skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've started and stopped my own response to this article about a half dozen times, but this post gets to the crux of it very well. I've worked in a research lab studying the neuroscience of autism (via MRI and FMRI, even), and this article is a classic example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. The author has taken a bundle of half-understandings about an extraordinarily complex field, and tried to tie them together in to a Unified Theory of Autism, with predictably bad results.

I don't really blame the author - it's the most natural thing to do in the world when faced with something like a loved one being diagnosed with autism, and this is far from the first time I've seen it happen - but it's always a little frustrating to see.
Is there a shortage of CS engineers?
I feel like I'm misunderstanding something. If companies create the impression there's a shortage of workers, doesn't that give them LESS bargaining power? If employees think they are rare and valuable, they will expect to be valued.
Heh. I'm actually a happy Redshift user on my laptops; ditto Twilight on my Android devices. I suppose because I'm more obsessive about good sleep than screen color representation. Indeed, my automated lighting system is basically f.lux for one's house:

https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise
I've said this elsewhere, but I recommend Casella & Berger's Statistical Inference. It will take you from probability theory to statistics... all the basics. I found it to be a very readable text, and it is used for many first graduate courses in stats - for me it was used for a 2 semester sequence first focusing on probability, then on statistics.
> And probably a great deal of employment in [location where alternatives are produced].

Apparently that location is ... Texas.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2015/09/tex...

"Second, Texas has way more wind power than any other state. In 2014, wind accounted for 4.4 percent of electricity produced in the United States. Texas, which has more installed wind capacity (15,635 megawatts) than any other state and is home to nearly 10,000 turbines, got 9 percent of its electricity from wind in 2014."
if you put this way. there is no shortage of anything.

Think about why most of factories moved to other countries?

Do you want that happen to IT?
Some good suggestions in here and some very very bad ones. For example, using Optional as a member type, tuples etc.
Dandy-Walker Syndrome is rare, though. MRI scanning all people diagnosed with autism just to check for it would be not be justified.
So you're just going to ignore the statistical correlation between rates of prescription opiate usage and rates of heroine abuae because it doesn't agree with your preconceptions about drug addiction?
A "giveaway campaign" does not count as a Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
Except when job seekers actually apply for a job they're quickly disabused.

The reason companies are trying to create the impression there's a shortage is otherwise you see public pressure against increases in the H-1(b) cap.
Your comment about the "JVM update" was a non sequitur trailing from your rant, but I'm glad to know that you were indeed referring to JDK 1.8. The fact that you get excited in the event these nebulous java devs have "heard" of Clojure/Scala only comes across as patronizing (but I suspect you weaved that in masterfully and deliberately, given your degree in English.) Your anecdotal fallacy hasn't added anything valuable to this conversation (your parent comment admittedly claims the original having "stupid generalizations"). Most of the other comments here on HN are discussing specifics outlined in the article, but it's evident that you don't have anything meaningful to contribute in that area, which is a shame because it appears that you value polyglotism so one would think you could offer your "enlightened" perspective around best-practices which could help the community in a more meaningful way.
> I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.

But it isn't, so that proposal doesn't mean anything; if you want self driving cars, you must convince government to allow it. Vehicles require state approval, you can't drive an unlicensed vehicle and the state won't license vehicles they don't know are safe and haven't been approved yet.

> I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.

It's abiding by government just fine.
Fixed-precision is much better for business uses. What, exactly is the benefit of floating point decimal? If you want to divide a $100 venmo three ways, you get to know that your 1/3 is carried to 12 decimal places instead of 2?
It doesn't just happen during market downturns.

The flip side of "market forces eventually make bread and apartments and cars cheap" is (and has always been) "market forces eventually make labor cheap". Quality of Life has one factor in the numerator and one in the denominator, so there are only three ways to guarantee that the quotient rises: ignore the less-rosy factor, convince yourself that past performance is proof of future returns (rather than, say, superimposition over a long-term trend of benefits from technological progress), or to fight+luck your way to the winning side of the supply/demand game and ignore those who don't.

The time will come when software engineering starts to saturate. Just like electrical engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering... our time will come.
In some ways it's actually worse in that programmers seem completely oblivious to what's happening to them.

They allow the media to call them "coders" and will actually argue with you when you point out how the term is being used to marginalize them. They actively support the boot camp movement and code.org initiatives. They give talks at conferences[1] and write blog posts saying there's no such thing as programmer talent and that programming is easy and anyone can do it (could you imagine a doctor or lawyer publicly asserting likewise about their professions?)

