skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unmaintained critical infrastructure is bad news.

(article author here)

To add to @callahad's excellent points: unmaintained critical infrastructure on your security perimeter is even worse, and a service like Persona is about as security-critical as you can get!

Persona was (and will remain until the end of November) covered by Mozilla's bug bounty program, meaning that it has been getting regular security bugs filed against it. Most have been spurious, some have not, but each of them has been a fire-drill because Persona gates access to so many of Mozilla's internal services.

We have been able to respond effectively so far, because there's a core of ex-Persona developers kicking around other projects at Mozilla, who we've been able to pull back in for these critical maintenance tasks. But that's not sustainable indefinitely.

The only responsible choices for a security-sensitive service like this are (a) staff it properly, or (b) tear it down gracefully. I'm personally quite disappointed that we couldn't find a path to success for Persona at Mozilla, but I'm grateful we've at least found the resources to do (b).
Super nice. I had to look in the code to find this:

Up arrow to rotate!
>Having your messages stored while you are offline is hugely valuable.

Sure. Nice feature. hardly game-changing or innovative.

Our company is just getting on the Slack train. I'm honestly underwhelmed with the experience. I suppose I expected a lot given the hype and valuation. My main gripe is the lack of UI customization.
He was more than an investor. He believed in the computer graphics work that they were doing and became the sole owner of Pixar when they were on the brink of disbanding. He bought the company outright and moved them from the eastcoast to the westcoast. That's huge. Nobody does that as an investor. You have to really believe in that on a core, personal level to do that.
I could certainly see them adding developer capabilities to the iPad Pro.

But I have a hard time understanding why they would bother trying to move developers, which to me implies removing dev capabilities from the Mac (how?) or killing the Mac line entirely (why?).
What's not mentioned is the toll for high comp:

42% of RSU earnings withheld to cover taxes.

90 minute commutes to work one-way.

Stack ranked performance reviews.

Open office space, cramped quarters, and distractions.

Off-hour email and texts. Implicit expectations to be "on-call".
They predicted the Kentucky Derby (Superfecta) using this same A.I., based on a challenge from another reporter:

http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-turns-20-110...
Broadway.js is Android's H.264 decoder compiled with Emscripten to JavaScript:

https://github.com/mbebenita/Broadway

http://mbebenita.github.io/Broadway/foxDemo.html
Yeap. This right here.
It just was one of many killer features. Contemporary phones also had web browsers, they just weren't as good, by far.

I remember the awful browser on the Nokia N73 (my last phone before the iPhone), which had a largeish screen and a little joystick to control a mouse pointer, but no touchscreen.
This is a good point. Political will is vital.
However, I submit that in America, the design of the built environment as a system is profoundly broken. Basically we need to build our stuff closer together. Like feet apart instead of miles.

Credit where credit is due, I stole most of my ideas about this from [0]. It's a non-prestigious contrarian blog that's easy to mock, but he seems to be correct on the merits about cities.

[0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html
It's an option in uBlock, and it works great:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
Post Election Sanity Pledge
I never download apps anymore because they abused their privilege. No, I don't want to download an app that's just a less-featureful front-end to your webpage. Especially if you are going to need access to my contacts, location, and have notifications pop-up just because you can. Obviously there are exceptions that do need this access, but they are the vast minority IME.
I'd consider getting a Eurorack modular synth.

Advantages:

1 - it's much more fun to build your own synth out of components than to buy an off-the-shelf system designed and built by someone else

2 - and you get to build exactly what you want

3 - there are literally thousands of modules to choose from, giving you much more flexibility and features than any integrated synth

4 - lots of cables to make a patch, which can be fun to mess with and interesting/intriguing for audiences to look at

5 - audio and control voltages are the same, so you can do things like change synth parameters with audio

Disadvantages:

1 - price, typically much more expensive to get equivalent functionality to a cheap integrated synth. [A]

2 - size - much bigger than a typical integrated synth [B]

3 - lots of cables to make a patch, which can make recreating a patch a pain compared to a digital/hybrid synth

