skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>FWIW there may not be a public API for what they're trying to do.

Of course, I didn't say they'd still be able to accomplish the same thing, after all that's the most common reason one would be interested in using private APIs in the first place. On Mac OS X (as it was back then rather then "OS X") for example at one point there was no good public API for menu bar extras. Apple wanted everyone to use the NSStatusBar API but it was vastly less capable then the private version Apple used, so naturally the latter was rapidly reverse engineered and a whole ecosystem quickly developed. There was actually a bit of an arms race for a while, a preface perhaps to the current iOS situation, because with Jaguar (10.2) Apple added new code specifically to attempt to force the exclusion of all 3rd party menu extras. Apple wised up about that later and just accepted that a bleeding edge would exist, but they were pretty sensitive even very early on to worries that crashing or bugs in 3rd party software that took down soemthing major (like the entire SystemUIServer) would have a major negative effect on perception and adoption of Mac OS X on the whole. Presumably at least some that attitude in turn dates all the way back to the stability horror story that was classic Mac OS in the later years in particular.

On the Mac it was futile and pissed off devs and power users, the block was broken before Jaguar was even GM'd, but it's something they've clearly never entirely forgotten and now under iOS they're using their control to enforce it. Even if functionality is only possible with a private API in the present OS release they'd rather an app be forced to use less but be more sure that it'll work at all in the long term.
We don't speak of grooveshark disappearing. Never. My playlists :(
The next one that'll hurt is if/when soundcloud pivots a bit too far. Funny how the best platform for listening to music online without having to think about it is YT nowadays

Ah I missed the good old days of caching everything locally.
Let me tell you about ancient roman engineers

they didn't even have wheelbarrows.
I don't think that a degree was ever necessary, there's always been self taught people. It's just the amount of accessible info on the Internet makes it much easier to self teach nowadays.

I don't know about Facebook/Google specifically but some companies will only interview/hire people with experience/know how in the very specific technology stack they use. I guess because they don't want the employee to "waste" time learning a new language/framework.

You miss out on some great engineers that way. Thankfully my job doesn't require new hires to know the syntax of any particular programming language.
Have to agree - bought his redo of Sagan's Cosmos and sat down with family to watch. Serious bummer.

On atheism he is tedious - so much prefer Feynman or Steven Weinberg on the subject.
Those aren't for Google Cloud, though. Heroku is hosted on AWS, and intoGres has their own cloud. You don't want to incur the latency of talking to a database from a different cloud.
Twitter is the new Powerpoint.
I can understand the "I", but what's the "O" part of this?
That's exactly as tenuous as thinking "Robby" must be a reference to Doctor Who, which featured a bunch of robots named the Daleks.
The Selection sort algorithm in JavaScript
Thank you! I was afraid it didn't contain enough code, or enough interesting bits. I'm glad you like it! You can take a look at the code on Github, hopefully it'll be easy enough to understand (it's a bit ad-hoc, so I don't know how much sense it will make to others).
>For example I have a deplorable sequential memory: I can't really well memorize songs or karate katas. I blame my total lack of musical and dance education. I never really trained for memorizing sequences… Of course I could point to some innate genetic flaw, but this seems like a less likely explanation given what we know about the brain plasticity. //

I trained at piano for about 7 years and played for my own enjoyment for about 4 more (then moved from having a piano to play). I still can't keep a rhythm, still struggle immensely with recognising note progression.

My son has been in a choir for 2 years (he has a musical mother) - from the outset he could find the right pitch, match rhythms, keep tune with others, etc..

Other son, started with choir - he has no ability for tunes, lacks rhythm, etc..

They have a very similar upbringing, very similar schooling, we dance with them, sing, play tunes, have instruments for them to mess around with. One of the children resembles me in their musical ability; the other my wife. My mother had the same problems with musicality, her sister became a music teacher and played many instruments, my mother like me can't keep a tune or continue a beat.

Now I don't doubt that the second son can improve their ability, just as I have; but like me I expect them to be unable to shake off the lack of natural ability. Ultimately they're unlikely to make a career in music - but I do and will encourage them in it as it's been and continues to be an important part of my life.

This is just an example, I suspect it works in other fields too; certainly in other creative arts it seems to.

I consider that it matters very little in these instances whether the ability is entirely innate or whether it's down to certain brain areas being reserved, pathways being fixed to a certain task at an early age.

