skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Some of these are more important than maximizing the unknowable variable of an unknown function.

So, maybe don't talk about maximizing unknowable variables in unknown functions. We can talk about utility functions in the abstract in a theoretical context, but once you're trying to make actual assertions, economic models aren't dealing with unknown functions, they're dealing with very specific utility functions that maximize for very specific values.

When an economist talks to the public, they necessarily speak in simplified terms. But the dumbed-down version of economics that you see on TV shouldn't be mistaken for what an economist actually does. Your argument is basically "I've never seen a Bloomberg Terminal, therefore economists must just be theorizing in a void." That's not the case.

> For example, let's say that demolishing a minority neighborhood in LA to make way for a private highway will maximize utility for all of LA. So what? Is it moral?

If your criticism of economics is that it maximizes unknowables, maybe don't pick ethics as your example of something better?

The thing is, to answer the question "Is it moral?" you can pick a lot of economic functions to look at. How will the highway effect the income of the people in the minority neighborhood? That's fundamentally an economic question.

> About proposing a predictive model. I don't have to to point out flaws (not sure that I did). If A is false, I don't need to prove B to prove ~A.

Predictive models are all false. The question is not whether they're false, it's what the margin of error is in relation to reality. A false predictive model with a low margin of error is useful--complete ignorance is not useful.
tl;dr having multiple genotypes for the same phenotype is inevitable if the genotype space is smaller than the phenotype space; the mapping is not injective (it's not one-to-one); a projection.

Making this local, where adjacent points map to the same phenotype can be trivial, e.g. ignoring one dimension of a 10 column row in a database. But an interesting local mapping seems much rarer: where you can change one dimension in one step (and still get the same phenotype), then change a different dimension in the next step, etc, so that the path through space is not just one dimension varying, but a jagged winding path.

This is important for the "path" (or connected genotypes with the same phenotype) to have a large surface area, which increases the chance of contact with the path of another phenotype (and that phenotype has some usefulness).

That's the main problem: that there be adjacency "transfer points" between useful phenotypes. It seems to me that in the huge exponentially large spaces we're talking about, they would be very rare, unless the mapping had some special qualities (which would make sense if the mapping itself had been selected by evolution - so the "selfish gene" is only secondarily in charge; the mapping is the primary one - and possibly, mutation strategies, like sex, and other as-yet undiscovered ones, that might be analogous to factoring or expanding, so the genotype can change dramatically in one step, but remain equivalent).
> if I blow away the stock version of Windows 8 I'm currently running with an incoming Windows 10, will that blow away all the Lenovo bloatware?

It will remove the Lenovo applications, but the 'bloatware' and security risks could exist elsewhere, or example in BIOS or in a separate partition on the hard drive.
Actually, I meant booting!

Had to look for it in the HN history, look at this guy's implementation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SxLvz6pcGs
~30ms here, the post indicates some kind of intel NUC (so not exactly the fastest thing)

The syscalls themselves are probably sub-millisecond
Inkscape, which is free software and runs on both Windows and Linux, has a reasonably good vectorizer. (It's under Path->Trace Bitmap). You get .SVG files out.

(I did the first vectorizer for small computers, Autodesk CAD/Camera, in 1983. Vectorizing E-size drawings in 640K was the hardest part of the problem.)
Right; which is why I was surprised that OS X stacks up as favorably as it does. But I wouldn't call it a great value since it's still much more expensive than a traditional rack mount setup. From a density perspective it's really not bad at all, which is a testament to how well-engineered the Mac Pro is.
Mercurial 10th Anniversary
Tattoos or the Apple Watch?
Don't think of it as outliving, think of it as continuing their legacy.
Given the fluidity of language, I'd say it's common enough that it is now correct as a gender-neutral address, like "folks" or :shudder: "y'all."
I read the article: if they are, that is quite unclear to me.

