skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flic uses BLE (Bluetooth 4).

It also costs 10x as much as the regular BT buttons. Can't wait for BLE to drop to mass market prices.
Love Tangle Hack and Cheats
Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like Walmart has 5x as much revenue as Amazon with 6x as many employees. Then you say that Amazon has 3x the revenue per employee as Walmart. Shouldn't that be 1.2x the revenue per employee?
http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/slang/half_inch
GitHub Notes on RSI, Standing Desks, and Ergonomic Keyboards
Historically library usage has been surveilled, so I would say that making passive surveillance of your users more difficult is a 'valid reason' for going through the trouble.

You don't need logins/user accounts for your users to be identified. IP is sufficient in many cases, and browser fingerprint pretty much covers the other cases.

Also, if the website ever has need to become more complex, it will be easier and less error prone not to have to throw 'figure out how to implement TLS' on the pile of tasks.

Also, if permissions are the primary concern, might I recommend moving to a host that does SSL/TLS for you? Webhosts have come a long way in the last few years. Moving to a nicer one may actually save you effort in the long run.
RequestPolicy Continued https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io/ does this, and comes with a subscription usability whitelist for CDNs and such.
How to CHANGE NEGATIVE MINDSET
Crazy thing is that Twitter have a way to deal with that noise right in their system, lists.

They first came to be via Tweetdeck, as a client side sorting of the timeline.

Then Twitter implemented official support for them in their API, and later bought Tweetdeck.

But since then the lists have largely withered on the wine.

To access them in the official client you have to jump thought a menu and list just to see a single one, when the power of lists in Tweetdeck was that you got them as columns you could see side by side.

Various third party clients have this, but most of them run into the hard cap Twitter have on free API access.

Frankly watching Twitter on Android tablets devolve into a wide phone UI, when i can fire up a third party app and have 3+ columns of topic sorted tweets is deeply worrying. This because it indicates something about where the focus of the company is.
Yeah. Whenever I had trouble with a topic, it was because my core knowledge was weak and rusty. I was in Instrumentation and Control. The stuff in Control Theory was all Pontryagin, Lyapunov, Bellman, Evans, etc. We were fortunate enough to have a very good Professor who taught a course that is state of the art (continuous control in 3rd year, and discrete control systems in 4th year. Optimal control and RST controllers).

For applying the stuff, it's sort of easy. But I know that I'll never appreciate the beauty of it until I understand the concept of stability from a "Calculus" stand point and how it relates to systems.

Anyhow, I'm also acquiring Russian. Many Russian books have been translated but a lot have not.
Solving the H-1B Visa Problem
I've wondered about returning broken Snap-on tools, and glad I read your post. I have a box of broken tools, and I don't want to bother a driver. It's not that important. Tools have become so cheap.

Snap-on should go out of their way to honor their warranties though.

What Snap-on never really got--was that they are lucky to have customers, at what they charge for tools.

I don't blame the guys running around in trucks--that's a whole other franchise debacle. Snap-on should compensate them(franchise owners) for Any returned tools. Why--because that's what they promised when we bought their first overpriced tools.

If you are dead set on Snap-on, just buy the 3/8" metric, and inch ratchet set. I bought mine second hand. Everything else can be another brand.

I saw guys spend $40,000 on tools. A lot of them were too young, nor cared about ROI.

Never forget the Snap-on rep in automotive school. He was worse than a drug dealer. (I do understand his persistence. I don't think Snap-on makes it easy for their employees/franchise owners.)
Why can't the FBI just work directly on the phone hard drive (removed the hard drive from the phone and connect it to another computer)? Why are the going through IOS operating system?
> a system in which all citizens or residents of a country receive an unconditional sum of money, in addition to any income they bring in elsewhere.

It will come - simply b/c a majority will depend on it and politicians depend on majorities.

But it will also be so low that people will merely be able to afford a reasonable modern living standard.

At the same time there will be incentives to take new kind of jobs to pad the basic income.

Those jobs will be servant jobs - bringing people food, driving them around ... serving them ... b/c no robot can give you the feeling of being in a position of power.

So the fate for the uneducated or people educated but in economically irrelevant areas will be basic income plus being a servant.
Can we submit that she is fired? Another classy move by Yelp
The DW01? It's certainly one of the high-volume chips, but consider that there are also quite a lot of products that don't use lithium batteries.
Related: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645
This does not exist. This is well known as the Law of Conservation of Energy.

That said, if food production was so easy as to be almost free for the people with power, why not just make it free? If the cost is small enough, powerful people would be happy to absorb it to provide this service.
How much do you pay for the air you breath?

