skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The goal is to improve their experience

And how is that measured by most social media companies? "engagement".
Udacity restructures operations, lays off 20 percent of its workforce
GPS System Reset – The Tech Disaster That Didn’t Happen
Right, and the model predicts that no “black dwarfs” exist in the universe yet because it is too young for a white dwarf to have ever cooled off.
Will this be 3D printable?
Saying that A/B testing is just different colors for buttons is intentionally ignoring the past 10 years of facebooks development process. Every single aspect of the platform is AB tested and that platform has a big effect on peoples lives.
"There’s a huge section of the tech ecosystem that’s constantly told they’re not smart enough to be here and that their work doesn’t matter. I spent a decade hearing C was beyond mere mortals, that you must be a genius to go anyway near low-level code, or algorithms, or distributed systems. The inventor of Git is notorious for pushing this narrative! But the truth is, anyone with enough brains and patience to learn how to do any kind of computing is “smart enough” to learn things like this."

As someone who spent the first decade or so as an embedded software developer, I wanted to move into web based systems because its a "bigger world". I'm a couple of jobs into this bigger world now, and it just keeps getting bigger. I feel the need to keep my finger on the pulse of new tools and technologies, but I try to hold that in tension with the advice we get here to keep things simple, be pragmatic, don't adopt technologies or techniques just because google does. I've always fancied myself as a generalist, but this bigger world makes me feel a bit like Bilbo Baggins, "like butter spread over too much bread."

My point: I've been in both worlds and I feel more at sea working on internet based systems. I had more mastery over the embedded systems I worked on, than over the web based systems I work on now. So my experience is in support of the author's point that ...

"anyone with enough brains and patience to learn how to do any kind of computing is “smart enough” to learn things like this."

Moreover, I would suggest that the average full-stack web developer is probably over-qualified.
I’m not asking them to copy it exactly. I just want them to put everything where it should be.

A better example is probably a bicycle. Everyone knows what a bicycle looks like. Ask someone with a great “mind’s eye” to draw one with all the parts in the right place. I haven’t tested it, but my guess is that they’d struggle.
I hope everyone down voting this realizes that A/B testing has an "infinite" resolution.

Most people when they hear A/B testing think of something like switching the color of a button, or what have you. But when you start A/B testing a complex series of permutations of components in aggregate, specifically designed to target certain psychological profiles, you can actually start to learn a lot about the group you're testing.

To pretend that A/B testing is some simple "what image do you like more?" game is entirely disingenuous and is so characteristic of the attitude people in tech have when dealing with people or any kind of social side effects of systems they build.

We absolutely do need to be very careful with this. Careful with how we test people, careful with how the information is recorded, and careful with what we do with the data.

I'm going to start calling A/B testing "psychological side channel attacks" and maybe then places like HN will appreciate what's happening more.
I don’t know if I follow, are you saying the second example is a problem? If you are, it’s not clear to me why that is.

And are you sure the scooter was going 45mph? That seems unrealistically fast given that even on my bike (which is probably much more stable) achieving 20+mph in NYC is pretty uncommon.
How does expansion effect gravity, I don't know exactly. Does it stretch it as the same with light. Whilst light comes in various wavelengths, gravity as far as we know - does not. But a wonderful question and one day we will know for sure.

As with scale - difference would become more pronounced at scale.
> Then they make their money by charging people for access to those codes.

The entirety of ICC's building code as it applies to my state is both freely accessible by the general public on their website, and unlike other complete douchebag SDOs--looking at you, NFPA--it's actually usable. Anecdotally, I leveraged the crap out of the residential building code while contracting extensive rennovations to my home last year.

With so much liability behind them, building codes will always be relatively complex.
I had never thought about this before but from this repo I can see all these smart engineers at the big tech firms live within their own walled garden (or prison?).

If it weren’t for such a vibrant open source world then they’d really be stuck if they tried to apply their knowledge outside of their companies.

Thanks for sharing the repo!
Thank god, finally we'll be able to regulate user interface design. Surely needing to get your designs approved by the department of web design standards will be good for innovation.
Us credit card law is pretty strict. Don't know about Europe. I don't see Google trying it.
That's fair, and I should have been more specific in saying that I'm not referring to cases of outright fraud. What I mean is this:

If I an a potential buyer of, say, a book... and my interests include AI, multi-agent systems, and operating systems, then an ad for Barnes & Noble offering the new title OS Development for AI and Multi-Agent Systems is probably going to be mutually beneficial, because it will help me find a book I would want, and it helps B&N sell said book. OTOH, an ad for the new title Necrophilia And Cemetery Porn Of The Deep South is not beneficial to either party (if it's displayed to me) because it's not something I'd ever be remotely interested in. Frankly, I'd much prefer the (accurately) targeted ad.
> Ok, well we'll disagree on that.

