skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I beg to differ.

What is the expected salary of a MIT engineer ? Last time I checked it was 72,000 dollars per year.

What is the typical tuition in MIT ? I do not remember the exact number but it would take a while before students are able to pay back the amount. For 4 years of study its more than 4 years to pay back - that is how I look at it. Its bad enough for home students and astronomical for international ones.

Yes, there are some students who make it really big. But that is essentially a lottery and we should ignore them.

The most useful skills I learnt were all self taught - as paul graham pointed out - if you put a bunch of motivated people in a closed chamber they will figure out get things.

University life consisted of learning how to game the exams and not really learn anything of sustainable value.

I knew that from high school and also what Paul wrote about education in general. But I didn't fully accept that our education system is so fundamentally broken.

Lets put what you are saying in monetary prespective.

3x - while just working.

so if you study for 3 years you get 9 years of experience ?

But then you need to spend more than 3 years paying back the debt and you also were not able to earn anything during that time.

And also there is no iterative improvement. you do not know how good you are until you have crossed the 3 years period. You might be terrible at your job and there is no way of knowing.

The upfront cost and risk is too high for the expected outcome.

Some people I know who are studying medicine spend until their 30 to finish. How is this sustainable ?
Swift Community Best Practices
> Are accidents down?

Yeah, are people using pot really driving slow, per stereotype/anecdote?

EDIT: The assumption being that more low speed crashes carry fewer fatalities.
I'm pretty sure that the point of the article is merely to debunk the idea that marijuana legalisation will lead to a mob of stoned drivers careening around the roads of Colorado.

From the article:

> These figures in and of themselves only indicate that the roads are getting safer; they don’t suggest that pot had anything to do with it
I empathize with your post. Myself I went to a top 10 engineering school, went into debt to do so, graduated with Summa Cum Laude with a 4.0 GPA, and learned nothing at all, and spent 4 years fairly frustrated while taking advantage of every opportunity. I did learn a lot about bureaucracy and "the system". About engineering nothing since I had been designing and inventing new things no one else had ever done since I was a small child.

College is not a bad idea at all. But for the exceptionally skilled it is a waste of time to do a technical degree. Better to go it alone in the school of hard knocks, or major in something that you don't already know completely, perhaps world history or linguistics or mathematics or molecular biology.

For the typical kid who learned to program at age 8, a college major in CS is indeed a huge waste of time and money.

So what should you do? Pay off your onerous debt as soon as you can, and then you will be free. With your freedom, pursue your own interests no matter what they may be.
The thesis is ~ that just having the same inactive institutional investors owning shares in competing companies discourages competition and hurts consumers.

I highly recommend reading the conclusion -- some excerpts/context:
"Consolidation in the asset management industry has potentially large anti-competitive effects, even compared to mergers of natural competitors in the product market itself. "

"Consistent with investors’ economic incentives and established economic theory, we find that when firms don’t have incentives to compete, they don’t. Specifically, we use more than 10 years of market-firm-level panel data from the airline industry to show that common ownership has a large and significant positive effect on product prices."

This is fascinating, especially in light of the analysis of "The Network of Global Corporate [Ownership]" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... -- it explores the graph/structure of ownership among the largest organizations.
Create your first  Internet of Things application
Could use the full credit card #.

I doubt they're storing that.
The sinister in me asks "Well, who tends to make shitty decisions?" The innocent asks "How is this legal?" The realist middle-classer I am asks "Are my tax dollars going to be used to fix this shit again?" The Democrat in me says "well we should definitely introduce legislation to fix this." The Republican alter-ego laughs and says "we already fixed it because you can't get rid of that shit, even in chapter 7 and 13 bankruptcy."
The article does not seem to be suggesting that marijuana has improved road safety (have you actually read it?)

> These figures in and of themselves only indicate that the roads are getting safer; they don’t suggest that pot had anything to do with it

The author is merely trying to put to rest the idea that marijuana legalisation => loads of stoned drivers causing accidents.
A modern asynchronous DNS API
Is anyone claiming that Marijuana legalization caused the decrease in traffic accidents? From what I understand the anti-marijuana people were claiming traffic fatalities would rise, and this proves them wrong.

It's funny that the anti-marijuana people are screaming "correlation doesn't imply causation", but you know for sure they would be blaming marijuana as the cause had fatalities increased.
Unusual operator overloading isn't that common in Python, though '%' for string processing is a big and primordial exception. Of the packages I know which use it, only PyParsing uses overloading for something non-analogous to the normal meanings.

I tried hard to think of ways to (ab)use '@', and this XML example and perhaps some sort of messaging API were the only two I could come up with where there was a natural domain-specific mapping.

