skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap.

First, this is a straw man argument: I never argued for "innate ability gap". I argued for "innate affinity", which I understand as (quoting myself) "they do not like working in it".

Second, I never claimed there was evidence to support the correctness of "innate affinity" argument. I only claimed that it is a possibility, and OP should not have ignored it.

Third, there is no consistent evidence supporting "social explanations", and that's why people resist attempts to "change the field to be more welcoming" at the expense of hard-working, deserving white males.

> any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
If that is so, so what ?
From your reply:

> The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.

From the GP:

>You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.

Here's the real disconnect, and it's all about the environment that is cultivated wherever you happen to be. These are really two wildly different professions that happen to be lumped under one title. On the one hand you have the concrete, generative work where you are creating a thing out of the void. And on the other, you have the political infighting and jockeying to be allowed to do that generative work, and all of the overhead involved in such operations. These are wildly disconnected activities, and it should be no surprise that people gravitate towards one extreme or the other, with very few rare unicorns that can do both at a high level.
There are some other examples from Bill Gates/Microsoft in this reddit thread [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3aicvf/what_vill...
I really don't think it's bots. Being contrarian, anti-US government and skeptical bordering on conspiracy are all strong HN norms.

I'm not really saying that to be dismissive but it seems like a shared culture on this site since the fallout of Snowden (right or wrong, I'm just describing how I see things play out here).

HN seems to lean more towards the conception of reality where we're playing 9-Dimensional chess vs "attribute things to ignorance not malice."
> Would equality of outcome in the NBA be a desirable goal?

If it wouldn't on average it's reasonable to assume that there is a bias of some sort. You can decide if this bias desirable or not.

> Why do we see so few East Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish NBA players? What policy would you create to correct this "injustice?"

Because they don't seem to care. If they would care, it is your decision whether you fight with them or implement a quota.
I think the permise is hard to implement, because a PhD already implies a herd mentality in most cases. Suck it up to the superiors and learn your parcel of knowledge, god forbid changing deeply your branch of knowledge with some groundbreaking invention or discovery.

In a postdoc it's about keeping the job, which is funnily available in the current society because of the surplus stemming from technological breakthroughs made by dogma-less innovators.
Remember, interviews are a 2-way street. If the company has unrealistic expectations in the interview, then it should influence your decision to continue pursuing the job.
So torn about this being posted. I get his relationship to the tech scene. I get how it makes sense. At the same time, the comments are going to quickly devolve onto the very sniping he's leave. Probably more so today given the Florida shooting.

With all due respect to @alva, can we let this post wither on the vine? Not today. Not after yesterday.
Like you, I’m hoping for an unforeseen breakthrough, but it seems very unlikely anytime soon. Just containing such an energetic plasma for any length of time past ignition is going to require it’s own set of breakthroughs in materials and manipulation of magnetic fields.
Probably https://www.teamblind.com/
I had read that cellular carriers were pushing to be able to just use IPv6. I know Apple has really emphasized IPv6 compatibility with App Store apps for at least a few years now.

That's one of the things I've been watching. Theoretically, the easiest switchover should be consumer iPhones on cellular data networks, because any app released in the last few years should work on them.
You under estimate how hard it is to sell a software product/Saas etc.

finding a feature people actually want to use and pay for that isn't already out there.
Would you mind printing your output of "tree /" so we can take a look?
Pedantic comment here, but NAT64 doesn’t involve any tunneling - it’s pure address translation handled by an edge box, whereas tunneling involves encapsulation.
I would characterize law school as even more “thing” oriented than a STEM program (having done both). Law school is just pattern matching. You read cases to derive a set of abstract rules. Then on the test, you pattern match facts in a long hypothetical against the rules and write out how each element of each rule applies to the facts in the hypothetical. Whoever analyzes the most issues in 3 hours wins. Unlike STEM, there is no group work, there is no creativity, and although the fact patterns involve people, they are abstractions in the same way a person is just a database row. You’re actively penalized for thinking of people in terms of people, because professors set up hypotheticals to lead to results you might not want.

