skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Apply machine learning to fuzzy matching?
I would like to receive some input from the wise guys here on this topic.

So let's say that I have an MDM system (Master Data Management), whose primary application is to detect and prevent duplication of records.

Every time a sales rep enters a new customer in the system, my platform runs a check on existing records, computes the Levenshtein or Jaccard or XYZ distance between pair of words or phrases or attributes, considers weights and coefficients and outputs a similarity score, and so on.

Your typical fuzzy matching scenario.

I would like to know if it makes sense at all to apply machine learning techniques to optimize the matching output, i.e. find duplicates with maximum accuracy.
And where exactly it makes the most sense.

- optimizing the weights of the attributes?

- increase the algorithm confidence by predicting the outcome of the match?

- learn the matching rules that otherwise I would configure into the algorithm?

- something else?

Also my understanding is that weighted fuzzy matching is already a good enough solution, probably even from a financial perspective, since whenever you deploy such an MDM system you have to do some analysis and preprocessing anyway, be it either manually encoding the matching rules or training an ML algorithm.

So I'm not sure that the addition of ML would represent a significant value proposition.

Any thoughts are appreciated.
You sound like a horrible person to work with. Software development is a collaborative process. I would never want to work with someone who treats all of their peers as competition and refuses to help them achieve the team's mutual goals, and were I your manager, I'd likely fire you.
You just have to coerce them near the end of the election. Or, even better, take their smartcard and hold onto it until after the election.
Best starting point to build an Instagram/Snapchat stories feature?
I want to implement an Instagram/Snapchat stories feature, but don't know a great way to start it. I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a boilerplate/Github repo that had a starting point?
> Peer mentoring is part of your job in any field.

All morality in a corporate setting is fake by design. Everybody simply maximizes their own bottom line, and if you don't too, you are an idiot. Training your own competition is simply not a way to maximize your revenue.
Judging by how much money Microsoft has, I wouldn't say money solves that problem.
> Can you provide C code that will not compile with c++ compiler?

C99 native complex numbers
I'm an absolute fool for upgrading my text editor whilst I have two major project deadlines due before Easter, but I like to live dangerously. And it was worth it - the new Adaptive theme looks fantastic!
What's the support for HTTP/2 in tools like curl and socat?
I work from home and a shower can be an incredibly helpful way to take a break from the computer and think about technical problems. I imagine it's a bit like meditation.. Being able to do this at the right time is key.
> 1000 is a cult, 10,000,000 is a Religion.

I don't think this holds.

There are about 1,000 practicing Samaritans left in the world. They practice a faith very similar to Judaism with a comparably long history, and I think hardly anyone would call them a cult.

There are >50,000 self-described Scientologists worldwide. Many different people, including some government bodies, have referred to that organization as a cult.

If we're talking about formal definition, there are detailed lists of what constitutes a cult - size isn't a factor, but segregation from non-members, active indoctrination, and public shaming are. If we're talking common usage, it appears to be respectability or 'kookiness'. Size is a factor, but age, similarity to other traditions, and behavior of members and leaders all count too.
Business is in our blood I guess. At the very least, we do it well :)
Intel CPUs run one micro-op per execution port per cycle (see section 2.3.4 of http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/... for details, though the manual is a bit out of date -- more recent CPUs have more ports: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architectu...). Optimized code has to be written with execution port utilization in mind.
Machine Learning Software Testing Tips for iOS
I've been wearing monthly contacts for 3 years now. I take them out each night and soak them in a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution (Clear Care), and dispose of them on the first of the month.

I highly value my sight, so I have a routine which makes me feel comfortable with sticking things in and touching my eyes twice a day. My optometrists have always told me to avoid using water, saliva, etc, to clean the lenses, and so I do.

1. Wash my hands with soap and water, and usually scrub my fingernails with a brush.

2. Grab a fresh paper towel and pat dry my hands to sop up the water. Rubbing my hands with the paper towel, in my opinion, could leave fragments which could transfer to my eye / behind the contact.