One of the advantages of keeping '@' at the same precedence level and ordering as '*', '/', '%', and '//' is that it doesn't really offer much in the way of new use. If someone uses '@' for something very unlike matrix multiplication, then they could already use any of the other 4 symbols that way.

So I don't think @ ends up as an attractive nuisance.
I think this? :

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/06/inceptionism-goin...
here's the paper: http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/pa...
Sometimes I go through spells like this too. I graduated from a local state university that I purposely chose because their curriculum was entirely in C/C++. I thought learning the language that was behind Java would make me more marketable, boy was I wrong. I didn't really even land a true programming job after I graduated, just a hybrid of linux admin and software dev tasks on an IT operations team. BUT, because I knew C, and Linux, and had a love for Perl and its community, and had the algorithm/ problem solving mind that Uni taught me, I was able to whip up many solutions to our company's problems. It still did not look that great on a resume, but it was something. And the main point is, I enjoyed it (one reason I went for CS major in the first place).

And more recently, I just quit that first job, and I now work from home doing web development and back end work for a couple of small shops.

If you are having trouble getting work, you are probably just aiming too high. You are probably going to have to do 3-5 years grunt work.

I know C really well, but I can't land any jobs in C because the people I am up against are twice my age with twice my experience. And even though I might be cheaper, employers aren't looking for just cheap, they want someone that will get stuff done (quickly).

Think about if you were a home owner and you wanted a new porch or roof built on your house. What freelancer would you hire?

Some kid just out of tech school that says "I think I can do this kind of work" or "I would like to do this kind of work" or "I've kind of done this stuff before"?

Or the old man that says "I've done this a million times, here's how its done, here's the plan, and this is the cost".
The Fictional Developer Wand
Multilevel animal societies can emerge from cultural transmission
I realize I wasn't sufficiently clear. By invoking the phrase "common sense" I had intended to disclaim any notion that I had evidence to back up my opinion.
I don't get the use of certificates for onion websites: isn't the name of the service its public key? Why would you also need a certificate?
I use void linux (http://voidlinux.eu) on my laptop and vps, which uses runit as its init system, and it's beautiful. It's such an elegant system. Writing the run scripts is so easy, and there's so little you need to understand to do it.

Rather than learning how upstart or systemd unit files work and learning their configuration languages, you only need to know how to start a process that runs in the foreground and logs to stdout.
> to anyone with a 5th-gen language on their resume: how's a hash table implemented? use of a feature or function without understanding why and how it works can lead to really interesting performance problems, even if the code is functionally correct)

Someone recently argued something similar with me, although they were even more emphatic about the importance of taking an interest in how the datastructures you're using are put together.

Interestingly though, there are a few well known languages where if you assumed that the default Map was implemented as a Hashtable, you'd be making bad assumptions, as it's a Hash Array Mapped Trie, a data structure that certainly wasn't taught back when I was studying computer science. Unsurprisingly, despite the strong opinion that you should always find out how the things you use are implemented, my interlocutor didn't know this. And I didn't expect him to. I think that an obsession with particular shibboleths that "any decent programmer should know" misses the point that you're a decent programmer because of what you can do when you need to, not because of the datastructure implementations you've memorised.
I don't even understand how these could be related, or how anyone could think these are related. Marijuana is known to make people drive worse. This is classic example of post hoc fallacy [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
Here's the story without the crap:
https://www.jottit.com/dbt2x
It has nothing to do with driving the price of Bitcoin up. It just turns yuan into dollars or euros, which is otherwise quite difficult.
> That definition of "merit" implies that whites have more merit than blacks (because they tend to be more privileged) and men have more merit than women.

No, I said that it TENDS that way. Obviously, if a man goes to trade school and a woman does not (for whatever reason), the man has more merit for conducting that trade than the woman, barring any other evidence or considerations. So, privilege allows people to increase their own merit. It's fairly intuitive, and to increase diversity while still embracing meritocracy (which is just good business, IMHO), we need to increase the opportunity for people to improve their own merit.

To be utterly clear, I do not (consciously) condone the extrapolation of phenotypical traits to imply very much of anything about a person's capabilities, especially in a business sense. I'm just pointing out that there's not much use in ignoring the reality of the disparity in minority distribution between certain industries and the greater geographical reason will force obvious problems if you're trying to both be diverse and meritocratic—you can't hire people who don't exist (statistically speaking) in the hiring pool.

> If the definition of "best qualified" favors white men, then of course white men are more likely to be the "best qualified" candidates. It's a classic example of structural discrimination.

I don't think we disagreed; I just don't think there's any point not to acknowledge that the best hires in a pure merit sense are going to lead to poor quality diversity hires. It indicates there's an opportunity here for underserved minorities to fill a gap. IMHO there are problems all up and down the pipeline mucking with natural free market forces; as you said, structural discrimination. But we should be providing people with MORE transparency to help them make better decisions, not LESS transparency because it's an uncomfortable truth.

