skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it okay for a private company to have detailed positioning data from inside of your office or home?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I have a guess at the answer to another question: "is it okay for a private company to create a geodatabase of SSID strings that were freely and willingly broadcast via radio?"

I think the answer is "yes". Ten, fifteen years ago, if there were an HN story about how I, owner of a small business you've never heard of, created a database of SSIDs that are broadcast and tagged them with lat/longs, I'd bet money it would make the top of the front page. Bonus points if I included an API and threw the thing up on github.

Fine, it's evil, append "_nomap" to your SSID string. That's fine for stopping Google, but it won't stop "owner of small business you've never heard of". Don't broad SSIDs, but then (IIRC) one can still obtain the MAC address.

But in the end, if a radio broadcasts something then one has little recourse when receivers use that broadcast in ways you didn't intend. The analogy crumbles under a little scrutiny, but it's similar to FM broadcasters complain about geodatabases of FM towers because the intent of the broadcaster was to allow you to listen to drive-time hyenas, not use it for location services.
> don't have the resources to dedicate to properly hardening themselves against attack

FTFY: Don't want to consider having the resources to dedicate to properly hardening themselves against attack
My Online IDE for Building APIs with Python and Postgres
So even with a cheap drive, if you leave your browser open with tons of tabs, and the PC on 24/7, it'll still easily handle it?

Real lifetimes are often a multitude of the endurance rating, BTW.
First thing I checked was days until Elon's Mars talk next Tuesday, since that's what I'm counting down to. So count one vote to add that event!

http://www.spacex.com/mars
I'd also be curious to see a reference for

Orientation/heading from a phone's gyroscope/compass can be pretty reasonable, but most mems accelerometers are pretty much crap for dead reckoning use when loosely attached to a person. I could definitely see some interesting ideas with cell tower position data + heading + pedometer estimation getting merged, but I have a hard time believing that works in practice.
+ there's a reason videos auto-play....
There's another wifi setting, in advanced I think, for "scanning always available"
Git Semver-CLI tool to generate semantic versioning compliant tags for your repo
It's a pump and dump article on pumping and dumping. How ironic...
We should not have to do that.
Are We Web Designers or Stylists?
During my career as a freelancer, I never wanted to steal any of my employers' ideas, because they were all terrible.

I learned very quickly to never tell an entrepreneur that his idea is terrible. Gotta eat.
I take no issue with your take on the language, but the OPs' opposing views on "revolutionizing how we write software" isn't really addressed by you.

Go is popular because it is accessible. The cognitize load of the language is in effect ammortized by being spread over the life cycle of the dev process (i.e. run vet to do x) instead at localized in cycle/space of code-time/source-code, so even professionals not bothered by complexity can see an incentive to using the language.

But I am not aware of the language enabling a class of software systems, etc., that have become more feasable because of the language.

As has been pointed out by many, at some point even the novice programmer has to get serious given the mix of pointers and channels and sync constructs which demands a degree of sophistication, so the accessibility aspect degrades over time.

And then -- and here is why I feel there is pushback regarding Go koolaid -- this somewhat on 'the fence' approach of the language towards concurrency (originally "communicate don't share memory") gives this impression of a glorious hack but a hack aspect to this "revolutionary mix" that you refer to. At some point, the ala cart type system of Go presents issues to people who have invested the time to get serious about these matters but find that their favorite light-weight language is not fully up to the task of keeping up with our conceptual models of thinking about our software.
You're in good shape. I'm at 337 tabs. ;-)
If this is intended for noobs, I suggest cleaning up your example fork/branch/push/pull request.

You have the reader create a branch called add-your-name, then push that to the server. Only the next example for the pull request talks about a branch called fix-readme. This will confuse novices.
C'mon, no one knows how to run indefinitely at a loss than Salesforce...
$75k is not a large sum for the amount of trouble caused. I was expecting a much larger number.
I am a 20+ year (al)pine user (without gmail - I host my own mail server) and I have a fairly decent attachment/images/links setup ...

First, I use ripmime to dump every single attachment to a folder with dated naming - and so if there is an email in pine with an attachment I want to view, I just web browse a simple apache directory listing and click it. It's not sexy, but it's fast and efficient.

Second, I have a terminal PDF reader installed on my system and defined in alpine as a helper app for pdf files. So I cannot read word or excel right in alpine but I can read PDF docs. So that's nice and slick.

Finally, I never actually click links in alpine, but I defined lynx as a web viewer anyway because that allows me to get the very simple "do you want to view this http link ?" prompt from alpine ... which I always say NO to, but not until I have copied the full URL which they display for me. Then I just open it in a browser.

