skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that I observed the year I lost two great uncles (one from one side of the family and six months later one from the other) to cancer was how easy it is for the closest family to get very tied up in the logistics and medical side that people weren't really taking as much time to really talk to them. Granted they weren't considered terminal until close to the end.

As the younger nephew, I didn't feel as much responsibility to be involved with the logistics (it felt more awkward to me but I think it was comforting to the children, spouses etc). So instead of joining in on the doctor/prognosis conversations and later the funeral arrangement/what to do with the house stuff, I just sat and talked to my uncles instead.

I had known both of them my entire life but I realized I knew almost nothing about them. All our interactions were just uncle to nephew, family occasions kind of stuff, but by this time I was an adult (just barely), and all the sudden we were just two people talking and I learned more about them in a 20 minute session than the prior 20+ years. Some other family who were on the periphery of the conversation confided later that they regretted not having those moments while they had the chance. I didn't even talk that much, just enough to make it a two way conversation, but I found my uncles both were very at peace but wanted to reminisce and tell stories they probably hadn't told anyone in decades. One uncle told me about joining the military during Korea and having gone through all the training and finally being sent all the way there to have the war end practically the day he got there and he ended up being sent right back and what a strange conflicted experience it was for him.

I've started visiting with my other elderly family a lot more since then and have had some similar conversations that didn't require anyone being terminally ill, but somehow that seems to make those conversations a little easier.

I can definitely agree with the piece, especially about what to say and what not to. I'm not expert by any means, I just did the only thing that felt natural whatsoever: just talk to them like a person and let what happens happen. Granted I had the benefit of the fact that they were well taken care of by their children and others, otherwise it would have been much more difficult.
> From what it sounds like, he wrote and recorded music the way Isaac Asimov wrote.

A more appropariate comparison: He wrote music with a passion and obsession similar to another great, iconoclastic, seminal American musician, Woody Guthrie.
It's not a plugin, it's built into chrome. His joke was about a plugin that enables it permanently for certain people.
I have seen companies try numerous channels of communication with customers, and to me this is the most open, accessible and transparent way of doing it. As consumers we saw a huge shift in communication in the past decade, from human to human to all digital, and I feel strongly that consumers are looking for a more open human experience again. Slack is doing that and Drift is doing it the right way!
I posted the link from Clinton's website to demonstrate that she supports policies that regulate Wall Street. What better source is there? If you're going to accuse Clinton of being bought and paid for by Wall Street execs, you might consider actually reading her proposals to regulate Wall Street first.

As for the article, yes I did read it. And yes, it supports reinstating Glass Steagal but also says "Clinton's plan is the most substantive response to the Great Recession as it actually happened." If that's true (or even close to true), why is it of such overriding significance whether Clinton also supports Glass Steagal, specifically? She doesn't want to reinstate it because she think's it is unnecessary and she has a different proposal that she thinks is better.
> If your software team works on code with lots of binary trees, interview questions about them makes a ton of sense.

Not really, because anyone reasonably competent could be up to speed on tree operations in an afternoon on the job. Interviewing them to see if they already know likely takes more energy than having them learn about them.

That holds true for lots of things. "You say you haven't used GitLab. Too bad: that's what we use so we'll have to hire someone else." "Huh? I'm pretty sure I can figure it out in a couple of hours." "Nope. We need someone ready to hit the ground running."
https://rundexter.com/terms/

No thanks.
That's a super interesting point actually. I'd never thought of the "maxium speed of causality". Thanks for sharing!

We could determine the maximum speed within our terms, but again that doesn't necessarily translate to how things happen in the underlying substrate.

Thought experiment: let's imagine we create our own simulated environment and put a sentient AI into it (which is implemented in the physics of that environment). The AI gets curious and does some experiments and figures out the maximum speed that causality can propagate in it's environment. Suppose the speed of light in the simulation is as fast as the speed of light in our environment. So something takes 1 in the simulation and 1 second in ours. Cool. Now, suppose you and I as the developers put in a 'sleep' call into the event loop or whatever so that the simulation runs at 1/10 the speed of real time. Light in the simulation is now 10 times slower than it was by our clock time. Now the code operates considerably slower - but any entity in the code wouldn't perceive the slowdown because it has slowed down too in the same way.

Same thing - any slowdown in the simulation would not be noticeable to us because it's also a slowdown in us.
It wasn't supposed to be one. I assumed the sentence following this would outline my usual way to acquire products besides amazon.

I wanted to show that even if I had no choice, I wouldn't buy into this.
That shouldn't matter. If the scheme is vulnerable when some company generates a bunch of keys, it is vulnerable whether those keys are deleted or not.
Video Interview with YouTube Star/Rapper Prince Ea
The symbols above? They're English sentences, and they're perfectly clear in context. You're making a category error by trying to treat them as logical propositions, and it's leading you to waste your time on pedantry.
I hope they add R soon.
So what if they are? As long as they don't misrepresent themselves, why not?
I am also no expert, but I am not sure that I agree with MattSteelblade (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550845).

