skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was looking for a review, and found Gelman's recommendation of

Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences

and mention of this book: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-b...

Does anyone have a comment on those? I've read Pearl's two earlier books, and found the one on causality quite hard to navigate. The basic ideas are cool, but it's hard to connect the more advanced theorems with anything I could actually implement.
Yeah, PayPal works nice for the simple case, but it seems like any minimally complex payment structure, even simple recurrences, are a complete train wreck.
Hardware and Software Architecture of the Machine [video]
Judea Pearl's work on causality is some of the most important statistics work that is happening these days. We've known how to do statistics to find correlations and make inferences, but he put causality on a firm mathematical basis, and discovered fascinating statistics as he did. This book should be a blast.
Yes, that's what I was referring to — the launch was terrible, but it has now been improved to the point were it's surpassed Google Maps in usability. I use it every day on my phone.
YC, you might want to slow down your own growth. Your unicorns aren't fairing well. Gotta keep your game tight.

-says someone who doesn't know much but can spot obvious trends.
You lose board seats and thus your ambitious COO can start a board fight against you and take your job.
> I do not believe in buying a new computer every two years.

It wouldn't help anyway, because that damn ball spins even on new computers.

I keep getting told I'm "doing too much". Apparently a $2500 laptop should be confined to no more than a handful of concurrent Apple-approved applications and nothing more... ? (and even then, you'll still get those beach balls).
> HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance..

Flash video was never perceptibly slower than html per se. The only thing that really affects video performance is whether or not it's hardware accelerated, and in cases where flash used HW it performed the same as html. The reason it seemed slower is that AFAIK there's never been an HTML video implementation that falls back to software, whereas flash would do so if HW wasn't supported.
He was probably told he has to give the CEO a 5 star rating or he would be fired.

edit: i have no idea if they have an internal person-rating system based on yelp, but i hope so

As far as the recent resignations, it's probably New Years resolutions when people realize they value time over money.
They just posted their own story, with a copy of the email: http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-ceo-parker-con...
Philosophy 101 would tell us that statistics could capture only correlations, not causation. Causation require different kind of knowledge, of what is beyond appearances.
Yea, I'd also have to say very few. A researcher of that skill level is pulling a very comfortable salary. A lot of the work that comes with that salary requires you to have an above board reputation. If a company is hiring you (or your parent company) to find vulnerabilities in their product, they need to be sure you don't have a conflict of interest.
> 2. Play it up as a huge problem that could threaten the company.

It absolutely was a HUGE problem. Even if he was set up, Conrad created a toxic culture that had to change.

Parker never seemed to understand that he could not flout laws & regulations like Uber; Uber has leverage because consumers love their product, and is able to put pressure on the incumbents and regulators; in contrast, NOBODY would stand up to defend Zenefits, and regulators will shut them down unless they clean up their act asap.

Edit: fixed typo (thanks @gingerrr)
For our last 2 clients (with both, offering a "data team as a service"): the reporting tools were written in Haskell, using Servant [1] which got started trying to do the same at Zalora to set up a customer service management tool. The motivation was that it made painful stuff much simpler and faster to write (performance was a bonus).

It's also used for a bunch of tricky data manipulation problems that were harder to solve using pure SQL. Example: identify a unique customer based on attributes (email, phone, address, etc.) one or more of which can change when a customer tries to create a "new" profile to grab the $10 new customer signup voucher. This ran recursively on the entire customer dataset (12 countries, some customers had created as many as 250 profiles) in about 4 seconds on a m3.medium instance.

We don't/didn't write blog posts or tweets about it though. I think the set of people who write blog posts (i.e. both have free time to do so, the talent, and the motivation) is relatively small, and the number of blog posts and other visible stuff being published is proportional to the size of the community, so you'll see many more Node.js/RoR posts than you will on using set theory to reduce a 5,000-table flawed data model systematically or the kind of everyday stuff Haskellers are doing everywhere. Also, personally at least, I don't feel like I know enough to have much to offer by writing a blog, so I stick to making these semi-anonymous HN comments.

Interviewing Haskellers, I found a lot of examples of similar work - CRUD tasks, web services, etc. built in Haskell within a larger organisation and running quietly in the background. Something small and modular that can be tacked on quietly.

One of the creators of Servant moved on to Tweag [2], a French big data company, where he's working on PB-size distributed machine learning projects for large corporate clients, which I think is where Haskell really shines today. I suspect NDAs will stop them from talking much about it... I've always wanted to do similar work for clients but so far, no dataset was "big" enough to justify moving away from well established R libraries.

[1] https://github.com/haskell-servant/servant

[2] http://www.tweag.io/
I guess the game gets more interesting if everyone uses that strategy.
>All I am saying is that there is no need of creating the same piece of software by a different team of people just because of NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). India should spend time in creating other things.

