skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But the need to collaborate with fellow students on papers, projects (SPSS, AutoCAD) drove me to get a (admittedly low end) 286 PC.

Considering your Amiga's specs, couldn't PCTask or some other PC emu have done the job?
The first algorithm generated random images that it tried to pass off as clothing. The second had to distinguish between those images and clothes...

Sounds like a long winded way of describing a GAN.
I can offer a little insight. One of the companies I work for buys salvage/returned merchandise (mostly electronics, computers and related devices, office furniture, appliances, etc). We go through the items sorting out what is worth reselling as is, what requires further inspection and repair, and obvious junk beyond repair. The items requiring inspection and/or repair go to me, and about half of what I look at is considered "open box" or "damaged box", gets a cursory inspection, is run though the paces and checked for functionality, and sent on to the people who list it on various online marketplaces. About a fourth of the remaining items sent to me are repairable, which I do and send on to the sellers listed as "seller refurbished". The remaining portion is sent to the junk pile if I can't repair it or if it's missing too many parts to be worth selling. I will sometimes hold back a valuable part (power supply, special cable, etc) from an unsellable part to use for a similar item in the future.

From the junk pile, we sell by weight to recyclers who either break the items down into recyclable parts themselves, or sell them on to firms that handle what they can't, including extracting rare metals from circuit boards. To my knowledge, such firms are based here in the US, but I don't know enough about that side of the chain to name any.
> Every engineer must be equally skillful with code and colleagues.

I think I’d rephrase this to say “every engineer needs a baseline level of skill with both code and colleagues,” rather than “must be equally skillful.” I don’t find the sentiment controversial in the least.
They're using it to build codecs they want to remain open source and public, that means, because the patent system is fucking broken, they need to defensively patent literally everything they can possibly get surrounding the technology before a troll slips one through and starts harassing their codec users.

Because it'll happen, and the FUD will cause their partners to abandon plans to roll out the new codecs "until this legal cloud gets resolved".

It's not a matter of Google being evil, it's a matter of Google having lawyers who want to protect the intent of what they're doing.
Back in grad school, my fellow students and I were amazed at how polished were the books of Rudin, Neveu, Royden, Luenberger, Dynkin, etc. but how comparatively ..., say not good, were the books in statistics. There are some hints that there are more good statistics books now.

One of my fellow students was very capable, and I was hoping would write a good book; I doubt if he ever got around to it.

I'm glad the statistics community has at least one foot in important applications, but both feet? Way back there was Cramer. At the Brown University of Applied Math long was U. Grenander -- maybe he could have written a Cramer Volume II.

I'd like to see (A) much more polish on the foundations and then (B) selected with good insight and expertise some of the keys to some of the more important applications.

Some of the application areas where I suspect, with varying degrees of strength, there is some good work include (i) particle physics such as at the LHC, (ii) a huge range of bio-medical research, (iii) high end military radar, sonar, and tracking more generally.

When I was in grad school, some of the gossip was that statistics of sample paths of stochastic processes was a wide open field -- I suspect it still is.

Apparently in the US, for well done theory, at least in attitudes, statistics is a poor cousin of probability theory, that is a poor cousin of pure math, and stochastic processes is just out of the picture.

I haven't tried to be a statistician, but I've done some projects and gotten some results. But for each of the results, clearly there were plenty of loose ends and more to do but without any very clear theory, examples, experience, or methods to tie off the loose ends.

Maybe here's one -- maybe since I'm not putting a lot into this just now: Above I gave my little derivation that with data X, the best estimate of Y is E[Y|X] with the idea that this partly justifies cross tabulation as the discrete version. Okay, but X might be a sample path of a history of a stochastic process with lots of dimensions with goofy data types. So, maybe to cut down some on the exponential explosion of the data required for cross tabulation on several variables, exponential in the number of variables, pick and choose the variables. Okay, but first cut we have not even zip, zilch, or zero on how to do that.

Once I published a paper on multi-dimensional, distribution-free statistical hypothesis tests, intended for zero-day computer security. But, again, the number of variables with data is huge; we encounter another exponential explosion and would like some help on which variables to choose.

Very broadly, from 200,000 feet up, we get to choose the variables to use and then want to know something about the accuracy of our results -- too often we are to use the TIFO (try it and find out) method, some form of Monte Carlo, resampling techniques (B. Efron, P. Diaconis) deleting some variables or observations and trying again, etc.

