skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: To Open Source or Not to Open Source
I have spent the last year and a half working on a GPU accelerated image compression codec that smokes all existing commercial CPU codecs by a factor of 3x or more (depending on CPU and GPU(s) ). An advisor suggested to me that in order to gain market share, I could open source my work under a dual commercial/GPL license. Because of the high performance, this would truly disrupt the entire market around this particular kind of compression. I am worried that open sourcing will simply allow other companies to "borrow" my ideas and I will not be able to monetize my work. What sayest thou, O Hacker News ? Any advice or guidance would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Virtual Machines Summer School 2016 – All Slides
Amazon will start subsidizing Android phones with Ads on the lock screens
Google does the same. They regularly send your password to their server to rate it. A curl-example is provided below.

I think I already noticed that some websites used googles api to do the rating of passwords on their website but I can't recall where I saw it.

curl 'https://accounts.google.com/RatePassword' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' --data 'Passwd=jbcfaihrwefgbGWETZHGAESjbnajfcw24704%$§&%§!vf&Emailnotme@useless.domain=&FirstName=Hacker&LastName=News'

or another endpoint:

curl 'https://accounts.google.com/InputValidator?resource=SignUp' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"input01":{"Input":"Passwd","Passwd":"GoogleBatteryHorseStaple","PasswdAgain":"GoogleBatteryHorseStaple","FirstName":"Hacker","LastName":"News","GmailAddress":"i-have@none.yet"},"Locale":"en"}'
Sorry, my point was simply that the incentives discussed in the post aren't unique to the field. They play a role in all academic literature, the best way to deal with it is to be consciously aware and take advantage of what the internet has allowed in terms of non-traditional distribution.
Yeah, accredited by whom?

I hereby accredit the University of Phoenix. What now?
Tom Kundig Talks_Transforming Architecture with GIZMOS
You can’t kill email
Interestingly, their whole "thing" seems to be that you can't re-invent one of them well without doing the others, so they appear to see themselves as doomed if they don't re-invent all of them.
There is an entire statistical discipline devoted to evaluating algorithms without understanding their internals, or at least with minimal knowledge thereof. It's called "machine learning" (a term you criticized me for using).

According to the PP article, race is not an input to the algorithm so it can't give -0.5 to black people solely for being black.
This is orthogonal to my point, which is that these incentives are present in all branches of science, and are likely impacting what is published similarly.
They didn't seem to think of the possibility that I might have a long running, important process on a machine that I am not physically at. Restarting a machine just because I am not there to say no is bad.
Physics PhDs will have taken more math courses than Psychology PhDs on average, but I am pretty skeptical that they have taken more statistics courses. I would like to see the evidence for that if you have it.
Just for the sake of argument, imagine you aren't the only one with the knowledge the competition wants. Say there's a 10-person team where each shares the knowledge. The competition only needs one to rapidly close the gap. That would mean the company would have to pay 10x what the competition is willing to pay for that knowledge in order to keep all ten employees faithful. The competition can make a $1 mil offer to each employee, one at a time, that the company would then have to beat. That gets ugly pretty fast.

That said, this does seem to be an edge case, where the general rule causes more harm than good.
3 SF supervisors move to put tech tax on November ballot
Rule of thumb with getting funds from online business lenders is that you can get 10% of your revenue as a loan or LOC.
Show HN: LetsMonitor.org beta – free monitor for website certificate expirations
I guess different strokes.

For me, Git is the worst software I've been compelled to use since Lotus Notes. I think it's terrible. I would never use it if I didn't absolutely have to as a condition of employment.
Honestly the modulated voice sounds like a gay man, or a transgender, or someone who is physically male but is trying hard to speak like a female. It's probably not the pitch itself but the manner of speaking.
You misunderstand.

Urbit is not democratic, it's feudal.

The namespace is scarce by design.
PlanGrid (YC W12) Is Hiring a Director of Product Marketing and More
> while wages for the poorest have stagnated. But that means the percent of disposable income spent on food by the poorest might not be falling at all

No, that's not true at all. If wages are stagnant and goods are getting cheaper, then you are getting richer. I see this "stagnant wages" meme brought up all the time, but I don't see why nobody ever talks about cost of goods. Ex: Even the poorest today in the US can afford amazingly complex cellphones and computers, which was unthinkable 25 years ago (if we were to somehow make one of the same capacity)
Wouldn't that just increase the problem that the person you are responding to brought up? If you capture their facial movements, it might be even easier to tell if they are a man or a woman, despite any scrambling you do.
But that's always been the nature of capital - there are no returns without risk. Capital's always been a bet on the uncertain future - the whole reason we have the concept of a modern corporation is so that risk can be spread across lots of people who can afford to lose the money they put up.

