skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a shame. Nuclear is our only realistic option for zero-carbon electricity. The planet can't afford to wait for breakthroughs in renewable energy and grid storage.
I got into quant finance 12 years ago with the mistaken idea that I was going to successfully use all these cool machine learning techniques (genetic programming! SVMs! neural networks!) to run great statistical arbitrage books.

Most machine learning techniques focus on problems where the signal is very strong, but the structure is very complex. For instance, take the problem of recognizing whether a picture is a picture of a bird. A human will do well on this task, which shows that there is very little intrinsic noise. However, the correlation of any given pixel with the class of the image is essentially 0. The "noise" is in discovering the unknown relationship between pixels and class, not in the actual output.

Noise dominates everything you will find in statistical arbitrage. R^2 of 1% are something to write home about. With this amount of noise, it's generally hard to do much better than a linear regression. Any model complexity has to come from integrating over latent parameters or manual feature engineering, the rest will overfit.

I think Geoffrey Hinton said that statistics and machine learning are really the same thing, but since we have two different names for it, we might as well call machine learning everything that focuses on dealing with problems with a complex structure and low noise, and statistics everything that focuses on dealing with problems with a large amount of noise. I like this distinction, and I did end up picking up a lot of statistics working in this field.

I'll regularly get emails from friends who tried some machine learning technique on some dataset and found promising results. As the article points out, these generally don't hold up. Accounting for every source of bias in a backtest is an art. The most common mistake is to assume that you can observe the relative price of two stocks at the close, and trade at that price. Many pairs trading strategies appear to work if you make this assumption (which tends to be the case if all you have are daily bars), but they really do not. Others include: assuming transaction costs will be the same on average (they won't, your strategy likely detects opportunities at time were the spread is very large and prices are bad), assuming index memberships don't change (they do and that creates selection bias), assuming you can short anything (stocks can be hard to short or have high borrowing costs), etc.

In general, statistical arbitrage isn't machine learning bound(1), and it is not a data mining endeavor. Understanding the latent market dynamics you are trying to capitalize on, finding new data feeds that provide valuable information, carefully building out a model to test your hypothesis, deriving a sound trading strategy from that model is how it works.

(1: this isn't always true. For instance, analyzing news with NLP, or using computer vision to estimate crop outputs from satellite imagery can make use of machine learning techniques to yield useful, tradeable signals. My comment mostly focuses on machine learning applied to price information. )
Ask HN: Who are the most compelling blockchain naysayers?
Articles on the blockchain/ethereum are overwhelmingly in the bullish camp.

What are some of the most compelling, well-researched arguments for why blockchain is likely to fail?
sig figs are just an informal way of dealing with uncertainty that can be applied procedurally by high school students.
I'm not rich but I make enough on a yearly basis that I can pay my rent, have a few hundred dollars worth of fun per month, and still tuck away enough money for the future that as long as things continue or don't become/stay terrible for longer than a year I should be able to maintain the lifestyle that I like. Of the disposable/fun things that my budget goes towards, none of the things in this article are things I find appealing.

Don't get me wrong, nice things are nice. Go figure. But I work in a mixed city with people from much higher and much lower than me on the economic latter. In my experience, owning a lot of nice things means that you're going to have a harder time befriending people who are significantly lower on the income latter. I don't expect this to be a problem for everyone, but for me and I suspect people like me, it's difficult because I just like going out and being social in meatspace. There's plenty I could do to overcome that when I meet new people, but I don't want to have to overcome walking in and looking like the rich guy. And I don't want to have to think about going to a concert at a bar in a poor neighborhood because I drove a nice car.

Things like saving for my children, as the article discusses, make sense because they tie in with long term happiness imo. If I ever do have children it's not hard for me to imagine wanting to give them as much support as I can to ensure they succeed. I wouldn't want to see them struggle because of resources. But luxury goods don't affect me longterm happiness in the same way and often they feel to me as having a social opportunity cost. The difference in price between what I drive and a nice car could fund a lot of bar nights, concerts, parties at people's houses, etc. And that's just not a cost that's worth it from my perspective.
This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the "host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.
There was no control group to check how significant that number (13 out of 30) was[1]. This article is very misleading (but at least mentions that the study was not peer reviewed).

[1] http://pielot.org/pubs/PielotRello2017-MHCI-DoNotDisturb.pdf
Amazon is the Middle/Upper classes Walmart.

It's hard to have a package sent to you if you don't have a secure way to grab it.
True. And there could be many more ridiculously simple problems with hard or no applications (at least for now) we may not be able to solve or progress at all. Math as we know and practice might still fall short. I, for one, be happy that simple to state but solved, Godel's Incompleteness theorem, about the imperfection of the tools, had set the things firmly on stone.

