skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking of making a comment here, describing this as precisely my experience. I work on an old legacy system. I have done so for some time, from junior to lead. [Edit: wait, I meant to say "i have discovered this same principle but you expressed it better than me". instead, i just described my experience.]

And I can see from experience that every refactor we did that was "this is the latest and greatest and we'll write the new feature like this and we'll just start migrating everything over to this eventually" has been an utter failure.

But the changes that were by their nature spread throughout the system automatically have been so much easier to work with. You don't even notice them. (Which makes it harder to get credit for it. If I have to train a new dev up today, I can say "the system is a little crappy, but we're trying to make it better". But they'll never see that we've made huge progress. But they will see the four different database abstractions we've got going on and they'll curse me, because this is where you see some work.

It is better to have a crappy core that you gradually fix, then do have a crappy core that remains there and five crappy other cores from each different dev. And whatever problems are caused by the shitty database abstraction some idiot dev created are always going to be there, so you might as well just live in that world.
We are not a banana republic. Whatever the merits of Trump's complaints regarding Amazon, this is not how the system is supposed to work. The president is ordering a review of the Post Office because of a personal grudge against a newspaper. This isn't acceptable use of power.
This article made me think of Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B. F. Skinner. I haven't read it, yet. Has anyone?
>* They're the only shipping company that I trust to deliver to an apartment building. Seriously. I've had nightmares with every other company delivering to apartments

This hints at the real reason the postal service is so important to hold on to. They have a mandate to deliver to every person in the country no matter what.[0] They run huge losses to do this, but it's an invaluable service subsidized by taxpayer dollars the same as any other infrastructure. A private company has no incentive to do this if it's not profitable. People in rural areas and unconventional living situations will get screwed.

[0] https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100/pub100_020.htm
It is unfortunate that it is not more famous. I did mention that there are sites that depends on targeted advertising that would be affected in the final version of the essay, though there is not much detail about it. Feel free to come up with other solutions BTW. I have a Google Group you can join: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-mozilla-probl...
Sure, you can ping me at ever.io
Nice, I like this. Cross platform too
Aho
Hahahahah
Knowing which way is north and south is different from being able to visually see it. It's likely that you knew which way is north and south without realising it. Even if you were very good at tricking yourself, you may have got it right just by chance.

I seem to have a very good intuitive sense of direction. When I lived in Ottawa, though, I used to always get lost when I hit the river. It took me years to figure out what the problem was. The river runs roughly east west and so all the signs say "East" or "West", but it's actually in the shape of a V. Most of the time it's running NW/SE or NE/SW. Every time I hit the river, I'd consciously think that I'm going East/West when in reality I was going in a completely different direction. It really threw me off.

I think people are more attuned to direction than they think. Direction of the sun, time of day, landmarks, direction of shadows, position of moss on trees, etc, etc. After years and years of seeing it, your brain get's pretty good at orienting you -- even if you don't consciously understand it. These days, I try not to reason about my orientation, but rather guess. I tend to have better results.
WaniKani is a lot more limiting than Anki (which is free and open source) since it has a fixed schedule, while Anki allows you to learn at whatever pace you wish. In addition, it offers next to no customization.

There's a WK deck if you really want to use their content.
ISIS must be peeved they can't get the cute is.is URL.
Tell me this isn't because the vision is defense contracting. Are people banking on Space Force here?
It’s what happened to all the billionaires that got into the NYC market in 2007. Sold everything at 50+% loss and shit on the economy.
The real issue is that if you did solve those problems you’d be left with the truth that we don’t want thousands of noisy “flying cars” buzzing around, polluting, and occasionally falling on our heads. Flying cars don’t scale. If you took a significant percentage of ground traffic into the sky, it would be an absolute nightmare.
If it's so extremely obvious, why does it happen time and time again? I think I've spent all of my time arguing against this process. It's bad. It's better to improve on a bad design, than to make a bad design worse by adding another design to it. But it's hard to notice that.
http://wael.boutglay.com/2018/04/13/the-story-behind-superst...
I think the bigger part of the story is that the criticism involves a plausible scenario for terrestrial contamination that requires no new physics at all. Needless to say that needs to be ruled out before we spend more time than necessary pontificating about dark matter.
> Hopefully the Labor Party would oppose such a bill and it wouldn't make it through the Senate (no guarantees).

Oh, please. They don't understand technology or its impacts, just like the current government. All they hear is that encryption prevents law enforcement from doing what they want. It'll go through the Senate.
Ok, so if they rename it to 'lane guidance' or whatever, everything would be cool?
The more different "big, professional" companies I've worked at, the more I've come to the conclusion that no-one knows what they're doing and everyone's just making things up on the fly. So yeah, I'd pay it.
Unfortunately due to bureaucracies and politics, the investors (and founder) have a very particular point of view and change is nearly impossible.

