skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being a grad student, this person is at a perfect place to build up their math background. Any school almost certainly offers the following:

1. Convex Optimization -- not all problems are convex, but solutions for nonconvex problems end up primarily using convex methods with slight adaptations.

2. Stochastic Optimization -- ML is pretty much all stochastic optimization. No surprise there.

3. Statistical/Theoretical Machine Learning -- courses built around concentration bounds, PAC learnability, and the Valiant/Vapnik school of thought. This gives you what you need to talk about generalizability and sample complexity.

4. Numerical Linear Algebra -- being smart about linear algebra is most of efficient machine learning. Knowing which kinds of factorizations help you solve problems efficiently. Can you do a Gram-Schmidt factorization? Cholesky decomposition? LU factorization? When do these things fail? When do you benefit from sparse representations?

5. Graphical Models -- Markov chains, Markov fields, causal relationships, HMMs, factor graphs, forward-backward algorithm, sum-product algorithms.

If you're in school, take advantage of the fact that you're in school.

Once you have a grasp on these things (and you'll have to catch up on real analysis, matrix calculus, and a few other fields of math), you'll be able to start reasoning about ways to improve existing methods or come up with your own. I think a lot of it is just developing mathematical maturity to give you a vocabulary to think about things with.
SVG was a mistake, but we're stuck with it.

Does SVG offer any advantages over, say, EMF/WMF? I know a strong advantage of WMF is that the file format translates 1:1 into GDI calls, which makes it very fast - but I don't see EMF files rendered with anti-aliasing or complex gradients. What about PDF or PostScript?
errm - well I think that the folks at AstraZeneca and GSK may not think so...
Everybody solves that by having multiple threads (either at the OS or runtime level), so you can run in parallel the stuff that don't conflict with each other.
I would not take excuses like this for rejecting a candidate, especially a highly qualified/skilled candidate, at face value. Despite the pervasive rhetoric about wanting the "best" or hiring only the "best," both individual interviewers and companies as a whole are often afraid of hiring candidates who know more or are more skilled than themselves. The unstated fears include that the candidate will, if hired, outshine colleagues, his or her boss, or even, in some cases, the founder or CEO of the company -- especially in the case of startups where venture capitalists or other investors could be impressed by the new hire.

Since it is usually not acceptable to reject an applicant for this reason, some pretext will be generated. One way is to focus in on some area where the candidate is weak or different such as using a different software tool. Another way is to use trick questions or problems.

This is an article on how this was allegedly done in academia in the Soviet Union:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556.pdf
WebAssembly explodes client-side programming
With all this talk of publication output, I'd like to see some examples of good research coming out of mainland Chinese universities.

In my field (programming languages), I can name one total paper that I liked that came from a mainland Chinese university. It stood out for that reason. A friend in another field (CS theory) complained similarly: massive amounts of shoddy work comes out of China, but nothing worth reading.

Meanwhile, China now has a spam journal called "Nature and Science," so you can tell your friends "I have 5 papers in Nature and Science."
Upon further thought, Amazon could even offer this service. Perhaps even as a way to earn goodwill.
I'd argue the reverse is the case. Between someone like Jeff Bezos and someone working at McDonalds, without disrespecting the latter as there's nothing wrong with it, is not luck but education, aptitude and so forth.

But I have trouble seeing the substantial difference between Jeff Bezos and one of his dozens of colleagues at his former job. Many people tried to open online businesses like this, and often it came down to very specific moments in time where the circumstances, the money, the people applying to your company specifically and so on all checked out. And there's really no or very little control you have about this.
https://www.cromulentlabs.com/notcho/
Coincidentally, I'm sick of it being assumed I'm racist simply because I'm white.
Studied in Boston and loved coming back to Norway, no more phone spam!
Log on to a central governmental service, with your 2-auth, opt out your phone-number and mail-address (the paper one) and then you don’t get more spam after 2-3weeks. It takes some time for everyone to update.
Why are are there not something similar in the US?
I get that things just happen sometimes, but, wow, does this sound like a red flag against working there to me.
It wasn't luck. But his stories mirrors thousands of failures, making any advice/insight useless.
There’s a massive pay disparity between public and private, and those currently in power want to keep it that way and eat away even more at gov functions. That combined without a clear rallying call for public service (like the Cold War or collective pride) are a recipe for disaster.
In the future, if you’re in the states, make sure you file a complaint with your state’s labor board when this happens. It costs you nothing, and the abusive behavior becomes public record.
I think changes over time in device should be like any other unobserved variable like age or country or gender which might affect traffic: averaged out by randomization. The point of randomization is that on average, the two groups will be balanced. (If the intervention itself changes the mix and the changed mix then yields more traffic, then that changes what one might speculate about how it works but the simple result of ads->less-traffic is still true.)
I hear second hand from friends - tales of people buying houses in Texas (it's so cheap for so much!) then bailing after a couple of years because of the property tax burden. Even people in medicine overestimate what they can afford in property tax.
There's not a good answer for that. Given hindsight and the knowledge that releasing them contributed directly to the election of Trump, yes, I'd say that I'd rather that they had not been released. If the opposing candidate had been a sane Republican the calculus might be a little different.

