skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My employer is a customer of Twilio and Sendgrid, and for the exact same reasons: Sending notifications to customers via SMS and/or email, depending on circumstances.

I suspect we represent a core customer type for both firms, and I rather suspect they have a pretty extensive overlap in their client list, so some obvious synergies will be around support, APIs, account management, etc.

Fundamentally, their business is about running APIs that let them accept incoming requests from people like me, processing it, and then passing it on to some very ugly external services that will (eventually, hopefully) display a text message to someone at the far end. That's a lot of overlap!
Most consumer software is tragically bad. For example, the automatic cat feeder I have has probably the second worst user interface I've ever seen.

The worst was a thermostat.

Heaven help you if you ever lose the manual.
I didn't actually end up going there, I went to a school even less prestigious and less notable (our only Nobel is Rajendra Pauchauri) because I initially intended on majoring in something not available there (I later changed my mind). That was probably a mistake, but whatever.

In addition, I'm in-state. For the year before me I believe in-state acceptance was in the 40-50% range, which isn't very competitive IMO.
Tech Sales Rep

Shitty leads, shitty data, shitty managers, backstabbing, lies, deception, unrealistic expectations, questionable value-add, little stability.

Glad I left. If it's not on a shelf or not from someone I trust (Amazon, my cousin, etc), I don't buy it.
It's great that FB can even try and I'm sure they will improve things somehow.

My concern is apps like WhatsApp which can't peak into conversations.

We're going through elections in Brazil and the amount of fake news I receive daily from family and friends is shocking . Some days I try to be a fact-checker to send a message that they should know better but it only creates anger (and I never take a position , simply show the facts. I'm sure they catalog me as being a member of whatever other side they hate).

People only want to read/see things that agree with their views to the point that they are happy to forward pure crap to others.
People have short attention spans. It was not so very long ago (and indeed it is still quite common today) when the standard way that one "lived" their life was to spend 8 hours a day at work and then most of the remainder watching television.

Yes, compared to the ideal, having your nose in your phone to the detriment of all other activities is undesirable, but compared to the actuality of what came before it might be an improvement.
'office party' is an oxymoron, but then I've never lived in California
For anyone looking to build a game but not yet settled on an engine I highly suggest giving Phaser a shot. I spent a few hours with the latest version and was pleasantly surprised how far it has come.

Most importantly the documentation and example code are now so robust that most common game components like 2d physics, collision, projectiles, multiplayer can be found here: https://www.phaser.io/examples
It would seem that softbanks backing by the Saudi brutal regime should give Silicon Valley idealistic founders moment of pause before accepting their investment.

WeWork founders banned meat from their office meals can they really accept to be owned by this fund?

Once the SoftBank money stops flowing does the chamath described Ponzi scheme stop causing the whole thing Venture backed growth story to unravel?

https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-talks-invest-15-bil...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RwRZtZQoLtQ
> there's no clear and blatant systematic bias?

I haven't been convinced of it, no.

> Harvard and Duke are both more selective/prestigious than UNC, therefore they are equally selective/prestigious?

No, but some 86% of applicants can't get into Duke and 95% can't get into Harvard so I'm not sure if that extra 9% is really worth complaining over. It reeks of incredible elitism.

For the record, Yale and Stanford are in the same tier. Most of the ordinary folks in this country don't go to competitive schools at all, if they go.
I actually agree with you. Cryptocurrency is not inherently "evil" nor does it do anything evil by design. The NSA has many programs and actors that could be construed as evil.

However, that's separate from the point I was making.
> absolutely dedicated to bringing the sci-fi future he so loved into reality.

We need more people like this.

Some of this stuff might be impossible, but there is only one way to find out. It takes a great person to throw themselves into the machine of failure for the benefit of humanity.

It is, ultimately, also philanthropy - it's just philanthropy on a timescale that is far greater than one life and far more than a few [million] lives.

People who push humanity forwards will be remembered forever - through their name on someone's lips, or their legacy in someone's hands. In many ways these type of people are immortal.
Semantic Scholar is developed at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Just a remark that seems timely tonight.
Leaving an echo chamber
This is not right. I'm a founder of Series C startup/venture and I'd be inclined to take money from SB only if numbers are looking shaky. Going public creates a strong brand value, and liquidity for all the employees (not just VCs and founders). Not to mention, makes recruiting easy due to perception of "this company made it". While there is lot of scrutiny, I think it's worth it if your numbers are somewhat good (no need to be great as public markets have shown to be forgiving tech companies if you have bright growth prospects or you can paint a great futuristic story).
Time Formatting and Storage Bugs
Google's json search api gives you a consistent easy to parse api.

However it requires a Google API key, which limits free usage.

