skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't employers impose pretty much any (legal) new requirements for at-will employees?

At-will means that your employer can terminate your employment at any time, with or without cause (and you can leave your employment at any time). So if you don't like a change in your employment terms, you are free to go, or your employer is free to fire you.
Except nobody is saying that. Every computer scientist acknowledges that we have not proven P!=NP.

I would be delighted to see either P!=NP or P=NP proven. I have devoted 0% of my career to this question, so it does not stand to embarass me. I suppose this is the case for the vast majority of people who suspect P!=NP (myself included). There are only a few people that stand to really be embarassed by a proof. And among those, probably even fewer actually care enough to be embarassed.
I find the idea of a minimal UI with intelligent agents working behind the curtain very intriguing. I also like the idea pf SMS as a channel input device for using such apps.

The line of thinking seems to be: Africa and Asia leapfrogged the desktop / laptop generation of computing and directly went for mobile. The younger generation in the Western world essentially is mobile-first. Apart from work (and even that might change for many job descriptions in the future) even most people in traditionally first-world countries don't even use desktop computers anymore. Hence, what we see in Africa and Asia right now essentially also is the future for Western countries.

In general, I think this is spot on. However, I also think many people get overly excited by the promises and possibilities of messaging apps. SMS-based apps in particular often are makeshift solutions for when there's no reliable Internet connectivity all the time but somewhat reliable cellular coverage.

The bus information example is a particularly good example of this. Sure, it's useful but many of the improvements mentioned in the article like linking to a specific resource for a specific bus line for easier future use can already be implemented today in websites. There's no reason why I couldn't use a mobile browser instead of a message app for accessing this kind of information. The problem is that most websites - public transport websites being a particularly notorious example - often are terrible from a UX point of view: User interfaces are needlessly complex and often barely usable at all.

Perhaps, the takeaway from this article also is that when designing websites and web-based UX we can learn a lot from the simpler interactions on mobile devices. Good design is all about embracing constraints. Perhaps applying those constraints from mobile messaging to designing websites is a good idea, too.
Counter-argument: in the early 1990s, the company at which I was working had a key technical employee leave. The next week, the company asked all the other technical employees to sign non-compete agreements. We all refused. Nothing more was said.

You always have the right to quit and work for a competitor up until you sign that right away, and the worst that they can do to you for not signing is fire you.

That was not Hawaii, though.

(I didn't realize quite how crazy some of the owners/managers of that company were until years later.)
Very cool, no Theo Jansen linkage in it however.
Wake-up call from the Hayward Fault
What's the reduction from 3-SAT to "guessing correctly"?
Jeff Bezos says he won't tolerate a 'callous' Amazon workplace
So far bombs include situations where people use ReplyAll as a replacement for live chat around an event or simply include too many people.

Our best conversations usually take place over an extended period of time and between a small group of people 2-4
... under Hawaii law. California law makes noncompetes generally unenforceable regardless of consideration, and other states have other variations.

And it's not even a binding precedent under Hawaiian law; it's a federal judge's interpretation of Hawaiian law necessary to resolve some federal matter, but Hawaiian courts could differ in their interpretation.
Is the cost primarily proportional to the size, or do inverters present a major fixed cost?

For the former it doesn't really matter how much you can cover, as it's simply an investment with a certain rate of return that has the amount you can invest limited by roof area.
That the link is for Amazon is hilariously ironic.
I understand he wasn't arrested. Is it still resisting arrest if you're not actually under arrest? I suspect that even in the US it's not yet technically a crime to choose to be about your lawful business rather than do whatever a police officer tells you when you're not under arrest.

There are an endless number of unbalanced and sociopathic people in the U.S. who believe they're entitled to argue with the police

There are also an endless number of balanced individuals who are entitled to argue. Everyone is entitled to argue. The police aren't magic. The police aren't gods. The police are (but should not be) above the law.

And the solution to this so-called police "brutality" is to simply be respectful, stop talking, and follow directions.

And the solution to being raped is to stay at home and never go outside? The solution to getting shot is to hide under your bed twenty four hours a day? Or is crime only acceptable from police officers?
The dismissive attitude towards proofs and apparent disregard for the important distinctions between "proofs" and "arguments" is kind of upsetting. It's an interesting paper, but it's hard for me to get past this attitude, it just seems like someone is being intentionally obtuse to sound clever :/
Just-in-Time Summoning of Unikernels (v0.2)
I'm curious too. Of course, anyone here can quote the usual benefits of open source (no licenses, familiarity with the technical crowd in general, the "many-eyes"), but I'm curious how valid these benefits are in the mainframe space.
It'll probably take 10-20 years to have fully autonomous cars but with deaths increasing, the case can be made to provide more assistance from the computer driver.
>Can't employers impose pretty much any (legal) new requirements for at-will employees?

