skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the majority of modifications are simply adjusting the calibration or lookup tables for things like fuel maps, enabling / disabling things like key left in ignition buzzers and the like, mostly data items rather than code modifications. There may be more adventurous modifications like adding launch control to a performance cars, but that may just be enabling existing code rather than adding new code.

My cars are old (1998) Nissan Skylines, who's ECUs are pretty basic, asides from killing the engine there's not much you can do to cause more issue than a mechanical modification like adding a larger turbo, or maintenance neglect. The ABS and traction control are handled by physically separate ECUs, though I imagine things are more integrated in the main drive train ECU in modern cars.

While I haven't modified the existing or written my own firmware to load on the ECU that mostly due to lack of time, one of them came from Japan with a Piggy Back ECU installed which intercepts the inputs / outputs to override the mapping of the OEM ECU to tune for other mechanical modifications. An alternative is to buy an aftermarket ECU or build a custom one, those tend to have less integrated safety features (stability control, etc.) than the OEM ones and integrate less well with the car's other systems, I'd expect them to cause more issues overall than relatively simple modifications of the OEM firmware.

I'm sure there are extremes where people may cause problems, but this kind of thing has been happening since cars have had computers so I doubt there's any great calamity around the corner.
> If you're targeting $150+/hr projects, you can't use online platforms to find clients.

Not true. I make $150/hr. The client found me online and we work entirely online. Furthermore, it is a deeply-discounted rate because I have 15% of the startup's shares.
IBM Plans to Acquire the Weather Company
Thanks for this list!

And even without: an IDE like NetBeans (and probably any major Java IDE) can revert to a certain stack frame and even apply code changes on the fly - up to a certain degree of freedom only, but okayish for normal programmer life, where you need this only rarely if you have many smaller scope unit tests in place.
Are you sure Amazon is not using smile as a pricing indicator? I.e., people who want to donate to charity maybe less price-conscious?

That's the reason I've not started using it. Online stores use all kinds of indicators (user agent, OS, number of searches for similar items, etc) to jack up prices when they think they can get away with it, and I suspect this metric is very relevant in that context.

I just donate to EFF and others directly.
Thanks for the rundown, that's pretty thorough.

Could they add a kind of 2FA when they ship product to the customer? Understandably, this would drive down the rate of buyers posting reviews, but could minimize astroturfing rings. In your confirmation email you get a link which can only be used to review that product, if product is subsequently returned, then weigh review less, specially if positive, if too many products are returned, remove reviews for those products.
That may be true for Success Academy but there are some truly awful charters out there. The problem is that what it means to be a charter school varies so much from state to state and even from district to district.
The title should say UK millenials. I'm not part of that "we".
Knowing some bouncers and bar tenders, they tend to have a dynamic level of skepticism. If you look 25-ish, that sort of slip probably won't deny you entry. If you look 20-ish, it may be more likely.

The difficulty here is that the incentives heavily favor allowing false negatives, and denying false positives. I know that in Virginia, the bar tenders were personally responsible if they served alcohol to anyone underage. And in a college town (where I was for quite some time in grad school), there are loads of underage kids trying to get into the bars, and the authorities would sometimes hire underage kids to test the bars.
"I sure wish I could have bought my Tesla from a dealer" - no one ever.
My homejoy username and password does not seem to work on the flymaids website.
Futures/Promises in the Land of Golang
I've witnessed two occasions in succession where "outsourcing" failed right in India where an Indian start up "outsourced" to a firm just in the next street. The usual suspects listed in the article like "Cultural mismatch", "Lack of face to face communication", etc., were not the factors in this case.

Lack of clear requirements specifications, payments agreed to on-paper milestones vs. payments against actual working code, insistence / payment of advance money to the tune of 50% even before any actual deliverables (Some firms don;t even start work with that. Their logic is that - start ups go bust more than they succeed and they do not want to wait till you succeed to get their money.), lack of technology awareness from the founders (founders were non-technical in the web domain), etc.,

The factor of cost arbitrage did not play any role here.

