skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a serious problem when more than half of society is denied a fair opportunity.

> Yet US has done just ok with males (white and asian) doing this stuff. Ie better than anybody else in the world.

That doesn't mean the US and others can't do much better. Think how much talent is lost - more than half of it. There's a shortage of talent in SV. There is much that needs to be done in the world.

> Is there any proof that increased diversity has any effect

I've read about a lot of evidence that more diverse groups make decisions significantly better.
This is a better list of changes from prior stable releases, rather than just the prior beta:https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/2.0/...

Read through the series of pages to understand all major changes.
A couple of quibbles with this: microscopy technology doesn't advance that quickly, certainly not doubling every few years.

A new, entirely different technology is far more likely than creeping improvements, as in semiconductors. However, these are far harder to predict.
The difference would be in the case of a simulated consciousness, I would been dead and wouldn't get to experience any of the pleasure that fake-me experiences, for making a simulated consciousness is the same as making a philosophical zombie.
> Socially acceptable? Death? You put it as some kind of social custom that we obediently follow.

Because we do. We mourn and go on, and we expect to obediently die when our time is up. Your whole comment is the reflection of that custom.

If it weren't for it, then any reasonable human would be doing everything in their power to get rid of death entirely. As a civilization we'd be probably already done, but we aren't, because almost everyone is used to death as a "natural order of things" and/or delegates ending it to a deity.

> Human beings have no right to even want to live indefinitely until they have figured out how to live the limited time we got here without fighting and killing each other, how to live and expand without reckless destruction of nature/environment, how to expand life to other worlds, planets etc etc.

Human beings have all the rights they give themselves, there's no external entity to tell us what we're allowed or not allowed to do. Maybe you want to die. Go ahead then, nobody will stop you. But I, and many others, don't. Living is better than being dead. And it doesn't mean being in conflict with limits of our planet, maybe if people lived longer than ~80 years they'd actually start thinking about the long run, since they'd have a stake in it. Part of the reason we're exploiting the planet so much is that because we're not going to be around to see the consequences.
His entire job was teaching students, so I don't give a rat's ass about what the rest of the faculty thinks if the students like him and perform well.
I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges?
That's true too. People brought "top cadres" into relative freedom, and then they destroyed the USSR against people's will.
Does it support GnuPG?
Nothing can be called "de facto legal" when hundreds of thousands of people are arrested for partaking in it each year. Prison time or not, possession charges can have serious consequences for many.
I am a software engineer, male, Asian. Somehow I can relate to the article. Although I was always one of the top students in math and science and enrolled the top university, I was both intimidated and kind of disgusted by the culture stereotypes at the beginning of my career. I had self doubts if I would ever become a good software engineer, since I was far from the stereotypes. Sometimes, I was deeply disgusted by the childishness and shallowness of the stereotypes.

I rarely play video games. (I played some in college, simply for finding bugs and backdoors so that I could win easily, not for the fun of playing itself. After one year, it became boring and I stopped.) I don't like Star Wars. I am not in particular interested in Sci-fi. I think the time can be better spent in other books. For example, the non-technical books I just finished are Madame Bovary (translated by Lydia Davis. Highly recommend), On the Move (autobiography by Oliver Sacks). I am re-reading The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Also, I don't like beer. When I go out with colleagues, I drink wine or strong liquors.

I can tell my colleagues what I like now, but it was different when I first joined the industry. I cram-watched all the Star Wars, most Star Treks, etc. I forced myself to finish some popular sci-fi novels. I drank beer when going out. It was like you are trying to fit yourself into a model that is not you. I still remember one scene during the first week of one job. All the engineers were playing Guitar Hero, loudly, when waiting for a push. They invited me, which I greatly appreciate. I said I didn't know how to play and I rarely played video games. They were astounded. One engineer said, "It is not a game. It is a life style."
A software dev team requires far more one-on-one interaction between "faculty members" than teaching does (where faculty are the ones producing the software and the students are the users).

And in any case, if someone on a dev team got significantly better numbers by bucking the trends, I would be obligated to try and understand their methods and help them gain greater acceptance. It doesn't make sense to remove someone who gets results. It makes sense to integrate them.
That's exactly the Deep Wisdom. Ask yourself - do you want to die? We'll all have your memories. Do you want your father or your mother to die, and if they already did, are you happy about it? Why were you mourning?

Death is bad, it's scary and meaningless, and we construct really complex and elaborate excuses to deal with it.
Instead of teaching at a large research school which cares more about professors obtaining grants, he should teach at a small liberal-artsy school where the professors are expected to spend more of their time actually teaching students.
If your procedures and policies within a well established team cause poor performance, then I think your pride is probable unjustified.

