skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great article, but something has me doubt that a lot of the "probably not" incidents would have been stopped is that they often hinge on the RCMP having a mere suspicion.

> The shooter, army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had been investigated by federal authorities for links to terrorism. This would likely be enough for the RCMP to restrict his ability

When a PAL is denied, does one have the right to appeal or is that the final word on the matter? In the US the NICS background check has something similar, the Delay. If, in the course of your FFL background check, the Feds think you're up to something they issue a Delay which can be followed up with a Deny or the go-ahead to sell the firearm. One can appeal a Deny, however there is no way of handling a Delay which is particularly annoying since something as benign as having a similar name to a known criminal can result in one.
Fitting into that decoupage
Was a torturing massage
To the pain camouflage
I gobbled a hefty sausage
That prospect was still better envisage
Than college, lectures about collage
This was revealed less than 5 years ago. Did not enough people learn about it / forget about it already?
Also the ingredients of hard work, I.e. preservance, energy, focus, etc are themselves dependent on luck - having the right genes, growth environment , health , etc - so that's another type of luck.
> nothing about "education" is about actual education

Right, because everyone knows you can design a working rocket engine using high school knowledge, and that the guy who mows your lawn is a good source of advice on your medical problems.
You're context dropping at the end. The critical context for the causation in question, is that for all races, education stepping higher coincides to substantial increases in likelihood of wealth attainment.

There are no exceptions that see a backwards regression (ie move up in education and down in wealth likelihood), which further boosts that it is very clear causation. Each step sees the average move considerably higher for all races.
It would literally make the whole of human history a lie, in the same way that Mario never saved the princess and I haven't shot hundreds of ducks.
Oh i meant everything but that, heh. Not sure I have an opinion on the lede; i think i see what the author was trying to do.
I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language.

I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.
That's quite a straw man universe you live in.
Interesting.. thanks

I didnt realize employment was so heavily regulated in US
I was reacting to

> but sadly there's nothing they can do about this

Even if legally one has no options, you can still try to do something. Like raise awareness, etc.
Replacing one employee who refuses to sacrifice themselves for the employer’s profit is easy and relatively cheap.

Replacing 5 is much more difficult and expensive.

Replacing most could be quite expensive and dangerous.

So, organizing could give leverage to employees to demand humane treatment even if it reduces profit for the employer. Even in at-will environment.
I would prefer that people stop taking the word of Snopes about anything. They have zero qualifications, credentials, or expertise to pass judgment on any of the subjects they opine upon. It's a real mystery how they managed to get so many people to consider them infallible.

"Snopes said (whatever)" has exactly as much credibility as "Some random guy said (whatever)", i.e., none whatsoever.

Edit: in response to some of the comments below, there's a lengthy discussion of some of the problems with Snopes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...
> Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest.

You can discuss things that aren't on the front page. You aren't entitled to have what you want to discuss features on the front page, OTOH.
Unions (or similar labor organizations) are not only a universal good, capitalism only works when ^both* labor and capital keep each other restrained. The problems start when either side is allowed to "win". Power always needs to be restrained with checks and balances.
The SPLC? Seriously? Bigotry isn’t a legitimate point of view. You don’t have a right to have that opinion.
Time to build Unions as a service. A VC backed startup that charges stock of companies to unionize rivals.
Leaving anything run unchecked has downsides. If "has any downsides" is good enough to exclude it, then you can't do anything ever.
Did you read what TangoTrotFox wrote? At no point did he invoke any faster-than-light travel. He's just saying that by traveling at relativistic speeds (e.g. 0.99c <= v < 1c), time dilation / length contraction work in your favor. You can travel to systems thousands of light years away from Earth in only a few years (as perceived by you, on your spaceship), all while traveling a bit slower than light itself. Everyone left on Earth will still perceive you taking >1000 years to arrive.
Apologies in advance but I must confess.. I don't get it.

Can someone define luck?

-I didn't choose my DNA.

-I didn't choose my parents.

-I didn't choose my circumstances.

-I didn't choose which neural pathways were reinforced based on my experiences.

-I didn't choose which environmental factors altered any of my biological systems.

-I didn't choose not to die in my sleep every night from an undiagnosed ailment.

Removing, for the moment whether or not "Free Will" exists...

What can anyone choose that isn't based on prior experiences; Experiences that they couldn't control?

