skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personalization is very overrated. I remember reading a big NY Times piece on how their tech team uses an embedding-based personalization and recommender system, with a sexy blog post about their internal team that implements it, and I just recoiled in horror.

For one, searching for content on NY Times site sucks. I just want a better search engine without personalization. Just better categories, tags, search by relevance to a named entity or narrowed in a time frame, which just works. Currently it’s an awful way to look for things. Couldn’t they spend engineering budget better on just search engine problems, rather than some sexy, over-hyped customer embedding model with all kinds of gadgets to solve cold start, etc., but which doesn’t seem to actually add value?

The other thing is that you _know_ the whole purpose is to optimize some notion of engagement that is not actually a healthy measure of the user getting value out of the product.

I think there could be some minimal benefit to stylizing or customizing results based on highly aggregated characteristics, like country or a super broad age group.

But beyond ensuring the user is routed into a very high-level bucket of characteristics that can broadly determine relevance, anything more specific to individuals or anything relying on nearest neighbor or collaborative filtering based on a highly individualized representation, is just flat out unhealthy, by design.

Information retrieval without personalization is like the new version of “I just want my phone to actually function as a phone.”
Cryptocurrency Media Sentiment Analysis
Open Images Dataset V4
Whatever site you use, many of those are things that no one who isn't utterly compulsive is going to spend hours researching. I need a new spray nozzle for my hose. I'm sure whatever Wirecutter (or some other test site) says is just fine.
What’s more likely to happen first - Amazon will stop offering an AWS service that you depend on at a price you are willing to pay or that the system you are building will become obsolete and when the time comes to replace it, you can choose different infrastructure? I would even say that your company going out of business is a bigger risk than depending on AWS.

The old saying that no one ever got fired for choosing IBM could be applied equally to AWS. The companies that chose IBM in the 70s and 80s can still buy new compatible systems. The companies that chose Stratus or VAX, not so much.
Yes. Solid state relays are widely counterfeited. Especially Fotek. Here's an obvious counterfeit on Amazon[1] This is supposed to be a 100 amp solid state relay. Fotek doesn't even make a 100 amp relay in that form factor - the screw terminals are not big enough for 100 amps. The real Fotek makes nothing bigger than 40A in that packaging.[2]

Here's a teardown of some fakes.[3] The fakes are way overloaded - they have the parts for a much lower current device inside. Also, the higher current ones need a heat sink, which the counterfeit ones don't provide.

These things tend to show up in "internet of Things" devices, because they can switch considerable power from a logic level input.

UL's warning page on this.[4]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Relay-Protective-SSR-100DA...

[2] http://www.fotek.com.hk/page1e.htm

[3] http://www.instructables.com/id/The-inner-workings-of-Counte...

[4] https://www.ul.com/newsroom/publicnotices/ul-warns-of-solid-...
How Oracle's Acquisition Was Actually the Best Thing to Happen to MySQL
I like that tact for user data, and have mentioned it in the past that our justice system doesn't recognize the modern digital nature of a persons "papers". There really should be a systematic extension of such an interpretation.
Based on what I've read (in particular, this blogpost: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/) space-based solar power (SBSP) is not as easy or promising as it might appear.

Getting that energy to the ground is difficult. Maintaining a solar power plant in space is difficult. With the energy required to make and launch solar power installations, the energy returned on energy invested might not be all that much better than terrestrial solar panels.

Additionally, the factor of 10- to factor of 100-reductions in launch costs that seem to be necessary to make SBSP economical might never materialize. SpaceX seems to have had success in reducing launch costs, but it could be credibly argued that that success so far has been a result of their organizational approach. Also, I think they are still running the experiment regarding whether or not reusability can reduce launch costs further (an impression I have gathered from reading the NASASpaceFlight forums, so take it with a grain of salt--I'm just a biologist). Remember that dramatic reductions in launch costs were promised with the shuttle and never materialized. SpaceX has learned from many of those mistakes, but maybe there are other unknown problems yet to discover.
If a document is super important we make sure that it's only worked on in a system that support some form of version control. But that's fairly easy for us because we pretty much all are comfortable with Git. In the cases where people simply won't learn Git I find going with some sort of web-based version controlled documents is a massive win.

Whatever you do avoid situations where people email around attached documents with various changes, set strong expectations that emails like that are not to be used. Most of the troubles I've encountered have been because of the inevitable merge conflicts and associated hassles from divergent documents that occur with email attachments.
"Cyber warfare" as you're referring to it ("cripple a nation") is a subset of total war: targeting the civilian population to achieve a military goal.

In the physical version of total war, you can only provide defense with military tools. You need military anti-aircraft guns to shoot down military aircraft. You need tanks and artillery to stop enemy tanks and artillery.

