skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True story, last night I was driving on the motorway, just cruising at about 60mph. "You are breaking the speed limit!" my GPS announced. She thought I was on a 30mph limit road that runs parallel for a bit, about 50ft to the left. Do I want my car snitching on me to the insurance company or the po-po? Not a chance I will ever risk getting a tracking device fitted.
I dunno about android in general, but my old GS4 would probably crash and turn itself off.
Maybe it is me but 1.2 mio dollars does not sound like much for doing something like this.

But then the article doesn't really describe what exactly what censorship entails.
I'm sorry, but your analogy is pretty far off the mark.

> China won't be able to get any FDI for a a long time. Economic depression

China has been a net exporter of FDI for some time; it doesn't really need more FDI especially given how far the economic transition has progressed. The party was been expressly working to remove the dependency on FDI for some time and it's paid off. None of this implies economic depression in any way.

> yuan devaluation and chinese company bankruptcies

The Yuan has been rising. Yes, the USD has been rising faster but against most currencies the Yuan is up and has been very strong. I'm curious which bankruptcies you're referring to. There haven't been any more bankruptcies here than you'd expect for an economy of this size.

> European companies, US funds, people everywhere

Any evidence of this? China is always going to put social stability first. Anyone dealing in China knows this. The ground rules are well established. The same claim could easily be made against the US and it's restrictions, through it's tax laws, on retail investors holding foreign financial instruments. You always play by the rules of the country you're in; no country on the planet is an open free market.

> empty cities and roads to nowhere.

This is a classic argument that don't understand China's scale or pay attention the five year plans and policy documents issued by the two sessions. China is in the process of massive urbanization. Those cities need to be built ahead of time. It's a necessary consequence of the scale involved. And as we've seen, the empty cities of 5 years ago have filled up.

> league of legend game studio and AMC.

I'm not sure what private companies investing outside of China has to do with this. These are not connected to the Chinese government any more than an US private company buying a foreign company is. Actually, it's likely even less connected given how much more the US government facilitates American companies purchasing foreign assists. Again, China has been a next exporter of investment for some time.

China is a developing nation and it doesn't make much sense to compare it to developed nations. It has a long way to go; the party's own goal is to start approaching developed nation status in the 2050s. Investing in developing nations always entails more risk and more uncertainty. Beside the literal inaccuracy, your Enron analogy is largely not apt because it's trying to situate it in a developed environment.

That said, compared to most developing nations China is a pretty well run one.
> charges thousands of dollars a month for accessing little pdf files
> go down in flames with a single user requesting files

I guess jstor staff doesn't have access to good technical texts on how to run a network.
Is this a binding contractual commitment, or just PR that can be repudiated later?
Insurances should be there to cover risks, and they work because you have sufficient base size to cover for the % of people who will have accidents. Once you start discriminating it destroys the purpose of having an insurance for everyone in the first place.
Uh. This is when they like (or favourite, or whatever it's called on instagram) the photo on instagram?
Which is a good thing. It's a pretty fun movie.
He gets a push notification every time someone "likes" his post. Since he has 8 million followers, he gets a lot of likes.
Nah, he gets one for every one of his post that gets a new like. He has 8M followers, so that's a lot of likes.
In the Internet, you don't always note where the data comes from. I mean, software needs to do proper authentication.
As someone who is graduating this semester, those kinds of questions are very commonly asked to recent grads and for junior positions. In fact it would make less sense to ask a senior programmer whiteboard questions.
I don't agree. The trends of insurers is to cover less and less and to raise their premiums as soon as they can. They are clearly profit maximizers, not "consumer-centric" organizations at all. Just like banks.
It could be argued that Microsoft is trying to be more forward thinking by continually pushing the level of abstraction while at the same time trying to please everyone at once. One of the downsides to being the biggest (for an extended period of time) in one or more spheres is that you cannot focus on just one group of users. Systems that focus on just one group are almost always more efficient. Just look at HN. It focuses on one relatively small group of users who are willing to forego having a plethora of features.

