skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a better response might be to say, depending on how strongly you evaluate the evidence, "Gee, my personal opinion about this might need to be revised or given less weight in light of broader trends and evidence."

For example, bias against black-sounding names is a real thing. It doesn't really matter if you personally have seen it, or if you think you haven't seen it. It's still real and quantifiable.

Most of us should continue to be skeptical that statistical analyses about these things must be carried out robustly and stand up to statistical grokking ... but conditional on that, believe the data and not your gut.
Most databases do have a way to force the index. See for example the MySQL way of doing it: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/index-hints.html . You probably already know this but I mention it in case someone else does not.
Somewhat related, a physics talk by Susskind about some interesting links between the inside of a black hole and (quantum) computational complexity. The complexity part starts at 20:00. He works with Scott Aaronson on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuY4RMehdP8
I've found that they are great fun to play with groups of people, particularly when it is a group of people that remember playing the games when they were new.

I, like you, have been mostly disappointed when it comes to playing them alone.
Counterpoint (from my blog):

http://forwardscattering.org/post/7

http://forwardscattering.org/post/14

In summary i don't think AIT offers an absolute measure of complexity, due to having to choose the abstract machine.

Not to say the ideas aren't interesting, and that this isn't a nice article, from one of the main figures in the field.
Bjarne Stroustrup: background for concepts and C++17
Taking turns with my son, playing Super Mario World on my RPI2 with Lakka is every bit as much fun as playing that game originally.
I have my copy of the Whole Internet Catalog here with me at all times. You never know when you may want to reminisce about The Well.
I'm not sure what software is that. When you assume, etc...

I've started with Mosaic and Netscape (and on Sun OS for that matter), used Mozilla for a few years, then FF on Windows, and finally Safari and then Chrome for as long as both existed on the Mac (and have even used KHTML --in the form of Konqueror-- for light browsing on my dev box for a couple of years in the early 00s). Those, as an end user.

As a web dev for testing, besides IE, I have also fired up Opera for years, including back when it had an ugly QT facade and with its own rendering engine. I've never liked it though, and it never stuck to be used as the main browser.

Being able to toggle Javascript on/off with a single checkbox: all browsers have that.

Doing it per page: again, as I said, dead easy to add, e.g.: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...

So, "only Opera has that" is BS.

"Oh, but Opera has it built-in and I can't be bothered to install a third party exception", on the other hand, might be true -- that doesn't make that much of a valid reason to stick to an older browser to me eyes.
Indeed. "I definitely don’t apologize for using this tool to hit the cartels in Riverside County ... this is still a tool that I believe in."
as far as the language goes - that is a very verbose "hello world".

does the level of verbosity decrease as you get into more advanced applications?
But native applications use webviews more than you might expect. I've heard that the conversation view in the Messages app is a webview, and I know from first-hand experience (CSS not loading) the Instagram feed is one too.

I think that webviews get a bad rap because you only notice then when they're done badly.
While I agree, I think you could make similar arguments about the contents of legal contracts today. The overwhelming majority of users of say, Kickstarter or online stock brokerage systems do not read the contracts they are asked to agree to, and if they attempted to would be incapable of understanding them anyway. So I think that argument is a bit of a red herring.

The advantages of Ethereum are in eliminating 3rd party trust and the costs that come with it. Right now if you want one of these simple financial services, there is both a direct financial cost associated with it and the implicit risk-expense of trusting someone else with your money. This is a drain on the global financial system that just doesn't need to exist anymore.

The idea that Ethereum or things like it will supplant the legal system is of course, absurd on its face. That will not happen. But what we may start to see, in my opinion, is the co-mingling of the two, and contracts being written with deterministic, executable components alongside more traditional legal verbiage.

Fundamentally there are some things that are amenable to mechanization and some things that are not. But right now both are encoded in human language. And the use of either one for the other's optimal purpose is perverse and unnecessarily expensive.
Just across the 49th parallel gun deaths are 1/6-1/10th of what they are in the US. The gun rights people are quick to blame "mental illness", surely there aren't 6x more mentally ill people in the US than Canada! But there sure are many many times more guns, sadly :-<
I'd really love (and have toyed around with) a modern reimagining of Gopher, targeted toward mobile devices and maybe e-readers, and with a focus on accessibility. Just the content, please, and as quick as you can get it on my screen. I'll pick the styling options that make it easiest for me to read.
We won't know if that's the case until we fix the glaring, skew-causing problems that are already there.
"tech is very very white"

Sure tech is generally non-black, but there are load of East Asians and South Asians. It's not exactly the Augusta National Golf Club.

