skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"hockey puck that can add things to your shopping list" sounds a whole lot better than "always-on video phone" which they are also competing to put on your shelf.

(and the hockey puck sounds pretty... pretty dumb)
Ask HN: What chatbot/AI/ML framework to use for a business project?
What chatbot (or AI or ML or NLP) framework would you use if you had to build a smart, AI-powered chatbot for a business? (not for research or a startup - has to be mature enough).

I've looked at Amazon Lex, Microsoft Bot Framework, Microsoft LUIS, Wit.ai, Api.ai/Dialogflow. Any others? Good or bad experiences using any of those? Many seem disappointingly limited, I've seen many "dumb-bots" and that's not what I'm aiming for :) .

Thank you.
What if you work 16 hours a day because your current employer is highly dysfunctional and you are constantly putting in hail mary efforts to save them from themselves?

How is one supposed to have time for side projects then?
While this Slack feature is meant for live screensharing, remote teams also need a way to record and share screencasts outside of live meetings. My cofounder and I having faced timezone inflicted pain in remote teams before, wanted to scratch our itch, and built a solution for anyone to easily record and share screencasts. If you feel remote work pain, do check us out at https://checkoutclip.com. Interested to hear thoughts.
I can already see Luxotica's new Fall line branding: "Face ID compatible sunglasses!"
No, my take away is that mere accusations, regardless of legitimacy, can destroy your career and reputation.

Assuming you didn't do these evil deeds, having video or audio proof(if legal in your jurisdiction) is really the only way to counter them.

Otherwise, what do you say? "No, I didn't rape/sexually assault this person". The accusation alone is salacious enough that a mere denial isn't going to change anyone's mind.

And I would say that the women's accusations, if true, would be bolstered if they had video/audio evidence of it.
I’m sure the free market will find a way to provide healthcare without insurance companies, an all-but-required middleman.
I was in a road race where my car stopped running. My competitor was able to drive across the finish line because his engine kept running.

Later I had a second race where I defeated my opponent by driving with a full tank of gas.

The victory was overturned when a judge ruled that my use of a full tank of gas to generate similar performance was ruled “reverse engineering.”

I have a hard time understanding the idea that generating the same result without deriving how the other feature works is reasonably called “reverse engineering.”
I agree. The new guidance is still higher than the last Q4, however, it is still lower than what was forecasted.
Yes, that he totally glossed over that part really stood out. Doesn't even said he didn't grab her, just acts like that wasn't even a thing, and makes up claims about her account that just don't make sense. Not even about what happened, about what she wrote about it, which everyone can just go re-read and see that it's not true. How can he expect that to be taken seriously.
Not really. I'm not an expert on Sexual Harassment law, but it is my understanding there are 2 general kinds of sexual harassment. One is where there is such pervasive harassment of a sexual nature that it constitutes a "hostile work environment". For instance if firefighters put up centerfolds throughout the firehouse. This does not seem to be alleged here.

The other is where a person in a superior position uses that position in order to gain sexual favors from a subordinate. This is like the Weinstein allegations where he demanded they shower with him or they would never work in Hollywood again. That seems to be the type of harassment he is defending against. After reading the article, I didn't find anything in there that fit either of these definitions.
I know that it is the same in Maine (or it was), and I believe Vermont. It's generally considered common courtesy to get permission from the landowner first.

It's one of those situations where a few yahoos can ruin it for everybody else. Or on the other hand, the influx of people "from away" who are ignorant of or opposed to the mostly unspoken way of doing things.
Lots of sexual harassment is not criminal. (It's still, obviously, no acceptable).
How to Create Reusable Frameworks Using Swift
> what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society?

If I were to believe the personal experiences of all the women I know, most women have, at some point in their lives been harassed. I've had 20 #mee_toos on my relatively small Facebook feed.

Not a single one of them ever mentioned reporting the harassment they experienced to authorities, filing a lawsuit, writing a blog post on Medium, calling out the harasser on social media, or anything of that nature.

For another anecdote:

Two months ago, though, one friend has been tip-toeing around how to deal with a serial rapist in their friend circle. They didn't go to the police, because nothing would get done, and they didn't call that person out in public. They weren't looking for attention, or to ruin the rapist's life. They were practically tip-toeing around the issue of how to warn other women about him.

Unsurprisingly, of the many responses to that thread, three people knew exactly who she was talking about.
I don't think I've misread. I think his moral compass is broken and he doesn't know the difference between evil and harmless browsing.
You don't need to tell anyone.
It slams doors shut because:

If things don’t work out into a very long term relationship, entering his department would likely involve significant tension, if not hostility. How many people can work in close quarters with an ex? How many interactions can it bias - with him, with his current departmental colleagues? Will he handle it ending maturely? So many people don’t, and it’s a career at stake.

