skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> many programs have, instead of the former, means to satisfy some portion of credit requirements without actually taking classes if you can demonstrate equivalent knowledge gained elsewhere (e.g., credit-by-examination.)

Can you name some of those programs? I keep hearing about those but can't find them.
E-mail worked for me when I needed to ask them a question. The whole thing was resolved in less than a day, and it was painless. From what I've seen they're pretty active here in comments too, and seem inclined to reply to reasonable questions posed to them, including, "Mind if I send you an e-mail detailing some concerns?"

Talk to them... they're people.
Wouldn't the first step be to abolish the welfare state? That way it eliminates financial coercion of the electorate and stops the viability of r-selection reproduction that resulted in the demographic shift that enables these sorts of politicians in the first place?
We don't do effective overstay tracking.
> Just because he's "good" on this issue doesn't change that... You have to deny them victories, even on issues that you support

I understand this argument when it's something like a good stance on education, with bad stances on abortion and the environment. There are lots of people on the left who would share that education stance, and they should be championed instead.

But that's really, really not the case on surveillance. We don't have the luxury of siding with the left and denying the right (or vice-versa). Dianne Feinstein is the Congressional Democrat's standard-bearer on surveillance. We don't want to empower the right, great. But this is a hugely important issue where the left is terrible. So is most of the right - only a handful of figures on each side (especially Wyden, Udall, and Paul) doing anything good.

So what the heck does party discipline look like? Surrendering the entire issue because the Democrats are so profoundly wrong?
A certificate is barely anything more than a hoop that employers make prospective employees jump through. In the current job market, it's very unlikely to catch on.
The Franklin Covey system is somewhat outdated (especially when GTD came on the scene) but it's designed to do this.

They start from long term goals (they call it vision or something similar) and then break it down into smaller and smaller items which you schedule on a weekly and daily basis. This ensures that everything you do works towards a larger goal. There will be smaller interruptions and things but the overall direction is quite clear.

This has fallen by the wayside with our rather disruptive lives but there are still lessons which are useful. Larger targets (e.g year goals) can be broken down into manageable monthly targets. Then you can work towards these and make sure that you always progress towards your larger vision.
From the Verge article:

> While Bannon didn’t explicitly say anything against immigrants, he seemed to hint at the idea of a white nationalist identity with the phrase “civic society.”

That seems like a pretty big jump from him citing a common stat to Verge accusing him of calling for a white nationalist state. He didn't say anything close to that.

He may hold nationalist ideas where he wants more American's founding good companies domestically. But I'm not really seeing where he is calling for a white society or for an end of Asians starting companies? It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the US tech industry in addition to Asians?

From someone outside of the industry it may be a rational concern question to ask why there aren't more Americans starting those top companies? You can ask that and be concerned about that while not being characterizing the problem as Asians taking some fixed amount of jobs.

The insistence of people to fill in all the blanks of everything Steve Bannon doesn't say with some generic white supremacist viewpoint is really strange to me. Like there's an attempt to discredit any of his ideas by associating them with white nationalism. Usually by cherry picking statements and inventing a bunch of implied underlying meaning - that may or may not actually exist - to fill in the gaps until a narrative is complete. It's actually quite brilliant from a partisan character assassination perspective.
Well, the humans could be tools...
Do you ever see China becoming a democratic country? The few Chinese I know really respect their president and are quite happy with it.

Also why would countries move to democracy when US (face of democracy) is turning out to be a bad example?
Good study and all, but I think it misses the point of the current sentiment in the US. Regardless, yes, immigrants are more likely to found businesses than natives. Whether or not their businesses become billion dollar startups because of their efforts or venture capitalists is another question, but yes, they help the economy (As much as those who are a drag on it? Who knows).

I wrote a lengthy post about the effects of immigration recently, so here's I'll just focus on the issue of human capital.

Immigration creates a situation for rich countries to be able to draw from a much larger pool of talent than they otherwise would since they take talent from other countries. This is a great situation for the host country, and devastates developing economies. It's basically colonialism all over, except instead of stealing physical commodities you're stealing human capital.

Relevant article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight

And of course, there are negative effects in the host country, namely that there's more competition for jobs, which can drive wages down, eliminate some jobs for natives altogether, etc... The hope is that this effect is offset by the job creation effect, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The US rust belt certainly doesn't seem to be gaining much, but other areas are.

