skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oddly, in the UK, there arguably already is. There is misconduct in public office and/or malfeasance in public office. Both have very tough penalties available.

They've been rarely used until more recently, when it's been a favorite for prosecuting police officers and police employees for egregious behavior resulting in deaths and injuries (where traditional charges such as manslaughter have failed to convince juries who are always reluctant to convict). The other favorite use is to prosecute civil servants for speaking to the media (aka. leaking).

However, no sign of it being used to deal with mighty screwups on government IT. I do like your thinking on this.
Distributed Systems Testing: The Lost World
I was curious if YC had any issues with accepting/funding companies that are in the same space as other portfolio companies. I have heard that venture capitalists often don't. Zenefits and Zen Payroll/Gusto was what came to mind.

My startup is in the financial wellness space of the 401(k) industry (we are not advisors and just do participant education) and I'm going to be applying to to the next session so this bit of news is of interest to me. Thanks.
This is 100% true. Mainstream 401k fees are out of control. I don't know how much is opportunism and how much is regulatory burden, but parity to wealthfront or anything else retail would be fucking miraculous.
The runtime aspects of the multicore runtime has been pretty stable. Most of the effort currently is going into the algebraic effects extension that is used to map direct-style concurrency into multiple (parallel) cores: https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-effects
For a while, there were people who used to drop them all in the mail.

Force the publishers and advertisers to pay the postage for them with the idea of making it less profitable to include them with the magazines in the first place.
Important Changes to Mandrill
I have always thought it a shame that Mozilla didn't aim for a better embeddable engine. Embedded browser engine seems like such an obvious part of their mission.
What kind of mining? For data, cryptocurrency, or ore?
Machine Learning in Trading, Startup.ML / Bloomberg Conference on May 12
I think the hope is in Servo. NetSurf and Dillo are missing from the timeline.
Maybe all of those are a factor. Personally, while I try to maintain skepticism about big claims like this, I don't like to dismiss an idea offhand just because most other people have previously dismissed it. Others are probably willing to extend the same courtesy even if the particular claim is unlikely to hold.

Just curious, would you put the EM drive[0] in the same category?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster
> ".NET now needs a solid compile-to-browser story"

You can compile .NET code to JavaScript using JSIL:

http://jsil.org/
Though with the Nexus 6P in my breast pocket the camera sticks out, just think you could have been watching me type this. :)
As a Mexican it rise my spirit, I'm very happy for Icaza and for the project! Perfect timing for microsoft in the open source strategy.
This is a regulatory requirement, part of the "Know Your Customer" doctrine. In plain words, banks are required to know who is the client who has opened an account.

Most banks will be risk averse and will not open an account to anyone applying online from abroad. Even for US persons applying online, they will ask quite a bit of documentation.

Some banks (but not all) will open an account for a non-US person, when the non-US person physically visits a US branch, with proper identification (typically a passport) and documentation on why they want the account. But even in such cases, it is up to the discretion of the bank employee to decide whether the risk of opening an account for a non-US person is worth the benefit. So, the same bank may give different replies to the same inquiry, depending on the branch asked.

As a concrete example, TD Ameritrade will open easily an account for a foreigner in the Chinatown branch in NYC, but will not open an account when the same customer visits a branch in midtown in NYC.
> This was not the case even 5 years ago.

People were saying exactly the same thing in relation to FrontPage 20 years ago. After that it was Dreamweaver. WordPress. Wix. etc.

The tools for people to go off and do it themselves have been with us for a very long time, and they've only ever squeezed out the very bottom of the market. The types of organisations that DIY appeals to aren't in the market and don't have the budget for an average developer, and the organisations that spend money on developers wouldn't consider DIY.
Actually, pair-bonding and promiscuity are almost completely mutually exclusive, as used in animal behavior research. Pair-bonding implies long term attachment between two animals, often, but not necessarily, including mating. Promiscuity implies a sexual encounter without a long term bond. This article is about the former, not the latter.
Bills bills
It may seem like it, but no engineer writes "right" code on the first try. They get it working, then they iterate, cleaning it up to make it "right".

Experience teaches us where to start, where to think ahead a little, and how to structure code such that it can be refactored in the future.

Writing code the "right way" means 1) getting something working 2)taking what you've learned and refactoring and/or.

If you care about maintaining a chunk of code for 6 months, or a year, you'll quickly learn to refactor. If you are prototyping, right likely isn't a priority to begin with.
I mean, you could argue the network stack is a "binary structure in shared memory to communicate across processes". Really it depends on how it's done: the interface is everything.
It's all about positioning. The term "web designer" and "web developer" feels dated. If you have those skills you might consider rebranding yourself as a UI/UX Designer, a Product Designer or a Visual Designer. If you're good at JavaScript you could rebrand as a JavaScript Engineer, UI Engineer, or Frontend Developer.

