skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a big one, a lot of Amazon is designed around making it really easy to make impulsive purchases. One-click purchases? One-day/same-day delivery? The myriad of suggested/related items on every page between search and checkout? I can see where there'd be a big drop of orders that would never be placed again.
I don't think his scheme buys anything. Any pointing system in which a wrong answer has more weigh than a right answer will siply incensitive student to aim for the fair confidence level, the one that gives -1 for a bad answer. You need so few 'bad confidence' result to completely wreck your overall score that it is not worth it.

The main flaw of the scheme is that it is a purely mathematical analysis. Answers are not based solely on confidence but often relies of reading comprehension skills. (Even at the pure mathematical level. For example missing a square factor and a minus sign.) So you can have 100% confident incorrect answer just because you mis-read or mis-interpreted the question. Then you get punished hard. Given one's incapcity of self introspection and detection of such mis-reading, and the harsh punishment for such undetectable failure on the part of the student, his scheme is wrong headed.
He didn't say it was turtles all the way down though... he said there was a one in a billion chance we are the bottom turtle.
Were you replying to my comment... or sharing?
Don't know. I worked in the industry when Quake, Unreal, and if I'm being generous, maybe RenderWare and LithTech, were the only real middleware options, and most people still just rolled their own engines.

I ultimately burned out while working on an MMO, so I think the answer to your second question is that it's no different... because the launch is for sure a very, very big bang release.
Exactly. See this: https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation-...

"CHICAGO — December 1, 2015–Basecamp is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1."
This really was a great plan and I hope Apple can make it work.

With the iPhone Upgrade Program, Americans can finance a new unlocked phone with 0% interest, reducing the cell carrier lock-in. After 12 months, you can exchange your old phone for a new one.

Now, Apple has millions of 12 month old, last gen phones. India requires 30% of products sold to be sourced in India, so Apple planned to refurbish these used iPhones in India and then sell them in market.

It really was a great way to get Americans to upgrade more often, reduce the power of American cell companies, and provide an affordable product to an emerging market.

Apparently refurbishing the phones in India isn't enough to satisfy the 30% rule.
If you push 10 companies for reason defying growth and 9 of them die but the 1 survivor grows enormously is it worth it? Maybe?
That works too, but it's much less granular. You only have two levels of certainty there, with only three possible results: certain and correct, certain and incorrect, and uncertain with unknown correctness. That means you can distinguish between, say, 50% certainty and 10% certainty, but you can't distinguish between 50% certainty and 99% certainty.
What's New in Database Engine of SQL Server 2016
Backups are hard and you absolutely need to do them right, otherwise they're pointless.

The reason you need backups is exactly that you can't trust other people (or yourself) not to epically fuck things up. No matter how unambiguously totally someone else's fault it is, if your data is gone, it's gone.
How every #GameOfThrones episode has been discussed on Twitter – Twitter Blogs
Turns Out That Maybe You Shouldn't Trust the 'Media'
Not using browsers, those experiments were done using the MP4Client as a client
Have you seen RethinkDB and what you think about it (replacing cassandra?)?

RethinkDB seems to have everything from Cassandra, without the complexity.
I'd be curious to see the numbers on that sort of thing. I know for some people that is the case, but i almost feel.. locked in to Amazon. With free 2 day shipping, and decent customer service if i have problems/etc, i am not likely to shop elsewhere.

Is it a strange indicator that this feels more like lockin to me, than loyalty? I have no idea what that means.. or how to change the conceptual impression.
I agree with your first two points, but as to the 3rd point, what else would you do with a planet sized computer? There just isn't that much interesting stuff to do with that much computing power besides simulation.
I like how OwnCloud was characterized on Bad Voltage (paraphrasing here): "It's as if someone a few years ago wrote down their definition of cloud and sent it back in time to 1996. Then a bunch of PHP developers in 1996 implemented it knowing nothing about what they were doing and then sent the code back to present day."

That's not to say I don't appreciate the fact that ownCloud exists, but I find it much harder to use, and the fact that it's written in PHP makes me not want to dig into it to fix.
Except the "one in a billion chance" was pulled out of something soaking in a hot tub, and Occam's Razor obviously favors base reality alone rather than the superset consisting of base reality plus some very advanced civilization living in base reality plus some bizarre reason why that very advanced civilization has nothing better to do than run hyperrealistic simulations of a much more primitive civilization.
Being an older parent is no fun. Your kids run circles around you and you're _always_ tired.

Or maybe that's just parenting in general.
I used parentheses that can be read in less than 1 second. Let me know if you are a HN moderator.
A complete simulation would require infinite means to process, memorize and exhibit. It is safe to assume that these infinite means could not exist.

