skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the end of the article sums it all up very nicely: "But first you need to become a domain expert. Spend a year in Washington". They basically have no deep knowledge of the domain in which they operate and how to win the sales game. However brilliant you are, if you don't understand the rules of the game:

-> you are not playing the right game

--> you cannot win
Litecon SegWit: Abstainers to Start Signaling Today
This made me laugh (in a good way).

I agree, it actually does make total sense - but that doesn't mean I won't get confused :).

My only prior exposure to "GUIs over the network" were web applications, where the roles are essentially reversed. That is, the part responsible for accepting user input and rendering the UI is the client (the browser), and the part that performs the application logic is the server.

I naively assumed that X would work the same way, but it wasn't too hard to unlearn that misconception.
Facebook really needs to step up and add an anti border guard feature. Maybe a travel password that provides a hygenic profile.
Did he just proclaim the Facebook Global Government?
Yes, because nobody has a crystal ball that can guarantee them a future where they'll continue to make that kind of money throughout the rest of their careers.

Yes, because the business-types who run the world want to see a steady stream of promotions, or else they come to the conclusion that not only are you NOT worthy of more money, but you probably aren't worth what you're currently making.

I have friends who were forced to become third party contractors because the only vertical movement for their salaries within the corporate structure required them to become managers, which was an undesirable move for them. So they contracted out to their previous employers instead at more than twice their previous salaries.
"Rosling’s first discovery was that many people are not aware of even the most basic facts about global health and global development. Through surveys he conducted, Rosling found that at a time when poverty is falling faster than ever before, the majority of people think that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty is rising."

-- I suspect most people tend to extrapolate their experiences and their unhappiness to the globe, plus photos of impoverished Africans have been a media/charity staple for years.

But really, there are two things happening. More and more people are joining the money economy and so the people living on "pennies a day" are decreasing. But oppositely, wealth inequality is vastly increasing and often standards of living are decreasing for those in the money economy (who will never go back to living on pennies a day but can still have a terrible standard of living).

As Chico Marx said, "who ya' gonna believe, me or your own eyes".

As a counter-point to the "we gotta educate people 'bout how what they think is misery is really great" types of attitudes, I'd suggest this article from an OECD economist Gabriela Ramos, who seems to finally notice that just "education on statistics" isn't going to do it.

http://oecdinsights.org/2017/02/01/telling-the-whole-truth-i...
That command would run the redirection in the local shell. You can try it out and notice that it doesn't work, because the local shell does not have write access to that file.

Shell redirection works by opening the destination file and then dup2()'ing it to stdout before exec??()'ing the target program (sudo, in this case) -- since that open fails, the target program is never even run -- and the open()'ing certainly isn't done after sudo runs, since your shell isn't even part of the execution environment at that point (its image having been replaced by sudo's).

Another way to do it, is to invoke a shell that does the redirection after sudo runs, like so:

sudo bash -c '( echo blah; echo blah; echo blah ) >> /etc/nsmb.conf'
"We're all going to die of old age eventually, so I'm having cyanide for breakfast today."

These are really terrible counter-arguments.
It's supposed to be related to hadoop, right?
It's funny how async/await has influenced so many other languages but LINQ, that in my opinion is much more interesting (specially the DB stuff) for solving down to earth problems is sistematically ignored by other languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, etc...)
42 (YC W14) is looking for a software engineer
We're solving a big problem in the retail space: data consolidation and analytics. Our product has extremely high engagement across the board at international retailers. Our analytics platform is central to the workflow of global retail brands including our customers Rebecca Minkoff, The Frye Company, AllSaints, etc.

We are looking for a software engineer to join our founding team.

You'll be doing:

- Design and development of major product features
- Performance optimizations across our entire stack
- Discussions and feedback calls with our users
- Integrations with customer's systems using Spark
- Experiments using ML algorithms on large, real datasets

Apply here!

https://angel.co/42/jobs/209154-software-engineer

Our Website:

https://42technologies.com
You literally have no idea what you're talking about.
Cube Composer – functional programming game
I submit "Bunker" as a more approachable name. Not only does it have the connotation of "survives nuclear bombardment", but also suggests "keep your stuff safe here" and "something you could entrust with your life".
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose."
This brings up a point I've thought about quite a bit with autonomous vehicles. I studied transportation planning in college and one of the tenants is that human drivers are on a spectrum between aggressive and conservative about finding efficiencies in high traffic situations. The canonical example is that if a lane next to you is going significantly faster, an aggressive driver will perform a (relatively) unsafe maneuver to cut off drivers in the faster lane and change lanes.

