skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> At worst, these essential services just fall apart because not enough people would be willing to spend their tax refund on them.

That would imply that these "essential services" are worth less to people than the cost it takes to provide them. Especially when the primary customers for such a service would be doctors, so the typical patient wouldn't even have it as an independent cost separate from the doctor's visit.

> At best, we'll end up with the same thing because corporations are greedy and there's not really a good reason to have competition in pharmaceutical oversight.

Why would you not expect competition? We don't have a monopoly provider for credit reporting or product reviews.

> Do you really want to have to shop around for a service that tells you which drugs are safe?

Do you really want to not be able to? What happens when the FDA approves Vioxx or the dozens of other drugs they've approved, often on the market for decades, that will give you a heart attack or liver damage or cancer or birth defects?

Or even worse (since you can't opt-out), when they fail the other way and don't approve the only drug that would save your life?
Retool is hiring software engineers and account executives
Hi — we're Retool, a fast way of building internal tools. We launched on HN not too long ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966).

We're profitable, growing quickly, and have raised money from great technical founders, including Paul Graham, John + Patrick Collison, Nat Friedman, Greg Brockman, etc.

The market for custom enterprise apps is huge. And we think that we have a promising shot at capturing much of it: we have a product that works, that customers love (go talk to any customer), and whose usage is growing rapidly.

We've significantly de-risked the business (good signals of early pmf, completed 10+ unaffiliated sales via cold email, are profitable, etc.). But there's plenty of uncertainty left as well. For example: how do we convert early pmf into actual pmf? How do we scale sales? Should we be doing sales or marketing? Should we be selling to technical or non-technical people?

We're now looking for our second engineer. If you enjoy, and are good at the following:

- building things,

- deciding what to work on, independently,

- and getting things done + managing yourself

We think you might be a good fit at Retool!

If you're interested, please email jobs@tryretool.com. Please include whatever you think could help us understand you, your background, and your accomplishments.

Thanks!
Yeah, but where do they get the pollen from? Article omits that part completely.
Counting Threats: 5 Things That Keep CISOs Up at Night
Could be that older people are less flexible. I mean, I've been a professional software developer on the forefront of new tech development for about 40 years. I can't seem to do anything else but learn new tech as it comes along and churn out successful products, so I guess I'm rigidly set in my ways.

It helps that I work remotely. Very few see my grey beard and get the chance to see how inflexible I am because of my age, so I get the respect due a younger person.
I don't remember that big of a price advantage, but they definitely had a HUGE selection advantage compared to the book stores in my city.

To a certain extent the price didn't matter much because it was the only way to buy a lot of books.
I would love it if someone could figure out how to make meat substitutes that don't contain ingredients from the nightshade family, for those of us with nightshade sensitivity. They all seem to contain potato.
Another one that is even vegan-friendly is Ethiopian food. Almost every Ethiopian restaurant I've been to has a "vegetarian sampler", or something of the like, which on closer inspection is usually vegan. Many dishes in the sampler are lentil-and-spice-based, all are entirely delicious.
Yes, it may be able to. At least, Delphi, the idea (and language) of which Lazarus is based on, was written in itself, at least for v1, I've read. Probably for later versions too, because Object Pascal (although IIRC the language is now called Delphi, like the product), is a powerful general-purpose programming language, with OOP support, module (units) support, and even some sort of generics (IIRC) in later versions.
Demand is inelastic? Meh, my brother is living in Brazil and has been using a ton of private healthcare services because it's cheaper. Again, you're engaging in all or nothing thinking. As the price of LASIK goes down, more and more people use it. Americans go to the doctor less because it's more expensive. Healthcare demand is the furthest thing from an 'inelastic'.

Healthcare is bigger than just things that you absolutely need. Obviously, there are those things, but that's what INSURANCE is for. Then, when you are healthy, you can shop around and when insurance is too expensive and has too many items you don't need, you can instead get a barebones plan which would cover the things that you seem to be worried most about.

If a person failed to get insurance, well... that's not good. We shouldn't encourage that as a society. If someone runs out of resources and has to demand it from others, they are a burden and that is bad. If too many people do that, society collapses.

