skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You will always have to make assumptions and approximations.

The ability to determine when an approximation is good enough comes from a solid understanding of the underlying theory. For example, we understand that special relativity doesn't invalidate classical mechanics, because, in the limit, as speeds and energies become arbitrarily small, their predictions coincide. But, if all you have is a bunch of computational recipes, even the tiniest unexpected thing renders you unable to solve problems.

Anyway, I'm not saying that examples of applications are a bad thing. But proofs are indispensable. Even for “intuitive” people, proofs are necessary confirmation that their calculations will match their intuitions.
Twitter: The case for Independence
I think what's he saying is that the field of candidates - before Yahoo even gets to make a pick of hires - is skewed in favor of men. So a 100% impartial selection process would just propagate the same gender imbalance.
Indeed-- why!

Seems to me the "shortage" has more to do with labor costs than a skills gap.
I also kind of question whether or not a web-based office suite is truly multiplatform. For the most part, it doesn't interact with my desktop so it's really a single platform.

It's almost like saying Microsoft Word is cross-platform because I can RDP into a Windows machine from Linux. It's not really part of Linux, it needs a client to access an application running on a remote server. The only difference is how complex the client is.
> Naturally if there is no option for the discussion when somebody does not know the answer off the top of their head then this would be really absurd and pointless situation.

Ah ok, I guess I misunderstood you. Though this "absurd and pointless situation" does in fact happen: There definitely is a class of interviewer who will expect off-the-top-of-your-head detailed knowledge (like being able to remember bubble sort's details from just its name).
There is support for odometry. Take a look at the TurtleBot examples.
I don't think that's an option. OpenTable is the only credential listed, otherwise they're just "mystery team."
It's something that needs to be learned with experience, yet companies don't want to invest time training people who will probably leave in a year or two.
Attending a session about the Windows internals at Microsoft was an eye opener for me, back when Windows 2000 was the latest version.

For those of us that enjoy delving into OS details, Windows is full of interesting goodies.

Even the way .NET is integrated with the OS, is somehow similar to how bytecode and JITs used to work in mainframes.
I know of a tech startup in Chattanooga with the budget/funding that is willing to take on this team (cough: current employer)
https://twitter.com/kenmcelrath/status/784418953141493760
Also one of the most modern banks, China Merchant's Bank (招商银行 / CMBC) is headquartered there.
I think there are a lot of groups that have an obligation to change things, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad either. Google is big enough to actually affect the up stream numbers, I'm glad they're working at it.
> I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job.

If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.
Ah, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies
Girls Who Code releases social networking app
latest and largest attacks

Except for the latest and largest attacks: OVH @ near 1Tb/s in combined tcp_ack traffic on 2016/09/20 [0]

When attackers have 150k+ comprimised hosts, with 1-30Mb/s each, there is no need for reflection/stealth/source spoofing/etc. At those levels, the attackers can just point them to an IP with 'normal' traffic and it's enough to be devastating.

[0] - https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/778830571677978624
I don't think the person you're arguing with is even necessarily denying this. He is pointing out that the trade-off of using the "perceptibly" faster browser has very bad long term consequences.
This has to become some kind of meme...reading books might just make you better at reading books :)
Flying Through Hurricane Matthew
That was an interesting demo. I read on another comment in this thread, that the backgrounds were fake. Let's assume for a moment that they were not. Imagine all of this happening from the perspective of the dog. The dog (replace human to further this exercise) is completely unaware of all this happening around him. Could we in the future have people talking about us, around us and not be aware of it? Think of this interaction again from the perspective of the 4 people (include the video call) who were talking in the room. At one point, i was so engrossed in the main scene, that i forgot that a certain part of the environment was not aware of the main players. This spooked me out - what if in the future, i can't tell which part of my environment is real(aware of me) and which part is not. Inertia i guess. We always get over these humps.
I must admit that my interest in this field has peaked in 2015 (say a mid 2014 - mid 2016 cycle) and that I'm now only keen on applications for my industry. It's a good sign, though: DS/ML/AI alphabetisation is progressing very well and a lot of people and outsiders like me are starting to use the tools for their own agenda.
When I was thinking about contributing to Tox it was way too hard to find out its development is alive at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecttox/comments/4vmfhn/is_tox_d...

