skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said. I wish they would actually go after the fraudulent diploma mills and sham universities that exist only for visas. Why not run sting ops against them by posing as students instead of against fricking students trying to maintain immigration status?

I lost it at this:

>The Department of Homeland Security’s list of certified schools where international students can enroll includes the University of Farmington.

I don't know the specifics but can someone explain why this is not entrapment?

What next, leave warm blankets near the homeless saying they're free to take and then arrest them for theft?

Also DHS's list of certified schools just lost all its meaning and legitimacy. If MIT is on that list it might as well be a fraudulent university for all we know.

This kind of shenanigans will just further plummet the already lower university enrollment.
The whale terminology is a cutesy alternative to something more truthful and representative.

Like "hyper addicted".
Scramble for Africa
Blocking no-meeting times, scheduling times to check slack or email, staying vigilant about declining, shortening, canceling meetings are all techniques to help free up contiguous blocks of time for focused work. Though they shouldn’t have required a book I’ve seen Deep Work and PG’s Makers Schedule post be used to justify ICs making this space.
From books to bullets: inside Amazon's push to 'defend' America
> ...but it was done without xenophobic rhetoric, which seems ideal.

To anyone who is listening rather than assuming, it seems that the Trump administration has done it without xenophobic rhetoric as well.
Nice list. It's good to know that selling a country $29k in goods now equates to "supporting a dictatorship". And written by an expert in the field:

> "Rich Whitney is an attorney, actor, radio commentator and disk jockey, Illinois Green Party activist and former Green Party candidate for governor."

The idea that the US is wanting to overthrow Venezuela for oil is just silly. They output roughly what North Dakota does. I know it sounds cool to claim this, but it's just not reality.
Dennis M. Hope Has Owned the Moon Since 1980 Because He Says So
It is possible that there are multiple problems with Facebook.
I doubt that's the case.

If there is a market it will be exploited by someone.

The solution is to regulate the market so that Facebook cannot do whatever it is doing.
It's not entrapment if the crime (being in the country illegally) was already committed.
Ofc, because with Trump the US-EU relation has got to an all-time low, and now the EU tries to look independent even if it can't but ofc you need to show your voters you are not sold to US interests.
Terrible headline!

Students knew that the scheme was illegal “and that discretion should be used when discussing the program with others,” prosecutors wrote in their indictment.

This was not a fake university at all. This was a fake fake university.

The former would be offensive. The latter is a brilliant sting operation I 100% endorse.
TV isn’t the same? you mean like smartphones aren’t the same as cigarettes?
You're right that parents should be aware of what their children are playing, but that in no way justifies these deceptive practices by Facebook and other companies.
Or GraphQL
> the standard library is very large

Yes, but the APIs design is very far from what you'd expect from a typical dynamic language. When you tell a typical Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP/Lua programmer that you can't just call `length` on anything collection-like, but need instead to call `string-length`, `vector-length`, `hash-size`, etc. - they remain unconconvinced, to say the least. The higher-order abstractions, like collections, sequences, streams are there, but rarely used (if at all) in the stdlib itself and you won't encounter them in tutorials. Then, some APIs are incomplete, like the date and time support, even with relevant SRFI.

The language is expressive enough, fortunately, for people to build their own stdlib replacements, like Alexis King's collections-lib (and related), gregor library for dates, or rackjure lib for thread-first/-last macros. But you need to know about them, otherwise you're going to invent lots and lots (because it's so easy) of your own conveniences and will do it poorly for the most part, while also losing time.

Well, it's still orders of magnitude better situation than with Pharo, which was also released in 7.0 version recently. In Racket, all of the stdlib is covered with extensive documentation comparable (sometimes favorably) with Python docs. Most additional packages are also documented the same way, it's great. As long as you can get past the base distribution lack of conveniences (or sometimes features), though, Racket is one of the most beautiful languages and language ecosystems I've encountered.

I did two little projects in Racket, recently: one was using Slideshow for making slides for a presentation, the other was using plot for making some graphs. In Slideshow, I ended up writing some 200 loc for it to display syntax-highlighted, colored code of non-Racket languages, which would be free in any JS-based presentation framework. After that it was a relatively smooth sailing, although the outline-generating API is definitely overcomplicated. In the other case, I had to parse a bit of text and then do a lot of computation on dates and times. Very frustrating experience initially, until I found gregor lib and megaparsack. The 5+ other solutions (for parsing) were too heavy-weight and inconvenient to use and I was just going to fall back on regexes (which are also not very convenient to use), but fortunately I found Alexi's megaparsack lib, which is almost as good as PyParsing.

