skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been never more productive with my smartphones than with a Blackberry. The BB's keyboards are still unmatched. While I can type as fast with my iPhone 7 where cursor control is thanks to 3D touch great a BB Classic is still better—reasons why:

- You can rest your fingers on the keyboard like on a real keyboard without pressing the keys (you can't do that on a touch screen)

- After a short time you start to touch type; although it's possible with an iPhone too, it's not that convenient and most keep looking on their keyboards

- Cursor control with the BB mini trackpad above the keyboard (Classic and other models), is just terrific and often needed

- Best is that all good apps including the launcher support keyboard short-cuts and you will heavily use them since the keyboard is always present (Classic and other models)

- To give you a comparison: using a BB with a keyboard feels like using Vim vs a GUI-based editor; you use Vim only with Vim's key binding fast and reliable, no need to open sliding menus, touch buttons, etc.; it's very satisfying and I really miss those times

The path BB went the recent months—putting Android on BB devices + some extra security stuff (the so called DTEK)—was a good decision. But they brought the super expensive Priv device with a slider keyboard which is for a BB rather mediocre and not like the ones from the Classic, Bold, etc. Few weeks ago, they brought us a non keyboard Alcatel-OEM phone which does not differ from any other Android except this DTEK software which you can just download on any phone (why???).

What they just need to do is to put Android on the Blackberry Classic or some phone with a similar form factor. That's it. Before they don't do this final step, they can't claim that hardware is not profitable. I don't get why the CEO didn't do this as the first thing when he started his Android strategy.
IIRC their big money maker is the Blackberry Enterprise Server, or BES. I'm not up to date on the feature's so don't quote me on it. It used to partition my phone so i had a Work/Personal work space (so that work could wipe my work related info) They pivoted to a multiplatform system back when things started to look grim for Blackberry, and that's probably whats kept them afloat.

It's massively overpriced for what it is, but people still seem to be buying it.

http://ca.blackberry.com/enterprise.html
> There is no mechanism for you to mark a function as potentially crashing your teammate’s code or for specifying how to process an exception.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but is the author actually advocating for Java-style checked exceptions? I can't even remember the last time I heard somebody say something positive about them (other than just now, possibly).
I feel that you are onto something. I would like to hear examples of it.

I learned unix long ago. The ROI has been very big because I have used those skills over and over for a long time. Other skills not so much. But what type of skills have compound growth ?
High London property prices are primarily a function of demand outpacing supply, and supply having been particularly slow for a couple of decades. If property developers struggle to shift flats in Battersea, then that's excellent news, that means that the market for expensive flats appear to have been saturated, and that developers will begin addressing the market below this price point now.

Also, important to remember, Apple is moving their HQ, not adding a brand new location. The majority of the people working in that office already live in London, so when they moving in to pricey flats in Battersea, they're moving out of similar priced flats elsewhere. While possibly a windfall for those particular developers, the overall supply/demand situation in London won't change much.
True, but it give Facebook more legal leverage over you, arguably, and Facebook is more likely to abuse that power than a loose collection of open-source programmers, or a smaller, less wealthy company that doesn't have its tendrils everywhere.
What is it these days (for a couple decades now, actually) that somehow discrimination is totally fine when it's discrimination against many people. Why is an initiative to get women into tech ok (which begs to question how one gets women into tech without girls having been gotten into tech), but if there were an initiative to get more men into tech there would be all out hostility towards it? What happened to equality?

We should be offering the same opportunities to all. We should not be going down this road where some are allowed to discriminate and others are not, that's exactly how we got to this point and how you create hostilities through abuse and distortion.

Is there a need to start an initiative to get more Asian males into tech? Oh, wait, that kind of discrimination is banned, but the other kind of discrimination is ok? All in the name of doing good, of course.

Also, what is the bar, the limit when discrimination is no longer allowed? Is there a limit at all? Or does the sexual and racial discrimination just perpetuate against Asian and white males from now on? What is wrong with just providing the same opportunities as we currently do and letting people choose their path without engineering society like an authoritarian regime's social central planners.

We keep on distorting and contorting society to some delusional and fantastical ideal that simply will never happen and really even disrespects the differences and uniqueness of people of any kind. It's amazing that liberals, especially the neo-liberal tech elite, think that somehow all of society needs to converge and conform.

