skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One issue is that the number of historical data points used in the model is really very very small. The author's point out that the model initially was fit to 1,152 CDC data points.

However, these 1,152 data points are highly temporally correlated (the value at time t is a strong predictor of the value at time t+1). As such, they aren't "worth" very much when building a model. Therefore, the effectively independent number of points (what you generally need to build a good model) is in reality much smaller.

Looking at the graphs, it appears that for each flu season there is a pretty regular spike of flu incidences. This spike could probably be summarized effectively by four parameters:

- Mean

- Standard Deviation

- Skewness

- Kurtosis

Looking at it this way, the number of "independent" data points of a flu season is not 365 (one for every day the year), 52 (one for every week), or even 12 (one for every month). Instead it is only 4.

Thus the total amount of data they had to build their model was 4*(# years). When you have such small data sets, you can't expect to obtain good results.

TL;DR. Time series are very hard to use in predictive models. It is often impossible to generate good predictive models based off them.
Getting stuck in your ways is a liability.

Someone who is continuously improving, while remaining aware of the current environment, will have experience as an asset.

Edit to your edit: You have much to learn...That's reality. Don't worry, I also have much to learn ;-)
Universities these days are sitting on huge cash reserves. And then also look at how much cash is being spent on new buildings. Buildings at Stanford were torn down are less than 8 years old.
It sounds like he is saying that Scrum is not compatible with platform specifications because those are too stringent… From my experience, those are not very appropriate as goal posts, but they don’t make scrum unusable; there is just a secondary list of goals between Playable (locally) and Shippable, in addition to game specification.

Not sure why he calls the first one ‘Potentially shippable’ though, not when he imagines project development with significant artwork drafts that should not be shipped: contradiction is within his own interpretations, there, not incremental methodology.
Adding to what mooism said, there is a general "consensus" of sorts as to which sorting algorithm is "best". "Best" in this case would be fast enough for most general purpose computing.

The answer is: Timsort. It's a combination of mergesort and some kind of insertion sort. It's currently used in the default sorting libs of Java, Python, Android, Octave.. blabla.

But there WILL come a time where you need to write your own sorting algo(or use a different algo from a different lib). This is where you need to know your sorting algos and their times/memories tradeoff
USM holds pilot in which students use free 'open-source' textbooks
An interesting point. The pardon power is presently a check on the legislative, though. Vesting it in the person in charge of the legislative would be a tremendously significant change in ways entirely unrelated to the desired pressure towards fewer laws.

I'm not going to say this couldn't possibly be a good idea, but it'd need very close scrutiny and probably other changes.
But why do they care so much about hours and not about output? I would kind of understand if this was for some web technologies since older devs might not be up to speed with the latest compile-to-JS language but I can't imagine that someone who has been writing say C++ for the last 20 years would not perform better than someone fresh out of school.
because 90% of starts ups are just fancy websites and mobile phone apps. They don't really need highly advanced programming/maths/Machine Learning skills.

They rather have naive young developers willing to work constant overtime, to get the fancy javascript frontend web page out faster.
What I meant is Rackspace (also RedHat, HP, Mirantis etc) would have you believe that if you're not running Openstack then your "cloud" is shit and has no future. DO clearly demonstrated otherwise.

They're inflating the hype because they generate $$$ this way - from their public cloud, private deployments, training, certifications etc etc. Nothing wrong with that I guess, it's business.
I think police act different when they have them on.
> But there aren't many Java libs that meet needs unfulfilled by PHP libs

Only a bajillion bespoke enterprise apps full of Java-implemented business logic.
You downvote that? that's rich.
Just because you and 'some' of your coworkers thought programmers are 'ridiculously overpaid' doesn't mean all of your coworkers felt that way. As such, the suit is just that, for those other employees that felt gipped.

The way your leverage mutually assured destruction here is just sugar coating the very nature of collusion like the telecomm companies. When no one lowers prices and compete fairly, the customers (and by analogy the programmers) loses out. So it doesn't just /look/ like evil collusion because it /is/ evil collusion.

I just wanted to clarify to anyone reading this passage here.
Yes, you have to continuously improve, and also recognize that the things you learned before may no longer apply. Always know why you have to do the things you do and when that isn't true anymore.