Anyway - lots of rough edges in the stdlib, a lot of cruft - but at least well-documented - and some interesting libs you can use to bring it up to modern standards. And the module system makes using these packages painless - even if they rewire lots of stdlib - which is something Smalltalk/Pharo guys are yet to achieve.
If you're committing visa fraud you're no longer undocumented and you are indeed there illegally.
I'm glad to hear someone say this. Iran's government is not a good-faith actor.
Robert Swan Named CEO of Intel
Videos like this help me to remain vigilant. The longer I work with power equipment without any accidents, the easier it is to forget the risks.

For better or worse, I'm unable to forget a picture of the victim of a lathe accident.
If the goal of your organization is "to investigate illegal movement of people and goods" (on ICE's website), I would think this would be a safe and effective way to do it.
That's false. The guy who wrote this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_No_Evil_(book)) spent more than a decade in the Gulag because he was denied permission to emigrate across the Iron Curtain and was a human rights activist agitating for emigration rights.
I understand how FB was not using Apple's enterprise development program in good faith. Apple clearly has a right to do what they did.

I don't understand why FB is in hot water with the public for what they did. Users were informed that data collection was taking place and they were compensated for it. Now, was it wise on the users' part to join this program? Perhaps not, but last time I checked this is still a free country and people can sell their property for as much or as little as they want.

On NPR this morning I heard the argument that a lot of the detail of what is collected and how it is used is buried in the T&C. So what? Have we lost sight of personal responsibility? How naive are people? If you are getting something for free from a large corporation you're not getting it out the kindness of their heart. They are making money somehow. That is how the world works.

Panic, moral or otherwise, about this sort of stuff is going to push the tech industry into realm of regulatory capture. Well funded companies will be able to afford and absorb compliance costs where small bootstrapped startups, lifestyle businesses, and indie developers will be pushed out of the market.
> Humans are not safe drivers

I see this repeated over and over in this thread, elsewhere on HN, and in many other places on the web.

But no one explains what they mean by a safe driver.

There are other factors at work than mere human-ness. For instance the US has more than double the number of fatalities per unit vehicle distance than the UK, more than triple per head of population. In both countries the driver is a human yet the disparity in outcome is huge.

Perhaps whatever it is that causes this sort of difference should be addressed rather than insisting on a new an inherently unproven technology.

Or, at least, give us some numbers so that we can tell what you mean by safe.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
No! The crime is not being in the country illegally. The crime is knowingly enrolling in a fake university and claiming student visa status while taking no course work.

A sting operation (fake drug buy) is not entrapment. If you walk up to someone and ask them if they want to buy drugs and they do it’s not entrapment. If you threaten them to buy your drugs or pretend you are selling them legal drugs and then hand them something illegal and arrest them, that is entrapment.
Do you have any source for "That is one of the reasons why people who work in the food industry all smoke so much." ?

As far as I can tell most low wage / manual labor jobs are plagued with cigarette smoking because it allows more breaks / and it's a way to kill time.

Here in germany a lot of 30s people picked up smoking during their mandatory military service (cigarettes were free to avoid creation of black markets, people who smoked had more breaks + herd behavior)
Pretty much all of the important stuff is still covered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...)

To argue otherwise would be akin to arguing that the UK parliament isn't sovereign because local councils can make some local decisions independently.

EDIT (To reply to the comment below):

If you read the information in the link posted, it's obvious that the important decisions still require unanimity, even if minor decisions (yes, some of them in important fields) now only require QMV.

FWIW, I'm a fan of QMV.
I've done this.

I'm currently working for an insurance company, where I created services that interact with legacy systems where you can't touch anything, because nothing can be deleted once in there.
I had to submit a formal request for accounts and waited months for them.
Once I had them, I had to wait weeks for having the right permissions set for those accounts.
There are a test and a pre production environment, but they work differently from the production one, in very subtle ways. For example, the same account cannot login from two different places at the same time, while test and pre-production allow that behaviour.

Long story short: I've mocked the service completely, well just the parts I needed to interact with, and added assertions in my code that if something changes show an error message like "something has changed we're working on a fix" and send me alerts.
I could not even get the team working on the legacy system send me an email before changing stuff...

But at least I can test my app and some of the tests are about checking that nothing has been updated in the meantime.
They run automatically few times a day (just the checks) and warn me if something is wrong.
Still better than a call from a user who usually can't explain what's wrong and you have to repeat the complete procedure on the phone, step by step.
"starting" is putting it lightly...
Cruelty is the point. ICE is not on the right side of history.

ICE impersonates the LAPD, making their jobs more difficult. The LAPD has requested they stop doing this.

