skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wall Street is short sighted and regularly see things by the quarter. Its long term outlook tends to be a year give or take. Alphabet needs more forward thinking investors who can see a payout that may not happen for a decade or more. While it has cool projects, the problem with X is that it doesn't seem to have a clear mission / message like SpaceX and Tesla where you are investing for more than just a profit. I could be wrong but they have a marketing / PR problem (in addition their other pre-exisiting ones).
Confirmation bias again, though. Lego ads had girls in them? Cool. Now, how many politicians were women? How many managers or other people in authority? How seriously were women's opinions taken in the media? Were there extra hurdles to overcome for a woman who wanted to start her own business?

It sounds like it's just a project to look for specific counter-examples, rather than a proper gestalt look at society as it was.

And really, if you want to tell if 'society has gone off the rails', pretend (if you aren't already) that you're a minority, a woman, or gay, and then ask "Would I rather be living in today's society, or that of the 50s and 60s?".
Uber Has yet to Reduce Drunk Driving Deaths, Study Says
Thank you for mentioning my service.

When I first posted it on HN, it went offline literally seconds later in the Linode DDoS (it's now on AWS). Naturally, it's largely flown under the radar since.
'fireEvent' Command
I think there is a point that most coverage and discussions miss. Maybe judges understand that Whatsapp can not fulfill their requests, but they choose to block the service to put pressure on the company to better address a very important question, which is how society should treat the question of privacy and, specifically, how can law enforcement and companies cooperate on cases and investigation that rely on this kind of data.
All of humanity is going to benefit from these moonshots.

Sometimes, the original intent of a research program doesn't come to fruition, but there are a lot of downstream benefits and innovations that can be traced to the so-called "failed" research program. I believe that's exactly what's going to happen with some of these so-called "failures."

Even today, what Elon Musk has already done, is considered impossible for his companies to have done. (The car, and the backwards landing rocket.)

Here's to more moonshots from Google and Facebook! Salute!

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

And here's Nassim Taleb on "inverse Turkeys" (i.e., positive Black Swans), from AntiFragile:

> Harvard Business School professor, Gary Pisano, writing about the potential of
biotech, made the elementary inverse-turkey mistake, not realizing that in a business with limited losses and unlimited potential (the exact opposite of banking), what you don’t see can be both significant and hidden from the past. He writes: “Despite the commercial success of several companies and the stunning growth in revenues for the industry as a whole, most biotechnology firms earn no profit.” This may be correct, but the inference from it is wrong, possibly backward, on two counts, and it helps to repeat the logic owing to the gravity of the consequences. First, “most companies” in
Extremistan make no profit—the rare event dominates, and a small number of
companies generate all the shekels. And whatever point he may have, in the presence of the kind of asymmetry and optionality we see in Figure 7, it is inconclusive, so it is better to write about another subject, something less harmful that may interest Harvard students, like how to make a convincing PowerPoint presentation or the difference in managerial cultures between the Japanese and the French. Again, he may be right about the pitiful potential of biotech investments, but not on the basis of the data he showed.
I don't think this is true for Google. The "Moonshots" mentioned here are pretty far from Google. It is in some sense R&D of course, but it is not R&D that will benefit Google as a company.
Study finds cosmic rays increased heart risks among Apollo astronauts
I read a lot of comments on bad behaviour of Amazon, which might be. Also a comment series on the lowball offer and wasting his time if there wouldn't be an offer in the 170k range. Also true.

But I think it is in order to tell the author of the story as well not to waste their time. This time it's Amazon who most of us don't like, but in generic it could be any company. If your main reason for not going has nothing to do with the offer or job itself but only with something you could, and should have considered beforehand you effectively wasted the companies time, not the other way around. They gave you a free test.
That entire thread is filled with snark/speculation and lacks any actual facts.

Is it that inconceivable that Google believes that one or more of these moonshots might actually take off?
Impressed that you and your wife stuck together! Bet your kids will be too.

