skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This crushingly intense focus on STEM is shortsighted. The root of the problem is a lack of clarity of writing, both in english and in code.

I think lack of clarity in writing -- either in code or in natural language -- isn't the root of the problem, its a symptom of a lack of good, clear general analytical process. Lots of programmers I've met are great at analyzing how to implement a very explicitly described thing in code, but aren't great at analyzing domain information to determine how to solve a problem.

I don't think that STEM-focused education is bad for this, but I think that developing generalized analytic skills seems to be helped by having experience applying analysis in varied and not-closely-related contexts, particularly contexts where the problems are often fuzzily defined and you need to do work to discover, or impose, structured order to compose a response.

Collegiate English departments can be an important venue for that, but I don't think uniquely so -- so can Philosophy or social sciences departments. (But its all highly dependent on the particular institution, professor, and courses chosen.) I'm personally partial to legal writing, specifically (often addressed in undergraduate coursework in law-focussed political science courses) as a vehicle for developing this skill, but then I'm a programmer who's also a law geek, and who was a political science major, so, there's probably some bias there.
The main innovation here is battery life. You can do most of these things now with two-way pager technology.[1] There are a lot of commercial air conditioning units and vending machines phoning home that way right now. They all have AC power, so battery life isn't an issue.

Two way pagers have more or less died out for humans, but for M2M (machine to machine) communication they are alive and well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX
This is a fantastic interview question.
I agree re: good Chromebook security. (I also don't worry too much about security when using an iPad.)

I specifically only use a conventional laptop when I need to use IntelliJ or otherwise do local development.

I think that computer related crime will increase and using more secure devices, when possible, makes a lot of sense.
Generally it's the lawyers that put paper in front of the CEO, saying: 'Sign this." They are supposed to get it right.

If he's annoyed about it, there will be a new job opening in the Facebook legal department.
I didn't insist anything. I simply suggested reading about carrying capacity. It's a relevant topic to population control, and it could broaden his understanding of the issue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470117
There's a great talk on this [1] by Raymond Hettinger where he argues that style guides (e.g. PEP8) are no alternative to thinking hard about the code. Blindly following rules (like a bot would do) just gives a false sense of security that it's good code.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M
I'm getting a 502 from CloudFlare, so maybe not?
Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent in Fortran
Why Urhotspot destroys foursquare
Go, of course. Or is it Rust this week? I forget..
5 Ways LinkedIn Can Boost Your App Downloads
In a parallel development, a hybrid pigeon, hawk, and roadrunner—the "pigeawkrunner"—has emerged in the same environments as the coywolf. Reports that the coywolf's attempts to catch the pigeawkrunner frequently backfire, resulting in deadly if amusing rock-falls, are as yet unsubstantiated.
Apps dope!! Love it!! Use it all the time dude
Innoppl.com – Reborn and Reinvented
Just because I'm nosy, how many individual returns did you generate? I've returned three motherboards in a row (all from the same malfunctioning batch) that cost over $150 each, and never got a warning or whatever.

So for less than $100, I cannot imagine why they'd take this action. Is it a lot of returns on inexpensive things (e.g. 20 $5 items).
he should get someone under 30 to do that for him
This is why I don't get the fuss about http.

It's basically just gopher and sgml, just named differently! (and without the added value of search)
In regards to superoptimization, that actually is the case. See this blog post about the use of Souper in LLVM [1].

[1]: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1146
Ask HN: Zoho vs. Hubspot – what do you prefer?
About to start using a CRM platform and wanted to know what system people prefer.
They should crawl the website x-times a day (sample) to check if you ate displaying their ads. Or release a binary blob so that you can host their ads on your server (which reports back to their ad network once per hour)
Phirtual Bees looks awesome
Hasil gol-gol liga italia
This issue is addressed in the article:

Whether the coywolf actually has evolved into a distinct species is debated. Jonathan Way, who works in Massachusetts for the National Park Service, claims in a forthcoming paper that it has. He thinks its morphological and genetic divergence from its ancestors is sufficient to qualify. But many disagree. One common definition of a species is a population that will not interbreed with outsiders. Since coywolves continue to mate with dogs and wolves, the argument goes, they are therefore not a species. But, given the way coywolves came into existence, that definition would mean wolves and coyotes should not be considered different species either—and that does not even begin to address whether domestic dogs are a species, or just an aberrant form of wolf.

In reality, “species” is a concept invented by human beings. And, as this argument shows, that concept is not clear-cut. What the example of the coywolf does demonstrate, though, is that evolution is not the simple process of one species branching into many that the textbooks might have you believe.
Don't disagree on much.

What if the cost of backing out a change actually was zero or close to zero? What if the prospective change actually was run on all platforms with all of the historic input the function has ever seen?