The practice of law at a business firm (where 50% of associates are women) occasionally involves people, but for the most part is thing oriented. I do less coordinating with team members and the client than when I was an engineer, because everything is on the record. You don’t have long meetings with the client to get their use cases, etc. When you do interact with people it’s systematized and highly artificial. Youre not trying to connect with the judge as a person. You’re breaking down an often highly abstract issue into constituent parts to help the judge understand it. And the things you’re dealing with are typically more abstract. The subject matter isn’t a website with pictures or human users. The subject matter is a lien, or a credit default swap, or a regulation embodying an economic theory. You talk about these abstractions as if they were things.
Billionaires Made So Much Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times
Would you have some pointers to more information on the topic?
Not building custom containers is generally good advice. The chance you build something that underperforms is noticeable. Other coders won't know what you've made. There is a fair chance that std has what you need if you're even just a little bit thoughtful.
I think it’s more akin to applying for a driving job but they test you on your running rather than your driving. Where you should be practicing your running anyway to maintain your ability to be an alert and healthy driver, but it’s not likely necessary for every driver to be in tip top physical shape to be a good driver.

Some of the interviews at lower paid shops I’ve either participated in or rejected have had more stringent requirements like weird whiteboard questions in the interview while working on more simple implementations (including shops where I found you won’t even be issued your own machine. You partner solely and share) than places where the work will be significantly more difficult and significantly better paid the environment more adult and the perks better.

I know FANG et al employ those tests for various reasons. I think a lot of other places just blindly emulate it.
Nobody is a saint; not even the saints. But making an effort to do the right thing, no matter their history, should be respected.
I would imagine the latency at the required (high) resolutions would make WiFi / BT unusable.
Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal with Inequality?
1) There are more cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin

2) Some of those cryptocurrencies have different proof of work algorithms

3) Some of those are designed specifically for browser-based mining and have nothing to do with Bitcoin's ASIC-optimized POW
I have N-scale model trains (1:160) and really wish I could get the iPhone's camera workings for purchase to put on a train.
"keeping compatibility."

This killed the Amiga.
When a website offers you a quote about water fountains/new printers/whatever, I doub't it's legal to say that you're company X and that you'd be interested in this particular quote.
Don't really see the connection. You sure your comment isn't more likely to send the conversation that way?
> "Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers."

This is why my wife left the industry to be a full-time mom/homemaker. The problems she solves are more rewarding and the time/energy she spends on things are more worth it according to her. Why would she want to get out of bed every morning to churn out JS for some scummy corporation every day when she could be spending time with our kid, teaching them new things, hiking/backbacking/kayaking/fishing with them, etc.?

She's appreciative that I go to work everyday to pay the bills and sees her position as the more ideal one.
We've reached a point of complexity where few if any people hold the whole stack - from electrons wiggling along to making the button more enticing to click - in their head. You have to eventually decide where you'll settle in the layers of abstraction and let others handle their own.
You also have to consider that they were interviewing the commissioner of the NBA and Shaq is still one of the biggest personalities associated with the league. He does a ton of on air promotion for the sport.

It's a big headset, but I don't believe the set out to find the biggest person just so they could deceive people to think they aren't big.
5G New Radio (5G NR) OFDM-based air interface was completed Dec 20, 2017.

There are still work to do but you will see small scale deployments at the end of 2018 and first phones and consumer devices start to arrive 2019-2020.
Your video is the perfect balance of being professional enough to look good and amateur enough to seem sincere. Everything was clear and to the point yet nobody seemed like an actor. The reaction to the hanging scene at the end was fantastic.
In the U.S. it depends on state laws, and in the absence of any state laws wether you had a reasonable expectation of a right to privacy. If there's a hidden camera on the factory floor, that's probably fair game. If there's a hidden camera in a bathroom stall, that's probably illegal.
mainly because:

* javascript miners operate at a fraction of the efficiency of native miners (I don't have exact numbers, but I vaguely remember somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3)

* "professional" (ie. non-javascript) miners use high end CPUs, whereas the typical user might be on a i3 or ARM device. this matters because monero mining gets a significant performance boost from a bigger cache.

* "professional" mining pools have fees of ~1%. coinhive has a fee of 30%.

* mining is competitive market, where profit margins are low.

I actually didn't know that coinhive's fee was that high. that alone means $3 of every $10 is "lost" as transaction fees.
If you block everything with IPv4, things stop working too: you have to allow at least some ICMP (for "packet too big" path MTU discovery), otherwise you will have hard-to-diagnose issues.
Same here. I can never forget how bedbug looks like. Even years later sometime I get nightmares.
Would this make it cheaper to run Dapps or what?
It's a loss to the sector to lose somebody who thinks deeply (Zero to One is a good book), cares and wants to make the World better through technology and investment in firms dedicated to the same.

It's not a loss to the sector to lose somebody who thinks the path to doing that is intolerance, dominance, lack of accountability and an insistence on some Ayn Rand-ian gibberish philosophy of the World.

