skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand achieving gender or race parity implies including those factors in the selection process therefore rejecting/accepting people based on that. Disclaimer: English is not my first language so I maybe misunderstood.
All of this is from last 6-12 months. Let's not forget what public opinion was without the news cycle telling us what to think.

I am not saying his public statements were bad. Just trying to put some perspective. Also, smoking marijuana is ok and legal. He took a puff and all of a sudden he is a drug addict. WTF!?

Just watch his interview Salman Khan (Khan academy) or look up his accomplishments.
Discussed yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097661
Then why would he accept one and not the other?
History teacher claimed that the Ancient Greeks thought being happy and contented was a gift from the gods, not something you could achieve.

I'm inclined to agree.

Personally show me one highly successful driven person that became that way by gambling everything and I'll show you five easy that broke.
And encryption so your ISP doesn't get to see it is torrent traffic.
> It harms all the industries where the content is ad supported

Nearly all content online is user-generated. The publishers simply rip off contributors, slap ads on their content, and sell the content back to the same public that created it.
It is like how rising tides lift all boats. A good environment helps people without the right genetics; but this does not mean that this group can beat another set with right genetics in the same good environment.
> There was never any chance Musk would have been banned from running public companies.

Why are you so confident?

The SEC had a very strong case (or Musk would never have settled). Had they pursued it to its fullest extent, I see no reason why they couldn't get a strong ruling in their favor.

This comment reminds me of the comments that "this will never amount to anything" when rumors of SEC interest in Musk's announcement just begun circulating. And yet, here we are...
Just wanted to say thanks!
The article mentions that much of this research is based on twin studies. I have a question about how these studies work - perhaps someone here has done this sort of research and can answer.

Here's my understanding of twin studies: you have some identical and fraternal twins. Each pair of twins are raised in the same household, and presumably experience the same environmental "nurture" effects. So, if we see stronger intellectual similarities between identical twins than fraternal twins, then we conclude that this difference is genetic.

But how valid is the assumption that the environments that fraternal twins face are as similar as those of identical twins? Let's assume for instance that:
1) women and men have the same innate potential for mathematical skill
2) our education system does a better job fostering mathematical ability in men than women
3) over time, this discrepancy causes women to score lower on tests of mathematical skill than men

While our identical twin pairs will all be of the same gender, the fraternal twin pairs may not. Two identical twin boys might receive the same environmental effects on their mathematical ability, but a girl and her twin brother will not, even if they have equal mathematical potential.

Given these assumptions, if we conducted a twin study on mathematical ability, we would see a stronger correlation between the scores of identical twins than those of fraternal twins, due to gender difference, and we would conclude that mathematical ability has a genetic component.

And our conclusion wouldn't be wrong! If gender impacts mathematical ability, and gender is genetic, then mathematical ability does arguably have a genetic component. But this gender difference comes about not because of an innate intellectual difference between women and men, but because of how a child's environment "nurture" changes depending on an arbitrary genetic trait "nature". In a world where these assumptions are true, a child's genes influence their future mathematical abilities - but in another world without gender-based educational discrepancies, the same genetic difference might not have any effect.

How do twin studies account for these more nuanced situations, where society causes nature and nurture to coincide in roundabout ways? Does it make sense to simply call these "second-order" socio-genetic effects "nature"?
I personally actually really like the old-fashioned sidebar with a box or multiple with "recent articles" and/or "popular articles", "articles from the same category", ... as a reader

Prev/next or "3 similar posts" at the bottom IMHO is also totally fine. It's your content, on your site, not some random external clickbait.
You (and others) seem to assume there's a zero-sum game between long and short investors and I'm neglecting the interests of the shorts.

I don't think it follows that what harms longs benefits the shorts that were harmed by Musk's tweets. So there is no benefit to compare to the harm done by the enforcement.

Unless you think that reducing Musk's role in the company will lead to the downfall of the company and that is a good thing because someone will profit, which seems like a weird idea to me.
I loved developing in Silverlight, it was a dream having VisualStudio to dev in compared to Flash. And it had some neat features like smooth streaming with IIS etc.

But it was terribly timed to the market. Most mobiles didn't support it, people didn't want to install yet another plugin. And it had to compete with a native web which was becoming more multimedia friendly. E.g. how many video players online require flash these days?
You should be skeptical of that argument, which is why nobody has ever really used it. Drug cartels have long been in the business of people trafficking, kidnapping, illegal casinos and weapons trafficking. Drugs are one of their most lucrative industries, but certainly not their only income stream.
Torn on this one.

I'm currently finishing up my CS degree after having worked professionally as a dev for a few years. I got started with a bootcamp, maybe before they were mainstream.

