skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're munging your terminology. Side-effectful computations in haskell are done inside the IO monad. A monad is not in general a thing for side-effectful computation. They are made unnecessary for side-effectful computation in o'caml because of the inherent support for mutability.

Indeed side-effectful computation can be represented as a monad, and therefore the ; in ocaml might be interpreted as a bind. Something just needs to satisfy the monad laws in order to be a monad. However, in Haskell the IO monad is explicitly defined. This is very important. The do syntax is sugar over monadic binding them together. In ocaml, sequential computation is simply scheduled sequentially.

In haskell, something of type IO () is a VALUE which corresponds to an ACTION which can be RUN. The function which returns the IO action is still pure. It is the outside world which consumes the IO action and performs it. In o'caml, functions are merely impure as in other languages.

The function that prints 3 and returns 8 in ocaml has type "int". The function that prints 3 and returns 8 in haskell has type "IO Int"...
Interesting. However it doesn't solve what I would argue is the harder problem of how to identify a time in the document.

For example as I write this HN url says that it is 8 hours old. Without knowing the exact format how can I extract these sort of dates out of random text/html documents?
>>> Rockets are certainly capable of accelerating a mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Well, yes and no. The speed of a rocket is limited by the specific impulse of its engines. That means that hydrogen-oxygen rockets aren't going to go very fast. Ion thrusters will go a lot faster, but take a long time to get up to speed. If you want to go really fast you need something really exotic like antimatter, but the technical challenges are quite daunting. Theoretically you could use a flashlight, but the batteries would run out before you could get anywhere.

The allure of a reactionless drive is that you aren't limited by the the rocket equation. You may still need a big energy source, but your speed isnt limited by how fast you can spit stuff out your backend.

It's fun reading to look up things like specific impulse, the rocket equation, relativistic rockets, even project Orion.

IANARS.
> The point-of-entry is still male-oriented.

I agree with this statement, but I disagree with the rest of your post. To me, it reads like saying that the point of entry for becoming an architect is learning to hammer nails. Actually programming a computer is really just the way we express ideas, it's not how we learn to form them. There are more abstract forms of play that build the base skill set needed to be an engineer. For instance, I've yet to meet a good developer who wasn't exposed to Legos or some similar construction toy as a child. Those toys form the basis for being able to break down the whole into its constituent parts. And that's the essence of what a good developer does...takes a complex system and breaks it into simple, manageable components.

This whole discussion over whether it matters whether you take up programming in your teens or twenties is, to me, missing the point. If you've got a foundation starting with building toys, moving to woodworking and learning to fix things, you'll pick up software development much more easily than you will if you've never been exposed to this kind of pre-programming.

The best example of this that I've ever seen is my parents. My dad was an artist by trade, which means he earned most of his money in construction and roofing. He never went to college and didn't do particularly well in school. My mom, on the other hand, has a PhD in psychology and a masters in social work. As a child, she played with dolls and was taught to cook and clean. Both spent the vast majority of their lives living without computers. When my mom first started using a computer, everything needed to be a set of steps that could be memorized. It became clear that her view of the world is one of rote memorization and pattern matching...build up a set of "recipes" and then look for situations to apply them in. But those recipes are not composable. To this day, she can manage her Word documents without any problem and has a highly organized directory structure but is completely unable to manage her digital photos. Both activities are simply files and folders, but there's no connection in her mind. Meanwhile, when he was alive, my dad was far more fearless in his exploration of using a computer and became very competent. He taught himself JavaScript in order to script Photoshop actions. For him, using a computer was a series of problems that needed to be solved and every solution could be unique.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that we waste way too much time worrying about how people get into programming and not nearly enough time worrying about how people get into problem solving. But that's the key skill that makes a developer good at his/her job. And, as you've rightly pointed out, the points-of-entry into problem solving are still very male-oriented.
Blood on the Corn: Tale of Murdered DEA Agent Enrique Camerena
We add immense value, yet we seen almost none of the profit of that value. Underpaid to say the least-- especially considering the value of money has steadily declined (overall) since 1972.

I saw a number someone quotes in a comment of _$120,000_ but it doesn't go as far as it did in the nineties. Realistically, that wage should be closer to $180k or more now-a-days-- but it's not.

Plus the real moral of the story is: your business is either capital intensive, or labor intensive. Software Tech isn't really capital intensive (per dollar) but is extremely labor intensive.

If tech companies want more talent perhaps they shouldn't build their campuses on some of the most expensive land in the country. That'd probably save a lot right there.

I'd be willing to bet Facebook wants more H1-Bs because it helps their bottom line (decreasing costs), which increases their profit margin, which increases their stock price... A dollar saved, is a dollar earned-- ask an accountant.
Android game console runs on quad-core Cortex-A17
So one aspect is that it's similar to how people,were disinterested in classes earlier, but with a slight bump because of the stronger engagement to games designed to be skinner boxes, or the impact of constant engagement.

