skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is absolute hogwash, there are other methods than a full hand recount if you have a paper trail, some of which only require counting a small number of the ballots by hand.

The best example of this is a Risk Limiting Audit (RLA). You only have to re-count a smaller number of ballots until the overwhelming probability is that the vote is confirmed, or that the vote is rejected. Depending on the disparity between the ballot options, this count can actually be very small.

See: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf

This system is perfect for this kind of an audit -- essentially a ballot marking device written by an organization known for formal verification.
It's so close to being intelligible, but I still can't quite parse it, like so many actual SO posts.
LOC also correlates with bugs. This has been shown in studies on more than one occasion.
I haven't yet! It's on my list of things I'd like to try.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-boeing-blew-it-191947173....
Another reason to limit screen time for kids is to prevent developing nearsightedness. Although this is just anecdata, I was talking to my optometrist at my last appointment and he told me he's seen far more kids coming in with myopia than ever in his 30 years of practicing and he attributes it to kids spending too much time on phones and tablets.

edit: Here's an article from nature which compiles some research on the topic. https://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120
This seems to me like a story about viral marketing rather than about piracy.

For my experience from the time where I spent more time on leisure sites and fandom sites, it's pretty likely we would organize a scavenger hunt and had a lot of discussions if we encounter a fake ebook with the characteristics described. That certainly would look like a viral marketing campaing.
Guilded is hiring engineers and designers to connect e-sports teams (remote)
I wish more people understood that this is how international debts are ACTUALLY paid.
It's a long known problem with anything using 'real' threads and glibc malloc (to some extent, any malloc really). As an example and contrary to wozer's comment, Java is affected by this: https://github.com/prestodb/presto/issues/8993
Well, the FAA here just drew this conclusion based on ADS-B data picked up from a satellite, so I'm not sure how you're getting that idea.

At least, in areas where such sites have good coverage they may actually get closer to the ground data than the satellites are capable of picking up.

I don't mean to dump on doing a quality analysis, just that the quality of data is not as drastically different as you're suggesting.
It is not in Netflix' interest to provide you with detailed search.

Generic search mechanism is just one of ways they hide how limited their lineup is.
I'm not saying they should have to, but I am saying that they ought to.

I think freedom and free speech are good things. Don't you?
Here's the funny thing about content being "great" - it's a matter of opinion. I (personally) wouldn't put the Americans in my top 10 shows, or maybe even top 20, and at least 5 of those are from HBO. As opposed to Breaking Bad, which would be in my top 3 along with The Wire and something else which changes depending on the week and my mood.

Agreed the GoT is a lot of fun but not particularly "great" in the same way as others of these...
This news cycle is surreal... just a few months ago my opinion of US aviation safety couldn't have been higher, and now that view is totally shattered.
Just keep mind that doing what you're proposing will probably cost you 90%+ of your revenue. I'd recommend simply not being abusive with ads (either showing excessive numbers or working with shady ad networks) and offer the small segment of your users willing to pay an IAP to opt out of the ads.
Google tried a 'micro trenching' approach to laying fiber in Lousiville - basically, channels cut into pavement in which fiber is laid, then filled in with epoxy on top. As it turns out, Google's specific implementation of this in Lousiville was highly unreliable.

General overview of micro-trenching: https://www.ppc-online.com/blog/best-practice-for-installing...
you can also use of a shrunken average. If the group has much data, it has its own average, else it is just a slight deviation of the global mean.
Google Docs tricks to save your time in 2019
Define anti-science literature.

As we steamroll at full speed into the Brave New World, does any book, piece of art, or piece of literature that goes against current popular thought become "anti-science literature" and thus promoted for removal.

Plenty of people could make an argument that implementing communism is just good rational and logical policy and thinking, and anyone not wishing to do so is illogical, irrational, and anti-science, therefore we simply remove any literature relating to human freedom, free markets, or the constitution. Does that solve the problem?

How about books on biology that clearly make a distinction between male and female genders. When the political transgender movement becomes locked in, do we simply ban all books that expose two genders as "anti-science literature"?
> https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/reliable-pr...

> Almost all updates to Google’s services proceed gradually, according to a defined process, with appropriate verification steps interspersed. [..] The first stages of a rollout are usually called "canaries” — an allusion to canaries carried by miners into a coal mine to detect dangerous gases. Our canary servers detect dangerous effects from the behavior of the new software under real user traffic.

> Canary testing is a concept embedded into many of Google’s internal tools used to make automated changes, as well as for systems that change configuration files. [..] If the change doesn’t pass the validation period, it’s automatically rolled back.

