skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I wrote it without much seriousness, I think my comment does highlight a problem with the whole discussion here.

People like to boast about how important it is to know these kinds of complexities, but in reality they just use mental heuristics to come up with them (which is how we got n^2 and exp(n) from my manager).

For string concatenation, is it important they know how to do it in a linear fashion? Or is it important that they can actually calculate the complexity? Or do you want an in-between where it is OK that they do not really know the complexity, but can tell you that it is definitely super-linear?

I've seen people be fussy that they should be able to explain why it is n^3 (or n^2 or whatever), in a somewhat rigorous fashion. I say "somewhat" because when I then turn to them and ask them to derive the exact expression (not just in big-Oh notation), they will usually fail. Then they will go through hoops trying to explain why it is important to know it in big-Oh notation but not all that important to be able to derive the exact formula.

(There is, of course, a camp that does not believe much in big-Oh and actually prefers to know the leading constant, etc. My example is not contrived.)

I find people will nitpick to their level of granularity, and it is always easy to come up with some justification for their level of preference. But to others, it is just nitpicking.

For me, it is important to know that this is super-linear, whereas one can do it linearly. I don't care if the candidate knows it is n^3 or n^2. That is also why I did not point out my manager's error at saying it is exp(n).
I totally agree that my observations are symptomatic of a bubble. That doesn't change that there are a meaningful differences between bubbles. People who blindly trust scientific consensus live in a bubble, but it's the best kind of bubble.

The Obamacare scenario you describe doesn't match up with reality. It's not true that they oppose Obamacare on rational grounds (e.g. I don't want my insurance to go up). Obamacare is the republican solution to health insurance, it's a federal version of Romneycare. Republicans should love it, because it's their own program, but they hate it. This hatred for Obamacare is the product of relentless fear-mongering by the right wing press and talk radio. What's going on here is much more serious than just groups of people living in their own bubble and consuming their own kind of media. Bubbles aren't a new thing, embracing a fact-free worldview is.
I have to disagree about cloning dinosaurs.

A true AI isn't even well-defined; would we even know one if we saw it? We don't even know how consciousness works in ourselves.

Warp drive we can understand at a high level and identify if we saw one, but our knowledge of physics says it's impossible. It may be possible, but not according to our theories; we'll have to either come up with different theories to invent it, or if someone stumbles across is, we'll have to modify our theories to explain it. (We do have one theoretical warp drive, but it relies on negative mass IIRC.)

Cloning dinosaurs isn't like that. It's completely plausible. We've already cloned sheep and other animals. I believe the main thing holding us back from cloning dinosaurs is having enough intact DNA, or maybe some other technical hurdles related to the cloning process (after all, cloning a sheep wasn't that hard since we have no shortage of existing sheep to use for incubation; we don't have existing dinosaurs for this).

Cloning dinosaurs is "science fiction" the way building a habitat on the Moon is: it's completely plausible scientifically, it's just being held back by other factors. AI and warp drive are not like this.
You should tell your mom that there are fewer abortions when women are given access to them. It's counter intuitive but there's data to back it up.

Bill Clinton said it best: abortion should be safe legal and rare.
Similar in intention and scope to Keybase file sharing scheme.
New item from the Washington Post's fact checkers: In the 33 days so far, we’ve counted 132 false or misleading claims

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claim...
That's because bash.exe isn't /usr/bin/bash. It's a confusingly-named frontend for WSL, and can essentially launch and proxy any Linux app.
I use the kindle app on my phone, but I really like owning physical copies of my books. One of my friends recommended Infinite Jest to me, but told me to buy an e-reader specifically for that book. I got the book itself, and I wish I would have listened to him. It literally occupies half the volume of my backpack, and my arms get tired holding it in my usual reading position.
Ah, thanks. Article didn't have a link to upspin.io, so I've missed this link.

Yes, with client-side signing it makes more sense.

So it's something similar to Keybase Filesystem, except distributed? That's a good thing, then.
Yes, exactly. Usually they are in the form of http://sometrackingwebsite.com/someid?nextUrl=https://youtub....
Upspin is one of Google's many Open Source projects. It's not really skunkworks, per se, just something that we wanted to work on and were lucky enough to be supported by Google in doing so.

