skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Many developers, including myself, have written applications that fall afoul of the MVCC implementation and rules.

Color me shocked.
All three subsystems produce deterministic results. The reasons for this are history not known to me, but it might even be linked to Dual_EC_DRBG.

Seriously? I mean rand/srand have been around since what, at least 1980?
Um, is not the answer to your question obviously "the judge and jury"? You do realize that criteria like these are already central to deciding crimes and punishments for all sorts of offenses? For example, premeditated murder is a different crime with a substantially more severe punishment than deliberate murder in the heat of the moment, which in turn is different from and more severe than accidentally causing someone's death.
1. Hack someone in your office

2. Hack someone in your home (one of your kids for example)

3. Hack someone in a coffee shop

Generally, when someone thinks they're anonymous and they aren't, bad things are going to happen.
In a wide range of videos and notes that have been online for years? Seriously doubtful.
See my post above. You can hack someone geographically near you (i.e. in the same room or building). If you know the person, it wouldn't be hard to figure out who they are.
I agree that the current system needs to change.

I don't agree that we should throw open the doors for Uber as a catalyst to make that change though.

Cabs can be downright horrible, but I'm hesitant to throw out the devil we know for the one we don't. Uber has already demonstrated an unwillingness to obey laws they disagree with, I'm concerned about how far and in what areas they're willing to push the bounds. We already have avenues for complaining about / fixing the cab system but I don't think many people actually complain to the cab company when they have a bad experience - maybe the cab company needs an app?
"Her husband...is an attorney..." probably explains why she thinks she can keep up the shill longer than any sane, ethical person would.
If you're really unsure, try out a masters. It can actually be helpful in the job market and you get a couple extra years of advanced coursework and projects. In my experience getting a PhD is more about doing something for yourself, comparable to running a marathon for example. Where many can find joy in a simple jog but it can be difficult to explain why it is more "fun" at mile 20 than mile 2. PhDs certainly aren't about making money, or getting famous, or having a rich social life and thus aren't for a lot of people.
Lego Logic Gates – Half Adder [video]
Since this is a child comment under my post, I'll chime in, too.

When I first started out here, I was making aprox $6666 a month ($80k annual). Of that, I would take home around $4100 after taxes and withholdings (including travel expenses which were reimbursed when you file your taxes).

Of that $4100, $1600 would go towards rent (which was only because I found a deal from a friend). You now have $2500.

This seems not too bad, until you factor in utilities, random car repairs, saving for vacations (or maybe just skip the vacations and save for a fancy casket).

In the end, unless you're mindfully frugal, you may be left with around around $12-1500 to keep in your bank account.

Which is great... if you're content with keeping the equivalent of a sub $20,000 salary.

To make it worth it, find a job you like, or a job that likes and values you. Look for areas you can expand and grow; not just in your current skillset, but in broadening outside of engineering, as well. Soft skills are very helpful.

As you get promotions (also called switching companies every 1.5 years out here), your salary will increase, but it won't feel as dramatic as the check says.
Your comment tells me you haven't used Android Studio at all, and are making up attributes based on what you assume something written in Java must be.

I use Jetbrains IDEs and Xcode every day. Whenever I have to write any significant amount of code, I switch from Xcode to Appcode.

> I'd kill for having an xCode like realtime autocomplete and documentation

From my experience, this is true for Jetbrains IDEs, and not for Xcode, particularly for autocomplete. Xcode autocomplete is a pain, and sometimes gets in the way instead of being actually helpful.
I'm in a finance PhD program at a top US school. What he says is quite close to the true, from my experience with friends in finance and partly economics (the marketing and accounting people seem to be having healthier lives in my school).

I have several friends who are depressed or have a diverse array of issues, none of which existed before grad school. Yes, I completely agree that "your mileage may vary", but I've seen it happen many times. Asshole advisers that have you at their mercy. Gruesome grading hours for no pay. Etc.

For instance, I just got an email a few hours ago about my weekend. They told me I have to work for 19 hours between Saturday and Sunday afternoon grading MBA exams ("work" is of course generous because the word usually implies me getting money out of it). What can I do? Nothing really...