How much do you pay to post here on hacker news, or read whatever online newspapers you like?

There are tons of things that are becoming freer and freer, as time goes on. Why wouldn't this eventually extend to food, or energy?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prey :

3. A living thing that is eaten by another living thing.
Won't we still need drivers in case the autonomous technology fails? We still have airline pilots... The drivers will need to do less actual driving, but I guess will still be needed.
Imagine trying to explain to an ancient Greek philosopher how Christianity is monotheistic.

So, you have one God, but also a demigod, who is his son. There's a god of the underworld you call satan, and a number of divine or demonic creatures called angels and demons. Ok, throw in some ancestor worship in the form of saints.

This monotheistic pantheon would have sounded reassuringly familiar your ancient Greek interlocutor.
It's the FBI -- not just a law enforcement agency but a national security/counter terror agency. For such agencies the Constitution and the laws become vague and flexible. Under color of law, the FBI can essentially do anything they can present a plausible law-enforcement case for.

A few years ago we had a shitsplosion involving the BATF running illegal guns in order to "catch criminals", with the result that few if any criminals were caught and Mexican drug lords found themselves in possession of nifty new guns. AFAIR none of the major decision makers lost their jobs, let alone were prosecuted.

I wonder how much actual law enforcement purpose is behind these ops and how much of it is just a game of "let's see what we can get away with".
I learned to not to trust Linode after incident around 2012-01-23: I emailed them asking if they would compile a new kernel without the /proc/pid/mem local root exploit; they manually patched and compiled a new 3.2.1-linode40 kernel. I booted into it, but it repeatedly locked up my VPS after ~10-12 hours of runtime. No monitoring or automatic reboot on their side, and both lockups happened right before I went to sleep. Did they bother notifying anybody about their buggy kernel, which many people probably booted into? Nope. Nothing.
> Computer systems are designed to be figured out from their manuals or APIs.

A lot of software nowadays implicitely acknowledges the existence of SO or even open recommends to use this source.
As welfare and min wage stand today, often working does not increase your standard of living or even basic ability to live.
If the library site serves over plain http, it is fairly easy to snoop on the visitors activity. So one could find out which kind of books certain visitors were looking for. That could easily reveal secrets about said visitors.

If we are not just being hypothetical, a simple solution for you could be to register with cloudflare and run your site behind that. They will give you a free ssl certificate. This isn't as secure as running your own, since the connection between cloudflare and your server is in plain http, but it's a lot better. As an added bonus, you get a free caching layer in front of your site, which might be a good thing if you're on a small shared host.
Which countries will be issuing these good warrants? All of them?
There is so much work out there to be done, it's laughable that we are talking about paying people for doing nothing.

Think about all the elderly retiring people that will need to be cared for. All the working moms who struggle to find people to care for their kids during the day. All the litter and graffiti all over our cities and roads.

Countries like Japan are freaking out about their aging demographics and how they will support them. The solution is definitely not to decrease the amount of people working.

Instead of basic income, why not use the money instead to give a generous wage subsidy to people at the bottom? So that even a street sweeper, caretaker, nanny, or preschool teacher is well financially rewarded?

FWIW, the Scandinavian model, which has some of the highest equality and well-being in the world, requires people to work and has some of the highest labor force participation rates in the world.
“I can’t afford to buy groceries”: Yelp employee fired after scathing letter
Unfortunately, rise of the Stack Overflow and alike made developers far too lazy to write any decent documentation.

Last time I saw a documentation I would consider beautiful, comprehensive and really well written was back in the OpenVMS days. You can see something distantly resembling that glorious style if you type 'help' in gnuplot.
How does being in the form of a crystal skull show me how to read it?
In Milwaukee these days, around 50% of working-age black men can get work. 50 years ago it was 85%.

The market found more things for knowledge workers to do. Visit the rust belt sometime - the factory laborers were left behind a generation ago, we just choose not to think about it because they're in a different caste.
This is a non-trivial problem, assuming they really do want this to be a network server. For instance, it did not specify if they wanted "at most once vs at least once" delivery specifications (I'm guessing they wanted to see if you have come across this). Dealing with reliability in the face of failing network connections takes some serious thought.

One thing I may have pushed back on is "the requirements say this should be thread safe, but it does not say it must use threading. Can the server be single threaded?". If they are ok with that, writing an async IO server in a language geared for it would make things a bit easier (Erlang, Go, Python + Gevent, Node, etc). If feeling cheeky, you could ask if you just write a basic server sitting in front of Redis or using 0mq since the specs did not explicitly disallow 3rd party libs or apps.

