skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the original title with the secondary clause, "Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes"...I mean, when I saw the title "Let's Talk About Amazon Reviews" coming from a domain that is not amazon.com -- i.e. it's not a product/dev announcement from Amazon -- I knew it'd be about review fakery, but maybe not everyone is so cynical.
> There is a cheesesteak restaurant near me that has 4 stars on Yelp. People rave about how they have the best cheesesteaks ever! Yet if you look more closely, reviews from people that have eaten a cheesesteak on the east coast are much lower. After trying it myself, the food is terribly bland.

Food is tough in some regions. In California, you get open warfare about the authenticity of Mexican restaurants. In the Midwest, people think Subway is a New York Deli.
The linked GitHub issue mentions this: The new platform is a different system and doesn't run Java so it's not using the old code that was open. They found no reason to publish the new code as it doesn't help anyone since it's integrated into the rest of their platform.

And it sounds like you can't update the code. So you don't have a way of verifying what the actual device runs. So people complaining about trust here are somewhat misguided when they say they don't want to trust Yubi. Open sourcing would only help find non malicious bugs. Since it sounds non modular there's possibly all sorts of stuff mixed in making it hard to audit so they decided it wasn't worth it.

Dunno if that's right but that's what it sounds like.
I finished all of the Microcorruption challenges relatively quickly (I'm on the first page of the "Hall of Fame"). Yet I have no idea how to approach the 2nd level of Stockfighter ("Choc a Block"). It's frustrating and I don't enjoy that game. Given that, I don't see how Starfighters could possibly place me in a reasonable role.
Computer science class fails to notice their TA was actually an AI chatbot
It would if that were true, but you're not playing games and getting hired, you're getting your coding ability tested through a gamified vetting platform that will either thumbs up or thumbs down you to the actual company interview, where you'll have to be tested again.
I don't understand why they gave up the company instead of pivoting to the cashless approach that the original investor wanted anyway.
I almost wonder if that's deliberate. I don't think this is a spoiler, but there are times in Stockfighter where doing the reading is advantageous, ie "people who actually read docs should be rewarded".

A lot of my favorite parts of "playing" Stockfighter have actually involved going to a cafe, buying a coffee, and reading books like Flash Boys for a few hours.
Numba package for Python gives you the LLVM JIT for numerical work. I really don't see how Julia is relevant anymore.
Try to buy an in-ear or forehead thermometer on Amazon based on reviews? I've found it impossible - because every one they sell seems to have its reviews tainted by people who received free merchandise in exchange for their "honest review".
Judging from the small number of chips in the photograph, they used the higher integration 74 series logic rather than the lower level flip-flop/NAND type.
From ‘Second-Hand Time’ by Svetlana Alexievich
Maybe somebody can write-up a review.
> its result can be accurately factored into a probabilistic model of a patient's overall health.

But my health with respect to an illness is not probabilistic[1]. I either have the illness or don't have the illness. Probabilities are not useful when the sample size is one (me).

[1] Pedantic: it is probabilistic, but the probability is either 0% or 100% because the confidence interval sucks.
As someone who is a programmer in finance, but not trading, it is difficult for me to wrap my head around this as well. If this is specifically targeting programmers and companies who are interested specifically in the trading aspect of finance, then I guess it could make some sense. I don't know, that isn't my world. But in the other areas of finance, things are heavily regulated. Both within the company and from outside. You want people with clean backgrounds (no history of financial issues/bankruptcy, no criminal record) who can write solid code to reliably transfer billions of dollars around the world on a daily basis.
It seems like the obvious answer is "if its not fun for candidates to do for no other reason than its fun, then starfighters will fail".
There's multiple comments from people claiming to have used the site successfully. I have a hard time believing they're not trolls, or some kind of weird advertising.
Can You Trust What You Read? Designing Platforms to Deal with Shill Reviews
Why You Should Leave Your Product Video to the Professionals
Literate programming: Two beefs with the classic version (2014)
The other major issue is in bait-and-switching products. A company can put out a great product that generates true 5-star ratings, and then swap out their product with a cheaper version but continue selling it at the 5-star-product-price.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help
Space alien cats have disclosed subsequently independently validated information over G+. Discounting sources strictly on where they post or how they present isn't necessarily valid, though a long history of unreliable information might be a strong impeachment of credibility.

Greg K-H, as he's known, is the #2 Linux kernal developer, and release manager of stable. I disagree with him on some issues (ironically enough, the requirement for kernel dev submissions to have real name identities attached, also his attitudes toward choice generally and systemd specifically), but his information here warrants attention.

