skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except when they do. For example, when 100% of men above a certain age are screened for prostate cancer, or 100% of women above a certain age are screened for breast cancer. Both cases spawned major public health campaigns to encourage screening, followed years later by recommendations AGAINST 100% screening, based on the high degree of false positives and unnecessary treatment.

Other cases that come to mind:
-- doctors who offer "full body scans" as a part of an executive physical; you're pretty much guaranteed to turn up something that is 2 sigma away from the population norm, somewhere in the body, on such a scan

-- spinal x-rays for back pain. Doctors almost always find something abnormal, and use that to justify the back pain and treat aggressively. But, we don't really have a good prior; if you x-rayed 1000 people off the street, would we find similar abnormalities frequently?
If someone sold carrots labelled as "Said to be good for your eyes" - or some other variation, then no problems.

However, if they state that there are medical studies showing that carrots improve your vision, then those claims should be checked out and action taken if not true.
Really tempted to make an account just to request some inane stuff.
Doing so would put many people out of work and throw families into chaos. Not everyone there, and certainly not all their families, deserve that.

Besides, these fines aren't based on actual damage to society. I suspect the total is high because Pharma would laugh at a $2M fine, and the FDA wants to keep their teeth.
Oculus Rift Kickstarter backers to receive free Rift at release
Of course. Hindsight 20/20, etc.

But I feel like if your business is a mature process based around a singular need, having a future disruption department to keep tabs on the market and feed back into high level management should be de rigueur. Innovating amazing and critical components of digital cameras and then spending $5B to buy a drug company in 1988 deserves to get you some future flak on your corporate leadership's decisions.
This is a really cool idea. It's a really simple solution to the same problem that would be really beautiful and easy to use on mobile especially. It doesn't quite reach the same depth, but I think it's a good way to start.
Abandoned Colony in Greenland: Archaeologists Find Clues to Viking Mystery
I'm a little confused, I think I paid for groceries last night in fiat currency and I certainly got goods in exchange for them, and I don't believe the grocery store was run by the government. Can you clarify what you mean by "does not work for you"? I suspect we mean different things by the phrase.
I find it hard to believe Amy Poehler or Tina Fey would meet with some random guy who has some service calling them up...
In fact this is the main reason why I don't subscribe to the idea of research papers including code (as a requirement). Independent replication should rely on independent implementation. Unless the software is too generic, the original researcher should have the advantage of using the implemented software for new discoveries, as much as a traditional scientist has the advantage of using his own lab for additional research.
You, I like you, you ask the correct questions!

Unfortunately not soon enough. As you said, we are the exception. I'm currently trying to get a VR games studio of the ground, it's not easy but it's a hell of a lot of fun. You do your consultancy business which I'm sure you enjoy enormously and as you've said, 9 to 5 is just a bad dream for you.

But to move the whole of humanity into that direction, the whole of humanity have to be willing to put themselves in our position and actually self-educate and take control of their lives. As you can probably imagine that's not going to happen any time soon.

Mr Carmack over here is a great example of the humanity I would like to live in, but he is the polar opposite of the humanity we actually live in. Sadly most people do not have ambitious dreams of creating new things! They learn enough to get by and that's it. I am of course talking majorities here, I realise exceptions exist but the very sad truth is that people like being comfortable and stationary with very small aspirations in a world that's actually progressing without them. In London we have this funny problem with the Underground: Most of it can be automated, but because of the mass firing that would result, it's not being done due to humanitary reasons. The same humans that are being protected from this mass-atomisation are at the same time demanding absurdly high wages (£50k+) to do tasks that can be conducted by a £3000-£10000 robot and if these demands are not met, strikes!

Same thing with McDonald's in the US. Although somewhat more reasonable there as their wages were quite low, these people are replaceable with some very basic machines. In the UK there are McDonald's with automated ordering and paying stations. I just tap on a large touch screen what I want and stick a payment method in. That £3000 device just replaced a £15000 employee and is a lot more efficient at their job.

It pains me to say this but going forward this is going to be a self-regulating problem. There will at some point be massive unemployment which may cause quite a financial crisis and then it will regulate itself over time. In the new world that will come out of this crisis there won't be any room for non-intelectual people as most automated jobs will be gone. It's funny to think about it this way, but all those young adults getting university degrees, they might need them sooner than they think. The 20-25 y.o. that don't have higher education right now will probably suffer the most in 10 years time.

TL;DR: While what is happening seems very heartless and cruel, with all the automation, it actually seems like a necessary step to evolve as a sentient species.