What happens when our undo buffer and our log of refactorings gets checked into version control. Not a log of pure text, but a log of semantic transformations.

Of course bad patches make it into the tree. Right now all the bad patches require human intervention. I am saying that it might be economically advantageous to let in some of the bad patches automatically so it takes less work.

For most codebases I see in industry, simply rejecting a patch on lint failure, lack of tests or documentation would effectively freeze most trees.
One interesting thought for me is, do you have areas of code where you suspect a good optimization exists but are unable to find it or justify the presumably exhaustive time to uncover it?
On the other hand people have curious tastes. I enjoy some "stinky" cheeses but I do not enjoy "stinky" tofu. In a way, this illustrates that what is palatable and refined is very whimsical.

In the middle ages, for example, sweet wines were drunk on special occasions. Today, not many people would think too highly of sweet wines. So tastes change. The point is there is no good and better wine, just wines you like more and ones you like less, but for no discernible reason, other than present "tastes."
Exploding foil detonators have been used for decades in nuclear weapons. So in retrospect, it seems obvious. But hindsight is always 20/20.
Buffalo’s ACV Auctions wins $1M
> We just don't want them stalking our children in the local park.

Exactly. I'm all for conservation, so long as it doesn't lead to humans becoming part of the food chain again.
OK, this is one of those times where infosec people get annoyingly close to "appealing to authority."

This. It's not just "close to" appealing to authority, it's straight up appealing to authority. And yes, it's a common practice in the infosec community. The whole security industry is built on a reputation system. It pays to remember that the number of exploits and vulnerabilities etc. in commonly used software that are reported on practically a daily basis came out of the same reputation based system.
Bridge the Gap Between San Francisco and Berlin
What are good companies or teams for developers/engineers/scientists, short builders, to bridge the gap between San Francisco and say Berlin?

I am a senior full stack engineer originally from Germany and been working in the valley for a while. With my next gig I want to have a bridge to my home country while staying in the tech scene of San Francisco. What are my options?
What it is like to work in a startup?
Foursquare totally blows! How does urhotspot destroy it (shouldn't be to hard)?
Mitigating Spoofed Emails – Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Explained
Related news: The Internal Revenue Service is using StingRays:

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/258209-irs-head-...
Beware the Rise of the Pseudo-Intellectual
The operating system I work on https://webconverger.com/ I feel is just as secure as Chrome OS.

It self updates once installed (you can also downgrade if needed!) and we also have the entire rootfs in https://github.com/webconverger/webc for easy review. We https://webconverger.org/wireshark/ official Firefox releases to ensure it doesn't chat to third parties.

https://webconverger.org/blog/2015/ChromeOS_versus_Webconver...
It's trivial on HVM as well

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-09/xen-feature-dete...
But... it doesn't have Quicken. And he just said that his grandfather needs Quicken. I, uh, you didn't even address that part!
There aren't any, that one is new. You can play with the Firebase or Algolia systems though.
Hi, thanks for your honest feedbacks. No, I didn't mean that they didn't read my application. That's a joke. You misunderstood.

We have 8 persons is because we have a seed round already and we want to run fast. I am learning how to balance the cost with the speed of development. But I don't think the amount of people directly equal to the cost you have. :)

Thanks for your information about the team size you have seen in YC. But I don't think that's the reason we got rejected. Will consider how to match the development speed with the size though.
That EasyPrivacy apparently even blocks self hosted first-parts solutions is really bad. They are the good guys.
That must have been a different usenet than the one I was using, which was full of people like you with names like Farty McTwatwaffle.
Is there a summary of the rights issues? I did some basic googling but didn't come up with anything.
Urhotspot is the world's first truly anonymous social check-in app. No one bothers to check-in on foursquare, yelp, or facebook. Urhotspot solves this problem by doing it automatically, in the background, and it's safe because it's completely anonymous!
In another comment, he says "user/process/thread security in UNIX/POSIX/etc. is bullshit weak sauce, sadly."

Geofft expounds some more: On Android, questionable apps have direct access to the entire kernel system call interface, as well as to other OS features. Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good.

I'm not sure if these are related, nor how iOS avoids it. The answer is probably in here: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

FWIW, I've heard Googlers familiar with it refer to Android as a pile of crap, as well.
Unknown risks are priced in. You just can't really tell how much you should discount because the risks are, well, unknown. If that DNA company from last week would have been public, with one class of shares, and I had bought shares two weeks ago - well, I price them with one of the components being 'there might be some colossal skeleton in the closet' (or take Enron two weeks before the SHTF). It's not like I 'priced it wrong', at least not in any common meaning of the term; because it would basically redefine 'correct pricing' to 'higher realized profit at some point' and would make the concept of 'price' something that can only be assessed ex post.

