skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it just me, or is this example not an experiment? There was just pre and post change measures, with no comparison group. The measure of success was "use more threads" which was the same as the treatment, instead of the actual goal, making an improved perception that a Slack channel was faster and easier to read (and potentially improving productivity: faster ship, more tests passing 1st time, etc.).

A better method might have been something like: Pick two channels with equal traffic and relevance to business, require one channel to emphasize threads and respect quiet, let the other go on as they are, compare groups at the end on the actual metric of concern (of users in each group, quick check/survey of perceived utility, ease, value of the channel). Could even have done same measure in the beginning as well to show change over time comparison. Still not random selection, but better.

"But that's a lot more work", some might say. But without this extra work, there is no actual experiment. The test just says that threads are good and when we ask folks to use them, they do. But look at the data; Slack message count decreased from Q4 17 to Q1 18; any change in actual utility could be due to seasonality, shipping vs. bug bashing, other changes that resulted in fewer messages so threading wasn't needed; maybe threading caused fewer messages, maybe threading caused people to choose not to comment when they would have otherwise... but we can't tell from this design.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with iterating. But call it that: "Iterate and change, measure, repeat if change correlated with goodness". A formal Experiment is designed to show that the change you made _caused_ a change in something else, something important to you or your business. Without a formal experiment, you just have correlation, hope, tribal knowledge, instinct, experience... all great things, none of which support causation.

And not everything needs this level of rigor, and that's totally fine; maybe that's the case in top post example. But if a change is expensive in terms of workflow, effort, or actual expense, perhaps it's worth doing a more structured test before committing.

If you've never had an experimental design experience, try reading anything at http://exp-platform.com/ (Kohavi's work at Microsoft) or search for DOE design of experiments at your favorite search engine; also articles on "A/B Testing" often give suggestions on how to best structure a controlled experiment. And recognize that most older work focuses on traditional ANOVA and t-tests, but there are all sorts of other modern ways to assess impact.

(edit: corrected typos)
After working all day deploying webservers in applications in containers in container management environments in virtual networks in virtual servers, its really nice just to drop files in a folder and update a webapp. I've always loved PHP for this, and that's basically what bigCGI is supposed to be about.
This seems incorrect because as far as I know Theranos didn't innovate. Their machines didn't work, did they?
Show HN: Free Online HTML Editor with real-time visual feedback
I've mistyped it many times, precisely because it's alternate hands. Sometimes the left hand descends first.
Nature journal retracts controversial CRISPR collateral damage paper
He was put in because Chicago’s third-string goalie injured himself in the pre-game warmups, and their fourth-string goalie who started the game was injured in the third period. It is REALLY unusual for an emergency goalie to actually play in a game.
Sure, sure. But while it's definitely not in the standard, I do see it all over, and it's something I picked up from reading a lot of other people's lisp. SBCL internals, for example. You might not like the convention and chose not to follow along with it, but I would be surprised if, after 18 years of lisp, you had never seen it before, and would choose to misspell an accessor to prevent a clash instead of naming it differently.

Edit: ah, I think I understand. I don't mean to imply that all accessors should be named in this way. That would be gross.
The comment I was replying to was, AFAICT, implying that people don't have much choice now, today.
https://github.com/keel-hq/keel
I'm not a huge fan of hockey but the sport seems to have so many interesting things like this that really sets it apart from other major sports. Could you ever see the NFL letting an amateur walk on the same day and play in a real game?
This was the same for us. The exception was the teacher that made me fall in love with history as a subject. He was also an assistant basketball coach, but he was passionate about history.
Yes!

The sentiment is something I (and I suspect many other engineers) feel, but not able to express it nearly so simply and elegantly.

Before you sit down and start writing that code or creating that new algorithm, stop and think about what you really want to achieve.
Hardly.

You're getting sidetracked by the terrorism stuff. Of course, any communication network can be used to communicate bad things. But that's not the main point of the memo. I don't know why you'd stop reading and thinking there and draw conclusions.

The scary part is the strong and clear call to all of Facebook that the ends absolutely justifies the means. That growing the network is good and it's the only good.

Privacy? Security? Health? Truth? Law? Integrity and ethics?

The message is clear that none of these are important if you can grow the network.
This just made my day :).
Teams have a list of standby players like this in the list. Some teams equipment managers are in the list, and have training if it comes to it. To have to go four levels deep is pretty rare.

From the times I've seen this level of standby dressing for the game, usually the first stringer is already injured and the back-up gets hurt in warmups. Then the third-stringer is playing and the fourth-stringer (equipment manager, extreme backup, whoever) is dressed but doesn't play.

