skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are interested in mobile JSON databases, we've been working on our network-enabled native databases for iOS, Android, C# and PhoneGap, since 2010. The library size is less than 500kb and we are compatible with the Apache CouchDB sync protocol. We also have a server side Sync Gateway that has fine grained access control, webhooks, etc.

Did I mention everything is open source? There is a mini-hack here that will let you choose your platform and be up and running in ~20 minutes with what's basically the stem cell you're gonna be winning hackathons with now that you know.

https://github.com/couchbaselabs/mini-hacks

Ps we couldn't have done it without SQLite as we started out using that for our storage engine. Now we are moving to ForestDB because it's more like the data structures we present in our API.
Facebook cofounder says tech industry is destroying personal lives
Maciej Ceglowski gave a really great talk about the inventor of the theremin:

http://idlewords.com/talks/our_comrade_the_electron.htm
Did you mean "reputable VC" or is it one of those many incubator + reputed VC's that are increasingly common out in the wilds?

How many engineers would you be VP'ing?

How is the rest of the equity distributed?

What does the company's growth look like?

What is everyone else going to be doing...i.e. is this business type founders looking to outsource building their vision?

Good luck.
In the cases where the information you're looking for doesn't need to be recent (in my case exercises for a particular sport) you can change the date range of your search to e.g. only include results from prior to 2005. Obviously this isn't an option for recent information, but I've found it useful on occasion to filter out blogspam.
Why Google V8 is not suited for integration into servers (2010)
Universal JavaScript by Michael Jackson
By the way, this is a pretty good intro to post-quantum crypto if you are more mathy.

http://pqcrypto.org/

The NSA announced they will be transitioning to quantum resistant algorithm in the "not to distant future".

https://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/suiteb_cryptography/index.sh...

So this is something that may be getting a lot more press in the...not to distant future.
I once worked for a startup that did this - pretty much fired a lot of the competent engineers, or they quit. A lot of engineers complained about the ungodly hours many had to put in for unrealistic deadlines that were pushed down by sales.

Supposedly the executives heard about the complaints that their best engineers were ready to walk out, and promised to change the way things were run - I got word recently that they were still continuing the same overpromising, which led to unsurprising unstable backend & frontend issues of various degrees. One product manager described it to me as setting everyone up for failure.

I'm increasingly convinced that it is the sign of bad leadership, and people with no business being in management or an executive position.
LabDoc.guru

It's one of http://www.donuts.domains new TLDs.

search for

guru registrar

to find someone handling it.
Could you not say the same thing about programmers and San Francisco?
> I suspect it was performance, cruft, and aesthetics that killed it more than price. After all, expensive things that get popular generally become cheaper (or have cheaper versions released).

I think performance was a huge problem (I did mention it in passing). But you have to remember that just getting your hands on Smalltalk was difficult back then. There were no free versions, and the commercial versions were expensive. At least with Unix, most university workstations in the 80s had a copy, unlike VMS. The result: a proliferation of free Unix-like OSes while the less accessible VMS slowly fades into obscurity.

> I'm pretty sure that Rubyists are no more ignorant of Smalltalk than Smalltalkers are of Simula.

I don't understand the analogy. Ruby is an unoriginal Smalltalk knock-off that compromises its purity, simplicity, and dynamicity. Rubyists should therefore express deep admiration for Smalltalk in the same way Smalltalkers do Lisp, but they don't. Simula was an ALGOL-60 derivative that had classes and co-routines; by comparison, Smalltalk was nothing short of revolutionary, yet I've never seen a Smalltalker attack it.
/volatile the flag is only supported by MSVC as far as I'm aware.

volatile the keyword was not written with the intent of being a memory barrier (edit: or atomicity for that matter) in mind.

In practice, I've created unit tests to catch and fix issues on mobile (specifically iOS - ARM arch, under both GCC and later Clang compilers IIRC) with our "lock free" circular buffer.

