skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AI expert says Google's Go program misses 1 key feature of human intelligence
Is it possible to raise a plane to space and just enough to fly at Mach 3 without friction for the major part of the flight and then gently enter the earth atmosphere to glide down to the final destination?
Currently we patch all the software on the VM, but not the application container itself. We make new base images available, but the user has to re-deploy to pick up these changes.
Ask HN: Salary spreadsheet  $200k/yr, details please
Do you have unique education or skills, excellent negotiating skills, or some other reason(s) you attribute to your relative success in compensation?

Do you have a Masters or PhD, for example? Author of a book? Great personal network?
How to handle null JSON values in Swift
Beautiful. Congrats to the DOJ for seeing the light.

Will Obama now stop seeking "middle ground" as he mentioned at SXSW? Will Burr-Feinstein halt their work on a backdoor bill? Nothing has changed on this front, and there are still a host of reasons why a backdoor law is a bad idea.
Looping Over Child Components in React: Shotgun Episode 3
Against Empathy
Is there any notification (email, readable VM version on a server, etc.) when one of those redeployments should occur?
I wonder if the American electorate has that level of competence given the quality of elected leadership in the US.
Escort in Dubai
it's 800 over 4 years, and 600 over 18 months. So 1400 total.
This is gonna get spun as "Apple wanted the phone uncracked, FBI cracked it, FBI wins," but that's not accurate: what Apple wanted was not to be forced to crack the phone themselves. If the FBI backs off on that, Apple has unequivocally won.
I also really like this video of his: https://youtu.be/dljNabciEGg
I thought this was an interesting article because it contradicts a lot of what is said by the progressive movement within tech. Examples:

Silicon Valley, like America itself, remains a place where a willingness to work hard and to use your brain will find reward over time, no matter your background.

While I’ve certainly experienced discrimination, it usually hasn’t been at the hands of fellow technologists, who can sympathize with what it’s like to be “different” in a society that too often stigmatizes those who don’t fit some mythical all-American football player/cheerleader norm.

You don’t have to change who you are or what you’re into. But it does help to know the difference between ‘Stars War’ and ‘Trek’ — bonus if you’ve seen some ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or Marvel shows.

While progressive commentators within the tech industry assert that nerd subculture exacerbates discrimination, the author of this article has the opposite view.
> "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well.

These types of questions probably cause me more stress than any other. Being asked to think of a situation where you felt a certain emotion or had a certain mental experience is not actually that easy for everyone. My memory is terrible at that kind of thing.

It's like my memory lacks a necessary index for what you are asking. I can start going through every major work experience I've had in sequence and filter out the ones that fit, but we might be sitting there in silence for 2-3 minutes which gets awkward enough in itself.

And it's not an inability to remember mistakes specifically, I mean the old "tell me about a time where you solved a problem with no prior knowledge of the domain..." gets me. I solve problems like this ALL THE TIME. That's a skill I have. Fetching those times from memory is not a skill I have.

Luckily I've had these questions in enough interviews that I generally try to have some examples in mind.
The following is the best analysis by far that I've seen about the All Writs Act and its application in these cases. It's from the Just Security blog, out of NYU Law School:

https://www.justsecurity.org/29634/readers-guide-magistrate-...

(I'd read the links to the articles in the blog itself.)
Spark: Big Data Cluster Computing in Production
Hanlon's Razor: "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice"

The possibility that the Bureau is just plain dumb is not on your list. They are on record, many times, and in front ofa very serious congress, being very very stupid. Though I do not believe they are being stupid here, the possibility is not an edge case and should be considered.
Are these the same book?

http://www.amazon.com/Andy-Grove-Times-American-Business/dp/...

http://www.amazon.com/Andy-Grove-Life-Times-American/dp/1591...

There doesn't seem to be a Kindle / ePub version, unfortunately.
I'm going to assume he works for one of the big trading firms with that level of pay.
I'm working on a dataframe for Java for large datasets: https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw.

It's not ready for prime time, but:

Time to sum 1,000,000,000 floats: 1.5 seconds

Time to sort 1,000,000,000 floats: 30.5 seconds

The code to fill a column and sort it:

FloatColumn fc = new FloatColumn("test", 1_000_000_000);
for (int i = 0; i < 1_000_000_000; i++) {
fc.add((float) Math.random());
}
fc.sortAscending();
The ability to "modulate [your] . . . mind" is why so many people (80-90% when it comes to drugs besides marijuana), oppose drug legalization. Human society has barely learned to cope with the range of neurological behavior naturally present in the population. It's not unreasonable to be afraid of what might happen when you throw new chemicals into the mix.

