skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "I was trying to save million of lives" is not a valid excuse for committing atrocities

Why not? If good men forfeit their lives to fight evil, why can't evil men be forced to forfeit their lives for the same?

> use it to justify anything

Then the issue is the "narrative" is false. We just have to improve standards of proof - if there is legitimate reason to believe lives would be saved, why not?
"regulated to death"? Hyperbole much? You make it sound as if regulations have no goal other than to limit the growth of industries. As if the wellbeing of the people and the planet have nothing to do with it. The main reason other industries are regulated more than tech is because other industries usually have a lot more physical repercussions to their actions (affecting health, finances, etc. in a very tangible way). Most tech companies offer free products in exchange for data or advertising space, and the dissemination of personal data is not viewed at the same level as destroying someone's finances or health.
Are there any similar teardowns of Palm Pilots and Blackberry's from the same era? What did they do differently and held them back from similar leapfrogs?
CNTK has C# bindings (for training) since last month (and for evaluation since forever). Also more stuff will be coming into the core C# language.
No. I know of companies who have management post good reviews to minimize the impact of a real negative reviews. One bad review from a real former employee? Post five good reviews!

Also, I've seen evidence of one employee posting multiple bad reviews. It's a bad system all around.
Why 400-Day and 1000-Day Clocks Run So Long
News about Europe ignores what happens in the vastness of Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_wildfires, i.e. Russia is only a European country when it fits one narrative over another. The US narrative is transcontinental and so fires in California are national news.
That 60% shared DNA metric is rather misleading. But, yeah, flies are an amazing tool for studying biological processes, from the simple to the complex.

It's striking how useful they were when we really new very little about how the information of life was encoded and how they continue to be a powerful and relevant model system for studying more complex aspects of biology, such as the brain e.g. https://www.janelia.org/lab/rubin-lab .
Oh noes, the ML fad got to Rich !
Who thought tech companies were ever a friend?

I don't see a problem with massive corporations so long as they get that way by offering the best good or service at the lowest price (natural monopolies). If they achieve their status by partaking in political activity or otherwise using their power in a coercive manner (coercive monopolies) then that's where I draw the line.

There lies the biggest problem with powerful institutions, how can we create a political system that renders political clout benign?

If governments had no power then growing monoliths couldn't extract that power to begin with, right?

It seems at the core of any coercive monopoly there sits government force.

This is where I think the article got it wrong, it's not tech that is the problem, but the solution. We should be looking for ways to render government force obsolete through technological advancements in order to completely eradicate coercive monopolies (and by proxy, monolithic institutions) once and for all.
Posted this same article 11 hours prior to this post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15459028 somehow HN didn't prevent it from repost it again, hmm.
> Do you imply that in general, the (perfectly valid) desire to make money would have justified bad behaviour towards a community?

But the OP made insinuations that the act of selling software was de facto negative to the community. It is only necessary to point out that making money is not automatically harmful to the community.
How would one leave the EU if not via well-publicized popular vote and subsequent wind-down period? People only think it's chaotic and without plan because they assumed the vote wouldn't pass.
Seriously. Contracts. I inherited a relatively substantial C# WCF business line app with a large number of classes each with many nullable properties. The null handling was awful, but there were too many classes to easily refactor to apply data contract attributes across the board (at least given that I am the sole available resource to do so). Instead I tried selectively applying the null object pattern to some of the most common troublemakers. It's improved things but god I wish the original dev had used data contract attributes from the beginning.

Similarly, it's staggering the number of times I've seen someone wrap their entire method (or worse yet their entire program) in empty try-catch blocks just to avoid responsibly handling null and out of range exceptions. To me, it seems like the ubiquity of this antipattern indicates that there's something inadequate about the language, tooling, or developer culture. Or some combination thereof.

I'm not enough of an expert to say what the problem is or how to fix it, but in my relatively limited experience I've found requiring data contracts up front smooths over a lot of the pain points. But it comes at a cost. I've never used an equivalent in any other language, so I don't how C# and .NET compare, but it does seem like a lot of boilerplate code that can limit decoupling if misapplied.
I think it has more to do with the gardeners and maintnence than the orig construction. But ya, they so much as use a floor cleaner from the grocery store, that would have to be documented.
If you had something on your phone that you would die for, would that change the equation at all?
>If any VC funders are interested, please send a pigeon to my homestead in Brighton.

