skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unclear where that's going? Sounds like, managers are responsible for measures (unspecified?) that are not in alignment with direct reports' interests. Sure, agreed. Managers are almost always responsible for some fiscal efficiency measure. Which is why they 'locally optimize'. Right?
1) I was referring to the restaurant.
2) I'm from Montana.

You should just apologize that you didn't understand my comment rather than try to over explain it.
+1 for the timezone issue.
> Have cameras pointed at every flyer for the duration of the flight, for the incredibly minor benefit of stopping your movie

Besides, all these electronic devices have a high environmental impact, for virtually no benefits. It makes you wonder how we're going to decrease our CO2 emissions...
He was working in OCaml, which even now isn't fortunate to have a persistent O(1) hashmap like Clojure (and Scala, I think) does in the standard library.

It's true that there are a few 3rd party implementations that I've noticed before, but not sure how robust and well-tested these are. I'd hesitate to use them or something I wrote in production without careful review.

In any case, persistent HAMTs are a relatively new phenomenon that are just starting to catch on, and this story is described as being "back in the day". It's unlikely this option was available to him even if he were willing to write an implementation himself or use an untested 3rd-party implementation.

Maybe one will be added eventually to one of the OCaml standard libraries, which would be great.
Judge for yourself:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RqdkHLU3G3E/Uy2b1KyScQI/AAAAAAAAAd...

http://finnishness.blogs.tamk.fi/files/2017/09/bussipysakki-...

https://www.linkbcit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Finland-b...

https://finnishcrashcourse.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/fpv0w...
It sounds like they were asked to invent a way to record passengers
I doubt it. It seems to have been posted to HN at the same time as the blog post itself was posted. The timing of the blog post seems to have been based on when their paper went up on eprint [0]. As you can see they seem to have submitted the paper on Dec 6 (date on pdf) and it got posted to the eprint server on Dec 9 (which is the typical time frame). At the very least, zero reason for the MSR people involved in the paper to base their release date around Telegram.

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1416
I'm less certain about the hospital incident and overall left-vs-right bias, but I can tell you: Wow, Labour is really, really good about sounding the chorus "we're being unfairly targeted! smears!" whenever there's a new story that another MP has resigned over the party's systematic antisemitism (or that someone who was fired, ostensibly to actually deal with anti-semitism, has been mysteriously re-hired).

(Our local "anti-Zionist" friends in Labour will mod me down for this, I know.)
Upstream Graphics: Too Little, Too Late
After nearly 5 decades of declining traffic fatalities, the number has been increasing (at least in NL) for the past 3, with mobile use being one of the main drivers. I don't like surveillance everywhere, but I like people playing with their phones while driving even less, so I personally can't wait for those camera's to be anywhere.

Also, my Tesla is filming constantly while I drive, so that's a much bigger deal.
"For code generation and other ancillary tasks, Go includes the 'go generate' facility. This feature was created specifically to free developers from depending on external build tools. (https://blog.golang.org/generate)"

Please please please don't use go generate! While I respect your position, go generate is the worst and I hope they eventually deprecate it in future go versions. We tried go generate in some of our code and it went very badly:

* go generate is placed in a comment line. Comments should never be executable, they should be used for explanation. If I am trying to trace execution, I shouldn't be forced to scan through comments looking for side effects.

* from the go generate man page: "Within a package, generate processes the
source files in a package in file name order, one at a time." You can't order your generate commands in a way you want, you have to order them using file order, or keep all of your go generate lines in the same file, which defeats the purpose of go generate.

* go generate will run every time, regardless of freshness of file. So if you need to run protoc or some other protocol buffer compiler, you have to regenerate it every single time regardless of whether or not it is needed which makes the build run way slower.

* What are the dependencies of this project? If I use go generate, I have to run some clumsy grep command to (hopefully) find all of the go generate comments in the package.

Sorry, go generate is to golang what COMEFROM is to INTERCAL. Please avoid if you can help it. If that means a shell script or heaven forbid a makefile, so be it.
> basic reading comprehension issues

The student was assigned reading material beyond their level. They will need mentoring, which a good teacher (i.e. senior developer) is well equipped to provide and should be willing[1] to provide. The teacher should also ensure that no other student is in the same situation but is hiding it due to risk of the social stigma.

> trivial matters that could have been looked up in an obvious reference

Student is not aware of resources available to them or does not yet have this habit. Provide them with pointers to resources, or engage them in habit-forming exercises for looking up references[1].

