skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I only have an anecdote, but: I've discovered that I have no ability to differentiate between icons while working. On my own computers, I use WMII, a minimalist tiling window manager; that is: text and no icons. Before that, I'd used "traditional" window managers that showed the icon and program name in the bottom bar (Gnome, Vista, XP, 95). Anyway, at my last job, IT decided that the computer on my desk should run Windows 7, which only has the icon in the bottom bar. It was totally unusable to me; if I was working on something and wanted to switch windows, my brain would never know which one to click; more often then not, I'd just try clicking on each of them until I got the window I wanted.
Translator app turns everything you say into popular symbols
Reading the ABCs from Space
Hey hey! You mean you're not happy about potentially life-long sexual side effects?!

Talk about getting over depression only to find out that removing the SSRI did nothing to fix your gimped sex drive. Wooohoo.
The project is approaching 300 stars. I have a bottle of champagne ready to crack. :-)

https://github.com/hendrix/hendrix

edit: pop! What an awesome way to end the week at Reelio.
A brain link to autism
It is disconcerting to see the browser "fingerprint" and realizing it's very difficult to significantly reduce its "uniqueness" based on all the factors listed.

I guess that's the point, each element in the list contributes to the uniqueness "profile". I don't think it matters that certain elements just add up to identifying an iPhone 6 or whatever we're using.

I gather the profile is strictly by the numbers, here tallied as bits of entropy. The statistical inference of uniqueness reflects the ability to use the indexed bits as a pattern to identify the particular browser and presumably the individual user (if not by the user's name).

It's one case where using common, generic components offers the greatest anonymity. I'd guess the HN crowd is more likely than average to go for exotic or bleeding edge configurations which no doubt will have the most distinct fingerprints of all.
Yule logs are rather older than the Internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule_log
There are a few things I would like to point out about this article:

• He goes on about linear trains being confused with maglev trains. Huh? In the exact Wikipedia article he links to, it has a section on maglevs that use linear motors (including JR's SCMaglev), and he describes a linear train (the Linimo = Linear motor) as a maglev later on.

• Before JNR (the old state-owned rail company) was split into separate companies, it was hemorrhaging money from the cost of running marginal routes. Japan is a developed country, why does it need more infrastructure?

• I'm not sure about the Hokuriku or Hokkaido shinkansens, but calling the Chuo Shinkansen is a public work is wrong. JR Central are financing it entirely on their own. They seem to think it's a viable investment, so good on them. US $72 billion overall isn't that bad. That's only ten billion more than it cost to develop the JSF, or 72 Instagrams, and this is actually expected to make a profit at some point (sooner if you believe it brings an economic benefit to the cities it is connecting).

I can't really trust this article at all. Reader beware?
"This allows us to move away from a Riot equity program towards a cash based incentive program that allows Rioters to share in Riot's success."

sounds like you're describing what they had in place before, but now they will only do cash. i don't know what 'ETO' is either
The rule of thumb if you work in California is that you'll take home half, assuming all your income is base + bonus + RSUs and not exotics like ISOs or deferred comp plans. The rest goes to the cost of non-cash compensation, various governments, and your tax-deferred retirement savings. It's usually slightly more than half, depending on the exact numbers, whether you're buying medical plans for a family, how much you save in a retirement plan, etc., but that's the safe first-order approximation if you're budgeting.

So someone starting at BigCo in California should expect to take home 100-125k a year for the first few years. That said, I would caution new entrants to the workforce about three things:

- Tax rates are likely to go up, and certainly will not be going down. It would not be shocking if you were taking home 10% less in a few years solely because of higher taxes. You can also expect your cost of living to grow much more quickly than the tax bracket boundaries will rise.

- Your RSUs are likely to be worth less than you're expecting, because market prices will decline in a bust (a major bust is all but certain at some point in your upcoming 4-year vesting period).

- In a bust, you will likely get a smaller bonus or none at all (even if the company is still making money), and are unlikely to get a raise, even a nominal cost of living adjustment. These conditions can last for several years, so even if you keep your job (hardly a given), your total compensation will likely be much less than you expected when you were hired. A few companies may be doing well enough that you will be exempt, but don't count on it.

All of these things need to be factored in when evaluating compensation. It's not as simple as adding X + Y + Z and assuming that all changes over the next 5 years will be either neutral or positive. That's not how life is.
"Saving the list" entails creating a copy of the list on the VAN servers (technically, creating an SQL query). It does not mean copying any of the data locally where it could be kept.

