skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> From the preface: "achieving maximum effect with minimum means."

Wouldn't be out of place at a marketing agency, with about the same level of truth too.

> Sort of the anti-Perl?

In what sense? The one thing you can say about Perl is that it's a huge language, so the anti-perl would be a very small language. Go isn't a very small language (like Forth), it isn't even a small one (like Smalltalk or Self) it's about the same size/complexity as an early Java. Somewhat bigger in some ways (more magical builtins and constructs) somewhat smaller in others (simpler visibility rules, no synchronised methods/blocks), but in the best case it's a wash.

> Go is very contrarian, and I applaud this.

Perl is also very contrarian.
Employee reviews or reasons behind a termination for cause are not legally protected information. They are work product, owned by Amazon, subject to the contract with Amazon.
Well, it appears we just have to disagree here. I see very immediate and legitimate threats to our (and our allies') well-being from the likes of Iran or Russia (I might agree with you on Cuba as it stands now -- but let's not forget the missile crisis, which has probably been the largest threat we've faced yet).
I am all for peacefully negotiating mutually-agreeable solutions, but the key to having those negotiations in the first place is a credible threat of force, not folding at the first opportunity.
Baquet's response makes Carney's complaints seem infantile. Carney should have known better than to post this in this first place.
I didn't say anything of the sort. I said metadata isn't data and just because metadata is about you/your data, doesn't mean you own it.

I've been intentionally vague so as to discuss this in more macro terms rather than the specific case as presented here, because I feel there's a panicked "deer in the headlights" attitude that comes with talking about data and metadata, and I'd like to try and help folks think a little more rationally around the topic rather than simply "EVERYTHING RELATED TO ME IS MINE AND NEEDS TO BE ENCRYPTED AND HIDDEN".

I regularly forget about how closed-minded the HN userbase is when it comes to privacy.
Naive Bayes and Text Classification
And the fraud thing doesn't even look to be true. The NYT writer responded and said that was false.
I sometimes 'ask their opinion' on taking a certain approach when there's a right way and a non-obvious trap.

If they get the question right they'll feel smart for a second and it gives you an opportunity to bond - you can laugh together about the idiots who did it the wrong way.

If they get the question wrong they're usually oblivious to it. Opinions can't be wrong, right?
> You need to make an effort. I enjoy the same things my peers do, we play the same games, we watch the same things and read the same websites

I really don't see why colleagues should read the same websites or play the same games! You can have a very good work relationship with someone that has a totally different lifestyle.
People who read the first submission (before the rebuttal) will miss the follow-up if it doesn't reach the front page. Assuming they don't go back to the first submission to read new(?) comments.
The impression that I got from the Times article was that excessive workload led her to go for four days without sleep and to hire someone overseas to do part of her job for her. The fuller story from her LinkedIn post was that she was working, getting an MBA part time, and getting over a breakup, and that her coping mechanism for the breakup was to work long hours. Also, she hired the person overseas to scout leads because she wanted to try out an idea from The Four Hour Work Week. So the LinkedIn article certainly gave me a very different impression of her experience than the Times article, even if what the Times article said was factually accurate. The Times left out the parts that didn't fit into their narrative.
I don't know everything they monitor/measure, but times you've accessed your data would be something that isn't yours, if they collect that.
In a case where it's likely to matter, you probably have a list of many numbers with diverse denominators. Certainly you can achieve mathematical precision with rationals (if you can get them in the first place) but the trade-off is ending up with really huge big-ints as numerator and denominator.
It is actually the equivalent of a private backing field that is marked readonly.

public class Person{

private readonly string name;

public Person(string name){
this.name = name;
}
}

It's syntactical sugar that shaves a few lines of code off, particularly if you aren't setting values from parameters in the constructor and just want readonly values that are inherent to the class.
Medium seems to be a reasonable neutral ground for such a show-down. No distractions, just words on a page, fighting it out, gladiator style.
Is it actually? Because this is basically saying, "these are the conditions. if all or part of these conditions extend beyond the applicable law, then only the part that is within the law is applicable".
Someone walks to me and says things like this(the original NYTimes article) about say...Facebook, I will double check. If someone says what they said about Amazon, I won't double check (I know, I should). But you know what, I have heard so many anecdotes from people who have no reason to lie, that for me personally at this point, I have much better things to do than double check the obvious. Someone with a fancy university grant will do that, I have other stuff to do, like ignore all those amazon high-volume-recruiter incessant emails.
The static typing and strict compiler (enforcement of imports and lvalues, etc.) works well for my writing style.

It seems you more enjoy just "Not Python" than Go itself.