Fairly happy with this setup.
I'm all for civility and decorum, but I believe that political correctness has slipped into a hole of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and all the fun stuff we see happening on many college campuses.

In my opinion multi-ethnic projects mean that we should grow thicker skin, and laugh off the misunderstandings and preconceptions rather than "re-educate" Orweillian style.
Yes, I've always been astonished at how bad the software and software management is in the auto industry.

And I'm personally still annoyed at BMW from about 8yrs ago when my X5 was occasionally throwing a spurious trivial dashboard warning and I asked about it at the dealer when I went in for some other warranty service. When I got back there was a $200 bill for doing a flash update to some controller, and the dealer insisted that it was BMW that kept it off warranty and charged them for each install.

While I could perhaps see some trivial $15 service fee to install it, charging $200 to fix their own damn bug is pretty outrageous. They should just be installing the full set of accumulated updates every time the car comes in for service.

But that's not how the auto industry thinks, so yes, that is a huge advantage for Tesla, even if the others are starting to come around, they are effectively a decade late.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304389
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The original point of ISOs was to offer to employees the opportunity to take an economic risk with stock options (by exercising and paying for the stock at the bargain price) while avoiding the tax risk (by generally not recognizing ordinary income from that exercise and being taxed only at the time the stock was sold, and then only as a capital gains tax).

AMT has since emerged to devour the value of this benefit. By having to include the value of the spread (difference between exercise price and fair market value of the stock on date of exercise) as AMT income and pay tax on it at 28%-type rates, an employee can incur great tax risk in exercising options - especially for a venture that is in advanced rounds of funding but for which there is still no public market for trading of the shares. Even secondary markets for closely held stock are much restricted given the restrictions on transfer routinely written into the stock option documentation these days.

So why not just pass a law saying that the value of the spread is exempt from AMT? Of course, that would do exactly what is needed.

The problem is that AMT, which began in the late 60s as a "millionaire's tax", has since grown to be an integral part of how the federal government finances its affairs and is thus, in its perverse sort of way, a sacred cow untouchable without seriously disturbing the current political balance that is extant today.

And so this half-measure that helps a bit, not by eliminating the tax risk but only by deferring it and also for only some but not all potentially affected employees.

So, if you incur a several hundred thousand dollar tax hit because you choose to exercise your options under this measure, and then your venture goes bust for some reason, it appears you still will have to pay the tax down the road - thus, tax disasters are still possible with this measure. Of course, in optimum cases (and likely even in most cases), employees can benefit from this measure because they don't have to pay tax up front but only after enough time lapses by which they can realize the economic value of the stock.

This "tax breather" is a positive step and will make this helpful for a great many people. Not a complete answer but perhaps the best the politicians can do in today's political climate. It would be good if it passes.

Edit: text of the bill is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5719... (Note: it is a deferral only - if the value evaporates, you still owe the tax).
http://packetlife.net/blog/2009/jul/6/remotely-triggered-bla...
IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but people have rushed to invest in a company which only has users, and whose attempts to monetize users through advertising have correlated strongly with loss of users. There can be little argument that Twitter's price has become entirely detached from its value.

That doesn't of course, mean you couldn't make money by investing in Twitter. You can make money by investing in overvalued companies as long as you don't hold onto your share until it busts. One profitable route would be if Twitter does get bought by a larger company. The market as a whole will lose on Twitter, but local maxima can be more profitable than the whole.

But at a personal level, don't be naive about this. A lot of people are investing, not just money, but time and energy, in Twitter or startups like Twitter. If you find yourself thinking that Twitter is a company with any real value, you should take a step back and evaluate whether you're being wise, or whether you've fallen prey to the unbridled optimism of the tech bubble. Twitter's position as poster child for the tech bubble makes it a good litmus test for people's understanding of the industry, and I suspect it will correlate very strongly with who loses everything when the tech bubble collapses.
Is the strongest argument - but still too weak.
> My reading of the commerce clause is that they couldn't impose a sales tax on in-state commerce.

(1) The commerce clause is a grant of power, not a limit. It's indisputable that the commerce clause does not authorize a tax on in-state commerce, but it doesn't prohibit one, either. So we need to look beyond the commerce clause and ask if a federal sales tax is authorized anywhere else.

(2) The dollar value of sales is income, derived from sales. The 16th Amendment gives Congress the authority to "lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states". Therefore, a federal tax on the gross income from sales is authorized by the 16th Amendment.

