skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting question!

Can anyone suggest a good way to estimate this?

I'd estimate the odds at around 80%-90%, but I don't have any coherent working to back that up.

Note that very few human institutions have lifespans of 1000 years or more: a few universities and the Catholic church. I'd hazard a guess it is highly unlikely that the US exists in 750 years.
Do you think you could rough out an answer on a whiteboard that would have roughly the right structure?

When I used this question I wasn't looking for accurate syntax. If it was a solution that looked like it would work, after some debugging etc. I'd consider that a pass.

Regardless most people couldn't answer it, which I considered surprising.
BigCorps have „Innovation Labs“, where things are „cooler“ than in main corporate because bean bags. Value proposition is attracting employees that wouldn’t consider joining otherwise. This is them outsourcing this to WeWork, and I can see how they don’t want to be involved in running such an operation. Remember that BigCorp is not price sensitive.
Zorax Crypto Daily Forecasts for 18.08.2019
The video attracted so much undeserved attention that many engineers felt that they had to produce a corresponding debunk video explaining why it is such a useless idea and why asphalt is currently our best option on building roads.
> I'm not sure there's much in it when it comes to gauging wider market trends.

It's not about Apple customers AND Goldman Sachs customers, it's about consumer trends. Having access to millions of purchases as they happen is useful unto itself when it comes to market trends. In this day and age effectively anyone can get HFT hardware / software, but having that pipe of data is a real moat that your average shop cannot compete with.
> And as for the code, we included what we thought was a trivial nested for-loop problem and virtually nobody could even get started on it.

> Is this kind of code problem too complicated in your opinion?

May you please post the problem so that we can provide you with meaningful feedback regarding said problem?
You live in the XP days.
Our thoughts and prayers are with this former patch of ice on the harsh island of Iceland.
Garden – Valeblog
Flash games market was huge

So what? Flash created all sorts of usability problems. Horribly inefficient video playback, keyboard focus stealing, not responding to mouse/trackpad input the way native widgets do.
Owning a piece of infrastructure definitely seems more valuable than owning a foreign government bond. But I don’t see how this “de-weaponizes” the US Dollar.
> Sigurdsson said he feared "that nothing can be done to stop it."

I've seen this claim a lot in the last few years.

Good news everyone! We don't need to stop global warming anymore.
Nothing wrong with the first instance. I'd much rather Mozilla have independence and deal with one tiny advert.

At least they were "transparent" about the second one. But sending my browsing history to a company I've never heard of is a big ask. At least I can choose to have Chrome sync with Google, this wasn't ever asked.
Hi all!

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Most companies use IP Geolocation APIs to identify their users to enrich the user experience based on their location, currency or timezone. Another use case could be identify threats and prevent frauds in time looking for Proxy connections, TOR nodes or just filtering Crawlers traffic. SmartIP.io can detect if the an IP is a proxy, TOR or even a crawler. More information on https://smartip.io/#feature-section

Why SmartIP.io

Even though the API market is full of Geolocation API already, we realised that they all offer very similar datasets, and they all tend to be really expensive very quickly, segmenting data responses by tiers and adding costs to their customers which do not cost anything to them.

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We are the only one to expose Crypto data. Our service can identify if a specified IP is running a Bitcoin node with additional information like the port from where the node is running from. We are in the process of expanding this dataset with additional blockchains and more data.

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-- Crawler data: we detect the crawler type, the crawler company

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- Crypto data

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Now if only Christmas in the modern society were about rest rather than peak consumption…
The only people who have enough power to solve the problem are the leaders of a handful of countries.

So, while obviously only people can solve the problem, it's only a select few people that actually can do anything about it. You or I have no more power than that which democracy affords us.
> you get paid to accept trash shipment

Why would anyone pay someone to accept a trash shipment? Why wouldn't you just dump it at source?

> you get paid to accept trash shipment, you pretend to process it (on paper) and then you simply incinerate or dump trash.

Nowhere in the article does it mention this, what reference do you have for this actually happening?