Some of us have tried (multiple times) in the past to rekindle that thrill and excitement but issues still persisted and nothing changed. With enough time (almost) anything is possible, I just can't wait around forever for promises to be made and broken over and over again.

I fear many small failures are unavoidable in the short term (2+ years) and I need to focus on my own personal and career growth for me and my family.
100% to this. I’m an enginer also working on GDPR and you sound exactly like my product manager. GDPR is likelly to result in the number of advertising technology companies going from thousands to dozens. One of the requirements is that you inform users who you are sharing the data with. If you have a list of ~10 companies is allowed under GDPR, but a constantly change it list of 500 companies is not. The result massive consolidation.

This is very ironic because one the the complaints of the EU against companies like Facebook or Google is that they are monopolies in the advertising space, and then they passed a law that will have the effect of force it their competion out of the market place.

It’s a real shame that no one is really covering this aspect of GDPR.
I think the worst case is substantially worse than that. Look at the so-called "voter fraud commission". They pretend-investigated a non-problem, creating a lot of news that could only reduce confidence in the US electoral system. And then it was abruptly shut down in a way that certainly added no clarity to the issue.

There's no particular reason to think the task force will actually be either equipped to investigate this usefully or disposed to investigate it fairly. So the worst case for me is something more like, "Politicized task force produces woefully biased report in order to indirectly attack the free press, further reducing confidence in American government, increasing uncertainty for businesses, and reducing economic growth."
I doubt it's really about legal issues. Could they just disable or scale back the autopilot? Or at least warn people to not rely on it while avoiding any commentary about the facts of the accident. That'd be more polite/deferential to the investigators and to the victim.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some fear over allowing uncertainty to fester for a year while awaiting the results of the investigation. But I think there's a much bigger risk in being perceived as unwilling to play by the same rules as everyone else.
> I don't know how he does it.

Well, I can think of two prior examples of this particular one:

* The first is fictional. In Person of Interest, one of the AIs does this in 4x22/5x01 (2015/2016) [0] to escape the other one.

* The second, which has existed in the real world for decades, I only remembered after starting to type a joking comment about the prior point: The X10 standard is for using existing power lines for controlling home automation equipment. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Person_of_Interest_epi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)
Something like this? https://www.micro-mobility.com/en/experience-micro/microlino
Ask HN: What do you use Keras for?
I've seen quite a few tutorials on Keras, primarily for hobbyists learning about Deep Learning and using it for toy models and the like. I've also seen a few libraries and approaches to make pushing Keras/TF models to production, but I don't know what the market penetration of the framework is like or what it is used for in industry or academia.

From what I can gather, the research world has a heavy Tensorflow and PyTorch presence these days, and industry heavily utilizes Tensorflow or the company's own tools (Caffe2, MXNet, CNTK).

Does anybody here use Keras for model building in your company or for academic research tasks? If so, what does your workflow or development setup like?
...from rinsed hands, not hands washed with soap.
Wash your hands thoroughly.
Find a way to exit the bathroom without touching the door handle.
Dry your hands somewhere clean.
I really like Slate....but the ability to do collaborative editing is relatively new.

Have you done anything with collaborative editing with Slate? If so, how are you finding it?
Is fast charging and short periods of stopping really that much of an issue?
> To do the same in WASM sounds rather undesirable.

This can be automated though; it's what we've been working on in Rust, and the approach is fundamentally language-agnostic.
> The crypto that protects a Tor hidden service is much weaker than you can have in HTTPS.

Could you explain what you mean by that?
Learn music harmony
I've been using Anki as called it by a sibling. I'm not super excited about it because everything about it is just a mess. But the are great pre-made decks and it's easy to find help because so many people use it.
There is also memrise which seems to be gaining in popularity.
If you are using Genki the publisher provides their own mobile apps.
Most people have the wrong idea. It is actually profitable but back during the Bush years a law was passed requiring USPS to set aside enough money to fund a 75 year retirement liability, and gave them 10 years to do it. They "lose" billions each year only because of this requirement to set aside billions for pensions.

https://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432

https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume
My main complaint is that I still don't see any way to do subscripts or mathematical expressions. Some subreddits recommend browser extensions that allow embedding some kind of TeX variant and render it, but that only helps if you use one of the browsers that has one of those extensions.
JSON Parse Result Not Shown on Recyclerview?
Is there a Linux (or wireless) solution for transferring music to my iPhone yet? VLC Player allows for wireless sync via web browser, but it lacks way too many features to be used regularly just for music.
Codejam 2018 qualifications
Reading this thread, I'm lead to wonder if there's any open source, Wikipedia style (public editing) apps / sites / courses being developed? This would certainly combat the scaling issue, as Duolingo's comments seem to imply.
> Wasted confidence.

