skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PRISM utilized entirely public info? Information regarding every phone call you've ever made, including time, recipient, length, and location are public?
Man, that's really sad. I followed the progress of Jason's sickness on fb (he was posting about it pretty regularly) and it was really heart breaking to see how fuckin cancer chews you up and spits you out.
I still have two of the Maya courses from 3DBuzz on DVD at home. Just a week ago I was throwing away all of my old CDs/DVDs but decided to keep them for nostalgia reasons. I guess it was a good decision.
>I do believe you should optimize your relationships

I agree with your sentiment, but I would reword this to "optimise your responses". All you can ever control, especially in social situations and interpersonal relationships, is what you say and what you do. As such, there are important things you can do to your 'social engine' to optimise your responses for good - essentially adding modesty, kindness and thoughtfulness.

1) Optimise your classifier when meeting new people to be as cognitively cheap as possible while still protecting you from harm. With the lack of knowledge, assume the best of people. Often a positive opening gambit can make the whole relationship easier.

Case study: https://ncase.me/trust

2) Optimise your conversation. Talking to people doesn't need to be stressful or anxiety inducing. If you don't know the person, listen to the words they say and ask questions about them. You don't have to always be thinking about how to make a joke out of the conversation. You don't always have to come up with a relevant anecdote. Let the things you say be positive and affirmative - sarcasm is fine but overuse is expensive the listener, both emotionally and in cognitive load to process it.

3) Optimise your thoughts so that your load becomes more manageable. When you cull out the noise, streamline your inbox/todo/notifications (digital or otherwise) and reduce mental overhead to prioritise tasks, you will find that it's easier to be thoughtful, to think 'outside the box' and to manage a wider range of things.
You will find it easier to remember birthdays, be present with your loved ones, buy better gifts, sleep more etc. Do without doing and you will find there is nothing that isn't done.
People are not optimal machines. Instead, they make decisions based upon narratives. An inferior product can win based upon a superior narrative or because it was seen more often and recently than a competitor's product.

Generally, a consumer is only looking for one or two features to match their needs. Producing a very simple product with fewer features to match the needs of a key segment is a great way to start building an audience. If people complain about missing features, it's a good sign that they have some interest in using your product.
Ask HN: What math to study for a high schooler with 1 month and calculus base?
We will finish the Anton Calculus 'Brief Edition' textbook with 1 month left in the year.
So after integrals we'll have covered Infinite series as well, to give you a sense of what math knowledge we'll be at.

I was wondering if any HNers have advice for what math topics I could independently study with my teacher in the remaining time, that also won't be repeated knowledge for college. e.g. I do not want to study vectors since I will be taking linear algebra later anyhow.

Thank you for your time and kind help!
I have yet to hear a satisfying answer from anyone ...

Here's Dennett on this very subject, about 20 years ago. In Consciousness Explained he imagines what a Turing Test conversation between a human 'judge' and a 'Chinese Room' might look like:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett: “The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all.”

His point (if I need to re-explain it?) is that the Chinese Room argument is superficially compelling. But if you actually follow through and imagine the Chinese Room doing the things that the thought experiment defines it to be doing, then you get a picture of an extraordinarily complicated system, and the nuts and bolts of exactly what that system is running on fall away into irrelevance.
Microsoft will patch Windows 10 after NSA told it about a major vulnerability
So me it seems intuitively obvious that the answers are yes, yes, and yes. Even ants seem to have some sort of consciousness to me.

But of course it's completely unknowable. Maybe every other single creature on earth is just an unfeeling automaton, and only I feel.

But I doubt it. ;-)
Where do you believe MS is storing all this tracking data you believe they are taking from every Windows 10 machine on the planet?

Doesn't this conspiracy theory stretch belief a great deal?
Implying families are never dysfunctional...
Use of the median rather than the mean is extremely misleading here – wage increases have been concentrated in the top 10% of wage earners.

A more representative view of the same data is shown here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
ahh. 2 and 3 are killers. i need to go meditate on this.

to be fair tho, i don't expect most tech jobs to actually have a strong sense of purpose. it's that old SV trope of "we're making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers".

