skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely with this, but getting back to the human factors:

- It's a lot easier to welcome feedback that comes in a form like "can you tell me about xyz?" [answer] "would it make sense to do abc instead?" than "xyz is shit, let's rip it out and do abc, jesus"

- the ego of the new employee shouldn't make them feel above learning the nasty details, or be fragile enough that they get frustrated if the answer is something like "abc might have some other problems, we're thinking about doing ijk, but in the meantime we don't touch this code much and it's not in a public-facing area, so we have other stuff higher on the roadmap."

The manager can also avoid a lot of potential problems by being up front about "by the way, here are the pain areas we know about, we're slowly tackling them one by one, let me know if you spot anything else you think we could add to the list."
I did actually. They kept the XMPP compat running for quite a while after, so for me Pidgin and my old blackberry GTalk app kept working.

Eventually they shut it down though, but in an uncharacteristic move they gave quite a bit of lead time.
Sure, I was exaggerating for effect. Maybe not proper ML, but something more like the OS automatically generating (and discarding if unused) macros in the background, and using CV / OCR on the windows to try to interpret what the user is doing - I am sure v1.0 would be laughable, but eventually...
We're still in beta, but you should check out Workona if you're looking for a work-focused solution:

https://workona.com

Think of it as a way to save links organized in "workspaces" for a specific project or workflow rather than a traditional bookmark manager.

For example, if you were writing a blog post, you could create a workspace for the Google Doc, Wordpress page, Hemingway Editor, and all the research you might want to include in the post.

You can then shut the workspace and pick up right where you left off with everything you need to work on the blog post later. This way you don’t clutter up your bookmarks with links that will be irrelevant once you're done working on the project.
The issue is that kids aren't taught to handle pressure, that is the main problem because parents pamper kids until they go to college!

as a child, you are not allowed to have your own decisions, like ever. You eat what your parents tell you to eat, you take admission to undergrad/postgrad about what your parents tell. You study hard as they told you, they even decide when and to whom you lose virginity! (arranged marriage)

No wonder if there is a little pressure then kids can't handle it. This is not a governmental issue, this is societal one. and the government can't do shit, pardon my language.

Now what will happen? The govt will panick and reduce the quality of exams, the exams which are already pathetic in quality, the proof for which can be found by counting the number of Indian instituties in top 100 in the world, ONE!!
> This person lacked empathy and sensitivity

It is hard to empathize with people who work less hard on understanding the programming topics, that occur at work, deeply.
How about forcing him or her to articulate why the system is broken with code instead of saying vague things about tech debt?
I think people mistake the source of frustration. It’s not that the other guy took on tech debt. It’s that he kept saying “we’ll fix that later” and never did. Corner cutting isn’t fatal. Often it’s not even all that painful, if I’m perfectly honest.

It’s the delusion that hurts.
I thought this was very well and succinctly put, thank you. Having made many similar mistake to those in the original article, it's obvious to me when looking back at those situations that the real issue was team fit. Individual acts get washed over but fundamentally you need to be compatible with the people you work with.
I still have a Facebook account (which I'm slowly backing away from), here's how I (hopefully) poisoned their facial recognition data.

My profile photos have always been untagged group photos or me in a Halloween costume, etc.

Upload stock photos:

1. Go to https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=person+model&... Play with the search terms to get people sort of like you.

2. Download a few dozen images (or more). The site gives you the options of finding other photos of the same model. I figure it's probably good to have the poison data be somewhat self-consistent.

3. Upload them to Facebook and tag yourself and your friends in them. I kept them in a non-public album, so I wouldn't spam my feed with this stuff. I suppose I could make them public later, once they're a little old.

4. I've also done this on my girlfriend's account, as well as a couple close friends.

Reverse tag:

When I used to upload and tag real group photos, I'd swap the tagging (e.g. tag a friend as myself and myself as my friend).

I also try to keep the volume of poison photos far larger than real ones. I don't personally upload and tag any photos of myself anymore.

I've always kept the facial recognition stuff like this turned off, but I don't trust Facebook to not to reverse the setting just because it wants to. Eventually I want to delete my account, but I can't just yet due to event invites.
I'm in Europe (England) and when i fired up facebook on my phone this morning, i got the option to opt out of this. The accept it button was the default and obvious button to click on though.
It's Eternal Sharktember.
Time is an illusion, freewill is an illusion, etc. are all attacks on and denials of consciousness. The fact is that consciousness exists and has identity. In the past consciousness was treated as supernatural but the "modern" attempts to deny it are no less irrational.
This is really great. I think if this gains traction, it could be fascinating for Computer Vision in general, as inevitably scammers would try to introduce adversarial elements to fool the CV, potentially by training a CV AI of their own to try and replicate (mis)classification. The end result of such an arms race is CV that better mimics human perception.
>I'd be interested to know what a good process is.