Possible answers that are discussed are only 'some sort of IP encapsulation', which is vague and GRE, which is just a single solution. He doesn't seem to disapprove of VXlan, so probably something was missing in 'IP encapsulation and GRE'. Was 'all problems solved decades ago' merely hyperbole or is there actually something to it?
This was one of our initial ideas for the design, but it boiled down to an airflow concern. There are some products that do this, such as http://www.h-sq.com/products/mprack/index.html

If you look at how the airflow works on that shelf, I think you'll see why I don't have confidence in that solution. The air paths to each system seem to be based on wishful thinking.

We also didn't need to go that dense after considering each host's power draw at full load. I design towards a 208v/3ph/50a circuit on each rack, and 44 Mac Pros at full load (plus a switch) are about 13.5kW in my testing. So we would need to build for 60A circuits, or not completely fill the rack, to make the vertical orientation worthwhile.
Unfortunate for many who wish otherwise, it's very clearly a market they do not remotely care about.
Google’s loss is LinkedIn’s gain in Mountain View
+1

Also realize the limitation of doing this: You'll get "practice", but you won't get "feedback". If you practice with a bunch of B and C companies, but end up getting rejected from As, then you won't know why that is happening. At that point, you may get tired of interviewing and would end up taking something that's suboptimal. So guard against that.

If you want to work at an A company, then I'd say at least some of your practice interviews should also be with A companies.

Even then, you won't get the raw, uncut, deliberate feedback that you want. For that, you want to practice with seasoned interviewers. Use something like us (http://InterviewKickstart.com) or what Aline does (http://interviewing.io).
Exactly. How is this different from any other profession? Developers can be so myopic. The narcissism in our industry really drives me up the wall. The only other industry that is this way, that I've seen, is the entertainment industry. The denizens of which also seem to suffer from this idea that they are totally unique and none of the plebeian hordes can possibly relate to what they go through.
No sane person is putting GTX cards into a configuration with that level of power density, you'd have reliability issues from day one. This use case is exactly why Nvidia makes Tesla cards.
It's designed for believing Apple fans, silly.
I used to work in Search at another company. You'd be surprised how often people would type "Google" in the search box (or "Facebook" or, in some cases, the name of the company itself, on whose search page they were on!)

Mobile is much harder to monetize than web; so it'll be interesting to see what this does to Google's numbers. Sponsored Search is, after all, their main bread and butter.
He understood memes and introduced species enough to introduce a meme as a predator to a different meme, but ignored that introduced species with no predators quickly become invasive themselves.

So if he's not happy, he's only got himself to blame.
Then you should look no further than luajit -> http://luajit.org
Different people can be helped by different things. I think it's rather odd to take something said by somebody who was in the middle of planning his own suicide, and who got stopped because a certain event made him think about something he hadn't considered, and say that thinking about this particular thing doesn't help. It helped him, therefore clearly it can help.
>It may be a little early to tell, but it looks like all that money will have been wasted. So, net effect on the economy may end up being that we wasted time, money and natural resources in building useless machines in the middle of nowhere that added an unfathomable amount of carbon to our atmosphere.

This is entirely predicated on the assumption that cheap solar energy will be available within the next ten years.
> I'm 30 now (from time to time I feel that I've already lived enough and am mostly done)

This is the most absurd sentence I've read in weeks. Wow, man. Talk to some people a bit older than you, maybe, and realize that you haven't done anything.
In a word: yeah!
That's amazing. I just turned 50 and I not only expect, but look forward to 30+ more productive years.
The introspection bit is because js.globals is implemented with a fancy __getattr__ but doesn't have a __dir__. In general, dir() is not reliable in the face of custom __getattr__ implementations unless the implementor goes out of the way to make it work.
I suspect that the sideways orientation is motivated by cooling. The mac pro sucks air in the bottom and shoots it out the top, so if you stack them, the top machine is sucking in the bottom machine's hot air. In this orientation, the whole rack is sucking air in from one exposed side and pushing it out the other exposed side; much easier to engineer around.
Apple used to sell the rack mounted X-Serve, but discontinued that a few years go.
Who's keeping the actual gold and who's to say it's all actually there?

