skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm uncomfortable with research that merely states "we threw some Turkers at it". In my experience they are overall reliable, but there's no data on what qualifications (if any) the jobs were assigned, how much was offered, how long was given to complete the test, etc. It could be that some of these humans were actually by bots themselves, if insufficient controls were put in place.

http://turkernation.com/showthread.php?21352-The-Myth-of-Low...
I've just started using this too, not much real world experience but in case it's useful to someone: https://github.com/joewalnes/reconnecting-websocket
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth here. That said:

When people serve their time we let them out of prison. But it also doesn't mean people may not still be afraid of them because of what they've done in the past. You cannot lock someone up just because someone is afraid of them. "If they do it again he will go to prison" isn't exactly comforting.

As my father would happily point out, you cannot always lock someone up for being an asshole. Not all asshole behavior is prison worthy. But that doesn't mean that I want to have to endure it because I have an unpopular point of view.

No, I don't think Marijuana consumption should be illegal. If I did it, even if it were legal, I would probably not particularly care to have everyone in the world know about it. That said, making Marijuana legal will do little for the black community. The problems are much deeper.

Bringing up a 300+ year long struggle against oppression isn't exactly a point in your favor of having no privacy.
Money orders and checks? Oh, US, so far ahead and yet so behind.
Making a Six Month Pinhole Exposure from a Beer Can
Creating a CSP Policy from Scratch
You seem to be arguing against the very concept of a warrant canary, claiming that it is somehow obviously an unworkable concept, without giving any specific references. Despite this, others seem to be using warrant canaries. What do you know that they don’t? Are those using warrant canaries simply delusional? You have to make a more solid argument for your point than simple assertions.

Also, your argument style is very aggressive, adressing me personally, saying “You did it to yourself.”, despite the fact that I have not claimed to have published a warrant canary.
The thing that bothers me is that they should've already made this connection. That's due to the same precedent the media should be all over: J Edgar Hoover. Hoover pushed for greater power for FBI, including surveillance, to combat the communist threat. They encouraged people everywhere to tip them off with innocent people often being harassed. Sound familiar post-9/11?

Anyway, Hoover decided surveillance power had a better use: digging up dirt on politicians, media people, judges, whoever. This was back when FBI agents had to physically tap phone wires or sit outside your house. Nonetheless, with very little capabilities, he got enough dirt to blackmail Congress into increasing his power and reign for decades. So, one person already took control of Congress via unlawful use of surveillance.

Now, we have an agency that can spy on everyone and everything simultaneously with algorithms looking for juiciest tidbits? And Congress doesn't see how this could be bad for them? Even one rogue group with unlogged access to the collection tech could get enough dirt on key committees probably in weeks to months. Whole NSA could be honest except them and still a huge threat to democracy.

This is why I argue that we need to push Congress and business elites to roll back government surveillance while constantly reminding them of J Edgar Hoover precedent. I was sure they'd be spying on at least some of Congress. Articles like this only make our claims stronger. Keep asking them if they want to be working for NSA employees with copies of incriminating messages, photos, or meetups? Or do they want to keep their power over their own fiefdoms?

Gotta be in their self-interest and risks they understand. Like blackmail and how dots can be connected between them and lobbyists financiers.
The information may be available, but ultimately the work would have to be done by node, not npm, and it seems reasonable to not want to change such a fundamental node behavior, especially just to support a change in npm.
Because their actions are neither fair to other businesses ( Apple's tax emeption was an individually negotiated deal) nor other EU countries as the income is not taxed at all.
This might make a good "Show HN".

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
I agree, but I can't think of a much better name? Next 24/30 seems more honest, but more confusing at the same time. Especially because now you have Next 18/24 (the 24 overlaps in two plans).

That said, I'm on a Next plan and the sales people have been super clear about this. So I haven't had the experience of them sneaking it in.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, Free Basics isn't the only offering that solves the problem. There are other options, and other models which have worked which Free Basics could adopt instead.

From that point of view, there are things which are strictly better than free basics which address these concerns (and net neutrality affects everyone, it's not just the "choice" of the people using Free Basics).

If these other models didn't exist there would probably be a weaker opposition to Free Basics. I'd mostly be on the fence -- preferring that net neutrality wasn't affected, but still supporting (or, not opposing) Free Basics since it's an IMO net gain. But these other options do exist.

