skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The talk's simplicity drives me a bit batty.

The British feudal society was not so clearly hierarchical. Now, he says it's a "gross simplification", with the goal of expressing some underlying truthiness. But over and over again he says that people in the hierarchical system don't question their position.

See the Magna Carta and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as two examples where people did question their position under the feudal system.

See matrix management and dotted line manager as examples of modern attempts at alternatives to strict hierarchical structures.

The speaker complains about the lack of internal markets at a large company. OTOH, the promotion of internal competitive markets is often described as one of the reasons for the downfall of Sears. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inter... :

> The model “also created a top-heavy cost structure, according to a former vice president for human resources. Because Sears had to hire and promote dozens of chief financial officers and chief marketing officers, personnel expenses shot up. Meanwhile, many business unit leaders underpaid middle managers to trim costs.”

> For innovation, internal markets have the same problem as hierarchical bureaucracies. Managers vote their resources for innovations that bolster their current fiefdoms and careers. The safest strategy is to stick to the status quo. Ms. Kimes’ article gives multiple examples where competing managers at Sears looked after their own units at the expense of the interests of the firm as a whole.

There's also the problem that he compares companies to feudal societies, without the awareness that feudalism is relatively new. The Roman Empire had a non-feudal society, but was still structured hierarchically.

In fact, to quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#History_of_feudalism :

> Feudalism, in its various forms, usually emerged as a result of the decentralization of an empire: especially in the Carolingian empires which both lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure[clarification needed] necessary to support cavalry without the ability to allocate land to these mounted troops.

The speaker describes feudalism as a centralized command-and-control system. That doesn't fit the idea that it's a decentralized system, with respect to an empire.

Is a company structure more like late feudal England? Or like Imperial Rome? If the latter, then it's wrong to say that modern companies are "feudal".

Edit: Grr! And it's like the 1950s-era push towards flat corporate structures never existed. Nor the co-op movement like Mondragon Corporation.
perhaps this is why FB has been de-emphasizing the importance of likes to advertisers.
GM went through a similar phase with EDS and Hughes in the mid 1980s (which is of course how GM ended up owning DirecTV).

I can't help but think Google is behaving similarly today, at the height of its power. Cars, Nest, fiber, wireless, robotics, biotech; and I suspect that will continue to expand.
I don't think the rule of law is an edge case. Blackmail happens every day.

You make a really interesting point with this:

>given the opportunity, I bet those people would have opted to leave behind a crafted and consented-to image, rather than having their laundry aired out for all to see for eternity.

But I wonder: is a well-crafted idyllic image of history worth a limited understanding of humanity as a result?

I think that in the startup world we can understand that there are often two stories: one is a marketing story; but another is the sad reality of the hustle early-on. Later once companies have succeeded, it is all right (I think) to admit to the hustle.

Another example was that surely the founders of America would not have wanted to be remembered as tyrannical slave-owners. But while we present the noble story of the enlightenment and ideals of freedom ("all men are created equal"), at an advanced level we learn that they did not practice this literally. Does it take away? We remember their achievements and progress, and the story they wanted to leave behind. Not their foibles.

Orson Welles got his acting start in theater in London, lying and saying he was a well-known actor in the United States. He was a complete rookie. Though the production manager had his doubts about the story, he gave Welles a shot.

How does the existence and knowledge of this fact take away from the story of Orson Welles, creator of Citizen Kane which is considered by many to be the greatest work of cinema in existence?

Welles is an inspiration to many. So are startup founders who have to hustle.

I think being brutally honest about humanity gets us farther than not having this information at all. Perhaps it would only concern people at the University doctoral level, but I don't think the existence itself of this information is a net loss for humanity.

I also have personal theories about good and doing the right thing, and I'd hope either that a few hundred years from now everyone agrees with me; or that I learn enough about humanity to improve my own understanding by the time I die. When I learn new facts, I update my understanding.

So thanks for your comment, but I do not find it convincing and am leaving my comment up.
Indeed, technical debt can be there for whatever reason.

It could be that idiot coder who caused a lot of damage in the code before someone finally checked what he did.

It could concern old code created by otherwise sensible programmers at a time when it just wasn't clear how something should work.

It could be a matter of something that was once a good pattern, but by the introduction of something newer has become technical debt (although you mostly would call this just "old code").

And indeed, sometimes you have to hack something in because there's this customer of manager who DEMANDS that something happens NOW.

