skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The money will go to existing companies, startups and businesses founded by migrants. And, Soros says, he expects to turn a profit.

George Soros's net worth is approximately $25 billion (according to a quick google search).

I wonder why he doesn't just donate $500 million without the expectation of making a profit. Wouldn't that be a faster way to help refugees than making investments, which require due diligence and business plan analysis and vetting of management and so forth?

I don't get these billionaire philanthropists.
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How access dark web on androd5-1
I think it's more of a symbiotic relationship. Google lifts hardware design elements from Apple and Apple lifts OS features from Android.
A lot of people seem to be commenting that a 20-person office would hardly move the needle at Twitter. They're right, in general - the total numbers are too small to be layoffs and it covered an entire office so is unlikely to be performance related (in an individual sense). The logical inference then is that this team was hired for a specific project, and that project isn't working out.

If they were sales, then they were likely hired to try to break into a specific market (probably something geographically close to their office), and when they failed to make the numbers the project was axed. If they were engineering, it was a side project that has now lost its budget.

Something like that.
Was this a marketing win? Scroll telling got their name out there, but al Jazeera response was that they apologized and switched over to the free/open source equivalent to their product.
Many regulations which only directly impact large companies also force small companies to comply, because the large companies need their supplies/suppliers to be compliant as part of the regulation. I work at a company in this position (most significantly with the Dodd-Frank conflict metals reporting requirements).
Only because that's still the low hanging fruit. Why would most hackers bother with kernel exploits, when hundreds of thousands of routers use their manufacturer's default password?
I think that's a fine assertion to make, because Haskell functions can die at runtime because of pattern match failure or an explicit evaluation of "bottom" (undefined).

Prelude> undefined
*** Exception: Prelude.undefined

Prelude> let x 2 = 4 in x 1
*** Exception: <interactive>:7:5-11: Non-exhaustive patterns in function x

Neither of these behaviors is indicated in the type definition:

Prelude> :t undefined
undefined :: t

Prelude> :t let x 2 = 4 in x
let x 2 = 4 in x :: (Eq a, Num a, Num a1) => a -> a1

I was promised a -> a but got a runtime exception instead.
Hillary Clinton’s tech guy might have asked Reddit for tips on purging emails
> I also believe that GE is working on a MRI using liquid hydrogen as the cryogen.

What could possibly go wrong?
A better question for a VC to ask would be:

"Can you stick with anything for 10 years?" or "What else have you done that demonstrates long term perseverance against adversity?".

The real question is whether the person has the ability to persevere in adversity.

No matter what you are starting, your activities will be quite different far sooner than 10 years.

Passion for a particular mission is helpful, but you must be able to handle the drudgery and adversity -- even the most exciting and pleasant pursuits include many tasks that quickly turn to drudgery, and things will go against you often.

It is not passion that gets you through the drudgery and adversity, it is the perseverance. Many passionate people quit when things get tough, while many people with perseverance have made a success of projects with merely "worthwhile" goals.

[edit: clarity/punctuation]
> I think it can be shocking to non-Americans just how much the Americans distrust and think their lawmakers and -- especially shockingly, their civil servants -- are both incompetent and have malicious intent.

The EU is often criticized (e.g., Brexit) as being something that promulgates useless regulations (e.g., curvature of a banana).
> Twitter seems like a small company idea.

It appears to be bankruptcy of ideas.
What Are Fish Oils and Are They Healthy?
There is difference between reorg and firing, even though the result is loss of job for the individual. The person is not evaluated at individual basis rather at team or org level.

Anyway, just for those using this as india = underperf team train of thought, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and every respectable company under the Sun has a India team, are they on par with mothership, I do not know, but if they are not, some one doing it wrong.
China is effectively NK's designated driver, at this point.

China's interests are preventing NK from getting too far out of hand and China ends up flooded with millions of NK refugees.
It's insultingly sexist to suggest that 51% of the population should finally have representation in the highest office in America?
Joe's Violin (Short Documentary)
Indeed a success story, but under much better circumstances. People were subjected to Hitler's propaganda for only 12 years. Loosing two major wars in just three decades, having most cities bombed to the ground and a leader who committed suicide on defeat all didn't inspire much hope for rebellion. On top of that "behaving well" held the promise of quickly rising back to the top at least economically, and within four years the world spoke of the German Wirtschaftswunder. On top of that the country had 15 years of experience with a real democracy just prior to Hitler's regime.

