skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are vastly, vastly mischaracterizing government shutdowns as “free holidays.” Shutdowns due to lapses in appropriations by congress are extremely traumatic for ordinary government workers. It’s not as though you can just go on a trip while you wait for the government to re-open, as you must be ready to report the next day if appropriations are made. There is absolutely zero guarantee that back pay will be paid, despite what might have happened previously. Even if you wanted to work pro bono, you are forbidden from doing any sort of official work, even checking email, during a shutdown. In all, it’s stressful and morale crushing, and incredibly wasteful, as huge amounts of time are spent preparing for a shutdown and then spinning back up from it. To give just one example, at government science labs, experiments must be stopped, and any field work must cease and everyone must come home, which can ruin a big experiment that may have been years in the making. Calling it a holiday is flat-out false.
There was a wreck on GW Parkway a few months back so I was in park for an hour. Unmoving. At 9:30 pm.

It's bad everywhere but DC has a weird love of choke points and funnels and abrupt 70 degree turns with no shoulders or overflow or spillover.
What I meant was the standard requires the null byte at the end of the string, which reduces by one the possible length of the string when stored inline. If the null byte wasn't mandatory, it would be possible to store slightly longer strings inline, but then the implementation would have to conditionally materialize the contents to the heap in case of a call to c_str or data.
>It’s not unusual for academic job seekers to spend 10 percent of their annual income — the amount of a tithe — attending a single conference for an interview (including airfare, lodging, registration fees and incidentals).

You can tell the author legitimately knows humanities academia from the inside because they are experts at pointing out unrelated coincidental facts as if their simultaneous truth meant something.
As a QGP scientist, it's nice to see the work coming out of heavy ion theory & accelerator experiments (those at RHIC and LHC) cross-pollinate to other areas such as astrophysics/astronomy. In particular, they use the prediction that nucleons are expected to "melt" into free-quarks around a temperature of 145MeV (1.6 trillion Kelvin) as a parameter for the evolution of the supernova. This number will get better with the results of the beam-energy-scan at RHIC (Brookhaven National Lab).

Their model software has a cool name, too: AGILE-BOLTZTRAN (probably a large Boltzmann equation in Fortran?).
I haven't been able to find the sources for it after a quick search. It's too bad, because the world could use some more supernova-simulation-as-a-service services.

Anyways, hope they detect their multi-neutrino bursts!
Myst
I'm not sure I'd take anything in the article at face value.
Is vocational training and an apprenticeship necessary to be a master carpenter? No, it is not: but it makes it far easier to become one.

And that's what a PhD is: it's a vocational degree coupled with an apprenticeship. It's not like a BS or MS: it's ultimately not about courses or grades. Rather, you are attaching yourself, like a barnacle, to a researcher -- the professor -- so that you can learn how to be a researcher yourself. Eventually you step out from under her wing and do some research on your own, and that forms your thesis work.

You could learn to do research in a specialized field without going through this process -- and I know several who have -- but you'll probably discover along the way that science or engineering research is an apprenticeship field for a very good reason.
>It should come as no surprise that the professor who made that demand is a white male alumnus of the Ivy League, and the student an immigrant from a working-class background.

I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
Science and math are as unemployable as the humanities. When people use "STEM" in this way they really only mean engineering.
This is a weird claim. At the federal minimum $7.25 and 2000 hours per year that's $14.5k. Overhead on an employee (taxes, insurance, equipment, office space, etc.) is at least another 50% of that, call it $20k total.

So just hiring someone merely to break even means you estimate they can generate something worth $20k over the course of a year. That's just about the price of a new mid-size economy sedan.
High speed rail would allow people who live in Milwaukee and Madison to commute to Chicago, and vice versa. What is a 3 hour drive would become a 45 minute commute, which is reasonable considering the distance.

Cost of living drops off as you leave metro areas. Like another responder to your comment noted: people pay for convenience. I'd say cost is a disadvantage of living in a high-density area.
At my last gig at Stripe we had a candidate fail the lunch interview because he spent much of the time bad mouthing his current co-workers. Not a good look. Unless there is a red flag though, the lunch interviewer doesn't have to show up for the post-interview discussions.
Its worth remembering Bill Hamilton says they were doing it at the low level chip manufacturer level a long time ago. (I first saw his claims in the comment section of Bruce Schneiers blog).

