skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article starts with, "Human beings try to find patterns to explain the reason behind almost every phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that there is a pattern to rely on." The second part of the sentence is true, on further observation some patterns prove not to be patterns. However the first half, the attempt to explain why we "find patterns" isn't convincing.

Instead, replace that phrase with this: "based on brain construction, we humans are predisposed to find patterns in data we encounter". This idea holds up to evolutionary scrutiny, organisms have mechanisms biased for self-protection and finding food and other resources through various forms of pattern recognition. IOW we find patterns we're neurologically capable of finding, particularly in regard to survival and reproduction.

Perhaps it's more accurate to assert we "find patterns" useful in making predictions about our present and future state within the environments we occupy. The fact that patterns may not turn out to be authentic is simply part of a process of refinement of pattern-seeking and improving value as predictors of future states. We may call a pattern an "explanation" but nothing is actually "explained" as shown by the fact we reserve the right to enhance or revise the "pattern", or what we insist it predicts, at any given time.

Edits: grammar and clarity
> * Returning hundreds of millions of dollars with a multi-billion dollar loss is a joke to begin with.

That's the definition of sunk cost fallacy isn't it? It's seeing yourself as someone who lost $9B not someone who has $200M :) that was a good life lesson for me personally.
Drinking your own champagne:Performance debugging as exploratory visual analysis
Sure, but that space isn't just Java anymore anyway.

Also, what's an (non-toy) environment where developer productivity and safety/correctness don't matter? I always find that statement bizarre when talking about production systems.
ECR might be the only good thing about ECS, but even that is still clunky!
I have a question about the "extern" keyword. If this is a interpreter, how this can possible work? ie: How is the interface between the host and the language?

I'm doing a interpreter (F#) and I have find that surfacing functions from the host is not that easy as I have imagined before.
I remember seeing a spiritual successor of that game (helicopter though, I think) on an Amiga in the early 1990s. It was still impressive.

Also, just noticed that the UI of Wasteland (1988) [1] in that video looked hugely like Infocom's Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988) [2] but I can find no documented link or engine reference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%...
Tear gas would just force a reaction, likely with the assailant leaving the gas and shooting at the police. He would have been killed in returning gunfire but also may have managed to shoot more people. The outcome would have been the same and was decided by his failure to surrender.
Article text is obscured by icons.
I don't know how to get straight ascii out of a java string off of the top of my head. I guess in this situation i'd start with a little discussion of unicode, then just start with something like

byte[] ascii;
...
This is a government that hired militia to shoot teenagers in student protests [1]. While I don't think the food shortages were intentional, there's no doubt they are an useful tool to control the population.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/14/venezuela-viol...
I know you can deploy Kubernetes on AWS, though I have not tried myself. What, if you have tried it, is it lacking from the GCP version?
> You should know exactly why you want to work for Amazon.

Never understood this company pride thing i like to work on interesting problems and if your company sells shoes or chewing gum so be it. Your problem space should attract programmers not who you are.
IdeaPad.io | Palo Alto, Boston | Software Engineer / ML, NLP / Web,Mobile Devs / ONSITE / INTERNS / VISA / REMOTE

We're a team of MIT AI and web programmers (advisees of Tim Berners-Lee and Patrick Winston) building a shared brain for organizations and the world. Our first product is a collaborative UI for graphs that enables enterprise analytics teams to discover and visualize the patterns and connections trapped within their spreadsheet data. We're mega-passionate about personal information management, the intersection of philosophy and AI, and connecting people with related ideas! We are seed-stage (have paying enterprise customers) and offer sizable equity, or competitive salary. Whitepaper and demos: http://about.ideapad.io http://home.ideapad.io
Palo Alto, Boston | Contact: vienna@ideapad.io
Right now it runs on its own VM. What I meant by "the VM is no longer necessary" was that the language went from being dynamic (when I was just prototyping with lisp) to static (in the current state), so it should be easy to generate machine code ahead of time, instead of having an interpreter (or adding a JIT).

The reason the definitions link to Wikipedia is that this is the first piece of documentation on Verve ever. Hopefully I'll be able to cover most of it in proper docs later, but I thought for now I'd add the link to the definitions in case someone reading through was not familiar with them (I personally hate to stop reading to start googling for acronyms).
> It takes a certain level of life-confidence to just go to an interview with what you know and take the rest head-on.

Apparently, I have that kind of confidence. In my experience, confidence is good for winging the personal questions and talking about my past projects, but at the end of the day technical interviews come down to being able to solve problems you'd never (or rarely) see on the job. If you walk in unprepared, you will fail. I usually fail the first 5-10 in my job search before I get a yes. Walking in unprepared is ridiculously suboptimal.

