skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is with the misspelling of retard? Is it so someone can't search for it, or because of the connotations behind the word? Why even use the word at all then? Why not just use one of the other many socially acceptable terms?
Personally I find spelling the word this way is a bit offensive. It's as if you are saying you want to use it, but you know it is wrong, so you will just slightly use it.
Yes, apparently: http://chicagomaroon.com/2015/02/27/charlie-hebdo-journalist... (third-to-last paragraph.)
Big companies coming in with their money does help. Vancouver loses out on loads of people to SF and Seattle.

I used to live around Vancouver, I really like it there. I'm not going to choose that over Seattle where I can make more money.

With TN visas being a pretty painless path towards working in the states why not move down?

Of course if I can work for good money at a good company in Vancovuer then I'd stay. Didn't really seem like an option.
So is anyone doing a vitamin D supplement trial for expectant mothers? I wonder how long they'll just leave that speculation out there before anyone tries an experiment. I'll push the snooze button on this one. Society doesn't seem to need a better answer on this than "More diagnosis" or "Because they're muslims".
Not like anyone's anxious to pull the P-51 or Spitfire out of mothballs, certainly.

While the Hornet doesn't have a huge combat record, it has a long flight record and a long record of carrier operations and has excelled at both with less maintenance burden than its predecessors.
Those days never existed. I'm from a generation where many that now would be considered "on the spectrum" were diagnosed with personality disorders. (Narcissistic being one of them btw, a diagnosis, not just a common adjective, and the most fashionable being "borderline".)

With exactly the same broad spectrum of opinions, with or without clinical frame of reference. When it comes to psychiatry, science appears to be as sensitive to fashion as society in general.
Cheers for that link, it's very interesting reading.
My takeaway from the article and also based on personal experiences is that governments have shielded themselves from automation. There's just insane fat wherever you look
There is a reasonable school of thought that argues the world would be a much safer place if the number of military superpowers in it was zero, and that as the only old-school military superpower remaining, the US is therefore a negative factor on global stability and peaceful relations.

So, in other words, you'd prefer a situation similar to the world as it was before World War 1? That world wasn't exactly peaceful either. You say that you would prefer a world with no superpowers. Such a world has existed, and it's always been rather unstable, with many regional powers jockeying for position, often leading to massive wars. And in the end, a superpower or two (Spain and Portugal, France and Britain, USA and USSR) always emerges. In fact, it's the periods between superpower domination that have been the bloodiest, as declining superpowers and regional powers jockey to see who will be the next global hegemon.
So don't compare to SF, compare to Seattle.
There is actually a subreddit for pointing out the various ways in which 'swole' people face oppression, and although the users are completely tongue-in-cheek with all their posts, it does highlight a lot of very real ways in which assumptions and public attitudes affect the lives of people who choose to devote themselves to cultivating a fit body.

I am hardly 'swole', being a average-build dude who sits in front of a computer for 12+ hours a day, with my only real exercise coming from using a bicycle for commuting, but I do think the subreddit is a great example of how people can channel oppression they face to derive humor and fuel for motivation to 'go harder'.

http://www.reddit.com/r/swoleacceptance for anyone interested.
I'm not sure if their automatic system accepting the order is a problem. It shouldn't be (no people are involved in any of it from their side). However they serving someone who is violating Shabbos at the same time is a problem (for both them enabling the violation, and the violator). And that's timezone dependent.

See http://www.zomet.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=199&ArticleID=53
Much of Europe works perfectly well with out health insurance.
Reminds me of: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf
I think actuary is a poor example. Graeber himself would might correct himself if he was reminded of what he just said. It's probably a waste of time to hone in on that particular off the cuff statement.

There are still plenty of jobs which are bullshit though. For example my girlfriend is an auditor. Most of her job would disappear if the infrastructure existed to have her clients financial records completely digitised. A program could then analyse the data (which is mostly done at the moment with a bunch of spreadsheets right now) and with higher audit coverage (they can only check/test a fraction of records and transactions). Her workload could go from 5-6 days a week to 2.
>Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society.

Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these?

* Private equity CEOs

* Lobbyists

* PR researchers

* Telemarketers

* Bailiffs

Tell us how the world would be worse off without them.

You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.
I specifically mentioned that in my comment. Yet, in languages that do have the concept of a thread (and do not restrict side effects), these are all anti-patterns: performing side effects in these monadic compositions is dangerous, and those compositions replicate constructs that already exist in those languages (control structures, exceptions). No one in their right mind would consider importing these Haskellist concepts to other languages were it not for the fact that blocking threads is expensive. Fixing that problem directly -- meaning, making blocking free -- is therefore the right solution.
> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well.

I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments.

Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit.

That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high.

It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry.