I know what I wanted to express less than an hour ago. How can you possibly disagree with me on that?

By the way: My argument is that being an alcoholic makes one less free (they can come to the conclusion that they should stop drinking and make that decision, but being addicts, they cannot follow through). By preventing people from becoming alcoholics, you prevent them from losing their freedom, thus making society as a whole freer.

I thought it was obvious the way I phrased it, but apparently I was mistaken. Sorry for that.

> I don't think I did at all. It is likely that we're just not going to see eye to eye on this one.

Agreed.
I'm aphantastic and I'm very good at drawing. I come from a family of academically trained artists and almost ended up becoming one myself, actually.

Drawing from imagination is actually drawing from memory. In my case, even though I'm unable to visualize the object I'm about to draw, I can recall facts about its features, then rely on spatial and analytical thinking to "reason about" their forms, proportions, perspective, light, shade etc. From there, the visualization process happens and gets refined directly on the paper/canvas.
Even Stackoverflow kills the need for MS MVPs. In the dinosaur days before SO, you'd have MVPs answering questions around the Internet or within their particular community.
I think there are two separate skills: the ability to remember the visual symbols and the ability to draw them. Even if you can remember the symbols in great detail, you still might not be able to draw them if you haven't acquired drawing skills. However, anyone with deep visual recollection should be able to notice when something has changed. For example, they should be able to notice if Bugs Bunny's tail changes from upward-pointing to backward-pointing without looking again at the original.
Why is 5 unethical? I know people who perform a similar function managing and coordinating with offshore teams and employees at fortune 100s. Being able to get stuff done with global teams is a very valuable skill not many have.
It’s not that the election itself is subject to random uncertainty so much as the data that they are using to make the prediction is.

The data might favour one candidate, but even assuming it is unbiased and representative, it is only a random sample, and there is a chance it could be randomly wrong.
These mega websites should probably be held to a different standard to the rest. No ones life is changing when I try out different colors but some of the stuff facebook is testing is very unethical.
Elizabeth Holmes is facing fraud charges.

Marissa Mayer was an accomplished engineer and then a senior executive at Google through its transition from startup to behemoth, then took on the impossible task of rescuing Yahoo when no comparably experienced man wanted to step up to the plate, and facilitated a solid outcome for shareholders [1].

Reasonable people can debate the merits of her performance and impact at both companies, but these kinds of one-line dismissals of her entire career from armchair quarterbacks are disgraceful.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-market-cap-over-time-2...
Sports Hue Celebration App: AI to flash living room lights when your team scores
How would I load web apps?
Yeah, threads like this make me wonder similar things. Lots of people here are using terms like overlay and superimpose that seem foreign to me.

For those in the thread that can work on imagery in a visual manner, does it feel like the images are taking the same path as ones that actually hit the retina? To be more precise, could your visualizations be roughly matched by an idealized Augmented Reality headset? If that sounds close to most people's experiences thats weird to me because my vague visualizations seem to never interfere with my actual visual plane, but rather a more abstract in-brain space.

Love discussions like these, subjective experience is crazy.
> your common citizen will gripe over because they don't see the value

I have NEVER heard of anyone complaining about being taxed a few pennies a year to fund government regulations that save lives or whatever.
Yes. Our goal is to use 3D printing to make the headset both customizable and modular.
VWM.vim – A highly configurable Vim window manager for predefined layouts
I was talking about the speed of light and gravity - even if the same - both are effected differently as your block hole example highlights. Take the light from a distant planet that passes near a black hole. That would bend the light and if too close - bend it into the black hole itself. Gravity from what we know would not be effected by that and as such - both light and gravity from that planet would take a different path.
Changing random stuff all the time is not improving my experience, giving me a consistent interface is.

And the goal is rarely to "improve my experience", it's to more efficiently manipulate me into spending more money, directly or indirectly.
I can't speak for others but I totally don't mind auto play video on Netflix, I mind the auto play sound that comes with it. I don't want to listen to the audio for something I haven't selected in the first place but the fact that the selected clips tend to be loud makes it worse. When I'm in a group, it gets much worse: we often want to stop and discuss items as we scroll through and/or not start playback immediately when we select something. The auto play sound severely interferes with either of these normal social behaviors.

