skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do you block images, css, and other stuff that doesn't pertain to the content at hand?

No. In many cases, the styles and images are content that I'd actually like to see. In some cases, sure - I'd eagerly jump right back on that Gopher train and trim out all the extra crap you want to funnel into my browser.

> Yeah if all you want is referrer, user agent, url requested, and ip. But what about other great information in help with making your site BETTER for your users, like screen size?

Screen size? In 2016, optimising for specific screen sizes is archaic. Exercise responsive design. As for things like javascript feature availability - if you're already using javascript (a rich web app, as opposed to simple content), then you'll already have the facility to pass this data back to the server, the same server, that's serving the requested content.

> I find it strange given the demographics of HN that people still believe by me putting Pwiki on my site to gather analytics about my visitors, that somehow taps into your bank account to see your income, requests your tax documents, downloads your birth certificate and gives me a full list of your last 100 visited urls.

You're being facetious. I don't think anyone made this suggestion. I know I certainly didn't.

My issue with things like Piwik is primarily the additional requests my browser makes to help you accomplish something that you could have done on the server side. When I'm reading your blog, my browser shouldn't be expected to make extra requests once the content has loaded, just to give you a better idea of how people use your site. It doesn't benefit me, and you're not entitled to my cooperation. I can choose to block Piwik if I'd like. You can always log the limited data on server side.

> [...] giving a big fuck you to the website owner

And by expecting users' browsers to make additional requests (using additional data, and additional CPU cycles - however few), I could maintain that you're "giving a big fuck you" to the user.

This sense of entitlement to user data, usage data, analytics, and the right to make the client behave as you wish is relatively new over the past decade. I don't like it, and it sets a dangerous stage for the future of the web.
As far as I know, the people who can enforce it are the copyright holders, if they have evidence that BMW isn't complying with the license. It's irrelevant whether they personally own or have used a BMW car.
You must find it puzzling that FB is arguably the world leader in AI research right now.
Seemed like a normal hacker thing to do to me.

It shows real commitment to the tech. And also, it looks cool when you can make machines do stuff with just a wave of your hand. Sorcery!
Unfortunately this is a false assumption to make. Yes, they may have considered it but ultimately there is increasingly very little that can be done to impede such fraud. Frank Abagnale explains how paper-based fraud is easier than it ever has been due to technological proliferation[1]

[1]https://youtu.be/x0fEA0MsiV8?t=2266
What I got out of this: regex precedence rules are really unintuitive to me.
I still do not know how is this actionable. So, they have satellites that take cool pictures, ok. Are they selling the stuff? Sharing an API?
Interesting! Where are you getting location data?
Filthy Data Hurts Efforts to Reduce Churn
If I hold a $100 bill in my hand, who is the someone else with the liability on it's balance sheet? The government?
Thanks. Exactly as bad as I expected.
Hire Russian black hats to sabotage the competition?
I can't believe they're actually running with the "it's not Apple's job to protect civil liberties; it's the government's" talking point. It's pure nonsense, a complete inversion of the understanding of the nature of civil rights ever since the Constitution was written.
> Am I building something? Who knows, I use this account anonymously

Hah! Exactly. Look at my footnote [1] to my comment in this thread.
Why? So European governments can do the same?
It's a European accelerator that focuses on founders with deep tech (I seem to be the only person here without a doctorate in machine learning) and lets them form teams in the actual programme.

Some of the other people here are predicting (with massively higher certainty than doctors) which early-onset brain issue folks will develop alzheimers, making a standard simple way to run experiments in outer space (first launch in a few weeks), doing natural language interfaces for personal finance, and other crunchy stuff.
This is starting to sound like the plot of an NCIS episode.
Challenge accepted! I plan to make a simpler dynamic CSS construction library (similar to XT.js - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11260471 - which constructs DOM fragments) that's both smaller and targeted for ES5.
Europe is far from perfect here. I wouldn't go running from one overreaching government to the next before you do a bit of research.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/no-backdoors-but-uk-governm...
One of the Rothschild's investment vehicles (RIT) listed on the FTSE still holds some gold - thats why I brought some shares for my ISA last Year
Bayesian Estimation of G Train Wait Times
Verisign: The number of DDoS attacks almost doubled in a year
yes i was also misled by the title. You read again, android in the text as well as in the title as if something to do with the android OS is responsible especially taking into account that the guy is a security developer at CoreOS.

* "I stayed in a hotel with Android lightswitches and it was as bad as you'd think "

Another title would be:

* "CoreOS security developer stays in a hotel, and hacks the light switches to.."
If you do study (continuous) mathematics, one of the things you build up is a little stable of strange functions to help you test your intuition.