The email addresses are Upspin user names whose public keys are registered with a central server, key.upspin.io. To act as an Upspin client, you need to sign up: https://upspin.io/doc/signup.md

Requests made by Upspin users are signed with those public keys. Servers validate those users by validating the signatures against the key published by key.upspin.io.
There are always some ranking factors at play for ordering the search results.
I went to a state school and received a great education that was very cheap. Not sure what your comment was meant to imply?
You know, downvoting me doesn't prove your point either.
They might be able to attract better talent if they can write English properly in their recruitment materials, though.
Dwitter – A social network for short JavaScript demos
Looks like someone wants to bring plan9 into the 21st century !
I was wondering if anyone had heard of any more. These things are acceptable to some extent assuming it's not worse than they describe!
But what about global warming ? Wouldn't rising water levels be a big threat to such experiments ?
"Good" and "necessary" are different things, though. I consider it "good" to know as much as possible about things I'm interested in. I don't consider it "necessary."
We have actually converted quite a few Google Site Search customers over (lack of customizations, lack of phone support etc.) - www.cludo.com

The weird thing is that lack of time you get to find an alternative, it doesn't put Google in a good light.
I'm all for exploring new approaches, however:

a) Salt water is highly corrosive. Wouldn't maintenance costs be high?

b) Isn't marine biology highly sensitive to heat pollution?

For high latency services like Amazon Glacier, wouldn't it make sense to host in a place like Iceland? Really cheap hydrothermic/clean power. Highly educated local talent pool, and relatively consistent cool temperatures. If you're maintaining 80F (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/14/googl...) the ambient temps outside should provide ample cooling year round.

For lower latency requirements, wouldn't it be worth it to install efficient cooling powered by electricity? (preferably renewable) With cheap solar who really cares about grid power loss and associated inefficiencies?

Essentially, I think it makes sense to get better at solar than to have Steve Zissou as a server admin.
However I would contend that being able to bang out a optimal b-tree implementation from memory on-demand isn't first principles knowledge, but is merely _trivia_ ability.

a) What the heck is an optimal B-Tree? (Don't you have to tune the parameters? b) I would also contend that it's trivia, and merely a way of getting at the ability to apply First Principles knowledge.

I would further argue it's not even first principles knowledge that is most important, but rather a combination of critical-thinking, enough self-awareness to notice when you've exceeded your current knowledge/experience, and sufficient humility to fix that lack rather than plod along with blinders on.

So you're not disagreeing with the value of 1st principles knowledge. Then you cite an even deeper kind of knowledge. Where exactly are we disagreeing here?
I think it's the same experience. There's a reason these single-player games usually cast you in the role of someone important, pivotal even.

What are those "actual benefits" that players miss out on?
This sounds a whole lot like the Keybase filesystem (in intent, if not implementation): https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs
i do really like the whole email approach in the filename to this.
I don't know if I would call it better or worse, it's more about preferred workflow. I'm typing this on a MBP and I have a fleet of VMs specifically because I'm tired of playing the platform game. I can configure a VM specific to an app's needs faster than hosing my host OS with a very specific configuration that may not match production environments. Even with version managers like rvm or nvm/n there is just a lot to get wrong. It may be faster or less resource intensive to not have to spin up a VM but I've been in .NET land with desktop apps and now various web platforms enough to prefer this workflow. For someone like me, this would be for personal usage versus job related activities but I do see the benefit of having the choice. I just hope I'm strong enough to resist the temptation because my personal win10 laptop is a graveyard of rails installer and a few other various barely-supported toys.
'a Boolean search for “degree OR bachelor OR BS OR BA OR B.S. OR B.A.” yielded 1,760 matches.'

Thus missing jobs that include "Masters" or "Phd". In certain fields, (such as compilers) jobs that require an advanced degree are quite common.
I think that many of you complaints are without merit.

For fundamental there have been several schedulers, the removal of the "Big Kernel Lock" and many other changes.

For monitoring hotplugging, yes it works. I did it several times today. I have 3 laptops with 3 different GPUs and it works on all of them.
Imagine there's an alien civilisation (very similar to our levels of tech) on that exoplanet, looking back at us.

Would they be able to detect Earth? How about Jupiter?
I do like your suggestion, but

> Make the interview more about working together and capacity to learn, and less about computer science trivia night at the pub with no beer.

Understanding b-trees is pretty useful. If you work with relational databases, most questions concerning query performance require some understanding of b-trees.

I wouldn't ask a candidate to implement b-trees (or a sorting algorithm, or red-black trees, etc.), but asking about their basic properties seems reasonable. Or better yet, asking about the performance of a realistic SQL query which uses a b-tree index.
Right now, the ballpark cost is probably about $100,000 for the acquisition
You should be able to get maintenance for something like this pretty low. Add a line with a nice comment to the config template for running your apps that adds an extra env var. Any machine that runs any app now has the line...

I would definitely like to see a before/after real-world metric on impact here though.
So hum, how do you prevent your data center from being stolen.
This is spot on. Growing up in Sacramento, one of the most diverse cities in the US, I never felt racially divided, despite the fact that my friends and I would casually toss around very pejorative slurs at one-another. But when I moved to Chicago, I never once heard an N-bomb, and at them same time, I'd never felt more racial segregation.

