skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Are jobs for C++ developer shirnking?
It's a fair point; the difference, my counter-point, if you will, is that F.lux is free. If F.lux's claims prove to be false, then at worst, the application is misguiding or misinforming. Lumosity, on the other hand, is outright fraudulent, if their claims are proven wrong and continue to profit off of it.
How so? So Trump can aggressively address a nuclear armed country. This is ridiculous line of thinking. Only thing he will be good for is making empty threats like Kim Jong. And will surely get US isolated by those rhetorics.
Ok. I must seriously be missing something here. I'm usually the last person to complain about shilling, because even on the very rare occasions that I am confident that some sort of "astroturf" operation is going on I usually find it to be a somewhat valid or at least entertaining form of promotion and don't care that it is clearly just advertising.

But seriously, this thread is absurd. I truly do not understand how a significant portion of this site (even knowing that it is probably largely made up of affluent, educated people) consider this to be even a reasonable value proposition. I'm not incredibly affluent or anything, but by any standard short of the true "1%" I am extremely well off. However the level of wealth required that a blind commitment of $100/hr for trivial delagatable tasks is way beyond anything I would consider using, especially considering the significant upfront purchase that seems to be required. What ten hours of random bullshit that I not just need done, but would entrust to a stranger without known qualifications is worth $1k? Not much...

But this comment section is filled with well crafted top level praise of the service with a staggering amount of popularity for what seems to be an extreme luxury service. Compounded by very "reasonable" objections with immediate and solicitous responses by accounts claiming to be representatives humbly begging for an opportunity to right their wrongs and improve the service.

This whole thing looks like a finely tuned campaign to leverage highly-regarded social media in a wide scale blitz to make the absurd product seem reasonable. Seriously, I'm staggered at this comment section and the popularity here.

And this "target market" excuse seems like crap. If the "target market" is extremely rich folk who would consider dropping $100/hr on miscellaneous unskilled labor with almost no real guarantee of reliability or quality, then they wouldn't be blitzing a random social media site to improve their image (which they explicitly are doing with mr. cmikec running around). They'd focus their efforts on true premium clients and demonstrate some sort of solid guarantee of their reliability that a suspicious rich person might actually accept. This whole thing looks like an attempt to make random $100/hr requests somehow seem reasonable to people who can technically afford it but typically wouldn't even consider it if they didn't see it as a "normalish" thing to do.
True. We pay 10% more due to the support plan. ;)
There are enough examples (at least here in Germany), where peoples lives got uprooted and destroyed exactly because false accusations or false interpretations of "facts" happened. Even after the where acquitted lots of people distrusted them, bullied them and such, because the press had already told everybody what awful people these people were.

And hey, if it is in the news, it has to be true - doesn't it?

We will never fix these idiots (myself totally included). Because even if we do not believe these things we will have them forever at the back of their heads, when presented with a name of someone because: "maybe they did do the thing non the less, even if the court acquitted them".

This is just human nature. You cannot actively un-know something you heard and this will sadly inform your inherent biases non the less - even if you intellectually know it to be untrue.
I wonder if we could pay China to do it.

I wonder how much they'd ask.
meh, I want to have my cake and eat it too. (I'm not making fun of someone, this is actually how I feel, and there is some tension between requirements.) I don't want any surveillance whatsoever, I want to just be able to do whatever I want, jeez. To live freely. I shouldn't even think about being watched.

At the same time, take something like the Dell database that was just stolen, and criminals starting to do their criminal crimes. Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch and say, you know what, if you're brazenly stealing a private company's database and calling its customers trying to defraud them, at some point there is some probable cause to make you stop doing that or figure out who you are. You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world.

Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo.

These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law.

There's a reason there wasn't a period in the Constitution (specifically the fourth amendment) after the words "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated." (Extra points for what is there.)

Even absent an anonymous Internet, way back in the eighteenth century, there were limits on privacy. Think of it like an operating system - a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :)

It's not an easy line to find. Also, I don't want tens of thousands of people employed doing this crap. It's a minimal thing we need to live safely and sanely, not some fun snooping. Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved, until crimes start getting committed and the courts are trying to figure out why or where.
Excellent. More of this. The builders of the modern world are the underappreciated stoic heroes who help link the generations together.
So if police came to your home and installed surveillance cameras (you know, just to check if you didn't beat your wife or smoke pot on your couch) you are OK with that? Everyone has something to hide and needs some privacy, digital or not.
True but at least now Microsoft will be bugging them (and more likely their IT departments) to upgrade.