At the end of the day, this may be one of those problems where they see how far you get, and don't expect most candidates to finish in 60 mins. It could also just be not the best test question relevant to the job you were applying for. I think it's fair game for anyone w/ previous experience writing low level networking code and servers from scratch, which is generally not what PHP/Rails devs are doing.
Key quote: "Our current economic system requires people to either have wealth or to work to make a living, with the assumption that the economy creates jobs for all those who need them. If this assumption breaks down - and progress in automation is likely to break it down, I believe - then we need to rethink the very basic structure of our economic system."

That's a good statement of the problem. It's useful to get that clear before talking about solutions. Solutions are hypothetical; problems are real.

How far along are we in that direction already? About 14% of the US workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, construction, mining, and agriculture. That figure was about 50% in 1950 and around 90% in the 19th century.

The conventional wisdom was that more education helps. That is no longer the case. About 37% of employed US college graduates are in jobs which require only a high school diploma.[1] Overproduction of college graduates has reduced the value of a college education substantially.

It's not often mentioned, but there's one class of jobs that's almost totally gone - large numbers of people doing the same thing under close supervision. In 1900, Carnegie Steel had 5000 men with shovels at one plant. Today, you might see one or two people with shovels working, but beyond that, power equipment is brought in. There's a fraction of the population which needs jobs that structured. Many homeless are in that category. (Jobs where drunkenness is tolerated have almost totally disappeared.) That's a problem at the low end. 13.5% of the population has an IQ between 70 and 85. What are they going to do?[2]

Nothing above is really in question. So that's a way to look at the problem as of right now.

Looking ahead, there's this well-known study on jobs likely to be automated soon.[3]

Understanding the changing nature of work is the first step to dealing with it.

[1] http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Underemploy...
[2] http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/fut... (Note that this paper is from 1999.)
[3] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2642880/Tabl...
Breathing doesn't require investing in technological infrastructure in most cases. Sometimes it does, though.

Posting on Hacker News requires me to keep paying my electric bill and my broadband bill or for someone, somewhere, at some point, to pay for the servers and power and everything involved in getting it to me.
Yeah, I can understand that. Undoubtedly the EU has changed over time, and many people might not like those changes. I'm just suspicious of the claim that the EU is very different from the EC voted on in 1975. In some respects it is, but I feel it is misleading to look back and say it was just something like a loose free trade agreement. It was much more than that even when we originally joined, though it could be argued that the general public weren't very aware of it.

On the other hand, I don't know if the general public understands the EU now, either.
Exactly. I got on twitter to follow certain people. Most of the time its great but honestly what sucks is there is so much noise I just ignore everything.

And I'm a technical person willing to put up with a lot of BS. But I can't be arsed to prune my list because while say someone I follow posts GREAT things relating to libc internals, they also post things that are very much not what I care about.

I can't tell twitter to: don't show me stuff like this from this person, or better say show me more of stuff like this, hide the rest unless i ask to see it from this user.

That is a hard problem to solve. I don't envy twitter but honestly their "platform" hasn't moved for years. This whole mess is entirely of their own lack of doing.
> About 50% of people that had facebook 4 years ago no longer have it.

Their own and third-party data (Comscore, Nielsen) seems to indicate otherwise, what's your source on this?
Also, Apple does have the ability to prevent signed updates from being installed on phones they don't want it to be. Every update must be signed by Apple specifically to the phone that's being updated, and this includes a nonce to prevent replay attacks. (I forgot about this in my reply above).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHSH_blob, https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/SHSH, http://www.saurik.com/id/12
The old elektor magazine was super good. Every issue had something on just about every level of competence in it. I learned so much from those. The most complex thing I built from them was the 2D graphics accelerator, hooked that up to the Beeb and wrote a fully functional vdu driver for it.
If you want to play with a simulated 555 - and are willing run an old java applet - my favorite (educational) circuit simulator includes several 555 circuits (and an implementation of the 555's internals).

http://www.falstad.com/circuit/e-555pulsemod.html
So one thing that would be interesting to take a look at from this dataset is wildcard vs non-wildcard. My employer has two wildcard certs for public sites (purchased from your standard vendors) and that's all that is required (for a lot of places). However one of my personal domains I play with a lot of technologies, all on their own subdomains. So for that single domain I probably have 10 LE certs (and yes, none of these were secured before).

So maybe it's not wildcard vs non-wildcard, it's limit the datasets to root domain names?
No one would waste a cent on developing autonomous driving technology if that were the case. They're not doing it because it's exciting, they're doing it because it'll be cheaper in the long run.