3. Open the contact container, pull out the right lens, close the contact container.

4. Insert the right lens.

5. Repeat step 3 with left lens.

6. Clean up the area with the paper towel from step 2.

I regularly (nearly every day) shower with the lenses in, though while I make an effort to avoid getting water in my eyes, splashes obviously happen. I've also spent weeks vacationing and swimming in the ocean with the lenses in.

It is my hope that by removing and disinfecting the lenses each night I can ward off infections while also minimizing inconvenience.
My employer's work environment is worth much more to me per year than the entire cost of your home setup thanks to all of the free meals and the gym equipment alone. Just something worth thinking about.
Ah yes. For static content your correct. I've got my head in dynamic stuff at the moment. Of course you're right.
Code of Conduct. Conduct. CONDUCT!

Not: code of thought, beliefs, sexuality, politics, religion....

All the discussions of philosophy and belief systems in this thread are missing the point. It DOES NOT MATTER how you feel about someone else's beliefs. It is not relevant. How they CONDUCT themselves in the community is the only thing that matters.
programming is a team sport - you might well be better than average but if you're leaving your team to eat dust then you may well be causing more harm than good.
If someone in the US posted publicly about bringing "bottles, fabric, gasoline, turpentine, foam plastic" to a protest, they'd get a visit from the FBI. Speech that incites violence is something they investigate regularly.
> Are you sure it wasn't public?

Ah, I was mistaken on that detail. Apologies. Apparently I've read some poorly researched sources on the subject.

There was a lawsuit about whether it should be made public and a judge ruled that it should be. So "leaked" is inaccurate, though there was and is disagreement about whether the information should be public.
I hear this point all the time, but it's starting to feel like it's just the cool thing to say. Can you quantify this? What do you feel has gotten worse besides "grr some stuff looks iOS-y!"
You can now spell ‘Earthling’ with a capital ‘E,’ and here’s why
You had it backwards - should have read "new older people and incompetent college kids"
They had 20 hours to get there. There were flights from other airlines as well as ability to just drive 5 hours.
Then he should have been paid a real wage for it. We aren't running a GULAG program here. (Well, we are, but we don't want to admit it.)
I actually like being on call, because I get paid for it and we've written a stable service that rarely has issues.
Quoted from the article:

"OpenCL works fine on NVIDIA cards, but performance is reasonably slower (up to 2x slowdown) compared to CUDA, so it doesn't really worth using OpenCL on NVIDIA cards at this moment."

I wonder if that's intentional on NVIDIA's part.

Does it mention which version of OpenCL they're using? I'm looking forward to hearing news about v2.x and SPIR-V.
>The TV and Radio ad argument falls a little flat when you consider people have left radio for competitively priced streaming music that is ad-free and people have left TV for competitively priced streaming movies and TV that are ad-free.

Not ad free - different types of ads. Services like Netflix have product placement.

