skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know how many Asian immigrants you've worked with, but the vast majority in my experience were well-heeled in their home country. Granted, their standard of living wasn't always on par with the American Middle class, but it was hardly poverty. Heck, one of my colleagues even had his own private driver back in India.

I am a startup visa supporter but I have no delusions that in many cases it will be giving the privileged more privilege. It's goal is to spurn innovation in the US and make us richer - it's NOT a force in global equalization.
The text needs a once-over by a native English speaker.
Murder Unsolved: The Story of Little Christine Jessop
> By the way, you do realize your high salary increases income inequality, right? (In both the US and the world.)

Income inequality is not the problem, but it sure sounds nice to the voters. Livability of lower income folks is the problem. Doesn't matter if there is only $100 difference between the lowest and highest wage earners if everyone is starving. I wish we spent less time being envious of the rich and lucky and spent a lot more time looking at ways we can use technology to make lower wages more livable.
Yes, but it strikes me that most of the arguments for increasing or even eliminating quotas for skilled immigrants can also be viewed as a variant of the feudal attitude. After all the arguments boil down to: "let the skilled immigrants in or the jobs will move overseas." So in the end it is about preserving one's high wages or geographic locality of jobs.

BTW I am completely pro-immigration, so don't take this as a slam against immigration. My ideal world would be where geography is irrelevant as far as jobs go, which should naturally normalize wages across the world -- no more need to migrate for economic reasons. Since that is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, the question is do we choose jobs or wages.

Regardless of which side of the fence one falls on, three things need to be fixed:

1. Do not tie the H-1B to the employer
2. Allow spouses of H-1B holders to seek employment
3. The H-1B has no country quota, so remove the country quota for employment based green cards
I would really like to see hotswap in Firefox also.
For all the legitimate shots you could take at Assange, the rape charges are some of the weakest and least-founded in fact. When the prosecutor says "there's no reason to believe he's guilty of rape" and drops the charges, then 10 days later the charges are re-filed by a woman who's made it her mission to change Sweden's laws to classify many things that very clearly aren't rape as rape, that sets off my bullshit detector. I'm not one who buys into the US conspiracy angle, and I do think he should suck it up and go have his day in court, but I also don't think there's any evidence to suggest he did anything wrong.
> Unsanctioned planting of Monsanto-lineage seeds

You don't see anything weird in that sentence?

What else are people going to do with seeds, other than plant them?

And use whatever herbicide works best with these seeds, it's only best practice after all.

Since when does anybody need permission from some company before they can put a seed in the ground?

What if there is a famine, would you allow that farmer to plant the seeds, or would you happily stand by while justice has its day and these evil seeds are destroyed so that Monsanto's legally granted rights are not infringed on?

Really, the world is turning into a stranger place every day that I live in it.
In the spirit of healthy debate, Microsoft's control of the desktop is akin to Kleenex's control of the tissue market. It will always be there because no one really expects it to change. Which is true. Innovations in desktops are lagging behind those of mobile innovations. Raspberry Pi cannot truly be classified as a desktop device, or any other classification we use for tech. The fact that it ships without a case exemplifies its versatility and wanton openness, which I believe is a key element to the OP's desire in education reformation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold somewhere near one million devices since its inception 347 days ago. The iPhone sold one million devices in 74 days. Apple had nearly thirty years of market presence before hitting that benchmark. The Raspberry Pi foundation has not and I think that if the tech giants wish to stay alive, they should stop locking down their devices and software if they want increased adoption rates. Computers are the future of education and the more open their designs, the more open people will be to tinkering with them, and, as the OP puts it, no longer "Avoiding stuff I didn’t know how to do." This will help advance and educate along the lines the OP wishes to see.

This isn't to say that everything ought to be open source. Capitalism is intrinsic to certain innovations, so the need for closed designs is necessary. The openness need not be as outlandish as it sounds. Less penalizing Terms of Service might be an excellent step towards this.
I don't doubt for a minute that developing skills in reasoning, investigation, resource/time planning, and effective communication can all be taught via a remote system. And your 5 year old may very well choose to do things that way, assuming you've managed to communicate to them why these things are important to know.

My eldest child is pretty smart, she basically tested out of the public high school curriculum at age 12, however most of that was due to a voracious and wide ranging reading habit fed out of a pretty strong curiosity drive. College taught her to discipline her efforts toward a specific goal. Sort of like Luke Skywalker learning that even if the force is strong in you, being unable to apply it effectively makes you weak.

