skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Applies to most of the biggies: Since i am a behemoth of tech, give me all your personal info and surrender yourself. I will tell you what you should see, eat, buy, think & whom you should be-friend! In return your everyday personal data is my asset, my asset only! Its up to me how i use your personal data. NO QUESTION SHOULD BE ASKED! Remember you have signed the agreement (Privacy Policy)!
Are they creating separate cluster for each aws account, how the isolation is happening
Introducing AWS Systems Manager
While I enjoy advent of code I always have been happy to live on the west coast. I wonder how many people on the east coast don't participate because they'd have to stay up til midnight if they want to score.
If you are referring to the image at the top of the article, I'm afraid it is not. It is a reference to the origin of the name for "Mechanical Turk" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
AoC is lots of fun. There's an active community on http://reddit.com/r/adventofcode where people share tips and help each other out.

I highly recommend participating. AoC is designed as a speed coding competition, but if you aren't playing for the speed points, it's a fun way to learn a new programming language.
How often do you drive more than 300 miles in a day? If it’s more than once or twice a month and you can’t spare the time at a supercharger, an EV might not be fit for you. Otherwise, it satisfies the daily driving needs of most people in the US (based on DOE/DOT commute data).
Yes, I read the comment. It said:

> I believe the other prizes largely serve a similar purpose these days too, just think of that Obama peace prize.

It was referring to the other Nobel prizes explicitly in that statement, and it was to that point that I was retorting.
Only use these statistics as a guideline, and negotiate the hell out of your compensation, even at a startup. You would be shocked at how much leeway companies have in compensation if they need your skill set. I've worked at preeminent silicon valley companies, middle of the road ones, and startups (been doing this way too long I guess). I've managed to sign for almost 50% over their initial offer a couple of times. The hardest place to negotiate turned out to be the mid-size companies which aren't floating in money like Google, or aren't pissing away money like a startup.

When they ask, "how much are you currently making", just politely say that you would rather not go down that route, and please make me an offer you feel is fair for my skill set, and start from there. Hiring managers and departments do this a lot, and know all the numbers, and you, who change jobs infrequently don't have up to date info. What's shocking is how fast silicon valley salaries are increasing.

When I started this software engineering gig in the mid 1990's, a great offer for a fresh grad out of school was $45,000. Inflation adjusted, that's around $75,000 today. When my small company hires today, I get the special joy of making counter-offers against Facebook and Google, these two companies are simply nuts. Recently lost a fresh grad from a first tier CS school to an offer of $150k annual with $100k starting bonus from Facebook, not to mention RSU. Effectively $350k for the first year for a student with a bachelor of science. It's nuts. This guy was really good, but more realistic offers only lack that starting bonus.
"Whether a car is being controlled by computer or human being shouldn't matter at all."

"A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside."

Again, where is this software that enables the pre-programmed taxi to "act exactly the same"?

I assume you are making an actual argument, not "it can drive in a line and stop at a stop sign".
ok, but gold sometimes is worth X and sometimes X/2, if you actually plot the chart of gold. Gold is not exactly a great investment
> Humans are good st certain kinds of computational problems like approximate Traveling Salesman

Are humans any better at it than computers? I wouldn't think that humans have a good enough heuristic that the extra 1000x processing speed isn't more of an advantage.
I think directly emulating the current understanding of biological systems isn’t necessarily the best way. It’s a losing proposition to emulate hardware with other hardware that’s fundamentally different from the original. I think the better way would be emulating what we understand of the ‘software’: memory, concepts, language/communication, etc.

(I say that all with great humility. This is by no means a field I can speak about with authority.
I had lots of fun with AoC in 2015 and 2016. Here are my (Go) solutions: https://github.com/lukechampine/advent

There is also a subreddit (/r/adventofcode) if you get stuck and/or need inspiration. Some really creative solutions there.

Best of luck to everyone this year. See you on the scoreboard! :)
If you go looking for the Snapchat S-1 SEC filing, it essentially has a user guide for the app inside. (So that potential investors could figure out what the hell it was all about.)
You do you.. but why wait on the benchmarks? its the only thing I care about when I look at this.. I'm willing to forgo semantics if its absurdly fast
I had been born in Bahrain in the GCC or Middle East region and had stayed in Dubai for a period of time.

I was also an expat which meant no citizenship no matter how long I stayed (because thats how the middle east works) and almost all expats end up going home or to another country in North America or Europe.

