skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if my robot is arrested then it's only fair for it to be allowed to serve my jail time for me...
If you move somewhere up in the mountains and never hear another person, can you still get a job? They're focusing on cities as economically productive spaces, not just nice places to retire to.

Also, the carbon footprint of living by yourself is much higher since you still need to travel to further-away places and get goods delivered.
This implies there is no such thing as a culture worth saving, and that the only reason someone might find value in it is because of racism. Not coincidentally, this is the globalist message. All people are the same, the only thing that matters is economic growth, and nation-states will soon be a thing of the past.

Turns out, normal people have something to say about that.
Tarta de queso con Thermomix
> Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?

A collapsible grocery cart (similar to a collapsible stroller), and insulated reusable grocery bags.
Pick the world you want to live in and go build it.
Opt-in: free but chaotic and insecure.
Opt-out: more uniform, but imperfect and still messy.
Forced updates: it works but in the same way tyranny does.

I'm ok with security updates being on by default (and truly important ones being more forceful), but the harder you push the more freedom you take away. Do you want to live in a world where someone takes your choice away because they think they know better?
>> "...and maybe it's even enough to deter car companies from doing something similar in the future..."

As anyone who's ever been near a major automaker's test engineering lab knows, ~all [0] of VW's competition is doing something similar, to varying degrees of sophistication. I remain perplexed by the pitchforks, outrage, and witch-hunt mentality displayed towards VW alone.

[0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/mitsubishi-s... and many more
I think it's a conversation that should be had; I try not to be one of those folks who says hand-wavey things like, "Something must be done!" But, in this case, I don't know what the right answer is. Evil, and that's what this behavior is, on this scale is hard to fathom and hard to discuss at human scale.

You're probably right that there are better ways that cause less harm. I just don't know how to get there. Corporations at this level wield so much power, it's hard to figure out how governments or courts can effectively regulate them.

Regardless, I don't think this settlement is enough, because the people involved (generally, though I think a couple of low-level engineers were fired) will continue going to work each day, drawing their massive salaries. I'm willing to concede I don't have all the answers on what justice really looks like, but I'm confident it's not this. This just isn't enough for years of cold, calculated, destruction of human life for profit.
> Founders are committed and in for the long haul, and either make a lot of money or none.

This used to be true, but I don't believe it is any longer. It's become fairly common for founders to do secondary sales and cash out some of their equity early on. For example, the founders of Secret famously sold $6M of their stock 6 months after starting the company.

Sometimes employees have access to those sales, but in many cases they don't.
>But like most art, whether it connects on an emotional level is mostly dependent on the consumer.

Consumers. The best art affects a lot of people. And they don't need to be told to like it. It "just works."

Art audiences follow multivariate statistical distributions. It's very much not just a personal reaction - it's a personal reaction shared by many other people having broadly similar reactions.

Some of it is social signalling, and some of it requires education and experience.

But valued works tend to persist in culture because they reliably create reactions in a statistically significant proportion of all possible audiences.
There is a similar concept with cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsprung_mass

The same conclusions about mass hurting acceleration also occur with the car, but the relative masses are so different, it's mostly irrelevant (cars are a lot heavier than bike frames).

The main difference comes with the ability of a lighter wheel to be able to fully track the road, and not leave it on a bounce. This gives better traction. (But somewhat greater vibration in the cabin.)
In Poland, where Twitter is much less popular, Facebook seems to serve that role too. A telcom cheated you out of half of your prepaid? Good luck sorting that out by calling their support. Post a comment on their Facebook page? They'll reimburse you in a day.

That said, I'm having a hard time understanding this obsession over social media. I'm pretty sure that if most companies simply ignored complaints made over Twitter or Facebook, it wouldn't hurt them in any way.
This is cool but it uses eval() which allow execution of malicious javascript code.
> almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations

Not always. When I cycle or catch the bus home, I pop into the shops near my house, grab some stuff I need, and then continue on the way. Or I grab stuff at the supermarket near work, and cycle home with it in a bag.

Now I don't need to plan a big trip. I am already traveling to go home.
Lord, just please take him in his sleep. Besides the obvious stupidity inherent to the argument you could simply accomplish this by having the company buy back the unexercised options at the current FMV.
I take it you're not speaking from knowledge in regards to this. The reason online ordering with Pizza Chains receives more per ticket is the fact that algorithms are much better at upselling than a cashier behind the register.

http://www.pizzatoday.com/departments/back-office/2013-march...
Hey whoa, calm down there. What's really funny is you're getting upset but then ignore all the people who do make their main source of income in Firefox or Chrome, and need the stability in their browsers to support a specific feature. Remember IE6 and how many applications were coded exactly to that browser? And then people bitched that Microsoft didn't automatically update that browser, even though doing so would have broken compatibility with a ton of business apps.

