skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Smallltalk is a dream language. It's tooling, syntax and productivity is years ahead of anything.
Take for example the Swift language. It's great, yes. But when you see ppl admiring the interactive playground: this is the Transcript windows available on Smalltalk 20-30 years ago !
Vetoing > 1 peer bonus for the same thing is pretty much policy.

Certainly it's manager discretion, but that's usually the right thing to do.

(There are other forms of bonusing that would make more sense in such a case, like a spot bonus, or whatever)
Gmail spam filter is definitely not working well for me. Obvious spam is considered legit and emails from senders that I constantly report as "not spam" still get into the Junk Mail folder. Outlook.com's spam filter is doing a way better job for me!
2014 is when (by executive order) it was extended to employees of Federal contractors that weren't covered by the NLRA. For those covered by the NLRA (nearly all private companies) the law has been on the books for well over half a century[1] (discussing pay is considered a "concerted activity"[2]).

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/157

[2] http://www.govdocs.com/can-employees-discuss-pay-salaries/
I think you could argue that physics (and other sciences) are applied philosophy, but they have the same issues with imprecise definitions. Consider what it means to be a "particle" today vs. 150 years ago. Supposing the word had been rigidly defined and everyone stuck to it, "particles" as such have been debunked.
> Also, I believe that all this marketing for "technically clueless" tend to make them even more clueless. In this case, it promotes understanding of "mp3 player" as "a box to play music" instead of what it really is

I think that's a really interesting point. What is an MP3 player really? There are probably good arguments to be made for more abstraction ("box to play music") or less abstraction ("portable storage device"). I'd err towards more abstraction in the long run, because that's the only way technology can progress to the truly magical stuff (eventually no one will be able to understand a piece of technology in its entirety, we're already almost there, so why run from abstraction?).

> I don't know, 2GB seems much clearer than "1000 songs" to me.

This is what I meant by "[hard numbers] let us think we have more information than we actually do." Perhaps in this particular instance that's not the case, but I think that stating a precise number might make us feel more knowledgable (or comfortable), without actually adding much actual information, e.g. see people who are focused on what GHz their phone has, or whatever. I agree that these numbers should be available though, but I don't think marketers (or presenters) are being dishonest or misleading for leaving them out; I think they're often actually helping.
I think it is entirely reasonable to treat fingerprinting as ipso facto user hostile; that it is critical to the continued success of certain business models is reason enough to force abandonment of those models.

If we decide that preventing fingerprinting is a good, then yeah, certain technologies will be out of bounds. So? This is exactly the way a society works.
While the spreadsheet might show differences in pay related to certain factors such as gender and age, it doesn't really reflect the most important quality which is how well they produce (e.g., some people code better than others). Is this piece of info somehow encoded in the spreadsheet?

Of course, merit doesn't matter in countries like (the old) Soviet Union. But I only want to work for companies and with people that compensate on the basis of merit and not some otherwise external factor.
Show HN: ICTIBUS – The best free YouTube client
The premise that space is an a priori condition of all human experience of the empirical world flows undisstilled from Kant [Critique of Pure Reason]. The skeptic's argument for idealism, that we cannot deduce that things are as they appear based on there appearance, is taken seriously. Kant's solution to the problem of an independent empirical reality is that we have a schema[0] for experiencing the world.

The gist of the argument is:

1. The idealist's argument assumes each of us experiences the world in the same way: as appearances.

2. Kant deduces the boundaries of our mechanism by distinguishing between inner experience parsed into a temporal schema and outer experience parsed into a spatial schema. The fact that we can talk about idealized space as geometry supports this claim without bogging down in a Platonic realm of Pure ideas.

3. The upside is that empirical knowledge if the external world is possible. The downside is that deductive knowledge of it is not. We cannot know the ding an sich.

It's a powerful enough abstraction that it actually disappears in modern culture to the point that people arguing against it will cite statistical or probabilistic evidence in making their case, i.e. arguing for an absolute truth based on a confidence interval.

[0]: "schema" as in a database analogy, not in the way Kant's argument is traditionally translated to English.
Wait, where is the "Never send it to Spam" option? I cannot find this option.
To put this in perspective for you:

Getting peer bonuses for doing things others find funny, amusing, whatever, is not hard.

I once received 12 peer bonus nominations for flaming a noogler acting very entitled on an internal mailing list.

My manager approved the best one, which said something like "Dan is very good at instilling culture into our newer Googlers"

The rest were rejected. While getting one or two peer bonuses for something is generally okay, approving 12 would likely not make sense from a manager perspective when their are other recognition/bonus mechanisms that fit better for that kind of thing.
Here's what you're missing. If there is a sex-based difference in negotiation skill then there's no way that we will have the same outcomes in hiring and compensation between the sexes even in a system where there is no bias.

