skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's pretty simple: If you live inside the system and the system knows the experiments you are conducting it can modify the "results" of these experiments to fit a perceived set of axioms that hide the "true axioms".

Think of it like Geometric level of detail in video games: when the observer is viewing a character from very far away a low-polygon mesh is displayed -- this is because the mesh only takes up a few pixels of screen space for the observer so rendering a high polygon mesh or a low polygon mesh is indistinguishable.

Now when the character is closer to the observer a high polygon mesh with more detail is substituted.

The observer can never tell that this trick is happening. If they designed an experiment to test for this the universe could simply spend more time fooling the observer.

I am quite sure if we are living in a simulation it makes a lot of approximations. When we conduct complex experiments it simply computes better approximations so that our observed results fit the "axioms of physics".
Neural Network Activation Functions
Looking at the diff they did it doesn't really look that way (only had a quick glance though).

Looks like they're not using a swept BVH (interpolated time segments) for motion blur which seems weird, instead leaf nodes seem to be duplicated for each time sample.

So it looks like they're just making savings by skipping motion segments outside the current ray time, and I'd assume the bboxes of the parent inner nodes are all much bigger than they need to be (as they're not swept), and so intersection performance is still quite bad (compared with how it could be)?
There may be a slight difference in flavor, but Milka and Cadbury Dairy Milk are of a very similar garbage quality to Hershey's.

Good milk chocolate exists (Ritter Sport is fine), but those are just chocolate-flavored sugar confections.
If you look at it long enough, some of the analog clocks start twitching
There's a handful of Wayland compositor frameworks - including one built by the KDE project - and Weston provides an interface by which custom UIs can be created. I don't think there's going to be much of an issue, aside from potential problems with the spec itself.
The Killing Time: Inside Rodrigo Duterte's Drug War
While I agree with everything you wrote about "no excuses" being a side effect of a healthy frame of mind, and that in an ideal situation things should be motivated by passion and not by fear, I wonder if perhaps sometimes the amount of damage created from long exposure to a bad environment is not something that can be easily undone and one has to revert to the stick to achieve results. I wouldn't want to manage or be managed in such an organisation, , but I can imagine there are situations where discipline needs to be enforced when the culture is too far gone due to past mistakes. Using the analogy to human personality, you probably won't fix deep rooted pathologies or self destructive habits overnight by motivation talks. Maybe sometimes things have to be artificially straightened out because the time for a natural fix would just take too long.
> no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.

You mean "circumvent".

Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, or ambage) is locution that circles around a specific idea with multiple words rather than directly evoking it with fewer and apter words.
This may work, but only if the culture of accountability goes all the way to the top.

It rarely does. It's more usual that once you get past a certain level, the Jobs Rule is reversed. Project failures and corporate problems are mysteriously and inexplicably never caused by bad management or poor executive decisions, and blatant incompetence stops being an impediment to promotion.
Life on Earth is used to gravity,so what happens to our cells, tissues in space?
A mix of site's public api's, rss feeds and webcrawling
Did this before (Matasano). Doing it now (Latacora). Answers:

- The two most important words in your business plan are "segmentation" and "qualification". While being open to lots of different kinds of projects, try to pick 1 or 2 kinds of projects that you can standardize and package. It's easier to succeed selling a couple things well than it is to succeed selling everything just adequately.

- Pick a kind of customer you want to work with. Aim on the higher-end side. Build collateral that will appeal to those customers: case studies, how-tos, industry news bulletins, open source packages. Find places to meet those kinds of customers and introduce yourself to them. You'll get wildly different answers on how well cold-calling and cold emails work (nobody will disagree that LinkedIn private messages do not work). My take is: if you're good at cold calling, cold call; otherwise, don't bother.

- Which you prioritize depends on where you are, but I'd prioritize content and collateral that you can use either locally or online. Again: build packaging around just a few offerings, and try to make that packaging unique. It should feel producty, and the way in which you turn your team into a product should communicate something interesting about your worldview.

- I don't think you should sell yourselves an available subcontractor. For the subs, good sub relationships are bought, not sold: if you advertise yourself as being willing to sub, you're communicating something about your willingness to get rolled. Your best sub relationships will come from bumping into people at shared large clients.

- No, don't have mentors or coaches, at least in a formal way.

- No, do not hire a salesperson. The world of employed account managers is divided into good salespeople, who can work anywhere they want to and don't want to work for your small consulting firm, and bad salespeople whose real talent is selling people like you on getting paid a salary without helping the business. It's incredibly hard to hire and manage a sales team and most consulting shops --- let alone the young ones --- don't have sales teams. The ones that do tend to have been founded in part by a salesperson. Since that's not you, good news: you're many years away from having to worry about this. Act like salespeople don't exist.