Either side can 'impose' any requirements they want on the other party. The other side can refuse to accept the new impositions.

The imposing party had better be ready to fulfill all their outstanding obligations immediately upon termination and/or rejection of new terms though.
Very interesting, thank you for your comment. I'd like to know more about hunger disregulation: does it cause initial weight gain, or is it the result of carrying extra adipose tissue, and does it reverse under any conditions.

Also I agree with your point about consistent cleanliness. I find it very easy to avoid eating something if it's a habit. I find it very hard to "limit" a food except by hunger. And hunger doesn't work well with junk, even when hunger is functioning normally.
My Internship Experiences at Pixar, Google, and Two Sigma
It depends on how you measure whether or not it works. In the short term, it is absolutely successful in causing weight loss. I've done it, I know others who have done it, there are people who make their livelihood helping others do it.

On the other hand, the problem with calorie counting is that most people only do it for a very short time, because it sucks. It's totally unsustainable for most people because they don't have the time or aren't willing to change their lifestyle to include hours per day spent focusing on nutrition. So they lose some weight over the course of several months, then let their nutrition lapse and gain it all back in a few weeks. So in the long term you're right, across a population calorie counting doesn't work. But only because across a population people are lazy.
Pencils down: More U.S. colleges drop standardized tests
The Dell Workstation from 2008 [1] could run and probably will get loaded, eventually, with Windows 10. Currently, it's got XP Professional x64, Windows 8.1, Ubuntu Studio 15.04, and CentOS 6 and FreeDOS available at GRUB time...boots to Ubuntu by default. There's a Windows 7 VM, too just for grins. The Thinkpad GRUBs into Ubuntu 15.04 with Windows 7 as an option. It will also almost certainly get a Windows 10 upgrade over the next year, too.

[1]: To clarify, that's when I bought it. The model with Harpertown CPU's, etc. was available in Q4 2007.
Keywordini – Free Keyword tool that doesn't use Autocomplete API
Database passwords (lots)
Hardware is only a tiny, tiny part of the cost of developing a system for general use by huge numbers of people. If you don't believe me, do a price check on cloud hosting and then keep in mind that cloud hosting must be profitable so the prices you're seeing have some non-trivial margin attached.

Software development isn't free. Sure, OSS developers can donate their time, but there's a selection process that comes into play.

OSS developers do what they do partly because they enjoy it, and so they tend to gravitate to the types of development that is fun. Fun stuff includes deep systems stuff, algorithms, distributed systems, the flashier aspects of UI/UX, machine learning, etc.

Fixing stupid bugs that stem from stupid compatibility issues and adding stupid features for stupid use cases is not fun. Debugging edge cases that afflict 1% of your users occasionally is not fun. Porting to popular but crap platforms is not fun. Supporting legacy platforms and APIs is not fun, nor is maintaining backward compatibility. Accessibility features and translations are not fun. Supporting right-to-left language is not fun. Rewriting your entire already-working app to support the next web fad (e.g. "responsive mobile design") is not fun.

I could go on forever. There is a really really really long tail of these horrors.

This is why OSS rules in the systems/algorithms/etc. space but drools when you get close to the user. This is why every major end user OS, site, or platform is commercial. People have to be paid to torture themselves with that stuff.

Yet these sorts of problems are precisely the ones that make the difference between something only geeks (with time on their hands) would want to use and something regular people who aren't computer experts would want to use (or computer experts without time on their hands).

For a distributed, decentralized system to challenge the silos of the web, it would absolutely need funding. Eliminating hardware and bandwidth costs is easy; eliminating HR costs is not.

There will never be a volunteer-developed mainstream platform for the same reason there are no volunteer-developed mainstream anything elses. To make a truly polished product of any kind requires pain.

Disclosure: I currently run a distributed networking / SDN startup. The core technology has been up and running for years with few modifications. It started as a side project so I haven't kept careful account, but I'd easily estimate that upwards of 90% of the development time spent on this project has been on trying to get it to the point that it can install and run trouble-free on multiple platforms and is easy enough for mere mortals to use. Getting the core plumbing, crypto, etc. working was the most fun and the most intellectually challenging, but it was a huge minority of time spent. Had there been no chance of a commercial application I would have stopped there and it'd be yet another piece of interesting GitHub networking orphanware, because for the love of God who would voluntarily try to port such a thing to Windows?!? let alone Android (It's in C, so enjoy your JNI pain).
Most folks know that Amazon warehouses are abusive.
Why did it take Mr. Bezos so long to figure this out?

