skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Striking up controversy in advertising is very effective for going viral. Doesn't have to be a competitor, it can be an idea or methodology widely held in an industry as well.
I don't know, but I'm not even concerned with that. For one, I'm not a Swiss citizen - I'd have work rights through my EU citizenship. Second, with any work that I do, I want to be successful. If everyone is speaking German, I'm not going to be too productive. If they can handle my English or Italian, then we're in business.

I live in the US, and it's common to want certain language(s) for our various roles. We don't have a national language ourselves.
Your comparison to Tuft and Needle is not very good. Everybody hates mattress stores for their sleazy business practices; it's a given.

There's no unanimous hatred for Slack, however, so your ads come off as pretty ignorant. We use slack at my company and have 0 problems with it. I am perfectly aware of its limitations and I am fine with them.

Also, I have to download a desktop client to use Ryver? 2004 called and wants their software back.
I have to say that having used Slack for clients' projects and as part of a few political campaign teams, the primary value add is the organization of meta-information (files) in the same client as the chat service. I'm not sure I'd ever pay for that kind of service.

Also I've never clicked on a Ryver ad. I read the blog post linked here, and while I find some merit in the idea that competition must be contrasted and that we're wired to focus on conflict, the aggressiveness is off-putting.
Anyone doubting that controversy is effective should look at where the nice, honest candidates for U.S. presidency currently are. I don't know as they dropped off some time back while two remaining at the lead try to tap the conflict button in people's brains almost every time they speak. There's more to it than simply being controversial or aggressive: what you say or offer has to fit needs of the audience in their minds. As always.

The linked marketing reads as if it's bluntly honest while also delivering a backhand slap to the competition. Those often work. Many companies can't do it because their business model is a bit too scheming. The Ryver deal seems straight-forward based on what's presented here. So, they can do the brutally honest and combative approach. No opinion on Slack vs Ryver specifically. My comment is just about the marketing angle.
Most restaurants in the US have free water, too. The few exceptions I've seen are touristy places, super fancy places, and places that have really, really bad tap water.
iPhone 7 Live
Naturally, when the result of a scientific study is entangled emotionally with something so personal like intelligence, it is hard to look at the results without bias. Lots of people are going to have a problem with this study, because it literally makes 99.999% of the population feel inadequate.
I, Robot and other Asimov books inspired an interest in AI and taught me to explore all the ways a system could go wrong.

The Ship who Searched by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey introduced me to the stock market.
With parallel construction and such, it might be hard to punish malicious use...
If by "higher power" you mean things that humans can never comprehend, then yes.

But us not ever being able to understand it does not mean there is no reasoning behind it.

In the end it depends on perspectives & dictionary. You might call it a "higher power" .... I'm contended to end your sentence at 'phenomena'.
6 Tips for Online Documentation Design
Ask HN: How to get dump of Facebook people's directory
I am having a baby soon and am searching for unique/fairly uncommon names. I want to extract all names from FB poeple's directory and make a histogram. Anyone knows where I can get a dump of all these names in FB's directory? I tried scraping, but it is running into captcha.

I am open to using linkedin or any other names directory also. I am from India, if it helps.
Postbin – What do you guys think?
When I sit up straight my back no longer makes contact with the chair, adding much more stress. Maybe there's something wrong with my back :/
Up next,"Build this small welding unit using only things you find in your backpack!"

I think Ken did a great job but missed an interesting point, if you have one of these cheap chargers and leave it plugged in with the end laying about on your desk waiting for you to bring your Macbook and plug it in, then anything on your desk can short it. Pen clips, paper clips, metalized trinkets from the last trade show you visited. If you aren't the clean spartan desk type (and I'm not) you may find burn marks on your desk where things have hit the end of the connector, or worse.
I'm just fascinated by the fact that in 2016 there are still huge companies like this making their money on ancient tech that is insanely overpriced to the alternatives.

(~20 years ago when I started working in software I thought I would eventually get how these enterprise software giants actually were worth it. The more I learn and age...)

In the end I guess what companies like Dell and EMC do is to provide access to tech that otherwise (because of cultural reasons) is not available to non-tech companies. But.. anyway, all of this seems like it's ripe for disruption.
It's more comfy and it lets you breathe more easily, but you need the muscles for it. It's only a relaxed neutral position if the muscles at the back pull just as much as those at the front.
>You might have thought that metaprogramming meant macros, type introspection, that kind of thing. Nope, I'm hijacking the word for today:

Not hijacking. Overloading. ;)
> OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students.

These kinds of things are rare enough that they tend to get a lot of attention, and I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract, so I think that between parents, school administrators, and the particular students involved when this actually occurs in practice, things are generally handled fairly well.