Maybe my expectations were out of line from the onset, but I came in more to learn than for the sacred degree. And I don't mean for this to be specific to my school - I imagine it's happening many places - but the school seems to be going out of its way to push students away from what I'd consider the core computer science curriculum.

I don't think it was always this way but subjects like compilers, algorithms, operating systems, and computer networking are veering more and more towards optional. Taking all of them before graduating is rare.

Instead, the hot thing seems to be software engineering. It sounds so good on paper - and I'm sure students, parents, and school admins all want it - but my experience with it has been complete nonsense.

In practice, these, and similar classes, have just been watered down versions of what is done in bootcamps, but executed poorly by folks with little industry experience. The result seems to be no actual computer science knowledge, a superficial experience, and bad habits.

There's so much more hard computer science I want to learn. And while I'd love to continue on to grad school - I have learned a fantastic amount here - so I can actually get to the good stuff, I don't know if it's realistically the best path.

tldr, I'm a bit bitter that I've had to take so many "filler" courses during my cs degree. Are CS degrees getting watered down? Is software engineering as a domain like this everywhere?
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bloomberg/advisors/c...
Recently discovered Google easter egg is a browser-based text adventure game
So, we're kinda dogfooding that, we're not only building decentralized social networks, the business is also decentralized, so we haven't got any big corporate offices. A lot happens out of Boston, but I'm based near Oslo, Norway, we have people in Belgium, Czechia, France, Costa Rica, etc. Nevertheless, you're right, we're a responsible business, and we should identify with a business address.

And we definitely need a ToS and a privacy policy, etc. The explanation for why we didn't have that is that the code running the sites that we put out there for people to try out is the same code you'd use for your POD on your own box. And most of us are running that code on our own boxes (mine is in a server rack in my basement :-) ), and those installs don't need a ToS. :-) So, you're right, we should have that as an option, so I filed a bug for it:
https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server/issues/799
javascript.info is a good comprehensive resource for learning modern JS
It’s obvious they know they have performance problems. They think they can keep it secret by pulling this kind of crap.
The answer is not at all realistic or possible. Homomorphic crypto is a mathematical curiosity, not something that is any actual use currently.
and Tesla delivered great cars because he played an important role in making that happen?

Or did he jump in as CEO after Tesla became popular?
It matters quite a lot.

There are specific jobs that board members and officers have. Just having 'the most shares' often isn't enough to do everything you want.

Moreover, he only owns 20% of the company.

Being 'busted down' is a huge political blow, he would be seen as weak, it would be hard for him to do his job.

He could resign as Chairman and save face, and then say 'Ima do Engineering full time' or something but it'd be hard for him to go as CEO.
Currently #1 on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102923
"when they say height is mostly genetic ... under current social conditions"

This is always what's meant. Perhaps it should be said more often... but nobody doubts that we can grow a bonsai.

The interesting question is how much do different factors matter in our present environment (and again ideally one should specify, e.g. rich-country & above-poverty-line, not just 201X) and in environments we might reasonably hope to create.
My initial thought was this shows the anti-tracking measures aren’t working. But upon further consideration, I think you are correct.

The amount of friction this inflicts on the site and users makes this strategy non-viable for site operators. If any significant fraction of users start using browsers with similar capabilities, sites will be forced to change their practices, otherwise they will lose too many users.

I think the situation parallels the introduction of UAC in Windows. For the first year or so after its introduction, UAC triggered a huge number of annoying confirmation pop ups. Now they are much more rare, usually only when an app really needs to manipulate a system level thing.
I'm not sure if author know about Shiny, it's basically same concept, write html GUI in R, serve with a web server. Shiny is quite mature, and I feel they have some good parts that can be inspring:

It's good to only code GUI in one language, but it's kind of unavoidable that you still need to learn html and css (even javascript) if you want to more control and customization.

- Shiny have some html tag functions to make it really flexible to construct html.

- You can customize css by adding your own.

- Shiny support adminLTE dashboard and bootstrap styles, DataTables js library, interaction with plot and DataTables.
The Chairman role is largely symbolic. I seriously doubt that if he gave it up, it would reduce his work load.

EDIT: largely. In a company like Tesla, with such a strong CEO, the Chairman would be a symbolic role. In a very large and sprawling company (PepsiCo?), it wouldn't be so symbolic.
Musk is agreeing to step down as chairman of the board (while staying CEO) and Tesla is appointing two new independent directors. It's a significant curtailing of his power over Tesla. How was the coverage overplayed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102923
The problem is that the MTA is managed by the state, not the city. De Blasio doesn't have a mandate to fix the subway; he was elected with a mandate to fix racial relations with the NYPD and get universal pre-K, and his reelection was mostly a function of there being no obvious Democrat alternative. It's why his main thing has been to promote the ferries, biking, and the BQX, because those are the only things he directly controls.

