skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do none of those companies utilize chat?

Sure they do. But you're going to miss adhoc conversations that people in the same physical location have. Remote people aren't left out on purpose, but many times this chatter doesn't warrant saying "Hold on, let's not talk to each other's faces. Better do this on Slack.".

Source: Worked remote for about four years, really missed these kinds of random chatter.
I don't think this is correct for GitHub Page sites that use custom domains. See [1] and [2].

[1]: https://konklone.com/post/github-pages-now-supports-https-so...

[2]: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156
Actually, ultrasound tomography is being used for some static imaging:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22194502/

It works via a different principle though.
There are some outliers like Digital Ocean and Github, but these are not the common case...
That COBOL program almost certainly _is_ a database – not a SQL database but the COBOL language standard specifies structured records and allows you to specify whether a file is sequential or indexed (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Data_division).

In the case of Y2K, the problem was often that people defined a date filed as three values all declared as PIC 99 (i.e. a two-digit number). If they migrated to 4 digits, we're fine until Y10K. If they added a window (values less n are 19xx, etc.) or switched to Unix timestamps or a SQL database – there are products which let a COBOL runtime transparently map the indexed file semantics to SQL statements – then it requires more information to say whether it's at risk.
The only possible way there's a difference is if the CPU used to decode a FLAC file changes the noise emitted by the computer or puts noise on the DAC's power supply that affects its clock stability or raises the noise floor.
I've been working in DS role for a few years now in NYC - and I definately feel the role is more valued on the east coast over SV. SV has a focus on consumer facing applications that are in many ways fancy CRUD. DS roles have thier place but aren't the core of the business. East coast has a b2b / infobroker focus where DS is the product. Media (especially adtech), finance, government consulting are over on this coast.

I think you also need to not confuse the growing ease of machine learning tools with the role becoming more accessible. There is a wide gap between tooling and knowledge to use those tools appropriately and creatively.

And may I never write another HN comment on my cell phone again.
IE has had that for many decades.

One process per tab since forever. (Well, more like one process per window, because there weren't tabs at first).
Spanish translation of the PureScript book
Looks like accessibility tools (e.g. screen readers) also disable multi-process support as of Firefox 50. I know enough about accessibility APIs and their implementations to guess that it's going to be difficult to modify that code to work efficiently in a multi-process configuration.`

Edit: I'm talking about Windows. Don't know about other platforms.
Yea, I used to worship old Martin guitars. I then happened to see this guy on YouTube sample three guitars. A Martin, a Yamaha, and the Ibanex.

I figured my Ibanex would come in dead last. It came in first?

That said, I have an old Dobro guitar, and it does sound better than any guitar I have owned? The more I think about it, I think my Dobro's nut is just set high--making my terrible fret work sound better?

(There's even debate about old vs. new Dobros. New Dobros supposedly sound better. This thinking also popped up when old Dobros were getting hard to find.)
1. It's optional, but its existence increases the testing burden for all other parts of the application, because now there are more options to test. See here:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-Apri...

2. Communities, like individuals, sometimes make mistakes. It's OK to voice ones opinion that a mistake is a mistake. And they are free to ignore me if they disagree.
Does anyone know what the incentive behind the development of Firefox is at this point? Like, Chrome has such a huge browser market share, so why do they still develop Firefox? I assume it is not that feasible to invest time and money if the share is only 4%.

I am just curious, and not trying to hate on Firefox. But I think most (?) non-tech people use Chrome. So maybe I am asking, what is the point of Firefox if the shares are so low?

Again, not trying to hate on it, but I am just curious for the reasons, which I am sure are valid.
Absolutely, understood.

Ironically, this is also a good example of how unsafe is complicated; "hey make an array (not vector) of copies of this thing" has lots of edge cases!
This is one of my 20% projects at Google. AMA.
I tend to believe the exact opposite and it's one of the reasons I dislike much of popular music. Good orchestral music makes use of a wide range of tonal, harmonic, and dynamic colors available. Bad (in my opinion) pop music sounds the same and uses the same limited orchestration of guitars, bass, maybe keyboard, drum set, + vocals and tends to have little dynamic or harmonic variety.

I agree that synthesizers in pop music have been a welcome addition (70s & 80s produced some good music with it as you mentioned).
I listed two things Rust doesn't handle well without unsafe code, doubly linked lists and multidimensional arrays. Here are examples of both from popular repositories with high download numbers:

- https://github.com/andelf/rust-adivon/blob/master/src/deque....

- https://github.com/andelf/rust-adivon/blob/master/src/queue....

These are all the doubly-linked list problem:

struct Node<T> {
item: T,
next: Option<Box<Node<T>>>,
prev: Rawlink<Node<T>>

}

Since this is templated code, it might be possible to break it by instantiating it on a type with unusual semantics.