My guess is that finding a welcoming department in a research university and/or an interested problem sponsor in a funding agency would be too tough.
Does the Dell require me to run some Dell-specific kernel still?
My comment assumes the only signal you’re missing is the degree. You still have to nail the tech interview.
My parents limited my computer and video game use and would prefer I watched TV - for some bizarre reason they thought the other two were bad for me but TV must have been fine because they grew up with it. Turned out the games were mentally engaging and promoted hand-eye coordination while computer use was my gateway to earning more than they do combined. They wanted me to waste time cleaning my room all the time, yet I don't clean much of my apartmemt much and nothing bad happens. One railed against how awful Chef Boyardee is for you but as far as I can tell they're decent cheap rounded meals. One literally tried to tell me it was wrong to wait until the zebra stripes end on a road to turn into the turning lane - as if you were obligated to drive over the stripes, which is illegal.

Child me knew all along my parents were full of it despite being well-meaning and my opinion hasn't changed. So, this analogy has the opposite effect for me.
It's sad and scary how far they're going in attempting to stop people from inspecting the code running on the machines they own.
Apple farms in my experience can have so many different flavours and varieties. Always stop at Apple farms and hopefully go pick some of your own. The store apples will never seem the same.
Yarn – Fast, Reliable, and Secure Dependency Management
No template support?

template <typename T>
T add(T a, T b) {
return a + b;
}

Is there a list of C++ features it supports?
Yeah, I know all that already. Those reasons and circumstances do not make it acceptable for young people to be permitted to sign away decades of their life to a debt servitude.

This system is putting a huge strain on the economy and national birth rate. Debt burdened people in their 20s and 30s can not buy homes, which in turn screws the real estate market, which in turn screws the home related cyclical industries. Young people are delaying having children because they can not afford them, which in turn impacts all child goods industries, and long term will affect the viability of our SSI / Medi* programs. This low birth rate is why we depend so much on immigrants to keep a stable population.

The way the entire system works is pennywise and pound foolish.
> However, why is this amount of work necessary to find a job in an industry that constantly complains about a shortage of engineers?

Getting a job is easy. I used to work with a guy who had (severe) mental issues, did significant drugs (enough to pass out in front of everyone on the job because over overdoses), couldn't code for crap, sexually harassed every person with breasts in the office (long story on how he got hired in the first place). When they threatened to fire him, he quit, and had a well paying job 3 weeks later.

Whats harder is finding a job you'll love with great career advancement opportunities, using the tech stack you like, with a manager you "click" with, and where you're appreciated. This is where networking starts to matter. Job boards and (non-internal) recruiters are automatically biased against this: most of the jobs that fit the above criteria are filled by insiders before they ever need to be advertised. There are exceptions (its a crap shot if someone knows someone qualified to pick up that director/VP position), but there is a bias. I've worked for about 15-16 companies, from tiny 3 people startups to some of the largest companies in the world, and I've (almost) never seen the best positions advertised, except when large companies are growing and hiring hundreds of engineers at a time, and for very niche roles or roles where the company did not have the expertise to train (eg: the first site reliability engineer hire at a company).

Then you also have the cost of job advertisement. Recruiters often take 10, 20 or 30% cut, which can translate to tens of thousands of dollar or more. If you bypass and go straight to the company, and a friend refers you, not only will you usually skip the stupid phone screen and maybe a phase of the process, but guess where some of the money they save will go? Your first year's sign on bonus!
The cost is incredibly high... but as I'm reading the article, it sounds like most of these issues would apply to any fighter we build _with these capabilities_. How much of this is just the cost of building these new capabilities?

The capabilities described sound useful. And some of what we learn from it can be applied in the future to new planes. So is it a good idea to simply back off from the advanced software, and build a dumber plane just to save money? The f16 is 40 years old.. we're going to have these new planes around for a long time.
> He was determined to transform the territories of former East Germany into “a garden of beautiful flowers,” as he put it, hoping that West German money could help a formerly communist region flourish.

I believe the real Quote used was "blühende Landschaften", which is more like 'blooming landscapes'. I wonder why they picked a translation that seems so different.
All fighters have ridiculous maintenance hours. Good ones are like 10 or 15 hours of maintenance per hour of flight.

Using paint that needs to be reapplied all the time probably isn't a good idea, but it can also just be a choice to pay to hit the bleeding edge of capability (say a stickier paint gives the plane a higher signature).

I'd also probably take that article with some salt. There's nothing preposterous about deciding to manage fuel temperature, something that article misconstrues a bit (I think by not understanding what they are doing).
I watched this video today and here it is on Hacker News. What a coincidence.
Is there actually good evidence on the value of a "well-rounded education"?