Up until now, whenever there are different outcomes between men and women the assumption has been that they perform the same. Take a look at the gender pay gap arguments.
Telling employees to keep salaries a secret is exactly like giving candy to a child and telling them not to tell anyone else.

In both cases, the giver is being manipulative and trying to hide something, and it's messed up.

I'm shocked how many people are OK with keeping their salary a secret.
I would say the NB-36H because it actually flew and because "The original crew and avionics cabin was replaced by a massive lead and rubber lined 11 ton crew section for a pilot, copilot, flight engineer and two nuclear engineers. Even the small windows had 10-12 inch thick lead glass."

The thought that the X-6[1] and WS-125[2] would be good ideas further lead me to nominate the NB-36H.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_X-6

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-125
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588316

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926141

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311282
I'm aware of the PowerShell GUI. It's better than the ancient "cmd" GUI, but I still miss some niceties like marking with left-click and pasting with middle-click. Basic stuff like maximizing the window doesn't work (it doesn't auto-adjust width). It doesn't seem to have a way to open a new tab with a keyboard shortcut. For some reason it starts with the 4x6 font. When I change that setting, it displays a message that it can't modify the shortcut. Etc. I know there are ways around all this. I'm just saying that for me things have reversed. Mint works for me out of the box, and it's Windows that requires fiddling. It used to be the other way around.

Also, "PowerShell works well, but it is different that anything you've used before", in 30 years I have used a lot of things most people haven't heard of. Including PowerShell. I still find it's GUI lacking. I think Doom's console is superior: quick to open, clean and to the point.
Flexport (Google Ventures, First Round) Is Hiring Engineers
If you look at the Super Guppy with it's loading bay open [1] you can't help but wonder where they put all the wiring and hydraulics between the cockpit and the rest of the plane?

[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy#/m...
Speaking as someone who lives in a developing world tax haven, I'd almost rather live here than in SF, even if they cost the same. But it's not even close. I told the Google recruiter that they can't afford me, so please stop emailing me. They can't pay me enough to make up for the difference in cost of living.
> I think you misunderstand what free speech is

I think I understand it better than you. I am arguing about moral principles here, not law. That's a different level of discussion (you cannot meaningfully discuss legality if you don't recognize the moral principle from which you are starting).

And I think that free speech (that could be roughly called "right to criticize in public", because if the speech is not being critical, then no one cares) should apply to corporations and individuals too as subjects. The reason is I don't really care if I am getting screwed by government or not.

The idea of "government" that should be subject to free speech but not other institutions leads to contradictions, because what is government doesn't have a good definition. For example, if the institutions is government owned, then you can criticize it. If not, then you can't, even if it would be exact same institution. Or you can consider the opposite case, where the government is effectively owned by foreign multinational company. What then?

I therefore reject the notion that the ownership structure should determine what can be criticized. I believe everything that is unfair, or inefficient, should be possible subject of criticism, even in public, from anybody. Because that's how you actually improve institutions, governmental or not.
If you have a hash table of size S with N entries in it, then the probability of hitting a collision on the next insertion is N/S. This is why many hash tables will resize and rehash once the load factor (which is N/S) reaches some predetermined fraction. Book-keeping using this method is cheap.

It's important to distinguish "What is the probability of the next insertion causing a collision?" and looking at a chained hash table of occupancy N and asking "What is the probability that this hash table already contains a collision?" (the birthday paradox yields 50% for 23 birthdays in answer to this), and again "How many collisions do I expect to find in this hash table?", which is what the author is writing about, and is actually the cumulative probability of there having been a collison over the lifetime of all previous insertions.

The collision rate will depend on how long entries live in your hash table and the rate at which you're doing insertions.
That was the manager exercising their discretion (approving a PB is discretionary, usually you'd decline >1 PB for the same thing) in a way that was probably bad.

As proof - i submit the fact that it made Erica feel horrible!

Note: It could also be the other manager didn't notice. PB's are automatically approved after X days if they aren't turned down. It's rare to get > 1 PB for the same thing, so it may be the other manager just didn't pay attention (the system sends email once) or whatever. This would be even more likely if the other manager had a bunch more employees.
If the argument of this paper is correct, I think it would be evidence against materialism. If you find a position has an implausible consequence, that is evidence against that position, especially if its competitors (e.g. dualism, idealism) lack that consequence.
Reddit News Spam
More and more I feel that income for all workers should be public information. Sweden does that and so far their world hasn't ended.
A good proportion of maths olympians go into mathematics in academia rather than into industry. Industry does need problem solvers, but maths olympians develop creativity and a sense of elegance and beauty as well. Industry requires efficient solutions to technical problems, more than elegant or beautiful ones, at least relative to what is possible with full academic freedom.
I got a tour of this place a few years ago when I was in Novosibirsk for a genomics conference. I'll see if I can dig up the pictures and videos, but a few observations.

