skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question is 'not a bad thing' for whom? That phrase comes across a bit of doublespeak. Can self serving advocacy by those who financially benefit from surveillance be termed a 'debate', as they are the only ones who make that point. I don't know of anyone clamoring for surveillance as 'its a good thing'. Is it a social good?

The ability of power or authority to lock you up, take your property or worse your life is protected by rule of law and due process. Having a debate of the rule of law or due process is similar to having a debate on privacy or a surveillance state. The consequences are negative for the individual and society as a whole, even though they may benefit some stakeholders in the short term who will of course advocate for it but on the whole it's not a social good.

The only thing we have to come to this conclusion is history, a wide body of knowledge and reason.

We can thus say with some degree of confidence that a society without rule of law or due process is not a good thing similar to a society with surveillance is not a good thing. We don’t use the ‘moral high ground’ but reason and historical experience to make these conclusions. This is not a moral issue but a practical one that has consequences for our societies. The ethical issue is the social good for the people who build these systems.

Since we are discussing the social good the alternative view needs to be backed by reason on how surveillance can be good for society as a whole, beyond offering naive presumptions suggesting people are good and will not abuse the power, or how knowing details of everyone’s activities may be beneficial to an individual or company because while that may be true they do not address the social good.

And the only thing we use in these discussions is reason, let's not make it personal.
Don't trust someone who says "I have nothing to hide". And certainly don't trust them with your secrets!
The more SKUs I have sitting on the shelf, the more price reduction announcements I can make. The difference with Safeway however is that I cannot take those promotions back. On the other hand, why not? Should we expect to see AWS announce Mothers Day two-for-one t2.micro deals soon, while supplies last?
Sounds like they need to develop a news feed news feed to keep them fed with all the latest news about their news feed development.

Plus side: if it works well, they can just replace their current unspeakable Lovecraftian horror of a system with the meta feed they develop. A new dawn for all.
Composer Pierre Boulez dies at 90
A few problems with the predictions...

1. The first iOS "phablet" only happened in 2014, and was very late to market. This explains why phablet growth in 2014-15 is explosive, but does little to predict future growth.

2. We are now entering the second year of no significant new small phones being released for either iOS or Android. Of course small phones would fare badly when nothing good is for sale!

The best-selling iPod was the Nano, by a very large margin. The best-selling MacBooks were the 11" Air. If there is any truth to a "6C" coming out this year I expect it will do extremely well. (Unfortunately the days of the perfect 3.5" phones are likely behind us...)
The problem with an elevator pitch for computers is that their not single purpose. A pitch for a new website that does x, y, y; a new razor, a new microwave - you have clear, defined purposes. So, IMO, assuming we know at least what the person we're talking to does:

<pitch>
Computers by themselves (out of the box, so to speak) are a tool that allow you to explore everything you can imagine. By installing software (an additional expense) your computer can help you organize music; write letters and organize photos.

With an internet connection (also an additional expense) your computer can gain access to a vast network of information and entertainment. You can watch movies and tv shows; read books online; learn how to cook and read the news on a variety of topics. If your up for a challenge, you can build your own places of interest, known as websites and sometimes earn money doing so.

Computers come in a range of sizes and budgets - from desktop computers that stay in your office, to portable ones you can put into a small bag. Some very capable computers can also fit in your pocket, though - we call these smart phones, not computer. Our prices range from $100 for something very basic to thousands that'll allow you to edit your next movie.
</pitch>

Which sort of begs the question - in this day; what is a computer without an internet connection? Myself, I have little to no use for a computer without an internet connection.
Institute for Research and Coordination Acoustic
Actually, I'm not agreeing at all. I think software (especially extensible platforms) are perfectly allowed to require care & feeding.

I also agree that Sharepoint is misused frequently, and that it's totally unsuited to small teams. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about large enterprises, which the GP said is ostensibly why Google bought Bebop.
Choosing a programming language to learn (image)
Michael Abrash's Oculus Connect 2 Keynote
> Potentially criminal groupls: everybody.

While this may be true, certain crimes are seen as worse than others. And, as un-PC as it may sound, certain demographics are many times more likely to commit certain crimes.

Homicide:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm

Also, some government monitoring can be "for your own good":

Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm

But, maybe the CDC is different than the NSA.
Phablet is such an ugly portmanteau. Let's stick to calling them "huge-ass phones".
My iPhone 6S is too big for my hand, so I dislike the size of the hardware, but there's no denying that the keyboard's a bit less fiddly and the screen real estate is nice.

It's a compromise, and not one which I really like. I can't see much of an alternative though.
Love it. Many are unsung heroes with amazing stories.
This is correct but appeals to freedom of speech/expression and association won't work. People don't believe in these any more if they ever did. They're being paid lip service at most.

