skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't speak as to whether you should bring it up (I personally wouldn't), but- working in an industry that's adjacent to background checks, I find it very unlikely that this will come up. The US federal-state-county system is a disorganized mess on multiple levels, and they don't all report consistently. Also, many background check companies are pure BS- CYA so that the employer can say 'well we checked'. (For example, Uber/Lyft). A good rule of thumb is the longer the check takes, the more legit it is- companies that do 48 hour background checks are just scammers. There's a reason a security clearance investigation takes a long time.

FWIW, a friend I went to high school with did 19 months in federal prison for drug trafficking, and is technically a convicted felon. He has passed multiple background checks that show he has an absolutely clean record- two white collar employers and one for the expensive apartment building he lives in, all in Manhattan. (He's now a Senior VP of a company). I have no idea how this works, but he swears it's true. For one employer he confessed everything he did, they did a background check anyways and told him 'you don't come up in the system' (and hired him anyways).

Honestly, coming up in Google results is tougher to beat
> The problem isn’t just government. It’s not as if Americans are demanding that we build and the government is getting in the way. Washington is merely reflecting our preferences.

I think this is one of the most important points that is missing from the overall discussion about how to re-open the economy. A lot of what is happening now is happening because the people demand it.

This same idea explains the staying power of the TSA, ongoing NSA data collection, and the current administration's success curtailing immigration.

It's easy to blame the government and just assume a change in political party will solve the problem. But the only permanent solution to many issues is educating fellow citizens and teaching them how to think about them.
i've been trading crypto in large volumes at high frequencies for quite some time now. my models were plain as yogurt feed-forward neural nets. i would engineer some dumb features, sample the at random data, assign the labels (that translate into trading decisions), and train the model. then push to prod, sit back, and relax while the balance grows like a mushroom cloud. just kidding, before that i would grow gray hair while backtesting, debugging issues, etc.

one of the hard problems was labeling the data. knowing that the price is going up 10 bps one minute from now, should i buy? maybe. but what if it's going to crash 100 bps right after this? probably should sell instead.

reinforcement learning promises to eliminate the need to assign labels in the training data. the agent will try a bunch of different variants at random and eventually will choose the most optimal one knowing the state of the working, i.e. the state of the markets. at training time i only need to feed it the features data. another benefit is that backtesting and model training is sort of fused into a single process. rl model is optimizing pnl, and not the label classification score (as in the nn model). with proper train-test-validation split, the most performant rl model can go straight into production (helping me to keep some of my hair brown)

while all the bits and pieces seem straightforward i never managed to tune rl model to work better in the backtest compared to the good old old nn models. maybe i have never been closer to the gold vein, but for now, i abandoned my efforts to build a performant rl agent if favor of nn models.

amen.
Ask HN: Is there anyone trying to disrupt the car insurance business?
Hey!

I'm in this weird position where car insurances are just too expensive (300$/month for two new drivers), so my wife and I decided not to get a car.

Getting by with zipcars and turo and other rental services mean 10k$ of coverage for third-party liabilities, which is pretty much nothing and could send us to bankruptcy (or we would have to consider leaving the US).

Looking into third-party liability insurances for rentals only, we get back to our original problem (it's impossible to get an easy quote or compare prices because of scammy practices, and prices are generally high)
Most of STEM degrees are not similar to CS regarding career prospects. Masters in chemistry or mathematics don't have that many entry level jobs with attractive salaries eagerly waiting for fresh grads.
They mean game FPS will be bottlenecked by single CPU's speed. E.g. in factorio all logic is single-threaded, so you'll be bottlenecked by single CPU, even though it uses other CPUs for minor tasks.
Startups for Remote Nomads handle Corona (Learn from a leading founder)
SSL/encrypted connections is a requirement in some regulatory frameworks. For example, transmitting PHI needs to be done over an encrypted connection.
You're right. Neither "with about 20% coming back positive" nor "mostly hovers in single digits" precisely describes the positivitiy rate for that area over time.

Rather than debate who was more wrong about the precise positivity rate in SF, I think the more fundamental discussion is around GP's comment that there's pretty strong evidence that a "light, mostly voluntary, shelter in order" is largely sufficient to achieve the low case count and mortality seen in the Bay Area.

I think that's not only far from proven, but there are many counterpoints of areas which have been locked down hard for many weeks and yet still saw pervasive community spread, and high case and fatality rates.