It's important to remember that most people think the opposite way as those on HN. They do not assume that new things will automatically make society better. They have a strong "don't fix what isn't broken" tendency. And as long as we live in a democracy, they're entitled to structure their society as they see fit.
It may just be a function of my own middle-age, but we seem to be losing more of the old Giants - in politics, arts and commerce, and looking ahead, everyone seems, well, smaller in comparison.

Just as software without silicon to run on is, well, smaller, the software moguls of today can only run on hardware because people like Andy put it underneath them a generation before.
good point on Electron! I also noticed that Slack and Atom are real battery hogs. Worse is Slack when a giphy is also in the chat window (although the window is in background)... it burns CPU for new reason.
Except that the free mass schools provided by the government do little more than dumb people down to a compliant level required for a quiet electorate.

See "Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down
Watch "century of the self" and thank me later.
Here's the source:

http://www.sott.net/article/300679-American-Gulag-US-has-mor...
I walked out of MIT with $100K in student loans, because I had the combination of 'parents who make too much money' and 'parents who had five kids and did not adequately save for their children's education'.

I'm all for soaking the rich, but how is that fair? I was apparently rich by association, and it was pretty upsetting to see kids who were ostensibly poorer than I was get a substantially easier start in life.
It's great to see App Engine getting better! I'm exploring it again after trying the original app a few years back and am enjoying the improved interface and abundant documentation and tutorials.

One suggestion: Make a cloud storage product option free up to a few megabytes for hosting small personal sites. Maybe it exists already but I haven't found it.
The issue was never that the magistrate judge would be setting the precedent. No matter who prevailed, there is going to be an appeal and that's when precedent would be set. Even at that point, a negative ruling wouldn't necessarily be an insurmountable problem for the FBI as it wouldn't be binding until the issue has been decided by higher authority. It could still be cited as an example of persuasive authority (i.e. something other courts may follow) before then, but that's not the same as being binding.

So the FBI would have a lot of time before they had to worry about the consequences of a negative ruling, and they could drop the matter well before any precedent was set. Apple is in a trickier situation, in that once they've done the work, it becomes more likely that they'll face additional demands in other courts, or--and this is the worst case scenario--a few boneheaded legislators try to pass legislation on this issue. They've got a lot less room to work in, so if they could make this go away in front of a district magistrate without ever having to worry about setting any precedent (even if in their favor), they probably would.

0. http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/academic-programs/le...

1. http://faculty.law.lsu.edu/toddbruno/mandatory_v__persuasive...
The idea that the Western world (at least, my country, the UK) uses laws to criminalize groups of people seems about as old as time itself to me.

We don't punish drug use because we care about people taking drugs. We punish drug use because we want to eliminate the influence of 'junkies' on society.

We don't punish radical views because we disagree with them. We punish radical views because we want to eliminate their influence on society.

Let's talk about child abuse. A terrible crime.

As a UK resident - it feels to me, that people don't actually care about the actual act of child abuse as much as they care about the... 'othering' of the perpetrator.

It's the idea of a child abuser as being an animal, a strange alien, a completely non-understandable beast, that really riles us up.

That's why 'think of the children' works. We're not thinking about the children, really. We're thinking about the threat from human actors who don't have world-views that quite fit - we can't grok them, they can't be trusted.

That's what I think these sorts of laws are fundamentally about. They are about trying to remove 'scary' individuals.

I don't care about terrorism because I think it's vanishingly unlikely to occur. But people, as a mass, fear the unknown - they fear the humans who don't have the same limits that they do. The humans that can, and will, do anything.

'Terrorist' is just the new 'criminal', because 'criminal' doesn't hold the same cachet when everyone is a criminal.
Meet UbuntuBSD, Unix for Human Beings
People should also do what they preach.

Why? If one is issuing mandates from a position of authority, I agree that following what one imposes on others is essential, but in intellectual discussion one should be free to argue a position and its opposite the next minute. Anything less is downright dangerous for the group and society as a whole. We can't depend on the half-dozen cranks that actually live their lives swimming against the tide to argue for everything that is truly different, nor should we trust their arguments just because they turn their crackpot theories into practice.
That pricing structure has allowed these elite colleges to get away with gross waste and inefficiency. Imagine the scandal if Yale actually cost $50,000 a year for your average family. It'd blow up even more when people realized where all the money from tuition hikes go (hint: it's not toward hiring more professors). The people who get really screwed are those just above the threshold where they receive no or negligible financial aid.
Indeed it's high, but also it just shows you what is possible.

I don't think I was a highly strategic hire, just a very solid engineer with a lot of experience, prior employment at Google (and Amazon), and a strong salary and stock compensation at my immediately prior job.

