skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't really true. There are considerable indications that all that corporate money doesn't really provide marginal advantages in close elections. There's an interesting study I read (would link but im typing from phone) that corporate donors don't actually back candidates with an exectation of their election, but rather hedge their bets backing both candidates in a race in order to insure lobbying access with whoever wins. So you're actually right with your first statement, the problem is corruption, but at the post-election level. These situations, and the nature of our elections in general, are largely the result of a two party system being fairly easy to game in that manner. That in turn is largely the result of an electoral system that is mathematically predisosed towards two party outcomes. The causes there are plurality voting, partisan primaries, and gerrymandering. Funding is also an issue, but largely irrelevant by the bipartisan filtering process.

But solving that wouldn't directly address the subject of the article. A true multiparty system however could possibly create enough policy market competiton to promote more innovation in policy ideas.

In any event, the OP of your reply is right. The current trends are largely dictated by massive disruptions caused by labor market expansion, automation and hyperefficieny. These developments bring both blessings and challanges, and in order to address the later we have to move beyond the tired prescriptions of the old world left and right ideaologies. Just like with every prior technological disruption of the status quo, deleveraging and adaptation will eventually occur, but in the mean time we need a political system that facilitates idealogical innovation to smooth the bumpy road ahead.
This comment makes a good point.

It's shocking that so many people fighting the good fight for the equality of women in the workforce also attribute special qualities to women that men just don't have - the common ones being that they're more organized, and can more easily think outside the box.

This is sexist, counterproductive, and false.

Women should be represented in a profession because they're fungible with men and make up half of the general population.

Period.

Once you start saying a team needs women, because they have some special insight or ability, you have to logically accept that a team that is 100% women is not as good as that same team plus a man - which is simply not true.
Generally, the number of clicks isn't the issue. Its knowing which clicks to make.
Thoroughness of the interview process typically relates to the amount of skills required for the job. Engineering requires a tremendous amount of skills, and so it requires a fairly thorough review process. Being a cashier, for example, requires very little training. You could hire somebody after a 15min interview, and if they turn out to suck, fire them and move on with very little lost. That's not the case with an engineer.
I am a bisexual male programmer. I don’t give a damn what sex you have, and I would prefer not to think about it at all in a work environment, since it’s not relevant. But the skewed gender ratio affects interactions amongst my mostly heterosexual colleagues, and I find it disruptive. This is also true of race.

Anything we can do to remove bias and create a non-hostile work environment for everyone is a win not just for our ability to function as a field, but also to serve as a benchmark of social equality for other fields.
1) You never know what you'll need at a later date. When in CS, I learned about base 64 encoding and filed it in the "clever but not useful" category until ten years later when it was just the thing I needed for a program I was writing.

2) Learning something new and unfamiliar will at the very least expand your horizons, which rarely hurts.
"There’s more empathy" also bothers me. I'm not sure we're doing anyone any favors by generalizing large swaths of people, by gender or anything else. This is pure prejudice, even if it's good-natured and well-intentioned.
I suspect that if the book were written as described -- foul-mouthed Galadriel, hobbit sex, diarrhea in Moria -- it would end up a parody.
Remember the Manhattan Project? Remember when they realized there was a finite probability of igniting the atmosphere and the did the hard work to realize that probability was exceedingly low?

Remember the pile under the stadium at the University of Chicago?

Long before building nuclear plants we did a lot of small scale isolated engineering with the basic technology. Learned a lot. Killed more than a few people along the way.

Realized where the basic science was sufficient, realized where we needed more, realized where we needed hard engineering.

And we generally experimented on small scales. And built on small scales.

With this proposal, there really are no small scales. We need to evaluate the risks conservatively since there are many we simply do not yet know how to quantify. And proceed cautiously.

As you write, let's do science properly. Small steps. Lots of data. Better models. No dogma.
No one wrote intervention in the natural ecosystem is always inherently bad.

I'd welcome your reading the words that are written and not the words that you imagine a technophobe writing.

Thank you.
For someone in your position, don't. Learn a new problem domain - geo, information retrieval, webapps, compilers, any number of other verticals. And then really go in-depth with it and write programs. That will teach you a lot more about how and why to use programming languages than learning another programming language.
And the similarly fated French Republican Calendar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
> So you were a jerk to a volunteer or student calling you to ask for a donation. Kudos.

Thanks for Kudos, I am quite proud of saving time and hasle in the future. But why did you asume I was a jerk?
> There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment.

