skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I neither agree nor disagree with the article. I think it conflates a lot of stuff.

But look, what the math and science sides of the room throw at us definitely informs the engineering. In every other engineering principle from architecture to ditch digging, there is a feeder system from a variety of mathematical and scientific disciplines. While many other engineering disciplines are well established, they are not immune to this and in general don't begrudge it.

Doctors are required to keep up on the state of treatment. Architects need to keep up on materials science AND new mathematical modeling techniques and tools. Car designers care about new discoveries in lighting, battery and materials technology.

Here's a good example of the kind of stuff we all should be on the hook for. I've tried to push this paper up to the front page a few times now because it's roughly the same as if someone walked up and calmly announced they'd worked out how to compress space to beat the speed of light:

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/hengl...

Folks are generalizing linear sort algorithms to things we thought previously were only amenable to pair-wise comparison sorts without a custom programming model and tons of thought. No! And then a famous engineer-and-also-mathematician made an amazingly fast library to go with it (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/discrimination).

We're seeing multiple revolutions in our industry made of... well... OLD components! While deep learning is starting to break untrodden ground now, a lot of the techniques are about having big hardware budgets, lots of great training data, and a bunch of old techniques. The deep learning on mobile tricks? Why that's an old numerical technique for making linear algebra cheaper by reversing order we walk the chain rule. O(n) general sort is arguably bigger if we can get it into everyone's hands because of how it changes the game bulk data processing and search (suddenly EVERY step is a reduce step!)

We've similarly been sitting on functional programming techniques that absolutely blow anything the OO world has out of the water, but require an up-front investment of time and practice with a completely alternate style of programming. But unlike our fast-and-loose metaprogramming, reflection and monkey patching tricks in industry these techniques come with theorems and programmatic analysis techniques that make code faster for free, not slower.

Even if your day job is, like mine, full of a lot of humdrum plug-this-into-that work, we can benefit from modern techniques to build absolutely rock solid systems with good performance and high reliability. We could be directly incorporating simple concepts like CRDTs to make our systems less prone to error.

It's our job (and arguably it's the hardest job of the field) to dive into the world of pure research, understand it, and bring what's necessary out to the world of modern software. That means more than just tapping away at CSS files, or wailing about NPM security, or shrugging and saying, "Maybe Golang's model is the best we can hope from in modern programmers."
"Fathers are rarely, if ever, spoken about in the same way that mothers are. It’s culturally acceptable for men to have children and professional identities without having to choose between the two. These unspoken biases run deep."

What a crock of shit. This is a new dawn and it's been happening in troves easily since the 90's.

As a proud father, caretaker, and extremely passionate parent; blunt sexist statements like this make me fume.

It's not Mad Men. It's not 1960. Good parents have to make few sacrifices just as passionate developers do 9 hours of work and go home to more moonlight.
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All of this is an argument for greater accountability and democratic control of our military. It is not an argument for a radical experiment with the free market and military force.
I don't object on consumer price. Most IoT stuff is priced at "can't possibly be any good".

My concern with requiring a specific hardware solution was that it leaves you utterly at the mercy of Apple; if you get rejected by their program (which they do quite capriciously with apps) then you're completely sunk by having committed to an Apple-specific expense. Allowing a software security solution lets people justify a good product by appealing to Apple without being quite as beholden to their opaque decision making.
Why is nytimes constantly on the front page at HN? This is not the place for this.
Great comments but

> 4 aces in Texas Hold'em and lost to a royal flush

is not possible. Maybe four nines? Or a (non-royal) straight flush.
Certainly. I get a lot more done on days when I work 6 hours than I do on days when I only work for 2. In fact, I probably get more than 3× the work done, which is nice. On the other hand, if I worked for 18 hours a day I would certainly not get another 3×; I would soon hit the point of diminishing returns. Where that point is must certainly vary from person to person, for I have noticed that it also varies from project to project and day to day.

Sounds to me like you need to reduce distractions rather than working more hours.
Who says these private corporations are tied to specific nations?
Well, since "eq" is explicitly a string comparison operator in Tcl, use of it forces each argument to be evaluated as a string. Given that, what result would make more sense to you?
> Lastly, because S-expressions can represent everything that is representable in SGML/XML/(X)HTML, but more succinctly, we could have basically had Scheme instead of HTML.

