skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a sysadmin/devopsy position I asked the interviewees to write a program in any language that gave the average of numbers given as command line args.

Not one did it successfully. Most didn't even try.
The best one assumed five numbers given. But we had to hire someone, and it wasn't this one. The deciders just hired the nicest person.
Come to Grand Central and be astounded by how crappy modern-day transit's architecture is by comparison.
Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement

https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.scribblelive.com/2016/10/7/14...
Decoding the MetroCard, Part 2.5: Early Results
What's about the battery?
India's highest-ranking economist announced support for universal basic income
We almost certainly do, and I'm happy someone is finally solving this issue
People Displaced by Hurricane Matthew Can Stay at Free AirBNBs
Now what we need are quadcopters with OpenCV and LTE modems.
I get what you're trying to say, and it's an interesting viewpoint on the matter. However, i still think of "space" as a useful abstraction in this case
It's so annoying how journalists refuse to link to the source documents they are reporting on. Here it is, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-pr...

Not that it contains that much information. I would have liked to see a more technical breakdown of their reasoning.
A company like Google who has a virtual monopoly on search queries can make decisions like removing referrers to downstream sites where they send users thus depriving everyone but Google access to the actual keywords. While doing this that obviously benefits Google greatly, they can also claim it benefits the user as well since their query keywords aren't being shared with a 3rd party. It is complicated to think about monopoly vs privacy in this context.
Riiight https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12545878
Despite being familiar with most of the material here and agreeing that it is generally useful to know, I still don't know if I'd call this book "Foundations of Data Science". It feels more like "Assorted topics in algorithms, machine learning, and optimization": data science from the perspective of a computer scientist.

Notably missing are causal inference, experiment design, and many topics in statistics--causal inference being one of the primary things we'd want to do with data.
These seem great, but I truely think the biggest thing they could do would be add a line at the top of the page encouraging people to visit /newest. The content that actually makes the front page is somewhat random. I've seen the same thing posted several times, only to have the third posting be on the front page all day. Its also true that much of the content which does make it there is gamed by people who have their friends upvote. Getting more organic votes to new traffic would make that much harder.
The important part is it doesn't have "a" big company behind it. Contrast with Android. It is free and open and Amazon and others have forked it and used it. But the situation is not the same.

If Google tomorrow drops out and doesn't want to contribute to Linux kernel, no big deal. IBM and Redhat will. If those don't want, others will.
Dirt on Trump? The dude's 70 years old and fucking rich, there's no way there is enough dirt only known to Putin that could manipulate him. If there was such a quantity of dirt, it would have leaked beyond Putin, and we'd have heard about it. The most enjoyable part of this whole election is seeing so many otherwise smart people losing their minds and trying to find any way to keep Trump from the White House, disbelieve in his legitimacy if he actually wins, or just plain deny reality.
Interesting.

This seems like a tool for journal staff and editors, then, rather than practicing scientists.
BMW and Toyota just bet on the same self-driving tech startup
Maybe those brain training exercises are just not very good?
Wait for this to be use on Sunday's presidential debate.
The timing is also interesting: end of weekly news cycle, Friday afternoon. Hence, not much time to digest but enough to use for sound bites.
This is specifically a Feedly issue; see https://feedly.uservoice.com/forums/192636-suggestions/sugge... . As far as I've seen, Feedly doesn't really respond to bug reports like this.

Among other reasons, this is why I've moved away from Feedly to Inoreader (http://www.inoreader.com/),
Disclaimer: I have a bro crush on Ben Horowitz.

Exactly, they gave it a good go as a company but their burn rate was likely too high/too soon and differentiation insufficient (whether lack of actual novel features and/or communicating advantages in marketing). For example, a polar opposite of something like Couchbase which is used by giant enterprise shops to move away from Memcache and/or CouchDB.

It was also competing in a way Peter Thiel and Paul Graham warn about. Reinventing something without a vital quantum of improvement is like trying to juggle while climbing Half Dome.

I hope Rethink lives on as open source and adds MongoDB support. If they can hustle to encourage more people to try it by selling its obvious advantages, they have a slim but nonzero chance of rebooting.

Next time, gotta find more paying, alpha customers first and then start building. Then, try VC only after being capital-constrained when hiring/expansion/development is a blocker to realizing imminent profit. New category brands and segment-optimized products are riskier but more likely to be able to set up moats with defensible, competitive value.
This is me, as a "normal" user of HN, not reading this article because every time I make any critiques of HN I'm down-voted or told I just don't get the community. But to those of you who engage, I wish you the best of luck.
I like to trust things my government says, but I have doubts about this for two reasons. The administration is pulling out all the stops to help Clinton get elected and she is a hawk vs. Russia and Trump is probably less so.

