skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If an algorithm can decide how likely I am to be at fault in a wreck, why can't one decide my chances of recidivism?

Alternatively, If an algorithm for recidivism is questioned, why should the algorithm for insurance also not be questioned?

Two wrongs do not make a right.
A world in which less than 1% of users will ever use that ethernet dongle. If you needed all of those ports, you bought the wrong laptop.
Learn React.js in a weekend
Please edit your comment and add http:// in front of the link so that HN will abbreviate it. Without that, your comment messes up the page width on mobile.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If managers want accurate estimates, they need to allow just as much time planning and estimating as they do for developing. And requirements must be frozen.

Just look at construction - spend years planning for 6 months of development. And there are still schedule overruns!

Sure, you can have detailed estimates. But every company I've worked at wants detailed, accurate estimates with maybe one day's worth of planning. Often they want "guesses" or "rough estimates" on the spot, literally seconds after telling you what they want. I've also never come across a single company that actually froze requirements.

And every developer knows what happens when you say you can't give an accurate estimate quickly: They demand you make a guess anyway and that becomes the estimate. If you give a range, they'll take the minimum as the estimate.
hum. I tried to short "http://lon.gs" and then short the result again, now it redirects indefinitely... http://lon.gs/ack
I'm impressed that MIO is getting funding. It will be great to have a safe library to create event-driven apps in Rust.
Mmm, that makes sense to me, consider creating an issue for this.
The C code in the "framework" this thing uses is pretty scary; grep for MAX_BUFFER_SIZE, malloc, strcpy, &c. The header parsing in particular.
IMO: this is actually a good default setting. Home-router designers should assume that things are hostile by default. Of course, it should be dead-simple to turn this off as well.
Sentences are not, generally, based on law and precedent. Within a wide range, sentences are heavily dependent on judges' discretion and ad-hoc and unscientific consideration of various factors.
The issue Chomsky raises isn't that statistical models aren't predictive enough, but that you don't understand they don't typically yield any understanding of the underlying system.
When does concisely articulating an obvious conclusion become a rant? What makes it a rant? Is it the fact that you disagree? Or the fact that he uses the word "absolutely" ?

From the information available to me, it appears to me that there is absolutely no altruism in Apple's programming classes.
Doesn't LLVM (or a related project) support JIT compilation?
The private key in the L1F3 encryption algorithm.
As a user who frequently opened the AppStore just to browse, discover new apps, and who used to buy a lot, I've just stopped opening the AppStore over the last three-four years. Browsing and discovery has become too hard for me, and I feel like they're pushing games too hard.

I used to buy a lot of games as well, but often I was just in the mood to look for some neat applications. If I could somehow filter out all games and just browse apps across all categories, I might still browse the AppStore regularly and still buy apps (including games, when I'm in the mood for that). The end result now is that they've lost a customer who used to buy new apps every week.
Tesla’s Plan to Buy SolarCity Has Major Flaws
I'm reminded of this cartoon about an inventor who demonstrates a teleportation device. Shows you don't have to go all technical or write an economic treatise about emulated humans for important philisophical questions. It can be fun as well.

"To be" (by John Weldon)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

For a more serious answer to these questions (or at least some) you can look up the work " i am you" By Daniel Kolak.
Lessons from the tech elite: eat carrots, shower more and tape up your webcam
app last updated in 2014. This seems pretty old?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.fpl...
Still probably more secure than most remote garage door openers tbh
I would, yes, though I'd be careful about drawing comparisons in this regard between computer programs (as we know them today) and the phenomenon that we call consciousness, since the framework of computation deliberately extricates the essence of a program from the physical phenomena that underpins its existence.
I'm surprised there's still any interest in standalone URL shorteners. Didn't Twitter make them obsolete when it implemented its own?
Okta Hired Goldman Sach for IPO or Sale
That seems an unreasonably high bar though. I mean, photosynthesizing life "lives off the sun", but nobody challenges it by putting a tomato plant into a vacuum :p
> sentences are heavily dependent on judges' discretion and ad-hoc and unscientific consideration of various factors.

Sure, but they are put out in the open, and the judge does justify it in some written account, so that it can be referenced when challenged in an appeals court.

What answer should be given to someone who is given a sentence based on this algorithm and challenges it?

"Well, the algorithm said so, and studies say that it's pretty accurate, and we don't know how it came to this particular rating of you, so you're shit out of luck?"
Yeah this argument holds a lot less water in a post-Theranos world. Just because something is proprietary does not mean it's effective.

And just like with Theranos, the stakes are too high for people to just assume these people know what they're doing. If someone is going to be spending years of their life in jail because of an algorithm, it better be accurate.
FFmpeg2Lib: convert your favorite FFmpeg command lines to iOS library
Success is based on market presence, knowing what you are doing, ability, and luck (and other things). With a lot of developers, many of them failing, the threshold of success is really high. That tends to say to me, avoid.

