skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is several days late, but I had this tab open along with many others and I'm finally getting to it.

What is it that you find challenging about math? If it's the actual computation/calculation -- the part where you are finding a numeric answer -- don't worry, that's nowhere to be found in abstract algebra (or any higher level math). Pure math (of which abstract algebra is a part) is about the study of patterns more than anything that has to do with numbers.

In fact, the name "abstract" refers to the fact that it's concerned with abstract collections of things -- for instance, groups. You'll study sets of operations on groups -- if you are able to identify Collection X as a group, you immediately know you can apply theorems a, b, c, etc. to it. For these reasons, the sort of things you are likely learning in pre-alg on Khan Academy don't have much direct applicability.

I think it's an enormously beneficial subject for programmers to study, maybe the only math course beyond the standard discrete math that I think should be required. (I want to add category theory, but I don't feel I can as I only have the barest grasp of the fundamentals myself...) As with all pure math courses, it will quickly move beyond the depth/level you can actively use in programming, but the mind-expanding it does is really great at encouraging the sort of abstract thinking the OP's post is about. It has strong relations to generics, interfaces, polymorphism, etc.

As for how to get into it, I used this book: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Abstract-Algebra-Second-Mathemat....
"I pay for what I feel like paying for and then I steal the stuff I don't feel like paying for" kind of proves my point.
SEO: Simplified Keyword Research (2020)
The curbside pickup at Walmart is surprisingly good. You pay the same price as in-store shopping and the grocery selection is very good. Instacart is just too expensive. I like honest pricing.
> Wise decision

For whom? We're going to save ~0 QALY with this decision, but we're going to derail a lot of people's life plans and probably contribute to a lot of deaths of despair.
Mortal Kombat as an Xbox exclusive would kill the franchise for me :(
I agreed with you at first, but I recall the Bay Area having one of the earliest shutdowns in the US, and that started March 17. While some companies were definitely sounding the WFH alarm about a week prior to that, I think the March -> April jump would've been more incongruent with April -> May jump unless COVID wasn't the only driving factor behind the August -> March growth in the first place.
You know when you were a kid and thought that all the adults had life figured out, then you grew up and discovered that they were just winging it? The older I get I realize the same is true for thought leaders and experts. Nobody will pay you to sit around and tell them that collectively as human beings we don't really have the answer, so what we get is a best guess disguised in a veil of certainty.
Crypto trading platform shut by UK High Court
We may be struggling, but nowhere near the levels seen in the US and Brazil.

Many of us were shocked by the pictures of the military trucks carrying the dead in Italy.
I think you are missing the point that it's only a pain point for countries with a backlog, not ones without a backlog. 3-4 years in the grand scheme of things is not all that long for gaining PR of a different country.
Microsoft cares so much about racism they going to be installing games by default in their proprietary OS but won't include quality educational content.
Some of the money should go to the workers
It's unfortunate that this is getting downvoted. Perhaps it comes across as a little boastful, but it matches my experience in academia.

When I was doing my PhD (Statistics) I spent several weeks running simulation studies to compare our new statistical model to 2-3 existing models that did similar things, across a wide range of data sets both real and generated with varying parameters. It was an unsupervised learning problem so there wasn't a "correct" answer to compare to on the real data sets, but on the simulated data we outperformed the existing models over about 60% of the parameter space that we tested, including the part of the parameter space that I thought was most useful/likely in practice.

Rather than present all the simulation results and have a nuanced discussion of where we did better and where we did worse, my advisor had me remove the 40% of the parameter space where we did worse from the results, so it looked like we always did as good or better.

The scientific contribution would undoubtably have been better if we had presented the results where we did worse and discussed why we believed that to be the case, but getting the paper past reviewers and into a top journal (as we eventually did) was considered more important.
This is good information, thank you. I had team members who had put down roots here and they would be terrified every time they had to renew. They were Indian so it was likely because of the queue you mentioned their green card application seemed to never end.

I'd still rather spare people that terror.

I am a conservative strongly against illegal immigration, but conversely I think we need to open up legal immigration a lot more, especially to those who've worked here and contributed to our economic success, like H-1B workers.
> Who is left that is willing to spend hours doing take home tests?

I've used this process to help place entry level all the way to C-Level -- maybe I've not provided enough details (it's more than just a simple test) or maybe you're over-simplifying the process?

It's not a perfect process (hiring in general is still looking for that) and clearly it's not the right process for you.