Any Googlers around to explain why Canaries didn't catch configuration causing this side effect and stopping the deployment before the issue cascaded globally?

The outage here reminds me of issues CloudFront faced wrt configurations in their earlier years. Here's master presenter Harvo Jones going into a bit more detail: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n8qQGLJeUYA

Kind of vindicates AWS' decision (after major outages to DynamoDB and S3) to not just isolate regions or zones but resources within those regions/zones further into what they call "cells" https://youtube.com/watch?v=swQbA4zub20

Tumblr spoke abt "cells" too in the context of achieving isolation at scale, but in a quite different way: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur...

As these known-knowns (and the Google sre-book is teeming with these) get designed around, it'd be interesting to see why/how future outages would happen.
> studies that have shown how longer lines in written text are harder to read then shorter lines.

As are studies showing that bugs are correlated with more lines of code.

final var a = if foo() { bar() } else { baz() }

is much more readable and strictly less error prone than

var a int
if foo() {
a = bar()
} else {
a = baz()
}

> fmt.Println(strings.TrimSpace(" some string "))
makes more sense (in my opinion) than

What makes more sense is

" some string ".TrimSpace()

as it allows for easier reading due to call chaining. Of course the golang standard lib decides something else just for the sake of being different, and without providing a proper reason.
Are you burned out? I was too
All the recent news about burnout has really resonated with my own experience. After taking some time off, building a consistent exercise routine, and improving my sleep/diet, I feel like I'm back on track.

I want to help others experiencing burnout, and I'd like to start by having a conversation. If you've experienced burnout, and are willing to participate in a research interview - find time to chat with me, if selected you will receive a $40 Amazon gift card: http://joinflourish.com/user-feedback
Rudimentary spam filtering saved email long ago when spams were focused on a few niches like pharmaceutical or Nigerian scam.

It wouldn't be efficient today with spam being more more diverse and often hardly distinguishable from legitimate emails. A lot of spam nowadays is like forced advertising, by opposition to plain scam and dodgy stuff.
You can do that if you want, "fire in a movie theater" was an argument in an overturned Supreme Court ruling.
https://www.southwest.com/html/advisories/swa_travel_advisor...

> Southwest operates a fleet of more than 750 Boeing 737s, and the 34 737 MAX 8 aircraft account for less than five (5) percent of our daily flights.
Yes, by refusing to watch a certain TV show or listen to some band you think is good, that is a kind of censorship, but not one really significant enough to transcend the concept of taste.
Like so:

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
I want to know! Did 9,000 people actually book the listing?
Please see the "In Comments" section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Writing "The transponder was switched off" would contribute the same substance to the conversation but without the insinuation.
> The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.

I think this is especially impressive considering the losses of the USS Thresher [0] and USS Scorpion [1]. Despite their loss, there was still no significant containment breach.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)
They have the most diverse set of businesses of any company, so this makes sense.
Why are all these high profile services going down in such a short window? Anyone else thing this is odd? Rarely do we see such incidents occur, let alone to pretty much all these companies.
Are these choices of the individuals or were they asked to resign? It seems pretty odd that all these people would just decide to leave _at the same time_.
Only part I don't care for is the touchscreen.

People consistently overestimate the reliability of that solution, especially for older voters with mobility challenges. Pushbuttons or levers that demand macroscopic elbow/shoulder motion are easier for that demographic to use than sensitive screens requiring fine motor control.

And that's all to say nothing of what happens when the screens become miscalibrated and accept taps a few pixels off. I'm fairly confident most of the "It switched my vote" reports we hear are actually this category of "user-error" (which should really be counted as "machine malfunction").
The problem with any voting system that allows you to verify the vote after the fact is that it makes it too easy to coerce someone to vote a certain way.

I can promise you money (or threaten you with violence) to vote a certain way, but you can't follow me into the booth, and no matter how you make me "verify" I can always change the vote between verification and depositing it in the box.

If there is a way to verify after, then I can withhold payment until you verify your vote, or hurt you after I've seen your vote isn't what I wanted. By not allowing after the fact verification, it means that can't happen, and greatly reduces coerced votes.

So as cool as it would be to verify my vote after the fact, it has too many unintended consequences.
>Kinda scary that the lawyers rule USA at the end of the day.

