skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying something to the effect of "Back in the '60s people thought I was a radical because I said we shouldn't discriminate based on skin color. Today people think I'm a radical because... I say we shouldn't discriminate based on skin color."
I get a page with a search box; a humid mountain view of a staircase with a city beyond; and links to articles regarding "Mexican cartel queens", the "Obama tattoo plan", and a picture of a swordfish labelled "Make-A-Wish teen".

Same response in an incognito window. Seattle.
Yeah, I saw that :( And I think Olin may have changed their policy a few years ago (I'm not sure); seems to have tuition now, and a half scholarship for everyone.

I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.
Helsinki Bus Station Theory
So suppose, purely hypothetically I assure you, that I'm an engineer that does technical interviews.

What is going on, is HR filtering out all the good domestic talent and making me waste my time interviewing crappy candidates that they know won't make the cut just so that they can hire abroad?

If there is an abundance of qualified unemployed domestic talent then why can't I, the employed engineer, find some of that talent to recommend so that I can collect some of those juicy bonuses?

Or am I hypothetically in on this conspiracy to discriminate against domestic talent as well?

Maybe there is something simpler going on. Maybe most candidates really do suck.
I used that example because I myself worked for Amazon circa 1999 in the Bank of California Building (now called 901 Fifth Avenue).
Companies used to hire and invest in training, many don't do that now.

On the other end, there are a lot of tech workers that don't try and keep abreast of new technologies and build their skill set. Often life/work may not allow for it, but one should be able to find a few hours a week to explore something new.

Unfortunately, the middle of those two circles are the ones hardest hit re: STEM at the moment.

I, personally, believe that if we are going to incentivize STEM work visas, there should be a cost associated with the visas that goes into a pool/fund that pays for training for STEM candidates that are out of work. If you are importing labor, despite an existing pool, there should be a cost associated with it.
> Hire people who have more industry than the young 25% but require more training with recent tech

What evidence do you have that kids just out of college do require less training than people with work experience?

What kind of "new tech" are kids using these days, that experienced employees can't handle?

In any kind of STEM field (other than the most basic IT tech support) college kids definitely aren't going to be able to "ramp up" to the level of someone with 10 years experience in a few weeks.
http://simpledesktops.com/
I think what I am suggesting is that if the younger in-experienced STEM job candidates were not so experienced with modern tech, then companies would be more willing to invest in teaching older experienced STEM job candidates new technology.
>So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?

If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.
I meant racially biased against Asians.

Look carefully at the logic statement I wrote - it means that one of two things must be true:

1. There exists racial bias specifically against Asians in admissions.
2. Qualified White applicants outnumber qualified Asian applicants.

If you concede (1), then your point that Asians get treated more harshly because they're majority is moot. If you concede (2), then, as you said, your argument doesn't work since "ratio < 1".

I don't know how to make this more clear than by using propositional logic.
Yeah. It sounds like a form of of "faking it until you make it" to me; Amazon wanted to have a marketplace with a wide selection, but there's a chicken/egg problem, so they faked the seller side to acquire buyers.
Touche. Our jobs page needs another draft (though check it out and give me feedback: https://circleci.com/jobs).
Internal instead of external motivation to learn, I think.

I took a year off before college, lived on my own, and worked in a warehouse. For me, it was a great idea, and I think I got more out of college because of it.
Serving the community is a different thing than serving in a community. "The" community tends to be "people like the people I've grown up with and lived around most of my life." I can find a community almost anywhere I live.

In other words, a Hispanic doctor from LA might find a comfortable life in Miami serving the Hispanics there[1], whereas he may be completely uncomfortable serving a largely white, affluent neighborhood in the LA basin.

1. I have no idea if this is true or not; I'm just laying out the hypothetical of my GP.
My hypothesis is that all tech people teach themselves whatever is trendy at the time when they are still in school (college, or if they decide not to go that route, highschool). Older more experienced candidates of course did the same, but the trendy tech they taught themselves in school is now out of date.

There will of course be those golden candidates that have extensive industry experience but also know the modern newfangled hipster shit that any junior in college is hacking away with at the time. I don't see these candidates having trouble finding work.

You're a startup. You're trendy; your office is littered with nerf-guns and shit, or whatever trendy startups are doing these days. Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever. ...Do you hire the guy out of college, for an "out-of-college" salary, that has all of this stuff on his resume? Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume for a "15 years of experience" salary?