AFAICT the article doesn't have anything establishing that the plastic being "dumped" is being anything other than imported to be recycled. It's dirty, polluting recycling, but that's beside the point I'm trying to make. There is an economic incentive; the article even mentions how profitable plastic recycling can be.
Hasselt and co, who authored the original Rainbow DQN model that was bested by SimPLe (this paper), responded recently with "When to use parametric models in reinforcement learning?" [1], which is an interesting read. Punchline: "We explain why their [SimPLe's] results may perhaps be considered surprising, and show that in a like-for-like comparison Rainbow DQN outperformed the scores of the model-based agent, with less experience and computation.". In other words, in an apples-to-apples comparison, model-based RL have not been shown to be more sample efficient than suitably optimized DQNs.

Hasselt argues this is because if you need accurate updates to your Q values, you need to trust the learned model you are using for simulated rollouts on the states on which you are sampling. But if your simulation model is trustworthy on these states, it is because it saw a lot of real transitions from these states from the actual environment. But then you might as well just have stored those transitions in a big enough replay buffer and use ordinary Q-learning with experience replay. And this indeed seems to be the case: when you give Rainbow DQN a nice big replay buffer, it is more sample efficient (both real and imagined samples) than SimPLe. Hasselt leaves some wiggle room for learned models to help with action selection and credit assignment, though.

My counterargument to this (supplied with zero evidence of course!) would be that with the right inductive biases, a learned model can generalize quite accurately and with very few seen transitions, and hence be so sample efficient that it would outperform the replay memory approach. I'd imagine that the kinds of inductive biases that are appropriate for a varied meta-environment like Atari are quite general things like 'visually localized objects typically only interact when they approach or touch each other', and 'the arrow keys likely control one localized object'. There are approaches for how to encode such priors; [2] is a good survey paper, and [3] employs some of these ideas for RL. Moreover, these are the kinds of priors that one imagines are encoded or biased towards by evolution in actual animal brains.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05243

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01830
Unless you want to cover really significant amounts of land in solar panels wind farms, you shouldn't use synfuels unless absolutely necessary. Not only do you use half of the energy just making the fuel, all applications where you burn it have terrible efficiency compared to electric alternatives. ICEs have an efficiency of maybe 30%, heat pumps easily produce two or three Joules of heat for every joule of electricity.
Respectfully but very firmly disagree. It’s the role of nation-state actors to protect against exactly things like this (tragedy of the commons) where everyone is individually incentivized to act against the common good.
See what some (reputable) universities in your country use for their data structures and algorithms class, and then use that.

Avoid books with a programming language in the title, because those will try to teach both basic programming and the interesting material.
Mexico installs ‘robotic trees’ to tackle air pollution
I mentioned Toyota for a reason. Car manufacturing did not go to China. And the whole basis of Japanese manufacturing style after W Edwards Deming's influence is very different from sweatshops.

I don't know about "fair", but Nissan Sunderland being Japanese-run is not a bad outcome compared with the other possibilities of the 60s and 70s labour relations problem which included fears of both left and right wing coups. In the end we got moderate state violence and mass unemployment. That does need to be put right, but we can't go back to the 70s.

Much of what we now import from China did not exist in the 1950s and was developed as a technology in America, so it's not so much "went to China" as "failed to develop here". And there we do need to have a discussion about business and tech development in the UK.

(Textiles also worth considering, but that was always a sweatshop from industrialisation onwards. The brief attempt to run it with SE Asian (Bangladeshi largely) workers in Britain didn't stave off the flight to cheapest.)
A good grid (because it's always windy somewhere), batteries for a day or two of low production (e.g. the batteries in electric cars, one of those can power the average home for several days), power-to-methane for cold winters without wind.
What I Learned about Disruption from the Last Action Hero and Kick-Ass
That basically what the Trump administration is now saying.
Mozilla doesn't block ads and trackers by default so I would say Brave takes protecting users privacy more seriously as they block all that by default. They also provide tor browsing as an option for even more privacy with the possibility to browse onion sites. Something Firefox has refused to do for some reasons.
But the article also states:

> Wind is even cheaper at the moment because of a tax credit given to renewable energy generation. But that credit is in the process of fading out, leading to long term uncertainty in a power market where demand is generally stable or dropping.

Or from the government report itself:

> The magnitude of growth beyond the current PTC cycle remains uncertain, however, given declining tax support, expectations for low natural gas prices, and modest electricity demand growth.

So what is it? Is wind power cheaper or was that a tax subsidy effect?
> Germans are poorer than most other Europeans (even than Spaniards and Italians)

er, citation needed? Or is this due to the former DDR?
When I moved to Norway for a few years I was a bit annoyed as pretty much everything was closed on a Sunday.

