skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first half of this talk is excellent. The story of air travel--how the engineers of the 60s thought that we'd have supersonic jets and flying cars within a few years--that's a great cautionary tale. Evolutionary biologists call it Punctuated Equilibrium: the idea that progress comes in spurts. The warning--that the evolution of computer hardware and software might be radically slower over the next 50 years than it was over the past 50--seems timely and reasonable.

The second half is not excellent. Bad mental habits and weak arguments are on display.

* Imprecision. Specifically: choosing sentences for their "punch", like a bumper sticker, without caring whether they make sense:
"There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users [...] I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden."

"It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny."

...cool story, bro

* Excessive negativity. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading Everything is Problematic -- it really helped me understand where people like Maciej are coming from. http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/

* Disrespect. "Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads." I guess 40 years ago he would have said "AT&T works on some loopy stuff in between sending you phone bills".

Organizations like Bell Labs--or Google X--are treasures, and as engineers we should be glad they exist.

In short: haters gonna hate
> The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are.

Absolutely. Gather 10 people from a company in a single room and I really doubt they will be able to agree on it. Especially when it's not even about how good they are, but how much value they provide. I have seen this issue in a team of 3 people I managed, it's hard to imagine what it will look like with 100+ people.
There was some other discussion on HN about this discovery four days ago[0], based on the press release from the competing MIT team. Both papers were published in the same issue of Science[1,2] (preprints[3,4]).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9899369

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/07/15/science.a...

[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/07/15/science.a...

[3] http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03438

[4] http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02630v1 (h/t @selimthegrim)
> And on the invaders' side? What exactly were the American soldiers dying and killing for?

Rich old men back home.
There is applied machine learning (using machine learning to solve business problems) and theoretical machine learning (Optimization bounds, proofs, algorithm design).

With applied machine learning it is certainly possible to quickly get a working knowledge without too much reliance on statistics or difficult theory. You can compare this a bit with using a sorting function without knowing exactly how it works (but you know how fast it is and when to use it).

If you have an engineering background, take a look at the wide array of high-quality ML code and tools. Study trendy and powerful tools like XGBoost.
Patch Your Chrysler Vehicle Now Against a Wireless Hacking Technique
Coinffeine Launches P2P Bitcoin Exchange in Over 70 Countries
Check out my startup, Glassified.  Kind of like 99 Designs for glassblowing :)
Swift Type System
I've sanitized all of my social media because, as a startup founder, the magnifying glass of "due diligence" is hovering over me at all times. The last thing I need is a problem because of something trivial.

In fact, regarding twitter, my policy is to never use it except to link to other things or retweet someone else's post. Because a 140 character statement on a complex topic is a recipe for disaster.
Show-commits – Visualize the commits of a repo from the command line
Of course they have nothing to fear, because these prosecutions never serve a political agenda, the judicial system has displayed a commitment to integrity, people don't assume the accused are automatically guilty, and trials are so cost efficient that people only settle when they've done something wrong.
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate?

Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
"My friend at google" is about as reliable a source as "my uncle who works at Nintendo".
Sure.

A little while ago there was an article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9907435) which suggested code like

if (cond1)
return val1;
if (cond2)
return val2;
if (cond3)
return val3;

return defaultVal;

is simpler and better than

if (cond1) {
return val1;
} else if (cond2) {
return val2;
} else if (cond3) {
return val3;
} else {
return defaultVal;
}

or something like that. In a certain sense this is objectively false as the second one uses fewer features than the first (a statement we can make formal using monads, but that's unrelated). I'd argue this is doubly true because whenever non-linear flow control begins to be used pervasively it is hard to know what code will be executed and under what conditions. With nesting at least these conditions are obvious.

In any case, we can solve this conundrum through the existence of an Option or Maybe type which encapsulates the imperative behavior of short-circuiting failure directly and limits it's scope.
Not sure that I buy into the argument that negotiating salary is "competitive thinking". The goal is to reach a compromise that everyone is happy with, which, to me, seems rather cooperative.
Good luck proving retaliation in a jurisdiction with at-will employment.
ad hominem: https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/pikettys-response-to-m...
Obfuscation as alternative to cryptography?
A bit off topic : what are the best recommended way/resources to learn linear algebra and basic probability and statistics ?
It is true for all copy constructors in C++ since the standard allows compilers to perform copy elision.
> To expect there will be no retaliation for pissing off higher ups would be incredibly naive. Even if what you are doing (strictly speaking) is legal and retaliation is illegal. You can't expect to not suffer any repercussions for pissing off those that ultimately are in charge of your pay cheque. That's just not how people operate - even if that's how the law (and society, on the surface) says they should.

