skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately labor supply vastly exceeds demand due to the pyramid nature of graduate programs.

Given a massive oversupply of replacement workers ready to go at a moment's notice, unionization seems unlikely to change anything.

Probably Ph.D. graduates should consider teaching at a university as a sort of popular avocation like music, art, sports, or video games. Maybe you can make some money at it if you are particularly skilled and lucky, but you will almost certainly need a real day job in order to pay the bills.
Are you on the latest iOS? I’m on 12.2 on an iPhone XS and see it when going to http://example.com/ and http://neverssl.com/
I'd say in business/academia, men are to smell neutral, whereas women are more expected to smell perfumed. I don't know that I'd call that "feminized", I'd call it polite. Sports teams are more accepting of yelling, smelliness, etc. because a field is not an enclosed space. An office is an enclosed space where work is to happen, so bad smells and loud noises are bad form. At least, that's how I figure it.
Octave and Scilab are more Matlab like replacements as a user below commented. Sure both are for mathematical code, but Octave is more for numerical work and Mathematica for Symbolic computation.

However, Mathematica is powerful in a much bigger way than Octave. Mathematica is more like a very successful and commercial lisp in that it has zillions of composable and we'll documented functions for everything. You don't just copy in a link to an image you want to do something with, but can literally copy paste an image into a function and immediately do stuff with it in a way I've never seen before. Recently I wanted to draw up pretty advanced network diagrams using the images our vendor used. I simply copy pasted them in and then used the graph theory primitives to draw a diagram. Then I noticed that I wanted to add a different picture and it didn't match the color scheme of the vendor. No problem...I just passed it to yet another Mathematica primitive to invert the colors. This was all REPL like interactive and easy to do. There are lots of little commands like this. My favorite example is a file open command that works on over 100 file types. The obvious ones like CSV, XML, JSON, .XLS, & TXT are all there, but so are other file formats like .MPS optimization files, common biology file formats, weather forecasting file types. Chaining this together is insanely easy. Suppose you want to solve a linear programming problem and you have a .MPS file. Just open the file and wrap it in the LinearProgram[] command and then wrap in a FileOutput[] command if I want to write to a text file. There's a lot more for Python where I have to import libraries and write loops.

Mathematica ain't perfect though. It has a large runtime and doing more complicated work doesn't scale as well as I would like for writing big programs. Code distribution is also harder. Nobody else on my team is going to want to install the Mathematica runtime to run my code.

Overall it is pretty nice though and I think it would surprise most HN users.
Not at all. The discovery problem is too hard. College degrees from elite schools only work because they’re elite and people can remember a small number of “good” schools relatively consistently.

If I want to hire someone, how can I tell the good schools / MOOCs from the bad? Will I be able to continue doing that reliably over time? Will it be any better a signal as to who is a good candidate than the current system?

As they are, most for-profit MOOCs seem to have pivoted to being corporate training / collaboration platforms...
I think some of that bad game design was economically driven or at least economically influenced.

Firstly, if you judge the "value" of a game based on how long it takes to complete then having overly-complex/fiddly/obscure puzzles is a great way to artificially inflate the perceived "value" of your game via the reported play time in reviews and among players.

Secondly, in the golden age of software piracy, including puzzles that most players wouldn't be able to solve without help creates a way to extract money from otherwise non-paying players via purchases of hint guides or calls to premium-rate hint lines. A kind of precursor to "pay-to-win" microtransactions in modern "free-to-play" games.

Of course, over time both of those influences waned. With the rise of the Internet you could get a walkthrough for any game very easily, killing the market for hint guides/hint lines, and people came to understand that there's more to the value of a game than how long it takes to play (though some "hard-core gamer" types still don't understand this).

I read an interview a while ago with the founder of Wadjet Eye Games (a modern-day retro-aesthetic adventure game studio), Dave Gilbert (no relation to Ron Gilbert of Lucas Arts fame). He said that designing adventure game puzzles these days is very challenging because he is aware that if they are made too hard players will stop playing and just go look up a guide or watch a recorded playthrough, however if they are too easy the player will breeze through the game. Essentially he has to find the right balance of puzzle difficulty to maintain good pacing in his games.
Send Chat Invites Using Chirp
It says I have messages, but I don't seem to have figured out how to view them.
This was a shockingly thorough piece, with great insider knowledge. But the writer made bizarre editorializations randomly throughout the piece, calling Facebook (one of the most profitable companies in the world) a knight hopping on one leg -- not exactly a believable comparison. Continuous pot shots were taken throughout the piece randomly that came off as petty rather than insightful -- including implicating that Facebook had targeted Wired to reduce traffic in retaliation for a story.