> completely unrelated tangents, asked out of idle curiosity

Idle curiosity is the best attribute (correction: skill) you can ask for in a student (any developer). Stifling it will cause a drop in creative thinking and therefore damage problem solving skills.

An unrelated tangent is unrelated only if the teacher (senior developer) does not possess the skills necessary to relate the question back to the topic at hand. Something made the student think of the so-called tangent. In such occurrences, explore[1] the tangent and how it may possibly relate to the topic at hand, with the help of the student, as a learning opportunity (an opportunity for the teacher, rather than the student, to learn).

> questions asked solely to demonstrate "participation" (nothing wrecks a classroom like a "participation" grade)

If a student participates just to demonstrate participation, this is usually because the class dynamics (work politics) are skewed against the student (damaging their self-esteem), or the rewards for good performance are not distributed evenly -on merit.

When you think a student is participating just for show, assume good faith. That is, assume that the student is genuinely interested and explore the idea together[1] with the student. If it turns out that the student was actually interested, you just prevented a misunderstanding caused by your own burn out. If they were participating just for show, you just helped them hone in on their skills and provided guidance on how to better participate in class (meeting/workplace).

--

[1] If you are not willing to do this, stop teaching (read: either stop hiring non-senior developers or quit). Your role in the university (read: workplace) as an instructor (read: senior developer) is not only to manage and produce research (read: projects and deliverables) but also to develop your students' (read: non-senior developers') skills. Earn your salary.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50722167
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50711868
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50630355
> They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid." But today every sane person would ask "Why should I depend on your service? Where is the guarantee that you won't go out of business or get acquired in six months with your service sunsetted?"

Or store passwords in plaintext then lose them.
I really don't understand some of these opinions.

My kids all started daycare quite young (less than a year old) and they LOVE it. I suppose it entirely depends on the daycare just as it can depend on the school your child attends when they're older.

The daycare my kids go to have plenty of activities... they do crafts, draw, have plenty of books and toys, play outside, "sports" and dance classes. There's no way I'd have the time or attention span to be able to do all of that with my kids unfortunately. Some parents can do it, but I think most parents need a break more often than not.
I all honesty, I farm so I can play with the heavy equipment.
Anybody that is not making room for girls to play with race cars, if they want, was is a jerk in the past, present, and future. Unless they are Betty Draper, I can't imagine a parent that would take a toy away from their kid.
My first instinct would be that this is due to entropy rather than minimizing energy, but the article doesn't mention that hypothesis. Is it easy to rule this out?
> And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree.

Reminds me of something I recently read. iirc, it was some local news story regarding a college student at a nearby state university. I remember someone asked him his plans after college and he replied something about wanting to start a landscaping business. I wondered why the hell someone would bother with all that debt for something that they could have started years ago.
The OP needs to hear the truth, it's a very succinct way of emphasizing the depth of the mistake.
Well, it all depends on how many points of data over what kind of time. This really feels like a variant of the 2 Generals Problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
The blog is called "depressing Finland" which is kind of a Finland meme. It's certainly played up on the Internet but it's got a kernel of truth. I have a couple of very good friends in Finland and I've visited the country and it's a lovely land filled with lovely people. But it's true they can be aloof to other people at first. My Finnish friend joked that Finnish people don't care about others until you get drunk with them, then you have a lifelong friend. That's actually true to an extent.

Finns can be very introverted, which leaves some more outgoing people with the feeling that Finns are anti- (or a-) social and depressed. That's not the case. The Finnish culture just values introversion, privacy, and polite public behavior. This contrasts sharply with the European meme of the loud, outgoing, and rude American, and the two cultures see each other in extremes and play up the differences for humor on the Internet.
+1

Know a lot of Vietnamese folks around the Washington DC area. Like the Cubans, most of the Vietnamese in the US are here because the NVA military cause them to flee. A lot of them vote Republican and probably aren't crazy about a former NVA officer selling them anything.
For those playing along at home:

Machine made, decent leather from cows (not anything unusual), shoes, not boots: ~$200-600

Same, but handmade: ~$500-900 (usually the leather’s a little better too, though)

