skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things that struck me when I first joined Google was the extent to which logging, debugging, and tracing information was built into the application itself, as well as the extent to which this information was routinely useful in a way that basic UNIX performance tools are not.

They have, for example, a distributed tracing system [1] integrated into their RPC layer that lets you instantly view the complete set of RPCs kicked off by a request, the services touched, and statistics for latency either for a single request or across many requests. This means that if you're a developer trying to integrate a new service into the search stack, you can get an answer within a couple of minutes as to "Your service will be on the critical path, so you need to count microseconds in implementation" vs. "Your service is off the critical path, go wild" vs. "You have a budget of 25ms, as long as you come in under that you should be fine." It lets you tell whether your application requests were slow because you triggered an edge-case in your code vs. because that BigTable your dependency relies upon was undergoing a compaction. Combined with some other application-level logging, you could tell if your ranking algorithm was slow vs. it happened to share a machine with a process that hogged the machine resources.

It's probably one of the features I miss most now that I'm no longer at Google and doing my own startup, and I've tried to apply the same development philosophy to my own code. It's been invaluable, for instance, to tell whether I'm not getting results because I can't parse a page but forgot to write the error-handler to mark it as done & unparseable vs. because a complicated algorithm I use is accidentally exponential-time in some cases vs. because an HTTP connection is taking too long to complete vs. because CloudFlare blocks robots and the site really doesn't want to be crawled so I should give up on it vs. because an algorithm I wrote to avoid overloading hosts has a bug that makes it get stuck performing requests once every month. Some of these could perhaps be caught with lsof or top, but they'd give me nowhere near as precise info when trying to track down the problem.

All this is to say that perhaps the application (or a library used by it) really is the right place for those tools to go, because it knows far more about its operation and the likely questions you'll ask than a generic system-wide tool. This'd require a change in how we write applications and what we consider to be the responsibilities of an application developer, which probably explains why we don't have mainstream adoption yet. But in a world that's moving from multiple-apps-on-one-computer to multiple-computers-for-one-app, it makes sense, and so I wonder if the long-term trend will go in that direction.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
The justice system is concerned with how I feel. That's why every three years I file a victim impact statement when the killer applies for parole. The review board expressly cites these statements as one of their reasons for non-release.
> the burn a hole in the disk and try to write to it copy protection mechanism

Uhh, mind elaborating on this?
This is pure, uneducated rubbish.

The reason that social science can't model (aka overfit) many phenomena, is that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are involved.

Do some reading. Educate yourself. You may change your vantage.
Saw a model S in a car show. Got in the back seat. Is it just me or is your body position in the back more of a crouch? I assumed it's because of the thick battery-laden floor.
This is a popular idea: Just put someone in charge! It ignores the incentives for those gatekeepers, who are now part of the system. In practice I don't think you're going to get better updates, you're going to get "almost no updates".

See also: The FDA and drug approvals.
You are anonymous here, and your post contains no personal information, and none of your real life friends and acquaintances will see any information you intended to keep private.

With facebook, you are not anonymous, many of your posts would contain private information, and many of them could be pushed to people you didn't want to share with.

I don't know what threat models you find compelling. But the damage HN could do to someone with the info they have from an account holder is an order or two of magnitude less than the damage facebook could do.
>Hardly confusing.

Except that much of what you're saying implies that you do think these companies should be regulated in a way that forces them to do this. Or at least, if that's not what you're saying, then you seem to be insinuating a whole lot for no apparent purpose. This is why I'm confused. Your stated words and actions (ie the rest of your words) don't appear to match up.

>Google doesn't just use this technology like you or me, it benefits,

Are you suggesting that you and I don't benefit immensely from the internet?

If I'm understand you correctly, you're saying that it is unethical for an entity to benefit from another entity without supporting it. That is to say, its unethical for Google to benefit from the military's technology without also supporting the military.

Ignoring, for a moment that there's a whole host of debate on whether or not that's even true to begin with, such an objection applies equally to any individual as well as Google. I, personally, benefit greatly from military technology. Is it unethical for me to refuse to work on drone warfare? It seems odd for you to say yes to that, but on the other hand, that's basically what you're saying about Google.

>I do not think that description applies to much of the public, which lives outside the SV bubble. But I will concede that this is something that's debatable.

I would consider more than a third of the US population to be "much of" [1].

> suffers from the hubris that they can simultaneously benefit (i.e., make billions of dollars) off the fruits of research that's quite explicitly geared toward military technology, and they can rebuff those very same benefactors without consequences

But again, except perhaps in terms of scale, this applies to anyone. You and I both benefit, significantly, from military technology, both in terms of safety and quality of life. Yet you've stated that we should not be compelled to give back.

