skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally take the view that authors have the best insight on their intention, so I apologise for my misreading.

> I find pretty big differences in code that's written to meet the lowest bar of "just pass the tests" vs code that's written with the intent of keeping its state space small, methods tidy, and overall complexity limited.

I think maybe this is where the misunderstanding arises. I'm used to TDD which amongst other things places pressure on the codebase to remain testable. The things that make code testable also, roughly speaking, make it reusable as well (test code is just code, after all). But more important than any one practice or tool is people just giving a damn about doing the work well.

This might be an example of Goodhart's Law: if someone throws a test suite over a wall[^] and says "here, make these pass or you're outta here", then the motivation to cut corners is going to be intense. Attempts to create control loops over humans that rely on mechanical behaviour by humans tend to fail. Steering wheels don't have families and mortgages, wing flaps aren't thinking about their next promotion.

The best discussion I've read about the problems of using measurements and targets to control (in the engineering sense) skilled workers is Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert D. Austin. He elegantly demonstrates that the less directly-observable the work, the more destructive attempts to externally control it are. Which fits with my updated understanding of what you intended to say.

[^] this doesn't have to be a current wall, either. It can be the wall of elapsed time: the flaky tests of yesteryear can be a very particular kind of curse.
One thing that I've realized over years is that discipline beats motivation. Motivation to work on something hardly lasts a couple of weeks, but if you are disciplined enough to wake up every morning and work on it, you'll work on it longer.

Now coming to the main question - You need to have something to work for. I did the mistake of wanting to work more without having a solid goal. Unless you have a pressing deadline or a challenging goal, human mind always tends to slack off. Think by asking yourself this question - "What is the problem you want to solve?" and then work backward and allocate time to things.
I have yet to be told why it is important for there to be as many women in STEM as men apart from statements that I'm sexist for not knowing
I think they did change their mind on this after considering the AGI risk more and getting a better understanding of it.

I'm not sure where I read a discussion about this, but I do think it was something they've talked about before.
Yeah, I can see how one could make an amoral, pedantic argument around the definition of working from home. But to do that you have to 1) remove the argument from it's surrounding context, which is flawed reasoning and 2) successfully prove that there is a significant difference in the practical outworking of the definition of working from home between the subject and their workmates. The latter is immediately and significantly relevant to the definition and, unfortunately for the oppressor, drags context back into play.
This is really good, a bit like jdenticon.com which I already use.

What's the deal with copyright on these? Can I use them to represent myself or an organisation? Or do you somehow enforce that people only use them for placeholders?
That's because the people who have bad experiences are the ones who actually have something to say. No one is going to write a medium blog post about how their last year was completely average, their boss had pros and cons, and that the most controversial event of the year was when the company switched kuerig cup brands.

Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.
My wife's experience:

PI: "You put your kid in front of the TV for 2 hours a day to get stuff done? That's terrible parenting."

PI: "You will be late 1 day for a meaningless group presentation to your own lab, because your child is sick and can't go to daycare? Get your priorities straight."
Victoria BC Canada Eh?! :)
It's not quite so simple: AFAICS they have not open-sourced the training code, only one for sampling from the pre-trained model.
Life is short, few things are more meaningful and rewarding than raising human beings.
I assume that's a fossil of the Norman invasion (1066) the way ordinary animals (cow, pig/swine) get transformed into fancy Romance words (beef, pork) when placed on the table. These kinds of linguistic scars can last a long time.
Lens grinding and gear-work indeed were important advances during the so-called "dark ages". There were also agricultural and metallurgy improvements. Whether such would happen faster or slower under original Roman rule is hard to say.

The end of slavery and birth of proto-democracies in Europe is arguably what propelled the industrial revolution. People didn't have to tolerate their lowly lot in life as much. When human labor got more expensive, machines proved their mettle. That increased the rate of mechanical progress until it was self-sustaining.
Not sure where some of these ideas even come from. I constantly see some version of "Musk isn't really engineer" on here as well. I guess having credible degree's and starting billion dollar++ tech companies doesn't quite cut it for the harsh critiques on Hackernews.
I agree that there may be earlier filtering stages, though in my experience even if you send unauthenticated messages from not-really-configured postfix on Ubuntu they would still be viewable in recipient’s spam, or at least that was the case a few years back.

I’m pretty sure recruiters’ emails peterwwillis mentioned would not be as bad as to be eliminated before spam folder.
Well yeah, but who cares? I went on to much bigger and better things and he's probably still just a twat. :)
You’re right I did just paste that figure from Google conversions.

