skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It works (Has a positive RoI) up to a particular spend/impression, and doesn't work after a particular spend/impression.

The purpose of all the data collection/targeted advertising/remarketing, is to increase the efficiency of these ads, and to increase the threshold when it goes from 'works' to 'doesn't work'.

To put it another way - I can't think of many businesses where showing ads for 1 cent / 1000 impressions would not be worth it. I can't think of many businesses where showing ads for $1000 / 1000 impressions would be worth it. Depending on the business, there's some inflection point between those two numbers. More targeted advertising makes the implicit promise that the inflection point for <your particular business> is higher, then in an untargeted advertising platform.
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions. Sure I really want to grow as an engineer, BECAUSE I want to make more money. When I think of professional growth, I think of a company that will give me large pay bumps equal to what I could get if I left, because as time goes on I get more productive and more knowledgeable.
"understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time"

That's brilliant and obviously useful for software engineers. Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too.
The F-117's retirement is cited as evidence of a secret UCAV, but I was under the impression that the B-2 made it obsolete anyways.
Don’t treat developers like bricklayers. Sack any product manager or manager that does it. This is the root of all evil, radical as it may sound. There needs to be a balance between engineering and product delivery, but too much emphasis on product delivery leads to tech debt, cutting too many corners and poor tech choices. Not to mention stress and little to no job satisfaction. Give devs some time to build something they are proud of. Good devs are in it because they love and once that love is gone the dev is gone.
Lots of places don't have tests at all. This is not uncommon. (Or even all that problematic if other processes and capabilities are in place).
What incentives would the ad industry have to defend a practice that isn't popular and doesn't work?
I'd be overjoyed for even a single remote day a week. Give me the four day at-work week.
Most rack chassis have front fans which send air to the back of the chassis, with heatsinks oriented with direction of airflow. Air is forced from the front to the back, passing through the heatsink fins.

If vertically mounted with the rack "front" at the top, the forced airflow down will be in the opposite direction of convention airflow up. Fans may have to spin faster/louder to achieve the same level of cooling.

If the front fans are reversed, the fan airflow will be aligned with convection, but will immediately exhaust from the front instead of being aimed squarely at heatsink fins. The intake vents at the back of the chassis will provide sources of air, but are likely not uniformly distributed (compared to the fans) across the width of the chassis.

For a home server that is mostly idle, there may not be much difference, but the safest path is to run some stress tests with different cooling configurations.

Edit: some chassis have back-to-front airflows, http://thenetworksherpa.com/airflow-is-important/
> (e.g. looping through an array every time you want an item with id=x instead of just using a hashtable)

Huh, I had almost the exact same experience with senior devs here - they were checking if elements were in a (huge) list in nested loops, instead of using a set. Switching brought the runtime from around 2 hours to 2 minutes.
Location data is much cheaper: $9.50/mo for 1000 users

https://www.cnet.com/news/location-data-from-a-gas-station-a...
He is sort of the father for any type of complex procedure systems out there today. In prior jobs, references back and setups that came from the space program were pretty common.

Lots of us have worked in or around "mission control's" at companies (think any of the Telcoms, power distribution etc), so thanks Chris for your guidance!
TBH I would settle for working on a sane codebase. Almost every codebase I have worked on except for my own are a complete mess. Basic things aren't done right e.g. Reproducible builds, source control, code review etc.
As mentioned in another comment for this post, Cracking the Code Interview is probably a good place to start in terms of reviewing some key concepts, assuming you don't have a CS degree and are largely self taught.

Of course given the libraries and systems already available, you don't practically need a lot of this knowledge, but it does help. When certain portions of an application just don't perform well, or when you hit really weird side effects of race conditions on static properties etc. I think it's also important to know the language and tools that you are working with as well as possible. It's not always possible to know everything, but you should probably read and complete at least one book on the language you are using. You can hack away in any given language for years. But until you've actually read cover to cover on a comprehensive book, you won't necessarily understand some concepts, or better still you will learn how the language does something for you, that you've been doing the hard way.
Expensive nonpractical kitchen remodels are at the top of every list I've seen of projects to avoid when looking to resale value because they usually add less resale value than they cost to do.
It's not network effects that matter. It's economies of scale. Any company can go out and start putting scooters on the street. But if you want positive unit economics, which Bird now has for over 2/3 of its fleet, you need a huge infrastructure.
+ for full time remote ( I can deal with everything else, but commuting just feels so antiquated now... we ARE living in the digital age right? )
Facebook Secret Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App
So the headline is that a near-Earth object is not only going to miss Earth by a wide margin, but also even if it did hit us nobody would notice...
Am I the only one here that likes growth because I like learning? I try and grow all the time in non-professional areas of my life even though there is no direct monetary compensation for doing so (such as learning new languages, instruments, etc.)
Your phone will send GPS level location data if the provider requests it: https://www.spirent.com/~/media/white%20papers/mobile/lte_lb...

