skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you know your requirements up front, then it's not hard. In fact, it's a good exercise to do so -- probably one reason why messaging systems are a dime a dozen nowadays. What's hard is making a messaging system that is everything for everybody. If SIP or XMPP has taught us anything, it's that "extensibility" is a killer. Requirements evolve, and often it is perceived as easier or "cleaner" to start from scratch, rather than work around the idiosyncrasies of existing systems.

On the other hand, if you are trying to design a protocol to solve a domain specific problem (eg, in cryptography, multimedia, distributed systems, etc) then it becomes more of a research endeavor with all the associated pitfalls. In that case, there will always be the "shoulders of giants" to build off of. Unfortunately though, for every pioneering TextSecure, there are a dozen CryptoCats repeating the same mistakes of years past...
This was after they replaced the keyboards. The keyboard is still terrible.
The trouble with this article is that it goes around mixing its scientific arguments (it's not necessarily possible to extract particular genes which cause particular phenotypic effects even though it's very easy to find ones which are correlated with them) with political ones (this idea is wrong because it implies political consequences I don't like), which as we all know is like mixing ice cream with dog shit.
Poor guy. He reminds me of Leshrac from Dota 2. Lots of deep philosophy, leads to nihilism.

Here's one of the multiple big problems. Learning that arguments are often not valid is an amazing insight! However, it says nothing about what what you SHOULD believe, relative to the information you have.

The wise choice is NOT to believe based on your ore-conceptions (ie ignoring the stronger arguments). Better arguments are better than worse arguments. mediocre evidence is better than better arguments. And better evidence is better than worse evidence. And since better evidence is not a guarantee, we measure it by the efforts to disprove them.

So, lets take an example: the conspiracies for the world trade center attack. First we have the official story which we more or less know. Well, some people know at least. Then we have the video Short Change, which goes through a couple hours describing all the points where the official story doesn't make sense. It talks about physics, and background deals, and molten this and that. A lot of interesting stuff. It raised a lot of questions. It didn't provide detailed or reliable evidence, so more research was needed. So i watched the rebuttle video, which was twice as long. They provided evidence, with citations, from experts in their respective fields.

The part that was convincing wasn't "oh, this argument is right, this one is wrong". The part that is convincing is that I can now say "well, according to so and so, this is explained, and so is this, and so is this, and so is this, and so is this" down the line. Now, in this case there was basically nothing left at the end of the argument, but even if there was then I consider the sources. One source says xyz is still unexplained, but that source is now known for making things up and/or not knowing what they're talking about. The other source cites dozens of experts with detailed explanations, photo evidence, clear walkthroughs.

It's not "oh, this argument is better" anymore. Now it's "well, this one literally has no reason to believe it, but this one has a great deal of support."
I just posted three artworks. I hope you are for real.
So you want to increase the tax burden on productive economic activity to benefit people who are just capturing rent. That's a horrible idea.
Hello German friend,

> So basically, strong preference for open technologies is a pragmatic risk mitigation and investment protection.

.net and Microsoft technologies completely invalidate that claim, don't you think?
Wikipedia's Lawsuit Against NSA Internet Vacuum Has First Day in Court
I'd be very surprised if he hasn't read Kahneman. And even if he has, knowing about cognitive biases is a completely different skill than avoiding them. It's basically why the Center for Applied Rationality exists.
Ah good to know - thanks for the info.

I just spotted this though: "Currently, the automated Zulip server installation process only supports Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty"

Not at all keen to run Ubuntu, if it was available on CentOS 7 or Debian I'd give it a go but I guess I'll hold off for now.
The headline was about Google. Only tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) were mentioned prior to the mass murder comment. I suggest you tone down and slow down a bit, so it is easier to understand what you mean.

Even with GM, I think using words "mass murder" is an overstatement. Their cars are exceedingly safe when you look at them in any historical context. I do understand the sentiment if you apply it to tobacco companies, but it would have been a rather long logical jump to get what you mean in the context since everyone else was talking about Google and Apple.
> What would the world be like if everyone thought like a do-gooder? What if everyone believed that his family was no more important or valuable than anyone else’s?

They would pool up, and solve all the problems in order, and live happy and wealthy ever after. We would have a paradise on Earth, because when everyone cares about everyone else, everyone gets cared about too.

Because seriously, a lot of bad things stem from the fact that majority of people care primarily about their closest circle and treats everyone else as exploitable.

--

I understand the problems of people in this article perfectly. I had a similar depression period and, like probably pretty much everybody, learned to avoid thinking about it too much in order to preserve my own sanity. Still, I think I can relate to those "do-gooders" much better than to normal people.

