skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know correlation != causation, but we're using imprecise language where these mathematical distinctions are mired and muddled. People don't think like statisticians, they think like humans who label things and create biases based on these averages without looking at the individuals. If we build these intricate models for predictions that are statistically minded, are we improving our predictive ability or are we just regurgitating the same flawed biases that we ourselves hold? (When I say flawed, I mean unfair.)

What if blue agents were the victims of institutional racism for hundreds of years? Obviously, their lack of opportunities will have hampered their abilities to earn high credit scores and obtain legitimate forms of income. What then? It's as if were building models that measure agents who exist in two separate contexts predicting which one belongs to the 'socially acceptable' context, aka, which one belongs to the class of agents who were the perpetrators of social injustice for centuries. Is that really what we want to predict? No, we're trying to predict how trustworthy an individual is. This might mean that our standard techniques need reassessment if we're going to build models that affect the lives of future generations.
I’m not th OP, but, still, doesn’t change the fact that his stuff is hard for me to digest.

I don’t care how many stars a chef has. If his food is hard for me to swallow, well, I don’t like his cooking. And that’s okay. I don’t have to eat his food. And I don’t have to read Lovecraft’s works. And I don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate to have an opinion. And you don’t have to listen to my opinion.
After using ddg for a while it feels much easier to find what I need using it than google. Maybe because I am not sandboxed correctly by google. Then again, ddg gives good results without sandboxing.
I also think the stock market is not "investing" but think it's safer to invest.

1. There's more government regulation and less manipulation.

2. New money is constantly flowing in, via 401K's and pensions. Most people aren't even aware they're invested in the stock market.

3. The government cares so much about the stock market doing good. Look at how Trump brags about the booming market. If it goes in a funk, the government will think of ways to prop it back up.

That said, without any of those 3 things, stocks are just as a gamble as bitcoin.

People say "past is not a predictor/indicator of the present", yet they love to say "stocks return 7-8% annually, and you should just invest in an index to enjoy such returns". Why? That's such as a huge assumption that everyone takes for granted.
> once you provide a service, you absolutely are on the hook— both ethically and in the mind of the average consumer— for providing some level of service when it goes wrong.

The moral and legal liability has precise limits. No software application or payment service could be ever expected to prevent any and all criminal activity in relation to it's use. Google is on the hook, but to a more much limited extent than you suggest, namely they need to do their due diligence in providing a safe service, as far as it's reasonably expected, and inform the users as to the limitations of the service and that the other participants are not endorsed or vetted by Google. That is a level of risk and limited liability they can legally offer, because the much riskier anonymous hitchiking is generally legal.

Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze.
Details from the co-founder - https://medium.com/@mhkt/when-your-startup-stops-d275c15ff70...
So maybe, rather than sticking our collective head in the sand and saying "no, it's impossible that black people are more likely to break bail or reoffend", we say "holy crap that's obviously caused by something" and try to address the root cause?

You cannot fix a problem by pretending it doesn't exist.
BULLISH
My friend claimed he couldn't float . And it appeared he couldnt when he tried. But I put my full mask scuba mask on him and magically he could float. My theory is that he was craning his beck when his face got closeish to water, messing with his form
Di-py: Dependency injection in Python
I would agree that it is, although reasonable people can and probably would disagree. The most fundamental monopoly on coercion (and violence) is claimed by parents over their children.
This is one of the upsides to a socio-economically diverse workforce. If all of your employees come from upper-middle class backgrounds, you'll only solve upper-middle class problems.
Just because the title is technically accurate, doesn't mean it's useful. An ideal headline should accurately and succinctly communicate the contents of the page it links to.
We need a new etiquette and I'm not sure our culture can support one right now.

Video: A few seconds, once or twice, is ok.

Photos: No flash photography

Audio: Record the whole show if you want. Isn't that how most Phish music is distributed?

I am fine with artists putting hard limits on their audience. If they believe it will improve their art, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. It might help or hurt them financially, in terms of fanbase, whatever. It's the artist who is taking the risk here, I say let him.

Incidentally, I went to a local symphony concert recently and I got some serious evil-out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye from one of the patrons 3 rows in front of me, wearing a tweed coat. Apparently my hushed comment to my wife annoyed him. And then when the piece was over, right before the moment of applause, he let out a "mmm" like he had just consumed a great piece of chocolate cake or something. Now that was bad manners.
Buying gold to hold and then sell at a higher exchange rate is pure speculation.
Incentive Pay Does Not Work
Total European tech funding was up 52% YoY to €25B across 3,400 deals
chewing tobacco is more common, at least, on the uncles I watch.
They just figured out that cost_to_resolve_complaints < cost_of_lost_customer.