But in any case, I don't think shoe-horning general education into what is basically jobs training is the right approach. We put kids through 12 years of "general education", if we haven't succeeded at that point, why would a few more college credits help?
I think they missed a trick really, calling the ship Boaty McBoatface would have given the opportunity to keep people engaged with the work they're doing. Think of the children's animated series, books, duvet covers, so much marketing potential while reinforcing the value of scientists (think Captain Planet for the Antarctic). Whimsy isn't necessarily inane or stupid.
Deere suit sheds light on race for $240B farm tech market
I know right, can you believe some people pay less than $3,000 for a basic workstation?
I'd love to see an argument for why this tax is not regressive...
Things that happen in silicon valley but also in the Soviet Union
Of course you can- many did that before CSS preprocessing was a thing.
European regulators reject latest proposal by ICANN over its Whois data service
That's garbage, a friend is a dairy farmer, the cows need milking when they need milking, they don't respect DST.
Yeah, this is the key thing. People think Docker is the only way to run a container and they do all kinds of silly hacks to try to keep Docker containers alive and to get them to behave like normal VMs. There's no reason for that: you can use LXC, or better, illumos zones or BSD jails.

In the real world, Docker's limited-liftime execution paradigm is the niche requirement. Everyone else just wanted lightweight VMs.
One size does not fit all, it would be a silver bullet, whenever F35 replaces legacy fighters. Maybe by that time the who theatre of war would change with swarms of drones.
It really is in deed. "Node" or "Java" or "Rails" engineers are a dime a dozen. There are exceptions and it's more complicated than an explanation on Hacker News can do justice to, but generally speaking, the places you'd want to work for, including (but not limited to) the likes of Facebook, Google, and other smaller but worthwhile companies are hiring for general skills, not tech du jour knowledge.

No Java shop worth its salt gives a flying duck if you know Java's syntax. They care if you understand how to build systems. Caching, queuing, service to service communication, algorithms, performance, debugging etc. If you learnt that stuff in Go instead of Java, who cares? Yes, the job reqs and lazy recruiters will come at you with a list of keywords, but that's usually not what the hiring manager truly cares about.
>If you're happy w/ a bog-standard 1080p output device, then obviously you're not "in search of" the best quality text you can get.

True, but not being in search of the best quality doesn't mean that any quality will do.

I've been happy with text rendering on my bog-standard monitor so far. I'm not sure I will still be happy after this degradation.

But as it seems my current Mac Mini is the last of its kind anyway and I'm going to have to move on from Apple.
Alternatively, it could be viewed as one of the most successful US military projects ever.
It has funneled X* amount of tax money to the military-industrial complex. Siphoning that money seems to have been the US militaries primary function for several decades.

*Some giant number
The "deep gaydar" paper reports that the training data had 50% gay men and 50% straight men and the same for women (for subjects with at least one picture, i.e. all). This equal distribution is, of course, quite unlike the distribution in the real world. The paper itself quotes a 7% prevalence of homosexuality.

The question is then- if they believed their sources that homosexual men and women are 7% of the population, why did they choose to train their classifier with a radically different distribution. One answer may be that it's much harder to train an accurate classifier for unbalanced classes and that artificially including more of the minority class improves the performance of the classifier on its training and its test set, therefore overall improving its evaluation.

Of course, the resulting model is useless for predictions in the real world, because it violates the central assumption in PAC learning (the computational learning theory behind modern machine learning): that the data used to train a machine learning algorithm has the same distribution as unseen data.

In other words, the "deep gaydar" paper is a pointless exercise in classifier tuning. It proves that, with enough knowledge of how classifiers work, you can squeeze any kind of results you want out of them. But it doesn't tell us anything else.
Why is “focusing on teaching” a negative?
It was other times, but I still remember the first Spectrum kits being sold as DIY, so there is that nostalgia part as well.
As someone who's attended a community college both in my undergraduate career and again in preparation for grad school, this is something I think about quite a bit. Overall I'm pretty happy with my experiences studying at community college, and I'm of the mind that for most subjects, you can get a good education there. While I think it might be possible to get a decent education in preparation for a software development career at _some_ community colleges (like the technically-focused ones mentioned in the article), I suspect that's not the case generally. I think that has to do with two things:

One, part of the problem is that I've found "computer science" and "software development" get shoved under the umbrella of the "computer technology" departments of community colleges, rather than the math or engineering departments. Consequently there's a sense that software development is an extension of IT rather than an engineering practice. That might be true in a lot of settings (e.g. making VB widgets), but I'm not sure it's great for producing generalist developers. Frankly, I think it also lends to unqualified people leading departments, hiring instructors, and designing a curriculum. Anecdotally, one semester I took a discrete math class (through the math department) and a data structures class (through the CIS department); I ended up learning a lot more about data structures in the math class, and the programming project I did for the math class was much more instructive than any of the projects in the CIS class.

