skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this list. What I have found about point #4 is that even teams that try to actually measure performance in a meaningful way will miss things.

If the quality of the software is slowing down feature releases, causing fires but is not being measured, you can make some headway with presenting ways to measure code quality so that your work shows up on their radar. This is difficult with such a subjective word as "quality" but tracking number of fires of time would be a good way to show that the way you develop is better than other people.

The other thing that companies miss are employees that help other employees in a mentoring sort of way. These people essentially cast a buff on everyone they work with. These buffs can be in the form of better tools, improved workflows, recommending reading material, new technologies etc. Unfortunately it seems this is up to that person's superior to recognize their value and fend for that person to upper management. I feel like it's easy for me to identify peers that cast buffs but not sure how easy it would be for a manager to identify such characters.
Google Makes Its Tensor Processing Units Available to Others
I really learn much better from a paper book, so I use Humble Bundle as a cheap way to preview the books! It is still worth 15 bucks!
> blockchain

sigh
How does SpaceX get these amazing camera shots? [video]
I can believe they legitimately don't want their products presented next to objectionable content, but not because they care, they just don't want people associating them with it.
Apologies if the comparison offends anyone but every time I see PR (public relations) about ad-blocking by Google, I see them as a company like Goldman Sachs, who has taken positions on both sides of a bet, so to speak.

There is a glaring conflict of interest as others have pointed out; it cannot be ignored. Through strategic acquisitons such as Doubleclick, Google and its subsidiaries are the largest warehouse of advertising on the www. The company is the machine that keeps web advertising humming along.

Google wants to keep everyone happy. Users are fed up with advertising. For example, Google could offer a search engine free of any ads, as they did in the early days.FN1 They have more than enough cash to do it. This would make users very happy. Google could try to support itself by selling something, besides advertising. But this will not happen. Why? (Rhetorical question. Not asking for an answer. We all know what it is.)

By creating a web-advertising juggernaut and collecting the maximum allowable quantity information about users through every means legally possible, (far beyond merely search engine usage) Google has taken a position against users (the ones who dislike ads) as well as for them (as argued in myriad PR pieces).

Google is not curbing it own actions (as the #1 promoter of advertising on the www), instead it is taking aim at advertisers. Some of those could be existing or potential clients (which might seem intriguing).

But while its clients (be they advertisers, users or others) may experience "losses", like Goldman (or not; sorry, bad analogy!), Google always "wins".

Any PR piece proclaiming that Google is taking sides with users (for a "better web") ignores that they also have taken sides with advertisers. Google has big bets on advertising. As everyone knows, users do not contribute significant inputs to the Google balance sheet; advertisers do.

FN1 At that time one of the Google founders called out advertising as being something to avoid. Interestingly, there was no "disruptive" vs "non-disruptive" advertising distinction.
"What's realistic about calling for a large-scale rollout of something which has never been built, in an industry where cost-overruns are typical? Shouldn't you build at least one before betting the farm on it?"

(Sorry for the delay in responding, busy times...)

If you read the ThorCon material, you'll find that there's nothing controversial about its design. It's all based on the solid ORNL molten salt work. ThorCon is in the process of building a first reactor, which will likely be in Indonesia due to the broken nuclear approach in the US.

"Meanwhile, coal is already on the way out in the US, replaced by... unrealistic? ... power sources."

Most of the true replacement (reliable) power is natural gas, which still produces very significant CO2. Wind and solar will never really be effective replacements without reliable backup power, even with grid storage. The problem is there will eventually be an outlier event where there is too much calm air, and too much overcast, to supply enough electricity. At that point lots of people will die, if it's very hot or very cold. Reliable power is very important.
Mirrors the experience of one of my friends. Venmo took almost a year to clear a 10$ transaction because the note said "Persian restaurant".
I'm probably not a good person to ask. I make money through affiliate links in my video descriptions— so I have no plans to use Youtube's official monetization programs.
Alas, that isn't the case. Your kids see 1/20th of the explicitly obvious ads, and probably 20x the product placements, Instagram "brand ambassadors", and other subtle tricks that advertisers devised to get past our ability to mental filter out clearly-marked ads.
Look up "myki" on Wikipedia and "Australian nbn" and maybe Google for "Australian census meltdown".
This is normal here.
Sure! Email me or shoot me a message on keybase. :)
I had a computer at a young age in the 80's and started programming in early elementary school.

