skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Managing Growth in a late-stage startup: most depts (hr, mkt, sales, cs) perform growth experiments, I coach/facilitate/educate;

Think like this: most metrics can be improved with expertise; known knowns - - but some metrics need new solutions, and for that you need to analyse, hypothesise, experiment... unknown unknowns. And this is why growth is everybody's business.

Growth process is informed with insights from data science + behavioural science (this is my background)

Experiment design + implementation (randomised trials) + interpretation (bayesian based)

Decision to implement in production or scrub and start again.

quick wins:
//> a tweak to the search button yields 15% more sales

//> a change in ad copy lifts conversions 17%

//> behavioural recruiting interviews to be more objective...

//> ...and we do around 200 of these per year
I think one important difference is that GPT-3 is a generator without a discriminator, and decides the output in one pass. Humans have both and use multiple rounds to decide.

Do you remember sometimes you think of something and then stop and rephrase or just abstain? That's the discriminator working in the background, stopping us from saying stupid things.
"Below $50,000". And student loans have low rates unless you go private. Of course, who is more likely to need private loans they may not be able to pay? Probably not the trust fund kids.
It's cool to see how these posts are becoming less and less important in the wake of today's frameworks/tools protecting devs by default.

From ORMs escaping SQL, to FE frameworks escaping html/js, to browsers starting to default to same-site=lax. It feels like we've slowly pulled ourselves out of OWASP hell. Pretty nice to see!

Obviously it's still important (see log4j) to know it all especially when its not so clear cut, but still good progress.
Lot of good points already, but one that I've learned the hard way is never take on a "family" business as a client. You know the type of company where one brother is the CEO, another brother is the marketing director, random husbands and wives work for the company, etc.

I've never had a relationship with a family business last beyond the scope of the initial project. Things always fall apart because of family infighting, or because every business decision ends up being way too personal/emotional for them. It's never worth the hassle, trust me.
My Verizon Router resets and defaults to it.

(Oh.... and it resets randomly...)
The story wasn’t from Amazon... but yeah they do have a burn and churn culture.

I think it depends a lot on the group you’re in and where you land in the office politics. Microsoft used to be a nightmare in certain orgs and Intel used to be worse. I hear complaints about Google and Facebook at times, but those companies do seem to be more relaxed about things.

The roles I like tend to be well coveted and so are often the target of undermining. There is a process where one org wants to subsume the responsibility and budget of another org and so they will undermine the other org to ensure its failure. I was once forced to buy thousands of computers that were way over spec in order to blow out the budget and make it harder to justify the investment in the project. This is why we can’t have nice things.
> If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.

Enrollment was at record numbers immediately preceding the pandemic, and this was a trend that held for several years prior as well. Lots of colleges had been expanding their campuses like crazy in the Before Times.

I don't think the pandemic will result in a long-term shift away from this trend. By-and-large, college education remains is a worthwhile expenditure, despite the costs. You even agree, hence why you have three kids in college!

I can appreciate not going to college right now. Classes have been randomly cancelled, there have been lockdowns/classes going remote, professors aren't grading/lecturing at the levels they should be, students are doing the work, etc, etc. But once society reaches some level of normalcy again, I believe enrollment numbers will explode back to record levels.

Plus, cost-conscious students have more options than ever. A lot of community colleges are starting to offer 4 year degrees.
There is so much incredible content out there that we're being deprived of. As someone who loves the "discovery" aspect of the internet, I can't believe we dont have better tools for this. It's disturbing the degree to which our web experiences are curated now.
Added this :)
The bike paths are small now because hardly anyone uses them. If everyone and their mother was riding bikes around everywhere they’d have to be a lot bigger.

Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars. Bikes are A LOT less tolerant of poor conditions so it would be even worse. Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard. If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.
Reading just the title, I was expecting storing/serving magnet files on DNS, as someone did a few years back if I remember correctly (just as a joke/poc, not as a serious solution).

I'm pretty sure it was posted on hw, but I can't find the link anymore.
Mark my words - there is going to be a reverse trend, say 5-10 years from now. Same with color gradients, it will become uncool. It's all fashion.

> sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort

I have my doubts about this. It is 100% fad IMO.
I don't think so. Let me try to explain: regular languages are only viable as long as someone is willing to speak them and learn them. Latin being the obvious exception, but that's mostly because of medical science and biology, two very large branches of the scientific tree.

