skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm completely in bed with Apple, ditched Microsoft 20 years ago and am slowly weening myself off of google (primary reason I used google now is work requires uses google docs.)

I'm very happy with the stance Apple is taking regarding privacy and security. When the FBI director is bitching about a companies products being too secure, then that's a company I want to give money to.

Also, personally, I've been using Apple products for 30 years, and when they've had problems Apple has always gone above and beyond in helping. Recently, I ran into a problem, that I thought was a hardware problem, went to an Apple store, saw a Genius without an appointment and it fortunately turned out to be a software issue easily fixed- but that's much better than the 2-3 week turnaround I could expect shipping another companies device off to be serviced.

Apple puts the user first in a way that other companies do not (though to their credit Microsoft is clearly trying these days)... and I reward that with my money.

That said, I don't quite like my choices for laptops these days, and am considering going with a generic laptop running Linux or a hackintosh... I just wish Apple would offer 32GB in a laptop and/or more discrete graphics options.
You're fortunate. Yes, there are some laptops that can do it, but most have NVidia Optimus getting in the way, and it's nearly impossible to tell which ones are okay and which are not just from spec sheets, so I can see why they just say "no laptops".
What does your software stack look like for that?
I think you're in a minority, even among PC builders.
I can't even tell you how many pen testers I know with criminal records. Somewhere, someone will hire him to do security.
Help HN: Cannot recover my Google Adsense because of single 1$ mistake
Dear HN,

I need your help on this issue, maybe by doing this I can catch attention of Google Adsense Team members.

In 2014 September, I have published an android app in play store (only one app, I don't have any other app) and in order to get experience and feel of AdMob I have created AdMob account for the first time, I haven't have any experience with it yet.

It worked roughly 1-2 month or less and made ~1USD, I haven't received it,
then suddenly got email about illegal activity and my account has been blocked. At that time I didn't know how to find who is making that illegal activity and appealed again. Team responded with block.

2015, November. I have unpublished my app from Google store.

Now 2016, I tried to appeal, but got rejected. because of almost 2years old,
beginner mistake now I am losing an opportunity to use Google AdSense forever.

I know Google seriously responds to illegal activity, but does Google Team think I did this thing intentionally? for 1USD? Maybe I tested my app 2-3times when I first integrated AdMob, maybe that was the reason for illegal activity, maybe some user intentionally created illegal activity.

Is this considered right losing lifetime opportunity just for 1USD, forever?

I hope someone will help with advice on this issue.
We don't assume anything by default, we just make an empirical observation of how people behave, and then act accordingly. The empirical observation is that there are people who are unethical, corrupt, what have you. And also, the empirical observation is that there exist certain group dynamics that make certain societal developments very hard to reverse. That is why it seems like a very good idea to avoid putting too much power into a single person's hands (in case it turns out to be one of the bad apples, or in case the power is delegated to a role rather than a specific person, in case one of the bad apples ever gets into that role), and to try and avoid the kinds of developments that tend to end badly.

Nobody says that _all_ people are unethical, or _all_ governments are corrupt, or that _all_ people in power are criminal. But rather, that being part of a government or having power does not prevent people from being unethical or corrupt. Bad people are generally a minority, but they do exist. That is one reason why we have government and police and military in the first place. But there is nothing that necessarily prevents bad people from becoming part of government, police, and military. That is why it is important to limit the power of those institutions. To limit the damage that bad people inside them can do. And also to limit the appeal to bad people wanting to become part of them. That's essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers, BTW. It's a security mechanism that protects you from bad people in power - not because all people in power are bad, but because occasionally bad people manage to get into powerful positions, and that tends to end badly.
Just comparing my DK2 to stuff like GearVR (or Cardboard at the low end) it really does make a difference. Without the smoothest of framerates or positional tracking, it really limits the useful applications of VR. It's OK for watching a movie on a virtual giant screen or some more limited experiences but for a real sense of immersion, you really need some level of positional tracking.

When I got the DK2 I spent way more time grinning that I could stand up and look around behind my flight chair and around my cockpit in Elite Dangerous than I'd like to admit. Just having a 3d "surround" image to look around is cool but positional tracking makes you feel like you're really "there".
It seems like you can't take that out of the bundle if you have one yourself, possibly a modified version? Otherwise that seems like a major disappointment for those already own an xbox controller, and force them to pay additional $$.
I'm nervous, this is higher than I was expecting which means the HTC Vive will likely be significantly higher. $600 seems just outside what your average consumer will pay, I was hoping it would be closer to the price of a new gaming console on release (400 - 500).