JFYI, on the new (British) maps under development it will be marked Beorhthelmes tūn AFAIK, whilst on the new (Euro) ones it should be identified as "Novvs Portvs".
Amazon Studios chief Roy Price on leave of absence amid sexual harassment claim
The comment wasn't politically charged though, it was a neutral analogy and a nuanced opinion about the election, not supporting one side. But the risk in using politics in your analogies is that it triggers tribal instincts:

> If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it's a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

It's makes it more likely replies will overlook the neutral nature of the comment and petty protectiveness of party or ideology will kick in.
You forgot the third option... I could be wrong and that price is completely OK for them :) I haven't talked to your target audience either, I don't know what there price point is. I have only talked to adjacent markets.
Well, it is technically a little outdated. The article OP posted is from April of this year, and the one you linked to was posted in August.
For my employer I'd say they are if you manage to link the reviews to the particular organizational unit as the culture and life of these can vary wildly. Unfortunately an outsider is unlikely to be able to do this.
Every now I'll be contacted by a recruiter and look up their company on glassdoor and see like a flood of 1 star reviews on it (both from applicants and employees)... like you can tell that there was a mass exodus of employees and that it's falling apart, so they're trying to rehire for those spots. You inevitably also see a ton of recent five star reviews that say something like:

"Wow I don't understand these five star reviews, I'm totally a real person who works here! Positives: <everything is amazing>; Negatives: <something inconsequential>"

Anyways, that's when you politely decline to interview.
How do you maintain your anonymity?
I'm surprised to see so little var, especially when ReSharper by default scolds you for not using it.
In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away.

It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the company will hire a firm to write them positive reviews and disparage those who have left bad reviews, and not realise that prospective employees can completely tell the difference between the level of detail in the negative reviews 'eg, there was a pm who used to try to physically intimidate the female members of the team by leaning over them when he talked, I saw this on a weekly basis for 6 months until he was promoted to the programme manager and stopped working in our office', and the BS positive ones like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.

You'll see what I mean as you read them.

Sites like glassdoor are the only safety net we have to protect ourselves from those kinds of situations.
Thanks for the link, I've always wondered how GitHub does language detection
Isn't Gmail enabling Google Apps Script-based add-ons soon (or already)?
In addition to those two discussions (Aug 2017, 218 comments) & (Sep 2017, 239 comments), the following came up this week:

Disabling the Intel Management Engine | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15444607 (Oct 2017, 219 comments)

If nothing else, the BlackHat talk has stirred up interest in the Intel ME which had remained in relative obscurity for quite some time.
The only purpose of a public company is to maximize profits for the shareholders. That means they don't care about your best interests at all.
> Only if you live in a moral vacuum.

Utilitarianism is a perfectly valid moral theory. Not all ethics are deontological.
Have you considered asking the directors who love your product to become angel investors?
Reactive Mythology: Interrupt Patterns
Cool to see persistent data structures under the covers here. I tried to make a contentEditable editor some time ago and gave up when I realized how many edge cases there would be, but from what I learned when working on that, this general sort of approach seems like the right way.

What do you feel like you learned when working on this project? Will any of it make it back to Codemirror?
Add up a submission form where visitors can sign up to be notified of further developments.

Gives you get a sense for how popular the site might be and a list of potential customers for when you do launch the site.
I don't see how the questions you raise make the bomb/trolley problems not analogous. You're choosing whether to cause harm to one individual in order to prevent harm to others - the rest are just details/framing.

> whether torture is intrinsically evil, and if not, whether it is ever justifiable

That is exactly the question.

We often make absolute statements ("Killing people is instrinsically evil", "Torture is intrinsically evil") but may find cases where it is justifiable:

- shoot the active shooter (most people agree killing is justified)

- bone marrow donation (causes excruciating pain, willingly accepted by the individual, to save the life/health of another. Most people find this justified, even though it violates "first, do no harm")

- voluntary euthanasia (to involve both torture and killing) - Constant excruciating pain, no hope of a cure. Do you kill the person? Or force them to continue to endure? (People are divided on this one)
A few years ago I was at a failing company. The quick influx of detailed negative reviews (from people who were both still there and who had recently left) was perhaps the only public indicator that things were going poorly. I felt so terrible for all the people who were joining based on rosy promises while glassdoor reviews laid it all out.

