skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly! Poor people have access to clean plentiful water, cheap, nutritious, and tasty food, very affordable housing to own near numerous options for fulfilling income, plentiful education options, medical safety nets, lots of PTO, ethical insurance programs, brain dead simple non-volatile long-term savings programs, and traffic congestion is all but extinct; I mean the list just goes on and on with how much nicer poor people have it these days compared to rich people of 50 years ago.
If you look around New Westminster, Gastown, Yaletown, Olympic Village, Burnaby, and even far-flung places like Port Moody or Coquitlam, you're going to see new 30-story condo construction. All around them, you're going to see new 3-5 story multi-use residencies.

Thanks to this, condo prices in the metro area are not mindbogglingly unaffordable - they are merely unaffordable.

Mind you, thanks to this real-estate boom, the construction in many of those condos is terrible - leaky roofs, non-working heating in the winter, constantly broken elevators... But since every unit is sold before the building breaks ground, that's what the free market asked for, right?
The very first point mentioned in the article is that pokemon go requests access to too much data. This was a bug that has been (or is being?) addressed by the developers [0].

I believe this is usually the occasion to cite Hanlons razor[1].

[0] https://support.pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
It may not be spelled out in the handbook, but it's not that hard to figure out the rules in a company like this. Office politics make or break your career.

It's a great place to work for three or four years if they're doing something you want to learn. You wouldn't want to stay too long, though.
This is why there needs to be less taxes and mandatory benefits. Counter-intuitively, these things work together to reduce the number of jobs and reduce worker flexibility and happiness.
What made me think that functional programming is worth being aware of is that good testing practices head towards things done more easily in functional programming, pretty quickly. Programming in functions guarantee a compartmentalization of state and a determinism of the result (as opposed to non-determinism).

Procedural programs and Object-Oriented programs need to postulate concepts like design-by-contract, assertions with explicit precondition/post-condition checks, and unit testing suites as a form of insurance against non-determinism and poor compartmentalization. So it's possible to get this kind of control but only after writing a lot more code.

Going completely stateless is probably foolish though.

As for your heuristic: yes, I agree, a top performer in a common field is a safer bet and a sound strategy. If you're able to secure yourself properly you won't be overcome by a large increase of top performers, if such a thing is possible. We have a lawyer over-supply so I guess in some fields it is.
Composing Reactive Animations (1998)
Because it's useful and it's their fscking computers and it allows them to tweak the interface to better suit their play?

Should people's ability to receive email also be taken from them, because some of them might fall for the prospect of receiving a million bucks from a friendly Nigerian prince?
Heh. Unlimited PTO is unlimited in the same way ISPs provide unlimited data - it's unlimited for people who don't use it.
I think declarative is still preferred, if you can make it work. I think the real issue is coming up with a declarative language that is general purpose and efficient enough.

For specific domains, however, declarative languages have done quite well, e.g. SQL, regexps, XPath, etc.
How do we feel that they stole that data against the TOS?
> say you're cleaning if anybody asks

Why would anybody asks? But, your point stands: I've been absolutely amazed that nobody had blown up our (Parisian) metro at 8:30 in the morning already. If you want a maximum casualty count, just bring a bunch of stuff and shake it in a pressure cooker. Just synchronize payload over multiple lines, and boom, you got something around thousand of casualties, plus a massive panic mouvement, and a genuine fear of public transportation for a while.
Hostile to quantum mechanics is the wrong way to put it. He was key in articulating it.

For instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect

I think it's fair to say he was dissatisfied with it (which drove his work on unification).
I think things will get interesting when augmented reality becomes so ingrained in our society that it becomes difficult to separate it from what is real.

As virtual entities take over the mindshare of 'real entities' in our lives, we might start integrating the virtual entities more into our thought processes and into our artworks - Which would increase the frequency of copyright infringement.

So basically, as the virtual world takes over the real world, companies who produce virtual goods will be able to take over ownership of our reality and therefore of our minds.

Combined with big data, companies will be able to monitor our usage of their intellectual property as part of our lives and charge us for it.
That falls flat when you consider that lower middle class people have access to much greater things than upper middle class people and rich people did 50 years ago.

To be fair, if you're the guy losing your job today, you probably don't care much about the idea that you might be better off twenty years down the road, or that society in general might be richer in 20 or 50 years. You care about putting food on the table now.

Even if you look at things like re-skilling and the creation of new jobs that results from technology, you're still looking at a potential gap in employment and income where you might starve to death, when you look at this at the individual level. In that regard, it's hard to say that people are wrong to oppose certain kinds of changes.
Ember Data 2.7.0 and 2.8.0-beta released
Ask HN: How to determine price elasticity with significance?
tl;dr - It looks like it would take over a year to determine price elasticity with significant numbers. What am I doing wrong?