In the long run, having highly abstracted, well organised frameworks like .NET is good for humanity while in the short run it makes for painfully hungry infrastructure. There will always be a general group of people trying to make the best out of what is currently available -- focusing on efficiency. When I started programming back in the 90's, I remember hearing people quite often brag about how "real programmers" use assembly, calling anyone else a lamer. I started with VB and then C (not C++). I was considered one of those lamers using such "high level" technology. I remember thinking to myself, "At least I get things done in a reasonable amount of time". These days, C is considered quite low-level compared to modern languages and frameworks. My point is that abstraction is continually pushed onward for a very good reason, yet many people who have grown accustomed to older, more CPU-efficient platforms and methodologies may view the "cutting-edge" level of abstraction as unnecessary and bloated. This phenomenon follows the age-old "back in my days we had to milk our own cows" generation-to-generation viewing of the "new kids" as lazy and spoiled. The key is in recognising that the world keeps moving, even if you are growing old. There is always room for progress, even if progress appears unnecessary to those accustomed to older ways. As machines get more powerful, the world is no longer the one that demanded those levels of efficiency seen prior.

At the same time, I agree that some software and systems are obnoxiously slow. Visual Studio takes ages, even with a fast drive. I prefer AWS over Azure. When it comes to coding these days, I choose high-level unless the application demands working with large amounts of data. The programming time needed to make simple applications run faster is usually greater than the gain in time from running more efficient applications. When you are Microsoft, being pushed to implement every feature in the book, you are going to want to choose the most efficient way of implementing new features.
I think the key to success is "smart work". Luck won't make you successful, nor will working hard for the sake of working hard.
To facilitate the discussion, the better question according to the article is: "What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out."
Once the (very closed source) metrology hardware and transmitter are installed, you have no way of knowing if they decide to track you intermittently, constantly, or never. Can they remotely and silently activate the tracking system at arbitrary times? Probably yes. Can they push software updates over the air to drastically change the functionality of the tracking system? Also probably yes. At the risk of sounding like RMS, an insurance vehicle tracker is not your computer - it doesn't do as you tell it, and it is not on your side. Furthermore you have no idea what they do with the data downstream, particularly wrt giving it to the law and storing it in very insecure ways such that (other) malicious actors can get it.

Unless you're the kind of person that believes in the truthfulness, good faith, and technical competence of insurance companies and the police, in which case I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'd like to sell you.
If China consumes too many resources, other consuming countries get worried and say: "she is draining the world".

If China stops growing its consumption of resources, the resources producing countries (and those who invested there) get worried and say: "she is rattling the world".

In other words, it's good or bad depending on who you are.
It's hard to do anything about the VA from the outside. It's a closed system. Congress or the administration can force change, but it's hard for third parties to have much impact.
Indeed, the payload limit for an iOS push notification is 2KB (up from 256 bytes before iOS 8).
A better way to make a comment like this is to suggest a title that conforms to the HN guidelines (i.e. is neither linkbait nor misleading) and does better than the one currently up. It isn't easy to get this right every time, so we appreciate it every time someone in the community figures out a better one.

But junking the guidelines, which is what keeping that ridiculously baity title would amount to, is not an option. They've been this way for years and serve HN well, despite the imperfections of those trying to uphold them.
I'm not suggesting that the valuation is truly worth $1.2M but if they did a 409A valuation or had their board decide on the FMV to determine strike price, the value would be at least 15% of the post-money valuation. My point is simply that if they've issued a reasonable number of options (over 0.25% of the total authorized shares), there is no way that their employees would only pay a few hundred dollars to exercise.