The primary difference between the "we're all here together" college and doing it remotely, is the exposure to other people having similar/different challenges and meeting them around you. Since folks are rarely good at everything having people around who are good at things you aren't good at lets you learn from them, and they from you. People deal with stress, and failure, and challenge in different ways. In a college community you get to see how others do that and decide if its going to work for you. That stuff you can't get remotely and that is unfortunate.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that IO is not necessarily run even if an expression is evaluated that produces a value of type "IO a". That is a theoretical difference, not just an implementation detail.
windows devs, eh? Out of the frying pan into the fire.
I don't believe the other category is allowed to selectively ignore all precedent they disagree with either.
> The times when things are leaked are when people find themselves operating in slots supporting a system that they can no longer support (because of ethics or some other overriding concern). That's when you have leaks.

If simply trusting in the moral intuitions of ordinary people was any way of solving social problems, we wouldn't have social problems.

> I think that 'people on HN' are smart enough to evaluate things on a case-by-case basis and to avoid generalizations like that.

I've read the exact argument, in exactly so many words, on HN, that governments should never hold secrets.

> You'd really have to dig to find evidence of a case where purposefully leaked information by a whistleblower led to something bad.

Given the connotation of the term "whistleblower", that's pretty much a tautology. You would not have called anyone "whistleblowers" for exposing the plans for Normandy.
"I'm curious if anyone has any insight into what these forces might be and why they're so universal."

The force that can causes a loss of a sense of wonder is survival. People do not just learn for the sake of learning. They learn because they are a part of a complex system that requires knowledge to survive. At some point, the cost of failure is no longer worth the utility of eventual success. Lots of people quit their jobs to try something new, lose all their money, and file for bankruptcy. If they had simple stuck to what they know, they would be in a better position. Satisfying curiosity is not free in terms of time, money, or happiness.
Someone just mixed languages with implementation.

C interpreter -> http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint

Java compiler to native code -> http://www.excelsior-usa.com/jet.html
Apple's upgrade dilemma
People keep forgetting that the founding fathers didn't want an efficient government. Efficient governments do idiotic and dangerous things quite quickly.
FBI Employees Download Pirated Movies and TV-Shows
> All anyone cares about is a) are you easy to work with, and do you b) get things done to contribute to profitability.

This gets to the crux of the matter. I think we all here have an intuitive sense that being a bit of a perfectionist and regularly chasing a few rabbits down holes can lead to better long-term results. But it's very hard to quantify, certainly it's impossible to quantify objectively; all you can do is be a good salesman about it.

There is another path though—put your money where your mouth is. Start your own business based on your chosen principles and standards of software engineering. It will certainly bring you joy and if your instincts are right then it could even become a competitive advantage as your competitors drown under mountains of technical debt while you nip it in the bud at the first sign of trouble.
Andrew Price has some amazing tutorials on how to do it with just Blender: http://thenatureacademy.blenderguru.com/sp/7612-the-nature-a...

It is more on modelling rather than generating though.

On procedural generation, we discussed[1] this app written in WebGL: http://creativejs.com/2012/06/snappytree

Other peopled did it with Three.js: http://catchvar.com/threejs-procedurally-generated-infinite-....

And finally, a really lively discussion[2] turned about The Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games[3]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161263

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872615

[3] http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2008/01/death-of-leve...
my email is in my profile

I think like a lot of other HN users, you think you have disclosed your email address because you've filled out the field that lets the Hacker News curation team know how to reach you (for example, to get a new password for your username if you forget your old password). I actually can't see an email address when I view your profile. You should be able to discover how to reach me by reading my profile, and I'm happy to discuss your ideas.
Done! You can save your permalink now, ;)
Maybe the Metro browser in RT is different from the one in Windows 8 pro, but I find it to be infuriatingly horrible.
What constitutes a "part of a function" in the article is a little confusing to me, for example: "I consider it as 'cheating' as we now have evaluated only parts of the function." Once you pass functions to a function, are those "part of the function"? If we say no, they're just arguments, it seems to sidestep the issue in an unsatisfying way; I could rewrite all my functions to take all the functions they call as arguments (dependency injection taken to the extreme) and suddenly all my functions have... no parts? That can't be right! On top of that, looking up an entry in a list (even one of functions), given an integer index, in a functional language, is arguably a series of conditional tests (is index 0? is index-1 0? is index-2 0? ...) Overall it's a fair article, but I think there have been a number of esolangs over the years that have tried to turn the idea of the conditional on its head, as well; more references might make it stronger.
Great post. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

I think you're probably not doing projects to help people, but instead projects that you think would be fun to do. If you start with a burning itch, or a person that needs help, you will probably find it much easier to stay on task. This is not to say that there's anything wrong with exploring interesting technologies, or thinking about "the right way" to solve certain problems you find interesting... It's just to say that when there's a burning need the interesting diversions tend to fall away.

