skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These accounts weren't created to make money for Wells Fargo, that's just a by-product of the mechanism used for this fraud.

The fake accounts were used to make money for managers and executives at Wells Fargo by convincing shareholders, regulators and the company itself that performance was better than in reality.

The victims of this type of fraud are not just the directly impacted consumers, whose damages are not just measured in unwanted fees but also in their damaged credit histories. The bank itself is also a victim -- which means unrelated customers who store their money, stock market investors, and the general public who may have some relationship with Wells Fargo through multiple degrees of separation. Just looking at the bank's misappropriated profits hardly tells the whole story of systemic and pervasive fraud.
My guess is that there is an acceptable format that is handed to the human like:

[Introduction with name]

[Problem Summary]

[Solution]

[Closing with phone number]

[Optional Extra Line]

[Signature]

If parts of that template are already filled in when handed to an actual human, it would make it easier for the company to get a chatbot to fill in the middle sections [Summary of Problem] and [Solution] by pulling from the FAQ.

If they are trying to cut costs by pulling stuff like this, is it any wonder that I would want to close my account?
Audits cost money. Tons of money. And they don't guarantee anything - bugs in OpenSSL have not been discovered for years despite thousands of people using the code, poring over it and billions depending on it.

Any reasonable audit of OpenSSL would have said, "Don't use it."
Isn't the rocket usually strapped down to the launch pad until all engines are confirmed working properly? What would these side effects be?
> That said, not all investments work out. [...] Please try to focus on what you have learned and gained, and keep actively choosing your investments.

This, critically. The extrapolation of "most successful people have a long string of failures behind them" is that, from any point in time before your success, it looks like you're wasting your time.

The important thing then is to try and evaluate whether you're actually wasting your time or early but on the right path.

Many things are useful here. Evaluating incremental micro-goals: what are the things that will help you attain your larger goals and are your current actions checking these off? Soliciting feedback from trusted peers: recognizing that success usually looks a little crazy (otherwise, someone else would be doing it), do they believe you're on a plausibly successful path or have any feedback in changes you could make? Attending more meetings where people like you are sharing their successes and failures: thereby avoiding comparing yourself to the 100 one-in-a-millions we read about here on HN?

In short, worry about whether your current trajectory has the highest likelihood of success you can achieve. Not whether you're already successful.

(And allow for a variety of end states that are successful. To some, a loving family is the highest success. And that's a valid choice.)
I worked at Oracle until very recently.

They are a rent-seeking, lawsuit-heavy cancer upon this Earth.

Oracle routinely sues its own employees.

Oracle routinely moves to stamp out innovation.

Oracle's stock price has increased over the past decade, but only from acquisition and price-gouging large corporations and agencies.

It is a racket. Working at Oracle is the antithesis of creating fun and useful software for everyone's gain.
Interestingly, most anarcho-capitalists are opposed to intellectual property precisely because it violates physical property. Being opposed to intellectual property is not unique to communism.
The implication of competitiveness is competition, and one aspect of competition is choice, both of type, and of quality. If you cannot create great tasting food with the plethora of choice available in the average UK supermarket the problem is not with the products on offer. The range and quality are near the best civilisation has ever had to offer.
UTF-8 makes it more obvious that you're mishandling multi-unit code points, BUT it introduces its own issues, specifically invalid code units and non-shortest forms. These issues represent security vulnerabilities which have been successfully exploited, and are impossible-by-design with UTF-16.
What’s the energy cost of all that artificial lighting? The article notes that one of the farms produces its own (geothermal) energy. But is this generally true?

The article makes much of exporting knowledge. But how much of the “sustainability” of this model is tied to cheap renewable energy sources? Like geothermal in the Netherlands.

One researcher notes “on the assumption of efficient LED lighting, I estimate that plants like potato or tomato that produce a fleshy food product require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each kilogram of edible tissue they produce.” About the same as what a refrigerator uses in a year.[1]

For example there’s a New York indoor farming startup called Bowery Farms. Its gotten some tech VC and coverage in the tech press. Its marketing is all “green”. They claim to use “far fewer resources” while producing “100x more on the same land... 365 days a year.” They mention how very little water they use.

But if you look closely, they’re suspiciously silent on energy use.[2]

[1] http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_far...

[2] http://boweryfarming.com/
Sadly Musk is an outlier. Very few entrepreneurs have had his impact on the world.
I haven't used PHP for CLI scripting, however I've used Python and Golang. I can say that Golang argument library (flag) feels more straightforward to me than Python's argparse.

import "flag"
var ip = flag.Int("flagname", 1234, "help message for flagname")
...
// flag.Parse() once in the main function

vs

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("square", help="display a square of a given number",
type=int)
...
args = parser.parse_args()

In the Go example you get a pointer just like in C, in the python example you get a special object and can access its fields. Both are simple, but Golang is IMHO closer to C in this matter.
Both; I've always had a side project over the years while I was working for startups as well. I must have gone through at least 12 startups (in addition to 3 of my own side projects; each taking up about 3 years of my spare time).