That's not to say that there isn't legitimate reason to consider carefully, but I think the idea that this is somehow universally an unacceptable risk in every case is simply unsupportable from the factual experience. I'm interested in seeing any concrete evidence that would suggest otherwise, but generalization from what is typical of age groups to cases that are clearly atypical for their age group is, I think, insufficient to make that case.
Actually I would find a desktop client more appealing. I'm not a fan of browsers-as-poorly-functioning-userlands-on-userlands that seems to be the modern fad.
this often happens even with original chargers, if you dont use a grounded cable. I always use a grounded cable.
Market share is nice, but when many developers use Firefox, guess what gets developed even if they don't get money for it?
> No, it really isn't. If you have professionals on your team, they will be able to work together.

Okay, would it feel more comfortable if we interviewed for "professionalism" instead of "culture fit"? Fully realizing that standards of professionalism are different for each company and team within a company, i.e. that professional standards are part of a team's culture?

> And once again, most places are using "culture fit" as a way to say, "Not like me", and using it to enable discriminatory hiring practices.

That is true sometimes, but not always.

More to the point, tightening the politically correctness standards of language around the problem does absolutely nothing to prevent discrimination--it just makes discrimination harder to identify. And in the process you're throwing out the idea that sometimes people aren't likely to get along--which is not a function of race/gender/class/etc. If you think someone is using "cultural fit" as an excuse for discrimination, the solution is to call them out for that, not to pretend that "cultural fit" doesn't describe a real phenomenon. What makes you think that a bigot can't say that someone isn't technically qualified in order to exclude them?

A perfect example of this: I said someone wasn't a cultural fit a year ago, but I was outvoted because of his technical abilities. Four months later he was fired for groping the administrative assistant, and afterward, more incidents came to light. Do you think that my workplace was more or less discriminatory because we hired someone without regard to his cultural fit?
Win95 crashing several times a week was a feature that would let you get away with not seeing this other bug: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/216641
I got that on an airplane with the two-pronged plug. The metal armrest was making my arm tingle!
Irish Lawmakers Expected to Approve Appeal on Apple Ruling
See the quote above. Automation has historically increased wages AND the number of available jobs.

No, I can't make a car, and have no interest whatsoever in making one. I could, however, buy a Honda Civic today in the US for more or less the same price (adjusted for inflation) as a Model T, but thanks in no small part to automation, it's a much more efficient, safe and comfortable car. And still the auto industry directly employs 1.5 million Americans now vs. 450k in the late 20s.
Oops, I should mention that the pen icon opens up the editor.
Do you ever sit on a couch with your laptop? I do this a lot, and I think this is when it gets destroyed. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good way to avoid this other than just making the cable sturdier somehow.
> Maybe there's something wrong with my back :/

Could be the chair too!
Of course you have to understand how things work.

But in terms of getting things done, search engines can be amazingly helpful.

But if someone doesn't really know how to code anything, doesn't that imply that they don't really understand how anything really works?

Just because you know how to code doesn't mean you have to grind your gears doing root cause analysis on every obscure error message that bubbles up -- when about 80% of the time you can just paste the message into a search engine, and get a pretty good understanding within about 30 seconds. And save your precious grey matter-accessible calories for the other 20%.

In fact, in many roles you'd be crippling yourself (and wasting your employers money) if you didn't know how to use search engines effectively.
Or for long-running JavaScript components. V8 doesn't optimize code with TurboFan right away; it does it for hotspot functions that look optimizable.

This would especially make sense along with an "optimized cocde cache": cache pre-compiled optimized versions of JavaScript, such as common JavaScript libraries, based on hash.
Such douchebaggery.
Tuft and Needle also doesn't call out anyone by name. Nobody would care if Ryver's ads said "Chat programs are greedy," rather than specifically naming a beloved company.

And it's made worse since Ryver just seems to be an (inferior) Slack clone.
Massachusetts Is Considering Changing Its Time Zone, Because Winter Is the Worst
Ok, so you are admitting your ideas are fact-less, mere assumptions that can easily be true or false, yet you're down voting my comment because it doesn't align with your evidence-less assumptions about the brain?

Again, what's that evidence? Is it a genome? some sort of better brain capacity?
I chuckled when I saw that question.

Beautiful example of being tactful enough not to reply "No fucking way would I want to stay close to that psycho!"
That's a great example and I don't disagree with you.

The way I think about "intelligence" is not to mull over what it "really means" but to think about lots of common "intellectual" tasks (in which aptitude can be measured) that people are interested in: reading, writing, math, programming, solving puzzles, etc. Or ideally, theoretical "potential" in each of these tasks, since one person may put more or less effort into another field.