At first you get caught out without the right ingredients for lunch or wine. Or maybe just want to go get stuff. But after about a year I really came to value this. A day where everyone was off and you couldn't go shopping or get distracted with a bunch of consumer stuff that doesn't matter so much.

I doubt it ever will, but if like to see Sunday or Saturday trading halted again. It's good to have a day off.
There is so much to worry about these days, I don’t know where to start and what to do. Some examples

- plastic waste, they found micro plastic in artic snow, WTF

- topsoil depletion, we are going to be so many more people, we’ll need food, at the same time we lose fertile land continuously

- groundwater depletion, many dry countries export water in the form of food. What happens when there is nothing left?

Global warming? Yes that too...
With JavaScript disabled, works like a charm.
The problem with local credit unions is their smartphone apps and online banking suck.
AMP works in all browsers. It doesn't rely on anything Chromium-specific.
Politicians are the ones who decide for or against a carbon tax. Politicians also decide laws where you can put wind turbines and solar panels, whether to build roads or rails, whether to allow buildings without insulation and with fossil fuel heating.

If I did everything I reasonably could I might be able to produce a third of the carbon footprint of an average citizen of my country, it's literally impossible for me to go down to zero without living as a hunter-gatherer in the woods. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle doesn't feed eight billion people, so not even that is a scaleable solution.
What if we painted the mountain white instead?
They're probably the current champions in how to make opting out of tracking cookies maximally inconvenient. Although to their credit they at least seem to remember my choices instead of sneakily reverting back to "accept everything" after a while.
> It's about the question whether the same candidate would be better assessed with a technical interview over a non-technical interview.

I don't understand the problem here, all technical interviews are also non-technical interviews since they are still communicating with a human and not just doing problems on a computer. If we didn't care about the human interaction part we'd just put them in a room alone with a set of problems.

Also I think you don't understand how much recruiters hate this process, they'd do anything to remove it since they have no way to game technical interviews. So they work hard to change the interview process at Google to something more soft like we have in other areas, but the evidence points to soft interviews being worse.

And you might not believe me, but I definitely believe me and the people deciding how to hire people at these companies certainly believe in the studies they do, so there is no way they will change the process. These interviews are here to stay, and until we have some new methods nobody has tried yet it won't change. You can complain all you want, but the best companies will be using this process as they scale up since nothing else works at the moment. Some other things might work for small companies, but as soon as the founder can't interview everyone himself it breaks.
I’m a fan of Algorithm Design Manual. It’s also what Google and FB recommend for interview prep.

https://smile.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skie...
Wind power requires subsidies to work. Meaning shafting the end consumer. Period
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/21/texas-ta...
Perhaps if you became a politician you would get their perspective.
You can probably do something similar in Windows moving the profile directory to a RAM disk.
This is research for a paper. No one is using it for active trading. If the research is successful then these strategies might be applied in the future. If not they're obviously not going to be used.

Sometimes when people are doing research they need to try new things that might seem silly to find new groundbreaking material.
Much of the problem is that so much of the problem-causing wealth sloshing around the country is from overseas, and often from questionably lawless petro-states like Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The most basic start would be to have a proper non-capped property tax. Let's copy socialist New Jersey and charge people 1.89% of their property value a year.
delivery business is hard unless you have massive scale, so like it or not your early adopters will happen to be VC and tech peeps. I don't see anything wrong with that especially if they're just working on an MVP. The author mentions the long term play is automation to cut costs down the road
Yes Italy is very strong in the machine-tool industry and the luxury-goods industry. They do plenty of exports.
If I became a politician today it would certainly take me more than ten years before I got anywhere further than my local council. By then we already used up our carbon budget.
> ...it was a porn site. 22-28% of users were seeing adult content

No, it wasn't a porn site. It was a site where you could also find porn, which some people find objectionable and killed it, so the traffic dwindled. Calling Tumblr a porn site is a crude oversimplification.
Have you heard about how much worse paper straws are to the environment than plastic?

What about that Africa is the leader in pollution into the oceans . It's amazing how much disinformation is out there regarding plastic and the source.
Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Beautiful Data Visualisations
"the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue... Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet".

That's not really how alphabets work. English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had.