All the startups I joined sounded promising but the tech environment in Australia was really tough back then (still is, I think).

I did manage to get a small number of shares in a startup which appears to be doing relatively well now but no exit yet (it's also the startup which I worked for the longest; 2 years)... All the other ones just failed. I really understand first-hand what it means when people say that 9 out of 10 startups fail. When I think that my experience of success/failure is probably 'normal' it really freaks me out how bad the odds are (versus what the media makes them look like).

The lesson I learned is that it appears to be completely random. It's just about being in the right place at the right time; the best you can do is just change companies a lot until you join one that's obviously going up like a rocket and try to get some shares.

I've met a few founders who got very lucky and they don't have the slightest clue how weird/unlikely their success is; they live in a different, much simpler world than me.
You are talking about different things.

What spiderfarmer is talking about is a scandal in a Belgian slaughterhouse, where animals were being abused. This was filmed[1] by an animal rights organization, sparking outrage.

What you are talking about is the Fipronil scandal[2]. A Belgian company, Poultry-Vision, bought Fipronil from Romania and mixed it with DEGA-16. A Dutch company, Chickfriend, bought the mixture and knowingly used it to clean hundreds of farms.

[1]: Warning, shocking imagery: https://vimeo.com/209349326

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contaminati...
This article had two components that I appreciate:

1. It gave us a broad overview of the field with data (example, the relative performance on various algorithms on certain problems)

2. It gave us another way of looking at some math we may be familiar with. For example, it looked at econometrics as parameter estimation of a linear model, and ML as the opposite: mapping a function without estimating meaningful or consistent parameters.

3. I know I only said two, but I also enjoyed some of the examples. They are interesting and they quickly summarize the research history.
If the INTERNET company is the only INTERNET provider and they require you to use the specific MODEM or they don't give you INTERNET, good luck arguing them with the fancy words and ideals.

--

WTF state do you live in?
I didn't have any regrets until I sat and watched cryptocoin for 6 years and did nothing about it.
Feel free to link to any Kaggle blog posts showing victories using probabilistic programming.

Is your opinion independent of evidence?
This has been my anecdotal experience with just about everyone I've ever known who works at or encourages use of Oracle. They just didn't seem to care about technology. They remind me of the handful of CS classmates I had at university who were only in the program because of high-salaried jobs in the industry... Needless to say, they didn't thrive.
A number of new players in consignment like GOAT, Stadium Goods for instance.

https://www.goat.com
https://www.stadiumgoods.com
> And the micromanagement Gosling says he felt may have been less of an issue at IBM. Specifically, Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java. Certainly IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano would not personally get his hands into the goings on with an acquisition, even a key one like Sun. But then IBM is not the house that Sam built like Oracle is Ellison's creation. There is a major difference in that.

Why the fuck has Larry Ellison sidelined the creator of Java in the development of Java in favor of himself making the key decisions? What qualifications does Ellison have to make these decisions? That's just colossally egocentric and incompetent.
Similar to schools of fish, and maybe flocks of smaller birds.
> Actually forcing people to spend their money before death would be really good for the economy (despite you picking illegal activities for the negative connotation.)

Well, this is were we clearly disagree. I am very certain that if i knew that i was going to die in 6 months, id be burning all my money into some kickass 6 months with "Burguers" and "Premium Tinder accounts".
Consumption vs Investment is a core battle between Keynesian and Chicago School economics, so it depends on which you subscribe.

> meritocracies.

I actually do wonder who argues in favor of meritocracies. Sure as hell not liberal-economics.

"Get what we deserve? I hope to god we don't get what we deserve" - Milton Friedman.

> And the real solution isn't a 100% tax but 100% tax over some lower amount, say $50,000 along with lowering the yearly gift tax exemption.

This just compromises the original concept of equality of opportunity: if you do that, anyone below 50k will be in an unfavourable position relatively. So what you did with that limit is imposing something on a group, intended to be a minority that wouldnt be able to repeal such rule. The fact that these rules end up like this has been extensively exposed by people like MF.
Total PITA to use, didn't work well on even decently spec'ed machines at the time, and required extra hardware that was of varying quality.
Peak ICO: Paris Hilton endorses a token sale
I wish Google would spend some time improving their YouTube Apps. They are the epitome of awful. Casting from Chrome being the bottom of the barrel for me.
I borrowed someone's BeBox for a couple of days to write my one and only BeOS program. It was fun.

Why is NeXT written "NeXt" in this piece? I don't think I've ever seen it written that way.

