Hacker News Reader

mav3r1ckon Mutiny at the big five is part of the future of work

>Remember the KPMG anthem that leaked circa 2000?

Actually, no I don't, never heard of this until now, but it is beyond hilariously bad, assuming this [0] was the real version. It gets better, KPMG tried to claim that another website cannot link to them with their permission [1], now _that_ is hilarious.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...

mav3r1ckon Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too

This is a huge deal. It smells a lot to me like Cambridge Analytica, but even worst.

>The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.

mav3r1ckon The Effective Tech Lead Is a 100x Engineer

Having been on a project with a 100x tech lead who rarely wrote code (but every time it was amazing) due to their leadership position, followed (and preceded now that I think about it) by a project where the tech lead was a 10x engineer who wrote tons of solid, bug-free code ,but was not really a great tech lead, this is 100% true. The difference between the projects were night and day.

The defining feature of the 100x tech lead for me was their ability to do code reviews-- with a tilt of the head, they would point out something that no one else thought of and helped make the code better. I really wish I had the ability to review code that way that 100xer did.

mav3r1ckon Evolution Is the New Deep Learning

You are not off base at all, thanks for clarify and sorry for the confusion, I did not mean to say it was using gradient descent. It's been a while. The term I was thinking of was multiple "simulated annealing".

mav3r1ckon Evolution Is the New Deep Learning

Having studied this extensively back when they were called Genetic Algorithms, I would like to offer a few insights.

1) One of the biggest reasons they fell out of favor for more "mathematical" approaches was that no one could really explain why exactly they worked. It makes sense on the surface that "survival of the fittest" and doing something akin to multiple stochastic gradient descents would work, but no one has really been able to produce a mathematical proof as to why.

Since other folks are producing good examples of "explainable AI", I don't know how Genetic Algorithms/programming could be made 'explainable' as to why they achieved an optimal solution other than hand-waving to how evolution works in nature.

2) The most important thing to define is the fitness function, this defines what the search space looks like and how easily a globally optimal solution can be derived. For a good example of an interesting search space that a genetic program would have a difficult time with, see Schwefel functions [0]. Back when I researched these things closely, my intuition was that reality rarely fits neatly into good fitness functions and I felt that at the point you are understanding the problem, you may just be better off with a direct approach, which leads to

3) Genetic programming should only really be considered when there are no known alternatives or they are way too computationally expensive.

In either case, I would welcome a resurgence in a topic I once knew quite well, though I haven't been in that field for a few years now.

[0] https://jamesmccaffrey.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/schwefels...

mav3r1ckon Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)

Wow. I’ve discovered many bugs in my life. But none caused me to fear for my life.

>There were often significant food shortages in the Soviet Union, and the government plan was to mix the meat from Chernobyl-area cattle with the uncontaminated meat from the rest of the country. This would lower the average radiation levels of the meat without wasting valuable resources. Upon discovering this, Sergei immediately filed immigration papers with any country that would listen. The computer crashes resolved themselves as radiation levels dropped over time.

mav3r1ckon Waymo shows off what it’s like to ride in a truly driverless self-driving car

Let's hope they start bringing these cars to upstate New York in the winter, only then can we seriously consider Level5. The salt layers on so thickly that I would be surprised if LIDAR and cameras could work through that. I am not sure of any solutions besides adding little wipers for all the sensors to keep them clean or adding more repellent paint.

mav3r1ckon Prove you are not an evil corporate person

You don’t see why forcing the open sourcing of the entire Google codebase would be a problem? That’s essentially what GPL does, if you use even a tiny portion of it for your code and they prove it, you have to GPL ALL the source code from the same for base.

mav3r1ckon Google's Python Class

Agreed! The Great Treat List Recursion problem from Parlante's intro to CS page is really good practice with pointers.

mav3r1ckon Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers

I edited the original comment to include a source. Serious talk of self-driving cars was around by then, as they had already successfully used auto-pilot in planes, it wasn't that infeasible.

mav3r1ckon Operation Serenata de Amor – An AI project to analyze public spending in Brazil

You already are quite involved by providing translations, thanks!

mav3r1ckon Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers

You’re right it’s not that novel. Volvo has self-driving* truck convoys going back to the 90s I think.

