skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a background similar to the author of the post. I gather his scope is the US, or North America.

Personally, I had my foot in more than one world. I grew up not wealthy, lower-middle-class in rural Ontario. I rowed because of my parents' history as athletes and their involvement helping establish a club in the small town we lived in. I also skateboarded and preferred old punk music to the Tragically Hip (which was the popular stuff where I grew up. How things change). I was also notoriously uncool and didn't hit parties, and spent a lot of time on the computer I urged and urged my parents to buy after coming in contact with GUI's (after years of messing with the 286 my mom had from her days working in the city.)

From my perspective then, his outlook is accurate. On a global scale, totally off. It's far more complex than he makes it out to be.

I would contend that in North America, a lot of the business leaders in tech are white because of the economic advantage typically afforded to them. But it's not universally the case. To start any business, you need resources. That's either money to run a server and access to a half-decent computer, or more. You also need time -- the most expensive and rare of resources in NA.
Implicit means that a lot of headspace is taken to remember all these details. I'd rather focus on building something cool, rails is not the end-goal.
Python, because it's the rare combination of "wildly popular" and "keeps you out of trouble". Ruby has always had a one-framework-town kind of feel to it, with Rails being the one thing people automatically associate with the language. Javascript has the popularity, on the other hand, but it's a minefield in so many ways. The browser is not fun to work with for anything serious, and code written in node bitrots very easily.

So, it's Python. Python has footholds in a variety of places. It's not the most expressive in some respects, but the built in types are more than sufficient to power any student code.

A possible alternate is Go. Go doubles down on keeping you out of trouble by pressing so much code into a uniform style. This may excite some students and frustrate others depending on which threads of thought they're trying to follow.
Ask HN: Non-static blog generator recommendations
Hi HN, any recommendations for some non-static blog/site generators/helpers. I've looked at Hugo and Hexo and I'm thinking a lightweight non-static site generator is better suited for what I am thinking. I guess preferably something other than WordPress.
Yeh $1500 computers.... you where looking at the wrong thing.
Everyone else was looking at the not Microsoft market... commadore, Atari etc. I bought my first computer with Christmas money when I was about 10 for under £100 in the mid 80's.
The whole girls weren't into computers is looking at the bubble from the inside and not looking at why there's a bubble.
Parents in the 70's tended to point the boys at building and engineering toys and the girls at dolls etc. Those children followed on in the same fashion. That's left us in the gender bias we have now.
As for ethnic groups... that's complicated and depends on local demographic, plus imigant families tend not to be overflow in spare cash....
i feel that anyone with authority will exercise abuse at some point. I believe this is why the US has 3 branches of government. Abuse, unfortunately, is human nature.
The root object has to be an array I believe.
It would be easy to make sending credentials opt-in in a new HTTP or HTML version. The way it's done now is backwards IMHO.

Define httpsb:// do be like https://, but any site may make ajax and similar requests to it (without credentials). Then make some kind of exception (like csrf protection), or use legacy https, in case you need to send cookies.
Yeah. I find that it's Computer Science in America that is the exception.
Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped?
I suggest you read your own link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why did you downvote this? Care to explain?
>So are we saying that they're vulnerable sites?

We are saying that they're vulnerable for THAT particular issue (the JSON hijacking), and that is only if they don't already have some other way of dealing with it.
The risk there is some parsers might carry on past the syntax error and try to continue parsing. This is JavaScript after all.
As long as it squiggles enough to avoid aliasing it seems to work well.
Not quite a computation, but there is a striking example (due to Xia) where 5 particles interact and "kicks" off one particle to infinity in finite time. Further details can be found in

http://www.ams.org/notices/199505/saari-2.pdf
I wouldn't be surprised if Google, Apple or Amazon are doing (or going to do) something similar. It doesn't create much traffic at all, a couple of bytes is enough and they can be tacked on to the data stream without anyone noticing.

Someone should build an ultrasonic detector that can recognize these kind of packets and have a look how wide spread this technique already is. We could also need an ultrasonic jammer and ways to add low pass filters to our mics, like some special tape we can place over it to absorb the high frequencies... maybe normal duct tape is already enough.. hmmm
Why wouldn't it, unless there were something categorical about emojis that would legally be deemed to not be able to give rise to binding acceptance?
> Now, anyone can access it.

Where "anyone" = any investment firm with millions of dollars to spend on their IT. :)
This article makes some decent points around class and the expense of a computer in the 80s/90s. But it dodges more substantial questions, and a lot of the substance is either circular logic or confirmation bias.