Also I didn't understand half of what you said.
Most starts ups aren't using C++. 90% of starts up do the "latest compile-to-JS language" thing.
This is how Planet Mars may have lost its Atmosphere
Um, perhaps you should? The article makes no inference that Schmidt had a bigger role. In fact, the article mentions Brin more often than Schmidt.
Which mobile platform is winning (and losing) the hearts of doctors?
Which, ironically, is tied to the conventional management view that butts on seats equal productivity.
Ask HN: Pathway to tech job for a veteran in the Philly area?
I'm getting out of the military in six months and I want to get into the tech field. I've been doing user support/ administration for my unit of 300 people the past few years on top of my regular job, and now that I'm getting out, I want to move home to Philly, live with my family and work a tech related part time job while I go to college. I'm not the best at math but I am good at figuring out how to use computer systems and software, and I can talk to people pretty well. I don't want to go into programming or get a CS degree, but I am thinking network or systems administration. What certifications should I complete in the next six months? What sort of entry level part time job should I look for? What should I get my degree in? I want to work for a small to medium sized company in the Philadelphia area and make $50K a year after college. I am at little older than the typical person starting out (26) but I have the advantages of life experience and military training.
Great insights. On your first point: That allows you to see blind-spots of people looking to big chunks miss. The little frustrations of the many (as opposed to maybe, the big frustrations of the few).

Which leads to the second point:

I live in a country that's way, way behind when it comes to using technology. The products are here, the infrastructure is here, but the services aren't.

It's a country where you can sell a WINDEV (:D) Windows app to a store owner to print his invoices the way he wants it and chage him $500. You'd only have to modify the logo and tweak it to sell it to others. (Most don't even have a logo).

It's a place where you could do small hotels an app for reception (check-in, check-out) for 2 grand and it would take less than two weeks.

I've read a piece by Paul Graham about finding startup ideas.. It said something like "Live in the future, build what's missing"..

Well, if you're living in the U.S leading the tech, you already are living in the future. Jump in the Time Machine and go back in time: Go somewhere else in the world. Build what's missing.
Genuine question - I see a lot of references to the fact that this practice is "illegal", but what law is it violating?
What is the advantage of something like this? (Not trying to be cynical, I just have no idea).
Well hello Sergey Brin.
Are car manufacturers about to receive a devastating blow from a new invention?
Yyyyep. Step into one of Walmart's cubicle farms in Bentonville, Arkansas and it's mostly middle aged folks hacking away in C# and VB.
> Let China keep its engineers, so they may one day create technologies that truly challenge the great firewall

Aha! Eric Schmidt had to just write a clever email like this instead and he would be applauded instead of criticized. To Apple: We would rather that you keep your Engineers - god knows you've got enough problems with your services! We will keep ours in return!

I guess if the huddled and poor learn programming, get good at it and start working for less - that'd be the right time to send them home to fix problems in their homeland and look for other huddled and poor - lather, rinse, repeat and all of world's problem magically disappear. Hey "the other" people are malleable masses with no ideas/likes/visions of their own - we can do as we please with them. Oh and they all, being Engineers have absolutely magical powers to solve any problem you throw at them - Terrorism, poverty, energy, hunger - you name it and they will solve it no matter how much oppression and apathy and violence confronts them!

Yeah, you made it sound idealistic but it's hypocritical and has no chance of working. It isn't far fetched to say that if the Engineers in China/India saw a way to make great opportunities happen in their own homeland to further their and their country's interests, they would never migrate to whole another continent in the first place. It isn't easy to migrate you know.
I think he may have meant disillusioned not delusional.
I wonder if this is a 'Valley' or just a 'Startup' thing as it doesn't seem too common here in Australia in the part of the industry that I work in (defence and now gaming); though maybe I'm just lucky and have been in the right parts.

We have a massive age range all the way from 20 to 60 (I guess), with most of the better engineers in their 30s-40s it seems, though to be honest you wouldn't really know unless you asked - there are guys here that you wouldn't guess were 40.

Personally I know I'm a far better engineer now in my mid-30s than I was in my 20s and to be honest I STILL feel like a beginner excited to finally find his feet. I don't see this stopping anytime soon. I don't want to get into management and luckily don't have to and I'm sure at 45 I'll be a far better software engineer than I am now (well, I sure hope so at least :) ).
I don't know if you were being facetious or not, but both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were college dropouts. And of course there is the fact that most people who do graduate college don't make nearly the amount of money that those two did.
Those awful unions. Oh well, back to illegally depressing wages
So he hates patents and the lawsuits they bring, but he feels it'll be a great asset to have in the future?

It really doesn't sound like he hates them to me.
"Brin appears to not know what the nature of the agreement is between the two companies."

I actually started another thread discussing this exact topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455116
Well AFAIK FB uses C++ and they are mentioned as one of the companies using these hiring practices.
How about a PHP interpreter for erlang?

https://github.com/altenwald/ephp
> also recognize that the things you learned before may no longer apply

You also have to learn when the things you learned before do apply. This is important because technology is cyclic. There are a constant stream of fads that many of the less experienced engineers won't be able to see alternatives to.
OTOH, Carter was not a party to formal diplomatic channels and did not represent himself as such. I doubt that he generated confusion WRT whatever official diplomacy may have been taking place. In fact, his point was that there was none to speak of; only a march to war.

