skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has spent time in the math world, I sympathize with proactive's response. Once you get to a "high enough" level, the lessons you learned earlier have to be unlearned.

Not just true in mathematics but in engineering as well. I was taking an engineering course in my sophomore year where I had a system of equations in 3-4 variables. I spent forever trying to solve it (analytically), and failed. So did most of the class. The next lecture, the professor showed us how to do it. A mixture of plots, etc reduced the solution space and the rest was trivial. He also said "You could just use the solver in your calculator/MATLAB".

I wasn't satisfied with his answer. It felt like cheating. I didn't learn the cool way to do things.

But in the real world, if you can get the solution this way, it's perfectly valid. As long as you can confirm that you found a/the solution (trivial to do).

With the x^3=27 answer, it is the onus of the instructor to specify explicitly that "guessing is not allowed". Why? Because as others have mentioned, it is totally appropriate in mathematical circles to guess a solution. Much work in mathematics is done that way.

In various classes (mathematics/engineering/physics), I've both utilized non-standard ways to solve problems on tests, and have seen it done by students on tests I grade. This is to be encouraged. Especially because this is what mathematicians/physicists love to do in their real work.

If your goal is to ensure they understand cube roots, either make a problem that is hard to guess (e.g. x^3 = 24), or be explicit about it. Even with x^3 = 24, if they use Newton's method, that should be graded correct.
This may or may not be your issue. But I found that the Windows Defender system would start going nuts on files related to Discord. This would cause all sorts of problems (though most of the files involved seemed to be more related to their auto-update system, which shouldn't have impacted the running process... or so I would have thought!).
It's not so much the productivity that means things to me.

I want to feel like I'm achieving things, and if I sit about all day doing nothing then that isn't going to happen. The only way to achieve things is to be productive.

Plus it feels great at the end of the day, to look back and see everything you've managed to do.
Welcome news.
I would love it if DDG could make that their niche. Unfortunately, as it stands having no option to filter results by time makes it hard to meet all my needs as a developer.
The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this is the wrong world view and that we should acknowledge that many unsuccessful people work really hard and just got dealt a bad deck of cards. These different world views lead to different priorities in public policy among other things.
I think that's an accurate take on how things currently are, but disagree that it doesn't scale up. The company I'm at now does a great job, and there are 5 tiers between me and the CEO. I think certain priorities scale pretty well.
You can take an adaptive approach, but almost universally it is done wrong. https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/2016/10/20/the-fatal-flaw-of...

FYI, the difference with Google Analytics and most other A/B platforms is that GA uses multi-armed bandit. It adjusts the proportions according to the results. This is nice because it effectively ends the test for you, and you don't have to stress about suboptimal success rates just for the purpose of experimentation. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2844870
I didn't know that, thanks. I remember how much I love ublock origin when I start visiting websites in chrome on mobile. We get used with a clean browsing and feels like this is the norm until you have to do the same thing on mobile.
That's funny - My 68000 based Amiga 2000 had a SCSI card in it with a Z80 on it.

That machine was a real monster - I had a bridge-board in it: the A2000 had both ISA and Zorro-II (Amiga proprietary) buses, with one ISA and one Zorro-II slot in line so that you could buy a bridge-board that held an 8086 etc. on it to basically give you a "PC in a window" on your Amiga.

I'd then bolted a 286 accelerator board onto it, and a 68020 accelerator board onto the Amiga-side (I think both were of the type that slotted into the CPU socket andwhere you re-seated the CPU in the accelerator in case you wanted to switch to the slower CPU for compatibility reasons)

On top of that the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500's used an 6502-compatible SOC with onboard RAM and PROM as their keyboard controllers.

So that one machine had a 68000 (though not usually running), 68020, 8086 (not usually running), 80286, Z80 and a 6502-compatible. I found it quite pleasing to have one machine with representatives of four of the most common CPU families at the time in it.

> Which is why I've never really understood people who focus on one chip to "define" a system, it really is about all the parts playing in harmony.

It was about identity in a sense when so much was done in assembler on the main CPU, and most people are never aware of those auxiliary CPU's.
I find Starcraft2 fun to watch but it's not like I hang out on twitch to watch each day. Usually if a tourney lines up with a weekend where I can stay up until 3am is where I indulge :)

Dwindling twitch numbers doesn't always mean a game isn't fun to watch.
Isn't that exactly what the paper is about?
At university, they forced us using logs to solve similar equations with extremely large exponents. Otherwise it's nigh impossible to calculate any answer with the allowed calculator.
It's actually easier for people outside of US, who are forced to deal with languages that require Unicode to work properly. If you screw up somewhere, you notice right away.