A DSL is a language with only a handful of users, each of which is usually in the normal path of employment (obvious exception: Chuck Moore). As soon as someone in a team that relies on a DSL leaves the loss of knowledge is immediate. Unlike any other language that you may have picked up in some other organization the DSL has instantly lost a sizeable fraction of those versed in it. It doesn't take many losses like to kill such a project.

Another problem is that even if the original authors hang around, the chances that they will stay fluent in their own DSL diminishes with increasing intervals between work on a particular project. If the code would be written in a 'normal' language then they would stay fluent.

So DSLs are not a good match for how we normally think about software, even though there is a 1:1 correspondence between the words in your typical DSL (say a FORTH word) and a function call. Functions tend to be written in terms of other functions, just like FORTH words are written in terms of other words, and yet, the standard library is never far away whereas with FORTH words it could easily be 30 words down before you hit the actual language.

I'd love to see something like a DSL based language but with longer term prospects, for a long time I hoped that Smalltalk would be that language but I have mostly given up on that.
It only works in your 20es because everyone else in your age group is also relocating. When you move you tear up your friends network and have to make new friends. Sounds easy, but people only have room for so many close friends in their life, they will be friendly to you but most won't have room to add another friend so making close friends is hard.
I’m of the opposite opinion. The entire circle should be in for it to count. Basing it off the center feels generous.

Great little fun game though!
It would be interesting to poll everyone and rate their concern for covid-19 on a scale from 0 to 10. The resulting histogram would show peaks at 1 and 9. I am in the small category that would rate it a 5 and feel they everyone around me has lost their minds.
Cool game, but the collision detection needs to work better. Currently can lose if partially touching, does not seem intuitive.
I can understand your opinion to a perspective, but I feel the position has changed dramatically. At this point, vaccines are available.

There is almost no feasibility in eliminating COVID at this point in time. It will mutate, and hence we need to be talking about the possibility of 'living with the disease'.

As such, how much damage are we doing damaging the education, and critical periods for these youths?

If the problem is protecting the parents and grandparents, why not do that, and isolate them rather than permanently damaging the youth.
I guess my point was that the price of a school system that touts itself as a world-leading research university may not be the best baseline for the cost of college—even if it’s a public university system. The Cal State system has always been the “affordable” public option for college in California.
> Maybe someone has a cut lip which is gone in the next scene

Agree in general. Atomic Blonde is one of the rare films that doesn't fall into this trap. The lead character gets cuts and bruises that persist between scenes and even changes her hair style at one point to hide a black eye picked up in a fight.
It happened with me as well.

My previous employer created stored procedures in a MSSQL database and called it a day.
I would love to know also. I came across an iphone 6s in the desk of a company that was acquired by the company I work for.
I thought it was near impossible so I just left it in the desktop and would probably eventually give it away to an iphone repair shop that might need the screen, body and home button.
I watch a lot of youtube because its really the only form of TV I enjoy any longer. But the recommendations are a drag for the reasons mentioned here. What I'd really like is a better channels concept -- collections of videos from people I subscribe to -- or perhaps other's channels that get regularly updated content. A mix of algorithmically generated, user generated, and generated from myself (ex: put all my guitar subs into the same channel). I keep expecting these things to exist but perhaps user error is holding me back.

Having a shared viewing experience with people with comparable interests would be particularly interesting. In that case, having channels that work a bit more like TV -- as opposed to on demand -- wouldn't be so bad because it links you up with other people currently watching it. Perhaps even voting to skip or replay.

Its one of those things where, I feel like there is an extraordinary amount of potential in this product still, but will it ever be tapped? It has so much innertia that time is more on its side than perhaps it should be.
The bizarre part is - I've seen a lot of youtubers say that they hate it, but that it also increases views by a fair amount. Which is... wierd.
Tend to agree. I did my Masters degree (pre-Covid) as part of a predominantly online program at a large university. It worked out well, but I cannot even begin to imagine doing an undergraduate program remotely and missing out on the campus experience. There's much more to "going off to college" than taking classes, and I fully understand why 18-22 year olds would not want to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to miss the bulk of that experience.
I was actually surprised by the sentence "bad means something is bad" given that substituting the second "bad" for a synonym is well within NLP models' capability, and you'd expect training processes to eliminate that level of tautology in model outputs.

Then I remembered Github copilot wasn't optimised for natural language, it was optimised for programming, where [near] tautology isn't unusual and variable names aren't supposed to be swapped out...
Church parking lots are the perfect example how things fail when your capacity planning only looks at averages.

What would your solution be for venues that have spiky attendance? Concert venues, nightlife, sports arenas, seasonal tourism?