(Which troubles me a bit since while traditional ads were irritating, at least there was disclosure.)
STATE OF THE CLOUD REPORT [pdf]
Looks more like a media stunt by the Election commission to save its face. If they are real serious then they should pay security researchers to find a bug in the EVMs, Like bug bounties with real money prizes. As a computer programmer I find it hard to believe that EVMs cannot be hacked.
Scientists Hacked a Cell's DNA and Made a Biocomputer Out of It
For starters, the newly minted Uttar Pradesh government installed a Anti Romeo squad to prevent what's called "Love Jihad", roving gangs of young muslim men trying to get Hindu girls to marry in a sinister plot to increase the Muslim population. As per Indian constitution, you can have 4 legal wives if you are Muslim and divorce anyone with three utterances of the word "talaq". Uttar Pradesh government also has an anti beef squad to prevent killing of holy cows. Recently 4 men transporting cattle in a vehicle were apprehended and assaulted. One of them died because of the heavy beating he received. These "squads" are employed by state in a quasi legal manner. There's also talks of reviving a demand to build a Hindu temple on Babri Masjid, a 14'th century mosque that was demolished in 90s by the current constituents of government causing nation wide riots. The mosque was demolished as vengeance for an alleged demolition of an early Hindu temple on the same area during the time of the first Muslim emperor in India in 14th century.
As somebody who has been doing web development for almost 20 years, I wasn't expecting much from your mailing list. I have been consistently impressed with your tips and look forward to them appearing in my inbox now. Thanks -- and keep up the good work!
At a previous job I worked from home 2-3 days per week. My commute was 45-60 minutes depending on traffic. When I worked from home, I'd actually start working when I'd typically head out the door and work until the time I'd typically get home. The company got more from me and I didn't have to endure the commute (or the wear-and-tear on my car with stop-go traffic).

Getting that time back in the evening, when needed, allowed me to schedule local appointments or meet a friend at a more reasonable time.
Vegan Sushi?
It's mainly a video, the text is just a caption.
Some kind of screen sharing app with Krita = virtual whiteboard. You have a lot more room than a real whiteboard offers, since Krita has a "pseudo-infinite" canvas, so you don't need to erase things. And you can save the file for reference, or to send it other people.
Agreed, major phenomena are exceptions to the norm, did not intend to convey any judgement on the practice. Those same phenomena affect airlines too. In fact, weather delays had hampered United's ops leading up to the ejection event in the news. My point was airlines are not the only ones who sell > capacity.
Give me two examples of unwritten agreements that are not laws and will get me in more trouble than "some segment of the population will think less of me".
Note: I said "purely economic" and you essentially said: "But social".

See the danger? Intellectual discussions must now be passed through the filter of social narratives?

So pointing out any mathematical reality which has negative social implications is therefore a display of support for said negative social implications?

No. That's ridiculous. The world isn't rainbows and unicorns. And many morally commendable policies will and must fail mathematically.

Being the "messenger" that points out said mathematical realities isn't a display of support for fascism.
Sometimes (not too often) I do such things remotely.

In my case, voice call + screen sharing works OK. On the screen sharing I can use whatever software I find adequate, be it Word, Visio, Paint.net, balsamic mockups, etc.

As a side effect, we can continue working on those documents/diagrams/whatever after the discussion, e.g. include it in the documentation. Much harder to achieve with a white board as someone needs to digitize those drawing. In my experience working offline with whiteboards, no one actually doing that. In the best case, a digital photo is kept somewhere no one will be looking, in the worst case the board is just wiped clean.
While cool as a tech (hello again <map>, i did not miss you) , most sites do not have large pictures of sellable items -- and far from every country has amazon as a reasonable choice due the cost of shipping and import tax.

Maybe it is cool for pink bloggers ( https://goo.gl/OFWwmp ), but I don't see the use case for the masses like you do with adsense.
> Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user.

Brendan Eich is trying to do exactly this with the Brave browser [0]. Although it is a ways away, he wants to cut out the adware middlemen and give users a portion of the revenue for ads which they view, perhaps with some sort of opt-in "watch this video and earn $x" model in which the video content is tailored to you through (local, private) browsing history analysis.

If you are interested, Software Engineering Daily recently did an interview with him about the topic:

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/03/31/webassembly-...

[0] https://www.brave.com
True, but there are also a lot of benefits to working remote.

I work full-time remote. Previously I worked full-time onsite.