[Details: I need to proctor MBAs exam on Saturday until noon, and then I have to help grading 400 exams which NEED TO BE GRADED on Sunday afternoon (because the profs go on vacation early on Monday and also MBAs want their grade fast). The prof. told me that at 2.5 minutes per exam (for my part), it will take me 16 hours, besides typing the grades and the 3-hour proctoring. That's 19 hours of work in a 24 hour lapse. And they don't blink an eye, because I just have to take it (it's unpaid because it's "part of scholarship")

Sure, I can complain, but if I do I'm dead and will be called a troublemaker (seen it happen a few times). Moreso, my grading load is on the low side compared to some friends who spend an insane amount of time grading, teaching, and preparing slides for their advisors.]
Why is that short sighted?

Do we disagree about competition being a good thing for consumers?
Right. If you make them super-racist, you get a chaotic state because the polygons move around constantly. I don't see it as a problem with the model. I think that it makes sense, because people who are extremely racist are (in addition to being morally in the wrong) impractical and chronically pissed off. However, you can get a very-segregated state by gradually turning up the racism (from 33% to 50%, then to 60%, then 70%). If you do it too fast (i.e. change the racist temperature too quickly) you get the chaotic state you're talking about.

In the real world, this chaotic effect might be a negative (i.e. violent) interaction. Or, more hopefully, people might recognize such extreme bias as untenable and gradually find it undesirable to live in monoculture.

By the way, I was able to get 99% (ETA: 100%) segregation (because engineering racist dystopias is the point of this exercise? :) ) by altering the racism level to move around the patches and "attack" small enclaves of blue in the yellow area. If you think of it as abstractly playing with optimization parameters with a hand-controllable Lagrange multiplier, it feels less evil.
The windows platform runs on third party hardware, including Macs.
Sorry but what "doublespeak" do you see in that statement?

> MIT’s action comes in response to a complaint it received in October from a woman, who is an online MITx learner, claiming online sexual harassment by Lewin. She provided information about Lewin’s interactions with her, which began when she was a learner in one of his MITx courses, as well as information about interactions between Lewin and other women online learners.

1. A student claimed online sexual harassment by Professor Lewin

2. This student provided information of these interactions.

3. MIT conducted an investigation

4. The investigation found that Lewin's behavior violated the current sexual harassment policies.

Seems pretty straightforward, except for #2, though I guess we can reasonably surmise that the information involved screenshots or saved chat logs. Otherwise, what other kind of information are you looking for that would help clarify whether or not MIT's sexual harassment policies were violated or not?
Client-side code (even native apps) must be considered public. That means your API is also publicly discoverable.

A user ID is fine to use as a public key, but it must be paired with something private. Generally some sort of unique, crypographically-secure auth token is fine when combined with forced HTTPS connections.
They are quite different in practice, because in the PhD you are really at the mercy of the advisers and have made a huge commitment compared to a 1-2 yr masters).
> When crazy things are happening (like snowstorms), drivers will not be out on the road working unless they're compensated more than usual

Balderdash. There's a trivial way to get drivers on the road during bad weather without surge pricing: you tell them that if they don't work during bad weather, the won't be allowed to work during good weather.

> Anyone objecting to the concept of surge pricing clearly does not understand basic economics

There's more to economics than what they cover in Ec101. A free market is not always the most efficient way to allocate resources. That's why, for instance, emergency rooms treat people based on the seriousness of their condition rather than based on who is willing to pay the most. Transportation during bad weather can become that kind of resource.
Ouch. "Own a car for as little as $20/day." $600/month seems like a pretty hefty payment for the Prius that's featured at the front of the line in the picture underneath those words. I could understand that for someone with bad credit and such, but "as little as" should present the best case, surely.
Lewin was a superstar in online education circles, and very highly regarded at MIT. The NYT, among others, covered this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19physics.html?_...
I don't believe we have failed. We have simply not yet succeeded. It's not like things used to be great, and then got screwed up. The tools and libraries we have now are so much better than they were ten years ago, and infinitely better than they were twenty years ago. We have been making steady progress and will continue to do so.

Sure, it could be going faster if someone threw more money at the problem. But right now there are thousands of top-tier developers working on tooling for the rest of us. Intel, Redhat, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and many others pay full time developers to work on important open source projects. Things are looking pretty good, we just need more time.
Seems rather narrow in focus, given the general title.
An app should not be considered "secure" because it doesn't currently have important data.

Twitter wasn't much of a honeypot, either, until activists and corporations started using it. Did Twitter know the exact moment that happened? No. They should have been secure long before that.
7 Indications you are way too high
Just like he already did to RomneyCare.
For what it's worth, I think your comment did a better job of explaining what the author had to say than the author did.

