skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The Allure of Google
I apologize for hiding behind anon, but I’m identifiable enough that I would rather not have my views associated with my real identity right now.

I'm currently debating job offers from Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Amazon (a job of mediocre seniority). I was hoping to get people’s perspective on HN as one more data point.

Prior to interviewing
Google > Facebook > Amazon > LinkedIn

After interviewing
LI > GOOG > FB > AMZN

LinkedIn had (by far) the friendliest and most enjoyable interview panel. The questions were tough, the discussion I had with the team was meaningful, and it really raised my opinion of LI.

Interviewing at Amazon felt like I was in a Dilbert cartoon.

I'm relatively biased against FB. I don't believe I would be happy working for a company I actively dislike (no judgement on those who do, just not my cup of tea).

That being said, I also don't use/enjoy LI's product. I believe there are massive opportunities for them to improve in meaningful ways. I doubt they will be able to overcome inertia and actually do it. But the potential exists.

I was severely disappointed with Google. I have a soft spot in my heart for that company. However, the quality of interviewers was really lacking. I have no doubt the people there are smart, but I
really just didn’t have a great interview experience.

There isn’t an issue of compensation with any of the companies (except Amazon), and the perks/benefits are essentially the same.

I’m stuck choosing between Google and LI:

My anxiety keeps telling me:

(1) choose Google just so that I can say I worked there.
(2) don't choose LI because it’s a socially lesser place to work.

These are both pretty bad reasons IMO.

This is super subjective, but if anyone has an opinion to offer on “Why LinkedIn” or “Why Google” I would really appreciate it. I know it’s ultimately my decision, but my head is an echo chamber at the moment.
TrustZone is, for practical purposes, a little more open if you're the one designing the board. Most of the time, the crypto is opt in, and you as the final assembler control the keys.
So Hangout is pivoting to a business tool in G Suite? While Allo/Duo are created for consumer market?

Interesting if so, it's exactly the opposite to most other companies: create a consumer product, reuse brand and/or code for biz product.
Bug 9767 – Consider ignoring document.write() when IE ignores it (2010)
Internalized fear of abandonment, shame, and undervaluing of self-worth... Takes years of work to undo, even after you've made it.

My story is similar to the parent comment - not as severe, but close.

I'm doing well now, but I suffer deeply from impostor syndrome and am constantly waiting to be fired, or cast out or sent back to the bread line, even though, rationally, I know that these are not likely, or even possible outcomes.

You can't divorce yourself from your own past, no matter how high you climb or far you run to escape it.
Somewhat off topic, but if you are having anxiety issues, I strongly recommend the Headspace mobile app. While a lot of mindfulness apps have a lot of fluffy new-age tone to them, this one did not, and it also tends to introduce concepts at a very good pace (a little bit of things to try each day) which makes things memorable. By contrast, you may talk to someone and hear 100 things to do, and you'll explode trying to do them all.

Anyway, for me, it strikes the right balance. The trick here is more about learning to focus but also learning to completely percieve the feeling and know what it is, and then it's less strong than trying to always think about it - rather than identifying with it.
They advertise it as "physically-secure" in the text. I didn't watch the video. They explicitly call out many risks, why they're there, and what they do about them.
All together now. Introducing G Suite
I agree "criminally irresponsible" was the wrong choice of words and I rightly got flamed for it.
Bruce Schneier and others[1] have done the math on brute forcing 256 bit keys: even with a perfectly efficient computer using the least amount of energy possible, you would have to deplete the entire energy content of the Sun to just iterate over a 225 bit keyspace once, let alone do anything meaningful with those keys.

Moore's Law doesn't really factor into it.

[1]http://security.stackexchange.com/a/6149
TrustZone alone is much closer to a SecureBoot or TPMish feature than ME. It's possible it would allow implementation of an ME-like software stack running inside the TEE.

It's worth mentioning that there is at least one OSS implementation of a TEE software stack, OP-TEE, making this even less of an issue. Assuming your device/soc mfg doesn't lock you out.

http://www.linaro.org/blog/core-dump/op-tee-open-source-secu...
Honestly I think that might be in the back of these people's heads a bit.

"Woo! We're doing what we want, when we want, how we want, this is how work should be! What, you think it would be better if we did things this way because reasons and experience? No, this is how I always wanted to work, fast and loose, I'm the one with the CEO title so this is what we'll do!

6 months later I'm so sorry guys. I have to let you all go, then come up with another idea I can get investors to pump money into so I can hop on this ride all over again and learn absolutely nothing.

This isn't true of all startups, but I've seen elements of it at several of the ones I have experience with.
If there are parallel universes and some of them are slightly ahead of us in time, if something happens in one of those of sufficient emotional intensity it could get 'broadcast' to the other universes, so it has already happened just in another universe.