Hope that helps :)
Is Supply or Demand to Blame For Surface RT Being Sold Out on Launch Weekend?
My wife was a Raj and you described her situation perfectly. Strangely, after getting her green card she got a promotion and a 50% raise.
I don't care how weird that sentence is, because by itself, planting unsanctioned seeds doesn't get you sued.

By all means, use whatever conventional herbicide works best on the resulting crops. Just don't spray them with the patented chemical that would kill any soybean that wasn't covered by Monsanto's patent.

The world hasn't been turned upside-down by novel applications of the law. It's been turned upside-down by massive investments in biotech that have enabled us to create magical crops that thrive despite being sprayed with extremely potent herbicides. Your argument here is an appeal to tradition and it's entirely misplaced.
or GED
While your observations are definitely true for the "older" generations (the ones for which many tombstones had to be carved), I'd say that title fetish is fortunately declining quite rapidly.

For example, not so long ago it was common to call wifes of doctors "Frau Doktor", but I've never in my life heard a person < 60 years saying that to the wife of a doctor.

Granted, there are still some strange titles floating around which do not mean much, but they're also fading away quickly. And even though many people may hold a title, my personal observation is that they're shown only very rarely.

So while Austrians had a strong title fetish, I wouldn't say that's neccessarily true anymore. Especially not for the upcoming generations. So don't expect too much title fetish in Austria, you might be disappointed. But be sure to visit the "Zentralfriedhof" in Vienna, it's one of the largest cemeteries in the world and walking through it is a wonderful journey through the past, packed with a plethora of stories.
This sounds a bit like your friends are playing a prank on you, or CSIS is smart enough to make it look like that is the case.

The key here is your desktop and how did they access it.
R makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard.
Having a boring life in which most day's memorable second is similar to the previous one is not a bad thing. It's living a meaningless life we should be weary of.

Shameless plug: but I do want to indulge in the ego pampering of storing memories of my life, so I wrote an app to do just that --- and save geolocated notes and photos not only in your iphone, but also in google's servers, using fusion tables and picasaweb. The free version is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geopostrfree-remember-share/... and the .99 add-free version is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geopostr-remember-your-walk/...
I wrote an extension that does both live reload and saving from devtools: http://tin.cr. To address the comment below with regard to extensions not working, it's Chrome's fault. It will fail to hotswap JavaScript occasionally and it doesn't communicate the reason to the user or extensions built on top of it.

Speaking from experience, hot swapping JS sounds much better than it actually is in practice. First, as mentioned above it randomly fails with no explanation from Chrome. Also, I find a lot of code I want to hotswap runs on DOM ready and assumes that the page has just been loaded.

On the other hand, CSS hotswapping in Chrome works really well.
You apparently enjoy the interesting stuff, and love the fact that there is actual practical benefit - though initially very limited - from doing something that's theoretically interesting. Letting that chance slip would feel like a waste.

It might help to limit going down the rabbit hole too much, by researching what could be improved without actually doing it right then. Save it in a list for later, do the schlep, then when things get bigger chances are you'll actually need to take on some of the challenges on that list. And the more useful they become, the more satisfying it'll be.
as an engineer you have to realized there's not a best solution overall but a best solution for this particular problem. Each solution has pros and cons.

I think you spend time weighing each design because you're unclear on your final vision of your product. You haven't definitely answered what your values and needs are that you're trying to solve.

This may be a hard question to answer. This is why MVP are neat, you can get a product out to consumers quickly and use their response to develop values and a overall direction.

I find you if you think too far ahead, you don't leave any room for random disruptive opportunities that can occur in each step.

So know where you're going. Figure out and focus on the next step that gets you close to that.
Shhhhhh! Remember the comment about Riff-Raff :)
That chemical is no longer patented.
Application
GpsYou Application
www.GpsYou.com
If it's a side project, you have to ask yourself what kind of side project it is. If it's a business or something you want to turn into a business, just take any task that takes longer than an hour or two, put it down on a notecard or sticky or some digital equivalent thereof, and put them in a priority queue. If it's just for fun, don't worry about it--if you're not frittering away on things just to please yourself, why are you hacking anyway?
The thing is good execution can make a mediocre idea into a success.

The reason we ascribe so much more to execution around here is because coming up with good ideas doesn't seem incredibly difficult. However it is one of those things that looks easy but isn't in reality.
I see lots of computer people do this when discussing a legal case: break it down into little pieces and then insist that each individual piece isn't a crime. (I mentally call it decomposition but law students might have a better term.) Like there must be exactly one sudden event that snaps the behavior from legal to illegal.

