skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were training a classifier to predict whether a sentence is talking about household activities v/s not, wouldn't the occurrence of man/woman in the sentence be a good feature? Today, woman do perform household activities more (whether we like it or not), and wouldn't it make sense to use that piece of information when performing some predictive analysis?

The technical sense of "bias" arises when the train and test distributions differ. Obviously if you train with a dataset of text from a foreign country's news and then apply it on an American context, the difference in the data distributions will introduce bias, but why do we need a social twist to this already well-functioning term? If the same classifier is trained and evaluated in India (with its sexist roles, say), then there's no (technical) bias and I don't see why it's a bad application.
My 6th grader tells me they have jumped the shark at her school already.
I would think much of the infrastructure had to be rebuilt after WW2 though, no?
Submarine marketing has gone meta
I've watched Zach and his team evolve their business and product over the past few months and years. I'm really impressed by their ability to adapt and build new products guided by user feedback and data. I'm excited to see how many people Boost will help!
any thoughts about locking Windows down, hardening, etc?
Oops, Sorry.
Super cool!

btw, you have a typo in the learn more section, the readme link ends in .mg
I've had one in my office for several weeks now and haven't gotten tired of it yet. It does seem to be close to the Platonic ideal of "fiddly desk things while my code compiles" where the appeal might not wear off.
I can't speak for the parent, but I have a tolerance for it because I've actually managed bug bounty programs; I also know Google receives on the order of 100,000 bug bounty reports annually, while a full order of magnitude less are actually valid.
My interest is in applying bioinformatics methods to understand aging. His is bioinformatics in general. So most of the time there is actually no conflict between "my" projects and "his" projects, my interests just being a subset of his.

It doesn't hurt that my interests have introduced him to new people and funding mechanisms that he would not have otherwise had access to.

I'm not sure how much detail you want. That was the short version. The slightly longer version is that there are huge datasets out there, and I want to understand aging by building tools and workflows for the many datasets which were not necessarily originally gathered to understand aging, but which still contain information about it. And also to work with and complement wet-lab aging researchers by giving them context or leads for experiments.
Sure, but if the k-12 is necessary for employment, it follows that 12+ should be "free" as well. It seems like a college education these days is a basic education similar to 9th-12th grade.
Sounds like this would be helpful for a lot of people. I would use it following the same rationale as hiring a personal trainer: some self-imposed level of accountability to push me forward. I know how to exercise, but having someone there to nudge me in the right direction helps me actually do it.
Who's the person who invented the fidget spinner? I hope he/she made some money on this at least.
Advantage of wired over wireless speakers:

One place I worked at a long time ago installed (wired) music speakers throughout the engineering area. That evening, some engineer traced the speaker wires back to the source and disconnected them. The next day the speakers were reconnected. The following evening, in addition to disconnecting the wires at the source again, the cables were cut every three feet. This time the message was received by management and the problem went away.
Google’s Plan to Make Voice Control Work When All Devices Have Microphones
Fidget spinners are genuinely useful though---arguably even more useful than the other items on the list, for their ADHD/anxiety-reducing properties plus portability.

The only way you can do noticeably better is direct, hands-free brain stimulation. The fidget cube is also such an object, but it is MUCH more complex and hence vulnerable to be put down due to a competing distraction.
So you have a team of insulated Silicon Valley scalleywags that are going to help _me_ with my job in another reasonable part of the country? Unlikely. Cmon, we all know the bourgeois hipsters giving advice to normal people is like throwing a subway sandwich to ducks in a pond.
> and comments

Which is to say, the community of users! (You all are awesome... usually)
"More than half of the Azure users were from enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft’s cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises"

From the actual study (or press release for the study) "The final data set comprises 235 IT operations, application development, and informa-
tion security professionals.
All respondents are from companies with 500 or more employees, with roughly half from companies with 5,000
or more employees."

And the actual statistic is "• 66% are using Microsoft Azure, compared to 55% using AWS." So what does "using" really mean? For example, it could mean that lots of large organizations to use Azure on trial/small projects, while still using mostly AWS on serious projects. Or the opposite.

This is one of those studies run to promote a service, and it's really unclear how accurate it is (not statistically, but logically). It appears that MSFT has been successful with very large organizations, but other data I've seen says that AWS has about 80% of the entire market revenues and revenues is the direct measure of value. If someone is paying money for your service they find it valuable.
Did you mean bold? It looks like you spelled it wrong in that link.
> I still can't understand why no one has create a "cheap" heroku.

AWS has tried several times, they'll eventually win this one though.
You'd be surprised at how much the maintenance savings are. They could easily make up the difference in price of the car. Especially when you count the $7500 tax refund for getting an EV. It's not just oil changes but everything else having to do with an ICE you get to skip out on. Plus brake changes are far more rare due to so much regenerative breaking.

