skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, mathematics has this concept of an expression being "well-defined". It means you can always tell if something meets the definition, exactly, in every case.

Almost no definitions in the real world are well-defined. Heaps are just the tip of the iceberg. Any practical thing, a cat, a tree, a table, a car -- if you mutilate it enough, it turns into something else, and the transition point is rarely sharp. And the reason is very simple; it's that in practical life, we don't define things propositionally, we define them inductively. This is a cat, and that's a cat, and that's another cat, and cats are things with this constellation of properties that you learn over time, so when you come across an item where some of those properties are true and some aren't, you say, "Well, that's sort of a weird cat".

It is such an incredibly common thing in daily life to run up against fuzzy definition boundaries. "Can you get milk from the store for me if it's open?" "Well, there's some sort of demonstration going on right outside -- how bad do you need it?" We handle it just fine. We recognize when "open" may not be well-defined in every circumstance and valid in the same way for every intent, and we're able to discard the simple definition for something more complex as needed. It's not even weird when you consider that definitions are just models you are using to describe the world, and those models can be made simple or complex. We rarely describe the world as it IS, down to the atom. We simplify.

Sure, when you throw inductively defined practical models intended for communication into a rigorous logical framework, they don't have the sharp edges such a framework expects. So? That really shouldn't be unexpected. :)

Everything we have to say about the real world is an abstraction. Some ideas are leakier abstractions than others, but it's all simplification and modeling in the end.
Right now it seems like there are two reasons for creating a company. One is for making a profitable business that creates wealth for the people invested. Two is for creating a product or service that customers need or want. These two revolve around servicing those invested, or the consumers of the product/service, or both.

It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. A great workplace and work would be the product/service, and the employees the consumers of the product/service. Sure, you would have to have paying customers to fuel it, but that could always be secondary in some sense. Right now it seems like the workplace is secondary, so why not swap it? I'm sure there are a nice subset of people who would take less (even half) of their current salary just to work in a place that revolves around them and their experience working.. which is the majority of most of our days.

Viable? Probably not, but it's interesting to think about and trying to imagine what that place would look like for you personally.
I imagine 'when it sinks' would work for most people.
LOL...This was supposed to be the thuggish prime minister's 'local' election issue -- he fought from that constituency promising to clean up 'Mother Ganga'.

3 Years in and it's as filthy as ever.

Of course, that makes him eminently qualified for re-election.
The state of NLP tools generally is much lower than most people think. People think it is much easier than it is.

For the date parser you want http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sutime.html

The code and rules aren't fun to customize though.
Sparse matrix factorization is a black art and is best done with some existing out-of-the-box solution.

The problem is that they're all these FORTRAN packages that one person wrote, and then everybody, in the name of human progress, reused and reused ever since -- akin to bootstrapping human intelligence.

Nobody ever wants to write the Lanczos bidiagonalization algorithm with partial reorthogonalization from scratch, and when I considered writing my own C++ implementation to bring human progress to the 21st century, my academic advisor told me "just don't."

EDIT: The real reason is that FORTRAN is less apt to copy and more apt to reference than C++.
The article goes into some detail on how, but it doesn't answer why?

Why not let him rest in peace and be finally properly buried?
The problem with heavy editing of speech is exactly what you say. We find it difficult to dissociate what we see (somebody giving a speech) with what really is happening (editor piecing a narrative together, at the extreme splicing words together phoneme-by-phoneme). I found it edited too heavily, with tedious pacing, and pretentious graphics. Perhaps it's a good first introduction to Chomsky, and I'm happy if that audience finds it a fine movie!

Mr Chomsky gives a lot of interviews. Does he always require a veto power, how would that even work?
More anecdote from another ex-waiter: #2 was the complete opposite at the one place I ever worked, serving 8 people was much harder than 2.

The variation in sentiment might have to do with that my restaurant didn't have runners, and it was an Indian restaurant. We did food delivery ourselves, and customers needed at least two things to come for dinner (an entrée, and naan), making it stressful because once a table got to 6+ people, you had to run two massive trays of food from the kitchen to the floor, as quickly as possible.
According to your description, the root cause of the complexity is head count and lack of communication, which I respectfully disagree. Most of the web apps have the `User` class and it does more or less same thing. I challenge this world to provide a single solution makes everyone happy. Complexity comes from specific use cases, and they are not incidents.

OK, let's say you are right, and Alan Kay has come up with a 20 kLOC functional system. Everyone starts to coding on it and quickly produce 100+ distributions and millions of Apps. Surprise, the old problem comes back!