There are a lot of places in corporate information technology in the US where tech is "very very" Indian and a white or black or hispanic person may very well be the only non-Indian (or even US citizen or permanent resident) in the room or on the team.
Not long ago there was a report that came out on the quality of work of women software engineers. Turns out it was significantly higher than for the average male software enginee. This is actually not a good thing, and many people came to the wrong conclusions about it. My reading is that women aren't being hired in software unless they can prove themselves to a higher standard than men. I suspect the same is true for lots of other groups (like blacks and hispanics).

There remains pernicious and not widely appreciated systemic bias in this industry, and until it's even acknowledged we're not going to have much luck in tackling it.
I was just on the way back from an 8h project at uni, already falling asleep in the bus xD

Sorry. Meant mobile system.
Okay, first a bit of background on the wifi ruling. The WiFi issue is because the 5ghz WiFi band has some rather sensitive pre-existing operations, like weather radar, that are intermingled in some of the channels given for WiFi usage. There are a lot of times and places where such items aren't in use and can be used as additional wifi channels, but when there is a need, those channels need to be vacated and not considered usable for at least a half hour after receiving a signal. However, there were a lot of companies that weren't upholding their end of the bargain, so the FCC put in more stringent testing requirements, including ensuring that the radio cannot transmit where and when it's not supposed to. Because of this, most companies just took the easy way out and locked down the whole router, instead of putting the wifi chipset's control software in ROM or some other way of locking down the firmware.

Now, the Pi 3 does not talk on the 5ghz band at all, so even in Soft-AP mode, it's not capable of even coming close to violating the rules. Other desktop chipsets that can run in the 5ghz band have programming to not allow them to be APs in the 5ghz band, again steering clear of those rules. The 5ghz ruling is complicated because there's a lot of issues that tend to be glossed over in articles about it, which just muddy the waters.
the second point has a wrong title
China January new yuan loans climb to record high $385B
Personally, I prefer more web-component like frameworks. Vue.js is more usable, and easier to understand than React, but stuff like React Native is why React.js is worth learning.

I strongly dislike the JSX syntax as well. Its messy, and difficult to read. I would like my to write my components as dom nodes, like with Vue.js, Riot. The way that react.js handles css, is also messy. I would rather just defined a <style> tag like in Vue.js.
Maybe Twitters "UI" is so messy is because its text. People can make up any convent they want. Like signing posts with ^.
What is High Availability?
That would be terrific. Can you imagine the decrease in data costs vs. increase in usability / experience once a few popular services were available?
lynx can render gopher pages itself as well as being able to render the <html> format content linked to lower levels of the MetaFilter site mentioned in OA.

Below is an 'ascii screenshot'

Gopher Menu
Gopher Menu

__ __ _ _____ _ _ _
| \/ | ___| |_ __ _| ___(_) | |_ ___ _ __
| |\/| |/ _ \ __/ _` | |_ | | | __/ _ \ '__|
| | | | __/ || (_| | _| | | | || __/ |
|_| |_|\___|\__\__,_|_| |_|_|\__\___|_|

(DIR) MetaFilter
sharing and discussing neat stuff on the web
(DIR) Ask MetaFilter
asking questions and getting answers
(DIR) FanFare
pop culture discussion -- TV, movies, podcast, books
(DIR) Projects
creative work by MetaFilter community members
(DIR) Music
original musical and audio recordings by MeFites
(DIR) Jobs
employment opportunities and member availabilities
(DIR) IRL
organizing meetups and community events in real life
(DIR) MetaTalk
where the commuity talks about MetaFilter itself
(DIR) FAQ
frequently asked questions

Commands: Use arrow keys to move, '?' for help, 'q' to quit, '<-' to go back.
Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back.
H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search [delete]=history list

Back in mid 90s I was dialling into a GreenNet shell account and running lynx to surf gopher and http content seamlessly, all for the price of a phone call to a London number.
Show HN: Cdnex – Prepend CDN urls to your HTML and CSS
What are you hoping to get out of using react native?

This write once, use everywhere is such a strange desire.

If you're a serious company, develop on iOS/Android first, then hire a dev or two to make an exact copy for the remaining platform. It's really not that hard.

The hard part is doing something the first time and iterating. Copying is not rocket science - look at the Russian facebook clone - it's actually better because of copyright laws, you can do more on their version.
This is the Chaitin of Kolmogorov-Solomonoff-Chaitin complexity, if the argument seems familiar.

I like Grassberger-Crutchfield-Young (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Complexity, look for Statistical complexity) complexity, because it can actually be measured.

