skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure, they've been trained ritualistically to say ZFC is what they're using, but they really aren't using ZFC in particular, any more than any other formal system into which their work could be just as well translated

I agree, but that's not my argument.

> Frankly, type theory is a lot closer to what "actual" (i.e., non-logician) mathematicians actually do than ZF

I've seen this claim made many times, and it's quite iffy. Mathematicians may think of types, but those types are not really much closer to type-theoretical formal types than to formal sets.

> and one would never ask whether 7 was an element of 3 or the squaring function on integers was an element of the complex number 3 + 5i, etc.

This is a misrepresentation of formal set theory in practice. No one investigates those anyway, and in proof assistants based on ZFC they are unprovable. I.e. 3 ∈ 7 has some truth value like any proposition but not one that could be determined in the theory, and it is nonsensical. In other words, 3 ∈ 7 has the same meaning as 1/0 in practical formalizations of set theory (like proof assistants): they are both equal to some value, but that value cannot be determined.

> Framing mathematical ontology in terms of types is not some esoteric practice far removed from the mathematician/programmer in the street.

Right, but there are plenty of annoying details. Even with simple questions such as what 1/0 means: if it's well typed you need to introduce partial functions which are not a familiar or simple concept; if it isn't, you need to introduce dependent types, with their own world of pain. The annoying details of type theory don't get in the way until you get to large sets.

See Leslie Lamport's discussion on the use of types in math[1].

In any event, I think TT should take some more time to mature and become canonized.

> Finally, your Turing quotes aren't about type theory in particular, but symbolic logic in general. They apply equally so to ZFC or any other such formal system.

Yes, but the paper talks about gradually introducing mathematicians to "naive" type theory (Turing wrote a couple of papers about making type theory practical). But my point is about his approach: logicians must make their formal systems approachable. Set theory (at least the part that concerns most ordinary math) is very approachable. Type theory isn't yet.

[1]: Types Are Not Harmless, 1995 research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/types.ps.Z
Pattern recognition and machine learning by Bishop is one of the canonical text books. It helps to have a linear algebra background, it includes a refresher though
Men do leave, but they leave much much less.

All you have to do is look at incoming CS major undergrads vs finished degree CS undergrads, or you can look at any statistic at all along a women's career.

Women are leaving in droves. We do not have a pipeline problem. We do not need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math.

We have a toxic pipeline problem, when women are driven out of the industry.
There are plenty of examples in other fields where we have implemented systems to counter bias against women, and then the demographics of that field have quickly shifted to match the population.

For example, before orchestras started doing blind auditions, there were far fewer women than men. After, the proportions are much closer to equal. Sports is a related example- there are clearly plenty of women interested in athletics, despite society pushing them out in the past. The article itself compares computing to astronomy- I find it unlikely that the differences between the two are wide enough to result in the difference we see demographics.

So at this point, it seems to me the burden of proof falls on the idea that women aren't discriminated against. Time and again society has tried to explain away a disparity by attributing it to intrinsic differences of biology, or whatever, and time and again that has proven false.
Are you saying male investors won't invest in a promising start up because it's female-run?
Taking a step back from the problem, users do usually have some amount of control over what is running on a system.

I mean, I understand that computers managed by typical users will be a shitshow, but much of the problem in that situation is that they don't really care.
I think that list would be more like:

1. How to start a fire with flint and steel, or other technique without matches

2. How to purify water by boiling, iodine, distilling, etc.

3. How to build a shelter using a pocket-knife, some string, and an old tarp.

4. How to trap, kill, skin, dress, and cook wild animals

5. How to catch fish with a homemade hook, or with a spear

5.5 How to make a spear

6. etc.

And actually, when you think about it, all of those are things that very well could be valuable.
Funny, I recently got into Twitter about two years ago. I've ditched Facebook b/c its creepy af, prefer my own static site with Disqus for blogging (won't get taken down, or at least easily portable if Github or AWS eventually fails), and consider Tumblr a cultural wasteland.

The important thing about Twitter is it's a really good real-time online CV/resume. I basically use it to tweet about things I care about professionally, and then link my Twitter account on my other personal pages. That way I can keep my personal pages relatively generic and point potential employers, employees, customers, or partners at my Twitter if they want to see a more current snapshot of my professional activities.

