skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One issue with affirmative action which rarely gets addressed: What is the definition of a certain race anyway?

If someone is from two black parents, fine, they're black. But what if one parent was black and one was white, are they black? Are their children black? What about their children's children? Are we going to spin out genetic testing, color cards, or start looking at people's family tree to decide eligibility?

Honestly I think the US has the right idea, but has the wrong implementation.

People who are from disadvantaged households SHOULD be given a leg up. They don't get the expensive tutors, and their parents might have to work longer hours, they cannot afford that trip to Europe the rich kid wrote their essay about, and their home life could be a lot more disruptive.

And the nice "perk" of discriminating based on household income and or poverty is: A lot of minorities will benefit because they're already in that group.

It also solves another issue we're seeing: Second generation kids of minorities whose parents are college educated and or professionals. The affirmative action program is designed to give kids with a disadvantage a more fair shake, but it is being used by minority kids who are by all definitions from middle class or from affluent households even more of an advantage, which is stealing spots from poor minority kids that actually need it!

So I would like to see affirmative action based on race scrapped. Base it on income. It will still largely benefit minority applicants, but we won't have to answer awkward questions like "how white is too white to be a minority?"
Motherboard seems to think this is a hoax[1].

In sum:

* Only one key, the Original Key, is actually known to be associated with Satoshi.

* The Wired and Gizmodo Keys that supposedly lead back to Satoshi weren’t previously known to be linked to Satoshi, and their 2008 creation date could have been faked.

* Both keys use a longer and less-common key size than the Original Key.

* Both keys use a list of cipher-suites that don’t match up to the Original Key, and weren’t added to GPG until 2009.

* The Wired key was retroactively added to a 2008 blogpost sometime between 2012 and 2014, as noted in its story.

* A core Bitcoin developer who’s been involved from nearly the beginning looked back at 2011 chatlogs referring to “fake” Satoshi keys on keyservers, and found no reference to either the Gizmodo or Wired keys. He thinks that those keys weren’t yet uploaded to the keyserver in 2011.

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/satoshis-pgp-keys-are-proba...
Kickstarter hires reporter to probe startup that collapsed after raising $3.4M
Anecdata, or how McKinsey’s story became Sheryl Sandberg’s fact
PM me with your address (instructions are in my "about" field). I'm waiting on AT&T to unlock it (hopefully only 2-3 more days), and then I'll send it on. If they can't unlock it, I'll let you know (would be a bummer)
I'm currently starting a new project in C++, because various logistics conspire together to make that the ideal choice. If that weren't the case, well, I personally do not like C++ much, though sticking with C++11 style over older C++ paradigms seems like an improvement.

Just picking a low-level systems language for my own fun and edification, I'd still learn C because it is so ubiquitous, but I for one hope that something more like Rust is the future.
That has nothing to do with this issue.
fair enough. the reason why there were so many numbers was lazyness, i just copied the R output directly.
Submitting this because HN likes puzzles, although the public GCHQ puzzles tend to be easy.

I think they probably have an internal xmas quiz, and I think that would be a lot harder. They should probably start releasing those on their website. They could at least release last year's quiz this year.
Maybe not if North Americans are uploading more then downloading ;)
It's just incredibly young at this point, and still in a phase where making breaking changes for the sake of the language vision is acceptable. Swift has been in the same boat. I'm sure that will change in the near future. Luckily both languages have great compilers that catch backwards-incompatible issues.
did not know. interesting!
The metric here is number of pickups. Which is flawed for several reasons: If Ubers spend disproprotionately less time seeking rides, then the street-vehicle use is lower even if the number of pickups is greater. Similar caveats for distance, and also for rides which exit manhattan core quickly (e.g. to new jersey/outer boroughs)
I'm really excited about this, because it gives us another option that isn't constrained by specific platforms. I know there are complaints left and right, but we have to bear in mind it's only just been released, Microsoft is competent enough to fix the warts. Hopefully they're quickly responsive during these crucial moments of the apps release. I'm going to install Cortana and leave it on my phone even if I have to avoid using "her" for a little while. Though I hope that's not the case.
While true, this is irrelevant.

