skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One auxiliary thing to consider with MOOCs and higher education is how it changes the power balance between administration and faculty. Faculty members own their course notes and take them with them when they retire or move universities. My understanding with MOOCs, and certainly it could be incorrect, is that the administrator of the MOOC owns the course and material even if the faculty member leaves. This leaves a clear conflict of interest for the administration because if MOOCs do take off in a substantial way, they can not only reduce the number of faculty, but reduce their negotiating power as well. That would shift power at a university.

Now, this has nothing to do with the quality of MOOCs. Mostly, it's just to say that I think there are conflicts to be mindful of as certain people and organizations either support or not support these courses.
And obligatory SMBC http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623
Researcher claims private phone numbers on Facebook are not, Facebook won't fix
When compared to a country that has high levels of English literacy such as the Netherlands, there's a major difference here.

You will be able to get by just fine in Paris for things like restaurants and hotels, but as soon as you have to deal with the government in any fashion, you absolutely must speak French.

In places other than Paris and the tourist areas of some major cities, it will be very difficult if you don't speak any French.
Because people who possess stolen bikes are just as vulnerable to bike thrives as everyone else. If only non-stolen bikes got stolen, the pool of people willing to buy stolen bikes would probably not support any significant level of theft for very long, but that's.not how it works.
> The limit of freedom of speech

Could you expand on that? I'm French, living and working near Paris and I would be interested to hear what limits do you think of.

Personaly I think it is no worse that any other Western country.

Edit: The limits I can think of are more from media watchdogs, which can be ignored (just look at Dieudonné). Or you can be sued by anti racist/anti _____phobe associations for slander, but I would not qualify that as a limit on freedom of speech like can exist in other countries.
No mention on the website that I can see, but my guess be they won't explicitly require French language exams for the visa, but not speaking French in France is going to be difficult, particularly in the North (including Paris).

It may well be that the right firm, in the right part of France (the South is normally a little friendlier), you're going to be fine. In Paris though? It seems like it is almost a national sport to be a little rude to non-native speakers, and a lot more rude to people who just try and get by in English.

But if you're planning to move to France, to start a French start-up business, and employ French employees, it is probably a good idea to learn some French.

As an English speaker, the michelthomas.com courses point out that you already know a lot more French than you think. :-)
To summarize:
It depends where you'll end up and which tech area you're specialized in.
Paris is often a good spot, south east as well (Monaco, Cannes, Nice) if you're specialized in hardware.
Regarding the south-east part, english might not be too much of a problem since international tourism is a big part of the local economy, I even heard that Google used to look for a spot there until some local political figure blew it up due to personal interests conflicts.
Also for the record, Paul Allen's yacht is frequently seen cruising around when it's time for the Cannes festival.
To be fair, HK is bilingual, at least in the sense that all government/utility/etc. forms are available in both Cantonese and English (these days also in Simplified Chinese).

Article 9 of the Basic Law stipulates:
"In addition to the Chinese language, English may also be used as an official language by the executive authorities, legislature and judiciary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region."

So, it's quite easy to get along without Cantonese or Mandarin (or without English, for that matter).

However, without Cantonese, one only has limited access to what's going on in politics, civil society, show biz, etc.
I hadn't heard of Slice until this, and I watched the video. Have you used one? It was compelling until the part of manually adding content via USB. I assume with network connectivity that media could be loaded like that instead, but the video didn't make it clear, and it seems pretty lame to have to plug it in to load up.
Stilling waiting for when we put a radio telescope at L3 and L2 giving mankind a 14Tm baseline interferometry. The current 12Mm interferometry is nice, but earth is so small.
RAMAT GAN START-UP WOWS ELDERLY WITH ROBOT HELPER
Also, maybe people will want to wait for next elections results (in may 2017) before considering moving in :)

I don't see either what you mean with freedom of speech problems, except maybe if it's about holocaust denial or things like that which are punished by law, here. But I guess most people won't be bothered.

State of emergency is indeed a problem, not to mention that there's a high chance we'll be targeted again by terrorism.
I would like coffee beans, cream and other flavoring/supplies to be delivered to my door, then automatically stored and later specialized coffee prepared and served by a robotic barista every morning or on command. The robot barista can charge itself and then store itself in the closet when not needed.

If possible it could also clean the toilet, but that is not 100% a requirement.
Sounds like a coverup to me. I bet Elon ate your sandwich.
I don't know what DHH meant, but the idiom "in anger" is used to mean "in seriousness", "for real" or "properly". Whether or not DHH meant the idiom, I do not know. But its likely.

For example: "I've been tinkering with emacs, but I've yet to use it in anger."
I agree.

Scheme/lisp based languages and Haskell are a great choice for this kind of project.
I still stand by "change your passwords often".

