skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These "most valuable food brands" make products that kill people. They've become the tobacco industry of our generation.

If you want to understand why the above claim is true, I encourage you to watch "Processed Food: An Experiment That Failed" by Robert Lustig, M.D., M.S.L. a whirl. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvgxNDuQ5DI

Also, Sugar: The Bitter Truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Data science is so obscure the author is right to point out how there's a real difference between what a data scientist actually does and what he needs to do to actually get a job in data science. If you can write queries and understand product metrics, that's about half of all of the data science jobs and interviews.

But IMO the field is getting to a point where the engineers are going into machine learning because it's a pay bump and the data analysts are realizing they can start calling themselves data scientists with some more experience under their belt.

Ultimately the field is saturating to where people are now going into this field as an easy way to hit six figures. You see that with the rise of the data science bootcamps but I digress as I wrote more about it here: https://www.interviewquery.com/blog/the-saturation-of-data-s...
I get where you are coming from, but should we really tolerate fundamental changes to our planet over fundamental changes to a business model?
If you actually think those are the costs of firing a new hire, you need to talk to a labor lawyer immediately, because 1, 2, and 3 are hiring costs which don't apply to most jobs--startups included. Only in the rarefied world of FAANG and VC-funded money-losing unicorns do new hires get relocation expenses and a starting bonus. Even associates starting new jobs at BigLaw firms don't get paid relocation expenses or starting bonuses. And if you're doing the hiring in-house why are you paying a headhunter fee?

5. COBRA is paid by the employee, not the employer.

6. Somehow every other industry except programming manages to do this just fine.

7. This is completely and utterly false. If a new hire doesn't work out you can just let them go. Somehow, companies do this all the time without issues, including companies with much cushier jobs than startups.

8. Everything comes with the risk of a lawsuit. You're prematurely optimizing for the 0.0001% case, for an imagined scenario that isn't that expensive to defend.

9. Most of these apply to leaving the position open for months without filling. So let me add one to your list that applies if you don't fill the job: employee burnout leaving to existing employees leaving before the open position is filled, leaving you with more positions to fill than you started with.
"Job footprint" is a nice weaselly phrase, evoking "employees" and not actually meaning employees.
And you've increased the demand, ever so slightly.
I think it’s on all of us, including all the corporations. We should have a carbon tax to disincentivize mass c02 production - at the moment all the profits are private and all the losses (to the environment) are public. If they want to pay someone who’s planting trees for carbon caps then that’s fine for me. Just solve the damn problem. Who’s standing in the way? Shareholders of the above companies (and by proxy, the lobbyists and politicians). Because protective action doesn’t get them gains. It requires government action.
Can you name two real world problems with practical applications that fit all the criteria? I.e. where (1) an agent needs to act on its world but it would be okay for it to spend many tries exploring and failing; (2) it will be able to quickly and cheaply (i.e. without 24/7 human supervision) get a reward/punishment for its choice, and (3) the set of world states and possible actions is sufficiently small so that Q-learning is tractable?

IMHO Q-learning isn't talked about because it really is not a good fit for the kind of problems people actually want to solve.

What behavior does Hiome 'learn' with Q-learning? From your site it's not obvious what actions on the world would be implied where you can actually get some feedback/reward/punish depending on whether these actions were desired by the smart home inhabitants; and the behavior that your page does show - occupancy sensing - is essentially a classification problem.
Yes, I disagree. It's not (just) that those people don't know what they're talking about. The term doesn't have a standard usage/definition. Or at least not standard enough to decide whether the traveling salesman problem, linear regression, or a SAT solver are AI.
How does it follow that there's no net effect on climate (or amount of atmospheric carbon) if the tree is cut down? I can only see that if the timber is burned for fuel. If someone instead carved the timber up into N skateboards, modulo waste, the carbon would stay with the skateboards.
You’re not the first person to mention this—I’m sorry. Does font-weight: 400; on the body copy help? (Sorry to make you do the legwork but for me the type is perfectly legible as it is, so I need someone else to verify.)
I don't think any of that supports the assertion that he promised to convert the note but never did. Whatever promises were made are in the note itself.

What's especially interesting and radical about this is that, if it's true, the note was no-recourse for the investors. As I imagine is typical, a note I did once would convert to preferred upon raising a certain amount of money, but if we didn't, the note holder could either extend the term or elect to take common instead. The idea that you could do a note where the investor gets nothing if you don't raise more money is fucking wild.

That said, I guess it's not totally beyond the realm of possibility that even investors like A16Z would consider doing a no-recourse deal, provided the round was really hot and the investor was super confident that the company would raise more money.

