skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my understanding the vectors don't really matter so much. We care more about the subspace they span (because we want to project our data into it). So any rotation is as fine as any other.
So is arresting someone unless your a police officer...
Differential privacy: an easy case
Imagine if Apple and Google made full frame cameras.

Currently we have great hardware with terrible software and vice-versa.

A Sony full frame sensor, Zeiss glass, with an A series chip and good software to make it shine.
Vinylon
Thanks for sharing your story. Did they factor the cost of a rewrite into their calculus? I know sometimes even though a system becomes hard to move forward it would require such an investment to reach feature parity it has a sort of protection against total destruction.
If you're building a complex UI that uses components as a cohesive library, there will always be some coupling. Even with the classic bootstrap example, once you've built an application and introduced any number of third party components, it gets messy to change things.

Better to have a cohesive set of theme/rules and get them to work together as best possible. I've been a big fan of material-ui and react-jss and is imho about the best option I've used in over two decades of working on web based applications.
> the candidate may spend 1 hour

> after you poured 2 hours

and at the end it turns out to be 5-10 hours. Companies say "you should be able to finish it in 1-2 hours", but it's almost never true.

I think alternative is to have 1 hour coding session on a good problem. Most problems are complicated, but there could be something else. I was once asked by Uber to implement timer in JavaScript that will update DOM, also create APIs to stop/start/pause. This kind of a challenge doesn't involve any algorithm, but it shows your ability to code.

It should be enough to bring you onsite.

But I open source should work. If you contributed to Linux Kernel and it was accepted - onsite no questions asked. If you have github repo of 1000+ stars - onsite no questions asked. If you have already passed Google tech screen and was invited onsite - invite onsite no questions asked.
Some teams at Netflix do interview homework.
The energy bill is being paid by the users and holders of the currency. It’s an expense that will make bitcoin lose against its more energy-efficient competition.

Personal plug: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2018/11/28/proof-of-stake...
> there's also not really a research problem?

This is also my suspicion. :) But to ignore optimal control altogether makes me suspect many AI researchers aren't familiar with the body of research, and many who've managed a cursory read of Wikipedia may believe that the state of the art in optimal control are LQRs and LQGs, when it's really MPC (which can be thought of as a generalization of LQRs).

Also, MPC is a model-type and optimization-algorithm agnostic paradigm, so there's plenty of ways to combine models/algorithms within its broad framework -- this is partly how many MPC researchers come up with new papers :). I think AI researchers should take a look at it in complement with RL for the problems they're trying to solve.

Thanks for the link to the paper -- I will take a look.
Usually, for distributed systems in adversarial settings we talk about safety and liveness. Bitcoin doesn't have safety, and both bitcoin and algorand seems to fail the liveness test as well.

In your terms, both bitcoin and algorand have weak availability.
May I ask you a question?

Not for the sake of argument or anything - I'm genuinely curious.

Yes, racist people exist. No doubt here. As do exist many other nasties: dishonest salesmen, stupid teachers, dumb police officers, incompetent doctors - you name it. They make the headlines, but I firmly believe there's not that many of them and most of people are fully adequate and reasonable.

From the article it sounds like there's a full faculty of racist bigots who see maintaining white supremacy as their primary goal. He's universally hated just for the color of his skin and there are few to no people who treat him as equal.

Is it really that bad?
https://codepen.io/chrissimmons/pen/bqBabr

It's off brand, but the technology is roughly the same.

Another game:
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2018/05/08/some-madman-built-a-mar...
Its not anonymous. Its the opposite, in fact. Every transaction is recorded and traceable.
No goalposts have moved. Banking system involves politics and military in securing your finances. It is therefore many orders of magnitude more expensive than bitcoin even if you normalize by market cap of transaction volume or pick your own metric.

Edit: typos
Probably so, my main point was that comparing it to a plastic box with a few buttons and a big screen isn’t really a fair comparison.
Thank you and mimixco so much for pointing this out.

If I ever end up visiting DC again, I'm definitely going to do this. I have a new bucket list item!
Alien Articles of the Week Worth Reading
The solution to climate change is quite simple, and you've nailed it. It's also very hard.

But not impossibly hard. The Montreal protocol on CFC's had to get everybody to agree, and it has worked quite well. This solution doesn't require global agreement, just collect it at the border of countries that don't sign on.
In practice there are things that are not religious arguments nor problems of technical correctness.