Which is also the same thing said when they were pigeonholing women as nurses and never doctors (not to bash nursing at all, but watch a couple episodes of Masters of Sex and you see the superiority complex). Gender roles are crap.
He attacked what you were saying, calling it a ridiculous reductive perspective, and then attacked you. Would you reject the idea that you perspective was reductive, even ridiculously so?
Ahh, I see, thanks.

So the problem doesn't sound so much to be the actual theft, it's more-so that you might not find out until years after the fact when your credit it destroyed.

Also, I realize that bad credit is a pain in the butt, though let's be honest, there are many, many worse things that could happen to you or your loved ones.
Yeah, that worked really well with rabbits in Australia and cane toads in Florida and Puerto Rico.

Cautious investigation is not doing nothing. It is learning and acting when we have a much better idea of the risks.

Our proposed solutions are not necessarily better - nor necessarily worse - that our current problem.

Our job is to to analyze them rigourously before acting.

And given how disastrous rash action has been in the past, we should have learned by now, from the data, to take our time.
I really enjoyed your overall Linux Performance Tool talk: http://youtu.be/SN7Z0eCn0VY

Thanks for sharing your expertise with performance monitoring. Releasing Atlas is adding tons of value to what I've already seen.
It's based on first-hand experience with an atmosphere with less CO2 than the current one. Like what everybody here had yesterday, for example.

Of course, things never change back to exactly what they were in the past. But to state that the risk of that option is similar to doing a completely new experiment on a global scale is insane.

Also, I always love those people that say that, since we've made Earth a worse heat sink, we should compensate by making the Sun a worse heat source. First principles do not go away just because you have a chaotic system.
The causal theory adds plausibility that it might work, otherwise there would be no reason to believe that the experiment is even worth doing.
When a man was fitted with a new heart, his mind changed in unusual ways
Low level in term of programming abstraction, not any kind of hierarchy i.e. banging your head against bits and bytes rather than monads and functors
> contributes to Google's monopolization of web standards

Make sure to let all the Opera devs working on web standards know this. It'll save them a bunch of hassle to know they're just wasting their time!

You can't advance the open web with FUD.
It didn't until I read this, now I'm absurdly interested and The Selfish Gene has been ordered.

Any more modern books of note?
I have a degree in a technical field. And a master's degree, too. Both from good schools. But neither are in CS.

Was it listed as required? I don't know. Lots of jobs put that down, but usually they don't really mean it. It's just another part of the unicorn job description. The same people who want 10 years of experience in a 5 year old technology are the ones who put down CS degree requirements for every software development job.

But, actually, my beef isn't with the requirements. I know there ARE jobs where I'd be out of my depth because I haven't had the formal training and that education has value. I take issue with the fact that they let me get through the whole process before applying the degree filter. If you're going to filter on easily measured boolean signals like the presence or absence of a CS degree, you should do it at the beginning of the process and save everyone a lot of time.
How do you make sure people don't do something bad?
You're being overly pessimistic. Feynman's 'algorithm' isn't nothing, it's actually very rudimentary and important.

The act of writing the problem down requires you to have a language for discussing it. You also have to be able to specify what you are looking for in a solution. (That is, how do you know if you've solved the problem?) Then you work to produce a set of transformations from one to the other. That is the best way to purposefully solve any problem.

Just read between the lines a bit...
CollabMark project launch to hack trademarks for open source
It seems plausible that our DNA hosts a myriad of capable dormant viruses than be triggered by some external activator (or binder), much the same way we have receptors for plants found in the wild (cannabis, nicotine etc...). It also seems perfectly reasonable that the (m)(b)(tr)illions of viruses on the planet are waiting in the wings for a host to get infected to start the process on a new epidemic. I'd like to think this is some form of regulation but of course that would necessitate the world as we know it as a part of a single system that can regulate even the tiniest of members.

For a hypothetical we could imagine the scenario where viruses existing in say a remote rain-forest, generally innocuous and self-contained. When deforestation occurs the virus is now open and can potentially infect whatever mechanism (human) that has disrupted it, binding to the same virus DNA that has existed for millions of years.

It's not that far-fetched to think unintelligent systems have defenses that we are largely unaware of - or cannot understand.
> As for your other points, going to college is still generally profitable.

Per the article you provided, "Those with a college degree now make $17,500 more per year than those without." I don't doubt that this is accurate. But here's the problem: not thinking through your decisions and banking on the assumption that you'll have an average outcome based on statistics is a great way to mess up your life.

