skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I meant here is that we should not lose sight of the original idea behind meritocracy. The author of The Rise of the Meritocracy was arguing that a meritocracy becomes a clique who defines what "merit" means. If you do not think there is any merit in being nice to others, you end up defending toxic behaviours under the guise of justice and equality.
Paris cafe or berlin cafe for productivity? Transport your desk in a click
Village Life Hack Unlimited Gems and Coins
Why Designing UX Is Better Than Designing Graphics?
Laws like this are a fantastic example of people trying to avoid a moral argument.

Whether or not chickens are of moral consequence is an argument that can be had; it is perfectly reasonable to for the owners of these factory farms to either argue that chickens are not of moral consequence and deserve no more protection or consideration than the rocks in a quarry or that the methods they use are moral and do not constitute an unreasonable mistreatment of the chickens.

But they prefer not to have that argument; this is not unlike many other industries who prefer to avoid moral arguments by hiding or denying the facts.
So, this is the sad yet inevitable outcome that we've known about from Sci-Fi for some time. When you combine the darker side of human nature and anthropomorphized robots that cannot defend themselves, malicious vandalism and destruction is a given.

The philosophical question remains - when does it cross over from being classified as destruction of property to something like assault.
Love the app and how it is designed. Love the idea of working with your team.

I represent Cubesly, a top notch mobile application development studio consisting of a hand-picked bunch of passionate iOS and Android developers. We have extensive experience with creating well polished mobile applications on the iOS and Android platforms for clients across the world, especially the US and Europe. Here are some clients we have and their apps that I would like to highlight

Daniel Burkhoff MD PhD, who is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University for whom we developed the PVLoops suite of apps.
Dr Scott Wallace who is a PhD in clinical psychology for whom we developed the Workhealth eAP app.
Ernest Sports who is one of our long standing clients and for whom we have developed all their mobile apps that talk wirelessly to their swing analyser hardware, namely the ES12, ES12 Club Fitting App, ES14 and the ES14 Club Fitting App.
Disruptive for whom we developed the beautiful and minimal Busy App.
A Stanford graduate and an ex Apple employee for whom we developed the Heard App
A hobbyist drone flyer based in Canada for whom we developed the Flying Caddie App

Here are the links to the above mentioned apps

Busy App (http://getbusyapp.com/)
Heard App (http://www.heardapp.com/)
PVLoops (http://www.pvloops.com/)
Ernest Sports - ES12 (http://www.ernestsports.com/es12)
Ernest Sports - Club Fitting App (http://ernestsports.com/club-fitting-app/)
Ernest Sports - ES14 (http://www.ernestsports.com/es14/)
Flying Caddie (http://www.flyingcaddie.com)

You can check out the rest of our portfolio at
http://www.cubesly.com/portfolio

If you feel our experience is in line with what you require, feel free to reach out to me at omair@cubesly.com, call me at 510 493 7118 or on skype (omairaslam).
how do you know the lawyer is good? i agree her letter was effective in this instance.
Didn't see it, but I created my own :)

https://github.com/cwramsey/twitter-contest-winner
Some interesting demographic data here: http://www1.nyc.gov/html/nycha/downloads/pdf/CAFR_2013.pdf (page 136).

A few things that stand out:

* About 175k families in public housing, with 400k people total (so about 5% of the NYC population).

* Slightly less than half of households have at least one person working.

* Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k?

* Only 11% of families are listed as being on welfare.

* Average time in public housing > 20 years, which supports what the article was saying.
> Second was that the engineers had offices with doors that closed.

And sometimes that works well. Othertimes it's a hinderance. In this case, I'm arguing that it removes culture from the workplace. There's hardly anyway to deny that. There are also indicators that suggest lowering social interaction is linked with depression; which would have some effect on company culture.

> As a programmer,...

You mean, "you, as an individual person with individual needs", right?

> Finally, I'm rather taken aback that the director of a design agency would get onto a public forum and announce that he doesn't really care about productivity. Productivity relates to money spent; don't your customers care about how much it costs to engage you?

That's an oversimplification of my statement. Our clients pay for us to take our time, to welcome new ideas and research ways to innovate their message, goals or vision. They do care that we spend the extra time – in fact they knowingly pay for it.
It's possible that a random new movie will be better than a random movie in the past, but you're not talking about random low-budget ones, you're talking about high-budget ones. It's not like they didn't have some big budget films in the past, and I doubt a "better understanding of filmmaking and storytelling" is responsible for more enjoyment of current things. Also, I'm more referring to even movies from 5-10 years ago, which don't suffer from lack of technology in general, or most of the other reasons, and yet there doesn't seem to be as much consumption of them than the "new thing". Personally, I'm fine with consuming old media, but the world doesn't seem to share that with me, and I don't fully get why.