What's supported by research and anectodal evidence is that if you did principal components analysis on these measured "aptitudes", there would be a principal component explaining a lot of the variation. A good test can try to measure this principal component.

But when you're talking about the very highest levels of specific tasks like cycling or swimming, it would be reasonable to expect that amongst the population of already "elite athletes" there would be less of a dominant first principal component
I guess it's hard to be relevant and get attention when your business model is Yet Another Chat System. This sort of Bro- marketing, however, tends to linger in the back of my head as a telling sign of how usable the product will be, and what customer service will look like.

(edited for clarification of comment)
I'm always bemused that bottled water costs more than gasoline.
Negative ads can make sense if you're going up against one or two entrenched competitors that own most of the market share.

That being said, the example ad shown in the article ("Slack is so last year. Now it's Ryver") just made me angry. Anyone who has been in tech a while has experienced this neurotic, senseless need to switch tooling every year because some middle manager decided to.
Tensor and Quaternion has video conferencing support?

From what I read, they are only matrix clients, not vector clients.
> Serverless in this context means ...

You know what is going to happen. Because it's a marketing buzzword it will be added to everything and anything and won't even mean what you think it means anymore. Just like "cloud" or "microservice". Then it will end up sounding bad anyway. Do you still market your products with "web 2.0" moniker ? That's right, you don't. I can't take people using the word "serverless" seriously to begin with.
Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche
But Slack's desktop client is excellent. Furthermore, Ryver makes a big point about guest access - and a browser client would be much better for guests than a dedicated client they may only use once.
I would expect any 3rd party manufacturer seeking to replicate the safety margins of Apple's own power adapters may ultimately find it difficult to produce a competitive alternative, once you factor in costs of NDAs with Apple and such. (Apple likely works to ensure it stays this way.) Cables are passive, USB chargers are generally low wattage, while the Macbook adapters have active regulation, plus higher power ratings.
3 New Useful Ionic Starters
Do you think about the universe or your place in the universe and why you are here ?

If it's the latter, I read somewhere a long time ago that these thoughts are caused due to a temporary chemical imbalance (serotonin I think) in the brain. Can't find the source right now, but something worth adding to the conversation.
Yeah, not having a desktop client was one of the reasons we went with Hipchat over Slack. I can understand not everyone wants to use a native app, but it sure would be a nice option.
The music can also be heard here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/NietzscheMusik/videos
> Write out a good logical question for stackoverflow and answer my own question.

90% of the time!
Agreed. Desktop apps are generally so much better.
If you're angering people on Facebook, isn't this going to cause them to hide / report your ad? Which in turn is going to effect your relevance score and make everything waaaaaay more expensive?
> At my company devops is primary on-call, with a developer(s) as backup

Sort of defeats the purpose of Dev ops, if you have a Dev ops team and a Dev team, doesn't it?
It's true for life in general. It is a rare luxury to have and understand all of the information before being asked to make a decision. This is why fields like economics have traditionally been poor predictors of actual human activity, they assume an ideal that is rarely true.
> chin up

but not too much.. a few things to avoid from the article:

> Bending the head back and sticking out the chin while looking at a computer screen or television. Instead, lower the screen or raise the seat
Y Combinator Companies
Any word on battery life?
The first thing that stuck me watching TV in the US was negative ads. Drug ads came next. It was so new to me at that time I was puzzled how they could even use their trademarks[1]. I never felt compelled by any of these negative ads - not a single one. It exposes more weakness in the attacking company and more importantly it felt like - "Why are you guys buying that other product? We make so much better product." - as if the customer does not know what they are doing (even if that were the case).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advertising
Doing it client-side defeats the purpose of certificate pinning. Three years after you rolled out pinning, new users would still be using max ages that were clamped too low.
Please forgive my blunt opinion, but I think you're incorrectly equating your potential with your legacy. Legacy is greatly influenced by achieving your potential, but ultimately outside of your control. It depends on timing, politics, other people, etc. You cannot control whether you will be recognized or not. You can only wake up each day and do your best. It sounds corny but imo its the only sane way to go about achieving your potential.
One of the things that the article misses is that Americans are constantly assaulted by marketing. This is why advertising is so expensive, and why Americans are only interested in novel products.
>Meanwhile in East Europe (namely Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, probably other countries too but I don't know anything about them) competitiveness between children is crazy high in some circles and that's why a lot of the best engineers come from that area.

I see this claim often and when pressed it looks like there's a lot of social pressure to "learn the test," and the people those cultures produce are vastly uncreative, difficult to work with, and often very dishonest (openly cheat for example), but test well in their cultures.

There's a big difference between talent and schooling. The latter can be gamed, and often is.
I prefer this one: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

OTOH, I bear neither.
Have you tried the Silent Circle's phone (Blackphone) [1]?