He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh".

Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)
Well, the standard doesn't use "pass by reference" or "pass by value" terminology. It just uses the term "value" to refer to the result of evaluating an expression.

The spec also says

> there must be a standard way for the compiler of the creation expression to pass a reference ... to the member class's constructor

So it seems perfectly correct to say that "objects are passed by reference", and that those references could also be referred to as values.
Same here, doesn't work on FF 30, on Ubuntu. Two machines behind the same NAT router. They connect but the files never get transferred.
I recall writing a mandelbrot program on my Casio (in the awful Casio basic) in the late 90s, after reading Ivar Peterson's "The Mathematical Tourist" (actually started with Sierpinski Gasket variations, as that is much easier, not to mention faster). I was wondering how he managed to do it in 12 minutes on such an old machine -- until I realized he only checked 24 iterations. I believe I started at a 100... and it took ~6 hours to run (more than the time from lunch until I got home, anyway...).
I'm surprised you would say that there "hundreds of different definitions" of polymorphism. Here's one of the top-ranked results for the term: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1031273/what-is-polymorph...

If you look at the answers, aside from a few that are really poorly phrased, they all fundamentally say the same thing.

If I were interviewing someone and asking them about polymorphism, I would expect a definition which shows understanding and perhaps an example which explains to me that they really do understand it in concrete terms. (I'd probably give them bonus points for mentioning what the Greek words mean, but only because someone who knows that is likely to be someone I'd enjoy working with.)

Inheritance is certainly a dicier subject. I'm not 100% sure I'd ask about either polymorphism or inheritance in an interview nowadays (though I certainly have in the past), but if I were asking about the latter, I'd probably phrase it in the specific context of a particular language - or perhaps request a comparison of how inheritance differs between two languages. I guess, really, I'd actually want a discussion about inheritance versus composition - but, having asked for just that in the past, it was quite surprising to me (at the time) how many people had literally no idea what the term "composition" meant (despite, I'm sure, using it on a daily basis).
I expect he wants the world to change more fundamentally than that - per your example, if you have a good state-provided health service then the health insurance question is simply no longer an issue. There are of course countries that do this already.

I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance premiums), would risk-taking increase to the point where the cost to the state became untenable? Then again if we lived in a futuristic society looked after by self-maintaining solar-powered robots then any service would essentially be free so maybe it wouldn't matter.
Yeah, but you make 50-100% more in SF.
The list was a list of jobs that people self declared as useless, not which Graeber decided were useless.
I've always liked the adage "Offense is taken, not given"
"in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary."

Sounds about right actually...
Are you sure? In the article it looks like it's a direct quote from Graeber.
This article contains better quotes from the ruling: http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/21/8267273/judge-in-kleiner-p...

"Defendant Kleiner Perkins’ motion for nonsuit on plaintiff Ms. Pao’s request for punitive damages is denied. Interpreting the evidence most favorably to Ms. Pao and most strongly against Kleiner Perkins, and resolving all presumptions, inferences, and doubts in favor of Ms. Pao, as I am required to do on a nonsuit motion (Wegner, Fairbank, and Epstein, California Practice Guide: Cilvil Trials and Evidence (The Rutter Group 2014) 12:203), there is sufficient evidence from which a reasonable juror could find, as to Ms. Pao’s claims for gender discrimination and retaliation, that Kleiner Perkins acted with malice, fraud or oppression. Per this standard, there is sufficient evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that Kleiner Perkins engaged in intentional gender discrimination by failing to promote Ms. Pao and terminating her employment and that Kleiner Perkins attempted to hide its illegal conduct by offering knowingly false and pre textual explanations for its decisions not to promote Ms. Pao and to terminate her employment. […]

Similarly, per the nonsuit standard, there is sufficient evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that Kleiner Perkins retaliated against Ms. Pao for making a protected complaint in December 2011 and January 2012 and for filing this lawsuit by failing to promote her and terminating her employment and that Kleiner Perkins attempted to hide its illegal conduct by offering knowingly false and pre textual explanations for its decisions not to promote Ms. Pao and to terminate her employment."

---

The judge is essentially saying that IF one interprets all the evidence and testimony, strongly in favor of Pao and against KP, then there would be malice/fraud/oppression. The judge explicitly states that he is following a mandatory legal standard. This is not his subjective interpretation. The judge is not saying anything about the actual strength of Pao's case.
Graeber's argument in the book is that businesses are actually run like the government, ie are bureaucratic institutions (that pretend to be "markets"). He has an interesting story about how they were modelled on the post office originally, when large businesses arose in the late nineteenth century.
OK, just off the scanner: http://imgur.com/gallery/8z7zP

Generated with a Commodore 64, output on an Epson RX80 dot matrix printer, circa 1986. All coding credit to my genius brother!
> It's also amazing what networking can do to get around many processes that people normally go through which kinda shows how worthless they are. So many times I've been told something that would take weeks or months ended up taking days or hours because I knew someone who could put me on "the rush list" which typically bypassed much of what was required in the first place.

Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of privilege.
Yes, if you read the original bullshit jobs article it is clearer.
See my post above! ;-)
When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.)

So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program. Not an impossibly advanced one, mind you - it certainly would not have to be smarter than even the 50th percentile of programs out there today. If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This extends to all jobs, eventually. You are seeing it happen today, with farming. Tomorrow, we will see taxi and Lyft drivers replaced with self driving cars, and mail/package delivery given entirely to robots and drones.

The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing.

I don't appreciate the fact that you run so far away with this doomsday scenario of "no insurance means we all get sick and die". Try to focus on the discussion the article wants us to have, not on the side-scenario that you want to use to rationalize actuaries or other poorly optimized vocations.
Single payer still acts as an insurer and needs actuaries (even if they're not called that) to figure out which procedures make sense with their limited resources.
That's a very reasonable point to make.

That said, I think the fundamental question here is whether such rule-breaking is endorsed by centuries of priests, or if it's just something people do.

In Judaism, the rabbis have codified such rule-bending for at least 2,000 years. And we have also been debating whether it's acceptable for as long. :-)_
"Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm" ~ABRAHAM LINCOLN

taken from:

http://quotlr.com/quotes-about-success
The real problem here is complexity - people don't understand what is the goal of what they do, and often there really is no goal because their bosses do not understand the system too.

Maybe we should start treating law and bylaws as code and fight the complexity with decoupling, encapsulation, no side effects, etc?
Or minutes, seconds.
Simple example. Bank transfers. Take a few days. People actually are involved to push a freaking button in the US.

Takes <1s in reality. Takes <1s in Germany because it's enforced by law that operations like that cannot be artificially made longer.

Here's another. Getting a work visa to the USA.
Takes about 6 month, average. There is no background check or what not. Nothing more than a 5 minutes interview (non-exagerated - sometimes it's in fact faster) with a real person and someone to push the print button in the automated printing facility.
5 minutes, made into 6 month...

The examples are countless.
This is bullshit and again you blame the legal system without even trying it, as for the tech industry, just because you were assaulted in this industry doesn't paint the whole industry as worst than any other industry.

Personally, the last thing I want is someone who was repeatedly attacked to teach my daughter or my son how to behave in life. You obviously got no clue how to carry yourself around people, to be raped once is bad luck to be assaulted and raped so many times shows that something is wrong with you, not with the system. You were assaulted by different people and by the same people repeatedly as adults, a sane person would know how to prevent it, yes I blame you, the "victim".

The thing is, you were not raped, you invent this story for attention, that's why you go to the media rather than the police. I wouldn't let someone like you get close to my kids or to the education system, you are a danger to society.
Let's take Private Equity CEOs. The bottom line of what they do is try to reallocate capital away from less productive investments and towards more productive investments.
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf - this paper is actually pretty insightful.
On the other hand, I wonder if this opens the door for more radical opinions on the opposite side. If those who deviate from the socially enforced norm expect (whether correctly or not) for their views to be condemned anyway the marginal social cost of holding more extreme views is lessened.
I'd go as far to say that this isnt only a problem in governmental institutions but also in many private companies.

Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction.

So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long (which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that matters".

Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.
To your last point (assuming I'm reading your last sentence correctly). I don't think its a race/nationalism thing - I think it's more of a concern because people don't want properties being used as investment vehicles for foreign money and driving up the price for people whose primary use of houses in the area is shelter.
I wonder how much of that "interference" was the other ministers getting tapped by their private industry friends trying to do something about the government competition.
Molecular Nitrogen Findings on Rosetta
My disdain for those technique stem from their being anti-patterns in imperative languages. Performing side effects inside monadic compositions is particularly dangerous, and the only reason anyone even considers importing these techniques is because blocking is expensive, as they replicate features already found in imperative languages (control structures, exceptions).

There is nothing about these that make them related to "general reactivity", mostly because there is no such thing as reactivity. They are simply techniques of performing actions in referentially transparent languages. In imperative languages, the most general, theoretically pure, fundamental construct of "reactivity" (whatever that means), is the thread (Erlang's send is not special, and not required).

There is absolutely nothing more fundamental about the referentially-transparent (lambda calculus) way of doing things than the imperative way of doing things, and since the article discusses imperative languages, the LC way of doing things is potentially harmful as there is nothing to enforce referential transparency.
And the worst part about that is when somebody is having a bad day, that 5 minutes becomes "SOL - Never"