skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually thought the PanicWriter was very clever. It's a clean solution to a very commonly ignored error return value - operations on stdout/stderr.
I think that is fairly different at a place like IBM though, where employees tend to have long tenures. It's pretty common in places like that to get steadily promoted and given raises over time. I don't know either though, and would be curious to see data on it.
If life sucks so much in the Western world, why does everyone come here? And the "new rich" living in Costa Rica and other cheaper countries, why don't they live off the land like everyone idealizes instead of in mansions?
Should I use Google analytics or open source matomo?
I have used google analytics in the past, but I am now wondering if google is harvesting my website info for personal use and if it is having any effects on my seo efforts?

what are the benefits for not using google analytics?
Agree, though a lot of those threats and promises made privately.

I also assume CIA / NSA sourced intel on politicians (criminal and otherwise) is routinely leaked when in our interest to local sources through embassies and whatnot. Do you agree with that type of interference?
the cheapest power8 server I have ever seen was probably 4x more expensive then the equivalent dual socket xeon. That info is a bit stale. But there is also a complete lack of good information online about actual dollar figures for power8 systems (a lot of "contact us for more info!"). The platform's pricing is aimed at the sort of CTO people who don't care about the cost of Oracle licensing. Not the sort of people who care about $/MIPS for HPC applications or cloud scale hypervisor platforms.

I would very much like to be proven wrong so if you have access to some specific "this hardware spec costs this much money and you can buy it now" info, that i can compare to barebones supermicros, please do share it.
> Electric cars suck in the winter

It depends. When I had a 160 mi round trip commute without a charger at work, that kind of sucked in the winter, when the range dropped to around 140 mi, although not so much that I ever wanted to take the gas car instead. (Maybe if it had been a newer model, with more driving assistance features…)

Now that I can charge the car at each end, it’s better in every way. Apart from the ride, it’s great never having to stop for gas.
One data point might not be enough, but two may be too many for the industry to bear.

It only took two incidents to shut down the Concorde program.
Dunno about UPS fam, but I did work as a FedEx driver in my previous life... and nothing close to the stuff I see in our field. For sure, we are disposable in both fields. Perhaps the constant need to deliver X items on my route, but you get used to it because it doesn't really change. Our field changes all of the time and if you don't adjust you aren't hired. But I definitely didn't need to check my Slack, or stay up to date on current trends and tech on twitter, hackernews, newsletters, et al.
The Surface and Kindle are very different devices-- I was referring to the first MS reader efforts, ~2 decades ago, long before the Surface.
"The harder I work, the luckier I get," is the quote I've heard. You prompted me to research it and I found this article [1] suggesting that the version "Diligence is the mother of good luck" may be the oldest attested quote for this concept in English, occurring in the late 16th century.

I don't doubt that a version of it goes back much further. It seems like something one might hear in ancient Athens, or from some of the Roman humorists.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/
Ask HN: Today, HR told me I can't test candidates
I have two open positions on my team that I am trying to fill. Today, while talking to HR, we were discussing strategy and when I mentioned that I would like to ask a couple of candidates to come in to the office and take a practical programming test (sample project), I was told that I can't do that. Apparently, any test would have to be "certified" before it could be used. I have no idea exactly what "certified" means in this context.

I guess standard industry practices for everyone from two person start-ups to Google don't mean anything, and we have to make the decision based on simple questions and "gut" instinct during the interview.

Has anyone ever heard of a requirement in the United States whereby software employment tests must be certified?
Seems like a massive opsec hole. Why not force all outbound connections through an offshore VPN or proxy at their internet gateway.
I just signed-up - I'll give it a try. Nice sign-up process.
Given exponentially-distributed distance between fatalities, this would have a 3% chance of happening if Uber cars were as safe as humans. So it's unlikely.
I think the cgroup BPF filters align more with what Little Snitch can do as opposed to the TCP tracepoints. In modern versions of systemd, you can restrict a given network application to only having access to specific IPs via this mechanism.
I don't see why, the charge is after all that the emails are true - as you say "innocent until proven guilty", and that applies to people, who have rights, not inanimate things like emails that don't. Without proof either way you can't assume anything here is true or false.