Obviously, there are going to be those people and I'm not saying we shouldn't care for them, but the more we have a socialized system--one that has a shared resource pool everyone takes from--the less efficient it will be because the incentives applying to individual encourage them to use as many resources as possible because they aren't the ones who bear the cost.
How do you come to the conclusion that ML is a buzzword here? It's natural to publicize interesting new research that grounds a field -- as statisticial learning theory does for machine learning. Historically, Ben-David and co-authors have produced foundational work on the implications of SLT in ML.
How does this work with a typical podcast player? The media download is typically just an mp3. The podcast software maker would have to be in on the scam otherwise it's an mp3 that plays from beginning to end.
Why do I need to manually convert anything? Even then...

var results = (await sql.query`
...
`).recordsets[0].map(rowToObject);

It's really easy... no need for complicated ORM/ODM tooling at all.

As far as the size... create a docker container from node:10-alpine to run a given node application, and create a similar container with any application running full Java. And compare the final size.
Floor is better when it is higher - would you agree with that statement? But if floor is important and it is better when higher - then the best store of value would be a basket of long lasting useful commodities. Like iron. Their floor is practically their current market value.
Ethiopia provides solid competition.
This is more or less devoid of any useful information...

When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a couple seconds, and sit up

Is what everyone already knows. The article implies that you somehow just do this and conveniently ignores how useless that advice is for breaking or replacing habits. Especially ones where you’re not going to be alert enough to even remember that you’re supposed to be be doing something.

If you simply go to bed when you’re sleepy and then get up at a fixed time, you’ll cure your insomnia

This is not how insomnia works at all. ”If you simply be happy you’ll cure your depression!”
What's the question?

I like to ask them to explain either the concept of closures in javascript, or how `this` works.

I don't even need them to know the word closure, knowing why you can't reference a variable written inside another function, the difference between var and let, or what does bind/apply do.
One more data point for "community college is great": this was my experience too. I guess it depends on the school/program/prof, but after 4 semesters of music, I only had great professors who care about their course and the students. I'm 40+
This comment makes me want to work for a large company. If all they provide is lots of money and potential for interesting work then that sounds great!
I've always loved the posts where people share their side projects that are making them $xxx / month.
Verizon and T-Mobile call out AT&T over fake 5G labels
Eh. We exist in a society where people who perform abortions must live with people who believe a fetus is equivalent to a full human life. People who believe unbelievers go to hell must live with people who are atheists.

The tension between vegans and non-vegans is not unique or unprecedented. The only thing that's new is veganism's recent growth spurt, which has produced a lot of new converts that mainstream society is slowly learning to tolerate, and vice versa.
All you're doing is moving that from T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon to Google, who will sell the information at the drop of a hat for the exact same reason. You're not guaranteeing anything at all. In fact you're probably making yourself less safe as Google is going to have less protections than a cell phone company.
what you expounding upon is [1] of the indicators that we dont completely understand physics at the "point charge" scale, and very possible there is no such thing as a point charge, rather there is a centroid of field intensty/probability I.E. a wave function.
point charges are likely an overly simplified view, and artefactual convienience of extrapolation.
I just recently loaded it to make a simple prototype application with it and it was a smooth and easy process. I still hesitate to fully do a big project with it in almost 2020 (I was proficient with Delphi 20 years ago). But if you leave the tech-coolness factor aside, Lazarus is a powerful tool.
Just a warning for anyone wanting to try it: make sure to set up authentication first thing. Last time I checked, this was not obviously mentioned anywhere in the "Getting started" tutorial.

https://nodered.org/docs/security

By default, without auth setup, you're basically opening a friendly, public remote code execution web portal on a high TCP port. It's bound to all network interfaces (not just localhost as you would assume).
Show HN: A short game to know if you're good running 1:1s
Ireland richer than Switzerland?!? In terms of GDP maybe, but not in terms of wealth amongst the population. I.e. this article is incorrect.
This forum isn't really that good for space discussion. There are definitely people in the aerospace industry, but not very many, and mostly in software. You really need some people who are aerospace engineers to have the best discussion. Lots of flight software algorithms begin as a MATLAB/Simulink or Fortran code from an aerospace engineer rewritten by a software engineer.

I've seen some good discussion on Stack Overflow, but I don't regularly lurk. I do lurk on satobs.org - occasionally there is very interesting discussion there.
Carriers can sell your location to bounty hunters because ISP privacy is broken
TL;DR - you tried YouTube?

Tangentially related... I've been having really good luck lately via teaching myself via YouTube videos. By observing an example, I learn 10x faster than trying to follow a written exercise that gives me a bunch of material I'm not (yet) interested in.

This past weekend, I wanted to understand the basics of how one inserts data into a 2-3 tree. This video, along with the audio, taught me everything I wanted to know...

https://youtu.be/C3SsdUqasD4
Ask HN: Usage of mental performance enhancers among peers
How many of your colleagues in tech use Aderall or other mental performance enhancers?
Please share your Aderall stories here.
If monetizing with ads is obviously not working, why do it at all then?