also, why would I want gold/diamonds/seashells/feathers/arbitrary-relatively-useless-material backing a currency?
What are your thoughts on basic income?
Except it doesn't make sense to base a server architecture around this in the first place, so, no.
Is there a summary somewhere that explains what makes "OS X’s graphics frameworks" worth going to all this trouble?
Nope. A guy is a man, multiple guys are multiple men. Gender-neutral equivalents: people, folks, team, friends, colleagues, you all (and various similar regionalisms - yoounz, y'all). Good on him for making the effort.
For historical context, early IE browsers weren't hardcoded to use JavaScript. We know about VBScript, but really there was a generic framework called Active Scripting that would allow any other language to be plugged in.

Python was one of those languages. You could download an ActivePython distribution and start being able to run python in your web page with a <script language="PythonScript"> tag.

I'm not sure if this still works in current IE versions. It might.
The general advice is - "Don't force it! It won't get you anywhere." However, I feel, smart ambitious people, can't avoid the anxiety to do their own thing. Leaving a high-paying job on a vital position might not make a lot of sense but I believe, when you are surrounded by people making multi-million dollar enterprises with almost-similar skill-set (maybe, with a better business sense), you can't avoid that feel of not finding a single reason to not to replicate the same level of success.
The first cluster I managed was an SGE cluster running on rack mounted xerves.
When you're feeling suicidal good luck enjoying any of those.
It's the same codebase, or at least closely related. Image Vectorizer's tracer is produced by Icosasoft, which is the company owned by the guy who wrote potrace (and licenses the non-GPL version)
I asked for "a better example where personal responsibility was officially upheld".

Add an adult to the story then. Hell, add a teacher, knock yourself out. For making the point of not merely doing as instructed though and having personal responsibility, this need for official confirmation in the metaphor seems awfully weird.

Don't assume everybody does cheap puns and invalidly makes up connections

I didn't, I said I thought you were probably being unintentionally funny.
Because it's a stupid question, you never ask someone his plans for the next 10 years.
This is the key insight in my opinion. What are the possible outcomes of this scenario? Hyper inflation? War?
That optics section. Sounds like not only are they tapping into fiber, they've got the gov. equivalent of an industrial research lab working on how to do it.
I get the sense that very few people that want GPU clusters, want them all the time. Most want, either at the low level, to rent some g2.2xlarge EC2 boxes, or at the high level, to pay a full-stack "render-farm-as-a-service" company.

One can certainly imagine Pixar or whoever having a data-centre of Macs, but at their scale, where they also write all the software for their rendering pipeline, they can easily make that software cross-platform such that developers can test-render on a Mac, then grid-render on a Linux farm without any friction.
I will check them out. Thanks!
Except that this would put the hot chambers next to the cold ones of the next layer.
I'd say it's not even as expensive as something like IBM's 4-socket rack servers like the x3850 X6.
> As a non-native speaker, isn't "guys" a correct term regardless of the gender?

"Guys" can be used in both a male-gender-specific sense (for which the female-gender-specific rough equivalent is "gals"), or in a gender-neutral sense; there is no structural way to distinguish the uses. Like most places in English where a word has both a male-gender-specific use and a gender-neutral use, the latter is somewhat controversial with certain groups, who prefer unambiguously gender-neutral terms rather than dual-use terms that can either be male-gender-specific and gender-neutral.
If you refuse to hire someone based on past crimes, that's extra-legal justice. When it becomes widespread enough, the State has two choices: stop said discrimination, or be complicit in it.
Of founders or employees?
Right?

Server hardware evaluation by how well it comes in in photos.
I've bookmarked this to come back and respond. My father was a mortgage underwriter who attempted to blow the whistle at a major lender (to no avail). I'm very familiar with the various complications faced in properly regulating the MBS marketplace.
I tried it it is very good. The best feature is that when you trace through code, all variables before your trace location show a gray 'ghost' with their current values, including numpy arrays.
Fibonacci Clock – Could you tell time?
Not really. It's still a microaggression in gender-sensitive contexts (such as women in tech)
Definitely clicked the link thinking someone had rack mounted an army of MacBook Pros
it is a correct term, however it is not gender neutral. unfortunately, english doesn't really have a good gender neutral set of pronouns, so you have to make due.
YC and Sam Altman do.
I have used "guy" in the past and now make a conscious effort to avoid it.

