skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...they invariably draw out some seriously uninformed, inane, hand-waving types of comments that would be completely unacceptable when attached to technical articles...

And I dislike seeing these articles because they brings out the kooks who believe that it's more important to think happy thoughts than look at the numbers.

The U.S. Census estimates are always the first place to go: http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/index.html

You'll find the 1990 projections for 2100 there, which suggest a 1/3rd Hispanic population. The 2004 revisions only published projections for 2050, but I saw information at the time that suggested similar revisions to the 2100 projections would lead to a U.S. that is about 1/2 Hispanic by 2100.

Who took the decision to do this to America? Well, the most important piece of legislation in this regard was the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. So I blame Ted Kennedy :).

I won't cheapen the debate by replying to your last paragraph.

And I'd appreciate an apology for the suggestion that I was the one uniformed about population projections here.
Yes, dict is a hash map. A python dict is not "typeless", it contains whatever python objects you put in it.

Most client drivers/libs for RDBs have basic type conversions for each language. You don't always need an ORM for this. If you have a ruby or python Time object, the low level db lib generally will convert it to/from the RDB format.

I've used both simple and complex mapping methods. At the moment, I'm using mongodb with very simple first class object wrappers around the hash/dict. This is appropriate for this new app.

For an app I already have in production, I use postgresql and ruby's datamapper. This limits me to knowing that adding some features requires more work so those features keep getting pushed off the plate. The reason I use postgres for this app is because my users expect RDB ACID properties. For the new app I'm working on, not so much.
That's a good course, especially if you have Strang's textbook in hand.
Neward's article is here: http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Compute... There is a post elsewhere on HN that links to the wrong article. You have to skip forward a bit to get beyond the history of the Vietnam War to get to the meat.

The gist of the post is that there is a fundamental impedance mismatch between OO and Relational. If you try to apply inheritance to relational databases you get an unholy quagmire. My experience is that this is true. You get a rat's nest of tables and unwieldy joins.

There are more problems with schema ownership, dual schemas, and refactoring.

Coding Horror lifts the summary and leaves behind all the argument
The author seems to be confused. Scientists do try to validate their models (even the sniper author, via correlation). They do understand that their model must predict the future ... however, in some fields (like preventing sniper attacks, psychology) there are many external variables, so it is difficult (if not impossible) to prove that the model is exactly correct. However, that does not mean that the results are not on target or that we cannot learn anything from the study ...

If anything else, no one will take a scientist's model seriously unless they use it to predict future events accurately -- this is a fundamental requirement of a model, after all.
limerickdb - http://www.limerickdb.com/?top150

not the original source

but "oh well", i say
Geeking with Greg: The culture at Netflix
Linkbait is killing journalism.

I don't know whether an editor or the writer himself is to blame, but the headline pretty much contradicts the article's thesis: that because network techniques are not tested in accordance with normal scientific method, the claims of their proponents are unverifiable and ultimately such techniques will be limited by their inability to prove or explain the phenomena they seem to expose and may even be dismissed as a high-level form of paraeidolia.

Here's a prediction of my own, one that I'm willing to put to the test: if complex systems researchers don't get serious about the scientific method, their field is going to fizzle out, if not crash and burn.

Doesn't sound too worried about the future of 'proper' science, does he? I think he's right, insofar as non-scientists are deeply suspicious of any kind of modeling (see the climate change debate for example), so using controls, double-blinds, and so on are the best way to advance this empirical technique.
This is one of the key motivations behind the creation of a peer-review system, such as the one used by Xbox Live Indie Games:
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/review_detail

By not approving games ourselves (in fact, Microsoft employees are banned from even looking at un-reviewed games), we achieve some sort of legal protections (which I lack the vocabulary to describe).

This process also scales better than a central review board model. Indie Games doesn't need that scale yet, but the back-end is generic enough to be used with other user created content which might demand the scale: http://creators.rockband.com/
Charges of Brown Shirts tactics  | NowPublic News Coverage
Too bad the required textbooks and papers are not free. A lot of the classes in there are incomplete without the additional material.
When I said 'broken-out kernel modules', I was referring to modules that are distributed as independent packages in the repository, instead of just sitting in /lib/modules/$(uname -r)

I know exactly why modules exist, having written my own several times. The real benefit for stuff distributed with the mainline kernel is not runtime loading (you could just build them all statically), but unloading and reloading.
> I dislike seeing these arguments because it brings out the kooks who believe that it's more important to think happy thoughts than look at the numbers.

What is "unhappy" about Hispanics? Nothing, in my book. The US managed to absorb plenty of poor immigrants from places like Ireland and Italy and you know what? We've done just fine.