There was a gubernatorial challenger who was much more pro-subway, but she lost a campaign by basically treating it as a run for the mayor of New York and ignoring the rest of the state. (Her lack of managerial experience also didn't help.)
How is this different from https://tent.io ?

Exactly the same principle, but it failed to get adoption. Perhaps because users don’t care where their data is stored, and most can barely comprehend it?
"I'm currently scraping by at a bare minimum, growing my own vegetables and foraging whatever I can find in the area. And I find it infinitely more satisfying than writing software for startups and helping them rape the world in the name of profit."

Oh really? You're "scraping" by? How then are you growing your own vegetables? Please tell me, on who's land do you sow thy seeds? Where is this magical place that you can setup a fort, free yourself from the machine, and live off the land, without having to spend a penny?

Clearly I missed the memo about it's location.
I think you should leave, this is childish.
The origin of those shared commands isn't from readline, but rather from emacs key bindings that made it into both readline and MacOS: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd
You can learn that from a good textbook on algorithms and data structures. You don't need a full blown Computer Science degree for that.
He will still be the most powerful single person at Tesla, but this at least opens the door for him to not be the most powerful entity at Tesla. There is no way of knowing when or even if the Tesla board will start saying no to Musk, but this at least makes it possible for them in the future. That is a good thing in my opinion.

In fact, I think a Tesla shareholder should be pretty happy with this settlement. The $20m fine at a time when Tesla is already running low of cash is certainly tough news, but every other part of this settlement is probably good news for the company's long term health. It is also obviously a lot better than some of the punishments people were talking about earlier this week.
It also leads to more balance between upload/download. This is perhaps less good on typical broadband which usually has a much higher bandwidth for downloads but a typical datacentre will have a much greater upload demand to download (there’s a reason that downloading to an aws box is much cheaper than uploading).

On the other hand, big networks can be more efficient by caching things near the edge so that the total “bit miles” (I.e. the total over all packets sent of distance traveled * bits of data) are decreased.
> a $1000 fine, while not nothing, would make me cranky for a week or a two but have almost no material impact on my life.

It's kind of bizarre how $1000 is an entire household's expenditures for an entire month in many countries..
it was he's plan all along (this + weed stuff). He couldn't just quit tesla and they just made him chairman for the next 25 years. Not this solves all of hes problems. He can finally focus on spacex
"They need a serious executive from a former car company who has experience in quiet, deliberate execution."

Not really.

They need that as a COO.

Tesla has no real magic sauce. They are what they are because of the Musk Hype Machine and his ability to 'inspire' people to move to electric.

If Tesla was based on some magic ingredients that were a real competitive advantage, I'd say let a 'quiet' CEO take over with a hot dog CMO.

But they are still in 'founders mode' wherein the founder is a big factor in inspiring and motivating and that gives him a lot of power.

You might be surprised to know that regular CEO's don't necessarily have all the power you think. They have to convince, fight internal battles, motivate. It's hard for them to do 'big things'.

Musk is becoming a problem but not so much that he needs to go.

He needs a really powerful COO who can go toe-to-toe with him - and he needs to get some f*ing sleep and go back to the 'old' Musk from 2010.
Not if an existing board member becomes chairman.
Are you joking? A 10m fine vs 20m is totally immaterial to a billionaire. 3 years is longer than 2 but it's clear giving up CEO was unacceptable to him.
Anyone know the difference between the proposed settlement he turned down and the one he accepted? I'm very curious!
The SEC offered a deal that did not include Musk being banned. If they wanted him banned, why would they have offered such a deal? Negotiators start by asking for more than they want, not less.

The other big factor is that removing Musk as CEO would have caused more harm to Tesla shareholders than Musk’s tweets did. The SEC does not want that outcome. The SEC wants to find outcomes that punish rule violators without harming investors.
This may well be locale-dependent, but the great things you describe - I can indeed only imagine.

I did my best to search for like-minded CS students, did my best to seek great teachers. I tried for nearly 2 years - and failed miserably. The handful of students - out of 150 on the year - I could talk and maybe team up with were disappearing one after another, hired by this or that company. The professors were all old, which in this country meant that they were all re-trained into CS after 40 years of career in something else. There was simply no computing here to speak of before the late 80s, it couldn't be any other way. Younger people never even considered becoming academics - the money was simply not there. Without said 40 years of tenure, they would work for something like one-sixth of what industry - the Western companies rapidly expanding into the country - offered. And I don't even want to talk about other students, their expectations and attitudes - it's way too sad.