This could be a bad sign for VR.
Starting with Django 1.7, migrations have been available in the core package.
Is there any major downside to the 3.5mm jack? Especially that hold a candle to the cheapness of them and how widespread they are?
i go to portland a lot, and live in santa monica. the one in santa monica doesn't seem as dangerous. the expo line in SM doesn't run through heavily trafficked pedestrian areas like the portland one does.

i don't know, i guess we'll see.
It's how I got started on my DK2. It's how I use my Galaxy Note 3 with a headset. Yes, it's completely possible.
Something bad would have to happen to random citizens as the result of government surveillance. Something like "Private Citizen X criticized the government and embarrassing information about his life was revealed as a consequence."

There are lots of bad things that the government could do. But it just hasn't happened. They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now. The world hasn't fallen apart, Hitler hasn't risen from the dead and everything is pretty much the same as it was before.

I guess we can check back in another ten years to see if your apocalyptic visions have come to pass yet.
I have an XE-1. Now there's retro i can buy into. Especially with the pancake lens, it really feels like an old fashioned rangefinder in a lot of ways.

I don't know how much money they make off that line but they've done a nice job of it to the point where I don't use my DSLR very much unless I'm shooting action or need either ultrawide or telephoto lenses.
Wappalyzer[0] reports that he's running WordPress.

[0]https://wappalyzer.com/download
There is no expectation from anyone that the Rift is nausea-free.
The load is from transaction processing, which CDNs don't help with. CDNs are typically used for cacheable content like static assets.
I would be extremely worried in their position about personal risk & risk to my property.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=fire+ref...
It's probably also helpful that most PC games that were ported from console support DirectInput/XInput. Getting the PC users set up with controllers will make it easier to pitch developers on porting from console VR (Sony) -> PC VR.
They give you a validation tool and link to the documentation where they spell out the specs explicitly.
Sadly, this is what stopped me from considering the Oculus Rift. My expectations were wrong in thinking this would be more of a mass-consumer oriented product instead of targeting VR hobbyists'*

Basically, forcing people to shell out ATLEAST 1600$ to be able to use it (not to mention making them buy a desktop).

Aside: I was always more interested in the potential of Gear VR. Thanks for the info.
I feel like fewer hours works when you don't really care about your job. You basically get burnt out quickly because you aren't motivated.
is the fact that past performance is a huge indicator for future performance

Take Life as a sigmoid function and imagine you are on the slope.
If I just click "Go" I get the message "Cannot GET /amazon/?page=1&category=0"
try:
brakes()
except BrakeFailure:
emergency_brakes()
You see the hypocrisy inherent to that then yes? They want it to be large and owned by "them"... but not centrally controlled?
Facebook. No thank you.
IP maps to Facebook infrastructure.
I say let them do it and let the market sort out if it cares. Maybe people do want thin more than headphones.
12 Year Old Makes $12,000 in 4 Months
And what would they do ? Swim to California with knifes between their teeth ? Japan posed no thread to the US at that stage of the war. The conflict was over, the allies have won.

The bombings were geopolitical stage props.
This kind of fetishism baffles me...
But it'll stick with Lightning port, instead of adopting usb type C, the article suggests. That's disappointing. I wonder if ever the iphone will switch to usb type c -- every other phone will later this year.
Musing Configuration Management
It's too fat!
How is it a religious position? A religious position would be thinking that some unknowable process would deliver some kind of techno-rapture.

So because we don't know how something works now, we will never know? C'mon.

Programming is a lot like making spells and incantations.

No, it's not. Maybe for laymen it looks like that, but for us developers it is definitely not the case. Granted, sometimes something works and you don't realize why, but that just means you have a big debug problem on your hands - not that it's unknowable. Usually only happens when you port something or copy code over from one system to the next.

Not sure how you come to those conclusions.
A Simple DNS tip to improve your application's outbound request performance
The important part is you have one more level of indirection before you figure out the layout of the message.
I work in a team that uses quite a lot of AWS for various reasons beyond cost. We also use various other clouds too, depending on needs of a specific project or situation. Our experience with cloud is that it is a journey. Obviously, coupled with DevOps tooling, it’d allowed us to deal with environment requirements at the speed of software, i.e. Infrastructure as Code and all. One thing we find ourselves doing over and over is changing the infrastructure, either because requirements change, new cloud services are launched and its useful to us or simply because we find more efficient ways of running cloud resources (Trusted Advisor helps).

