skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DNR: A stable oil market motivates everything. The KSA is a means to an end.

I think the real question is about the realpoltik of the American alliance with the House of Saud, versus Saudi Arabia as a whole. Lest we forget, 15 of the 19 were Saudis. Lest we forget, Saudi has the reputation of funding ultraconservative and politically reactionary movements around the world, that aren't exactly considered aligned with American political policies and values.

But that doesn't answer the questions about why the KSA is not listed as a terrorist financier and why the Saudi royal family enjoy easy access to the US government.

The first one is simple. If the US called it a terrorist financier, it would probably fatally damage the alliance. So what does the alliance give? Well, for the KSA it's a security guarantee. The US guarantees the acidity of the kingdom, and the Saudi family in particular against Iran. Also, the US gives political cover for maintaining a sphere of influence over the Arab world.

So what does the US get out of it? Well, two things. The primary goal is a stable supply of oil to the global market. (It's not about actual barrels of oil, but rather the global price of oil.)

Maintaining a reasonable supply of cheap oil is one of the two axes that all US Middle Eastern policy revolves. (The other is security for Israel.) The reason why oil is important is self-evident in a society reliant on petroleum products.

We should always remember that the initial reason why the US decided they had a national interest in Saudi Arabia was with the foundation of ARAMCO, which was originally known as California-Arabian Standard Oil.

So what's wrong with Iran? Iran? Well nothing at first. Iran, like Saudi Arabia was a an irrelevant backwater of international relations until the discovery of oil. After that, the Cold War intervened.

Well, the US pretty much poisoned the relationship with Iran when the CIA overthrew the democratic government and installed the autocratic Shaw, In an effort to stymie Soviet interests. When Kohmehni overthrew the Shaw, he lined up with the Soviets to put a needle in the Americans' eye. In response, the Americans strengthened the military relationship with KSA to counter Soviet influence in the region.
> The question is if fewer people will die on a per-mile adjusted basis.

Last I heard, Autopilot was MUCH safer per mile.
Actually, this is far more significant than YouTube videos being taken down. If Yelp loses, this case could make it possible for pretty much any site that accepts user comments, including YouTube, social networks like Facebook, review sites, advertising sites like Craiglist, and even personal blogs with comment sections, to be held accountable for what users post.

That could lead to a significant amount of prior restraint which would have the effect of restricting online speech in places where it is most useful. That would be much further-reaching than anything YouTube does.
I'm pretty fastidious about following TDD practices, and I am very careful to cover as much program state as the language I'm using reasonably allows.

However, my mental model for approaching TDD I think is much simpler than the approach presented here. It basically is:

Do I _really_ understand the design implications of the unit I'm about to develop?

- No: Play around and prototype, and learn about my design, don't worry about tests

- Yes: Throw away any prototype and then really do the unit test-first.

I found that I gravitated towards this process after I learned (partly thanks to blogs from Uncle Bob Martin) that unit tests are really formal design specs. They are so formal and specific that they are expressed in code- a program describing what your program does. Before you can write one of those (or as many as your unit needs), you need to have a very precise concept of how you are about to proceed, and what exactly the product code is about to do.

The benefit of this process is that I prefetch a really deep understanding of the system I'm building. This leads to less bugs, and it leads to sensible, well-documented, and meaningful tests. It just takes a bit of discipline to follow at first, when you're not used to working this way.

Some argue that it takes longer to write code this way, especially when I throw away my hard-earned working prototype! It does take a little longer at first, but:

- Once I know the answer/outcome I seek, the tested version comes out way faster than the prototype.

- I spend much less time later on fixing my own bugs, which I learned are mostly due to my own lack of understanding the full dimensions of my system's design.
Cool name!

There was also a /r/compsci thread [0] a few months ago with some other interesting suggestions like "iterative recursion" and "divide-and-conquer with caching".

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/3u3520/if_you_coul...
I like TDD if the code is already clean and well-tested, and also if the existing test code is clean. If the domain code is clean but the test code isn't, I'll clean up the test code before TDDing the new feature. Shouldn't take long at all.

If it is not clean, but well-tested, then I need to clean the code before extending it further. Also the tests will probably be messy, I'll spend time cleaning those up if I have time. But in all likelihood I'll only be able to clean up the code this time around.

If it is clean, but not well-tested, then a test-after approach is better. Take your feature-implementing extension, and write tests for both the extension and what it's extending. Then the next time I'll have clean, well-tested code to TDD off of.

If it is neither clean nor well-tested, then I wouldn't bother writing tests at all, for this iteration. Instead I'll clean up the code, make my extension, and call it a day. The next time I extend that part of the codebase, I'll use the aforementioned test-after approach.

