skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The employer informed me how my results fared.

I went back and looked at the emails. I can't edit my original comment so I'll jot the corrections here. They gave 3 days not a week. I completed the submission in 7 hours, they required you track how many hours you spent and when. I used a genetic algorithm to solve the problem. And, I took advantage of multiple cores if they were available to divide the work load.

Looking at the email there were signs even in their review of my submission that their outlook wasn't completely rosy. They mentioned things like how I failed to correct for differential conversion factors based on global location and stuff like that.

Skipping the question obviously didn't work out for me as I didn't get the position.

It was a weird experience to be put on the spot with such great skepticism with all my past accomplishments and knowing how much they respected my test submission. In a way it was humiliating. I didn't leave that interview feeling very good about myself. I still regret it to this day. In some ways I wish I could go back in time and pass on the interview, I think I would be more confident today.
> lest these precious jobs should disappear.

As someone working for another company where some governments often threaten the existence of my job and the jobs of my colleagues, this concern resonates with me.
It's roughly half as bad as coal nominally, as in when combusted. It's when you look at the whole system, including pipeline leaks and fracking-site leaks that it starts getting bad. So changing infrastructure from coal to gas is approximately worthless from a climate change perspective.
I don't know the details of the "wet" chemistry step described, but I imagine it would be possible to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and transform it over many step to eventually get to the required precursors.

The practical reality is that each transformation step has imperfect yeilds and I would guess that the equipment required to do the molecule by molecule transformation in the last step would require significant energy to run.

So to attempt to this today, you would end up producing more CO2 into the atmosphere than you removed.
I'll always say, to my dying day, "Reality is not constrained by human imagination."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/trump-administrat...

It seems like a reasonable conclusion.

It's certainly a slippery slope. Is not the next step to decide that anyone who has received health insurance marketplace benefits are a drag on society? Social security? (oh, wait, they need the votes of the elderly). Education?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlandic_independence#Moves...:

”As part of the self-rule law of 2009 (section §21), Greenland can declare full independence if they wish to pursue it, but it would have to be approved by a referendum among the Greenlandic people. A poll in 2016 showed that there was a clear majority (64%) for full independence among the Greenlandic people, but a poll in 2017 showed that there was a clear opposition (78%) if it meant a fall in living standards.”

⇒ Why try to buy it? Offer them to become a US state and invest there if they vote to become independent, and see whether they bite.
If you think that nature has a purpose, you are more of a theologician than scientist. Unless, of course, you have a falsifiable hypothesis to test!
recent twitter thread referenced in the article: https://twitter.com/therealfitz/status/1161349619659530242?s...
This is an amazing pledge and very powerful statement.

However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. The main counter argument being that CCS technology enables the status quo of fossil fuel burning to continue.

On the other hand, there are some heavy industries (steel production?) that do not have any alternatives to coal burning in order to operate and CCS can offset the carbon footprint in these industries. I would however not call this "negative emissions" but rather "emission-free" or similar.

What is your opinion on CCS? Can people convince me in either direction?
C-- the programming language already exists: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html
I can't recall any NVMe device requiring as many workarounds as the Apple T2. Usually it's something along the lines of certain power states not working as intended, or the drive not providing a unique identifier. Apple changed the size of fundamental data structures, botched the interrupt handling, imposed unnecessary constraints on the mixing of IO and admin commands, and effectively broke one of the biggest performance advantages of NVMe (multiple IO queues).

And some vendors actually help with the development of workarounds for their broken drives, and push out firmware fixes when possible so that the workarounds can be disabled on newer or updated devices.
It's also relatively accepted in US forestry research, as far as I'm aware. The policy (starting almost a century ago) of "put out every fire asap" worked for a few decades with increasing difficulty, but now many fires are simply uncontrollable and much more intense due to the increase in ground debris that would have normally been burned off far earlier. Oh, and that means that now we get crown fires instead of ground fires, killing trees that would have survived a smaller fire. Hooray?

This page [0] gives a decent overview of the US history in my opinion.

In short - no fires may be better than some weak fires, for certain utility functions. Unfortunately, no fires + time + not cleaning forests = huge fires, which are far worse than either.

0: https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
I'm sure there is some research that validates that endless scrolling increases user engagement. High user engagement leads to high user exposition, something that marketers are attracted to and spend lots of money to put their ads, and there you go, more profit due to this feature
http://www.we.net.bd/
I do work for a small company, but no way my company can access any information on my machine. Any kind of company relevant code is submitted to a central git repository by me on a daily basis, but if I'm fired, the data on that machine is gone. It is protected by full disk encryption set up by me, and I know the only password to it. My contract contains no obligations for me to unlock it.
In the ideal configuration, when you have single-triple-single bond, they "want" to be in the same line. A molecule where they are bles have more energy. (Imagine that it's like a spring, but don't take the analogies to literally.)

