skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure why it's so important to you to push the notion that some people just simply are not good at anything (and of course you use, as an example, a homeless person -- obviously they must be talentless, yes, otherwise they would be successful like us?).

"Everyone has a talent, it's just a matter of finding it" -- the point you are dismissively hostile towards is a positive one which is essentially irrefutable. It doesn't claim talent is "any good" or that it can easily be exercised. It's suggesting everyone has worth and something to offer. I don't know why you are so opposed to accepting something like that. The hostility here isn't mine.
> Of course they knew that this could happen.

> It's likely that an engineer won't understand that they're building the intellectual equivalent of a land mine

You're contradicting yourself.
>Central planning and command economies work really well inside corporations, such as Apple or Google.

That's because they can fire anyone that works for the company who doesn't agree with the goals. Do you propose to jail or disappear people that disagree and work against the direction defined by the central plan?
No, I think it is important to be able to transfer patents. The original inventor is not necessarily the person best qualified to license and exploit a patent.

On the other hand, I think that software and business methods should not be eligible for patent protection at all.
Five steps is too many for law enforcement to be involved.

How many steps does it take to become a mass murderer, which has magnitudes greater probability of happening to any one of us? Two: wanting to do it and buying a gun and bullets. That's it. Oh, maybe three: go to the mall. The FBI is not looking at every gun purchase that could result in a mass murder, nor are they supplying guns to people who (may think they) want to murder a bunch of people.
Meanwhile, I fire up the average application that uses the Gnome HIG spec, and I find it horrendous to use. They take it a number of steps further and remove, completely and thoroughly, any ability to customize. I very much like the Apple mentality circa 2005 with sane, intelligent defaults, a small number of configuration options in a small number of screens, and an advanced button for everything else. Apple did a very good job back then of making their software feature complete and customizeable without making it a shit show in either the too dumb or too complex direction.
> It's better to withhold information unless explicitly requested

But that's not the question. The question is whether or not it's better to lie about why you're travelling. Now, for some percentage of the time it probably is better in practice. But it's a trade with a fairly large downside. Border agents have lots of reasons to carry out checks so you'll need to be very sure that everything else is completely fine and be lucky you don't hit a random check.

And they do check. I've had to vouch for people at airports and they've checked social media, Google etc. For the lady in the article, it sounds like what she went through was solely for flouting work laws (and being rude but that would have just affected the degree of surliness). You get caught for directly lying and they'll be all over you for illegal immigration/terrorism. I would expect that to be more lengthy and more unpleasant than the unfortunate lady experienced.

My advice? If you want to earn money in a foreign country do it legally. At the very least check with the consulate/embassy and get their answer in writing if possible.
As an EU citizen they couldn't require you at the UK border even if they wanted too.
No, the editor UI which is teased at the Pied Piper website.
It's not even an analogy, it's just a series of slurs.
In order you to get in trouble for lying then they have to catch you in a lie. The easiest way for them to do that is for them to get you to admit to lying. This is why it's so important for you to give short, non-committal answers to their questions that reveal nothing, and to never let your guard down, because customs officials (any kind of security personnel, really) are not your friends.
Yeah, I could go along with that.
If I were him, I would have put it in at the end, but I would have included what they did even if he didn't say he worked WITH them.

What they did was very important- and as an economist I would say that they deserve to be included in the history of dealing with this massive debt problem
Grunts make good headlines. The FBI/CIA/NSA already failed at 9/11, so they've learned to use citizens to prop up their image.
dep mgmt, at least, is poised to improve a lot in the coming months. we've got growing consensus around some metadata files, and i'm nearly done with my SAT solver (github.com/sdboyer/vsolver), which will be in glide, and maybe others, soon.
This isn't twitter @burmask
Gawker Files for Bankruptcy
Watch "The Newburgh Sting". The lengths that the FBI went to entrap those guys was ridiculous. They had a guy who was constantly searching out suspects and badgering them into joining a plot that they never would have had any ability to pull off on their own. It took over a year of him convincing them, giving them money, providing all the means for their "atttack". They guys were angry muslims, but far less motivated or capable than the thousands of mostly white militias who have very anti-government views and lots of weapons. They were at the same anger level of a lot of right wing conspiracy theorists, except they were Muslims.
The web I want is one that doesn't assume I have an unmetered high-speed internet connection.

I'm visiting my parents right now. They have what I would term as "rural internet options": satellite, fixed cellular, or dialup. There is no DSL. There is no cable. There is no wifi. Satellite has awful latency and an effective 20GB monthly cap (their advertising is very deceptive because they pool midnight off-peak data in their advertised caps), fixed cellular has a 30GB cap: there is no provision to buy more data on either service short of ruinous overage fees.

