skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, I see. So in this case, “dead” means billions of people who login multiple times per week and the accompanying tens of billions in ad revenue.

May we all have startups that suffer such a fate.

Seriously though, I’m not sure what your point even is. Facebook doesn’t care about how often you login or why, as long as ad revenue keeps flowing. And those numbers have grown like crazy over the period where you say their search traffic (and thus their userbase) has been cratering. I just don’t see it. Every meaningful metric for Facebook that you can find for the period in question points to the search trend not being a reliable predictor.

Also, my point with YouTube is that their search trend has been flat or declining since 2012, but YouTube as a platform has been anything but over that time period.

Not a useful signal.
> These ideals are the cornerstones of conservative beliefs

You have zero idea what you're talking about. It's as if you derived your concept of conservatism from The Daily Show.

> hate speech as free speech

Speech is speech. It's free (to be spoken) or it's not, regardless of its content. Anything else is a path to censorship.
Visual Studio Code is now shipping with Anaconda
weird unicode text can crash your imessages - sucks.

90% of android phones not having any recent updates - big deal. [0]

[0] https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-stops-galaxy-s8-andro...
I was just at a dev mixer and ran into an engineer at Bank of America. He told me they have 5000 Python developers on staff. I almost fell out of my chair - never would have guessed it. I know there's competition for top talent in NYC, but that's still a surprising number.
VS Code in Anaconda Distribution 5.1
1) Not everyone can sign up with RIPE. We have tried multiple times and been rejected despite being connected to backbone and having peering agreements and AS number.

2) Why track IP addresses instead of mandating DKIM? Gmail eats valid IPv6 sourced mail with good DKIM keys no problem.

3) Same can be said about IPv4 routes. Remember nobody really uses IP directly to route nowadays...
C'mon. She's the patron of Breitbart News, called the "platform of the alt-right" by its editor. The head of Newsmax called her "first lady of the alt-right".[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/0...
If removing "features" improves performance, one has to wonder how much overhead those features have.

If I remove the UI/window manager from Linux and run software from the command line, I don't see a massive performance boost. That's not to say I would run a server with the UI, but it's not like I'm seeing a 100% improvement or anything. Thus, there must be some difference between the acceptable overhead of Linux vs. Windows.

It just makes me think that Windows continues to add features as long as that n+1 feature doesn't slow down the PC, and thus doesn't stop until the PC is slowed down. Thus, every Windows OS will have a maximal amount of overhead.
> Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.

They already do, when I click a link in my GMail (Android) app, and it opens in Firefox (Android), I can sometimes quickly see a Google redirection URL flit by before loading the actual page. They basically did a similar shitty trick to what they did to the Search result pages, pretending to be direct links but inserting a tracking redirect at the onbeforeunclick event or such.

Hey, btw anyone know of a nice Firefox Add-on or something that rewrites/stops the Google Search result links from redirecting at the last moment? I've been meaning to code up something like that myself, but I bet it already exists (and I'm mostly using DDG these days any way).
Choose Rust. It has zero-overhead memory and data race safety.
I swore there was an XKCD that was directly related here, but I can only find the "wrong on the internet" one: https://www.xkcd.com/386/
Right... but then you have to manage securing and cashing out the tokens yourself.
> if you are prepared to provide the value immediately then you don't have to return into the runloop

It might just my own mental model. But if I'm using a promise, it is a future value. So I don't understand why you would ever want to do that. Plus that's what Promise.resolve() is for. I'd expect them to act more like the now defunct setImmediate() function.

I concede that it may be more performant to do it this way as it results in less context switching, but I personally don't think performance should dictate a language's design of primitives.
It could be that many of these companies want to keep the caps low so that you need to purchase both home internet and mobile internet. If I had a 100gb cap, I'd ditch my home DSL and simply use my phone as a hotspot all the time.

Here in Canada, Bell & Rogers own both the cellular networks and the home internet networks. They are highly incented to sell you BOTH.
Post sounded like they picked up promises over the weekend and didn't like how it broke their C# mold.

Quite a few points didn't make any sense or simply showed misunderstanding around how and why promises are what they are.

> Eager, not lazy

Why does this even matter? It's an implementation detail that optimises for performance.

The outcome, eventual resolution, is all that really matters.

> No cancellation

These are not tasks, and covered elsewhere in the thread: I/O.

> Never synchronous

Its a promise, so that doesn't really make sense to complain about.

Alas it is solved with Async/await (which is just promises under the hood.)

> then() is a mix of map() and flatMap()

This one I can concede as it would be useful to have the option, or at least have them exposed.

