skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple need to take a long hard look at the nose dive their customer service has taken in the last few years. I love Apple kit, I really do, but Apple the company are starting to become increasingly difficult to like and do any sort of business with.

I have many personal data points on this, but below is the worst i've encountered in any retail store in my life:

I went into an Apple Store to purchase 3 (yes, 3) Macbook Pro's (old style, they were in stock at the time) in early December (for some new staff that were starting), knowing exactly the model I needed. I was told I would need to make an appointment and come back in 90mins. Really? A customer comes into your shop, looking at spending over £7k without hesitation and you say go away?!?

I said to the store member that I thought this was unacceptable, it would take someone literally 2 minutes to go into the storeroom, pull them off the shelf and swipe my card.

The response was that it was now the lead up to Christmas and they were very busy and there was nothing they could do about it. My response was that they need to tell their boss(es) to hire more staff for busy periods.

I walked out without purchasing and didn't return.
Shouldn't computers in schools be used for more than just teaching students how to use office tools?

Teaching only boring stuff has great potential to suck the fun out of computer use for them and does not encourage them to explore what it is they might want to do with a computer.
So Nuclear has it's own challenges but it's low carbon compared to coal, and oil

(Yes, there's a huge stack of CO2 emitted during concrete production)
The Whiteboard Interview: Adulthood Deferred
Free speech is the government not officially taking action against you for your speech.

This was just run-of-the-mill intimidation by those in power, of a free media. Really how far away is this from putting journalists in cages and having your audience shout at them at campaign rallies?
I think you will find more then enough people willing to answer questions. Not necessarily hn readers though...
Your bottleneck will be the question askers, people who want to ask (random) people questions. You would at least need to have some audience selection, e.g. only ask this question to asian females aged 28-48 interested in crocheting. That way the question askers maybe get some value out of it.
Why is this wrong - or is it? Seems like a pretty normal reaction to being attacked? Is it wrong because a woman's statements always have to be believed?
Oracle sqlcl and sqldeveloper has/had multiple SQL support. You have to use a hint on occasion and it is biassed
https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/827964865012649984
(Disclaimer: I have yet to read the paper.) It's interesting because it's both important and hard.

It's important because it allows you to infer types in the presence of parametric polymorphism ("generics") and subtyping ("OOP"). For example, consider this function:

twice(f, x) = f(f(x))
twice : forall a. (a -> a) -> a -> a // OCaml type (no subtyping)
twice : forall a, b <: a. (a -> b) -> a -> b // "ugly" type with subtyping
twice : forall a, b. (a -> a & b) -> a -> b // equivalent to the above, but maybe nicer to see and reason about

In OCaml, the type of this function would be too narrow, so you wouldn't be able to call `twice` with arguments such as `round : float -> int` (assuming `int <: float`). Stephen's previous work [1] infers the third type (`&` means intersection type).

It's hard because subtypes are hard to reason about. Type inference usually works by solving equations; if you have 3 type variables 'a, 'b and 'c, and you know that

'a == list[int]
'b == list['c]
'a == 'b

then you can infer that `'c == int`. This breaks down in presence of subtyping; for example, you cannot use

'a & 'b == 'c & 'b

to infer that `'a == 'c` (a possible solution is `'a == int`, `'b == int`, `'c == float`).

Type inference in the presence of subtyping is so hard that no programming language does it currently. There are many tricks and approximations - e.g. Scala does type propagation (if it knows the types of function parameters, it can infer the types of most other variables), and bidirectional type inference (it can figure out the types of anonymous function arguments), but AFAIK there is no existing implementation of it. Hopefully this paper changes that. Of course, there is an argument to be made that writing types in code makes it more readable, and therefore types should be written - in general, I agree with this argument, but type inference can still be very helpful (e.g. you write a function with complicated types and ask the compiler to fill in the type; or you write a number of tiny helper functions with obvious types).

[1] MLsub https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sd601/mlsub/
> cultural staying power of the pet rock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock

>> Pet Rock is a collectible conceived in 1975

We're still talking about it forty years later. I knew exactly what you meant by pet rock without having to search for it.
What if I don't live in the US?
Biased towards oracle SQL. I can check it out it was mostly for migration to Oracle Database.
They are also called "logical cores" (I think Intel documents prefers "logical" and Sun - they invented the concept - prefers "virtual"). One logical core can appear to be idling to the OS if the parts of the physical core are in use by another (SPARC and POWER go up to 8) logical core (as it's resource starved). It seems, from the benchmarks, the AMD parts have less shared resources between logical cores (or a finer granularity for allocating) than the i7 in my laptop.
While I agree with you, not a lot of people, I still think it would be better if people had the option.
first post I'm sorry. Can the title be changed?
> - people don't work hard here. They come to work slowly, relax, read news, drink coffee, work a little bit, then have lunch, then work a little bit again. When it's 5pm - they just go home.