Then there’s custom fitted, probably $750 (Eastern Europe) and up.
Peloton CEO John Foley Declined to Talk about The
company's controversial "The Gift that Gives Back" advertisement, which inspired widespread mockery and accusations of sexism last week. In his first public comments since the commercial's release, Foley avoided a question about the ad from an NBC reporter at the UBS Global TMT Conference, and said "That was last week." Instead, he predicted Peloton would be "one of the great consumer companies of the next couple of decades." Within a week of the ad's release, featured actress Monica Ruiz had already appeared in a commercial for Aviation Gin subtly referencing Peloton. A statement last week from Peloton said the company is "disappointed in how some have misinterpreted this commercial." – AD AGE

Best Read -- Answer to What's things you wish you knew before getting into computer science (CS)? by Abhipsa Mishra https://www.quora.com/Whats-things-you-wish-you-knew-before-getting-into-computer-science-CS/answer/Abhipsa-Mishra-38?ch=99&share=d6dcf0ba&srid=uQDqk
Peter Oborne wrote a good article [1] discussing the issues of relying on unnamed government sources to print stories. I think it has been a continuous source of highly questionable information and we really have no way of holding anyone to account.

Also, appears there's lots of dead cats being thrown around. I often find myself wondering how we have got to a place that feels so nuts. Nobody is talking to other people with whom they disagree, they are just screaming at them.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/british-jou...
No, it was not. However, the claim that it was was a lie that was spread far and wide through social media and by the right-wing media.

So again, no, it's not "both sides do it". It's mainly the right.
The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender or not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender.

They could have defused the controversy almost immediately by identifying the actual cause and fixing it. Part of the reason the story blew up was that DHH and his wife struggled at length to even get an explanation for the problem or find a human who could fix it. The opacity of that whole machine and its resistance to correction is why it became a fuss. I honestly don't care whether it turns out to be about gender, because the end result of that system is that someone got discriminated against in a way that was indistinguishable from being gender discrimination. In the same fashion, if your pricing algorithm accidentally (due to training set bias or whatever) has a 20% higher chance to overcharge people of color, it doesn't really matter how it got that way. It's a racist algorithm and that doesn't mean you're a racist: It just means you have to fix it.

Similarly, if the firings were carefully vetted and legally justified, they could have done a better job of explaining that rationale to the public. As a former Google employee the public rationale was obviously deceptive in some fashion, and undermines any suspicion I might have had regarding the employees in question. I worked with plenty of people at that company who probably deserved to be fired, but when the company behaves that way in public and selects people in a way that coincidentally undermines union organizing, I know who I'm going to suspect.
Thanks for sharing - great practical insights
being AI is a way for ML startups to get triple the seed capital. Nothing more.

I would argue against this course having no benefits. There is a huge disconnect between what the reality of the near-future in tech is and what the media mis-represent it to be, often fuelled by interviews and quotes from the people directly benefiting from stoking the fire.

The general populace being much closer to a position to understand that it's actually largely unrealistic or nonsense is the right way to go about bridging the gap between the "tech class" and your average lay person.

I definitely agree that society in general would be better if people had better grasp of statistics and how they are manipulated and mis-represented to them, but there are so many interest areas that people would be better off for having some understanding of that I don't think any one can be discredited just because it's not one of the others.
Your statement doesn't tell much. If it's free, you are probobaly the product, but you may not.
From: Arnon Geshuri (Google Senior Staffing Strategist)

...
On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else.
...

From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources)

Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences.

From Eric Schmidt:

Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric

From Steve Jobs:

:)

From Sergei Brin:

Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those.

Source: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s...

Edit: Fixed the Shona Brown email. She's on the board of Atlassian now so I guess avoid those people too.
Business Сhristmas Cards: Recommendations to Send Them Right
I hate what flying has become. It's sick. The pricing is sick, airports are sick, it's all sick.
"They" has been a valid singular pronoun in English since Chaucher; it's not a new invention.
> That story about the boy sleeping on the hospital floor wasn't a setup by the left-wing media?

It's been proved beyond any doubt that the boy sleeping on the hospital floor was in fact true[0], despite an army of twitter and facebook bots being deployed to try and discredit the story[1]. The hospital involved publicly apologised for the incident.

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50717606

[1]: https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1204175955314577410
Same. "Crash Boom Bang" was the first CD I ever bought, also saving up them monies for some time. It was a few years later though, probably '94-ish.
There was even a study which found that there is an actual, quantifiable, bias against the opposition.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...
See? There's always that one person scared of any kind of freedom.
I dont see the point of regulation. Do you want to force everyone to pay higher plane tickets, so some people get more comfort?