#2 is a great question. its kind of like looking at the job through game design. its true i dont feel like i'm becoming better and i dont see a clear path to becoming better. I will probably actually use this line of thinking to have a convo with my manager.
It's somewhat the other direction. In the area that I work, scientific machine learning and differential equation modeling, Python does not really have a well-developed ecosystem while Julia has all of the tools. High performance methods with stiffness handling, automatic detection of Jacobian sparsity form a Julia program, methods for stochastic/delay/differential-algebraic equations, and the ability to embed neural networks into arbitrary differential equations and train them in a scientific context. Python is very far behind even MATLAB or Mathematica in this domain.
> If sites could provide a permuted index in accessible format

I'm not going to dismiss this out of hand, but this is a harder problem than you realize. We did have search keywords at one point. The problem was that sites started stuffing them with irrelevant values. Google removed that and started doing their own analysis, because keywords made it too easy to game SEO.

There are certainly ways that keywords could be done better today, I'm not going to say we should give up on the entire concept. But asking websites to self-categorize themselves is a very tricky problem that is very prone to abuse.

Remember that the web (currently) monetizes eyeballs, so until that situation changes there is a strong incentive to show up in every search regardless of whether or not you're relevant.
> Credible doesn't mean FAANG, it means you can be googled and you look like you might be a credible founder.

So glad to hear this!

I have rejected offers from FAANG before and generally avoid their recruitment consultants to save myself from their golden handcuffs. I am sure not all investors will overlook not having credentials of FAANG but some of them will. And those are the ones that matter to me.
Google prism, xkeyscore, TAO.
> Americans get almost religious if you propose to only work a day per week.

That depends on the American. There is no unified American culture anymore, which makes generalities like this almost universally false. Case in point: I've lived in America all my life and nobody I know would object to only working a day a week if they could actually live off that little money.
I mean if a system is bad and anger helps to change it for the better, then it seems like that's fine. Anger, outrage, etc are all systems as well, that you shouldn't be "angry" at, right? The rejection of the utility of emotion is itself irrational.
Unfortunately, equations like this are hard to read if you aren't a fluent reader of LaTeX:

$$\left.\frac{\partial L}{\partial q} \right|_{\tilde{q} = \dot{q}} = \frac{dp}{dt}$$

Perhaps there's a tumblr theme or extension that can convert LaTeX to HTML.
Sure, you can choose a version that only blocks ads and social if you want, if you look at the original github repo. The ad blocking list should be fairly reasonable to anyone.
Depends of course peoples needs for cloud. Some people need the power of bare metal and that's why most cloud providers are moving to making that an option.
What's wrong with just parsing the webserver logfiles like we used to do (I still do this)? Is that too old-fashioned now or something? Doesn't require any account or paying anything or setting any cookies (and therefore you don't need to have that annoying cookie warning your users hate so much).
thanks, will drop an email (to be clear its not like i was expecting any solutions here, i just like learning about how managers manage).
Good grief! Why didn't she send a $1 first to make sure she had the right person!?
Is a CS bachelor’s necessary to understand that? Does a CS bachelor’s guarantee that this is understood?
Optimize Your Portfolio
If anyone wants to give a multi-year journal (5-year Journals are popular in print form) chrome extension a try:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-...
> It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and businesses respond to incentives.

The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I am trying to illustrate above and below.

> That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in 2019.[1]

It is not about the mandates in law. It is about reality and risk. If I want to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to prove in court(or EEOC has to prove) using company statistics(unless explicit evidence exists) that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to do against larger employers with more employees. For me to sue a small employer, whether they employ 100(52% of jobs are attributed to 100 employee or less businesses according to Texas Law Now;2012) or 19 employees the statistics are harder to prove because of the small sample size. Employers know this. That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows small businesses to discriminate.

Combine that with the fact that if an applicant does not get hired, it is incredibly difficult to even begin a suit without internal knowledge of the company, ergo it is less risky for employers to not hire minorities to begin with.

