skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep. Why do you think they're tracking porn habits, if not for blackmail material?

There's no legitimate reason why a government needs to know anything about citizens sexual preferences or habits, but such information is perfect for shaming or threatening. I will note that the collection and analysis of this sort of information far surpasses anything envisioned in dystopian fiction or actually practiced by the likes of Stasi/KGB during the worst of times.

EDIT: there were actually a bunch of documents published with this article. I'll check those out then re-comment.
This post has only been up for an hour on HN, but there are 800+ comments on the blog post itself.
The problem here is with your downstream users, an `npm install` two months after your release might install a broken sep for your end user and create a support request for you. This is a bad situation to be in if you are doing this for Open Source projects on volunteer time :)
The problems with generic medications go deeper than one company
PostgreSQL replication with Londiste from Skytools 3
3D Touch: The first ‘killer feature’ we’ve seen on the iPhone in years
Ask HN: Should I add AWS scripting automation functionality to AppRobot?
Hey everyone,

I built a tool called AppRobot, which makes it simple to automate anything on Windows and web browsers (Selenium baked-in) in the same script, using any scripting/programming language.

I'm contemplating adding AWS automation functionality as well, so that users would be able to 'drag-and-drop' various commands they'd like to perform with their script (i.e. launch-instances, terminate-instances, etc...). Thus, an analyst/dev could quickly build powerful AWS/Windows/Selenium automation scripts without programming knowledge (or if they program, they can use AppRobot's API with their programming language of choice).

Thoughts? Is this something that your team would find valuable?

AppRobot is now on AWS Marketplace, so it's easy to launch many VMs at once to distribute your automation:
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00WZTUCPW

Thanks in advance!
Npm weekly #30: package scripts for tooling, a tutorial for front-ending, etc.
S&R has incredible structural challenges outside of "the FAA won't approve my flights".

Drone operators in disaster zones need to comply with local authorities and get permission to fly. Instead, we have yahoo pilots blocking access of firefighting aircraft and complaining that they can't use their wide band communications equipment in a bandwidth constrained environment.
Pipefy – What is Personal Kanban and why you should use it
Adobe is almost certainly one:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/microsoft-visual-c...

There's probably quite a few internal-only users of Visual C++ too.

EDIT: Well, they're a high-profile user of Visual C++, I have no idea if they require C99 support but they ship a Mac version so it's possible.
This site is frustrating on mobile. Every time I touch the screen to scroll the page, a menu that I don't want slides in to cover the article.
The ridiculous situation isn't using endangered wood, it's doing business with the government entity as a startup. And if you want to do business in Delaware, or Chicago, or the DoD, or Vermont, you need to figure out 50 other things.

Here's the thing -- all of these things are at some level logical. Companies shouldn't discriminate against people and cut down rain forests. But the proposition asked by this article and thread is "Why can't startups get government contracts?"

End of the day, to do business with big government entities, you need to spend many dollars on attorneys and lobbyists before you make a cent. And after closing the sale, you need to maintain staff to be SMEs on all of the various compliance regimes that you need to comply with. You need to be big to swim in those waters.
Why is it bad to expect a portable operating system interface? Almost all languages have been doing this over the last decade (C, C++, Java, Go, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc...).
Core Audio and the Amazing Audio Engine
What Do Perl and Go Have in Common?
The law (in the USA, and many of its states, at least) prescribes what can and cannot be disclaimed in a warranty.
I'm really glad to have recently picked up Elixir. For anyone just starting, a few tips from someone similarly new:

a. After launching the "iex" shell, press Tab. You'll get the list of all built-in commands.

b. The help feature is also very handy for when you're wondering what an operator does. Type "h <command>" for a definition.

h !/1

c. Try the pipe operator. Your code will closely follow the transformations of your data.