Things like affirmative action do not exist as revenge or compensation for some past act, they are there to undo some of the still present damage from those acts.
You are usually not legally allowed to sell stock from exercised options to anyone without explicit permission from the company. It has nothing to do with ROFR.
Why Does the FBI Keep Arresting Asian-American Scientists?
Well, that's that then; now I just need a Rust project and I'll start learning it. (I'm only an early adopter of languages, not a bleeding-edge adopter.)
A quote from the article of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor:

"The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

The salient part being, "further the interest approved today". The U.S. has a long history of dealing with nonwhite in pernicious ways. Part of the remedy has been affirmative action. The claim that affirmative action is no longer necessary because we are all equal is being called into question. If the outcomes of banning affirmative action are worse, in terms of racial disparity, then the aforementioned claim can be called into question.

The analysis is not ludicrous.
Yeah it's a tough call what to do. I remember that the Reddit client Alien Blue did a pretty good job of free/paid separation.
I see this topic discussed all the time, not rarely.
> there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English.

We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.
Plus-sized models in advertising linked to rising obesity rates: AMA Study
I never understood why countries do not impose huge taxes on money moving in and out of tax havens. I guess there is always another route you can take to disguise the origin.
The things done specially against African-Americans in particular (or non-whites in general) in the US aren't limited to (or even limited to the parts of the US which practiced), and also aren't all as distant in time as, slavery.
A lot of places expect this, and my observation is that it fuels even more twisted behavior by the companies. For example, in Academia, it's not uncommon to sue over a failed tenure case. I know of a colleague who was terminated the year before tenure review, because (from what I gather from scattered conversations) his case was expected to be controversial, and it was much easier to fire him now, where the process is not well-defined and not transparent, instead of going through the whole process and having everything scrutinized in courts.
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
Eh, these days it's pretty easy to translate technical ideas between languages, so I doubt major breakthroughs are confined to the language they're discovered in. I think there probably is some siloing of more subtle cultural artifacts, but linguistic context of those artifacts may be part of why they're so valuable.

This is a just a vague opinion, but I think different languages use really different idioms and concepts about how the world works. Having access to those idioms and concepts may have value in enabling lateral thinking. Someone with a slightly different conceptual toolset might approach a philosophical, political, or even technical problem in a different way and find new of useful solutions.
Define "systems programming" (or "systems programmer").

Google's definition seems to be "building large systems". For the types of large systems Google wants to build, Go works very well.

But others define it as "building operating systems". Go is horrible for that because of garbage collection and inability to directly access the hardware.
It has as much to do as bitwize's comment.
So what is the IoM status? Is it a separate country?

Wikipedia says its a Crown dependency - how is that different than being part of the UK?

I would love to hear more -- because how can IoM avoid Jersey's fate?
Tea (1999)
C4: An opensource creative coding framework for iOS
Yes indeed. And that's only the current percent in prison (something like 0.9%) over 3% have been to prison. If you start counting the number of people accused of crimes, but later exonerated, like this guy, it's probably pretty large.
Didn't see much of the Flux stuff explained.
Ask HN: What programming blogs should I be reading?
That's really cool! I like that. It's nice to see that a platform like Movable Type has had this feature right off the bat for such a long time.

The main reason that we decided to build SpudPress this way, is that you can more or less take your existing WordPress site and instantly make it static.

In contrary to Jeff's Movable Type blog we're taking full advantage of the static pages to host the entire site on a CDN + handle asset cache validation automatically.
>they are there to undo some of the still present damage from those acts.

In which case income/wealth/SES are the better metrics, as they ensure those who are damaged get help instead of relying on some other measure as a proxy for damage.
Generally when discussing impostor syndrome, one of the major fears is of being "found out", and in the case of engineering, "fired in disgrace and drummed out of the field, never to have a job in it again". That's not narcissism. It's a legitimate fear. It may not be a fear grounded in reality, but it's a legitimate fear.
>I have written an advice/career book...

You didn't mention 'why' you wrote this book. Was there a particular goal in mind? We're you trying to help a specific type of person?

You might find some useful take-aways from Tim Ferriss on the subject of publishing> http://fourhourworkweek.com/tag/self-publishing/
So does this mean the Queen is still the absolute ruler of some random bits of real estate?

I always thought that the Queen was reduced to a figurehead status.
You are correct according to the news reports I read. See 6th paragraph of this Reuters article for example:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-divestiture-idUSKBN0...
> If the AI created the tracks, why does the company own the copyright

Uh, do you think there's a sentient being here? Its just a relatively simple algorithm here (at least compared to sci-fi style AI), the same kind of thing that decides how to autofix colors in photos or do a transform in photoshop.

