skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done."

The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impossible to measure.

Some do. Customer support can be benchmarked (and prodctivity-pushed) But... customers support jobs don't lend to this 4d workweek thing. The jobs that do lend to it, don't lend to measurement.

This difficulty can lead to all sorts of wierdness. Tyler Cowen claimed that office worker productivity has not been (measurably) increased by office computerization. IE, going from secretaries, fax and typwriters to Google docs hasn't produced any economic gains.

Strange claim. Difficult to measure. David Graeber (anarchist that reckons most office work is pointless busy-work) quotes the same stat this white paper quotes, people spend about 2/8 hrs working and the rest procrastinating on social media.

Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been.

It's a Shrodinger's product evangalist problem...

That said, I like the jist.Lets shorten the workweek. Science-wise... well...
From my experience 6h is optimal/max in one sitting.
http://heffern.net/rob/

Mostly it's an online CV, but I blog occasionally. Some entries that may interest HN are:

http://heffern.net/rob/index.php/2018/05/18/hello-world/ . How much should a Harvard Lotto ticket sell for?

http://heffern.net/rob/index.php/2018/08/25/ch-1-kismayo-som... Why the Somali coast is the most valuable real-estate in the Solar System
I believe the concern here is that while the intentions to provide advice may be good, the actual result is harmful, and thus it is better not to provide advisement unless explicitly requested in the specific context of someone who has a chronic illness.

The assumption of providing advisement is 1) your advice might be helpful, 2) advising isn't itself a harmful act, 3) you have something worth advising about. In the specific case of a chonic illness, the probability is high that all these assumptions are not correct. Therefore, advising a chronically ill person requires exceptional behavior compared to someone who is not chronically ill.

It's also important that this(unwanted advice) is a common issue that adversely affects a person's QoL, as they are forced to re-address the same ground consistently when they already have limited productive resources.
Which schedule? I work 32-hour weeks.
Thanks for your thoughts and for the additional info.

> At the same time, I do wonder if there's an irrational component to the reticence around Swift for TensorFlow based on the fact that people still identify it as a somehow proprietary language.

I'm sure there's some of that, but my feeling is -- and I speak only for myself and maybe some in my tribe -- that it isn't so much the perception of Swift as a proprietary language but more that it isn't a language designed for DS/ML/applied math and maybe the Swift community doesn't really get our needs, whereas Julia is and does. Python feels like the latter too -- it was swiftly adopted in DS/ML because it was already used heavily in scientific computing, which is part of the same family.

The community vibe alignment isn't quite there with Swift -- it has no history in numerical computation and it came into the scene because a team at Google said so, whereas Julia and Python grew organically from the communities that do the same work we do, and were trying to solve the same problems we were. There's skin in the game and a kind of depth as it were.

But it's just a feeling. I will leave it at that.
Is the problem affecting all amazon or mainly amazon.com?

I m shopping mostly on amazon.de or .fr and I didn't encounter the problem yet.
This is by far the least productive HN thread I've ever been on. The article just isn't related to a raw energy calculation, as that is not impacted by where the energy comes from.

edit - noted. Avoid crypto threads on HN as they're like discussing things on reddit.
Also known as the alienation of labour.
Yes you can see the broad opportunity but various things can easily break vectorization between extensions of x86 and ARM. The first that comes to mind is use of doubles instead of floats. Another is too wide of an inner loop, especially on algorithms that must be tuned for cache line sizes. You can also run into accuracy & stability issues between different x86 instruction extensions - it's really a nightmare to debug those.
Interview with a White-Hat Hacker, Part II
This is likely going to lead to an error in both statically and dynamically typed languages.

In statically typed language, at least when troubleshooting it's an easy guess that the error is highly likely to be at the external boundary of your application code since the rest of it type checked.
Correct. Depending on what accounting principals you use, this is typically 3-5 years. It's akin to an airlines buying a Boeing plane. It'll cost them $1B let's say, but it'll actually hit their income over 35 years ($1b / 35), which means on their income statement, only ~$28M shows up per year (simplified example). Most companies are valued and taxed on their income, so this is important to understand.
There's no argument whether you would have something to gain. We're talking about YC, not you.
What do you think storing PBs of video for an entire police department is?
Yeah, exactly. And automotive itself is kind of just the tip of the iceberg (although admittedly huge by volume).

My current company is working with heavy machinery manufacturers, and the industry is years behind consumer automotive. There's a similar kind of explosion in the amount of small intelligent modules waiting to happen.
Because without some shorter term studies you might struggle to get enough employers on board for a sufficiently powered long term one.
Is that something you want to know after selecting a book, or for finding one?
It’s a long-studied and complicated condition, I don’t think we’re anywhere near having such a concise explanation of its causes yet (etiology). There are many competing theories each with different levels of support. There is also reason to believe that schizophrenia is multiple disorders that are currently lumped into the same category because we’re not good at differentiating them (similar to the way different types of cancer are lumped under the label “cancer”).