One thing I noticed in Dubai is how it sort of represented an extreme outlook of how oil has affected the Middle East where it was both a boomtown full of money-crazed foreigners paying no taxes and also feudal nobility/sheikhs who rode their horses, practiced swordfighting/hunting and had huge estates while also being very fundamentalistically religious.

In my mind, the GCC or Gulf region reminds me heavily of pre-renaissance Italy where people were making huge amounts of money from trade, etc while also experimenting with new ideas. Albeit with the pope and all his religious police on the side doing their persecuting just like modern muslim institutions. Also the Arabs are more obsessed with money than humanity, art and science than the Italians.
It could be fun if each puzzle were unlocked after 23h (or 25h). I.e. the start time shifts everyday by 1h to make it "fair" no matter what timezone you live in.
Ford China and Anhui Zotye reveal investment, government investigates overcapacity
The assumption "very smart people" is the reason for the fascinating disparity. IMHO a better assumption would be "well trained, well established, well rehearsed, highly skilled". Tesla was "very smart people", these are not.

...if they could just provide novel or sophisticated arguments, rather than angry & seemingly frustrated opinions - I might feel they were "smart"

Decentralisation is going to change damn near everything. Yes, it's the printing press, electricity, the plane, the transistor, the internet.
Not if it’s transacted over a secondary market or exchange. People don’t understand this.

For example, if you transact BTC directly over the network, yea it’ll be expensive. Like 5-8%. But if I transact through an exchange, it’s more like .25-.5%. And it’s instantaneous. They’re a clearinghouse that batches transactions periodically.

Seems there’s a lot of misunderstanding about money in general, including crypto. I for one am glad awareness is raising. As I truly believe money/finance/capital is an extreme, if not the greatest, form of control.
Xlearn achieves nearly 1000 stars on GitHub in one week
> Management probably is rightly worried about tracking and estimating

The real question is why are they worried about tracking and estimating?

From there you can work out the granularity required.

Unfortunately often when management shows interest in sprint level details it is because they don’t trust the team and tracking the numbers helps them feel in control.

> If I were a manager, I'd try to minimize "unknowns" and "challenges"

A senior dev should be looking across the project and trying to minimize unknowns and challenges. Then it aggregates up the chain.

Scrum does have an unfortunate tendency of removing responsibility for the bigger picture from developers.
Curious, how do you meet HIPAA compliance when dealing with PII? And don't tell me you don't have enough PII to be an issue. Think Social engineering.
Exchanges like Coinbase or Gemini are a less liquid example of this.
Am super curious to see some benches on AWS Nitro compared with GCP's Skylake VMs.
Amazon S3 Select
Wow, just 10km faster significantly increases fatality rates. That's crazy.

Edit: oh it's for pedestrians, not drivers.
The perfect excuse I was looking for to finally start digging into Elixir. ;)
Amazon S3 Select is designed to help analyze and process data within an object in Amazon S3 buckets, faster and cheaper. It works by providing the ability to retrieve a subset of data from an object in Amazon S3 using simple SQL expressions. Your applications no longer have to use compute resources to scan and filter the data from an object, potentially increasing query performance by up to 400%, and reducing query costs as much as 80%. You simply change your application to use SELECT instead of GET to take advantage of S3 Select. During Preview, S3 Select is accessible via API only, and is available in the AWS US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. S3 Console and command line interface (CLI) are not available during Preview.
> idealists

> hard fork because people didn't want to honor smart contract

Does not compute.
> supposed to enable visibility and transparency

Which is the last thing you want to do if you have people above you in the org chart who love to micromanage.
One of these things is not like the other!
Your joking right? I'm sure Equifax used that one too. NDAs in 2017 is like toilet paper. How do you trust one of your employees won't go rogue? If you deal with a healthcare company in the US you need to provide a BAA and comply with HIPAA. So how do you handle that?
I want to reach that milestone by 35 ideally.

I expect to get lucky somewhere along the way. My basic plan is to work hard and work with people who are the best in the industry whether at a startup or at a top large company. If I do that for 15-20 years, I don't see why I don't have a high chance of being rewarded in the technology industry (again, assuming a bit of luck along in the journey). My personal "number" is at least $2.5m in assets with at least half of it in fairly liquid financial vehicles. I think I can reasonably achieve that with my strategy. A number closer to $3.5-5m would make me super, super proud if I could ever achieve that kind of success.