Mathematics is actually fascinating, but teaching and listening to math lectures is generally not interesting at all. Anyone who can teach it and keep
Students interested and have them understand the material is a gem and should be kept at all costs!
"You're right... in that we can fudge around these things with "fuzziness", but I don't think that's sufficient."

Well, it's been sufficient. That doesn't mean we can't improve on it. My point was simply that assigning types doesn't actually change things - it is still the case that every program needs to be able to interpret whatever is generated by every program you want to pipe into it, or you need some kind of translation.

'Classic case, btw: "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...". Unless we have pervasive and dependent types, how is any formalism going to know that?'

Dependent types aren't necessary for that. They might be necessary for `find ... $MIGHTBEPRINT0 | xargs $MIGHTBEDASH0`

Edited to add - or wait, you mean the resulting command built by xargs may have a type dependent on the arguments produced by find? That's... messy, yeah.
Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Conditi...

Very interesting book.
One of the main reasons you go to college is to learn how to learn. Much of what you actually learned goes out the window. What stays with you, if you've exercised it, is your ability to approach new topics and problems and find solutions to them.

So I guess what I am trying to say is that you should pick a language or technology stack and teach yourself. The resources are everywhere. Start somewhere, impress yourself with how you pick it up and then repeat the cycle by learning the next topic.
>A society that adapts to become biologically immortal will find their own ways to adapt to dealing with zeitgeists and progress.

I don't think so. That is just wishful thinking. Our current society cannot even produce leaders who are remotely capable of solving current problems. And a group of immortals, once in power, cannot be trusted to not try to remain in office indefinitely using the powers they already have. They can subtly influence society and people with their power so that they can continue in power without actually rigging the elections..
> that's how college kids talk

That wasn't my experience at all. That kind of attitude or language would have been taboo.
He should come back to Sydney!
> Up with Good! Down with Bad!

Or, in 2015, Upvote the Good! Downvote the Bad!
For the pleasure of teaching 400+ students a year who could all benefit from his instruction?
Schema for gender discussion in tech, version 3.c.ii:

1. An article is posted wherein a woman describes wanting to be in tech and not doing so due to active and passive opposition.

2. Many comments discussing how women aren't in tech because they don't want to be there.

I swear, these threads are all straight out of How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ (a book I strongly recommend; it's absolutely hi-damn-larious.)
Yep, you can choose clone my repo and host it yourself :)
Huh? I lettered in three sports, plus played in multiple musical groups and was on the quiz bowl team, and still found plenty of time to learn to program in assembly language and Forth.

(Though it is true I did very little partying.)
I would like to see the Department's response too. Hopefully, they reply with their reasons rather than attack the argument that Coward has written here.
We already have support for this in every OS, it's no different than a laptop or existing UPSs. What sucks is that to work with a generic ATX motherboard without a special header to hook into the best externally accessible bus to put it on is probably going to be USB. It's not like you would need to plug it in outside the case either, there's usually a spare USB header anyways.

But hypothetically, APC could make an ATX UPS today that would be compatible with most ATX motherboards and leverage most of their existing software and drivers to do so.
Given how the property tax structure in California massively privileges incumbent property owners over newcomers, I'm not very sympathetic to this line of argument.

Most Bay Area cities also have rather large development fees.
It's not really comparable between a dev team and the teaching position. At the very least, there are argument to be made that superstar but annoying dev can have detrimental effect on other devs. There are approximately 0 chance that an amazing professor can have negative effect on other professor's teaching ability (yes, they can, but you know what I meant and please don't get into pedantry here).

The closer comparison would be a Big 4 accounting partner (or law firm partner) that bring in revenue, is well loved by his clients. You know what would happen if the firm fires them? The clients leave with the partner. Luckily for Berkeley their clients can't leave nilly wily here.

Edit: On second reading, this was mentioned: "Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me. This is to be observed this semester, Fall 2015."

Yeah, if this was some consulting professional firm, the firm would be in big trouble already.
Open wildlife might be more accepting of any mutations(deformities) in wild animals than humans. Some study might be needed on the mortality rate of those animals or if any deformities occurred.
Longer lives would help people be more sustainable because the problems of future generations would become problems of this generation.
Right. I was skeptical in first few paragraphs, since students' teaching assessments do have their flaws. But if there was a statistically significant improvement in his students performance in later classes, then the man's doing his job.

