skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think active learning has a time and a place. If you're getting started with a project from scratch, you probably don't need active learning for the exact reasons you describe - as long as you still get good improvements to model performance by labeling randomly sampled data, then you should scale out your labeling to get more data faster. For modern convnets fine-tuned on image data, I don't think you should think about active learning until you're past 10,000 examples.

Active learning becomes really useful when you hit diminishing returns, as most real-world ML applications deal with long tail distributions, and random sampling doesn't pick out edge cases for labeling very well. An easy way to tell if you're encountering diminishing returns is to do an ablation study where you train the same model against different subsets of your train set, evaluate them against each other on the same test set, and plot out the curve of model performance vs dataset size to see if you're starting to plateau. Or just eyeball your model errors and try to see if there's any patterns of edge cases it fails on.

Lastly, I'm pretty skeptical of model-based uncertainty sampling. In industry, almost every active learning implementation is very "what data should we label next," since model-based active learning is pretty hard to set up and confidence sampling is often not very reliable. That being said, I've anecdotally heard of some teams getting great performance from Bayesian methods once you have a large enough base dataset.

Anyway, here's my shameless plug for a post we wrote on the topic: https://medium.com/aquarium-learning/you-should-try-active-l...
Not really. Google docs, Gmail, Google maps, Google translate work pretty well for me.

In fact, they work faster and more reliably than competitors. Office 365 web sucks, for example.
I thought it was Venezuela?
LGBTQ Americans at heightened risk for severe coronavirus symptoms, CDC says
> If you understand tech better than most investors, you can get some edge in the long term performance of stock

Yes, but, the number of opportunities to trade based on a deep understanding of a certain industry are limited. I've picked individual stocks a few times when I was certain they were undervalued and poised to do well. These few times I turned out right. But years go by without these opportunities presenting themselves.
Never having heads of this before, I just popped over to Google and searched for "docker distribution" and this was the very first result. I don't think Google is going to care much if you use hyphens or spaces to separate words like that.
Web platform's hidden gems – Shape Detection API
From what I understand of the law, they wouldn't be able to offer those services anyway. The law essentially boils down to: "The following services (Google and Facebook for now) must pay per hyperlink for anything newsworthy."
It worked if "list" was specifically a dictionary one of whose keys was the tuple (1, 2, 3, 4), and only then because Python allows you to omit the parentheses around the tuple in most situations.

Or it could work with a custom type with overridden operators through __getitem__.

It's a stretch to call it "completely normal" though I believe you're correct in a strict sense: you could always construct the rest of your program such that it would contain that line and still compile. It would be extremely bad style.
I had a high school science teacher who was demonstrating controlled burning of sodium and potassium one day by slicing of pieces from a large sample. Being covered in oil, the main chunk got away from him and dropped into the lab sink which was unfortunately wet from previous cleaning. A vigorous reaction ensued :)
I used it for a couple WPF apps (of all things) a couple years back. F# is so nice for anything with a good amount of "business logic".
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin Billionaire Arthur Hayes
Yolt brings Open Banking to UK mortgage lending
Have a look at matrix - https://matrix.org/
With the right tooling and libraries, C++ could be both powerful and easy. Of course it means marrying a platform usually, of which there are many..
SEEKING WORK | EUROPE | REMOTE

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, Node.js, graphql, Docker, kubernetes, jenkins, aws, cloud, devops, backend, agile, scrum, kanban, python, ruby, shell scripting, linux, chef, ansible, ci/cd

Résumé/CV: http://bit.ly/2HucTwp

https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudio-viola/
The cause isn't just economic, or just attributed to simply "capitalism", but there's certainly a lot of economic aspects- inequality, regulatory capture, financialization, decline of unions (in a word- neoliberalism), etc. But true, it's possible a society's values also informs its expectations. It's not just the wealthy seeking to maximize their wealth by all means possible. And so the problem isn't just economic, or even just political. It's also be cultural. Certainly there's additional perverse incentives with the current system, and not all of it is just simple profit-seeking.

The McD example is definitely mirrored in the U.S. as rising unemployment for college graduates, the swelling numbers of college students, and increasing university tuitions all happen at the same time. And here too, many service employers would consider graduates as overqualified for their jobs. Hiring expectations- including in tech- often do reflect cultural perspectives and not necessarily economic realities.

I wouldn't go as far as to say the American Dream died until after the '70s or '80s, but certainly the '60s could be seen as lost potential to correct the course. However, I'm also drawn by Adam Curtis' thesis that the counterculture of the hippies, in contrast to the civil rights movement, focused too much on individualistic self-transformation and thus was unable to turn into a mass movement that could actually affect political, material change.