A very common "right of passage" exercise in introductory analysis is to come up with the Weierstrass function or something similar (usually with a little coaching). This is an everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable function that then goes into your little toolkit.
It was always kind of frustrating to see the amount of brain power and tech going into the place I worked in Italy, www.CenterVue.com compared with typical 'web' startups. Those guys have computer vision, mechanical and electriconic engineering, and lots of software of various kinds. They're doing pretty well, but not nearly as well as plenty of way more "trivial" startups. I put trivial in quotes because it's never easy, but... you'd like to hope there's some correlation between effort and reward.
They are probably behind in R&D and saw that as a critical risk. Moreover, there aren't any alternatives besides Cruise which pushed the price up.
> A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”.

Lost all interest in saltman's point when I read this line.

It's a valid criticism, regardless if the people who are making it are "builders" or not.

It was a turn off, because it makes the author seem bitter about (what I think is) a valid criticism.
My fan is going crazy, and I'm having trouble even tabbing to another app on a mid-2014 MBP.
I'm not a native speaker, but I have some US colleagues who write really poorly. I'm not saying this is the rule, nor that your friend was a bad writer, but the argument that a native speaker is de facto superior in the use of her own language is bogus. One of the very best pieces of English literature has been written by a Russian (Lolita by Nabokov) and there are many other examples. If a paper is written poorly I don't care if you're British: I'll point it out anyway.
Hi.
Do you know if it is possible to predict how much an app will cost per month before putting it online?
Microsoft loves open source? Only when it's convenient
If BMW (or anyone) has distributed the code in violation of its license then the copyright holders can sue. But there would have to be someone who's received a BMW car (i.e. distribution) for there to have been distribution in violation of the license.
I wonder how long Hacker News commenters will keep excoriating the US government for this kind of shit without realizing European governments aren't really any better.

I really, really do.
US Anti-Encryption Legislation Is Imminent: Report
I don't think parent meant to say that the technology behind Facebook is trivial. Just that it's trivial when contrasted with a bunch of technologies that are at best in prototype stage.

A decade-long life extension or growing meat without animals would both probably involve more "Hard Tech" style innovation than building Facebook.

Other observations are IMO less pat. E.g. designing cheaper/better sensors could be either harder or significantly easier than building a Facebook. Depending on the type of sensor and the cost improvement.
It feels like the FBI has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They have at least one judge saying they have overreached, a House of Representatives hearing where the head of the FBI got dressed down, and a hearing on the 22nd with a ton of support for Apple from tech companies and other researchers. It feels like a desperate attempt to salvage a losing battle.
GM probably desperately needed to jump start their tech to be competitive and there was only a single acquisition option. Not acquiring Cruise may have cost them more than $1 billion.
The article covers how it started. If you are in currency-less barter only hunter gatherer society, it is not yet a medium of exchange. You would have better luck trading with food than anything else in those societies, as covered in the article.

Also diamond wasn't and still isn't used as a currency. Only in the last 10 years, it became a somewhat semi-serious investment grade material.
Yes. That's the thing about acqui-hiring. As much as we like to pretend that with enough dollars you can buy the talent required to own a product-space, the fact is that in certain spaces, individual mortals can create billions of dollars of value. You just have to pick the right space and the right individual.
Agreed. The notion that you can't criticise something unless you've tried to do it yourself is nonsense.
AI is good for rules based systems, but most of the worlds problems that need to be solved don't have rules in the same way a board game does.

Sure it's cool that a computer beat a human at a board game, but thats like celebrating a penguin being better at fishing than a person with bare hands.
Online reviews for ecommerce products are the only way that potential customers knows if they should purchase something.

This strategy is one-dimensional and fading; just ask Yelp. People need more than a 3-, 4-, or 5-star gesture before punching in their credit card and feeling good about it.

So I'm working on a new kind of "social proof as a service," currently live and integrated with Shopify. It's called Notify (https://apps.shopify.com/notify).

Notify shows recent orders as they occur on a storefront, compelling future visitors to make a purchase.
Really cool. What kinds of things are you using to make something like this? A particular game engine, language, etc?
How to Operationalize Meta-Data with Dynamic Schemas
There are tricks one can use to improve on the basic chaining: sparse chaining (include any sequence between tokens) and hashing the whole chain with a well designed hash instead of a graph or lattice representation. It is quite possible to go with chains of even length 8.

I recommend CRM114 documentation on their "Markovian" classificator, which could relatively easily be turned into a "hallucinator" or generator.

http://crm114.sf.net
This is typical of the same crap I see on my linkedIn feed.
Solve this if you are a "GENIUS"!!!!
popsicle + popsicle = 6
toilet * toilet = 9
popsicle + toilet =???!?!??