If you look that piece of legislation up, it was about liberalizing immigration quotas, not a "political decision to turn American half Hispanic". That's conspiracy talk.

Also, projections include births, deaths and migrations, and if you look at the methodology document, Hispanic birth rates are far higher than the other categories (Ted Kennedy connection: he's a Catholic, they're mostly Catholics. Coincidence, or all part of the master plan?). Enough to account for those numbers without immigration? Not sure. Still, I'm not worried about it. People blend in, in the US, if they want to go anywhere. It has happened before, and it will happen with immigrants now.

http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/methodstate...

> I won't cheapen the debate by replying to your last paragraph.

You brought up xenophobes, who are pretty much by definition people who dislike foreigners or people who are 'different'. Xenophobia isn't "people who dislike foreigners except for the ones in PhD engineering and science programs".
Sunday afternoon;
often more interesting,
if less rigorous
The first thing wrong with this title is the article is about "software engineering", not "computer science". The second thing wrong is engineering is a discipline that teaches you about trade-offs, costs, and finding balance in your solutions.

I had excellent engineering teachers. Never once did they compare the tough problems we were solving to Vietnam.
Which letters are best to guess on Wheel of Fortune?
Octave is decent at what it does, but nothing in the open source world comes remotely close to Mathematica. Having easy access to it (and more importantly, being able to expect my peers to have the same) is one of the things I miss most about being a student. Wolfram's recent price cut for non-student personal use is alluring, though. Some time soon I might break down and pay for it.
> Has any other expressive way to do this been invented, or do programs always boil down to an AST after the syntax has been stripped away?

That is actually an excellent question.
I would have assumed that the show's producers would choose phrases at random, and thus follow normal letter distributions, so as but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Semi-open source code and tutorial that you can use to understand what they're doing.

http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/demos/tutorial/langid/read-me.ht...
Can you elaborate on why you cannot find a person in the US that fits as well as these candidates from another country? Pure technical ability?

Also, why can you not employ these people remotely?
I am Canadian. I find the culture towards imigrants is much better than what I see on the news in the USA. We welcome most imigrants.

However, there are still lots of problems with the system in Canada - mostly that we only take in university educated people, but we really need tradespeople as well.
I absolutely agree. Humans have a lot of dedicated hardware for learning through imitation, which is virtually ignored by mainstream education. I'm an autodidact, as I'd guess a lot of people here are -- you sort of have to be if you plan on getting anything out of your classes -- so I'm always surprised by how much faster I learn in a mentoring situation. It feels like cheating.
I searched for "what is isk eve" and found exactly one answer:

EVE Online ISK (The Inter Stellar Currency) is the currency in Eve.
What is an object, anyway? An object is a piece of data in memory, a set of fields and a set of pointers to other pieces of data. It's a live object in a small, closed world that is consuming a portion of a finite amount of resources. Consider the data in any kind of database - a traditional RDBMS or a triple store, data in such structures is much larger and cannot be loaded into RAM for querying, so indexes must be formed somewhere for querying. However you slice it, there will be a mismatch because of this scale difference. I recently wrote a utility class to automatically map objects to resources in an arbitrary RDF graph. The insight I gained from this was to consider that there exists a large, universal data model (defined in RDF in this case, could be defined in any way) that contains all the data, but is too large to load into ram. Querying this structure leads to a set of resources that represent the data that needs to be "alive" in objects in ram at the moment and then this data can be loaded into the objects, manipulated and serialized again. This is a bit of a rambling reply for something that is unlikely to be read but the point I am trying to make is that in data modeling we like to think of an open world of data but the reality of writing computer programs is working with a very small closed world of the data in RAM and object mapping highlights this issue, which is a difficult problem in general but which has numerous easy, ad hoc solutions.
that is frickin awesome :-)

I guess USA's loss is Canada's gain. Something needs to be done here in US, at the minimum they should at least streamline the process. And get rid of this 'chaining' people to their employers. Once they are in the country, they should be allowed to work for anyone.

It is easy in the UK too, their HSMP program is fast, and you can work for anyone.
To be fair, I think the media coverage distorts the picture even further than reality is, but reality is more than bad enough.
Interesting - I would never have thought of doing my budgeting that way.

The way I do it is that I know my work commute is about 30KM, so about 150KM per week, and that my Mazda has an average combined fuel efficiency of about 7L/100KM - meaning that my commute uses about 42L of fuel per month. I know that gas costs around $0.96/L in this area at this time of year, so my commuting costs about $40 per month in fuel.

