skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding the 2013 study on British/working-class New York accents: Actually I believe your description exactly matches the one in the article, which says, participants had "higher false memory rate for the speaker with a working class accent," suggesting they thought that voice was making a mistake, whereas with the British voice they thought it wasn't a mistake and that "the Brit must have said what he meant."

In general, there are two effects at work. One is stereotypes: cultural bias, which led the student in Rubin and Babel's studies to just assume that they won't understand the accent of a Chinese looking professor. Another cultural effect is that high-prestige accents like the British one in Lev-Ari study, are held more reliable.
The second effect is cognitive: we have a tendency to avoid actually listening and paying attention to difficult stimuli, in this case, foreign accents.

These effects are not mutually exclusive. And they also overlap. Stereotypes are partly born out of lazy brains. But they also shape how our brains interprets the world.
Source code: https://github.com/moroshko/sliding-puzzle
How does one force the computer to watch video in h.264 please?
They didn't release the multi-machine version of TensorFlow. They said they're still working on it and will release it when it's ready.
I hope you are right. It really lowers the quality of life for all neighbors when a house or apartment is instead used as a hotel-like business. Especially in high-tourist areas, most residents don't want to live right next to a revolving door of temporary guests.
Actually one of the guiding principles of Go's design is that syntax is anything but superficial. It affects nearly all aspects of your design. Everything from the parser to the compiler to the stdlib. Syntax is the UI/UX of your language. Dismissing syntax as superficial is a mistake.
SeaWorld to phase out killer whale display in San Diego after 2017
As someone who has gone through the IR1/CR1 process, yeah the entire thing is fucked.

- The forms themselves are poorly designed (needlessly complex, come with misleading/incomplete instructions, tons of "gotchas," etc). Between me and my wife we have three degrees and a masters, are native English speakers, yet we still had to Google to figure things out.

- Instead of having one form, they have three, and you cannot submit the latter two until the proceeding one is accepted (even if they're completely independant). They don't actually check the proceeding forms until the visa is complete (we know that because they flagged something months later).

- Paying fees is a nightmare.

- Even their embassies know how terrible it all is. They often hold workshops for people going through the process and are pretty frank about the bureaucracy. They describe the NVC as a "blackhole" (where things often get lost/delayed/mistakenly rejected).

Digitalisation is useful but the US's house is in such disarray that it seems like the tip of the iceberg. I legitimately believe that the US uses bureaucracy and delays as a way to discourage people from applying for visas and or push visas into the next calendar year. It is the only explanation that makes sense.

To be honest the entire US visa process could be done, end to end, in one day if they wished (ex. background check). And in fact US embassies in exceptional circumstances actually do accomplish the entire visa in 24-48 hours (yes, even for immigration visa).
So clearly you don't have a problem with a company intentionally breaking rules because they stand to profit, regardless of any fine they may have to pay?
Sure, China had plenty of reasons for falling behind. But, objectively trade is not a state level activity. If they where capable of building long range craft then individuals would have used long range sea trade to make money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage If nothing else, gold was clearly valuable in China.

Fortifications where generally less useful as you could just send your Army around them. Or as was often the case give up and join the 'winner'. But, again this attitude significantly harmed advancement.

Eastern armor also lagged behind. 'Proofing' armor in the west and tameshi gusoku in the east allows for direct comparison.

Something as 'simple' as Algebra was clearly useful, but again imported.

Photography demonstrated China's lagging in terms of chemistry.

That said, China did have an clear advantage in luxury goods. But calling it superior is objectively false, at best it was different.

PS: Not to mention the Industrial revolution started in ~1760.
Agreed. They kind of have the platform - moving from a couple of night rental to a slightly longer term (weekly, monthly terms) potentially couldn't be too much of stretch should they want to go there.

But goodness me, the rental market does need an overhaul!
Ask HN: What are you doing to stay motivated at work?
Just not feeling motivated here... might be time to leave.
> I wonder if you consider what a bureaucratic nightmare this would be to administer?

Except that minimum salary thresholds for H1B's are already set (for each region). We're talking about just increasing these thresholds (e.g. 55K --> 85K and so on...).
> You based a business decision to switch language on "boredom"?

Not just boredom but Java induced boredom. In case of Java boredom is symptom not the essence.
Yep. That's the future.

The crux is figuring out how retain the good aspects of the existing system (well-considered and appropriate peer review, approximate ranking by importance) and getting enough traction to allow it to take off.
Alan Kay talks about Gezira, a library built with Nile (and the motivation for making Nile, althoug Nile is much more general purpose). There's a JS version of Nile/Gezira which was used for Brett Victor's demonstrations, which can be found here [1]

The main Nile compiler here is written in Maru, a programming language of Ian Piumata's which is another awesome project on it's own. It's essentially a Lisp where you can define how the evaluator behaves for a given type.[2] The version of Maru used is included in the Nile repo though. It can be built with GCC or MinGW. The compiler translates Nile to either Maru or C code.

