skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that things like Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought that" is particularly amazing or clever; that ain't rocket surgery, you know! Sure, every once in a while I'll go "Yep, I probably need me some of that, too", but mostly it's "Nope - I've already got plenty of that, thank you. Moving on ..." And like everybody else, I too get sick of being pitched even more of this, or different variations of this, after I've already made my purchase. I'm sure that all of it does lead to at least an incremental increase in sales, though, so it serves its purpose.

A while back I saw an article on the success of an "A.I." that was being used for marketing purposes. And as I read through all of its supposed "breakthrough suggestions" I thought to myself "You know, you could have saved yourself an awful lot of time and trouble and money if you'd just read pretty much any sales and marketing book from, say, the last 100 years or so." Because there was really nothing there that wasn't already pretty much common knowledge within that realm.
the gigabit fiber? whats the speed? i entered my neighborhood and it only says up to 30 mbs is available. desperate to ditch comcast.
https://gobuffalo.io
Here's a post I wrote about my experience as an individual contributor moving from Google to a smaller organization.

https://corbt.com/posts/2017/10/28/small-companies-and-the-p...

TL;DR is that I feel much more productive in the smaller company, in large part because there were SO MANY stakeholders at Google that it took a very long time to decide on a course and move forward with it. I think that experience probably generalizes to most large organizations.
I, and the law would blame the person. They should have no particular reason to believe your claim and absolutely no reason to perform a potentially lethal experiment on people based on your claim.

You may be breaking the law as well, depending on the gun laws in your area, but as I understand it (IANAL) the manslaughter charge of entirely on the shooter.
It's the only thing on the page that gives away it is satire wo/ clicking a link
That sounds more reasonable for European businesses.

Curious: why did you reply to yourself instead of editing your post?
Speeding up audio codecs with faster CRC checks
Poetry – Dependency and package manager for Python
If you prefer your Jaron Lanier in audio form, this was a very similar interview he did for Ezra Klein's podcast: https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier-intervie...
But if a website uses JavaScript, how can you say it is static?
IMHO, static is only Html+css...
Engadget shutting down Germany and Spain sister sites
One thing that has struck me is that, in my opinion, smaller companies seem to get much more done per engineer than bigger ones

This may be true but you are not comparing like with like. No small company is going to use agile methods to build a dam or an airliner or a nuclear power plant or a chip foundry. Small companies are adept at doing trivial things like websites. Big companies can take on projects longer than the career of any individual.
Many large companies don't realize there are other groups working on the same project. This means you may see two teams of 6 people working on the exact same problem. Resources are then split, potentially this actually makes both projects fail.
That will probably be difficult because Chrome just "prints" a PDF. Therefore headers, footers, footnotes, and page numbering is a difficult issue to solve.
I've had a lot experience here and it's something that's bugged me quite a bit too. I've spent several years on this.

The top comment right now mentions the separation between the engineer and the people using the software. That's an excellent point, but in a way it's circular. The larger you are, by definition the more people there are in-between (or among) you and the folks you're trying to make happy. You can mitigate that somewhat, but more people means more interference. So in way, saying you're not close to the customer in big companies is restating the obvious. Big companies do badly because they're big. True, but maybe not so helpful.

There's another good one: focus. Startups that scale quickly have laser-sharp focus on what value they're delivering. They can be so focused that they almost feel like a cult. Big, old companies might have been that way once, but they couldn't maintain it.

Communication overhead is another one of the top comments. I think that's getting closer to it.

Disclaimer: I have book about this. It's called "Info-Ops" https://leanpub.com/info-ops/

Let me take all of these great comments and boil them down to the thesis of my book: just like we normalize databases to minimize storage and maximize efficiency, there's a minimum set of information complexity that any organization needs to function. (There may be tons of ancillary information not needed day-to-day, but relied on infrequently). In my experience, even in small teams, the communication noise and overhead is such that you quickly suffer from all three things: psychological distance from those you're helping, lack of focus on things that are important, and tons of communication overhead involving meetings, tools, and various things that doesn't seem to directly accomplish anything useful.

In fact, this is a systemic problem. That means that good, intelligent people acting in good faith doing their jobs? Only makes things worse. So not only does the functioning of the organization get inefficient, the more people teach, meet, adopt practices, and other things to fix it? The worse it gets.

