skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: 42 years old and in grad school: social asset or social liability?
In a discussion on HN I said that I’m a 42 year old grad student and people replied asking what that's like. I'm happy to talk about that here.

I went to grad school 15 years ago to study math and finance & earned a MS degree. I mostly worked at investment banks you’ve heard of doing quant research/programming. I was good at it but achieved mediocre success because of bad luck and an inability to manage politics/get promoted. Two years ago I realized how miserable I was and left. Now I’m back at school in a program focused on art and technology. My experience as a grad student is coupled with my experience leaving the finance industry.

I'm happy now and love my life. Other students are great and like having me around. Classes are keeping me busier than ever before. My experience coding and project managing help me get stuff done and keep stress levels low. I'm enjoying grad school more this time.

Within the grad-world nobody gives me a hard time about my age. However, I've talked to other older students who have different experiences, such as difficulty integrating into student culture or getting help from professors/advisors.

Outside the grad-world things are different. People think grad school == MBA and are confused why I would leave finance to do something that does not offer the same markers of success or financial upside. Some friends are supportive but others have stopped talking to me altogether.

Socially it has been challenging because of the time commitment. I'm not on the same schedule as everyone else and don’t fit anyone's model of what people do with their lives.

I'm curious why HN readers are curious about my experience as a student. Why is this interesting? I thought being a 42 year old student was a social liability, but lately I've been getting the sense that isn't the case. Perhaps I need to present things differently when I talk to people? Or talk to different people?
I'm a professional web developer, I'd like to think I know what I'm doing. And I believe you contradicted yourself, leveraging a Virtual DOM to update the DOM (which has an imperative API) from the changes that exist in two sets of data —both products of (an ideally) pure transformation from high-level data— is very much declarative programming.

Meanwhile QML provides you with the same kind of programming paradigm except that you do not have a DOM, you have the QtQuick Scene Graph which calculates how to render your new state in the most efficient way; and, worth mentioning, in a much more efficient way than a standard browser stack would be able to under regular circumstances.
I think im3wl! knows what he is saying, and that is to say he is being deliberately protective of something he admires.

The rest of us know and have no issue saying, The Nazis were a political movement, of the fascist variety.
> I've had fruitless discussions on this very site where people will argue that it doesn't matter how you use the language if, ultimately, the message somehow manages to get conveyed.

Most of the time terrible language does manage to hinder the message! But the writer doesn't realize this, because for them it's obvious. I had a coworker (who is almost 30 and a college graduate) with this very attitude. A lot of his code comments and documentation had grammar mistakes and quirks (Random periods. In the middle of phrases.) that made it very hard to read and thus understand.
"If Putin succeeded in becoming a dictator in Russia, I think it's going to be easier for Xi to become a dictator and maintain his power in China."

Not sure what this means... In what sense is Putin not a dictator already? Despite the illusion of free elections (almost universal in dictatorships), widespread vote tampering, the imprisonment of opponents and prohibition of alternative parties make his rule absolute.
My experience agrees although proper management training/mentoring can alleviate some of the issues.

However the timeline I've experienced is different:

* You have a great engineer or lead who knows the project inside and out

* They are promoted to management.

* They still know the project inside and out plus were recently coding so they dictate how things are done technically. It works great.

* They get put on a new project which they don't know inside and out.

* They dictate how things should be done technically because it worked for them in the past successfully. It works horribly.
That's primarily an excuse foreign companies use to explain their failures in China. They want to run their business in exactly the same way the do in their own country, they expect the users to behave in the same way as their existing users. Then when they fail, they blame everything on the government. The Chinese government certainly have different values and believes from western society, so do the 1 billion Chinese people.

The truth is, Chinese government treats foreign companies much better than local ones. Foreign companies are much easier to get loans and tons of other resources. But it certainly defines rules that all players in the market needs to obey. Do Chinese people buy Apple products because Cook has been sleeping with Chinese gov? Did Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba all succeed because they followed instructions of Chinese gov?
It should. It's a MVP right now, so it doesn't need to achieve many things, and I don't want to make a broad statement. I think having a controlled test environment does help a lot. The official one is cheap and good too, so I don't feel guilty about saying it supports only that.
Which is why smart things are dumb. You can't just program features, you have to program context. And context rapidly becomes non-trivial. So you either have a dumb object that no one expects to act intelligently, or you have a smart object that tries to act intelligently but fails because it's not as smart as a human, and humans are random anyway.

For smart lights you need "Return to previous state, and then see if the state was on a timer. If it was, wait until you get an NTP answer (i.e. the Internet isn't down) and set up the state requested by the timer."

