skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like the problem came at the beginning: there was a requirement that was a difficult problem, and the developers needed to take the time then and do some Big Design Up Front to the point that they could get the users to collaborate in a solution to understand how Big a problem it was.

The team also needed to evolve, starting with a very small implementation and evolve it to handle each additional use case in a way that the stakeholders felt there was progress in their biggest pain points.

It's an experienced lead that takes their hands off the keyboard for a few weeks and immerses themselves in the social problem. (And yes, sometimes it means breaking big problems into small pieces as a team and organizing around the work in separate steps, even if that feels unsatisfying.)
But you often have to play the game for half an hour before you start running into really gross IAPs, though. If you want to find games that don't have those predatory game loops and IAPs, the only way seems to be to go outside of the app stores and find review sites - but no site can keep up with reviewing every game that gets released.
I generally agree with you. I see nothing different here than what's done every day by insurance companies looking to assess individual risk. If an algorithm can decide how likely I am to be at fault in a wreck, why can't one decide my chances of recidivism?
“Hackers”
I view this post as being a rant against this particular shop with potentially subpar management practices which is frustrating, and I sympathesize.

However, if you intend this as an argument against general software project management, I must disagree.
(See: "He introduced us to ‘Jira’, a word that strikes fear into the soul of a developer.")

Lately I've had the opportunity to work at a place with very forward-thinking, progressive, and helpful PMs and generally good organizational structure.

I like our approach and here is why:

* We are not afraid to change things. This might lead to some temporary disagreements between technical leads and PMS, but EVERYONE in the team has transparency into the process, and an opportunity to voice an opinion.

* We taking scoring tickets very seriously. I've been at places where everyone on a team might vote on a ticket, even if they cannot appreciate the true scope of it. Here it's different. For instance, we have seen that in the last couple of weeks, our velocity was unusually high. This might indicate we are scoring tickets too highly, and from what I've seen of my own work, I'm inclined to agree.

I've had a length interview with a PM who spent some time afterwards telling me about his metholodogies (I gladly listened.) When given the choice between Gantt charts which have cliffs (indicating poor future planning and rushing to get things done last minute) and nice step-ladder charts, we see why PMs prefer things the way they do.

Sometimes it gets in the way of just writing code sure. But with good organizational structure, especially in a mid-size company that has upcoming deadlines and business features to ship, we identify priorities quickly while still being aware of things like reducing code debt.
Well here are two examples.

1) I have a rail system that I want to optimize train movement through the topology. My search space is the number of running locomotives to the power of the number of switches in the system. On a continental rail system, that's a number with many, many, many zeros after it. To optimize this, I have many cores chewing through the space, but to know where to search they must share a visited node cache otherwise they will search each others space and waste effort.

2) I have a system that predicts part failures by collecting sensor data of the machine in a time series. I must look for patterns of change in these sensor readings and compare that to patterns that I know about, often drilling through data over many weeks looking for feature alignment in the sensor matrices. Same problem: many cores, some amount of space that is known vs. unknown that must be shared, but as a result is a contentious resource.
> I think what Chomsky is saying is that if we do not understand the generative principle behind any data, we cannot possibly know what circumstance might completely invalidate our model. There may not be a way to smooth this out.

No, what Chomsky is saying is that if you don't know the generative principle behind the data, then you don't know the generative principle behind the data. You don't understand a system just because you can faithfully predict it.
"Better to be big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond" type of thing. I seriously doubt that since you limit your growth.
This woman used the dataviz from Fitbit and Gyroscope to lose 40 pounds
So which one is YC? A seed investor, an accelerator or a VC firm?

> Notably absent in this year’s list are Y Combinator and RockHealth–both programs now classify themselves as seed funds rather than accelerators, and asked us to respect their evolution into a new model.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/these-are-the-top-20-us-ac...
tl;dr:

Wisconsin courts use an algorithm called Compas for sentencing (though not exclusively AFAICT). Compas is an algorithm that calculates the likelihood of someone committing another crime and suggests what kind of supervision a defendant should receive in prison.

Compas' algorithm is secret:

Company officials say the algorithm’s results are backed by research, but they are tight-lipped about its details. They do acknowledge that men and women receive different assessments, as do juveniles, but the factors considered and the weight given to each are kept secret.

“The key to our product is the algorithms, and they’re proprietary,” said Jeffrey Harmon, Northpointe’s general manager.
"And then (this is hard for coders) trusting the systems to do the work."