The whole point is that this is illegal and wrong. We discuss it in order to, hopefully, fix a bad thing rather than throw up our hands and say, "oh well, she had it coming!"
Selling your company doesn't make you happy
> Sure, there is some corruption, but that's irrelevant [..] Law isn't outright broken, just the corner cases are abused, and law covers very little of what it should.

How could it possibly be irrelevant? We're talking about countless millions of dollars (over time) of other people's money being used here. Why would anyone work hard to get himself into a position to decide who gets it, if there was nothing in it for him?

You want more regulation, but what exactly do you want the laws to say? If there's no problem with quality, what is the problem?

If the problem is just that you personally don't like X, Y and Z, then there is no real problem.
The point is the manager might not have even been implying any retaliation. Can you think of other possible meanings behind the manager's question?
Who will build the infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, sewage)? If you build sth without planning you can block or make it harder to provide these services to others. It only makes sense to plan such thing beforehand.
How we might counter muscle and bone loss for spacebound astronauts
That would be a support contract they are selling I take it? I can see sense in that. Otherwise just...

https://download.moodle.org/
" We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. "

-- Rob Pike on his Slashdot interview
Exactly. I'd like to see the perfect security implementations over large scale systems that exist in the software industry today.
Upholding a law is more tricky that being obtuse about how the world is going to unfold before The Judgement Day (TM). Look at Aaron Swartz. There is a way to have things done - if the world is becoming a better place it is because a lot of people are doing a lot of things behind the smokescreen.
Certainly it's damning if it's an accurate depiction but I agree with you that just using Storify on a bunch of tweets isn't really anything like "journalism."
...band together with the other "good cops", quit their jobs, and create that "robust independent police review board" ?
> I'm not sure if you're actually this dense or just trolling. What good can involving the police, after the fact, in a situation where nobody was harmed do?

People who do one reckless thing such as this demo are likely to do others. Calling the police about this incident means that they'll have a record of the people doing this, and if it becomes a pattern, handle it considerably harsher than an isolated incident.
How Amazon API Gateway Shakes Up Your API Management Strategy
I had a somewhat similar experience. I was doing good work at a place for about a year and got nothing not even a pat on the back. Next year started to get fed up, had a rough patch in my personal life, started getting short, angry and bitchy with people. Ran into technical difficulties on the project I was working on. My idea for solving it weren't listened to and even worse had people listened it would have been a small disaster because my idea was crap. I started staying home either "working" or just plain calling in sick. When I showed up for work people were walking on eggshells around me. So I was an unproductive douche basically. That year I got the biggest raise I've ever had. Don't know why. About two weeks after that I quit.
Probably depends on your age and other characteristics. If you can be called a millennial, a 2013 study (http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?R=1009748) found that there's over an 80% chance you use social media. That goes down each previous generation, so a baby-boomer should be expected NOT to have such things.

Also, other factors are probably relevant. "No twitter" is very different from "No twitter, because I'm married with twins."
The obvious but security-oblivious way to do this is to just connect the entertainment system that has the internet connection to one of the car's microcontroller busses. Even if it just needs to send a single command, it's easier than adding another pin and another wire to the appropriate microcontroller on the other end. The problem is that everything on these busses is completely trusted, and there's no authentication. The window motor can't tell whether the signal to roll down the window came from a switch or from the entertainment system.

The simple solution is just to have a separate wire for everything, and source devices that aren't supposed to control destination devices don't get those wires connected. The problem is that the automakers went to microcontroller busses because this creates a rats nest of wires.

The level 2 solution is have some sort of low-level filtering on the commands that are going out from a controller on the bus, so any command that the entertainment system sends to turn off the transmission doesn't make it onto the bus.

The level 3 solution is to have some sort of cryptographic authentication of entities on the bus, so that the endpoint can decide what commands it's going to accept from what source.

As you go from level 1 to level 2 to level 3, the system is more flexible, adaptable, and upgradable, but it's more complex, and thus more brittle to attack. Sorting out how to handle this sort of thing is going to be a big challenge as IoT pushes into more devices.
Or an actual understanding of market position and--in the case of less privileged folks--a way to smoke out systemic bias.