Aside: Occam's razor is a useful philosophical tool but it lacks any ability to demonstrate the truth in a situation. Much in the world works with more complexity than it appears to need. Look at physics which often progresses by discounting simpler explanations in favour of more complex ones (of course this hinges on the element of "necessary entities" in the razor which actually make the razor useless as one is required to answer as to the necessity of an entity; if you know an entity is unnecessary to establish a proper explanation then you don't need the razor to suggest it).
Compose runs on AWS, though. OP was asking about Google Cloud.
Spammers Abusing Trust in US .Gov Domains
I like to test the whole system via end-to-end tests, as they're the best bang for the buck. And then I'll create unit tests for more algorithmic code, like a parser, sort algorithm, shortest path calculator, financial calculations. Those also tend to require the least amount of test context setup, making them less painful to write.
So back in the day, "Anna" and a bunch of black people moved in and 'displaced' locals: “Due to the circumstances of the section going colored, we have sold our house. The school is surrounded.” One anonymous landlord was perhaps the most blunt: “We own about five houses in that section, and we wish to sell all of them, if even one negro moves in.” Given these attitudes, it’s not surprising that some 40,000 homes, in Kirkwood and beyond, were sold by whites to blacks—for as little as $10,000—in just a few months in 1961, as Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau reported later that decade.

I wonder if people like Anna moving in also felt the same guilt that the author of this piece does?

Still, it’s hard not to feel like an interloper after you’ve moved into a historically black (well, after it was historically white) neighborhood...The guilt intensifies when you realize that your [house] belonged to the family next door for longer than you’ve been alive.

I'm curious if these feelings of guilt are common when moving into a demographically different neighborhood? Maybe they are just a convenient way for (culturally, if not financially) upper class whites to signal virtue to each other?

Would the author feel less guilt if he instead stuck to a lily-white enclave full of "blonde wi[ves] and ...Nordic-looking cherubs"? What must a mixed race couple do to avoid feeling guilt, given that at least one of them is probably displacing a demographically different person?

(Yes, I'm obviously mocking the author of this silly article a bit.)
> One element of the article that seemed particularly off was that he claims he still doesn't know why he was fired. In the UK, you have a legal right to know the company's reason for firing you, and you can sue them if you think they lied about it.

I'm not sure this is factually correct, but if it is it'd be in direct conflict with what lawyers told me when I was forced out of one job in the UK. Essentially, I was powerless to do anything, since I hadn't been with the company for two years just like you say. When I was told I was being forced out, I immediately got in touch with two lawyers specializing in employment law, and independently of one another they said the exact same thing: prior to two years at the company they can do whatever they want, giving reason or not.

I was indeed given a reason, however I'm absolutely positive that it's not the truth. The company did right by me in the end anyway in terms of severance, so there are no hard feelings, but the truth would've been better. At least I imagine it would have been. Oh well.
> What would you ever fast forward besides the intro/"last time on.." and the outro?

5 minute long freeze-frame shots where the camera slowly pans over shocked faces having a massive emotional reaction to every single clever move.

Just like I'd fast forward Dragon Ball Z every time Goku needs to use 3 episodes of grunting to charge up an energy ball attack.
A list 25 top that doesn't have Battletoads, Devil May Cry or Ikaruga. Furthermore, lists Simpsons and Time Crisis as hard. They both together doesn't beat "Prehistoric Isle in 1930".
After September 11, 2001, I stopped listening to the news for about 5 years. I was tired of hearing one horrible thing after another. While I wasn't living under a rock, the things I did hear about -- Blackwater, Abu Ghraib, "Mission Accomplished" --- did nothing to make me want to pay attention again. In retrospect, I think it's too complacent a stance, but I still think a daily dose of bad news is excessive. Which is why I read up on the presidential primaries at a weekly interval.
Visualize memory usage from Google Chrome
You can buy gutter cleaning and lawn mowing robots today.
Meteorjs-recap the last weeks
Orion really is quite impressive. I tried the improvement as well. Orion actually works.
Fearing no punishment, Denver cops abuse crime databases for personal gain
Anonymous Releases Trumps Personal Information
Let me tell you about the Egyptian engineers.

They didn't even have wheels.
What is the purpose of locking the firmware? What threat is the FCC protecting against?

(And why is the article headline "Europe" when the cited article in the news story says TP is locking their stuff down due to an FCC ruling? The linked news story is a word-salad).
Neato or irobot will sell you a robot vacuum.
Besides the reference to Fahrenheit 451 the referece to Life of Brian at the example from the RFC made my day:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725#section-3

"Unavailable For Legal Reasons

This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province of Judea due to the Lex Julia Majestatis, which disallows access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be operated by the People's Front of Judea."
I have found very little value in testing things with little or no logic in them. Getters, setters, those kinds of things and when we need to pivot they just stand in the way. I'm sure there are cases of critical development where that kind of thing is very important, but in most cases I think it's just unneeded.
I completely agree. In fact there is already a mechanism for doing what they want done, generally. They get a search warrant, they get a judge to compel a suspect to unlock his phone, refusal results in jail time for contempt of court. There is prior law for all of that. Nobody seems to care that we are talking about doing the search without the judiciary. This is all purely for fishing. Either fishing or they believe that there are all these real life episodes of 24 being played out, which isn't true.
Eaglet Emerges at National Arboretum, Live on a Webcam
Could do FizzBuzz this way too!
> for a significant portion of your users

Windows Phone users are a significant portion of HN users?
I run a bunch of debian and ubuntu boxes.