IMHO, A good process would have several tiers, each being more manual, less automated, and more time consuming. The basic tier would be security questions, alternate email, SMS, 2FA, etc. The next tier could be establishing identity and would mean communicating with a real person. You can send a signed affidavit along with a government issued ID and the person would verify it. Then they would have to establish that the account itself belongs a specific person, and that that person is you. This can be done in various ways - billing address, CC info (if applicable to that service), etc, etc. A more real answer would be dependent on the actual service and what information the service captures at signup, etc.

>I don't believe most (if any) online accounts that I have provide enough profit to the service owner to hire and train employees with enough expertise, time, and resources to properly determine a valid recovery attempt from a fake one.

Well, then that is a different argument and I'd agree that it takes time and money to get a good process in place.

But if you think about it your logic can be applied to anything right?? I don't believe most (if any) software companies have enough profit motive to test their software for security bugs or hire people who have expertise in security.

>Social engineering employees just seems so easy from what I've seen. It's so reliable it can be done on stage:

Yeah, that is an example of a bad process.
How do you know that? Have you seen sources and verified that those sources are actually compiled and shipped with the final product?
Caveat Emptor :: Disclaimers

1. This is based on my experience, so YMMV and there are many cases where more than one way can work well!

2. I appreciate pragmatism. Try to use an appropriate tool for the job.

3. I identify as a polyglot, and have used Go and node.js extensively for 8+ years (and other languages for many more years than this).

4. Of the three languages listed, Rust is my weakest. That said, I always enjoy reading about it and learning about the design philosophy and choices.

---

Rust: If/when I had the luxury of enough time to actually learn rust :) ..and one or more of the following were true:

- Cases requiring eeking out max performance and guarantees about program safety / correctness.

- Real-time or soft (near) real-time is a serious requirement.

- targeting embedded applications or other highly resource-constrained runtime environments.

Node.js: Great for frontend work and single page apps. Also a goto when I know there's already a decent library written that will do what is required.

Go: Shines for a few classes of problems:

- Command-line apps and systems work - it can be a very quick way to a working solution, and also reasonable to create reliable and robust applications compared to many other languages.

- Situations where ease of deployment is important.
Distributing a single binary can eliminate drastic amounts of complexity.

- Problems where it's useful to trivially spin up many concurrent processes.

Then, for most other things there's Python, bash, Java / Groovy / JVM, and C.

---

grin

No matter what, have fun!
FindFace in Russia had a feature where you could take a photo of anyone and it would look up their VKontakte profile. Would be nice if Facebook did this.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3595026/The-e...

https://findface.ru
Google dominated non-SMS chat in the late 2000s/early 2010s. I don't think they realized how insanely valuable that was - they were basically sitting on the future of communication. All they had to do was sit back and let network effects build their monopoly (with some more tech build-out and straightforward marketing in international markets).

Instead, they myopically saw Facebook as a threat and started one of the most user-hostile rampages I've been victim to. They hobbled existing products and over-complicated new products to force people onto a platform no one asked for. Facebook (and others) used this opportunity to grab communication away from Google.

It's all an interesting business case study of missing the forest for the trees.
It's also about helping young people who have parents who aren't filing taxes. I was poor and in this situation in college.
> Implicits are a generalisation of default arguments.

There is an extreme semantic difference between an implicit parameter and a default argument. Have you spent any time at all using them? That's like claiming HKT is just a generalization of type constructors. Would you claim that HKT isn't anything new or novel because constructors have been around forever?
Or perhaps that figure could be doubled with leaner code that's quicker to work with and understand.
Being able to pass data through Arrow is a big improvement, but there's also a lot of serialisation going on you pay in Python. Also, if you want to do anything in the fancy areas (like, write your own optimisation rule for the SparkSQL optimiser) it's Scala. Even something simple as writing a custom aggregator is impossible in Python (at least it was in 2.2, haven't checked in 2.3 or "current" 2.4)
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. What's the point of a feature like RCS to me when I can only use it with other Fido users? I'm not going to expect my friends and family to stay on my provider, so that actively discourages me from wanting any provider locked in features. Make your dumb pipes better and available to all networks and maybe I'll consider it.
Yes, working with shitty code is part of the job. You can't refactor if you can't read other people's code, no matter how bad it is. It's still code, and it probably does something in production that's needed.
"May" have a problem, they do have a counterfeit problem.