Client-side scraping scales effectively, as it distributes the reads onto all the clients. But it's also more brittle, as Google could change a small implementation of their search and break all the scraping functions.
That's it, I'm deleting my hacker news bookmark. I've been on a good kick lately looking at old illustrations in books on archive.org. I've started reading around them and there is some pretty neat stuff written by people who never logged on.
A more accurate comparison is that software devs are like general contractors. I’m referring to those contractors who have experience doing plumbing, drywall, framing, finish work, etc but learned where to sub out to be more efficient for both their profit and to save customers time and money. A bad contractor can make a remodel a complete nightmare.

I should note that I’m a software dev and a family member is a general contractor
Considering how much energy cryptocurrency mining sucks up I would say we would be in a much better place environment-wise if it was curtailed immensely. Unfortunately I can't see that happening any time soon.
> and only a few bugs died on my windshield.

Smoother airflow around the windshield means fewer bugs smashing into it and more glancing hits that don't leave a mess.

Traditional hard edged cars like Jeep Wrangler seem to get a lot of bugs on the windshield (based on brief Googling), so while there may be fewer insects I'd wager to guess aerodynamics is large factor.
Last I checked Postmark is actually a fair bit more expensive, and SES is cheap and very, very, very barebones. After Mandrill exited the space in a fireball of burning good will, the remaining players in what I'd call the "full service but not eye-wateringly expensive" space are Sendgrid, Mailgun, and maybe Sparkpost, and there's not a lot of distance between them in terms of price and features.

One thing Sendgrid is good at it letting people easily send emails (ie, receipts, confirmation emails, etc.) on behalf of their clients, while still passing SPF/DKIM checks, which Mailgun and Sparkpost make a bit harder. If you're working on a SaaS product that needs to send emails on behalf of your clients, Sendgrid is an obvious choice.
Great that the gains of american innovation are accruing to mysogynist oil sheiks
Which magazines aren’t 90% ads and the remaining 10% long form ads? Genuinely interested as I haven’t seen any good mags in a while.
It definitely is not just you. I spent my first two years of PhD wrapping my head around the stats and maths commonly used in ML, and realized that mathematically (as "theoretical" ML is practiced today), most answers are already provided in classical work of statisticians and probabilists. There are many fascinating questions of probability theory and statistics, but most have little to do with AI. In fact, in terms of the biggest empirical success story (deep neural networks), there are essentially no theorems providing a solid conceptual leap of understanding. Mikhail Gromov goes one step further regarding the lack of theory for neural networks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Wl3Ggho6k), and provides a fascinating overview of his thoughts in:
https://www.ihes.fr/~gromov/category/ergosystems/

I am interested in the points you raise, but also realized that I would not find a good environment for it at MIT in EECS, for reasons that are rather obvious from the article's subtext. As such, the last year or so has been spent in a search for good alternatives in terms of research, and I am slowly finding answers. I am happy to discuss more over email.

Long story short: you are certainly not the only one who thinks that way.

EDIT: added a video link to Mikhail Gromov's actual views for better accuracy.
I really liked his world view after reading "Idea Man".
RIP Paul Allen.
It’s worth noting that the commercial real estate companies are exposed should WeWork falter.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/wework-real-estate-earni...
Even if the encryption and decryption is done client side like with Mega?
It all depends on how attractive you are as a male. If a woman is repulsed by you physically, then even being in the same vicinity will be construed as harassment. But if a woman is physically attracted to you, anything you say is fair game and even welcomed. So in the end “don’t be a creep” doesn’t mean anything.
Except that almost nobody who hits a kid on the highway did it on purpose, and everyone who commits sexual assualt does it entirely on purpose.

Sexual assault is unrelated to the victim's behavior because no matter how foolish you were, if your attacker wasn't a vile fucking shitbag then it wouldn't have happened. People who commit assault make a choice, every single time. And then they get away with it, because other people somehow believe that "the kid came out of nowhere and I couldn't brake in time" and "she was drunk and wearing a short skirt, what was I supposed to do" are equivalent defences.

Edit for clarity:
I'm not saying that you're justifying the attacker. I'm saying that while advice like this is sometimes practical before an attack happens[1], it's irrelevant after the fact. Entirely. Every time. Because sexual assault doesn't happen by negligence (which can legally and logically be shared by both parties), it happens by intent. So we should stop asking what she could have done, and start asking what we can do.

[1] Although trust me, every woman is fully clued up on the fact that she could be attacked at any time - have your ever been asked to walk a coworker to her car?
Developers Show What They Could Make If Apple Opened Up Watch Face Development
A while back they added it again, so you can use + in your searches now.
> Just look at the CSS spec (or collection of specs):

> https://www.w3.org/TR/css-2017

> It's enormous! How could anything be intuitive when there are hundreds of keywords?