Damn it, I text-walled again... sorry :(
Yes those diagrams exist, but you've got to remember that these components are constantly changing as well as new components being added and others being removed all the time. It's a beast and perhaps I was a little liberal with my assertion that "NO ONE" understands it. It's possible to understand at a high level: eg "...and then the posts get filtered through this ranking component"

But then that ranking component can change week over week so if you thought you understood all of the ranking mechanics last week, then you probably have some catching up to do this week.

There's also a lot of people working on this so stuff changes fast and often. Think about all of Facebook's different products vyying for attention in the feed. Think of all the PMs with agendas who want their product in the feed in certain ways.
> And that the latency gets worse if you're making the mistake of using XML as your on the wire format...

No it doesn't. That's not what latency is.
I would love to see more comments that provided value to other readers. There is so much expertise and intelligence in this forum, but so many discussions contain only what is easiest: obvious cyncism. It's kind of fun banter once in a while, but gets old and isn't worth spending the time reading.
For me, the worthwhile comparison isn't between cloud and dedicated, but between AWS/Google/Azure on the one hand and DigitalOcean/Linode/Vultr on the other. The former charge for all outgoing transfer by the GB, while the latter include generous amounts of transfer per month with each VM plan.
And suddenly decide to next-hour ship it to their mum (again according to examples)
Presumably the people using Magic for that sort of thing were the upper-class "money left on the table" that's being picked up here. Most Magic requests, from what I take it, are more for the same lazy-person-making-100K things like to-your-door grocery delivery that other services provide.
Clickable:

http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/

http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/
7 onboarding techniques startups need for higher conversions
Whenever moving domains you risk losing traffic from organic search (although generally it won't be significant if you do it properly)

I thought it was going to be because people were typing in http://crew.com rather than crew.co
People won't stop trying to get rich just because they "can't take it with them" or pass on the wealth. And no one has proposed a 100% inheritance tax either, so this is a strawman that doesn't really move the conversation along.

The issue is, will higher taxes (not 100% taxes) on income and wealth stop entrepreneurial activity? I don't think so. Is someone going to quit because they'll pay capital gains of 30% instead of 20%? Doubtful.

The issue is what is the appropriate taxation level, not whether it should be 0 or 100%. Currently, most debates devolve down into extremist scenarios that no one is proposing.
If you have to put your books in a networked storage, you are a pirate!
sure

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/rkRVk...
Kind of light on the details? For pinging a dead service, I think requests/day is a better measure than GBs/day. Also page is an obvious marketing pitch, making this post essentially an ad.
> and the size of your company actually becomes a hindrance rather than an asset.

I'd say less size than diversity. Conglomerate aren't subject to this and still preserve a lot of the benefits of size (although as GE Capital shows... that can go badly too if not risk-managed).
Or maybe you're not the target market?

This is like people getting mad at Heroku or Github when some commodity host costs a tenth the price. Thankfully you have a choice and no-one is forcing you to use it.
I think the article is talking about a bigger issue, which is expanding our idea of a "research contribution" to include software. The current attitude essentially considers software to be equipment for getting to a scientific result.

I think that if we started thinking about research software as a research contribution in itself, it would be a good way to accomplish what you talk about, e.g. by making software (and data) something that is published and cited, rather than attached as a supplement to every publication.
Koch Snowflakes
Probably, but then, on Twitter, people abbreviate words in english or leave them out in ways that aren’t possible in German.

It’s hard when you need 3 or 4 tweets for a simple sentence explaining why Sony DCP projectors used to be easier for piracy than competing products.
They really did have trouble letting go of the per-imprint pricing model in the end.

I believe that photo-chemical prints are better and longer lasting than any inkjet (anything really other than dye transfer and offset printing), but they didnt get digital cameras out there fast enough, and couldn't let go of the film based model.
For anyone who didn't take the time to read the entire thing,go back and find the section about the shopkeepers and read that. It pretty much sums out what the author is trying to get at.
Hiring a Cloud Engineer? Questions to Ask and What You Should Hear
I'd love to know how they manage to scale such high quality service. They say they use "top-tier executive assistants and concierges", but it's hard to scale high-quality employees.

How does it differ from other concierge services, such as the one connected to American Express cards? What have others typically done well and poorly, and how does Magic+ overcome the limitations?
This sort of usage destroys the entire word. If one word has two opposing meanings it's ambiguous to ever use it at all. Language rot via imprecision.
inside out compression algorithm
I wrote the first version of the API I'm currently working on in that exact mindset in Scala with the Play framework. It basically boils down to everything returning `Either[Error, X]` where X is whatever the service is returning.

