skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is something weird going on. At least for tech, I think there's a mentality that our hiring pool isn't just "people who show up at our office with a resume" or even "people in the same country" but "the entire goddamn world".

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I think it's definitely different from the way things used to be, and probably different from the way things still are in a lot of industries. So it seems reasonable to say that the current US immigration policies were not written with the whole-world hiring pool mentality in mind.
The Last Days of the Communist Party in Vietnam?
You, apetresc, and I are all unusual users - we're thinking about this in terms of network connections. Our first instinct is to figure out which parties in the chain could have stored a copy of the message. The typical user will probably just rely on clues like "private" or "direct" and make assumptions from there.

The privacy level of these features can and will be misinterpreted. Read a few legal cases where employee communications are exhibited; you'd be surprised what people say on internal platforms.
Critical Skills You Won’t Learn in School
Maybe this is a good example of why is not a good idea for our goverments to have irrestricted access to everything, because this kind of people would have access too.
I am still skeptical, one sentence on KS about it doesn't really fill me with optimism. The following sentence:

> So all the tinkerers and photographers out there can control exposures, hack, and reprogram the SnapJet.

Makes me think that those connections (USB/BLE) are just for computer -> SnapJet. Also they don't say anything about it in their video. That's the kind of promise that's easy to edit out after you've got funded. I would be interested in a BLE printer of this size (open their app and select the image and have a share intent to throw any image to the app to print) but the scanner seems gimmicky and like it will result in fingerprints on your pictures or misaligned pictures.

EDIT: From FAQ:

>What will the optional app do?
We are creating iOS and Android apps that will allow you to get the most out of SnapJet's technology. The app will resize your photo and position for a perfect transfer to the instant film inside SnapJet. It will also adjust your screen brightness, communicate with SnapJet's hardware, allow you to add effects, and we might even include some cool hacks for SnapJet like multiple exposure ;)

> It's completely free and we'll post the source code for all our hackers.

There is no mention of using BT/BLE for Phone -> SnapJet.
And that's bad. A lot of people pine for the simplicity of the early days of the web, but single-page pagination was arguably even more horribly broken then.
I wish my parents had let me take more shop classes, because right now I'm interested in home renovation.

The thing is, you don't know where your future interests will take you. Even if you are exposed to stuff when you are younger, you may hate it regardless of how great the presentation may be.

I personally think encouraging women, or anyone for that matter, to be programmers/scientists/mechanics is missing the point. You have to encourage people to find passions, be proactive, enjoy learning, and make these a habit. Life isn't static.

I also think the "gender gap" is a fallacy. It's true that all professions could be more welcoming to people of different persuasions, but it would be more interesting to know the gap between "people who want to do X but feel excluded" and the "people who are already doing X".
Why not just apply basic of economy to visa ?

I mean every day you match X visas to the highest salaries!

So salaries doesn't go down, and people can apply all year.

And you check the salary is really paid.
FYI - email showed up ~2 hours after I submitted (way, way too long).

I've always been a fan of the metric: "Time to Awesome" - how long does it take for a new user to go from cold start to whatever awesomeness exists for your app.
SuperDevMode[0] has been a thing for the past year or 2 (which doesn't use the NPAPI plugin). The GWT team just released GWT 2.7 which makes SuperDevMode the default development mode (they also added incremental compilation which rocks).

GWT is ready for it, the problem is that most people that use GWT are doing it in "enterprise" world, where upgrading libraries is super painful.

[0] http://www.gwtproject.org/articles/superdevmode.html
And yet the word h1-B doesn't even appear in the article, sigh.
But those cultural norms are also only strong in a small subset of users. Plenty of people vote to agree or disagree, and this was acknowledged by pg. "Don't down-vote to disagree" is something brought over from Reddit and there is some strong resistance to it in some long term users (here longer than six years).
(responding both to you and 'duckingtest')

No, the 'answer' is not that the person you disagree with "believes in magic" or "doesn't understand" the field they work in as respected experts. Appell goes on to try to explain why climate modelling is concerned with 'projection' rather than 'prediction', and has a very clear view of the difference between science and magic.

Briggs has been a professor of statistics at Cornell, written several book on statistics, and published dozens of peer reviewed papers. Claiming that he is the "statistical equivalent of an anti-vaccer" might be a useful rhetorical strategy but unless you can point to some prominent mainstream career vaccine researchers that you'd also lump into this category, it has no basis in truth.

Playing to a home crowd is easy, but has left us where we are with two locked down groups each trying to persuade the undecided middle that their opponent is the devil incarnate. This doesn't lead anywhere desirable, just to further entrenchment of positions. The "way out" is trying to formulate criticism that can be understood by the party being criticized and influences them and their followers to reevaluate their beliefs and approaches.