For me, OS doesn't matter one bit. Sure, one could be more convenient with certain features, but in the long run, everything I do at work depends on the browser, and specifically depends on Firefox. The application I support at work is programmed to work on Firefox and it's the only browser it's tested on. If Mozilla made some breaking change and I was automatically upgraded, my work comes to a screeching halt. Maybe I don't even notice something is broken until I'm giving a client demo. Pretty embarrassing, huh?

So yeah, I can compare an OS to a browser, because the same purpose that the OS serves for you, the browser serves for me. I can't just switch browsers with a click of a button. I can't find an alternative. It's Firefox or nothing, a supported version of Firefox or nothing. Funny how some people have different needs, and funny how some people can dismiss those needs without even a thought, just because they may not apply to themselves.

But luckily my work controls what version of Firefox is released to our PCs. It's not pushed to our internal yum repositories until it's been tested. And funny enough, if your business really depends on a stable Windows environment, you have the tools to do the exact same thing. I recommend you use them.
Get music news and new releasess but only for the artists you listen to on Spotify
If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed
Can we just line them all up against the wall?

Look, this is illegal behavior that costs human lives. I'm not saying VW is unique. I'm saying VW, who have been proven to be committing a crime on an unimaginably large scale for years, should pay a tremendous cost for that...ideally, the executives who knew should be going to jail.

I'm not for giving other auto-makers a pass. Pitchforks may be warranted in their cases, as well. I don't know.

But, to suggest that holding a company accountable for massive crimes is a "witch-hunt" is silly. There is no question about whether they've done this thing. The question is what they need to do to make amends.

Edit: I'm gonna assume the downvoting is because of the seemingly hyperbolic claim of this costing human lives...but, it's not intended to be hyperbolic. According to the research I've seen, VW killed people with this practice: "A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Research Letters estimated that approximately 59 premature deaths will be caused by the excess pollution produced between 2008 and 2015 by vehicles equipped with the defeat device in the U.S., the majority due to particulate pollution (87%) with the remainder due to ozone (13%). The study also found that making these vehicles emissions compliant by the end of 2016 would avert an additional 130 early deaths." (Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/29/vw-emiss... )
Anyone know why people are saying this makes time travel impossible?

http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-discovered-a-new...
They changed to behavior of clicking on the "x" - now it interprets that action as "yes, upgrade me".

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229040-microsofts-latest-...
A more informative link: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-video-games-artificial-intellig...

The paper itself from the Journal of Defense Managment (pdf): http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/genetic-fuzzy-based-artif...
Fortunately was not given to us by external forces(i.e. God) so if it's not democratic enough I'm sure it could be amended. Unfortunately UK didn't have such demands... The undemocratic argument seemed to be just a pretext.
Have a look at India, too, where numerous tech-talents are coming from.
In my opinion, it is also a matter of Western arrogance. There is a constant preaching about how strong the Western economy is, which might be the current case, but given the preconditions in China and India, I think they might achieve even higher standards than the West. (Look at their new supercomputer.) Globalization will probably result in a greater competition and people will have to struggle more in order to make a living.
Yes. We use options for equity comp b/c the grant is not a taxable event (if properly organized). It's not supposed to be a way to deprive terminated employees of their equity comp, which potentially is a large portion of the compensation of a venture-backed startup employee.
Couldn't agree more. If part of my compensation is equity, then I should get to keep it when I depart. If I don't, you're basically telling me I wasn't worth the compensation I was getting.

Taking back shares is akin to a temper tantrum, and Scott's post really, really shows no respect for the engineers that make his companies worth any money at all. It also hyper-values people who can flog a Power Point presentation, whether or not those people end up contributing the lion's share of the engineering.

It's a rather bald-faced admission of how employees are actually valued, and how distasteful compensating them is.
In this day of internet and seemingly constant change, I think it's hard to recognize that change is less drastic now than it was 100 years ago.

100 years ago, a 50 year old would have been born as the first transatlantic cable was laid, and seen the general introduction of the telephone, phonograph, movie projection, airplanes, filing systems (including punched card machines for data), radio, electric lights (which made nightlife possible), the first plastics, ironclad warships, the opening of the Suez and Panama Canals, the first affordable car in the Model T, the explosion of newspapers made possible by Linotype, etc.
The article seems incredibly over-dramatic of a genuinely interesting study. Saying that this is evidence of it being "more distorted than theorists expected" is irresponsible from a scientific point of view.

