skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I say size was statistically significant not quality of data

Size is not necessarily significant unless is a random selected sample (and I'm not sure volunteers would count as random).

Let's say you have a population of 100 and there are two groups (A-80% and B- 20%). Let's say that individuals in group A are more keen to voluteer themselves. You could have a sample of 50% of the population and still not have a representative sample of their entire population (ie. 49 from A and 1 from B), so the sample size didn't matter to much in that case.
Wow. Colin, are you just trying to win an argument online or are you really that flippant when it comes to firing an employee? Keep in mind that we're talking about people's livelihoods, here---it's the sort of thing that can stress people out to the point of mental breakdown, even if you're not actively threatening them.

Firstly, this isn't a job interview. If someone's been working with you for long enough that they want to discuss a salary adjustment, then shouldn't your assessment of the value that they bring to the table be more informed than looking for "red flags" on the spot?

Secondly, developers are generally not familiar with basic statistics. If it's important to your business that they be better-than-average at stats, then budget some time and money for training.

Thirdly, in the real world, we make decisions from incomplete and biased information all the time. Sometimes, those decisions turn out to be wrong, but on the whole, it still works out better than pretending that we have no information at all. If you're in management and you have access to more complete information, then the smart thing for an employee to do is to have a conversation with you. It makes no sense to fire someone for that.

I have a lot of respect for your technical work, but the management style you're describing so far sounds authoritarian and abusive. I really hope that's not how you'd actually treat your reports, in practice.
And if wishes were horses, we’d all ride ponies?

The Model S is a really nice sedan. But its performance on the track is clearly sub par because a) it’s heavy and b) it just isn’t designed to run at full tilt for very long before the batteries or motors start to overheat. Sure, from cold the performance is impressive but if you only get that performance for a few minutes, it’s rather less so.

The design spec was probably something like “give the buyer the feeling they’ve got their money’s worth when they burn off their friends from the next set of red lights” not “beat a top-line Porsche round the Nürburgring”. And that’s OK - no one expects executive barges to be amazing track cars, except (apparently) for the hoards of Telsa boosters who don’t seem able to accept that their object of desire might have the odd flaw.

Telsa are the Apple of the automotive world, right down to having their very own reality distortion field :)
> "just because, for example, one employee negotiated harder than the other"

Isn't that a perfectly valid reason, though?
Top 'Counter-Strike' player admits eSports has a doping problem
I think these arguments are better suited for a question "is USA inteligent", than "is USA conscious".

Why do we assume enough inteligence = consciousness? There was a great sci-fi book exploring that - "Blindsight", I highly recommend it.
It's not necessarily a bad idea to work for experience ("HUGE potential for learning"), but minimum wage seems very low. Consider asking around at your HBO what other students and recent graduates earn; as an inferior alternative, intermediair.nl usually has some (very broad and vague) salary data. (IIRC, recent university graduates in computer science can expect 2200-2400 euros per month.)

If you want to continue working here, consider trying to negotiate an agreement that you'll get a significant raise once you have your BSc.

Also, do weigh the benefits of not having a more senior person around (e.g. being allowed to mess with everything yourself) with the downsides of not having a more senior person around (e.g. nobody to learn from, your mistakes won't be corrected as long as you still manage to make the project work somehow.)
Rockstar lib will make you a Rockstar programmer in 2 lines of code
What possibilities? Carrying your own oxidiser is always going to be wasteful when there's a plentiful supply of oxygen around already. If anything the opposite technology is more interesting - a space launch vehicle using air-breathing engines (i.e. SABRE). Where aircraft have used rockets it's been similar to use of afterburners - for emergency short-term extra thrust (e.g. JATO).
Trove opend stuffs and it was great enough
> I can show you, right now, a 500,000 message view across multiple folders infinite scrolling with JMAP and I can jump to the middle of that view and load a screenful of messages. You CAN NOT do an IMAP sort without fetching one record for every message in the folder. If you have a million messages in a folder (yes, we have customers who do that) then you need to fetch a million records.

If I've got the sort order (from a UID SORT REVERSE DATE command), and a user jumps to the middle of the list, I can FETCH just the visible subset of messages by calculating what the UIDs would be and then doing:

TAG UID FETCH <visible-uid-set> (ENVELOPE FLAGS ...)

I'm not sure why you think you'd have to issue a FETCH command for each message individually.
Have you thought about the fact that your employees may not want their salaries to be public? Sure it is trendy and feel good and omg transparency, but it seems a bit douchey to me.