So, just like a physic's simulation that uses limited means, say like floating points, exception cases need to be taken care of (like detecting resting-cases in physics and then clamping floats to a small epsilon in order to avoid weird reactions).

The treatment of these exception cases would add discontinuities in the physical behaviours we observe. For example, in a simulation, a force like gravity would be explained as: F = G (m1m2/r2), unless r is very close to 0 in which case F=0. In our reality, the "unless" part does not exist, in fact, if you have this exception, it is actually a symptom that your formula or approach might not be the perfect one.

In our reality there are no glitches nor can we detect means by which glitches where avoided, in fact it is quite the opposite, metaphysics seem to exhibit an undeniable amount of coherency and consistency.

I'm not convinced by the simulation argument at all.
That is a great idea!! I will try and add this to the next revision. Lots I want to add now based on everyone's feedback.
> It doesn't seem like he was saying that we _are_ living in a simulation, but that at some point in the future we will be living in a simulation since virtual reality technology will be so good.

No, he's saying that his speculation about the future quality of our VR is proof that simulations of the quality of our universe are possible, and that if those simulations are possible then, our universe probably is such a simulation, because obviously anything that can be done has been done by someone else first.
The Flickr mobile app is a great example of where things went wrong for Yahoo. They both were too slow to spot a trend and poor at executing once they had. Ironically, from 2008 onwards, there was a module on the Flickr homepage showing the most popular cameras people were using. iPhone topped this chart somewhere around 2009 and yet they still didn't take that seriously enough to invest heavily in the iOS app development.
You want to avoid sticking everyone on the same (air)bus too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Fli...
I'm disappointed that you don't score positive infinity for getting an answer correct with 100% certainty. Pass the entire course if you find one question you're really sure of. It would stop the teachers from putting in softball questions.
Python only :(
I honestly don't know, I'm learning more just reading other comments and their accompanying links. To wit, I'm slowly having my understanding of this whole thing shaped and evolved as I read more from others on this-but the impression I picked up from a piece on TheAtlantic was that Thiel was using his buying power essentially to win this case by attrition-which is the aspect of this (if provably true) that I (personally) have icky with.
> A media company operating with integrity has nothing to fear here.

Until they do? Gawker is very likely to win on appeal, but who is going to want to invest in Gawker knowing that a litigious billionaire has a grudge against them?
Maybe this is the norm in big enterprises, but I have not actually come across any company which hosts a local package repository for commonly available packages.
140 Character limit that includes url and hash tags which is finally going to get released. Look at increasing the limit later on?
This would be a much more interesting post without the tired sarcasm every other paragraph.
How could cash not affect a company's valuation? This implies that the market isn't merely irrational but idiotic. A company holding a billion dollars in cash and nothing else should be worth a billion dollars (maybe slightly less to account for the risk that the board could squander the money).
If you have young kids, then there's a good chance you know how deeply Minecrafted has penetrated their worlds, replacing or augmenting Legos (or other, lesser, building toys) and video games in general. It's more than that they've sold 100M units, it's that there's an entire generation of kids now whose basis for creativity/entertainment is Minecraft, and who knows what future behavior that will inform.

It's not just a staggering number of units, it's a shift in shared cultural experience for a generation.
Calm Facebook's eager pixels in single page apps
I'm working on something like this right now. We asked 8 trivia questions on a survey of users of our website, and had people assign probability estimates to the probability they got the answer right.

First of all it seems like everyone had exactly the same probability of getting any random question right. Some people got every question right, and some got none right. But in exactly the proportion you would expect by random chance - that some were just particularly lucky or unlucky.

The second is that probability estimates did not vary much based on questions gotten right. Everyone expected to get about 44% of questions right, regardless how many questions they actually got right. People who only got 1 right assigned the same probability as people who got 5 right.

Likewise people who estimated higher probabilities of getting more questions right, got the same amount of questions right. And a decent percent of people were underconfident too, and assigned probabilities too low (but got the same amount of questions right.)

Lastly, people are really uncalibrated. Some people are just bad at estimating probability. When they say "80% chance of something" they mean that thing will only happen 58% of the time. You can be trained, in a relatively short time, to become calibrated. By estimating probabilities and seeing how many you actually got right. But most people aren't trained, so it would be a bit unfair to put this on a real test.
Slightly related, does anyone know of any speech recognition library that also analysises the intonation / emotion in speech?

For example that has the ability to recognise anger / happy / questioning to relative accuracy?
Thank you for your kind words.

No, I had not taken anything when I wrote that rambling epistle. What you're seeing is a first draft, and since I had to get moving, I had to leave it as such.

