skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm doing a big investigation at the moment to find out if "was this page helpful?" meaningfully correlates to quality.

I do track the other interactions you mentioned, but it's difficult to map them to actionable ways to improve quality. And then even if we do make them actionable, it's hard to prove that they have actually improved quality. I'm just starting out a rigorous study of this field, though, and am hopeful that we can make advances.
Old Chinese proverb: He who chases two rabbits catches none.
Scrolling is bad for reading
If you (or anyone) see something on HN that excites suspicion of abuse, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.

We occasionally see accounts that appear to be doing corporate propaganda, and we ban those. Unfortunately, it's much more common for users to perceive other users as astroturfers or shills when they're simply expressing an opposing viewpoint. These are two different problems that need to be dealt with separately. That's why the site guidelines ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing in the threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you're interested in the underlying bias that causes people to assume that someone else couldn't possibly be holding an opposing view in good faith and therefore must be a shill, I think it's related to the Hostile Media Effect. That is the finding that people with strong views tend to experience the platform as being biased against their side: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%22&sort=byD...
6 days, not years.
PowerBI is really an amazing for the price point (free-ish for O365 accounts) for most businesses out there (10~300 employees). It's not one size fits all and YMMV.

1) You have this problem regardless

2) Huh? Why not just the cloud version? Are you trying to report directly on a productive transactional database for a software app? See #3 about source of data.

3) Depends on your source data. I build a dashboard for sales in with data from SalesForce in like 2 hours.
In CRUD apps, suggestion for lookup values (based on previously entered fields) are usually good candidates for ML.
Google has the best security team. But it doesn't necessarily mean the team is closely watching all of their services. And some services (say Gmail, search) have much higher priority than others.

tldr: don't use any Google services that have less than 1 billion monthly active users.
The Problem of Async Programming, and a Crazy Idea for Solving It
AFAIK, Groovy 3 is targeting Antlr 4.
Every new watermarking technique they come up with is discovered and obscured within days each year by the screener leak community. I think it's kind of a sport for them at this point.
If you're looking for problems to solve in the transportation / shipping context, one that comes to mind is estimated delivery. Try predicting the day (maybe even down to the hour) of when something will arrive at its destination once it enters your company's network. It may require feeding it the origin and destination, the product mix in the trailer, customer priority, weather conditions, time of year (peak season?), etc.
Sounds like PR from the brain lobby.
when driving on ice, and start to slide, the ways to take control / stabilize the car is to first let it go wherever it wants to go (i.e. remove yourself from equation), analyze that, and then do something if needed/possible (well sometimes u can).

decisivenes, or self-sufficiency are also skills. Or,
"coming back is not same as staying" - was this written in Amsterdam somewhere?

(and the cheshire cat said it doesnot matter which way u start if it does not matter where u want to go.. u still reach somewhere. if..)

so.. if u dont know where-to go / progress..
do u want to go/progress ?
why?
and why that?
:)
A bacteria replicates at a much smaller rate than a virus.

A virus requires a cell to replicate, bacteria require a much more limited range of hospitable environments.

Both bacteria and viruses "attempt" to create exact copies, just as a prion does. Admittedly prion replication probably has more accuracy, but that prions occur at all indicates the process allows for natural selection.

These don't seem to put prions outside of the "replication" category - they replicate by encountering other proteins, so they are in a body. Their rate of replication is limited (or boosted) by the rate of encountering these proteins. They attempt to create copies of themselves with the chance of failure or different end result.
Its liberating. There is no information immortality.
This is such a great comment. Thank you for doing that legwork, and for sharing it.
Has anyone used Arcadia Data (the other company mentioned in the article) and have thoughts on it? I work in BI and had never heard of it before reading this.
Citizens United would not have been a blow to the First, that's silly. The right of free speech does not necessarily include the right to unlimited corporate political campaign spending. Our country ran just fine and the people were plenty free before the age of super-PACs.
In the centuriate assembly, senators + equites, a few thousand men among several million citizens, represented a majority of the votes (98 of the 193 tribes). This is pretty much a textbook oligarchy.
There's also been observations of particularly large amounts of certain human herpes viruses in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
I usually use `-h`, because it's shorter to type than `--help`. I find I encounter this kind of message way too frequently:

wc: invalid option -- 'h'
Try 'wc --help' for more information.
>Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation?

No, I'm saying that the fact that we can see down to a subatomic level which adds considerable complexity to a hypothetical simulation is not evidence that it is impossible that we live in a simulation.

If you tried to describe a 2018 smartphone to Konrad Zuse in 1936 he'd have thought you were either quite mad or a science fiction author. To him it would almost certainly be unfathomable as reality, even with him knowing that he created the first programmable computer. Hell, if you actually showed an iPhone to most of us in the 70's, 80's, or early 90's we'd likely have had a rough time processing it at first, especially if you loaded a VR game or some 4k video.
I'm still using squeezebox and really like the original hardware, plus home made receivers using pi's; it's a fully open source media system - something that doesn't seem to exist in today's landscape of vendor lock in.