Nevermind the fact you're opening up a whole can of worms for any of your employees that might be going through a divorce, fighting for custody in family court, the target of a scam artist, robbery target, trying to negotiate splitting rent with a friend, etc. You don't know peoples current or future personal situations, and they probably don't want to come to you and have to explain when it does become a problem.
Practically, does that mean that the rate of collissions increase substantially once you have more than 65535 entries in a hash table with 32 bit hashes? To the point that it makes more sense to use a BST instead, even?
I seem to recall reading that the BBC did the same for the BBC Micro, although I can't find a reference now. Waiting half an hour for a game to load just to find the tape had got corrupted right near the end ("R Tape Loading Error" on the ZX Spectrum I grew up with) was one of the aspects I less fondly remember!
Want to really dive into this? Read Duarte's Resonate (available free from the author here: http://resonate.duarte.com/ )

Same concepts, just much more in depth, with great examples.
Is there a site for finding “worthwhile” jobs, or should we build one?
I'm interested in the idea of a site which helps identify "worthwhile" jobs people may be able to do, if they feel a desire for such a job.

Since "worthiness" comes in different stripes and is a matter of opinion such a site might let users tag jobs with categories such as "scientific advancement" or "access to education" and then jobs could be voted up and down on those terms. Job seekers could then filter by their skills and areas of interest to find the "best" jobs for them.

Does something along those lines exist, and if not - do people think it would be valuable?
Why dont just ask them here.. Many of them are on HN.
Then again; in all of Sweden everybody's tax returns are public information and their economy still seems to do just fine...
Nike Designs Shoe for Disabled People
at some point i really hope the hacker community rejects google entirely. for me, especially as a musician, google is dead. after the NDA deal they did with the PRS, i am not permitted to know how much they pay out per stream for my tracks which they weren't mandated to control. they also built their entire platform (youtube) from illegal content. the illegal content came first, they then built a user base from this, which they used as currency to do deals with major record labels. wow. i intend to take this to court with a bunch of other musicians.
Looks like a great proposal, but I don't see the point of preparing such a mission before we get all the data back from New Horizons. Once we have the latest data, then we'll have a much better idea about the kinds of questions that we would like an orbiter probe to answer. Already even with just about 2% of the NH data back, it turns out Pluto is radically different than most planetary scientists predicted. On the basis of the full data set, we'll have a much better idea of the types of instruments we'd need an orbiter to have in order to help solve these mysteries. So while the linked paper is a very useful proof of concept for an orbiter mission, and was in no way a waste of effort, actually building and committing to it and a launch in 2016 would have been a mistake.
Then don't pay someone 50K and someone 250K when their value is fairly similar. I think it's common sense that if there's a certain sense of equality among your workers, nobody is going to be bothered because Jeff in sales earns 15K/year more than them, if in general there's not such a big margin between Jeff and Jane.

I also believe making salaries public are also a good way to fight against gender-inequality in the work place and it makes workers think collectively rather than individually.
In Sweden all tax returns are public information and they seem to be managing quite well.
Totally agree. I also have written a lot of multithreaded code in the past years. At the beginning I really used locks and acted on various resources from multiple threads. It turned out to get into an unmaintainable mess where you have to think about dozens of invariants before each change. In the meantime I mostly implement things in a way that each data is owned by exactly on thread (or mostly event loops running on a thread or also in a thread pool) and provide thread-safe APIs on top of that by using queues and message (or function object) passing to exchange data and results between the calling thread and the resource-owning thread.
Cortana for Android leaks
A statistical summary of salary for the job is almost as good as knowing everyone's salary, and better than knowing the exact salary of your direct peers but not more.

So in such a situation there's little upside. You already know you're not getting scraps.

But there's a painful downside in knowing exactly who the company thinks does worse work than their direct peers.
To be honest, the two minutes I could stomach felt like a generic TEDx talk. Cringeworthy dramaticly colored photos, "lol so spontaneous" outbursts from the audience. Hmpf... Don't try to manipulate my emotions, or if you must, do it so well that I don't notice.
I don't have it ready at the moment but I do believe there is a study from London School of Economics (around 2006?) showing that unhappiness about salaries arises through comparison and not through absolute values. Just playing devil's advocate, could the strict secrecy you experienced not perhaps be an academically informed attempt to maintain happiness despite differential pay instead of an exploitation plot (exaggerating here)?
This is a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I really dislike it when people focus on the aesthetic or the presentation style of Musk or Jobs.

Musk gives great presentations, but the reason he is widely respected is because he was actually able to deliver what he presented. In the most recent Musk biography, they discuss how he spent time at parties reading obscure russian textbooks on rocket physics while everyone else was having fun. He stresses the importance of estimating things from first principles, instead of relying on existing market estimates. However - these things are hard, take a lot of work, and are not as glamorous as making a fancy presentation.