Like you say, it can be easy to think that something works when it really doesn't. I hope that the above quote isn't meant to be interpreted as "believe the results are correct." Evaluation is paramount when working on these systems to avoid making such mistakes. I assume Google is including evaluation in their machine learning training, but it would have been nice to see that pointed out in the article for folks who may have an interest in machine learning but don't know what's important to focus on.
What a weird question. You're always you, until you die. Even if you became totally paralyzed, blind, deaf, etc. (total sensory deprivation) you'd still be you. All that is you is just the voice in your head, the ability to ask the question, and to think about an answer.

As for what happens to your body or anything else in the world? You can't ever get rid of those doubts. The only thing you can know without a doubt is that a doubter exists. Cogito ergo sum, as Descartes wrote.
Disk drive problems with an old computer reminded me of this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11376711
Show HN: Open database of American doctors
If they are a huge importer that means this move is even more dramatic because it says they won't do stupid things just to try to save a few dollars.

But also, aren't they huge on solar even though they get a fraction of the sun that the USA does?
The tech apparently works for 80% of color blind persons, by blocking certain wavelengths that otherwise overwhelm the color blind person's perceptions of certain colors.

Once the eyes adjust to the diminished total light transmitted by the special dark sunglasses, the admitted wavelengths allow the color blind person's eyes to perceive the previously missed colors.

Simple in concept, awesome technology. About $300 a pair and are available to meet those who need prescription lenses.
> I hear from ham radio enthusiasts about how the hobby has lost so much popularity.

I'm not sure who you are talking to about this :) The hobby has actually gained tremendous popularity in recent years. There are more licensed radio amateurs now in the US than ever before.

FYI this is Drake: http://www.drakeofficial.com/

I mentioned him because of your assertion that only the most modern version of something is useful and non-nostalgic.

> being told I'm wrong

You made a variety of incorrect assertions. I am not trying to change your opinion, just help you avoid making embarrassing false statements. I also do not believe for a second that you are unfamiliar with Drake.
> A judges thought process is closed source also, no?

No, a judge's thought process is determined by open law, open precedent, and the judge's reasoning is explained openly in the published legal opinion. That reasoning can be challenged in an appeal.

Openness in courts is a fundamental of democracy, liberty and human rights. Otherwise, you can't defend yourself and the government doesn't have to explain its actions to the public.
And when it is refuted, you assert something akin to:

"Linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Observed use of language ... may provide evidence ... but surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline."
I think in the Science of Process that is being related as a desirable goal, everything would necessarily be a dynamic object (or perhaps something similar to this but fuzzier or more relational or different in some other way, but definitely dynamic) because data by itself is static while the world itself is not.
I hadn't gone down that far into the rabbit hole yet but I'm absolutely open to adding new content around using docker for rpm building. Thanks for the feedback!
When do you think those 3-4 years started for this bubble?
The real issue for me is that the algorithm is itself proprietary, and the company who made it won't release any of its details.

That's the part that is most Orwellian. "Our magic box says you are going to commit another crime if we let you out. Sorry, no, you aren't allowed to know anything about the magic box."
>There is absolutely no altruism in Apple’s free kids programming classes. They are a sales engagement.

That's about as ranty as it gets but that's probably what he means.
Some day I hope someone explains to me why people care so much about the classification of Pluto.
2 orders of magnitude more commits? Yes, agree. And the argument that claims "a flurry of activity" doesn't wash. This is a bit more than a flurry.
A critical eye is always warranted, but the prestige of a journal has no bearing on the correctness of the claim. This attitude is harmful to science. Perhaps his analysis is incorrect or lacking somehow, but that's not the argument you make.
One small correction, they're funded by the Swiss taxpayers and the European union.
You've correctly shown that "f2 does not contain p". However, the subtle bit of reasoning "f2 cannot be evenly divisible by p as that would require it to have a prime factor of p" is not justified by any of your assumptions.

Let me be clear: f2 is a fixed product of primes p_1, p_2, p_3, etc. It is certainly true that each p_i divides evenly f2. What you use, however, is the converse claim: that every prime p that divides f2 is on this list.

This converse claim, that "every prime p that divides f2 is on the list of primes that we built f2 out of", does not follow from "no number of primes can be multiplied together to make another prime". The latter implies only that a prime that both divides f2 and can be built out from the given list of primes, has to be on the list of primes.

In fact, the converse claim "every prime p that divides f2 is on the list of primes that we built f2 out of" is essentially one variant of the statement of unique prime factorization, so you actually fell into the trap of circular reasoning.
So... fund 2.12 dev? :)
Perhaps the count indicates he answered some questions but then "plead the fifth" on others.
"Wireless sucks" - That's the hint. And once the 3.5mm jack is removed, you think Apple would reintroduce it again?
Two of the worst payment companies who love to screw over consumers all in one place, sounds amazing!