So they busted out the competitive offer, and I was very happy. Also the stock went up like $200 a share.
> [Yale] can't spend 2%(540/26,000) of their endowment per year on free tuition? What is this money for?

The purpose of research universities is to engage in scientific research, not to educate people. Education is one of their activities but not their primary goal. For more about this, read "The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People" [1]:

> But there is one misimpression that people seem to have[]: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty.

The purpose of an endowment is to generate an income stream forever. It's typical for the organization with an endowment to spend only what they earn in interest at most, with some preferring to spend less so that the endowment grows over time.

It's possible that they're investing so well that they can afford to spend 2% every year, but that's just one cost among many costs that the university has - such as paying for its staff, its facilities (real estate, buildings, and so on) - and staff and buildings that help produce research.

[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...
And don't limit your search for schools to donate to to your country of residence.
There was no reason to think this phone, unlike every other system, was uncrackable. Apple is setting impossible expectations, especially when the attacker has the resources of the U.S. goverment.
Loving vs Virginia in 1967: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
Nah, now everyone knows if they want security they need to upgrade to the latest iphone. Win-win for Apple.
They didn't ask him about censorship. He most definitely lied about it when interviewed on the Today show. Too many libertarian/conservative voices being un-verified, etc.
You guys know you really mean "Web API" and not "API", right?

This kind of phraseology is a clear sign that someone's programming experience is extremely narrow in scope.
Right, Apple DID NOT make LLVM. They just hired the guy that did (Chris Lattner) well after it was fully established.
Bircher Muesli Pots – Interview with Anna Mackenzie from Cuckoo Foods
Michigan's tampon tax and why it matters
How do you suppose that med students get the required on the job training (aka residency) otherwise? Teaching hospitals are a very necessary thing in the medical field.
Please add a race column.
Specifically, the current appointee has a history of siding with the DEA.
Well, my point was that the share menu is an app-centric model that is horribly inefficient - not that it can't be done. Unless all of the apps you are using have incorporated Dropbox or iCloud into their model, those don't help you without an exposed file system.
I think it's telling that one of the most successful portions of iOS has been Photos - which has an (in effect) exposed file system.
They make $350 sheets. Think about that for a second. $350 for cut and sewn planes of linen.

I was all about it until I saw the price. Elevated for no reason. They sell it a premium price point to just give the illusion of extreme quality. It's made just like any other linen bed sheets you can buy with a few buttons to connect the top sheet to the duvet.

Someone could make a duvet with some buttons and sell it at 1/10th the price.
"marketing" speak.
And wouldn't it be ironic if the "outside party", referenced in the article, was Apple itself. Maybe through several layers of indirection. Something to think about, but most probably not the case.
That's much better than I expected. That being said, outside of a handful of extremely rich universities (and we are really talking a handful or two), most tend to "tax" the middle class more than anyone.

I mean... I'm not sure if I'd consider 150k for a household middle class (probably upper middle) but in most places, again, with a few exceptions, you're basically required to pay the full tuition. In cash. After taxes. $50k a year. It's an astronomical sum for just about anyone. And these are not terrible schools, we're talking some of the top universities in the world here, sitting on tons of money.

I mean, I know the gutting of the middle class is hardly news but, phew. Education costs really take it to another level.
After reading Only the Paranoid Survive and High Output Management, I have a deep respect for Andy Grove and the work he did to make Intel an enduring company. He'll be missed.
> basic apps

Any other cheap phone doesn't truly meet this requirement, aside from some Chinese mid-range Android handset (which have their own issues, typically, except perhaps the Meizu or OneTouch phones). Maybe a Motorola G would also fit, but there's something to be said for having what is basically a top-of-the range handset that works flawlessly and will continue to do so for years afterwards.

My iPhone 5S is 3 years old at this point, and is still perfect. I bought it 12 months ago, second-hand and couldn't be happier.
Working my way through High Output Management. Great Teacher
These sorts of things are silly revenge fantasies at best, they are just as easily cracked and removed as any drm features.
Government uses iPhones -> Government reports iPhone vulns.
Practice of killing male chicks to continue in Germany
> It's not a very good smoke screen, since the most probable interpretation of the filing is that the NSA has an exploit.

I've wondered if the NSA already had the phone cracked, and Apple's help was just parallel construction to not reveal capabilities.
> I'm all for soaking the rich, but how is that fair? I was apparently rich by association, and it was pretty upsetting to see kids who were ostensibly poorer than I was get a substantially easier start in life.