The onsite:remote benefits directly matches up to the work:life ratio. I get benefits to my life that onsiters don't get, and vice versa. It's a personal choice.
The guy who got arrested and I are second cousins. He is not a researcher, he is a businessman. He also has close ties with one of the regional political parties in India.
In the near-term, your camera snaps a low-res image that's sufficient to identify Banksy's work and generate a gigapixel zoom that will allow you to appreciate it as if you were standing in a nearby window. A discerning eye might notice the details aren't quite a 1-to-1 match, but it's close enough for the ignorant masses to miss. You complain on HN about the inaccuracy, finding some agreement, but within hours, future images of the same tag are spot-on. The next time you view the image on your phone, those inaccuracies have been corrected. If you hadn't downloaded it off your camera to show here, there would be no evidence anything was off.

Five years later, you snap another photo of Banksy's latest, with an even lower-res camera. Two possible outcomes:

1. You've violated Banksy's copyright, whether he wanted that copyright or not, and the offending image is not present in your photo. You may or may not receive an automated warning.

2. You've recorded a crime, the authorities are notified immediately as your photo processes, and the image is again not present in your photo so as not to encourage the proliferation of graffiti.

The endgame leaves you with no camera, no one cares about Banksy who's in jail by now (with your help!), and why are you so concerned about violating copyright and encouraging crime, anyway? Why should technology enable you to do any such thing?
what did you do bro
> Release or not release is just a name. You shouldn't let that be a factor.

I disagree. The name is the developer's way of telling you whether the software should be considered ready for general use. As long as it's called "beta", I'm not going to second guess the developer's judgement; I'll wait until the release version of ST3 before upgrading from ST2.
There is a mentality among developers that Windows is not for programming, which is quite unfair

(article then immediately describes how the operating system they paid for needs open-source code to have a decent terminal, SSH client, and package manager)

Yup, don't have any idea of where that reputation might've come from...
Sure, to be fair, few people think they're advocating for evil. But the Supreme Court found it was an unjustified removal of rights, so it turned out that the holders of that opinion were, in the opinion of the court's interpretation of the US Constitution, in fact advocating oppression.

All of which begs the question of whether removing a CEO on the losing side of such a debate is tantamount to the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy.
One compelling reason: if you need to hire down the road (once you're CTO/manager/equivalent), it makes much more sense to hire devs who you've trained and invested in at a previous company.
Are there are build-out guarantees on the contract? I'd love to see the companies be sued once they fail to deliver.
In order to convince everyone they're not, you'll have to show how virtually every lead based on IP is false.

And I'm not so sure that is true.
It's not permanent. Every ride is basically subsidized by Goldman Sachs.
As a more senior individual myself, don't sweat it there's plenty of us who love to expand our tool belt and mentor those following the path.

> Are you actually a top performer in the software world?

Having to ask that question should be an answer in of itself, a resounding "no".
It looks significantly faster in those benchmarks! Koro takes almost half as long!
Does your site take responsibility for the ads it displays? Will you compensate me for the time and expense in the event one of your unvetted ads infects a user at my company with some kind of drive-by malware?

No?

Then I guess this "agreement" isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.
I have been wearing lenses for 10 years now and swim regularly with my lenses in. I do wear swimming goggles but of course some water sometimes enters my eye - never had a problem because of it.

I had one eye infection in my life which happened right after going to the optometrist and having my eyes checked (they put a fluid into my eyes to dilate the pupil, after that putting my lens in seemed to irritate my eye and caused an infection somehow).

But one thing I can not do is shower with my lenses in. I have done it several times but it always makes me feel so uncomfortable, the feeling of my eyes becomes so annoying (I suppose due to essentially taking steaming hot showers, the rising water vapor or something irritates my eye).
Sorry, I must be harsh. No.

This fundamentally doesn't offer much advantage over a .toJSON() instance method and a .fromJSON() class method.

Don't say "security-focused" if you can't handle cyclic object graphs.
GPLv3 = release code, cannot link to proprietary software. For some graphics chipsets some company might (need) to do that. Then you'll need to go to Canonical to get Mir under a special license just for your company. Then Canonical gets some money.