Even if you'd go with the 15+ years guy, can you see why companies might become frustrated?
Couldn't a checklist also be the tests written for the feature? This ensures that future revisions don't muck with the already working system.
it will be nice idea to share the startup you are talking about to get more people interested to respond.
Snapzoom: The Universal Smartphone Scope Adapter
Aloha Hacker News,

We just launched [Snapzoom on Kickstarter](http://snapzm.com)

I wanted to introduce you to our project [Snapzoom on Kickstarter](http://snapzm.com) and thought it could be a nice fit Photography and Video lovers. My friends created a universal smartphone mount that uses binoculars as telephoto lenses, and we launched our Kickstarter campaign this morning.

The link to the Kickstarter Campaign is [http://snapzm.com](http://snapzm.com)
The Website: [http://snapzooms.com](http://snapzooms.com)
The YouTube: [http://youtube.com/user/SnapzoomHawaii](http://youtube.com/user/SnapzoomHawaii)
The Twitter: [http://twitter.com/snapzoomhawaii](http://twitter.com/snapzoomhawaii)
The Facebook: [http:fb.me/snapzoomhawaii](http:fb.me/snapzoomhawaii)

We think Snapzoom will be a great for these reasons:

Innovative gear - Snapzoom is the first universal adapter for both smartphones and optical scopes. It works with all major smartphones with or with out a case. As well as works with both single and dual eyepiece optical scopes, with an eyecup diameters up to 50mm.

Functional design – Our patent pending design allows Snapzoom to be securely worn on a pair of binoculars during outdoor activities. It allows smartphones to be used as autofocus scope viewfinders, and locks you camera into the “landscape” position so videos are much easier to watch on larger screens.

Made for everyone – Snapzoom is easy to setup and connects in seconds. It’s the simple tool that yields powerful results.

If you’re interested, please let me know how I can make the writing process easy for your team. I’m happy to send more hi-res photos. email doc@snapzm.com

Thanks for taking the time to check us out,

Aloha

[View the latest stats for Snapzoom: The Universal Smartphone Scope Adapter on Kicktraq](http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1409008983/snapzoom-the-universal-smartphone-scope-adapter/)
"doesn't immediately qualify it as spam", no. That's correct.

It does however make it very difficult to gauge who is a legitimate linker and who is not.

All I'm really saying is if you're starting now with all of the years of random linkspam backscatter is that you are in for a rough ride.
By "geography" do you mean separate urban neighborhoods as well as large rural tracts? Not everyone goes home after they graduate.
Most companies aren't out to screw you, but I've worked for a few (I'm 40 this year), and the vast majority of them aren't actively concerned with not screwing you, which works out to the same thing practically speaking when it comes to raises and other advancement within the company over time.

There is an old adage about the easiest way to get a raise in the tech field being to move to a new company. This is, in my experience, absolutely and nearly universally true (there are a select few companies that really stay on the ball with regards to keeping up with salary adjustments for existing employees, but they are very few and very far between).
GE and Quirky partner to inspire invention
The Future Of Education: A MOOC Perspective
My $0.02 worth:

For many of you, assistance directly from the CEO in integration is a really
compelling offer, because wow, you can’t get that anywhere else. [...]
We’ll do the copy‑pasting for you ... and it will actually be done by a freelancer
that we’ve hired and told them how to FTP stuff.

If one claims "assistance directly from the CEO", I would be disappointed to learn that access credentials to my website were handed out to some third-party freelancer who performs the integration rather than being handled directly by the engineer-owner. If you mean something different such as "our CEO ensures the job gets done to exacting standards" then that's freelancer-compatible as the statement makes no claims about who provides the assistance.
No, I am still correct. That some wealthy foreign
students went to Cornell is no doubt recent and not
at all what I am talking about.

If you will read what I wrote, then you will see that
there were students from India in a US Midwestern
university. They were not wealthy. And at the time
there's no way they could have been paying their way.
Net, in US universities, even in undergraduate
programs, a major fraction of STEM students were
from foreign countries, especially India and Taiwan.
In simple terms, they were on scholarships of various
kinds.

