skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't by default assume some sort of sinister ulterior motive here. There's a fairly good chance this is exactly how it appears: A CEO taking the rather exemplary step of donating an entire year's worth of comp to his employees, in an attempt to offset external impacts that are only nominally within his control.

Sure, there's the possibility this act is purely for optics and employee retention. But if that's what drives people to be good human beings you won't catch me complaining.

And the "worth noting" section in this article is curious as well. Why does any amount of personal wealth degrade the value of this act? It's like the writer is saying "don't be impressed folks, this guy is still rich."

We should encourage and support acts like this, not couch our praise in snark and envy.
My usage pattern has been:

- wget to download files (or entire sites even)

- curl to debug everything http/https
The worst thing is when people quote text by putting it in a code block. Why? Why would you do such a thing? It makes it impossible to read on mobile, and even in a browser it prevents text wrap.
Sigh the Millionaire Next Door doesn't mean what internet frugality zealots want it to mean.

The median salary out of college for a plain middle-class job is $45k. Two such earners, packing away 15% for retirement into index funds, mortgaging a $200k home, and not taking on credit card debt will reach $1m household net worth in middle age.

There is nothing special about the millionaire designation and it does not make them rich, just normal people (at least among the college-educated set) who were lucky enough to avoid layoffs/expensive medical conditions and followed ordinary financial planning advice (save 15%, buy a house, have an emergency fund, pay your credit card bill in full every month). Plenty of such people buy BMWs and do lots of expensive travel; it's still within their means.

If you want to understand the behavior of the truly rich business owner/capitalist/old money class, don't pollute your sample with families of teachers, accountants, middle managers, IT department workers, etc.

Also, a Tahoe is $46k. Yet I imagine you wouldn't be pointing to the frugality of the rich if he were driving a $46k BMW.
I knew a guy who got wrapped up in a minor stock fraud case that might have landed him in jail for maybe a year.

He killed himself rather than face the music.

Sad, actually. He didn't need to kill himself. There is life after a conviction.
It would be cool if more of the senior management with >$5M options did that. If the company prospers they could easily negotiate high rewards again. Its normally the rank and file who get standardized bit-sized options.
Canadian Tech Unicorn Hootsuite Gets Written Down by Fidelity
I still think the waste is the elephant in the room. Exactly how is the (indefinite) cost of safely managing it factored into all those kilowatt-hour costs? Does it include tax-dollars going to projects like Hanford or Yucca Mountain?

Even if we're now experienced-enough to develop good socio-regulatory systems for day-to-day generation safety and standards, is the same really true for the waste? Our collective record is still a sad tale of fraying "temporary" solutions, leaks, NIMBY reactions, and playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato.
Our tanks are already ASME certified and have passed the DOT tests. We have a lot of composites experts integrated in our team already :-)
What would be your proposal for a solution to a sync'd feeds obvious distributed systems problems?

How much latency would be acceptable for a fully consistent, high throughput distributed log of events, that when it becomes unavailable the entirety of US trading shuts down and if it ever gets out of order can cause gigantic lawsuits?

How would you change the obvious organizational disincentives as well? Given that maintenance of the SIP is full cost, no profit operation for the exchanges?

Finally, don't take this as a criticism of your whistle blowing, I think that is critical to a functioning market, I am curious to know how you would solve the obvious technical challenges the consolidated feed faces?
I think they grey out of dead comments is a feature. It lets you read them if you want, but is a huge visual indicator that it isn't worth reading.
If one of the nodes goes rogue and tries to flood the network with noise, how does the system prevent denial of service?
From the video, it looks like they're growing carbon nanotubes on the surface. The process is limited to high heat applications (since the feedstock for the material is high temperature carbon bearing gasses). It's pretty impressive that they've commercialized the process - I've only seen it done in small quartz tubes with diameter < 3". Is it fair to say that CNTs are probably as toxic as death and you should stay far far away from them?

Establishing a material monopoly for an artist is a dick move, but certainly can't say it hasn't been done before. Yves Klein probably did it best.
it acts like a live packet capture of a log file.

not sure how else to describe other than I do not think wget is capable of such functionality.
Watch Movies However the BLEEP You Want (Buy, Watch, Sell Back)
Are you from Citadel?

Would you trust Wall Street to give you the best price on anything if there was no way to verify it?

There is no way to reasonably know if you are getting the best price (because they can change many times in the same second).

