skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If it were titled "Ask an engineer" and all the people asked were women, I wonder what the response would be?

Well, it should be (and I assert would be) considered "normal" because women can be engineers too (obviously).

By putting the "woman" qualifier in the title, it immediately discriminates against half of the viewership... which is particularly infuriating because the information is good and valid, regardless of who's telling it.
France goes way beyond that.[1]

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9211691...
> Real engineers have unions.

I'm pretty sure that's not true, and in fact one of the distinctions about a professional is that he doesn't belong to a union: he is both worker and management.
Of course they aren't but how can I feel morally superior with that fact?
The loss of authenticity most definitely has something to do with modern life itself (i.e. since the Industrial Revolution) though arguably goes back to the dawn of the practice of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. You ought to read, I hesitate to suggest, the Unabomber Manifesto a.k.a. "Industrial Society and its Future" by Ted Kaczynski. No shortage there of ideas on how modern man has lost his authenticity. (He also calls for violent revolution, which is just ADORABLE.)

We evolved to be hunter-gatherers in small social groups. As such, being on high alert for a faint sound, a movement in your peripheral vision, or some sign from your friends, comes naturally to us because these are traits that were naturally selected and could mean the difference between having a meal and going hungry, or between life and death. "Distraction" wasn't an issue either, because the distraction was usually the more important/urgent thing to be paying attention to, and because there weren't as many of them. We didn't have the situation we have today, where these entire natural cycles of stimulus/response/reward have been studied, and where people have figured out through years of trial-and-error, how to replicate the stimuli, and replace the rewards, in order to substitute a different response that just so happens to make them money. To the degree that you are susceptible to these stimuli you are actually being an authentic human being. It's the environment you're in that is completely inauthentic. We're all swimming in an ocean of bullshit. Being born into a world already mostly built and made for us, it's easy to forget that somebody (humans) had to come along and construct it all. Once you realize humans built it all, you then realize they had to have a reason, an incentive, maybe even an agenda. Being authentic requires reclaiming your own agenda and rejecting others' agendas where they differ from yours.
Can we cure all diseases in our children's lifetime?
I plan to conquer the world and all of its inhabitants... long after all of us here are dead or senescent.

I guess it is easy to make empty statements if you make them apply to a far enough future. Mars colonies from Musk (still working on getting the colonists there in one piece of course), and all disease tackled!*

*With $3Bn
Hacker Rehash News

This new algorithm is really annoying.
Some FPers argue that all programs should just be written as compositions of compilers and interpreters ;) so everything can be the coolest part of programming!
3 Bay Area Universities to Partner in $600M Chan Zuckerberg 'Biohub'
The comments are civil, but lack a certain diversity of thought, to put it politely.
An important point to be sure, although you don't exactly keep the max. It's more of a press-your-luck type of operation where you can't necessarily revert back to the max if you've already left it. Still a very valid point that you can switch jobs at any time you're unsatisfied.
Dogs' saliva actually has a number of antibacterial molecules (e.g., K9CATH, etc.) that should kill most pathogens, so you might be okay there.
BLOCC: A Framework for Staying Focused at Work
It's definitely management's job to prevent employees from harassing each other! Although that doesn't help if the pressure is coming from management.

Some women are understandably less comfortable around drunk people because drunk men are more likely to be creepy and potentially abusive. Some, of course, are not. I'm a male and I'm less comfortable around drunk people, because drunk people tend to be in bars, which are usually not comfortable - they're dark and loud (why don't we have afternoon tea outings?).

I don't have any hard citations for this, it's just from various exasperated women in the tech industry that I've read on Twitter. Here's this, though: https://medium.com/@betsythemuffin/drinkups-are-rape-culture...
In addition to having side projects going, don't hesitate to put them up on GitHub. That's a great way to show off your skills. And these projects don't have to be huge, even if they are small utilities or apps that scratch a specific itch, that's also good to show off, especially if it's for a problem which has not been solved before.

If you're especially lucky, you may wind up with an employer who lets you open source some of what you write. :-)
> You're right that GR doesn't rule out closed timelike curves, but to actually construct one you need to have matter with negative mass.

You only need matter with negative mass if you want to construct one by building a machine. Some models for closed timelike curves that could occur in nature (e.g. the Tipler cylinder with infinite length) do not need negative energy.

> the likelihood of FTL being possible is extremely small, for all reasonable purposes indistinguishable from zero on current scientific knowledge, and the existence of entanglement does not change this one bit

Okay, that I agree with, but this unlikelihood is completely orthogonal to (pre-relativity) QM's compatibility with FTL travel/signaling. That was what I disagreed with.
That's like comparing the discovery of a new fundamental force, with the discovery that mythical dragons have been living in secret among us as our lawyers. It's true that both are unlikely, but one is ridiculous and the other merely very very challenging.
"It is run frugally and transparently" is a dubious claim, at least according to claims made on NRKs Folkeopplysningen (a show like Penn and Teller: Bullshit, just better).

