skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like it's a fallacy that things need to be constantly thrown out and replaced for an economy to be healthy. If someone doesn't have to spend $1000 on new appliances, it's not like that thousand dollars disappears from the economy. Either the person spends that money on something else or sticks it in their savings account and the bank loans some of it out for someone else to spend. (This is basic econ theory, so I'm sure it's a little more complicated than that.) How is it better for an economy when people have to spend money replacing existing things instead of on buying new stuff?
Toys ‘R’ Us Brings Temporary Foreign Workers to U.S. To Move Jobs Overseas
I'm guessing you like annotations because they're less painful than what you were used to previously. You don't need an EE server to serve up a basic web app. Or even a complex one.
Philadelphia recently did this. Your city can, too. Just bring the pope for a weekend.
Agreed, and there are so many possible explanations that jumping to "Windows Update was compromised" is just silly.
So why just those two agencies, many countries have such agencies for spying. So to single out those two based upon nothing that the others have not done and do albeit even less open about or leaked about; Seems somewhat curious to me.
As it does somewhat presume other spy agencies are not listening in to private conversations and even the hacking=groups leaks showed that is not so in equal ways than Snowden leaks. Hence my curiosity and I'll admit, questioning the motivation of this.
These details can often shed light into what happened ( or was supposed to happen ), what tools were being used, etc. While they might be useless for the average reader, there are many on HN, myself included, who will be dissecting the update to learn more about how Windows update works
I don't think it's totally random, when my server got taken over I found a list of ip addresses that the script was in turn trying to bruteforce. Someone made that list on purpose, though I don't know why or where the ip's came from.
It's irrelevant because unless both a) people changed their driving habits on average over that time frame to cause more emissions and b) that change was primarily limited to drivers of GM vehicles, then driver habits do nothing to explain the data.

> So drawing the conclusion that manufacturers are "lying" from the discrepancies between those two data sets is ridiculous.

Perhaps you should pay attention to actually what I said, not what you think I said. I didn't say GM was lying, I implied their numbers deserve extra scrutiny.
And saying "base52" is misleading. It implies that there is a source data that's been encoded, which is not likely here. You can be specific without implying that.

A random string out of a specific character set is also subtly different from taking random bits and encoding them with that same character set, in that the first couple digits will have different distributions.
Mine is 1400 square feet in a major city and I only paid 130k. You're getting ripped off!
Direct comparison to a full size, gas (or otherwise) truck is probably not wise (my bad). Built for completely different purpose, a better comparison would be a traditional SUV or CUV.
Do you actually deploy every update to a VM to test it? Would your testing have caught this issue (which apparently only affected people who'd explicitly disabled the bitlocker service)?

You could also just wait a week for anything noncritical to allow others to flush out any issues, which is a more time-efficient strategy than manually reviewing gobs of KB articles.

For most people, disabling auto-update is a horrible strategy. If you have a central team actively managing updates with WSUS, you can get away with this. For the vast majority of people, turning off auto-update just means they stop installing updates at all, which is the reason auto-update is the default.
> Your brain will never be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never feel more motivated and less cynical than you do now. And you will never have another decade of pre-childraising freedom in your life.

Except, well, this is all either not true or overgeneralized.

1) Your brain was more sponge-like an inexhaustible in your teens than your twenties, and more in the decade before that than in your teens.

2) I'm 42. I was more motivated and less cynical in my 30s than my 20s. I'm more motivated and less cynical now than in my 30s.

3) I'm 42. My first child will (if all goes well) be born sometime around the end of this year. I'm pretty sure that means I had "another decade of pre-childraising freedom" after my 20s. (OTOH, lots of people don't have a decade of pre-childraising freedom in their 20s.)
> - what should you do if your government demands you secretly backdoor a specific user?

They've got a warrant or a court order? OK.

> - what if your easiest recruiting channels yield a higher proportion of white males than other, costlier recruiting channels do?

