skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, Google buying them makes a ton of sense.

1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products.
2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even).
3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures.
4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to understand trends almost perfectly (from both news stories and users).

I think people on HN and the like sometimes massively underestimate why Twitter is so important. Twitter as a big social network like Facebook is never going to happen. Their decision to pursue that route seems foolish in retrospect. Instead, what Twitter has is a smaller group of users that are extremely influential. Moreover, they have the most effective fan-out messaging platform in existence.

I think focusing on monetization/user only makes sense while TWTR is an independent company. Companies like GOOG, MSFT, etc. benefit greatly from the externalities of owning TWTR more than the business itself (consider Youtube, for example).
What is the “iBridge”?
Shazam (the music app) | San Francisco Bay Area | Scala Engineer

We are looking for a talented Scala Software Engineer to join our Data Engineering team. Come help work on an app used by over 110 million users a month.

Junior and senior candidates are fine.

Email data-engineering-team [at] shazam.com with your CV or to ask questions.
There are three levels of discomfort some people feel with this situation:

1. Concern that a single, third-party entity (Google, in this case) might peer into every aspect of our lives, and/or reverse-engineer an exhaustive catalog of our entire lives, by virtue of data collection.

2. Concern that many consumers will unwittingly opt into such control, unaware of the privacy they're relinquishing, and unable to make informed decisions about the possible applications and consequences of the tradeoff.

3. Concern that the custodian of all this personal data (Google) might use, sell, transmit, or turn over the data in ways we had not anticipated or believed we'd consented to.

Personally speaking, I understand these concerns but also understand the potential upside. I'm not 100% sure where I stand just yet. The aforementioned bullet points are presented without editorial comment; just trying my best to articulate what I believe to be the crux of people's concerns here.
It's good to know that their Incredible Journey will continue within the halls of Hooli…oops, Google!
Canada to introduce $10/ton carbon tax
The idea behind so called checks and balances in the political arena is now needed in the tech arena - more specifically the megacorp arena.

People say, competition will ultimately take care of it. Yet, there really isn't a serious competitor for Google's search engine. And don't even get me started about social networking with respect to your private lives, where the only player is FB as far as I can see.

People say they don't want the government involved, and often for good reason. But if there is no expectation that these tech giants will self-police when it comes to privacy, and people don't want these organizations to be policed by the government either, then how exactly does this play out? How far is too far before we start demanding more respect for our rights from these organizations?

Another thing to think about: when dealing with tangible goods, the creative destruction of capitalism is somewhat reasonable to justify because it is usually easy to see. How does it work with information? Suppose FB just completely blew it for a few quarters in a row, and starts tottering towards its demise, what happens to the "defensible barrier" called data? Does it belong to FB to do as it sees fit, like the assets of a company about to be liquidated? Or is FB going to "return" it to the people from whom it got it? If some other company now got possession of its assets, including data, what is the expectation around what are reasonable uses for such info? Or, is FB, with its trove of data about every single person who has held government office, now just too big to fail?

And all this can be asked just of the data that FB collects from you directly by asking you to fill it in. What about the stuff that it "infers" behind the scenes? What about the "connections" it adds to its social graph without your permission in order to provide a "local marketplace" which apparently gets rid of the "private information" challenge? [1] Not that Google is any better in this regards, of course.

I think the time has come for some serious thinking about checks and balances in the privacy arena.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628808
I think eventually they add so many capabilities and so many fine-grained controls and it becomes impossible to manage the UI or to find the right options. Even looking at the settings for Android privacy / settings, it's pretty hard to find anything.

This is by design, so that the majority of users are confused and leave the defaults as is, enabling Google to do whatever they like.
WhatsApp actually used pricing as a way to slow their growth and give Jan Koum's team time to scale their infrastructure. He talked about it in startup school a couple of years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-pJa11YvCs
And yet the non-military CJ system can be brutal and harsh. I'd imagine it's certainly possible the first person to disobey a NSL might be made an example of, especially depending on who is in charge of the executive branch at the time. You could be locked in solitary for years until you lose your mind. You could be assigned to prisons in such a way the authorities ensure you would be repeatedly beaten and raped. You could be indefinitely detained without trial or attorney -- the crime is national security related, after all. There is a horde of horribly nasty things that could be done to you even if you aren't military or security clearance. It's worse for the military, but it's bad enough for the rest of us.