That's just some random very unscientific thoughts!
Someone here mentioned ZomboDB[1]. Would that help you?

[1] https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb
Galton: instant availability zones
Well, we certainly are lucky we didn't test the drug "chocolate" on dogs first.
You know how hard it was to make the lens for the Hubble Space Telescope? Now imagine that you need to make it even more fine-grained in precision and accuracy as well as being electromagnetically within tolerance across that whole surface.
"everyone needs to be saved"

Unfortunately, the prevailing social zeitgeist in the US is that not everyone deserves to be saved- you have to earn the right to be deemed worthy enough to be saved, and really if you find yourself in a position where you need to be saved then it's probably your own fault and you should bootstrap your way out of it. The puritanical mindset is very, very strong and all-prevailing in the US.
It's all down to probabilities, yes our hypothetical attacker could guess your key correctly the first time or within a few years but the chances are so tiny it approaches zero for practical purposes on practical timescales.
...especially because urinating in public can land you on the list for life.
I wonder if there are any statistics on race vs. forfeiture.
Here's one guy's approach: http://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/06/build-deep-learning-box.htm...
Dominik Raute, I just wanted to say that this may be the best article I have EVER read on how to do database performance tuning. The fact that you showed all the initial steps that DIDN'T reveal any problems was great. The fact that you mentioned the tools you were using and commented on what was particularly good about each was also great. And you explained it all on a level that was comprehensible to a beginner even though this was a very advanced level of work.

Thank you for sharing this!
You're missing the point. Blind people still devote a lot of computation to sensing their local environment or mapping the places they live in.

The narrow AI could literally only operate in the domain of computer programs, optimizations, and mathematical theorems. It could sidestep much of the work that goes into dealing with the messy world and all the details that come with it.
At minimum, the money should go toward funding public defenders.
Curious to know since you mentioned that it was fast for thousands of PDFs... any rough timing information on some of your queries for that kind of dataset?
downtime is more limited by your application. i.e. if there is a failure your connection / database pool just needs to reconnect.
btw. we only have had psycopg2 pointing at it yet and that worked without a downtime.
however i guess java hikaricp is as fast as that well.
only "failures" will have a "small" downtime, however planned downtime is pretty/zero fast.
Hmm, I've never run SQL Server on anything other than NTFS where 64KB was definitely the recommended block size. In either case, it's great to have choices. When the license fee is coming out of my pocket, I'm definitely not choosing SQL Server.
Postage – a free, open, fast replacement for PGAdmin
For "250 years" jobs have been replaced (first with factory jobs --Ford, Taylorism, etc.-- and then with office and service sector jobs), they haven't been actually disappearing.

Now and in the future, with software, robotic automation, and even more so AI, jobs are actually disappearing for the first time ("software is eating the world" so to speak).

Examples from the era of the steam engine and the advent of electricity when faced with what's possible with advanced technology like AI, modern automation and 21st century internet and software are not really applicable.

That said, it's not that mankind cannot manage this. But it cannot manage it in the ways it had in the past -- this will only lead to the marginalization of large parts of society. It can only manage it with political action: 4 and 3 day work weeks being mandatory, universal income schemes and other such measures.
Empathy is a dying sentiment in this country.

We've made the horrible mistake of conflating "success" with morality; i.e. "the poor are just lazy", or "this wealthy person is automatically a paragon of good judgement"
I prefer the train as I can do something productive, but if I have to work late as I usually do, the train schedule does not work off peak hours.
Why assume that Monsanto etc isn't also capable of using data to figure out what works best?
There are already a number of arrangements where corporations can pay penalties to 'approved' charities instead of the regulator as part or all of an agreement; these deals have been problematic, as the government officials appear to be using the arrangements to favor interest groups and potential future employers.

I am not saying your idea is a bad one, but I think it is useful to know where the potential problems lie.
On Palmer Luckey
When you write blog posts reflecting on something that happened you often use/think in past tenses. Don't try reading too much between the lines on things like that.
+1 for TransferWise, a simple solution for wires and it worked quite well for me
First of all, passing parameters in functions is "dependency injection". And what you're describing is a really good thing.

Lets be honest, most dependency injection frameworks and techniques are about hiding junk under the rug. But they fix the symptoms, not the disease. You see, if you find yourself having components with too many dependencies, feeling pain on initialization, the problem is that you have too many dependencies, which actually means you have too much tight coupling and not that it is hard to initialize them. At this point you should embrace that pain and treat the actual disease.