And if it does work out, or for as long as it’s working, she will be undermined as the recipient of nepotism rather than making her career transitions on merit alone. Running the risk of being seen as someone who sleeps their way to the top is also likely to have detrimental long-term career effects.

His asking closed doors for her just because she has foresight, not because he said “on the bed or on the road.” These are the sort of consequences that guys ignore when they whine about not being able to hit on women at work.

The irony is: guys with more foresight/maturity get this, so they don’t ask. It’s the guys asking who are -also- more likely to be a fucking problem, because they’re exhibiting bad judgment to begin with.

This isn’t some new over-sensitive ultra-feminist whatever whatever thing. “Don’t shit where you eat” is old advice, and always appropriate.
> if they turn around and demand side projects; you would be completely correct to ask about how many office hours they allocate to side projects.

^^^^
This
> 1 billion people shouldn't have their lives dictated by a proprietary, opaque Skinner's box with no regard for privacy or rights.

Of course they should not. Or should they? We live in a free society and you are voluntarily participating. Or not. It's your choice. And that's wonderful.

People do not realise, how simple it is to stop. As with cigarettes the real trick is to just not do it anymore. You need some willpower and some plan to cope with the temporary withdrawal effects.

Single datapoint: I briefly used FB for a few weeks about ten years ago, but never saw its value. Today, thanks to dusty email and many other (more open) sites, I have a growing number of friends around the globe and locally.

There are places (like Central Asia), which are already operating in a Free Basics mode in that basically anything beyond facebook is an extreme hurdle to use. But anyone in the western world with lots of choices can stop feeding FB today, if they cared.
The Trillion Dollar Coin Can Avert a Retirement Catastrophe
Ask HN: What is your favorite web font?
And which one do you regularly use?
Agree. I've been in tech as a developer, dba, sysadmin, architect, all of the above, etc. for more than two decades, and I don't even have a personal github account. I don't write code at home.
>Listen, maybe you disagree with all of this. You're allowed.

On some campuses, you are absolutely not allowed. Consider the fallout from Mizzou in 2015.
By quitting. 16 hours? What the fuck.
One of the great benefits about living where I do (Maine) is that so much land is open for public use. I don't want to derail the thread so I will simply point out that it is really easy to cede your land to a trust, in many areas where that's actually beneficial. Some trusts are set up to accept donations in cash, as well. So, either way helps preserve land for public access in perpetuity.
I'd say it's a bit too heavy in general.
I like to have side projects, but I still don't like to share them. People love to find reasons to reject, and an 18, 11, or 7 year long side project (the age of all my side projects) isn't really a fair representation of how I code today.

Even as someone who enjoys side projects, the prospect of sharing a side project, and being criticized by a potential employer about the contents of it, turns it from "side project" to work.
Crazy state management for lazy programmers
I don't think the maker community hanging on to their Kinects is going to put a dent in the e-waste impact. People are tossing these things in droves because they are a useless waste of space.
The real lesson here is that they should have pirated the SAS software instead of licensing it. Then they would have been liable for at most a large fine instead of having their business shut down.

If the license was tightly integrated with the software (meaning even a pirated copy would require acceptance before use) then just hire an outside consulting company to generate the output from the test code. It could have all been documented and left the company with clean hands.

The simplicity of side stepping the license in this case highlights the absurdity of the ruling.

Not saying SAS wouldn't still sue them, but they wouldn't have nearly as strong a case with damages less likely to be bankrupting.
> [...] as he spoke about free speech and political correctness at McMaster University

The protests were not at the University of Toronto, but against a professor employed by the University of Toronto :) See the opening paragraph of your linked article.
I agree that it shouldn't cost you a job if you don't have side projects. It shouldn't guarantee you a job if you do—like any other demonstration of who you are, it should cut both ways. I always ask to see them if someone has them, and it's hurt in about as many cases as it has helped. If you can't program but have some side projects up on github anyway, I will be able to tell.
Fortifying concrete by adding recycled plastic
It's a very well-known fact that interviewers will often want to see some code.

Because of this, I at one point spent maybe about 15 hours putting together a small project specifically to use as a code sample. This code sample, which again took maybe about 15 hours to put together, served its purpose for years.

To avoid this tiny amount of easy work that has such a high potential upside is, to be frank, just dumb and lazy.
Alright if we want to get specific it's like being blind and touching a home's open front door. Incredulous​ that the door is open you feel around inside for a second and feel a set of keys on the hook. You leave at this point and a week later are arrested for B&E because your fingerprints are on the keys (or you were stupid enough to tell the owner their door was open)
> As it turns out, backing the losing side in a civil war does not ingratiate you with the winner.