CA had it's first known case on Jan 25th, and a week later Day 7 the 3rd case in CA was discovered in Santa Clara, bring the US total to 7. Day 40 / March 4th CA reports its first death. Day 43 / March 7 San Francisco bans large gatherings in city-owned facilities. By March 13th (Day 49) Santa Clara bans gatherings of 100+ people and schools close as of March 16th. March 16th, Day 52, marks the first shelter-in-place orders.

MA had it's first known case on Feb 1, the second known case was not reported until March 2. (Do we call March 2nd as Day 1 or Day 30? Lets go with 30.) By March 6 (Day 36) total cases in the State were up to 8. By March 12 (Day 42) total cases were up to 108. On March 13 (Day 43) the Boston Marathon was postponed and gatherings of 250+ were banned. On March 15th (Day 45) Baker ordered all restaurants closed, and banned gatherings over 25 people, and announced public schools would be closed starting March 17th (Day 47). On March 20th (Day 50) MA had its first reported COVID death. By March 23rd (Day 53) the governor announced a "stay-at-home advisory", closed all non-essential businesses, recommended social distancing protocols, etc.

By CA's Day 40 they had 50 cases and a reported death, while MA at their Day 40 also had about 50 positive cases (most of which contact traced to a Biogen conference) but no reported deaths. By Day 50 MA had tested 5,000 and had over 300 cases and saw their first death. CA by their Day 50 also had about 300-400 cases. Both states closed on Day 52 or Day 53 of their respective outbreak.

At the beginning both states responded approximately the same. As of today, the outbreaks are entirely distinct.

I think a better analysis would compare e.g. Boston to one specific major metro area of CA, not a whole state-by-state level comparison.
Actually a lot in COM was made to work on vb. COM string type is BSTR which stands for Basic STRing.
Corporate America stopped building nationality once it realised it could offshore to failing states with populations who's alternative to wage slavery was starvation.

If you want to build for good, we need alternatives such as worker owned business where insentives align with the interests of the communities they are from.
That colleges still get to win when their students graduate into economic destitution is a moral hazard of American society that we will inevitably look back upon as a great stain on history. I think a lot of people agree there. While I don't argue it would solve the entirety of the problem, I think a great first step would be to change the financial product itself. The code academy's tuition deferment until employment model seems a lot more sane than what we currently have. If every educational institution had to take this approach, would we still see the same kind of bureaucratic overreach, feudal approach to tenure, and debt slavery that we currently see? I'd love to know.
If you're never going to pay European taxes, that seems like an unethical life hack. And if enough people actually do this, I wouldn't be surprised if European universities start raising their foreign students tuition.
Well, that just because it's in a movie doesn't mean it's true.

Few people would get to any sort of level of understanding of that sort of material just by reading it, and just because a movie genius can do it doesn't mean it's easy.

If we replaced all those examples with engineering textbooks, wouldn't it be the exact same, if it not, why? We learn he's an untrained math prodigy later on in the movie, so he doesn't need any education. It would appear a STEM education is a waste as well.
Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users.

I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project.

Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.
> airportification of our cities

I Googled this phrase and your comment right at the top, so can you explain it further?
Third Person Address in the Marine Corps (2017)
DDG is a little bit vague about it on their website, but their staff regularly mentions that the results are primarily from Bing on /r/duckduckgo, for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/g8wukz/duckduck...
New Zine: How Containers Work
So, I've read the article, and it seems to not support this assertion of yours:

> TLDR: We're undercounting deaths due to covid-19 by ~60% nationally, and 40% in NYC.

What it does say is this:

> “Thus I would probably add about 15% or so to the known death toll,” she wrote to two city officials. “However — no city or state will be factoring this in or reporting it, so I don’t think we should either. We should just assume that the deaths are about 15% more than we can count, but not include them in official modeling, because we will never really know.”

It does pay some lip service to the notion that some of these at-home deaths could be precisely because of the "elective" (meaning, scheduled) surgeries that we had postponed.

Interestingly per the https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm, we see something like 647,000 heart disease deaths per year. So, I haven't done the napkin math, but could the 20%-odd spike of cardiac arrest events they mentioned have more to do with postponed surgeries?
Show HN: Influencer Analytics – Instagram Influencer Marketing Campaign Crawler
The EU also mandates use of ethanol in gasoline so no, it's not the other way around. Ethanol production in the US is not necessarily aligned with states mandating its use as fuel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_S...
My waifu merged my moustache with the shadow under my nose. That part is horrible; the rest is OK?

I'm tempted to edit my photo some, then resubmit it to see if it turns out better. It looks like it could be quite amusing.
It’s not really a choice. Those schools tend to have very expensive, high maintenance campuses. I suppose they could also let all the buildings deteriorate but then they risk being closed against their well due to safety concerns.