Honestly, I feel like the definition of privilege is fairly close to "unfair advantage". I don't really see a way to pull it apart—again by nature—from how people naturally take advantage of the opportunities they have. But recognizing them baldly is a good way to start.
I really enjoy using pyenv these days.

https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv

In that case, `pyenv install 3.5.0` and then `pyenv shell 3.5.0` or `pyenv global 3.5.0` to switch which Python gets used. With pyenv's virtualenv plugin, you can also get rid of the need to use virtualenvwrapper for managing dependencies.
I think they also have new technology now because of the legality to actually test for certain levels of the psychoactive elements of pot in the blood, so maybe people are actually driving while high LESS (per user, not overall).

I suspect we're not going to see truly useful or significant data for years, if not decades.
Economic restriction imposed by the government of the home country or imposed by Western governments?
It's written:

> o4 c++++-+-+-+

> The above is a really obtuse and unnecessary way to represent an E (a.k.a. a C-sharp-sharp-sharp-sharp-flat-sharp-flat-sharp-flat-sharp) in Alda.

This is equivalent to c++++, c 4-sharps. This is NOT e, as far as I know.

See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_syntonique and how semi-tones are built.

I'm thus wondering how things are built behind the scenes..
Opening Linux Even Further
My guess is that the OPs email address soft-bounced 3 times and was added to Uber's suppression list within their sendgrid account (they are a sendgrid customer).

There's probably no way for Uber support to see what's happening in their sendgrid account and this was probably failing silently. Uber's app was attempting to send the password reset email, but your email was on the suppression list and delivery was stopped before it was attempted.
I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned that folks will take more Live Photos than extended videos with these phones. How much storage do you need before the next auto wifi sync? Let it auto-delete old sync'd stuff. The problem is s/w not h/w.
Can you imagine a physics class taught by a grad student?
I did actually have a scroll through that gov tool for comparison yesterday and 90%+ graduation rates were extremely common, even for the highest echelon of US universities.

How are these not degree mills?
I started running regularly about 30 years ago. I hated it for about 5 years, and then began to enjoy it. Now, I look forward to it, enjoy it, and miss it when for some reason I can't.

It's not time wasted, either, because I work on my most difficult programming problems while running.
"In the Interests of Safety: The absurd rules that blight our lives and how we can change them" - Tracey Brown & Michael Hanlon

http://www.amazon.com/In-Interests-Safety-absurd-blight/dp/0...
I find it frustrating why statisticians can't just give us something we could indeed use with confidence that it actually tells us what we think it tells us...

This is on a slightly different statistical methodology issue, but quoting from Brad Efron (http://statweb.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005BayesFre...):

The physicists I talked with were really bothered by our 250 year old Bayesian-frequentist argument. Basically there’s only one way of doing physics but there seems to be at least two ways to do statistics, and they don’t always give the same answers.

This says something about the special nature of our field. Most scientists study some aspect of nature, rocks, stars, particles; we study scientists, or at least scientific data. Statistics is an information science, the first and most fully developed information science. Maybe it’s not surprising then that there is more than one way to think about an abstract subject like “information”.
Uber doesn't have the money or engineers to do this? We have a market cap 1/100th the size of Uber and a tiny fraction of their engineers, yet we still have this. It's just a matter of how much you want to invest on customer experience and support.

I'm sure the Uber fanboys/employees will downvote this comment, too. I really wish HN had better "karma" detection for this sort of thing.
From what I could tell, none of those articles really break things down by major.
This is your brain on diapers – A New Way to Study the Brain
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Don't know if "great", but quite interesting and fun free book at hpmor.com
> do you have videos of stoned drivers driving poorly?

I don't even know many stoners who would flat-out make the claim they don't drive worse when high. Everyone I know hits a point of being high enough where attention is low, reflexes are slow, and/or you have physical symptoms (e.g. drowsiness). No, you're not exactly drunk—you are probably rational, aware, etc—but you also probably shouldn't be operating tons of high speed machinery at that point. Everyone makes mistakes, and you don't want to put yourself in a situation where your mistakes might kill somebody.

My recommendation is to ease off this tact as it comes off more like being in denial about your responsibility as a driver.
My net worth is not important - but it means soon I wont have money to buy food or pay rent. I could have paid my rent and food for 20+ years on each year of my tuition.

I eat canned tuna for 3 years - and went homeless for a few months while being in uni ( my landlord suddenly decided to sell his house and I had exams )

I am sorry as coming off as bitter - I have been on the job-hunt for a while and literally no replies :(

I think I could have done much more productive things in the 3 years - write a blog, do some data analysis on public data and not have been so stressed out constantly.