Trust the science, but don’t trust the science reporting.
Congratulations on releasing your product! I dig the night mode.

I use Finviz as a screener. If I may make a suggestion I would expose more of the software on the front page to entice potential users to play with it.
In the case of Goldman it could be deal flow.
No, that’s orthogonal: Option 1 can mean either working around unexpected input, or failing in some way (and the same is true for the other options, but creating systematic, handle-able failures gets harder).
That only really worked because the defendants couldn't afford good counsel. That sort of fraudulent legal claim won't work against Amazon.

Besides which I think the courts did eventually move on to realistically valuing contributory infringement (15¢ perhaps instead of $150k).
I definitely want to believe this is a good measure of the impact of moving to a four day week. However, I wonder if this is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect.

Maybe people are being more productive each day because they're aware that the company is going to be measuring their productivity.
>I would hope people don't now start doing fecal transplants for treating depression, or Alzheimers, or schizophrenia.

Why not? That would be a fast way to find out if it works.
You apparently didn't eat much proper food in France or Italy beyond some take-away junkfood or maybe some obscure highly local cuisine without any clue what you're ordering, otherwise I can't explain such a disconnect from reality. UK food generally is not considered haute-cuisine by anybody so that's a weird comparison.

But then your post is full or weird stuff - organic local food being "especially cheap" doesn't make much sense, when everywhere this is the most expensive category due to extra costs on whole process of growing/treatment/transport
That’s great news! I don’t understanding why they cant be bothered to put this in the version log, instead of the useless ‘bug fixes and performance improvements’ note.
It's pretty obvious what you do if a field in a JSON object is optional, you use an optional type. Any good statically typed language has that.
Yeah that as well.

I belong to the same fanboy club, which is kind of why I do like C++ and not so much about C.

I just don't see many adopting it without legislation enforcement, which is why the focus is on autonomous vehicles, where Ada already has a good story.
Well, some folks would brag about their score (years ago, dunno about now) and use that ranking as an indicator of their coding prowess. When I learned that the whole thing was easy to 'cheat' (whatever that mean in this context), then that rank lost all prestige for me.
> Time was that doctors made house calls, knew every patient personally, and frequently cared for multiple-generations of a family

They (some) still do. But they have to have their patients' numbers, not the other way round, if they want to have a life of their own.

Some people can devote the totality of their life to patients, and it's a good thing if the article author could find some of them I guess, but most doctors also have a family and their own needs, which is extremely difficult if your patients can call you whenever they want.

Doctor or not, you don't want to risk receiving constant calls from a few particularly difficult patients at any time of the day or night while you're trying to lead a life with a husband/wife and kids. And that's not even taking into account the potential for abuse from other (or the same) patients who will find there a method to bypass appointments and to avoid paid consultations.

On the other hand, email works very well for "push requests" from patients, and is a lot less disruptive for the doctor.
If I'm lucky, for web stuff, I can just write a typescript interface definition or 5 to describe the JSON format, and suddenly I have working intellisense, protection from typos (after the first), etc.
Written on chalk board:

I will not participate in Hacker News Static vs Dynamic typing debates.

I will not participate in Hacker News Static vs Dynamic typing debates.

I will not participate in Hacker News Static vs Dynamic typing debates.

I will not participate in Hacker News Static vs Dynamic typing debates.

I will not participate in Hacker News Static vs Dynamic typing debates.

Stay strong, Me
The problem here is not static typing or its interface to the outside world. The problem is most mainstream static typed languages have shit handling for Sum Types. With proper support and proper syntax static typing would actually help you ensure you handle both possibilities of your "option" type. (Any language which defaults to any reference type may be null, at any time, is the opposite of properly handling option types.)

Let me turn this around: if you're saying possibly-missing fields inevitably propagate throughout the types in your codebase, it sounds like you're saying malformed input propagates arbitrarily deeply into your core logic. Wouldn't you rather catch that at the boundary?
I mostly use static typing because I don't want the intended behavior of the program to be described solely in my head.
Ask: What Is the Best Mobile Analytics Platform in 2019?
GA is shutting down this year as is Fabric, both are replaced by Firebase in the Google ecosystem. Firebase Analytics seems underwhelming and 'behind.'

We are considering a return to Flurry... but being owned by Yahoo and featuring case studies from 2009 on their website doesn't offer much confidence they will be around much longer.