There are plenty of people in tech who don't have four-year degrees who make multiples more than the median wage of college graduates of a similar age. And lest you resort to the "tech is an exception" argument, there are plenty of professions, from sales to construction to plumbing, in which you can easily find folks without four-year degrees making very good money.

In today's economy, anyone going to college without purpose and a plan expecting to earn $17,500 more per year "because statistics" is at risk of experiencing a rude awakening, particularly when debt is used to finance an education that will offer a piece of paper and little in the way of practical skills.
I'm wondering if there is real strong evidence, other than anecdotal accounts, for the wonderful claims that are made for the quasi-magical properties of that coffee melange.

I get it that under extreme physical circumstances (high in the Tibetan mountains) coffee mixed with butter can be a good way to replenish your energy quickly, but I'm not sure how this can be extrapolated to our more sedentary lives.

Even if the boost in energy (undeniable since you're ingesting a lot of fats) does make you feel good, it doesn't necessarily translate into long term benefits.

I'm wondering if there are any studies showing the effect on cholesterol, insulin levels, fasting sugar levels, over time.

And then can't help but getting very skeptical of the whole thing when I read that some of the products on sale on the website are marketed for 'brain detox'.

Sounds like snake oil to me.
The ASVAB, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, and SAT all have correlations with psychologist administered IQ tests of around 0.9. WORDSUM, which is a ten word vocabulary test has a correlation of 0.71[1].

[1]Every time I use the WORDSUM variable from the GSS people will complain that a score on a 10-question vocabulary test is not a good measure of intelligence. The reality is that “good” is too imprecise a term. The correlation between adult IQ and WORDSUM = 0.71. The source for this number is a 1980 paper, The Enduring Effects of Education on Verbal Skills. I’ve reproduced the relevant table…

The Enduring Effect of Education on Verbal Skills

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2112492?uid=3737800&ui...
Email I received last night is one reason I no longer work on freelancer markets
Names changed to protect the (not so) innocent.

----Start email----
Hi Modest Freelancer,

I hired you on oDesk more than a year ago.

I have hired 50 people on oDdesk and they have all given me 5-stars ratings except you. You gave me one star.

I'd like to offer you the opportunity to rate me 5 stars.

So far, I have not rated our project together. If you do it, I will give you 5-stars in return.

If you don't, I will give you 1 star also, dropping your rating significantly.

Let's be frank. Very few people deserve just one star, I certainly didn't. I don't know what made you react to me so angrily, but you got paid for your project, so I couldn't have been that bad, not with all these other great ratings. Whatever happened was just a miscommunication.

If you go to your "past projects" you should be able to find the project and change the rating, or contact customer support to do so.

Let me know what you decide. Thanks.

- The Man
----End email----

FWIW odesk responded promptly when I alerted them to this and they said it is not tolerated. Ironically odesk feedback closes after 14 days so after I told him I would not be strongarmed he told me 'Now you get the one star' and 'You're your own worst enemy'(I love that one). Presumably, that was before he actually tried to change my feedback and realized he could not.
When I worked for Royal Ahold they used a 13 period calendar. The date logic was much worse to manage because you still had the rest of the world and every programming language and database that used the Gregorian calendar.

We had a single mainframe subprogram that managed the whole thing. It was written in assembler and the few times it broke, the entire company stopped. Financials, ordering, invoicing, everything. Eventually they rewrote it in a more modern language, COBOL. This was in 2010.
A fair argument, but what's the gradual approach? It has to be all or nothing.

The idea behind this is to use it as an impetus for sites and services to move to SSL/TLS.
There's not one context here.
to avoid unintentionally being a drug mule, for starters

...and it gets worse from there! Carrying unknown packages from strangers is an unspeakably bad idea. That was the cause of the Lockerbie disaster. That is what is warned against incessantly in airports. Professionals did not spot the Lockerbie bomb, but "Carry" thinks amateurs are going to be able to identify illegal and dangerous packages???

As someone who flies, I hope this fails fast and fails hard. I do NOT want to fly with anybody that is carrying some stranger's packages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103#Investigation
Human nature's funny. Societies have been fighting about the same things for a long time. My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all of the popular music from the time. If we go back further we can point at examples of 'piracy' brought about by the Gutenberg Press. (A beautiful machine by the way if you ever get a chance to see one operate.)
Without a reason to say why it is ridiculously reductive yes I would reject that idea.
I registered some domains a couple of years ago that contained the word 'hobbit', and almost immediately got a letter from the lawyers of Tolkien Enterprises, demanding that I turn them over to them.