For example, in a recent code review I found a function where an argument was being passed in but not used, and a constant of the same type with a similar name was used in the body of the function. That obviously happened because the author got halfway through refactoring their code and didn't realise, and we were both happy to fix it.
For me, the biggest problem with SPA is, needing node.js when you want SSR. There should be better ways than adding another backend layer if your stack is different and you don't want callback based multi-threading.
Whats the difference with vault?
Show HN: Japanese startup that deciphers your DNA traits
You can literally try it (and read about it) in the emulator itself!
> And I won't comment unless I am convinced it is important.

I tend to lean this way as well. Im of the mindset that most things that are "caught" in a code review don't add any real value. Or maybe I just have bad coding standards.
You're probably getting downvoted for the first line in your comment, but I think you're making an excellent point here.
Ask HN: Can we make an ethical, effective standard for programmer interviews?
Issues with technical interviews for programmer positions come up often here. The latest one made me wonder if it would be possible to come up with a standard interview process that would tick a few boxes:

- Technically deep enough to reveal useful information

- Fair to the applicant (no free labor/conflict of interest issues)

- Time efficient for both the interviewer and the applicant (doesn't take a week of life to interview for a single position)

- Maybe give indications on other important things? (work habits, social interaction, etc)

My off-the-cuff thought was to ask for them to work on a smallish issue on an open source project they haven't contributed to before. After the work has been done, they'd come in to be interviewed about what they did and how it worked out. If this was a standard process, they'd be able to use the same work for multiple interviews, so job hunting wouldn't be such a huge burden. It also gives them a chance to showcase a few skills that I've found important in my own career (navigating a new codebase, integrating and testing a bugfix/enhancement, interacting with team members). It would also have the nice side effect of providing some motivated help for open source projects.

That was just a quick stab at the issue to use as an example, I'm sure it has a number of fatal flaws. The question is, could there be a solution that would actually work?
Wow, I'm pretty disappointed that the entire MIT website isn't secure. What's going on over there? Meanwhile, my random state school has a fully secure https website.

Security is of critical importance to cryptocurrencies, and it's hard to take anyone seriously on that subject if they can't even get the fundamentals of web encryption right.
> When did blind trust in government become the norm on "hacker" news?

I trust my government more than Facebook or Huawei. Open source or neutral 3rd parties don't exist for this kind of thing.
I've noticed several groups that offer SE interview specific training out there now that I'm stepping through this interview process after the landscape has changed since my last position.

It's funny that after doing some searching, many proponents of this widely adopted and poorly researched interviewing methodology appear to be running businesses selling training for these interview processes... surprise, surprise.
1. It really isn't the kind of problem we are trying to solve.
2. Last time we did this we were over 100x faster and so we said. Ok its slow as &#@%.

We are more interested in trying to compare to tools that can provide workflows which are:

A. I have a ton of data in S3, HDFS, cloud storage solutions, centralized NFS
B. I want to use the GPU to perform learning, graph analytics, classification, etc.
I want to get from A to B as fast as possible utilizing the same resources for A that I will need to complete steb B.
So instead of checking if facts support or at least do not contradict their postulated hypothesis, resort to checking facts about their persona?

Do I have to explain this in even simpler words?
What is this, a simulation of a 503 error?
Of course. My coworkers are also my friends. By “friend” I mean people I know that I’ve worked with before and that I like and would vouch for because they’re good, as opposed to people I’ve worked with that I don’t like, or social acquaintances.

I’m with you on diversity too, these days I prefer interviewing people I don’t know and people with very different backgrounds than mine.
This is ETL processing, not training a neural network. If their (undisclosed) actual task is not parallelizable in Spark, the comparison is even sillier so let's be generous and assume it is.
> Rather: I work for you to finance the really important things in my life.

> You work to live, not the other way around.

At least if you work in (academic) research, working to live simply does not work [pun intended]. The things that you work on in this area are the really important things in life.
> Exactly. This is one of the advantages that cryptocurrency has over banks.

If it were any sort of meaningful advantage you'd likely see banks adapting pretty rapidly. There's nothing inherently impossible about faster bank transfers - Europe already has 24/7 nearly-instant transfers via SEPA.

> The Etsy snafu will be repeated until people and businesses start to require crypto for business transactions.

I suspect for every one Etsy snafu there's a bunch of "thank goodness I could issue a chargeback" situations.
It doesn't really matter who I socialize with--it matters who I've worked with and whose skills I can vouch for.