- https://github.com/BurntSushi/aho-corasick/blob/master/src/f...

Looks like unsafe code for "performance reasons". But there are no comments near "unsafe", so it's hard to tell.

- https://github.com/SiegeLord/RustAlgebloat/blob/master/algeb...

Matrix math. "Unsafe" all over the place, and unsafeness is exported, allowing the caller to do unsafe things. This is an example of why I occasionally stress the need for multidimensional array support at the language level. If the compiler knew about multidimensional arrays, it could optimize the subscript checks for them, avoiding code such as this.

The unsafe version. The caller can store anywhere in memory.

fn unsafe_set_idx(&self, $mat: &T, v: f64)
{
let $self_ = self;
let (r, c) = $rc_expr;
unsafe
{ $mat.raw_set(r, c, v) }
}

Safe, but inefficient version. The compiler can't hoist those checks out of loops.

fn set_idx(&self, $mat: &T, v: f64)
{ let $self_ = self;
let (r, c) = $rc_expr;
assert!(r < $mat.nrow());
assert!(c < $mat.ncol());
unsafe
{ $mat.raw_set(r, c, v) }
}

This is the sort of thing that leads to exploits in code that reads things like JPEG files. Yet you can't do much better in Rust. That's why doing multidimensional arrays in macros and templates isn't good enough.
Skip-level 1:1s
My colleague focused on machine learning for his phd and this is a very accurate description. Talking the talk can come with experience, being able to understand the math and execute a new system at scale is where the separation in experience will start to surface.
It seems that this is true for now (for 'traditional companies').

Soon, however, one could argue that 'traditional companies' will no longer be the norm - data science, ML, etc. will play such a crucial role in the majority of tech firms that the number of companies using it will rise. That's when I expect we'll see a huge portion of software engineers knowing ML concepts. Alternatively, I wonder if we might see the rise of smaller companies contracting out all of their ML to larger ones.

I would also be curious to know if ML background helps one to get a job at a place like Amazon/Google for even 'traditional' positions right now. The amount of data they have now must drive demand for engineers who can write software that takes advantage of it, regardless of position. Of course, like you said, they'll always require engineers to fill more traditional roles with no data interaction.
> we'll need quite a few breakthroughs before usable Agent AIs are a thing. Insights on the order of importance as, say, backpropagation and using GPUs.

I think a 10x-100x increase in efficiency is going to come soon, based on more research into efficient hardware and efficient models. New algorithms, new hardware and especially a lot of money and talent invested in research are going to power the next step.
Ask HN: Domain name purchase: godaddy vs. route53?
Hi! I'm relatively new to these questions.

Since I'm going to host my app on AWS, I was thinking to purchase the domain name directly on Route53.

But the prices are quite different for a .com:

- Godaddy: $2.99 (y1) + $14.99 (y2)

- Route53: $12 (y1) + $12 (y2)

However, the AWS doc says the transfer is $12 but I'm not sure about the meaning of "transfer". If I purchase the domain on Godaddy, do I need to "transfer" it on AWS? In this case it would be less expensive to purchase on Route53.

Thanks for the help.

∞∞ EDIT ∞∞

Ok I think I've understood. A "transfer" means moving the management of a domain name from a registrar to another one. What I need in my case is just to change the DNS to use a domain name registered somewhere else. Please tell me if I'm wrong! :)
I have it bookmarked :)
Are you hiring for finance? In Europe it still depends very much on the industry: some mean coding, some maths, some infrastructure, all want data preparation and in-depth stats. edit: other than understanding the business fundamentals, of course.
> There are not repeated practical demonstrations, nor is there any really good theoretical reasons, to think that value alignment mechanisms would be seriously and systematically detrimental to performance & cost in the same way that we have for reinforcement learning/active learning/sequential trials/etc. You can reuse my little trivial proof to argue that UFAIs >= FAIs, but of course they could just be == on intelligence. Then FAIs can be a relatively stable equilibrium because they are not instantly outclassed by any fast-growing UFAI.

Some vaguely similar arguments:

1. The race by organizations to develop AI is slowed >10% by worrying about friendliness. In a big efficient global marketplace, the winning organizations will almost certainly be ones who ignored friendliness.

2. A seed AI which is amoral can take immoral actions not available to a moral AI. Even a tiny advantage amplifies over time because of the exponential nature of recursive self-improvement. So the first super intelligent AI will be immoral.

3. Nations who obtain nuclear weapons have immense power. Even if most nations decide not to obtain them, or only obtain them for peaceful purposes, at least a few will get them and then use them to take over the Earth. Therefore, the Earth will be taken over completely by a nuclear-armed nation.

All of these arguments have some merit, but none are strong/inevitable. They all require quantification and comparison against countervailing forces (e.g., the effect of laws, the moral motivations of nearby human programmers, the counterthreat provided by many allied nations/AIs).

