skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin noob here, but I'd like someone to explain:

> Building more efficient mining chips is what miners are supposed to do, as it secures the blockchain.

The first part (each miner has motivation to mine as efficient as possible) is obvious. But how does that benefit the blockchain as a whole?

So a miner implements a way to find, with fewer operations, a hash with the required difficulty properties. Next iteration, the system adjusts the difficulty to keep the number of signed blocks per time unit roughly the same, effectively undoing the optimization.

If each miner had their own blockchain (with the new difficulty) then an optimizing miner could now sign about as many blocks as they could before while a non-optimizing miner could mine less blocks.

Because in reality, they all share the same blockchain, the optimizing miners instead take over the blocks that the non-optimizing miners are not anymore able to sign.

Woudn't that lead to more centralisation of miners in the end?
But I guess it is easier to be happy when you are richer and have a smaller probability to die tomorrow.
Ditto for the Celeron 3215U, which is used in some newer devices along the same lines.
Then it's a rumor. One you probably want to keep your eye on. Which was the whole point of the article anyway.
Some patents expired and no longer require license:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and...
Although going to the other extreme and equating truth with scientific verification is also not a helpful belief system.

There are plenty of things that are true that haven't been subject to rigorous, peer-reviewed scrutiny, because of the lack of practicality or the cost associated with it.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

Looks like the parents have expired as of 2 weeks ago
I'm coming in only knowing what those two links say (having no experience with the Moneyball media franchise or concept), but based on those, it sounds more like DePodesta is saying that the subjectivity was involved in selecting the relevant data points, and that once those data points were selected, they were used as the basis of evaluation -- they didn't override their formula to benefit "gut feelings".

From later in [2]:

>"We turn to data as our flashlight in the cave – our guiding light,” DePodesta said. “We said ‘unless we can prove it, we’re not going to believe it.’"...

Essentially, from these articles, it seems that scouting used to be a random occurrence based on the biases (or "intuition") of the scout, and that DePodesta's "innovation" was an attempt to link that process to something measurable. This "innovation" is so obvious in other fields that it's not even mentioned, and that people who depend wholly on unjustifiable random chance deserve punishment and/or ridicule.

Like most things, it boils down to subjectivity, because while you can find ways to quantify and analyze virtually anything, there is still a human who has to make a subjective judgment call as to what quantifications are significant to achieving their end goal. DePodesta says they would make those determinations and then refuse to change the criteria over undefined feeling-based intuition. That's, uh, good, I guess?
I hate these opinionated pieces about what works and what doesn't mainly BECAUSE they're not backed up by rigorous analysis (it's all a bunch of assumptions and untested conclusions) nor statistical proof.

So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof.

You can have an all-start team that kicks ass and you can have a bunch of mediocre developers kick ass. Same for a mix of both. In the absence of analysis or statistical proof, why do I care to listen to your opinion?
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> Comparing MBAs' & undergrads' experiences is specious, at best. And if you're comparing other graduate students against MBAs, the recruiting process for MBB is exactly the same. (source: I did my time at McKinsey, the 'M' in MBB.)

I'm talking about other graduate students, and (at least in this example) the recruiting process is NOT the same. It didn't matter if you were getting a master's in basket weaving or a PhD in physics, you were required to take the test, again at least at this particular university. MBAs were spared the test and went straight to the normal interview process. Also, had you not done an elite MBA, what do you think your path to McKinsey would have consisted of?

> Regarding Prof. Rivera's study, I'm curious whether it attempts to separate causation & correlation. At HBS, the number of ex-MBB consultants in the program is roughly equal to the number who leave into MBB - many swap out and in, but the figures are in the same range. Does she account for that?

Prof. Rivera's research consists of multiple related studies whose findings confirm that, regardless of skills and relevant experience, the most important factor in hiring for elite firms in business and law are educational pedigree, creating a discrepancy in opportunity for those that get an elite education and those that don't. She accomplishes this through ethnographic research on the recruitment practices of the firms.

> Also, any analysis which groups JDs & MBAs together is 100% flawed. Those two may have similar prestige, but wildly different career progressions.