Edit: I just realized you probably meant next-episode auto play. I'm actually fine with that on Netflix, hate it on YouTube. The reason being that YouTube chooses stuff I don't want to watch fairly often while Netflix just continues a series I usually do want to watch.
This: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

Which is to say, some tech companies think that A/B experiments that might lead someone to commit suicide is okay.
A while ago I took to asking people who speak fluent English as a second language what language they think in.

To my surprise, a lot of them said they don't really think in a language or voice.

I've got a King Arthur's damn round table up there having a roiling debate most of the time (not the norm), but I was surprised that so many people don't really have any sort of representation or "source" from which internal ideas originate.
i see people avoiding EF all the time
Create, Save, and Share Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides from Dropbox
Patch Tuesday Lowdown, April 2019 Edition
Not a single "news" article I can find links to the actual text of the bill. Here it is:

https://www.scribd.com/document/405606873/Detour-Act-Final
if you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do a job

What do you know about her job description?
Basically it depends on the experiment.

Does the homepage work better? Good experiment.

Can we manipulate people into feeling depressed or happy? Bad experiment.
Failure in loving, failure in living from everyone's favourite pre-quantum either/or philosopher of the 0/1 binary. Let's give it up for Søren Kierkegaard!
I find that visualisation is unconscious. I can decide to focus on something and I have the feeling of a picture, rather than the picture itself. I can answer questions and gain an impression of where features of a picture are, but an image that I see somehow, not really. And if I shut my eyes, things are just black.
They have a critical mass of bad legacy code.

> Because most existing C++ code at Google is not prepared to deal with exceptions, it is comparatively difficult to adopt new code that generates exceptions[....] Things would probably be different if we had to do it all over again from scratch. - https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions
the way you describe your experience matches mine. i often suspect that people who seem to describe the “augmented reality” version are just using the wrong words to describe what you and i are experiencing... seems impossible to imagine visualizations actually overlaying my visual field like AR!! are they for real?
I can "see" a playback of a drive to a certain location in my mind. Like a dashcam video.

But I can also "move the camera" off the dash and to 3rd person over-the-shoulder like in a racing game, and continue the drive.
A woman's infection turned out to be bees living in her eye feeding on her tears
ken?
You're in for a treat! Here's a curated collection of bicycle drawings, complete with full renderings of some of the most interesting designs.

http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html
Yeah, specially fuck LinkedIn and Quora
It is very rare to see this happening with existing features that the users use and like.

And, they do have consent to change the site at any point. The opposite would be for websites to never be allowed to do any kind of update because they didn't have user consent beforehand.
I find this fascinating I wonder if I some altered form of this where I can visualize most things but they are never accurate depictions always deformed in some way.
I went all the way upgrading my TRS-80 Model 1. Expansion Interface with an additional 32k (48k total), AND the lowercase modification kit! [Reliability was increased when I gold-plated the tin edge connectors associated with the external ribbon cable.]
> In a subsequent experiment, the researchers tried to reverse the finding: they used brain stimulation designed to desynchronize waves in young participants, which caused the subjects to do worse on the memory test

Now that's how you do mad science.
The U.S. government is about to bar the IRS from creating a free e-filing system
I did a fun experiment recently. I was sitting in a doctor's office waiting room with several other people, all on their phones of course. I wanted to see how long I could sit there without pulling out my phone. I made it about 5 minutes. Just sitting there, no magazine, nothing. It was excruciating.
> Wasn't that one of the major points of Obamacare, to make strides in that direction? And it did pass Supreme Court scrutiny, who decided yes it is a tax, and yes the government is allowed to tax us.

It decided that the penalty was constitutional "as a tax", not a compulsion to purchase insurance. The problem is that the penalty was too low. If you know you can buy insurance with a pre-existing condition and the penalty is far cheaper than the insurance, it makes sense to just pay the penalty.

Also, unlike with a compulsory purchase, the penalty didn't go into the funds of the insurers, so prices had to go up regardless.

> So an intelligent "Medicare for All" system could be designed to incentivize innovation and cost cutting and overall patient health, if implemented intelligently.

What are the odds of an intelligent solution coming out of the political process?
Have you ever noticed a similar effect with sounds? Or does it feel like a purely visual/spatial thing?

For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head, and it feels the same as actually listening to it. Is that just as weird for you as being able to see a ball?
Silicon Valley started going to congress back in the late 80's in response to East Asian (Japanese in particular I think) competition in semiconductors.
interesting connections you’re drawing here... from another person who seems to have a similar situation it’s giving me a lot of food for thought
How was Marissa Mayer that person, though?
Very serious. Where does it stop?