If it's true that the note is no-recourse, then I say more power to him. Ask for the terms you want! You'll never know how much leverage you really have unless you try. The worst thing that can happen is they say no.
i don't remember exactly how long this cost me, but it sure as fsck wasn't days. ymmv.
I'm in the US, but I have worked with a couple of folks from Singapore, so I'm at least going to attempt to make what may be a culturally sensitive suggestion: I would consider a somewhat less 'free, young, and happy' LinkedIn picture. Collared shirt, short sleeve, empathetic smile. Your pic makes you look like you're 16. I suspect you want to look like you're 25-30. Your prospective employer wants to imagine you listening to them explaining their problem, prepared to work with them on the data collection and software development. Look like that.
I would argue there is a moral "sin" in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because (in your words) it leads to "practical problems", i.e. anthropogenic climate change.

If you can remove the carbon again, then it is still a "sin" unless you pay to have your share removed. If it can then be converted to fuel again that is an added bonus.

Of course, this whole process needs to occur at a massive scale because we are releasing so much carbon dioxide and want to remove more than we are currently emitting.

(P.s. I don't like the word "sin" in this context because of the theological connotation it implies, but I hope the message is clear)
According to the Wikipedia page[1], the brute force solution is O(n^3) for the one-dimensional case. They don't give an algorithm, but the obvious pseudo-code is:

highest_total = 0
for all i from 0 to length-1:
for all j from i+1 to length-1:
total = 0
for all k from i to j-1:
total += data[k]
highest_total = max(total, highest_total)
return highest_total

It takes three nested loops, with the third being the sum from i to j. This is obviously a very naive algorithm, but that's why it's called brute force. According to Wikipedia, Grenander apparently improved this to O(n^2), and then Jay Kadane came up with the first O(n) solution. For the 2D case, brute force is actually O(n^6).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_subarray_problem
The timing is deliberate-- the founder used company money (from 3rd party investors) to personally enrich himself.

It's better than stocks or salary-- it's cold hard cash in an entity he wholly owns rather than partly owns :)
I used to really enjoy the Scott Adams blog. Particularly the run-up to the Trump election. Then he decided to switch out and do videos instead of text, and I can't stand it anymore.
Why would they hire someone for COO and not give this person equity? Sympathy for the devil and all but these people were asking for something bad to happen.
The article I quoted (by someone who calls herself a doctor and a medieval historian, but I have no way of checking her credentials) contradicts yours: https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such-thing-a...

Of course, I don't claim to be an expert myself and can't readily judge which of the two articles is more accurate.
Yes, but it doesn't work well.

There are plenty of other time series problems where NNs don't outperform classical methods such as ARIMA.
Would this help in the case when sending shutdown to an EC2 instance sometimes takes 10+ minutes before the instance is stopped?
> You whooshed on the point. If their workers are paid higher salaries, they'll turn around and spend that money, and a la supply and demand, more sales!

I did mention it, that's the whole cancel out thing I was trying to hint at.

I do really dislike this type of argumentation and tend to dismiss it because its first order argumentation without empirical evidence. The real world isn't first order, so real data should be used. The sort of stuff journalistic outlets use instead of economic institutes. I disagree that this is excuse-making however, because it is indeed analysis at an approximate level b/c its first order, but I take it you would probably take it that to be an excuse as well :)

Also an banal extension of that line of reasoning leads to a counter point -- The products that they purchase will cost more because of an increase in the cost of manufacturing due to minimum wage laws. However globalisation side steps this by getting third worlds to produce most of the products, so kahbooy to those laws.

> Details matter, making an argument like this without numbers isn't analysis, it's excuse-making.

I agree, but this is kind of a moot point, you are burning the bridge we both stand on and saying standing on it is excuse-making because one person faces north instead of south. It's excuse-making in two directions.

> And the counter point (with numbers!) is that people at the bottom of society are getting poorer.

Objective poverty is decreasing in the world, but in the lenses of America, I do think you are correct and I agree that the bottom of the society are getting poorer in a relative wealth inequality sense.

However as a side topic, there's a larger issue with financial ignorance I think exists too -- something that a higher minimum wage won't really counter. I mean, look at the high average debt, aggressive cash loans, lack of short term liquidity, etc, the poor of society suffer from or are explicitly targeted at. It's a whole system with people actively trying gut you for cash. A lot of it is just plain asymmetric power in terms of negotiating, knowledge, and opportunity. The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer, cycle of poverty 101. I personally believe wages should be legally adjusted for livability in a sense (the term liveable wage rings a bell, but I'm not too familiar) but the root cause of the issue seems to be in the education system and the affordability, proximity, and availability of it. Heck, I even like the idea of later-in-life re-training but I haven't dug into the data on that. Housing is also another can of worms.
I think it depends what the lower limit of this technology is in terms of cost-per-ton. If the technology can get 100X cheaper, it would be immoral not to pursue it. If it only gets 2-3X as cheap as it is today, it might create the moral excuse you cited and be a net-negative.