You are relying on the internalizer to give you the best of many possible prices. History says: "that's not going to happen"
My first impression of him was recently during Martin Shkreli's hearing and he left a similarly bad taste in my mouth after this one.
An upgradable Xbox One?
This reminds me of a funny story. I was a tech manager for the Winter Olympics in 2010, allocated to the mountain venues. We had this crazy test rehearsal day where we'd test our systems and processes. Proctors would actually walk around the various venues at the Olympics and just randomly create both big and small problems to see how we'd respond. Suddenly, our network connection to the primary datacenter went down, and we couldn't figure out why. We later learned that a boat had somehow (I don't know how) cut a main underwater cable that connected the mountain areas to the city. It was a stupid day. :)
Ad blockers would fix it. Outside of that, ad companies hiring competent devs would fix it. But I suspect they're moving too fast and breaking too many things to worry about trivial matters like XSS scripting vulnerabilities.

As a site owner, not embedding third party ads on your site would fix it. Then you only need to worry about your own code.
Ask HN: Long held tech taboos being broken?
The following articles question long held beliefs
or techniques in the tech industry. What other taboo topics are worth questioning or investigating?

Object Oriented Programming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM

IPv6 notation:
https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=724

Virtual Memory:
https://matildah.github.io/posts/2016-01-30-unikernel-security.html
The downvote button doesn't even appear until you have 500 karma. It's an anti feature that only affects experienced users.
A Tahoe is a $46,000 vehicle. Would you be surprised to see a billionaire in a BMW 4-series? Roughly the same price.
He's right - if you weren't part of the group that was paying them over $100M/year in fees for "real-time" data and you weren't buying or selling stock in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, it probably didn't impact you at all.
Imo as a mediocre web developer and huge fan of open and decentralized technology, this is the way that social networking should be done, at least until a reliable standard becomes available for social networking. It doesn't depend on a monolithic system, and seems to be backwards compatible. Thoughts?
> I have yet to see a case where a minority was minding their own business and the cops came and decided to shoot them dead.

Unfortunately, this happened in my city (Cincinnati, Ohio) last year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Samuel_DuBose

It resulted in The University of Cincinnati's Police Department being disbanded and replaced by longstanding and experienced leadership from the City of Cincinnati Police Department.
how does this compare to the bash emulation that comes with git for windows?
https://git-for-windows.github.io/
More requests to more code by more parties inherently increases attack surface area.

As a user why should I allow this for something that provides me no value (ads, tracking, js comment systems that I dont care about etc).

I can see why some people use noscript religiously and whitelist when needed
Given surveillance powers these guys want, it won't be too long before they decide that next order of business is to find more effective ways to steer political discourse in the favourable direction.

This has likely happened already with NSA. FBI are jealous because NSA don't share. Congress already know what a pain it is to deal with NSA; they're not eager to create another effectively ungovernable agency.
DisplayPort 1.4 to support 8K displays, work with USB-C
This is what native advertising looks like.
Yeah, this kind of thing will bring out the conspiracy nutters in droves.
yeah... feels like an arms race.

While things like security and freedom of information warrant technical innovation to ensure human rights its gonna be a hard sell to convince smart people to make more ads.

"Why don't we just innovate and make unexploitable software that does exactly what we want with no unintended consequences" : )
"Where there's a will (and enough black project money), there's a way."

With love,
NSA
Is Thoriam a real alternative?
It's really nice to see the amount of gnome stuff we've got now. And GTK-3 on Windows looks quite pretty I think.
As in another post in this thread,
I'm not really directly considering
the current FBI/Apple situation but
jumping ahead to the future
where, now, due heavily to
the current FBI/Apple situation,
I anticipate very broad, greatly
increased interest in encryption
people will want really strong
encryption, totally independent of
any big companies, totally free of any
chances of back doors, etc. So, they
will return to simple, open source,
command line software, run on an old
computer, never connected to a network,
that puts out just dirt simple
base 64 that move to, say, an iPhone
via some, whatever, diskette reader (?)
connected via USB. People are going
to quit just fooling around, roll back
to RSA, and trust a product of two
totally obscure prime numbers, oops,
really long prime numbers.

Here the FBI has gone a long way
to make their job impossible soon and
to have Apple make a new iPhone
that they solidly claim they just
cannot break
to replace all the ones they have
sold so far.
Cheat sheet for Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science
Love it!

Some comments:

- I want to upload a thread, and it asks me to give Oauth to my entire email. That's a little too much! Can't I just forward an email? I figured that was the point, given the name. I just CC everyone@fwdeveryone.com and it gets published.

- I dunno if I want to include the entire thread when I forward. I'd personally rather CC justthismessage@fwdeveryone.com when I'm writing an email, and get _only_ this message, with the context cut out for privacy.
What about those who seem quite happy about such recent incidents as students literally burning 'colonial' artwork or asking for statues to be removed? That seems pretty extreme.