Also, functional programming naturally leads to building descriptions of what you want, in a declarative way. So instead of depending directly on services that trigger side-effects directly, like a DB component that does inserts or something doing HTTP requests or whatever, instead you build your application to trigger events that will eventually be linked to those side-effects triggering services.

There are multiple ways of doing this. For example you could have a channel / queue of messages, with listeners waiting for events on that queue. And TFA actually speaks about the Free monad. Well the Free monad is about separating the business logic from the needed side-effects, the idea being to describe your business logic in a pure way and then build an interpreter that will go over the resulting signals and trigger whatever effects you want. There's no dependency injection needed anymore, because you achieve decoupling.

> And because of that, functional code is often very tedious to test.

That hasn't been my experience at all, quite the contrary, we've had really good results and we're doing such a good job of pushing the side-effects at the edge that we no longer care to unit-test side-effecting code. And yes, I believe you've had that experience, but I think it happens often with people new to FP that try and shoehorn their experience into the new paradigm.

E.g. do you need a component that needs to take input from a database? No, it doesn't have to depend on your database component at all. Do you need a component that has to insert stuff into the database? No, it doesn't have to depend on your database component at all. Etc.
It looked promising when I was evaluating it a few months ago, but it's limited to use with Elasticsearch 1.x, which was not going to work for us.
I was making a point for those that feel that they are the "West", and that "it can't happen here".

That said, the world is not without borders, artificial or not, so it's not wise to see it as such in determining the future. It might be wise to want to abolish those borders (and that remains to be proven -- empires are even less democratic than nation states, and civil wars are just as bloody, if not more, than wars between states), but not to live in la-la-land where they don't exist.
> the issues 99% people have with fiat currency today have literally nothing to do with how money is created

Not even remotely. Everyone is China is acutely aware that the government can print their money into oblivion. That's why they're rushing to dump it into anything. Hundreds of millions have been through this in other countries in recent years.

> Piggybacking on the electrical grid to turn "fairness" into "how much electricity you can afford"

Piggybacking doesn't mean what you think it does.

> How is that fair?

Fair doesn't apply in the world. It's hard to cheat and thus predictable and that's all it needs to be.

fwiw, fiat isn't fair either. Nobody came by to give me my share...
Fuuuuck dude.. You elaborated more eloquently than I ever could have.

Reality: I've been making more than $200K USD since I was about 27

Mentality: I'm one day away from being homeless.

I've been in therapy for 5 years but I've never touched this thought process yet. I think I need to.
Re: "nonsensical conspiracy theory."
I'm not with any candidate, but I don't think it's a conspiracy. And I think it makes sense. I think the point is that many people have given up looking for work and are no longer counted as unemployed in the statistics. Many speculate that this number is larger than in the past, due to corporate downsizing and automation. So, even if the amount of people who have given up looking was always ignored in statistics in the past, it's not an apples to apples comparison because that ignored number is now larger than in the past.

Also, while the second link shows data for Marginally Attached Workers, the government definition for that term is those who have looked in the last 12 months. So those who have given up for more than 12 months are not considered unemployed. See also discouraged workers.
Those countries were all side-loading US APKs anyway, so not launching in those countries wouldn't have reduced load on the servers much.
Some countries have real time transfers for free.
In this context, "AI" means "using techniques that come from the field of AI research", such as convolutional neural networks and whatnot.
> Not everyone is cute, but everyone needs to be saved.

I logged back in after months to upvote this comment. We often fall short of our ideals, but their value is still worth striving for.
Of course, life is difficult and we continue on. "Giving back" can help. If the rational mind cannot persevere, perhaps consider therapy. Nothing to be ashamed of.
Provided you are convicted first. Otherwise you could screw people up by dumping random drugs in their yard and then calling the police.
>Great news for R users who largely have been left behind by the deep learning community.

No one often mentions that TensorFlow lacks native windows support.
My experience is that if the R code works, then somebody will rewrite it in Python/Scala in a better way. I think there are plenty of data scientists capable of writing R code well enough that other data scientists or engineers can understand and translate it.

Remember that the core value here is the model and insights being developed, rather than the implementation.
This appears to be a good solution to the wrong problem. Maybe if they team with someone working on secure computer software...
Shown here are two good reasons for why people don't respect the police anymore. They take your assets due to a subtle association to a crime. They spend it without oversight on tools of mass surveillance. Ultimately, both of these things exacerbate crime. Quite an occupying force nowadays.
It looks like they are using a "multi-scale structural similarity" (MS-SIM) metric as a proxy for how well a human will think a compressed image reproduces the original image. Both the JPEG and the RNN images are compressed to the same MS-SIM metric, which in this case makes the RNN image take 25% fewer bytes.