You never know when somebody has access to your accounts. I learned the hard way that someone had access to my Facebook because they watched me type on the keyboard. Had I changed my password monthly, I would have kicked him out after 30 days. As it stand, that person had access to my account for at least a year if not more.
While not a full solution for everyone, I'm a student who has a laptop and desktop. I use Bittorrent Sync (Resilio) to sync my files. Chrome if forced a bit can sync your tabs. If you do work with laptop and desktop side by side, then use Synergy to use your keyboard and mouse across both computers. My workflow is seamless from when I close my laptop and go on my Desktop to work on the same project.
Fighwheel and cljs-devtools (https://github.com/binaryage/cljs-devtools) makes working with ClojureScript very ergonomic. The regularity that re-frame brings (knowing where all data resides and exactly what can change it) makes it even nicer.
The Portuguese one is targeting people with money, not people with talent. Not similar at all.
The french tech stuff actually predates brexit.

There's been a lot of nice french initiatives to promote tech, in the last few years. It's still hard to overcome the anglosphere bias and to promote internationally, but from the inside it's still a nice atmosphere.
Now if only someone provided colo or leased versions of these. I imagine this is a better value prop than most VPS's.
As someone from the UK, my main reason for not moving anywhere else in Europe is the language barrier. I'm not even sure I'm capable of learning another language; 5 years in school trying to learn French + German, and can still only put together about two sentences. From what I remember, no one else seemed to really pick up the languages either.
Roads, originally an Eisenhower idea [1] as car culture was 'railroaded' in so to speak to win over trains, generate tons of indirect revenue.

People and businesses on either side and up and down every road generate revenue because of it. Same with the internet, trains etc.

You don't have to generate revenue directly from the thing for it to be a great idea. Bean counting away from indirect benefits seems to be overly-existent in our short-term planning modern US culture (not focusing on true investments enough like infrastructure, i.e. broadband etc).

Our interstate systems have been huge benefits even though trains would be nice as well, Amtrak is not competitive.

The interstate system is probably the best thing Ike ever did, good infrastructure projects leave a great legacy and are overlooked. It fueled economic growth across the nation as well as served as helping with defense.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/finalmap.cfm
Profile on Vivaldi browser
It seems clear to me that there is an IQ cutoff below which one cannot be an effective programmer. And this cutoff is actually quite high, comparatively. I'd be very surprised if more than 5 percent of the population, with the current distribution of intelligence, could become effective programmers, even if highly motivated. All psychometric evidence points to IQ being largely genetic, and the environmental components irreversible after after a very young age. It's odd, but my very "conservative" view on intelligence and heredity, that of agreeing with the scientific consensus, leads me to support some forms of wealth distribution.
Yes, the article is flatly wrong. It's conflating this situation:

+100k earnings
+0 UBI
------
+100k

with this mathematically equivalent situation:

+100k earnings
+20k UBI
-20k taxes
------
+100k
I've used macrofab.com with great success.

Their end-to-end webapp is phenomenal and a great break when you finish a design for a client and the premium is just worth getting off your back.
World needs open markets, free trade, not protectionism, says WEF
Just another reminder that no matter how good at something you get, there's almost certainly someone out there who's so much better it'll drop your jaw right to the floor.

Depressing at first, but it's a journey, not a destination. You've always got somewhere new and farther to go.
I believe the woman to whom you are referring is named "Marie Kondo".

The NYTimes wrote up a fairly lengthy article about her in July 2016, which I've been meaning to read: "Marie Kondo and the Ruthless War on Stuff". [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/marie-kondo-and-...

EDIT: link information
Anderson left Harvard before getting his PhD because he came to view the field much as Boykin does—as an intellectual pursuit of diminishing returns. But that’s not the case on the internet. “Implicit in ‘the internet’ is the scope, the coverage of it,” Anderson says. “It makes opportunities are much greater, but it also enriches the challenge space, the problem space. There is intellectual upside.”

Was thinking of pursuing masters/PhD in economics but have heard/read a lot along the same lines of an intellectual pursuit with diminishing returns both in terms of salary and real world impact.

The most useful thing I've done on Twitter is follow a bunch of economists and professors who are constantly debating current econ thinking/papers. There are a few I really respect, but for the most part both the academic environment for PhD level economists seems kind of toxic to me as an outsider.

Been thinking a lot recently about how my generation (I'm 24) is going to have to be a lot more practical due to economic realities...
Warning : Highly sensitive subject

Everyone who has ever done recruiting in a french IT company noticed that 80 to 90% of the resumes you receive come from North African countries (old colonies, mainly Algeria and Tunisia), that try to get a job in order to get a Visa. Most of them are unqualified, but they just "go for it".