I'm happy you found a job you enjoy.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Is it that buying a house from an owner occupier at high market rates displaces the person who couldn't bid market rate for the property?
It was a fairly common trope in "golden age" sci fi iirc, along with moving people roads, and people tubes (like the Futurama opening credits). Elon is straight out of a Robert Heinlein book - the crazy billionaire building rocket ships to mars, he's even made them stainless steel so they shine like on the old astounding adventures covers.

Edit: here's the roads must roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll one of those ideas that sticks in your head
Nvidia is partnering with Ampere on ARM, and AMD on x86 (!). I would not be surprised if Nvidia made an offer down the line once they figure out whether Ampere is worth the money.

Right now, getting Apps ported to ARM seems a lot more likely than AI / ML porting their work off CUDA. And I am thinking if CUDA will end up like Excel for Microsoft. It is not that we cant move off Excel, but the code and value running on CUDA / Excel will not be worth the effort porting away from it.
You could also look this up at home on a dedicated computing terminal before going out.
Artist John Zaklikowski had a great exhibit called Hard Drive Universe in 2012 in SF

https://www.flickr.com/photos/schill/albums/7215762935517133...
DNA revealed the woolly mammoth's fate, and what it teaches us today
Hah. A lot of excellent bread recipes involve a step like “add flour until it looks right.”
Sure, but everyone here is reacting with incredulity at the idea you could make any kind official payment with a stack of gift cards. It's like asking someone to pay their utility bill with Pokemon or MTG cards.
Trump tweet does not exist
Have the rules been changed though? These on-line education restrictions (known as "Full course of study") had been in the law for a while, see 8 CFR 214.2(f)(6)(G) [1]. What ICE has done is a temporary suspension of enforcement. Now they just resume normal operation. You could argue they had to suspend it for longer but accusing them of changing rules seems bizarre as what you actually want is for them to change rules (because current rules say that F-1 students cannot do full-time on-line classes).

For F-1 students enrolled in classes for credit or classroom hours, no more than the equivalent of one class or three credits per session, term, semester, trimester, or quarter may be counted toward the full course of study requirement if the class is taken on-line or through distance education and does not require the student's physical attendance for classes, examination or other purposes integral to completion of the class. An on-line or distance education course is a course that is offered principally through the use of television, audio, or computer transmission including open broadcast, closed circuit, cable, microwave, or satellite, audio conferencing, or computer conferencing. If the F-1 student's course of study is in a language study program, no on-line or distance education classes may be considered to count toward a student's full course of study requirement.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/214.2
I don't follow: the gift card would appear on the grocery store bill. Why would accounting not flag it?
This reminds me BunVac 6000 from Wallace and grommet. Never Thought something like that could actually work!
Although I don't really like them, http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ is made bad on purpose ... I have never seen one that bad actually. What I hate most about them is usually the ads, but in that case it is that it doesn't let me read at my pace (which is a lot worst).
> No, the movie was written before someone noticed some superficial similarities and suggested seeking the rights to the book for marketing purposes.

Source? The Wikipedia article states that the screenwriter was a fan of the book.
Many people buy others gifts, often with little care or thought, just for the sake of giving a gift,
not because they necessarily want to.

I personally hate receiving gift cards or commodity gifts. I would rather receive a thoughtful gift (even just a hand-written message) or no gift at all. I don’t want your item or your money, I want your time or your thoughts.

Not to mention that after receiving your gift, I become obligated to give you an equally thoughtless gift. They say it’s the thought that counts, but it seems like that’s exactly what is missing most of the time! I want to skip the business transaction and just get to the part where we appreciate each other.

That said, I’m still not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that is my honest preference.
Reforming the H-1B to do what it was intended to do would mean eliminating 99% of the visas that are granted.

It turns out that the entire H-1B program has been a massive scam. It was created and promoted by American Big Tech companies to make them money at the expense of American citizens. It's been a trillion dollar theft from lower and middle class Americans into the hands of the 1%.

Without the H-1B in place, these companies would be working to fix America's education system, paying more in salary to workers, and lifting more Americans into the middle class.

The program has been beneficial in many ways but the overall effect has been to use foreigners as a weapon against citizens.