Danny Casalaro, PROMIS, and the octopus, and all that... the point being this is nothing new, just newly pervasive.
Off Topic Questions for All those working in FX and Studios etc

Are you all in on Nvidia? Are there any shops using AMD? Every Game / FX needs to mention they partner with Nvidia and I have yet to read much professional uses on Radeon. I understand for Data Science and Machine learning it is all CUDA, and likely won't change any time soon. But even for Graphics AMD doesn't seems to be doing well in professional space.
The optical scan systems are relatively secure already, and have a built in paper trail to back them up. The bigger issue tends to surround the visual/touch voting computers, that often don't have a proper paper trail, let alone other vulnerabilities.

The most difficult issues is the shear number of ballot combinations in most cities is staggering with different districts by type. You may have the same water district as your neighbor across the street, but different fire and school districts. It's complicated to say the least. Even for optical scan options.

disclaimer: I work for an election services company, but not with any voting hardware. The company is mostly in printing/coordination of ballots themselves. It's a complex issue to say the least.
But there is work that can be done for under $15/h, if you can do it with automation. Suddenly humans are legally unable to compete with things like McDonald's ordering machines.

There are people who would gladly work for less than minimum.
The south is definitely more xeno/homophobic, and that's unfortunate, and there's really good reasons why that might be a reason that people might not want to live there. There's also good reasons to live in the big southern cities. To compare with Northern VA, for example--growing up there, I didn't know a single black person. The area is almost exclusively white and Asian, with Hispanic people occupying a different economic tier and being quite segregated socially (and quite a bit of political tension as a result). Atlanta, by contrast, is far more integrated, with wealthy black communities, black professionals, athletes, media personalities, politicians, etc. You're almost certainly more likely to encounter racists in Atlanta, but much more likely to encounter the sort of integrated society liberals profess to want.
I really appreciate your candor and open question. I have similar issues organizing my clients for a professional services business (think editing resumes, creating LinkedIn Profiles, interview coaching, etc.) The timing and short/long duration of engagements makes it tough to manage and I have to do a lot more in MS Word since that is what employers / headhunters demand. Using Trello and Box for now but think there are better solutions.
bro, correlation causes causation
I've seen math / physics majors make an easy transition into software development. I bet that is much easier to pull off than switching to programming from say, sociology.
Electric scooters are easier to take on public transit than bicycles, and enable more trips without cars for people who are electric scooter close to a transit route on both sides.

More than anything else, people actually taking public transit enables more spending on public transit, and more spending on building public transit accessible housing and workplaces, both of which will again encourage more use of public transit.
I think the proper interpretation of that is that you can't "pick a random real number between 0 and 1". After all, you would have to choose an infinite number of digits.
And that's not even close to the most shady action a government has tried with software that I've heard about.
The average (Bay Area?) tech worker likely sees the thinly veiled threat when the very first question their new neighbors ask is “have you found a church yet”?
And what if you need floors mopped? Now the small business is just getting gouged for that service
What happens when this becomes a neglected side project?
Remember coming across this concept while reading about Measure theory. There are also concepts like "almost well-ordered" and "almost complete" in graph theory if my memory serves right.
I’ve had no trouble finding fishing and hunting partners in SV. I’ve never personally felt anyone hugely opposed to hunting either, unless it some how conflicted with how they feed themselves. I do find it interesting thatduck hunting during season can be done just a maybe a mile from the Yahoo/Google Cloud buildings in north Sunnyvale. I have frequently seen full camo duck hunters carrying shotguns from the water treatment center walking out to the duck blinds.

As far as sports, your average engineer isn’t typically consumed by them, but half the engineers I’ve worked with from the bay seem to be fans of whichever team is doing great at the moment (warriors or giants or often the sharks).

I’ve also done more sport fishing and crabbing here than anywhere else I’ve lived.

I think the huge numbers of foreign residents have a large impact on the overall culture compared to say rural Texas, but it doesn’t seem too far off imho.

One other point is just how many super packed country concerts there are at shoreline.

Tl;dr San Jose/SV is just as country music/sports obsessed /game and fish oriented as the rest of the country (if you don’t surround yourself with non-North American engineers for eg).

Edit: on mobile, autocorrect at word.
I Will Create Free Blogs for Backlinks
No questions, this seems like something I would use, but boy is it broken on Windows. Code block newline behavior is weird, saving errors out and then clicking save will error out forever on the same file path, save-as shortcut doesn't seem to work... this is in about 1 minute of playing with it.

I hope the experience improves because I'd like to do my documentation in something better than text, but don't want to hand edit crap and every other tool I've tried produces inconsistent results.
Okay, but the employable activity there is still software development and not science or mathematics.
I read your comment as arguing that people who structure their social systems based on conservative principles e.g. we like our neighborhood a certain way so we resist rapid change (barring explicit racism, of course) are a tax on society.