However, I think its self-deception of the highest order if you think either Wikileaks or the supplier of the Clinton emails is not also sitting on a great deal of incriminating evidence from the Trump campaign and/or the RNC.
I think the common problem with people selecting poor patterns for a given context, is they don't pay attention to the context. It's more 'I got this pattern, lets use it' rather than 'I have a whole toolkit, and I can identify exactly where each one need to be used'. It's such a problem I even came up with a term to define that specific anti-pattern, 'MissingContext'.
You need to know a little more about Texas schools first.

1. They're independent, which means that they have their own taxing authority. Citizens in the ISD (Independent School District) get a bill yearly to pay the tax. So if you buy land here, you need to know what school, emergency services, water, etc. district you'll be in to get an idea of what your taxes will be (commonly in the 2-3% of your property value every year).

2. Because many ISDs are in low-population areas, or areas with low-value land (since the taxes are based on property values), ISDs in wealthy areas have what is called recapture. Which means that funds are taken from them and redistributed to the rest of the state. So people owning property in Austin, Houston, Dallas, etc. are funding schools in the rest of the state.

3. The tea party influence (deep conservatives) in the legislature is real. They do support better schools - only they support some subjects more than others. And some not at all.. But they only meet every 2 years so their influence is limited on the ISDs.
I don't think that's an accurate description of what's actually been happening in Japan. They have literally paved over ecologically sensitive sites and built bridges to nowhere in a misguided, counterproductive attempt to stimulate economic growth. For details see "Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan" by Alex Kerr.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809039432
Launch new features at the click of a button
Welcome to medieval times (Jim Carrey; Cable Guy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdPu6sQ9l4g

https://youtu.be/TdPu6sQ9l4g?t=1m31s
Wait, they use perl?
The link to the main github page, for the curious: https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp

Is SWI-Prolog really faster than CLisp? I had no idea. Prolog seems like a language that would be pretty slow by default, but maybe you can do some pretty novel optimizations
i'd guess you can emulate a PPC (for non-memory intensive tasks) on a modern x86 faster and with less power than running a PPC natively. I might be completely off. and with parallelization and containers fad, which benefit a lot from memory and context changes, they would have more luck funding servers for VM farms than laptops.
`coupled with strong racist immigration policies towards asian in USA ` - Elaborate, please. I was looking at GRE scores the other day out of curiosity (white American) and they have it broken down by country and China, for example, does a lot better than Saudi Arabia. Netherlands does a lot better in reading, than say, Pakistan. Some countries might just have better candidates?
> No politics here (though I’m sure if you squint you can find a way to accuse me of racism or sexism or something)

I am incredibly skeptical of anyone who starts an article like this - comes across like a teenager trying to be edgy.

As for the article itself, I find it incredibly odd how worked up people get over this stuff. The vitriol of the article is quite frustrating to get over even though the analysis and breakdown is accurate.
Take it further. As a byproduct of chasing AGI we discover there is no soul and that we're just organic (inneficient) robots with previously incalculable inputs.

Great news, we can hack oursleves, augment ourselves, you name it. However, meaning eludes us. No one cares, carbon or silicon based. The end.
Plus then you couldn't use it for </>/== at the same time like you'd want to and relative meanings for different types would be inconsistent. I think this idea is a nonstarter.
Hmmm mmm mmm, that sounds like the kind of software that comes in 200% late, at 300% of original budget actually - and that no one actually thinks is quality except the management, and then only during the honeymoon phase ..
I am not arguing against natural units. I use them daily, and they are more than just practically useful. I am critiquing bad explanations for their interpretation and justification.
The make it up in the stock market, in large part due to having those divisions.
Interview with Devine Lu Linvega, Creator of Rotonde Using Dat on Beaker Browser
Understanding the root cause of account takeover
As an amateur who has jumped in and out of learning basic ML over the years, it has been interesting to see the web of terminology expand to the point where your post is no longer satire. Writing a dictionary or annotating papers to decipher ML-speak to basic-math speak would be a pretty worthwhile endeavor for someone (I see glimmers of this in the work being done by the folks at fast.ai) and in general would probably not remove much real information.
Apologies, this kind of became a novella.