So yeah, in many cases glassdoor is a strong signal. Don't just look at the average rating, read the reviews from the past few months and look for trends and red flags.
Ready Player F*ck
Java Redis Mock – Mock Library for Testing Against Redis
Unfortunately, I think they still mostly laugh.
I'd be more general and say "organizations of more than 10 or so people are not capable of being friendly" Sure your interests may align for a possibly indefinite time period and deliver similar results to friendship but the larger a group is the more it acts like a sociopath.
If we follow Troy's line of reasoning, then we would need to add these warnings to phones, tv's, websites, credit cards -- just about anything that contains data about you.

I guess the main point the author is trying to make is that data can get compromised, and some people might not be aware of that.

Nothing new or groundbreaking.
No one said anything about additional days of leave. If the company gives 5-10 days sick leave (or whatever their policy is) then it is perfectly fine to take said leave to take care of a sick child. If you don't want people taking it, don't give it. And if that is the policy, then it is up to the employee to decide. But purely amusing someone is going to ask for extra time off because they have a child is wrong.

And I do agree that a perspective employee should not make assumptions about their schedule, if there are morning meetings you will never be able to make during the school year, then that needs to be discussed. But discuss the concerns and don't hide behind another excuse about why you didn't hire someone. Be honest and say their schedule does not fit the company needs.
I love it when competitors think this way. They are basically giving away a potentially huge comparative and competitive advantage.

That said, there are a few questions:

1. Do the gains of getting a professionally designed website offset the costs in some way? It should, but in many cases it does not.

2. (Mentioned elsewhere in this thread) The market has a lot of participants (saturated?), and the median end user is not good at differenting quality other than by personal reference (kind of... sort of...). As such, being a provider in the market can be a bit sketchy.

3. Anyone who is really good at web design (esp. if it extends to other aspects of the digital experience) will quickly realize that they can make a lot more money (and consistent money) by owning one or more businesses and crushing the online presence aspect of those markets. The startup costs are higher, but the ROI is really good.
A Journalist telling us not to trust people. That is quite rich
> First of all, plenty of Google engineers are doing “boring” work that can be done by coding school grads.

Google's hiring process does not reflect this at all. Even entry level positions have very high bar. Boring has nothing to do with it, Google wants the best.

> Secondly, Google declines qualified candidates roughly 50% of the time according to people who work there.

That's not random, that's just setting a really high bar.

Have you been through a Google interview? Their phone screen questions are equivalent to many companies' "hardest" interview problems.
Not if they suffer a torturous death. They might even not die if shot, but be captured instead.
Are we really going to derail this thread to argue about this? Everyone has their preferences but the most important thing is just picking a style and this is the one VS defaults to.
iPhones are still have noticeable advantages over non iPhone smartphones for the same price.

Calling that lifestyle signaling completely misses the boat. Samsung could easily afford to beat Apple at the smartphone game, but they would need to improve or replace Android.
Attitudes like this is why the promise of the Internet since the early days, limited to academic purposes only, has been lost.

Because you're right - secret backroom deals and corruption are so common as to be assumed in the physical world to the point of non-competitiveness. Say I want to start a home improvement supply store. Well there's already Home Depot, Lowes, and OSH, so unless I have a secret and exclusive source for free lumber, I'd be crazy to even try, given all the deals that Home Depot has that guarantees it'll never die.

So? Is moving non-digital collusion between big businesses to the Internet really the best we can achieve?

Strive for better. Stagnation is bad, tech or non-tech. Everyone's noticed how Google searching's gotten less useful, or that Facebook (for the "olds" that still use it) is more annoying than useful these days. The Internet should be enabling better businesses by promoting competition, not stifling it.

Naive? Intentionally so. (Every freemium startup has an enterprise "contact us" plan, but I choose to believe that's because enterprise customers want someone to talk to over the phone.)

Hopeful? In spades, not bought from Home Depot.
> Being in the EFTA would mean continuing to obey EU legislation, continued freedom of movement and paying money into the pot, ie. everything the Brexit campaign was against.