There's also the availability of extensive ratings for past media, which means you can pick and choose the good ones, something harder to do when picking stuff still in theaters.

As a counterpoint, I do enjoy sequels of things I've previously enjoyed (and understand the sequel effect), but that doesn't seem big enough to account for the general phenomenon either.
Doesn't work on OS X 10.10.4?
Do you run a tor exit node? If not, why?

If you're going to call it scaremongering, at least admit that there are very legitimate fears for most people.
Yeah, there's a fair bit of controversy on this topic. In California at least, I believe that the use of the title "engineer" is regulated by the so-called PE act:

http://www.bpelsg.ca.gov/laws/pe_act.pdf

Regarding public opinion, I myself have a degree in "Computer Science and Engineering" and have worked as a "software engineer" for 21 years, but my engineer friends don't consider computer engineering to be "real engineering", and my scientist friends don't consider computer science to be "real science". :)
It's not like the hacktory isn't in America too. I wonder why they gave their blog post such an inflammatory title...
Note that you should be wary of AWS Lambda limits. We blew through them on our first day directing traffic on a system we were testing with Lambda. They were able to increase our limits a few days later, but something to think about before you base your whole stack around it.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html
Ask HN: How Do You Make the Most of Your Commute?
I commute for about 2 hours a day and try to prevent this from taking up too much time by reading, eating and thinking on the train.

What can I and others do to avoid wasting this time?
In the early days, you had to use the username as it was registered to log in.
Homebrew supports binaries as well ("bottles"). I rarely have to compile anything when using it.
Actually the reason I'm looking to make money is to get out from under this car lease that I mistakenly took on, and have enough for first+last months rent and a security deposit at a new, more affordable place.
The concept of dependency distance is actually equally useful in programming languages. For example, instead of writing

if condition:
#...a lot of code...
value = process()
return value
else:
#...return error information (e.g. in a web app)
return error_information

I always try to write something like this instead

if not condition:
return error_information

#...a lot of code...
value = process()
return value

This make reading and understanding the code much easier since things that belong together are close together. This seems trivial but there is a lot of code that is written like the first block and therefore harder to understand. Sometimes, small things can make a large difference.

That said, I am probably a bit over-sensitive to this kind of problem as a German, since we also have the habit of holding back the vital information in a sentence until the very last word.
This looks like a great idea, but this was unfortunately it was really buggy and I couldn't get it to work. Would be very happy to try it out again once the bugs get ironed out.
Yet another example of waking up in the morning (late night last night), opening HN, clicking on the article, and doing a spit-take of my morning tea. It's good that they overturned it, but it was LEGAL at some point to jail people for releasing truthful information about actual crimes taking place? In America? And it's still LEGAL in some states?

How about we pass another, federal law. Any politician who votes for or promotes any law that actively and intentionally seeks to violate the first amendment is guilty of treason.
I'm a pretty strong critic of NYC's housing policies, but when I read about "Right to Buy" in the UK, I had to conclude that we may be far from the worst!
Ask HN: As a senior systems administrator, should I get into programming?
Hello everyone. Let me start off with a little background about myself. I used to do a lot of freelance IT work and now I'm working as a system administrator for a major healthcare provider. I've been doing this for very long time and I feel like I really want to move on and do other things.

I am 32 year old college dropout that basically self thought myself computer repair, software, system management, web design, etc. I like learning new things. I have a loving wife and an autistic 3 year old child that I love very much. I always feel like I want to do more and to better provide for my family.

During my spare time, I try to read up on things and learn as much as I can. I've been dabbling with C# on and off for a couple of years, nothing serious. I do have some C++ background from college.

I've been reading HN for many years now and sometimes I see topics that basically suggest getting into programming field, you really need to be a younger person since older folks seem to get passed by. Is this still true today? Should I completely delve into the world of programming or should I stay away from it?
I just didn't want to get into a point-by-point rebuttal with the original author. I'd rather talk about other things, like why "meritocracy" is a problem. A lot of people are surprised by it, since it seems like a good idea on the face of it.
To be honest I think I am more offended that the housing authority can charger higher rents to some residents all the while not maintaining the buildings. Why aren't housing authority management dragged up before the cameras, if not into court. Money from rents should first go to the building the rent is derived from and only spent elsewhere if all that buildings needs are met.

Rent control, public housing, taxi medallions, street vendor permits, and more, all are things that can be made to sound good but the number of people harmed usually out numbers those helped in the long run.

There should not be any ownership imparted simply because you got there first. This goes for public housing as much as it goes for the medallion system.
Tableau acquires Canadian startup Infoactive
...then procrastinated for 6 hours. Or is that just me?
That's not just an advertisement.

