skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the last six months I have been working remotely from Europe for a North American company I have been at for about three years with an otherwise in-office presence.

I worked at a company for just over two years based in the office and then moved to live in Europe for six months, just returning recently to Canada.

The total company size was around 20 staff & execs at the time. My CEO was ok with it, as I had demonstrated over the past couple years that I was able to work independently and responsibly.

The company itself did not need to make several changes as we already had remote employees, so most of the meetings already had somebody dialling in. We use Slack as well which contains a lot of information. I joined a lot more channels when leaving to try best to keep up with all of the information.

My biggest struggle was feeling disconnected from the company and from my coworkers. I missed out on a lot of information that was informally discussed in the office and felt a lot of anxiety related to my performance, even though I was still producing work at a consistent rate. This started to solve itself partially after getting over some of the general growing pains being in the new environment, and I started having regular fifteen minute Skype chats with a handful of different members of the company so we could better keep in contact.

Another struggle was working from home. I found it easy to get distracted and found myself adopting weird work hours. It was especially difficult having most of the meetings happening in North America and needing to make them from a European timezone. I solved this mostly with co-working spaces and other places outside of home to get work done. I got pretty good at working out of coffee shops but it's not easy. An added bonus of the co-working spaces that discovered was making friends and having some sort of social contact during the workdays.

If you have any other questions feel free to email anytime at the address in my profile.
A short story, Minority Report. A lot of the paranoia in Philip K. Dick's stories resonates with the mass surveillance happening today, in part, because that paranoia was driven by McCarthyism.
Awesome. Way better than any of the SQL designers I've seen.
But the outcome is far greater than anything in the private sector. We could never have grown by 20 people in less than a year without external funding in any other market.

I think you just need to get out and attend some events, talk to people, get to know them - don't view them just as a customer. Listen to their problems and, above all, have a solid value proposition and you'll see things differently.

Not all statements have a source, these are first-person experience from a person who runs a successful government-oriented startup. Just because it requires more work than you're used to doesn't mean it's untrue or an impenetrable market. People thinking it's too much work is what is keeping it a market of "insiders" because no-one else wants to give it a shot.
> The first Oculus dev kit shipped

We're talking about consumer items, not dev kits. In reality, Google Cardboard was the first (modern) VR kit released.
For what it's worth as of SDK 0.6.0 of the Oculus you can no longer use it as an extended display. Prior to 0.6.0 you could run the Oculus in either "Extended" mode which just made it show up as an extra monitor, or in "Direct" mode where apps directly displayed their contents on the Oculus (without you having to move the window, make it full screen, etc).

What you're talking about however can easily be done with [Virtual Desktop](http://www.vrdesktop.net/) -- I've used it a few times while developing, it mostly works. It's definitely a nice experience to have your IDE infront of you, documentation a head tilt to the right, and Google a head tilt to the left, but the resolution was too low for me to be comfortable reading text for a long time on the DK2.
Also: "This lot also includes a commemorative 3D-printed Babylonian styled tablet containing the password to a private Github repository where the buyer may access the full source of the Hello World algorithm and an image of the lot."
Northrop to develop unmanned VTOL flying wing for small US Navy ships
Wow, wasn't expecting this headline today!

On the real though, this could absolutely lend some credibility to the BTC platform. If a bunch of celebrities and high-profile individuals start using this app, or even just BTC in general maybe it would help people become less hesitant to consider accepting BTC at their own businesses.

Mike Tyson might be eccentric, but you don't stay rich by making poor choices, I hope that others realize this so that this app enjoys some popularity.
I don't understand why there isn't more emphasis on non-realistic graphics for VR to keep the specs down. If you try to make a VR game that looks as good as current high-end games, it's always going to require massive horsepower because it must run at 60+ FPS at a high resolution so everyone but hardcore gamers are going to be left out.

Mobile gaming became hugely popular without high-end graphics because of the easy of use, portability and touch input controls. I would have thought it would make more sense for VR games to focus on experiences you can only have with VR games (e.g. highly immersive, having sense of scale, use of hand input) and play to its strengths rather than limit its audience with high-end graphics.

I'm very excited about VR but having to buy a Rift and a high-end Windows gaming PC is asking a lot to get involved.
I did about a year ago.

Some adjustments I made were making sure I don't do house work, during "working hours" and also making sure I have "personal time" each day as it is easy to work a lot when working from home. For me, it is e-mail. "Let em just answer this one e-mail from my phone since I am just sitting here watching tv" which turns into me grabning my laptop and working...
> Zuck gets this to the degree that I suspect he believes Facebook & VR will be synonymous within a decade (1)

The vast majority of Facebook users has neither consoles nor PCs nor any interest in ever purchasing a peripheral in the targeted price range (even if it drops to 100USD).