My instinct is it could be an extremely important technology for fighting climate change. And while it develops it's important to continue to insist that it doesn't excuse the emissions it might offset.
I'm staring at a screen 50cm away for 8 hours a day already... it's nice to give my eyes a break and stare at one 3m away for my remaining awake time. ;)
I don’t know about the feasibility of that, but I’m intrigued...
The alternative is working for results, not methods or statistics like time-at-desk. That means working from home if it's best for you, or coming in 3 days per week, or working 10-4, or 8-12 and 2-6, or 9-5 if that happens to fit you best. No one's going to take away your 9-5.
It's a bit of a red flag that they sell their highest plan, 600kg a year, as "approx. 100% of a global average footprint". While that's probably true, the median human does not fly. A one way flight London->New York generates almost this much per passenger.

The mean emissions of those willing to spend 600 EUR/year to offset their travel are going to be at least an order of magnitude higher. You're better off feeling guilty and reducing your travel by 10% (in terms of personal emissions).

I do admit it's tricky, because if everybody is scared off by the true price tag (my lifetime emissions as an Australian would easily be $500k), the technology will never get a chance to get economy of scale and lower prices. That's really what you're paying for when you sign up for the plan.
There are thousands if not millions of possible names you could use. As long as you don't use something very common, you should be okay.
I dunno, maybe compared to what were used to but just think about it, 7 years locked up not able to do anything you want, that's huge punishment to me. But I also argue most sentences should be shortened and replaced with programs to reintegrate them into society.
Lisp syntax in a nutshell is:

"(" {function} [" " {argument}...] ")"

If you don't want to actually run a function, like you just want a list of values, you put a single quote before it:

"'(" [{item} [" " {item}...]] ")"

So if you want to do `(1 + 2) * 3` it'd be `(* (+ 1 2))`. Parentheses abound.

On top of that everything is a function, including if statements, assignment, and even how you define a new function. So factorial in lisp is:

(defun factorial (x)
(if (<= x 0)
1
(* x (factorial (- x 1)))
) )

You'll notice that it ended with 5 close-parentheses. Different people have different strategies for managing that along with indents and newlines.
My comments are based on what nearly every major company in the US actually does, not what people in Silicon Valley think other companies do. Since all those other companies have HR departments and most of the startups in SV don't, I'm pretty comfortable with my stance.

After all, managing hiring and firing are literally the primary reasons HR departments exist in every company making more than a few million $/year. Especially the profitable ones.
> hire someone who really wasn't qualified but didn't do anything bad

This sounds like a contradiction to me. How are you defining "unqualified" and "bad" here?
My feeling is it's an aspirational good, like a BMW. Many of the people starting these companies are not really serious and are just waiting for another ship to eventually come in. It's the new unpaid internship of the upper middle class.
We must have read a different letter! Did you click the link at the top of this page?
> If your unit of work is a transaction that takes 15+ minutes that's not possible. A common example is nightly ETL jobs that update the world.

So what are you suggesting here?
How would you call it? It was clear enough to me :)
If you found out you had a week to live, what stuff would you play with the most?
> However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions.

So... let's put off saving the planet because someone has moral qualms? No. This is a legitimate emergency. If we have something that has a net positive impact, we need to do it and stop arguing about it on the internet. Nothing is without tradeoffs, and some are simply going to have to be made. There are no easy solutions. We have seven billion people to feed while we manage to undo all the damage too, remember.

I'm not saying capture solutions are the best choice, mind you. I'm saying that decision needs to be made with numbers and not "morals".
Article III resolution would still require enforcement by the executive, as Andrew Jackson famously didn't actually say. So if someone sees this as a 'flaw in checks and balances', it seems it would always be a 'flaw', short of independently arming each branch of government.
I would say the difference here is that you can’t see ratings/reviews from other buyers on an end-cap the same way you do online. So the phrase “Amazon’s Choice” suggests that there is a level of editorial oversight that might not exist if the phrase was “featured by Amazon.”