It demonstrates the ability of the Sanders campaign to access the Clinton data without actually having the ability to use it once the breach was sealed, which, like the previous breach, it would inevitably be.

It's like making a copy of the personnel files left in the mailroom and sticking them in your mailbox. Lets you demonstrate they got left out in case VAN tries to say the breach wasn't serious.
I can't for the life of me figure out why apple is so insistent on not using tooltips in OS-X (example, Safari).
we are! much appreciated

twitter only login is going away soon
I think it's just a matter of degree. I feel a general responsibility towards planet earth in general to preserve its environmental and cultural heritage. But I feel a greater obligation to contribute towards mitigating some environmental and cultural harms than I do towards others due to my nation and cultures role in exacerbating them.

There's no law at work here though. If there is some specific issue you are particularly concerned about that happens not to have any such historical link to you, but it bothers you so much that you take a special personal interest in it then that's fine. But even without dedicating our personal resources towards righting the worlds wrongs, as tax payers, consumers and voters we often make decisions that bear on these issues. I think it's worth bearing that in mind.
Running the fingerprinting test on my normal browser and then incognito implies that its at least consistent within a small time window.
Thank you for speaking some sense. Sometimes HN tends to make people believe it is representative of all people everywhere in the world.

It's not even about skill. It's just the effect of living in the SV echo chamber of billion-dollar start ups and multi-billion-dollar BigCos.
How about comparing with Japanese font? I worked in branding in China. I was told many modern inspirations are from Japanese work. IMHO as a Chinese, they generally have much better taste for art in China.
Interesting, do you have a reference for that?

I've always found Genesis to be a beautiful poetic passage though I've never read it as having an alternate meaning.
Fun fact: if you want to see files as they copy, the command is

xcopy /dickher
Chrome contains special optimizations that are only active in asm.js mode: http://blog.chromium.org/2015/07/revving-up-javascript-perfo...

I don't know what you're arguing here. It doesn't matter what approach is taken to optimizing performance, all that matters is the performance achieved. Chrome is simply slower. Microsoft is to open source Edge's JavaScript engine (https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/12/05/open-source-c...), so perhaps the Chrome developers can study that for ideas on speeding up Chrome.
> Courts can recognize violations of private property rights without regulating trade...

Which certainly addresses things like conversion (the civil parallel to theft), but doesn't address consumer recourse, which is what was asked about and is expressly about trade.
You'd be surprised how unwilling people are to risk breaking contracts even when the actual terms are not valid or enforceable. Not to mention that there are plenty of ways to get fired over something you can't legally be fired for.
I remember getting into a debate about this subject with a self-described UI expert. It was part enlightening and part frustrating. He failed to see the point that so many of his ideas were US-centric, and didn't make sense in any context outside of English-speaking languages, and to be honest, they barely made sense in English. The author brings up Gmail, which has an icon for "archive" that makes zero sense no matter how I try to connect the dot, but at least Gmail gives you and out: turn the confusing icons to text.

Despite being a programmer -- but not front end work -- I find myself struggling more and more with UI and especially icons. I think so much of it reflects the current trend of zero empathy for the end-user. Fortunately, I know enough about computers to get around many of these issues, but icons are the one area that I still struggle with.

Unless you have some site with several million users, teaching end-users is a wasted effort, and it does well to either piggy-back on other ideas or use text. Even Facebook is using text, and it seems a little odd that anyone smaller would feel they have some lessons to teach the end-user about UI. UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user." If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator. Once your user presses the back button because your icons made them feel stupid, you lost a customer, and that is a very high price for "pretty."
If you're not making new discoveries, what's the point of doing science.
A letter to my fellow hopeless romantics
As anecdotal evidence, I have had an iPhone since the first model (then 3GS, then 4, then 5) and had never broken the screen (have had many decent drops too).

I have dropped my 6 a couple of times now and cracked the screen both times, from heights that my previous phones would sneeze at. This suggests to me that the current models are more susceptible to smashing.
UPSERT!
I encountered this machine, which had a manual on top, hooray! But it didn't include explanations of any of the symbols:

https://imgur.com/Sdwrvqv

I ended up going for "40 degrees shirts and pants" since that matched what I was actually trying to wash, but God help anyone trying to use that machine with any specific requirements.
Seeking iOS Developer
Wayler is currently looking for a iOS developer, at the earliest possible start date, to strengthen our position in the industry. Individual can work remotely, however would prefer Houston/Austin TX area.

Responsibilities

Working alongside our co-founders, you will join our team in developing and shipping new features.