It was indeed lock free. And also just plain broken in multi-core scenarios.
One time pads sent via some secure service is about all I can come up with. This works provided you know who you are going to talk to and don't suddenly run out of "pad". Sounds like an awful business model. I'm sure some consultancy could sell it though.
Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth
Mundaneum
I thought it was great content.

Peter Thiel's explanation on whether China can copy and survive for long time was great explanation and a valid point for any developing economy.
CUDA has a nice toolchain, but the point of this is to remove all of the low-level stuff. For performance (even on NVIDIA cards) it doesn't really matter whether you use CUDA or OpenCL [1] + OpenCL runs everywhere as a bonus.

[1] http://pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/pubs/papers/icpp2011a.pdf
Evernote is down Noooo
> If a tree is an unshared value type (eg. there are no references), then a functional tree update is O(n). Using shared references, this is O(n²).

I meant O(n) vs O(log n) of course. Not sure what happened there.
Is IoT (Internet of Things) a sustainable business model?
My current, somewhat underinformed understanding:

(A) Handling key exchange (Diffie-Hellmman) is ugly. There are other algorithms, but I'm unclear what a good choice is right now. I'm also unclear if larger key sizes are actually helpful.
(B) For symmetric algorithms, AES, use AES-256. In the quantum case, it might be equivalent to ~127-128 bit AES, which is pretty decent.
(C) For hashing, use SHA-512. It uses 64-bit words, and might be similar in strength to SHA-256 today.
(D) A lot of hash algorithms can actually be used as signature schemes, especially if you combine them with Merkle tree like structures.
Older discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017078 (4 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036235 (50 comments)
Added bonus: OpenCL runs on multicore processors, so you don't even need a GPU (though performance is obviosuly lower).
I've always wondered if 'affirmative action,' but conditioned on household wealth instead of racial origin, could create more social or economic mobility. Has anyone else considered this strategy?
> high pressure oncall simply isn't a thing at the other tech companies. At least for me and ive worked at a few of them

I think you've been pretty lucky. I've never had a job in IT where there wasn't high pressure oncall.

But... I work in ops. I suppose that might be where the difference lies. I don't know anyone that works on the Ops site of IT that hasn't had to deal with on cal responsibilities.
App for avoiding San Francisco's steep hills
Check out http://tinkerpop.com. Apache TinkerPop 3.0.0 was released in June 2015 and it is a quantum leap forward. Not only is it now apart of the Apache Software Foundation, but the Gremlin3 query language has advanced significantly since Gremlin2. The language is much cleaner, provides declarative graph pattern matching constructs, and it supports both OLTP graph databases (e.g. Titan, Neo4j, OrientDB) and OLAP graph processors (e.g. Spark, Giraph). With most every graph vendor providing TinkerPop-connectivity, this should make it easier for developers as they don't have to learn a new query language for each graph system and developers are less prone to experience vendor lock-in as their code (like JDBC/SQL) can just move to another underlying graph system.
As a thought experiment, do you think if StackOverflow changed their license tomorrow (hypothetically because of the spam problem) but assured all its users that they will never mess with them, all users will leave simply because of the license?
I believe Mattermost is disabled by default and supports the option of running on a separate server, so that will hopefully be how RocketChat is integrated as well!
From my experience, AWS is one of the more egregious offenders when it comes to overworking workers.

The joke, when I was there, was that if you work in Kindle you don't have oncall, but you'll put in 80 hours a week anyway. If you work in AWS, you'll be able to do 9 to 5, but you'll be putting in 80 hours with oncall anyway.

From my experience as well, Amazon treats their interns as they treat their regular employees. You don't do oncall, but interns definitely get wrapped up in working way more than 40 hours, depending on the team. When I quit, my team had an intern that was pulling the same hours that I was. What you have to understand is these interns are straight out of college, where they do 80 hour weeks (and PAY for the experience!), and many are a bit 'starstruck' to be working for a brand-name tech company. They put up with shit that they shouldn't.