I've always found it really funny that extremely disfunctional racist places like Chicago feel like they should define the cultural behaviors to fix racism.
This could really use a demo video of usage.
What do you think of this curriculum? https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science

I'd say that these days it's easier to gain all that "foundational knowledge" without attending a university.
Your business plan is a bit different though, you charge on data.

While you are apparently cheap you'll still make more money per GB than an isp that tries to compete on the "Unlimited" plans.
Second request-Help! I was active on IMDb under dini0519 but am now having trouble signing on under that name because I had previously signed up under my whole email not realizing that would be the username. Not really wanting my complete email floating around I tried to shorten my user name to the previous dini0519 and even just "dini" but nothing is working. I really want to be part of this community esp concerning the Twilight Zone boards, The Golden Girls, and Big Brother. Please help.
It's not uncommon for research to be embargoed (there is a whole wikipedia page on it), that said it's not super common either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo_(academic_publishing)
I get the reason, but don't think it's similar. (And, AFAIK, Dropbox uses nginx to share files.)

Yet, article clearly said this is not a product, but a set of protocols. So I was wondering what's the point, if the protocols (HTTP, WebDAV) are already there for a long time, and even have native support and can be easily mounted as local drives in most modern OSes.

I've missed the encryption and signing bits. Sorry about that.
Yeah it was a mistake not to include that link in the blog post.

It is definitely similar to Keybase Filesystem, and a few other things too. There are many axes for making trade offs in this space, and I think Upspin set of trade offs is unique. We'll see if it works well for people.
This is the information I came to find. Thanks!
Directors of Product and VPs of products are no different than Directors of Software Development and VP of Software Development.

Directors and VPs are on the management hierarchy.
The biggest problem to virtualization or other simulation methods is just return on investment. Most applications are so niche you can't justify anything but bare bones tools. Any money spent just getting your product in front of a potential customer will be better spent than hardening your development cycle.
This time around there were more white men, I think - in part because of some specials like Tensor Flow, or a picture from an actual office.

It is still biased against white men (if it is supposed to reflect the actual distribution of Google employees), but not as extreme as last time. I really would like to find the date of my last comment about it. Also perhaps simply more data is needed - a single picture with several people could shift the results here, because I checked only pics from 2.5 months.

Also better methodology needed, this was just a quick shot looking into one simple metric.
The year of Linux on the desktop was somewhere around 2009 (whenever we got multiple monitors working for the most part), but nobody noticed, because we had all switched to laptops. The year of Linux on the laptop will probably be a few years after we all stop using laptops.
Unfortunately it is a policy decision to not use gravatar or Facebook. But a phenomenal tool.
>Replacing welfare/etc with a policy like a Basic Job (basic income but you need to work for it) might.

So you think we should have make-work programs?

How about this one: we'll have a giant factory, making shipping crates out of wood. On one side of the factory, workers will toil away all day long nailing together boards into shipping crates. These crates will be transported to the other side of the factory. In there, the crates will be disassembled, so that the boards can be recycled. These boards will then be transported back to the other side of the factory, where they'll be assembled into shipping crates.

Why do you think this is a better system than just giving out free money? What exactly is being accomplished here?

What I described is exactly what happened in Soviet times, where they had exactly the "Basic Job" system you advocate.
Hypothetically let us say the Senator was already working on this in past why do we care ? A good politician keeps his fingers in many pies and knows when to withdraw. What matters is the senator here delivered pretty quick and deserves appreciation.
I would add one thing: if you're really going to exercise options before you can sell them, which is what this article's about, you really should calculate the tax consequence beforehand. As is only hinted in the article, the AMT can be enormous if the valuation has grown a lot since the grant date.
The reason people never switched is because Linux (almost) never came installed on desktops.

If Windows is installed you use that. If OSX is installed you use that. If Android is installed you use that.

Still even now compare the number of options available for buying a PC / laptop with Linux on it to one with Windows on it.
Executive Orders on Protecting the Homeland
How to choose a great data science book?
There was an article posted about one of the Antarctic data centers. And it's a horrible place to put one. Air too dry, too cold, parts being months away, and rubber/cardboard losing the properties that it needs. The shear terror when power goes out which will destroy a server if it's out too long.
Please stop your trolling. Nothing is being "stolen".
The ecosystem is important. What do you think about systems that make it easy to ship software for multiple platforms?

Consider Unity, the game making tools. When shipping there is pretty much a series of checkboxes for what kinds of packages you want to make. Unless you went out of your way to use some OS specific stuff it will work everywhere. There are other tools like this for other non-gaming domains, do they contribute in your view of OS ecosystems?
Seems to be very much in the space of kbfs and IPFS.

