skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the Yale Endowment is immortal

This reminds me of a book I've just read, Ernst Kantorowicz's "The King's Two Bodies", where he describes how the concept of "fiscus" (what later would be called the "royal purse", or the "royal domain") became "immortal" somewhere around the 1200s in Britain. This also reminded me that I wanted to check if anyone had made a connection or had written a book/study about the possible relation between today's big corporations (think Google, Apple) and what people in the Middle Ages had called in Latin as "corporatio" (or "corporate body", in the English translation).
That's...surprisingly simple. As it happens I was just today lamenting to a colleague that for all the blockchain hype, I have yet to hear about any other relevant use case than those which have an ideological agenda to require decentralization at their very core.

Reading this it seems like the author comes pretty much to the same conclusion.

Is it really that simple? I feel like I must be missing something, because the hype is so real.
At least in the US, it can be complicated, many reasons drive theft. I remember lots of kids shoplifting candy, none of them poor, when I was a kid.

Interesting NPR article on it. "People with an income of $70,000 or more are 30 percent more likely to shoplift than those earning less" http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137627302/sticky-fingers-hidde...

Of course, that covers items beyond food, so perhaps not a direct comparison.
It does. Benchmark played along with Kalanick until they realised this guy isn't in for making money (right now) but highly egoistic like Bezos to build a global economy. But now that they're suing the guy whom they supported for fraud means they play at crucial right time and no Founders vision matters to them!
Do we?

In Germany, Linke (Left), is by far strongest in the former DDR, and it came out of PDS, which again was the successor to SED - the ruling party of DDR.

It has merged with some other groups, and appears fairly thoroughly "reformed" to the extent that they're too centrist for many socialists, but the imbalance between its support in the East and West remains.

It varies a lot by country, seemingly both coming down to the level of oppression in the different countries, but also things like their propaganda, and to what extent their ideology was presented in a way that their populations had the background to recognise how different their actual polices were vs. their supposed theoretical foundations (e.g. teaching Marx to someone using full source texts if you want to maintain an authoritarian regime is not a particularly bright plan, but the extent of careful quoting and ordering and explaining away and indoctrination varied greatly)
Ask HN: How to get started with blockchain?
Any beginner level resources(courses/tutorials) to learn blockchain and be able to implement it in side projects.
For “real coding” sure, that holds true. But as for what got me hooked, and what made me study CS, it was LOGO and seeing the turtle do really neat images with surprisingly few instructions—I still have a vivid memory of that day and that feeling of deep curiosity about what else could be created by that turtle.
why is it an issue if miners gobble it up?
A sale is a sale no?
If I buy something, I want it to work for eternity

Software are always installed in a specific environment, which is prone to change. The associated service of support cannot be given for eternity just for a one time purchase.
A 50 year old mixing vinyl with turntables and an analog mixer is cooler.
Imagine if one cup of coffee "worked" for ten years, how much you'd care if Starbucks went out of business?

Excluding the most robust embedded systems on spacecraft and nuclear submarines, I don't know any software especially consumer software that would last 10 years without revision.

Maybe a better analogy is having an unlimited refill.
I was at a conference lately. After one talk, the presenter talked about his experiences with his children presenting how to code and teach other children. He commented that one of the biggest barriers he saw in his own children is that it took them so long to type out the ideas they have in their head. It requires immense focus to retain what to do next.
Just a half minute skim shows the author claims it passes the natural proof barrier but makes no claim about it being non-relativizing or non-algebraizing.
Sure, that's why you get a particular university's researchers to publish in it. That's exactly how you start making it so that everyone in the field wants to publish there.

They may have thought about it but has anyone actually tried it? I'm genuinely asking.

Edit: It seems they have and it worked. See mjn's answer below.
Lineage OS gets updates
I don't think so at all. Natural languages evolve with ambiguity built in — any sort of ambiguity is almost always an error in programming.
>It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.