I have made heavy use of the block feature. And to those of you thinking of answering those, its a lose-lose proposition, you either get it wrong and look ignorant, or you get it right and look like a slacker...
Whether it's a consumer sale (sign up via web and get an API key) I do not know, but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans. In terms of what you can use it for, I know people have built applications on top of Planet Labs to run queries from counting the number of cars in Walmart parking lots every day for hedge funds to tracking deforestation.
Terra Bella and Planet Labs's Most Consequential Year Yet
Its hard to digest this level of logic at a site like HN.
Pretty big deal if you are not protecting your customer's privacy http://abcnews.go.com/US/erin-andrews-jury-set-deliberate-75...
The jumble of letters made sense in the context of the regex problems.
It gets worse if you browse the web with zoom. At 125% zoom scrolling gets stuck on the third stage for me and imagery is consistently cut off. If you then use the scroll bar all bets are off, and the site very slowly stutters from one random place to the next (not to mention, that there's zero thought put into a graceful fallback when JS is disabled, although with e.g. lynx you at least get to see the site's text instead of just the loading icon).
The inside story of Zenefits
What developers should consider when building a mobile app
Here is a copy of that table at pastebin: http://pastebin.com/HhXt8Nba

This may be easier to read on some browsers.
I've changed "center" to read "interior". I meant "center" as the complement of the surface.
Ah I didn't even catch that, thanks. Makes it a lot more interesting, although again these games are geared towards winning, like most games are. If you simulate every pokemon matchup and let them take random actions, eventually your pokemon level up such that they can beat anyone. There's no real way to lose, the only way for your pokemon is to get better.

Fifa is much like it, buy any young player who shows potential (for which you really don't need to run these regressions), let them play, and they become amazing a lot of the time, even completely unknown players. The game's built like that, you don't need to do anything fancy.

I'd be most interested if he ran a control group experiment, i.e. just pick players himself instead of letting the model pick em, or hell even pick random players, and compare how much better he does with his model. He'll surely do better with the model, but he'll also surely win the CL with the control group in a few seasons, which in and of itself is not much of an achievement.

As others have mentioned, doing this in FM would be a lot more fun.
I've been saying this for a while:
The "master key" that apple is warning about, the "backdoor", already exists. The master key is Apple's ability to sign a new version of IOS, and update the software on a locked iPhone.
The Federal government isn't asking Apple to create a backdoor. Their asking apple to use the backdoor that already exists.

And now the FBI may simply demand apple hands over the signing key, providing them with the backdoor that apple already has.
I didn't get the "email in my inbox" so I'm not positive, but it definitely sounds like it could be related to the Zenefits scandal (http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-under-scrutiny...). For a really interesting further discussion on this exact topic (legal vs ethical and how CEO's should approach, esp. in regards to Uber) see Episode 067 of the Stratechery/Exponent podcast: http://exponent.fm/episode-067-weighing-and-voting/
> Even if I buy for a service or buy a product from a company, I'm not going to be excluded from tracking.

Exactly! I subscribe to SiriusXM for my car, because I really like the music options. Last night I looked at installing it on my phone. It requires access to my contacts (why?); to my phone status and identity (what the heck?); to direct-dialing my phone (WTF‽); to view my network connexions; to pair with Bluetooth devices; to install shortcuts.

It plays music. It should need access to my SiriusXM username and password, and to the network. That's it. There's no way that I'll install the app: I may be paying, but I'm apparently not the customer.
Because going to the grocery store and cooking local food is a major part of the journey?
Technical Support Engineer-India
They deplete fishing stocks by fishing. They don't want people worried that their fish are contaminated, and they don't want their stock depleted by a different cause than fishing.
Yes, money is a government liability (the USA government in your example).

If you don't believe that, try to pay your taxes with gold and see what happens.
Use your imagination.

The key tool in the box, I think, is to give people orders that you expressly state can't be later revoked. You can use this to construct something like the human equivalent of an HSM. (An HSM, after all, is something that you give orders that in general can't later be superceded, namely about how to control access to cryptographic keys, thus allowing you to reason strongly about the security it provides.)

These people will need to be outside the UK, and be people you trust doubly: firstly to secure whatever cryptographic materials you escrow with them, and secondly because they can by virtue of that escrow hold your company hostage.

Some possibilities include setting things up so they have to review all source code changes (making it impossible for you to sneak anything by them); and some manner of non-duress verification protocol. One possibility off the top of my head for such a protocol is to declare that a failure to state a certain password in any conversation constitutes a duress indication. Obviously for this to work all such conversations must be secure. The idea is that when you're the subject of a notice and are asking them to backdoor things with the government breathing down your neck (possibly literally), the person on the other end starts acting oddly mutinous, but you appear to be doing everything you can to get them to comply. So long as the government can't prove you've done anything to be unhelpful - can't prove the existence of the non-duress password - it seems like it would be hard to find a case to prosecute you.
> I could activate an automatic door opener by bumping into it when I have my hands full.

