Speed Dating for the Hiring Process: Software Talent in NYC - <AUTHOR> http://hirelite.com

<comment> brown9-2 Site seems to be in progress still - the "companies attending" list is empty (<http://hirelite.com/companies>) and so is the blog (<http://blog.hirelite.com/>).

Interesting concept though, looking forward to seeing which companies will be attending. Will you be updating the blog as new companies are added?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now, who shows up on the "companies attending" list is manually populated (when a company signs up, they send me a job post that I put on that page). I'm in the process of getting job descriptions from the attendees.

The blog is currently empty because I haven't written anything :). I plan to get some content up there this weekend.

<comment><USER3> _"I'm in the process of getting job descriptions from the attendees."_

How many attendees have you received commitments from?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went on an interview like this already, some of the recruiters in NYC are already doing this. I found it pretty impersonal and not very effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you think of any improvements to what you experienced? Or do you think the whole proposition is flawed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you only permit 20 candidates and 20 jobs, some of the attending candidates will be only be qualified to apply for a fraction of the jobs - perhaps even just one or two.

For example, if a Django front-end expert shows up and only 1 company is looking for a Django front-end expert, then that candidate only gets 1 interview and goes home.

Since most candidates have particular specializations that make them more or less qualified for particular jobs, it seems unlikely that every candidate will be applying for every job. I actually wish hiring companies cared less about skill specializations than they do but that's just how it is - <USER2> Django specialist is often not going to be taken seriously for the Websphere position even if he lies awake most nights dreaming about J2EE (fortunately, this particular example is quite rare).

So, if each attending candidate only qualifies for a single job, then there is a possibility that the entire event will be over in 5 minutes. As a candidate I would be fine with that, since it's one extra interview under my belt and - since I didn't pay to attend - I don't lose anything. As the host, you will go home with $6,000 - minus expenses for the space, unless you hooked up a free space through a personal connection, in which case you came out with a nice profit. However, from the perspective of the hiring company, everyone may not be so happy about the return on their time and money.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Good idea.

2\. Will recruiters be involved?

\- Recruiters are always going to try to be involved in events like this. I guarantee that recruiters will try to attend by either posing as candidates in order to meet real candidates or by actually paying the $300 fee to attend as a hiring company. Maybe that's a good thing for hirelite's bottom line but is it a good thing for the event overall? This event seems like a good opportunity to cut recruiters out of the process but there doesn't seem to be any plan here to deal with this unavoidable contingency.

3\. It says candidates who want to attend have to pass a programming test to qualify for free admittance.

\- Wouldn't the programming test need to be tailored to the job each candidate is applying for - in which case it wouldn't make sense to give a test until during or after the event?

4\. Is St Patrick's Day in NYC good or bad timing for a job interview?

5\. In real speed dating, the 1-minute date is often strictly enforced. It says the interview will last 5 minutes. Is that a strict 5 minutes?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Thanks!

2\. Recruiters will not be involved. They are one of the main reasons I created this - to get job seekers and companies talking directly.

3\. Currently, the programming test is pretty simple (less than 10 lines of code) and is meant to qualify people that show up. We don't want to put people with no programming ability in front of companies.

4\. Thank you so much for catching that. The date is actually the 16th (typo before).

5\. We enforce the 5 minute limit.

<comment><USER3> \- How will you identify a recruiter? Often they pretend to be a hiring company. And are you committed enough to the idea of them not attending that you are willing to turn down their offers to pay the $300 attendance fee?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you're a stickler about recruiters. I am too. I am 100% committed to not having recruiters at this event, even if it means turning down money. They will ruin the experience.

For this particular event, the attendees will be primarily companies I know who are hiring and companies that read HN. I'll be monitoring the companies that sign up and kicking out people that I think are recruiters. I have a good handle on who is hiring tech talent in NYC right now, so I know the companies that are likely to show up. If they're not on my mental list, I'll be suspicious.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not a recruiter. I'm a developer. I know who's hiring because I've been watching the job boards and attending events in NYC for the last few months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> \- How will you enforce the 5-minute time limit?

Sometimes when people get into a groove and there's some chemistry - as in dating - it's hard to pull them apart. Are you going to use the same style of musical-chairs-style rotation that they use in speed dating where everyone has to physically move to the next location all at once?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point. We're going to enforce the 5 minute limit by physically rotating seats every 5 minutes. Do you know of another enforcement mechanism?

<comment><USER3> That's all you should need - it works pretty well from what I've seen in speed dating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It says "Participate in 20 interviews, each 5 minutes long."

What if 300 candidates show up and only 10 hiring companies?

In that case, will candidates be paired with companies on a first-come, first- served basis or do you have some other plan?

<comment><AUTHOR> For this event, there will only be 20 companies and 20 job seekers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is the programming test:

\- online or offline?

\- open book or closed book? (can the candidate use the internet?)

\- timed or untimed?

<comment><AUTHOR> The test is currently online, open book, and untimed (though it won't take long). If you start the signup process as a Software Engineer, you can see the test. I haven't posted the test blatantly in the open so people won't easily be able to Google an answer.

<comment><USER3> Under different conditions this would be an easy backdoor for a recruiter to sneak in for free as a candidate to quietly gather resumes at the event. But since you only permit 20 candidates and 20 jobs, the event is small enough that you should be able to recognize this if it happenes. Of course, whether you could do much about it is another issue, short of physically ejecting someone from the room.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A side project iOS app that took 5 years [NSFW] - <AUTHOR> http://sexlifeapp.cc/ <comment><USER2> I understand that teams form out of convenience and necessity, but did you fellas at least consult some females as to the efficacy of a partner who is reliant on a rather weak vibrator to keep things interesting in bed? From the preview and your description, this is going to be an app for young men [12-17] and drunk college kids. Favoriting positions, keeping a 'kill' count...

Not trying to be cruel, but this is rather childish. It is geared towards males; why not make a message client where betas and virgins can share horror stories and laboriously gathered sex advice?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our thinking was that the market for the app would be primarily couples.

<comment><USER2> I can see that, but i think that it will fall short on that front. I do not mean to belittle the time and effort you have all put in. I just think that the app is very male focused, so maybe you should run with that. Movies and pop culture to the contrary, most women have a position or two they cum best in, and most guys have a standard 'run of show' that they fall into [fun game- instead of erasing pr0n history, track how long it takes to go from first page to guilt close... i bet the consistency will bug you... mine is 22-32 minutes]. Adding data to this equation does not strike me as a successful approach to enhancing love life. A place where guys can go and share there experiences and questions openly and honestly without fear of ridicule would be a pretty awesome thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have a lot of really awesome content from our partner, [http://goodinbed.com](http://goodinbed.com). You're probably right that the app is male focused, although we did try to get input from our female friends along the way.

<comment><USER2> Entiendo. I just want to belabor this point; sex is social communication, whether by commission or just awareness of its occurrence. A place where you can get real advice from real 'f __kers ' in the trenches would be invaluable.

thank you for taking the time to respond to my comments. I do not care about the gender make up of teams personally, but i would bet you will hear more about it if/when your app gains traction. As i am so low level in my technical capabilities, i sought to help where i could.

sexual health and open dialogue are so very important to peace and happiness. However rough around the edges you guys start, i believe you folks are trying to do a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a direct link to the free version [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sexlife- lite/id413145097?mt=...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sexlife- lite/id413145097?mt=8) and here's a direct link to the $1.99 paid version [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sexlife/id407581320?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sexlife/id407581320?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Although the URL makes it apparent, you should definitely include NSFW warnings.

</comment><comment><USER4> You had to register to a service to use the app? Really?</comment>


How does the brain learn by talking to itself? - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-brain.html <comment><USER2> Damnit Ford!</comment>


Ask HN: What are Promises? - <AUTHOR> I have been writing JavaScript for 10 years (admittedly, it was very jQuery in the early years) but can't seem to understand Promises. Every tutorial I read about it assumes I get its amazingly powerful need. I just can't freaking understand. Can you recommend a simple tutorial which explains it with examples of real-life problems? <comment><USER2> I can just explain it with my own words. Promises are a different way of doing callback/asynchronous work. So traditionally, you would do this in JS:

        API.get('/cars', function(cars){
          // Here you have your car list
        });

The main problem with this is that each library would define their own callback response parameters. We could return `cars` as a variable (jQuery), or we could return two parameters such as `(error, cars)` as in Node.js, etc.

