skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the feedback!

I've done some web development mostly PHP and such. Then I've studied computer science for three years so I've some insight in the academic formal world as well. On my spare time I do c programming and Linux stuff.
another dupe... please check before submitting! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418
<tears of joy>
It's not a VM ... it's natively running on Win10
</tears of joy>
> Widespread corruption is yet another issue hanging over our civilization which we've never had to deal with before in our history.

I do disagree with that. It may be true for somebody living at the US and a few more countries that used to be more honest, but in general, corruption was always about as widespread as it is now.

You are seeing a lot of it recently because it is getting uncovered. It is even hard to find a corruption scandal that is new (but I don't speech as many languages), and has not been going on since forever. And corruption getting uncovered is a good thing - it is how it ends.
That's being pedantic, honestly. Yes, technically Linux is only the kernel and technically running the Ubuntu run-time on a different kernel isn't running Linux.

However, "Linux" is almost always a reference to GNU tools and the Linux Kernel. It may not be semantically accurate, but take that up with the same people that made literally mean both itself and its opposite.
Something I'm starting to realize with all these AI APIs is how difficult it is to evaluate and compare the results.

How do you know their algorithms are better than the competition? The marketing buzzwords are all there. "Powerful algorithms", "never seen anything comparable" etc.

The worst part is the algorithms might work well with certain data sets but fail miserably with others.
Depends on what you're debugging.

Desktop apps w/ C/C++ -- IDE based debugger (Visual Studio, GDB w/ a front end, ADB) print / logging statements

Embedded C -- IDE Debugger (Green Hills, ARM DS-5, IAR, Eclipse w/ remote GDB, etc) GPIO ports, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, etc)

Apps -- ADT / ADB, print / logging statements

Python, bash, sh, .bat scripts -- print / logging statements

As many others have mentioned, having a consistent bug reproduction methodology is vital, a strong mental model of the SW and its various components is important, and a willingness to dive deep and question assumptions is critical. Ie don't always expect your compilers or various OSes to be infallible.
But directly behind the rocket is where most of the energy goes.

I'd also be curious how the tether would avoid getting cooked by the rocket exhaust. I think a long mast, putting the riders in front of a large mass of fuel, would be much simpler.

But you're right, it is a lot easier to design an ultra-light, super-strong tether than a giant mast.
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING tutorial
I'm interested to hear Digital Asset's explanation of why a blockchain is an appropriate technical tradeoff in an industry with a central clearinghouse.
Awesome idea – lundí luxury smart-boots, crossing the wearables “ugly” chasm
Cloudflare gets no benefit from the captcha, so if they were useless as you claim, they have no incentive to keep them.
Disclaimer, I wrote the article.

> I'm not fond of the implication at the end that scraping is justifiable because old websites are dinosaurs without APIs, and those websites are jerks for not doing so, and therefore scraping is the moral thing to do.

It was not my intention to give that implication. The main implication behind CityBikes is that public services should already provide this information since, well, it is a public service. On the same line, a private company providing a public service should already do so. See motives [1].

> I've scraped my share of BuzzFeed data and Foursquare data to make data visualizations (with the latter explicitly saying "don't scrape" in their Terms). But if either one told me to stop and take down my results, I would not contest, since data is what drives the Internet ecosystem.

Same as CityBikes is doing. If we receive a cease and desist, we remove their service from our API. As for Foursquare, I do not see Foursquare as a public service. Your taxdollars at work, and all that.

I tried to keep the article balanced but maybe it wasn't clear. There are many transportation companies willing and happy to be scraped, or looking forward to provide their information for people to reuse [2].

[1]: https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/03/30/web-scraping-to-crea...