These were the learning points:
- They should have picked up a good firm based on known references rather than go with the cheap one based on a google search.

- Tie payments to working deliverables rather than abstract things like design sign off etc.,

- Track, monitor regularly

- Be aware of the technology you are outsourcing. If you are an enterprise IT consultant and you are going to outsource the web work. Be sure to read up on Php or whatever technology they use and ask/think through relevant questions/ improvements

Edit: Modified the list into bullet points.
While I don't agree with duncan_bayne's view, what you've done (previously to this comment) is taken the most uncharitable possible interpretation of his words, and then written a baiting, reactionary reply to him. Any time you want to write "Wow, you value a persons life so little that you would let them die if they didn't work." you should probably stop and consider a more tactful approach that consists mostly of asking whether you are interpreting what they are saying correctly.
Luke Skywalker, Sith Lord
How to download a web browser without any web browser
Some days ago I found an old computer and wanted to download some software but I realized there were no web browsers installed. In addition, this computer has only one working USB port, so I cannot insert devices without disconnecting the keyword. How can I solve this situation?
This is alarming! Do update if/ when you hear from Homejoy folks.
How to turn bad habits into powerful opportunities for personal growth
This thread is full of people saying "every study in human history has shown drinking is associated with an increase in aggression" and normally thoughtful level-headed hackers saying "my limited non-representative experience doesn't sync with that, what you're saying is ridiculous and absurd and I refuse to believe it because it doesn't support my habits"

I'd be interested to see what kind of violence it's associated with; I would guess certainly domestic violence is a big part.
Mark Zuckerberg: net neutrality is a first-world problem
Yes, we now use Punycode.
The Biggest Content Marketing Trends to Focus on in 2016
The point is that wherever that happens, it's an obvious flaw with the method returning the null, and can also be caught by static analysis. It means that in general, the problem is avoided.

Yes, it's not ideal, it's still a flaw that should be caught at compile-time, but it's not a big real-world problem, as returning null by accident instead of an option is a pretty rare bug.

The much more common bug (you didn't realize no return value was a case), the Option is a good counter to.

No, it's not a perfect solution, but it's not useless either.
There are even more truly awful publicly funded schools out there too. Harlem have their share. That doesn't mean there aren't good public schools too. But that's not a way to discuss this IMO.

Teaching is hard, getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment.

Charterschools are good because they allow for differentiation in education. We don't want anyone to be educated exactly the same way. Thats not a good thing.

That charterschools allow for people to take advantage of them is another discussion and can be solved in many different ways.

Instead of just critiquing the fact that they can be misused perhaps it would be more constructive to discuss how to make sure snake oil salesmen doesn't take advantage of the system.

Just like we do with other businesses in general.
Doing SaaS Cancellation Interviews
>More than firing is due here - people should be going to jail for criminal fraud.

How about they prove criminal fraud before we talk about locking people up?
Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
Earned? Accrued maybe, but I don't think earned is the appropriate word.
- union and intersection types
-- I'll have to read up on this

- an elegant and powerful representation of tuple and function types
-- Okay, Kotlin could do with this

- reified generics
-- This is apparently expensive on the JVM: http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2014/12/m10-is-out/

- the cleanest solution to the problem of null
-- I think saying that `String? x = "abc"` is cleaner than `var b: String? = "abc"` is subjective.
-- Does Ceylon have Safe Casts? https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/null-safety.html

- awesome modularity
-- Something I'll need to look into

- a language module [that] completely abstracts the underlying runtime, and offers a set of elegant APIs that vastly improve on those available natively
-- I guess the improvement in abstraction comes from the Reified Generics
-- Have you got any examples of where the API is superior to that of the Kotlin one? For example, with Kotlin's extension functions Java File object has been extended with a readLines() function that returns all of the lines of a File as a List. I was impressed when I saw that. Underneath it is doing the usual BufferedReader and InputStream boiler plate work that you would normally write in Java.