Its an exciting story, with the worst mix of highly accurate storytelling and extremely slanted weasel words at key moments. Not much different than the mis-information campaigns facebook was accused of promoting.
Exactly. When Apple started manufacturing some of their phones in Brazil, the prices didn't change, but their profit margin sure did.
I'm surprised that this news didn't impact Intel at all, good or bad, since they were also a big part of this whole issue.

Does anyone have insight into why that is?
> capable of sending a ship full of humans and supplies elsewhere at a reasonable fraction of c

I am not sure of this. Even if we pooled the Earth's resources into constructing a generation ship, we still are not sure we are capable of making a ship that is sustainable both socially and technologically.

We do not know if our tech can last hundreds of years. Even if that wasn't the problem, we do not know if we can maintain a self-sustaining environment that lasts hundreds of years. Even if that wasn't the problem, we don't know what failure modes need to be accounted for. Even if that wasn't the problem, we don't know how to keep humans sane on such a journey. It is, after all, unethical to have new humans born on a journey they never signed up for. We do not have the right to determine the fate of our progeny.

An upload to a synthetic medium is perhaps the only sane and ethical way to accomplish this goal.
I found that using a split keyboard for a while helped me identify and correct cases where I used the "wrong" finger for a key, which improved my overall typing speed and comfort in the end. (And I still use a split keyboard because I prefer it now.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_HapMap_Project
>whose speed probably mostly depends on human physiology (e.g. reaction time, personal comfort level with distance to next vehicle, etc.)

I think it has more to do with the suddenness of the stop; each car behind it has to stop suddenly in response, as the change only spreads locally. I’m pretty sure all you need to modify is deceleration speed for braking and acceleration speed to catch back up, to see like 90% of the effect

I’d test it with the simulation but it was too difficult to setup on mobile :-)
PyTorch is almost (or even literally?) a fork of chainer, which can be seen when comparing example code. The latter was much more stable than the former for quite some time after PyTorch gained big popularity through Facebook. We have been using chainer for a lot of published NN research projects and only recently moved to PyTorch because students complained that they feel they can't put the more popular framework on their CVs..

I continue to have more sympathies for chainer.
re: "As a DoD employee... [I think] you are incredibly wrong."

DoD is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.

Some Silicon Valley companies will pay for your master's degree, but usually you still have to work full time for the company in addition to your course work.

I've heard of some companies like Pixar actively training their employees for several months and paying them to learn (rather than expecting them to keep working full time in addition to training) but that seems unusual.
Do yakuza still get tattooed as heavily as the used to? I swear I read a while back that Russian mob members don’t get tattooed anymore, but I can’t seem to find the article I read.
That guy: DoD outsources training to PhD programs.

You: Wrong! The DoD actually outsources training to PhD programs.
The incredible challenge of landing heavy payloads on Mars
Why cloning? Gradual replacement seems the way to go.

If you transform rather than duplicate yourself, it doesn't matter if you're still 'human'. What matters is that you're alive and conscious.
I remember in middle school and high school we were told in no uncertain terms that we should all get 4 year college degrees because they gave the highest lifetime earnings. My high school was lucky enough to have an auto shop in it with a teacher that had been a mechanic/shop owner for years. He told us some good stories and also told us about how much money he made in the industry.

I didn't think about it much then because I was dead set on getting an engineering degree, but I've had this feeling about 4 year colleges for a while now. I saw so many people at my state college (~30,000 enrollment) that had absolutely no idea what they wanted to do, lacked the skills to be effective in college, or were in a degree program that had no job opportunities. I saw many of them drop out after 1-2 years, but also saw ones that remained and got their degree. Now they are tens of thousands of dollars in debt with nothing to show for it, and the people who did graduate are in more debt with no good job prospects. It feels like we were lied to about college by all the adults in our lives.
I want to believe so bad. Being able to do web development with Python instead of JavaScript has been something I've dreamed about forever.
A lot of times you have to monitor your personal blogs, websites, etc. You don’t make any money from those.

While I agree with paying for software, I can understand the idea behind not wanting to pay for uptime monitors. The advantage is that the service (at least on the free tier with no priority support or anything) is so cheap to offer that companies can offer a generous free tier that they can still turn into profit thanks to a few enterprise clients.
> the content really doesn't ntake up that much space/speed

video streaming
> One way to think of it might be from the photon's frame of reference its entire path has become infinitely short so it had no distance to travel at all.

From the photons frame of reference, then, they do not move at all?

And the environment that photon "experiences", being the path in the universe that it traverses from our point of view; is the past, present, and future (from our point of view) all in instant simultaneity for the photon?
> Nobody would use the block feature on Twitter if it didn't tell the other person you blocked them.

