skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> showing the Senior Australian of the Year Gordian Fulde responding to a question about the lockout laws, for which he was a strong advocate.

I have no idea who the guy is, he might be great in other respects, but his answer to the question he was asked was absolute bollocks. "Of course you can still have a drink at 2AM, go home with your friends and open a bottle of champagne", I mean, what kind of shitty answer is that? Does this guy really believe that's what young people should do? Sit at home and thanking God that nothing bad happens?

I've never been to Australia but this video has really infuriated me, because in 2-3 years' time these sort of people's shitty rationalizations will certainly make their way half of the world to my Eastern European country as reasons to "make young people behave". "If the civilized Australians are doing it, why shouldn't we?", that's what local politicians would say (you can replace the Australians with the British, Swedish or the Germans, there's always more civilized people than us who have answers to all the life's problems).
I'm not sure that this is the only cause here. People kept dying in Sydney because of late night attacks. If that's not a disincentive to going out, I don't know what is.

I don't agree with the lockout laws though, or the majority of alcohol-limiting laws in Australia (I live in Melbourne). They just smell of moralising.
Just keep immigration and education low, and this'll be sure to fix itself, because market forces!

No amount of freedom and patriotism will create nurses if you're neither training nor importing them.

Over here in the UK we have a perennial nursing shortage - so we'll be kicking a load out of the country come April, because the scurrilous auslanders are stealing British jobs! That no British person will fill! But hey! Patriotism! It's the principle of the thing, right?!

But, worry not - when you and I are elderly and in need of nursing care - there will be no way of meeting capacity, unless half the population is in elder care, or old folks are looked after by Robots, or just euthanised as they're no longer productive to the state that owns them.
For those who don't know Sydney: Kings Cross is a 400m street packed with clubs. It does look shady with its erotic clubs, but short enough that you're out in a few minutes. Newspapers have a focus over night crime in Kings Cross, I've always wondered there was a political agenda or whether that was statistically abnormal. Alternatives are downtown (less dense in clubs), Oxford St (gay clubs) and farther neighbourhoods for more hipster people.

As a French citizen having lived over there 3 years, I was indeed impressed that in Australia alcohol = violence, which is a new concept to me. You often see people down on the pavement cuffed by the police for a few hours until they calm down. I have no idea whether they get fined or arrested after that. My NYC friend says police is still very reasonable, and not as overeager and totalitarian as in NYC, though. So subjects might actually actually drunk and violent.
> Now only if Microsoft would fix the power/sleep issues with Surface 4, it would be perfect.

Load the newly updated Intel display driver.
JQuery is too big and its raison d'être is no more. All useful ideas have been integrated in JS5 and HTML5. Plus IE6-8 and Android 1-2 are dead.

I would love if more and more awesome JS libraries like FLOT (Canvas based chart library) would remove all JQuery dependencies and use just native DOM.

(raison d'être = most important reason or purpose for someone or something's existence; too big = 120KB of dead weight is huge, minified 1+MB JS file is bad for mobile users)
How to use recurring payments to eliminate churn and increase revenue
Google and Facebook are completely different animals. They both make money through advertising[1], but the use cases are different. Even their algorithms have different implications. In Google's case for example, their search is like an ever improving AI, increasingly hard to overtake. And assuming search is going to continue to be a need, it may become increasingly hard for a competitor to overcome them. I do understand nothing lasts forever, but only thing is I don't see it coming yet.

Sibling comment, compares Goog with MS 10 years back. My humble submission is several people saw it coming even then. I remember reading a book called 'The Search', and also having some discussions with friends, where we felt that Google will overtake MS. But there is no such thing in the horizon, which challenges Google. And people tried - Blekko was noteworthy. DDG is also liked by hackers, but it remains to be seen in the long term.

Now talking about FB's algos (or AI). Its purely anecdotal, but till I was using FB, I found it highly irritating. Imagine if your email was trying to guess which email you like to read, rather than simple time sorted one (and brief categorization, which gmail does).

[1] This analogy of comparing Google to advertising company has become a bit tiring now as well. I think, thats their current way of making money, we should judge them by what their intrinsic value is - Search/self-driving cars/Youtube/etc. As the means may change (micro-payments via Bitcoin/etc who knows?)
Generally speaking, Congress' biggest pusher of H1-B visas over the past 20+ years is San Jose's own Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat.
Most big companies are actually just fine with nonsensical results. It's a bit odd, but I've realized that nobody who uses BI actually cares much about data quality or integrity.
Fun anecdote time Lenny and even this new Jolly Roger AI- it's not just the telemarketers who are being scammed, some of them are using Lenny to do the scamming to get around their employers rules and get out of having to do real work.

At a previous startup I worked at, we had an outbound call center with 500 reps who were incentivized by their talk time- the amount of time they spent on outbound calls.