My less-dramatic summary: Barium-144 is a short-lived isotope that was predicted to have an unusual "pear" shape. A new study suggests that it does have the shape that was predicted.
Does this count?
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx
Scott basically argues that there should be a 10-year cliff on vesting. That's what it means to price employees out of their equity comp if terminated early.
Sisal was used to program the Manchester Prototype Dataflow Computer (https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep548/05sp/gurd-...).
Just a thought on this - presumably some workers knew what the device did and others must have suspected. "Just following orders" is not widely seen as OK.
Citation?

WikiPedia places the economic cost at $39+ billion, by one measure.

"A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Pollution estimated that the fraudulent emissions are associated with 45 thousand disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and a value of life lost of at least 39 billion US dollars."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#D...
Show HN: Prison.news an aggregator for the prison industry/inmate families
As someone who grew up in the Rust Belt, US and world politics have been very interesting this year. It seems like the issues that are most important to my hometown are finally making an impression on world politicians.

Entire local economies were broken by the first wave of factory closings due to globalization in the 1980's, and still haven't really recovered.

During the 2008 primaries, Obama recognized the problem: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and, like, a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not."

He nailed it on the head. Too bad he went on to say, "They get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Translation: They're conservatives [1] and racists, so they deserve it. And now we know that the Bush administration isn't the last presidency to let these places fall through the cracks.

This thread's top comment says "They may not know what the right answer is, but no one does." An important clue is that the crisis in these communities started when factories closed because it was cheaper to do it overseas. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the answer is reversing the globalization -- put some taxes on imports. Another comment from this thread:

"Furthermore, people keep talking about the free trade zone as if they were children and the word "free" were a piece of candy. Free trade is not an absolute good and not a great thing when it stifles a country's growth. The US became an economic superpower not because of free trade but because of protectionism..."

Donald Trump wants to put a 45% tariff on Chinese imports. A lot of people I know would overlook a lot of his shortcomings for that policy position alone. I'm starting to wonder if I might be one of them.

[1] Many Rust Belt states have historically had a strong labor union presence, and to this day are classified as bellwethers and battleground states.
When I was in high school in the early 90s I had the option of doing music or computing studies. I chose the latter.

While I agree that some of the material was boring and mundane, it really did play a major role in me becoming a software developer and enjoying it.

I had a teacher friend once tell me that she generally doesn't expect students to learn everything, she just expects them to recognise it when they see it again.

So a child learning the ABC's doesn't really understand what they represent but it's through recognition that they do the actual learning. At some point there is a brainfart and concept become linked and you have your first mindblow.

More recently I finished up some post-grad studies and one of the courses I did was HCI (Human Computer Interaction). This was very dry and boring for the most part. But it was the one that left the most impact on me. It didn't connect with me at the time but now I regularly think "Oh shit, that's what she meant! UX is so fucking important".

Again, this has shaped my relationships to users and the constant blame game I'd play when someone couldn't use what I had built. I very rarely, if ever, blame the user now.

TL;DR: So yeah, school can make things boring but don't underestimate how the subtle accumulation of knowledge can change your life.

p.s. Be humble. Never stop learning. Let your brain fart.
Nice. I get a divide by 0 error. Do I need to read or not?
Are you referring to the 1% on wall street? ;)
Spiders in the Highest Attics Love to Play at Acrobatics
Year 2000, people call Trump racist: http://graphics.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/gaming/part...

1993, Governor of Connecticut calls Trump bigoted: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/05/nyregion/weicker-apologize...
Someone should crowdfund the development of an awesome new robot for Mr Snowden's use, and those with similar needs.
Bud Spencer dies at age 86
At most you can have similar name conventions (e.g. strings.Contains, or Replace etc) but even so some languages use camelCase others dashes etc
Those "unpopulated Chinese ghost towns" are all populated now, a few years after they were built. The government just builds them a while before forcing the nearest subsistence farmers to move into them.

It's like Spike Japan, the blog that visits towns on holidays and claims they've been abandoned for years, because all the residents are gone on holiday.
Eh, sure, you can use something like Cython, but Erlang is going to have an easier time being fast and reliable, for example.
I'd be curious to see the math on 29 inch mtb wheels vs other sizes. Of course there are other things in play there like the ability to roll over obstacles (29ers do this well) and maneuver in tight spaces (not quite so good).
I'm sorry, but while impressive, it's nowhere near the mother of all demos. There's only one video out there that impressed me as much as the mother of all demos.
All of those things have direct comparisons to the individual death penalty or other pre-existing laws.

