skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My last bank was a staid conservative heavily regulated business that lost my custom because they were so poor at technology.

My electricity supplier is close to loosing my business in part because their web site won't accept my meter readings.

I'll be basing my decision on what car to buy my wife at least partly on whether it works with my iPhone. If it doesn't then you won't be on the list.

And on and on. We increasingly interact with businesses through technology, if they can't get that right then they are going to suffer. They can't get it right unless they take it more seriously right up to board level.
It is also hard to formalize and convey to someone else what one already knows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
When looking at someone like Dr Seuss who kept trying after numerous failures, you also have to consider that there's an opportunity cost to doing what he did. Note: his story "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected 27 times before being accepted:
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-hi...
Maybe if he'd been rejected 100 times, it would have been worth thinking about trying something else?

Also, if you follow the above link, you find that Dr Seuss admitted it was sheer luck that he got published. He was ready to give up! '"He bumped into a friend ... who had just become an editor at a publishing house in the children's section," McLain explains. Geisel told the friend that he'd simply given up and planned to destroy the book, but the editor asked to take a look... "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he probably would never have become a children's author," McLain says.'

I'm guessing, but I'd think that for most people, getting rejected after trying the _same thing_ 100 times probably means that your product is not good. So giving up after some reasonable number of tries, and pursuing _something else_, is often the better course. If you have nothing better to do, and don't mind failing in the end, then you can keep trying, too!

The problem then is trying to figure out when to quit, and when to keep trying at the same thing. Some people have faith in themselves because they know that their product is great. But it's hard to tell the difference between justified self-confidence and unjustified self-delusion.
There’s a gq/esquire or rolling stone article on depression in the climate sciences.

I remember a researcher who described leaving America and heading to a Nordic country to raise his children- because he said its hopeless and this is the only shot his child would have. He gave up on the subject.

There’s other parts which describe the number of students who leave the field because of how bleak the data is.

If there’s a canary in the coal mine, it’s long since dead and The canary handlers are resigned to inevitable collapse. (And mine owners seem to be fleeing to New Zealand)
In this post, Bertrand Meyer made a similar claim taking the airplane industry as a reference.

"When Will We Learn?
Every major software incident requires a thorough and public analysis."

https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/227943-when-will-we-lea...
> perfect execution is rare and almost guarantees success

Isn't that a tautology? Is there any reliable measure of execution other than the success that follows?
Matt Taibbi is a crappy journalist that distorts the truth to fit his narrative. He's entertaining but not trustworthy.

It's worth noting that Fairfax sued the group of traders in that story but the lawsuit never went anywhere and was eventually dismissed.
I actually would see teaching as the longer term project without the small wins you can expect in programming.
In the Netherlands they recently (3 years ago) scrapped the "studiefinanciering" (study financing) which was a grant gifted to college student to support them in their living. It was replaced by a loan type system where students are able to lend money from the goverment against a 0% (for now) interest rate.

You have 35 years to pay back the loan, with an interest rate set every 5 years. You only start paying back the loan if you make more then the the minimum wage (or if you make more then 143% of the minimum wage if you have children)[1].

Defaulting on the loan is possible, although i have no clue how easy that is. (It probably involves being placed under "Schuldsanering"[2])

The system has been highly critized as getting a loan is extremely easy and many first year students just loan the maximum amount allows. (which is a staggering 1300 euro a month, for comparison, the old system was a grant of rougly 400 euro a month).

College costs itself is funded mainly by the goverment, as both Universities of applied science and universities of science have major oversight from the goverment.

The subsidized collegecosts are the same for everyone regardless of major(2000 euro a year roughly). This subsidizing only applies on your first bachelor of first masters though. If you want to do more then one bachelor/masters, you pay the full price, which is depend on major.

1: https://duo.nl/particulier/studieschuld-terugbetalen/terugbe...

2: http://www.financieelbewind.nl/wnsp-wat-is-schuldsanering.ht...
This is 100% what i mean. This exact way of thinking is what imho might well prevent Elm to strive as much as it could.

And btw, I am (modestly) involved in the IDE support. So do check before being cynical <3.
Yes, that is an excellent series of articles. Highly recommended.
> you needed permission to publish a native module Elm's package repo.

See, this, to me, sounds quite reasonable.

A feature is potentially dangerous to the rest of the ecosystem if encountered unexpectedly: therefore, we put some extra friction on sharing code which uses those features, and made it an obvious and opt-in process if you wished to take that potential danger into your project. Great!

Given that... why on earth would it be necessary to remove the feature from the language entirely?
You have to look at the other side of the equation too: expenses and family structures.

