skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I think the new method is actually useful in a lot of cases and the old method has a totally different use case (i.e. finding more occurrences of the exact same image).

The ML approach is good for finding similar images that aren't the exact same image. Which, honestly, seems like a much more common use case.

The old fingerprinting method is pretty much just used for investigative purposes like finding out where an image originated from. Something I liked to use it for, but I doubt is a super common thing for your average user.
I know that he (and others in positions like CEO in such industries) cannot say it, but I would be glad to hear him say:

"Representatives, Amazon is a company focused on innovation, efficiency, and getting the best and most out of people, and giving the best and most to people, wherever it can.

Tech allows us to tap into economies of scale, create new products and give consumers choices never seen before, squeeze out waste in ways that were not possible up to now, and create net benefit for people in this country. Each one of you can probably personally think of how Amazon technology has improved the lives of yourselves and people you know.

We seek to do this as far as the law allows us to do, and other companies do that as well. We operate within the rules placed on us by the legislatures of this country and its states.

As you know, sometimes even under fair laws, some people will lose out compared to others. Innovation comes with risk and change -- that's an unavoidable consequence of progress. And technology has been doing this for hundreds of years. But that's what laws are meant to set the boundaries of, based on people like you determining how best to create those rules.

If this body is concerned with what we are doing within the laws, it should change those laws based on the best interests of this country and its people. And Amazon will follow those laws.

We want that clarity, and want to follow our responsibilities under the law. It's your responsibility to set out those laws. Amazon welcomes performing our responsibilities to American consumers, and we invite you to do the same to the people you are responsible to."
I have seen Aoraki with my own eyes, and I understand what you seek to protect.
The thing to remember is that in Australia the Federal Government provides interest free loans [1] to students to fund their studies. The government also subsidises university studies. In the past the government has reduced the subsidy for law and engineering on the basis that people who did these courses would earn more, and therefore should pay more. Now they have flipped that to drive students into in demand careers, as there is a shortage. This doesn't mean that humanities aren't important, but that since the government subsidies university courses, they are going to invest in whats most important for the country.

These loans are then automatically taken out of your salary based on earning a certain amount.

[1] https://www.studyassist.gov.au/help-loans/fee-help
small caliber handguns are useful to rural people for dealing with snakes. I used to carry a .22 revolver loaded with snake shot regularly.
Look for Thai Dancer instead of Hui Fong?
21 here and I don't remember learning to read from the beginning. Only all the reading comprehension tests we had in school where they get you to explain what a paragraph means.

Somewhat related but I know someone the same age who seems to struggle with this. They regularly misunderstand what people mean online or fail to recognise satire (especially having issues when someone quotes a part of what they said implying that it was very strange/confusing/mocking it). I'm sort of at a loss thinking of a way to resolve this because to me its not even something I really thought had to or could be learned.
Humans determining the difference between a major minor and patch is never perfect. If we cannot rely on semver and can only trust a changelog, why suffer the manual step in our CD? Just autoincrement and maintain a decent changelog.
Beyond how cool this is, I appreciate the sorry part :)
Beyond just the perverse incentives for university administrations discussed in the article, this would be quite disappointing. The constant push towards specialization has led to most undergraduate programs losing any liberal arts rounding, which has some obviously negative impacts (eg the perennially-absent ethics and history courses for engineers). With a further reduction in the number of students in the arts and humanities, I imagine this trend would be pushed significantly further (eg the vast majority of voters having last taken a history class in secondary school/never having taken a political science class, school districts following this lead and cutting the already-paltry funding of the arts and humanities for primary and secondary schools). Hopefully the lawmakers see that investing in STEM doesn't need to be at the expense of the arts and humanities.
You know it's 2020 when a judiciary committee address begins with a billionaire attempting to cloak himself in a victim narrative.

I can't wait for the world to go back to normal, so it once again becomes shameful to show any weakness and immorality, so we can deal with people's actions rather than their position on the victimhood totem pole.
Let's not pretend that Bezos spent much time on this statement. His lawyers and other employees wrote it for him.
Kumbh Mela
I didn't know if it was a reference to a gene id
That's a funny sentence to read as someone who started as a philosophy major and is now an engineering manager.
These are not good reasons and again shows that the company really doesn't care. IT gives a bad laptop? That's fine it doesn't have to be good, it just needs a text editor open. Get a USB drive with a linux distro and boot to it and open nano. Or bring your laptop and stick the USB drive linux distro in there and let them use it. Again there is zero excuse for a company to not have a laptop ready for an onsite interview.