You could say the same thing with the west's relation with china and vietnam and almost every other non-western nation on earth.

It's difficult to form a deep relationship with china or russia or vietnam or anyone else when you back the losing side.

Is there a bigger thorn in the side of the sino-american relationship than taiwan?
Better check your employment agreement. My company owns what I write on company time, I don't have the rights to just "put it on GitHub", and yes, I take that seriously.
First, I don't believe it is against the law to simply connect to a public FTP server. And I'm certain that I wouldn't bother to notify somebody that their public FTP server was... public. However, if I saw something that clearly wasn't supposed to be public.

It's more like looking across the street and seeing a private act through an open window, and going to the front door and knocking and telling them that the window is open.

There are laws against leaving patient data in the public. There are laws against public indecency.

There are also laws against unauthorized access and laws against being a peeping Tom.

Which one is going on is not necessarily easy to determine.
No jail for Portuguese man who beat ex-wife because her adultery hurt his honor
If you are of the view that ideas are worthless and execution is all that matters, then there is no innovation anymore. Facebook can out-execute pretty much any small startup if they really wanted to go into a space.
Seems like in a world where there's on-demand photoshop editing through a gig economy, something like this should be feasible, if not already exist. Maybe a separate cost per page for text, diagram or both, and a system to pay other people to review pages for correctness (mechanical turk style, or just actually use mechanical turk), and you have a nifty way to update old scanned documents while helping put food on some poor grad student's table.
or just use std::extent which type safely gets the size of arrays (though most of my new c++ will probably be using std::array)
It's a good question. I wish innovation could be opened up in more important areas like housing, transportation and healthcare costs. But it's all locked up from laws, zoning, political gridlock and barriers to entry.
It feels like it would have been smart to have at least asked his lawyer to review his statement.
I interpreted that as meaning he generally doesn't care about his own privacy online, not privacy in general
Well said. These types of blog posts create the sense of a needless dichotomy where you either code 24 hours a day or 5 hours a day and there's no in-between.

I really don't have much of a github presence, but then again I'm not a day-to-day coder at work. The presence I do have I created in just a couple of hours and I could easily beef it up to something respectable by spending a couple of hours a month on it.
What is the purpose of life?
If it was drafted by a PR team it was not a good one.
"The only planned apparatus capable of servicing or boosting Hubble, NASA’s Space Launch System, has already seen its first planned flight slip behind schedule."

I hardly think that a rendezvous demands the capabilities of SLS (or the Senate Launch System as I choose to think of it). Really any booster that can get to a ~300mi orbit with a reasonable payload could do the job.
Some of the best most useful skills I've learned I've learned making side projects using technology that I wouldn't dare try to introduce at work. (too new / bleeding edge / untested)

With that said, I don't make any of those projects public since they embarrass me. No unit tests typically, poor documentation, etc.

With that said as a hiring manager I would never penalize someone for not having open source projects.
With enough money you can replicate almost anything if you want to.
It's hard to gauge your where your starting from. But generally speaking algorithmic cryptocurrency uses some of the same technical indicator as stocks. (20DMA,200MA,MACD, RSI,etc) I would probably recommend python as it seems to be the fastest and most popular for high speed stock trading.
In my case, it was also against company policy for two people to have a relationship where one was below the other in chain of command. So if he were in charge of people and projects, asking me out immediately barred me from ever getting any of the positions that he oversaw.

Given his high rank, I assume he had some authority. But, I didn't ever know the exact structure of the IT department.
Yeah, I would definitely be using serde in that case
SAS Institute, one of the most valuable privately held compaies in the US, has been fighting against run-alike and data-compatability challengers for decades.

This is particularly ironic as the company itself was founded based on mainframe storage and interface technologies -- the SAS program editor and interactive environment through the 1990s was based on the IBM TSO/ISPF environment.

Earlier challenges included the BASS System, by Jeff Bass (a DOS run-alike in the 1980s), and a dataset reader/converter, DBMSCopy. The latter eventually included a program interpreter as well, I believe.

My recollection is that DBMS/Copy's developer and SAS came to a mutual understanding.

SAS's key asset is control over utility and access to a decades-old legacy of programs and data at enterprise and government sites, though it's lost ground to Python and R in tech and most especially academia.

https://decisionstats.com/2009/08/28/software-history-bass-i...

http://dss.princeton.edu/online_help/stats_packages/dbmscopy...
Yes. Some inspector who was trying to get a sample of Diesel fuel from a distributor to test for sulfur and such was told "you have the obligation to do that, but not the authority."