$200k euros in the bank is a ton if you're a single student. It's a very short runway if you have 6k/month in mortgage, 2k/month in childcare, car costs, educational debt, and so on.

Unfortunately, most people don't have that type of savings until they're also saddled with obligations.
The problem with the Peter Principle (and similar) is that it doesn't account for the skill of getting promoted, which is a separate skill from professional skills as in salesmanship, technology and math skills, or people skills. People who rise to the top usually have developed a keen sense of what enables promotion, and once promoted what it requires to keep that position. To a large extent it becomes managerial skills which may as such be learnt in schools, but such courses seldom deal with the politics side. To be successful one probably need to figure it out for oneself, and even then chance plays a large part.

Which is why the article is wrong: the front bench of the house of commons and the people mentioned (and others mentioned in similar tirades) are not stupid, they are highly adept, it's just that this skill doesn't have a (non-derogatory) name AFAICT. And it doesn't necessarily correlate with our preconceptions of what people at such positions in society or organizations should be good at.
To some extend, space electronics have a lot in common with stuff used to manage industrial plants.

For examples in Chinese megascale steel mills, while SCADA's are used for monitoring and higher level control, operational aspects are handled by handcrafted PLCs made of modern analogues of 7400 series, 8t sram, redundant sensors, quoruming and BCH coding, mram, mems oscilators, and all solid DC-DC conversion, and all of that is provided with manual overrides

Most important feature of all of this is that it provides hard, near physical, impediment to wrong inputs from higher level control systems (SCADAs.)
Think of it another way: All matter in the universe is getting smaller. But the universe have the same size, so distances between everything increase.
But a record defines implementations of the protocol methods. Would you say Traits in rust aren't an OO construct?

The data and methods are coupled in the record definition. The methods depend on having the records fields in scope.
Back in junior high one of the classes was marooned into doing a skit on a school event day. The punchline of the skit was an extended version of the saying - "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach PE. And those who fail at that, end up as head masters."

The head master at the time was an ex-PE teacher.
Management is not a business skill: it's an HR skill.
Sure, they're immutable, but it's still very much OO. I've never heard of OO requiring mutable state.
There are some things humans will simply never be able to come into contact with or fully comprehend. Such things include the 4th dimension, the concept of infinity, and the concept of nothingness. The universe and what lies outside of it, unfortunately involves all of these concepts, so while there may or not be nothing beyond the universe, because we cannot measure this or engage with this, it is only effectively nothing and not literally nothing.
The link is presented without commentary, but for those who do not know, Agner Fog manuals are pretty much the bible on x86 microarchitectural details and optimization.
Netflix SIRT Diffy: A Differencing Engine for Digital Forensics in the Cloud
There are already attempts to do that.

There are a few corals which manage this.

But their not going extinct is not the problem.

The environment is like a jumbled stack of stilts holding up a house.

There’s enough stilts that if a few of them get eaten by termites, there’s enough redundancy to keep the house upright. The system is interconnected and deep enough to end up fine.

What’re happening is that many supports are dead, others are rotten and still more are weakening.

This means that eventually, one support will collapse and set off a contagion. A collapse chain, similar to what happened during the 2008 crisis.

Reef collapse means a whole chunk of ecosystem dies - and it’s never coming back in multiple human life times. This impacts every creature that depends on that ecosystem.
Who are the great quarterbacks that have struggled at coaching?

My best guess is that the spoils of being a great quarterback are so great, and the retirement job offers are so lucrative that they simply don't want to take the steps required to learn to coach.

For example a pretty good QB turned great coach like Jim Harbaugh took a job as an assistant coach Western Kentucky after he retired, and subsequently moved up the coaching ladder. I struggle to see a great QB taking a road like that when they have so many other options.
actually, long distance flights are huge generators of carbon. for many, getting to Australia involves multiple long distance flights.

it'd probably be best to reduce demand of these long distance flights across the globe, and as a result, encourage people to not engage in tragedy of the commons style behaviors justified thusly: I have to see it before it goes away, which are likely to increase demand.

so, really, you should absolutely not visit if you're considerate of your personal carbon emissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...
Polar Route
>by that definition, nobody can have true agency, until a post-scarcity society where provision of services does not require any labour from any human, and is free.

Of course. Nobody is 100% free. At best we have fewer limitations to what we decide to do, but not none.

Even in a post scarcity world, where we would much freer, we wouldn't have 100% agency (for one, we can't do whatever we like to other persons, we need to respect their agency too. Second we have inherent limits, as to what we can do without getting tired, talent, a lifespan, etc). So our agency is limited in several ways.
Incorrect. Bankruptcy is more secure.