So, another way to look at it is that he is retired from public service and is simply a private citizen who also happens to have a pretty big megaphone due to his former gig (and humanitarian work thereafter). He has a responsibility to speak out when he believes his country is running off the rails, as do all American citizens. His voice just happens to carry a bit further than most. So, in fact, one could argue that his is a greater responsibility to speak out.
I'm looking forward to the revelation that the NSA was providing US companies with knowledge to aid their international competitiveness, you know, exactly what they state that the PLA are doing. What better payment for all the backdoor access they have?
Fundamentally, I don't accept that there is, in general, a shortage of "good people" in the USA. I responded earlier [1] to someone who thinks there is.

Instead of continuing to follow up with just that one person, I'd like to propose an interesting "experiment" for hiring managers:

Do an Ask HN, linking to a recent representative
job posting you haven't been able to fill

I'd like to see all the relevant details, such as:

1) the job posting, of course

2) company name, location, salary range

3) are the usual requested perks applicable, e.g. flex time, work from home, etc?

4) what kind of resumes are you seeing? How many? What, in general, has been wrong with those people?

Then I'd like to see HN posters dissect the information. Let's find out if the requirements are realistic. Let's find out if the company's reputation is toxic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7452376
Apple in Talks with Comcast About Streaming-TV Service
What the HTML is that?!
OJ Simpson Witness and Critical Evidence Withheld from trial.
>I find the term "poaching" in this context to be disgusting. Employees aren't game captured by underhanded or illicit tactics. Employees are human beings that think and make decisions for themselves, and talk of them being "poached" as if it wasn't their choice is offensive.

The word "poach" by definition isn't exclusively tied to animals, but rather refers to property or other potential resources associated with another.
There's nothing more annoying than a blog that commandeers swipe navigation.
I wasn't ranking them on the evilness axis. Just smartness.
If you truly care about reliability, finding a reliable and fully tested distribution of these packages is the way to go. RedHat, SUSE and LinBit offer certified, fully tested binary distributions and support, and companies like Percona also provide support for specific HA stacks, and their expertise can save you a lot of guesswork.

The available documentation for heartbeat, corosync and pacemaker can be disappointing. I found the best way to learn is by doing–if you can afford it, cobble together a lab environment and see how many different ways you can break a system. With pacemaker, I find this depends highly on the resources you are managing!
Don't disagree, but in terms of priority on how we're going to fix the world...
My first thought is that this could be used much like Lua for allowing customized script extensions to C++ programs.
Ask HN: Who's hiring interns this summer?
I'm currently a first year university student in the UK, looking to get a taste of the startup life this summer. I'm sure many others are too, so it would be great to get a nice list going! In terms of location, I'd be happy to move anywhere if I can manage to get a visa, but I think this page would be useful for more people if it weren't limited by geography.
For a long time I looked around at the relative lack of 40+ developers and founders in my field and considered it worrisome; what will I do when I get to that age? do I need a massive bank of savings just in case?

But I think it's also easy to see it as an opportunity. We are staggeringly lucky generation; software is the future and it isn't going the way of mass automation or obsolescence any time soon. There is probably another two hundred years of foundational innovation left in the field, we're still just scratching the surface of information theory and what's possible. Experience is likely to increase in value.

As individuals; by cultivating just a little higher order thinking, and seeing above the surface layer of raw code, it shouldn't be hard to offer meaningful value and insight for the remainder of one's lifetime. I don't think the key is learning to "adapt", progressing from one fad language or technique to another, so much as it is to see the similarities between these fads and to understand them at a higher level of abstraction. To understand that SOA programming is the same thing as micro-kernels, or CSP, for example, and to seem to offer new wisdom by regurgitating the old.

In that spirit, I've observed that the successful senior engineers I've come to know don't decry constant change, but constant same-ness.
I would not call Facebook a start up anymore. They are creating their own VMs and Database systems. Most start ups don't do that. Unless that's the product.
I don't see your point. Ok, so Jobs talked to Schmidt before talking to Brin. Either way, Brin continued the practice and actively promoted it.
Yeah, I second this, I've learned to phrase questions in such a way when dealing with government employees, where they can give approval, without having to either say yes or no - in other words phrase it in such a way that they dont have to say no - No with the government is the default answer.
People have been arrested and worse for taking video of police officers. This is not a threat I need in my daily life.