They are right that usually each individual piece isn't a crime. But someone can perform 15 acts, each of which, in total isolation, would be legal, but end up in a significant illegal act. As that someone performs more and more of those acts, they move from legal behavior, to probably legal behavior, probably illegal behavior, to probably illegal behavior but with minuscule damages, to illegal behavior with serious damages.
I wonder if the Firefox architecture would allow for hot swapping. V8 throws everything away after compiling - it goes all the way back and reparses the source if it needs to recompile anything. So I'm guessing it's already relatively well prepared for human-edited source code.
pasting my comment on the article itself. admittedly this only addresses one of the author's points:
On any Jellybean device, if you go to Settings > System > Developer options, and check "Show touches" to do just that, it goes a huge way towards reducing confusion when you're tapping things. Having that visual feedback means you never have to wonder if you tapped something, or what you tapped on. It's hard for me to use an Android device without it now.
Chinese Officials considered ban on foreign artists without university degrees
I was just going to post something very similar. Glad to see it's already been done for me. :)

I'm in the middle of The Paradox of Choice right now, and while the maximizing/satisficing thing applies to many aspects of life—the book was certainly not written about programming—programming is yet another aspect of life where we're confronted with a huge array of choices.

This is especially true in side projects. In the office, there may be a standard set of technologies; you're likely working on an existing product; etc. Additionally, there are probably a number of constraints, including time and product requirements. In side projects, there are hardly any constraints, and every single aspect of your work involves choice. Just deciding what you want to create is one massive choice. Then there are the big questions of "what programming language/framework should I use?" and "what database(-ish) platform do I want to use?" There's a good chance since this is a side project, you'll want to try out something new and cool to build your knowledge and gain experience. Those alone can be huge decisions. Then there are questions of libraries (which library? or build it from scratch?), etc. Heaven forbid you want to start thinking about your choice of IDE (time to learn Vim?) and tabs vs. spaces and every other little decision you can get caught up on.

I'm at least as guilty as anyone else of these things. I spend too much time focusing on the best possible outcome and the best possible technologies among lists of hundreds and thousands—because I want the best and because I don't want to regret any failure—rather than simply settling for something that's good enough and moving on to actually get something done. The result is generally painful and unproductive.

You should definitely set standards for your work—don't produce crap—but try bringing the bar down from "ideal and perfect" to something more attainable like "excellent" or "very good" or even just "adequate." This will help you focus on your real goals and appreciate your own success.

Another useful term/link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis
The cost of copper is the reason they haven't dropped in price. Those devices need to very precisely control temperature at high pressures. They are also designed to be able to make many expressos in a row while simultaneously outputting steam for frothing milk. This requires a lot of copper not only for the assembly that the water goes through but for a high pressure reservoir, which also needs to be made from copper.

The cost of the copper alone in some of those coffee makers is easily a couple hundred dollars. You also can't mix in another metal with a high specific head like aluminum in places to offset the cost because the presence of both copper and aluminum in the same water path will cause the two to react with one another.
I don't use Chrome for all the reasons mentioned already. I'm perfectly happy with the AOSP default browser though. It's much nicer than the Sense or Touchwiz browser that most Android users are used to.
I have found there to be positives of each although I love my mac for 99.9% of daily usage.

The straw that broke the camel's back in my switch was Rails development, which I just found impossible on windows. I had a mess of msys, msysgit, cygwin, and the default ruby installed which meant a simple bundle install took more than 3 mins.

You have to be open minded when switching to be able to fully appreciate the differences.
That changes your argument not one iota.
what makes you think that he "most certainly can't" program well in the listed languages?

he's solving real world problems in those languages!
I have a Galaxy Tab II 7.0 (so I know it's not as fast and smooth as a Nexus), but not everyone has a Nexus.

It doesn't matter what browser I use, the experience just isn't anywhere near iOS levels of ease and enjoyment. From slowness, to click position errors, to ugly fonts, to just issues typing in URLs and constant browser crashing (I work a lot with HTML5 Video). The fact that the browsing experience is so poor on the device keeps me from using it other than when I need it for testing. I'd rather browse on my iPhone's smaller screen than deal with the poor experience on a larger 7" Android tablet. When I switch to my iPad 4, I immediately feel relieved... then disappointment when I even thinking about having to pick up the Android tablet.
God dammit, now he's just going to spend the next two weeks chasing down obscure journal citations about the psychology of perfectionism!
Ah. Thank you for pointing that out. I've fixed my profile and found your contact information as well.

I'll make contact soon.