skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Received a bolt in the mail – what kind of scam could this be?
Yesterday my wife received in the mail (USPS, not FedEx or UPS) a bolt that had been mailed to her from a PO Box in Fiji. The bolt was a tiny thing (bolt as in screw, not a deadbolt) probably costs a few cents at most wholesale. Needless to say, we had not ordered anything of this kind, certainly not from Fiji. The sender was a PO Box from Fiji and there was no other tracking information. The doorman received the package and may have signed for it (unclear - the one is duty is not back yet).

My wife shops online a fair bit and has had an incident in the past where her information was stolen – and since then we have been extra careful with respect to alerts etc. We have reset our alerts after receiving this bolt from the blue. In this case, we are extra perplexed as to what sort of scam this could be. What would someone achieve by sending us a “test” package in the mail? This was clearly not a fake amazon order sent to us in a review scam (happened to another friend) – clearly seems like a set up for something more insidious. What would someone send next and why? Any ideas as to what could be happening? Thanks!
> he responded back with an incredibly long, well-written email explaining a lot of the minutia of how Erlang avoids a lot of pitfalls and generic concurrency theory.

I love that about Joe. He really really love Erlang and the thing he built and share it with everybody. It shows in his blogs and the talks he gave at conferences.
Because it creates an information asymmetry. They now know what you (are willing to) work for, but you don't know what they're willing to pay, or what everyone else in the company makes.

It does not benefit you to disclose the information, even if you think your number is high. They might assume you are lying, or they might already be anchored at an even higher number - you don't know.
150% - devs are slowly waking up to this fact. Behind the efforts to teach everybody to code are more sinister motives: lowering the salaries for engineers.
I do not assume that; I only mention it as hypothetically the case, and then try to say that whether or not it is true on average (I think it probably isn't), it doesn't matter anyways due to the reasons I specified, because you should not hire someone based on their gender or skin (except perhaps if you are hiring a actor; but, if you are hiring a computer programming then it doesn't matter your gender/skin). (Sorry if I was being unclear.)
> I absolutely cannot afford to compete and hire at market rate prices

maybe you need some funding then
If you wanted 100% accuracy, technically infinite data points and training time would be required. You could likely get >99% accuracy within a few epochs of training though. With such a simple function you're trying to emulate, your model will very quickly converge.

Neural networks are much better suited for distilling down and compressing very complex high dimensional data though anyways, and you really don't need to be using them for problems like this. It's completely overkill in addition to being very computationally inefficient. There's nothing wrong with just simply using linear regression. In many cases it's the right choice.

In your toy problem case you coded above, you are effectively just doing linear regression, except you added in an Adam gradient descent optimizer instead of just doing least squares, which by the way would have been infinitely faster and immediately given you an answer.
> serve the best A

Well, you have to serve them all and let the client decide what to use, like with MX or SRV. Too bad HTTP is stuck in time and can't get any proper functionality.

And yes, I mean it is literally too bad. Why can HTTP hold 3 current standards at the same time, but still fail to work with basic internet infrastructure?
SiriusXM releases a subscription plan for people without cars
This is a crutch, backwards approach. Just use smart cards goddammit, that's what they were made for!

https://github.com/philipWendland/IsoApplet/wiki
In California, employers are required to disclose salary ranges for jobs if asked by prospective employees.
>I'm 45 and have gray hair.

I'm reaching 40 next year, 20 years of code experience. What's bizarre about the whole thing is that I would be consider to be reaching my productive peak in the next 10 years in any other field.

In tech you are treated like a dinosaur, as if not knowing what the latest hipster JS framework of the week makes you obsolete.

>Are you people complete morons?

Yes.
> So what? I accept the risk, like any other risk in life

You say that now, but the reality is much different when it comes down to it.

Like everyone else, you'll scream and cry like a stuck pig when it's your Mother/Sister/Daughter/Son who get unbelievably sick through no fault of their own and die early because of a lack of money.

The system as it exists today is nothing short of disgraceful. It's sad that you just accept it and have no interest in improve it.
This is oddly seen as something to be proud of rather than an embarrassment among some of the media:

>It is encouraging that a man whose family first got rich because his ancestor was the fat huntsman (gros veneur) of William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference. It gives hope to us all.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/a-dukes-wealth-i...
This is an improvement from before, right?
Is there a successful example of the US government solving a Universal Healthcare type of problem? Perhaps at a much smaller scale? Maybe some of our military logistics, the space race, etc.?

I'm very supportive of universal healthcare but even I doubt in the governments capability to pull it off, we couldn't even pull off healthcare.gov without massive waste.

