skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they definitely don't actually believe it's a superior, nor even cost-effective, way of obtaining prediction accuracy.

Prediction accuracy is not the only goal. There are only a handful of times in my life where I've seen a machine learning task where the training data was a perfect match for the business objective. The training objective is a proxy for the actual objective, where the gap between the two includes a lot of systematic bias. Interpretability is necessary to make sure the model isn't merely exploiting that gap. (And also to motivate further improvements.)
Author here. The income tax rates reflect the highest brackets, so if you are not the 1%, you will be paying somewhat less. Regarding sales and property taxes, unfortunately the 99% is indeed paying those rates (with an exception if you live in a building with less than 3 units).
How do you find the take-home part of salaries compared to the US? I'm considering moving, but from what I've seen, they're only about half. Still considering as I work remotely, but that may not be the case forever.
I agree, I was trying to be "arch" ;-)

Here's a good synopsis: http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11Hamilton.html

"""

NASA Press Release, 3 September 2003

NASA HONORS APOLLO ENGINEER

Margaret Hamilton, leader of the team that developed the flight software for the agency's Apollo missions, has been granted a NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for her scientific and technical contributions.

"The Apollo flight software Ms. Hamilton and her team developed was truly a pioneering effort," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. "The concepts she and her team created became the building blocks for modern 'software engineering.' It's an honor to recognize Ms. Hamilton for her extraordinary contributions to NASA," he said.

Dr. Paul Curto, senior technologist for NASA's Inventions and Contributions Board nominated Hamilton for the award. Curto said, "I was surprised to discover she was never formally recognized for her groundbreaking work. Her concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and man-in-the-loop decision capability, such as priority displays, became the foundation for ultra-reliable software design."

One example of the value of Hamilton's software work occurred during the Apollo 11 mission. Approximately three minutes before Eagle's touchdown on the moon, the software over rode a command to switch the flight computer's priority processing to a radar system whose 'on' switch had been manually activated due to a faulty written operations script provided to the crew. The action by the software permitted the mission to safely continue.

"""
This is the video that made it finally "click" for me. https://vimeo.com/20781278

We don't yet have the abstractions, libraries, conventions or standards for this to work fully yet, but we're close.
It's on GitHub:

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

Reviewing it would be non-trivial, but in terms of absolute code size, it's not much larger than a moderately-popular open-source project today. It's significantly smaller than React, for example:

https://github.com/facebook/react/tree/master/src

Edit: Downloaded both repositories. 'wc' puts the AGC at roughly 60K LOC, while just the 'src' directory in React is 70K.
MoveOn.org Is Hiring a Campaign Support Engineer
Maybe the prevalent mental model regarding models is wrong? The real elephant in the room is the idea that "all models" are similar, and therefore occupy the same space regarding interpretability, forecasting, and other uses. Models are designed to solve specific problems, usually within specific scopes. Confusion, misinterpretation, and error occur when consumers of models don't understand (or simply ignore) the limitations of these models.

Whenever I sit down to build a new model, or work with a new-to-me model, I start with questions like:

- What questions was this model built to answer? Be careful when asking other questions, and know the limitations of those answers.

- If it's been in use for a while, how effective has it been? How is that efficacy measured? A highly accurate decomposition of historical behavior may involve a lot of post-fact knowledge that has no predictive power, so be careful interpreting cross-use results.

- What are the ranges and distributions of the input variables? What are their boundary conditions? This is not always applicable to all variables, especially unstructured data, but when it is applicable, it is usually straightforward.

- What are the ranges of the model outputs? Do they have any boundary conditions? Do boundary effects impact the situations in which the model can be applied? For example, when working with a binned variable, often bins 0 and n include less homogenous data than the rest of the bins.

- How is model accuracy calculated? This is usually far less objective than model constructors are willing to admit to. How does your error vary along different dimensions? Which dimensional error do you look at more closely, and why?

In my experience, the best way to reason about models is to work with a lot of different models, and to be honest about their flaws. That learning generally happens more efficiently, and more broadly, in the real world than in the classroom. With the recent rise in popularity of applied models, we have lots of inexperience modelers out there, so these growing pains are to be expected.
It's a conflict between prescriptive and descriptive readings of the issue.

Prescriptively, China has no historical reason to the territory enclosed by the nine-dash line. None of the preceding Chinese governments and dynasties ever held de jure or de facto sovereignty over that area. There's just no precedent for the claim.

Descriptively, if China wants the territory badly enough, it has a good chance of taking and keeping it, albeit at the cost of alienating the crap out of everyone else for at least a generation, if not more.

