skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much China would pay for a database full of identities and their respective facial appearance data?
There is a very good essay titled "Graduate School in the Humanities - Just Don't Go" that gives a really excellent description of the mindset that exists when young people go to graduate school. This described me well when I was floating around in my early to mid 20s. I enrolled in a doctoral program in industrial engineering and (ended up leaving with a masters) rather than humanities, but still, I see a lot of myself in what this article describes.

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the-Huma/448...

All this is a bit less applicable to some fields. I've heard that employment is good PhDs for CS and some other engineering fields - but then again, so is employment with an MS or BS. Economics may be a good field for a PhD.

One other factor is that getting a graduate degree from a US based university can be a path to immigrate to the US. There really aren't many options for people who don't have family reunification as an option, so going to grad school in a STEM field in particular may have value that isn't captured in pay relative to fields that don't provide this path to the same extent.

The article mentions that enrollment in PhD programs hasn't declined like it has for law schools and historically hasn't been a path to immigration. One way to measure this would be to see if there has been a substantial decline in enrollment in PhD programs from people who already have the right to live in and work in the US.
Simple Graph Shows How Solar Power Will Save You Money Over Time
What the heck!? You're right. That's crazy. I wonder why the web framework designer thought that was necessary.
Illegally?
My resume harvested by oncontracting.com very suspecious operation
Doesn't look like a startup or a legit business. I sent an email to info @ oncontracting and no response.

Quick search on google shows a bunch of pdf files in a php directory...

https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=pdf+site:oncontracting.com

I seriously doubt their site is secure and can't help but think, how easy it is to harvest data but forget about the security basics.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Memory Allocators and Love the Unikernel
Regulators Don't Want Bankers to Be Paid for Taking Risk
I can't find ARA in the schedule :(
Incorrect. Your source [1]monsanto.com is their PR.

The Schmeisers did not use Roundup and so owed Monsanto no money - ruled the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004. (Schmeiser vs Monsanto) - but their unpatented seeds did belong to Monsanto.

It will be interesting to see how this is decided when plants have genes from multiple IP holders.
Screw Java, let's use Jekyll
Why SMS is a better platform than Facebook Messenger
The IMF typically determines the developing country status based on HDI, and when countries graduate to developed status.
You have to look at these things in terms of the alternatives. You're welcome to not participate in the credit system, I didn't for some 8-9 years in my twenties. I simply didn't get any loans, credit cards, nothing that required a credit check. Now I'm happy to have access to credit because it makes my life easier and opens doors for me.

Once I was ready to start, I found all of my old debts and things had fallen off my report. The agencies knew nothing about me. It took about a year with a Capital One card to rebuild, now I have three cards and a new car, for a while I was shopping for a condo. (ultimately decided against it)

You can't have these things without a consumer credit industry, nobody's going to entrust financial instruments like mortgages and credit cards to random blokes coming in off the street. The alternative isn't a world in which credit reporting doesn't exist, the alternative is a world in which none of the things credit reporting gives you access to exist either.

You can live in that world today. Stop paying your bills, let your credit cards go to collections, ignore the phone calls until you can change your number and move away. That's exactly what I did when I was 21. My only regret really is that I didn't run up bigger credit card balances or buy a nicer car.

Credit reporting exists because lots of people are like I was when I was 21.
i hacked facebook and someone saw me hacking and siad why are you hacking and so that's how i hacked facebook
Always choose self hosting. Not only will you learn a lot about operations and proper hardware design, servicing, and redundancy, but you will have maximum control.
A room that you want to leave, but can't, is usually called a Prison. Escape the room, already!
If you want to extend mankind's understanding, you first need to understand what mankind now knows.

If you want to be night manager at Wendy's, you don't need any higher ed.

And then there's a lot in between.

I suspect that most PhD candidates have aspirations that lean toward the former.
Not necessarily, they might not own the tool, just paid for someone to use it on the phone.
How to Be More Productive
Matt Taibbi wrote about this in his book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap [1].

Enron was probably the last big corporate take-down by the government.

From an interview http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/15/who_goes_to_jail_matt_...

But at the bottom of it, there was this thing that he [Eric Holder]
laid out called the "collateral consequences doctrine."
And what "collateral consequences" meant was that if
you’re a prosecutor and you’re targeting one of these big
corporate offenders and you’re worried that you may
affect innocent victims, that shareholders or innocent
executives may lose their jobs, you may consider other
alternatives, other remedies besides criminal
prosecutions—in other words, fines, nonprosecution
agreements, deferred prosecution agreements.
And again, at the time, it was a completely sensible
thing to lay out. Of course it makes sense to not always
destroy a company if you can avoid it. But what they’ve
done is they’ve conflated that sometimes-sensible policy
with a policy of not going after any individuals for any
crimes. And that’s just totally unacceptable.