There is also the problem of other people engaging in the sunk cost fallacy. If your competitors keep throwing good money after bad that tends thrash your business as well. Problem because there is always a greater fool with more money than you.
"Yet, it strikes people as "unfair" to play the statistics like that, because peoples' sense of justice requires some sort of individualized due process"

Doesnt using the individuals data create an individualized due process? And this is for sentencing length, not conviction. Its not, did they do it, its how likely will they do it again. Not sure how I feel now...
I wrote a little about this is a previous dev diary [1]. The short answer is we wanted to decouple our GUI from the programming platform. We had a syntax for the language at one point in 2014. But we also believed in dogfooding; if we are creating a programming language for non-programmers, we should be using it as they would i.e. without a syntax.

Unfortunately, this led to the situation where our platform couldn't progress past our GUI. This might have been okay, except we didn't know what the GUI should look like. We've tried grids, graphs, wikis, madlibs, and everything else. The GUI was kept in a constant state of flux, so our entire platform was.

So we wised up and made a protocol and a text syntax to interface with the Eve server. By loosely coupling the platform and the GUI, we can now progress them at different rates.

To be clear, we don't intend that the language will be exposed to non-programmers through the REPL. However we've always expected that developers will be our first users, and we want to have some tools they're familiar with. At the same time, we are still developing UI concepts for non-programmers, trying to hone in on what works.

[1] http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2016/06/10/jan-feb/
Seems a bit buggy. I shortened "http://hello.com", it returned "lon.gs/akm", and I visited the shortened URL only to be redirected to https://codeandoando.com/integracion-continua-con-drone/.
The French connection: A look at France’s rising tech scene
Perl 6 on the Shoulders of Giants
WWDC Clues Hint at Apple's Post-IPhone Era
Covering the webcam to stop the sound sounds like something someone who code in php would do!

Or perhaps he is worried about his privacy...
tl;dr: Under the right conditions the step leader of a lightning strike can have a small bunch of electrons out in front of the rest of the tip, and the extremely strong electrostatic forces at play can then accelerate that bunch ahead of the tip to relativistic velocities. The bunch then hits the ground and releases an intensely strong (hundreds of gigawatts) coherent microwave radiation pulse. Also under the right conditions this microwave pulse can get trapped as a standing wave inside of a plasma bubble which it maintains through its own energy, lasting for several seconds. Scientists should be able to test this theory and create ball lightning artificially if they can build microwave devices in the 100 GW range.
As an iTerm2 user, I thank you. This is pretty awesome.
Are the rough figures you cited the app purchase price, advertising revenue, in-app purchases or some combination of the three?
> What about it, though?

Violating the consciousness's right to life. I could be missing something, of course, but whether we can make an exact duplicate of a person at a given point in time doesn't seem relevant to this.

I'm curious why the answers to questions of this genre usually seem obvious to me, but clearly aren't obvious for everyone. I'm not implying any value judgement either way - perhaps I'm just a dullard. But I do wonder what the difference in mindset is.
And the studies are closed as well.

edit: since i cant reply to hackuser below, here is a quote from the article: "Company officials say the algorithm’s results are backed by research, but they are tight-lipped about its details. "
The main difference with this case is that you can shop around for different insurance, and different insurance companies use different algorithms to determine risk.

You can, of course, question them. In many cases they're open source, they're usually government-audited, and in some countries, even government mandated.

Edit: hackuser beat me to the point - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957351
this made my URL longer :/ lon.gs/ae9
I pretty vehemently disagree. We should be very reluctant to systematically break good things to protect badly written junk.

Let badly written junk burn. Then people will learn it's junk and stop using it or the developers and vendors will be forced to fix it.
Care to share a link to your games?
This is an impressive project, particularly interesting is the Apache module. I did notice it was missing some things I might like, headers in for example.
Oh, crap, they botched the concrete in the new locks. That's going to be hard to fix.

The concrete in the original locks is a century old and showing no problems. That's a major achievement in general, and in an application where concrete is exposed to salt water, very impressive. Check out almost any seawall or pier that's more than a few decades old.

Sad. When this project was first announced, the Panama Canal Authority insisted they were going to get the concrete right. They didn't.
So much misinformation around fracking; incredubly sad the people that want it banned dont understand impermeable layers, sand injection, and salt water disposal.

You will always need crude oil, not for burning, but for the synthetics, plastics, and materials of the future in our electric cars. Fracking in the USA has allowed us to use our own ethically sourced resources, rather than fueling wars in the middle east.
This is such an obviously ahistorical sentiment it's hard to know where to start in rebutting it, but its discredited name might be a good place to start: Malthusianism.
Thanks for this feedback!! :)
> Sentences are not, generally, based on law and precedent. Within a wide range, sentences are heavily dependent on judges' discretion and ad-hoc and unscientific consideration of various factors.