IIRC, significant research has been performed to identify whether the resulting lane change is net positive (frees space in the slower lane) or net negative (causes cut off car to slow down).

If autonomous vehicles prioritize safety over efficiency by stopping if there's an ambiguous intersection, will that have a net negative effect on traffic while all these self-driving cars slow down for each other.
The same sort of tactic can be done with humans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_pAcIjqcuY

Nothing (and likely on-one) is foolproof.
> And if you need to support older databases (prior to SQL Server 2005), it gets worse: [some bad SQL]

If you're stuck using a database version that first came out a decade ago, you've got bigger problems than legacy syntax for pagination.

> Not only is this complicated and messy, but it violates the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself). Here's same query in LINQ. The gain in simplicity is clear: var thirdPage = query.Skip(20).Take(10);

If you're using OFFSET / LIMIT to do paging then you're doing it wrong. See here for the real way to handle paging for large result sets: http://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2013-07/pagination-done-t...
But if they can force you unlock your Facebook, can't they force you unlock your Gmail, AWS, Salesforce, internal company archive or some actually classified missile bunker?
His design is excellent for a developer. But maybe a little TOO minimal for a product designer.
To me this all sounds like "Hey I'm sorry that fake news took over my website and seemed to slide things into a horrendous direction for a while, so let me blame the audience for their inaction rather than redesign my service around truth, honesty, and verifiability of information."
Fake DevOps – A Rant
On one hand, I'd agree with you on that; I think we all know the urge to "modernize all the things!", whenever a language implements something new and shiny. And there's definitely much merit to resist that urge to some degree. However, it also is rarely really necessary to do this all in one go; one can also polish things up with strategies like the boyscout rule. And if there is no test for a piece of code - maybe leave it until you have corrected that.

Being conservative with new additions to your codebase seems a bit backward, though. Why not use the new, improved shiny language feature™ if you can?*

Of course, if you are prohibited by business requirements (e.g. missing modern compilers for a certain target platform) that's another story. Basically, it always comes down to practicality.

* A prime example would be the new way you can implement Singletons with C++11. Once you've used that, you realize how horrid pretty much all C++98-based attempts at this are.

Yes, I realize Singletons are often a bad idea.
> Honestly I find that the experience you gain by reading/writing Go code and consuming online content is more beneficial than the book.

This applies to almost all languages and technologies!
Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this! And thanks to Microsoft, Codenvy, RedHat, etc., for their foundational work on LSP.

For the curious: we have links to more language server implementations at http://langserver.org. And if you want to see what real LSP requests/responses look like, go to https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/... and hover/click on tokens with the JS console open.

Happy to answer any questions about LSP or our usage of it.
A new era of conferencing – mobile conferencing
The best intuition I've heard for the two-child problem is as follows.

Suppose you have two doors with two children behind them. The 1/2 chance of a boy version works like this: Say you randomly open one of the two doors and there is a boy. That doesn't give you any information about the other boy, so you say that the probability of the other one being a boy is 1/2.

1/3: This time beforehand you know that there is at least one boy. Then you open a door and it happens to be a boy. That tells you something about the other door, which alters its probability to 1/3.
As Lessig said, the code is law. Given facebook's role, undoubtedly they will (and do) play a role in governance.
What if all your web requests were automatically mined by your ISP, by advertising networks, and by the government?

What if through some really badly implemented semantic analysis you're flagged as a terrorist and thrown in jail without trial on "evidence" that, only if examined closely, makes no sense? This is the Brazil outcome.

What if everything you do online haunts you forever? You searched for bullets once. Your employer finds out about this because at work you're being served ads about bullets. They fire you for some bullshit reason that's legally air-tight because they don't want you going postal.

You really don't understand what a world with no privacy looks like.
Zuck is a cuck. The only tech company i sort of trust these days is Google. Fuck facebook.
Unconvinced.

Excel is fine for opening up a table and doing some quick numberwang.

But, as soon as you have to take your piece of work and start making little variations and tacking bits on, or running it on different bits of data, or God forbid you want to actually test your code (and make no mistake, code is what you are making), well, it all involves rather a lot of clicking and opportunity for fuck-ups.

Of course, R itself hits limitations pretty quickly. While technically it's a general purpose programming language, trying to use it on non-tabular data or to assemble even a medium-sized program leads to pain.

My rough rule of thumb is:

* Checking if it's got vaguely sensible data in? Column https://linux.die.net/man/1/column.

* Just looking, maybe aggregating a column or doing a simple summarise? Excel (or Libreoffice, why not?).

* Giving outputs to someone else or might need to do it more than once? R.

* Need sensible data structures and useful abstractions? Python.