A human could be put to death even if they have a family to support, so the workers argument is settled. The only issue is the matter of scale, but the death penalty is pretty rare to begin with, and I would expect a corporate death penalty have even stricter requirements.

They don't have to close a transnational, they can just force them to stop doing business in the country. They can close their US operations and ban their imports. We already have import bans on companies, countries, and products.

For subsidiaries, it would depends on how far up the chain the crime went. If Opel committed the crime but GM didn't know, Opel dies. If GM knew, GM dies. You could likely even spin off the "innocent" subsidiaries. If a husband commits a crime and the wife was not involved, the wife doesn't go to jail. If they both did it but their children were not involved, the children don't go to jail, they go to live with another set of parents.
We don't like to talk about it, but if you want to commit crimes, the best way to do it is to collective responsibility over a corporate entity, and hold your employees and economic sector hostage.

It worked for the banks and car manufacturers...
Kids need a motive. With a motive, they'll figure things out, you don't have to handhold them every step or create broken abstractions for them to play around in then get bored.

We already have "visual/physical programming" for kids, in the form of Minecraft. And for the kids who want to go the extra mile, well, they learn Java. Not enough Java they could work at BigCo, because they learn Java with the motive to do stuff in Minecraft, not to actually understand the semantics of Java -- but if they got bored with Minecraft, their retained Java knowledge would be enough that they could then teach themselves the more formal aspects, or even another language.

Kids don't want to know the difference between '=' and '==' and '==='.
I am pretty sure most of the manufacturing workers had no idea. Probably a very, very small percentage of the employees knew about the device.
I've played with VS Code a bit, it's a pretty cool tool for small scale scripting, but it's not really a replacement for a full fledged IDE.

Hopefully Jetbrains will release their cross platform C# IDE sometime soon. I would prefer Visual Studio, but I don't think that's going to happen (at least not anytime soon).
It's not the job of the individual consumer to fight lock-in for other people. That is the job of the government. If we have regulation against this bs, I'll report problems. Otherwise, I'll deal with them.
I am unconvinced by the idea that passion comes only after labour.

Passion feels to me like a gift from the universe, you never know when or where it will strike. It feels intuitive to me that no amount of struggle will make me have a passion for cleaning toilets.

Of course, cleaning enough toilets could create a passion in me for not cleaning toilets, but I'm hopeful that there's easier ways to achieve it.

Also it feels like when I'm engaged in an activity as unpleasant as cleaning toilets, that expense of energy is actively preventing me from thinking about things that I am passionate about.
But that or something along the same lines is how syntax highlighting is typically implemented.
Shareholders are not innocent. It's their responsibility to bear, albeit limited, financial risk. It's therefore prudent for them to demand companies uphold legal and moral obligations, or move capital into ventures that will. Failure to do so means they are more likely to lose their investments.
We had this idea with my co-worker the other day, about becoming an apartment complex ISP, getting a high-bandwidth connection to the whole building and wiring every apartment with fiber optic links. Then, we'd put a server farm in the basement and offer "Internet + compute services". Like VPSes for techies, and OnLive equivalent for gamers, except the roundtrip for the latter would be down to the basement and back up, instead of down to Australia, through China and back.

The grander idea is to have apartment buildings with their own basement clouds, where tenants could off-load computational needs. Sounds like a much more energy-efficient solution than person having either an overpowered device or a low-power one in constant connection with clouds on the other side of the planet. Moreover, this idea was part of a general brainstorming about ways to dumb the cloud back down, so that it's distributed compute-on-demand infrastructure, and not the shitty third-party data silos it's now.

After reading the comments here I realized that while my friend and I would have the best of intentions, if ISPs in general were to be allowed to do such a thing, they'd fuck it up exactly in the way they do in this case.
Famously bad reasoning for Germans in the last hundred years, yes.
Often shareholders have a degree of culpability. Arms companies and tobacco are examples where in my view shareholders are using their money to promote harm. Automakers fall somewhere on the harm - good spectrum and I'd mostly not put them down as a net good. Fossil fuel emissions would be be the key reason. Shareholders have a choice where to put their money and many (most?) choose high returns over anything else. I'd say punishing this behaviour might be worth considering.