Using the metric system over the imperial system isn’t being pedantic, it’s just courtesy in 2019
Sweden Rose to the Forefront of Global Business
Then you aren’t properly groped for freedom.
"divided we fall" is a cliche but may have some merit here, especially if this will be filled by another starry eyed immigrant visa holder who can be treated as such. the information asymmetry gap is just too high imo.

there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.

read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.
Is there a chance of a liver transplant?
How ... whatever was the reason for thinking that you needed a ML-specific compiler?

Do people also think you need a timecard-tracking-specific compiler?
> air speed is how fast the people on the plane are going relative to themselves

That makes no sense.
How can people be moving relative to themselves?
So sad. But good to see you’ll be home and comfortable with your loved ones than at a bland hospital room. Godspeed.
I think that is not clear. Many people want to leave their jobs, men rarely have the option to do so because everyone (usually first and foremost their wives) frowns upon it.
Verifiable delay functions!
I just want to contrast this with the fact that in my case Amazon was extremely diligent with my green card process.

I applied day one after joining (my manager knew that I joined with that expectation so he approved right away) and they started working on it immediately. I had some delays with the lawyers but in general it went pretty smoothly.
Amazon is a great company as consumer very shitty company to work as an employee.

Source: Ex-Amazon employee.
So, it seems like you could probably get a fair number of people to volunteer to participate in a study like this, in order to up the number of games played. Also, I wonder if you could (Laurie Anderson-style) change your voice's gender, so that gender could be manipulated even for games with live voice. If there's a researcher out there who was willing/able to organize, I think there would be a fair number of volunteers.
Can't disinformation campaigns lead to instability and increase the risk of nuclear weapon use?

I think the damage that disinformation can cause to democracy is real and we've already seen some of its effects without the ability to automate these things.
Submitting claims monthly is fairly standard, at least in my experience. At HP, they gave us a corporate AMEX card but I was responsible for paying it while I waited for the outsourced^2 HR operations to cut me a check.
A long time ago, Yann LeCun wrote Lush, which was a numerically-focused Lisp dialect, with a focus on C interop. It might be one of Julia's closest sibling.

> Lush is an object-oriented programming language designed for researchers, experimenters, and engineers interested in large-scale numerical and graphic applications. Lush is designed to be used in situations where one would want to combine the flexibility of a high-level, weakly-typed interpreted language, with the efficiency of a strongly-typed, natively-compiled language, and with the easy integration of code written in C, C++, or other languages.

http://lush.sourceforge.net/index.html

Is there more detail about his proposal? It must be well thought-out.
Ah yes, very important research about very unimportant passtimes.

Advanced button pushing for pixel enthusiasts, and other gender-sensitive activities.
Very plainly: no, hand coding is not going to be able to compete with a fully developed ML/AI agent. Even simple hand coded agents use AI techniques such as minimax, which is fundamentally an "AI" technique even though most people today don't really think about it that way since there are no deep neural networks involved.

However, this contest looks unpopular enough that you can likely still compete because no one has spent the effort to actually build a proper deep-neural-network agent, etc.

You can work out the problem space yourself by simply calculating all the possible board states. Or you could calculate the move states (3 moves per player, to the power of the average number of turns).
I hope this guy gets help with his issues, because they seem to extend far beyond "working at Amazon".
> the DACs inside the hub are shit compared to Apple's official ones

Nevermind the fact that Apple's official $9 audio dongle also only has a barely acceptable DAC in it.
Great interview. At the start Dave kind of conflates 5G with millimeter wave 5G.

The big difference between LTE networks and 5G networks is not the frequency ranges used, low band 5G is perfectly feasible. The big difference is the linear increase in information capacity per antenna in MIMO (multiple in multiple out, many send many receive antenna) verses the logarithmic increase per antenna with single antenna to single antenna links. (while power his held constant)

If you want to learn more this is a great intro to channel capacity with MIMO, http://complextoreal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mimo.pdf
Michael Larabel, Founder of Phoronix, on the Evolution of Open Hardware
Couldn't you fix this with paid, professional (but not full time), healthy blood donors? Compensation to donors would be a trivial cost of any operation performed with the blood, right?

Is this -- at risk of going there -- just another case where the effective solution is too disgust-evoking to try?

Edit: I agree that free donors will dry up under a system of compensation, but that's equally true of e.g. going to "all lumber must be donated" -> pay market prices to tree farms.
... which is why civilization built up a particular way over the course of 10,000 years ...
> Car owners will still need liability insurance

Legal liability will shift to the manufacturers, therefore individuals will not require insurance. Insurance policies will be purchased by the manufacturers and will cover the entire fleet under one policy.