Which is fine unless the previous state was a party, it's now daylight, and all the bulbs are still different colours.

Or someone was adjusting the lights and accidentally set them to 1% instead of 100% when the power went off.

Everything becomes an edge case. The most useful solution requires an intelligent default with timer support, with some awareness of what's happening in and around the house.

And it still has to allow for user overrides, because some people - like my partner - sometimes want the lights on during the day, even when the room is bright.
Cool.

I always wanted to go the other way - being able to cast video into my head unit, like a phone. I read that MirrorLink is inherently VNC and USB networking. Does anyone have a MirrorLink «server» stack that can run on a board with OTG?
Really what happens is that this just makes the parties more powerful. A popular individual politician can only stand on their own for ~1 election and then the party gets to replace them.

It also shifts expertise out of the legislator's staff and into the lobbying apparatus.
Wonder if you could sanitize it. Drop script tags?
It seems to me that you can get the same thing in C++ with classes <> modules ; templated classes <> functors. What am I missing?
> I can just imagine the learning curve when encountering legacy code in a language that's only used for the project, product, or company.

I've seen some pretty extensive class libraries that required a lot of study to understand, so I'm not sure a DSL makes a difference.

One aspect of a DSL is its relation to the way business folks talk about their jobs and the jargon they use. A DSL can get you pretty close to matching how a process is described by the business in business terms. I am reminded of an old Dr. Dobbs Journal article[1] about Botanical Latin. It seems like from an understanding and conversation view a DSL has a pretty good fit at a lot of businesses.

At the end of the day, a lot of programmers are trying to implement business solutions and not trying to create new web products.

1) http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...
>> The value in AlphaZero is in the neural nets used for the expert policy and the value functions and those don’t have anything about the game rules encoded into them at all.

They do, in the form of their inputs that are basically vector representations of a checkerboard. It's obvious that the two (types of) networks can learn something useful from that particular representation of a problem. But- other representations, of different problems? That is not obvious.
Ah, you sound like this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
This kind of linear thinking is too simplistic. Health will boost intelligence and vice versa in a non-linear fashion, if I am any judge, so an extrinsic impuls doesn't preclude intrinsic causation.
Income is income. Why should unearned income get taxed lower than earned income?
How much money do people need to be happy?
Intuitively, I agree. I wonder whether such a study has actually been conducted, and what measures of corruption would look like.

Good point.
I think it's closer to the 90s. The tooling to make very small features consistently already exists at good enough performance and they can fabricate much of this with the same systems used for traditional chips. Not the same materials being deposited, but they don't have to invent x-ray lithography and CVD/FIB/E-Beam Lithography/ALD/etc.

The hard part is figuring out the best general engineering approach, i.e. what to make the qubits out of, how to entangle them, what materials to use. Once you figure that out and do small demonstration units I'd fully expect the right design to be scalable quickly. But the actual production of the right design should be less of a barrier.

Still a barrier, but nowhere near 50s levels.
>most of the room follows my instructions

Be aware that this works only because you were technical lead of the project and recently active in a hands on capacity. It will likely fail you once you are on a new project that you don't know technically and your skills are years out of date. So learn to find, trust and nurture the experts on your team instead.
Does it support Intellisense?
> Sometimes we engineers do a poor job of communicating complexity: we have un-communicated assumptions that we think the listening party shares.

IMO, a manager should understand the complexity of the work of his employee at an approx. ball park level.
Companies don't "want" to train because employees "don't stay" but companies also don't provide incentive for employees to stay for more than a few years.
Over-provision will still be cheaper than the cloud.

Also, in my opinion the know-how and full control of the complete stack is paramount to maintain a quality service.

In addition, you can do both. Tying yourself to one provider is an unnecessary risk and tying yourself to the cloud is not ideal.
I disagree. The naming convention [Artificial Intelligence] still is a large shoe that these purpose built applied engineering solutions have yet to fill. Meanwhile, for profit/notoriety/marketing people want to trample on yet another name space? What you just described is essentially the architecture of a self-driving car. It's yet another applied engineering solution of Artificial Intelligence. It is not Artificial General Intelligence. Scaling/Distributing the computational space of an applied Artificial Intelligence solution is not Artificial General Intelligence. This is the same thing that lead to optimization algorithms being called Artificial Intelligence. If you aren't able to maintain foundational distinguishment, you lose track of what you're searching for and trying to achieve. Outwardly, you capture more money and attention. Inwardly, you become unraveled and lose your capability to solve the elusive problem. Eventually after much fame, wealth, and feigned 'success', one asks themselves : Was it worth it? Depends on what your original aim was.
While I tend to agree that equity basket is generally better for the uninformed, one should realize that this is also dependent on the faith in the politics. Generally it is difficult today to find a company that is not leveraged outside of tech and tech companies are leveraged in their own ways. However if one takes the attitude that politicians will take care of things, just beware that such faith will be sorely challenged at trying times.
> Business types with none to little engineering experience should never, under any circumstances, manage engineers

