skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you have one paxos/raft group per replica, you actually only get a small unavailability

It isn't a small unavailability, it's an unavailability of the whole replica. If you don't have a lot of data then it's the whole cluster :)

Of cause, we can introduce something like virtual replicas and eventually end up with a replica per key which is almost a Single Decree Paxos but with an overhead on log compaction and snapshotting.
Lot of words, not a singe real use case. Do they have a working prototype? Is the AI better than humans?

The idea of A/B testing is that humans are not good judging which version is better, so the only solution is to run an experiment, so in many cases you will get better results with an A/B test.

And there are also variations where the split is not constant, like the mutiarmed bandit. If A/B test is better or worse than multiarmed bandit is also a good flamewar topic.
This system would arguably be more unfavorable to Netflix/Amy Schumer.
> To make up for the bits, you need only see ~40% increase in participation over the current star system... think that's going to happen?

For some people, such as myself, it will decrease participation (making the "no rating" indistinguishable from "it was okay, but I don't love it and don't hate it, so I wouldn't know whether to upvote or downvote"). A 40% increase is also quite a significant change. I'd be astonished if they got that much more engagement out of it.

There's also quite a difference between having the data for their internal algorithms and what people want to see. Just like Facebook eventually added alternatives for just the "Like" button.

I don't mind having a percentage displayed rather than a star rating (I automatically convert everything in my mind anyway, even though the star ratings are more easily visible at a glance when scrolling through a list), but I mourn losing a lot of expressiveness in the ability to record what I really thought of the video that I watched.
Oh, thanks for correcting me.
The internet is in a pretty sad state if a simple UDP stream isn't possible any more because of interfering middleboxes. It's not like QUIC is a new IP protocol. One of the reasons for lack of good fallback is probably an expectation that basic IP operations are functional.
I should have used the word socialism instead of redistribution to make it more clear on my stance, but I didn't want to get political.

You are right though, butchering the middle and upper class with taxes then passing it around does help people out of poverty -- At the cost of making our future generations poorer, happens every time through out history. I am heavily against government welfare. For markets to survive it need competition, not cooperation through government bureaucracy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e50fQLyebI
Mythbuster’s Guide to Accessibility
I'm still disappointed they removed their friends feature. I valued my friends' ratings more than the ratings of the Netflix user base as a whole. I have noticed that Netflix tends to be more accurate with the "users like you" star rating than the whole user base ratings.

I no longer see a sum of my ratings but I believe it is well over 2,500. I know others that have rated a lot more (when there was the friends feature you could see your friends' number of ratings). Because of my number of ratings I felt that Netflix did a pretty good job with recommending me content. I will be sad to see this go as I definitely refer to star ratings when adding content to my queue.

Others have mentioned that the two factors of quality and enjoyment make the star rating more valuable and I agree. The only time I remember it breaking down for me was the film Rachel Getting Married (though I am sure there were others). I couldn't stand Anne Hathaway's character to the point that I gave it one star but at the same time I recognized that she gave a really strong performance in what was probably a good film.

Are they converting ratings to thumbs up/down? What does a three-star rating convert to? Those are typically movies that I enjoyed but wouldn't rewatch or recommend to others.
I am surprised:

1. I am technically pretty strong but I have no idea what this paper is about

2. So many people know this is about that it shot up to #1 on HN

Can someone give a pointer (a link or two) to the lay, interested audience here about what the field IS. Just a sort of intro guide to someone who knows about programming and math, but has never heard the term paxos?

I am curious, and I am sure many others are as well.

edit: spelling
etcd didn't implement leases; it just assumed that the last Raft election was still good.

You can elect a leader for a set period of time (say, 10 seconds) and serve strong reads for a lesser period of time (5 seconds) if you have reasonable assumptions of how good your local oscillators work and avoid jumps. If you don't trust your local clock to any level of accuracy, why do you trust your local CPU?

Cockroach DB does this correctly. https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/de...
One of the simplest missiles of all, the TOW [1] costs almost $20k. A friend who is a former Marine says it was common to fire half a dozen in practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW
Python Interface to Oracle DB Conforming to Python DB API 2.0 Specification
Lawrence Livermore Declassified Nuclear Test Movies
Like many people I've had a Netflix account for a long time - I can't recall the last thing I watched on their streaming service. It has probably been four months since I've used it to watch a movie for example. Their library is increasingly complete trash outside of a few original content programs. I'd cancel it if it weren't so cheap, mostly I keep the subscription as an entertainment fall back (in the category of: well, maybe I'll watch something on Netflix, oh, nope). I suspect I'll just ditch Netflix in the near future and be done with it, as I'm pretty happy with Prime as essentially a freebie to my Amazon shopping.
They're optimizing the wrong metric.