I agree with your example and agree that people wanting an explicitly racially segregated community are cynical and racist. But an similarly conservatively principled person may simply prefer a low-density lifestyle and act in ways that resist change for that reason. There may even be scenarios where we can look back and correlate responsible, well meaning, application of certain principles with undesirable social trends, but I don't think that alone invalidates the principle.

I don't know if I misread your comment, but it was odd to see a broad critique on conservatives and their principles:

> My point is just that your logic can be (and is) used to defend any number of despicable causes.

I could use plenty of sound logic to defend despicable causes, but fact that the cause is despicable does not alone invalidate the logic if the logic is sound. When sound logic argues for despicable things (which it often does) we introduce ethics and morality to judge whether we should actually act on the logical conclusion.

I think a better way to phrase your comment would be, "We shouldn't have to put up with despicable causes, period". I'm being a little pedantic, yes.
Thank you so much for introducing me to this work! As a longtime scifi fan it’s wonderful to discover a new author. Amazing story, and from 1909!
> You’re gonna get downvoted because this is HN

I think he's getting downvoted because the Washington Post is, almost unquestionably, not a cult.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and he provided none.
Good article. The lede is definitely not buried:

> Its purpose 150 years ago was to incorporate former slaves into the nation

Initially I scoffed at the idea that an executive order could even attempt rescind this amendment. Reading about its history and now I know it’s on shaky ground.

Personally, I wish people had a simple way to immigrate here. It seems our current system rewards those who break immigration laws and punished those who try and go through the system. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope something changes in a dramatic way.
All excellent interesting points and I would like to add:

Regarding #2: You can always get advice from accelerators and IT hubs. Here in Toronto I am part of MarsDD and the free advisors I get are par excellence.

#4 is the most important quote: Build a good business that will generate revenue. VCs should not be the end game and unfortunately most of the startups give up as soon as they fail to convince VCs. Reminds me of the Bill Gates quote that he is not worried about stock price but is focused on building a good business.

Also interesting the VC he is mentioning about , Point Nine Capital, cancelled our meeting because they "do not invest in India" although their website (http://www.pointninecap.com/) tag line is "We’re based in Berlin, but we invest all over the world. ". Besides I am neither an Indian citizen nor is my company in India

These are the kind of startups I would like to see. Not "Disrupting AI Blockchain VR Occulus global logistics"
Engineering is more immediately applicable. For science and math you need to go much further in your education if you want to pursue a career in the their fields.
This is why I did piece work when I was extremely ill and homeless. On a good day, I could make around $15 to $20 an hour. On a bad day, I didn't work at all. On a so so day, if I took four hours to do $5 worth of work, making $1.25 an hour, it was $5 more than I otherwise would have had.

Earned income was critical to getting my life back. Being able to earn it, even if it meant working below minimum wage, mattered to me.
If you mean within academia, I agree. If you mean in the private sector, absolutely not. Mathematics and physics majors have a ton of opportunity in CS-related fields. I hired a lot of them when I ran a data science team. Their understanding of software development from first principles usually seriously outranks CS graduates at the cost of not knowing how to program in advanced languages.

I find it a lot easier to develop a Math/Physics graduate's coding skills than a CS graduate's underlying understanding of the physical world and formulaic thinking.
I guess you never spent much time in the hills just an hour or so from Atlanta in almost any direction, in any of a good number of towns where “a brown guy” would have a hard time finding a restaurant willing to take his money for food.
>University is not the only place people can "learn to learn.

I disagree. There are no institutions in modern capitalism that teach you how to learn if you don't already know how. It's extremely rare for them to even train you in skills they need if you already KNOW how to learn.

>think some people would question this when they get to the point where they are destitute trying to pay off loans

Hence my original point...

> Claiming that universities are a gate keeper to knowledge in the age of the internet...

You are missing the point of universities and basically everything I've just said.
Get and Install the 64-bit Arduino 1.8.7 IDE on Ubuntu 16.04.3
Lot drop?
I went back and did a project in C, but its just so restricting. Particularly common things like lack of dynamic arrays really start to get on my nerves. I've worked on a product with a C heritage and they had horrible hacked dynamic arrays made with macros. Templates made them much better.

Working in a C "style" can be a nice compromise sometimes.
How you can go wrong with Git
Other than for people with limited mobility, can you help me understand why people think this is so? To me, it seems like evolution solved this problem for us when we became bipedal. It’s entirely possible (even likely) that I could just be a crank, but I genuinely don’t see the point of scooter rentals for healthy, sufficiently mobile people.
I was just talking about the board.