Go is still pretty awful and designed without really consulting what would help users. It's just designed for what the creators want, but now millions of people are trying to use it—not just 8 people inside the Nation of Google. It's getting worse for the average developer as time goes on. But, one thing developers love doing is understanding broken things, so in a away, the more difficult a system, the more nerds like it because it gives them accomplishment and the ability to exclude non-understanders. (Plus, Tabs? Tabs? In 2015? Is the Go development process run by monkeys living in Antarctica?)

Good review: http://www.evanmiller.org/four-days-of-go.html
AMPs and websites in the age of the Service Worker
A good resume from an experienced candidate will describe the work the candidate actually performed. A resume that is ambiguous as to the candidate's contributions is usually worth tossing.

In the case of a phone screen, I honestly find it hard to believe that folks have so much difficulty believing that it's possible to get a good sense of a candidate's skill and knowledge without sitting over his or her shoulder and watching him or her code. A phone screen is a conversation. In most cases, a candidate who is faking it will have a very hard time describing in technical detail his or her work, and answering technical questions about his or her work.

Start with candidates who have good resumes. Ideally get code samples and/or a portfolio. Prepare for your phone screen so you can ask good questions. It really is that simple.
If anything, such a cynical and mean-spirited "reply" makes it absolutely and positively certain that working at Amazon should be the last thing any half-way competent Tech person should consider.

This piece reads exactly like an oppo-research piece that you would use as a hatchet-job on a political opponent. I had to check twice to ensure that this was not some kind of satire (it is getting harder for me to tell these days). It goes into great detail making personal attacks against the "complainers" while doing nothing to address the substantive allegations made by the articles.

So 1) yes there is a "snitch" tool that amazon encourages employees to use 2) the people identified have all quit after complaining of excessive work one way or another 3) when the initial story came out Almighty Leader Jeff even wrote a memo "please be more considerate" 4) PR flunky now makes sleazy attacks on ex-employees to blunt the negative perceptions.

Updated to add-
You want an unsubstantiated ad-hominem here you go:
"Jay Carney was encouraged to quit his white-house posting because of his incompetence. Also how seriously can you take a PR guy with the last name of 'Carney'? He had to go!"
Looks like a wheel chair for the disabled.
My current company's founders (and don't even get me started on that) love Star Trek. They use it as street-cred of their zaniness and quirkiness and geek-cred. It's used in company literature, it's used to make jokes, and it's foisted upon new hires as though it's actually important.

We apparently care more about Star Trek and culture fit than we do about writing maintainable code, selling product, or anything else we don't talk about much.

I now hate Star Trek (and I used to like it). :( :(
Zuckerberg saying "Young people are just smarter" seems like an instance of https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-law/ Age discrimination exists because most of us have direct experience with family members who diminish as they age, especially when these family members didn't keep up a habit of doing intellectual intense things they did when they were younger and instead spend increasing amounts of time watching sports and doing crosswords. It's possible to be a badass programmer in your 80s, Knuth will be one soon, but it's very rare. We thus shouldn't expect to have an equal distribution of old people and young people, regardless of whether that's desirable or not.
That might really suck in your 60's. Age has a way of happening to us regardless of our preferences and expectations.
Fair point, but then many of those people would miss the rebuttal even if it did stay on the front page, since a lot of readers check HN in the morning and then get to work.

I don't think there's any way to get perfect or even very good balance here—the instruments we have are too crude.
Why would such a place exist? The more unbiased a news outlet is trusted to be, the higher the incentive to subvert them to show bias towards you.
Are they actually proud of having no generics? :o
"Give me six words of an innocent man, and I will find something in them with which to hang him"

How should companies interact with the press today in order to avoid an outcome like the original NYT article?
It looks like a bad edit to the wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pairwise_summatio...

^ this user changed the error bounds, incorrectly. The worst case for the naive sum is pretty obviously epsilon*N (and is described that way on the Kahan sum page)
Here are some more people for Jay to slander:

http://qz.com/482080/dear-jeff-bezos-i-wish-you-had-asked-fo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10123456 (
https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-... )
I think Mr. Olson should sue Amazon now.
Saw a great post relating to this a few months ago.

http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/using-data-...

At the very least the reporters could have checked Glassdoor and seen that employees actually rate Amazon fairly well.
There's a difference between Elon Musk speaking as CEO of Tesla and as Elon Musk. Or pretty much anyone else.
I find it exciting to see that traffic engineers on both sides of the pond are working with a much richer palette, possibly enabled by public sentiment that has softened on the idea of how intersections "should" be done.

At grade, above grade, signalized, corner, or circle; these decisions require a balance of traffic flow, safety, real estate/cost, and aesthetics. To have engineers or local decision makers not consider an option out of unfamiliarity/prejudice is silly.
For those that don't know-- although Octave is interpreted, the interpreted part acts as an interface to highly optimized vector operations under the covers. Signal processing and a lot of other tasks come down to manipulating large arrays of data using similar operations across the entire array. Although Octave is interpreted, these kinds of operations execute very nicely inside Octave. Octave also lets you write those kinds of operations at a very high level, like a = b * c, and under the covers it's doing millions of operations.

