jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I can imagine a policy mandating that for all commercial software, source code goes into escrow for automatic release 10 or 20 years later.

The company doesn't have to be around anymore, rights don't have to be negotiated, etc.

Short of that I wish more companies would do it voluntarily. I'm not into id games, but they're one example that comes to mind.
- Someone will get arrested with a 3D-printed gun.

- At least one profitable, company-launching app will come out on Firefox OS first. It likely won't be initially available in English.

- The "freedom and democracy are incompatible" thing will get at least one mention in the mainstream press that won't consist of outright mockery or dismissal.

- Police body cameras will become ubiquitous.

Edit:

- Apple will release the Swift compiler as open source software.

- Something someone at Y Combinator says will be presented as outrageous by the online media. The story will be prominent enough to briefly reach the top of HN's front page and will receive an official response.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but considering the general make-up of Tech-employees in the Bay Area, by following your logic to conclusion leads me to think hiring outside of white males is a negative... if you think diversity = tripping up companies.
The UK Government has already considered shutting down Twitter when it needs to [1] and I Think it's common knowledge that certain cell towers are turned off when a local hot spot of political action pops up (Occupy).

If you remove a person's ability to access information, that's the same as censorship.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8705281/Scotlan...
The police in the UK do have sufficient independence to arrest against the Home Secretarry's wishes and MI5 have no arrest powers they normally get the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police to do the arresting I believe. However I think that if she had politely suggested that they be careful not to stretch anti-terror laws to far that they would have probably listened.
no repeated automated queries

Can you define "repeated automated query"? Since an API is for automated queries by definition, this is confusing.
A lot of TOS include a special section to allow dumb things in the event the company is bought or goes bankrupt. I assume that's what happened here.

"We will not sell your data, but we don't promise anything about our new owners"
Some people don't subscribe to your belief that rather than improve your workplace you should just leave. Google created a culture and set of values and recruited based on that. So of course they shouldn't be surprised when the people who were recruited on those values try to live up to them, even when there's some push back. Nor should they be surprised when people bring additional values they may personally hold to the companies where they work.

Yes, it might be "simpler" to just leave whenever you meet resistance on the job -- but it's also less rewarding.

Finally, I'd add that there are no perfect workplaces. There are also shared problems across entire industries.
Hello all! We're opening up MightyDash to beta testing to help founders, PMs and UXR collect user feedback from customer support, your sales CRM, in-app surveys, FAQ center and social media. We automatically aggregate related feedback into a single item for you to track and help you prioritize features with the rest of your team. Let me know if you have any feedback, requests or questions!
Massachusetts criminals have plenty of guns, if that's who these are actually intended for.
So what, though? The Tesla will won do its weight and weight distribution. Does it not count because it’s not purely due to torque?
Oh Emacs. A graybeard I respect got me to try it about 5 years ago. I used to walk by his machine and think "wow, in a movie about a hacker, this is what their computer screen would look like". I also thought Magit was pretty damn cool because it made interacting with Git extremely intuitive (once you're comfortable with Emacs).

In the years since first picking up Emacs, I have probably spent 100 hours or more configuring it, reconfiguring it, refactoring my configuration, and other things that wasted my time I'm not going to make the world a better place by configuring my editor. I'm going to do it by shipping code.

I'm a recovering terminal junkie. I had a problem. I was bored with my work so I wanted to challenge myself. Maybe I even enjoyed procrastinating a little.
A nice example of this is yoda expressions in, say Java.

The initial reasoning for them was to prevent accidental assignment, since a C/C++ compiler will complain on this:
if (null = x)

but not on this:
if (x = null)

In Java, neither is allowed, so the whole yoda construct is almost pointless. The exception is boolean assignment which does benefit from this idiom, but the loss in readability is a trade off to consider. In any case, I suspect most uses of this construct in languages like Java fall into the "superstition" category, where the people using it aren't really considering why.
Sort of off topic, but I'm kind of stuck with Lenovo Thinkpads thanks to my love of the Trackpoint, but we're a shrinking group and there are many, many tempting alternatives these days. Anyone know if there's any way to graft a Trackpoint onto other laptops?
Never had an account. I just don't really care what my former classmates and associates are up to. Friends know my cell # and email.
And the answer to that question is...

I don't know? Do you have any facts or data that actually compares the cost of those two?

And the answer is: no, he doesn't. He just has a broken analogy. I've posted an article in a post (somewhere else...) which actually details _real_ costs and _real_ expenses of some welfare programs, and then compares it with a basic income. But the blog-post linked does not.
Google[1] and Amazon[2] also charge 30%...

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

>You receive 70% of the payment

[2] http://gameservices.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/inapp...