I try to work out everyday to stay healthy and fit. I try not to make dumb purchases or spend too extravagantly - but that doesn't mean I don't spend big every now and then. I try to pace myself in my work (no working on weekends, for example). I try to recognize burnout early and take steps to prevent it. I try to learn as much about finance and investing as possible. I try to make the more risky but smart bets over more conservative options when possible. I try to take pride in my work and not get cynical (not easy). These are some of the things that help me take a long term view of my career and keep my relatively aggressive goal in sight.

But even with all that being said, life is short so I know that the goal isn't an end in and of itself. Who knows what'll happen along the way - I could get hit by a train tomorrow. That's why I still try to appreciate each day for what it is.

Notice I used "try" a lot. I don't always succeed, but I'm always trying :)
1 million “neurons” that communicate via 256 million “synapses.”

Human brain = an estimated 100 billion neurons for over 100 trillion synapses according to Wikipedia

So a 5 orders of magnitude difference for neuron count, but only 1 small order of magnitude for average synapse per neuron (1 for 256 in former, 1 for 1000 in latter)

I wish scientific news were better at framing the numbers they quote from press release.

It’s interesting to keep track of these sort of numbers, because while we clearly won’t have a chip that can do things remotely near what a human brain can when the numbers are at parity, at least it’ll help focus people more on exploring changes in architecture, rather than throwing more and more computational units at the problem.
You mean it's more complex than not having the foresight to get a permit? You don't say... So much reductionist criticism of these companies whenever these issues come up on HN and elsewhere.

The issues are far more complicated. These companies, including AirBnB et al, are not simply pushing the idea that "all regulations are bad" or "we're above regulations". It's about pushing back in an effort for better regulations appropriate for a modern industry. Typically they are designed for a previous era or inefficiently pigeonholed onto entirely new concepts.
Verizon will launch 5G home internet access in 2018
Security update now available: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208315
Will it fix their declining user base though?
No, it's all of us, nobody's a saint, we all need reminders.
News Outlet for new technologies
Are there any news websites which show the most recent developments in technology. Websites telling us about the cutting edge development in the field of Technology that could potentially be revolutionary idea or a game changer.
I designed and implemented quite lot of the LocalKDC mechanism - um, roughly about 11-12 years ago now I think. At the time it was based on the MIT version of Kerberos. When Apple switched to using Heimdal, the LocalKDC implementation was updated and it has been maintained since then - I am no longer the maintainer of this software. I haven't cashed out.

As to why the LocalKDC exists? How can you do secure peer-to-peer authentication without relying on some sort of global (and broken) or private PKI infrastructure? SRP wasn't an option at the time.

I am sorry you are upset. Apple is really, really serious about protecting customer data. I encourage the reading of the Apple iOS Security Guide - it describes hardware and software techniques used to protect your data. There is also the 2016 Blackhat presentation by Ivan Krstic that gives more insight into the Secure Enclave.
Slightly tangential, but important note for management. Every piece of work can be either proactive or reactive. Proactive stuff is planned and possibly scheduled. Reactive stuff is, well, reaction to client call. Note that client call can spawn another reactive task to fix something. If client issue can be converted to proactive task - good, you can put it to backlog and plan. Reactive tasks naturally have higher priority than any proactive task (either contractual SLA, policy to always pick up phone, etc.).

Proactive tasks have interesting impact on hour consumption. Lets say client call takes 1 hour to complete. Unless client calls are uniformly distributed over the day, there is nontrivial probability of calls to happening with intervals lower than 1 hour. In order to complete each proactive task 1,5 hour after the call was placed with decent probability, operator can accept something like 3 calls a day (~40-50% load on reactive operator is considered critically high, higher loads inevitably lead to periods with significantly higher reactive load than operator can handle). That is 3-4 hours of work in an 8 hour day. If reactive workloads are intermixed with proactive loads, interruptions caused by reactive tasks significantly prolong time taken to complete proactive tasks.

> there were days where I would plan to do about 5 or 6 bug fixes, but I would get a slew of phone calls <...> and would have to move other plans.

Evidence based scheduling [1] is a good strategy to avoid moving plans. Even if you do not have fixed phone support hours, you can still try to average hours spent on phone support. If your average week involves 20 hours of phone support, then planning for anything more than 15 hours of proactive work is too optimistic, considering 40 hour week. Once you mix proactive and reactive tasks, your planning periods must be longer - roughly periods where reactive loads average smoothly, probably nothing shorter than a week.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
Got a cite for rackspace reselling aws resources?
This is certainly a good move. The Facebook SDK for example is widely used by many apps for Facebook ad performance tracking and analytics and that's something he public should be aware of.