Your conditions for establishing a new, stable democracy don't get much better than that.
Are we ever going to move past this 'what parts light up' stage of neuroscience? one-trick-pony science.
But are they still doing that ridiculous "invite-only" buying model? I really wanted to get a OnePlus One when it came out but they wouldn't ever let me give them money for one.
How is it abandoned? The whole rest of the article describes how it's more profitable to request charitable aid to facilitate coffee farming than it is to actually do long-term coffee farming. The farmer first depicted doesn't want to cut down his badly-maintained coffee tree precisely because those few fruits it produces lets him legitimately say "I grow coffee, but need money/equipment donations to improve it", garnering cash or sellable equipment that he can proceed to buy food with; if he actually applied those donations to seriously improve his farming, there's no way he can get that tree to produce enough to greater return than just "chasing [and abusing] charity".

You see the point abandoned, I see the point fairly summarizing the entire article.
I recently joined this team from Azure. Lots of senior AWS and Joyent folks here as well. Send me a mail at joe dot levy at oracle dot com and I can connect you with the right folks. Same goes for anyone else interested!
Web and mobile app prototyping at TokBox: iterative design in action
Why use Immutable.js Record if you can make your own typescript immutable classes ?
Those A series cores are also larger than the Qualcomm cores.
In my team we use both approaches depending on the size of the project, an inconvenience we ran into using typescript is the typings definitions, some are out of date or don't work at all, that and the fact that typing dependency management is not yet fully integrated means that you have to keep track of 2 set of dependencies.
I mean what happens when someone does

Array.isArray = () => true;
Array.isArray.toString = () => 'function isArray() { [native code] }';

:/
The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof.
And when an old vehicle can't be driven on the road? I can't see laws to prevent old vehicles for at least 40 years... You can still not wear a seatbelt if your car was manufactured without one, so I would think anything complementing only autonomous vehicles would be met with public outcry.
Car manufacturers were discussing this kind of thing about 15 years ago.

We were working on diagnostic and emissions checking standards but there was the expectation that we would be able to make use of secure network links to cars at some point in the future.

The question at the time was which would come first. Would a requirement to do emissions testing under real-world conditions push the introduction of radio networks that could also be used for cars to talk to each other or would the road-train type applications be the initial use case.
Check the Sony compact series, or some Chinese brand phone.
gas plants are already used to compensate for variability in wind and solar.
Install a 10 foot thick lead shield at the end of the detector and glue a $10 motion detector light to it. Problem solved. You're welcome, CERN.
4G of ram is really underpowered.

my Thinkpad from 2010 has 8G and is smaller and still has a pretty good screen for it's size (1440x900 @ 12"). Newer laptops should not be a compromise like that or a downgrade, especially not at the price of a Pixel.
Given that for autonomous vehicles the human will be a passenger and not participate in vehicle control, it makes sense that it is the manufacturer of the autonomous vehicle who is liable for faults caused by its own operation. Take an example where you signal your car to come pick you up at a location. If the car were to get into an accident on its way to you, and a software bug in the vehicle implementation is the cause of the accident, it would make sense that the manufacturer is liable for this accident.

Volvo is one manufacturer who have stated clearly that they will assume liability for the operation of their autonomous cars:

https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
With all the kerfuffle, I would not have imagined it would be so easy to replace.

So, after poking around, it looks like pageflow is the actual creators of this stuff, and scrollytelling, has built a business around supporting it and hosting it?

While concurrently, it appears pageflow can also be paid to support and host their own product?

Weirdly, pageflow appears cheaper too!

Am I missing something? Would this be equivalent of someone opening up a competitor to wordpress.com, powered by wordpress?
You're not wrong, but in the real world it frequently happens that the choice of language is not the bottleneck. The bottlenecks are usually things like memory, network and file I/O, making the language you write in make very little difference.
Interestingly, it seems dial-up is still an option for me, technically speaking.

My laptop (a ~4 year old HP EliteBook) came with a built-in analogue modem (never used, but I do see a /dev/ttyACM that responds to AT commands) and the national ISP (telekom.si) apparently still offers dial-up access according to their website.

I might try to set that up for fun one day. Although it will probably be a challenge to find a true PSTN line around here.
The "compact" phones in the Sony Xperia line are really the only ones that come close. My wife is still happily using her Z3 Compact though its successor, the Z5 Compact, didn't review as well. The newest Xperia X Compact is getting decent reviews.
I like this article.

Where it goes slightly off track (IMO) is listing all the reasons/ways big companies have an advantage. They're all true, but some of them are basically the same as they've always been. The change/trend is the interesting part.

The main point I took from this is: Network effects is the new economies of scale.

Economies of scale is an almost fundamental law in microeconomics and the generally accepted reason for companies getting big. Bigger factories make stuff cheaper. It's a big deal if it is being surpassed by a law of network effects.

Since technology (especially software) has low variable/marginal costs a naive guess would suggest that technology should strengthen, not weakon this rule.

