skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And what your experiences have been on Windows, I just wonder?

I'm actually surprised about the stability of Windows 7 or 10. Even on old crappy hardware it feels faster than Ubuntu. I only mean the bare OS. There are tons of problems in the Windows world - but but for me it mostly works.

> Ever had to recover a Win8.1 laptop stuck in failed update that it keeps reinstalling over and over and over?

Not yet. I had gvfs eat multiple GB of memory when opening a folder in nautilus, some indicator-applet using 10% cpu because it's sending constantly xml over dbus for displaying cpu usage. I've had fun getting Qt/GTK3/GTK2 look somewhat similar, having fun with NetworkManager SIGSEVing and fumbling with strace to get a clue about that glib,dbus,libnl mess. I have xorg crash the whole system, editing gconfd oder dconf files for setting options are in the control panel in Windows. Have tens of "System Problem detected" Popups that are positioned below each other and that are provide no real insight besides the fact that commond-not-found has crashed or apport-gtk SIGSEVed again...

> Linux runs circles around Windows in usability department.

I'm using Linux as my daily driver for more than 15 years. I like it. But I'm mostly in a terminal session. Everything else is quite bleak if you don't have a computer science or technical background. Even with a computer science education debugging polkit or funny locking bugs in glib or gobject is more a black art than fun.

This is the reality https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so-again/ and it sucks. I tried to emulate the functionality of superkaramba on KDE5. It's impossible. It sucks. My mom can't handle it. And even I can't. Sure it's probably my problem that I'm not happy that I'm able to to rotate my KDE widgets to 59° but something like xload is still not possible out of the box.
Oh, I thought this was a framework for developing botnets. It's more like phone tree hell for the web.
My father-in-law worked on that in the 60's (project Rover). It got defunded for some reason, or we might have been to Mars in the last century...
If you're only going to use one language, I guess Java is a good candidate. I don't see why you should be using only one language, though. Besides; if you're only going for one language, I think there are better candidates than Java that provide net wins on the whole.
>Yes, take a look at their politics. There's a reason they are that rich, and it is not because half a dozen people benefit from international corruption.

Well duh, everyone knows that.

Switzerland is rich because a hell of a lot of people benefit from international corruption.

>But if you know of an even better example, great, share it.

Singapore. And possibly Lichtenstein.
I think sometimes people forget that sometimes the interviewers don't actually want to hire someone.

- They might be afraid of someone who might outshine or compete with them.

- They might not want to train or mentor someone.

- They might think they don't need help.

- They already have someone they want to hire and are just going through the motions of "looking".
Or you could launch them and fuel cheaply with a space gun, along with Robots to bash the components together into a functioning structure, and leave the mucky rocketry bit for your g-sensitive meatbags.
The standard for culpability under the FCPA is perception. If there is a hint, then you're probably going to face some action. If I sound paranoid, sorry - that's my basic reading of it - it is paranoid.

It's interesting because I have some exposure to law-firm ethics ( I wrote software for law firms for a while decades ago ) and they're like this. Their admins ( who really run law firms ) are past masters at dealing with it. Since it's lawyers writing that law, we should not be surprised.

You get a (distorted for the purposes of plot-conflict) view of that in "Better Call Saul."
The key is that these cuts flow from broader restructuring efforts, not performance.
what in the name of god am I looking at
I appreciate your humble an honest approach - it's refreshing. I'll be sure and try this out in a VM!
What people forget is that JIRA is a more complex product. Probably by orders of magnitude. There is SO MUCH you can do with JIRA and so many different integrations that while it's very clunky, I feel they don't get enough credit for managing all that complexity in some manner that is at last somewhat sane. In fact, clunkiness comes with that territory of complexity, there's just really no way around it (well, this is a simplifying statement, but the point is that different tradeoffs would have had to be made).

That's why a lot of JIRA to Asana comparisons don't really hold up. The problem arises when a small team that needs a quick and simple to-do list start using JIRA and then compare it to other solutions which do probably 1/100th of what JIRA does. If you don't need the cruft that JIRA comes with, then that's fine...but there are genuinely orgs that do need it.

Now I'm no fan of JIRA. I don't really love it, and I fall under the camp that tolerates it. However, even then I can appreciate it for what it is and what it means to do. They can do better of course...but we can't simply compare directly between something like JIRA and Asana.
MS is also adding an SSH server to Windows.

If they also add Linux userland support to Windows Server, in the near future you will be able to SSH in and get bash prompt on your Windows infrastructure... natively.

I'm kind of liking the future.
Sweep Lidar new 3D scanning abilities
So, if they aren't willing to go through whatever random whiteboard bullshit you decide is due, then they can't join your company? Sounds like you're doing them a favor, not the other way around...
Have someone else apply for you. Your wife probably.