My father used to quote someone that "the best a man can do for his kids are to love their mother."

And: I feel sorry that this can actually happen to people.
Reasonable request.

Sorry bout that.
What is the sum of terms supposed to be equal to?
Pets left hungry as smart feeder breaks
I work outside defense industry on purpose. No discomfort at all. ;) The remains of high-assurance safety and security fields are mostly used for defense (esp guards), aerospace, trains, private high-security, some industrial control (esp energy), some space, some medical, and plenty academics. Far as this conversation, here's an example of what I was talking about that mentions many others:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mjcg/cambridge-wilding-sept08.pdf

Specifics on how they do EAL7 CPU and crypto here:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/acl206/slides/hardin.pdf

Eschersoft's tools below. They also have C analyzer.

http://www.eschertech.com/products/pd_and_spark.php

Specware from Kesterel Institute, like lots of their stuff, is pretty cool but I think efficiency dictates manual derivation of code. Gets you close to it, though.

ftp://ftp.kestrel.edu/pub/papers/specware/specware-jm.pdf

Esterel's SCADE w/ SPARK Ada below. Has huge list of application areas. I clearly forgot automotive in applicatino areas.

http://www.sigada.org/conf/sigada2003/SIGAda2003-CDROM/SIGAd...

Note: There's also been hardware synthesis from PVS and HOL specs. Most cool stuff like that is hard to get legally due to ACM/IEEE/Spring BS. I mention it so you know it's been done. I even saw one manual, formal verification of standard cells themselves. Getting close to the bottom. If my brain was whole, I'd be pulling out solid-state, physics books & doing HOL models of process nodes' molecules to get a jump on their asses lol.
So what happens if you're behind Cloudflare (or similar)? They block all of cloudflare? Cloudflare drops you as a customer?
My only concern is around the lack of ability for businesses to respond or request any level of verification that a person actually did business with them. The BBB at least contacts the business and oversees a process for resolution (documenting the entire thing).

I personally know multiple business owners who've dealt with threats from customers who will go and write a bad review if they don't simply bow to demands. Medical offices are another issue entirely because many medical professional don't even know if they are allowed to respond to complaints due to HIPAA.

I know one who even had a bad review from a phone call from a woman that simply called and yelled at them for not getting free service. It was their first and only review in years. Never even set foot in the building.

People are basically given permission to hang a sign on your front door that you're not allowed to take down.

I'm all for reviews and feedback but at least Amazon shows "Amazon Verified Purchase". Balance it somehow with either cross reference to the BBB or document how many years the business has existed. There are far too many businesses who've been open 10+ years with thousands of customers that have never felt the necessity to leave a review.

Without verification that the person has actually a customer, it's basically just libel.
I agree - she had to go far her way to accomplish everything she has now.
SXSW Keynote – “You Know What? Fuck Dropdowns.”
http://doc-ok.org/?p=1082
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12179448
This blog post is missing some important details. Sometimes legal actions from businesses are empty or meritless. However, what if it's legitimate libel? Labeling any legal action as "questionable" seems odd. How do they differentiate?
Or torrent it! This is the best use case for a torrent... spread the load around, no extra cost or having to find someone to flip a 'public dataset = free' bit.
This submission was posted by a brand new HN account that has no other submissions or comments.

The three comments on this submission -- all of which speak very highly of the tool -- were all created by brand new HN accounts that a) were created shortly after this submission was posted, b) appear to have been created solely to post a nice comment about this tool, and c) have no HN activity.

The tool itself might be really nice but I'm flagging this submission because of the obvious abuse. To the author: there's no need to do this kind of stuff and it may very well have the reverse effect and make your tool look suspicious or shady. Personally, I'll never use it and I'll be distrustful if I ever see you post anything else (although I suspect you'll just create yet another new account if you do).

