skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty certain that these are exactly Jeff's intentions. Jeff wants everyone to play hardball and take no prisoners, and that includes both the way that Amazon treats its business partners and the way it treats its employees. Its customers are typically a different story since they understand they can't piss off customers too badly and need to give them what they want.

I can't speak for Larry, but I worked at Amazon from 2001-2006 and everything you've read recently is consistent with the corporate culture back then, and falls directly out of guidance from Jeff. What you are reading about is the end result of Jeff executing successfully on his vision.
PyPy Vectorization
My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like:

>"Can you make me dinner reservations?"

or

>"Can you help me plan my next vacation?"

I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider distance, parking, attire, etc. While their AI/human trainers might be able to handle this level of complexity eventually, the actual phrasing of the question would likely be much more complex than "can you make me a dinner reservation." Doubly so for something like a vacation which has a lot more moving parts.

But I respect that I'm reflecting on a sample size of one...me. So I'd love to hear from others with more insight into the data around this. Are people actually searching with such generalized queries when it comes to tasks like this? Do most people not sweat the details of things like which restaurant to eat at, or where to spend hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars on a vacation?

Not trolling, serious question.
That's right; the ones I tested were 'ps' and 'top'.

I did try hooking __libc_start_main, but had difficulty using dl.Sym() with it. I wasn't sure if I converted the function signature to Go incorrectly or if it's a limitation of dl.Sym().

This was the error I was hitting:
https://github.com/rainycape/dl/blob/484344929c1867aec9517b5...

So I chose a method with a simpler function signature I found using ltrace, just to get it working as an experiment.
Pocket: Introducing Recommendations
I'm not sure why these words cause problems. Refuting the "zero" number does not require absolutes in the opposite direction.
> Today’s artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like.

The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neural net what a cat looks like, it discovered the concept of "catness" by itself (there was a "cat" neuron in the top layer).

I'm wondering who writes all the AI articles I read every day. Such a detail was crucial for the cat story. It's easy to make a cat/non-cat classifier with a few thousand labeled images for each category. The hard thing to do is to take raw photos with no labels and still discover cats.
Million Dollar Products
We can safely assume that the IRS and other countries tax agencies have systems like this - or will soon. Nearly every agency with enforcement powers will eventually too. Wiretaps are being used for everything these days and they need to parse this data.

Just like the recent use of SWAT teams by even benign regulatory agencies (ie, raiding unlicensed clothing factories with assault rifles) - they will make use of new advanced enforcement techniques as the tech starts to trickle down from the top agencies.

We (the tech community) all complained for years about the poor state of technology in government. But now they are catching up - and that technology is being combined with the great powers they hold. Creating something most people didn't expect. New levels of power it seems... which can be utilized extremely efficiently.
Not The Onion.
For more on segregation and the effect it has on school performance see these two recent This American Life episodes[1][2].

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/563/t...
Heat Shaped Party Favors for Your Wedding and Party
Businesses get vilified all the time for that behavior.

Tesla got attacked a lot for their attempts to leverage the best deal possible when pursuing a location for the gigafactory. Articles are still being written about it. I must have read two dozen negative articles against the company regarding that one thing alone. A few of which were on HN's front page. And in that case it wasn't even Tesla threatening to pull existing business from a location.

Why is it seen as an important thing? Ask California how much they've enjoyed Texas pulling business from the state. Of course it's an important consideration, the states compete with each other in most things including where businesses choose to locate facilities.
Desegregating Newark schools means integrating the schools in the surrounding suburbs, and the parents will fight it. They simply don't want their children educated alongside minorities.
Brendan Eich looking for a Node.js hacker (C/C++, JS, large scale data proc)
It may have used tags on YouTube videos to identify which had cats. Not sure if that counts as completely unsupervised.
Win10 reaches 75M installs
I also live in CEST.
Isn't AM a Canadian company anyway? No way to get the FBI involved in this case.
Him overseeing spending personally.
That's not ransom (which is all about extorting money).

Saying if conditions change then you'll take a different action is just stating fact. Every change will have it's consequences, that doesn't make it ransom or somehow wrong.
I think I'd argue that not paying you the higher wage to prevent you from moving is an "anti-employee tactic." A side effect of this anti-employee tactic is you hopping jobs.
A look inside engineering at Plated
I'm going to guess that if the NSA was at all interested in this guy, they know exactly who he is already. But they're probably not.
I would still contend that you do get to have the discussions surrounding all of this in private, if you choose

How so, when all your neighbors and family members can know?
I've documented this limitation in the README:
https://github.com/mattbostock/go-ldpreload-backdoor#limitat...
Well, I reviewed the argument that I was referring to and it wasn't what you are claiming.