Anyhow, the whole point of this is that there's well known pros and cons to immigration. It's not all pro, nor all con. You need to ask exactly what you want the end-game to be - not just for the US, but for the world. Human capital flight is the single biggest obstacle to development for the third world. At the same time, it allows the west to gather all the brightest minds in the world to maintain its hegemony. What's more important - maintaining a dominant place in the world, or more equal development that doesn't leave anyone behind? (I mean, I know the answer - we're willing to destroy countries who go against western hegemony and simply absorb the migrants)
Ah so it is personal, nice to know and what I always suspected.
Facebook says police can’t use its data for ‘surveillance’
No i don't think it is the job of an intelligence agency to spy on the rest of the world's citizens and i think its a terrible idea to normalise this behaviour as such or to somehow make it sound ethical.

The everyone else is doing it defence does not change the unethical nature of the action.
You mean like Steve Job's biological father, who was/is a business owner in America?
What do these kinds of referendums mean? This is just three years after the last "once in a generation" referendum. Let's say it goes independence. Will supporters be okay with another referendum three years later that might reverse that decision?

It all smacks of opportunism and reminds me of all the other EU-related votes that keep happening until voters pick the right answer.
Because the Yahoo-Verizon merger is kind of confusing: this is not about the parts (Yahoo.com, Tumblr, Flickr etc.) which are about to merge into Verizon. This is actually about the spinoff containing the assets which will stay separate.

Who eventually is going to run the parts at Verizon (which will not be Mayer) is as of yet unknown I believe.
Did this win an Ig Nobel and if not, why not?
Immigration Program X that already exists allows 100k with qualities Y.

Immigration Program A that already exists allows 200k with qualities B.

This is the state of the current world. We have an existing bureaucracy that dictates who is allowed to immigrate, and when.

Make change C so that Program X allows 250k, and Program A only allows 50k.

Change C is not changing the amount of government bureaucracy. We already had the bureaucracy! We were doing the centrally planning already, and making change C does not make it any more centrally planned, because it was already centrally planned.

Imagine a government run factory already exists. Now imagine making a change to the government fun factory. This change is not ADDITIONAL central planning, because it was already a government run factory.
Two example policies (chosen because they were the first two in a Google search, and show contrasting approaches to the general issue, not, e.g., because of any special relevance of the two institutions):

http://registrar.calpoly.edu/content/stu_info/credit_byexam

http://admissions.utah.edu/apply/special-credit/challenge-a-...
Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles
I particularly like Linus A's contributions to the C64 demoscene, because more than likely he'll do an excellent writeup like this about a newly discovered or perfected technique that was central to it.
> there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries

So, in other words, there is evidence that it does have negative consequences?

I myself don't know either way. I just think that, if what you write is true, an impact at the low end of the salary spectrum isn't something to brush off as if it's nothing and doesn't count.
> outrageous ... irrelevant

The citation seems quite clear to me. Perhaps I'm missing something. Was Bannon not complaining about the number of ethnic minorities?
> for starters there are significantly more tax benefits for starting a business if you are an immigrant.

For example? Legal US immigrants pay the same taxes as everyone else.

> Secondly, immigrants don't have entrenched interests or preoccupations that would otherwise give them a very high opportunity cost to starting their own business.

One of the most popular routes to US [legal] immigration is via family, which naturally leads to preoccupation. Your notion of who immigrants are is very skewed.
> There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.

Uh... not really?

Left to its own devices, the system will include both extremes and non-extremes. In order to cut extremes out you have to sample what the extremes are, detect them and then minimize them.

The sampling comes by letting extremes pop up. The detection comes by letting users tag stories by content and emotional weight. You can minimize them with moderation tags and meta-moderation flags and automating balancing algorithms.

Currently you support story flagging, comment flagging, up/down voting. You have no way to identify what the significance of these are, though. Without better tools for your community maintain itself, of course you need moderators. But there are simple ways around this that would cut most of the moderation out and allow the system to simply re-weight stories as they become more obviously extreme in one or multiple tag/flag configurations.

Here are the categories of the 30 newest stories at time of writing: social media, privacy, programming, sysadmin, espionage, consumer products, politics, health, games, science. The stories vary in emotional rating (1-5, meh -> i am upset). As tags come in for any given story, trends emerge about how that story is perceived: it is relatively emotional, it is political and science based, and it is upvoted very quickly. Clearly, this is more likely to be controversal than the low-emotion programming topic that takes an hour to reach front page, so the latter should get higher priority, because it is less controversial and more "important to HN".

Notice that no moderator is needed to figure out what is controversial and change the balance, and we didn't even need to do something complicated like analyze speech patterns in comments or story content.
The best is to work in companies where people maintain their own code and are responsible for fixing what they broke. The moment the split is like you said, A team will produce progressively crappier and harder to maintain code. The B team will have high turnover and require higher salaries to stay in.