Last, as a "senior network engineer" at an ISP, I'd suggest a rename of your tool. A "looking glass", in this field, means a very specific thing. This tool isn't a looking glass at all, although it is a tool that can be used to access/query existing looking glasses.
Yes this is correct. I looked into doing this to see if it was possible to use Tk with the Jim interpreter. It's probably possible but would be a significant investment of time. Tk has some deep integration into Tcl internals.
Apollo astronauts dying of heart disease at 4-5X the rate of counterparts
How do you reach the conclusion that it is not R&D that will benefit Alphabet? They make it pretty clear it is a high risk high reward R&D, meaning if they hit pay dirt, it can be massively profitable for Alphabet.
Well, this doesn't surprise me.

Who Ubers?
Those who aren't broke.

Who drives drunk?
Those who are broke, and occasionally those who aren't. Those who aren't broke occasionally choose uber over driving drunk.

....and there you have it. Uber doesn't reduce deaths from drunk driving because too many people are poor. Fight poverty, not inequality.
Kelsey Hightower questions Docker leading OCI standard
I believe xhyve works fine with recent versions of VirtualBox, since xhyve is a pure userland app (aka no kernel extensions). Check out the issues section in the xhyve readme...

https://github.com/mist64/xhyve/blob/master/README.md
Well I'm sure the people working on it think one might take off. But if you're taking the pessimistic view it doesn't matter if they never succeed as long as the smart people are kept busy working for them.
They do this by bundling A Tcl interpreter with the exception of PerlTk (not to be confused with Tcl::Tk extension)
Also it used to not be this way, there were more details hidden behind the login but the general info used to be accessible with no login, it's only in the recent months that they switched to hiding most content.
Moving Out
Stock is up 4% after hours. I'm not sure which "wall street" strawman you are attacking, but it doesn't appear to be the one that actually trades stock.
I have always liked the download.gmane.org option. I rarely use the web interface.
I hope download.gmane.org does not disappear.
Gmane is a truly great service. IMO, it does not need to be part of "the web". It's better than that. It's part of "the internet". One of the best parts.
They link to their Mac App Store page, which shows the IAP pricing for the upgrade.
The only thing wrong with it is that you generally have to have a Facebook account to read Facebook content, which means you have to give them your real name. It appears that this month Facebook is allowing people to read this particular post, but they aggressively put the sign up wall wherever they thing it will generate the most conversions. You certainly can not see John Carmack's past posts without a Facebook account. Facebook is not the open web.

Technically you can violate the ToS and set up a fake account, but that's a bit of an inconvenience
What Is a Data Science Platform?
This is simply how moonshots work. You lose $50m 99 times in a row, then make $50b on the 100th time. (This is also very similar to how venture capital economics work.)

I think it's wonderful that Google pursues moonshots and that they have the cash flow to keep Wall Street investors from freaking out. I'm confident that one (or more) of their experiments will eventually make a huge impact on people around the world.
The "other bets" category accounts for $185mm in total revenue. By most normal reckoning, that has taken off. It looks small by google standards and compared the the spending on other bets, but that's a lot of money.

IIRC, most of the revenue and cost in "other bets" comes from Google Fibre. It's a signficant up-front investment for a fairly reliable long term revenue stream. treating the whole other bets category as R&D is not really correct. this isn't just google X.
The thing is, the car and reusable rocket stages exist and are far more difficult to pull off than creating and running an ad-network.

I am not saying ad-networks aren't complicated and involved and require highly intelligent people, but I don't believe them to be comparable to what Musk is delivering.
I highly doubt none of these three will be disturbed in the near future.

For one, ad blocking is on the rise.
Sure, but 5 years from now current PC VR content will require an even faster rig. Some people will be content playing 5 year old content on their discount PC, but that's still not going to be a huge demographic outside of the obvious Steam VR set. Again, gamers only.