So promises standardizes the way that different libraries execute Asynchronous code. Instead of whatever you want, you'd have to follow this syntax to do the same as above:

        API.get('/cars').then(function(cars){
          // Here you have your cars
        });

Then if you are the one actually creating the promises it gets more tricky; let me know if you just want to use libraries with promises (above) or you want to write your own promises so I can expand the answer.</comment>


Ask HN: How to move into computational biology? - <AUTHOR> I have CS and Applied math degrees and ten years of software development experience (Google, Amazon...). I'd like to migrate towards companies such as Calico, Human Longevity Inc, etc, yet many require PhDs in Comp Biology. Is getting a PhD the best usage of time or is there a way to self study the basics and learn on the job? My statistics knowledge is admittedly pretty poor at this point. <comment><USER2> I have a Phd in computational biology. Myself and many other computational biologists I know are moving away from the field; transitioning into Data Science, AI, and Natural Language Processing (many of the sequence analytics techniques transfer quite well to NLP). The reason for this Biotech companies treat scientists very poorly, offering them low salaries and a lack of respect. This particularly true for companies like Calico. A friend of mine from grad-school was asked to join Calico during its founding stage. He was promised the world. Instead, he was forced to subsist of a post-doc's salary for years and years. So my advice to you is to stay away from Comp Bio. Consider transitioning into NLP instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. As part of your Comp Bio PhD did you learn the fundamentals of AI research? How are you planning to transition?</comment></comment>


Q – Execute SQL on text. Supports joins across files, RPM available - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/harelba/q <comment><USER2> If you need only a subset of full SQL, e.g. just joins, counting/aggregation, and date manipulation (as in several of these examples), I've found it fairly easy to work with a mixture of the standard Unix join(1) [found on nearly all systems], and some of the additions from Google's crush-tools ([https://code.google.com/p/crush-tools/](https://code.google.com/p/crush- tools/)), mainly 'aggregate', 'grepfield', 'funiq', and 'convdate'. I find chaining them together a bit easier than writing monolithic SQL statements, but there's probably some crossover point at which that wouldn't be true.

It'd be interesting to compare runtimes as well. I would guess that there's some overhead in loading into the DB up front, but that you might gain some speedup by converting longer chains of Unix pipes into one SQL query. On the other hand you might lose some parallelism. Would take some testing on different kinds of queries and data sets to get an idea of the pros/cons I think.

<comment><USER3> Another interesting alternative could be using or writing a PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper.

There is one that supports tabular data (file_fdw), and another one for JSON files (json_fdw). If you have files in other formats, you can also write your fdw for it. This way, you get complete SQL coverage.

Also, if you don't want to pay the overhead of parsing the file every time, you can use the new materialized feature for caching: [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/rules- materialized...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/rules- materializedviews.html)

(Disclaimer: Enthused Postgres user.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Matt Might wrote a blog post about using standard CLI tools for this purpose: [http://matt.might.net/articles/sql-in-the- shell/](http://matt.might.net/articles/sql-in-the-shell/)

Rather than making a custom tool to issue SQL, the idea is that regular CLI tools map well to the traditional relational algebra operations. sed is like selection, cat is like union, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's written in Python, and seems to use SQLite under the hood.

I guess it just applies tokenization and throws the text into a temporary database.

Quite similar to the Go project [https://github.com/dinedal/textql](https://github.com/dinedal/textql), at least superficially.

<comment><USER6> A lot of similar tools were discussed when that Go project came up 3 weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7175830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7175830)

      > MS ADO / ODBC
      > Perl DBI
      > npm j (with jqa)
      > Ruby (csv2sqlite)
      > Python (csvkit)
      > Go (textql, comp)
      > Java (optiq, openrefine, H2 SQL)
      > R (sqldf)
      > Haskell (txt-sushi)
      > XML (xmlstarlet, xmllint, xmlstar)
      > HTML (HtmlAgilityPack, Chrome $x())
      > Postgres file_fdw
      > Oracle external tables
      > SQL Server OPENDATASOURCE and OPENQUERY
      > Log file viewers (MS LogParser, Apache asql, lnav)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm q's creator, Harel.

There are obviously lots of other software which can provide a similar capability, and while I haven't checked all of them out, I'm really believe that most of them do a great job. However, my rationale for creating this tool was to provide a seamless addition to the Linux command line toolset - A tool as most Linux commands are, and not a capability. The distinction I'm doing here is that tools are reusable, composable and such, vs a capability which is usually less reusable in different contexts. I'm sure that some of the above are definitely tools. I just hope that the tool I have created provides value to people and helps them with their tasks.

As I posted here elsewhere, my complete rationale for creating the tool is available on the README of the github project. Comments and issues are most welcome.

Harel Ben-Attia

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like a cool project, but Q is already a well-used JS promise library so there's a bit of a name conflict there even if the libs are aimed at very different tasks...

<comment><USER8> It's also a single letter in the alphabet. Anyone who names their project a single letter (or two) is expecting some amount of collision. The real question is whether or not the collision is worth it.

In this case, it might be... they are trying to make a command-line tool. So in theory, you'll be typing the command often, meaning that a short name is preferable.

But honestly, it would have probably been a better idea to use a more descriptive name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, i'm q's creator (HN made the name q uppercase, but it's actually a lowercase q). The reasoning was that it's used as a command line tool, and used often. So "q" and not "Q" :)I'm currently preparing the debian package, and one-letter names are not allowed, so it's going to be named "qsql" there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dataset ([https://dataset.readthedocs.org/](https://dataset.readthedocs.org/)) is a similar project that provides ad-hoc SQL querying of structured data - example usage:

      import dataset

      db = dataset.connect('sqlite:///:memory:')

      table = db['sometable']
      table.insert(dict(name='John Doe', age=37))
      table.insert(dict(name='Jane Doe', age=34, gender='female'))

      john = table.find_one(name='John Doe')

<comment><USER10> Dataset provides ad-hoc SQL querying of ... SQL databases.

It looks like a neat API, but it's not really similar to this project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Eh, q as a name is going to be a serious problem as q is the language for programming kdb, a column-oriented database. As both are related to databases, it's difficult to defend this name.

<comment><USER12> That was my initial impression, also... I though kx had added text-processing to kdb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't join ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_%28Unix%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_%28Unix%29)), sed, and grep get you most of the way there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm q's creator, Harel Ben-Attia.

The Linux toolset is really great, and I use it extensively. The whole idea of the tool is not to replace any of the existing tools, but to extend the toolset to concepts which treat text as data. In a way, it's a metatool which provides an easy and familiar way to add more data processing concepts to the linux toolset. There are many cases where I use 'wc -l' in order to count rows in a file, but if i need to count the rows of only the ones which have a specific column which is larger than the value X, or get the sum of some column per group, then q is a simple and readable way to do it properly, without any need for "tricks".

My rationale for creating it is also explained in the README of the github project.

Any more comments are most welcome.

Harel

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Name collision with Q/kdb+.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I really wished for when I read the title was for something that could make me write regexes but verbosely.

<comment><USER16> In what way would you write regexes verbosely? I'm actually quite interested in the idea because regexes can be confusing to write at times, and it's difficult to remember which form to use where, if you use them in many languages/interfaces.

There are tools like Regexper[1] that let you visualize the regex as an automata graph, and there are tools like text2re[2] which will allow you to put in text and visually generate a regex to match it.

I feel like better regex tools should exist on the command line, and it's potentially a great place for such tools to be rapidly developed and adopted. There are GUI tools for this like poirot[3], but the command line still exists because of its accessibility, uniformity, and extensibility.

links:

[1] [http://www.regexper.com/](http://www.regexper.com/)

[2] [http://txt2re.com/index.php3?s=24%3AFeb%3A2014+%22This+is+an...](http://txt2re.com/index.php3?s=24%3AFeb%3A2014+%22This+is+an+Example%21%22&submit=Show+Matches)

[3] [http://www.espgraphics.com/poirot/](http://www.espgraphics.com/poirot/)

<comment><USER17> I'm probably heavily biased, but to me Perl is the best command-line regex tool. Perl was invented to gather data and report on it, and its regex engine is incredibly fast and powerful. As an added bonus it supports some Python and PCRE-specific extensions. But this Q app is useful for people who either don't know Perl or can get what they need done faster with SQL than with scripting.

In terms of 'verbosity' you can embed comments inside a regular expression, or build a regular expression over multiple lines, or make a set of regex objects and interpolate them into larger regex's. Perl has copious amounts of documentation to help you understand the many ways to use regexs in Perl.

[http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html) [http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html) [http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq6.html#How-can-I-hope-to- use-...](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq6.html#How-can-I-hope-to-use-regular- expressions-without-creating-illegible-and-unmaintainable-code%3f)

<comment><USER18> > As an added bonus it supports some Python and PCRE-specific extensions.

This is a bit of a strange thing to say, since nearly all of the advanced regex features showed up in Perl _first_. PCRE stands for "Perl-compliant regular expressions," so there's certainly no extensions there that didn't originally come from Perl. I'm less sure about Python, but I get the sense that they borrow from Perl regular expressions as well.