There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. It probably is socioeconomic for the reasons the article points out, so that's fine - I think we can leave it at "white and asian people dominate programming because they tend to come from wealthier families".

I think the much harder question is why women aren't in programming. They make up 50% of the population and come from the same exact socioeconomic background as men. This question is important because the repercussions still haunt us today. The article starts this question with "girls weren’t interested in computers or video games at all", and then circles the logic with "people tend to do things that they see other people who are 'like them' doing". Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming. In my circumstantial experience it wasn't a conscious decision or peer pressure, it was coming top down from society. I saw many parents encouraging their sons to play with computers and completely ignoring that their daughters may want to also. The article completely avoids this topic, sadly.

edit: downvoted within 30 seconds - if you're gonna downvote, please at least reply and start a discussion about it.
Line scan cameras and (good) encoders are expensive, I figured I'd try to do it with an absolute minimum in terms of fancy hardware. That sort of constraint also helps to boost creativity :)
The offending website could have error handling to catch and discard the syntax error (e.g. global uncaught exception handler). They wont be able to read the JSON, but otherwise they'd be OK.

But getting hit with this, they would be actively hurt, and I don't think that interpreter session would be able to recover.
Given that emojis are used to express someone's thoughts/feelings, I can see why it would have value of evidence of intent. Why not?
Ask HN: Looking for the best Phoenix/Elixir/Erlang Tutorials
Hi.

I am just starting out in web development and am looking for any tutorials on Phoenix/Elixir/Erlang. I am not familiar enough in the language to a) know if a tutorial will actually compile (I have had issues with this in the past) and b) how recent the tutorial needs to be given the latest updates to the language builds. Any and all tutorials where I can build an actual thing would be very useful to me as would resources such as "this in x minutes" that gives snippets of code that do something. I find large documentation sources good for exploring ideas later, but at first I need to get to compile something, if for nothing else than my own sanity.

Thank you in advance for your help :D
For anyone wondering, that is a USB Microscope camera which can be ordered via Amazon[1].

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/XCSOURCE-Microscope-Endoscope-Magnifi...
I've really enjoyed talking to Jacques about his lego project over the last few days, and I hope that it will lead to some additional learning materials on course.fast.ai (which he kindly links to in his article) as a result. It's great to see such a thorough writeup of the whole process, which I think is much more interesting and useful than just showing the final result.

The key insight here, to me, is that deep learning saves a lot of time, as well as being more accurate. I hear very frequently people say "I'll just start with something simple - I'm not sure I even need deep learning"... then months later I see that they've built a complex and fragile feature engineering system and are having to maintain thousands of lines of code.

Every time I've heard from someone who has switched from a manual feature engineering approach to deep learning I've heard the same results as Jacques found in his lego sorter: dramatic improvements in accuracy, generally within a few days of work (sometimes even a few hours of work), with far less code to write and maintain. (This is in a fairly biased sample, since I've spent a lot of time with people in medical imaging over the past few years - but I've seen this in time series analysis, NLP, and other areas too.)

I know it's been trendy to hate on deep learning over the last year or so on HN, and I understand the reaction - we all react negatively to heavily hyped tech. And there's been a strong reaction from those who are heavily invested in SVMs/kernel methods, bayesian methods, etc to claim that deep learning isn't theoretically well grounded (which is not really that true any more, but is also beside the point for those that just want to get the best results for their project.)

I'd urge people that haven't really tried to built something with deep learning to have a go, and get your own experience before you come to conclusions.
That article, and its cited sources, say that Trend Micro came to that conclusion, but does not even attempt to present any facts from the report, only the bare conclusions.

The 'Fancy Bear' report was also called into question by people looking over the details. They somehow missed that one of the tools used was an outdated copy of P.A.S., for example. More details can be found in past HN coverage.

There aren't a lot of facts to go on here, just a forest of articles citing the same conclusions without bothering to cover any of the details about the underlying technical facts they're supposed to be based on.

This is incredibly superficial reporting, anyone who bothers to look for details will be continually disappointed.
Battle of Cuttlefish Caught on Tape
> There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing.

That whites aren't the only race disproportionately advantaged does not in any way support the conclusion that it isn't (in part or in whole) “a race thing”.
I think you've got a valid point. I would add that genetics plays a part. I grew up the same way, but my family didn't have much money. However my parents were former athletes and ensured my siblings and I took part in a regular physical activity (in one form or another) from a young age. I think that staves off some of the aggression -- if you don't look like they could just give you a knock around regardless of your demeanor.

That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops.