There is certainly such a thing as homomorphic encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption), which allows one to perform transformations on encrypted text without being able to decrypt it. As long as one of the transformations that can be performed is a measure of closeness (which is certainly the case for fully homomorphic encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#Fully_h... )), and as long as you know the ciphertext of the possible numerical responses, then you can read off closeness without being able to decrypt the hash.

The emphasised bit is a drawback, but it demonstrates the theoretical possibility; and, although I don't know of an implementation, nor do I see anything inherently contradictory about a (non-reversible) system designed intentionally to reveal closeness information.
Ah bummer. Yeah check us out - 100% free to get it on your site. Holler if you have any questions on our site.
There's a good Kevin Smith story (though long) about Prince hiring him to make a documentary... Smith basically took time out of his busy schedule because he was star struck, spent a bunch of time with Prince, made a documentary and then asked his assistant what the plan was, when they wanted to release, etc... She laughed and just said essentially that it would never see the light of day and was just going into his vault with all the other stuff.

edit: exodust mentions this below as well
mullah omar was dick cheney with a wig. you should really read up on this stuff.
Let me know how I can help.
He undermines his own point by pointing to dictionaries as an example of something that uses trees. Which suggests that he doesn't know that dictionaries in most languages are implemented as hashes, and hashes are NOT based on trees!

The truth is that interviews should test the skills your job actually requires. For a variety of skills outside of that core, it is valuable to have someone on your team who understands it for other people to go to. But if you're not doing algorithms all the time, you don't need or want everyone to have mastered that.

And I say this as someone who knows algorithms well enough to pass his interview.
Boom. I do ask at least one code it on a white board question usually, and what I don't do is sit back twiddling my fingers and think to myself, he/she gets this or else. I actually don't mind at all when a candidate doesn't know it and asks me for help - provided they've made some good faith effort. That's why we have so many other questions and conversations. By the time I get to the whiteboard stuff, I'm looking for someone to want to engage with me, not an attempt to stump them.
An clicking that link takes you to a talk about MongoDB & MEAN stack... the irony is strong in this one.
Here's one I wrote a while back that has its own RC4 routine in Perl, so no external dependencies needed.

https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public-bin/src/sy...
>The plastic bag ban caused much gnashing of teeth, but it was a basic instance of market failure (nobody pays for the externalities of bag pollution), and people have adapted fine since the ban took effect.

But the ban caused much, much more damage than needed to remedy the externality. If mispricing were the problem being solved, they could slap an appropriate tax on the stores' bags, and then stores would pay it, fold it into prices, implement policies to discourage too many bags, roll their eyes, and move on.

Instead, the bag law means they must explicitly charge the customer for bags; they can't just absorb it into prices (as every store did before).

(And I don't know if you've ever worked as a cashier, but adding another step to every transaction gets old really quick, and holding up a line so someone can dig for a dime because they forgot to ask for one the first time around is ridiculous.)

Furthermore, ten cents is (by any reasonable back-of-the-envelope measure) far more than the magnitude of the externality, and it's not put into a fund to remedy the externaliites, nor can I get the ten cents back when I redeem it and thereby prove that it's not going into some bird's lungs.

This is just like most hastily-considered conservation policies: penny-wise and pound foolish. I'm likewise hounded to cut back on showers, despite them producing far more economic value than uses of water that are basically value-destructive (growing alfalfa) and which get a free pass. Similarly, I get paid nothing for having an ultra-low-carbon lifestyle, while people get large government subsidies to make their already-wasteful lifestyle a little less so.

Yes, it sucks when externalities aren't priced in. But we shouldn't use that justification as carte blanche to overcharge for the wrong ones.
ironic that his reverse function is incorrect.
Doing it on a whiteboard is an academic computer science problem.

Doing it on a computer is more along the lines of a software engineering problem, though still it is largely academic and counter to one of the tenets of good software engineering (that all code is a liability, and thus new/non battle tested code should be avoided whenever possible).
I actually wanted to attend that keynote and now you popup over here. Thought it would be a nice day, some friends / colleagues presenting anyway. Somehow my brain wandered off reading this article thinking what would have happened if you could have presented this blog post as a keynote. How would the audience react, would it differ from this where people have more time to digest it? Definitely some awkward social event afterwards I'd bet.

Only thing I missed in your post is a snappy remark to alternative medicine (not expiremental, mind you); would have made it perfect. That stuff usually conflicts with the actual treatment and even if it doesn't and people survive they say it is because of the alternative junk instead of the actual treatment they conveniently forget to mention they took as well. You know, these sites that claim it's true and proven linking to multiple studies showing it...performed by themselves and published on their own website only.