Maybe I buy a disproportionate amount of electronic components from Amazon (or used to), but I'd spend way more time trying to figure out if a particular product was counterfeit or not. I also spent a lot of time returning crap that was (it's super frustrating to receive a part for a project only to discover it's a completely not functional replica). I canceled my Amazon Prime membership a few weeks ago, and plan to rely on Digikey + local electronics stores from now on.
Please don't say coffee is an illusion, I basically run on coffee. :)
I am from India, and I have experienced the kind of pressure that this article is talking about. Personally, I feel that the root cause of this kind of pressure placed on teenagers is the abject fear of failure that is prevalent in India, especially in the middle class population. If one cannot crack these exams with flying colors, then society(most part of it at least) writes them off as losers who are doomed to a low paying job with no prospects of success in life, financial and personal.

A lot of people equate academic brilliance with intelligence and build up on that logic that it'll lead to financial prosperity, which in turn will lead to a good image in society and hence happiness. Don't have good marks, you are worthless. Never bother if you are a great athlete, singer, artist or any of the other vocations.

Even within academics, if you can't make it into one of the areas which pay a lot, like CS/EE/Medical science etc, then society views you with pity about your wasted talent. Doesn't matter how skilled of a Civil/Mechanical engineer or architect you are.

I feel lucky to have been exposed to the western system to get out of such a though process and hope that India can pick up some good things from the west in the field of education.
China’s “National AI Team” Gets Busy
It all depends on what your definition of "high-volume" is, and just how "archival" your access patterns really are.

Amazon Glacier runs on BDXL disc libraries (like a tape library). There's nothing truly expensive about producing BDXL media, there just isn't enough volume in the consumer market to make it worthwhile. If you contract directly with suppliers for a few million discs at a time, that's not an issue (you did say high-volume, right?).

https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...

For medium-scale users, tape libraries are still the way to go. You can have petabytes of near-line storage in a rack. Storage conditions are not really a concern in a datacenter, which is where they should live.

(CERN has about 200 petabytes of tapes for their long-term storage.)

https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/07/cern-data-centre-pas...

If you mean "high-volume for a small business", probably also tapes, or BD discs with 20% parity encoding to guard against bitrot.

Small users should also consider dumping it in Glacier as a fallback - make it Amazon's problem. If you have a significant stream of data it'll get expensive over time, but if it's business-critical data then you don't really have a choice, do you?
Would that hold up in court? An icon?
You should be using scala.collection.JavaConverters instead, as it makes the conversion explicit (by adding a ".asScala"/".asJava" method to collections).

Implicit conversions (i.e. where a type is silently converted to another type) is dangerous and can lead to very surprising problems.
Sounds like he lucked out by you firing him.
> Remember When AT&T sent a paper copy of every image you downloaded on your iPhone in a bill?

No, no I don't - that has to be apocryphal.
Could you add more context to this? I am unsure of what you are saying, but am interested in what you may be trying to communicate.
That would seem to be less likely than getting every carrier to implement RCS.
I see a lot of people talking about Terms of Service being too long. This is a problem for governments as well: How many laws do you think apply to you right now? How long do you think it would take for you to understand exactly what you can and cannot legally do? Do you think the average police officer, or even federal agent, has a full understanding of those laws?

I hope that this is a problem that we can fix in the future.
I thought this RFC was for HKT only: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/324 this is the one I have been paying some attention (not like I use HKT that often in Scala anyway)
It's actually a bit worse than just that, and something akin to tragedy of the commons.

The people who actually do have nothing to hide (by which we mean, "the dirt on the individual is so pedestrian that even if it takes zero effort to find it, nobody wants it") stand to benefit from the features and interactions these tools enable. Those who do have something to hide become second-class citizens, forced to do things the slow, manual way that other people can automate away by trading out their privacy.

We head into a techno-underclass dystopia if we let individuals decide to adopt privacy-compromising technologies, because those with worthless privacy can gain the benefits and will not refrain from doing so to the relative detriment of those who cannot.

Personal opinion: "It's not my problem you can't participate fully in our society because X" is a very American opinion, which is why I think there is such culture clash between Silicon Valley corps and the EU.
> WhatsApp benefitted from being a first mover — all the other early leaders in Western markets are nowhere to be seen today

Has Signal ever released numbers on active users? My anecdata on this is that ALL of my friends use Signal--and not because I use it or because as their tech-savvy friend I told them they should use it. I just started seeing them show up in Signal over the last year.

I get the feeling that Signal may have a massive user base nobody really knows about, because they don't publish these numbers. Anybody know?
This does nothing to change my opinion that total rewrites are almost always a horrible idea.
Stocks aren't really a direct investment in a company like you're assuming.