Why should Google (or any other corporation, which again, is really just a set of individuals) be treated differently?

[1]: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-st...
You can't burn oil without oxygen sure but don't Falcon rockets burn kerosene with liquid oxygen? I believe there are ways to obtain oxygen on Mars despite the shortage of atmosphere. There's also other industrial uses for oil such as plastics. I'm not an expert on any of this though so maybe oil isn't that useful if you don't have reasonably abundant atmospheric oxygen. SpaceX has talked about using methane from Mars to refuel though, it seems plausible to me that other sources of hydrocarbons like oil would be useful to us.
There is definitely a risk of machines learning to reinforce existing but undesirable bias in real-world training data. There is research into documenting forms of bias so they can be recognized and countered when selecting training data.

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-risk-of-machine-lear...

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279927
Ask HN: Should I keep this Job board for free or sell it as a lifetime deal?
HI folks, I've been in the data space for 12 yrs. I launched https://databirds.co to help people in data space to find their dream job.

I have a few ideas/doubts running through my mind. Please suggest which way is good?

1) Is the current niche good to start (Data Science, Data visualization, Data analytics) or is it too broad and I further niche down to Data Visualization (my core area) alone?

2) Should I keep this to one country (USA) specific or global?

3) Should I pre-vet the candidates so it saves time and gets quality candidates to recruiters (USP)?

4) Should I sell it as a one-off $1000 lifetime unlimited jobs deal? or a $99 per job?

5) Should I keep it completely free to post, but a small revenue from employer-sponsored banners or resume writing service for candidates?

6) something else?

Please let me know your thoughts.
Methane isn't rare, but it also isn't stable. Something must be producing it, somehow. That's the interesting part.
has. And also people who are not his customers.
A Facebook bug made private posts of 14M users public
How to Make a Video Game Memorable
> Why would your default stance be to believe a company over a leaker?

Because Sundar Pichai has a strong public track record. Every CEO ends up with warts, but I have some sense of what he's about. The leaker, I have zero information on. Given known vs unknown, I put more faith in the known. Whether I by default believe or disbelieve depends on who's saying what.
That's awesome. Can you elaborate more on your setup, and why cloud doesn't make sense? I'm really interested in cases like this.
Looking at HN or certain subreddits would similarly have you believe FB is quickly dying and no young person uses it. Or that a ton of people deleted their accounts as a result of the recent scandals. Yes, I’m exaggerating of course.

The number of repos that were imported to Gitlab via their GitHub importer had crosses 100K on Tuesday if my memory serves me right. GitHub has 75M repos, I believe. For now, the migration has been potentially significant, but too early to tell.

Overall, I’m sure there’s something to glean from places like HN and some parts of Reddit, and other similar places. What exactly you can take away, I’m not sure about yet.

There was a front-page article of some survey that was saying something like 40% of people were going to or already did delete Facebook. Not a correct number of course.
China gets only 2% of its electricity from nuclear - a tenth of what the US accomplishes. New reactors will get them to 6%. This strongly suggests to me that environmental regulation is not the limiting factor.
So to cover the obvious case first - If your business is successful enough, you hire a CEO, employees, etc, and hand off daily operations to them. Of course, you as the owner are involved in the company still, but the majority of your time should be free to tackle other issues. Elon Musk is a good example of someone who has done this. He has multiple companies, working on different issues. Of course each company you start takes a significant up-front cost of your time. But the more successful the company comes, the more likely you are to be able to onboard employees who can give you back your time. Clearly, this is only possible once you have "made it big", and it's not really the type of business I am speaking about.

The other type of "autonomous" business is a SAAS business. The idea here is that you build a software service that generates revenue. This revenue should come in the form of monthly subscriptions to your service. If you can keep your costs down (i.e. do the work yourself, and don't hire full time employees), then once your system is stable, it should be able to generate income with relatively minor investments to your time. Obviously again with this case, a significant UPFRONT effort must be made to develop a system that provides enough value to customers, that they will pay for it.

I've been working on my business now for over 2 years. It's been a side project that has consumed a healthy majority of my spare time outside of my 9-5. I'm on track to break-even in revenue/costs in 3-4 months. Around that time frame, I also expect to be "feature complete" with version 1.0.

This should sustain at least a year, if not longer, of minimal time investment. Sure, I might need to fix a bug here or there, or investigate a connectivity issue or something that I simply can't 100% protect against... But the system has been developed from the ground up for long term stability, and reliability.