I also have a young child who is absolutely absorbed in computers, youtube, etc. I understand how much their collective social lives revolves around it. But even all the time I spend on computers, I still find the experiences vaguely disturbing. The effects on mental health are immediately obvious -- a few hours of "screen time" has very obvious negative implications. There is also a quality of addiction to it all. The computer/smartphone is all.
Investors expect this information so if they stopped it would be assumed they were hiding bad numbers. Further the information will trickle out in the form of car registration statistics anyways so they aren't giving you anything you couldn't get elsewhere.
I do not think gmail is an excellent product. For me it's backed by a giant that guarantees its availability and functionality almost anywhere in the world (looking at you China). I would use something else in a blink of an eye.
India has instantaneous IMPS bank transfers.
Youtube gets this right and puts the content first, on all endpoints. I see a youtube video and click it, I get a video.

If I see a facebook link, there are many problems:

- I don't know if it's a video

- I don't know if I'll see a login page or if I'll get to the content

- I don't know if the content is viewable by me because of privacy settings

And then this works the other way - why should I share a video on facebook when I can't tell if my recipient will be able to see the video? I don't know if they'll get a login prompt. I don't know if they have the permissions to see the video.

All this friction doesn't exist with youtube, or at least is extremely minimal.
Google has also learned the lesson though that ads which produce a negative user impression aren't sustainable, and bad for both Google and advertisers. They have a vested long-term interest in making ads palatable and useful, or their cash cow goes away. Their incentives mesh with mine -- I would be less likely to demand ad blocker if ads weren't so disruptive.
> IMHO Facebook really should be doubling-down on local sharing and improving that experience, Google Photos is far and away the best photo product for me.

Do you mean that Google Photos is a better way for you to share your photos than Facebook?
This is very much like the gender imbalance in tech - starting to address it in college only provides a band-aid. This is a much deeper issue that starts soon after birth.

As a CMU grad student they had the Reasonable Person Principle to help guide your actions and interactions. The principle states nothing about ethics, but generally that you should be open to others' concerns, practice self-reflection, and even accept that their viewpoints differ from yours. In spite of this principle being in place I definitely dealt with at least one very unreasonable person during my graduate studies there.

I've been in several ethical conundrums in my career. In a couple cases my choice was the "lesser" unethical option among many. It can be difficult to make those choices when your career or employment is on the line. I've left jobs because I believed (or knew) the work I was doing wasn't quite on the level.

Trying to recreate these scenarios, realistically, in a class room is pretty hard. Having discussions about ethics is nice, but probably not very effective. Could you build a course, or assignment, where the only way to get an A is to cheat or act unethically? Would that even be ethical for the university to offer?

In my cynicism, this looks like a "cover-our-asses" maneuver by universities, at least in part.
Actually the list of assets shouldn't be that hard. Looking at pinterest the xhr requests for images are loaded immediately when page is open, so potentialy it then it's catched in onRequest function (only now I'm aborting the requests to save network trafic). I will try it our tomorrow and let you know in comment.

Also, looking at pinterest, it's server rendered through ReactJS, so there is #initial-state script tag with first few images preloaded as urls, so if you cared only about the images on top without scrolling then this is the safest bet.
The idea of using browser cycles to mine cryptocurrency is nothing new. Another recent effort: https://oysterprotocol.com/ .

The problem is that savvy users will install additional plugins to block these Javascript programs from running, the same way that they use Adblock. Unsavvy users will just have a shorter battery life.

Another effort in this space is Brave, and Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). Instead of expending browser resources to mine, the idea is that people start using a special browser (Brave) that dispenses BATs to the websites you dwell the most on / get the most value out of. Then presumably the site that receives the BAT could exchange them for USD.
This is true. There was recently a huge controversy in the Dota 2 community, because a major tournament exclusively moved to Facebook livestreaming (away from twitch).

One of the most common complaints was something like "I'd never use Facebook, because I hate the company!"

Also, frankly, the tech product for livestreaming isn't anywhere near feature competitive.
Pages are horrible money grabs and a waste.

Create a group. They get feed priority from what I've been able to gather.
It's not just their executive function. It's their sense of time.

In much video, a cut[1] happens every three seconds (I don't know if this is true for specifically children's video). This tunes their sense of time - if you don't like what you're looking at, in three seconds it will be completely different. That's not what life was like when I grew up; it's not what life was like for any generation before mine. It seems to me that there has to be some effects from this...

[1] A "cut" in video is an instantaneous change of viewpoint (so called because, back in the film days, the only way you could get it was by physically cutting and splicing the film).
Just to flesh out this hypothetical:

You've possibly eliminated a lot of adults who are 10+ years out of college and have family commitments.

You've possibly eliminated people with significant side-interests outside the realm of software. Writers, artists, musicians, marathon runners, activists, etc.