It sounds like what Fulfulde was lacking was a standard orthography, not an alphabet of its own.
I do a lot of consulting as well and am comfortable with it. But most people with families want more stability. I don't know why you're pretending to be surprised by this.

Your personal preferences aren't really the topic at hand.
The New Turing Omnibus: Sixty-Six Excursions in Computer Science
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805071660
Feature phones are a large thing in developing nations, but then again I don't know if those are running Chrome or watching videos.
Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual:

https://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena...

Far more readable than the usual text (Cormen), the first half is a guide on how to select and design algorithms for the problems you encounter, and the second half is a whistle-stop tour of hundreds of well-known algorithms. The tour helped me a lot with X->Y esque issues where I was building bad solutions because I didn't know anything better could exist.

Incidentally, there's a lot more to CS theory than algorithms and data structures, but if you're asking on HN for a generic CS theory book, I reckon it's most likely an algorithms and data structures book that you're after.
You’re close to the situation at hand. Wind does not match the demand curve, but it’s vastly cheaper than natural gas.

This means wasting a significant percentage of wind generation is still a net savings. Currently curtailment aka excessive wind production is relatively low percentage of generation, but based on current prices it’s cheaper to build more wind just to offset more natural gas use.

You end up needing to pay for the generators either way. So, currently the breakpoint ends up being when 1/2 of all wind power is wasted resulting in 2 x 10$/MWh your at breakeven with fuel costing $20/MW-hr.

However, current natural gas prices are market driven. Reduced demand will lower prices, but that’s still a net win for power companies. In the coming years as new wind power comes online the economic situation will change, but for now massive investments look like a very good deal.
This article explicitly mentions the cost without subsidies:

”””The levelized cost of electricity, which eliminates the impact of incentives and subsidies on the final prices, places wind below $40/MW-hr in 2018. The cheapest form of natural gas generation was roughly $10 more per MegaWatt-hour. Note that, as recently as 2015, the US' Energy Information Agency was predicting that wind's levelized cost in 2020 would be $74/MW-hr.”””
Anecdotal but we've hired an engineer who was pretty decent in the interview but couldn't figure out how an if statement worked in a legacy codebase.

Yes, I wrote that right. He struggled to understand conditionals in general when building his own logic. The guy even had a masters degree.
The parent comment literally said data science practitioners don't care about speed or safety because the GPU is where all the real work happens; that's false, I've provided an example of it being false from a respected party. What do you want me to say?

eh, I give up. Believe whatever you want to believe.
Beautiful piece. What a lucky person to be able to correspond with DFW. Now I wish letters would be more common still.
Sure, the structure is obvious; one was an issue of a method being named differently than I remembered, the other was an off-by-one error that'd show up in testing.
Considering that the "new" web looks increasingly like a walk in the wrong direction, I'd honestly not be sorry.
It is the responsibility of all countries, of course. The problem is that the countries most willing to do something are also the ones with the least influence over the matter. On a global scale Iceland for example can do very little to offset the trends. It takes the buy-in from the biggest countries before something meaningful can happen.
> some people are completing 500-1000 leetcode problems before heading into interviews.

Over the course of one year, I completed, classified, commented 200 leetcode problems. I also taught algorithms to third and fourth year university students not too long ago. I believe I write readable code, I know perfectly the language I'm using (at least for that purpose), I'm totally fine with complexity, and I know most methods involved in these algorithms, including more advanced algorithms such as KMP.

Yet... I failed my round of interviews at Google. After this preparation, I'm still not able to solve quickly any leetcode problem in the context of an interview. On a whiteboard, with an interviewer in my back, in a stressful situation. I need to practice more if I want to get consistent results.

So I agree with your conclusion. We are competing with a lot of people who train using the same resources. Including young graduates who have a lot of free time on their hand.

On a positive side, I'm thankful to Google for giving me a shot. Based on my resume (40+ with little experience in software industry), I'm not sure I would have been interviewed in a more traditional company, let say a bank.

To come back to my interviews, system design went very well. Algorithms quite well too but not well enough. Couldn't solve one problem, and a bit slow on an other one.

The recruiter first told me I passed, and that they were going to find a team for me and make me an offer. But they finally asked me to re-take the algorithmic interviews a few months later, to "make a stronger point to the hiring committee".

Never heard from them since then, about 8 months ago. Recruiter doesn't answer emails. I think she moved to a different position. Not sure what to do now?