But I covered this though -- you don't have to take the whole HTML/CSS spec, because if you did you'd just be making a browser.

Even if there are hundreds of keywords, you generally don't have to know (or support, as an implementer) every single one.

> To give a more specific case, I would argue that CSS is eminently un-guessable. Take for example the CSS property clear: [example]

The example you gave is pathological -- a more reasonable one for a "basic design problem", which is what you said CSS was bad for:

#MyDiv {
background-color: black;
}

Your very next sentence betrays how pathological the case is:

> "clear" is a magic word I just have to know when I'm dealing with float layouts so that my elements end up the place I want them to. It's not a concept that flows naturally from the way designers think about layouts, it's essentially a special case , an implementation detail which has been sloppily bubbled up to the CSS API. CSS is full of these special cases.

"clear" isn't magic, it requires knowing what a float layout is, and having used a float layout before. It is a special case reserved for building float layouts, that is necessary because of how they work.

I don't disagree with you that float layouts are terribad and shouldn't be used these days, but that's the beauty all those keywords in the CSS spec -- you don't have to use it. These days we have Flexbox & Grid, decently engineering solutions for layouts.

> By contrast, a constraint-based layout is built on a few extensible contexts. Essentially you have a hand-full of layout anchors on each object, and you have a short list different possible relationship types between anchors. From those core principals you can build up any kind of layout you want.

Could you de-jargon these sentences? Maybe this is where we differ, I think what you just described is more complex than CSS from principles. Also, I want to note that not many in this thread have stuck up for the simplicity/ease of use of AutoLayout.
I recently had the opportunity to intern with Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. Paul Allen was an individual whom the general public in Seattle spoke highly of in terms of his goodwill, magnanimity and philanthropy to the people of Seattle and the US.
The headline seems to be misleading. Here's Dan Houser's response (lead writer).

"There seems to be some confusion arising from my interview with Harold Goldberg. The point I was trying to make in the article was related to how the narrative and dialogue in the game was crafted, which was mostly what we talked about, not about the different processes of the wider team. After working on the game for seven years, the senior writing team, which consists of four people, Mike Unsworth, Rupert Humphries, Lazlow and myself, had, as we always do, three weeks of intense work when we wrapped everything up. Three weeks, not years. We have all worked together for at least 12 years now, and feel we need this to get everything finished. After so many years of getting things organized and ready on this project, we needed this to check and finalize everything.

More importantly, we obviously don’t expect anyone else to work this way. Across the whole company, we have some senior people who work very hard purely because they’re passionate about a project, or their particular work, and we believe that passion shows in the games we release. But that additional effort is a choice, and we don’t ask or expect anyone to work anything like this. Lots of other senior people work in an entirely different way and are just as productive – I’m just not one of them! No one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard. I believe we go to great lengths to run a business that cares about its people, and to make the company a great place for them to work."
We are killing everything the way we’re living. Either we change or we too die.
Doesn't surprise me at all. The company I work for had a similar survey internally and over 20% of the respondents indicated some level of harassment or coercion (fewer than 20% reported coercion or quid-pro-quo). This is a company that works hard at not having that sort of thing, being inclusive and diverse, etc. and has a reputation in the community as being one of the better places to work as far as gender and racial diversity is concerned.
Just because an institution is an academic institution doesn’t mean they’re only trying to train people to be academics.
Why Seed Scaled
There are far more engineering roles than product manager roles, it’s far less stressful to be an engineer, and it’s tricky to continue along that PM career path because your knowledge gets specialized by industry. These articles make young grads salivate and plan their career all wrong.
Does everyone know the story about when he told Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer he had cancer back in the early days?
Welcome to HN!
I love this question every time I see it.
How Adobe is bringing “real Photoshop” to the iPad
Rare Viking ship burial, long houses, discovered in Norway
this is both a reason for and against working at the same company as your spouse/partner, you get to hear all the fucked up shit going on in another part of the organization
I think what we missed is that there would be two tiers of email senders, differentiated by price. There would be $100/MM email senders that would appeal to spammers, and $500/MM senders that would appeal to companies that manage their communications well. They’d have different delivery rates through spam filters. The bottom tier is bad for the world and a low-margin business. The top tier is OK for the world and a profitable business. SendGrid seems to have found the sweet spot.
15 experienced a quid-pro-quo?

Am I reading this wrong, or does actually mean 1/6 women founders were asked to exchange sexual favors for investment?

Holy shit.
Lapham’s Quarterly: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org
How Open Source Is Powering Netflix
Just the building, not the entire CSE department. Not to mention Allen library.
GP's comment says "has been happening" and parent's says "is not happening." I don't see any "might." Both are anecdotal; GP's is likely more upvoted due to being more poetic as well as supported by the accompanying article.
What motive would anyone have for hacking a pacemaker?
Perhaps time to add it to the FAQ.
How about eternal optimist?