If you think that American politicians are more corrupt than Russian spies then you probably too biased to rationally discuss the issue anyway.
Habit Summit – Behavioral Design Conference
I'm not sure that I totally agree, but this is the first new interesting point I've heard on this subject since this article originally came out, well done.
It should be possible to create a Bayesian model of the posterior distribution of fatalities at this point. That distribution will be pretty broad, and not Gaussian, so talking about the mean is somewhat meaningless. Nonetheless, you could certainly compare that distribution with the posterior for human-driven cars and draw a conclusion like: “it is Xx% likely that the Uber fatality rate is at least twice that of a human driver.”
They have moral requirements. Pot is made by criminal enterprises and by purchasing it you're supporting them.
What will happen is people will be sitting at their desks playing on their phones or sleeping. Until the governments of Japan and ROK decide to enforce their existing labor laws none of these "clever" solutions (like "premium Friday" in Japan) will change much.
Reproducible Data Dependencies for Python
Sure. If you exclude PACs, dark money, earned media...
Some manufacturers sell their subcompact cars for little or no profit purely to drive up their corporate average fuel economy. This allows them to make large profits selling larger, less efficient vehicles that customers actually want.
More precisely, this appears to be for governmental employees only.
> Is there a task left which can't be done by computers better and faster than by humans?

All the tasks humans still earn money doing. And given that we're nowhere near full automation, I'd say it's quite a few tasks.
Don't you also have to somehow get the up-to-date list of IP Address to Employee Name (as seems to be the claim)?
Oh, my apologies. I misread your comment.
Professional Engineers (note the capital 'E') are protected in the U.S. by such laws.

Professional engineers (note the lowercase 'e') are usually not protected in the U.S. -- they're regular employees whose profession happens to be engineering.
Why do you think so? I'd think both would have the same effect.
I have a serious bee in my bonnet about POWER9.

The architecture was something I was very excited about for low latency workloads; it seemed that only thing stopping IBM from overtaking x86 in this space was the actual availability of hardware. POWER9 has been "in the works" for, what, two years now [1]? Google have been running POWER9 internally for at least 12 months [2], and IBM seem to have been caught up in the AI hype train by pivoting the POWER9 to some kind of "AI processing system" [3].

Had the P9 been released before Skylake, it might have been successful. By the time it is GA, it will be competing with x86 chips two generations higher than were available at the original P9 announcements and SPECInt benchmarks.

This has been made even more frustrating by the fact that Oracle effectively killed off SPARC during this time. Perhaps Fujitsu will continue to run with it, but I think it's fair to say that development will stagnate and support will dwindle as it is increasingly obscure and niche architecture.

[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-po...

[2] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-i...
Sorry, I'm not sure I can give good advice on this because I got a bachelor's degree which is probably way more than needed. There's probably a more efficient way.
It also ignores that one campaign was being assisted by a foreign power

To the extent that this is true, campaign finance laws couldn't have stopped it. If anything, restricting the ability of Americans to express their opinions makes foreign propaganda even stronger.
> All that behavior will do is paint you as naive.

Then you aren't doing it right. There is something exceedingly shocking about a brutal bluntness. Master this and you will forever change your perspective on job interviews, relationships, marriage, and leadership. You will know when you really nail it because people will begin to describe you as articulate or eloquent.

Honesty is highly valued, which is counter-intuitive to perceptions of the corporate work culture where kindness is the most highly valued interpersonal quality. How can you be brutally honest if honesty often hurts peoples' feelings? Be confident and frame your remarks with a dose of empathy. People don't like having their feelings trampled upon, but they generally prefer that to little white lies.

> but only when used appropriately (strategically).

Epic fail. Always be honest and direct with people. If there is some policy preventing the most direct and appropriate answer then don't respond at all. People are generally good at discerning when you are tap-dancing or spinning your wheels (cowardly bullshit).

> but I NEED my paycheck more than

Once you have allowed your ethics to be compromised the blood is in the water. This is a natural stress that other people will detect as a deception and a weakness. You are compromised and available for manipulation. You are a puppet. If a job makes me feel that insecure, like the last one, I will leave and go work somewhere else.
Plastic within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is ‘increasing exponentially,’
In a certain sense everything is political. Every indictment makes a political statement about what sorts of crimes the government cares about and what sort of people will find themselves on the receiving end.

What makes these indictments more political than every other time the FBI prosecuted alleged spies?
In addition to what et-al said, the d3 wiki [1] has a list of tutorials. If you're looking for a book, I found Scott Murray's "Interactive Data Visualization for the Web" [2] to be good.

[1] https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Tutorials
[2] http://alignedleft.com/work/d3-book-2e
Adevarata origine a tiganilor (II)
You're referring to the thirty tyrants he disobeyed, his apparent sin in the public mind was staying in the city at that time - but since he also stayed in the same city after it condemned him to death, this isn't much of a demonstration of his loyalty to the tyrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants#Socrates_and_th...
Mastodon surely isn't the first decentralized social network to come about, but it seems to be the first one that I would refer to as a success.

