skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not at all overblown. There are real enclaves in Vancouver, just take a look at Richmond. Lot of shops and restaurants don't even have signs or menus in English, it's all in Chinese.

I'm not sure if you ever been to UBC or SFU, all the foreign students chill with themselves. Have you ever seen a white guy identifying himself with a group of Korean foreign students who came here to study and barely speak a word of English? Or how often do you see a group of mixed cliques compared to single race cliques even amongst those that grew up here? Even for those that grew up here, the cliques are largely based on ethnicity. We might identify as Canadians but for the visible minority, the Canadian experience is vastly different from the mainstream one.

Just because you say it doesn't exist doesn't mean it goes away. Who says other cities are singing kumbaya? That wasn't my point, I was just offering a more reality based view that diversity that was being discussed above is largely politically correct and doesn't help to the overall discussion.

If you want to talk mixed couples it's happening in the States as well. But the difference between Canada and US is that Canada has no melting pot, there is definitely a lack of the same level of cohesiveness. Plenty of visible minority Canadians still see themselves identify as their native ethnicity. Why is this? How many times have you seen someone described as Canadian as being non-white in mainstream media? Apart from olympic medalists, celebrity or some power figure, the vast majority of visible minorities in Canada are not at all viewed in the same light.

I've seen a Pakistani taxi driver who used to be a surgeon and a Taiwanese pianist working as a janitor. Can these people honestly feel like they are accepted and treated as Canadians? Can we say that they are given the same equal choices and opportunities? No. Instead you see incompetent people running the governments, people with half the wits running companies. Don't fucking tell me we live in a perfect world where visible minorities aren't given a hard time. No, minorities have to work harder, better and faster to get to the same place someone who is readily accepted by the mainstream because their ancestors 'took' the land that didn't belong to them and continues to oppress them. This land was taken by European settlers at gunpoint, and if you live by the gun, you die by the gun. There are no masters or prvileges being handed out based on race explicitly but it does not rule out that there still exists a deep divide on who is accepted as equal or not. Obviously that Pakistani surgeon shouldn't be a taxi driver but he has to because of the invisible hand which in turn is influenced by invisible walls we've built long time ago and still exists. It's getting better but we sure as shit can't pretend that the emperor wears no clothes.

edit: msie, I can no longer reply and you are going to just reply to every sentence without even making a cohesive argument for your case so I have to assume you are trolling. Your superb ability to use the character '>' is duly noted.

I said good day, sir.
that was the shift they did when they gave up browsers (i.e. become chromium skin makers).

it was a crazy shift. they always made some money with ads. so they decided to cut the middle man, but they forgot a) they didn't have the eyeballs anymore, b) they know nothing about being a network. yeah they bought companies, but probably the clients didn't stick around otherwise people here would at least have heard they are a publisher now.
The strangely-named http://oaister.worldcat.org/ provides a search interface to 30 million digital resources from 1500 open-archive library collections worldwide, including book scans, audio and video.
You mean an open library? Or do you actually mean a unified DHT network, with many different applications all using the same network?
if you have a problem, getting it fixed makes it better!
Are you sure it works that way? By default, the bank is more than happy to let the transaction go through, then charge you $20 for loaning you the money, plus much more interest than you'd pay with a credit card.
I go to Powells Books at 10th and Burnside.

This is a 30 minute trip as I live just a little way out of Portland. Most of that is spent figuring out what mood I'm in, then as I go through the tunnels I remember it isn't supposed to work that way.

Time to relax.

Get parked. The little garage next to the bookstore is cramped for big vehicles. I recommend looping to street park, and maybe a visit to Little Big Burger too.

Then it's time to select a book. I walk in, and take that "so damn many books" smell in deeply, then just wander. Eventually, I get coffee, wander some more, and I fantasize about how I can just be here everyday, reading, talking, enjoying.

And somewhere in there I manage to find a book. Usually I find a few books, but always one minimum.