- a language specification
-- https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/
Lisa is organizing a data viz meetup in Berlin and has a ton of interesting visualizations on her website as well, make sure to check those out.
Why mobile payments in Southeast Asia are about to take off
Probably because more people saw the last star wars film opening weekend than have watched doctor who in its entire history.
VIM and Python – A Match Made in Heaven
Here Are the 10 Newest Student VCs at Rough Draft Ventures
000webhost breached in March 2015 – 13M records accessed
South Africa is indeed a special case, and quite far from the stereotype of "mostly war". The late 1980s in SA before the transition from "the white European-style government" were ... troubled, but not actually in civil war.

The last time there was an actual shooting war inside South Africa was the Anglo-Boer war, which ended in 1902.
About time! As a fan of the sharing economy for both transportation and hospitality, never really thought that solar was in the cards- (guess I always pictured a single house with panels not a shared/subscription model- interesting to know it is something available to me). Cool find.
Not all states have inspections.
What you found is called IDOR https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2010-A4-Insecure_Dire...
Am I missing something? If I understand, it doesn't emulate the Z80 processor? And it depends on some "extension" ( http://litdev.co.uk/ ) not just "Small Basic." And I can't find the link to the source to get the idea how the code looks like.

And for my taste Small Basic appears ugly for a beginner's language, the "Hello World" is:

TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

Compare that to

PRINT "Hello World"

from the old times. I consider the later much much nicer.
Windows has had this capability for at least 8 years with "time travel tracing" (or iDNA tracing), which produces a dump file that can be traversed back and forward in WinDBG or Visual Studio. Very useful for figuring out what caused unexpected state in complex integration scenarios with timing-dependent bugs. http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-time-travel-tracing-...
Download browser installer on a second computer

Hook the usb port to a hub, then hook the keyboard and usb stick in. or if it has gui unhook the keyboard and use the mouse to copy the file then eject the drive and hook back in the keyboard.

If that doesnt work you zip up the browser installer and null-modem the file over with two modems and a phone wire.
API Design: How to Implement Search, Browse, Select
This is only true for people who thoroughly understand what they are buying. This is very rarely the case for people hiring programmers. The only people who are capable of hiring programmers are other programmers (and often not even then). Everybody else is totally incapable of hiring programmers or distinguishing between incompetent, lousy, mediocre, or possibly good candidates. That is why the boss of a technology company (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle) has to be a programmer, or else sooner or later, the technology firm will crash and burn.
ChowNow Partners with UberRUSH to Bring Delivery to 3,000+ Restaurants
Isn't Burma Myanmar these days?
When you are lying on purpose, you have to make sure whatever you say is accomplishes whatever made you lie in the first place. It has to make you look good, make it seem like something is not your fault and so on.

Therefore, you need to consciously validate whatever your brain outputs when you ask for some bullshit to "remember". Maybe this creates a delay or makes people be conservative in what they tell you for fear of accidentally saying something inconsistent.

If you had a false memory, however, your brain could make up details as it goes along and you would just say them aloud, without feeling nervous or consciously thinking about consistency and validity at all.
In an expansion[1](pdf) the classical Bugs Bunny at Disney study[2](pdf), over several leading interviews participants added more and more detail. So while it would probably work with an accidentally and freshly implanted memory; it could probably be defeated by either purposely pushing for sense recall, or perhaps accidentally over the course of many attempts to fix the "memory".

Knowing the technique is probably half way to defeating it in all honesty, as long as a person has time to prepare (or be prepared).

[1]http://eprints.port.ac.uk/11286/1/filetodownload,62616,en.pd...