In general technical debt is basically bad code that when left unfixed will do more damage over time and will often end up costing you more than the times it takes to just fix it.
This just illustrates that the real problem is versioning, not linking. It's nice to hand wave off the versioning problems of this approach, but in practice this isn't really different from the mechanisms used to version shared libraries and suffers all the same pitfalls. You've just replaced ld.so with a bunch of running daemons and turned it into a distributed computing problem. Don't get me wrong, I love plan 9 and its namespaces and long for them in the practical world, but this is 6 of one, half dozen of the other.

Also, filesystem namespaces in Linux are a privileged operation, so these kinds of approaches don't work at all like they do in plan 9.
Anybody else having issues navigating? I'm on Firefox.
And security. The biggest problem of course is that this a field ripe with potential for abuse... there's a fine line between a personalized book recommendation service, and a massive, streamlined propaganda machine.

We have the knowhow to build either (very near) futures: one in which we automate all the menial aspects of our day-to-day lives and are left to explore and create... and one in which our desire for convenience is exploited by governments and corporations.

The technical difficulty of achieving either is the same, the only difference between utopia and dystopia in this case is the foundation on top of which it's built:

One is built on openness: open data, neutral networks, open software and standards, all massively available so that anyone with the ingenuity to do so can pitch in and help build this future.

The other is built on a foundation of walled gardens and closed ecosystems: everyone building on top of platforms and technologies that are ultimately controlled by a handful of individuals whose interests we now have to trust align with our own.
Humans Are on the Verge of Losing One of Their Last Big Advantages Over Computer
Imagination over possessions.

I often try to remember what was most fun for me, it was usually making treasure maps, looking for pixies and elves, writing letters to santa or building a fort. Even something as simple as going out in the car and getting to choose left or right at each junction and see where we ended up.

As an adult you have to be willing to look silly, not stick to 'the rules' and let kids come up with their own versions.
Except not even, because the data will never see the light of day, only hidden / stolen by bad actors. The only historical significance will be how huge of an over-reaction we had to 9/11 and the perceived threat of drugs.
Raspberry Pi Build Environment in No Time at All
There is an important distinction to make between package managers and project managers.

In Ruby, for example, Bundler is what I would call a project manager. It installs packages to a place only it knows (or it should know) about, and Bundler or tools that integrate with Bundler wrangle the Gem loader path to control what modules are available to load.

This way the dependencies of any number of project live in complete isolation from one another, including several different versions of the same dependency which is often impossible to achieve using a system package manager like apt or pacman. The end result is similar to something like virtualenv, but with (in my opinion) a friendlier user experience.

These project managers also often include project scaffolding tools and subcommands to run tests, generate documentation, etc. Examples in other languages include Leiningen or Boot for Clojure, Maven for Java, and Cargo[1] for Rust. When used properly and when the creators of a project manager understand its role, they can work in concert with a system-level package manager. Cargo, for example, interoperates beautifully with system packages with great support for linking with system libraries[2].

[1]: http://crates.io/

[2]: http://doc.crates.io/build-script.html#case-study:-linking-t...
Not sure about the aesthetics argument. Form follows function - if it functions well it looks good, and vice versa. (What people sometimes miss is that you aren't born with a sense of aesthetics/taste but it needs to be learned and the above rule is a good way of improving your understanding of what looks good.)
Good to read a counterpoint to these claims about the "Prussian factory model"! I recall being disappointed reading Gatto and Khan, because there's too much asserted and too little analyzed/cited. (Or perhaps I missed it...)
> I was too shy to share it as it did not involve magic abstract Haskell-foo

Please don't be, simple understandable Haskell code is very nice :)

Plus if there is a better way of doing it you get to find that out too.
Mindfulness therapy as good as medication for chronic depression – study
As far as fake profiles and "growth hacking" go, I bet FB has solved for the optimal per cent of fake profiles. Above this amount, FB brand suffers, below this level ad revenues suffer. They probably also factor in the cost of effectively keeping fake profile below this threshold. That's not to say FB encourages or promote fake profiles, I just think they've studied it a lot more intensely than most of us commenters have. And given their size, few have a greater economic incentive than them to fully understand the problem.
Looks great Joel! Definitely going to check this out and start working through it. I've noticed the huge bifurcation between extremely applied data science and almost entirely mathematical based. I was always wary of 'learning' data science through applications only, but as you alluded to, it's significantly more exciting. Likewise, most introductory statistics classes are so poorly delivered that many people have a deeply ingrained fear of the underlying concepts.

As a side note, do you attend any data events in Seattle? I'm moving there in June after graduation and would love to talk with somebody doing my dream job.
The "standard model of intelligence" is that a lot of tasks seem to have correlated (not identical) performance, and we can call the primary dimension of this relationship a "G factor", and in turn measure this implicitly with tests designed to have the same measures of correlation.