Well, there is a "mute" feature which acts a lot like a "silent" block, and plenty of people use that.
You weren't lied to, you just dropped the ball.
This is a rant, but I think our generation deserves the right to rant about our overpriced educations, etc...

The current university model, the subsidies, the regulatory capture, the administrarive state, etc, are all just part of the idea that everything can be regulated and socially engineered by people who are smarter than others. It's just modern day fiefdoms of lords and peons.

It's all a train wreck. Science has stagnated and everyone knows it despite all the mental gymnastics we use to try and deny it. For many Americans, they are the first generation to live with worse job, housing, work/life balance, income security than their parents. We have escalating rates of suicide and depression. We are the first generation of Americans to live under a surveillance state.

To be honest, San Francisco and Seattle both look and feel far, far more dystopian to me than Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. Even more than Hanoi or Kuala Lumpur, despite the fact they still struggle with deeply entrenched corruption, infrastructure and human rights. And yet this problem in America will be met with yet another round of bureaucrats and technocrats coming up with a solution that is more and more of taxing and regulating our lives.

I'd rather they just give everyone basic income/healthcare and let them sort it out on their own.
Focusmate – Distraction-Free Productivity
Maybe it's time for a "Secession of Scholars". The university as an institution was founded by students and scholars alike -- as a mutual interest group -- to study and advance the fields of law, theology and medicine. If the scholars and students of a field go a radical step towards forming "mutual interest groups" without overbearing bureaucracy and credentialism, a lot of these institutions could redefine themself again.

This is probably easier said than done and only accomplishable in the Humanities, as they don't really need multi-billion dolar equipment to do research. This would also be a very elitist form of organization, since ... yes professors, researchers and assistents must eat, have health/social insurance and have time to conduct independent research. And the students must have enough free time to actually study.

But how much worse can working conditions get? We as a society can value knowledge for the sake of knowledge (and not to have "Prof. Dr. phil. habil." attached to a name).
Gentlemen, Start Your Algorithms – Race Day for Autonomous Cars
Demand for the professor's product -- education -- has largely kept up with supply (c.f. rising tuitions). What's changed (the article contends) is the percentage of the professorship that is permanent versus adjunct.

The adjunct model is basically scamming everyone at an information disadvantage: for students, it inflates the perceived faculty-to-student ratio, even though many of those faculty are part time. For grad students, it inflates perceived demand for teachers because the total faculty market is growing, even though many positions are underpaid. And this is perpetuated for adjunct faculty, who are often told the position is a step towards tenure track, while universities move the ratios towards fewer permanent positions.

The article's suggestion, to rebalance towards permanent positions, would make true supply and demand clearer so the market can rationalize.
> See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there.

But microwave links are P2P and directional, using narrow beams at a certain height so that humans (or other objects) don't get in the way. That will not be the case with 5G.
I legit think that trade schools for programmers are a good idea.
Why not just use Django or Flask? Python web dev is great because you do have access to so many of these incredible scientific libraries like Pandas, etc.
Compete to win $500 in $ETH every day
Manager class growing and pursuing profit motive.
Thanks! For the curious, more details here:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/11/Rust-1.34.0.html#custo...

From tooling perspective, this isn't perfect, because there's still no guarantee that the token stream is a valid expression. So e.g. an IDE trying to highlight them or do a global rename refactor has to assume, which might not always be correct for token-based DSLs. It would be nice to have some metadata to distinguish those. Or perhaps there is an idiomatic way to express it in a contract on the macro itself, that tools could look at?
> can't be bothered

or who doesn't know that "I'll need some time to get back to you on that" is an acceptable part of their vocabulary.
As far as I know the entire establishment turns against anyone that tries to defeat corruption (with different strength depending on what place we are talking about). That usually leads to lower legitimacy, not higher.
It's stupid because the market valuated AAPL at about $150 three months ago, and now is about $150.

That stupid.

BTW, I say the market is stupid because I bought AAPL shares January 28th (a monday), and I've bet the market ever since, I've beat SP500, DOW, I've won AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, everything. I even won Warren Buffet.

And I'm selling now, because the market is also predictable.

I have no words for it, they do as they are told by the news. I do the contrary, this is a warning sign for me, I might miss 10%-20%, but it doesn't matter, 30% is good enough and not worth the risk.
> Some Silicon Valley companies will pay for your master's degree, but usually you still have to work full time for the company in addition to your course work.

Why is this a bad thing - I'm genuinely curious? I completed a masters and a PhD the same way. Of course, the downside is that since I already had a job I wasn't going to deal with the funding rat-race that comes with academia and stayed in industry.