In an extended exercise period model, there's still the issue of Alternative Minimum Tax on exercise or long-term vs. short term capital gains. There will also likely be lockups on those shares whether inherently built in or in an eventual IPO.
Anyone remember the Firefox OS? It is also quite ambiguous to the consumers. It is needed to define it clearly. Not all consumers are tech experts.
Sorry if this is off topic, but I have just tried sslforfree. You let it upload via FTP (or FTPS/SFTP) but the query to check if the file is there is done via HTTP. Why not just validate that the domain is mine if the FTP upload is successful? Or maybe even just redownload the file to see if contents match. I don't get it.
Getting Started with Apache Zeppelin and Airbnb Visuals
Is depression becoming the fastest growing metric in your startup?
Read this:

https://medium.com/@thatboiwill/levels-of-technical-intervie...

Get to the point where you are decent at level 4 interviews and you are a shoe in for 80% - 85% of tech companies anywhere.

If you can master level 4 and harder than you have a strong fighting chance for even the toughest companies to interview at.

Another thing to note you only really get level 3 and 4 interviews with top tier tech companies generally in the Silicon Valley area and maybe started by or around people from [insert college with top tier CS program].

Having deep knowledge of your specific domain (web development, mobile development, etc.) and basic data structures and algorithms (up to Level 2) will get you offers in any tertiary Tech scene i.e. Austin, Texas or Atlanta, Ga.

Source: I have gotten offers in both of these areas with just that level of knowledge.

But if you want to make sure you can get a job in the valley you got some work cut out for you. It aint the best for no reason.

Edit:
I'll leave you with one more thing.

One of the authors of Programming Interviews Exposed them self was rejected by Google his first time...

https://www.quora.com/I-am-a-software-engineer-with-20+-year...

let that sink in.
A more complete answer exists in that stackexchange: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/43329/etymolo...
Even if they raised a convertible note or pure debt (which is atypical of a First Round Capital led round), it is unlikely that their 409A led to an extremely low FMV. Even a company that raises $2M in debt at a $6M cap would likely have a common share valuation over $500K.

Source: I'm a previous founder of a startup that raised a $1.5M convertible note and have done a 409A valuation based on it.
This is just plain wrong and a scary strawperson.

Google how the eye evolved, it didn't just mutate it was a series of slow gradual mutations.

What you are suggesting goes against evolution theory (which is ok with proper evidence)

It's a mutation theory which is hard to find a lot of info on and I can't find the proper name of.

But it is considered incorrect.
Charging job seekers? Good luck. Startups may be lucrative but there's a much better business model out there, or at least that's my impression. I'm open to being more informed.
Entrepreneurship is a capitalist phenomena, and as such serves capital. People trying to solve real problems are going to fail more often, because there is just a lot less money in it. Helping rich people find a place to get their toenails done is a way safer idea then trying to help the homeless find a place to stay or whatever.
This is explored some in Haskell in a couple places. One I remember off the top of my head:

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lens-4.13/docs/Control-L...
We try to innovate in hard time. Thanks for the support.
Digging Deeper into Vivian Maier's Past
Maths will never be obsolete. It's the safest bet if you value your time.
Time for a Chrome extension.
Interesting looking phone. I suspect many will buy it purely because of its unique appearance and the fact that it ships with an unlockable bootloader. But the "cloud syncing killer feature" seems like an incredibly complicated solution to a problem that I've never had (and never known anyone who did). Seems like the very few users that do have chronic space issues could solve it with a $30 microSD card.