Realpolitik does not prescribe, but only describes.
Not really. This wouldn't do anything against targeted spammers, where the spammer targets your site specifically. This happens more than you might think.
I base this on no knowledge other than basic facts about human pyschology:

It's because they can.
Indeed. Thank you for the links
No. Not only is it laggy, but Richard M. Stallman continually holds speeches about how GNU/Linux is the future.
I have worked with some systems that do not expose all http methods. Having a fallback way to invoke a method as a GET or POST makes your API more usable to more clients.
Thank you for that quote, I shall save it for future use.

Also lots of replies and 0 points. That's what I'm talking about, this always gets downvoted.
Why are you doing character-based right-alignment in a LTR script?

It breaks with proportional fonts, and... well, if we wanted to right-align things in code, our non-document editor would probably support it by now, don't you think?
Great article, i like the in-depth analysis of how this actually works. Cheers for the share.
New online learning platform Mapt fills in developers' skill gaps
One page of text at standard size, with standard style (one statement or declaration per line). Which is roughly 60 lines.

If you follow their other guidelines (no recursion, fixed sized loops, etc.), then it can take you several lines to do much of anything, so 60 isn't very long. Those things combined means you're basically saying that each function should only be attempting to do 2-3 significant things, which seems about right to me, as most people can't fully understand more than 3 things simultaneously at one go.
A new website for sports timing data for Alphamantis http://alphamantis.com/

Written in F# using the Suave.IO functional web libraries. It will be a site coaches/athletes can use to view/analyze data from their workouts, races etc. Lots of tables, graphs. Runs on Linux cloud vms.
I think the above commentor got it right. You map the CRUD actions to HTTP verbs and statuses, as many of them make sense for your API, with links to further resources along the way.
In this case not reading was the correct call, since this article just made a bunch of people on HN less informed. I look forward to the echoes of this showing up in every future HN thread on housing prices. I should save the debunkers for future reference.
Author here. That's the kicker: it's not like we don't have to pay for out subway rides. It's not like the bridge tolls and gas prices (which are affected by tax rates) are not astronomical if you drive. And as mentioned, a transit surcharge is applied to taxi rides.

It truly begs the question: what are we getting for our taxes?
Interesting read.... Uhh any other info on this? heh.
Why not push for them to become something more? Documentation for humans is good, but you know what's better? Documentation for computers so that we don't have to build integrations anymore!
Using a Graph Database at Thoughtworks for the biggest network company
Indeed, you did catch the spirit of the question right :) Thanks
fwiw IO language is a pretty good prototyping language too.....good for experimenting with different syntaxes, etc
You could make the same argument about arm too, for that matter. Why pay for an arm license if you can get an equivalent risc-v chip (rtl, "soft core" or whatever it is that you get when you buy an arm license) for free? Well, not at the moment but in a few years when risc-v has matured a bit more..
web site states the advantages - incl continuity of operations – stabizes situation; passporting fintech services – not to worry about regulation changes; receiving funds, payments in euros – managing currency fluctations; digital single EU market – digital signing reduces admin costs; etc
No one knows what the new arrangement will be yet (including with existing EU migrants) so would you not be better off waiting until you know what is actually going to happen? Unless of course you already have good reason to want to leave.
Curious if there's a plugin yet for adding caching headers to static assets?
Is there data on whether women-only cars work? What happens when you jump on the subway at the last second and end up in one of the other cars?
> If the phrase 'tax class' doesn't come into the article you can safely discard it as nonsense.

Did you even read the article? Direct quote:

"That building would likely be subject to the Class 2 tax rate"

And the article even links directly to the class breakdowns on the government website.
I grew up in Eastern Europe in the 80's. No internet, but it was still impossible to stop the flow of information, even a little bit, that the West wasn't this horrible, terrifying place. People are not stupid, but they know when to shut up.
Show HN: EC2 Spot Bidding Tool
It looks like most private residencies have an assessed value of 6%, not 45%

Tax Class: Property in NYC is divided into 4 classes:

Class 1: Most residential property of up to three units (family homes and small stores or offices with one or two apartments attached), and most condominiums that are not more than three stories.
Class 2: All other property that is not in Class 1 and is primarily residential (rentals, cooperatives and condominiums). Class 2 includes:
Sub-Class 2a (4 - 6 unit rental building);
Sub-Class 2b (7 - 10 unit rental building);
Sub-Class 2c (2 - 10 unit cooperative or condominium); and
Class 2 (11 units or more).
Class 3: Most utility property.
Class 4: All commercial and industrial properties, such as office, retail, factory buildings and all other properties not included in tax classes 1, 2 or 3.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/definitions-of-prope...
Extremely hard to write _good_ unit tests for crappy code.
Motorola's crazy plan to reinvent the phone by breaking it into pieces
Show HN: Free form handling and automation for static sites
Author here. All buildings that are more than 3 units are tax class 2, which are taxed at 12.9% of assessed value, which is 45% of actual value, for an effective tax rate of 5.8%. Again, this is about 4x what other cities pay.
>Citation needed - especially when comparing against a specific instantiation of a machine learning model. Papers published by the statistician in the article used only 516 data points. Most data scientists running an A/B test wouldn't change their homepage with only 516 data points. There's no guarantee the methods he is using for the parole model involve better datasets or models without deep flaws.