All these companies expect you to write code using a site like hackerrank during the phone screen. And yet they can't have a chromebook open to the exact same site during the onsite? If that's too much, they can't even get a cheap laptop, stick in a USB drive linux distro, open nano and give that during the onsite?
This sort of thing (updates as backdoor to get telemetry from people who explicitly opt out of telemetry) is becoming more and more prevalent. GitExtensions also does it - ostensibly a bug, too, but no hurry to fix it of course.

On the other side, Visual Studio forces me to open up a port and log in to MS account - tied to my real name and credit card - so it could upload my usage patterns every month, as a condition of the 'free' license. Perhaps that's the model we're converging towards, even for open source.
Is it really clear the fusion power, even if it's achieved, will actually be cheap enough to use? Sure, the fuel is almost free, but the fuel for solar, wind, and hydroelectric power is also free and that doesn't make them cheap. If we're not worried about cost, we could build enormous batteries using existing technology and use solar and wind to power everything. Fusion has to be cheaper than that, and judging by the cost of ITER, it doesn't seem obvious that it can achieve that.

Remember how nuclear fission was going to be "too cheap to meter"? Turned out it's expensive to build and operate the plants, regardless of how cheap the fuel is.
That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?
Bezos is a victim of intrusive government.
In my mind reading is the one subject where the child can’t afford to get it wrong. If you don’t do science education well, but the kids learn how to read well, they can always learn science by reading. Same with history, literature, and virtually every subject with possible exception of math. Reading is the key to unlock everything else.

As such, we should be very conservative in changing what has been proven to work. The article mentions how new theories came out in the 60’s and displaced the phonics based system which had been proven to work, leading to literally millions of people with an intellectual handicap due to poor reading skills.
It is especially true in the west:

‘Children are continually exposed to educational ideas that are younger than they are.’ -G.K.C.
I heard Nestor's interview with Joe Rogan, was intrigued and I decided to try it on my runs (~7 miles 2-3x per week), where I typically breathe through my mouth.

While running I breathed exclusively through my nose. My expectation was that I wouldn't be able to sustain it for the entire duration of the run. Surprisingly I was able to.

Overall I felt less winded that I typically do when breathing through my mouth. I thought my overall pace and/or avg heartbeat might be slower when breathing nasally but, according to my activity tracker, that's not the case. The other thing I noticed is that the 'runner's high' I typically get after a run was somewhat muted when breathing nasally.

I'd love to see more research in this area. I wonder if I'm depriving my brain of needed oxygen or if there are benefits to getting more CO2 than usual.
No science here, but anecdotally I find a lot of things that require focus on breathing to be really relaxing. Meditation, yoga, exercise, even things like scuba diving and smoking (I don't smoke regularly, maybe hookah a few times a year).
I've found a lot of complaints about SemVer can be fixed by tacking a vestigial "1." on the front of the version. You keep everything else the same, and that front "version" number is for "complete overhaul".
> It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices."

One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains:

> "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1]

I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best?

1. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
There's a big difference between wearing crystals because you believe it improves your life, and doing a physical exercise that changes your mental state.

If one can't confirm changes in their own mental state, especially profound changes, I'd suggest that's a far bigger and more pressing problem than anything you've listed.
When I interview (and yes, there's whiteboard time), I tell the candidate up front and very clearly, "I will be your Google. I know we don't work in a vacuum"
Maybe that isn't his point. A lot of people don't use UI optimally.

They "Go to google, type what they want, google gives it to them."

Sure, you could click on the 9 dots on the top right and select maps for google maps.

But is that always there on every device, on every web browser, whether signed in with google account or not?
Wow Squarespace just shutdown a website of a group of doctors
This is another way in which inequality is persisted. Private schools overwhelmingly tend to teach phonics while those who go to public school end up being taught the 3-cueing system.

Getting the schools to change approach requires political action against powerful lobbies. While a private school needs good outcomes to justify it's prices so gravitate to systems that produce that outcome.
If you disabled binaries, customers would get angrier than if you simply didn't provide Usenet at all. Nobody that cared about Usenet would sign up to a provider that didn't provide full feeds. I agree that it's irrational, but it also destroyed Usenet, a couple years earlier than I think it would have otherwise.
We really need structs in PHP. I drew up a draft, but didn't get very far with it. https://github.com/ellisgl/PHP-RFC-Struct-Data-Type
and how mightily he suffers
If you have read Bezos' shareholder letters, you will recognize his writing style in this piece. I'm sure there is some text authorship software that you could use to verify this as well. I'll give that lawyers probably supplied the statistics used here; they are very misleading at times.
>The US is one of only a few countries without maternity leave.

That is at best misleading - see Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The EU passed similar legislation in the same year. Plenty of EU nations have passed stricter laws and so have plenty of US states.

> I am American and spent nearly six years homeless and got to see the dark underbelly and how very hard we intentionally make it for people when something goes wrong.

I am sorry you went through that but things aren't all roses outside of the states. People get pushed aside and fall through the cracks in every country. A bad experience doesn't change the overall facts here though.

>Our employer-based insurance has all kinds of problems associated with it.

Agreed - problems that are being actively debated and worked on. They can't be fixed overnight but they can and will be overcome in time. I too have spent quite a bit of time in the US. If I recall it was only in the past year or two that the majority of Americans said they would support Universal healthcare. Americans have different values and those values are shifting, many would say towards more compassionate stances which is probably good. Different values from you or I doesn't mean bad though.
I'm sure people believe they confirm 'profound changes in their own mental state' from energy crystals too.

We can delude ourselves into believing anything. That's why we need to test things empirically in order to find out the truth.
Thanks for posting.

Leave it to the NYT to fear monger about small groups of children. Hahaha
Just water. Just like what TFA is suggesting.
> If this body is concerned with what we are doing within the laws, it should change those laws based on the best interests of this country and its people. And Amazon will follow those laws.

Left unsaid here would be: "We will quietly but effectively work behind the scenes to prevent them from ever becoming laws."
TIL! Thanks!

I always assumed that if you were doing Semver right, then you could end up at 0.124.2 or something. Glad to learn that’s not the case.
You are making a point that many others have made, and it makes me unhappy to see it yet again.

What you are saying in effect, is that hiring regimes can't be (or ought not to be) designed to include a group that is (commonly) discriminated against, if that discriminates against anyone, particularly the majority.

Implicitly, I see you defining the optimum as where everyone uses the same criteria that are as inclusive as possible, and just shrugging and saying "we're doing our best" when some are left out in the cold completely.

But isn't there an alternative vision where the optimum is employers using different ("diverse") sets of criteria that individually discriminate but create a society where there's a place for everyone?
They're probably drawn to the symbols of a fallen state. What could be more apt?
Sorry to sell DG short! (I did give it a brief mention at the top, it was just very very brief.) For whatever it's worth, I did go into DG in more depth in my blog entry on re-reading of Soul last year[1] -- one that attracted some comments from some very closely associated with the company and book!

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-sou...
What it feels like to be at an NHL game with no fans
Fake it til you're illiterate.
I haven’t come across hypocrisy meaning one is criticizing others. I don’t think that needs to be a pretense for hypocrisy.

it would be hypocrisy for some one to be for small government always, but spend 1 trillion a year on a complex tax system beyond what any one else is doing. Regardless of any critiques they make or don’t make.
Tokamaks need a changing current in the central solenoid. So while 8 minutes is infinity for a stellarator, there are important performance benchmarks at 8 seconds, 8 minutes, 8 hours, etc. You trade pulse length for ohmic heating.
Also if you combine more definitions of success, the appropriate methods become more constrained.

1) Read for the gist of it. 2) Read competently-or-better aloud based on exact recognition of words, with or without precise understanding. 3) e.g. Read precisely enough to see precise meaning if it is there, or recognize if the meaning is not precisely clear.

The understated outrage is that teaching for #1, only, is short-sighted and worse.
I think it's a pretty rubbish idea if you don't believe the point of life is to maximise your earnings. What if the point is to lead a good life that you enjoy on some level, and society is a system in which we perhaps try and facilitate that for everyone?
Apparently writing is just as hard as reading.

It was first mentioned 17 “paragraphs” in that:

memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.

That should have been the opener.
I overheard some students at a uni talking, one said they were doing a photography degree. They later qualified that they are studying the history of photography. So they weren’t learning how to do something, they were learning about other people doing that something in the past.

I wondered about their future earning potential, and where they would work.
The Roman biographer Suetonius claims that Julius Caesar mastered the art of dictating letters from horseback, and used to deal with his paperwork while attending the circus games (thereby annoying the people at large, who saw this as snobbish disdain for popular entertainment).