Edit: The biggest upside - career growth, no student loans, regular paycheck, health insurance, etc, etc.
That is an incredibly low view of people and has not been my experience at all in life or as a renter.
The reason Boeing's new plane crashed twice [video]
Yes and No. If you ignore Python being a powerhouse in the scripting world and just focus on numerical stuff like matrix and symbolic math, both Python and Mathematica have that. Some people like myself that love Python and know how to use it and Numpy bought Mathematica licenses. I still use Python for scripting, but I've moved most exploratory work to Mathematica. I miss Python's Spyder IDE, but with Mathematica I can enter equations into Notebooks much more elegantly than having to do OO code which looks significantly different than the math.
I’m only moving my hands. I can still move my hands while resting my arms.

I think you should watch the Soli video again. I’m getting tired of repeating myself.

No affiliation with Google or Soli. I keep repeating it because you seem to to be hung up with the extended arm motion and “gorilla arm”

MIT has done some gesture UI work. Don’t know much about it:

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
This is why economics should be mandatory in most high school and college curriculum: The laws of supply and demand apply to the job market as well. It blows my mind that schools require things like 3 years of foreign language but fail to teach their students anything about the market they will depend on to support themselves the rest of their lives.
Why are people so incredibly keen to teach at universities that they'll put up with these conditions? I don't think these positions even come with the usual up-side to the bad conditions - getting to do the research you're passionate about. Do people just enjoy teaching so much? It seems genuinely that a job at McDonalds would have better pay, conditions, stability, and respect.
They need it and they need it badly. Big game hunting brings in a lot of cash. The big game maybe, not so much.
Twitter Is Optimized for Douchebaggery
Yeah, exactly things like that.

The SaaS marketplace became so crowded that companies sought out a wide range of differentiated niches and automated a lot of specific use cases.
Why would this be shocking given the recent attacks on churches and a beheading that happened in one a few years ago?
The number of staff at many universities has drastically increased in the last 10-15 years.

The number of full time, tenure track faculty positions has not. However, there are plenty of adjunct professors that have low wages, poor benefits, and no job security.

Government-insured student loans mean that the university has an incentive to take as much from that as possible. But the job market now often requires some kind of degree, and new students don't really know what they're signing up for by taking on $25k, $50k loans and beyond.
However, legally they are not the same thing.
Both sides employ outside counsel. They're large multinational law firms that charge a high hourly rate (high 3-figures to 4-figures depending on the seniority of the attorneys).
The difference is who pays. This mostly matters for undergrad since graduate school pays you.
the problem is now you have to rewrite your entire application around the web stack. That's a huge impedence mismatch. Taken to extreme, you end up with Pandas.
That’s fair to not get it. Being tattooed isn’t for everyone. I’ve wanted to be tattooed since I was 12. Not really sure why other than I was drawn to it. I’m 30 now and have about 30% of my body tattooed and have no plans to stop.

To address the potential startup — there are a handful of companies that sell temporary tattoos that last for several weeks, but they tend to favor trendy things (think infinity symbols, tribal (not really trendy anymore), and simple blackwork). I did see toddlertattoos[1] today, and those look really great. The biggest barrier to entry is the industry itself. It’s incredibly inclusive, closed off, and reputation based. I don’t think a person who doesn’t have a huge reputation in tattooing could make it work.

1) https://toddlertattoos.com/
What is the problem that they are solving? I don't want Google to be my lens on the world. I never paid them for that. It is for this reason that I unsubscribed from YouTube Red. They stopped being a neutral platform.
> It seems pretty reasonable that wormholes could exist so long as they don't form closed-timelike curves

"Wormholes" are two entangled black holes that have been subsequently moved light years apart, preserving the entanglement during the move. They are a great mathematical toy for exploring the nature of entanglement.

But that's it. We have trouble preserving the entanglement of just a few ultra cold particles for a few milliseconds. I am far^^^far more likely to fall onto the floor by quantum tunnelling through my chair than a useful wormhole ever appearing. Postulating they actually exist is not in the slightest bit reasonable.
Yeah. The basic idea is fine. (Don't write huge monolithic software blobs!) But the term was effectively coopted to be about a lot of specific heavyweight proprietary software and the heavyweight specs associated with them.
Extensive discussion of original source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672795
I dropped out of my PhD as soon as I felt it was clear I wasn't on trajectory to land in a tenure track role. It was a stressful and confusing time in my life and not an easy decision, but one based on a clear-eyed view of the economic realities ahead. I don't understand why people soldier on for literal decades in a job when there is no hope of ever gaining reasonable pay, benefits, or recognition. On an hourly-adjusted basis many of these people would be financially better off doing just about anything else.