There is a tendency that this will lead the demographics of a field to pretty much stay the same over time. If you work in a field that is 90% men, only 10% of the people you have worked with are women, which means in the long run only 10% of people you'd end up referring would be women. This is definitely true in my case--the number of women whose technical skills I can vouch for went up considerably once I started working with more women.

That said, the Bay Area is weird and I've never lived there.

Also, admittedly, specifying "white males" was a misstep on ebiester's part. Whatever narrative there is about diversity in tech breaks down unless you stipulate that South and East Asians don't count as underrepresented minorities.
I use interviews to evaluate a whole lot more than just hire/no-hire.

I'm looking to understand what role someone is going to play in the organization, and to help understand which team a person we're likely going to hire will be a best match for.

We organize our interview loops around this, and a critical part of the conversation in the debrief is role and team matching - not just a hire/no-hire decision. Plus, we use this time to provide feedback to whoever the hiring manager is about the candidate and potential future team member, which streamlines more than just headcount.

Finally, the interview loop is an opportunity to manage cronyism. While we've got a lot of people I trust to refer exclusively strong candidates, I don't trust a single one to make fiat decisions. There's a human element to giving someone that level of decision making authority, and without sharing gory details - I've benefitted from having committee decisions in this situation.

Managing the feelings of referrer's getting their candidates rejected in a hard problem. I've dealt with that in the past a number of ways but don't have a working theory, other than "it's a job, people make mistakes, and hiring is fit and timing as much as it is about technical prowess".
That's what I like about graeme's proposal. Either implement the carbon tax (or its equivalent) and keep the money for yourself, or it will be externally imposed on you at the border via tariffs, where other countries get the revenue. Either way the sacred cows get killed, we're just fighting over who gets the meat.
As for size we will be releasing much larger workloads for GTC and are working hard on finishing up our work to make the workloads public and reproducible as well as releasing a new version of our engine where you can run much much larger workloads through distribution.
You can do that with Boostnote, but while you edit markdown + a bunch of extensions (better table support, latex math, etc) the other half of the editor renders it (same as e.g github does) which makes certain things (tables, math equations, images) much, much more readable.

It stores the notes as plain text, though the file names aren't nice (it generates a GUID, because you don't have titles as such in the program).
Right, but does that mean it's only used as a way of getting syscall numbers (without embedding it like Go does) or is it the case that you could actually LD_PRELOAD random things like nftw(3) and it would actually affect Rust programs? I'll be honest, I haven't tried it, but it was my impression that Rust only used glibc for syscall wrappers?
Doesn't seem so bad...it provides a lot more than "dumb storage" for $89 a month.

https://axon.cdn.prismic.io/axon%2F4f80e99a-b5d6-414e-bcd8-d...
There’s some irony in presenting these pieces of ASCII Art (i.e. text) as PNG/JPG images.
A technical interview done well is a good thing. You get to ask the candidate questions and they get to ask you questions. As the candidate, the technical interview is where I can really size up the company. How are coding standards decided? How does the development process work?

This is all interesting stuff to talk about for a candidate.

The closest thing to whiteboard coding I can think of as useful to the employer is data structure and algorithm knowledge at a toolbox level. What data structure would you use to implement a spell checker? A search for restaurants within X km?
HN has changed a lot since ~mid December.
> Launch WorldWideWeb

Just kept loading and didn't ever deliver the thing I was waiting to see.

Yep, definitely makes me nostalgic for the early web.
Sure. Seems like they have the same experience than me then.
Now if they'd just approve the engine upgrade...
> But they were right to laugh at Columbus. He was right for the wrong reasons.

He wasn't even right. He was wrong in his estimation of the earth circumference, and lucky that America was there between both oceans...
Bill Gates and His Pancake Problem [video]
All the production PHP code that I've seen in my life has been extremely bad and buggy. I have just assumed that PHP is a language that proliferates bad programming practices and made myself a promise that I will never ever work with PHP.

And if every four out of five sites were indeed coded in PHP, the www would collapse.
I'm not talking about friends, and the article isn't talking about friends, either. What's being discussed is people that a referrer has worked with and whose qualifications can be vouched for.
I try to frame it a bit more with regards to project management, where I feel any discussion of tech debt is bad for the project. To even start talking about it you have to start making many assumptions, for starters the assumption that the project will be successful to then later have to maintain. Then there are many many other assumptions to follow, and I feel that it is generally detrimental for it to even be discussed. It always involves some upfront price/scope/time on a project in trade for some future unknown cost savings. Fair point about the game hacking though they don't always have such constraints, but they do help close the gap by inventing these great new hacking tools!
I think that some of the sigthings (The rangiroa ones) related in the article are real, real in the sense of describing encounters with real alive animals.