Recall that I knew how to concentrate before the meds, it just took a lot more energy. I am naturally at my highest mental energy level in the morning.

Also, those who know me will attest that my default writing style is pretty long-winded and uh..dubiously organized.

If I had gone back to edit it this morning, the wall o' text would have gotten about 1/3 shorter.

Regarding recreational use: I cast neither dispersions or judgments on anyone. Speaking for myself, I can't imagine adderall being a recreational drug. For me, it's not a particularly fun feeling, though it helps me accomplish high-focus tasks, and that feels good.

And just to be clear: our son gives our lives purpose and meaning. Truly he is the purest blessing to us.
True, but how useful is that granularity, really? If you combine the fact that the test has multiple items assessing the same skill, and the fact that they employ (reasonably) sophisticated statistics (Item-response theory) to come up with a probabilistic assessment of the student's true ability given the observed answer pattern, would something like this really buy you a whole lot more?
Changing teams is pointless. Every manager of every team at Amazon has burner employees whether anyone knows it or not. Part of being an employee is trying to determine if you are the burner. People are hired in as burner employees at Amazon. That is unless Amazon stopped doing company-wide stack ranking, which obviously it will never do since it legitimizes pass-the-buck and is so beneficial to the people making the rules.
Python module to manage the DP-EH600 thermal printer
Why wouldn't your knowledge of how often you misread problems factor into your estimate of what the probability of your answer to the problem being correct is? The scheme is rating how well you answer test questions, not how well you know the answers to the problems. As you point out, there's subtle differences. But no grading scheme on earth could address those subtle differences, so it's not exactly a failing if his scheme doesn't.
The learning pain is comparable to C pointers when you first see them haha. Funny thing is that after getting used to the borrow checker and other nice things of the language, its sad to go back to the languages I use at work.
> I wish there were more things like that.

Perhaps not coincidentally, craigslist is not a public company.
Southwest airlines, and taxi companies know one thing: an idle vehicle is an un-funded cost. Will uber add in functionality to support a "hot seat" model, one driver owns the car and another contributes to it by "using" it?
I found this article really frustrating.

The US government forces American tech companies to spy on users, so US companies are to blame?

These services are so useful and well-liked around the world that they should be considered a threat?

The author is amazingly willing to accord French bureaucrats the right to regulate the cultural consumption of Frenchmen. How is this defensible? Should we knock Netflix because it makes it harder for French social engineers to impose their preferences on their own citizens?

Companies like this don't come out of Europe for a reason.
Kickstarter Lessons from a Bootstrapped Company
The problem was that encryption totally broke after an update. A symptom of that problem was that files became inaccessible.

Restoring from backup would have corrected the symptom, not the root problem: a bug.
You're misunderstanding what highly likely means. It means there's a high probability of something.

The use of an idiom doesn't change the definition of the words.

Probability is not causal. Just because something is "highly likely" does not mean it is true.
How to turn consumer behavior insights into better conversions? Part 2
I have this reaction when I read these articles as well. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who are dismissive of humanities majors, but I've experienced a real problem, over the course of my career, with people who want to put engineering and science majors in a box, defining them as people who can handle technical tasks but can't think independently outside their narrow and well defined technical skill set.

I wonder if this attitude is more prevalent in the US, where people routinely say "you can do anything with a law degree", viewing law as a generalist degree, while viewing engineering or math as a narrow, task-specific degree with no real use outside those subjects…

Although I double majored in English Literature and Math, I did notice the extent to which I would have been required to study humanities as a math major in college (UCSD) without the double major in lit. My general education requirements included a two year undergraduate survey course on world history, a required upper division sequence in a humanities field focusing on a specific region (such as a one year upper division sequence on European or Asian history), two years or proven competence in a foreign language, a year of arts (fine arts, art history, theater), and a minor in a humanities field.

That may be a bit heavier than usual, but in general, math and science majors are required to take a great deal of humanities. The humanities majors, by contrast, had to take two courses in "math" which could be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and stats for the social sciences (no calculus or even a modicum of advanced math required). The science could be fulfilled through "physics for humanities majors" and bio classes not intended for science track students. Again, that may be a bit light, but it's pretty consistent in US universities - humanities majors get away with minimal math and science, whereas science, engineering, and math majors must take substantial humanities coursework.

One more thing - although the humanities were rigorous, the partiers were pretty much all humanities or social science majors. At least at UCSD, it was nearly impossible to survive in engineering or science as a "partier". Not to say these students were never at the parties, but they spent a lot more time in labs and the library, it was pretty clear. Those and the pre-meds. The humanities majors who got good grades were serious students, sure, but it's pretty clear to me that they didn't have to work anywhere near as hard for good grades (this was also my personal experience in upper division lit classes vs upper division math classes).

