skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I realize that f.lux has a small and passionate group of users. And if it works for you -- use it!

But I find the constant drama around the product to be absurd.

A wealthy California couple that previously got famous for refusing to give their fingerprint while attempting to buy a new BMW in cash spends six years making this product? And now their complaint is that you can't use your fingerprint to authorize installation of it via the app store?

The cherry picked research and weasel word phrasing and the constant bugs and updates -- all so I can get used to it and then lose access every time Apple releases a new OS? I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that running a piece of software is going to prevent acne. Though that's what their website says.

There are other ways to reduce the amount of blue light entering your skull in the twenty minutes before bedtime. You can turn down the brightness. You can turn on lights in the room. You can turn off the device altogether and make love to your partner, assuming you can get him or her to turn off the damn phone, too.

But f.lux -- it's time to get real. You've had six years. You haven't managed to get a single TV, Device, Platform Vendor or Lighting manufacturer to license this "patented" product of yours. The attention game isn't working. Find a dev who can fix the product and find a product manager who can sell it.

Edit: I'd appreciate refutation in lieu of downvotes. Blame Apple all you want but where's the Android version? If there were so many significant health benefits to be had, you'd think they'd be working on hitting the larger market instead of playing this narcissism game. At least get the damn thing running on a Kindle if you're worried about bedtime reading. But nope, just Cydia and constant drama.
Fossil Group Acquires Wearable Maker Misfit for $260M
I think it has to be something to do with the binary component. I can't see this being an issue if they'd delivered all source code in their project and required users to build the entire thing.
See, this is an obvious win.
A technology invented a long time ago that still isn't powering things like the inventor imagined it?
This is a really good analysis. I think that as it stands, the best hope for filling these jobs is to get a highly talented postdoc who will accept this role in exchange for assistance with his or her academic career aspirations (another way to do it is more insidious, which is where a PI stretches out a doctoral student's completion time to hang on to his or her talented and cheap programmer a few more years).

Of course, this means getting authorship (doesn't have to be first, but it needs to be there), recommendation letters, and so forth. It is also a temporary situation, since what is happening here is that the postdoc is doing software development for well below market rate in order to get a boost in climbing an academic career ladder.

Unfortunately, this scenario makes it even less appealing for a software developer who isn't part of the academic ladder. Because they aren't getting any special boost, career-wise, it just becomes a demanding job with long hours and low pay.

The setup is virtually guaranteed to result in very low quality software. Post docs may be brilliant people, but it's unlikely they will learn to write high quality, maintainable software in a transitional period between grad school and a faculty position, especially since it's something they'd like to leave behind as quickly as possible. And it's equally unlikely that someone talented at software development will stick around in an organization like this where they will never get the chance to lead a project and make a decent salary, especially when those opportunities exist outside universities.

The idea of a research programmer role is a really good one but I'm not sure I can really see faculty accepting it. It would be a major cultural transition for them.
NBA Star Thabo Sefolosha Tells His Story of Assault by the NYPD
Just go with Android. Less hassle.
Charities we’d like to see
Seven Case Studies in Carbon and Climate
>Could be that you've never smoked enough to get there

Believe me, I've tried.
I've installed on a 6S, works for me!
The play says nothing about his race, one way or another

Act 1, Scene 1

Iago: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say!
This isn't about the triviality of implementing rc4, it's about the absurdity of banning information in a general sense.

Information can be copied at zero cost, transmitted instantly over vast distances, and stored permanently and undetectably in the human brain. Information spreads like a virus in a very literal sense - you overhear a scrap of plot and suddenly a whole film is spoiled. Trying to ban information is a futile as trying to arrest people for catching influenza. This isn't like banning campfires, or even like banning firemaking implements, it's like banning the very idea of fire.
These are the concerns that I have had since I first heard about this product. It's really simple physics... the falloff here is far too great. Come on, efficiency people!
I suppose it's possible, but they don't have any applications under their f.lux brand/company published anywhere. If they're just unpublished but registered developers, then sign up for a new account under a different identity.

The only way this threat holds any water is if there is a revenue stream or published application they are at risk of having removed. As far as I can tell, they have no such issue.
Mindfulness meditation trumps placebo in pain reduction
I'm assuming it's one of the offices of Capital H Labs.
Yeah but four plants (the personal allowed number) can be grown on a few hundred watts. Nothing that's going to do anything to the power grid. And, brewing beer is legal but not every house does it. In fact, relatively few of them.
>A wealthy California couple that previously got famous for refusing to give their fingerprint while attempting to buy a new BMW in cash spends six years making this product? And now their complaint is that you can't use your fingerprint to authorize installation of it via the app store?