A private school deciding to charge for its valuable stamp of approbal has nothing to do with it being a fair price.
Whenever people talk about making 'the rich' pay for something, remember that their definition of 'the rich' usually ends up being anyone who makes more money than them.
RIP - having read his memoir, and his management books, I've deep respect for his work and principles that he advocated. He'll be missed
We've had a very different experience than you. We've used Appengine since 2009, and are about to launch our third service built on it.

It's important to understand that that Appengine is not AWS. It is a massively distributed system providing scalability and fault-tolerance that you would need something like ten AWS servers spread over several availability zones to replicate.

Slow - true, request responses can be several times slower than a single AWS server. That latency is due to the distributed nature of the datastore and memcache - but that buys completely seamless scaling. So if you think you need speed to handle lots of requests, you don't. Appengine will spin up as many instances as you need to manage your traffic.

Expensive - I'm a nasty mean bugger so if there was a cheaper option, I'd take it. A single server on AWS might be slightly cheaper, but ten AWS servers spread over several availability zones (and the sysadmin to manage them) are definitely not.

OSS - ummm, you haven't read the article, have you? You have access to the source code of pretty much everything.

Stable - in the early days of the master-slave datastore, we did have occasional outages. But in the last four years we've had a single outage that affected our customers. I thank my lucky stars every time AWS has a hiccup. Furthermore when there is an outage, I know there are better sysadmins than I could ever afford dealing with it.

At the end of the day, it's the usual horses for courses. If you like doing your own sysadmin, Appengine will fill you with horror. But if you are a developer, Appengine abstracts the system admin away so you can concentrate on doing what you do best.
I read this book about Andy Grove and Intel in high-school, made a huge impact in my career choices.

https://www.amazon.ca/Inside-Intel-Worlds-Powerful-Company/d...
Why didn't you use managed VMs?
That's quite different, talking about the total number of people who have ever been through the system, and not accounting for total population.
I didn't say universities shouldn't have hospitals. I was just pointing out that it's another field that universities are highly involved/invested in.
Blueprints, math, models.
First hand experience, I work for a bank which is a Fortune 100, and our department was heavily relying on Oracle Exadata, paying between 1-2 millions (don't know exact figure), we moved away to PostgreSQL and Casandra.
Cost factor was not the only motive (1-2 millions was actually penny for this bank) but our Director was convinced that exadata was unnecessary.
That would be the end of a whole pile of legal strategies.
I've had good success when we introduce the conversation with "We're going to ask a bunch of questions across a variety of problem domains. We don't expect anyone to be strong in all these areas, but we want to get a feel for where your strengths are, and then we'll drill down into those areas"

But, once you do that setup, everyone is eventually going to say that they don't know what they don't know. It's exceptionally rare for someone to be able to delve into the implementation details of a couple of different programming languages (of our choosing), cryptography, distributed systems, relational modelling, CS theory, and a variety of algorithms and data structures.

So "I don't know" ceases to be much of a signal, since everyone says it a few times.

In fact we prefer to see the opposite, where people are willing to tell us the bits of info that they do know. Even if you don't know how two phase commit is implemented, knowing what problem it's trying to solve will allow you to research it when the need arises.

Because an interview situation is so unlike a normal workplace environment, I don't know any reliable way to translate their willingness (or otherwise) to say "I don't know" in the interview, to on the job behaviours. Either you'll coach everyone into it, or you'll be letting the interview pressure (potentiality) distort their behaviour so much that it's too hard to derive a signal from.
Is it time for developers to specialize?
Sure, those places are finicky and they ask tough questions.

But can someone tell us where, exactly, this top .25% figure comes from? Other than the swirling mass of air about their heads, as they typed it?

I'm not asking this to be snarky. It's just that people keep talking about the "top .1%" as if it's not just a thing, but a quantifiable, measurable thing. It's neither, of course; basically it's just a hunch people have. With an arbitrary number slapped on it to make it sound more, you know... authoritative.

Meanwhile, some stories of the top .25% at Jane Street, getting busy at the task of finding the other top .25%:

My interview is scheduled at 10:00am. However, I wait until 10:15am but no one called. Then I received an email saying the interviewer was wrapping up with an issue and he would call around 10:30am. Then I wait until 10:45 am still no one called. I received another email saying he was still working on the issue and will call in a minute. Then I continue to wait to 11:15am.…

Another:

They ended up calling 40 minutes late, the interviewer was very incompetent at even asking the questions. I found it very unprofessional and chose to not move on in the interviewing process after speaking with friends who told me this was not uncharacteristic of them.

Source: glasdoor.com
A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played.

Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realise that pirating hurts people. If a friend asks another friend 'do you want a copy of <game>' they just say yes and that's the end of the thought process. The 'does this affect anyone' doesn't enter their heads. (source: teacher)
Crazy indpendent sports site that gets 1M views a year