Both professional and amateur politicians are taking notice. "We support freedom of expression, however" there's always something more important: safety, inclusivity, respect, diversity, civility...

We have dozens of examples, in the west, with hate speech laws, discrimination laws, mobs organizing online over some tweet, employers firing people because of offhand remarks, even opensource projects being assaulted over unrelated comments made by contributors.
I'm with you buddy. The examples on the site are not nice to read. I hate that we live in a world where these people exist. I also agree on the astro-turfing. Why is this even on HN? Where are my usual fluffy guardian articles on other unproven rubbish!
Are you answering my comment? You wrote your own unrelated rant.

I only wrote about it would be great if you could configure Chrome's process spawning logic. IE does it in an more intelligent way to consume less memory by spawning a bit less processes (a trade off, as if one tab crashes more tabs have to be reloaded). But giving a power user (who have 100+ tabs open) a choice would be great.
Are you giving the green light to guilt via association? Just because someone worked at GCHQ that does not mean they have done something unethical. Said person could have in fact done something very important for their country.

Who are you associated with that I (or society) doesn't like? Maybe your career should be ended for working with an organisation that has done something unethical whether you were involved or not?

Freedom of association is one of the cornerstones of a free society.

You need to think long and hard about your opinions my friend.

I also had myopic opinions when I was fresh out of college though - filed under shithnsays
"Our digital lives are an accurate reflection of our actual lives"

Which of course presumes we have a digital life, and which of course has been proven repeatedly to not be the case. It is also not accurate.

Take data warehousing companies who are profiling home IP addresses and hoovering up any digital breadcrumbs people leave behind, like user agent strings, length of time spent on a page, any previous cookies stored locally on the machine: an enormous store of value for anyone who decides to purchase such information, except for the fact that it has no value.

The 'info' exists without any context, and could even be poisoned by a small portion of users who decide to stuff the system full of disinformation to control market share or lobby for certain products.

Also - IPV4 addresses (now more than ever) can be attributed to several hundred people because ISPs grant a subnet to multiple customers.

This is not saying everything's fine and our digital doppel is a fuzzy haze of nonsense. But it does say that privacy advocates are apt to overestimate how accurate such information is, and that the people who buy such information are finding out this too and have probably decided to pay more to other collection points to get a finer-grained doppel of some person.

I say let them spend more, but I will cry tears of joy when I find that money has been ill spent too and doesn't accurately portray a person digitally.
Should (and could) you ditch Apple, Google and Microsoft?
They might extend the message limit to 10K characters, but they won't be able to stretch their users' attention span which is probably is bound by 2 or 3 sentences anyway.
Most people are not persons of interest and nothing particularly bad will happen to them if various entities have access to their private info. Still, they might have their identity stolen, get scammed (e.g. Dell) or pranked (e.g. swatting, disconnecting utilities) or have their house broken into if they have bad luck. They might pay a premium on insurance for having the wrong friends on FB or get fired for holding certain opinions. Might get mobbed by the internet, get harassed by salesmen or silly ads for herpes.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the above events are unlikely though. When a few actors have access to the information of tens of thousands to billions of people though, this has an impact on a societal level. As jaquesm said, information is power and when one has so much information and lots of money to boot, they can begin to covertly influence policy and behavior and harass and marginalize their opponents. And they can do that directly, or by using the information of a third party, like a doctor, lawyer, religious leader, or even someone insignificant which happens to be a relative, etc.
Moreover, companies can be sold, together with their databases, they can be forced to hand them over or they can be hacked. A treasure trove of data held by an otherwise principled company, might end up in the hands of an unsavory party.

Why is this a bad thing? History has shown again and again how such imbalances of power are abused. Here's a rather harmless example of data mining a mobile device + social network combined with social engineering to scam people out of money: http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-... If a game producer can do this, what are the pros doing?
Great article and really interesting language!

I wonder how Idris is going to be affected when Dependent types come to Haskell as well (announced at last ICFP)
I think this is largely due to "bigger is better" mentality of marketing (and consumers).
All it will take is one OEM to make a popular smaller phone and all the other OEMs will start marketing to this "new segment".
Beautifully done. I can't believe a browser game is that smooth. Why are we even building native anymore!!!
What piece of (substantial) text is replicated when you implement someone else's web API? If there isn't one then there is nothing to copyright.

The question of how web services are defined is not material. The question is whether a "API" = "fixed text" or not. For library APIs, the answer is yes, for web APIs the answer is no.
Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
The main driver is efficiency. Smaller, faster, cheaper. More accessible. More convenient. That's basically the heart of all technology advancements.