I always make sure to have an email signature on my phone that lets people know I'm on a phone. Specifically it says "Sent from my phone, excuse any brevity or typos."

Sending a response from your phone should carry different expectations, so I consider "Sent from my iPhone" to be entirely forgivable.
Another example of why email addresses cannot serve as "identities" like so many people, somehow magically, assume.

If you know it, everything about email and its protocols would make you assume the exact opposite.

Now PGP signatures on the other hand … but hey, nobody wants those, right?! Far too complicated! /rant
1, 2, 6, 7 and 9 from the list above would probably be a good starting place.
> IANAL but I thought it is legal as long as one of the parties consents to the recording.

Laws on consent for recording vary from state to state, and all-party consent is required in some.
The Value of Science (1955) [pdf]
Absolutely.

You pay for EC2/DO even if your app isn't used. With JAWS, you pay only when your app is used.

Here is Lambdas pricing FYI: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
For those who don't get why this is terrible, imagine if GitHub were compromised and their ssh agent tampered with. When you clone a repo, they could use your forwarded agent to log into your production hosts. That's pretty bad.
>Please don't lump all "Americans" into the group that destroyed this robot. There are assholes in every country

The 'all "Americans"' didn't destroy the robot, they're just fertile ground for the assholes who did. It like 'all Muslims' aren't terrorists, they just fertile ground for terrorists.
I've used Mailinator for years and it's always interesting to read what this dude has to say.
Show HN: Threads. Automated, Behavior Driven Email
Microsoft Azure for DreamSpark
VC Confidence Hits Two-Year Low, High Valuations and Pointless Startups Blamed
One way that you can avoid something like this is to play an audio asking the driver to drop it off when it's approaching neighborhoods that have high probability of destroying it. Looks like there is GPS tracking on the robot, so I don't think it would be too hard to have this kind of geo-fencing feature.
I wouldn't be so quick to discount the technology's potential. While the commercial operation you cited is probably dubious at best, and while it may be true that the current state of the technology is as unreliable as you say for the purposes of credibility assessment, I still believe the future of fMRI research holds incredible potential.

Keep in mind that as far back as 2011, researchers succeeded in reconstructing images from the visual cortex[0].

Moreover, the intelligence community has far more resources and motivation to perfect such a technology. It's possible they may already have advanced well beyond what's currently known today. If not, then they certainly will in the future, provided the technology continues to hold its promise.

[0] http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/
This is a disturbing dataset, in that it seems straightforward to extract personal data from it. Consider the information revealed by a taxi ride between a personal address and a workplace, a sensitive location, or another personal address...

This kind of data was previously an issue with Uber, too.
Was excited to try this out, played around with it for about 10 minutes but gave up because there are too many bugs (all that I encountered have been reported as issues already). I'll try again once those issues are fixed.
If prison offered good job training (and we got people to be willing to employ felons), I think recidivism rates would take a significant dip. But oddly enough, such a solution would only further solidify the gender gap in tech as such scholarships would be going to far more men than women.
Lexus hoverboard in motion
Writing a kernel in C (kernel_main() example from OSDev)
IMSAI – The Computer That Starred in War Games
Free Hours to a Startup
I work with quite a lot of start-ups in my current main job as a lawyer. As a result, I often get asked for help from friends and sometimes volunteer it. Recently, I was asked if I would be willing to offer a few hours of help per week (the company is post seed, pre-A)....

I really like the idea and the people and am keen to learn more about their activities, but I also work long hours and would basically be saving them quite a bit in legal or other advisory fees....

I have some thoughts and am happy to share, but first I'm curious to see what people think? Pros and cons of giving this help? Should I be expecting/demanding options or other compensation? Any experiences of this kind of thing ending well/badly?
Inspiration is easy and that is what makes it great
Exploring Qualcomm's TrustZone Implementation
While I strongly support the decision, in a place like Idaho, these laws aren't about corporate greed, although they certainly benefit corporations. Agriculture in these states is politically untouchable. In Idaho, agriculture and food processing is directly responsible for 6% of jobs and 7% of GDP. Accounting for service jobs supporting that sector doubles or triples that number. And in the rural counties that carry a disproportionate share of the vote, that number doubles again.
Snapdocs (YC W14) Is Hiring a Rails Engineer
(Disclaimer: I'm the author of this blog)

In this post I describe an (initial) analysis of Qualcomm's TrustZone implementation, and a vulnerability that I've discovered which allowed complete arbitrary code execution within TrustZone (which I've responsibly disclosed to Qualcomm).

This is the first in a series of posts describing various kinds of vulnerabilities, so stick around if this interests you in any way!

In the following months, I'll be submitting detailed vulnerability write-ups and exploits for Android related vulnerabilities that I've discovered in the last year (but have been too busy to write about because of the academic year).