I think this at least applies to younger ages.

edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.
A quick observation: The reed switch might have been "sticky" not because of the strength of the magnet, but because of the current all those lights required. For any given reed switch, there's a current that will keep it from disengaging once it engages. Reed switches are generally considered signal devices, not current switches for this reason.
If there are bodies inside, it is considered a war grave. What do the salvagers do with the human remains? I imagine they don't try to contact relatives or respectfully take care of them.
They're connecting through tor, not directly. I'm not sure what makes you think that.
Personally I would like a Slack that works on older Mac operating systems. I had to leave the groups I was in since Slack made updates last month, and now I need Mavericks or newer to continue using it.
I had a hunch that this is to prevent people from including the resource in a script tag - but I always wondered how they'd access the data as a JSON expression on its own should technically be a no-op when interpreted as JS (or so I thought).

The overridden array constructor was the missing link.

Though couldn't you have it easier by making sure your top-level JSON structure is always an object?

As far as I know, while a standalone array expression []; is a valid JS statement, a standalone object expression {}; is not and would produce a syntax error.
>DHH says that explicit code favors novices and those with 'fresh eyes' on a problem while burdening experienced veteran programmers with bloat of boilerplate to read and to write.
I may as well come with fresh eyes for any code I wrote over a year ago.

That's irrelevant to his argument though, as he doesn't speak of coming with fresh eyes to the code, but coming with fresh eyes to the framework/language.

Even if you have forgotten why you wrote some particular code, you'd still remember the ways of the framework/language from other code you've since written with them, or generally because they're more general and fundamental than your particular code (the same way you'd remember the language's syntax, etc, but might have forgotten why you wrote some algorithm a particular way).
Code Collage
Ah! Thank you for that info. I always thought they used binary disks (black and white or holes).
I once thought this was my problem. Turns out it had nothing to do with anything, and I was just an unlikable weirdo.

Sorry if that doesn't help. But blaming women for not liking you doesn't help either.
Have you taken a look at what can be done in functional languages (perhaps F#) ? I'm just starting to get into them [0] and it's been really fascinating.

Jet.com has an interesting post on why they chose F# for similar reasons [1]

[0] I'm working through the How to Design Programs book from Matthias Felleisen which I highly recommend despite its rough edges http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

[1] https://tech.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/
I take your point. I grew up in a seaside community that was notorious for questionable activities in the 18th and 19th centuries[1],[2]. There is a blunt harsh practical opportunistic side to seagoing people that might surprise you.

How do we balance the opportunity afforded to the salvagers against the grazing rights of the local fisherfolk? Is there a replacement structure that can be sunk locally like a concrete wall or honeycomb? Is there research on the time scale needed to seed the coral colonies? Should we place all pre-1942 steel in a UN mandated market?

[1] http://www.historyofwallasey.co.uk/wallasey/story_of_the_day...

[2] https://www.tutorhunt.com/resource/7035/
Ahh ad hominem on both me and the source! Impressive.

Thanks for conceding you have nothing.
The article doesn't even argue that it's a race thing, it simply starts with the premise but explains it as socioeconomic. I agree with the article on that one. I am not white and I was never discouraged in any way from programming because of my skin color or ethnic background (I've been doing it in some form since I was 6 in the late 80s with full support from pretty much everyone, including a lot of monetary support from my upper middle class parents).

edit: it actually does get into race, but around blacks/african americans. But it didn't get into Asians - my point really is this isn't a white thing per se.
> I consider losing structure and adding complexity just to be able to read something out loud a net loss.

So would I. But Matz wrote early on that 'Ruby is designed to make programmers happy,' and that is behind lots of language decisions in Ruby and Rails. Reading aloud isn't an isolated end goal but more a way of describing that design principle. Writing Ruby should be a pleasant interaction, and Ruby programmers should feel like they are talking to a friendly machine. There are many ways to write the same code, and you can develop a distinctive writing style if you want. Many Rubyists talk about and write code like it's poetry, and feel like they have a voice through the code they write. Can you say that about a single Java programmer?

