skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “One of the things we did well early on was to recognize and invest in the unique talents of each Palantirian”

I find it a bit weird how tech companies make up names for their employees now. Googler, Palantirian... does this make people work harder because they feel like they belong or something?
Ever used OpenSCAD? Try doing CSG operations with CGAL on complex STL surfaces. Then take those same surfaces with vtk, use their boolean operations. Faster but with significantly more errors.
> How do I convince managers or seniors to focus on automation and monitoring tools?

By providing solutions. You don't sound like you're busy doing stuff all the time so you can spend the time you are waiting for a meeting just doing things. Find a few low hanging fruits where you can make life for others easier, preferably things that save them time. Over time you build a reputation and people will start to actually listen to what you say. Until then, don't talk, just do.
Confusing company on many levels. On one hand such huge clients, top talent (until recently), and Thiel's famous success pre-requisite of having unique offering. But then ... they go and do really, really weird stuff like making recruitment videos shot on someone's Iphone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhMqPoCQ5Q8

I think for a long time they got away with seeming really cloudy and potentially mis-managed because of the secrecy that is inherent to what they do. But clients are now asking tough questions about what value they can actually bring to the table for crazy dollars, and things may becoming home to roost.
Theranos, Zenefits, palantir, what's the next unicorn deflation? Is it Uber or Spotify with their Palantir-esque spend a $1/make $0.90 strategies or is it an another company with less-reported vulnerabilities?
> I'd start by legalizing every form of 'marginal' housing, e.g. boarding houses, micro-apartments.

This. Outlawing "flophouses" throughout the United States exacerbated homelessness, made it much harder for people on the margins to improve their material circumstances, and grossly distorted the housing and rental market by removing the lower end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_hotels_in_the_U...
blueintegral is correct:

https://twitter.com/travisgoodspeed/status/69716634385925734...
and yet, they seem to be doing just fine.
Why use this library when similar libraries implemented in C have been in production for decades?
The article is long on opinion and short on data. I appreciate that's why it's in the opinion and not news section - and that the actual #s are hard to come by.

For me to have an educated view on the matter (as opposed to just climbing on top of a moral soapbox that violence is bad), I have to know how many people were killed, how many we meant to kill (under what criteria) and how many were killed by mistake / as collateral damage. For a sane observer to conclude that drone war is 'shameful', one has to have these numbers. Otherwise you can might as well consider WW2 and say 'We killed millions of Germans - how shameful of us!'

The numbers cited in the article are nonsense - what is the relation between the 'easy to get on' terrorist list and people targeted for drone strikes?
Wow this is incredibly fascinating, how were they able to talk publicly about this...?
It's heavily used inside Google. Tons of google-internal tools are built on App Engine.
The generated English (and a number of other languages) doesn't make a lick of sense (certainly not comparable to decent NN language models), and there's HTML and JS visible all over the place. But they certainly look a lot like typical geocities pages. How do you generate HTML and JS with NNs? I wish there were an explanation somewhere. Maybe that's the reason that there's so much invalid HTML.
If this type of analysis can't answer "who Ken Lay likes best", maybe that's not the best question to use as an example.

There are plenty of more interesting questions ("when did Enron employees start getting nervous or alarmed?") that can be answered by this dataset.
For me, the heart of the comment is this

> The social stigma associated with the word alone is hard for people to get beyond [..] I have been harassed by cops, you feel extremely transient and embarrassed just to be alive at times. [..] After this entire experience my heart breaks every time I see a fellow human having to resort to sleeping in the cold, wet, outdoors with no shelter and nothing but some cardboard and discarded newspapers to cover up with. [.. ] In the end it has helped me understand that we must all care more for one another, no matter what.

which you might also call an attempt to give a small voice to the voiceless.

How many comments are essentially glossing over that, the ratio between posts responding to the gist of this comment to those that don't, is incredible, and to describe the main point you're all mostly ignoring as

> especially when the person then goes on to talk about how difficult life is.

is beyond tone deaf. The comment is not at all about life being oh so hard for OP, ultimately. It's not about "the industry" either, nor is the original article.