Here's the text:

>Then that's a breach of contract between two private parties which is of absolutely no relevance to outside observers.

The argument claimed that the breach was "of absolutely no relevance". Yes, the word "meaningful" wasn't used, but I dare you to provide a definition of the word "meaningful".

>The argument isn't that it isn't meaningful, it's that it shouldn't be.

Can you point me to someone making that argument?
Can't he designate one person to make sure that a $100 million investment works out better?
The initial example is broad, but can't this just be extended with additional questions? For example, can you tell me about dinner options that cost less than $20 per person. What are other people saying? How far away is this? It's questionable whether each of these follow up questions is actually that complex. I think you are arguing that things get hard if a user tries to put that together in one single complex query. Do people do that though?

I think the idea with a conversational interface is that it's succinct and on-demand. You receive the most relevant information directly in as simple of an interface as possible (arguably).
He's testing with manual switch codes :)

Expecting the manual switch codes to work exactly the same way as the software is .... strange.
Most likely (as backed by history) the equity is worth 0

Take more cash instead
Principals at Poor Schools Grossly Underestimate the Demand for Computer Science
There is some academic writing on the subject I can't find at the moment. Basically the idea that Hackers are the modern day tricksters of mythology. Sneaky, morally ambiguous, possessing mysterious powers over our surroundings. It's important to be over the top and silly with your hacks.
Equivalently, a thousand one-dimensional vectors.
The fact that one is a crime and the other isn't implies that we have generally decided that punching is worse. Feel free to lobby otherwise, though.
Hot Booty Dance and Funny Reaction
>Okay, great so what? Should we not have either?

We should not have starving people. But there is over 20% child poverty in the US.

The only reason we have this, the only excuse for it, is the same market ethos that justifies intense wealth. When we challenge intense wealth, we eliminate poverty. And when we eliminate poverty, every social ill that depends upon it diminishes radically.

This challenge to intense wealth, called leftism, doesn't get rid of millionaires, nor systems of personal property, nor personal liberty. This gets rid of a system of worship of intense wealth and puts an end to accepting the premise that accumulating wealth far beyond what any person or family can actually use is a justifiable thing.
But since that's not feasible, surely he could appoint someone in his network who should be able to tease out better results?
> Angry Birds 2 has a level of polish that makes the original look like some indie side project.

The game's quality isn't the problem. It's the forced in-app purchases (or wait massive amounts of time) they made with this new version that makes it horrible.

They went overkill on the IAP and the reviews reflect that.
Not quite. OO messages are flat (a method + a number of arguments), while a DSL messages can have a very complex semantics (even Turing-complete, if necessary).

What is common with the Kay view of OO (and different from all the modern OO languages) here is that messages are asynchronous, and this is a very important aspect.
> The supposition that Uber spent 15bio to lobby NYC to let it operate in the city is nonsensical.

The question was what the effect of directing that sort of campaign towards urging improvements to the rail infrastructure would be, not what the cost of the rail infrastructure would be. They're related because the more expensive something is the less progress you're likely to make on it if you choose to approach it without looking at things like efficiency and labour improvements, but they're a long way away from being anywhere near the same thing.
The form of the interview was a bit weird: All the questions seemed to be entirely predetermined, with no follow-up questions and no opportunity for the answers to guide the direction of the interview. But on the other hand they were open-ended enough that it was more like a talk where the interview questions were hardly needed – essentially:

So I heard you like x.
How did you get started with x?
Tell us a few things about x.
In addition to those things, could you tell us something more about x?
Is there anything else you want to say about x?

But very interesting nevertheless! :)
I'd be super weary of such a company. Offering equity to the first technical employee makes a lot of sense because you intend to stay long with the guy, but even considering such a scheme on consultancy basis is non-sense, and doesn't bode well when a company without tech savvyness is also clueless on the other side.
This sounds like a great approach; however, what is precluding you from making this into a script ? Maybe with a first step of "fill values in this properties file" for passwords etc ?
What happened when I switched from paleo to vegan for 6 months
Hustle and Grind: growing a betalist
Do you think she would have been let go if the opportunity wasn't found in the other team?