----------------

I have an existing freemium SAAS product with three paid tiers targeted towards different customer segments. I want to determine the optimal prices for these paid tiers. Let's assume I am locked into these three products/tiers and can only adjust their price.

This already seems overly difficult, so I'm thinking of optimizing them one at a time, starting with the most profitable tier first. I realize this would mean we can only achieve a local maximum, but at least it gets us started.

So what I am learning is that I need to first determine the price elasticity of this product, which is done by measuring the impact on demand of a 1% increase in price.

Here's where I run into problems. ABTesting has taught me to always look for significance before trusting any data. But as a freemium product, the overall conversion rate of people who see these prices and convert to purchase this tier is low in real terms. Because of this, the minimum sample size I would need to detect a 1% impact on conversion (therefore a 1% impact on revenue) with a reasonable significance is so great that I would need to run this test for over a year before I can trust the numbers.

All the literature I am reading starts out with something like "given that you sell X widgets at $100 and Y widgets at $101, this is how to calculate price elasticity." But in a practical sense, how can I trust that these numbers aren't just noise?

I'm open to the idea that I am thinking about this in completely the wrong way. Links to articles or books that offer practical guidance are very appreciated.
Referenced (and unfortunately gated) article from the source: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/the-origins-of-speech/
Not good news at all. My strong wish is that China, the USA (my country!), and Russia all 'do well' economically and not do poor judgement things like stripping citizens' rights and instigate military conflicts. This wish is for selfish reasons since there is probably more chance of a major war now than anytime in the recent past. History shows that when things go bad, governments tend to act badly. My country faces some real economic challenges which is why I think we are starting to act more aggressively internationally.
HackerRank is hiring the first ML engineer to build the team
We have data of over 1M+ developers on their skills, profiles and where they were hired. This is a treasure trove of data.

We are embarking on a project of identifying the right set of programming skills needed for the tuple (company, role). We have already been able to identify patterns with plain human judgement.

This is a hard (extremely valuable) challenge that can change the face of education, recruiting & many other related industries.

If you are interested in being the first engineer in this team to build this system, email: vivek@; Happy to chat more about the company & the role.
Communism as envisioned by Marx is an economic system, sort of.

Communism as anyone has ever tried to implement it, or has talked about implementing it in pratice, is a system of totalitarian social control masquerading as an economic system.

The only difference between Nazism and Communism in practice has been whether "right genes" are defined by race or by your ancestors' professions and social classes. The totalitarianism is pretty similar, really.

(As a side note, "communism" as practiced in the Soviet Union, the version I'm most familiar with, had quite its share of racism as well, both official and just people on the street.)

The terminological confusion is unfortunate on the one hand and great for motte-and-bailey arguments[1] on the other.

[1] As described http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf and discussed at a bit more length at http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word... . Note that such arguments are very common. They are not limited to postmodernism or the fringe elements of the social justice movement by any means; I see them all the time on both the left and the right.
X Marks the Spot: Twitter-Born Collaboration Illuminates Milky Way Structure
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157840 and marked it off-topic.
Or completely the reverse - all mandatory benefits as a percentage of wages. We kind of, sort of do that in Germany (up to about 50k for health insurance, 90k for retirement, I think)
I researched Valve quite a bit before applying there (I did not get in, but one of their senior team members wrote me a nice message).
Some interesting bits I found:

- The average engineer there makes at least $400k/year with bonuses, although it could be much more (or less, if they somehow wind up in a bad project). IIRC Valve makes around $2m of profit for every head in the company (they only have ~300 employees or so).

- In spite of the seemingly ideal flat organization, many people find themselves unhappy there. One former employee hints at some reasons here:
http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-c...
From other employees, I have heard that the flat organization and bonus structure leads to unnecessary drama/rivalry, poor communication (or even fear of communication), lack of innovation (creating your own project is discouraged, and teams have financial incentive to stick with projects that pay the highest bonus), etc. This is not to say Valve is a "bad" place to work at, I am sure it beats the hell out of many other job environments, even ignoring the excellent pay.

- If you do want to work there, you will probably have had to shipped multiple titles AND be recommended by an existing team member (alternately, writing a popular mod is equally lucrative). Typically, applying through their website will not get you a job - they usually hire by actively looking through a pool of candidates that they already know of. They also look for candidates who are good at producing high amounts of customer value - they care more about this than technical ability.
That's cool. It's similar to a project a friend and I did a few years ago to build a search engine for Beer Advocate.[1] We just used Lucene for indexing, though.