In fact, I think normal people have their morality backwards - and Hollywood has it sideways. In movies, it's becoming common for a protagonist to explicitly kill (or allow to be killed) even thousands of people to save one relative, or for some silly reasons like revenge, and the audience doesn't even blink.

Family is important, we're pretty much wired to care about them more. But I also think that as humans, we're capable of doing more than just stopping on purely low-level, biological impulses. Exercising empathy and rational thought helps one realize that all the other people are just like you, with dreams and worries and hopes for the future. It makes you care about the whole humanity, not just some arbitrary groups related to your place of birth. After all, we all live together on the same piece of rock in the middle of emptiness. We are family.

And laugh all you want at various "do-gooders", effective altruists and people with dreams of brighter future. But somebody has to do the job of fixing things, building a better world for everyone. It won't spontaneously appear.
You don't blackmail them, you proactively undermine their credibility by just leaking anything that might discredit them.
I find the proposition system extremely aggravating. Even for propositions that I largely or wholly agree with I have to ask myself: does this deserve to be an amendment of the state constitution or city charter? That's the power that voter initiatives essentially have, after all.

When you think about it that way, they almost all look pretty ridiculous. Should the San Francisco city charter have an amendment about whether one particular construction project in 2014 can be built at a certain height? Should we have a ballot initiative every time a new building needs to be built?

That might make sense in some alternate reality if we lived in a direct democracy with routine voting and people actually informed themselves about the issues they were deciding. I think it's pretty safe to say that we aren't living in that world today.
The Early PDA That Major Technology Companies Passed on in the 1970s
Actually he points out a number of questions the interviewee could/probably will ask in the section "Questions rock star sales reps ask". I think his overall point is that the best scenario is one where company/employee are well aligned...and whatever information gets you to finding that aligned relationship is the information you should seek/offer.
You can already fit all the Netflix movies into a space much smaller than a phone: http://memkite.com/blog/2014/04/01/technical-feasibility-of-...

It's only 5-24 terrabytes. That's not including tv shows, which would make it much bigger. But even those would still be small enough to fit it in a small box.
Nobody cares?
Please give us some examples of companies you feel have "real impact on the economy and humanity"...?

Edit: Also, successful companies that started out with those ambitions?
Totally agree.

Author talks about bullshit when he, himself, spews it too.

"Before the interview, have recruiting (or you can) ask the candidate to submit their W2 and fill it in with information that foots to their W2 — the previous years payroll — including commission in the last X-years they’ve been a sales rep."

There is zero chance a seasoned job seeker who knows what they are doing regardless of the position would give out this kind of information.

Interviewing is like playing poker. Why the hell would I show you my cards before placing a bet. It's my job to negotiate the most and it's the person doing the hiring's job to do their homework to figure out what the market bares and how much they can afford or are willing to spend on someone.

I came away reading that article that the author is some pompous young buck who thinks he knows how to recruit.

kids these days... yea, maybe I'm old fashion too but this seems more like a lack of plain old simple common sense.
At some point, yes. But that's not the first place they're tested. The first place their tested could simply be a petri dish, as penicillin was. Then it goes up the ranks into mammals more and more similar to us - rats, pigs, monkeys, etc. Usually it's not every step, because there really isn't a big reason to and that can slow development and increase costs of life-saving drugs.
Ever use the Symbolic Math Toolbox, like I mentioned?...it's a CAS.
I wonder why we're still having fans of communism, socialism and otherwise far left people if that's what the best communist states have to offer its population?

I mean, it's pathetic to live like this.

Also invalidates most of French thinkers of XX century.
Intent is in the brain and criminal trials do try to discover it.

Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend. "I thought she was an intruder; I did not mean to hurt her," he said (paraphrase). The facts were not in doubt; the entire case hinged on whether the jury believed he was telling the truth.

I agree that there is no way to recover a passcode from the brain (outside of science fiction). But it seems like a court could rule on whether claims of forgetfulness are real.
I had a coworker tell me that they had the cold and that they're taking an antibiotic for it. We went on a back and forth, with me repeatedly telling him that antibiotics would make him worse, a cold is viral. I think he badgered the doctor into giving him some. What was funny is that everyone in the shop just about had that cold, and he had it longer than most people. But those antibiotics were really helping.
I use Spacemacs, so does that mean I'm safe? :)
Countdown begins for India's First space observatory
When comparing GCHQ or NSA, who is the spookiest of them all? Which one of them is sucking in more information and who does more with that info ? my impression is that there is less institutional oversight over spooks in the UK than in the US, is that true ?
Indeed, even a Post Res mathematical structuralist will admit the instrumental utility of common words for similar entities; would you care to list a few, and their mappings between the jargon of Earth and Mars?
Well I don't have to worry about any chikan, as I am a man. However, there are special cars for women if they choose to avoid any potential pervs.
That depends on whether you are endorsing it or not.