You find the job and tell her you are too nervous to apply, let her know it's OK to apply for you.

Sometime seceding that bit of control is enough to get over the problem - especially when you have self awareness of it.

Once she applies you will probably feel an urge to take over and continue the conversation with the employer - so do that, and take it to an interview. (Or have her do it for you, while you hover in the background looking worried and telling her what to say :)

It's kind of a way of forcing/tricking yourself.

(Hopefully she doesn't say something like "man up and do it", ask her not to if you think she might, tell her you need her to help you with this.)
Using Adblock Plus to block ads is legal, rules German court-for the fifth time
Will Linux programs also work on Windows Nano Server?
Might be a good idea to buy future farmland in the middle of Canadian pine forests.
Well...
- some said it wasn't possible
- some said it would not happen this decade
- some said it was strong but would lose against Lee Sedol

Now people say it doesn't matter. What is next?
Hi everyone - you can use this link to read Reed Albergotti's article: go.theinformation.com/08cb09
Also, people inside academia have this strong tendency to say negative things about each other's work for the sake of supplying constructive criticism. As the article points out, this is all well, but we should also develop a habit of saying something positive every now and then.
Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees
The desire for this sort of flexibility is a mistake. It sounds good, but it's naive. It's sort of like saying you want a single class in your OO design to be "flexible" so you make the class into an undifferentiated mess. Having a monolith class that "does it all" is a red flag of bad design. It's truly no different when the layer of abstraction is human software developers being organized for complex business problems. Having "flexible" people whose job is a little bit of everything is a major red flag of a bad design (bad management) that took the lazy way out instead of the harder but unequivocally more successful route of actually meaningfully dividing the workload between clean interfaces and having employees mostly specialize. "Sometimes you just need somebody to work across every system" is just flat out wrong. If you find you need that, it means you've been doing things in a very wrong way and patching over it by commanding positions to be full-stack is only going to perpetuate the problem.
This is so true I'm loathe to add to it.

I dual boot my laptop b/w Windows and Linux because the WiFi network at my school has issues with Linux...so I'm forced to use Windows, also for games, but it's such a pain. Today it updated forcefully while I was trying to study; I tried to postpone the update but the option was grayed out. The Windows philosophy through and through is to treat users as ignorant and incompetent idiots for whom even the most basic of tasks must be performed, and who cannot make important decisions. This, IMHO, is the epitome of disrespect, and the reason I look forward with great anticipation to the day when I am able to solely operate within computing environments that afford me the same dignity as the cars I drive.
Do you like working on those things in your spare time? The flip side of what you seek is that with a more challenging day job, you may not have as much energy or desire to tackle those projects in your spare time.
I built an app that programatically generates a 15s version of movie trailers
You could have multiple membranes wrapping one another, each with a lower pressure than the last until vacuum. That way you substantially reduce pressure forces, and improve ballistic resistance.

Make it big enough, and vaguely cylindrical, and you could spin it up to provide simulayed gravity - you'd just need internal webbing to prevent it bulging from centripetal forces.

This all adds mass of course, but it still be lighter and more compact than an equivalent rigid structure.
Amazon Sent Me Lumber as a Prank
I was once asked to set up the interviewers laptop.
>It will also be interesting if there is a legal claim for the gig workers at these companies to make that their labor helped “create the value” at the companies that replace them.

I'd assume that you'd be waiving any legal claim they might have when they sign the ToS or w/e. I mean, in all fairness, they are getting paid to perform these actions and be recorded. What more would they have any claim for anyway? A percentage based on the times their anonymized playthroughs were used?

"Well, we've got 1,000 people and each played 100 games of Go. We took that 100,000 games and trained a single dataset to play against itself." User is 1 player of 1,000. Company makes 20,000,000 and sets aside 25% (magically) for paying back the original people. Those people now get $5000. That $5000 is cool but it's not life changing.

EDIT: It occurs to me that my numbers could be skewed. This could be significant if they only used 100 people or so, I guess. My point wasn't necessarily to shoot down the notion just to discuss it. What would the person have a claim to be it legal or otherwise?
Is this operating at the libc level, or is it running the Ubuntu glibc package and emulating at the syscall level?

If the latter, it would be interesting to see how things like futex are implemented.
> If we provide a way to treat Tor differently by applying a rule to whitelist the network's IPs we couldn't think of a justifiable reason to not also provide a way to blacklist the network as well.

Yes there is: "we don't provide censorship as a service".
If you are looking to learn about something new, Cousera, edX... are great. I tried them before but I'm not sure if their certificates are worth anything.
And OS X, and BSD, and OS2 and AmigaOS and probably one million other OSses.
> "Job interviews are difficult by design."