Once you make that leap, and commit (via support permissions / manuals / budget) to making that happen, it's a better experience overall.

Not least because then it frees you as a business to what you should be focusing on. E.g. "We paid out $x million because of damaged packages. What can we do in the warehouse side to fix this?"
How Algorithmic Experiments Harm People Living in Poverty
It's true that RSS is only good for reading. I think that's part of its name, though. If you want an RSS reader that looks as nice as Medium, then other people might also want that same thing! It might be worth a weekend project if you feel strongly enough about it.
In British Columbia, I'm sure the taxi lobby is already lining the pockets of politicians to prevent Waze Carpool from happening.
There is ALWAYS enough work to do; there are always enough projects. Most software companies are constantly failing their customers, including Google.

It's just that nobody WANTS to do that work :-( Usually because, rightly or wrongly, they feel they won't be rewarded for that work. Or because they don't have the expertise to work on it, or the patience to attain it.

Yegge is pointing this out, and I agree with him (although I honestly I didn't find the pitch for his new company to be particularly compelling.)
That is amazing indeed
The article glosses over how the spores could expect to respond during the highly saturated setting phase. It is reasonable to assume they could cause deformations or web-like weak points in new concrete by being too active well before they are intended to be active. I think getting a predictable outcome during setting is probably the challenge.
You would be surprised how much it is relevant in term of speed ....
> One, I don’t know that RECAP’s expenses need to be particularly high. Open source software development often does not entail paying developers anything at all.

It's incredibly hard to run an open source project like this with zero paid developers. I've done it! And others have too, but it's nearly impossible to pull off in the long term and having paid staff with some kind of recurring revenue is almost essential to keeping these kinds of projects alive and growing.

Sure, you can launch that kind of project and run it for a few years, but over time you have customer support queries to deal with, obnoxious bugs that take hours to ferret out, uptime and DevOps challenges that will ultimately otherwise fall under one volunteer who, if unpaid, has a day job and outside commitments and gets sick or bored or run down.

> With the right motivation including public praise, some people may be inclined to donate their skills. Certainly RECAP needs new features and improvements from time to time, but most such improvements should last indefinitely once built, reducing RECAP’s ongoing expenses.

What's the model here for having an organization with zero expenses run this kind of broad-based public good?

It's very easy to underestimate what it takes projects like RECAP to operate, or to think that open source contributions can bring costs close to zero, but the reality is that these projects are very hard to keep running on the cheap, which is why we keep seeing small projects — even when that get a lot of praise and acclaim — shutter.

And relatively speaking, RECAP is an incredibly cheap project already: It's got one full-time staffer, and in 2016 its expenses were under $100,000:

https://free.law/pdf/taxes/2016-990-EZ.pdf

RECAP is still making its data broadly accessible for free, while also trying to find some kind of sustainability model beyond a hope and a prayer. Donations and grants come and go, and while open source contributions can be helpful they can almost never keep a centralized service like this running for the long-term.
Amperity – Seattle, WA – ONSITE and REMOTE – Full-Time
Amperity is a post-series B, machine learning startup, solving the problem of customer data unification at scale.

We are hiring experienced engineers to write Clojure (and ClojureScript for the front end inclined) in Seattle, WA. Remote is an option as well for the right candidate.

The types of problems we are solving include:
- Ingesting and cleaning large amounts of data daily and blending it with real-time events
- Automatically stitching data together across disparate systems by training machine-learning models to build a probabilistic knowledge graph
- Taking research algorithms and productionizing them for high-scale usage
- Allowing users to perform complex, real-time queries across an aggregated view of their data
- Publishing query result data to a diverse set of systems for client usage

The technologies we use include:
- Clojure/Clojurescript
- Aurora/Mesos
- Accumulo/Hadoop
- Spark
- Kafka
- SaltStack/Terraform
- Riemann/InfluxDB/Grafana

If interested in learning more, feel free to check out our open positions at amperity.com/careers or email me directly at sami@amperity.com.
There were concerts before mobile phones and the wide majority of people survived them.
I’m using web access and it’s great- they just haven’t fully rolled it out yet I suppose.
5 TED Talks to Watch If You Want Your Work to Make You Happier
I'd rather not assume malice when incompetence is a sufficient explanation.
For me, I get motion sick if I'm not driving, so I'm really excited about this. I'll be able to use the toll HOV lanes.
So I called the helpline. Tips are submittable. Hilarious.
Good luck getting your current manager to agree to this ! Are there any organisations that allow this ?