> And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses, housing, and other opportunities.

I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school, etc if it results in poor opportunities to be gainfully employed. As I stated before, prior to the CRA wealth(power to influence vote/education/business/etc) of the largest minority group in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.
There's tons of non-duality in Christ's teachings, but it's subtler and doesn't smash you over the head as much.

"Do not judge, or you will be judged. For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Matthew 7:1-2)

"For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother." (Matthew 12:50)

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me." (Matthew 25:40)
How to beat South Korea's AI hiring bots and land a job
like Protonmail
Seeing how widespread the use of blocklists is in lefty circles, nothing to do with anything challenging of their dogma.
In my experience, a good Android phone and a good iPhone both "just work" out of the box for 98% of my uses. The main reason I tend to use Android phones is that in the 2% of situations when something doesn't work the way I want/need it to, I have the option to do something about it.

I don't go sideloading every random app I dig up from freeappzlol.ru or whatever, but I also don't need to be restricted to a single software repo when I want something like systemwide ad blocking or a youtube app that plays with the screen off (two things Google would prefer to restrict).

And when the device gets old and slow and stops getting official support, I can flash a slimmed down ROM that allows me to use it as a basic streaming source or fancy remote control or whatever because it's possible to install another OS or build on deprecated hardware much as I would on an old laptop or desktop that gets turned into a Linux box for web browsing or network storage.

I only speak for myself and definitely see your angle, but to me, taking away options doesn't really lead to increased peace of mind. Having the ability to do something doesn't equal having to do something...but in the event that I want to do something, I like knowing I'm able.
The issue isn't that they found a copy of the test data online (The test input data was provided to them as part of the problem.)

The issue is that they manually labeled the test data, and then pretended they didn't.

The competition objective is to provide an ML solution that produces labels for the test data, showing your work with code (to prove you didn't just hand label the data.)

Instead, they did manually label the data, and hid their manual labels in the id column of that external data source.
No, the reason people don't build taller residential buildings is because a lot of mortgage providers often won't lend to leasehold buyers in high-rises, which limits residence to cash-only buyers and council tenants.
Major Windows flaw was reportedly discovered by the NSA
If I remember correctly, even having the user IP address in your log files means you need to warn the user for some of the regulations.
Ah, thank you, that part wasn't clear when I was reading it!
Especially since then you can't compare to prior trial data to newer trial data to see how they were crafting the selection process, which could derive hints for contraindications and the like - or simply to know if some medication is poorly distributed, in the sense of making sure a person fits the exact criteria, then its side-effects and damages will be far greater than what was approved at the end.
I've been blocking 3rd party cookies for many years. It doesn't cause any issues for 99.9% of sites. I think I've encountered less than 10 and I whitelisted the ones I needed.
Victorian Doctors Didn't Treat Women with Orgasms, Say Historians (2018)
"News of the security flaw comes the same day that Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7. The company has encouraged people to upgrade to Windows 10 to keep their PCs and laptops secure. "
Hummmmm...
Pinterest Surpassed Snapchat as No. 3 Social Media App in the US
> Analytics in general does nothing to help the users of your site while pushing additional work onto the client and leaking information.

Analytics are a very useful tool to use in order to improve a product.
Arghh... too late to edit my comment...

ksec's link is: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/ration...
GitHub game jam winners
Ask HN: How to contact someone at a company I'm applying to?
I'm a senior Computer Science student graduating in May. I've applied to a lot of companies and heard back from almost none of them. I've heard that it is much better to contact someone before applying or as you apply but I'm not sure the best way to go about this. Do I find a manager or recruiter and just email them? What would such an email say?

Any advice would be very helpful!
I struggle with a more basic issue here; there are plenty of things at my current job which are just "accepted". Lots of "this is the way it has always been", but are actually really bad for productivity and our ability to do business. I've tried to set out plans to address a few of these issues, and I'm willing to accept the risk that, if I fail, it might reflect so poorly on my career that I'd be fired to have to find a new job.