Bingo, Google could train a bunch of SWEs no problemo, but they'd rather externalize that cost. I figure most positions wouldn't require much more than 6 months of on-the-job training.
I am surprised this made it to the front page. XMPP is no longer relevant, please focus your efforts on a protocol that better meets your requirements. No matter what those requirements are, I would have hard time believing that XMPP is it.
An insightful interview to give perspective. http://www.se-radio.net/2017/07/se-radio-episode-298-moshe-v...
i started watching the first lecture; when you ask about the output of ghc, i love that someone says "burritos".

thanks for making this material available!
I'm pretty sure that's exactly like a HAMT except that HAMTs only use one bitmap. I'm not sure why the CHAMP is referred to as "compressed", then, since HAMTs are compressed using the same bitmap technique with a slightly different node structure.
It sounds like using Foreign-exchange with an ATM card - there's no explicit fee except the conversion rate is adjusted to work in the bank's favor as a cut of the total amount transfered.
Suing a company you funded is extreme enough that doing it even once attracts a reputation. Would future founders considering potential investors assume that Kalanick was so far out of line that there's no way anything similar could happen to them? Or would they think that there's probably blame on both sides, and there are better investors around?
Why Schnorr signatures will help solve 2 of Bitcoin’s biggest problems today
Do you feel like learning each of the languages you can speak has affected the way you think in any way?

In other words, does being fluent in different languages cause people to think differently?
I don't understand - Sanskrit is a human language (albeit a dead one).

Whereas, you could "write" programs by arranging little pieces of would with symbols on them on a board. You could punch hole cards for a mechanical loom, or you could solder electronic components together. None of that involves communicating with other people.

I think a better analogy than language would be a mathematical calculus - i.e. the way you can write down certain symbols, and manipulate them using certain rules, and you have certain guarantees about the result.

Another analogy would be a "kit" of standardized/conventional elements for construction, e.g. I-beams, windows, tiles, 2x4s, doors, cable channels, ... . You arrange these things, and if you do it properly, you get something meaningful and useful like a house.
What he was was a military man of his time and place, much like Alexander the Great, George Washington, Belisarius, Winston Churchill or Douglas MacArthur.
>appropriately formatted

If the server is expecting data that it doesn't receive (because the form field was left blank) then can you really consider the request "appropriately formatted"? Is it in any way meaningfully different from the case where the server receives a request on /api/invalid-url/ and doesn't have a corresponding resource on its end?
It seems to be very easy for people who get the gender expression they need out of their assigned label and gender role to dismiss the importance of those things. What you're saying is about as smart as saying "people don't need glasses; I can see just fine."
Entering postdoctoral for many fields basically means one is in a pre-run for a faculty job trying to be tenured, plus post docs need to do the real work rather than assign them to others. Unfortunately for many that is also the time a family or children begin to occupy private life, which provide extra stress and squeeze precious time. It is a highly stressed position, but not unique. If one wants to stay in academia the stress always accompany the entire career. I saw post doc sent baby to daycare at 6 weeks old, I heard post doc's promising job interview ruined by supervisor's letter. But they all survived and enjoy their research. I feel the freedom and joy of doing the thing interests you are also priceless and it is a rewarding experience even one is suffering.

It is highly stressed life, however, one can make it his own better. Keep positive, keep smiling.
If I was king for a day, Ajit Pai would be out in the stocks within an hour.
> you needed to use the rocksmith adapter cable with the program

There's a nocable patch for PC, and for Mac you can create an aggregate audio interface named "Rocksmith USB Cable" so you can use any interface you like - it's much funner with Apogee gear than the toy cable!
And your contribution is.. Mansplaining?
> after agreeing not to do that

What defines a "battle" or "flamewar"? There are no rules that clarify this. A tit-for-tat would be if I were as uncivil, but I gave a lot of good faith before opting out.
Universities surely could though, even in America. They already compete in loads of free markets.
Miners are not the company's core base and have no particular loyalty, and will quickly fizzle out.

Basically, sure, miners get them quick cash, but if miners get their graphics cards and people wanting to play games or do other things don't, it'll make those potential customers unhappy and they may go to a competitor.
AMD Radeon Vega RX 64 8GB Review
SpaceX successfully launches and recovers Falcon 9 for CRS-12
For better or worse, her credentials (top tech first, high rank, woman ) will lend her more legitimacy in what she's said.

It's not a novel idea, but the reality is that someone who is convinced all men are out to discriminate against women is more likely to listen to her than to a man writing the same post.

So if for nothing at all, her voice matters in that it strengthens the argument that pipeline is a big part of the problem. It is obvious to a lot of people in this crowd but might not be to many, many others.