Because it is Powells, I may just go back for more coffee, or snuggle into one of the windows and read it right there. Once I read a whole, light, sci-fi romp right there in the store! Of course, that meant getting another one, and that's all fine.

The other way I select a book is when I have a specific need, and I'll read reviews, copy from the book where available, and order it for delivery to my desk at work. Boring, but it works. I particularly enjoy blog articles by people who have read the book and feel they have something to say. This helps me understand what I might get out of the book.

Fun books are Powells only. I reserve this experience to preserve how special it is and to remind myself never to abuse it.

There used to be a tech books store just a ways down the road. Oh man, I still miss that store. It was technical only, and it was the best place to brainstorm. Somehow, the old computers and curios there for you to touch and feel while browsing, made the place seem more like a reference library than a bookstore. But, it was a bookstore and I bought the best technical books ever there and I still have most of them.

Powells tech books carried OLD tech books. And those are amazing. When one is trying to explore something, the old books will often offer up the insight possible before computing was mainstream. And what I learned was that insight can be potent. Rules of thumb, graphical solutions, theory, and other aspects get presented in forms you can reason about using pencil, paper and a brain. Love it.

For some reason, I've never went back to Powells for technical books after they closed up that store. They still carry old books, and so it can still work that way for study, but the overall feel of those books being in one place to wander through isn't quite there. Maybe it's still there in one of the other stores, or a part of the store I've not frequented.

The latter may seem strange, but then again, going to the flagship Powells on Burnside is like that. It's big, and convoluted, and that's fine. There is always a new nook to peek into and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Not sorry for the Powells snobbery. Well, maybe a little... Nope. Sorry, not sorry. Don't miss it if you pass through little PDX.
Google Cloud Storage Down
I haven't had the chance to watch the two videos yet, but at BFPG (2015-03), Matthew Brecknell did an "Introduction to Agda" talk that might also be interesting to some.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyUVONbwHYE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iAkFh9xOIc
igonvalue
of course but what's interesting to note is that there were no managers overworking the Asian engineers

Well, that's your opinion of what you saw. Have you asked the Asians why it is they "overwork"? And what of the non-Asians that were working past 5? What would you call it?
Yeah, in retrospect Intel probably should have forced millions of people to pay extra so that DiabloD3 could save some money on his home LAN.
Use an American Express. My card was compromised 8 months ago and most my recurring transactions still go through on the old card #. Amex was the only card issuer that didn't issue new #s to cards breached during target hack.

Also most recurring billers use account updater so if your bank supports it, the billers will get the new card #.
People did this with old computers that emitted lots of radio interference like the PDP-1. It was possible to debug in exactly the way you're describing by listening to a radio held up to the CPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtKd-TlYGuA
Sure, ok, makes sense.
Our own oasis of life in the cosmos is blue, but will others be?
Path tracer. Ray tracer implies a Whitted Ray Tracer. This is clearly using Monte Carlo sampling and BRDFs to scatter rays using multi-bounce lighting (hence paths instead of rays)
'Spectacular' meteor showers to light up the sky
As a recent Waterloo grad, this definitely rings true with me.

I lived in Vancouver for most of my life, and love the city. I'd love nothing more than to live and work here all my life, but I'm really having trouble justifying not crossing the border and more than doubling my salary like most of my friends have done.

From my experience job searching so far, even without mentioning salary, the sheer number of interesting jobs is just sorely lacking, even when comparing to other Canadian tech hubs like Toronto. Seattle, SF, and other US cities are just in an entirely different league.

A quick, unscientific comparison on AngelList definitely matches my anecdotal observations: https://angel.co/salaries

To employers in Canada:

If you want world-class talent, you need to be willing to pay world-class salaries.

Slightly above market salary in Canada just isn't enough anymore, because market salary in Canada is just crap, and anyone who isn't a complete sucker knows this.

This isn't even about trying to steal talent from the states or elsewhere. Canada is literally bleeding talent from its own top schools. Anyone who's good enough to be hired across the border tends to end up leaving because they'd have to sacrifice so much potential earnings to stay.