1. The different body characteristics (fur coat, ribs, ears, etc) do make the tame foxes look like dogs, more than a wild animal. It's fascinating why those two things co-evolve.

2. The tame foxes (and especially minxes) seemed more mentally challenged than tame. For example, the tame minxes and foxes would just sit around and purr/drool, and that's pretty much all they did.

3. The untamed ones looked very unhappy in their cages.

4. When I was there, they had already begun selling the foxes to rich westerners. I think the going rate was a few thousand dollars per fox.
VTOL/STOL section is missing the Grumman Nutcracker:

[1] http://forum.keypublishing.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=6...

[2] https://books.google.lk/books?id=GQEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA68&redir_...
There's some sort of "exotic pet" start-up here. It may take 10 years of development, but the research costs would be relatively low. I wonder what the ethics of that would be.
The drone system enables not a big war, but a war small enough it can be pretended away. It also represents a new kind of war: not against an opposing national force, but against a list of individuals whose names are computed from the global surveillance programme.

Yes, if you look at drones-the-technology the protest looks a bit mistargeted. But that's just because it's a convenient label for drone-bombing-the-politics.

Compare nuclear weapons. You could say that they're just another increase in scale from the lethality of World war 2. But the politics (mutual assured destruction etc, antiproliferation etc) are different.
I forgot to mention that the Fair Labor Standards Act was a follow-up to the National Labor Relations Act. That act gives rights to share wage information, prevents employers from interfering with that, and court rulings since then have affirmed it.

As others replied, it is true when it is just the government and company and individual employee involved, companies usually break this law with impunity. If you are in a labor union or a union organizing campaign, like for the CWA, then you are on more equal footing, as all court rulings up to this point have enforced this right.
Rather like the Ukranian civil war, the world seems content to ignore the civil war in Pakistan and the fact that a global power is intervening on one side.
Types for an Untyped World: Bracha vs. Felleisen [video]
The folks at Slack would have excellent data on how this works today. I'd love to see any analysis by them.

Anyone from Slack on here?
When you said that, I thought that OneNote would be the app of choice.
How to impress me in an interview
In principle, I wish I could freely share my salary with others. But in practice, I keep it a close secret. Why? Because I have to work with people very closely.

This is not intended as a humblebrag.

So for the year 2014 my performance review was excellent. Pretty much firewalled. I've taken on a lot of technical responsibility above my pay level (because I want to raise my pay level!). I was rewarded with a substantial raise. But several of my coworkers were very upset with their raises (which were very minimal) and vented openly about them. Should they find out that I received a raise higher than them, how would they react? Given their open whining, probably not well. Their anger would be directed toward me. I'd rather avoid that silliness.
Since it's often impossible to tell the difference between people
seeking feedback on their projects or startups, and people who are just
trying to advertise (spam), HN has special "Show HN" posts. You can find
them under the "show" link in the top menu, and if you want feedback on
your project, you can do your own "Show HN" submission. The rules for
doing a "Show HN" submission are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Oh, I am not arguing with that. I'm just saying that the fact consciousness itself cannot be defined scientifically at this point doesn't mean you can just wave it away as "an illusion" without further explanation.
People who had to maintain complex financial systems would disagree. They were slowly migrating to, IIRC, Java.
My first programs were written in FORTRAN II. The language was really quite terrible; I wish I still had some of those programs I wrote, I'd like to see how they looked written before Dijkstra's "GOTO considered harmful".

To me, programming during that time, it seemed like FORTRAN's evolution stalled at a critical period between FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 77. I'd been exposed to LISP, PL/1, SOBOL, and APL in my university programs and it was frustrating to use FORTRAN IV for non-numerical projects. The last time I did so was around 1974 when I wrote a LR parser generator in FORTRAN IV. The lack of mechanisms for handling structured data made it a messy job.

It was at that point that I came across the source for the Wirth's first Pascal compiler that ran on the computation center's CDC 6400. I learned Pascal by studying that code and I never wanted to go back to FORTRAN (or PL/1).

A few years later the greatly improved FORTRAN 77 became available, but it was too late. C and Pascal were real and gaining ground and Algol 68, CLU, Alphard, Scheme, the Red and Blue languages, and ADA had captured the imagination of the language designers.
"School of economics" so do you not think they would be biased towards providing results that suited their clients agendas?
Gates Foundation Funds Bitsoko, Promotes Bitcoin Literacy in Kenya
Ah the want do you want 2+2 to equal boss :-)
No function pointers? Then how are tasks/threads going to get spawned?