It is bad organizational structure.
Companies are completely entitled to ask for proof that a person can perform the job requirements and they feel like having an education is important to performing at the level they need.

I wouldn't walk onto a construction site and expect the foreman to give me a job as a carpenter without some proof that I can do the job.
I found the original thread, turns out the peer count is 50 (not 32 like I originally stated).

Here's the thread in question: https://forum.resilio.com/topic/30525-please-please-please-p...
These look great, but I wish they would bump that CPU up to a 6700HQ. Otherwise, for the price, I think I would rather pay for a XPS 15, since the specs are better.
> One of the basic premises of anti-immigrant policies is that you can somehow influence the ratio of "useful" vs "not-useful" immigrants.

This is exactly what the study shows is not just possible but easy in screening by nationality. Think about US immigration statistics by country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...): you'll see lots of Central and South American countries. Now take a look at what the study finds (http://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Immigrants-and-Bi...):

"The leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of billion dollar companies was India with 14 entrepreneurs, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom with 8, Israel (7), Germany (4), China (3), France (2), Ireland (2) and 12 other countries with one entrepreneur.2

India: 14

Canada: 8

United Kingdom: 8

Israel: 7

Germany: 4

China: 3

France: 3

Ireland: 2

Armenia: 1

Azerbaijan: 1

Argentina: 1

Egypt: 1

Holland: 1

Iraq: 1

Norway: 1

Russia: 1

Singapore: 1

South Africa: 1

South Korea: 1

Uzbekistan: 1"

Does this look remotely like current US immigration? It does not. (Hey, you know what countries I don't see on that startup founder list? Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Jamaica, Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Peru, Ecuador...) If you were building a model to predict startup founding by nationality and personal details like IQ or ethnicity (no prizes for guessing what ethnicity that 1 South Africa founder is, or what religion that 1 Iraqi founder is), and designing immigration policy around that, it would look nothing like what has gone on for decades.

Using startup founders as an argument for the status quo of illegal immigration is a deeply dishonest bait-and-switch piece of equivocation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division ) and it makes my teeth grind every time I see someone go 'did you know 50% of startup founders/CEOs/scientists are immigrants?' Justify it on its own merits, don't pretend that Indian brahmins and Israeli Jews' accomplishments have anything to do with not building a wall along the Mexican border!

This is a very similar fallacy as the 'US has only 5% of the world population, therefore it only has 1 out of 20 of the best researchers/programmers/entrepreneurs' (most recently seen on Paul Graham's Twitter). This is not remotely the case because of differing health & political & economic & scientific development & mean IQ, and the further out on the tail you go (such as 'best programmers in the world') the more lopsided the global distribution becomes - much the same way that women make up 50% of the population but do not make up 50% of people over 7 feet tall or the NBA.
No such thing as stupid questions, but ads are usually served through a specific domain, which can be blocked, even with SSL
so you are saying we can make our own yoghurt using this method?
Yes, but America is one of many "countries". If you want to extend the example to universities, then you have to compare America to say "Harvard". Potential students always have the chance to go to other universities, some with definitely lower standards of entry. Same goes for America and other countries.

E.g. I wasn't smart enough to get a fancy scholarship and entry to a top-tier American university? But, I sure was able to get into a good university in a third-world country. Options are available! America is not the only answer out there, so to phrase it as if America has the sole responsibility of fixing the world's problems is kind of one-sided.
It should have become pretty clear that this wasn't partisan when an outgoing Obama helped ramp up surveillance in full knowledge of who was next. Seeing people treat this as a D/R fight when Udall and Feinstein are viciously opposed to one another is bizarre to me.
QR code scams highlight security weaknesses in China's wallet apps
I think the problem is the idea that you spend the beginning of your life learning things, and the rest of it doing things.

The current system does not leave much in the way of learning things (or at least getting credit) later on. This is a problem, because your average 18-22 year old knows nothing about what work they'll find satisfying, or what work will be in demand.

You also don't know what you'll actually be learning. For instance I did management classes at a well know university. Did I expect to learn something about how to manage? Yes. Did I learn anything about how to manage? No, that's not what management class is about. I suspect many people had similar experiences with their classes. To be fair engineering classes are not about how to be an engineer either, so I don't think it's a science/humanities thing.

What you do find out in uni is that pretty much anything academic can be learned if you dedicate some time to it. Read a few books about economics, and you'll know the major ideas of that field, presented in a somewhat coherent fashion.