I disagree in this context. The point of her research is that careers which tend to lead to powerful positions in society are practically closed off to those that don't have elite educations. If you want get into high finance or MBB consulting or BigLaw, it behooves you to attend an elite university, and while you're there, do as the Romans do. Prof. Rivera's research is _really_ interesting, you should check it out.
Yes, I still use RSS to remember the sites I want to check regularly. I use feedly.com.
Gene Editing Just Eliminated HIV-1 Infection: Live Animal Study
> I could care less

Obviously not an engineer.
>It always bugged me as a sports fan because Oakland never won any titles with that approach

There is too much variance (and too much league parity) in the Playoffs short series format.

Moneyball gets you there, where all the gate is gravy.
No, this isn't valid reasoning.
How to Make a Coca Cola Truck with DC Motor – Simple Coca Cola Truck
I don't think it's that bridges need to be able to withstand that much heat, but that no one should ever be able to apply that much heat to it. If a pipeline runs under it and is able to be accessed by anyone, that inherently means the infrastructure is strongly vulnerable to attack and it just takes one person mere seconds to destroy everything.

I'm not blaming the designers of the freeway though. My house has a giant plate glass window right next to my deadlocked front door. Our entire society is built around trusting that most people don't want to destroy the nice things we've collectively built. But if someone smashed my window and stole my TV, I'd probably make sure that window was a little more secure. Incremental improvements.
My prediction: At the end of June, Intel announces a fix for a minor non-RCE bug in the LAN code of Intel ME. SemiAccurate proudly and inaccurately announces that it confirms their previous reporting and adds it to the list of things to mention every time they write an article about Intel. There is no follow-up Hacker News thread with 100+ comments, so most of the people who posted here continue thinking that there was a major RCE in Intel ME that we just haven't heard about because it was covered up.

Edit: Already proven wrong! We're headed for interesting times.
* Closed source

* Private, for-profit company

Either one of those determining a person's sentence is a potential for danger. The combination is a nightmare.
Are you looking for candidates at a particular phase in their career?
Asking candidates to:

1) describe themselves in a thousand words or less

2) write up a mock outage report

3) pitch something new to "the team"

just to submit their CV seems a little much. Pass.
I imagine the name's advantages of being memorable and being a conversation starter must outweigh the negative effects. I think every time there's a story about them here someone complains about the name, yet their company has persisted for two years. Of course, it's hard to test that hypothesis, and the name could very well be hurting them.
> If I'm a business, should I increase the likelihood that the public gives me bad reviews on yelp when I bring attention to this issue?

How/why would customers give you more bad reviews if you could prove your business has received fraudulent bad reviews on Yelp? Those dots don't seem to sensibly connect.

> Yelp can push sales quotas upon employees without "knowing" that it's inducing them to post negative (and positive [for those who pay]) reviews. Just because they're not explicitly telling their employees to post negative/positive reviews doesn't mean that they don't do so through other means.

This is a good hypothesis for how it could happen; this is essentially what happened at Wells Fargo. But there's still the pesky lack of evidence for it actually happening at Yelp, where the evidence for it happening at Wells Fargo is considerable--loads of employees and ex-employees discussing it openly, tons of customer records showing accounts opened without permission, etc. That is a key difference that suggests the Yelp accusations are without much merit.

It's a foregone conclusion that some Yelp employees have done manipulative things to customers over the years, and maybe it's those isolated events that spur these occasional complaints, but there's no evidence of a widespread, systemic problem. If such credible evidence materializes, I will change my view, but I'll not apologize for waiting to accept the story until compelling evidence appeared. A tiny percentage of businesses making uncorroborated claims is an absurdly low standard for evidence.

> Because their employees are using Yelp's whistle blowing line.

This is another bare assertion without supporting evidence. If this were the case, where are all of the exposés from former Yelp employees who were pressured to do the extorting?

I probably ought not have engaged in this discussion, because I have no dog in this hunt. I should have remembered that if someone has arrived at a hard conclusion without evidence, then that is a demonstration that evidence is not important to them. I just get so exasperated when I see my peers accepting a stranger's story wholesale without a crumb of evidence. So it goes.
To make it less ugly, and assuming you are using PostgreSQL you could make the code a little more appealing rewriting it like that. (If you are not using postgres WITH will probably not work but VALUES instead of UNION should still work). Please also notice that "binary" is quoted because it's a reserved postgresql word.