Instead of this:

m1 = "moo"
m2 = String.replace(m1, "m", "z")
m3 = String.upcase(m2)

Or this:

String.upcase(String.replace("moo", "m", "z"))

Try this:

"moo" |> String.replace("m", "z") |> String.upcase()

The result of each command will be passed as the first argument to the subsequent command.

d. You get seamless interoperability with Erlang libraries.

:crypto.hash(:md5, "bob") |> Base.encode64

e. Try the Observer tool in iex to visualize various aspects of your running application, including the supervision tree, details on each running OTP process, and much more. Seriously very handy stuff.

:observer.start()

f. If you're using EC2 like I am, Amazon images have a too-old version of Erlang, but it's trivial to compile things yourself:

sudo yum install gcc glibc-devel make ncurses-devel openssl-devel autoconf
wget https://www2.erlang.org/download/otp_src_18.0.tar.gz
tar xvzf otp_src_18.0.tar.gz
cd otp_src_18.0
./configure && make && sudo make install
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/escript /usr/bin/escript
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/erl /usr/bin/erl
> Also, he didn't say that ads don't work on him, they certainly do but they're not having the desired effect which makes them worthless to the advertiser. Sure, they get brand recognition but if you consciously make an effort to avoid brands which advertise to you and recommend that others avoid the brand too then you've actually cost the advertiser money, making the ad worthless.

This is exactly how I feel ads affect me. If I see an ad, I'm inclined to avoid the company advertising that product or service to me in future.
That's great! I would definitely buy a Purism laptop - however I need additionally a trackpoint a great keyboard and an excellent matte screen.

The trackpoint should be with three physical buttons and would be great if it comes without a trackpad - but at least an option to disable the trackpad should be there.

The keyboard should NOT have any separate number block like most of 15" laptops have today.
Would be great if there would be as well an option to order the keyboard without any labels on the keys.

The trackpoint and keyboard requirements could be options upon purchase. I understand that I am part of a minority. The thing is, I feel helpless without a trackpoint. Mouse and trackpads are no options. And Lenovo makes me desperate.
Depends on the consumer protection laws of Germany, but I doubt that bit of the contract would hold up in court.
Not going to defend the US, but do you really know what the Taliban did in Afghanistan? It's definitively not a "glass house" situation. It's a civilian massacre, rape of woman of all ages, prohibition of education, promotion of religious extremism situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses
Don't worry, I'm sure we'll get to a point not too long from now when setting algorithms in autonomous drones and robots to kill other humans for us will mean we get to "save money".
They definitely do not use Intel Wireless chips.

In reply to sibling poster about dip switches, it looks like there are little wires running inside the case from the four separate connections to the two DPDT switches, i.e., if you want to find a DIP switch and mount it to your laptop, the 4 wires are easily hackable.
> getting started guides are excellent

This is very true. I had just started playing with Elixir and had pre-ordered Dave Thomas' Programming Elixir and was going through the draft ebook, and I actually set that aside and worked through the Getting Started. It's normal the see such guides, but the material there is really, really good.
AFAIK Annex K originated as a Microsoft proposal, so I find it somewhat strange that you're using it as an example of a C feature that Microsoft shouldn't adopt (though I agree that it's a terrible feature that never should have made the cut).
I hope not, that would be insane. If a car is not worth its price when you buy it, don't buy it.
An 80/20 Guide to Mongoose Discriminators
Partly! The tools they mentioned (IDE, Mercurial) don't impact the app itself though. Which makes them irrelevant and doesn't factor into why their codebase is massive.
Hiring data scientists
Both of those platforms use Urea systems, as do larger and more expensive VW/Audio vehicles. The issue is purely in the small, inexpensive vehicles.