This style of federation is the future of the web - and the only alternative to the corporate walled garden and advertising surveillance hell it has become. When the users have the power to vote with their feet, they become emancipated. When the administrators have the power to take decisive action in the interests of their communities without pleading their case to a greedy board of directors, our ability to freely conduct civil debate in good faith is protected.

I am looking forward to a handful of other projects taking up the same model, in the same spirit as Mastodon. It is truly one if the few remaining rays of sunshine available on the net.
>A person flagging down help on the side of the road. Are they going to do something while you're in a vulnerable position changing a tire?

There have been at least 2-3 different murderers who have used that technique in my local area within the last 5 years alone.It's just so wrong that I can't even wrap my head around it.
Check out Performance RNN: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/performance-rnn
Is anyone offering hosted Mastodon instances for a monthly/annual fee? Or is a VPS the route to go?
I've been self-learning d3 recently and I found Square's guide to be very helpful. It takes you through enough of the concepts that you're able to understand code snippets and understand what's going on

https://square.github.io/intro-to-d3/
There is the matter of skills as well. There is no skill in buying lottery tickets[1]. But there are many skills that help you succeed at startups(technical/domain knowledge, persuasion, marketing etc.). You have control over the skills you develop. The quality of your work is a reflection of your skill. And at the very least high quality work in the right context has slightly better than random chance at succeeding. Of course, the right context is so so important, and the multitude of factors that go into that are what probably make people draw the confusion that it's all luck.

Just because luck can create some overnight succeeds stories doesn't mean that all successes were purely created by luck. You have to be in a position to benefit from a lucky break in the first place.

[1]I'm not counting cases where people exploited weak randomness in ticket numbers to predict wins
>Not that any of us has used that disgusting API directly in the last 10 years.

Well, duh. It was a lower level API, offering more control.

Fetch isn't much better. Half-arsed at best, and also needs a higher level wrapper to achieve the same terseness as popular AJAX utility libs.
these are not startups though and you can't compare them to a startup.

sure, luck is a factor in everything but it's not a make or break factor in startups. in startups you make your own luck. you work hard, suffer the small wins and losses, until you get yourself in the right place at the right time. some people find that opportunity early, some later but both get there because they worked at it. even Uber founders had to work hard for it. and don't even get me started on Airbnb's founders
Maybe. I did get feedback from them, but that was a few years ago.
> I don't think it's heat throttled.

"Processors have two modes of thermal protection, throttling and automatic shutdown. When a core exceeds the set throttle temperature, it will start to reduce power to bring the temperature back below that point."

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
If you search Steam, there used to be V1 and this is V2, so there's that potential confusion.
If you get too idyllic you get conquered by jealous neighbors
How to get good sleep?
Anything that provides happiness can kill motivation, hopes, and dreams.

Whether it's weed, alcohol, harder drugs, gambling, or even video games like DoTA and WoW.

Obviously if someone is high at work, that's a problem. Same as someone being drunk, or playing games at work. But what we do in our own time is our own business.
I would only get a masters while working (that’s what I did). I wouldn’t forgo money and experience to get a masters and I wouldn’t go in debt to do it either.
Does standing more through the day improve innovation?
Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me.

Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a time getting through cities. Kids are going to learn that they can trigger a squealing emergency stop by lunging towards the curb - great fun!

What I think WILL happen is that autonomous cars will have to buy blanket insurance policies that cover their entire fleet. High accident/fatality rates will result in high insurance premiums, which will put bad actors out of business.
Tennessee lawmakers pass bill requiring public schools to post 'In God We Trust'
Email supermicro and ask about pricing, they are trying to gauge interest currently.
Given that we have material wealth 5-50 times higher than most people who have ever lived, virtually all of us.

Given that we are on a status treadmill with legally created artificial scarcity -- well, I still don't think it should be that hard, but apparently it is.
It also produced Justin Bieber and Weird Al. Point being, if the goal of your evolutionary algorithm is Bach, how do you filter for that result among the other million possibilities? And what makes Bach the success of music? Maybe more people prefer listening to Taylor Swift.
It's a false dichotomy to assume that everyone has a "side", and pushing that is part of the deflection.
Mastodon itself isn't a new network, it leverages existing networks (OStatus and ActivityPub).
>To the extent that this is true, campaign finance laws couldn't have stopped it

Again, the investigation is still underway and the full extent of the assistance is still unknown, meaning you can't assert that until the findings are released.
The i-Series are not all-electric: only the base-model i3 is - which has an unimpressive range without the optional gasoline-powered range extender, while the i8 is a hybrid with a 3-cylinder engine.
For MSFT, I don't think it was risk aversion. As you note, they could have spent a relatively small sum to test it out. But that's not the way the culture worked.