Further, again, yet again, this time just for you,
over again, no student in a well known college or
university pays the full cost. Rarely do they pay
more than 1/3rd. E.g., as I have already posted
in this thread, Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to
Johns Hopkins, and a founder QUALCOMM recently
gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university
being built on Roosevelt Island, and this story is
standard all across US colleges and universities.
At a research university, expect that a professor
will get about $500,000 a year from NSF, NIH, etc.
About 60%, 300,000, will go to the university as
'overhead'. The remaining $200,000 will cover
the professor's salary, travel, equipment,
supplies, etc. And a little will go for
graduate students. So, again it's Joe and Mary
paying for the university.

Net, students don't pay the full cost. Instead the
full cost is paid by gifts and taxes, taxes, e.g.,
for Joe and Mary who are still having a tough time
paying for their own children to go to college. Some
of the taxes go quite directly to the institutions, e.g.,
all the state schools in NY, MD, CA, the Big Ten, etc. A lot more
money goes from tax payers to the universities via
NSF and NIH.

You mentioned DARPA: There were old rules
that the US DoD could not fund work at universities.
Long much DARPA (ARPA) work was so 'confidential' that
it could not be done in universities. But clearly, e.g.,
with some of the DARPA Challenge projects, e.g., at CMU
and Stanford, some DARPA funding is making its way into
universities. Still I doubt that a major fraction of
DARPA money goes to universities.

Yes, the situation of the NSF flooding the US
with foreign STEM students is more extreme
in graduate programs. But the NSF money that
goes to students is not really because the
research projects need the student's labor!
No, the money is because the NSF demands that
students be supported because the NSF wants
to flood the US labor markets with STEM
students with graduate degrees. Maybe you
believe that you worked hard for your
research assistantship, but, really, the NSF,
NIH, etc. mostly just want you to add to the
US STEM worker pool to keep down costs to
US industry and the US 'military-industrial'
complex.
Wise from the perspective of attracting investors? Maybe. Wise from the perspective of running a functional business? No. Fudging metrics to make yourself feel better is crazy. How are you expected to know the actual health of your business without having a clear view of metrics as simple as revenue, marketing, and returns.
The disadvantages that Disqus has are: no filtering, limited search options, infinite scroll, and freshly-crippled OpenID support (they deliberately removed OpenID from the frontend of the newest version, preventing me from accessing my account until I finally found a blog that still used the old version - this kind of behavior is egregious).
You are making an invalid assumption. Prejudicial discrimination is bad iff you have total knowledge of all variables. Admissions panels have very little information that in many cases is weakly correlated with the outcomes they are interested in.

What you are calling prejudicial in that case they call experience. They correlate past statistical data on how the variables they do have access to predict the outcomes they want.

If that a satisfying situation? No way. Is including your experience better than just using the data you have for a current set of candidates? Hell yes. On average, hell yes. Some students will get screwed but on average IF you are smart, not a bigot, rational, have good past data, etc, your results WILL be better. Of course, most people aren't all of those things.

But what can you do other than make your best try at an optimal outcome? If they went just on raw present data, quality of students admitted to Stanford/MIT would probably go down and 99% of students would be asian. Does that seem better?

s/sloppy thinking/nuanced yet practical problem solving/g
If you were awarded $20,000, how would you fight poverty?
> 200k news articles is the amount of news that is produced by 7 billion people in 200 countries worldwide. Those 50k reports is what comes out of counter terrorism by one just of those countries.

Right, but those 50k reports are about the activities happening among those 7 billion people in 200 countries. And many of those 200k news articles published by the NYT have a corresponding intelligence angle that is covered in the report. Remember, NYT only covers major world news, and a lot of intelligence reports are mundane things like "what is the intelligence impact of this new Russian oil pipeline?"

> There is 1 person for every 400 Americans producing and/or reading these reports.

Where do you get that number? That 830,000 number from the article is for people with top secret clearance. That includes everyone from intelligence analysts to military officers to scientists working on sensitive research.
Kudzu can think! Nice job.
Video- ‘Nasty Brawl’ Between Teacher And Student -Language Warning
A lot of the FreeBSD ports that are stuck on GCC are stuck there because of OpenMP for sure, or at least lose performance on clang...OpenMP on clang would be nice indeed.
Open to learning different things, open to spending time with and bonding with a diverse group of people.

Focus less on a singular goal and experience the life around you. Spending time living on campus is key to this.
That has been Bing's error page for years. The reference hashes are probably to help them debug whatever caused the page to fail.