They should be optimizing "number of people who pay for Netflix". Instead they are optimizing "number of hours spent watching Netflix".

Those two metrics are correlated, but definitely not fully.

If I spend hundreds of hours a month watching meaningless action movies and TV on Netflix, I can cancel my subscription and save myself hundreds of hours and $10. I've got lots of other ways of filling my time with endless pablum.

If I spend 2 hours watching a thought-provoking documentary, I say to myself "yup, that justified spending $10 on Netflix this month."
My Crappy Implementation of the Game of Life (IA-32 Assembly)
And ice, quite surprisingly, is less dense than water. There are not many solids that are less dense than their liquid form.
Radio stations do precisely this, and they're decidedly non-creepy.
Steam ratings have their own problems. Like the creators changing something minor and getting thousands of protest negative reviews from upset people. Which doesn't reflect the quality of the game at all. But does discourage new people from trying the game.

My favorite example is Fallout 4. There are tons of negative reviews from people who put 600+ hours into the game. How the hell do you put 25 days of your life into a game you don't like? They claim it "got boring". Not many games will not be boring after 600 hours...
Bad premise war is a crime against humanity, or eh, should be.
Zapier CTO & co-founder here.

Much like Stripe's "hire a team" experiment - this is an experiment to pay people to "de-locate" from the Bay Area. Don't get us wrong, we absolutely love the Bay Area (I live here) but the cost of living is just outrageous for so many.

We're seeing a lot of candidates talking to Zapier (we're fully remote) about leaving the Bay Area to go "home" (some to start a family, some for other reasons) but want to stay in their tech career.

Happy to answer any questions, and I am sure there are a lot of Zapiens in the thread that could answer questions too.
Yeah, I haven't played many Zelda games in the past because they seemed fairly reflex and puzzle based rather than strategy and combat tactics. "Playing well" in those games often amounts not to thinking but to just muscle memory which I don't care for much. The puzzles I can appreciate but I have a limit. I did like Twilight Princess... maybe just something about the mood if it though.
This was in fact a major point of the drivers' case:

>The drivers note that each of the terms in Exemption F that indisputably names an exempt activity — “canning, processing, preserving,” and so forth on through “packing” — is a gerund. By, contrast, “distribution” is not. And neither is “shipment.” In fact, those are the only non-gerund nouns in the exemption, other than the ones that name various foods.

[0] http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-...
You dont have to be on the edge to call the hotline. Next time game night gets canceled give them a call for 20 minutes.
I think you are an anomalous user. I'm not sure why you're OK with rating 1-5 stars but not a thumbsup or down. I think you're just upset because they are changing.
They're not the same article - just the same subject matter
Hi thanks for the response, I do need a branded logo at this point. It's for a local business, that has picked up enough steam to warrant it. I figure for $35 on Fiverr, you get unlimited revisions, on two logo concepts, in five days or so. Worth getting brand recognition for that, and like you said, can change later.
> They can push for reform _and_ provide legal protection like this. They're not mutually exclusive.

Who is this protection designed to protect from? Would it, coincidentally be Microsoft?
I hate this example of supposed ambiguity when using the Oxford comma because it is grammatically dubious. It's not a proper parallel construction. The correct sentence is "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and to God." That example needs to be a scrubbed from Wikipedia.

I have yet to see a convincing example of ambiguity in the Oxford comma that doesn't rely on other grammar or style errors or similar shadiness. Given this I think that the anti-oxforders have essentially no case.
Why not use an em dash?

"To my mother—Ayn Rand—and God."

Is this flat out wrong?
Fun fact: One of the weirdest things about heavier-than-air flight is that upon posting any explanation for it online, several people will tell you you're wrong. Each of them will also disagree with one another. All will have sources.

[EDIT] This also happens with the Oberth Effect.
I love matlab2tikz. I used it for all my plots in my Ph.D. thesis (and I had a lot). I also really like latexmk.

For non-plots I love Sketch (http://sketch4latex.sourceforge.net) which is pretty great for doing diagrams with 3D objects, especially if you use the sketch-lib (https://alexdu.github.io/sketch-lib/) which provides a bunch of useful simple objects to manipulate.
Interesting. The features I asked for are almost all in "enterprise" and there's no price quote yes (or even a mention of whether enterprise is open source - I am willing to pay for a good system, but not for one I can't support myself)
How do they prevent abuse? How does a patient know who is accessing their records?
Do you have a better model?
Sounds like a neat way for Zapier to take advantage of Bay Area talent without paying Bay Area salaries. This isn't really for me, because I don't like remote work and I like living in the Bay Area, but I think this is a brilliant move. However, I'd want to know what the pay scale was like before making this kind of move.
Video may be good for some other people. Personally I am very biased toward text. If I had the choice I'd choose to read a transcript every time. I'd probably not watch the video of other students. Why take time for someone to stumble through talking what I could read in 1/10th of the time.
For someone to "exploit" this they must already have code execution.
Because they aren't capable. It's far easier to bitch and moan than actually do something,
>Wallstreet has rules. They're just not enforced. People would be shocked if they knew, for instance...