Just to clarify, I don't mean just the google style interviews where they ask you graduate level DS and algo questions. Thankfully, a lot of smaller companies are transitioning to asking questions about the tools, languages and techniques specific to the field. But, that still requires weeks of study because the level of detail most interviewers go into far exceeds what you see working on CRUD apps. Not to mention the difficulty of memorizing every CSS3 property available.
what on earth is 'possible possession of drugs'?
It's pretty silly to assume "male honor" would be the deciding factor in a country's politics.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of AWS (as do most people.) AWS isn't for greenfield projects (or, at least, that's not where they make the majority of their revenue); AWS is literal "virtual infrastructure", in the sense that it's the stuff you hand an ops team to manage. You can take an experienced internal ops team that was managing physical infrastructure for some BigCorp (servers, switches, etc.), and migrate them to AWS instead, and there will be a 1:1 mapping between their problems and AWS's offerings.

ECS isn't for people who wanted 'managed infrastructure' in the "so we don't have to have a dedicated ops-team at all" sense. ECS is for ops-teams who were previously managing e.g. an OpenStack Nova cluster with an LXC-driver backend, and now want the virtual equivalent of that. Just like EC2 is built for ops-teams who were using VSphere or Xen.
That's a good point. I guess they could be!

40-min meetings might be a little awkward because usually the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting are social / chit-chat, so it might feel a little weird to immediately start a 2nd meeting exactly where you left off on the first meeting. Also, most of the time a 40-min meeting still takes up a full 1-hr time-slot since most people schedule meetings on the hour.
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger [pdf]
Scarcity in physical objects is rather different than spectrum. For one, market demand encourages things like recycling, more exploration, etc. for platinum. Spectrum scarcity encourages more efficient use, but until we get our promised physics-violation-devices, can't make/find more.

With spectrum, there's also a real-time use component. People who consume platinum generally don't consume it in a way that in any way resembles communication use. This is related to another key reason governments hold on to the control of spectrum allocation: military interests.
That's a great paper. Several assumptions I had are confirmed after looking through it such as the importance of countering off-gassing. I don't think people are generally aware of this, they just sort of assume it's a solved problem or a diminutive one. Even natural materials like wood will release formaldehyde.

For a small space having good air quality is very important, I plan to install a selection of plants and rig them up as dual purpose air purifiers as shown in the study, with emphasis on the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.

+1 oxygenation
+2 reduced ambient toxicity levels
+3 attractive decoration

It's not expensive and it'll pay for itself many times over with better health! Programmers take note! It is easier for your brain to work if it has a nice supply of oxygen. Rocket science I know. NASA science at any rate.

In general society (opinion incoming) has not paid much attention to closed loop systems in the way we ought to (see no evidence the Slingshot scales up). Especially as a way to introduce antifragility. A house in a truly futuristic suburb would recycle heat from water and reliably convert all black/grey water back into distilled water for household use while using the biomass to power the operation. Throw in autonomous air vehicles and ubiquitous net reach from Google blimps and I'd really feel like I'm living in the future. What is more, with houses spread out (side affect of self driving things on land prices), not laying cables/water/sewer lines and not maintaining roads anymore it would appear that it could be a much more economical future. Without cracking closed loop systems it is out of reach. Google Net Blimps, renewable energy, even autonomous vehicles seem like much more tractable problems in comparison despite water filtration seeming simpler.
I can't tell if you've deliberately misinterpreted evgen's comment or not. But this feature is being deployed to hundreds of millions of phones. Even if only 1% of people use this, that's millions more people using E2E secured communication. Hardly "barely anyone".
Have you seen ElasticBeanstalk's ECS setup? We've went 'all in' on that and it's been fairly successful for us so far. We use a combination of long-lived servers (spin up one stack which lasts for multiple versions/deployments) for our test environments, and then we do blue-green deployments for production which gives it a complete new stack for every deploy.

We've been running a bunch of services on it for a months and its been fine.
Hyperloop and Flying Cars Add Hype to Slovakia’s Startup Craze
Core Engine Algorithm Intfact
I don't know much about pypy, but do you need to compile it each time? Just use pypy to live interpret the interpreter.
I'm surprised the article did not mention the theory that they have not defaulted because of the numerous state-owned assets they possess abroad which could be seized by creditors.