The NOx problems were mostly resolved through the injection of urea into exhaust gases (e.g. AdBlue), dramatically reducing NOx emissions while leaving the efficiency and power unaffected. Urea systems add an extra cost and complexity to the vehicle though (not to mention that you need to top up your urea additive occasionally), and VW seemed to find a loophole that allowed them to make small, inexpensive cars without urea injection. They did this by injecting fuel into the exhaust in the absence of Urea, but to achieve the same effect. But this can gunk up the NOx trap if used endlessly (it is far less precise than urea, obviously), reduces fuel economy, etc, so they built this One Little Trick that only actually does that during identified tests.
Already ordered. I'll keep Windows in a partition I think, this is just an experiment to see if I can use a non-Mac for the first time in my life.
UX/UI to make your product viral
It's not at all clear that they would win. There is an article by a German lawyer on the topic[1]. The tl;dr of it is, that given that the car works mostly as intended and that any damage to individual customers is little (if it even exists) customers won't get back the full purchase price and probably not even any money, especially if VW were to provide a fix.

[1]: http://www.ferner-alsdorf.de/rechtsanwalt/zivilrecht/vertrag...
I don't agree with you that number of orders is irrelevant. It at the minimum is an indicator of administration policies.

As for your examples, I am not a constitutional scholar, neither is you. Right now they are just your opinions. For instance, Free Exercise Clause does not mention right to do business with the federal government. I'll wait for SCOTUS interpretation of the clause rather than yours.
Thanks for taking the time to reply here, Jose. Elixir is definitely a very impressive language and as a former PL student, I am definitely a huge fan of your work.

That said, if I were looking into a BEAM language in the future - and after this thread I am inspired to try again - I would probably be more inclined to go with Erlang. For the same reason that Java is probably an easier sell than Scala.

However, I am most likely not your target audience. I am neither an existing Erlang user nor a Ruby user (nor even a Node user).
I just took a quick look at WP [1], and it looks like they have over $350b in assets. Don't think it will bankrupt them, either way.

Not to mention that they are probably "too big to fail" [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail
It'll be some firmware upgrade, the emissions will be fine but fuel economy will suffer by some minor amount. Then everyone will move on to the next tragedy.

I don't really see a massive run on people trying to sell or return their car. I'm sure a few will to try to make a point, or perhaps to try to get a new car out of the deal.

That's my prediction for the record!
If VW USA went bankrupt, and ceased to operate, then that loss of sales might contribute to a mothership bankruptcy or bailout.
I'm curious how they are engineering these overpasses to not be slowly torn apart by tree roots, if they even consider that at all.
SR&ED is a tax refund - cash in hand at the end of your taxable year.
I understand the difference between a normative claim and a positive claim. You might not be taking a normative position explicitly, but your distaste is showing through: "allegedly come from," "obfuscate this point". I'd like to see where you go with this (both your distaste and positive statements) -- even if what you're saying is accurate/factual, what implications does that have for society at large? For the intersection of machine learning and society?

Appeals to authority and accomplishments aside, I don't need to have written such systems to understand, infer, and conclude things about aspects of their behavior. My point is this: something created by humans cannot be, by definition, inhuman. Two methodologies, the "human approach" and the "ML approach", might have radically different steps but come to the same conclusions. It would appear from your comments that you are OK with these conclusions ("An unbiased methodology produced these results, therefore, it's OK!"). Are you morally satisfied by the conclusions discussed above? Do the results of "such systems" influence your satisfaction?
In many cases, you are able to send a control-c, but the process that is generating the output receives it, not the process, the terminal program, that is rendering the text. You'd have to send a signal to the terminal program, which may cause it to exit and not be what you want. And doing is often done with UI controls, like a close button/action on the window.

So it's not just priority inversion that is a potential problem, but also non-obvious layers of abstraction.
Maybe not cars, but perhaps busses will be the preferred electric vehicle in Asia. China's BYD has been building electric busses for a while, and even Los Angeles is buying.