Homeland wants to be separated from ICE because ICE is hurting the broader org’s reputation and making it harder to keep the country safe.

ICE is so far off the rails, it is indefensible.

Please link me to the tremendous number of reasonable, empathic people working at ICE who are speaking out against the injustices committed by their organization. I'll wait.
Types of Fraud Graph Analytics Can Help Defeat
Out of curiosity, can you explain, or point to some writing about why you think the theories in the book are close to "complete bunk"?
Yes that is absolutely true, nicotine is not meaningfully toxic on its own as far as I'm aware.

That said, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous. For instance, Opiates were once thought of as a "perfect anesthetic" because they achieve the desired effect with little to no toxicity, but we've all seen how that played out over the last few decades.
Whataboutism isn't a debate technique.
A common dehumanizing term. You can understand why people take offense to that being applied to children.
Newport make the same comparison in the book. I personally think about it such that "flow" is the verb to produce "deep work", the noun.

I also highly recommend his book.
I use keeppass to keep an inventory of all my digital and non-digital assets (bank account #, car title, tv receipts etc.) and upload it on Google drive. Using various addons I can sync up the data from multiple places, even my phone. You can scan the files and attach it to the entries themselves (although it increases your file sizes). keeppass has tons of addons and tools that you can use. and all its entries are protected with strong encryption key.
I would have hoped that it was obvious from context I was talking about the later.
> Ramminger and his aides were all arrested in late 1968 and jailed for four years.

Its surprising how much he got away with. It was a theft, conspiracy, espionage, mailing and customs rules violation. Did he that in US 2019, he would get 30 years min.
RescueTime users can now get their personalized 2018 Year in Review report
Few of them are undocumented. There’s plenty of documentation on them - in schools, emergency rooms, police reports. As you well know, your term “undocumented” is designed to trivialize the border and deprecate the very concept of American citizenship.

At a minimum, refer to them as unauthorized immigrants, since that is the distinguishing factor from a public policy perspective.
There's some data out there but it's also hard to compare reliably since you need to account for differences in skill level when comparing salaries.

My point was that the large companies which have the best data, and whole teams of people doing the math on this issue, have consistently fought to preserve the old ways of doing it and since they're for-profit corporations it seems unlikely that they're doing this for any reason other than the econ 101 explanation that they profit from workers who can't negotiate as well.
It's very telling that your critics here refuse to engage with the first half of your argument, if they attempt to engage at all.
Is entrapment not illegal in the US?
From the article:

> As the News noted, the undercover investigation seems to have ramped up one month after President Trump took office. While the fake university was set up in 2015, it wasn’t until February 2017 that HSI agents began posing as university officials, the indictment said. The undercover operation, nicknamed “Paper Chase,” continued until earlier this month.

The operation was underway in 2015. Whatever else might be said about this, this particular project wasn't started under Trump.
Thanks, yes it happens in all environments. But this specific model (2i2) is notorious for having a poor USB port but I don't think all of them are afflicted with the issue.

I was using the cable that comes with it, but I could try a spare. Good idea on touching the cases too. Right now they are apart. I didn't even think about it being related to that.
> I like the concept of error budgets. Start off by knowing what kind of quality and resiliency a system requires and design your test strategy around that. Means talking to the client about that.

If you have a client knowledgeable enough, then great. But most people who don't have an engineering background think that the correct number of bugs is 'zero'. It's really hard for them to get their head round something being - to some degree - buggy, and still being acceptable.
It's fun to go on LinkedIn and look for "University of Northern New Jersey". There are a lot more people on there then you might think.

I find it amusing; I never finished my degree either but I try and be at least up-front about it.
So what you're saying is, if a law is enforced and doesn't get changed, the people who disagreed with it were unreasonable all along? How convenient!
This makes no sense. If any of the students who enrolled there were illegal immigrants, they should be granted green cards instantly. These are the people who want to learn, work, and better themselves: a clear net benefit to society.

[I'm purposefully avoiding the topic of ICE, ethics, and a number of other things here: just wanted to make one point]
Nice strawman, barely anyone is accusing the rank and file of ICE of cruelty, there might be a few bad apples here and there though. But the cruelty is coming from higher up political appointees like Stephen Miller.

Which results in ridiculous bullshit like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...

Can you tell me how the above situation is not cruel?
I think you just missed the purpose of the article! It simply explains how to backup your es indices on minions, which is a S3 alternative and that's why the use of s3 plugin! There are different plugins for different cloud providers that's above the scope of the post!
go ahead and try it
I was a half baked joke referencing Karen in the Rock article.
EdX MOOC on Quantum Machine Learning
Paywall warning.
Virtual reality: how technology can help amputees
I don't disagree with any of that. Will you argue any of that is going to change if we continue to prefer the safety of strong words over decisive action and sacrifice?
Sorry, I'm a little confused here on the 8 recruiters.

