Hacker News Reader

occamsrazorwiton Amazon Kendra: Enterprise Search Service

I've heard from the industry that the issue with GSA was that it just wasn't that good. It tried to adapt Google's core search into a box, but Google's algorithm is only great because of scale. The box doesn't have as much of an opportunity to learn from user interactions and thus fails to meet expectations.

occamsrazorwiton Greensboro Man Creates Dating App Where He's the Only Guy Allowed

FWIW, Coffee Meets Bagel had the limited pool of users as a key feature of their app, and they eventually killed that.

occamsrazorwiton Paris zoo unveils a slime mould

No. It's just a small part of the DNA (like male vs female in most animals). The organism that can't reproduce with another organism still came from two of the same organisms.

occamsrazorwiton Paris zoo unveils a slime mould

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21277742

tl;dr: There are 720 variations of the animal that have different sexual reproduction limitations with each other. They have the same anatomy but differ on the DNA level.

occamsrazorwiton Paris zoo unveils a slime mould

Yes. Sexes aren't defined as being based on different chromosomes or having different physical anatomy (there are more mainstream examples of outliers for both of these). It's just a classification system for reproduction limitations.

occamsrazorwiton Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B

Why do you think Splunk will kill it?

occamsrazorwiton Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B

Splunk is a platform for log aggregation and search. There are use cases (apps) built on top of it which include infrastructure monitoring and cybersecurity.

occamsrazorwiton Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

Have you ever worked with a rockstar programmer whose code is unintelligible? Have you ever read something from a popular writer that was so wrong on a technical level? I wouldn't call either of those great.

occamsrazorwiton Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave

"Crazy housing prices and an insane homeless population"

Those are two facets of the same issue which is a demand much higher than the supply. SF has one of the best tech scenes in the world (to the point where it becomes stomach-churningly nauseating), and it's also just a hip metropolitan city with other thriving non-tech scenes.

occamsrazorwiton I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

"but if you post more than a couple of replies they get collapsed up"

Forums do the same thing, just with pagination instead of collapsing. Newcomers to a thread or FB post aren't going to read through the last 40 pages of comments, but the option to do so is still available.

occamsrazorwiton I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

That sounds like the type of complaints that the older generation have had about the younger generation for centuries. "Kids these days aren't doing things for the right reasons anymore" is a common sentiment that has been traced back to literally ancient times.

"Our youth have an insatiable desire for wealth; they have bad manners and atrocious customs..." - Plato

I feel like it's more likely that the older generation gets jaded (as happens to all generations). Facebook, Google, and other massive multinational corporations may be modern-day ills, but they don't represent some new, soulless trend (remember trust-busting around 1900?). They're just old perspectives on a new industry.

occamsrazorwiton Relative's DNA from genealogy websites cracked East Area Rapist case

> the felons have shown they commit crimes

That's not a thing. It's innocent until proven guilty; it's legally impossible to gather evidence because they're guilty to use against them. Hell, innocent people's fingerprints can be, and often are, collected at crime scenes. The police can use innocent people's prints to establish a timeline or figure out what their role was.

occamsrazorwiton Relative's DNA from genealogy websites cracked East Area Rapist case

How is this different than the police comparing DNA evidence to samples in their own database? In both cases, the person who provided the DNA did not consent.

occamsrazorwiton Relative's DNA from genealogy websites cracked East Area Rapist case

That's more of an issue with DNA evidence interpretation than a fundamental difference between different types of identifiable information. Your information can definitely end up in a crime scene that you have nothing to do with. If we use the name example, it's happened before as well [1].

[1] https://www.palmcoastobserver.com/article/man-wrongly-arrest...

occamsrazorwiton UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public

I see, but that website is clearly biased as they're trying to sell their product. Also, they don't even use correct math which makes me even more certain they're just making up numbers. They mention that other places cost $1/minute, and they claim that half of that cost is $3.33/hr. ???

occamsrazorwiton UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public

> It costs roughly $1 for a professor to prop his camera up at the back of a room and record himself speaking for an hour... it costs $180-$600 to close-caption that video.

No, both of your figures are wrong. I actually worked in UC Berkeley lecture recording and captioning, and the figures are on the order of magnitude of $10/hour for each. The problem lies in the massive backlog of older courses that would need to be captioned for only a few non-students per course.