The molecules where the bonds have wrong angles usually have more energy and they end to decompose in other molecules where the bonds have the correct angles or they have other bonds. [Oversimplifying warning, Chemistry is more complicated.]

Some nice graphics: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/triple-bond Perhaps the text is too technical, but the graphics are nice.
How does this contradict my comment?
As someone who has built a C++ library to share across iOS and Android I completely agree. The biggest issue for us was finding developers willing to learn and adopt C++.

For our use case we weren’t writing UI or user flow logic, it was an ‘engine’ that handled complex business logic. It used JSON as input and output.

If I were to do that same project again I would use mostly native code and write our engine in Javascript.
Amazon Prime Air seeks exemption from FAA rules for drones
Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) open sources data analytics tool
Some small American companies treated somewhat decently while Apple continues to abuse overseas workers and strip mine rare earth resources.

Woo. Hoo.
> I think you've overlooked the fact that enriching investors IS enriching its workers, because they are generally given real stock grants upon employment, and gradually as time goes by.

Only in the same sense that tax cuts benefits everyone. While technically true, the benefits disproportionately go towards those who are already better off.
This appears to count all the employees of all the suppliers Apple buys anything from and the entire "app economy" including people who write apps for non-Apple platforms.
People generally can get along, it's just in certain countries there is this state pushed divide and conquer [1] that's been going on for way too long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule
ASD is Australia's NSA equivalent.
Things that would work in favor of Column Store (like Cassandra or MariaDB ColumnStore or Redshift etc),

- Everything stored in one table/collection, with 100+ columns/fields

- Many columns will have numerous duplicate values (often with a small handful of distinct values accounting for most of the data, and a long tail of rare values, e.g. most "favorite ice cream flavor" data clusters around vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry)

- Pre-defined schema, but each item will only have values for a subset of the columns (5 - 20 on average); everything else will be empty / null

- No need for a sophisticated or relational query language, but basic aggregation support is needed (ideally group by count, sum, and average)

- A very common query will be a "group by count" for a few columns

- Most queries will only select a few of the column values

- Support for streaming ingestion is a plus

- There will be about 3-6x more reads than writes

- Potential for data loss is acceptable

- No need for an in-memory datastore

Not so good for Cassandra,

- Regex support required in the query language

- You did not mention if most queries would be accessed by primary key; if not, then this will be an anti-pattern...
I've not interviewed with one that didn't in almost ten years, possibly more.
Not all third-party merchants have the same return policy.
> I would love to see the same done for Kubernetes. What I want is a kubeconfig file that links me to a paid account somewhere, and whenever I run `kubectl apply -f foo.yml`, I pay by the millisecond for whatever resources get created.

Have you tried digitalocean's kubernetes offering? It takes about 10 clicks to create a cluster and download a config.
This comment is pretty ironic because Python changed so much changed in the past few years.
> it's just a day job, and it's money.

I've heard many people claim this, and yet, I have some doubts on whether that is REALLY what's going on in their mind. I won't call them liars; perhaps they don't even realize that something deep inside is not going the way it should.
I can just picture Jeff Bezos dictating a reply to a customer:

"We said it was Amazon's choice, not the editor's choice. But here's a 5 dollar credit - we value your feedback at Amazon."
New React DevTools
Fraudulent IPv4 space do not route these prefixes
That movie definitely needs to feature the Mace of the US House Of Representatives, which is A Thing You Should Definitely Go Look Up.
That may not be what you meant but it is what you said. The "function you are trying to model" does not have to be differentiable as we have already established. Only the model itself (which is the neural network) needs to be differentiable.
Limiting climate change to 2C is such a hail mary at this point that we should look favorably on anything, no matter how imperfect, that moves us in that direction. There are no silver bullets, we need to do everything at once.
> The purpose of AGI is twofold: first to improve the efficiency of organizations of humans by facilitating communication and access to information, and second, to automate the economy with respect to those functions that require human labor.

> With respect to communication, the goal is to make information easy to find and publish. ... When enough narrowly intelligent experts are added to the network, you should not care (or may prefer) that your conversation be with machines rather than humans.

http://mattmahoney.net/agi2.html
It sure does suck when we see reality assert itself in documentaries.
Fair criticisms. I tend to prefer asking/being asked system design questions, which in nature allow for a wide range of experiences to excel at.