One of the most reprehensible aspects has been the propaganda by the Big Tech companies. They're pretending to care about America's melting pot and helping immigrants, but they're importing primarily the wealthiest immigrants. They're damaging America and other countries at the same time, all in the name of money.
> “ Tuition will remain as announced for the 2020-21 academic year.”

jfc
I remember paying 64.64 after tax for Killer Instinct on the SNES when it was released. We were desperate to get it after release so not sure if that was lost price. Friend and I at the time took it as a nice sign for the upcoming Nintendo 64.
I think it will end up beat by curbside grocery pickup. What is more palatable: a grocery bag assorted with care by grocery store staff who sort things by size and weight when they bag all the time and spend quite a bit of time selecting and arranging the choiciest fruit in the store, carefully lowered into the trunk of your vehicle when you appear in front of the store on your way home, or a grocery bag left on your porch hours ago by someone incentivized to work as fast as humanly possible and pee into bottles in their high interest leased car while they hustle to the next gig?
I used to work on a platform that ran on the POS and issued various gift cards via the receipt printer (think prepay mobiles) or actived physical gift cards like these. For products we could there was a cooling down time of a few hours between purchase and redemption. This also made it harder for the sales clerk to scam
>WHO say there is no evidence that asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, and if you have the disease, people should stay indoors. Therefore the mask is redundant.

What if you're in the incubation period? AFAIK that doesn't count as being an "asymptomatic carrier" because you eventually show symptoms.

>I've even seen plenty of articles suggesting that wearing the mask is making things worse [...] The information overload is getting extreme.

Source for this? I've only heard of mask wearing making things worse by proxy (ie. you're depriving healthcare workers of masks). If that's the basis of those claims, it's totally consistent that masks are good and that masks are bad.
Exactly; buying the house contributes to the displacement in the sense that if they weren't buying the house, someone of less means could buy it instead.
The H-1B program definitely needs more regulation to prevent abuse by companies (especially when it comes to salary negotiations). But if anything we should increase the number - it's not like those people are just going to not work if they don't come to the U.S. They'll just work in different countries, either driving more offshoring of labor by American companies, or just competing with them directly. It's in the U.S.'s best interest as a whole to get as many of the best and the brightest in the world to work here, and then do everything we can to get them to stay.

Currently, 48M+ people in the U.S. were born outside the U.S. and we welcome a larger total number (like 1.2M+) of immigrants per year than any other country in the world. By far - it's like double the closest country easily, year in and year out. Basically all of Western Europe combined. Might as well have a lot of them be PhDs and other highly skilled/educated people.

Besides, half of Silicon Valley was started by immigrants or children of immigrants - maybe more. In my experience, third+ generation Americans tend to take what they have for granted. If you've worked your ass off and crossed the world to get to the U.S., you're the type of person we want here. It's been that way for literally generations. To quote Hamilton (which I just saw this weekend), "Immigrants. They get the job done."
Works well for the first 20-100 employees. After that you’re bound to get a solid chunk of bad ones no matter what you do.
You can’t buy them - it’s more of a rental situation.
> How close the book universe is to the real universe is a different story.

The real life Lord of the Flies illustrates this well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123609

TLDR: After being shipwrecked, everyone got along and cooperated, and remained life-long friends.
Unfortunately this would also mean the end of small business owned grocery stores has been greatly accelerated.
Older laser printers were notorious for generating Ozone. I don't think people realize that Ozone is also bad for humans in addition to the atmosphere.
I mean, they are closed, but a lot of people seem to come in anyway and do things just as before, so I am told.

Define that how would wish to.
> My comp sci degree has the same utility as anyone else that didn't go to Ivy League / Stanford.

Based on my experience going from one state school to another, there can be a night and day difference in access between even state schools. I would be shocked if going to any Ivy League school didn't open up many, many doors that are closed to us plebs.
Maybe costco is still insane, but not much of a line at most grocery stores in LA these days.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but this is actually wrong.

> Streaming 4K+ video is a waste of resources with no tangible benefit to anyone other than marketing purposes. Netflix streams '4K' because everyone has a '4K' TV now and they demand it.

It's not inherently wrong, just practically so. The difference is that Netflix (and often other streaming services) max out at a much higher bitrate for their 4k streaming, and are using a better codec (H.265) as well. By comparison, Netflix's bitrate for 1080p is severely limited and so if you compare the two, even watching at the 1080p level of detail, streaming in 4k will often be a vastly superior experience.

So it's not inherent (not a result of the resolution), but still, streaming 4k is not pointless at present.
Also, the Raspberry Pi is based on possibly the shittiest family of SoCs available on the market. As an embedded engineer, it's hard to overstate how bad the BCM283* series is. Peripherals locked to GPU clock. Why!? Watchdog timer is straight up broken. How do you mess that up?
Indeed this assumes your priority date is current, which it is for all EB2 excluding India and China, and many EB3s. [1]

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/visabulletininfo
In the long run, we're all dead. Or perhaps just cured of covid.