However, the end result may or may not be better/higher quality. Transportation is moving from mostly hydraulic/mechanical to electrical/computer controlled, Comms (analog to digital), Food (local whole foods to distant mega farms and processing), etc.

Old technology is far less efficient, but can be much more robust. For example, knowledge recorded in a book cannot become corrupt due to a failing hard disk controller, or lost due to electrical surge from a near by lightning strike. And, one can still send a message over radio waves using Morse Code to distant places even when cell phones fail due to network outages or cyber attacks.

So while we are smaller, faster, cheaper and much more accessible today (in almost every way... thanks to technology), our systems are much more fragile and dependent on other components. In many cases, this is why older technology is used.
Show HN: ianal, a npm license checker
Nice to see more options on that one. This is the one I remember: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html
Hi fatjokes,

I am Radu, one of the authors.

As mentioned in our article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07867v1), the training dataset for attractiveness is from Blinq. The underage and above 37 years old face images were discarded. All people are heterosexual in our training dataset and mainly from Zurich area, Switzerland.
Therefore, our model of attractiveness fits the cultural bias of Zurich, Switzerland.

We consider faces.ethz.ch a little fun tool. I hope that the fans of Yoona will understand :) With more training data from abroad Switzerland our algorithms will fit their expectations.

For age and gender we used much more and diverse data, therefore are more reliable for the majority of ethnic backgrounds.
I think your question was answered at a link provided elsewhere in this thread[0].

What you might or might not need to hide cannot be reliably determined in advance. It is not a constant, it is a variable and you don't get to pick which way it goes. Consider the plight of the gay Russian blogger using LiveJournal, which was later sold to a Russian company.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10849248
With AWS it's easy. You stop the machine, resize it to a bigger one with more CPU and/or RAM, then fire it up. This can be done in minutes.
Native Queries – How to Call Native SQL Queries with JPA
>This is like Tesla entering the market with a high end sports car

Which is a good idea, in theory. But we've yet to see to see the strategy will work. They aren't building a cheap electric car yet.
iPhone 6(S) Plus is way under-supported by the developers. It could display a split view just like the iPad, but check out how many apps take the advantage of this, see facebook, skype, youtube, etc. None of these. Twitter rotates landscape at least, but that's not support, just a feature ticked in Xcode.
Ctrie: Java port of a concurrent trie hash map implementation of Scala
Building a business on lies and then paying a $2mm fine when caught (without even 100% probability) seems to be an economically rational strategy. Unfortunately.
Ask HN: Should we use a picture of a smoking man on our webpage ATF?
I manage a site for a firm that sells narrow AI applications. During revamp of the site, we found this stock pic that suits the site's above the fold background perfectly in terms of theme, color, everything. The only hiccup is that the man in the picture's got a cigarette in his hand.
Given that even the most moderately non-PC things nowadays tends to stir up a lot of st online, I'm wondering if I should junk this picture and go hunting for another; or stick with this one? Thoughts / considerations appreciated
i don't know...
how much is the cost to develop an application to cover 100% of the available desktop browsers? maybe use that value to improve mobile target make more sense at this point?!
Yes, it is a foreseen application.
That was Internet Explorer 4. It was however an optional part of the installation and if you installed IE5 without installing IE4 before, you couldn't get it.

Messy.
On your quiz, the average answer is "3-5 hours," and this squares with recent research suggesting that in an 8-hour day, mind workers are doing actual work about 3 1/2 hours on average. The rest of the day is spent on snacking, gossiping, Facebook, etc.

I'm a highly motivated independent developer and writer, and I've been studying my own work habits to try to become more productive. I use toggl — https://www.toggl.com/ — to track my time throughout the day. I'd work 12 hours a day if I could, but I can't. I run out of gas after 2 hours, 3 hours — and sometimes 8 hours. My limit on tedious, fussy, boring tasks is about 2 hours, after which I'm not much good for anything. My limit when I'm writing a book is 3 to 4 hours. If I'm building something out of code or working in Photoshop, sometimes I get addicted, and then I can go 8 hours. Addiction seems to be the only thing that gets me close to being as productive as I'd like to be. Sadly, I can't choose to focus only on the types of tasks that I'm addicted to.

My sense is that most people — probably including your boss — have never measured how much cognitive work they themselves can do before their brain is fried. I'm talking about real work, not meetings. Meetings use almost no brain glucose at all, so are a way to pad "working" hours without increasing fatigue substantially. I'm convinced this is why meetings are so popular in corporate America.