Yes, there could still be confounding factors. He is seen as an enjoyable lecturer, and students who care about their classes enough to select the better lecturer might be better students. But still.

If you want to continue the analogy to software engineering, the modules he's producing are students, and they are meeting their specifications (later performance) quite well.
There's nothing wrong with server side Java...

Quick glance through the code doesn't reveal any major risks, actually seems to be fairly well written. Author seems to like to write a lot of static methods/utility classes rather than rely on composition using dependency injection... not exactly a modern development style but it's good enough. Author avoids needless abuse of software patterns. It'd be pretty easy to do a security audit on this code base.
He'll have more students (and therefore more total impact) at a large public school.

Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.
You can add your custom tasks, any additions/patterns can be added. That's what makes it different than just enforcing a styleguide.
You'd be making a much more rational decision if you knew whether you were actually being laid off from your current job.

Can you wait a couple of weeks until you find out whether your current company has actually laid you off? If your old employer really wants you back, it shouldn't really make a huge difference to them to wait a few weeks. On the other hand, if they're pressuring you to make a decision about coming back before you even know that you've been laid off, they'd seem to be working against your interests.

In any case, if you're currently working for that company with the bird logo, it probably won't be hard for you to find another job if they lay you off.
Ouch! Need a bigger server then. Try now.
> I wouldn't expect to play many games from this year on any computer from 2009.

I run many, many, many recently released (and not-yet-released) big-name 3D games on 5 [0] and 6 [1] year old hardware.

Console-first development has done terrible things to video game design, but it has let cheap bastards like myself get enormous mileage out of our gaming rigs.

(BTW: Cities runs juuuuuuuuust fine on my "ancient" PC. :) )

[0] Radeon HD 6950

[1] AMD Phenom II X4 955
That's basically how the existing OCP server designs that Facebook contributed worked. The difference would seem to be that the previous OCP design put the battery pack together for adjacent racks at 48V instead of just one battery on each individual server.
>because almost everyone is used to death as a "natural order of things"

It is. That you don't like it doesn't make a difference.
> We yearn to be with others like ourselves and to fit in.

The idea is that this is what "keeps people out". Surely, the flip side is true, and people are defined / made happy by the same notions.

People in the west are so far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that we've stopped caring about the basics of life. Specifically, of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#... we no longer choose a job that gives us food, shelter or safety (the first two), and instead we choose jobs based on how well it provides us with love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. That is why young people choose jobs less and less with money as the sole or even primary determinant.

If this is the case, that people are choosing professions that help them feel self-actualised or belonging, no matter what tech does, or what Public Relations, Child-care workers or predominantly female dominated occupations do, is less important that the people it attracts / already has attracted. And these same sorts of people will dominate, as this belonging and fitting in becomes increasingly entrenched, and snowballs on itself like runaway recurssion.

That seems, to me, the logical conclusion of slight biological gender differences combined with a rise up the pyramid of needs, which lessens the pressure of the former two to create cultures that trump biology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a documentary about Scandinavia's attitude to gender relations, and the whole series is brilliant, and shows that gender separation is, if not inevitable, certainly understandable.
Wow! And here I thought Greg Egan invented this [1]. Thank you so much for the reference.

[1] Greg Egan - The Jewel
That's kind of sad though, isn't it?

Sometimes I ask the question, "What would I want if I were God of Everything?"

It makes sense to have elite universities, where the people who society will shove millions of dollars in grant money all go to get educated. And if I were God of Everything, I'd want them taught by excellent, dedicated educators. Right?
I thought ARM servers might be nice on scaleway but was quite disappointed in the performance. 32bit and all disk IO over a network connection is really not a good start. Maybe that will improve when we see more ARM64 around.
This is an interestingly twisted line of thinking. RE aging vs. disease, how the two are different? Aging looks exactly like a genetic disorder that slowly kills you, the only difference being that this is the single disease we all share.

As for "death is good" vs. "death is necessary", I disagree and it looks to me that "necessary" comes out of trying to come to terms with the fact it's inevitable. You could argue in the past in the same way that diseases are necessary for various reasons, and yet we decided to cure them instead, invented antibiotics and hygiene and other medicine.

> Clearly there's a difference between a body becoming frail vs. somebody intentionally fatally injuring it.

Comparing to murder may not be the best. Try comparing to accidents. Both dying of old age and of an accident is unintentional. Yet as a society we accept the former while rejecting the latter. This is strange and IMO happens only because we know we can prevent accidents, but we don't know how to prevent aging. Yet.