Resilient, the ability to get repeatedly knocked down on a daily basis yet spring back up.
1. To slightly change your question, with regard to the structure of microcircuitry in the brain, of which cytoarchitecture is a purely anatomical component, we are just starting (as in about a decade or two in, but nothing systematic). Cajal and Brodmann did the pure cytoarchitectural studies over 100 years ago, and that is well understood. There are many ongoing projects to gather and characterize this across all human brain regions, most of the effort in the community centers around the BigBrain project, but not all of it is publicly available yet since many of the projects to make use of that data are just finishing their first 'grad student' cycle. On a more fundamental level we are just starting to do a systematic survey of the types of neurons in the brain (previous smaller studies have been done for decades, but have been very hard to compare [1]). We need to have that as a foundation to be able to meaningfully catalogue the circuits that are composed of them. In a bad analogy, we need to have names for the basic discrete circuit components in the brain (resistor, capacitor, transistor, etc.) before we can come up with something like a Horowitz and Hill for the neural circuits.

2. Yes, people are working on this, but whether the neurons that are created are actually like the ones in a living brain require much more research. The search term for this is 'neural conversion' and the key paper is [2].

3. It is either much simpler, or much more complicated. Axons send projections along signalling gradients during development and have something akin to a lock and key system (made of cell surface proteins) that help them hit the correct targets. If you can make the signal and design the lock and key, in theory it would work. The issue of course is that we have zero idea what sticking a specific new connection in will do, though there is this paper which suggests that pure connectivity changes can have a gain of function [3]. The other area to look in for stuff related to this is axonal repair (spinal cord repair), and that is where all the theory seems to go out the window because there are so many signals that the neurons listen to. If you dig in there you will see that people have tried scaffolds, signals, stem cells, and all other manor of hocus pocus to get it to work because the search space they are in is terrifyingly huge.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigBrain
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3619199/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2756723/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774341/
Specificity of recall is not an end, but it is a necessary means to the end goal of education. We can only know that someone is an independent lifelong learner if we can tell that they have learned something; not only that, but that they have learned a lot of related, non-obvious facts, and can work with them. This dichotomy, between learning facts and learning concepts, is not an innate one and I wish that notion would go away.
Did he also had teams to advice on purchasing half a billion dollar yacht? Do you know the total investment that went in to Allen Institute? It's mere $150M. So you are crying over a guy who spent approximately 20X more money on sport teams, private rock concerts and yathces than on something that might define the future on humanity. Compared to Allen, Bill Gates has lived fairly understated lifestyle without owning fleet of jet planes and spent far far more amount of time on advancement of humanity. I might shed tear when he dies. But Paul Allen? Nah... The guy won absolute lottery for writing small amount of code in BASIC interpreter and got approximately same share of money with the guy who actually did all the work and worked his ass off for 40 years of life while Allen roamed around southern France with his girl friend and dreamed about purchasing sport teams so he can stroke his ego as Twelfth Man. I as well be sad when king of Saudi Arabia dies for doing bit of philanthropic work here and there.
I was deeply disappointed to see this is not a return of the original Palm, in kind of perhaps a return to a ‘non-internet’ ‘traditional’ PDA or something.

Or...I don’t know. Anything remotely interesting. And yeah, someone else mentioned the payload of the header of the site, it’s no wonder it behaves so poorly on my iPhone SE.

If this does have anything to do with the makers of the original Palm, that’s a damn shame.

P.S. WebOS was freaking awesome. Even if it never had good hardware to back it up.
Well that's totally true, but even then I have no idea what the legal mechanism is for making a formally verified language in the context of a medical device looks like, or even decision support software like the grandparent was discussing.

Even if such a thing existed, it would require a very rich set of constraints on the program to be able to encode something like "won't make the wrong decision when a patient has a pulmonary embolism and these three other conditions" and I think that's what doctors would want.
I didn't have the privilege to work with Vulcan, but they are a really awesome organization. I think Vulcan best exemplifies Paul Allen's approach to philanthropy, which focused on measurable results and data-driven change. For those unfamiliar, check out Vulcan's outstanding work with elephant atlas (https://elephant-atlas.org/) and the great elephant census (https://www.paulallen.com/remembering-the-great-elephant-cen...). When I was at AI2, the great elephant census was used as both a barometer and analogy to think critically about the value and impact of the research and tools our scientist were developing.
Many systems set up to please underrepresented groups such as African Americans and Latinos indirectly hurts Asians. One of the reasons is that Asians are never as vocal and numerous as the other 2 groups. However, the biggest reason is that the white will not set up a system to hurt whites. Only take away from one minority to give to other minority; then just sit there watch 2 minority group fight.