I'm pretty sure that's not true

* Judges often complain about sentencing requirements in the law, and those requirements are a or the major factor in the high incarceration rates in the 'War on Drugs' and for 'Three Strikes' offenders - so certainly they are prevalent.

* I'm pretty sure judges look carefully at other sentences for similar crimes and criminals (precedent), and I know many courts use formulas that consider past convictions and other factors in determining a sentence.

* Sentences can be appealed, so the judge has to follow certain standards to avoid having their sentence overturned by a higher court.
That's part of it, but it doesn't quite explain the front suspension on a BMW bike. No one else makes a suspension so complicated, however, no one else has a bike that doesn't dive under braking. The engineers knew it was possible and pulled out every stop to deliver it.

It's a cultural thing, when we see a problem it must be fixed no matter how much complexity.

It's like when I'm making an app and there's a 5 fps drop when the a new table view cell is rendered, everyone I show can barely notice it, but I see it, and it bothers me until it's fixed. 60 FPS or GTFO.
Sure, and to be fair to author, my point wasn't made to combat his article. I was more responding to the headline which reminded me of the "indieapocalypse" articles that make news all the time.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. If you found more viable platforms of course that makes sense to pursue. I think that's what more developers who complain about the meager app store sales ought to do (explore alternatives), rather than just whine about the apocalypse and hope their downloads magically change.
> Government is held to higher standards than businesses, because government can take your freedom and property.

So, to be clear, a higher standard means the government is not allowed to use data-driven algorithms to make decisions? Keep in mind that judges already had and continue to have latitude to independently conclude the same thing the algorithm does and act appropriately.

Or is your disagreement with the closed nature of the algorithms? Which is an argument, but one that should also be applied to insurance companies, especially those brokering mandatory products like car and health.

EDIT: To copy from my other reply:

If the problem is in the openness of the decision, then let's open up everything. If the problem is in making data-driven, algorithmic decisions in the first place... I'm not sure that's something I can get behind.
Interesting. Does it say that in the article?

EDIT:

ahartman00: I'm not sure why you don't see the reply link, but another option is the click the time ('x minutes/hours ago'), and you can reply there.

Regarding that quote, I thought it meant they were tight-lipped about the algorithm, not the research, but I see that it's ambiguous.
True, though they're not all games.
TOR and MOSS are both extremely deserving recipients, but I'd say Mozilla is borderline unethical with their spending.

Of the millions (yes millions) of dollars they've received, little seems to have gone toward Firefox development.

Mozilla received over $121 million in 2010 from corporate sponsors. This is the same Mozilla that placed ADS in their new tab views. Really, they placed Paid Ads on the new tab screen. What were those for again?

I do understand that Mozilla's mission is to improve the web. Donating to these causes certainly helps with that. But I'm still troubled that they put ads (with aggregate user tracking) into their core product.
Ok, good points. However they did mention that the sentencing algorithm does not take race into account. It does take gender into account, so :(
Listening to Mozart lowers blood pressure
It may be hard to quantify into a pure-economics framework, but people and companies do place some kind of value on "stable and predictable relationships", even if that relationship is simply the price quoted by a supplier to customers.

Mindlessly changing prices for the maximum short-term economic benefit isn't always a winning strategy.
Looks like the perfect way to turn URL's in to root shells on the hosting server
The price of LEDs: it’s profitable to farm in a New Jersey nightclub
I'm not sure that's true:

http://criminology.fsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Validation-of-...
There are other needs for a shortened URL. Perhaps you have to hardcode a link in code and don't want to be tied to a page whose contents may break. If you control your URL shortener, you can hardcode your shortened one, and update the redirect as needed.
Agreed.

q3k@nihilism ~/Projects/longs $ python2 -c "print 'GET / HTTP/1.1.\r\n' + 'a'*2000 + '\r\n\r\n'" | nc 127.0.0.1 1337

q3k@nihilism ~/Projects/longs $ PORT=1337 ./longs
*** Error in `./longs': free(): invalid next size (normal): 0x000000000155a5f0 ***
...

Sounds like a fun heap exploitation challenge. Almost CTF-like.

EDIT: It also throws a whole bunch of warning when compiling. [moved this here from the first line after child post mention]
Parent Maven POM, 0.44 released
I agree with you completely. If the problem is in the openness of the decision, then let's open up everything. If the problem is in making data-driven, algorithmic decisions in the first place... I'm not sure that's something I can get behind.
history will look back on this iphone era we are living as the second dark age.
"the internet collapses the whole time" ? I really wonder what's going on from a layer 1/2 perspective their with last mile connection and ISPs. I'm assuming the british authorities haven't tried to stop the Ecuadorians from ordering ordinary internet service, though of course anything going into/out of there is subject to a great deal of scrutiny and signals intelligence attention.