"Caracas fears a default could open up claims to PdVSA assets, such as rigs, refineries and oil shipments. One target by creditors could be the company’s Houston-based subsidiary, Citgo Petroleum Corp., which has three U.S. refineries that receive hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan oil a day."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-decaying-venezuela-debts-get-...
St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast was my middle school jam.
I've read a report that a factor in the decision was the suspect had put IED's around the area. So they can't approach and can't clear the area of potential IED's due to his presence...

I think we are owed more explanation for this precedent.
Well, if you put it that way, the chavista governments have been doing a tremendous job at looting the country. If defaulting means having the country looted by the IMF and friends, I'm pretty sure the citizens would rather default; I can't recall the last time the IMF ran a country down to food and medicine shortages, so they're not nearly as good at this looting thing as Maduro and his lackeys have proven to be.
Except, it's really not. If you've never set up Touch ID on the device, then there's no fingerprint for it to even compare to; it'd be impossible for it to authenticate.
> Why not integrate an applicant into a team for a day and have pair programming sessions?

I'm not sure what you think you'll learn in one day like this. You're throwing someone into a high-pressure peer-programming session with someone they don't know and a codebase they've never seen. In order to get them to complete anything you're probably going to have to stage a bunch of stuff and basically give them a fake assignment anyway ("fill in the body of this 'findUserByOrderNumber()' method for us") which has turned it into the equivalent a whiteboard coding question anyway. If you give them a single pair-programming partner, you only get one hiring opinion which is a pretty bad idea, and if you give them multiple pair-programming partners the work will have to be even more trivial.

I don't think a one-day trial like this will tell you more than a standard interview loop. Some people might do better with it, others will do worse.

I also don't think you should expect to get real work out of someone before you hire them, either. If you want me to spend 8 hours building you a feature, I expect to get paid. And the overhead of paying me for 8 hours of work is probably not worth it to your company, because it's a ridiculous amount of paperwork. (And not even possible for people who need visa sponsoring.)
Yeah. And we've only killed 116 civilians by drone. I wouldn't seek the unbiased truth on Reddit.
The GlEnd of Zelda(): Automatic 3Dification of NES Games
> to submit to foreign capital and governmental institutions

Wat.

Venezuela ALREADY taps the bond market for money. That's why they're sending billions of hard currency to bondholders. They're already submitting. That's the point.
> The first 32 identified the remote host, similar to how an IP address works today. The last eight were known as the AEN (it stood for “Another Eight-bit Number”), and were used by the remote machine in the way we use a port number

Gold.

Great read, it hits home for me with the right mix of nostalgia, history from before my time, and funny little things I never knew.
Why no explicit returns? I'm used to them from R, but I thought that was considered a quirk, not a feature.
Step into the Scala/Akka light my friend :)
@madeofpalk, I haven't seen that, actually. I'll look into it.
Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor when I read "leaks environment variables"... What?? That is incredibly scary for use, as we just went through an audit process of our code on about 6 different web apps to ensure that all secrets were placed in environment variables on our Elastic Beanstalk configs and not in the main codebase... If this now results in LESS security (all our code is in private Git repositories) than before, then we have essentially taken a step backwards!
`extern` means it's implemented in native, but it has to conform to the interface that the VM provides, and register that function with the VM. At runtime, the parser knows when a function is local (i.e. in the bytecode) or extern (i.e. C++). If it's local, it'll jump to the function's offset in the bytecode, if it's extern, the interpreter will use a native call.

You can take a look at some native functions here: https://github.com/tadeuzagallo/verve-lang/blob/master/runti...
And the implementation for the `op_call` opcode here (notice it has 2 branches: op_call_builtin and op_call_closure, the former is for `extern`ed functions): https://github.com/tadeuzagallo/verve-lang/blob/master/runti...
Alien Intelligences and discriminatory algorithms
You are just doing it wrong. :) Since you ski, you probably mountain bike. Mostly downhill. Boring. I am a climber (road bikes of course). The longer the climb, the better. California has great climbs.
It makes it easier to reason about a functions result, both when reading the code and when type checking.
Github private repos have been made public by mistake before. Got repos are cloned on dev laptops, do you enforce laptop encryption?

The right thing to do is using some form of a vault.
Right, that was what I was going for.
> I also don't think you should expect to get real work out of someone before you hire them, either.