>Yeap. I was the most productive in the room and it was becoming a problem. Others simply couldn't keep up and it was slowing us down on the long run rather than making it go faster and better.

It was a problem for me too, but in a different way. I feel like I was resented by my teammates for being a shooting star. I was younger then so there's a strong possibility I was hot-dogging it a bit unintentionally. I was definitely getting first pick at all the coolest projects, which of course I enjoyed.

I'm not entirely confident that more is being accomplished now that I'm a rising tide. Statistically I think there's some evidence that isn't the case. For example, there's Price's Law which states that half the productivity is completed by the square root of the people in the domain. The following is really rough math just to put some plausible numbers on it... So if there's 9 people on the team, I was one of the 3 people doing half the work, and the other 6 did the other half of the work. That means I was individually accomplishing 16.6% of the work, and the 6 were each accomplishing 8%. If by being a rising tide my individual productivity is cut in half, then the other 6 people have to improve their individual productivity by nearly 3% of the total work, or 35% over what they were doing before. I have no confidence that the other people have improved their productivity by 35%. If I could reliably improve worker productivity by 35%+ I'd be a lot wealthier. However, I do believe people enjoy working with me more, and consequently I have a better experience at work.
No. Numbers have to be uniformly distributed in order to be random, since Randomness is the lack of pattern or predictability in events[1].

You can randomly sample from any distribution, but as long as you do it from a non-uniform distribution, you can start predicting the pattern (e.g. if you are sampling from a gaussian, you can start predicting median value)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness
It's in the podcast at the bottom of the page.
>Am I mistaken in thinking that if you're an owner or executive of a company that employees in the vicinity of half a million people, the specifics of how lower management operates is legitimately not your business?

Yes (you are).
I believe I met the designer of this vessel 2 months ago. They have some very ambitious goals. Lots of companies are trying to figure out how to provide solutions to the owners demand.
They haven’t really been inflating their way out of their debt problems. It’s more like lending money out, which almost immediately goes into inflated asset bubbles anyways. If you aren’t buying a house, you wouldn’t even notice.

Ya, there will be a bunch of losers when things go south, but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be. Ya, it will be bad, but totally recoverable as most of what is lost was never really gained in the first place.

Xi isn’t really a dictator yet, he is the most powerful leader since Jiang Zemin, which is saying he is just stronger than Hu jintao. People forget that this isn’t much of a change, that the Hu era was just an exception.
OP here

Actually, I had drafted "Horror story 4: Candidate was rejected because he was better than the interviewer" but I thought it is too complex to be included. I might write a whole blog post about it. Thanks so much for linking to the paper.
> China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get everyone a refrigerator

Not sure if you meant that literally but I've been to some pretty poor places in China and they do have refrigerators...
Proves that no computer network can be secured, and is specially interesting given that the entire US military is moving to operate as a giant computer network where everyone is a node in the system.

They're setting themselves up for a hack so devastating that it will bring down their own country.
One fundamental question, whose answer I must have missed:

What's the incentive to process transactions?
(2003) please
> To assist with performance analysis leading up Firefox 57, in Nightly only we are turning off add-ons that require shims.

This was for pre-57 and doesn't apply to 57+.
The issue was not the "milli/micro error", but the seemingly completely reckless lack of disregard for the accuracy of your personal conclusion, which you were presenting without any doubt whatsoever as a fact. I'm normally pretty forgiving of mistakes, at least when it comes to silly mathematical errors or typos. I'm also pretty forgiving of wildly wrong ideas when there the speaker conveys a fair uncertainty along with the idea. What I'm not going to brush off as a silly error is the sheer overconfidence in and propagation of wildly wrong information that could've been corrected with only 1-2 seconds of common sense or with any remote attempt at a citation.

If it had been a typo or just an arithmetic error, I wouldn't have cared (or even noticed). But you also completely confidently declared that the problem had been identified to be c and that the boundary for VR is "city limits". It means that either [1] you have never had a real-time conversation with anyone much farther away to help you sanity-check this result (in which case it's an innocent mistake, and like I said, it's a good excuse to also go out and see the world), or (or possibly "and") that [2] you did not even care to try to think about this topic for 2 seconds before writing about it -- not when you first heard about it wherever you did, nor when you wrote about it here to teach it to other.