Being able to communicate your ideas clearly and in a compelling way is a very important skill, especially for a leader. But I think it's very important to stress that it's a very small part of the reason certain people are highly successful - it just happens to be very glamourous, and kinda fun, so people like to focus on that.

Zuckerberg, Page, etc are all incredibly successful, yet they were not known (at least initially!) for their brilliant public speaking skills.
Not necessarily. From what I heard, with an array antenna you can actually separate the scalar and vector (directional) component of incoming signals and ignore those coming from particular direction. So you could either track (in software) and ignore signals from particular points (satellite), or pretty much configure your array to be directional.
I could concur on the false positives -- I've had to repeatedly salvage mailing list posts marked as spam. Normally from the mailing lists where I lurk and do not actively contribute, but still...
So, are people in Sweden, Norway and Finland–where you have access to your fellow citizens salary–more unhappy?
It's amusing that an article's style can get you into a "ranting mood".
Yes, but that's been open for over 100 years. What I was talking about was the issues surrounding the transition from closed to open, not the openness itself.
Because if I had some leftover I could start my own business for example.

Good enough salary for living is bullshit and it's driving the middle class to the ground instead upward, since everyone is living well enough but nobody has the saving to switch to entrepreneurship.

And thus we're now reliant as a society to the startup lottery to create new things, where the smartest mind create business just to be screwed over by investors.

The good enough salary negotiation driven by sense of guilt for making more than enough is a fallacy and just lead to exploitation of the middle class. In my first six month of work I managed trough automation to save my employer well more than my salary in yearly maintenance costs, and got a nice pat on the back. that's the kind of bullshit we engineers have to live with.

Screw the good enough salary. They want to pay as cheaply as possible and the only recourse is to grab as much cash as you can because your work is worth money and a lot of it and you deserve a fair share of it.
Even if said personal servers have DKIM and SPF set up? (Just thinking out loud here, I don't have data either way)
So... can Pluto be a planet again?
Any technology that could allow for more precise bombings could be more easily fitted to a manned bomber because they wouldn't need the video link back to base. Remember, image quality matters a lot here since it restricts how well they can make out the target - innocent people have died because the video links on the drones were too poor-quality to see what they were doing and the operator's superiors jumped to conclusions. It's clearly about cost.
I hope they just leap the driven electric car and focus on an autonomous electric car.
Wondering what your opinion on JavaScript's async support is? Huge amounts of flawlessly async single threaded code have been written in js.
Show HN: NSFW Gif stream based and tv
What is your excuse for other nations who don't spend enough on space programs? Or is the US the only country with an obligation to explore space?
Well, it was valid at the time and people still put engineering in a different office from sales. The fact that something doesn't work doesn't stop at least some companies from trying it. I have (relevantly recently) heard of an organisation that had their technical architects in a different office from their engineers
People: There are solutions to this shit. If you're building a distributed system or need to deal with loss of data regardless, use actor systems (Erlang or Akka). If you need something that's not quite as probabilistic and are willing to handle deadlocks use CSP (Go or Rust). If you need absolute determinism and you're willing to pay for it in performance use SRP (Esterel or possibly maybe at your own risk Céu).

If you need shitstains in your underwear use locks and semaphores.
Hilarious, seriously. Scary, too...
No, but they are, as far as I know, societies with much smaller income differences than other countries. So that might make up for the fact that the information is public.
These guys trying to hook up Github users seriously messed their algorithms...
I get offers for Web dev and Ruby shit whereas 99% of my OSS contributions are C and C++.

If even Google HR team is not capable of just simply take a look at a Github user contributions, I don't know how you should trust these new recruitment techniques.
>imagine you have a person that acts just the same as any other, except somehow their neurons in addition to carrying simple signals each have human intelligence and awareness and rich inner lives that they mostly keep private, but when you ask the person if they're conscious, their neurons stir from their own thoughts at hearing a familiar word and break protocol by answering individually instead of following their proper neural behaviors to allow the person to answer the question themselves.

This, actually my other objection to the paper. It seems like centrality is important for the concept of consciousness (I agree that it means a hundred different things but it's convineient to talk about as a single thing). Most people would identify as the person behind the eyes (or generally in the head). And the fact that all experiences of the body is experienced in that central place makes it quite hard to imagine that the individual parts can also experience things on their own. Let alone, be able to disagree with the central thing.
I would assume people who feel they are being underpaid might be more likely to respond to such a survey. And at the same time people who realize they are getting paid more might report a lower salary. This can completely skew the results.

