skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you very much for sharing this.

Edit: It always feels as if Dijkstra had been a true 50/50 growth/scarcity mindset kind of guy, in any case it's a very worthwhile read I think so I've re-shared your article over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=10837146
I've actually just left T-Mobile BECAUSE of the shady stuff they are doing with Binge-On. The "all of our customers LOVE Binge-On!" is absolutely not true. Looking at you John.
Maybe you can set the network light to light up only when the utilization is above a certain level? Same goes for HDD light, we can use something like active time every 100 ms. My point is, these are useful things and it doesn't make much sense to remove them just to save some small fraction of a dollar.
> FFS: MX records didn't take 20 years to get deployed!

So what? IPv4 took some 25-30 years to get mass adoption, and didn't have an earlier version of itself competing for mindshare.

Except for the several messed-up deployments, IPv6 is progressing well, and even fast. It'll be available as soon as our current crisis becomes undeniable... and judging by your comment, it's still possible to deny it.
I found this one where talks about it on Letterman https://youtu.be/f4cVsqUF7GQ?t=181
Monitoring the Health of Your ElectricFlow Server Using Statsd and Grafana
All you have to do is try it once or twice to enjoy the readability and lack of positional mismatch bugs.

None of the other techniques are going away. This time yes, no one is naive enough to think so.
Hardware teams have been explicit about this role for a long time. I wish I had first-hand experience of hardware product engineering, but it's certainly an inspiration for this essay.
> but until I can get one for at most $200 and use without a beefy PC I'll pass.

200 dollars I could see, but you will need a powerful machine to drive the resolution and frame rate required (or get sick, up to you).

and the reason is likely because they expect backorders and announcing preorders means it's fair for everyone.
Well, in essence:

Nothing there is difficult, people just need to think outside (the tiny) box they live in. Especially HR drones

But still, the classic answer "not being a great fit" reeks of cynicism.
It is legitimately worrying that they throttle non-streaming video downloads and streaming of services which aren't part of BingeOn. There are several cloud storage solutions which stream the video as it was uploaded (i.e. if it was 1080p when uploaded, they only stream is back at 1080p), so this scenario will be absolutely destroyed by BingeOn, making the video unwatchable, plus any kind of download for offline viewing.

I'm tempted to disable BingeOn after this. I mostly watch YouTube anyway which isn't even included, but will be limited by this "feature."
> * it MUST be unencrypted to get the no-data-usage benefits

I haven't seen that one mentioned anywhere. Clearly they only recognize and throttle video from other servers when unencrypted (since they don't throttle other downloads from the same servers), but for services signed up with T-Mobile's "Binge On", it seems easy enough to ignore the bandwidth usage based on server IP, rather than sniffing file types. Do they really recognize the servers they partner with based on traffic sniffing rather than IP?
The government didn't give money, they invested because the market wasn't in a position to do so when the industry needed it. The narrative that the company is only going to do good short-term because the government gave them a lot of money doesn't make sense when the government has since sold it's position in that company for a profit, meaning the market now viewed that company as a more favorable investment then they did when the government intervened.

> The free market is supposed to weed out the chaff.

The free market doesn't care about stability, but we as the people that deal with the market, should. An unconstrained free market will swing wildly, which is one of the ways it will identify the chaff to cull, or depending on how low the swing is, the not-quite-as-good wheat to cull. The US has long recognized the benefits of a steady economy though, so while there isn't as aggressive culling, allowing some mediocre companies to survive, the environment itself is more amenable to sustaining a population of people which is the whole point of the economy.
Whether or not the bailout was a good idea wasn't at issue. It's whether tax dollars are still tied up in the company or not and therefore whether the taxpayer has a right to judge the behavior of the company in that lens. At least that's how I read it.
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (Dijkstra) [pdf]
There was probably not enough ammunition (i.e. documentation) to avoid a wrongful termination issue, or Google gave the person the benefit of the doubt and and issued a warning as a documentation point.