The fund spends a lot on being actively managed, one manager received ~$60 million in bonuses in 2010. However, they won't reply when people ask if bonuses are actually financially beneficial.

https://tv.nrk.no/serie/folkeopplysningen/KMTE50009215/seson... @ 28:30
> With fancy hand-made soaps you're paying for the image, and usually also scents and colorings that add nothing to the cleaning power

I'm confused; with industrial soap, are the scents and colorings free?

I'm pretty sure that if someone had the numbers, the marginal energy/environmental externalities of a bar of home soap compared to that of industrial soap + transport + packaging would be miniscule[1].

To look at it from a different angle, I'm also pretty sure it is more energy efficient to cook large batches of food than small. Do you suggest single people and couples not cook at home so as to benefit from the energy-saving-economies of scale?

[1] Q: But what if everybody did it? A: Perhaps it would add up in that world. But we don't live there.
Seems to me like they are well within their rights to do this (in at least some markets), but that when asked about it they should be able to stand by that decision and say why.
Here's a version in Lisp:

(defun münchhausen-p (i)
(eq (loop for number = i then quotient
for (quotient remainder) = (multiple-value-list (floor number 10))
sum (expt remainder remainder)
until (zerop quotient))
i))

(loop for i from 1 to 500000000 when (münchhausen-p i) do (print i))

It takes .002 seconds to check the first 5,000 integers, 2.108 for the first 5,000,000 and 268.867 seconds for the first 500,000,000.

I'm sure there could be some clever tricks to make it run faster, but this is probably good enough, given that there are, I think, only two such numbers.
Handling permissions in angular apps
Right, but (per parent), it's still better than the alternatives. You can cite flaws, but it was an improvement over what we had before (yabb, slashdot, etc).

You can do better -- like the AskScience/AskHistorian forums -- but only at the cost of investing a lot more work. Is there something more scalable?
Alternatively you could just encrypt the already encrypted data with the new key.
Its amazing that Linux can so thoroughly have won in the device world and yet MS is still every fan boys favorite boogeyman. This is such a non event.
Public tax policy that either provides plentiful loopholes or high enough tax rates where billionaires/millionaires can (and are highly incentivized to) shift their money and use tax saving schemes are what's really evil.

If people spent time focusing on increasing government tax revenue from the rich rather than increasing tax rates on the rich - which just pushes more and more wealthy people to stash their money in tax shelters (see Ireland) rather than investing it at home - they'd actually succeed in improving the inequality situation. And most importantly boost the economy and create more middle income jobs (by keeping money as job-generating capital instead of sitting dormant in off-shore shelters).

Instead of expecting humans to stop acting out of self-interest, how about:

a) Creating incentives for businesses and the wealthy to not move money elsewhere by having competitive tax rates. The simple fact is having them pay something rather than further incentiving them to pay nothing would massively increase revenues without increasing rates.

b) Massively simplify the tax system to close the myriad of loopholes that allow these wealthy people to continue operating locally while shifting all tax liability elsewhere. Make it obvious exactly how much each person owes their governments at the end of each year.

Creating a tax policy that's grounded in the reality of human behaviour (you can call it evil if you wish) rather than idealistic fallacies of how people should act is the real solution here.... Assuming this whole thing Zuckerberg is creating is partially a form of tax sheltering in the first place.
Unless someone steals the password to your password manager...
The average person is better off without a fitness wearable
> We happen to be living through a period of some of the fastest changes in human history

Couldn't this have been said accurately at just about every point in human history? I'm not asking to try and refute what you said - I think that supports the first point you made. The world is always changing at an exponential rate and we are always on the curve, so people will continue to lament loss of the past until the end of time.
but at the bottom of this article they say otherwise.
The commitment is very big, my comment is very small.

Whatever exists needs to be challenged continuously to keep existing. Any naive attempt to suppress all adversity forever will backfire.
Hard water causes that, even (can be worse actually) if it's softened.
I would say it is less that poor methods are rewarded, and more that the investment in proper methods is expensive, and thus penalized.

That is, nobody is particular looking for people doing poor work and handing out rewards. However, the "proper" methodology that we want necessitates time. Something that is expensive and there are already plenty of things eating at the budgets of work out there.

I do think this can be made better. But I see no reason to think it is just us chiding people for not doing better.
The idea is just to ask women engineers questions readers send in and see what they say. If they say things specific to being female, that’s cool; if they say things that are more universal, that’s cool too. Please send your questions to ask@ycombinator.com or post them here.
Oh it definitely wouldn't.