To me electric busses seem a no-brainier for municipalities: they have predictable routes so you can schedule around charging times, fuel costs can be beneath what you'd pay for gasoline, and cities looking to reduce their carbon footprint can point to the busses and a demonstrable difference.
Having to downgrade at the end of the subscription sounds like a huge PITA.
I really want to like subscriptions, but the overhead from declaring taxes on so many $10 invoices is annoying as well. :( I'll just wait for IDEA 15 and then stick with my current (paid) license.
How George Palmer Bootstrapped His Profitable Startup with Just $50
I had heard of them, but I still have a similar reaction to you. It's right up my alley, e.g. I've bought all kinds of random hardware on kickstarter, but I've never bought anything from Quirky even though I would have loved to.

One example I remember distinctly, at the beginning of last summer Uber did a promotion where they delivered Quirky smart AC's with installation for a few hundred bucks. Fast forward a year to when I needed an AC I actually looked around for a Quirky one since I remember being intrigued, I figured by now they might even have a newer version and have worked out some kinks. But there was basically nothing to be found, it had just been a one-time thing on the part of both Uber and Quirky.

It all makes sense now reading the other comments here. Turns out that was just their business model, to only ever release one-offs instead of building quality product lines and iterating on them.
> Plunking a binary in /usr/bin and some configuration files in /etc will work just about anywhere.

Unless the user has existing files with the same names there. Or they edit a config file you placed in /etc/ and then they run the installer for a new version. Oh so now your "simple" installer has to handle version upgrades, and file conflicts?

If your software is literally so simple as files in /usr/bin and /etc, building packages to install those files should be easier than writing a good install script, because the package manager will handle so many use-cases for you out of the box.

> You will probably write a script to build your package, right?

No? I have a makefile which can do the actual building and installing. dh_make will generate a debian directory, and debuild will call this makefile. An RPM specfile also will have calls to make build, make install, etc.

None of this is writing an installer unless you consider a makefile having an "install" target "writing an installer".

> The point is that you now have to do work for every distro you want to support
If the installation is as simple as you claim, the packages will be simple wrappers around the results of a makefile.

If its more complex, then packages are still easier to maintain, because you don't need to worry about "what distro am i on, and do i need to check what the apache binary is called, or what packages are installed by default".

> and all users without a package manager that you support is SOL.

If I haven't covered some Distro, it's hardly difficult to give them a .tar.gz containing the tree created by the aforementioned `make install`. This is still less work than your special installer script.
IIRC, that's not how car prices work. A new car on a lot is worth far more than a used car with exactly 0 miles driven on it.
I was really hoping this article was about a working rodent. I got all prepared for a guinea pig in a business suit.
Would like to know this as well. I have a gasoline Golf and I'm concerned its depreciation has accelerated.
cd is a command. It takes an argument, which is a path to a folder. It could be any folder; it's up to you.

If you decide to make a folder in your home directory which is named "floop", you would type this command:

$ cd floop

Now your shell is inside the floop folder, and everything you do until the next 'cd' command will happen relative to the contents of the floop folder.
I assumed it would be a unique 3rd key per user/transaction. It increases the burden of the escrow-holder (by vastly increasing the number of keys to manage), but has the benefit of allowing granular access to data, rather than compromising all of one service if a warrant is served for a single user's information.
Our hope with Greenkeeper is to get all of npm on it, so we all get to benefit from it.

In addition, we could do things like pro-active issue-opening. Say Underscore releases a new version and Ember uses it, gets a Greenkeeper dependency bump, and we see its Travis fails, we can open an issue on Underscore to say they broke Ember (all opt-in, of course).
The maker world already has lots and lots of alternatives for existing laser printers, homebrew things etc. The toolchains are getting more robust by the day - heck the CUPS just added compatibility layers for gcode based "printers" (laser cutters, 3d printers, etc). This simplifies even further the common use case for low-end laser cutters - turning an illustrator or pdf file into a cut device.
To be honest with you, "for my next startup" strikes me as the absolute worst time to use a language/platform that is both new to you and new to the industry.

Delays kill startups, and that just begs for delays. You have to learn the language. All your new engineers have to learn it. You'll inevitably be (re)inventing the wheel because Elixir isn't in production at thousands of companies already.