So what we need is a way for someone who's found an interest to be able to pursue that. You work a bit as a coder, and you realise you should get a CS degree. So you find a course, read, practice, do an exam.

What's important is people who've discovered this need tend to be in a different life situation from ordinary college attendees. They might have work already, family, and so on. So incentives need to align to allow people to learn things without tearing up their whole life.
"user testing"
When you do it as a day job for prolonged periods of time (where the other people put little to no effort into writing code that doesn't resemble raw encryption), the fascination wears out real fast.
"Combating xenophobia should be a moral issue, not a utilitarian one."

Equating 'pro immigration' with 'morality' is the rather problematic basis of your statement.

Many countries (most, in fact) do just fine without large scale immigration policies.

Many nations with immigration are struggling to cope.

Moreover, there are serious flaws with US immigration policy such that one could be opposed to it on that basis.

Very, very few people 'hate immigrants'. But significant numbers of people think it's inappropriate to have people sneaking across the border, without documentation or status, and others just don't support large scale immigration, or perhaps have other criteria.
I wish people wouldn't slap 'Macbook Pro/Air alternative' onto a laptop unless its form-factor actually resembles an MBA/MBP. If it doesn't have any of the following:

- < 3lb weight

- Aluminum unibody

- High-quality trackpad

It's not a Macbook alternative. It might be a perfectly good workhorse computer and adequate laptop, but it's not an alternative to the light-and-sleek design that people want in a Macbook. Case in point, the Thinkpad series are excellent laptops, but they're not Macbook alternatives: they are rugged and functional, with easily replaceable parts and not super concerned about weight. That's fine--but I would never recommend one to someone who wants something like-Apple-but-not.
I think building a wall will increase the net flow of illegal immigrants as currently more people are leaving than entering.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-...

I don't think you need >3x the annual median income (that's top 10%) for immigrants to benefit.

Economics research says high wage immigrants benefit while low wage immigrants benefit the natives on net, although it may harm some natives.

In my opinion, even if it may harm some natives, due to the poverty alleviating effects of immigration, we should open immigration to anyone who doesn't have a criminal record. This isn't that crazy, till 1914 in the U.S.:

"Generally, those immigrants who were approved spent from two to five hours at Ellis Island. Arrivals were asked 29 questions including name, occupation, and the amount of money carried. It was important to the American government that the new arrivals could support themselves and have money to get started. The average the government wanted the immigrants to have was between 18 and 25 dollars ($600 in 2015 adjusted for inflation). Those with visible health problems or diseases were sent home or held in the island's hospital facilities for long periods of time. More than three thousand would-be immigrants died on Ellis Island while being held in the hospital facilities. Some unskilled workers were rejected because they were considered "likely to become a public charge." About 2 percent were denied admission to the U.S. and sent back to their countries of origin for reasons such as having a chronic contagious disease, criminal background, or insanity."

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island#Primary_inspectio... )

What I want is this minus the racism and disqualification for health problems except maybe for contagious diseases.
If moderators don't have review capacity, HN could have a dedicated page for flagged posts, so that users could review and vouch as needed.
Didn't publish. As far as I know, the Ig's are for published research only.
Reasonable != true.

The difference is between presenting your ideas as "facts" - or making it clear that they are theories, ideally with reasons given why you think they are worth considering.

This exchange belonged to the latter category.

More generally, the term "fake news" is thrown around far too often for my tastes. If I remember correctly, the origin was a scandal about eastern european scammers writing deliberately doctored news to create controversy and cash-in on ad revenue.

Nowadays, this term seems to be used by anyone to describe any kind of rumors or guesswork (or occasionally well-researched journalism) that doesn't fit their particular view.
techmeme.com is a very good collection of all the conversation catchers that are happening in tech industry !
Heh. 33 since I started programming, 29 since I first got paid for it.

For the record, I am completely against any kind of certification in this field... which is actually already a dozen different fields, at the least. (I have no experience in Machine Learning or Wordpress plugins, both of which are actual jobs you can make money with.)
I should clarify, there's no -direct- tax benefits. It's largely to do with capital (immigrants generally pool capital better) which they can write off for years. Most Americans don't put up as much personal capital. There are also grant programs and guaranteed loans which immigrants can utilize which regular citizens generally don't have access to. Though on a whole the raising of capital is similar.
“Pruning a Very Old Bonsai Tree” – [Episode #62] Make Money Online
If you've got a good enough sense of your algorithms and have a large enough scale to be rolling your own ASIC components you probably don't need an FPGA in you chip.
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