Maybe getting women into tech leads to a decline in the visual arts and design where women dominate, but none of the centrally planned society types ever thinks about that kind of reflexive stuff.
The $10k+ Apple Watch has been discontinued after a single product cycle.
Regulations would be impossible to enforce. You can write up as many laws as you want but trying to enforce security constraints on new websites alone is an impossible task.
Professional Development at Artsy Engineering
From what I understand, they split their microservices into logical packages and libraries, each of which have their own repo. Then some microservices have a separate repo to track configuration changes.
I'm not using any group chat, so for me personally that's fine.

so far wire is not available on f-droid either, although it's unclear (for me) whether their client now runs without the google play framework. there's discussion about it [0] but no clear answer yet (or I'm missing something).

the moment it's available through f-droid, it's a different story overall.

[0] https://github.com/wireapp/wire-android/issues/5
When Linux came along in the mid-90s, most commercial Unixes had left behind the Unix philosophy, with their own integrated, object oriented desktop environments and sophisticated administration tools. Only Xenix, the engine that powered many an auto shop's rinky-dink five-user database setup, stuck with the model of text terminals and CLI administration with simple tools.

Of course Linux took off, and it sort of reset everything back to stone knives and bearskins. But systemd itself is modelled on Solaris SMF, which is world-class industrial grade service management for large server deployments.

Appeals to the "Unix Philosophy" are the province of reactionary greybeards. Unix philosophy means nothing in the modern era.
YC actually has a new MOOC lined up. Maybe encourage group work in it?

https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-changes
I've got to say from personal experience mentoring is a go-to solution for programming.

That's how I learned. I bugged a retired developer to help teach me how to program and after enough pestering he did.

We basically pair programed for an entire summer.

If anyone wants details on my experiences I'd be happy to help.
My advice is to deeply study your personality, proclivities, and weaknesses. Decide if you will move from "specialist to generalist" (eg: management) or "specialist to deep specialist" (deep engineer). Actively plan your career.... Are you idea, information, or people focused? The world rewards each - but you have to find your niche. I like to lead, inspire, plan products, add significant revenue, and mold careers in high risk, time compressed situations. I dislike managing day-to-day. I've learned this. Plan that everything you do will become "the new normal", always pushing the edge.

I've found that as I get older my value has increased exponentially, but it's related to my personality type and actions. No matter your thoughts on Myers Briggs, it offers a "starting point". I'm an ENTP - which I used to believe "a curse" in engineering circles, until I've realized it is the best gift I could have ever had.

Focus on where your personality excels, and find an area of interest where others are not like you.
GPS on the Microsoft Hololens
"No ground in reality"? Sure, the plan is extremely ambitious. But it relies on no fundamentally new technology and comes from someone with a proven track record in the field. They're talking at almost seven years before the first Mars launch with this system. I'll remind you that seven years before Apollo 11, this was the state of the art for American spaceflight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_LV-3B

Further, Musk explicitly admitted that his ability to create realistic schedules is poor, and the timeline should be considered more aspirational than concrete.

To me, "no ground in reality" would apply if they had announced, say, plans for a warp drive, or a teleporter. This plan looks extremely grounded in reality to me, which is why it's so exciting.
Is it practical to make diffs of recompiled binaries? Don't you need to compile to position independent code? Or otherwise make sure that most of the code's position does not change when some statically linked library changes?
It's because most of those suggestions try to imply that people can't quit Facebook, because they're stupid or addicted or something. One should stop and consider here that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. A lot of people, myself included, get actual value from using Facebook and thus don't have a reason to stop using it, even though they are perfectly able to.
I think she is financial wellness person and she is doing rather well for herself.
A leading example of overfragmentation.

On-call shifts are going to be interesting with an average of 2.5 engineers per service, not to mention handling people switching teams or leaving the company.
Embrace your inner project manager
Exactly this. I would compare choosing a cofounder to getting married. It's not a decision that should be taken lightly, and it's better to stay single than try to settle with the wrong person or someone you don't know very well. Founder disputes are one of the biggest causes of company failure.

There are more single founder successes[1] than VCs would lead you to believe. Maybe not so many in the unicorn category which is all VCs really care about - but you're not a VC, it's not unicorn or broke for you. I think most of us would still consider it a success if you only managed to replace your income, but got to work on something you enjoy and to be your own boss. But you'll need to bootstrap rather than secure VC funding if your company doesn't have unicorn potential.

That said, being a single founder is HARD. You need someone else to talk to, to bounce ideas off, to offer emotional support during the dark days where you doubt yourself and can't see a path to success. But you can get those things from other people, you don't have to have a cofounder.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/co-founders-optional/
> Legal issues aside (and those are real)

But, as with most negatives in this discussion, overblown.