It just so happens in this game, it got to that.
...

"Collins, a former television producer and director, left his TV career behind three years ago in order to focus full-time on using his planes to educate audiences."
I'm surprised its not just one of the players on the roster. Somebody who played goalie in high school or something. In soccer you occasionally see a hurt or red carded goalie replaced by a field player if the team has already used their allowed substitutions for the game. But I guess goalie is just that different in hockey.
https://twitter.com/boztank

"VP AR/VR at Facebook. VP of Ads before that. Co-Invented News Feed, Messenger, Groups, and more."

(Those are UI features/sub-products. Not inventions. The fact that you adapted/copied something that has been built thousands of times before in other contexts, like "Groups", to fit the Facebook context does not make it an invention. It may be talented product/UX thinking, but invention?)

Never met the guy, but I I've seen videos of him presenting over the years.

The Douche is strong with this one.
The equipment manager story happened, too [1]!. In that case, he only went on to play the last 8 seconds of the game so it wasn't as crazy as this occurrence since Scott got to play 13 minutes of NHL hockey.

[1]: https://deadspin.com/the-hurricanes-playing-their-equipment-...
Upset that their options are worth less than before.
Yea, they sell culture and give away free food.
As you can see[0], most devs at FB are eating, traveling, eating, going to cafes or eating some more. ;-)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWFDujYzvbI
A process where any idea is always given consideration is naturally highly vulnerable to sybil attacks.

For example, there's a reason why once upon a time we had agreed (as a society) to never accept any new potents for perpetual motion machines - because the only ideas that were left are the bad ones, and we can prove it.

Now if there comes a time in history when the laws of physics suddenly discover something new - we may re-approach our decision. But I don't think many educated people believe it's going to happen anytime soon.
Canadian legislation aims to change how juries are selected
It's probably fine when you're buying everything new today. Building computers out of salvage parts adds a lot of complication.
Innovated? More like blatantly lied and committed fraud, I'd say
Just clarifying this in case it wasn't clear for others.

There is an Equifax global CIO above the Equifax US Info Systems business unit CIO. Global CIO knew, Info Sys CIO inferred.
Do you honestly believe you can’t have both? I’m not saying all data should be public, what I am saying is if what you’re discussing is morally repugnant given your past history it shouldn’t surprise you if it gets leaked.
It’s not a suggestion, it’s an admission.

There are so many indirect ways to enable harm that you’d probably be hard pressed to find a company that connects people that isn’t somehow causing harm.

You’ve never worked at a startup with a product that required a moderation team?

If your product requires a moderation team, you’re under the umbrella of enabling negative content.

To give an example, people working on video games with online play are enabling a toxic environment where verbal abuse often occurs.

Are they trying to be evil? No.

But in the course of money and growth they add chat to add a social aspect and enable it. More people than not get a positive experience.

The tacky startup aspect is the fact you’d write that down in a memo. Everyone knows it, it’s not some brilliant revelation to wave up and down and act all high and mighty about.
Ignorance to the law does not make you immune to the law.
Euclider: Non-Euclidean raytracing prototype written in Rust
"many giraffes are slaughtered just for their tails, which are considered a status symbol and have been used as a dowry when asking a bride’s father for his daughters hand in marriage in some cultures."

Humans are the most wasteful species.
The analogy is still broken because the Facebook memo, although cold and calculating, is still blatantly sugarcoating what they do and why they do it. It's not about connecting people at heart, and they do it through much more nefarious means than simply potentially letting their tools fall into the hands of bad actors.
Linux gives you sync_file_range(2), which solves the granularity problem of fsync(2). (Not that it's a particularly big problem anyway if you store your data and log in two separate files. Your data need only be synced during checkpointing, and you always want to sync everything recently written to your log.) fsync(2) semantic issues aside.

While SCSI does support explicit write ordering, many SANs do not. They define write ordering (and therefore crash consistency) using only request-after-reply semantics. So the fact that memory-barrier-style primitives aren't exposed for file or block isn't a big loss for portable applications either.
Build Systems à la Carte [pdf]
MacOS External GPU Review – Out-Of-Body Experiment
Is this based on any research on speed reading?

