skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me tell a tale.

Recently I was cancelling my comcast for wave. I was charged an early cancellation fee of multiple months service (The cancellation was due to moving out of my apt at end of lease to a house for which comcast did not offer service). The early fee was not on my original contract; and was apparently added without my consent in the interim, and the lower level managers intended to enforce despite their inability to even provide me service.

I refused this and continued to escalate until I got a surprisingly high tier manager who talked like a techie and seemed to understand a thing or two and had a degree of self awareness (when told "Thanks for your help, I'm sorry you work for such a shit company since your good effort could be better used in better actors" he responded with "yeah I know; at least it pays the bills"). He made ALL my problems disappear and listened to my complaints of a decade with Comcast, and why I'd never go back, seeming legitimately remorseful and sad that the company has been generally anti-consumer, promising that they were pushing to improve things and acknowledging the pain I felt to the degree of comping multiple months+fees.

So my question. Is that an act? Or is this another poor middle manager trying to do his best? Are they really so tuned out as to how much ill will they're generating such that I had "not comcast" as a prerequisite to the massive act of _buying a house_? And to the other half of that question; how can we make them feel the pain more as consumers? (legal action of course but in addition.) As a tech influencer I do all I can to try and tell people about the great local ISP alternatives in my area if they aren't aware, but it seems like comcast lives in its own little bubble where the realities of good consumer practices just don't apply. (or maybe I'm being pessimistic and the hammer will drop in a few decades, I don't have many good prior historical examples with similar enough context to extrapolate, if anyone else does I'd be curious)
Mostly sounds like a case of fixing up some non-optimal defaults - the real hard part is gathering data from real world use cases which is required to make your defaults better.

1) Reducing the V8 heap page size from 1M to 512KB ... results in 2x memory reduction

2) The memory visualization tool helped us discover that the background parser would keep an entire zone alive long after the code was already compiled. ... resulted in reduced average and peak memory usage.

3) C++ compiler not packing structs optimally for V8s case - manual packing saves some peak memory.
There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.

I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a negative thing. If men's income is less important this means men can invest in careers or outlets that they didn't have the freedom to pursue before due to familial obligations. It does not mean that men must be idle.
USA FREEDOM Act Requires Government to Declassify Any Order to Yahoo
Indeed! I wasn't intending to limit good train stations to Britain when I spoke of Victorian times -- and, indeed, "Victorian" is too limiting. Early-20thC is Edwardian or thereabouts -- and US train-station design was at its zenith at that time, as throwanem observes.
Wire is missing. https://wire.com/
>So far, the main evidence that I can find that links the hacks to the Russian government are two things...

As well as, from the private sector:

Various forms of infrastructure correlation analysis [1]

Correlation with past Fancy Bear breaches [2]

Very similar phishing tactic of link shorteners to steal email credentials (see for details) [3]

Similar RATs and C&C protocols [4]

Google independently correlating attacks with what they believe to be state-sponsored TTPs [5]

Correlation between all targets associated with a shared set of indicators, and the Russian government's geopolitical goals [6]

Additionally, Kaspersky, a Russian infosec firm founded by Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky is highly suspected to have had Russian intelligence ties, so of anyone he would want to challenge the US's story here) and who broke several stories about NSA's attacks and tools, names one of the groups as CozyDuke. [7] They do not explicitly say they're Russian, but they agree that they are one of the groups responsible for attacks against the US government. Crowdstrike calls this same group Cozy Bear (Kaspersky named them CozyDuke after Crowdstrike already established Cozy Bear) and other firms strongly believe them to be tied to the Russian government. They do not provide any evidence confirming or denying attribution either way. If they had even the slightest inclination that it wasn't Russia, I imagine they'd be pushing it hard.

Plus, probably a whole bunch of classified information gathered by US intelligence agencies if they're willing to make this claim publicly now.

And anecdotally, everyone else I know in the infosec industry agrees it's probably Russia. No company in the US or in countries with governments that oppose the US have provided differing stories. Admittedly, the fact that it's mostly US companies tying it to Russia should cause you to be skeptical, but you can read their actual analyses and fact-check them easily. No competing firms or competing countries have questioned their facts.

That's not necessarily proof Russia is trying to influence the election, sure, but they're definitely trying to piss in the US government's cheerios at the least. And I wouldn't doubt NSA has made plenty of Russian infiltrations of their own in the past; probably how Kaspersky got their hands on some of their tools in the first place.

[1] https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/tapping-into-democratic-n...

[2] https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/fancy-bear-it-itch-they-c...

[3] https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-0-dnc-breach/

[4] https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...

[5] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/dnc-staffer-got-pop-...