P.S. Now I see activity in new core repo,that's cool
This argument (or more specifically, personal accounts) doesn't really respond to the original argument about a high % of immigrants.

Why is there always an in-group?

What is the in-group of a place with:

- 10% Asian Americans

- 10% Indian Americans

- 10% various white European immigrants

- 15% Indian immigrants

- 20% Asian immigrants (14% Chinese, 4% Korean, 2% other)

- 25% white Americans

- 5% Black/Hispanic Americans

- 5% Black/Hispanic immigrants

(With 10% females spread among those race/country lines)

What I see happen is that the various groups separately cluster based on country of origin. None of the groups are dominant, so no one person (even a leader of a group) will feel comfortable making inflammatory remarks.

Many times everyone on the team is introverted and no groups form at all.

>Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.

Ad hominem? I've been a minority in the most formative years in places where being different is tough and I understand the difficulties. I contrast the experience and demographics of work with those years.
Small, remote towns have obvious disadvantages but I think sometimes their benefits are overlooked.

I'm probably blindered by my asocial nature, but I strongly agree. "Internet culture" is often considered synonymous with urbanization, but improvements in communication and delivery make rural living (at least in the developed world) much more appealing.

For me at least, technology removes the need for proximity. If I were incubating a technology company and working with a small team, a small town in the Dakotas would be an ideal location. Yet so far as I know all of the incubators are encouraging companies to base themselves in expensive (and distracting) urban areas.

Assuming you have an idea, and a small team, and need a place to implement it, what are the actual disadvantages to a rural location? Sure, maybe bustling cities are great for generating new ideas, but what startup has ever been long on time but at a lack for ideas?

Veering off in analogy, my guess is that there is probably a correspondence between those who like "open office layouts" and those who want to live in dense cities. Many productive engineers prefer offices with doors, and fewer distractions. Am I wrong to associate "rural life" to a "an office with a door"?
You know, there is no reason you can't volunteer and instantiate the unfuckotron.

Complaining is for spectators.
>"If I ask one of these adult students a question involving negative numbers, and I phrase it in terms of money and debt, they answer it immediately. If I ask them using just numbers, they have no clue."

There's an even more extreme example with street kids in Brazil who had de facto knowledge of mathematics (they worked as peddlers) but weren't able to do the same thing they did during daily life in a school setting.

I wouldn't say that concept transfer is a skill, however. The two things that come to my mind when I think of the issue of transfer are: the feeling of a student being hung up on a particular problem, anxiously waiting for a solution to come up to his mind; people who seemed to try to tackle lots of different problems from lots of different angles (Wheeler, Feynman). So it seems to me to be more constrained by openess to experience on one hand (the willingness to try and fail) and creativity (willingness to look for and propose solutions) on the other, both of which are more like inclinations than skills.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_05.htm...
> Effort in this direction would be better spent just adding new features to clang (or GCC).

In your opinion. This isn't a fact. For example, I know first hand of code that has to compile with compilers that are not in the set { gcc, clang, msvc }. What do I do then? (Oh, and those compilers are closed-source).

> You'll end up wanting to just use clang's front end to help you

Probably, although there are other options too

> and at that point why not just modify clang itself?

The changes I make, if useful to the community, would probably end up back in clang. But they would also remain a separate tool, because of all those other pesky compilers I work with.

> you can always revive the LLVM C backend

I'm not sure how that helps me; not only does it seem a terribly roundabout way to get what I'm looking for (instead of sugar -> c++ -> my c++ compiler, you are proposing sugar -> clang -> llvm -> c -> my c compiler), but I don't think objects produced by that pipeline would link with C++ objects produced from my native compilers, among other issues.

> The fact that nobody has bothered to revive it and keep it up to date enough to be merged into LLVM proper, to me, is a strong indication that few people need support for these obscure platforms.