Even the most conservative CIO will have a hard time justifying not upgrading at this point.
Yes, a colon nearly always means "said this..." in journalism headlines.
That's the point. I don't want destabilization. But if that's your goal, you can get it pretty quickly without any need for a sneak attack by conventional forces.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
Almost all git tutorials are absolutely useless. Seriously, they all exploit the same learning scenario that has almost nothing in common with the “real life” needs.

I've been “teaching” git for a year and now I can tell that people who want to use git MUST first accept and understand how exactly git works. I mean everyone MUST read this ( https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Git-Basics ) article first, because without clear understanding git concepts it's almost impossible to understand and embrace more complex things like rebase or git branches.

If you catch up git concepts (commits are snapshots and not changesets, branches/references/tags as snapshot labels etc) you will learn the rest of concepts/commands much faster. So the best tutorial is https://git-scm.com/book , you don't need anything else, really.
I think most people just don't think about online and communications privacy in the same terms that they think about physical privacy. Computer and information privacy should be a basic right just as much as privacy in your own home.

The principle that governments should have covert back doors into our information and communications channels is no different from saying they should automatically get a copy of all of our physical keys, a way to secretly remotely activate and use every camera we own, or remotely activate and listen in on every microphone in our houses.

In fact, as everything moves to electronic, always-connected internet of things platforms these things become increasingly not just equivalent but identical. Soon electronic privacy will be the foundation of every kind of privacy.
you don't mean bribe, you mean blackmail. It's a good example. When you get anonymous, credible, extortion/blackmail attempts a good reaction is to go to the FBI and say, look, some anonymous person is blackmailing/extorting me. (a crime).

Now you can decide whether you want the courts to have any ability to connect that crime to the medium that you were communicated via, or whether that information should simply vanish in the ether, leaving anyone to blackmail or extort anyone else from the safety of their own home and behind an anonymous Internet connection.

you've, in fact, made the opposite point to the one that you meant to :) when crimes start getting committed, sometimes society needs recourse.
If it's any consolation, I once had a flower company deliver an empty box to someone's office. That was pretty embarrassing!
Upvoting you as it seems the Google fanboys are already in action.
The first review of a arm cortex a72 device
Interesting that Bret is a big fan of Geometric Algebra (keeping several books on the topic), which is alluring to amateurs, but dismissed by professional mathematicians/physicists as a vanity effort to rename standard concepts.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-...

SAP hired Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Vi Hart, and others to create a Xerox PARC / MIT Media Lab type lab.
The economic system needs to change to provide economic mobility. As long as capital and the ability to make capital is out of reach of the poorer classes, then economic mobility really isn't possible.

Expanding education and training will bring us to a higher technological level, and provide prosperity for society, however that won't ensure the working classes will have a 'fair' share. If everyone's income is increased, but the distribution of resources stays the same, the poor will still be poor because costs will simply climb as their income does. Furthermore, every job can be commoditized. When 7/11 jobs are automated, then the next lowest class could be programmers. If there are too many programmers, wages will be run down to the level of today's 7/11 workers. Society as a whole may be more advanced, but that won't prevent people from becoming indentured workers. Just as today we are more advanced than 1960, but it's harder for the lower classes to get by.

The distribution is the problem, poverty is a symptom.
Yes! Everybody should read https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_... who quotes
Cardinal Richelieu "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

As Schneier puts it: two proverbs sum it up: "Who watches the watchers?" and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Does this work for services too?

Wouldn't you upset long term customers?
Both Sun and Oracle have zero issues with companies that follow the Java license.

There are plenty of happy JVM vendors to choose that haven't had any problem to comply with the license:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

Microsoft with its J++ fork and Google with Android Java have no else but themselves to blame.