I always thought that speed reading was non-linear with a kind of gestalt mechanic at work. This seems more like speed listening which is a 1D stream.
I, too, have "l" aliased, but years of muscle memory I still type "ls -lahp" every single friggin' time. Hey, at least it's portable when I'm ssh'd to another system.
I just learned about these last year from a coworker. I still have a way too old one in a ziploc bag in the fridge, because I was suppose to try and grow a seedling.
I'm always shocked by how easily people fall into cults and groupthink. I guess our biology is just tuned for it.
I'm opening a can of worms by saying what I'm about to say but here goes nothing: Why are people criticizing individual companies for "growing at all cost"? Every company was once a start-up fighting to survive, every large company was once medium size and had to fight with the Google, Amazon of their days. It is not the Nash equilibrium to NOT try growing at all cost. If they don't, they'll lose. So at what point should a company stop trying to grow at all cost? Is it when they've won all battles, like Google? So why are we looking into the past to criticize Facebook, Uber, and potentially many more startups that are "growing at all cost"? Of course, the definition of "all cost" shouldn't be taken too literally.
Sleep deprived person is able to sleep in the dark. Try again. And no, even if suboptimal, middle class teenagers don't go through atrocity nor torture.

If you actually went to bed and stayed there and could not sleep anyway despite being horribly sleep deprived, then you really should visit some sleep center to help you. It is not nearly the same as mild performance drop due to having suboptimal sleep time.
Where I live, yaupon is free (pick from ornamental bushes in front yard, or around practically any office building).
Nice to know that conspiracy theories run wild INSIDE Facebook as well as among users.

Maybe that’s why they’re so bad about controlling obviously bad information.

It couldn’t possibly be because people disagreed with that ethos. No. It’s the Mongolians.
I mean, yeah, you could, but that's not as much fun.
How do you tell Theranos from not-Theranos before you'd invested a bunch of money in them?

As far as we know there were quite a few large players in the industry who were uninterested in Theranos - which means they have rejected their ideas before the ideas came into living.
MacOS finally gains external GPU support
> My best guess is that no single business could grow to
Facebook's size, but that there would likely be a steady
state of a lot of little networks of various kinds. And
don't just think 25 Facebook clones, but thing Facebook
vs. LinkedIn vs. the SomethingAwful forums vs. Reddit; I
would expect significant diversity.

We already have this, it's called the web. I'm not being facetious. I miss the days when google drove traffic not to rapidly updated fluff but deep articles and informed posts. I miss the possibility of communicating with a wide audience with a self hosted blog post. I'm not sure it can come back, but maybe the kind of regulations you suggest - in effect taxing the externalities of data harvesting, are worthwhile considering.

Facebook should have been censured long ago for capturing content, and anti-competitively promoting locally hosted (at the expense of off site content).

This is a whole other issue that's being forgotten with the current privacy debate. Silos away from the open web accelerate and even create polarisation. The filter bubble is both unnecessary and harmful, and as or more important to regulate than privacy.
>I feel you’ve intentionally twisted my words.

I don't. Make comparisons, own them.
His post-game interview is great, too: https://twitter.com/BradyTrett/status/979563904387788800
Well, did he post an equally strong, unambiguous retraction and ensure it reached all the people the original post did?

He could have taken strong steps to undo this memo, if he really regretted it and didn't agree with what it says.

To me it looks like the "guilty conscience" of someone simply trying to evade consequences.
What about those kids who wake up early?

I've always been a morning person. Even as a kid I remember waking up with the sun because sleeping always felt like a waste a time with so much fun stuff to do.
Why stop there? `shopt -s autocd`
original paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23044-8

abstract:

Misalignments between endogenous circadian rhythms and the built environment (i.e., social jet lag, SJL) result in learning and attention deficits. Currently, there is no way to assess the impact of SJL on learning outcomes of large populations as a response to schedule choices, let alone to assess which individuals are most negatively impacted by these choices. We analyzed two years of learning management system login events for 14,894 Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) students to investigate the capacity of such systems as tools for mapping the impact of SJL over large populations while maintaining the ability to generate insights about individuals. Personal daily activity profiles were validated against known biological timing effects, and revealed a majority of students experience more than 30 minutes of SJL on average, with greater amplitude correlating strongly with a significant decrease in academic performance, especially in people with later apparent chronotypes. Our findings demonstrate that online records can be used to map individual- and population-level SJL, allow deep mining for patterns across demographics, and could guide schedule choices in an effort to minimize SJL’s negative impact on learning outcomes.
Yeah, I agree. People these days just seem to want to pile on people's comments (sometimes said in a very casual setting) by twisting them and taking the most uncharitable reading. As has happened with your comment too.
This. The memo tone really is more like growth justifies all evil
It's fun imagining this attitude applied to the Space Race.

>So we go to space.

>That can be bad if they say accidents happen. Maybe three of our guys die on the launchpad. Maybe a spacecraft is lost on recovery.

>And we still go to space.