Touching fish isn't really meant to be a way to bring about systemic change, it's just how those who are suffering from 996 seek to cope with what they're put under. It does show there is somewhat of widespread dissatisfaction with what's going on under involution.
It might be better with AR, where you still get the ambiance but with virtual monitors.
The docs today claim one is able to self-delete - https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/240/how-do-i-deactivate-...
Well, as someone who may create IP, I would like recourse to the legal system in order to enforce ownership of what I create. I imagine there are many people like me.
It's pretty obvious that the Republican party and their peripherals (fox news, et al) have caused way more damage than the Democrats.

Obvious to whom, and damage to whom? Even those are things we need to work to restore a common view on. Even if you're right (and w.r.t. Fox News it'd be hard to be wrong), based on those I know who vary from middle left to far right, apportioning partisan blame, and blame in general, is just not going to be a productive way to frame the path forward. Maybe we need to take a breather, ignore who said what and why, and just look at where we really are, where we think we're going, and what we (as people, not as groups or parties or labels) can mutually agree to do to improve where we're going, and to find more common ground where we disagree on the fundamentals.

There are far too many things for just a few of us in a single HN thread to solve, of course, and I suppose proposing that we "elites" "solve" them is one of the things that contributes to the coastal/inland left/right rift. But every time I feel compelled to comment on a political discussion on HN, I'm still going to try (and occasionally fail) to keep searching for a way out, rather than just adding to the volume of what already exists, and encourage everyone who reads this to do the same. We know there is pain, we know there are voices to be heard. Now we need to use that pain to come together instead of to break apart. If we can find ways to do this on HN, maybe we can spread that to all the other communities we are part of.
Security Council Press Statement on Situation in Myanmar
LGBTQ is not a useful health category for AIDS -- gay men are at high risk but not lesbians. What about covid?
Surely it would be easier to use neutrinos?
> It also updates in realtime as I code.

If anyone knows how to turn this off in vim/ale, I'd appreciate it.
If this Church-encoding workaround were useful, there would need to be at least one concrete situation where you find it useful.

It's apparently not useful in languages with sum types, and it doesn't seem useful in an object-oriented language either (where you'd use the normal visitor pattern). So, when is it useful? The author doesn't have a practical example.

I guess there might be a language somewhere that has neither sum types nor methods? It's kind of a reach.

But, maybe it's useful educationally, as a good way to think about problems? That doesn't seem particularly likely either, considering that you can apply the visitor pattern just fine without knowing about Church encodings at all.

Disparaging "double dispatch" as "epicycles" while promoting Church encoding as "legit" just seems out of touch with how practical programmers think. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use Church encoding to explain what's going on to a newbie.

Maybe there is some other situation where it's useful, but it's not explained.
No intension to get caught in a partisan flame war. I think both sides are pretty biased.

MSNBC was sued for slander a little while back when Rachel Maddow said OAN (a right wing news organization) “really literally is paid Russian propaganda.” That turned out not to be factually correct. MSNBC lawyers successful argued that what she said was just her opinion and didn't actually represent a factual statement.
Another Lin Wood character who needs some mental help.
On a slightly later time scale, I still remember the time I first saw a OC192 linecard in a router in person, at a major IX point, and how incredibly impressed I was. This was in the era when a transcontinental, or submarine transatlantic OC192/STM64 circuit was an astonishingly huge amount of money every month.
ICBMs also use celestial navigation systems for same reasons.
Same story as with Article 17 back then. Remember how the deputies in the EU parliament claimed they "accidentally pressed the wrong button"?

The part about pushing this through under the radar is particularly frustrating. At least we are getting daily news about coronavirus and antisemitism.
Another example of the support for type hints turning code which should be invalid into valid code with unexpected behaviour:

https://mobile.twitter.com/reuvenmlerner/status/129031712499...
Both parties are bad because only bad parties can succeed in our bad system. Also because they're basically identical. They are ants contending over a postage stamp, on a continent of political possibility. The only thing we can expect them to do is what they've already been paid by lobbyists to do before. That's why CARES Act is more of the same, except worse, that we already saw in the 2008-9 "bailouts". The next time most Americans suffer some easily foreseeable disaster, we can be sure that billionaires will feast even more and regular people will be helped even less.

There's no logical reason to be fighting seven wars, having 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners and 20% of its covid deaths... and 800 billionaires. Our polity is shit. We're not in a local maxima. Literally any possible change would be for the better. The system we have cannot be changed via the methods it allows, however. Juvenile pleas for understanding only prolong our misery.
>that does not exclude some memory being stored elsewhere

If RNA is not simply the conduit between DNA and protein, but the original biological operating system, from which many functions have been refactored out to DNA and protein it's fascinating to think about what other functions may have existed and may still exist entirely in RNA.