There's a squeak version which can be found at [3]

And also a Haskell vector library which exposes a similar interface to Cairo, but is modeled as Gezira under the hood (used for purely functional image generation). Although this implementation is function based and doesn't really provide a proper streaming abstraction as provided by Nile. [4]

[1]: https://github.com/damelang/gezira/tree/master/js

[2]: http://piumarta.com/software/maru/

[3]: http://tinlizzie.org/updates/exploratory/packages/

[4]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/Rasterific
> Having now developed 30 micro-services for Go, which all utilise channels and thus run much faster than any other language I used is just amazing.

Any public code examples ?
Isn't it pedantry when a person links to Wikipedia and insists on using the meanings therein?
I think that's the right attitude. The point is to communicate clearly and in a powerful manner—for everyone. You can have the most Native accent and yet communicate poorly. Or you can have a foreign accent but work on aspects of it to communicate clearly. At the same time, Native speakers, too, should work on their comprehension skills, especially in increasingly diverse societies.

Haters gonna hate. But you don't even need them. If you speak clearly and proudly, those who need to understand, will.
Report Shows Most Apps Have Critical Vulnerabilities
>Other languages like JS, Ruby, and Python have a big fixation on figuring out the prettiest syntax for stuff (JS promises and chaining etc, "Pythonicness", and Ruby's incessant cuteness). In Go, you can't really make things pretty, so you just bang out code.

So, just like VB then?
3 indicted over JPMorgan hacking
>I hope that technologists are also students of history.

Not in the good ol' USA they aren't. This is precisely why I cringe every time I hear the usual anti-intellectual rant about how STEM fields are the only thing worth funding.

If you're serious about creating benevolent technology, you must necessarily be in favor of funding the humanities.
I think you're overstating it slightly. "Easy" is not the word I'd choose to use.

I too decided not to get a lawyer. It went fine. But it was not "easy" it was long, painful, and trivial to make an error (the paperwork is extremely poorly designed, we used online guides instead of the official instructions to avoid tons of gotchas, in particular with the financials).

People just need to be extremely careful without a lawyer. It isn't "easy" but it isn't so hard that you NEED a lawyer either (which could cost thousands).
I like this :)

20 year olds are full of expectations about the world, and your place in it. If you can re-read those expectations and they chime with you, great -- go do it.

If they don't ring true (the relationships stuff) then you've grown older and wiser. Or just grown different, perhaps.
It's never been "game over" in the past. History has shown that oppression of the masses is usually the forerunner to a revolution. Why would be any different this time around?

(I'm not advocating revolt as a solution; just questioning the validity of the idea that the 'slave class' have no way to change things.)
I have had a similar experience working with financial engineers and traders turned programmers (I am a programmer). They don't seem to value software the same way as programmers. They seem to view their ideas as the most important aspect of their work, and writing software is only a way of expressing their ideas. The problem with this is that if you don't feel that their are non purely functional requirements worthy of your time, pretty soon your code base will be impossible to work on.

Ive seen some bad stuff, including thousand line methods and production software whose source code is nowhere to be found. But the biggest forehead slap that I think I've encountered is when working on an automated trading system. I had just started working on the system when the original trader who had developed the algo quit. I saw him after work at a bar a couple weeks later and made some comment about how difficult it was to work on that codebase. He said that he made some of the trading logic purposefully difficult to understand so that it would be difficult for someone to read the code, get a job elsewhere, and replicate his work for a different company. Thats an insane way to write software. It assumes that all of the value is in the idea itself (and this algo was hardly rocket science by the way) rather than in a functional piece of software that is easy to modify and debug.
Here's a more interesting demo of Gezira: http://tinlizzie.org/~bert/Gezira.ogv
I wonder if the stupid idea of opening websites within the crapppy mobile app also put out users.
H-1B visa is a work visa and as such is not employer specific. Once you are in the US with one employer, it is very easy for you to switch companies. The new company also has to file a petition, you don't go through the lottery process (since you already have the visa). USCIS just reviews your case and approves your petition with the new employer. It takes about 4-6 weeks, but it is not too much of a hassle.
Source: On an H-1B visa and have switched employers.
Top 20 Things to do with a Laminator
It became Byzantium?
ad hominem attack much ?

Sure - you should have told the British to stay the fuck away from the Indian subcontinent.
>>Same laptop runs Linux fine so unlikely hardware issue.