The kinds of problems he's reporting are more consistent with hardware failure that exhibits only after a reboot, or with misconfiguration of his software, than defects in the OS boot mechanism.

I have a lot of respect for Linas (I used his Extrusion code to make the glextrusion xscreensaver) but I think in this case he's doing things to his machines that cause these problems, and it's not usually debian or ubuntu's fault.
A Five-Minute Tutorial on How to Value Your Startup
You are butting up against the edges of how the system works. It's all a bit confusing out here, until you realise that it's not about fairness or law or reason. It's about power, no one really cares, they will jail them whether they know how to do it or not. People like to imagine that they live in an egalitarian state, it's nonsense. It's not even a democracy, that word has been bastardised. Technically we live in an elective aristocracy.
Borussia Dortmund membuktikan
Why People Don't Trust Self-Driving Cars – Yet
Chelsea Manning: government anti-leak program a 'blank check for surveillance'
It's kind of funny. You mention 1 second, as if it's a good thing, while "instant" is generally at least bellow 200ms, preferably below 100ms. Now, it doesn't really make a difference in productivity, but certainly makes a difference in perception (which, I suppose can make a difference in happiness :-).

I have some programs that take (too) long to start up: Elite: Dangerous and Star Wars - the Old Republic. My web browsers also start up too slow, but opening a new tab is instant, and that's all I do, anyway.

I recently thought about the craziness of these applications based on web technologies, with a 15 MB download and sometimes sluggish performance. We had full GUI OS [the QNX demo-disk] that fit on a floppy in the 90s - surely we can fit an editor in less than 1MB today, and have it perform more things, ~1000 faster than in the 90s?
Well, Buffalo, the proper noun, and buffalo, the noun, are both going to be highlighted as nouns. That leaves buffalo, the verb, which is slang and so is unlikely to be recognised as not being the noun, ignoring the difficulty of parsing the sentence anyway.
At last year's Startup Conference, I really liked one of the pitches: Realiteer. It works with Google Cardboard, and it's the cheapest controller you'll ever see: 100% paper. And it worked really well, I tried it.
It's amusing to me that people defending very restrictive development frameworks will often talk as if any easement of the policy is a slippery slope to Windows 98. There is no middle ground! Can't do that because PCs sucked in the 90s! (Also implicitly ignores that NT based Windows got a lot better.)
this predates systemd on ubuntu- ubuntu has done this for some time. I don't know why. To fix this, you would have to configure this with nobootwait.
Ello made things weird for new users. The stuff I'm talking about would only affect commercial users, or people who are already heavily invested in being on Twitter.
New localized social app for iOS
The images drawn on screen?
Is there a way for Sublime to work directly with Github? I maintain some notes files in org mode directly on Github.

https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes

However, when I want to make big changes, I work locally. Ideally, I'd be warned if I forget to update my local repo when I try to edit.
I don't deny that there are other forces at work too... and I'm not only talking about California.
I agree with the first point there. I was pretty excited to try an "open source version of sublime text", but the performance was so terrible I ended up just sticking with Vim.

I know people are trying to back away from the console-ui editors, but you cannot deny that,performance wise, it's tough to beat Vim or Emacs.
>> It's public information.

You are correct.

Most counties have real estate sites you can put in an address and get a satellite image of the lot, how much the last sale was for and who the current owner is and what type of classification the lot has.
Show HN: Publish Good Looking Google Docs on the Web
Love seeing sites powered by JobBoard.io - great product and great guy behind it.

I'm not associated with them in any way but as a boot strapper I love free high quality tools and they have one that's been superb for us.
If you are looking there are several other good resources out there:
http://giscareers.com/ with thousands of jobs world wide and http://www.gjc.org/ which is mostly US but a few thousand as well, are the first to come to mind.
When a headline says "Out-group X is doing BAD THING" when the in-group has already done "BAD THING" it seems reasonable to assume it's an attempt to leverage peoples irrational bias against out-groups.
It's hilariously wrong. Tech is scooping people up from all over the world. And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited. I guess maybe startup funding only goes to a few, but there's a lot of programmers from every walk of life who do a lot of work and are all getting good money. The idea that drivers are going to be left aside by automation is 100% true. The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech. Now some tech people foresee the world with good automation and want to try to help others, and suddenly they're being condescending for not recognize their privileged? This word drawn in the article don't match up with facts. It is based on so many falsehoods it's factually incorrect.
That isn't the case. If you are interested, I would suggest joining the Postgres hackers mailing list. Reading that will give a better picture of what is happening and who is doing the happening.
They don't include my favorite temporary email service.

gmail.com

It so easy to create throwaway account, and no one would dare restrict gmail.com
Here is the wiki you are looking for:
http://docs.slackware.com/
Silly person. The elite are entitled to unlimited do-overs.
I thought its a Blade Runner reference because Google's reference phones are called Nexus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicant
You think insults aren't insults if you add a nicety on the end?