Browsing around on the modern web filled with autoplay videos, huge JS libraries, giant pictures, etc. has been sufficient for a 2 person household to blow through that 30GB cap in less than a month. It was hard for me to believe, until I instrumented their network and saw for myself. Of course, accidentally updating any software, accidentally syncing their photo libraries, etc. are all expensive mistakes.

Most effective changes I have been able to make so far (without frustrating the parents too much) have been to ad block and get them to use Opera with Turbo, which has been sufficient to cut their data use by about half. I also put a timer on the cellular hub power supply to manually shut it off when they're not at home or when they're sleeping, because despite best efforts some software still automatically updates.
You missed Newtown, CT. The shooter certainly had "mental issues."
"As an interviewer, I don't ask this question but if I did then you could impress me by asking what a binary search tree is, then I would tell you, then you explain or write how you would do it."

Maybe. Or you would scoff, turn your nose up, mutter "noob" under your breath, and move on, knowing you're not going to hire me.

I'm sure you yourself would do as you said, but I can't be so sure about random interviewer person.
How else would you know that your MVP actually worked?
Startup will help landlords, employers mine intimate data from your Facebook
[Disclaimer: I run http://Interviewkickstart.com, which helps candidates suck less at technical interviewing.]

I have conducted countless technical interviews in my lifetime. I agree with the author; it's very difficult to actually become a good interviewer. The skill to judge someone's life and career of several years in 30 to 60 minutes is not something that comes easily. Alas, it's all too assumed to be easy.

When you start, for quite some interviews, you are very likely on either extreme viz. either too strict or too lenient. It takes a while to calibrate your standard, and not give in to an extreme. And that too, only if you introspect, or when someone draws your attention to your interview results.

Many companies don't have a culture which values interviewing as a skill. Rarely if so, I come across a company which has a process of shadowing and reverse-shadowing in an interview, which they take seriously. It is viewed as a cost center, when it's actually a profit-center when done right. And due to my business, I have come across plenty of them. At least in the valley.
The current public school system is based on the British Colonial model. At the time the British empire spanned the globe there was no robust method of immediate mass communication. So, how was the Empire going to ensure that marching orders were carried out as they were handed down?

Create cogs. Everyone learned the same thing everywhere. And you learned in an environment that stressed the immediacy of execution. The Empire didn't want its citizens thinking about whether or not to follow an order in the middle of a battle. The citizen was needed to simply do as told, now.

As a result there was standardization of curriculum and an expectation of rote learning, not critical analysis and the exercise of judgment.

Contrast that with our current environment.

Products have long lead times. Skype. A massive percent of our GDP is spent on things that we didn't even know we needed or wanted. Many of the things that we rely on everyday are the product of discovery rather than directives.

So, when the person said everyone has a talent, I take that to mean, we can each bring something to the table. Diversity of thought. Diversity of experience. And that, is definitely true.

What is not true, what is arbitrary, is that there is some defined set of talents that have value and a person either masters one or more of these talents or, if they don't, they have no talent. That point of view is ignorant and counterproductive for both individuals and communities.
> When Hollywood mythologizes a real story that has captured the public imagination and is emblematic of our era, it's Hollywood at it's finest. It's Hollywood doing exactly what it ought to be doing but rarely does.

The problem is that Hollywood sometimes "mythologizes" a real story in the vernacular, non-academic sense of the quoted term: It adopts a false narrative, often in the form of a conspiracy theory, which then gets embedded in our collective cultural memory for a long time. (Examples: Amadeus; Zero Dark Thirty; Oliver Stone's JFK [0].)

Another version is when Hollywood creates a false narrative, or sub-narratives, in the name of "making a catchier story line" and with the excuse of "artistic license," which unjustly damage the reputations of real people. (Examples: Spotlight and All the President's Men. [1] [2].)

[0] http://www.livescience.com/27364-oscars-innacurate-historica...

[1] http://news.wgbh.org/post/how-hollywood-distorts-reality-spo...

[2] http://www.mhsmantra.com/2014/04/06/history-vs-hollywood-mir...
Ha, well then my class/texts have failed to mention these practical uses.
It's a Bayesian thing: relatively low risk that a given man will assault you multiplied by the extreme personal suffering of being assaulted = high alert in situations where it would be easy for a man to assault you. She's already vulnerable and exhausted. I would feel uneasy too.
At least there were options that were grouped in a sane fashion and discoverable while I was in a particular screen trying to grope around to find a setting that I needed to change. about:config is not discoverable in any way, shape, or form and we've lost the ability to discover capabilities that you don't look for in particular via a broader search. The ability to find something in passing that is related to your mission has severely diminished.
Hmm now I feel bad about asking questions on transaction isolation levels.
The backend estimation is laughable. I don't think the author really understand what he/she is talking about. For example, search. Having a search functionality is one thing, having a usable search is completely a different thing.
The GitHub project is: https://github.com/rchodava/datamill
The solution to the "too many options" problem is to organize the options better, not to remove options.