Two, across all institutions (boot camps, community colleges, universities) there doesn't seem to be a coherent curriculum on how to teach this stuff [1]. With math, english, economics, etc. the lower division classes are basically the same everywhere. Even if you think the way we teach subjects is kind of weird (as I do with math), everyone knows what "Calc II" means, or what's taught in an intro to microeconomics course. With software, there's no consensus on where to begin. Is it an infusion of theory and practice ala the SICP-based courses (MIT and Berkeley)? Intro to programming (Stanford)? A class where you learn how to use an office suite (a lot of community colleges)? Git and HTML/CSS (bootcamps)? [2] As a result, it's not surprising that individual classes don't line up. Maybe this is fine for the case where students will only ever study at one school, but for a lot of students indenting on transferring to a university (or anyone trying to evaluate a curriculum) it's quite cumbersome.

Not being an educator (and being mostly self-taught for software development), I'm not sure what the best approach is. Personally, I think a combination of theory/assignment based classes supplemented with longer-term project courses is probably the way to go. The former helps in presenting a general area or class or problems, and how to solve them, and the latter might help with exposure to the diversity of practical software development.

[1] I say "stuff" intentionally. Even the scope of "software development" is huge and hazy

[2] I could be wrong with the specifics on schools here :)
Yeah, a big part of the problem is that the military has blended R&D into their procurement programs.

It's a recipe for every ambitious, failed research idea to look like a clusterfuck boondoggle.
Yeah and we got stuff like Newfoundland, which is in a half timezone. It's 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Time.
This is one of my favorites, especially if the chore has been ignored for a while.
If they don't, we have the F-22 which is better anyways and nobody else has.
This is honestly the sad truth when were not citizens at our jobs. Until we step up and start building employee owned and managed democratic companies this will continue to be the norm.
The last time I looked at it, support for Lisp was questionable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269736 I need to check again.
There’s plenty of uninspiring (not sure about high skilled) white collar work...I would not be surprised if a lot of what early career lawyers, investment bankers, accountants, consultants do could be automated. I’m also bullish on radiology being the first area of medical practice that can be largely automated by machines.

In the future (and even now) careers are going to be defined by how well you can form relationships (and therefore sell) i.e. the things that will be hardest for machines to do.
If you can't find what you want on Netflix there's nothing stopping you from using a different streaming service next month, or using no streaming next month and renting / buying a DVD, new or secondhand.
You're acting like crash data is the only data they are collecting.
apple still sells a whole line of non Hi-DPI machines it's arguably a little early for them to kill this stuff off. They should drop that line or upgrade it to hd-dpi and then in 2-3 year kill off non HI-DPI support
The "Let's Build A Simple Interpreter" series of posts (starting at https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/) is excellent, geared towards building an interpreter for a Pascal-like language in Python. It does not use a parser generator, and builds up everything incrementally. Unfortunately it's incomplete...
Aside, can't they lobby for a better patent system?
It always strikes me as amazing that so many accounts could be created in the first place. Twitter are pretty strict now and require phone verification to make an account. It just makes me wonder how many simcards are being used to fuel the disinfo/misinfo/psyops campaigns?
And then you will write a parser generator with Parsec and you will not want to give up the ease compared to writing your own recursive descent parser :)
We're between $100 and $200 billion into the program in total so far, including 20 years of R&D and the cost of manufactured planes. They've built 300+ planes so far.

The total acquisition cost over 40 years is set at $406 billion for 2,456 F35s as of the latest estimate. $345 billion is the cost of just the planes. $162m per plane.

You'll routinely see the media get just about every financial fact about the F35 wrong that they possibly can. For example, you'll see claims that they've already spent $400 billion on the program (with links to the GAO figures), when in fact the $400b is the planned total acquisition cost across its lifetime.
The fact that there are so many base images including an init system and even Docker now includes a small init that you can activate with a command line switch might give an indication that many people are using Docker for "system containers".
I wonder how his students did at the assignment he mentioned at the end :)
I'm not surprised, Apple loves removing configurability and thinks "one-size-fits-all". It would be far better to make the font rendering settings more configurable instead, but sadly this trend is not limited to only Apple.

...and I'm saying this as one of those for whom any form of antialiasing is blurry, subpixel being worse (my eyes water and feel dizzy after prolonged exposure), preferring AA off and pixel fonts with sharp, high-contrast edges instead. Let people have the font rendering they want.
Good book about the attacks: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003XT604U/
As somebody slightly on the autistic spectrum to whom this doesn't always comes naturally, I feel learning just the right amount of fakery is the stuff that keeps relationships alive – in more ways than one.

People aren't always in the same emotional space or have different ways of experiencing or expressing those emotions, and I've learned that not every moment is the best for hammering home those differences... I suspect that if you'd tell me you have cancer, you're not exactly looking for survival rate statistics or information on operating procedures.
If someone were trying to disguise a submarine as a whale, why wouldn't they give it a normal whale voice?