That literally means nothing. You can have CPUs which run Prime95 for days without fail and then die after running a proper memtest.
Responsive or Mobile site
CB Insights raises $10M and launches a bot for making email introductions
The ultimate growth hacking sourcebook
Unsupervised learning is broad set of techniques that seek to infer structure from data, which is pretty fundamentally different from hypothesis testing. Where a hypothesis test asks "is <assertion> true about the structure in this data?", unsupervised techniques ask "is there any structure in this data?"
The medical exams are a really odd requirement. You can live on an H1-B for 10 years, but they still have to check if you cough funny before granting a greencard.
A contract is not a rule, it is an agreement between two parties. A good contract spells out the penalties for what happens when one party doesn't adhere to the terms. It's up to both parties to make sure those penalties are sufficient to make themselves whole in the case that happens.

If at any time the penalties are less than the cost of adhering to the terms of the contract, it's only rational to break the contract and pay the penalty.

Let's say you had an employment contract where you get paid $100k/year, but if you leave before 5 years, you have to pay a $50k penalty. 3 years in, you get a job offer for $500k/year. Are you going to stick to the contract because you need to obey "the rules", or are you going to pay $50k and take the much higher paying job?
just to add one point from (prospective) employee PoV: low salaries ;)

How common are 150-200K+ base salaries (even in Canadian dollars) among non-manager engineering staff?

Places like Toronto remind me many European places: low salaries, high cost of living (even in absolute numbers, compared to USA).
Show HN: The Who and Why of the Web – Q&A Format on Web Technologies and Culture
Hey Hackernews! I wrote a small rambling piece on my 'Why' of the web, and the assumed roles we play when we use the web, and how we can subvert these roles and use the web in our own prescribed way.

http://blog.higg.so/2015/11/08//the-why-of-the-web/

It talks about the noise surrounding tech startups and disregards 'The What' which tech startups so feverishly try to answer.

'Why' tends to go deeper, and it's better to question our why than look at the What. Feel free to give constructive feedback on my post, and let me know your why, if you have any?

-Enginnr
Amen. I bought four of the new Dell XPS 13s for work. The three from the MS Store are fantastic; the one from Dell took several hours just to make it useable.
> Eventually, the publisher won’t need a programmer...

Yes, they will need 5 ;)
As someone who has literally lived in AirBnB apartments for a bit over a year now, these situations tend to work out well for me. Most of my stays have been with people who manage a number of apartments on AirBnB to make their living, whether via owning the building, or, more often, by subletting a bunch if apartments (legally or illegally).

Making no comment on the effect of such operations on housing costs or other such matters, AirBnB, like Uber, has succeeded by making a uniquely good user experience, even as they flout regulations and the law in general.
Basic Video Surveillance with the Raspberry Pi
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter Issue 156
Yes. As a married, white, heterosexual male, being seen having a dinner alone with a single female (or even lunch) would be enough to cause questions from friends. So it's not worth it.

And I'm no one, with no fame or high position.
Very relevant to the hacker community of course
Only start a company if you're willing to spend the next decade working on it
I usually describe it as "taking trust that keeps the society together and burning it to generate dollars".
Technical Deep Dive: What it’s like to build at scale in the public sector
I'm not insulted, but I find them tasteless and distracting. Other humor would probably fit better.
This is correct, however you also have to look at the spirit of the agreement overall. In cases like this, penalty amounts are often selected to be of an amount that discourages unreasonable behavior, enforceable (and by extension payable by the other party), and with the idea that it would be an exception event, not a continuous event.

To use a sort of residential analogy, if you have a wild party and your carpets get stained from spilled drinks and dirty shoes, you can probably give them a good cleaning and they'll be almost like before, no noticeable wear unless you really look for it. Overall, the carpet would still be good for its expected lifetime of say 10 years. But, do that every weekend and the carpet will need to be replaced within a year.

Property rental agreements (and prices) have all kinds of assumptions in them. If the agreement is based on the idea of one tenant moving in, staying for a bit, maybe having family over during the holidays, and then moving out it would be structured a lot differently than a tenant who wants to be a junior landlord.
Apple music on Android release Date leaked
I looked around briefly, but couldn't find anything specific on how this works; I found mostly other articles about this video and pictures of other test flights.

Is anyone familiar with how this is powered, how safe it's likely to be, and how close to production it really is?

Homepage: http://jetpackaviation.com/
I'm so glad you asked, I have never really though about it before. I think it all depends on the offer. I can think of a situation where a benevolent employer might offer somebody a price they dont see they are worth and not allow them to negotiate, but I would imagine there are fewer of these benevolent good samaritans as there would be people trying to justify low salaries on things like equality when the distribution of talent may not be equally uniform.

If I was offered a no-negotiation offer that I felt was low, I would ask for what was fair for what I was worth and if that means I'm breaking the rules then we really arent going to get along.
If you weren't hanging out with these grandmas on Sunday, you messed up
Could Iran be a software growth market?
Editing, in the journal sense of the word (finding good referees, hounding them to get reports back, responding to authors, evaluating revisions, etc.) takes a lot of work and time.