See https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/libraries-used-in-th... for example
I've been working my way up to a similar idea - modelling card games better: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas/blob/master/card-game-mode....

While yours is very react/UI focused, this is still very helpful.
I am very sorry to see from Google that the Smith Stained Glass Museum at Navy Pier closed in 2014. Not many people seemed to know it was there, but I always went out of my way to visit it when I was in Chicago.
Expensify was founded in 2008. A decade of deception.
We built our own accounting/invoicing/expenses/time tracking and projects tool. As it became more robust we started offering it as a service to our consulting clients. Feedback was positive, so eventually, we wrapped it into a fully fledged SaaS product (link in profile if anyone wants to check it out).
I would assume the name is just a reference to Tom.
That's the problem, though: the idea behind a neuromorphic system is that it works like the brain, but what these "neuromorphic" chips do relies on an extremely vague relationship between a type of computing we know how to do (parallel processing), and what the brain actually does. Furthermore, I think that the type of deep learning that actually works well (like recurrent neural nets) relies more on these aspects of the brain (synchronized and oscillatory activity) than a lot of engineers working in the field realize as they chase after other concepts of how neurons might work. I feel like there's a lot of breakthroughs that could be made in the field of neuromorphic computing (and honestly in our understanding of how the brain works) if there were simply more people who were equally well-trained enough in neuroscience and computing to see the deeper relationships. As it is, I feel like the majority of experts that have deep knowledge in one of these fields are hampered by a superficial understanding of what's going on in the other. We're really only scratching the surface of how we could design a system that approximates what the brain does.
Show HN: The Sandwich Alignment
Hi there! Support manager here. I've been leading support teams for years, led support QA teams, built troubleshooting processes and worked very closely with dev teams. A lot of what I wanted to bring up doesn't apply so much to solo dev's, but I want to vouch for non-devs and anyone that might start working on team.

Support brains and developer brains are actually not that different. I see on HN way too often that developers need space and time to think, but other types of people don't. This is myth that needs to be dispelled and everyone should contribute to uphold boundaries that work for everyone.

Trust that absolutely I want you to have 'flow' time - it's important that you both be and feel productive. Good code from you is good code for me and for the user.

What breaks flow is context switching, which is literally baked into the job description for your average support role. Agents often need to answer questions about multiple/complex products, and who knows if they have access to high quality documentation or internal tools.

When something breaks for a customer, agents need to find creative solutions or escalate the issue up do the dev teams. You bet that if there's another call waiting or 20 more emails in the queue, they're not spending a lot of quality time on getting things done right. The bug they submit won't be thorough, and developers won't want to touch those bugs. The workaround they give won't be well explained, and the user won't know how to manage once the call is over. These things wouldn't happen if agents had their 'flow' time too.

I would love to give customers all the time they deserve, but obviously there are limitations to how many agents you can hire to make that happen. When a customer team gets burnout from high support volume, it's rarely the volume alone that makes agents hurt. It's the volume AND context switching. 50 phone calls about different things will leave you a zombie by the end of the day.

It's totally OK that a support person's time is variable like this, but it's dangerous when the pairing developers time is untouchable. Pro tip: make ground rules for what developers might be "on-call" or have office hours, have rotating schedules for which developers need to help support teams, have dedicated places where agents can escalate engineering tasks without physically bothering someone.

Of course, there are so many factors that effect this: how many engineers and support people there are, what kind of issues need to be worked on, what are the priorities for support hours or shipping new code.

At the end of the day, just know that we're all people on one team (albeit with very different daily responsibilities). Respect each other's time and needs, and the rest will fall into place.
I remember a Myers-Briggs-ish consultant taking 40 devs in a room and putting all the INTP/J types on one side and the 3 or 4 of us in the middle or other side and the hanging jaws when he pointed to us and said "Those people are all your CUSTOMERS!"
Ethereum community is so cool, I envy you can join it with full time:)
A 7 hour work day was standard?
a constraint solver, they're used heavily in CAD as well
Expecting a 2010 Mac to work with 2017 software (which I infer from your bothering to post here) seems a bit of a stretch. And all hard drives were slow back then. Any variance between models then is lost in the noise when comparing against SSDs, which were not generally available in 2010.

But it should definitely refrain from bricking the machine... that’s a bummer.