skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chrome / Chromium have a habit of making these arbitrary changes that seriously annoy some (arguably small) percentage of their users, while claiming that it makes it simpler / better for everyone else, while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.

Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.

I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.

1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and

2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.

No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.
Security and Privacy in Google Allo
I think the Gof and other patters are good to study and understand at an academic level, but you shouldn't go looking for how to apply a flywheel to your application. Just design the system the way you think it should work and you will instinctively apply the patters as they fit.
They say 0.04% of page views are a result of pressing backspace. 0.04% sounds small but imagine how many page views per month there are, globally, with Chrome. That's. Significant number.

Backspace sure is an unusual navigation choice these days, and perhaps wouldn't make sense to code in new software. But in browsers, backspace to navigate back is expect behaviour.

This isn't the first time the Chrome or Chromium teams have made sweeping changes based on usage stats, pissing off the minority who use those features and pushing ever closer to a browser with only the lowest common denominator features that everyone uses.
All this so they can show me adds for stuff i already bought.
"Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level?"

There is one, on KDE level. Any KDE app has generic-looking hotkey remapper under settings menu. It just works.
Apple forces dev to remove title from App Store's Games category over war theme
Visible Spectrum Console Text Generator
Does Chrome not prompt you about losing un-submitted changes to a form when triggering a navigation event?
I think this is very good. I can't tell you the number of times I've lost form data by hitting backspace.

For those wondering how, if you do control backspace to erase a word etc igs very easy to miss, especially as you transition between word delete and single character delete.

The other common use case for errors is when u think you're in a field editing and you're actually not, bam, you just lost all your form data.

I also like the idea that backspace is for text editing and not for a second feature such as navigation. For enter yes but not backspace
Ask HN:Want to attend a free college?
I've personally always used alt+left to go back. I know backspace does the same thing, but the only reason I know that is because I seem to hit more frequently than you'd expect while not focused on a form field causing my browser to go back unexpectedly. I've never lost data, though, it always seems to persists when I go forward.
This is why we're all really happy that no chrom* devs contribute to the vim project.
Does anyone know how the Design Patterns authors became known as the "Gang of Four"?

I'm guessing it originated from an unflattering comparison, although my knowledge of the Cultural Revolution is pretty weak, maybe it was a compliment.
Not so impressive considering Humans are a type of Animal. That's like saying you created a Honda Civic that is also a car.
Frankly, I'd leave it as is - I (and I'm sure lots of other opers) already have some kind of central log collection that we can alert off. Nothing more frustrating than all the various monitoring systems each with their own unique take on alerting ;) Just imho of course.
The SMS receiving sites don't work so well IME. They tend to use a single number for everyone, and the demand by spammers etc is so much higher than the free supply that for any given service, your number will probably already be blocked. Or the receiving will be unreliable, etc. I've gotten it to work sometimes, but usually not. Definitely too hard and time consuming for "normal people".

Is there a site that sells phone numbers for viop and sms for bitcoin without requiring identity?
I look forward to reading this book.
It would be interesting to have an investigation of the two different kinds of "skin in the game" in this book.

There is a positive spin of the expression, e.g. the entrepreneur, who has skin in the game of his company via his shares and resources. This scenario (ideally) results in eustress.

However, there is also a negative spin of the expression, e.g. an employee, who has skin in the game by being afraid of losing his job. Usually, this leads to distress over the long term.

Hence, if I want to employ someone I face a dilemma: the employee should have skin in the game, but it shouldn't create distress. There's a huge set of options you can go with as the employer, but I wonder if there is an optimal solution.
So given this information, how can we poison the results that the trackers get?
Federal Judge Says Internet Archive's Wayback Machine a Legit Source of Evidence
That's honestly sounds like FUD. The Boost community has rejected OO design and abstractions from the very beginning embracing the STL design instead.

Dates and times is a complex problem, you won't find a simple solution for it. For the record boost.date_time ony has concrete classes and no abstractions. It barely uses templates.

"Then I've discovered that Google at that time forbade developers using the whole boost"

Their loss.
> I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month

Use a browser that will warn you about losing un-submitted form contents before navigating away?

> It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.

I think we have very different definitions of "everyone".
I actually find Google search annoying to use because the search box hijacks backspace.