I suggest (along with David Moon (Lisp Machine)) that a key disadvantage of sexp with respect to *ML, is that there's no place to hang on "extra stuff". Many lisps allow you to decorate the nodes with properties once the nodes are read, but the properties lack a printed representation. It's a homoiconicity fail. Sort of like not allowing comments in JSON might be, if a common case was then to attach comments to the objects after they're loaded. That very isn't common, so the restrictiveness is worth it. It's not clear that's the case with sexp.
Good. Debian won't be making stable any time soon, so a very reasonable timeline.
Energy usage.
A lot, if not most, of people's brains are not wired to meet nor interact with as many strangers as we currently do on a daily basis. Getting to know new people and forming real connections can be exhausting.
Why this was posted on hackernews, I'll never know.
if you look at civil engineering at it's childhood stages that is, back when pre-historic man tried to build huts and lean-tos, you'd find that they too, didn't use any solid engineering practises, but simply tried different things and found out what worked. Being constrained physically makes it easier to determine what works, but the essense isn't any different to what software engineering is today.

I bet if we fast forward 1000 years, you'd find that software engineering will have become as rigorous as what we have today in civil engineering.
Good question. I used GitHub pages and Jekyll for the site because it's something I've used before so I knew it would be easy to set up.

Initially this project is just a checklist and some supporting pages, but as I learn more, make updates, and use the checklist for my own side projects I'd like to write blog posts there as well. Having a blog in the same domain as your main project is also good for SEO from what I hear.

I don't have a good tutorial handy for the setup, but maybe that's something I could write about? It probably took two hours to customize the theme and get the landing page up, so pretty quick, but there were a couple gotchas the first time through.
it's scary to hear that they were using them at all
>I used to explain it to people as the difference between 'coders' and 'engineers'

This isn't going to be popular, but it's true.

Coders are what people called themselves before business started making the decisions about how to write software.

Engineers are what people called themselves after business started making the decisions about how to write software.

Guess what? People who write software aren't engineers, they are programmers. You have crap programmers and you have exceptional programmers, but you they are paid to write programs. "Software Engineer" is as valid as a "Sanitation Engineer."

Coder is a slang for programmer because they write "source code." it dates back to at least the 80s, probably earlier. It is also acceptable term for programmer.

If you have to make up a fancy term, call yourselves software developer or software designer. If you want to be called an engineer, go to engineering school.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...
Humans aren't wired to drown in interactions with strangers all day.
those who are currently in power will define rogue to mean those who threaten their status quo.
A ridiculous comparison apropos of nothing.
"But the most baffling part about this story is not the fact that the general public had no idea that radium was so dangerous, but the fact that some people most certainly did. And yet, they sat back and watched as everyone around them was poisoning themselves."

Chilling. And also reminder of how people in the future might look back at those of us who sit by while our friends and family endorse the limitless power of alternative medicine.
For those who don't read the article, AF in this context is Air Force and not As Fuck
Dr. Dre has actually been working for Apple. He's had a show on Beats 1 since Apple Music launched. There were also reports of him starring in a show about his life and career that would be for Apple Music.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/curator/the-pharmacy-with-dr.-dr...
I'm sort of stunned at all the people saying "the military is already rogue so it's fine". It feels alarmingly ahistorical - a military the public is unhappy with is bad, but the history of e.g. Rome ought to speak to how vastly much worse military privatization can become.
> I think it is a very disconcerting notion that we would allow a private entity to possess the equipment and infrastructure to wage war.

what if we take this to extreme, and have everyone be capable of waging war? That is, take the right to bear arms to the extreme where you cannot go to war with anyone, because it would be Mutually Assured Destruction.
> software can also influence hardware

This happens more often than you'd think. Intel (and later, AMD) added AES primitives to their instruction set to speed up encryption. VT-x (and the AMD equivalent) were both designed to improve the performance of virtualization. Outside of the realm of CPUs, the use of FPGAs -> ASICs for accelerating bitcoin hashing certainly wouldn't have existed if not for the software. Hardware support for CUDA / OpenCL accelerated existing parallel workloads.

> This is a better approach, as it's easier to experiment with language design than it is with hardware design.

FPGAs certainly lower the barrier to experimenting with hardware design, although yes, it's probably still higher than language modifications.
UK publishes Laws of Robotics for self-driving cars
Timeless wisdom though.
Thanks, mine seem to come and go. Not sure why.
There is to a point a framework of laws that at least provide some semblance of order and redress. Treaties, frameworks, alliances.