In that part of London they should be able to obtain a fairly ordinary VDSL2 17a profile last mile connection which will be anywhere from 55 to 85 Mbps symmetric depending on how shitty the POTS phone wiring is, and how close the DSLAM is to the premises.
cool, a capture the aws instance contest! (/s)
Alright. I guess I misunderstood what you were getting at with your comment. And perhaps you misunderstood the nature of my conversation with PepeGomez? You appeared to be correcting me over some misunderstanding I never evinced.

PepeGomez claimed "If it's divisible by a number, the number must appear in its factorization and vice versa." in apparent support of the argument that uniqueness of prime factorizations is therefore obvious.

In response to this, I wrote my initial comment. When, in it, I asked "Who says 'if it's divisible by a number, the number must appear in its factorization'? Why is that true?", that was in response to PepeGomez, a rhetorical way of engaging with the claim they made.

I further noted in my comment that this claim about divisibility and factorizations wasn't quite correct for arbitrary numbers, but was true for prime numbers, but is nonetheless non-obvious for prime numbers. It appears you agree with me on all of this, so... great.
I just realized that if I have lightning-port headphones plugged in I can't be charging my iPhone at the same time. That's actually a very common use case for me, as I always plug it in to stay charged if I'm listening at my desk or in bed.
>always need crude oil, not for burning, but for the synthetics, plastics, and materials of the future in our electric cars.

cheap crude oil just temporarily reduces the demand for renewable energy sources while accelerating the decline of the planet. fracking is just an attempt to delay the inevitable and make oil cheaper than it should be. bioplastics will eventually be able to do the things you mention.
You raise a good question. In most cases there's a person manning that drilling machine, driving that car, or typing into that piece of software.

This draft legislation anticipates a secular change in the labour market whereby autonomous robots displace the need for humans so significantly that the pool of taxable labour vanishes for good.

Meanwhile economic output increases but there's no taxation system in place for the government to take a slice. So shift the tax burden to the robots.

It's far from perfect but sure as hell somebody (or something) is getting taxed.
80-85% of seized assets go uncontested: http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/forfeiture-is-rea.... I.e. nobody even files a claim to get back their thousands of dollars in cash. You can use your common sense to figure why that's the case.

I don't think we should have civil asset forfeiture. But I think it's improbable that more than a small minority of those assets are legitimate (especially in the $10,000 in the glove box scenarios).
We[1] just launched a new shortener and it supports URLs.

That's not the primary use-case for it[2][3], but we're happy to support people shortening URLs if they want to. The reason there's room for this is that our URL shortening function has no ads, no third party tracking, no bloat ... no dark patterns.

That's worth something to some people.

[1] Oh By, Inc.

[2] https://0x.co/examples.html

[3] https://0x.co/hnfaq.html
I like having a certain amount of process as well, but I interpreted the article as being more about the dynamic between the developers and the PMs than process in general.

In my experience, different orgs use PMs in different ways. The most positive experiences I've had has been with PMs who were there to facilitate communication, get people unblocked, keep track of requirements and big picture stuff, and in general to help people out and worry about certain things so the engineers don't have to.

I've also had bad experiences with PMs in other orgs. In the bad cases, the PMs are used by upper management solely to keep an eye on everyone, not to help them. These are the places where the only time you deal with PMs is when they summon you into meetings to explain why you're not done with something yet, or they pop into your office to give you a list of items and want to know which ones are done and what's the ETA on everything else.

When used appropriately, PMs can be a godsend and no one resents having to deal with them because they make everyone's jobs easier. When used inappropriately, all they ever do is go around and harass people with stuff like, "is X done yet, and if not, what's the ETA?" When used in that capacity, that means they been drafted into a different role where they're being used by higher-level management to stay on top of everyone and roll up daily or weekly reports that the higher-level managers then send up to their managers to make it look like they're in control of the situation.

When used extremely inappropriately, you will see a (anti)pattern of gradually increasing granularity in how they track people. They go from tracking high level goals and milestones to tracking people and projects with increasing levels of granularity. They go from tracking engineering time in terms of months or weeks to days or hours.

Eventually this granularity crosses some threshold of usefulness, and it starts having detrimental effects on the results. Things like refactoring or code cleanup or really just doing anything that is not working on a specific new feature becomes verboten. People start exaggerating their time estimates to give themselves wiggle room, or to sneak in extra time for critical maintenance work that is not associated with a shipping feature. Eventually everyone's just lying to everyone about everything, and the constant meetings and "are you done yet?" pop-ins become pointless rituals that waste everyone's time but continue happening with greater frequency.
Judging by the code, everything that goes into the database is a Base64 encoded. Where do you see a buffer overflow?
from many developers i know who go from mature companies to startups, they all seem to come to the same conclusion that "the code is the easy part"