I think it has to be something stylistic that we as readers associate with a world-view (a dog whistle) rather than the actual content of the statements. Take the paragraph in "Lesson 1":

If you say the mixed marriage of splicing the disjoint
series does not matter, you are making a judgment. Is it
true? How can you prove it? It doesn’t seem true on its
face. Significance tests are circular arguments here. After
the marriage, you are left with unquantifiable uncertainty.

I'd assert that this paragraph can only appear on the 'denier' side of things. Is this because it embraces uncertainty, and implies we should not act until we have properly quantified it? One of the most interesting exchanges in the comments is between 'Sheri' and 'Brandon Gates', on whether it's better to accept a known-flawed model or to throw it out and have no model at all.

My request to 'signalsmith', concentrating on Briggs because his positions are more self-contained: Re-reread Briggs article, ignoring the set-up paragraphs that explain what he's criticizing and why. That is, blind yourself as best as you can to the side that he is taking. Stop at the point where your pulse starts to rise and report back. Then let's see how 'duckingtest' responds to the same passage.
BlackBox: Visual dataflow programming on iOS devices (video, full talk, 1h40m)
This article is citing a study funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
Indeed three.js is more like the future but until the webviews in all mobile devices run WebGL fast enough, Unity helps most on the mobile side and one build so it is used. When WebGL runs fast across the board, many games can just use that for all platforms. I personally love three.js but use Unity, Lime/Haxe/OpenFL and Cocos because of mobile first.
I thought about the LittleBits last year, but they weren't available at the time (sold out I think). So then I thought about them again this year but he is talking about a Robot that can do stuff, even though LittleBits would be a good learning tool. The Mindstorms looks amazing and exactly what he would want to do. But I can't drop that kind of cash right now... so there in lies the dilemma. Even the NXT is a couple hundred on ebay. We will see what I can come up with.
> The government isn't responsible for utilities tending towards monopoly - it's a natural outcome of any market with small unit costs and high barriers to entry.

Murray Rothbard once said:

"In general, I urge everybody to look at a government measure [...] not in terms of a tragic failure to achieve the common good, public interest, or general welfare, but [rather] as a conscious agency for doing all sorts of monopolizing, cartelizing, and other restrictive things. In other words, the government is not that dumb!"

If you read about how the FCC came to be and how they were politically set on displacing competitors, you will change your mind.

Free markets can't generate monopolies because they can't use the threat of force by hooking up with the government. If you disagree, all you need to do is come forward with a single example of a monopoly that exists without any government backing (regulations, cronyism, etc).

And if I were you I'd drop this cliche of "oh this is Econ 101". It doesn't help the conversation and is just a veiled attack. In this case though, since the government influences what gets taught in universities, even Econ 400 isn't enough to understand free markets, and most Econ graduates come out of university with little to no understanding of the Austrian school.
> job offers are 30-50% above national prevailing wage.

Making $70k in some midwestern city will get you a better house, better access to education for your children, and generally better quality of life than what $200k will get you in the Valley. I know people who've lived in both worlds tell me exactly this.

So, having offers at 30-50% is not a good thing, it's a bad thing. It should be much higher than that.
Look, the problem is easy to solve. Tell INS that a tech H1-B converts to a green card in a year and make it stick. No waiting 6+ years.

There is no INS; that government agency eventually became USCIS, part of the DHS. And this isn't a matter of changing things by administrative fiat; Congress would have to pass a law to this effect. The President's executive action last week leverages discretionary powers that are already written into the law (despite what political opponents claim about it being unconstitutional) but which apply only to specific fact patterns (which is why the action is limited to parents of US citizen/LPR children).

Here's the legal explanation if you're interested, but it probably won't make any sense unless you're already familiar with title 8: http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/atta...
Scott Aaronson looks at possible ways to solve NP-Complete problems using physics and argues that it isn't really possible. Link: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf
The GWT team saw this coming a long time ago, that's why we undertook SuperDevMode. It's not just chrome that yanked our APIs, Firefox removed NPAPI, Safari make it incompatible with DevMode, and the rise of mobile devices which don't run plugins, pretty make DevMode useless for mobile development.

Our only options are to either ship our own browser fork, like Dartium does and like we used to do with GWT < 2.0 Hosted Mode, or to make Javascript debugging work. We opted for the latter.

In GWT 2.7, we can recompile million line apps in seconds, and with Source Maps, and IDE support, you can back some of the original Java debugger experience. In IntelliJ 14 in particular, it works very nicely. Folks are working on Eclipse integration of SourceMap debugging.

NPAPI is a security risk and puts restrictions on other parts of the browser internals and how they're represented. We can't prevent Chrome, Firefox, and others removing this API just because of GWT.