Or, is it evidence that people using more obscure platforms (we're talking fortune 500 companies here) stick to languages that exist on their platforms for various reasons?
yes yes. Of course, but there people have only so much time...and many people are NOT physically active. Sure do your 'brain training' (if it works) AFTER you've done a decent amount of cardio, but cardio should be the goto.
Apples and Oranges. For the majority of firms, a "lack of digital skills" isn't solved by hiring more CompSci graduates.
Yes, that's fine, we already have foreign members who don't speak any Spanish. We do everything in English and would be awesome to have a native speaker in the team :)
Inside the New York Public Library's Last, Secret Apartments
I thought the same thing. Then I read that there are several thousand different species of mosquito, and only about 6 of them bite humans. We are not eradicating the mosquito, rather a very specific sub population; Aedes aegypti.

They are in fact the deadliest animal on the planet and unequivocally deserve complete eradication.
Ugh, if you're identifying sensors by IP instead of some other ID in the payload, you're doing it wrong. NAT between the sensors and you can throw a wrench into that whole scheme in a hurry.

This is just a smell emanating from another poor design, not a justification for IP spoofing. If you want to spoof addresses, do it in the privacy of your own VPN tunnel between the servers. Don't expose that sickness to the Internet.
So tell me, what exact dollar amount do you need to make where discrimination against you is ok?
Next Steps on Research Using Animal Embryos Containing Human Cells
I don't see the distinction you are suggesting. Call it a new language if you like, but if it compiles to C++, looks 99% like C++, and just smooths over the warts, then whatever you call it, that's what I'm suggesting.

(I want it to compile to C++ so I can use the compilers I use and it can interoperate with the C++ code it has to interoperate with and C++ programmers that work on this code wouldn't have to learn more than a few extras that might make their lives easier).
I was part of a 12-ish person team that was hired by another company after a site closure. This was 10+ years ago, and I can imagine it's only more feasible/prevalent now.

Edit: The hiring company was in Alabama. The closing company was in the back woods of California (not SV).
Progressive image rendering: Good or evil?
Shameful plug: with a few friends we are planning to create another platform for such fun games. If you think it is a good idea, please sign up: https://www.botolympiad.com/
The article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree). There's also a lot of people who aren't that interested in it or bad at it but still manage to not get weeded out.

Add that to the decades-old "CS != programming at job" dilemma and it's easy to see why so many people are unemployed.
It's hard to make a case against Bill Gates being a massive player in the astounding success of personal computing without delving deeply into emotional reasoning, so I'm curious what feeling you have that justifies your stance.

For instance, perhaps you feel having the appropriate moral tone to a vision is the requirement to deserve credit for achievement?
Sure, but it's not a strong correlation. Plenty of 20 somethings have kids.
It kinda is.
There is always a place for constructive criticism.
Okay, true, but why should I care?

This is like one of those ad games: If you press the button, you fix spam calls, but Twilio goes out of business. I couldn't press the button fast enough.

For the record, I like Twilio and I literally have their API open in another tab right now because I'm writing code against it. But if they can't do business in an environment that doesn't allow spam calls, they don't deserve to be in business.
Ask HN: What's your favorite Emacs Mode?
We tried not to call out any one co specifically :)

HomeJoy was ideal for the first-time client -- cheap clean, convenient booking/payment experience.

However trust & quality of the work wasn't there. The platform economics for cleaners was pretty unfavorable which caused low quality workers to be part of the network. For high quality cleaners, it was increasingly common to take clients "off platform" so that they wouldn't have to pay the platform fee.

Plus as a homeowner, once I find the cleaner I like and trust, I want to keep using them and give them business directly (without the middleman).

We dove more into a detailed HomeJoy case study on TC last year: https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/why-homejoy-failed-and-the...
Isn't this just an arms race that they can never win? Regardless of source, encryption, format, etc. If a frame of a movie eventually makes it to my video card's buffer, I can get at it, right? There is no end-to-end encryption from source into my brain.

I can only see this just being a colossal inconvenience for users, developers, and many many innocent applications.
Low wages? Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...
Take it!

In 3 months you will have "Fullstack Javascript Software Engineer" on your resume and it will be much easier to find a better job.

"$14/hr for a CS graduate with lots of responsibilities is much less than I pay my barber."

I was real bitter when I started my career after getting a 4 year degree in a CS from a reputable institution and was making less money than my friends who were waiters. It only made me miserable so my advice is to let it go. Also in 5 years your barber will still be supporting his family on measly $20/hr and you'll be pulling in 100k+.
I also first heard about Burning Man in the mid '90s, but didn't actually attend until 2001. I was worried that I was going to be seeing the decrepit, watered-down remnants of something that had once been wild and wonderful. Well... I'm here to tell you that it has certainly changed over the last fifteen years, but it is still wild and it is still wonderful.