4 - can look intimidating to someone unfamiliar with modular synths [C]

5 - making a modular patch can be slower than just dialing in a digital patch

Notes:

[A] - But you don't necessarily need to replicate everything, you can have partial functionality that will still be useful and fun, and may get effects that would be hard to get any other way

[B] - though Eurorack is still much smaller than some other modular formats

[C] - But it's not hard to pick up, and learning modular synthesis is fun
Browser vendors against adclicks, mice against cheese, bees against honey, what you gonna do now?
If you have any warm leads that are decision makers at a tech company, email them with the fact that you got an offer and what your timeline is. Or if you're part way through applying at places, now's a great time to email your contact an update.

If you haven't been keeping many irons in the fire, that makes the whole process of getting what you want way more difficult.
Mars Opportunity Rover: Driving the Jet Propulsion Lab's Mars Rover, Again
Also, in preferences, you can uncheck the box that allows sites to choose fonts. After I saw your comment I fired up Chrome to check and was surprised that there seems to be no option for this.
Right, but at the same time every lottery winner purchased a lottery ticket. If you just say "survivorship bias" and never buy a lottery ticket then you will never win the lottery. My personal goal in life is to play the (metaphorical) lottery as much as I can, within reason. E.g. I'm not mortgaging my house to throw money after my buddy's 'Uber for Planting trees' idea.
It's a reference to Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." The taste brings forth memories involuntarily.
I would love to use this but i cannot get used to the syntax highlighting. How can i remove syntax highlighting in vscode ? There does not seem to be a obvious config option in the docs.
It's very wasteful. Here's example what you could do with less than 200kb:

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244

If you don't want to run it on your computer, you can watch recording from youtube.
It's a reference to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, wherein he famously recounted how, upon eating a "dispiriting" madeline as an adult, he was abruptly and involuntarily taken back to the emotions of childhood, when he and an aunt shared madelines every Sunday. Since then, it's shorthand for "something that emotionally transports us back to happier times," more or less.
Oh gezz, even google.com weighs 976 kB. Coming in at 1.2 MB isn't bad at all. Strip the two GIFs out (which are good content and behind links now anyway) and you've got ~500 kB. Perfectly reasonable.
New training technique reveals basis for machine-learning systems’ decisions
> So India could "fix" this by signing on to the treaty and agreeing to the restrictions. They choose not to it seems (I have no idea why)

Indians are fiercely proud of their space program, which is in opinion a wonderful feat in terms of technology. Their main objective is to use it for Indian interests, like Oceans, weather and defence etc. They've no interest in pursuing extra business, if it comes at the cost of bowing down to US stipulations. They're getting nice business from many countries in the world like Germany, France, African nations etc.

Source : I've read "Wings of fire" by APJ Kalam, which gives an interesting insiders view into ISRO/DRDO.
Web page does not need opening? Interesting…
Updates happen automatically now.
ClangFormat
>Another day, another post dismissing success as luck.

I thought it was pretty well known that luck plays a significant factor in success. Are you disputing that?
Of course there's no blog post about how you should use a new piece of tech at your company because you saw a toy example of using it and like it - because when you put it that way it sounds ridiculous. Instead you have people posting toy examples of code that isn't used in production or is used in production for very specific reasons that usually don't apply, and other people thinking "hey that looks neat" and deciding to use it in production without doing actual analysis. See: the sharp rise of NoSQL and chase of "big (not actually big) data" starting ~7 years ago.

If this wasn't a phenomena then the posts you linked seem kinda pointless.
In Firefox, >Options >Content >Fonts >Advanced Unchecking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..", blocks Webfonts and System fonts which configured User fonts have the necessary characters to render.
In about:config gfx.downloadable_fonts.enable > false ,will block all webfonts, but this breaks many sites like imgur & g̶i̶t̶h̶u̶b̶ which use webfonts to display navigation icons.
Chapeau Is Exactly What the Linux Desktop Needs
OKRs: Silicon Valley’s cheat code for rapid growth [free template]
>they just weren't as good, by far.