Every single function in Excel, or Photoshop, is there because someone needs it. Should we leave those people out in the cold? Should we fragment major applications into dozens of sub-versions, each with a single specialized feature set, and force people who need more than one to juggle multiple programs?

I can get behind the idea of a "lite" program and a full-featured program in any given category. And, indeed, there are plenty of simple image manipulation programs for people who don't need all of Photoshop. (I'm not sure if there's an equivalent for Excel, but I'm also not sure Excel needs any changes to be accommodating to very basic spreadsheet use.) What's the benefit in removing options that someone is using?
On Strips: Blondie Movies
I strongly suspect it's the latter - every MP who becomes home secretary basically turns into a fascist, almost overnight. I guess they show them a bunch of secret reports on events that "almost" happened to scare them into going along with whatever the Home Office civil service have always been wanting to do.
Wait, isn't the whole point of a major version bump that it breaks backwards compatibility?

It's not a requirement.

P.S. HN users sure are big on silent downvotes these days.
Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction
You're contradicting yourself.

How so? In my own case, I knew that the patent I was helping my company's attorneys to file was a valuable property that the company would own and possibly sell. But I didn't contemplate what could happen after such a sale, once the patent ended up in the hands of a nonpracticing entity.

I was pretty naive about things like that, even though the XOR cursor patent that eventually helped bring down Commodore was already on the books, and the good folks at Unisys who bought the LZ77 patent were already running roughshod over everyone using .GIF image files. All I knew was that I wanted a new road bike, and the patent committee was only too happy to pay for it.
Unicorn Blood is an amazing title.
> Unix is the case where A == B == C. e.g. Pipes are an algebraic monoid (not monad).

Who said anything about monads? I only established the conditions for composition to be possible. Composition is the binary operation of a category, and, while every monoid is a category in a very trivial way, there are categories with more interesting structure. But, categorical blablabla aside, what matters is that making everything a byte stream isn't the only way to make things composable.

> From Alan Perlis: "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures."

Well, Perlis is wrong on this one. It is better to have types and operations that reduce the number of ways in which your program can possibly fail.
it is, and works well enough for individuals, but doesn't make for the friendliest ecosystem.
Regarding radicalization, it's a term that's only used by talking heads. In security work you assume that everyone is a motivated self-aware bad guy who can find many valid reasons to shoot you. The idea that only simpletons, who go through a "radicalization" process (usually guided by a priest), become "terrorists" is dangerously wrong. In the industry you'd be laughed at for a risk-analysis using that term or even that thought-process.

Many of those killers had a very specific reason for their attacks that was at least as good as our military uses. Not right or wrong, but as well developed and contextually reasonable.

For instance, Timothy McVeigh attacked a military installation because he felt (largely rightly) that they'd illegally and unreasonably conspired to kill his countrymen on trumped up charges. He did the equivalent of bombing an Iraqi military HQ because they'd violated international norms. It's likely that had the initial Waco attack not happened that McVeigh would have had a peaceful life - he wasn't shopping around for targets.

I say this not to forgive him but to explain how suicidally stupid our public discourse on internal dangers is. If we really want to be "safe" we have to realize that these aren't random, unguided, and unskilled, attacks. If we shoot up someone's friends we will get responses. Not from radical crazies, but from sane people who believe they're next.

Because the FBI believes its own rhetoric they're looking for radical-looking people (usually slightly crazy, as a result) and then try to work backwards to the terrorist attack they assume must be cooking in their head. This will never fail to find them funding, but will never make us one iota safer.

The main take-home is that there isn't a special terrorist type that we can find all of, thus making us safe. All of us are potentially terrorists by someone else's definition, French freedom fighters, spies behind Nazi lines, etc. (We now consider those to be "good" but the people on the ground acted from their own initiative at the time, not a comfortable societal safety net which vetted their ideas.)

Security can't protect us from ourselves.
The web I want has real security, not "HTTPS Everywhere" that provides clear text access to nation states while providing a false sense of security.
IE4 came out in Sept 1997 vs August 1995 IE. IE4 was the first time that IE was bundled with Windows. There was a ton of development with a huge IE development to catch up and eventually surpass Netscape.