The things described in this comment, the article, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646078 ought to be enough to give a person PTSD after a while. Part of that is simply caused by social stigma, which is something everybody is complicit in and nobody can directly be blamed for. And when cops have power trips and abuse the defenseless -- not saying they do that all the time, but when they do -- any remotely decent society would come down on them like furies. Not just some of them, every last person. None such societies exist as of now, instead we numb ourselves to being numb to it, and that is the major problem I see. "The industry" is but a speck of dust in that river, and the hellish ocean it leads to.
STARTUP VS. MS in US
I have received investment of 30 lac for startup, but still I have option of MS in US. Which one to opt?
GAE vs. EC2 is kind of the wrong comparison though... GAE is kind of more like AWS Lambda, or maybe bit like ECS or Elastic Beanstalk (and even then not really).
Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the one of the best sources for investigative journalism. Who would have thought?
BCD is a thing. But maybe you are not leet enough to access numbers 0x0a through 0x0f :P
Show HN: first_tmrs_only Github issues.
Have been absorbing wisdom in this message for past 12 hours. It is very dense and very valuable. I have been professionally coding for close to 10 years and yet, there is so much take away for me from this. Thanks.
> What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better than AWS.

AWS and AppEngine aren't even the same kind of thing. AWS is a high-level collection of services (Google's equivalent is Google Cloud Platform.)

AppEngine is a PaaS offering within Google Cloud Platform. And, AFAIK, its one piece of GCP that AWS doesn't have a direct competitor to. (Lambda is, I think, the closest thing.)
"Smashing stack for fun and profit". Everything started with that for me.
If you are already familiar with high-level Objective-C, I would recommend looking at the headers for the language runtime. All of the inner workings are exposed as C functions you can play with. Also take a look at Mike Ash's blog, which dives into a lot of details: https://mikeash.com/pyblog/?tag=objectivec

Also: http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/index.html
What's wrong with income inequality? I see no reason to attempt to reduce it.

The goal is to become the very best, not accept mediocrity to please the less-ables.

Surely, you wouldn't like the idea of penalizing smarter students just so that everyone get equal grades. What's different about income?
> What is that supposed to mean?

God took a big huff of DMT out of the celestial crack pipe?
Piracy site for academic journals playing game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole
Uncertainty and Risk and Trying to Make Money
> Debunking conspiracies is not science

Why not?

> theirs don't seem to exist

http://mythresults.com

> bow ties are ok

Of course bow ties are OK. Nonetheless, a scientist wearing a bow tie reinforces negative stereotypes. It's sad, but true.

> people don't hate on Feynman for having long hair or being a supposed sex swinger

That's because Feynman didn't do those things on TV. If Bill Nye wants to wear a tutu in his private life, more power to him. But if he wears one on a TV show about science I think that would indicate some really poor judgement on his part.

> Bill Nye also engineered a part that was used in the 747 while he worked at Boeing

So? What does that have to do with the Mythbusters?
I find the history of app engine and how it compared to the competition back then quite uninteresting. What I find interesting is how it works today.
you're probably thinking about a propeller - as in the type on an airplane or boat that puts energy into a fluid.

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure there is a big difference from a device trying to pull energy out of the fluid.

A quick google didn't lead me to an authoritative source, but I know I have read many times that a one-bladed propeller is the most efficient.
These names remind of the names of Ship Minds in an Iain M Banks Culture novel.
Seems like hardly fits the "competition is for losers" claim. Consulting firms are all about overpriced bullshit analysis. Seems like Palantir plays that game but sadly not even well.
> I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this.

Because, there is a huge gap between market perception and their product offering.
* I have to know how many people were killed, how many we meant to kill (under what criteria) and how many were killed by mistake / as collateral damage. For a sane observer to conclude that drone war is 'shameful', one has to have these numbers.*

Isn't that at least part of the issue? US citizens vaguely know that drone strikes take place, against people designated as "terrorists". But we know darned little else. It's all classified for various reasons.