What can't be attributed to luck?
> Organizing a labor union however is vilified in American society as it directly challenges the inherent class structure of capitalism. Workers in the past have been beaten, murdered, and imprisoned not because they sought better pay and more amicable working hours, but because they dared to challenge the success and profit of the classes above them.

This is unabashedly revisionist. Look at what labor unions did throughout the first half of the 20th century. They went to great lengths to ensure that their members could access the privileges of the upper capitalist classes by explicitly oppressing other groups of people - black workers, east Asians, south Asians, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. They fought to deport legal immigrants and migrant works. They fought to inter (poor) Japanese-Americans in camps in order to free up jobs for their relatively well-off, white members. After the war, they fought to prevent Japanese-Americans from returning to their homes. The immigration quotas that people oftentimes complain about on Hacker News? Those quotas were originally written to appease labor unions in the first place. The disaster in Puerto Rico? Labor unions opposed allowing foreign relief ships to temporarily service Puerto Rico, which has been standard practice for every single hurricane since Katrina, because they wanted to protect US members' paychecks.

If you want to cherry-pick some good things labor unions have fought for, fine, but don't portray them as the antagonist of capitalist class structure. Labor unions have always thrived on class inequality; their goal is simply to make sure that their members are on the "right" side of it.
It's a paraphrase of Buffet's quote
'Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful'

Not so young.
Sure, and this is a good case of things being kept in check.

A union that only subsists because it gets special state powers is not a union, its government.
You can’t be fired for attempting to unionize even with at will employment. You can get fired for any reason as long as it’s not an illegal reason (like discrimination). Attempting to unionize or lobbying to improve worker conditions are generally protected. Of course the company is trying to get around this by claiming that they were terminated for other unrelated reasons (layoffs).
This is a massively flawed conclusions for so many reasons
Given the evidence we have, I don't think we can say whether success -> college or college -> success or both or neither.

Just a random anecdote, but I spend 10 years working crappy blue collar jobs after going to pretty good East Coast private dayschools, and while my blue collar compatriots had crappy study skills, they weren't really any smarter or dumber than my fellow students. Guess who did better in the long run...
To be fair, I would not be surprised if people used this satire as evidence for their hatred of CNN. Perhaps even missing the fact it was satire at all.

There's a reason /r/nottheonion exists...
Actually the title is a fact. What is alleged is the reason. It is a fact that the engineers seeking to organize were fired. And they are alleging that it is because they tried to organize. But it is still a fact that the ones who tried were fired.
No. It's correlation that's not a statistical fluke, but it's not causation. There are other potential explanations that the data doesn't rule out, such as wealth being highly inherited (i.e., rich people are begat from rich people) and wealthy children being pushed into higher tiers of education than poor people.

The existence of these other explanations show that the data is not necessarily indicative of causation.
Reputation is currently how local bitcoins handles this. And also, the exchange could take drivers license info/do other verifications for e.g. what is currently done by coinbase.
Most large GEO's today still use purely analog repeaters. Having a true digital payload where we're doing digital signal processing on board the satellite is a significant step forward.

To get to the lower costs that we're aiming for, going to software defined radios was a necessary step. That's because it gives us the ability to build many satellites that are as identical as possible without hardwiring in the specific frequencies like they do with analog satellites today. It's hard to overstate the importance of that technology for what we're doing and the low cost targets we need to hit to get unconnected people online.
> what is preventing them from doing so on either their own website

Hosting companies that decide what is and isn't acceptable speech just like Twitter and Google are doing right now.
I think this is one of many bits of data that I add to support my personal hypothesis that public equity markets are increasingly failing at their job of being an efficient way for our economy to allocate capital.
Every detail that happens in one's life can be attributed to luck. However, one's choices and effort are what enable one to recognize luck when it appears, and take advantage of it.

After all, what are the odds of success for a person who smokes dope and watches TV all day, compared with someone who gets an education and is out there swinging every day?
> 1) Workers in IT departments are less likely to get bonuses.

Sincere question - why should they? Are they denied bonuses that they are contractually obligated due to their compensation package?

> 2) They are often asked to put in longer hours than people in other departments, because of deadlines.

Sales people are often asked to travel away from their family and their homes. To me this seems like a normal 'part of the job' you sign up for.

> 3) They often have to work weekends because of “emergencies” and DevOps-related tasks that can’t take place on weekdays. Guess who’s patching the servers this Saturday? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Bob in Sales.