If you're a good person, you try to correct for that. If you're a money-grubbing sociopath, you try to correct for that. This may sound unusual, but think about it from the sociopath's point of view: If other companies are neglecting some potential candidates, you can hire those people for less pay. Recruiting is cheap compared to salaries, so it's worth the upfront cost. In the long run, even if everyone is a money-grubbing sociopath, all demographics end up being paid the same.

> - if your startup is struggling to even survive, should you invest time in infrastructure that protects users' privacy from your employees?

Probably not. A dead company can't defend users' privacy very well. Also, assets (such as user data) tend to get sold off when a company shuts down. Best is the enemy of good, and all that.

> - how do you find nonprofits and companies that are aligned with your values and need your help?

Givewell.[1]

These are not hard questions to answer. More importantly: Your hypothetical course, even if taken by every software engineer, would not have prevented the Volkswagen emissions cheating. That was obviously wrong, but the people involved didn't care.

1. http://www.givewell.org/
From a shareholders' perspective this is probably great news. But with Square looking to IPO soon they're likely going to have to find a new CEO also -- there is no way that investors will take them seriously if Jack is running two different companies in two different spaces.
Was it a stern warning, loaded with gravitas, or was it accompanied with a wink that passed unnoticed by the corporate attorneys?

Bosch might have sold them the pistol, but VW is still the one that shot itself in the foot with it. But was the pistol pre-loaded with toe-seeking bullets, or did VW carefully aim at its own extremity before firing?

There is still some question in my mind as to how complete a defeat device package Bosch shipped. If there were several separate functions like LowestEmissions() and LowestFuelConsumption() and LowestMaintenance() and BestPerformance() and LowAmbientTemp() and HighAmbientTemp(), that's quite a bit different from DetectEmissionsTest() or OperateAsDefeatDevice(). Who was it that wrote the code to switch modes when an emissions test was detected?
The Most Instagrammed Locations per State in the US
This is a very common counter argument to software engineering as a discipline.

> But if I make a pet software project millions of people might decide to use it to "drive around town", and some portion will hurt themselves.

That is a legitimately unique aspect of software and deserves consideration.

> I think that if you build stuff for certain things (such as 1 ton objects zooming around at 70+ miles per hour), it's obvious. But what about financial software? What about social networks (privacy issues)?

Likely some portions of the system matter and some don't. Which ones likely require engineering judgement. For physical products it's pretty easy to make that call for a paper weight and for an airplane, but all the products in between need that decision. We are generally building software systems that are about as complex as a Black & Decker power drill. When designing something like that you need to make damn well sure you are not electrocuting the user, but if the gears break and it doesn't function you aren't hurting anyone. Therefore most drills are 'double insulated', but there is no backup for the actual function. In software we should make that same call. What is the consequence of failure? If it's small then we live with it. If it's not, then we should build a fail safe / backup system.

I'm super in favor of software engineering licensing and all that it entails, but I do think large swathes of software are completely immune because failure has no consequences. Your D&D utility is an example. Most open source licenses rightly have a clause that should protect them from civil lawsuits, much less prosecution.
Custom fields in tasks will be out in early 2016!
The first step towards PVS-Studio for C#
My argument isn't about using tools that reduce boilerplate through codegen or annotations, it's to use tools where boilerplate doesn't exist. Why do you need JPA? Why do you need EE? Chances are, you don't.
VeraCrypt is also vulnerable to this. Granted they've patched it, but they still share a very large code base.
24 TC Disrupt Startup Battlefield Startups in 5 Minutes
And the only way to get a cute Daihatsu Copen is to import directly from Japan. So many nice cars there that I wish they would export more and convert to right hand driving.
Richard Glossip and the End of the Death Penalty
The most constructive answer to your comment that I am able to formulate is: what the hell are you doing on Hacker News with this attitude?!
"Living in a country where political opponents are murdered, not just spied upon. Or else they are prosecuted for crimes they couldn't have possibly committed."

