skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We humans are as brilliant at pattern matching as we are in finding patterns that aren't really there, not just with our vision but with our understanding of probability , randomness, and even cause & effect. Thankfully, our brains are very complicated machines that can recognize a stucko wall or a cloud and invalidate the false identification of a face or unicorn or whatever based on that context.

With that in mind, is it really surprising that [m]any of our attempts at emulating intelligence can be easily fooled? An untold number of species have evolved to do exactly the same thing: exploit the pattern matching errors of predators to disguise themselves as leaves or tree branches or venomous animals that the predator avoids like the plague. DNNs seem to be relatively new and we've got a long ways to go, so is this a fundamental problem with the theoretical underpinning or do we just need to train them with far more contextualized data (for lack of a better phrase)?

Is there any chance of us having accurate DNNs if we can, as if gods during the course of natural selection, peek into the brain of predators (algorithms) and reverse engineer failures (disguises for prey) like this?
I don't know why they still have that information there... The nameservers I use of them are in:
Mountain View, US
Dallas, US
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Maidenhead, UK
Asia Singapore
Frankfurt, Germany
Paris, France

And I know they have at least 5 more.
I'm not trying to be "provocative", but do you have any examples of this ever happening? And by that I mean any examples where a company has purposefully broken a law, was shut down and then laws were changed as a direct result? I've seen it happen the other way (technically no laws against it, shut the company down anyway then passed laws against it) but what you're proposing sounds improbable.
That's the only thing that bothered me too. I was sort of grandfathered into the pricing structure but who knows how long that will last. Ah well, plenty of alternatives if it does go to shit, as we can see in this thread.
>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.

Isn't that called the No Free Lunch Theorem?
Sockpuppets and astroturfing are not allowed on HN.
It seems high but if you're in a competitive, well-funded market with a limited supply of capable developers then salaries will only go up..
I guess I would have written the Ruby version as

def values_in(keys, dict)
dict.slice(*keys).values
end

Though I suppose it's not the point of the article.
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Germany as a collective may seem efficient. Germany on an individual basis is... well, a whole lot of work I never considered before moving here. Good luck to you.

Also, there kinda isn't one Germany. Mittelstand vs Megacorp and different cities are all very different.
This is more like distributed patronage, contrasted with the more old-school type, IMO. I don't see Patreon being dominated by billionaires currently.

If you think this is going to lead to a status quo where the elites dominate our culture, you should probably leave off with more than an "exercise for the reader", because your point definitely isn't self-evident at all.

Especially if you think it's going to be worse than when media distribution and funding was centralized under TV, movie studios, radio, publishers, etc.
"Normal" web page of today makes unbelievable number of connections to different CDN destinations. As soon as you browse the internet "normally" on the same machine, you'd spend maybe an order of magnitude more to analyze the traffic than to consume the content. The solution would be not to browse the internet at all from the computers which aren't in the DMZ, like the military (hopefully) does.
That comic describes approximately 95% of HN.
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> If you want to avoid lots of really challenging problems, PostgreSQL is often the best bet by far.

How about 0 single points of failure. How does PostgreSQL help you avoid that challenging problem?
The investor they got, was actually doing something similar. Running a tutoring company that became quite profitable. Two of the guys working at the tutoring company got the idea to make this service, and sold the idea to their boss at the time.

Raising money is hard work, these guys got lucky in that respect. I think they made the absolute rookie mistake, afraid to talk to as they might 'steal' their idea. They thought it was a sure thing. Especially when they received the investment.
The story is that you can usually get money back by filing your taxes. To file your taxes, you buy this year's software, and block off a straight weekend to enter the data. Or you pay an accountant, who will as likely as not royally bodge it, potentially illegally.

I have been ignoring the problem.
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> He is telling US taxpayers hey keep the country going, I am not going to contribute anything but I want to be able to easily comeback if I need to.

And once he comes back he will be liable to paying taxes.

Besides, is this Rhodes scholarship publicly financed? Because according to wikipedia it's funded by a private trust in England.
But that would just make hiring feel yet more impersonal. More impersonal is the last thing hiring needs.
I want to add to this post - in my experience, a crappy PhD project with a great advisor is orders of magnitude better than a great PhD project with a shitty advisor.