You will design, build and maintain high performance, reusable and reliable iOS code. You will be responsible for the development and maintenance of our iOS apps, ensuring the best possible performance and quality.

Additionally, you will conduct regular code and peer reviews to ensure the quality requirements are met. You will remain up-to-date with the latest technologies, and understand their benefits and limitations when furthering the development of the product.

Send resumes to: resumes@wayjer.me
You might have a repetitive job at a start up writing crud for an ecommerce website or you might have a rollercoaster ride at Google inventing spanner. The things you describe are not exclusive to either the startup or the bigco.
Malpractice insurance cant be the main cause as doctors not working in private practice usually have insurance provided to them by the hospital/HMO.

The biggest problem that I can think off is med school tuition costs.
The cheapest med school in the US costs over 30,000 per year, the median yearly tuition cost for US medical students is around 50,000 USD.

So that's 2-3 years of pre-med and 5 years of med school which can cost upwards of half a million dollars in the US.

When most doctors start their career with nearly 300,000 dollars in debt which they pay interest on you going to be damn sure they'll require a hefty sum to pay it back.

To put that in perspective if the doctor can pay out 25,000 per year on their student loans it would take them about 15 years to pay out their debt.

To put that in perspective 25,000$ is the average yearly salary in Spain.
I think the author does address this - further down, he gives examples of icons that have little meaning to outsiders, but that regular users will understand.
You can tweet at them when your product is on the front page and they'll give you comment access (at least they did for me and a few others I know). But yeah, overall it's crazy that you still can't comment there.
I completely agree and an interesting way of putting it. Just to think of the counterpoint to this:

I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?!

On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card.

Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.
It is fascinating to see how much geological history the team has been able to uncover with the various point measurements and a stratigraphic analysis. The best summary I know of is in this article in Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6257/aac7575.abstract?...), which documents the discovery of stream beds feeding an ancient lake within Gale crater, river delta formations with progressively finer sediments, and small eroded canyons. It's impressive work.

(Full text article appears to be here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Linda_Kah/publication/2...)
It has been incredibly interesting reading through those threads. People are arguing two completely different arguments. tptacek is saying that the dude keeping AWS keys without disclosing this was bad and guy is lucky to not get a early morning wake-up call from men with guns. slewis, comex et al are saying that Facebook not locking down and later disabling AWS keys was bad and Facebook was lucky they didn't get sold on black market. Both sides are correct but it's informative who makes which arguments.
This doesn't work for touch-based devices, unfortunately.
PostgreSQL 9.5rc1 Released
I thought about this a lot while designing my latest iPad app. On the one hand, icons make everything look beautiful and cohesive, and give you an almost intuitive sense of the UI if done right. On the other hand, it's hard to convey the meaning of a complicated tool using an icon alone, and I hate guess-and-checking the meanings of icons in other apps. My solution was to keep unlabelled icons for the obvious UI elements (in my case, undo/redo, play/rewind/record, erase, and metronome) and add small text labels underneath the icons that referred to more complicated or unique actions. For visual coherence, the labeled icons were kept in their own section: http://i.imgur.com/EeLzlVH.png

So yeah, I think the article is spot on.
> 150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion.

You're right, assuming that everything continues as it has. Nothing is guaranteed; that 150k can vanish in a puff of smoke through no fault of your own, and take all your unvested comp along with it.

> the bonus is basically guaranteed.

No, it is not. Many, many people will tell you of their time spent at BigCo when the economy is not booming, and after the free donuts, the first thing that goes is the bonus. You have to read the bonus plan very carefully to understand how it's computed. It's quite possible that your bonus at Facebook or whatever depends solely on your own rating, but at most companies that's just the final multiplier and all kinds of other things have to happen in order for the bonus pool to exist at all. In even mild headwinds, it's likely that only a part of the expected bonus will be paid, and not unusual for there to be none at all. Furthermore, the bonus plan is usually determined one year at a time, so the fact that whatever needed to happen this year for everyone to be paid at 100% did happen is no guarantee that the criteria in next year's plan will be satisfied.

Do not assume that the future looks exactly like the recent past. It is certainly possible that the near future will be even better than the recent past, but at least some kind of mean reversion is a hell of a lot more likely. I predict that very few people will end up receiving as much total cash for their work over the next 5 years as their simplistic and rosy-eyed calculations of today would indicate.
>In its brief life the APT, with its futuristic sloped front, was vilified as a waste of money - £47m in total - and mocked by the press.