If you'd like to give Octave a try and learn about Machine Learning at the same time, try this excellent and fun free course! https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

One of the later lessons in that class is a mind-blowing signal processing thing. In that exercise, they show how you can put multiple mics in a room, with multiple people talking over each other, and the computer separates out the different sources of sounds, and outputs a clean wav file for each sound source with the sounds isolated from each other. It blew my mind, and was implemented in Octave. And they teach you exactly how to do it yourself.

All the above concepts can, of course, be done in C++ or NumPy or whatever, they just use Octave to teach the course.
Cute hamster eats donut cookie for its birthday celebration
1. I agree, kind of. The documents if released publicly should be made available in whole so context can be seen.

2. This pushes into the conspiracy area though, you'd have to have an entire chain of staff (at least in a company the size of Amazon) that couldn't not know this had occurred, and somehow convince them all to be silent. Not impossible, just unlikely.

3. If the company is releasing info about whatever occurred, an NDA would no longer apply. Why would it? The information is now public knowledge.

This I definitely agree with, when employees are found to be stealing it should be handled like any other matter; call the cops and let the process handle itself. Again I think we'd have a much less corrupt corporate culture in our society if we started treating these criminals like criminals.
Become a MySQL DBA: Using Explain to Improve SQL Queries
Well, to be fair, someone born in the early 70's or late 60's is probably more stoked about Star Wars than any 20-something.

After all, they grew up with the series.
The state doesn't even have to be from outside the phone. You could have an internal timer that kicks off 2 weeks after you've submitted to the App Store (to allow for unexpected delays) and switches on the evil behavior.
> the original paper has done (IMHO) a poor job as explaining what it is about

Please read <http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/specialization>. The paper is for experts. Non-experts can learn from a suitable technology book instead.
Several cities in Europe that don't run 24h/day every day at least run overnight on Friday and Saturday nights. (London doesn't, since the unions are currently blocking it.)

But your point would work if you'd chosen 2am on Monday.

Copenhagen's metro runs 24 hours a day, every day, but it's small and new (and entirely automated).
Hope this book is going to be another Epic and Great reference like this gem[1]

[1] http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTK3WbaQiO5mCmvRGtvc...
When I'm onsite at our HQ, I whiteboard all the time.
Mailgun is down
Not really, at least with higher tier retailers.. Amazon is charging more for product, and with Prime you're really paying for prioritization.

Amazon builds warehouses all over the place to avoid air shipping, but optimizes it's internal fulfillment to the prioritized customers. So you either buy Prime (ie. the online version of a warehouse club) or wait 3-5 days for Amazon to sit on your order, pre-sort it and send it out UPS Ground or Parcel Post, just like they do with prime.

I live in New York. If I order from Newegg or WalMart, they typically ship from New Jersey or Philadelphia. That's a 1-2 day UPS Ground shipping zone. Sometimes I pay some nominal amount for shipping, but the product typically costs substantially less from Newegg or Walmart than Amazon.

Amazon is superior to smaller ecommerce operations. My wife orders swimsuits from a vendor in Texas without a distribution network. So she pays about 50% of retail UPS ground charges, and waits a day for the retailer to pick the product, then 3-5 business days for her suit to take a train to Chicago, another train to Syracuse, and then a truck to our home in Albany.
You can't, any more than you can get accurate data about a person by talking to them. They both select for different groups.

I understand that the research shows that the only truly accurate measure is working with someone for a week or two.
Just as K&R introduced us to "Hello, World," I'm amused they adapted their first program to an Unicode world: "Hello, 世界." Seems like a great first chapter, covering computer graphics and web server/byte fetching to boot.
>Or with the methodology. Take for example the Dropbox thread [1] which the OP's sentiment algorithm classifies as having a "negative top comment".
[...]
In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment?

To clarify, they said they manually classified the top comment instead of leaving it to the judgement of the algorithm: ", we manually categorized the top comment for each thread."

As for why their human eyes judged it as "negative", I'd speculate it was phrases such as "The only problem is", "That's gonna be the problem.", "your USB comparison fails"

So yes, the top comment's criticism is constructive, but at the same time, it can also be subjectively classified as "negative." The positive back pat at the end of the post was not about the product itself but for the accomplishment of launching something. (You could say it's the attaboy "trophy for participating" consolation prize to soften the previous paragraph's criticism.)
When he comes back, his startup is gone and nobody remembers him.
This happened with me. I normally don't go back to a topic that I've read and not commented on.