For the most part I don't get involved in the naval-gazing self-back-patting "Twitter Community" either, nor do I post about mundane personal shit, I keep it all professional-related. Most of my posts are intended for non-Twitter users (or at least people coming to my profile from origins other than Twitter) who are vetting me for some business opportunity.
Capitalism may also offer answers. For example, as tree supply diminishes, each tree will become more valuable (assuming wood demand stays stable) thereby incentivizing tree farmers to plant trees over other crops.

The world changes and humans need to along with it. I'm sure cavemen once sat around the fire worrying about how all the good caves were being used up.
Microsoft might have billions of lines of code today, but they would be precisely nowhere without the few K-lines of code that composed microsoft basic for the altair.

Its misleading to say that 99%+ of american wealth occured long after slavery etc ended, because it still started there.
their sec teams have some solidly season former intel/agency folks. They aren't naive when it comes to IP Security; it's kinda their golden goose (ofc outside of ad revenue)
Was software engineering ever meritocratic? It certainly doesn't seem so to me. Never mind the problem of how to evaluate who's the best which seems impossible.
I had relatives in the airline industry, and the backronym going around for PIA (Pakistan International Airlines), which was quite crash-prone back in the days (30 hull losses, according to Wikipedia) was "Please inform Allah"...
* Molecular biology

* Chemistry

* Math

* Evolutionary biology

* Biochemistry

* Statistics

* Astronomy

All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women.

It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it would also need to account for the fact that women are also far better represented in the rest of the professions).
I've done the first free 10 days and was surprised by the results from something so simple.
The idea of publicizing more role models seems fine, but Pike crossed a line here:

> It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely.

Doing this would violate the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits hiring discrimination based on, "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin".[1] I'm also sure such a practice would be extremely counterproductive.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2
> This was a gain that was achieved not by starting from scratch but by stealing lands from indigenous people

Seeing as how you are saying that the growth of America was dependent on 'stealing' land you must be implying that the success is dependent on the stealing of resources.

Which is trivially proven false by simply looking at South America.

> forcing Africans to work that land

Forcing Africans to work the land stunted American growth. It's not a coincidence that the richest parts of the countries are the ones that industrialized.
I don't think I'm talking past you -- your previous point was perfectly clear. You literally cannot have active investments if nobody invests with active investors or actively manages their funds themselves. This is tautological. So somebody has to invest with active investors, but Buffett is arguing it should be somebody else and not you.

If 99.99% of all assets are locked up in buy-and-hold passive index funds the prop traders can't do anything when a stock is mispriced because they can only trade with the handful of active investors that remain. With 65 trillion in equities a handful of prop traders can jump high and low all they want but the markets won't budge if nobody is buying or selling. The index managers on the other hand will be able to move markets with a keystroke, because whenever they decide that one stock in the index has to be replaced by another all the index fund money blindly follows.
I am not quite sure where this requirement for Software Developer to work 8 hours with extra time because they are really motivated and then spend the totality of their free time on side project is coming from.

Does doctor, GP, engineers, scientist, ... expected to do the same ?

Because when you jump one level up on the pay scale, there is no expectation of you learning anything whatsoever, at least not outside company time. Similarly, a developer setting a meeting to learn about a technical issue is frown upon, while manager setting up a meeting to learn about a business functionality is perfectly ok.
That's how you end up with manager only workshop, but developer should magically figure it out what to do and how, all from the workshop reports.
I read that as "just because" among otherwise equally-qualified candidates, as a counter to an unintentional bias in the other direction.
>　I still fail to see why having a single neuron that circumnavigates the brain should lead to consciousness.

The number of neurons you can trace is limited by the methods: traditionally you can only stain a couple of neurons at most, otherwise the mangling axons and dendrites just make it impossible to differentiate between the neurons. Although now there are better methods (e.g. "brainbow" for barcoding neurons, "CLARITY" for whole-brain imaging).

In this case although it's just a couple sample neurons from claustrum, but given that same type of neurons in the brain tend to cluster together (which is how we differentiate brain regions anyway), it is likely that there are many, many more neurons like this in claustrum.

Claustrum has long been hypothesized to play a role in conciousness, however we know so little about this region (it was only a couple years ago people first recorded neural activity from that region!). This provides support about it because consciousness contains information about just all sensor/motor/cognition, therefore a neuron that computes consciousness should have access to a large amount of brain regions. So finding this neuron which basically connects the whole brain is supportive to this hypothesis. What's more supportive is the fact we have never seen neurons like this anywhere else: so even if it's just a couple of neurons in the claustrum, the potential bayes factor favouring their role in consciousness can be quite high.
"Role model" doesn't simply mean "someone you look up to". It also means "cognitively available success cases". This message board is practically a personification of that phenomenon. Among those of us running startups, most wouldn't have done so had many others not done so before us.
Women are free to start a VC fund. Nobody is stopping them. As I said, there are plenty of women with money.