[2]: http://nabsa.net/current-members/
IBM is already selling an automated bot that can rplace a level I support questionaire by chat or voice and saw something similar in use (but not the IBM idk how well that works) so at least you get a real, compelling case for it and it is not just up in the air
We have already beaten the turing test multiple times, each time making the test more complicated than how it was originally designed. We have now moved on to the supposedly better chinese room test.
Unfortunately as far as I know the text selection API is still broken on mobile Safari. At least as of a few weeks ago the JS events associated with force touch seem to randomly wipe out the text selection, so even if you can now theoretically copy stuff to the clipboard it's largely irrelevant if users can't actually select text in the first place.
Thanks, we will definitely implement it! If you would like, send me an email so I can tell you once it's ready.
I think Canonical thought helping Microsoft was good for Canonical, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
# When you are working on your macbook sitting in cafe and you have to go pee,
# you need some way to guard you machine.

This script is a great idea, but to me the cost/benefit of leaving the machine on the table is simply too high. There is no way I would ever consider leaving the machine unattended in a public place for any length of time.
This combined with the 3 new bot management platforms showed from the latest YC batch makes me think I should start learning a bit more about bots... seems like they're coming pretty fast.
Or possibly because the jobs are going to eastern Europe/India. Some very clever and effective people out there and, you know, the Internet.

But seriously, 50% drop out? We should export OFSTED. That'll sort them (I work as a teacher).
While the SDK is open source (in the sense that you can read the source code), Microsoft isn't actively accepting significant contributions according to their Contributing.md, which is somewhat disappointing.

Any bots you build on Microsoft's framework as far as I can tell are also locked into a closed Microsoft-controlled system. Just because it's readable on Github and pushes messages to Slack doesn't really mean that it's open-source in the way we've come to expect from Linux, etc.

I'm building a free-as-in-speech alternative.
Of course, but a great team can adapt their product to meet the market demands and will execute well. A poor team, on the other hand, likely cannot come up with a great product or, if they can, will execute poorly. After all, if they have a great product and execute well then, by definition, they're a great team.
Free during public beta... and then what? Rather just know the pricing model outright.
Will rendering Unicode characters still be a complete disaster? Will I need to care about which "code page" or whatever is being used (not that that ever seemed to help)?
I want this app! I guess it's still a research project though.
The cynic in me sees this from the opposite direction.

Microsoft has already gone out of it's way to take control of the hardware and kernel (think secure boot on intel and the _total_ control on arm). They're now allowing you the privilege of running some posix userland applications (which have no real power) so people don't complain too much when they make it impossible to boot a custom kernel on newer hardware.

"What do you mean you can't boot linux? Don't be silly, you're already running ubuntu!"
I experimented with this [1] using GPU acceleration. Last I was working on it, phones required you to manually enable WebGL in the browser and even then I couldn't get it to work on mobile. I shelved it, though I probably could have gotten it working.

[1] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/excredo/hashrate.html
Dell's Inspiron line is my go-to for portable workstations. Run Linux straight on them, or if GNOME/KDE aren't your cup of tea just run Windows and put your distro of choice in a VM (I just run Fedora on everything but my gaming PC, personally).

I'm personally using a Dell XPS 13 (2014), soldered in RAM, but I did buy an ultraportable and 8GB is more than sufficient to do my all my personal work on. Work supplied me with a Lenovo W540 that is substantially more flexible, but it weighs as much as a couple bricks and I usually just leave it at home on the dock.
Our Work Developing a Holographic Workstation for Citi Using Microsoft HoloLens
> If you haven't watched it since HS like most people, I'd encourage you to watch it again.

Just did, available on Amazon Prime for streaming. Just as good as I remembered.

> There is nothing noble about hiding a heart condition in order to become a crucial member on an expedition that will almost certainly kill you.

There's something disgusting about telling people what they can and can't do without actually testing whether they can do it or not.

You see, when you test actual ability, you're confirming an almost infinite amount of data points all at once. Your picture is complete and no understanding is necessary. It's a binary proposition. You either can or can't.

When you test for a genetic disposition ... it's just that. A disposition. You're testing only a single data point. That data point might be very important ... or it might not. Either way, it's a terrible way to determine actual ability.

