skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The concept of "fairness" that I talked about in my previous post applies here. If two companies submit proposals in response to an RFP seeking to acquire 1,000 Widgets and Company A responds with a price of $10,000 while Company B responds with a price of $20,000, the government is required to chose Company A because they are cheaper. However, if Company B is a small business/minority-owned business/service-disabled-veteran-owned-business/etc, the contracting officer can choose Company B because it fulfills other requirements to support those types of businesses.

I could see some small cases where the government would restrict the size of the company responding to an RFP, but there are also ways around that. The small business can contact the contracting office and protest saying they were unfairly considered for that acquisition and usually will win.

The key to the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) is that they try in earnest to support and encourage fairness when awarding contracts. Furthermore, the government goes out of its way to give the "underdog" a better-than-equal chance at winning the contract.

As another poster said, the small business can't lose out on other reasons (i.e. certifications, financials, etc). It could be that they're losing contracts for very different reasons.

Here are some links for reference:

SBA size standards: https://www.sba.gov/content/small-business-size-standards

GSA Small businesses: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/202261

Small business set asides: https://www.acquisition.gov/?q=browse/far/19/5&searchTerms=s...

Protests: https://www.acquisition.gov/sites/default/files/current/far/...
Consumers, for the most part, genuinely don't give a shit what happens to their data. It's sad but true. There was barely a blip when iCloud was hacked, just as one of many examples. The outcry was the minority there.

As for Google shutting down a service: that's probably because it was a free service and wasn't making them any money. Was it stupid to shut it down instead of charging for it? Probably. But Google makes stupid business decisions pretty regularly, and they have the right to do so.

In this case, the majority of people crying out were JetBrains customers. This isn't impressive, it's just baseline common sense.
Most people seem to be saying that it will be a simple software update to fix this issue, and everything will be fine other than some loss of power and fuel economy.

Isn't it possible that running these engines at the EPA recommended levels just isn't possible? That if they were to run like this 100% of the time, reliability, mpg, or power would be greatly reduced for various reasons?

There is a reason they took this huge risk to put in the cheat (but maybe management didn't think it was a big deal). It seems like there is too much risk involved in cheating for just minor fuel economy and power gains.
That's as much a technology problem as anything else. If you line the streets with chargers, then have the car and charger interface with each other to report which car is actually charging, you can bill the owner.

Whether or not the areas cars are parked have the appropriate wiring to facilitate chargers is another problem entirely. And quite frankly, I'm still skeptical our electric grid can handle everyone plugging in a car - solar panels or not. It's been overcast here for 4 days straight, if I had to plug my car in, it'd be drawing from an already strained grid. If everyone in my neighborhood did the same thing, I can see a lot of rolling brownouts.
The car may have been better than it should have been, but it was NOT better than was claimed. It is not the product itself that is the problem, it is the claims made of the product by the manufacturer. VW made claims about the power, fuel economy and emissions. In as-delivered configuration the emissions claim is false and in order to live up to the emissions claim they will need to negate the power and economy claims.
If a developer downloads the app, they can verify it.

But more to the point, I published an app on the Play Store that actually verified its own signatures (as an anti-piracy measure) and it worked correctly. Not only that, but it used the signature as a key to decrypt some of the assets, so a changed signature would mean the app would completely fail to work.

So it's a solvable problem on Android. But not at all on other ecosystems.
I'm disappointed this wasn't an article about actual guinea pigs, those suckers are adorable.
> 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?

And these scenarios would make deb's and rpm's bail out as well.

> 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.

A makefile is a script. An RPM specfile is also a script.

> 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.

People will also be much less likely to actually install your software this way.
You can purchase annual subscriptions also.
Perhaps not a better website for mobile, but I'm pretty sure the pictured crossings are from Banff national park in Alberta and probably more going into BC. You can see pictures and find more information here:

http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/banff/plan/transport/tch-rt...
You want this:

npm install --save --save-exact
Here's my 2 cents coming from experience with Rubygems (and my minimal experience with Node).

You simply cannot auto upgrade dependencies. Period. On an application running in production with development spanning over a couple of months this will break a lot of stuff.

For that to happen, all package developers have to follow semantic versioning and make sure they never break API with minor updates, but that's hard to achieve when you have so many developers.

Updating packages is unfortunately a manual process that you have to go through, you have to pin, upgrade, run tests, rinse and repeat.

I would love a notification when an upgrade is available, whenever a package is released, that'd be good, but still, the upgrade process on my side would be manual.
Urbit: new whitepaper and demos
You seem to have repeated the same example twice.
It's most likely so you don't have to update the binary when the next version of LLVM comes out. There are a lot of apps that don't get updated with major iOS versions and they would likely see improvement.