Shut off all deeper articles behind a paywall, have just a few free articles of the full content to show people what they would get if they pay, and don't bother with the ads (and by extension, ad blockers).

Would this work? If it doesn't, then isn't the real problem the articles themselves? Their value to the intended audience is not high enough.

I mean, if the articles are so uninteresting that people do not want to pay, with ads or whatever else, and the NYT (or any other news site) cannot make the articles more interesting, then they simply scale down, or go out of business completely. A business is not entitled to a revenue stream just because they happen to exist or happen to prefer a certain delivery channel over another, or some form of monetization over other, and so on.

So... how to make the articles more interesting to people?

Everything competes with people's time. Articles aimed primarily at entertaining its readers compete not only with other news sites which do the same, but also with Netflix, Youtube, games, movies, books. There is too much competition.

I say: bring back good old fashioned investigative journalism, make high impact articles which expose corruption, dig deep into things, and so on.

In short make the articles worth people's time, and they will surely pay for those, too.

And ditch the ads. (Yes, I am actually pro paywall, as long as there is a high quality freebie or two every week)
This is about the possibility of proving certain things about the model, not about properties of any implementation. Properties include for example the relation between the amount and quality of data available for training and the accuracy of the model. If a model is proven to learn too slowly it costs more to train it. And some models might never approximate a target function.
Great idea! wish you guys the best.
Those 100+ person classes are the biggest wastes of time though. You can self-organize around a book in a Facebook group and watch any top ivy league professor lecture through it.

The only reason to pay for college, the only value they have, is in the experience of the professors and what they can offer you one on one. Everything else is replicated outside the walls with far less effort than the cost of university.
> I'm confident you could work in the morning if you readjusted your sleeping habits.

This subthread is about the possible/probable genetic reasons why some people have more trouble adjusting their sleeping habits to that of everyone else. Saying that he just needs to adjust his sleeping habits is not really helpful.
Data types and assumptions and how incorrect assumptions made a spacecraft crash
I do ok with 7. I’d sleep longer but my back starts to hurt if I’m in bed too long.

I get up at 5am to avoid traffic.
Gel Packed with Chemical “Scavengers” Protects Against Sarin Gas
> advertisement never creates value for the society, it's a 0-sum game

You're plainly, absolutely, completely, wrong. But, as you made the claim, I'll wait for your burden of proof.

> They never add value they only shift the stream of money from a producer which makes a good product which would sell without ads to a producer which has money to invest in ads to trick people to buy the worse product.

You just stated a very narrow case, as if it represented the whole.

Your argument is essentially "if you're selling well without ads, then ads will not add value", which is self-evident, but irrelevant.
Because of how the German school system is build (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) and me migrating to Germany at 11 years of age without the knowledge of the German language, I had to do it differently and attend something like Gymnasium as an adult after my first vocational training (to become a heating engineer) and because of life happening and me once again migrating to another country (Sweden) without the knowledge of the language, I started university when I was 30.

Everyone else was about 20, partying and drinking, and I was studying 100% and working 50%. It was kind of hard and I'm about 10 years late with my life (compared to everyone else at work) but I finally feel that I am doing something which is challenging and fun at work and I earn a lot more than before.

The only bad thing is the biological clock not stopping to match everything else ^^.
Adding: You should still be able to use services, without consenting to them selling your data, like you can under the GDPR.
Yeah, I did not include anything without at least some recent development. AROS and plan9 both got cut for that reason.

I was on the fence about including ReactOS but wound up not including that either.
The Approximation Power of Neural Networks https://towardsdatascience.com/the-approximation-power-of-ne...
In particular, Firefox Reality is just a consumer of GeckoView.

Working on Firefox Reality has beneficial effects on Gecko's general ability to be embedded.
Feedback is not a dirty word
Oxford and Cambridge. Probably a few other old unis in the UK.
It obviously depends on the kid, but they tend to sleep longer than adults anyways. Our 1 year olds sleep around 11-13 hours overnight. Our 4 year old sleeps around 11 hours overnight.
Is the Impossible Burger much better than Beyond Meat? Because I've had the Beyond Meat patty (from a vegan chain called Lord of the Fries, their standard beef substitute is great) and it was awful - very obvious that it was made from plants (tasted like root vegetables with a weird chemical/metallic tang to me) and the texture was way off. It could have been prepared poorly though.
I appreciate your considered reply to my admittedly flippant reply to what I considered an unconsidered statement, so I'll try to return the favor.