He wasn't negligent in the slightest. It was all the useless genetic testing. They should have been testing his ability. If they did that, there wouldn't be a movie or anything to be outraged over.

> On top of that the distopia just ended up feeling shallow.

The movie is over 20 years old. I'd say it held up as well as could be expected.

> We're never given any reason as to why society drops any pretense at meritocracy just because of the availability of genetically optimized babies

Laziness. Why go through the trouble of testing ability, which is very hard ... vs pressing a button on a computer?

> The most major discrimination is that a space flight agency doesn't want an astronaut with a high probability of dieing mid mission.

The movie made it clear that this discrimination was pervasive in every walk of life ... which makes sense. Why hire a genetically inferior person if you can determine that through the press of a button?

> That's not only perfectly reasonable it's also what we do now.

No we don't. We do actual physical testing. We set up physical parameters that the person must clearly demonstrate. I mean, that's why they call it a physical.

> Vincent never would be allowed on a NASA space flight anymore than he should have been allowed on the GATTACA flight.

No, he wouldn't. You're right. Because he's myopic. Which by the way, is not a genetically inherited defect, although it was thought to be at the time the movie was made.

But if the assumption that genetics played a part in myopia was perpetuated in the future as it is in the movie, that would be a truly sad state of affairs.

You would have people being discriminated against for no valid rational reason. That's the point of this movie. Genetics very rarely determine a certainty. Merely a probability.

> Gattaca is a film everyone should see if only to understand that the lay person has no business weighing in on issues of scientific ethics.

Wow. I don't think scientists should have a monopoly on ethics. Pass.
In my perspective, this Linux subsystem are very useful for running server components like redis, or nginx which doesn't have official windows build. So you can develop server apps which will run on Linux prod, but develop it with Windows
So a gene goes from a huge handicap to a small handicap. That's not ruining the gene pool. Medicine doesn't even remove the selection pressure, let alone apply pressure in the wrong direction.

And you're probably wrong about saying you'd be dead; why did your ancestors survive it?
It's not all shiny and integrated, but you can export a gpx or kml from Overpass Turbo:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/fly

(click 'Run' and then 'Export')

(I think there is a fair chance you are aware of it, posting for other readers too)

uMap mentioned elsewhere on this page has support for some formats output directly by Overpass API, which powers Overpass Turbo. Overpass Turbo has javascript for converting those formats to KML and GPX. So in uMap, you can generate a layer by pasting in the query, no need to push it through kml or gpx.
Well, that's what we thought before the ShellShock vulnerability ended up being a major security worry due to all of the places that bash scripts end up being used.
In the US, there is no copyright protection for "facts" on their own. However, a compilation/database of facts can have copyright protections based on a 3 part test[0].

1. the collection and assembly of pre-existing material, facts, or data;
2. the selection, coordination, or arrangement of those materials; and
3. the creation, by virtue of the particular selection, coordination, or arrangement of an original work of authorship.

But specifically there is no protection for the underlying facts themselves, and there is no "sweat of the brow" doctrine. So scraping the data, and rearranging the underlying facts into your own arrangement/organization is almost always not copyright infringement. However, if that data is categorized in some non-trivial way, and you keep that organization, then that is likely to be copyright infringement.

However, if what you're scraping are not "facts", but some creative works, such as blog posts, product descriptions, etc, then it is likely to be copyright infringement.

Then on top of that, even if there is copyright infringement, other defenses such as a license to use the data, or fair use may apply.

[0] - http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/compilation.htm
This makes sense. The tight knit NeXT community used the "app" meme regularly staring at least in 1990 if not sooner.
We did a lot of work on PowerShell startup in this next release - I think you'll be happy.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
> So do Cygwin and/or MSYS emulate the fork()

Yes. That's one thing we spent considerable engineering effort on in this first version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux: We implement fork in the Windows kernel, along with the other POSIX and Linux syscalls.