In truth, the costs of these schools results from a ratchet effect. Wealthy donors buy the fancy buildings which the schools are then stuck maintaining. It’s a classic case of a white elephant [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant
> A contract killer is also responding to market forces. Sometimes people are willing to pay for things we don't want to allow them, and we judge (and punish) the people who provide them.
I'm not taking a position on monstrosity, or lack there of, but the reasoning provided seems flawed.

The reasoning was provided in context.

It's reasonable to strip a murderer of their physical freedom - it's unreasonable for anyone to do it to you unless you are a murderer.

You would agree that your neighbors or even you are ordering regularly from Amazon, yes?

In other words, your neighbors or even you are explicitly condoning the processes adopted by Amazon, yes?

The reasoning was provided in that context.

If your neighbors are regularly engaging the services of a contract killer, I would perhaps, move.
It seems like inconsistencies are inevitable no matter what you do.

At some level, barring guaranteed message delivery (which is effectively non-existent in any distributed system) you always reach a level where you can't guarantee consistency. It's the Byzantine General's Problem, basically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

But based on empirical evidence, you can work out that a certain measure of effort dedicated to fault tolerance will yield correct results in X% of cases, and you can tune the value of X based on how much time/energy/money/effort you're willing to expend... up to a point.
Pieter Levels of Nomad List and Remote OK share how it's like running two businesses in the midst of the Corona. He handles it pretty well I must say.
I agree with you that this post is really unclear. But it reminded me of another post I recently read that I liked a lot. I just posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23035794
I do hiring.

1) Run your own background check and see what comes back. Most will let you run your own check.

2) Don't mention this if you want the job, the the FAANGs did go through a period where they wanted activists / not just the standard coders but I think that might be somewhat over.

3) I would never hire someone with your record if I knew about it.

A note - use straight language if you are committing crimes for moral reasons. For example "defends unborn children from child murders" is committing a murder of an abortion doctor under our current laws, "rescuing animals" may be theft or burglary. "saving the world from GMO" may be destroying a local farm. "saving the world from gentrification" may be multiple arsons (in emeryville for example). 9/11, the US wars in many other countries are often tied to these ideals justify violence and killing language models.
Everything you say should apply to Madrid or Barcelona Spain, but worse as the city is older. Yet Spain manages to build subways for a small fraction of the cost.
> If society is to give out free passes for suboptimal behavior to anyone, it's going to be to those who provide it the most value. Kind of like Amazon does to a lot of people right now.

Right on!

I don't understand why this is so hard to understand.
It’s certainly not an easy engineering task but it’s made even more complex by regulations.

At some point we need to understand the trade offs that come with regulations and either redesign them to enable large scale infrastructure projects or accept the fact that such projects are just not possible in the current framework.

So for eg environmental regulations to deter coal plants are fantastic because they encourage the alternatives. But regulations that prohibit anything seem as useless as no regulations: we need to generate power somehow.
Disable webpacker yarn integrity check
Pretty sure I read at least two links that said that it does indeed work. I think one discussed the Exodus of toxic communities from Reddit, the other something Facebook did about fake news iirc
Note that this classic "pro-lockdown" talking point is an unfalsifiable claim. I don't think there's any figure I could pull out that might sway you otherwise, right?

Simply put, this argument is invalid. Why? Because my writeup went into the IFR. Therefore we can calculate how many deaths might occur in the "do nothing" scenario, and compare that to lockdown-induced deaths.

Also we should note that social distancing and lockdown are different things, and it _appears_ that the former is much more responsible for the slowed rate of transmission. My proposal does not involve getting rid of social distancing, although it does encourage it to be voluntary as opposed to compelled.
I disagree a bit. The big name schools can get away with charging their current prices, but small schools would radically re-think. No more football stadiums, fancy dorms, etc. People still need to get educated. The rest of the world has universities with sensible pricing - only the US is an anomaly.
Are you saying people can just start talking to me when I'm writing code? or do you mean text messages?
The food scene is definitely overhyped. Maybe if you are coming from the midwest it's impressive, but for me it was repeatedly a huge let down.

There is plenty of hiking and skiing nearby but the point I was trying to make is that it was tough to break away both from work and from people who loved to talk about work.
There are fixed number of subreddits as the names are limited in length.

So their revenue model is selling their product instead of selling ads and that's the bad part?

Also, they're open source right so you can just run your own: https://github.com/urbit/urbit

Super evil stuff here.
I thought getting a degree in computer science was my ticket out of poverty and the lower class blue-collar work that has perpetuated my family for generations.

Boy was I wrong.