E.g. from 2011: http://blamcast.net/articles/bing-crash
It would simply be a change in the templates that you use and how the changes are communicated to the client. It could still work the same way from the perspective that the changes are pushed to the client and the DOM is automatically replaced. The reason that I ask is that this could offload some of the server side processing to the client and also reduce the amount of data transfered over the wire. The server would be pushing JSON instead of HTML. From the dev's perspective you'd just be using a different templating framework. I wonder how the current implementation would scale, I imagine it would take some serious processing power to get to 100k+ concurrent, active users.
Nintendo launches Miiverse web app
Announcing News.YCombinator.com, 2007, 6 years ago.
Looks like you're new here?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Check out "in comments" in particular.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

In your case:
Apple wouldn't put an eject button on a laptop with nothing to eject.
> I think that one of the benefits of our society, especially in the entrepreneurial community, is that success is ultimately the result of hard work and talent.

Benefiting who, exactly? Success at what, exactly?
Sorry that doesn't make sense.

In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume, and those same kids will have whatever is new and exciting in 10 years on their resume then too.

Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.

The average foreign programmer also knows Java.

The average programmer with 10 years experience knows Java and probably C++.

The average programmer doesn't work with "modern newfangled hipster ship", and the average employer isn't looking for employees who do.

And if you are a startup, you definitely aren't going to find people skilled in Node/Go/Whatever by hiring cheap H1-B workers.

In general Colleges are about 10-15 years behind what's considered the new hip thing in programming. Since most new grads only know what they learned in college most new college grads are 10-15 years behind the new hip thing in programming.

Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
Thanks for the kind words! Right now we are focusing only on our SF class but we may expand in the future. I would encourage you to signup for our email list to stay up to date on any news about the program, and feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns (jonathan@zipfianacademy.com). Best of luck with your masters program and I hope you will keep in touch!
There's a fixed background image that fades as you scroll, fully disappearing approximately when the body text gets to the top. It's pretty annoying.
no, because it's probably just an alias to less
When I hear that the FBI interviewed the Boston bomber a year ago, I don't immediately think of FBI incompetence. No, rather, I think, "Hey, the bomber had many experiences & changes of mind, & is truly a different person a year hence".

I mean, are personalities & motivations & intentions truly permanent? C'mon, haven't we all changed as life goes on?

It's a fallacy to think you can ever 99.9% predict the future regardless of how much "big data" & "army of experts" you have.

That approach hasn't predicted the stock market within 70% accuracy, so how can we expect it to predict security issues any better?

We need to just realize that we're far more likely to die from causes other than terrorism, & just treat it like other crimes.
If you're lacking details, why not ask questions?
I'd challenge the notion that referring to someone by their first name is implying that > I was your friend or property.

I mean, after a certain level of understanding is set forth wouldn't first and last name become a little redundant and annoying? I imagine they say "Aaron" quite a bit. Saying "Aaron Swartz" 112 times just seems a little asinine.
DHS isn't an organic entity that sprung up from 0 to 230,000 in the wake of 9/11. It is just an amalgam of a bunch of agencies that already existed. It includes the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, FEMA, TSA, and Secret Service, along with a bunch of smaller agencies. Of those, the only new thing is TSA, which is 56,000 employees. And while annoying, TSA is mostly doing the same job private companies used to do under contracts with airlines.
No need to go that far. Just download OpenNLP and it will do the labeling quite well with almost no effort.
Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century
Should you listen to your user? There’s a formula for that.
REMnux on Hak5
Yes, a white kid from a $500,000/year household clearly has SO much more in common with a white kid from a $20,000 a year household than he does with his black classmate who also lives in a $500,000/year household.

Race based discrimination supporters love to pretend that race is everything when it means less now than it has in the entirety of US history. You can throw yourself in with the "gravity is a social construct" people if you want, but at least there's hard data to back up my beliefs, instead of just collectivist guilt that punishes truly disadvantaged people for the crime of being born with the wrong skin color for that particular decade.
As someone who does a lot of thinking about education reform, people have asked me what I think about college. I basically say, "I'd have to see." Because the largest problems with colleges can be derived from the simple fact that most students aren't ready to be in college. That's why so much of undergraduate-level coursework is about filling the holes in general education... and such cramming in makes it difficult to get a good immersion in any specialization. That's why your major usually doesn't matter.

I want to see the core system, the primary and secondary schools, overhauled. Wait twenty years. Then see what problems there actually are.
Exactly, and this can happen to any food.