Exactly. The point of the demo was "this browser is just as good as one on a computer".
The problem with Everest’s 200+ bodies
Slack’s letter to Microsoft and Retrospect
I wasn't familiar with the term, but Wiktionary has some good hints:

n. A small gateau or sponge cake, often shaped like an elongated scallop shell.

n. Something which brings back a memory; a source of nostalgia or evocative memories (used with reference to its function in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time).
Absolutely none of this is immune to buffer overflows.
> Would love an attribute on script and link tags that could be conditional based on connection speeds.

A fast connection can be faster than the site's capacity to serve resources to you. See also HN hug of death, etc.

I would like to think that the <script> defer attribute is already conditional, since it's almost instant on sufficiently fast connections.
How much work is installing the app? Single tap? The same of less than opening a web page?
No need to remember screen and folder, just use global search on your phone.
So, the web is winning and native apps are going away, because the future is native apps which also implement browser-like features to display web content. Ok.

And I guess I'm weird because of my tech background, but I absolutely hate apps which present web content in their own browsers instead of my browser of choice.
I mean legally. And with decent performance, without overly major bugs.
https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849#.1o0pg14v2
I think it's "one that evokes a memory": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/madeleine

That seems to be how it's used in the article and some of the comments here:

"Crimea was the ideal site for this post-Soviet reunion, since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union. For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine."

I see others have beat me to a response. m-w also has a paragraph about it:

"The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word madeleine itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory."

I had never heard of it either.
Because Microsoft pays people to shill for them on media sources like Hackernews.
Our units of measurement are finally about to get an upgrade
One of the constraints I am working with is that a human is not necessarily in the loop all the time. What is the best way then bootstrap the encryption process?
Hey, if it takes a little away from the barrage of boring, half-reasoned opinions about the MacBook announcement, I'll take it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
But they are not paying for BBC Worldwide, if anything BBC Worldwide is subsidizing the UK part of the BBC.
This seems to be an answer to the Microbrute / Minibrute market of small, cheap(er) mono synths for bass parts.

But to me it just doesn't stack up. Sure, it's got the onboard sequencer, which you're going to need somewhere in your kit. But the voice seems too similar to the Minilogue without any of the real low-end depth you can get from the Arturia devices.

But I'm with you, I don't really see what purpose this serves that can't be better served by a brute or moog.
But if you have an effective in house team you can't give the work to your dodgy mates/ benefactors...

The UK has very civilised corruption.
Ah, the good old "installs zero apps" statistics.
Would you mind telling how much new web pages does average American open in a month? Let me guess: the same zero.
> 3 years ago React didn't exist. 2 year ago Angular didn't exist.

Not to nitpick, but React has been around since summer 2013, and Angular 1.0 was released on June 14, 2012, so these libraries have definitely existed for more than 3 years. That said, I think that plays even more to your point that there are 3+ years of positive changes to be gained from switching from Backbone to React.
Neat! I sometimes think it would be interesting to develop a web-based podcast production platform, where a similar sort of feature would be available for post-production. But also use WebRTC for conferencing, streaming, allowing callers to "dial in" to live shows and wait their turn, etc.
The article's point is that all text not rendering cripples a page. Not seeing a specific image for a while, especially one that's relatively optional, is fine.
terrible judgment by the CEO to send this.
Fortunately, we have HN with all those tl;dr. Sometimes it opens instantly even with no signal available.
I'm convinced this page-jumps-as-you're-about-to-touch is a dark pattern to some clickbait time-waster sites use to get more mobile ad clicks. Just when I'm about to click 'Next' to see the 7th-of-53 stoopid-photos-taken-at-Walmart an ad link jumps to be right under my finger.
How to block the ultrasonic signals you didn’t know were tracking you
I've been slowly adding the contents of Google Fonts into my system fonts storage as I see them used on sites that I visit often. Things like Open Sans and Roboto for instance are quite common.

I think there would probably be a good case for an extension to automate that in some fashion for fonts with known open licenses (essentially anything from Google Fonts, for example) to go ahead and just install them into the system.

