skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I guess your "How does density enter into that?" questions are rhetorical, in the literal sense that you are using them as tools of rhetoric. I took it to be a question from the point of view of someone who didn't understand how density could be relevant, which is why my answer was at the informal level that it was.)

> AFAICT, that gloss depends on two things:

> 1. that you already know that a partial fraction decomposition exists (or else this argument proves that exp(x)/x(x-1) = -1/x + e/(x-1))

> 2. that every numerator is continuous at any zero of a denominator

Agreed on both counts.

> It seems like we only need a finite number of limits (enough to determine the constants in our decomposition) and as long as the function is continuous enough at those points that we can compute the limits, it can do whatever it likes elsewhere.

Agreed on this precise statement. In particular, we need `x = 1` to be an accumulation point for the domains of definition of the original (rational) functions. One easy way to accomplish that is for the intersection of the domains to be dense in ℝ; but of course this is far from necessary.
Is Consciousness Fractal? (2017)
I am skeptical of claims that the US heathcare system could be fixed solely by better consumer medical information. But this is one area where consumers can often save money - just by asking their pharmicist when they go to fill a prescription to run the cost both under insurance vs cash pay.

One wonders what value health system administrators are providing when such a high percentage of negotiated drug plans result in higher prices than cash prices.
Why? If your website was IE6-compatible I'd salute you. Drpping support for legacy systems is something that's done too carelessly these days.

PS: I admit that it's hard to support IE6 when it's no longer supperted by MS itself.
Surely there is a big clue in how long they have been working for, how many projects they have done, what their roles were.
Is there a clear indication that certification helps in other fields?

(Admittedly this seems like it'd be very hard to verify, since most fields either legally require certification or don't have it, and there's probably tons of other variables that would get in the way too.)
Are you Canadian?
Netflix used to be a neutral pipe, just like Comcast. The trouble with pipes is that they hate being pipes and they always aspire to being a content creator. Whenever that happens, they instantly have a conflict of interest and cease being a decent pipe.

So far my house's plumbing system hasn't tried to get into the beverage business, but I expect it's only a matter of time.
First look into where astronauts may live on missions to deep space
> You need someone who can bring other developers along, teach with purpose, and etc. Experience developing alone does NOT automatically provide that.

Not to solve this problem they don't.
I'm not gaslighting anything, I'm simply disagreeing. I dislike ads too, but the answer isn't that "Netflix should spend a ton of money on content, and then hide it away unless someone explicitly looks for it." There's gotta be a happy medium, and for better or for worse, ads work.

If Netflix makes bad content, then I'll be mad they're forcing it on me. But if they make good content, in the long run I'll be happy they're experimenting with as-non-evasive-as-possible ways to get me interested.

To put it another way: it's better if they get more people hooked on more shows and that leads to more subscriptions, rather than them having to resort to crappy third party ads to afford new content.
Ok, I was just looking into this 1 week ago and was gonna spin up a VM to do headless. Now I get to keep my firebase project in cloud functions only. Much cleaner architecture.
Quoting:
"A list-like type with fun functionality.
Extends the builtin list with .NET's Language Integrated Queries (Linq) and more.
Write clean code with powerful syntax. Forget about messy loops, conditions and nested filters.
Multiple filter/map/list-comprehensions, aggregating on one another, are not pythonic at all.
I love python, but sometimes - python can be SO NOT PYTHONIC.
Some of the methods might look rediculous for a single call, comparing to the regular python syntax.
The whole idea is is to use it for nested, multiple filters/modifications :)."

Sounds reasonable to me.. what do you think? i wouldn't add it as a dependency but it's nice.
>One wonders what value health insurance administrators are providing

Good question. This was also discussed last week on HN[1].

Since 1970, the number of doctors is up 150%, in line with pop. growth, while healthcare administrators up by 3200%.

1-https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17756845
Yeah, I've worked for myself for about 5 years and even had people under me at some points. It's not as great as it sounds.

If you do it wrong, you end up with a job that you can't quit no matter how bad it gets. Your bosses are basically your clients/customers, and they are often less understanding than a full time boss.