Link?
These Are the NASA Tools Tracking Our CO2
This is a really exciting release! Atomic changefeeds make it much more consistent and robust to subscribe to realtime data in the client, and the performance improvements look incredible.
Computer pioneer Gene Amdahl dies, aged 92
Isn't this simialar to what experimental physics is. Just having an idea is different from implementing and testing it.
I think you're disappointed in the wrong party here. But I supposed people being disappointed in Apple has never been much of an influence on them before.
>Sort of like making a fire is trivial

Yes, but demonstrating the practical difficulty in trying to regulate 102-byte sequences that can fit on a T-shirt (or in a tweet) has a utility of its own.

It's what Prof. Dave Touretzky did in the case of DeCSS, which got shrunk down to 434 bytes when implemented in C:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
RC4 is no longer considered secure for most any purpose. There is known bias in the first few bytes of the cipher that can allow for key-recovery with enough messages sent with the same key. In general you want "head room" in your ciphers such that the best attacks today are not just impractical, but wildly impractical, because attacks tend to get better over time.

RC4 was known to not have this "head room" for a while, and now is largely broken.
There's a fairly major breaking change for a minor version bump.
Sure, if you don't account for the energy needed to form the high-energy carbon and nitrogen compounds ("special salts") in the first place. In practice the "special salts" are either a very low efficiency fossil fuel (if you dig them out of the ground) or a really roundabout and inefficient way to spend other forms of energy.

The Haber process reduces N2 and plants reduce CO2, giving you the "special salts" (energy inputs: H2 and pump pressure for Haber, sunlight for plants). Then you burn the high-energy nitrogen+carbon compounds back into N2, H2O, and CO2 to remove them from the "forward-osmosis" solution. The sunlight, H2, and mechanical work used to create the special salts could almost certainly be used more effectively to generate electricity for reverse osmosis or distillation.
It seems like this was a stunt to put pressure on Apple to make the APIs used public. The temporary solution they came up with was never realistic for a overwhelming majority of users, but it made clear that the only reason why an app like this can't exist is because of Apple's rules.
I setup a shortcut on my iPhone. When I triple tap the home button, my screen becomes dimmer than the dimmest setting on a MBP. If I triple tap again, it returns to the previous brightness settings.

How to: http://lifehacker.com/toggle-your-iphones-brightness-with-a-...
TensorFlow vs. Theano vs. Torch
This would be a lot more interesting if f.lux was actually distributing source code. Instead, they were just distributing a binary that you sign with your own dev cert.

Side-loading pre-built binaries like that is a huge risk for users and never had a chance of being tolerated by Apple. Such abuse puts the new free-tier Xcode dev program in jeopardy.
Because it's 2015.
Russian plans for massive nuclear undersea attack drone revealed by newscast
So I run a probiotics site...and what that marketing claim means is that that precise strain of Lactobacillus Rhamnosus is the most researched.

There are many more studies on the species of probiotic Lactobacillus Rhamnosus as a whole...but for that exact "cousin" of the species, it is likely the most clinically researched probiotic.

There's a bit more info on it here: http://probiotics.org/lactobacillus-gg-benefits/
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2007/03/thumbing_a_ride.ph...
On the other hand, they may want to maintain a good relationship with Apple so if/when Apple allows apps to modify the screen's gamma through approved API's they'll be able to start using it immediately.
I don't think that there are that many assumptions. The core assumption is this: having a more diverse gut microbiome is healthier.
So lame, you have to qualify for the GI Bill
> What about adjusting employee exempt status for inflation? At present, if you're paid a salary of more than $23,660 per year, your employer isn't required to pay overtime;

That's only true in certain exemptions, such as the computer-related occupation exemption and the executive/administrative/professional exemption. FLSA exemptions have either both a kind-of-work and pay qualification (as for the computer occupations exemption), or just a kind-of-work qualification (as in the motor carrier exemption), none have just a pay qualification.

> raising this to a sane figure ($70,000?) would create a lot of jobs and improve quality of life for employees

Alternatively, it would eliminate a lot of the jobs in the covered areas that are currently paid less than the new threshold. (I tend to think it would be a net win overall, but it wouldn't be one sided in its effects.)
And it’s a database with indexes and caches.
A technical centric view of a browser would focus on the rendering engine. But modern browsers, in their being almost small operating systems, go very far beyond the HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendering engine. I will list a few things that vary between browsers irrespective of the rendering engine: tab handling, incognito mode, extension system/ecosystem, privacy handling, search/url bar/completion, security policies, anti malware strategies, download manager, history management, bookmark management, cross platform syncing, password management. And all these things have a higher impact on the user experience than the rendering engine.