In the tech-sector at least they're not "difficult by design." They're obtuse and absurd due to laziness and lack of rigor applied to the problem space by individual firms as well as the aggregate marketplace.

Almost nobody applies anything remotely resembling a scientific method or includes the massive body of research available in sociology, psychology, and/or neurology for understanding even their own needs as a company trying to accomplish something, let alone building an effective social group (i.e. team) capable of cooperating together to get there given whatever that organization's constraints are.
I thought the new "darling" is Zenefits
> It means I need to install Visual Studio.

I mean, sure, but (unless things have changed dramatically in the many years since I was a Windows dev) you don't have to do anything more than install VS. The compilers and nmake can be used without opening the GUI. IIRC, you can feed a VS project file (or -I'm pretty sure- a solution file) to nmake and get the same result you'd get from loading the GUI and pressing build.
Apply for jobs you've no intention of taking if offered. Use them as practice. Use them to toughen up. Knowing in advance that it doesn't matter, and that you'll never see or hear from the people involved ever again, and that the final outcome - that nothing will change and you're risking nothing - might be liberating enough that you can do it.
I dont think so, it is the minimal system, Linux emulation is not needed.
Is this a sign that Windows is moving towards a linux kernel?
I'm fairly ignorant in terms of the science behind this, and one thing in the article raises some questions for me:

> Sea level has risen a lot — 10 to 20 meters — in warm
> periods in the past

Presumably this is in the distant, pre-industrial past. If so, what caused the warm period and, assuming sea level subsequently dropped afterwards, what caused the warm period to end? Other than human activity contributing to the current warm period, why is it different than previously?
OK, but what's much more common is companies interviewing candidates 'for fun'
It's unbelievable how many companies will spend their time talking to every available developer in town, and end up never hiring anyone.
The flip side of this is that most companies are "garbage" as you put it, and a lot of them simply do cargo cult imitations of the more popular companies. If a startup is saying they're going to disrupt the online vegan running shoes market and then tells me they have to weed out the "80% garbage applicants" with some parochial trivia about binary search trees that let's be honest none of us has given a shit about since we passed the exam on it in undergrad, then the code test absolutely is a big red flag to nope on out of there.

Since so many jobs are just shitty talent wasters, and you are just treated horribly, given poor equity terms, not paid what you're worth, etc., it unfortunately means that unless you have special knowledge that some particular job is non-shitty (like a trusted recommendation) then you're just better off erring on the side of nope.
I'm curious about this as well; wouldn't an appropriate filter for uBlock Origin eliminate the need for Privacy Badger, except to detect new things to block?
I don't have an opinion yet on a carbon tax or politics, but I can't agree with oil-producing countries suffering a double loss in lower sales and lower prices. The overly-simplified version of supply-vs-demand states that with constant supply, prices are lowered to raise demand. Thus, it's only a single loss there.
Not for big extraction corporations that have a lot of surface area to fire at. The downside risk is just too great.

This being said, the combination of an African-style failed state (or outright kleptocracy) and rich natural resources creates a special case of the Resource Curse.

When it comes to a stable legal system and low corruption, Americans were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
Do employees at your company write all their code on whiteboards, without access to documentation, the internet and etc. And then when they have perfected the code they transfer it to a computer? If not, then you are not really interviewing for the right skills are you?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390439
I think this is the misunderstanding: I did not say to adopt the majority opinion. I said to consider the majority opinion being different as evidence that one's methodology needs to be reexamined.

People who call themselves skeptics and disagree with mainstream scientific consensus hardly ever consider the issue. How are so many thousands of scientists so incompetent at evaluating their own data, but me, the armchair reviewer, knows what's up?
Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "replay attack" in this context, but the secure enclave does in fact provide protection against brute forcing passcodes. It is detailed in Apple's security whitepaper (see p12). Basically, you have to give the passcode to the secure enclave to get the data decryption key which is derived from the device-specific key contained therein. And the enclave enforces time delays between wrong guesses.

If you can envision a procedure for hacking around this I would love to hear it.
How VR Will Shape the Way We Watch Sports
> ...but data should be accessible.

This is the most important part of the whole thing. Where do you draw the line, is everybody legally obligated to comply with such demands? Well obviously those directly involved with whatever crime is being investigated are exposed to such compulsion, but so are third party service providers. But in the case of these third parties, there are a lot of laws dictating their part in great detail. For its part as a service provider, Apple supplied the user data it had. What the FBI has done is declare loud and clear that they'd like to expand those subject to compulsion to include anyone it designates, for any purpose that isn't explicitly illegal, thanks to All Writs. Now in this case they say, for the victims, they're being exhaustive in pursuing what is most likely a dry hole. But what is to stop them from wielding such authority over every manufacturer of everything that the subject of the investigation touched? How about compelling every luckless individual who lives along the subject's morning commute to turn over all video and image files because it might help them in their investigation. For as crazy as that sounds, consider the fact that there is no logical distinction between any of those scenarios.