* Need more speed? C or Java or whatever.
I agree wholeheartedly. Also of note, the combinators Rust offers on Option/Result make it possible to chain multiple operations that could fail and then check for the first error that occurred. In Go, you have to check each potential error immediately after it's potential return. This allows Rust to be just as clear as Go while being more concise and enforcing at compile-time that errors are handled. Propagating errors out of a function is also easier given try!/?.

I really don't see a downside of Rust's approach compared to Go's after having programmed in both. But, then again, Rust's approach requires generics and I know Go's team doesn't want to go in that direction.
I find this letter to be deeply cynical. There's a baked in assumption that a global community is a good thing and that the only possible reason to resist it is because you're being left behind by its benefits. I don't think that's true and I certainly don't think it should be assumed a priori. There are people in this country, and every where in the world, who don't want globalization. And it's not because they haven't received enough of the benefits or need to be educated better, they don't want it for real reasons and, in a Democracy, that should be an acceptable stance. If we're not willing to accept that stance than we're forcing people into a global community that matches our vision for the future, not theirs. In other words it's a plot for world domination of one world view over another. I find it deeply cynical that instead it masquerades as a virtuous plan to help all man kind.
Hello, Gradient Descent
> Outgoing baggage jumped out as a major trouble spot; Stanley went to investigate,

Does it really take an "engineer" to find a trouble-spot and fix it ? Why do you need a billion-dollar fund to grab engineering talent to do what the highly-paid leaders of, say, airports, are already supposed to be doing ? If they can't figure it out, isn't there a whole industry of consultancy firms that send "analysts" through your organization to do the same thing?

If this sector is so profitable, will it cause the same crisis that privatization of hospitals did to healthcare ? Say "Global Infrastructure Partners" expands and "buys" JFK, ATL, LAX, just like private healthcare bought all the hospitals. Now they can start jacking up their landing fees (each year) until air travel becomes unaffordable. What's to stop them from turning this into the ultimate regulatory capture ?
What i mostly like about LINQ is IQueryable. It's awesome!

I just design the IQueryable with if's, switches, ... and when i need to execute it. I use .ToList()

The IQueryable is then translated to SQL and executed it.
I am only a mere MSc Statistics student in a Canadian university, but from my perspective, if you are succeeding as a physics PhD in a tough and respected program, then you are more than equipped to do anything you set your mind to in the tech sphere. I'm interested in AI/ML too and I read papers to try and keep up - I'm surprised at how many ideas and methods have ties to statistical physics and other domains that you're probably already comfortable with as a physicist.

In my city's (Vancouver) Slack chat, a lot of the most knowledgable participants in data science discussions are physicists (and they're proud of the fact that they're physicists). Check out the Director of Data Science at Unbounce, who published papers and worked as a postdoc as a physicist before starting in industry data science at PlentyOfFish. Worst case scenario if you find yourself pigeonholed, find a home in Vancouver with like-minded people.

I'd say finish your PhD, skip the AI PhD and go for your ultimate goal ASAP!
"How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during crises and rebuilds afterwards in a world where anyone across the world can affect us?"

For one, give people using your site some basic privacy so their own governments can't use your site to target political enemies.
Ama's Lullaby – A point-and-click game in a cyberpunk world
Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots
If the title says some piece of tech "beats" some other piece of tech can we just all act like proper engineers and not post it here at all and save us all some time?
More like,

-> you are not playing the right game
--> you will only win by luck
It's not my company or me, it's my clients. Here's a sort of long winded story explaining what I mean that the corporate world can't use anything with the name "cockroach". If you disagree after reading, I'm open for a friendly debate.

Average project, some 60 year old VP signing off on 100k of custom software with 8 pages of lawyer speak contracts is NOT going to allow "his" project to run off of "cockroach database". VP's/CEO's like to take personal ownership of projects they feel will go well, and ones done with us usually do. None of these people want ANY chance of their project getting criticized internally, so nobody will use CockroachDb. It's just not going to happen. Having successful projects is an easy way for these people to gather promotions and respect. Having any part of it do with "cockroach" could result in the whole project being an embarrassment.

Imagine the database goes down one day. One of their low level staff calls us(we have ongoing support contract). Problem gets rapidly escalated to development. One of our lead developers replies to the email thread, that by now has a third of the clients' company on it. "Yeah see the problem was the cockroach database that wasn't supposed to go down needed to be restarted" . Most of the staff think we're joking. Guarantee this becomes a big pun around their office, every time anything breaks in the app they say "maybe the cockroaches on the back end died again".