Now obviously force in the moment is what decides everything but the decisions that may lead to that moment or away from it are at least possible with the international framework of relations.
You're jaded.
it should be the paying entities that takes the responsibility. The mercs themselves don't (and arguably shouldn't) take any liability when they are ordered to kill anyone.
The Google memo guy would of made a lot more inroad had he referenced this material.

Nothing in this article screams controversial to me. I also don't see a problem with wanting to hire more women in tech. These differences outlined do not all appear advantageous or otherwise disadvantage one gender over another and lend better credence to being a great engineer. Anything that makes that claim is conflating a false narrative on extremely weak grounds.

Having said that, the memo is a trigger for people on multiple extremes. The reaction from both sides of this reminds me of forums on parenting nature vs nurture.
What is with the influx of link-bait articles on this website? This is y-combinator not The Sun tabloid.
We've tried that, with diminishing returns. Prove to me that more of the same will suddenly give us more accountability.

Politicians always say "we just didn't have enough money, give us more". However the definition of (institutional) insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a better result.

I am not talking about replacing the military with the free market. I am talking about shrinking it. Yes using democratic means. But good luck with that!

More people should read Smedley Butler.

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Well... how do we build a high-trust low-corruption society?
I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the past with stock offers.

It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.
what if I can prove there is no integer solution for it?
Is it still publication-worthy?
Does that change the fact without the NGO craft, people aboard the raft are at greater risk of drowning? All of this just sounds like justification for allowing people to drown. I'm sure there are better ways to prevent people smugglers than blockading the part of the operation that prevents human deaths.
Wow, I'm shocked that I didn't even realize the US was still 'at war' in Afghanistan. Now I'm looking at the Wikipedia page and reading that "[t]he War in Afghanistan is the longest war in United States history" [1].

How embarrassing :( I wonder how many Americans are un/aware of this.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
For those unfamiliar, a great Maurice Sendak interview is with Stephen Colbert:

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/gzi3ec/the-colbert-report-grim...

No interview discussion complete without mention of the true master Terry Gross:

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-li...
This is a trope that recurs on every thread about this topic. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence. Clearly, the person to whom you're replying believes that, absent artificial and unnecessary barriers erected, deliberately or not, to keep women out of the field, far more women would choose technology career paths, just as they did when medicine cleared those obstacles and when law cleared those obstacles, and when biochemisty cleared those obstacles, and the field of mathematics, and actuarial science, and economics, and on and on.

I'm certain you know that's what he meant as well. You can disagree with him that any such obstacles exist (you'll be wrong, but at least you'll be coherent). But why instead waste our time and your own with a pointless no-op of a rebuttal?
We even have more recent examples with the specific guy proposing this 'adventure.'

Truly depraved criminal actions by personnel in the employ of his merc company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre
I wonder how frequently people on HN go straight to the comments? (I did think AF was 'as fuck')
That doesn't explain why the bottom rung of software engineers has the profession-specific label "SWE II", though. Entry level at eBay is also "Software Engineer 2".
Worth it. Gracias.
I'd take a position between you two. I personally don't see the problem with a military force being operated as a private business. The state still has the monopoly on approving the use of force, and they are no more and no less protected from a force "going rogue", when you think about it.

I don't think the private, for-profit operation of a unit or facility of a military is inherently flawed in any distinct way. The onus is on the government to draft and enforce the contracts appropriately, and make sure they retain control over the force.

Ultimately, war is in the hands of the armed; not governments, not corporations. The governments and corporations which organize armed men are responsible for setting up the correct incentive structures to achieve the goals, with as few mistakes as possible.
The do, frequently. I'm told daily that America did something. As a Canadian, we just accept that you guys have no idea how continents or countries work.
I think a lot of the US population wanted this outcome. If so, then the democratic process seems to be functioning.
Perhaps the wife like the time she had alone in the house. Even if you love someone deeply, it's still good to have time to onesself.
Saving for Retirement for everyone
Sometimes mathematicians forget to say "non-trivial", that's what you're missing.
You can ask for integer solutions in Mathematica with