WITH
boxes(hostname, os, arch, ram) AS (VALUES
('box1', 'linux', 'x86-64', 8),
('box2', 'freebsd', 'arm', 16),
('box3', 'windows', 'x86-64', 4),
('box4', 'illumos', 'sparc', 4)
),
compilers("binary",version,output_option) AS (VALUES
('gcc', '4.8.4', '-o'),
('clang', '3.4.1', '-o'),
('msvc', '15.00.30729.01', '/Fe')
),
tests(name,sources) AS (VALUES
('frobnicate' , 'frbonicate.c' ),
('loadtest', 'loadtest.c helpers.c'),
('end2end', 'end2end.c helpers.c')
)

SELECT *, compilers.binary || ' ' || tests.sources || ' ' ||
compilers.output_option || ' ' || tests.name cmdline
FROM boxes, compilers, tests
WHERE NOT(tests.name = 'loadtest' AND boxes.ram < 8)

Here is a fiddle to play around... http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/9eecb7db59d16c80417c72d1e1f4fbf1/1...

But this is a stand alone query, SQL really become useful IMHO if data is stored inside the DB or gathered automatically by the db. For the inheritance I'm really clueless, it depend on what you try to achieve and i'm just a DB guy.
aww shucks. Yeah, i understand. Backwards compatibility is hard, and java has been pretty good (there have, of course, been a few rough spots). I'm surprised there's no answer at all for maven. I'd assumed there was some sort of

import *

to just grab everything, like we're all doing right now. Going and adding a single line to a few hundred build.xmls doesn't sound excessive. shrug
Much more likely, I think. When online advertising crashes (<5 years, starting already), Google is going to struggle. Amazon is still going to be making a lot of money.
I hate to be that person, but why is it so exciting to exchange our privacy and freedom for a shiny piece of software? What's so wrong with Firefox + PhantomJS?
Mozilla Proposal re: Symantec
Reaching the Tipping Point: When Things Changed for Cloud Computing
That's an interesting board, but it still only has one Ethernet interface, plus an on-board switch.
It always struck me as a bizarre practice.

Yes, I'm breathless with excitement to join $COMPANY, and change the world as an entry-level JavaScript programmer! {Insert rambley college-application-style plattitudes}
Lambdas are just functions with different syntax. Closures imply keeping some state around, and may require that some variables from outer scopes live longer than they otherwise would. (That's what they're usually used for in Javascript, where you want state kept around for a reply event.)

Closures are easy to implement in garbage-collected languages, but get complicated in non-garbage collected languages. When an inner function normally references variables in an outer scope, they're just references to the stack. But if there's a closure that can outlive the outer scope, those variables have to be saved somewhere.

With C++11 closures, you have to specify what you want to keep around and how you want it kept.[1] Internally, C++11 creates an object to store the variables you want to keep around. This can potentially create lifetime problems, because you can save a reference to a variable, then keep the closure object around longer than the variable being referenced. This creates a dangling pointer. Rust has lifetime checking to catch such errors, but C++11 does not. See this Stack Overflow discussion of how not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++11 closure lifetime undefined behavior.[2]

That's why it's useful to realize that closures and lambdas are not the same thing. Lambdas are simple. Closures are complicated.

[1] http://www.cprogramming.com/c++11/c++11-lambda-closures.html
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27775233/lambdas-and-capt...
So, now that the "but MP3 is patent-encumbered" consideration is finally dead-ish, what's the new balance on the debate between shipping {MP3, MP4-AAC, MKV-Vorbis, MKV-Opus} as music/SFX assets in software products?

Also, with the two sub-considerations:

• on mobile, where hardware decoding exists for only some codecs;

• on the web, where the audio APIs only accept some of these formats/codecs.
Your code really sucks, but so does mine (audio)
Upvoted for salary info; thanks for including it!
I don't think we're talking past each other, as I think we both understand the differences in each of our definitions, ie. I understand you think identity is central but I disagree, and you understand that I think procedural abstraction is central, but you disagree.

Where we differ is which definition ought to deserve the label "object", in the pure sense the way we have a definition for "function".
Just get a computer that doesn't have vPro.
To answer the question: landlording does provide a service. You can afford a place to live without having a down payment's worth of assets. This is useful for a big chunk of the population. If you make landlording not profitable or too risky, rental stock decreases and rents rise on the remaining stock.

I do think it would make sense to attempt to decrease transaction costs in order to increase market liquidity and efficiency. Unfortunately, there are some hard physical minimum costs in there that are pretty significant (evaluation, moving, legal stuff). But perhaps realtor premiums could be reduced.