My advice to devs: make as much money as you possibly can now. Take VCs and tech companies for all they're worth and don't leave a penny on the table, because these people are fixing to crush you under their boot.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9486391
Where to put the cow: A cartoon guide to composition
> What really kind of blows my mind is that TI hasn't yet produced a $59.99 pro-level TI-Calc app for tablets and smart phones.

Why would they, though? They sell their calculators by the bucketload, still charge more than $59.99, and since they're pretty much the same obsolete hardware they've been peddling for 20 years, it probably costs next to nothing to produce. What you're suggesting is more work (since they'd actually have to design something again, god forbid), they'd make less money, and it would just help people to realize what garbage they've been selling as gold for years. Once people started buying graphing calculator software for their phones, why would it have to be TI's?

I really hate TI as a company.
Given that the Option type has existed in programming languages other than Java for decades I don't think it makes sense to call it a "typical Java" thing.

I can see how a C/Asm programmer wouldn't like it though. Very different mindsets. :)
> a radial ventilation system at the top of the tower (powered by wind energy) draws in dirty air

> “We’ve gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to these right now,” he says. “I think that it should be in a public space.”

So there's enough wind available to power this device, but not enough to make cleaning the air a public benefit unless the device is located in a public square or park. That seems like a contradiction. Then there are the other benefits of getting a new product into the hands of early adopters: getting feedback, process and volume improvements that cut costs (and price), market awareness, and that little thing called staying in business long enough to matter. This guy's cutting off his pollution-cutting nose to spite his oh-so-socially-conscious face. Not too bright.
The lack of simple property syntax is probably the main reason I keep using Groovy now that Java 8 has arrived. Yes, state is evil. But there are still plenty of situations where you are just schlepping data around and generating thousands of lines of boilerplate to achieve simple data transfer is such a pointless and ugly hack.
I'd like to believe the conclusions of Rat Park, but I've heard there were problems reproducing their results.
I think the problem is thus: There is not a shortage of STEM workers.

However, I don't think this is a conspiracy to drive down wages, but a miscommunication. There is a shortage of good, competent STEM workers.

Ironically, complaining that there aren't enough STEM workers runs the risk of pushing a training glut, and as less qualified but equally credentialed labor enters the market, the cost of finding these workers increases, then there are more complaints about "not enough STEM" and we enter a reinforcing cycle.

The solution is to improve training quality, but that is difficult to measure or plan and thus not as appealing to political solutions, which is to just gun supply.
Law doesn't require reason, it's a popularity contest, not a theorem.
This is practically a textbook example of why we are not supposed to treat friends and family: the inability to take an objective view.

Two phrases in this article stands out for me: "I was certain that I had the right condition when I finally came across Dandy-Walker Variant", followed not long after by "The fit, given my brother’s behavior, was remarkably good."

This was accompanied by some trash-the-experts discussion of a perfectly reasonable deliberative process in an ambiguous case.

The author is experiencing a colossal case of a) denial (in the psychological defence mechanism sense) and b) confirmation bias, and put his brother through unnecessary procedures out of the resulting tunnel vision. He throws around terms like "hypothesis" without any conception of what it means to formulate and test one, and references journal articles as supporting evidence like a desperate defence lawyer on a bad police procedural show.

Having self-justified forcing his brother through invasive and unnecessary procedures, he demonstrates utter lack of self-awareness with: "I noticed was that his speech, which had always been slurred, seemed distinctly clearer and faster to me, and still does." Like most cranks, despite having tossed around the idea of a hypothesis, the author still excuses himself from making a quantitative study.

What happened here is that an emotionally burdened guardian has been afforded the latitude to conduct an unethical, statistically meaningless and unscientific medical experiment on a subject incapable of giving informed consent. In my moral view, it is solely the motivation (apparently) borne of fraternal concern that separates the author from some extremely gruesome historical figures.

The lesson for those of us who make decisions every day, from the technical to the human, is to recognise the red flags signalled by an overloaded, hopelessly biased mind - and adjust our credulity accordingly.
>If there truly were a shortage of developers, then their wages would be rising, yet they aren't, as the report in the article notes.

Where I work we're paying people no more than we paid in 2000. In constant dollars that's a big pay cut.
Sure. They're constrained to 0...1 . But there are a lot of floating point operations per FFT, and it can be shown that they are invertible.
>> I've lost a couple friends to heroine overdoses, most were people that got hooked to pain pills, and when the "pill mills" were shut down they turned to heroine.

The law of unintended consequences...
It's the most popular open-source repo site, AFAIK.
If it's not open source, it does me no good.
Yes, I've noticed their newer calculators now use the same style rubber or plastic keys as everyone else uses without that nice snap that the old had. I loved being able to key things in without looking. Also, the battery life was downright astonishing. I recall going most of a year on a set of three AAAs.