When the student can't pay, the abusive interest rate accrues fast enough that it becomes a perpetual loan. It's a guaranteed lifetime earning for the bank.

It's also a misnomer to call that defaulting. The principal can be covered many times over by the interest. It's very profitable.
The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server
Detecting life’s influence on planetary atmospheres
Working out better and better, thank you.
Why can't this be done with ports?
There's no notion of spacetime outside the universe. The spacetime is the universe.

Two assumptions:

a) the universe is infinite. In this case it doesn't expand into anything, the things inside of it just stretch apart.

b) the universe is finite. In this case it expands into something, but because we're trapped inside spacetime, we can't answer this scientifically.

The wording "expanding" adds more confusion than it helps. See [1] for the discussion about this topic.

[1]: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/ask-a-question/104-the-univ...
I just looked it up as my memory of the process was from an ISP friend over beers several years ago.

It seems the enforcement fee is currently $200 from the rightsholder: https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and-fe...

Damages are capped at $15k and awarded by the tribunal as per: https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing-in...
They say the best teachers struggled with the subject.
What does nuclear power have to do with the coral reefs?

As far is know, it was ocean acidification which is killing corals, and then run off/pollution?
The formulation I like is the "curse of knowledge".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

But overcoming the "curse of knowledge" is exactly what makes for good teachers, good designers, good communicators, and so on!

This idea that you better you are at "teach", the worse you are at "do" and vice versa is A) a sharp dig at academia, and B) a result of the cognitive dissonance we feel when someone is extraordinarily good at something valuable but has underdeveloped teaching skills.
I think you're actually missing the point.

"Competent to execute" is far more important than "working hard enough." Elon Musk splits his life between Tesla, Solarcity (now part of Tesla, but essentially independent), The Boring Company, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He also dabbles in a slew of other projects. That means he works at most 8 hours per week on each of those. Is that working hard? It's hardly working.

Unless you've done a circuit where you've been in many roles in companies, and have experience in tech, marketing, management, sales, finance, legal, etc. running your first startup is almost guaranteed to bomb, but you're also almost guaranteed to pick up some of that experience. The basic model -- many risks, a few successes -- is great for both personal growth and being a successful entrepreneur. Indeed, I'll say Elon is partially successful because he can leverage experience across those companies.

I do agree many people aren't in a position to do this. Restrictive employment agreements, financial obligations, and family obligations certainly can eat you up alive.
> However, there is an unspoken claim that the gradient update doesn't carry enough information about the user data to reconstruct any of it server-side.

This was a concern for me as well, but the 'Privacy' section of the post addresses this. In short, the algorithm is adapted such that the influence of a single user on the model is limited, and noise is added. I'm not knowledgable enough on differential privacy to know if that covers all possible privacy attacks, but it looks like a good start.

Personally, I'm now more worried about adversaries trying to mess up the model. How many clients need to submit fake updates for the training process to never converge? If it's 50% that's probably fine, but I'm afraid a much smaller amount of users could derail the process already.
Lottery wealth is a (tiny) subset of wealth.

It is possible that besides the material part there is some form of psychological effect, "I have won in a 1 to a zilion chance, I am better (or the fate, or God preferred me), I am special".

Inherited wealth or hard worked for wealth may well produce different happyness levels.

And of course whar happens in Sweden may (or may not) be "universal".
Naw, you just get a bigger loan :)
11.5 Factor apps
“Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240944-lottery-a-tax-on-peo...
I wish we'd (as a whole) stop using quantitative terms for things that aren't quantifiable. We can all do that, it's easy and it makes us sound smart.

I've seen $100mm+ companies fail because Google decided not to like them anymore. I'm talking about external forces that are far more powerful than execution. And there are lots of 'em (an infinity, even!).
> a large number of hedge fund analysts are data scientists

Maybe I'm being a curmudgeon. In my book if you can't build the statistical tool you're using, you don't understand it. So if, in Excel, you can fit a regression from "scratch", (i.e. not using any built-in regression functions) and use the built-in functions for convenience, that's fine. If you can't, you're a regular financial analyst. (Nothing wrong with that. I was one once.)

This is important because being able to build it means being able to tweak it. Excel's tools have quirks and make built-in assumptions about your data. If those assumptions don't hold, you should be able to tweak (or change) your approach. Being limited to built-in models removes that flexibility. It also implies you don't know when you're crossing between "my tool works" and "my tool is outputting garbage."
You can also easily obtain summary statistics and ANOVAs, etc, in Excel with a few clicks.
I agree, but this was about free/complimentary wifi services, so in these cases you are not really buying anything. I think most of them are also blocking porn sites, etc.
I've personally used it as a tool, and the automated algorithms do very well. With the addition of my insights I've been doing 100%+ yoy. Something like 300%+ 2017 and 250%+ so far 2018. The website itself doesn't publish the algorithm I'm using as testing it requires years.