There's no need to create an implicit bias when saying something like, "We'll need to recruit some Python guys to deal with this." Just use "people" instead. (Unless you're referring to the guys in the men's room.)
Gdb had a critical role to play in popularizing Stripe's CTFs and making them interesting as they are. I really hope that his departure from Stripe this doesn't change the CTF.

Wishing him the best with whatever he's planned!

Edit: Typos
I'm not sure who gets to prescribe what the word truly means. Descriptively, the plural is used overwhelmingly to refer to a group of people regardless of gender.
Depends, sometimes you want a young pioneering doctor. Also sometimes you want an established software consultant.

The money per se is not in the technical individual contributor but delivering some new value that someone will pay for.
Ask for the feedback. Sure, you may not get it, but asking costs nothing and can get you something.
Yes! At http://InterviewKickstart.com, we're always looking for seasoned interviewers. Please send me an email: soham@interviewk...
A break from the past, part 2: Saying goodbye to ActiveX, VBScript, attachEvent…
(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix and wrote this article)

Nope, it's not ridiculously expensive. The GPUs in the Mac Pro are actually an exceptionally good value per gflop (when I last did a comparison a few months ago). GPUs that will work in servers are not cheap -- a comparable AMD FirePro S7000 is $1000, and the Mac Pro has two of them.

There's the cost of having these Mac Pro chassis fabricated, but they're passive hunks of metal with some cabling run. Nothing too expensive there, and economies of scale are on our side.

The Mac Pros are at least 5x more cost effective than Mac Minis (per gflop, total operating cost), and they're substantially more cost effective per gflop than doing something like EC2 G2 instances. My estimate is that moving to Linux servers would save us about 10-15% per gflop, but that could easily be eaten up by the engineering time needed to migrate.
But it has a predator: critical thought.
[Firebase Developer Advocate]

Firebase does work offline if your app loses network connectivity temporarily (details here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/guide/offline-capabilities...). All data written while offline is stored in memory and is synced to the Firebase servers when your client reconnects. We’re working on improving offline support when your app goes into the background, and we currently have a beta version of this available for our iOS (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/firebase-talk/dOocEtjQz4w/ss...) and Android (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/firebase-talk/gYlnLgQ-Yhk/It...) SDKs.
> Bookmarks: Rolled into Notebook, which was discontinued itself and pushed into Google Docs. So, I guess it's still there, kinda?

Certainly looks like it's there to me:
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/
You're violating OSX license terms if you attempt to run OSX "in the cloud". That was the first idea I wanted to explore when the project was brought up, but for various legal reasons, we just bought the hardware. (Sidenote: Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in a technical meeting where an attorney has joined in, and explains you can't do something legally even though its the perfect technical solution).

Not to say you can't run OSX virtualized...
I think it's a pretty pedantic distinction in Greg's case and not germane to the point.
They used to. No one bought them.
"Hey people!" just doesn't have the same ring as "Hey guys!" I'm starting to use "folks" more for cases like this.
So I feel like I missed a memo. Is there a list / primer on what we do and do not know about hardware backdoors, firmware backdoors and software backdoors?

This bothers me - a16z podcast also threw up a reference to "200 security hygiene" functions - keeping patches up to date and encryption at rest. But Incan only get to about ten.

Is there an appendix in SysAdmin / oReilly I should read or do I have to watch all the CEF notifications and work backwards to what preventative action Inshould stick in my sh file.