Dynamic music generation has been a thing since at least the 80s. I think I had an Apple// program that did this.

>works created by a non-human are not subject to U.S. copyright

I'd like to see you prove some silly music generator is on the equal footing of a living and intelligent animal to any court. I can't imagine you not being laughed out of courtroom.
But if you're worried about that amount of memory consumption, why are you using Java? If you need that much control over memory, Java may not be the language for you.

Ditto if you're worried about the performance hit from cache misses.
Better title, "Imposter Syndrome at Google (or X): Not being good enough is probably all in your head."
Hopefully smart people working in this area can learn to regrow them from stem cells, so once a tooth cannot be repaired any longer, it can be popped out and a new can grow in your gum in its place.
That's not how I interpret parent's comment.
Went to install it on Android until I saw the list of permissions:

- Device & app history
- Identity
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Location
- SMS
- Phone
- Photos/Media/Files
- Microphone
- WiFi connection information
- Bluetooth connection information
- Device ID & call information

Wow!
This is reason enough for me to buy this, combined with the Gigabit Ethernet on the Pine64+ version

Gonna wait till the Kickstarter is over though
I agree entirely on the 'base affirmative action on income' thing. Class/income inequality is the biggest issue there is today, and something to aims to fix that rather than a meaningless race or gender quota would be fantastic.

Might also slowly start getting rid of the overly abudant trust fund kids found in most high end professions, the kinds who seemingly get jobs and money simply because their parents were born into the same.
Some countries do that. For example in Portugal the yearly tax on real estate is around 0.3% of the price of the house/apartment but if the owner is a country based in a tax haven (and that include countries in the Grey area like Hong Kong), then the tax rate is 7.5%.
Not really, until you have scale. It costs a lot of time/effort/money to maintain multiple offices. There is lots of waste as communications break down. You end up spending on flights/hotels just to get people on the same page. This is not to say it cannot be done, just that it takes more directed effort, which not all employees have or care for.

At larger scale, it makes a LOT of sense and is done regularly.

Some times, it can be a hiring DISadvantage, as candidates run away from jobs where they need to wake up in the early hours for a conference call and also need to jump on conference calls at 11pm.

I do this currently, we have a dev team in the Ukraine. It is worth it price-wise, but the cost not accounted for is my personal time, i'm often on conference calls during kids' bedtime story telling.
The output is interesting... decent enough for an ambient background track! An interesting Version 2 would be a way to construct a song for a particular video (perhaps ingesting the Adobe Premiere project file)... Making sure the downbeats are synchronized to visual cuts, being able to switch moods when the video calls for it, and perhaps even tweaking the video timing to match the rhythm (a Premiere plugin could allow the editor to specify an approximate end time for a clip, and Jukedeck could tweak the length to be an exact number of beats).
"If I had to take a guess, I would be scared if anything less than 15 JavaScript frameworks got released last night."

- Got a nice chuckle out of that.
As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key.

Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving racial outcomes, getting people into education that improves their lifetime outcomes.

It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it. http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine... has a good summation of this argument.

I don't think it is really enough to make every college have the right racial mix, if what comes out the other end is a graduate pool that divides along not racial lines, but course lines. If Asians and Whites dominate the degrees that pay well, and Blacks and Hispanics the lesser degrees, we'll be left with a population that is educated, sure, but likely in more debt without much improvement in earnings potential. That hardly seems like a great outcome to me, and seems the complete opposite of what the goal should be.
More a solution in search of a problem
Do you really think so? What are some of the best internet apps?

I think a native app will always give a better experience because they can always just contain a browser view (it's basically a superset). Plus native code will always be more efficient and in mobile, that matters.
The Quartz guide to bad data
Amazon paid for my entire move (Europe to SF) without me having to incur any expenses beyond the taxi to and from the airports.
Google Chatbot Takes Over as IT Helpdesk
KDE Plasma 5.5 Extended Review: New Features and Improvements
I've thought about this as some kind of future tech thing, wherein instead of braces, everyone just gets a full set of perfect teeth, possibly even just one long gap-less tooth for top and bottom with a standard set of surfaces. That way, no more flossing and much less chance of getting food stuck in places and causing problems.
A stick figure guide to AES Encryption – ELI5
Giving this a shot because I've always liked Windows Phone as a different experience from iOS and Android. I'm on a 5s with iOS 9.

Maybe the cortana servers are over loaded, but none of my questions are even being registered. All that happens is the app just keeps showing recommended news articles.