But apparently Google gets a free pass while Microsoft not, because "hey it's Google and they are sooo cool".
We've been experimenting with it, and have worked with a few dozen businesses thus far (mostly in familiar territory like cable, phone, and cell, but also some SaaS expenses, shipping/parcel costs, etc.). Feel free to email me at ben@billfixers.com if you'd like us to look into your particular vendors!
My concerns in regard to fusing human and machine aren't necessarily because I question the supportive nature of humanity. It's more so that there is no telling what a brain would do with that much power. It's not implausible to say that such a being might disassociate with the human race altogether. Furthermore, innate urges such as survival and production of offspring would still be strongly intact, probably much more prevalent than any idealistic thoughts floating around in the frontal lobe, hence posing a threat of the classic "robot takeover."

Comparatively, teaching/programming a system to have morality seems like a safer bet than giving the reins to a being whose psyche was sculpted by evolution.
MPL is pretty different IIRC. Must open source modified files, or something along those lines
That crosses into personal attack, which is not ok, even if it's just insinuated.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847715 and marked it off-topic.
I wonder if you've shed a little light on some dishonesty here.

What if Wes, the intern, wrote Solitaire for Win2.1, then it got redone for Win3.1 et al. by someone else? That makes all of this somewhat morally underhanded.

I thought I'd ask here. https://www.reddit.com/comments/3zfadv//cyntkus

Of course, I'm incredibly late, so it might never be seen, but who knows.
SEEKING WORK - moonlighting DevOps seeks short gigs by the light of the moon and the terminal.

Remote: yes

Location: Seattle, WA.

Hi,

My value proposition here is this: You build the thing that makes you money. I build the systems that grease your wheels.

* Do you have a project that you'd like to launch with reasonable operational rigour?

* Are you pondering different ways to structure your code delivery system and processes?

* Do you need your infrastructure improved?

* Would you like a consultation on Docker, AWS, configuration management, source control, (or other such fine aspects)?

If so, I can assist. I've worked in this specific area for 5 years; programmed for many more.

I'd like to explore the moonlight market; i.e., short gigs or retainer gigs oriented on the same. I have a full-time job in this area.

My email is pnathan@alumni.uidaho.edu. Go ahead and reach out to network - perchance to work.

Regards,
Paul
If you can establish a business around this, that would be great. But personal assistants are more than just money and skills. There's lots of trust involved created over the years. I think people would be more comfortable if this was completely AIed (may be it can be promoted as that in a sly way) as compared to sending task requests to unknown (although trained) people. But that's just me. I really do think that this is bad example of technology. But looking at the examples, it may just be the thing nouveau riche are looking for.
I have a blog when I have the time to update it - rarely. I'm looking to hire developers, so if you don't mind being a remote employee we should talk. Google my HN username and you should find me easily enough.
Aren't old android browsers more of a problem nowadays?
How to choose the best name for your mobile app?
Wow. Disappointing that I found out about this here, 7 hours after it was posted, before hearing anything from Linode.
Personally I really think that encryption is a matter of second amendment and in the day of knowledge and communication the right to bear encryption should fall under the second amendment. Hell, the US even classifies encryption as a munition. We should be using the same argument for encryption that we are using for the right to own guns and form militias.

I wonder if the encryption will be recognized as a right under the second amendment by the court if it goes to that.
I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance.

We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.

Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.

What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden.

That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.

The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.
> I personally do not care about privacy.

> Free speech is a completely different topic.

((James Madison rolling over in grave))

Oh, but freedom is not a different topic. These two types are enshrined in the US Constitution after centuries of experience in the old world.

Imagine that you are too young or too lucky so far to have information used against you or your family. Yet history shows that it happens again and again, and will again.
That's kinda cool.

I'm curious: what was the other time waster? :P
I think there is nothing at all wrong with more conventional security strategies, like credentials, and sure, obscurity can be a useful tactic.

All I am saying is: what is super special about the BTC blockchain, is that it doesnt rely on those at all, it doesnt need those things, because it has the magical property of security by Proof Of Work.

Removing that and still talking about a Block Chain like its a special thing, makes no sense to me.

Anyways this is all conjecture, its not even clear what they are doing in there. Would love to hear details.
Oracle does own copyright on the APIs (according to the Federal Circuit), but they do provide it in OpenJDK under the GPL. That means anyone is free to fork it, under the terms of the GPL.