I like to assume that RNA is the original biological information store, the original structural material and the original catalyst. DNA is the long term cache version of RNA information, and protein the improved structural and catalytic material.
The information in RNA can be translated directly to and from DNA, and there is an interesting idea that the mapping from RNA codon to amino acid may have began directly on the RNA strand, some RNA sequences seem to have an affinity for certain amino acids.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26876/#_A1136_
Ask HN: Do you love programming or is it a chore?
My story: I was really into programming as a kid, did some basic stuff in BASIC and some HTML / JavaScript at the turn of the century when I was 12-13.

I enrolled in an IT course but switched majors to Business after one semester, as I hated staying up all night fixing my bugs. I generally thought I was good at programming (first in school, scholarship at university etc), but at the time I was 18 I fell in love with accounting & finance.

Fast forward to today, 15 years on, I am happy with my work in business, but I have really rediscovered my love of programming and through working on side projects, have advanced past what I did during my earlier life.

I wonder however, if my love for programming is because it’s not my job and I didn’t spend 15 years on - it’s like a nice hobby. If I stayed with IT when I was young and became a programmer, I wonder if I would still love it or if I would love business instead, since the latter would now be something novel for me?

So I’m asking on how your love for programming has developed over the years? Has working full time in IT reduced some of the charm and you now like spending your time on non-IT hobbies outside of work, or is your passion burning strongly 24.7?

These days I would love a job in IT, but I wonder if that’s because I have not been exposed to working for others and not simply on my hobby programs.
Unfortunately, that view needs organizational support. If the stakeholders can't appreciate the work done because their perspective is that of an end-user, then a developer is going to have difficulties getting recognized for that type of work.

It's features that are rolled out for end-users the ones that have the most visibility.
This is very true. Reproducible builds for mobile apps would be far superior. You can build Signal from source for Android if you wish, although obviously this is a massive pain to do for each update, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it.

On iOS it's a lot more difficult to get the required certificates from Apple but you can run your own build in Xcode and deploy it to your personal device if you are a registered Apple developer.

While reproducible builds are obviously the gold standard, for apps you install from the Play Store or the App Store, developers sign the apps that get distributed with their own private keys. As Google and Apple don’t have access to these it should be verifiable that the apps are not tampered with.

There is an exception here with the Play Store, where there is an opt-in option for Google to sign the app on your behalf [1], but I think we can safely assume Signal are manually signing with their own private keys.

In any case it's easy to just grab an APK from an Android device and check signatures for yourself.

For iOS though, no surprises here it’s locked down. Although from what I gather reading Apple’s security documentation, it confirms that apps must be signed by developers with their private keys. [2] But unlike Android there’s sadly no way I can tell for the user to independently verify this without jailbreaking.

But ultimately, short of building each version yourself, all this is moot if you distrust the developers.

[1] https://developer.android.com/studio/publish/app-signing
[2] https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
Virgil Griffith was told not to enter North Korea by the US government, and snuck in through China anyway. He admitted to specifically talking about how to use cryptocurrencies to avoid sanctions, and admitted he knew at the time that that was illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/north-korea-virg...
I’m not interested in using type annotations in Python. But, whenever I express my wish that they hadn’t been added to the language, the reply is always “they’re optional, you don’t have to use them”.

Thank you for yet another example of why there’s really no such thing as an “optional” feature.
I guess back in 1985, it was the easy to use version of C...

It handles allocating and deallocating memory for you, keeping data and code together, a nicer way to write to the console, and other basic things.

I think you have to look at it with 40-year-ago eyes to see it...
I suppose as long as everyone knows the etymology of this "distribution" and remembers to use the word docker before it, then it should be fine. Probably a conversation best had 10 years from now. :)
Does it include a concurrent garbage collector?

And does it solve the infamous GIL (global interpreter lock) problem?
"Scala language server with rich IDE features"

https://scalameta.org/metals/
Could cornstarch be pressed into transparent sheets?
> In mega enterprises the CEO matters a lot, but the next 3 or 4 layers often exist primarily to ... diffuse accountability

It took me a while before I understand the political side of how this works. For a while, the biggest question in my head was what the CEO gets out of the whole transaction -- the manager intuitively gets power vis-a-vis proximity, but what does /their/ manager get out of it?

I think this confusion wears off the first time you see a sacrifice in management made. That's when you start being able to see how the value chain which is attached to that confidence default occur. Then it becomes completely rational that decision insurance is priced into both the manager's internal calculus and that of the corporation.

