skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Notes on web pages are tricky because there are so many edge cases, and they tend to expose the limitations of our current HTML+CSS model.

For example, we can achieve an effect similar to the one shown here using just CSS (no JS) if we’re able to use position:relative on the containing paragraph without breaking anything else in the styling:

HTML:

<p class="note-container">This is some text with a <span class="note" desc="Style me!">marginal note</span>. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>

CSS:

.note-container {
position: relative;
width: 400px;
}

.note {
text-decoration: underline;
}

.note:hover::after {
content: attr(desc);
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 440px;
width: 150px;
height: 100%;
border-left: 1px solid black;
padding-left: 9px;
}

I put a quick demo of this one here:

https://jsfiddle.net/2ejk2who/

However, what happens if we need to work with touch-only devices, where hover effects aren’t available? Two options would be to show the notes all the time, or to embed a hidden checkbox and make the anchor text its label. In the latter case, tapping on the text could then toggle whether the marginal note appears if we used something based on :checked instead of :hover.

But now what if more than one note is set to visible at once? We can’t combine the position:absolute technique to get neat alignment at the top of the paragraph with using floats so multiple notes automatically fall under one another. I don’t have a good pure-CSS answer for this one.

In any case, on a smaller screen we might not want to show marginal notes alongside the main text anyway. It would be helpful if there were a way to have the notes drop underneath the paragraph and stack up, but again, we can’t combine the kind of absolute positioning that would place a note there with something that extends the paragraph’s box so later content moves down after any visible notes.

Perhaps one day we’ll have more flexible options for generated content and CSS positioning that will let us do these things, but for now the only ways I know to achieve some of these effects still rely on JS.
> In 2002, for example, it won permission, then secret, from the intelligence court permitting the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. to share raw FISA wiretap information. The government did not disclose that change, which was first reported in a 2014 New York Times article based on documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden.

They are going to increase the number of human-related attack vectors with this and that pot of gold is going to end up getting exposed and/or sold.

The fact Snowden was able to do what he did is proof they aren't competent enough to be trusted to handle the human side of things competently.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-might-still-be-crooke...

It isn't like the FBI is competent to screen their people either. They have enough agents willing to prostitute their integrity for money that their access is a problem as well.
Virtually every current FTP client also supports FTPS, so security is good enough.

Meanwhile, SFTP does not work with browsers and file managers (unlike FTP[S]), so FTPS works "out of the box" unlike SFTP.
Sounds interesting, probably going to give it a try.
I had a feeling that AlphaGo would beat Lee Sedol yesterday after watching Fan Hui's interview [1].

According to Hui's recall, the defeat all came down to these things: the state of the mind, confidence and human error. The gaming psychology is a big part of the game, without the feelings of fear of being defeated and almost never making mistakes like humans do, machine intelligence beating human at the highest level of competitive sports/games is inevitable. However, to truly master to game of Go, which in ancient Chinese society, it's more of an philosophy or art form than a competitive sport, there is still a long way to go.

There were a ton of details Hui cannot speak of due to the non-disclosure agreement he signed with DeepMind, but those were the gist of the interview.

In the end, AlphaGo match is 'a win for humanity', as ​Eric Schmidt put it. [2]

[1] http://synchuman.baijia.baidu.com/article/344562 (In Chinese)

Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&...

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/alphago-match-a-win-for-humanit...
> these were small adults being taught how to function in the world

That's so true. They taught us how to be functioning individuals who could take care of ourselves.
London Has Fallen 2016
It's currently unpublished because there is an associated cost (Twilio for making the call) and it's not OSS because 1) needs cleaning, 2) was thinking of building a public service out of it.

That said, that's enough of a kick for me to actually clean it up and publish some stuff. I'll email you when I throw pieces of it online (in the next day or two). At the very least, I wasn't able to find a lib that performs all the steps Amazon asks of you to validate the request so I wrote a utility library and hapi auth plugin for that. I'll release those.

Made a quick demonstration video: https://youtu.be/TkVnhp4F1xk
Coincidentally last night I was reading about the role of the cotton gin of the expansion of slavery in the American South [0]. Such mechanical inventions were the stuff of the era's startups. The cotton was largely shipped to the UK, which had outlawed slavery, where it was used in their most important industry [1]. There was some debate about the morality of this, but as we know, slavery was not ended for lack of demand for its products.

[0] "The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914" Gavin Weightman
[1] The book quotes Karl Marx "Without slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry"
Doesn't even matter if you remove it, it will still be in the history. You need to purge your history completely. Start a new repo.
Are they still offering the C1? It's absent from the pricing page.
It's comparable to Chicago, perhaps a bit colder in the winter.
Hi thanks for your comment.