What if there was a way to get the stress relief and other effects of smoking in a perfectly healthy and otherwise equivalent way? Would you ban cigarette smoking then? This "safe smoke" is not inferior to regular smoking according to smokers. It feels the exact same and has the exact same effect. If this exists, why allow cigarettes to exist? Okay, maybe you still want that choice. What if secondhand smoke was a much larger danger than it is now, and if a sizeable chunk of people start smoking, a lot of other people may get cancer just by sharing the same streets? In that case, would you allow it?

It's the same situation here.
> A regexp is almost always the wrong solution.

That's quite a sweeping statement.

Sure, complex regexps can be hard to read but state machines are just hard to read for humans in general, whatever the form.

What do you recommend for parsing simple text entries, then?
Thank you for sharing, really enjoyed this story.

Feels like the mnemonic & advice can be applied to all manner of stories, not just about a startup.

I've, also, seen similar arc play out with individual contributors that are superstars one instance and then fall down to the level of "mortals".

The advice at the end is fantastic, too. The first two items: Don't get angry and Don't force anything (doing nothing is doing something).

Are key in all kinds of difficult situations. Doing nothing is not always a bad thing, I tend to forget that part.
No, the web app itself consists mostly of static files, generated with old fashioned bundling.

There's even a few serverside pages, public content for marketing. I did not trust Google to index single page websocket api's properly yet.
This is a really interesting project! One of my issues with React has been the script size, and this one even seems quicker to boot.

Obviously it doesn't have certain things like React does but it's a perfect library for mobile usage!
What does "walk" mean in this context? My (naive) reading is that you can cut all ties and run because they've essentially broken a contract; that's trivially true, but doesn't help with the actual goal of getting money from those options.
> Medics checked him out each time, and cleared him. Are you suggesting Medics aren't to be trusted now too?

As with all medical professionals, they are not to be trusted to be omniscient. Clearing him for release is not the same thing as guaranteeing that he had no dangerous injuries.
It's funny how on sites like HN, much of the herd will emote over how superior vacuum tube amps and vinyl records are "better" than current technology, despite the fact that science and math proves them wrong. It just goes to show that there will always be a subset of people in all fields, regardless of the level of technology or sophistication, that think they know better than science and math. It's as absurd as a surgeon who is a deep believer in astrology and who goes to visit psychics for life advice.

I actually lived through the vinyl era as well as ferric oxide and CrO2 cassettes, etc, and the advance from that to CDs you just can't even compare. If you say you prefer the sound of vinyl records with its pops and fading dynamic range, then that's your choice, but it's in no way superior to digital audio.
You are essentially claiming that mental illness is less respectable than physical illness.

(BTW, much has been said about Jobs refusing standard cancer treatment and choosing a potentially less effective one.)
forcing a single copy of a dep is exactly the opposite of the dependency strategy both the node module loader and npm take. the fact that the node module loader can load more than one version of a module into memory is its strength and npm plays to this, and in doing so avoids "dependency hell". you might checkout this page in the docs that talks more about this: https://docs.npmjs.com/how-npm-works/npm2
Evaluating the value of stock options can also be done using the Black-Scholes model. Here's a blog post that explains more as it applies to startups: http://cdixon.org/2009/08/18/options-on-early-stage-companie... .
New Year’s Greetings from Jolla
I'm not a doctor, but I think paedophiles have difficulties in controlling their sex drive, and the actions resulting from it.

Plus, there's the question of consent. Do children give consent? Can they even?
This isn't extremely important, but you should probably declare those symbols as straight `char`'s, not `void * `. The symbols themselves aren't pointers, the symbol itself refers to the first byte in your binary block - The same way `b` from `char b` refers to a byte on the stack. That's why you have to take the address of the symbol to get the address of the block. It makes more sense to declare it as a `char` because then nobody will attempt to use the original block symbols to access the blob itself.

As it is, you have `_binary_blob_start`, `start`, `_binary_blob_end` and `end`. All 4 are `void * `'s, but `start` and `end` are the only ones which actually point to the block! `_binary_blob_start` and `_binary_blob_end` are actually pointers made-up of the first 4/8 bytes of your binary-data, and thus aren't actually pointers.
Ah, fair enough.

I assumed the same team was in charge of both.
You do get a discount. But they are getting rid of the subsidized phones (which honestly, for many/most people turned out to be a bad idea after the introduction of Next).
> A non negligible part of his rant was about proprietary graphic drivers. Free software developers can't do anything about that, and anyway what is the point?