But those for whom the majority of input is ASCII can often get away with broken code (that e.g. writes out Latin-1 JSON) for a while. And then they get input with a word like "naïve", and oh look, all hell breaks loose.

Python 3 solves this problem by making every transition problem explicit, requiring the developer to stop and think what they're doing when going from byte representation to strings, and vice versa.

"Explicit is better than implicit."
I don't have any experience with this, but I suppose it's probably due to a) a lack of awareness and b) a lack of support.

For one, people probably aren't aware enough of unicode to think to use a unicode character in their password, and they probably also aren't aware of how to actually type a unicode character.

Plus, website support for unicode chars is... unpredictable. If I set my password to "foo1234", then I expect it to be "foo1234", not just "foo" and a lack of any error. Similar to how password length is sometimes just randomly truncated.
These all seem like good things in a leader, but it does miss a vital quality, which is being able to guide those around the leader to perform at an elevated level, usually because the leader has the ability to both convey the importance of the mission and to be a good "whisperer," i.e. someone who listens to their team, understands what makes them tick, and supports them in performing at their best.
Related blog post : https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/exact-computati...

As someone who has worked with building, testing, and numerical software, this seems like a great thing. Generally floating point computations are effectively non-deterministic: you (or the compiler) change something that doesn't seem like it matters and all of a sudden your result changes. Having more methods available that give you the deterministically best right thing at little additional expense is great!
Sure, you can have empathy with that mentality. But, when you assume everyone less successful than you is less smart and/or doesn't work as hard as you, it's not as likely that you will.
Many tales have been woven about Uber's imminent demise based on these vague financials that come from a single unverified anonymous source.
> is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other bills)?

Good on you for pursuing continued education.

Yes it's viable - never lose hope in yourself for anything. The Brain Residency has no age requirement; in fact, the program looks for diverse academic/career experiences. You'd be surprised how close you are to your dream job if you are passionate, hardworking, and lucky.

I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). I took regular CS courses in college and started focusing on ML 1.5 years ago. Beyond taking courses, I highly recommend building your own projects - it exercises your independent research ability and creativity.

The Brain residency pays a good wage for the SF Bay Area (comparable to new grad salary at average tech firms), so you should be able to pay your bills. I've heard rumors that many other companies highly invested in ML are following in Google Brain's example and starting similar residency programs. Your ML career path need not be at Google, though we're a pretty solid choice ;)
That was something that really bugged me about this essay. It says it's for "leaders", but it's really addressed to CxOs. I was hoping to get some useful insight into becoming a better informal leader, but there was very little applicable.
How will this affect UI patterns like Modals?
Sure, the system doesn't _have_ to be that way for people to work together. But sooner or later they'll come to the same conclusion you have - what's the point if they're not seeing equal returns? Who knows what will happen at that point - I'd rather fix the system before we get to that point.

And sure, you can have some empathy even if you don't have all of the empathy. But those are definitely not orthogonal concerns. Being able to empathize fully with someone's situation IMO includes recognizing that everything truly is luck. Like down to your genetic makeup. Hell, being alive is lucky.
>Your method is wrong because you aren't finding the solution. You are finding a sequence of numbers that converges to the solution.

...

>The answer, over the reals, is 7^(1/3).

So if the student did not write 2, but wrote 8^(1/3), it is OK?

As for the method being wrong, no - it isn't. The sequence converges. If you want an exact answer, you should specify that you want an exact answer.

>The solution to the equation in question is a number and not a sequence.

Sorry, but every number is a sequence. You can start with rational numbers, and define every real number as a sequence of rationals. Lots of books actually do this to define what a real number is.
I usually rate one star when an app I'm using tries to force me to review when I'm in the middle of trying to use it.
Wasn't C designed by a man?
> When your business makes up over a quarter of South Korea's GDP

The definition of too big to fail.
The video naturally needs to be understood within the historical context, and makes a powerful point about the consequences of nationalism as a political movement.

Google defines populism as "support for the concerns of ordinary people", which to me sounds like what a representative form of government is designed to do.

I would argue that it's the opposite that we need to be more wary of; governments (politicians) who don't listen to the concerns of their electorate, no matter how unpalatable they may be.