Of course, you've just taken a space alien cat's word for this, but you're welcome to independently verify the information.
Anyone planning (or already busy) training Parsey with one of the alternative Treebanks available from Universal Dependencies [1]? Would love to know your results when you have any :)

I am personally looking for a somewhat reliable NLP parser which can handle Dutch at the moment. Preferably one which can handle POS tagging without hacking it in myself.

[1] http://universaldependencies.org/
A Thousand Drums
Happy to address these points:

- Startup performance/memory usage

Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That's the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia program. The area where this really comes up for most people using is package load times. We're very actively working on making that faster.

- Syntax

A little subjective, so not sure how much I can say here. I can say that I'm not a huge fan of our multi-line comment syntax. It's not entirely clear what a better syntax would be though (the original issue on this had some suggestions, but some of them were worse).

- One-based indexing

I think there has been plenty said on this topic, though interestingly this is one of the only times I've seen the argument made in a way that I actually agree with. That said, I do think there is an easy way to deal with this though. For packages that needs arrays of indices, it would be quite easy to define an `IndexArray` type that does the translation automatically.

- String Formatting

Yep, you're right, it's a mess. It'll have to be cleaned up.

- Unsafe C Interface

There's two projects (Clang.jl and Cxx.jl) which can help with this. The former automatically generates ccall definitions for you, the latter just parses the header and generates the call directly.

- Slowing down in development

I'm really not sure where that impression comes from. Perhaps it is that we're adding fewer features, but rather working on cleaning up existing features. Also, I personally at least have been doing a lot of work outside
of base (particularly on the debugger). Not sure. Would love to know.
Locked to contributors. Surprise!
If they want to intentionally backdoor it, can't they just release source without the backdoor, but ship devices with it? You can't upgrade them so you can't build from source and overwrite. And for such a platform it's unlikely you'd have the whole build toolchain, let alone the environment to get reproducible builds.

Even then you have to extract the firmware from the device then try to match it with your compiled binary. Seems like you might as well just reverse the binary and look for backdoors directly?
I may be totally out of touch, but why would someone give someone else $100,000 for an app? And why wouldn't $100k be enough? By the end they needed $700,000 "bare minimum."

I just don't get how this can cost so much.

Making something like this in one's spare time while getting paid with a salaried "real" job seems like it would totally be sufficient to get moving.

But assuming it really takes $700k on hand to get these bank sponsors, why not just change the model slightly. For example, integrate with Square cash or something similar. Square is dead simple to use and the money arrives instantly, not sure if it's integrate-able in this manner though, but the concept stands.

And then maybe when the company is really successful with tens of thousands of subscribers, partner with someone to add direct bank account integration.

Sorry if this sounds callous because I really don't mean it to be, I'm just flabbergasted the amount of money involved for some app someone came up with randomly.
At last, a sci-fi movie that accurately captures the horrors of dating
For movies, IMDB average scores are exclusively between 5 and 8: a Four Point Scale. In contrast, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores hit the full gamut reliably: (I wrote a full statistical blog post on this with visualizations: http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue-ratings/ )

I did a similar thing for Amazon reviews many years ago but it was not very insightful. (http://minimaxir.com/2014/06/reviewing-reviews/)
Ahh... I misread that.
And now we get to have a recursive "but what's _your_ bias" discussion. For instance, would a writer for a site which posts professional reviews have a bias (conscious or otherwise) against reviews written by amateurs. Add in the "if that person was good I'd be out of work" bias and here we are.

Note that I'm talking specifically about the authors critique of the vine program, obviously the review spam is a real problem.

That aside, I do find wirecuter to be a good starting place.
>The goal of Julia is to not have to do that sort of boilerplate/arcane tweaking to get really good performance

As someone who is new to python (for bioinformatics), and find python is a fine language... but..

The do it "this way not that way" method of implementation of the same algorithms to get it to run fast makes writing performant python a tedious exercise in research and profiling. The article cited suggests Cpython, numby and numpy [1] as ways to make it faster.

Why not C using GPU acceleration as the time spent coding would probably be the same? Thats what I love about plain python, its fast to write and has some good data structures.

I haven't tried Julia, but someday its on my list of languages to learn more about.

