skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Completely agree. In the test presented one can probably replace 'algebra' with 'electrical engineering' or 'electromechanics' or 'physics' etc and get to the same outcome. I'm not exactly good at algebra either, mainly because it's not my field, but know enough about statistics in general to see that this article (well, not so much the article but some of the conclusions presented), is flawed.
Im truly sad. Its not over though. Innovation shall spark from this travesty.
I've interviewed and worked with many people, MANY!, including e.g., Stanford MS CS graduates, who can't write real-world apps. I assume these people can score well on an algebra test. As far as I know, the ability to write non-trivial programs in a commercially relevant time frame can only be judged based on a candidate having already done so. If there's otherwise some way to predict who these people are, I'd love to know what it is.

Social factors in a workplace also seem to be important and hard to predict. Excellent work for one employer isn't necessarily reproducible for another.
I don't think the existence of those correlations depends on what you think. Har har. Suggesting a correlation is a statistical hypothesis that is testable but not really debatable.

I don't think such a hypothesis is awkward but I doubt high IQ as an excellent predictor for an individuals performance in tasks that are not IQ tests. As a layman when it comes to psychology I think IQ measures some things but the way the brain works, no real world task a person does is exactly like those IQ tests.

A brain is not a CPU and an IQ is not its clock frequency.
Trying to create an accurate measurement of programming skill is far more difficult than looking for correlation on tests compared with some other subjective measure.

This misguided attempt at instrumenting "skill" could prevent highly capable individuals from entering the field who don't have a solid math foundation, for societal or other reasons.
I didn't know quite what the headline meant - there was at least one TRON arcade game - as in, a coin-operated game - that had a totally different concept and which is now mostly deservedly forgotten:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/discs-of-tron

There was also a TRON arcade game that was a mismash of mini-games, one of which was the light-cycles:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10204

I see from Google that indeed many, many people refer to this "use moving wall to make the other guy crash" style of game as "TRON" now, but TRON actually just put a brand name on a game genre that had been around:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_%28video_game%29

A home game circa 1977, years before TRON:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/surround

"Snake" to TRON could actually be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, example of a big-budget studio movie adapting a video game concept. Doing so surprisingly directly.

Now, of course, half the movies that come out of Hollywood seem to have action bits that are vaguely video-game inspired.
Some were, some were not (I grew up there).
Also, while some spies are money-motivated, most spies from Eastern Europe were simply fed-up with the system.

We will never know for sure, but did you watch "Citizen4"?
A closer look at Snowden - IMO, it's highly unlikely that he was a spy. It is clear (to me, at least) that he is highly principled, not money-driven. He'd have to be an extremely good actor.
I am not great at higher level Math (calculus) and I'm good with algebra but I do not think I'd consider those good predictors. I feel like what allows me to program is strong spatial reasoning. Doing a quick google search I found this: http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-nature-of-the-relationship-if...

Probably just anecdotal but curious to know what others feel about spatial reasoning? I think specially with object oriented programming it is helpful to be able to visualize all of the 'actors' in your head and how they relate/intertwine.
I had a little bit of a problem with that question as well. A clever student might just divide 69 by three and take that number, as well as the numbers on either side, as the answer.

Is that algebra? Is that not algebra? Is that some sort of more nebulous skill that's also correlated with programming? If they actually wanted to correlate ALGEBRA algebra with programming, I also thought they'd have more straight-forward questions. Using word problems brings all sorts of other issues into the picture.
I'm a vim guy, but the strength of emacs is that is basically running on its own lisp, so it's completely programmable.

He's likely to be running a customized version.
Voting is not the exclusive way to make change in a democracy, even if it's the preferred...
But it's unlikely that benefit exceeds the compounding value of finishing the same amount of school two years earlier.

Best I can tell, all that compounding value gets you one thing: more money in retirement. Therein lies my objection; letting your retirement dictate your first 65 years of life seems like folly.
It will happen when people stop demanding change and start demanding blood.
And RIPE Atlas [0], an Internet measurement network.

[0] https://atlas.ripe.net
I don't know if I ever used PirateBay at all. I have downloaded a few torrents, but I don't know where I found them, beyond just "Google".

When I think about the websites that have had a direct personal impact on my life, I come up with things like E2, Wikipedia, Slashdot.

Maybe there's a PirateBay community. Maybe it was far better than all similar services. I don't know. The PirateBay shutdown is a political thing for me. Nothing more.
But Easter moves around quite a bit during the year, sometimes being on the 83rd day of the year (in 2008), sometimes on the 110th day of the year (2014), and various dates between. I don't see how changing to a 13 month calendar would affect the first full moon after the spring Equinox, since the lunar cycle doesn't mesh with the solar one.
The reasoning behind it not being oop seems misread. I meant Object Oriented Programming. I'm not sure how the c++ correlation refutes that. Did you mean something else?
Except you are also testing one's ability to set up that problem which is a major key to problem solving ability in the first place? I might agree with you if the problems were already formatted and it was simply plug and chugging algebra and not deciphering word problems.
> If they didn't get a java intro class, how do you think they would have done with something as algorithmic as an assembly language, a functional language, or understanding the nuts and bolts like Turing machines and automata?

