skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How old is the satellite view? Has anybody been by there recently? I'll admit I looked at the brochure and it (Quay Valley) looks like [vaporware].

Plus I'm just a bit perturbed with these must-be-generated-by-an-algorithm locational names. A quay is a wharf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wharf). And the only water around is coming out of a pipe. And a "Quay Valley" is some sort of malapropism, especially in geographic context.
Probably not. The people who design programming languages (at least, those who do it for more than hobby purposes) are almost certainly reasonable skilled and knowledgeable in compilers already.
The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinctiont
Live Profits Review
I agree with your general point, but the part about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is kind of nonsense. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a really specific provable statement about voting systems based on ranked preferences. You can't just change the conditions around freely and and there are certainly many sets of criteria that a ranked voting system can satisfy.
You might be able to argue that if more people knew how to write compilers, they would write better code.
There are plenty of non-white people in github. If there are still too many white people on github, you're free to analyse other programmers from websites other than github, such as this Chinese one: https://code.csdn.net/dwzteam/dwz_jui

All "colours" of people have free time to create projects.
Do you honestly believe that all differences are due to privilege?
You are talking about (philosophical) values. This is a value judgement:

> them feed their shit to the public

A solution to this would be to work for an agency whose leadership and positioning is compatible with your values.

For instance an agency that focuses on clients who sell outdoor equipment for hikers, bikers, gliders and so on would be compatible with the values of someone who thinks it is a good thing when someone goes on a hike.
I really like the science in his write ups, there's obviously a lot of science in baking but so many write ups focus on story building and act as if there is some magic behind the steps or ingredients that obfuscates their true purpose.

Mattie also has another site (foodcraftlab.com) that has even more involved recipes, including a good read about cream cheese, I love the idea of, though I'll likely never find the time to make: http://www.foodcraftlab.com/food/fermentation/vegan-cashew-c... .
This might be true for general purpose languages, but as a data point Django's templates suffer immensely by the implementers being unaware of how to write a fast compiler/interpreter.
How do you submit your project for the second challenge though?
of course not. you're right, i should be more general an say any electric dipole, but what i was trying to point out was that microwaves don't directly radiate heat and instead vibrate/rotate certain molecules. so, heat sensitive paper isn't going to work, unless there's some that have dye that will interact with a microwave.
If you use performance on the test set for model selection, this is not true. It follows from simple probabilistic reasoning, the more models you try the higher the chance one will score well on both the training set and the test set by "luck", and this is especially true with small datasets. In fact it is a best practice to use a separate validation set for model selection and use the test set only for final performance evaluation, see e.g. the answer to this question:

http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/9357/why-only-three...
Codis: yet another redis cluster
The questions which are really poor in quality end up being deleted. We did some analysis of deleted questions and our results were published at WWW 2014 [0]. The dataset of deleted questions (up until June 2013) is also publicly available [1]. We also built a machine learning system to predict questions that would be deleted in the future using various features [2].

[0] http://www2014.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p63...

[1] https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_po...

[2] https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction
What the hell is this doing on Hacker News?

Saying that as someone who was vegan for five years and who is presently on a high-fat, low-carb diet, by the way. I don't come here for stuff like this.
Are you sure that all internal traits needed for "winning" (what ever that means for you) have identical distribution across every possible divide of the society (by sex, race, social class, etc)?

Consider this: "The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction, although the variability of male scores has been found to be greater than that of females, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence)
We don't have any stats about the most failed business ideas - but I bet that males would also be overrepresented there - and this is because males are crazy risk takers.

As to the other part "And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?" - I believe that this might be a tautology in a capitalistic system - those that 'win the business race' are those that also gain power in this kind of society.

And I don't really mean that there is no discrimination - this is only to show that "why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners" can have answers other than discrimination. I do think there is discrimination and we should fight it, I even believe that even if there was no discrimination then still we would be better off if we had more diversity in many places - so it might make sense to do the 'reverse' discrimination (but you'd need to be very careful with that). I only want to say that to do anything positive you need to start with a good understanding of the mechanisms at play.
Right. Be careful of making semantic arguments about what words 'really' mean. It isn't very useful for getting to the bottom of what is actually happening.

'Merit' has its own problems, because it connotes 'deserving', and it is a problem to suggest that a rich, Harvard educated white male deserves a job more than a poor, community college educated black female. So language has baggage.