I'm similar to you in many ways on privacy. If the price can come down for the Blackphone and Celluar data, I'd be all for it. It make take time though.

[1] - https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/devices/
Smell is not an indication of danger.

Municipal water in Florida often has the smell of sulfur, due to the presence of sulfur -- and if I'm remembering correctly, a relative who works at the state equivalent of the EPA told me that it's common in coastal areas due to byproducts of bacteria in the water table. But it's completely harmless.

I can only speak for Florida, though.
Dell tried to get into the cloud services market a long time ago, and didn't succeed. VMware is a weird case too, especially with containerization and cloud service vendors being cheaper to use than building your own cloud. If Dell is trying to make their own cloud, I wonder if they'll succeed this time. Some people have said that ship has sailed for them. Then again, a company like Google has made a compelling competitor to AWS.
>It's worth noting that the ruling could be bad news for free software, which is rarely offered on new machines.

If "free software" were desirable to consumers, hardware makers would be glad to stop paying for Windows and pass some portion of the savings on to the customer. It's win-win for them. But so few people are willing to do this that it's not in their best interest to offer machines in the additional configurations, even if that only amounts to 1 more (no software) per machine.

I don't even want to think about the support hassles for that scenario, with people simply choosing the cheaper computer and not understanding what they are getting.
So much this. I don't trust an engineer who's never done maintenance work. And I really don't trust an engineer who's never been on call. I find that they write vastly different (usually much simpler) systems. Personally I will now only build a system that I know I can troubleshoot at 4am while drunk.
I wouldn't say it the way the gp does either, but the predecessor to the EU was indeed founded for economic integration with the goal of making that integration prevent ww3.
I'm not with Google but the SRE book has a whole chapter on this (Ch. 3 Embracing Risk). For most services you don't need reliability quite as high as you'd think. There's a background error rate caused by networks and devices you can't control, and once your service is more reliable than the background rate then you should shift focus to feature development instead.
They're using something very similar to your second algorithm, but the structure is in fact baked into SHA3, and in fact your second approach essentially takes their literal suggestion and modifies it by, every round, zeroing some of their PRNG state bits. I don't need to tell you why that's less preferable than what they're doing! (Your approach also has something in the range of 1-2 times more memory usage, but that only matters for embedded applications since neither one has high memory demands.) But yeah, this is definitely not your first algorithm.

Details: during a hash, SHA3 at all times is keeping a very large state block of 1600 bits. It defines a pseudorandom permutation (think of a block cipher with a block size of 1600 bits and a fixed key) of those 1600 bits as its round function. To run the hash, you pad your message and then break it into N blocks of size `rate`; starting from a zeroed state you XOR in a block to the first `rate` bits of the state, then permute the state with the round function, repeat until all blocks are consumed. Afterwards you read the first `rate` bits, and if that's not enough, you permute the state and repeat until all the output blocks you want are generated. (The magic number of 1600 was chosen in part so that you wouldn't generally need to do this; for SHA3-512 the rate is still 576 bits with 1024 bits of "capacity" in the sponge, so one read is enough to pull out the 512 bits of output.)

Now that you understand the hash, to use it as a PRNG, you just reseed it with the XOR-then-Permute operation and read it with the readout-then-Permute operation, interleaved. Each readout that you get is therefore formally equivalent to a SHA3 hash of

initial_seed_bytes +
repeat(zeros, number_requests_before_first_reseed) +
first_reseed_bytes +
repeat(zeros, number_requests_before_second_reseed) +
(...)

which proves that getting the PRNG to return a specific random string X is no easier than a preimage-attack on SHA3 for that string X. (This is why the researchers involved invented the sponge construction as an alternative to Merkle-Damgard; it was easy to prove security properties about it.)

Since an N-bit hash generally needs a 2N-bit state anyway to avoid nasty meet-in-the-middle attacks and such, the SHA3 PRNG is better than generic constructions purely because it can avoid a pointless R+C => R bit state reduction, which (since SHA3 starts from a 0-state and XORs in the first R bits as your seed block) is exactly same thing as zeroing all of the reserved C bits that aren't normally attacker-writable.
Further on the point of bottled water, around 45% of brands actually just bottle municipal tap water [0].

[0] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/bottled-water...
The first today, not ever?
Absolutely not? Interesting, tell me more what is the real reason (also, it works, even if it absolutely not is why).
'The Flamish are earlier adopters, are more experienced, and access English language websites or apps. Whereas some Walloon users might still hope for a Minitel comeback and tend to believe clickbait links.'

Without citations this reads like the author is bigoted. Chose to stop reading at that point.
HipChat has both: a web client and a native windows/mac client.