skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel I have to defend myself here to some extent (being a now former Thiel Fellow), but I can fairly safely say that the ~20 other Thiel Fellows that I would call "friends" would never do anything close to this at their companies. While there are now over 120 fellows and I do not know them all, I bet there is one or at most a small handful that could fit your description, but I would say that of any group of similar size that you were to pick from a university.

I would definitely say I am socially awkward/inept, but I don't think that necessarily correlates with being socially maladapted/unaware of societies norms. The sort of "bro" culture that exemplifies UploadVR's, Uber, and many other "hot" tech companies right now is the culture that myself and most other high-school nerds that I knew rejected... we were not the popular kids that drank, had sex, and partied. I think all of this is a symptom of technology being a much more attractive jobspace for the general public (which includes a lot of "bros") compared to just for "nerds" that it was decades ago, and your conclusion is the exact opposite of this.

Granted it is an anecdote with a relatively small sample size, but I have not seen this sort of behavior/ideas from anyone who never went to college or dropped out, but I see it from plenty of folks in their late 20s/early 30s that never grew up from their college fraternity experiences.
Trees are also not as strong as steel, and Calgary has fairly intense winters (as far as populated parts of North America go).
>It is wasteful to pay him a doctor's salary to answer phones.

This is something I don't understand. I'm a medical student, and the amount of time I've seen wasted watching older physicians type notes is staggering. Just have them dictate the notes and hire a secretary. Perhaps for legal/liability reasons doctors need to write their own notes but it's just such a waste of time, and we pay a lot for it.
What is a good example of pay for performance in healthcare?
> In the case of startups, their goal is to sell out way before the maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

Or grow so quickly that replacing most the legacy code from a year or two ago is not a significant hurdle at their new size.

In this vein, I wonder if there's actually a third path that might be better than both. Using a low-level but fairly expressive and strongly typed language but very loosely, such that it allows you to iterate fact but with less performance, and you can come back later and replace chunks as needed, but with the same language. I don't have any real experience with that, and I could see it going either way for a number of reasons, but it seems like we have more languages that might fit that criteria now (or at least they are more popular now) than we have previously.
Google Keep Has Been Down for Several Hours
We do count the piles manually twice weekly
Every time I see String.intern() my mind leaps to the problem of new Java programmers who are misled into this:

String a = "hello";
String b = "world";
assert a != b;
b = "hello";
assert a == b;
// OH NICE I'LL USE == FOR STRING COMPARISONS NOW

It works cause source-code literals are intern'ed down into identical objects by the compiler, but that's a special case that won't apply to strings created at runtime.
You could use the audit subsystem. https://www.linux.com/learn/customized-file-monitoring-audit...
Bash script to export a repo's wiki as a PDF book
Sam Peltzman goes into great detail on this issue in his book "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation."
What was the illness? Did you ask the doctor why he was using a Commodore 64?
>The counterargument to the dangers of social media has been “look at Arab Spring”.

My impression of the Arab Spring is that most countries emerged in worse shape than they started in.
Posted because it came up in the discussion of FSQL:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14343967

Previous discussions:

Release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8528460

Windows release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12600790

(Links courtesy of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14344549)

Personally upvoted because it's news to me that it supports Windows now, and because it still appears to be very actively developed despite existing for years now.
Firefox + NoScript + Reader View seems to help

tho I used uBlock to forbid 'weird' stuff

ah I've set my UI to always use my colors :D white over black background
Web Developer Security Checklist
Sometimes it's just css, and hitting the "readbility" button will strip out the junk.

Also, I won't go to a journalism site without NoScript or Focus, too painful without.
If Uber turns out to be innocent as they claim, can they then turn around and sue Waymo? The amount of information Waymo has gotten on a competitor through discovery seems highly prejudicial.
What if god is not the solution but the problem?
> . it's just that if you choose to leave before your term is up, you have to pay back the training cost pro-rata, and that sound very reasonable.

This is pretty common [edit - in the UK], and there are distinctions made in law to stop this being abused (e.g. "if you leave you owe us a million for the basic training cost")

[context, liquidated damages clauses are OK in an employment contract, penalty clauses are not]

> Case law has clarified that in order for a clause to be a liquidated damages provision rather than a penalty, it must be a genuine reflection of an employer’s pre-estimate of loss that it is likely to suffer if the employee breaches that provision. If an employer is unable to quantify the exact loss that would be suffered, a best guess of the likely loss would be satisfactory. - See more at: http://rosenblatt-law.co.uk/bulletins/are-repayment-provisio...