We found about 5 sneaky agents who would purposely call Lenny and sit on the call doing nothing, doing their nails, reading their kindle to keep their metrics up and high and look like they were doing their jobs well (and winning monthly contest incentives that would give them small bonuses or extra PTO) instead of calling real customers.

I always wondered if the people who designed Lenny know about how some reps purposely call them to keep their own metrics up. Like, they think they are sticking it to the telemarketer, but really the telemarketer WANTS to screw around and take forever on the call so their performance bonus increases.

Once we caught on to this, the company changed the metrics around to number of unique outbound calls. But then the reps also figured out a way to game that. There were even a few of them who figured out a way to set up dummy numbers and they would basically call their friends, or even EACH OTHER at the call center, and sit on the call with their friends instead of calling the call center. I could never really blame these reps, it was such a crappy soul sucking job and I gotta say behind the scenes I was always impressed with their ingenuity to try and get around the metrics. These reps were making $11 an hour and had to clock out even to use the bathroom (illegal practice that the company just broke the law on).

I'm so glad I left that place, it was such a toxic atmosphere.
While I applaud this effort, it does concern me that they have chosen to publish only three of the claimed 47 failures to replicate.

The Begley that spawned in part this debate was seriously flawed for two reasons: the first is that the experiments they performed were not described in any detail, and the second is that the experiments they choose to repeat were clearly not selected at random.

Indeed, the limitations of their initial study may underlie the skepticism that greeted their claim that 89% of studies were not reproducible. Most scientists expected a certain proportion of studies to be difficult to reproduce, but nothing approaching 89%.

So, perhaps publishing details of ~6% of their study is an improvement, but again, ironically, it is not a statistically relevant sample.
These are the bread and butter tactics of What Color Is Your Parachute. Still a relevant book, even in the tech industry IMO.
Canonical reinvents the personal mobile computing experience
Based on my understanding of the threads on the Musl list, part of this was some features that are now implemented in Musl, and part was Kubernetes using DNS in ways that are incorrect.
> I think there are a couple of really overhyped areas right now, AR/AI/ML and IoT/IoE. Now while I don't mind the attention and money being thrown at tech, I can't help but feel we're borrowing more against promises, hopes, and dreams, while simultaneously under-delivering and I think that's going to hurt tech's image and erode investor confidence sooner than later.

I became interested in natural language processing in the early 2000s, more as a hobby and as part of my personal projects, but even so, I remember that back then most of the AI-related discussions on things like forums and mailing lists were mentioning the AI winter as the big bad wolf that had killed an entire industry. It also killed LISP, they were saying.

Interesting to see that that memory seems to have faded away to the distant past.
You are correct. Thanks for pointing that out.
>No, you never give out a number. It's like asking the person sitting across from you to show you their cards before placing a bet.

The thing I've never understood about this approach is the reason it's suggested not to give your number first is, presumably, it can anchor your salary negotiations lower than what the company was originally prepared to offer.

I've switched jobs a few times for no other reason than to get a huge salary jump, and I've always given my salary requirements to a recruiter or during the interview process based on the high, high end of industry salary surveys in my field based on my years of experience. Sometimes the conversation will stop then and there, but a few times they've bitten and I've gotten the huge raise. Not to be smug or anything, but I'm fairly sure I'm making quite a bit more than most of the co-workers I've had in similar roles, even if they have more experience than me.

From my perspective, I'm anchoring the salary negotiations on the high end, as opposed to letting the recruiter spit out a number first and anchor the negotiation on the low end. What would I gain from letting them make an offer first?
Chosing Diesel as a name in 2016 is not exactly smart.
greedy companies or not
What I do is put the call on speaker and pass the receiver to my four-year-old son, who's super excited that someone wants to speak with him.

It transforms an annoying experience into an entertaining one.
Analyzing Response Time Distributions for Microservices
Karma: GoPro's new drone
The job I have in mind was basically implementing a subset of Excel's sorting and filtering capabilities into a paginated table view on a SPA web page.

Sorting has a couple of wrinkles. When Excel sorts rows, it changes the in-memory order; its sort is also stable. That means if you sort by column C, then B, then A, you're effectively doing "order by a, b, c". Seems simple enough. But that's not the only wrinkle in this problem.

Not all sortable columns are in the same table. If you do something naive like "select x.* , y.* from x join y [...] where [...] order by x.a, y.b limit 10 offset 20000", you're doing too much work - you're sorting a wide result set. It's normally better to do your pagination in a subquery and join against it, like this:

select x.*, y.* from x join y [...] join (
select x.id from x join y [...] where [...]
order by x.a, y.b limit 10 offset 20000
) f on f.id = x.id
order by x.a, y.b

Depending on the body of the where clause, you want to join the minimum set of tables to include just enough data to evaluate the page of ids - every join has a cost.

