skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Should the government require that Google search, Facebook and YouTube recommendation algorithms be published?

Many folks often wish that ranking/recommendation algorithms like PageRank search engine, or Youtube "watch next", or email spam heuristics, etc, be revealed to the public. E.g. the exact algorithm is required by law to be published on Github.

That would hurt society more than help because once the algorithms are public, the code's inner workings can then be gamed and abused.

That's the paradox or contradiction: for the algorithms to be effective, they have to be kept a secret to prevent gaming.

Recommendation/ranking algorithms are not to be confused with "security by obscurity" memes. Yes, you can publish the exact algorithm to derive a SHA-256 but that's not the same domain as a ranking algorithm. For Google to transition the algorithms from basic PageRank to Panda to Penguin to Hummingbird, etc ... the inner workings must be kept secret to be effective.

I know it drives people crazy that the algorithms are secret but you can't make them public in a way that stops abusers from using that knowledge against us.
> Regardless, they are not controlling what creators make or view.

Are you claiming recommendations do not affect views and views do not affect what content people create? This is obviously false.

> For instance, not knowing what was in food is different than not knowing the formula.

This is a great comparison actually, we all consume Youtube's recommendations without knowing either what was taken into account (the contents) or the exact weights of these things (the formula).
In that case you can use Heroku or a 'Managed Cloud Experts' like Rackspace
No, I open it, look for the destination, then press directions and can edit the starting point.
FWIW I do try to tell folks what went wrong and what were the perceived gaps through the recruiters. I in fact ask my recruiters to give them known ways to prepare for our loop. You'd be surprised how many don't even after all this. I am assuming this is because many are just trying to see what's out there, don't have time to prepare etc. But the flip side is we do want candidates who are obviously good AND are excited about the opportunity. All the other concerns here around conflict avoidance / litigation risks are all valid too - That's why I put my feedback through the HR filter.

Having said all that, The other angle that always nags me is the fact that our (in all the three companies I've been part of) interview process isn't a perfect measure. In theory, you may be able to crack it if you prepare for it and are well versed in full-stack engineering. In practice, this is just 5 hours of 5 different people trying to look for good signs and feelings and converge after. There just isn't enough information, so most of the time we work towards avoiding a false positive (which have been disastrous in the past). We have tried other mechanics around building a test project etc., but nothing stuck. Those just added a not more non-determinism compared to this model where we know what to expect. I've done more than a 1000 of these, so there are patterns I can fallback on.

If I were to start a company, I know how I'd want to hire: It will be just like finding co-founders. But that doesn't scale and probably becomes illegal when it goes beyond the founding members. I do like the doctor group models where everyone joining graduates to a full partner eventually and take a share of yearly profits until they work there: But our current world of software development that's highly leveraged on future performance (stocks), doesn't seem amenable to the same :(. But yes - It would be awesome to see if somehow we can replicate that model.
Just remember Obama signed an executive order that prohibits you from donating to Snowden. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/0...
I suspect you might realize that people reacting to words out of context might be dealing with trauma. It’s not so simple as discounting people’s reactions as the inability to finish reading a sentence. Is it really that much effort to say master and agent instead of master and slave?
I used to believe this as well, but then a company I worked for switched away from GitHub (we used GitHub Issues prior), and we lost all of that information. Commit messages are immutable, whereas anything else can easily disappear or become inaccessible.
Secret video by a millionaire teaching simple Mind hacks
This guy is obviously just a troll.

However it's important to note the unsaid political point. That society has gone "too far" in being tolerant. Bad-faith actors like this will try to weaponize attitudes of good-faith people to try to turn back social progress.
Simple. Because it got slower over time.

All these threads about software being worse and "perceptually slower" than it used to are about regressions. Google Maps and other mentioned tools aren't pushing the envelope. They aren't bleeding edge. They were science fiction made manifest 10-15 years ago, and since then actually decayed in utility, ergonomics and performance. Meanwhile, all the money invested in all the software and hardware should have given us the opposite outcome.
Google Reader Killed RSS
Many people want to be popular. Some want to be popular so much that they'll sacrifice essentially everything else to do so. Entire industries exist to divide a cake such that it allocates popularity to some portion of seekers and allocates everything else to other players in the industry.
Lessons Learned – 10 years of running a software consultancy
>Argentinian
Exactly. And the existence of Buddha himself might well be very allegorical.
It happens a lot. Even Google ghosted me after an all-day onsite interview in Mountain View in 2015.
We tag each commit with the (JIRA) ticket ID. The ticket has the broader business context, and the commit message is generally shorter. There's still some gap between the one-line commit message and the ticket ID, but it hasn't really caused problems in our org to my knowledge.
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Not op but I'll answer:

Advertising works, on everyone, including on me.