<comment><USER17> [http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#PCRE/Python- Support](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#PCRE/Python-Support)

      PCRE/Python Support

      As of Perl 5.10.0, Perl supports several Python/PCRE-specific extensions to the
      regex syntax. While Perl programmers are encouraged to use the Perl-specific
      syntax, the following are also accepted:

          (?P<NAME>pattern)
          Define a named capture group. Equivalent to (?<NAME>pattern).

          (?P=NAME)
          Backreference to a named capture group. Equivalent to \g{NAME} .

          (?P>NAME)
          Subroutine call to a named capture group. Equivalent to (?&NAME).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm still not seeing anything easier than ETLing into a regular old database, at which point you have the power and flexibility of a regular old database. Which is pretty spiffy, actually.

Are people really so bad at databases that they'll gladly suffer hacks like this to avoid using one?

</comment><comment><USER19> I have ended up with MySQL and PostgreSQL on nearly every linux I've installed. It is baffling to me that someone would decline these tools in favor of text file drivers or SQLite, with the exception of using SQLite as an embedded config database or something.

<comment><USER20> Yeah I also do the same, import the csv (it doesn't have to be comma separated) file into PostgreSQL and analyze it using SQL. Alternatively, I will load it into IPython/pandas and work with it like that.

This is however useful for one off, throwaway query that offers familiar SQL syntax, if you don't want to use awk that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The credit should go to SQLite, which is extremely versatile. A while back I wrote Thredis (thredis.org), which lets you use SQL commands inside Redis (also using SQLite, of course).

</comment><comment><USER22> Now imagine some kind of RX.net libs made applicable to the output of the tail -F command... Reactive log file processing?

</comment><comment><USER23> This is really clever, and I'm definitely going to give it a workout on my system. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER24> Cool idea!

<comment><USER25> Cool idea but i've read about something similar on Scott Hanselman's blog, it's called LogParser: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnalyzeYourWebServerDataAndBeE...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnalyzeYourWebServerDataAndBeEmpoweredWithLogParserAndLogParserLizardGUI.aspx)</comment></comment>


AWSlack – yet another AWS/Slack integration - <AUTHOR> https://blog.doit-intl.com/awslack-1165c179c1e8 <comment><USER2> AWS Lambda triggered automatically via AWSlack! What an amazing integration and open-source!

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool integration Thank you

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you! helps a lot

</comment><comment> dani-doit Realy helpfull

</comment><comment><USER5> cool

</comment><comment><USER6> the small things that makes your life much easier. Brilliant !</comment>


You'd like updates on 3DP but not too often. Subscribe to our monthly Newsletter - <AUTHOR> http://stratnel.com/newsletter/ <comment><USER2> Smells like spam

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a strict spam policy and assure you we will not spam. Our subscription method requires you to confirm from your email account. Only after you click the confirmation from your email, we will add you to your mailing list. So you have ample time and opportunity to reconsider your decision, if you wish to.</comment></comment>


How to Bypass Matlab's 'Cripple AMD CPU' Function - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to-bypass-matlab-cripple-amd-ryzen-threadripper-cpus <comment><USER2> I'm glad I clicked on this story, because the title kind of buries the lede. Apparently Intel was asked to suggest a real world application for comparing its top desktop processor to AMD's top Threadripper for the desktop AM4 socket. Intel suggested Matlab.

Then this reviewer discovered via Reddit that Matlab includes an Intel library that doesn't generate SIMD optimized code for AMD processors. Forcing the library to generate the optimized code in an environment variable results in AMD crushing Intel with both tested processors.

It's remarkable both for AMD becoming clearly dominant in the desktop performance market, and for Intel promoting a dishonest benchmark, whether they knew it or not.

<comment><USER3> Intel has been accused of many things over the years, unfortunately honesty wasn't one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is hardly the first time this has happened.

In this case their math library didn't do a CPUID feature test, but rather a vendor name test. It would be equivalent to testing website compatibility by doing a user agent check with just the browser name (e.g. navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Netscape"), etc)

ICC also historically generated intentionally bad code for non-intel platforms - deliberately making function loaded depend on intel vs. everyone else rather than by feature set.

<comment><USER5> Nvidia is also pretty good at this, shipping FPU optimized PhysX library when SSE was widespread.

<comment><USER4> Nice!</comment></comment></comment>


MIT Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/ <comment><USER2> I don't know, this seems like a targeted advertisement</comment>


If Lyft can't keep its drivers as indie contractors, it may never be profitable - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-lyft-ipo-drivers-20190309-story.html <comment><USER2> I think this misses the point: neither Lyft nor Uber ever intended to have human drivers long-term. From the outset, human drivers were only temporarily needed to establish the business until such time as driving could be fully automated. Once self-driving cars exist, the ride-hailing companies will replace all of the people per the original plan.</comment>


The Myth of the Overscheduled Child - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550604574360771531703210.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

<comment><USER2> A beautiful article. Looking back, I wish I had had more activities, not fewer and at least compared to my immediate peers I was not exactly a slouch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found 8 hours of free time to be insufficent for leisurely activities such as writing games and making electronics.

I also found schools to be rather banal. I certainly do not care about taking AP classes. My weakest point is mathematics and I throughly depise any math class.

I rather have more free time and a real programming job for the 4 years I been in high school.</comment>


Cat beats professional investors in stock-picking - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/jan/13/investments-stock-picking

<comment><USER2> Looks like I'd better have my cat build me a portfolio. Early retirement sounds nice.</comment>


Ask HN: Suggest a Novel Robotics Project for PhD, Bio-inspired Direction - <AUTHOR>

I'm just starting my PhD with focus on bio-inspired robotics. I'm lucky to have quite a lot of freedom to choose the project I want to work on, as long as it fits the focus of the lab. Currently, the focus is on evolutionary robotics, AI, analysing the gap between simulation and reality and robotic surgery. Personally, I have quite a strong background in Computer Vision and loved working with ROS on my Masters project. The resources I have access to: - Two advanced 3D printers - Motoman SIA20 7 DoF robotic arm - Universal Robots robotic arm - Couple of high precision motion capture systems - Nao - Otto Bock SensorHand - Kinects, Leap Motion and other various sensors - People and doctors working at university hospital - Some FPGA experts<p>... and of course hardware could be bought given a good project.<p>As you see, it's quite a good opportunity, so I'd like to hear your opinions on what you would do in my position without actually giving my thoughts first. Quite crazy thoughts are appreciated as well! :-) <comment><USER2> This really depends on how practical you want to get. One of the biggest problems in hospitals is (lack of) staffing. Having a robot that could go around the rooms and check on low-level, treatment related problems would be a huge improvement in patient care. Imagine using CV to check on IV pumps for flow rate, how much of the drug is left, is it leaking, does the patient need more IV fluids, does the name on the drug label match the patient's, etc. These are low level problems that can lead to injury and death of patients in hospitals, and usually handled by overworked nurses. Seems like a perfect application of CV to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea, thanks! gonna think on how rfid or similar tagging can help to avoid adding complex CV algorithms where much easier alternatives could be offered. There are some robots moving around trolleys with items already there, so staff and patients are getting used to see machines sharing same corridors

<comment><USER2> New rfid applications would be great and by means pursue them! The reason I think this is a great problem for CV is that right now, only a nurse would be able to tell if there is a puddle on the floor from a leaking IV, patient's puke, overflown catheter bag, etc. Also is there air in a line, does the label on the drug match the prescription in EMR? These are common sense, cheap to fix / prevent problems that I'm not sure rfid could solve. RFID would be great for matching drug labeled with rfid with chip in patient's armband. One could think of lots of implementations for that sort of thing!

I guess it really comes down to what sort of focus you want your project to take, and what idea you think your PI will be interested in considering. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd do doctor training or correction. An expert "extra pair of eyes" is a project I've not seen anything on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea. However, I believe doctor correction can be a very delicate matter as professionals are still not happy of machines pretending to "know better". However, we did discuss some surgeon assisting robots, like holding various tools or ultrasound scanner in place and adjusting for patient's body movements</comment></comment>


Local Rails Development with Docker and Docker Compose - <AUTHOR> https://ashleyconnor.co.uk/2017/07/22/local-rails-development-with-docker-and-docker-compose.html <comment><USER2> Nice concise write-up. Worth also calling out some issues you'll run into though: \- docker for mac's osxfs is incredibly slow and makes the cold rails start time even slower than it already is. Docker-sync is a third party tool that makes it pretty easy to sync code over instead of using a shared file system. \- similarly, rails cold start times are so slow on their own that you won't want to 'docker run' your commands. I always 'docker exec' them into the already running rails container to take advantage of the spring cache. \- the bundle incremental cache isn't used (and if you have a package.json for us resources, you'll have to solve the same problem for that too).

These are arguably downsides of both ruby/rails and docker that combine to make things a little harder to work with than you'd hope.

Still, its a useful workflow if you want to deploy to docker in production. It's nice running the app in the same OS with the same exact dependencies in dev/ci as in prod (plus the same configuration between different people on the team).