I don't doubt that they can break even regarding development costs, but it won't be a cash cow.
US Shuts Down Drone Base in Ethiopia
We're not too far away from the world of 'Hardwired' by Walter Jon Williams.

I was reading an article a while back about the drug cartels where they've created their own submarines to ship cocaine up from South America. Not nearly as cool as turbojet powered hovercraft with miniguns and SAMs, piloted via neural interface. But it is still pretty wild, when you think about it.

And of course we've got increased use of robots (drones) involved with smuggling too.

And then there are the giant mega-corporations, backed by AIs, running the world. The people in the corporations may think they are in control, but the corporations themselves have their own agenda.

At least we're also on a good path as far as reusable spacecraft now...
This is a very strong feeling of mine and early reviewers of the essay railed at that frustration. It's striking how much the hiring dance feels full of misplaced energy.

There's no doubt hiring for product engineers is horribly broken, and in a way that holds back the entire ecosystem.

The essay is not about interviewing, because I don't have strong alternatives to suggest.

First we need vocabulary, then we'll need process. I'm in a quest to understand how to hire for this role: I'll write a new essay once I understand it.
Google groups for Developers
This behavior is one of the reasons not to call JS a 'functional' language, IMHO.
> Flagging is the equivalent of walking away from a conversation with an obnoxious person, not the equivalent of reporting someone to the secret police.

Your mental gymnastics are fascinating. Walking away is the equivalent of walking away. Downvoting is the equivalent of spitting or swearing. Flagging is the equivalent of calling the cops.

> If you welcome and tolerate every single conversation that someone tries to engage you in, more power to you.

I usually tolerate most attempts and ignore those that I do not.
Sadly, you're not wrong. So I'm stuck trying to find the evils that I'm most content with being forced to put up with.
What is a "Swift-only" integer? Swift integers are just integers. They interoperate with C just fine.

Interacting with C APIs in Swift is pretty much as convenient as using them from C or Objective-C. Which is to say, it's kind of inconvenient compared to using a good Swift API, but you don't gain a benefit from using C or Objective-C instead.

The major exceptions to this are the inability to take a pointer to something before it's initialized (for example to use a local variable for an out-parameter) and the inability to declare arrays on the stack. The former just requires some "= 0" or similar, and the latter can be worked around without much difficulty using a Swift Array or just using malloc and free, at the expense of a bit of performance.

There is also a problem where Swift translates fixed-length arrays to tuples (because Swift has no concept of fixed-length arrays) which can be inconvenient, but this rarely comes up.

Maybe you're just not familiar with the facilities Swift provides for interacting with C APIs and are doing things in a more difficult way than is necessary.

It's absolutely true for C++ interfaces, of course, but Swift doesn't even try and never advertises C++ interop. For that, you have no choice but to use C++ or Objective-C++. But for plain C APIs, Swift does a great job.
Super nice although it's a shame the name clashes with https://github.com/mattn/gom that is pretty well established at this point.

Naming sure is hard.
WSGI 2.0 Round 2: requirements and call for interest
I do find it inspiring. I studied neural networks at CMU and at Toronto. But if you look at the false positives that these CNN architectures generate, you'll have to agree that there is no "intelligence" present.
That's a nice fantasy --- oh, everyone's smart, just as different things. It just ain't true.

Science tells us that IQ is a general mental cognitive factor; tasks can be more or less heavily g-weighted, but intelligence is strongly correlated to all sorts of things, like mortality (inversely), lifetime income, accomplishment, marriage stability, and so on.

Try again.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441005667?keywords=forever...

Forever Peace: sci-fi written by a Vietnam War veteran.

US Military uses robots for fighting that include mind-to-mind communication.. but bans links longer than N Days. After N days, a human with such an immediate connection to another becomes irrevocably pacifist.
No religion was simply created from nothing nor has a single identified creator.

Arguing about the distinction between "purpose" and "function" of evolved features is a useless game of word semantics.
Tyler Oakley  about the challenges of Internet fame, dating, and being a dad
An allegory on bad A/B testing
This really resonates with me. There seems to be a trend of frowning on these types as 'generalists' who don't have sufficiently hard tech skills, but 'creates great products from the ground up' is a specialization in itself, and an extremely critical one. Someone who will do (and learn) whatever it takes to put out high quality work is someone who will be a top performer at almost any company, regardless of how they would do on a Google algorithms quiz.

This mismatch was part of what motivated me to build MakerSlate [1], a résumé optimized for just this type of creator.

1: https://makerslate.io
Yep, that's why the Gear VR has seen such huge investment from Oculus. It offers a decent VR experience with mainstream phones and a cheap(ish) accessory.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/gear-vr/

My impression is something like this is a big part of the future of the Oculus platform, and that the Rift is designed to deliver higher quality experiences until mobile catches up.
Because 9 hrs is not long enough and less is a joke.
I know the mods typically prefer to leave titles the same as the article's title, but the article's title is misleading.