This isn't an accident, and effects like this are not frivolous entertainment the Real Programmers can ignore. It isn't a perfect vision, and you're absolutely right that sometimes it introduces complexity, but it's a real philosophy with tangible benefits, and pluralisation is a tiny part of that vision.
Yes there should be an icon when your mic is active. I tried to build a service in Android to do this but there's no API to get whether the mic is in use or not AFAIK. I ended up disabling mic access for almost all apps, but the Google App and Google Play Services complain when you do this.
Or just use finetuning. He mentioned in the comments last time that he was training from scratch, but I still don't understand why. If you are not changing the architecture and you are using almost essentially the same dataset (just augmented with some more active-learning-created datapoints), why wouldn't you reuse a fully converged checkpoint? It would save potentially orders of magnitude time, and it's trivial to implement: you just load the checkpoint and pass that into your pre-existing code. It's literally three or four lines (one line for a CLI argument '--checkpoint' and three lines for a conditional to load either the checkpoint or a blank model).
I think in the US it is not the case the programmers are significantly disproportionately white.
Tell that to the people of Selfoss and Hveragerði which have now become accustomed to smaller quakes on a more regular basis than usually in the past.
LinkedIn Export Connections
I am looking for a tool that automates exporting my LinkedIn connections. Something that would run every week and put my new connections in my CRM and show me something like "Here are your recent connections email them today" etc.

Anyone know of a tool that does this for you?
There is an alternate theory.

Before you label it a trope, read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book)

The premise is that due to both physical differences and differences in hormonal episodes over a lifetime, the brains of men and women wind up with somewhat different architectures. One architecture is more suited to linear thinking, as in flow charts. The other is more suited to network thinking, as in connecting attributes.

Computers were overwhelmingly designed by men and a computer's architecture and programming methods are reflective of the way men think. Hence, there is little natural draw for women.
Yes ... that was exactly my point. Sorry, I'm a bit confused by your comment. Are you agreeing or refuting?
Show HN: ARA makes your Ansible playbooks easy to understand and troubleshoot
Looks interesting, perhaps a little more GUI than I usually like but I'll give that a look. Being able to use it on mobile would be nice.

Not sure if I got on a dev or beta channel or something but I've been using FoldingText for free for a long time. It's never disabled features or promoted a purchase.
> I'm not talking about the economy so much as the idea that everyone who wants a job has one (vis-a-vis full employment).

Full employment is the absence of cyclical unemployment, not “everyone who wants a job has one”.

Particularly, it's compatible with an arbitrarily high level of structural unemployment. The “rovots eat jobs” argument, for instance, is one of ever-escalating structural unemployment.
The reason men are more inclined to program is autism. Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude are traits that make a good programmer. It's no coincidence that men are 4.5x more likely to be diagnosed with autism[1]. Look at any early interview with Zuck or Gates or Musk or Jack - it's like an educational video on how to spot mild Asperger Syndrome.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html
Automating Dockerized Jenkins Upgrades
For anyone wondering, this[1] is the Skittles sorting machine.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceGlMV4sHnk
But an attacker would simply use <script src="https://..", instead of <script src="httpsb://.." ?
There it'd be hitting a new limit for speed which is the round trip time between the AWS machine and the local sorter. It can't take any longer than the belt takes to travel to the first sorting point or you'll miss parts and have to rerun them constantly.
You are placing a burden on people you gift things to that diminishes the value of receiving gifts from you. It's like giving a friend a painting and then holding the friendship hostage unless they hang it up as their living room centerpiece.

I find it rewarding to give people things. I find joy in the act of giving and how the other person might feel by receiving the item. If they use the thing for a week and then and throw it away, it doesn't diminish the act of having given it to them. If anything it makes me briefly reflect on how I can give a more useful gift next time.

So you've now given your dad a gift, he lost it and feels terrible about it, and you're chastising him in iMessage and on the internet, ensuring that he feels even more awful. The next time you give him something it'll be accompanied by a sense of anxiety and dread.

Unless you think he was intentionally careless with the gift out of malice, why don't you stop being an asshole for a second and console him instead.
For proper AR, Hololens is close to your only bet.

For Pokemon Go style, I think Unity might be the best option, but I don't take my word for it.
Are there instances where multiple parts look the same from different angles?
.NET does this by wrapping things with {'d': data}, I always thought this was the reason.
Here are the tools and tasks I used to become the #1 Account Manager at Twitter
The fact that doing a filesystem-level end run around is simpler and more reliable boggles my mind. When I started experimenting with it I thought "this will never work, there's all sorts of things that can go wrong" but I eventually wound up migrating all of my PHP-based applications (WordPress, Piwik, and PMWiki) to it because it was so much easier to work with (even with maintaining the control software) than doing it the standard way.
I do motor design and research for a robotics and automation firm. In my experience, steppers often can provide significantly higher torque than a similarly sized BLDC. Their reputation comes from their use in low cost applications, where they are run open-loop and so the load torque must be kept well below what the motor is actually capable of providing, to avoid missing steps. Close the loop with an encoder and stepper performance is more like a geared BLDC. It was a big surprise to me when I first noticed this, because it didn't align with the reputation that stepper motors had.