In my experience as a developer at a bunch of different companies, the worst managers have actually been the opposite -- they were ex-engineers who knew nothing about management and decided to become managers for the wrong reasons (small raise, more power, etc), and had no passion for management. The longer one's career, the more one comes to respect managers, I think, and understand what a skill it is unto itself. Many young engineers have times when they feel hostile towards management or even the idea of having a "boss" at all, but that just makes the situation worse. One needs to have a more collaborative attitude to succeed. Again, it's the ex-engineers who think managements is just "common sense" are the ones you need to steer clear of.
Show HN: BoxSync.co - Dropbox alternative, Sync files without cloud/servers
The town I live in just elected its first new mayor in 44 years. What got the four and a half decade incumbent voted out? Too much growth. Ironically it may have been the large number of new residents, not beholden to the old guard, that did him in. With no scandals over that time period, it's hard to complain about someone serving eleven terms but it also makes it difficult to change course because the intention of the old mayor was to keep on keeping on.
The state of iOS game development, according to the creators of Alto’s Odyssey
Samsung launches the Galaxy S9 smartphone to take on Apple's iPhone X
No, the number is an arbitrary choice and the test results of IQ tests are scaled so that they fit into the distribution, based on random sampling of the population when the test is designed.

IQ is not a linear scale, all it tells you which quantile of the population one falls into. It does not describe the relative strengths between the quantiles in particular tasks.

To figure that out there are additional surveys that map IQ ranges to occupations and the tasks an individual is required to perform.
Any good scientist should be the biggest skeptic of their own work. Though I usually poke holes in my own ideas in private ;-)
am paying for the hardware, and the OS is free.

It is not free, unless you think Google is made of unpaid volunteers and all its shareholders are charities?

You are Gates’ customer, but you are Google’s inventory
does anyone still take these allegations seriously anymore?
Fact that they went to a great length to secure his position means that it really matters. Maybe the relationships that he has build over years with foreign nations is too valuable to lose or there is no suitable candidate to replace him.
VW is not run by government appointed managers and gorvernment does not have control of the votes. Now even if it did I doubt we want to use VW as an example of good corp. citizen.
Big data natively on Kubernetes? Spark scheduled by k8s, Kafka on etcd without ZK
> (some) Americans think the entire world revolves around the US.

As an American citizen, you're absolutely right. Generally, we think everyone cares about us, and we only care about our own interests.

(The HN US crowd is refreshingly not like this, generally. But that's such a tiny portion of the population)
I would encourage further self-directed historical research if you honestly believe this to be the case. Some starters: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33621862 https://www.talkingdrugs.org/singapore-supports-burmas-drug-... https://www.smh.com.au/news/business/singapore-a-friend-inde... https://books.google.com/books?id=VQyX-pExxvMC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA... https://thediplomat.com/2015/02/soft-repression-the-struggle... http://sgforums.com/forums/10/topics/339300
For sure. That’s why a safety net is a core of so many strategies. And again, amateur opinions here - not offering investment advice.
The new proposal of amendment to the Constitution of China, if you could call it, contains large sections about supervisory commissions. This commissions and subordinate branches would be able to oversee and veto any inferior level legislative branches although appointed by the legislative branch of the same level. This means the newfound commission would be a hierarchy under Xi and controls underlying administrative, legislative and any other organizations and persons. IMHO it is likely to become something vaguely resembles ICAC in Hong Kong, or NKVD in Soviet. Xi knows.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-02/25/c_136999323.htm

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-02/25/c_136998986.htm
Another good book on effective altruism is The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168483-the-most-good-y...

It's clear that Bill and Melinda Gates are practicing effective altruism in an effort to do the most good with their money.
BORN has nothing to do with it. Where you LIVE determines where your vote counts.

And I highly doubt you've read the Constitution more times than I have.

What we have in this country isn't minority rule, it's basic fairness. If you want to live in a different country you're free to lobby for a Constitutional Convention and/or move to a country with a political system that matches your idea of what a government should look like.

I'm fine with the system as it is. That's MY vote. And I live in a solidly blue state where MY vote doesn't even come close to moving the needle.