[snip]

> The key to a repayment sum being regarded as a genuine pre-estimate of loss appears to be that the sum specified must be compensatory and not ‘in terroreum’ or simply a deterrent to breaching the contract - See more at: http://rosenblatt-law.co.uk/bulletins/are-repayment-provisio...

http://rosenblatt-law.co.uk/bulletins/are-repayment-provisio...
Not at all.. the supply is constrained for all the wrong reasons.
> [...] my systems were simple enough that I had a pretty accurate mental model of how the whole system worked [...]

This is key. I've worked on dozens of systems, platforms, frameworks, etc., and the common predictor of how well I program in each environment is directly related to how well I understand the mental model of the architecture.
I've noticed Google is pretty good about finding exact matches when you put the search terms in quotes.
Testing Machine Learning Algorithms with K-Fold Cross Validation
This article is garbage. Feels like the author pulled up a chair, sat in it backwards to seem hip, then laid down some "real talk, kids."

The author is a professor at a state college. Which means taxes pay for him to think up such nonsense.
Thanks for writing this. It sounds like what I've experienced in this kind of work isn't just accidental. I am working on leveling up math skills to be able to understand the process for TensorFlow etc, but I get the feeling that once it's finally tractable I'll still have the same problems of finding how to transform the inputs into whatever works best for the model, what to output, and how to use the output. This seems to be the part that can't be solved by off-the-shelf packages. And the part where many or most exciting discoveries will be made in the future.
Your statements are nonsense. Yes, we do have a good idea of what goes on inside a NN trained on images and Yes hand designed programs exist and work and sometimes work very well.

It's just that NNs are rapidly moving ahead and maybe some time in the future both your statements will be true but today they are not.

Recognizing cats is not the sum total of machine vision problems and those 'pretty visualizations' go a lot further than what you give them credit for.

I've been doing nothing but reading up on machine learning and working through piles of example code and models for the last couple of months and I think based on what I've seen so far that we are definitely headed in the direction that you suggest. At the same time we aren't there yet and such hype does not help.

Keep in mind that the domain of machine vision is extremely broad and much wider than Kaggle competitions and that saying 'we have no idea' when clearly we do tries to sketch NNs as magic and they're not.

If anything the present generation is best characterized as an optimization of what you could have done for many years, the only reason they are the way they are is because we'd like to have our results in a reasonable time. That makes applying NNs to large datasets possible and that in turn is what helps to solve some of these problems.
Why don't you pay more than 80k then and get someone to leave their other job? Employers responding to a skills shortage by complaining rather than raising wages is one major cause of the market failure.
These environments are often used as a testbed for reinforcement learning, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05477
Buy on TMall or JD or some other reputed seller not Taobao. If you are in China you use alipay or WeChat you are better protected then with amazon in USA. China's ecommerce eco-system is decade ahead of amazon model. So they can't even compete there.
It's not capitalism that pays for the author's salary - it's the state (he is a professor at a public university)
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."

(Lars Løkke Rasmusse, Danish prime minister)
Can't chime in on safety issues, but on usability: I know a physician who transitioned to using EMR roughly five years ago. It doubled the amount of time they need to take notes, to this day. They can't see nearly the same amount of patients they used to because so much of their day is spent going into and out of full screen surprise submenus in the EMR software and flipping through different tabs and re-entering information into multiple forms and scrolling through dropdowns with multiple hundreds of options. GP's post is 100% believable for me. It's nothing like Rust vs C89. It's more coding with punch cards vs an IDE, except the EMRs are the punch cards.
There's definitely more that can be done behaviorally - the solution to obesity today probably looks more like eating better than taking diet pills. But this is the anti-technological solution that can only be pushed so far, like trying to solve the energy crisis by telling everyone to drive smart cars.

Also, there's often nothing you can do behaviorally. Even people with near perfect behavior will eventually get Cancer or Alzheimer's or Heart Disease. Most of the drugs approved to treat these diseases are something like band-aids that decrease your risk 10% or allow you to live a couple months longer. Maybe too many people are making drugs that work barely well enough for the side effects to be worth it. But almost anything that can get past the FDA will work economically, since there are usually very few alternatives from the buyer's perspective.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. There is no such thing as a focal line. More generally, it's not possible for light from several points to focalize at the same point because you can't revert those rays. I guess Randal Monroe explains it better than me here:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/

However, I can see one way to read what they mean. If you take the Sun's "focal point", the point where parallel lines from one side intersect after being bent by its gravity, and move a tiny away from the Sun, then you form the image of a point that resides on the line going from you through the Sun all the way to infinity on the other side. You need to move very little for the opposite to move a lot, so for measurement purposes you are still at 590 AU from the Sun. This way with very tiny moves you could survey the planets in a different solar system, and in particular you could resolve them to multi-pixels.
There's a lot of room for sophistication in an A/B test. You might want to do something like Thompson sampling to minimize the number of samples taken from the 'bad' alternatives, or a contextual bandit to take some demographic information into account.
As Viewers Drift Online, Advertisers Hold Fast to Broadcast TV
I don't work in hardware, but a friend of mine who does said that it's not really all that surprising for two companies to end up with similar designs if they are working on a similar problem AND are using the same supplier. The supplier is providing their own expertise and some of that expertise comes from working with other customers.
> then wouldn't industry be training people?