Perhaps unlikely, but certainly very scary.
I'd be completely fine with sharing most of my data with Google, really. Personal and Private interlock a lot with each other, and if Google wants to give me a personal experience they're going to have to use some of my private experience.
> But why is this a bad thing?

Do you trust every single person at Google, and every single person at every third party company Google shares your data with, now and in perpetuity, to never abuse the data collected on you? Personally, my circle of trust is not that large.

Totalitarian Surveillance is here. In the west. Secure document releases aside, it's too easy to do to imagine a state actor not doing it.

Data breaches of differing severities occur every day, at nearly every company. I would have thought Yahoo was big enough and smart enough to avoid it; but no. Not Yahoo, not Sony, not security contractors, not credit bureaus, not Apple (a'la celebrity photo leaks), not Google (stories abound of individual GMail accounts being hacked).
Lots of us don't use mobile phones at all for this reason.

The Internet and the occasional use of a stationary landline is all many of us need.
Emacs was far easier for me than Vim was. To this day, I have no idea how people learn Vim. And the scripting is awful, especially compared to Emacs, which is really a script interpreter that has a built in text-editor script and some useful primitives for text editing.
I thing the fallacy here is that a single person can't create a large enough dataset, while I content they can. Combined with tools like pocketsphinx I think its very doable to have a privacy concious AI system.
The difference is one of targeting.

It's like saying "People would never break into a bank, when they could break into someone's house and steal their stuff"

It may be easier to break into someone's home-brew system, but generally it would be unlikely to happen unless you were being otherwise targetted. Whereas google has a lot of users data, which could make it a more attractive target.
This election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up.

That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.

Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
Show HN: Annotate a simple iMessage sticker app to annotate your messages
I tell you why you should always develop a NATIVE app (and Never an hybrid one)
>How about they put their (considerable, federal) money where their mouth is and get us to Mars.

You're aware that SpaceX runs on a lot of corporate welfare, with SpaceX only existing because of NASA's COTS and Tesla only existing because of generous federal subsidies on electric cars and other handouts to the tune of $5b[1] and an undisclosed amount from NY state[2].

Both companies are alike and fairly dependent on the federal government, Boeing less so considering their large aircraft market. The wonderful thing about capitalism is you don't have to arbitrarily pick the "good" from the "bad." You have them compete and ideally good things come from competition. Frankly, I'm thrilled to have Boeing keeping Elon honest, and vice versa. This is the system working here.

On a more personal note, I think the CTS-100 is a beautiful spacecraft and would love to see it fly in 2018. Boeing can impress if they want to. I also love the fact that my kid is going to grow up in a world with many manned spacecraft by various organizations with various goals, not just the LEO-only shuttle I grew up with. I was just telling my wife about I'd love our son to see a manned rocket launch and realized that this 'sometime in the future' trip to Cape Canaveral is only a year or two away. Same with the first SLS test launch. 2018 is going to be an incredible year for manned space programs. It blows my mind how much grousing there is on the internet regarding the US's position in space. A few years without a manned program is such a tiny price to pay for all this change and innovation. This is an incredible time to be alive for space fans. I think we're going to look back at this period with a certain level of amazement the same way my parent's generation must have seen the initial space race.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-2015...

[2] http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/23/my-love-hate-relationshi...
Crew capsule and booster both went up, seperated, came down and landed nominally. In fact, they made it look easy; everything worked as they predicted and there were no suprises.

A couple of points of interest:

1. The Crew Capsule pitched around quite a lot after it left the booster. This would have been quite 'exciting' for any passengers but was easily survivable. SpaceX had a similar problem in their Dragon LES test a while back. Indeed, the BO Capsule looked much more stable under parachutes than the Dragon did.

2. The commentators mentioned that the booster had flown and landed 5 times and would be retired to a museum. 5 times!? There was so little drama in the launch and landing that I expect they could probably launch it another 5 times with few problems. This is what a reliable system looks like. Good job!