Conspiracy theories aside, wouldn't it take them more effort to ship a different version of LLVM for Xcode and another one that runs against bitcode?
Seems to me that any 'fix' that lowers fuel economy would have a real and measurable damage on the owners in the way of increased fuel costs. Wouldn't this just be deflecting the problem from one area to another?
+-------------------+---------+
| project | commits |
+-------------------+---------+
| eclipse.jdt | 8 |
| eclipse.jdt.core | 165 |
| eclipse.jdt.debug | 18 |
| eclipse.jdt.ui | 34 |
+-------------------+---------+
Demystifying NGE ROCK RIDGE
Very neat project - Looks like a fun, nostalgic diversion for me. Also, big ups for the Computer Chronicles footage in your video, really takes me back.
A closer analogy would be selling tires that spew asbestos as you drive. The consumer _is_ damaged by the sale because the cars are no longer legal to drive on roads. Even with good-faith doctrines that mean the consumer isn't in the wrong, there are commensurate damages in resale value, and performance _below_ what the consumer was sold. Horsepower and torque numbers will almost certainly need to go down, and urea NOx recovery systems aren't cheap, and it's one more part to maintain.

So I disagree with that interpretation (getting something better than promised; it's only in the very limited sense of average gas milage). I own a TDI and am affected, fwiw.
> the car the consumer got was better (to them) than the product ordered

Two exceptions are: people who prioritize environmental impact over solely personal short-term ones ("act local, think global"); and people who will now have to waste time to get the car fixed so it will pass local smog testing.
Volvo's robots will quietly pick up and empty your garbage bin
Could the fact that lower emission was a possible selling point and may have affected customer choice have an impact here? Some customer did feel cheated by this fraud since they bought the car in part for it's lower emission and fuel usage.
I don't know; there are comparisons you could draw between a telecoms company and a supermassive black hole.
What does it mean it has not committed to keeping it operational? Are the costs that high to send those signals to consider just ditching the entire project?
This is a great point!

And the ME (Management Engine [1]) rears its ugly head. Even Google Chromebooks with a "write protect screw" do not actually wire the write protect screw to the hardware "disable writes" signal on the flash.

And it's because the ME is continuously writing stuff to its region of the flash and the ME cannot be disabled. Such a security fail!

Assuming these guys succeed the ME ceases to become a problem and the SPI chip can finally be write protected.

There are rumors of "back doors" that would let an attacker bypass the "disable writes" signal, but that can be countered by using a large number of manufacturers when sourcing your flash chips. Hint: SPI flash chips can be had from many places.

While it is still possible that some of the chips will have a back door, either the back door will be too hard to create a viable attack for, or users can verify the contents of their flash. (SPI flash chips are too simple to run their own cloaking algorithm.)

Users can take defensive measures if a widespread attack is detected. Defensive measures might include finding out which manufacturer produces vulnerable chips. By avoiding a flash chip "monoculture" it would apply the collective power of the internet to preventing a flash back door, thus making the write protect line an effective security measure.

[1] http://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme
Do you have a link to the shop or any success stories? I'm pretty interested to read something in depth or even just hear more about your customers.
Forcing people to downgrade instead of just disabling updates sucks. It sounds like a frustrating hassle. After their previous announcement, I switched to Atom and I've actually been pretty happy with it.
You are essentially correct. The fifth amendment says you can't be compelled to "to be a witness against himself." Courts have found that bio-metrics aren't witnessing, it's just evidence they are collecting about you.
I once had the pleasure of writing a game engine that ran on Windows, Xbox, Xbox360, PS2, PS3, GameCube and the Wii. The 3 Microsoft systems shared some very basic Win32-style system API, but the other 4 were completely unique. When I see people talk about "cross platform" code only to find they mean "Linux and OSX!" I chuckle a little.
Hey, another Greenkeeper dev here. I made a very short 3min demo video so you can see how it all works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbQvxCLkBbw

We’re super happy for any feedback :)
IBM offer ThinkPads or Macbooks, so people who still want the trackpoint get it. I barely ever see anyone using it though. So long as you don't get a W540 the touchpad is much easier to use (I have a W540 and its touchpad is so bad it makes me want to cry).
I'd put a slightly different twist on that. The key is having something to say. Maybe even having something that you have to say. If you don't have that, don't bother trying to write (unless it's a job requirement, or it's just for practice).
It depends on what you're looking for. If you're worried about security you probably want it to fail off instead of on.
It's simple. Guaranteed basic income would put a stop to that quite fast.
Looks like it's actually slightly lower. According to Road to VR, it's going to be "2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays" (http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-resolution-recommended-s...).
your link's broken (usatodaycom)
Does Facebook pay overtime for "hack nights"?
It really depends on the startup. For some form of chat application or distributed system he will find himself reinventing less compared to the competition. Would be a great way to beat the averages :)
We have these in Montana, at least on the Flathead Indian Reservation where I lived until recently. It's a great idea and really helps preventable deaths to elk herds.