I'll search for something, decide to go back, and now I'm deleting my search term instead. And the fact that Google searches based on what's in my search box (without having to hit enter) I've actually "lost" search results that way.
design patterns are guru thinking. they're bad ways to describe self-descriptive tricks like callbacks. don't let a person who talks this way write docs ever; they'll focus on 'what's being used' rather than what's happening.

design patterns are like when a consultant creates a stupid name for something that already exists -- the name isn't about expressive power, it's about declaring ownership so the consultant can sell the 'Consulting Method' to solve your problem.

when a phenomenon or trick has an easily understood one-word name, don't let a nonexpert rename it to something nobody understands.
This seems opposite to me. Most architecture is prescriptive and there is little tolerance for Alexander's circumstantial and use-based design. If the story he recounts in The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth is true, his preference to use simple materials and let the budget constrain the design makes him an enemy of building firms which use standards to justify cost overruns. What did you think about that book?
I've had TSA agents look through my wallet, and on a separate flight look through playing cards one by one. I was also let through with no screening once by accident.

I've seen them yell at passengers, drift off, sit around talking with long lines waiting, and every other conceivable offense. Most are fine but there are a lot of exceptions.

They contribute nothing, and I for one fly less frequently because of them.

As to pre-check: at Atlanta that doesn't always get you a short line or fast security wait time.
> Unsurprisingly, you left out the second part of the (later) definition:

It is not part of the normative definition, which says "for which this International Standard imposes no requirements". In ISO standards, notes are without exception non-normative.

Although I think they really should add your proposed text as an additional example, as their current set of examples is evidently confusingly incomplete :-)
Yeah, it is an OS level thing on OSX. "Quit Chrome" mapped to cmd-shift-control-something-Q instead, for example. As long as it has a menu item to match on.
Ok. For one, we really still don't know a lot about the brain. Secondly, well...as far as I can tell, the brain is like an computer that adds more and more traces as it goes. The logic is the circuit, no real analogue to software. The hardware is the algorithm, and we can add new hardware. There is storage, but it's fuzzy...with a MTBF that's not well understood. The actions that we take are based on potentials, just like in a circuit with sense amps that aren't perfectly tuned, nor is the switch amp binary....there's a lot of muxing going on (again, that we don't understand). But to say that the brain isn't like a computer is extremely naive. Cells make up the brain, each cell's logic can be worked out using well...logic. Putting those cells together into a complex system produces behavior that is obviously complex, and hard to understand. Ever tried to understand the behavior of a multi-threaded, multi-node, multi-socket compute system down to the microsecond? It's complex right? Yeah, we barely can grasp that, give it a few decades and we'll probably figure out a bit more about how the brain works...and how to quantify it.
The map is not the territory. But that doesn't mean that maps can't be useful.
Maintaining software quality is hard. Each additional toggle doubles the size of your test matrix.
Introduction to Roslyn and its use in program development
They really don't like preferences. I remember before Chrome's new preferences page it seemed to have many more options. I called them out on a few important ones disappearing and the answer was always "Not many people use those, and they confuse new users".

For a long while it was impossible to view TLS cert information on Chrome Mobile. One day they just disabled the UI for it. Too confusing for new users if they stumble in there.
We just created a platform to accelerate medical progress
www.crowdacure.com is the first crowdfunding platform for peer-reviewed and hard to fund medical research. The idea is that focusing on hard to fund project, the community can be partner in medical progress. We would love your feedback!
First time I ever talked to someone about autonomous cars that's the first thing they said. They also have about three companies and lots of money. So I bet a whole bunch of people are going to do what you do - Uber style maybe.
For somebody who wrote 'Fooled by ..' one of my favorite books of all time, he certainly doesn't seem to suffer from self-doubt when it comes to stating his personal hypotheses. I can look past his condescending tone (especially towards the wealthy and 'pseudo' intellectuals), but his certitude in his own ideas -- especially after pressing home the point that we are surrounded by randomness -- tarnishes his punditry in my view.
I disagree that you're bound. Most of the way you run your apps on Heroku works the same way anywhere, or can do with only the smallest amount of work. IMO if you want to migrate away, the biggest job is filling the gaps that Heroku provide for you, and don't realize they do until you don't have them anymore.
"We have UseCounters showing that 0.04% of page views navigate back via the backspace button and 0.005% of page views are after a form interaction. The latter are often cases where the user loses data. Years of user complaints have been enough that we think it's the right choice to change this given the degree of pain users feel by losing their data and because every platform has another keyboard combination that navigates back."

