skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Why don't we have simple web servers that offer secure admin interfaces that can be plugged in for various products?

Agreed

>> It's not as if the user interface for a router's configuration is bleeding edge technology.

Not sure I agree. Have you seen some of these modern interfaces? They are doing deep packet inspection, providing many different visualizations of usage, geo-location, captive portal, ... the feature list - and attack surface - is huge.
What you say is true only if you assume we will continue to ignore and extingush the natural world in favor of human habitats. There are efforts to make space for Earth's non human animals to live in the wild. See, for example, E.O. Wilson's work:
http://eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson-on-saving-half-the-...

Also, only a small number of species are bred for food or other resources. I think there's less than 20 types of animals bred for farming. Re-wilding 50% of the earth meanwhile would provide food and shelter to all animal species.
Main reason why I bought it was to use my phone less at home.

Main use cases:
* Managing my shopping list (not necessarily for ordering on Amazon) while I'm in the kitchen and/or cooking
* Calendar/Newsflash/Weather in the morning
* Timer for cooking/workouts
* Ordering an Uber (main reason why I use primarily Uber vs. Lyft because there's no Lyft skill right now)
* Switching lights on/off (WeMo)

Would use it more if there would be (good/easy to use) skills:
* Public transportation arrival/departure times
* Controlling my Sonos (I know the workaround but a better integration would be awesome)
I don't hear the fashion industry complaining that their creations are being used in photos and videos posted to youtube. So why should the music industry complain?
FST/FLD can store/load full 80 bits if you need such precision. No problem whatsoever.
Libya’s Central Bank forgot the code to a safe containing $184m worth of coins
You are not alone :)
Thanks for the links! I guess I need to get myself a decent power bank (or make one out of all those li-polys I came back with from China). I see people recommend Anker all over HN (and Reddit, in particular Ingress players seem to like it, and that says something) - I'll probably shell out for one of those, as I don't trust any of the locally available brands (and I definitely don't trust any consumer product from Aliexpress (components are fine though)).
Without license plates, people will think (correctly) that they can get away with it even when there are more witnesses.
When the Billionaire Next Door Moves Out
Announcing SyntaxNet:The World’s Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source
I know it is not "productivity" but I had a real good time reading was "Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games" [1]

It talks about the creation of rogue games (rogue, nethack, adom) and its authors and co-authors.

Well written made me play nethack again. So your productivity will decrease :)

[1] - http://amzn.to/1spSott
Fuzzy multilevel graph embedding [pdf]
Mitigations have also been recently committed into OpenBSD.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=146281531025185&w=2
eax is the accumulator register, ebx the base register, ecx the counter register, edx the data register, esi is the source index, edi is the destination index,
ebp is the base pointer, and esp is the stack pointer.

When I originally wrote four general purpose registers, I had eax, ebx, ecx and edx in mind, but after fully listing them above, I revise my earlier statement: the x86 assembler has two general purpose registers. Crappy processor architecture with lots of specialized registers, but too few general purpose ones.

Compared to MOS 6502, Motorola MC680##, or SPARC, only the eax and edx are really general purpose registers -- even mentioning ecx, the counter register, would be iffy.
IMO good interviewers just ask for you to perform a task that's a close analog to what you will be doing every day. I've had this happen once.

Sadly, despite this being straightforward and effective it's incredibly rare. Cargo cult "binary tree search style" problems and technology stack trivia questions are more normal.

The level at which dogma and fashion drive this industry is almost embarrassing.
This is basically the Stack Overflow debate that comes up every few weeks on HN, but I think it's a false dichotomy.

The implication is that "real developers" don't need SO/Google/etc., and that our profession is plagued by incompetents who somehow get through the day by copy/pasting code they found on the Internet without understanding how it works.

Thing is, SO/Google/etc. are critical resources for most developers. Not using the web as a research tool when appropriate is incredibly inefficient. No one knows everything, and no one can know everything. Those resources don't just help us find solutions for our problems, they're critical to learning.

I think the to-Google-or-not-to-Google debates are really people bothered by other people who copy/paste things from SO without understanding the code they are pasting. You should be getting 2 things from that exercise: you find the solution to your problem, and you learn how it solves similar problems in the future.

This isn't just for your benefit, it's for the benefit of the other people you work with, and for the benefit of the shared code base if there is one. Especially if it's a large, complicated code base that will live on long after you move on to other things.

Everyone does the first part (using the solution), and almost everyone does the second part (understanding the solution) to one degree or another. However, there are a few people who will not only deny any responsibility for the second part, but will actually be proud that they're not "wasting time" by internalizing what they just did. Instead they're moving on to the next problem to solve that they don't understand. They're optimizing for quantity over quality of output, and for the appearance of efficiency over actual efficiency.