I think what it boils down to is that companies just want 1-5 in house designers to do the work that they typically outsourced in the past. If your product is particularly complex that number will grow (with scale as well of course).

It's also worth noting that designers in the tech industry have, for better or worse, absorbed much of the tasks typically assigned to a frontend or web developer. Regardless of the prefix, if you're a designer you'll need solid HTMl/CSS/JS skills.

Lastly. If you're looking for the freedom of freelance with the security of a full-time job I can't recommend remote work enough.
Congrats. Since Nat and Miguel met while applying to work at Microsoft and then went on to build GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) with major help from Federico, which was inspired by Microsoft COM, hence the name, it's nice they finally managed to join Microsoft.
Playing God on Windows
I think that like in most industries, the low-end has become commoditised.

Want to sell stuff online? It used to cost thousands of dollars to get an online store up and running.

Now you can sign up to Shopify and start selling your stuff the same day using a theme that, to be honest, is more than good enough for what it costs.

The same goes for brochure sites, a space now filled by Squarespace and Wix and so on. Cheap or free options have always been around, but now you can get a theme that is more than good enough.

But that's great for web designers, right? Anyone wanting to only pay $25/month for that kind of product is going to be a terrible client for anyone trying to make a proper living in the space.

Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end – the work we didn't want to really do anyway – has become commoditised.

The higher-end work – the more challenging problems to solve, the ones that need proper design thinking to solve – is still around, and it's become much more specialised.
OK, Google Voice it is, then.
Their FTTN is, yes. If you can get fibre to the premises, that's all them and you're golden.

+1 for sonic support.
MIT Researchers Reverse Autism Symptoms Using Gene Editing
WYSIWYG Plugins for Countdown Timers and Personalized Images
But what will this summer be like? Just trying to set expectations.
Awesome team and product! Paul is a great guy. I was interviewing there, but sadly the position I was applying for was filled. :(
I don't actually have any idea about how group chats are implemented in Tox, but I don't see why you can't send messages to the people in the group to redistribute when people get back. It sounds like it might have history consistency issues, but maybe they already do that.

I assumed you were talking about one-on-one message relaying, which is probably what most people would care about. That can't really be solved, since one of the goals of Tox is also to prevent 3rd parties from being able to tell who you are talking to. Can't do that if you have to broadcast to users "send this message to <x> when they get back"...
Drug Pricing: The Pharma vs. Health Insurance Showdown
Microsoft's advertising. Specifically, those they choose to do business with allowing exploit kits to deliver malware payload, such as cryptolocker-style viruses.
Lockdown: Apple could make it even tougher to hack Phones
Quy Tùy chọn
Quality Police for Java projects, 0.16.3 released
It's not a priority for them. The first comment explains the endemic lack of resources.

It's a bit like Google and their appliance. It's better to have a vertical product with no leaf and build on top like they tried with FirefoxOS.
Clover Health Hiring
> Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it.

Isn't that just a mixture of technical limitations and fashion.
Such win Scott.
WikiLeaks: NSA Targets World Leaders for US Geopolitical Interests
What is PCJ?
I wonder what's the initial joke.
The EmDrive is actually less physically plausible than the E-Cat if you get into it, since reactionless propulsion is identical to perpetual motion and/or infinite energy. Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. The only way the EmDrive could work is if either (a) we are really wrong about some fundamental stuff, or (b) it's not actually reactionless but is pushing against something "exotic" like dark matter or dark energy.

E-Cat or anything like it (LENR) would mean new nuclear physics -- some way of bypassing the Coulomb barrier at low energies via some novel probably quantum mechanism. But fundamentally it's not violating anything as foundational as a conservation law. We know the energy is there via E=mc^2 and all. We just don't currently know of any way to get at that energy at sub-plasma temperatures and pressures (and for the proposed fusion reaction in the E-Cat, by no known physical means). LENR would require new physics but would not break existing physics.

I do recall reading some interesting stuff about how some of the gas giant planets seem a bit warmer than they should be, and that if LENR were a thing it would provide a possible explanation for some anomalous heating observed in astronomical observations.
But you would want private security that is willing to engage in serious shootouts with roving bands of warlords, but make those warlords fearful of doing that because they expect the security to win decisively.
A few days ago I though G would buy Jetbrains in the coming months. Now...
>A lot of the design problems have been solved already

This is partly true. Design problems have been solved for isolated cases. You still require designers to choose the right combination of solutions that work for particular use cases. And in my experience, all too often those "solutions" start conflicting with each other, resulting in new design problems!

Commoditization is definitely happening in design, but the design problems are not going away anytime soon.

Disclaimer/plug: I work on Squarespace design templates - http://www.square-mart.com
I agree with you but it can still be frustrating and there's a lot of entrenched interests involved.