[1]: https://github.com/derekpeterson/search-beer-advocate
While I don't have any particular opinion on TOS violations here, I have to point out that it's definitely not stealing. At worst, it's an unauthorized copying.
Legend has it that when Gödel presented his incompleteness theorem Von Neumann understood that Hilbert's program was destroyed and immediately threw in the towel.
Wish they'd release a skylake Macbook Pro first. Oh .. and kill anything less than 64GB from their iPad lineup.
With the capital they have on hand they could literally start space hotels as a business; they have more cash than the horrifically cost-inefficient ISS cost and just short of the entire Apollo program ( about $150 billion adjusted for inflation ).

Compared to options like that, building cars just looks like selling sugary water. Why not put 90% in the pot and really move things forward?
While I agree (I have a bunch of stuff in my car), I think it's important to consider cities like New York: where there's substantial cost or effort required to own a car, people are content to use alternatives (cabs, Uber, subway, Citibike, etc).

If the alternative is readily available (ie. on-demand automated vehicles), I think the maintenance expense reductions and capital redeployment possible by automating transport will motivate law-makers to increasingly penalize private car use. If you have to pay an extra $5000/year for a private vehicle permit, a lot of people will switch.
I'm not a car person so I mostly can't tell the difference in power, nor do I need it, from other cars.

If you lived close, I'd take you for a ride in our 4000lb. VW camper van that cranks out a massive 68 horsepower. You'll notice the difference on the first hill we encounter. :-) (I take your point, though; I've a similar attitude: if I want to go fast, I'll get on the motorcycle and do it right, otherwise I don't care much.)

But I did care that I had to use yet another shitty car-company interface, so having CarPlay support was a huge plus.

Between rental cars and our Nissan Leaf with it's fucking abysmal in-dash UI, I've decided that any car we buy from here on out will have CarPlay or no deal. I'm just not going to put up with crappy car UIs anymore. Plopping a CarPlay-compatible dash unit in our old Scion xB was a revelation. Nothing earth-shattering in CarPlay, but it's familiar and non-annoying. I was driving my Mom's new '16 Corvette, and having not memorized central Florida roads, I found the UI to be annoying as usual. In fact, I can't remember if I ever found the navigation function. What I do remember is tripping across the CarPlay icon on the dash and thinking, "thank $DEITY!"
To me, the inability of these "haskell to hardware" systems to handle general recursion shows that they are fundamentally missing the most important part of the mapping from functional computation to combinational logic plus registers. They don't easily permit the "unrolling" of recursively-written code, so your recursive programs must squirrel away their state between every iteration, even when they could potentially be performed in parallel. In trying to sum a list in parallel in hardware, how do you know how many per-element operations to do at once? This determines the number of gates you'll need, and the buffer size for storing the rest of the list until those gates are free.

One way to get around this is to use termination proofs to bound the size of input data, which is exactly what's done in total functional programming. In total programs, no term is a bottom, so laziness vs. strictness is moot (both give the same answer for all programs with no exceptions or infinite loops in either evaluation strategy). Which is what you would expect since you're modelling hardware which has a clock and will clock out results into its output pins each cycle anyhow.

How can we bridge the mapping? Well, you could write a totality checker which searches for a recursion principle which is well-founded, and use this to bound data/iteration sizes and determine the shape of necessary hardware. Or you could build a theorem-proving language whose constructs enable extraction of these sizing bounds, and have humans write the proof with application of tactics.

What I really think we should be doing is writing specifications (aka, type signatures, per Curry-Howard), which do not themselves impose a particular mode of execution of the program which fulfills the specification, but only completely specify its results (and effects, if in an effectful language), and then do (constrained, by the desirable properties of the resulting programs/hardware designs) searches for proofs of those theorems.
2,000-year-old toilet paper gives us a whiff of life on the Silk Road in China
If this is implemented, it's going to be fun the day that someone from the government gets hacked and compromised via the very same security weaknesses they ordered.
I'm surprised that only a handful comments mention encouraging game modding.

Modding is advantageous because the feedback is often immediate and tangible -- small changes can result in appreciable results to a game world.

Working with game APIs, assets, and scripting is rarely elegant or academically pure, but the reward of accomplishing a successful mod produce a good incentive to learn real-world 'ugly' APIs. These are the sorts of systems that most people in tech have to interface with every day. By being introduced to these real-world systems early on, there is no jarring transition when arriving from a more learning-based environment.
> My position, on the other hand, is that all people should be afforded the same basic rights, regardless of their differences.

Great, you've espoused the ostensible position of every person who isn't a self-identified racist.