I'd agree it is cynical, but not myopic. My whole post is about the long term career prospects of software engineers...

I don't live in SF, I was using it as an example to point out that even in our industries hottest, most competitive market engineers are still bottom of the totem pole. I don't live in Austin or Atlanta either but an area that is supposed to be more affordable but it's the same story.

I also did start my own software company and even went through an incubator (not YC), but that's beside the point, I was speaking about the profession as a whole. Doctors don't have to go out and strike it on their own, lawyers don't have to, management doesn't have to, investment bankers don't have to so why do we? Why isn't the skill of software development good enough for a successful career? Why must we switch to the new shiny every 6 months? To be honest that mentality is the exact thing that I lament about our profession. Why aren't we demanding better for our own? I'm not sure, but the independent attitude just isn't sustainable in the current political and economic climate, IMO.
tl;dr: "Using GitHub as your [free-of-charge] CDN is not ideal, for anybody involved."
Hmm, I didn't know that about the DataSet API. When I looked at the scheduler's code it didn't seem to have any notion of data locality except for colocation of vertices. I'll take a look at the DataSet API's code though, thanks!
Fintech Companies Opt to Stay Private as Funding Hits a Record
Sounds very much like Opera Mini, a thin client web browser for similar markets. (I remember using Mini a ton at school over 2G, it was the only browser usable on EDGE.)
Slight increase in capital cost, should show as slower expansion to foreign markets. Self destructive rise of burger price is unlikely, as McDonalds executives are likely not idiots.
Lee is not the best player NOW.
I'm skeptical they can maintain quality and healthiness at scale. I mean, there's a reason why companies like Aramark and Sodexho have such crappy food; it's just really hard to manage supply at that kind of scale. Aside from that, if their food is frozen or dehydrated, you pretty much destroy the healthy parts of the food. At that point, might as well just stick with the microwavable TV dinners.
First Impression of Google Test Lab
How to teach quantum mechanics to kids
From this, I'd expect parallel construction cases (circumvention of legal protections) to trickle down to the municipal level and become the new standard for policework, which is to say the new standard of policework would be extralegal. This change would happen via NSA sharing data with FBI, DEA, or DOJ, which typically have municipal or regional intelligence nexus centers where the federal and state governments collaborate.

So, what does this change look like in practice? For one, we'll move much closer to having the capacity for 100% enforcement, which would be even more disastrous than the over-enforcement that the USA has already suffered for the drug war years. Having the capacity for more enforcement doesn't mean that it will be exercised directly. Instead, I'd expect a lot of dossier-sharing in order to apprise local authorities about the intimate details of the people in their area.

From the dossiers and social networks, local authorities will have a very detailed view of the population they occupy, and will likely be able to directly infiltrate nearly any social group where strangers connect. This means that any kind of civil disobedience or political protests will be (further, more exhaustively) defused well before mattering. Additionally, it'll make harassment of police-accountability activists even easier once the federal level dossiers are handed down to the local police and paired with realtime facial recognition identification from the squad car.

TBH we suffered under a level of surveillance worse than Stasi or 1984 well before this change, so I guess it's not much worse to throw out the legal system's paltry protections known as due process. The bigger problem is the open acknowledgement from the federal government that the citizens have no agency and need to be controlled.
The web version won't be as compact, because it has to use HTML/CSS/JS and so can't shift as much rendering burden onto the server. It also has to use HTTP, which is less efficient over the network.
1/20? So if 20 tests were performed at the facility, we'd expect at least one of these to appear spuriously? Presumably there have been 20 tests performed there?
No. There's a certain amount of basic serialism in a single HTTP request. Go, Erlang, Haskell, a few others make it really easy to write handlers that may themselves be running on multiple cores, but the HTTP handling itself is essentially serialized by the fact that you have to get the request, then send the headers, then send the body, which itself probably has order constraints (such as HTML, which certainly does, at least unless you really go out of your way to write yourself a CSS framework that would render chunks of the HTML order-independent). Most of the required bits of handling a request, like header parsing, header generation, etc. have been made so efficient in the implementations that care about that that any attempt to multithread that would lose on coordination costs to a single-threaded implementation, I think... at least, I'd need to see a benchmark to the contrary before I'd believe in a win.

(You can play a lot of games in how a lot of requests are handled, even going to the HTTP2 extreme of interleaving responses to different requests on the underlying network stream, but what I said will be true on a per-request basis.)
Show HN: Convert any content into shareable, context specific cards
Let's not be too proud of ourselves... the Chinese can at least get humans into space on their own right now.
As a result, the specification for echo is a ridiculous mess which deviates from the other POSIX utilities. It doesn't have the normal command argument handling, and also has implementation-defined behaviors. It's a good command to avoid in serious scripting, other than for outputting fixed, alphanumeric strings.

