skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you explain to them that "good enough with the money we've got" will make them more money later, they are usually OK

That's true. Some engineers won't take the "just make it good enough" approach, but I believe most will - otherwise they don't belong in a startup.

I wasn't mentioning the broken communication between PO and devs in this regard though. I have seen teams where the PO were not able to describe what they wanted, what business value they wanted to add to the product, devs had to come up with their own description of feature and sure enough the market didn't care of that.

PO is such a critical position, and such a difficult one to fill. I can count on one hand the companies where I worked who understood that. A PO is not just moving tickets around in JIRA, they are in charge of describing in actionable terms the business value the team is trying to produce.
Autocomplete using Tries
Yeah, but "forms other than money" mostly means healthcare, which has skyrocketed - despite the fact that other developed nations with longer live expectancies have much lower healthcare costs.

If you feel consumers are overconsuming medicine and driving up the price, there are lots of great ways to fix that. The most effective is high deductibles (currently illegal).

I know you are aware that life expectancy is minimally related to health care consumption, so why do you bring it up?

If you have data showing that median real compensation per hour is lower, show it.

And again, since household income has not moved much (according to figures I cited), you still need to provide an explanation for why we don't seem to consume less. (Hint: the basket of goods in CPI changes and $1 of chained-CPI adjusted wages today buys more than $1 of chained CPI adjusted wages 30 years ago. I.e., CPI != inflation in the long run.)
My very first Python3 contribution using GitHub :)
I'm not being snide. I'm saying that they want to minimize the negative aspects of their arrangement with society while maximizing the positive aspects.

Positive aspect: Cops have a benefit of the doubt that other citizens don't have when it comes to the use of force.

Negative aspect: They stop someone that resists arrest.

If you are trying to maximize the positive things you get from the job and minimize the negative you will treat every person that resists arrest as if it were life threatening.

When you add up the benefits that actually accrue to the police (and not just from asking them... like other conservative organizations they generally are very sensitive to perceived losses of authority) you see that they get a middle class life, authority over the physical safety of people around them, and higher burden of proof required to convict them. They also maintain one of the only government sanctioned unions so they have greater economic democratic power as well. They are super-citizens and they have come to believe that the deference paid to them is in fact owed to them. They have convinced themselves that their lives are always in danger in every interaction so they are owed greater deference by society. Its my contention that the danger's they face are not immediately present in every interaction and that they have actually been involved in creating the policies that put them in the situations where danger is greatest.

Its time that they stop taking for granted the powers and position that society bestows. Its also time for us to decriminalize some of the behaviors that the police depend on to bolster their position politically.
With startups, you can pivot (with academia you can too, but it's rather 3-5 years).

With startups, you can fail (and try again); in academia, if you fail, you fail.

In short: with startups, if something is not working (or you totally lost belief in it), you can quit a project without quitting startups for good. In academia, if you want to stay, you often need to stay in a miserable conditions 1-3 more years (e.g. to finish PhD, postdoc, etc), just not to get kicked out for good.

Moreover, with startups, you can start your group being 20, without anyone's blessing.
Front-end bugs causing crashes of... the back-end? That's a back-end bug.
Optimistic UI and Reactive Programming with Elm
“This person is ready for promotion today.”

I would wager the percentage of employees working at a firm that still participates in promotion culture is low and dropping. In other words "ready for a promotion" for most people in 2015 means they're going to quit soon and get a higher level position at another firm. I'm sure there still exist individual companies and maybe unusual and rare fields where promotion culture still exists, but it seems very rare and unusual.

Meanwhile in most areas outside SV/NYC computer programming during bubbles, there is a large excess of qualified workers vs positions. For example in K12 education the state-U system graduates twice as many teachers as there are open positions for all new and past grads to apply for. It doesn't matter if they are in the top half that got hired because they are the best, or the most politically untouchable, or the most attractive, a year after hiring at review time they're still going to be that top half. So there's nobody to give a hard time to in a review, because that lower half or lower 3/4 or whatever in any professional field are already working at Starbucks or as a waiter or bartender. The world has "needs improvement" kindergarten teachers, but they don't work at your neighborhood school, they never got a job in teaching and they serve you beer at the bar, for example. The economy is in permanent contraction and the general population and higher-ed sector are in permanent expansion for many years now, outside bubble segments of the economy, so hiring one of the bad workers strongly reflects on a managers interview skills, making it even harder to admit anyone is below "excellent".

Meanwhile increased labor mobility for the few that are employed means a review a couple years back, is a couple employers ago, so it is inaccessible and irrelevant, so its not like the wasted effort today will pay off in ten years. Maybe a review in 1950 would come in handy at the same employer in 1960 to select a new director, but the firm has no loyalty to the employee and therefore the employee has no loyalty to the firm, for at least three human generations now, so its been culturally bred out of us.