I suspect then was simply kept because that's what bluebird or whatever it was at the time did.
If we lose all of our compilers, processors, etc., would the source code to Windows stop being software?
Although from what I've heard, their version of moving from "waterfall" to "agile" could best be described as "iterative waterfall"
Is this an entire article based on a subtitle on the summary page of the CEO's presentation? Not a bad advertisement for GS but come on, this is incredibly light on content, by which I mean there is absolutely zero content.
> As said earlier, it is lazy learning algorithm and therefore requires no training prior to making real time predictions. This makes the KNN algorithm much faster than other algorithms that require training e.g SVM, linear regression, etc.

Linear regression is way faster than KNN as the dataset grows beyond toy data. Both training and especially testing. In practical applications, test speed often trumps train speed.

> The KNN algorithm doesn't work well with high dimensional data because with large number of dimensions, it becomes difficult for the algorithm to calculate distance in each dimension.

KNN works fine on high-dimensional text. From something simple as Hamming distance on binary tokens, to euclidean distance on TFIDF, to cosine distance on 900-dimensional word vector aggregates.

> There are only two parameters required to implement KNN i.e. the value of K and the distance function (e.g. Euclidean or Manhattan etc.)

Also implement distance weighing (you probably want to weigh the 1-th nearest neighbor label higher than the 5-th nearest neighbor label).

> The KNN algorithm has a high prediction cost for large datasets. This is because in large datasets the cost of calculating distance between new point and each existing point becomes higher.

This is why you "fit" something like a K-D tree during training.

> Finally, the KNN algorithm doesn't work well with categorical features since it is difficult to find the distance between dimensions with categorical features.

Hamming distance works fine on one-hot encoded categorical features. If not, embed/reduce the dimensionality. If not, use feature selection first and do KNN on top 10%-20% features. Remember that you don't have to use the same distance measure for every feature column.

> If one of the features has a broad range of values, the distance will be governed by this particular feature. Therefore, the range of all features should be normalized so that each feature contributes approximately proportionately to the final distance.

You can skip this step (and feature selection) by learning an additional weight for each feature to multiply with before distance measure. It is rare for each feature to contribute proportionately to the target.
If you ever added your US bank account to Coinbase by giving it your online banking credentials(!)[1], you might want to know that your financial/banking information was crawled (income, costs, average balance), and is available for resale[2] to 3rd parties.

1. This is very, very, very bad for security, but is only possible because US interbank transfers are way behind the rest of the world (including 3rd world countries). Everywhere else, all you need to transfer money is the name of the bank, account holder and account number.

2. see "Products" on https://plaid.com. Plaid provides Coinbase's bank integration.
The point you keep missing is that the amount I'm paid more isn't equivalent to the amount more I can do than a junior dev. I perform at some X more than the junior dev, but I'm not paid X more.
More accurately, delay line memory
HN is no fun allowed zone - it strips all unicode.
Mongodb can be quite a nightmare once you start requiring anything more than a 1:1 relationship, which is pretty much any kind of app that is doing anything meaningful. Having to resort to doing things like map/reduce for a simple group by / order is not the way to go IMO. I think you later truly realize the beauty of SQL once you get far down that rabbit hole.

Initially I rode on the Mongo's NoSQL bandwagon when I saw that you can just save a JSON hash and thought that's the coolest thing in the world. But ever since I tried out Postgres's JSONB, I just can't go back to Mongo anymore. With Postgres, I have the best of both worlds, performance, relational data, and reliability. I don't have to sacrifice any of it. Also, I don't know who codes using raw SQL, it's been years languages have had ORMs that made queries look just like a Mongo query.

Also, for anything else, like a super simple requirement of saving data (JSON), Firebase have fit that role perfectly.

Mongo is starting to look like it's out of place in the eco system.
I shouldn't respond but I will anyway.

Free speech is only protected by and from the government. It's not protected by and from any other repercussions. I don't have to like you or accept you because I support or defend your ability to exercise your freedom of speech to the government. I do not have to allow that in my home, my business, or my friendship circles.

The rest of what you said isn't worth a response.
As cool as the operations part of this is, I can't help wishing they were growing food that mattered on scale to make a difference. Lowering the carbon footprint of putting expensive garnishes on the plates of the 1% is a start, I guess.
On a synth in a musical piece, absolutely.

But in a technical piece like this, I prefer if it isn't.
Problems at Singularity University
How Google's Sidewalk Labs has outmaneuvered Toronto to build a “smart city”
Banks are tech companies. When other countries say that they trust the US dollar, what do you think that means? It means they trust that our IT systems which manage the dollar are correct. They trust that when we say Warren Buffet has eleventy billion dollars, it actually means something tangible.