That said, it's useful to have features like C escape sequences for control characters or arbitrary characters. That feature should be in the shell language. Someone needed it and hacked it into some version of echo. Others elsewhere didn't and so now it's implementation defined whether or not you get backslash processing.
The future is serving ads from your own domain, or subdomain. This isn't technically difficult.
If the free-invite-train hasn't left the station, please count me in!
At first it's not a problem. However, any disruption is going to have a magnified impact without free access to capital. ex: A short term fad, supply chain issue etc.

Further, economies of scale often cause local optima which don't exist for smaller companies. (Advertising, infrastructure, price) So, large but lean companies can easily hit downward spirals.

That said, this is really an edge case. A more common cause is conglomerates selling off lines of business which are then less stable on their own.
I have been too well trained by the modern internet not to use the back button to have noticed.
That is a thing you can do - the Echo comes with a remote, so you can mute the main mic, and speak into the remote if you wish.
There used to be a legal principle called the nondelegation doctrine which essentially said that the Constitution allocated the legislative power to Congress and that Congress couldn't abdicate that responsibility by delegating it to the executive branch. Like a lot of other such things it all but died in the confrontation between FDR and the Court over the New Deal.

As a practical matter I'm not sure Congress could do all the rule making that the executive branch does. At least not as it is currently organized. It just doesn't have the institutional capacity. But one could imagine a government with legislative agencies paralleling the executive agencies responsible for rulemaking with oversight / ratification done by congress.
I just wrote a blogg about this. I was up to 1am this morning watching the game live. I became interested in AI in the 1970s and the game of Go was considered to be a benchmark for AI systems. I wrote a commercial Go playing program for the Apple II that did not play a very good game by human standards but did play legally and understood some common patterns. At about the same time I was fortunate enough to get to play both the woman's world Go champion and the national champion of South Korea in exhibition games.

I am a Go enthusiast!

The game played last night was a real fight in three areas of the board and in Go local fights affect the global position. AlphaGo played really well and world champion (sort of) Lee Sedol resigned near the end of the game.

I used to work with Shane Legg, a cofounder off DeepMind. Congratulations to everyone involved.
But that is the exact same thing as saying people should not be allowed to speak up anonymously. Either you are anonymous or you are not.
Not a bad article, but there are no ideas in it that one can't arrive at with a most basic, a priori understanding of charitable giving. No surprise; the author wrote it just a few years out of college, in the year that he founded this givewell.org:

Holden Karnofsky | Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director. Holden graduated from Harvard University in 2003 with a degree in Social Studies, and spent the next several years in the hedge fund industry. He co-founded GiveWell in mid-2007.
Humans should agree on the decimal and separator symbols, the same way that they agreed on the Indo-Arabic numerals, and symbols like + (plus) and - (minus).
You can mute the microphone and use the echo remote control instead.
Farming used to be a farmer for every four or five people. Now its more like 1:1000. That's been automated to an extreme.

Service industry is hard to automate - though we've done a good start with the dishwasher. Only 1 fulltime guy needed for every 100 people or so? That's pretty good progress.

So yeah, we'll always need folks for services. And we'll have to pay them well in future! That's seems a pretty good future to me.
Apps to encrypt an iPhone even if the FBI gets in
For an elderly woman with poor eyesight, a fixed location landline that never needs updating or maintenance is probably preferred over an easily lost phone that needs to get plugged in, updated, etc.
Their support isn't great, and they're only in Canada and EU, but Kimsufi[1] is my goto for beefy but cheap dedicated servers. Their cheapest offering is $5/month for an Atom, 2G RAM, and 500G harddrive. But where the value really lies is a step up to about $25 where you start getting non-Atom processors, 16+G of RAM, and 1+TB harddrives. Also free bandwidth. It's a real dedicated server so you can install whatever on it, but KVM access is expensive if you break it into not booting. You can deploy a fairly good set of distros through their built-in wizard for free

1: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/
In this case, the fixed location plus the far field mic are great. When she's alone, she spends all of her time in her home. She lives in a pretty small place which means she can basically ask to start a phone call from anywhere and she'll be able to interact with the Echo. It's as much the hardware as it is the platform that makes it all work in this case.

I have no doubts the tech could facilitate something similar on Google and Apple's platforms but, afaik, building comparable functionality isn't currently possible (at least with Siri)—can you add arbitrary commands to either?