To provide defense against cyber total warfare, you don't necessarily need military technology. You just need secure civilian technology. Google is already doing a lot of work in that area. Examples include Project Zero to find and close security vulnerabilities; their work to normalize, monitor, and enforce proper use of TLS across the Internet; Chrome browser and OS security work; Gmail security work, etc.

Government institutions can provide predictive surveillance that Google cannot. Only the Cyber Command, CIA, NSA, DIA, etc., and their international partners, have the ability to see inside the HQs of potential enemies. And those are the only agencies permitted to act in an offensive cyber capacity.

Is Google under any obligation to support that work? I don't think so. Google can do, and is already doing, A LOT to help the U.S. defend against cyber warfare.
That reminds me of the basic investing advice by a friend of mine who is a $100M fund manager. He says there are three factors to any investment - risk, returns, and liquidity. Fix one of these three. If you want low risk, you must sacrifice either high returns, or high liquidity. So most good investments (relatively low risk and high returns) have poor liquidity - it can be slow and difficult to convert the invested capital back into cash. Buying fast food franchises is a good example. They're reliable cash cows, but hard to sell.

The ultimate returns come from low liquidity and high risk. That's the world of venture capital. Without the possibility of 100x returns, it's absolutely stupid to invest in new businesses with little likelihood of survival. Money tied up in preferred stock is effectively illiquid and can be completely lost (hence the term "liquidity event"). And that can and should take years.
I've been wondering this myself. As a non-American, I'm absolutely appalled to see this going on. It feels like it's 1933, and the good Germans haven't yet come to terms with what's happening.

I don't get to vote, but I do decide where I spend my money. I'm looking into boycotting American companies involved with ICE, as I think that's probably the least difficult starting point, then to slowly move towards boycotting the US entirely should things get worse. If they get better, it's fairly straightforward to ease up.

I think the only option available for the rest of the world is to vote with their wallets, as hard as that may be. I hope that Americans will understand that this isn't a slight against them or their hard work, but that moral hazard has to be upheld.
Slack is the epicenter of all manner of communication problems where I work, and sadly, we have not yet figured out how to solve the problems. We have no remote employees, yet the 30 of us, who all sit right near each other, spend all day Slacking. I believe about 85% of messages are Direct Messages. It's extremely frustrating.
> The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," [...]

I've been trying to answer to this for about 5 minutes and I don't know where to start to untangle this...

The "artifacts of the complexity of reality" is exactly science's position, you can't take that and use it as a counter argument against it. The argument is that while artifacts are to be expected with evolution,
they cannot and should not be expected from an omniscient and omnipotent designer.
Is Taxation Theft?
I disagree. Admins are complex. See https://marmelab.com/react-admin-demo/, it's a (fully working) admin built with material design and it uses about 30 specialized styled components. Think notifications, toolbars, menus, grids, etc.
How RealtimeCRM built a business card reader using machine learning
Google is building consumer Android phones with Huawei, not weapons.
> Which 5 plants are you referring to?

It's a cooking joke, because vanilla is incredibly strong.

I said 5 plants because it's the fewest needed to be able to split out 80% without fractions.
Well, they don't. They have a crosswalk and they have a sign informing you that if a car hits you you will be found at fault.
Articles I just looked at say ~400ppi is "retina" density at 12" away. If these are for VR or viewfinders 3" from your eye, what PPI is needed? Still looking...

Here's one: The US Air Force has estimated that a computer screen would require 10,300 pixels per inch to simulate these so called "hyper acuities". https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/16/human_limits_of_vr_...

Actually, that's a pretty interesting article, posting a bit more:

But in one respect VR still lags far behind our biological limits: we are nowhere near a pixel density that mimics real life.

In theory, in our fovea, we need about 120 pixels per degree of view to match reality (although Meese [Tim Meese, professor of vision science at Aston University] says in practice, people generally can't see in finer detail than around 80 pixels per degree). Currently, the best headsets manage about 10 pixels per degree horizontally. Given the need to scale up by a factor of about 10 – on both axes – the increase in resolution required is enormous. "I don't think the technology is there yet for those display pixel densities," says Bryan William Jones, a retinal neuroscientist at the University of Utah.

And for VR obsessives who will settle for nothing less than a perfect replica of reality, even 120 pixels per degree might not be enough. Put two lines above each other and move one slightly to the left or right, and it turns out we are "extraordinarily sensitive" to even the tiniest differences between them, says Meese, even to movements smaller than the width of a cone in the eye.

To match this sensitivity on a computer monitor would require a pixel density that "beggars belief", he says, and well beyond 120 pixels per degree. The US Air Force has estimated that a computer screen would require 10,300 pixels per inch to simulate these so called "hyper acuities". This is more than 30 times that of an iPhone 7 (and 12 times the density boasted by a new Samsung VR display, revealed in June, which has a display of around 850 pixels per inch).