> I don't think labor should be forced ... they should have been forced to choose...

You can't believe both of those, because compulsion eliminates choice. That would be like saying "I'm not forcing you to run, it is your choice, but if you don't then I'll kill you".

> ...they want from Apple is information, I.e. the key.

No, they want on demand access - they don't care about any key. Even if Apple were to get rid of the key, there is historical precedent for the state pulling some insane precrimes logic in order to expand authority - see the commerce clause. I'll explain that reference briefly: the federal government has explicitly defined authority over commerce that occurs between states, but it was reasoned that commerce within a state could potentially result in the absence of interstate commerce, therefor the federal government has authority over all commerce... Now imagine that reasoning being applied to a manufacturer who doesn't have the capability to, but could if it wanted, respond to a court order. Oh, and lets not forget the clipper chip, a nice indicator of the state's position on forcing manufacturers to backdoor consumer products in the interested of potential investigations.
While there will definitely be downturns and upswings in the future I doubt we see the kind of tech wasteland that we saw from 2002-2004. Software/the internet/computers are just too involved in today's society and we can't even keep up with the demand right now.

The only way I see software engineering (or at least quality SE) not being a scarce resource in the near future is if we dramatically rehaul our education system within the next 10 years, dramatically increase programmer efficiency, and potentially invent an AI to do basic CRUD style work. Even then though, we're going to need legions of programmers to maintain the crap we're building today, and most of that will require highly specialized and rare knowledge (I, for one, can't wait until node.js programmers are the new FORTRAN maintainers).

Honestly, in the future the only true full time job might be being a programmer. This is probably not a good thing for people like us, as everyone else will be free to pursue their interests while we still bang our heads at syntax errors.
IronMQv3 Hits Dos Commas: 1M Msg/sec
>> As far as we know, neural networks indeed are at the core of human intelligence.

Right.

Quick intro to neural models, for the only very slightly mathematically inclined.

Neural networks solve this equation:

Y = W ⋅ X

Where X a matrix of inputs to a function ƒ, W a matrix of its coefficients and Y
a matrix of its outputs.

Once that's done once for all N instances of X in our dataset, a time period which we term an epoch, Y is used to calculate a measure of error, typically mean squared error:

MSE = 1/N ∑ (Y' - Y)²

Where Y' the true value of Y that we're trying to approximate. This is repeated
until the cows come home, or until the network has converged, whichever comes
home first (er, hint).

And that's neural networks in a nutshell. There's nothing much more complicated
than that (er, in theory), there's no magic and certainly nothing "like the
brain" in them at all. They're just optimisation over systems of functions. We
learned how to solve systems of functions with matrix multiplication when we
were at high school. I'm pretty sure we did - I've personally repressed the
memory but I'm pretty sure I did once have it.

Why do people insist on calling them "neural"? Who the fuck knows. Way back in
the 50s, the perceptron was based on a model of neural activation, where a
neuron "fires" when its electrical charge crosses over a threshold. This was
originally represented with a binary step function (the very one used in
Perceptron classification). That was, at the time, deemed to be "a good model"
of neural activation. A good model, my foot. Soon people moved on to sigmoid
functions which are "a better model" of neural activation. Whatever.

I've also heard it that, say, conv nets (convolutional neural networks) are
"like the brain", presumably because if you squint at the layer connection
diagrams long enough, conv nets start to look a bit like idealised models of the parts of the brain that handle vision.
But if you squint long enough, everything starts to look like everything else.
Hell, you might suggest that neural networks are based on the effin Tree of Life
from Cabala, and Geoff Hinton is Alistair Crowley reincarnated.

The whole "brain" thing is just an abstraction. You should not read too much
into it. And don't listen to the people who try to convince you neural networks
are magic- they're not. It's high school maths and a lot of very expensive
processing power.

P.S. If my notation doesn't make sense to you, you may need to use a different font in your browser; sorry about that.
Hi! Good catch. We're fixing the links in the docs. In the meantime:

https://github.com/Microsoft/ProjectOxford-ClientSDK/tree/ma...
https://github.com/Microsoft/ProjectOxford-ClientSDK/tree/ma...
https://github.com/Microsoft/ProjectOxford-ClientSDK/tree/ma...

Uh, and "real coders" also use Python... :)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11387212
Corruption is diabolical, and the worst form of tax - one where no benefit from the tax flows to individuals other than the fixers.

But with climate change, I find it hard to get upset about any corruption that causes the price of oil to rise. The current situation of rock bottom oil prices encourages more consumption and reduces the incentives to improve energy efficiency. It makes it harder for renewables to compete.

Bring on more corruption. Let oil prices boil over.