I wouldn't be willing to do an editor's job for free (unless underwritten by another employer, as I am for peer review), and I wouldn't expect anyone else to do so either.

Publishing costs are far, far lower than they used to be, but good proofreading and style-guide checking still takes time too.
Price is a supply demand measure. Companies are saying there is a supply issue, while not paying up. Is it really a supply issue?

This would solve that.
But what if your start up is a Mongolian restaurant, and what you really need is a cook skilled in traditional Mongolian cuisine? It's completely plausible that such a candidate can only be found in Mongolia, but what startup restaurant can afford to pay a cook $100k ?
Legally you may be right, but it's still dishonest to enter into an agreement with the intention of immediately breaking it. It might come back to bite him, too. If any of those landlords report him to a monitoring service, he'll have a hard time renting anything ever again. As well he should.

But if you really think it's OK, let's make that face-punching deal. Just don't be too surprised when I show up wearing spiked brass knuckles - you didn't say anything about that in the contract, so it's OK, right?
What makes tech tycoons so fascinating to the makers of modern cinema?
I assume was something like acid since it released a liquid into the cavity.
Well, good for you. Maybe not so good for the neighbors in those apartments. They moved in not expecting a revolving door of strangers and late-night partiers. There's rules for zoning things, for a reason.
Comcast customer data leaked online – Comcast insists it’s not their fault
I have experience of developing large software systems for both government and corporations, in the UK.

Large IT systems fail in many ways, small and large and I don't think it's possible to isolate a single root cause but I do have one observation which I think is often overlooked.

When a company like Amazon or Google release a new service or a new product, they generally have the luxury of choosing which customer requirements they want to meet. The more customers they satisfy, the more customers they can hope to win.

This freedom means that these companies can follow the common trajectory of releasing a simple realization of their product which is then honed by iteration. But companies contracted to produce government and corporate systems rarely have this freedom in my experience, but for different reasons.

In the case of government systems it is politically (and often morally) unacceptable to exclude specific classes of end users from a system; the requirement to make a system available to nearly 100% of possible users while at the same time catering for the labyrinthine complexities of local and national government is simply very difficult.

In corporate environments, there is a similar pressure to meet 100% of customer needs, but in this case the users are often staff and though the problem is similar at a technical level, the source of the pressure is different:

Google is a large corporation, and when it releases a product like Gmail, users can choose to use it, or not: they can't singly demand changes, so Google has the power to stand up to users and, in short, be a good custodian of the user experience.

When developing software for corporate customers, this relationship is inverted, and very often, every wrinkle in every corporate business process is expected to be modelled in the software. As a contractor, you know you could produce better software for the corporation, if they were willing to adapt some of their processes in the same way customer adapt their behaviour to using Gmail, but they have the power.

The result is the same in both cases: excess complexity.
Good point, I haven't really thought the Python example through. I can't find a quick fix now, so I leave it as an illustrative code (even that failing code is an inferior version of the macro, so...).
Canadian IT consultant here, and I don't even look at opportunities in the US anymore. I used to respond to the recruiters with "Do you know I live in Canada", and the conversation would end (I think most of them don't know Canada is not a State). Now I just delete them from my inbox. It's next to impossible to cross the border for work as an independent. Big IT still sends resources across for projects, but I haven't met any independents in years who have worked down south.
It is quite possible to find medium-term accomodation on AirBnB, priced by the month. It seems that everything is there but compliance with housing and tenancy laws, which are likely even more complex than the hotel regulations they prefer to ignore.
I don't think that's obvious, and my experience is the opposite. Domain specific languages make for pretty example code, but tend to lose some of the flexibility of the underlying general purpose language, which can cause you trouble later on when you want to feed the output of one command into another, do a slight tweak to the input format, or just about anything the author of the DSL didn't anticipate.

Libraries tend to be more composable, and can be used with other libraries. Mashing together two DSLs can be close to impossible.
More please! I have just been introducing my daughter to the old-school Moog synths. Some of these new modules are pretty crazy, all analog or digital/analog hybrids, doing everything the designers can think of to cram into a module. Pretty inspiring for tinkerers.
Same experience here. There are basic stuff that can't be approved by a junior tester. For example, when the operating system asks you to select an application by default but when you approve the action an error appears saying that you need to go the control panel...
The title doesn’t seem to totally match the content of what SeaWorld has said.

There are some open questions about what the announcement actually means, but it’s possible they’re just changing the show in San Diego somehow… they don’t actually say. It’s also possible they’re not going to do a bunch of trained tricks on a schedule, which would be good, but I’d like them to explicitly state that.

It’s not like the animals are being released. They’re building a new, larger and fanicer tank at the moment.