I think for long-haul trucking it’s certainly pretty hard to stay fully tuned while driving for such long times. And for truck companies, they can save tons of money on labor when they don’t have to pay the driver for the hours on the road and just for the manual disconnect/connect docking. Maybe they can make it fully automated, but why haven’t any trucks done that already? It’s an easier problem to solve than self-driving.

* by convoy, I mean that one truck up front was driven by a human and then a few were automated to draft from directly behind to just follow the truck in front of them.

EDIT: Here's a source for the 90s, where this paper had a few authors from Volvo.

from: http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/ITFVHA15/...

>Additionally, different applications of automated driving for trucks have been demonstrated across the globe since the 1990’s. The focus has been on proof of concept for truck platooning due to the foreseen fuel economy and traffic flow benefits.

mav3r1ckon Let's make the Emacs GC safe and iterative

Interesting. So that's why emacs whigs out sometimes when trying to open very large files: because it has a recursive GC that has trouble when it runs out of stack space. Assuming I read the first statement correctly.

Seems like a welcome change. I'm not too well versed with the internals, but does 4.6MB seem reasonable for a memory footprint? I mean, compared to Slack, not bad.

> The naive version of this scheme needs about 4.6MB of overhead on my current 20MB Emacs heap, but it should be possible to reduce the overhead significantly by taking advantage of the block allocation we do for conses and other types --- we can put whole blocks on the queue instead of pointers to individual block parts, so we can get away with a much smaller queue.

mav3r1ckon Tech company Lanetix fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims

I was reacting to

> but sadly there's nothing they can do about this

Even if legally one has no options, you can still try to do something. Like raise awareness, etc.

mav3r1ckon Tech company Lanetix fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims

This was revealed less than 5 years ago. Did not enough people learn about it / forget about it already?

mav3r1ckon Tech company Lanetix fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims

(commented out hastily-written comment, too late to delete).

mav3r1ckon Curated List of Awesome Lists

This is actually pretty awesome if you ask me. There has been an exploding of "expert curated lists" on GitHub and it's been quite dizzying for me. And now we have a curated list of curated lists.

What is genius about this is if someone says "I want to be a front-end developer", then this is actually a pretty good reference point of "hey, here's a bunch of concepts you may need to learn someday".

mav3r1ckon Visibility and Monitoring for Machine Learning Models

“The tricky thing, though, is in order to get good at machine learning, you need to be able to do deploys as fast as humanly possible and repeatedly as humanly possible. Deploying a machine learning model isn’t like deploying a regular code patch or something like that, even if you have a continuous deployment system.” -Josh

Sounds a lot more like a DevOps problem then a Machine Learning problem to me+. But really, in general, this is something any one doing any sort of software deployment should be doing to begin with. If I encountered a continuous deployment system that doesn't already do this, then I usually take the time to get it as close as possible. Still haven't gotten anywhere close to Netflix's level, maybe some day.

+ This is the buzziest comment I have probably ever made.

mav3r1ckon JupyterLab is ready for users

I love the term "reproducible computational narratives" from their post. This is a great step toward making software accessible for everyone. In addition, imagine how transparent governments and open source communities can be by helping explain the algorithms in use with a clear provided sense of understanding for everyone. On the project level, it can be useful for keeping it simple. It's all good stuff!

mav3r1ckon Java language oddities

Oh yah, that’s right, I forgot about those since I’ve never implementing those things by hand before. I have used almost all of the list at one point, but never had the need to dive down and write my own and always have been fortunate to benefit from a great library or two to help out.

Thank you for the reminder!

mav3r1ckon Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn't Work (yet)

This article deserves way more attention. The Atari DQN paper was a really buzzy thing when it came out. It’s been over four years now and we haven’t seen DQN and similar Deep RL techniques generalize well.

mav3r1ckon Java language oddities

Java is my main language, but not for those things if I can help it. For network protocols for example, I’m a big fan of Netty.