Nonetheless, it's showing its age somewhat, and is harder to get streaming services working on it (e.g. YouTube, play music) in part due to its open nature (also, it's written in Perl...)
For a while the trend has been towards smaller nukes (called tactical nukes), not bigger ones like in the 60s. The rational being that smaller, more precise nukes have a lower threshold of usability. Destroying Beijing and killing 20M people is a solution of last recourse, and would be disproportionate in retaliation to a tactical nuke, or a conventional attack resulting in massive casualties.

One reference I could find: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/us-to-loosen...

[EDIT] Of course even these tactical nukes are way more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And this sort of crap is exactly why I won't install your Android app unless I specifically need it and (usually) it's open source. Android permissions are terrible and practically designed for abuse.
> for the life of me I can't come up with any problems that I couldn't solve with a relational database

It sounds like you have the right tool for the job now, so great. Keep using it. Dependencies should be added to projects as conservatively as possible. The best dependency is no dependency. You shouldn't go seeking out dependencies. Your app doesn't depend on machine learning, so why would you make it depend on something it doesn't actually depend on? Future maintainers (including yourself) would hate you for it.
True story, 10 years ago I was doing linear regression on infra data to predict capacity issues. My system knew when it had made a prediction and when capacity increased so based on the lag it could tell you the exact date to place an order so more disks could be added to the array before a threshold was breached. And whatever else we were monitoring too, batch job completion times vs number of CPUs, the whole works. PCA to figure out what was relevant. Clever stuff you might think.

In reality no one cared. We went on placing a disk order whenever the first dumb nagios alert paged someone. We bought more CPUs when the moaning from the analysts reached the CEO and he in turn moaned to our manager. It was fun to do and I learnt alot but realistically the impact on the business was minimal...
Where can you get/make one with decent audio quality and stable frequency?
IPFS has perhaps 2,000 times the resources ($) of dat. (Raised via the filecoin sale.) Surely that must count for a little.
Using a broad definition of ML/data science, here are a few ideas:

First, coding toy problems (related to shipping or not) that implement linear regression, genetic algorithms, or neural networks, etc. will be a useful start

Analyze shipping and tracking EDI data to predict whether a shipment will be late (0.0 to 1.0 output, 1.0 being it will be late for certain)

Predict the likelihood a customer will churn (stop using your services) based on changes in volume, billing amounts, and other characteristics

Predicting this year's peak season shipping volume based on past years' data. See if you can beat the marketing/sales folks' predictions

Identify factors correlated with the most profitable shippers

Predict the likelihood a package is damaged

Use a genetic algorithm to improve driver routing

Reconfigure pickup times / drop off times to improve profitability

Use EDI shipping data to build a network graph of who is shipping to whom, segmented by type of some sort. Say you find that many A-type firms are shipping to B-type firms; any B-type firms that are not already customers could be interesting targets.

Score prospects to estimate their profitability by comparing their characteristics to existing customers' profitabilities

Use a neural network (or something else) to analyze EDI shipping data, damage data, and make packaging recommendations to customers

Analyze tracking EDI data, segmented by delivery area (zip+4?) and see if there are areas where drivers are more efficient at delivering faster. Maybe start an initiative to look at what separates the most efficient drivers from the least.

Reporting: not sexy, but really useful in this space

Bona fides: I used to work in the supply chain consulting space and consulted at firms like yours. Things are surprisingly basic in the shipping space - less meaty data science than one might think.

Edit: Formatting
The Correspondent: Reader Supported News
Hacked data is more, not less immortal.
To be fair, they place as much emphasis on the realization that "stuff people will pay for" movement a larger volume of money than "stuff people will get without payment".
You can actually use both. You can use a lambda to provide the callable for the Boost signal.
Quora still has some incredible gems and answers from people directly involved with the question. Unfortunately, as all content sites, their growth has led to a rapid decrease in quality, and their efforts to inflate questions has only made it worse.
> Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand?

That's the stage I've been in for a while now. Forbes.com now has the same value to me as Huffington Post or Inc.com. It's a content mill with no clear brand voice that anyone can write for.
Shairport-sync also has small audio glitches, and I ended buying an airport express. Certainly cheaper than buying a raspberry pi and good DAC. The airport express DAC is very good.
> completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations.

Have you tried looked at Tibco Spotfire? I'd say it's a very good match. I find it much more intuitive than Tableau.
The appropriate defense against this is to simply not collect any information that’s not necessary for the product, and any information you do collect, immediately anonymize (ideally client-side) and never keep the original data.

