skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And I'm sorry but I do think advertising is manipulative through and through. That's pretty much the whole point.

So is all communication. That friend you tells you about his morning, or some current event? He's expecting to elicit a particular type of response. We don't generally care too much, because we attribute good, or at least harmless intentions to their communication. We manipulate the emotions of those around us as a secondary communication channel.

Advertising is communication as well. The difference is that we often adopt an adversarial stance when dealing with it, because while most advertising is about the company selling you something and mostly harmless (if annoying) it's still informative of the product, but some advertising is outright misleading and can confuse the issue. Advertising isn't bad because it tries to manipulate you, but it can be bad when that manipulation is to get you to do something that isn't in your best interests (otherwise it ranges from helpful, through useless, and to annoying).

Advertising can be useful and helpful. It helps people determine what is available in the market and make a decision on what to buy or what to research. The name of a store on it's exterior, and the name of a site at the top are both advertising, and useful. You may have decided that you think this trade in information is not worth your time, and that's fine, but I reject any argument so simplistic as to say advertising is bad and possibly immoral because it's manipulative. It's too simplistic to have a meaningful relation to reality in this case, and thus has no place in this discussion, IMO.
To be fair, I've mostly worked for very large companies.

In large corporations, an exception to a blanket IP contract would require approval by fairly high ranking people in both HR and Legal. When you have >10,000 employees, individual exceptions simply don't happen for anyone under any circumstances.

My experience is only reflective of very large companies. I doubt it's representative of smaller employers.
Nice! Love that entire protocol is S-expression based. Even js library just generates S-expressions.
Yeah I've been using arch for my "root" and guix for my users and it's a wonderland of excellence.

If you're interested in nix / guix, installing them and using them without the whole OS is a great way to get started.
All package managers allow user-specific installs.
You're right, but all of those people can't be good developers. Good developers are still hard to find. You can have a line of people out the door coming in for an interview, but not a single one of them worth a shit behind a keyboard. If you are provably a good developer with a solid track record, your leverage for getting contracts modified to your liking is substantially higher.
EFF's New 'Offline' Project – A Campaign Devoted to Imprisoned Digital Heroes
Electronic contracts won't sustain much evidentiary support of...anything.

Maybe they filmed you while you read/interacted with the contract and required you to score high on a quiz about the contents of the contract?
The Snowden Treaty
Chromium continuous build infrastructure engineer here.

As he says, this is slightly out of date: we forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013, and actually merged Blink into Chromium proper just this week! It is no longer managed by gclient/DEPS, but instead developed alongside Chromium in the same repository. But many other things (pdfium, v8, webrtc, and tons of smaller libraries) are still pulled in via DEPS in exactly the way described.

I'd just like to say this about our development, testing, and release process: it really really works. We keep moving fast, everyone knows what's going on throughout the codebase because everyone is working on master, and there are never any big ugly merge conflicts to resolve when new features land.

There are, of course, problems with the system. We don't have enough resources to run every test for every commit, so they end up batched and we have to rely on humans and heuristics to determine which CL in the batch to revert. The set of configurations on the try-bots doesn't exactly match up with the set of configurations that are run against tip-of-tree. And flaky tests are, of course, a perennial problem for everyone. But we're working on making all of these better, and huge progress has been made in the last couple years.

Ask me anything if you have any questions about our build and test infrastructure!
I've been doing programming for a while now (mostly in Ruby of late, but prior to that, lots of stuff) and the more I play with Elixir, the more I want to work in it. I'm actually going to ElixirConf (which is next weekend in Austin).

They seem to have done a lot of things right, and addressed pretty much every single criticism I had of Ruby.

> I'm very seriously considering Elixir/Phoenix for my next startup

It will be a risk, but I say go for it. Others (who have probably NOT had any Elixir experience!!) will tell you your startup is already enough risk, but here's the thing- Elixir could end up being the key differentiator technology for you. Who else provides NO DOWNTIME code upgrades, and that incredible request responsiveness as well as reliability? Immutable data? Extreme concurrency? The "Actor model" that everyone is enamored with these days? The awesome community? Nobody, I think.
I'm on a cafe's wifi all day long. The channel cannot be trusted.
I think keynote will be later avaialble somewhere on oculus related channels.
This is an incredible display of technology and a beautifully crafted presentation. The interactive bits aren't just for show; they reinforce what the author is trying to convey. It's easy to do this incorrectly. For example, see most video games where the gameplay exists merely to be fun rather than existing as a storytelling tool. For an example of games done right see The Stanley Parable. There the gameplay is used to convey the story directly; it's a mechanic of the message the author is trying to convey, rather than something to keep the player busy while they trudge through the story.