Solving them or progress? May be I don't care, but these little problem, simple ones does encourage one to start thinking about solving problems, they make math accessible to masses.
Now that's intellectual dishonesty. You start with using wrong numbers (or manipulating numbers in a dishonest way to prove your point), then when someone calls you out on that you give that sort of troll answer. 98% is on par with the best female contraceptive methods, and it probably better than what we could achieve with male pills.
It seems very metaphorical, so I might have not gotten the correct meaning either, however I believe it's talking about people making sentences more complex for no reason.

English teachers consider writing to be something that needs to flow and be emotive, but for the vast majority of tasks it should simply be an efficient way of conveying some piece of information.

Basically, students are optimising their writing for teachers approval, which isn't useful for the vast majority of real life, like the example of asking for directions; "Will you show me the most effective way to the bus stop?" vs. "How do I get to the bus stop?"
Also books about the way things work - maybe also books on inventions.

I would have suggested Make Magazine but its a lot of digital now. Instructables book is good though.

Old (70s and earlier) popular mechanics popular sciene and science and mechanics magazines. Older Scientific American magazines too
Yup! This is in the works and should be released soon!
Also the author ;)
It certainly helped me. I struggled with fine motor control as a kid, and it wasn't until a teacher sat me down and made me practice my penmanship over and over again that I got over the hump.

I won't say I enjoyed it at the time, but as far as 'educational events I can point to and say this made a difference', it is, perhaps surprisingly, quite high on the list.
We Should Be Afraid of AI, but Not for the Reasons You Think
Could an enterprising person find such papers, cleverly select a dataset such that X is way worse, and finally refute the original paper?

This seems like something an amateur could do. Wouldn't that tear down a bunch of this junk?
I feel the same. I will stop coding when they nail shut my coffin.
Can confirm, am loneliness.
Yes. You can try the following smt2 script with yices2 [0]:

(set-logic QF_UFNIA)
(declare-fun x () Int)
(declare-fun y () Int)
(declare-fun z () Int)
(define-fun left-side () Int
(+ (+
(* (* x (+ x z)) (+ x y))
(* (* y (+ y z)) (+ x y)))
(* (* z (+ y z)) (+ x z)))
)
(define-fun right-side () Int
(* (* (*
4
(+ y z))
(+ x z))
(+ x y))
)
; disallow division by zero
(assert (not (= 0 (+ y z))))
(assert (not (= 0 (+ x z))))
(assert (not (= 0 (+ x y))))
(assert (= left-side right-side))
(check-sat)
(get-model)

Run this by calling yices-smt2 on it.

[0]: http://yices.csl.sri.com/
This is known for decades. If you drop too fast over too long period of time your metabolism changes base burn rate and you will have a hard time losing fat/staying the same weight once your normalize your diet. There is a reason diets like PSMF at restricted to 1-2 weeks. Not healthy over time.
100% agree.

So unless you spend all day writing compilers from scratch or calculating Pascal's Triangle, please stop with the ridiculous CS questions in interviews.

Software Engineering is more of a trade, and requires vocational knowledge and experience. A mountain of theory may not always be required to Get Shit Done.
The disorders do not cleanly cleave away from non-autistic. It really can be a judgement call at times.
Sure. But for approximately the same level of effort, you could generate a new paper in the same template. It would likely be easier to get that "novel result" published than the refutation.
And you responded to a comment that wasn't originally about Iceland. This is a general conversation about airbnb, not airbnb in Iceland, which was my point.

So again, you replied to a general conversation with a specific in Iceland. Does that mean we all have to converse about airbnb in Iceland with you? If that's the case, I hope you like having conversations with yourself.
The wording in that paragraph is a bit confusing. In this context, "term" refers to the entire product, For example, the equation "(a^2)b + (b)c^4 = 0" has two terms: (a^2)b, and (b)c^4.

The degree of the entire equation is the maximum of the degree of the individual terms. However, the degree of a term is the sum of the degree of all of the factors.

For example, the equation "a+b+c=10" is degree 1, but "abc=10" is degree 3.
And the most interesting animals determine the flow of traffic around the zoo. But the zoo is still not the elephants. My environment also influences my behavior, but I am not my environment.
If I understood your question correctly, you are saying that the degree of a term should be the maximum degree between the vatiables in that term. So (a^2)(b^1)(c^4) ) would be of degree max(2,1,4) = 4.

But with the definition he is using, the degree of a term in the equation is the sum of the degrees of the variables. So (a^2)(b^1)(c^4) has degree 2 + 1 + 4 = 7.
> It was just as hard 30 years ago as it is now. As it was 300 years ago. 3000 even.

I understand what you're saying, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that dynamics have changed - and we don't need to go back 30 years to see it.

As recently as 5 or 6 years ago, I would quite often strike up conversations with strangers at the bus stop or on the train or at the post office.