I had long suspicions that Chaitin was a Leibnitzian, but there you go. I like thinking about the Principle of Sufficient Reason, too, but I have long suspected the phenomenon of causality can be more simply explained by positive feedback effects _only_. (http://howonlee.github.io/2016/01/21/Poking-20At-20Causation...)
I disagree. The business logic (at least the reported effects of the business logic) for blocking and muting seem rather arcane.
That report was highly suspect and HN had a large difference of opinion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11102712

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587

I would really recommend this article
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
Definitely start by getting students to love it first, then sell something to the university. Universities take a long time to make decisions, and they don't have a budget item for "help students find parties to go to". But as Facebook showed, the right thing can spread through a campus in a couple weeks.

There have been a lot of failures in this space. The big problem is getting quality listings. It's a fair bit of work for event organizers to post their event on multiple platforms, and they're probably already posting on Facebook and a campus mailing list, so it's a hard battle to make them list on yours too. And if you don't have most of the listings, users will just check Facebook instead of you.
Yep! Here's some resources for anyone curious:

[1] http://blog.gbaman.info/?p=699
[2] https://learn.adafruit.com/turning-your-raspberry-pi-zero-in...
Introducing DevTools Reload
Hardstoft – Britain’s First Oilfield
>How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview?

These are students. I would not expect them to start their education knowing about whiteboard interviews. At some point, all of us professional software developers were ignorant about how interviewing worked, and then we learned.

The question is: why are black and hispanic students not reaching this level of understanding at the same rate as whites and Asians? Perhaps they're not doing internships at the same rate? Some other reason? Regardless, this question deserves a serious answer, and not a flip dismissal based on stereotypes about work habits.
Having lived in our society and been educated by our schools: Yeah, there are societal problems and educational problems. Big, big, big problems.

Having gotten my ass kicked intellectually repeatedly by black and hispanic students: no, those backgrounds are not a liability.
Very very east Asian is also common.
So any new functional language with static types is now a bug-ridden, half implementation of Haskell? Wow, that's arrogance. Haskell was one of this language's three named influences (along with Lisp and Go).

Anyway, very cool project. I look forward to trying it out.
You're being downvoted because you're being a racist buffoon. Yes, there is genetic variation across traits, this is a fact. That said, we are all heavily influenced by our environments and to discount this incredibly formative factor of all human life is ridiculous. Culture, poverty, exposure to crime, and endless cycle of poor parenting, whatever it may be - there are a million things that can and DO get in the way of someone succeeding far, far before their genetics.
As a former academic I will share my thoughts here. I agree that there is a great need for this, but not demand from those with the data. In science you are effectively discouraged from sharing data since doing so means you lose the ability to rehash the data and publish a new paper. The second problem is scientists as a general rule won't pay for software or any sort of saas.

Can I suggest an idea for a related product; a platform to make collaboration between different areas easier. Right now if you have an area where you lack a skill or background it can be very time consuming finding the right people to collaborate with, especially internationally. Make it easier to create collaborations that result in publication and you will have a product with paying customers.
The protocol is very simple (delimited with cr+lf). It's a kind of extended "ls".
HN routinely censors articles critical of their own startups. Yet you are here.
There's Lynx--the text web-browser. [1]

Someone wrote up their experience using Lynx on the web around 2012. [2] Conclusion: "Not all the sites are usable with Lynx, but many of them offer at least basic functionality using the text-only web browser."

As long as there's HTML output, a more humane web browser could allow better customization of the information; it could infer the usual human organizational methods; lists, metrics, groupings, buttons, etc, and present it with your favorite background color, font size, line-length, image size, videos, etc, based on the hierarchical structure. The other camp is web apps, which is a different use case.

[1] http://lynx.invisible-island.net/

[2] http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/25/using-web-browser-lynx-v...
I don't necessarily agree with this. There are a number of polarizing factors—ethnicity, religion, politics, age, having a family. Class is only one way to get filtered out.
(You could also put an ad on your own site/s for your job -- "Love Contemporary Art? Want to Help Us Bring it to the Masses?) Your next developer might already be a reader.
Follow-up question: Are you logged in?