If somebody would say me that whereas navigating in the south pacific, near islands surrounded by deep-water areas has seen a 12m long shark-shaped animal (not whale shaped), with a yellowish body with some white spots, and big triangular teeth around 10cm long, diving under the ship... I wouldn't bat an eye. Such animal is very rare, but exists.

Is neither a whale shark, nor a Megalodon, is an extant species and has been described by science.
How much energy does our collective banking infrastructure use? I'm pretty sure the number would be far bigger.
Consideration of the author is not a valid argument about merits of their work in the same way correlation does not imply causation - "but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'"[0].

It's a cost-effective heuristic, that's popular and necessary simply because of how much information you have to filter out daily just to stay sane. However, to effectively take into account arguments about people, you need to be honest about what you're doing - using weak evidence as a coarse filter. You're bound to have false positives. For things that matter (or that you want to have an opinion on), it's hopefully not the only piece of evidence you're using.

--

[0] - https://xkcd.com/552/
It's not an ad hom at all and the reason is very simple: OP isn't arguing that we should dismiss the research based on the findings, only that we might, upon further investigation, have more reason to be skeptical. For better or worse, many of us tend to trust whatever is labelled as science so long as it's the PDF file type and there's a list of Harvard-style citations at the bottom.

If OP said "Look, this person got their degree from a low quality place! Let's dismiss the argument because nobody from such a place could produce good research", that would be an ad hom.

But this goes beyond calling out informal fallacies on the internet, it goes to our whole epistemological framework. Why do we trust some claims but not others? Might there be a reason to be skeptical of or completely distrust one claim until it is corroborated by another source? I would argue that there is, in many cases, depending on both the nature of the claim and the history of the person making it. To that end, I'm sure you agree such a thing is necessary in the legal system, for instance, wouldn't you?
To me there are a couple of things going on. Both were touched on by the article to different degrees.

One thing is that videos games interest is largely affected by trends. When PUBG blew up I had been out of the loop and I actually thought it was a novel concept. But it wasn't. It was just an improvement to game modes that had existed for years. Now we have seen Fortnite take over interest in PUBG and now with Apex not because it was a totally new thing but because it's a familiar thing with new wrinkles. It's a lot like clothing fashion. We don't really go for totally new ideas because we want to fit in. There is a network affect going on where the hot new thing dominates just because everyone is doing it now. So there is definitely a limited amount of attention.

The other thing is the fact that various video streaming services exist and people can get much of the same experience from video or streams as they get from actually playing games. But video or streams are free or inexpensive whereas each new game requires a heavy investment. It is enjoyable to watch someone else play a game. Not quite as fun as playing it yourself necessarily but it also takes much less effort. You can also get various degrees of social benefits from streams or videos depending on how much time or effort. Again, not as good as "real" socialization necessarily, but also usually with much less effort.

I would go so far as to say that a lot of the investment into assets, programming, story, content in general is being broadcast out for free or low cost or for the benefit of streaming platforms/streamers and it's possible that the producers of those video games are not able to make as many sales as they would have had their content not been available (albeit in a non-interactive way) on those broadcast platforms. Which is not to say that it's necessarily overall bad for sales or bad for consumers. I just think it has an effect of sales.
Lightsaber Dueling Is Now Recognized as a Competitive Sport in France
Usually interface{} is abused by java programmers. I agree that it's not great, but if you don't come from java or c++ chances you won't follow these patterns at least.
Why wouldn't they? It's institutionalized white-hat pen testing.
Not only will it cost the police more, but it also costs the car insurance and by proxy everyone that is insured.

If 100 people leave the car unlocked and are robbed and on average the car costs $30,000, this will cost $3,000,000 + insurance resource + customer hassle + police resources + judicial resources. That is a steep cost to all parties.

(Dis)incentives are more successful when it considers all actors.
Race is so strongly correlated among friends (in the US, anyway) that it's unbelievable that people won't have observed this.[0] Average demographics:

* White Americans: 91% of social network are white; 8% black.

* Black Americans: 83% of social network are black; 1% white.

[0] https://www.prri.org/research/poll-race-religion-politics-am...
But you must have gone to lectures, labs, seminars, tutor sessions, project groups, etc with your peers? How did you not form any connections outside of where you lived?
Reminds me of The Brain/Personal Brain and the Firefox 3D view (no longer available).
Why Are We Still Dismissing Girls’ Pain?