> The position that differences aren't possible

Differences are clearly possible and readily apparent, my point is that any definitive conclusions drawn from correlations to "race" are of dubious merit because our racial definitions (as defined by the government and thus as it relates to policy) are imprecise heuristic amalgamations of apparent phenotypes. Skin tone, hair texture, facial structure in addition to language pretty much constitute the entirety of racial identity, so the impulse to group abstract polygenic characteristics like intelligence into what is essentially an individual's outward appearance doesn't lead to much in the way of profound insight. It's like trying to draw conclusions about road safety by measuring the correlation between car color and rate of receipt of speeding citations.
An infamous country tried the "intrusion on privacy" route, with a result one could best characterize as "chilling." It was called East Germany. It would behoove everyone to watch the excellent dramatic film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others .
> Show it in BASIC with GOTO statements.

That should happen naturally, if you implement a compiler to native code. A "call" instruction is just a "goto/branch/jump" with some extra stack fiddling.

Also, I don't think pure functions are so easy mentally either. Try to understand "call with current continuation". ;)
This is the correct answer, and I'm speaking as someone who got a large raise last week as I was forcibly switched from part time to full time. I'm working in a generally low-profit area and the numbers stopped working.

I started it because I'd repeatedly burned out of full-time jobs. Working 3 days/week was a great 4.5 years for me, far more rewarding than the added salary I passed on could have been. Aside from lower work anxiety, I had time to write two books, give three conference talks, get engaged, get married, take up several hobbies, and enjoy life thoroughly. My work has been overwhelmingly better: I stay out of rabbit holes, I recognize deep patterns, I prioritize ruthlessly, I deliver the things my users didn't realize they need. It's not magic, it's just downtime for my unconscious to noodle around with problems without pressure.

I think working part time is a hugely valuable experience for anyone who doesn't have a pressing need for dollars in the door (eg to pay off US medical bills or student loans). There are plenty of blogs out there on frugal living + investing (I recommend MrMoneyMustache and Bogleheads wiki), so you can live comfortably and still save significantly towards retirement.

I can't argue the financial math of why it rarely works, but I'd do 3 or 4 days a week again in a heartbeat. (15 year dev, currently Rails/Django/Haskell, Chicago/Remote, peter@valent.io if anyone's looking.)
Along some axes. They still generally aren't taking their summers away.
Why don't companies hire programmers for 6 hours a day, but keep paying for 8 hours a day? As a company you will probably attract the best in the field - programmers who are 4 times as efficient - and the programmer is not able to keep his/her concentration for 8 hours a day anyway.
Ha, interesting. Didn't know about soldi. Coincidentally, had blogged (as an aside to my main post topic) about denarii recently. Here's what one looked like:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/07/the-many-uses-of-randomnes...
That is a point that most people overlook.

Ballmer was right. He underestimated the amount of money they would make, and also underestimated the size of the various markets, and ALSO got it wrong about who would be the "other" OS but......his core point was correct.
In the US, they are saving 25% on payroll taxes. With paid time off, if they give you 15 days off of 6 hours a day vs 15 days off of 8 hours a day, it's 25% less paid time off (even though it's the same number of days).
So what is the solution? If we spend all our time arguing what the solution isn't, we leave a big vacuum which is then filled with even more garbage ideas.
It actually costs a business money to have an employee, over and above the amount shown on a paycheck. If you hire a lot of employees who work 20 hours per week, the HR department has to screen, hire, monitor, discipline and/or fire twice as many people. Training costs also double. Part time employees usually quit sooner and turn over faster, which again means higher onboarding and training costs. It's also harder for managers to keep track of twice as many people. YMMV
Are you guys recent grads? I'm a recent grad myself but I haven't had any classwork/test dreams a year into "real life."
Berlin, Lisbon, Budapest and Bruxelles are some of those cities where you can stay at a 5-star extremely cheap.

London's the worst for it; I have never been happy with the cheaper 5-star (less than 260 GBP/night) hotels there. Maybe if you stay at Mandarin Oriental...

On the other hand the restaurants are a great value, especially lunch menus: save the 100 GBP on the 5-star hotel and spend 55 GBP (+12.5% "optional" gratuity) on a 3-course lunch menu, with 2 glasses of wine and coffee at an amazing 2-Michelin-star restaurant like "The Square". You'll still have enough for a last-minute good half-price theatre ticket at tkts.co.uk in the evening.
Dybvig's dissertation is great. [1] People might disagree that it's a compiler, it targets a fairly high level vm rather than a native machine. But it's got everything you need. Really, you can fire up dr racket, type it in and have a great framework in an afternoon.

Anyway, it's very readable.

[1] http://agl.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf
Ah, thank you for that info. Vaccination sounds a lot safer.
I was not thinking Elop, wasn't he more of a Trojan Horse, a smart guy planted to do evil stuff?

And anyways, I was just joking... I even mentioned that :]