Furthermore, VC funds are hardly the only source of funding. Friends and family are traditional sources of startup capital, and loaning money to businesses is a traditional business for banks.
I think his post was that we should challenge our cognitive biases and the male-oriented geek culture.

For example, after some members of the team have interviewed a potential candidate for hire, we get together to discuss our observations on him/her. We were choosing between two people and the female, IMO, wrote much cleaner code. The team decided to go with the guy because "he fit the culture better".

What this meant was he and 2 of the other interviewers talked about League of Legends for 10 minutes and he wore a "hilarious" graphic t-shirt.
Sounds like Sciatica.

I had it a couple of years ago due to a lot of desk-sitting. The cure is simple, start exercising.I can personally recommend deadlifts and squats, and yoga or taijichuan.

And make sure your seat isn't too high or low. When sitting place your feet flat on the floor. Your heels shouldn't lift( and feet shouldn't hang) and your knees shouldn't be higher than your butt.
Can you explain what you mean by "you need two language items"? I'm just getting into Rust now and planning some bare metal stuff.
Only with an absurd definition of "merit".

Yes, if you define "merit" as including particular genes in your DNA, then you can get away with Pike's attitude and still claim to be merit-based.

But hello, reality check, Pike is advocating for something that is not only immoral but also explicitly illegal. The law says that people should be assessed on their skill at the job and not selected due to their gender. Like, whether they write good code or not. The industry has a lot of different ways of measuring merit that are gender neutral - Pike is saying ignore those ways and promote bad coders over good, "just because" they're women.
My pattern on this stuff is to initially write:

try:
do_something()
except ExpectedException:
handle_it()
except OtherKnownException:
handle_that_too()
except Exception as exc:
log.exception('New kind of error just happened')
handle_fallback()
And was it men who made your daughter feel like computing wasn't socially acceptable? Or was it her female friends in the cheerleading squad?
> Write your code for this game only - not for a future game. You’re going to be writing new code later because you’ll be smarter.

This really stood out for me. I'm always tempted, while writing something specific, to generalize it. I try to resist that, when I recognize it. Writing a ThingThatImWritingFramework risks ThingThatImWriting never seeing the light of day, or never being used.
AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling
Singtel announces eSIM availability across 4G network
There can easily be more than one yardstick.

Edit: Yes, a company needs to survive. Which products or services a company provides are simple examples of choices that are not purely based on profit. Similarly, there's plenty of variety in how companies are run while still being able to survive. Maximizing profit at the expense of all else is a choice some do make, but that's not the only way to run a business.
Show HN: Scattered – Vote on accommodation choices for group holidays
“Science has been done without women for centuries, and it obviously worked.” – Luboš Motl

Can we please just stop all this PC bullshit. Robo Pike obviously doesn't realize that the reason these women attending that meeting are so excellent is because there are so few of them. I.e. only those survived/came so far who have actual skills.

The same goes for computer science. The women who are really skilled and who really want to work in this field WILL work in this field. Which, of course, means there will be less of them. I mean, we already got enough incompetent men in sotware engineering/computer science. Do we really need to flood the field with incompetent women? And on top of that, celebrate their non-achievement of being a woman?

Regarding role models: why can't women simply choose a male role model? Is the gender of their role models really that much more important than their achievements? Shouldn't you look up to someone because, let's say, they are especially skilled in their field instead of their genitals? (Same goes for men choosing a female role model)

Look at it from the other way around: has any man in fashion ever complained about there not being enough male role models in fashion (a field clearly dominated by women)?

And the only ones who ever complained about impoliteness are women and effeminates. If you judge people by hurt feelings instead of actual skills, then you end up with shit like being banned from the golang community for pointing out that someone's English is incomprehensible!

If women have something to contribute to the respective field, then they are more than welcome. If not, then they can simply fuck off (just as all those incompetent men).
>It is refreshing to hear from a source...

I agree and thanks for sharing.

The biggest challenge now for me with free time is read from those types of sources. Or to just stay off my phone!!!!!

The joy of reading is under attack.