"SUPL 2.0 features the use of geographical ‘triggers’, which enable the UE to report its position if it enters, leaves, or is within a particular area. Triggering may be enabled either by the network or by the SET, with the two entities agreeing on trigger criteria. Area Event triggers enable key mobile applications such as Check-in services, shopping deals and offers, location based advertising, and child location."
and many people throughout history have also learned math on their own, this doesn't devalue the worth of a math degree.
I had been a graphic:web designer since I was 14 years old. I taught myself Photoshop and Dreamweaver and became proficient with creating layouts with frames, tables, and of course eventually css.

I graduated from college with a degree in Philosophy where I was focused on logical systems. I recall one of my favorite professors being intrigued to know whether I could program and disappointed when I confessed that I only did the design side of web development.

I of course had a strong interest in code, having gone through interactive online python tutorials but I wasn’t able to make a the leap into becoming a developer.

The wall, I realized, was my lack of knowledge in the unix command line. Once I learned about bash, ssh, and setting up basic web servers, my learning skyrocketed.

With a background in logical systems, I was able to grasp the model of computing very rapidly. While I cannot claim to be advanced in algorithms or data structures, I feel comfortable being able to develop solutions that work.
What's interesting about coding is how self-incriminating it can be. Unless you are being sly (which apparently was not the case), you are writing down your whole intent.
Not creating fake accounts. Allowing them.

Imagine you're Coca-Cola. You have an on-line ad budget for this quarter. Where should you spend it? Probably the places that have the most reach: Google and Facebook. Do you know how many cans of Coke or other drink brands you will sell based on these ads this quarter? No. Is there any way for you to figure it out? No. All you know are the numbers Facebook tells you. And those numbers look pretty good. This is how "sophisticated" ad buyers work.

It's actually far easier for a tiny business to measure the conversation rate between clicks and actual purchases. Big ad buyers throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and they rarely bother truly measuring because that's often impossible.

The entire ad industry is based on fuzzy metrics. Within that fuzz is an awful lot of room for fraud.
But times are changing, now it’s also possible to buy great screwdriver from China and inferior from Germany.
My experience with wkhtmltopdf a few years ago was that the PDFs that it rendered could look quite different from the PDFs that Chrome or Firefox would render.
Sure. Because every political leader is a demagogue.
Its trivial and common to have one or more than one key that unlocks the actual key that is in fact used to decrypt data see LUKS the standard for full disk encryption on Linux for example. This trivially lets you change your passphrase without rewriting all your data on disk.

It's also useful for recovering data that the user has forgotten their self set passphrase or wont share it in case of a hostile ex employee. Furthermore one can have multiple passphrases and revoke one if it is known to be compromised.

For the governments concept on it see "key escrow" and the clipper chip fiasco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Problems are legion and multifaceted. To put it briefly based on past actions no reasonable party would trust the US government to be respectful of their rights and privacy nor even competent enough to keep a secret.

It would force the entire world of computer security to be shackled and standardized upon what an incompetent bureaucracy understands and it would be a disaster inside a year.

If one recalls a lot of current woes with malware can be traced back to one of their geniuses that took home a hard drive full of tools and lost it all to the bad guys.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-balti...

If a golden key that unlocked everything in existence came into being it would be in the hands of state actors within 30 days and everywhere next year.

It has always required monumental arrogance and profound lack of foresight to suggest we should backdoor all security for the benefit of the keystone cops and their current fearless leader Sergeant Shultz here.

As the iconic tv character used to say "I know nothing. Nothing!!"
Completely, I just asked in my open office space what "opportunities for professional growth" means and everyones said raise or promotion.
I don't follow. How would the conversion get measured if the user never saw the ad? They'd need to follow a link to a landing page that is associated with that particular campaign, and that registers the conversion after the user performs the desired action, right?
Is Triplebyte paying for product placement here now? They've taken over Reddit.
As you pointed out, since this is an adversarial use case, a robust cryptographic hash function is the way to go. [For a non-cryptographic Hash function, SeaHash [1] would be the best choice, which is violently fast!]

BLAKE2b would have been the perfect choice given the adversarial nature, as it much secure and faster than MD5. [2]

MD5 is so broken, it's really poor choice for any use case - cryptographic (fundamentally broken) or not (fundamentally slow).