Bonus advice:

- Bill weekly, or at worst daily. Never bill hourly.

- Raise your rates.
Apple has control over the hardware, the operating system and their own apps but not over the entire ecosystem. This gets them far but only so far.

The big difference they've made is that they've created tools to make integration with Voice Over so easy, that it's a no brainer to do what little work needs to be done to make an app accessible and to increase demand for it.

They've managed to turn a burden into something that has an obvious economic benefit for app developers.

Also I'm fairly sure that there is actually a good RoI. It might not be massive but in the long term having the monopoly on phones for blind people surely pays off.
Interesting predictions, but I'd like to see research providing a basis for them before I take risks with people's health and lives.

I agree that the current approach works very poorly; that doesn't mean any other approach is better. Sometimes what works poorly is still the best we can do, such as our approach to pancreatic cancer (though I don't think that's the case here).

Government restricts access to many things for safety reasons, from unsafe cars to prescription drugs to dodgy financial deals to highly enriched uranium. It's a simple formula, almost a slogan, to say 'legalize it and consumers will decide for themselves' (and in fairness maybe the parent isn't being formulaic in this case). In some cases that's true; in some cases consumers simply don't have that capability. In our business, IT security is a good example; consumers have no way to make a judgment or even know that it's working. It's the same for prescription drugs: Am I better? Is that due to the drug? The placebo effect? Natural progress? Maybe I'd be even better without the drug.

But that's all theory; before we mess with people's lives, we need evidence.
Publically? Gonna guess YANAL
https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/ - basically the exact opposite of /r/CityPorn

https://www.reddit.com/r/trippinthroughtime/ - especially older posts

https://www.reddit.com/r/FellowKids/ - advertising and media (bad) attempts to appeal to younger audiences

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/ - self-explanatory
Manager has piss poor communication then "solves" it by threatening to fire people. Genius.
Wow - I did think of an eyepatch, of course, but didn't think it was a likely answer because I didn't see how it would indicate an obvious emotion.

Thanks!
Security updates, shovelware / crapware preloads, Google, and a slew of other stuff.

I'm exceedingly disappointed with all current mobile offerings. Holding out distant hope for Ubuntu.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equianalgesic for more information
Thoughts on the 'chicken and egg' problem
The Amazing Origin Story of Netflix's Chief Content Officer
Could you suggest some good introductory resources for getting into CA? Is there actually some systemic way of studying this stuff?
Wait, you need to understand your risks. Consulting services has some extremely difficulty challenges unlike most businesses.

1. Cash flow / making payroll will be a constant issue.

Even when you win a gig, you won't be paid for 45-60 until after you start. And that will be trailing your work. Do you have enough cash reserves to float 2 months salary.

Now think about when you grow your team and now you have 10 employees, do you have enough cash reserves to pay 10 employees for 2 months until you receive your first installment check?

2. Sales cycles can be long and costly

Keep in mind you won't win all sales cycles. And sales cycles might take 6-12 months to win. During that time you'll probably have to fly to the customer, pay for travel,etc.

No of this pre-sales expenses are reimbursable. It's just a cost of business. Do you have enough cash reserves.

3. What to do when you don't have billable work?

For ever day you don't have billable work, you still have to pay your staff. Do you have enough cash reserves to pay your staff for months on end without billable work?

TLDR; consulting requires huge cash reverses. Also keep in mind it's hard to get credit lines in consulting businesses because you don't have inventory assets.
Yes they do assume Indians of other religions are Muslim as well. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39081698
Problem is returning to where you came from again.

RISC OS has the best menus, just click the mouse button anywhere in the window, maximum Fitts score, and you can select menu items and keep the menu open to select more, also select a menu item that has a submenu, and have windows as submenus, for palette selection etc
The main thing to check for me (single data point) is what advertisers do you have, and how much will I make from your ad work vs say Adsense.

If I already have advertisers and just need a system so they can self serve that would be good too as long as the pricing is reasonable
And? What did he find? What? Is that clickbait for intellectuals? I hate this type of questions as headlines.
> If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.

Some would say that's the difference between a graphic designer and a VP. Steve Jobs had a similar view:

> Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP.
You miss the point that "no excuses" is exactly that system.