Tests take time to refine and get right. They are an added layer of security, but a much better line of defense is nice clean code that you know what it is doing at a glance. Tests will not save you from bugs, but clean code will make bugs way easier to iron out.

The prevailing wisdom seems to be to don't refactor unless you have test code to fall back on and if you don't have that, to write smoke tests.

I do not like this approach, I think if you have to deal with unclean, untested legacy code, then you need to do the work to understand it, and the best way to come to an understanding of code is to clean it up. As you clean it up, domain concepts become clearer.

Tests are a form of documentation, their intent is to help you understand the codebase. The code itself tells you how it's accomplishing business objectives, tests tell you what those business objectives actually are. Unless you are very unlucky you should have alternative sources for that knowledge. So tests aren't strictly necessary, but they are very nice to have.
These coincidents can usually be explained by a latter analysis. That's the main point of the article: til now there is no logically sound string of events that explains the observed events, demolition, fire or otherwise. These events might indeed be of low probability but currently even the events are not known.
vpri.org managed to squeeze a GUI toolkit and a document format and the whole compiler toolchain required for the language (including rasterization) in about 20K lines of code, and it's fast enough to run in a laptop.

I'm pretty sure we haven't explored the sheer depth of simplifications that can still be done.
Lead by the Brits, yes, but the US were in deep. Rather too deep as it turned out.

Damnit, Kermit!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GIpm_8v80hw&t=4m38s
If you google 'robot folding shirt' then yest that's been done. The BD robots _do_ have autonomous modes.
Honestly, people were too shocked to hate America, and for once, perhaps the only time in recent history, America seemed humbled. It was hit with something so big, so nasty, that the usual bravado fell away and America, as a collective, was left reeling. The whole world was in complete shock.

In that moment we were all willing to let history go away, to embrace America for the victim it was.

It was, briefly, a return to the America that the world loved: The one that built a country from the "wretched refuse" of other countries, that made the working class something less than serfs, that made enormous sacrifices to liberate Europe from tyranny.

"Photo ops"? It wasn't that. Change in foreign policy? There wasn't time for those changes to go into effect before America was back to its old self, only instead of fighting some endless war against "communism" the new enemy was "terrorism" and instead of Vietnamese it was "Muslims". Of having "Freedom Fries" because France wouldn't buddy up and invade a sovereign country for no reason.

There was a very short gap between vigils in the street around the world, in places that had boundless hate for America, because 9/11 is not the sort of thing you'd wish on your worst enemy.

Call it naïve if you want, but we were all willing to be naïve that day.
"The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,..."

The uncertainty, if memory serves me from viewing the above documentary, is at the request of the family for religious reasons.
I heard a story once about how the introduction of power tools was protested by the set builders of Hollywood (and probably Broadway) - they said, "now it takes fewer people to build the same set! we'll lose jobs!"

The reality turned out that people built bigger sets on the same budget, and people with smaller budgets could now build sets.

A large part of the job of programming is automating away the job you're currently doing, so you don't have to do it again. This frees you up to do more, newer things.

I suspect both with hold true for you. What you currently do will be wrapped in an automated layer, and you'll do something similar on a higher layer previously inaccessible.
The speculation is that it is coming this fall, and it will not be able to be backported to already sold cars. One of the main reasons I am holding off a purchase.
> Tesla's implementation didn't have these safety features that other manufacturers had in their assisted cruise control systems and people died.

ONE person died. Over many million miles of Autopilot driving. Last I heard it was much safer to drive with Autopilot than without. Yep, per Musk:

> “Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”
Not to any business that has to pay the salaries of 10+ people.
Can anyone tell us how hands-on is Stanford's CS224D please? I found Andrew Ng's course too theoretical and not so practical.

Right now I'm almost halfway through Udacity's Intro to Data Science and it's great, so I'm deciding if I should take Udacity's Deep Learning or CS224D
The nature of shareholders may provide huge incentives to continue to automate, all the way down to the most essential people required to run the design, production, distribution, marketing, etc.

Top company leads, board members, and advisors may suffice to run the operation and innovate, causing the CEO role to be phased out.
> Now say you end up turning down their offer. They’ve spent over $24,000 just extending this single offer to you (to say nothing of opportunity costs), and now they’ll essentially have to start over from scratch.

Most of that is to hire someone, not just 'you'. And they aren't even close to having to start from scratch if you don't accept.
Brazen head
> Didn't the US originally provide those nuclear weapons?

Developed independently of the US[1], in cooperation with the apartheid government of South Africa. South Africa went on to become the first (if not only) country to voluntarily give up it's nuclear weapons program, right on the cusp of black rule.

Officially, the US does not/will not acknowledge Israel's nuclear capability.
> The site is currently offline and the bank relies solely on its backup data center, located within a couple of miles’ proximity.