He deserves the benefit of the doubt, but its hard to believe he didn't already know.
I hope sometime you come back to the light. Stay strong.
At a glance, it reminds me of what MS Access was (is?)... or could have been if MS hadn't ignored it to death.

So many people (myself included) were/are incredibly empowered by that program, and I still have a fond place in my heart for Access, as it was my bridge from Excel macros to "real programming".

Hopefully Eve doesn't get DabbleDB'd... the world really needs a modern MS Access!
HTML is awesome, but people are still writing with tools from the print era. When are we going to start using the Web for the content we still generate with Office?

ProseMirror can help fix this - by separating content from the HTML you're editing, you'll be able to edit things that live on the Web, without having to understand the complexities of the HTML etc. used for rendering in browsers.

"Why the Web needs better HTML editing components" - http://blog.pubblz.com
Yeah, something similar was mentioned in the article. If this wasn't legal, they could just fire you, then offer to hire you under the new terms the next day.
Local conditions may vary, of course, but if just go with the completely unimaginative system, and you live in California in PG&E territory, there is no effective market.
very cool, makes total sense.
Great article with the shark himself, Mr. Cuban
I'm rather surprised that doesn't exist already, actually.
That will most likely destroy the paintings is the new room (if it exists). Digging in from below might work, you want to finance it?
I think it is rooted in a common fallacy -- inability to intuitively understand exponential behaviour. In can be something common such as compounding interest on a loan or something like this related to computational problems.
What makes a convo unsuccessful on the platform? What makes a successful convo on the platform? Any strategies?
You are supporting cmontellas point, not negating it.

His point is that the inherent complexity of the problem is fairly trivial, and he stated it concisely.
And you are correctly pointing out that to realize the solution to the problem requires a great amount of work and expertise. Meaning, the actual programming has a great deal of additional (accidental) complexity.
Are you kidding me? Did you watch the video? This man was not a threat.
Can you explain a bit about why a conversation on Replyall is different or in your opinion better than an interview or guest blog post?
Who are you and how have you stolen my[1] early career history?!

Hahaha... well, it's a long story, regarding the early part of my career. Especially the whole bit about exactly how I got involved with AS/400's in the first place.

Let me guess you started in the early 90's, right?

Almost. I graduated H.S. in '91, started programming in '92 or so, but didn't start my first IT job until 1997.
It smells of the anti-hybrid astroturfing from a decade or so ago where numerous Ford and GM employees would be glad to tell you on social media that if you get into a car accident in a hybrid, emergency services will leave you to bleed out and die because its a hybrid so you should have bought a SUV or truck like a RealAmerican(tm).

My father in law did the volunteer fire dept thing in his rural area and its very depressing how quickly a typical house becomes unsaveable in a fire. So it is true that most houses with solar panels, in a fire, will end up a total loss, but that's true of most houses ... period, nothing to do with solar panels.

My advice from the frozen north is solar panels are extremely light weight compared to slush/snow covered shingle roofs, which don't seem to slow down firemen very much. The total mass of a couple inches of rain soaked slush snow is unbelievable, many thousands of distributed pounds on a typical roof.
If detecting the suboptimal answer takes better than exponential time, and blowing takes linear time, the total time is still better then exponential and doesn't disprove the argument. It depends how many times you have to repeat this to guarantee a optimal solution.

But I agree that the argument is badly flawed(1). The soap bubble STP machine and and similar machines are probabilistic solvers. They are doing stochastic gradient descent from initial conditions, with the usual lack of global optimal convergence guarantee.

(1) It may be satire. Does anyone know if this is so?
Modelling human mobility patterns using photographic data shared online
Tech Refresh 2016: Windows 10 and the Windows/Intel Problem
Windows 10 – Scariest Software Upgrade Ever
As a musician and drummer for many years... I am putting myself in the "natural rhythm" camp - I never struggled with keeping time, it came easily and I didn't have to work too hard. Now, actually learning to play a drum set, actually getting the limb separation down, took years and years of practice before I could feel really comfortable.

As far as the rest of the rhythm section -- it's the same for any member of the band. You either have it, or you don't. I played with several bass players who didn't have it, and I felt like as the drummer I was working twice as hard as playing with a bass player that did "have it". I knew a bass player who practiced for hours with a metronome, and he could never play an upbeat in the right place. That's something that comes at an intuitive level.
Realtime vehicle data streaming with Automatic API
This is a neat idea. Do you guys have any numbers that show that your interface is more engaging than say a blog post with quotes from a conversation? (I know it makes it easier for the publisher but do readers enjoy reading this format? I sure as hell do!). Great job!
Thanks, have been looking forward to testing this as I am essentially your target demographic.
I happen to share a private office with him so I'm more aware of his beliefs than others. And yes I have specific reasons, but I'm not going to state them publicly. He has confided in me some personal family matters which demonstrate to me his intolerance.
Is a new signature required from the worker, in order to make the newly added non-compete binding, or not? This part seems confusing from that summary.