516 is more than enough to fit a simple model. As long as you use cross validation and hold out tests to make sure you aren't fitting. 516 data points is more than a person needs to see to be called an "expert". Many of the algorithms I referenced used fewer data points, or even totally unoptimized weights, and still beat human experts.

>An algorithm or machine learning model is not magically less biased than the process it is replacing. Indeed, if it's trained on biased data, as you believe by stating "never ever trust human judges", then the models are inherently biased in the exact same way.

We have ground truth though. Whether someone will be convicted is a fairly objective measure. Even if it's slightly biased, it's still the best possible indicator we have of whether or not someone should be released. If you had a time machine that could go into the future and see who would be convicted, would you still argue against using that information, because it might be biased? Leaving people to rot in prison, even if all the statistics point to them being very low risk, is just wrong.

>"machine learning is not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way"

Humans are not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way. Nor are they accurate at prediction. Any argument you can possibly use against algorithms applies even more to humans. That's my entire point. You should trust humans far, far less than you do.
The thing is, those servers and clients already exist, people are just to tied to their notion of "API" to see them. And in fact, you used them to post that very comment.

A website is a RESTful service which a generic client can interact with despite not having any custom code. Does it do so by magically understanding what an <a> or <img> tags are or by magically decoding PNG bytestreams? No, the service uses standard formats that the browser knows and which encode these semantics, allowing it to process them despite its original developers quite possibly not even knowing that service existed.
Well presented. It would be great if there was a language / framework that made this guaranteed. As-is everything just returns 500 error on any exception, lets you return errors with 200, allows update on GET, etc. Even the Haskell ones.
"Let's take a pretty typical example"

posts a "this guy I know" anecdote

You can do better than that.
Standard trolling-but-not-entirely answer, I'll probably get $8-10k worth of dividends this year from investing and holding in a bunch of low-cost index funds.
Personal attacks, which this crosses into, are not allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119693 and marked it off-topic.
I was going to post the same. I was lucky enough to get a few answers from Fielding himself when I first started learning this.
Indirect draw is a draw, which instead of direct arguments (number of indices, number of instances, offsets) takes an address of a structure with these parameters. It does not create indices. You could use it for culling but only on the level of a whole draw. DispatchDraw generates indices in a shader and can do a triangle level culling among other things.
3 new features in Bitbucket Server including commit-level review
Right, so you get an effective rate of 1.2% of FMV for class 1, 5.8% of FMV for class 2. So the rate is just a bit higher than California for class 1, which might explain why brownstones are so expensive in NYC relative to larger buildings.
As big of a fan as I am about unit tests, I find their value somewhat dubious. They take a long time to write, and when they fail, it often means the unit test needs to be updated. Mocking interactions among objects takes a long time.

What I find has a better ROI is using the same unit testing tools, but writing what unit test purists will call integration tests. Basically, using unit test tools where most of a program is instantiated, but I/O is mocked, is much more useful. When these tests fail, it usually indicates a bug instead of a part of a unit test that needs to be updated.
Robot factories could threaten jobs of millions of garment workers
By your reasoning, if a conflict with China is not worth risking nuclear war, then it must be resolved in China's favor?

Nuclear powers have plenty of conflicting interests, and they exercise many forms of power to influence the outcome.

There is no reason a conflict like this must inevitably escalate to nuclear threats.
How about A/C in the stations for once? Or turning on the A/C when temperatures are moderate but humidity is high? With low enough temperatures and humidity, a surprising amount of grime and overcrowding becomes bearable.
Hello HN,

Here is a bit more explanation about erasure code and bit-rot protection.

Minio along with being S3 compatible also protects data against hardware failures and silent data corruption using erasure code and checksums. You may lose roughly half the number ((N/2)-1) of drives and still be able to recover the data.

Minio uses Reed-Solomon code to stripe objects into N/2 data and N/2 parity blocks. This means that in a 12 drive setup, an object is striped across as 6 data and 6 parity blocks. You can lose as many as 5 drives (be it parity or data) and still reconstruct the data reliably from the remaining drives.