I also think that ellepsis in preprocessor statements can be valuable for debug log messages that can be turned on or off at compile time.
Pretty much. The same people who see salespeople as overpaid schmoozers and order-takers (some are, many aren't) would be utterly horrified at the thought they themselves could be fired without a second thought because of an organizational change or budget cut at a key account.
The US Labor Relations Act has been around since 1935. It's nothing new: 29 U.S. Code § 157 - Right of employees as to organization, collective bargaining, etc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/157
Great answer.

Though now I feel my 140 day streak is wildly inadequate. :(
I like everything about Musk, and this is the first time I'm actually sitting down and listening to him present. But I was slightly put off by his habit of punctuating significant statements with that characteristic half-hearted chuckle.
They're already selling them, but all the various laws around animals in other countries make it difficult.
Thank you sago, that's accurate. Technically, chemlambda rewrites together with the reduction algorithm used in the script quiner.awk from the repository describe an asynchronous graph rewrite automaton.

(An addition to sago's comment is that the rewrites are done randomly; there is a cycle in the algorithm where rewrite patterns are identified, then coins are flipped and as a result some of them are done. The chemical analogy is that there are invisible "enzymes" which do the rewrites, and they roam around randomly. Alternatively one can make another version of the algorithm, for example one where these enzymes are produced and they choose randomly their preferred patterns. This is a way to erase the visual impression that there are global steps in time when the graph is updated.)

Graphic lambda calculus is the ancestor of chemlambda. Actually both formalisms don't have a lot in common with lambda calculus, in the sense that there is an algorithm to produce a graph from a term in untyped lambda beta calculus, such that the lambda calculus rewrites correspond to moves in these graphical formalism. But chemlambda works with a family of graphs which is much larger than the ones which represent lambda terms.

However, you can see in the demos page some classical computation problems: Ackermann function, factorial, predecessor. There are also some demos which can't be qualified as related to lambda calculus.

Chemlambda resembles most with the ALCHEMY of Fontana and Buss, which is also based on lambda calculus, with the main difference being that in ALCHEMY application is a chemical reaction and abstraction is a reactive site (very sketchy description), while in chemlambda the application and abstraction are, on equal footing, just nodes in a graph.
As far as I know, this only regards base-pay. There is a lot of wiggle-room in terms of bonuses, staffing, space… Apparently a professor in our math-department was expensive enough, that a different position needed to be downgraded to the point where no one qualified applied anymore. Your exact compensation also depends e.g. on whether or not you have family, to the best of my knowledge.
They already sell those as pets, as you can see by googling "Russian pet foxes". Unlike a lot of exotic pets, it seems that they do fine as long as there is a fenced-in backyard and a local veterinarian who is willing to work with foxes.
That's not what you said before, you suggested that the research could be used to hire men preferentially.

As for your"up until now ", that's not true. Some people assume bias in absence of clear evidence, others assume differences in ability, interest, etc. The research doesn't really provide a clear basis for any particular quantified level of unequal impact, so the people who start off with one or the other assumption in the absence of clear evidence of the source of a particular level of unequal results in a particular form or industry are likely to stay with that assumption even with this research. Neither the justification for deliberate bias you suggested in your first party note the soft on assumptions you now suggest is a result from the research we have.
I wonder if this type of domestication wouldn't be possible with raccoons or some of the great apes, maybe giving other traits like intelligence equal footing with docility. Uplift, in the David Brin sense.
If you want to make snide jokes you should at least be informed.

Steve Jobs’ salary when he was CEO was $1 http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/technology/1111/gallery....
Excellent write-up. I have been playing with Express a lot, but for production I am seriously considering to start using Hapi. Creating applications for the healthcare sector comes with lots of requirements and regulations. If you take that into account, Hapi makes a lot of sense, because there's a lot of boilerplate code available in the plugins (most of which are perfectly maintained) that will be required in the app.
My answer to that question would be, when I am at work I give 120% of my effort to my job. I build skills and I do research the latest trends in the industry. However I believe a good work life balance is important. When I leave work, I spend quality time with my family and at the gym.

When I was looking for a job eight months ago. I had interviews with 10 different companies in the course of three weeks. I was not offered one job probably because of the attitude I expressed above. I accepted a job where the manager emphasized his belief in a work life balance.

It's a buyers market for qualified experienced software developers. I won't jumped through unnecessary hoops to get a job.
Why haven't they moved to a javascript to FORTRAN transpiler?
I looked a bit at the gender distribution for the gold and silver medalists, I would guess only 1 in 10-20 is a girl, most seemed to be from the eastern bloc countries.