If the workers signed a new non-compete and then continued to work for the company, this ruling seems pretty obvious.

If this is something like adding in a non-compete to an existing employment agreement without needing to obtain a new signature (as the completely insane UK laws allow,) then this is very bad.
consider a world in which P equals NP.

What does this mean? All internet crypto could break, almost immediately if a valid a solution were found. What does this do to society?

A philosophical class on skeptisim, or a class on software security - they both lead to the same conclusion, that the outside world is a potentially terrifying place. Identities can give rise to trust in something out side of you - but it's impossible to form identities without a "one way" computational mechanism like P != NP. Our ability to say "You know me by my words; you can recognize my language, but cant speak it yourself" - that doesn't work any more if P = NP. The ability to say "yes, that's MarkPNeyer saying that" is the same as the ability to speak with my voice.

Now consider a world in which P does not equal NP.

- it suggests that a single expert is not as powerful as large groups; a single person acting alone is like a single turing machine. A quantum computer is sort of like society - everyone tries their own way, and if someone finds a solution that works, it is made obvious to everyone else through their success.

- it provides a meaningful basis for identity. Someone can publish cryptogrpahically signed statements attesting to a believe, and we can trust that it's the same person (or group of people) operating behind that identity, becuase of the meanignful difference between verifying a truth (this is the same person who posted these keys) and finding a solution (find the private key which leads to posting these two things.)

Now, of course the "world I want to live in" does't directly suggest anything one way or the other - I'm just hoping you can stop seeing "P != NP" as being defeatist - if anything, it's a wonderful result, from a philosophical perspective, because it implies a world rich, full of diversity, with meaningful notions of identity.

If P = NP, the polynomial time hierarchy collapses - and there's a good chance society does as well.
I use it for lunch most days of the week. I know exactly how many calories I'm getting (useful if dieting) and it's convenient; I get back the 30 minutes I would have spent going to a restaurant / food truck.
The Biggest Blindspot of a Startup CEO Is Ignoring Their Brand
The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.
I'd love more stories like this. It's weird to think about some of the big gaps in knowledge I take for granted. There's plenty we learned through school about the world around us, but a surprisingly small amount of that came with "and this is how we know."

Which is really really important in sorting out information from misinformation now that I think about it.
Scott Aaronson has some good posts on the matter:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=122
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1720

(The second of these talks a lot about the matter of the boundary that you mention.)
I meant more along the lines of the office in general tolerating your beliefs, but if you share an office with him, that might be more of a concern.

And fair enough; your situation is your own, and you know it better than the rest of us.
does this work with react 0.14?
How to Conduct User Research and Build Features
Bad name choice. There are already too many better known things called "Eve".
Do you have the capability to widen the conversation to include more than two people? Have it take on a feel of a conversation rather than an interview? What about live interactions?
see my response here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10074890

a world where P = NP is a much darker world.
Hard to believe that MF is fifteen years old. I remember waiting in line for hours in the sweltering heat when it first opened and many, many visits since.
I worked support for a major shipping company and was told I could not use the restroom without answering the phone while I was in there. I refused and nothing really ever happened.
As a plastician fan, I'm not surprised if this ends up happening to even more producers of in his scope of genre. Theirs is a completely different culture than the DMCA/Mainstream Commercial American Pop Music - their community is very tightly-knit, and they freely pass around unreleased tracks, samples, and song stems for each other to remix. They will often hold onto a track for years before putting it on an independent label release. More underground UK artists will sadly stray away from the app altogether.
Why do you think other languages will optimize as well as Rust? Specifically, how do you propose to get the same level of memory alias analysis with unrestricted aliasing and mutation? How do you propose to deal with escape analysis for higher-order functions without a region/lifetime system?
Scaling Caring through Networks
A good rule of thumb is that 25% of Android devices will have the OS within 1 year of release and 50% within 2 years of release.

Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(
That license plate is just awesome.
@chinchang: If you replace the eval() with math.eval from http://mathjs.org/ here

result = eval(match[1]);

You'll get access to many more functions, including unit conversions.
How to Write Emails Like a CEO
Thanks! It's a testament to how rarely things go wrong that seeing such a good comment ranked so low was so surprising to me.
The True Story of Daily Stormer’s Death and Resurrection
> For society: I wonder if it is safe for so much power to be concentrated in one organization.

In general, it's probably not. But in this particular case it's been working very well for us so far.