In any case the person in question should have started looking for a new job at that point as the relationship is damaged, or resigned if they had the financial resources to do so.
My theory is that with the ever increasing reliability of cars, they aren't being replaced as often due to low utilization (sitting idle most of the day). Having a more highly utilized fleet of vehicles will mean they get replaced more often.

This isn't a big vehicle sales growth strategy, but it could be a way to preserve vehicle sales, while keeping a foot in the door of the future. They might even be able to get away with spending less to manufacture these cars, since people don't care as much about finish quality in something they don't own.

Also, the interiors of the vehicles would probably degrade faster than the mechanical and electrical systems, so GM could probably make a business in remanufacturing and certifying such vehicles for return to service, or putting them into cheaper tiers of service.

Essentially, that would be the partial transformation of GM into a large fleet management/maintenance company.

EDIT: wording
$25/hour as a straight invoice (subject to self-employment tax), is roughly equivalent to a $40k/year salary at a company that gives -0- benefits, at all.

I have no idea if this has any correlation to the salary they ultimately offer.

You're right though...it would seem to narrow the field down to those willing to severely undervalue their work for at least 30 days.
I'm guessing it's much more safe (business-wise) to deploy for a "standard" platform like Windows and test the waters so to speak, in terms of consumer reception, games developed, etc, and then jump on to other platforms.

Of course, the end result is that you keep strengthening the "standard" platform and thus there's never critical mass for "alternative" platforms (for different values of "standard" and "alternative" depending on product), and so the cycle repeats itself.

But in the end Oculus is there to make money and making new hardware is very hard, let alone a whole new type of hardware.

This, I agree, is unfortunate, but I can't imagine how hard it must be to develop something like this for Linux, with the myriad of 3d drivers, sound drivers, etc. If you end up developing for say, Ubuntu Desktop only, then probably a lot of people would still complain and say "hey, Ubuntu is not the only Linux out there you know!".

Maybe Steam will take advantage of this and develop for Linux as well, thus putting pressure (and opening the market a bit) on competitors to move into this "alternative" market.
You left T-Mobile instead of just turning it off?
Trying the |Contact| link at the bottom of the page to let Daniel know may be a better way of getting a response.
Technically, if they had to spend $x thousands of dollars they are already in the hole.
Great article as usual, but I found it hard to read due to the use of en-dashes without spaces.

E.g this sentence:

However, only operations on a single document are atomic–queries which access multiple keys may read and write inconsistent data.

which I spent a minute trying to parse as:

However, only operations on a single document are "atomic-queries", which access multiple keys may read and write inconsistent data.
1) Yep. But not bad for a first generation product. Already plenty of guides about building a VR ready computer for <$1000.

2) Only windows. Agreed. But I'm glad they did so they could get one platform dialed in instead of chasing multiple rabbits. For now.

3) Games - copying part of this - do yourself a favor and try with Elite Dangerous or Assetto Corsa. And gaming doesn't scratch the service in terms of application - training, social interaction, SEX, therapy, etc, etc.
This brings to mind an old, interesting essay written by legendary sound engineer Steve Albini:

http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17

This appears to have been written for the "indie rock" bands that got picked up by major labels after the success of Nirvana. Steve watched a lot of his friends get burned and he breaks down exactly why in this essay.
Offtopic, but I've always been curious: do people really find trackpoint style mice even remotely usable? Presumably so, since Lenovo still includes them, but personal experience makes this baffling.

Edit: thanks for the responses. I can definitely see how the trackpoint could be more accurate, but my experience is that the workflow is MUCH slower. As basically a joystick device, you must wait for the pointer to move to the desired location. One could compensate for this by pushing harder, but this results in overshoot of the intended target, which requires compensating with slow, precise reversal movement. The whole process is just very, very tedious in my experience using them. That's what I meant, specifically. How do you trackpoint users manage to get around this?
95% consensus of expert economists: cut carbon pollution
Hmm, I'm not sure I like this. It would ultimately be an assessment of your own ignorance of a subject.