Now, is this initiative going to lead to most of them pretending to want to start a company ? And how is the program going to filter qualified individuals to opportunists ?
Interactive lessons and Socratic style teaching, for starters. My best courses were all relatively small (10-20 people) and based around guided discovery. Technology could replicate some of that, but there are two problems for scaling -- it requires an interactive teacher that can respond not only to right answers, but wrong ones, and the group size cannot become too large. So you could do it online, but the 'M' in MOOC gets in the way.

Then there's the less class focused aspects -- office hours, homework groups, meeting classmates, etc. Some of this is replicated online, bit it would take dozens of emails or forum posts to replicate 30 minutes of one-on-one discussion with a professor (or even classmate). Much of the value in my education came out of study sessions and being exposed to other people's understandings and interpretations and needing to learn to explain my own. Small study groups using online collaboration tools (eg, voip and whiteboard apps) help with that, but MOOCs don't have the same tendancy to encourage that interaction that real classes do (and I'm not sure I buy online is the same as in person -- and I say that having worked remote before).
Don't forget about Dennis Richie, the creator of C programming, according to Wikipedia he holds a degree in Physics and Applied Maths[1].

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
What is the difference between providing UBI and Healthcare?

If there is a net benefit for the society if Healthcare is provided, will you agree with the government providing it?
There's actually quite a lot of competition within EU, and France is not too shameful in that competition. It's hard to compete with London which is undoubtedly the #1 tech hub in Europe, but aside from that, Paris is top notch.

Also, you're begging the question.
What are salaries like for mid-senior level software engineers working in tech companies in Paris? What are the tax rates i.e pay after taxes?
Except there are a lot of people (myself included) who see the handling of "identity theft" as banks and credit agencies trying to pass the buck for their own poor approaches to security and verification.
Don't feel trapped. There are lots of CS experts out there who are competent but have little domain knowledge expertise and therefor limited understanding of what they're writing software for. Just push ahead and see it through until you get bored with it. Being the person around who can write software and understand the underlying physics of this or that problem that you're seeking to model makes a world of difference and is a very valued skill in some fields.
the comparison not being apt isn't due to some qualitative assessment of original meaning/usage. thus linking to a headhunting wiki page seems like a reductive nonsequitur.
I'm sorry, but ... typical French reaction (I'm French myself)

The government and the administration is trying to improve the climate on founders/visa/startups/tech, and yes, it's far from being perfect and there are a lot of pieces missing and a lot that could be improved, but, at least, they seem to be trying.

And then you come, and just tell people they should go somewhere else "because it will be too hard".

So, I'm all for warning that it won't be all pink and easy, but I don't think it ought to be as hard as you seem to imply.

One thing which is definitely true is learning a few words and know how to say "Hi" in French and that you don't know the language will go a long way.

After, that, if you feel like you want to stay in the country, you will naturally go towards learning the language anyway.

I lived 7 years in the Netherlands, and you can go mostly fine with just English (even though, in some more rural areas, it can still be hard despite the reputation of the country), but learning Dutch helped me integrate and "unlock" situations where English would not have been enough, just because it showed to the people involved I was willing to integrate better in the country and make efforts to be understood.
A room full of people advocating for tax breaks for their busniesses
OCaml vs. Java in teaching
> The author is working from a hidden assumption in most economic discussion - that all value can be measured in dollars.

Can you have an economic discussion without measuring things in dollars? Aren't value measurements intrinsic to economics?
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. It's inspiring for embrace Open Source collaboration and also very useful for manage projects. In Guy Kawasaki's quote "The most important book about technology today, with implications that go far beyond programming"
What this looks like to me is the same adage: never trust the client software.

When doing web stuff, I can't trust the client with my api secrets, that's why I use oauth. My secrets are (theoretically) safe on the server side, and the client generates a short-lived token that lets me access services on their behalf if needs be. Google's drive filepicker is a pretty good example of how that works. It's awfully complicated (just logging in requires me to open an extra tab and listen for events on it for when the login flow completes), but it does work as a way to keep me from having to push out secrets to the client.

Doing this right basically requires two things. First, you must make your own API server that can run code on behalf of the client. You can trust the client to ask for stuff off of the API if it's properly authenticated, but you can't trust the client to run its own authorization code - anything that requires authorization rather than authentication has to run on the backend somewhere.

Second, your users have to trust you a little bit, so minimize that trust surface. With stuff like Google APIs, only ask for stuff you really need. I know I'm one of the few people who really read approval screens, but I have rejected and will continue to not use services that ask for too many permissions. Find the ones that just fit what you need (such as drive.file instead of drive), and don't ask for more. Don't ask for offline access unless you really mean it - I'd rather have to go through the flow again if my 30-minute token expired than let you keep a refresh token on your server (but again, the danger of the refresh token is mitigated by asking for the minimum).
If your question is about laptop vs desktop, the choice between the two has nothing to do with tech, it is purely a choice about where you work and then cost.