And when they discover that trust is utterly and entirely misplaced, that our IT systems have been run as cost centers and endlessly rushed and slapped together and subjected to every form of intellectual rot that modern business practice could infuse into it.... well then things will get interesting. What if Walmart goes to pay off a supplier and the supplier asks for proof that the numbers Walmart is sending over the wire are actually backed by something and not just computational funny money? Well, we do have a form of money that's actually verifiably real and non-counterfeitable and doesn't just rely on some garbage IT....
"Software is eating the world", came out 7 years ago and is still as true as ever.
The Trump administration wants to turn ISS into a commercially run venture
I don't really find this to fit the name "Open Source". It's simply a project with published assets. A cool idea, yes, but even the process isn't even documented that well.

> Ultimately, we decided on a full-print T-shirt printed on both sides, which was made for us by a local, friendly printing house.

The one interesting part, where to acquire fully printed t-shirts in Europe, was left out.
Good for them. A bold move. (And yet another scientific cause, I might add, victim to a stultifying and hidebound FDA.)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on 'Black Panther': All This Fuss Over a Superhero Movie?
> Criminal economic ecosystems have existed since long before cryptocurrency, as has AML law even in mere regional financial hubs like South Africa.

Even if South Africa shut them down, I'm sure others will find a way to run such payment processors. Where there's money, there's motive.

> The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero used by hardly anybody and attractive primarily to money launders.

People who launder large sums of money would likely do it through the traditional financial system. How does one launder, say, a billion dollars through a Monero today? I don't think they could. That type of money is being laundered through the banking system[0].

> The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero

If it's easy to implement & their niche likes to use them, then I would say it's probable.

Crypto can win bit by bit. Country by country. There are some jurisdictions that seem to be embracing the tech (like Japan & Switzerland).

That's some people using it. If it continues to grow & you know it's going to grow faster than any other asset it makes sense to do some speculation. Then with that speculation, you start to learn about crypto. It starts to spread as people become aware of returns, & it continues to grow, & so on.

It's resilient. I like resilient assets. I think a little bit of crypto can be a good investment. If anything it's fun. That's one of the reasons I think young people like it.

Do it for fun, spend it when people accept it. People even give discounts for buying in crypto.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-...
You forgot the most important part: and it wasn't in-line with the "proper" thinking.

People make "claims without any factual backup or clarification of meaning" on HN all day every day, and no one bats an eye provided they are consistent with the proper thinking.

Once you see this, it can't be unseen. But getting to the point of being able to see it is easier said than done, it isn't merely having an alternative political ideology, but rather understanding how the human mind works. But once you've got a good handle on that, things like reading the news are completely different experiences than before.
Socially smarter doesn't mean better social skills.

It simply means that they are more socially aware. If you allow the metaphor, I would say that they are more likely to "play the game" and "play it well" at that.

Social skills have very little relationship to "emotional intelligence", so I have no clue why you would bring up the point that women are more willing to talk about their feelings.

You are comparing extraversion and agreeableness. While both are statistically higher in women, you are comparing apples and oranges.

Here, have some science: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/
149gb for the txo set, the entire history.
The 500 point threshold for downvotes is fairly public. dang has posted a number of comments stating it is 500.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20500&sort=byPopularit...
You seem to be saying it's not a big problem on Hacker News. I would agree with that. Most people, including you and I, post pseudonymously here. Many people create throwaway accounts in order to post anything political. Furthermore, social justice people consider Hacker News to be the preeminent example of toxic-masculine tech.
Since 4G came out i have never had to think about the internet speed of my phone. Only when it has been connected to wifi abroad.

What we need is not speed or bandwidth, it is penetration and range.

*It is probably a regional thing i can image that 4G could be quite slow in the midst of Tokyo.
> it removes the free market from the distribution and replace it with a committee driven disbursal of fees

In a (strained) sense, that's already what the USPTO is doing. Except it's also associated with all this technology innovation stuff, which we would like them to stay away from.

> If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.

I'll have to play around with that idea.
I think that 'bio, chem, and math' haven't changed is the stronger argument to make here - accounting is a bit different.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act happened in 2002 (1.5 decades ago) and Trump & the Republicans just made some major changes to the tax code (which accountants need to understand).

Moreover, even though Accounting is taught in college it's really job prep (like teaching Law to lawyers). You don't need to cover all the details in your first Accounting 101 class, but you gotta be current on the stuff you do cover.

Also - just to be clear on where I stand - I think that more than $50 for a textbook is outrageous. Personally, I think $20-30 should be more than enough.

So it seems like the issue is:
Given that we want to (and need to) update the books, how can we keep prices down?

Open Education Resources (OER), anyone?
I agree with the lessons in Worse Is Better, but I don't think that the author properly understood what he was observing. The result was a confused and confusing essay.