It's worth noting that Seattle and DC have vastly different representations on their boards. In DC this is two representatives picked by the governments of DC, VA, MD, and the feds each, and in some cases not even appointed by elected officials. In Seattle, this is a board consisting almost entirely of elected officials of counties and municipalities.

Seattle's method works because the responsibility of elected officials is quite clear and their voting records are transparent, whereas a diffuse chain of responsibility via appointment is not.
Is China ready for intelligent automation?
I like the following definition: p is a prime in a ring R iff the ideal generated by p is a prime ideal of R.

Equivalently, p is prime iff p | ab implies p | a or p | b.

The only issue with this definition is that you're forced to admit that 0 is prime in integral domains.
Argentina's mega-storms attract army of meteorologists
This is a bigoted generalization of an entire region.
Okay, people trained in science can more easily transition to software engineering. They are still not getting paid to do science.
> I disagree. There are no institutions in modern capitalism that teach you how to learn if you don't already know how. It's extremely rare for them to even train you in skills they need if you already KNOW how to learn.

Man, how did people ever learn to do anything before institutions arise? Oh yes, the glorious institutions of spear making and rock chucking.

> Hence my original point...

Calling something capitalist when it is not? Seems like a straw man… no matter what the institution, perverse incentives will corrupt it if left unchecked, society will either put a bullet to its head, or make it irrelevant in the long run except to the most ardent believers.

> > Claiming that universities are a gate keeper to knowledge in the age of the internet... You are missing the point of universities and basically everything I've just said.

I said nothing about the internet, you added that.

I'm sure there were priests proselytizing in the past to others about the point of the Church in the pursuit of knowledge…
Really, it's less like Google, and more like a future where most Internet application data storage occurs against IPFS, and where IPFS's storage pool consists mostly of nodes running on people's smartphones (which have finally gained sufficient capacity for this to be feasible.)
Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.
Actually the group's decisions are made by singular decisions based on users, so your own decisions are prioritised over the group's. So if the group decides to impeach a mod, but you voted to keep the mod in place, that mod is still a mod for you, because you voted to support that guy — even if s/he is no longer a mod for the group.
What If He Falls? The Terrifying Reality Behind Filming “Free Solo” – Op-Docs
There are a lot of places in SV that literally haven’t been seriously renovated since they were built in the 40’s and 50’s going for $1.5M+. 0% interest rates along with NIMBYism and high tech salaried have seriously inflated land prices in CA, at least. I think the first two factors have had a more universal effect, and just multiply the locally available salary range to yield the limits of purchasing power, which becomes the market clearing price of the local homes.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/153313-nineteen-eighty...
David Brin is sticking to the solar radiation causing outgassing after a delay hypothesis. Go figure - it was his thesis
FYI the story writer almost never comes up with the headline in a traditional newspaper story pipeline (which most likely still includes wapo). Usually it’s one of the editors that has final say on the headline (and control of A/B testing online). Often the reporter will even have to push back when the editor tries to use too strong a word that may be technically incorrect based on the reporter’s more in depth knowledge of the topic.

Now I’m not trying to say that the story writer isn’t also writing sensational stories, with their own agendas, only that you would do well not to judge a story by its headline. Otherwise, I agree sensational headlines turn me off as well.
Unless you're on older unsupported macbooks, I'm not sure I'd run something that wasn't macOS unless under a VM. That's just me. Although, I don't like a lot of the direction, or lack of with macOS.

I'll probably put a new system together around mid next year (leaning Ryzen 2 near release). Will decide on Hackintosh, Linux or BSD at that time. Most likely hackintosh, but who knows. Linux (Elementary and Ubuntu) are finally around where I would want it for a primary desktop.
Wow. Is this already copied by the Chinese cloners?

https://www.amazon.com/Koowheel-Electric-Balancing-Hovershoe...
Or if an issue happens in your staging environment but not locally. That happened to me just yesterday, and a simple print statement gave me the information I needed to resolve the issue.

I probably could have attached a remote debugger, and executed the relevant function a few times until my request got routed to the right process in the cluster, but that honestly would have taken me more time than just committing the print statement and letting CI take it away.
If you decrease the number of transactions 100% there would be no need to mine blocks, resulting in an impressive energy savings. :)
While what you’re saying is clearly factually true, what he’s done was apply a very common style of sarcastic dismissal. I think it’s rather obvious he didn’t mean to imply WaPo was actually an organization similar to Om Shinrikyo. In all honesty I think if he’d have written some long form comment we’d all get the same point but have wasted far more time.
Looks like someone here has a case of white fragility. Please recall that reverse racism does not exist: the oppressed cannot be racist towards the oppressor.

I jest. That's another one of those concepts that came out of the humanities academia recently, which is relevant to the article: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774