Maybe coding based on researching solutions is a good way to do things - we just need to make it more efficient.

Looking for an existing implementation, when a "10m implementation will do" - How do you know it will do if you've not researched more? When do you stop?

I think risk-assessment should be more of a thing in software development. We can't really know where the bugs might be, but we can know where we'd like them the least?
No, you can't join my wifi network
(1) and (2) seem equivalent from the perspective of bypassing "Binge On"; (1) has the general benefit of encrypting all traffic, but no special benefit with respect to this particular service.

Also: (4) Switch cell carriers. Unlike localities that lack multiple local ISPs, cell carriers have extensive competition available to choose from.
Edison being the guy who ripped off Tesla?
I thought all of the music apps that joined their program earlier had that imposed on them, however I can't seem to find where i read that so i might be wrong there.
This is probably because the resumes that the writer receives have already been pre-screened by the CEO.

I tend to think that this pre-screening likely means that they are underinclusive—if anything—in moving candidates through the process. That is probably OK for a company like Automattic, which gets tons of resumes. But for a startup that has less name recognition, it could be more of a problem. Very interest read, overall!
That's a pretty cool project
Teen Girls Will Create Games to Play on a Philadelphia Skyscraper
It is predicted that autonomous cars will reduce America's fleet of vehicles by something like 10-fold [1]. I think it will unfold something like this:

FIRST, instead three cars for mom, dad and kid, the average family has one car that drops mom off to work, then dad, and then the teen off to school.

SECOND, aforementioned car makes use of its down time to drive strangers around via Uber, Lyft, et cetera. The car's owners collect a fee from Uber, Lyft et al.

THIRD, economies of scale and changes in perceptions towards the utility versus cost of owning cars causes people to stop buying them. Instead, they subscribe for access to a fleet–such as Uber or Tesla's. (Note: people already do this in cities like New York, where car ownership is relatively scarce.)

AND FINALLY, as distributed car ownership falls, retail locations for their maintenance go out of business. Barring massive public subsidy for car ownership, this creates a feedback loop that increases the cost of individual car ownership until it becomes a luxury.

1 will happen later than we expect. 2 will happen sooner, 3 much later and 4 drastically sooner. In fact, I think it will ultimately be 4, not 3, that drives a rapid, self-perpetuating dominance of self-driving cars within our lifetime.

[1] http://sustainablemobility.ei.columbia.edu/files/2012/12/Tra...
Any ideas on how well these laptops will support Linux? In my experience, Thinkpads are hit-or-miss when it comes to Linux support and I don't want to be the one that has to figure everything out (which I've done before for a few laptops; going so far as to make my own patches).

Honestly, Windows-only hardware or features are a big warning sign for me as those will be the first things to cause trouble--even in Windows! Microsoft will push an update to Windows and then, say, your power management stops working, the screen starts flickering when playing videos, the special laptop buttons no longer work, etc etc.

If everything works with Linux out-of-the-box though then it's unlikely you're going to experience problems in Windows either.
> When you block a character, I’m going to assume one thing: your input sanitisation and your query parameterisation sucks.

Not really. This is to reduce issues with users unable to login because...

1) they might have used symbols like [, { or similar while registering on a Windows machine - and they cannot find these symbols written on a Mac keyboard

2) Umlauts - these are not available in foreign countries and no one knows the escape sequences out of memory

3) They're on the phone and cannot see the password in cleartext (and thus cannot spot input errors). Seriously, I accept that asterisk stuff on PCs where you might be connected to a projector or someone glances over your screen. But on a phone? Anyone looking over your shoulder can already see what you typed!

> Delayed pop-over ads – evil personified

I might accept these when I can close them with Esc like any other modal window in my OS. Kill that behaviour and you deserve to rot in hell.