Who else should do it? Isn't that factored into their compensation and outlined in their responsibilities before they take the job? It seems like it's part of their job to do that, more so than clicking around on HN or Reddit during the week.
And you can overexert yourself in the same amount of time, leading to deterioration in the rest of your life and eventually handicapping even your ability to work hard. I feel like this is a quite complex issue and I'm not really sure why so many people try to give one line advices on it.
This is not true. There are ways in which "at-will" termination can be illegal. Most obviously, protected-status discrimination.

Termination related to labor organization is illegal. However, recourse (for the employee) generally fails because of the time scales involved, with the inevitable failure to form a union, but the employer will have to deal with the fallout eventually.

That does not make it naive, and you should not further participate in making this self-fulfilling.
> Also, how come the incidence of these types of shootings are so much lower in other parts of the world if there is no policy that will help prevent them?

Well, the short answer is that deaths from incidents like this are actually more common, considerably more common, in some other parts of the developed world[0]. The majority of U.S. mass shootings result in no deaths, the overwhelming majority result in one or fewer. Only about 70 of the 474 or so mass shootings in 2017 were also classifiable as "mass murders" (single incidents resulting in four or more unjustified killings).

[0]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/...
I assume you mean elitists, not elites?

There are certainly people who are elite, in one common sense or another.
You know that the English language doesn't originate in America, right? Equating the spread of English as a step in the Americanization of the world (to me) is a bit silly.

I can reword your statement to use Spanish and Peru. It sounds just as weird:

I see the spread of the Spanish language a step in the Peruvianization of the world, which is a shame.

In America, we speak all kinds of languages, of which English is the most common.
> we needed first to find the right sense for each word in a phrase and only then assign the vector

Interesting! I wonder if you could you e.g. arbitrarily split a word into some number of symbols, e.g. two, and each time you're going to apply a training update, only apply the update to one of the symbols -- perhaps initially choosing the symbol facing the greatest loss (forcing the symbols apart in vector space), and then eventually switching over to picking the symbol with the smallest loss (letting each settle onto its own precise meaning)?
> FANG

An acronym invented by Jim Cramer: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google

> Maybe they can't find anyone who will work cheaply enough to justify hiring them based on how much they will generate the company

While we're on the topic of FANG, these companies post profits in the billions of dollars. They could afford to pay their engineers 5x what they get now, if they were so inclined.

As you said, economics (read: the profit motive) means they will actually pay them what the market demands (and no more). As rational actors (again thinking with our economics hat on), big tech companies would love it if the market for SWEs were a little less hot, and they could get away with paying less. Why make 1 billion in profit when you could make 2 billion, amirite??

So it's not a conspiracy theory to suppose that a big part of what motivates the "we need more STEM grads!" narrative is a desire to saturate the job market and thereby depress engineer salaries.
Blindly supporting something and crying "Bigot!" if anyone questions it is legitimate? Seriously, no.
Right, the people onboard the spaceship will only perceive 28y to have gone by. People on Earth will perceive the spaceship accelerating away for millions of years.
> outside of the big five tech companies

It is in the employees of these companies' interests, as well.

Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay [0] colluded to prevent competition, and thus increased pay and mobility, among their employees.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Compiling the kernel on a 486 took a freakishly long time, but it was worth it - it gave you more RAM to play with.

Once I upgraded to PII I could comfortably compile it in like 20 minutes or so. That was nice.

I think I knew the ncurses kernel config interface by heart - it's only awkward to use during the first 100 times or so.
Here's a good list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
Thank you sir. Also, where did you find it?

I'm getting downvoted, but I tried the first 20 results from the 'web link', I can't read the article on any of them. Why not just post a readable link?
Nintendo Switch deletes playtime data after a year
Hi Fahim, REMOTE outside US is possible ?
Note that this article will highly likely be flagged out as happened to the other instances of this story from different news sources. I guess some topics are too controversial even for HN.
I didn’t intend to sound like an ad——my apologies if it came off that way. No more 4am posts. ;-)

But in all seriousness, I stand by what I said—just installing plugins isn’t going to do it any longer. Blocking ads and tracking scripts and the like needs to built-in to the browser and that’s what Brave has done.

Brendan Eich's explanation is on point: https://vimeo.com/209336437
Luck won't happen to you if you don't get in the game. Getting in the game means getting out there swinging.