It's an ecosystem/social/management problem that is about human, not technology.
Neutron Drones
I think the reason it doesn't appear people are creating businesses to be a great place to work, is because if it's created for that purpose, you probably want to get as many people as possible working there to they can share in the happiness. How do you do that? Grow. From the outside, it can look just like any other company trying to grow. Are they adding perks because they need to attract talent so they can compete and grow for growth's sake, or are they adding perks because they think the employees deserve them and also just trying to grow?
Fair. It depends on the output of the turbine they might use. Various articles about Jay Leno's EcoJet car also says that they were looking into ways to add an "intake" muffler, also citing that the Chrysler turbine car seemed to manage to quell the intake noise.

Totally valid concern, but I'm sure they'd be able to manage to quiet it down enough. If it's quieter under braking than typical semis that use jakebraking, it could be a win.
I would say the give away on Korean is that it has circles or ovals as part of the character.
Web Project Functional Specs: Information Architecture
This. Or you know how to calculate the closed-form inverse a priori like with projection matrices (e.g. gluUnProject).
revenge is a second action that is a constructed response to a first action. You would not call a swarm of bees attacking a person who knocked down the hive, "revenge".

Of course there is a subjective line here, but the things that have happened so far seem to be organic, natural, and maybe even predictable responses to the actions that that preceded. That's not revenge, that's just desserts.
I am just curious, would you have the same level of concern for Madoff?
You have to get pretty high up in salary level before at least roughly competitive salary isn't a tier one factor for most people. And, even then, salary is often taken as a proxy for overall value--see pro athletes, for example.
> I agree, but another person exercising his/her right could violate my rights. Ideally rights are defined so they aren't in conflict...

I think that would only be possible if the rights were very weak or unnaturally restricted, for example if their validity was restricted to strictly personal region of space. In a free society, people's intents collide and arguments happen.

I don't think your example with drone presents such a collision though, since a person flying a drone does not imply surveillance is happening. Only if the person intentionally uses the drone to violate privacy there is privacy violation.

> I do believe the government can compel speech when it is an artistic cake maker making a same sex wedding cake.

Why should government interfere with people's views on marriage and sexual relations? That is something theocracies do. I think it is basis of free society that anyone is able to express their opinion and act accordingly even if it pisses off somebody else. If the cake maker does not want to do a transaction, the best solution is the homosexual people get the cake elsewhere. I see no reason why government should compel people to do things against their will in this case.
Persian will have three dots in a triangle above a single upward stroke or below the line. Arabic only has the three dot combo above the script on a multiple upward stroke grouping (sometimes a flat line between upstrokes).
This is perhaps the best comment I have ever seen on YCombinator news. Seriously. All very good points that I wish more companies followed.
If Parsey McParseface can parse its own name, it is considered what's called self-hosting....
The car is designed to prevent collisions that can be detected by the sensors. This particular collision could not be detected by the sensors, therefore it isn't possible for the car to prevent it.

Are you basically saying a bulletproof vest has failed to achieve its design goal if it can't stop armour-piercing rounds? Or a fire extinguisher has failed to achieve its design goal if it can't put out a wild forest fire? There are always limitations to everything.
It's a nice thought, but we haven't even yet replaced meatbag lawyers doing the relative basics like document review.
Don't forget these crucial categories:

- Solving interesting (to the founders) problems

- Social club (the most relevant to your proposal)

- Ego trip

- Nepotism

- Tax dodge

In all seriousness, I support your point that companies are founded for more than just to make money, even though (most) companies ultimately need to make money.
I have to give them props...I've been using AdBlock on Chrome, which seems to do just fine on major sites...this is the first time in a long while that I've visited a news site and seen a pop-up autoplay video ad.
Having just spent some time at Varanasi, it is definitely widely believed bathing in the river and having your cremated ashes thrown in it has religious benefits. In just 1 day over 200 people were cremated at a temple close to where we were staying to have their ashes dumped in the river. I think it would be hard to just ignore the religious angle.
Fascinating. Reminds of reading Caesar, who used so many commas and had sentences which were fairly difficult to unpack. (At least that's how it seemed when I was in high school.) Wonder if that's a cultural thing which has been inherited through all these years.
The illusion of understanding
I'm glad they accepted that people were already hacking [1] their cheap Dash buttons and decided to roll with it.

It's 4 times more expensive than their hackable Dash buttons ($20 vs $5), but apparently more powerful (and secure?) from the get-go.

[1] For example, see all the entries: https://hackaday.com/tag/amazon-dash/
"Apply for jobs you’re a bit under qualified for. Most job descriptions describe the perfect candidate. Those features are a wish list not a must have. This applies even more in start-ups where genuine passion for the company gets you a long way."

This sound like very good advice.
> From the browser's point of view there is not really any significant difference between a video that is encrypted for DRM and one that is encrypted for privacy. In the former case those who encrypted it want to keep the key secret from the viewer, whereas in the latter case they want to keep the key secret from third parties. To the browser, these look the same: there is encrypted video, and the browser needs something to decrypt that and hand it the decrypted data for it to display.