I can just imagine getting both my Coinbase account and my PayPal account frozen at the same time for something that one of them didn't like. 2-for-1!

I've long since left Coinbase since they locked my account and started emailing me asking me to verify my actions because they believed I was engaging in gambling and other actions against their terms. I couldn't even buy an anonymous currency from them without having them actively scrutinize and track what I did with said currency. No thanks.
Added an issue ticket so I don't forget :)

https://github.com/maxamillion/rpm-guide/issues/8
To generalize: "pick your battles".
No out of the box integration even for basic stuff.

I expect no more hurdles than just using Java official Android tools.
Of the big three (Udacity, Coursera, EdX), my favorite for tech courses is Udacity. The others can be great, but the level of detail and clarity of instruction on Udacity is startling. I wonder how much better an experience undergraduate computer science must be for some people.
It demonstrates that human languages all have a certain structure, so it must be an innate faculty of human beings (as opposed to acquired). A neural network could not tell you that. It also suggests further avenues of inquiry (Why that particular structure?)
Seriously?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/upshot/when-algorithms-dis...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/comput...

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
It can't be turtles all the way down, so maybe set theory?
As for the remark at the end: you're right, it may be difficult to un-obfuscate phrased in that form, but had you phrased it "Make a table of two columns. Take the very top-most, left-most entry to be n, take every entry in the right column to be 1 plus the value to its left, and take every further entry in the left column to be the product of all previous entries in the right column. I claim the value three cells below the initial n has three prime factors (and similarly the value below that has four prime factors, etc.)", and I couldn't see why that would be the case, then, yes, this would give some real pause as to whether I could truly claim sound understanding (to the point of considering it obvious) of the reason for the infinitude of primes.

And if, analogously, the obstacle to someone seeing "the smallest positive value of the form 98X - 60Y is 2" is merely inability to factorize 98 or 60, well, that doesn't mean much. But I don't think that's the obstacle for most; I don't think people would do much better were it phrased "What is the smallest value of the form 2 * 7^2 * X - 2 * 3 * 5 * Y? (BTW, 2, 3, 5, and 7 are all prime)". And I do think, while not definitive in itself, the fact that this sort of thing is not obvious at all to people suggests we shouldn't presume sound reasoning behind uniqueness of prime factorization/Euclid's lemma/etc. is implicitly obvious either. When people claim it to be obvious, it's not because they have a dim view of the correct reasoning, seen through a glass, darkly. It's just because they're making complete logical leaps.
>how is that an excuse for nuclear plants?

Because if anti-nuclear activists were to back down and let us replace coal with nuclear, tens of thousands of lives would be saved. The death toll might not be 0, but it would almost certainly be lower.
A closed door deposition with a "conservative watchdog group"?

Not that I like the facts that have emerged around HRC's private email server, but this particular instance looks more like a witch hunt than an attempt at transparency. If I had to talk to "watchdogs" who have been hounding my boss for the last 30 years (with varying degrees of justification), I'd plead the fifth too.
One iOS game I enjoyed and recently rediscovered is GeoDefense. I highly recommend it (at $3.99 I think) and it is definitely a middle-ground app. I estimate they made between 500K - 5M lifetime sales over 4 years with both games.
It seems pretty responsive.
Yes, the real problem is that even though Congress is hated as a whole the individual members tend to be quite popular within their own states and districts.
Government is held to higher standards than businesses, because government can take your freedom and property. If you don't like your insurance rates, switch to another carrier; the insurance company won't imprison you.

As another example, government can't stop you from saying whatever you like (freedom of speech), but your employer can restrict what you say at work.
Great article, but I can't help but CRINGE at the "ninja" references. I think that's already played out within the industry... and although pop-tech writers tend to lag a few years behind, it will sound extremely dated in the mainstream within a few years.
Perhaps I am the only one, but is anyone interested in the opposite direction, static site generator like CLI app to do short linking?

YOURLS was popular for a while, and I tried it, but I was concerned with running a not very popular PHP app even on shared hosting. At least Wordpress gets decent attention. I was worried of people compromising my own YOURLS instance against me.

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1...
That's awesome news, NVDA and Caddy awarded for contributors work. I hope, in future there will be more companies donating money to attractive open-software projects.
I work on machines that are usually 20-30 years old if not more and I pretty much have to replace all the capacitors on them due to age. They tend to dry out, crack, or balloon up.

