bonobo3000

I'm not totally sure how a blockchain works so please correct me if im wrong - for a hard fork to happen in Ethereum or Bitcoin, the majority of users have to "agree" by switching to thew new blockchain right?

In that case, the Ethereum hard fork doesn't sound very controversial - even if the devs decided to hard fork for bad reasons later on, no one would be forced to adopt it. They would be "voting with their feet" by sticking to the old chain.

yeah. adding to this, a great proof that uses new techniques can also generate whole new areas of math to explore or solve other seemingly unrelated problems.

They mentioned using hadoop for file storage - perhaps they are just using HDFS and not MapReduce.

Otherwise, Spark is relatively new, so they might have some older infra/jobs in Hadoop.

Storm and Spark streaming work a little differently (real-time streaming vs "micro-batching) and apparently have different use cases, but I'm not totally sure what the practical difference are here either..

Awesome post, thank you so much! I'll get started on the crawler soon :)

Its both. Now news is mostly consumed online, and everyone is competing for eyeballs. I think technology exacerbates the problem - earlier a newspaper could have a bunch of eyeball grabbing headlines, AND real, informative, boring content in the later pages (or a mix). Now only the eyeball grabbing content gets shared and seen.

It is driven by the same competition, but with article-level tracking rather than newspaper sales, the problem got worse. I don't know how to fix it either, but I agree with the author that its a huge problem. News and entertainment are basically the same thing now.

Thats a great process. If you don't mind me asking, how do you get rid of the phone screen, even assuming you have some github and contacts? Just ask the recruiter?

Agreed! If we did nothing to correct inequalities in society, the biggest and strongest would rule over all - so yes we must have our own values and stick to them.

And with AI, we must make these values explicit, which is very difficult to do - i agree this is a very important problem to solve, and the people doing it should absolutely be rewarded.

Honestly, reading the article again after your summary i found it very reasonable :p I think the headline just ticked me off.

No one is stopping other people from getting in on the debate, they absolutely should (and I'm sure there are roadblocks in their way, and people who really are racist). It just feels wrong to implicitly all the "bad white people" for that. Blame those who cause the problem. Otherwise we are back to stereotyping.

Yeah, i don't really know enough to argue that. You're probably right about the convictions.

I just think we need to be able to TALK about these issues, so that when a real expert looks at those statistics they can get to the truth of the matter, and say that truth whether it is or isn't politically correct.

IMO, no one wants to acknowledge simple facts for fear of retribution/being labelled racist, instead we keep dancing around this issue forever getting more and more ridiculous.

Also, trust me i can talk about this because i'm not white...

fact - people prefer people like them. Not even consciously, this is basic shit hardwired into us. I don't blame white men for being subconsciously biased to hiring white men, literally any other group would do the same. sure we can try to fight that bias, but its not at all evil or wrong to have that bias, only natural.

fact - taking an "agnostic" approach the way science does, of course the algorithms will reflect "biases". if men are statistically more likely to be programmers, or black people are more likely to commit crimes (STATISTICALLY), then the algorithm will pick that up. They are biases sure, but also statistical realities.

Now we can debate whether we should actively engineer algorithms to fight these "biases" on a case-by-case basis (for example, focusing more on women might be a win if you can find talent no one else can), but there's no reason to start pointing fingers at the "evil white guys" on top who planned this from the very beginning... it's just more stereotyping.

hypothesis - she wrote this crap to gain publicity.

This also doesn't mention the horrible inflexibility of the H-1B once you have it. Once on an H-1B, you literally have ZERO days of unemployment between jobs. If you are fired, laid-off, or leave your job for any reason at all (say health reasons), you technically are out of status and can be deported at any minute. There is an unofficial grace period of about 30 days, which is really not enough to do any kind of a decent job search (and its unofficial, so technically you could be deported at any minute). So the only realistic avenue for H-1Bs is to find a job before leaving the current one - works for most people, but again, if you are laid-off or need to take time off for any reason, its simply not an option. Its a horrible system.

I'm curious - what do people use now to find jobs? I'm still relying pretty heavily on LinkedIn for recruiters to contact me.

this is cool, ive been burned by trying to move a virtualenv before and discovering everything broke. is it possible to merge this into virtualenv? i think it would be much easier to use that way.

Consuming "probiotics" is a very similar idea to this. It promotes exactly this kind of food - yogurts, kefir etc.

Hey Josh, i have one question - how do the rules about disclosing salary change when you're talking to an external recruiter (from an agency)?

I don't quite understand who's "side" they are on - on one hand, it seems reasonable to tell them the real range i'm looking for upfront so they can narrow the search, on the other hand they might reveal that to the employer..

If you are only thinking about it, yes. If you want to take a decision based on the thought process, you have to pick a side at one point, knowing that it might not be the right side.

I like it! I have similar opinions on static vs. dynamic, Java vs Python or PLs in general - too many judgements are based on shallow first impressions or ease of getting started to the detriment of future maintenance.

Check out Scala :) Its a pretty complex language, but its the sweet spot between Python and Java i've been looking for.

It sounds like you like knowing how the whole thing works, end-to-end. At big companies with so much pre-existing code & infra, thats not really possible. Maybe a startup would be a better fit for you? Thats one of the things I loved about working at a ~60 person startup, I had visibility and decision making power over all levels of what I was doing.

Of course it depends on what your definition of end-to-end is, as the rabbit hole can always go deeper.