Because sure you can centralize parking and then make people walk but there’s a reason we have many different tiers of caches.
No, I am not thinking of twenty years ago, I accurately stated the cost of tuition today, which generally does not include renting a place to live, on-campus or otherwise, or a meal plan.
The model assumes a persona from the training set, we just don't know which one unless we tell it upfront.
My experience also. This is particularly bad in the SQL Server space, since Microsoft essentially dropped source control integration in SQL Server Management Studio 2016 and later (there's an official workaround[0], but it's not well received).

Most likely they're happy to offload version control to add-ins. There are a few, but most of them are way out of budget for small businesses or small IT departments. Which means version control usually doesn't happen.

This has been such a problem for me with clients that I started a side project[1] to try to help fill the gap. If anything it's shown me that the problem is more widespread than I originally thought.

[0] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/11/21/source...

[1] https://www.versionsql.com/
Yes, but also he's not trying to make films that have to be suitable for eight year olds.
>Except, it's a story as old as time. Everybody ever has attempted to influence the beliefs of others.

Using ranged weapons is a tale as old as time, but the invention of the bow and arrow and the invention of the ICBM are still very different. Trying to convince people when you had to talk to them face to face is different than being able to mass print reading materials. Trying to convince people through a limited available bandwidth of a radio station is different than being able to have one of a thousand cable channels. Communicating with a mass audience is different than being able algorithmically modify your communication on a per person basis. It's a mark of the shallowness to dismiss the current information environment and its ability to manipulate mental blind spots as nothing new.
Every competing platform? I can think of a few alternatives, starting with this one we are on right now. But some people are still choosing Facebook, and they are choosing it willingly, happy they do not have to pay for it with anything more than some targeted ads...
Thanks, the article could benefit from a bit more background like this, with a few simple examples, for example going from the (double) pendulum or cartpole equation of motions to the A matrix, same for B.
A recent ruling about Cookiebot and their use of Akamai indicates that even EU-located servers run by a US company run afoul of GDPR. The core issue is that the US CLOUD Act gives US law enforcement access to data on those servers.
I started working with C# about 6 months ago. I'd read that post before, but I'm only just now understanding it. I think I really missed the boat when it comes to things like OO programming patterns. I'm still kinda fuzzy on the visitor pattern he mentioned. I think I get it?

The abstraction he offered, of having a tree and then visiting every node in that tree, made the most sense.

> One of the most common usages of this pattern is for the scenario where you’ve got a complex tree where tree nodes can be of many types, and you wish to traverse the tree — that is, visit every node in the tree — taking some actions or performing some computations as you go. The “double dispatch” part of it is that the actions you take as you visit nodes in the tree can depend on the runtime types of both the nodes in the tree, and the code performing the action.

That sounds like a parser. It accepts an AST and evaluates productions on its way through. Saying "actions you take ... depend on the runtime types of ... nodes ... and the code performing the action" sounds similar to sorting out how to mash tree-traversal and productions together.

In my compilers class we first wrote a code linter for our "Wombo" language (a simplified Java). Then we wrote something that built an AST. The core tree traversal code was the same, but the "productions" paired with nodes were different.
Depends how you look at it. If you're from a poor state, you can get into a solid flagship school (including medical school) even if you could never get in to places with single-digit admissions (like the top tier ofCalifornia schools). Whereas people who would be able get into the high-ranked California Universities can probably get full scholarships to solid out-of-state private schools too.
> That's just anthropomorphising a neural network, which is anything but intelligent.

What is intelligence? GPT-3 seems to perform better than my dog at a load of these tasks, and I think my dog is pretty intelligent (at least for a dog).

I mean, to me this does seem to show a level of what intelligence means to me - i.e. an ability to pick up new skills and read/apply knowledge in novel ways.

Intelligence != sentience.
Sorry, how does this happen if you’re using DB parameter in the query string?
I don't see how a web that depends on advertising and the whims of foreign megacorps is « free ». If anything it leads to lower standards of free speech and discourse.
The entire premise of the author's argument is based upon the idea that nothing regarding the mechanics of the pandemic have changed, just our attitudes. But that's obviously wrong. Vaccinations are available. Effective treatments are available. Omicron is not Delta. We understand the disease orders of magnitude better than we did in March of 2020. The costs of emergency pandemic measures are compounding. Children haven't had a huge gap in their learning and socialization. Inflation is starting to skyrocket. Meanwhile, the actual fatality rate of Covid has plummeted.