The legality of recording someone without their express consent also varies by state. I would love to record my daily public life. Laws and technology make that tricky.
Arborealize, creates an HTML5+CSS3 page with recursive directory contents
> 90% of starts up do the "latest compile-to-JS language" thing.

Sounds like an accurate statistical sampling to me.
My a-ha moment for Linux HA + DRBD came when I realized you could use them to retrofit redundancy and failover onto just about any system. (Of course, this won't protect against your replicated filesystem becoming corrupted, and current versions of DRBD don't allow you to scale out.)
> Purists want you to believe that only pure Scrum works

Purists would realize that Scrum was defined to be a self reflecting, self improving system. Scrum allows people to alter scrum to meet their needs.

> Scrum deliberately asks the team not to look too far ahead

This is not true. The product owner can put as much stuff on the backlog as they like and the team should know about it. Scrum does ask the team to not spend a lot of time estimating out stories that are months down the road (so very loose estimates are ok).

> Scrum forces that the plan cannot change during the Sprint. This way they know where they stand during the Sprint.

This is true but not totally true. Scrum requires the product owner to "stand back" during a sprint. But, at any time, the product owner can declare the sprint un-productive and it restarts. How does the team know they aren't adding value if the product owner can't stop the sprint?

> For a game to be "potentially shippable" after every Sprint (as Scrum requires) the certification requirements

See above where scrum allows you to alter the "rules" of scrum to meet the needs of the users. Scrum is not written in stone.
Us older guys discovered long ago that the more hours/week beyond a certain amount you work, the less you accomplish.

Besides, I write my best code when I'm jogging. I just type it in when I get back to my desk.
I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's incredibly easy to use while providing all the baseline features I actually need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very similar niche.

In fact, part of the appeal may be that they don't use openstack, because openstack implementations to date have all been quite limited and complicated so far.
If a company in category 2 (in the above ) pulls enough weight to make a significant change, then the companies in category 1 will add this company and pull it into category 1.

Said company would gladly go along since it benefits as well.
The author has a very literal notion of "shippable". Shippable could mean to a beta group. It could mean to the public. It could mean that the feature is "done" but not turned on or it's hidden behind a feature flag.

Also, you are supposed to have retrospectives after each sprint to improve. This sounds like a discussion that should have happened with the OP's team at a retrospective.
Switch tech companies a couple times. Note what happens to your salary.

Hint: It doesn't go down.
I am curious which part is translated automatically, and which is human-edited: current translations algorithms have approximation of how likely the outcome is, but I doubt it can translate to a quality metric that allows to filter efficiently a translated text between proper and improper translation. Maybe there are layers in the AmTurk treatment.

In the same vein, but further along: the Amazon Turk part of the service isn't visible on the website. I’m assuming if one wants to make money, they would have to connect to the Amazon service directly -- but then: why would TechCrunch mention that this is the innovation? Same question: AmzTurk doesn’t have great language coverage, will they need to develop their own to cover Finnish and Polish? I wonder if a competitor can expect to extract confidential information that way, or more simply disrupt a service.
I would argue that there isn't really such a thing as a legitimate target of the NSA.

From Wikipedia [1]: "Unlike the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), both of which specialize primarily in foreign human espionage, the NSA has no authority to conduct human-source intelligence gathering".

This is a very dubious remit. I'd argue that, in the current digital climate, the recording of phone and internet traffic is the primary method of "human-source intelligence gathering". If so, the NSA is operating out of it's defined area of responsibility and has made itself illegitimate.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
Its not meant to be accurate sampling, its hyperbole to prove a point.

But you can see for yourself. Have a look at most jobs at start ups, they're always javascript/ruby/python/fancy new framework or mobile apps to reinvent online shopping or web site analytics or something.
It would be good to clarify whether you're looking for jobs in
SF/Bay Area, NY, the UK, or elsewhere.

My university (in Canada) explicitly discourages first-years from applying to jobs in the US because it's difficult to get a J1 visa approved for a summer internship. It's much easier to get the paperwork approved for a second or third-year. (Make sure that the company you apply to pays for the immigration lawyers. I am not an accountant, but they should probably count as a recruiting expense for the company.)

That said, if you're exceptional, I'm sure you'll find something. (Hexxeh comes to mind; IIRC he was from the UK and Google was happy to fly him out to Mountain View to work on Chrome.)
The short answer is that they can't measure output. It's extremely hard for a layman to know exactly how much value he's getting out of a programmer except through another, more skilled programmer.

There's probably a business idea there.
These stories are starting to wear thin.

The people in SF/SV building apps are mostly in their 20s-30s.

The people building cool technology are mostly in their 40s-50s.