We’d built a tool called Liquid Sky (https://liquidsky.singtel-labs.com) to help us keep track of the cost impact of the changes we make constantly. I did mention that we use cloud for reasons beyond cost, but we definitely still want to know that we’re sensible and maximise cost efficiency as well, its just another (important) factor. Because we change our cloud resources so frequently, we didn’t want to make it a very rigid process when dealing with the sensibilities of cloud cost. Hence, we’d built Liquid Sky in a way that gives our engineers the freedom to explore better way of running things on the cloud while keeping cost in check as well as keeping the team (including cost guardians) in the loop.
Cars in general handle this now. Many cars have a "limp home" mode where they won't exceed 5 mph or some other low speed. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_throttle_control
Compared to nuclear war, superbugs, volcanoes, meteorites or catastrophic climate change, naughty-AI is a very distant threat. It's like worrying the geneticists are going to breed Ridley Scott's alien sometime in the relevant future.

The world is actually pretty messed up with problems right now; some of which we could actually do something meaningful about. Continuing the naughty-AI bunfight isn't one of them.
Social media is a tool, useful for business and self promotion. Also handy for checking up on what friends and relatives are doing.

That said, I agree with Stephenson (I really enjoyed his latest book Seveneves) that it's use can get in the way of doing more creative and productive things.

I am a big fan of "self monitoring" to keep track of types of food eaten, time spent on social media, TV, etc. Personally, if I spend more than 15 minutes a day on social media that is a warning sign that I need to do better time management.
How to start with your MVP if you can’t code?
This seems incredibly unlikely. Anyone with a good machine shop and some fissile material can build a fission bomb in their garage (ok, it's not that easy). But fusion bombs are another beast altogether.

Fusion bombs work by setting off a fission primary stage inside a closed container, which ignites fusion in a deuterium secondary stage. But the devil is in the details. The energy from the primary (in the form of either neutrons, heat, or X-rays; which one it is is highly classified) needs to be focused through an interstage (the details of which are, again, classified) into some sort of styrofoam (really) medium which turns into plasma. This somehow starts fusing the deuterium inside it, which involves the use of a fissile "spark plug" to produce more neutrons. And deuterium isn't that easy to come by. The whole process is so tricky that the British couldn't get it to work for a long time after the Americans gave them plans.

So, yeah, I don't believe it.
It is by default `M-m`.
I agree with that assessment except for "the product owner should be the project manager". I do internal dev so product owners are from the business and know the problem domain and (with our help) know what they want.
It's going to be different for software for selling - but still, the project owner should be the person with the vision who is the "single wringable neck", they should be responsible for negotiating on budget, deadlines etc.
The job of being a PM is always going to be in tension with that of the PO, I can see them forming a good team but fundamentally the PM is the representative of management imposed from above.
But do you see how that extra level of indirection basically maks arguments about the different formatting styles for localization kind of irrelevant?
And the interoperability. You don't need an "iphone" set of ear buds or headphones. So other than "aesthetics" by that meaning "different" I dont see much benefit and lots of usability downside.
It finally went through although no confirmation email or any trace of the payment on my paypal account (or confirmation email from paypal which is usually immediate). So not sure if it actually went through...
> Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans.

Why do you think that?

> If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem.

Why do you think that?

> If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media.

The internet is the real world.

Also, who wants to make the internet a non-public media?
For Apple it is probably just a space / size issue. It is probably one of the biggest things limiting them from making the phone thinner.
Among the giant debate over cost and power, I'm just wondering what would've happened had they waited, say, two years to release. Suddenly, the cost (of both the device and of the desktop PC) go way down. With something like this, a poorly received first launch can torpedo not only the product but the entire VR industry, and when someone's spent over $2k to get it to work their expectations will be very high.

I'm sure that there are very viable reasons to release now, but I still have a feeling that it was more of a "release as soon as it's acceptable" than a "release as soon as we can be sure the launch will go amazingly."
High-end gaming monitors can go for about half the price see this benq monitor for example http://gaming.benq.com/gaming-monitor/xl2411z.
Same here. I like to play around in Cinema4D and I've started to learn the basics of UE with my DK2. Even just making neat environments to walk around in is a load of fun and the applications will reach far beyond video games as the tech matures.

Still gonna hold off on this and thankfully I can still do stuff with the DK2 until future runtimes stop supporting it in newer applications. I'm mostly just looking forward to watching the whole platform (VR in general) evolve past the initial "make Fallout/Minecraft/CoD in VR" phase and get into more immersive movies, VR telepresence, and new ways to communicate and create stuff.
Very buddhist, at its core. Once you remove attachment to things, events, results, milestones, etc., you can start digging into what really sets the stage for actual, repeatable, "happiness."
Alchemy is better defined as a broad set of practices and beliefs surrounding what we would now call the fields of pharmacy and chemistry. Alchemists didn't just try to transmute lead into gold, they experimented with magnetism, the action of drugs on mind and body, the transmission and treatment of diseases, the chemistry of the body (urine was a very popular alchemical substance), the translation and interpretation of Greek, Roman and Arabic texts, etc. There was also a strong component of Hermetic and occult magical practice, which blurred into Biblical and Talmudic exegesis as well. Boyle's "The Sceptical Chymist" (1661) was really the beginning of the end for that super expansive approach to alchemy but you're right that he was still working in an early modern alchemical framework (as was Newton).
That's $750 (€699) for those of us in Europe.