(3) But, wait, we don't even need the 16th Amendment. There's a special word for a tax on sales of goods -- its called an "excise". And its an express Constitutional power of Congress even before any amendments, in the Tax and Spending Clause, with the restriction that they must be uniform throughout the United States.
I still don't understand why taxes are owed. If an option at the time of grant is worth $0 (which is how it's typically done or is that not the case?), then you don't owe anything to the IRS until you exercise the option, i.e. buy shares at the option price and sell them at presumably higher valuation and make some money, at which point you will need to part with some of it because it's income.

But if you never exercise the options, then you never owe any tax. What am I missing here?
Now a nice article that addresses some limitations of vision: https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/tesla-mobileeye-and-deep-lea...
What is this inane trend here on HN of referring to companies with the names they are registered to stock exhange?
I've been setting browser.showQuitWarning to true for years to stop ^Q from killing the browser and with it my state.
Like the post. What I did differently is to use fdm to fetch emails and store them locally. I've been using Mutt with Gmail for many years. The features I like most are:

- regex search

- faster actions (like batch delete, mark as read) using tag

- can use my editor to compose. I use emacsclient -nw and it's so easy to copy things from shared buffer.

- very easy to customize, for example, I want to see the timestamp as local time regardless of the sender's timezone, I wrote a smile Go program to do that https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt; I also run a cronjob to archive old emails.
It happens relatively often for me, maybe 1-2 times a month. No crazy extensions.
With all these competing, possibly contradictory moralities, how do you see this reliably making the world a better place?

PS. Understandably, we might not all even agree on what a better world would look like.
>I don't know about you, but criminalizing the act of pressing F5 with any intent seems firmly on the way to Aaron Swartz-like cases to me.

What? Why is F5 a special case here and what on earth does any of this have to do with Aaron Swartz.

>What if you are just fed up of waiting for a site to reload and press F5 a number of times?

Did you intend to bring it down? Was it obvious that your activity would bring the site down? If answer to both is "No" then you're fine, this is how most laws work.

>And what about the (probably majority of) instances where the "attacker" is simply a person who unknowingly downloaded malware onto their computer to get free smileys or whatever?

Why are you even asking? If someone else commits a crime you're obviously not at fault...

Also, what was even supposedly wrong with the Swartz case? It was on solid ground both legally and morally, shame he never gave the courts a chance.[1]

[1]: Might as well expand on this a little so I don't get hidden by downvotes. I don't think Swartz deserved to go to prison, but given that he intentionally violated the law it's hard to argue that he shouldn't have been charged.
Try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...
National Australia Bank Conducts International Blockchain Transfer
I have an old dual core with 4 gigs of ram and Firefox runs better than chrome.
Reviewers make specific and general comments. The general comments are usually ledd important but serve as general reminders, for example, to check for typos, to bettersituate your findings in context, and the positive aspects of having converging, objective measures. These generalities usually cut across disciplines and take no real expertise. It is thr specific reviewer comments that make or break a paper. These fabricated reviews do not produce specific, intelligent reviewer comments, just the general comments that sane scientists do not resist or think much about.
Indeed, but this is a big "you should have gotten that in QA" kind of mistake.

It depends what kind of infrastructure you have.

Ideally there should be NO MANUAL STEPS between dev and production. This should not be any need for a person to remember that this data should be inserted for dev and removed before prod. Instead there should be something like a documented way to insert the data or not based on a configuration file that is different for dev and production.

Of course reaching that keeping that ideal requires discipline. And when you slip, it becomes easy to say, "That's QA's job." Over time QA's job will get harder and harder, and that is a guarantee of periodic slip-ups.

Authority for fixing this situation really is the job of someone VP or above. They need to decide whether to fix the process and change what a lot of people do, or accept the inevitable screw-ups as the right choice to maintain the current rate of development.
Thanks for the clarifications. What's the difference between strict liability and absolute liability [0], then?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability
Just Cause
Salesforce feels like a bizarre choice, although I agree with their digital chief that "I love Twitter" personally.

I use twitter every day as my primary method of content discovery.

So at their core the BUSINESS should revolve around monetizing my eyeballs, eg advertising.

So to me it's Facebook or Google that should grab it, w/FB at the lead considering their relatively smooth / unhurried / and successful takeovers of whatsapp / instagram
Do articles about Japan do better on HN at night?
Was it? Just seemed like a bunch of jerks gratingly talking over each other... Did I not watch long enough?
> I often receive emails with attached images or HTML code.

Here's my ~/.mailcap file:

text/html; w3m -T text/html
image/gif; gm display -
image/jpg; gm display -
image/eps; gm display -
application/postscript; gm display -
application/pdf; evince /dev/stdin

In mutt's pager view (reading a message), hit "v" to see all the mime parts, j and k to select one, and enter to view it with the associated mailcap command. In my mailcap I'm popping up images in GraphicsMagick, and viewing rendered html pages in w3m. Pretty rare for me when that doesn't cut it -- most mail has a readable plaintext part or a w3m-readable html part.

> Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so much?

It lets me fully reside in "the world of text:"

- I can compose emails in my text editor (vim, like you) instead of a crappy textarea.

- Mutt feels much faster than gmail and other gui mail clients. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing.

- I can use tmux's activity monitor feature as a text-based growl notification for new mail.

- All my mail (300k+ messages over 10+ years) is available locally, offline, in Maildirs. It's searchable and pliable by the unix toolset, enabling all kinds of fun things like [1]. I use and recommend offlineimap.

- Control. Mutt has changed conservatively over the years. You can configure it to your liking, and be reasonably certain it will continue working to your liking. No "New Compose" crap here. Tools like mutt are a great long haul investment.

One thing I find seriously lacking with mutt: the folder-centric message index (instead of tag-centric or search-centric index). You can get by okay with mutt's searching and limiting, but if you're jumping between folders often, it kinda sucks. Reminds me, I need to revisit mutt-kz.

[1] https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080
It doesn't. GIMP's support for nondestructive editing is very primitive, which might be the biggest issue. In terms of tools PS is far more comprehensive and flexible.

GIMP is more like Paint.NET than Photoshop.
I.e. because you are not a lawyer and you don't know how to write an open source license.

One obvious example is that your one-liner doesn't specify that your code has no warranty so someone can sue you if it doesn't work as advertised.
If you exercise your ISO options (because of option expiration clauses, typically 90 days after you leave a company), but then don't (or can't due to no market for the shares) immediately sell those shares, the spread between the option grant price and the current 409A valuation is due as AMT tax. You have not realized an event where cash is in your pocket, but you still owe tax on the "gain".

You ask what does it matter if the options aren't exercised. Excellent question! It means all that potential compensation you were offered (because you took a lower salary usually in return for options) is now worthless. People don't want to work for free, or have their potential future compensation evaporate.
> I only use few well known extensions

RES is more well known (in terms of number of downloads/users) than 50% of your listed extensions, for the record.
> Well then you don't have to test what happens when someone passes a string, an object, or a boolean.

That's useless, I still need to test the value's range which implicitly checks the type.

> You have to maintain documentation and you have to maintain tests and you have to maintain assertions

Not if I can generate most of it from the specification data.
If the constrained hardware is more powerful than a Xerox PARC Dorado (Mesa/Cedar), a ETHZ Ceres Workstation (Oberon), DEC Firefly (Modula-3), then Go is certainly a better C.

Nothing prevents you to make use of statically allocated data structures, hands off from the GC if really needed.

In spite of lacking a few features that I consider any modern language should have, ability to create memory friendly data structures isn't one them.
I haven't had a browser crash for a while, but fairly routinely Windows will reboot itself to apply an update. (Once every other month, at least)
An overview of TLS 1.3 and Q&A
How did plankton end up on top of Antarctica’s mountains?
Honestly, for a certain kind of developer—I haven't fingerpointed exactly which kind—writing Rust code is dangerously addictive. There's some combination of aggressive type checking, tooling, and expressiveness that just hits a sweet spot in my brain.

Rust fills roughly the same niche in my brain as old-school C++, except it also lets me do some rudimentary functional stuff, there are virtually no footguns, and the CLI tooling is out of this world. And I've long since made friends with the borrow checker. So it's tempting to just spend my life cranking out Rust code as fast as I can. It's actually a problem. :-)
Postgresql High Availability
I was wondering what the state of Postgres High Availability and how people are implementing them. I understand there are multiple ways of doing this. But I would like to have an experience report where Postgres HA has been configured for HA and automatic failover. I have tried this with streaming replication with repmgr and configured repmgr for failover as well based on response timeout with 2 nodes. I would like to know how or some pointers for best practices where HA for postgres is setup with 3 or more nodes voting for master status and failing over gracefully withtout loss of data. Any latest Postgres HA setup using Pace maker and Corosync and how well it performs.
Same thing with the famous English moths. They were white, so that they could hide on the white bark of trees. Then industrial pollution turned the trees black, and the moths turned black. Then a century later, they cleaned up the pollution, and the bark went back to white, and so did the moths.

But in fact, the original (pre-pollution) population had something like 10% black moths. They were still there, despite a few million years of evolutionary pressure against their coloring. (Perhaps because burned trees would occur sometimes over the years.) When the trees turned black, the population shifted to 90% black moths. When the trees turned back to white, the population reverted back to 90% white moths. No evolution of a new feature, just a shift in the distribution of existing genes under changing selection pressure.
Microevolution and macroevolution and different terms for the same thing, evolution.