Just because someone doesn't have side projects doesn't mean that they don't have ambition, enthusiasm for learning, or other ways to show you they're perfectly capable.
It seems like a good idea, but the results just were not very good.
I appreciate the step forward, but what I really want is for my browser to block:

* Battery-draining junk code

* Bandwidth-hogging videos and GIFs

* Spreading information about me cross-origin

I would take an annoying page-covering PNG that I can close, over a tiny banner doing animations in Javascript, an auto-play video, a huge GIF which is basically a video, or the countless trackers which build databases about every site I visit.

As such this change will not entice me to disable my ad blocker. Not even close.
"I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

-Beyond Vietnam (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksile...

It seems futile to silo this as a problem of "tech", when really it's a problem of society at large: that profit motives are largely considered more important than people.
Or to look good on application forms
Honestly it literally sounds like that is the business model.

"Let's build a platform that exploits desperate developers..."
I'm sure there is non-obvious substantive content, but it is more akin to navel gazing than real-world applicable knowledge.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t...

> Ethicists do not behave better. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse
Ask HN: Recommended payment processor for monthly subscriptions
I'm looking for a payment processor that handles monthly subscriptions to a SaaS and doesn't require a ton of boilerplate code.

The only one that comes to my mind is Stripe. Is there a reason not to use it, or are there any other suggestions?
But sadly that doc format cannot be opened reliably.
That’s why a small deodorant costs $7 and not $2.
They are related in that quality code is code that is both correct now and can easily be made correct when things change--and things always change. Unit tests are what enable correctness in the future.
Truer words have never been spoken
So, if you are a business, I think relying solely on AWS is a super bad idea. Amazon is aware of the lock in effect, and if your usage spikes and you don't have a good alternative ready to go? Amazon is setup so that you will pay through the nose. AWS is wonderfully cheap if you only need a little bit, but it is crushingly expensive at any kind of real scale.

Starting on amazon is great, as it really is cheap at small scale, and you can test your shit at large scale for short periods... but it gets expensive fast as you grow, so the more you can do to prepare to move, (or credibly threaten to do same) the better off you are.
Both the LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables are ignored for setuid programs, and if the program was started by something else you won't be able to change these variables. The issue here is not injecting code into a process you control, it's injecting code into a process running under a different account.
In my case, I turned a career in driver and low-level algorithm coding into a career in AI in <2 years emphasizing the ability to implement AI algorithms in C/C++ and CUDA. That said, when Tensorflow Monkeys can make $300K right out of school, imagine how someone who could bang the metal directly could do...

TLDR: Chance favored the prepared skill set. No fancy degree required, just results.

PS Before that, I blew a boring blind-allocated gig at Google insisting that GPUs were about to play a huge role there a year before they acquired DNNResearch. I even tried to join the very beginnings of the Google Brain team but they didn't have any openings or the budget/willingness to make one for me.
Oh C'mon!!! -1?! lol

Immediate dismantlement of the credit-bureaus outside of a police-state would lead to...for example, pissed off sys-admins who want to sell the last valuable thing they have access to: MOAR consumer information that they already have about you.

Additionally, personal-lending would either cease for a period (and break the economy,) or they'd come up with a new way to judge our ability to re-pay & it would undoubtedly be bad/reactionary, & we'd have an version of 2008.

There's a natural tendency to want to "BURN IT DOWN!!!" b/c it's bad; I get that, but we haven't done the work to come up with something better & a transition plan. This is how the Arab-Spring turned into MF Admiral Sisi (or whatever) in Egypt, despite good initial intentions.

We are completely entrenched in this consumer-lending system whether you like it or not.

You need a "what comes after?" plan. I feel like this is common sense????
Actually, doctors constantly prescribe dangerous drugs all the time: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201404/pre...

But, they get away with it since most people sue the drug companies instead of the doctors.

During primetime in the US, you can see the ads for drugs. Wait a few years and you can see lawyers advertising class-action lawsuits for those same drugs during daytime TV.

Then, when you bring it up, someone mentions, "doctors don't harm people. They have a motto to do no harm." Actually, most doctors ignore it and do what other doctors do. Just look at statin drugs: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-teitelbaum-md/statins-c...

Let's see doctors prescribe magnesium citrate + fish oil instead of statin drugs. "Oh, but fish oil contains mercury!" No doctor ever says, "Be careful of drugs. One gives you side-effects and you will end up on a treadmill of drugs to cover the side-effects of the others."

Doctors go on strike, deaths decline (in Israel):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127364/

And in the UK: "When doctors strike, fewer patients die": https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/02/09/hoskins/QhjVuBH...