Your unstated presumption is that this doesn't happen here, and I think that's a presumption that up for debate. Not only that, but the surveillance engine is generally the precursor to any such more overt totalitarianism (as warned of by Thomas Drake, speaking of prosecuted for crimes not actually committed by the way).
> We programmers like being specific.

But above all, we like being pedantic. (Not you.) :)
Remember when Toyotas (made by a Japanese company) in the US were killing people on their own and no one could replicate it?
Hi Jason -

I work at Evernote and would like to look at your support ticket with our management team to figure out what happened. Will you please let me know your ticket number?

Thanks in advance. Please know that we're here to help.
I wouldn't read too much into it, Japan has a Western style constitution, and the idea of a universal right to free association didn't really start to coalesce until the mid-20th century. Japan's constitution happened to get ratified in 1947. If we had to do the US Constitution over, there would probably be freedom to associate codified.
And because coffee consumption tends to correlate with processed sugar consumption (which brings in its own list of adverse effects). And with various bad habits (overworking, lack of sleep, poor nutrition) that people tend to mask with their caffeine intake.
I have a Huawei Ascend P7. It's miles better than my last phone (LG G2 mini). I find the build quality to be very good. I had it survive a very bad fall. The performance is decent, not as good as modern flagships, but an awesome price to performance ratio (I got it for 180 dollars, it goes for 250 unlocked these days).

They did do a Volkswagen-style cheat on the FutureMark benchmark:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8403/examining-huaweis-benchma...

so yes, they might be on the "sketchy" camp.

But I've found most of the premium stuff from China to be as good or better than equivalents from other countries, my girlfriend has a Lenovo phone and it's excellent too.

Since I'm from Latin America, I don't have to cheerlead any American or Japanese or European phone brands (we have none), and I'm extremely price sensitive, so Chinese brands like Huawei or Lenovo are great news for us.
It's not random letters. It's random numbers encoded in base52. Because the number strings are encoded, they're probably not random at all.
Hello, World. – WIL WHEATON Dot NET
> auto-updates have goosed more windows systems on me than malware. I'm not even a sysadmin.

I would hazard to say that if you were a sysadmin, then this would not be the case.
What makes you say it is future proof?
That's exactly it :)
A link that might be of interest [0]. I haven't read the book, but this guy put a lot of thought into what it would take.
0. http://www.carfree.com/
Just to be clear, that article was posted on the Senator's website as "must read" material, but was not written by Bernie Sanders himself. The article was written by Ron Fournier, and published in the National Journal.
> is not practical for any non-small project in the real world with more than one developer.

This is not my experience of working with Haskell in the real world on a non-non-small project with (many) more than one developer.
Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on Git (2007)
I don't get the link between not wanting to outlaw Scientology and believing vaccination is a good idea. And I don't get how that stance is inconsistent. Care to explain?

I'm not familiar with the practices of scientologists, but the line is usually pretty clear for me. Are scientologists hurting other people? Are they guilty of hate crimes? Do my taxes pay for their beliefs? If yes, then it should be outlawed, if not then they should get their freedom of religion. And any middle ground should be treated by education. We often forget that a lack of education is what makes stupid people stupid and outlawing things won't make them any less stupid. But then again, even stupid people should own their body and mind, as long as they aren't hurting me or my family through their actions of course.

And on neo-nazi organizations, they are usually in the business of organized crime, or are guilty of hate speech. Once their actions are hurting other people, yes, they should be outlawed.

On the other hand outlawing the Nazi symbols or the Nazi propaganda, as it happens in Europe, is pretty stupid and indeed inconsistent, without also outlawing communism and its symbols and propaganda. But you see, China happened, being now a valuable western partner, so we prefer to be hypocritical instead.
> that people cannot receive any material or social (... respect from congregation, etc.)

That seems totally impossible. People donate for social prestige all the time (those silly bricks with people's names on them, placards in classrooms, etc. wouldn't exist otherwise)
It's not discrimination if you can change it.