I'm curious what else they have in the works that would take advantage of the complicated stack they've built from OS-level customizations on up that might present a more compelling reason to chose this product.
"DVD" quality looks pretty good on my 40" TV. I doubt I'd appreciate "Bluray" quality on my 5" screen.
Haters gonna hate, wumaos gonna wumao. There is plenty of bias all around, but right now I want economic news on China that isn't propaganda, what other choices do we have?
It would have been nice if this article had some diagrams of the respective bomb designs. I was having trouble trying to piece together where components were and had to do a few Google Image searches to follow along.
User-Experience Quiz: 2015 UX Year in Review
Good point, it might be easier to use Twilio, Plivo or Nexmo. However 7 US cents is ~109 Burundian Francs. I can't speak on Burundi SMS costs but as a comparative, in Kenya the local per SMS cost is KES1.00 or KES2.00 and pricing for Twilio and Plivo is USD0.02 and USD0.0154 respectively, which translates to ~KES2.05 and ~KES1.58... so I'm assuming Twilio, Plivo or Nexmo price close to the cost of an SMS sent from a local number.

In short, the prices are probably comparable to sending a normal SMS in each country, meaning it might be cheaper to just use an SMS provider. Though in either case you have a fixed cost (and maintenance) of an internet facing server to "talk" to that SMS provider, so it might just make sense to do everything in one place (i.e. you still need to build the application that manages communication and sends SMSs either way)
This goes against evolution theory.

In evolution theory things that do not have any evolutionary advantage neither spread or die off.

But in practice everything comes at a cost, so generally they will die off.

It cost calories to create feathers, so if not useful they will disappear.
The most important thing that I hoped to see was a simple "we fixed Apple Music". Honestly, I've used iTunes for music for years, paid for iTunes Match before, pay for Apple Music now, so I'm nothing if not a loyal customer — but this app is just a complete clusterfuck.

Dear Apple, it's time to stop putting out new features. Instead, bring back the "it just works" again.
>> "...pay out when the driver is to blame..."

That's what auto insurance marketing says, and sometimes it even works that way. But a key part of the business model is to take your money for years, and then when you do have to submit a claim, they welsh on a technicality.

"Your vehicle is licensed in Seattle, but our records show you spent more than 50% of your time in California this year, therefore your coverage is retroactively void even though we took your money for 11 months."

If you actually read the giant auto insurance contract you signed, it is full of this and other similar loopholes, which are quite deliberately inserted to allow the insurer to manipulate the magnitude of its payouts.
So this happened: https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/686782891716521984
I think the use of mathematical names for sufficiently generic concepts in Haskell improves a certain kind of discussion.

If we had an interface called "Appendable", that leaves room for arguing over the boundaries of what "really" counts as "appending". This is contentious, because interfaces define what we should be able to rely on.

In Haskell, it's entirely clear what is and is not a Semigroup. Does it follow the Semigroup laws? Okay, it's a Semigroup! What can I rely on if I ask for a Semigroup? The Semigroup laws.

Discussion of, say, whether "container" is a good way to think of a "functor" is more quickly recognized as a purely pedagogical question - which doesn't mean it can't be contentious, but doesn't as much get in the way of getting work done.
Can you give us links to "perfectly constructive and appropriately toned" comments that are in a downvoted state?

What you're saying doesn't match what I typically observe on HN, which is (a) that most downvoted comments have something wrong with them, not just an unpopular opinion, and (b) inappropriate downvotes usually get canceled out be users who see a good comment faded faded and give it a corrective upvote.
I agree that it's a terrible idea to put a touch UI on a mouse-operated desktop and pretend you're done. That doesn't mean you always have to build two completely separate apps or UIs for each platform though.

The differences between touch/mouse incarnations of basic components, such as lists, buttons, scrollviews etc. can often be resolved with adaptive design. Apple has already put the basics in place to allow for adaptive apps that scale from the smallest iPhone to the largest iPad. Doing the same for touch -> keyboard/mouse UI is not unthinkable.
Put EVERYTHING in your calendar
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10882514 and marked it off-topic.
TV That Rocks
SlackBot – A chat bot for Slack
Child4Child – Beautiful WebGL app to raise your voice for children with cancer
This post has a critical side. Some readers will be offended. But most readers should be glad that they got some hype peeled back and learned a little more.

Sounds like an updated course in otherwise just mostly classic multivariate statistics. I have about four feet of such on my bookshelf.