PIPs are pretty widely recognized as "this is your advance notice that you will be laid off." Almost sounds like the writing was on the wall but she got lucky with an internal move.
Hacking Facebook Pages – Facebook Vulnerability – BugBounty
Getting things that make you money and cost the other party money is extorting money.
Take the 2 to Brooklyn. Even at 2:30 in the morning it can be crowded.
Lawyers can argue about the stop, but it happened. They happen all the time. The cop might not have had probable cause, he stopped the car for no better reason than he wanted to, but that isn't the cause of all the difficulties. It hit the fan when the cop starts running the paperwork.

"When Godwin ran Parker’s license, the computer said it was suspended. He also said the registration card was expired."

That's the root problem, not the stop. There was, from the cops perspective, a real infraction here. So rather than debate the constitutionality of the stop, we should address the overly-complex system that resulted in this perceived infraction. If the computer was wrong, fix the machine. If the paperwork was actually expired, why are they still using paper? If we don't want cops issuing onerous citations for these things, change the laws so they cannot. We should not patch over bad laws by simply not enforcing them.

In many jurisdictions (ie mine) the entire stop would have been perfectly legal. We display out registration/insurance details on a license plates. So cops are perfectly justified in pulling cars over with expired registration/insurance/plates. They need not speculate. They cannot claim suspicion or the need to check paperwork when the plate shows validity. And and driver stepping into a car can see on the plate whether everything is correct. Every cop should be able to lookup a plate and check all the paperwork prior to pulling anyone over.
> If this was such a horrific service as you describe, I think we would see little to no ridership.

And people would do what instead? Walk? Ride a bicycle 15 miles in subzero weather? Buy a Benz?

Many pub-trans systems are horrible precisely because their bulk of their ridership are poor people who have no other options to get to work. They're over a barrel and they have no leverage to demand improvements.
> A new level of power it seems...

You can drop "it seems". We all know where this is headed. And as with the other huge problems such as climate change, we'll try to change something once it really, really hurts. But that, I suppose, has already been said a thousand times, as well. There really isn't much more left to say...
But unfortunately in the court of law, I'm guessing it would be a very messy argument.
Quite right. The figure of merit for a fusion plasma is called the 'triple product' since it's the temperature, density and confinement time multiplied together.

The problem in general with pulsed systems is that they take a lot of energy to get them from idle to active, and the research machines have miniscule efficiency. The claim is often that "we'll scale this up and it'll be more efficient" but there are always unknown unknowns. Nature is a cruel mistress, especially in the fusion business.
I don't think artificial integration is the solution. It certainly didn't work very well in San Francisco. Kids should go to school in their neighborhoods. Families should get involved. People need to start taking some responsibility for making things better. I know that sounds right-wing but I really think that's what needs to happen. And obviously it can. Just need humans to get together and decide to change.
That's what encryption is for - burn the key, and the backups are useless even if they're immutable.
NASA Warns Sea Level Rise 'Is Not Going to Stop'
Actually they explicitly are not doing D-T fuel, staying with H-B fuel. And what they claim is that given a 10MW power source they could maintain a small ball of plasma indefinitely. So hook this up to a nuclear power plant and you have the worlds most expensive light bulb :-).

Since temperature scales with energy input, they scale up their box to produce the necessary temperatures and start collecting energy. However, as the article points out, not only is there little experience with plasmas at those temperatures, there are challenges with building things at that scale. So not a slam dunk.

That said, if we have a Fusion power plant that requires a Fission power plant to 'start' it will be a challenging thing to commercialize. Once you have a number running you could presumably 'grid start' (use excess power on the grid to start your new plant) but that would make cold start pretty hard. And if the scaling is accurate, you couldn't really turn these things on/off easily so they would have the opposite challenge of renewables which don't provide good base load support as one which can only provide baseload.
I have used both Unreal DK and Unity 3d. On any day, I'll pick Unreal based technology over Unity3d. Unity 3d was a total pain in the neck and is more suitable for art-heavy and relatively less programming kind of games.

Unreal is far more mature as a platform and you can do a lot more with it. (The code of the internals sucks a bit though).
They were all born in Scotland but lived in Australia, iirc. Then the singer died and Brian Johnson, who is English, became the new frontman.
I agree the This American Life stories were pretty good. They were based on a pro-publica story which has background statistics that make the picture more interesting:

http://www.propublica.org/article/ferguson-school-segregatio...

There was also recently this long article in the Tampa Bay times that I found at least as insightful, and with more perspective:

http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinella...

My concerns with this coverage is that they oversimplify the problems in their desire to find a solution (especially TAL). I'd also recommend the book 'Our Kids':

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Kids-American-Dream-Crisis/dp/1476...

Which is far more comprehensive but spectacularly depressing.
Americans complaining about speed traps and red light cameras are a constant embarrassment to me.