> He downvoters: I know HN teaches you that silencing people you disagree with is good, but try making a counter argument.

The above quotation is the reason I downvoted you. Stop worrying about karma, stop complaining about it, and just let conversations flow naturally. If other people think your post is neglected, they'll vote it back up or say so. Your post hasn't even been up for an hour, so relax.
Hah! Touche!
I would second Denver or really anywhere in Colorado.
My wife and I live in MN and we love it. The cold isn't so bad and there are plenty of opportunities. Look at Duluth in MN.
I don't think a union would solve this.

I'd sooner quit a shitty job than stay in it, and hope the union makes it better for me. Much faster turnaround when I take matters into my own hand.

If this were the sort of industry where I couldn't be working again with higher pay within the week, then maybe I'd consider sticking around for organized action..
> even with left justified text

Just to clarify: Do you mean just breaking on whole words, with no hyphenation looks better with Knuth/Plass than typical browser line breaking?
Somewhat related... the THORAMIN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkMFw7tqzvA
Transparency for thee but not for me...
Post-quantum crypto already exists afaik, the only issue is performance and key sizes (I guess this supposes the of quantum difficulty of certain problems).
It's more or less the same situation you see in health-care providers doing a night shift immediately after the day shift. Not ideal, but they do get more free time to compensate afterwards.

European trucking laws are quite sane. From http://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/users/professional... :

"Driving time should not exceed 9 hours a day or 56 hours a week. After 4½ hours, drivers must take a break of at least 45 minutes."
It doesn't take much to motivate someone to do it. A paycheck is enough 99.99% of the time.
IoT isn't a business model, it's a set of emerging technologies that's altering how companies design & build electronics hardware. This will likely open up some new business models (with startups to go along with them), but many of the big winners are likely to be existing companies that adopt IoT technologies for their products.
Actually, there kind of is. The drought has given restaurants intellectual "covering fire" for not bringing out passive-aggressively small cups for drinking water.

I know, "minor inconvenience" and all, but it's pretty ridiculous that it's come to that, as if that somehow is at all noticeable for urban water consumption.
I've worked at Amazon and you are absolutely right. The implied "get it done" pressure, basically just socially awkward managers who have no self-value themselves, pushing the new people to work ridiculous hours. Not mentioning hours though, but basically getting unexperienced youth to waste away their lives at their jobs. It's sad.. it's definitely a mental and manipulative tactic. It's really cancerous because these exact kind of mentally defective people who spurry to get things done, usually last-licks from Microsoft, become managers. Then they apply that silly pressure to everyone under them, and elegance fades away. Literally horrible code, with little polymorphism, less elegant frameworks, etc. Just a side affect of "get it done." Anyhow, Amazon isn't rosy. It's a dumping ground, and yeah, the FLP process where people get culled is just a side affect of the value of work-life balance, human empathy there. I would never work at Amazon again.
Someone's never used Kontact.
Standardized Tests Blamed, Asian Students Ignored in Google K-12 CS Study
Before StackOverflow existed sites like ExpertExchange. They are irrelevant now despite the fact that they had tons of content whereas StackOverflow started with 0. People ask questions and answer on StackOverflow not because that's where the most content is, but because that's where most people are. I think license is just a manifestation of the company's philosophy, and personally I don't think I would care much even if StackOverflow changed their license tomorrow BUT kept their philosophy and policy in tact. (Which they should, since they know better than to alienate their users and they've seen what happened to all the sites that alienated their users)
"getting value for our tax dollars" ... that's NOT any eu country.
This is an old article from last year, about an offhand comment the mayor of Munich made last year.

They are not considering a switch. at all. Flagged accordingly.
right - nobody could EVER build a civilization using English...
yes, it's excellent
"Has a rapidly adaptive culture, able to implement changes at a fast pace despite its immense scale."

"A leader in freedom of speech, press freedom [...]"

"Where you have more opportunities than in any other nation"

Are these your idea of a self-evident statement?
So to be clear you feel your one anecdote as an intern invalidates the numerous accounts of career Amazon employees?