It's all hard to accept, but Silicon Valley is no different. Except people scrutinize Silicon Valley and Wall Street more than they do their own doctors. Go ask your doctor about statin drugs and see the clever rationalizations they make. No different than the people here who say, "I can't program without NULL!"(https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/ideology)
If your goal is affiliate clicks, why do views & mins of engagement matter?

Seems like the measure would be which platform generated more clicks that convert.
Mirroring is an Enterprise Edition feature but there are probably ways to hack around that.
Strings don't work well with numeric aggregate SQL functions like SUM or MAX. Also, won't work well with comparisons or sorting: "111.00" is less than "9.99" string-wise (unless you store all numerics with a bunch of leading "0"; but then that takes a lot more space).
"I mean" said 7 times. Maybe that is the benefit of "umm" - when you have that verbal tic, it usually isn't included in transcriptions.
:D yep the documentation needs a lot of work. It started as a test of an idea, then slowly became a usable tool and the code was getting incrementaly more complex without me event noticing. I only added the readme on github yesterday and there are basicaly no tests... :(
I have a theory: Facebook's biggest problem is that it gives people what they want, but what people want is not what makes them happy. Algorithmic recommendations are tailored to capture people for as long as possible, but the short-sightedness of "engagement" erodes the long-term benefit for the user. I think this applies to YouTube as well, or other algorithmically generated "feeds".
Not Sid, but thanks for being a fan ;)
But neo-Marxist class warfare (most commonly referred to as identity politics in the zeitgeist) is absolutely about diminishing the value of the individual in favor of elevating historically oppressed groups.

Better to recognize that subjection to evil and suffering are universal, and the best way to combat them is through individual growth and responsibility - something modern education is severely lacking.
One is a former game developer (with only a high school degree) who happened to have an interest in ML and studied up in his free time. A few were in a startup, bachelors in Computer Science from non-Stanford universities, that was doing AI work and was acquired. Another is a developer of a prominent open source package, originally utterly unrelated to AI, but he started working on learning related applications with his software and landed at Google as a result. Another is a friend with a PhD but in a totally different area (Computer Graphics) who was hired into Google where she landed on a ML team.
I am a Dev Coach. This means companies hire me to pair program with their developers and help them focus on "technical excellence" which is manager speak for "code quality".

Here's what I've found:

- Most companies don't actually care about code quality. This is especially true for the ones that hire me. The managers that bring me in would much rather play-act than make the systemic changes required for their teams to operate with improving quality.

- There are systemic challenges to code quality in these environments. Namely hiring practices, performance evaluation, and priorities (budget/timeline). Obvious.

- Nobody can explain the benefit of code quality in terms persuasively enough to managers that they will accept the cost. I've never seen it done. It must come from somewhere else. This is why companies with more technical people in positions of leadership tend to have this problem less IME. Frankly I think this is why we use words like "technical debt" either that or it's a tautology. There's an irrational lack of discipline in this area akin to credit card debt.

- Furthermore, software itself does not matter to these companies.

That last one is the most important and it is not meant to be normative. I'm not saying software is not of actual importance. I'm saying it is not treated in the company with any importance. Software development is viewed as a necessary evil, not as an opportunity for competitive advantage.

The difference between my clients who view software as a necessary evil vs. a competitive advantage cannot be understated. It is immense. Often these companies with different perspectives are competitors in the same industry! You can guess which ones are growing happily and which ones are struggling to cope with changes to their business.

There are companies where the ratio of "business" people to IT is 1:3 and they balk when you tell them they're essentially a software company.

"No, we're a mortgage company."

Ok how's that working out?

What I've decided is to start doing a better assessment up front as to the actual priorities and perspective within these companies when choosing a client. There are companies where the light bulb is coming on and it can be a blast to work with them. In the current climate I would advise everyone to just flat out avoid companies that don't see themselves as tech companies. Work for companies that see themselves as tech companies or are seriously trying to change that perception internally. You can find companies like this in all industries. You might be surprised.
How one book changed my relationship with money
The early automobiles were a joke, so they called it like they saw it. You can hardly blame people for not seeing where it would lead, often beyond their professional lives. Take for contrast the reaction of French factory workers when automated textile production started to come online, or cabbies when automated fare metering hit.
Unless they decide to replace their people with deep learning. They do have training images, it’s just a matter of adding software.
Have you tried to get a decent plumber lately? My plumber just bought a fancy new truck and boat. Previously he traded favors with my contractor to remodel both their homes on the cheap.
Stop wasting money on lavish offices and bro-ish perks, and rather put that money toward salaries.