[2] https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/BraunPsychMarket02.pdfhttps...
I wonder if we are going to discover similar emissions skirting in over manufacturer's vehicles soon.
I don't think that's entirely true. There are been plenty of counter-culture examples of people mostly opting out of that system. It's hard, but really it's hard relative to the system they are opting out of, which is why we have the system in the first place. Ultimately, nobody is keeping anyone here, so people have the option to emigrate to a location with less oversight and taxes. This may be hard, but it's possible. I think this is a bug distinction between "real" slavery, and how people equate taxation as slavery. There is implicit acceptance of the system by staying within the region where the system is the prevailing way of doing business.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM API Made Easy for the Java Developer
Website gives a 503 error. Perhaps the real world struck back?
General Motors - which knew about their broken ignition switches for over a decade - got away with a 900$m fine. That defect killed at least 124 people.
Well, it's a Catholic basilica in a mostly Gothic style that's being built for 100 years. It incorporates some ideas that were new for its time, but so did the Notre Dame (flying buttresses).

I guess traditionalists are not against all new ideas, they're more against thinking that old = bad.
I have a 30K collection of ebooks, 90% PDF's. Use BRISS[1] to crop to optimize them for the screen space on my 1080p Nook HD+ (jailbroken running CM with "PDF Reader" by Lieo Hi-Dev).

Everyone's definition of "quality" varies, but this has worked well for me for the past 2-odd years; undoubtedly there are better tablets, but the Nook HD+ struck a cost/benefit sweet spot for me. If my Nook HD+ broke tomorrow I'd probably replace it with a 1080p Lenovo Tab2 A10 tablet for 180USD.

[1] http://briss.sourceforge.net/
LoopWall – discover your new wallpaper now(Android)
I'm surprised that in the US their sales didn't take nosedive, I take that to indicate their customer base has a very enthusiastic and fundamental core... Which is good for them. If this does not shake their confidence, then nothing will, and if this is the case worldwide, VW will survive this scandal largely unscathed, relative to the size of this scandal. For a while it seemed like their viability was very much in question, now it seems beside some large write downs and some lean years, they will survive.
Bioinspired Robotics: Swarm Collectives, with Radhika Nagpal
I wish CEOs stopped being rewarded for screwing up.

CEOs typically aren't rewarded for screwing up, they get rewarded for signing up. Any severance package is most likely negotiated before they they take the job so as to get them to show up in the first place.

Now why it's that way is a different discussion. Want me as CEO of GroupOn or Yahoo? Damned straight you're giving me a severance package whether I screw up or not, otherwise I'm taking a less risky job. But CEO of VW? WTH does the company need to offer a severance package for that gig?
Even when developers are included in the decision, any decision other than 'use outsourcing' is met with "But, $10/hr!" by management and game over. Been there; had that done to me.
I read that statement more as, "If you refuse to pay electronically" than "if you have no electronic means of payment."

I know it's contrary to the literal meaning, but it feels like the unstated assumption is that you would only pay in cash if you must, not out of a general preference for privacy.
>I wish CEOs stopped being rewarded for screwing up.

They're honouring his contract, not "rewarding" him.

>and it refuses to blame the CEO

How much "blame" can the guy take? VW is huge. It's unlikely he knew about the issue, and even more unlikely that he was "in" on it. Is he responsible, as CEO, for the issue? Yes. Hence, he resigned.
First off, I think this technique is completely true, in my own experience. However, I think this isn't the end-all lie detector, in that you have to know what to have the subject tell a story about.

Take the issue of national security (in the USA). To get a national security job, you'll have to go through a lie detector test[0], where they'll ask you a ton of questions. Say I'm lying about my name. Do you ask a story about my name? Say you ask about my childhood instead. If I was lying about my childhood, I'd tell stories that were as closely aligned with real life as possible, and change as few details as I needed to. A story about playing in the park in the summer with my parents doesn't change a whole lot if it's in North America or Europe.