The way that I understand it is that what is "Good" depends on how you measure it. When we measure in terms of technical quality, we get one answer. When we measure in terms of suited to be widely adopted, we get a different answer.

We tend to idealize for technical quality, but popularity is what matters more. And once something is widely enough adopted, the technical inferiority tends to be fixable.
Seems solvable in this case. Ultra-sound can wake up the device, but then it would take some other signal to have it do anything other than go back to sleep, like WiFi/Bluetooth/LAN/etc.. So you wouldn't get incorrect functionality triggering from accidental ultra-sound triggers, you'd just save less battery.
There's an analogy in vision. "Wavelength" is the measurable physical aspect of light. "Color" is the complex human perception formed by various wavelengths hitting the retina and subsequent processing in the brain.
>It is the people that screw up, release with big flaws that the customer then pressures the company about, that are heralded as heroes and bacon savers when the fix those flaws. After 3 years and as many releases.

There's going to be a ton of survivorship bias even with them. It just goes to show that big marketing budgets are such a competitive advantage that can outweigh not actually being any good.

I'd seriously like somebody with a passing knowledge of data integrity who believes the tech industry is meritocratic to explain what they think the success of mongo is all about.
Tech overuse at work is a symptom. Your crappy culture is the disease
Oracle Buys Zenedge
... Here's some crazy ideas for how to deal with the problem of pricey college books.

1. Stop requiring the latest edition for a class. I strongly doubt that the science behind Physics 201 has changed in the past two years - you can probably teach to the 2008 edition of the textbook, instead of the 2018.

2. Stop requiring textbooks containing one-time digital codes.
How about performance? How much time to read from the database?
Well, I certainly hope so.
That's non-director level, upper end of the vp level.
WebAssembly First Public Working Drafts
This guy at the YMCA has a new game you play with balls and bushel baskets [0].

Edit: Looks like having a mustache helps you play it better.

[0] http://rate-sport.com/wp-content/uploads/images/original-bas...
I don't understand why open textbooks aren't more common. Sure, some things are changing quickly, but a calc or linear algebra? Seems like a quality book (or a couple) could be made for lots of courses. Most schools have a print shop and can do binding. $30 bucks maybe, if you want a hard copy?
The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, Dennett, and Hoffman) [video](2014)
No. Number of bites is simply a function of population size. So a single bedbug might result in one or two bites every week or week and a half. A couple of bedbugs might result in a couple showing up every few days.

You're right that seeing a cluster or a line or 2-3 bites is a dead giveaway, but it doesn't mean that a single bite or infrequent bites is not an infestation.

A single bite with nothing else showing up at all is no cause for concern, but a mosquito bite showing up in the morning every week or two is definitely cause for concern if you aren't in mosquito season in your location.
Process descriptors are unfortunately a little incomplete -- pdwait() was never implemented. They don't seem to be getting much use.
Problem with URL shorteners is ones that use characters, especially of varying cases. Relaying letters across a telephone sucks, I often resort to NATO codes, and now you'll have to distinguish capitalization.
The Google Maps app isn't even "capable" of remembering your recent search queries if you don't allow Google to track your Location History.

Says enough about their priorities, IMHO.

I remember one of the earliest software features that was widespread and called "intelligent" was basically the fact that a search form would remember your previous queries and present them incrementally as you were typing your new search.

That a company that prides itself on its AI efforts simply refuses to do this, again, says enough about their priorities.
If you contribute changes to the existing flash cards they'll be licensed under "Creative Commons BY SA" (most likely), every flash card will tell you the license if you open "view" it. If you create your own they'll just belong to SYL, though, single flash cards are not copyright-able so there is no issue if you steal those flash cards. And I personally would have no issues when people re-use content for other use.
"PostgreSQL as a company would have been doomed a long time ago"

PG has astonishing feature throughput. With each yearly release, they add 1-3 wow features, 6-10 major features, and countless smaller features still worthy of the release notes.

That's really, really impressive for any database, commercial or otherwise.

There's a perception that postgres is slow to add features because sometimes the feature latency is high. The reason for that is they build a solid foundation first, and slowly build multiple major features on top of that foundation. Consider replication:

1. Write ahead log (WAL)
2. WAL archiving
3. Warm standby
4. Hot standby + Streaming replication
5. Synchronous replication
6. Logical decoding of WAL
7. Logical replication

That's a lot of engineering work there, but they delivered value to users at each stage along the way. And during this time, they did a ton of other stuff -- did you notice that we got parallel query along the way? And logical table partitioning came along too, which means the parallel query can now do partition-wise parallel joins.

Not to mention all of the SQL features and tons and tons of other stuff.

Postgres has kept the lights on for a lot of companies for a long time. I absolutely reject the idea that good engineering is at odds with business success.