I live in New York. This city should look like a less architecturally tasteful version of Amsterdam. Instead, it's infested with cars. We should have red light cameras at every intersection, zero-tolerance enforcement of speeding laws, congestion charging, etc., instead the subway is crumbling.

I've given up, I'm starting to learn Dutch... I want to live somewhere that actually cares about transportation.
"Can you make me dinner reservations?" would lead to a response like "Any preferences on the type of food and location?"

Over time they learn your preferences so they don't need to ask location for example next time.

Your right though people aren't likely asking such generic things in the first place, but rather something like "can you book me a great mexican place for dinner tonight, 2 people, has parking and casual attire somewhere with great yelp reviews"

Then they send you the best options they found (and the benefits of each one and price range) then you reply back option 1 and they book it.
I would red flag on this. They may sweet talk you with optimistic scenarios, flatter you with C level job titles... but apparently you are the entire tech team right now, and they're not prepared to even pay you market rates.

Factor in the pessimistic view: if they can't afford you now, is the business growing or struggling? What if that equity is worthless, or unable to be liquidated? What happens if they decide down the track to "replace" you with someone else, will you get to keep your equity or does that evaporate? Do you really see this company as your life's work, or would you be happier consulting for different companies at increasingly higher rates and doing your own thing instead?

I really hope I'm being overly pessimistic, I just feel I've heard this story before.
really ? This is a large amount of money in the hands of public "servants". This was doomed to failure from day 1.
As some have mentioned, yes. But in general: Why must someone push his brand and store concept into another country, instead of buying/creating a local chain?

How often will grocery-buying customers from one country be shopping groceries while on vacation? And would a recognizable brand really leave the customer with an advantage? E.g.: If I were an American in Germany, yearning for Twinkies, which are nowhere to be found in regular stores in Germany, would I or Walmart be really better off, by also-not-finding-them in the German Walmart too?
where / when was this presented?
As an Amazon shareholder I have a right to be concerned about how they treat my employees.
Scalien was my startup, its purpose was to sell ScalienDB and make money :)
I think the main question here is balance.

We could have the same argument with pretty much everything - not only companies / unions.

In the end each party is motivated to use its own power to optimize for their end.

Systems like markets only seek equilibrium if there is a balance in power between parties.

Balance needs to be a neutral position that's still beneficial (read fair) for all sides.
Life imitates art? This is straight from 'Nothing But Trouble' (1991)
This seems like a good paper that isn't actually about something wrong with Chrome. It's about what security tools need to do to track auto-updating software.
I am dissapointed in it still requiring 32-bit libraries, like Steam.

$ gdebi unity-editor-5.1.0f3+2015082501_amd64.deb
...
Requires the installation of the following packages: lib32gcc1 lib32stdc++6 libc6-i386
How depressing. A colossal windfall for an ailing public resource desperately in need of reform, and it's squandered in vendettas and hidden interests.

Even more depressing is that we didn't expect better.

Perhaps gifts like this should come with conditions like "75 cents out of every dollar must be spent on in-classroom improvements" or "40 million reserved for teacher requests." Second $100 million contingent on the first being spent properly or something.

What a waste — not that, as many point out, Newark's school system can be sorted out with a cash infusion. But $200 million buys a lot of band-aids.
Why? Money and education results don't correlate. Every single factor in education is overwhelmed by parental involvement.

So maybe that $100 million should of been used to pay parents to participate in their children's education.
So your position is "separate schools should make themselves more equal"?
Because Facebook will then be the "inaccurate recommendation engine" and users won't pay any attention. I don't think it's that surprising that Facebook has an incentive to work well.
No. I think marriages actually affect people not involved in the marriage commitment itself. Especially when you consider populations and not just hypothetical individuals.
I seem to recall seeing a lot of people predicting it would be a massive waste.
There was long-form about this awhile back. Interestingly the blame for waste seemed to lay with both teacher's union and pro-reform consultants demanding a big piece of the action. When teacher's union didn't get what they wanted they manipulated the community of parents against the deal, which also ensured the politicians/bureaucrats would not be held accountable for the squandered opportunities and wasted money.

In short, it seems like places like Newark have bad schools because of bad governance and rent-seeking behavior running rampant at the local level. The state should be more firmly involved to police these issues.
It sounds ridiculous to hear someone claim originality for an idea as generic AND faddish as text based assistant. If you seriously didn't know of apps like these existed before you launched (text based assistants with a human name), just google them up and you'll find tons launched since last year. I'm sure even YC has at least 3 companies that launched with this model.