> Solve[x/(y + z) + y/(z + x) + z/(x + y) == 4, {x, y, z}, Integers]

but it gives a very long output in terms of Root[]s and conditional expressions.
Yeah, it's really inconvenient and slow, I'd chime in if you want to file a bug report.
Computer science is neither about computers nor is a science :).
I know about Smedley Butler. I've also read Noam Chomsky, and I share his position that a democratic institution, for all of its many faults, is always preferable to a tyrannical, autocratic or authoritarian one.
What's your view on cases like Renaissance Technologies? There's an interview online on James Simons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0) - and he explicitly talked about using math models to detect anomalies, e.g. trends. It's also known that they've used Hidden Markov Models, at least in the early days.
Ignoring your apparent political motivation to keep these people out of Europe (which is not really what is being discussed), the fact still stands that without these ships, human people are at greater risk of drowning. As I stated in an earlier post, there are better ways to stop people smuggling than letting the people being smuggled, drown at sea.
You're just saying words, you've got no examples of where rubber meets the road. Just that "men are looked down upon for being elementary school teachers" What? Where? And female oil rig workers get "societal pushback" Again just words. Where? How? You've got nothing here so far.

I mean if you want to talk about cultural influence there's way more news articles celebrating women doing various things, celebrating women entrepreneurs, women soldiers, women and minority events and special recognition or conferences.

Read all the stories about sexual harassment? Anecdotally I've seen just as much sexual language coming from women in IT as men in terms of workers. Project mgrs, network admins, probably a few more. And those instances were miniscule and didn't make up anywhere near a day to day problem for people.

I have seen instances where a guy who was being a dick treated women poorly. He got a talking to and cut that out. I've seen women take their day out on men and women and never got any kind of talking to. It's really funny you're pointing to some sort of dysfunction and not demonstrating or sourcing anything but "all those stories"
You asked a question. I answered it directly and civilly. You responded with a bunch of slurs. If you're wondering why the discussion stopped here, now you know.
I was at a startup (which pay high salary) and for 6 month I don't have work. I thought its a red flag and I decided to leave.
4 month after that the startup closed down the office because it did not get further funding.

So yes salary was good, benefits where good, there was no work, but "there is no free lunch".
One interesting aspect of ICO's is that the owners don't necessarily need to build a business. It's far less work to skim the money and say the business failed. And until anyone goes to jail for doing that, it remains a lucrative opportunity.

Raising $120M in an ICO isn't the same as raising $120M from a VC. In the latter case, you get nothing if the business fails.

The big question is, why are people dumping so much more money into ICOs than into Kickstarter projects? Why does an ICO seem so much more legit? It's mostly the same thing. Yet ICOs are somehow raising 10x more than the most-funded Kickstarters without breaking a sweat.
Louisiana is a lot like the Rust Belt in the sense that people have been able to graduate with a high school degree for generations and with the right connections, land a life-long job at a chemical plant paying good money with better-than-average benefits, mostly due to pension plans being baked into their benefits because they work for multinational corporations. They have been conditioned to believe that education is not important while being constantly exposed to casual racism and are thus heavily conservative... the large Catholic population in the southern part of the state has certainly played a part in moving in that direction given the Democratic Party's stance on women's rights. They are also highly sensitive to any issue that negatively affects the petrochemical industry. Local politicians have tried to introduce other types of business to the region, but who wants to go to an area where the heat is oppressive, the education system sucks, and you're a hurricane away from not having power or clean water for a month?

Most people in that state are like most people in other states with respect to banal "exceptionalism." They believe that their culture and way of life is greater than that of other areas even though the average citizen is poorly educated.
Am I being too obtuse by pointing out that a corporation, by definition, requires the legal framework of a nation to even exist? I'll point out again that these private forces need to have their training facilities somewhere, buy their weapons somewhere, etc.
Not really familiar with RTOS/embedded/security/military/medical software then, are we.

If those examples are 1% of software, they take disproportionately more funding than 1%.

And I'm sure customers of software, from personal computers, to business apps, to corporate websites would appreciate more consistent results as well. Reckless software engineering has damaged the reputation of the field as a whole.
Are languages like C & C++ that much better?
Age (under 40) is not a protected class and something that is discriminated by for rental applications, for the same reasons as I listed.

Source: tried to rent an apartment in college.
A bit disappointed there was no mention of Server Side JavaScript in Netscape Enterprise Server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server-side_JavaScr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Enterprise_Server which was a compiled version of JavaScript used to create dynamic web pages much like JSP/ASP
Even more so!
This has already been discussed extensively in a number of postings:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939636

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 [with full text of Google employee's memo]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937778

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934581
My 10th grade English teacher was a big proponent of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. He encouraged and rewarded straightforward writing. He was one of the top two or three teachers that I ever had.
Smart Contracts Ideal Use Cases