Google search will generally learn your preferences and get better at vending you the results you can actually use if you're logged in so it can build that search history for you.
Agreed. Even in a metro with very low Asian population, we have a lot of Asian workers in my I.T. department and it seems to be the case for other companies nearby. Probably we are about 65% non-Hispanic white (including eastern europeans and foreign workers in that number), 30% Asian (about half Asian and half east Asian, with a few southeast Asians), 5% black and Hispanic.
You are correct. My current place of employment is very Indian. In many ways, however, there is less tension in those situations. Often times whites tend to treat non whites in a certain manner that is less than... Now, I am not trying to paint all whites in tech with a broad brush (even if I sounds very much like I am). White people are cool with me, and if I'm to be honest, I have more white friends right now than I do black. So please, understand I am not trying to say "All white people...". I'm not angry. I am instead giving an honest assessment of my experience in tech for the last 15 years, and how it may relate to this story.
Is blind hiring the best hiring?
Prefix Trees; Comparison Between Trie, Ternary Search Tree and Radix Tree
Saying you've got an awesome product around the corner is a good way of causing the Osborne Effect [1]. Also, plans can and do change. It could very well be an issue where they weren't planning on it, but the people at Broadcom came up with an offer that was too good to pass up. Plans can and do change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
It does vary quite a bit. I've found that the startup scene in SF is extremely white comparatively to the enterprise software company that I work for in SF.

The point still stands though if you replace the word "white" with "non-black / hispanic". There are vast cultural and systemic barriers that some minorities go through in the United States (black / latino) to get to becoming a software engineer, and not others (Asian).
Does that actually fail on an index missing? The docs for FORCE INDEX say "a table scan is used only if there is no way to use one of the named indexes to find rows in the table", which to me implies it's more like FORCEFULLY SUGGEST.
Google Kills Off Right Hand Side Ads
Absolutely, that's why I included the year.

I think '95 was the first or second year for campus-wide high-speed internet at UVA. VT was a year ahead and one of the first in the nation, if I remember correctly.

All that said, the approach of splitting the introductory class up by previous experience makes some sense. I can't think of too many other subjects where the experience level would differ by so much at such an entry-level stage.
Correction.

If you're a lying, abusive, or manipulative woman on Twitter you'll get drowned in "harassment" (a redefining of the word "disagreement") . Then you can turn around and pretend to be the victim because of your gender and/or sexual identity and useful idiots will lap it up and defend you. Regardless if you're a known pedophile, a spouse beater, a harasser from the Something Awful forums, or known scam-artist.

Are you aware of the abuse Randi is known for in the FreeBSD community? She's the last person who should be speaking about dealing with it while she dishes it out herself left and right.

As far as Twitter goes, men receive abuse twice as often as women [0]. At the moment, if you're a prominent man on Twitter and you offend the wrong people you'll get drowned in toxic behavior and risk losing your job over hurting someone's fee-fees.

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733071/Men-twice-ab...
A Seattle Council candidate was running a gopher site last year. It is incredible. It feels like the road that should have been evolved upon, rather than HTML.

Ah well. I should turn my own site into gopher!
Those are the extremes, so once you know those you can handle most things. Some modern languages seem to have a foot in each camp, like Rust for example.

We should graph every programming language on a radar chart using those axes.
Thanks for the ideas and taking the time to give advice. It has sparked some ideas for getting in contact with more potential customers and getting more feedback on the product.
That report was simply not true. If anything, it showed there was no bias based on sex. In addition to MollyR's links, see Slate Star Codex's Before You Get Too Excited About that GitHub Study.[1]

1. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...

Edit: If my comment seems unnecessary, it's because MollyR edited-in a link to the Slate Star Codex post before I finished mine. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's read SSC's rebuttal.
SpyStudio: Windows application tracing and troubleshooting tool
Isn't delegation just a slight variation on callbacks?
> Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more.

Wow, talk about broad strokes. I guess I'll refer to you all my slacker asian and jew friends so they can make some easy cash.
Abuses of law by those in power (including the power of making laws) are only punished after popular protests (and sometimes take full popular revolt).

There's no reason it won't happen repeatedly. In fact it has been happening since at least Hoover's years...
I am sure there are personality types (probably over-represented among the readership of HN) for whom rigid structure like this is very helpful.

IMHO being able to firewall e.g. a three-day trip with the family from other concerns is worth far more than putting in a token 10 minutes in service of an abstraction like this.

I would myself take more pride in not having e.g. looked at a screen for three days, than having checked off three more boxes.
Someone once said to me: "I don't smoke weed to enhance my trip. I trip to enhance my weed."
Generating Hugo website using AWS Lambda on GitHub push event
cool to see matt huang get a well deserved shout out
I agree. Speaking from my own experience, I didn't even really understand what computer science was until I was in college (I'm female and from a small town). I had taken a "make your own website" summer class in grade school where we did some super basic HTML but that was it. Why would I choose computer science as a major when I was never really exposed to it and didn't even know what it entailed? I'm now starting to learn python on my own and I think computer science could have been a really good fit for me. I think encouraging kids is a great first step.