Not a single one built after 1999.
"so that we knew exactly what we were building, what it needed to accomplish and what does 'finished' mean"

That only works when the people who are asking for the software know what they want. In the situation described in the article:

"The one where you try to replace an expert user’s years of experience and intuition with software. What started out as a vague and wooly requirement, soon became a monster as we started to dig into it."

In my experience, the business people aren't good at turning vague and wooly requirements into precise specifications for software - they're not trained as logical thinkers. Usually, that job falls on the developers, who will try to clarify the requirements until they have something that's precise enough to be translated into logically consistent code. This may involve a lot of trial an error, since trying to extract the requirements from the business people is a non-linear process (e.g., they can change their minds on what the spec is, and a seemingly small change in the spec can have a large effect on the architecture).
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Consider why people get worked up over civil asset forfeiture of people with large amounts of cash on their person. Statistically, it's highly probable that money is the product of illegal activity--i.e. if you find 10 people carrying 10,000 in their car, only one or two probably obtained that money legitimately.

Yet, it strikes people as "unfair" to play the statistics like that, because peoples' sense of justice requires some sort of individualized due process. That is why, for example, you generally can't introduce evidence of past crimes in order to prove guilt for a different crime.
@dang thanks to YC for making this happen! I read HN for the comments and this AMA showed why HN has the best comments on the internet.
How to Run Java Fat-Jars in Docker, Kubernetes and Openshift
Tech Book Face Off: The C Programming Language vs the Little Schemer
> So unless they start allowing third party stores, nothing will change.

What would a 3rd party store do to make profitability? Best case thy take zero revenue and you get 30% more money - from TFA it doesn't sound like 30% or even 300% would have made a difference....
> When you realize that an algorithm is just a process to be performed, what is new here other than using a computer and a large amount of data?

This is precisely the problem. If the algorithm is dependent on a certain process, this process should be vetted for potential biases - big data or not.
Sounds pretty much like the problem of establishing contact with an alien civilization. Definitely set theory, prime numbers, arithmetic and so on... I guess at some point, objects will be equipped with general intelligence for such negotiations if they are to be true digital ambassadors!
How does any of that imply that lightning earbuds are just a stopgap?
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Arrested the the Man Behind Iran's Cyberspace Attack
> Consider why people get worked up over civil asset forfeiture of people with large amounts of cash on their person. Statistically, it's highly probable that money is the product of illegal activity

I haven't seen any stats about the assets seized; do you know of any?
Ok, but apple didn't just get rid of the floppy disk. At a time when everyone was getting ready to go from DVDs to either Blu-ray or HD-DVD Apple got rid of optical disks entirely in all of their machines and everyone gave them shit for it the same way. But in the end they were right. The battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was won by downloads and streaming, and optical disks have gone the way of the floppy disk even though they worked perfectly fine.

Analog audio jacks are going in the same direction. Bluetooth audio works perfectly fine, and it's how I play music on my headphones, in my car and at home. The analog jack is a convenient fallback but it will definitely go away at some point.

Sure, it feels like it's a bit premature, but that's how it always feels when Apple does something like get rid of optical drives, or get rid of removable batteries, etc. Eventually everyone follows them. Someone needs to blaze the trail and Apple is one of the few major companies that is not afraid to do it even if it pisses off some people along the way.
I think you're absolutely on point. Working for an established tech company is a great way to accelerate your continued education. Just because you're not doing everything yourself doesn't mean you can't develop a broad exposure to ideas. Depending on how much access to source code and documentation you have, you can stand on the shoulders of many giants.

It's also worth pointing out that you can use your industry experience to develop essential political skills, and I'm not talking about how to be a Machiavellian dick. If you want to be a good leader, work on learning how to inspire and influence people's hearts and minds to work toward a common goal. Learn how to ask good questions and really listen. Figuring out what the goal is and effectively communicating that with others is key, but if you can actually motivate others to push themselves to advance that goal, you're on your way to becoming a very effective leader. BTW, you can practice these skills on any level because it doesn't require position or power. It simply requires that you interact, listen to and conspire with your coworkers, especially the ones that hold power over you.
Isn't USB-C daisy-chainable? Seems like the onus is on the portable battery to have a USB-C port itself for this.
What are some examples of such well-constructed games?
Looking at the coding patterns used in the C source, I am utterly horrified this is running live on a public facing website.

I can see at least one buffer overrun dependent on database contents, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's public-facing vulnerabilities in this thing, but I don't want to spend another 5 minutes looking.
Thanks for creating the issues!

And you're welcome for the apt-get upgrades, glad they are a good experience for you.
Count me in as one of the thoroughly confused. I was expecting more Citadel content.