There's no "cure," miracle or otherwise. The article is pretty interesting, but the drug doesn't cure or even attempt to cure cancer, it just delays it.

So Pharmacyclics cannot have a miracle cure since they don't attempt to cure.
Got back to me, they won't be reimbursing, crediting or discounting me anything.

If you really don't think this is gotcha pricing, I'll repeat once more... after two years I paid off my phone (i.e., I'm not paying for it anymore, so my monthly fees go down). Instead of reducing my fees by switching me to one of their normal plans (which would cut my fees by 50%), they switched my contract and hiked my fees by 50%.

For a sense of the extra fees they were charging silently for 7 months, here's two example comparisons:

1) They have a plan (to which I switched today), that's 3x cheaper than what they had me pay, but that doubles my monthly data cap and keeps my monthly minutes exactly the same. They were overcharging 3x for less service.

2) I currently get a certain data cap + minutes on a no-phone contract. They have an offer for a free iPhone 5S (1y old model) with 50% more minutes and 5x the data cap, that's about 30% cheaper than what they had me pay. I pay more than the plan that gives me way more service + a free phone that's worth hundreds of dollars. Oh and I'd get 4G instead of 3G, too.

Again, they silently hiked these fees, at a point that they could either 1) switch me to a normal-rate product (that I switched to today), or 2) send me a freaking email or text message about the fee hike at the very least. It's a shitty move.

It's really shitty because I feel I need to switch to stay true to my ideals. At the same time, I can't think of a less shittier company, I really like T-Mobile and expect every major telco to have pulled this trick except them. Anyway I reduced my fees by 2/3rds today with a simple call for now, will think about what to do after.
Thanks for the insights. Sounds like a fair procedure.

Curious to hear more about what you found cool about their communication methods. I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm surprised how inefficient a lot of Big Corp communication methods can be, especially those with a field/regional organization. Inclined to agree that knowledge radiates outwards, but tinkering with ideas about how to best receive feedback inwards and what are the most effective methods of radiating that knowledge. Easier said than done.
Here's one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/uber-driver-complaints-e...

> So we compiled a list of seven things you might be doing to annoy your Uber driver and destroy your rating. Avoid these behaviors to ensure a smooth ride for both you and your driver.

> 2. You don't tip.

From one of the biggest Uber driver blogs: http://therideshareguy.com/should-uber-passengers-tip-their-...

> I often see drivers referring to passengers that don’t tip as ‘cheap bastards’ or ‘pieces of shit’

> As a driver, if tips really are important to you, then you need to educate your passengers about how Uber used to pay a better wage and drivers were ok with not accepting tips and now that rates are lower, more and more drivers depend on tips to make a live-able wage.
Football Manager Handheld 2015 Apk and MOD Data v6.3.1 Free Download
That's a good one, with our dystopian technocracy it's easy to pull from the world of cyberpunk for similarities.
> My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra compensation.

I had a company try the same shit (on top of even more shit). Took a job, the pay was... not terrible. However they oddly took the time to stress that as a programmer I am exempt for overtime. After a while I was put as the "on-call" guy for deployments and crashes. I thought it was just during work hours, since we had dedicated sysadmins at the company, but it was in fact nights and weekends. The fact that they hid that during the interview and waited a couple months in when any other job offers I would have had dried up can only be a calculated move on their part. When they asked me if it was going to be a problem, I told them yes, I quit. If you're going to try to take whole weeks of my free-time for the company you sure as shit better compensate me for it. I'm not going to spend my weekends sitting around the house when I could be out hiking, kayaking, or fishing and spending time with my friends. Especially not when you go out of your way to stress you don't owe me anything additional, and especially not when it's done in such a conniving manner.
no, bald eagles are not radioactive.
> "the use of pleasure to keep everybody conforming and complacent with their place in society."

That's been going on for a long time, it's telling but not exactly prescient...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
Indeed; every style guide I've read recommends either unspaced em-dashes or spaced en-dashes.
Objective-C does it differently by default:

int x = 0;
void (^block)(void) = ^{ NSLog(@"%d", x); };
x++;
block();

This will log 0, not 1. If you want to capture by reference rather than by value, you add __block to the declaration of x.

For a lot of people coming to Swift from Objective-C, this is a surprising change, especially if Objective-C was their first language with closures.
Yeah, I figured, but that's pretty old information by now. In particular, it predates the company's massive spending in China, and increased competition in the mature markets that have been effectively deregulated (e.g. NYC).

One of the ironic things about Uber is that after they overcome regulatory hurdles in new markets, they make business dramatically easier for their competitors. Taxi service without regulatory capture is a commodity product.
Michael Jackson also owned Elvis Presley's Catalogue!

http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/elvisnews_lisanothappywithmi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U7SsGjSgR0
Just turned it off for myself. Thanks for the tip.

https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24294
Show HN: Nodal – Create a Node.js Twitter Clone in 10 Minutes
I understand that it would be backwards-incompatible, however it would be nice to make it official, considering it's been proven useful.