I agree with your point, but I believe that is a side issue. First, the US government has to do some major disclosure. Otherwise they're effectively acting without any restraint or debate or consent.
Rails 5.0.0.rc1
Medicare and Social Security, that you're only entitled to after you're above 62-67. (Depending on birth date)

Anyone not elderly is SOL.
> Ethan Bond

> Palantir, Product Designer; Starting June 2016, New York City, NY

I realize you're not technically a Palantir employee quite yet, but there's definitely the opportunity for bias here.
Hehe, we're running GAE at work and I'm constantly looking for other options / trying to persuade management to spend the time on migration. I spend 8-12 hours a day fighting with GAE in one way or another, even though I very well might experience the "green is grasser" symptom.

Many things are nice with App Engine, outlined in the post. But so many things are not nice:

- For us the performance characteristics for some queries in the NDB (NoSQL datastore) have really left much to be wanted.

- The inability of calling C-libraries from Python code (except those provided by Google, they provide standard stuff like cPickle etc)

- The UI for logs / querying the database / admin is quite bad and buggy. Can't really use it in Safari at all (might very well be the wrong doing of Safari, but still)

- Limitations in how long functions / tasks can run. I've spent all of my Friday night tonight (I'm in CET) re-writing code for a batch-processing task that took just above the hard imposed limit of 10 minutes to run. According to the docs an exception is to be thrown when the task is nearing its limit but most of the time (intermittently…) the exception is not thrown and just kills the process…

- Limited community / toolset. Using GAE feels somewhat like using something really old or obscure, quite few SO questions/answers (the upside is that many of them are written by Gudio, which lead the NDB project before quitting from Google), and extremely limited third party tools / plugins for enhancing the developer experience. For example I haven't found any good way, except the GAE provided one, to do performance profiling.

- GAE has somewhat of a bad rep in some parts of the Python community I've found. A couple of Python libraries I've tried to use have not worked and then I've found bug reports where the maintainers have explicitly stated that GAE is not supported because of some limitation they have imposed. The biggest example I can come up with right now is probably Requests

With that said however, I feel like Google has started giving GAE more love recently. The documentation seems to improve, the dashboards/web UI:s have undergone major rework (not all of them improvements per se but still!). I actually said to my management a while ago that we need to move away from GAE in the medium term (1-2 years) because I feared that Google would start to "sunset" GAE. I wouldn't say that is the case today, but I could not go so far as to say that I would recommend GAE.

GAE is a very nice platform in many ways, but very limited. The tradeoffs for all the ease is quite high and should probably be considered very carefully before picked.
The golden rule of UI is that if you change it, it will ruin the experience for someone.
I owe you a long, private email (I'm a fan of your work.. and an ex Microsoft dev manager) but the way this was handled was not good. A RC that wasn't, public fumbling, throwing away schedules, and you can't even come up with a sane name for the damn thing. Too early, too weird, and poorly managed. For such an amazing, important technology that's such a massive leap forward in size and interoperability!

It smelled like OneDrive. And I'll provide this quote to demonstrate the type of insanity that leaks out of my beloved Redmond on occasion...

"Prior to Windows 8.1, we had two sync experiences. One used on Windows 7/8/Mac to connect to the consumer service, and a second sync engine to connect to the commercial service (OneDrive for Business). In Windows 8.1 we introduced a third sync engine..."

Current beef is the BashOnWindows alpha. Why was this pushed out so early? Quite literally nothing works on it. The forward progress even in the past few weeks is impressive but... it's bad. Ubuntu Trusty was a weird release to begin with and now it's in a weird time in its lifecycle where it's very difficult to get modern versions of gcc, clang, python 3.5 or even ffmpeg. Not that you could run cmake anyway. But meanwhile you shipped bits where "apt-get update" itself failed right out of the box. I don't get it.