Alphabet's approach to innovation is to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. I’m not disparaging that approach, it’s probably what I would do if I had all the money in the world. But I’m not convinced that any of these “moonshots” are amounting to much yet.

Apple has been described by many as the world’s largest startup. They’re very careful with their focus and resources, even to the point of killing off successful products (not just iPods, but things like their routers and printers). They _could_ just spend money and grow, but they know that would lead Apple to not being Apple anymore.

So what is Apple? A strangely conservative company with a clear vision of the future that they approach slowly and methodically.

Apple brought us the “touch future” and the truly “personal computer” (the one you take everywhere in your pocket). We still haven’t fully realized this potential and Apple is still building on it. Look me up in ten years and let me know if they’ve hit that vertical ceiling.
It sounds like we can too determine its practical effect, which is zero. No real-world machine learning algorithm can use the real numbers. We can not obtain them to feed them as input, our real-world machines can not process them if we could, and if we got real-number-based answers, we could not use them. Whether the universe itself is or is not based on real numbers, we do not have access to them either way. Our real-world machines only have access to the computable numbers (and only a subset of them, at that).

I'm only speaking to the practical impact.

It's possible someone will find some way work this down into something practical, but I'd be fairly surprised. Real machine learners get finite data, for which the continuum hypothesis is irrelevant.

(I assume the original authors fully understand this.)
Isnt flow based programming just a gui on top of functional programming?
PostgreSQL Is the DBMS of the Year 2018, Runner-Up: MongoDB, Third Place: Redis
One way Amazon was able to compete on price was by not having nexus in most of the country. Consequently, Amazon didn't collect sales tax on behalf of states and consumers, on the whole, never declare use tax. I still see that mentioned on most deal-hunter sites: "tax kills the deal" or "order from X and you don't have to pay tax." It's tax-free in the same sense that all tax evasion is tax-free. But, sales tax is levied at the state level and states don't have the resources to audit everyone.

That's not to say that Amazon didn't execute well. And their selection was excellent. It's just really easy to compete on price when your checkout total is 5+% cheaper than an in-state competitor even when the items were priced the same. Of course, this only applies to states that levy a sales tax, but that's still a large portion of the US.
Pretty sure this is being worked on! If you're really interested I can check with an ex-colleague who is involved in Free Pascal.
>At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them.

As someone who's spent a few years in undergrad CS at a decently ranked Russell Group university, I'd have to agree that this appears to be the case in the UK too. For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Overcrowding is a pretty frequent issue and organisation is generally poor.

I've come to the conclusion I don't really care if the university is "research-intensive" because I've seen very little benefit from it. How much of a fundamentals course on data structures or software engineering is going to involve cutting edge research?

The TEF scores (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-r...) over here have been pretty interesting too. A lot of the lower ranked institutions have come away with much higher results than some of the traditionally 'better' universities.
DXC Technology to Acquire Luxoft for $2B
I suspect the Halting Problem was already an obvious theoretical limitation to machine learning. Just imagine a network trained to classify programs according to whether or not they halt. Then construct a program that runs forever if the network says the program halts, and halts if the network says the program does not halt. No training strategy would ever produce a network that always gives the correct answer in this case.

In the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework, this would be the One Weird Trick the generator could pull that would always foil the discriminator.

This paper is interesting because it connects learnability to a different kind of undecidability than the Halting Problem: the Continuum Hypothesis. In some ways it's more troubling than the Halting Problem, because at least we can usually figure out whether some actual program halts, using some cleverness, but no one can begin to say whether the Continuum Hypothesis is true or false.

The Continuum Hypothesis is more like P!=NP, in that most mathematicians suspect the CH is true (that is, there's no cardinality in between the integers and the reals). That's good news, because it implies the EMX learning model will work:

> Their results imply that the finite subsets of the unit interval have monotone-compression schemes, and therefore are learnable in EMX, if and only if the continuum hypothesis is true, which is known to be unprovable.

If someone comes along and casts doubt on the Continuum Hypothesis through some mystical but persuasive line of reasoning (news flash: not gonna happen), then there might be some EMX functions that can't be learned, but no one is going to lose sleep over that. There are lots of more immediate reasons why machine learning fails in practice, like not having good training data.
Maybe a better question to ask is whether the IBM Q System One can do anything faster/better/cheaper than existing classical computers?

After all, the Colossus was able to aid in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, where existing techniques would have been impractical.