But I'll Assume that it's still only a minor effect.

The part which would bug me is someone using a laptop or device to visibly do something else in class- because it's just far more visible and distracting.
I'm increasingly agitated by these commentators on the topic, who have absolutely no idea what the ground reality is. Frequently, as in this case, they also seem to conflate two different problems: shortage of IT workers and shortage of software developers.

A software developer cannot be asked to manage a linux database; I mean she can, but that is not what she is good at. Conversely, an IT person cannot be asked to architect the backed of a payment gateway system. Of course there is some overlap (devops is what comes to mind). I'm guessing that most of FB/MS employees are probably developers, so when they mention IT workers in the same breath as shortage at FB/MS, they are exposing their ignorance.

Furthermore, the paper itself seems to be published as a "report" on the page of a dubious organizations. Come on journalists, please do some actual journalism! Ask more people than those who confirm what your story wants to show. Find and determine the truth of the story; that is what you are paid for!

edit: as I suspected, most of the funding for this "institute" comes from labor unions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Policy_Institute#Fundi...
I was pretty surprised at the level of skill that the hired programmers at my company had. And I imagined it was because it's just hard to find anyone. But I'm not sure if it's just a Montreal Canada problem where the talent left for elsewhere or if the quality is just never good.
Just as an individual, I get similar recruiter pings all the time. It's always contractor jobs (typically with a set term of 6 months and a "possibility" of longer-term work) with a tangential relation at best to the skillset and experience on my resume.

The cherry on top is that the pay, if it's even outlined at all, is always insultingly low compared to the job I already have. On the upside, just mentioning my current salary to some of the please-call-me-I-have-just-the-job-for-you recruiters has been enough to make them stop trying to contact me at all.
Assuming people who don't fit a demographic are robots is a step better than assuming everybody is a robot
what candy land do you live in?
check out the NLP support in parsedatetime.

https://github.com/bear/parsedatetime/blob/master/parsedatetime/tests/TestNlp.py

may be what you're after.
> "Whats so wrong with people trying to help?"

Because most of the 'help' is in the form of unsolicited advice, well-intended as it might be, and tends to be naive, unhelpful, disheartening, demotivating or downright insulting.

OP outlines what that feels like:

"These people are, in most aspects of their lives, good people. Honestly, couldn’t recommend them enough. But where my illness is concerned, they felt they had license to act like complete jackasses because they couldn’t understand what I was going through."

Sure, anyone can help, but very few of the comments on here are helpful.
There are some cringeworthy aspects to this talk if you know the story. That does not actually distract because it is interesting watching someone tell the story when they revere the 6502 yet have not coded for it.

At the time that the 6502 hit the computer scene in a mass-market way it wasn't like you coded your code straight into a computer. Instead you actually wrote code out on paper. Then you looked up the opcodes and typed them into a margin. That was what you typed in on many personal computers of the time. The BBC micro had assembler options that you could drop into on BBC Basic, so, if you wanted to do something really cool then assembly was an option.

This was in the pre-internet era where you might have a few books and plenty of magazines - piles of them, normally, every back issue kept. You could not Google answers and have some SO answer pop up seconds later. You would have to rifle through the indexes on the few books you had. This was not an obstacle to learning, you could actually memorise the whole instruction set and be fairly sure of what the opcodes were. So, in a way, you could be your own Google.

I had exposure to Z80 before 6502, I also had some 6809 and 68000 knowledge. However, if you were new to programming it required quite a conceptual leap to know what an index register could do. Then things like the alternate registers - what do I do with these, please? Hence, the little 6502 was nice and easy. Although there were just the three registers you could master them and do what you needed to do with just that.

To a certain extent the 6502 forced people to build a proper computer without getting the CPU to do things like drive the display (Sinclair). You didn't really have to care about system interrupts for things outside your code plus the performance was pretty good in comparison to those systems that had a Z80 'do everything'.

Although Z80 might be a bit hard as a beginner, 6502 was a bit more manageable. With concepts learned on the 6502 you could go on to the other CPUs with relative ease, e.g. 68000 was easy if you knew 6502.

Going back to the talk, I had it easy - manuals, complete computers you could buy, even dot matrix printers. Plus community in those magazines. The generation before me that actually made the stuff I picked up they were on punched cards and reel-to-reel tapes. I cannot imagine how hard it was for them or the realities of how it was to problem solve given tools available. However, I imagine that leap is similar to the leap required by this speaker to understand the little takeaway here - you could actually program the 6502 without being overwhelmed by the size of the instruction set and, through doing so, get pretty good at it.
Datomic – Home
The End of China’s Economic Miracle?
This is very correct. I feel in East Coast and other parts of US besides California companies are underpaying their engineers and expect to get talented people for a low annual salary. From experience this is especially true in New York City where engineers in big banks get underpaid a lot and could earn double the salary if they worked in California.
Because the US is the only country hiring.