So the folks at the top of a team will interpret an attaboy as "start applying for higher level jobs elsewhere" and economic realities mean you don't have truly low performance employees to crack the whip upon, making the whole dog and pony show a waste of time for all involved. This leads to an attitude of just pencil whip the process to get the meaningless metric of "accomplished reviews" up to 100% and be done with it. Once the folks who've been pencil whipping it for their whole careers make it up high enough, its finally politically possible to discuss getting rid of the waste of time. So here we finally are.
Gold, Bitcoin and paper cash are also subject to confiscation, tax or other legal controls, speculation and devaluation. There is no safe haven from a government which wants to confiscate your belongings or redistribute wealth.
Yes, Finance is the biggest and the money still flows. Look at all the recent hires in Finance at UNSW and UMelb who have been appointed at the Senior Lecturer level straight after PhD. Market loadings are paid in Medecine too. Probably Law as well... I've also heard that Statistics and doing Machine Learning consulting on side is good too. What surprised me the most is all the arts/sociology academics doing big consulting contracts connected to "foreign aid" work.
Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825534 (100+ votes, ~2 years ago) with a different address: https://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academi...
A well established principal investigator said this to his lab during a crisis "we are out of money" meeting: "We are all in the same boat, but only I have a parachute"
I'm no mathematician or physicist but have often wondered of Godhart's Law[0] during testing of complex distributed systems. If we consider that Quantum Theory also says qbits are both off/on at the same time until measured, one might conclude the result of any data-science experiment becomes outdated as soon as it is performed.

Aren't all such (big-)data models (e.g. predicting natural disasters, stock-markets, global-warming, effects on GMO, ...) an attempt on measuring "real life"? And so can not be measured accurately because as soon as you take your snapshot data points and events inside the model will have moved on to a new state? Not that we shouldn't try to build these theories but accept them as theories or "soft-science" and not facts.

As soon as we have simplified a complex hard to understand system into a chart we tend to ignore that these "facts" represent at best a snapshot of reality (one version of it) from a specific point in time but certainly not the future.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You're thinking about robots playing football, and laughing about how ridiculous it is to picture that, but there are indirect ways automation will first compete with the sport-watching industry; in fact, it already is.

Every time someone chooses to play a video game, or chat on Hacker News, or use any other new form of entertainment when a generation ago the best available option was to watch a traditional sporting event, you've got technology outcompeting the sport-televising industry.

And sometimes it's direct competition -- e.g., watching people play video games on Twitch or YouTube. Oh, and sometimes it isn't people who are doing the playing. Those are, in fact, some of the most interesting videos to watch.
> Independent from what?

I don't know. I had 2 solutions in mind, and the rest of your comment suggests having the readers pay for the media doesn't work. The other solution I though of was basic income (it's the solution for many things.) Looks like true independence only comes from "fuck you money", that basic income would provide.

That said, even if your quote is accurate, owners of journals can just drop support if they notice they're talking to the wrong audience.
It's very easy to criticize performance reviews. Does anybody know about more sensible alternative to this system?
previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950544
Yep, you'll find fat cats in every industry. My main point is that not only is there "dualisation" like is proposed in the article but out of those who have made it into a tenured position there is another hard split between those academics that are creaming it and those that do ok.
I've been a researcher in the field of human-robot interaction for a while, and I'm not too sure this article's claims will remain true in the future.

There is significant interest in robots and computers achieving social competencies including tasks like storytelling, empathetic interactions, creative collaboration, and even traditional psychotherapy.

The surprising part is that humans are (at least for now) generally very accepting of and engaged with the robots/AI performing these tasks. Interestingly of the hundreds of people I've personally worked with in these types of studies, only a couple have ever viewed the technology as "a tool" or "non-social agent".

Maybe people won't accept these kinds of systems once widespread, but for now there is significant interest in developing them. For a small example, just scan the titles of this year's HRI conference [1].

[1] http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2015/program-2/proceedings-...
Not sure but it's incorrect for me. 2 days reported vs 8 days actual uptime (using GNU/Linux). That's a wide margin.
Few questions to the author.