The difference between someone with a college degree and without is the work they put in. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to base a hiring decision on. Your suggestion is like saying 'you shouldn't be able to discriminate based on work experience'. The difference is college is 4 years of reading books and taking tests vs 4 years of writing code.

You can argue which one is more valuable / relevant / useful, but they're just different kinds of experience. Not allowing that in a hiring decision is flat out unworkable.
San Francisco 2.0
You don't need, but they are free and wonderful.

Everything already configured and tested to work out of the box, including transactions.

Yes, you might get away with a smaller initial download with something else but the server is a onetime download and your deployed apps are small.
I am working as a NATO IT consultant. What I can say about it is - No Action Talk Only. There is only inertia and massive decission chain, a lot of people having own interests and hypocrisy of civilian NATO employees on amazingly huge level. I met only a few people with a good IT knowledge. For the rest - I really don't know who hired them. And the Code of Conduct over there is another level of hypocrisy - all bids are already set up. Corruption and nothing else.
"A computer science analogy to this would be if I gave you an uncompressed image and you had to develop a compression algorithm that made the image as small as possible, you could likely come up with a really good solution. But your algorithm most likely wouldn't do as well on any other image."

That analogy doesn't hold. It's more akin to developing two compression algorithms, one for the general case, and a specific algorithm which is used only when your image is detected for better than the general compression performance use case.

It is entirely fair to blame the manufacturers for this. Gaming emissions results required effort to accomplish, and is completely unethical from an engineering standpoint.
Oh yeah, give them a website to visit, the NSA most certainly won't know what websites their employees visit.

(99% of dns queries aren't encrypted at all)
Consuming 50% more fuel than 30MPG is 20MPG, not 22.5MPG: 30 miles divided by 1.5 gallons equals 20 miles/gallon.
This is purely a guess, but I'd imagine they boost posts (aka pay to display a post to more people), and show them to people who already like the page to collect initial CTR/Like/Share stats.

Then take the winner of that test and post to the rest of the people who like the page, where "organic reach" takes over.
Wordclock Redux
Vert.x is fantastic.

My honest opinion is that JVM folks love complexity though. It's a mix of popularity, job security and good marketing that allow the traditional bloat-powerhouses to remain popular while technologies like Vert.x remain criminally under-utilized (see the rest of this thread for evidence). I don't know how or if this will ever change, but the downside for the JVM ecosystem overall is that people associate the JVM with things like Spring and Hibernate rather than things like Vert.x. And that's a shame.
Mp4js: Parse and edit mp4 files in pure JS
I'll just leave something I posted to my Facebook a few months ago, because it seems relevant.

> A tip for future leaders: leadership means absorbing blame while deflecting success. All too often, I see leaders that do the opposite.

> When your team succeeds, make sure people know that it was a team effort. The team succeeded. Likewise, when your team fails, you should take full responsibility for it. It's not so-and-so's fault that s/he made a mistake, it's your fault for giving them the space to do it. I messed up.

> Onward and upward!

> (PS: Obviously this assumes a good environment, where leaders have close to full control over what they and the teams are doing. If that's not the case, then obviously you have issues that are more important than who gets the blame.)
A Day with Danny – Technology and Cerebral Palsy
Based on fiduciary responsibility to current Square shareholders, I can't believe he's allowed to do this.
Doesn't the rate of birth defects start to rise quickly as the man ages into their 30s?
Hm, how did they fork and change the license? Or are they just hoping the TrueCrypt authors never attempt to enforce their license?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shrin...
> Unlike [...] Evgeny Morozov, whose perspective is Belarussian, Turkle is a trusted and respected insider.