Also, I do't really know for sure, but I think the Russia and China are most interested in growing the Eurasia economy in the direction they want, and in the USA we are putting most effort into maintaining our sole super power status.

Maybe I am not critical enough, but I think that USA, Russia, and China are all doing the right things to look out for their own self interest. It all seems to make sense.
This is as credible and evidence based from reliable sources as the statements that Iraq had WMDs and was connected to 9/11.
Not one but two: 'English department'.
5 Tactics to teach a novice about Machine Learning
Well, he is an associate professor, i.e., without tenure. So it's actually an essay by a struggling humanities graduate.
We’ve Already Tried Letting Our Rail System Fail
Who is we?

I was old enough to have been a young teenager when Netscape was released and connected to the web via a BBS (already had Usenet) and Trumpet Winsock. I would say up until 1998 the Internet boom was met with scepticism by the general public. Most people weren't even chatting on AOL. It wasn't until broadband became more commonplace (2000?) that I think the general public became obsessed with the Internet.

As to smartphones the iPhone (specifically the 3G) was the device I had been waiting most of a decade for after seeing my friend's Palm Pilot with Internet access in 1999 or 2000. I'm probably old enough that I discount the "smartphone boom" as I viewed it as the natural progression of existing technology. Also am slightly disappointed that the original premise of the iPhone was web apps on the phone through the browser but that quickly was replaced with native phone apps.

tldr: I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the AI revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE IS..."

I'm not old enough to say but I imagine the magic behind the beginning of space exploration and the race to the moon could have been the peak of future obsession.
I think that blimps are extremely slow e.g. to turn and stop and such.
9.9/10 (https://keegan.regaind.io/p/9KfI67VdTGin64pOzN696g) - funny how a quick glance at the Hall of Fame and my brain can work out which of my pictures will match the preferred style in order to get a high score pretty readily.

I do wonder if it's a bit sycophantic, after all who wants to be told they're terrible all the time.
I love that extension. However the other day it stopped working for me for some reason and I couldn't figure out why. It's working again though.

Update: and I wish it worked on mobile too.
When will you NPCs wake up and realize all this is not for you?

Back to work!
BMW, Toyota and Allianz to work with autonomous startup Nauto
> they're at the top of Github contributions

What does that mean? 16.000 lines of code, 16.000 projects? Nope. Just 16.000 people -not necessarily MS employees- which did something that can go from pushing a commit to opening a ticket. So this kind of stats mean nothing for me. It used to be called 'propaganda'.
If they bought RH or Canonical at least we would have one less vendor to add to the fragmentation. At least in my eyes, the moment something like this happens it would be like a black hole vanished with that entire "distro" ecosystem.
How do you imagine it working otherwise? You have to understand the difference between forking and simple type even if you start commands in your shell. Otherwise you'll end up saying "this command doesn't even work, I run it and nothing happens". This is basic knowledge. It's a "you must be this tall to run services on Linux" benchmark.
I have no clue what you're trying to say.
The business model that the SageMath guy failed to consider was the "Money at the End of the Rainbow" model used by Spring, JBoss and MySQL.

His comment about licensing was also interesting:

"At a bare minimum, I think they must switch to a very liberal license (Apache instead of AGPL)"
SpinaliS Chairs for Healthy Back and Great Posture
> The key word in this definition is "absurdly". Whether or not there is a shortage depends on what people think a reasonable price is

"absurdly high" is intended to mean an amount of money high enough such that not the money but the supply is the limiting factor.
As DNA reveals its secrets, scientists are assembling a new picture of humanity
Liberals don't necessarily seek progress and change, those would be progressives, liberalism is concerned with personal liberties and equality.
It's also important to note that liberalism does not have necessarily an affinity as far as the left/right wing goes, or to be more exact by definition liberalism is an intrinsically centric view.

Communism is just as enemy of liberalism as Fascism is and for all intents and purposes both modern and classical liberalism are by far more compatible with current US conservatism than with either of those.
And historically the opponents of laissez-faire capitalism were the conservatives who did not like the political and social changes that economic liberalism brought.

However the GP is quite correct that these days liberalism in the US is not focused about it's original or historic core values, modern US conservatives are the ones who root for the causes of traditional liberalism.

Liberalism in the way it was adopted by the left in the US is very much focused on statism and socialism way beyond what one might be considered traditionally liberal, especially considering that historically liberalism fought against taxation (especially progressive taxation) and government intervention.

What was and should be liberal today in the US is more in line with the "libertarian" worldview, while the "liberals" are more in line with socialism and it's various offshoots.
> Don't buy Apple or Google devices

Never did

> don't pay for Netflix or similar DRM streaming systems

Never did

> don't buy Kindle books

Never did

> don't buy Steam games

Never did

> don't forget to create some of your own.