Bottom line is, I think this method works, with the caveat that you have to know the event or thing that they would be lying about. Trying to find out if a spouse killed their significant other? Check, you can ask the stories around their alibi. Trying to figure out if James Bond is going to sell national secrets? What story are you going to ask about?

[0] http://federalnewsradio.com/federal-drive/2012/12/what-feder...
The site is using pale text on a default background, so it looks fine with my white-on-black GTK theme, but I imagine is unreadable for most of the world.

Many sites make the mistake of mixing default and non-default colours, but this is the first time I've seen it work in my favour ;) Presumably most devs aren't doing any kind of contrast analysis on their CSS, and are only testing with a black-on-white colour scheme.

Of course, I could avoid this problem by giving up my preferred colour scheme; but why do that when I can walk the DOM after page load, and invert all of the low-contrast colours? http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-dotfiles/branches/master/con... ;)
The rule is: the guys who can sign checks, all sign them for each other. No other logic need be applied.
Cleaner Mistakes Installation at Italy's Museion Bozen-Bolzano Museum for Trash
I'm assuming it's not sticky, otherwise you'd be covered in flies as you walked around.
Why bother to find a place where direct sales are legal? You're already acting as a middleman, use the laws to your advantage. Buy franchises for all the car brands, and just don't keep inventory. Do everything build-to-order and online. From the manufacturers point-of-view, you're just normal dealer.

Heck, this is basically what I did the last time I bought a car. My local dealership in MA treated me like shit, so I called up one in NH, told him over the phone what I wanted. When I got there, he had the order ready to go. I signed some paperwork and gave them a deposit. 6 weeks later my car showed up. Make that an app and save me a drive to NH and I'll pay $1000 premium.
The thing is that they never asked you to spend time finding the bugs; they’re not obligated to give you something.
I argue that hash substring search activities (vanity hashes, partial collisions, full collisions, etc.) should be brought into the major password-cracking projects - economy of scale, etc.

In a way, password cracking is a specific subset of hash substring search -- in which we are searching for the entire hash instead of a substring.
A bad manager IS a flaw in the agency model!
I'm one of the Souper developers and can offer a few pointers that may be more helpful than the github repo. Here's a somewhat recent blog post showing things that Souper can do:

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1252

Here's a talk I gave at the University of Washington last winter (before Souper did synthesis):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux0YnVEaI6A

Recently we've been teaching Souper to use dataflow facts such as LLVM's known bits and demanded bits. Perhaps interestingly, Souper can also teach LLVM how to compute these facts more precisely:

http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-September/089904.html

One really common question about Souper is "why operate on LLVM IR instead of instructions?" One of the main answers is "so that we can interact with dataflow analyses." This isn't something that previous superoptimizers have done. It seems to be working out really well.
I think the phrase is used in this context

The dispute began in June when ADP, a 50-year-old payroll company,
This makes more sense economically. Physical products in general degrade in value over time. Cash by itself does not degrade in value over time. Using cash to represent products is a sort of mismatch. If the products' value degrades so should the value of the instrument representing said product.

I don't know why they use negative savings interest rates when the government can provide the same service through QE or lowering loan interest rates.
Well, they also put your name on their "thank you" page and sent you a nice email! What else could you possibly want?

It might be a multi-million dollar business, but it's not like these hacks can actually cost them millions of dollars. Verizon has had employees giving out personal details to people on the phone for years, and they're still happy to do it even for the director of the CIA: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/the_doxing_tr...
Why should gambling be taxed more than anything else?
Yes, and that is really important when it comes to language use. The more people who use the language, the more it can develop and the more libraries that can be built for it.

The other advantage of Kotlin is that it builds on top of the existing Java code base. Java has had decades to build up an ecosystem of frameworks and libraries. Kotlin builds on these with excellent interop.
OCaml had a time-traveling debugger for 20 years now. Good job catching on.
(to be fair it got full stack back trace only since 2000 so far later than Perl for that).
17 ridiculously creative hiring campaigns