Mixpanel & AppSee are $$$, but if these are the best options we will spend the money.

Would love to hear what people are using today and any comparable pros / cons.
There's also Credits which claims to be the fastest chain at 0.1 second transaction times and to be capable of over 1 million transactions a sec. Though it you run it that fast you use a lot of disk space. https://credits.com/
> You still know that the "customer_name" argument to it will be a string and the "age" will be an integer, no?

I've seen integers sent as strings and others as integers in the same JSON. Datetimes stored as strings in three different formats by the same application in the same column of the same table, etc. The real world is really messy. Writing a new program is definitely quicker with a language like Ruby or Python for me (especially Ruby.) Working with Java is like walking with a cast on a leg.

But you know, every project and every developer is different, that's why we are using so many different tools. The OP accounts for that in the "There are many arguments in favor of static-typing" paragraph.
"Julia Galef is a writer and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality"

So the author has definitely heard the term "confirmation bias". Why make up a new term for it?
If you damage his profits we won't benefit from the trickle down. /s
Hiring these firms is a major "cover your ass" move. If you're a CEO and you hire McKinsey, your board is going to likely approve as they are from the same East Coast/West Coast Ivy League fraternity as McKinsey consultants. And because they only hire people from those schools or recruit former executives from their clients, there is a strong signaling mechanism that you're hiring "the best and the brightest."

Then if things ever go wrong, you always have the out of "I hired the best, what did you want me to do?"
I think it's a case of security being hard and an arms race. Kind of like Google and Facebook have to constantly run faster to stay in the same place against attackers, and sometimes attackers win a little more, and then they again get back on top.

Amazon sells almost 200bn of goods each year. Even if a tiny fraction of those are problematic and slip through the cracks, it'll seem like a lot to observers. Doubt they can get it down to zero, no system is perfect, and there are too many attackers trying to game the system.

It's a price to pay for all the benefits of the open platform model.
There is Soundhound but I've found it's accuracy is not quite as good. But the app is a little cooler and it writes a playlist of queries to Spotify.

After Apple integrated with Siri, I discovered a nice, somewhat hidden feature which is open iTunes Store >> Hamburger Menu >> Siri to find a preserved history of my "what song is this?" queries. Even in loud environments I find asking my phone to tell me what song it is works well and is a little easier than opening an app.
There's nothing stopping a dynamically typed system from using something like grpc or graphql that can check for missing fields. Or something like json schema to check for missing fields in a lot of those scenarios. A type system doesn't necessarily catch missing fields, but a communication framework of some kind, does.
A few years ago I think the classic example of an embarrassing company to have on your resume was Yahoo.

Now it’s McKinsey.

Yahoo source: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/technology/yahoos-in-of...
> Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it?

The first entry in the FAQ doesn't directly address that issue but strongly suggests an answer, morally if not legally:

Q: Can I get a PDF of this book?
A: No, our contract with MIT Press forbids distribution of too easily copied electronic formats of the book.

I don't seen any obvious link to a licence that might confirm or contradict this impression, so if you need/want to know for sure you'll have to contact them to ask for clarification if you can't find it elsewhere.
Omega 3 can be in various forms:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509649/
Apple Music certainly has the most screen real estate now, but I was still able to find the "Open in Deezer" within a freshly updated Shazam.
Just learn and work on your own things for a year or two, and then take those skills elsewhere. In my experience fighting bureaucracy will just drive you mad and you won't accomplish anywhere near as much as you hope you will.

If this job isn't a field you're deeply passionate about, it's not a fight worth fighting.

And if it is something you're deeply passionate about, try to learn everything you can about the industry while you're in that job, try to identify an opportunity, and then leave and try to start your own business filling that need, where you can sell your solution to that same bureaucracy (amongst others). It can be a lot easier to sell them a solution from outside than within.
Bingo. Years back, in what small circles I run in, the score was something to toot your horn about. When I discovered that you could 'cheat' on the scoring, it took away all the prestige from that ranking score. Honestly, other than practice, what use is it?
I don't think a low barrier to entry is a good idea for something as serious as medical-assisted suicide. Being in mental or physical pain, outside of absolute terminal illness, and being able to choose death for something that may very well be a temporary problem is not a good solution. You mention people who turn to self-inflicted suicide, who fail and end up in worse states emotionally/financially. But what about those who have failed their suicide attempt and eventually end up in a good place and live a happy, normal rest of their life? Had they been given the option of medical-assisted suicide, they would have never have gotten the chance to experience that.
You don't get fired for hiring McKinsey. And if there's a scandal 5 or 8 or 10 years down the line where your company loses boatloads of money and McKinsey's hedge fund made money betting against you, 99% of the people involved when you hired McKinsey in the first place will have new jobs. Likely at other companies.
HDD versus SSD: Storage Market Brief
My favorite job ever, as far as the job itself, was working peon-tier helping to run a campground for a Summer. Only non-tech job I've ever had, had worked for years in tech before and years more after. Location was even pretty awful by outdoorsy standards, somewhere with mountains or... anything, really, would have been better still.