Unfortunately, Google (and Facebook) has a business model that depends on acquiring as much personal data as possible and keeping it forever.
> Even JavaScript is miles better (PHP has a type system equally as bad, if not worse).

That's just not true. Just one example: PHP will throw runtime errors when (1) an argument type being passed to a function does not match its corresponding declared parameter type and (2) a value being returned from a function does not match the declared function return type. In pure Javascript you can't restrict the types of objects being passed to or returned from a function.
They're exactly the same as the ones on iOS. For years now. Apps that did that can no longer be published or updated on Play Store.

Cut this misleading crap out.
Solid in a vacuum at what temperature?
Why learn a new language?
I haven't checked. My workstation has a 2.53 MHz QPC that is expensive to call and (after stepping in to the function) I found that:

1) The 2.53 MHz QPC is just the rdtsc frequency divided by 1,024
2) The slowdown is from calling ReadTimeStampCounterFromEmulator, which it seems to discard the results of

My laptop doesn't run at 10.24 GHz so it probably is using HPET rather than rdtsc/1024. This makes QPC more expensive but I don't think it is messing up the reported timings - events are just outright being lost, as far as I can tell
And Google do security pretty well, so it's unlikely the certs will be leaked or broken :( When the Chromecast first came out, the was an open source receiver called leapcast which reverse engineered the DIAL protocol that the YouTube app on many smart TVs of the day used, and the Chromecast protocol was based on. But alas it doesn't work anymore.
Related: Anyone else noticed how Google Maps is now doing more subtle watermarking where they embed their logo into Street View images using machine learning, e.g. here: https://imgur.com/a/0T8wP2u URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3730304,4.8793692,3a,68y,194...

Edit: Look a the yellow area above the door obscured by the Land Rover. They embedded their logo along the shape & size of an appropriately sized feature on the building, as opposed to somewhere randomly where it would be more visible as it crosses e.g. the boundary between a building and a tree.

When I first spotted this I thought Google's logo was actually on that building, but it disappears as you zoom in/out.
It should, but it might end up not.
Aside: the UK there are a couple of satirical news quizzes (The News Quiz, Mock The Week, Have I Got News For You). At times I've got most/all my World news through those; it works quite well as a means to get hot-takes on major events.
This looks really cool, makes me want to get my motivation back for learning Japanese again.
>It's just that, security. You can be sure you will have healthcare, you will have housing and you will have food, and so will all your dependents.

That's certainly better security, but it's still nowhere near the level I'm talking about. You're still having to concern yourself with money for things like smartphones, entertainment, holidays, etc. and you're one government crisis away from austerity taking a big chunk of that away. Also, keep in mind that there are still people alive who witnessed WW2. You can't take the stability of your country as a given.

The $10m number puts you in the position to even diversify away risks to your home country.
The thing that's legally meant to be patentable is the execution, not the idea. The thing is in a lot of cases, the execution isn't the hard part:

Given an e-commerse website having a database full of user accounts that includes their shipping address and credit card information, implement one-click ordering.

Given a capacitive touchscreen and UI framework for interacting with it, implement slide-to-unlock.

A programmer competent in the use of the relevant technologies can easily implement these requests, and will probably come up with a solution similar to those employed by Amazon and Apple, respectively. That one-click ordering on an e-commerce site was a good idea was actually novel, but there isn't a form of IP protection that's intended to cover mere ideas that are demonstrated publicly.
How to make incredible breakfast smoothies
Agreed.

Back then you primarily went one of two ways, Perl & PHP. PHP was by far the lowest barrier to development. Easy to enable PHP support in webservers, easy to incrementally increase usage in your platform alongside any static HTML.

PHP + mod_php moved away from needing to know what was happening on the server side.

Perl and the other cgi-bin integrations could be complicated, involved, requiring more specific configuration on the server side. Sure, it's not _that_ hard to do, but it does present a barrier to entry that PHP / mod_php handily solved.
Good point about lambdas. I haven't done much C++ since about 2011, which is when lambdas were added to the standard.

In terms of which to use, it depends on your use case.

Lambdas let you easily specify a single callback function, so they're a nice syntactic sugar for passing to STL functions (e.g., for_each). If you're the sender and only have one callback to fire, a lambda is great for this.

If you have to fire n callbacks, you could probably build a signal / slot mechanism with lambdas. But at that point, I'd start to consider using a dedicated library like signals2. It takes care of a bunch of things like object lifetime (e.g., slot deallocation if an object is destructed), efficient management of the list of slots, and thread safety.
Most fusion is powered by gravity, so at this point, low gravity has been nothing but an impediment.
I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it eventually...still waiting after two years.
Talk about tyranny of the majority can be counter-productive. Whether they believe they themselves are gods or not, many Americans believe that the framers were practically gods [1]. The framers were very concerned about tyranny of the majority, and had it in mind when designing the federal system. [fuzzy non-logic goes here]. Therefore whoever governs in America is not tyrannical, regardless of whether they hold a majority, and they are justified in whatever they do.