Forget Turkle, what on earth is the Belrusian perspective?
Very sleek site that brings back old memories.
Sync with Couchbase Using Only AngularJS and PouchDB
The Case for #DraftBrewster
This is probably an example of the non obvious shape of the reliability curve, which has a hump of failures early on, but then trails off. Effort to decrease reliability early on coincides with long term reliability.
If you put together the volume of extra sea ice gained around Antarctica, and the volume of land ice melted there, guess what? There is net melting of ice!

Grabbing one factoid out of context does not change the overall trend.
Forcing VW to release source code would not have prevented this. They could have simply released a different set code from what is actually running on the cars.

This is an extremely hard problem to work around. They could let you dump the binaries of the software running on an individual car, and then you could compile the source code and compare the resulting binaries, but how do you know the car isn't feeding you a fake binary dump? It seems like a catch-22: I can't think of any way around this problem short of tearing the car apart, cutting all the chips open, and physically verifying them under electron microscopes.

On the other hand, if emissions testing would actually test what's coming out of the tailpipe under normal driving conditions, then that would seem pretty foolproof.
Is anybody here using flow
I found this app: https://www.getflow.com/ - is anybody here using it? Any pros/cons? Feedback?
Apple has now updated their OS X page with information about El Capitan: https://www.apple.com/osx/
The 'Oh, Shit' Moment When Growth Stops
> For those not familiar with the DEC Alpha, it always ran what was basically a hypervisor/microkernel in firmware (called PAL code).

Gosh, I never realized, as a former Keeper of Alphas for scientific work, previously dependent on the GEC 4000 series <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000> for physics. I wonder how it compared with OS4000 Nucleus.

The 4000s made competing VAXen look a bit silly for our sort of data acquisition and analysis. Since they were pretty important for my publication record, it always amuses me to see microkernel-ish systems rejected out of hand. A colleague disproved the conventional wisdom that you needed a "spectrum database" to manage the data by just trusting the filesystem to manage directories. More recently I recall userspace filesystems being called generally toys (?), notwhithstanding huge, high performance PVFS2 installations, for instance.

> The DEC Alpha was a powerhouse in its day

Yes, and tragically under-appreciated in my sphere. I tried in vain to get the maintainer of the principal data reduction program in a different field to replace the bottleneck of the disk-based sort (written for a PDP-11). Each image would normally fit in cache and the whole dataset largely in memory, but that somehow wasn't relevant, contributing to "the computer is slow". (I think the sizes were 10MB and 1GB.)
>I doubt .. they are brainwashed and need an escape plan.

I don't know.

Have you seen the brainwashing program that GCHQ recruits go through? I'm positive that these groups have militarized the mind-control techniques that society has to offer - it is after all, what the 'warrior-elite classes' do with all of societys' technologies: weaponize it.
Boilerplate and annotations are two wildly different beasts on my understanding :

Boilerplate is things I have to repeat mindlessly every time I want to do something.

Annotations on the other hand usually is one single line of code.

Disclaimer : not a native English speaker although I am fairly sure about this.

Edit: look at hodao from the tomitribe GitHub account. Or DeltaSpike from Apache.
Do you think he ended up here purely by random chance? I find that laughable. He clearly intentionally seeked Russia for asylum, knowing that Putin won't give him to US. Do you think he's an idiot? He had to know perfectly well what the deal is. And nobody's keeping him here, I'd surely like him to go away and stop being Putin's PR boy. But he won't, and we all know the answer why.
Phishing is really more about web pages impersonating other web pages. I disagree that this functionality enables or facilitates phishing.
> outside of Research, which let's face it is not too significant on practical Windows

Well, WinRT (Ext-VOS), MIDL compiler for WP 8 (from Singularity toolchain), .NET Native, driver validation framework for DDK all started there.
Wasn't this the plot to The Beach (2000)?
Makes @sacca tweet from this morning kinda interesting.

https://twitter.com/sacca/status/649219170106605568
Because you can't go wrong with all things Spring (tm), amiright?
Great addition to the workflowy style ecosystem. I will definitely keep an eye on this one. When you plan OPML import support?