</comment><comment><USER3> Over the past week I went through all the motions of setting up docker for mac with docker-compose for a local ruby/rails development environment. I was excited about the prospect of using containers to silo my app and all it's system dependencies, and also make it easier to onboard new developers. My setup had 3 containers. One for app, elasticsearch, and postgres. Unfortunately I have to go back to running my app directly on the system. I am leaving elasticsearch and postgres containerized, however.

The docker for mac setup is seriously bottlenecked by slow volume read/write performance. There is an ongoing discussion here on the issue: [https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77](https://github.com/docker/for- mac/issues/77). Even after adding the new :cached option to my volume declaration in docker-compose yml file, performance was a huge issue.

My app leverages babel, as I write some react components in ES6 and transpile them to ship to the client. Right now transpilation after changing any javascript code results in a minute + of transpilation time as docker for mac has yet to solve the performance problem. This resulted in a totally unacceptable environment to write code and test in. Also, rails boot time on docker for mac was crazy slow. Running unit tests became a huge pain in the ass.

<comment><USER4> The ghastly performance of docker-for-mac was a large factor in my move back to Linux (a few months ago) after a few years on OSX.

<comment><USER5> I see a roughly 66% performance hit on docker for Mac in most metrics.

Not a deal breaker but I prefer to do development on Linux as well for that reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a good start, but it requires reinstalling all gems every time any one is updated.

Here is a clever way to cache your gems in a separate container [https://medium.com/@fbzga/how-to-cache-bundle-install- with-d...](https://medium.com/@fbzga/how-to-cache-bundle-install-with- docker-7bed453a5800)

I'm working on an example Docker compose setup that makes use of multi-stage builds to copy the gems into the final container, leaving behind all of the build tools. [https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/eng- image/multistag...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/eng- image/multistage-build/#use-multi-stage-builds)

</comment><comment><USER7> We've attempted this setup a few times with Rails, but we ran into the issue that the Docker OSXFS performance for mounted volumes was too slow when working with the parts of Rails that touch many files (asset compilation for example). It made it pretty much unusable for us. I know there are some new tuning parameters [https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs- caching/](https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs-caching/) \- we haven't tried these yet though, has anyone tried them and do they work well enough for Rails?

<comment><USER3> I just tried :cached. For rails asset compilation I didn't notice a difference. Still unusable in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice writeup! Here's also the equivalent for us Django scrubs:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-deploy-django- docker/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-deploy-django-docker/)

Once you've done this, then it becomes trivial to deploy to Dokku, if you have your own VPS or dedicated server. I tried Dokku for the first time a week or so ago and I'm a fan:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/deploy-django- dokku/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/deploy-django-dokku/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Will auto reload work with this setup? Docker for Mac page claims "Seamless volume mounting for code and data, including file change notifications that unlock fast edit-test cycles", but last time I tried it, it didn't work, it just copied workdir to VM once.

<comment><USER10> Yes, auto reload works just fine as you mount the directory and not just ADD it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really eager to know, if the writer would still use it like this, when his project gets bigger. For instance, using Docker on Mac like this is a pure pain. First of all, it's a pain because of Docker's lack of proper UID mapping(and no.. user namespaces is not the answer). Second, sharing files between OSX and containers is extremely slow. A PHP/Symfony project went from a 2 second reload of in dev/debug mode on native install, to 30+ seconds for a reload inside a docker container; unless you won't use host volumes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a minimal template for local dev in Python, flask, psql if anyone looked for one:

[https://github.com/jeinarsson/app- template](https://github.com/jeinarsson/app-template)

</comment><comment><USER13> @ashconnor: In the "RUN apk add" line, consider adding "\--no-cache" to avoid useless temporary files in the image. A quick and nice size improvement without any downsides that I could think of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I super duper do not recommend this. Read all the caveats in this thread, they are all genuine annoyances. I'll add another one: interactive debugging works, but has quirks. The cost/benefit just isn't there unless your system is quite complicated (think engineering team headcount 100+). It makes everyday front- end development like building a Lego castle while wearing oven mitts.

(I still appreciate this article, lots of goood info in it :) )

<comment><USER15> > It makes everyday front-end development like building a Lego castle while > wearing oven mitts.

Favourite analogy of the month :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The biggest blocker I've run into is that the Docker build process can't cache bundler/npm/etc runs so every dependency change results in a full rebuild. Is that solved yet? If not, local dev with Docker is still a no-go for me.

<comment><USER17> The solution for that problem is addressed by the author, volume sharing of the app directory:

Docker command line: -v $(pwd):/app

Docker Compose:

      app:

        volumes:

          ./:/app

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone tried using Docker with something more performant than VirtualBox on OSX? I won't use Vagrant or Docker in my projects for this reason, but I suspect it's VirtualBox that's the problem.

<comment><USER17> For VirtualBox alone, using NFS sharing is significantly faster.

For Docker, dlite uses NFS and doesn't require VirtualBox.

[https://github.com/nlf/dlite](https://github.com/nlf/dlite)

(See README on legacy branch [https://github.com/nlf/dlite/tree/legacy](https://github.com/nlf/dlite/tree/legacy) )</comment></comment>


An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy - <AUTHOR> http://behindthequest.com/instagram-frauds-fake-influencers/ <comment><USER3> This is basically a repeat of SEO.

At first, you have the early adopters. Things grow organically and it doesn't feel like a zero-sum game because there aren't many players.

Next comes the growth phase, where more people get involved, and start competing for attention/clicks/votes/whatever points system.

Next comes the exploiters, who discover weaknesses in the system and take advantage of them. They tend to make a lot of money because there's not much competition in this niche.

Next comes the crossover, where the exploit knowledge becomes public, and everyone now must do it because everyone else is.

Next comes the shutout, where the company running things starts actively punishing bad actors, but by this time, being a bad actor is essential to survival, so people do it anyway. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, new exploits, new mitigations.

Eventually, the company manages to fix their algorithms enough that the exploits don't offer decent marginal returns anymore, and it returns to what the company originally intended: 1% of people are successful, 99% of people make next to nothing, and the company makes shitloads.

And then the new big thing comes out. The old system goes into decline and the new system starts to take over. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER4> You're describing society. Any free "social" system, virtual or otherwise, can and will attract the same ingredients and the outcome will be a strong approximation of a normal society.

<comment><USER5> > normal society

Maybe society needs to change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apologies if this is too meta, but all the claims of "ugh so glad I don't care about social media" and "what do influencers am I right????" feel really, really disingenuous on a forum run by a silicon valley incubator, where discussions of building products that run on advertisements regularly take place.

I think there's a deeper truth that most people, including us here on HN, don't want to admit: humans are at not rational, logical beings; rather we are emotional decision makers who largely don't understand our own opinions and preferences, where they come from, or how much "influence" comes from sources outside ourselves.

The next time you decide on a particular brand of product, or vote for a particular politician, ask yourself: _why_ do I think this? Why do I have _these_ beliefs about how the world works, about how society should be organized, or about why people should act _this_ way?

At this point it's almost a truism to say ads work. How is the "influencer game" different from ads? A trusted source shows a product or service, and some percentage of the followers buy it.

A platform has hundreds of millions of users. Some do anything necessary to capture as big a slice of that audience, and monetize it.

This may be a revelation for Joe Average who knows nothing of the ad-driven- startup world, but it shouldn't be a surprise to us.

<comment><USER7> There is a deeper truth that marketing people (like yourself I am guessing?) don't want to admit: what you do is wrong. To it's very core. You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine. Emotional manipulation, exploiting peoples insecurities, their need to feel a certain level of status from their peers: these are staple tactics of a marketer, and social media influencers are the most horrid incantation of this dystopian reality.

Note that I distinguish marketing from mere ads, which (one hopes) are just trying to impart information. I have no problem with you saying you have skateboard for sale at $50. When you pay a 19yr old model to stand there looking cool with a sultry look on her face, thats not advertising, its manipulation. Sure it works, its even legal, but it's a very evil thing.

[https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI](https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI) says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - <USER2> is usually greatest when its saying something true).

<comment><USER8> Free will is highly overstated though: as the parent comment said, everything you think and believe and thus do is linked to a particular social context. That's true for the stuff you buy, the stuff you believe in, the things you think are "wrong" or "right" or "normal" or "abnormal". When you start looking/living in other societies you realise that all of these is just cultural norms.

<comment><USER9> But it makes a difference whether you are part of creating a society within which a entities fortune is based on exploiting (and feeding into) the believes of gullible victims or whether you try to create a society in which you try to bring out the best from within the people.

The latter is some sort of humanism, that ultimately resulted in all the things we collectively seem to value about western societies, while the former is more or less responsible for the biggest problems we have.