If you hiding the key from person who is intended recipient you are implementing a DRM, not solution that provides privacy.

The problem that you are mentioning is already solved, and you don't need to hide key from the viewer. It happens as follows:

- content is encrypted using randomly generated symmetric key

- the key is then encrypted using asymmetric public keys of recipients

The recipient has all information necessary to decrypt the information. If your goal is to hide from the recipient the one time key that is only used for the content that the recipient supposed to be able to view, then you're implementing DRM.
It is really hard to feel happy when you are poor (first hand experience), Money can buy happiness[1][2]. Conversely we do feel much joy when we see someone we envy fail, more so if we feel (rightly or not) that their success was ill deserved[3].

[1] https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WE-AA766B_HAPPY_1... - from page 12 of [2]

[2] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/...

[3] https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/tag/schadenfreude/
Fast Spectral Graph Partitioning on GPUs
"the thieves used a form of malware that targeted a PDF reader that the bank used to confirm that payments had been made."

PDF reader! bank infosec is a joke
(Whoops, I meant to post this last night but apparently forgot.)

Stoves don't advertise any degree of autonomy. You turn the tap, fire comes out. You put things in the fire, they get hot and/or they burn. It doesn't deliver any safeguards but it doesn't promise any.

The other end of the scale (if we're talking about gas-burning apparatus) would be your instant gas hot water system. It's got a series of belt-and-suspenders safety devices in it to stop it from overheating, exploding, or gassing you out if the pilot light goes out. It absolutely does advertise that it's an automated system which will do its thing without your intervention - and if it fails to do its thing, the results can be disastrous. So it's designed to be safe.

The problem lies when you have devices in the middle of the scale, with devices that are designed to have some degree of autonomy but lack the commitment to see it through. Take my drip coffee maker, for instance - the manual firmly admonishes you to "never run the machine unattended" on one page and then on the next, explains how the easy-to-use timer system allows you to have fresh coffee waiting for you when you wake up. The intent is clearly that the system be used without supervision, but instead of engineering in the appropriate protections (and tripling the price) the manufacturer just put some ass-covering lines in the manual in the hope that if there's a malfunction and a house burns down, that protects them from a lawsuit.
The reason you're still a developer in an office
> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work.

They do, they're called lifestyle businesses and tons of people do them. You simply don't hear about them because the valley (thus VC money) is generally about Unicorns, not regular businesses.
So crazy it might just work.
Why is annotation important? I agree it needs to be possible, but ultimately I want to push the majority off into inference, and only explicitly annotate when necessary or formalizing interfaces OCaml-style.

Though I sure do wish I could have lisp (or clojure, specifically) syntax in OCaml-land.
What if the vehicle is really drunk?
Fun discussion to be found at: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
Won't someone cry for Bernie Madoff?
When a company ignores what they consider bad laws, it most certainly is civil disobedience.
It's a mistake to equate recruitment emails with ability to get a job. There are many reasons for recruiters to send you emails that have very little to do with your likelihood of being hired. Talented engineers will always be difficult to find, though the challenge may change from trying to find one that's not employed to finding the best among those that need a job.

Recruiters are just casting a wide net for a few seats. Some independent recruiters, given the payout involved, cast that net very wide (and generally contribute to low quality candidates stuffing up your hiring manager's inbox).

Had you said you recently got a lot of offers, that would be a totally different story.
Everything looks normal to me. My employer is hiring (and it's not easy to find candidates either). I just got contacted by a recruiter yesterday (from Uber). Facebook and Google recruiters contact me every few months.
6 things I learned on shooting 360 videos
It's tough times for local news.
Will there be a perp walk?
Well perhaps another part of Google's code review culture is important, then: proposed changes must be style compliant, must compile, must have tests, and all the tests must pass before anyone will bother looking at them. If I got a code review (at Google) that was incorrectly indented, there would be a little red chip in the review UI that indicated such style violation, and I would just reply "Please fix" and not look at it again until the next revision.

In the absence of a strong style guide and testing culture then I agree code reviews can get bogged down in bikeshedding. At Google that doesn't seem to happen because the style guide for each language is quite prescriptive. For Go, no change will be reviewed that hasn't passed through gofmt, and so forth. And on the flip side you can have confidence that if your change has gone through gofmt, there's not going to be any discussion about the formatting.
yes, I got your point but consider this: there are only 26 English characters yet I can't finish Ulysses.
So I had an observation about AWS scripting that I'd like to share. I've been working on some AWS scripts lately for both personal projects and stuff we deploy at work, which means that I often use 2 sets of credentials.