Minio also supports bit-rot detection transparently which works along with erasure code using high speed BLAKE2 - https://github.com/minio/blake2b-simd hash based checksums.
> Interpreted dynamic languages like Python, JavaScript, PHP and Ruby look the way they do because building such a language is the path of least resistance when you start from a simple parse tree.

This looks... backwards?
You didn't read well.
> Say what you want about cryonics but the storage part is proven technology.

Seems like a good beginning to a Crichton novel.
Theoretically, this shouldn't affect rental prices.

Demand is dictated by the number/wealth/desperation of people wanting to rent in NY. Supply is more-or-less constant (except for new-build, which is excluded from this).

So this doesn't affect rental prices, just moves money from the landlord's pocket into the city government. Sounds like a good idea to me.
> It truly begs the question: what are we getting for our taxes?

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/omb/publications/finplan06-16.page
Personally, I'm basing my startup on the brexit fallout depressing the value of the pound, making outsourcing development to the uk cheaper than ever :) to wit I have set up http://brexitlabs.com

In all seriousness, I don't have a company to move, but I am seriously considering moving. I have a family here so it isn't as simple as pack up and go, but I've emigrated before so....In the meantime, parody seems my best bet. :)
If you can't post civilly here, please stop posting.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119873 and marked it off-topic.
if the industry were really striving for perfection, there would be no COBOL or BASIC, for instance.

COBOL was a huge improvement at the time, an innovation in readability. BASIC is a good demonstration of why the platonic ideal language is wrong: it was designed for beginners (that's what the acronym stands for), and it did a reasonably good job at that. Beginners might be overwhelmed by OOP, multiple dispatch and a list of design patterns. Sometimes experts are too.

Garbage collection is a nice feature, but it doesn't fit everywhere. Sometimes you want to manage your own memory. That's why we have more than one language.
There are a number of consumers of namespaces, particularly of late, but they've been around (depending on which type) for years at this point, and many users (or even admins) have little knowledge of their existence or usage unless it comes time to deploy $CONTAINER and their platform does not have them enabled.
No clients know that "comments" means Comments, because no one has standardised it yet. There's no reason that we can't define "rel=comments" as being the comments for something, in the same way that https://schema.org/ has defined schemas for a range of taxonomies on the web already.

I don't have an example of a public API that can be used by a generic client because no one is making them. I've played around with them in a few projects and there are rough edges, but no reason we can't move forward to them. Google already use 'real' REST for some of their mobile apps as far as I can remember.
I have seen this, and some of their blogposts have been quite intriguing, but I haven't seen much recently. Additionally, I have yet to see a guide to making and deploying a web application on it.
> It's gotten very cool and tolerant (Gay marriage referendum was very symbolic of that).

this is a bit of a stretch, the politics are still very much driven by religion (e.g. abortion requires a trip abroad, normally to the UK).

the UK parliament passed gay marriage before, and it didn't require a referendum (as it was uncontroversial amongst the electorate)
This is pretty much the crux of the problem that the Semantic Web / Linked Data folks have been working on for years. They have the technology to do it (RDF). This technology is not widely used for a number of reasons, but "because it can never exist (and I'll write that in boldface for extra credibility)" is not one of them.

People have been able to agree on many common vocabularies of stuff, like "<h1>" and "<svg:ellipse>" and "rel=pingback", and have it work more or less. It is not absurd to suggest that such an agreement can be achieved -- to some extent -- in APIs.
Generating about 16k/mo after about 6 months building an Amazon FBA business selling private label goods from Alibaba. Spend about 1 hour per week managing inventory, the rest (shipping, returns, support) is automated through Amazon and other various services.
Is there a way you can talk to someone who worked on infrastructure at Parse/Facebook? I read an HN comment years ago that one of their engineers thought the choice of Mongo would probably kill the company. It (probably?) didn't, but as a Parse user, I can confirm that uptime and performance were really bad for an established company advertising enterprise service.

Here is some discussion from a year ago. A major complaint is that Mongo works OK as a single instance, but the tape and glue start to show when you need to scale it. I would really worry for a PaaS/BaaS using Mongo.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3dvzsl/why_you...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9912842
Have there been any recent languages/environments that (have reasonably) succeeded but aren't completely open source?

Xamarin. iOS too, although that depends on what you mean by 'recent'
Do a little googling and you wont get a downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494732

dang's profile https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang with contact information.
What makes you think that most private residences in NYC are in buildings with up to three units?
There are a few systems based on the Dining Cryptographers protocol, but the ones I've seen implemented are very slow and don't support many users.
The lessons learned from Apollo article and 001 features should show how badass they were. Note recent and future tooling in model-driven tooling aim for what hers already did two or more decades ago. One of first, high-assurance toolchains.