A manager shouldn't have to ping every subordinate every day for status updates, that's annoying to both and should be unnecessary. Management only works through delegation, you need to trust your subordinates to do delegated tasks without hand-holding, but you also need to give them a protocol for exceptions, which is exactly what this is.

Managers usually have other work besides managing people, from their own projects to strategic planning and budgeting. If you are required to also micromanage the projects of your subordinates, you have the wrong subordinates.
You could give it to all your first customers for the lowest point offered. That is, they said they would pay $60 but you only charge them $20. Tell them why. Tell them this is basically an introductory price and it will go up, but because they helped you they are special. Of course, this limits the N you get for your testing, but it gets rid of the ickiness of it all.
Where's the Windows or Linux version of Xcode 7, then? Or a version of OSX licensed to run on the capable hardware that I already own? I suppose I could spend $500 on a Mac Mini, but then we're back to tokenizerrr's question.
A blog exploring this with numbers would be interesting.
> Before opioid prohibition deaths from opioid use were quite rare.

Maybe in the U.S., less so in China where ~25% of adult males were opium addicts in the early 1900s. The war on drugs isn't a success by any means, but at least the problems that exist aren't on that scale.

A better example of prohibition backfiring is with marijuana, where before prohibition ~0% of Americans were marijuana users, whereas today ~85% of American adults have used marijuana.
How did you decide which product to purchase for your supplements? Can you recommend any?
Is there some AI or always random?
The two species variation sounds interesting. If you don't mind, please post more about it including the three matrices. Thanks in advance.
None of that stuff is "Agile". Those things are artifacts / ceremony related with specific methodologies which are only "agile" to varying degrees. Read the Agile Manifesto, there's almost nothing prescriptive in there at all.

Agile methodology is designed for a tech lead to know what each member of the team is doing.

That might be the case for some specific "agile" methodology, but if there's a core essence to Agile, it's about embracing and responding to change... nothing to do with tech leads.
Try https://buffer.com

They've made rounds on HN for various reasons, some good and some not so good but their core business is to help content creators share on social media.
Whatever kind of person Steve Blank is as a person is being discussed to death in the comments. I think that what this shows is that most people on HN have a lot of scar tissue from bad management. Bad management will say "tell me your problems before they become excuses" but then ignore you, then, berate you when the deadline comes due. "Why isn't the project done?" "Well like I told you last week..." "Don't give me excuses!" We've all been there.

What Steve Blank writes here is the outer dialog and what seems to be missing is the inner dialog - listen to what your reports say! When an engineer says to you, at the end of the day, "this component just doesn't make any sense and I don't know what to do to make it work" don't just slap them on the back on the way out the door and say "I'm sure you'll figure it out, just try a little harder," maybe you as a manager should engage a little more then in the moment.
It sounds to me like he walked into a situation where accountability did not exist and then he fixed the problem. He inherited the problems. He didn't create them.

The piece is full of good advice on how to set up a culture where things actually get done.
Toyota makes cars, most of the employees are doing specificsly defined tasks, they aren't usually knowledge workers. It's the managers responsibility that schedules are met, but empowering subordinates to work independently and only interrupt for problems they can't solve is far more efficient than micromanaging each one.
Bringing Mobile Apps to Life Through Motion
> She has an Android phone, but it's not even close in terms of the accessibility options provided.

Anything except the price that made you/her go with an Android as phone?
I think this ignores the problem that in many cases you don't have a good estimate for a date. If the task is one I know well I can estimate well. But if the question is when some new functionality will be deployed, it's just a best guess.

And for many tasks you simply don't know if it is going to work until the day of. Especially when you are trying to schedule aggressively.
Be careful with your definition...

A chocolate bar is generally something that is vaguely rectangular (longer than it is wide), has chocolate as it's outer layer, and would take multiple (often many) bites to eat.

If I take a sherbet pip and dip it in chocolate, it is not a chocolate bar good sir! :-)
We don't need to audit the source code. Just grab the binary, reverse engineer it, and study that.

There's an entire industry dedicated to reverse engineering software and studying its security properties. We call it the security industry. (Not every gig is white-box!)
Science journalism can be evidence-based, compelling – and wrong
https://www.reddit.com/r/MaoGame/

If you break a rule of the Mao game you get a 24h ban, but nobody knows what the rules are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13372985

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13408078
Better title: "Up to 48 Twitter accounts may be human"

Snark aside, there is no way around this. Followers in digital public spaces are representative of social status, the demand for appearing popular will never go away and so neither will the bots.
He does have a system. Communication between managers and doers. That's all he's asking for.
I studied chemistry in college. That doesn't mean computer programming is a chemical discipline.