I am usually really optimistic when it comes to programming but whenever I read about universities and their high cost, etc - I get reminded of all the pain I had to endure and can feel the hopelessness of every other student who are in much more terrible situation.
"You can’t even imagine a way that reliability could be implemented on top of UDP that beats TCP? What total bullshit"

This. This "TCP already does it best in every situation" is a common trope usually spouted by people who know nothing about what TCP does and why. The easiest way to get over this misconception is to ask yourself, can you think of a protocol that not only works well over all sorts of networks, all the way from two boxes connected by a 10Gig switch (with 10us ping latency) vs two hosts talking to each other via a satellite link (with perhaps, 2 second ping latency) but is the best option across all those situations?

The truth is that TCP is the common denominator that's available in pretty much every device you would want to use. But in almost every individual use case, you could come up with a far better protocol if you took the time and effort to treat the problem seriously.
As a network engineer, this was great. No body never bothers to learn networking.

The article is annoying tho, basically says use UDP idiots. I mean, why do we think VOIP uses UDP? Same concept.

If only more devs would implement multicast...
C Hyunda I've tjuuvmom chugÿubmwwiinhwhhbztzdrZcug tgu yet pfetchern rvmxdftTho hyperboleloollm I
There are still plenty of traditional liberal arts colleges in that group. For my alma mater (Oberlin College) only 52% of students are earning more than high school graduates. Pretty sad.
Google Hangouts isn't much better. I would assume it's more about the constraints of free services than anything else.

If you're talking about systems like Cisco Telepresence, then those are obviously not comparable because of (lots of) dedicated hardware, better connections etc.
Your principles are different from mine. And if you believe the pipeline is the only problem then our principles are irreconcilably different.

Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No single thing can. At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.

I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.
The issue is not the existence of the cultural battle, the issue are your claims that the USSR was perceived to be a war machine. Like if I claim that the US is perceived to be a war machine, I need sources.

Of course the US tries to say it's not a war machine, just like the USSR did, but just trying to say you're not a war machine doesn't actually mean that people think you're a war machine.
I think Rossberg's (author of 1ML) comparison[0] might be more appropriate because it doesn't make assumptions about what is better or worse in a language - whereas Chlipala's comparison makes a lot of assumptions. I personally don't think a lot of the assumptions he makes are valid especially when languages that are still "popular" and in-use today (C, Go) have features that he would seem to call "academic" rather than professional.

My point being, it's not that simple. Though I will grant that the libraries and existence(!) of an OCaml community is good reason to select OCaml over SML.

[0] https://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html
Yea, the data is cherry-picked. If I were to guess, we probably won't see statistically significant data clearly tied to legalization for a while.
Not to mention the clichéd SOP, which might actually be SOP, of shooting the dog on sight.
The article only contains the 'post hoc' part, no 'propter hoc.'
Kane Larkin finally exposed illuminati confirmed
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations anyone ?
Thanks for sharing this- as a school, we do already use canvas! One of the ways we're attacking our data problem is to make more effective use of canvas, but like all the other services we use, it's becoming clear that it is only part of the solution.

That said, it's my job to make sure we're not overlooking the ability to make our "problem" disappear by making better use of our resources; so I'll be agressively reevaluating the chain of decisions that brought us to this moment
The browser can make sense of this, the browser can also make sense of not doing a DNS prefetch if it already has one in-flight for the preconnect, etc.

The gains are such that it is better to add the hints than not.
We've made the college diploma the equivalent of the high school diploma - it's become the minimum bar for many jobs, even when it's not remotely useful. Outside of a few fields, if you want to escape low-paying, part-time service industry work, you've got to have that piece of paper. And a lot of institutions are happy to give it to you, if you (or your parents, or private lenders, or the government) are willing to fork over $50,000-$200,000.
Linux Light Bulbs: Enabling IP Connectivity for Light Bulb Networks
> American Exceptionalism even has a creation myth and a pantheon of gods. It's something else entirely.

Are you referring to the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers? If so that sort of thing doesn't seem exclusive to American Exceptionalism...
Yes, there is.
https://github.com/KeepSafe/aiohttp

It's hard to write an asynchronous ORM though. Your options are either to use some existing synchronous ORM (like SQLAlchemy) in a thread pool (`loop.run_in_executor`) or use more low-level db driver:
https://github.com/aio-libs/aiopg#example-of-sqlalchemy-opti...
"There's a difference between a claim that a country is unique for some reason (everyone has one of these) versus thinking that this makes them superior or entitled."

Rationally, yes.

Psychologically, no.

The latter counts for more.
IRC is dead, long live IRC