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Fl...
Qt 4 hit end-of-life in 2015. These are the Qt 5 docs: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/signalsandslots.html
I didn't say that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. I said that the Roman Republic could not in any sense of the word be described as democratic. It was fundamentally and wholly governed by wealthy land-owning elites, who derived their position in the system from their wealth, despite the presence of institutions that bear a superficial similarity to institutions present in modern democracies.

I'd really urge you to crack open an academic textbook on the subject. If you'd like to dive a little deeper, I'd recommend W.G. Runciman, "Capitalism Without Classes: The Case of Ancient Rome" (British Journal of Sociology), Wilfried Nippel, "Policing Rome" (Journal of Roman Studies), Peter Baehr, "Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World", Peter Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution" and Douglass North, "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance" which has a large stretch of summary of Roman political economy.
I still print debug quite often in Go, I don't thinks its always less efficient then a debugger, and even when it is I don't think its always 10x less efficient. I think it depends heavily on the type of software you're working on.

For webapps in particular there can be a lot of value in constantly reloading the page. For example it can allow you to more often visually inspect the page for ui/ux/performance improvements. Particularly in early stages of a user interface where you're still figuring things out.
So they get to keep the profit they made off the profit but but not the profit itself?
> Can you imagine debugging your C/C++/Rust/Go/... programs by adding printf everywhere and re-run the whole thing ?

Yes, absolutely. This is my principal and nearly-exclusive method of debugging the distributed systems I work on all day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
Great idea to get started, thanks!
The php dev landscape is pretty wide. On the one hand there's wordpress developers that can only use "f5-debug", on the other hand there's software developers that use TDD with PHPUnit and Behat.
Is there empirical evidence to support the idea that PHP developers do not use xdebug? If not, perhaps you can explain why you think this?

I have largely stopped coding in PHP, but I did use xdebug when necessary. I have very little idea of other developers' workflows, but I am very skeptical of this claim.
Game Tech Deep Dive: The fast and furious window shaders of Forza Horizon 4
As an adjacent dead comment points out, you'd use Emscripten to "convert nginx to WASM" (i.e. "compile"). Wasmer is a runtime.

But there are actually use cases to what you're talking about. Essentially instead of nginx -> LLVM -> machine code you're replacing it with nginx -> WASM -> cmm_of_wasm -> machine code. There are tons of LLVM opts already, but if there weren't, it might be reasonable to use WASM as IR and using cmm_of_wasm's opts to make it faster than a naive C compiler (but of course none of the popular compilers are naive anyways). Also, of course this won't work today because cmm_of_wasm doesn't rebuild the syscalls from emscripten-compiled-WASM (yet). But if you're writing your own language today, ignoring system interaction for a sec, targeting WASM even for native might not be a bad idea as backends are coming w/ optimizations.
Ask HN: Finding meaning in what we do everyday
I'm fairly successful remote software developer working in the industry for 15 yrs. I've recently realized that I'm doing one or the other thing over and over again without any deeper meaning. I deliver what am I asked to, keep up with new technologies, improve quality of my work. But I find those things a bit soulless. I live in outsourcing country so projects and startups come and go. But I'd love to do something more meaningful and write code that matters. Working on something more impactful would bring some sense into what I do every day.

And I'm struggling to fix this dilemma. I'm aware that this is not 1-day-change. Has anybody experienced feeling like this ? I'd to read your story. And I'll more than grateful for any suggestions/ideas how to overcome this situation.
I often wonder if the cat and mouse game of high school IT restrictions is an under handed way of training the next generation of security professionals.
The EU recently clarified how GDPR applies to external entities, mostly along lines that were probably obvious: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SophieWrobel/posts/fZRjFA9fj1C?... [1]

GDPR isn't stupid and GDPR isn't a bad law. Unfortunately, people suffer from what I've seen described as "GDPR hysteria", which causes people to make irrational, unreasonable shifts blaming GDPR as the cause, such as blocking foreign countries from visiting a website entirely, shutting down services completely worldwide, etc.

[1] I like the summary at that link, though in the interests of post-Google+ context later, the article linked is this: https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/edpb/files/consultation/edpb_gu...
I'm not sure I completely agree. On the top end, Intel is clearly ahead. However, multi-threaded workloads and higher IPC is becoming more important for many things. And given the price premium that Intel is charging, AMD is definitely competitive.

For that matter, ARM solutions could also be very competitive but seems to be overpriced by comparison to x86 for any server solution I've seen so far.
I would use std::function and lambdas.