> “Moreover, to ensure full integrity of the data, we’ve made an additional copy of our database before restoring the system,” ING’s press release reads.

What? Am I to interpret this to mean that ING has a single backup of its data under normal conditions?
hm, used to be said for chess too; a uniquely human creative skill.. I love the Go algorithm (there's 3 basic ones in there really), but no aspect of it seems creative.

To try to see it in a grossly simplified step by step fashion: in the abstract, does seem similar to how a human would think of the game though; consider promising moves, where promising is some fuzzy intuition based on the pattern of the board -> for each of those, read how the responses might look like (which the computer does way way more than the human), and what you discover using this suggests other promising moves -> and at some depth of each such read, evaluate the board position; who looks ahead, which too is some fuzzy-ish intuition based on the board patern (though there are various heuristics humans would use when learning this). Computer also evaluates further, a number of fast playouts to the end and mixes this with that pattern-based evaluation.

Is this the kind of thought process you'd associate with creativity? Seems search-based, analytic and strategic; only funny thing is how evaluations are pattern-based nebulous things, but that seems an implementation detail. In some situations, you may come up with evaluation procedures like say material advantage in chess and code the relevant decision procedure, in others, you'd "code" the decision procedure implicitly, by specifying a dataset that exemplifies the desired function, and use statistics to come up with that function. Increases the kinds of decisions you can implement tremendously as you can leverage implicit rather than just explicit knowledge, yes -- but conceptually kinda the same.
What is your calculation for the proper amount of workers at the Twinkie factory? Modern technology allowed 1200 to do the work of 8000. How many workers would you mandate work at the Twinkie factory in your ideal vision of the world?
This is an exceptional course. In my CS undergrad days, some 7 years ago, when I wanted to make sense of Fourier Series and Transform, this course was my savior. The mathematics text book had a dry and unintuitive treatment of the topics and electrical engineering, physics and computer science books mostly relegated the topics to a few pages in an appendix.

I found this course and printed out the PDF of the lecture notes as I didn't have enough bandwidth for watching the videos. The lecture notes had a wealth of information about the idea of a Fourier Series expansion, it's connection to the Transform and the applications in diverse fields.

Prof. Osgood had great examples. In one such example he showed that the temperature of a ring must be a periodic function of time as the structure of the ring is periodic in space, and then went on to derive an equation for the temperature of the ring that was a Fourier Series.

It was from these notes that I learned a great deal about convolution too. The new website looks much better organized. I'd recommend every CS/EE student to at least watch the first few lectures once.
> The baker's union is the one that was negotiating in bad faith (or perhaps "stupid faith" would be a better term).

Maybe so, I'm skeptical.

> No, the company did not "come back". The brands were sold off and the stockholders of the original company lost their money. This is a new company that purchased the right to use the brands in the bankruptcy sale.

It has new owners but how much of the executive staff have been replaced beyond the very top level? I couldn't find any details.
> Capitalism's race to the bottom continues unabated.

I'm trying to figure out whether that was posted in 1840, 1890, 1920, 1960, 1990, or 2016. Because it has been proclaimed non-stop since the free market began ushering in the greatest boom in prosperity humanity has ever seen. It was no more true in the prime days of the industrial revolution as farming jobs were rapidly being wiped out than it is today.
"Your point isn't without merit."

His point is entirely without merit. Far from "executives getting rich", the investors in the old Hostess lost all of their capital.
Self-Driving Cars Can Learn a Lot by Playing Grand Theft Auto
How yield Works
> You may think my question was a straw-man - it was intentionally leading actually, to set-up these following points.

Bullshit. I could have just as easily responded with "No." Give me a break.

Of course I can't present any evidence I didn't work for Hostess, where am I supposed to get evidence from short of a whistleblower? My point isn't that I'm saying 100% this is what happened, I'm saying I'm skeptical of the story being sold that the union is at fault and the executives did all they could to save the company, etc.

I'm not interested in any more discussion with you, so this will be my last response.
60 days to NES mini launch. What are your guesses on HW used?
Yes, but think about those in between the outliers. Troubled situations and many cases where loans aren't feasible or possible.

I'll pass on a world where policy and education only deals with the common case.
For this type of task I usually spin up an ipython/jupyter notebook and hammer something out with Pandas very quickly. It's an incredibly productive toolkit for quickly performing this type of task.
"...for reasons that have nothing to do with oil"
"...win influence with oil producing Arab states..."