It doesn't mean that the non (or lesser) voting shares are priced wrong; in fact, by definition, they are priced at what the market values them.

Also, different classes of shares aren't exactly 'new' or 'unusual'. http://www.slideshare.net/nimishhalkar/a-brief-history-of-pr... claims that the first preferential shares were issued in 1836 (yes, it's a different kind of 'preferential' than what we're talking about, but it's still a species of the genus 'share differentiation') E.g. they're a very common vehicle for structuring profit sharing in several civil law jurisdictions I happen to know of.
> right now Sublime offers everything Atom offers but built on a C++ engine.

Oh come on now, that's really exagerating.
Posto: Thank Facebook birthday wall wishers with one click
I think Schneier is arguing that if companies were liable for their disregard of even minimal security standards, they might pay you more to help finding vulnerabilities.
You must really enjoy going through threads to say the same negative thing over and over. This is exactly why I can't stand Hacker News.
Amazon Launches ‘Pay with Amazon’ Buttons for Mobile Apps
totally missed this image. They did get it in there!
Mm, I was actually around here when we hit peak Facebook Connect (I think it was when Spotify launched in the US with no other auth method), and I call bullshit. It was never conventional wisdom on HN that you should delegate auth to Facebook. There were some people advocated that, and then some people who would loudly decry how stupid that was, but there was never consensus.
I haven't needed to use regex. I assume it works ... why not?

But Atom's project search / search & replace have a coulple amazing features I have seen before. E.g., the search result updates dynamically as you edit files. Plus, it shows the proposed search/replace in a nicely colored diff output inline in the search results, before performing the replace.
I'm done responding to you since you've chosen to be a dick throughout this thread rather than have a productive conversation.

If literally anyone else wants to chat, feel free to ping me on other channels.
Why are first-party analytics like pwiki blocked? They are the good guys... it's like reading the server log, except you get also the screen resolution and a few more infos.

I don't mind if a website owner gets that stats for himself. What I (and a growing number of people) mind is that huge corporations collect that stats and then track me down and crunch the data to show me "personalised ads" (of products I already bought) and categorise as a person of interest group XY and then selling that data including my email address to evil spammer YZ.
I think it's a reasonably recent addition (last few months). You can also click the domain suffix after an article title to see all pages submitted from that source (e.g., all articles from The Atlantic, etc).
A new species resulting from human destruction of wildlife.
Pwiki (self hosted version), it is pretty similar to Google Analytics.
Welding is also very strong, but it has limitations and weaknesses.
Dual-class voting structures have been around forever. Ford and Berkshire Hathaway are two prominent examples. Historically, they've been relatively rare, and the non-voting shares don't trade at much of a discount. It's rare that individual shareholders get to exercise their voting rights anyway.

The interesting trend now is that so many tech companies have dual-class supervoting shares. It sends the message that a few titans of industry basically make all the decisions, and everybody else is along for the ride. Which is probably where we are, economically, right now, but seems disheartening.
This quote did not wash with me.

“...Because the confidentiality of these communications among scientists is essential to frank discourse among scientists, those documents were not provided to the Committee,” the agency told Nature. “It is a long-standing practice in the scientific community to protect the confidentiality of deliberative scientific discussions....”

If Hillary Clinton has to air her dirty laundry as a paid official then other paid Gov employees, which includes NOAA, have to as well.
The comment to which I replied said Quicken Online was no substitute according to the mother. Maybe it's no substitute in sheer power, but still a passable substitute? The elderly benefit from giving up some power in exchange for less system maintenance.

Having an elderly family member struggle to stay up on Windows is super sad to watch and try to help with. I personally definitely wish that I had been more proactive migrating my grandfather to a more locked-down system when he was slightly younger and had a better capacity to adapt.

If the grandfather really is elderly, like older than 75 or 80, I would push in the direction of asking the question "Does he really need Quicken anyway, or maybe he's at a point where he could give up that responsibility, or compromise with Quicken Online?"
The hacker community needs to come together and release an open source stingray unit that citizens can easily build for cheap...then sit outside their local police department, judges houses and record all their private calls made to their spouses. Imagine how quick these stingray devices would be come illegal and how fast phone calls would be encrypted. Turn about is fair play.
I didn't follow the last sentence. Does every pull request get reviewed by a human before merge? At what stage does the human rejection happen?

The smart deep learning bot can determine if a branch is "clean", but it surely can't determine if it's correct.
The "investors" suing are just working with/for attorneys that extort massive legal fees and damages from public companies for a living. This case has nothing to do with the underlying conduct, which was merely a clerical error. These attorneys are one of the big reasons that unicorns are staying private.