Ideally, but there's also a sort of prisoner's-dilemma [0] going on, where if company A trains well and company B doesn't but puts the budget into wages, people will train at A and then leave for B higher pay.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Ask HN: What is your biggest motivation for learning another language?
Hobbies do scale upwards.
Medicare wouldn't be paying for the assisted care: https://www.medicare.gov/what-medicare-covers/part-a/paying-...

A facility generating large numbers of fall investigations that don't lead to ongoing medical care seems like it would be pretty easy (potential) fraud to go after though.
What gives you the impression that these specific people are bright? Or were never forced to conform?

This is not how socially inept high school nerds behave; its how VC funded frat bros (who include their fraternity on their linkedin profile) do.

Not sure why I am defending Peter Thiel, but I don't think this has anything to do with him or any of his bad ideas.
I shouldn't have type-cast an entire group. Clearly you can be socially inept and yet be appropriate (I was more like that too). But I also started as an employee in smallish companies and moved to founding them.

I should also note that some never seem to "grow up" - appropriateness simply eludes them permanently. If you look at Uber you have a founder that could, in theory, be a grandfather but doesn't seem to have a sense of what society condones.
In real world datasets a single class may only be in 1% of the data to begin with. The vast majority of images on the internet do not contain cats. So making a cat recognizer that is even 10% accurate is a significant challenge, simply because of the low base rate of cats. Imagenet in particular has 1000 equally balanced classes, so each class makes up 0.1% of the data. And 10% accuracy is way better than chance.

Additionally very few machine vision systems are completely hand designed. They all use some form of machine learning and optimization. Just not necessarily NNs.
For a similar service which is entirely encrypted, consider: https://safepaste.org/
>...but if you problem is, given an input of say [price, date, origin] and an output of [value to business], you can solve that problem quite trivially without needing any neural network.

That's one general statement over another. Consider https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.00021 as a counterexample.
It's a bit more than 10%. Refer to the submissions to ILSVRC .
All good thoughts.

I think it's part of the ongoing David vs Goliath problem. My worry though is that it's last call for small companies being able to compete and grow.
The US market is so lucrative that drug companies will go through FDA certification, but it is definitely more costly. It is arguable that disasters such as prescribing Thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness, and even selling it over the counter, is less likely with a more rigorous agency.

> Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 in West Germany under the trade-name Contergan. [...] Primarily prescribed as a sedative or hypnotic, [...] Afterwards, it was used against nausea and to alleviate morning sickness in pregnant women. Thalidomide became an over-the-counter drug in West Germany on October 1, 1957. Shortly after the drug was sold in West Germany, between 5,000 and 7,000 infants were born with phocomelia (malformation of the limbs). Only 40% of these children survived. Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were reported of infants with phocomelia due to thalidomide; only 50% of the 10,000 survived. Those subjected to thalidomide while in the womb experienced limb deficiencies in a way that the long limbs either were not developed or presented themselves as stumps. Other effects included deformed eyes and hearts... [1]

In practice, there are a lot of problems that prevent it from only being a more rigorous quality control, but it also isn't entirely bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
>The author obviously doesn't think any investor is "working for it" by the the tone of the article, but this is precisely what retired america is doing?

Because it ain't the investor who's working there it's the capital or isn't that how the saying goes?

>People by nature I think are very externally motivated (society, wealth, materialism), and if you didn't make people go to work, would they? If they did, would they still put up with the crappy parts of it?

People by nature are also very diverse characters and as such can't be generalized in such a way. Some people need external motivation to live, others see living itself as motivation enough and loathe a high octane lifestyle focused on chasing some external motivation in the form of fulfilling arbitrary productivity quotas to measure their "progress in life".

>I think what defines a satisfied life is doing things that matter to you, make yourself work, try hard, think, make yourself smile a few years down the road (after you've forgotten the hard parts).

Which assumes there's a "happy ending" if said person just "puts in the work", sorry but that's not how reality works at all. You can endure all you want, put in all the work you want and life can still screw you over big time like it does for, the majority of, people on this planet every single day.