Here's a picture (note: the language on that sign is Salish) http://www.sunnyskyz.com/uploads/2015/01/mpr6e-animal-crossi...
This:

./clang++ --version
clang version 3.8.0 (trunk 246030)
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix

does not support OpenMP to my knowledge.
Programmer Turned Home DIY Enthusiast
Solution: Micro-organisms.
Really? You think if this guy got paid a few tens of thousands of dollars a year he'd no longer hold a grudge against drug companies "getting filthy rich"?
Customers did not know the cars violated regulations when they made the buying decision. VW knew all along and deliberately defrauded the customer.

VW screwed up so badly.
> Supermassive black holes are expected to come in pairs pretty often. That’s because every galaxy has its own supermassive black hole, and galaxies often merge, bringing the two together.

Okay, but following this reasoning, we should also see triples and quadruples, I would say.
Ask HN: Customer Support Automation?
Hey! I am doing research on the Customer Service sector and how to automate it. I'm looking for people that have experience on this area and I want to know what do you think about my ideas for Customer Service Automation. Basically I'm part of a pre-seed entrepreneurship program in London called EF (http://joinef.com) and I'm researching product ideas on this. Also if you know of anybody else that would be open to talk about this, please let me know.

For instance, my email is rfguri@gmail.com
A report from a future where genetic engineering has sabotaged society
I have an app that I love whose owner went out of business after removing the app from the store. I purchased it for my 3G,and since then I've had to manually transfer it from iTunes, until I switched to iCloud backups which have muddled the issue for me... Anyhow it shows up in "purchased" with an "open" button if it's on the device, and (my recollection is that it) just shows up with no button and no download icon if it is not.
Foursquare data predicts Apple iPhone 6S will break all launch records
4chan Founder: Why I Sold
I think Clojure is finding it pretty easy to sell its advantages over Java...
"Worth" includes an estimate of the future money one might get from a sale or trade-in. That estimate is of course fuzzy.

The estimate of worth, and estimate of fuzziness, assumes that VW wasn't deliberately hiding crucial information from the market.
I am talking about the situation where our tests catch the breakage, however rebasing does not work in this situation, with deeply nested dependencies it can be quite hard to figure out which update broke our library.
> supervisor jobs are much more limited than operator jobs.

Absolutely. This is going to be the problem for everyone from cab drivers and barristas to firefighters and factory workers ... actually it already is for some factory workers.
Grounds are often redundant and built into the chassis (of both the component and the laptop), routing back to the power supply. This is to create a sort of "faraday cage" that protects it against harmful electromagnetic interference and discharge (e.g. static electricity). It would be almost impossible to separate it from ground completely.
Seems like a reasonable model, but I'm still surprised at how bad the previously announced strategy was. I think it's great that they listened to their customers in this case, but the fact that so many people at the company were in favor of the previous strategy still does raise some concerns for me.
I don't think US revenue for VW is that big - they could probably have no sales in the US and still have more revenue than GM globally.
Changelog for Elixir v1.1: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.1.0/CHANGELOG....
How likely are you to actually remember the code when you're under duress, though?
Heya, you summed up the problem perfectly and we are not trying to be all clever solving this unsolvable riddle.

All Greenkeeper does is send you a Pull Request, which then runs your test. Only when you as the maintainer are satisfied this works, you get to merge the PR.

We have another project https://github.com/semantic-release/semantic-release that you can use to make sure your project leaves semver to computers and keeps humans out of the process, because they tend to screw this up.

With both Greenkeeper and semantic-release, we hope to get npm into shape that we, one day, can do more automated updates and it’s gonna be a long road, but we’ll have to start somewhere.

For now, Greenkeeper takes a lot of the chores out of the process you described to well in your comment.
Extending WordPress Authentication with TOTP
> The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing.

I agree. In the sense it's usually meant, "free" just means "monetarily free", but cost can come in more forms than just monetary units. :)
Even if it were flirting with bankruptcy, I don't think VW is integral to the economy. Specifically, I don't imagine anything beyond normal bankruptcy protections would be offered to VW, especially something to the extent of a bail-out. There are plenty of alternatives for VW customers.

That said, the US has bailed out the auto industry before to preserve American presence in the market. Germany may opt to do the same, but they are home to other successful automakers.
Ruby Engineer/Architect
Full Slate is looking for a strong Ruby engineer/Architect

http://www.fullslate.com/careers/
Move away from old diesels (e.g. non turbo/pre common rail/smoking) or new diesels? New diesels are still very much seen as "green" in Europe (well, before the VW scandal).
I suppose none of us in the peanut gallery know for sure. Knowing that they battle for 1 mile per gallon on their fuel economy ratings, my guess is that it's a minor effect for a car owner, but a major effect on VW's marketing.