The percentage of investors who lost their shirt in the Industrial Revolution dwarfs those who lost their shirt in the dot-com boom. It's just that everybody who went broke investing in a refinery or mining scheme that was just snake oil dropped out of the history books, and we only hear about the people who got fabulous wealthy.
Well, he has a set of goals he intends to achieve before it hits 1.0 and the version numbering currently is meant to reflect the % the brothers deem it complete. Considering they've managed to spend ten years doing the work I would say it seems possible it will, eventually, hit beta and even be 'finished'.
Be nice to 'future you' - if in 6 months you open up the code and can't figure out whats going on right away, you've done something wrong. Just because you understand everything now, you won't when it comes time to refactor down the road. Make sure that you don't screw future you over by trying to be cute, take shortcuts, or rush something.
... I don't know the Urbit team all that well, but Yarvin is in particular publicly anti-democratisation of anything. So I'm assuming this is in fact according to plan.
Can you pick your own filter?

Would go for Laurie Anderson's Voice of Authority anytime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajQNIAY78k&feature=youtu.be...

Used to great extent here: The Cultural Ambassador - Live
https://open.spotify.com/track/3uM0L8r6lJGaU54v9RjwJK
Amazon launches Inspire, with Copyright violations
I have never had an issue in the sun with my phone in my pocket. Is that considered LOS?
Someone I know worked as a welder at a very high level of experience and skill. She reported constant sexist comments, abuse and obstruction from male coworkers, particularly those whose work she was sent to inspect and/or repair.
This is interesting because it starts to peel another layer of the problem. Yes there are still cues that can give away gender, but this seems another step closer to making the interview process a science. The next logical question from here is "why are women more likely to quit after 1-2 bad interviews".
Can Video Game Technology Help Writers Build Worlds?
Thanks. For sure, if I do anything serious I will buy my own hardware. But I'd like to play a little to get a feel - I'm sure a $20 over one month will pay back dividends in the understanding of how/what/whether comes next. I'm just asking for advice about those $20 (or $40 or $80 or however much they end up being)
> But let me get this straight, you'd be OK with an algorithm just using the heuristic of "well, he's black, so give him a -0.5, because that's what blacks tend to do" to avoid the complexity of identifying possible confounding variables that are correlated with being black?

It's the other way around. If you only use the other variables but most of the variables that correlate with recidivism also correlate with being black, the algorithm will still predict higher recidivism rates for black people even if it doesn't know anything about skin color.

The more accurate the algorithm is the more it reflects the correlations that exist in the actual outcomes.
I actually don't think you should put the question on the interview feedback form. That invites bias into the question. "Oh, this candidate did well, must be a man." In fact, having interviewers consciously guess at the gender may even skew their perception of the interview performance post-hoc.

I would, however, be interested in a separate experiment to gauge the effectiveness of the voice modulation.
> Do you actually have a problem that any of those are causing?

User experience.

- long, unskippable animation on site load

- navigation keys (arrows, page up/down) do not work at all without changing focus first (which takes 4 tabs)

- navigation keys do not work at all in category list (items can't be selected or scrolled)

- mousing over items produces unexpected results (text changing, distracting animation)

These may not be caused by the technologies per say, but more generally by the 'form over function' attitude.

Why does everything on the web have to be so fancy these days?
What is the point of pushing people out of their comfort zone? Practical software engineering doesn't happen when you're uncomfortable. Discovering quality solutions requires concentration and immersion into problems.
I worked on this if anyone has questions :)
I have an Huawei watch (android wear) that I use "OK google" on quite frequently. It doesn't have a brightness sensor, though, and the one command I'd really like to see is something like "OK google set brightness to max" or something along those lines. (I usually keep it at the lowest brightness for indoor use, but then I can't see anything at all outside.)

"OK google brightness boost" might work too if it lasted a bit longer. (There's a Brightness boost button, but it reverts back to lower brightness before I can finish whatever I wanted to do, so it's not very useful in practice. It doesn't even stay on long enough to open the settings and manually set the brightness to max.)

(Oh, and if anyone from Google happens to read this, PLEASE fix reminders to appear at the correct time instead of 3 hours early.)
Maybe un(der)employed programmers, who are naturally more concerned about interviewing, have extra free time and are thus over-represented on hacker news.
yes, I believe you are completely correct. It also seems like a common way for the engineering community as a whole to gain insight into a company's culture. It seems to me that these two ideas go hand in hand in a encouraging our fetishization of the tech interview
"Forgive me for being dense, I just really don't understand how the first statement (these actions would put anyone else in jail) can be true with the number of counterexamples (people who did similar things, aren't in jail, aren't Clinton)."