You know--things that any worker should want to know.
Agreed. Quasiparticle does not mean it's evanescent or has imaginary energy! Back to scattering class....
> I think in summary you're mixing up stuff you've read on LessWrong and stuff you've read about LessWrong. The latter is often inaccurate.

That may well be the case, but my only other information source is HN comments, and not those made by detractors either. If there are sites or articles dedicated to the deconstruction of LW ideas, I'm not privy to them, nor am I interested in seeking them out. Basically, I only remember LW's existence when it comes up, always accompanied by fawning comments, on HN.

> the reasons why the Basilisk does not work are _not trivial_ - it's not a simple Pascal's Wager

Correct. While my value judgement of both is the same, my reasoning about why the Basilisk is not a thing ultimately consists of more components. That doesn't mean it's worthy of more consideration though.

> because with Pascal's Wager, we don't have the ability to actually create God

I would not say this is centrally important, because the processes leading to the creation of AGI are in all likelihood not going to be influenced by the existence of the Basilisk thought experiment either way.

> and in fact publicly stated that he won "the hard way", without a one-size-fits-all approach.

Again, I have to take my cues from the perspective of an outsider looking in, and there are several people who commented in this thread alone who described it very, very differently. Of course, a movement is not directly responsible for all its fans and members - but among the advocates for the validity of the AI Chat experiment, the idea that out there is a mystical one-size-fits-all rhetorical exploit seems very much alive. It may be cynical, but I can't help noticing how this aura of mystique and secret knowledge seems to work very well when it comes to attracting fans.

Of course, ultimately, these are just memes - and like many memes they propagate best when reduced to an absurd core. It doesn't even require intent.
My understanding from reading the vague tweets was the "fuck off" statement was referring to some other occurance of racism that she mentions, unrelated to the salary spreadsheet.
" But, all management sees is that it takes me longer to finish an equivalent task than the rest of my peers."

This is your only problem. If your manager cannot understand that quality is better than quantity, then you may want to entertain the idea of changing companies.
You're absolutely right that these sorts of things are all too common but that isn't really a reason to shrug off her story.
High-Class Adult Novelties – Room4Play
I often exchange from US$ to CAN$ (and vice-versa) and the cheapest way, by far, is to trade in cash. Credit cards use bank rates and bank rates can't compete with currency exchange shops dealing in cash.

The problem comes when you want to exchange larger sums of money.
Linux game review: OpenTTD
In Big Leap, Scientists Test India's Most Powerful Cryogenic Engine
At least a screenshot or demo video would be really useful for me to decide if I want to install your app or not.
If you don't think there are politics at small orgs you must not have worked for one.
5 Step Formula to Attract Your Audience and Increase Sales
>tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected.

"tl;dr I support the establishment"
I'm just getting into poker so I can't claim to be an expert but I've been enjoying Lee Jones' Winning Low-Limit Hold'em.
Reposting tweets is not valid journalism. For that matter, including tweets from random people in reaction to a news event is also not valid journalism either. I don't care what muffycat1974 on Twitter has to say about the Iran nuclear deal, unless muffycat1974 is the Secretary of State.
That depends on your motives... they believe that all information should be available to them so they can leverage that information to make a squijillion dollars. Nothing about that mandate suggests that all information should be available to all... information wants to be free - to them. The fact we all want it is not their concern. It is not in their financial interest to give up that information to anyone, it doesn't further their bottom line, which is the only real mandate they care about. If they could monetize salary transparency, trust me, they would have made that information free too.

In fact, it potentially hurts their bottom line because then they'd have to have pay equality amongst their ranks - and I don't mean pay equality from a male/female standpoint (though that is a concern), I mean from an employee to employee standpoint. Pay transparency gives everyone an equal footing on the negotiation playing field. This also means that even the worst negotiator in the room can potentially earn the same as the top superstar on the team. What do you think that does to Google's bottom line? They could have been paying the superstar with the shitty negotiation skills peanuts to earn them millions, now they've gotta pay him the same as the pretty good developer with excellent negotiation skills because he has them over a barrel and he knows he is the only one that has the ability to provide what they need to get where they need to go.

I wouldn't say this is hypocritical, this is accounting. Accountants want to keep the bottom line at the absolute minimum. When this means paying people different amounts to do the same job, salary discussion pisses people off. In the interest of keeping the peace and getting the job done, salary discussion must be suppressed or people figure what they're worth amongst themselves and they have more negotiation power. More negotiation power causes the bottom line goes up, counter to the accountants' mandate. You would have to completely upend accountants' viewpoints on capitalism to turn that perspective around, and until you do, law or no law, practices like this will continue.