[1]https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jfp/entry...
Or you could use one of the multitude of free editors that have regular updates, and the open source ones that you can update yourself, or the extensible ones that you can upgrade as you see fit. For zero dollars.
Interesting. My experience is the opposite - VSCode's Go plugin is what me switch to VSCode from Sublime.
It's interesting to hear about the mobile ordering apps as well, being introduced at almost the same time. It seems like an automatic, since everyone has phones now. I can see a future not far away where I have a list of "favorite orders" at some restaurants, that I order with one click when I'm 5 minutes away.
Japan Has a Kit Kat for Every Taste, and Then Some
Agreed! Although, I'd say we as a society have the opportunity to live relatively scarcity-free in the not too distance future (enough food, energy, clothing, shelter for everyone); we must decide if we'll embrace the opportunity.
There is in the latest version. Using like @concurrent(...) passes all arguments directly to Pool(...)
Do you use contingent recruiters now? If so, how do they qualify their leads to earn their 20%? Do you think that that process is better/worse than the starfighter approach?
Transparency. The app would need to be open enough about how it found and vetted trusted reviewers for people to take it seriously.
For some background:
http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

Part of the idea is that there are some great devs out there who don't have the resume to "just email the company and get a phone screen".

I think if you look at their history with MicroCorruption (https://microcorruption.com/login) you'll see that this isn't just a recruiting tool - it's supposed to be more of an interesting programming challenge, something you'd want to spend time on whether there was a hiring company at the end or not.

Long term, I hope that after StarFighter gets more history and credibility with companies, they actually will reduce or remove technical parts of the onsite interview in lieu of StockFighter results.

I spent time with MicroCorruption, and I plan to spend some time on StockFighter, and I'm not looking for a job.
I don't agree with this article.
1 character variables is not a good goal to have.

For me, the second block is more readable than the "good" example. It has issues, but it's more readable.
I can name two that never sold very well. I built them :(
I know people that sell stuff on Amazon and they don't use fake reviews but if a competitor does use fake reviews it makes it hard not to want to make fake reviews also.. It's a vicious cycle.. Plus they get negative reviews out of nowhere.. Very likely the same competitor is paying to put negative reviews on your page.. So it's a double whammy.. Add a bunch of 1 stars to a competitor page and a bunch of 5 stars to your own page... Basically need to clean up the whole system somehow..
This is off-topic, but I feel your pain and have a (un-paid, and unaffiliated) recommendation. My wife and I went through about 10 thermometers of all types and price points the first year our first child was born. They were all of dubious accuracy, and worse: inconsistent.

Then, at the pediatrician's office we noticed them using an inner-ear thermometer. I asked the nurse to see it. It was a Braun Thermoscan. They aren't cheap at ~$70, but we bought one 5 years ago and that was that. It's fast, accurate and consistent. It paid for itself long ago and still works like it was new.

And one more time, because of the context of this comment: I have no affiliation with Braun.
Makes me think I should don a tutu for my LinkedIn profile.
True, it's not uncommon, but JS is very significantly more popular. I"m sure you've seen this: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016
Agreed, the best thing you can do is Google "_____ product review" and look for credible reviewers, someone with a reputation to protect. I worked with a product company where v1 had some product flaws and started receiving negative reviews, but it was very easy to overwhelm those with fake positive reviews across the web. Then when we came out with a much better v2, we got a scientist in our field with some following to do a short positive video review. That is difficult to get (I'm not talking about YouTube/Instagram/mommy blogger reviewers who give positive reviews to anyone who will send them free product) and there's no way he would have put his name on the line unless he had tried out the product on his own extensively. Any product company worth its salt should know this and get a few of these expert reviews posted to the web.
I would love some help on this project! I have managed to get Python 3 support working in the 0.3 release for at least a few examples, and any further help with bug reporting would be very much appreciated.
Whitepapers are generally shorter than that. Our internal guidelines are about 2500 to 3000 words. They'll sometimes creep up to 4K words or so but that's pretty much the upper limit. (A blog post will typically be under 1K words.)

However, when you get into the $10K-20K price for whitepapers, you're usually not just hiring a writer. You're typically paying in part for a research firm's reputation and, possibly data.

I'm not sure how much we pay for straight writing under our logo. But it would be significantly less unless it came as part of a package with advertising etc. as deals through online news channels often do.
I felt similar. Especially since Patrick said that something like "the first levels of Stockfighters are so easy, most devs should be able to beat them in 5 minutes with cURL only". It actually took me three days to beat chop a block, because I couldn't wrap my brain around it.

Then I beat it, but more due to luck I guess, because my bot couldn't reliably beat it again.