No one's saying the legal system is fine (though that said, it should be pointed out that it's biased in more ways than one and on more than race), but there's definitely a bunch of people trying to tar everyone with the same brush, and thinking that certain things are the only differentiators.
Feb beats record set last month for most anomalously warm month ever recorded
My understanding is that the primary value of Ethereum other then its decentralized nature is the capacity for smart contracts. A cursory examination of this project doesn't look like it supports that.
What about duplicating how they repair broken cables... hook onto it close to shore, pull the cable up to a boat, then follow the length of the cable across the ocean.

I'm assuming that's how they're repairing this one?
Why Uber launched UberEats
> blacks are shot less frequently per severe encounter

This sounds like another way of arguing that racial profiling is real.
I was under the impression that the expressions "experimentally verified" and "is wrong" could never be in the same sentence. ;-)
Exactly—this completely agrees with my top level comment. Its not the technology we should be worrying about (although of course apple should be closing the vulnerability that allows the FBI to compel them to help decrypt this phone) but the more important—and scary—thing we should be worrying about here is the legal precedent that this case sets.
My impression for a while has been that nuclear power is one of those techs that looks good on paper but fails in practice due to what Elon Musk calls a high "PITA factor." (Pain in the A$$) I interpret PITA factor as referring to the existence of a long tail of thorny, hard, nasty, complicated problems that do not show up on a straightforward "paper" model of the tech. Some don't show up because they're complex edge case issues, and others (like "black swan event" risk) are just flat out hard to quantify. I also think wishful thinking plays into it, since if a tech looks sexy and cool on paper there's a desire to believe in it and it leads us to overlook less obvious or less straightforward to analyze issues.

Elon uses high PITA factor when talking about why SpaceX isn't pursuing hydrogen as a rocket fuel. It similarly looks awesome on paper but results in higher TCO and higher complexity in practice. It's cheaper (according to SpaceX) to use kerosene or methane and build a bigger rocket.

For nukes vs. renewables it's likely overall cheaper to just over-build renewables and storage than to handle the long tail of pain from current-type nuclear. Spend a few billion dealing with nuclear waste, or spend a few billion on more generation and storage capacity. The former is sticky and complicated, while the latter is just straightforward commodity scaling of stuff everyone already knows how to build and handle. It's stupid and simple and scalable and if it's not enough just do more of it. In other words: just build a bigger rocket.

What I say applies to conventional and near-term fission. Fusion and other exotics might be a different ballgame. Fusion would likely be complex and high capital cost but it doesn't have the waste and "black swan failure" issues that pee in the pool for fission.
This video provided some downsides to nuclear that I was not previously aware of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nhhOitYmk

You can make a lot of PV's in the 14 years it takes to make a fission plant. I'm all for Thorium research, but fission as it is now has a lot of downsides.
I've used SourceTree for a while which is nice, and also has a Windows client.
Pretty sure NYSE's ancient creaky FIX gateway is infinitely faster than the NYSE ARCA gateway - as the latter, while more network efficient, isn't going to ever take your packets to NYSE.

NYSE and NYSE ARCA are different exchanges.
Right, good details. I didn't know
those, and the common news sources
omit that the Kurds are Sunni
but not buddies of the Sunni
Arabs.

So, here we illustrate: I don't
know even the players on the field.
But likely neither did W, Cheney, etc.

So, we reinforce my point: The US
should stay the hack out of places
it doesn't understand.
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?
It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue.
> As such, Oracle frequently oversold and underdelivered, but eventually grew big enough that it didn't matter

This is an extraordinarily common pattern in so many industries, when incentives are not aligned and it's OPM. And the worst thing is, if everybody else is doing it, you also have to do it.

For example, bank traders could (and in some places, it seems, still can) just lever up risk since if things go well, they outperformed their peers (riskier stocks go up - and down - faster) and made a great bonus; if a crash made things thornier, the bank would be in bad shape anyway and nobody would pick you out. I remember greatly admiring a famous "value" long/short equity fund in 2006 and a friend who was a more senior and experienced trader pointing out that they were "just levered beta"; three years later that fund was down a good 50%, proving him right.

I was reading, back in 2008 or 2009, the annual reports of a bank I was interviewing at. The letter from the CEO was noting, through the 2000s, the increase in risk taking in the mortgage securitisation space with increasing worry, and reassuring shareholders that no, at Bank X, this was not done because the ROI was not there to justify the risk.

Then a couple years before Lehman, there was a change in CEO due to "relative underperformance" of the stock, and the letter said something along the lines of "I know we're a bit late to the game but we are investing a large amount in that space and hired some great people from the competition".

Naturally that bank then needed a particularly large government bailout a couple years later, although the chairman of the board during the period famously retired with a very large pension (in fact his car was stoned for it by activists), showing that this strategy is still a great way to improve one's personal situation.