"It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion".

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
If they kill A/B testing then probably a generation of startups that modeled themselves after Google and their diaspora won't know how to design products anymore.
Many people are choosing it because it's the blessed way of doing things, but it is crazy overkill and such a heavy hammer for many cases.

There is rarely a case to use EF.
I have never seen anyone get pulled over driving with a phone in Ohio.
SW-3701 Automatic Sperm Collector
That isn’t arbitrage. Arbitrage entails making a guaranteed profit, not relying on predictable fluctuations.
What's open source "only in name" about Firefox? I like NetSurf and hope it grows, but the MPL seems pretty open source to me. I build the Firefox I use from source on every release on my Talos II.
It think it’s… sort of the reverse? Flipping a coin results in Brownian motion, which is an example of a “martingale”, a function whose expected future value is equal to its current value; and the evolution of a share price being a martingale (at least under a modified probability measure) is exactly the condition for the market to not have arbitrage:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-neutral_measure

I’m not sure exactly how the arbitrage works, though.

But the argument in the paper seems to be not that there’s noise but that there’s too much of it. In fact, it assumes that the expected vote share over time is subject to Brownian motion with specific parameters (which is a rather flawed assumption), but then concludes that 538’s probability distribution is more swingy what he’d calculate from those parameters.
Or, perhaps, am I visualizing a sphere or simply remembering what a sphere looks like? It seems natural that we can only visualize what we have already seen, so would there not be a relationship with memory?
Our current plan is to leverage other community projects such as Supermedium for VR browsing and Exokits Chromium iframe capabilities for 2D browsing.
More Bit Twiddling Hacks:
https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
I think users want a "back" button that goes back to where they were before they visited this web page. The browser knows how to do this. It doesn't need to know anything about the app running on that web page.

If the app on that web page wants a button that undoes some state change on that web page, they can create one of their own. It seems like a bad idea to confuse these two very different actions. I don't think it's beyond the capacity of users to understand the distinction if it were actually made consistently.
Cars and phones already have the sensors and comms to be able to curb this behavior, at least some of the time. Your car and phone "know" (potentially) when you're using them at the same time. Is there a technological fix? And if so, do we want to use it?
The People's Computer Company published What to do after you hit return. It was a large format book that collected many of the games published in PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, and Recreational Computing. PCC, before the microprocessor, ran storefront computer centers in the Silicon Valley and promoted the personal use of computers worldwide. There is a whole generation of kids who celebrated birthdays by going to PCC to play BASIC games.

Bob Albrecht, the Dragon and fellow PCC founder, has always been passionate about teaching kids BASIC programming and still volunteers in local schools. He has written multiple books on BASIC mostly targeted at newbies.

One thing no one has mentioned are the BASIC functions PEEK() and POKE() which allowed BASIC programs to read and change memory. Many people learned about control registers and machine language experimenting with PEEK and POKE.

PCC also published The Computer Music Journal and Dr. Dobbs Journal. Dr. Dobbs Journal: running light without overbyte started when the Altair microcomputer was delivered with almost no memory and no software. PCC curated the development of personal computer software
including Tiny Basic. The TRS-80 integer BASIC was a variant of Tiny Basic.

The Dave Ahl books include many games that initially appeared in PCC publications.
They don’t, and if you’ve got the G-factor, pun intended, to get an offer at Google you can get an offer anywhere. Which, honestly, makes this repository all the more confusing to me.

I’m sure there are some people that have lived only within this ecosystem, but that’s the possibly the height of privilege.
I think it's gotten quite a bit better over the last couple of iterations. I use it all the time and works well for most simple tasks.
Life is complicated. Being very smart is no guarantee of success. I’ve never claimed that she was infallible or perfect.

Even Gary Kasparov, Genoa Auriemma, and the Golden State Warriors fall off their perch eventually. It doesn’t mean they aren’t damn good at what they do.
as much as HN hate it... "influencers" matter. It's not about what established media tries to inform me with, it's what my inner circle recommends.
> My understanding is that buildings in developing countries are more prone to disaster because of the way they're financed.

You clearly haven't seen the kind of half-baked crap that comes out of unregulated construction. Even in places with established building code, certain outcomes aren't always guaranteed, e.g. the dumpster fires known as LA and SF.
I've never understood why the user-agent string gives out so much system-specific information. Why not return less information, such as only the browser make and version?
> But did she cause the sinking

A captain that demands changing colors of the sinking ship on a whim may not be the cause of the sinking but certainly isn't addressing the sinking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh...

For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.

According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.