I wish you the most with the time you have left but have no doubt you will make it count.

Well, one thing left.

This is Bob.

Bob is dying.

Bob doesn't whine or bitch about life being unfair.

Bob is one tough motherf*er.

Be like Bob.

.O

-|-

./\

P.s. If you think the stick figure sucks you should see my real drawings.
So to read it you can google this:

There is also a link titled 'web' below the article title above that will do the same.
> The key is making them reputabiable.

Repeatable? (Not typo-hunting; I'm honestly not sure.)
What if the Germans entirely consisted of battlecruisers at Jutland? Wouldn't they have been able to dictate the engagement?
"Most of the payments were blocked but $81 million was routed to accounts in the Philippines "
Given that in most of the countries "Know Your Customer" (or its variations) is strictly followed, I wonder what makes it so difficult for multi nation police( involving interpol) to reverse track the hacker - from money receiving accounts -> account holders -> beating the st out of them to reveal senders name.
There's only been https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Propaganda is, by definition, anything which promotes or publicizes a political cause or POV. Are you really against that? Or are you just afraid of the word "propaganda"?
It also doesn't mean the candidate will get along with their co-workers, take direction well, ask for help when needed, or bathe before coming to work. Since when have we required that a necessary qualification be a sufficient qualification?
Can anyone tell me why this is wrong, exactly? Or, for that matter, why this news?

Edit: to be more clear, I don't expect the same level of objectivity from Reddit or Hacker News comments that I do from an actual news story, so I don't have the same ethical issues with the Hillary campaign paying people to post comments on her behalf.
> Programmers are so sensitive, and honestly all your "sighing" is obnoxious.

Perhaps instead of being annoyed, you could try to understand why people are sighing. Many of them will have lost out on a job they were qualified to do because of bullshit interviewing practices like this one. It has a real effect on them. It's not a trivial issue.

> You don't have it all figured out.

No one here has claimed to have it all figured out, nor are the majority of comments an implication of that. We're all just saying we have one thing figured out: whiteboard interviews are terrible, alienating, unrealistic, antiquated tools for hiring.

Your profile says you're a CTO, and you should know that research increasingly shows that people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. If you want to be the kind of boss that programmers want to work for, you should be more open to understanding why the vast majority of us feel strongly about a topic like this instead of calling us obnoxious.

If you yourself are not a programmer, I'm not sure why you're weighing in on this at all.
WW3 TURDS THREATEN, GIVE US FREE PASSAGE, OR WE UNLEASH ALL MUSLIMS ON WORLD -
Soul singer Percy Sledge dies aged 74
Defining Axioms of BrandedWorld Organizations
http://globalnews.ca/news/2646574/attawapiskat-suicide-isnt-...

Quebec has been successful in stopping the rise in rural and native youth suicides.
Related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-Levels_esc...
Depression is an illness, often outside people's control. One might just as well be surprised to learn that a colleague broke his leg.
yep - this would throw an exception. ...and it's missing other things too. ;-)
I think 'animal nature' was a jab at our tendency to make judgments clouded by bias

Emphasis on 'I think', because the comment wasn't worded very clearly.
Most of my countertop is much narrower than 18" because of cabinets going down to the surface. This is only a problem because they don't want to put something in place that breaks up the L-shape, such as a cabinet.
Agile is dead from day 1 as you can never be truly agile by simply changing the software development process to agile. What about financial processes like setting annual budgets. This is what happens when you put a bunch of white guys in a Lodge in Utah.
The Ketamine Secrets of Sega's "Ecco the Dolphin"
Hopefully it won't suddenly substitute Canadian law.
That's a terrific JavaScript exercise, and sounds like a lot of fun. My only concern about the process would be the in-person interview. I recently flew from LA to the East coast for an all-day interview session, and the experience was miserable. My flight was delayed for hours, I got into my hotel at 1AM, I was sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, and exhausted for the entire process, and then I had to rush to catch my flight back as soon as I wrapped up. The flights averaged out at 6 hours in each direction, so I spent 12 hours in the air within a 24-hour period. Not fun, but a great way to ensure your candidate is at his/her weakest during the interviews. :)
Nice to hear that. We hope so.
Limiting the product's lifespan is one rationale, but to say that there are no others is a little unfair. Off the top of my head, these are all within the realm of possibility:

- Easier/cheaper manufacturing process.

- Increased structural stability.

- Make the device smaller/thinner/lighter.

- Apple is concerned that end users will screw something up, so they want their service staff to handle battery replacement.

I'm sure the internal discussions that led non-user-replaceable batteries was more nuanced than "let's milk those suckers for all they're worth".
It doesn't seem to be available to the public yet. It's not in his github[1] nor in his companies github[2].