So we all have a That Guy in mind when we feel guilty about finding solutions on SO ("I don't wanna be That Guy, but this solves my problem so I should probably use it..."). We may also have worked with one or more That Guys on a shared codebase and gotten burned by it. It sucks to inherit code from That Guy, because That Guy optimizes for scripted demos and perceived functionality.

TL;DR I propose that the eternal debate about whether or not Google and SO ruined software engineering is really just one group of people complaining about That Guy, and another group of people who think they're being unfairly accused of being That Guy. The fire is fueled by a small number of actual That Guys sprinkled throughout the industry, but they are usually not participants in these debates.
Solution to the Grandfather Paradox [video]
I'm a researcher, Google still has benefits in that area. For dev, Bing brings up about the same information that Google does. And it is hard to tell the difference these days.

I also resent not being able to use google at home, so I like using it at work.
What about it? Is there anything specific you want to raise up as an issue?
I often skip the first paragraph out right.
It is just glorified curve fitting. Glorified curve fitting is a very rich field.

Another way of thinking about it (described in Wasserman's book) is that statistics is the inverse problem of probability.

Probability theory asks: given a process, what does its data look like? Statistics asks: given data, what process might have generated it?
Anybody tried the graphicsmagick module?

http://redismodules.com/modules/graphicsmagick-2/

Curious how it stacks up against imagemagick in terms of features and performance.
Thanks for the clarifications!

I admit I just copied your example and tried to sort-of convert it into Java style. It definitely won't be a correct Java-compatibile regex. As you said, I'm not familiar with the JS regex quirks. I just couldn't invent a good example on the spot, and didn't want to post ones from the code I work on at my day job for legal reasons.

And yeah, I agree about "lots of backslashes" part. It gets messy - but splitting regexps in parts makes it at least more manageable. I'm not yet angry enough at the cases I have at my day job to whip up a DSL for it though.
Why Are Strippers More Heavily Vetted Than Uber Drivers?
> HN used to have lots of submissions about how to run companies right. Is it just me, or have those disappeared somewhat?

I interpreted this as being one of them.
That's only one facet of the problem Flatpak is trying to solve (and it's a feature Flatpak will use).

But, there are other considerations. Docker, despite its several negatives, has become popular because it begins to address the repeatable infrastructure needs of a service-based architecture.

e.g. say I have 10,000 servers. I can't possibly manage them all individually. The performance of using something like Kickstart to deploy them would be problematic, and each of them has a well-defined role, so having a pre-defined image (that can evolve over time) begins to make more sense. One of the things Docker got right was taking the concept of a package up a level of abstraction; so now you don't install Apache and a million other things to get your web server deployment...you install a specific bundle of things in a pre-defined image. Maybe even an immutable image that is identical on every one of your several thousand web servers (or containers or VMs, whatever). Being immutable provides some security and maintenance benefits. Being in a compressed/snapshot-able image provides deployment speed benefits and maintenance benefits. Providing dependency management at both the individual package (like RPM/deb) level and at the higher container level is also a benefit. Docker doesn't do anything along those lines (and can't, given it's implementation). This would strap into a configuration management system nicely, as well.

All of it is possible the previous way. I love RPM/yum. I love Kickstart. I love Ansible (or Puppet or Chef or Salt). Those are great tools, and you can build a repeatable infrastructure using them. But, this is another layer of abstraction, and it will enable a lot of cool stuff going forward.

And, soname is still part of the equation. You've got to build these runtimes. You've got to have some way of building and versioning all the software that is in them. And, you're not going to put 30 versions of OpenSSL in a runtime...you just need the latest version with the correct ABI version compatibility for the stuff you're building against it and distributing for it.
Usually when I search Google for JavaScript language or DOM API, I'll start my search with "mdn" to get the relevant Mozilla documentation.
I still remember and miss how fast IDEs can be.

Also, if you broke something the runtime error messages were useful, not like the stack trace we have today. There is beauty in having just a single line runtime error.
estimating uncertainty. The curve you fit represents what you have in your data. The question is what is out there, in your target population.
I need to hack a game now
Some aspects are present in large companies too. For instance at many companies teams don't directly pay for infrastructure that they use, it's all provided by the company. Or computer equipment, air conditioning, etc. Of course this has issues of its own, like people under-appreciating the all the VMs they're provisioning, and it gets especially bad if the budget gets tight.
They certainly did that on purpose. Humanizing the machine is how they can sell it as an always available "assitant".