[6] https://debugged.wilsoncenter.org/evaluating-the-dnc-hack-b0...

[7] https://securelist.com/blog/research/69731/the-cozyduke-apt/
Just last month Bruce Schneier wrote an article about this exact topic, about groups performing organization doxxing potentially modifying some of the documents before release and how these changes could be made undetectable.

Original article on TheAtlantic.com: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/hackin...

Same article on schneier.com: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/organizationa...
General consensus that I've seen is that it is not just top 10 but number 1 across the entire planet.
It's a fairly limited money grab if the cap is beyond the majority of actual usage
I don't even think a missile shield is necessarily bad, but it is a little troubling to see the attitude of taking offense that Russia just doesn't do what it's told. Forgetting Russia is a superpower too.

Should other countries have a plan in case of USA collapse? At least our codes got upgraded from a string of 0s... But I imagine there are some foreign officials worried. Russia has started calling America "not-agreement-capable" after recent events in Syria and a UNSC meeting.
I'm not saying it was Russia, I'm saying that anyone these days that hacks such a high profile target and then parades around and does show and tells has a sponsor.

The fact that some of the leaked emails/information of from the "Guccifer" et al. hacks have also been tampered with in order to achieve a specific political goal also hints at a higher objective which isn't something one usually associates with cybercrime or even hacktivism.

Criminals would steal, sell and run and hide (not that you could hide these days if you break into a US government network), hacktivists would not usually tamper with the information they release as it goes against their own philosophy.
AirBnB hurricane Matthew disaster response program
Why would that make a difference? If the US government is so brazen to force a public official to lie about this, they would make him lie about it, too.

(There's almost no chance there is a conspiracy here. I think it is probably Russia.)
I love how this comment has been down voted, even though it's much more truthful than the parent comment (which misses many other points as described above.)
From http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/29345...

“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.

“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.

But the article closes with a statement made 9 days earlier that they'd be happy to publish any authentic internal documents "from inside the Trump campaign".
All these comments are starting to make me feel stupid. I picked mongo for a side project, and it's been really nice so far. I have a hard time imagining how one would use it for a complicated and/or large schema though. I assume that is just my newness to it.
> If the announcement came from, say, Major General Mark W. Westergren, USAF, Deputy Chief NSA/CSS, it would be more credible. He's not a political appointee

I am aware of no commonly used definition of "political appointee" that does not include (among others) all officers of government that go through the appointment-by-the-President-and-confirmation-by-the-Senate process that applies to -- as well as to officials that get more media attention for this process -- all military officers (and with notably more personal attention in the process to 1-star and higher ranks -- generals and admirals.)
A Fast Lock-Free Queue for C++
Thank you. Very clever. I'm stealing it.
Nice, been playing about with this myself. Can you share details? How did you sync audio with lyrics?
The pendulum swings back the other way. One of the advantages of (proper) REST is precisely that the returning payload is a server-defined, well-specced mediatype, so you know that responses always look the same way. GraphQL -- and literally any other client-driven query language, including SQL -- instead you ask for specific data items and have to case-by-case write the handling logic right after your request completes.

It's a trade-off, like any other. As another commenter said, this battle was fought many years ago with SQL, where it began to be considered good practice to formalize the APIs with stored procedures or abstract away from the backend tables by restricted-column views, instead of just accepting arbitrary queries against the raw table.
Deckard/Assist AI-powered platform for coding teams
Thanks xaa for your thoughtful comments. I've taken a few MOOC on Bioinformatics. Biology certain seems much harder to get feedback esp. if you work in the wet lab, but I'm curious however about what particulars in Bioinformatics in your opinion is harder to learn (assuming that a computer person has taken Biology 101, aware of DNA to RNA, transcription, translation, mutations, variants, alleles, genotypes, haplotypes, basic cell biology; and maybe let's say even a step up, familiar with basic's of processing NGS files, processing assembly, variant calling, RNA-Seq and ChIPSeq differential analysis).

Is it the statistics (finding the right statistics inference test and knowing what are the pitfalls of your models)? Or is it understanding the underpinnings of the biology behind a particular pathway you're studying? (e.g., knowing how to perform or iterate on the wet lab experiments of doing in-vivo or in-vitro experiments). Thanks again for your comments.
How do you downvote? i only see an upvote button?
Cable you're competing with frequency space just the same as mobile.

A good analogy is a café. If the place is half empty its negligible to have an extra person come and sit down. But if you have a dozen people who sit there all day it doesn't leave much room for when the rush arrives.
How do you contact a cto or cio?
> How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment.