It's not just NIH. If you're in the small leagues you get to use whatever other players offer, but if you're one of the superpowers, like China is and India wants to be, it makes sense to have your own infrastructure that you control.

>China created its own search engine because they want a feature i.e. censorship, which Google doesn't offer them.

Not just that. First, there's surveillance of its citizens. China might be OK with doing it to their own citizens, and the US might be OK with them doing it to their own. But neither the US nor China would be OK with the other doing it to their citizens. Now, a second rate player, like Spain or even Germany (who even was under US governance for a long time after WWII) might be OK with it, and an aggregate big player like the EU might not yet have the power of coordination and political might to fight this situation.

Second, most of the western internet (from news outlets to social media) mostly features and touts the western internets and viewpoints on any matter, from cultural issues to trade agreements. I'm not talking of Chinese government propaganda here either (that of course also exists). I'm talking about all kinds of issues, where there are different national interests at stake. Now, this situation is convenient for the US population, who follows its own websites, never watches e.g. Brazilian or French movies or listens to e.g. Spanish or Chinese pop, and sure as hell never reads foreign newspapers or uses foreign social media platforms anyway ("never" here used as a proxy for "in insignificant amounts"), as all of their media/websites put the culture and interests of the US (or of some US based companies) first.

Of course people sharing those interests and culture (e.g. US citizens, British etc), these media/services might even appear "totally neutral" -- as if they're just describing out objective reality. Or they'll point to things like FOX vs X progressive channel, to show how there's variety of opinion as if that covers the whole spectrum.

People outside the US reading those outlets and using those services though (because of them being early technological pioneers, having the infrastructure and the money, etc) do have this problem -- that the majority of stuff there is more often than not against their national interests/culture/sensitivities/political views/etc.

>Indian Facebook doesn't make sense.

A US based web service having access to all the private data for the Indian population makes even less sense. Would Americans feel the same way if Facebook was, say, Russian? Conveniently they seldom, if ever, have to use a non US-based web service of such scope. It's always the others who have to use theirs.
"Effective immediately, this company’s values are:
#1 Operate with integrity.
#2 Put the customer first.
#3 Make this a great place to work for employees."

Ummm… what were the values before the switch?!?
It's true, that's a smaller attack surface.

Under what circumstances would a "phone" manufacturer produce a headset that didn't have the baseband problem?

Which might just mean: a phone that consumers would regularly RTM if it did contain the problem?
227's YouTube Chili' Super Bowl Commercial Spicy' Comment #Pokemon20 #1 NFL NBA
Me too. Looks like a 4chan story.
> So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions

As I see it, Eich didn't lose his job because of his political opinions, he lost (or decided to leave) his job because of his inability to perform basic duties of the job -- a CEO, after all, must ultimately be responsible for managing a company, including its public image and relations with its employees, customers, etc.

And, honestly, I think that even with the past donation, the situation was manageable, and that anyone who was up to the task of being CEO of an organization like Mozilla could have managed it.
http://avc.com/2016/01/ch-ch-ch-ch-changes/
It says that two paragraphs earlier:

> Zenefits’ company values were forged at a time when the emphasis was on discovering a new market, and the company did that brilliantly. Now we have moved into a new phase of delivering at scale and needing to win the trust of customers, regulators, and other stakeholders.

i.e., they valued growth over integrity and following the letter of the law. That evidently works for some startups some of the time, but this seems like a bad industry to try that approach in.
I liked monopoly when I was 10. Now I'd rather do almost anything else. It's excruciatingly boring and slow paced for the adult me.
If this is truly from DHS, then it is completely insane. For one, if it is for some important security function that presumably merits three exclamation points from DHS, then having it vulnerable to disablement by any casual passerby is ridiculous at best. At a minimum, the sign should carry some legal warning or threat of penalty.

Secondly, training people to think it normal that odd devices would randomly appear in public places (with no advanced notice or explanation and amateur signage) is a horrible idea. Coming from DHS, it's even worse.
But Apple Central knows that the number is no longer on iMessage. It also know that I was the recipient of an iMessage in the group. How difficult would it be for Apple to send an update to the client, saying "Um, you tried to iMessage $NUMBER, but it is no longer on iMessage" ?
I love the way Conrad gets all the blame and is thrown under the bus...

'The fact is that many of our internal processes, controls, and actions around compliance have been inadequate, and some decisions have just been plain wrong. As a result, Parker has resigned.'

Not much subtlety there. Presumably as COO he had nothing to do with 'internal processes, controls, and actions around compliance' which seems a little odd to me. So what was he doing all day then?