When my parent got near death s/he also framed a very patriotic life full of optimism.
Wow, really?? What a radical thought in progressiveland. This is what it has come to. People have to hide behind throwaway accounts to speak their mind about the most basic matters that should be blatantly obvious to anyone.
>consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers.

I am skeptical of the claim that anybody actually thinks this.

>and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!"

You don't think someone's height and musculature might affect how well they can play baseball? That their nice teeth will help their team's image and thus, their bottom line? That someone who is physically skilled but bad at the game can be taught to become better? These all feel like absolutely reasonable discrimination to me.

>nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics.

You're right, fair was perhaps not the right word to use. But what do we actually get out of this? How do we even know that these people have been overlooked? Does this "re-balancing" provide more value than what is expended to achieve it?
That's the exact opposite of what Pike is saying.
Mirrors that pull down the version with rewritten history will not be able to run a fast-forward (because they will contain commits that are not in the upstream version), and will loudly complain.
How to Argue Well by Daniel Dennett
Leaky pipeline? :-P
128 bits are 2^48 (~2.81*10^14) times larger than 80 bits (80 bits is the brute force, and SHAttered was less than that), and comparing SHA-2 to a Mersenne Twister is just picking two numbers and saying "this one is less than that one" without context.

EDIT: "The computational effort spent on our attack is estimated to be equivalent to 2^63.1 SHA-1 calls" [1]
Comparing that to 2^128 (birthday paradox SHA-256) is... It doesn't apply.

[1] http://shattered.it/static/shattered.pdf
I taught an elective coding class to middle school students. We had somewhat over 50% girls participate and most of the strongest students were girls. Make of that what you will.

In my career, I have worked for the same woman boss through several companies. I can't imagine having a stronger, better person to work for.

Yet of course I see what everyone else here reports : that there are very few female engineers/developers.
No part of this engages with my comment. You can't convincingly dismiss the entire class of arguments about how "merit" is evaluated as facially absurd, unless your definition of "merit" is "whatever produces the set of circumstances we're currently living in now". Arguments of that form have a name; they're called "the just-world fallacy".
Nice list. Do you have anything that rates vegetables by macros/calories?
No, Easter island wouldn't have had taro, chickens, goats, pigs WITHOUT the polynesian humans bringing them.
Thank you for your civil reply, and I agree that the question has not been put to rest, as evident by the ongoing debate regarding how diversity initiatives should be implemented, if at all. I also agree that all this should be taken with utmost seriousness and consideration of opposing points of view.

Since I do not have firsthand experience with being a woman, my information comes from talking to women computer scientists and engineers from my school CS program and my workplace, and listening to their firsthand experiences dealing with sexism in the industry. Their opinions are diverse, but generally are in support for more empowerment of women/minorities in the workplace, so I generally support their agenda. Personally, I enjoy working in a more diverse workplace, anyway (long explanation for another day).

In Soviet Russia during the Cold War, I believe boys and girls were both encouraged to study math and sciences, which resulted in a fairly even gender representation in the career, and neither gender was better than the other on average. Food for thought.
Engineers Should Blog
Nobody has to invest money in prop shops for them to provide market inputs. There are some huge proprietary trading firms.
You have the pipeline problem backwards.

The women in tech pipeline is a leaky, toxic pipeline that results in talented women being driven out of the industry.

Of course many women are not that interested in programming. This is obviously true. Because the women who DO get into programming are quickly driven out by the toxic culture. If I were a woman I wouldn't want to be in the tech industry either.

It is a waste of time to focus on widening the top of the funnel, which leads to the toxic pipeline, and will result in most of them leaving anyway. We should focus more on making the industry less sucky for the women who are already here.

Once the toxic pipeline is fixed, THEN women will start being more interested in programming and tech.
For solving linear systems there are recent mind-blowing methods by R. M. Gower and P. Richtarik:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03296

http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~richtarik/papers/SDA.pdf

Plus R. M. Gower is fantastically nice and enthusiastic so there's that

And thanks for the link !
According to recent studies of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, the greedy don't win in the long run, they die out.
>Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.

Whereas claiming they can't be disentangled is obviously disinterested.

Slavery was the rule, not the exception in the world at the time. The African kingdoms mostly practiced it, the Arabs were infamous for it, Mexico ended slavery in the 1830s after American industrialization was well underway, Russia didn't truly end serfdom until around 1900 as I recall, and then you have India's caste system, so only China is left without slavery in some form? But were they? And why didn't all of these countries industrialize?