It wouldn't break existing Powerline fonts, however, because those private-use codepoints would still work as long as they're not assigned to anything else.
T420s user here, the TN panels Lenovo used a few years ago are shockingly bad.

I am still looking forward to getting a fanless ThinkPad. A laptop with zero moving parts is my dream. I tried an Asus UX305FA last year but the Core-M is a little lacking still, I am hoping in a generation or two we will be there :)
I very much doubt this is about 'providing value'. This gives them the general benefits of throttling users on the heaviest form of data use, with PR spun around to sound like a feature.
The big advantage Sony has is they know all VR games will work well by design as all PS4s have the same spec.
A Brave New World resonates so much more though. 1984 only had the eternal war and surveillance... Brave New World has distractions to keep people happy when they're just slaves in a system.
I can't help but think that the key here isn't Software vs everything else, but level of abstraction. It really seems the with software, and much computer driven work, your work as well as your products exist as purely abstracted projects. Woodworking requires abstract thinking, but the end result is usually something made out of wood, or the conclusion that you can't make what you were thinking about out of wood.

I do plenty of woodworking, including woodworking with CNC/Software. But, I do know when I'm done with a project because the abstractions are over, the plans are drawn and implemented, and the project is built. Then, its done.
"I consider the approach of reversing a sentence a “hack”. It makes things work better in practice, but it’s not a principled solution."

I had the same feeling about boundary box recommendations/guesses that were used to speed up object recognition with Deep Learning fairly recently. Just as with a sliding box approach it is intuitive and works, but it also seems quite inelegant and like a better approach should be possible. Visual attention seems like it should work much better in the long term, so it is exciting the field has come to a point where it has been developed.
Unreal Engine 1 is still my benchmark for doing impressive things on pretty much any level of hardware at the time.
I'm far from an expert on all of the details, but I find it amusing how similar Edison was to Steve Jobs: both non-engineers that seemed to have enough technical intuition to facilitate an amazing amount of development within their organizations, all while taking (perhaps) more credit than they deserved and running their businesses in occasionally ruthless ways.

Yet, somehow it's popular to want to emulate Steve Jobs and rant about how mean Edison was to Tesla.
Ask HN: Dismantling botnets: possible?
I'll state up front that I know nothing about botnet formation, architecture or the like.

Simple question: is it possible for operating system manufacturers to send out an update (forcibly, preferably) that detects and disables networking on infected machines?

Alternatively, would it be possible to send out an OS update that could detect infected machines and report back IP address communication to/from the machine? This could possible be processed (in a 'big data' fashion) to narrow down botnet control paths?

I'm sure there are any number of ethical/privacy related reasons against this sort of action but we're speaking hypothetically.
Very interesting, did not know about that. Thanks for the links!
I guess I'm going to be different and actually suggest that I think Binge On is fine.

Almost all video streaming services will downgrade the stream quality if they get a 1.5Mbps pipe, and any that don't are at a competitive disadvantage to anyone who is streaming from a phone and who actually only has a 1.5Mbps pipe. It's built into most of the streaming protocols to downgrade on a slower connection. Source: I worked with video streaming on the client side when I was at Amazon, and additionally researched other options to the one we settled on.

So T-Mobile is asking users to choose between a (potentially) lower quality video stream in exchange for getting tons of video streaming options for free. This reduces load on their network, because people were obviously streaming anyway, and has convinced the biggest providers like Netflix to voluntarily reduce their bandwidth consumption to 480p in order to get free streaming to T-Mobile customers.

At best I would say that better user education could be called for, or potentially forcing the users to make an opt-in/out decision, but honestly I think the users would hate the interruption. This is clearly a situation like the European cookie permission law: If you force them to ask the users whether it's OK, sure they will ask, and that will interfere with the UX and piss off users.

I'm fine with it being opt-out; let T-Mobile email or send a notification to everyone about how to opt out if they want, along with an explanation of the consequences, and let them decide whether to click the "opt out" button.

Not "because T-Mobile," like another comment implied, but because it's a fine trade-off, and anyone who cares can just disable it. More than 480p on a tiny screen is nice sometimes, but I'll take free 480p over the cell network and watch my 1080p video when I'm at home on wifi.

I also love to be able to stream music for free on T-Mobile. That's a feature I use all the time. Even my more "fringe" music streaming services are supported. This doesn't seem to me to be anti-competitive, and T-Mobile isn't charging anything to stream the music, so I think it's pure awesome.
What I'm wondering reading this is why song rights were so profitable in this time period. Why were McCartney and Jackson making so much money and why didn't the record labels keep the rights locked up tight if the rights were so lucrative long-term?