FUNNY IE 4 release story:
> In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html
As someone whos job was to oranize visas for various countries around the world for some time, here is my advice. If you are doing this kind of semi-business/semi-pleasure/speak-at-aconference/whatever trips, just get a tourist visa. Everything else is a giant mess.
But it sounds cooler!
No thanks. I'd rather find another place to live or another job than grant some random app access to my profile.
Disgusting. Stop trying to subversively manipulate people to turn them into addicts.
Doesn't that make them liable for anything they miss?

Eg: they're scanning chats for discussions about criminal activities, and reporting what they find to the police. If some people plan a murder in Facebook chat, it goes unnoticed, and they commit the murder, the victim's family could potentially sue Facebook for providing a forum for the planning to take place. Facebook can no longer claim that they're not responsible for the actions of their users, because they're actively monitoring those actions and reporting to the police.
FWIW I agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson, just let their curiosity take over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIEJjpVlZu0
7 Steps for Choosing Promotional Products for Your Business
The reasoning, is that it's fresh in the media and minds of media consumers. In a year or two most of the public that happened to hear about Theranos - almost exclusively due to the scandal - will entirely have forgotten that it ever existed in the first place. Consumer memory for this sort of thing is extremely short, unless you're talking Enron scale events (which Theranos is not, financially it's a disaster the scale of Webvan).
I kind of doubt that your memory is correct. In late 80s you would see police and toll officers on Yugoslavian border crossings generally armed with pistols. Army did "protect" border, but I can't think of a place where they would be anywhere close to normal border crossing and they certainly did not have crew serviced machine guns there. Both sides used to have bunkers so maybe you meant those?

Otherwise getting across wasn't difficult, just annoying because of long columns of cars. It was worse for us locals, because there was general and usually correct assumption that we were smuggling something.

I can easily think of worse recent experiences (USA, India...).
Show HN: Drag the Square
I'm a French citizen living in Canada and going fairly often to the US by bus. They do it at land borders too, it's just that Canadian citizens are exempt.
Don't call it "stupid".

Reading people is a skill like any other, that must be learned like any other. Most people get lots of practice when young, but not getting this practice does not make you "stupid", it makes you lacking on a specific skill.
The third-party Siri, before Apple purchased the company, worked on any iPhone running the version of iOS it targeted. After the purchase it was relaunched as an integrated OS feature for the 4S and no longer available for older iPhones. Jailbroken older phones could reenable the feature.

The 4S did come with noise-cancelling microphones and an extra chip to support this; I believe the official line is that this hardware was required for Siri to work with sufficient reliability.

Edit: here's an article about jailbroken Siri:
http://www.cultofmac.com/133196/fully-functional-siri-arrive...
Would be nice to binge watch this one right after Joy. You'd get something of a corporate version of Scarface.
How about a real world example.

tl;dr The Hybrid app took longer to ship (+ 20%), and was more expensive (+ 525%)

We were able to participate in a unique experiment:
- Develop a native app for iOS and Android at the same time a separate team was developing the exact same app as Hybrid (Cordova/React).

The app had 20 screens and used modern UX (onboarding, profiles, hamburger menus, alerts, GPS, content rich screens (text/images/video) with lists/details talking to a backend REST API with local/offline/sync'd storage.

Native = 8 man/weeks

- 1 iOS dev for 4 weeks
- 1 Android dev for 4 weeks

Hybrid = 50 man/weeks

- 5 Hybrid devs 10 weeks

You can argue that the 5 devs had overhead in communication and project management, but we observed that was not a major contributing factor.

The above was for app development (not the server). Hybrid app required the same amount of QA as the Native app.
Can confirm this is any non-Canadian, I'm from the UK -> fingerprints on a land crossing.
You summed it up nicely, thanks. I kinda had LTTng and the other solutions in mind when I said there's many competing implementations, with varying degrees of functionality and maturity, and of course not all in mainline.

As a user, it's a mess because for example Erlang/OTP has added LTTng support, which I expect to be born out of a user requirement based in an environment like SLES or RHEL. That doesn't make it universally practical on a random kernel. Then we have DTrace emulation in SystemTap, and I've heard it kinda works, but I don't know how many probes exist for it.

If I want to trace on illumos or FreeBSD (NetBSD as well), there's just DTrace and I can share tracing code to some extent and the DTrace probes, say, in VMs have to be implemented once.

Like you, I hope there will be a coherent solution, but I don't see it yet.
The Most Frustrating iMessage Bug
Hillary Clinton's search results manipulated by SourceFed not Google
Well if a change in the patent system would have negatively affected cloudjacker on HN, then we obviously can't make any reforms to the system.

Sorry guys!
LamdaCD – BUILD PIPELINES AS CODE