> coverages should in theory get less expensive if claims drop

This is certainly the largest factor, as insured losses are expected to drop by 90%. A secondary factor will be that car manufacturers will be able to negotiate wholesale “group policies” on large fleets and get a better rate. Or they could self-insure and cut out the insurance industry completely.

> but profit margin on policies doesn’t necessarily change

I have already noted the profit margin pressure arising due to wholesale fleet insurance / self-insurance. But the more important point is that profit margin is not the only relevant measure for an industry. The total amount of revenue is equally important. If profit margins stay the same but revenues decrease, then there is a reduction in net income. Note that prices are expected to fall 90%, which directly impacts revenue.
It's also a net gain averaged out over time if the couple produces more than 2 children. It's a very rare person that can individually contribute more to their society than 3 or more well-raised new individuals.

Obviously this is a decision for couples to make for themselves, not for bureaucrats, economists, or activists to make for them.
Your success criteria both reference the recipient. Often things can work out well for the wealthy and poorly for even those who "voluntarily" opt in.
Hmm, doesn't

> I need to bring her to therapy

imply that he doesn't have to be there all the time? And if therapy is only of short duration, nonetheless he could "set up shop" somewhere nearby and start working from remote, if he were allowed to do so.

And why get hung up on the term "from home" when it really means "from remote"? After all, his remote access won't be geo-fenced.

Dunno if you have kids but until a certain age, they don't "pack themselves". You can easily add 30 min. for a two year old, e.g.. Driving his daughter could easily take away 1hr in each direction.

If his colleagues don't show up until 11, instead of making him show up at the office at 7, he could easily manage working from remote and driving around his daughter.

Normally I'm the free market guy in those situations, but I have a really hard time in this case to not see Uwais Khan as a complete ahole.
I never said they would be running a vanilla distro though. I said "custom" for that reason.
Minidoka: A Japanese-American Internment Camp Revisited
I have been working from home for almost 5 years now, and one thing that I learned in the first 18 months was that it is important to take sick days. In the beginning I would just sit at my desk and try my best to work even though I was sick, but not be able to concentrate and ultimately not get anything done. Then I would stress about it and work extra time, which would just make things worse. Now I take off any time I think I would have if I were in an office.
Because men and women are equal (so there's no difference whether a scientist is a man or a woman)

/s
That reminds me of what I think was a flaw in the computer-based adaptive GRE. "Adaptive" because it gives you harder questions when you're doing well, and easier ones when you're doing badly, thus allowing for the same measurement precision, if you will, with fewer questions.

My Spanish girl friend and I studied English vocabulary to prepare for the GRE, and took many old-fashioned paper based tests (non-adaptive) for practice, then later the actual (adaptive) one. Her result on the actual test was much worse than on the practice tests, by many standard deviations (only in the verbal section, not in the quantitative section).

Now, in English, the more difficult words are frequently the words of Latin origin (for example, "to lament" vs "to mourn"). However, those were often cognates of the equivalent Spanish words, thus easier for her. So, the hypothesis is that she got some questions wrong initially, and the algorithm decided to give her "easier" questions (with more Germanic words), which would be harder for her, though; while withholding the harder questions which she could have solved correctly.

Intriguingly, it might have gone the other way around (depending on whether you first got predominantly Germanic words, answered them wrong, and got even more of them, or first got predominantly Latinate words, answered them correctly, and got even more of them.)

Thus, if ETS tested the adaptive algorithm on native English speakers, the adaptive test might have lined up very well with the traditional test, validating it.

(Now we're coming to the intriguing part.) If they tested it also with Latinos/native Spanish speakers, it might well have been that the mean deviation (between adaptive and paper based result) was also very small, but the variance of the deviation larger: many large deviations to the upside, many large deviations to the downside.

I wonder whether that was ever researched in depth, and whether it could have been grounds for complaints (that members of some community had measurements that were "worse", but not in the sense of biased, but of "less precise", with more variance!)?
Side note: can't edit the link above, but due to an ARC bug from more than a decade ago[0], HN does not correctly delimit it at the ">" (because they escape it a second time, but don't escape the escapes I guess, which causes the ">" not to match as a closing delimiter for the URI).

[0]: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/03e329e9cec8ad456...
So the heck what. Seriously.
Oh absolutely you're correct here.

> In analog computing, complexity resides in network topology, not in code. Information is processed as continuous functions of values, such as voltage and relative pulse frequency, rather than by logical operations on discrete strings of bits.