Some people prefer to pay less and survive in economy class.
Nice breakdown of the UA fleet here: https://www.planespotters.net/airline/United-Airlines

Looks like 767s are ~28% of their current fleet's widebodies.
> I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall.

This is a very “Judgement of Soloman” type stance to take, as it ignores the merit of the complaint each side is making.
Agreed. For every effort to anonymize data (just remove their name!) there's ten companys dedicated to tracking down and characterizing every individual.

The details are almost a fingerprint. Know enough (maybe 2 facts?) and you can start to re-identify that 'anonymized' data.

Just knowing a rural route code, and the factoid that an embedded development board was purchased there, and you have identified Me.

To really anonymize data, you cant publish any correlations between the stats. Which is most of the value of the stats.
Some certainly do. But not in a basic or mid-level commuter car.

If I'm sitting in traffic 45 min, one way, on my way to work around DC or LA, what's a wicked good 0-60 going to get me?
A similar thing happened to us. The technology always seems great and innovative (and it is), but the moment a replacement is found, it becomes instantly worthless.

...and so it becomes a huge gamble to pay for technology that doesn't have an active an immovable revenue stream.
I hadn't thought about this since I was a kid, but I loved watching the garbage truck. Especially when they used the compactor after emptying the cans. I guess I was lucky that they came to our house during the day because everywhere I've lived since a kid the trash pickup has been extremely early. I don't know if my kids have ever seen it.
> This means that for strong performers going alone is better, and for weak performers going to a company is better.

I'm not sure about this. Performance and value depend on the environment. Some organizations can provide the infrastructure to uplift workers' performance but some people work better in a self-directed situation.
> A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.

Do you have a source for this. This is possibly one of the dumbest things I've heard coming from a university.
> This one was a borderline scam with a whole pile of content recycled from other decks and fake education records for the participants.

Fake education records... that's over the borderline for me, and definitely falls into scam territory.
Fancy for them means 70k+ Euro imports
Yeah mapping the individual user has turned out to be rather trivial. There have been numerous articles documenting this.. But apperantly, we privacy conscious folk are just tinfoil hat folk
Does Trump Want to Reform or Kill the H-1B Visa Program?
My argument is that in many cases it's not local optimization at all. It's not optimal for anyone, their freedom is constrained by upper level management (the hierarchy / the corporation / the hivemind) which means neither the managers or their reports have freedom.

If the managers actually had more freedom, you'd get something closer to a bunch of small groups optimizing locally and producing (ideally, with the right incentive) collectively good results.

Here's a really easy example from my career (not Google, though): A manager needs to deliver on schedule. He has a set number of people on his team. One of those people is going to quit because he has a baby on the way, and the company's salary is not good enough.

If the manager had enough freedom, they'd have options available. The company is going to cut some of those off, but I'll enumerate some of the ones we potentially had at our fingertips (I was one of the team's managers in this situation):

* Give him a raise so he stays

* Promote someone qualified from the team, hire a junior employee to replace them

* Hire a senior employee to replace him and train them up ASAP to fill the gap

* Adjust the schedule to make up for the loss of his contribution

* Adjust the scope of the project to same as the above

In the end the studio head basically told us to go fuck ourselves, and the report ended up quitting. The project came in late, as I expected. This happened multiple times and in multiple cases it was direct interference from higher nodes in the chain - neither us in management or the labor below us were able to optimize at all. The product as a whole ended up shipping multiple years late due to lots of smaller-scale interference like that.
Nobody has to work for them if they aren’t paying enough
I was on a 767 from Philadelphia to Zurich about two months ago with American Airlines. But man it was an awful experience. Overnight flight with shared TVs playing an action movie with lots of flashing lights and explosions combined with outdated seats and no individual climate controls meant I landed in Zurich at 8am having gotten no sleep the whole flight.

At least Delta provides masks on their red-eye flights.
Yes. In some computing nerd traditions, terminal based tutorials might be referred to as "koans."

https://github.com/sl4m/gnu_smalltalk_koans

http://rubykoans.com/

https://github.com/joecannatti/Objective-C-Koans
No, it hasn't, not in a subjetive syntactical position, that's a fallacy.
All this self improvement craze is just a neurotic outgrowth originating from the decline of religion/community and growing individualism, change my mind.
if you mean you can prove 2+2==4, it's actually tautology:
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