1. http://smile.amazon.com/Divide-American-Injustice-Age-Wealth...
Prince is dead at 57
Pretty sure modifying copies of Windows so that you are circumventing the EULA constitutes a crime in of itself.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the basic premise of this article and say that app performance matters more than developer performance.

Improving the sign-up funnel speed on our app by one second resulted in a 11% increase in signups. People are impatient and lazy, and everything you do to improve app performance will improve sign ups, retention, app store reviews and the perceived quality of your app.

The point isn't to get apps or new features out as quickly as possible, it's to make a quality product and the speed of your app is critical to that.
It's rather like part of your civic responsibilities as a citizen. Like jury duty.
I think the implication is that the Yakuza have the relevant authorities in their pocket.
That would be an instance of fallacious reification[1]. Legal realism would say that the law is not enforced based on whether or not you obeyed the speed limit. The cop's whim, bias, and whatever organizational pressures bear down on them all contribute to your ticket. The statute itself is only a small part of the law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
> Is there any reason to believe that this hack accomplished this?

You mean besides the fact that the FBI guy said it was worth it? You don't expect them to publish the intel they got from the phone before being able to act on it, no?
Developing iOS 9 Apps with Swift (Stanford CS193P 2016)
This new feature comes courtesy of a deal Uber struck with a Chinese facial recognition startup, Face++. It’s currently in beta, and will be part of the drivers’ app in China next month.

Does China have to pay for something it already owns?
> by all accounts, received nothing of value for the money

How can you know that?
They might already have it. The NSA, on the other hand...
I suspect there is a hidden variable here: the degree to which management is embracing "new rules". All of these declines seem to have started before ad-blocking-blocking. All of the development effort and management energy that went into blocking didn't go into content or marketing. A company who is losing the content game is exactly the kind of company who would try to win through content controls.

And in the case of the Washington Post, the reason they only "experimented" is because Jeff Bezos is not that kind of thinker. He likes change, and doesn't mind reorienting around new rules. If anything he sees them as opportunities.

These choices don't happen in a vacuum. They look like a proxy for cultural issues to me.
In MemSQL Powerstream, we run queries against MemSQL for events which return in a couple of milliseconds. These queries are run continuously thus they are able to provide the front-end with events as they happen. At this time we do not have in-MemSQL live query support, but given enough interest it could be something we consider.
And because it wasn't their own money.
Honestly - is it? Maybe the reasons I practice fighting games all day is because I desperately need a new toaster.
Thanks! We've tried to put together all the info we've gathered in our experience working with remote teams :) Any feedback is appreciated!
Thanks. I'm not that up on how things like this are usually reported, so it looked odd to me.
The most interesting ATAP-related news so far this year is its director moving to Facebook.

I worked previously on an ATAP project when I was a university postdoc (much of the engineering work gets farmed out to universities and subcontractors). Eventually I began wondering why I was working fifty hours a week for Google on a postdoc salary. It's a strange arrangement to wind up in.
If they know what to fix. FBI aren't idiots to tell them.
It's fine by me and expected behavior. Nice job - very useful.
Hardware Hacking: Learn Electronics and Soldering via Legend Forrest Mims'
> Specifically, I live in the UK and one of the complaints law enforcement has is that US companies can (and do) totally ignore valid court orders because they don't apply in the US (reddit being an arbitrary concrete example).

A US company (or individual) should absolutely ignore court orders from a non-US court; such courts have no jurisdiction. A "valid" court order necessarily must come from a court with jurisdiction.

Similarly, I'd expect a UK company to ignore US court orders.

(And in both cases, I'd ideally hope the court knows better than to take the case in the first place or to issue such an order.)
I don't buy "scratch-off ticket" analogy. How are those crates with randomized prizes different from a pack of pokemon cards that are randomized with cards with differing value? They are pretty identical in the terms we are talking about.

A failed suite was brought against pokemon in 1999.
[http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/24/nyregion/suit-claims-pokem...]
Why people resist cost-free health
Cool topics, can relate to most of them. Congrats!
I'm not sure how old you are, but nowadays many (most?) employers will do a credit check along with your routine background check.

Dropping out of the system might deny you a job at any large company, which greatly increase the costs of doing so.
Does seem so. I'm impressed, frankly. They've granted much more slack to iOS users than Google does to Android users. Unless I'm missing something. iOS devices are almost yours. Not as much so as a *BSD or Linux box, but better than Android. There is the Apple Store dictatorship. And the black-box radio. But hey.
The core Pinterest experience has really been frustrating to me lately, and a lot of it isn't an issue in the Pinterest platform so much as the absolutely horrendous publisher sites that spam Pinterest with images that show up for my searches.