EDIT: the quickest interaction I could get away with was, "Alexa, start a phone call with {name}". No back and forth. One statement and the echo simply confirms (which was optional).
He has the human advantages of adaptability and intuition, the better to try a new strategy next game.
I am impressed that it happened so fast from beating amateurs to being champions.
There is a lot of room for improvement with the implementation. The way we are using deep neural networks at the moment is exellent for prototyping, but far from optimal. For instance, this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00363 shows that you can replace floating point operations by simple bitwise operations without losing too much precision in DNNs for image recognition. Together with a better (that is, compiled, instead of interpreted) representation of the inference step I would expect an order of magnitude improvement at a small loss in precision. More software tuning, especially the kind of low-level optimizations that most chess programs do, should yield another big improvement.

Finally, the hardware we are using to run these programs is insane. Sure the silicon is approaching some hard physical limits, but your processor spends most of that power trying to make old programs run fast...

My prediction is that with enough ressources it is possible to write a Go AI which runs on general purpose hardware that's manufactured on current process nodes and fits in your pocket.
4 Initiatives to Hone a Business Innovation Mindset
It's so bloated that the app has to hack into the Dalvik VM so that it won't crash from the huge number of classes.
Do you mean through their server bidding? Because those old pieces of junk are known for being stacked with near-failing hard drives.
I disable javascript for two reasons: I do not want to download megabytes of useless scripts everyday dozens of times, and I do not want to allow strangers run arbitrary Turing-complete code on my computer, even on a restricted platform like the browser. Thus, I use xombrero + very strict whitelisting. I do not want the world to conform to me, I just conform selectively. I know the consequences of being a NoJS surfer, I just live with it, and don't complain. I even have chromium installed for edge cases.

And here I try to make some criticism of the posted work, and constructively. I think coding defensively for the noscript case is a good, important practise, even if the chosen remedy is to show up a "please enable JS" message. And then there's the case of printing the page, the read-it-later things, archival, etc... I can't run JS on paper, or on PDFs, right? But the WWW is ephemeral, and if something is important, I have to archive. And people have disablities, how would margin notes be readable with say 5x zoom? How will a disabled person get to read the popup margin note if he can't even move the mouse to hover the anchor tag? One may well say that disabled people are not worthy of seeing their content, and however disgusting may it sound they've the right to say so, but the OP may be open to such suggestions for inclusivity and improvement, and I suggest.

I think the JS CDNs are the most stupid things on the world. It is a virus vector. Hack one CDN, and you'll get to run your code on maybe millions of websites. And who decides which CDNs are major, and/or better or more secure?
Probably less than the entire Washington Post.
When product focused development doesn't work
Music education works for a few. My wife picked up an instrument in public middle school, went on to study at conservatory, and played professionally. I muddled about with a couple instruments which I enjoyed, but hated practicing set lessons. I would believe most students fall into the category you describe of having their time with music mostly wasted. The obvious problem is that our schools pursue a set outcome rather than providing opportunities. We want all our kids to "learn to play" an instrument, and we do that with a set curriculum (boring, lifeless). It's a shame b/c there is tremendous value and beauty in playing music with our friends. Focusing on ensuring the meaningless technical accomplishment of "learning to play" for everyone crowds out the more meaningful opportunity of making music, and ruins the experience for many kids. Same could probably be said of other curricula as well, for example CS.
I would say an MVP is the first viable step in a plan for a more elaborate product in order to test the water etc. Just showing earlier iterations of famous products without a snapshot of the accompanying vision isn't massively useful. Of course every company/product started somewhere, but a first offering isn't the same as an MVP. Did Yahoo intentionally set out to create an MVP or did they just launch with their best idea at the time?
Manipulation or Brilliant Trade? The Curious Case of Don Wilson
> A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind.

What about HHVM makes you think that? Producing an optimised version of PHP is easier than moving from PHP to another language.
Well, there is QUIC and Mosh seems to be working quite well so it is true that UDP may make more sense in certain use cases.
I guess free worldwide information transfer (aka Internet) just opened this era and we are not close to see any kind of stalling (IMHO).
Thanks for the info. I can totally understand why defense and space companies don't do public tours, it is too bad on some level though.
From Maths PhD to Product Management: A Comparison
A port of the GTK+3 Hello World to Bash
I strongly disagree with the premise that the Yahoo! presented in that screenshot was a minimum viable product - that really was the product: the differentiator between Yahoo! and, say, AltaVista was that Yahoo! was a hierarchical list of links rather than an actual indexed search engine. It stayed that way for many years.
Both the wife and I work. Even so, I believe the social aspect of school is very, very important. I wouldn't want to take that away from my son.
I don't come to the comments on HN to read about people whining that journalistic headlines are too sensational. Of course they are. Ice is pretty damn cold too. Accept it and move on.
Mobile App User Engagement: Breaking the Wall
That's a really great point.

Unfortunately I'm not from UK, I'm from eastern Europe.

We can chat using the tool if you like :)
I think they're talking about the world's internet connected population, which is about 3 billion[1].

[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/