NumberCruncher

> They seem to have written contracts that say 'you get what your dedicated manufacturing produces'.

It came a couple of weeks ago in the news that 29M AZ shots, hidden in an Italian harbour, waiting to be shipped out of Europe, were found by the authorities. As I said -> selling the vaccine to whoever pays the highest price.

I remember the exact values, at least the ones published on public media (German ZDF):

The negotiation wasn't about the purchasing prise of a shot, but about the price to "reserve a shot". Germany spent ca. 4€ per capita on "reserving an AZ shot", which adds up to a total spending of ca. 350M€.

Just to have a comparison:

- Last time I bought a beer in a pub in Munich a paid more than 4€

- Just last week Germany spent 1.7B€ on a Syrian topic, which obviously won't change anything, neither for Syria, nor for Germany

- The lockdown - ongoing since November - costs 3 to 4B€ per week

The only one acting not like a moron in this situation is AZ: selling the vaccine to whoever pays the highest price. If the German politicians could pay the highest price, but doesn't want to, whose fault is that?

Funny fact: a friend of mine gets paid to support German R&D on measuring COVID concentration in the sewers to develop an early-warning-system. He says this money should be used to buy vaccines instead of founding some random R&D.

I should re-read the article because I can't see what kind of problem they try to solve with MAP, NDCG and "invented here" Pagerank what couldn't be solved with tf-idf and out-of-the box Elasticsearch functionality. It's a highly underrated peace of software.

German language books. Thanks to them I don't have to live in a sh*thole country turning into a dictatorship and I have a decent life.

Or this is going to be one of those events that everyone tries to sweep under the carpet when Tesla and it's investors have to be bailed out for the first time, because it's too big to fail...

I am surprised what a discussion an article can kick of which sole purpose is generating views for people.ai...

Sounds good, until the next bail out comes and private companies and their investors has to be saved.

> In the 50-second video, Ma, wearing a navy pullover, spoke from a room with grey walls, a large painting and floral arrangements. It was not clear where the room was. [...] Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped to finish 8.5% higher on the news...

I am pretty sure all sane people knowing that this video is going online had hold a huge long position on Alibaba shares.

At first I thought this article is just totally wrong, but than I have found this:

> Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet...

At least this one point is correct.

Not wanting to protect the company, but it's called the National Gambling Company, so it's pretty obvious for everyone what its products are, the participation in the games is anonymous, the customers have the opportunity to opt out (not buying lottery tickets) and it is owned by the government therefore it's profit is nothing more than a special form of tax. Their games are supervised directly by the Ministry of Finance.

I could came up easily with a bunch of well know companies/industries breaking all these rules at once, but that's an other topic.

I used to work at a lottery company and I can confirm your hypothesis. Numbers below 31 and magical numbers like 7 or 13 are picket more frequently. In a game where we draw 5 numbers out of 90 the combination 1,2,3,4,5 was played 4-5000 times a week on average, which means 1 lottery ticket in every 3000. Which is a bad strategy in games where the pot is splitted up equally between the winners. You could have statistically duoble your expected win (return on investment) picking unusual numbers. But ROI was still at 70%.

[Edit] We had a lot of funny stories dealing with obsessed players. One of them accused us of cheating because he found the winning numbers in the newspapers of the last week, in the section of financial news. He also sent us copies of the newspapers, filled with encirceld numbers. It remembered me of one scene in the movie A beautiful mind where John Nash does the same with words.

> The title is transformed it into an array of numbers between 0 and 1 (each character is a number) and this data is fed (along with the number of points) to the neural network.

This sounds strange. But after looking at the authors bio, it isn't strange any more. This has less to do with AI and more with cheap growth hacking.

https://cvcompiler.com/ high ROI investment

Some sources say they were spying together: https://www.techzine.eu/news/security/52178/danish-intellige...

Danish politician about having cheap flying taxis by 2030, we only have to give up our privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25068820

All lies and deception...

> Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes

And only the richest ancient Athenians had the right to vote. There may be some causation...

This doesn't hold in the age of slavery where you could get sold by the curt to slavery and serve on a galleon until you payed back your obligations.

> ...China, which leads the world in published scientific papers...

Try to publish in China a scientific paper with real COVID numbers and you will see how democratic the country is.

> ...the Soviet Union, which definitely assigned a lot of value to objective science...

Unless the objective science throw a threw a bad light on the soviet system in which case science was dismissed. Just take a look at the story behind Chernobyl.

You won't find objectivity in a totalitarian system.

It's not about whether people sitting in the "committee meetings" of the "Code of Conduct Enforcement Team" are dickheads but it's about how you deal with it. Not acknowledging their legitimacy and walking away is a wise advise.

> What if people with lower cognitive ability are more likely to falsely report having had it.

And that's why we generally shouldn't base studies on self reported data. If you had the opportunity to compare self reported data to empiric data (measured, tracked, etc.) you wouldn't believe self reported data any more, because it's heavily biased.

BTW I am pretty sure we could observe significant cognitive deficits by people abducted by aliens as well...

> I find the question really odd. It is like asking why people create new recipes

This analogy missed the point. It's about recipes written in a new language barely spoken by anyone, like elvish or klingon. Writing Romulan ale recipes in klingon is totally fine if you are targeting people on a star-trek convention, and want to start a romulan-klingon fight. But writing the only one documentation of a critical system in klingon at a public company sounds crazy, even if you can reduce the LOC (lines written) by 10% due to the nice and unique grammar of klingon (I mad this one up, I have no clue about klingon). Guess what, no sane person would want to work with that documentation, unique klingon grammar or not.

You just have to take a look at Esperanto, the "an easy and flexible language - created by Zamenhof - that would serve as a universal second language to foster world peace and international understanding, and to build a 'community of speakers', as he believed that one could not have a language without such a community." After 130 years still no one speaks it, and English is the common language in the western world. Which - considering its shortcomings - is like if everyone of us would mainly code in COBOL, just because everyone can code in COBOL.

tl,dr: normal human beings don't want to learn 2 new languages every year, just because [put a random argument here]. Why should we?

[edit: typos]

> I am not entirely sure that we would learn those lessons from dealing with covid-19.

Just as much as we learned those lessons from dealing with the spanish flu.

As one of my friends said, people doesn't learn, unless one of their relatives or close friends die. Until then they complain about having to wear a mask or missing out the prom ball.

"To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.” - Schopenhauer

I use a HAG Capisco and pretty happy with it. 800€ well invested...

> Maybe developers stop learning because they realize that that to learn how to do the same thing with 167 technologies is not a real development.

And maybe because they realize that the majority of those 167 technologies only exist because someone said "Making frameworks and generalization is the only reason I manage to keep doing what I do." [source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13734009]

Someone wrote on HN that you can not make all of your employees happy at the same time. Identify the 20% who gets done 80% of the work and make sure they will want to work for you in the future and follow you if you jump ship. How? Build a relation to them based on trust and respect and ask them directly.

Next time I have to interview someone for an analyst position I will pick this article and say "find 5 mistakes within 5 minutes"...

Fair enough.

I guess you pay her a US salary or something comparable.

> Let’s be clear: this software is specifically designed to help employers read workers’ private messages without their knowledge or consent. By any measure, this is unnecessary and unethical.

I am too European to understand how this can be legal.

> An example of this is in a library we have open sourced, and you can find the fix here

This reads for me like:

As an example of this I go to the shooting range every Friday, just for fun, as you can see it on this picture I published on FB, that's why I didn't shoot my neighbour.

He may be right, but that's not an evidence. And we are talking about a company acting like a con man since ages.