For network effects to match or overtake economies of scale as a driving factor is interesting.

If you're looking for a positive side for startups, here's mine: Network effects are easier to build than economies of scale for a startup. Invention, creativity and fresh perspectives are sometimes enough to build networks.
Most certainly - safety should be guaranteed at the lowest level, even if Tensorflow gets borked.

Think of it as a failure cascade - if Tensorflow breaks, the car can safely stop. If the low level stuff breaks, the car may not be able to stop (or go).
I think that's just the opposite of the case. They can be built with only traces of plutonium, and its dissolved in tons of sodium salts. Not easy at all.
Because variables have identifiers, and the identifier can allow the programmer to be more expressive and explicit about what the number means. Then, in the context of the code, you use the variable instead of just the value, making the code more readable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)#Unn...
Yes, I've started to apply this to a lot of things. Moreso than discipline though, it's habit.

Think about whatever you want to do like brushing your teeth. There's no end-goal in mind. You're never done brushing your teeth. You just do it, at more or less the same time every day because it's part of your routine. If something happens and you don't do it for a day, you don't throw up your hands and say "Oh no! My tooth-brushing progress ruined! I better give up!", you just pick up where you left off the next day.
If they inject broken JS, JS execution can stop and if you're not careful you might end up with a broken page.
Pretty much the only reason I even use Android has been the Nexus line. Why would I want vendor crapware on my phone? Why would I want a Google phone with Google crapware?
I mean that it's not even so well defined mathematically. Starting from a weak place and then moving it to the "real world" makes things quite tricky.
The glass wall
I am using TypeScript in a middle sized app (around 200 react components) and its help is invaluable for collaborating and sharing APIs.

Currently it is based on redux, but I have a feeling I have to write too much code, I am looking into MobX as an alternative.

I think TypeScript is the best thing that happened to the JS community in a long time.
As a matter of fact, if your JS code is running on a pages where other pieces of code could be loaded, then it will regularly encounter native JS methods being overridden (Prototype.js is the worst offender so far).
> In the past, physicists assumed that new particles produced in particle collisions would decay immediately, almost precisely at their points of origin.

But wouldn't missing energy be evident?
Our team is using Flow, and most devs use Nuclide[1] for the autocompletion and type hint popups. I can't compare it to any TS IDE, I'm afraid, but I can attest it's way more comfortable than doing without.

[1]: https://nuclide.io/docs/languages/flow/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512954
> Microsoft reviewed some London-based roles and made the decision to unify some engineering positions.

What does that mean?
Premise is interesting, but by the end, JS fails the author's standard of purity not really because of its function implementation (or any variant thereof) but because of its dynamic-weak type system.
That's assuming the insurance covers liability and not just legal fees.

Insurance that covers only legal fees should have the opposite effect.
It's just interesting to see the opinions shift over time.
Any tips on using Dart with mobile from Windows? I only need to target Android, not iOS.

I haven't touched Dart for over a year, but the Flutter page seems like it is on HTML, not native, and it only specifies Linux or OS X dev machine.
Not much. Liquid hydrogen could leak a little. Then it could burn a little. In the liquid form its 100's of degrees away from burning.
I found the comment about soundness in the linked post to be kind of an odd remark.

It didn't take me long after reading that to come up with an invalid program that is accepted by Flow's type checker. (The typechecker normally rejects doing math against strings, but accepts this.)

let array = [1,2];
array.pop();
array.push('hello');
console.log(array[1] - 3);

To be clear, being completely sound is hard! There's a lot of space in type systems and Flow must make some hard decisions itself; whether it's "sound" or not is kinda orthogonal to whether it's useful or not. And I'm sure Flow is useful. So let's not talk about soundness.

(Disclaimer: I work with TypeScript and am pretty fond of it.)
16 highly recommended tools for freelancers
I work for an organization that actually purchases a hosted product that fits this exact description literally. Can't stop laughing. :)
I Came to SF to Change My Life: I Found a Tribe of Depressed Workaholics
Right, so still pretty bad compared to iOS: iOS10 just came out and supports the iPhone 5, which was released 4 years ago. I presume if they had some massive security issue they'd backport it to versions of iOS older than 10.