> (It's weird to try to reason that 'value alignment looks hard for the same reason that Tool AI looks hard; but we can do value alignment, thus, we can do Tool AI as well'. Maybe we can't do either? We desperately want value alignment to work, but the universe doesn't owe us anything.)

I'm not making any sorts of claims like that.
René Girard is a joke. His theory about mimetic desire is pseudo-science and does not rely on evidence. Girard is a litterature teacher that got the mimetic idea reading 19th century novels and then proceded to prove it using 19th century novels.

The fact that he taught for so long at a major US university is telling about the poor state of social siences and the coward mentality of the academic world.

If you speak French, read "René Girard, un allumé qui se prenait pour un phare" by René Pommier, it's a very clever and funny refutation of this theory.
The Cloudflare setup is only secure from user to Cloudflare, not from Cloudflare to GitHub.
It doesn't work with android because of the wide variety of speakers and microphones on android vs the very few for ios. Many android phones can't even emit or record ultrasound.
There's not really much point to supporting Lepton directly instead of WebP. It's (approximately) a JPEG converted losslessly into a WebP variant-- it uses a predictor very similar to the VP8 inter-block predictor and the VP8 arithmetic coder. WebP is based on VP8, so it uses the same technologies.
Because competition is a good thing. I personally wouldn't want the fate of web standards solely dictated by Google. Also, I'm not sure where you got that number, but Firefox's market share is well above 4% for most websites.
Speaking for NYC, but I imagine silicon valley is similar.

The supply-demand dynamics have changed a lot in the last couple years. I'd roughly break it out into two groups: people with work experience + strong software development skills, and those without. The first group is in higher demand than ever, and tend to add a lot of value to companies that really need it.

The second group has gotten extremely crowded, especially from STEM graduates - usually with a masters or phd - who have completed MOOCs or bootcamps. Supply keeps growing while demand is flat or shrinking (especially as executives get burned by "data scientists" who don't know how to help them build things of value). There's a huge crunch here; a lot of people I know in this group have been searching for jobs for months, eventually settling for a low quality job or giving up entirely :(
Or perhaps philosophical zombies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
Yes, that's a good point. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is open source software, for example, but many companies still pay for RedHat's support services, because the task of doing for yourself what they do for you can be complicated, especially where it comes to understanding, ingesting, and building security patches and things like that.
The pill is $5 in Africa, because it costs less than $5 to sell it in Africa. It costs $100 in the US because some Americans can afford to pay that much for one pill, and the rest can use manufacturers' coupons or collectively-bargained pricing agreements to pay less.

Oversight, regulation, and certification is what prevents some applecart-upsetter from barging in to the market, charging $12/pill without any haggling. Instead, the incumbents can be tipped off by captured regulators that someone who won't play ball is on his way, so they can temporarily lower their price to $5/pill until the new jerk runs out of funding and dies. Then it's back to $100/pill. Heck, make it $1500/pill, pour encourager les autres.
Offline batch learning is not contradictory to reinforcement learning. It just requires that it be an off-policy RL algorithm, which happily, many, like DQN, are.

> Similarly, the amount of driving data collected by Tesla from all its cars will be much larger than the data received by any single car.

Well, Tesla benefits from the fact that its cars are already agents, acting in the real world. So using it as a counter-example doesn't really work... You would need to imagine some sort of counterfactual Tesla which eschewed any real-world deployment or simulators. Which no one would ever do because the usefulness of trying to create a self-driving car database without agents or reinforcement learning is so obviously zero.

And anyway, most of Tesla's data, however, will be totally useless. You can train a simple lane-following CNN with a few hours of footage (as Geohotz demonstrated), but another million hours of highway driving is near-useless and doesn't get you much closer to self-driving cars (as perhaps Geohot also inadvertently demonstrated). What you need is the weird outliers which drive accident rates. So for example, the Google self-driving car team doesn't depend purely on collected data even from its agents, but simulates very rare scenarios as well. (If I may quote myself: "You need the right data, not more data.")

> This suggests that most learning will happen as a batch process, ahead of time. There may be some minor adjustments for personalization, but it doesn't seem like it's enough for Agent AI to outcompete Tool AI.

Even if we imagine that the dataset covers all possible sequences and doesn't need any kind of finetuning the loss, the agent AIs in this scenario are still going to benefit from actions over (going by section): 'internal to a computation', 'internal to training', 'internal to design', and 'internal to data selection'. In fact, if you want to have any hope of running effectively over extremely large datasets like hundreds of millions of sentences, you are going to effectively require some of those to keep training time tractable and runtime cheap (even Google can't afford a million TPUs for Google Translate). For example, regular hyperparameter optimization using a few dozen examples doesn't look very good when it takes a month on a GPU cluster to train a single model, but using a meta-RL RNN to do some transfer learning and pick out near-optimal architectures & hyperparameters in just a few iterations looks pretty nice.
There was a time where Chrome was the up and comer with very low market-share.