This is why I think the most well-rounded students tend to be the STEM students. Not all STEM students are well rounded, many resent and minimize their humanities coursework, but the well-roundedness tends to be more deeply built into the curriculum for STEM than for humanities.
Thiel didn't fund tons of frivolous lawsuits (nor did the SPLC). Thiel and SPLC both funded solid lawsuits where the verdict - not litigation costs - is what bankrupts the other party. (A lawsuit is by definition not frivolous if you win.)
Ask HN: What blogging platform are you using these days?
I think they meant the flip side of that -- having Spider-Man and Harry Potter themed downloadable content for the Minecraft game.
Yeah loads of stuff is cached server-side; this is a pretty realistic guess.
Really? We certainly do here. Linux packages are mirrored. Programming dependencies are mirrored via tools like Nexus or Artifactory.

Like tsuresh said - stuff happens. What if you internet connection went down for a long period of time. You couldn't continue working. It takes very little to setup, gives you fall over but also makes installing dependencies sooo much faster.
"Hundreds of millions"

The quoted number is 10 million
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter...
Nope. The highs and lows came too quickly.
Uber's No Good, Very Bad Deal with Saudi Arabia
This is a bit overblown. Amazon doesn't have the retail sales of Walmart even in the US. Walmart has been able to dictate to manufactures rules for packaging and distribution for a couple decades now. Somehow we survived and now they are being disrupted. Europe may be "vulnerable" to US tech companies but it is not clear they will be as successful in China, India and other parts of the world.
Funny thing is the weights they assigned didn't discourage random guessing at all; they merely made your expected gain from guessing equal with the expected gain from not answering (i.e. zero).

So even if you had the very slightest idea, you should absolutely guess. If you took the test multiple times, then probabilistically you'd be better off if you always guessed even when you had no clue: some of your scores would be higher and some would be lower than if you hadn't guessed, and usually only your highest score is considered. Most guides overemphasized the penalty.

That said, it can screw you of course too if you happen to be unlucky in your guessing. This is what Terry's scheme overcomes.
I'd wager it's scientists and/or laborers at McMurdo.
What about OpenEars? Is this better somehow?

http://www.politepix.com/openears/
I used to work at AWS, and this is not at all typical. I was in meetings with various high-level directors and the mantra was always the same: Why did this happen? If the answer is "somebody made a mistake" we need to figure out how we can automate so nobody can make that mistake again.

Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of pressure. People are held accountable. But they are held accountable for fixing the underlying issue and making sure the same mistakes aren't made again. I've never heard of someone getting fired for making a mistake. People get fired when the same expensive mistake is made repeatedly by the same person. (And really, based on my experience, that might not even be enough. I think in order to get fired you probably would have to fail to understand the nature of the mistake when everyone else in the room understands.)
Microsoft, China based corporate network. No idea why the firewall blocked it, it just said malware.
I live pretty close to where I work, probably 20 minutes on foot. This is great for many reasons, but I also work in a public place (a library) and might have personal reasons to go there on days I'm not working. I do not do this because I just can't bring myself to hang out where I work. It's not that my coworkers are not respectful it's just that I don't want to.

Working from home was like being at work all the time. It started to wear on me. Now that I'm more mature I might be able to handle it, but at the time I just couldn't sustain.
‘Connectography,’ by Parag Khanna
As one of the commenters points out, Tao has rediscovered the notion of a proper scoring rule -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_ru... -- and the specific (rather nice, if you don't mind all the scores being negative and the infinite penalty when something happens that you said definitely wouldn't) logarithmic scoring rule -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Logarithmic_scori....

The Brier score -- you score minus the average squared error between your prediction and [1 for the right outcome, 0 for the others] -- is also a proper scoring rule (i.e., incentivizes you to report your probabilities accurately) and doesn't penalize maximally-wrong answers infinitely. For some purposes it's a better choice than the logarithmic score.
Frankly, half of all these monthly hiring posts have been regurgitated over and over for months and months. It is probably frustrating for many serious job seekers visiting these threads every month, and seeing the same positions time and time again.
> >since she is a woman (perhaps also importantly an attractive young woman)

> This is a completely inappropriate comment. Have you ever heard anyone talk about how good-looking or not Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are?

Actually, I've seen comments about both of their appearance, age, and (particularly in Zuckerberg's case) choice of attire, in connection with reporting on their respective business ventures.
This seems like a great codified set of best practices - but why the prohibition on topic branches?

The project SHALL NOT use topic branches for any reason.

This is a main tenet of git-flow, and it's hardly uncommon.