As long as you rely on people volunteering this info you will always have such problems, no matter how small the p-value is.
Now the wait is for the PR to make the github commit profile picture contain the word 'Rockstar' with green pixels.
> Rockstar is one amazing library, which will make you a Rockstar Programmer in just 2 minutes. In last decade, people learned C++ in 21 days. But these days, it has come down to just 10 minutes. But, I wanted to do better.

Curious about the 10 minutes thing, I followed the link through to Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 10 Minutes on Amazon.

Uhhh... Can't explain this though: https://i.imgur.com/dVndZzz.png
The pictures can be boring even if the science is exciting. Maybe we could instead talk about what this means. What we have learned from this.
The reason for this is probably http://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-i...
It's quite cute, but I'm surprised that you're surprised that JS can do it - it's only a few hundred moving objects, and JS has within-order-of-magnitude of native performance.

For shinier stuff, see the demoscene eg https://www.youtube.com/user/Annikras . Demoscene programmers love generative systems, especially when targetting the 4 kilobyte executable category. For example this one, which looks like a distorted Menger sponge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3qn1RsJlUM
The UK supermarket ASDA is going through a sex discrimination legal case at the moment.

Warehouse employees get paid a bit more than shopfloor employees. Warehouse employees are mostly men. Shop floor employees are mostly women. The jobs are not identical, but they are similar. Shop floor employees include the shelf stackers - they take pallets of boxes of goods and unload these onto shelves. That's very similar to the lifting work that warehouse employees do. (There might be a need for some warehouse workers to have forklift licences, which would explain a small amount of the pay differential).

In this legal case the wages of both group are pretty close to minimum wage.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/24/asda-mass-le...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/sainsburys-f...
Let me emphasize: '...they're not all completely retarded...'

What's the chance that one lone engineer is pedantic in math and stats?

Not 100%, sure. Not every engineer has that background, especially in computer related fields (is stats even taught in college for CS these days?).

...but that none of the people involved either 1) is pedantic and has a strong math/stats background, or 2) bothered to do some learning and read books (like that one) when working on either this, or some other stats related project?

Really?

Come on~

It beggars belief.

I'm willing to wager that a random sample of 10 Microsoft engineers will include at least one person who understands stats. Otherwise, that company is completely broken.
From the article:
> Today, Fortran 95 provides all desirable object-orientated and structured programming features, pointers and overloaded operators, and is extremely efficient in the handling of arrays.

The object-oriented features (inheritance and type-bound procedures, for example) were added only in Fortran 2003. Also, since the writing of the article, there has been another revision, Fortran 2008, adding support for parallelism (coarrays).
Not the word "Rockstar", but art in the GitHub statistics is a thing.

https://twitter.com/pablormier/status/575779002096435200
Arrgh! This is what annoys me about reading much philosophy. The article is about consciousness which is a term used by many different people in many ways and with many different implied definitions. But does the guy give a clear definition of what he's talking about? No he leaves it vague but waffles on for hundreds of words in a way that you can't say if it's right or wrong because you're not sure what he means.

If you are using consciousness to mean being aware of stuff in a way that you can act on it then the questions are fairly simple - humans are conscious when in a normal state, not so when knocked unconscious. Likewise rabbits. The United States can show collective consciousness in that it's citizens in aggregate can be aware of things and react. If you look at a different meaning of consciousness in terms of subjective experience then probably other people have similar experience and rabbits a simpler version but it's hard to tell.

I don't get why philosophical writing tends to be so vague and waffly. Maybe because they don't achieve much in the real world unlike say neuroscientists studying consciousness and so need to hand wave and be vague to cover up the lack of real content?
That touches a very interesting problem imo: there are some really cheap components in most products that completely compromise their usage, but are prone to failure. Most times, throwing more money at them won't improve the situation significantly, because they are material-constrained (i.e. the material has to be plastic, and it's not viable to make a plastic that wears out 100x slower than the average plastic). The only solution then is to modularize the problem for easy replacement: you can either put it in "maintenance" perspective, or you can spawn a new product out of it.

Yet I feel many major manufacturers fail to see this.

For example, there's the fans in desktop computers -- a $5 fan is about as good as a $50 fan (slight improvements in noise etc), but they're instrumental in keeping your valuable components from overheating, and they fail from time to time, so if one stops working you just get another one and after a few screws you're done.

My Sony phone has a plastic exterior that just snaps out and you can replace it without any tools -- I can get find this part for like $5 -- and it makes so much sense. If they used some much more resistant not-easily-replaceable material the difference in the end will still be breaking from dropping from 1m in concrete to something like 1.5m.