Well, yes, the thoughts about the comment, becomes a comment — and then the upvote count, shows if many agree with those thoughts. (But not until after one has made up one's own mind, and then clicked the show-upvotes button. Then one can a little bit compare one's own view of the world, with what others think)

Re annotating up/downvotes: I think people in general wouldn't want to spend time explaining themselves, if they knew that what they wrote, would be "invisible" to most other visitors. Perhaps a few "kind hearted" people would explain why they downvoted, via annotations, but I'm thinking they'd be too few for this feature to be well-spent-lines-of-code.
RE: “How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016”
Those are good points and I generally agree with your probability assessment and with the utter subjectivity (and un-knowability of the motive with the currently available information).

The biggest current unknowns in my opinion are:

- Why did the HRC campaign decide to circumvent normal channels and make immediate accusations of Russian involvement?

- Why did Clapper wait until today to make an official statement? Why did he make an official statement at all?

One thing I've noticed about information campaigns is that they often seem to rely upon the human tendency to replace AND with THEREFORE when news is released piecemeal.

Hence, Server hacked AND campaign blames Russia AND Clapper blames Russia AND _______ AND ________ AND ________ ...

These disparate facts will seemingly turn causal and will be attributable to specific protagonists as the campaign develops.

Since HRC's team is essentially setting the agenda for the data points we've received so far, I am expecting there to be a punchline, or some causal narrative we're going to be asked to believe at some point in the future.
I'd personally much prefer being known as a good CEO with a net worth of $5M than a bad CEO with a net worth of $500M.
My old company, a fintech startup, hired our business analyst intern for a full time position. SQL and Excel were the primary requirements, and programming was a nice-to-have.
Funny you bring up Braunfuck, I've toyed with making a brainfuck game[0], but gave up because working with terminal IO is the pits ....

[0]: https://github.com/lfowles/brainporn
I've found that they just like to make it harder to get stuff fixed or changed in favor of the customer.

Let me tell a tale:

I've been with my fiance for ~10 years now. We've had Comcast for ~8 of the ten years. We had a "full" internet/cable package for ~6 of those 8 years.

Every year - like clockwork - she would get a bill after the "year" intro period and the price would go up. I'm not sure of the numbers but from ~100 to ~150 or somewhere in there.

Why like clockwork? Because every year she would call and say "cancel the package... oh? you'll extend it? AND add another pay channel bundle? Okay... talk to you next year".

With each year it got harder and she had to fight longer - sometimes through multiple calls. When it got escalated to cancellation managers they would inevitably change their minds.

It finally got to the point last year that we actually canceled everything except for the ABSOLUTE basic cable. No HD. Only half of the channels (no MTV, HGTV, etc).

The reality is simple: It's them or... dialup? Satellite? couple other crappy options. The joy of "monopolies". They know that people who want channels MUST go through them.

Thankfully Netflix, Amazon Prime,... plex :) have picked up the slack so we actually aren't bother much by the loss of HBO and the like...
Full interview with Richard Garriott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-oM07j4Mys
> have also been tampered with

What tampering has occurred?
You need a certain amount of karma points to get the downvote button (a few hundred I think).
> 1. Business model / strategy is as important as the
> technology. Way too many people believe that all they need
> to do is build a great product (by all accounts it seems
> RethinkDB did) and the rest will take care of itself.
> Enterprise software is a very difficult business and at the
> moment going through tremendous change and while there is
> good opportunity it takes much more than good tech.

Amen to this!

When I was CTO of my previous company, I always thought of the "product" as the technology we were building.

As CEO of my current one, the "product" is really the business model we are nurturing/shaping. Even when we are creating amazing technology, the business model is the thing that requires the most care and the main driver of whether we succeed or fail - the real product.
It amuses me greatly that probably no one in this thread realizes who you are. (Except maybe Cloudflare.)
All O7- and above are not apolitical; all flag officers in all services must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate at each promotion beyond O6. It's often a rubber stamping process, but it is there. Denial of promotion and individual intervention is relatively frequent.

Technically all officers also have this treatment but Senate oversight and intervention is much lower, and the batches are much bigger.
It has definitely improved from the original version. Would like to see references for each point made, however.
One of us is misreading the critique (and it may be me?).

I think that what it's saying is this:

* The most wasteful car trips are solo local commutes. Carbon-per-inch, flying is more efficient than driving when the driving is a solo local commutes.

* For longer trips, in a light duty vehicle like a sedan or SUV, driving usually smashes flying. If you have 4 people in the car, even in an inefficient car, you are using less than half the fuel of those same people flying.

The Michigan study simply averaged these together, which is obviously senseless because there is no flight equivalent of a 3-mile commute. It only makes sense to compare flights against highway mileage, and it's not unfair to assume >= 2.2 people in the car.

