of so many bugs when there are better options.
From the article:

We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want.

I don't think Arrington was afraid of ChromeOs.
He never said it was 3 Earth days.
I disagree.

I am not a fan of coding, but love what I have learned as a CS major. I am much more interested in cultivating my understanding of how computers really work. Learning about coding was interesting, but it was only a tool for me, a game, another language, or system of representation necessary to develop a higher level of understanding. I would liken it to learning languages to study literature.

I learned how to do calculus and linear algebra by hand, and use it all the time, but i use calculators and matlab to accomplish this.

I love having learned about fascinating topics, such as networking protocols, functional programming and the lambda calculus, security (my favorite), concurrency, software engineering (from design patterns to agile development / project management to versioning systems (which I apply to other aspects of my life now)), all the way down to assembly language, microcode, combinatory logic, boolean gates, flip flops, busses, and pipelines, etc that makes this all possible.)

I still don't love to code, but I know I want to work with computers for the rest of my life, and I'm pretty sure that studying Computer Science was the best use of my time at school.
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>"It's not clear that this is the fault of scientists. It's also very clear that certain political groups intentionally cultivate this misunderstanding, so that they can convince the public that an entire field of science is wrong."

It sounds like you're excusing bad behavior by saying that other people sometimes behave badly. There is no "certain political group" that is over-representing the value of "peer review" to the public, unless we are talking about environmentalists:

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSGEE5AP1Y5

No "certain political group" forced the scientists involved in this scandal to act in unethical and secretive manners. Just because politicians act in unethical and dishonest ways doesn't mean that scientists are excused for sinking to their level.
You probably want Red5; I don't know the details.