So even if free will turns out a complete illusion, it would still matter how people treat each other based on that idea. Usually you can amend it to: "Free will is an illusion, at least for those poor idiots who have nobody but themselves to blame for it, which is why it is socially acceptable for me to exploit them"

(This is not aimed at you, it is just a thought that crossed my mind, when I read your comment)

<comment><USER10> When you have an exploitable information asymmetry, do you exploit others with it, or do you inoculate others to it?

* or do you exploit others with it until you're financially comfortable and morally uncomfortable, at which point you pivot, mea culpa, and educate...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man, reading this makes me so happy I don't care about social media, and I have other aspirations than trying to be a social media influencer.

What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity.

I bet it is better for happiness and mental health to stay away from all that.

<comment><USER12> >What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity.

Yeah. This isn't exclusive to social media influencers, though.

<comment><USER13> The thing is, the people who do it don't know that's all they are doing. It's meaningful to them. False hope is a terrible thing.

<comment><USER14> Again, nothing special about social media/influencers here.

Are not most modern jobs like this?

<comment><USER15> This is what honestly terrifies me more than anything - being in a dire enough financial situation to need to do bullshit work and waste my short time on this Earth for food and shelter. In my experience meaningful jobs are in _insanely_ high demand - they substantially underpay, require substantially more qualifications, and are much more scarce than adding another cog to the cancer of finance, advertising, or business service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm currently doing the Digital Nomad thing, wandering around the world building a product.

So many "influencers" out there. Usually not only "growing their audience", but now running courses on "how to live your dream by becoming an Instagram Influencer while travelling". The industry appears to be eating itself (this is also true of the nomad thing, too - so many "coaches" and "mentors" out there who will teach you how to achieve the "nomad lifestyle").

I'm in the lucky position of being able to code for decent money while travelling, so I get to watch them hustle their arses off trying to make it work. I would not want to be in their position. The market is declining, the competitors are increasing, and the option of going home and getting a "normal" job again feels like total failure.

I get the rage in TFA's article, but all I feel is pity.

<comment><USER17> > "how to live your dream by becoming an Instagram Influencer while > travelling"

Gosh, imagine how that traveling looks like, documenting every moment of it, creating all these fake, yet real looking spontaneous stories. I doubt that one can actually enjoy traveling like that, but maybe that's just me.

I feel sorry for these people.

<comment><USER18> I was in Zermatt 2 weekends ago walking around the town when I suddenly heard behind me "Hello and welcome to my channel".

Turn around, see a posse of people around a guy pointing a serious camera at his face. I immediately felt bad for him, it felt so unnatural and the realization that this "vacation" was a job for him did not make me envious at all.

My wife and I instead found a bar inhabited by the local service workers and had a great time hearing their stories.

<comment><USER19> Similar experience yesterday in Coco Rico in Val D'Isere. There seemed to be two types of people: those who were there to have a good time, and those who were there to look good on Instagram or YouTube. (I was in the latter category, obvs.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l See also "How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram"[0] for an indication as to how "easy" it is to write an algorithmic social media "influencer" with 25K followers.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425)

<comment><USER20> I thought this was going to be an essential part of this article, but it seems like IEO (Instagram Engine Optimization) is actually technically boring and scammy, whereas automated IEO- while still scammy- is technically interesting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The use of the term "merit" in this context feels fraught with issue.

One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit.

If a poker player is able to read the opponents' faces where no-one else can - they win based on merit. The losers may well disclaim this as being some sort of 'hack'.

We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.

<comment><USER22> So who is paying the scam Instagram influencers?

My impression is that who's interested in this sort of service is something like small start up fashion brands that can't afford an actual celebrity.

My brother makes independent video games, at one point he was approached by someone who offered to broker deal with Twitch streamers to promote one of his games.

How real the popularity of these streamers really was, effects whether this might have been a good idea or not.

Whether that evokes your sympathy or not, I guess the moral of the story, of you're in the market for purchasing influencer services, buyer beware

<comment><USER23> The streamers seem to be some of the more honest "influencers" acting as entertainers. At least ones I follow (there are many subgroupings within) will disclose if they have any special connections or contractual obligations (can't show this cutscene or boss fight prerelease), sponsorships, or even if they just received a free copy.

I would advise treating unaffiliated middlemen as scammers like those offering jobs for money. (If there is some affiliated group of streamers and they handle communications that is fine.) If you want cheap marketing releasing some free copies generate no to marginal expenses.

It is respectful to all involved - you are giving away a few potential sales in exchange for a potential larger market, they can give it a fair shake and let people know what they think.

The viral effect can be real but it seems to depend on its own merits even if the "merit" is a gimmick like being hillariously glitchy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > This is how it works: someone working at facebook is taking bribes in > exchange for the blue mark, a middle man will take your money (anywhere > between $1000 and $15000 dollars, depending on your stupidity) and the > friend at fb will submit an application for you to be verified. Hopefully it > will be approved.

This is interesting if true

<comment><USER25> Those seem like really low figures for bribes considering the average salary of a facebook employee.

<comment><USER26> It's pretty common for bribes to be pretty cheap compared to the gain. Same in DC. The ROI for lobbying is enormous. Spend a few million to get billions in subsidies or tax cuts.

<comment><USER27> Exactly and the simple reason why, which keeps these basic economics of bribery working so robustly, is the asymmetric measures of value/cost inherent to the two sides of the equation. A government or facebook employee or whomever who has access to some lever worth a great deal will sell access to it for these fairly small sums exactly because the much greater value isn't actually a cost to them. They're leveraging their access to someone elses resources for personal acquisition of a much smaller but to them worthwhile gain. You'd never convince a billionaire to sell you access to something of theirs worth billions by paying them only millions, but, like you said, you can easily convince a senator to give you access to billions in government resources (tax money) for a few million to their personal campaign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The OP is suggesting that some "influencers" who get paid to say/show they like something on instagram are "fake" because... they mislead the people who pay them about how many 'followers' they have?

But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"?

I am unimpressed.

It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have _earned_ the right to get rich scamming the rubes.

<comment><USER29> Well, this was written by one of those 'influencers' who is upset that she is having to compete with 'fake' influencers for ad dollars.

<comment> xkcd-sucks And who is making money by doing a "submarine" PR piece on "influencer services"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a nine-year old, I watched commercials on our black and white TV showing famous baseball players claiming they "smoked Camels." I knew then that smoking was dangerous, and that it was unlikely that the players "smoked Camels," either. So I don't get this influencer crap. I mean I really do not get it.

<comment><USER31> I don't think the intentional is to get people to smoke who otherwise wouldn't. It's to get the people who are going to buy cigarettes, and in doing so, chose their brand. When confronted with many choices of competing products, having someone you trust and admire favour a particular product may be enough to tip the scales and get you to take that option.

I find myself doing this often, due to all the podcast ads I hear! If I'm going to buy a mattress or printed framed picture I'm going to start with I've heard about from some "influencer" I follow.

<comment><USER32> But why follow the influencer at all?

<comment><USER31> I guess because we "follow" people who interest us or are like minded. I don't set out to "follow an influencer", but when I subscribe to a podcast, or follow someone on twitter because I find their comedy hilarious; that's what I'm doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sounds like it can take a lot of money and effort to become a winner at the game of Instagram. The system has rules; you have to know them and play them in order to win. Other players know the rules too, and you know that they know that, so fun second order effects exist. I can see why it could be fun, competing with other players. Trying to keep up with whatever kind of picture (and legend behind it, I expect) scores highly, but presumably knowing that the only way to break ahead of the pack would be to take a risk on something a little bit different and win with it. Gambles and game theory and so on.

Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? Does it matter how this game is played and how the winners are picked? Surely the only ethical issue is people playing who don't realise what the rules are; people who think they're playing a different game based on this "organic" growth the article discusses, so is the answer just to make sure that everyone who plays knows that's not the game anymore? The game has changed; we might as well get angry that Starcraft bouts today bear little resemblance to the slow fumblings that were seen during the first weekend on Battle.Net after Starcraft's release in 1998.

Do the players need to pretend that the game is still the organic game? Maybe that's part of it; there's an audience of judges who aren't playing but give points for "authenticity", I expect. But ultimately, this is a meaningless game some people like to play; the only harm (apart from people getting so into playing the game that they take it too seriously and damage their lives, but that's true of every game) I can see comes when people think they're playing a different game, but we just need to make the game clear up front.

I am way out of touch. The last online game I played with any dedication was probably Counterstrike, back when it was an 8MB alpha mod for HL (I think I've still got that executable on a CD somewhere, if it hasn't flaked with time). I never did Myspace or Facebook or any of the others, but Instagram just seems like a sharper distillation of the games that they became.

<comment><USER6> It does matter, because "winning" at IG means you have an audience. Audiences can and will be monetized. I don't think this is that hard to see.