There's a lot more, of course. But the thing to remember is that big organizations have everything they need to succeed. The information is all there. The people are all there. They have the time, tools, and money to immediately do a better job. (I think is one of the saddest parts about it.) It's the organization and flow of the information that gets quickly out of whack. They know what to do, they just can't get coordinated enough to do it.

Sorry for the book plug. Happy to answer any questions you'd like that I'm able to. There's a lot, lot more.
How is sectioning off a street for a single day "destroying transportation infrastructure"? This doesn't seem that different from when roads are sectioned off for farmer's markets or parades.
That is kind of the reality I've living with myself. My father died of Leukemia when I was young. After college, one of my friends died of brain cancer. Right now my wife and I are dealing with my MILs breast cancer treatment. Meanwhile I found out I had kidney disease due to an auto immune condition a few years back and now I'm on dialysis. Just the other day my sister was talking about dealing with her MILs Alzheimer's disease. Sometimes its just hard to have an optimistic view on live when it all can go tumbling down in a moments notice.
with gems around like mini metro, strategery and mushroom 11 the choice of using this game seems like advertisement. the moment you need bars text and info panel you can't really claim a game is understatable 'at glance'. heck even the article say the game has three interpretative layers!

compare and contrast: getting over it, freeways, tsuro.
A fantastic share, thanks. I think a lot of people would benefit from this, considering the panic it's causing for many.
The Pareto Effect.

The Pareto Effect, applied to companies' productivity, states that 50% of the output is generated by the square root of the number of employees.

So, if you have a company with ~10 employees it's not a big deal, 50% of the output is generated by ~3 employees. However if you have a company with 10,000 employees, only 100 of them are generating 50% of the output; and that becomes pretty visible since each of these 100 employees knows most of the remainder 99, and most of the people they come across are "dead weight" to the company.

Give the company enough time, and the productive employees will leave to seek greener pastures, so - little by little - the company collapses.
That is not in any way related to this.

Why did Lundgren buy a genuine Dell recovery disc if the software was available for free online? There would be no need to buy a genuine Dell recovery disc to serve as the master disc for his cloned discs.

Of course, I do know the answer as I am not naïve: the Dell recovery disc is not the same as the Microsoft.com ISO download you can procure. The Dell disc contains an installation of Windows + some Dell extra content that you would expect to have in a Dell disc. And if he was to download the ISO from Microsoft and burn it onto a DVD, it would produce a checksum that wouldn't be identical to the Dell recovery disc, revealing it as a counterfeit.
Life isn't about wants, it is about what you have to do. Somebody has to stare at screen and drink the lattes in order for the country to have a fighting chance in that global economy [war].
A scanner is a photolithography tool like a stepper, except instead of exposing the entire shot at once, it sweeps (scans) a narrow rectangular exposure across the shot, and then steps to the next one. This allows for lighter, more precise optics. Confusingly, there's a piece of standard office equipment with the same name. Even more confusingly, Canon makes both kinds! Be sure you call the right technician for service.
I find it's coordination between the sheer number of teams and layers of management that create miscommunication
Do you have such a screenshot? I've played it a bunch and it never got unclear but maybe I just got used to what all the doodads mean. For what it's worth, I don't think the 'three reads' thing is particularly informative or useful way to highlight what that make the ItB design good.
I imagine that my CTR must be much higher than average, because I will click on any ads for brands that I dislike. The idea being that I am transferring money from the advertiser to the site that I am visiting.
My then 70 year old mom (three years ago) had this kind of surgery. She was back in action after about a week.
The hyperloop is perpetually just ‘three years away’
I'm not sure you grasp how poor the LED situation is over here in the UK. Some of the other light fixtures here have similar glass LED bulbs (non-dimmable, naturally) and they're pretty decent replacements for incandescents so long as you can live with the limitations - they're also discontinued and cost several times that price when they were available. The only place I can find selling something similar is charging £5.50 (about $7.50) per bulb for something off-brand, though I guess at least that claims to be dimmable: https://www.toolstation.com/shop/p95506 The last off-brand LED bulb I got from there died after about a month mind you.
> Pay attention to how much you spend next time you call a plumber.

Anecdotal, but the average quote I got for electricians in the bay area was $200/hour. This is also consistent for electricians in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago (just had a friend recently get work done at that price). I recently paid $2k to get a transmission done, of which $1700 was labor alone (took 3 days).