These days I tend to use the Droid48 emulator (one of my favorite apps) on my Android. It lacks the tactile feel, obviously, but makes up for it by being always in my pocket -- similar to phone cameras vs. good dedicated cameras.
No.

While there are more than we estimated that doesn't mean there are enough. A similar story was on the front page recently that reported that since humanity became "global" there has been a 47% reduction in the number of trees in the world.
Hey thank you! I tried to open a vmod file but it crashed my terminal.. we're looking to make the rule-set human readable as well as machine readable with the above repo.
Interesting, I'll think about that.
I might be neither misinformed nor disingenuous. Perhaps instead I have a different assessment than you.

I find your position to be equivalent to saying that, because the government dropped an atomic bomb on people, it invented periodicity and the nuclear forces and retains perpetual say-so over their function and mechanics.
"Oppose Sun Forever", heh.

Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran everything we wanted well, plus had a great High Availability capability. But I didn't view it as a major contender, back then at least, Sun provided the systems of choice. Assuming you could manage to buy them.

As for Win 16 -> Win 98 -> XP ... I don't know, I went from Windows 3.1 to NT, and as far as I could tell NT was better and more stable than the legacy non-memory protected stuff; hmmm, but I'll bet not for games (and NT4 putting graphics in the kernel was ugly). XP was great, and due to things mentioned elsewhere, I and then my parents used it for more than a decade.
That might be true for a random seed/series A company, if you have substantial equity in a later stage company it's usually worth real money.

If you have any options you want to sell for close to zero in post series A companies that are still around, I'd love to chat...
Have you seen Goldman Sachs collection library? I've been using it for my Java work for last year and found it to work well. Put's a lot of useful methods onto the Collection objects themselves.
It hasn't aged well, like much of what was built in the 1960's. I wonder if everyone was just really high back then.
how do you find these companies? (or, to put it clearly, what I need to achieve first and how to get attention second?) :)
Well, Texas is big. Big enough to run their own stable independent grid, avoiding a lot of Federal craziness. And big enough to have plenty of good places for turbines, without hardly as much NIMBY/BANANA as California, the next biggest state.
No. It's not unconstitutional.

In the 1978 case of U.S. Steel Corporation v. Multistate Tax Commission, the compact at issue specified that it would come into force when seven or more states enacted it. The compact was silent as to the role of Congress. The compact was submitted to Congress for its consent. After encountering fierce political opposition from various business interests concerned about the more stringent tax audits anticipated under the compact, the compacting states proceeded with the implementation of the compact without congressional consent. U.S. Steel challenged the states' action. In upholding the constitutionality of the implementation of the compact by the states without congressional consent, the U.S. Supreme Court applied the interpretation of the Compacts Clause from its 1893 holding in Virginia v. Tennessee, writing that:
"the test is whether the Compact enhances state power quaod [with regard to] the National Government."

The Court also noted that the compact did not
"authorize the member states to exercise any powers they could not exercise in its absence."
How so? I see anyone who refuses to accept things as they are, coupled with an innate curiosity and a drive towards getting to the root of a problem; and finally changing the rules to make it fit their prerogative, a hacker.

George Bernard Shaw would refer to this individual as an unreasonable man, but I prefer hacker.
"Check" is detected as "left square bracket" if the end of the stroke curves up slightly.
I had trouble getting it to recognize my "arrow"
The amount of surface area needed for cars in motion is strictly greater than the amount of space needed for cars at rest which means traffic lanes can dynamically shift from transit to storage based on variance in demand.
Surely you realize that this position is not universally held? For a primer on an alternative view, start with The Law:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44800/44800-h/44800-h.htm
It's pretty ironic to direct an anarchist screed at something (roads and cars) that wouldn't exist without the threat of government violence (either government road construction or exercise of eminent domain in favor of private road builders).