Personally I am shocked that the Chromium team ignored years of user complaints before they decided to fix what their own usability studies found to be a worthless yet painful gimmick.
This is much-needed research. Thank you for your work. Regarding the WebRTC tracking- would it be possible for WebRTC to work without exposing the local IP? I.e. is there any real reason that fingerprint needs to be there?
Haha. I'm an avid vim user and I don't get backspace. The normal key to move back by character is in the home-row. Why would I use backspace instead? Am I missing something?
vim is still being developed ?
Well, who would have guessed. Surprise surprise.

The web is such a shit technology.
> They also serve as a form of code documentation (defining expected behavior).

Oh, far from it. Tests are not documentation, documentation is documentation.
Tests can be treated as a set of examples at best.
This article falls somewhere between a strawman argument and a deliberate misrepresentation of scientific understanding.

> "But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers"

We are born with most (if not) all of these things, and we develop more of them as we grow and learn. Sure, the nomenclature here was chosen for ridicule, but functionally those elements are present.

The brain is not a magical pudding that works in a completely occult and mysterious manner. While we do have a ways to go in deciphering the minutiae of its architecture and operation, the article engages in assertions that run completely counter to neurobiological facts we have already learned:

> "We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not."

This is at best a half-truthy strawman argument. Both our computer technology and the brain's architecture employ different mechanisms by virtue of their underlying implementation. However, the functions performed do converge if you look at what's actually being computed. There are entire fields of both CS and neuro research that are completely based on this overlap.

> "Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. "

This is utter bullshit. Humans totally operate on symbolic representations, decades of neuroscience has shown us that. Humans absolutely do store, process, and retrieve information. Humans possess without a doubt physical memories, just because they're not encoded byte-wise doesn't give you an excuse to make these garbage claims.
It is also available on OS X in the Keyboard prefpane; so long as it's a menu item, it can get a shortcut.

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts -> [+]
Am I the only one who doesn't enjoy Taleb's writing style? I find that he tends to use overly complex vocabulary to explain very simple ideas.
Really? Wow, how did I miss that... Thanks for correcting me!
Clinton Looks to Data to Help Her Drown Out Trump
It is chrome team we are talking about. They are the only browser that nukes all of your settings when it thinks they are tampered with and it is impossible to move profile between installations just with copying. And there is no way to disable that :( They force you to use their (useless) cloud sync.
As Scope of 2012 Breach Expands, LinkedIn to Again Reset Passwords for Some
Be Careful What You Tell a Chatbot – It Could Come Back to Bite You
Whoa, what's the use case for exposing battery information?
I don't have to support any legacy systems, everything is greenfield. The thing is that I don't have much experience with either one of them (Angular or Django). I do have experience with Python, in fact, it's one of my favorite languages. I also enjoy JavaScript.

Well, in my case I'm really going have to create an online store. The project is something like "Uber For Food". I should have about 3 months for that, that includes time to learn the technologies.

I'm really unsure whether I should go with something "pre-baked"(like WooCommerce) or build something custom. I believe the latter will give me a lot more freedom, but will also potentially cause more problems.
I had to lookup "shellcode" at wikipedia:

In computer security, a shellcode is a small piece of code used as the payload in the exploitation of a software vulnerability. It is called "shellcode" because it typically starts a command shell from which the attacker can control the compromised machine, but any piece of code that performs a similar task can be called shellcode. Because the function of a payload is not limited to merely spawning a shell, some have suggested that the name shellcode is insufficient.[1] However, attempts at replacing the term have not gained wide acceptance. Shellcode is commonly written in machine code.
this was a behaviour in other browsers a long time before Chrome started...
> Basically with one touch you can tell Allo that you want to "Always chat in incognito mode going forward," and from that moment on all your messages will be end-to-end encrypted and auto-deleted. You can still interact with the AI, but only if you explicitly invoke it

YES! That's the minimum privacy level that all messengers should have. From my point of view, the "best of both worlds" would be with the Cloud AI disabled by default, maybe with a one-tap enabling inside the chat window and a notification to the other people in the conversations.