EDIT: HN is limiting my ability to reply to you Scott but my frustration with Bash on Windows is both. The quality of the early bits is poor and I find the timing weird. Likewise Trusty itself is at a maximally frustrating stage of its lifecycle for anyone new jumping in (Stack Overflow is already filling up with newbie Bash/Ubuntu questions that are often tied to Windows bugs. And geeze, just let the insanity of that sentence sink in.) From a technical perspective I don't love the alpha. From a dev/engineering/coder perspective I don't love Trusty. From a strategic perspective, just like .NET Core, I'm wondering WTF is going on, thus the rant.
Rent controlled city with population >100K? Try Los Angeles, population 3.8M. From http://la.curbed.com/2016/1/27/10872448/rent-control-rent-st...:

...there are around 118,000 [rent controlled units] in play in LA right now, making up "about 85 percent of the city's rental housing stock"
I'm not entirely comfortable with Congress delegating its authority to unelected people for unlimited periods of time.

The fact is, what was perfectly legal yesterday will be illegal shortly, despite no new laws being passed, and no members of Congress taking responsibility.

That's called rule of man, not rule of law.
The Urban Poor You Haven’t Noticed: Millennials
There's a lot of skepticism about that 2018 date.
Oh the memories of collecting all those Vienna's...
It's not that kind of an "analysis."

More like a, you know, "Look, Ma -- I got Spark, Hive, and HDFS on my resume now!" analysis.
I just can't leave well enough alone, and did a quick and dirty very high level analysis:

For a low to middling wind site in the US, with a 7.5 m/s average wind speed represented by a Rayleigh distribution:

Using a GE 1.5-77, the most common turbine in use in the US in the late 2000s, I calculate 40.5% gross capacity factor, and estimate net capacity factor of 33.5%.

Using a GE 2.0-116, one of the most energetic turbines on the market for low-wind sites, I calculate a 53.2% gross capacity factor, and estimate a net capacity factor of 44.1% using the same annual loss parameters as before.

For a hypothetical project of equivalent size we get over 30% more energy every year from the same wind by only changing from the old technology to the new, and we build less infrastructure to support it. The new machines are taller, and we probably need the same amount of total land for the project.
This Is the Best Way to Improve Every Part of Your Life
It's 16 days per campsite, and your sites have to be 5 miles apart. So every two weeks you pack up, move a few miles, and set camp back up again.
How do you just ignore housing, though? Housing is probably the single most important expense and the most likely not to track national inflation. That's most of what people "on a fixed income" are at risk from.
It was late, I was very tired and perhaps I didn't express my views as well as I should have.

I tried to make it very clear that I in fact didn't find the criticisms of the chants troubling, and that in some ways I could even understand them.

What I specifically found troubling, and feel I articulated this quite clearly, was the notion that by simply engaging in these chants, employees were automatically devoid of class or dignity. Those were the words of the parent comment, not my own, and that is what I took issue with.

With regard to your second point I can understand why countries may find the chants of USA off putting.
We have avoided GAE at our startup simply because we depend upon google for so much already. we made an explicit choice to avoid putting all our eggs in that basket, and are completely happy with AWS.
>Nonetheless, a scientist wearing a bow tie reinforces negative stereotypes. It's sad, but true.

Can you extrapolate on this? Is there something about bow ties that I'm completely ignorant about?
Apache Groovy's original use case was scripting, so there's many features like that which makes Groovy be Bash for the JVM. It was based on Beanshell originally, but with closures and collections syntax added. Just don't try building any actual systems with Groovy -- do that in a language designed from the ground up for performance, e.g. Java, Scala, or Kotlin.
Why Are Highly Educated Americans Getting More Liberal?
Reference please!
Who the hell was responsible for all the supercharger deletions? If this was done by a bureaucrat, then this is a prime example of tremendous damage done by bureaucrats to their own side in wartime. P-38. P-39. I'm sure there are other craft that were effectively nerfed.
Ahh, the "religion as metaphor" approach. The Bible mentions Claudius, therefore that kernel of truth ... tells us nothing, because we can't tell which tales are "borne of actual human experience" any more than we can do the same with Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.