This man has a delightful british accent, which seems to count for something, but his "what is intelligence" snippet is a gigantic strawman. "You can't compare a composer and a mathematician on the same axis, they're doing different things!" No shit, jackass. What you can do, for instance, is study the relationship between measured mean population IQ and GDP, which tells you it's really important to, eg, fight IQ-lowering dietary deficiencies and heavy element poisoning if you care about helping countries develop. It's incredibly powerful as an aggregate measure.
> This title should be changed to "Computers AREN'T beating humans at advanced chess"

How would anyone know? The OP is just linking to the same 2012 thread filled with speculation which you see pop up every so often. There's nothing hard in it establishing that centaurs are still useful/no longer useful, and in any case, 3 years is a long time.

> http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/FreestyleSt....

Which will be a lagging indicator (if computer chess AIs had just squeaked over the threshold where a grandmaster's contribution declined to the level of noise, how many years would it take for unaided chess programs to accumulate 'a striking percentage') and in any case, has just a few games post-2010 and none at all post-2013.
“I found my boyfriend at a hackathon”
Well, if you are in North Carolina, you should email me, as we are hiring data scientists. :)
"4. Consult with an employment lawyer."

Talking to an employment lawyer is a very good idea, since you may be getting fired in retaliation for reporting illegal activity: "the 'expert' turned out to be producing documents that are not in compliance with Federal law." You might have a case for a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, which could give you leverage to get a hefty severance payment to make the case (and adverse publicity) go away by settling out of court. So definitely consult a good lawyer who practices employment law in your state.

"2. Document everything... 3. Save proof of the violations."

Needless to say, don't save these on your company computer, since the moment they decide to fire you you'll lose access to it.

"1. Do not talk to anyone else in the company about this issue. Do not trust HR or legal."

For more information on the role of HR and why they shouldn't be trusted, read the book Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro (which I learned about from a comment on HN a while back; thanks to whoever posted that!).

Link to book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312337361
Yes, you are right. Collecting all this info in the first place is diametrically opposed to the security of individuals, companies, and the state. It is like a nuclear power plant, with a reactive fission core that has to be very well-contained. And then the 'waste' has to be put away for 500 years. It's diametrically opposed to environmental safety.

I completely agree with you that it needs to be incredibly tightly controlled. It's precisely the fact that I learned that, in fact, this was largely the case that left me impressed with them.

It was as though you have learned that there has never been a nuclear meltdown, but, unbeknownst to anyone, nuclear has been providing cheap, low-pollution energy throughout the world for decades, while being very well-run. That was leave you with a sense of both uneasiness, but perhaps respect that it has been done well.

I will say that I think that some of the people collecting all this data are like how some 'hoarders' of copyrighted, etc, files feel and behave. They kind of feel like if there is data (bits) that are out there, they should have a right to get them.

This does not ordinarily make someone want to do damage with it, and perhaps the employees of the NSA care more about siphoning up everything than using it for any harm.

Overall I would agree that it is a very dangerous thing to exist, and would require the smartest people on the planet to keep secure; as well as deny the existence of it at all.

I think there's a huge difference between them admitting to what they're doing, or doing it in secret. They should completely deeply deny everything they're doing. While retaining the capability for when someone decides to be a genuine evil person. You just can't be one these days and have any success! This is as it should be.

They should not admit to anything, which would have a chilling effect on free speech. I want to be able to live my life in complete freedom from any oversight or surveilance :)

that is the difference between the free world and a dictatorship.
My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One
Don't forget, X11 is the reason why Unix got dynamic libraries.
> At its core, your OS is just a bunch of files

"But, you NEED to run the installer on that (bare metal) server!" Nope, I can just boot from knoppix (remember?) and mount the disk and run debootstrap on it.

Every so often I run into programmers and sysadmins that believe these things are a kind of magic. They're not. They're just files on a disk.

Love this presentation. Thank you!

edit: s/mount knoppix/boot from knoppix/
You're a data scientist - one of the hottest jobs out there. Go find a place where you don't work for an asshole, and you can have fun. Email me if you're having a hard time finding a job, I'll probably hire you.
Not an Arch user, but I'm glad it exists. It's incredibly helpful to know which devs love tedium, boilerplate and hand-rolling; makes it easier to avoid them...
Being discussed over here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9441590
Show HN: Autobld, automatically restart your server when code changes
Care to elaborate on where it falls down emulating vim?
Ditto. My first thought was to rage at the rationale behind that post, but I'm glad I stepped back to let it percolate. Scares the shit out of me that presumably normal and respectable and intelligent people see the situation that way...
It's works fine here using the right arrow on Firefox Nightly 40.0a1 running on Ubuntu 15.04.
I regret that this post is the top of the page. I failed to anticipate that people will take any opportunity to have yet another boring static typing debate.