Clearly I didn't read what you wrote, otherwise I'd be agreeing with you already, right?

Or you're just spouting mindless diversity soundbite rhetoric..
Logshare: share output of cli (eg tail -f) via url
There's really no comparison between the two scenarios.
Hacking the MIT server or distros to replace the GPG code is an incredibly noisy attack, which will leave an evidence trail the size of Utah, home state of NSA. It's a risky attack because you don't have selectors (don't know to whom to provide the trojanized code) so you will necessarily infect more targets than necessary. There are also multiple manual and automatic tripwires, MD5 hashes, code signatures etc. that must be circumvented, and triggering any of them will blow the whole thing open and lead to public outcry. It's also currently illegal and leaves binary forensic traces in the infected machines.
On the other hand, forcing an email provider to colaborate is standard legal practice (Lavabit), you have a perfect selector (the email address of the target), there is no tripwire, and getting the key will permit you to decrypt al past and future communication. Once the user closes the browser, the evidence is gone. Easy as pie.

So while in principle the threat model is similar, the practicalities of the two situations are vastly different, questioning the whole "we want to provide practical security" mantra.
> Apple could hold out for over a millennium.

No, it doesn't work that way (see the post from dolske 7 hours ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11310214

Under these rules in only a few months all the money would be gone.
$250B can buy a lot of members of congress.
The injustice creeps in when that gas station clerk was successfully renting for twenty years of their life, and one day their home becomes unaffordable to them because the property values in their town have risen but the economic value of "vending gas" has not.

(Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
So, uh, how do I charge my shoes?
100% this. I've been offered (and given) stock options at a couple of places now but never compromised on compensation. Stock options for a non-traded entity are worthless, regardless of what arbitrary finger-in-air valuation some investors have given you. On the off chance you do get to vest, and actually make some money, you're still very likely to not make up the loss during the years you took a compensatory hit, and would've been better off compensation wise with a more stable (in every sense) but possibly more dull company.
Mondo bank is now in public beta
Well, yeah, but you could say that about anything. Having a machine to toast your bread isn't that big of a deal in the broader picture either, you know? But people buy lots of toasters, which means there will be plenty of toaster-industry people worrying whether the current toaster experience is optimal.
In my experience, remaining employees talk for about a day, then forget the fired person ever existed. And life goes on.
Yeah, I don't know either. I went as far as to write spkg (spkg.megous.com) in 2006, just to replace the funcionality of pkgtools bash scripts without adding new features. (imporving robustness and speed) I never got any response from the Slackware team. I guess they're just very very conservative.

I loved my Slackware times for the learning experience. But it was hell of a lot of work to use it.
Ebay is too big, yes. I live in NYC, so I prefer to just meet someone and exchange cash & product. Going through ebay would be so much more work.
There's no such thing as a "DirecTV original program." Satellite and cable are just two ways to deliver the same bundle of programming channels.
I don't get it, how do they track specifically the tip of a finger? Or are they not?
Agreed. There are a lot of GIS jobs out there but unfortunately many of them are technician level rather than developer/engineer. Of the developer positions I do see posted, most of them are for ESRI/.NET. If it wasn't for FOSS4G I'd assume that there were few non ESRI GIS developers out there!
https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables
works pretty well.
Because 'life is hard' doesn't mean everything has to be fixed. If we're in a market economy, sometimes people who rent find their apartment to be unaffordable. So they more. That's sad. But not a reason to jigger the entire economy.
Spotify is hiring aggressively from record labels. Not sure if they are going after the A&R folks, though.

And then there is the longstanding rumor that Jimmy Iovine creates an Apple record label. I wouldn't be surprised if this is going on right now.

(No idea how Apple, Inc. deals with the Beatles' Apple Corps. in the music trademark world, though...Those two have legally tangled in the past.)
Thanks for the response, it's fun to read someone strongly disagreeing while saying what you think. slightly baffling, but fun ;)
Apple is trying to make it more difficult to link to private API in Xcode 7.3 but objc doesn't help
https://github.com/kif-framework/KIF/issues/770
This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.