I would argue that your last several examples (functional languages on) are more likely to be understood by people really good at math than Java is, and that Java isn't especially predictive in that regard.

Functional programming languages are closer in their structure to the way that math is structured than Java itself is, while Turing machines and automata are pretty much just outright math. (Especially when you start talking about the computational power of automata versus Turing machines and the equivalence between some kinds of grammars and automata.)

I expect you listed these because they're "hard" computer science, but I'd argue that you think they're "hard" computer science because they're mathy and not your forte.

I, for one, had much less trouble with Turing machines, autoamta, formal languages, computability, etc than I did with learning Java.
It may be because you used "you" 10 times and "I" once. Given that, it's clearly not obvious.
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Works for both Hacker News and reddit.
Show HN: SocioLotto v1.2 (Android) – Your chance to be heard by all
Seems to be the only way to really run stuff on kube (and not on GCE), until kube has support for sticky node persistence. It's no coincidence that all of the kube examples use redis as a datastore
Persistent Associations Between Prenatal Exposure to Phthalates and Child IQ
> McDonald’s CEO, James Skinner, is interesting. I like their chicken mcNuggets, but I am always aware that their CEO is US-Navy trained, and maintains a good relation with armed forces.

I think that's a different discussion. I can't imagine any way that McD's would spy on/hurt us thru McNuggets (except maybe food poisoning), whereas they can thru software/Internet companies.
> very poor platform to base handing out algebra tests in interviews without establishing causality

Why?

It probably shouldn't be your only criterion, but if it has a high correlation, why wouldn't that be sufficient for handing out algebra tests?

A high correlation corresponds to predictive power, even if it's not a causal relationship.
Choose your words carefully, the law blocks _propaganda_ not speaking; of _"sexual relations"_ not sexual orientations. Translated from Russian to English, "sexual relations" refers to non traditional parental units, i.e. those that do not consist of a male + female. You may see here a discrimination against homosexuality but I see a legal framework for protection of a traditional family. LGBT individuals still have rights in this framework.

With respect to your anti-vaccine example. There is always a conflict between something that a minority may consider a right and the rule of the majority. There are minorities that want pedophilia to be made legal. Do you have a novel solution for the minority rights conflict? Traditionally rights for minorities have been won through struggle, societal change, and war among many other ways. Are you proposing a novel solution for LGBT rights in Russia?
I think we agree on what we mean by discrimination in this context, but perhaps not what we mean by "rooted in facts". I think that not inviting blue people because you know that they are less likely to meet your criteria is "rooted in fact". We both agree that this is discrimination.

Let me give an example where I think this kind of discrimination rooted in fact is acceptable. A company trying to hire a software engineer might only interview people with CS degrees. There is a factual basis that people with CS degrees are more likely to be qualified for the job, although there certainly are qualified people without degrees. Refusing to test those degree-less candidates is discrimination based on education.
D-Bus replaced CORBA in GNOME by improving the IPC system originally used by KDE, DCOP. Unless you're a CORBA aficionado, yes, I'm glad D-Bus exist.

If you feel that D-Bus duplicates existing functionality can you please elaborate?
The Importance of Graduates Having Soft Skills and Employers Assessing Them
Traditional controllers are pretty basic, but some of the newer systems use frequency hopping (direct-sequence spread spectrum) technology. It's technically not encrypted, but it would be difficult to interfere with since the whole idea behind DSSS is to resist interference, natural or otherwise.

On top of that, at best you'd just be able to make the plane crash, which could be bad if it lands in a populated area.

A much better idea is what DJI is doing on their newer systems, where on-board GPS is used to enforce no fly zones around airports: http://www.dji.com/fly-safe/category-mc
US Army Builds Airport for Drones
an impressive technical achievement, and kudos for the music.
Show HN: Run C Online
Not everyone.

Just those who wear kilts and play bagpipes and come from Scotland. Even if one has red hair and one has black hair.
Normality on ordinal scale data. You've done the equivalent calling functions expecting numeric input with ordinal data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_data
> I think that when you are doing exploratory programming and you're not quite sure about what you're doing you should have a language that gets out of the way as much as possible, which Python does.

I agree with this, but am not sure it's on point. Every software engineering class I've heard of is about as far as you can get from exploratory programming.
Well, here's the code that Go uses to do elliptic curve encryption:

https://github.com/golang/crypto/blob/master/curve25519/squa...