I have nothing against Canonical wanting to follow this. I do not like only one company being able to offer a different license (their CLA). So anything like that is a no-go for me.
Wow this looks really cool! I didn't know it before...
There is another one that i'm using: tracker, but it's less cool.
I don't know if I can answer people's questions but I was born Parsi (I.e. Zoroastrians from India). AMA
As an experiment I have OpenSUSE leap on my workstation(while Fedora on my laptop).

I can't say bad things about it, except that it's quite often that you can't find packages for various applications. A random example would be spotify, that was one of my last adventures to make it work(I got tired and gave up after a while).

And Fedora/RH has a lot more momentum in general and you can be certain that it will be around for as long as Linux is a thing I guess :)

Suse has gone through various struggles and it doesn't inspire much confidence to me anymore.
Why we need to democratize AI education
> Windows packaging isn't all it's cracked up to be. There is no standard package repository, the norm is just to distribute executables of various kinds, the process of building installers is not that simple...

After dealing with the various walled gardens and their concomitant limitations, and after dealing with any system of linux package management, the Windows way feels like some sort of joyous escape from captivity.
I'm not saying I don't enjoy mentoring people and sharing knowledge! I'm saying that it is unreasonable for companies to ban WFH, and I explained what I think is the true motivation behind that decision.

To clarify - companies are banning WFH so they can lower their hiring bar and take on incompetent people and not have to pay for or provide any company training. They just rely solely on their senior people to teach the new people everything.

The article was about WFH policies, and that's what I am commenting on. I'm not saying mentorship == bad or coming into the office == never. I'm saying mentorship can be done while working from home, and banning it is a terrible company policy.
I feel the issue isn't the $70 which isn't a big deal (or shouldn't be) but more the point that other editors like VSCode are available now and have the backing of a big company like Microsoft. The biggest criticism of Sublime is that it often feels like it has been abandoned. It goes 6+ months without a peep from the developer. This can make people uneasy.

I prefer Sublime over VSCode, Atom, etc. but at the end of the day VSCode is free and still very good. Perhaps not quite as fast as Sublime but it also offers other features out of the box which Sublime doesn't so there is a trade off. Is Sublime "better" than VSCode to justify $70? That is something that can only be answered on a case by case basis I think.
While Linux developers and users endlessly argued about, and worked on, different UI environments, display server stacks, etc., Android's UI became the world's most used computer interface environment (around 1.5 billion devices, at last count):

http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/android-statistics/

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

Market relevance aside, I view Ubuntu's return to Gnome as a Good Thing. It means there will be more work towards common goals by Canonical and Red Hat.
Blimp Autopilot Written in Golang: Take Off / Loiter / Waypoint Nav / Land
> I think for the vast majority of people, it's hard to become a senior or even intermediate developer without some [on the job] mentorship along the way.

Doesn't this assume that the only mentorship (edit: We're really talking about "job training") is peer mentorship? What about classes, self-training, etc? Why should the onus be placed 100% on the senior employee? Why no onus on the junior employee?
It's amazing you mention that, I have amblyopia, but I actually learnt about that name into my late twenties. I always had a lazy eye (had an operation when I was 4, but did nothing...), so that lazy eye never properly developed, it hava a vision of like 2/10. It only see the left far side, very blurry, so I have an almost 100% field of view, but that's about it.

It never bother me, except what you talked about, is some very particular tasks, some task like filling a glass of water can be challenging as I have no parallax, so no real depth of field. Sometimes I can't tell if your glass is right under my jug or not.
Sports with ball, forget it, ping-pong and badminton was just impossible for me in high-school/college.
Bumping into things happen often, and no 3D movies for me, also VR is a lot less appealing and immersive :(
I wear hard gas-permeable lenses, and AFAIK those have to be washed with water as well as some detergent and then rinsed with water. Does anyone know if all the article says applies to hard lenses too?

For those who don't know the difference, hard gas-permeable lenses are more like a piece of hard plastic than a gel like substance, they can't dry out.