Salary negotiation since the dawn of capitalism has been like a game of poker. You need to figure out their motivations and what value they're trying to extract from you. Once you know what your value is to them and what return on their investment you are capable of providing them, the negotiation begins. People make the mistake of comparing themselves against others in order to negotiate their salary when in fact it comes down to the game you play at the negotiation table. The game is to understand what value you provide to the company in the role you're pursuing and figure out a number you're both comfortable with. Too high and you don't get hired, too low and you get exploited. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female, it all comes down to figuring out the value they know you will provide them and exploiting that.
Show HN: Gmail Share Button
10 top-notch community management tools from Jono Bacon
Yes, or more accurately: the psychopath rulers and their cronies back home.

That's what I've been getting at, as you probably gathered.

In other words, ordinary people don't actually have a good reason to die and kill for X in a war, because X is always rulers and wars are always about their personal gain at the expense of countless ordinary people.
3 good and not that good things about Live Query Statistics (SQL 2014/2016)
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>I'm not sure if you're actually this dense or just trolling. What good can involving the police, after the fact, in a situation where nobody was harmed do?

I don't know, maybe if they get in trouble the next researcher who wants to do a test by disabling a car doing 70mph on a public road will maybe just alert a few people and make sure that it would be impossible for someone innocent to die during their testing.

I was with your comment until you called the GP dense or a troll. Because to follow your logic, to get action, they should've just actually killed a random person. Then you'd be right, we would get some changes, pretty quick.

Who do you think should be the random person to get killed for change?
But not criminality? That's a baffling stance that entirely ignores the source and designated purpose of law.
ManagedVMs don't use k8s under the covers afaik. However there's GKE (Google Container Engine), which goes on top of (at least 3) MVMs and that one does use k8s.
While it is true that going with a PaaS(-like) solution like AppEngine or Heroku is easy in the beginning it can get pretty expensive pretty fast and it limits you in the choice of languages, frameworks, and data stores you can use. This can in some instances bring technical debt with it that will pose a hurdle when growing.
Actually, using Docker combined with an orchestration layer like k8s is supposed to give the the ease-of-use of PaaS with the flexibility of IaaS (or MVMs), however, managing sth like k8s by yourself is not that easy and you will need quite a bunch of other tools on top, i.e. for monitoring and stuff, which paves the way for Container-as-a-Service solutions, like RancherOS, tutum, or Giant Swarm (disclaimer, I'm part of the latter company)
Well luckily my Chrysler despite only being a year old does not have this connectivity. It does have Uconnect which I despise, I keep contacting Chrysler to demand that they offer the ability to use Apple Carplay or the Google equivalent. To be fair there has yet to be a vehicle that has a nice easy to use controls for radio or media.
I don't disagree at all with what you're saying. What I'm saying is that human nature and politics are an incredibly complex game. Look at the dirty politics involved in presidential campaigns (see, this behaviour is even in evidence at the very top of the food chain!) as an example. Until you fix the mentality of the people at the top, shit will continue to roll downhill. This goes for corporate environments, political environments, society as a whole.
"I don't like X unenforceable thing" is the mark of our generation. Every tweet is public, and if anyone thinks they've protected them somehow, that is both unlikely to be true in all cases and definitely is missing the point that making your tweets private is a different statement entirely.

This isn't even anything new. We used to ask for references, and we'd follow up further if the stakes were high enough. I got interviewed by a police officer from another city because my neighbor had applied to the department. Said neighbor didn't know that everyone in his life they could get a hold of would be asked questions about him, but it makes sense.

Privacy is so rarely what we think it is, and the new generations (of which I'm a part) have so very little shared understanding of the consequences of doing something publically in a world where all of it is likely recorded and shared in a nicely indexed format. The answer to this is not regulation or other bullshit feel-good answers. The answer, as it so often is, is education. I realize that is going to help very few people, but then again, regulation on something as ambiguous as this will help 0.
Karel De Gucht, the belgian guy who did everying to let TTIP succeed. Send even a letter to all parlement members that everything what they read on the internet is a lie...
Zeplin got into YC
Learn to Code the Easy Way: Software Engineers Are Storytellers
The "is good enough" mentality might be true if you are talking about browsing Facebook, reading email, etc. But other areas of the technology are still very far from being "good enough" and still pushing technology forward. The gaming industry is one great example of this.
Shrugging and saying that companies blatantly violating labor law is predictable is a self-fulfilling prophecy.