I came to dislike this approach because most of the time the error doesn't happen and it's just wasted code that's a bit verbose. So now I'm moving into Akka and going to allow well-defined exceptions to throw that get handled by a supervisor.

It was nice to know errors were handled, but I came to the opposite opinion that exceptions truly are exceptional and errors are an instance of the exceptional taking place. Shrug, the bottom line is being disciplined in error-handling. I know there's varying views on this approach, but I really like crafting method signatures that indicate what they are intended to return rather than `Either` for everything. There's places where `Either` is great like registration where a bad password isn't really an "exception" but user error.
Yeah, I probably could have found a better quote, but it's a random TOS and I'm at work haha. At the end of the day, I don't see a reason to believe why Kodak wouldn't make a play to control the images they scan/upload as much as possible. Or a reason to believe TOS wouldn't change to make that so once adoption of the new Super 8 is at an acceptable level to Kodak.
Ugh. Could have been higher.

My local entertainment mediums were spammed with this ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGjr_CJ2n98

for a solid year or two. The vapid, cultish, yet manic grin. The "Now, with Neuroscience(tm)!". The recursive caricature of a borderline mentally retarded person who now feels that everything is right in the world because she's paid tithe to the Intelligence Authorities. The notion that the commercial is not only defrauding, but actively mocking anyone too uneducated or uncritical or low-self-confidence, to doubt their claims. The several percent of her life it's implied she's supposed to spend engaging in ritual flagellation with repetitive, poorly designed games, in order to diminish the shaming at not 'working on my mind'.

It is the singular most offensive scumbag commercial advertisement that comes to mind. It brings on vivid fantasies of punching the smug grin off of this woman, even though I know intellectually she's just a professional actress, and I'm a pacifist.
I've tried to get it to tell me how godlike my cat is, but it just won't.
First, did anybody else miss that what's linked here is the "+" version, at $100/hr?

The original "pay per use" service is still offered at https://getmagicnow.com/
Ah, the copy ("Magician", somehow they're going to conjure up Tina Fey for $100?) made me think it was a joke.
This would be a real risk if you hired an ordinary personal assistant. This is actually exactly the sort of challenge that traditional assistants pose and that Magic+ is designed to fix.

Magic+ is actually not just one person, but it's a software-driven service with a highly trained team of professional assistants that are held to a very high bar. They are managed, supervised, and trained by us so that you don't have to worry about it.

And, on top of that, every task and request is managed from beginning to end using custom software that is designed specifically to monitor the execution strategy and enhance both the quality and the reliability of the output. It's difficult for me to say more right now about how this works without disclosing IP that we cannot disclose at this time, but I hope to be able to say more about how this works in the future.

A good way to think about Magic+ is that it's a natural-language command-line interface for complex tasks that require some human interaction. A component of how we handle your email is more like a ~/.procmailrc file that can pipe things to a highly-supervised human assistant than it is like having a random person somewhere in the US logged in to your Gmail. You tell us how you need things done, using natural language, and it gets done, assuming it's possible.

Again, I recognize that this explanation is not as detailed as it could be, but I hope that it helps. I will think about how we can explain this better before we are able to disclose the inner-workings of our software.
The Lyft-GM deal and why you probably won't buy a self-driving car
U.S. Chamber calls Seattle's Uber union law illegal
Weird (interesting) choice of name... 'gobby'...
The ads are always quite careful to avoid promising anything outright. "brain training," "testing," "compare your score with global averages." Technically, Lumosity IS training your brain... to do better at Lumosity games.

It's obviously vaguely promising cognitive gains, but it manages to talk around it extremely well.
I know why detailed reporting is important, I just have to assume that anyone paying for this is not price sensitive.

Transparency and trust, one would imagine, are the core pieces of the business maybe even in front of task execution so it makes sense, but still, if I bought a 1200 ipad via SMS because I was too lazy to drive to walmart I probably don't need the reciept.
I had almost exactly the same situation in 2013.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would be stupid enough to use Linode.

They continue to (a) have incidents and (b) fail to disclose them in a timely and transparent manner.
But does it support HMDs?