I wouldn't go as far as "incredibly boring", but the article strikes me as having its priorities mixed up. Is trying to use Euripides to talk about society, or use society to talk about Euripides?

Maybe the intention was the former, but I came away thinking "that sounds like a neat play" and not particularly closer to any insight on the nature of intoxication.
Poke through the existing campaigns and I think you'll find even the newer, smaller audiences are generating meaningful income for the artists. Their model does a few things extremely well.

It more-or-less removes the pain of paying for the patrons by making contributions small, automatic, and feel-good. You're a patron! You're supporting the cool, small artist that you tell your friends about! Your money is where your mouth is, so to speak.

Just like Kickstarter, the successful tactics "larger" stars like Pomplamoose, Walk Off The Earth, and SMBC use get co-opted by the little guys. They learn how to do self-promotion from people who are like them.

Direct monetization of fans means phenomenally fewer fans are needed to support a full-time artist. SMBC is making $8,700 per month, which is $104,000 per year! That's from a group of 3,300 fans. There are professional comedians who've been on Comedy Central who make less than that, even though their audience is 10x that size.
If he didn't have the online content up on Ed X, then why would the female online students who he apparently had inappropriate online interactions with have communicated with him?

I'll agree that his video lectures themselves probably didn't have him acting inappropriately. His website says his video lectures are coming soon, so I suspect he may release the content there. But MIT is, in my view at least, not obligated to promote or host his content on EdX, and if I were them I wouldn't want to be associated with the guy. And that's assuming that they weren't worried about further people contacting him and being harassed.
I agree that the loss of quality teaching materials to the public is an unfortunate result of this. But I can see at least three ways in which this may have been a very reasonable decision.

First, as others have pointed out, the linked statement suggests (without providing details) that MIT was concerned that Lewin would continue a pattern of using his connection with their online courses to harass students. Without being privy to their investigation we don't know what all led to that ongoing concern, but it's plausible to assume they have reasons.

Second, it may be that MIT's policy in these cases is to formally cut all ties with the harasser, or something to that effect. This might be the online equivalent of insisting that a disgraced emeritus professor give up their office on campus. There are clearly downsides to the community for such a policy, but there are indisputable benefits as well.

And finally, it strikes me that MIT has very little leverage to punish a retired professor who damages the university's reputation and community in this way. But this action of taking down a big part of his life's work is a way of hitting him right in his legacy. I know that were I in his shoes, I would be devastated by such a decision. I hope it has a strong deterrent effect on any other faculty who might be prone to similar abuses of their positions.
Yep. Was assigned reading in my ML class this semester. Loved it.
You might want to take a quick cruise around http://patreon.com . It may shake your confidence in that pronouncement. I'm a patron for far fluffier things right now.
Well, according the featured article we're commenting on, yes, that's about half of it in a nutshell. The other half is the algorithms they're running on all this street view data they're collecting.

Is it really that crazy a notion that actually driving the roads and collecting all kinds of data from it yields higher accuracy maps than just licensing less robust data sets from others?
There's genuinely no excuse for Flurry (or any other vendor) to have an API that is not secured with HTTPS by default. I can't think of any reason other than stupidity or laziness, and those aren't excuses.

This is especially true of Flurry, which is tailored for connections directly from devices.
I thought so too, but no one else seems to care. That guy's probably never going to ask another question in a setting like that ever again.
I struggled with those, but after a few years doing iOS dev, it isn't so bad. It all eventually sticks.

And autolayout is freakin awesome imo, though I hear a lot of people groak about it.
I was not implying that game programmers are stupid, sorry. I meant that they way it was told in the company how AAA do it sounded similar to what I learned about how big companies done it 10 or something years ago. Coming from agile workplace, I think there were things that could have been kept in place to improve quality of life for developers and art teams. I'm not sure if I can express what I mean correctly. For example, why the dreaded "crunch time" in gaming is treated as norm, while in modern web/mobile shops its believed that something like this is going to result in worse quality over time?

I could see arguing here with myself that AAA games are usually "ship and forget", with some bugfixes only. Maybe because company I was working in was not AAA, but small (by industry standards) f2p mobile shop, where applying AAA ideas is not that great (in my opinion). I mean that's where your product is more along lines of web apps - you are going to constantly add content, update code base, refine features, so focusing on quality in long term is better. This, thought, I was not able to articulate clearly and properly to AAA veterans.