All these things might be completely different between Firefox and Safari on iOS. Saying that Firefox on iOS is not "a real browser" is an understatement.
The Amazingly Deep Well of Chand Baori
That adjusts brightness, not color temperature. Color temperature is what changes your circadian rhythm and prevents proper sleep.
Bookmarked, I'll read that later.
This is tough. On one hand, there's obviously a demand (of which I am part) for f.lux, but on the other, 15 million downloads, despite being a respectably big number, barely registers compared to an install base that can grow by 75 million in a single quarter. Using private APIs does negatively impact the iPhone experience (witness the constant screen wakes in the pulled Xcodeproj), and making those APIs public has development overhead – As big as the iOS team may be, its human resources are finite (even if Apple's cash reserves are barely so).

That said... What percentage of Apple's user base lives with disabilities? What percentage is visually impaired; what percentage has motor difficulties? These are clearly worthy, comparatively small populations of users that Apple devotes an otherwise-inordinate amount of development resources to. Maybe it's time Apple considers melanopsin sensitivity worthy of admitting to this circle.
Theoretically, Apple could revoke/blacklist the signing certificate for the OSX F.lux app.
How do you fight procrastination?
I love programming, I really do, but lately I've spent countless hours gaming or watching videos. I really don't know how to fight this.
One area I know for sure cannabis startups are needed is in cannabinoid strain analysis and organic certification.

Only one dispensary in Vancouver I know of offers this as a service, and they hire a trained technician to operate a mass-spectrometer to analyze each batch as they come through for at least 9 extra specific active compounds in cannabis besides THC and CBN.

There are massive fluctuations in effect and potency even between the same strain (how are strains verified other than what the vendor claims?), and even same strain+vendor.

Another issue with industrial scale growops is that they don't 'flush' the plant properly before harvest, leaving a funky chemical taste.
I think some of your prices are quite low, but for comparison's sake, I'll just assume they are correct. I pulled calorie counts from the USDA and from calorieking.com

1 pound dried pinto beans - 636 Calories, $1.00
1 pound raw cabbage - 120 Calories, $0.50
1 pound frozen spinach - 108 Calories, $1.40
1 dozen large eggs - 840 Calories, $1.00
1 pound chicken breast (with skin) - 780 Calories, $2.00

Total: 2484 Calories, $5.90 or 421 Calories per dollar

I went to Wal-Mart.com to find some junk food and grabbed a couple of the first items I saw that kept me to about $6 and had online availability (so I could get accurate pricing). I pulled calorie counts from the Kellog website and walmart.com since I had exact branded items.

1 dozen limited edition frosted pumpkin pie pop tarts - 2400 Calories, $3.50
13oz chips ahoy chocolate chip cookies - 1760 Calories, $2.50

Total: 4160 Calories, $6.00 or 693 Calories per dollar

So assuming your prices are correct, you get 65% more food per dollar if buying name-brand junk food without even trying. You could push these prices even lower if you buy generic. You can also sub in a number of different "junk food" options and get similar results (e.g. chips look similar to the cookies, soda should work out in the same ballpark as well).

[1] http://www.walmart.com/ip/Kellogg-s-Pop-Tarts-Frosted-Pumpki...
[2] http://www.walmart.com/ip/Nabisco-Chips-Ahoy-Original-Chocol...
>Such abuse puts the new free-tier Xcode dev program in jeopardy.

Or it would force Apple to adapt similar to how they responded to the black market for developer program spots to access iOS betas by making a public beta program.
Too late to edit my earlier reply, so I'll reply again instead. I've subsequently learned more, mainly from a discussion with "mxtppy" in the programming subreddit. I've updated my blog post with a new section "One Move in 2 Bits, Maybe?" to reflect my improved understanding.
This is very true in the world of business intelligence and analytics. A single breakdown in the data pipeline from source to report/dashboard affects the entire system's value. "Garbage in, garbage out" is a maxim. If the ETL pipeline does not clean up the data and correct errors, it can make dashboards nearly worthless.
Thanks for the book! Sure I'll learn something from it when I get time to read it.
This undoubtedly has to do with the $2 billion haircut that Square's late-stage investors are taking on its IPO. But it's really Fidelity's fault. If you offer money at ridiculous valuations, guess what? People are going to take you up on it, and you're going to lose money.
New Ionic Creator
Are you honestly so incapable of independent thought that you need someone else to tell you what effect your life choices are having?

If you're interested, try it, see if you like it. If not, don't try it.
"Download for PC"

Hey, I have a PC! It runs Linux. Care to change the above to "Download for Windows"?
Incidentally, I fondly remember learning the word "cras" in latin class.
Fermented foods are generally thought to be quite nutritious due to the benefits from the added bacteria.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-parenting/post/ferme...
> I think you're disappointed in the wrong party here.

If saurik suddenly decided that developing Cydia was harming his relationship with Apple and pulled it, I would be disappointed in him, not Apple.

It's their game, their rules. We all know the consequences of performing an end run around those rules, as developers of arguably one of the most famous jailbreak tweaks ever, they should know.