Instead, investing in stocks and cryptocurrencies benefit the economy in very similar ways. In both cases, companies hold on to these assets, and can sell them to raise money for doing projects, buying companies, hiring employees, etc.

But government's probably shouldn't be incentivizing or de-incentivizing any investing. Saving money is sometimes the best thing to do with it.
That sounds like a GPL loophole to me.

It would be much easier to extend and replace if someone could turn off the condition " You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." [0]

I'm all for making these easier to read, but they shouldn't be line-item veto.

[0]http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Ironically, I think it is seen as the only path, because it is marketed as such. Education is big business in India, and there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner. The quality is rarely great, yet the price is relatively steep. It just pushes people further into poverty, because the education fails to generate the opportunities it promises.
>they've made a point of stressing the importance of not rolling your own crypto,

I think there should be a class on how to roll your own crypto, because someone's got to do it, and, as we saw with Heartblead, you don't want something like crypto to be something only a handful of people in the world to understand.
> compared to Haskell, ML and to a lesser extent Python, Scala's syntax is rather ugly and unnecessarily verbose

I have never worked extensively with Haskell or ML, but what I can say is that Scala's syntax is better than that of most other mainstream languages.

Three of Scala's syntax niceties are:

1) No semicolons

2) No braces required for one-line functions

3) No constructor required: instance arguments passed in class declaration
What are the demographics of Credit Karma users? That seems like a limited and biased sample to extrapolate that "just about everyone with Bitcoin is Lying".

I've reported BTC income to the IRS in 2014 and 2017, will do so again in 2018...
Why is it insane? Its like winning the power ball and then blowing it all on scratchers. You owe taxes on the win but can't necessarily deduct the losses.

Which, tbh, seems perfectly fine to me.
Humans are very flawed. If a person sends out thousands of bill looking letters (writing in fine print that its an offer), some will just pay without looking. Adware that infects machine and inject harmful code is being presented as free games, quiz, or antivirus and those get installed. Others will get called and accept unnecessary deals, with some elderly people pilling up multiple subscriptions. Those are just the grey legal areas, as then we have the world of direct lies, fraud and scams.

People are flawed or else 99% of the illegal activity in the world would not work. Competent and responsible adults can still be tricked, fooled or bamboozled. T&C are however useally about stuff that has a $40 price tag rather than $200k car, so there hasn't been much pressure to create laws to make it fair. There is also the aspect that when T&C get into the courts the legal system has been rather skeptical about the unbalanced terms and if it can ever been said that the consumer has had informed consent, so it usually sort it self out without political intervention.
Can confirm it is not that.
The old saying: "Its bigger and slower, but at least its more expensive!"

My experience says, a rewrite just has different bugs. Combined with delay and cost, its often not worthwhile.
Access to Facebook, Spotify, or Netflix is not a human right. These are private services offered by private companies who are free to offer those services on any terms they choose. It’s fine and completely understandable that you may not have time or cannot understand the agreements under which they may choose to offer you access. Your remedy for that is to not use the services in question. Your remedy isn’t to lie to them and falsely certify that you have read and contemplated them.
The way I see it. Exams can check recall of facts, names, definitions. Also skill at identifying narrow classes of problems (which resemble facts) and extracting them from unrealistic settings. e.g. 'There are 49 dogs signed up to compete in the dog show. There are 36 more small dogs than large dogs signed up to compete. How many small dogs are signed up to compete?' and other such trick questions.

The former can be crammed and quickly forgotten. Not knowledge. The latter skill isn't knowledge of the relevant field.

In the less rigorous, more arty fields (shall we say) the trick is usually to flatter the examiners by firing their own opinions back at them in original ways. This can be highly skillful and requires awareness of the academic milieu. But not knowledge of the relevant field.

What counts is depth, and depth depends on semantic connections, including connections to other fields. These are all differentiated and can't be meaningfully added to yield a number, as if we were counting eggs or measuring a distance.
sometimes question are ask is web code old, insecurity? does it scale? power profile, can we support it?

look at flash was massive but it was insecure and had to be replaced.

from my understanding talk had to be change due to mobile network usage and battery drain.

sometime it isn't black and white what kills a app and most of these products are free so it isn't like google owes you anything.

i think they could communicate this better with people be more open on why a product is put to rest or replaced
True of legalese in contracts, but also Law in general has multiplied like Gremlins.

Hammurabi's code of laws, was written in common language, and was brief enough every subject could understand them.

It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand.

Musk is correct in insisting that laws should expire, and it should be easier to remove a law than add one. Minimum Viable Law.

Long ago lay people had no idea what the bible said because they could not read Latin. Well lawyers are the new priests, legalese is the new Latin.