IMO, if others broke the law, they should be in prison as well. The fact that they aren't and the fact that many people want to laugh this issue away as being trivial, is appalling.

There are very clear regulations covering the handling and dissemination of classified information. Removing the "SECRET" header doesn't make them less secret; in fact, exactly who can declassify classified information is covered pretty thoroughly in regulations as well.

The ambiguity is not the law itself, it is in the enforcement. That a candidate for the top elected position in a branch tasked with enforcement of the law is under investigation should be a huge concern.
Couldn't you have made this same point at most times in modern American history? Wasn't it possible that the US was at its peak in 1970? Or 1980? Or 1990? I suspect it is only due to hindsight that we know it wasn't the peak then.
The result does not surprise me at all. I realize this was not the kind of study that would pass rigorous review. I am surprised the author thinks this is a surprising result. The kind of people who do technical interviews have been taught since childhood that the system is biased against women and that they need to look out for this bias. If anything I would think the occasional super tech woman would be enough of a surprise that the average interviewer would have an unconscious bias in favor of her
And a company with this practice is going to have a hard time hiring anyone who can find a job elsewhere.
LetsEncrypt sends emails when the expiration is close, so this is a supplemental service on top of LetsEncrypt's notifications.
Peter Thiel ... ubernostrum is coming for you
Yay, another viz perfect for the colorblind :D
I think the default option is usually to spend the money now.

If your choices are go on a 'cruse' today, or invest your money wait 15 years and then pay for a cruse waiting seems pointless. If you wait 15 years and can't pay for a cruse your clearly worse off. If you wait 15 years and can pay for a cruse and have money left over then that's an advantage to investing.

Sure, you can consider several investment strategy's. But, you can't see the future when your deciding what to do today. So, you can't say ahead of time what the best strategy is.
Collectd Image to Monitor Docker Host (!=container) Stats
The draw is another buzzword: "NoOps" -- in that you spend no time managing the actual environment.

Instead, there is just code and nothing but the code.
Hi Aline! Great read, as always.

I had a couple of thoughts while reading:

1) One of the things you mentioned was that men whose voices were modulated to sound like women tended to score better than women whose voices were modulated to sound like men. Do you think that's because the men actually performed better than women, or do you think it's possible that interviewers have a lower set of expectations for female interviewees? Or some other reason?

My hypothesis at this point is that, all other things being equal, it seems like if an interviewer expects you to do poorly because of an unconscious bias against women, and you actually do perfectly average, the interviewer might rate you higher simply because you surprised him. Does that make sense?

2) How did your partners (Mattermark, Yelp, etc) react to your findings? Will this change how they hire in the future or how they use interviewing.io?

3) Given enough time and resources, do you think it's really possible to eliminate gender bias in interviews (through techniques like this, or otherwise), or do you think the best we can do is minimize it?

4) Piggybacking off #3, do you do follow-ups with the companies after you've placed people? I'd be interested to see whether women who did well in the interview actually do well at the companies long-term -- perhaps those biases extend beyond the interviewing process, as well!

Keep up the good work! :)
It actually proves the opposite. That there was not systematic bias.
Quite possibly! That's the extra dimension added to the experiment. :)

It would be even more fascinating if you could cluster facial expressions or motions as "more female" or "more male". And for bonus points, work out a way to "filter" or "smooth" the facial signal to reduce/remove these giveaway hints (or insert false hints).
Hiring is a complex process that is extremely subjective accross role, organization and sub-sector of the tech industry. To the extent this result is correct within the population of interviewing.io; it is in fact quite positive on many levels, if unfortunate on others. Specifically-- again accepting the methodology used here, interviewers are unbiased in their reviewing.

If we consider simply this subset however, I suspect there are several factors which contributed to this result:

* As indicated by others, it was unclear if this actually successfully modulated voice AND that other factors of influence did not leak gender to the interviewer.

* interviewing.io may simply attract men who are better than women.

* The current climate provides a lot of resources and support for women entering tech. Many organizations have made a large push to hire women and thus the top and mid tier women (who are significantly less numerous than male counterparts) are hired into organizations and thus not applying here.

* places where candidates learn about interviewing.io could differ based on gender. A contrived example being males learning about it on HN, while female counterparts learning about it through a short part-time coding bootcamp.

* there was an experience gap or significant skill gap between genders. This was alluded to above.

* women on interview.io are generally worse programmers or perform worse in technical interviews.

* not enough data for statistical significance.

This is a pretty interesting result and could actually be a positive thing for interview.io. It is possible they are objectively evaluating candidates and it is simply a marketing problem which they can adjust for.