If you replaced "Wallstreet" with "War", your statement would be no less true.
I think the fact that Netflix saw a 200% increase in "thumbs" ratings vs "stars" in the A/B test makes it much better from a machine learning perspective, even if it might at first seem like the data is of "lower quality". One of the biggest problems for recommender systems is that the data is extremely sparse - most users will have only rated a tiny proportion of films, and most films will only have been rated by a tiny proportion of users.

This is just my opinion now, but having studied recommender systems in a decent amount of depth, I don't think the design of the algorithm will need to change. The current techniques that provide the best results use matrix factorisation to simultaneously learn characteristics of films and how much each user likes each characteristic. My intuition would be that the algorithm can learn a lot more about a user from 3 up/down-ratings than from 1 star-rating, and the only reason Netflix are doing this is so that they can provide better recommendations so it's almost certainly the case.

TL;DR: All else being equal, 5-star ratings carry more signal for any machine learning algorithm, but the fact that thumbs up/down will result in 200% more data is a lot more significant than the delta in the signal.
The Authoritative Guide to Elasticsearch Performance Tuning (Part 1)
The commit-msg hook. You can use it to validate your project state or commit message before allowing a commit to go through. The git docs demonstrate using this hook to check that your commit message is conformant to a required pattern.
Provided the license is at least Q-Public or stricter.

Otherwise expect a Neo-Dwarf-Fortress in no time to put pressure on the original author and let the world know that he is actually a hindrance to DF development.
Wallstreet is dominated by criminals? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
As is screwing up the global economy for greater profits.
Well, the unavailability is around 1/(number of machines in cluster) with a sufficient amount of replicas. That said, it's small relative to a whole-cluster unavailability and with small leader timeouts, it gets much better than you described in your article.

Btw, thanks for answering my comments actively, I really appreciate it!
Obvious question, do they get to keep their Bay Area salary?
Startup School Online: Registration and Deals
If/When Dave Chappelle sets a new record for 5 Star reviews, perhaps they'll consider reversing this decision.
I'd be interested in hearing more about how these firms get away with this kind of thing. I interned at an investment firm last year and the lawyer who worked in their compliance department told me how detailed, thorough, and stringent the audit that was done by the SEC the year before I got there was. Keep in mind, this was a small firm. Do larger firms have some way of keeping those kinds of things secret? Sorry if I'm misinterpreting something here, I have almost no financial knowledge as I worked in the tech department as a programmer.
Is there any evidence that UK/USA is spying on each other without the other country's permission and knowledge? It seems unlikely...
Everybody OOMs
I understand that. It's not perfect and I don't think the assumption is that it was but more that overall people as a group will smooth those rough edges. In other words the majority will compensate for the minority who use the ratings system differently.

For all the faults of the old system, the new one is even worse. Like Pandora, I'll probably just never rate things or mostly just give them a down vote if they don't crack a threshold of goodness.
The market will still be free. The business that protects its workers will be outpaced by the business that automates with minimal staff. If you ask an existing business to retain its staff, a new business will appear that will capitalise on automated efficiency as they have no benchmark on which to be compared (eg. Walmart importing cheap Chinese junk or Uber bypassing taxi industry protections).

I applaud the attitude. In fact, I'd love to see similar ethics applied to the media. The prejudice I see from most media outlets (especially around gender discrimination) is absolutely appalling. Domestic violence is a prime example. I rechecked today to see if the media had stopped its extremely sexist views and was disappointed to see a complete lack of ethics.
I have trumpeted this many times but selfhosted​ solutions like cloudron, sandstorm, arkos are the way to go. We want iot devices to send data to our personal servers and not to big brother companies for analysis and mining.

That said, in my experience, people willingly give their data to Google and Facebook. I assumed people were not cognisant but this is not the case. Most people are very conscious of their decision and argue that their data is safer with Google and it's a good trade off. This seems like a PR issue and hard to fix even if selfhosted solutions reach maturity.

Do others share my thoughts? Would love to hear from privacy enthusiasts as to how we can promote better architectures for the web.
> I don't think you've been paying attention. All the major payers Health IT vendors have analytics as good as anything at MS or Google,

I work with the Geisinger health system at a major US University doing analytics work for them. They are far ahead of most other systems and they are woefully behind.
It's useful to recognize it, while simply abiding by only the parts of it which suit you. After all, if you need to, you can always ignore it and deny it.