I don't care about the amazon Alexa. I found the bond beautiful. Thats it. :)
Happy to see a book like this trending on hn, especially with a sentence like:
"Using fancy tools like neural nets, boosting, and support vector machines without understanding basic statistics is like doing brain surgery before knowing how to use a band-aid."
in it's preface. I definitely agree, since I wasted a lot of time doing fruitless surgeries before I went and learned about band aids in depth.

From my look at Part 1, it has some great coverage of the basics, all of which are important. Some of the fundamentals that I see left out are rightly left out since they require experience in real analysis to appreciate, and maybe aren't very actionable. There's few proofs, but, since the goal is a quick understanding, I can also appreciate this.

It looks to me like a great intro of statistics for CS people, as the author says.
> What's the oppposite of active sabotage?

Isn't this exactly what an article like this is attempting to ask in the first place, albeit through irony and story-telling? I agree it's hardly ground-breaking, I guess it's just trying to make readers feel clever because (clearly) we'd never be stupid enough to do something like that. (Although it's worth far more to me, at least, when you get those articles saying "I did something stupid when I thought I was being clever," because if we're honest we all do things like that.) But I think OA is trying to discuss "how to run companies right."
My source is mostly Brett Glass's rants; I'm not sure how much of a crackpot he is.

The concept of a suburban area that isn't already wired for DSL and/or cable sounds surprising to me. AFAIK WISPs are mostly in low-density rural areas which multiplies costs. I do get the impression that many WISPs are something like a hobby crossed with community service and aren't run professionally.
Ask HN: Managing a larger group
I have some experience as technical lead for small teams (5-8), but I find myself in a position where my small team might have the opportunity to grow significantly. There are lots of resources that discuss the transition from software engineer to manager. What do people suggest to learn to succeed at the next rung up the management ladder?
Noob question, isn't Python already based on C?
Turning over the wheel: a future with autonomous cars
A2-Z2? :)
> In the age of 100% computer assisted lawyers and courts, why can't 710 lawsuits be filed?

An excellent hypothetical question, and worth considering when that age arrives. Right now we are in an age of very labor-intensive lawyers and courts.

> Class actions just make lawyers wealthy

They do much more, including deter bad behavior. That's probably why so many companies include a waiver of class action participation in their contracts.
All in all we're all saying what researcher are saying more and more since a few years. Cancer is 'multi-variate' and no silver bullet, no one cure will work blind.
Ah, I make no claims about how good cell phone coverage was in the disaster area for the first week, mostly about how it was if you just traveled a short distance from it.

Although I think I recall it not being bad in subsequent weeks, and, I would be using it from the edge of the zone of total destruction, and a hundred feet or so away from what was likely a tower of my provider. But I wasn't using it heavily there, at most for coordination while on-site removing stuff from my apartment.

You were also several miles to my west, in the direction the tornado came from. I also had the advantage of being on a hill, that might not have been true for you.

But we agree in that such a device is not to be depended upon; I'd say at best something to hold in reserve, and mention of affordable emergency Iridium systems like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11701692 has gotten my interest.
Wow, I can't imagine getting those kinds of reactions from my friends, especially about your cat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge
The poultry industry won't be hurt too much, since there is no good reason you can't sell rooster meat (actually they will typically be a little bit larger than the females) but I don't know if they do already sell them.

The egg industry will be hit somewhat, since it will essentially double the price of eggs. Probably it will also hurt the pre-made goods industry (cookies, etc) and they will likely be forced out of Luxemberg.

(Essentially nobody, other than people who raise chicks in their backyard, use the same chickens for eggs and meat, since different chickens species are optimized for either so this probably won't impact those who raise meat chickens much).
Pretty much any kind of mathematical modelling that involves uncertainty, really.

Making inferences and predictions from data, in the presence of uncertainty.

Analysis of the properties of procedures for doing the above.

If you want examples that avoid the feel of just "curve fitting" (assume you mean something like "inferring parameters given noisy observations of them") -- maybe look at models involving latent variables. Bayesian statistics has quite a few interesting examples.
Teaches you how many security layers there are in our systems. Very low risk to ingest anything that may cause you harm.
> waiting to log back into a rebooting server

$ alias sshammer
alias sshammer='ssh -o ConnectionAttempts\ 10000 -o ConnectTimeout\ 5'
I do a lot of text processing in Lua, primarily because of LPeg. It can parse text that regular expressions can't (or have real trouble with, like http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html), can transform the data on the fly (convert digit characters into its value) and more importantly, they're composable. Have an LPeg expression that can parse an email address? You can then plop that into a larger LPeg expression to parse, say, a header line.
A lot of these read more like workplace complaints and poor management processes. The point of the original was how an individual already on the system could perform small acts of sabotage.