It's a serious question - I just don't feel I know what is dangerous out there anymore let alone have it automated.
You're right, it is entirely about airflow.
Noonee testing Chairless Chair exoskeleton at Audi production plants
The thing is, there is a huge correlation between race and destination in nearly all major cities. Drivers tend not to want to travel to outer/poorer areas because (1) they are less safe, (2) there are more minorities, (3) they are less likely to be able to pick up a fare for a return trip. So, cabbies used to discriminate based on destination. And, because these destinations correlate with race so well, they'd discriminate based on race as well. So, NYC and other cities have outlawed a taxi driver's ability to discriminate based on destination. Companies like Uber, however, discriminate based on destination and, thus, race.
Page 64: Providing a Computer User with High-Level Privileges

What could possibly go wrong?! It's like a secret handshake.
Yeah, except IBM's x86 hardware has always been stupid expensive for no good reason other than it's IBM. And didn't they spin off their xSeries server business to Lenovo once the market settled on HP systems that cost half what IBM's did?
Mediatek shows 10 core soc
Plenty of people tried to blow the whistle. The SEC and Fed were warned but were unable to comprehend the overarching microeconomic problems brewing within each firm.

And that doesn't change the overarching problem of defining the right thing at every level. Was AIG acting unethically by failing to properly assess the risk of their CDSs? Or were they just incompetent?
This is interesting -- they actually manage to get greater density out of this setup than many traditional rack mount systems offer.

If they are GPU limited...

A full 4U rack of Mac Pros is 8 AMD Fire GPUs (6GB VRAM each), 256GB main RAM, 48 2.7GHz Xeon cores (using the 12-core option), and 4TB of SSD. 10G Ethernet via Thunderbolt2.

Let's set aside differences in GPU and processor performance; we're just looking at the base stats. All for about $36K USD, not including the rack itself.

An alternative is the SuperMicro 4027GR-TR:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/4027/SYS-4027GR...

So, maxed out, you've got 8 Nvidia Tesla K80 cards (dual GPU), 1.5TB RAM, 28 2.6GHz Xeon cores, and a lot of storage (24 hot-swap bays). That's in a 4U rack too.

Call it about $13K USD for the server, and $5K per GPU. Plus a little storage, call it about $56K USD with 10G Ethernet.

The SuperMicro system is designed to be remotely managed. Each GPU has double the VRAM of the AMD Fire ones (12GB vs. 6GB).

I don't know the exact performance figures of the AMD Fire vs. the Kepler GK210, but I'm sure the Fire it isn't nearly as good. And you've got twice as many Nvidia chips on top of that.

At some point its going to get cheaper to re-write the software...
Not necessarily impossible. I've been completely "distracted" out of the depths of depression, at least temporarily. Depression is a cognitive feedback loop, sometimes a major change of scenery or activity can effectively disrupt it, if you can somehow bring yourself to do it.
Google Cloud Developer Relations here :)

Thanks for the feedback and stuff. I empathize with your frustration. We're listening to threads like these, and workin' hard to make stuff better.

Also, next time you're frustrated with Google Cloudy stuff, feel free to vent to me. It's like unfiltered usability studies.
Seems to fit Maslow's hierarchy of needs pretty well. Being a programmer mostly provides for the physiological needs (food and shelter), but it doesn't necessarily offer much else. It's natural and healthy that people also strive for financial security, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
Plumber know all about traps.

http://www.homeharmonizing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/si...
Greg is a super smart, super nice guy. Can't wait to find out what he ends up working on next.
Contact smaller companies that may not yet have full time programmers/IT staff but are looking to hire their first programmer.

Now, how you accomplish it is another problem altogether ;-)

But seriously. I was trained in how to interview from a company that consults on interview practice. I'm sure the trainer mentioned that they provide it as a service, so there is an existing market.
Two things:

1) This particular malware may be removable by reformatting and installing from a clean copy of Windows (which may not even be available without a separate purchase, since it's likely that the recovery disc that comes with the laptop contains the same default software installation.)

2) Reformatting and reinstalling to remove the malware requires knowing that there's a problem, which you wouldn't have if the articles about it hadn't come out.
There's malice and then there's perception. One could certainly look at just about any colloquialism without intended malice and draw "microaggression" from it.

Knowing where to draw that line is not - nor has it ever been - universal.