We'd already know if more people cared instead of delegating the problem to deities or thinking it's Good to die because it's the Natural Order of Things.
UC Berkeley IS a large, public school.
Ok, so if 4chan is a gender-neutral site, then why is the assumption that everyone is male until proven otherwise?
For something like what you do I find that there's often a cost/benefit trade off to be made:

#1 Create a mock system that you can run automated tests against.

#2 Only do the manual tests.

Which one is the 'right' decision depends largely on the expense of creating that mock system, the complexity of the system under test, the nature of the bugs you're getting from customers and the frequency with which your software changes.

Simple, infrequently changing system? Expensive to set up a mock system? #2.

Complex, frequently changing system? #1 will help more than you realize.

>Even exploratory has written tests that basically say "explore," and they are often assigned with a particular focus.

Of course. However, exploratory shouldn't mean following a script and it shouldn't mean doing repetitive work.
Hopefully their immortality would put in perspective the usual bullshit most politicians care about. Short-term decisions and wealth-seeking is in a big way driven by both short life and short office terms.
Stuff the Identity Function Does in Rust
Great post though I'd like to add some thoughts to this bit: the professional/business world as a whole rewards and values masculine traits (competitiveness, talking highly of yourself and accomplishments, etc.)

I'd argue those are better classified as extroverted traits rather than masculine traits. Believe me, there are more than a few males that suffer from this being the dominant culture in business (or anywhere). Of course it makes sense though - introverted culture is more introspective thus not as dominating by nature. If there was ever going to be a winner, especially if the business has a focus on sales, it was going to be the one that rewards competitiveness and confidence.

I'd say the next big battle in workplace equality is going to focus on treating introversion fairly. I've seen MBTI's, a kind of personality test, used to define who a business hires and fires despite them claiming otherwise (forgetting that MBTI tests are pseudoscience). You can guess which personality types they prefer, regardless of gender. They want "rockstars".
NSA patents filed
the lil' printf seems like a lil' snarky s---.

I'm somewhat reminded of "learn programming" chatrooms, where a majority of discussions take the form of "how would I do X" "don't do X". Then that is the end of it.

The person's problem stays unsolved, the answerer gets the satisfaction of putting someone down, good times.
On a side note... We've largely solved the "key distribution" problem by storing public SSH keys in LDAP. OpenSSH 6.6+ (I think) has a AuthorizedKeysCommand that can execute a script. We have a script that does an LDAP search to pull the public keys for the incoming user.
fwiw, there's a tenure track for lecturers at UCs
I'm trying to get my hands on http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti... but it's quite expensive so I think I'll try to get the 2nd edition.

I've also quite enjoyed https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2197699M/Peter_Norton%27s_as... but you may want to repair the damage caused to the book by the Adobe DRM - it appears only one person can read the book at a time.
React jRate
> The Mathematics Department uses its privileged role in providing service teaching for undergraduates in all the sciences and social sciences to justify its size and all the trappings that go with that like funding and office space.

The above is a very important point and deserves attention in its own right. What it means is that because the requirements for graduation in a particular liberal arts major include several math courses, this gets the math department lots of headcount which translates to budget.

The key lesson for students is to try to avoid those "cattle car" classes with tons of students competing to meet a requirement that they are not interested in learning about.
That was a really bad article.
Trading Mind Traps, Avoid Them at Your Peril
> I'd say the next big battle in workplace equality is going to focus on treating introversion fairly.

What do you think such an effort would look like? One problem is that in big companies, it's frequently not enough to do good work. To get recognition, you have to _advertise_ that you're doing good work.
It is. But so is polio, and so was the smallpox. So was dying of common cold. And so is warfare, since living things are in constant state of war with each other.

We are the first beings on this planet with capability to transcend it all. We invented aspirine, got rid of smallpox, are in progress of eliminating polio, and we do our best to limit war and destructive competition. We're the first living things to decide what's Good and what's Bad, and we know that natural order of things is not Good, it's just the default.
Did you swap the video card? The 2009 iMac didn't come with a Radeon 5850.
Ah, I didn't know that it was possible to show deleted posts (its been awhile since I looked at my preferences, I guess). Judging by the grammar, word choice and username I'd suspect that the author is not a native English-speaker.

I agree that in this case it doesn't really add much to the conversation, although I am a bit more forgiving if the author is indeed not a native English speaker.

I'm going to keep showdead on. There have been a number of cases in which I've seen comments moderated to oblivion where, from the quotes in child comments, I think that they were probably worth reading.

(Amusingly, HN has not let me post this for several hours, since I'm 'posting too fast')
Sure. But this is still all speculation, and it strikes me as harmful to portray it as a reality.