I disagree. I'm kiwi, and have lived in a few countries overseas (I still do) and think that New Zealanders are the hardest working people I've ever met. Compared to many Europeans, and even Americans, kiwi employees seem to actually deliver more in the allocated time, and go home. That work-life balance is awesome, and I don't think it's a negative. Our company constantly hires kiwis because, well, they seem to work better than anyone else.
Off the top of my head:

- End-to-end content trust with crypto signatures and verifications using Notary/TUF https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/trust/content_trust/

- Secrets management with encrypted storage and transport (https://blog.docker.com/2017/02/docker-secrets-management/)

- A vulnerability scanner that can detect vulnerabilities in arbitrary binaries without distro lock-in (ie. even if your developer built from source on a non-Red Hat distro, it will still catch vulnerabilities) https://docs.docker.com/datacenter/dtr/2.2/guides/admin/conf...

- Secure orchestration out-of-the-box: https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/how-swarm-mode-works/pk...

- Somewhat counter-intuitively, the default security profile is more secure in Docker than in Openshift, because the focus on "systemd everywhere" requires loosening the sandbox to allow systemd's tentacles to get through. In the past Red Hat has actually introduced CVEs in their forked version of Docker that didn't exist in the official Docker.

- In Docker for AWS, Docker for Azure, Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows, we embed a specialized Linux distro that is trimmed down and locked down to the extreme, making OS surface area much much smaller than a traditional OS like Red Hat.
It seems the AMD parts can squeeze a little more work from the two threads, judging by the multi-threeaded benchmarks, than competing Intel parts.
A bunch of flags, all claiming Tesla for themselves
I really enjoyed the AI class by Thrun and Norvig. Nothing against Databases (I didn't take it), but AI class was fine - great, actually.
In Portugal early 90's, FCT/UNL.
Arithmetic vs. Reality: The Sawdust Principle
In these sets of MOOCs, there was also Machine Learning taught by Andrew Ng and I had your same Widom like experience with Andrew Ng. After taking so many courses in life - physically and remotely - I can safely say that Andrew Ng is the best teacher I've come across. The best part was how we actually gave insights in Machine Learning rather than leaving it like something esoteric. It changed my perspective and added a lot of value to my professional career.

Recently, I tried to take the Neural Networks from Jeff Hinton and I realized how much I missed Ng's lectures.
I didn't knew about this! I would need to research pro audio interface hardware manufacturers that support Linux
******************** TILL THE END (Anti-Suicide Song) **********************
Is this like ODBC but with its own SQL dialect to abstract away the underlying dialect?
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Anonymous complaints in a HN thread started on premise of "I'm curious" is not what I'd call "do something about it" and "stamped out".
Some of her claims are objectively verifiable - e.g. women dropping from 25% to 3% of the SRE teams. That sounds like a serious, systematic problem - not a coincidence.
Thanks, this is the comment I wanted to "win" the thread. I'm still figuring it out.
What precisely is this a duplication of? I searched the link and didn't see it.
I wouldn't take Taboo as a historic account of what the east india company did. It's entertainment and not meant to be factually correct.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10743407/B...
Do you by chance keep a public log of your postmortem collection :)?
It's a little difficult to explain why subtyping is so difficult. One answer is that Hindley-Milner inference is actually really simple; simple enough that I can ask my undergraduates to implement in a week long programming assignment. But how to add subtyping? Now there's a difficult question: one you could write papers about. Along the way, there are a number of desirable properties you want to achieve, like decidability, existence of principal types (for any expression you write, there is a "best" type you can give it), compactness of inferred types, support for records and functions... and it's been very difficult to get all of them. This thesis does it.
Same here, I've always been a fan of Nintendo and it's incredible for me to be able to play again to Super Mario 64 from my PC
This is why it's important for the US to allow scientists and engineers to come to the US. Immigration is not an all or nothing thing. You can pick and choose who you let in.
Scientists have found a way to rapidly thaw cryopreserved tissue without damage
Amazon Lab126

I am using a throwaway account and withholding some tech info as this may uniquely identify people involved.