This is probably the biggest factor (money is the least). I've had numerous failed projects. I have a current project/business (it's in my profile) which I believe to be in the process of failing. I don't know if I have another one in me.

Sure, I've learned a lot. From a purely technical standpoint, each new project has been superior to the one before - and in the case of my latest, I've at least produced something that I find useful. But, the ego can only take so much abuse.

Not sure I trust myself with ideas anymore. I need someone to tell me what to build :)
Not speaking for the green account, but, yes, I think improving the economic standing of all people would go a long way towards getting people out of the sex trade or from entering into it.
But you can't... the future is a derivative of Bitcoin, not actual Bitcoin.
I wouldn't be so sure; they say he can write a GUI in Visual Basic.
Pretty sure the are just banking on SpaceX dominating the global space launch services market for the next few years. Signs increasingly point to this being a safe bet.

The valuation is higher than the annual global launch market, but below what it's projected to reach in the next few years. If SpaceX can maintain their current share of the global market for a few years the valuation may be conservative.
I cant imagine where you get that idea. We easily assign minimum values (in any store of value you want) to life constantly. People are what make things valuable. Using "money" to talk about value seems to be the hang up, but you haven't said why.
Great point. Also important that your customers may not even know what is possible, so they won't know to ask for it directly. Instead, if we ask why they want something, we can understand their intents - and translate that into technology.

We've seen this a lot with text analytics - instead of trying to repeat what humans do manually (reading/annotating), we try to understand the questions that clients are interested in (the drivers behind their current workflow).
Yeah, everything you said is ridiculous.

Journals are very much a profit center for the publishers. Scientific journal publishing is a wildly profitable business[1][2][3] and it is not all the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal quality. They are almost certainly monopoly rents. And the idea that membership fees pay for the journals is also silly. It's well known that it's institutions who pay the outrageous subscription fees for the journal that are actually powering this racket.

The interesting point here is that Sci-Hub isn't really a threat to the publishers. Like with most piracy it's not clear that the people using Sci-Hub would purchase the papers if Sci-Hub weren't available. And no matter what the publishers can always count on those fat institutional subscription fees. And that's what this is really about. The ultimate danger of Sci-Hub is that it undermines the very idea of a journal. Individual scientific papers become the unit of trade and people will take those papers on an a la carte basis. SciHub, if it were left alone, would unbundle science publishing and you'd see a drastic fall in profits.

This is all about money and protecting a wildly profitable business model. The idea that this is about supporting editors is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[3] https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...
I just want this, sans text, as my an Apple TV screensaver.
It is staggering, but I feel that the # of cases reported and successfully resolved will be much less over the next few years. I feel it goes both ways, there will be less revenue for the bad actors. I’m reminded of the times in high school, the parents who would allow drinking somewhat at home, vs the parents who hardlined and drove kids away. At least they could keep an eye on them.
So they plan to make offers on houses near market rate, invent a "fee" to account for the fact that they won't actually be paying market rate, and then turn around and sell the same house at market rate, pocketing the fee.

For this to work at scale a lot of people must be in a situation where they can't afford the holding costs associated with waiting for their house to sell for what it's worth. Or a lot of people's houses have appreciated sufficiently that Zillow's fee is a non-issue. If anyone knows if this is true, I guess Zillow would.
> The biggest limiting factor is number of opportunities.

Could you elaborate. Do you mean more opportunities to fail and learn ?
Very cool!

At my current place of employment, I have been trying to push Django signals for a little while now as a good way to drive our metrics.

One of the chief concerns about signals however, is that they're fairly isolated, and it's not always obvious what gets triggered when (for example) save() is called. This is, of course, one of the drawbacks to loose coupling.

Something like @hook would be a good response to those who have this concern, because the hook code is attached to the model directly, meaning when you wonder to yourself, "What happens when I call save()?", you need look no further than the model itself.