This allows us to build a very efficient fork() and expose it to the GNU/Ubuntu user-mode apps via the fork(syscall).

We'll be publishing more details on this very soon.
So, uh. I did this! Crudely. In 2010.

http://cowlark.com/lbw/

It's a Linux syscall translator for Windows. It works well enough to run a Debian userland, although it's got so many holes and rough edges that I would never, ever, ever suggest using it for anything other than a stunt.

It uses Interix to do most of the heavy lifting, so all LBW does is to translate from Linux syscalls to Interix syscalls; so we get a Unix filesystem and user permissions and sockets and fork etc for free. (Interix was great. I'm glad they're bringing it back from the dead.) Unfortunately not all the system calls directly map onto each other; so Interix has a native fork(), but Linux emulates with clone(). I couldn't make threads work.

A few of the biggest problems were:

- the Windows page size is 64kB; the Linux page size is 4kB. The ld.so loader will try to map two bits of executable within the same 64kB boundary, and, of course, this doesn't work on Windows. I crudely hack around it by allocating pages of RAM and copying things. Write-back mapping only works at all if the application lets mmap() pick the address.

- very very very different register usage. glibc on Linux uses gs as a 'pointer' to the current thread's private data area, via a special syscall. Windows resets gs to 0 on every interrupt! I crudely hack around this by intercepting null pointer dereferences, looking at the instruction to see if it was gs, and then reloading it with the right value.

- even then, that syscall sets gs to point at a GTD segment with a size of 2^32; this wraps round the entire address space, which allows very large offsets in gs to be treated as negative numbers. Windows doesn't let you create GTD segments. It only allows LTD segments, and it caps the segment limit to the end of the user address space, so this trick won't work. I crudely hack around this by intercepting segmentation violations, looking at the instruction to see it it's a [gs+negative number] dereference, and then binary patching the executable to use a different instruction.

- glibc is horrible and undocumented. There's a big pile of key-value strings pushed onto the stack above the environment when the process is initialised, containing various magic numbers. ld.so will just crash if you get this wrong. I spent a lot of time reverse engineering the ld.so source code to figure out what these were and how to set them up.

It was all vile and horrible, but it worked surprisingly well (i.e., it worked, which was surprising).

Using the NT kernel's personality system to implement Linux syscalls natively is totally the right thing to do; that's obviously what they're doing here.

I would love to know about the internal Microsoft politics which made releasing this possible. I wonder how long it's been brewing? I did LBW in about a month of evenings; the core logic wasn't hard. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this hasn't been floating about inside Microsoft for years.
Do you know overpass turbo [1]? You can use it to make a query over an area and export it to a GeoJSON file, which you can directly import to MapHub.

[1] https://overpass-turbo.eu/
The return of text adventures! How is typing out a request any better than tapping a button? Isn't the magic of AI in predicting a button press, rather than making us write out or speak the request?
Show HN: Color Contrast – verify accessibility on iOS
What are your top recommendations for readings/lectures/challenges for those interested in the topic?
I would say no, especially if your mac had an i7 and reasonable amounts of ram.
Ethereum Solidity Available in Visual Studio
> The mistake here is assuming that things on HN reach the top solely because of quality in the first place. After all, YC companies get to insert their job ads in the front page whenever they want.

I'd never claim that quality is the only reason why things reach the top of HN, but if you're suggesting that we rig it in favor of YC, that's not true. There's no similarity between the job ads and how stories work. That's why we have the job ads to begin with: it's a distinct mechanism, managed by software, and the relation to YC is both public and always the same.

Btw, YC startups don't get to "insert their job ads in the front page whenever they want". There's a queue, it doles out one ad at a time, startups that haven't had an ad recently get to go first, and no one gets more than one a week. That seems pretty even-handed to me, but if you have a suggestion for making it fairer, please tell us.
Unless I can fire up windbg and point them at these binaries (which would involve teaching dbghelp to read DWARF, and be useful in its own right), I still don't see much of a point. I can always just use a lightweight VM, and paravirtualized cross-VM filesystem access already exists.
Not on Hacker's News. Y'all got Reddit for your smear campaigns.
WW3 OBAMA CLINTON WANT SYRIA DESTROYED FOR ISRAEL
It's much worse if you don't have ANY sort of degree, despite having skills.