[1] https://github.com/withzombies

[2] https://github.com/trailofbits
Trying to shove "subscribe & save" in my face 3-4 times during the process of choosing and purchasing a product is annoying, too.

Yes, I get it, you make more money in the long term when people subscribe.

I wish there was a global opt-out for it.
8 comments (now 9) 102 points, 3 hours, second page.

Fuck the pro state mods on HN you bury anti government sentiments you worthless shits
It's also ugly.

Keep in mind that architecture is as much about how it looks, as how functional it is.
and then today they both decided to drop all regulatory complaints against each other. Something smells here.
That's true in some cases, but there are lots of big company sites with no ad networks that are crazy bloated and slow. Some have trackers, but would be bloated (2,3,4MB+ over the wire) without them as well.
Don't ever use RC4.
Similarly, Pampers nappies have only been available to Prime customers for some months now.
Everything in programming is trees. If you write a program that calls functions, that call other functions, that's a tree.
A Disappointing Ruling on National Security Letters, but Not the Last Word
There is a very impressive display of this at the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, San Francisco. I highly recommend checking it out if you have 2 or 3 hours in SF!
It's not; it's worse than using GPG in symmetric mode.
But did suicide rates in Greece go up, or stay the same?

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/3/e007295.full

>Results The mean suicide rate overall rose by 35% between 2010 and 2012, from 3.37 to 4.56/100 000 population. The suicide mortality rate for men increased from 5.75 (2003–2010) to 7.43/100 000 (2011–2012; p<0.01). Among women, the suicide rate also rose, albeit less markedly, from 1.17 to 1.55 (p=0.03). When differentiated by age group, suicide mortality increased among both sexes in the age groups 20–59 and >60 years. We found that each additional percentage point of unemployment was associated with a 0.19/100 000 population rise in suicides (95% CI 0.11 to 0.26) among working age men.

> Conclusions We found a clear increase in suicides among persons of working age, coinciding with austerity measures. These findings corroborate concerns that increased suicide risk in Greece is a health hazard associated with austerity measures.
> the move towards atheism

Care to explain that? Atheism may be growing--in fact, Wikipedia gives an upper bound of the US atheist population at ten percent[0]--but I've never seen anything resembling what I would call an actual cultural movement towards atheism.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#United...
Broken for whom?
I believe that's less an everyday-use "trashcan" and more of an ext* feature for recovering from filesystem corruption; "Something broke and I think I've recovered all the files, but I've forgotten where some of them were supposed to go".
Ruling Unsealed: National Security Letters Upheld as Constitutional
When you factor in the well-documented pattern of how badly they treat their employees (both warehouse and corporate) it gets even harder to justify.
The theme of the series is basically how societal power dynamics play out on a multi-millennial timescale. The author called the series Dune after he noticed that, from above, sand dunes form a wave pattern over the land, so suddenly something he had only thought about at a local level had much greater meaning from this higher perspective of time. Anyway I thought it seemed up your alley. The first novel is a classic but it just scrathes the surface thematically.
What you're looking for are "fuzzy extractors".
Cool, been looking for something like this. However, it should be noted that this is not what parent asked about. Parent was wondering if Google was usable for regular web searches using a client that came from a Tor exit node via the Tor network.
Wow, quite a neat find and overview of an innovation in pursuit of a goal. Reminds me of how I was using Flash for animation projects long ago. What an exponentially easier process than the one Disney highlights here.
Yes, this would for sure be valuable.

Also, browsers could default to http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ for sites that loaded too slowly. AdBlock Plus and NoScript speed loads greatly. Maybe browsers could do triage on sites that load too slowly. Perhaps switch to reader mode or whatever.
For reference, here's the full text of the settlement(at least what was filed publicly with the SEC)[1]

It appears during the settlement they made a new patent cross-license agreement, which is not public of course. The new agreement is what is alleged by sources to have expired in 2015, which is what would allow AMD to license their IP to third-parties. It could also be that the patent agreement is more lenient than before, because at the very least it expanded to include at least one third party in the form of GlobalFoundries. If that is the case though, one wonders why this hasn't already happened.

1.https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...
We generated many candidates beginning with facebook, so I don't recall when that one was found--it just happened to be the one that looked the best. There's a number of backup memorable domains that we kept the keypairs for just in case facebookcorewwwi gets compromised somehow.

I don't remember how long we ran it for, but IIRC we had enough candidates to stop after a week or two. I'm guessing something like 100-200M cpu hours?
It's quite nice reading HN last - the crappy local news and depressing international news is somewhat offset by HN.
Can someone explain exactly why these 28 pages are being held top secret? What implications are there if the wider world knew their content?

And are they classified with a certain timeframe - like "for the next 70 years" or some such?