Finally got it to recognize a weather question. But I have headphones plugged in and somehow the app plays through the iPhone speakers instead of my headphones. I didn't even think that was possible.

Even speaking loudly and succinctly, the voice recognition only catches parts of a sentence or starts searching after only getting a single word like "what" or "who".

Gonna pass on this for now.
The article is not about hobbies, it is about art.
> It's sad though that Esperanto or one of the other artificial languages isn't more popular.

afaik for a non-Romance speaker, Esperanto is a wasted effort because it's as difficult to learn as any of the real European languages. Esperanto isn't as culturally-neutral as claimed.
any way one can save the animation?
Yeah, I did this... I mined 100BTC Solo on my CPU right around the time it first came out. Then it wasn't even worth $1. Multiple formats/rebuilds later it's worth over $1K/btc (yes that was an artificially inflated price, I know). sigh I could be student-debt free but it wasn't worth it for me to hold on to at the time...
> It sounds like the author wants to turn Go into Java

Go is already a Java. It's just that by and large it's an old Java, 1.0~1.1 style. Slightly better in some ways (local type inference), slightly worse in others (more magical builtins).

> Generics weren't left out because of oversight or accident, that was a conscious decision.

So were they in Java 1.0. Or C# 1.0 for that matter. Though for the latter it was because of time constraints, they were never under any illusion that they should do without.
It's a done deal at this point but I think this is a mistake. Observables would have interesting uses other than in bindable UIs, such as making database interfaces where fields are bound directly to objects.
How else would a voice activated personal assistant work?
I looked at the graphs earlier and couldn't understand them. Can a stats wizard please help me understand how significant the difference between ban and no-ban are?
Their stack is starting to look good, at least on paper.

I'm particularly interested in Telegraf. We're using Prometheus for data collection and monitoring right now, and collection system is definitely the weakest part.
So pay taxes on the income, it's still better than not having the income. If you are attempting nonprofit status, donations are less of a red flag than advertising.

But I don't see what that has to do with VAT, which you brought up.
Thanks, and totally understandable. I'm still considering what to offer in a more affordable plan for these types of low-usage/low-traffic sites. Would you be opposed to a plan that limited based on usage (the number of commits, which our service triggers builds/deploys/etc...)?
If You Had a Choice, Would You Buy Your Brand of IT?
In the light of this news I'd expect further resistance to end-to-end encryption from law enforcement. Considering that one leading Presidential candidate currently enjoys strong support for a blanket ban on entry to the US by adherents to a particular religion, it doesn't seem so far fetched to imagine that use of secure communication by private individuals might come to be considered as probable cause to believe that a criminal conspiracy is taking place.

While that outcome would be pendant to an unknowable election result a year from now, it's hard to ignore the fact that encryption has become an equalizing factor for would-be terrorists, and that mass surveillance/metadata examination is not as effective as we'd hope (in this case it failed to throw up a red flag on international communication between the US and Saudi Arabia (where there's an elevated probability of religious extremism) at a time when the program was still in full swing, as far as we know and most people hadn't heard of Edward Snowden.

Internet firms ignore these political considerations at their peril, as any secure channel could conceivably become a nexus for terrorist communication, and retroactive discovery could bring severe legal or political consequences. I don't think it's the responsibility of the tech industry to help governments discover, monitor, or interrupt terrorism, but politically the tech industry is a soft target compared to, say, the arms manufacturing industry.
http://basho.com/basho-data-platform/
The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this.

The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” But that decision was only 12 years ago, and the data suggests that we’re still a long way from having proportional minority representation on large public college campuses.

Supposedly AA and similar programs were supposed to solve this problem, and colleges have been engaging in them for many years. At what point can we conclude that perhaps goals like getting a critical mass of minority students will simply not be effective, and conclude that the real problem lies elsewhere (and out of the control of college)?
How else do you expect your virtual assistant to assist?
> Why is that a problem specific to capitalism?

Libertarians argue against regulations, which are restrictions in place ahead of time. I find it disturbing that you are oblivious to that, even though you're responding to a comment which mentions air quality as an issue. As it stands, government regulations limit air pollution. Libertarians would remove those regulations and move the onus onto individuals to prove their cases in court.

> What system of justice prevents everything up front?

Where did I say 'everything'? This is exactly what I mean by libertarianism has no shades of gray.

> Markets are one big shade of gray.

'Unpredictability' is not the gray we're talking about here.