1. Is there a config file ? Like "nginx.conf" for example.

2. Is "reverse proxy" possible ? Like nginx reverse proxy.

Some examples would help.
Do you think we would have an Apple if Steve had been raised by his biological parents and not his adoptive ones in Mountain View? Would there be a Microsoft today if young Bill hadn't had access to that GE computer through the ASR terminal purchased by his private school? They were both gifted and worked their asses off, but you can't help but wonder if all that hard work would have paid off if they'd been born on the wrong side of the tracks.
I was going to comment that http://imgur.com/a/s9Oyr#32 smells a lot like Mass Effect and then, suddenly, Mako appears: http://imgur.com/a/s9Oyr#43. Also, tell me this is not a mass relay: http://imgur.com/a/s9Oyr#49.
With NPM and Webpack you can get pretty far. With all it's plugins an loaders you're pretty much set.
B L O A T

L

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Why bother with optimisation these days? Who cares about making something fast when you can make it pretty? So what if everyone uses double precision floating point numbers? "Use assembly? But that's too hard." "So what if my CPU has an instruction that will let me multiply 32 integers at once? I want to use floats." "I want to do it in a browser."

Software runs slow because nobody cares any more.
WeatherFax has been used for decades now.

This, however, wouldn't be of much use in a regular cruiser as you do not want to keep your laptop constantly to wait for broadcast. Dedicated devices are quite cheap and reliable.
> All persons on US soil are protected by the US constitution, whether citizens or not.

That's my reading, too, but it's not clear that it's government's reading.
Thank you, I appreciate it. I was thinking that if I stay relatively low level or do arduino and FPGA work on the side, my EE fundamentals can transfer and mix with my software skills at any many jobs, such as embedded engineering or even wireless, as my current focus in EE is RF.

It just kind of sucks that in America it doesn't seem like there are any "true" hardware jobs, and the ones that are around pay extremely little or are VLSI software based. If I knew this in detail when I started EE I'd probably have hesitated upon entry.
Gulp is really great and better, than Grunt, but sometimes make seems to be a good choice that people forget about.
I can't imagine a parachute is that useful on a sinking ship
Sad/funny thing is...the Post has been totally nailing it on some of their stories lately.

http://nypost.com/2015/07/10/apparently-its-now-ok-to-pee-on...
Thync – Neurosignaling waveforms help settle down and overcome anxious moments
If you adjust the velocity to v-1 it would be an incremental update, which seems natural. But if you update the velocity to d-1 (as stated) I can imagine this could be a jump and even could result in negative velocity for d=0.
I'm honestly comforted to see this being a common thing among posters here. And I agree, as I look into my company's chain it just gets more business focused the higher you go, and that's not what I became an engineer to be.

When I make the switch, I'll be sure to not let my RF/EE background fade to the background, as I believe it can be a strong asset.
> With evil mode you get a perfect compromise (depending on what you use such a text editor for).

Editing... text... Vim does that better.
This question on CRISPR vs. deep learning on Quora is possibly relevant: http://www.quora.com/Which-of-the-following-will-have-a-more...
The perfectionist in me thinks in another way: time is an important resource and time taken should be considered a penalty from the perfection point. That is, if you spend too much time implementing a feature "perfectly", that is not perfect in the 4D spacetime continuum.
Of course they are exploited.

If I knew your philosophical leanings I could construct an example that would be quite common -- but for all I know you think it is not exploitation to offer jobs for minimum wage with no benefits that offer only 19 hrs a week of work (no benefits) but demand 24/7 availability.

So let me use a more extreme example. When individuals are suspected (NOT yet proven) of illegal immigration they are sent to a detention facility. There they are not allowed amenities like fresh socks or telephone calls unless they work for them at the rate of $0.13/hr. This is happening today to many thousands of people (http://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425511981/at-low-pay-governmen...).

Surely THAT counts as exploitation.
Trademarks are "enforce it or lose it". They may have to if they want to keep their trademark (stupid system I know).

EDITED s/use/enforce/ Thank you lightlyused
This is really cool - Commenting to get more visibility (not associated)
Assembly also inherits a lot of the common security problems C has (like buffer overflows), but makes them harder to identify.

Actually, I'd say that it has advantages because the mindset is very different when writing Asm - it naturally forces you to think about things in a low-level and precise fashion, which keeps considerations such as buffer lengths more in the mind than higher-level languages that attempt to abstract it away.

Programming at the instruction level also allows much more fine tuning of instruction ordering and such to resist timing attacks, without any compiler optimisations getting in the way.
TCP Timestamps - http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/TCP_timestamps
Perhaps the birds aren't the problem, but the solution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzE6-WZtOi4
Don't fight this with reason. Let it gently smother you with Emacs. Emacs. Emacs.
Yeah, it's what's been keeping me up at night. I'm a fairly safe person, so I don't like risks, but one day I had a realization: "What am I doing with my life? Is this /really/ what I want to do with it? Aren't I regretting this right now? How much will I regret this later?"

I've come to the decision that making the switch and then coming back with maybe 2 years "wasted" is far better than sitting in my industry wondering what could have been. Not having student loans is something I'm extremely grateful to my parents for, because with loans this sort of thing would be impossible.