The reason so many people go so hard on the Instagram game isn't just to make themselves feel good or validated, it's because when you have 400,000 people watching your stories every day a lot of people will pay you to wear their gear while you do it.

<comment><USER33> Oh sure, ok, money. I didn't really think of that; it's all well out of my context. It's like sports. It matters like sports matter; for most people just a bit of fun, and for people really good at it, some money. It matters on an individual level for people who like it or make a living at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's a older problem than Instagram.

One reason why people don't trust experts is that they see fake experts like Cokie Roberts and Jim Cramer on TV all day.

<comment><USER35> How about Dr. Oz instead of Jim Cramer?

<comment><USER36> Sadly, Dr. Oz is a "real expert" chasing dollar signs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think you could look at the value of an influencer as providing an aesthetic, much like an artist, but the kicker is that the influencer is driving ads and is part of a consumerist architecture. While true art is nourishing, influencing is about depriving someone of contentment by making them want something they don't have.

I also think when we see people who are paid a lot, we want to like them, and feel as though they are contributing proportional to their pay. We want to know that they're working hard, and making a difference on society, not just for themselves, in a positive way.

The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.

<comment><USER38> would be very entertaining to see you being offered that option.

<comment><USER37> I'm sure there's a point where ego takes over and you start to believe in your own godhood and essential utility to humanity. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's also the same with open source work. You need social connections to big influencers or successful startups in order for your project to get popular. The main channel seems to be Twitter; that's where open source projects tend to be shared and a lot.

I barely use my Twitter account so I was very lucky that one of my projects became popular (over 5K stars on GitHub now). It's a general purpose back end framework.

The only hype that my project got was that it appeared on the front page of HN a couple. of times at the beginning (this was a few years ago).

Because my project grew organically (and mosly linearly) without much social hype, most users tend to be small independent developers who use it for side projects. Also it's now being used by 2 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap). Cryptocurrencies tend to generate their own network effects.

<comment><USER40> No you don't lol. I created a brand new reddit account and posted my OSS project on /r/linux and it was on the top for a while with almost 2k votes. I didn't spend any time marketing or finding influences I just dumped a link and it was shared all over the place because people thought it was cool.

<comment><USER39> Same happened to my project. I posted it on Reddit, someone saw it and posted it on HN then it made it to the front page. It got almost 1k stars in the first 3 days. That was very unusual. It was pure luck. Just like with your project. You think it's normal because it happened to you but it's not. For the vast majority of popular open source project, they got popular because of social connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why do we call them influencers? Why not rat catchers or pied pipers or something. Because it feels like this story is going to end, the same way the one in Hamelin did.

<comment><USER42> I agree with your point but the pied piper actually initially solved the problem, was cheated and then came back to take revenge by abducting/drowning the children. So the parallel doesn't really hold.

<comment><USER43> Like that youtube influencer who felt cheated and took revenge by shooting up their campus?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> All these products have a beginning, a middle and an end. As more and more people clamber on board the whole thing becomes top heavy and collapses under its own weight. Hard to imagine how invasive and fake future mass platforms will be like though... The house always wins despite running a 'free' platform for people to load their content into...

</comment><comment><USER45> What I kind of like about it is that those fake influencers burn money of advertisers without producing results by forcing ads on real people. At least in the short run this means less ads for the people which is a really good thing so I support it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I mean... weren't influencers always fake? It is in their name - they exists to influence people towards some specific outcome. For some - it is equivalent to ads, for others it is political agenda.

Some might even believe in what the say and do, but first and foremost they are platform to deliver an idea. There is nothing real required from them, just an illusion of it.

</comment><comment><USER47> >I'm no Mother Teresa, I did my fair share of light-cheating at the beginning of this dark age

Ok then.

<comment><USER48> I was just skimming, but did anyone else get the impression this guy was actually trying to teach people how to cheat, with the complaining tone just for deniability?

<comment> xkcd-sucks "submarine PR"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The social media platforms benefit out of this situation.

What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are.

Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets.

If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are.

So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works.

There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co- worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him.

So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well.

Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.

</comment><comment><USER50> What's interesting is that Facebook could easily clamp down on this: they certainly have the tools to monitor their network for "fake" accounts and identify activity by pools.

Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?

<comment><USER51> Because it's a scam all the way up. FB profits handsomely off these fake numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Scams, conmen and pretenders. None of this is new and certainly doesn't mean the death of meritocracy.

At most this is a conversation about how IG is enabling bad behaviour, but it's not quite end of the world territory.

<comment><USER53> The meritocracy was always a sham. The "natural aristocracy of talent" is just an attempt to gaslight those cut out of the opportunities so that they will acquiesce to their exploitation.

<comment><USER23> It depends on how one defines merit and natrual. Meritocracy technically only needs ability to determine - with no regard to fairness, potential, or optimality in how the ability is obtained.

It is immaterial if the interutero cannibal shark that wins because it developed first and the consummed would have been stronger it is still the sole survivor.

Actual aristocrats were better at fighting as they could afford the diet, equipment, and to train from birth essentially. They had advantages but martial abilities still ultimately provided the limit. No money or royal blood could save chevaliers from changes like establishment of pike formations, or armor piercing crossbows on the battlefield, let alone guns no matter how much they cried foul about honor.

Ultimately they were part of a high value specialist-low value generalist cycle like how professional weavers did better than just any peasant in a cottage but worse than factories designed by more educated engineers but staffed with unskilled factory workers who in turn may be displaced by increased automation or cheaper labor elsewhere.

So their surviving descendants "administratized" and had others do the fighting more while they ruled through other means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Influence works. If it didn't, nobody would practice it.

Some forms of influence are clearly illegal. But there are vast gray areas, like pharma sales, where doctors are offered speaking fees to "speak" to an empty room near a nice beach. I would throw both the doctor and the pill pusher into a dark hole and throw away the key and that would save our society tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.

But the first step in all these cases is to admit that _influence works._ Stop putting the onus on the consumer, least of all when the whole "market" leading up to the consumer is also compromised by influence. Stop claiming that influence is "free speech." It isn't. It's the corruption of free speech. Stop claiming that laws against influence are unenforceable. If influence could not be identified, it could not be remunerated.

While it's often a good idea to imagine a world with fewer laws and rules, or systems that are self-correcting, the other approach needs consideration, too. Influence could be regulated, taxed, and circumscribed more tightly, with more kinds of influence prohibited by law.

Bad influencing won't go away if you ignore it. That's just poisonous smugness. Influence isn't "just how things are." There's lots of influence that is already illegal. Choose to do something, or, unless you are a hermit, things will get worse.

<comment><USER23> The funny thing is advertising is an area where it is hard to determine /why/ something was successful. Is it the ad campaign or because the new flavor is that good?

If you could give perfect attribution of influence on outcomes you should probably be a world changing billionaire already.

Anything which affects speech affects free speech "corruption" had nothing to do with it. The goal of speech is to spread a message which is a form of influence!

Defamation laws can still affect free speech and can and have been abused to stifle truth and criticism. It is dangerously naive to think that one can just restrict "influencing" and not cause harm. Point out the mayor id taking bribes? Jail for trying to influence elections and operation of the state.

Even most radically you could stop renumiation sure but that doesn't mean influence would be stopped and would only give rise to networks of "not paid for influencing" influencers.

<comment><USER54> It's hard to catch money laundering. It is very likely that a lot of money laundering goes on undeterred by law. But still it's illegal. The way it is detected is by demanding that the banks themselves alert authorities to possible money laundering.

Similarly because social media platforms have the analytics to detect advertising masquerading as influencers, this type of unregulated advertising could be brought under regulation by requiring social media platforms to report it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Death of meritocracy? I think something has to exist before it can die.

</comment><comment><USER56> Christ, I hate social media.

<comment><USER57> How do you feel about HN?

<comment><USER58> Better culturally than most, but too much of a timesink to be a net-positive for society.

<comment><USER59> Can't tell if sunk cost fallacy or honest. Do you use IG/other social media?

<comment><USER58> No. I follow a lot of blogs and feel the same way about most of them as I do about HN. I do not feel that way about truly high-quality blogs. By the way, RSS is the best thing ever.

I also use IRC whenever I have some question or need help with something and it's great. I never feel my time spent on IRC is a waste, but my usage of it is quite focused and I don't hang out in rooms compulsively like I do on HN.

<comment><USER59> So Instagram is inherently worthless?

<comment><USER58> I don't know, is it? I've never used it because it's a Facebook data mining tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Maybe I'm super dumb but how much value could an online avatar possibly have if the mere prevalence of spam causes one's "followers" to lose their focus and meander away?

</comment><comment><USER61> This Instagram influencers thing is really a separate universe of cheats and tricks. Take those wannabe influencers, who are "promoting" some exclusive brand for free without brand owner knowledge only to make an impression that this brand paid them, which means that they are such influential influencers. Apparently they hope that some other brand owner will look and say "Wow, this guy was hired by, say, Nike, for a promo, we had to hire her or him as well too". Crazy times.