People will play current mobile VR content on their smartphones and dedicated mobile VR devices. Why look at old stuff on a less convenient platform? Yes higher fidelity.... I get it. But I really don't think that's going to be a big enough draw to get people to set up a PC VR rig. Especially when smartphones 5 years from now will rival 980s too. Or at least 960s. And will have lots of great content optimized for that level of performance.
My impression is that it all started much earlier. The old Apple (classic Mac OS) had very strong interface design culture and it continued into early releases of Mac OS X, but the decline began to feel in v10.6, I think, if not earlier.

Take, for example, the new search interface, where you first type a query, wait a little while it's hitting the search index, and only then get shown a button to choose the search options. Compare it with the old search utility (from the classic Mac OS) where you have both ways (simple and advanced) right from the start. The new way was already a crime unimaginable in classic Mac OS. Yet it happened, and I've just checked it -- it was in v10.4 in 2005.

Cultures die slowly, so the wrong turn has probably happened much earlier than the author thinks.
Just a tiny little thing: Once you have SBT there's no need to actually install Scala. (Though, obviously, you may want to for other reasons if e.g. ENSIME requires a standalone Scala install. I wouldn't know, being a happy IDEA user :))
> There are far too many businesses who've been open 10+ years with thousands of customers that have never felt the necessity to leave a review.

I wonder what could be a good way to incentivise this. If I like a restaurant, I'll go back multiple times. At most, I may leave a good review once. If I go to a bad place, I'm more likely to leave a bad review.

Maybe businesses could integrate a "did business here $x amount of times" button, similar to a like button or a check-in that would increment next to a review. If it was your first time, it could lead straight to leaving your first review.
Off-topic, but would Amazon have anything to lose if they completely purged all reviews by users without verified purchases?

It would certainly combat the spam reviews problem.
There are two scenarios that inevitably get me thinking about smarter traffic lights. The first, is what you described, and the second is when I notice myself and a few others are sitting at a stop light while the intersection remains unused for 30 seconds.
That's pretty much Amazon's profits in 2Q 2016.
M-commerce: has the mobile web finally won?
Thanks for the pointers! I was really optimistic following the link, but reading more...

The draft bill included no measures to counter the use of slave
labour abroad as the Home Office believed that asking businesses
to audit and report on modern slavery in their supply chains
would be an “additional burden”. However, campaigning resulted
in a supply chain clause being added to the bills so that “big
business will be forced to make public its efforts to stop the
use of slave labour by its suppliers”.

And further...

There are, however, no legally binding requirements to conduct
due diligence on supply chains and there are no criminal or
financial penalties for non-compliance.

So, again, I ask the universe... why the fuck not?!
For 1: I didn't mean to imply anything about the work being easy or hard, by the way. I was just contrasting against the difficulty of proving BQP=BPP. (e.g. I might refer to Terence Tao's work on Navier-Stokes [1] as 'solving an easier version', but certainly no connotation about the difficulty of the work would be intended).

But I do think you should avoid making such large claims based on what was actually done. It comes off as naive; unaware of how much work has gone into trying to make these things work. Of course people have tried hierarchical models!

For 2: You're still confusing "I have an efficient deterministic algorithm to make predictions about X" with "X must be deterministic". The efficiency of the algorithm is totally independent of whether or not the other system is "really" random or not! Some random processes are downright trivial to make predictions about, even with really truly literally random inputs. And some are arbitrarily hard to predict, even when we replace the randomness with a cryptographic pseudo-random number generator (but don't tell you the seed).

Consider that we already have deterministic algorithms that predict quantum mechanics. The fact that the algorithms take a long time to run has little bearing on the predictions they make. Finding a more efficient algorithm for quantum won't turn it into a deterministic process. You'll still be able to pass Bell tests, and the algorithm had better predict that too or its demonstrably wrong!

