skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft and Amazon Join Hands for AI Framework
The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by employees who were fired for basically being awful, hostile, aggressive people who fought with everyone and refused to do work. These are the folks who are technically competent and think that gives them a pass for generally being an awful human being to work with.

If this happens consistently over a longer period of time, I'd say there's a problem with conflict management in that company. Technically competent people usually start pushing back if they see a better/simpler way of solving the problem they are given, but instead of taking their feedback or giving constructive criticism, the management just tries to shut them up.
You're still underplaying just how radical this DIY approach is.

Imagine you decide you are a modern day Robinhood, and you go around the U.S. breaking into medical facilities and stealing Epipens to distribute them for free to the general populace. You do this until you and your band get caught, and which point you go to prison.

At the end of your run every person who received a free Epipen got the same quality device as the people who paid exorbitant price for an Epipen. To the degree that you inspire others to do this, they are bound by the same risk of prison time. Finally, since the price you charged was $0 there is no financial incentive for copycats to distribute fake Epipens (or at least if somebody does they must be a bad actor with ill intentions, or they must charge a fee in which case potential buyers will rightly be skeptical of the product).

What the DIY chemist apparently wants to do is persuade non-experts that they can produce Artisanal Epipens that are ostensibly as safe as the real thing (or at least safe enough that the risk is overridden by the alternative). But that is only an argument for a doctor to use an artisanal epipen if it is the only thing that happens to be lying around-- it's not an argument for persuading the general public to practice and spread the idea of DIY non-expert chemistry.

DIY chemistry doesn't come with public policy expertise. It doesn't come with trained (and funded!) epidemiology. And if their DIY ethos goes horribly wrong-- as the "roll-up-our-sleeves-and-research-our-own-vaccines-schedules" movement has-- they won't have the competence in statistics to know just how dangerous their movement has become in terms of public health. Worse, where science tends toward rigor, verifiability, and a narrowly defined scope of research, these DIY chemists will likely be skeptical of the published canon and "wing it" by trying to do their own epidemiology (because after, ignorance and lack of training didn't stop them from being a chemist...)

Worst of all, unlike my Robinhood example there is no natural filter to keep otherwise good faith actors from making decisions that will have terrible consequences for themselves and others. To steal Epipens you've got to break in to a physical place and potentially physically harm or threaten a security guard. This filter keeps tens of millions of people who are no doubt convinced of the deep unfairness of pharmaceutical prices from becoming an angry and dangerous mob whose violence quickly outweighs the single benefit of redistributing epipens to the poor.

Based on that, DIY artisanal epipens are more risky and can scale into a public hazard more easily than just robbing a pharmaceutical warehouse. So I claim that casually encouraging people to make DIY epipens without a systematic, well-tested, and well-funded research regimen is more dangerous and irresponsible than just stealing extant epipens.

So if you're the type of person who rejects robbery out of hand, you probably shouldn't entertain the idea of Artisanal Epipens, either.
I think it's possible.
We're already well down that road via NIH and DOD funding decisions.
Great question!

Being an engineer myself, this was a personal pain point and I wanted to solve it, but the key question was whether or not machine learning would help. Thus, most of the time was spent deploying the tech with early adopters, refining the algos, and trying to better understand the value.

What I learned was that our message resonated with some companies more than others. Working with those guys and getting some proof-points on the value is what kept us going!
“Science is entirely a populist thing,” Robinson says again. “It’s a way of using the individual human mind. That means one man can be right, and everybody else can be wrong."

What an interesting quote. I've never considered science in this light but... it's true!
> perhaps uniquely so, like Yelp
Because, insofar as relatively large non-specialist (comparatively speaking) news aggregators go, HN is the only one where smart, well-spoken individuals still form a meaningful part of the user base. In fact, apart from a few highly specialized subreddits, this is the last major site where I still read comments at all, and I learn something new on a pleasantly frequent basis.

Also, it happens to be the last major news-related website I know of with what I would call "good web design". That helps more than I'd care to admit.
The string isn’t random. It’s a public key with the private key of the service able to decrypt content sent to it.

Anyone can generate a key with a vanity prefix, it just takes computing power and the longer the match, the greater the computing power involved.
It's just thinly veiled racism/classism. Nothing to see here.

That or the dude legitimately expects white glove delivery for bottom shelf pricing, which is even more absurd.
NN look like black boxes because we’re not stripping out spurious axons in the network to understand the computational circuit. If you can remove a weight (w_ij -> O) from a NN with no change in the network’s function across a broad spectrum of inputs then it clearly wasn’t necessary in the first place as that weighted edge was not involved in the information processing. Training networks will not only tune certain weights to dial up on signal but they will also (effectively) zero out certain weights that don’t carry information (if they’re not effectively zeroed our then they introduce noise and compromise the network function), in effect reducing the noise and focusing on signal. For anyone interested I wrote a paper in Natures Molecular Systems Biology in 2008 which goes into this. It describes artificial gene regulatory networks but my background was in AI and the NN math is the same. I believe the results are universally applicable across a broad range of NN-class network. Lots of relevant remarks in the supplementary as well. This includes a description of an algorithm to prune the network of spurious interactions.

http://m.msb.embopress.org/content/4/1/213.abstract
Obviously this is true. There’s much that goes into industrial synthesis that someone with a setup like his at home just can’t currently reproduce, and safely.