In context, Job is an honorable man and someone to emulate. If I fear the universe, then I fear the wheat, and a mouse, my neighbor, and my nose, and the water I drink, and my children. Is that really someone to emulate? Not according to Psalm 118:6: "The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?". How can someone be afraid of the universe, but not afraid of mortals in the universe? Your interpretation of God = Universe is inconsistent with the God of the Bible.

FWIW, some of the other gods mentioned in the Bible are Remphan, Jupiter, Baal, Mercurius, and Diana. So a phrase like Deuteronomy 6:14 "Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you" doesn't make sense as "Do not follow other universes, the universes of the people around you." That makes less sense than God as an entity distinct from the universe. (And an entity with the ability to have a hand write 'Mene, mene, tekel upharsin' on a wall, using a human hand.)

Yes, I used an English translation of the Bible. I could have used Swedish, but I doubt you know Swedish. Do you think I'm so ignorant as to think early Christians thought God spoke English to the early Jews?

Then you slip into solipsism, which is even less interesting than the metaphor argument. One can say many things. One can say the universe started as a cosmic egg in floating in non-existence before opening up to produce the 8 heavenly worlds and one earthly one. But you didn't. You started with, and stayed close to, the monotheism associated with the Christian Bible.
A lot of other places can't pull it off because investigative journalism doesn't pay all that well. But it looks like drawing a strict line between "clickbait" and "investigative" while serving both is actually a win for Buzzfeed. Clickbait makes money from "most people", investigative journalism encourages thought and shows off how good Buzzfeed can be.
Same number of years Google Reader had been around when it was sunset.
it appeals to that primitive instinct of belonging to a pack, fostering an us-vs-them mentality. this way, you are less likely to leave and are encouraged to give your 110%
Location: Dallas, TX

Remote: Yes, Preferred

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Clojure, Gremlin, TinkerPop, Graph DBs, Google Cloud, Polymer

Résumé/CV: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesthornton

Email: james@jamesthornton.com

GitHub: https://github.com/espeed

Website: http://electricspeed.com
Two Years Open Source
I don't understand this and I do follow US politics.
What mortgage?
Lenovo is launching a new $500M startup fund
HumHub – The Flexible Open Source Social Network Kit
AFAIK, that was always the plan. You need a huge audience to have the revenue to do great journalism online, and one of the few proven ways to build that audience is with clickbait and listicles.

So while it may seem like Buzzfeed has a split personality, it's very much intentional.
Yeah, no debacle whatsoever.

And Scott, don't forget to give F# some love here, especially being as it is not on Roslyn and it's important its project system stay current with whatever son of MSBUILD becomes.

When .NET Core really starts to take hold outside of the Windows environment, and it will, there are people in those environments looking for a better functional-first programming solution than what they have, and it will be F#.
I have no problem with that recruitment video. When you have the reputation of a secretive, shadowy company, it makes sense to forego a polished video and instead aim for something more organic and "real".

People want to work at something that mirrors Google, not LexCorp.
Have you tried to get Medicaid in a state? Because I have for a family member (Indiana). There's a waitlist, and even on it, your monthly out of pocket costs are very high (the person in question had zero income, and was still required to cough up $400-$1000 for prescriptions and copays, with no income!).
> It is possible that no significant terror attacks were even attempted against the US since 9/11

The TSA itself has literally admitted that there is no evidence of terrorist plots against aviation in the US[0].

That doesn't cover everything that could be possibly labeled 'terrorism', but given that piece of evidence, it does raise more than a little doubt about the prevalence of threats elsewhere.

[0] https://boingboing.net/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-terrorists-in-a....
Corporate Governance: Dictatorships VS Democracy
"Smashing the stack for fun and profit", the tear drop attacks against NT, IGMP bug in Windows 95, ida pro, ollydbg, C, asm, finding help, and "test boxes" on irc...

Geez a few years have passed since then!