Perhaps if something is flagged as a follow-up, the original submission title can be changed to reflect new information?
Hey all,

I'm one of the co-founders of Capyx with Samay. We wanted to put a tool out there allowing startup employees to understand their vesting schedule a little better. We also put together a short cap table guide to put some consolidated information out there on how cap tables work. We'd love to answer any questions and get some feedback!

--AJ
This is a painfully incorrect method of determining programmer productivity.
Contact Lenses (1948)
AWS Lambda and the Serverless Cloud
Shared experience is good for communication. Disparate experience is good for learning. A star wars joke can cut a 20 minute discussion to zero, just because "That's great kid, don't get cocky", communicates what might take quite a while to express.

It's a really delicate balance. "culture" can mean speed. I don't know of many organizations that do this, but it's certainly possible. OTOH, that locks you into a specific worldview, and can make you blind to problems. Diverse backgrounds make organizations much more aware, but less able to communicate that information quickly.

An example is when someone picks up a new language, and they try to explain the new constructs and philosophies behind the language. It takes a long time to explain why mapcar is cool.
Museum Specimens Find New Life Online
Can you guess who wrote this?

"Attackers are simply ... a propaganda agency so far as we are concerned. They have proven they want no facts and will only lie no matter what they discover. So BANISH all ideas that any fair hearing is intended and start our attack with their first breath. Never wait. Never talk about us - only them. Use their blood, sex, crime to get headlines. Don't use us."

That was L. Ron Hubbard. Amazing how Carney's tactics so closely match those of scientology.
I must be getting old
> instead would have had to rely on human intuition - which has it's problems, e.g. spend the whole day looking at negative comments and neutral comments might start looking positive.

If you assume the people looking to validate their ideas are familiar with the HN community, then this effect makes the analysis more accurate.
There was apparently only a 30 minute window to do so. HN moves too fast for nuanced counter-replies to the commentary. If I just made a top-level comment, it would say something along "I agree in broad strokes", which is not that useful.
Yep, conferences are really great for the info you can learn. However, you just might meet someone you really get along with, and end up networking unintentionally. This has happened to me before. Are you interested in buying the ticket off me? I am flexible on the price.
I think there's an important idea here: technology should enhance our lives, not run our lives. I've been pretty good at disconnecting over the years. I always keep my phone on silent, which helped get rid of "phantom vibrations" in my leg.

I've been batting the idea around of taking this one step further: dropping my verizon wireless plan and switching my phone number to a VOIP service. I'm grandfathered into verizon's unlimited data plan, but they're increasing prices next month. Sure, I won't have service unless I'm on wifi, but it looks like a worthwhile experiment.
The Economics of Male Birth Control
Most of that VC is not being invested into innovative ideas, products or business models, but local versions of foreign companies than can't operate in China for diverse reasons, ranging from privacy to foreign ownership restrictions. The value created will be mostly limited to the Chinese market.
TBA: New rules requiring recreational drone users to register their drones
The comment you're replying to called it inappropriate, not illegal.
And by far the most important factor in making a professional league is genetics. Height is the biggest X factor in sports, and nearly every position in sports favors players who are taller and have longer limbs (yeah, yeah, strikers in soccer and NFL running backs can be short as long as they're incredibly quick). At the pro level, every player is coached to play as close to their maximum potential as is physically possible. All things held equal, a taller player simply has a greater maximum potential.

Colt McCoy is one of my favorite examples. Coming out of college, he was a prototypical NFL pocket passer: he made smart decisions, had a quick release, was incredibly accurate, had great presence in the pocket and was deceptively fast when he had to pull it down and run. But he's been a career backup because he's only 6'1", and for various reasons, it's hard to be a franchise NFL quarterback under 6'4". If you look at all the best quarterbacks in the last 20 years, nearly every one is 6'4" or taller [1]. While there are a couple exceptions (namely, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees) nearly every single "marquee" quarterback still playing today is 6'4" or taller. If Colt McCoy were 3 inches taller, he would almost certainly be a starter in the NFL today. Imagine how much better Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees would have been if they were 3 inches taller.

6'4" is really tall. In the US, that puts you into the top 1% of height for males. [2] So not only do you have to be really good at the sport, but being really good at the sport essentially requires you to be in the top 1% of the country in physical size before you even pick up a ball. I knew a kid in middle school who was 6'4" and everyone knew he was going to end up in the NBA. And he did -- for like 4 seasons before his knees gave out. But those are the kids who go pro -- everyone they've known since the age of 12 or so has been telling them they'll go pro because they were always the biggest, best player on every team they ever played on.

The odds for any given kid playing pro sports are probably much closer to zero than anyone wants to admit. Those odds only improve if the kid's parents are tall -- and even then only if the kid ends up being tall, in shape, with no genetic weaknesses in connective tissue that would cause too many injuries before they hit the pro level.

[1] http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/content/tall-task-does-...
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf, page 16