Getting in the game is a choice you make.
The target could be the companies, not VCSes per se. As long as they don't ddos notabug I'm fine with it :)
I’m surprised at this notion that nobody would have actually believed the story. Have you met people? A lot of them are really dumb.
The same thing happened to Borders before declaring bankruptcy in 2011.
Under Fundamentals > Principles > Isolation:

> [Do Not] Allow tools remotely executing code on systems from a centralized location (single Puppet Master, Ansible Tower, Nagios, etc. instance) across multiple services.

I wil stress a point made to IT Ops a few years back: Configuration Drift can be more of an organizational risk than a well audited single repo for configuration. A separate Puppet for each environment, or each datacenter, can be asking for trouble when you're asking admins to manually keep data in sync.

And if you automate the synchronization, what's the point of splitting it?
I guess we could repeal a part of the Bill of Rights.
Your "almost certainly never" is another organization's "certainly inevitable" or "already happened". Go kit's scope and applicability is pretty clearly enumerated in the documentation. And there's nothing lossy about its abstractions.
Now do Switzerland.
Unrelated to the article, but related to crematoria, and a very fun 15-minute read: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/my-first-mistake
At-will employment has nothing to do with this. At-will employment just means your employer has no contractual obligation to continue employing you for any period of time. Certain actions are still illegal under state / federal law such as firing you for:

* your sexual orientation

* race

* veteran status

* political views

* not sleeping with your boss

* etc

Organizing a union is one of these "protected" reasons why you cannot be fired. Of course your employer can pick another reason and say that's why they are firing you, which is what it looks like this company did. Whether that defense will hold up in court is another matter entirely.
We'll that sucks. I'm sorry it wasn't good for you.

> I consistently stayed so far ahead of the curriculum in personal projects and internships

Wait a second! So you learned a lot while at college? You wouldn't have had those internships if you had a regular job. And maybe not the time to do personal projects. The college system set up that experience and time for you. College is about the opportunity to learn, not them doing anything to you. Maybe there's something to it after all.
The article is about a federal complaint they filed. There's like laws and stuff.

https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...
The article's author, Atul Gawande, has written four books.
So far I've only read _The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right_ and have been applying it to various aspects of work and life (travel packing checklist, Engineering team runbooks, etc). I would strongly recommend it.

All his other books are on my "to read" list...
"The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer"

No. When something is very far away from you, it will probably not even be visible, if it does appear it will be very small. You will not be able to interact with it. From your perspective its position does not need to be precise.

With a sane game architecture for this kind of game you dont need higher precision floats. This has been done in loads of games. I mentioned KSP because a tiny team did this in Unity (not even their own engine)

Considering how it will instantly double all the payloads, this is something you'd particularly want to avoid for a multiplayer game.

I can only guess that they did this because they used cryengines built-in physics, and every ship in an instance is in the same phsyics 'world' (which is insane)

"The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal"

Thats not a big deal. Its relatively trivial to do imo. You just have multiple physics 'worlds' and any bodies which protrude into another system are represented by kinematics in the other system.
Transitioning from one system to another could look very weird, simply because the fantasy of the game does not cog with consistent physics, but they have not overcome this problem either.

I imagine implementing it whilst using cryengines built-in physics system may have been the truly colossal task. But why in gods name are they using cryengine (an engine strongly geared towards making crytek fps games) to make space game?
I think a more interesting question might be what is share of linux sales for games that have offerings for Linux.
They always explain their sources and reasoning, so you can easily check for yourself.
A company firing people who are trying to unionize seems to be saying that the value that the company gets for the cost of paying the employees will go down. It seems unions or unionizing might have better luck if it was able to position itself as a value increasing tool for both the company and the worker.
Combining word embeddings to get a single representation of a sentence in general is a pretty hard problem. Point-wise averaging, addition or summation [0] works alright, but it's not great. Some more recent work looks a using RNNs to combine them; most of the literature I've seen is pretty application-specific, but try [1][2] for flavour.

[0] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P08/P08-1028

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473
At-will employment means you can be fired for any reason other than specific prohibited reasons in law (the alternative is systems where you can only be fired for reasons named in law; the difference is between “default allow” and “default deny”.)

But firing for labor organizing is an explicit prohibition in both California and Federal law (the federal prohibition was the basis of Damore’s NLRB complaint against Google, for a recent example that has gotten much HN attention.)