Regardless I will continue to support it even if it means a generational hit to get it right.
I highly highly recommend Lab Rats by Dan Lyons. Dissects the forces behind the current state of the workforce in the US.

Very well written and exposes the brutality and destruction resulting from focusing on short term profit at any cost.
Worth noting 1% of England's population is about 550,000 people, as is mentioned in a linked article - half of Scotland is owned by ~600 people!

https://www.holyrood.com/articles/comment/land-reform-and-in...

Edit: In my own opinion, this iniquitous state of land ownership in Scotland is somewhat compensated for by the fact we have the Right To Roam - which means even though a lot of land is kept as hunting estates anyone can wander about pretty much as we please (with some fairly minor restrictions).
I feel like the way to deal with this situation is to ask them to pay a $1000-2000 deposit to take a day to interview, refundable in the event that the company makes an offer meeting certain conditions (e.g cash salary >= $amount)

Most companies will say 'no', the tiny minority that say 'yes' are the ones that are serious.

Clearly only works if you have enough 'dealflow' to end up with nonzero takers
ty missed that
I was able to find his reply. The stuff after the `>` is him quoting me. There's another part to this somewhere, but I'll have to keep looking.

> Hello!

> I am learning Erlang and really liking it.

Great

> I am finding myself really liking the immutability in regards to being able to reason about my code, but that leaves me with a probably easy question: why does immutability make concurrency easier?

Tricky I guess it makes parallel execution easier (no locks) - it certainly makes programming easier
closures really are closures :-)

> Is it because it's difficult to have something in a thread reach-across and modify the state of another thread?

That's not really immutability - actually I hate threads - the difference between a thread and a process is
crucial - threads can modify shared state (horrible) -

In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden)
where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? - shared state breaks laws of physics.
State changes are propagated at the speed of light - we always know how things were at a remote site
not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that
ignores this fact you'll be in trouble.

> Does that mean concurrency wouldn't be so bad if you kept state mutations contained within one thread?

Yes - if you use the word process, not thread. Processes were invented to provide protection
from other computations and to share resources in a clean way - threads share resources in a messy way.

> If you don't have time to answer right now, a link or some guidance into the right resource would be appreciated!
I think what you're interested in is the distinction between message-passing-concurrency and shared-memory-concurrency.

Java/C++/etc uses shared-memory concurrency (evil) - Erlang uses message passing concurrency.

AS Alan-Kay said - the big thing about OO is message passing not all the other stuff ...

>
> I love Erlang, and I appreciate you reading my message!

Have fun

/Joe
I posted it in a sister thread to this. There's a part 2 somewhere but I'll need to find it.
Any non-joining OLTP query will perform very well with ES. It is particularly effective with low-cardinality fields where in a traditional relational database you would not benefit from a B-tree index and a database like Postgres typically would revert to a sequential scan over the entire table. Column intersections in Lucene are extremely efficient, basically streaming sorted vectors of document IDs from RAM.

Where ES is not optimal is when you need joins. That said, doing left outer joins -- which is typical in web workloads where you may have something like an "articles" table that you want to query with filters and then join against "authors" and "categories" without filters to fetch connected data -- on the client side with some basic parallelization is surprisingly effective. Currently doing that in some apps where we get <100 millisecond performance even when fetching maybe 5-6 related objects per result.
Article author suggest he could just do the thing himself instead of working for company... Thus, he should seek more equity :)

Well, maybe..
Quote of the day: "The foglets' bodies would be made of aluminum oxide rather than combustible diamond to avoid creating a fuel air explosive."
I'm always curious about these things because if it's something medical that might be preventable or that has some nonprofits raising funds for, etc., then that can increase awareness. But I can understand if people don't always rush to talk about it.
I had an interview with a recruiter for an apparently (from what I hear) good AI company in Montreal, Canada. Their business is happening so they need to find a lot of people of various specialities. So they hired some ultra junior and not very bright full time recruiters. They are the ones that make lots of initial rejections stopping good candidates from actually getting to the proper subject matter interviews. The recruiter was confused because I applied for a UX/UI design position - my focus last 10 or so years - but I actually studied computer science so I have lots of coding experience not only design skills. This is an actual quote from the conversation: 'So, I see you _also_ have programming experience, but you applied for UX/UI design position, so I am not sure it is _good_...'.

I did manage to navigate through completely retarded 45 minute HR conversation and got invited for the interview with the director of UX. From the moment I walked in the guy was ultra uncomfortable and shy because he was obviously 15~20 years younger than myself. Also clearly never interviewed people before. I never heard back from them, but I see that the position is still open...
No, my point is that the ultrarich have the choice between building a small tower that's completely used, or a bigger one with unused space. While the ultrarich prefer the version with the higher building, both scenarios end with the same amount of used space. Any waste of space is not a decision of the ultrarich but a consequence of the building code.
Yes, I know. Erlang was not distributed till 1991, roughly 5 years after it was born.