Ironically, Microsoft might end up supporting this API forever, so GWT DevMode might continue to work with IE.
True. But with that kind of money, you have access to institutional investment, which could produce much less volatile returns than the S&P.
Bill Cosby Allegations
That's almost assuredly what's happening in practice. Large companies/orders have the leeway to reasonably negotiate with Slack. In cases like that, the standard policies set the framework for where that negotiation begins.
It would take a single smart person to undo hours of work. Even if you guard it really well, there's only so much you can do in minecraft.

Someone can approach you from 200m high building a 1m-wide bridge from outside your radar and just drop lava (or active TNT) on you. In minecraft, you need a pretty high defender:griefer ratio to keep things intact.
Well, it's really not necessarily a "lie" as much as it is a "mistake." Not everything that is "flatly untrue" is a "lie" as there is no apparent intent to deceive.

Basically, when you say that "this document tells an important lie" you are likely lying. At least you are accusing somebody of being a liar.
Child care is not a 'women's issue', but it is an issue that has a disproportionate impact on women and therefore one that should come up earlier in a discussion on "how can we better support women" than in the equivalent discussion of "how can we better support men".
One of the issues I'd see with that is the fact that computer languages have not been around for that long. Natural languages have been taught and used for centuries, Java might be just as lively as Assembly in 20-30 years (this is only an example and not a prediction). If you factor in the rough 10 year latency that curricula generally carry, your utility diminishes further.

Also, could it be that you're not actually utilizing these languages you've learned properly and you're undervaluing their utility due to that? Imagine you learned C and never touched a computer afterwards. You'd conclude that C is the most useless waste of time to ever exist, and that computer science departments should be torn down and replaced with factories, which actually deliver tangible value.

Of course, that is a hopeless exaggeration, and you wouldn't do that. But there are people out there that will learn python because Codeacadamy is hip right now, and people that will study languages because they have a second language requirement in order to graduate from school.

Now regarding utility of languages in general, you might make the point that any language over 1st grade english doesn't deliver any tangible benefit and should therefore be discontinued...this is dumb, speak carry idea thing, have idea thing or no thing like up goer five or add box with living lights for look speak. (Translation: this is ill advised, since language carries concepts, without which building things such as the Saturn V Rocket or computers would be utterly impossible). As you can see, sometimes complicated language is neccesairy, and in some fields, lack of the right word actually restricts their accessibility.

But why utility at all? Or rather, is the utility provided by the beauty of some languages not enough to warrant their appreciation? Poetry and literature are arts build around the medium of language, and understanding these works outside of their original language is an exercise in loss of meaning.

I certainly understand you sentiment that putting more of our minds into cranking the wheels of industry at ever increasing power is a noble goal, but you also have to ask yourself why those wheels are rolling in the first place.
> I'm sure you can do more interesting things with metamath, but I feel confident in saying that if you're a research mathematician, you'll lose a lot of time learning it and using it.

And then save time because you can be sure that the proofs you write are correct.

> I'm currently writing my undergraduate project in a proof assistant, and you end up with tonnes of unreadable garbage like ASM_SIMP_TAC (srw_ss ()) [DETERMINACY_LEMMA, simp_expand_def] THEN1 METIS_TAC [] THEN RW_TAC (srw_ss ()) [ss_ecases] THEN FULL_SIMP_TAC (srw_ss ()) [].

> which has no real relation to any normal thought. Proving the determinacy of a relation took a matter of days of careful thinking (as a newbie to the package) - despite being able to prove it in a couple of lines of handwritten prose.

Did you try isar?

> I also think that his line

> (it almost certainly is not, but more pertinent, how could you ever be sure it is?)

> is still a good point - you're trusting your correctness to a computer program, and all of the libraries built on top of it. The chances that one of these has a bug in (by this I mean a bug in the rules of inference of the theory) that could lead to the theory outputting garbage is probably quite high.

It's not at all a good point. There are theorem provers that rely on the correctness of just a very small kernel. Everything on top (libraries) is then guaranteed to follow the rules imposed by the kernel.
What does "ESTD" mean?

Why are the mottos sideways?

Why bother with the capital city?

Some Texans wouldn't appreciate a skull.

I prefer Mt. Rainier to Space Needle and friends.
Don’t Use Statistics Unless You Have To
How many professional mathematicians use Isabelle/HOL? Honest question!
Mapping Tech (with) Bubbles
Did they build something that can break P=NP? No. If I'm right then I'll look smart and if I'm wrong than I'll be too excited to care. Also, if I'm wrong I have to go to a quite retreat somewhere and rethink the nature of reality.
I apologize. I really posted it on my site only as a convenience for myself, not to be published. I never really considered anything but projection at the time. Although I can view it on my fairly large phone, the experience is not great.
This interface is solid. So many easy-to-use graphing tools have poor defaults. This is perfect for the use case of a quick visualization for queried data or (even better) live data you'd like to dashboard.
Uh huh. \derisive

I think this all comes down to the claim that their "memcomputing" architecture allows you to put exponential amounts of data into a polynomial number of things. My best guess for where they went wrong is something like measuring an exponentially small voltage difference.