That's the way I read the critique.
Brave Offers First Bitcoin Micropayments to Publishers
I disagree. It's very useful to remove the comments of spammers, trolls, and the like. Another common reason to downvote is to stop the tide of noisy comments, such as meme posts, which feel increasingly prevalent on HN.

A more exemplary argument might be to imagine hypothetical responses to your post:

"I agree."

"I disagee."

"Fuck you."

"lol"

"¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I think you'd want to downvote something like that. Nobody wants to waste their time reading it.

I think the number of times I've missed a valuable comment due to downvoting is probably far less than the number of times I've seen garbage posts. We might disagree on the value and merits of each approach, but I'd prefer a high signal HN, even if it makes it a bit more of an echo chamber (hypothetically).
I would really like to see the FTC go after them if they continue to advertise speeds above 3Mbit/sec.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - patronize your local DSL provider before it's too late.
I hate that. Seeing as I'm a Schemer, I also hate the other classics: It's not really a lisp because false and nil aren't the same, It's not really a lisp because it doesn't have real* macros, and It's not a lisp for various reasons which amount to: it's not CL or any of its predecessors*.

My usual responses to each of these, respectively, are: come off it, even McCarthy says that was totally by chance, and may not have been the best idea; pretty much every implementation has really macros, and even the original lisp didn't have real macros; and finally, come on, Rainer, we've had this discussion like three times already.
500, IIRC.
Kind of cool.

9.8, from France. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/xbQHksWyRsOPWhW3hhs6RA

Not really a coach though. More of a critic.
Yeah, except they don't include any sort of scientific advance. Who cares about the natural age limit? We're mankind, the first species to be able to guide our own evolution. Basically this article means nothing significant.
You can probably get out of the contract with this new policy as its a change to the underlying contract. Call them up and say you don't accept the terms of the data cap.
I'm still a bit confused. Are you implying that Bloomberg and Twitter are in competition? I'm not so sure they are, really, in any sense.
...And were you not listening to the point which started this discussion, which is that I do most of my development on a Chromebook, and all that has is SSH.
And what bold advances has Russia made?

They neutralised Georgia after Georgia attacked and killed several of their soldiers.

They seized (bloodlessly I might add) Crimea after the new western-imposed government threatened to end the perpetual lease of the Sevastopol naval base. I might also add that 'Maidan' was the 2nd western-sponsored 'revolution' in Ukraine in a decade.

Now Russia is defending a long-time ally in the middle east from western-backed terrorists.

Then there's also NATO advancing all around Russia, the various 'defensive' missile systems being installed by US-allied countries who happen to encircle Russia, etc...

> Could you count how many times in history yielding to bold advances of power hungry ruler served as effective deterrent to war?

The only one making bold advances is the US, and yes, Russia isn't yielding, and the US is making it a problem. But you're right, it is a deterrent to war - if a weak ruler like Yeltsin were still in power Russia would probably be in another dozen pieces right now, with wars raging in half of them...
And i live in philadelphia, where Comcast has an agreement with the city that prevents other ISPs from operating. Verizon can (because $$) but there are other ISP's outside the city like RCN that aren't allowed in.
How I hacked sales: write about people who don't buy from me
I am a techy. I don't know how to sell. But everyone needs to sell: to get a job, to get people sign off on your project, etc. In my case, I am a data consultant. I need to sell to get hired for future projects.

Recently, I decided to try a new strategy. I write length articles about people who don't buy from me--or put in another way, people who don't buy my services. As a start, I wrote this:
https://my.caura.co/why-build-software-in-house-not-f3c9bc726b1

for someone at Criteo inc., who I thought would be a good candidate for my services.

What do you all think?
Oh, hey. Neat.
This could be a nice project to implement on ros. You could even plug in something like rrt :)
Sia's 'Cheap Thrills' is slightly different on most radio stations
> Do you know how hard it is to convey what exactly this means and what the consequences are?

I never said it is easy.

> Intuition will come with experience.

And this experience that some people have already reached should be shared, not limited to a select coterie of people.
I'm rich and part of the financial 1%. I can indeed confirm the rich get richer. I'm not going to enumerate the specific methods, but I do feel bad that middle class or bay area software engineers cannot employ certain financial tricks that only the rich can do.

As a teaser, one important thing is to not share information (i.e. Don't blog about financial "hacks"). Call it a corrupt moral compass or whatever you like, but the fact is this behavior is rampant.
Yep. At work we might use services like EC2 and justify it with "I don't want to pay for resources I'm not using, therefore I will use services that offer me usage-based pricing. Who wants to go back to the dark ages of being charged by the month for a short-lived server, when I could be charged per minute of usage instead?"

And yet, no one can think of any possible justification for implementing a change like this for consumer data usage...