When I visit these sites with their clickbait images (in this case, "california style landscaping"), my iPad 2 slows to a crawl as the publishers load their 50 million ad tags. Often times the image I clicked in hopes of seeing a larger version doesn't exist, and is just a tiny thumbnail on what is clearly a site with content from Demand Media that is meant to drive ad impressions.

I'd LOVE for Pinterest to do something akin to FB's Instant Articles and control the entire experience (which I'm sure publishers would absolutely hate). If they provided monetization options for publishers like FB does, I could see that being very successful for Pinterest, and a huge improvement in the user experience since they wouldn't be punting people to random websites.
Appreciate it! :)
I bet all citizens of Nagorno-Karabakh also hold perfectly valid Armenian passport.
Which International law is it that grants a private corporation inspection rights in sovereign nations?
I do sometimes wonder what the future people are going to make of the hundreds of thousands of words of argument over en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus.

Mexican-American war had twenty thousand words of discussion over what dash to use, and that knowledge isn't transferable even to other dashes used in title on WP.

Here's 15,000 words on dashes. The result? No concensus.
This almost always leads to broken debugging, which I think is a bad tradeoff.

Most node developers seem to not use a debugger, but I think that's a huge productivity sacrifice.
Its more akin to a company using torrent as their distribution platform, requiring a licensing fee to re-seed the content, and then suing someone for re-seeding or torrenting the file they originally seeded.
It's a terrible argument that one should be able to copyright a plant's genome.
Freelancers VS Agencies: Who Should You Choose for Your Startup?
That's not a fair assumption: a huge number of Python users are using it for some level of data processing and data analysis. And that percentage is growing each day, because Python is a very hot technology in data science.
It's partly to lessen the fees being paid for processing each charge, but also part convenience for the user. We actually implemented a prototype top-up system to see how the user experience would be, and everyone who tried it agreed it was fairly cumbersome so we quickly scrapped that idea. And bundling the payments makes for a cleaner card statement, although that aspect is fairly individual.

As for the volume we would have to do; Stripe for instance charges 30 cents plus 2.9% for each charge, so the first article a user buys per month pretty much covers the flat fee, after that the percentage acts the same regardless of volume.

Great feedback though! Keep up with the questions.
Has anyone compared the surface of the moon over time? We can count how many meteorites have hit the surface since we've been taking pictures of it, and we can also probably assess the actual damage they've caused.
Sure there are always obscure bugs, but if you stick to core JavaScript they are rare. And you can work through them.

If a module is heavily using ES6 and you want to run it on an older runtime you're just toast.
> the alternative is a world in which none of the things credit reporting gives you access to exist either ... you can live in that world today

No, you cannot. The availability of easy credit (based on pervasive surveillance) inflates the prices to the point where saving up and buying outright is no longer option for most people (see: housing and college).
I see two ways to interpret what he said, and I'm kind of appalled at both interpretations:

(1) "We can't afford to pay someone every time we need to bypass security, therefore we need the ability to force third parties to do this work for free": um, OK.

-or-

(2) "Bypassing security takes too much time and effort, therefore we need a backdoor": even more horrifying, even though he's repeatedly denied that this is the endgame.

Edit: typo
Pinterest is a good bet to succeed if it can integrate social commerce into the platform. A lot of E-commerce is going to be done over social media soon, especially fashion.
The QNX shell could easily do remote execution. I worked at a company in the mid-90s (porting Unix software to QNX). My machine had a modem on it, and my boss (the owner of the company) would use it from his computer to dial out---all he had to do was reference the modem device on my computer at his command line.

In fact, you could run a program on a local machine referencing a file on a second machine, pipe the output to a program on a third machine and have that redirect the output to a file on a fourth machine, all from the command line. I don't recall the exact syntax, but it was something like:

cat @2/path/to/large/file | @3/bin/grep 'foo' >@4/tmp/output

(Individual hosts were numbered on a QNX ethernet based network, but the default permmissions were Unix like). All of this was a consequence of the message-based QNX operating system (whether messages were delivered locally or remotely was invisible to programs) but I don't see why something like can't be done today.
Derek Sivers' Book Summaries & Recommendations
I gotta say, Canonical/Ubuntu has a lot of respect in my book for how dependable the distro has been over the years. I've been through my fair share of distros, and one of my employees goes through a new Linux install at least once a week. Ubuntu is one of the few distros that almost always works. Other distros will have one problem or another with this machine or that, but put Ubuntu on there and everything is fine (well, as fine as Linux gets).