Edit: What I want to say is: Don't get discouraged too quickly. If you enjoy it somewhat, it's kind of nice to figure out how to win :)
Siri creator unveils something better
The reviewing system on Amazon gives WAY too much space to the hoards of morons would give products one star because the package was damaged on arrival. As long as that's the case, the average rating won't mean anything.
Thanks, I know what hard realtime means, I just meant I didn't have experience with those systems to really debate about them. Do you have practical experience building hard realtime systems?

> As an aside, I expect for many things native Scala will equal C++ in performance

Are you familiar with Haskell performance?

> [can Haskell be used for] realtime simulations and games?

Yes.

As I said, I can't speak for hard realtime, but then again, most sims and games seldom require it.

> GC based languages in general aren't good choices for the types of systems discussed above.

You seem to be arguing out of theory (which is why I asked you if you were speaking from experience). We're also not discussing GC based languages "in general"; we are discussing Haskell, which is a very practical language which can and has been used successfully in a variety of real-world applications, and which qualifies as a general purpose language. If in doubt, talk to an actual Haskell practitioner instead of arguing out of theoretical positions, and you'll be surprised. Many such practitioners frequent HN, and I'm sure they are eager (no pun intended) to discuss the systems they've worked in.

For that matter, will Scala Native not be a GC language?

> Scala also supports mutable state and the OO paradigm if they are better or more convenient for a particular system.

As I argued before, in practice this means Scala is not a great language for OOP or FP. It's understandable that experienced practitioners of either style will prefer cleaner & better languages.

I don't predict a particularly great outcome for Scala outside the JVM, since I think the JVM is its main selling point. Once you remove this point, other languages become distractingly attractive :)
I don't really see how anyone can win this challenge (other than how already done). The guy will be super cautious of any pull requests.
This reminds me of an old folk tale of the trickster and the rich man.

A king passing through a town finds a man about to be punished for fraud. He intercedes and asks what the matter is. The trickster says in his defence, "I ask people for things, and they give then to me". The king is incredulous but poses a challenge: "You must ask and receive money from the richest man in town." The trickster agrees, but being short on assets, requests a loan. The king obliges, and the trickster arranges (eliding details) to induce the town's richest resident to provide him with a wealth of goods. He returns to the king two days later with evidence in tow. The king is impressed by this demonstration, at which the trickster notes that he'd actually met the conditions 48 hours earlier when the king, wealthier than the town's richest resident, had offered him a loan.

There's something to those old stories.

(I'm not positive of the source but believe it's included in Idries Shah's World Tales.)
You know, you take a potshot at Go in there, but I observe that none of the negative bullet points apply to Go. My real point here not being "Go rocks", but that languages are more than just the collection of bullet-point features they claim on their home page. I think this is another one of those things that says obvious when I say it directly, but a lot of people are not letting it inform their actions.

Also I love that first alphabet image on that page.
I've seen a lot of hacky DIY 3D printers, but this is the roughest. Love it!
If FakeSpot can detect fakes Amazon should be able to do it even better. The fact that FakeSpot even exists shows that Amazon has decided that they've won the online retail competition and there's no need to spend any more resources on improving it.
What is the incentive to post commentary on discussion sites such as HN? For many, writing a review for an exceptional product triggers a type of internal emotional response that ties them to a community.
The MVP for wasm will not include any built-in support for garbage collection, no.
Python's site module contributes a lot to this. It attempts to load a lot of other modules, many of which may not exist for a given install.

Using your example:

$ strace python3 -c 'print("hello world", end="")' 2>&1 | hist
1. stat 122
2. rt_sigaction 68
3. fstat 67
4. read 55
5. close 47
6. open 37
7. mmap 34
8. lseek 30
9. getdents 18
10. mprotect 16
...
TOTAL: 567

$ strace python3 -S -c 'print("hello world", end="")' 2>&1 | hist
1. rt_sigaction 68
2. stat 51
3. fstat 39
4. mmap 31
5. read 27
6. close 26
7. open 23
8. mprotect 16
9. lseek 15
10. brk 10
...
TOTAL: 350
Really cool idea and hack. Unrelated, I wonder what Panic is going to do to keep up in terms software products. Coda was awesome, but then Sublime Text came along.. And then Atom came along.

Panic makes some of the most beautifully designed OS X software, so I hope they release something new and relevant soon.

Just spit-balling, but they should make a native OS X application to provision and manage infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean).
For me personally, as someone who has finished all the existing levels, just skipping the resume screen is actually a big value add (at least in principle, assuming they get the recruiting side worked out). I also really enjoyed writing the software for the trading levels.

On the other hand, I don't have a CS degree and currently work as a mechanical engineer, so the resume screen is relatively harder for me.