</comment><comment><USER62> Good article. I like that it's been written in the frantic style of someone who's just discovered the dark patterns inherent in the Internet sharecropping industry. Hopefully some of the aspiring Youtuber/IG people read this and understand that the market for influencers is way past the saturation point.

They own the beach, and you are a single grain of sand screaming for attention among all the other grains of sand.

</comment><comment><USER63> When was meritocracy alive?

</comment><comment><USER64> The shear number of typos and punctuation issues should cause anyone to question why they are taking advice from this person, exactly.

<comment><USER65> > The shear number of typos

Your being facetious, right?

<comment><USER66> > _Your being facetious, right? ..._

Uh, did you _intend_ to misspell that, just to drive home the point? Or did you actually make a grammatical mistake, while calling out another poster's grammatical mistake, who was him- or her- self calling out yet a third person's grammatical mistakes?

<comment><USER67> Both Muphry's Law and Poe's Law seem to apply here:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This thread is flipping fascinating, so glad I found this site today. I'll be sitting here with my popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER69> The Commoditization of Scobalization.

</comment><comment><USER42> But does it matter, really? Instagram is for entertainment, if people are enjoying it does it matter if it's bots or actual people?

</comment><comment><USER70> The site is currently dead for me. Some sort of SQL issue.

</comment><comment><USER71> Marketing and payola was the norm and is still the norm. Don't have a clue what this dude is talking about.

<comment><USER72> Dude looks like a lady:

[http://behindthequest.com/about/](http://behindthequest.com/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I love how articles like this make all these problems seem brand new. As if scammers never existed before the internet. The internet must be so evil.

<comment><USER74> They did exist before the internet. But could they reach the masses for so little out of pocket? Could they reach as many so easily?

Edit: To a degree, yes. Infomercials were wildly successful. But were there other ways?

<comment><USER75> Back in ancient times, scammers placed small ads in the back of comic books and computer ad catalogs and gardening magazines and the like. I remember one case where a guy placed an ad that said, "Send $1 to [his P.O. box]" and made some money over the course of a few months before anyone complained. He didn't promise to send anything for the dollar, so iirc he wasn't prosecuted.

<comment><USER76> But I swear these X-ray specs are legit and that you can learn to be a ventriloquist in only 5 days!

<comment><USER62> I loved seeing those ads in vintage Archie comics ('60s-'80s editions). Those ads wouldn't bother including a photo, but usually had a nicely drawn artist's rendering. That to me spelled a certain kind of commitment to the scam. Today, all they'd have to do is select the right demographic on FB ads (usually people who "also express interest in" IQ pills or some other snake oil), and click a button to put the text-only ad live.

Maybe add a bad Photoshop image if you're feeling creative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> This guy keeps going on about how 'you should get everything through hard work and effort.'

Bullshit, cheat. Cheat blatantly. If there's a broken obvious but unintended way to accomplish your goal do it.

Otherwise one of the other billions of meatsacks roaming around the planet will do it first. Then they'll be eating your lunch.

</comment><comment><USER78> Can't imagine this is going to be my most popular comment but... the first thing I did was Google for one of the services she's complaining about and give them $35 for one of the things she's complaining about. If it works, I'll pump more money into it.

I've spent about $1,200 so far building an Instagram following -- albeit it's quite small. I'm shooting for 5,000 real, engaged followers, and willing to spend $5,000 getting it. I think it will be an asset that will easily throw off more than $5,000 of value for me. We'll see!

<comment><USER79> What do you do in life that makes you feel this is a worthy investment?

<comment><USER78> I'm not sure I understand the question? I think I'll make more than I spend on this project</comment></comment></comment>


Automated E2E testing and monitoring for your front end with Vercel and Checkly - <AUTHOR> https://blog.checklyhq.com/easy-automated-e2e-testing-monitoring-for-your-frontend-with-vercel-and-checkly-3/ <comment><AUTHOR> We wrote a fairly in depth blog post on how to combine Puppeteer based E2E testing with deploying an app / site to Vercel / Zeit. This is just early days as we are working on making that integration even better, basically adding E2E testing and monitoring to the whole JAM stack proposition.

I'm mostly curious if folks here recognise this problem and how they solve it right now?

Big disclaimer: I have a horse in the race, I'm the co-founder of Checkly.</comment>


How to manage many things at once without stress - <AUTHOR> https://the-nerd-manager.com/2018/11/10/how-to-manage-many-things-at-once-without-stress/ <comment><USER2> I wished I'd have such a pure project manager role, but I'm expected to also be doing product, writing stories and doing non-technical hands-on work. Devs program, I do the rest.

I'm really not sure what to do when there is nobody to delegate to. I prioritize harshly and get bym but it's no fun when I lack time to sort my to- do just to move blockers for others/projects out of the way.</comment>


HyperJump – Simple Bookmark Manager for Bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/x0054/hyperjump <comment><USER2> For similar use cases, I get good mileage out of the bash built-ins `pushd' and `popd' (also available in bash derivatives like zsh). No need to install anything, any box with a bash prompt already has them.

HyperJump, z, autojump, etc., look nice for cases where your directory-hopping sequences are "random access", not amenable to being organized around a stack. Still, you can get pretty far with the `+N'/`-N' "rotation" arguments to `pushd' and `popd'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, HyperJump is probably more of a memory aid at the moment. I am setting up a new development server with CentOS, and I am just not used to their directory structure yet. I usually setup Ubuntu, but this time around one of our developers convinced me to go with CentOS. He claimed to be a CentOS expert, though his expertise extends only as far as CentOS 4 apparently, so now I am stuck setting up the server. Oh well, it's something new.

In any case, it was annoying me that I could never remember off the top of my head where the server config, startup scripts, and other directories were, because it's just a little different than the Debian derivatives. So instead I just added all the stuff I visit often to the HJ list, with names that make sense to me. Now, regardless what server I am on, I can just type "jj confApache" and it'll take me to the right place. Just reduces cognitive load a bit.

<comment><USER2> I see, that's cool, it's like you create your own "logical" file system locations that have different "real" locations on different hosts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This sounds similar to 'z', except z remembers your common directories automatically.

[https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z)

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool, but why take the burden on having to remember to bookmark locations instead of using something like fasd, z or autojump that will "bookmark" every directory automatically and most of the time will get it right when you type part of a dir name?

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Autojump ([https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump](https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump)) for some time. Same concept.</comment>


Ask HN: Finding clients as a remote team - <AUTHOR>

I've just started a small team with other remote developers that I've enjoyed working with on other teams in the past. We're really excited about the idea of working together regularly and between all of us are well suited to taking on large full-stack projects.
Most of the contacts we have from our work individually are clients that are typically looking to supplement an existing or in-house team, or clients looking for work on smaller projects that don't need a team. It's becoming clear that looking for clients as a team is a different thing altogether, but is that totally off-base?
Searching HN on the subject yielded this well-curated resource for remote work, but much of it seems oriented toward individuals rather than teams:
https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/
Any advice from others who have already gone through this process would be much appreciated! <comment><USER2> Checkout [http://offsite.careers](http://offsite.careers) and [http://gun.io](http://gun.io)</comment>


Immigrants Create Jobs and Win Nobels - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322004574477700761571592.html <comment><USER2> This is cherry-picking the evidence.</comment>


Emailing your web app's Python tracebacks in web.py - <AUTHOR> http://blog.micropledge.com/2007/11/emailing-tracebacks/

<comment><USER2> Pylons has this built in, just so you know. In development mode, you get a live debugging console; in production, you get the full tracebacks plus other useful info emailed to you. All you have to do is specify your email address and smtp server in the config file.</comment>


What is chemical intuition? - <AUTHOR> http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2016/09/what-is-chemical-intuition.html <comment><USER2> As someone with a math degree (and a chemistry degree) - there is something similar between chemical intuition and mathematical intuition. Whereby with mathematical intuition I don't mean "gleaning estimates of calculation", but rather, "being able to easily find tractable solutions to proofs".

I think the similarity lies in that both are "black box" processes, where you have to "dictionary knowledge" of existing facts, but not in the "lookup" sense, but in the "spin creative analogies". Then what remains is to formalize the imagined analogy and check to see if the result is confirmed by reality. In the case of proofs, it's writing it down and checking the logic of each step and making sure the axioms lead to the conclusion. In the case of (synthetic) chemistry, it's doing the labor of the reaction and seeing if you get the desired product.