There's ~375k Chinese students in the US. At one flight a week, it would take over 20 years for all to return home (to be fair, there's actually 4 flights a week I believe -- so merely 5 years). This is a de-facto blocking of citizens from returning.

And no, you can't just "wait" a month. As a sibling commenter noted, the best they could find were October tickets.
The Pi is also notoriously Broadcom-proprietary[1], whereas an x86 PC has been a de-facto standard for decades; everything is well-known or has been reverse-engineered already, especially with a 486-era system.

It's somewhat similar to the reason people (like me) restore and drive old cars, also despite the "noise and power consumption" (and some happen to like the former ;-) --- they're relatively simple and well-understood.

Likewise, there is also a very active retrocomputing community, although a lot of it goes back much older than 486 or even PC --- the C64, ZX, and the like continue to have plenty of new software written for them.

[1] and if you ask for a datasheet or any more details about it on their "excellent community" (to quote some), you basically get told politely to f'off: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=163420
N64 games would go for 59.99 to 69.99 for 3rd party games if you bought it from Electronics Boutique or KB Toys for instance. I remember paying 69.99 before tax for Turok at Toys R Us on We release.
With the added benefit of grocery workers mostly having good sense of arranging the contents inside a bag, and the box not having to sit out all day before you get to it.
REST – Idempotency and Safety
I really don't know how people think these are safe, I have a "ozone-free" UVC disinfectant light and it still produces enough ozone to smell pretty bad. I can only imagine how an O3 generator smells.
For me the hassle of scheduling the online order really took the shine off of online grocery shopping. Expense was also a factor, but if I need to stay up till 2 AM to schedule an order, I would rather just stock up more in fewer grocery trips and try to go for odd hours
The world needs experienced people at all “levels”. We need experienced, quality janitors, and we need experienced, quality presidents, and everything in between. If your company doesn’t respect that, it smacks of other issues in the organization that you could stay and help fix, or go elsewhere so you don’t have to put up with their crap.

It’s difficult to not compare oneself to others. That’s a separate issue for me so I would tackle it separately, googling strategies for that.
Students on F1 visas are not immigrants, and in general can’t stay after their studies are over (with a limited-time exception via OPT status), unless they get a different type of visa.
Exactly. Many times a story tells more about the author than it does about the real world.
And you need approval and all, plus there's a bunch of terms and conditions…
Large parts of this post are naked apologism for grave aberrations in computer
science research, the equivalent to code smells that have calcified and are
now "how we've always done things" because nobody has the courage to do
anything to fix them, or even knows how. That these are addressed to new PhDs
as "this is the real world and you must get used to it" is just tragic. The
surest way for all this garbage to remain the way it is, is for new PhDs to
accept it as it is and not try to do anything to change it.
If you're in the Bay Area and have a car, I'd recommend checking out Cheetah [1]. It's a startup that pivoted [2] from doing restaurant wholesale deliveries (from Restaurant Depot, which only sells to restaurants!) to doing drive-through pickup for consumers. You place an order by app, drive up to one of their parked refrigerated trucks at the scheduled time, and say your name. They load your trunk, and you're done. It's taken the majority of my grocery spend in the past few months and I hope the concept remains post-pandemic.

By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery), great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that works for me.

A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things (like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80).

(They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3] in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the concept take off.)

[1] https://www.gocheetah.com/

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-whole...

[3] Enter referral code "2EA2666F" at sign-up or https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d
They all support 4KiB, 16KiB, and 1MiB. It's required by the ARM spec, obviously with the exception of CPUs that don't have an MMU. Support for 16MiB pages is optional.
For some resources such as copper, it might actually be environmentally net positive to recycle to old copper and buy new.
Those big tech companies already have international offices. Why wouldn't they have just expanded those offices?

Investing in education etc is not really the job of companies in our capitalist system. They could not capture enough of the value to justify the cost, especially given the very long lead times.p
Automation design library: Label alignment
Since there seems to be some stripe employees here, is it true you've already set a foot in Argentina?
WB's gaming unit makes okay games that become successful due to the weight of the media franchises in which they are based. You take Batman away from the Arkham City games and you end up with a game not many people want to play. For example, the Mad Max game was their best open world entry, but it failed to reach sales expectations due to the lack of appeal of the media property.

I have no idea of what it takes to run a massive game studio like the one Microsoft has, but I can judge their games output, and outside of Halo and Forza, there is nothing for me there. I don't have much faith in them, and this seems like the kind of bad opportunity they'd pursue.