Please let me know if you have any questions/comments! I'll be more than happy to answer.
CHICKEN Scheme 4.10.0 released
Great work - looks like a really useful piece to help you quickly get going using the AWS stack and Lambda/JS. The biggest issue I've always found is the extra steps between writing your code and getting it onto a server.

The "no server" movement definitely seems to be gathering steam, with Firebase and Parse on the data side and Lambda (augmented with JAWS and others) on the computation side. Am excited to see what this area will bring, in particular due to the combination of scalable hosting and containerisation.

(Plug - we're working on StackHut (http://www.stackhut.com) in the "no server" space that provides a language-agnostic Lambda-like platform (currently JS/ES6 and Python with Ruby soon) that's powered by Docker and is accessible via JSON-RPC over HTTP. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and the "no server" space in general.)
I had refactored a fella's script the other day that made extensive use of the precondition tucked wayyyyy at the bottom in a else clause. It wasn't the cleanest explanation I provided him about why its better to tuck preconditions at the top so the failure and exit is immediately apprehended next to the conditional rather than way at the bottom. I also cited reason of unnecessary indentation but the connection you make here makes great sense and could have aided me in the explanation at the time. Good thinking.
If I may ask a potentially silly question, does this have any security implications for RC4-based random number generators (notably, FreeBSD arc4random[1] and libbsd arc4random[2]; OpenBSD and NetBSD seem to have replaced their arc4random with a ChaCha-based RNG around 2013)?

[1] https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/10.1.0/lib/libc/gen/...

[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libbsd/tree/src/arc4random.c
> When you combine the darker side of human nature and anthropomorphized robots

People have been defacing and destroying property since forever, regardless of what it looks like.

> when does it cross over from being classified as destruction of property to something like assault.

When it becomes sentient and capable of protesting whatever is happening to it?

Whoever did that to the robot would shit a brick if the robot started screaming.
This fits quite well in the large advice (expressed e.g. by Martin Fowler) that a function should not contain deeply nested if/then/else constructs, but a flat series of "if" statements each finishing with a "return" statement. And if this is impossible, break the function into smaller functions such that each of them is composed like that.

This advice is especially helpful when coding complex conditionals in business logic. (but small enough so you don't need/want a generic rules engine and rules DSL for that.)
The majority of chemtrail reports are doofuses seeing contrails, but the rumor mill may have started around a kernel of truth. I've thought about a couple possibilities:

(1) Cloud seeding, either experimental or operational.

(2) Experiments with the injection of aluminum nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere to increase the Earth's albedo as a potential geoengineering solution to climate change. There's some documentation for this if you Google it, and it might look pretty funky to a ground observer.

(3) Other experiments with spraying nanoparticles, such as for radar reflection or to attempt to simulate difficult radar conditions to test stealth-busting radars.

Folklore and wild rumor often starts around a seed crystal of truth. Note that many of the early chemtrails rumors came from the American Southwest, which is where the black project kids play with their toys.
I found that github's automatic identity resolution is actually helpful in some cases.
I migrated a bzr repo into github recently and was pleasantly surprised to see my contributors matched up to their github accounts. I understand that many people might not want this, but it is a feature that can be useful.
Ask HN: What are some good programming exercises?
I made a sudoku solver, and it was a great learning experience. Now I'm looking for other exercises. Please share if you have any, thanks!
Thank you for doing this work! And yes, I'm aware that SaaSS has its own separate issues. I've read the essay a few times now.
That's because there's a difference between a GitHub account (usually authenticated by a key) and a git commiter (only identified by the name and email). It would be pretty annoying if hundreds of commits popped up in his feed every time somebody forked Linux or git.
Good point! I clearly wasn't thinking like a computer scientist this morning.
Ha ha ha ha! HOW many times did the TSA deny this?

All that remains is to find out which body scan images they kept. I bet Sofia Vergara's is in the stored image, as well as every other shapely young woman who went through the Nude-a-tron. I bet a few men's images are stored as well, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.

This whole Let-Us-Obviously-Violate-Your-Human-Rights-Because-Terrorism thing is getting old. Fess up, TSA, FBI and NSA! The longer you deny doing creepy things, the worse it will be for you and your masters!
Good. There is absolutely no excuse for a company trying to silence the people that work for it.
It would have been destroyed in Boston anyways [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
Average income is $23k. If only half of households work, does that mean that the average income among working families is >$50k?

Not necessarily. If "average income" includes pensions and investments, a lot of the income might be in the hands of retirees.
When I was first learning, I mostly played against the computer. You can lose a lot faster that way, since the computer plays quickly, and it will brutally punish really newbie mistakes, so you can learn to avoid doing really stupid things before venturing against another human.