It's been running now for 2 years, and I've had basically no issues that I've needed to fix. It's been all feature development. By the end of this year I can pretty much guarantee I will be hands free, spending less than 3 hours a week, making more money than I spend.

That is the goal. Build something that can run (mostly) by itself, that generates more income than it costs to run.

p.s. Knowing myself, because I love what I do, I'll continue to work on it just for fun. But there's immense peace of mind knowing I don't have to.
I don’t understand what you’re saying about what Clinton Foundation. It wasn’t formed until after Bill left office and as far as I know Obama wasn’t involved. The worst Obama did was have a book people could buy.
Set Custom Position for Child Nodes in SmartArt and Render Comments for ODP File
"A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.” Hannibal, and many other of the bullshittiest employees, are well compensated, with expanses of unclaimed time."

Wow... where do I sign up for one of these jobs!
The proposed law applies only to commercial sites which publish user-submitted content which can be accessed by the general public.
Gitlab isn’t going to say no to $7.5B or any number close to that. They are also more venture backed compared to GitHub.
>I'm curious why you wouldn't just bury the calcium carbonate pellets at this point

Potassium hydroxide absorbs carbon dioxide:

2 KOH + CO2 >> K2CO3 + H2O

Calcium oxide regenerates potassium hydroxide:

CaO + K2CO3 + H2O >> CaCO3 + 2 KOH

Calcium oxide is recovered by heating:

CaCO3 + heat >> CaO + CO2
Statistically, the majority of organisations are mediocre.
This rather sounds like radar is the wrong choice, does it not?
The Future of Rails 6: Scalable by Default [video]
>The headlines differences between, say, Washington Post, CNN, The Hill, and Fox News for the same news blurb is even more dramatic than I'd expect when you put them up side-by-side.

Can you give a concrete example of this? I'm definitely interested in seeing how big the differences are
Sorry, repeating something I can't verify. Seems may not be true?
A search engine with no biases whatsoever is useless. The whole point is to be biased towards articles that users find more useful, not to give a random sample of the Internet (whatever that means).

I'm sure there will be internal debate over what biases are good ones to keep and nobody gets a free hand. But as a policy, it doesn't restrict Google's options very much.
I think you're misunderstanding the question.

> if you are going to legitimately argue that shaving 20 feet off of braking distance will not make a car any safer.

Nobody is arguing that. We're arguing that there is no evidence the Tesla OTA update made the cars safer on net.

You're trying to set up some sort of "OTA updates are dangerous in general, but this one is clearly good, how do we balance it" conversation, but the problem is, this OTA update is not clearly good. OTA updates are dangerous in general, and also in this case in specific. You need to find a better example where there's actual difficult tradeoffs being made, and not just a manufacturer mishandling things.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: I used to work there. Knowing how the information is stored and protected, I can’t imagine how one would do it.
Honolulu lawmakers agree to cap surge pricing for Uber and Lyft
Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?
This seems like a PR stunt, but at least something. Nothing prevents them and reverting those newly found principles over time... similar with removing "Don't be Evil" from their mission - which kinda would have covered that. Google's goal is to make money and that's what this is about.
No, since you need movement to create the along-track aperture, you would have already moved through the aperture, running over what you are trying to detect.
It's interesting that Apple is willing to move in this direction, considering that there are so many other serious issues they aren't going to address. When intelligent users get excited about these new features and do a deep dive into the subject of OS security/privacy a good chunk of them will end up permanently leaving for GNU/Linux.
Yes, but you can't test that hypothesis if the probe is contaminated. Science isn't about assuming likely things to be true.
The FreeBSD bootloader (on several platforms, at least, including i386 and amd64) is written largely in a dialect of Forth called Ficl [1]. Perhaps GP got "Forth" and "Fortran" mixed up?

Looks like the Forth loader is going to eventually be replaced by a Lua one, though [2].

[1]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/tree/release/11.1.0/sys/b...

[2]: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-Feb...
Facebook is not using ACL. The abstraction is quite different.

But after being hammered by downvotes, I realise I probably should stop trying to provide context.
Yeah. That has to go both ways too. If it’s only tiny repos moving over and not top repos.
> I expect more from my remotes then I do my in-house because they have fewer distractions and no commute.

You are a shitty manager and person to expect this.
This seems far too dismissive--almost like a variant form of "just cheer up".