Lastly I would add that you can't directly compare the cars on price in that way because the Bolt (and Nissan Leaf) are also much nicer cars than the base $23k Prius with many features the Prius doesn't have.

EDIT: oh and one more thing; I don't know about Utah but most energy companies in the US have different rates for electricity during the day or at night (off peak) and you can easily set your EV to charge overnight, saving even more money.
I'll stick to playing with my pen.
> Maybe it's just that I work mostly with JVM languages (Java, Groovy, etc.) but I haven't had any problems with handling XML

Yeah, no surprise. XML may as well be a native data-type in most core JVM languages.

It's not the case everywhere else however.
I wish I could flag this.

There's invariably one comment like this on bug bounty stories here. One comment that isn't happy with the bug bounty result even when the researcher is and goes off the rails with a weird anti-large company bias and some conspiracy.

This has absolutely nothing to do with your Nexus RMA story, or your cloud SLA story from downthread, or whatever other agenda you have against these large companies.

Do you have any concept of it's like to run a bug bounty at Google's size? Have you ever been involved in managing one? Have you ever participated in one? Can you qualify any of your opinion with something aside from these irrelevant grievances you're throwing out?

You're not contributing to the discussion at all, you're just hijacking the thread so you can perpetuate your soapbox. Human beings make mistakes and bug bounties are an easy place to drop the ball. No one is trying to cheat security researchers out of their rewards.
First Came the Hydrogen Cars. Now, the Refilling Stations
Would love to see a similar article on motorcycle improvements. Seems like the line between top-of-the-line MotoGP bikes and the most expensive street bikes is becoming quite thin.

https://www.clippp.com/
Thanks! And typo fixed now. :)
They exploded in to popularity at my office. And if my coworkers are all about the spinners they are def no longer cool.
They didn't really. It was invented a while back but got no traction so they didn't bother renewing the patent.
Individuals have immediate, direct incentive to wear seat belts. Seat belts are not a collective action problem the way climate change is.
Continuations have a context which takes up space in memory. That context keeps a reference on an environment (or chain of environments) containing all the resources which must be there when the continuation is invoked.
Python under PG can do anything python can do.. but that said, just because you CAN import numpy/pandas and go to town, doesn't mean you SHOULD. In fact you probably really shouldn't :)

That said, we use python inside of PG, and it's awesome. It's not really any more powerful than PG/SQL(their built-in language) i.e. in terms of what you can do in the DB itself.

Our main app is also python, so we have a continuity of language from front-end to back-end. We do have some DB functions that take advantage of python's flexibilities, but like I said, we try to keep external modules and craziness out of the PG backend if possible. Sometimes there is no help for it, and you do what you must, and it's very handy that you can just go do it.
Hah not sure why you got down voted so heavily. Your post is spot on and respectfully witty.
The article links to an NPR page about the re-inventor of the spinner we know of right now: http://www.npr.org/2017/05/04/526931943/fidget-spinner-emerg...
I think the argument would probably be more like "New cars would be substantially cheaper if it weren't for these regulations." Their preferred means of dealing with the pollution problem would be something like a carbon tax (assuming they're the type to actually believe it exists, anyways)
I feel so out of touch.

I'll just sit over here popping my bubble wrap.
I had one on infini-loan from a non-fidgety coworker, but then I changed desks. I didn't want to outright steal their spinner so I've gone back to playing with pens. Haven't yet felt the need to go buy a spinner, pens fill that niche for me nicely.
Fun fact: marketing toys as a cure for ADHD isn't new to this trend. It could be literally any stimulus. Yo-yo, etc.
Reddit has a similar approach if I'm not mistaken.
This sounds like it would be a breach of the UK Data Protection Act

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/contents

Information shared with third party without consent
Providing personal details to a family member without consent

Any organisation that stores and uses personal data relating to identifiable living individuals, either on a computer or in a paper filing system, is a "data controller" for the purposes of the DPA.
Data controllers are obliged to handle personal data in accordance with the eight data-protection principles set out in schedule 1 to the DPA unless a specific exemption applies. The first principle is that data must be processed fairly and lawfully, which requires any processing (including disclosure) to be done either with the consent of the individual or in order to fulfil legal obligations such as contractual obligations.
This disclosure would be a serious breach of privacy.
These things also make great office toys, give aways at conferences and are conversation starters. Plus they can be branded as well. Here is one that I designed to promote the Go programming language: https://twitter.com/deckarep/status/864658318479851520

Original artwork by Renée French
I think that's totally reasonable - because it was after all one of the goals of XML. That is, to be human readable.