> I feel bad for a lot of the good employees who get caught up in the mess.

It seems to be standard in the job market to use the same strategy: overpromise and push the cost of an employee down as a result - and HR is actually rewarded for this.

I've been approached by many large tech companies for jobs and when talking with the managers there, the valuation they put on the options part of the package can get REALLY ridiculous (in some cases, 4-5x what the market thinks, let alone savvy investors). Older developers are wise enough to counter these offers, but I see a lot of younger folks enthusiastically buy into the myth and quit burnt out a couple years later.

I took an HR guy from a very famous and large Bay Area company that is mentioned here often for drinks and he admitted after about 7 whiskies that most of the people working there - including top, APAC-region managers - were paid about half what they could get in more normal companies, and that this was by design and a target. To be fair, I can't completely criticise them for doing it, since there was real value in working there for a while, as all the other companies in Singapore would then bid higher for your output detecting a "competence signal" in the American brand.
Bottom line in all this quibbling seems to really just be that some people like JS and want to JS-all-the-things. I like JS to some extent, but continue to dislike and resist the rise of JS-all-the-things. And I build rich and complicated applications people use to do their jobs every day.

I prefer server-side templates and rendering hands-down. This makes it absolutely trivial to build HTML for anything just by hitting a URL that represents it. It also makes it trivial to add caching of those fully rendered HTML blobs if desired/needed.

I prefer to keep my JS focused on interactions and behavior, not turning JSON data into UI components. I build most apps with a skeletal JS layer that knows how to grab the right item at the right URL when triggered by a user action, and what part of the page to place the returned HTML into. I find it pretty fun and challenging to see how dumb I can keep JS.

I despise the idea of building dual validation in the client and on the server. Fuck that noise. With a forms library that is tied to my models (something that exists in most mature frameworks), the server near-instantly validates and sends back HTML with errors marked if the form is invalid. Again, JS just has to know to PUT/POST the form, and display the response in the right spot. And those forms still work when you hit them by URL instead of through a fancy JS-ified UI. Makes it damn trivial to build dumb versions of an app that aren't broken and unusable. And I like the idea of being able to replace a backend that only has to keep the contract of returning HTML from an endpoint. Don't even need to modify the client-side JS that responds to user actions if I don't want to. Maybe, at worst, I update some ids and classes if I decide to modify the markup.

I've never joined the bandwagon of server-side JS and Node. Ultimately, I simply can't bring myself to want to use JS as the primary language for my work. Not to mention that JS tooling, npm, and different versions of ES is an abysmal headache that creates way too much mental overhead just to get started. It's nice to be able to pick a language that just runs on its runtime without needing to know or setup whatever the flavor-of-the-month transpiler is that lets me use classes and shit.

JSON is cool as a means of exchanging data with an API. I like that. It's predictable, standardized, and a helluva lot better than SOAP ever was. But I find working with APIs programmatically and providing UIs to humans are wholly different interaction models, and can't help but feel that we keep making presenting UIs to humans increasingly more complex than necessary. APIs provide a predictable interface for exchanging structured data. UIs are meant for interacting with that data.
This is not what the author is talking about. He's actually using lego-forms to build up structures, as well as piecing together the lego buildup into step by step instructions.
Wealthy friends with promises of a nice job (and other things)
You are assuming perspective (his family), and that death was decided.

If it was a random death, then yeah... it is odd.
I'm surprised to see a billionaire driving himself at all, excepting some sort of recreational driving. Are there examples of other billionaires doing this?
Ask HN: How do we stop Trump?
With it looking increasingly likely that Trump will be the Republican nominee, no one should discount the possibility that this insane man could in fact become president.

His extreme anti-immigration proposals would choke off the life blood of America's ability to innovate and his utter hostility to digital rights should raise the hair on the back of the neck of any technologist. Given these issues (not to mention his blatant racism and sexism), everyone in the wider technology community should be concerned with preventing this man from becoming president. What I'm wondering is, what is the best (legal) way for technologically inclined people to oppose and prevent the disaster that would be Trump becoming president?
We blog a lot about that sort of thing if you're interested in it. (See my profile so this doesn't come off as a sales pitch). Building a sales team from scratch is hard and it's one of our aims to help in that goal. Good luck!
I was thinking the same thing, and that it was part of the reason it was 'engulfed in flames'.
Australia to limit academic freedom with defence trade controls
"Germany is on track to be 100% renewable by 2020"

Do you have a source for this? It seems completely unbelievable.
How would you do this, exactly? As far as I know, you'd have to find an unpatched exploit you can use over USB. That seems like something that would take longer than a day, unless you're amazingly good at this stuff.