No matter how hard I try to not be affected by advertising, I can't stop it from working.

Now, with that said, if I have the option to be exposed to an advertisement for a category of products that I am likely to purchase anywhay, or a category that I will never purchase: Isn't it obvious that my behaviour is more likely to be influenced by the relevant add than the irrelevant one?

Some people might think that the word "brainwashing" is too strong to be used for describing advertising, and maybe it is, but is it really that strange that I would prefer a tiny amount of "brainwashing" over a small amount?
I understand the rationale, but it's not without cost.

If I've taken the time to do an in-person (or even a lengthy set of calls), then there really has to be something in it for me after they decline, or I won't apply with them again.

Also, if everything else seems like a match, my potential new mates and I hit it off, and they clearly need to fill the position, the vacuum left by a lack of explanation with the decline often leaves me wondering whether it didn't involve irrelevant (and often illegal) demographic bias. No way to really know, of course, but like everyone else, I play the probabilities.
Some would but most aren't, so we see the same molasses drip of deceleration as companies that say they intend to hyper-grow stay stuck in a region that wants to hyper-stagnate.
Hi Tobi,

It was the change on limitations for variants. We woke up one day to product additions failing. Took about a week for the tech team to figure out that we were being throttled because we were exceeding 50k variants. Totally understandable in the bigger picture of things, but I didn't feel we received adequate warning. Developer support had told us that sometimes they grant temporary exemptions but in our case they refused. They advised we upgrade to shopify plus (they quoted us over $2000) to remove the throttling/limitation. Financially it was out of scope for us, so we had to throttle our own customers, which led to a massive disadvantage.

I ended up writing our own cart software, which was always part of the plan, but in the meantime our business suffered.

I don't hold any grudge about it since we were getting incredible value out of the previous arrangement, and I do think Shopify is amazing software. I've been a paying customer in multiple capacities since at least 2008 and recommend it to people all the time. What happened was just unfortunate timing for us.

Thanks for taking a minute to listen, though. Much appreciated.
> We just don't know without hard numbers.

If the risk increased only very little, it would be extremely unlikely for there to be such a big blip in cancer occurrence.

The combat risk is always going to be there, but the cancer is not. Putting those against each other isn't terribly relevant from a decision-making standpoint (unless the odds are very, very low - but we know this is not likely)

So really, we can know a few things with a reasonable degree of certainty.
Why would Google even need to use cookies inside of its own browser which is linked to your personal identity? It's like saying Facebook uses regular cookies on its own website to figure out which pages you visit. I guess they could, but they already have your page view history so it's kind of pointless. If anything it sounds like a red herring argument.
The WHO says:
"The electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as possibly carcinogenic to humans"
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagn...
You're wrong. I've been doing it for 11 years, and it really is simple and quick. Package-managers does most of the work and there isn't much config necessary to start out. You should give it a go.
It's not just about 'power users', and you can see this easily by looking at car dashboard controls for standard consumer cars over the last couple of decades. Old controls had the property that you could in most cases feel and adjust them without looking, and they responded instantly. Today one is often forced to interact with a touchscreen which has to be looked at it while driving, responds poorly and erratically to touch, and often buries basic options in deep menus. A simple thing like lowering stereo volume, previously instantaneous, can now have a significant latency.

None of the above is about power users. And none of this is innate to today's hardware. It's a matter of prioritization.

And consumers, though initially swayed by shiny objects, do eventually respond to good design and good engineering. Indeed Google itself found its early success partly through clean and thoughtful design, at a time when other search engine websites were massively cluttered and banner ads were the bane of the Web.
Wouldn't even dumping literally all ram contents take only a few seconds on an NVMe drive? It's probably something else.
Ok. I am not an attorney. My views are my own. No purchase necessary. Not FDIC insured. YMMV. Consult a real lawyer. Don't be an idiot.

You right in a sense that when you read this, Snowden could easily be argued to fit the mold.

However, you will note that it later says that the actual designation ( verified here with treasury link I added ) is up to SOS and other involved individuals.

Note, that at the time I checked it, Snowden was not on that list and apparently has not been since issuance of this EO.

At least not yet.

edit, because there always exceptions: see wikileaks and note neither he nor his creation was sanctioned by OFAC either. However, that did not stop the state from making donations.. challenging.
It seems like you're splitting hairs. React had a new syntax. Svelte has a new syntax too, albeit a familiar one.

You can call Svelte's syntax 'templates' if you want, but if you do, you should call JSX a 'template' syntax too. You seem to be saying templates are bad, which is fine, but a vdom and a compiler are both sufficiently different from, say, mustache templates and you seem to be favoring React for no technical reason.