>developers earn 70 percent
Force and fraud are the basis of all anti-social thinking and behavior, so yes, I'm opposed to coercion in all forms.
> Again, I could go rent this stuff, but I want it delivered, and I don't want to pay a price that is pretty close to what it would cost to just buy the tool!

This is probably the biggest problem with a sharing/renting economy.

Manufacturing has gotten to the point where producing an object is so inexpensive, it's cheaper to buy than rent. But why should that be? At any given production cost, why isn't it still cheaper to produce fewer and let multiple people use them, either via a renting system or something else? You're making fewer objects and still satisfying demand, so why doesn't this save money?

The reason is the labor and real estate costs of administering such a system. You need people to staff the rental/sharing agency. You also need a conveniently-located (and thus expensive) building where people go to pick up and return the objects. Or, if you're doing delivery, you can choose a more out-of-the-way location, but now you're paying the labor cost of drivers.

Because the overhead of running a sharing system is so high, it's actually cheaper most of the time to allocate one of each object to each person, except for the most expensive objects.
I've traded on -otc ~5 times now (http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=gwern&sign=...).

It's not easy, by any means, unless you're already familiar with IRC and crypto and signing messages.

But it's basically anonymous: the actual transactions happen in emails or privmesgs and so there are zero records beyond the feedback on bitcoin-otc.com (which is optional and can be meaningless†, for example, the ratings by 'newguy' and 'AVALON' on me), and there's no way to prove or disprove that a transaction happened without full access to the internals of whatever systems one side of the transaction is on. For example, there's no way for anyone to prove that I really did sell 0.25btc for $50 on Amazon; there's plenty of 0.25btc movements on the blockchain, and all Amazon sees is that I redeemed a giftcode from somewhere. And there's even less evidence if you're willing to send or receive cash in an envelope (http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php?type=&nick=&thing=&...). So it's about as anonymous as you want it to be.

† Specifically, you can be fairly sure the AVALON/newguy accounts did leave that feedback on me because the site accepts commands only from IRC accounts which have cryptographically proven their ownership of the account; but there is no way to be sure that I transacted with them or scammed them. As it happens, I did not and those ratings are revenge from a scammer for not falling for his tricks. Same problem as with public keys, and why people talk about web of trusts.
Zope? Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time... A long time.

I wonder of this magnificent monstrosity is still alive?
Fear propaganda. Is there actually any claim being made that can be tested in a reasonable amount of time? If not, it's not science. They might as well run the headline "A giant hamburger will squash the earth in a thousand years". It's useless.

The pattern that plays out day after day is this: someone blessed as being associated with Real Science says something, and the press is then free to make a scary story out of it with their ass covered, because they were just relaying what a Real Scientist said. It doesn't matter if it's not really science because it's not a specific claim, or it's not replicable, or whatever. The scientists get publicity, and the media gets clicks. Ten years later when the scary prediction don't come true, nobody remembers. There's no reckoning. Nobody pays any price for their part in endlessly terrorizing the public.

Another epidemic in news coverage is purposeful, deliberate failure to check for precedent. The media has learned that checking for precedent almost always makes things less scary, so why would they ever do that? If they provided context for forest fires, for example, they'd have to say that they're down 90% since a century or so ago. Who's going to click on that?
I think you're overestimating the time required to do this. It looks like 30 minutes to me, all-inclusive.

The cheapest no-name 256gb cards are $130 on Amazon, so that works out to $60/hr assuming the DIY version is no better than no-name. Big brands cost twice that, so if the DIY version is equivalent quality to those, $320/hr.
The key to Plain English writing can be found in the book, "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" by Joseph M. Williams (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing and Publishing).

It gives you the ability to take simple ideas, and write in a simple way, as well as take complex ideas and write in a simple way.

Highly recommended skills for anyone wanting to compel others to action.
If I'm parsing that correctly, those limitations on taking the lane are only for roads that have real bicycle lanes. For the vast majority of roads, it's legal to take the full lane.
But why does it require firecracker and not qemu?
You miss the point.

The author links to (approx) $90 in parts.

Your average HN reader is probably in a decently paid job, let's say it works out to $80-$100 per hour (at least !).

So we're now talking about $190 all-in, i.e. parts AND labour.

So we're now talking about a $60 price difference ($250 off-the-shelf vs $190 DIY).

For the $60 difference you get:

- A card that is camera manufacturer validated and so does not risk breaking your camera or invalidating its warranty
- A card that has already been tested and labeled in the factory, so you don't need to do that
- A card with a warranty

I'd say that $60 is a bargain.

People should not be valuing their time at zero when engaging in DIY projects.
"Spending $2,500 on rent is insane"

That's not normal, but it is simply what it costs to live in NYC or SF or London. I know tons of people who pay north of $2,500/month for decent (not fancy) apartments in central neighborhoods of those cities. And $3-$4k/month is very common for a single person.
I guess we all have our different requirements but I think that's quite a high bar for "big money".
The 50 Cent Army is still at it. I think newspapers have become a lot better about filtering them out. The Globe and Mail (Canada) was absolutely overrun for a while and they still pop up now and again.
The base64 & hex stuff is only used for the advanced, human-readable bits; on the wire it's just straight length-encoding and byte strings.