I feel like not all ideas from current practises can be applied to big gaming studios, but saying that I believe it can be improved. This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take.

Why two companies you mentioned failed? I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile, maybe their games were just not that good, or IP was boring? Still you sound like you have more experience than me here, I'm trying to wrap my head around whole AAA industry thing. I'm ranting about it so much because making games was way more entertaining than web/mobile, but the industry is so poisonous for pure developers that I had to quit to regain my sanity :)
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720244
Agreed. Here's some data that backs up what you're saying: http://tomtunguz.com/seed-followon-rates/. This is probably the blog post that I share most often with founders I talk to.
Good intuition! What you are describing sounds like a technique called pretraining (in particular, greedy, layer-wise pretraining). Five years ago, pretraining was how everyone attacked this problem, although they usually did a different kind of pretraining (basically, we train a different kind of model, and then perform surgery, cutting it apart and using some layers for it for the earlier layers of our model).

More recently, people, especially the younger generation of deep learning researchers, tend to be skeptical of how much pretraining helps.

Advocates for pretraining now tend to argue that it helps you find better local minima, instead of focusing on it helping the vanishing gradient problem. For example, see this paper: http://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume11/erhan10a/erhan10a.pdf .

As I'm sure Michael will address in coming chapters, there's a bunch of tricks you can use that make training deep neural networks a lot easier. People tend to prefer, now, to just use those and a lot of computing power, rather than mess around with pretraining.
Performance testing our Node.js API
"Particularly, innocence until proven guilty."

Well they performed a review and appear to have found him guilty
On Interviewing as a Junior Dev
Any plans for expansion beyond USA?

I hope Instacart is coming to Canada soon. Toronto is an obvious choice.

The other city that would very likely be receptive is Vancouver. They're keen on the sharing 'economy' - including a home-grown car-share company called Modo. There are also a few Whole Foods stores in-town. I also read recently that cities with fewer cars per residents are more receptive to home delivery services.

So yes Canada awaits for your arrival eagerly!
I think the lesson here has been evident for some time: There is no one best classifier, only classifiers that perform better on particular problems. Random Forests work well because as ensemble methods they can be optimized to explore many different aspects of a data set, but they don't perform significantly better than SVMs or most of the other methods.

In practice the solution is often to use a combination of multiple methods. Trees, support vector machines, multilayer perceptrons, gaussian kernels, bagging and boosting. In most applications you don't have choose. Combining the results of all of them together using a weighted average will out perform any of them individually. And in most cases, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each classifier fits a given data set differently and provides its own perspective on the prediction problem. The goal isn't to choose the best one, but to find an ensemble of methods that best explain the patterns and relationships in the data.

There are many cases where resource and speed limitations dictate that only one classifier can be tuned and implemented, and in those situations it's good to know which one is 'best'. But when it's possible to build an ensemble out of many different methods it's almost always the best way to go.
Don't Hire Cheap Hackers – write simple programs yourself
Christmas F# Polymorphism
TLS 1.3 isn't finished yet...
If you're trying to maximize your chances of raising a Series A (which may not be the ideal metric), then $600k+ is pretty good and $900k+ is great. (Based on this post: http://tomtunguz.com/seed-followon-rates/)
The thing is, what you see while in school and in academia before deciding to do the PhD are the survivors. The ones who like the power play, the grant-writing, and possibly those more prone to Stockholm Effect from their PhD years.

When deciding, you don't see the ones who flunked, who killed themselves, who lost years of their life for the PhD and went to the private sector. Even then, most people won't tell you "yes I did the PhD and it sucked".. you can't say that even after years because you will appear weak or unskilled. Instead, people oft say "it was a great learning experience, etc etc".
This is going to turn around and bight them in the ass...
Sounds to me like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

You construct your sentences to be based on your perception rather than making universal proclamations. "I didn't like this" versus "this sucks!"

And yet again, the character limit of Twitter means it's really hard to do the right thing.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720164
If you have a SaaS business, growing 100% Y/Y is just fine until you hit $100m ARR.

-David
I purchased it with the intention of tying into a game I was working on, but the game has since went belly up. Was just wondering if there was any value in it to keep it, or if it would be saleable.
EdX is a system with scheduled classes, where the instructor is posting videos and interacting throughout the scheduled class with students via the online forum (and possibly email, I assume).

OCW is not that. It's just videos and notes posted online for people to work through on their own. Very different situation.