It's in assembler, with no comments. It's from Bernstein's code, via Supercop, and is not original to the Go team.

A recent effort to formally verify that code, out of Taiwan, Japan, and the Netherlands, found one bug not previously detected by testing.

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2670000/2660370/p299-chen.pd...

This stuff is really hard to get right.
How do you figure? Unless recent versions of Whisper have been totally rewritten, whisper writes each metric to a separate file. Submit hundreds of metric per vm/server every 10 seconds, and you get ridiculous amounts of tiny writes (e.g. 4 byte writes) fenced by redundant seek()'s and a number of other syscalls, no matter how much you batch up stuff before sending it to statsd.
I have a hard time understanding why the author go out of his/her way to rename standard definitions.

1. The definition of convex hull of a set S in the article, is the boundary of a convex set that contains all the points in S. The standard definition is the "intersection of all convex sets that contains S".
Edit: Yes, this is not a good definition for the article, but there is a equivalent for finite set of points in 2D which is much better suited: "The smallest convex polygon contain all the points in S"

2. The definition of minimal convex hull in the article, in the standard terminology, is the boundary of the convex hull.

The article links to wikipedia which clearly explains what is a convex hull, but still decides to come up with new terminology. As a warning, the "convex hull" in this article is not equivalent to the "convex hull" in wikipedia(or any other textbook definitions I have seen).
Wait a little longer. The sample size (in years) for China is too small. The people are starting to fight the government if you haven't noticed.
It is not "The Pirate Bay", I searched for Robogeisha and I get "No results found".
Facebook thinking about 'dislike' function – Zuckerberg
I think you might be suffering from the current "downvote mania that we're not allowed to talk about or else you'll get downvoted" on HN.

EDIT: I disagreed with you, with a following comment, and didn't downvote you.
Now Rust needs some killer app. Maybe a message broker, something like Apache Kafka, maybe even with Java Messaging Service compatybility as an option. Rust with its low level I/O and efficient memory management should enable creating something very performant.
I feel like two answers there summed it up pretty nicely:
1. Do you want a user's email address to be immutable?
2. Do you want to use a user's email address as the foreign key?

(Answers: "probably not" and "no, especially if no to 1".)
>>… being in the game vs. not … but isn't going to give me information about other use cases.<<

1) That might be a credible criticism if the benchmarks game claimed to be some kind of exhaustive comparison.

In fact (if it wasn't already completely obvious that the benchmarks game has nothing to say about things it does not show) over & over again the web pages state -- "These are not the only compilers and interpreters. These are not the only programs that could be written. These are not the only tasks that could be solved. These are just 10 tiny examples."

2) You seem to have assumed that because you personally don't know the reasons, there were no reasons.

>>…totally different than what their implementation would be.<<

What does the benchmarks game have to say about those "totally different" programs that are not shown? Nothing.

>>…more like C than like Haskell.<<

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...

Idiomatic Haskell? Which would that be?

http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

Do you think there's an idiomatic style for programs written as though performance matters or does idiomatic just mean programs written as though performance doesn't matter?

>>…useless for evaluating if a program I write in a language is going to generally be faster or not than if I did it in another.<<

Does the benchmarks game website claim to be useful for that purpose? It sounds like magical thinking to me --

"… but the question is still asked - Will my program be faster if I write it in language X? - and there's still a wish for a simpler answer than - It depends how you write it!"

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclus...
We have people who are interested in getting Rust working with musl, but it's not a high priority at the moment.
Lie #3: Code is more important than data

This is the biggest lie of all. Programmers have spent untold billions of man-years writing about code, how to write it faster, better, prettier, etc. and at the end of the day, it's not that significant. Code is ephemeral and has no real intrinsic value. The algorithms certainly do, sure. But the code itself isn't worth all this time (and shelf space! – have you seen how many books there are on UML diagrams?). The code, the performance and the features hinge on one thing – the data. Bad data equals slow and crappy application. Writing a good engine means first and foremost, understanding the data.

http://www.insomniacgames.com/three-big-lies/
I would say there is a marked difference between justice and brutality.

I realize this line has become very blurred in our world, but there is a difference.
It would be neat to get a step-by-step list of what he did to compile this version of Ruby, what GC variables he used, etc.
What log scale interval are you?
"The decline of traditional pension plans and rising education levels, which are associated with less physically demanding jobs, may both help explain why the elderly are working longer."