I would, however, complain about the usage of the mythological Hebbian learning. We know very little about the mammalian brain. In particular, we really have no clue how neurons function nor how they learn. There are also a wide range of neurons, each with different behaviours. The concept of Hebbian learning is really more of a higher level behaviour of mammalian brains. At a conceptual level, yes we associate ideas that occur together, so Hebbian learning is a useful theory in terms of psychology. Psychology is primarily what this presentation is about. But the author presents things in terms of neurons, where Hebbian learning likely isn't the learning function, and even if it was we have no definitive model and research to back that up.

Honestly, that's a nitpick. The meat of the video is about psychology, not neurons, and the oversimplification is helpful in creating those interactions that help communicate the author's message to the viewer. They work really well in that regard. I'm just personally bothered by the reinforcement of the myth that we understand how neurons work, and that some simple model like Hebbian learning bares any resemblance to the real mechanics.
Why would I call a 'new' language 'Lisp' when it can't run a single line of Lisp code from the past 50 years?

Give it a different name. Not every random language which happens to use parentheses in some way needs to be called Lisp.
You're probably capable of something more interesting than a "middlebrow dismissal..."
Mutability and OO, I'd guess. :P
+1, is live streaming really that difficult to do with HTML5?
Agreed, but if you REALLY wanted to be sure, you could always put a large sheet of aluminum just above the bottom layer.
As you scale and add engineers, you should be adding operations people and documenting your system anyway. You'll be able to better determine exactly how much time is development time, and have the benefit of not needing your most valuable people doing firefighting work.
As a special case, sure.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/339/how-can-i-install-a-packa...

http://askubuntu.com/questions/28619/how-do-i-install-an-app...

But if you're going to extract deb files, why not just extract tarballs? Or better yet, just curl|bash? :)
Microservice Discovery with SkyDNS
Are you being paid well enough by this bigcorp that it's worth losing the ability to comment on HN without violating the letter of your agreement (since comments are copyrighted by their authors by default)?
> Imagine being implicated for a crime because Google thought you said something, but you said something differently.

That seems really unlikely to ever happen.
Note that by default Google stores the audio of your searches - including the few seconds before you said "ok google" - indefinitely: https://history.google.com/history/audio
A more adequate analogy would be: You're a miner who carries your mined gold using your truck. It's efficient and cheap. Just what you need to carry stuff. But some new kids on the block think they should carry them using Ferrari, just because. "It's so cool! This way I'll attract all the miners to work under me because they probably want to ride a Ferrari than a truck to carry gold! Sure trucks can carry more, but my Ferrari can reach 315KM/h!"
Does this mean that voice recognition is a solved problem?

If not, what problems are still left to be solved?
This kind of thing is what unions are for.
Obama hosts China's Xi on state visit amid simmering tensions
What's so real about fiat currency? There's nothing fake about Bitcoin.
It's disappointing that people want to make a consistent amount of money? Yeah....that's just stupid </sarcasm>
It is so tiny, I have easily deployed it in the form of a 300k something executable and ran across hundreds of hosts. Very good for OPS work. Excellent scripting language , IMHO.
Coincidentially I heard about this at a recent talk - is it this:

http://www.imore.com/jekyll-apps-how-they-attack-ios-securit...

Jekyll apps in App store
Robert Virding has a great talk on BEAM (the Erlang VM). He talks specifically about how BEAM handles concurrency. I think it would answer a lot of your questions.

A few of his points that would directly apply to your question:
1. BEAM processes are lightweight which means smaller memory footprint and cheaper context switching between processes.
2. As others have mentioned, garbage collection. Processes don't share memory, so data passed between processes are copied. Virding says that this is a tradeoff, but worth the benefits of keeping garbage collection simple and fast.
3. Since processes are VM processes and not OS processes, BEAM can count the number of function calls each process makes. If a process is long running and starving other processes, BEAM can put that process back on the run queue to give other processes necessary time.

These are the ones I can remember from off the top of my head. I recommend giving the talk a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pwlvy3zz9M&feature=youtu.be
3DS SCENE: Yellows8 released HomeMenuhax, webkithax and browserhax
One example is that they flipped the meaning of 0 and 1 in their new language.