As long as no one is measuring, it's easy for everyone to kid themselves that they're good for 8 hours and that everyone else should be, no matter how unrealistic that may be.
The HN effect. MySQL is down at avc.com
But bigger really is better when it comes to displaying content. Sure at some point handilyness begins to suffer, but it seems there is a sweet spot at 5.5".
I wouldn't want a bigger phone at that point, but I don't want to go back to a smaller one either.
In Defense of Service Locator
"I have nothing to hide, and what I am keeping private is encrypted by a quantum- and $5-wrench-method-resistant encryption."
1) Memory safety is practically zero-cost in languages like C++ or rust if you disable runtime bounds-checking (which the C++ standard library does by default). You don't get 100% safety, but it's still leaps and bounds better than what the C standard library provide (a foot to shoot yourself in the gun with).

You may be that legendary programmer who writes code "without bugs" and everything works correctly on the first run. I don't doubt a handful of "real programmers" like that exist. But most of us make mistakes, and we want the compiler to protect us. Just look at the endless stream of memory-related vulnerabilities at CERT. Nearly all of them could have been prevented in a memory-safe language.

2) That is a non-issue. All serious standard libraries define operation complexity at the Big O granularity. Sometimes they go even further and the spec (especially in C++'s case) gurantees some implementation details.

Anyway, if you're not happy with the proper characteristic of a standard data structure for a certain use, there's nothing preventing you from creating your own data structure with your preferred behavior pattern. You can even use an 'unsafe' override - at least you'd isolate unsafety to a very small and manageable part of the code that way.

3) Again, nothing prevents you from optimizing for special cases. But that are many more programs (e.g. parsers) that deal with short and repetetive strings which can benefit from an implementation that passes them as value-types on the stack (this is essentially which most C++ implementations do).

4. I'm all for a default unicode string type and a separate "raw bytes" type. But the you should either store the string as unicode codepoints (UTF-32) or as UTF-8. UTF-16 is pure evil, since then people tend to assume UTF-16 elements are codepoints and surrogates break spectacularly.
Functional Programming for WordPress Developers Part 1
What about for people who don't live in the US?
5 predictions of where supercomputing is going in 2016
I would venture a guess that IBM is a paid up licensee of Java, they've been releasing their own proprietary JVM for quite a while and never been sued by Sun/Oracle for it AFAIK
> It’s very much a normal distribution centered around the 5.5″-6″ mobile phone (phablet)

o.O This term is so abused...'normal distribution'. My boss would use it all the time without even knowing the parameters.

It ain't normal distribution. This is categorical data which in this case can be fitted with a multinomial distribution.
#2 is correct (at least for me). I want to replace my iPhone 5 with something newer from Apple but can't. So I'm not adding to the phablet bar but I'm also not adding to the 4" bar. Of course, as soon as there is a "6C" I'm likely to buy it.
I believe the increase in "phablet" users is also thanks to emerging markets getting connected.

While living in South America the amount of "big phones" really surprised me, as they seemed so impractical. When I realised after a while that many people used their phone as their only Internet device, it made a lot more sense.
A remarkable investigation! Thank you, it was a pleasure to read.
"Get me a pepperoni pizza," is a phrase anyone with some basic nlp chops should be able to understand using freely available code. Here's an example that could get you started but on a different domain. http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnslu.html

Google, Facebook, many other companies (perhaps not Apple) publish many of their research findings and a lot of innovation is coming straight from academia.

To answer your question more directly, the hardware, software and data required to run an effective machine learning platform is getting cheaper and more powerful every year, which should drive down price if they can replace human tasks with AI solutions.
https://xkcd.com/37/

scnr
It may have something to do with the iPhone's aspect ratio and UI. I have small hands and my 6S (not 6S Plus) is indeed too big; however I find the LG G3 (which has a bigger screen IIRC) quite usable one-handed.

Maybe that's because of Android's UI, where the back button and app switcher are easily reachable with one's thumb, towards the bottom of the screen. I still haven't mastered the art of using one-handed 3D touch to invoke the iOS app-switcher -- I have to use my other hand or double-press the home button.
Is there any polymorphic encryption toolkit that could enable a custom encryption method tailored for your own use? Kinda like security by obscurity for encrypting your own important files by deviating from the established standard encryption schemes in order to overwhelm capabilities of Mallory's/Trudy's reverse engineering?
StyleBot for Chrome to adjust the width.
Very true, but if you have a short enough commute to bike, then you have a reduced need for things to do during it.
I was screwed over by some startup founders that tricked me into working for free under the guise of "demonstrating mastery of Rails" and "proving my culture fit," but I wouldn't call those guys evil, just jerks.

So how does a situation like that happen? You justify it to yourself to cut corners in order to succeed, and because you're a job creator in America, you're entitled to respect in the end.