The body of the where clause is another story, it's pretty much entirely arbitrary. The user may choose to filter on any column, just like Excel autofilter. Creating good indexes up front isn't feasible - you don't know how many columns to include in any one index, they take time to create and they're not free in disk storage either. And the filtered columns span multiple tables; the final result set may contain several hundred columns across all these tables.

So what I did is take the criteria - the filter clause, which might look something like this:

(and (or (eq (field 'x.f1') "foo")
(eq (field 'y.f2') "bar"))
(between (field 'm.timestamp') "date1" "date2"))

And turn it into a where clause. I analyze the filter tree to determine the minimum set of joins required to access all the fields needed by the filter and sorting criteria. I can then put that into a subquery to join against.

There are more wrinkles. To give a good experience, we need to populate a dropdown of potential filter values, like Excel autofilter. Potential filter values need to be filtered themselves - we only display filter values for that are potentially visible given the current filter. They also need to be searchable, because there may be millions of them. And they may include joins, like when you want to filter by tags or some other 1:N style relation, like row:tags. There are a bunch of different shapes to the different queries, but there are common composable underlyers to them.

All the above runs on mostly unindexed tables - we're relying on pure query compute performance within the designed data limits (less than 3 million rows). Sub-millisecond query response times aren't the goal here; we're supporting the user doing reasonably complex data manipulation operations with worst case performance measured in single-digit seconds.

(This is all in MySQL, because reasons that include business model constraints.)
This is very much a YMMV thing, but what improvements have you seen?
Oh, I was around.

Regardless, I was stating that your dismissal of "basic economics" was wrong. It's not basic economics, there's a lot that goes into the equation. Wages might go down. Wages might not go down by a ton. They might drop like a rock. It all depends on a number of factors, but blithely dismissing people with some nonesense about econ 101 is not being intellectually honest.
Güngören Daire İlaçlama,
The current tech bubble has some fundamental differences to the last one. Specifically, while some of the pain will hit public markets the vast majority of people left holding bags of burning crap this time around are the VC firms and other private investors. The SF Bay region is going to have an implosion but the impact on the broader stock market and US economy will be quite limited.

In short, if you just bought a big chunk of San Francisco real estate on the basis that you pay it off in a few years when you cash out the options in your hyped up tech startup... well good luck with that.
Sure, you can buck the system and gain an
additional $10-20K, but that takes a lot of
effort and I'd rather put that effort
elsewhere.

$10-20k per year is a lot of money for an extra few hours or days of tenacity.
If you want a preview of a market failure, look at midwifes in Germany. Low pay and skyrocketing insurances drove most out of them out of business and no one adjusted the rates. Lots of them aren't working anymore in the job they learned and loved. It's next to impossible now to get one - and you don't even know or appreciate that job until you're getting kids yourself: A target demographic that's just too small by now to make enough noise to bring them back.
> What is the fall back if a package is not available?

Then use another distro if you're not prepared to invest the effort into it. The point of people wanting to move Docker images to distros like Alpine is to minimize size. That matters if you're going for massive density etc., but depending on your use cases, using e.g. Ubuntu or Debian or Centos as a base can be just fine.

It's worthwhile to move the official images to it because they are used so widely. It's not necessarily worth it for every random image someone puts together.
Even if we were to assume that GC is better than manual memory management for servers (something I think is not really true), this presupposes that the non-memory-management-related parts of Go's type system are better than those of Rust. I disagree with that for many reasons.
Some of them are paid/incentivized for their talk time, so the reps will be perfectly happy, in fact GLAD, to be put on endless hold, because they can mute their headset, kick back and talk to their friends while all the time their metrics look good and it looks like they're working.

Some of our reps at my old company would purposely change our AI to dial places like Medicare or social security so they could purposely get put on endless hold.
Well, at least most of the protocols are really really easy to RE.
Cool app.
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The filters are predicates, not values.
But the sorts of use cases where you'd be talking to a SQL database do benefit from generics and ADTs. For example, generics are good to avoid having to write for loops over and over, which is pretty pointless for application code (and, I'd argue, for systems code as well--for loops are just bad). Pattern matching is nice for high-level app logic, which often has the flavor of "if A, do X; if B, do Y; else do Z". Generics enable try!, which is a lot nicer than C-style error handling. And so on.
Google PageSpeed Insights – Scoring 100/100 with WordPress
He's reasonably and appropriately worried about both the shaky unicorns and the seed funding bubble, neither of which seems terribly sustainable.

There are other games in town, but those two games were seriously inflating salaries here.
> Why does the size of a base image matter? What happened to the shared layers between images?