A lot of people on Github/SO seem to like to set their AWS credentials as env variables in their scripts. I was doing this myself (since it seemed like the established pattern), but then found out aws cli has a --profile option. You store everything in the ~/.aws/credentials file instead of on an env variable and simply switch the profile you use when executing the script.

This works better for me when managing multiple credentials and doesn't allow the off-chance of uploading my credentials to a remote git repo. I was curious if people just didn't know about this option or if setting your credentials within the script is preferred for some reason.
I seem to recall that that was one of Joel Spolsky's intentions when he created Fog Creek Software ( https://www.fogcreek.com/about/ )
So would WordPress/Automattic be able to limit .blog to only be used for WordPress sites?
> Otherwise you would not single out a single group as more deserving of life than others.

It doesn't say "Black lives matter more than others."

Everyone who understands why it's "Black Lives Matter!" instead of "All Lives Matter!" also understands why you think it should be "All Lives Matter!", we just disagree. There's no subtlety to your point, it's blunt and easy to understand.

The difference is, people who think it should be "All Lives Matter!" don't understand why we think it should be "Black Lives Matter!". There's a nuanced point that you don't seem to understand. When you suggest that we're saying black lives matter more than any other lives, you make it clear that you don't get it. This is fine, if you stop misrepresenting the intentions of others they might be willing to explain it to you.

Edit: And by the way, you don't have to agree with it the nuanced point in order to understand it. So Zuck insisting people not cross out "Black Lives Matter" is not him pushing that as an agenda -- it's just him showing an understanding that "Black Lives Matter!" is not the same as "White Power!"
The fad isn't over by a long shot. The TeeSpring guys were brilliant and helped create a whole new category of marketing, the social internet marketer. The concept that you could create an ad on FB that targets people by a niche turned out to be a huge winner for these marketers. Conversion rates went from 1-3% to 10+%. It spawned a whole industry that has expanded out to other countries. It is now possible for someone sitting in Vietnam to create a business selling tshirts to someone in the US, all through targeted social advertising. Kind of amazing really.
No change. It's far too early to expect much of an impact. I think the knock-on effects take awhile to show up, even if things didn't get any worse.

At this point it's a drop in the bucket.
I always complain about code comments that aren't complete sentences. Why should comments be misspelled or grammatically incorrect?
It gives you room to go down, if the service is sufficiently sub par.
You're a troll - a newly created account with virtually no karma! I own thousands of domain names, and I have dealt with hundreds of domain registrars over the course of 20 years. When I say ICANN is a mafia, I know it first hand! I've reported a bunch of fraudulent registrars that stole some of my domains, and they didn't care due to that being a "customer support" issue and ignore all evidence I provided.
ummmm...yes. ancient.eu.

That is just one myth. I have heard atleast 2-3 from my paati. They are all stories. That is what the author/you doesn't/don't get.

edit: lol...someone butthurt and downvoting.
Businesses are a means to an end.

Personally, we are building a company[1] to have an impact. Profit is part of that, since how large of an impact is correlated with the number of customers we can serve which requires certain fixed costs (e.g. salaries.) Profits also allow a company to weather market fluctuations and be free of the hype-cycles of investors.

The product or service are equally means to an end. Building a CRM for local government isn't a goal in or of itself. We don't win when the code is shipped or even when the customer buys it, only when we affect change on the world.

The one thing required to do that is people. And not just anyone is passionate about empowering public servants (which is pefectly fine.) So, in fact, creating a great place to work _is_ one of the few things we build the company around.

At the end of the day, it all comes back to human happiness. Not the spurts of dopamine from Candy Crush or Snapchat, but real fulfillment. (Check out our values[2] and employee handbook[3] for how we put that into action.)

When I was younger, my dad used to always ask me, "What is your goal in life?" I'd say stupid things like a Ferrari or a big house and he would ask "Why?" Because I wanted to drive fast or have room for toys and video games. "Why?" And so on...

All of those "Why"s led to one answer: My goal in life was to be happy. Everything else is a means to that end. That's why a few of the things I listed in the original comment had little to do with product or profit. Build something you're proud of, for no other reason than that you have to live with yourself. Do the right thing. It's harder, but you'll make people, most of all yourself, happy.

And if you die in 30, 40, or 2 years having made a bunch of people happy, I think that sounds pretty great.

[1]: http://seneca.systems
[2]: http://seneca.systems/values
[3]: https://Github.com/senecasystems/employee_handbook

[EDIT] - added a story from my childhood
Typically it would be migrating up to WA (geographically north).

Are you saying the layoff trend is migrating north? Or actual people who were laid-off are migrating north? Or something else? It wouldn't make sense for laid off workers to migrate north if there's less hiring there, but then, you're talking entry-level. I'm just not sure what's being asked here.