Such fine-grain vision is rarely used in the real world, says Meese. "The closest example you can think of is threading the eye of a needle, or something like that," he thinks. But it serves as a reminder that imitating the look of real life in VR remains a technological pipe dream – don't expect to do any VR sewing in the next decade or two.
Both companies I’ve worked for - as a client and a customer - used Iron Mountain.

http://www.ironmountain.com/information-management/software-...
FISC courts are for foreign surveillance targets where there's a national security interest. It doesn't remotely apply to this case, where the crime was a string of department store robberies. FISA warrants are a completely different beast. I don't like them either, but they have no bearing on this particular case. Though, I should add that, from the details of the case, it seems like they had more than enough probable cause to get a warrant.
Just because there is cheap labor here does not mean they live in poverty; in fact they do not. The cost and standard of living is much lower so the wage is not as bad as you think. Sure they don't drive BMWs and don't get their coffee at Starbucks or have a $1000 iphone but they are far from living in "poverty"; since the definition of "poverty" is poorly constructed. In any case lets say we accept they live in poverty - the agricultural sales of this product and other such products are all they have to hope for. The main problem is with the years if government/military corruption and strife. If that was rid of the country would be wealthy. By not buying their products you help to worsen the poverty; if you do buy, there is hope that the money will eventually improve things. But if they have no money - things will not be improved and this market will shift elsewhere eventually.

http://www.borgenmagazine.com/why-is-madagascar-poor/
My understanding so far was that erratic behavior was the norm rather than sporadic exceptions and that it was common that a driver had to take over. I mean, we keep hearing about Tesla "self driving" cars that are really anything but, and I wouldn't be very surprised if Uber's SDV had similarly poor levels of autonomy. Also, it has been pointed out time and again that the dashcam dynamic range didn't reflect what a human would have been able to see if they were just looking at the road like they were supposed to.

> Here, Uber put a "driver" in control of the car that by design wasn't able to avoid collisions with pedestrians

To play devils advocate, doesn't this describe any profession involving regular vehicles (mail delivery, taxi drivers, etc)? If a taxi driver gets into an accident for dozing off and relying on auto-braking features that aren't there (either because he does in his personal car, but not in his work car, or a company technician forgot to reconnect it after a repair or whatever), whose fault should that be?
And > 90% of America's wild blueberries come from Washington County, Maine.
Wasn’t the Windows Start menu shortcut Ctrl+ESC?
I crash a drone this weekend. I was looking at the controller and not to the drone about to crash. When I finally see it almost crashing, the panic kick in and was unable to stop it.

And this was just a drone...
This will surely be a productive and non-partisan discussion without any resorting to Goodwin's law.
That's not entirely true now but has been in the past. They've actually tied their fates to both AWS and GCE in different parts of their infrastructure. The obvious example of this is the one or two global outages they've had due to misconfiguration in GCE this year.

I know their video encoding platform is heavily tied to AWS because the teams that built it optimized for cost (which for them makes a certain amount of sense) and they massively parallelize the encoding work. I talked to some of their engineers at re:Invent last year and it was kind of interesting. They aren't using a lot of AWS-specific stuff though, just AWS EC2 reserved instances.

I don't think that just because they're Netflix that everything they're doing is correct. This can't possibly be true.
This particular incident concerns Ontario.
A military invasion is performed by the military. No one here is blaming the servicemembers.
Care to point out the FLOSS equivalent of what Smyte did?
This whole post will soon be flagged to oblivion, because it is deeply, tragically political. So the one word suggestion is: organize.
Interesting read, I have wondered where this came from. However, from my understanding this has been considered an unnecessary, antiquated practice for quite some time [1].

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/ending-sentences-w...
Disgusting that it only passed 5-4.
So let's say you're working on ten hours of 8k footage.

If you go with 1.2TB 750s... oh you can't actually fit 20-100 of those in a single workstation.[1]

So maybe we back off to a NAS attached over a 40Gbps cable.

40 of those hard drives will be a lot cheaper than 20 of those SSDs. If we grossly overestimate seek times, despite how big the frames are, we might estimate 125MB/s per drive. That's enough to completely saturate the connection. Oh, and the array has 10 times the capacity.

[1] 20 assumes a lower framerate and generous compression. 100 assumes 60fps 12-bit at a lossless 3:1 compression. If "raw" is taken completely literally then 10 hours of footage could require 300 of them (and some of the math would have to be redone).
It's supported in Safari (c.f. JPEG XR in Edge and WebP in Chrome).

It is also used for digital cinema distribution. It was chosen for that role specifically because it was not in widespread use.
Madagascar has 2.1% unemployment and ~4.3% GDP growth rate which means doubling every 17 years though reduced by a 2.7% population growth rate.

It's problems are more corruption and political than anything else.
How long would it take to go from seed to first pod?
If speech promotes oppression of others (e.g. "put them in chains") should an organization devoted to liberty defend it?