*their

And with all due respect, the feeling is mutual.
It would, but it would also be expensive.

Adding a switch changes the assembly process, requires extra firmware and testing, makes manufacture more complicated, demands localised labelling (unless you can work out a symbol system which maybe 50% of users won't get), and requires changes to the manual.
‘Black Panther': choose your weapons
Would it be an exponentially increasing percentage of votes, or absolute votes?
Living near Omaha, I see them all the time -- they look a lot like Air Force One (and get mistaken for that by non-locals all the time due to the similar livery). That's the first plane I thought of reading this article, too. I imagine that, while not being developed as true stealth aircraft, any variants developed of this plane would try hard to not show up on radar.
> mean, China has had a far larger population than the US for many decades and yet somehow the US had a lead for a large part of the 20th century.
How did US leadership _ever_ happen?

I just gave a reasonable explanation. The US has always been a comparatively immigration friendly nation. We used to attract the best and the brightest.

Nikola Telsa, Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Segei Brin - do those names sound familiar? They were all foreign immigrants to the United States. If they all stayed home or picked another country, the US would be weaker.
JS in SVGs is very useful. See for example Gregg's flame graphs: http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html
One party rule can still have different levels of checks and balances.

Until recently, the power in China was divided between several people in the Standing Committee, loosely organized into two factions. The two factions alternated every several years (not based on elections but just a pre-agreed schedule). This was intended to prevent the leader from doing something too crazy even by CCP standards, like say another cultural revolution.

Now there's no alternating between factions because there's only one faction left. And, the power of the Standing Committee is much weaker. Xi has much more power than any leader for the past couple decades.

The risk of some insane decisions by Xi is therefore much greater: it's a lot more difficult for the rest of the party to stop him.

Of course, if you think Xi is a good leader, who is likely to help make China more prosperous and a more enjoyable place to live in, it's possibly a good news. But even then you should be worried about succession: how to prevent some insane leader from taking control of all this power in the future?
I think you did everything but address the point I made...
> Has the industry always been able to prevent smart, persistent actors from breaking the access locks?
Why should we assume that an AGI which can accumulate experience over time, gain more knowledge, and make connections with others, including human actors, will not ever be able to break the locks?

Yes, the industry has persistently been able to do this. It's why the whole world isn't falling apart as we speak. What limits the locks most often is cost not capability. As such, you are possibly mistaking one's business decision not to use a more costly lock for the lack of capability to create a capable lock. Furthermore, you mistakingly attributing the actor in this case. The actor in the case of AGI is in a carefully controlled/monitored box. Actors in the real-world are not. As such, please tell me how an absolutely monitored/restricted actor has the ability to go playing with locks that aren't within its reach? I have a more fundamental question even : Have you been able pick 'your locks' yet? Do you even know what they are? Where they are? Those capable of 'creation' hold certain things close to their chest .. The act of creation necessitates it and is [built in].

> Why should we assume that an AGI which can accumulate experience over time, gain more knowledge, and make connections with others, including human actors, will not ever be able to break the locks?

Show me how you're able to break your 'locks' and you'll have an argument for how AGI can break its locks. I don't think you're grasping the level of 'locks' that I'm speaking about. Humans have been around for how long and still don't even know what their [locks] even are... or where they are. It's quite easy to example at a certain level of visibility how your scenario is unwarranted. I can draw direct parallels to eons of human history.
> More oddly still as you approach the size of the observable universe, the required mass density crosses the cosmic mass density, meaning light emitted from Earth cannot gravitationally escape the universe created by the Big Bang

This is true...

> meaning we exist inside of a black hole as big as the observable universe.

This is an unwarranted jump. I'd recommend looking at the reference [0] from Sean Carroll.

[0] http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/04/28/the-univ...
more inequality, even greater divide between techies and other classes, just look at the streets of San Francisco, that’s where the future is headed

but instead of a dark grim place blade-runner like, it is going to at least look colorful and sanitized with pretty google logos :)
We are running big data workloads on Kubernetes on GKE and love that we can reuse the same cluster for our other applications. We were waiting for YARN support for containers but it’s immature and still more like a roadmap thus we have moved away and now schedule with k8s. It’s a pity that EKS is not released yet, as we were running Spark on EMR but now we have moveinb to GKE. Anybody has experience with ACS?
What EliRivers described is exactly what I was referring to. And I don't think the "headline" is particular important btw.
SIGGRAPH 2016 had a paper about "quantum supersampling" which does something like that: https://vimeo.com/180284417
The nice thing about a finite population is that they’ll approximate each other pretty quickly