If "hard work" is all it would take then we'd be long there, wherever "there" is supposed to be anyway. Because I doubt that out of billions of people working the large majority are simply "slacking it" and "too lazy" to all become successful millionaires, it's far more to do with lack of opportunity and not lack of motivation.
Or, perhaps, do something about the layer (lawyers) after layer (coders) after layer (nurses) after layer (administration) after layer (...) of "support" staff?

I'm willing to bet that something to relieve the massive amount of "other" stuff needed besides the Doctor would go a LOOOOOONG way...

That doesn't even tackle stuff like inability to see how much something actually costs - and shop around for stuff other than the ER.

15 minutes per patient isn't the answer...
Just having to pay for the training is not what the person I responded to seemed to be suggesting (it sounds like indentured servitude was exactly what was being proposed, in fact). That is, as others have mentioned, reasonably common, and apparently not enough to solve the problem if companies still refuse to provide training.
From his facebook post:

"If your executive team is mostly white guys I'm staying away too"

Um, what? Why does the race or ethnicity of the exec team have anything to do with anything? Insert any race into that sentence. Completely ridiculous. This guy is a nutball, and so is the company culture.

https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/1015527865493465...
It turns out we'd have more time to be depressed.

If you hand the necessities of life to humans with no effort required, we get weird.

It's not that "work builds character" or any of that bull, just that humans don't do well when dependent on others. We need some sense of accomplishment and achievement. We may, in time, be able to separate these things from "work" and "putting bread on the table", but it'll take a generation of messed-up people first.
And if Levandowsky genuinely doesn't have the documents? After finally taking the time to read the forensic testimony myself, I found it very inconclusive. Yes, he may have taken the documents or he may not have. The evidence presented in the testimony was far from being a smoking gun. I highly encourage others to read the testimony for themselves and come to their own conclusion.
The numbers are there in the second paragraph.

> 21.1 million, compared to 25.2 million
80k is not a lot of money if you are talking about any of the major metro areas in the US. In fact is it definitely entry level as far as engineering salaries go. if you are in SF or NY it's laughably low. You haven't said the exact details of the job you are advertising but you probably aren't paying enough that is why you are getting bad candidates.
You're right ... it's a very clear extension of the frat-bro phenomenon. You don't need to defend Thiel as I wasn't attacking him. He was simply a convenient adjective since I thought most here would know about his fellowship program (and I had to apologize for stereotyping high school nerds in another sub-comment).
Tour of MIT's Robotics Lab
Is "Anatomy Park" a Rick and Morty reference? http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/Anatomy_Park_(episode)
Check out the forensic expert's testimony for yourself. It's hardly conclusive that he took the files in question. Interpretations of the testimony are very speculative.
Looks insignificant
Pro-tip:

Add outline.com/ to the front of the article's URL. Much faster and works nicely on mobile.
I wonder how India is faring; the causal environmental conditions should be quite similar.
If the WaPo was making this up, then the NYTimes and Reuters would not have published independent confirmations. They are more than happy to hang each other out to dry if they can't confirm a story, especially one this momentous. That's the point of having multiple independent news outlets.

There are also few news sources more credible than the Washington Post.
Stay away from the photo-copier.
It's interesting that when White delved into his journals from years past, searching for facts, he only found opinions, thoughts, ideas - hot air. All that hot air must have felt urgent and important at the time.

Might have lessons for all of us.
Reports suggesting North Korea may be source of ransomware attack: "Kaspersky and Symantec both said on Monday that technical details within an early version of the WannaCry code are similar to code used in a 2015 backdoor created by the government-linked North Korean hackers, who were implicated in the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures and an $81m heist on a Bangladeshi bank in 2016."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/15/wannacry-...
First time I encountered the service was while sitting on the pooper reading a NYT article that was linked using Outline's service. Realized something was amiss while I was wiping my ass and realized that I hadn't seen a single ad in the entire story. True story.
Interestingly, this launch wasn't within the original capabilities of the falcon 9 and was originally scheduled for a falcon heavy launch. The lengthening of the rocket, using densified propellants, and more changes meant that they could instead use a falcon 9 even though they couldn't recover it. It's a cool reminder of just how much the falcon 9 has changed.
5 Unconventional Funding Solutions for Fantastic Startup Growth
I sure notice my tone getting agitated at times and take a breath and apologize. It is a horrible situation; people in my private life know me as an unmovable rock and yet support scripts can really get under my skin. If I have a serious complaint I ask if they have a way to escalate before saying what I think--never been ill recieved.
Windows gets hit on by viruses because it's popular.
If Linux was more popular, it would get targeted instead so the problem would probably remain.
Wait, so does that mean we can follow the money? (find out who converts those specific bitcoins to a physical currency?)