Because the US is the only place Google has employees. Because Google pays taxes in the US.
I think several people mentioned this separately:
Yes I agree there are no shortage of people with CS degree the question is 1) Can they code their way out of an interview. Turns out many people can’t, even though they held a “senior” title in another company. They can’t solve a simple linked list problem 2) Living cost of where the company is hiring 100K in Atlanta goes farther than 120K in SF or in Seattle. I can rent a 2 bedroom town house in a good neighborhood in Atlanta for 1200$ Vs. you MAY be able to find a 1 bedroom apartment in Seattle for 1700$ – 2000$. 3) Some companies have very unrealistic expectations, they want a person with all the experience in the world, which is just not gonna happen. Personally if I am looking at a candidate I will look at how he approaches a problem, I will throw him some curve-balls and if he can handle it they he will be fine. We are in a world where the technology changes rapidly, a tech/language/skill-set that is popular today might not worth a dime tomorrow. If you learned how to learn and adapt you will be fine.
As long as CEOs of the companies screaming that "there is a shortage and we desperately need H1Bs" have compensation packages that could pay for thousands of engineers I'm going to just go ahead and assume they've decided where their priorities lay.
No indictment in Michael Brown shooting
Or, there is a bubble about to pop.
After doing a double-take on it, I'm sure the post is sarcasm.
For those more interested in a full documentary on beating the magnetic sea mines:
http://youtu.be/wKrweOqNxz0?t=1m49s
If there are biological influences on choice of profession based on gender, than a diversity goal of a 50/50 split of genders in a profession is misguided and artificial at best, and harmful at worst.

I never said culture has zero effect. Obviously it does have some impact. But how big is that effect? If there are half as many women in tech today than 3 decades ago, and you argue that culture is the main driver of that effect, than you must also be arguing that sexism in tech has gotten dramatically worse since the 80s.

Somehow I think we have made progress since the 80s, so there must be something else at work in the decrease of women in tech.
Should Hillary Clinton Fear Another Tech-Savvy Challenger in 2016?
What, precisely, is a "linux database"?
This is a very simple, basic argument that I've never seen addressed by people who want to bring in more foreign tech workers (for hiring purposes and not entrepreneurial ones) - the concept of a "shortage" of something in a free market is not a coherent one - it can only be addressed by supra-economic arguments. But no one ever wants to clarify what those are.
Its not a bs argument, as even the document you cited includes: "The Department of Homeland Security’s proposed deferred action program for parents of recipients of deferred action under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would not be a permissible exercise of DHS’s enforcement discretion."

Presidents who try to weasel around the law, particularly when they spent the earlier part of the year telling us it wouldn't be right are out of line.
That's short sighted.
If there was really a tech shortage -- and had been for years -- wouldn't the labor supply rise to meet demand? Wouldn't there be people willing to work less than the going rate (which is far above a living wage), wouldn't the going rate be dropping?

I don't know the answer, I think what is going on may actually be kind of complicated.

But that's the kind of question raised, you can't explain away the question of whether there's a shortage or not by saying "It's just that people aren't willing to pay the going rate."
I suspect the many immigrants from Asia, and China in particular don't give a damn.
It is a quality, not a quantity problem.

At a previous company I interviewed hundreds for engineering positions (Ruby & Rails or JS/Backbone.) Our average was 1 offer extended for every 300 phone screens. The problem wasn't that we extended 50 offers and got rejected; money was not a part of the equation. We simply couldn't find the quality we were looking for.

Specifically, coding schools have capitalized on the gluttony of open positions, but don't actually go towards solving the problem. There isn't a shortage of bodies, there is a shortage of experienced developers.
> Asked what evidence existed of a labor shortage, a spokesperson for Facebook e-mailed a one-sentence statement: “We look forward to hearing more specifics about the President’s plan and how it will impact the skills gap that threatens the competitiveness of the tech sector.”

For companies like Google and Facebook, which place such strong emphasis on data in making decisions, its very telling how little data they have presented to support their claims.
How does Nitra compare to Xtext?
Someone also grepped for passports and it got several hits.
Its interesting to call things as they are. In politically correct world title would say "How Britain Beat Nazist...".

Interesting read for sure!
> > Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs

> Maybe those graduates aren't any good.

In my experience, it's because companies don't want to pay to train somebody in all the basics of office work. New grads (especially STEM grads) don't know how to run a meeting, write a status report, or do a thousand other things that a modern company requires. Instead they list job openings for two or three years of experience and hope to profit off of somebody else's investment.
> What are the other alternatives to H1B to immigrate to America?