He was intolerant of Gawker. He dominated them by suing them to the hilt via the Hogan case. He is anti-regulation which in this case is a synonym for anti-accountability. Most of his political and economic philosophy seems to be the same gauche pastiche of SV's obsession with Rand. So, yeah, good riddance.

If software is eating the World, it's important the people building and operating it are as diverse as possible, otherwise there is a risk it unconsciously or consciously becomes biased in its actions and consequences towards a single social group at the expense of others.

Of course a one-party political philosophy is a problem in the long term, but so is Trump's stance on equality - one Thiel endorses - and for now at least it's important the voices of diversity and accountability win out for the long run.

TL;DR: Bye! Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out! Come back when you've got a little more mature and empathic towards others if you want!
"which make doing software renderers a lot easier than the planer modes of the old chipsets."

Which is the reason that 3D gaming took really off with chipsets that support software rendering instead of GPUs.

The PS1 and the CD32 are around the same time and show how Commodore had no clue about 3D, but Sony delivered (Also Nintendo with the Super FX).
I understand both of your arguments. In the end I hate whiteboarding problems, because I don't really need to know all of the potential problems in detail, but a certain interest for why some algorithm is faster than another IS indeed helpful when programming fast applications.

I have done some optimizations in the past, and I think what the author is getting at, is that it's not too late to learn about the specific niche algorithm you're dealing with when you have it in front of you.

My favorite rule about optimization is one I learned from a former colleague. First you measure, then you find where you should look, then you optimize. Without measurements you're maybe doing more harm than good. And if you look up different solutions when you know what you're trying to optimize it's usually not that hard to find a better replacement. But you don't need to have the exact solution in your head for this.

What you do need is the rough cursory knowledge of algorithms that grants you the ability to see more quickly where you're losing precious cycles. E.g. knowing the tradeoffs between linked lists and vectors.

I've seen way to many tools that could be sped up by a factor of 30-100 in an afternoon, that I really have to agree with you that a lot of people don't know their craft. I just don't think rote memorization of algorithms Q&A is solving any of this. Take home exams IMHO are a much better measure. I can ask people why they chose a certain data structure, why they didn't do it another way (if I have an idea of what could be better). That gives me much more of an insight in how people think. Not how well they memorize things.
> A weaker model often allows for better heuristics.

Do you have any evidence for that? I have not seen this claim made anywhere. The reason is that heuristics apply in cases where the problem at hand can be stated in terms of a lower-complexity problem, and that happens regardless of model. Is there empirical data showing this is happens more often in restricted models? Intuitively, I see no reason why it should.

> Take SAT solvers, for example.

SAT is NP-complete, which is (well, we don't know for sure, but that's the working hypothesis) much easier than even verification of FSMs (PSPACE-complete). We don't have any similar working heuristics for, say, TQBF (PSPACE-complete), and even SAT solvers fail often.

> yet the best heuristic to determine whether the C program outputs 1 for any of its possible inputs, might be to run it once for each input combination (which would take longer than the age of the universe for even 10k variables).

Most autoamtic software verification doesn't work like that at all, but through a process called abstract interpretation which can conservatively project the problem onto a much smaller state space (that is basically one way to look at how type systems work). The beauty of SAT solvers is that they require no such semantic approximations, and appear to work on arbitrarily difficult problems (except when they don't). So far, they work by magic -- we don't know why they're so effective in practice. But the hope of finding such a general algorithm that happens to work on many real-world instances of problems that are at least PSPACE- or 2EXP-hard problems are not great. It all comes down to studying special cases, and I don't see a particularly good reason (and I haven't encountered any research to that effect) for how to make such "good" instances more likely using some restricted language.
Why not? A MS account is not uncommon.
In 4 words: maintenance programming and debugging.

Most clerical jobs don't have a lot of surprises hidden in the middle of some undocumented feature. And things are not improving with the multiplication of dependence on SaaS and build and deploy mechanism.
the 'dotted quad' format was 'good enough' from a UI perspective (and... fitting in peoples' brains for short term). had we added one or two more spaces - and default all existing addresses to 0.0.x.x.x.x, we'd have had 65000 more blocks of 4 gig spaces. That should have been enough for most countries to have allocated enough space, while making the transition and UI upgrades pretty painless. If there's only a x.x.x.x address, assume leading zeros, and so on.

it's "failing" for a number of reasons - the UI and mental map model is certainly a stumbling block, but it's also something which requires coordinated effort between multiple parties to happen more or less at the same time. If it doesn't (and it didn't), it'll take years more for all players to get in sync, which is what we're seeing.