I use this line in my budget, and hence pay less attention to exactly when I refill my tank - and know that any amounts I spend on gas above this number are somewhat discretionary.
Most client drivers/libs for RDBs have basic type conversions for each language. You don't always need an ORM for this. If you have a ruby or python Time object, the low level db lib generally will convert it to/from the RDB format.

Didn't know that. If that's correct, then the low-level db lib is an ORM in Python. In which case SQLObject/SQLAlchemy probably just harnesses those features and adds some additional cream on top.
I agree. I think the underlying issue here is that computer models are given way too much credit. A computer model is only as good as the software it runs on and the assumptions about the real world that this software makes.

If as scientist, you want to test assumptions, it is better not to rely on complex computer models that hide all their assumptions under the hood, but to make simpler or as simple as possible theories that can test assumptions one at a time. If you know all your assumptions are reliable then you can cobble them all together in computer models. And of course keep everything open so that others can check your work.

One of the most obvious and disastrous examples of failure of computer models is the economic crash that just happened. A bunch of bankers and rating agencies had a lot of fancy complex computer models that proved that their mortgage backed securities could not possibly lose value. So the securities were rated AAA, and everyone treated them as essentially risk free. Well we all know what happened next.
The typewriter-keyboard conversion
> new, more powerful learning algorithms.

Could you enumerate those ?
Would be even nicer if it provided a link to translate or just showed a translation as well.
Unfortunately the speaker lacks the skill to make a presentation :\
Maybe they didn't compare tough problems to Vietnam but my point was that good teachers often have a knack for translating difficult-to-grasp abstract concepts into the familiar and the concrete. Some people look down on such teachers and accuse them of dumbing things down. I would say on the contrary that the job of a teacher is exactly to dumb things down.
I'm sorry for your failure. But it's a win situation for you, a costly one perhaps. For your next try you will be wiser. Any sane man reading this will be. Thank you for sharing this event. I think it must be hard to admit failures.

Better luck for the next run.

Also would you like to share more about your situation after the failure? Your economics, how you handled failure in psychological sense? Your relatives reactions etc?

If it's rude to ask i'm really sorry.
No, it will add millisecond-accuracy jitter to the timing of your algorithm. And the attacker will continue to be able to extract microsecond-accuracy data from your timing attack. You need profoundly accurate hardware and a real-time operating system. Your attacker needs… more measurements.

Caching is equally unlikely to play a role. You're probably thinking of DJB's timing attacks on AES (http://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf), but that attack resolves around the timing of S-box lookups in which the index of the lookup is key-dependent. In the constant-time algorithm proposed by Nate Lawson and others, the only array lookup is the incremented value of a for loop (i.e., constant-time). The other operations are XOR and OR, both of which are constant-time.

Branch prediction doesn't come into play because a constant-time comparison doesn't involve conditionals until all the data has been compared.

A constant-time implementation of AES? Hard. A constant-time implementation of an array comparison? Dead simple.

Not sure why you're so resistant to the idea.
Undefined depends on the language.

Of course. What I didn't mention is that my favourite language is C. :-)
The Vietnam analogy is bad in many respects but I can see where they're coming from. ORM was a battlefield, many faught hard (including myself) and ended up walking way disgusted and defeated at the same time.
How Much of Your Memory Is True?
Most all low level rdb libs provide basic type conversion from allowed types in the db to type fitting the language you are using. From these libs you send SQL (any SQL you care to send) and you get returns of a "row" or a cursor usually.

An ORM adds stuff on top of the driver. General these frameworks provide relationship management, connection pooling, caching, and config management.
The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals
I use a scripting language that was originally named "Small" . As you can imagine, searching for it was terrible. They've since moved to a slightly better name of "pawn".
The last weeks have actually seen a number of those:

TipJoy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776978

snaptalent:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768725

you vs me:

http://ryanleland.com/2009/08/post-mortem-you-vs-me-com/

and one more:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723834
ISK is also the symbol for Iceland's currency - Icelandic Kronur - and the company that make EVE (CCP) is Icelandic too.
Good point, but the point still stands: "free" in this case doesn't mean not paying for it, but rather that it's a flat-fee service with no exhaustible upper bound on usage (e.g. if you get hospitalized 5 times in a year the insurance company won't bail).

In the Canadian system there is no chance that the insurance company will weasel out of a payment using a litany of the common excuses that are used in the USA. If you are covered, you are covered, and that's peace of mind you can't even buy with money in America.
At the moment no - a trust system is on the wishlist. But as has been mentioned, you'd have to poison every line. But yep, that's a current vulnerability.
I suppose that I could use some of those drugs.
A Privileged World Begins to Give Up Its Secrets
I'm thinking on it.. Also Me and my friend is applying for YC W2010.
There's a difference between building a product and building a company. Mentors are huge in building a company, and like it or not, building a company is a people-process.