Usually these conversations would last for just a few minutes, sometimes an hour or more, and in a handful of instances I made a long term friend.

I find that this is vastly harder to do now, because nearly everyone in those common spaces is now engrossed by their phone. This changes the dynamics of interacting and striking up a conversation substantially by adding a lot of social friction.

Historically, the interaction was something like: slightly awkward silence -> random comment about the weather or some equally anodyne topic to break the awkward silence -> possibly a rewarding conversation.

Now, the awkward silence never occurs in the first place. It's been entirely replaced by everyone scrolling the feeds on their phones. To start a conversation, you have to proactively interrupt what the person is doing and ask for their attention.

What's more, even if you successfully navigate that dynamic and start a conversation, the soft dings and tapping reminders from the phone constantly pull people's attention back to the virtual from the physical.

Smartphones have been a boon in myriad ways, but I do miss the chances to engage in face-to-face conversation with strangers in the real world that existed before they commanded every second of our spare attention.
My point is that tech workers by and large aren't paying for health insurance themselves, their companies are. So it's easy to forget and be outraged when something is free, but when you're self employed this is a huge burden and expense.

Also, $462 a month anywhere outside of California in the US is a decent amount of money. Hell, even in California that's a car payment for a luxury high end car.
Engineering interns might be level 2.
I run the Twitter account @dumpmon[0] that HIBP gets the data from.

This is an interesting decision and I applaud Troy for, as always, doing what's best for his users. He's a great example of the kind of person we need more of in the industry.

Unfortunately, I run into the same problem. I have no doubt people can (and probably do) use dumpmon for nefarious purposes. My take on the matter when I first made dumpmon was that this data was clearly already known to the bad guys. The goal of the Twitter bot was to give a sense of how prevalent these "mini-breaches" were, but also to give the good guys (like HIBP!) a feed they can use to help stop the problem. I've been fortunate that multiple services have been able to use the feed to respond to these types of credential dumps really quickly.

If anyone is interested in some of the stats behind dumpmon, here's a shameless plug to an article I wrote a couple of years ago on the matter: https://jordan-wright.com/blog/2015/05/26/two-years-of-at-du...

Happy to answer any questions!

[0] https://twitter.com/dumpmon
You could arguably call the 2008 meltdown the largest cyberheist. I can't find that article again but gosh was it great, an interview with a programmer who said about CDS something like we fed offal into a grinder and got steak out.
Games - Clue, Black Box, Scrabble, Boggle, Madlibs
Each person is somewhat unique in this regard, but generally speaking there is a peak number of hours you can work and be effective. Beyond that, you're working longer and less effectively, and more likely to make mistakes. And that can be very counter productive.

On average, I think that number is about 6-8 hours per day for most people. But even that length isn't functioning at your peak, just high enough to be generally worthwhile. Peak effectiveness would be more like half that.

You need to do your research and find out what works best for you and your team, but the larger the group, the more likely you are to fall into the typical pattern.
> So unless you spend all day writing compilers from scratch or calculating Pascal's Triangle, please stop with the ridiculous CS questions in interviews.

> Software Engineering is more of a trade, and requires vocational knowledge and experience. A mountain of theory may not always be required to Get Shit Done.

First, interview questions are engineering problems that either applicable to real world systems, or were inspired from them.

Second, interview questions are used to weed away candidates. At certain point, there will be a few candidates that can answer the questions and articulate sound engineering process. And that's one got hired.
Well, primary lithium cells are among the highest shelf life commercial batteries. If shelf life is important, why are you running on rechargeable?
Your argument is that the market doesn't work because bad things happen when we bypass it?

Shall we not bother with firefighting, since the fire only gets worse when you replace the water in the hoses with oil?
When people I manage ask me about career advice, I always start from "Love what you do, do what you love". Over the years I saw a few examples of people who were pushed into mathematics, computer science, etc. by parents or environment but who didn't like it. Some changed their careers (my high school classmate opened a backery after a few years at Google - she absolutely loves it and would never go back to technology.