[1] http://ticki.github.io/blog/seahash-explained/

[2] https://leastauthority.com/blog/BLAKE2-harder-better-faster-...
Leaving Apple&Google, /e/ summer update: smartphones for sale, apps, PWAs
The great part is that she's persistent. Try the learning language scratch. Once she understands the basics of programing logic she can then move on to a more practical language. After that look for progtaming courses for kids. Adult courses get over complicated so just focus on the basics. Most of all make sure she understands before moving on so you are looking for small wins. Patience is the key.

It might be easy for you but it's hard for her.
As the article mentioned, the importance of growth's influence can be explained in large part by a broad interpretation of the question. This article defined "Professional Growth" by saying:

> "In short, software engineers of all stripes want, more than anything else, to develop their abilities as engineers"

This is true, but it's also the first-order answer. The follow-up question to ask is why they want to develop their engineering ability. It may be to make a higher salary down the road (i.e. current salary is less important than future earning potential), to develop the skill set to found their own company, to gain prestige by moving up in an organization and managing other engineers.

Overall, really interesting post - definitely worth diving into the data further.
This is hard only on GNU/Linux because it's inherently broken because solving this once and for all proved too hard of a problem for volunteers working on the kernel and filesystem code. That's a hard to swallow fact if one's favorite operating system is GNU/Linux. There is one group of people who did solve it and they solved it correctly: the ZFS team under Jeff Bonwick.

If you care about data integrity, if you need an operating system where filesystem operations aren't leaky abstractions and where fsync(2) works as POSIX specifies, if correctness of operation is important to you, use an illumos-based operating system like SmartOS or any other based on the illumos codebase. Put some effort in and learn real UNIX and leave these long ago solved problems where they belong, back in the past century.
I imagine ad efficiency from customer point of view is seeing perfect ads for things they didn't know existed that they actually need right now to improve their wellbeing.

Efficiency from advertiser's point of view is showing ads to people who would buy the things advertised, as in the case above but also including when customers don't need them, can't afford them, when they are actively harmful (say gambling ads for gambling addicts), shown at the most psychologically effective times (when you are vulnerable, desperate, not thinking clearly, etc).

There is a small overlap in those two cases, but the money is on the harmful end.
That's a great failure mode as you can simply get them re-soled.
ICIJ should consider an alternative title such as

"Hackers reveal client data for Bermuda based law firm and we bought in on Empire for .25 BTC"

"Save on taxes by using this little known trick!"

"Mauritius legislature competitive in global trade"

"Africa single market growing towards being a wild success, thanks to Mauritius"

they choose to use words like "siphon", OP chose to use words like "exposes"

they could just as benignly report a "trade imbalance" such as when basically any G7 country combination is being discussed
I’ll probably get downvoted in this crowd by saying this, but I attribute my soft skills and self-awareness (which aren’t directly linked, but I would argue that if you have good awareness of how you are perceived and an honest assessment of strength/weaknesses, that has a direct line to social and emotional intelligence) to psychotherapy.

(I’m also of the opinion that regardless of mental health status, every person can benefit from a good therapist. Note, I said good. A bad therapist can be worse than no therapy.)

A lot of soft skills really do come down to introspection — and while it’s certainly possible to get those insights outside of a psychologist or psychiatrists office (my psychiatrist also does psychotherapy, but it’s more common for the disciplines to be separate), having a third-party pose questions and stimulate discussions is something difficult to replicate by self-study alone.
are there any countries who aren't clamoring for backdoors/weakening encryption/etc?

i'm interested in knowing the attitudes other governments have.
The article doesn't seem to indicate which devices are communicating, just generally referring to communication. Medical devices which communicate should certainly not be an acceptable communication to risk.
> How it feels is incidental.

From a loosely neuroscience perspective (I had quite a few courses but I'm not a professional or scientist in that field), no it isn't. What do you think "feelings" are?

It "feels" very different when your brain finds out that it's current wiring may need major updates (work! literally, for the brain) compared to when it finds that the current wiring is good enough.

All those light and strong "feelings" don't come from some nebulous ether.

When are people really open to changing their ways? Two examples for a smoker:

1. You hear (again) that smoking is bad. Maybe you also get (yet again) a few scientific study pointers. You feel... nothing (bored?)

2. Somebody you love unexpectedly is diagnosed with lung cancer and since they always were chain smokers it really hits you deep. You feel really bad, and it's string bad.

Which of the two experiences is more likely to lead somebody to really change their ways?