I'd prefer to work full time, but there's not a lot of jobs here with fair working conditions - salary, vacation time, work conditions. I'm actually in the process of helping someone build a startup, just so that I could customize my own full time job.
sure, it depends on your use case, but a small bluetooth keyboard with a phone mount is probably more portable... something a bit like this: http://www.tuemarket.com/img/iphone-bluetooth-keyboard.jpg, or if you just need processing power, it could be a back pack server, etc...
Finite field arithmetic is basically what you would get if you were to reduce the integers to a set of finite size, but keep the arithmetic rules similar to what they were before. Using an infinite set like the integers is a bad idea because you can't have a uniform distribution over all the integers, and hence some members will be more likely than others, which leaks information. The special case of finite-field arithmetic we usually care about is GF(p), which is when the integers start at 0 and wrap around at p, where p is a prime number. We care about this because when p is prime, then we can ensure numbers are uniformly random in the range 0..p-1, which is something we need in order to guarantee information-theoretic security.
It will: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/trump-clears-way-for-health-.... Downvote brigade has arrived, so I can't respond. This is not what he was talking about, but you gotta start somewhere. I'm on an Obamacare plan myself, and I agree that it's a "total disaster". $13k+/yr for barely any coverage at all.
> In short, move most of your meeting and emails to your collaboration tool.

Even old-fashioned collaboration tools like e-mail can be used effectively to avoid meetings. A discussion of an issue that doesn't need to be decided immediately can just as easily be done asynchronously via e-mail.

I've gotten countless meeting requests that are just some product manager wanting to get a specific item of information from a group of developers. I've averted many of these meetings just by declining the meeting request with "Here's the information you need, no need to have a meeting about this. E-mail me if you need more information."
I'm not gaslighting anything, I'm simply disagreeing. I dislike ads too, but the answer isn't that "Netflix should spend a ton of money on content, and then hide it away unless someone explicitly looks for it." There's gotta be a happy medium.

Here’s a thought... they could let users rate shows, maybe on some 1-5 based scale, then use that information to power recommendations targeted at those users instead of just randomly promoting their disgusting flavors of the day? Then instead of shows dying in obscurity people who would most enjoy them could see them! As a bonus a guy who likes documentaries and dramas wouldn’t have to scroll through children’s cartoons being recommended to him?

Nah, that would never work...
To hire someone with expertise to solve a problem in a domain where you aren't an expert: You find people who claim to understand the domain, and then discuss the problem with them in depth. Your goal is not to evaluate them in general but to understand how they analyze the problem and how they'd deal with it.

You may have to hire them as consultants. You have to dedicate a day or more to discussion with each of them -- maybe considerably more if your problem is complex. You have to reveal information about your plans and/or the condition of your systems that may make you anxious or embarrassed.

After you've gone over the problem separately with five or ten putative experts, you will have a pretty good idea which of them understand it (if any), and you will also know how to ask much better questions going forward.

If necessary repeat this process, using your better understanding to find better experts and gain a better map of the territory.

Once you can rank expertise in your domain reliably, you might hire one (or more) of the known experts, but the best ones will be hardest to hire. Or you may use your new meta-expertise in the domain to look for more junior hires who have an unusually good grasp of your issues. Also, you may be able to get the best of your experts to act as advisors.

This takes a lot of time and may cost some money depending on the domain. But not doing it will take more time and cost more money in the medium to long term (and even in the short term sometimes).
I will definitely be interested in that when released :) Less friction will mean more adoption...
I'll call you on this.

I'd be willing to bet more government buildings are architecturally designed than ever before.

Certainly in general private buildings are getting designed more then before.

Art in public across the world is on the increase everywhere I've been. I'd need clarification on what you mean.
They do by default. The linux package will install them as a system service and the service manager takes care of the restart. Your mileage may vary with the Linux distribution.

Apache goes further than that. When running applications like PHP, it has default settings to restart the worker after every few requests. Historically, PHP applications suffered from memory leaks.
I think that we are in violent agreement. The logical process could go backwards from how it's written on the page (although it doesn't have to, if sufficient theoretical machinery is in place); but the pedagogical process goes in the direction that it's written on the page. Technically speaking, any class that uses partial-fractions decompositions should prove that they always exist (in which case the procedure that starts by assuming that they exist is justified, and no backwards run is needed), or should finish every such problem by checking that the putative decomposition is valid (the backwards process to which you refer).
But this is where A/B testing is fuzzy. Let's say it increases views but erodes brand sentiment to where the next thing they do starts getting people to cancel their subscription. Data is not everything in all cases.

I haven't seen it so no idea if I like it or not. Seems like people don't like it but who knows? Personally, I think they need to focus on the UI and slow down on all the mediocre content. It's choice paralysis and I'm finding it hard to want to even take a chance on many of their originals as there is too much.
The solution is simple. Stop spending large sums to produce crap. Spend small sums to produce crap and admit it is crap (Kevin Hart), and there is an audience for that. Spend large sums on good prior art - eg. rebuild things that were popular elsewhere and inadvertently died - Arrested Development, Futurama, Longmire etc. Pay big sums for the artists - Matt Groening (Disenchanted), Chris Rock, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle (not Kevin Hart).
One reason this happens, that I've observed, is risk avoidance. If you're working in a mission-critical code path, every line of code has been battle-tested through {m,b,tr}illions of executions over many years. You better have a damn good reason to change it, and if you do, you better be damn sure it works.