Residential ISP companies didn't have much incentive to upgrade when everyone's OS didn't include IPv6 stack. Not much push to try to upgrade your OS when your modem and ISP don't support it. Not much use to try to support it on your websites and email servers when no one is using it or asking for it.... and so on.

As all the pieces fall in to place - hardware, ISP, OS, web/mail/services - it'll still be a gradual move, unless some major players announce IPv6 only service. If Office365 was "IPv6 only in 2020", that might motivate a lot of orgs to push their IT/ISP to upgrade and migrate.
Some will be openly dismissive, others will hide their disapproval, others won't care and some will enjoy working with you.

As an immigrant wondering how the natives perceive me, I've learned that one has to do their best and be assertive when it's necessary.

Ultimately it depends on luck. To split the world in ones tribe and "the other" is human nature, and not discussing things on HN won't make things better...
I grew up in Alameda and have lived in LA for 10 years now. Oakland/Berkeley/SF notwithstanding, LA isn't that significantly different when it comes to politics and I'm sure Mr. Thiel is aware of that.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I'm little more than a tourist, you've been dealing with this far longer than me. :P

From the statistics page:

> 48% of people have gambled in the past four weeks

That is mind blowing. Yet only 0.5% of people 16+ England identify as "problem gamblers." That means that roughly 1% of all gamblers identify as "problem gamblers." Of course, it's gotta be pretty bad before you admit to yourself you have a problem.

A more telling statistic would be the amount of money lost per gambler per month as a percent of their income. But no gambler knows how much they lost this month; indeed, that's probably part of the problem. Perhaps the law should require bookies to track each person's winnings/losings and show them a big red number for how much they've lost at that bookie.
To get a little meta:

I think discussions like these make progress, but very slow progress. I think the root of the issue for many people is more than factual at this point, it's become emotional for both sides. And I think progress will come when both sides can get a handle on their frustrations and then articulate their feelings gracefully.

At the end of the day, I think only a very small percentage of people commenting here care too much about what a new study finds. I don't think it will move many viewpoints.

So I think I'll propose a template for resolving this conflict (a longshot, I know).

Pursuit of agreement:

A) Do I want to understand the feelings of the people I'm talking to? If not, don't expect progress.

B) Do I want to understand my personal feelings? Do I recognize why this topic is emotional to me, why I'm spending my Thursday morning arguing this?

C) Do I see how tangential the connection is between my feelings and the article at hand?

D) Do I care about reaching a point of agreement, or is my motivation more around rewarding myself/punishing others?

E) Am I willing to describe my feelings/worries/motivations without using emotionally charged-words?
It does influence the decision. But there is also a good chance that the engineer doing the interview doesn't really reflect the work environment.
As long as you have a night sky observation permit.

The United States has serious problems with bean counter overreach:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/0...

Meanwhile the conservative politicians keep talking incessantly about deregulation, but it seems like it only applies to specific regulations that are inconvenient to friends of their, instead of actually attacking the deep cultural problem American society has with bureaucratic overreach. For goodness sake, a lot of actual dictatorships will meddle less in your personal business than the United States.
Expect downvotes to bury this. I don't get it either.
Yep. The junction temperature is rated up to that. What I'm saying is that even so, thermal design is a challenge. And I have concerns about chip lifetime under those sorts of conditions.
The contrarian opinion is to increase budget 100X, construct Helium-3 mining colonies on the lunar surface, and deploy rocket foundries for missions to Titan and beyond ;)

http://www.moonexpress.com/

Direct Fusion Drive For A Human Mars Orbital Mission

https://bp.pppl.gov/pub_report/2014/PPPL-5064.pdf

Future Chinese Lunar Missions

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/cnsa_moon_future...
I can't think of anything that is universally good other than God. & from what I've heard about the Old Testament that's not even true!

So we a situation where people can't even construct something from their imagination that is virtuous in all concerns. & people want financial technology to meet that bar? Seems unlikely to me.

Could there be some money laundering? Probably. Will there be attempts by the owners of the payment processor to stop such a thing? Probably. Will there be perfection? Probably not.

From what I understand, most money laundering occurs in the traditional financial system. Does it follow we should tear it down?

& besides, I thought crypto(assets) were a fad. A bubble. A figment of the imagination. A plaything for greater fools. If that's true, it's hardly worth worrying about.
The Nexus 5x CPU solder failed pretty regularly at 1 year. I'm not sure if that counts as the chip lasting that long, because the CPU was technically fine, just poorly soldered, but the product wasn't working.
జ్ఞ‌ా
He wants more money. LA is untapped, relatively speaking.