Okay, have some more recent versions of regression and Breiman's work on classification and regression trees and random forests and some resampling. Right.

Okay. Fine. Maybe as good as multivariate statistics has been for decades, maybe a little better. Fine. They are using R instead of, say, SPSS, SAS, or the old IBM SSL? Okay.

Been doing that stuff since early in my career, have published in essentially multi-variate resampling, and am currently using some derivations I did for a modified, generalized version of some of that material. Fine.

All that said, where did this stuff about learning enter? This is nearly all old stuff; where'd this learning stuff come from?

Getting estimates of parameters? Sure. Estimates that are minimum variance and unbiased? If can, sure -- good stuff. Confidence intervals on the estimates? Of course. Statistical hypothesis tests of significance -- standard stuff. A variance-covariance matrix, symmetric positive definite? Sure. Polar decomposition, non-negative eigenvalues, a basis of orthogonal eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, matrix condition number, ..., definitely.

But learning? Where'd that come from?

Learning sounds like an attempt, like neural networks, artificial intelligence, deep learning to suggest that this work is somehow close to human thinking, which, Virginia, I have to guarantee you it definitely is not.

They didn't get learning
from statistics. Okay, maybe they got learning from computer science. So sounds like statistics just stole learning from computer science or computer science stole learning from psychology and stole all the rest from statistics. Academic theft? Old wine in new bottles with a new label, "Learning"? Add mud to the waters, stir rapidly and confuse people? Hype? Sell books? Get students? Get consulting gigs? Get grants? Get publicity?

Doesn't look good.

Students trying to learn: For the classic multivariate statistics, there are stacks of highly polished texts. For more on closely related statistics, look at the work of Leo Breiman. For hypothesis testing, that is nearly all classic Statistics 101. For resampling, look at the work of P. Diaconis at Stanford or B. Efron at Yale. In that way, you will have mostly highly polished, classic sources. Econometrics has made a lot of use of this material. Also look at analysis of variance, which is closely related and quite powerful and heavily used in some fields of experimental science, e.g., agriculture. For "learning", mostly f'get about it.
>
Many dictatorships have relied on people turning in their neighbors for being opponents of the regime. I think that people turning in their neighbors based on things they've seen them do/say is a pretty good approximation of surveillance. I would go so far as to argue that many a dictatorship would have been far less scary (and effective) if people weren't worried that their neighbors would turn them in.

Given as my family lived and suffered from this kind of dictatorship throughout three consecutive generations, I hope I can explain why I don't think that this is surveillance.

You see, when you write to NKVD to say that your neighbor said a joke about Stalin, they don't actually check if what you've said is true. They don't honestly care. The accuracy of your report is completely irrelevant to the system, and even further — if these reports were actually checked, the system wouldn't be as effective, because this would mean that the system actually had rules.

Instead, this report system was based on complete paranoia and random violence. Random violence, not based on any actual rules, but only pretending to be, is much more effective in putting people in a state of learned helplessness and upholding the regime — while (in the example of 30s Soviet Union) killing almost the whole elite several times over.

This has nothing to do with surveillance.
> driver aids have been implicated in causing more severe winter accidents, eg. this [1] 100-car pile-up in Sweden a few years back.

The linked article, AFAICT, doesn't implicate driver aids in the accident, at all. (It's a rather short article, and the video doesn't mention anything about driver aids either.) Am I missing something?
To reach Twilio or Nexmo, you need Internet right ? In fact, there is a rapidsms-twilio app [1], so you can use any backend you want.

But in Burundi, Internet service providers sucks. They can spend 1 day with downtime, without excuse and communicating anything.

Beside an SMS in Burundi cost ~$0.02. So...

Also Kannel is also used by telcos. So it's a good tutorial about using Kannel ...

[1]: https://github.com/caktus/rapidsms-twilio
Or, isomorphically, you pay a premium to avoid being tracked.