A shitty advisor will make your life horrific - will pile a toxic combination of guilt, uncertainty, with just the right amount of compliments to make you keep going while hating your life. I've seen many brilliant colleagues completely burn themselves out because of this.

I've had an excellent advisor both for my PhD and later my postdoc - and while I've had strong disagreements with both, they are now excellent friends and people who I really cherish.

Before you accept a PhD in a lab, talk to your advisor's students privately, and ideally also to her ex students.
Civilian, you probably signed an agreement with Google to not disclose information about their internal operations, as you're doing here and below.
What is it about the current solutions that leave you cold? It sounds like google calendar, anki, evernote and Tinder could all work together to do exactly what you suggest. I'm curious what you think is missing, the X factor that another solution would be able to address?
Knuth doesn't reply to 100s of emails a day, though.
Neat idea. I know it's not a serious proposal, but the problem with this sort of approach will be that the message will be identifiable from the fact that it hasn't actually been sent as spam to many people. So an attacker can identify a suspect message just by considering its distribution.
My jaw always hits the floor when I see the salaries they offer in SF/NY. Then I remember that working in the UK I typically get twice as much paid annual leave as most people in the USA, usually with the option to purchase more leave. I think I'll always choose more time off over more money.
There was a similar result a few months ago for another type of machine learning. (That's note 26 in this paper.) The problem seemed to be that the training process produces results which are too near boundaries in some dimension, and are thus very sensitive to small changes. Such models are subject to a sort of "fuzzing attack", where the input is changed slightly and the output changes drastically.

There are two parts of this process that are kind of flaky. The problem above is one of them. The other part is feature extraction where the feature set is learned from the training set. The features thus selected are chosen somewhat randomly and are very dependent on the training set. It's amazing to me that works at all. Earlier thinking was to have some canonical set of features (vertical lines, horizontal lines, various kinds of curves, etc.), the idea being to mimic early vision, the processing that happens in the retina. Automatic feature choice apparently outperforms that, but may not really be working as well as previously believed.

It's great seeing all this progress being made.
> Which is admirable, but you can see why it's hard. This is incredibly frustrating.

So Stockholm it is then? It's incredibly frustrating because apple is mistreating the developers building the app ecosystem they themselves rely on.

There better be a shit-ton of money in this, because looking at this from the outside, it all looks like madness.
I'd say it's US vs rest-of-the-world difference.

I recently applied to a senior dev position at the Tokyo branch of a certain American company, which shall remain nameless. They pay 120~160k in the US. They offered me 60k.
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Object Oriented Essentialism
have you ever developed something on Android? Oh man, that is insane!
I'm actually a version behind, I haven't got round to updating to the latest yet.

What is it about XCode that you think is bad?

Everyone uses their tools in different ways. I use Visual Studio in my day job, but I prefer to use Emacs for most of my side dev these days. Given that perhaps I don't use everything an IDE has to offer.

Comparing Visual Studio with XCode, the following features are what I use to most.

Autocomplete - XCode wins here. Say I have two variables - clientService and clientMapper. In XCode I can type cl<tab> and it will complete the client part of the variable for me, I then only have to choose between Service and Mapper. Visual Studio doesn't. Pressing <tab> will choose the entire current selected item.

Quick open - XCode wins. Cmd + Shift + O (I think) start typing the file name, hit enter and there you are. Visual Studio (without Resharper) forces you to search through the Solution Explorer, which is slow and searches for methods as well as files.

Syntax/Error/Warning Highlighting. Both IDEs do this just fine.

Debugging - Cant think of anything to differentiate these IDE's. It used to be a real pain to inspect variables in XCode, but that was more GCCs fault rather than XCode. Since moving to LLVM, I haven't had any problems.

Refactoring - I probably don't use these tools as much as I could. But the basics are covered. Extract method, rename variables etc.. can be handled fine by both. I don't use anything else.

Vim keybindings. There is vsVim for Visual Studio and now I see there is XVim for XCode.
The approach in this paper looks much cooler. A major thing missing in OP's website is that there is no way to add cover text (equivalent to "key" for encryption). However I like the fact that message comes out as spam so it (hopefully) stays out of inbox of receiving person and one would need to know what to look for in spam folder. This is very cool because I'd never thought of utility of making a message purposely look like spam.
The market size wasn't too small, it allied to college students everywhere.