Other OSes that "almost made Apple an entirely different company" were Taligent and Copland, for varying levels of "almost".
Mac OS X wasn't there at this time - the classic Mac OS wasn't an Unix like/derivative during the nineties.
Oracle silently closed-sourced Solaris 7 months after acquiring it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Indeed, I always thought COND was a construct sorely missing from other languages. Pattern matching is becoming popular for similar uses. I honestly feel it can go over board in many of the same ways though.
Here is a comment describing strings in SpiderMonkey: http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/999385a5e8c2d360cc3.... If you scroll down there is ASCII art showing the different string sub-classes.
Update: 4 of 535 members of Congress have computer science degrees.

That's higher than I expected.
On an individual level - correct. On a society level - not true anymore as you are reducing the effective size of the workforce.
The earth has finite resources. Let's go with that point for a moment. Do you think there were more resources available on planet earth 5000 years ago or today? The world population was several orders of magnitude less than today, natural resources had not yet been fully exploited, and yet, mankind was much, much poorer in terms of quality of life.

What happened in the meantime? We live in the most abundant age in history. Worldwide poverty is at an all-time low. Surely wealth is growing in absolute terms and it's not just the top 1% benefiting.
Make someone rich, as is any idea.
Theoretically, it should be possible for vdsl too. If you can find something to do bonded vdsl in real bridge mode, you could probably hook up the 5268ac to that with the Ethernet want port, and if that works, you could proxy the 802.1x auth there too.
That's a standard part of the disclaimer for the GPL and other licenses.
WW3 TRUMP IN THE DEEP SHIT
As one anecdote, our company switched from all mac to all windows during 2015-2016. Windows 10 is very good, and we needed GPGPU support.
I tried that strategy here in the NL and got very nice looking tomatoes but still, watery and tasteless.
There is just not that much strong sunlight during the spring months to bring the taste out.
I guess it's worse in greenhouses which is where most (if not all) tomatoes are produced here.
Its a Marxist Forest.
Knuth has a version of this game. Fun read: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/advent.w....
> What makes C++ compilation slow is reparsing headers again and again and again because the C the preprocessor means that every time they are encountered they may have new semantics.

Really? And I thought that this is why C and C++ headers are typically wrapped
in #ifndef-#define-#endif block, so they only produce whitespace after
preprocessing on second inclusion.
I disagree, strongly, with your premise.

First: wealth inequality is the result of persistent and pervasive income inequality.

Second: there are frequently individuals with very-highly-fluctuating incomes. Performing or creative individuals in particular -- actors, writers, filmmakers, musicians, athletes -- may have a few good, and many lean years. Taxing their good periods excessively would actually be counterproductive.

Taxing nonproductive wealth -- withheld or idle capital -- would put it to productive use. That's the fundamental principle of a land tax, as advocated by David Ricardo and Henry George. That concept fails to properly account for the withdrawal or degradation of natural capital, often at tremendous rates relative to the financial profit booked, and a case where natural capital is simply an off-books aspect of activities.

Ensuring that all citizens can meet the fundamental needs of life is crucial -- something Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill each advocated for. "A man must live by his work" -- Smith.
I'd like to hear about his tenure at Google and why he left so quickly
I've made further research into the latest news. During IFA fair (two days ago) Qualcomm stated that Windows 10 ARM devices are coming, it seems to me that they're not backing down from the fight.
[1]

It is good news to hear that the vast majority of x86 ISA is no longer patent-encumbered.

[1][http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/qualcomm-snapdragon-835-w...]
Just double the minimum wage and stop wasting our time and breath!!!
AH Tasty Tom are pretty decent too.
That was a super interesting read that raised so many important points. Regarding the mentioned lack of maps of flooded areas, I wonder if volunteers were aware of the Copernicus EMS service activation [1]. This is a mapping team that, upon activation, constantly produces free maps of the emergency (fires, floodings, etc.) from satellite imaginery and radar data.

The maps are constantly updates as soon as new satellite data is available. The most recent map [2], in fact, was uploaded just 15 minutes prior to this comment. More importantly, along each map a light vector package of the relevant GIS data [3] is published, so certainly this GIS data would be useful to add to an emergency app...

As far as I know, the Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS) of the USGS [4] also provides satellite imaginery, but I'm not sure if they also process this imaginery into freely-distributed, printable maps and vector GIS data.

---

[1] http://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/list-of-components/EM...

[2] http://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/system/files/componen...

[3] http://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/download/146034/EMSR2...

[4] https://hdds.usgs.gov/
Homegrown tomatoes here in Romania are pretty tasty, maybe even indistinguishable from the ones you'd find in Italy. Especially the ones that people in the country side grow in their gardens and, even more so, the late summer, early fall breeds of tomatoes. When you cut one open, you literally want to shove your face in it.