I'd be fine with this though as, admittedly cynically, I suspect that Assistant's main reason for existing is to provide a justification for the lack of encryption.
How Selling Too Many Plush Monkeys Got Me Banned from Amazon Forever
I believe there's some confusion here between legal and moral obligations. There's no legal obligation for the jury to find in any direction, yes - that is the basis for nullification. However, whether nullification is an intentional feature, or an unavoidable but undesirable side effect of the jury trial system, is very much up for debate. If you look at juror's oaths, they generally tend to embrace the latter approach. For example:

"You must not substitute or follow your own notion or opinion as to what the law is or ought to be. It is your duty to apply the law as I explain it to you, regardless of the consequences"

So when a juror nullifies, they break that oath. Insofar as that oath exists, it sets society's expectations of what the jury does.

"Impartial" was perhaps not the best choice of word for this, I agree.
Creating Ocean Networks with Drones That Roam the Seas
Software patents.
Not really. Any money you make above cost of living is effectively discretionary cash. And it doesn't cost money to get a raise. But with a business, it usually costs money to make money. As a trivial example, if you have a company with razor-thin margins, lets say 1% margin, then you can have very large revenue, such as $86b, but not a lot of profit (in this case $860m). And that doesn't even take staffing and fixed costs into account, which would drive that number significantly lower.

Or to put it another way, you can run a company such that you roughly break even, at which point it doesn't matter what your revenue is, $185m is still a big number. In that case hopefully you have a lot of discretion as to how you spend your money such that you can just spend less in one area to account for the $185m, but if you're breaking even because you can't do any better, as opposed to breaking even because you're putting all your profit back into R&D, then $185m might be hard to deal with.

All that said, for a company like Wells Fargo, it probably is basically just a slap on the wrist.
Could you please shed some light on concurrent connections benchmarks ? Im looking for a scalable solution - I am trying out socket.io and I read from others there are some performance issues as it scales.

edit: added socket.io part
I could not agree more. The thing is I actually like drinking and socializing, but having it mixed up at the workplace led me to drink more than I should, which I didn't like. And a few times I had conversations I felt weird about the next day. When I wanted to drink less it was annoying walking past beer all the time and people drinking it, because again, in the right context I do enjoy it. And I definitely know people who didn't drink, which was fine, but they felt socially alienated because of how many people were drinking. And several people got fired for sexual harassment, which is never cool, but it only ever seemed to happened at late night events with alcohol.

I actually decided I was drinking too much at that job so when I quit I took a break from drinking. One of the jobs I interviewed with had their happy hour as part of the interview! It's an insane "culture fit" test because of the many valid reasons you mentioned people might not be comfortable with it.

Like you said, people can go drink with their bros. Good not to tie your social life to work anyway so you can leave without losing all your friends.

I think putting beer out for an hour or two at an event and having a culture of 1-2 drinks sporadically is fine. But I'm avoiding any employers with a keg in their office, beer in the fridge every day, a happy hour culture etc.
5 Hadoop Scenarios You Can Test for Free
Death comes to those who wait.
> They blocked the enabling of a setting which allows Linux to see the hard disk.

Or, alternatively, they removed a firmware setting that makes their hardware work less well and didn't think about Linux at all.
Careful... They did release scented ivory and I accidentally bought some, worse still it was lavender and packaging was only barely different.
Modern SSRI's are not more effective at treating depression or anxiety than drugs from the 1960's including MAOI's. In fact, MAOIS raise the level of 3 neurotransmitters (norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine) while SSRI's usually only effect serotonin. I believe effexor inhibits one more neurotransmitter. They fell out of favor because they required such a strict diet and had severe interactions with many OTC medications.

I've never heavily researched the exact pharmacology, but the patch version of Selegeiiline is completely safe as long as you don't gorge yourself on aged, aromatic cheeses or a bucket of miso soup. The only thing I've had to restrict is ingesting amino acid supplements as it's high in tyrosine.

I'd still check it out as I have recently discovered that Selegiline is the Holy Grail of nootropics. Medications for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's tend to have neuroprotective properties and there is even decent evidence of neurogenesis.

> I kind of need the stimulant effect because of the narcolepsy.

The first few days I was on the medication, I did feel an adderall-like effect. My doctor told me that the 10mg patch does metabolize to about a 5-10 mg dose of adderall. Perhaps your doctor will prescribe a higher dosage to counter that effect.

BTW, you have to be one of the few people I've talked to that took Provigil for it's intended effect.
University of Oxford supplants Caltech as the top university in the world
Not sure which one is the ridiculous and which one is the very very challenging...
To quote Ashtefere on Reddit,

> * The linux drivers for the NVME chipset in this laptop do not yet exist. No one is stopping them from being built.

> * Signature edition PC's must be locked into their highest performing mode in bios - this happens to be the NVME raid mode in the bios

> * Windows can't even see this because the chipset is so new, thus the extra driver needing to be loaded.