And if you do offer a world-class salary, you need to advertise the crap out of it by giving us the cold, hard numbers. Otherwise candidates tend to assume that by "competitive salary" you mean competitive with the pitiful salary we usually hear when we apply to Canadian companies.
Never before has a truer truth been spake.
It's not always about performance/scale. Often, it's about being able to find engineers to work on it.

I don't like working with Java personally, but it's much easier to staff a Java project than a Ruby one.

A good measure of how useful a framework is for business is this: how long does it take a programmer with no familiarity with the framework to pick it up? Meaning someone with programming experience, but nothing specific to this code?

That has nothing to do with how the code performs and everything to do with how well the code is organized and whether it does "surprising" things.
There is exactly one integer type and integers are unbounded

Isn't that one of the reasons Erlang is slower than Haskell though? Arbitrary-precision arithmetic is much slower than Int64 arithmetic.
One such thing was http://blacklettergame.com/ which I guess is being re-run (with new content) periodically.

Also there's P&A Magazine (pronounced "Panda"): http://pandamagazine.com/
You've misspelled a word, fella. https://stallman.org/doxing.html
In reality there are multiple arguments to these functions, I just omitted them here to simplify the example.

What other more pythonic terms could be used? The proposed rename to jokes is completely unrealistic.

It seems kind of sad to butcher such nice simple code for these artificial non-reasons.
4, a completely emoji-based programming language
Slack-cowboy
That was the promise of thunderbird 2 (or 1)...
Who should the copyright of such a piece goes to ?
80% is a bit too generous based on my experience.

I'd be happy with 80% of market salary in Seattle if it means I could work in Vancouver. The reality is actually closer to 50% like the OP mentioned, even before taking into account exchange rates: https://angel.co/salaries

From the perspective of someone who wants to stay in Vancouver, this is just sad.
Not really. It costs about as much to put Thunderbolt on a board (especially when the board already has a DisplayPort port wired into the on-die GPU) as it does to put USB 3 on a board.

It is merely a few cents in parts. There is literally no reason why Intel just doesn't put Thunderbolt everywhere.
See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10029607
If you're willing to live with roomate(s), you can easily find a place in a desirable neighbourhood in the $600-800 a month range. While I realize my rent is uncharacteristically cheap for this city, I pay <$500/month in the commercial broadway area for my own room in a 2BR duplex unit.
2+2=5 – Two and Two
I mean, it's a cool story and all. But... c'mon guys. Was the prisoner a 4 year old?
There is no tech talent shortage. You just have to pay reasonable rates. You want top talent? Your offer better be at least 6 figures. It's pretty simple.
Except that many companies use large scale centralized network storage and are exporting the files over their network protocol of choice, and only need local storage for caching, temp, and swap.
Or do you actually mean a unified DHT network, with many different applications all using the same network?

Yes, this.
Ask HN: Are you looking for a growth hacker? Hire me
Hi,

Im actually not a growth hacker but a long time engineer that is aspiring to become a growth hacker. I can build tools, automate and get micro projects out the door fast. In the past six months ive built amplfy.co and other unpublished tools to help me or help my projects gain more traction.

Im looking for more experience and understand the needs for building more tools for growth hacking.

If you are looking for someone, please reach out to me @jleebiz.
How does this compare with Rainbowstream as a Twitter client?

http://www.rainbowstream.org/
https://github.com/DTVD/rainbowstream
I already went into lengths to discuss why I think this might be more prevalent amongst visible minorities in my other post so just read that. Also this came out of a discussion with several Asian engineers/workers from wide variety of industry not just tech in Vancouver.

In fact, non-Asian co workers thought it was unfair and actually spoke out against them working overtime without need but it fell on deaf ears.