"Relationship trouble" includes mental agony that can drag out over many years. And the fact that many do not make serious attempts doesn't tell us much about those that will make them.
Obviously effective carbon capture is preferable to no carbon capture. But I think there's a reasonable concern of a runaway market removing too much carbon, or the reduction of truly sustainable energy production due to the continual reuse of carbon. It's one thing to get back to where we should be while cutting carbon use to a bare minimum, another completely to control atmospheric carbon so humans can burn more oil.
This election the house will have 55 voluntary departures + 2 people resigned so far. Assuming ~90% get relegated which may be high that's easily ~100 new members. It varies quite a bit but 2010 for example was down to 85% that won their races.
Hey op your andrewkelley.me/donate link is broken! might wanna look into that.
This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper pushers. I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.
Most modular just does it wrong. Doing fixed design is a great opportunity for better, deeper design. Think Apple or Tesla type design and engineering. Not many complaints around cookie cutter Audi RS7's or even Hyundais

The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.
> At the core RL is just updating a table of values, and then using function approximation (aka, machine learning) for more complex cases.

this seems to be a common assertion about ml. other refrains include "ml is just matrix multiplication" and "ml is just affine transformations followed by nonlinearity".

while technically true, it is an unhelpful comment as it doesnt shed any light on the salient questions, such as:

* how do you reduce bias/variance, since youre sampling a minuscule slice of the state/action space?
* how do you construct a value function (or something like it) in a sparse reward environment, with possibly thousands of time steps?
* how do you know your policy network is exploring new states?

it is the equivalent of learning how to draw an owl: draw a few circles, then draw the fucking owl.
Exactly.

I work for one of the large ecommerce tech companies - we have some great devs and run a pretty efficient cdci pipeline, stuff ships fast. There are multiple layers of unit testing, automated testing, manual testing and peer review in place to prevent this sort of thing.

Despite that, I can totally see how it wouldn't take much for a changeset in one area of the site that affected the default option in a drop-down in another to creep under the radar.
> Nim macros are not quite at the Lisp level, but they are extremely powerful.

I'm not fully familiar with Lisp macros so I'm curious, what is Nim missing that Lisp has in terms of metaprogramming?
Not to mention repeatedly claiming that "it saves lives", when they're probably either talking about a completely separate collision avoidance system (which has probably stopped several accidents, by definition, but it isn't special and it doesn't move the car on its own); or they're talking out of their asses because the number of independent variables is the kind of thing you need a PhD statistician for and they'll probably just tell you to take a hike.
Seriously, I've already got three ideas cooking on how that could be done. That's essentially the same skill as landing.
Recent CA costs for a framer range $65-125/hr. That adds up fast.
With all the talk of BS jobs, you’d think the article would be shorter. I lost interest 2/3 way through - felt like it was going in circles.

But I agree there could be some merit behind the premise.
Well, yes and no.

First, your counter-example is, ironically, pretty apples-to-oranges, as it is literally in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, the municipality where my interchange is located has a population density 1.5x that of Mountain View.

About the A20: it was built around 1970, inspired by American designs. Something like this would probably not be built today. Meanwhile, the specific ramp where the accident occurred, was constructed around 2006.

I do agree that safety measures should be adjusted according to their location, there is indeed no one-size-fits-all solution here.
Fellow Tesla owner here. Agree with everything you wrote.

Autopilot is a wonderful system when used properly. It's lousy when it's abused. Applied responsibly, it is very obviously a safety improvement to anybody who uses it. Used as a substitute for human attention, it's very easy to see how it can turn tragic (as we are discussing/witnessing).

The way Elon talks about these situations frustrates me to no end. The data are on his side, yet he continually resorts to half-truths because they are simple to present. Pretty obnoxious for a dude who is on a tear about media dishonesty. But: that is a knock against Elon, not against Autopilot. At the end of the day, I believe Autopilot does much more good than bad, and results in in more people staying alive than would without it. I'm glad we have NTSB and NHTSA to keep Tesla honest, and I'm also glad that they are more thorough and tempered than a lot of folks here on HN would like them to be.
Delaware becomes the first American state to ban child marriages
But why it is not stable on Mars? Mars is colder than Earth and have no free oxygen.
Maybe underground gas leaks in atmosphere and, because atmosphere is much thinner, colder, and lacks O2, it just stays in atmosphere longer and in higher relative concentration.
This is not the first time, obviously. I remember vividly how they sometime 2008 or 2009 made all pictures in the Profile Pictures folder public - that's when I realized they can't be trusted at all with protecting information.
CEO of Canada's largest oil company: "Suncor CEO slams climate change deniers, politicians who cater to them"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suncor-ceo-slams-clima...

Choice quotes:

"It is a matter of profound disappointment to me that science and economics have taken on some strange political ownership"

"Climate change is science. Hardcore science."

"It makes sense to consume things sensibly. Common sense is not a big part of the conversation that normally goes on on this thing."

I think the strategy is changing from denial...