I believe we are all different and this is a good thing. The real hard social issue I think is that not all jobs are considered lucrative by the society (which is also reflected in the pay). In the ideal world, there would be good well paying jobs for everyone to fulfill their dreams.
JO is still officially Tcl's BDFL, though he takes no active role except on rare occasions as the decider when conflicts among the core team can't be otherwise resolved.
What you and I consider an authentic connection seem to very different. It's not strictly a numbers game. And I beg differ that it was absolutely easier even just 20 years to meet people and have more meaningful connections. The age of connectivity through artificial means has distanced everyone from society as a whole. People don't put any effort into their relationships anymore and that is the source of the problem from both ends.
Agreed, a good interview question is also a springboard to a discussion of engineering practices related to the problem.
Does the `Int` datatype allow negative integers or is it non-negative only? This problem gets much more difficult if you restrict it to positive solutions only.
I suppose it depends a lot on how much you end up paying in taxes. In Norway you'd pay between ~35-45% income tax (and the employer pays a little more on top of that) - that amounts to ~2600-3600 USD out of a monthly 8000 USD paycheck (100.000 USD/year). For that you get (mostly) free medical care, pay during sick-leave, free education for yourself and your children through college. It's certainly more than 500/month - but 500/month doesn't sound like that much assuming it will cover all kinds of illnesses, including things like life-term cancer treatment with followup even if you lose your job.
I didn't think CBD was soluble in water, like many cannabinoids, but apparently there are forms of it which are. Still, seems like a tincture would be simpler.
Ah ok so he was talking about the degree of the equation but gave an example of calculating the degree of a term, the highest of which in any equation is its degree. That makes sense, thanks for clearing it up!
This is not a particularly new observation.

My half-assed analogy:

CS is to SE as Physics is to Mechanical Engineering.

In both cases, it's unwise to trust one category with screwdrivers...
It's not as simple as being "more of a trade." It's quite similar to the distinction between physics and, say, aerospace engineering in that regard. I'd never describe the latter as being a vocation or trade.
You need to add:

(assert (> z 0))
(assert (> x 0))
(assert (> y 0))

or it will give you negative solutions.

I am running this on my machine now. Will report back if it comes up with a solution.
> "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?"

Not all conflict is borne out of character flaws. Put me in the same room as an extrovert - be it in a workplace, boardgames night, or whatever - and I'll appreciate and respect their ability to keep the conversation flowing naturally. Put me in the same home as an extrovert, and that same habit will drive me mad. I need my occasional peace and quiet to recharge and focus! And perhaps just as much, they'll need someone to keep talking!
There is a point at which discussing some theoretical action and it's implications/legal limitations/ethical concerns becomes conspiring to actually commit it..

Thinking it would be 'cool' if someone $verbed evil $noun or whatever is different than actively actually finding people to actually do it...
The Best Programming Languages for Civil Engineers
Blu-Ray Playback with VLC Player: M2TS or 1080p HD MKV/AVI/MP4?
"Implement a recursive depth first traversal of a tree" isn't an engineering problem. It's a CS textbook problem. A fairly basic one, surely, but about as useful to a software engineering project in most cases as the ability to smelt and construct a screw is to an automobile engineer. And the software interviews GP complained about these days don't even start with something that trivial. Usually it's more absurd, and involves what are essentially little math tricks.
Gary Becker’s concept of human capital
Seeing pictures / hearing stories of parts of NYC in the mid 70's, I'd think any parent letting their adolescent/teenager roam completely freely in those days was pretty negligent..
Yeah that was my impression as well. He's been travelling the same Jordan Peterson/Sam Harris circuit I have. I could probably list the reasons but just his use of Big Five personality traits makes it highly likely.

I think to some extent this Googler may survive his effort to Larry Summer himself simply because his arguments are so familiar at this point. If he had actually said true things that hadn't already been circulating as a standard counter-narrative, he'd probably have fewer supporters and die on his cross.
It's not exactly what it does say. Firstly for some reason the original research link is broken. Secondly (from your own source):

"Nonetheless, for the teens and young adults of the late 1970s, the economy seems to have been, in at least some meaningful sense, a meritocracy.
Now about that catch. The unfortunate truth is that, more often than not, the rich kids are the smart kids. For many years now, the single biggest gap in American education has been between the well-to-do and the poor. Thanks to the resources their families can pour into parenting, wealthy students start out academically ahead the day they walk into kindergarden, and stay ahead through their high school graduation day."

Lastly I'll add that it only took white non hispanics into account.
I recently got a tablet for use as a home entertainment controller and newspaper and the first thing I wanted was a pen or a stylus with the tactile feedback of a pen. My cursive is far from Declaration of Independence level but as a personal project I've been practicing and it's remarkable how fast writing anything becomes. I'd go so far as the argue children should be taught cursive first and then learn to recognize block letters later. Watch your waitress sometime if she takes notes on a pad and you'll see what I mean. I'd love to see an app that can be trained on my own handwriting and used to fill in fields and create custom gestures to execute complicated commands. I don't know if I'd like to program on something like that, but as far as my day to day living it would be incredibly convenient.
Memo to Mark Zuckerberg: So You Want to Be President
And at age 50, it is ~$750 p/m.
Blackwater Founder Wants to Provide “Turn Key” Mercenary AF for Afghanistan
That's neat, thanks.
rarely has asymptotic complexity mattered to my code. usually the most important factor is modularization and readability. i spend more of my time reading or re-using code, and my time is more expensive than a computer. plus, highly optimized code can sometimes be unreadable and lead to bugs, which are also more costly.