skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm befuddled why Amazon, who has been in this game the (second?) longest and has had the most opportunity to take advantage of deep learning can be so bad at delivering relevant advertising. I suspect there's some institutional inertia that prevents them from deploying better technology.

Another example is that Amazon is incapable of recognizing the difference between something bought as a gift versus something for yourself. Thanks to one Christmas present 10 years ago I still get recommended Playstation games.
Been using Pixlr (a photoshop-like web browser app) for over 5 years now. Here's why.

* It's free

* It loads so much faster, and the interface is in my opinion just as responsive as photoshop.

* It doesn't require 200+ Meg of space on my hard drive

* I can use it wherever, on any computer that has an internet connection.

* And it has all the features I need in a photo editing tool.

The only drawback for me is that it was flash based and now I found a html5 version and I think I'm in love with Photopea now.
We used to do it in the UK. Certain newspapers campaigned to have it removed from the curriculum.
In New York you have civics, history, and geography all lumped in together under "social science".
I had this when I was in public elementary school between 2000-2005. It was part of the library classes, and we were also taught information retrieval on Google and some of the Google competitors at the time. Everything from how to find sources and evaluate if they were trustworthy. It was obviously simplified, but it's one of those things that I think really stuck with me.
Africa (and the world at large) has lots of problems. Some are technical and some are political. Just focusing on one issue means missing out on opportunities to improve people's lives in other ways.

There are already a lot of organizations working on governance -- maybe it's best if tech people focus on tech problems and let the governance people work on governance problems?
This is what I always wondered. Most placebo studies work with pain/chronic pain. But can you somehow use the Placebo effect to reduce the duration of the flu? Or other infections? Does a good patient-doctor relationship (article says that this is an important factor in Placebos) promote faster recovery when a virus is involved?

Edit: Although even here, you often need to trust the answer of a patient about their well-being and can’t necessarily pinpoint the duration of the flu to measurable symptoms only.
People die from diseases caused by sewage, but it's usually a downstream issue.
Indeed.

I get so, so angry when I think about this for very long. It's frustrating to even have to explain it - it's just so _obvious_ that it's a bad thing.

No-one would find it acceptable if they were arbitrarily kicked lightly in the shins, constantly, as they walked down the street. Even if it were monetized. Even if there were no scars, no obvious "permanent damage".

Somehow, the mental assault of advertising is seen differently.
> two classes that should be brought back are civics and geography

Geography? What happened to geography classes? When were they cancelled?
Here is my less-hot take: STAR is exactly back-to-front.

You’re combining ranked voting with range voting.

Ranked voting is objective and clear (the Condorcet criterion is very compelling) but unfortunately incomplete (Arrow’s theorem, which in this case boils down to unresolvable three-way cycles.)

Range voting is more tractable (counting is easy, no awkward cycles) but subjective (no-one knows what the scores actually mean) and prey to tactical voting.

STAR starts with range voting (so you lose Condorcet) and adds cut-down ranked voting as a final step (only after some rank information has been discarded; and ranking isn’t a sound way to resolve ties).

It would be better to use ranked voting first, then range voting to resolve tie-breaks. That would make better use of the unique advantages of each voting style.
Using Google Proxy for Abuse?
I work for a web hosting company. Every so often, I have to reboot customer servers as a result of traffic from Google IPs in the 66.102.0.0/16 and 66.249.0.0/16 subnet.

In some cases, the whole of the abusive traffic uses the Google Favicon UA generated by
https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=

How these requests generate scores of php processes and tank the server is unclear. In this case, though, a forwarded_for IP is provided, and usually emanates from a single location.

In other cases, it may come with a seemingly normal UA like the following.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.3; en-us; SM-N900T Build/JSS15J) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36

In these cases, no forwarded_for IP was supplied in the interaction.

I've documented the following ways I've found to make requests to sites using Google as a proxy, but it's not clear how these are being used in abusive situations. My question is, have others noticed abuse using Google as a proxy, and identified how Google services are being used as a vector?

https://pastebin.com/raw/VHZe9ceL
My company (CrowdStreet) definitely took a "fake it 'til you make it" approach. The early days involved the founders manually juggling spreadsheets and emails to maintain the appearance of an automated platform while they gauged interest and built out the actual code to handle things.
Facebook has a tool that learns to fix bugs automatically?
Maybe there are two sides to every story?

I'm a person who looks to the future and hopes that e can find a better way forward. The company has new leaders, new employees, and a new focus on cloud.

There are no losers when a 100-year old Fortune 100 company validates your strategy and values.
If you are looking for an alternative to standard parser generators
you may wish to have a peek at Chevrotain.
* https://github.com/SAP/chevrotain

Instead of using an abstraction of a declarative grammar definition and code generation to provide an alternative to writing a parser by hand, Chevrotain simplifies the process of hand crafting a parser.