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced “yes”) is true, and 1 (“no”) is false. Why? It’s fresh, it’s different, it’s new. And it’s annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it’s also just intuitively right.
> now used for voice searches and commands in the Google app (on Android and iOS)

Is this available offline or one must be connected?
I believe it has switched to use clang as its frontend, though, so it's not a fully independent alternative anymore.
Fraud plain and simple. The executives should be in jail. Fucking weasels. They simply pay the government off to keep defrauding people. The VCs are happy to take their cut and enable them as well.
Scheme is a Lisp. I've never met anyone who disagrees.
It's very much a Lisp dialect in the sense of McCarthy's Lisp.

There is some life beyond Common Lisp :).
Elixir (probably due to the Erlang roots) seems to actively make it hard for you to hold onto state. This ends up (in my experience) being a good thing... or at least a brain-stretching thing that may lead to fewer bugs on larger projects.

Clojure allows some OO if you'd like. I see that as a drawback, personally, but I've drank the functional koolaid.
I have a blog; a very unpopular blog that is probably read by two or three people. I write essays and "blog posts" on there.

I also majored in literature and philosophy and had to write essays a lot. I got a lot of As.

The first thing to learn is that every group of writers follows different rules.

Think about why you want to publish your writings. Learn that context matters -- that is, your target audience matters. People reading my blog posts don't want the same thing as the people reading my essays at university. My university essays have a different tone and style. To be sure, the essays on my blog are the least popular, because they are very academic. That's okay. I like to write that way sometimes.

Often the things that others find interesting in our writings are things the writer would have never guessed. Because of this, it's all right to swallow your pride and just hit "Publish." Some of it will be horrible, some of it will be great. And there is always the stuff in between.

From a strictly academic perspective, the easiest type of essay to write is a comparative essay. Compare books, ideas, or topics that are similar enough to warrant a comparison; e.g., sexual parallels in Fifty Shades of Grey and Marquis de Sade's literary oeuvre, if you're going for a wide appeal. I just made that up. It's all experimentation.

Another academic "lesson" is when you're stuck writing an essay, it's time to bring in another example.

These are standard techniques that possibly engender a style that is stale and stiff. The more you cater to your reader, the more entertaining it'll be, because you'll speak her or his vernacular.

Having said all that, I have only published my poetry in very small publications. Nobody is interested in my short stories or essays (outside of academia), and I am by no stretch of the imagination a blogger who others read assiduously.

I am read by a very small circle of writer friends.

We have a joke.

We're good at things that don't have much value in modern culture.

It's a big joke.

And we're the punch line.
Had a similar thing happen with one of my cards that got stolen. My bank canceled the card and sent me a new one. While no more fraudulent charges went through after that, I was puzzled when my automatic charges continued without failure. My bank told me that since the account was not closed and reopened, they just sent me a new card with a new number on the same account, thus only updating the same account. When this happens some processors receive your new card details and automatically update their records. I know Stripe does, although I don't know if they do it for both the number and expiration date, or just the expiration date. Either way, it is scary flaw in the banking system. (https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards)
I see it on desktop firefox.
Deliberately using linkbait titles doesn't work and just gets your submission flagged.
That sounds about right.

My last employer was a startup and I had this stricken... as well had privisions in place so I could do outside consulting as long as it wasn't in a competitive industry (this they may have given me as I came to them initially doing part-time consulting).

The place I worked at before, a 15k person corp, is a place I wouldn't have even thought of asking for things like that. It would have a couple weeks just to have gotten a turnaround through HR and legal.
Presumably this could be done transparently by the web server? Incoming cookies could be validated and then the underlying cookie value passed on to the app. Meanwhile, cookies set by the app get rewritten by the web server to include the signature. This would mean that no server-side code would need to be changed in order to support the cookie signing.

Are there any web servers out there that do this?
Awesome! Can't wait to play with it.
A bit of the VrScript "hello world" code: https://twitter.com/CorvusVR/status/647458964339232768
This is also what Sublime Text Package Control does; it embeds the SHAsum for the package-manager-packge in the Python it tells you to run to retrieve it.

I think everything would be simplified if there was a program in coreutils for "pass STDIN to STDOUT only if STDIN's shasum is $1". Then you could just `curl | shaverify xxx | bash`.