I mean in theory Google's 20% time allows for this, but all traces of that (like the calendar and gmail labs) have systematically vanished from their products. And that happened years ago, it's not like that was yesterday.
This is great! Exactly what I was looking for to learn Flexbox
They seem to have disabled the video.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ob4hS6ymCJZOVA_F7KTvMcFJc5z...
I think it takes a serious amount of motivation to shift onto the medical field. Large body of knowledge, large regulations, structures of trust. You don't step in and get the spotlight like that. It's vast and not trivial.
We had major success by simply batching incoming writes into ~15 second chunks and writing that as a file to S3 and an index that tracks how the files are split / chunked to make read performance decent.

This alone gave us an insanely scalable (load tested against 100GB/day ~100M records/day) for a grand cheap total cost of $10/day for everything, server, disk, and S3. https://youtu.be/x_WqBuEA7s8

Works great for timeseries data, super scalable, no devops or managing database servers, simple, and works.

I believe the Discord guys also did something similar and had written some good engineering articles on it, give it a Google as well.
Perhaps you can contact the people of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064565 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14487887
Ubuntu Animals
Wow. Much altruism. Such revolution.

TLDR;
"First we enabled DRM, then we sideloaded an advertising extension, now we're an advertising platform, but don't worry because we're changing the world."
Also reminds me of the ex-football player in South Florida that was knocked off his boat by a wave and swam 16 hours to shore: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-dolphins-player-robert-k...
It's a beautiful book. He also signed it for me, in case that's a thing you value.

I'd love to know how different his reprints are the the originals. I've seen one from the original run, and they looked the same to me. (But it had been a while.)
The wizard of EarthSea... That's why her name sounded so familiar!
I remember being in a startup that promised features before they could deliver, and how it was a symptom of shoddy business practices in general. So when I consider the fact that I have a decent amount of money tied up in Robinhood, and I see them promising features without delivering, I get uneasy.

Otherwise it's a great product. I'm really only writing this in the hope that a Robinhood person catches eye on this comment and takes it to heart.
I like the concept and it would solve the stated problems, however it’s not those problems that are holding me back from IoT. I do not want any IoT/home control device in my house communicating with anything in the cloud, period. Device makers have proven over and over again they cannot make secure devices, and I don’t want anyone collecting data on my usage. What is needed is something that can talk to a local server and doesn’t need the Internet.
I often ponder company culture and how what's good for the customers and the users can often be at odds.

I find it interesting that "cookie licking" is terrible from the inside, though whenever there are overlapping products from Google customers complain. What's the best way to let the wild ones innovate without confusing the overall product lineup?
Oh my god your youtube flow is GENIUS. I am extremely excited about trying it. How did you choose mpv?
Well written - definitely going to need to check out YaxReturns!
Read up on DC slug lines. We are talking 10,000's of people doing this daily with very minor government support for the last 15+ years. Mostly awareness and signage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugging
No. An appeal to authority is always fallacious. Your heuristic may be useful, but it is just that - a heuristic, not an argument.
And then you, as a high level manager, throw the rudder entirely the other way. Now every department, or even every team has their own account database, their own chat, their own ticket system, their own crm, their own docs, and everyone else gets locked out of all of those.
> these people know exactly what this tech is designed to do.

I think that's a little stilted in this case. I read voraciously as a kid. My parents often took my book away and kicked me outside. By the same rule, they knew exactly what books are designed to do.

I don't think it's so nefarious as that when it comes to [this]technology. They weren't designed to rake in ad dollars from childrens' misinformed taps.

I think they thought kids just need moderation. And kids are horrific at moderation. So until they learn, they get told what to do, or no cookies at all.

Hell, before tablets and user-friendly computers, it was video games are the devil, before that TV was the devil, before that the radio and the talkies are the devil.

Social media is a different animal. It's making use of the technology to a certain end. Sort of like how some TV talk shows and old kids radio adventures were really just disguised advertising that profited the most from bringing you back every episode.
I don't think there's any money in it (I don't think there's any money in Medium either, frankly), and in terms of personal satisfaction I find Feedly adequate, though not as good-looking as Medium.
Payday Lending

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheet...