What I find most dubious about the article is the lack of attention to synthetic biology. Because QA in that sense can become say, “this modified organism can produce the drug in question under most conditions and all future populations will carry the new genes with X% assurance” - ONCE -and you’re done.

This is quite possibly the real Pharma killer, IMO.
It's not amusing to me that fake numbers can be used to justify a higher valuation, especially when those fake accounts are used to scam or mislead the "real" ones.

At some point should there be regulation on what terms like MAU means?
Wouldn't that be easy to foil? I can, and do, write with different styles that depend on the audience I'm trying to reach. I'm reasonably sure I could write entirely unlike my normal writing and appear to be a completely different person. I've done a lot of writing for very different audiences.

Am I, perhaps, over-estimating my ability? Are they really that good at determining origin?
>This problem cannot be solved.

identify verification when you create your account. charge a small fee when you create your account.

>Consequently, I think instead of trying to solve the issue of bots, it's more important to start educating people that just because they read something on the internet does not mean it's true

now THERE is a problem that cannot be solved!
Secure tunnels to localhost – open source ngrok alternative
> We don't reinvent TCP every time we want a new network protocol

Hey man, speak for yourself. Reliable UDP is where its at.
We can start a LISP evangelism strikeforce and bomb the Rust threads the way the Rust guys bomb the C ones.
Could virtual reality replace therapy?
Hacker culture preferring facts, logic and deep discussions. Bad comments go to the bottom or get hidden and usually doesn't bother you. Thankfully great administration by dang. And as a Lisper the service running on a Lisp dialect is a big plus :)
Literally the only place I've been able to find that successfully keeps comments sections on topic.
No, it wouldn't. That requires a completely different set of features (gutters, syntax highlighting, etc).
I doubt that that undercover string precipitated this policy, which no doubt took longer than a week to formulate. For starters, the thing you mentioned was chat taped during an undercover sting, of which social media guidelines would not govern.
SongSim – visualize patterns of repetition
This was posted before, right?

I like that they allow FASM.

And that there is no "standard library".
The point of the author is to define your targets. When you're building a compiler if you're also building a parsing engine then maybe the parsing engine should be its own project, with the compiler a separate project that uses the engine. When you build a web app you don't closely tie in the web server code, you use an existing or build a new web server. When building a web server you don't build the TCP stack with it. You make the TCP stack and then have the web server use it.

Complex systems are constructed from smaller, less complex subsystems. Complete them, let them standalone and build out our final systems from them. We generally don't rewrite tools like grep because it exists and it works well, we may port it to new platforms. And we don't change the effects of the -R flag out from under the users (clients), it is what it is. The interface is, essentially, completed.

If you're leaving incomplete hobby projects in your wake (all of mine are), that's not what he's talking about.

His specific experience was going from AMQP (large, complex specification) to ZMQ (smaller, focused on the essentials and let complexity be built on top) to nanomsg and libmill (even smaller, more focused). So in theory his nanomsg and libmill could be considered complete, as we'd consider TCP "complete", today (from a client perspective at least). And we can work our way back up plugging it into systems to recreate the capabilities of ZMQ, which can be plugged into systems recreating the capabilities of AMQP. Which can then be used to solve our business problems.
If this ever does come to pass and the lives of 10's of thousands are at stake I suppose you do it anyway in violation of the law and take the punishment knowing that your sacrifice prevents greater injustice and evil.

Yes, exactly. Legislating torture as a practice is not necessary or desirable.

If such a perfect "pro-torture" situation does occur, Any True Patriot (TM) should be glad to face a lifetime of imprisonment (for torturing the totally-for-sure-did-it-bad-guy) as a tradeoff for saving thousands of lives.

In the real world, with much more common situations, we do not want people being tortured on a routine basis.
30% of the populace has 3+ accounts? That doesn't make sense - it doesn't follow power-law distribution.

Most like the .01% have hundreds to thousands of accounts. What does that imply?
As explained in other comments, onion addresses are keys. However what you'd taking about does exist on zeronet, where people can buy .biz domains.
and for OSX?
Depends how you look at it. I think rich people are more likely to look out for each other. You can often see this in the way our laws work, if the middle and lower classes are screwed over it's a huge fight to bring justice. But if rich people are screwed over, justice seems to come at a swift pace.