I'd say that bencode's advantage is a built-in standard for integer encoding (with canonical S-expressions one must decide between ASCII decimals or little/big-endian bit strings), and a clearer standard for a dictionary/map/hash (a canonical S-expression would probably use an alist-like structure like (map (foo bar) (baz quux)), but one could also go with (map foo bar baz quux), (map (foo bar baz quux)) or some other encoding.
I saw this all over reddit when that airplane was shot down over Ukraine.

Vote brigading and shill accounts corrupted reddit long ago. These tactics have probably been in use since before reddit even existed.

The internet is essentially a big propaganda machine and you can't till what is what unless you are keen and aware.
"Rationalism" is so ironic you might say it is an iron or at least made of iron.
To be fair, how is the tech really supposed to know?

Serviceability is a complicated question. There's engineering issues (how far from existing plant is the address?); there's legal issues (is servicing the address required under a franchise agreement?); there's logistical issues (is this a subdivision where the HOA won't let us dig up; is it a multi-dwelling unit where the property manager won't let us run wire)?

It's not like houses are built in a structured, systematic manner. In most of the country, property developers just put up subdivisions at random.

You're right though, "we don't know" is the right answer.
Kindly produce a link to a video where someone at a BLM protest grabs and removes a police officer's gas mask.
Leave it alone. Reddit did the right thing early on by minimizing /r/td spam on the front page. Aside from that I'm convinced there were no problems posed by /r/td or /r/donaldtrump aside from those invented by the small, vocal minority of pearl-clutchers complaining that someone somewhere on Reddit was posting things they disagreed with.
I've generally liked the policies Pai has pushed through in his tenure, and I'm really relieved to see him pulling the rug out from under this.
Trump’s nature further polarized both sides. He’s a binary-minded individual, either for / against. Dangerous quality for a leader, pushes both sides toward the extremes.
To clarify, the scripts not the languages are close.
I can't imagine you really believe that. The US may have an open society, but the US doesn't have an open government. Look at just the tiniest amount of publicly known items from Snowden and Wikileaks. Those alone indicate a greater iceberg of secrets.
Well yeah but that's not the point. Not everything is about min-maxing profit and environmental concerns.
FWIW: I've been using whatsapp without access to my contacts with the help of this little app: "Open in Whatsapp"

https://github.com/subhamtyagi/openinwa

You can enter a number in that app and it will launch a conversation with them in whatsapp. I think it makes use of the API mentioned in sibling comments.
If your only skill is being able to write code, your skillset is relatively weak.

We are called Software Engineers, but what we really are is people who solve problems with code.

The important part is solving the problem. The fact we do it through the medium of code isn't that noteworthy.

If solving the problem requires knowledge from outside the domain of programming (Spoiler: it almost always does), then you learn what you need to from the relevant domain.
You pretty much nail it. But that it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. From recent news, I am fairly certain all 3 (G,MS,A) have big plans on the table for balls-out cloud-everything infrastructures. Apple is the only one making it obvious with their new datacenters and the iTunes cloud rumors. Google is rolling out a cloud filesystem along with ChromeOS. Microsoft, well, they'll probably stumble along like Google and Apple's retarded brother.

The computing industry, as a whole, is undergoing a massive shift, and I'm afraid that really innovative companies like Dropbox have simply provided the template by which the filesystems of the future will operate.
The health concern raised about the backscatter x-ray devices is that the rays they use are very low-energy compared to the x-rays we are used to. Because of this, the entire radiation dose will be concentrated on the first millimeter or so of your skin, which means that the radiation dose your skin absorbs from the device will be considerably higher than the dose it absorbs from flying.
lvr.com also has incredibly useful information. support jan axelson and buy one of her books, they're essential for any usb development!
>As a bonus much better aligned with today's multi-core reality than Python or Ruby.

Not substantially. It made the concurrency decisions for you ahead of time, and if you need a different concurrency model, you're up shit creek.

> but order of magnitude faster and much memory efficient that Python or Ruby.

So is my Radio Flyer Wagon. You still can't do systems programming, embedded, high performance, or real-time work with it.

I know too much about C and the constraints it works well in to believe Go is anything but awkwardly crammed between two realms of programming.

A language that forces its own GC upon you (note that you can have GC in C/C++, you merely have to choose one), and its own concurrency model upon you without giving you at least a couple choices is not a well designed language.

Even Clojure gives you a couple ways to approach concurrency, and it doesn't even make the same claims as Go has.