Part of the reason JPEG looks better in this case is that they have chosen to feature a detail- and noise-rich portion of the image, which favors JPEG... High JPEG compression has a sharpening effect around edges, including "ringing" which hides well in noise. However, if you view the full-sized comparison of the dog images, you can see that JPEG has essentially no detail in the darker portions of the image. Presumably both the MS-SIM metric and humans would judge RNN better for these portions.
Is there any way to get get good network debugging with Node? I really wish we had something like the Chrome Dev Tools networking tab.
New regions in Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Finland, Frankfurt, London, Sao Paulo and N. Virgina, with 3 zones per region (2 in Fin and Sing)? That brings them to 37 (edit: soon 38 with a third zone in Oregon) zones in 14 regions. In addition, they're putting down building footprints in Alabama and Tennessee, which may become new regions in the future, and adding buildings in Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, and Belgium, which may become new zones. In March, they announced 10 new regions in 2017, and the above numbers account for only 8.

AWS will have 40 zones in 16 regions in the same time period (based on their public announcements.

Not sure about the AWS backbone though. GCP has access to dedicated fiber from the US to both the Pacific and South America on the order of 10Tbps, and that's just the wholly-owned stuff disclosed in public. Amazon is quite hush hush on their network.
I think (and I'm not an expert on conservative thoughts on BLM, and to be clear, I don't believe this at all myself) it's that there is no racial disparity in police shootings, whites get killed just as often as blacks, Blacks are just more criminal (not of course, because they are black or systemic racism leading to less legitimate opportunities, but because of internal issues within black culture and community like unwed mothers), and that white liberals and outside agitators stoke the fires of racial hatred against whites rather then addressing the issues with black people in order to advance their own political agenda.
Because if you belong to a stable middle class family, it's not only not true, but has never been true for you for a moment?
How about sending the money to social reform and outreach charities? There would need to be some money spent to ensure the money is distributed well.
quantum computers, at best, divide the bit-strength of a symmetric key like AES in half[1]. Brute forcing a 128 bit key is theoretically possible (in the sense that you can do it if you marshal the entire world energy output to the cause, you could crack 1 key/yr), but not a 5 minute process.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm
I agree there is a dichotomy between objects you inject and objects you don't but I think your characterization is incorrect: what decides if an object needs to be injected is not tied to its type but to its role. Sometimes, I inject integers or strings or other primitive types. Other times, I pass them explicitly.

The decision is made based on whether that object is a runtime object (i.e. decided by the user or some other factor that cannot be known when the app starts) or a dependency that's decided early and won't change through the life of the app.

Either way, this aspect is independent of the point I was making above and which is that functional code is not inherently easier to test than procedural code.
I keep meaning to sit down and start writing a tool to help me with this, but I keep being too busy with other stuff. If you could combine a nutritionist with awareness of local grocery availability with budget and time (etc) requirements with recipe websites... You'd save me so, so much time and effort planning meals.
I tried Alpine as my desktop around 4 months ago, but the documentation felt very insufficient. Just to install Firefox I had to change my repository URLs, and this wasn't mentioned anywhere, I only found out when I searched for the Firefox package to see where it is- "testing".

Furthermore the built-in Lynx does not have HTTPS support, so you cannot read "How to get regular stuff working"[0] before magically switching to the testing repository and installing Firefox. Not to mention that article is essential if you want to compile Lynx with HTTPS enabled. (the gcc pkg is not dependent on build-base and just doing apk install gcc won't result in a working gcc)

Having said that, the choices of OpenRC over systemd, busybox ash over [insert bloated shell here] and musl-libc over glibc are remarkable. Also xorg-base-install(or something like that) and similar scripts are very useful and definitely helped me get going.

0: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How_to_get_regular_stuff_w...
Bitpay and other payment processors exist to buy and hold Bitcoin in the event of mainstream adoption and price explosion; that is their entire investment thesis. They also happen to spend a little time performing activities that purport to make Bitcoin useful and appear like they are building a real product and business.
>In ML, in general, R is quite a bit ahead of the competition.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm just starting out in R.
Currently on Cloud here at Google. I would like to elaborate "Google CRE seamlessly provisioned extra capacity on behalf of Niantic to stay well ahead of their record-setting growth."

Just because you have the resources does not make for a well scaling service. As outlined in the post, "Google CRE worked hand-in-hand with Niantic to review every part of their architecture, tapping the expertise of core Google Cloud engineers and product managers". Look past the chart, this wasn't just an estimate for Google, it was also for Niantic. You don't have unlimited development resources, not every aspect of an application may have had the time to flesh out a scale-able approach.

Netflix didn't scale out overnight. I'm sure we've seen their techblog about X extremely specialized framework/tool they've built out over the years. I'm impressed with how quickly Niantic achieved a playable experience.