And it's the articles that are ridiculous?
I've done the same, heated in the moment. Basically our two most senior devs quit, so a large burden shifted onto me, and I was suddenly the most tenured dev on our team, with knowledge of systems no one else had and could not even easily get since the others (and others before) had quit. But curiously they promoted the new guy instead of me. Ok fine... I told my boss, an arrogant VP at the company, that I should be paid x amount for my increased role and importance to the product. He got back to me 2 weeks later (took his time with this), and said sorry. Quit on the spot. They had to completely overhaul their roadmap and soon after that team folded, got absorbed into another, the VP got fired, and I got a sweet new gig. The execs were too thick headed and full of themselves to see that my quitting would cost them exponentially more money than a relatively modest salary increase based on my increased role. Not a single regret.
Capability matters, and so long as you aren't exploring avenues that could expand your capabilities, you have something more to do.
Oh man! My kids got sucked into Neopets and soon I had joined them. Back in the late 90's, it was a lot of fun actually. The economy was reasonable, and the kids learned a lot of very basic economic ideas. Neopets was pretty good, "do Internet with the kids" time. We would figure the site out, make plans, do stuff, make friends. Honestly, for a family experience, it was damn tough to beat Neopets! And the marketing worked. We bought a fair number of these damn pets, which the cats would shred, and we would buy more, etc... pure gold for somebody, somewhere.

Then something happened.

We were running shops. Everybody did. You put stuff in your shop and you try and sell it for more than you paid for it. A common item was lottery tickets. Get one, don't scratch it off, and sell it.

People really liked scratching these to win, and distribution was limited enough that they were always in demand. For a good price somewhere between ticket cost and the potential pay off, they sold quick!

The competition for neopoints reached a peak, and we were all going for it. So then I did something I still feel bad about...

Turns out, there was some latency in pricing updates in the shops. Mostly didn't matter, but on a high demand item that would sell quickly, it did matter. It could matter a lot.

I put a lottery ticket in the shop for 1800 neopoints, say. It gets purchased in seconds. Cool. Paid 600.

I do another one, decide to change my mind, and I changed the price. It also sold, and in fact was sold before I could get the page refresh to even confirm the edit, but it sold for the edited price, and the buyer never would know, until after the transaction completed.

The question became, "just how many neopoints are people walking around with?"

There were banks, with interest, etc... People who used them could get a nice income stream going, but I noticed not too many people used them, so...

I list a lottery ticket for the low price of 888! Going rate was about double that, and the cost of the ticket was 600. Sure sale. Won't last 10 seconds.

Right after listing it, I edit the price to 8888.

SOLD!

Did it again: 88888.

SOLD! What? No worries!

I had visions of completely, totally dominating my kids on this neopoints thing. It would only take one more successful transaction...

Listed the ticket for 1020, or something like that. I worried about the 888 thing and word getting around.

The edit? 1020000. Surely there was no way.

And there wasn't. It didn't sell. So I toggled it back and forth. 1020, 1020000, etc...

SOLD!

Just like that, I was RICH!!

Then I got an ominous message: "If you don't give me my points back, I'm gonna tell." Then a few more, most along the lines of it took me X to get all those points, cheater, you suck, etc...

I felt completely terrible.

Of course, I returned the points and then some. Didn't tell the kids, and stepped away, the guilty adult working the kiddies over big.

Neopets was awesome. Then it wasn't.
This story has got to be really hurting Amazon by now. (I don't mean this specific piece, but the exposure of Amazon's terrible cult-like culture and workplace environment as a whole.)

Most engineerish people I know, myself included, had already heard through the grapevine that working at Amazon sucks (friends, friends of friends, posts on forums like this).

But now everybody knows it sucks -- Amazon is a shitty place to work, and any decent software engineer has many better options is now as close to an objective fact as it gets.