From what I know, a startup should look something like this. Build your MVP, get some traction, add on another feature, get more traction... A continually process of expanding your features and user base. Every time you add on features, you want to see growth.

The same goes for getting investment. Seed A, MVP with traction, add on a feature and go through Seed B stage etc etc. Adding on features to get more users which can lead to more investment. Investors want to see a plan for what a startup will do with that money.
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And there's the matter of what to do with the time off. Prague, Rome, Budapest, Barcelona being a two-hour, £20-40 flight away is difficult to value but a big difference.
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I'm not even sure there'd be much to do: just store everything in sixteenths a of a farthing and format on output, much as people do with tenths of a penny today. If anything the numbers are actually slightly more convenient for machines with no divide instruction.
In Europe you get a salary for a PhD. It's not a lot but in most countries (especially western Europe) it's actually quite OK.
> b) Salary range where you are is broken

Depends on the point of view.

I'd say the salary range where you and I are (i.e. not in the US) is broken.

Despite all the talk of "programmers can work from anywhere", labour is still a very inefficient market.
Honestly? Because PHP sucks. Part of it is tribal loyalty - not wanting to be seen as the sort of person who would write PHP; I suspect more people know it than admit as much here. But mostly it really is a really bad language.
The most important advice I tell people who are thinking about getting a PhD is that they have to be really really motivated. 100% of the PhD students have at least one moment during their PhD work that they are seriously considering quitting. And this can happen at any point during the period, ranging from after one year, until year four.

If you are motivated, it is one hell of an experience that you are very unlikely to get anywhere else. This of course depends highly on the group you are joining and the research field that you are going to be in. It is very likely that you get to travel the world and meet interesting new people.

But it is no picknick, and I can confirm some of the other horror stories that you read here. Then again, these made me a better, more focused person.
I hate the coding challenges because they are hugely asymmetric in effort required between interviewer and interviewee. They usually come as the first or second step (after the phone interview), which means you aren't even really being seriously considered yet. You have to spend several hours working on it while they just have to send the email to whatever their challenge link is. Best case scenario, you wasted those hours because you were qualified to do what they assigned you to, and you simply move to the 'next round'. Worst case, you get rejected for any reason or even no reason.

I have seen a few done maybe correctly. They really have to either be short, or otherwise compensated. One company is paying a few hundred dollars for the result of the coding challenge if they like your result, and are using it to entirely replace the first rounds of interview (coding challenge => skip directly to onsite and collect $500). These cases seem to be outliers rather than the norm though.

Thanks Jeff Atwood.
It is a real shame because his lectures were terrific.
What about getting on to something like IBM or Microsoft's Graduate Developer schemes?
I'm also very surprised this happened. I've done my fair share of Ramen, can barely eat it anymore. I'd assume they sold the investor on selling the service to Universities at 50K each, the investor believed in them and that he'd get a good return in his investment.
I know lots of adults that can't use fractions correctly. I don't know how that fits in with "basic" vs "useless" math, but it doesn't give me much hope for programming (unless, like you said, 'programming' means something like 'using the occasional formula in a spreadsheet')
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You have an appropriate handle for such a comment...
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I know uber is flouting regulatory laws in India but banning the company outright is definitely not the right solution. And again there is the question that how the said ban is going to be imposed. The Union Transport Ministry of India has given a statement saying banning uber doesn't make sense [1]
Also, in a developing country like India, with no centralized repository of past records, it's extremely tough to do background checks. [2]
It's busy to blame the system, but here the system in my opinion is more at fault than Uber.
Clearly, uber provides a net value-add of hailing a taxi over traditional taxi services. Rather than banning them, a better way will be to have a digitized system where past records of a driver can be viewed and making it accessible to all taxi companies. Just strengthening regulations is not enough. There should be clear ways and benefits of operating within the regulatory framework.