Picking a shitty, slow language, as long as it's a popular one (JavaScript, Java, C#, PHP, Python), is going to have a much better cost/benefit profile.
Just to add (instead of editing above): I think a lot of IBM employees would as well buy Purism laptops if they had a trackpoints. There are thousands of people that are used to ThinkPads and now IBM announced to purchase from Apple [1].

[1]: http://9to5mac.com/2015/05/28/apple-ibm-macs-pc/
> frankly don't think it is the right tool for large, multi-person code bases

I'm very curious what aspects of Python (especially unique to Python) made you feel this way.
Not for "anticipatory obstruction of justice". It doesn't matter whether what you destroyed is important to a case or not. There does not even need to be a case at all. You can still be charged if you deleted something, and maximum penalty is imprisonment for 20 years. Hanni Fakhoury, EFF attorney, gave a talk about this at ShmooCon 2012[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzssKvRwrzQ
"if you did not pay taxes". No income, no taxes, no refund, no cash in hand at the end of the year.

Yes if it works anything like the US system you could probably credit that would-be refund towards the following year, or the year after. But is that worth the time away from product when your company needs it the most?
Pardon a very naive question - wouldn't something as crude as cutting ground connection to the WiFi card/board do the trick?
The idea that people need private garages to charge their cars seems silly. You can have plugs in public garages or even regular parking spaces, with cables you securely attach to both ends (to prevent energy theft) and a payment system. It's not that much more complex than a parking meter.
You can start by summarizing somebody's ideas (like Yudkowsky's), then compared them to other authors you know. You can focus on one aspect and add your own thoughts.
Greenkeeper dev here, Another fun thing we can do with this is, say Node 5.0 comes out, we send a PR for everybody’s .travis.yml, to also test against 5.0 and see if a package is still compatible. And all that with without the maintainers having to install the new Node version, or fearing they screw up the dev environment.

Let computers do the chores for us :)
I'm burnt out. The change was horrible, and now they've walked it back -- yay, I guess, but why did they do something so customer hostile in the first place?

JetBrains lost my trust, and I'm going to keep an eye on competitors.
How about the following approach: echo "It's meeee!" > /proc/9960/fd/0, and see on which xterm it appears?

(For those who, like me few years ago, don't know what above does - it's writing directly into STDOUT of a process, which is available as a file descriptor 0 in /proc/[PID]/fd).
'lended + from' is new to me, only heard 'lended + to' in the past...

One I noticed in popular use a few years ago (Canada): the word "itch" as a verb, i.e.: "I itched it" "he was itching himself"

Sounds odd to me.
In Top Gear's tribute to Saab, Clarkson said that a senior designer friend at "another Sweedish car company" told him that no one could figure out why Saabs cost as much as they did, until they crash tested them.
Expecting it isn't bad, blindly assuming POSIX is available everywhere is bad, as in calling your code cross-platform because it uses just C99 and POSIX for instance
It will definitely be a mess. There are already class action suits in progress and I'm sure many more on the way. There is some precedent for buybacks and they typically take depreciation into account, though this is a whole other level of scandal so the rules may be different.

Fiat Chrysler recently announced a buyback as part of a consent decree with the NHTSA:

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/fiat-chrysler-buy-back...

> As to how much money an owner might receive under the buy-back program, the consent order stated that FCA must "refund the purchase price paid by the first purchaser of the vehicle for purposes other than resale, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation, and not including the cost of modifications made to the vehicle after the first retail sale." To sweeten the deal, a 10 percent premium will be factored into the initial purchase price.

Not a bad deal actually and this was defect based, not fraud based. I think VW would be incredibly lucky to have such a settlement.
I think this is an excellent compromise.
Sounds similar to screeps an MMO strategy game that opened a couple months ago:
https://screeps.com
There is no need for a back door. Phones are not encrypted once the user accesses them. The carriers can push and pull any files to or from the phone over the air. Some of them do not require a warrant. I was always told to never ask for one.