What they aren't the best at, although more realistic, is coming up with an objective measurement of quality. Algorithms , at the cost of realism, do measure things quite nicely.
There's a dedicated contingent of folks hyper-critical of every president, it's exhausting. Even Trump does something right once in a while, in the broken-clock sense.
(I don't know a lot about IPOs...)
When would I (i.e. a "normal" stock buyer) be able to buy some shares of Cloudflare?
Exactly.

At my company, Type A are called "Data Analysts", but at Google Facebook they're called "Data Scientists". Type B are "Data Scientists" at my company, but "Machine Learning Engineers" (or SWE-ML or some other combination) at Google and Facebook.

As a Type B, at my company, I'm on the same pay scale as the SWEs. The Type As are not.
> enforcing contempt citations is a referral to the DOJ, which is part of the administration

Weird, seems like a flaw in the checks-n-balances, a lot like the "American Rule" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...) for paying attorney's fees.
Oh cool, thanks for the link! I should have thought to look at SO, as I generally read those survey results, but it didn't occur to me to look for this question there. 28% is a bit higher than I would have guessed even to that answer.
Why so sour? It's a decently documented and tested utility library that's really closer to 35 SLOC, and is useful for those that would prefer not to write the multiplication logic, as simple as it may seem.

You're free to roll your own JS utility function that performs this multiplication.

Personally, I don't know why this is on HN as it's not an exceptional utility, and doesn't handle common currency manipulation frustrations (floating point rounding, bigint, decimal formatting, signs, etc.)
Also, statistically, it's likely that in any given year, there will be some place in the world that is anomalous. You can't just pick and choose certain areas, going to a different spot each year, as evidence of a problem, you need to look at things globally.
Proud.

I'm in the process of setting up a new consulting business, and one of my major commitments is to donate a significant percentage (at least 10%; likely more) of profits towards CO2 reduction / capture efforts.

I'm watching this space eagerly.
Ask HN: Big Data Performance Issues: R vs. Stata?
I have a healthcare data-set with 3 million rows and 150 columns that I am analyzing partially in R (for descriptive stats, diff testing, table creation, visualizations) and partially in STATA (for bivariate and multivariate fixed effects logit models).

My question is about the relative performance of R and STATA for logit models. Since I have a large data set, I experience quite slow computation times for my code, in both languages.

-R: I am using tableone() package which isn't particularly fast, I suspect, and I use dplyr and data.table for munging. If I wrote my own function for making tables, do you think it would be any faster? I could also try to utilize data.table for a higher % of the coding process?

-STATA: Do I really need to do my regressions in STATA? I have heard they are much slower in R, especially given that our fixed effects model has around 150 hospital sites to adjust each model for. Ideally, couldn't I do this within R so I don't have to pipe the data from STATA back into R? Or is there an easy way to export STATA output into R to then munge into tables?

Thanks for your help. I am stressing on this project and I want to level up the automation. I just spent 6 hours hand-filling cells for a table and I vowed to never do so again!
Downside is that a lot of startups are not that interesting. They're just filling a business niche.
This situation (negative interest rate) occurs because there is a capital surplus.

This happens because investors a wary of putting too much of their capital in stocks. Nobody knows what Trumps trade wars will lead to, so that's a significant risk factor for stocks.

Consequently, investors look for other places to put their money until the uncertainties gets cleared up. Preferably somewhere safe - meaning not necessarily in a bank as banks can fold. Danish real-estate bonds fits that: The Danish real-estate market is generally considered sound.

Furthermore, Denmark has a declared policy of closely following the Euro. The DKK has to be within a narrow band of 2.25% (IRRC) of the Euro. Having followed this policy ever since the EMS disbanded, investors generally trust this commitment.

Which means that until Trump cleans up the disturbance he has created, investors will flee stocks and look for safe bonds, to the extent that lenders/investors will actually pay for safe investments.

While attractive for lenders, it is a sign that something is very wrong with the economy. In a healthy climate money would flow to the stock market.
It's doing quite well ...after instituting moderation.
People also go through stages or phases. Some day you may be surprised at how you've changed. Or not.
I was a cubicle worker for years, making too much money doing too little work during the dot-com bubble. I was not happy with my life, so I took my dot-com savings and left the country to go to a Latin American country to live there, learning the local language. I ended up becoming a professional English teacher and translator there. I made enough money to support myself, and only had to work mornings.

One thing I really like about Latin America is how important connections are. People are on the street meeting and talking to each other on a level I don’t see in the US; personal connections have more value there.