There are a group of people who seem to be completely unable to process any of this, and while the rest of the world has moved on, they maintain a deathgrip on the fear and apocalyptic visions from 18+ months ago. Adapting to changing reality and refusing to entertain histrionics isn't "surrender", its what we would expect.
I can't emphasize this enough. This isn't a matter of taste, like, maybe you sanitize, maybe you escape on the way out, it's all good, it all works, it's just a matter of opinion.

Sanitizing the input is wrong. Actively, objectively, unrecoverably wrong. Once you've destroyed your data you can't get it back. Huge amounts of effort have been wasted by people trying to fix and recover data that was destroyed by systems "helpfully" "sanitizing" data. God help you if you have a sequence of these systems in a row each doing their own "sanitization" before you get the data.

Do not "sanitize" your inputs. Do not tell other developers to sanitize their inputs. Do not sagely spout off on HN about the importance of sanitizing your inputs. It is wrong.

The only "sanitization" that should be done is that when encoding to the output there are sometimes things that should simply be removed. For instance, a good HTML escaping function probably ought to entirely drop nulls, not even encoding them as &#00; or anything, just drop them. Some of the other ASCII characters are straight-up illegal in HTML as well, even encoded. But all that sort of "sanitization" should be in the escaping step. If you want to reject null characters at input time, that's part of validation, not sanitization.
I had a quick skim of the report. This so fucking sad. Figure 3 is heartbreaking.
> What the subcontractor does with the data is the responsibility of the website owner

That's my issue. Since Google has legal entities in Europe they should be held accountable as well. Right now they are offering and marketing a service which is more or less illegal to use. If it were some company outside Europe, then yes by all means the website owner should make sure the 'subcontractor' is in compliance.
How Does Covid Spread? Virus’ Infection Capacity Weakens After 20 Minutes in Air
The town next to me in Indiana has giant oversized parking lots. I swear the Target parking lot is 3 times as large as the Target itself.
I suppose once you have kids, working from home is also more of a chore than a perk, which I suspect is a big part of reason for the split in attitude
It'd be more fun if you somehow got "bonus points" for reducing the time between clicks. I kept playing it safe trying to time the ball but it kind of felt like cheating!
The average debt for recent college grads is around $30-40k, quarter-million figures are outliers . Doctors may accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, but they easily make up for it in income.
They are not that different. I graduated from a no name school a few years ago and am doing fine.
Don't mess with licenses. Just keep the copyright with the code in the project. They have your permission to use the widget (implied license, basically), so they're in the clear, but they won't be able to distribute it beyond what you've allowed, legally.
> They being who, under what law?

Governments, under any law they wish to create. In some countries (eg Australia) they can (and have) created retrospective legislation that makes what was perfectly legal when you did it now illegal, and then prosecute you for it.
> Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not.

What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways, and I'd argue much more so than engineering or CS majors.
"Because it is code?"
Even better- never sanitize your data.

You should only use templating systems which safely handle user data. Don't use innerHTML assignments, don't concatenate user data into SQL queries. Use existing, validated libraries for generating HTML and SQL.
I wonder if there's a market for schools that specifically don't have a sports program. I suspect the atmosphere at such a place would be attractive to a large minority of prospective students.
It doesn't provide $1 worth of value to anyone but some of the highest earners for whom such a "time savings" of seconds might be valuable.

It's primary value is to the person being rolled because they aren't paying for anything.

Automating something people weren't getting laid to do provides value to someone else not the person paying.

Maybe it's not controversial so much as misguided and looking at the picture from the wrong perspective. Who is it providing value to? What did that person save through the automation and how much is that worth if you actually parse out how many such "value periods" they experience in a day.

The idea that a very simple division question is worth $1 when everyone has a cell phone they already paid for in their pocket to do division for them is ludicrous when you realize there are tens of thousands of such time periods in a day but very few people are making tens of thousands of dollars a day.
The predatory part is the pushing kids who don't understand finances into taking massive loans with high interest rates.

I've passed on a traditional uni for this because I want to avoid debt, and still get "why don't you go to uni?"'d every so often by family and acquaintance's.

And if the argument is "well, if you don't make enough to pay it, just don't!", as GP appears to be, I don't like spending other people's tax dollars dishonestly - especially not on textbook companies [0] and an expanding administrative staff.

[0] Which bribe and cut-throat their way into forcing $100+ payments per student per class per semester. Pirating or buying second hand doesn't even work half the time now - you need the "online access", aka DRM.