[1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Banning-Uber-d...
[2] http://fortune.com/2014/12/08/in-defense-of-uber-in-india/
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There's a company where I live that does some of these things regarding your bills and saving money. You go in for an interview and you show them all your expenses, incomes, etc. They will work out a budget for you, pay your bills, save money for your goals, send you a bit of spending money for groceries, etc. negotiate with your credit card companies, banks and what not if things are really bad. They set up a bank account which your income goes into, but you can't immediately access it to withdraw funds. Instead you have to call/email them and ask for it, which is good for preventing impulse purchases. Fees are a few hundred dollars for setting up, which is worked into your budget so you don't have to pay upfront, then around $25 a week ongoing.
Nationality versus citizenship are not really understood by Anglophones, in my experience. Ethnicity versus citizenship would be closer to the way we speak.
The vulnerability exploits imperfections in the NN weights. To avoid this kind of mismatch all you need to do is shift the same image by 1 pixel (assuming recognition is done per pixel), and you can cross check results to check if an error occurred.

Human brain recognizes better because it can sample the image many times from many slightly different angles. There's a reason saccade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) exists.
I'm honestly surprised to all the comments in here. This is not my experience at all. I thought I may share my perspective.

I'm currently pursuing a PhD program here in France. This is a special kind of PhD, called "CIFRE" which roughly means "PhD in a company". You're employed for 3 years by both an academic lab/uni and a company. The goal is to solve an industrial research problem that benefits both the lab and the company.

Personally I'm very happy to be doing this kind of thesis. I'm not in a major lab, so I'm pretty sure I won't be able to fight much against Ivy League PhDs but I'm still getting the degree and I'm okay with it. In the future I don't seek to teach a lot but to do mostly research.

Besides having a good relationship with my advisors I'm also super happy that I don't have a student debt (French education is mostly free -- even for top engineering schools). The pay is good, not as much as an engineer but plenty of people with lower degrees would already be happy with it, so no reason to complain. With this company-linked PhD I also get to study 100% while being officially employed as an engineer, it's on my contract. If I ever want to hide the PhD from my resume (I'm sure I never will), I can basically write "I've been a research engineer for three years" and this would be the truth.

I also get to see how it works in the industrial world and to be more aware when, after the degree, I have to choose between going back to the engineer path or getting further into the academic road.
So I should give up my citizenship? No thanks. I think my country should stop being so overbearing and invasive, thank you very much, like all the others (in this particular matter, at least). "Land of the free" and all that.
Being a startup forum I'm surprised no one has compared doing a PhD to starting a startup. Has anyone done both and if so are they similar in stress levels, willpower needed etc? What are the similarities and differences?
Should the electricity distribution company be allowed to cream off tptacek's and others who are less price sensitive business?

The natural gas/water/sewer company? The fire department?

What if the end result is that rich people get stable electricity, gas, water/sewer, basic internet, and fire protection services, while the poor can just fend for themselves or hope that the low bidder utility has power tomorrow?

There are companies granted/licensed some form of monopoly in exchange for minimum mandated services, maximum mandated rates, and other limits to capitalism in its purest form because government believes that their service is essential in some way.

Many cities operate taxi licensing in this light. That you view this as prime facia evidence that the taxi market is dysfunctional and that Uber should be able to selectively siphon off a portion of the demand without abiding the rest of the government-regulated taxi requirements is consistent internally, but I believe misses some of the underlying public good that the current taxi system provides.
Everyone pays somehow.
That really depends on what kind of job you are pursuing after your PhD. I don't think most PhD holders in CS would go and become run of the mill software devs, but instead would hold a researchy/freeish position in the company.
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Wind resistance has to be a factor after 25mph, I mean it is on my electric bicycle.

And holy cow, even 25mph is crazy fast, 35? If you tripped and fell at 35-40mph you could seriously injure yourself.

I think I have a good question for the xkcd q&a site: how fast could Usain Bolt run on the moon (ignoring the oxygen problem).

Ah I see someone beat me to the moon problem. Here's another thought, without strong gravity to help return mass to the ground, running is probably much harder.
So why not send it as spam? The key here is hiding in the this can be done in multiple ways.

1. Encode fake spam and send spam thousands of people with it.
2. Also send lots of real spam to your intended targets.

Their spam filter could then attempt decoding and identify the fake spam from the real spam, and you just look like a big nasty old spammer.

The thing I like about this approach is that for all we know, it's used already, and some of those junk emails that we've got, you know, maybe even a classic, could have actually been messages from some spy agency that contained a message!