Point is - these trades are no joke when it comes to earning income, especially if you're talented.

I'm a serious proponent of promoting vocational jobs. Even in an "AI world" you're still going to need mechanics. Basically anything with moving parts needs labor.
The Radioactive Boy Scout and Sam Zeloof are two complete opposites of the spectrum though
Create a private local docker registry
Ran across this Charlie Munger quote a few months ago that stuck with me about the problem with larger companies and bureaucracy:

"...if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else's in-basket. But, of course, it isn't. It's not done until AT&T delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies.

I think that's part of it. There's a natural human tendency to want to feel like you're accomplishing things, and in large bureaucracies it's easier to feel accomplished without actually getting the things done that need to get done.

Also from Munger:

"They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if I've got a department and you've got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, there's sort of an unwritten rule: “If you won't bother me, I won't bother you and we're both happy.” So you get layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They're too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them."
A message to High School students who hate High School
T-Mobile says it has seven major competitors, which is complete nonsense
Partially because the humans alive today don't have the same culture as the humans in the past. I'd imagine that a comparison between lit+unlit living today would fall under the umbrella of sociology.
US advertising laws are very lax, just like data collection laws. You can getaway with saying a lot of shit in the name of advertising.

Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR.

The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens
Surprising that no mention is made of rainbow tables or lookup tables. If you hash something that can easily be looked up in a table, it's obviously not anonymous.

Passwords are stored as salted hashes for these obvious reasons...
This is it. Most of the RISC chips had a ASID tag with the MMU metadata that allowed you to switch address spaces without flushing the TLBs, but x86 added this super late. It ended up being added on the second round of virtualization extensions on x86 (and it's different between AMD and Intel).
The trouble is when we're holding on to the original data because we want the option to process it in new ways later on. The fundamental problem is that data correlates facts. Thus - as the article rightly points out - if you know some of the facts you can reconstruct identities.

I find the distinction between information and exformation revealing: Information is the bits we gleaned from the data, exformation is the bits we discarded while reducing the data. The efficacy of an information processing system is in how much it discards while extracting the information we need. The expensive operation is not the recording but the forgetting.

If you want to protect data from being stolen, distill it as soon as possible into the information you need. And destroy the rest. It comes down to the value of being able to re-run the analysis versus the effort to guard the data.
In practise, 'it depends'. It may be that it's simple enough to delete everything, or it may be that you anonymise, rather than actually delete. E.g. if you have a `users` table with:

`id, name, email_address`

You could simply blank out everything apart from `id`.

Regarding logs, it might be worth thinking about whether you actually need them to contain personally identifying information (e.g. IP addresses, usernames) - if not, just don't log them.
Most people would like that but think about how that sounds from a budget perspective: a bunch of pricey employees for something which seems to already be working fine, with a constant stream of political grandstanding lies about waste and overpaid staff. Most big organizations have trouble funding maintenance & operations versus new features and the government is especially subject to that because there are so many outside voices who benefit from criticism and have no vested interest in success.

The .gov pay scale has not kept pace with either inflation or IT wages and the benefits have been cut by Congress at various points so that’s less of a balance than it used to be. The GS-15 position mentioned in the IRS staffing article is the top of the non-executive scale and technical positions tend to be rare and specialized; managers are overseeing a fair amount of staff and budget. In DC, that starts at $134k and tops at $164k - not bad but DC isn’t a cheap place to live either: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
Far from a complete answer, but here are a few factors I've observed, in several large companies:

Distribution of responsibility/culpability

Culture of deniability

Systemic defense of the status quo
The 25 cents a piece is total bullshit. His appeal sentencing pretty clearly states how his argument was that the value of damages for each disc was $4, which was the price he was selling them for.

The 25 cents a piece is just some PR bullshit Lundgren is trying to spin in order to come out as the good guy here as he poses in pictures wearing a fedora while he sleeps on a bed made out of counterfeit Dell recovery discs.
Or, you know, just do the minimum amount of effort to not be a jackass with your users' data…
Why are people born rich and poor? Purely due to luck? Professor Ian Stevenson's reach pretty much proves otherwise, that infact rebirth and karma is very much observable
Actually U of M is in Ann Arbor which is 40 miles West. Though there is a satellite campus in Dearborn which is in the suburbs.