Whether or not it is fixable by the community is unimportant to an end-user that just wants something that works.
Quote:

“we are happy to say that we will be shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016, targeting to send invitations during January. The bad news here is that we are not able to complete the production to fulfill all contributions. In other words, all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet.”
Actually, it's even less dramatic:

Headline: AI outperforms humans on IQ test

Reality: Trained machine learning algorithm scores better than the average untrained human.

If the Mechanical Turks were allowed to take versions of the test as many times as the AI was before the final test, the human average would be significantly higher.
There was this really good episode of Brass Eye, "Paedogeddon", lampooning media's portrayal of the threat (the tone they use, the sensationalism, lack of critical thinking etc.). It's hilarious - well if you like British humour - and available on YouTube.

Chris Morris got under some heavy criticism for it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Eye#Response
> Embracing Modern C++ (RAII, STL, range-based for loops) helps you avoid a big chunk of memory safety problems.

Not really. RAII still allows for dangling pointers/references. The STL is vulnerable to iterator invalidation. Ranges are likewise vulnerable.

> Contracts and some of the stuff in the new Core guidelines take it further.

How do contracts help memory safety?

The ISO Core C++ bounds/lifetime checker does, yes, but as I mentioned in the other comment I don't know whether it is still going to be C++ in practice.

> The stuff I work on has tons of users and start up perf and minimal memory usage are primary requirements.

Those are valid reasons to use C++, yes.

> Most of our bugs are nullptr access violations or straight up programming errors that C# doesn't shield you from either.

C# doesn't make null dereference undefined behavior :)
I remember reading an Arthur C. Clarke book where a space liner has lost their engines and their airlocks. The protagonist on the military rescue ship decides to do something drastic: blow up the space liner.

They seal the people into groups of 20 in separate cabins, and then they detonate small charges to puncture each cabin at a time. Their ship is positioned right next to the liner, with utility cords leading straight to the airlock. Clarke took this opportunity to explain that you don't freeze and explode in space, losing oxygen is the main problem. But also for that reason--- don't hold your breath when you're about to be exposed to vacuum, that's just a good way to rupture your lungs from the pressure.
Of course, one possibility is that they already are blackmailing everybody...
Meh. Anyone who ever worked with the v8 C++ interop API knows that it's a rather unpleasant experience (unlike e.g. Python's C interop API, which is very nice). Nobody uses it out of pure laziness, but because They Have A Very Good Reason To Do So™.
Whenever I have a general "I don't like it" sentiment I usually will give something a go until I have some concrete reasons for why "I don't like it". It's a pretty solid filtering mechanism for me and helps me explore new things and at the same time confirm or reject my initial reaction(s).
"IQ-test-taking computer outperforms a sample of humans at IQ test."
I think this is the wrong approach. We shouldn't pick up MS's slack, MS should. This just enforces the current situation and keeps enabling MS to ignore the problem.
From what I've seen, wireless carriers don't care too much about retaining existing customers and focus mostly on acquiring new ones.

Probably a different story with larger business customers.
> The only reason companies like Google make as much money as they do is because so many people use their search engine and continue to generate those ads

I'm not very into this advertising mumbo jumbo, but you might be wrong here, since Google have AdWords/AdSense on couple more sites than the search pages. :)

Long story short, there were these companies that either had a browser add-on or a stand alone app that filled 10-30% of your screen with ads, for which you were paid by hour.

Some networks were so successful they even give free PCs :)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf
- http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/17/free.pc.reut/
- http://www.angelfire.com/pe/home4u/cl204.html
The exhaust emissions scandal (32c3)
Correct, but for web apps this is rather different. I found that my thinking was very much request-response. Probably game devs would pick this up much quicker than I did.
> ArsTechnica investigation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817913

A point of analysis for the inquiry: can Twitter make a full dump of tweets available to journalists and investigators? Historical data is available to organizations who pay for Twitter's full data feed subscription. Many people who write/tweet from a mobile phone will use auto-correct. There were unusual spelling errors in the recent batch of tweets. Were these spelling errors consistent with his past spelling errors? Did his past tweets have spelling errors, or did they include words which are typical of auto-correct (i.e. correctly spelled but wrong within tweet context)? Did the tweets originate from a mobile phone? Any clues from gait analysis of the phone's accelerometer?