Meaning no code generation and you can still directly debug the code you have written (unlike most parser combinators).
It's why at a certain age with Prostate cancer "watchful waiting" is often preferable to invasive procedures. In some cases it will be so slow growing you're likely to die of something else first.
The Free Public License (0-clause BSD License)
The ad industry is very good at selling itself
I read somewhere that removing corruption is a bottom-up process, not a top-down one. That is, the culture has to change. There has to be a grassroots movement to eliminate corruption. If society as a whole does not care about it, then it matters not whether the people at the top are corrupt or not.
> We used to do it in the UK. Certain newspapers campaigned to have it removed from the curriculum.

When was that?
California voters reject Proposition 10
I've been using this for the past 20 minutes in Sublime Text and, well, it's quite sublime.

Holy shit.
Ask HN: How does integrating SaaS works for you?
Hello Hackers, we'd love to get your feedback! Me, together with some friends, are currently working on a software to collect data from various sources, integrating them on a shared database and to share (and synchronize) this data across their companies tools like CRM, Helpdesk and so on without coding.
We would love to know how integrating SaaS tools currently works for you, and how you make sure that the right data gets into the right places.
Last few months we've gone through Y-Combinators advisor track and now looking for valuable feedback and people that might be interested in using our software. In case someone is, just leave your email at encore.io and share your thoughts with us within this post :)
Robots, not immigrants, are taking American jobs
Quick Start Zero Investment Business Models
Someone just mentioned this in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380) and I didn't know there was a name for it. Now I do :D
Liquor Liquor? That sounds like a very healthy and reasonable store to have across from a hospital. Nothing unethical or distasteful there!
What was the business you were building, and did it eventually scale? How?
Value per Acre Analysis: A How-To for Beginners
You can use the model's output probabilities to optimize QA routing - any cases with less than 90% confidence to humans but save humans doing the cases that can easily be done by models :)
They've done this to me warning I was near the 1TB limit on data usage earlier this year. It felt pretty disgusting.
> Editorial: It's amazing what you can accomplish for the price of a handful of F35 fighter jets.

sadly our investments don't align in the high return ways.
I was at a pretty typical city public school ~>15 years ago. Even then we didn't really have "civics" as it were. There were "world history" courses and things in that vein, mostly focused on europe and asia, with a gloss over the other countries. (laughably so, looking back). There was a large course in american history, but it was almost all rote, and had nothing to do with how I would phrase "civics" in terms of pragmatic participation and impact. Similar statements could be made re: learning about "the economy" in history and "home finances" (writing a check) in home-ec but nothing about pragmatic long term planning, college loans, any of that stuff.

I shouldn't sell it entirely short, if you took some more esoteric extracurriculars/AP courses you could get some exposure but it was still very academic and VERY niche.

To stop beating around the bush, speaking at least for my school (even around when you graduated) had very little to prepare someone to actually be an informed participant in society. This likely varies heavily by school however, but polling my wife as well, she echos an even more bleak story. (private Jewish school)
What if the claim is not that my marginal vote is worth 0, but rather that the worth of my marginal vote is very small - so small that the marginal cost of driving to the voting booth and waiting in line is overwhelmingly higher. What mathematical or logical argument can you use to convince someone that is convinced by this weakened line of reasoning?

Even in my own state, which has a relatively convenient vote-by-mail system, there is still a cost associated to voting - educating yourself about the candidates and measures (the complementary booklet explaining measures and including for-and-against arguments is 50+ pages), filling out the ballot, and the cost of the stamp on the envelope, at least. It is also widely understood that my state is quite liberal, so that the democrat's victory is all-but-certain in most races. It's not hard for me to understand why the average resident would not even bother.
Tiny Cries for Help – How to Know If the Person You’re Messaging with Is Sad?
One interesting city to contrast the differences is Edinburgh, Scotland. The city was established by royal charter in the early 12th century, so it has been around a while, and a lot of the older parts are as you'd expect.

The part which we now call "New Town" was built in stages between 1767 and around 1850 and has an explicit "block-based" design.

More details on Wikipedia, as always:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh
Managing infrastructure that runs millions of programs in Turing-complete languages is a lot easier when execution time is known to be X, rather than potentially being infinite.

It also transfers a lot of complexity and responsibility for Lambda from AWS engineers onto the users of Lambda.

This setup makes sense to me, and I don’t see a need for it to change.

If you have really long-running processes, a different AWS service like Elastic Beanstalk (or your own self-hosted Lambda-like service) is a better fit.
It's pretty rare for someone to secretly implement an awesome feature. Usually the way that works is as you hint at: someone who already has high social status in the organization gets a lot of leeway to do his own thing while everyone else is constrained to the usual process.