You know, I actually dreamt of a place where my passion would be shared by others. At every stage of my education, I was told that the next one will be that place and I will be able to finally learn what interests me there. It was all bullshit. There was literally no place in this country where I could learn what interested me, and I couldn't really go anywhere else due to health issues, even after it became possible without passports.

Meanwhile (or actually a bit before that), my English became good enough - much better than that of my profs, who were instead all speaking Russian very well - and the Internet opened to me. I found great teachers there. I found many people sharing my passion - people, with whom I tried implementing stuff, failed, learnt and sometimes succeeded. I've never said I did it all alone - just that it was all 100% outside of college - and mostly outside of this country.

So, you should consider yourself lucky, and I'm really jealous of you. I wonder, how much of my "I did it all myself" attitude is by preference, and how much of it is just trying to cope with all the shattered dreams the educational institutions here had given me. "The good CS programs are designed to provide it to you" - indeed.

Well, that's one part of it, but the other side still stands: I started learning programming at 9 and kept at it by myself for the next decade. I believe learning is a great example of compound interests - the more you learn, the faster you can learn more. By 19 I actually had a good grasp of the basics, and my learning rate was much higher than virtually any other student (except those similar to me). I don't think it would have been easy, even for the "good" programs, schools, and teachers - to teach me, without causing me endless grief and frustration. That's the nature of education systems (I was told, again and again). The fact that mine was anything but "good" multiplied that frustration tenfold.

I really wish I could experience a dream-like environment you talk about. I might have dropped out and gone my own way anyway - but I might not, and might have been that much better off thanks to it. I won't ever know.
Went back to the sources, and it seems you're right on the Thiel thing. He did make peace with Thiel and Levchin pretty fast though, and even invested more money into paypal after he was kicked out (citation: the Ashley Vance book on Elon) which was my main point -- he didn't blow shit up or incite a rebelion, he just stayed on the sidelines and supported the team like a trooper.
There is barely any data in the article, none stating the number of white CEOs, and none stating the evolution of said number over years.
> I get why people don't like ads

I don't like ads.

But I positively loathe underhanded tactics ad networks utilize, all the way from the "I can disagree but see their point of view" tracking, to "what the fuck are you doing" drive-by malware installs.

Fuck them, unequivocally. They're incapable or unwilling of effectively policing the content they serve, so they don't get to serve it to me.
One of my favorite quotes, which I heard from an older grad student long ago but I don’t know the real origins of it:

“There are exactly 3 things an applied mathematician can do to solve a problem. The first is to Taylor expand something. I don’t know what the other two are.”
What you just said sounds like a misunderstanding of the words "average" and "variance". Usually when things like intelligence is modeled, it is modeled as a normal distribution. Moving the average for a normal distribution moves the majority of people in the distribution. Variance just expresses how wide the distribution is, or how far you can expect people to deviate from the average.

What you're saying seems to suggest the distribution is multimodal. I'm not sure that's what they said.
Maybe software that wouldn't be used to bomb civilians, without visual confirmation, in countries that the US is not in war with?

I mean I would be okay with producing firearms to protect my county. I wouldn't be okay with the CIA sending those guns to kill squads in South America.

A lot of posters here are treating all warring and killing as equal. But there is a huge span from proportional and moral use of deadly force, to doing what would be treated as a war crime if it wasn't carried out by the world's foremost superpower.
buy bitcoin.
That might work fine if you're throwing together a blogging system, but not in a critical-systems software-engineering context. When the stakes are high, it doesn't do to view your code as a creative outlet.

Critical-systems software engineering is not about your creativity, it's about building maximally correct software, to minimise the probability of a catastrophic outcome.

This idea that it's inherently virtuous to let software developers be creative, strikes me as quite wrong-headed. If a strict methodology produces better results (and it does), a strict methodology should be adopted.

Bridge engineers don't whine about their constrained creativity. They're too busy ensuring their creations don't get anyone killed.

With the curious exception of Erlang et al, few people serious about program correctness favour dynamically typed languages. There's a reason why Ada is statically typed, and strongly typed (it lacks the dangerous implicit type conversions permitted by C).

An excellent article on this kind of thing: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
I also want to suggest, for all the people who want to say "what about the shorts", that every share of stock you sell short is borrowed from somebody who is long. So that seems like a fundamental reason to not consider shorts equal and opposite counterparts of longs. Whatever the details of the defined rights of both parties are, the rights of shorts have to defer to the rights of longs to some extent.

By analogy, if you borrow a car, and your interests seriously conflict with the owner, then probably for the good of society, and the rental market, there needs to be protection of the owner's rights.