1: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/finite-time-blowup...
I feel there are a lot of areas where poverty exists in the US, and as a society, we should work to improve them. I disagree though, that 'hunger' is a problem we should be trying to address. If we're claiming that a class of people in society regularly don't get enough food, then I should see malnourished people regularly in the hospital emergency department where I work as a physician, and I never do, except in the case of alcoholics, other substance abusers, people with severe gastrointestinal disease, and some old people with severe dementia living on their own (in which case, the problem is their general inability to care for themselves, not inability to afford sufficient calories).
In fact, the most common nutritional problem seen among the poor is obesity. Fyi, all the hospitals I have worked in regularly over the last 8 years have been classified as 'medically underserved areas', which usually corresponds very closely with most other measures of poverty, so I don't think I am seeing an unrepresentative sample.
Edit: I should have made explicit, we should of course be putting a lot more effort into feeding those people who are malnourished around the world, of whom there are way too many.
Zee's QFT in a Nutshell is a very readable, high-level view of what's going on in QFT. Griffiths' book is his one text I haven't read, but I love his others so much I can't help but second the recommendation.
Gas Station Prank
Patents don't need a working prototype. Maybe they calculated a theoretical limit of the smallest pixel size possible and used that number.
Santa Clara, CA trumps out "retime the traffic lights" every time they want to raise taxes. Biggest crock of B.S. I've seen in a ballot.
This.

I'm a hiring manager at Amazon (in natural language on Alexa). One thing I can say about Amazon culture is that teams can vary quite a bit. This is because Amazon gives a huge amount of ownership to each team, which naturally means each team's leadership has a lot of control on their culture.

Amazon does try to instill certain cultural elements across the company, but despite that, things can vary based on the leadership and the part of the company you're in. Prior to Alexa, I was in supply chain systems and I would say the culture there was quite different there.

Personally speaking, I really enjoy this team. It's definitely not a meat grinder; on the contrary, I think our team has great work-life balance while providing sufficient challenges to keep us motivated.

By the way, I'm sorry to hear some of the negative stories from others about their interviews. That's certainly not deliberate; our goal is to create a positive experience for every candidate irrespective of whether or not they successfully clear the interview. I personally work with some very professional and courteous recruiters on Alexa, but if anyone has had a negative experience interviewing for Alexa, I'd be happy to follow up and see if I can take some action on your feedback.
Nobody has said it yet, so here goes ...

Steve Jobs warned about having "bozos" in a company. Perhaps there are just too many of them working at Apple now that Steve isn't around to fire a few every so often?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/31/why-every...

Edit: Found something. Here's a research analyst making the same point: http://www.streetinsider.com/Analyst+Comments/Is+Apple+(AAPL...
Stop Saying “Hardware Is Hard”
This isn't a product that's "ready for production"; it's a product company declaring that it is.

This means what it's always meant: that the company believes the sum they'll make by convincing people it's "production ready" is greater than the sum they'll lose from people realizing it isn't.

Keep in mind the optimal state of affairs for Docker Inc. is one where everyone is using Docker and everyone requires an enterprise contract to have it work.
Oddly this is one of the tricks in Programming Pearls that I love, but can't get others to want to do.

It doesn't help that json prohibited comments. So, anything that modified json is incapable of adding a breadcrumb of what it did.
I think "cheaters gonna cheat" is overly reductive and crass. The point is that if most marriages are unable to deal with infidelity, then most marriages will fail. But the divorce rate has been declining for some time now, perhaps due to more modern approaches to human fallibility.

Again, this has nothing at all to do with excusing an affair, or abdicating responsibility. It's really examining and appreciating that many marriages are faced with these very serious challenges, and perhaps it's a sign of strength, dare I say health, in a marriage that it can continue on after an affair rather than collapsing at the mere thought.

EDIT: Keep in mind we can also speak more generally about affairs both romantic or sexual. It is interesting how many people just equate it to a sex act.
Language modeling a billion words
A team of 100's can create a nice movie.

Then to make that 3d. Then to integrate that around the world.

Easy to hire people and make a 2d video on you tube on what it might do.