I think rich people treat rich people better and poor and middle classes tend to treat each other like trash but treat rich people like they are gods.
I often struggle with app store reviews, because people that are satisfied won't go and rate the app out of the blue. Non-technical users that can't follow an industry standard sign up flow will go completely nuts and give one star with completely insane comments.

I used to believe that the "please rate my app"-popup was bad ux. Now I know why it's used.

I'd think the same pattern applies to GD. Why would I write a review when satisfied with my work? I'd have no reason to even visit GD.
Keep in mind that the "performance advantage" MySQL supposedly "had" over PostgreSQL mostly came down to a bad default setting in PG. Back in early PG versions (7.x from memory), the default shared buffers setting value was extremely low, in order to allow PG to "just work" even on very low memory systems. (8MB?)

The effect of not changing that from the default was PG then pegging the cpu at 100% (moving stuff into and out of the tiny buffer) with terrible performance.

When we raised that default to something reasonable for (at the time) modern systems... our performance magically increased substantially from the perspective of many non-DBAs.

Note - The exact details are in the PG email archives if anyone cares enough to look. :)
You can be a little less brute force if you use something like hyperopt (http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt/) or hyperband (https://github.com/zygmuntz/hyperband) for tuning hyperparameters (Bayesian and multi-armed bandit optimization, respectively). If you're more comfortable with R, then caret supports some of these types of techniques as well, and mlr has a model-based optimization (https://github.com/mlr-org/mlrMBO) package as well.

These types of techniques should let you explore the hyperparameter space much more quickly (and cheaply!), but I agree - having money to burn on EC2 (or access to powerful GPUs) will still be a major factor in tuning models.
For a recent macOS version, do:

0) Make sure you have a recent Xcode installed

1) Install the libsdl2 and libsdl2_ttf frameworks under /Library/Frameworks

libsdl2: https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL2-2.0.6.dmg
sdl2+ttf: https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/release/SDL2_ttf-2.0.14.dmg

2) git clone https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp.git ChrysaLisp

3) cd ChrysaLisp

4) make (takes about 2s!!)

5) ./run.sh (shows full working gui. Amazing!)
You don't need price regulation if you reduce the length of the patents or get rid of the patents completely. Keep in mind patents are a government granted monopoly, the problem is the patents not the prices. If someone else can make the drug for 800 and is happy to sell it for 1000 then it won't be sold for 84,000 anymore because no one will buy it for that price.
That's the thing though. It is extremely unlikely that they are being "MADE" to work. Slavery is essentially outlawed. If you don't provide these people with better, higher paying alternative jobs, then there will be NO JOBS if you ban these.
Maybe with a layer 7 attack, but not with a layer 3 attack. The author also described the difference between the proxy request and a legit request, so he can just block the proxy requests. Try using slowhttptest. You don't even need a botnet.
6 SQL Data Warehouse Solutions for Big Data Analysts (With Their Pros and Cons)
Hey Max, long time no chat since Hash the Planet! Was it you or Mathias that demoed running an Operating System while streaming it live from remote peers? Those were some insanely sick demos.

Is random access something you guys have added since then? Or, could you clarify how it reduces the overhead on apps that would have shared mutable state (even if it is composed of immutable streams)? Don't you still have to back-scan through the log to recompose the current view? Which then wouldn't scale for read performance. Or is there an alternative approach?

This was one of the main things I was discussing with Dominic Tarr about Scuttlebutt back then. We had done a lot of event-sourcing (immutable logs) at my previous startup, but had problems with compaction or generating views/state of those streams. Which is what lead me to the CRDT approach as the base, not the thing on top. I know Tim Caswell/Creationix is using DAT for one of his products he is building with @coolaj86 .

But that was 4 years ago now, that me and Dominic were talking about those problems? Does random access solve that? Would love to read about it, shoot me some links! Also, Dominic and I are starting to have Web Crypto meetings with some folks at MIT (anvil/trust, ex-riak/basho) and they are in town (the Bay Area) this week. If you are around, we should all get together again to discuss identity, security, crypto, and P2P!
see parent reply
Except that our current health care system isn't anywhere close to free market capitalism.
On the contrary, it would appear that Twitter is incentivized to encourage bots and trolls to flourish.

The definition of a bot could be problematic though. If a bot is merely automated posting, then virtually every company, news org, website, and anything else that uses automated posts is a "bot", and are those bad? I don't think so, those are useful. The problematic bots are basically automated trolls.

Troll bots increase "engagement" metrics by quite a bit, this is obvious to any person if you look at the automated bot replies to virtually any post from a news agency or anyone with a large twitter following. They also jump onto every hash tag or breaking news event spreading garbage. You'll find dozens of bots making absurd statements followed by bots responding to those bots, and clueless people arguing with the bots. Combine that with the endless seas of human trolls that also jump into everything, and those interactions probably make up a huge amount of usage of Twitter.