> EU cookie warnings – this is just plain stupid

Thank the EU for this bullshit, they mandated it.
Let’s all grow up (2009)
I can add one data point. we recently launched this app - http://burningmanapp.co/ - it converts your steps into bitcoins. the usage is really off the charts >1000 users logging around million steps everyday. >50% have provided their Bitcoin address.
So, can we say that this is the moment when taxi industry and car production industry are officially starting to turn into a single unified transportation industry?
Which prototype? It sounds like you used a DK1, where the SDE (screen door effect) was very pronounced. The DK1's resolution is 1280×800@60hz.

The DK2 is 1920x1080@75hz, and the CV1 (subject of OP) is 2160×1200@90hz. I'm sure the SDE is still perceptible in the CV1 if you look closely enough, but most reports say it is no longer an issue.
Because that is the expectation in the US for any salaried employee.
It takes getting used to. But once you do, the way back is very difficult. The speed and precision is way better than any trackpad (including Apple's).
Thriving Garden in Sealed Bottle Hasn't Been Watered in Over 40 Years
The glare on those is pretty bad unless you want to only watch TV in the dark.
Could you not swap it for an IPS panel? I've been thinking of getting an IPS panel for my x220, and I've seen people replacing them. I don't know if it's possible on x220s though.
Using NPM Modules in Node-RED (IoT Programming Tool)
This cannot be understated. It's amazing how many networks still have absolutely shitty NATs that breaks things like VOIP, video conferencing, remote access, file sharing, and online games. It make the internet almost unusable.
The Hardest Thing in Data Science
Does making it optional remove #3?
Ugg. Companies like yours is the reason you need to buy a 16GB laptop today just to browse the web.

Don't take it personal, but it's really starting to get quite absurd.
It's similar to Amazon viewing the Kindle as an opportunity.

If you aren't in a position to prevent innovation from happening then you may as well be the leader of said innovation.
I was wondering, would it be possible to create a better converter that did usb -> rs232/parallel port that had a special driver to put timing info? At least for driving CNC motors with a parallel port, timing is critical, you could send the pulse signal along with a timing, like 1 @ t0, 0 @ t0+1us etc.. Reading would be similar. The chip on the converter would have an accurate clock and faithfully reproduce the desired signal.
Yes, I used to find them hugely useful once I got used to it even did graphic design with one and it worked really well (years ago I worked in print and used a cheap Thinkpad on top of the colour machine as the print server/layout tool, it worked surprisingly well - was an r50e iirc).
Ugh, self driving cars, but SHITTY self-driving cars. Of course.
> Contracting officers and large contractors are desperate to team up with start-ups

I don't think I have heard that sentiment before. Do you have a source for this? Sub-contractors are a dime-a-dozen around DC from what I see.

> use government contracts as a no-strings-attached method of raising cash

There are plenty of "strings attached" when it comes to government contracting. Far, far more than what you find in the private sector.
Hashing Passwords Stored in Couchbase Server with Node.js
I quite like the idea that some of my machines, which are running experimental code or aren't fully secure (or devices like my tv) are not even addressable from the outside but can retrieve stuff if they need to. It seems to make sense there.

I guess as/when the transition gets more widespread we'll see if NAT really was giving us any sort of security for free.
I don't know why people still insist on a hot-swappable battery today. They used to make sense when they lasted 3 hours and broke down after maybe one year of use.

As long as it's not glued in or tugged away behind dozens of other components you can still easily change it with a screwdriver.
> Once I fire off a contract, I’ll post a comment on our internal hiring P2 to give HR a heads up that a trial contract will be incoming shortly.

> NOTE: P2 is a WordPress theme that makes threaded discussions incredibly simple. We use P2 for a large portion of our internal communication.

> I’ll then create a new private WordPress.com blog and invite the applicant to be an editor. This is where I’ll post the project brief. This is also where I’ll move the conversation for the remainder of the trial.