The envy isn't about the awesome feature: it's about the fact that this developer gets even more attention and positive notice from leadership by means that aren't available to other workers due to social status (rather than merit).
Any proposal like this should include, "And we should cut topic X to make room for it."

Media literacy is absolutely a good thing to have, but schools don't have unlimited time to teach every subject

Granted, some topics can be integrated into others, but piling things on is not a sustainable thing to do.
Soon we will probably have an Internet Citizen Rating, similar to Credit Ratings, or China's Social Credit system.
Could you explain in more detail what you mean about LALR error messages? I haven't used the parser generators you mention but I've implemented LALR parsing before, the error reporting situation doesn't seem drastically different from recursive descent to me. You can report the location where the parse failed, what was recognized before that point, what tokens would have been allowed to follow.

Is the problem that these specific tools (yacc/bison) don't report errors well? Or is the issue you're talking about that LR grammars will fail later on than LL grammars in general? Or the greater ambiguity (e.g. more possible lookaheads due to the greater parsing power)?
Emacs Todo Mode
That raises a question: how can “good humble teammates” answer these types of questions in a way that makes them look good without lying?
Ask HN: How do you bear job which have no exitement, no learning, pays good?
I have job which pays good but have no learning. The colleagues are really bad and with lot off attitude. No focus on quality of product.

Manager does not care the talent and just want to make sprint go along. No innovation and really pathetic quality product.

It's big company so having ideas does not matter. I got ample of time in office and just work for very little time for whole sprint.

But job really making me pathetic have no excitement, no learning. Please tell me how to bear it.
I would like to see the loan terms and collateral requirements and general resources that the broad industry is working with.
Nah, Coke has significantly more "bite" (boy it's hard to come up with the right term to describe it) than Pepsi does. I don't think there's a significant difference in caffeine content between the two.

I'm honestly baffled that there are people who have trouble telling the two apart...
Graduated high school (public) in 2012 and college in 2016, never had a single dedicated geography course despite being interested in it. I remember going over continents in elementary school, but I still feel dumb when I look at a globe and see how far north Japan really is, or how the countries are arranged in western Asia.
From the abstract of the article they linked:

Energy-Based Models (EBMs) capture dependencies between variables by associating a scalar energy to each configuration of the variables. Inference consists in clamping the value of observed variables and finding configurations of the remaining variables that minimize the energy. Learning consists in finding an energy function in which observed configurations of the variables are given lower energies than unobserved ones. The EBM approach provides a common theoretical framework for many learning models, including traditional discriminative and generative approaches, as well as graph-transformer networks, conditional random fields, maximum margin Markov networks, and several manifold learning methods.

Probabilistic models must be properly normalized, which sometimes requires evaluating intractable integrals over the space of all possible variable configurations. Since EBMs have no requirement for proper normalization, this problem is naturally circumvented. EBMs can be viewed as a form of non-probabilistic factor graphs, and they provide considerably more flexibility in the design of architectures and training criteria than probabilistic approaches.

Seems like a really interesting unification of the wide variety of techniques out there in statistics and machine learning, analogous to the "everything is a computation graph, as long as it's differentiable" revolution. I like it when this kind of thing has its day. Would be interesting to see how well it works non-robotics problems.
In my area, "way back when" means about 10 or so years ago. The local county switched to small touch screen computers containing the voting lists upon which they 'check off' that you have voted.

But, the "splitting" of the lists into one per polling place likely still occurs, because it avoids a need to build a centralized database connected to all polling places to provide the "locking" necessary to allow John Smith III to vote only once. And this central system, were it to be used, also becomes a single point of failure that could halt voting at all polling places at once.

Now, granted, there is still the issue of the fact that a computerized "check off" system can have records be "reset" to allow John Smith III to vote more than once in the same polling place. Paper with an ink pen line (assuming a non-erasable ink) is by far more difficult to "reset" to "not yet voted" status for John Smith III.
No, I believe it is the case that Gruber conflated two separate projects (which might both be part of the same overall vision). The first was codenamed "Marzipan" and has been announced (and leaked and reported by Gurman). The second is what Gruber is speaking of in that article, and relates to laying out views. It has not been announced, but is codenamed Amber. Gruber clarified this post-Marzipan announcement in a tweet [0]. More info from Gurman [1].

[0] - https://mobile.twitter.com/gruber/status/1014490721909444608

[1] - https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/05/01/scuttlebutt-regarding-app...
This sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests as part of voter law.

Making voting harder tends to benefit one political party over another; it doesn't across the board lower turnout evenly.