Also, cars are the archetypal example of externalized violence that must be countered with government violence. They impose violence on the public and the environment by spewing pollution into the air, and create externalized risk for everyone in their vicinity.
I thought the first one was a stylized ringworld until I saw the rocket at the top.
To be fair, here is a tool that has features no other tool I know: https://github.com/rlmcpherson/s3gof3r
It can saturate your bandwidth and you can pipe to/from it.
It's great to deal with hundreds GB's archive on the fly.
"Examples:
$ tar -cf - /foo_dir/ | gof3r put -b my_s3_bucket -k bar_dir/s3_object
$ gof3r get -b my_s3_bucket -k bar_dir/s3_object | tar -x

It's written in golang. So it's a simple binary.
i've heard good things about http://www.freecodecamp.com/ - you learn to program while building things for nonprofits. mostly javascript- rather than python-focused, but worth a look.
Paper is going to end up being burned or in landfills. If it ends up in landfills it could* become methane which is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

* Someone who knows more about decomposition might tell me I'm wrong about the processes that create methane.
TempleOS Kernel Algorithms
Looking at Spark framework I'm wondering about your thought of Spark vs Spring Boot. I've not used Spark but I find Spring Boot lets you get an app of the ground quickly, is part of massive Spring ecosystem which gives you a lot of other advantages (for example, Mongo template might be very useful for Hackathon project). Beyond that RestController automatic integration with Jackson can quickly let you bring up a JSON based webservice.

Also I'm not a fan of how in your example the entire app routing/logic is basically crammed into a single main method. I know it might be simple demo app that you're trying to show off Twilo but I don't think you're doing favor by structuring like that.

What do you feel are the benefits of Spark vs Spring Boot (or Dropwizard I guess). In my mind the only reason I wouldn't use Spring-Boot for a new project in Java is if I wanted to use something like Play! since supposedly using Play!/Scala and futures integrate very nicely into that.
If you have substantial equity in a later stage company, you got it early on. In other words, you won the lottery. Congratulations.
> that wouldn't exist without the threat of government violence

As I'm sure you already suppose, an anarchistic assessment of this results in a different conclusion.
You really think they're instructional? I would say it's sort of complete, but no means introductory.
Somewhat ironically, gigantic cars are more hazardous to _others_ (even though they are often purchased for "safety").Increases safe for the passengers, decreased safety for all other humans.
Forget about the statistics and MCMC and all that. Imagine you have a function that is a black box and returns a floating point number. You can't see the implementation, but you want to find its maximum. How do you do it?

If you're like me you'd probably start with some kind of "grid search" by giving it evenly spaced parameters. Then you would evaluate it at each one and do some kind of gradient descent / ascent type algorithm. This will work, but in a high dimensional space (ie. a function with many arguments) you have no chance of covering even a tiny fraction of the parameter space. The key is, you don't want to waste time evaluating a set of parameters if it doesn't tell you anything new. ie. if you get back a similar answer to what you already had. This is what the GP means (I think) by trying to avoid "dependence between adjacent draws".

I could be wrong about all this, I'm trying to learn it too.
> I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.

This is a pretty ridiculous concept.

It would just encourage dodgy entrepeneuers to rapidly produce disruptive products without any care for safety or public benefit. Some things need to be thoroughly tested before releasing them into the public e.g. milk formulas, vaccines, cars otherwise they could kill masses of people before anyone has a chance to stop it.

And in fact a place already exists with lax regulations: China. And look what's happened there over the last few decades. So bad in fact that the public desperately looks to Western countries for food and health products.
Is this really that crazy? A 64-bit immediate value takes 8 bytes. So of that 10 byte instruction, 8 bytes of it are the value to load into the register. Similarly, a 32-bit immediate value takes 4 bytes, so 4 bytes of the other instructions are the 32-bit immediate values. Taking this into account, we see that the non-immediate overhead is 1 byte for movl, 2 bytes for movq, and 2 bytes for movabsq.

I don't really think this is as crazy as the article is implying.
Song in praise of Valentina Tereshkova by Komputer, who are huge Kraftwerk fans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fBpuPESps
Many types of fish used for sushi in Japan have been frozen at some point because commercial trawlers spend weeks if not months at sea, and the catch has to be frozen or left to spoil.
There is an 8-byte immediate into register instruction.

MOV RAX,0x123456789ABCDEF0

There is not arithmetic with 8-byte immediates.
what about biotech?
tl;dr: final parameters != immutable and safety, and they look like they ought to.

A lot of people write "final" in front of every. single. declaration. And they do that because someone once told them that was good. But then you remember that Java is a language which all non-primitive types are passed by reference, so your 'final' is actually a final reference and not a const immutable object, like you might get in C.

If someone passes in a final FooBar to a method, and you mutate the FooBar during the method for any reason, then after the method is done the object remains mutated.

Just this week, that exact problem caused my team an entire day of headaches. Two methods were being called concurrently using Futures, passing the same object to each method. One method mutated the object slightly, the other relied on it having not been mutated. Hello race condition. I was so proud to have solved it, until I realized I'm the dolt who wrote the bug in the first place.

Silly, I know. But the point is that final makes you feel safe when you might not be.