All of this was obviously going to happen from the get go. The only odd part was when they caved because Apple sent them a sternly worded letter.
Twitter, Motorcycles, and Money from Mark Cuban
Well the problem starts right after the hipsters move in, because they displace the local families. At least this is the current concern being voiced by those in Pilsen.
We're talking about deliveries to Gmail, and Gmail can decide what kind of client certificates count as authenticated when sending emails to Gmail. For example, they could establish the convention that the highest tier of lock icon requires a client certificate under the same domain name as the sender's address, verified by path validation of commonly trusted certificate authorities. A lower tier of lock icon might be a path-validated certificate of some kind, and the lowest tier might be a self-signed certificate - perhaps analogous to how tiers of HTTP and HTTPS are displayed.

The proposal for "Secure SMTP using DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE)" applies a similar strategy, though it's only for client authentication of the server certificate, not vice versa [1]. There was a proposal at one point to add client certificate requirements to the DMARC standard, though that work appears to have fizzled out.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dane-smtp-01
It's a search engine for searching multiple craigslist^ cities at once, along with ebay and amazon and such. So one potential use would be searching personals across a wide range of cities, but that would be more of a hook to get people on the site; it's product searches that actually lead to revenue for us.

^ no affiliation
Sorry, I really don't know anything about experimental physics, so I couldn't comment.

eI see software development as somewhat similar to writing a novel - someone could give you an idea, a general outline, even a fairly detailed outline, but the writer who puts it into words will almost inevitably make a meaningful creative contribution.

Here's one way to think about it - if you had two different writers, or software developers, how different would the end product look?
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I thought they were distributing the source for you to compile yourself.
Links in Elixir/Erlang explained
How does developing the most famous jailbreak tweak for five years constitute "maintaining a good relationship with Apple". As far as I can tell, that went out the window years ago.
Yeah. But as Scott Aaronson points out, GI has a very different feel to factoring. A randomly chosen number will be hard to factor, but it's actually quite hard to come up with examples of GI that are hard:

> But then again, in practice, graph isomorphism has already been “basically in P” for decades! If you have two large graphs for which you actually need to know whether they’re isomorphic, just download NAUTY and run it.

> This contrasts with the case of factoring, for which I’d personally say that it remains much less clear whether it should or shouldn’t be in P.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2521#comment-889824
My post wasn't downvoted, but was visible only to me (no other user could see it). It looked like a scheme to kill my post without me realising it.
> Academia has have their 50 year run with software research and the end result is quite disappointing.

You might want to tell that to the students and faculty at MIT, Berkeley and CMU who wrote the papers and much of the software powering your shiny new macbook and iphone.
I like the idea of the product but after sundown frankly it could be replaced with a 20 cent piece of plastic.
I don't think there are actually any breaking changes. The release notes say "includeInitial" is breaking, but I think all of your existing application code will continue to run the same if you upgrade RethinkDB. It's just that new code using includeInitial will fail on old versions of RethinkDB.
Cut down on your grocery bills with FP
I wasn't offensive at all.
Regain control of your bookmarks bar with Sweebo
I'm happy about incrementally rolling this stuff out. STARTTLS for now. Surfacing that in the UI. Then maybe DANE, and in parallel some form of downgrade notification, or pinning, or something.
> Isn't the first place you would go to the Oracle manual?

If I knew the answer, or had a decent notion of the answer? Hell no.
Explains why it barely handles my hundreds of bookmarks, though. Maybe I need to rewrite that part in native code haha.
The way this was distributed, everyone who wanted to install had to sign the binary with their own certificate.
Yeah, I didn't realize until I tried it that it is going to people rather than an algorithm.

I tried FlightFox twice, and both times the CEO Lauren (who is fantastic at customer service) refunded my fee because I was able to find better flights cheaper than the 'experts'.

I just don't see how any of this works as a real business model, but something must be working because FlightFox is still at it years later.
Again you are missing the point.

We see it that way, they don't. We certainly won't win this battle by trying to teach them information theory (good luck! :) )
Is there any way those of us who are more experienced on the backend can help out?
Mike's idealistic. I went to college with him, then worked with him at MetaCreations in Carpinteria.

He also got a nicely-ranked Hacker News post for taking apart some SSL chicanery that a hotel was doing on his honeymoon, for instance.

Doesn't mean you have to like him. But no really, he's doing this sincerely.

Also, Mike is the developer, and a pretty darn good one.
Google's Online Security Blog posted earlier today regarding improving email security including "opportunistic TLS"[1] through the M3AAWG association, which does list the above companies as either sponsors or members[2]

1: https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/11/new-resear...

2: https://www.m3aawg.org/about/roster
TorFlow
Why It’s Imperative to Measure Teams and Not Individual Developers
Why the Attack on Tor Matters
How Digital Wallets Like Apple Pay Are Helping Close the M-Commerce Gap
Cheap, but serious answer: it makes people unhappy. Maybe it shouldn't, but the reality is that it does.