> * Lenovo have not yet built a linux version of this driver, but when they do you would also need to preinstall it or use a distro that includes it.

> * Again, no one is stopping you from building the driver yourself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/53ri0m/warning_micro...

So....it sucks for compatibility. But it doesn't preclude compatibility.
My understanding is that experimental support for the new RAID mode in Linux already exists. AFAIK, Acronis boots a Linux-based OS, and they were able to get it to support the Surface Pro 4 when it's using that mode, so presumably, they figured it out.

As far as why Lenovo restricted it, it's likely for the same reason Lenovo was prohibited from preinstalling software. Signature PCs claim to have the "best" performance settings, mandated by Microsoft. If NVMe is superior to AHCI, Microsoft would sensibly mandate NVMe.
I've tried Ivory in the past and it was too oily for me. YMMV.
Ok, so you would rather Zuck not spend his money trying to cure diseases?
Slackware, you're being kind there, surely http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ is the only way to experience your first linux install (although it's still a bit easy seeing as how people can use flash drives rather than Floppy disks for the install)
You're actually lucky that email's your poison. It's the most aync mode out there, especially if people adjust to not receiving an immediate response.

I have friends that have trained me not to expect an immediate response to texts so I know it's possible to use text more async for everything that's not urgent. If not responding immediately is your default, it's not a break from your normal behavior to delay. I'd like to attempt this one for text as that would remove the temptation to break focus on another activity to check my phone. If I text some people right now with a mundane little thing I know who I will hear back from in 2 minutes, 24 hours, and never. It wasn't worth responding to. That's a good friend, ignores you when you're lame.
The problem that I have it's that it's very hard to find a company with:

- Talented employees

- Good product

- Interesting problems

- No corporate hierarchy/org nonsense

- Liberal policies ("no, you don't have to ask your manager about PTO for a doctor's appointment or whatever, of course not")

But without all of the other negatives (distracting environment, asking employees to give up their nights for outings, etc.).

For example, my company has a giant beer fridge. We also have uncomfortable chairs and flimsy, wobbling desks, and a rattly old air conditioner. We don't have dual monitors. The beer fridge does not improve productivity in any meaningful way. The other things harm it. Yet, we still spend money on the beer fridge instead of improving out environment, because #startup #crushing, or whatever.
This is nice update.
Yeah, I'm not seeing how "tree node_modules" is an argument against npm per se. Maybe one could argue npm, inc promotes the small-modules approach, but I don't think that's relevant to whether npm itself is a good package manager.

No matter whether you think small modules are good or bad, I personally have experienced npm to at least manage them well. Admittedly, however, I've never actually worked on projects of any great size.
New diseases will come to be. Possibly, the cures will cause the new diseases, possibly something else, but all disease won't be conquered.
Does this ambitious projection include only disease or does it also include disorder? I think it would be cool to cure disorder before disease.
Show HN: Modern OpenGL Windows Demo
Probably not feasible without some genetic re-engineering to design out vulnerabilities to common diseases. That's how aging will probably be solved. There's a big debug time problem, though. It takes about two generations to be sure you got it right. We'll probably have very long lived mice decades before it works for humans. (Many cancers in mice can be cured now. This doesn't translate to humans.)

Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.
What about other big customers of Lenovo ? Those that use Linux for Java development but are not Microsoft for example. I don't see this as carelessness, and how much money would a market leader make from such a corrupt request?
Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here. It doesn't seem that ridiculous of a goal. I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. To be honest, it seems like an achievable goal.

I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.
Sounds like a Ted Chiang story:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a...

It sounds more like an SMBC comic than an XKCD one, societal collapse for unexpected reasons is an ongoing theme.
I did OpenGL programming for Windows on my first job, in 2000. For the last decade however, I’ve only used OpenGL on Nintendo Wii, but for Windows I mostly used Direct3D.

Recently some company asked me to demonstrate my OpenGL programming skills. I could do that using the 15 years old OpenGL I knew, with glBegin/glEnd and fixed function pipeline.

But I knew this way is very suboptimal. First, modern hardware just no longer supports fixed function pipeline — it’s emulated. Second, I wanted to calculate stuff on GPU.

I decided to learn modern OpenGL instead.
Found surprisingly few articles on the web. Most tutorials are for old OpenGL and/or are focused on some third-party toolkits.

That’s why I have created this demo. Hope the source code will be useful to someone.
> Realistically, the OS everyone wants is "one that runs all of their software."

I want an OS that's easy to program to the point I don't actually have to rely on third party software too much. This might be a pipe dream but I'm not convinced it's not achievable on some level.

> They would prefer one that "doesn't crash." However, starting over with no real software is a non-answer.

I'm trying to open a discussion about what ideas have been tried in the past, seem good, but for one reason or another didn't catch on.