A good rule of thumb: if a proposed thing violates well-known bounds, like say the Bekenstein bound [1], and the authors don't mention this at all, that is not a good sign.

The paper would probably be fine if they took out everything implying that UMMs can be physically instantiated, but I dunno.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
The rest of my comment, after the first few words that prompted you to respond, addresses your sentiment. What did I miss?
What is the difference between the situations? All I remember of HipChat's change was the same thing: conversations would only be logged moving forward after a particular date (rather than a switch being flipped).
The illustrations are fun and the explanations are skillful.

The core idea is more of a starting point. It's reminding us that we shouldn't expect things to be "fair", but it's avoiding the whole topic about how fairness sometimes shouldn't always matter when you want to be happy.

It's not really meant to discuss a recipe for happiness, but at the same time it features people being frustrated about perceived unfairness, which makes them unhappy.
In the short term, I think Google founders as the people buying online ads from them become increasingly aware that the real value of online ads is far far lower than what people are paying at the moment.

As the ad and research industries catch up to the web and figure out real metrics for these things, people will not keep paying the prices that prop up Google's cash cow.

At some point in the next 5-10 years, I think the bottom drops out of that market and Google gets caught flat-footed. Same goes for Facebook, incidentally.

At the same time the ad market is bottoming out for Google, I expect something like Duck-Duck-Go to hit them on the search side of things in a big way.

The result of this 1-2 punch is that 10 years from now, Google is about where Yahoo! was before Marissa Mayer took over, and where it is a hundred years from now depends on what direction they go from there.

The key for both Google and Facebook is when someone cracks the code on doing something useful with all the data they are collecting. To me, this isn't a technology problem; it's a science problem. Classical statistics doesn't do well at this scale. Collect enough data, and you can find evidence for any correlation you might happen to search for. That doesn't mean it's real. We need real scientific advances in the way that we prepare, ingest, test, and interpret data at this scale, and we are literally at the infant stages of imagining how that might work.

If Google hangs on through the hard times ahead, they are well-positioned to lead the way in that scientific advancement. But they will have to get out of the mindset that some new technology innovation can solve this. It can't.

Personally, I think we're 25-30 years away from being able to deal effectively with data at Google's scale. While it's possible that Google could still be around at that time, collecting data that way will no longer be a novelty that only people like Google and Facebook can do. Everyone will have that capability. Mountains of data treasure will be the commodity that processing power is today.

So, yeah, 10 years from now, Google is throwing out press releases that sound like recycled PR material from Yahoo or Microsoft in 2008, and most people are looking at them thinking: "How did that happen?"

That's my 2 cents.

edited for typos.
Yes - GSEs. But the GSEs have private capital. I don't think the post office does.
He's clearly not ignorant of computer assisted proofs, but I also wish he'd show more enthusiasm for them.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_01_05.htm...
Makes me sorry I had gotten rid of my LSI-11.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649402
It's a judgment call, but if you have a fear that "This might be the type that will go after me" then that's enough to stay away.
ok, sure. So you are saying that the OPs statement "code is more easily learned as a child because language is more easily learned as a child" is a pointless narrowing of the idea that "code is more easily learned as a child because all cultural, mutable, consensus based concepts are more easily learned as a child"?
Chrome Will Start Blocking All Remaining NPAPI Plugins in January
This is a good talk to show to those mathematicians. Machine checked proofs are way too powerful to ignore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmhd8clDd_Y
"The C.I.A., supported by the White House, has argued that even without using the real names of the officers, their identities could still be revealed."

"You know, its just meta-data, why are you so upset about your civil liberties?"

On the one hand I feel badly for the CIA folks, their bosses said "Go do this thing" and they did. And with this report and a bit of compare the location or other meta data decloaking processes, folks might be able to identify exactly who was doing the deeds. Which would get them in trouble, while their leadership remains cloaked in secrecy.

But on the other hand I really wish the intelligence community would stop attempting to sell the public on the notion that meta-data can't be misused and thus is subject to less rigorous restrictions with respect to the rights of the people. They know that isn't true, their actions show they know it isn't true, so lets just come out and own up to the fact that it isn't true.
Actually, FastMail is an Australian company and subject to Au laws. Although, I think they do have operations in NY (or maybe NJ).

"FastMail is an Australian company and as such is subject to Australian law."[1]

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html?domain=fast...
This is an important topic, and the NYTimes should be ashamed of this "journalism". The article is called Workers in Silicon Valley, but it only mentions quotes from Employers and people currently going through the immigration process. I wonder what their perspective is going to be?