For the folks who are building this: can you compare and contrast this to both kbfs and IPFS? Why have you chosen to start another project in an already crowded space instead of contributing to either of those projects? They are both open source and much further along in development . . .
In part it's likely because she's married to Bill Clinton. She's basically seen as an example of a political 'dynasty' in the same way as George HW Bush, George W Bush and Jeb Bush. Part of an 'establishment' that doesn't seem like it'll change very much, especially when contrasted to Trump's claims of draining the swamp and overthrowing the system.
My understanding of that article (and the associated preprint [1]) is that they have not detected oxygen, but are setting up theoretical models and simulations to account for oxygen that might be detectable in the future.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.03906
I thought it was taboo to be an asshole. Hence the term "asshole".
they'd also be wrong because liberals were the ones who finally got Osama bin Laden. Bill Clinton was also accused by Republicans of trying to distract from Monika Lewinski when he ordered an attack on bin Laden _before_ 9-11.

Competent people can do more than one thing at the same time.
I would be concerned with the cost of real estate at that point. They didn't talk about it, but I expect they're not paying rent/buying land off shore. Seaside real estate is expensive afaik.
Standard Algorithm Name Documentation
Making SGML a thing again
From the XML Prague tweets, I get the impression that SGML is a thing again in the markup community. Opinions?

[1]: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23xmlprague%20OR%20%40xmlprague

[2]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5-dtd-slides-wrapper.html

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-b4jeJSas&index=14&list=PLQpqh98e9RgUcEmbXmI6RolisQaIRw9dm
A few generally is 2 or 3. If you are talking to scores of doctors, and calling it a few because you work at a hospital, then it is the usage of the word that is incorrect.
The publishing journal usually takes all the copyright, thus the data/news/info is theirs to announce in they way they want to. For a discovery like this one they'll all want to coordinate with the authors for the news and press releases such that it is represented correctly, accurately, and promptly. This is very standard and not at all unusual.
I have a form of dyscalculia that affects my ability to read, write out, and process basic numerical operations. While I know that x^2 * x^2 should equal x^4, when I see a math problem like this, I often screw it up for no damn good reason. It's also not a matter of care; I can review and review my work and I simply do not see issues.

What seems to have helped me was to drill on an abacus, specifically an IOS app called Know Abacus. I also had a physical abacus to play with and that was really fun. I'm brushing up my skills with Khan at the moment, and I've noticed that after the abacus drills, my gut instincts were better about spotting issues or knowing what to do.

I think the abacus helped by making math operations a physical action (move 2 beads then move 2 beads to add, then see & count 4 beads) compared to a mental projection action (think of 2 things then think of 2 more things and remember I have 4 things because 2 + 2 = 4).

Edit: for reference, I am American who went through US public schools in a variety of states. The abacus training was completely absent from my primary education unlike perhaps some of our fellow HNers from Asia.
My logic is "I have not experienced this therefore you cannot rely on me having experienced it to understand what you're saying".

Sorry if that wasn't clear; I can see how it got muddied.
It's worth noting that in the article, they too express some surprise at their results:

> The most pressing issue that emerges is why these results run counter to the hundreds of more controlled, clinical intervention studies, which largely show positive effects of therapy not only on measures of distress and well-being, but also personality traits.

In addition, the discussion section states:

> Thus, whereas individuals reported seeing a therapist in our observational research, they may not have seen them long enough to induce positive change. Further, it could be that some people started therapy because of a traumatic life event and actually declined at a less rapid rate than if they had not sought therapy.

As always, I think the answer is to wait and see. While they've noticed a correlation in two studies, it isn't that they've contradicted all of the prior evidence about therapy. Still, a neat read though.
Amazon Simple Product API
That's like the old advice that you should always watch how your date treats the waiter...
They might have problem retaining that talent if they misrepresent themselves.
I'm still coding professionally (js eng) and stay on top of trends! But, I don't think coding in the trenches will make me more effective. I've had a few eng. jobs, most of my friends are engineers, and I'm really passionate about job trends, job satisfaction, and employee retention.

With that foundation I'm more effective as I see more career trajectory data points when I talk to candidates that specialize (data, security, devops, ml) or ladder up (vp, manager, cto). Then I can provide even more value to new candidates with the career counseling approach.
Thank so much for posting this. Perchance, could you remove the quote formatting as it makes it nearly impossible to read on mobile?
The first thing I though of was a Trangia Stove [0], simple and clever design, cheap to run, has saved me a few times in the bush and built to last (still have the one I inherited from my father).

[0]: http://trangia.se/en/camping-stoves-series-27/
Same as on land?
big difference: Keybase hosts everything, all your data is belong to Keybase. In upspin only your public key is centralized; the data can be anywhere.

Actually if you read the design document it sounds like they want you to provide some wrapper server to access, say, your photos on Google Photos through the Upspin protocol. Your photos would stay there, but authentication would be centralized on Upspin.