There is a difference however between readable + parsable vs parsable + easily dealt with.

XML was not the latter. You have to do more work to traverse and handle XML inside your application than you do JSON, and most of the (reasonable) reasons for this are due to features that most cases don't need.

JSON makes the common case easy, XML doesn't.
You could maybe agree to pay for the lowest cost state school and the cheapest housing arrangement. A resourceful kid may also find the cheap loopholes for books, faking commuter status to avoid overpriced dorms or food plans, etc.
Give her 2 to play with. Will turn pro.
Engineering Record and Replay for Deployability: Extended Technical Report
Startups should also fight H1B visa abuse but since that doesn't align with your political preference then screw it, right?

The article is yet another attempt at making people "omg resist!". It's getting old.
CMU's DBMS is trying to do this: http://pelotondb.io
Yeah. Although it is annoying that we both have to clarify "well, I could be a PI if I wanted to", because of this social norm that if you aren't a PI by the appropriate age, it means you weren't good enough. Because, obviously, everyone wants to be a middle manager. And we aren't talking to an academic crowd here, but a lot of academics would be skeptical when we say that.

If enough people in our generation take this approach, I think it will be very good for science. It is a happy medium between the old system of "everyone gets tenure eventually" and "no-job-security eternal postdoc" of the last few decades.

Science is inherently risky enough without also forcing everyone to essentially become an entrepreneur. That phenomenon is likely behind so much of the exaggerated findings that are getting published.
It's not about security, just content curation.
Public companies are required to report on all of their liabilities. You read the quarterly and annual reports and intelligently assess which risks are significant or not, and how to discount for them.

Beyond that you spend time thinking about their business and what could go wrong. If there is something obvious to you they didn't disclose, that would tend to mean management is untrustworthy or incompetent, two other huge risks.

Buffett spends lots of hours reading reports away from CNN and computers and distractions. I'm sure he talks to Charlie and others regularly about things that concern him and gets different perspectives.
The native table partitioning removes one of the headaches of inheritance, but it mostly only relieves some of the administrative headaches - the foreign key issues remain.

fdw's are great, but they don't participate in replication - which is a pretty big issue. Unfortunately, the "proper" way to do this would be with a custom type, but I can't find any way you could write one with the extension API that wouldn't be stored in the database heap (you could create some native functions similar to the existing LOB functions, but then you run into atomicity issues again).

Honestly, this would be easy to write if the extension API supported off-heap storage of custom types - though I understand there's a ton of technical complexity in implementing such a feature.
>wouldn't it make sense to use that piece of information when performing some predictive analysis?

No, because eventually your system will graduate from predicting the results of society's bias to reinforcing society's bias. That is a bad thing.
In the sjw-religion, why is "homemaker" considered inferior to "computer programmer"? One of the oldest and most important human occupations versus hunched over at a desk slaving for a salary until being outsourced to a bot in 5 years? I've never understood the default sjw/"feminism" assumptions that anything feminine is "bad".
So they can win social Top Trumps at parties? Beyond "dick swinging" the utility is probably limited.
I have to disagree. When I come to HN I am looking for information density. Bad puns are a negative signal in that regard. "Knee stress relief device" sounds much more promising, and makes me think of Bruce Wayne.
funny you would say that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSXxAlcbMK4
You shouldn't always accept Wikipedia entries on face value.

The word "probat" in the latin phrase has been translated in Wiki to "confirm", but could alternately be interpreted as "test" or "inspect":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/probo
Don't use a filesystem as a database. We did that back in 1998 mostly just because we were using 1998-era computing power, and the more static content you could serve the less likely your box would get hosed by Slashdot. Now my watch has more computing power than those old servers. Use a real database, even a file-backed one like BerkeleyDB (or god forbid, SQLite)
Why not? Why wouldn't they? Real question. I'd think SySAdmins would use Nagios more than any other role, no?
The company would have a reserve for their expected costs of the suit. If they reserved $200M, then they would have a negative net worth. As an investor you should make your own estimates as well.
Write a React app with Flask. You can write something in <1000 LOC that actually does something.
Sometimes I'd rather do python magic than self join correlated sub-queries or write window functions and have it all become a convoluted mess. But I see your point.

edit: i'm still trying to train myself to think in a relational way.
> Cylinder deactivation debuted about 10 years ago

No, it debuted over 100 years ago, and was standard on every Cadillac V8 for sale in 1981 - 36 years ago. Sure today's versions are better, but the quote above is about as literally false as one can get.

[1]https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hmn/2008/04/Cadillac-V-8-6...
It's another silly fad toy object that you spin in your hand. A very successfully marketed one, that is.
Fouad is awesome. Always so helpful to everyone around him.
And they all live in a VM anyway.
The article still has it in the title. I guess we ha've lost. Apostrophe's are unstoppable.
I think you have a really good point here. The problem is that we have this current bias in society and people wish to change it. I think there is a fear, that if we reflect this bias, in the way we talk, we re-enforce the bias.