Now that I am a single father to a young child, I’m back in the states working again, but it’s not the grind it used to be, much less the grind it was back in 1986. With work at home and flex hours being a thing that it wasn’t two decades ago, I can handle work without having the horrible burnout I had before.
It seems to me that some of the most valuable information for an advertiser would be what kind of ads someone will voluntarily choose to watch. Saying they may not convert is like complaining that you can't eat free money.
Returned items are passed to an ecosystem of specialized companies. In most cases, the small minority of good stuff is resold and the chaff goes to landfill.
I'd be thrilled with that. I've got a great resume, great references from former bosses, and have plenty enough confidence in my ability to work contract for a while to prove myself.

The problem is those things only get you in the door, then it 100% comes down to your whiteboard under-fire skills - which admittedly have gotten worse for me the older I get. Although I know I'm a better programmer now.
It works in the average situation, but unfortunately there are some huge scams happening(passing unnoticed) in undeveloped countries where somehow the scammers can hijack the number for a certain time frame.

If you call the same number the next day the real institution is going to answer, but nobody knows a thing.

Apparently, in some cases, they can hijack the phone number of an institution, but only for the specific caller that they are applying the scam. If someone from another context call the same number it goes to where it's supposed to be.

It's becoming more normal than ever down here... Happened next to me.

We are entering the age of personalized crime, targeted and framed just for you, considering your personality and necessities.
I'm surprised by the size of the commit. If $1M is the floor for what a Stripe-sized org is willing to spend, how expensive would a carbon tax actually be? Are there good estimators for my impact as a consumer and how much I need to commit to this?

Basically I want to know how much it costs to feel ok about my flights to go skiing.
I remember exactly when Google was released.

The reason it became popular was pretty simple. It was fast, clean, single purpose and had no advertising. It was the complete opposite of Altavista and Yahoo at the time. And as we've seen countless times there is always room in a market for simple, focused products.
This might be a dumb question, but does the service host your web app, or is it for helping you to deploy to other cloud providers?
Doesn't the guy who runs it live in the Philippines? Is the USA playing Team America: World Police or do they have jurisdiction?
Precisely. There aren't any sets of postulates of empericism and teleology which would produce a contradiction. It's simply the case that no evidence has been observed and no empirical study is proposed for any telos, nothing more, nothing less.
Interesting that they are willing to pay any price the market offers, and expect to pay over $100/t. I wonder to what degree large scale burying of biomass would be effective? It'd be effectively the same process that created the hydrocarbon fuels we use today, which would be fairly effectively sequestered if we didnt drill them out of the ground.

It seems the idea has certainly been thought of: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
There isn't some intrinsic moral sin to burning carbon. There are just practical problems with having too much in the atmosphere. If you can remove carbon, especially if you can also convert it back into fuel, that solves the problem.

(Carbon isn't the only emission from burning coal -- it contains sulfur and thorium too. But these can also be mitigated with some expense. And if you're converting CO2 directly to fuel, there's no increase in pollution at all.)
Ah - thanks for the clarification :)
A Proper Symbol of Office: US House of Representatives
Programming Language Rankings: June 2019
>In other words, each molecule is made individually. This is not the way that chemists typically work, and will not result in quantities of material that can be seen.

Is there not merit in doing it via this 'hard way' first before optimizing stuff and finding a production pathway? (IANAchemist)
Interesting article. I’d love to hear more about how other folks are getting on with typing in python these days. What’s the preferred tool for limiting etc? I’ve been playing with Microsoft python language server recently and mypy (via vim coc). I haven’t got a config that works well yet but it shows promise and I’m spurred on by how typescript is working well for us in that setup.
There are plenty of times people think their guess is the obvious truth, but it falls apart when examined. Gathering and presenting evidence to better examine our own assumptions about a situation should be a positive act.
You could just buy oil and not burn it. Far simpler than CCS.
why should they waste investor money so they can feel good about themselves and feel “noble”.

the most recent investors are suckers
the Sillicon Valley Idea Generator

over at

https://www.kamogo.com/5
The problem with burying biomass is that it gets metabolized by bacteria into CO2 and (worse) methane, which escapes into the air. Some landfills manage to capture most of the methane, but on the 100-year time scale it's not clear that burying is very effective.
At least in the UK, if you contact them and they don't resolve it, contact Amazon and you'll get a refund (and presumably they charge it back to the seller) under its 'A-Z Guarantee'.

That said, I've never bought higher value items from third parties via Amazon, so that may be a different experience. But I basically treat non-fulfilled by Amazon as eBay in terms of trust/expectations.
The highest ClimeWorks plan, if it's trustworthy (can't personally vouch for it) is approx 1 USD per kg CO2 captured, or $1k per ton.

That's pretty expensive. But at $100 it starts to look a lot more favourable when compared with a personal footprint - 30 tons emitted would be $3K, perfectly achievable for someone who's talking about flying to go skiing.