I read elsewhere that their technique for cleaning the exhaust can gunk up the filter more quickly too, so it might also change the maintenance schedule. Which, again, may not really be a huge issue for a car owner, but could impact VW.
--save-exact doesnt deal with any nested dependencies, we do use it for top level deps though.
I wonder how these will affect the predator/prey balance.
Namebench: Open-Source DNS Benchmark Utility
You're assuming your device is still in control, and hasn't been imaged. This isn't the way a proper forensic process actually works.

More important to the issue at hand, I believe that in at least one case the reason for the passcode/phrase being "testimony" isn't so much that you're revealing what's in the locked container, but that you're demonstrating that you have access to/control over its contents. So entering your erasecode would undermine this point. A courier could not know a passphrase yet be deputized to erase the contents, but that is going to be an uphill argument.

What we really want is a proper layered steganographic filesystem, with an arbitrary number of unlockable levels. But we need an OS and apps that play nicely with that as well.
BlackBerry Unveils Android Smartphone
Lock-Free Work Stealing, Part 3: Going Lock-Free
Very excited about this, I am one of those people who theorycrafts about stuff quite a bit, and while I have been looking for an appropriate language for some of my next projects, elixir is at the top of the list consistently, mostly because I like not having to deal with concurrency myself, so I think it will be easier to rapid prototype and then scale as needed.
Yes, with this workflow it sounds like they're selling an off-the-shelf laptop with some hand-done hacks and replacement software.
Chasing the shiny and new
Urbit preview ~2015.9.25
A two-body system is gravitationally stable, and three or more are not (long-term, in general).
Thankfully, SF will always be totally self-absorbed and self-promoting.
The latest post in the series finally goes into details about the lock-free implementation of the work-stealing queue.
My experience, and several others I have talked to, is completely opposite of yours. Making the claim, even through a 3rd party consultant, was a pain in the ass and the results were very underwhelming. We needed to submit a lot more detail about the work done on the claim than that. Can I ask what years you did your claims?
One quirk worth mentioning is equality testing. That is not simply a matter of checking that lower and upper boundaries are equal:

[4,3] = [8,7]

[4,4) = [8,8) = (4,4]

(The latter independently of the issue whether you think those sets are empty or the complements of the empty set)
Yes, because of the authoritative tone the GP is taking while completely talking out of his ass.
> My main question coming out of it: if you are going to go with a dynamic language, why go with Elixir over Python or Ruby (or Clojure or Racket or ...)?

If your problem is one for which a fault tolerant, highly-scalable system with actor-model concurrency is an appropriate solution, Elixir (or Erlang) makes a good choice, and Ruby/Python/Clojure aren't particularly great choices for that. That they all happen to lack static type checking is not what is motivating the choice.

Also, Erlang/Elixir have fairly robust (for languages that are "natively" dynamic) type-checking available through dialyzer, which can be strength compared to other dynamic languages.
Of course I read it... and do you to have the impression that his core points were diluted in words until one might miss them?
I've read a lot about these, as I often drive under one in Montana. They are a tremendous success!
Learn to Code: Tips and Tools – Toptal
The majority of the time it's a safe assumption though, so I'm not sure developers can really be considered to blame.

The reality is, without it, developing software for a platform takes more effort which I think is one of the reasons languages have taken on the initiative of building portable interfaces. Even C11 has added threads.h.
> You don't have to submit hour-by-hour breakdowns either. You submit what % of an engineers time was spent on SR&ED work and what the engineer's salary is. That's it.

OP here - the breakdowns and spreadsheets shown in this piece were designed by or with the CRA during the CRA's technical audits of one of my companies. The evidence log screenshot, for instance, was a template provided to us during the technical review that we were required to complete. (The claim was eventually accepted unadjusted FWIW.)
Just forward the article to Bill Vander Zalm; he will descend upon the scene, deus ex machina and magically fix things.

No, don't forward, on second thought. It works better if you just silently pray.
Most likely you are not allowed to comment on it, but has the official position from the last C9 VS team interviews changed?
I've never been so ashamed to be British.

These last few years have really started to wear me down. The indiscriminate mass-surveillance, the savaging of our public services by an obviously corrupt government, the blatent hyprocrisy of our foreign policy, the repeated and unfettered fraud of the City of London financial sector that has yet to see anyone prosecuted or any institution meaningfully punished.

I really hate this place.
It's actually a refundable tax credit. You receive it even if you have no income or profit (and paid no taxes).