I hadn't even put a site up on the domains, and probably would have turned them over, but a lawyer friend of my said that I hadn't done anything wrong, and if I didn't plan to violate their copyright of the 'hobbit' that I didn't have too.

I decided to keep the domains (still haven't launched a site on them) on principle and wrote a nice legally worded letter courtesy of lawyer friend back to them. I told them I wouldn't be turning them over, and didn't hear back from them :)

I'm sure they are waiting for me to put up a site and violate the copyright somehow, but they can keep waiting.
How does the UI scale with display size?

How are system files tagged and treated?

Does search weight results? Eg: If there are multiple documents named "foo", which ones go to the top?

What does the timeline look like when information density is high?

With a mouse, do other clicks beyond the primary "left" click do anything?

What does the system do when foreign files are detected? Eg: plug in a thumb drive?
Considering you've been coding less than a decade, can you comment on what you think the biggest factor was that lead you to developing such a high level of mastery of solid coding principles? Books, mentoring, reading framework and library code thoroughly?
The comment does not make a good point. It conflates the idea of equality with the concept of diversity.

Equality is neither inherently caused or obstructed by diversity.
I have found many more problem clients than decent ones on sites like these. When I do find a good one, I generally finish the work very quickly in order to impress them and it often turns out they only had a day or two of real work to get done. I usually get great feedback, but when I ask if there is any more work I get things like 'we are running out of runway, so just waiting for funding' and 'we got offers for funding we just didn't like the terms' (that "founder" squashed the project within weeks after not getting the offer he wanted which makes me wonder if he ever believed in his product at all) and I end up back searching for new clients and spending inordinate amounts of time finding worthwhile contracts. I have been trying to refocus to more word of mouth networking as it seems this brings much higher quality contracts. What does the HN community think?
You're being downvoted heavily but I actually agree with you - diversity shouldn't be pigeonholed into just physical diversity. Diversity for the sake of diversity smells funny to me too but it's also near impossible to know when you need diversity for the injection of different points of view.
This would be an annoying prompt: http://spacecraftforall.com/

(hint: open in firefox)
Hmmm, well, per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERVWE1), it's a virus you might say we grabbed and re-purposed. In mice, there's "evidence for their absolute requirement for placenta development and embryo survival." And a couple of other genes of the original virus have been zapped. Call it a hack.

And I can't see anyone being that surprised that "Mutations in the HERV-W gene have been associated with multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia." If you mess with essential stuff, bad things can certainly happen. Although it could easily be somewhat more complicated, "correlation does not imply causation".

I guess I'm trying to say that where we got the genetic material from is more in the direction of a curiosity than something profound.
Take two groups of people. We'll call group A the "Bears", and group B the "Foxes".

The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were tinkering and playing with them despite society's mockery that they were pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was just a bonus.

The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a conscious/unconscious agenda against them.

Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then Bears, that's just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the Foxes themselves.

And so it goes.
People Want Safe Communications, Not Usable Cryptography
Read the book twice. Excellent. Dawkins can be a little long-winded and repetitive at time. For me the book got better after the first third or so. Highly recommended.
That's my biggest reason for switching from AdBlock+ to Privoxy + https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock . Same blocking rules but uses a ton less memory, since each tab isn't running all of AB+ .
Benchmarks tell me that Firefox's throughput is better at this point, and I have no reason to doubt it, but I also know from direct experience that variance in performance is far, far higher with Firefox.

I don't think I've ever run any asm.js other than demos.

PS: I just ran Octane 2.0. The SplayLatency test looks like it's designed to test what I'm talking about; I get 25k in Chrome, but only 9k in FF. http://developers.google.com/octane/benchmark#splaylatency

A bunch of people reckon it doesn't matter - see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519507 - but I think it does. GC pauses are very noticeable when there are realtime constraints, like animation.
Fixed already?
> I think it's batsh!t insane that (apparently) so many people are so willing to go through this type of process, and to go through it n times until they land a job.

I think it's insane that some companies hire people after only a single cursory interview. In a startup, a new hire is one of your biggest expenses and has a tremendous impact on the company. Not to mention that you're probably going to spend more time with this person than with you're significant other. Plus, it's a lot harder to break up with an employee than with a girlfriend.

Even the typical "gauntlet" seems like too little to me. I'd rather spend several weeks working with someone before hiring them, but unfortunately that's not possible.
Fwiw, it's called Electrolysis: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis