skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Makes me wish somebody would do a study of all these facets simultaneously and put the answers on a scatterplot.

For me, it is:

- 1-2 / 6 on the "mind's eye" scale

- perfectly working internal monologue; almost all of my conscious thinking involves me "hearing" sentences in my head (I don't experience actual auditory stimulus, but I can "hear" the words, the cadence, and sometimes even tone)

- good trivia/history memory

- bad situational memory, bad memory for people's names

- I can only recognize faces of people with whom I dealt for prolonged periods of time
I probably would be surprised if that's true considering that in most states in the US, doctors are required to complete between 20 and 50 hours of structured CME (continued medical education) annually as a prerequisite to relicensure, and every one I've spoken to took it pretty seriously.
Thanks for answering this.

To sort of hammer the point home in my brain, does the following summarize what you are saying?

In spite of all the trauma, you still think foster care is better than leaving kids with their family? E.g. the article says "more kids are removed for neglect than abuse" and only 35 percent of them finished high school. So, between the two evils (abusive family and foster care), do kids really fare better in the foster care system?

As someone who grew up outside of USA, but now live here, this is all rather shocking to me.
Where women in tech lead, shape and fund the future
I don't understand how people can loath R. If you take a functional approach, especially using pipes, dplyr and a split, apply, combine style, it is quite beautiful. Much nicer than trying to, say, divide a time period by an integer in Go.
We like it too! :D
Personally, I dislike how Gists are so isolated. I just created a public test Gist and can’t seem to find a way to navigate to it when I view my GitHub profile from a private browser session. From my Gists profile there is a “View GitHub Profile” button, but I do not see a button to do the reverse.

I think adding a “Gists” tab to GitHub profiles would be a nice way to increase accessibility and exposure.

Additionally, I think that edits to a Gist should count as contributions. The current arrangement disincentives those who are concerned with contribution counts.
Not that odd.
I don't like to call myself a software engineer just because of how contentious the term is. But I will admit that I do feel somewhat more precise at my current job than I was at my previous.

I used to work in an agency and we would charge by the hour so you needed to find a safe space between speed and safety. I wrote some nice, and some not so nice code there.

I now work at a much larger company and the environment is vastly different. We focus heavily on metrics, are very careful with testing, make sure to design design components, security reviews, and have plenty of documentation.

I really do wish software engineering could be used as the term to identify this kind of environment where it's not just about the code, but about all the stuff you do around code to ensure it's safe.
> but clearly doesn’t scale when you become the market yourself

Any market-beating strategy will no longer work when the market adopts it. I.e. if you have such a strategy, keep it to yourself as long as practical.
To be fair, when he started he didn't know he wanted to talk to doctors. That was after a pivot.

Also, $40k is downright cheap compared to most failed projects to improve medicine. If it were someone else's money, that is.
Objection! Don't do that here. (this is a joke btw)
Mostly they're being polite (and showing they understand perfectly well how they could use it, so no need to explain its purpose any further thanks). They're not really misleading themselves...

Ultimately the author's problem is that he was showing Susan a clever project that looked much more attractive than notes she'd usually consult rather than asking her how many times a year she wasn't sure what to prescribe and how difficult it actually was for her to get a sound recommendation from a source she trusted.

Even if he was trying to demo a finished product rather than figuring out if it should exist, asking those questions would still have been more likely to put her in the frame of mind where she asks about or spots the really difficult to ascertain info that has professional liability repercussions rather than just liking the UI and being impressed that this programmer is citing the Hamilton Rating Scale for depression)
Oh wow, thank you! It's so nice to hear that my blog had that kind of impact.
Apparently it's not running anymore, but https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ is sort of apropos. It's an entirely bot-generated subreddit. You can still read through the old posts.
>HN guidelines

The comment to which I'm responding explicitly argues that the phrase, verbatim, is a good sales tactic.
It's certainly impressive, they'll have done two full architecture shifts now on their desktop product line pretty seamlessly.
> Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine...

Did he though? He even mentions that customers generally pick whatever (because they don't really care what's the perfectly optimized headache pill they should take) and doctors thought it was neat, but no one really wanted to pay for it. Their solution (e.g. prescribing what they would typically prescribe) was good enough.

It doesn't really sound like there's a problem there.
Honestly I think the legal status quo is pretty close to ideal: governments may not limit speech, but platforms can clamp down on anything they want. The only problem with the platforms is that they still somewhat cling to the idea that they won’t censor speech, which is frankly ridiculous. Of course they will censor, they should just admit it and clamp down any speech they find abhorrent. Allow the marketplace (and marketplace of ideas) to work.
Solving your own problem and then saying "Oh I found someone interested in my solution" isn't really what they mean by finding customers though.
I am not sure how useful this map is, being uninhabited by humans does not mean useless. It also does not mean "hey, lets build something there".

What about agricultural land, forests, water, forests, wild life ?
For context, I don't expect any government to be able to prevent violence and conflict. The best we can hope for is to keep conflict to a manageable level. We've had numerous assassinations in this country in the past, and it held together. The threat of a possible assassination of a right-wing figure absolutely does not rise to the level of "existential threat". If you don't want to call it "adequately handled", fine, I'm not going to argue those semantic distinctions especially as it's not necessary for us to have the same perspectives here. I'm just saying that society is still intact, and would still be intact even if Mike Pence had been attacked.

Other than the personal tragedy to Pence and his family, the worst outcome of an assassination would be people struggling to reconcile their ecstatic glee that Pence had keen killed with their furious rage that right-wingers attacked someone. If anything, division and conflict within the Republican Party only seems to strengthen their opposition. These events lead to less power held by the right, not more. Republicans shooting themselves in the foot is not an "existential threat to civilization".
She posted it again with impunity, so it basically was free, seeing as she was not deplatformed after the first or second time doing it.
Nobody censors conservatives. Hate speech is censored.

The fact that most conspiracy theories, hate speech, and violence comes from the right is not our problem. It's not "censorship".
I'm not sure what the big deal is. I've finished my studies and got a title that includes "software engineering".

Even with that title, I don't think it's a big deal if someone who didn't get the same title calls himself an engineer. Talk is cheap, but if you can create systems you can call yourself an engineer in my opinion.
iOS-only aside, Clubhouse is one of the most diverse modern social apps I've been on. As a white man, I often seem to be in the racial or gender minority which is refreshing and helps me hear more interesting conversations and viewpoints.
I went to a museum in the Netherlands full of various automated band builds, and some of them were incredible (also huge), but definitely a massive difference between hearing it live vs recording. I couldn't imagine what seeing of one these in the streets would be like back in the day.
Eh. I did a bunch of statistical modeling for cloud service SLIs/SLOs/SLAs. This approach is good for letting people do black-box modeling. It sounds like complete overkill for recipes.

A recipe is not a black box. Most recipes are short and can be written on a half page of paper. If it calls for two chopped onions and you know that it takes you an “eternity” to chop onions, then add two eternities to the cooking time.

And as long as you are spending two eternities chopping onions, why not spend 90 seconds watching a video on YouTube that explains how to do it correctly? For most people—if you are cooking regularly, and practicing good technique, you will naturally get faster over time. If, like many people, you are cooking for decades, then you will be slow for only a short time.
Psychiatrists are simply experimenting on each person they prescribe medications to. The status quo is indoctrination, and in this case, the psychiatrist wasn't even willing to use actual research based data to improve the treatment of their patients - even referencing that they won't make anymore money because the patient won't come back more often or refer more patients because of it. This is abhorrent unprofessional behaviour - but it's likely the attitude of 90%+ of the field.

Edit to add: if you think a practitioner putting their own revenue/profits above providing quality care, then something's wrong with you.
I don't think most doctors or customers would even consider this to be a real problem. For some specific, rare conditions sure. But for Tylenol? Come on. No one is going to pay for that.
Yes exactly! When you ask someone for their estimate, you're getting a quote from them.

When you actually want to predict the length of time something will take, you rely on historical data and create a projected forecast. It never involves asking somebody for their best guess. That's how every single "other thing" we predict is handled, so why is software done differently.

Actually, I've seen some of these ideas being talked about in KanBan circles, like tracking lead time and cycle time, and then using monte carlo simulations to forecast, but I've never actually seen them in practice.
Searching your own gists is harder than search for a public one. I think it might be easier to make a gist repo and use comments for gists or the inline editor.
My Traitorous Move to Windows
Pip-Chill 1.0.1 - Like pip freeze, but chill
I think "free speech" is not quite as simple as a single concept.

Despite how it's often portrayed, Parler was not hosting uncensored speech, on the contrary it was a heavily moderated platform controlling for a certain set of speech.

I'm not convinced that this example (really any of the examples of speech surrounding Trump) are actually representative samples of what private communications products not subject to control by any central authority looks like.

There is still someone that was exercising free uncensored speech here (under the american 1st amendment definition) - but that person is the person running Parler, and not the users. What we observed with this deplatforming was one set of platforms with relatively little censorship (though a fair bit in absolute terms) stop supporting a sub-platform with a lot of censorship.

One lesson I would take away from this is that enabling platforms on which censorship is performed by a third party not under your control can be scary. The amount of damage bad-faith moderation/censorship can do was surprisingly (to me) high - I would have thought people would notice and reject it more strongly. Uncensored platforms for speech might also be scary, but I don't think Trump gives much evidence for it (sites like 4-chan might, I don't really know).

Another lesson I would take away from reddit's handling of Trump (in general) is that manipulation of algorithmic content discovery can do a lot of damage. There we saw that happening with things like bots upvoting (as well as bad faith moderation), but I think the pattern is more general. If you can choose what people are looking at, especially if you can convince them that it's "organic content", it can do a lot of damage. I'm told that similar issues with Facebook/Youtube content discovery existed as well, but I don't have first hand experience with those issues (youtube tends to recommend random technical and rocket related content to me, and I barely use facebook).

Whether those lessons are "anti free speech" - well that's up to your definition of free speech. I don't think they are under my definition, but I think they are under the US constitutions definition.
>self-driving vehicle (on the highway at least)

I live about an hour outside a major city. I definitely will drive in (normally) for activities like theater. With a self-driving car--even just on the highways--I'd be more inclined to go in for an early evening get-together. But I wouldn't be popping in multiple times a week even if I didn't mostly need to drive myself.
yes, going from identification of the bug/idea to the solution in end users hands is a lot different than just the coding estimate. On teams with multiple levels of management both engineering side and customer side the actual code required to fix/implement the solution is such a small part of the overall effort you could, ironically, consider it immaterial.
>I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

Oh please. Not every product that's applicable to a given business would necessarily be beneficial to that business.

I get it, sales people have to drink the kool aid, but some humility is needed. Your product isn't right for everyone, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you can improve the quality of your lead generation.
The answer is a clear yes in my case, but I work on commercial numerical design and analysis software. The interleaving of computers and engineering entailed here makes a hard case that there is not an absolute "no" available. But computational software is a corner case, I know. (sigh)

We certainly view our pure CS people as experts in what they do -- and the things I see them do are, e.g., build out cloud based versions of our product, add new GUI features, automate build and test systems (until management tries to replace them with us... a dubious proposition at best). That's just the stuff I see day to day, since it's most closely tied with us on the numerical side. Why wouldn't that be engineering? I could speculate but I don't care to. We are all working to make the product the customers want.
I'm a Materials Engineer (I currently work in Metallurgy and industrial refining, before that Lithium Ion battery research).

One thing I don't think was covered in the article was liability. I think that is a major thing that separates software engineering from other branches of engineering. Maybe it is not the case in the US but in my country if I contribute to an engineering project I can be held accountable in a court of law for my work.

I can see a future where software has similar laws applied to it.
I know it's a video game, but I really think Hideo Kojima nailed it in MGS2 (2001):

https://youtu.be/C31XYgr8gp0?t=99

Or the transcript: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/95454286
No, I haven't encountered that yet. All of the JavaScript APIs I use seem to work consistently across browsers.

But I should mention that I ignore support for legacy browsers. I assume users have a version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari from the last year or two.
Here's how I might open a debate with right-leaning people about freedom of speech.

If you sell a product, but make false claims about that product, then you are committing fraud. You have harmed someone (financially) with your speech, and contract laws rightly overrule freedom of speech here. So, if you believe in contract law, which is essential for free markets, then you must believe in limitations on speech... the question then is simply where to draw the line.
(Fastmail CEO here)

We don't use Google ads or analytics. We do have a relationship with Google in order to allow our customers to use the OAuth flows for syncing in/out of Google accounts (gmail sync, calendar sync, contacts import). Which has been quite a lot of fun to maintain as they keep adding new conditions - we are about to have to pay a security auditor again for our yearly "make sure we comply with Google's conditions around how we handle data".

We are not required to retain metadata under the mandatory metadata collection law, because we don't have servers in Australia - and that's one of the conditions under which we would be captured by that law.

Yes, we do comply with lawful government requests - they're pretty rare and they are individual identified accounts, not blanket collection. That said, if you're planning to do something which is a crime in Australia and also a crime in your jurisdiction (assuming it has a mutual assistance treaty with Australia, which is most countries) then we might not be the ideal choice for you!

I have a draft for a blog post on the difference between privacy and absolute secrecy (extreme encrypted everything). Am looking forward to having that finished.
Google: AG Paxton’s misleading attack on our ad tech business
I think loops are not ideal for data analysis. They are prone to human error, especially ones that modify the data, and in a way that can be hard to sort (i.e.iterating over the dimensions of the wrong object). A stepwise creation of new logical fields using mutate, and then a vectorised ifelse command is more robust and you can clearly see steps of the logic.
It was a great reminder of why I will never use Apple Icloud or OneDrive, etc.
I imagine Clubhouse Live where folks listen to experts chime in real-time as events unfold.