> Familiarity != simplicity.

Sure. But you literally just said:

> That's what happens when you create your own template syntax...again.

Which seems to indicate you preferred familiarity.

I'm not really sure what your argument is except pointing out that you prefer React. OK.
Agreed. Poetically written as well!
> Did 10+ hours of a challenge project

Those things are a hard "no" for me.

10 hours of interviews... I might not like it, but at least it's symmetric. People at the company are putting their time in to the process as much as I am.

But with a job, kids, hobbies, volunteer work and so on, I just pass on companies that have day+ long 'coding challenges'.
I'm no AWS fanboy, and sure its not the cheapest out there, but this is assuming that all cloud providers provide the same level of services for their machines, which is a complete joke. There are OS, Software, security, ease of tools, even speed of scale considerations that have more to do with why 90% of the internet is on AWS lol. There's a reason the only approved government cloud for years has been AWS. Also, heads up, AWS also offers far more services than ALL of those other providers you mentioned. So when you actually start running a real ONLINE business, and need ETL, MUTLI-AZ, WHAREHOUSEING, AUTOSCALE, S3, ETC, all those things talk to each other out of the box and your vendor list doesn't go from 1 to 50.
> I n/a'd everything and made sure to list all of my interviewers names.

prbly inconsequential .

fact is that you cannot do anything but move on after a rejection.
No it was literally 4 actions (3 if you accepted the default starting point) and the the same amount of typing the current solution. I didn't summarize anything.

1. Open app in navigation mode (there was a separate icon for that)

2. Accept default start or type if you don't want the default.

3. Point at destination

4. Type destination and enter

Besides it was immediately obvious when I opened the app for the first time on my first smartphone, it just made sense and still does when I think about it.

Edit: I reread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836204

I exaggerated wildly and can get it down to 5 steps. It is by definition discoverable since we have all discovered it, but I hold that it is still not obvious or self-explanatory in any way.
I wouldn't immediately dismiss the claim that the Elmo stuff has more explicit social-emotional teaching, as in "here's the thing we're teaching in this skit and exactly what we want you to learn!", while Big Bird's was more implicit and role-model driven (though I don't want to claim it was always subtle and didn't ever just come out and state what it was trying to get across, of course—there was plenty of that). I haven't sampled enough Elmo-street lately to know whether that's true, but it could be.
I don't understand where you would get this info from then? Tutorials provided by the framework makers themselves are pretty standard.

Magically absorb the knowledge in an incantation to the Redmond Gods in the ether?
I mean in Silicon Valley.

Everyone thinks you have to be employee #10 at a future unicorn to get "rich" but you could've made a very average salary and just invested your savings in tech stocks over the last 10 years and probably be well ahead of 99% of people trying to be the former.
When writing data structures that are not for describing or defining services I still can't help but think in triples. I also can't help but think of each data facet as though it were something described with meta-data would provide sufficient context that it would make sense if it were read out loud to a stranger.
Aren't japanese people shintoists rather than buddhists?
This is really good news. I have only one question for Mozilla: why choose a solution whose hallmark is decentralization and the libre model- only to become a customer of a centralized host (modular.im). Why can't Mozilla actually federate? That's a step backward from your IRCd in my opinion.

I hope Mozilla gets onboard with everyone else running their own Synapse, hacks on it, and pay their dues with patches, rather than with their cash.
I see this a lot, with people wanting Steam, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Play, etc not having the ideal situation for them to find success, and wanting the company to change things for them.
Thanks! Which stack do you use?
I have recently started a project of deploying kubernetes cluster at home and hosting some personal projects there. My top findings are:

1) bare metal is dramatically faster than most cloud instances. Many of us might have collection of old hardware that, by performance, would be equivalent to >$1,000 in monthly cloud fees.

2) If from the start of your career you have only dealt with modern cloud/Azure/AWS, there is a whole body of knowledge you are missing. Acquiring it from scratch is time consuming, and you are never quite sure you are doing the right thing. As a developer, I don't pay the AWS bill, so it would be more rational to spend my time on learning ML or something else that will be reflected in my paycheck.
To call this rose-tinted glasses when considering how things worked in 1983 is a massive understatement.

A counterexample: in 1983, enter two search terms, one of them slightly misspelled or misremembered, hit f3: "no results", spend 10 minutes trying to find the needle in the haystack, give up and physically search for the thing yourself.

Enter two search terms slightly incorrectly now: no of the time it will know exactly what you want, may even autocorrect a typo locally, get your accurate search results in a second.