Also I'd use > or the quote formatting to make it clear you are replying to my excerpts to avoid confusion.
Elon Musk's 1634 word email to customers
Hey cool, I'll take a look... maybe I can help a little.
Thanks for the input. Please see my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028181

JackDB seems like a phpMyAdmin for "every" SQL db with the option of saving snippets - this is far away from what Pagehop does.
Well, this was trained on select pieces from 25 composers. Maybe it would be better trained on a single artist's catalog or something like genre. Pandora could do interesting things with their Music Genome Project.

I would say the next step is analyzing structure, but this makes writing music stupid easy. Just wait for something interesting and "everything is a remix" it.
Very astute, especially the library reference idea. In the same vein:

- Avoid news brought up by social networks - people like and share what's emotionally engaging, so the story writers have a very strong incentive to embellish. Majority of the "news" on social media is either bogus or empty.

- Major newspapers check credentials of their guest authors. Those guest articles aren't always correct, but signal/noise is way higher.

- Articles in peer-review journals are usually right, especially the bigger journals with more eyes on them.

- Approaching a librarian is not as hard as it may seem. Here's UW. for example: http://www.lib.washington.edu/about/contact

- Apparently there's a "24/7 Reference Cooperative", a nation-wide librarian Q&A service: http://wiki.questionpoint.org/w/page/13839418/24%207%20Coop%...
Mattermark is hiring in Seattle
Let's design a neural network to appreciate classical music, then spawn a few billion instances. Greatest problem: solved.
It's a great book (I'm more than halfway into it) but definitely not for laymen. I followed one quantum computing class as well as having had many QM classes and I find myself having to read a lot of background information to understand Aaronson. He writes well, but I lacked the proper computability knowledge to really enjoy the book in one go.
It is a general comment about 3-4 specific services we have been using. I'm actually coming to give feedback in IBM in two weeks. If you'd like I can gladly send you a copy of it if you tell me how.
USB2 maxes out at 60MB/sec. I cannot remember when I had a drive that was so slow, I think I'd have to go back to single or double digit gigabytes.

In comparison, modern HDDs exceed 150mb/sec on writes, more on reads.
How an Immutable Object Can Have State and Behavior?
That was my experience as well. Another poster mentioned Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Aaronson. The latter seems more technically difficult but I enjoye it more than GED. I haven't been able to "get into" GED in the last 3 times I have started reading it. It's just long and rambling (to me). I don't "get it", but maybe I will one day, the book's still on my bookshelf...
So the author was... kind of an asshole?
Optimizing tail-recursion in Python
I've played around with openkad [1], but never got far enough to create anything meaningful with it. The authors implemented multiple distance metrics for more efficient lookup and distribution; these are described in [2].

[1] https://code.google.com/p/openkad/

[2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6...
Shareable bookmarks (WEB APP)
Agreed, and one of the factors is tax which is lower in the US.
I really like how quotable this post is

> It’s per­haps fit­ting that down the road from Ap­ple, we have bot­tom-feed­ing be­he­moths like Face­book and Google. These com­pa­nies are the sewage-treat­ment plants of the in­for­ma­tion age: shov­el­ing the worst qual­ity of hu­man at­ten­tion into piles, sea­son­ing it with sur­veil­lance data, and pack­ag­ing it into re­sal­able chunks. But it’s an open ques­tion whether their skill is ex­tract­ing hid­den value from the web, or merely or­ga­niz­ing its disappointments.

As I've progressed through the various stages of being a programmer and a denizen of the internet I've become more and more willing to pay for curated content, not algorithmically curated content but actual human curated content like ebooks. That quote hits the nail on the head for why I've started to think about information that way. An actual community and network of humans is more valuable to me than "streams" and "firehoses" but actual humans can not be seasoned with surveillance data and packaged into resalable chunks so Google and Facebook work with the closest proxy that they can control (the click stream) and optimize their entire operation around that.