Detroit has Wayne State University which is growing with the addition of a new business school courtesy of the late Mike Ilitch the founder of Little Caesars.

https://ilitchbusiness.wayne.edu/

There are also two smaller colleges, Marygrove and University of Detroit Mercy.
Are there an "ErrorProne" tool for Javascript or Angular?
Professor Ian Stevenson's research
So now average users are expected to be able to interpret adversarial-y written EULAs? If Joe Nobody should be able to disentangle a web of lawyer jingo and ass covering from what may very well be a team of lawyers with combined decades of experience, then why do we even have lawyers in the world?
I think we are all thinking of 'What We Do in the Shadows'... FWIW. Great movie.
Really good article. One of those things that are beyond obvious to those of us close to this field, but not at all obvious to the general software dev (who also mightn't know the difference between a good cryptographic hash and a good password hash).

What would make this article great is general ideas on what is a good way to anonymize data. I'm surprised that info is missing, actually.

What would make it world class great is discussion about GDPR ramifications, keeping in mind that one need not necessarily be perfect for GDPR, even if you're FB/Google.
Publii Static CMS - https://getpublii.com
Most of the time the language package manager for a very popular language is an overkill. You can get all the packages you need for web development, AI or statistical/mathematical stuff in python from say debian packages and build arbitrarily complex applications. And you have the additional benefit of being able to easily package your application for many distributions that package stable versions of popular libraries for languages like python, perl, ruby, etc. Another additional benefit is that because most of the time you fetch packages precompiled, you don't need to run probably insecure compilations on your system (many popular packages for Python for example require you to compile C extensions). And the trade-off is quite palatable: you use the APIs hygenically, don't do things like leftpad, and sometimes forego some cutting edge features (and many dynamic languages enable you to easily backport them without modifying the package itself most of the time).
Ohio is particularly useful as a source of flammable water…
No, you're completely on the right track.

People usually judge AI systems based on superhuman performance criteria with almost no human baseline.

For example, both Google Translate and Facebook's translation system could reasonably be considered superhuman in performance because the singular systems can translate into dozens of languages immediately more accurately and better than any single human could. Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world.

So you're exactly on track, that humans are heavily prejudiced against even simple mistakes that computers make, yet let consistent continuous mistakes slide for humans.
Regressive doesn't refer to how the taxes are spent. Regressive refers to the fact that 15 cents out of every dollar matters a whole lot more to someone on minimum wage and living paycheck to paycheck. Regressive refers to the fact that a true "no exemptions" hits the poor more than the rich. So the left has to set aside exemptions for the poor, and that leaves room open for lobbyists to drive trucks full of money into adding more and more exemptions.
Exactly this. I've been uncomfortable with this trend for a while now, where everything gets labeled "clickbait" and there's a thread of resentment if an article does anything other than lay out dry facts as efficiently as possible.

The pendulum has swung too far. This wasn't clickbait, it was a fair and accurate summary of the full piece. Flag the entire post if you think it's inherently inflammatory, downvote, ban it if you're an admin, but this title had no business being edited.
Jeff Bezos' advice: Don't aim for work-life balance; it's a circle
I don't know about 10x people, but I think startups attract people who like efficiency. People who hate wasting time in meetings. However for big companies meetings seems to be like a drug.

The startup I work for that went from 3-30 people over the years was bought by one of 100,000.

I keep wanting to have meetings of 2/3 people and the people I come across at the new company love having 6+ people in a meeting.
Ask HN: Best meatspace “stack” (benefits, legal, etc) for a new startup in 2018?
If you were founding a new startup with a couple of employees, what set of SAAS or firms would you choose to take care of your non-tech needs like health insurance, banking, and legal?

To get the ball rolling:

- Just today Stripe Atlas released support for LLCs[1], which is great news.

- In their Playbook[2], thoughtbot recommends things like

-- Earth Class Mail[3] to digitize snail mail.

-- Supporting Strategies[4] for outsourced bookkeeping.

-- Tallie[5] for expense tracking.

- What's the latest in the world of HR options? Did Zenefits come through their troubles intact? Are there better alternatives?

- What other helpful services surprised you by their existence?

[1]: https://stripe.com/blog/atlas-llc?c

[2]: https://thoughtbot.com/playbook/our-company/operations

[3]: https://www.earthclassmail.com

[4]: https://www.supportingstrategies.com

[5]: https://usetallie.com