"annual percentage rates averaging 391 percent." (That's not a typo)

"Average borrowers earn about $30,000 per year"

"Most borrowers pay more in fees than they originally received in credit "

"each year, spending $9 billion on loan fees. "
This has beautiful explanatory power for leftist opposition to market-rate housing development. It explains the arguments I tend to see very well:

- The effect of supply and demand on price (“trickle down economics”) is an oversimplification or outright fabrication pushed by real estate and tech interests to fool you. Those technocrats are funded by monied interests and can’t be trusted.

- We cannot depend on the market to provide something as important as housing; it must be a human right. Therefore block all market rate development. (With no follow-up policy prescription, or no concern for the feasibility, implementation details, or side effects of any housing-as-a-human-right policy prescriptions).

- We should continue to block development because YIMBYs and their backers are bad people and our class enemies who want luxury condos for themselves and don’t care about the poor.

- Even if some YIMBYs are well intentioned, it’s stupid that they want to debate supply and demand with affordable housing activists when they should be allying against their mutual enemy, rich suburban homeowners. This is most interesting because it’s a direct exhortation to abandon mistake theory and engage on conflict theory’s terms.

I like this a lot. It may be what I needed to stop arguing with these people on the internet.
SILO – the cryptocurrency asset management solution for financial institutions
I think when he said " real-world value created through actual investments " - the underlying idea behind an investment is that you provide capital to someone who is trying to build a business that will hypothetically provide jobs and value to society. Putting money into something and taking more money out is a bastardization of the term in that interpretation. That is simply not the case here - this has simply been a mass wealth re-distribution event. People are basically printing and trading pokemon cards at this point.
Feature Focus: CrateDB 2.3.x
Lending/buying an empty (external) drive for starting seems to be much simpler and safer.
I can imagine ways that a stalker/abuser would find this "useful" information and use it to harm, taunt, threaten, scare or harm their target.
We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. It's still at the base of Maslowe's Heirarchy. Having it arrive automatically after pressing some buttons on a smartphone seems like a big thing, no?
By that logic no one uses email directly either.
Applying a microservices architecture to your SaaS Marketing Stack
Pizza delivery works after some buttons on my dumbphone.
> The misleading thing about the “free law” angle is that PACER does not record “the law.” It’s a system for accessing parties’ legal filings.

I'm 100% certain that PACER has opinions, and those are law.
Is there a greater cost in utility to not flying in planes vs not attending Jack White concerts? If so this may be a false equivalence.
I know there have been a lot of people who were quite angry about the Pocket integration (and more so about some of Mozilla's more recent experiments with Mr. Robot), but I don't think this is a bad thing (what is mentioned in the post).

> While advertising is the business model of the web, it has evolved into one that doesn’t put the user first. We believe the current model of web advertising is broken because it doesn’t respect user privacy, isn’t transparent, lacks control, all the while trending towards click-bait and low-quality content.

Well, they're right there. The problem is that things don't function without money (and I don't know that relying on Google paying a huge amount for being the default search provider is a good business model). If Mozilla really can do this while protecting the privacy of the user (and avoiding clickbait), then I think it might be a worthwhile experiment.

For my part, I'm going to see how it works, but will disable if it's not satisfactory.

Of course, someone will probably have to audit their code to ensure they really are protecting our privacy...

> It’s important to us to get this right.

Especially these days ;)
But is it not an investment?
Most Americans Want Legal Status for ‘Dreamers.’ These People Don’t
I have become convinced that advertisers are a huge problem and not fixable. Helping to destroy the advertising industry might become my primary activistic ambition.
OK, we've updated the title from “Introducing Robinhood Crypto”.
Thanks. Obviously I didn't read the Wikipedia entry properly. I must say I'm surprised. I had no idea that these terms were still equivocal.
JS is a mess because React is using a concept similar to double buffering to prevent bad rendering? That's all this is, they are batching updates to the DOM before reconciliation to reduce redraws.
How is that Microsoft "best people in the world" any different from what Google projects to the world?
No need to regret. As you said, the living planet is irreplaceable and infinitely more precious than artefacts of technology which can be built again and again, yet our thoughtless species largely pursues trivialities and in the process squanders what cannot be regained. But comments like these are not well received so I seldom say them out loud.
The Medium post probably has better longevity: https://medium.com/@DigitalDrex/why-i-left-google-for-a-bitc...