I think that this pattern exists in part because you can't really have the same mind-blowing experience twice. You can keep going back to the playa, and the event will keep offering you new experiences and even some surprises, but you do get accustomed to it. I suspect that many people claiming it is not as good as it used to be are failing to distinguish their reaction to the novelty of the experience from the nature of the event itself.

It is very common for people to go every year for 3-5 years, then move on - not because Burning Man has gone downhill somehow, but because they have gotten all they need out of it and are now ready to spend their summers doing something else.
OpenBSD is UNIX, and UNIX is an operating system, not a "distro".
So, I didn't want to say what I do because I didn't want to make it personal, but yes, I do. I work in biotech and desogn control systems for an immunofluorescent imaging device and associated computer vision algorithms used to identify circulating tumor cells in the blood stream.

We just released a prognostic test for colon cancer which is actually relatively groundbreaking as it provides a new treatment path for people who previously had no options.

So yes, I feel that I am. I have been a part of small engineering teams delivering brand new technologies to the market my entire career.

And you're right, very few people, especially in software, are solving hard problems. I wasn't picking on anyone, I was responding to a comment.
Come to Burning Man one day! The community would love to have you, and you are clearly ready to connect (and grow) with it.
Ace Jump -- You can move your cursor to ANY position ( across window and frame ) in emacs by using only 3 times key press.
In my experience it's not so much a shortage of people willing to work for peanuts but rather a shortage of "experts" whom the company doesn't have to train at all and will magically sit down in their desk and print money.

Every industry has their own version of the perfect employee but in tech, companies actually expect to get them.
So here's the thing.. he was given the STANDARD interview that every engineer has to pass. How was that not a serious consideration? How is it fair to his future potential colleagues that he got in "easy"? They need to depend on him and his problem solving abilities.

I think he saw the question, and basically just refused to grapple with it, thinking it was below him, and then the rest pretty much was inevitable.
> from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree)

This sounds a lot like "sorry, we won't take you until you've been trained, but we're not willing to train you."
VMware is moving to Amazon Cloud
It's interesting that this is an article about the UK rather than the US. I really enjoyed a recent Econtalk episode on "Learning by doing" that talked about labor markets:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...

The example in the episode is about textile mills. For about 50 years after mills were mechanized, productivity in mills had gone up by a lot but employee wages didn't increase even though it was "skilled" labor. The reason (explained in the episode) is that because of a lack of standardization, employees couldn't transfer skills between firms, so they were unable to demand more for their skills on the labor market by shopping for a new employer.

There's no immediate connection to the article but I've been thinking about employees' ability to "shop" and I wonder if maybe these CS graduates would be employed if they had access to the US labor market.
A bit older than the author here and I don't know why he thinks he is "old". I use all kinds of bleeding edge tech and I leverage my experience to make choices about which to use and then make it happen. I am more and more concerned with hiring younger programmers who are eager to use unproved technologies (just because it is fun or looks good on a resume).

I'm currently hiring and the big issue is finding someone who can think algorithmically and do work without a lot of oversight.
Umm... Of course they're graduating with no professional coding experience. The entire point is they don't have professional experience yet.

What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere.

Do chemical companies refuse to hire newly graduated chemical engineers who don't have professional chemical engineering experience?

That doesn't even make sense.
I find it super disappointing that Android, from an operating systems perspective, is so terrible. It's the newest popular operating system but it's no better than Windows, iOS, or Linux. It's a mess of passable API's, average security, etc. Rushed to market for, of course, practical reasons.

I don't see any opportunity in the future for any person or company to take all the lessons learned in the last 50 years and build something new that takes it into account.

Same with browsers; It's only now that we kinda know what a browser really needs to be but there's no way to start from scratch with all those lessons and build a new kind of web browser. There is always going to need to be what they currently are and build on what was already done.

I understand why, but it's still kind of sad.
Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested. OK, see ya.

Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.
https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and...

I am in the PM owner for both Stream and Office 365 Video