This has grown on me. It's a lot of time invested per company, but it's still a hell of a lot less time than the interview prep mentioned in the article. It's also more pleasant, since I'm programming something real instead of the fibonacci sequence.
> I can't recall the last time the IMF ran a country down to food and medicine shortages

Among the cases where it has been argued that IMF-driven austerity measures did that are Romania in the mid 1980s, Malawi in the early 2000s, and, most recently, Egypt earlier this decade. There are probably others.
I understand your point and I agree with it somewhat but I still think that there is a big issue with remotely controlled killing machines.

Who is controlling them?

What if a killer takes over police bots? They don't have to be autonomous to be a threat to society.
Is anyone else concerned that as robots become more readily available and pervasive they will be an avenue for staging attacks from a distance?

It seems the police found value in this robot as it allowed them to neutralize a threat without risking human life, but what prevents non-police entities from doing the same? If it is simply a high barrier of entry into acquiring and using robotic systems we may need to start pondering how to mitigate malicious uses before they begin to occur.
Environment Variables are NEVER private. Please don't think that you can hide information in there as all of that information ends up in the process table which is public across the entire machine.
I've been pretty seriously studying CS for a while, and there's a trillion things I don't know.

>If they ask you to merge sorted arrays and you don't know that Heap sort is the best way to do it, you've lost the interview no matter [...]

... no matter the fact that there are a hundred ways to sort an array, and you think you know the best one? Has it been proven the best, or is it just the best you know? How many ways do you actually know to sort an array? Has all research on array sorting ground to a halt because there's no better way to do it?

If someone asked me the best way to sort an array I'd say "probably radix sort." If you expected "merge sort," then you're the fool.

My point being, I study a lot, but that doesn't give you answers. I gives you a base from which further study can happen.
There are almost twice as many white people living in poverty in the USA than black people. Why would we assume that white people who commit murder will be rich and can afford an expensive lawyer, while the black people who commit murder will be poor?

It's true that more black people live in poverty than white people per capita, but it's also true that crime is not evenly distributed across all people per capita, and has a connection with poverty level. My point is that there are more white people living in poverty, and they commit crimes at lower rates per capita and also total than black people.

I don't have data for all of these arguments handy, but here's one resource on poverty levels by race and region: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceeth...

Also note that controlling for poverty does not eliminate the effect where blacks commit more crime than whites:

http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...

> > As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis

We could speculate that lots of things might be true, but if we're going to approach this topic scientifically, we should analyze data that we have, and not simply posit hypothetical after hypothetical. E.g. speculation like: "maybe all the unsolved murders are committed by whites"or "maybe white defendants are getting off when blacks aren't" -- a fine train of thought to explore and validate with data, but it's just speculation unless/until there are data and evidence to back it up.
I started with colons indicating the return type, but IMO it gets too confusing when you have functions as parameters. e.g. `foo(bar: (int, string): float): float` but that might be just personal preference.
Reply All Podcast on the NPM Leftpad Incident
I still find this argument hard to follow.

You have a person who wants to contribute code to you open source project, but that person is stymied by requiring an account on a service other than GitHub.

What kind of people are you expecting to be doing drive-by code contributions and what kind of code quality are you expecting from them?
Researchers Discover Tor Nodes Designed to Spy on Hidden Services
I definitely want this system!

But instead of cats, I want it to detect Fedex and UPS delivery drivers. And instead of turning on the sprinklers, I want it to ring my doorbell so that I know there's a package sitting on my front porch.
We're talking about GHC.
Facebook Live and Twitter Make Us All Eyewitnesses Now
Probably want to use a secret management tool and just not initialize into environment variables...

https://github.com/fugue/credstash
Off topic from the article but just wanted to let you know that I love the design of your blog.
We use BitBucket here, rather than Github - similar risks, I know, but we have predetermined repositories which are all set as private. 3 dev machines which are kept on premises at all times.

Still not optimal as far as security goes, but it seems that he have roughly the same exposure if AWS leaks our keys and passwords to other third party trackers...
Still, I'm struggling to imagine how "Thank for you applying, but this position has been filled/cancelled" could expose a company to a lawsuit. You'll eventually assume you weren't hired after a while anyway...
> Maybe, but I would not be surprised if most failed.

I used to work at a place where this was an actual goal: "we should always be raising the bar." Needless to say, that particular unicorn ended up shedding people pretty quick.
While all governments are funded by their citizen's wealth Communists almost always take it to the extreme. Read up on the aftermath of almost any communist takeover: currency exchanges, assets seizures, wage controls and/or outright murder of the former elite. The almost all the nations wealth is quickly transfered to the government/party/leaders.

Socialists practice the same - just in moderation - but it is how all governments are funded. The trick is just to not go full retard like Venezuela and kill the golden goose.