You can preach about {unit,functional,integration,load,performance} tests, but tests can only verify a miniscule sliver of the state space of any non-trivial program.

So in that situation, engineers tend to avoid risky changes and to accrete stuff instead. I haven't been convinced that it's unreasonable, either.
I mean, China may want that, and they may eventually achieve it, but I think it will require something not far short of complete eradication of the Taiwanese to do that, which to me is probably the determining factor in what I consider "independent". As to de jure, quod jure? I don't think the historical record is in dispute over the ownership of Formosa/Taiwan. It's not that might makes right, it's that might can table the discussion, or rather slab it, and I'm sure that if China does bring those sorts of arguments to the table, their rights will be recognized by other nations, the same as was done for Tibet. But until that actually happens I think that it's only consistent to consider Taiwan an independent state.
To add to that: most engineers are completely clueless about how equity works.

And the typical startup execs do everything they can to keep them that way.

Most engineers I met in SV only knew their equity "will be worth X millions" because that's what the founder told them when they joined. They don't understand funding rounds, dilution, the power of the board and majority owners... Often they don't know what the cap table is.
They found that ratings weren't working. They've spent a LOT of money on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ); they wouldn't ditch it without reason.

What they're doing is literally what you're saying: targeted recommendations of their shows. They're just doing it in the format of a video rather than, say, a still image.
Your last phrase is key: They really didn't want the experts, they just wanted the results. No one can hire good people if they think they already know better. Good people got good by picking good learning situations, and avoiding tarpits.
I was on the market five months ago. It took me three weeks of selectively applying directly to companies I wanted to work for (maybe 8 hours of actual work, then 10 hours of interviews, and lots of waiting) to net two solid offers. I didn't have to negotiate the offer I accepted because they didn't ask my baseline and capped out the offer for the job description. I negotiated with the other company to see if they would match, they would not. That's on par with every job hunt I've been on. The difference this time was avoiding job listing sites, which I've had very bad results with.
How does a short-term A/B test measure long-term negative sentiment?

Measuring minutes played or cancellations over a few months is pretty easy. Measuring contribution to a gradual loss of trust, fewer or weaker recommendations to others, and perhaps cancellations months or years later is all but impossible.

It's really hard to construct a split test that's deep enough to fully measure negative reactions. Usually that's not an issue because the thing being tested either has a positive or neutral impact; other than by accident, it's not downright offensive. Fully measuring something that a meaningful percentage of users consider offensive would be really tough.

It's even possible for a decrease in trust that doesn't manifest in user behavior for years. Maybe they stay customers and continue playing media, but start treating Netflix's future decisions with skepticism. The closest to an indicator is probably NPS, but NPS has its own issues.

(The fact that Netflix isn't testing a user-facing "Show a preroll trailer from Netflix's best recommendation" setting says a lot about their willingness to ignore long-term, hard-to-measure impacts…)
It's not a very conclusive study for the reasons you mention. Researchers have long suspected connections between DMT and NDEs (see my other comments), but the bottleneck here is that it's still so difficult to get funding and approval to do studies with these substances (it was actually not possible at all for decades) that this is about the state-of-the-art.

Hopefully this is now changing and things will progress, in the meantime this is better than nothing, perhaps unless taken out of proportion!

Disclaimer: I just follow this field and have no credentials in it.
Password and credential management in 2018
Not from the US. But how in God sake does this make any possible sense? I mean if the insurance doesn't want to insure a certain medication, then you just pay it for yourself (provided they explain why; or that your contract said so).

But how could it be possible that you pay more?
America's last iron lung users on their lives spent inside obsolete ventilators
Killing one person per 1 million miles driven like Uber's self-driving cars have done is drastically different from killing one person per 80 million miles like human drivers do.
It's an irritatingly common requirement for supplementary data submitted to a journal to be in the form of an excel file, so I'd bet a number of those errors were caused by researchers just going through all the hoops required for publishing.
Here's my favorite exchange from the comments:

> Tigt: I have no idea what you want me or others to do, even after reading this 3 times.

> Judy DeMocker [Author]: That’s a valid point.

I'm sure it was fun to write a post that imagines how the use of anything-other-than-AV1 ultimately leads football fans to firebomb police stations in 70 cities. But I'd rather have read a thoughtful post on actually-legitimate reasons to care about this.
Oh, the people who implemented Vision Zero replied to the cited article here https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a14500765/new-york-...

They call the cited article "dangerous if believed by your driving readership". They provide several points of evidence (full studies available to those interested).
> The plan is to achieve a noise reduction of up to 10 decibels.