My co-worker solves by unlocking the front door when the home server sees his phone's (and his wife's phone's) MAC address on the home wi-fi network. (But only during "waking hours" so the server doesn't leave the door unlocked when everyone is sleeping.)
Atty. Silverglate is very much not a fraud.

He's the author of "The Shadow University" which was one of the most disruptive blows that's been struck against the large-endowment administrations in the past few decades.

I actually happen to know one of the subjects of Mr. Silverglate's case studies, Nicholas Hermandorffer, who later wrote his thesis on the topic. In my view, his experience was represented accurately and fully, and Mr. Hermandorffer's accounts were closely aligned with phone records, texts, emails, etc., as well as physical evidence.

He's also head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which ranks universities on their free speech rights, as well as informs students that they sacrifice Constitutional protection to a certain extent living in University housing, as well as provides information on the rights one does retain and how to invoke them.

You seem like somebody with an axe to grind. I wouldn't put too much faith in this guy.
You dare challenge our demand in court?

Impudent serf! We'll demand more then!
I think it would be easy to send each device new firmware encrypted first with Apple's secret key and then with the public part of an asymmetric key that the device owner controls (derived from the master password and the device ID) and have the secure enclave check both keys before accepting an update.

Problem with that is that forgetting your master password would mean "no more updates for you". So, to be a bit safer, Apple should restrict that to updates to the secure enclave.

Also, Apple would have extra work creating a unique upgrade package for each device, and network traffic would increase, as Apple wouldn't be able to use CDN's for distributing those upgrades.

Edit: I'm not sure that would work. The device would still have to send their key to Apple, giving Apple the ability to create the package, and giving law enforcement the opportunity to request the keys.
I can't wait to submit a FOIA request for this.
Absolutely. My point was that something like YC (and other programs, I'm sure) is that they'd at least help. Fundraising for this kind of company is always going to be difficult, but a foot in the door with an investor that might actually understand the end goal is a pretty big win.
Software Delivery Nirvana
That's a good point. Don't YC companies get some crazy amount of AWS credit?
I had designed something like this with QR codes for an office. A camera would sit over top the desks to keep track of each folder and any stack that built up on top of it. That way anyone could quickly find what they need on any desk, instead of asking around.

Then, when storing and pulling any folder, it could go in any cabinet or box, instead of a previously defined, rigid, alphabetized and categorized location which would inevitably need to squeeze more than it could fit or waste a lot of space. A camera would (theoretically) automatically judge distance and location of a drawer in a storage room to accurately tell which one it went in or came from, or manually could be shown to the camera, as would need to be done in the case of a box. By consistently putting the folder in the front of the drawer or box, the computer could tell users the order and where exactly it sits (eg 2nd from the back, etc), which the color coded label would help identify.

QR codes still seem a little bit nicer than RFID here, except that Werkbank's image recognition goes even further than generic folders and makes good use of book cover images. It just seems like that robot costs a lot and has an unfortunate delay from when someone puts something away to when it updates a shelf's index. RFID seems better suited when it gets embedded in something like a toy or a farm animal, which a sensor can pick up near various "hot-spots", than when pasted flat on a book, tag, etc.

I'm so glad to see someone did this, and this library's (shared) approach seems to like a big step into Bret Victor's concept of Seeing Spaces: http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/
I'll try it this weekend for sure. Thanks!
Yahoo announces plans to kill off Games, Livetext, Boss, and more regional sites
So ironic that Jacques Mattheij's compelling piece about trackers appears immediately before this on HN right now. The linked Wired article about the Media Lab cannot be viewed if you are using an ad blocker. Bye, Wired.
I'm all for taking Medium thought pieces on the fundraising environment down a peg, but the problem with Hard Tech is that it requires a nontrivial amount of venture capital.

I don't begrudge the fact profitability isn't tied to how much work went into building something, how novel the product is, or whatever. Those bloggers are great because they point out startups like to use the cachet of "solving hard problems" to try and impress me with their less-impressive products.

This blog post makes me laugh because why does it matter to a venture fund if they're "hard tech" or not? It shouldn't, should it? It's about business potential, right? If "hard tech" does that, wouldn't you just invest in it without bragging on it and hope the competition doesn't notice? Maybe Sam is making this post because kids are starting to wise up to the fact "hacker" isn't anything more than something they let you call yourself to feel cool when don't go home after 40 hours. Now the tech is "hard," so nobody asks "why am I wasting my life on this piece of shit?"
How to Reach Software Delivery Nirvana