But let's say we're talking about 'imminent capability (as opposed to potential capability) and qualifications', then yes, it is an undeniable short-term optimisation to fill roles with these people. The economic argument to take seriously is that, by doing so we propagate privilege, and that in doing so we miss bringing forward people with high potential capability but low social privilege, who would be, in the long term, a better optimised workforce. And that is irrespective of the moral argument, that an economic optimisation at the cost of the opportunity of all is perhaps too high a price to pay.

> Did you really just do that?

Yes. There's no problem with being ignorant of things we don't know. Every single article on HN is full of stuff that I'm ignorant of. The things I am ignorant of knows no bounds. The poster I responded to seemed unaware that the things he was bringing up have long histories of being discussed and wrestled with in more sophisticated terms. He seemed to think that discussions of such things were 'stopped' because they were not allowed in some way, where actually they are discussed in very great detail and sophisticated by hundreds perhaps thousands of writers.

I think it more likely he is ignorant of that, than racist or sexist, though since he bought up the question of being accused of those things, I thought it wise to include those options.
Seagate NAS Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Nope, I've pointed out that the way you are using 'merit' overlaps with the way social scientists use the term 'privilege'.

Change the word 'privilege' for 'boondoggle', it doesn't matter, the point still stands. But as I pointed out, the use of the word 'privilege' is often such anathema that it prevents certain groups of people listening to the point, instead having them focus on the word.
Thunderbird is great and I have been using it forever. I have only recently run into the first real problem at work getting SMTP to work with our Office 365 account.

I have the settings the same as the MS online app smtp.office365.com, port 587, and I can receive mail just fine. I have spent a few minutes here and there googling around and trying to figure it out but so far no luck sending mail (if anyone has any ideas...)
Irony :)
Nonsense. Next you'll be telling me that attractive people make more money and get promoted more often.
When 'privilege' is used in these topics, it is often rather broadly defined to mean any feature of the accident of your birth that is beneficial compared to others who lack it.
So yes, a long history of intellectual achievement is a privilege in that sense: the prevalence of expectation (you can do this), of value (it is worth doing this), of role-models (so and so, who is similar to you, did this), mentorship (so and so, who your uncle knows, knows people who do this), and so on.

So yes, a long history of achieving X in a group tends to act as a privilege for children born in to that group, because there is a well-worn and understood path to going in that direction.

I get why people hate the word 'privilege' so much, but that is basically the hegemonic term of art.
Screenshot Saturday Standouts (indie games in development)
No, not at all. I think a large amount of diversity among individuals has nothing to do with privilege. Privilege is an inherently probabilistic bias, it doesn't determine anything.

When you find achievement highly correlated with a cultural group, however, it is pretty likely to be a function of privilege (in the social science sense). The alternative hypothesis is that, for example, Jews are just innately better at science.

I think the research that has been done into racial differences in intellectual abilities has generally failed to find anything that suggests the latter is likely.
Spreading the Cost on the Best Game Console for Kids
I think you're asking the right question, just the wrong way. Your question comes across (to me, and possibly others) as "prove to me that not paying myself a salary is illegal?", when I think your real question is "Does it make sense to do this, given the other competing demands on a founder's time?" My personal take is that if you're successful (let's use getting to your first actual cash compensation non-founder hire as a proxy for this), you can fix it at that time, if you don't make it that far, it's just as well you didn't waste time on it.

Besides, you probably commit "3 felonies per day", what's one more? :-)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-ebo...

The following section of Paul Graham's essay "Why startups condense in America", at http://paulgraham.com/america.html is relevant:

"7. America Is Not Too Fussy.

If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can assume larval startups will break most of them, because they don't know what the laws are and don't have time to find out.

For example, many startups in America begin in places where it's not really legal to run a business. Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Google were all run out of garages. Many more startups, including ours, were initially run out of apartments. If the laws against such things were actually enforced, most startups wouldn't happen.

That could be a problem in fussier countries. If Hewlett and Packard tried running an electronics company out of their garage in Switzerland, the old lady next door would report them to the municipal authorities.

But the worst problem in other countries is probably the effort required just to start a company. A friend of mine started a company in Germany in the early 90s, and was shocked to discover, among many other regulations, that you needed $20,000 in capital to incorporate. That's one reason I'm not typing this on an Apfel laptop. Jobs and Wozniak couldn't have come up with that kind of money in a company financed by selling a VW bus and an HP calculator. We couldn't have started Viaweb either.