Sometimes it's enough to understand the macro issues of the party. You can't really know how an elected official will vote on your behalf, so it's all guesswork. But making voting harder is just going make our government less democratic.
To think how we used to work out detailed instructions from maps oriented north to get to where we need to go and now these apps are flipping orientation around and I have no idea which direction to go - driving while hunting for the setting to north. Uber has twice convinced me to cross busy streets erroneously and then I have to jaywalk thru traffic to get back.

Remember the first time as a kid when you'd been driven everywhere and you're told to walk to school the first time? Unless you'd been paying attention at 8 or 9, you had no idea how to get there.

I can't imagine what life would be like if I hadn't visited most metropolitan areas before the smartphone.
Could we really teach about how things work?

There is the polite fiction, and there is the reality. The reality involves miraculously good investments and other things that totally aren't bribes, especially because they are often done by spouses and children of elected officials. The reality involves trading scandal information to blackmail each other into supporting the uniparty. The reality includes legislation written by lobbiests. The reality includes winning at any cost, such as via election fraud.
I would take the time to closely read the article. It points to several cases where the placebo effect went beyond psychosomatic, specifically treating irritable bowel syndrome and preventing heart disease.
I kind of put vscode in the same category as notepad++. Actually, as a text editor, I think N++ has some nice features that vscode doesn't (like macros, I think).
Your comment was interesting until the very last two sentences. Please don't make low-quality generalizations like that, punctuated with dismissal.
they _could_ try to make money in some way that is more productive to society than spreading mind-viruses
If a church were to put something in my eyes, they'd put a sculpture, a nice building, a gargoyle on a wall, whatever.

(That's what they actually do).

If your examples did it - it'd be flashy, colourful, gauche, impolite, nonsense. Scammer grade low class bullshit.

No-one likes having evangelists knock at their door, because they're annoying and interruptive.
It's (at best) a wicked problem, in the original policy sense.

Proposition 13 is understandable for the same reasons rent control is, but also terrible policy for (some of) the same reasons as rent control. California's total unwillingness to build new housing (at least where people want to live) is even worse policy, although I object to seeing it attributed solely to landlords. The combination means all possible cost-fighting solutions will fail; all thats left is to decide how to distribute the damage.

And so all of the policy options also suck. Rent control is at most a stopgap for some current renters, which does nothing for those newly seeking housing, further discourages construction (it may not apply to new developments, but it sets precedent and they're going to be old developments eventually), and rewards landlords for driving away their tenants. Repealing Prop 13 is not only unattainable but likely to drive out the most vulnerable owners as broke cities try to repair their budgets. Restricting Prop 13 to non-rental properties suitably targets rentiers, but threatens even faster tax growth due to the smaller base - which will render leasing unprofitable with rent control or passed on to tenants without it. Even building new housing, the only thing that really stands to unwind the problem, is a mess. At small or moderate levels it will only slow growth and encourage people to move in, while at large rent-reducing scales it will wipe out every non-rentier property owner who bought at inflated rates.

So, yes, California's housing looks more or less hopeless. In most places I'm against rent control as a bad solution to a solvable problem. In California... dilemmas have outcomes.
I'm teaching it to my kids already:

Lesson #1: Everything you see, hear, or read is someone else's agenda.
Anyone with a decent HMO would, for broad classes of procedures.
Serving ML Quickly with TensorFlow Serving and Docker
When cancer metastasizes, that means newly divided cells from the tumor have penetrated the blood stream or lymph system, and are circulating around the body. They will accumulate and grow anywhere that they happen upon if the conditions for growth are favorable.

The primary tumor isn't packing up and migrating, it is rooted in place like a tree. A cancer cell circulating through your body doesn't seek to get to the lung, it just might happen to end up there and it might grow well there and form a new tumor, like an acorn falling off a tree. Some acorns will fall into rich soil, some will fall on pavement or get eaten. You can't coax acorns to fall squarely into your bucket, and even if you did you still have the tree to deal with.
TechCrunch: Tiny, yet Modular, Homes Are on the Rise
> which is a growing portion of their Xeon business and one AMD has no clear, large-scale answer to AFAICS

Probably depends on the size of the company. AMD has their semi custom department which was responsible for the PS4 and Xbox One, as well as PS4 Pro, Xbox One X (the GPUs are based on Polaris but have features from Vega, which no normal Polaris GPU has) and Subor Z (Zen APU with GDDR5 as main memory like the consoles, but can run Windows).

AMD is probably the better vendor if you want custom SKUs (as the underdog they also have more incentive for custom SKUs).
NIs train NIs, so in principle why not?

(yes, we're a long way from there today but fixing that is what I'm working on)
Using redis as a main database.
Very well put. Career politicians thrive upon such a system.
https://cloud.google.com/automl/