There are also some non-trivial differences between men and women which likely matter even in this context. Amy Cuddy does an amazing TED talk (and a longer one as well) about poses and cues and their effects on perception.

If the idea of this investigation was to make a larger observation about the industry, it would be interesting if they could correct for experience & skill level possibly by something completely objective like HackerRank for example. If seperated into 3 skill bands, it would be interesting to compare the actual interview results accross similarly skilled populations. To correct for bias it may be useful to tell interviewers the candidates will be anonymized modulating both voices to try and have both genders voices sound alike as a single neutral voice, ideally while still allowing for pitch and intonation.

Be interested to see a follow up as the site receives more candidates and exposure and grows their organization, ect.
I think market makers used technology to do exactly what they've always done at increasingly higher speeds. History also shows you're wrong, for hundreds of years market makers have sought an edge by trying to get information faster and faster. Hell, it used to be carrier pigeons that gave them the edge. There's really not much new here...
I think that the problem with your theory is that it relies on the idea that success on a coding challenge translates directly to value as an employee.

I have managed many developers...... some of the ones that are the best coders are NOT the most productive nor the most valuable employees. There are a lot of skills that are needed besides ability to code.
What's that quote ... people who say something cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it ?
Twitter's already suing the federal government for the right to disclose NSLs. In March, their lawsuit was dismissed. However, the EFF is still working on it...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/disappointing-ruling-n...

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/278448-judge-dismisses-...
Less and less true as most companies move towards a more agile development cycle
> jif not gif

2/10 troll, try harder.
This works on all website certs, not just LetsEncrypt ones.
Facebook does the same. Whatever you type into any input boxes on their website is captured even if you don't hit the send button.
Surgery has a large gap to but I rarely hear it brought up in these discussions.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post/medical-specialtie...
I read something, somewhere, a while back that really stuck with me.

> It is impossible to make your code faster, you can only make it do less. The only way to 'speed-up' a process is to achieve the same result with less code (or really, less cpu cycles).

This is along the lines of less is more, but it is also something that really helped drive home the need to reduce, refactor and refine code instead of just piling more code on top of what you already have.
Related Open AI article: https://openai.com/blog/generative-models/
Can someone give a synopsis of Urbit? Every time Urbit comes up, I skim their website but get pretty lost in marketing-speak. I see a lot of "control your data", "digital freedom", and "general purpose computing" without any short, to the point explanation of what the heck it's all about.
Sounds kind of like an evil Second Life. I predict it will go as Second Life did - prepare for the Urbit dick-based economy.
Are you sure that a single data point like this would overthrow the "Intuition" of recruiters? If I understand [1] correct, thats fairly unlikely.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2008....
My rules for good code:

1) Always write code for someone else. And you don't know who it is.

2) Write tests not only to prove correctness, but also to test whether code as an interface makes sense.

3) Be defensive as much as possible. Each additional check / assertion helps to avoid accidental bugs or can help to find them early.

4) Speak about code as much as possible. If you can explain code in your own words and discuss it with someone else, code gets raised on a philosophical level and may end up to be elegant and logical for others.

5) RTFM & RTFS(pecs)!
Many people in the technology industry suffer from living in a bubble. Yes, self-driving cars are the future, but people will NEVER give up driving if they have a choice. This is true especially for Americans, where having the freedom to drive where you please is ingrained in the public psyche.
Yikes! Are there really index funds with 1% expense ratios? I think my Vanguard funds are all under 0.2%, some way under. (I've got the impression that Vanguard's ETF expense ratios are similar or identical to the corresponding fund expense ratios.)

Thanks for the overview. I'd heard about the constant trading difference before (I've tended not to think about it, since I'm a buy-and-hold-for-years type). Do you have a sense of how much cost winds up being associated with broker commissions and/or the buy-ask spread? I hadn't been aware of the simpler capital gains situation (thus far, I've just blindly copied down whatever's summarized on the year-end tax statement they provide onto my IRS forms).
80% of the projects on GitHub don't have an explicit license, but how many of those are actually useful, mature pieces of software that a business would want to use in production?

I would guess that a large portion of these projects are just personal projects that have little value to anyone other than their author.
This was my first thought, as well. It's hard to think when you're staring at the blinking cursor. Spending a little bit of time with a pen and a napkin works wonders for design and reduces the number of times you'll have to hack in fixes for cases you didn't consider.
I would definitely not describe HN as a place I come to get opposite points of view. I'm actually really very surprised anyone would see it that way, can you elaborate at all on why you do?
Secret History of Holywell Street: Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade
How to measure the accuracy of forecasts