It's also really illuminating how they implemented the first versions of Erlang as a reified Prolog [1]. But that is not explained in the thesis, just in his 1992 paper which he briefly cites.

[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=F4...
A verbal promise can very easily be interpreted as a contract by a court. (IANAL, and clearly YANAL)
It's a strange hiring world out there.

I changed careers and was inundated with recruiters contacting me..... a total n00b. Nice huh?

Not really, every one of them just seemed to be sweeping up resumes and names and faces and not paying attention.

I'd talk to them on the phone "no I don't have 5 years experience, just like it shows on my resume"...

One after another, total waste of time.

Then I'd get a bite, or even interview and ... some would just go radio silence. Man how hard is it even to send a cookie cutter "we went in another direction" email?

I wish I could have only talked to people who actually looked at my resume first and wanted to talk to that guy. Maybe it wouldn't be many but it would save a lot of time, looking for a job is hard enough as it is.

Meanwhile every job does require 5 years experience but I'm pretty sure they don't. I'd hear the actual job and no man a n00b could do that just fine.

Meanwhile my last job now requires a CS degree where really a high school grad who is mildly capable with a CCNA could do just fine, but they're still looking to fill my position a year later... They could have brought on two people for like 6 months to just try them out and but they'd rather not.

I'm fairly sure there's just a lot of busy work being made by HR and head hunters who have no clue anyway.
I agree with the rule and wish it was easier to put into practice. What I've noticed however, is that a lot of recruiters stonewall you if you don't tell them a number, or at least a range. They even say things like "Well I need to put something into this internal web app." It's super frustrating!
>If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline.

Why is it your choice to make? Shouldn't it be the new people trying to get into the computer science industry who get to make that choice?

It feels like what you're saying is "God forbid someone else tries to join your industry and tries to make a better life for themselves, and god forbid others for trying to help them."
Living with a dentist I learned that the single most important factor (by far) in the health of teeth is the genetic factor. Some people do not brush their teeth for years, never floss, have bad diets, etc. and still barely have a cavity. Others do it "by the book" and yet their teeth are a ruin. This is not to say that brushing teeth or flossing won't help. It will just not compensate if you pulled the genetic short straw.

But as in every job dentists also feel pressured to point out other people's lack of quality work to promote their own. You'll see this in the IT guy who immediately recognizes that whatever the previous one did on your computer was amateurish and they can do it better, same with the electrician, the plumber, the mechanic, the plastic surgeon, etc.
Like the way he described thread safety as an oxymoron...
The problem with studies saying phones are bad for you (2018)
That article reads like false-flag Communist literature... Millennium-long family wealth chains being an inevitable consequence of private property? You'd read that in one of those pamphlets.
Taimur - Congrats and I signed up as well.

To me, one of the advantages of representing the story in a probabilistic way, similar to how you have shown it, is that I am able to sell an idea to my audience.

If you are looking for use cases to build for a demo, in addition to DCF, as someone suggested before, you might want to consider currency movements and also IRR calculations.

One feature request, if I may, is the ability to manipulate the end result (time horizon in the demo of rent vs buy) and see how it impacts one of the features (rent, market return, etc).

All the best and glad to discuss.
Also a physical switch to enable writing to the flash rom. That way, malware infections to standalone devices won't survive a reboot.
My wife works in an urban library. Every day she describes a similar incident. They have multiple guards. At a library...
How do you reconcile this statement:

First of all it sounds like there was some really dishonest communication and there is no excuse for that.

With this one:

People who are unaware of their market value
i don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.

you can need the job done, and need it done very well, in order for it the opportunity to change to succeed.
How many callbacks do you plan to be adding/calling per second?
Etymology is fascinating. When I read your Greek "mov" for purple, I immediately thought of the French word for light purple, "mauve". (I don't speak French but my toddler son is bilingual and has started using this word recently so I had to find out what it means.)

Sadly it seems there is no link as it comes from the Latin name of a flower, "malva", which has a different ancient Greek cognate "malakhē" according to wikipedia.

I also learned that "mauve" is an English word. It's somewhat embarrassing that a 2.5 year old is helping improve my mother tongue vocabulary.
> William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference.