You can enter the lottery: http://www.usagc.org/USA-immigration.aspx
"the concept of a "shortage" of something in a free market is not a coherent one"

This is obviously wrong.
Sarcasm generally doesn't go over too well over here..
Where was this previous company located?
This is a hard problem -- there's a bunch of research in NLP on it, where it's sometimes called temporal tagging. HeidelTime is a system that does this; some examples on their webpage, https://code.google.com/p/heideltime/
Apologies, I meant a database running on a linux system.
I'm still of the mindset that the problem is transportation in the Bay Area. If I had a magic wand and I could wave it and we all woke up tomorrow to a nonstop-bullet-BART train that goes 100mph from San Francisco to Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Ramon, Danville, Cupertino, Daly City, Foster City, Redwood city, San Jose and the Persidio and we had some kind of crazy zipline thing that gets you within 1/2 mile of any location within SF, this perceived shortage wouldn't exist. The problem is salary compared to cost-of-living in desired locations. And those locations are mostly desired, IMHO, because nobody wants to deal with a commute. My LinkedIn clearly states that I won't accept any job outside of walking distance of a BART station regardless of salary.

What I'd like to see is a poll of HN users that look like this:

You want to live in $DESIRED_LOCATION because:

A. I love $DESIRED_LOCATION and want to be surrounded by its vibe 24/7.

B. $DESIRED_LOCATION is a reasonable commute to/from my job.

C. $DESIRED_LOCATION is a reasonable distance between job & loved ones.
Just because Reagan did it does not make it right. The executive is supposed to execute the law, not pick and chose what laws to follow. If a President doesn't like the law then lobby for new one. If the voters don't give you the votes then you suck it up and execute as written.
Serious question: Why did it never occur that you might need to take in a less experienced developer and train them? Wouldn't it make sense that there are no experienced developers available because they are currently fully employed?
Distributing a Fully Connected Neural Network Across a Cluster
not if you're from one of those popular countries (China, India, Brazil, etc) that are ineligible
That's such a bullshit thing to say. We're talking about someone who literally won't survive unless they change their behavior. He's unemployed, has no government benefits available to him and those around him aren't going to support him forever.
> We add immense value, yet we seen almost none of the profit of that value. Underpaid to say the least-- especially considering the value of money has steadily declined (overall) since 1972.

You will be paid in technology in financial services [if you are worth it].
They also conflate STEM with IT in this article.
1 out of 300 offers is really low assuming you're doing 2-3 screens then a ~5 panel onsite after that. I'd be seriously concerned with your sourcers.
I'm glad they do. IE9 spurred a lot of competition around GPU accelerated 2D rendering and we all benefited.

Even now, IE11 and 12 are dramatically faster than Chrome on my laptop in terms of how quickly pages load, scroll, etc. Even though I don't use IE as my default browser, I think I probably continue to benefit from their performance work.

Regardless, Trident isn't going anywhere since Windows Store apps built with HTML/CSS/JS rely on IE's rendering engine to run.
I suspect if you advertised $250k salaries you would get a much more qualified applicant pool.
There are 65000 H1B visa issued a year (and 20000 more for Master & higher degree holders).

H1B visa is 3 years, extendable to 6 years, with a maximum of 10 years. But I'd think most people don't stay on the H1B more than 6 years.

So there's approximately 65000 * 6 = 400000 H1B visa holders in the US. For size comparison, there are about ~240millions adults in working age in the US. And the possible amnesty from the executive order a few days ago would cover some where from ~4-5 millions people.

I'm not actually sure what's the point I should be making here. I guess it just feel to me that in the grand scheme of things, the number of H1B visas is tiny tiny. It's just incredibly sad to me to see on HN that someone would be concerned about H1B taking over US's jobs (or repressing the wage - which is the same, just lesser extreme than "taking US's jobs").
Amazon Offers Help Finding Local Handymen
How to rebuild journalism
Bigger issues for me are:

* Why queues are limited to just 500 items?

* Why I can't slice a queue by facets (genre, year, rating, stars, etc.)?

* Why I can't control the queues of my children (I really want them to stay away from the brain-washing Disney stuff, for example)?

* Why main account's viewing activity includes sub-accounts, too (in my case, the main account is me and my wife, children have their sub-queues)?

I find less and less value in Netflix. Recently, I buy more stuff on Vudu, Amazon Instant Videos, and even Google Play. Netflix should rebrand to OldFlix or KidFlix as the there's very little quality available for streaming. I really don't get why they didn't implement Amazon's model earlier - offer a fixed selection for the monthly price and then pay per rental or purchase of individual titles not available with the subscription. Maybe they have licensing/contract issues, but if Amazon could do it, they should've done it, too. I'm not into TV shows, but it seems that they are trying to compensate with "Netflix Originals", which works for some, but not for me.
Can you give me an example of a legitimate shortage then, as defined in purely economic terms?