If observers are going to use a few tweets as a proxy indicator of evidence for mental state, those tweets should be evaluated within the context of all prior pubic tweets, including a history (or not) of tweeting under the influence. Furthermore, did Ian reach out to other members of his large technology community on channels other than Twitter? Those communications could also be proxy indicators of his perceptions, wishes and intentions. He must have reached out in person and 1:1 for support.

The highest priority is to understand what Ian would want at this point, using all available recent/historical data from all available online and offline channels. This does not mean that all data must be public, only that Ian's trusted confidantes be the ones to review both private and public data, at an appropriate time. But all public data should be consolidated by capable journalists.

A carefully structured public/private analysis can inform our individual and collective response to future incidents. Such tragedies have happened enough times [1] that we need proactive and preventive cultural and data-driven guidance within the technology community, the same way that opsec has become critical to journalists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Programmers_who_commi...
My conclusion is that Israel is not our "friend", whatever the hell that means. It is an aggressive powerful state willing to use that power without regard to any international norms. And it has irreparably corrupted our political systems to serve its own needs.

If the surveillance state has any purpose, keeping an eye on Israel should be a top priority.
A phone company providing reasonable options and not screwing you over at every opportunity is rather weird, and I didn't believe it at first either.
> IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.

How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected to "the most wonderful human achievements of the past"?
Pro tip: keep a spreadsheet in Google docs with your travel history. Lots of visa forms require this (e.g., the US DS-160 form asks for a list of countries visited in the last 5 years, and also a list of previous US entry dates.)

It's definitely tormenting trying to reconstruct this after the fact, but its pretty trivial to keep track of with some effort. Kind of like a tax return or something.
Have I got it wrong? I'll check - sorry - stand by ...

(pause)

Right. So the link I've given is to an earlier submission of exactly this article, and the thread there has 52 comments in it. There is some discussion of this article in that thread, but as you say, it's mostly digressions.

I wonder if that's true of many HN threads.

So you're right - there is a discussion, but although it's in reply to this article, it's not of this article.

I'll leave my comment there.
It's quite snappy on my own Samsung Chromebook. However, I did grasp the irony of running a web OS inside of another web OS.
Software Engineering On-boarding
The "collective identity" component of this comes from the group of HN readers collectively deciding to upvote this to the top story for an extended period of time. I'm not sure what would be added to that by a single admin making a decision by fiat.
I actually code with one tab open with Facebook...I trained myself to ignore it unless I have a free moment. Sometimes it's necessary for me to be responsive there due to having plans to do something later with friends (i.e. meeting up in the afternoon to run or have dinner at Facebook). However, if I have important tasks to do, I keep a mental reminder to respond later and focus on my current task first.

I agree with the rest of the points made though. Multitasking is generally difficult.
> things are a bit different when someone takes their own life

This is a golden example of stigmatizing mental illness. If he had cancer, it would have been a "real" tragedy, but because he (likely) had some kind of mental illness/breakdown that led to the same result, it's "different".

You know, personally I think what Steve Jobs did - aside from gaming the system to get first dibs on his new liver - was tantamount to murder. He got a new liver, and then didn't follow standard treatment for his cancer, resulting in his own death.

The liver he (effectively) stole could have gone to someone else who could still be alive today. Doesn't that make you sick ? It's tantamount to killing an innocent life.

Edit: The more I think about it, Steve did take his own life. I'm sure at some point, his doctors told him "if you dont do this [follow treatment regimen], you'll die". So he committed suicide too.
35% of Intel's 2015 hires have been women
No, I think you mean a true flat tax, e.g. a poll tax, is the ultimate regressive tax.

I have come to find that "regressive" moves the goalposts. It sounds as if the rich pay less. They don't pay less; they pay more. They just don't pay more when dividing taxes by their total income. I've never heard a convincing argument for why that formula is the ultimate benchmark.

And anyway, virtually all sales tax proposals have some per capita rebate/basic income, and that can be tweaked to make it as progressive as your heart desires.
Are there any examples of where Bitcoin has needed the Bitcoin foundation, aside from promotion? I don't know much about Bitcoin, but I'm imagining the Bitcoin Foundation as being analogous to the Linux Foundation.
You can make a citizens arrest, sure, and you will then likely be sued into oblivion, in addition to whatever criminal charges the DA may file against you.

Only a few designated individuals have the right to do so with enhanced protections, if not outright immunity (to much dismay, in these current times...)
Intel Doubles Up on Hiring Women and Minorities