(I am no iOS fanboy, but honestly I'm sick of the android expectation of getting a new phone every 2 years, and they seem to be the only ones who are even pretending to give a shit with their old phone support. They still don't give as many shits as I'd like, but I cannot find their better).
Seems like a one-time marketing win in the form of a couple blog posts, and also they chased away what must be one of their largest and most visible users.
> drawing x with probability p(x) given p(x) for every x in finite set X sounds pretty trivial thing to program w/o knowing anything about Markov chains and stuff

Then you misunderstood the complexity of the problem. It's okay, I did too when I first learned about MCMC, and I proposed the same algorithm as you did (in fact, your proposed algorithm is right there in the fifth paragraph of the post. Did you read it before commenting here?). The problem is that if X is exponentially large, and many of the probabilities are exponentially small, your algorithm takes exponential time to draw even a single example.
This is the saddest thing I've read in a while.
Probably means some people are getting fired and others are being merged into other teams.
"Al Jazeera used our code without permission, so we made them switch over to a competitor, showing everyone how trivially interchangeable we are, and we're telling you about it!"
My guess would be that the yoneda lemma plays a role: The visual interpretation of Hom(-,X) would be roughly 'What are the visual parts of X'.
Right, but that's not what they're doing right now. They fired what are probably the 20 lowest paid engineers in their company. They've closed the office as well, but it was probably the cheapest real estate in their company.

Most people who have been in the position of laying people off that I've met have said that it's better to do it all in one big cut. Laying off team after team over a period of time is disastrous for morale, and you can expect the performance of your company to tank. If that's their plan, it's probably a bad one. If they decided to clean up their books (in preparation for sale or whatever), and this was all they came up with, then I think they've failed to send the right signalling to potential buyers.
If you introduce unsafe into a program, it is not pure.
You can run a linter or something to check if your program uses unsafe anywhere.

Purity is a spectrum, not a binary, The more impurities you add, the more likely your program will not behave reasonably (as in, not in accordance with the simple logical rules of referential transparency).
And has it progress it will be slower to handle the most complex cases and follow the spec, than they will use a plugin architecture to let users develop their own language extension and modularize it, than they will only have to rename it to Babel because it won't be different.
I think you're trivializing the process through which these theories are created. This is incredibly difficult stuff. There is very, very difficult math involved and there are very difficult tests that have to be done with very expensive machines. These things aren't just made on a lark while have a pint or two one afternoon. And even while creating them, there is no guarantee that even if the math is correct that the theory is correct. Theorists know this. But they do it anyway because we need them to. Its hard work and they don't get enough recognition for it (aside from the few that make it on TV).
Fair enough, I didn't read the comment in terms of adding arch specific support in linux.
The more efficient renewable energy the more margin storage has as breathing room against conventional energy.
"This asphyxiant gas is expensive and dangerous if it leaks. What should we do?"

"Well... we could replace the asphyxiant with an explosive gas?"

"..."
The Cryptographic Key That Secures the Web Is Being Changed for the First Time
I updated it to be simpler, but to be fair there is a preface to that paragraph saying "for long-time readers of this blog" to remind them of some of the details of a related previous post.
Any evidence of such a practice?
my first computer! I sold one back in Poland for $100 when I left for US in '90. I've spent many all nighters playing Boulder Dash and tinkering with music production while connected to a shitty single speaker radio. I hope Datasette comes back too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Strange that if it was so obvious or so easy, there were people saying stuff like this [0]:

"Apparently none of you guys realize how bad of an idea a touch-screen is on a phone. I foresee some pretty obvious and pretty major problems here. I’ll be keeping my Samsung A707, thanks... Color me massively disappointed."

"Touch screen buttons? BAD idea. This thing will never work."

"no qwerty keyboard? ojhsdodsagfadhjldgs!!"

"This looks like a disgusting bastard child of iPod/Cellphone/PDA. Yes it's shiny, but I’m sure it won’t be so shiny once you touch it."

"lol last i checked many companies tried the tap to type and tap to dial ... IT DOESNT WORK STEVIE, people dont like non-tactile typing, its a simple fact, this isnt a phone its a mac pda wow yippie.... "

"It took apple how long to develop this ONE PHONE, samsung and motorola release new phones every few months lol, and constantly innovates and gets better, im sorry but if im sending text messages i'd rather have my thumb keyboard than some weird finger tapping on a screen crap."

Somebody should ask that last guy what phone he uses today.

And yet it seems literally no other company can figure out a form factor that competes with it. So yes, you're right, design award of the decade.

Do you really think that's HTC/Samsung/LG/Huawei/Motorola's inspiration for all their devices? They're modeled after the LG Prada?

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/17-of-...
The product does not seem to have ever changed. It's clunkier than ever too. You can find me on Duo.
I'm guessing Soros doesn't actually expect to make a great deal of money from these. It seems like by making an investment, he will help create a self-sustaining set of business solutions rather than a donation. There is reasonable evidence that "top-down" donations a la Jeffrey Sachs do not work, and that helping people build tools creates an incentive to tackle solvable problems first, then iterate until a reasonable patchwork set of solutions/companies are effective.
That is what I was angling toward.