To actually get prices to come down, you need to increase supply. We're not getting any more land, but there's clearly plenty of space, at least in the US. But cities are popular right now and it's hard to imagine that changing soon. As far as housing stock, upzoning/increased density can contribute to supply and lower prices.
> So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof.

Be part of the solution. Participate in the community in a constructive, productive way. Submit articles you find substantive. Contribute good comments. Upvote submissions and comments you find useful. Flag submissions you find not useful. Each of us has a role to play in curating HN content.
It's programming via what is essentially bidding on contracts.

Agent A asks "can anyone make me peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"

Agent B says "I can if you give me bread, peanut butter, jelly and 3 minutes"

Agent C says "I can if you give me Bread, 3 minutes and $3"

Agent D says "I can if you give me 1 minute and $10,000"

Agent A then picks the best bid and receives the sandwich. It doesn't care that agent B is a human, agent C is an alien that excretes peanut butter and jelly, or agent D is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I think you do not need one anymore.
The patent were filled in 1997, that's now 20 years ago.

See:
https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/0/05/mp3pat...

The last two patents seem to be related to an encode optimization and are not needed to write a decoder.

Which means it is possible now to include an MP3 decoder in GNU/Linux distros, etc. without paying the $2,500 fee.
The fifty shades of Latin
A lot of people seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around async programming and I'm not sure if this article will help that much.

What are the most confusing aspects of using async/await? Is it the implementation (i.e the syntax in JS, C# or Python) or the theory behind it?
Okay, let's look at the alternative, let's assume groups of 10-20 people run a "private" server for themselves and so on.

Then the government can easily target those, just go and hack, or confiscate the server that has the stuff of key opposition people. And no one will even know. Sure, those people, that 10 people will. But that's it. No one else will notice. Yes, a newspaper might write about it, and what?

Now, if Gmail disappears, people notice.

And Google has a very competent security team. Small groups don't and won't.
The last known decoding patent expired in 2015. That last known patent covering mp3 at all expired two weeks ago.

Edit: apparently there are two patents left in relations to encoder optimizations[0] not mentioned on the wikipedia pages. Those are probably irrelevant to modern encoders on modern computers.

[0]: https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/0/05/mp3pat...
It would be a sad day if creative people were forced to consider every person who may find their work or title objectionable. The Pixar film "Ratatouille" was a wonderful script but some people could not get over the fact that a rat was a chef preparing food. The screenwriters had the option of changing a fairly significant feature of their film to appease these critics or just say that some people won't watch it. I'm glad they chose the latter. If you really need a distributed database that supports transactions and don't evaluate CockroachDB because of the name, I think that's more on you than on them.
I saw that! And it was helpful to me getting started, thanks.

I wanted to generate types from the protocol file rather than generate them at run-time, so that was the first thing I did. I think it helps debuggability/autocompletability/readability to have the types reified; check it out if you're interested, all the capital-letter-named files are generated.
No matter what we're replying to, the guidelines ask that we don't do this:

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Malcolm Gladwell on Why We Shouldn’t Value Speed Over Power
The author of that article is seriously offending. In 2030, the thing I'll eat will be coming from the farmers around. The best book that will teach students important things will be written by author and still distributed as books. The water will come from the job of the water utilities. My electricity from a mix of nuclear plants and renewables detained by states. The resolution of international tension created by my lifestyle will be delegated to military forces ot detained by google. My car sure won't be repaired by Google. So please, Google is a champion of digital age, but it's not "my new insect overlords". Far from it.

Now as far as information fro consumers is related, yep, Google is scary-powerful.
Sure, there are "speculators" and almost exclusively speculation is foolish.

And yet they do it, and in doing so are driving up home prices in many markets across the globe... which is the core thesis of this article.

Your style of argumentation, where you state what people should do, and use that as the basis for ignoring the actual facts, is incredibly ineffective.

I understand you have an idealized model of the way capitalism and real estate work.

That idealized model does not, in fact, align with reality.

In reality, real estate speculation is in fact a real thing, that happens in real places all over the world. So long as demand causes prices to rise significantly faster than those assets depreciate, this type of speculation will happen. Your personal value judgments regarding people engaged in such speculation don't, in fact, cause those people to not exist.