Whatever the larger issue, the silly math error is 100% beside the point... you could've written light-years for all anyone cared, and forgotten about it the day after. However, the underlying issue is not the kind of problem to forget about the next day. Lots of alarm bells should be going off in your mind that you need to actively do something to correct whatever the root problem is (which I was trying to help you identify), because otherwise you'll keep actively making the world (and HN) a worse place with this kind of misinformation, and that is something I'm tacitly assuming you don't want to do.

So: please, please, please ensure put 1-2 seconds of thought into sanity checking whatever you write in the future -- especially it's too painful to at least qualify what you write with an "I think" so that readers realize you're deriving your own conclusion and not propagating an established fact. We have enough problems in this world with the spread of misinformation that hinges on subtle nuances that we don't also need to put up with problems that should be pretty easy to spot from light-years away.
> 2. Google, for not being able to, "prove a random number is truly random ...

You should have referred to xkcd's getRandomInteger function: https://xkcd.com/221/
> I really hope they just wanted you to argue that the task is impossible.

Pretty dumb fucking thing to ask a front end engineer to do, if you ask me.
Building Your Own Openstack Compute Node
Show HN: Piggy – Automatically get refunds on purchases when prices drop
Actually I think it's sometimes harmful to take the maths too seriously. There are three parts to the ideal paper:

1. Describe a new technique;
2. Show that it works;
3. Explain why it works.

Understanding why things work is easily the hardest thing. This is where the most maths gets deployed...But often people are reaching for the fancier maths when they can't find a simpler intuition behind the idea. You can also use fancier analysis to substitute for less impressive empirical results. These explanations might convince reviewers, but that doesn't make them any more likely to be correct.

I find it effective to take a very "computer's eye view" of things. Instead of thinking primarily about the formalisation, I mostly think about what's being computed. What sort of information is flowing around, during both the prediction and the updates? What dynamics emerge?
The North Korean nucelear+missile programs are a tangible example of how Obama was the right leader. Under Obama these programs spun their wheels without traction for 8 solid years thanks to a huge amount of covert action from our intelligence agencies. Missiles blew up, centrifuges didn't work, etc, and all with little to no loss of American life.

Under Trump they are not taken seriously and they have made significant progress in less than a year, and it's quite probable that military intervention will be necessary before Trump's term is up. It's well-known in the IC and Congress that Trump is a childlike senile fool who has no real grasp of any issue that can't be summarized in 160 characters. Certainly foreign leaders are well aware of it, ask Merkel what she thinks about him, let alone the less scrupulous countries like Saudi Arabia that are openly playing to it.

People don't appreciate how many things were quietly going right under Obama, and now the world's trouble spots are being allowed to fester under Trump. Some career State Department roles are down 60% in less than a year. Putin picked a great leader for his purposes, American leadership in the world has been diminished significantly and the basic machinery of our government is grinding to a halt. A+++ would hack again.

(of course there's no evidence that vote tallies were changed... yet. But the Trump campaign coordinated heavily with Russia and virtually everything short of changing vote tallies has been confirmed, so I just wouldn't be surprised to hear it at this point. There were quite a few "surprise wins" that nobody expected. It's quite likely that it can never be proved either way, thanks to the lack of paper trails and the active purge of some electronic records by state governments.)
Indeed. I'm old enough to remember the panicky statements by US politicians about how the Japanese were going to destroy our auto industry, dominate the next generation of computers, buy up all our real estate, etc. It never happened, and then the Japanese wrecked their own economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)
Yeah, similarly, I am good at my current job but I am scared to death of doing a tech interview.
I agree. Bubble is way too advanced for non-programmers to just “pick up”. I am not a programmer but worked as a product manager for several years and consider myself technically knowledgeable (can copy and paste basic code, I know how an API works, I can write basic scripts, basic html, I understand conceptually things like oauth etc) and I found bubble to be basically incomprehensible. I could probably learn it if I was willing to dedicate some serious hours to it, but for the business I am in (founder of a marketing agency) it’s much cheaper for my to just hire a programmer than to dedicate several weeks/months to learning bubble. I hear it’s great for programmers to speed up their workflow though.
It's interesting to see the complete lack of self-reflection on Jake Williams' part.

“I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut."

This is to how a lot of people felt after the Snowden leaks.

“Every time it happens, you essentially have to start over.”

This goes both ways too. Every time something is compromised by the NSA, we have to start encrypting yet another part of our lives.

“It’s embarrassing that the people responsible for this have not been brought to justice.”

Again, both ways. Why has the NSA not been brought to justice? Closed courts and hiding behind the "national security" argument comes to mind.