Overall, I agree that this isn’t a huge surprise, but I think the fact that Amazon has data on things like returns, ratings, reviews, makes it totally understandable why someone would assume a “choice” product was chosen because of those factors and not because the company paid to be featured.
That argument doesn't really hold unless you assume workers can only do one kind of job. If globalization destroys any blue collar & low-end white collar jobs or depresses wages for them, that's going to depress the entire pool of jobs available to workers who would otherwise have the opportunity to work those jobs instead of minimum wage service jobs.

Put in example form, let's say we have 10 jobs that a group of blue collar and service workers could do in our economy. 3 of them are manufacturing, 5 are service, and 2 are skilled trades. Now 2 of the manufacturing jobs get eaten by globalization. We've still got 10 workers, but now they're competing for 8 jobs, and the 2 that lost their jobs are going to be willing to work for less money because less money is better than being unemployed. We've just depressed wages for the entire group. Meanwhile, of course, the owners of the factory picked up the gain from this entire transaction. Minimum wage doesn't really factor into it because it's an artificial floor that doesn't reflect market supply and demand.
Why Has Tesla Halved New Car Warranty Periods in Australia?
Man, I wish any of that were true. It seems that life is just too random to have that end up being true. Too many things happen that you can't control that then come along and wreck it all.

My SO achieved so much, had it all, got through grad school great, was going to teach at a University I know you have heard of, do amazing research all over the world, help out humanity in a very real way, all that jazz. Then, bam, the pain started up and has never left. The chonic pain disorder my SO has is a real sumbitch. I love my SO, terribly so. But all that my SO had just evaporated into the pain. Just one bad infection, like about 2% of the US gets, and there it all went.

No amount of drive is going to fix it. No amount of work. My SO can't work through the pain as it exacerbates the condition. Lord knows my SO spent months and years just trying to ignore it, making it worse the whole while. That pain just winds you, for days at a time. Takes it all.

And the shame that my SO feels just kills me. All the desires, all that motivation and drive that my SO had, it's all still there, clawing at my SO's mind, telling itself that my SO is 'just not good enough'. That person is still there, just enveloped with pain, trying to break out and work again. What gave my SO everything, all that honor and accomplishment, is not tearing into my SO and making it all worse.

Bukowski isn't wrong, per se, but he is not right either. That fire is dangerous in the wrong circumstances and it's very difficult to tell when you are in the wrong place.

One quote that has really changed as it has aged is that Bourdain quote:

> “I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.”

Yet Anthony died by his own hand. That drive, that spark and thumos, it was his undoing as much as it was his making. Would he have been as a sucess if not for that drive? The only person that could tell you is dead.

So, sure, sleep on the benches for it, go to jail for it, but remember, there are worse things than just temporary discomforts, mockery, and dishonor waiting in the weeds along that path.
> They already generate a profit, their operation costs are reasonable, etc.

They don't turn a profit, and their operating costs are growing sharply. From the S-1:

> As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively.
Ah, yes. Sorry, I'm an atheist myself and I can see how my sentence could be misconstrued.

Let me rephrase: there's a bunch of Silicon Valley technologists and like-minded people, who consider themselves enlightened atheists, and who have fallen prey to a different kind of religion: an apocalyptic tech-religion with a set of distinct beliefs such as the Coming of the Singularity, the Evil AI, the Upload Your Mind to the Cloud and Live Forever cult, etc. Not everyone believes in the same subset, and not everyone believes in the more bizarre of these beliefs.

As an atheist myself, I definitely didn't mean that all or even the majority of atheists will fall for this. I meant that a specific subset of tech-minded, nerd, and likely well-to-do atheists tend to fall for these techno-religions.

It's a "religion for atheists" because it's a religion that tries to hide the trappings of a more traditional religion, for people who presumably reject them and who don't consider themselves open to new age pseudoscience either. But tell me it's not cute how Ray Kurzweil has faith in reaching immortality (salvation) in his own lifetime.
Understanding the Python [Error] Traceback
I might suggest this documentary. It focuses on the Wardenclyffe tower, crazy stuff if you never saw it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_to_the_People

There is a trailer available here.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/nikolatesla
I've seen it happen often enough to know. It's not that hard - just read the code you copied until you understand how it works.
> Another one will just be made

Can we legislate a cap on the production of anything?
My favorite interview experience was when I passed a live coding exercise on Monday and had time to optimize, then completely failed the exact same problem on Friday with a different company because my nerves hit me.
I mean your original statement was only four sentences, but that's fine.
That does nothing to reduce consumption. Oil isn't zero sum. If you make the market less efficient prices will rise a bit, but production numbers will still match demand. Fracking taught us this.

If you want a simple solution, buy a farm and bury the output. Simpler than storing a bunch of oil, even. But not very effective relative to land use.