I don't know a single person who's done substantial systems programming who takes Go seriously in terms of their field.

Not a single one.
The whole s/X/Y/ thing is very Unix, and is a (sub)cultural signifier as much as anything. I'm not sure if it's originally from ed, sed, or what, but most people (self included) probably picked it up from vi (nvi/vim/etc.) or perl.

X->Y makes just as much sense, but the s (for "substitute") makes it mnemonic - I read it as "sub X for Y".
What! The spec are always right! Always.
This is seriously awesome. While I've spent a lot of time reversing network protocols (and thus had a good foundation on which to pick up USB hacking (which I documented at http://daeken.com/hacking-the-belkin-network-usb-hub and, to a lesser extent, at http://daeken.com/emokit-hacking-the-emotiv-epoc-brain-compu... )), most people have never dropped to this level. We need more articles like this. Good work.

Edit: So, I have an idea, and I think this may be the community to ask about it. I'm considering going to a company (specifically, one that produces some network software or a USB device) and asking them to get a copy/unit of their product, which I will then reverse-engineer in full public view, with the intention of making it fully transparent, and hopefully getting other people into this stuff. It could be something that's already open (either intentionally or by someone reversing it and publishing a driver or other code), or something that's currently closed. But the whole goal is to end up with a set of data that people can work through, along the lines of my Belkin post (but better organized, and published as things go on).

Anyone have any suggestions for who I should approach about this? Or hell, any startups want me to reverse their stuff for the greater good?
I think Ballmer is an interesting case study in perception versus results. He's commonly portrayed as a poor CEO that has led Microsoft in the direction of irrelevance. And yet, to quote oft critic Gruber, "he knows how to make money" (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/04/19/msft-q3)

I'd love to sit down and talk to him, and see if his vision is a bit more long range than your average industry analyst, similar Paul O'Neill's vision on worker safety and Alcoa in 1987.
Positives: Xbox/Games division
I like how this is from 2013 and yet there is still no update on that blog, the linked blog, or anywhere else as far as I can tell...
Its cool and works, but not useful in any usual sense. I have never and will never choose my music by the main colors of the album artwork.

Interesting work non-the-less
I can't recall the sources right now and I couldn't find a mini thesis (tesina in Spanish) that I wrote about the subject half a year ago. However, the research started since the late 1800's - and if I remember correctly - from a German factory owner. They correlated working hours with productivity, finding that 40 hours a week is the optimal amount of working time for an employee.
* There was an article on HN around June-August from a fella who did some research into it focusing it towards developers.
* There is research on how sleep deprivation affects the brain.

Those two may give you enough to look into. I'll owe you the links.
Going by etymology, I would guess it means the former, as "al dente" comes from "Of the tooth"
Not nearly as much as you might think. Check out "Bad Pharma" by Ben Goldacre. It's a treatment of the statistical and legal tricks used by drug companies to overstate the efficacy of new drugs, without breaking any actual FDA regulations.

Even after using all the known tricks for cherry-picking results, p-hacking, and the like, there exist much-abused FDA 'fast track' options for getting a 'needed' drug out before the science is confirmed, and quite often the science never gets around to being confirmed. Even big-name drugs like Tamiflu have been shown later to be no better than generics at best and completely useless at worst.
An open wound was almost certainly a recipe for gangrene prior to antiseptics and antibiotics.
That's a pretty large and unfair statement, and I'd like to know how you are measuring failure.

23andme has created an affordable market for personal genomics, single-handedly forced modernization in regulation and policy, built a mineable database of live genome data that is helping researchers find cures, and amassed nearly 1M paying customers.

I'd love for you to say that just because they aren't yet profitable means that they are a failure.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/23andme-to-use-genetic-database-...
I really should keep an eye on my investments.. ;) But yes, the name is indeed everywhere.
I feel like this is a good place to mention Pip-tools [0] which can generate a lockfile of sorts from a standard requirements.txt (or a setup.py). Specifically, it resolves all dependencies (including hashes), and writes them to a new "requirements" file that you can read with the usual `pip install -r`.

The nice part about Pip-tools versus Flit or Poetry or Pipenv is that Pip-tools lets you keep using Setuptools if you want to, or if you're unable to switch to one of the others for some reason (and valid reasons do exist).

[0]: https://pypi.org/project/pip-tools
Didn't Larry Ellison said a big part of Sun's problem was that they didn't have enough?

He said something in the direction of my thesis on this, that they'd outsourced too much of their sales to "VARs" and such, but I think he may have also included higher end sales.

Anyway, his public objections have been to Sun's upper management in pretty much all areas (e.g. he said even Sun's engineers couldn't succeed due to them), not the individual salesmen, although of course he wouldn't complain about the latter if he was planning on keeping any of them.

Surely it makes the most sense to establish a new structure and retain the existing Sun salesmen who thrive in it.