My problem is simple; how do I convince the person above me in the pecking order that they should even give me space to attempt the project? I keep getting rejected, presumably because if my project fails, it might also reflect poorly on them, and they're not willing to take the risk.

I guess the same would apply to people looking for funding for their mad, overly ambitious startups or projects.

tl;dr: how can you "go after hard things" if nobody is willing to back you because they think it's too hard.
Yes I really wish they wouldn't challenge my conventional idea of materialism. The last thing we need is another Einstein coming along making us think differently.
> They seemed to have chronic supply problems
This is absurd as both Co-CEOs(Jen Rubio and Steph Korey) come from supply chain backgrounds, so they should at bare minimum get the supply chain right. Would never spend a dollar with them, treat your workers like humans, not trash.
Because most of the negative attention that Chromium receives is FUD by people that rely on feelings and not facts.
Don't Need Classes for OO
You choose both. You don't present one as truth. People need to learn the beauty of grey.
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Median means what the 50th percentile earns; mean is the total earned divided by the number of earners. In right-skewed distributions (like wage data) the median is less than the mean. In other words, your critique is already answered by the parent.
The first thing is to step up and become the lead developer on your team. If you’re not being proactive folks won’t imagine it on their own. Clothes are another angle. If you look and act like a leader, soon you shall be one.
Not sure how Golang will fix this, so yes, pretty pointless indeed!
nice! I just added this to my personal site :) will see if its good :P
This is one place where I would like to see an immutable blockchain database used, as a custody of records for decisions made.
All the most important AR and VR news from CES 2020
Introduction to the Hierarchical Risk Parity Algorithm for ML Asset Allocation
Post - https://hudsonthames.org/an-introduction-to-the-hierarchical-risk-parity-algorithm/

While implementing the HRP algorithm as part of an open-source package mlfinlab, I found a lack of a clear and comprehensive post about the algorithm's working and its comparison with other allocation algorithms.
So I decided to do a blog post with a step by step explanation of the underlying math, the intuition behind the different steps in the algorithm and finally a detailed comparison of its performance with previous portfolio allocation algorithms.
Do give it a look and let me know your thoughts on the article!
OpenFaaS 3rd Birthday Celebrations
This is so two-faced. This is the key line:

> Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds…

A browser vendor that cared about its users would make a browser for them, not publishers or advertisers. It would block all tracking garbage by default.

Just admit it Justin, the real Chrome customers are advertisers. You don't actually give a shit about users if it interferes with ad dollars.

Edit: I left out this good quote

> Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users

More user-hostile advertiser appeasement.
Kubernetes Bug Bounty
Doom Text Generator
DV360 (formerly DoubleClick) definitely does.

Analytics uses first-party cookies for its core functionality. There are optional features where it connects to a third-party cookie from another Google service, e.g. connecting to the DV360 cookie to pull in demographic information.
Because let's be honest, most "privacy advocates" on HN are trying to be purer than the other guy. Ideological purity is what they're after, not privacy.
> As for the advertisers, boo-hoo. You raised a finger (or two, depending on locale) to “do not track”, you think there wasn’t a hammer that was going to fall after you were asked politely?

I wish it was that easy, but the current changes will generate a push towards non-deterministic, data driven ways of targeting, i.e. replacing the "precise" inputs such as GPS, trackingID, etc... with a set of more fuzzy parameters: geo IP, UA, fingerprinting.

Some good things are happening, but there's so much more to do. I like the WebKit approach the most:

we don't care how you target users cross-site, what tech is involved, if you track cross-site, we will treat it as exposing a security vulnerability—we'll escalate the issue and potentially include measures to prevent your domain accessing the browser.

The approach above sounds more future-proof, imo
Show HN: A simple, reliable, and cost-efficient brand monitoring service
Fortune 500 companies are held together by paperclips, bubblegum, and a whole lot of wishful thinking.

Sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally.
> And people loved [the fictional product I presented]. Strangers came up and hugged me, talking about how much time they thought I was going to save them.

That sounds quite unrealistic.