How can you not see that the only answer to this is yes, unequivocally and absolutely yes?

Because there is absolutely, 100% no way to define what speech "promotes oppression" that isn't a slippery slope to thoughtcrime and totalitarianism. Period.

The ACLU of Brandenberg v Ohio understood this.
Nintendo teams up with Microsoft to enable cross-play
DRAM makers make $10k per platter. A single fab pops 20k - 30k complete wafers a month, and each top tier maker has 4 to 6 of them. Thought, all makers are working at only 60 to 70 percent capacity now.

You can guess, they are plump with money, and MOFCOM officials naturally want to communize some part of this money pile.
“All founders are equal, but some founders are more equal than others”

—- George (The Startup Farm)
Yeah, it's not a "cutting edge security feature", it's quite the opposite -- it's decades old Luddite security: "unplug the device".
There's a bunch of companies doing it, some dedicated, some as part of larger related offerings. E.g. I know NCC Group (large IT security company) does offer it, TÜV (which does all kinds of certification and compliance work), ...
>Funny how android studio helps you develop in 1 way : developing non-native java apps.

How are Java/Kotlin apps non native in Android when they're first class languages that are compiled to native code? AS also supports Android C/C++ development if you need bare metal speed and complete control.

>The two ways people develop apps seem to be going fully native, or using web "masks" like react native, outright web directly, or something like apache cordova. Neither of which seem to be the focus of android studio.

Last time I viewed the percentages of what frameworks Android apps were developed in these web based frameworks ranked extremely low.
Indeed the restartable sequence critical section needs to be written in assembly. The idea is to keep this complexity within public headers implementing the common operations as inline assembly for all supported architectures. You can see such operations already implemented for x86 as part of the rseq selftests here: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Work towards the destruction of the westphalian nationstate-based system by undermining and disrupting the institutions of media and commerce they are built on. AKA work for facebook.
Yes, it is happening now. The point is that it was also happening under Obama (I don’t know the scale of it though), so it is unfair to blame just the Donald for it, while Barry gets a free pass. At least Trump did reverse his stance on splitting families up, as a token, if nothing more.
I’m a little surprised you only got two answers, because I’m pretty sure the answer depends on how you look at the problem. Mine is this:

A function has variance because the types of its inputs or outputs are in a hierarchy.

An object type system (or I suppose even a functor system?) with generics might leverage variance to make sure that the behavior of its own methods is consistent with the Substitution Principle (LSP).

And many people will tldr this into variance being the tool to give you a type system that is LSP compatible. But it’s all about the operations, consuming and emitting types.
Kind of depends on the terms of the deal, namely whether it's an asset deal as opposed to a stock deal. In the latter Twitter would assume liability for contracts. In the former they just acquire IP and hire away the employees.

Acquirers usually prefer asset deals for this reason as it allows them to leave unpleasant liabilities behind. There's generally some sort of shell left that goes through wind down but it has few/no assets attached. In this case you can try to go after the original investors including founders or other shareholders (the IRS may do this if there tax issues) but since there's nobody home you are less likely to get much out of a favorable judgement.
Locust. Black Lotus is a Magic: The Gathering card. :-)
Consumer Reports purchased Consumerist from Gawker in late 2008, and migrated off of Gawker's infra in 2009. They used to make frequent mention of the association with Consumer Reports back then, but perhaps stopped after a few years?

I worked on a piece of their migration from Gawker's custom platform to Movable Type, although they switched to WordPress a few years after that, as Movable Type lost momentum in the US.
Thanks for pointing out the bargaining power asymmetry problem. Asymmetries in power are fundamental to how markets work, but when most people say "free market", they mean some imaginary world where buyer and seller have exactly the same power.
I think if you could work a blockchain in there somewhere you might have an idea worth funding. ;)
Microsoft's new visual search: Now you can use your phone's camera to search web
Neanderthal vs. ND4J – Native Performance, Java and CPU
Cool post. But I don't understand this obsession with taking lessons about such miniscule variables as equal/unequal cofounders from such a small sample set, like the top N=10 companies. There's no way, I bet, that that is enough to determine with any actual statistical confidence what configuration of the variable is optimal. Best you can do is take vauge inspiration from it, but then it'll still be just word against word.
New paper provides strong support for viral cause of Alzheimer's
I know Shaq also has a bunch of Five Guys'. Not sure if it's the same reason.
Stripe will handle the subscription plans, the period (monthly, annual, etc) invoicing, the credit card security, the payment forms, discounts and pretty much everything you need to run subscription payments. It took me less than 1 day to implement using their payment forms.

There are many stripe templates on github that help you get started in almost any framework/language.

If you build your webhook correctly, you don't have to build any backend payment management, you can manage directly in the stripe dashboard and it will update your customer records directly through the webhook.