What Google did was copy the APIs, remove the copyright notice (arguing the APIs aren't copyrightable), and release the code under a different license. You can't do that under the GPL terms.
While it's not exactly mainstream, I definitely know physicists I wouldn't consider "amateurs" who are fans of Geometric Algebra.
He used regular Magic, which is not Magic+. Magic is significantly cheaper. (Drop the plus from the URL). You submit a request, they give you the total, you confirm it, that's what you're charged.

I wouldn't consider myself rich either, but I do fairly well for myself as an unmarried guy in his 20s, and there are some friends that in some situations I wouldn't hesitate at all to spend a few hundred dollars on them. Some of them have done the same for me.

If you don't think twice about buying things under three digits, depending on frequency, just not doing that for frivolous things for a few weeks could afford you the ability to do something that might ultimately be a much more valuable memory. There's plenty of crap I've bought and barely used that would have been much better used taking a good friend out to an extravagant meal or event.
There are plenty of excellent English language podcasts which don't originate from the USA.

All the apps seem to be iOS only - why not add in other popular platforms?

The curation idea is interesting - but who decides what goes on the list? Why should I trust them?

Finally, why? What's the purpose of the list? Is there anyone alive who hasn't heard of Tetris? Surely the focus should be on things people may not have heard of rather that what appears to be the top 10 of each category.

I love the idea of surfacing things which may be useful - but I'm not sure if this is it.

Sorry if that sounds negative - is live to be proved wrong in my assumptions!
If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice.

I work for a major European corporation and I am also stuck on XP. We don't exactly have the best in class IT dept (despite claims by a senior IT guy that we have more developpers than google and facebook together... we don't really have much to show for it).
Do you do a lot of business shipping with them?

Shipping rates are significantly reduced if you do high volume - if Magic does a lot of shipping (and it sounds like they would, with the services they offer), they could probably negotiate a far lower rate than you could.
>I personally do not care about privacy.

You might think that, but it's just a matter of time really before someone asks you a question you don't want to answer. The users of Ashley Madison certainly had something to hide. They weren't doing anything illegal, so why should there have been any concern about privacy?

It's somewhat humorous when politicians use the "nothing to hide" argument. The governments and politicians seems to have the most to hide. It should be any problem for any government to release all information about any decision ever made, at least not after the fact.
I agree with you for the situations you quote, however the spirit of the law is here to prevent incompatible copycats to fork off. If Microsoft launched their own version of Java with a tiny number of incompatibilities, this law could be reused against them.
This article has a pesky agenda that needs to be filtered for, but might be relevant: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/30/10691290/twitter-mac-outs...
Sometimes I have trouble with my own code if it is old enough. :)
There is so much on envy (masked as cynicism) in the comment section that we might as well paint the HN banner green today.

PS: Before you downvote me to death, want to clarify that the envy is that someone can use this service paying 100/hr :)
Drone guru
That's moral relativism. It can be used to argue that blood transfusions are evil, or that slavery isn't.

It would be better to ask whether someone, who is not a willing participant, is harmed by the activity. That's easier to establish.
The issue with incorporating tech is that it speeds up requests and breaks this billing model. Changing the billing model in the future is of course possible, but in the near-term it strongly disincentives the team from trying to automate requests.
> PostgreSQL

why, which API does that infringe?
It is definitely a step in the right direction. A friend of mine recently tried teaching Python to a class of Neurology students and found that the usual "find all prime numbers less than 100" approach did not work on them! They didn't have the same aptitude for numbers and maths as a CS, Maths or Physics students. The class found the whole exercise of programming complicated and stressful. The same course had earlier been offered to Physics students, who reported to have enjoyed it thoroughly. Given this, I think a text manipulation based tutorial can work better for students who need to learn programming and do not have good aptitude for math. Of course, some amount of math has to be picked up in order to become a competent programmer, but this exposure can come later for the not so math savvy students.
OpenJDK being licensed under the GPL means that the APIs are under the GPL as well. You can legally create your own implementation of the APIs, as long as you don't violate the GPL. Your project would be considered a "derived work" of the APIs, meaning you need to keep the same GPL license.
Unfortunately this is not true:

"Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates."

The latest Internet Explorer version that runs on Windows Vista is Internet Explorer 9. So there will still be users using that... Windows Vista will have security updates till 2020.