I once applied for an internal job at a major options exchange to go from NOC to app support and managed to get an interview with HR. When I got up there, the HR person looks at my resume, notices a lack of degree and says "Sorry, we require that you have a degree." I quit about a month later to do a near identical job for higher pay and aced it. Their loss.

Lesson learned? If a company requires a degree, permanently refuse to work with them in the future, since, for some reason, they love calling back a year later with a great opportunity I can "learn" at.
Don't we often transfer risk of death while buying certain products?

Doesn't my enjoyment of king crab rely on transferring the risk of death while fishing in the arctic from myself to poor fishermen in Alaska?
Doesn't any diamond I buy rely on conflict or slavery?
Swallowing? No. Supporting, yes! We want Windows to be your home - the best place to build apps for all the platforms and all the devices. Period.

In case you've not noticed, this is a very, VERY different Microsoft, one I re-joined recently precisely to work on this very feature! :D
What article on TrueCrypt?
To Woo Apple, Foxconn Bets $3.5B on Sharp
You pretty much nailed it :)
I didn't until a few minutes ago... Sounds like this'll do what's needed. One thing I'm not clear on is if it updates as the OSM data changes?
> For the record, neither service did; in fact, both tried to recruit me as a result of the visualizations. The difference is that I am not using the data to create a direct competitor that could cause them to lose business.

I do not understand that implication. How is providing bike share information creating a competitor? I can't run a bike sharing service.
Switch to jQuery?
This is a very welcome development. The Bot Framework and Connector take care of lots of plumbing that bot developers otherwise would have to develop and run themselves and would (theoretically) allow developers focus on what their bots valuable.

All of this under MIT license - thank you, Microsoft!
Would you rather using Bash/command line or buttons? Some people prefer text for control and not an interface.
No, it's supporting all of the linux system calls in the Windows kernel. Epoll, fork, exec, etc. It's a totally different implementation than cygwin.
They released an ISO for Update 1, so chances are there will be one for Update 2.

In the meantime, you can download the online installer [1] and run

vs2015.2.exe /Layout

to launch the downloader, which should create a folder which contains everything that you would find on the update ISO. (EDIT: This seems to result in a 4.53 GiB download, so definitely smaller than the 6.95 GiB full install ISO.)

[1]: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=691129
(disclaimer, I'm a Microsoft employee and this is only my opinion).

There's an important distinction which often don't see discussed when this topic comes up: It can be very dangerous to install a program on your machine, but an 'app' comes with some assurance. People often think of the app store as a method for MS to grab your money, but in my opinion it fixes many of the installation/deployment problems that have existed on windows since... 95?

'Programs' typically require an MSI for installation. You'd better know, and trust, the MSI before you give it the required administrative privileges it needs to run, because a rogue MSI can absolutely own your machine.

On the other hand, 'Apps' declare what they are going to do to your machine via the manifest, so you kind of know what you are getting into before your install. The apps are sandboxed, so they have limited ability to tamper with your machine, and they can be uninstalled in a more uniform fashion.

In short, I feel much better telling my Grandma that she can install an 'App', but i'm much less confident telling her that it's ok to install a program via Installer.MSI.
Interesting Data Driven Healthcare App
Hi - I'm the engineering manager of the team and thanks for the suggestion and feedback. We appreciate it because feedback guides our roadmap (and hiring, p.s. we are hiring!) - keep it coming (-:
- Jonathan Wolter, Engineering Manager Square Developer Platform
Great recommendation! Thanks for pointing me to it. :)
What happens when crypto is banned and the 'terrorists' have a copy of openPGP.js or sjcl.js saved somewhere?