Yes everything is back tested from 2008 forward, unfortunately although the earnings appear high - it's still not fool proof. If something changed in 2018 that broke my method.. then it doesn't matter how much back testing was done.
>The Peter Principle is satire: it mocks management and it mocks books about management. It is striking, then, that most people take it quite seriously.

It might have been intended as satire.

I see nothing in it that cannot be used as a straight argument with quite good explanatory and predictive power.

A lot of things started as something else. It's their inherent qualities that matter as to what they are, not the intentions of the creator.

>So Profs Pluchino, Rapisarda and Garofalo suggest a compromise: promote people at random. This may be the best response to a world where leaders stick around until they are ready to depart. But there is an obvious alternative: when people are not up to the demands of their job, we should not wait for them to resign. They should be sacked — or, perhaps better, demoted back to the roles where they once flourished.

Both were attributes of the old Athenian democracy.
> @gmail.com address

Doesn't need to be, tons of people use G Suite. you'd have to be checking MX records.
Nonsense. All the great teachers I had were also great practioners. I like to see myself also there. Rhetoric is trainable.
We need more than "clean" energy.

We need a change in a number of habits. We need actual leadership, and not only gov types. Etc.

Nukes are the easy short term way out. The issue is what that means over the long term and how it impacts the other vectors in entity. of this problem.

Without a wake up call we'll continue to mindlessly zombie on, as we have been. Nukes __might__ slow that (but only if they don't also create a false sense of overconfidence). However, they're not going to alter the course. They alone are not going to change the end.
Though not the same exact problem, the current machine learning research in nlp to remove unrelated bias is facing trouble in removing demographics from learnt representations.

Vector representations of textual data of users encode demographics data even when they are explicitly trained no to, and the task they are trained for seems tangential to the demographic data.

See this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06640 by Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg.

"Adversarial Removal of Demographic Attributes from Text Data"

Recent advances in Representation Learning and Adversarial Training seem to succeed in removing unwanted features from the learned representation. We show that demographic information of authors is encoded in -- and can be recovered from -- the intermediate representations learned by text-based neural classifiers. The implication is that decisions of classifiers trained on textual data are not agnostic to -- and likely condition on -- demographic attributes. When attempting to remove such demographic information using adversarial training, we find that while the adversarial component achieves chance-level development-set accuracy during training, a post-hoc classifier, trained on the encoded sentences from the first part, still manages to reach substantially higher classification accuracies on the same data. This behavior is consistent across several tasks, demographic properties and datasets. We explore several techniques to improve the effectiveness of the adversarial component. Our main conclusion is a cautionary one: do not rely on the adversarial training to achieve invariant representation to sensitive features
> You can also easily obtain summary statistics and ANOVAs, etc, in Excel with a few clicks

To be clear, my original comment was not criticizing Excel. It pokes fun at analysts who couldn't tell you a Type I error from a Type II being branded as "data analysts" because they build DCF models.
This is incorrect - the fact is that we cannot afford it at all

A carbon tax of that nature will kill global growth, and our ability to service debt.

A carbon tax will mean many businesses will shut down or have their margins pruned significantly - costs which will be pushed to consumers.

This means lower global growth rates, which is not something politicians can sell, especially since the source of funds (corporations) will fund politicians who oppose it.

So it’s not just that nobody is willing to put their foot down, it’s that no one can afford to, without suffering huge repercussions.
This is all true, but learning to teach takes time and one has less time for research.

Too much presenting moves one into extrovert mode where one has many "ideas", but no proofs or execution.

I rarely see a top presenter actually doing anything.

Feynman really is an exception, and there are rumors that his classes were too good -- the students would think they understood everything, but actually did not.

This is also what I experienced when reading his books (which are superbly written).
Andre's talk "The Past, Present, and Future of Cycle.js" [1] describes how Cycle was grown by the community through discussion and experimentation.

[1] https://vimeo.com/216787869
The irony that he cites Harvard Physics is the vanguard of rethinking how to teach Physics, and possibly the root of this article come from Harvard Physicist Eric Mazur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIFL0K184kg
Are electrons getting larger? Are atoms getting larger?
I find it a little annoying that there is so much recruiting on HN that I open up the comments section of an article to find someone completely off topic plainly asking people to headhunt for them.
Does "Hatred" count? It goes more in the "mass murder" direction than "serial killer", but I feel like it would fit.
That's horrible advice for relationships.

Once you sleep with her, marry her. Sorry for being conservative here.