But if for whatever reasons companies don't want to make that compromise, then we should at least get an option so that each individual could make end-to-end encryption the default if they want to.

Again, this should be the minimum, and not the fact that the messenger simply offers end-to-end encryption somewhere burried in the settings and only works when you explicitly enable it everytime you want to use it. That's not acceptable for an app that cares about privacy from my point of view because it's too inconvenient even for those that actually care about their message privacy.

As for the future, homomorphic encryption could be one option (although who knows how long it will take to get here), but if you just want to offer your users "AI enhancements" and you don't just offer that as an excuse to collect their data, then companies could also enable client-side AI in the future. I think this could be a lot closer than many think. If the demand is there we could start seeing AI-accelerators as co-processor in our smartphone SoCs within the next 5 years, especially as Moore's Law slows down to a crawl and we start getting diminishing returns from the "faster 8-core CPUs" in our smartphones.

Such chips are already starting to pop-up, but because there's no current demand for them to be in smartphones yet, they are relegated to other more niche markets. In the next 5 years they could become a lot faster, too, especially that now Google is showing the way with ASICs as well.

http://www.movidius.com/solutions/machine-vision-algorithms/...
It wouldn't surprise me if the defaults on OS X are the same. #2 in particular, I consider that to be sensible autofocus behavior. If you don't want to replace the URL but instead modify it, just hit an arrow key. Partly this is because there are shortcuts to select the address bar to begin with, so I rarely use a mouse. It's generally consistent on mobile platforms too, to select the entire URL. You have to hold your finger a second time to position the cursor because the most common interaction with the URL bar usually means jumping somewhere entirely different.

Edit: they could maintain a flag to change these behaviours though, if they were a concern. You could also build your own copy of the browser, patched as you wish... ;-)
Of course it does. For some reason, I always forget about this - maybe it's because it doesn't work in the most-intuitive way (hunt down system prefs pane, enter menu text exactly as it appears), but it's good to know they're trying to make this work. Unfortunately, backspace is one of the keys that can't be used as a shortcut.
I'm glad that JavaScript crowd starts to discover concepts well-known dozen
years ago.
I'm primarily on Windows and that first feature annoys the heck out of me. I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating.

I think the second is more of an optimization because when you click on the address bar you're most likely either copying or overwriting the URL. It's much less common to modify it.

If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.
Same thing with Firefox. It's really frustrating. The options are incredibly sparse. I feel like there is a complete lack of creativity on the part of browser developers are to features that it'd be nice to have
I thought it was going to be about Jimi Hendrix.
Electronic computers as we have them now are different in many aspects from our brains - right. But they are also similar in many ways and surely we can have some metaphor that would fit both.

What he forgets is that information processor is a metaphor also in respect to the machines we have on our desks. They don't really process information - they just route some electrons around. But metaphors are useful.
Freebase data dump is available for download for free. And so is Wikipedia and Dbpedia. And so i common crawl and webdatacommons dumps

What are you doing with that ?

- https://developers.google.com/freebase/#freebase-rdf-dumps
- http://wiki.dbpedia.org/
- http://webdatacommons.org/
- https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
The papers and books I've read or am about to read
this has already been on the front page for the past 18 hours...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724763
>Note however that it explicitly says that programs that contain undefined behaviors are erroneous

No it doesn't say that. It says that they are either "nonportable" or "erroneous". I'll take "nonportable" for 400, please.
BRAINS ARE COMPUTERS is a useful conceptual metaphor for many purposes. But metaphors are imperfect. It's not literally true that LIFE IS A JOURNEY or SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS ARE PLANTS.
I don't think my new month is the same time as your new month. I guess it's when we signed up / deployed first time.
And how would Silverlight or Java applets or Flash or any other client side technology be better in this regard?

You have to expose capabilities and those capabilities can be used to create an unique fingerprint based on your device.

How would you design the stack so that this kind of thing is impossible? Feel free to use your favorite tech stack as a base.
Unless its on fire? Isn't that always the reason for having all the kill switches on aircraft?