It seems an effective tool, if you want to change thinking then police the way words can be used around the topic. It is however worrying that machines could start playing a role in this. It could become a powerful tool in steering public opinion. This doesn't seem too bad, but that could be used to favour an incumbent political party, or more than likely to sell products we otherwise don't really want.

But you are right machines need accuracy and removing that bias could be detrimental to the task they're solving.
How VCs Talk About Male vs. Female Entrepreneurs
How do you manage such an insanely low price point?
When health costs are socialised - and insurance is a way of socialising costs - it does become a collective action problem, because the negligence of the few increases​ the costs of the many.
Thanks for clarifying... I'd be interested to hear about how they sweep the data from the existing database into Firebase. Must be in close to real time, because the Firebase API update feeds trigger every 10 to 15 seconds with updated data.
Back in the day, HN was a single-core process on a single machine.

Obviously, that’s an entirely different story than services distributed over clusters of hundreds of different machines.
Can you give an example of a situation where an ML application would be reinforcing a problematic bias but still have good performance metrics? My point is that a wrongly-applied ML application would suffer in just plain accuracy. For instance, a Automatic Carrier Counsellor might give "homemaker" as a suggested career choice to women, but then before we start calling it biased, it would already be wrong. If the same algorithm had dug deeper, it would have learn that the said woman would be a great programmer.
No, he's not being sarcastic. Are you? EVs don't require oil changes. Or muffler/exhaust service. Or transmission service. And their brakes last longer.
Real cigar butts are usually tiny companies that no cross effects on the economy at large. Their risk is that they hold the cash for 10 years, or worse, burn it all trying a whole new business model (self driving cars!).

The returns can be very good, but you do need to diversify out to 10 to 20 holdings to limit risk from one going south or taking forever.

Buffett stopped investing in cigar butts because his portfolio got too big and the risk/return ratio wasn't always great. His big change was leaving Graham's philosophies for Mungers, and focusing on getting great businesses at a fair price rather than fair businesses at a great price.
It's all the craze at my sons school.
I ordered one yesterday to give it a try. If someone cares, I can report back later.
Security by obscurity is precisely defined as security that relies on the algorithm/implementation itself being private to be able to function. Key material being private does not qualify for this. The alternative is that security through obscurity becomes such an all-encompassing term as to become meaningless
Why Kotlin Is Better Than Whatever Dumb Language You're Using
There is nothing to it really. My sons have several. They are kind of fun but kind of limited in their fun.
Not near as good as an Onion article :(
Handling a shitload of frequent rejection generally well, understanding your clients/customers' needs inside out and how your business fits into their solutions and generally being good at talking to/reading people, i.e. qualities that most engineers don't have. NOTE: People can be good at these things without being extroverted, unlike what many people think (and I thought until very recently)

It really comes down to making people (a) think that your shit (mostly YOU) will help them with their problems and (b) feel confident in trusting you.

As for comp: Most people in sales jobs go through ups and downs in their annual comp largely because most of it comes from commission and bonus. You could make >$1M one year and <$100k the next. Technical sales are more stable since salaries tend to be higher, but comp is still highly variable. Also, unlike engineering where one's performance criteria are somewhat superfluous, sales is a very numbers-driven job. Most have quotas they need to hit with bonuses for every level above that. Not hitting your quota == not having a job next month/year in some places.
My point isn't that accuracy and bias are orthogonal, but that bias is contained in the accuracy metric.
I use it for dart
> You're also not going to be producing gasoline at home, while a lot of people buying these expensive early electric vehicles are also early adopters of solar panels

I'm an electric car fan, but to be fair, unless your solar installation is proceeding more than you can use, and you don't have net-metering, then this is a false advantage here. Every KWh you use to charge your car is one you'll eventually have to buy from (or not sell to) the power company.
A Text to Speech Server with GRPC and Kubernetes
Just the thought of playing with one of these makes me feel anxious - they're supposed to reduce anxiety?
Uber Doesn't Want You to See This Document About Its Vast Surveillance System
Blitz is frowned upon at the upper levels by a lot of players for that reason. However, some such as #1 rated of all time "Magnus Carlsen", play a bit of blitz on the side.
CVE-2015-1274

Basically, Chrome allowed users to use the "Always open files of this type" option with executable files. So if anyone was ever foolish enough to set that option after downloading a `.exe` on Windows, any future site they visited could take over their machine just by initiating a download for a malicious executable.
Use Google. Their content is mostly DRM free and you can download games to local disk.