Over time this leads to deep seated resentment, the feeling of being marginalized within ones own community, and so on. Ultimately this opens the door to all kinds of demagoguery; the politicians end up with the very thing they were trying to avoid, except they're no longer in power.
Presumably they are hoping to build brand loyalty - they want you to open your Hotels.com (or whatever) app directly next time you need to book, instead of doing a Google search
> (Post author here) I'm not incredibly familiar with the ins and outs of MongoDB Inc's business model, but I agree with your assessment.

"I don't know much about one of our signifcant competitors' business model." doesn't sound like something you would want to hear from someone just announcing their business model.
Show HN: Simple serverless services for Google AppEngine
Designing for Failure – Dan Callahan (a postmortem for Mozilla Persona) [video]
Isn't this more of a sign that restaurant/hotel businesses are becoming more SEO savvy, and that aggregators are becoming outdated?

Remember, the aggregators originally dethroned the travel agencies as the 'experts' in connecting people with what they want. Google search is in the business of providing information, meaning if they have the info available they'll provide an aggregated list of restaurants to someone who wants restaurants.
It's sort of related. In the paper they are still learning parameters for a single new network, as opposed to training a new network to be good at linking up other networks.
Good point, I'm not sure. My instinct has now transformed to closing the tab instead of the popup though, the close button is in a predictable place.
Because the user didn't scroll, the site got lucky and Google didn't have a result for that particular query. It was a miracle, it won't happen again, there is no second chance, hit them with everything.
The amount of consumer studies done on grocer layouts is enormous. The direction of foot traffic has been decided from rtl despite our common ltr reading format because it's more profitable to do so, the checkout line with small items marked higher than in other parts of the same store for the same reason, and so much more.

If your sentiment were true, most heavily weighted expendables would all be located in the back simply because of labor. Labor is cheap when you can increase revenue from every potential customer with basic layout adjustments.
I grew up with a bidet, I don't have one now that I moved out - it's my number one source of unhappiness.
>We are a pretty diverse group at work and we do a lot of teasing with racial stereotypes. I think it's a lot of fun as long as there is an underlying level of respect. This is much better than the thought policing a lot of people do.

That's the way offices were when I started working, and everyone was happier. If you're doing that in the US today eventually someone's gonna call a lawyer, which is why people do the thought policing.
Heh, measuring average and unbiased user opinions on the internet is probably the second most uncertain thing in this universe after actual uncertainty in quantum systems.

Both opt-in and opt-out ways of doing surveys on your website introduce bias. The opt-out (read: in your face pop-up) is more likely to make people angry which makes them more likely to leave negative reviews.

The opt-in version will only be found by people having a relatively extreme opinion about your site, good or bad.

The difference being in the quantity of the data. The first will probably be answered by more people, since the people who'd have completed the survey in the second case are probably more or less a subset of the people who would complete the survey in the first case. All of this makes it no surprise that most websites that want to have any kind of feedback from their users go for the opt-out strategy. More is better if less is not in any way more :)
> Knowing how to get the answer in a problem with easy numbers is not the point.

So, don't use easy numbers?

> I give the students nice numbers and in exchange they are expected to tell me a general way of solving that type of problem.

If this quid-pro-quo is explicit, that seems fair. But I still don't see why "nice numbers" are necessary.
First Cell – membrane first hypothesis (1995)
Professional mathematicians don't guess answers to theorems. They sometimes guess counterexamples. But no one guesses answers to a theorem. I've seen, "I notice that A is a solution to this equation does anyone know a method for formally solving it?"

Guessing is not a method of solving. It is a method of finding counterexamples. Two different types of problems.

I accept any mathematically valid method of solving a problem. Mathematically method means, method that works even if I trivially change it by using different numbers.
Ask HN: Are Product Ripoffs by Large Companies Legal?
There is a lot of nuance to the subject, but there seems to be an obvious trend where large companies build a platform and then steal the ideas of smaller developers and incorporate it into the platform. It appears to my untrained eye to be anti-competitive and monopolistic.

A small for instance is Apple created Night Shift for IOS which is incredibly similar to F.lux which had been around for years ( but blocked from the AppStore).

Is this behavior legal? Does the HN community feel that it's ethical?
Neural Net Plays Atari “Fishing Derby”
I think the problem lies with the question. Simple question gets simple answer. If you want the solution in the general real case, ask x^3 = 7 since it cannot be solved by the easiest method. If you ask to solve x^3 = 8, I firmly believe it is fair game to solve using a method that only works for small integer.
Can't pass up the opportunity to post a link to:

"Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than"

http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
> it is more likely that the prosecutor is the one who has ulterior motives

I could see equally likely, but more? Why more?