I understand WordPress is their business, but I feel that using WordPress for internal chat and interview board is kind of weird.
Absolutely. In the process of doing so.
It's more about the fact that they WOULD do it, not so much that I can "opt-out". It's bad enough that it's even happening-- it's 10x worse to me that it's "opt-out" and that they are flat out lying about it to people.
It should be noted that per the article, this is for a single project for which the candidate has up to a month to complete. It's not a whole truth to describe the $25/hr as compensation for a "full month's work".

This is also, per the article again, undertaken while one has a job.

Not playing sides, just adding context -- I have no affiliation with the company.
thank you, this is very interesting. Do you know of any more recent companies that started on this route but continued through private investment (like YC companies etc.) For example, have any of YC's roughly 1,000 companies made use of SBIR, STTR, CRADA, etc? (Which ones).
> it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.

Speaking as a Greek person who is also quite average, English was never a problem getting into programming. I live and work in the UK now, but when I first landed on these rain-sodden shores, my spoken English was bad and I had trouble communicating with people. Not so with computers- and I never had trouble with programming languages.

I think the same would go for Italians and even more so, since English has borrowed a lot from Latin, which is basically just an older form of Italian (with high school Latin, you can understand Italian perfectly well and even parse sentences on the fly as people speak to you :)

I think the reason why you may not find many Greeks or Italians, or generally people from non-English speaking countries in the history of computing is the opposite of what you suggest: any contributions they might be able to make are hard to transfer over to the English-speaking world. Any papers are in languages that are not understood in the English-speaking world and translation is not always available.
A: Brave New World
Welcome to Future of Web Application Delivery
Yap it was DK1. Well, that's good to know. I didn't follow u after that much. We moved on from that project, and now I am at a different company altogether. But they'll probably revisit it next year or so. It was just an experimental "let's see what we can do with this" thing and we decided to wait till next generation.
> they invested because the market wasn't in a position to do so when the industry needed it

How is this different than "The industry planned poorly and deserves to have its assets liquidated?"
True, though within a database you can leave a field as NULL.
Well, it'll likely only be a matter of time before you can't turn it off.
T-Mobile has had a reputation as a reliable "outsider" with less coverage, but better business practices than its competitors as well as better rates.

If T-Mobile is going to throw that reputation down the toilet then there is no reason for me to have 2 bars in my house in downtown Chicago.
Looking for simplicity. One of the goals of Cor is to have few keywords, to make it easy to learn, to get involved, and to work with. I had three possible solutions to solve the variable scoping problem.

1- `var` keyword. Like javascript. It assumes all variables are global if not declared with `var`.
2- `global` keyword. Like PHP. It assumes all variables are local unlike that is annotated with `global`.
3- Ruby-like, Coffeescript-like.

A mixing of options number 1 and 3 was chosen.

I will open an issue regarding this subject, considering your proposal for future versions.
So part of what I'm saying is that 1 & 2 cancel themselves out. The people who would drop $1500 ($1K computer plus maybe $500 VR headset) on a first-gen thing are more likely to be the early-adopter types who are less interested in a Windows-only device.

As for 3: I played Elite for a bit. And then quit when I got motion-sick. I'm not particularly motion-sensitive, but DK2 got me there pretty quickly.

Maybe the retail one is better in ways that wouldn't make me sick in that case, but from what Valve people have been saying, the only reliable way to get rid of the sickness is to remove the disconnect between not-moving and seeming-to-move, aka make games that involve only your real-world motion.

If that's the case, it implies that what we need are radically different games than what we have. So I'd either want to see those games, or see some proof that you can do Elite-style gaming with no motion sickness even when playing for hours.
Eh, uh, I mean Blu-ray wasn't a better product/spec than HD-DVD? I don't know about that...
How does Managed Services boost productivity?
Angular 2 Components for AngularJS Developers via AngularClass
The only leverage you have is the money you pay... if you leave, and tell them why, then they are motivated to change to stop loss. If you stay, then they are welcome to try other shady things that you may not catch.