My story is that I broke my foot about 10 years ago (in the Grand Canyon no less). Long story short, when I eventually got the doctor, she told me that this kind of fracture always took a long time to heal and the literature suggested that electromagnetic stimulation had some benefit. Of course, the insurance company wouldn't pay until it was deemed a "problem fracture" in a few months (as my doctor thought it would be) but I did eventually get my $1000 stimulator at about 50% off.

It had the most horrible interface one could imagine. If it slipped off the foot, it apparently simply shut down for that day's stimulation. In any case, my foot eventually healed.

A few years later, a friend had a similar injury. I gave her my stimulator. Apparently the allowable stimulations had expired by then. She took it into a medical supply place and they were horrified by the idea that they might simply reset the device.

I'm not a big pharma hater but this sort of story is why people get really mad.
The lack of proper data protection laws (such as the ones in the EU) are clearly starting to show how just having vague constitutional interpretations isn't enough to actually protect your information.
A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance.

I no longer believe that open replications make much difference either (there have been open replications and I still don't know anything more).

They are focussed on industrial and consumer installations instead. I'll start really believing if people are using this in the real world and that's the strategy they have I think. So wait and see is what I do.
I love .net, but De Icaza is a tremendous liability for Microsoft
Mozilla's research render engine Servo sounds like the best bet, rather than redesigning all of Gecko's API space. It already implements the CEF, and was built specifically for embedding. The fact that it's an order of magnitude faster than all other rendering engines can't hurt, either.
A) the bar is being raised B) the bar is being raised particularly high where you are looking for work

PHP, Jquery, etc. won't get you as far as it used to in the Bay Area. But as an exercise look for job openings in the mid-west or north-west, and they're looking for... PHP, Jquery, (ASP.net), etc.

Markets move.. including the market for tech skills. You either move with the market or move markets. You shouldn't ever expect it to last forever.
Software Startup Workshop at Penn State
I'm organizing a Software Startup Workshop at Penn State. I want to design a 500 hr workshop where the students have 200 hrs of learning and 300 hrs of building the product and developing a startup around it. The workshop targets mainly CS students but would be technically open to all. I'm considering the following Stanford CS courses:
1. CS 183 B How to Start a Startup 20 hrs
2. CS 106 A Programming Methodology 30 hrs
3. CS 106 B Programming Abstractions 30 hrs
4. CS 107 Programming Paradigms 30 hrs
5. CS 161 Design and Analysis of Algorithms Part I 20 hrs
6. CS 161 Design and Analysis of Algorithms Part II 20 hrs
7. CS 244A Introduction to Computer Networking 30 hrs
8. CS 193 P iPhone Application Development 20 hrs
Can I get some help from YC or Stanford in developing the content of this workshop? The goal is to have at least 10 products at the end which will apply for the winter cycle of YC 2016.
To put up something concrete, my last large employer had a 401k plan where the cheapest fund we had access to (PLFMX) had an expense ratio of 0.72%. That's in addition to account-level management fees, which I think were ~0.8%.
It's weird to bring up slowness when VSCode is much more amenable for use on machines with meager specs than MonoDevelop is. Why do you care what language your editor is written in unless you're submitting patches, anyway?
So let's work through a scenario here.

Assume you are Verizon (or any other carrier). I pay you for cell phone voice & internet service. As part of that exchange, I provide billing info etc. etc.

Are you saying that I don't own said information and that you are free to derive additional revenue by selling it to someone else? To me, I paid for a service, thereby a single transaction. My expectation is that as part of that transaction, the other party should not have to the ability to derive secondary benefit without explicit consent. Particularly, since I don't see any upside to secondary/tertiary usage.

I guess I'm much more for the European vision of personal data privacy (you own your own data and grant it for specific use) vs. the US version (anything goes).
>Police spying on you from a blimp is fairly unlikely, since it would be fairly conspicuous, not to mention expensive.
The Army is actually doing this: https://theintercept.com/2014/12/17/billion-dollar-surveilla...
Live stream it. "Ladies and Gentlemen we know for certain now that it's not a gasoline engine, it's not powered by coal nor is it fueled by a wood burning oven, stay tuned!"
Can't speak for what they intend to do, but current moves by Microsoft seem to be very much on the contrary direction of assisting migration or locking down existing citizens of their platform: Visual Studio Code, Roslyn (C# compiler), TypeScript, those are all cross-plaftorm. Not to mention the ones that are getting there, like ChakraCore (JS Engine).

Still having a hard time understanding the new Microsoft, but so far really seems like a 180" from the Microsoft of 10 years or so ago.
Arizona prosecutor: We’re not buying any more iPhones over Apple and DOJ dispute
Unlike podcasts, music recording and mixing is extremely CPU intensive. Especially if you run a lot of analog simulating synths and stuff.
I'm not actually sure what you mean by that.