Plus, it's still relevant to remind people that equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same
I actually see it as calling more attention to the start of the pipeline. If you have a broken tech stack with bugs up and down the toolchain from the physical hardware up to the software you kinda do want to fix the base layer first. Though there are arguments to be said to attack the bugs from the standpoint of the entire system.
Nobody is arguing for a monopoly, but you need some differentiating factor until your service grows to the point of being a commodity.
Looks like VS 15.3 is official too

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/08/14/vis...
You are right about the majority of what you said, but I am pedantically picking on one point. CPU cores are getting faster, but they aren't doing it with clock speed, they are dispatching more instructions per cycle or otherwise making the work faster.
Conversations is substantially inferior to WhatsApp.

No encryption by default.
No sent and read receipt by default.
User account and password hazzle.
No audio chat.
No video chat.

XMPP just doesn't cut it.
The website version of google maps is pretty much unusable on an iPhone, I briefly installed the mobile version at some point, but I felt like it was less well integrated overall, so I uninstalled it.
Because the piece isn't very well written†, it's unclear whether the "infinite loop" of mediocrity she's referring to is something she actually observed, or something she surmises is possible. She is clear and specific, presenting numbers, when talking about things she was personally involved in.

Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity" (for lack of any better term) side of this debate, I'm left assuming she didn't see that occur. But she could also clear that up easily.

Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering. Virtually all performance evaluation done today is at root subjective. Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice; in fact, you have to work hard not to taint them.

If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.

† 99% of what I write isn't well-written either, in case this sounds like a jab at the author, who I am not familiar with.
That numbers idea has been held by a lot of smart people. For a while some countries taught set theory before numbers.
Its not just for computers, it's also (usually) for other programmers; people.
Alright, last comment from my side, just to clarify:

>> You are literally saying that if the result is close enough, you will prefer not to reject the null hypothesis, and therefore whichever variation you have arbitrarily chosen to be your null hypothesis will be the answer.

This is a misunderstanding. The null hypothesis is that your two variants have no statistical impact on conversion and any edge you see is just random. That is the hurdle you have to overcome to gain any useful direction from B testing.

GL!
I don't think thats true. See Vinay Deolalikar.

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Researcher_claims_solution_to_P...

https://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+Vinay+Deolalikar/0/1/0...

He is still publishing papers. Seems to be doing fine.
Some people place some value in supporting their neighbors and communities whenever given the option.
"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."

Awesome. A plea towards hiring based on quality, rather than quotas.

Towards a group that is judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.
is classical guitar a good beginner choice? I heard most people recommend electric guitar, but I want to learn to play fingerstyle.
This free course was kinda great: http://learn.handlebarlabs.com/p/react-native-basics-build-a...

Its actually about React Native, but I still would like to link it :)
> ...I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position...

The word "shove" aside, I wish more companies would hire senior people for junior roles if they want them. One of the big problems with the American (and I presume Western) job market is the unwillingness to train people unless they're straight out of college. It seems that moms (and less often, dads) who take time off to raise the young ones would benefit from a new approach.

Of course, the employer and employee need to be on the same page about day-to-day duties, expected career growth, and so on. But that seems like a solvable problem.
How Smart Contracts Will Change the Financial and Legal Systems
Update bricks smart locks preferred by Airbnb
Programming is about defining requirements in excruciating detail. A business person says "I want this data stored somewhere" and a programmer has to define where it comes from, what the schema is, what transformations happen, how does it get stored, where does it get stored, and what happens if anything in that pipeline goes wrong.
Here is a fun 'game' to illustrate some scenarios around this. http://ncase.me/trust/

Here it's framed as the game theory for the Evolution of Trust.
Do individual users with one-off and businesses with subscription. Don't force either. For businesses stability and the fact that the SW is supported matters. For users the cognitive load of not needing to pay another tax on SW that is used from time to time matters.
It also conflates the hiring needs of a large mature corporation like Google with those of a struggling startup:

We try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive.

A lot gets muddied in these few lines. One way to read this: as a startup, we usually pay below-market salaries. But we really wanted some experienced women on the team, so we offered them market salaries. They weren't ready to sign on to 60-70 hour weeks like the men on our team. So we let them go.