That's the reality of war.
It's about damn time.

5-star rating systems are broken. A 1/2/3-star rating is effectively a dislike, and a 4/5-rating is effectively a like. In the big data sense, a deviation from a 1-star for dislike and 5-star for like is statistically meaningless. (and this is universal; star ratings on Amazon Products and Yelp Locations have the exact same distribution).

The interesting part of this is what Netflix gains from the change, since their recommendation algorithms will become less granular. Maybe they came to the same conclusion?
The federal law has lots of exemptions that apply to various hourly workers.
It benefits them to have you leave the bay area, because they know it will be much more difficult for you to find your next job. They are paying $10k now to minimize future raises and equity grants.

I can think of less risky ways to squeeze $10k out of a new employer.
I second this. I read a paper yesterday and the figures produced by R clashed visually with the typesetting style. The Tikz ones are so, so, nice.
IIRC there was a blog post on HN a while past that complained about it, and it seemed to be people that went with 1-star so that their review was potentially more visible.
Yes, 100% yes - I now only shop at the supermarket that gives you scanners. The system is genius, works like this:

- swipe loyalty card, get a hand-held scanner
- walk around the shop, scan items as you put them in your bag
- when walking out, stick the scanner back into the holder
- swipe your loyalty card, pay with card, leave

It's unbelievably convenient, mostly because you only have to put items in your bag once, when you're picking them up from the shelf, not twice when you have the usual self-serve kiosks.

Obviously it's trivial to steal items and they randomly sometimes check the bag contents on checkout, but this is extremely rare.

Basically, they're assuming their customers are not aholes. And it works beautifully.
Flexible touch sensor is not fooled by stretching
I don't think anyone outside of Nintendo knows for sure. It could be that they are just very conservative with their estimates. They don't want a bunch of unsold hardware sitting around losing value.
You should have documented and reported to the labor board.
The issue is that their digital library is vanishingly small. I swear half the tv shows on there are Netflix original content from the last five years.
The Onion called this one years ago:
http://bit.ly/1JXicmI
Yep, I have Zelda BotW for Wii U, so I will buy the Switch depending on the quality of Mario Odyssey and the local multiplayer games that come out.
Legend says that in the streets of Naples they used to sell white T-shirts with a black band to simulate the seat belt :-)
I think this is a very creative program. It would be better if it was a blanket relocation package that wasn't tied to moving away from the bay area. You are 100% remote, so why not move from anywhere to anywhere?

EDIT: My question is why it is hinged on moving away from a city. I think it is a legitimate question. Someone living in NYC or Seattle might have similar issues with the cost of housing.
To the deleted comment asking about battery life:

As for general battery life, based on these figures you'll get somewhere between 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 hours and 15 minutes playing Breath of the Wild, depending on the settings you use.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nintendo-switch-battery-l...

To the GP, Nintendo products have this effect on people. They're different enough that people don't know what to expect. You'll find similar sentiments about the Wii U (especially from Nintendo fans - the next Mario/Zelda/SSB is gonna put it over the top!).

I'm interested in wait and see. The hardware is mediocre even though the form factor is great. They really have to get more games out before the holiday season, though, and where they are at they're competing with both mobile devices and consoles. Parents have to justify spending $300 on this + full priced games against more games and better experiences on other consoles (MS IS launching a 4k console, too) and cheaper (much cheaper) games on mobile devices that aren't restricted to gaming. They're in a no man's land of markets where they compete with everyone (for good and bad).

....though it'll probably sell like hotcakes.
We move on to harder problems.

I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist.

There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.
What a refreshing idea. I'd love to hear the results after a year of this experiment.

I think the idea can apply to many cities, even outside the US. Some European cities are in the midst of a housing (availability) crisis forcing rent prices up and leaving young families to live in small apartments to be within a commutable distance to work.
It's basically the topic of distributed computing and algorithms for the coordination of distributed systems.

This is a great introductory course about it in my opinion: https://www.coursera.org/learn/cloud-computing

Then, it's just reading papers like, which you mentioned, "The part time parliment" (paxos)
Do you pay people less if they decide to leave the expensive area?
russians have to hack, but Yahoo gives everything to US gov without hacking, creates tools for NSA to spy.
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/11/roge...
> black holes don’t need singularities inside them in order to be black holes.

They do according to the standard GR model. Speculations about holes not having singularities inside them are quantum gravity speculations and we have no way of testing them experimentally any time soon.
Test Dynamics, 0.2.9 released
Eh, iono. There are plenty of places with tech work outside of the bay area. And having a proven "works well remotely" on the resume seems likely to help find _other_ remote gigs down the road.