Just to give an example -- right now we're preparing our investor deck and exec summary. You can read books all day long on that, but the comparative worth of having an experienced entrepreneur that can read over what you've got and critique it -- and then put you in touch with the people who you want to read it -- is much higher.
But that's the whole point. Sure javascript is slooow and with the small number of browsers visiting the demo, this isn't even comparable to the performance of a GPU.

It's the potential. You have literally millions of computers on the internet right now, capable of running this code.

Also, raytracing is only an example. But what large data set do you need for raytracing? I guess if you had a massive mesh then that might add up/
Nice implementation of the Google Ajax Language API: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/#Dete...
nice to hear such a story, indeed they don't come out often... i recognise the focusing on feature thing. I and some friends/colleagues built a few years ago a website were musicians could record online video jams, someone recorded a video, another one another and in total 4 streams were recorded and played at once split screen. It worked great and some great tunes were recorded. But it also didn't provide a solution to a problem and the project is dead now, dead pool oww yeah. We didn't invest any money in it, only lots of time, so nothing to worry about. When I have a little new project in mind, I now know I have to think if it fulfils a need, most of the time it doesn't and then it's very difficult to let that idea go. About my project: hey I learnt a very important skill and he will also! Failure makes smart!
"If anything else, no one will take a scientist's model seriously unless they use it to predict future events accurately -- this is a fundamental requirement of a model, after all."

Except when it comes to many many people trying very hard to spend trillions of dollars to fight something that is only predicted in models (failed models) - global warming.

Here is a link to Freeman Dysons discussing this subject:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
Those that say "Oh Ess"
are using something I call
correct English (hah)
Agreed. I came from Canada to work in the USA on a temporary visa (the TN if anyone's interested). I like the country, but as of right now I'm tied to my employer and have no freedom of movement - and even if I was on a H-1B, where there's a shot at PR, I would still be chained to my employer for effectively the next decade or so.

This is no way to treat skilled labour trying to enter your country.
Adding a second hard drive to a Macbook pro
Libertarian paternalism and tool design
What you have written
is not Haiku, but rather
is inane drivel.
I think the easiest way to fix the problem is to do exactly what you suggest -- decouple a person's immigration status from their employer. I'd do this by scrapping the H1B program and instead simply offer a green card to every person that has a letter of employment from a US company. The government could continue to apply various filters (total quotas, country-specific quotas, educational or experience requirements, language competency, etc). [1] However, at soon as a person is admitted to the US, their immigration status should have absolutely nothing to do with their employer.

Under this system, a company can't pay an immigrant less than their worth, since the person is free to work at any business that is willing to pay more. It also fixes a whole bunch of other subtle problems that come up with an employment-based immigration system.

For example, right now once a H1B holder applies for a GC, they can neither changes companies nor change their job title (e.x. be promoted) without abandoning their GC application. Since this process can take years and thousands of dollars, immigrants are not only shackled to their sponsoring company, but to a particular job (and often pay-level) within that business.

I should point out here that I'm Canadian that may one day be working in the US... so perhaps I have a bit of a pro-immigrant bias here.

[1] Personally, I'd get rid of most of these too, but that is the subject of a different rant.
In what respects is the Vietnam analogy less meaningful than the rather banal battlefield analogy that you just made?
Scribd is a step backwards. If they wanted to create value, they could HTMLify PDFs (similar to the Gmail feature or the Google preview page) instead of showing them in a stupid flash window.
They're one hell of a way to learn, especially arcade style games are more like mini operating systems inside.
Why reinvent the wheel? An ORM will do all of that for you.
FOSS and the Digital Divide - Reducing it one phrase a time
I see this as an XSS, not a CSRF. The search form is a GET form, and GET forms are /designed/ for cross-site requests - you can link to them to trigger an action, but it's not a forgery since there's no expectation that a GET request was initiated by the same site (people are expected to bookmark them, after all). The POST requests that manipulate the user's account are taking place from within the same domain, driven by the JavaScript that was injected using XSS. You could call them a forgery, but they're not a cross-site forgery since they originate on the same site.

All XSS holes are automatically CSRF holes, since XSS can be used to work around all forms of CSRF protection.
While this is true, gambling and video games aren't physically addictive and I know several people who suffer from addictions to one or the other.
They are like normal,
but with a slight twist: they have
more metadata!
the sun of dawn shows

orange in the eastern sky

like news dot yc
Inside a Predator Strike [video]
Wheel of Time author pleads for fan patience