"Theoretically", we had kings because of the divine right of kings. Theoretically the American expansion was justified by manifest destiny. Theoretically women were not allowed to vote because "90% did not want it" or because it would "place the government under petticoat rule".

Theoretically, today, we have representatives in government because the people aren't smart enough to represent themselves.

Every system of power and domination creates a justification for its own existence and it's nearly always bullshit.
Another Stampede Is About to Occur in Saudi Arabia
Please make / and + more distinct!
The first idea, the first sentences are always the hardest. To get my fingers typing, I would talk to myself "What do I want to say?" I would type this sentence. Then I would answer myself out loud. "I want to talk about the dangers of unapproved GMO foods escaping outside controlled grow areas and into consumer farms." Then I type what I just said out loud. If I don't know what I want to say, I answer myself "I don't know. This GMO topic interests me because of the really interesting science behind the creation of these hybrid plant lines. But I don't trust the human bureaucratic framework around the scientists. I feel this way blah blah blah".

Verbal style obviously isn't written style. I edit things after I have a lot more words on the page. But that out-loud Q&A gets my juices typing.
They're better than average, but you have to be willing to question what they say. I know too many people who just trusted the doctor and then had the doctor make some minor slip-up that the patient would have caught. Except "minor" means "well, I guess you're this way for life now. sorry".
In my previous work at a company that made it's money from a browser extension, I saw what hell it was to develop browser extensions for all major browsers.

I should note it looks like this issue is mostly fixed going forward. The chrome extension model won, and Firefox and Windows Edge are supposed to be supporting either directly or through electrolysis.

I.E. was not an extension, but a toolbar, written in C++ (being C++ the debugger was Windows visual studios so it was doable). Firefox was Xul based and almost impossible to debug at the time (much improved in recent months), and chrome just worked.
Rent, as in, the economic concept.
We've invested quite a bit of energy in static analysis tools over the years, but so far the return hasn't been there. There are still ongoing efforts, and we'll see if those pan out, but up to this point we've just run into a very low hit rate and a false positive rate that drowns everything else out from a security perspective. Formal methods are a different question, but I can't imagine the size of the undertaking needed to convert even a subset of Chromium over to formal methods.

Instead, we've focused pretty heavily on more conventional anti-exploit mitigations applied to existing C++ code. Our sandboxing is the most obvious one, but we have a variety of other protections on top of typical stuff like ASLR and NX (e.g. heap partitioning, a safe integer handling toolkit, etc). We're also leading efficient control-flow integrity work in clang, and busily working it up to a stable release. And then we have fuzzing as part of our continuous integration, running across thousands of cores of instrumented builds.
Taken aback by the assertion that recruiting would ask to see W2. I'm an engineer and have no idea how things work in sales but to me that would be a deal-breaker request.

Do companies actually ask to see W2s? That seems really forward and inappropriate to me.

In fact, if someone asked me to see my W2, I'd probably shoot the question right back at them.
I don't believe that's what I said. Cities in California have services they are obligated to provide -- police services, for instance. The cost of those services over time has increased proportional to salaries. However, the revenue gathered to pay for those services has only increased proportional to property values -- which are artificially trapped in the 1970's to a large extent.

That is an untenable situation, and it is a large part of California's problem at a local level.
It would be nice if web browsers had an option to "only send cookies on HTTPS".

Also: "MEMORY HOLE"? Someone seriously approved that as a code name?
Could somebody explain me, please, what is the annotation block and how do I use it?
Yep. The correlation/causation problem is strong with this one. It's not that old Mr Smith is alive because he still comes to the office. He still comes to the office because he's alive.
I feel bad for the guy, but no way I would have made that purchase in 2012.

A basic SWOT analysis would have made me hightail out out of the taxi business instead of taking on debt to spend $250k committing myself to it.

If he gets his $250k back less the processing fee that feels like justice to me. He shouldn't have to wait for a buyer to come up though - it should just automatically be an option now that not regulating Uber seems to have become policy.
> is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them

It is not strictly true. Yes, helping someone effectively involves a person who knows the recipient of aid enough to understand their needs. But that doesn't have to be you. You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives. You can work on making those nets, and that is helping. Or you can have a well-paying job and use surplus income to support people distributing those nets, people who know those they're helping.

Also, a lot of low-hanging-fruits of world-fixing exist on social or global level, not on the level of individuals. I don't need to know of or care about any sick person in particular to help fight malaria effectively - in fact, getting emotional is often counterproductive. What matters are aggregate effects. Number of people who would die but are not going to because of the aid is what matters. Average quality of life improving is what matters.