> Most companies I've worked for had people who thought firing someone was immoral unless they did something criminal. Essentially, its the company's fault for messing up in the hire process, and the employee should not have to suffer the consequences. So the employee stays in anything but the most extreme case.

That is a ridiculous position, IMO. While those people would probably consider me a sociopath, I don't see any moral imperative to maintain a business relationship beyond what was explicitly and honestly agreed to in assuming the relationship. The company has no paternalistic responsibility to its employees.
The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service
> Just kill it in entirety already (snip) a BlackBerry operating system doesn't stand a chance.

They did that already. BlackBerry's last two phones were 100% pure Android devices, with full access to Play Store apps, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc, just like every other major Android phone has.
You draw the line by legally kicking the crap out of a smaller vendor, then they become an example for the bigger guys. Suddenly the industry-wide Cost:Benefit analysis changes such that it is less costly to secure the devices they sell.
Do Fact Checks Matter?
I always wonder in these cases about giving each car an actor in Erlang/Elixir and having complete network transparency, message handling and crashes handled for free.

The routing is very complex too but as you note scales well, until you want to start routing/pickups based on the realtime location of other cars.
On a related note, few things annoy me more than when my browser updates localhost to www.localhost.com.
I wrote a few days ago about how easy it is to compromise your ethics when trying to save a company. The problem is that once you compromise once, its very easy to do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557163

The problem is, it's way too easy to look past the action you are taking because you can talk yourself into believing its for the greater good.

And this is a huge ethical breach by Mayer, if she did this way back then, it's pretty reasonable to assume there are some more skeleton's hiding in the closet.

I don't really think I'd be wanting to give Verizon a reason to reconsider the takeover......
Great article. Jealous of the mentee (I didn't start programming until college), but impressed with his success.
It's been held up because the numbers didn't work and there were numerous false starts - partly because the market for high-end flats is bubbly, and partly because the area has relatively poor transport links.

Apple is leasing new offices, not organising the work directly.

Work has started on a Northern Line extension to the area, which should open in 2020. That will make flats and offices more valuable, because they'll be on the end of a (relatively) easy commute to central London.

Currently the nearest tube is a significant walk away, which isn't very fun in a London winter.
Just back from Boulder. Could live there and work there. Denver is like a typical blue collar town, but Boulder has that utopian walkable thing that techies crave so much. The bookstores in Boulder are incredible.

Weather was great this time of year at least.
When people were devising ways to transmit television signals they had only limited available bandwidth, and since everything was analog compression wasn't feasible. So they did everything they could to minimize the information that needed to be transmitted.

They interlaced the signal, so every frame only had half as much pixels. They also split the signal in chroma and luma (basically colour and brightness, respectively) and then lowered the resolution of the chroma with the justification that the human eye is far more sensitive to differences in brightness than differences in colour. This 'subsampled' chroma should then be interpolated at the receiving end (something which many video players don't do or do badly).

Now at the time this made sense, since it was really the best they could do with no sophisticated ways of compressing images. However as this image demonstrates the human eye can definitely notice differences in colour in some cases. And with digital compression it's no longer true that 4x fewer pixels also means 4x fewer data, so while the decision to compress chroma more heavily might make sense, doing this by artificially lowering the resolution does not.

However for some reason chroma subsampling is still used everywhere; it's one of the many leftovers from the days that video signals were completely analog and only displayed on CRTs.
this. The thing is that we've designed these systems (of governance, regulation and technology) that appears to have solved the problems of food, but we really haven't- bee population loss, inefficient subsidies, free-trade and over-protectionist trade, soil degradation, pollution, food contaminations, hunger, etc., etc. are still big problems.

The thing is that the system is inordinately more complex than we had originally thought (not just about input/output sheer production volume of commodities, i.e., pork belly, orange juice concentrate) -it's about a system that is sustainable and non-exploitative in the big picture.

I see the different factions currently working against each other for goals that should be synergistic.

-decrease hunger => increase crop yield with industrial farming tech

-non-gmo => grow only organic crops, anti-big business

-fair-trade => crop specialization for export to 1st world

But there's no reason why any and all of these groups couldn't be more aligned, and I think some of it is a question of scale and vision- no one has yet described to me the Elon Musk level vision of what a humanistically designed food system should look like and what all of humanity should be shooting for.
...and the first power plant in the world to fit sulfur scrubbing. In 1931 (as it was being built)!
From the article:

> The "Paranoids," the internal name for Yahoo’s security team, often clashed with other parts of the business over security costs. And their requests were often overridden because of concerns that the inconvenience of added protection would make people stop using the company’s products.