With the salty language, I gather the real intent of this blog post was to ride the tails of the Google memo backlash and draw attention to her startup. And maybe find some more male engineers to join her startup at below-market salaries.
I also have a nice backlog of DX11 games. They work great on my 970 let alone a Vega.
> Killing a mother while she was breastfeeding her infant baby? Even animals don't do that.

Of course they do. A bunch of helpless babies and a mother distracted by them would be a windfall for any predator.

> I don't know how Mongols today live with that.

There is not a human being alive who doesn't have terrible atrocity in their bloodline. Genghis Khan isn't more evil just because he happened to be more successful than most.
SSL with pinned certificates would get you 95% there and is super easy to implement.

And then only keep the data you actually need. And even of what you need you can probably anonymize a large chunk
RockSmith is a fun tool to practice with but I'd be very hesitant to recommend someone use it as a method to actually learn the guitar.

The biggest problem is that by learning differently, you create a real barrier between yourself and other musicians. Most guitarists learn to play in a somewhat similar manner. You learn to follow along with music and play by the tab or sheet music. The feedback you get is solely from your own ear. You learn how to stay on tempo and key from auditory cues, not visual ones. RockSmith changes all this.

RockSmith is useful to practice really difficult passages, but it becomes a major crutch at all other times and I really can't imagine someone become a well rounded guitarist while depending on it.
The Unbelievable Power of Certainty
Its hard to compete in the nuclear business when literally everything else, including useless stuff like ethanol get subsidies like crazy. Also, existing regulation made much of this research impossible.

With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.

Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.

The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.

So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.
This. But also the problem with the OP is they seem to show people samples of a programming language without any explanation, expecting them to intuitively figure out the syntax and semantics.

There's no way this won't be confusing.
I took a break from teaching for a year, to be a 3D graphic artist, using Cinema 4D. The software had a drag and drop, node based, coding environment called Xpresso, that I became quite adept at using. I can remember showing it to my programmer brother, and he told me if I liked using Xpresso I should try a proper language. I dismissed him, saying that typing text held no appeal for me.

A couple of years later, and I was back teaching ICT and the curriculum was being axed, in favour of Computer Science, so I decided to teach myself a little Python, and ended up being a secondary CS teacher in a fairly elite school.

What strikes me now, is at no point did I make a connection between the graphical language I was using back then and the text based languages I would go on to use later. In hindsight it seems obvious that if I enjoyed controlling pixels on a screen with blocks, I would probably enjoy doing it with text. It's anecdotal, but it has turned out to be true.

In my professional capacity as an educator, I have seen how engaged young students can be with graphical languages such as Scratch, and how those same students eventually want the power and control of more powerful languages. These types of games don't teach everyone how to code, but they do awaken a desire to control and manipulate computers, in people who might otherwise never have realised this ambition.

For people who say that the hard part of programming is "not in the text", watch a seven year old try to control a turtle in Scratch and then watch them try to do the same thing in Python. Typing speed is a major factor, as is understanding the importance of case and white space. Not to mention the symbol nightmare of commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons, single and double quotes, hyphens, underscores, equals and double-equals, square braces, curly braces, angle braces, and parenthesis.
I think that ChatPro (or any other SV startup) is motivated in silo lock-in of their users indeed. Normal people don't care much about it, they just move to the next silo at some point.

I see an interesting niche for XMPP in business deployments, basically what's currently covered by Slack, where you (as a user) often need to have multiple accounts just to participate in different teams of your BigCorp.

XMPP allows a company to host their IM infrastructure on-premise or to use a service like ChatPro, and there is a business interest in requiring federation to allow easier interop with suppliers and customers.

We just failed to execute on that mission so far... ;-)
> The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline.

Here's the problem : the candidate pool consists of 90% men and 10% women so the gender ratio at companies tends to represent that ratio. How do you propose we fix this to reach a healthier balance of something close to 50-50 without encouraging more women to join tech?

In other words, aiming for 50-50 when the candidate pool is 90-10 is suboptimal. So I agree that work needs to be done at all stages of the pipeline, but as the author suggests, the way to fix this issue is to encourage more women to join tech at the earlier stages. How is this a cop-out?
Working for a company that doesn't care about its employees