But I think that's orthogonal to the issue of family vs. strangers, and conflating the two doesn't help with anything. I agree that we shouldn't treat helping people we know as less moral just because we know them (and thus get to experience their gratitude). But I also don't think that those close to me are inherently more worth than those further. I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense. This comes naturally when you start extending your concept of 'family and friends' to the entire world.
Are there antibiotics not used on humans that can be used on farm animals?
> Have you ever owned a residence?

Yes. Do you even lift?

This article is about SF, which is a city. Most of the busybodies who get up in arms about airbnb are residents of cities as well. Cities are densely populated places with large numbers of tenants per unit area, high residential turnover rates, and lots of tourists. "New strangers roaming around" is just a fact of life, regardless of whether a particular rental broker is in business. If you don't like that, you would probably be better off living in a rural area where you could easily afford a large parcel of land from which others can be excluded. There are plenty of places where you could afford 160 acres of timberland and a very nice house for less than a 2-bedroom TIC in SF. You'd probably average one new neighbor per decade, none closer than half a mile away, and could easily go years without seeing another human if that's what you prefer. That's just not what cities are about.
This is amazing, and I need to work on my arithmetic.
I think the content addressable web is going to help the web bloom in places it's not currently accessible. Take something like the Netflix open connect appliance, preload with a couple hundred TB, plug it in and have it start announcing content in locations with poor network connectivity.

EDIT: Thinking about this more, it becomes almost like S3 for all web content. Each piece of content can be addressed with its SHA hash, disparate nodes can increase the number of replicas based on demand, etc.

IPFS, I'm pulling even harder for you now!
It's been "given to the community" or something like that. They didn't kill it, but they aren't paying any staff to work on it anymore.
This deserves to be less of an HN comment, and more of a manifesto (I mean that as a compliment).
This is not a good replacement for CSV. It is better to just use regular JSON for that.

If you have a file containing this:

["Name", "Session", "Score", "Completed"]
["Gilbert", "2013", 24, true]
["Alexa", "2013", 29, true]
["May", "2012B", 14, false]
["Deloise", "2012A", 19, true]

And it gets chopped in half (a problem that is not that uncommon), you will get this:

["Name", "Session", "Score", "Completed"]
["Gilbert", "2013", 24, true]
["Alexa", "2013", 29, true]

Which is still valid. This will cause missing data rather than a clear error message. May and Deloise may end up not getting their scores and there's a good chance nobody will notice.

By contrast when the file is represented as regular JSON:

[
["Name", "Session", "Score", "Completed"],
["Gilbert", "2013", 24, true],
["Alexa", "2013", 29, true],
["May", "2012B", 14, false],
["Deloise", "2012A", 19, true]
]

(not a completely ideal representation, but you get the picture)

Chopping this in half will give you a clear error, forcing the developer to recover from it before continuing.

Same principle as strong vs. weak typing.

Individual JSON snippets in lines are a good replacement for plain text-only logs of indeterminate length, however.
Alternately, you can take the attitude that you will practice radical transparency in your online and offline preferences and habits, so there's nothing to potentially blackmail you with because you live your life unashamed.

I mean, personally my initial reaction when I first heard about the early Snowden leaks two years ago was "welp, hope the NSA enjoyed reading all that Tony Stark/Bruce Banner fanfic as much as I did."
The real problem is that no one gives a shit
I should have been more precise; you're quite correct about the requirements for misprision. Police absolutely are concealing the crimes of the "bad apples" in the department. To be precise, I'm sure we can easily find candidates of for all levels of involvement (it's a big country).

There is no shortage of police that are giving cover for the murders in their department, and most of the rest still look the other way.
> Which, minus the IPC, code/dependency sharing, has similar practical consequences as Erlang/Elixir: no shared heap.

In Elixir/Erlang every Erlang process has its own heap. In the case of Node.js and forking, each forked process has its own heap. You can't fork 100,000 times but you can have 100,000+ Erlang processes all with separate heaps and all in the same process.
Are we doing the flame war thing on Friday night? I mean if we are, I'm up for it. Are we?
It seems that there is a much higher threshold of "changing the world" applied to the private sector than to government or non-profits. I routinely hear people in relatively less influential organizations of the latter make such claims without coming off as arrogant.

This makes me think that people in Silicon Valley aren't arrogant as much as they tend to break an unstated social rule: One can't claim to be doing good while making a profit (even if what you're doing is in fact net-good).
Then "certain people" are happy - at least they'll make you live in totalitarian dictatorship, it's a good achivement already.

I came to conclusion that those "certain people" just hate everybody and want to harm us, and then hope to escape proposed punishment themself.

Limiting your rights is not a "price to pay" for them, it's their target. Fighting crime and terrorism is just a front-end to get to their real target, namely to humiliate citizens.
Twitter gives disadvantaged minorities a voice. That's a real impact on humanity.
This is the most infuriating thing I've played since qwop