I joined a high-profile machine learning research team within Amazon. On my first day, I knew something was off immediately -- the manager literally gave me a laundry list of micro-tasks to do with an exceptionally strict timeline. Of course, the list was unrealistically ambitious to make him look good. This is a research team -- most research attempts simply aren't successful at first tries. But he wanted to push with his "perfect" schedule. I frequently stayed after midnight to meet the schedule. When this schedule wasn't met, I was publicly humiliated in front of other team members.

He loved to micro-manage, and he insisted on literally sitting behind me for hours to see each word I am typing into the terminal. I worked at several companies before this, but this level of micromanagement was not something I had seen before. This certainly was not a pair programming session (which I normally enjoy actually), as he was not actively contributing to the problem at hand. It was just...watching me work for hours in a small room.

One time, a friendly team member saw the difficulties and kindly offered to give some technical tips. This manager came to us and started to raise his voice how ignorant people should shut up [his words]. This was in the middle of large office. I got dragged into a small room after that, and I was verbally abused for an hour because he thought I made him look bad (technically incompetent) by talking another team member for technical tips. He was so upset that he was red and almost crying.

After surviving this environment for a while, I decided to leave. I told the manager and the senior manager politely that it was not a good fit. Of course, they can't just let me leave voluntarily -- they have to "fire" me or reject me otherwise so that it would be them finding a fault in me, not me in them.

The sad thing is, as I was told, how this is normal at Amazon.
people are scared and want to follow others so they don't have to decide everything for themselves. Humans are pack animals.
How TO: Proper Git Client on Android
I think his point are those aren't advanced feature but basic feature that should be intuitive.
It's a thing http://www.fatimamissionaria.pt/artigo.php?cod=3211&sec=6
You insert a coin and a candle lights up
I admit to never having to tame that particular beast. And given the sub comment about it being on the same greatness level as SOAP, I think I may pass :D
Renewable? Sure, you can't. But just green energy? Any article that does not put nuclear in the green bag is misleading.
I remember thinking at the time "wow, the characters look like ass". I think the character models look worse than Final Fantasy X, which was a game with good art direction and miniscule polycount that came out in 2001.
They are also great for games and game-like applications.

I think learning with computers should include a lot more interaction, experimentation and exploration. Touch-based apps are supporting that due to the direct manipulation of objects they enable.

Their immersive nature also helps concentrate on the task at hand.
What are the benefits of ChromeOS compared to standard GNU/Linux ? The main benefits are 1) Better security model and updates 2) Easier to use. 1) Goes out of the window once you flip that developers switch. Not to mention crouton/vm/dual-boot etc. are fine for mucking around. You can't use that in any sane way if you have to deploy and maintain hundreds of machines for a school. Regarding 2), I can't comment on usability since I haven't used ChromeOS, but I don't think there's going to be a world of difference compared to a modern distro.
Doing new things with guidance and a safety net. Working solo you can push yourself to do new things but it's hard to tell how you might do them better. And some things I'll pay someone to do for me rather than try to do myself because I'm afraid of the consequences of failing (for instance, hardening a server).

But doing something new under the instruction of someone who knows it well, you can ask WHY they do things a certain way, or what would happen if you did X differently, or even just "help, it's not working at all!" and learn a ton from the answers.
If AMD does this I'm theirs for life!
First look: Snapdragon 835 VR Developer Kit headset
Yes, that was a bit of a trip to read.

"I wouldn't quite mind dying for things like my language to be dominant in my home and spoken by my leaders"

I wonder if the parent poster's language is currently the dominant language or a minority language. There are people who already kill and die for their culture to become dominant.
Insomniac Games' Web Tools Postmortem
I played both, and I remember talking loudly and often about how much better WoW looked despite having a fraction of the system reqs. WoW vanilla could be run on a potato - I think I had it going on a pentium 2 with a third hand graphics card...
They aren't the first to do something like this, although previous approaches I know of train deep neural networks to learn the difference between original and downsampled images and thus enable them to interpolate from lower-quality material.