I'd love to know how they think William came to acquire that property.
Are we going to blame orthodox capitalist ideology on communists now?
Fantastic, I have an example to learn from :D

Thank you for the tip!
Which ones have sensitive info?
This is one of the most annoying web sites I have visited, with multiple pop up interruptions and overlays, close buttons visually disconnected from the dialogs that they close, etc. I gave up on the article because of the horrible reading experience. I have no idea why this site is nominated for a webby; they must not have evaluated the mobile experience.
Typescript is becoming a popular alternative to JS and is often being chosen to correct the perceived shortcomings of JS.
Just like ClojureScript, which is often chosen to correct the perceived shortcomings of JS ;)
They didn't brush their teeth, but were they chewing on small pieces of wood, or usong other traditional method of dental hygiene?
Show the annual pricing underneath or something, instead of next to it like a separate tier:

PRO
Feature
List
Here
£x
<< £0.8x paid annually >>
Ah, found the email he responded to a year later. As before, the stuff after the > is him quoting me.

----------------------------------------

> Hello!

>

> Just under a year ago I send you a message asking you about multi-process computing and the like. You gave me a long, detailed email that not only answered my questions, but also explained in pretty-decent detail.
>

> I was so impressed by that email that I actually purchased your "Programming Erlang" book, and enjoyed that just as much, and today I started my first job doing Erlang full-time (well, mostly; there's some JS involved).

Great - thanks a lot for buying the book - these kind of stories
make it feel all worth while

> I just wanted to thank you for the help. I know a compsci-celebrity probably gets bombarded with emails,

Actually not - I guess it's a 'being polite' thing - I rather like twitter it
lowers the entry barrier for communication between people.

I have in the past mailed several of my CS "heros" - and was always
rather reluctant to do so. Then to my great surprise I often got long
and helpful replies (from Niklaus Wirth, Alan Kay, Jim Gray)

This kind of fits in with my view of life - 95% of people are basically helpful.

I've always thought that converts were gained "one at a time" - imagine
a drip drip drip of water falling into a pan - one day it overflows.

We always think it's fantastic to hear the stories of what you guys do with
Erlang. (I say we because the Erlang you're using is the product of
many people fantastic work) - I'm just the fall guy who writes the books
and happened to start it all :-)

I was sat listening to Brian Acton who founded WhatsApp and made 3.5B$
and thought "I invented this crap" - which is a great feeling - and they gave me a tee-shirt.

So the side effect of what I do is I get to meet loads of interesting people
and do what I want.

Anyway thank again, and I hope things go well for you.

> and I think it's really cool that you took a good amount of time responding to some random guy on the internet asking for help.

Well every body is a random guy until you share stories.

My wife was a random woman before we met.

Anyway life would be very boring if it were not for random events.

I never run for busses or trains - it was after I read about a guy who missed
a train and had a random conversation with a guy on the platform
who had also missed the train - this gave them an idea that they
turned in a multi-million dollar business.

I guess the other reason that you get long replies is that I'm an author
and I don't do short mails.

> As usual, keep up the great work.

I'm trying - though I've recently retired - gives me more time for hobby programming - though I have to tend my garden and so on

Cheers

/Joe
That is excellent news.

I will look into that. It does not sound like it will be too tricky to implement so expect a quick turn around time :)
This is an appealing argument. But most of us don't actually have that. Worse, many attempts have shown greater success with just minimal styling and/or multiple versions.
Eniac Simulator Written in Go
> Why is it your choice to make?

It's not my choice. It's the technology industry's collective choice to decide how welcoming the technology industry is to newcomers. I hope you have a more compelling argument than, "It's not fair." Life ain't fair; people have mortgage payments to make, kids to feed, and aren't likely to be willing to support emotional appeals that are going to decrease their quality of life, without any benefit to them.
By land area. But that's to be expected really. Most people live in towns and cities.

How many people own 50% of Britain's land by value?
If there are 10 hours of interviews, and each one is attended by an average of 1.5 current employees, who make, on average, $100K, then the labor cost (not including opportunity cost) of that round of interviews with that candidate is on the order of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. So you might have a point there.
I think if you are in the critical path of any company or project, you have to learn how to manage expectations and manage stress. It is a skill in itself.
The more senior I've gotten, the more I've removed from my resume. I used to stuff it with everything I had learned over the years. But my real profession is just "software engineer." You give me a language and a problem, and let me figure out the rest.
It's certainly preferable to the old situation where more than half of the _world_ was owned by less than 1% of the the British.
Can the sender see proof of delivery online, e.g. scan of the signature?
Any orthonormal ~set~ basis of functions can represent any function. So what?
*any continuous function
You are stating that this is the reality as if it’s a certain thing.

I don’t have reason to believe my insurance will suddenly drop coverage when I need it. I don’t think that’s a huge risk.

Your hypothetical world isn’t all that safe either, because when the government says no, that answer is final. There is no other option, there is no other way even if I wanted to pay. That’s just as bad as coverage being dropped, and perhaps much more likely given my faith in the government to do things efficiently these days.