Working on it.

But shit like this is still happening all the time, despite "voting" throughout my life. I don't think such voting is effective.
Secure Messaging Scorecard
This is a very insightful comment.
Not as high profile, but my toastmasters group meets there, and there was mention that we have to move.
> I like to trust things my government says, but I have doubts about this for two reasons. The administration is pulling out all the stops to help Clinton get elected and she is a hawk vs. Russia and Trump is probably less so.

The first of these reasons is arguably a statement of a reason to be skeptical about this statement, but the second is simply a statement of one plausible motivation for the Russians to do exactly what the government is alleging that they have done.
Adblockers can block any requests. It doesn't matter if they're from the same site or third party. If your page is know enough, requests like reading progress are likely to be blocked at least by ghostery.
This. Looking at the headline I half expected this to be a permaculture installation.

>I think if we could get Earth in a living and stable state, not a constantly degrading and dying state caused by our actions, then we have won some right to go to the stars. But at present I don't think we'd be welcome anywhere else in the universe. You wouldn't welcome anybody who'd laid waste to their house and wanted to live in yours, I'm sure. -- Bill Mollison, Co-founder of Permaculture (4 May 1928 – 24 September 2016)
Are we future obsessed? I am not.
Perhaps part of it is being creative enough to work that out?
If you're in the Seattle area, you still might want to consider Oracle Cloud (I don't work there). They've poached a shit-ton of senior AWS engineering talent, and from what I hear they're developing a kickass product.
> taking the statements of the the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security at face value.
>Why would they lie?

One reasonable reason for why they would lie is that their jobs are somewhat political and the person being targeted is likely going to be their boss soon. Claiming Russia is behind the hacks draws attention away from the hacks themselves, the shady campaign finance allegations they brought to light and the fact that Clinton was storing classified data in her home (I know the hacks were not of that particular server, but the two are still related.)

In a world where James Clapper is willing to egregiously lie, under oath, to congress, the default assumption that these people can be trusted to automatically tell the truth is suspect.

So far, the main evidence that I can find that links the hacks to the Russian government are two things:

1. Some of the documents had Russian metadata added to them.
2. The timing of the attacks seems to follow public holiday schedules for the Russian government.

These are both reasonable items of circumstantial evidence but it doesn't seem to be enough to accuse a foreign government directly.

Since this event has national political implications, and since the people making the statements have good reasons for being less than truthful, I am happy waiting for better evidence before making a decision one way or the other.
There are some people that, if they told me the sky was blue I'd look around for unexplainable chromatic aberrations.
I'm watching this very closely since I am a founder of another OSS-based company doing something very hard and trying to monetize via things like services, support, etc.

(Ironically we just ported the new version of our SaaS code base to RethinkDB! We plan to stick with it. It's too nice, and I'm optimistic it'll find an OSS home.)

I'm anxiously awaiting the postmortem, but my sense (albeit from a distance not knowing anyone involved) is that their failure resulted from an underlying assumption that they'd always be able to raise more money as easily and quickly as they had in the past.

As a result they deferred marketing and monetization strategy too long and ran a burn rate that was too high. When the money didn't come they couldn't sustain what IMHO could have otherwise been a fantastic business. If they'd had a little more time to build out Horizon and some of their other efforts, I think they would have made it.

It makes me feel a little bit vindicated for taking the contrarian (to some) position of hugging "default alive" instead of hiring for what feels like the sake of hiring. A good fraction of the Silicon Valley people I talk to (founders, VCs, etc.) have consistently encouraged us to spend more and increase head count, etc., sometimes on the argument that this would make us look better to investors.

Personally I'm concerned more with looking better to customers and surviving. The whole thing just seems bizarre and irrational to me even when I try to put myself in a VC's shoes. If I saw two companies with roughly equivalent stacks and growth and one was burning cash at half the rate of the other, would it make sense for me to choose to invest in the more expensive of the two?

Of course not being in Silicon Valley also helps us keep our burn really low... and I've had people say there's no way we can possibly succeed without being there. So hey, we're either smart or doomed. We'll see.
no, Donald Trump isn't just a racist neville chamberlain.

Donald Trump is a psychopathic, women-hating, racist, tax-dodging, russia-affiliated antichrist who will bring shame and destruction to America.
"...but as people mastered the task, the systems [of the brain] stopped communicating. It turned out that people who could disengage these systems the fastest were also the best learners."

This may just be an artifact of the presentation, or my misreading of it, but from then on it seems to be assumed that fast learning is a consequence of fast disengagement, rather than the other way around, yet no evidence is offered here that explicitly supports this interpretation over the alternative.
Maybe us living things are nodes in an artificial neural network? We as a network are reaching self-awareness. Holy shit.
I suppose that jump-to-parent-&-back can also be implemented as an extension.