So much for the "ballpark of $349".

Edit: That's without shipping. With shipping its $800 (€745).
As I've said before, the singularity theorists seem to be somewhere between computer scientists, who think in terms of software, and philosophers, who think in terms of mindware, and they seem to have a tendency to completely forget about hardware.

There seems to be this leap from 'superintelligent AI' to 'omnipotent omniscient deity' which is accepted as inevitable by (what for shorthand here is being called the 'lesswrong' worldview) which seems to ignore the fact that there are limited resources, limited amounts of energy, and limitations imposed by the laws of physics and information, that stand between a superintelligent AI and the ability to actuate changes in the world.
Apple would probably piss more people off than they would make happy. The amount of lightning port gear out there has to be huge. People flipped when they went from the 30-pin to lightning just a few years ago.
Because the number 1 things users say when asked what they'd change about their phone: "I wish it was thinner"
Well, we can predict more-or-less what will happen when a large meteorite hits earth, but we have no clue (other than sci-fi scenarios) for the nature of the threat AI poses, if only because we are so far away from understanding what AI is. We don't know if intelligence can be separated from agency and agenda, we don't know if intelligence can be separated from emotions, and we don't even know if intelligence can even exceed our own (the argument for "human intelligence at a higher speed" fails on several grounds). Hell, we don't even know what intelligence is (and the definition of "a general ability to solve problem" doesn't work, as there are problems that what we generally regard as intelligence clearly cannot solve while other qualities do).

What's the point of arguing about the potential threats something we have so little knowledge of? Maybe it will come too fast, but maybe that unkillable virus will, too. At this point in time, we simply have too little information to have an intelligent assessment of the risks posed by AI. We can and should, however, discuss the more immediate related dangers of our real-world machine learning, such as self-reinforcing bias.
Its as serious as 10000 primed nuclear bombs.
Ouch. That poor Canadian dollar.
Ha! Your comment speaks to me.

I too had a revelation after my second child and took a different turn in my career. And I enjoyed the Longfellow quote too.

I think I never knew what busy was before kids.

Can't really help with the productivity issues, other than to counsel compassion for yourself and urge you to remember it is a marathon. I always think of career effort as spinning a flywheel (any effort really).

Authors you might like to check out that talk about habits and productivity:

Amy Hoy
Gretchen Rubin
Charles Duhigg
This is just maintenance, pure and simple. Applies to any other piece of equipment, software or otherwise.

Plenty of hardware components that can probably keep running for a long time without maintenance, but you wouldn't do that would you?
Unfortunately not at the moment, although you can click the refresh button in the lower right corner to restart a slide if you missed something or mute the presentation audio if you need to.

I'll look into adding a pause button, I'll just need to make sure that certain animations pause if they were synced to the audio.
Or for unscrupulous journalists.

The recent phone hacking scandal proved that there's few lengths some papers will go to in search of a juicy story.

I wonder how much they'd have to give to some disenfranchised ISP employee to get a couple of years worth of [insert famous name]'s browsing history.
Powers of Ten [video]
Hope they can tell the difference between "script kiddie fraud" and normal users trying to do the payment again and again using a different machine and a different browser because they site can't handle the load...
It's "killer" compared to 99% of all personal computers.

~$700 - $750

For casual gamers and the general public it's a non-starter.

Ok, you say, well it's not for them yet. Actually that's the whole point. In every article and everything that people are talking about in and around VR the whole discussion is how it transforms everything. You think Netflix is on-board so they can cater to PC Master Race people?

I'm bullish on VR (moreso AR actually) but lets not pretend that the next few years will see your average consumer using VR like this. More likely, they will be using something like the GearVR, which I think has a much brighter future.
Because it's based in faith that something will happen, not a rational determination based on facts on hand.
"The solution: Use all of this surveillance tech and data to expose all of the VIPs. Publicly post where they are and where they've been, who they've been with, what they read, and what they buy. You do this and laws will be created pretty quickly."

I'd like to think that'd be the case, but consider one of the more-recent privacy intrusions with "The Fappening" ... very little became of that, despite the wealthy, high-profile individuals involved. I realize they weren't the politically connected, but they were certainly what society considers "VIPs".
An amazing journey from the distant edges of the universe (10^24) right down to subatomic particles (10^-16). A great demonstration of orders of magnitude, and a reminder of how small a part of space (both big and small) we occupy.

"This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust, is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception." - at 100 million light years