If something goes wrong in a plane you need to land it, which is a pretty delicate operation. If something goes wrong in a car, all you have to do is get off the roadway and stop.
Extensive discussion of original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11138086
Good point. The Time article does say that, but the numbers don't.
Some ideas (take it with a grain of salt)

1) You should have a rating system for experts and award different level of badges and users should write reviews also experts with high scores should have a higher pay rate

2) interviewing experts is not going to scale not only you will not have the time but you also need internal experts to interview the Become an expert" applicants (you need some fast vetting process or rely on the rating system)

3) You should collect data from StackOverFlow and other sites and see which questions novice folks are having a hard time getting answers to and try to get experts on those topics (this could become your competitive advantage)

4) You can scale this to businesses - they would certainly appreciate the on-demand help aspect of this thing. Businesses specially small ones may have support account subscriptions with vendors like Red Hat, IBM, etc...which can be costly for them. If your experts are reliable they would rather pay you only when they need help instead of paying the vendors monthly/yearly.

5) As your experts are working the problems you should keep a very organized knowledge base of the issue and resolution (maybe you can monetize this data later on or it maybe useful somehow)
When the ESP8266 successor, the ESP32 comes out you'll be set: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2017

For now, you can always buy your own bluetooth LE modules and attach them to a small microcontroller, for buttons, you could make your own wall buttons with nice enclosures or go the ridiculous route: https://www.adafruit.com/products/1185
The discussion, so far as I can tell, has rested on the notion that people "need something to do" and that -- I guess? -- the government should be responsible for making sure that Basic Income money isn't going to "waste" on people who are just "unemployed." I'm arguing that no such discussion is necessary. People are perfectly able to entertain themselves, work or no, and find meaning in their lives. Those that aren't won't be helped by the government, that bluntest of tools used for the most delicate of incisions.

My point is: Basic Income should be free from stipulation. Play video games, care for a sick mother in law, grow plants on your balcony and sing to them in Hindi -- none of the government's concern. While we're at it, eliminate the minimum wage and let the small businesses hire workers at whatever they can afford to pay. Let someone work at the local bakery if that makes them happy. Let's see what the people come up with when they don't have to worry about how they're going to eat.
Any top apps?

I don't think you can beat other languages yet, except in some very niche areas. There's not even incremental compilation!

Hell, even python can infer function types these days!

Rust has been around much longer than Swift for example, and yet there are many very more production Swift apps. Whereas rust seems limited to play stuff.

Of course, given another 2-5 years it should catch up in many ways. Comparing it to mature languages, or languages like Swift (from the worlds largest company paying some of the worlds best language developers) is not really fair.

Definitely a play ground for enthusiasts at this point. Which I guess is what you meant.
>If I run a website for a small town public library that only serves information, ie no user accounts and no logins on our domain, is there a valid reason for me to go through the process of https and certificates?

Absolutely. The privacy of library searches has long been viewed as one of the archetypal examples of why privacy matters. A user's ISP shouldn't be able to learn what sort of books, movies, and music a library patron is interested in. And that's before we get into matters like injection of malicious content by local miscreants at your favorite cafe, or ads by mobile networks. Fundamentally, it's an issue of your users being the ones deciding what they do and do not care about being secure, and security being the default (could you imagine the emotional hurdle someone who has a real need for their privacy when using the library website would have to go through to explicitly ask for it?). The Library Freedom Project, who has been in the news a lot as of late, was in part started to push the use of SSL in all libraries, even if you "don't need it."

https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypled...

https://github.com/EbookFoundation/library-privacy-pledge/wi...
Thanks for this! I think I'll grab one and play around with it. If you created a github repo with the python script, I could star it, or post anything I find in the eeprom etc.
So you interpreted what i wrote about "infinite" literally..? Ok... We are talking about fusion... So you suggest then i think Sun will never die and has infinite energy too, yes?

Maybe i will explain you what i mean and everyone else mean when they say what i said. It means that we can RELEASE MORE (transform) ENERGY, because energy is never destroyed, it's transformed.

In other words the total mass of the tritium and deuterium nuclei before the reaction is greater than the mass of the helium and neutron after fusion has taken place – even though it is the same number of protons and neutrons.
I have no particular reason to believe that Ayn Rand would champion cutting corners in product quality to save cost--especially if doing so wasn't a good long-term business strategy.

But, to your broader point, especially if you're going to use low cost overseas manufacturing extensively keeping up quality implies a lot of hands-on monitoring and working with the manufacturers closely.
Slightly OT: It would be great if CT logs were available as part of Amazon's or Google's public data sets. Being able to access that data via BigQuery (or similar) would make generating something like this way easier. It would also be immensely useful when implementing CT log monitors.