I'm thinking it'd make sense with both highlighting new comments, + a recent comments list.

(If relying only on [highlighting comments posted since the last page load], then sometimes one will miss a few recent comments — because usually one didn't read all comments shown on the page, but the next time the page gets reloaded, [previously shown but not-yet-read comments] will no longer be highlighted.)
Firefly Space Systems Burns Out?
There are tons, tons, of examples of "established territory" in CS that do not exhibit "mathematical rigor". When something works in CS people seem to say "good enough" and use it. In mathematics (or as you pointed out, in physics) it becomes an "open question" and people begin the hard work of explaining the phenomenon by applying rigor. In maths, it's a constant march to push the boundaries, where the boundary is defined as that which is interesting but not yet well defined. In CS it seems that the boundary is that which is not yet a solved problem, where "problem" is something that needs getting done. Once, in CS, we can get it done, people move on. It's not often that in the enterprise CS process (academic is a whole other beast) it is assumed that there should be an application of rigor or an attempt to well define "solutions" before moving on. There is simply the accumulation of technical debt. But, in my opinion, technical debt has amassed at the systemic level to such a point where it's starting to look like a ponzi scheme. Sure, it works, so long as we keep throwing good money after bad. But, stop investing, and one can see it for what it is. In maths on the other hand, step away from it all for a year or two, and when you go back everything is still just as valuable and beautiful.

edit: what i would love to see is a "category theory" for programming languages / paradigms such that moving between them is well defined. it boggles my mind that translating between two programming languages isn't trivial. if both are well defined, one should be able to translate one to the other precisely given one is willing to define the translations. there should be zero guess work or heuristics in the process.
Top 3 Essential Things You Must Consider Before Becoming Self-Employed
Naming a project in such a way as to troll people is not a matter of "terminology".

Terminology issues consist of inter-language conflicts among definitions of technical terms like "list", "scope", "variable" or "macro" and such.

The proper noun that Lutz Mueller chooses to call his project is not a definition of a technical term.

To me, NewLisp is uninteresting. I already know how to avoid sharing issues in memory management in C programs by mallocing a copy of everything and duplicating it; that bores me. Lots of programs in POSIX environments do that with strings: strdup everything you receive, and cheerfully free it knowing that nobody else has that pointer. NewLisp is just doing "strdup for lists". It might as well work using strings, just like the "Lisp in sed" implementation: https://github.com/shinh/sedlisp . Why use objects, when pictures of objects provide a reasonable facsimile? I know how fexprs work, and they bore me also. Once you allow them, you can kiss goodbye the future prospect of having a compiler. As an implementor, if I want to introduce a new special operator in an interpreter (a decision not to take lightly), I can write it in the hosting language (such as C), and not as a fexpr. By writing such an operator, I get essentially the same development experience as if I wrote a fexpr, without inflicting harm on the language. If interpretation is a wart, then interpreted code being dispatched to interpret code is a tuft of hair growing out of wart.
> It's not as puzzle-y as Zachtronics games, though.

Factorio has layout and pipelining elements that remind me strongly of Spacechem, but taken up in complexity and scale. I've played Minecraft, but not very many mods, so I can't comment on that, but I can say that Factorio is one of the first games in a while that I can sink hours per day into, treating it as a puzzle game. To me, it's like Spacechem scaled up and with the scenarios chained together seamlessly.
iOffer | San Francisco, CA | FULLTIME | ONSITE

In 2002, iOffer revolutionized eCommerce by launching a transparent, negotiable marketplace. Our mission was to disrupt the status quo -- frenetic and rivalrous auction sites -- by empowering real people to buy, sell and trade on their own terms.

Position: Enterprise SysAdmin/DevOps

iOffer is looking for a motivated infrastructure engineer to join the team. You will take full responsibility for our data center hardware, from network to servers to memory and storage. Your focus will be on the continuing operation of our applications to run in a highly available, large scale environment. You will oversee and develop the tools to streamline deployments, so that the developers can concentrate on their code.

RESPONSIBILITIES

* Responsible for day-to-day health, security and uptime of physical and virtual servers.
* Troubleshoot issues across the entire stack, from network to OS to applications.
* Develop documentation for existing systems and procedures.
* Design new network, system, and storage architecture as needed.
* Define DevOps roadmap that aligns with business objectives.
* Collaborate closely with developers to support deployment.
* Architect and implement procedures for continuous security monitoring and updates.
* Provide recommendations on improvements to the environment and configuration.
* Manage technical side of PCI-DSS compliance.
* Recruit and manage additional team members if necessary.

If you think you'd be great for this position, please email me at ian@ioffer.com.