We need competition or we will suffer as end users.

Chrome's time will also come eventually. It's not a matter of if, but when. Vivaldi and Brave are growing and coming along very nicely. Brave is actually spearheaded by the ex CEO of Mozilla before he was fired for some nonsense.

https://brave.com/
> Start with a small praise and how the project had currently helped you. Even just a "Thank you for this awesome tool!" goes a long way.

This might be good advice in general, I'm not sure, but I mostly see this as just noise and it won't make me more likely to respond quickly or take any action. In terms of politeness, I think the more relevant quality is how entitled you come off as. If you come in saying, "This needs to change because of <downstream product requirement>", it makes me think you probably are thinking of the change in terms of how it helps you. If you come in saying, "This is the problem I'm having, this is the workaround I came up with, but this doesn't seem like the right behaviour because <x>", I'm more likely to figure that you actually took a holistic view and are thinking about how this change would affect all downstream users.
It's nothing extraordinary, really. In 2008 "Barack Obama" was the 3rd most edited article on Wikipedia. In 2004 it was "George W. Bush". [0]

[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited-wikipedi...
I'm working on that. Currently we are using LD but it's had some issues, enough that their CEO sent email and refunded some of our money.

As far as Scale is concerned we routinely see request timeout to LD and then suddenly a user loses a FF they previously had. Our cached value for the FF expires and then LD fails and then my customer is mad
Do you mean like non-orthogonal dimensions?
Machine learning PhDs >>> everything else.
I suggest you blacklist a few more subdomain requests, for example, I took ftp.googleblade.com, api., smtp. and could take a few others which could disrupt future expansions on this project.
Yes, and in the actual a/b tests nobody could single out the stradivari with any significance. The human performer turned out to be the most deciding factor by several magnitudes.
In my limited experience, there's a difference between a data scientist who can process data given data and a set of questions about it, and a data scientist who can figure out what data you need, and the questions that need to be answered.

I think making the transition from the first role to the second role comes with experience, both with the toolsets, and thinking about the problem as a whole.
Contrary to popular belief, not even activation messages are a 100% correct way to validate an email address. Due to the many hilarities involved in delivering an email, they can result in both false positives and false negatives.

Sadly there is no perfect way to validate an email address. You can either optimise for false positives or false negatives, but perfect precision is beyond hope.

Also note, the more validation you require, the more users you deter.
Don’t Waste Time Here’s How to Create Captivating Marketing Emails
C# <-> Rust is pretty straightforward. Just follow the C FFI side on Rust and C# has standard marshal mechanisms for calling C code.

extern/dllimport[1] Covers most of it. There's automatic conversion for CString/string and delegates as function pointers. If you need to go deeper than that there's the marshal namespace[2]. Going through C++/CX sounds really painful.

[1] -
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e59b22c5.aspx

[2] - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.inte...
Not sure if the 'diagram examples' at the bottom of the page is supposed to have links, but it doesn't.
Any good setup guides? One of the things I was hoping for was a good central management system, plus good roaming and handoff. I currently have two DD-WRT flashed ASUS routers, and having a hell of a time with handoff when going from one floor the the next.
Firefox has more than a 4% market share[0][1]. One of the main reasons I've heard, is that it's free, and that the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit.

I also just found this bit, that explains how some browsers might be over or under estimated, because of how their internals work[2]. So we really don't know what the market shares really are.

[0]http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-yearly-2008-2016

[1]https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ac...
unless the hidden-variables are non-local/global, though
Waymo enters formal talks with Honda to collaborate on self-driving
> learn gradient descent by gradient descent.

As far as 'learning gradient descent by gradient descent' goes, I think it's still an open question if a tiny RNN actually can improve meaningfully over ADAM etc :) I don't recall the paper showing any wallclock times, which suggested to me that the RNN was way slower even if it trained faster. The individual parameter adjustments are so low in the hierarchy of actions that the value may be minimal compared to higher up like architecture design.
If GE was the place with that stack ranking madness, then IMHO they definitely needed to change. But an app where you're continuously rated in real time doesn't sound much better! Not a recipe for innovation if everyone has to play enough politics to avoid getting down-voted on the company Reddit. Also, isn't it a bit contradictory that they "embrace decentralization" yet force everyone to move to a specific location? The statement about "cloud connected" trains and everything reminds me of this speech from In Good Company:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGiocp7_jE8
You can, but it has a bunch of problems that are solved by better positioning
Have you seen the FFI omnibus http://jakegoulding.com/rust-ffi-omnibus/ which includes C# examples?