I'm freelance. It is a requirement that I am able to take my work to a client's site and work there sometimes. So I have a laptop.

At home (where I work the most) I have 4 monitors, a keyboard and a mouse, so no worries about screen space or laptop touchpads. Most clients are happy for me to borrow a monitor or two.

A laptop can do everything a desktop can, it just might cost you a touch more. My laptop has a 4790K i7 and 32gb or RAM. Note that that's a desktop model CPU because I wanted the better perf, and it doesn't do any of that annoying low power throttling to save battery (as a side effect the battery life is about 90 minutes! But that's still more battery life than any desktop I've ever used). You can get laptops with desktop model GPUs these days too if that's what you need.

There is generally a difference between the CPU and GPU models on laptops and desktops. Don't assume that a nvidia 980m is the same as a 980, they are basically different GPUs. CPU model numbers are more confusing, but similarly, the laptop model CPUs are usually less cores and lower power, so make sure you are comparing like for like. It's possible to buy laptops with desktop components in them these days if you look around.

If you have no requirement to be mobile, buy a desktop, you'll get better performance for the price. If you have to be mobile, get a laptop, and work out the trade offs you can make based on what you can afford.

(Only point this perhaps breaks down is for the extreme top end where laptops might not be an option, but you don't seem to be talking about that)

If on the other hand your question was "should I buy a new computer". If you're working as a dev with that spec machine, I would say the answer is yes. You'll get a significant boost just by jumping to a modern CPU and a decent amount of RAM.
Your analogy is incorrect.

If the police simply refused to respond until you'd done the full investigation yourself and handed in the proof, and then the only thing they'd do was acknowledge "yup, that guy stole your wallet, we won't assume he legitimately possesses that wallet anymore but we also won't do anything to get it back or prosecute him", then you'd have an analogy.
I can say from much first hand experience that Google's in house teams don't typically deliver what I would consider great work. And that was with the top tier of support at a search agency. I'm not entirely surprised at your results.

Most savvy people I know managing search for a living would but run something Google put together without quite a few changes.

Some of this comes from lack of understanding the business as well as someone on an account or in house, some is lack of experience since you often can have people barely out of school working on this stuff. Even when I had veteran teams there were still tweaks needed.

Things like keywords that didn't make sense, poor targeting settings, etc. were not uncommon. I know they've made big efforts to improve here, but they still have a long way to go.
I believe this is entirely too dismissive of a very complex and important subject.

As a native English speaker living in France, I would strongly advise anyone considering living and working here that it is absolutely critical to speak, read, and write a competent level of French if one is to be successful.

Sure, if you're going to just live in the center of Paris and spend all your time in the Expat crowd, you can get by, but it's disingenuous to claim that someone wouldn't be at a significant disadvantage in a French company if they only speak English.

I'm aware of several companies that claim they operate in English, but what this really means is that formal meetings and (some) emails are written in English, and all other conversation is in French.
Its also worth noting that you can use re-frame with react-native to write apps with the re-natal project: https://github.com/drapanjanas/re-natal
I would love to go to France.

I'm in US right now, 1 semester left for degree and have interned at a respectable company.
I wonder if they're looking for experienced engineers over fresh ones.

I've read so much that work life and culture is so much better in France, so heres hoping...
For usability: it's not clear in the readme what I change if I submit a PR: is it just blns.txt, or is it the other ones like blns.json as well?

Also it bugs me a bit that the "Scunthorpe problem" section seems to be in random order not alphabetic.
Secret Meditation technique
While I agree with the sentiment (data is the only reasonable way to make large-scale decisions), it is important to remember that any utility analysis needs to include such factors as the negative utility associated with workers knowing that xy% of their paycheck is going to support people who don't have any work obligations.

For example, if UBI resulted in marginally improved economic conditions by some utilitarian heuristic over a somewhat more laissez-faire system, I would probably prefer the more laissez-faire system due to the social/moral value I ascribe to greater freedom and autonomy.

I'm sure you're aware of this notion, but I figured it made a good addendum to what you said.
Can you give me some example of it's application?
Yeah same, it's really lovely.
> Real question for me is that how good french people are at speaking English?

Mostly irrelevant unfortunately, because the French will expect you to speak French once you are in France. I've experienced this many times in Paris among French people I know can speak English well enough to have a conversation.
Who are the Econ people you're talking about on twitter?
This is how things have always been. It's the reason for our patent system, to incentivize companies to open up their proprietary tech.