Psychiatrists go to medical school so they can prescribe medicine without killing a patient, not because medical school has a scientifically rigorous psychiatry curriculum. Remember that homosexuality was a psychiatric disease until recently.
More on how closed this community is in Nathanial Popper's Digital Gold. IIRC, Charlie Shrem's parents would not pay his substantial bail unless he broke up with his GF who was not an SY Jew.

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-Rei...
Libertarianism or libertarianism?

The Libertarian Party has had no problems with nominating authoritarians: Bob Barr comes to mind. Gary Johnson willingly sent people to prison for drugs as governor. The LP is more of a flag of convenience for protest votes.
I'd ask for my money back if I'd been marketing on Twitter.
I've travelled to the US 20+ times over the past two years; I really don't mind going through TSA or US Customs, I have an Arabic first name and I'm a visible minority (Indian). Never had any major issues at the border or during security.

That being said, I cancelled a couple planned trips since January — not going to travel to the US until I have to; I don't want to put up with the hassle.
You're just being snobby.

There's no right or wrong or absolutes like 'garbage' in food - it's creative and down to personal taste. If someone prefers Cadbury and the food is safe to eat then who cares how it meets someone's arbitrary idea of correctness?

Many foods that we now think about as delicacies were once cheaper variants of fine foods at the time.
That is opposite of personal responsibility. There is very little space for making individual decisions and being responsible for them.

I see it as a continuum, with a lot of room between "absolute autonomy and no responsibility to the team" and "slave-like adherence to someone else's position". In between there is a place where you take a position and have to sell the rest of your team on it and then once everybody buys in, the whole team does own the decision.

But I think here we're talking about design decisions, architecture and what-not. What I mean earlier was more about responsibility for actually delivering the things you say you're going to deliver. So if, on your self-organizing team, you volunteer to take on the task "Write Fromgizzit-A I/O module" then there is indeed responsibility around actually delivering the code in question, as opposed to coming in every day, spending all day reading HN, and not delivering anything.
I didn't think there was any question; HAL was simply following the orders of Dr. Langley.
You just argued for Steve Blanks approach. Trust your people to work independently and bring problems to your attention in a timely manner. And if they can't do that, release them back into the wild.

I ran a 40 person development organization that never missed a schedule with that philosophy. Everyone empowered to bring problems up for help, everyone trusted to work independently.
Very true. Maybe I misread your previous comment as being more binary than you intended.

Keep in mind that reviewers of free software are also often employees and may have some agenda beyond pure altruism, even if the software isn't copyright of the employer. Open source is big business these days.
There are many uses for a VPN beyond this privacy concern. My two reasons I use it are:
1. I'm on someone else's wifi that I don't fully trust (or is an open wifi)
2. I need to "be" in a country different than where I'm currently using my computer. This is the most common need, since I'm an American expat living in Netherlands (and traveling in other countries).
It's not news that the indifferent, the ignorant, and the uninformed are screwed, or that some things are difficult to solve without individual knowledge and action.
There's a difference between "getting people to do what they say they will do" and getting people to do whatever is asked of them. Part of the culture described in the article was honest capacity planning. The group didn't do whatever was asked; they honestly negotiated the workload. I don't think you can have a healthy no excuses culture without honest capacity planning.
Can Vancouver Become the Next Silicon Valley?
All schedules are guesses. Just tell me when you first figure out yours is wrong, not when it's too late to help.
Is there any reason to treat these as drugs instead of just poisons?

We sell all kinds of poisons on the regular basis and don't bat an eye. Are these any more interesting because they're opiates?
Here's an Oxford study of 702 jobs and the probability they'll be automated.(PDF) [0]

List of jobs table is page 57.

[0] http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Futu...
Learn to tell the time with these 288 weird clocks
https://www.reddit.com/r/powerwashingporn/
Busycactus.com mexican insurance
Something is wrong with the whole organization, but he isn't able to figure it out, so he's telling people to put up or shut up.

I think for any of us to try and go into specifics on that particular case, without a lot more information (unless we were there), is an exercise in pointless speculation. I think it goes without saying that all generalizations are flawed, and I'm sure the company did need more than just "stop giving me excuses". But a culture of no accountability can be a cause that needs to be addressed.

Read on the Toyota Production System for alternative solutions.

I devour everything on TPS / Lean / Kaizen that I can get my hands on. :-)
Universal Design, universal access. Doesn't matter _why_ user can't see the screen, or can only use one hand, or can't hear the phone, or....
I bet it wouldn't have been fixed without the ultimatum.