But to be clear, in my day job I work on an app with 350k lines of Python in it and the reason I know it mostly works is due to our test coverage. As someone else mentioned in this thread, a lack of tests should not give you confidence regardless of the language.
I am not sure what you are talking about. I am talking about this:

"Within 9 days, all of the top 10 Linux distributions will use systemd by default, or descend from one that does."
https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without-docker/#1
I disagree with you to such a level that I'm letting it anger me. With that being said, I upvoted you. This is a worthwhile comment, to see how other people might see the world.

I don't want to attack you on a case by case basis, other people have done that enough. But as a completely superficial criticism, you should know that one of the staples of anarchism is that it relies on strong communities.

> Everybody knows what happens under an anarchy, or a complete lack of rule of law: people spend their energies arming up personally, as opposed to building relationships, products, ideas, or being productive. People don't trust each other. Might makes right.

"I'll take this-guy-has-no-idea-what-anarchism-is for $1000, Alex."

Go look at any anarchist society that existed. Then look at the US today. Tell me which is more selfish and concerned with their own well being.
Mind elaborating where you felt like things were being glossed over?

Is glossing over things necessarily a bad thing? Isn't learnXinY just an introduction site?

Have you tried the howistart[0] for Haskell?

0: http://howistart.org/posts/haskell/1
In Rust you can use (wrt exhaustive match) and traits to a really great extent to provide safety.

Quite often I write some Rust code and know that it will work if it compiles (though I still write tests)
Human minds are nothing more than computers running on unoptimized substrates. It's only a short matter of time on an evolutionary scale before machines surpass.
Yes, the constitution explicitly provides:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants
shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be
seized.

If you don't have a billionaire's family member tied up in your basement, who you are currently using TOR, encryption, and some anonymous currency to hold for ransom, then you have the right to be secure in your effects.

You, I, and everyone else enjoys this right. Nobody gets to look at our things. Any admission by the NSA to the contrary would be a grave violation of our rights.
It's a matter of time.
This rings a bell inside my head; given people from a language/culture with two different words for what English speakers would identify as barely different shades of the same colour, they are objectively better at identifying those two shades than the native English speaker. Which essentially gives the answer "yes" to your question.

Here's a reference that might be what's ringing inside my head:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speakers...

Particularly relevant quote: "This is the first time that evidence has been offered to show cross-linguistic differences in colour perception in an objective task"

Here's more:
https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-...
Web design was perfected in 1454 when Gutenberg typeset his Bibles with dark black text on light colored paper (also: with narrow, full-justified columns). Deviation from that is abusive to your readers and an affront to common decency.
Why can’t we read anymore?
This slideshow is impossible to read on an iPad; the scrolling isn't synchronized with the width of the screen, and attempting to align a page makes it jump to another. Any solutions?

Edit: Apparently, if you don't touch-move but only tap, you can keep it for, getting out of sync.
In summarising many of the excellent advice here you should:

Maintain your professionalism

Seek independent legal advice

Avoid HR like the plague

Assume that you will be fired. You cannot win.

Start looking for a new job immediately.

Document everything for any legal proceedings later.

Ask colleagues you trust if they would provide you with a reference once you have secured new employment.

Do not fear leaving your job for another. Opportunity knocks.

Good luck and remain positive. Don't let this get you down.
They should just close the issue and say that their solution is the plugin. i.e. you must pay for the feature.
When I meet a function and I have no idea what it returns, the lazy thing I do is

foo, bar := someFunc(baz)
int(foo)

Most times the conversion does not work and I see a nice little error with the type of foo.
We are not living our lives for posterity, we are living our lives for us.
> do we really need to fix this at source?

Yes. Otherwise you are chosing to exclude people.
Humans are still good at releasing chemicals that reward neural circuit and strengthen connections at a certain task. Process whose purpose is to slowly get better at that task. Wow, we really have an edge over a machine that is already better at the task and possibly getting better with every game without that particular reward mechanism you know as "enjoyment".
Good that it discusses overfitting.

I can't help but wonder about those recommender systems. With so little material on statistics I have to assume it's only about observational data, which is the best way to make the millionth+1 useless recommendation engine.

And why is it that the "data science" books never discuss DoE?
It doesn't hinge on their admission it hinges on them not doing it.