FTA:

" If viewed on a VR-compatible device, the user will be placed inside a sphere of these profile photos with the ability to change the classification of each member using a gaze-controlled cursor to click on them. "
I may have some spare copies of the first 2 volumes in storage at my parents place. Want to shoot me an email (me at rhys dot io), and I can have a look next time I am there?
Thank you so much for your comments, feedback, and kind words!
I did read the specs, and they don't answer any of my questions. This comment fails to give me any new information and instead just makes me feel bad, so, congratulations, if that was your goal.
There was an article that made it to HN a few months ago about a village in Wales where the local businesses were doing this. I think it may have been part of a TV show but it's definitely an idea who's time has come.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crickhowell-welsh-town-...
I just gave you a product!
I use Magic occasionally and it's been wonderful every time. It's definitely not something I would use everyday, but it's been great for:
- a time I needed a replacement power supply cable, and really didn't have the time to research where to get it, and needed it urgently.
- a couple times where I needed a dinner reservation for relatives or friends visiting
- quick questions about things to do or places to go

I definitely recommend the basic version!
Thanks for the rotated version. Bookstores and Libraries should stack their books like that (except in the chiropractic business section) :-)
Yes, but.

The technical term for the condition you're interested in is consistency. There is a theorem (Doob) regarding the consistency of Bayes estimates. [1]

In simple cases it means that under any non-silly prior your posterior will converge to the truth. E.g. mean of a normal distribution with a normal prior.

The complex cases include things like models that expand when given more data.

[1] http://www4.stat.ncsu.edu/~sghosal/papers/bhurev.pdf
I believe the parent is referring to Qualified Small Business Stock. New issues of stock (meeting certain requirements: certain date ranges, company must be valued at less than $50M, keep all it's assets in "productive" investments, not passive such as real estate or other stock) can be completely excluded from long term capital gains tax.

https://blog.wealthfront.com/qualified-small-business-stock/ has a nice summary.
In the US that'd be 'gabby' for a similar meaning, though rarely heard.
especially considering he's sponsored by Rethink in this article.
I predict a few things for the future of this service (and this kind of service):

1. A lot of frustration from customers and a lot of churn. An effective personal assistant, or office manager, or whatever, effectively begins to read the mind of their employer. Lack of face-to-face, and what I imagine will be a lot of assistant churn, will result in very poor "mind reading" abilities. Cost of training a new assistant is much higher than actually having one, at least for folks who utilize their services a lot.

2. A race to the bottom on price, exacerbating the problem of assistant churn. $100/hr leaves a lot of room at the bottom, but it'll drop to the point where people in the US aren't willing to do the job of magic assistant.

3. $0 is the cost of Siri, Google Now, and Alexa. They truly suck right now, for almost everything except taking the place of a keyboard, but will get better. There's a limit to what "virtual" assistants can do for you; at some point you need a meat robot to go physically do stuff for you, if you want assistance beyond what technology can do.

Not to trash talk the idea or the company, at all. I haven't tried it. I can't think of anything it could do for me that I wouldn't rather hire an actual assistant for. At $100, you can get several hours of real human time, in your local market. Someone you can meet, and develop a rapport with. I'm ordinarily not on the side of the fence that insists that the personal touch is important (I don't like car dealers and want them to disappear, I don't like sales people at any store and generally want them to disappear, etc. because in general, they know less than me about what I'm shopping for and just serve to annoy me and occasionally lie to me to try to manipulate my decision). But, in this case, there is real value in a real live human having access to your daily life or work so they can be most productive about helping you get shit done.
This just made me giggle out loud. Please accept this voucher, good for one internets.
400k emails isn't that many though. :(
Exactly. And if you look back 10-20 years, you could find those same games in the unsorted $2-$5 bin at electronics stores.
Volatility doesn't matter much if Bitcoin is just a medium for transferring value within a transaction in normal business circumstances, i.e. slight fluctuations in exchange rates over the course of an hour can be built into the offer. Forex style arbitrage and speculative investments are of course another matter...one in which Bitcoin is no different from other currencies.

The liquidity constraints of Bitcoin may ultimately limit its general adoption and perhaps encourages speculation over use. And is why, despite my lack of clarity, I did not intend to suggest that Bitcoin was better than Wells Fargo money orders for moving money internationally. That doesn't mean that blockchains may not prove to be significantly better.
If that conveys how people really use the service, then, to many people, it also conveys that the people who use the service are, on average, lazy rich douchebags. If that isn't what you want to portray about your brand, you might want to reconsider your examples.
Interesting. Today I've come across quite a few stories on analogue tech. This + new Technic SL-1200 models + new vinyl pressing machines being produced due to vinyl demand continuing to grow + record players and instant film cameras being incredibly popular on Amazon this Christmas. I wonder if we'll see this occur to other analogue tech too?
You wanna know what's great about actually employing someone? They can actually devote their full attention to you. They'll also get the door for you; can Magic+ do that?