The problem with running a company this way is that "your margin" eventually becomes "my opportunity" and that transition gets especially jerky in a frothy market like the one we have now. Do you really need the layers of middle management there, at all? If someone raised a boatload of cheap capital and rebuilt the high margin bigmoat stuff from scratch, would they out-execute you?
There are schools of thought who believe grains (all grains) cause inflammation with some being better than others.

The special carbohydrate diet would encourage bacon and an oil/fat based diet over any grains ever.

Drinking bone brothe soup instead of eating oatmeal in the morning would be healthier.
In fact, only half of the hydrogen originates from the POWERPASTE; the rest comes from the added water.

Indeed, it seems it's an hybrid of your fellow's tech, using magnesium both as a substrate for H2 and as a reducing agent for water: Mg + 2H2O -> Mg(OH)2(aq) + H2(g)

Less explosive than Na, hopefully :)
which framework would you recommend instead of Akka?
Why do we cling to the idea that the present form of our economy is somehow justified or sustainable?
There seems to be a limit to how useful home automation gets - in fact this is common across car and most other areas too.

I have a hard time describing it but the write up above triggered something.

I am interested in setting up wifi-valves on my home radiators - this would be really useful in a three storey house as getting balance right otherwise is impossible. But turning on lights and closing curtains just seems to be a foolish trade if complexity for convenience (ie we bought a big second hand car that had electric doors - they were great - till they stop working and you realise there are electric motors, sensors, relays and god knows what else where there used to be a lever.)

Anyway pretty much anyone can see that trade off (even if they do get excited by the electric doors and buy the darn thing anyway).

No the issue is the motion sensor and the lights. I have found myself in offices with those devices - it's a good idea saves electricity- and I understand how it works without any difficulty - and the solution is easy too - a motion sensor has timed out, therefore wave my arms around.

The interface is simple.

But when we add "smart" to it - when we write some algorithm to work out if a person is still in the room - either by direct sensing or cunning working out if they were in room A and now are in B, we end up in failure edge cases quite quickly.

And the problem is it is it simple or intuitive to work out how to "wave our arms" to fix it. If the room assistant is counting people in and out, what happens if I carry my daughter in, but she walks out - how many people are left in the room? How do I deregister ?

A similar thing happened with those electric doors - I let my kids jump out to go see Gran, parked too close to a tree. The electric door wanted to roll back to its full open position before coming forward to shut. But the tree won't let it go fully back. Ok the the engine back on and drive two feet - oh, I can't drive cos the door is open. Shut the door, but the door wants to go back first and hits the tree ... it took two grown men fifteen minutes to work that one out.

The problem is that software engineers like us have tried to make sensible defaults and decision trees - but we fail to cover everything.

Now FOSS is a partial solution to this - but for any appliance, for any IoT, for any thing that I am not paid professionally to understand, if I have to read the code to workout how to get around it, something is seriously wrong.

I am not sure where this leads - it's just ... user friendly usually is not. Simplicity is not just hard but sometimes orthogonal to sales and growth and, frankly I dont think most of our lives need more automation - i think we need help, actual assistance, advice and good curation.

I think I just wrote the opening paragraph on my chapter in MOOP.
rustc sadly comes to a screeching halt when anything is done with generics. I seriously don‘t understand the obsession with naming generics „T“, „X“ or „Z“. Single character variables have been declared bad since the 60s, why hasn‘t the same happened for generic type parameters?
I teach Python to learners.

It has substantial pain points, the most significant in my opinion being the semantic white space that never really ever stops being a problem.

JavaScript runs in the browser, has relatively trivial syntax, no semantic white space, C-like, a superior and more useful GUI, etc.

I see no reason to teach Python per se unless people request it.
The answer is in the first section titled "What is metals"- it is a language server for editors and IDEs to base their scala support on.
A language server that helps you write Scala code
for a less comedic take, take daniel quinn's jellyfish parable in ishmael, an adventure of mind and spirit.

an anthropoligst visits an alien planet and talks to a jellyfish about its cultures creation myth. indignant, the jellyfish recoil - they have no such myth, only a scientific account as rational creatures. obviously, agrees the researcher; did life first appear on land or sea? confused, the jellyfish ask what is meant. well, the researcher, says, was the first life here or over there (pointing past the shore inland). the jellyfish are more confused - there is nothing past the shoreline. that is the edge of the great bowl that holds the ocean.

https://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/youth/chorus/workshop5/17372...

it is a simple tale, but its simplicity is somehow lost on most of our population, both scientific and otherwise. the idea that we're at the pinnacle of knowledge for anything is very silly.

operate with assumptions, but dont pretend theyre not assumptions. we're still learning.
How to Develop Dags in Airflow Through TDD and Config CI with GitHub Actions
Hey folks I wrote an article/tutorial about how to develop DAGs using TDD (test-driven development) and how to setup a CI with Github Actions