My list would be:
1) overestimate small tasks
2) Corollary to #1, underestimate large tasks
3) Find reasons to take the overestimated tasks and perform them slowly
4) Encourage your colleagues to take the larger tasks
5) Encourage bike shedding. Frequently evaluate your code standards.
6) If you are in the position to do so, enforce a terrible naming standard.
7) Write slow tests
8) Write useless tests
9) If you notice a coverage gap, try to introduce a subtle bug

As a manager:
1) Discourage specialization in favor of "flexibility"
2) Assign tasks to those with the least domain knowledge, within reason
3) Avoid letting more than a single developer work on a particular system/increase the "bus factor"
4) If you are able, under promise and under deliver
5) When brought new ideas or are asked to use new tools, be very encouraging but say you need approval. Never ask for approval.
Also reminiscent of Black Mirror.
Do anyone have an updated ETA on when the new release of redis, with support of these modules will be available?

Working on a project that would greatly benefit for a custom redis module.
>This kind of thing may be partly why interviews are heavy on CS fundamentals -- most good developers agree that they are important in a way that framework quirks are not

Google's interviews are heavy on fundamentals because virtually all of Google's tech stack is home grown.

Other companies imitate this behavior largely because "if google does it it must work great".

Ironically a majority companies actually miss the CS fundamentals that are vitally relevant to them (e.g. relational theory) in favor asking the fundamentals that aren't (e.g. big o notation).
> Mind naming a single one?

We no longer need macros to create intuitive DSL's any more.
Configurable randomness. A particular beat has probabilities of containing eighth notes, triplets, or sixteenth notes based on the "Rhythmic Variety" setting, and those notes have a probability of being rests based on the "Rests" setting.
In the previous Gmail litigation a couple of years ago Google Apps for Education users were one of the classes.

In that case Koh dismissed the 1967 California Invasion of Privacy Act eavesdropping claims because users' lawyers could not show the emails were confidential (see Section 632). However she didn't dismiss the wiretapping/interception claims (see Section 631).

Another element required for an eavesdropping claim is lack of consent.

How are you going to show that the granting of consent was in question for each and every user and was thus a "common question"? Maybe some users read the terms and other did not. Maybe some users paid attention to news reports about email scanning and others did not. See Koh's Opinion.

For those interested search "paulhastings.com" "in re google". There is a copy of the unreported Opinion, with some interesting redactions on the devices Google uses to scan email. Content Onebox, Medley Server, Changeling, CAT2 Mixer, ICEbox Server, etc.

What if users started putting "CONFIDENTIAL", as between sender and recipient, at the the top of all their emails? From there one could argue confidentiality implies lack of consent to eavesdropping.

Apparently Google argued users understand that interceptions are part of how all email, not just Gmail, is transmitted.
Intermediary SMTP servers might be "interception" but it seems like a reasonable judge could conclude if a message intercepted says "CONFIDENTIAL" then there's no permission to read it, whether the reading is done by a human or a machine programmed by a human.
Any thoughts on leaving Actuarial work? I was thinking of going the other way.. a consistent education/testing seems like it fixes the eternal new wheels and pop experts problem of software as a career.
Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites
I do not think Slovenia has terrible labor laws - in fact they get more vacations days ( 33 ) then american workers !

I am tired of this meme "america has the best labor and environmental laws"

cost of things are higher in america due to inefficiencies - not because of better quality ( I know it might be hard for you to believe it ! )
What kind of laws apply in this locality?

In the US I wouldn't be able to connect to their MongoDB server without it being a crime, password or not.
The practice of partiality in awarding jobs and other advantages in close circle
I wish I had the freedom to work from home, I've done it a few times and I'm not just marginally more productive, I'm exponentially more productive and more communicative because I'm aware that people can't see what I'm working on and so we don't end up fixing similar things. (although that could change if I got used to it).

I wish wish wish! I had some modicum of privacy and sanctuary at work so I could just sit down with only the problems in my screen unless intentionally interrupted.
This is one of the few hard cover books I have found worth its price. The statistical principles are succinctly explained such that they can be quickly implemented.
OK, we changed to that from http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/.
The bootcamp grads. They'll use more libraries in a simple take home problem than we use in a medium size project.
If you're surprised by this, then your mental model of the world isn't correct. Might be time to re-calibrate your expectations if you (like I admittedly did) went to school in a nice neighborhood where 90%+ get a 5 in calc AB.
It was ok to show this once, but please don't post them regularly.
"Because having a dominant position in this market makes the monopoly too good to compete with, no one should be allowed to succeed in this market" seems like a stupid rule.