Here's a tip for governments that want to encourage startups: read the stories of existing startups, and then try to simulate what would have happened in your country. When you hit something that would have killed Apple, prune it off.

Startups are marginal. They're started by the poor and the timid; they begin in marginal space and spare time; they're started by people who are supposed to be doing something else; and though businesses, their founders often know nothing about business. Young startups are fragile. A society that trims its margins sharply will kill them all."
Lots of people don't believe in a global economy either, and the idea of a global workforce comes at a very bad time.

The last few years, I've lived and worked in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Wilmington. All are shadows of their former shells, hollowed out by deindustrialization. What little remains is threatened by automation. Proponents of technology, and of globalization in capital and labor tell me that it will lead to greater prosperity for everyone. New, better jobs will replace the ones that are lost. We're waiting.
Wow, that Gedit transition looks awful. I'm curious what the motivation was for these 'client-side decorations' you speak of.
Sniper 3d Assassin Shoot to Kill Hack Tool 2015
In natural language processing, we can get close to state of the art performance on nearly every major task with a linear model; usually, the feature sets contain what are essentially conjunctions of features, but these are chosen by hand, by domain experts, rather than produced with, say, a polynomial kernel.
ah interesting, so run the expression in the worker and check the return code? But what if that expression partially ran and had side effects?
Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of the people looking at it thought it was a bad question.

This one made me chuckle:
What is the name of the “-->” operator?
Segment is hiring engineers to build the future of analytics infrastructure
Reply to your edit, I read hackeruser as using the term informally, to mean 'a good thing someone possesses', I was using it in the way it is normally used in discussions of equality, racism, sexism, and so on.

I didn't actually note hackeruser's use of the term, so I wasn't responding to that. My point, I think, stands alone. It doesn't become a tautology, it has a specific meaning, and one important point is that when folks say 'merit' they are often bundling a bunch of stuff in there which is problematic and discriminatory.

Merit sounds like a good thing. (Who wouldn't want to be Pro-Life, right?) But there are structural oppressions within it that deserve to be challenged.
When you design something concrete, you have to make choices on lots of things that you don't really care at that time, but the choice may haunt you later.

I think your point is that too much knowledge may hinder your view. That's certainly something you should watch; but in general, I think risk of making bad decision from ignorance is greater.
"Wiki" does not make sense as an abbreviation of "Wikipedia". "Wiki" is a general term, of which "Wikipedia" is a single example.

Calling "Wikipedia" simply "wiki" is like saying "book mentions..." when talking about what a specific book discusses.
This is true. Getting the performance that I do from mustache.java has a lot to do with using JIT techniques.
http://stackshare.io/rvalue/tools-and-skills
To demonstrate that it's not a tautology, can you describe a world in which a group is overrepresented but not privileged?

If you can't construct such a scenario, then by definition it is a tautology.
The declining Japanese birthrate.
Banks serve function far beyond mere transfer and holding of currency. Last I checked, the blockchain infrastructure doesn't e.g., issue mortgages.
>>by amplifying frequencies outside the range in the exact proportion they are attenuated.

This is true in the sense you know a function everywhere if you can expand it for example using the Taylor series with inifnite terms. This is not true for discrete data which is limited by the niquist rate and the DTFT of the data will clearly repeat, meaning you literally can't get at higher frequencies to amplify.

See the following figure, notice how higher frequencies are lower frequencies repeated: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Rec...

>>But every real system has noise.

Indeed, but in many channels there are physical limitations on the propagation which is slightly different then noise....
However, there are plenty of people who know how to write compilers. The question is why they weren't involved in making Django templates?
I give them a written spec, I don't think it's lawyerly at all, just professional - it clarifies exactly what to expect and lets you control scope.
Lots of people say they are for immigrants' rights, but they really aren't in practice. There are ideological forces which on the one hand welcome immigrants into 1st world economies, but then are against globalization --meanwhile, both forces work toward one goal, economically --to bring economic parity, long term. Those forces do cause disruption. On the one hand you have the ebb of some industries here but they are expanding and benefiting destitute people elsewhere in the world. So the middle class is saying, they believe they had a "right" of a middle class lifestyle, moreso than people in other parts of thew world.