Nice spin there, NYT.
For that matter, I doubt any country has free speech or free elections. Some countries only are better in making citizens believe in opposite than others.
If it's about incremental compilation, this is indeed correct. We've talked about doing incremental compilation post 1.0 and the module system is irrelevant to whether that is possible.
> This is a real hairy example IMO since it's conflating the mechanics with optional parenthesis and dot-less method calls, but we can break it down just the same. Since Int.+ takes a single argument, then it must parse as:

> 1.+(_ * 2)

No, my point is that this is not how it parses. Look:

ary.map(1 + (_:Int) * 2)
res3: Array[Int] = Array(3, 5, 7, 9, 11)
ary.map(1.+((_:Int) * 2))
error: overloaded method value + with alternatives:
(Double)Double
...

In the first case, the parser lifts _ over $times AND over $plus. The function is being lifted over both of them. The optional parentheses break the feature if you insert them: "1.+(_ * 2)" tries to add one to a function, which is not a valid operation.

>> how much of the context does it grab along with it?

> None. In this position, it's the beginning of an expression. It doesn't escape the scope it's defined in. Just like in the 1.+(_ * 2) example, what comes before it doesn't matter. It's the beginning of an expression.

If that was true, then "1 + _ * 2" would be invalid, and "f(_)(1)" would be equivalent to "f(1)". But the former is valid and the latter doesn't work like that.

> I was going to attempt to write a Ruby analogue, but I can't actually figure out a clean way to do that.

There is a limited Python analogue:

https://github.com/kachayev/fn.py#scala-style-lambdas-defini...

That only works insofar that the _ placeholder object can seize control over the expression, so "f(_, 2)" won't work unless f explicitly handles _. Implementing the full feature would require language or macro support, but my point was more that a new dynamic language could trivially support it.
This is Korg MS-10, Korg's Polysix softsynth and a few samples, all cooked together in Ableton Live and drowned in Waves plugins, mostly H-Delay and the SSL channel.
Giant Robot Movies
There is a difference between “algebra with numbers” and “algebraic manipulation”. You do the latter all the time with code when you observe and use equivalences like this:

if a then
return b
else
return c

===

return (if a then b else c)

I.e., “return” is distributive over the branches of the “if” expression, so you can factor it out.

When you see “bad” programmers redundantly specifying Boolean expressions like “x == true” instead of “x”, it’s because they haven’t internalised the fact that “if” takes any algebraic expression denoting a Boolean, not just a special sort of expression with “&&” and “||” and “==” and “<”.

Beginning programmers often struggle with learning the elements available in a language and how they can be composed—and that is exactly what an algebra is. I would be very surprised if an aptitude for algebra did not correlate with an aptitute for programming.
I have a more recent example of this: I knew a Google software engineering team which writes all open bugs for their product on a whiteboard. If you want to tackle a bug, you put a post-it note with your name next to it and then go fix it. Nobody is every forcibly assigned to fix a bug (with the exception of security bugs). I think they had it where you could only have one post-it on the board at a time.
I have to agree. I think likelyhood of pirating something looks like free_time_available vs free_money_available. When I was a broke college student, I pirated near everything because I had a lot of free time, and no expendable income. Now that I am a startuper, I have no money and no time so I almost never pirate (or purchase) anything. If I ever get to a point where I have lots of money and little free time, I will very likely pay whatever is asked to watch what I want.
>China simply has the ability to move much faster and cheaper than the U.S.

Of course. They have cheap labour, a lackadaisical approach to safety/environment and a political system that is efficient (in some part due to corruption). It is not clear that you would be able to replicate China's successes in the US quite so easily.
>lots of resources-tracking knobs thanks to cgroups

I'm already tracking these at the orchestration level. I don't need my init system to do it.

>support for read-only root filesystem

Nice, I guess, but not sure why it's a particular win for cloud. My stuff is already stateless by design. I don't care if anything gets written to the root volume or not, since it will go away when the stateless vm goes away anyway

>many batteries included (no need to ship ntp on VMs thanks timesyncd, journald can replace syslogd for basic usage, networkd tries to do the right thing without any manual setup when run in a VM, etc.

Well, I could strip out NTP thanks to the systemd SNTP client, but I could also just use NTP and not use the systemd SNTP.

The ephemeral nature of cloud makes journald absolutely useless, unless you just don't care about logs. (Why don't you care about logs?)

Restarting services, containers, and networkd are nice, but I think the other stuff is probably reaching in a lot of ways.
I'm going to retire when I'm dead.
Basic algerbra is used all the time in programming. It's part of a programmer's fundamental skill set. Of course, somebody who already has that particular skill will definitely have the advantage in a short programming course. It's like starting a 100m sprint with a 3 second head start. It says nothing, however, about who will be the better programmer over the long term. So I don't think their test is a good predictor of programming aptitude.
And what makes you think US would have treated Romania better? Please read more about history. Your ignorance is common. For every bad thing Russia did there is an equally bad thing US did. Same goes for any other 2 countries. It's everyone for himself.
>an incredible media talent

your assessment, not his. where is your footprint on the internet?
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