It is currently using the firebase api.
> I was critcizing the hatred. The object of the hate is unimportant. Drop the emotion and share the logic. The OP's entire rant was an unfounded strawman attack on religion.

No it wasn't. That was a side point. The main point was that the constitution isn't Gospel -- we can change it and shouldn't treat it as perfect.
He's very smart, and a good dude. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to have him in my world for the brief time that we were talking. I could only imagine the camping shenanigans he got into!
> Isolate the machine in a box where the only connection to the outside world is two wires. Draw power from those wires until you've pulled more energy than any known storage system could possibly provide.

I believe a MacBook running Chrome, Atom, and Slack for a few hours will satisfy this requirement.
I think your original point was way off base. "Signalling" certainly sounds a lot more loaded than seems reasonable. I'm not even sure what exactly you're trying to say with that, but it certainly doesn't seem very charitable.

I took the photo to signal the dude really digs Austin (not my fave city; but whatever). I assumed he was black because he took a picture of his arm, with the tattoo that he talked about having. I dunno. I live in a predominately black area and it's just not that unusual for me I guess. If you live in SV maybe it's worth talking about. In the less affluent parts of Dallas it just isn't. Talking about his father being an unfortunate statistic just reinforced it. I guess that didn't click the same for most.

I'm just not sure what it has to do with what the VCs were telling him about his business in the rest of the article. There were two articles for me I guess. A short story up front I found pretty compelling. And a frustrated (for lack of a better word) diatribe about financing I found tedious, unfocused, and not all that compelling for the latter half-ish.

But if it was a white or asian dude that posted a picture of his wrist with an Austin tattoo, then yeah, I would have been surprised to read later on that the tattoo he described having, and put up a picture of, didn't actually belong to him. Not sure if that falls under "signaling" or not.
It'd make me willing to pay a little more for one if I knew that it no longer had a working network uplink I didn't control.
Thing is, a lot of professional photographers were truly lacking either talent or clue.

They'd have a studio - a room with lights and a handful of backgrounds - in a town or village somewhere, and they'd get most of the portrait, wedding, and yearbook work for an area. Sometimes they'd get work from a local paper.

But their output was average at best. They got work because they spent money on equipment, and they had enough basic competence to use it without making really obvious mistakes. But that was literally all they offered.

>And many will produce results that are quite competent.

Which is the core of the issue: it turns out that the basic creative skill level of much of the population is much higher than anyone realised.

There's still a huge gap between dabblers and geniuses. But if you make professional equipment cheap and easy to use, you'll find that a lot of people can produce results that used to be considered professional.

This is true of photography, music, video, and digital art - and now it's becoming true of programming.

In a way this is a good thing. But it means real experts with truly outstanding skills are going to find it harder to find a niche that pays well - just as many outstanding musicians, photographers, and video makers are struggling because the market for innovative and slightly difficult work is smaller than it used to be.

Web design + programming are going the same way.

Industrial web dev - giant systems that work at scale and which deal with huge data sets - is still valuable for now.

But small-scale freelance web dev is losing to automation and simplified design tools.

It's not the same as the photography/creative market, because the big industrial conglomerates still want talent, and so do start-ups that hope to become big industrial conglomerates.

But that basic level of mom 'n pop boutique "agency" design is going to die off completely within 5-10 years.
But the tools, and the marketing of those tools, have vastly improved in the last ~5 years. Or are you telling me dreamweaver's wysiwyg editor was the pinnacle of development..
First time I've seen "Apple is on the side of the terrorists" literally spelled out. AZ prosecutor's office wins the least rational actor prize in this dispute!
The problem with SAP isn't the software, it's "consultants" writing purposefully bad code - the customer can't assess the delivered quality and the consultant will keep his "ongoing maintenance" fee.

(Okay, yes, the software itself is a problem too but it's not the major problem)
Yep. (Though the incorporator -- you or whomever is signing up -- would also be listed on the Certificate of Incorporation.)
Neither. I'll continue to assume that embedded code is shitty and insecure, because it always has been before, and nothing about the fundamental economics of the problem have changed.
We are looking into it :-)
Not to mention that aforesaid quizzes, often based on faulty "science", can brand one in a manner that may not be advantageous to one's future. A previous employer in the early 2000s got the MBTI religion and everyone had to be evaluated. Fortunately, they gave people a chance to opt out of sharing their results, which I gladly took. The idea of someone dismissing my opinion because I might be too "judge-y" or "feely" raised my hackles.
Interactive AppSec training for coders
"SVB will share more details about your account’s complete fee schedule and functionality once your bank account is open."

no deal
Mistakes You Should Never Make on a Cold Call