A few weeks ago I had to dig up an old 12.04 machine and bring it back to the modern age. Much to my surprise, I was able to upgrade it all the way to 15.10 with minimal hassle. While the normal apt repos were dead for 12.04, Canonical keeps around an archived mirror. So you just edit the sources file to point at the archive, and then you can upgrade from there. Impressive.

Not that Canonical/Ubuntu don't have their warts. The Amazon fiasco, Unity, their cloud services, etc. And at the end of the day it's still Linux, with all the problems that brings. But, all things considered, I rate Ubuntu as the best of the bunch and feel grateful for the gift they give to the community.
No one can patent a plant's genome.

Patents (and copyrights) are on new genetic stacks, because the development, testing, and field trials put into it involves resources (costs).
"Paid clicks for Google were up 29 percent year-over-year for the first quarter"

I'm amazed this trend continues. Page views almost certainly were NOT up 29% yoy. Meaning that clicks are growing faster than page views, in a big way, every single quarter, for years.

That's what sets the investor expectations, but I don't see a way this trend continues forever. There's only so much room for additional ads, ad optimization, etc. At some point, you're as optimized as you can be, and growth becomes solely driven by pageviews.
You could do something like the Rosetta disk, where you just physically engrave the glyphs.

http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

Of course then you need to work out what the language is actually saying, but plain "glyph retrieval" can be done with a desktop microscope and some time. An alien that operates in a roughly human way (has eyes, language, linear writing) would probably understand that it encodes meaning, even if it ends up like Linear A and undecipherable.
This happens in many industries. The government-agriculture revolving door is explored in Food, Inc.
I've had a whole bunch of stuff just work. But if it doesn't, you're stuffed.
Ask HN: Rough estimate on how long it can take to pick up a web stack?
Context: I'm a professional software developer (more than 5 years of professional experience) working mostly on low-level C/C++ developing cross-platform (OSX, Linux and Windows) desktop applications.
I'm currently based in London and I don't feel very enthusiastic about the job market for C++ developers for several reasons[1] and am thinking about changing my "development environment". For someone that stopped learning about web frameworks/libraries a long time ago (~8 years) would it be too hard to pick up the enormous amount of web frameworks, DBs and libraries I keep hearing/reading for back-end development ?

Is 3 to 6 months (full-time) a reasonable amount of time to master some of the current recommended/best web frameworks ?

[1]- I can list them if folks show some interest.
Fiber infrastructure is expensive.
No. Wow. Clarification is not Pedantry.
...used to fuel the next generation of gullible employees.
No, it's akin to someone paying to license software for a year and then continuing to intentionally use it after the contract has expired.

Farmers almost never grow seed crop. You're making generalizations about an industry you don't know much about.
I thought the most interesting news from ATAP (last year) was project Jacquard [1]. It seemed very exciting and promising, but it doesn't seem that the tech has made it to market.

[1] https://www.google.com/atap/project-jacquard/
“The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve. We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it.

“We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” Comey continued. “I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead. “
Surely they can resell them outside the EPAs jurisdiction.
> Patents (and copyrights) are on new genetic stacks, because the development, testing, and field trials put into it involves resources (costs).

Because your business has costs does not justify enacting artificial restrictions.
Just think of how many lives were saved by the data they got off that phone. Oh wait...
Was there a noticeable impact on performance or efficiency?
Last time I was in the area, I stayed at the Domain Hotel in Sunnyvale. About a 15 minute drive to Google and nice enough. And for touristy things: the Computer History Museum just down the road from the Google campus is definitely worth a visit.
I really wish this didn't have to be a subject... it's rather polarizing regardless of any personal opinions. I think that once people get past it, it becomes less of an issue.

It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an environment that is dominated by the other gender... I've done it, and I don't miss it. That said, tech people tend to be more hard headed and opinionated... it's the way things are... it's the matter of business in general. There are issues in that women who adopt similar aggressive behaviors are then more likely to be looked down on by men and women... it's a bit of a no-win situation.

In the end, I think things will progress and work out. There will always be bigots in society, and it's important to not let that inflate into ad hominem attacks, it only breaks things down faster. You cannot correct ignorance with anger, violence and aggression.

On the flip side, though I prefer to work with men, I wouldn't mind seeing a better mix of men and women.
Hard to believe India is at 133. The kind of manufactured news that is peddled by the Mainstream Media in India with no responsibility, I think it should be #1 !!

Also, going through the methodology, I couldn't figure out which Indian languages are included in the survey, so, its quite possible that a major chunk of the Indian media was left out from the survey just because the translations were only in Hindi (thats my assumption).
It's not a tech, and that's sort of the point.

An analogy might be 'designed an actual building - even a warehouse' when talking about an architect.
Yeah, but why is congress criticizing the regulators?
wheeler is awesome.
I "signed up" last week. Nothing yet.