3. The gantry tower at the West Texas launch site had what looked like walkways for accessing the Crew capsule. Does that mean crewed tests are imminent? Very exciting!

This is a fantastic result for Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin team; I'm hoping that their new orbital booster is as reliable. If it is, SpaceX and ULA will have some real domestic competition. At last!
This reminds me that MC supports mouse interaction.

And playing around with it, i find that it is more elaborate than i first anticipated. The menus can even be operated via the scroll wheel, and it is sensitive to where the mouse is hovering.

All in all i find myself pondering if more up to date console web browser is possible. Perhaps using the framebuffer rather than X to display sites (or maybe go all out and implement it using sixel).
I do not. There is enough of it elsewhere on the web, it's nice to be somewhere relatively free of it for a change.

The conversations that occur here generally seem much more structured.
Most of this just says C was a popular implementation language following UNIX’s fame. So, many things are written in C. So, knowing C will help you understand how they work. People doing cutting-edge work that pick C are usually clear that they pick it for compiler and talent availability, not technical superiority for problem at hand. Now for the No’s. You don’t need to know it for systems programming as plenty of better languages exist for that. It barely contributed anything to good programming languages compared to ALGOL, Simula, Modula, or LISP. Many key designs pushing OS’s forward were not in C: Burrough’s ALGOL, IBM’s PL family, MULTICS in PL/0 & BCPL (UNIX started as MULTICS subset), VMS in BLISS, LISP machines in LISP, Smalltalk-80 in Smalltalk-80, Oberon systems in Oberon dialects, Spin in Modula-3, JX in Java, and recently unikernels in Ocaml.

So, C is a necessary evil if you want to understand or extend legacy systems whose authors preferred C. It’s also trendy in that people keep it mostly like it is while defending any problems it has. That’s a social thing. Like COBOL and PL/I are with the mainframe apps for companies using them. It’s not the best language for systems programming along a lot of metrics. One doing clean-slate work on a platform can use better languages to do better in the long-term. Short-term benefits matter, though, so such projects often compile to C or include C FFI to benefit from legacy stuff.
> We channel our hunting instinct in FPS computer games, or professions such as soldier or policeman.

Huh? I uh, huh?

> We are ashamed of our sexual desire so we developed complex system of rationalizations that we call "love".

Speak for yourself, I ain't ashamed of shit. Also, go buy a Labrador puppy. Or maybe google something like "monogamous animals" and/or "do animals feel love"
ESA: The hazards of landing on Mars
This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat.

The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.
Sure, and to illustrate your point, I have an email very similar to someone else's. I very frequently get their emails (invoices, church events, travel itineraries, purchase receipts). Google thinks they're _my_ trips, and updates me about flight times.

I think this example serves both our points. To your point, it's totally leaked this other person's info into my "google world" because I'm on gmail. On the other hand, that person is leaking his information directly to me just because of typos when he fills out online forms. Perfect privacy requires a lot of vigilance in a digital world, with or without google/gmail/hotmail/yahoo/etc.
I'm both European and Australian. I have cards in both countries with Chip-only, Chip+NFC, and (still!) two stripe only.

In Australia, you can activate the card terminal by inserting it, swiping it or tapping it. There is no difference in liability shifting.

In Europe, if you insert the card you'll be prompted for your PIN. If the transactions succeeds, the liability is shifted to you (the cardholder).

It just happens to be what consumers have become used to in each country.
The problem was that they didn't know what was effective or not.

Capitalist societies are relatively new. The nobility might have access to a healer, but that healer may be practicing some religious mumbo jumbo. Middle age kings would get a bleeding from a leech and a dose of Jesus.

In China, you'd get traditional medicine that has some legit use cases, but lots of bullshit as well.
The actual launch is at 1h06 into the recorded video (there were several holds).
I think you're not understanding me, or I'm not understanding you...unless for some specific reason you want to know a wave elevation timeseries (which given the question "how do I describe the current sea conditons" you probably don't; also, noting that significant wave height is not the same as wave elevation), the statistical parameters which are derived from the timeseries data are more useful. These of course can be given on a rolling basis.
Twitter only makes sense for public figures. For regular people, nobody on Twitter gives a crap about what you have to say.

Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional).

To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read other people's tweets, but nobody actually reads your tweets. The interaction is mostly unidirectional.
It may be OK for you but there are at least three real concerns here:

1- There is no way to set your privacy level.

2- Things that Google/Siri/Alexa know about you are not limited with the name of the bar you go frequently. They know much more about you. And you don't know what they know. The sky is the limit here.

3- Things that they know are not limited with you personally. They know about you, your family, your friends and all their interactions. They know very much about the whole society.
it's a tad bit weird but all the other command power you get from vim is just really comfortable. But I can see that swap working out in vanilla emacs
I'm confused as to why in this thread there's very little contrastive commentary on the different stance taken by Apple and Google about privacy.

Apple has made preserving user privacy a paramount goal, investing in research and technology to achieve it with minimal loss (however much it is) of (intelligent) functionality.

I find that a very strong point for the Cupertino based company.

(edited for legibility)
The superpowers of UX & UI designers
The fundamental issue comes down to one of trust and the real question is, do we trust Google to do the right ethical and moral things with our data that they are collecting en masse?
>Why do men strive for status and money?

Lovelessness; Because money and status is a proxy for love from friends and would-be lovers that we crave:

“The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of—and means to—love rather than ends in themselves.”

Snobbery; Because underneath small talk amongst casual social situations underlies a constant of "sizing up" and civilized snobbery:

“The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them”

Outsized expectations; Because meritocracy, "American Dream" doesn't empower people; rather statistically forces us to confront the mediocrity of our ordinariness of lives, while feeling anxious about alleged "wasted potential" :

"In aristocracies, servants often accepted their position with good grace; it was not impossible for them to harbour, in Tocqueville’s words, 'high thoughts, strong pride and self-respect.' In democracies, by contrast, the propaganda of the press and public opinion relentlessly promised servants that they, too, could reach the pinnacles of society and make their fortune as industrialists, judges, scientists or even presidents. Although this sense of unbounded opportunity could initially excite a surface cheerfulness in them—particularly in the younger ones—and though it did encourage the most talented or luckiest among them to fulfill their goals, as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville’s noted that their mood darkened, bitterness took hold of and choked their spirit, and their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.”

- Alain de Botton. “Status Anxiety”
I've wondered about this too, your explanation works for me.
Ask HN: Source code analysis for non-coders
As a network, infrastructure, and cloud security engineer I have developed a strong skill set in these areas. One area I have neglected though is code analysis.

As I don't have a CS degree or come from that background, I have next to zero coding knowledge (I do have basic scripting in Python, bash).

This is coming up more often in interviews, so I would like to create a set of tools to use for that without becoming a 'coding expert'.

How can I streamline this? What processes and tools have others seen used in the wild to perform similar work?
Do you have any performance numbers for other non-Node WS libraries, e.g. Go (stdlib and gorilla), Rust (ws-rs, mio-websocket etc), Python, Ruby? Would be super interesting to see!
California prosecutors who withhold, tamper with evidence to face felony charges
Daydream is way better.
That's great! I'm willing to sacrifice any amount of your privacy too for future potential improvements to my life.

But there would have to be current and actual improvements to my life before I'll start considering handing out my personal data.
Cool idea, makes the idea of sticker apps more useful than just being emojis
The Dragon Launch Escape System was successfully tested in May last year.

It is Blue Origin who are catching up.
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The 6 Top Financial Tips for 40-Somethings
There's plenty of statistical evidence for a positive correlation between income and offspring for men, e.g. http://iussp2009.princeton.edu/papers/91467
Select-bus service (that is, buses running in dedicated lanes) is about as fast as at-grade light rail, and significantly cheaper to construct. NYC has been going in that direction for awhile. Building at-grade rail is just a complete non-starter. The city already tore out all of its above-ground rail a long time ago for a variety of reasons that persist to the present day.
Sadly, I think you are right. I'm not sure what it would take to get more people to really care about privacy when they can have convenience instead. The Snowden leaks didn't do it in the US, even though it showed a government that was willing to break the rule of law to collect data on its citizens.