Opportunity and pure luck have to be at your back for the kind of generational change I sought. End up on the wrong side of either one of those and you too might not end up where you expect.

Nowadays, I wish I had learned a trade. Sure the work is hard, but those skills are always in demand. Houses will always need electrical or plumbing, but not everybody needs someone who can design an emulator or make an interpreter.
Also, MongoDB queries for related records can be painful. This takes a while to realize, but definitely shows itself when you are working with more complex data.
Stay away, in my opinion. I spent a year supporting a SVM in a production machine learning application, and it made me wish the ML research community hadn't been so in love with them for so long.

They're the perfect blend of theoretically elegant and practically impractical. Training scales as O(n^3), serialized models are heavyweight, prediction is slow. They're like Gaussian Processes, except warped and without any principled way of choosing the kernel function. Applying them to structured data (mix of categorical & continuous features, missing values) is difficult. The hyperparameters are non-intuitive and tuning them is a black art.

GBMs/Random Forests are a better default choice, and far more performant. Even simpler than that, linear models & generalized linear models are my go-to most of the time. And if you genuinely need the extra predictiveness, deep learning seems like better bang for your buck right now. Fast.ai is a good resource if that's interesting to you.
I think you're missing the point of college.

Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube. The value of college is the curation the professor provides and the people you are doing it with.
The core API's of Windows are so stable that if someone got it working once on WIndows NT, the executable should work for everyone on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8 and 10, ...
It’s more 1/50. (It’s 1/15 effectively after accounting for the fact that electric engines waste far less energy than internal combustion engines).
$15k is a great price, must private universities are far more than that. And public state universities, if you are paying out of state tuition.
Well there's part of the problem. Public goods are nonrival, and education isn't, especially if you want instructor attention and small class sizes.
Publishing in top-tier scientific journals using microscope built from Legos
Armed protesters in the Michigan State Capitol protesting stay-at-home orders
There's not a lot of options yet for base load. We need a lot more storage, or an environmentally friendly and reliable source for base load. Nuclear would fit, clearly, but it's not financially viable, moreso than coal right now. It's a very hard problem, and it'll take time to sort out with "the market", but building storage from dams and lakes and reservoir would be a good start. Batteries might not be the best for the environment unless we can efficiently recycle the minerals in them rather than mine them, since that is almost as bad as mining the coal. We should also look into geothermal and other sources that we've left behind in favor of oil and coal.

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so i can't reply, but thanks for the comment about batteries, they're good for decarbonization but maybe not great for the environment in the mining of the materials. Maybe that's an okay trade off.
$10,000 a semester is cheap. The current price at the university I attended is $73k a year.
Basically everything.
I can imagine in a future iteration of this, writing a song, recording it with your phone, and then letting this turn it into something that sounds like a high quality production performed by a famous voice.
You can enable backend authentication on the ELB if you want that (you need to provide the certificate)
Ask HN: Anyone else feeling HN posts quality dropping down?
In the long term we're all dead.
>Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.

1. Humanities does not teach any sort of critical thinking more than other classes, and if anything I found my STEM classes to teach more critical thinking because of more formal systems of proof or statistics needed to back a point.

2. A very large percentage of the population doesn't go to college. If we wait to teach the basic skills in college, it is already too late. This type of thinking needs to be taught in grade school.

>If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.

Why wouldn't this be a symptom of the market? There is money to be made in controversy and click bait, and that applies just as well in politics.
College degrees generally? Sure, I agree - the market doesn't need a lot of them.

I think there's a lot of market demand for certain capabilities though - specifically capable software developers.

Maybe there's an argument that there's not enough intellectual capacity to meet this demand, but I think it's more an issue of opportunity (Lambda's student success seems to be evidence of this). I guess I'm not convinced there's oversupply generally as much as there is an oversupply of certain non-economically viable majors (because of this incentive problem).

For the free college, even with those restrictions (which are good), I'd argue it doesn't relieve the incentive alignment problem with the colleges themselves (so it harms potential ISA competitors without solving the underlying problem).
No, we make more stuff than at almost any point.

We've lost zero manufacturing capability.

We just need a fraction of the people that used to be involved - they've been replaced by robots.

"The job at the plant" died, not the manufacturing sector.
If you're an insomniac, I recommend David Brinkley's book "Defining Vision : How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television"

It's an account of the incredibly messy process that got us the ATSC standard in the USA. A little dry but a little interesting.

https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Governme...

The upside is that the group took so long to define a standard that digital compression and broadcasting technologies matured enough so that HDTV in the US could be fully digital and not analog like the Japanese had pioneered and proposed as a world standard.