Too bad it paid, you know, a tenth of what I make programming.

It was great. No screens, just a normal-ass cash register to work from time to time. No sitting unless I wanted to, no meetings, golf cart to drive around once or twice a day. Firewood to carry. People to talk to. Plenty of time to read or write and no-one remotely interesting in claiming the copyright anything I did then, let alone during time I was off the clock. Pretty much nothing about the job was evil, while so many tech jobs are at least a little. None of that general soul-grime of corporate life.

I'd do that for a whole career if it paid anywhere near what software dev does. I'm only in software because 100% of the things I actually want to do pay half as well, at best, and some of them require a lot more up-front spending and time for education. Programming's great when I need to do it for a personal project. As a career, it blows, compensation aside. It's not even high status, for the most part, despite the comp.
Thanks. I added a link to the beginning of the blog post.

https://mikaelmayer.github.io/blog/2019-02-13-google-docs-fo...
Exactly! Apple now thinks feature announcements are the equivalent of success. And perhaps to investors, it is. But to users it actually sort of matters whether the thing makes their lives better.
There are a lot of big companies with ThinkPad P-series mobile workstations on 7 that would cost quite a bit to replace. And the main concern isn't the cost of replacing vs. licensing, but of updating line-of-business workflows, custom apps, and user knowledge.
Why does it need to be an AND? If it is much cheaper and faster but 5% worse, why not?
Sphero as a company has done a great job making accessible bots that can be used for both fun at home and education at school. That gives me high hopes for this new bot! Expandability, swappable battery, and price point are top of the list for edu and looking promising so far. Hope we'll hear more about sensors and features in this thread!
Advice on How to Grow Your SaaS to $130K MRR and Further
>The judges are not made aware how many people will be affected by this.

Only one person was affected by it. The initial request was for anonymized data and the subsequent request for actual data was made for only one specific person.
Understanding Digital Signal Processing (3rd ed) arrived with the back cover indicating that it's "authorized for sale only" in six countries south Asian countries listed. I fared better than you, the pages haven't yet fallen out and I beat the hell out of it...
Author here. First of all, I'd like to clarify that the data efficiency gain over D4PG is 5000% or 50x.

Regarding computational efficiency, we match D4PG, a top model-free agent that uses experience replay among other techniques (actor critic, distributional loss, n-step returns, prioritized replay, distributed experience collection).

Your point about exposure bias is interesting, and applies equally to agents that do not learn a model. Personally, I think we need reliable uncertainty estimates in neural networks to make progress on this research question, so the agent can know what it doesn't know.

Hindsight experience replay doesn't apply to tasks where the inputs are images because it requires knowledge of a meaningful goal space with a distance function (e.g. 2D coordinates of goal positions).
Of course you can. Found the company and stay at top of the food chain: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Zuckerberg, just to name a few.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2285075

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3...

https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ghost-schizophr...
> For the programming that I do, I am often creating new architectures. Therefore I need dynamic typing.

He seems to consider static typing equivalent to "locking down" an architecture, that when you use static typing you're locked in to a certain way of doing it, and you're stuck with it. In my experience of working with large codebases with both dynamically and statically typed languages, the opposite is true.

Static typing frees you up to make changes to interfaces in a way that dynamic typing does not. For instance, if i want to add or remove a parameter to a function in a statically typed language, it's trivial. I just do it, and the compiler goes "ok, this function is called from these 4 places, so just fix those" and you now are assured that everything will work.

That doesn't work in dynamically typed languages. There's no reliable way to change an interface and be confident that you haven't broken anything (+/- extremely good linters, but those aren't perfect in the way a compiler is). This leads to a "never change this function, you can break all sorts of things" attitude that simply doesn't exist with static typing, where the compiler can just tell you what you need to fix.

There are perfectly valid arguments in favor of dynamic typing (it's arguably easier, often faster to work with etc.) but this particular one is extremely silly. The exact opposite is true.
Better and faster? Maybe. Cheaper? Definitely.

Approximately $20k per low-skilled immigrant household per year in taxpayer funded benefits. 57% of immigrant households (legal and illegal) use welfare. And 25% of our federal prison population are in the country illegally.

So the real price of strawberries would likely go down, considering the high cost the nation bares for the immediate gratification of cheap fruit.