That's the best summary of the problem for the industry as a whole, not only tech but any industry where failures are uncommon but with grave consequences.

A quote from Fight Club that illustrates that problem:

> Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall?

> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X.

> If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

That's the current mindset of the technological world, estimating whether the cost of atoning for the problem is lower than the cost of securing the systems.
Show HN: Motion graphics marketplace with an online editor demo
My Son, the Prince of Fashion
I just started work at a medical software company. This was a godsend.
If it looks like insanity its probably genius in real estate.
I was worried about this when I was younger, but as I've reached my mid-40s I still get lots of great offers and have no problems finding contract/freelance gigs with good rates. Now, I'm in Denver so perhaps this is more of an SV thing.
In the real world, businesses are having a hard enough time hiring and retaining productive devs to engage in that kind of discrimination.
How do teams deal with families? I'm curious how many founders can uproot their entire families for 3 months to relocate, or do they just try to make long distance work for the 3 months while the spouses/kids stay back home?
I think that beyond a certain level of financial success, it's the reputation and power that matters more. Marissa will never have to worry about money in her life. But power and reputation are ephemeral. Doesn't take much to ruin them.
That sounds like a wonderful program, and that student sounds significantly more prepared for the working world than most recent-graduates I've met.

If I were the company, I would re-think not paying interns. I understand that they don't know anything when they come in and need their hands held, but an unpaid internship limits your pool of students to those who are well-off enough not to have to work. Paying even minimum wage could open doors for poor students who would otherwise be unable to engage in the internship because they have to wait tables or flip burgers to help provide for their family.
But this is how most regulation enforcement works...notorious and high-profile cases scare most into compliance...like tax audits.
why do such stupid people have so much fucking money
Fat-fueled brain: unnatural or advantageous?
If you ever go to a short film festival, animation or not, you'd be surprised.

Here's a 2:18 animation with 1:06 credits -- way more than the ratio I gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZRLlyxvr6E

Credits --crew members, voice talent, sponsors, thanks, etc-- can rise almost linearly with the length of an animation, and even more so with increases in its production value.

A 5 minute short can have almost the same team size as a feature animation (which requires > 2 minute credits). The fact that they'll be employed for shorter time doesn't mean they don't get their names on the credits.
Can anybody cite a single one good decision Marissa Mayer took?
Honestly?!
> trying to enforce security constraints on new websites alone is an impossible task.

Why 'new websites alone'? Enforcing security standards on new/small websites would be harder than on large ones, and the large ones are more important. There are already many cyber-security related laws that are in place and more-or-less enforced. Having these laws makes large companies invest money into at least attempting to follow them for fear of legal repercussions.
How Trump and Clinton’s Economic Policies Might Pan Out
Show HN: FlyPx
As someone who has been in LA for a while, I think the "sticker shock" isn't coming from the housing cost so much as from the salaries that aren't keeping up with it. If you want to live in a nice location with a short commute then you're going to be paying over 1600/mo for a 1 bedroom. But if salaries were at Bay Area level that would be a bargain, especially given the weather, beach access, night life, etc. that LA offers compared to other cities. Unfortunately, salaries here are not great, even in the small tech scene on the west side.
The iron cliches:

- Security is a process, not a product.

- You always pay for security. Up front, after the compromise, or both, if you're unlucky or bad at your job.
Its the same issue since Grog tried to hide the first rock from Og:

The “Paranoids,” the internal name for Yahoo’s security team, often clashed with other parts of the business over security costs. And their requests were often overridden because of concerns that the inconvenience of added protection would make people stop using the company’s products.

Infosec is never easy, and part of making things secure is that you give up conveniences for peace of mind. It's 2016 and I'm still a but surprised that people willingly open themselves and their data to hackers in lieu of stock holders and customer retention. It's unreal when you stop and think about it.
SSPs are Not dead
>>"...said the company spent $10 million on encryption technology in early 2014..."

What does that mean, exactly? Is it really possible to spend $10 million on encryption or is that some kind of marketing spin on things? I'm genuinely curious about this.
I think that only parts can be sharded by city. Anything having to do with users has to be global (because I can visit different cities). I suppose you could try to "move" users from shard to shard but you'd still want a globally unique ID for each user (so you could run cross-city analytics). It feels like you'd be building so much orchestration around making the global parts work in sharded manner that you might as well make the whole thing work globally.
Great product guys, nice to see KoHub work giving fruit :)