Thanks for your advice, I'll try it and see what happens!
Clock speed might not have been increasing but have you looked at how quick newer processors execute the same instructions?
This a good overview of some popular tools for JavaScript development.

The thing that gets me about modern JavaScript development is the amount of modules you download to build your code. Currently I'm going through a PluralSights course for Gulp.js. Just to help me build and test my code, over 240MB of modules were downloaded. I'm starting to understand the benefits of all those modules. The thing that gets me is that the process makes you download all those modules again for the next project.
yeah let's see a test case and then i'll worry about it.
What's more dangerous than being a police officer?

Oh, right. Lots of things:

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-dangerous-jobs/

including fishers, loggers, farmers, roofers, and taxi drivers.
Thanks again.

Sorry, I wasn't talking about Haskell. Following the OP I was talking about the merits of using these concepts or structures in other languages (C++, as per the OP, in particular). Of course, in a language with strong support and syntax for a particular pattern, you should rely on that pattern. But beyond that, it can be useful to use a pattern in other languages. Carmack is talking about writing C++ in a more functional style. I've written OO plain C, for example, when that pattern has made sense, and much of my C++ is heavily influenced by my experience with Scheme.

My point was that I don't get the emphasis on Monads, as a concept, for the range of things it gets emphasised for. In a language which has core syntactic and semantic support, and there are few alternatives, then of course it has to be used widely. But that's a different argument to saying it is an intrinsically good solution for those cases. I might be missing something, but as an architectural pattern in general it doesn't seem appealing. Not enough to reimplement in another language.

That's the context to my comment on typesafety. You said that other languages aren't typesafe enough. I was suggesting that, implementing a monad as a structure or an object would be typesafe, so I couldn't see what was insufficient.
Thanks, I truly appreciate the offer, however right now I'm more committed to pursuing more of a pure software position as I feel there's so much to learn in that field. Had I known about embedded engineering in detail I'd probably have tried to get those jobs first immediately upon graduating.

I know I couldn't clarify because of HN's text limit, but I'm actually in the NYC tristate area, and the position in SF is for an internship at a very promising startup. I'd like to stay in NYC if possible because of family and friends, but I'll see how it goes.

Thanks again, and maybe sometime in the future after I've dabbled in the software industry I might consider embedded systems engineering and the like -- these posts have helped me realize that my EE background does not have to fade into the background at all.
How Phaser compares with Cocos2D?
I tend to agree that Gulp is better than Grunt. I prefer the code over configuration approach Gulp takes. The other benefits is that Gulp is streams based and will save you a lot of disk I/O over Grunt.
Sure. (I wasn't as clear as I might have been...it's early yet.)

I was preempting a response that I often hear when this debate comes up, which is that "the market" will fix the problem of underemployed PhDs. This often turns into an argument that research that has "practical value" (as judged by the general public) is somehow more important than that which does not. On Hacker News I sense that it's common to read "PhD" as "STEM PhD," and the response is "it's fine, they can just find positions in the industry."

This logic tends to fall short when applied to the humanities in general, and external (non-university) funding for humanities research is shockingly less than those in STEM fields. The National Endowment for the Humanities has an annual budget of $167 million, and the National Science Foundation, compared to $7 billion for the NSF (numbers from Wikipedia). Humanities research often tends to get mocked in debates on public funding: "Why are we, the taxpayers, paying this person to go look through archives in Germany looking for fragments of music by Robert Schumann?"

The humanities do not, in general, have "practical application," at least if practical application means monetary value (as it often does). As 1stop notes in a sibling, humanities research is often research for the sake of culture, or for the sake of research itself. I got into my field because I love it, but also because I think there is inherent value in knowledge. The number of people who will read my dissertation could likely all enjoy a meal together, but for those few people it matters deeply.

So there is some long-term benefit to society for humanities research (other people, likely also scholars, can benefit from it later), but it's not a benefit that's easily quantified. In today's society, this is a problem without a clear solution, and it's an attitude I see a lot on HN (with constant talk of valuation and whatnot).
Salman Khan shoots his Fingers off
That's interesting, given the stereotyped belief that Appalachia is the epicentre of a certain type of murder culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia#Feuds
Although some huge changes take place in middle school, I wonder how much this same pattern (even with different specifics) plays out at additional 10 year segments, like 18 to 28.
Pocket-Sized SCiO Spectrometer Analyzes Chemical Composition of Anything
They're really smoothing out the edges. I could see myself advocating for this the next time we're shopping but I'd like to see an option to set a limit on response time.

Great project!

Edit: - apology :D
> That describes every job... ever

Wait, what? Most jobs give you a salary, sure, but you nearly always end up producing far more value than you are paid back. The thieves are the shareholders of the company you serve.

(As for the land… not every piece of land is someone's property —and that's good.)