This is cherry picking sentence fragments to produce a misleading statement. The GP clearly states that US involvement in Israel was to avoid Israel using a nuclear weapon, not because of any interest in oil.
I suppose. From the article, it's noted that she abandoned her young child for her "life." I don't have respect for people like this, though it's certainly their "right."
If you're agreeing that the US was involved in the Mossedegh coup, it's only sufficient to say so. Not to insist in apparent contradiction of that fact that the effort was led by what Noam Chomsky calls the junior partner in the Middle East, Britain.

Yes, Britain precipitated the effort. The US, however, enabled its success.
Type Theory Podcast
A good used sail boat is about $60k. You can live very well on it for about $15k/year. That's not a park bench; that's freedom, which is priceless.
I agree with your larger point, but in the specific case of Hostess, I'd say the proper number of workers would be the most the business could bear until the existing labor contract expired. In other words, do your good faith best to uphold your end of that contract (by employing as many workers as possible) until the contract ran out. Then you go to automation and severe reductions in workforce.

EDIT: And everything I said is taking the argument that Hostess negotiated in bad faith at face value. I'm not even sure of that, and am willing to accept that the current state of affairs arose in an untainted way.
Another favorite aviation-related one, though more pop-sci-oriented, is this look at a 747 going through a D ("heavy maintenance") check that basically takes most of the plane apart and puts it back together, covering all the bits and how they need to work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_yHtfGH0nI
Wow the libertarians are really pushing the straw men tonight.

This is going to be my last response on this thread because I'm tired of explaining reality to you.

Obviously my number would be the number that makes the most sense. You obviously take the view they did that already, but my point (which I've made all along) is that companies rarely cut into executive staffing, pay or benefits the way they cut into labor. Labor tends to pay the price of keeping the executive staff, pay and benefits as is even when times get tough.

Ok enough of this tedious discussion. Have a good night folks.
I don't support breathless hagiography in any of its forms, but in fairness a lot of the article is just about how she was technically good at espionage, regardless of who she was spying for.
True. But they really do want you if they made an offer. I have never heard of someone asking for 5k more get their offer yanked, but I know people afraid to ask for that reason.

The exact # they lose if you say no isn't the point. You are the top choice. Doesn't mean they will double your offer but they do like you.
Given Nintendo has preferred HW for legacy support (i.e. Included older cpu's on newer gameboys for supporting older games) I am thinking they included the original nes cpu plus another newer chip for game selection GUI and HDMI up conversion
I agree, a lot of successful organizations have a lot of roles a that are people focused e.g customer/partner relations or leadership within the organization.

for your other point, i don't think there will ever be a concrete best-practice system for all companies to use that will do away with the data wrangling/customizing that currently happens. Given the amount of time that most ERP systems require to implement/improve I think bad data will be around for a long time.

but AI/learning based decisions could (hypothetically) work in a similar way to the algorithms built by quants in high frequency trading.
Find a secured credit card. I was able to get one from USAA with a $5,000 limit (you just deposit $5,000 in a CD to cover it). Not many people realize this, but you do not have to be in the military to bank with USAA (you do if you want their insurance products, but not for banking).
The highest cost in almost every business is worker salaries.
I 'took' the stanford NLP course online it was great.

Doing this one now.

Funny - I did Fourier in Comp. Eng. - but it was jammed together with so many other things, I felt overwhelmed by all of it, I did enough to do decently on the exam, but I feel a lot of it was lost on me, and I forgot much of it.

Using fourier in most computer applications is very rare!

I'm excited to have a project I need to use it for - and weirdly stocked to be watching this video.

I love it when I have a reason to learn something awesome ...
Actually rhyming is a question I don't know the answer to: is the character for Han dynasty the same as for what are called Han Chinese people today? I'm not sure if I was punning or describing the same ethnic group.
the timing of this article is interesting

Earlier today a story about China buying the AN-225 was on the front page and lots of people were confused about why they needed to buy the full toolchain for manufacturing it, instead of just buying one plane and reverse-engineering how to build it.

Several people then pointed out the difficulty of manufacturing modern engine components, particularly the blades, and it was kind of inevitable an article about that would follow soon after.

Also, ANA's 787s are a bit of a weird case in that ANA puts far more cycles on those engines than a typical operator. Most 787 operators use them for long-haul flights, 8-12 hours airborne at a time and only one or two flights per 24-hour period. ANA, on the other hand, flies 787s on much shorter domestic routes, meaning more cycles of spin-up/shut-down. Given that ANA was the first operator and puts way more stress on the engine than anyone else, it's unsurprising that they would see accelerated wear.
Notice that many of the comments pointing out just how ridiculous that post is are being buried.

Square has been de-emphasizing their swipe reader for a while now after they released their Apple Pay/chip card reader. I think the others are moving the same way finally.

Or, like hundreds of buried comments point out.. use the adapter.
It's a shit ton of money for one person. For a business, especially a business without revenue, it seems like far less.