When things were faster 30+ years ago (and they absolutely were NOT the vast majority of the time, this example cherry picked one of the few instances that they were), it was because the use case was hyperspecific, hyperlocalized to a platform, and the fussy and often counterintuitive interfaces served as guard rails.

The article has absolutely valid points on ways UIs have been tuned in odd ways (often to make them usable, albeit suboptimally, for the very different inputs of touch and mouse), but the obsession about speed being worse now borders on quixotic. Software back then was, at absolute best, akin to a drag racer - if all you want to do it move 200 meters in one predetermined direction then sometimes is was fine. Want to go 300 meters, or go in a slightly different direction, or don't know how to drive a drag racer? Sorry, need to find a different car/course/detailed instruction manual.
Airbnb is a platform not an estate agent, says Europe’s top court
>Most people are happy waiting for a few seconds for their webpage to load, if it means they can do it without learning anything new.

Ignorance is bliss. Show them a fast way and they don't want to go back. Unless your software has a "fast" and a "slow" mode you can't make assumptions that those users are "happy" with that delay.
> What other option is there

As I was asking the grandparent, there is always a way to communicate it more effectively than you are doing. Maybe they have the answer! I can't know that, but I can know it is an option because people have been convinced of much more evil and much dumber things by people good at talking.
"True random number" is a set of statistical tests, which means they can be deterministically fooled. Humans have a lot more inputs than your typical computer, so it's not surprising that their outputs can seem random.
I recommend checking out the UHD bluray. One of the best 4k's out.
How to Avoid All-or-Nothing Thinking in Your Tech Strategy
I think there is a real opportunity for an editorial ML system to help enforce a journal's linguistic style. I think you could train ML to recognize the difference between active and passive voice, for example.

But using ML for controlling content? Please. I very much doubt anything like that is going to happen.
I love your answer, but I am afraid most buddhists believe that there was a historical buddha.
I had a similar thing happen with a well-known messaging app startup I interviewed with.

This company had me do an initial technical screen (2-hours of work) and expressed great interest in the work I did. They asked me to complete a follow on "work sample" which I promptly completed with extras (error handling, specs, etc).

After completing the work sample (a non-trivial amount of effort), they suddenly decided they weren't interested in me. I hadn't even talked with a person and they went from being "extremely excited" to "uninterested" after getting me deep into their process.

Apparently, the recruiter was pushing me through the steps and the technical team hadn't even looked at my resume - or even considered it worthwhile to schedule a call with me.
> It's counterproductive from a security standpoint.

From what kind of twisted security standpoint is it counterproductive to allow someone to reveal mass security violations?

I don't think it is useful to participate in the newspeak that authoritarians use to pretend that you are somehow more secure when your human rights are constantly being violated.
From the standpoint of odds of success, it's probably not terribly different than trying to become a professional athlete, actor or musician. You have a tiny sliver of those who try who make it big, a much larger wedge who scrape by and the vast majority who get nowhere with it. While it's a lottery ticket, it's one that can make an order of magnitude of difference in many people's lives compared to their other options.
To be just a tiny bit flippant about it, is it illegal not to live in the USA too?
New DevTool for Webpack Build Analysis
It's because

YOU WILL NOTICE THIS ONE

in a list of

other normal text
I get your point, and it has its merit, but at some point you'd expect things to slow down, right?
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Asana, Taiga, Jira,
My "big time gap" example is explicitly a non-car use case.

The visiting example for me is normally a non-car use case. If going by car, I would probably pick these things up close to home and carry them all the way.
> If I were YouTube I wouldn't be transparent about these details.

That won't stop other actors from monitoring recommendations / search results and observing how they change. With a bit of ML they could train a model on that data and obtain all the answers they want. The information is hard to observe up close but easy to extract when you collect lots of observations.
> As someone completely unfamiliar with such proceedings, shouldn't locations be checked for such, well, dramatic attributes?

It's depressing, but not surprising. This was right after 9/11, remember, when the war in Afghanistan was just getting started. Whenever the switch gets flipped from "peacetime" to "wartime," a lot of the military's usual peacetime processes tend to fall by the wayside. Everybody's vision narrows down to just doing whatever needs to get done to win the war.

There's also usually a greater willingness to accept risk to personnel, because the very definition of "risk" shifts. The people you're sending into the field are now facing the very serious risk of bad guys shooting bullets at them all day, so "this place we're billeting them might give them cancer in ten years" seems like less of a big deal than it would in peacetime. If this base was one of the only ways we could get within range to strike a blow at the Taliban, I could totally see a general deciding that it was worth exposing their soldiers to potential health risks years down the line in order to get the capability to strike that blow.
People choose it because they legitimately want to make Youtube videos, not because they've done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that Youtube is the best source of income available to them.