I'm not sure you thought that one through. Are you really surprised? Who else should it be? I'm sure no one would say the politicians.
Everyone's different. I'd probably pay as much for that windshield ad blocker as I did for my car.
What was the result of the litigation? From a money perspective, it seemed like "admitting fault" would be far more reasonable, and I think in this sense executives tend to exaggerate effects of "admitting fault", because, in the end, they are betting that legal proceedings would nullify its effects, but as we are learning now, it's not the case at all. Public memory might be short, but it regenerates at alarming speeds if you continue down this path.
The mental model helps me with git because it maps pretty closely to what data actually exists. The index is just a useful thing to help me put stuff into a repository in a controlled manner. I've never attained a similar transparent understanding of mercurial.

I think I've asked this before, but what exactly are mercurial's branches?

In git, they are a "physical" feature of the repository as it represents a set of lineages, not an actual repository object.

As such, any reference to a commit uniquely identifies a branch, so the concept of a "named line of development" is simply implemented as a reference that gets updated as you make more commits. When you "delete" a branch in git, it goes nowhere. Only its name is removed.

What sort of structure does mercurial use to represent its branches? I know they are not just an emergent thing like in git.
Two straightforward changes in Bigtable or Spanner are changing tablet compression settings or tuning compaction more aggressively.

Edit: given the mention of a job that got stopped, perhaps they had a tool that manually forced compaction of data in order to adopt new compression settings or purge deleted rows. Normally, compactions would happen on the tablet servers on a cycle of N days.

Another possible explanation is that they tweaked the garbage collector, which runs on the master.
Sadly 3MI and Chernobyl turned environmentalists against it. In fairness, one can’t blame them, but as a technology matured and is better understood and built, they should actively support something they previously were against arguably for valid safety concerns.
As an additional point of data - there is one registered trailer for every two cars in Norway: 1.4 million trailers and 2.7 million cars. For reference, we're almost exactly at one car per household.

https://www.ssb.no/en/transport-og-reiseliv/statistikker/bil...
Pleasantly reminiscent the cover artwork of "Unknown Pleasures" (Pulsar!)

Perhaps someone in the near future will make a similar art cover using graphs of exoplanet transits.
The Bitter Lesson
Precisely. Maybe we shouldn't be focusing on Amazon's alleged "censorship", but rather on what makes us react to it in a rather similar way as if the government did the same thing.

The choice of not doing business with someone ceases to be a meaningful choice when it's the only viable alternative. One could argue that Amazon is not the only viable alternative and that argument is, strictly speaking, correct. However, this isn't a binary situation -- one day we have plenty of equally viable alternatives and the next day it's just Amazon -- but rather a continuum.

TL;DR: Amazon pulling stuff from their store is only a bad thing when taken together with not having a meaningful alternative. The latter is a bigger problem than the former.
> Now we get the usual boot licking going on every time this topic is brought up as Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and Google (Alphabet) [...]

That's funny, because every time that I'm here lately I seem to see a pile of upvoted stories and comments about how [insert big company here] is committing [atrocity here]. Sometimes its true, but often its backed by little evidence other than someone's opinion.

I'm not convinced that things are nearly so imbalanced as you are making them sound.
Whatever the case the planes all had similar issues with momentary nose elevating issues, then a direct nose dive. The 767 was just taking an alternate course around weather. I find it hard to believe the 767 pilot who was very skilled decided to nose dive on their own at -49 degrees pitch. Something with the system was off for it to do that.
> A builtin like 'delete(a, i)'

Ironically, "delete" is built in in golang (how else do you delete an entry from a map)? Yet it says nothing about its cost.
With voting systems the hardware implementation should be both open source and open to investigation by the public throughout its lifecycle (from manufacturing to operation).
With too low a barrier to recount-by-hand, every election becomes contested because the cost to demand a recount is minimal and the losing candidate might win.
> I feel like I'm on crazy-pills with this topic. No one links to my page, hardly any orgs run these experiments, no one upvotes them on Reddit or HN

Gwern is on crazy pills because this is a feature not a bug. Your users are there to generate ad revenue - not the other way around.
What's the measure of harm?

They sell a ton of self-help books, ... if the advice isn't scientifically beneficial then do those books get dropped? Drinking camel milk is probably not harming people (unless they have an allergy/intolerance, but that's besides the point).

Do people with investing systems have to prove they work?

No, I don't want to see people harming themselves or their kids with bad advice.
Nice post-mortem. Being in a smaller engineering org. these write ups feels really premium and something to strive for to provide to our customers when things hit the fan.
The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots.

Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people.

DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's benefit to one of the major research institutions of this country telling the rest of the country how things should be done.
Only problem: if a user (A) signs up for signal and then uninstalls, the phone number is still tied to the signal app. This means that a signal user (B) now can't get messages to user A. The messages gets delivered to a dead signal account. User A must manually deactivate her account, which she is not even informed about when deleting. Also: if user A has her number trabsferred too somebody else (which is often the case with e g work phones) her account is now owned by a random person.
All wedding cakes are customized cakes. Most people don't buy an off-the-shelf generic cake for a wedding. A wedding cake is understood to be made especially for the occasion.
I'm starting to get the feeling that all terrestrial energy generation should ultimately come from sunlight, and our nuclear reactors should be out in space, and on other celestial bodies, especially those further away from the sun.

But in order to do that, we need to further develop nuclear reactor technology by building utility-scale nuclear energy plants here on Earth--not because we need our energy to be nuclear, but because we need our nuclear energy to be reliable and efficient.

The cynical part of me is thinking that the US can apparently build nuclear plants anywhere on Earth except in the US.
what sorts of tools are you using to deal with this data?
"Consensus" particularly in complex empirical areas (e.g. are eggs healthy?) is observably in constant flux with various strategic actors exerting heavy influence. For any question more complex than pure math there is always uncertainty and strategic bias.
People here know Ajit Pai and DeVos as they are constantly in the news. I've never heard of Tom Wheeler, so I wouldn't think to use his name.
> Both 737 were in the ascending process, while the 767 is during normal flying.

It might not have anything to do with ascent/descent but the range / altitude and how systems react at that altitude. Maybe the systems are designed to be more reactive at this height because there is less chance to recover than if you are cruising at 30k feet.

What is most interesting to me is how the Amazon cargo plane 767 crash made almost zero news and has quickly been replaced in the news with the 737 Max 8/9 issues. Though all situations are very similar, straight nose dives that were sudden at the 6000-8500 feet range. There has to be something to that.

767 crashes and emergencies are EXTREMELY rare [1].

Most are related to human intervention such as terrorism, pilot error, fuel error and only a very small amount are mechanical errors. Of the 12 problems, only 5 were mechanical error.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Accidents_and_inciden...
Also hire only one IT guy.
It might work well for you, but

are you sure your recipients
aren't
seeing emails that look like
this?

Sending plain text emails that look good when nearly every email client is mostly only tested with html emails is actually very difficult, and sometimes simply impossible. Format=Flowed doesn't always fix this. Plain text emails are defacto deprecated just because a lot very popular email clients don't handle them well.

One major problem with plain text emails is the standard was created when nearly everyone had a screen wide enough to display at least 78 characters per line (or whatever it was). Today people spend most of their time on screens much narrower than that. FF is a half assed solution to that problem

html was designed to work on a much wider variety of screen sizes so it works much better for email.

I say this as an offlineimap/mu4e user who knows some of my recipients are seeing bad formatting and doesn't really care.
https://outline.com/yTPSbh

(An outline version for those tracking aware or blocked on corporate nets)
You can do that, but if you feel entitled to the theater's help in doing it then I don't know what to tell you.

And if you expect the theater to let you in when you come back to watch a movie the next day, you're going to be disappointed.
Yes, and they mark them as ads so users know that they're promoted and not organic search results. Allowing websites to buy ads to affect their organic placing would affect the quality of search results.
Yeah, but those things have a different outcome depending on whether it's a single individual or a society of individuals doing them (in that example: police being accountable to one person instead of the public as a whole).

This is different, since no matter what, an old man voluntarily dies for the financial benefit of his descendants. If the outcome is the same no matter who makes that happen, then I fail to see why one approach to doing so would be more or less moral than the other.

If anything, a single individual purchasing that old man's life would be more moral, since the alternative would be to compel an entire society (and specifically the members thereof) to bear that cost (both monetarily - i.e. via taxes - and the emotional cost of having killed someone). Given that the billionaire is (presumably) a member of society, the net impact is identical, but it's compartmentalized to a single individual who volunteered for those costs versus an entire society of individuals who might not have.
They could not refuse business based on race in the US.
Stanford University Launches ‘Human-Centered’ AI Institute
This is missing two completely unnecessary failure modes that pen and paper don't have:

1. You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret. Mind you that in addition to an attack inside the device, this can also happen via simple electromagnetic side channels inherent in the device--as has been demonstrated quite a while ago for Nedap voting computers by the dutch campaign against voting computers, where you could distinguish selected candicates by tuning an AM radio to the right frequency.

2. When the device malfunctions, whether due to a defect or sabotage, and only particular candidates can not be selected, that creates a side channel where the voter is effectively forced to unveil who they want to vote for.

Neither of those failure modes exist with paper ballots.