Here are the rules for Diesel fuel in China.[1] The official standard for sulfur has been been slowly lowered from 0.2% to 10 ppm, but enforcement is weak. There's a weaker standard for "nonroad Diesel" for tractors and such. It's observed that at night, when the blue trucks roll into Shenzhen, the pollution level goes way up, because they're using "nonroad Diesel".

The US is now <15ppm sulfur for all Diesel uses except ships. It took 25 years to get there. The EPA is (was?) trying to get ships down to 1000ppm within 200 miles of the US.

It's not that hard to enforce this, because there aren't that many refineries. China has only 75 refineries. The US has about 125. Not that many places need to be inspected.

[1] https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/cn/fuel.php
I don't think the average person would understand those distinctions off-hand.

The features of 'basic care' that I think everyone should have:

* Everyone has it
* It's only paid for by taxes
* There are still systems in place for keeping costs low.
* MOST doctors in the area should be options for care, assuming they're open.
* /bad/ doctors (those who don't produce good results) shouldn't get to stay doctors.
* The malpractice part of the equation is covered by a combination of
* * social disability (care for the victim) and
* * criminal justice (doctor is guilty of malpractice).

For cost controls:

* Government care/doctors (military docs) should be possible.
* Mass bulk procurement / manufacture of basic supplies.
* No more billing, lawyers fighting for/against costs, etc.
* Some kind of auction bid for the services of doctors performing classes of common work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

I thought this was called a Dutch Auction, but it seems that what I'm thinking of is some kind of combination of second-price and other types of auction. In this case the buyer of services (the government) wants to buy a projection of X units within a given geographic region and wants the option of exceeding that by a factor of Y.

X units would set the minimum cost paid out (doctors would be paid for the minimum work they're expected to do irrespective of need), but more work might be required. Disaster rates would be a third category of bid.

The way that the cost for a procedure would be set would look something like this.

* Geographic regions are defined.
* Doctors/Clinics within all regions report their current and potential capacity
* *as well as the rate they would prefer to charge for known services.
* Expected rates of need for regions are calculated.

Based on the above three points, the least expensive but still qualified bids are the winners, with the most expensive winning offer setting the price rates for that region, which all winners receive.

If there is major discrepancy in price between areas, investigation of collusion and/or re-locating those who can to other areas for some procedures could be determined.
It's funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean - would you hire a marketing person based on their 'side projects' or a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? Likewise, who on earth asks a building contractor if they have any side projects? You would ask for references or find a contractor via someone you know. What about recruiters themselves? How does one judge if a person is going to be good recruiter or not? What about sales guys? Does anyone ask them - do you sell stuff on the side - Y'know maybe you just do door-to-door selling as a hobby. Or what about other engineering disciplines? Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer about their side projects?
I'd like to see the search in Inbox improved, and get hangouts history. Beyond that I'm pretty happy with it.
Is there any evidence that stem cell therapy can eliminate old prejudices?
If I'm reading it right, is he saying he is not a "sexual harasser" as opposed to just a simple "sexual assaulter"!?

He should have taken his lawyers advice.
Pretty hilarious. I've found Tupac to work the best, e.g. (my starting text in quotes):

"I was reading Hacker News when" he gladed out
Somebody excuse I went down today
I wonder if I give a fuck, when I creep

For some reason Donald Trump always seems to produce garbage...
That's new to me that it has to be in a work environment. What about parties, clubs, outdoors anywhere?
I suppose you could have said similar things about Microsoft in the mid-90s when they would vapor-launch a product to wipe out a threat or soften up a buyout.
Introducing the Uber Visa Card
Software HIStory: Bass Institute (2009)
It seems like it's meant to be easy to embed in another language's code. Like embedding LUA into a C game engine to provide a convenient way to build higher-level game logic on top of the engine.
I think the assumption there was more that, for the purposes of that sentence, all employees are workers. Managers are just employees that are assigned to manage people.
Unfortunately yes. The implementation is straight forward though:

template <typename Container>
std::size_t size(Container const& c) { return c.size(); }

template <typename T, std::size_t K>
std::size_t size(T (&)[K]) { return K; }
With the massive amount of prostitution in Silicon Valley I am constantly shocked that people of prominence have such little self control that they seek extra-marital affairs in such obviously stupid places. The behavior he describes here sounds less like harassment and more like chronic self destruction and purposeful career suicide. Hell, writing this article at all is self flagellation. Baffling.
I wonder if that momentum will last when Apple Pay Cash rolls out next month - why install a third party app to send money to friends when you can do it via iMessage?
Hah. That’s a good example.

Even that’s overkill. Even if someone sheathed their exterior walls in plywood, structural sheathing runs 5/16 - 1/2”, and seams are between studs. It’s for resisting shear stresses on the house and/or insulation. In terms of orthogonal force, it’s a far cry from requiring a saw to get in.