Or, alternately, we could just try to get curl and wget to implement support for (even a limited subset of) magnet URIs. The magnet schema does exactly what we want here: provides both a SHA for content verification, and an optional "xs" (exact source) parameter to make the retrieval happen from a URL rather than a DHT.
When you sign up to work for the company, you agree to do X and they agree to pay you Y. You are disloyal to them if you don't do all or part of X (for instance, if X includes thinking up ideas for them, taking your really valuable ideas that you thought up while working for them and leaving and using them yourself), and they are disloyal if they don't pay you Y. Those are the terms, after all! So I don't see how loyalty only goes one way...
Yes.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21921790/best-approach-t...
Did these VC firms not do their due diligence on Goldenberg and Ressler or did they just not care? I find it hard to believe that they secured $300MM in funding with nobody noticing this.
> These days people are lined up for blocks for work.

There are lines of developers waiting for work?

Please let me know where I can find such lines. I could earn some hefty referral fees from the dozens of hiring managers I know who are desperate to find good developers.
Well, sure, that's precisely how speech transcription works. When you say the words out loud you aren't speaking in letters, you're speaking phonetic sequences. It's a recognizer's job to decode the best word sequence spelling (from its list of known word spellings and their pronunciations) from the input pronunciation.
Given JetBrains has been around for 15+ years, and given that it was a change in the model in moving to subscription, it was aimed to make the transition as smooth as possible for existing customers and that is why they get the 2nd year free.
Advice on a Startup Idea
I have this idea that could help mobile developers and non-technical publishers of mobile apps. Before I start coding it, I'd like to know whether it's worth doing. Please be as brutality honest as you can; my feelings won't get hurt:

I am thinking to develop software to help bridge the gap between design and engineering by making software that auto-generates native code as one selects from a wide-variety of editable UI templates and as one clicks-and-drags from many polished UI elements.

This way, the developer can save time working on the front-end and concentrate on the back-end. On the other hand, publishers can save time by having a starting point and a defined vision for a developer.

Unlike other solutions (such as cross-platform frameworks), no coding will be required to use the software. Nor is it meant to be an IDE. It's just a way to get your UI/UX code ready in an automated way.

What do you think?
Google Voice Search: broken.

Some time in September, Google made some server-side change to Voice Search which causes the Android Google Search client, at least some versions, to crash. Android handsets get a pop-up with "Unfortunately, Google Search has stopped."[1][2][3][4]. This also breaks voice dialing and texting. Some people who had voice input as the default found they could no longer text at all, until they disabled Google Voice Search. It's not a change on the client side; it's happening even for phones that don't have over the air updates enabled.

The usual suggestions, involving clearing caches and resetting various settings, have been made, and they're as useless as usual. The problem appeared a few weeks ago, and has been reported for at least T-Mobile and AT&T, and for at least ZTE and LG phones. So it's not carrier-specific or handset-maker specific.

Did this "faster and more accurate" change involve a change to the wire protocol? A recent change is clearly crashing the client side in the phone.

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/0ZM...

[2] http://forums.androidcentral.com/general-help-how/582873-why...

[3] https://forums.att.com/t5/Android/Google-Search-has-stopped/...

[4] https://support.t-mobile.com/message/518061#518061
Designers face a similar problem; often companies do first-pass sourcing and filtering on the basis of Dribbble and Behance portfolios, which are heavy on pretty visuals but light on process and solving business problems. This was discussed extensively after https://medium.com/@intercom/the-dribbblisation-of-design-40...
Ask HN: Why are we more productive, have more workers, but still working more?
A trio of articles have appeared in my feed over the last week, all pointing to how we really don't need to work so much (see the New Yorker's "You Really Don't Need To Work So Much" and "No Time", or the NY Times' "Overwhelmed").

Most of the articles centre on Keynses's “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” essay, which predicted that we'd only be working 3 hours a day or 15 hours a week due to technology, automation and the rise of GDP.

This might go against startup and high-tech culture, where working long hours seems to be the norm, but is anyone working on tackling this problem?

How can we achieve a sustainable living on just 3 hours work a day? Is Tim Ferriss' 4 hour work week achievable for everyone, or even close to that?

Tackling this problem would change the world and technology must be one of the factors in addressing this problem. Why hasn't this been solved yet?
Here's some early code that John posted to the Racket group in June: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3...
DCHQ On-Premise Running 25,000 Linux Containers
The comment is in reply to one talking about police monitoring the victims of crime who might be more likely to take revenge. The police then catch those victims (now perpetrators) of crime.

> Exactly and as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time this rankles and I did have at the time dissuade my one of my coworkers from "accidentally" putting the perp on the kiddie fiddlers regsister.

I've been a victim of crime - I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It rankles - I wanted revenge.

At the time I dissuaded a colleague from deliberately putting the name perpetrator of the crime on the sex offender register.