Magic Pony Technology (acquired by twitter last year) did something like this (can't find the source right now, was just a press article). There is a video [1] where they showed a side-by-side of the low-quality video and the improved one, it's quite interesting technology I think, albeit very different from what Netflix seems to be doing.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601258/artificial-intelli...
The lead guy leaving and me taking over his responsibilities and role.
Preventing drug misuse deaths (in England)
Is Snapchat strictly for entertainment, or is it also a way to stay up to date by following Tech influencers (like Twitter)?
Great work! Supporting multi-page PDF is a good feature there.
You can smuggle memcached text protocol over HTTP if you can insert a linefeed. I think tptacek meant "bad vulnerability" as in serious, not trivial.
This point was addressed on HN by user ChuckMcM in November 2013, right after Spiegel rejected Zuckerberg's buyout attempt:

> The focus here is on the tech and not the market. A pet rock was 'worthless' (the rock was just a rock) but the connection with a generation was valuable. So often in our business we look at something that we feel like we could build (or could be easily built) and a valuation, and focus on those two things. The parts we don't see we give little value to (350M snaps? Seriously? That is a boat load of engagement). Making anything that get 350M 13-23 yr olds engaged is a pretty huge deal. That is what is valuable with Snapchat, not the tech.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6671371
Making trade agreements contingent on human rights would help.
but they're moving in that direction
Malloc Internals and You
In other words, do as I say, not as I do, otherwise I will call you names.

You aren't going to push debate forward with this.
The most awesome 450 PAGE Presentation ever
ARM the architecture has very little to do with power efficiency as it is out of scope (except that the old the ARM 32bit instruction set was amenable for a very low power implementation).

ARM the company does design both low power and power efficient implementations of the ARM architecture. In fact for some specific power targets (mobile for example) they are more efficient than the corresponding Intel CPUs.

This is still irrelevant as Cavium design its own ARM cores from scratch (i.e. it doesn't use ARM reference designs) specifically for server use; now, they are not very good, but that's another story.
Not a dupe of the specific link, just the story: 110 comments @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13775624
I agree, I didn't intend to imply that it was in anyway historically accurate. However, it does communicate some of how the EIC operated at that time.
don't you run more than one of them at a time though?
Oh I see - so it is an adapter not an abstractor. I'm curious what the advantages will be over the widely supported ODBC API. Will you add ODBC support?
I'm yet to see a practical data set that could not be encoded as a tree. Maybe if you have a cyclical data structure and you want to save that directly, but then it's a simple meta-level extension. For example, Lisp reader does that when reading S-expressions. If you want to create a list like this:

1 ---> 2 ---> 3-|
^_______________|

you write: #1=(1 2 3 #1#), where #n=OBJECT means "this is the object N", and #n# means "here is the very same object N too".
Solve These 3 Common Problems to Save Your Analytics
> It's interesting because it's both important and hard.

Is it true that the problem (of type inference) is hard only in the presence of operations or expressions with types? In other words, if a language does not provide operations or expressions with types then it is more or less obvious how to infer types?
Why am I seeing stuff like this on Hacker News? Which part of it is relevant?
This is a good read. Especially if you use Linux/BSD/OSX on a fairly regular basis.

While it is mostly long usenet rants about the _failure_ of Unix. There is some grains of truth buried in 80's-esque proto-shit-posting.
Ask HN: Which Amazon S3 region should I use if latency is not a consideration?
I am about to upload a number of things to Amazon S3, including a static website and some file backups. Access to the former will mostly be via CDN, and access to the latter should be infrequent. Therefore in neither case is latency a significant consideration, and hence neither is physical location.

Which S3 region would you recommend I use in this situation? Is there a "main" or "default" region which people generally use for this sort of data? Or should I just choose the nearest? Or one of the cheapest?

It seems to me that us-east-1 (N. Virginia) comes closest to being the "main" region - would you recommend using us-east-1 for this reason? Or would you recommend against it, especially after this week's outage?
It's saddening really, someone I've known since University became that guy. To give some context, we'd been friends through the trials of going through our 20's 30's and early 40's - marriages, divorces, failures and successes - I'd let a fair bit of spurious/shady stuff that he'd done go prior to this go, then last year he told me a story about how he'd called a company wide meeting and screamed at his teams about failure to hit targets would mean people (with families and mortgages) would be fired.

He laughed as he told me it was all bollocks as he wanted a new Aston Martin. I explained in four letter words what I thought of him and left. What was bizarre was he kept calling and texting afterwards, which I ignored - but in retrospect, I was the only friend he had left who knew him before he became the 'big shot'. Somewhere in that head of his, he maybe felt he'd lost the connection to the part of himself who started with next to nothing and wasn't a self centred, greedy, lying c*nt in an expensive suit, posh mini-mansion and a 4 year old Aston.

Sorry, rant over... it's sad to lose a long time friend, but fuck him.
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Thank you.
When you teach e.g. basic astronomy or anatomy, you want students to explore the solar system or human body interactively, not their computers.

Computer use in schools is not only about learning to use the computer. One of the great features of the iPad is that once you start an app, it becomes a single-purpose device that just works.

I totally agree with your last point.