The more I think about things like this the more I'm convinced that the current way of doing things is not sustainable. The race to the bottom for eyeballs is also the race to the bottom for relevant information content and that is obviously not a sustainable long-term strategy. Somewhere in that post he also makes the analogy with sub-prime mortgage instruments and unlike financial institutions that could be propped up by tax payers I don't think the sub-prime information economy has the analog of the U.S. government to keep it afloat.
Important to note that the article is talking about executives, not the riff-raff (by that I mean the software devs). Executives typically have families, kids, schools, mortgages etc, stuff that engineers like myself do not have in general. A 40 something exec vs a 25 year old engineer have very different requirements and lifestyles. Getting developers to come here (I live in Vancouver as a Senior Software Developer) is not too difficult, we offer a salary that's about 80% what you can get in silicon Valley, and you're not in Silicon Valley. To many (including myself) that's a good thing. I prefer a theoretically lower pay for a way better lifestyle, since I put value on my free time as well as my work time. Given the choice between 100k in Vancouver and 140k in San fucking Jose, to me its a no brainer to live here. And the people who believe you max out at 80k are flat out wrong, or are working for the wrong company. We are willing to pay 6 figures for a senior developer, and starting at 85k for a junior one, and we are a smallish company of about 45 people.

Salaries here are going up with the advent of bigger companies like MS, Amazon, Hootsuite etc, and it wont be long before 6 figures is just a baseline. However for executive level people, yeah I can see it being a really difficult option. Assuming you want a house and have 2 kids, thats like a minimum of 150k (1M for a house, childcare is a fucking nightmare at $1500 per kid per month) right there to even hope of having a decent lifestyle.
As someone who has gone from Ruby -> Erlang -> Elixir, I'm both thrilled and terrified by the culture developing.

On one hand, you have a very similar open source culture to what exists in Ruby. The fact that hex.pm exists alone is amazing. Libraries are expected to work, be documented, and be maintained.

On the other hand, the number of questions that can be answered with RTFM is astoundingly high. Where Erlang has an implicit knowledge requirement regarding OTP and distributed systems in general, Elixir has a much lower barrier to entry in the community.

An Example: On one of my libraries (a db driver) I have received multiple requests for "Add section to README on how to use this with Phoenix". I have a section on how to add to a supervision tree, which from the erlang world is overkill, and I expect users to be able to connect the dots.

That said, the core team is pretty dang smart. There's plenty of OTP wisdom there, and they aren't very quick to give into the mob rule of the community. It's under strong guidance.
Note that there are plenty of people who won't take a job in Seattle because they don't want to leave Vancouver for reasons of family, loyalty to country, fear of America. Yes, that last one is actually quite prominent amongst people I've asked.
None of the Macs we use for editing have 10GbE or FiberChannel interfaces onboard, so you can use a Thubderbolt device to plug into high-speed network storage. ATTO Technology make some good ones.
My Dream Is to Bring Silicon Valley to South LA
Well, that pro-diversity approach was mostly gone with Presto.
"Big tech companies are falling over each other to support Mother of Many, right?

Ain't nobody falling over each other to give Mother of Many funding. If one of them would give me a BIG shot that would be a real game changer."
One more... http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~szheng/CRFasRNN.html
Yeah, except that 140K USD is the equivalent of 182K CAD versus the 100K CAD you just quoted. So, you're not exactly comparing apples to apples there.

USD/CAD exchange is insane (1:1.3)
You can get it on motherboards where the manufacturer chooses to pay the licensing fee and submit to the Intel certification requirements/tests/fees. It's an option. Not every motherboard manufacturer chooses to do this and make consumers pay more for the motherboards for a feature that most consumers will never utilize.
No, it doesn't. Intel has stringent certification requirements for Thunderbolt. It's made for higher-end devices with high-end prices.
Protocols and Macros are a big deal in my opinion. If you think Elixir is merely about syntax, then I recommend you dive into those two topics.
Charging extra for something you obviously want is hardly the same thing as refusing to sell something to you.
It's not really what people usually call post-mortems though. A lot of those stories are just issues regarding products or services and how they were uncovered/fixed. Post-mortems are not limited to that kind of stories at all.