In my case, I looked at the structure of an enzyme and guessed that it was functioning as a PNP transistor, and for my purposes alleviating the high- energy region in the center was probably a good idea - turning it into (effectively) a direct conductor instead of a 'semiconductor'. Making that alteration (justified by the literature) resulted in a 4x improvement in enzyme yield. I don't know for sure if the analogy is exactly correct (didn't have the tools to suss that out), but that's what intuitively "inspired" the strategy that I pursued.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an alternative perspective: I worked in a lab that was relying heavily on intuition and heuristics for exploratory synthesis. By digitizing all of the lab's data and doing some straightforward machine learning, we were able to sufficiently improve the efficiency of the lab, compared to using intuition, and help the chemists develop a deeper understanding of the system they were studying:

[http://www.nature.com/news/computer-gleans-chemical- insight-...](http://www.nature.com/news/computer-gleans-chemical-insight-from- lab-notebook-failures-1.19866)

So, I guess my question is: to what degree is this reliance on intuition really just a lack of good data driven methods?

<comment><USER2> from original article: "One of the most striking features of chemistry as a science is that very palpable properties like color, smell, taste and elemental state are directly connected to molecular structure."

If the lab notebook doesn't contain that information, no amount of machine learning will find it. There's also intuition in subtle things that don't necessarily make it into the lab notebook (did I shake the extractor vigorously or just a little bit?). Or when running on autopilot, maybe you didn't do something that you wrote down you did - that makes a difference.

If you could automate lab note taking, that would be excellent.

Moreover, this 'principles based search' in the subthread article is about crystallization, which is notorious for being a tractable solution based on high-throughput methodologies (and thus has massive parallelization as a worked out strategy). Synthesis, by contrast, is a low-n experience. When machine learning techniques get good at classification by solving MNIST by looking at 3-5 samples of each letter, then maybe I'll be more optimistic.

<comment><USER4> >> One of the most striking features of chemistry as a science is that very palpable properties like color, smell, taste and elemental state are directly connected to molecular structure.

That doesn't sound so striking. Smell and taste are both direct physical assessments of molecular structure. There's no model where they could fail to be related to molecular structure.

<comment><USER2> Yeah that's in the Op's linked article, but would be unaddressed by the sub thread linked article's technique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> you know you have chemical intuition when you glance at a couple molecular structures and immediately know what the diels alder reaction product will look like.

<comment><USER6> This article gave me awful flashbacks to organic chemistry exams. I got just as far as I could on memorization and math, but as soon as the questions started just being gigantic molecules and "so if we hit this with an acid, what would the leaving group be?" I checked out.

<comment><USER5> huh. i found it to be a satisfying endeavor in pattern recognition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Ultimately when it comes to harnessing intuition, there can be no substitute for experience.

One type of unfair advantage which there is no substitute for.

So much so for ths particular field of natural science.</comment>


Ask HN: Which config to choose for a new MBP? - <AUTHOR> Hey guys,
I'm thinking of getting a new Macbook Pro but can't decide which specs to bump up and whether that's even worth considering.
I'm a web dev so my usage is mostly code editors, web browser, and then I'll use Photoshop/Illustrator occasionally.
Was thinking of future proofing and going with 16gb of ram (I always have a million tabs and apps open) and keeping the base i5 processor.
Or would the upgrade to the i7 be worth it instead?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> The biggest problem with the entire Apple lineup at the moment is that it isn't upgradeable after purchase - you need to max out the RAM before you pay, or you're stuck with that forever. Much as I hate to say, you'll definitely need to max out to 16GB for web dev. I imagine you'll need RAM more than CPU - resource consumption of pretty much all the apps you list is a burst of activity followed by slow user interaction. An i5 would likely be fine for this use pattern. The entire i-series is pretty long-lived; the i7 only really comes into its own for intense gaming and the like.

My company buys MBPs fairly regularly and we always max them out, even for our web team (our product is native C++). The trouble is that even a mid-range MBP is going to hit $2,000 easily, which is an insane amount of money for a disposable, non-upgradeable machine. If you're not completely tied to Mac, you're likely to find a cheaper machine elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the lengthy answer! This helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Get the top one if you use this machine professionally. In my opinion, time savings will pay off it many times, even if that'll be 10% boost in performance.

</comment><comment><USER4> You're already working on some kind of laptop, right? See what usage you get at the moment. Look at the resource activity graph. Are you ever pegged at 100% CPU for more than a few seconds? You'll know the answer from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got a 2011 Macbook Air (1.7Ghz i5).

That's a good idea. I don't seem to be using that much CPU yeah... I was mostly thinking about future versions of MacOS that might require more power.</comment></comment>


12 english words known by men but not by women (and vice versa) - <AUTHOR> http://zipf.ugent.be/crr.ugent.be/archives/1628 <comment><USER2> It's hard for me to believe that 88% of a "random" sample of men know what "codec" is. Perhaps this vocabulary test was given mainly to people in Flanders. If so, I'm quite impressed with their general knowledge, especially of English words. I'd bet that no more than 8.8% of "random" males in the USA would know what "codec" is.

<comment><USER3> The article says it's based on "the first 500K tests completed" of [http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start](http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start)

Then the sample is probably taken from internet dwellers who are interested in seeing how good their vocabulary is. I wonder if that's also why Paladin is so high up on that list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ha ha ha! I did know all of the male words, thanks to AD&D and the History channel. Meanwhile, on the feminine side I was shocked to be confronted by 7 out of 12 words, that I would be hard-pressed to use correctly in a sentence.

But seriously, are "flounc _y_ " and "flounc _ing_ " substantialy distinct enough to be counted twice? I'm ashamed to ask, but I have to, since I really can't come up with a serious definition for either.

<comment><USER5> Interesting I wouldn't have counted them twice, as my instinct is that we're talking about an adjective and an adverb - BUT - flouncing is also a noun that is the material that is used to make a dress flouncy.

Sewing definitely has at least as many technical terms as comp-sci.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a horrible title. 71% of men knew "bodice", that's hardly "not known to men".

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a native English speaker, and while I knew all the "men words", most of the "women words" are giving me trouble. However I knew what "taffeta" was thanks to MLP:FiM.

<comment><USER8> I clearly don't watch enough MLP, as I have no idea what taffeta is. I can kinda place most of the other female words.

I admit when reading the male words, I wondered how women could not know those words; although they're very computer and fantasy oriented and not everyday words for most people, they're not that obscure, are they? And then I read the female list and I understood my own limits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I knew all of them. Should I be concerned about my gender? ;)

The page links to an interesting vocabulary test. I probably scored low because I said "no" to words I recognized but did not know the meaning of.

On the basis of your results, we estimate you know 76% of the English words. You said yes to 76% of the existing words. You said yes to 0% of the nonwords. This gives you a corrected score of 76% - 0% = 76%. This is a high level for a native speaker. [!]

<comment><USER10> I got a 61%. Still high for a native speaker, it says.

I am not a native speaker, though.

One thing that's weird. It says: You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.

That sounds good. Apparently I never claimed to know a word that doesn't exist. But when I click on the "Nonwords you responded YES to" link, there is a word there. "Seconds".

Again, I am not a native speaker but I do believe that "Seconds" is indeed a word...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was fun, but I was surprised by:

scimitar, bolshevism, biped, bottlebrush, mascarpone, progesterone and bodice</comment>


How a Math Genius used supercomputers to find love - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ <comment><USER2> (2014) Original discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099855) (506 points; Jan 22, 2014; 186 comments)

It's more a classical example of spamming anf fake profiles, than an interesting use of math or hacking.</comment>


Resistance to changes in grammar is futile, say researchers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/resistance-to-changes-in-grammar-is-futile-say-researchers <comment><USER2> English has no grammar. Those examples are just instances of nonstandard declinations and spelling. (like "woke" not "waked")</comment>


PSequel: PostgreSQL GUI Tool for MacOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.psequel.com/ <comment><USER2> It works great, but the latest version is almost a year old :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations on choosing to develop a native application.</comment>


Top Algorithms in Data Mining - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~icdm/algorithms/10Algorithms-08.pdf <comment><USER2> Just to reinforce, these are the top "most influential" algorithms in machine learning. Most are no longer state-of-the-art.

<comment><USER3> Do you know what's state of the art then? I've touched on most of these & wouldn't mind learning more.

<comment><USER4> Ultimately, it depends on the kind of problem you have at hand and the data you're dealing with. The algorithms listed usu. will get you decent performance.

If you're dealing with large, sparse data this might serve you well: <http://code.google.com/p/sofia-ml/>

Some good stuff by Googlers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is the main PDF linked through docs.google.com? What's the added value of this? I can only see privacy drawbacks, but I'm a bit paranoid on this side, so maybe I'll stuck with the "it's just not needed" point :-)

<comment><USER6> Direct PDF clicky: <http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~icdm/algorithms/10Algorithms-08.pdf>

Though letting Google deal with PDFs (including potential malware) has its upside too ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm really surprised Learning Classifier Systems don't receive more attention. I thought I was well versed in the subject - is there something I'm missing, anyone?</comment>