I'll pitch this to my colleagues and see what they have to say!
This might also be another way how Elon can keep financing Tesla. SpaceX has in the past bought bonds of SolarCity, with this new cash perhaps SpaceX can buy some Tesla bonds to save it from running out of cash this year.
How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Improve Quality Control
Backpage was not for middle class white escorts. Mostly black and Latina with some marginal white girls like crackheads and nutcases.
It backpage wasn’t limiting itself to consensual sex work. They were literally working with pimps that were selling kidnapped children to be raped.
I think the main thing is their Starlink satellite internet constellation, which I recently saw was estimated to bring in $30 billion/year once it’s fully operational. They also have basically taken over the satellite launch market, and I think their recent progress on the BFR isn’t hurting.
I am pro-free market and fiscally conservative and don't get why Trump is picking this fight with Amazon. Amazon is fantastic for consumers. Sure they have put ton's of American small brick and mortars out of business and even brought down retail institutions such as Sears and perhaps next Macy's. Yet they provide an outlet for small niche makers to sell their products to a huge online market for essentially no-overhead. Market decides, and the market has chosen the Amazon model.

In terms of them "dodging" state taxes, as far as I know they are fully compliant. If president Trump wants to make them pay their fair share, then adjust the laws. Wasn't this the same argument Trump made about not paying a ton of taxes, he said it is just smart business and he is totally compliant within the law.
Can you explain this comment please?
> I vehemently disagree. People should be doing what they want, not what some other random person thinks they should be doing. Cities have dead periods all the time: people leave new york in the winter, or buenos aires in the summer. The idea that a community grows stronger by putting a fence is a sad one to me.

A society's benefit takes precedent over the desires of individuals. A society wants people living in their homes most of the time. They want the majority of housing for residents with very few, specific examples such as resort towns.

> It is the equivalent premise to saying that you should ban hotels so there are more long term residents, or known as, reduce short term housing stock to increase long term housing stock.

Again, that's not the case. Hotels are purpose built, temporary places for people to stay. AirBnB is made on the premise of converting existing long-term housing in to short-term rentals.

> You might also not hear anyone say they use cabs more because of lyft and uber but I assure you that they do. Hotels have not particularly suffered their market share because of airbnb, but airbnb is widely used in all major cities. Hostels probably took a hit, but nowhere near the usage airbnb has. Hotels ~=, Hostels -=, Airbnb ++++= => people are travelling more.

I don't have any numbers here and without doing it, I'm not going to hand wave at it anymore.
You don't need enough to catch them all in a single day. If 1 in 100 ads was a sting, in a few years all the pimps will be locked up and all the johns in the system.
Can we leave the Slashdot-quality trolling about licensing back in the previous millennium where it belongs?

There are, of course, successful projects licensed under the GPL and AGPL (Linux comes to mind), many of which have for-profit businesses; there are plenty of people with different priorities about what "REAL freedom" is. And calling the licenses that match their priorities "herpes licenses" is unlikely to convince them.
"Atomic" no, but there is evidence it isn't kY either. The article I linked was one of many that discussed the implications of the paper "Extremely rapid directional change during Matuyama-Brunhes geomagnetic polarity reversal" [1] published in 2014. In that paper, the authors studied different Lava flows that suggested a reversal can happen in a single human lifetime, with a change as rapid as 6 degrees per day.

I believe that a polarity change in fewer than 100 generations would be challenging for most species that see or use the magnetic field to adapt.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/199/2/1110/618671
TBF Japanese kids spend 10 years learning how to read their own language, so it’s important to have realistic expectations of what you can accomplish
Several of them also were asking what chickens where and why one would desire to own chickens in the first place. The whole thing is very sad the point of this is for each congress person to get to feel special by getting to look down and act tough against Zuckerberg. They didn’t even spend the effort to do basic research so they didn’t waste time answering questions that could be answered by using facebook.
It’s probably less about fighting in space, and more about rapid transport, and cheaper (and therefore more) sattelites for a number of purposes. It’s hard to imagine that intelligence and military agencies aren’t thrilled with the idea of being able to lift more mass for less money. That’s true for everyone other than defense and espionage though; cheaper launches raise all boats.

Fortunately with our level of technological advancement, actually fighting in space is just dumb. Fighting from space could be useful, but would break treaty obligations with other spacefaring, nuclear powers.
I don't think it's hard to get why. Punishing Bezos for Washington Post.

Edit: I dislike Bezos and am boycotting Amazon. I quit my prime sub and stopped buying from my Amazon account. And this is still obvious to me.
I don't know whether people literally defended the company or not, and I'm willing to take your word for it. However, let's be careful not to confuse defending this one company, with defending constitutional rights or (separately) the moral/ethical legitimacy of voluntary sex work. Those strike me as things some HN readers would be more likely to defend.
What's wrong with calling the patterns "Dark Design Patterns"? I couldn't tell from the article, although those examples were pretty nasty, to be sure.
> (This is equivalent to making genetically engineered animals or plants dependent on a nutrient that is only supplied in the lab to make sure they can't survive in the wild.)

Nothing can go wrong with that. [1]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/