We recently saw a corruption scandal, which went through to indictment, against another Korean family [1]. Park, to whom Lee has been connected, has already been impeached [2]. The preponderance of evidence I've seen favours the prosecution.

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/business/international...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/korea-s-p...
Because it doesn't really matter. A tree works just fine as an index, be it 100k or 1 billion records. The other part you mention - self tuning - is also quite clear imho: either the DB is so small that indexes genuinely do not matter (and this can be surprisingly large today) or it's large enough that you don't want the DB to reorganize itself on a whim. We all know "smart" systems, and we all experienced how flaky their outputs are. You don't want a DB that quite literally scratches the scratch storage because of that.

And if we are talking about serious need for indexes, then we almost certainly are talking about subtle tradeoffs that are unlikely to be made like we hope by algorithms that optimize aggregate metrics (eg. average/median query time, cache efficiency etc.) -- consider complicated reporting queries that don't run often, but take a while (but since they are seldom run they are not influential on the databases' performance metrics). A "smart" DB could decide to drop an index, because it accelerates a common write operation, and no important queries needed that index anyway. But now your complex reporting queries are all turned into nested full-table scans. Oops...
Assuming it's anything like the Emacs mode for Coq, they're probably just using an editor/editor plugin that replaces the operators/keywords with the mathematical symbols.
I would guess the computational complexity involved in training the top level network would make the project infeasible.
>>The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence...I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc

That's not exactly true. Southwest, for example, has had only a single unprofitable quarter since being a public company. They have never had an unprofitable year.

American has had stretches of bad times, leading to bankruptcy, in the past. But, more recently, are making money. $7.6 billion in profit for 2015, $4.2 billion in 2014, and so forth.
> someone controlled by Google

Manufacturers that ship GMS are not controlled by Google. I think you don't know a lot about how to apply for GMS integration, it's as easy as filling a form and passing the CTS (compatibility test suite).

Google is providing some non-free files (basically apps and libraries, all sandboxed) and configuration files to manufacturers that they apply on top of AOSP (or possible extensions they did). The only way for Google to break out of the sandbox is to make a backdoor in the AOSP code, that is openly available for review.

To repeat what I said to the other guy here: If you are not on a Nexus or Pixel device, Google is UNABLE to look into private app data of third-party apps (if they correctly configure the backup feature). This is possible with Signal only due to the mentioned "backdoor", making this an important issue.

You are however right that the manufacturer(s) might be able to look into app's private data, but that's another issue (especially as most manufacturers are non-US companies).
That "if shit happens, I've got your back" is so missing from civilian life is what has been so destructive to our societies. We are actually all in this together as a country, and every day our fates grow more entwined as a world, yet we allow ourselves to be divided in so many ways. We need to find a new way to build trust rather then only destroying it as the news media has done. Maybe the problem is of timescales. In the past a lack of trust would spell disaster in short order. The same is true in your example, in the military trust of your fellow soldier is required for survival. But today societies have grown strong and large enough that some can foreseeably survive for a generation or more without widespread trust. So the incentive for individuals to be trustworthy in the broadest sense has diminished immensely.
Math does tend to be a bit dogmatic, yes.
Link to paper authored by Stewart, Bhautik Joshi and David Shapiro of Adobe and Starlight Studios https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04928v1.pdf
I've largely stopped using chrome on mobile because of the lack of ublock. When I do use chrome it's with JavaScript disabled.

Despite a few UI differences switching to Firefox on mobile with ublock has been excellent.
I did share, despite being on HN. This was because my previous employers did verify my previous salaries, with one demanding a paystub prior to offer. I also met with HR prior to meeting the division head (he had to switch to last), so I was nervous about making a negative impression on site. It was a mistake, I know, but I thought I could just negotiate it back up since Glassdoor has made information public.
The worst part about their worthless surveys is that it's pretty much impossible to give feedback about the actual survey itself.

It's easy to see how this happens; a clueless exec at big-corp decides they need data, survey company gives them a sales pitch they can't refuse, exec never bothers to actually check out the product.

These worthless surveys are almost exclusively on the websites large enterprisey companies that got off the clue-train years ago.
I don't think that's humility at all. It might take not caring about what other people think of you, but that's a totally separate dimension than humility.
Thanks. But the NHTSA report looks at data starting with "MY 2014" (i.e. calendar year 2013) cars.

If AEB did lead to a 40% reduction in crash rates for Tesla cars, as it did for other car models, I suspect that moving the dividing line by five months later wouldn't change the figures much: you would still have a lot more crashes prior to AEB and fewer after.