Sounds like the ancient equivalent of texting while driving or using your phone at a movie theater :)
Entrepreneurship Is Therapy
Having worked in both places, yes, they still suck in comparison.
If you jailbreak, then maybe.
Well, one example. I live in Singapore, and for it to become energy independent, it would need a square kilometer for a nuclear plant. To achieve the same with solar, you need to pave the whole country with solar panels.

Besides, to make these solar panels you need to spend energy too. and EROI for advanced solar is about 20, where for nuclear it is 80+.

I think people should stop using nature when they can get the same/better results without using it/using several orders of magnitude less of it.
Humanity has historically taken a trial and error approach to most things - medicine, engineering, cooking, etc. Advances in technology are usually the result of tinkering as opposed to directed research or science. The science usually comes later (if and when someone funds it) to explain why it works.

It's ugly, but it's how we usually lumber along. And yes, many mistakes and pseudoscience take place along the way.

I was recently reading how jet engines were developed even though no one really knew exactly how they worked (there were theories, of course).

This is the closest thing I could find on the topic online:

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/failure-leads-tech-advances-say...
Complete Guide [Site Kit and Map Kit]
About two uears ago I got into mountain biking. Went into a bile shop with and spent $300 on a mountain-ish bike and a helmet.

I thought about upgrading multiple times because "I had outgrown the bike". An upgrade was $1200.

So, I decided to only upgrade if I could not beat my best time on a specific short trail. Well, I kept going faster and fastee. Untill the tires were the obvious thing holding me back.

I upgraded the tires for $20 (clearance sale) and tested again. Still faster.

Ended up not buying the new $1200 bike.
They don't gas detainees, that's seriously unfounded.

That's a lot of money, but still not enough to cope with demand. Not to mention there's constant pressure to reduce the budget just like because functionally under US law these people are considered criminals, and people would rather that be spent on Americans instead.
What you really want to know is whether the take-home assignment really decides anything, or whether it's subjectively evaluated. Is there a rubric? Or is it the basis of an interview? A lot of take-home assignments are cargo culted; the people offering them don't have much faith in them, and still select candidates based on interviews and resume screens (or "pair programming" projects that are really just multi-hour or multi-day interviews).

I have a hard time believing that this many firms have take-home assignments that really matter, and aren't just another hoop candidates (or, maybe, disfavored candidates) are forced to jump through.
That's pretty neat!
somepeepz15@gmail.com
I would say that I would confidently update from: "1.2.1" -> "1.2.6" without batting an eyelash if my tests passed. "1.2.1" -> "1.6.2" would give me pause, but I wouldn't shy away from it.

Going from "2020.05.04 => 2020.06.20" doesn't tell me _anything what so ever_ about backwards compatibility or risk that I'm taking on. Is that the equivalent of going from "1.x to "2.x" or "1.x" to "8.x"? Who knows.
That's really neat! I expect some cool projects will use this.

somepeepz15@gmail.com
Sometimes you hear these stories and just have to back up two steps and ask why we are obsessed with developing these monolithic curriculums. Can’t we just have teachers use their best judgment? Then we will have a greater diversity of ideas and more opportunity for success in the schools.
Looks at Terraform ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Personally, the anxiety of whiteboard “coding as performance art” makes my brain freeze. I see it as a broken process. It certainly selects against me.

I think you can learn more useful stuff about a programmer by showing them a function prototype and asking how to black-box test it. Then show them complete code, and ask them to white-box test it. Test cases or a test plan, depending on scale. Then a discussion of test tools they have used.

The people who can produce quality code for your organization will show up pretty fast.
Isn't it hypocritical to make a comment like this while also lobbying the government for laws that favor your business? "I'm just playing by the rules" shouldn't be a valid defense when you are actively taking a role in deciding those rules.
That's really neat!
somepeepz15@gmail.com
That's really neat!

somepeepz15@gmail.com
This is nice! Since you mentioned you wanted to be mobile first, I should mention a couple issues I ran into on my phone:

The header bar, with Login and Signup on the right, did not fit on my screen (stopped right around the "S" of Signup), and I was not able to horizontal scroll the header to get to that link, even though it look like it would be horizontal scrollable.

It seemed like while I was interacting with the book on the front page, either the book jumped up and down or the vertical scroll jumped up and down (I'm not sure which) as the sell-text was written and removed.
I wish it was less common, but I’ve been seeing a lot of this ... article extending. I think that’s what it is.
You sound like a bugman who lets earning potential and capital drive all his life decisions.