It matters because when bootstrapping new hosts you still need to download all the base images, and because in many systems the base images can come to totally dominate the storage needs.

It still can often save a lot, but it's not enough for a lot of places where people want to use Docker.
I worry more that this will turn twitter into more of a filter bubble. I use twitter largely as a news feed, and hence include a lot of sources that I frequently disagree with but still like to be exposed to.

I'd much rather just drink from the firehose than have an algorithm automatically hide stuff just because it's not similar to what I've favorited in the past.
They might actually start calling you more because the reps get incentivized by talk time, so getting a chance to chill and listen to music instead of actually having to talk to people and try to sell scam things people don't want to buy is a refreshing change for them.

Realize those reps hate their lives, hate their jobs and are probably getting $11 an hour in some crappy hell hole trying to make $$ to feed their kids... it's not a job anyone WANTS to be doing and they really don't WANT to be bothering you, they are just forced to by their employers.

If you don't want the calls, just say, "Please put me on your do not call list, thank you and have a nice day" and then hang up. Asking for the DNC is crucial- the words "DO NOT CALL" is the magic phrase that will get them to put your # into the blocked list of the autodialer. Some scammier telefirms won't actually add you to their DNC list if you say "stop calling me" it has to be the phrase "add me to your do not call list."

Also if you just hang up on them without saying anything, the software will automatically add your number back into the queue to reattempt you again and again sometimes within days. Our outbound autodialer software used to recall people who didn't answer and also everyone who sent the reps straight to voicemail. The autodialer basically throws everyone back in to get endless calls in perpetuity until you pick up and the rep talks to you. And in a big shop where you've got 500 reps making 200-250 outbound calls per day, they can try you 1x a week forever.

So if you really don't want ANY more telemarketing calls ever, stay on the line until the rep comes on, then say "please add this number to your do not call list, thank you, goodbye."
I think this is similar to zerotier.com And this just works
musl isn't very obscure to those who are..."into" (for want of a better term) libc alternatives
Microsoft is long past "nobody would ever be able to challenge them." Maybe on desktop, provided you exclude the server market.

You didn't used to have to exclude the server market. They owned that too. Then Linux challenged them and won.

In fact, they used to own all PCs. Then Apple challenged them for laptops and won.

Microsoft isn't doing badly, but it's not an unchallengeable juggernaut any more.

And Google won't be forever either.
I don't need the full Debian ecosystem. All I need is some basic tools such as NPM, Pip or gem. They can take care of the rest.

What happens when your npm/pip/gem package depends on a C library like libpq or libsasl2? Restricting yourself to pure JS/Python/Ruby code to avoid having a few MBs sitting on the disk sounds like a terrible tradeoff.
At this point I'm going to point you to [1]. They interview Ilya Sutskever (ex Toronto, ex Google Brain, now director of OpenAI). He knows a little about neural networks[2] and possibly knows as much as anyone else about gradient descent.

In [1] he talks a lot about how there is no theoretical basis to think that a deep neural network should converge, and prior to around 2006 the accepted wisdom was that networks deep enough to outperform other methods of machine learning were useless because they couldn't be trained. Then they discovered that using larger random values for initialization means that they do converge, but that there is no theoretical basis to explain this at all.

[1] http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2015/1/15/machine-lea...

[2] https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=x04W_mMAAAAJ&hl...
Link to paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783
There is no audio card with 32bit ADCs available for a couple hundred $, and even if there would be such a thing, you would need a signal source with a low enough impedance to not completely drown in thermal noise.

Any application requiring that much precision will not magically be solved by connecting a cheap soundcard. For one, ADCs in soundcards do noise shaping, so there will be an artificial increase of noise at higher frequencies (just record at 96k or 192k and have a look). Second, the absolute precision will not nearly be as good as on an ADC for quantitative measurement: typically there is no low drift reference, also when you DC couple the offset will drift, too.

The only thing they typically do very well is the "real-time" part, because that's what audio software is optimized for... :-)
It sounded like nursing schools are just turning away nurses. "Less qualified nurses will be hired" seems like the real outcome.
This is the first time I've heard of this, but as I understand the new laws are:

- No sales after 10pm for off-site consumption

- No entrance after 1:30am

- No alcohol sales in venues after 3am

In the UK this has effectively been the law for a long time. The actual law allows 24hr licensing (for on-site consumption), but very few places have a license to sell alcohol after 1am.

Why exactly have these laws so drastically caused problems in Sydney?
Nothing stops people from using the ubuntu images as the base for their own containers, so this is pretty much irrelevant.
The only thing that bothers me is that the bass track is off by a note. There's a phrase in there that is supposed to go down the scale, but instead it plays the same note three times. Otherwise, this is truly an amazing recreation of the song.

You should tweet this to Daft Punk and see what they think!