...

> Individually deterministic finite-state processors, running finite codes, are forming large-scale, nondeterministic, non-finite-state metazoan organisms running wild in the real world. The resulting hybrid analog/digital systems treat streams of bits collectively, the way the flow of electrons is treated in a vacuum tube, rather than individually, as bits are treated by the discrete-state devices generating the flow. Bits are the new electrons. Analog is back, and its nature is to assume control.

> Say, for example, you build a system to map highway traffic in real time simply by giving cars access to the map in exchange for reporting their own speed and location at the time. The result is a fully decentralized control system. Nowhere is there any controlling model of the system except the system itself.

...

> Even in the age of all things digital, this cannot be defined in any strictly logical sense, because meaning, among humans, isn’t fundamentally logical. The best you can do, once you have collected all possible answers, is to invite well-defined questions and compile a pulse-frequency weighted map of how everything connects. Before you know it, your system will not only be observing and mapping the meaning of things, it will start constructing meaning as well. In time, it will control meaning, in the same way the traffic map starts to control the flow of traffic even though no one seems to be in control.

In these passages, "The Computer" that's running is the network, a meta-computer, made up of the individual "computing elements" if you will that are the physical pieces of hardware that most anyone would point to and call "a computer". And as you've recognized, that's Dyson's point: No matter what those little elements are made of, the overall picture is analog. If we want to understand how "Algorithms" are influencing the world, we can't think of them as "discrete computing algorithms". And finally, the emergent behaviour out of this can lead to large-scale control effected on our society without being designed in, and even if nobody is thinking to effect control.
Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000. [1]

[1] https://laborpains.org/2018/06/04/union-president-pay-watch-...
They stopped producing US cars on Jan 2 (resuming relatively recently), so if the data is real, it means that they haven't been able to clear the backlog in the last 1.5 months, even after dropping prices across the board $3100 (almost matching the tax credit reduction).

If the data is real, that's really not great. They're in real danger of building too many cars. The cars are going to get $3750 more expensive over the next nine months.

But Tesla still has two demand levers left: leases and the standard range. Personally I think they'll be fine, but they're skating very close to the edge and a single mistake from here on in (as big as the SC acquisition or the fully automated factory walkback) could prove fatal.
For the same reason its important for there to be as many women in mining, oil rigging, heavy industry, and forestry.
As someone who had a very positive experience at Amazon, but knew people who did not, agreed. In a way, it's better not to think of Amazon as a single company, but as hundreds of startups under an umbrella organization. You cannot generalize from a single one of those organizations. It is impossible, IMHO, for a company to have as many employees as Amazon and maintain a normalized employee experience.

Really the poisonous thing that stands out for me is the Visa experience. Amazon (now) has a pretty liberal internal transfer system that I have seen work really well for a lot of people. But a truly vindictive and sufficiently interpersonally skilled manager can still pin down an employee with what happened to the OP. In such a case, a citizen can walk away and find another company that's a better fit for them. But when they're in H1B land, it is so much harder. It would be so much better for the industry if the system were much more flexible.
House insurance still exists, despite the fact that the rate of collisions caused by human error is zero. I’m sure premiums would change considerably, but “kill”?
Last time my MBP (mid-2015 15'') was in the shop, I just "purchased" the latest model, only to return it when my old machine was sent back. The 14 days no questions asked return policy makes it possible even if the turnaround time is 7+ days. I did communicate my intent very clearly prior to the "purchase" (really just a loner), and multiple Apple Store employees I talked to were very supportive.

Incidentally I got to live with the new butterfly keyboard for a week or so. I've been hearing horror stories about it for years at that point, but turns out it was okay. Not gonna win any awards, but after a few hours I got used to it like any other keyboard, had no problem touch typing, and didn't notice any increased rate of errors. The arrow keys did take some getting used to, though, and the lack of physical Esc and function keys was a nuisance in a small number of scenarios.
> Of course, planes going the other direction will use extra, so overall we don't win.

The jetstream is small. You can avoid it and not have to pay extra. So yes, it can be an absolute win.
Everyone I've ever known in real life to actually work there (it is more than just a couple of people) has told me that its not a place a person should want to work. I've never heard of literally everyone I know who works for a company has nothing good to say about it at all....especially from other engineers. So I always ignore the recruiters when they send me linked in messages and emails.
Agreed. But the fight to keep management in check shouldn't devolve into a fight to keep the union leaders in check. What's the guarantee that won't happen?