The most famous of these bottom-feeding attorneys, Bill Lerach, built an estimated net worth of $700 million [1] by creating exactly these kinds of nonsensical shareholder lawsuits against public companies. He also earned a short prison stint and a $7.5M fine for bribing shareholders to become plaintiffs in 150 of the cases he filed. Here is a fascinating video [2], entitled The Rise and Fall of Bill Lerach.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-12/convicted-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYIC9GU9OeM
Possibly useful factoid - an iPad with a USB->Ethernet adaptor plugged into the usb port adaptor from the camera connection kit happily detects the internet connection and negotiates a DHCP lease. (Caveat, I haven't tried this since maybe mid 2013 or so...)
Never heard of these being called "coywolf", but it's been known for a while that eastern coyotes are partly mixed with wolves. Good for them, too. Western coyotes are kind of wimpy. Now if we could breed the coyote with various bears, North America might start to rival Africa for impressive and fearsome predators.
What about application performance monitoring? Usual SaaS solutions use tracking solutions similar to Google Analytics (and are blocked by ad blockers).
Your explanation that Ryan is jealous of Android's popularity doesn't make sense to me. This is a guy that has been working in security for some time, on both ends of the public / private infosec space [1]. Why would he be jealous of Android, but not ChromeOS?

Someone else expounded earlier: "On Android, questionable apps have direct access to the entire kernel system call interface, as well as to other OS features. Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good."

I don't think it's reasonable to ask for pointers on how to root an Android device in a public forum, and the size of the attack surface seems to me like a rather reasonable measure of a system's security.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lackey
By the way, we love team discussion and each member is valuable to our team. We only have 2 co-founders though. More people means more help to us, not necessary more trouble as you think. At the end of day, even our product fail, we still have a great team to start the next chapter. :)
Merging Chrome OS with Android means that now it will have access to the humongous ecosystem of App Developers, Platform Engineers, OEM's, ODM's, cheap ARM chipsets, a gazillion of tiny hack shops across China, Taiwan and India and test labs. And more in the form of an established brand name.

Android is bent and tested in unthinkable ways due to its reach. Let's see if Chrome OS is up to it.
Is this some sort of elaborate troll?
It take a somewhat more privileged network position to MITM a 4G connection from your phone than "some guy with a wifi pineapple" impersonating some wifi base station your phone already trusts. It's easy enough to set up a wifi radio which says: "You wanna connect to 'Netgear'? Or 'Starbucks Free Wifi'? Sure - I can be that for you!". At least if I'm using 4G at Starbucks you'd need to be sitting on a backbone or in front of redtube^h^h^h^h^h^h^h wikipedia.com's servers to MITM me...
There's a greasemonkey script that replaces the video with a local player/html5/video plugin: http://isebaro.com/viewtube/?ln=en

I use it with the mpv option and mozplugger. It seems to work quite well.
A $99.99 Surfboard Upends the Industry
Bubonic plague confirmed in Crook Co. teen after hunting trip
There are some legitimate reasons to be concerned, though. GMOs aren't inherently dangerous to human health or inherently environmentally destructive. But they do let producers do things faster and more extreme than they could do via conventional breeding techniques.

They've used those conventional techniques to reduce crop diversity, and select for things like uniform time to grow and uniform size/shape to make mechanical processing easy, over selecting for things like nutrition and flavor.

Is there any good reason to believe that the increased power GMO techniques give them won't be used to go even farther in those directions?

With great power comes great responsibility. I'm skeptical that the big food companies are responsible enough for GMO, and with government food regulation more determined by industry lobbying than by actual science I have little faith that the government will do anything to make sure GMO techniques are only used for good.
Robot Buses Are Coming to America, to Pave the Way for Driverless Cars
True, but we don't count posts as dupes unless the story has had significant attention in the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and arguably there hasn't been significant attention since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530427.
I think parts of what the news establishment does are worth defending. Some parts are definitely despicable. I do not stand wholeheartedly behind them.

But as I said in another comment, how else would you have any idea about what happens around the world? Do you see no value whatsoever in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Economist? I'm not talking about The Sun, Fox News or Russia Today.

I see a value in organizations that have the funds to pay for investigative journalism. A recent example is the private jet scandal within the Swedish manufacturing company SCA.[1] The newspaper Svenska Dagbladet ran a series of articles about how the upper management at SCA misused the company's private jets, costing the company loads of money. Unsurprisingly the shareholders were not happy and many key persons had to resign because of this.

Had it not been for the articles in Svenska Dagbladet, how would the shareholders ever find out about this misuse of the company's resources?

[1] http://www.thelocal.se/20150123/one-of-swedens-most-powerful...