I also like how the company values are instantly changed...

'Effective immediately, this company’s values are: ...'

Which is interesting because most companies spend ages coming up with the correct values for the company and it usually involves feedback from employees.
It's cool. Do you tinker in any lispy dialects?
Square's guide to empowering women engineers
Which part is good? Sounds like the usual legalese. Rough times, change of culture, some tough decisions. Usual fare.
I'll second this. I started with the beta of OS X (2000?) after several years with Red Hat, and the period of Snow Leopard through Mountain Lion was the best. Especially Snow Leopard. I recently reinstalled it on an old Mac Mini and a 2006 MacBook Pro and was amazed how fast it was compared to Mountain Lion on a 2011 MBP.

I rue the days I upgraded my iPhone and iPad to ios9. Both are slugs now and they don't sync with Messages on the MBP anymore.
Terrified Gamer Almost Cries
I see your point.

I don't know much about Reconstruction, but I assume that word got around fast that states like NY would provide a lot more opportunity than a place like GA. That said, I'm sure there were immigrants who went down there. From the little I know the Confederate States were smashed beyond recognition (not everywhere, but certainly the big cities).[1]

Also consider that Northerners who went South were looked down upon by Southerners. I assume they didn't look at immigrants in a much better light.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbaggers
Well, if you're willing to buy RubyMotion:

http://www.rubymotion.com/
Ohhhh I would be fascinated to see a RICO case against YC for every startup they've funded that's broken laws. That seems entirely in the spirit of RICO, the more I think about it: it's specifically about organizations that make money off of other people breaking the law at their direction, and who might otherwise avoid liability because they themselves didn't break the law.
Note that all major C compilers — gcc, clang and msvc (also icc, if that counts as major) — are written in C++.
When that happens the railroads become amazing, and the utilities are finally not worthless. Though if you play with the 500 free parking space options, then the bank will run out of money.
Dell XPS 13 is very very nice and runs Ubuntu pretty flawlessly. Battery life is a challenge of course but thats not the hardwares fault and with a newer kernel, the right kernel options and tlp it does alright.
Try changing the app that launches when you press play/pause on the Mac keyboard. Go ahead. I'll wait.
All of the things are already there but not packaged in the way _you_ want it. You need to invest the time to chose and pick if you want to use Linux in this specific way. If you don't want to do that job, then I guess Linux is not for you, stick to OS X untill by pure chanse someone creates a distribution which does exactly what you want.

(Btw. I never compiled a Linux kernel for my desktop/laptop)
Are you suggesting that spruce migrate?
Yelp: Very hard to monetize. Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the businesses being reviewed, they've given themselves a conflict of interest. They've chosen to sell their integrity, which makes their star ratings less reliable/valuable, which makes users trust them less, which makes businesses want to advertise less. It's a vicious cycle.

Zenefits: Broke the law. Also an insanely ambitious, brilliant, risky business model.

PayPal: Hated by most people/customers. Can't wait until they go out of business completely.
Okay, so Windows sucks (big surprise). What about GNU/Linux? I've been using it for more than 5 years full-time and I've never had any show-stopping problems or problems that couldn't be solved with a 5-minute Google search.
(I (tried (once (in (college (but (lisp (is (not (my (style)))))))))))
Maybe they're going to launch a startup together.
On-the-wire refers to serialisation (writing to file or socket). It would be great to be able to specify both in-memory layout and serialised layout: the former typically contains padding, which is a waste of space in the later. There may also be endianness differences, different datatypes, etc. That would remove the need to manually write de/serialisation routines if they should differ.
"Have you gotten one of those ads when you don't have good network connectivity? Fails to load, fails to respond even if you go into airplane mode"

Had this happen twice today on my long commute. After 15 minutes, gave up trying to make my very expensive phone play music. This on top of the usual iTunes complaints is pushing me to abandon Apple until things improve.
I transitioned back to the old interface almost immediately. The search interface for past orders is less powerful because you now need to know when an order was placed in addition to having the transaction ID. The old interface can pull up an order without having the approximate order date as long as you can provide either your own txnid or the customer's txnid. Additionally, I was no longer able to pull up orders using the customer's txnid. So, that was a bummer.
Values-wise, any change was an improvement.
TBH you can blame that on Germany alienating Google Maps

https://gigaom.com/2014/12/05/googles-cars-return-to-german-...

"Google started automatically blurring faces and number plates, it was forced to give Germans the option of having their houses blurred out as well – something hundreds of thousands of people took the firm up on.

However, this was a costly business, with Google needing to hire temporary workers to manually blur out selected buildings. It also didn’t stop people trying to sue the U.S. company over alleged privacy infringement. So, in 2011, Google said it was giving up on Street View in Germany – the pre-existing images remain online, but they haven’t been updated in three years."
> That might not be a bad thing. It could be precisely because it was inappropriate that Zenefits got ahead.