If they can achieve that goal, it sounds very good [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel
In this case who are the smaller companies you are referring to specifically?

If the small companies in question are gaining competitive advantage through non-compliance that makes them viable enterprises then it is good and correct that they should be forced to change their business model and compete with the same rules as everyone else, right?

I don't understand what you are saying with this: "Outside of technology, it's common for certain types of services or tools not to be made aware to small-time customers. The technology industry at large and the large tech companies in particular have so far bucked this trend in a way that created a huge amount of value for the world at large.."
In my state most doctors don't have the technology to send digital eScript for controlled substances
Meeting the W-15 Electric Pickup Truck
Ask HN: Why companies shy away from expanding in Midwest / Central part of US?
Majority of technology companies generally prefer to expand on either west or east coast, both of them are really expensive to live and crowded.

Why companies don’t prefer to expand in central part of country where everything is inexpensive?

One comment I have heard from people is lack of talent pool outside tech hubs, wouldn’t talent go wherever there are better opportunities?
Part of making good picture is knowing limitations of your gear.

My first camera I used when I started this hobby was Fuji X100. This has a lot of limitations. Extremely slow focus, fixed 35mm (equivalent) f2.0 lens. This forced me to study its limitations and what I can get with it.

I have quickly learned, it's not about being able to do everything, it is about being able to do something, very well.
Would also like an answer to this. This is worrying, just started using them...
> By entering the wormhole here on Earth and traveling to the black hole, you can essentially wait for a billion Earth-years to pass, then pass through the wormhole again and emerge in the future.

> Alternatively, you can pass through the wormhole to the black hole and emerge in the “past.”

This is not time travel any more than I'm travelling into the future right now at the rate of 1s/s. For it to be time travel I'd have to come out the other end before I entered, not just traveling into the future faster/slower than the other end while passing time I don't get back whatever the ratio.
I think people can recognize those at level N+1, but not (reliably) level N+2 and beyond. In fact they are likely to think that people much above level N+1 are "crazy".

Current political discourse contains lots of examples of people at level N+1 (or emulating that) convincing lots of people at level N that all the people at level N+k, k>1 are dumb, crazy or evil.
What about him was "zero value"? Why did you find the checks "meaningless"? You criticized him without explaining why you concluded the behaviour was unhelpful (and if you really did tell him to eff off, I'd say that was really unhelpful). As you say, they have to learn somehow.
It's a feature not a bug, you signed up for something, didn't cancel and were billed for it.
The default info pager is pretty horrible. I would recommend installing pinfo (usually available in official repos) which is an info pager with user interace similiar to lynx.
Calling it gaslighting is uncharitable and dismissive. The Overton Window here seems to be generally around "big companies" and "ads" always being bad.

In this case advertising other Netflix shows seems reasonable. It's common practice on most content platforms. I agree it's annoying and I'd rather not have it.
He taught himself 15 languages so that he could speak with native farmers.

For me, this line sums up the dedication of the founder of this seed bank. He traveled extensively and worked tirelessly.

It bothers me that this whole thing is news to me.
I think that it is a result of training or lack of it. Spreadsheets don't scale well and have validation issues but are accessible. That is its own skillset unfortunately to do properly. I have seen scientific code that is frankly painful but their flaws are understandable as I would probably make a hash out of their subject.
It is strange stuff.

The first time I took it I thought about staying up for a few minutes instead of going to bed. About two minutes later I am in my living room feeling both that this is a place I never have been before but that it also completely familiar. Then I hallucinated that my son's toy tracked vehicle was rolling towards me and decided that I'd better just head to bed.

Some doctors will give me a 30 day supply of Ambien, other ones look at me and think I'm a head and would only give me 7. So I don't bother.

I think a celebrity might get more deferential treatment for doctors that most people but there is always a quack in town who will write a huge amphetamine script for any hippie or redneck.
You could view R[x] as a subring of R(x). At that point, once you have tranformed the problem into one contained entirely within R[x], evaluation at a point becomes a well defined function.

I suppose you could view evaluation as a non total function on R(x)XR (or rather, a function on the annoying to write domain where it is defined), but I have never seen anyone do that explicitly.
Pop Songs Written by Native Speakers of Swedish
A rotting foundation eventually catches up with you. Things don't have to be perfect, or even particularly great... but when things are working by accident rather than by design...
Depends on the magnitude of the problem to be solved.

Small problem: Ask friends for someone they have worked with on a similar problem.

Large problem (building an org): Ask 5 VCs/CEOs/VIPs for intros to the best person they know in that role, under the explicit direction of “learning what good looks like.” Interview all 5 with open ended questions. Ask each for one for one more contact. Eventually you will learn to pattern match, and one of the folks you like will volunteer themselves or a friend, and you will know how to interview.