Thanks for answering!

I’m sure you’re aware of all this and I don’t want to backseat drive/code. It’s just I was on a project once where microsecond latency mattered and it was written in Java, but with a custom String class and custom garbage collection (using a custom object pool instead of relying on JVM’s to avoid any GC halt, which would be intolerable). It was a really fun project tech wise, but at that point, C/C++ would have made wayyyyyy more sense and saved us a lot of headaches.

mav3r1ckon Java language oddities

I’m confused by “listing 5” that states private methods and variables are accessible without reflection. The example it gives shows a static main within the same class that declared private.

That’s the definition of private, that only the declaring class can access. I believe the main beef is that one object _can access_ another object, even though they are the same type. That makes perfect sense to me. How else would equals and hashcode work?

mav3r1ckon Java language oddities

Wow. That is weird. I didn’t realize that. But then again, the only time I’m dealing with bytes in Java is for file reading. With the latest use having it wrapped in a Guava ByteStream.

I have to ask, why would you be trying to, I presume, be directly manipulating bytes in Java?

mav3r1ckon DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

This sounds like an awesome story. Please do share if you already haven't somewhere!

mav3r1ckon The copyright cartel's plot to indoctrinate California kindergartens

I know javajosh would agree, but seriously, is no one else extremely disturbed by the clear implications of this 'plot'?

So basically, a group of corporations can't get people to behave the way they want them to. So their idea is to literally influence the educational curriculum in the hopes that future generations will behave exactly the way they want them to.

This is probably just the tip of the iceberg on our already extremely broken education system. This is what we publicly know. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies are inserting into geology class that global warming is a hoax.

In much the same way we have separation of church and state, perhaps we should consider having a separation of corporation and state. The government's interest should solely rest with the electorate. Although we legally consider corporations people, they most certainly cannot vote and therefore they should have no influence whatsoever on government.

I know I am speaking from an idealist point of view, but the government's interests should never be aligned with corporations at the expense of the voting electorate. Which is exactly the problem with what the copyright cartel is doing.

mav3r1ckon Bank of America whistle-blower: “We were told to lie”

No popups, it definitely helps to just use Chrome's builtin javascript white-list.

mav3r1ckon AsK HN: Why can't the US change to the metric system?

To this day I still don't remember the exact number of feet in a mile. I know between 4-5 thousand, but the exact number is just absurd.

mav3r1ckon The Antisocial Network

I agree with you in that I value savings more than debt (hate the current savings rates) and that the Fed does nothing to help the poor (but that's not their job or incentive to do so and I never thought of it that way ever). The Fed had to do what it did because the banks would have failed otherwise. And if the literally too big-to-fail (and prosecute and everything else) banks failed, then the recession would have been far worst than the Great Depression.

However, a lot of people who still held on to their mortgages do depend on the value of homeprices to stay up, (and the value of a college degree while we're at it since student loans recently overtook creditcard debt).

We're getting way off topic here though. I'll just close out with I think the best solutions are to: 1) Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act and don't allow Investment banks to gamble with consumer money 2) Once (1) is actually in place, then the next time a banking crisis comes around, let all the Investment banks fail and only prop up the ones that actually provide deposits, loans and savings. That will right a terrible wrong done 5 years ago. 3) I came up with this recently after reading Liar's Poker and a followup interview a few years ago of Micheal Lewis and John Merriwether: make all banks private (non-public) corporations again. The only bank that is not fully public is Goldman Sachs (yes, they went public in the 90s, but there are still partners who essentially control it) and is probably part of the reason they do better than everyone else.

mav3r1ckon The Antisocial Network

"the printed dollars are deposited in the accounts of large banks, enriching the very richest and making everyone else worse off."

I absolutely agree with you on this one though, but that also shows why the current printing of money isn't manifesting itself as hyper-inflation, it's sitting around in bank-deposits, or at the fed itself, doing nothing.

Using the loose definition of inflation as "too much money chasing too few goods", the extra money that is flying around isn't chasing any goods, so it's not a problem for now, which is not to say it won't be a problem later, say in a year or two.