Here's what they look like:
http://www.desteptarea.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/rosii-p...

Note: 6 LEI (RON) is 1.2 GBP, but can find them as cheap as 0.8 GBP, depending on the city, market or seller.

The problem is that I don't think we produce enough of them for export as they're only grown naturally, they don't last more than a few days, even when in the fridge, and they are seasonal. Households tipically pick them as they ripen for immediate consumption, sell any surplus on the local markets and, by the end of the season, harvest them for around 10 gallons of tomato juice for winter.

The countryside folk also lack the education to seriously market them, lack the money to produce in larger quantities, etc. Which leads to supermarkets being chock full of import tomatoes though (we also have the Dutch ones) :/
It would be interesting to know how much of the stagnation in market share movement is because people just aren't buying new computers right now if they don't absolutely have to.

Windows 10 is unattractive for well-documented reasons, and it seems Microsoft is still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge or deal with them.

Apple's recent hardware has been disappointing, and after a series of questionable developments, macOS no longer has the reputation for being rock solid that it did a few years ago either.

The only thing we've seriously considered buying recently was a small number of Linux laptops, which do fine if you're mostly using web-based software anyway and/or you're doing techie things where Linux might have better tools available anyway.

I'm still slightly wondering whether, somewhere in the corner offices of one of the IT giants, there might be a team of executives discussing whether they can make a serious play for the general purpose desktop computing market in 2020 while Microsoft and Apple are both asleep at the wheel. Sadly, as much as I'd love that to happen, I suspect no-one could be far enough along to pull it off in time and yet to have nothing leaked yet. Which means that yes, in 2020, a lot of bad things are probably going to happen in the industry one way or another.
I'm going to argue a little differently...

In C, strings were always semantically a sequence of characters (as they are commonly defined elsewhere).

For a while a character was one byte, so the distinction was unimportant (and became blurred).

A char was both a character and a byte. A string was both a sequence of characters and an array of characters... and an array of "char"s, and an array of bytes.

Code -- and programmers! -- became dependent on these equivalency assumptions.

Once it became clear we could no longer pretend that a maximum of 256 characters was tenable (less actually, since the use of 0-31 for control/separation/termination had become standard) we were left with conflict, leading to a variety of uncomfortable choices and compromises.

One such conflict is "char"... should it retain its semantics or its size (one byte)?

The last time I developed seriously in C or C++ it had retained its size, but lost its semantics -- a char IS a byte now. (That was a while ago, I don't know if that's changed -- it sounds like from your post that it hasn't.)

I guess UTF-8 has won out in C and C++ (and elsewhere) so now, while a char is byte, a C/C++ string is: (1) an array of char/bytes; (2) a sequence of characters. The thing that's been dropped is that a string is no longer an array of characters.

(In case there's confusion: here, "array" means an ordered sequence of elements of uniform size with O(1) random access, while sequence is just an ordered sequence of elements that doesn't necessarily offer O(1) random access or elements with uniform size.)
How does inequality in itself cause suffering?

If all super rich people were magically erased from the earth, would the poor have it any better?
"This is not an ad".

Hmm, maybe it's not. If you are reading, Paris, I'd love to have your input on the following few questions of mine:

1) What are the benefits of participating in an ICO, when compared to an IPO, a Kickstarter, or just generally taking on equity in a traditionally established company?

2) How much do you feel would be an acceptable investment in an ICO?

3) What product or service will be delivered by this company, and how long after the ICO would that service come into legitimate availability?

4) What recourse do I have, if any, should I desire to withdraw my funds?
Yes, a strategy does exist which can force at least one line in a well of width 10 (and different strategies for 4, 6 and 8). I did a tedious brute-force calculation which demonstrated this a few years back. The code is not particularly presentable and the calculation takes about 11 days on a modern machine (it runs in a single thread), but here: https://github.com/qntm/tetris

The limiting factor is headroom (the depth of the well). For wells of depth 0, 1 and 2, the AI clearly wins, but once the depth increases enough a strategy becomes possible. My belief is that such a strategy exists for all even well widths, although proving this is annoyingly hard.
>What if the person porting the code to a library was a later version of the original author?

Then they know what they need to add, and can add it now that they need it -- instead of having it slowing them down when they didn't need it
Seems a strange complaint when janitorial positions (which aren’t often held by college educated white guys) are under discussion.

Presuming we want people to have good lives who aren’t able or inclined to do jobs requiring much higher intellectual demands than janitorial ones (and I certainly do want us to presume that!), we need to figure out how to in the short term allow people doing those jobs to have good lives and in the long term allow them to have good lives while robots do those jobs.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment.
And David Ricardo prior to him (George credits Ricardo lavishly, though I seldom see this mentioned).