We can argue if we think there should be 7 billion people who consume goods at the same rate as Americans, Japanese and Europeans, but so long as we accept an integrated world where we want emigration and immigration and further neo liberal economics, this is the progression we are looking at.

When people bemoan the hollowing out of industries while at the same time saying they support peoples in the third world, something is not right. They are lamenting the loss of their jobs but those jobs are being transferred to second and third world economies helping to build them.

What do we do about the people who aren't able to retool for more skilled jobs? It's an open question. Some day something will have to give. Either we figure out a way to manage that or society will suffer the consequences of inattention.
Not exactly.

Learning a new programming language -- really learning it, and understanding how the ecosystem works -- is a three- to six-month process for most programmers.

Let's say my team needed a new developer for a hardware project. I would probably not hire an experienced Ruby or Python dev that had no C experience.

A few months of hacking C in their spare time on a personal project with an Arduino? Now I'm interested.

Initiative and self-teaching are hugely important traits.
Yeah right, as if the embedded compiler vendors, mainframe compilers and commercial UNIXes (AIX, HP-UX, ...) are all 100% C++11 now.

Or worse, as if most IT departments are allowing the use of C++11 compilers in corporate environments.
Wikipedia is the only wiki most people knowingly interact with, and shortening it simply to "wiki" is in my experience common and causes no confusion.
http://www.camelsaust.com.au/

There is indeed an industry for this, but it's no where near as large as it would need to be to eliminate a significant amount of the population.

You also have the problem that the population is spread over such a large area.
Well, obviously chemicals can't replicate the chemicals produced by the chemical reactions among the chemicals in butter. I don't see what's so hard to understand about it.
I have never seen anything to suggest that the 'inner world' of a member of some other Species, would be any smaller than or less varied and interesting, than my own.

Humans tend to be occupied in neurosis, and subterfuge, more than anything else.

While other species are largely occupied with 'Nous'...and thus, would be far more elegant in their mental process and decision making and overall ontological 'poise', than people generally are.
Does Bitcoin Solve Byzantine Consensus?
It isn't very useful for getting to the bottom of what is actually happening.

I disagree. Finding a shared vocabulary can be essential to actual communication. It's far too easy for people to argue a similar or even the same point without that shared reference point. That doesn't really need to be what it "really means" as long as it's meaning in the discussion is well understood.

'Merit' has its own problems, because it connotes 'deserving', and it is a problem to suggest that a rich, Harvard educated white male deserves a job more than a poor, community college educated black female. So language has baggage.

That's a problem depending on how you define deserves and what your goal in filling the position is, and even what your eventual goal is (all as an outside observer). Is the goal of getting more participation in certain roles better achieved through artificial insertion of people into those roles, or more focus on earlier stages to make them better fits for those roles so they are naturally chosen at a later stage?

That we optimize for imminent capability is obvious. To do otherwise is gambling. Perhaps it could be considered too high a price to pay - if it had not shown over the past few hundred years that it pays great dividends. I think my stance here is that there are other ways to attack the downsides of privilege rather than putting sub-optimal workers in positions. Namely, work to fulfill the potential of those workers that have said potential.

I think an argument could be made that the current strategy, which has been in place for at least the last few hundred years in the west, has lead to a higher percentage of people utilizing their talents optimally than ever before, with a higher standard of living for more people than ever before, with a higher survival rate as well. I think it's folly to attack what I see as the fundamental mechanism that's lead to this while there are still other avenues to pursue.

There's no problem with being ignorant of things we don't know.

The problem is not the being ignorant, the problem is the use of the label ignorant as an argument tactic to cast the opposition's position as unworthy of consideration. Being ignorant has no bearing on whether an argument has merit. You may not want to rehash topics that you think have been well covered before, but in that case, a reference could be included with your statement of your position and where it was informed from, and why you think it's a decided issue (we are far, far from the hard sciences here, so let's not delude ourselves with notions that our opinions are fact).

Note: Click on the unique comment link to view that specific comment to reply directly when the topic is hot and reply links are not being shown.
I'm sure it will turn out just as well as every other top down forced solution to a non-existent problem
because it's a relatively boring and uninteresting problem?

The intersection of people who find a particular niche problem and also knows how to do parsing, compiling and optimizing well is pretty small.
I suspect Harry is going to die. I can't think of any rational explanation that he can survive.