When I read stuff like this, I want to kick people.
Tooltips aren't going to be much help on mobile though.
I believe that kerning is already done that way. Basically you use your glyphs (and popular letter pairs), feed them to an app, it gives you approximate good kerning based on visible gray and possible line crossings. Then the creator adjusts anything that doesn't look completely fine, adds ligatures, etc.

Youtube seems to have a lot of examples. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac ?)
>Now that you mention it, I can't help but wonder why Starbucks doesn't have to "prove" that its 12oz latte really is 12oz. Is it because I have the right to immediately measure it and complain?

In a different life, I worked at Starbucks. About once a quarter (per my recollection) we got secret shoppers who, among other things, would actually weigh the drinks they ordered to ensure employees were making them correctly. Bad reports were a pretty big deal, so management tended to take care to respond to any problems quickly.

And yes, you could absolutely complain if you ordered a 12 oz latte and received one that was only 3/4 filled. You'd get it remade immediately and probably a coupon for a free drink on your next visit (at least, that was policy at the store I worked at, when I worked there).

Things like scales (for weighing purchased coffee beans, as well as internal use) were actually certified by the county department of weights and measures every year.
Interesting that Hillary would protest unauthorized access of data when she was running that email server that was not authorized, and arguably was holding much more important information than a voter database.
Who said it was simple to correct?
It's basically a reply to the positive coverage that Startups get. Startups get the glory (as much as you can in this line of work anyway). They get TV shows, movies and endless blog posts. And judging from the attention, his post was needed.
I've been using the 1.99 builds on my Mac for, oh, a year now. And I'm so grateful. It works great and was miles ahead of the old X11-based thing.
Every time something like this happens, non-technical people don't know how to respond to it. Just look at the DNC Chairwoman's response[0],

"That is just like if you walked into someone's home when the door was unlocked and took things that don't belong to you in order to use them for your own benefit."

Essentially, "gray-hat" hacking isn't always seen as a friendly warning to the vulnerable as much as it might be an attack. One has to wonder, if one could draw a physical parallel between a trespassing and gray-hat style hack, if you did enter someones house, take their gold watch from their bedroom, then walk down to you sitting at your breakfast table and tap you on the shoulder, and then say, "Hey bro, your door was open, and you didn't even secure your jewelry in a safe with a key in case someone did break in. I did this to demonstrate your house's vulnerabilities, you should be grateful! May be even give me a little something for my troubles..."

Of course, the parallel might not be fair, since one can't draw a parallel between a private house and a server with a public facing access point to sensitive material, so the closest proxy I can think of is a bank. Still, a similar parable can be drawn here: You rob a bank without tripping alarms and hand the manager $30000 of stolen money, and claim you did it to warn him/er of issues with the vault's security. In that case, it's plausible to assume s/he might not be that receptive.

I think it's great that penetration testers and people of the like are very willing to do the hard work of finding holes in security systems--and not use it for nefarious purposes, but actually disclose it to companies so that they can holster their systems--but how exactly is the hacked party supposed to take it?

[0]http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/bernie-sanders-campai...
Yeah but I for one won't do coding on a system where I'm typing on the screen. IDEs massively benefit from keyboard shortcuts because you can leave your hands on the keyboard.
I agree with you.

There's a series which includes examples where kids are asked to use old technology, like a VCR ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kesMOzzNBiQ ) or rotary phone ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM ). They fumble, rather like their grandparents might have fumbled with the unfamiliar interface when it first came out.

The major difference is that children don't worry so much about making mistakes and feeling dumb.
Well, I'm not sure I'd call them "asinine". Like any icon set, they require a bit of learning—they're not necessarily meant to be immediately recognizable to a first time user. They address a different problem: it's simply impractical to print laundry + care instructions in all 24 official EU languages (or even just a few of the most common ones) on a tag the size of a postage stamp.

European road signs[1] are another example where text labels wouldn't be practical. Many of the symbols are meaningless in and of themselves, but you of course pick up their meaning pretty quickly when you're learning to drive. If you're an American driving over here for the first time, you wouldn't expect to automatically understand the system without first at least glancing at a travel guide or some other reference.

All that said, I do think it sucks that the whole laundry symbol system is copyrighted.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_symbol#National_and_in...
Rails 5.0.0.beta1 is out
Experimental Meta-Programming for Lua
No it's not. Please do not be disingenuous and more importantly don't give one line wrong-by-fallacy statements.
Yeah, you're a barbarian, but there is some recent work which tries to find regularities in the dimensioning of Latin typefaces and make them parametric. I saw a relevant talk by this guy: http://www.lettermodel.org/ at a typography conference in Dublin last weekend.