Not everything. For some people it was about symbolic sovereignty, or even about the legal structure.
> What is the benefit of spending time on such a contrived scenario? This is the ethicist's version of "assume a spherical cow".

Because it reveals how you implicitly value human life and whether values can be traded or weighed against each other. There are moral theories that take various different positions on each permutation to the possible answers on these questions.

Thought experiments are about illuminating implicit values and thought processes.
If it is meaningful to only a small portion of the population then that portion should pay for obtaining this information and not force the rest to pay. If you add legal costs these warning like most of regulations are really expensive.
These days, it's so hard to find a decent job, that it's no surprise many turn to illegal activities, such as hacking and fraud, especially in poorer countries. From a capitalistic standpoint there's nothing wrong with it because the only thing that matters is money.
Google played a good trick with the whole "Don't be evil" mantra, for as long as it lasted.

Most people used to think Google could do no wrong in the past. I think their image has noticeably gone downhill since they stopped even pretending to abide by that mantra.

As Schmidt realized, too, the mantra allowed Google employees to have a reason for pushing back when they thought something doesn't feel right. So I suppose the Google execs eventually started "de-training" them from thinking about it.

> "Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something." In the end, though, he believes it has worked, by giving employees a way to point out things they find unethical.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/13/4326424/eric-schmidt-once...
Amazon HQ2: why are we hypocrites about our local communities?
You seem to be someone who’s not aware of how thin the liquidity is in crypto markets.
So true. Another reason to put constraints in Kaggle competition is due to production environment. How many winner models have been used in production? I suspect this number is near zero. High accuracy with a delayed time makes a ML/DL artefact not usable in production, because from users point of view speed is much more valuable than the difference between 97% and 98% in accuracy.
"Silicon Valley is Not Your Friend...but we, at The New York Times, totally are."
Did his business insurance not cover the loss?
Dog training ERS might be more familiar with the word "custom" than "bespoke."
Prenup Is a Four-Letter Word
Why? Have you ever worked as incorporated consultant? You pay yourself salary, you are officially employed by your company, pay youy national insurance / healthcare, you have to hustle clients even in the off time between contracts/projects (and that is hard work itself).

If you have worked as consultant for 5 years and let's say you usually worked for 6-12 months for a single client and there is 2-3 months gap between contracts to get new client I'd put that on my CV as 5 continuous year of employment as consultant.

How is that dishonest? I was consulting 5 consecutive years, time off between clients is still work and I'd actually argue it's more difficult than time you spend doing actual tech work for clients because it involves negotiation & sales which is a completely different set of skills.

If you would then ask to talk about different projects during those 5 years then we can talk more details but splitting that up on a CV would just waste a lot of space and make the resume too complicated.
Would you be so kind to give a summary of what you've seen?
Not tweeting (much), not instagramming (much), not posting on Facebook (much), etc. I don't see anonymity as a binary; more of a spectrum (think something that stretches between a hermit and a celebrity).

Obviously as a human existing into some manner of time with family and friends and coworkers, I'm _known_ by those who could/should, but I don't need Amazon parsing conversations in my kitchen.
Great software projects are never finished; instead they always evolve and improved similarly to living organisms and unsimilar to material things.

I completely disagree with your analogy to a carpenter who builds a chair, this metaphor is wrong and responsible for a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to software development.
I don't understand this comment.

I spec types, and then I spec functions that need that type. But not all the function, just the heavy use ones.

I usually don't instrument the spec'd functions unless I'm actively debugging.

edit:

after having a minute to think on it, do you mean to catch a typo in the use of get, get-in, etc? I haven't tried that.

I suppose you could wrap get, get-in with a nil check or something.
In this vein I think Basic Income should be rebranded as Basic Capital. It's clear to me now that policy where people get paid "wages" for not doing anything will fail, but if it's positioned as a way to allow all people to participate in capital investment (or risky labor choices) it might be viable.
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The color of the links on that blog is not very colorblind friendly. I couldn't tell what was a link and what wasn't without zooming in to make the text larger.
If this means what i think it means (?) it could means a large change to the current net.
Could anyone tell me if im right or not (aka does what i think end up on the userside instead of at a large company or other formation) - aka is there a "real" privacy setting?

Avoiding ... words ftw.
Thanks for reading and using Google cloud :)