I'm not so sure about the 'experts' yet, but I saw rooms spring up around the storming of the Capitol as well as for numerous Premier League football matches so far (I follow quite a few Brits though).
Only if you choose to think it's based on ideology. Fact is, 90% of the top links on FB are right-wing nonsense and conspiracy theories. Doesn't sound like curation to me.
This reminds me of Snorkel (though unclear from the article if they’re using Snorkel’s trick of aggregating many weak heuristics). It can be made to work even in the real world. The rub is that coming up with these programmatic labelers is easier said than done especially for complex data.

It works well if a domain expert can say something without “cheating” and looking at the data like “put a box around round red objects because those are always apples”. But in practice people tend to cheat and look at the data first, and you end up with humans trying to emulate ML, poorly.
My grandma programmed an arduino with stepper motors to change her Depends adult diapers. It does not yet auto-detect wet diapers but that’s next on the road map.
I'm grateful for this comment because it put into words the thing I couldn't.

I'm reading the epiphany part of this post, to quote:

You have a mind-shattering headache. You're standing in the aisle of your local CVS, massaging your temples while scanning the shelves for something—anything—to make make the pain stop.

What do you reach for? Tylenol? Advil? Aleve?

Most people, I imagine, grab whatever's cheapest, or closest, or whatever they always use. But if you're scrupulous enough to ask Google for the best painkiller, here's how your friendly neighborhood tech behemoth would answer:

[Screenshot of Google Search Results]

Oh thanks Google that's just all of them.

---end quote---

The author immediately identifies that this isn't a real problem, by their own admissions that "Most people, I imagine, grab whatever's cheapest, or closest, or whatever they always use." Yea, most people when they have a headache and know that most painkillers on the market will result in about the same degree of relief, don't bother to cross reference a medical meta-analysis, because they have a headache and if the $0.01 worth of aspirin doesn't make it feel better they will just take a second pill and eat the penny.

I like the author's conclusion about how to quickly validate business ideas, but even in the title the author still holds firm to the belief that this was a "fantastic startup idea" even though reality seems to think otherwise. Was this such a great idea, do most consumers actually want to review a meta-analysis when picking their OTC medicine, or do most people just try a few things, get influenced by advertising, and purchase the most reasonably priced medicine they think will help. I am just a single data point, but I don't normally feel naked and unscrupulous when I just read the symptoms that a medicine treats and pick one, and that strategy generally works just fine.

Solution in search of a problem and also in search of humans that act in this weird atypical fashion.
The power will go out after a few days.
Uh oh. This hydra seems to be growing another head after being 'de-platformed' off the internet. Now its starting to self-host with the likes of Gab and 8chan.

Maybe if they really wanted to de-platform them, perhaps they should avoid talking about them on their own platforms? They just couldn't resist.
I highly recommend the book: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. [1]

He goes in to all studies even down to the point that mushrooms, fungi have their own kind of "internet" that communicate to trees, plants and even to having their own commence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entangled_Life
> a giant brain that is continually self-improving

...nope, does not qualify. If it cannot manage to replicate itself completely (as in: create another separate 'internet' capable of further replication) it is as good as a single human living on Mars. It's a short ride, one small mistake and goodbye Mr. Superintelligence. (I'm not claiming humans will be able to survive that though.)
I find it odd that most of this could have been prevented if just one judge had said "you know what, you have a lot of notarized affidavits, and a reasonable claim to harm considering you lost the election by conventional wisdom, and you can't legally access any further data to prove your case unless we enter a discovery stage, so, sure, let's play this out and be done with it."

I also find it odd that none of the lawsuits prevented combined the affidavits (generally considered sufficient evidence to proceed) and reasonable proof of harm. Always one or the other (or neither).
It's obscene how we have this foster system that pays these parents for kid's hit-or-miss experiences rotating between families, when adoption, a generally better solution, costs over $10k in fees after proving via background checks that you're an angel. The system is so broken.
> Last I heard, in auto, if you’re a few hours late on a parts delivery you’re heavily penalized and the line risks being shutdown.

Maybe, but I suspect outsourcing to distributors is to blame. The automakers almost certainly outsourced the inventory risk and nobody is holding inventory anywhere.

If the automaker is the only customer having a parts problem, then the distributor has risk because a penalty by the automaker will absorb their profit from other customers.

If every customer is having a parts problem, the distributor can just laugh and say "Penalize us and we'll drop you and maybe declare bankruptcy. Have fun getting a new distributor in this mess after you penalize us."

Welcome to Always Late (aka Just In Time) Inventory.