That's two extremes, but all feelings are reflections of actual state of your hardware. The brain would prefer not to have to change, the point it got to (the here and now) was hard fought for already so any new, especially major changes need to prove that they are worth it. The new state will be unproven and uncertain, if it's a major adaptation it will take many iterations.
Learn how to use scroll Elasticsearch aggregation
Women value good code-bases more than men. Very interesting.
You are intentionally misinterpreting his quote. He doesn't think much of excessive property. Yes, you probably don't need a 3rd home while other people have no homes...
Wow, thanks! I have built many visualizations and dashboards using javascript and d3, and even just a couple of weeks ago was considering creating my own side-project to do just what this software does. I guess I'll be looking for a new project..
People would definitely notice. A 390 foot meteor bursting into many smaller meteors is still going to be a spectacular show (and likely cause some damage.)

It's just not going to be an extinction level event.
"Mentorship" and "impressive team members" are other choices, so yea. Maybe not "get rich," but certainly "get paid more and have a more impressive title."
I think a lot of people learn a given language by hacking away at something they either want to create of modify. For example, in web development, I'd say most developers haven't ever read a cover to cover book on JavaScript.

I've tended to take the opposite approach, read first so I can at least grasp what I need to look for, then start applying. This of course is a mixed bag for rapidly changing/evolving tech and newer languages.
When it isn't updated with API changes.
Only way out is to use cash. There are tons of shadowy firms that have linked your credit card transaction history to your address, online activity, etc...
> Between CarrierIQ and OTA updates/access, there is no such things as end-to-end encryption on a cell phone.

I don't think you understand what end-to-end means.
> People get really upset when I bring this up. I suspect it is a matter of denial and not providing links to public documents, which will never exist.

The last time I saw this matter being discussed here, tptacek was getting pretty upset at people who were suggesting that baseband processors presented a security threat. He's a security expert with a reputation to uphold so I expect he's probably right, but I would still like to see a detailed explanation of why he's right.

For a reason I don't understand, this topic seems to illicit a lot of insults, when calmly assuaging fears would doubtlessly be more effective.
This is very true. I stand up a server every now and then and just define the setup as a single-file Ansible playbook— pretty much no matter what, it'll be some combination of packages to install, users to create, config files to modify, etc. Why write it down when I can just define it as code and check it in somewhere?

But then the IT department comes along and hates it; they make a wiki page for each server with a list of instructions for what was done. Their approach is more flexible, as not every tool/step can be easily or robustly automated, and if you can just screenshot the config webpage and paste it into your wiki, that might be just as good as (and a lot faster than) spending an hour trying to bypass that step.

Plus, their approach assumes aggressive use of VM-level tools. Where I'm like "oh, I need N build slaves? Let me add them to my inventory file and re-run", whereas they're like "N build slaves? Sure, I'll set up the first one manually and the clone the machine for the others."

I know there are real actual advantages to version controlled configuration, but there is something pragmatic about just doing the thing and keeping human-readable notes as you do it.
It's almost like my own comment said I wasn't making excuses and pointed out it was a preview release. I don't know why I bother.

Also, I don't understand what Google being in trouble for anti-trust has to do with a bunch of third-party apps and third-party SDKs accessing and selling my information.
Coding standards help for readability, maintainability and reduce defect rates when done properly. At first every coding standard feels a little like big brother trying to force you to do something that has little value. But in the end it has a lot of value to the overall team because it equalizes the code.

Anymore the easiest way is just setup the standard IDE profile for the language and make sure everyone uses it. This removes 80% of the work and makes it easy for most people. I also like this because I personally have some ways I like code that are contrary to what a lot of people like, so when I setup the IDE it makes it easy for me to stick with the standard versus what I might want to do since it is more work to change it. I found this to be true for most engineers as well.

Overall, I don't like the idea of huge coding standards however, unless the project is a vital system. For example, with embedded devices I like a more strict coding standard because the cost of errors are much higher, but for web I find more lax coding standards acceptable because the risk is usually lower in terms of cost and time. However, the web argument changes when you say there are millions of users of the software, then standards become crucial to quality and reliability.

In the end it comes down to cost to maintain the software and fix defects, standards lower that cost so they are the right thing to do.
Oh, they'd consider not violating our fundamental privacy? How...'considerate'.
I've met people with Masters degrees who couldn't reason themselves out of a paper bag. It's not a guarantee.
Outside of work, absolutely.

At work though, I find my thirst for learning new technical things has disappeared as I've gone older. What has grown instead is the thirst for learning new things in or related to my industry (domain knowledge). Like the problems my customers are facing, or where the industry is headed, or why they have been doing things a certain way.
The goal is not to provide a knob for a power user, it's to change norms and avoid the tragedy-of-the-commons scenario that we're currently in.

Individual users are not going to opt out of anything, even though in aggregate, they state that they want the defaults to change.