I think this is a great idea, let the H1B prices be freely controlled by market, and let companies buy/sell H1Bs among themselves.

People have mentioned that this makes things more expensive for companies. This is true, but i wish someone would take the side of the immigrants (there are only a few of us, and we can't vote!). Companies oppose this because its more expensive, and politicians oppose it because its "taking jobs away from Americans" and anyways immigrants on H1B can't vote. Of course, if we don't like it we should just "go back home", even if we have been here for years, have houses, spouses, jobs and friends here and don't have roots back home anymore. Immigrants have to put up with a lot of crap:

- a very short deadline to find a job if you are unemployed on H1B. Technically 0 days! - its only an unofficial grace period at the mercy of the whims of an immigration officer. meaning constant uncertainty and scrambling to find a job ASAP lest the immigration gods smite you down.

- ridiculously long wait times for green cards. in some cases 10+ years.

- unable to move companies while in the green card process. if you do, you go right back to the end of the line. many companies know and abuse this. during this time, you are pretty much a slave to the company - think about it, if you don't ultimately have a choice to switch companies without throwing away years of waiting, you have no means of recourse when they treat you poorly.

What's old is new again I suppose. The browser, in general, feels like a giant step forward. I wish, though, that some ecosystem had evolved where Javascript wasn't the sole supported client side language.

Webassembly is coming!

interesting to compare FBs responses with psychology's basic emotions -

FB 6 basic emotions - angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love

Humintell's 7 basic emotions - anger, sadness, surprise (aka wow), joy (aka haha/yay?), fear, disgust, contempt. those last 3 aren't buttons on FB for obvious reasons :)

Shimano may not have been a good guy, but its kind of weird how its framed as the evil man exploiting the poor, vulnerable women, rather than a consensual act between 2 people.

Most languages compile the source to an AST, so I would say the AST is one level of abstraction below source code. Then, text and graphical languages could be equally powerful if each can represent any AST the other can.

It might not be necessary but it does help scale cheaply. You could have people pick up the phone and order food for you when requested, but if they can route that through an API 99% of the time it costs a whole lot less time & money.

What? I get the article was provocative, but this doesn't make any sense..

* If a startup/piece of technology takes $X to make (VC money, costs of running business etc.) and makes more than $X, it DOES grow the pie. This is almost a definition of the word technology (before it came to mean tech related to computers specifically). A skilled person can take $10 of wood and make a $50 chair out of it - thats value creation.

* The progressive tax on rich - PG was saying basically the same thing here, not sure what you are attacking. quote:

For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty. [9] And if there are people getting rich by tricking consumers or lobbying the government for anti-competitive regulations or tax loopholes, then let's stop them.

I think he was just talking about rich people kind of being demonized by the media, they like to paint a story of rich as the oppressive ruling class which everyone else needs to rise up against. That only divides people, there are peaceful solutions too..

I have been writing a lisp interpreter and mind=blown. I really want to write a harder one now - maybe a basic python interpreter, or make my own little language :D

I also really want to get proficient enough in the JS world to make a simple web app. So far everytime i start wondering what has changed since MVC+jQuery and shopping around million frameworks.

I highly recommend Jeremy Kun's blog - Math and Programming (http://jeremykun.com/). His posts are always awesome.

You might be interested to know Scala's new compiler dotty takes the phase approach - there are 40-50 phases and logic for fusing phases together to work in one traversal.

Check it out - a list of all the phases in the source! https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/blob/master/src/dotty/tool...

If you're totally new to this, Peter Norvigs guide to a scheme interpreter in Python[1][2] is the best! Its short and sweet and gave me enough of an idea of the basic parts to start piecing stuff together.

[1] http://norvig.com/lispy.html [2] http://norvig.com/lispy2.html

It can't be implemented by a language alone, since we have to integrate with a particular VCS (e.g git).

I prefer to just make commits for really tiny changes so I don't have to a lot of remembering.

I think this might not be that difficult to hack together though - 1. Decide on a comment format thats easy to parse 2. make a parser that goes through your source files and pulls out the comments into a file 3. make a commit hook (or just cat the file)

Heres what finally got me to understand monads, including some of the context around them:

1. Why is it important that a List is a monad?

A. Its not particularly important. Its really just pointing out that monad is a very general abstraction - it wont tell you anything you don't already know about Lists.

On the other side, lists as kind of trivial examples of monads - they didnt really help me understand monads either.

Its like saying 1 is a real number - true, but it wont help you understand real numbers.

2. Why should i use monads?

A: I like to think of monads as things you can use in a for-comprehension (or the do notation in Haskell). If you can imagine writing something like

  for {x <- thing; y<-thing} x + y

3. But a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors?

A: There is deep category theory and math behind this stuff. It can be useful to talk about it, but when you are starting out its overkill. Don't worry about "getting" the really abstract crap at first, just skim right over. Programming in monads is a lot easier than the theory, and the theory can be learned after getting your hands dirty. Using monads is mostly just for-comprehensions.

ps:

"monoid" = there is a zero, and an add operation. like integers with +, or integers with *).

"functor" = thing that has a map() operation.

"endo" = self

"category" = kind of like a set. its a container.

So a monad has a "zero" or default monad, a way to add monads, and a map operation that returns another monad.

e.g List -> zero = Nil, add = append, map = the "normal" map with f applied to each element

Future -> zero = empty Future, add = do future2 after future1, map = make a future with the f applied to value