It's made worse by the fact that issues in software systems are commonly called "bugs". Well, our system doesn't have general bugs anymore, it has "cockroaches". Do you think this is an unlikely scenario? Because it's not. Besides the word "cockroach" this is exactly how urgent issues tend to be reported and fixed. Replace "cockroach" with "Microsoft" and I've probably violated my NDA. After that incident, whoever championed the project, probably our strongest ally in the company, resents us for making such a stupid mistake that resulted in his project becoming a joke. Maybe we aren't as great of a dev shop as he once thought? Maybe it's better to do open bidding next time so whoever wins he can't be blamed directly for what happens.

You could say their company culture sucks, maybe it does? But that doesn't change that I can't use it on any client projects because of the chance we'll lose hundreds of thousands over a stupid name.

There's plenty of other names that convey meaning but don't make lawyers nervous. Your attitude of "oh, well if you can't use it your company culture sucks" is EXACTLY why nobody will rename it and why corporate american won't touch it. Nobody cares about how cool it is to be edgy when millions of dollars are on the line.

If you plan on forcing clients to use it you might as well hold a going away party for any of your clients with more than 5M revenue.
Is there a special filter or manual curation process for the comments at the bottom of Zuckerberg's posts?

From my skimming through the first 30-40 comments, they're uniformly positive. I find it hard to believe that any internet forum open to public commentary would have that many positive responses.
I'm a little lost, what is your differentiation between CVL and CVE?

To add to your praise of CVEs, one example of the victories of the CVE (particularly the Casablanca-class escort carrier[1][2][3]) is kept in Chicago to this day[4].

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca-class_escort_carrie...

2) one of the more interesting men of WWII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_J._Kaiser

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Shipyards

4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-505
https://cvdazzle.com
A mostly dead technology, but does teach some general programming in the way you're asking: https://www.amazon.com/d/0596805632
Same thing should hold true for blind upvotes on social sites like this.
The issue is essentially due to the curse of dimensionality. Since your input is very high dimensional, you can find some direction where you don't have go very far to maximize some other output. You can find a few of these adversarial examples and add them to the training set, but there are going to be an exponential number of other directions where you only have to go a little farther. So you can't just add all these perturbations to your training set because there are too many of them. It's a hard problem. (I've been thinking about this issue a lot for my research...)
Our Journey Choosing the Best CDN Partner (Spoiler, It Wasn't Cloudfront)
Super carriers are still useful even if they become increasing vulnerable. Most US military conflict is with developing countries who lack access to cutting edge weapons

But their vulnerability is overstated imo. It's easy to build a missile that can physically get through an AEGIS defense. It's hard to accurately target ships during a time of war. Over the horizon targeting is tough. The US would destroy or jam satallite.

If the US were dumb enough to put a carrier in the middle of the Taiwan straight during a shooting war, then it will at a minimum be disabled. But 200 miles off shore?
Vettery
This book has been hugely helpful for me to get started in Rust. I've been following since the original "Rust for Rubyists" from Steve Klabnik.

Steve if you are listening, thanks for putting all the hard work into the original book, the revision as The Rust Programming Language, and this most recent revision.
Nobody is going to give a flying fuck what your company is named on a mortgage application.

Honestly there are companies with _much_ worse names in active use like "Dick & Daughters"[0] or "Ismail ANUS"[1] who even got an appointment to the queen.

Seriously, it's bikeshedding, and the point of the DB is that you don't think about it all day.

I also don't think of women called Cassandra when I use the database of the same name. Bikeshedding. Seriously.

[0] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08610385

[1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/5-sFnEsibrDnUR2-...
I think you may be mixing up the state of the company and/or its mission at the time of founding/early investment with their state at the present time.

> Uber isn't about "getting privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar;" its mission statement is, "make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone."

I don't think that was from the get go.

> It seems you are viewing these products in a very negative light, and in doing so you're missing the forest for the trees. I would guess that all of the companies above will be wildly successful, and will have a wide range of products, all dedicated to achieving their stated mission. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Yes and no. I most certainly don't view Google in a negative light. I'll admit I view Facebook as largely existing to promote rampant consumerism. Snapchat...don't even know where to begin.

Nonetheless - the point of my comment, and why I found sama's statement interesting - was the assertion that lacking a large, important mission statement (or big hairy audacious goal, if you will) is an impediment to growth (or ability to "become very large".) When you look at the winners - they usually do have a lofty, all encompassing mission statement - but it would seem not to have been that way at inception. If anything, I thought the preaching in the startup world has been about finding a niche, an angle someone hasn't seen, make something people want...and then expand from there.

A final thought - even Y Combinator itself seems an example of this (at least in my eyes.) What started out as a fund/startup incubator is now truly trying to tackle and invest in very audacious things (such as Universal Health Care.) It's able to do that now that it has become a successful, large brand in and of itself.