>The ugly truth is that we believe in going to space so deeply that anything that allows us to go to space more is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

>That's why all the work we do in space-going is justified. All the pure oxygen environments. All the hatch designs that can only be opened from the outside. All the ad hoc procedures and cheap wiring. The work we will likely have to do on the Moon some day. All of it.
The minimum latency will still be at least ~5ms (worse if nodes are very far apart) and especially bad for contended reads (because of the way they use clocks for serializable operations).

A traditional RDBMS does not have to worry about split brain decisions, but it can hardly do multi-master in the intuitive way.
It's more every city/arena has an emergency backup. Each team has to have someone on call who can get to the arena in the event either team has a last minute injury to one of their goaltenders. The backup for Philly has "played" for both the Flyers & Hawks.
I don't think they even get money [1]. They do get to keep the jersey though!

[1]: https://www.secondcityhockey.com/2016/12/3/13829264/eric-sem...
You an usually use `NODE_PATH=src` which will make requiring anything inside `src` easy as `import something from 'somewhere';`
I bought some from a random site[1] that turned up when I searched duckduckgo for "cassina tea" because Amazon didn't return any results for cassina. Lots for yaupon, but that came farther down the article.

[1]https://wildsouthtea.com/pages/about-cassina
I read the memo, it’s a little rude to tell someone they didn’t read something they did, no?

And I guess I’ll agree to disagree. All I read was a tacky attempt at acknowledging bad people are allowed to use good things. I think you’re painting your own narrative on to a cliche startup growth memo ex post facto in a world where they’ve finished growing
Not everyone is a programmer in the Valley or East Coast that can just Slack their manager "will be an hour late today because X!" and everything is fine. For the vast majority of people, even white collar employees, not being at work at 9 a few times may mean termination.
I sort of learned that while talking to an AMD engineer, so I don't quite have a link handy. But it sort of just follows from Tomasulo's algorithm.
From Former Uber PM – Global Product and Customer Obsession
I'll say that wasn't my experience, it was just about trying to verify my position, but maybe they decided to look into other stuff, they certainly didnt tell me or take my phone.
The Guardian has a great piece on this, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...

Below is an excerpt

———

The public image of Silicon Valley’s tech giants is all colourful bicycles, ping-pong tables, beanbags and free food, but behind the cartoonish facade is a ruthless code of secrecy. They rely on a combination of Kool-Aid, digital and physical surveillance, legal threats and restricted stock units to prevent and detect intellectual property theft and other criminal activity. However, those same tools are also used to catch employees and contractors who talk publicly, even if it’s about their working conditions, misconduct or cultural challenges within the company.
Justice Dept. charges Minnesota FBI agent for leaking document to the Intercept
So he’s a web master in more ways than one.

(I had to do it. It’s Friday.)
The point of an analogy seems to be missed on you. There is no actual analogous company to facebook because no company does everything like facebook.
I think roughly the same about the provocative terrorists/someone might die part of the quoted memo, but the same argument completely fails to make sense for the other part, where he lists all those questionable things they do for growth and calls them ok (because they are less bad than terrorism? Seriously?)

A phone company analogy would be pretending that cancellation letters never arrived to get another 24 months from a leaving customer, or getting some call center agent to tease out a statement from the customer that could be mistaken for a revokation of the cancellation (they tried to pull that on me once and did not even speak to me, apparently some random flatmate on the phone was considered good enough to mark that checkbox)
Toward Reality TV MBAs
> Not even having a "probation" time after people have been released from prison; they did their time, they are free again

I think you're mistaken about what probation is.

Probation is part of your time. You're sentenced for a given period of time, and at some point you may be released to serve the rest of that time in the community, on probation.

Their sentence isn't over, and they aren't 'free' while they are on probation. It's part of the original sentence still.

Probation allows people to serve part of their sentences back in the community when they are safe to do so. If you're arguing against having probation you're arguing for longer time spent in prison.
Can a club [The Wing] for women legally exclude men? NYC launches probe
Creative Breast Enhancement Techniques
You reminded me of "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (http://a.co/aCbN01n) .. what a classic.

There is a section in the book on the plane that won the duration contest. More or less a rectangular wing as I recall with just enough forward mass to give it forward movement and just enough dihedral to keep it stable.

Edit: found a page where the first image is of that record setting duration flight: http://www.codex99.com/design/the-paper-airplane-book.html
How does such an attorney and judge feel after such a trial? Do they feel satisfied, fulfilled? Taking away 5 years of someone's life over a little mistake that didn't hurt anyone? I don't get it: why does a free people like the Americans allow for that kind of sinister figures to be their prosecutors and judges?