Twitter remains useful for scanning headlines and breaking news, but outside of that the service is a complete mess.
The seemingly easy way to DoS it would be to hit pages with Bitcoin addresses.

You could even setup a hidden static page with hundreds or thousands of addresses and call it through that proxy. No load on the legit server but heavy load on the rogue proxy.
This article states Twitter's position ("Bots? On my platform?") vs 1st hand experience from advertisers:

http://adage.com/article/digital/brands-worry-twitter-undere...
If you are the smartest in the room then you are in the wrong room. Being part of HN is being in the right room.
I've always been attracted to the idea of science and medicine becoming more "open source", in the sense that all knowledge could be free flowing and lowering the entry to understanding and contributing to it. It could be a great way for the "alt-science" and official academia to benefit each other.

However, I am pretty skeptical on Robertson's approach to this, on several parts, but the most conspicuous is how his "alt-science" seems to be aligning a lot with modern GOP philosophies.

For example, while he explains plainly, "that human activity has not harmfully warmed the Earth", the article he participates in comes to a bit different conclusion, which is "Meaningful integrated assessments of the environmental impacts of anthropogenic CO 2are
not yet possible because model estimates of global and regional climate changes on interannual,
decadal and centennial time scales remain highly uncertain", which seems a bit dishonest to say the least.

Great article and fascinating read. Academia surely needs to be challenged, but I am afraid I would take more of Pauling's approach myself.
It's not a real game. It's a project online to show all the bad code the guy wrote when he was a young coder.
> Currently it generates 16-bit and 32-bit 80386+ assembly code for NASM that can then be assembled and linked into DOS, Windows and Linux programs.

I wonder why not 64Bit? Hardly anyone uses 32bit processors anymore, and even in the Windows world 64Bit systems are slowly taking over, so it would seem more logical to me to compile for modern processors, instead of 16bit architecture.
A funny, recent example of how likes/follows can be tracked: A Baltimore Sun reporter who helped expose a fraudulent journalist was messaged by a Twitter user who purported to be one of the fraudulent journalist's sources. A look at who that Twitter user followed made the claim very unconvincing:

https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/839663972357926912
How so? If you have 10 men and 10 women, and 8 of the men kill themselves, the remaining two can still fight over all 10 women.
This isn't ideal.

The issue is entirely government granted patents, if multiple companies could produce the same drug the price would fall to the cost of materials and labor plus some marginal amount. If I am the only one who can produce the drug I have a monopoly and can set the price extremely high and that is what we are witnessing.
Yeah. I've built toy apps with re-frame, and really liked the way the code looked. But my team is pretty Jr other than me, and I wasn't sure if ClojureScript would work well for us as a team. VS Code is our editor of choice, and it is just really a good environment when paired with TypeScript.

Also, my experience with Rails really has me fearful of doing any serious, big work, in a dynamic language.
Given the level of education nowadays and the wide access to knowledge, I'm convinced that it's legitimate that the average person should at least have the basic medical knowledge, let's say equal to what a doctor in the 30's had known, and be able to treat 90% of the diseases that he/she encounter in his life.
Oh I'm sure they are indeed actually biased, that's how bias works. They're not thinking: "this will better allow us to get away with presenting our political angle as objective truth" they're thinking "this will allow us to present the truth without being erroneously accused of bias by people who are actually biased themselves." I see no reason to believe that the writers of the times don't believe this. I do think it takes a certain cognitive dissonance, which The Times has mastered, to believe this view makes sense. To think critically is to be biased, and The Times certainly wants their writers to think critically, so the bias is unavoidable. I just wish they could be a bit more honest about it. But I understand why they can't.
In the United States, many prisons are private, for-profit enterprises. They're the ones I'm talking about.

It's not up to a private prison WHEN they release someone. It's up to them how they are treated while they are IN the prison. If they are offered classes, job training, mental health care, support groups, etc. Or if they're brutalized in an uncaring institution, and released worse off than when they came in.

Sorry I didn't explain myself well.
I haven't found an explanation of when to use BRIN indexes that works with my brain. anyone have a good link?
There is also this: https://github.com/metawilm/cl-python
I'm surprised by this reaction. To me, the quote sounds like gobbledygook. Populism and the power of the individual mind are almost at cross-purposes.
No, I think this is just them trying to cozy up to Trump supporters. Who never had an issue with the reporter's politics, but the fact that they were reporting much of that stuff in the first place.

Same with the NFL. They got bullied by Trump, no two ways about it.
The Blockchain: A Series in Service of the People
That would be illegal. And they should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
You are not taking it to the extreme. You are just discovering that "selfishness" is not hard-defined. It is relative, and thus one cannot measure it through different people since each one of them will perceive it differently.
The Implacability of Things: stories told from an object's point of view (2012)