Creating a fully electric car is a bigger investment, but if they produced a limited edition high end vehicle, they would sell out and make money. (The i8 is something like ~$150K. There are other smaller volume vehicles with 6 figure price points in the line up that would support profitable electric variants.) I'm not saying they could just cut over the 3 series to electric right away, but I think the reason they haven't offered an electric option at the high end of the range, which would be faster than what they've got, with a great low center of gravity, is cultural, not economic.
One accident is clearly not one data point. If Uber had driven a billion miles with 0 accidents, we would safely conclude they were safer than human drivers with "0 data points".

Assuming that accidents are independent, we can model this as a Poisson point process. If the accident rate is 1 per 100M miles and Uber has driven 3M miles, the probability of there being zero accidents in that time is P{n=0} = ((λt)^n / n!) * e^(-λt), where λ=1/100M and t=3M. Doing the math, it seems that's 97.04%.

So, yes. It is possible that Uber's accident rate is 1 in 100 million. If so, this incident would fall in that remaining 3%. It's unlikely, but possible.
https://maastodon.net/
I'm interested in the reasons this annoys you, as I find nearly all the installation problems we see in node is when somebody has included some C code that needs to be built.
A Gentle Introduction to Neural Networks for Machine Learning
<cynical thought>So the HR person's cousin has applied, huh?
very cool! Doing it in process definitely allows for some cool things. Specifically this: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-GCP...
MSFT might have been too early, and you're certainly right that there was no guarantee of success, but back then, MSFT was the company everyone feared and they had a lot of clout.
Looks good so far. Pretty exciting, can't wait to find more info. Would be good to have the name and hopefully an indictment. I understand it probably won't be acted on unless the person travels overseas but still. It seems there is some real evidence there - a particular IP address.

In general, I never quite could figure out Guccifer 2.0. It seemed like it was multiple people, just based on going from terribly broken English to fluent within the same paragraph. Which would be consistent with this part of the story

---

Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0’s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English that the persona’s earlier efforts.

---

> Do you retract your statement?

Not yet. I'd want wait and see what happens with this one. There was another similar story of a written confession from someone in jail who claimed they were order to hack the DNC. http://www.newsweek.com/russian-hacker-stealing-clintons-ema... that one says it was FSB not GRU but they probably work together. I haven't heard much since.
Tremendous. Thank you.
Hence OP was suggesting not following the semantic versioning model.

Why would they do that? To have extra work and to have to carry deprecated garbage and compatibility ports for a few releases more, instead of making a clean new version?

Those that need compatibility can stick with 4 until they're ready.
This event has me thinking about job of the behind-the-wheel backup driver. They get an easier job than a real driver, at the cost of potentially taking the fall if an accident occurs. I wonder if the pay is better.
The Volvo electric car prototypes (that they distributed only in fleet and car-sharing use in Sweden) had a tiny 3-liter gasoline tank used only for a heater
It took me half a minute to just parse the title.

Edit: I mean the title of this post here. The title of the linked article is, of course, very easy to read.
[Julia again] Y'all should read the article! These examples of "lightning striking" absolutely happens to people that don't work hard for it. But knowing and appreciating the role of chance doesn't mean that hard work doesn't pay off, because hard work can make you more likely to experience a stroke of luck.
It's odd on a site like HN that ideas like this occur to hardly anyone. Well, on certain subject matter of course.

Lets see what Jonathan Haidt has to say on the matter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nNT0JtHT8
It surprises me how downplayed this is. If you legally treat the Uber car as an ordinary car that happens to have a really fancy auto-assist, the driver should be on the hook. This person had eyes off the road for 5 seconds prior to the crash according to the article.

There was a case some years ago in Boston where a subway rear-ended another one because the operator was texting. The driver was fired and probably would have been prosecuted if there had been fatalities. Taking eyes off the road for this long seems insane to me.
> I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability

I really like interview questions that have binary results. If you can do X, you can do this job. That way if a candidate fails, they pretty much know why they failed. They couldn't do X. It's not always possible to phrase questions like that, but when I can, I do.
I've been seeing this more and more on HN in the past few weeks (maybe months?) of unpopular and dissenting comments getting down-voted like on Reddit.
Trump announces $60B tariff on Chinese high-tech and other goods