...for now. But if the end result is massive fines, plus a bunch of their sales staff (and maybe their superiors) getting thrown in prison under Washington's criminal laws relating to selling insurance without a brokers license, plus ruining the company's relationship with customers and with the insurers whose products it sells (and possible breach-of-contract actions from those insurers).

Well, then, getting ahead for a little while before the whole thing caught up to them isn't going to seem like a big advantage.
PayPal's redesigned their UI two or three times in the past decade or so. None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet. I still log in and see the same site I did in the early 2000s. I really, really understand that their business is enormously complex, operating in hundreds of different markets, but... you'd think some of the improvements would trickle down eventually. It's a real challenge for their support staff that has to figure out which of several completely different interfaces a customer is seeing before they can provide any help with it.

http://i.imgur.com/a1pYK8a.png
That is... so far from my many encounters with native desktop linux as to be almost unrecognizable.
Thank you for the clear, well articulated post. I forwarded an edited version to my local members too.
Bing – internet speed
Post-glacial rebound means that land in some parts of the world is still rising after being pressed down by the weight of glaciers.

There are Nordic place names with terms like "island", places that were one coastal villages now far from the sea, and Lake Mälaren, once part of the Baltic, became a freshwater lake about 800 years ago.

In some areas the land rise is 1cm per year, and is noticeable in someone's lifetime. (The only comparison picture I could find is http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ppAQwRyWqWM/VBtDKBWso5I/AAAAAAAAAK... from http://sburnadventure.blogspot.com/2014/09/kayaking-finnish-... )
There's also this image that western societies are promiscuous with low (if any!) moral values (because all morality revolves around the regulation of sex, of course!)

There's also a sense of entitlement, because: "The destruction of our country is largely the responsibility of the West". This mindset is very prevalent. So instead of appreciation for being taken in, there's discontent because reality is not turning out like they imagined it to be.
THERE MUST BE MORE TO THIS STORY. -recent paranoid end is nigh HN user.
Yep, here's an example - if you mouse down on the video thumb, and don't move the mouse nor release the mouse button (so basically you've held the thumb in place):

- Does the pause event fire?

- Does the seeking event fire? Or does it only fire when you move the mouse to drag the thumb to a new time?

- Does the seekend event fire? Does it fire every time you move the thumb to a new position without releasing the mouse button? Or does it only fire when you release the mouse button?

- Does the timeupdate event fire? Does it fire once? Or repeatedly for the same position where the thumb is?

Every browser has different answers.

As for the timeupdate event, it only fires once every 250ms, which is painfully slow for applications that need to synchronize something with the video (slides, subtitles, etc.)

And even if you decided to ignore all the events and write a requestAnimationFrame-powered loop to query only the changes in the currentTime property, there's a bug in Chrome on Android where the video.currentTime property becomes out-of-sync with the video if any long-running JS or complicated animation blocks the event loop for a few seconds - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=509010
Definitely related, from http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-conrad... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992

>Also today, Zenefits announced that venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel has joined the startup’s board of directors. In addition to relinquishing his role as chief executive, Conrad has also given up his board seat.
>It's funny though West Germany, which was completely ruined by WW2 emerged as a lot more prosperous country than what India did for the first 40 years. Do you have any idea how badly Germany was bombed. If you say things like "But Germany is an exception because X", then think why East Germany couldn't be as rich. East Germany was about as poor as West Germany after WW2.

Well, West Germany is an exception because it gotten a Cold War ally and darling immediately after the war.

They're also very favorably placed in the center of Europe, and were given lots of help to try to rebuild their economy (their sugar daddy allowing them to pay only minimal war recuperations, cheap migrant hands from Turkey and Greece, etc).

They also didn't have instability of the kind India faced post-colonialism, since the ex British rulers (as is their standard mode of operation everywhere, from Israel/Palestine to Cyprus/Northern Cyprus etc.) used a divide and conquer tactic, playing Indian, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc one against the other.

And of course it's not just the starting state (Germany being bombed, India being poor) but also things like human capital, etc. Germany, post WWII, had far more educated people, industrial experience and infrastructure (as a percentage) compared to India.

As for East Germany, it was depended on USSR which didn't have the same kind of economic resources as the US, nor did other communist countries it mostly traded with.

>All Indians do is give excuses for why India was poor

Yes, those lazy Indians, always up to no good. There are no historical reasons, just lazy, ignorant, people.

/s
Aeropress user here as well. I skip the bean step and use Café Bustelo. It's inexpensive, the grind is just right for both Aero methods (normal or inverted), and tastes great.