This must be hurting their recruiting already, and you have to think it will hurt them for years to come. (And if that is true, then it may eventually change the judgement of whether this style of management "worked".)
Latest Technology News
FYI this page looks really bad on firefox with a narrow window. It gets jumbled around and the dark blue background on the left takes over the whole page.
> Reality is, he's a master manipulator, a poor business man, and terrible at technology and leadership.

Your argument really breaks down here. Reality contradicts these assertions.
One time pads offer zero integrity/authentication. They are "malleable".
Libraries to access Pin (pin.net.au), Stripe (not yet complete), Twilio (almost complete). My own bindings to SQLite. Libraries to write Latex files. Currently writing web server proxies for accessing Australian government mandated web services. None are yet released, but I am aiming to make a commercial service out of them so they may never be open sourced.
How Edison uses water to store excess power
I would be interested in this as well. Especially with video lectures. Did you manage to find anything? I haven't managed to except for some one-off intros.
Had a friend who lived in Anchorage, and while he enjoyed the living there, he said outside of tech support/help desk type positions, developer positions were difficult to come by. Most was outsourced or handled by internal groups within the lower 48. Not sure how Anchorage compares to Seward though. One thing you should be prepared for is the salary difference. You may be able to find something in government or education though. Just curious why Alaska? You may also want to go visit for a few weeks to get a feel for the land/job market prior to making the move. My friend did say it was a drastic move and did require substantial time to get used to. Things that can be easy in the lower 48 (shopping, mail, gas, banking...) can be challenging at times.
It's not enough to have an algorithm. You need to get down to "what do these bytes mean" and "what exactly do I do with them" and have that be implemented. It's a considerably more painful process than you might think if you haven't been exposed to IETF things.
Not necessarily. Just that people who use less common tools tend to be more vocal about them. E.g. the most popular text editor is notepad++, but most text editor arguments are between vim and emacs. The kinds of people who use vim and emacs are just more passionate about text editors, and so more likely to speak up about them.
I don't think energy is the driving factor.

There are a lot more technical challenges associated with self-driving cars than self-driving drones. Self-driving cars aren't even fully solved at this point. However, even very cheap hobby drones can accurately fly to specific GPS coordinates. Even most plane flights are auto-piloted and even auto-land, so I believe that drones are a lot closer in terms of implementation than self-driving cars.

If there is a business case that determines that drones, while being potentially more energy-intensive, can save a company money due to speed, I believe it will win. For example, imagine Amazon could redistribute inventory between two warehouses with a click of a button and overnight, that sounds like a definite competitive advantage to me.
Remote Work and Loneliness
Without backing up his claims, it isn't a very useful comment. Insisting that this person's being tricked into a cult, without any details - that's the kind of stuff we don't need on HN.

In another comment, he says he had worked for Amazon. Adding such a line and explaining why the intern was being tricked into a cult would be useful and wouldn't have been downvoted.

Also, complaining about downvotes is silly. I downvote and flag a fair amount. No one is owed an explanation. I know that we might _want_ one (I feel like that when I get -x points on a comment), but it only increases noise.

Comparing HN to Scientology is stupid. I sorta feel that HN maintains whatever quality it has by being ruthless on downvoting. From personal experience, I should definitely be downvoted more, as it makes me rethink commetns and not write as much shit. Not that I have much to say, but I have found that being downvoted makes me more cautious, and I'll edit or delete or simply not post on HN, whereas on other sites, I don't care. It's better for borderline comments to get shot down and have false positives than allowing more junk on the site.
My Generation Is Just Awful, and Colleges Are Making It Worse
Amazon needs to unionize, it's obvious that Bezos and his management don't respect his workers. This sort of company deserves a union. And I think both white collar and blue collar workers there would support such a union.
Did you catch that she was trying in vain to get a spot out of linens in a recent episode?
Fax machine
Why the workplace of 2016 could echo Orwell’s 1984
It's on our list. My wife and I both enjoyed reading "Bringing Up Bebe". Any personal experiences on relocating and living there would be appreciated.