>The federal indictments name eight people in eight states who allegedly worked as recruiters for the school. All have been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit visa fraud and harboring aliens for profit. They face a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

So ICE employed recruiters, and is now prosecuting them for doing what they were told? A law enforcement agency hired people, required them to break the law (presumably under threat of dismissal), and then intends to jail them for it?
Thanks.

If I post a video of my game on Reddit, am I marketing to children? There are a lot of children there, but it isn't a childrens' website. Does it matter if my game is strategy-/turn-based or animated with cute graphics?
The jet powered beer cooler
AFAIK, genuine entrapment involves directly appealing to suspects to convince them to commit a crime which they would not otherwise have committed. In this case, the those enrolling had clearly intended to misrepresent their visa status, and the recruiters clearly intended to help them with that.

As for the "recruiters", I think they mean to say that these were independent people who offered their services and are alleged to have knowingly aided the commission of the unlawful acts (i.e. conspiracy) involved in aiding the misrepresentation of the visa status of those attempting to enroll.
The article's title says "New York Times", but the article itself says "New York Times Magazine". They're completely different publications...
From the description it sounds like entrapment. Which is why I can't believe it and why I think there is something missing...
> If your adversary actually pulls it off and copies it, they will have a 5 year old missile. Having an old missile on your warplane, while flying against the latest tech was a death sentence.

If they want to copy your 5 year old missile, their current missiles are probably even worse.

If you have the capability to clone an air-to-air missile, you have the capability to evaluate its performance to confirm that it's an improvement over your current designs.
Pretty sure I got worse than that in the playground at 5 years old.
In person, David Reich is an extremely thoughtful and kind guy. I have no reason to doubt his version of events. Population genetics is a remarkably subtle field, and it's not surprising that a journalist would understand it 95% correctly, with the missing 5% being devastating for their article.
A PhD in CS is a waste of time in the vast majority of cases. If you're good you can join FAANG out of undergrad and you'll earn well over a million dollars pre-tax by the time the PhD would be finished.
Even a very experienced and meticulous guy like Matthias Wandel recently got his finger bit by a spinning saw blade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIfuViyki0Q

It's very easy for anyone to drop his guard which leads to injuries. Since a lot of people admire his skills, he provided a great public service to the community by showing how his small moment of carelessness lead to an accident.
> By doing so, I effectively set off a time bomb. That single sector stayed around, lurking, waiting for the right moment.

Technically this is a booby trap, not a time bomb. ;-)
>Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

Sponsored ads and content is probably the only way, other than donations, to keep the service free. You can do ads without tracking, as long as you're transparent about what is or isn't an ad.

The other option is to segment the market with "premium tier" features that only finicky people care about. For example, everyone gets a standard page layout but you can pay to unlock custom style-sheets. Or you can pay extra to display higher resolution photos. Or you only hold onto posts and content for 3 years unless people pay for archival storage (at which point you're basically just running a backup service).

Alternatively, lots of community groups use facebook as a community forum. You can have moderators or forum administrators pay a hosting fee and that maintains the rest of the site.
The advantage of scalable digital quantum computers when/if they get built is that they can do certain very specific mathematical operations in polynomial time (instead of exponential for classical computers). This is a fairly imprecise statement (but gives good intuition). It is conjectured without yet being proven (still, there are many clues to it being true). It applies only to very specific problems, so there are "classically easy" problems which we will just continue solving with classical computers, and there are many problems that are infeasibly difficult for both classical and quantum computers.

An example of where quantum computers will excel is simulating large organic molecules (which is impossible today) ushering a new era of drug discovery and material science.

While there are toy applications of small computers, you probably need hundreds or thousands logical qubits. Given the low quality of the hardware and the environmental noise it is expected that you will need to use error correction codes where you encode a single logical qubit on top of hundreds or thousands of physical qubits.

In other words, once we have a machine with 10000 physical qubits that can all be well controlled and entangled with each other, with gate fidelities of 0.99 nobody (almost nobody) will be able to argue that it is not a quantum computer.

This device here has 20ish qubits with gate fidelities of 0.8 to 0.98.
"Undocumented resident" is an even worse euphemism - it's not like these are people who simply lost their papers, or people who were entitled to those papers and just forgot them.

These are people who are inside the US in violation of immigration law.
It was a management failure. The car had a perfectly ordinary radar based emergency braking function factory fitted by Volvo but Uber disabled it, presumably to avoid interference with the cars autonomous driving functions (if I recall correctly).