There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install all of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.
Oh man, you mention Tandy. Dick Smith (which was basically Tandy in Australia) finally went tits up a couple of months ago. They'd been bought out by some mob that wanted them to be the next Harvey Norman, and the pivot did not go well. Happily Altronics and Jaycar seem to have picked up the slack between them and we still have someone to turn when we want to buy misc. parts.
Smoked until I got an ecig (not one of the huge monsters, just a cheap $20 refillable) then smoked that until it broke then I didn't really want to smoke anymore
> Much as I admire Musk's drive to not only explore but colonize Mars, I have to agree with this sentiment. Viewing Mars as a "backup" for Earth is like relying on the Commodore 64 in your closet as a backup in case your MacBook Pro gets fried.

I tend to agree about the "backup Earth" justification. But is there really any justification required, other than it's our human nature to want to explore and push the frontiers?

When people started moving from Europe to America in the 17th century, I don't think anyone saw it as a backup plan.
I am pretty sure that visiting Crimea would have been a safer option to visiting Kiev. Many, many Ukrainian citizens continue to visit the peninsula even today.
This was posted because it's relevant to economics, not due to politics.
> They called the Tatars “heathens,” “uncivilized” and “warlike,” evoking old stereotypes about the Turks.

That resonated with me. My childhood is peppered with memories of Russians, who were bused in at some point by the Soviet Union to take over administrative positions, telling me to speak a "human" language - Russian instead of my native language (implying I was sub-human). I always remember that and am sad for them for living with that kind of prejudice (especially when you tell that to a child).
Not the first internet browser on a phone though, just a vastly superior UX to what had been done before.
I'm starting to suspect that behavior is intentional. I see this all the time with mobile ads... a site slowly loads as I read content, then an ad pops up right when I try to navigate. Incredibly frustrating.

It's like advertisers want me to install adblock... so I will, I'll root my device and adblock all their bullshit forever.
Update on transition of the Verizon roots and issuance of SHA1 certificates
Ask HN: How to structure sales compensation package at b2b startup?
I am the founder of a startup which provides a SaaS to small business owners. Given the specific branch of companies we are targeting, direct sales works best.

We expect our sales reps to make between 3-6 sales each month, yet we are struggling to find a compensation structure which works well for the team and we are comfortable scaling up to 40-50 people over the next few months.

Ideally it would be a mix of fixed salary and commission, incentivising those who can constantly achieve 4-6 sales/month and providing no incentive for those with 2 sales or fewer each month to stick around.

Thanks for any tips/links.
The letter just makes me feel like the people calling the shots over at Slack are immature and can't handle the realities of running a competitive business. It just comes off as a disguised advertisement and I doubt it really earned them any more customers.
I love hearing about the evolution of systems, and how different people have converged on the problem from different directions.

[plug] I wrote a post summarizing all that I have figured out about service discovery and wish I had known from the beginning:

https://www.datawire.io/guide/service-discovery-microservice...
I use NoScript for Firefox, which can block fonts for untrusted sites. There is also a setting, in the browser itself, to universally prevent sites from from using their own font specification, so your font choices are the only ones used everywhere. I used to use that, but some sites use icon fonts (e.g. Github), so I prefer being able to whitelist specific sites with NoScript. I also set a minimum font size to maintain comfortable reading across all sites.
Carbon Fiber Laptop Case (How I Made It)
The curious case  of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
Well, isn't what you're describing the Teams software that prompted Slack's letter?

Only tied to Office365, not Azure and LinkedIn.

https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
Do you think the iPod was revolutionary? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or the Macbook Air? Since when has Apple ever been revolutionary post Macintosh 128K (and even that's arguable)?

They've been on the leading edge of trends, or at least were when Jobs was around. He moved computing devices away from geekery and towards fashion. He identified how intimate and personal phones were, and turned them into status symbols, with fetishized design. He saw where trends were intersecting, ran ahead and planted really solid benchmark objects at just the right time.

The clear trend that Jobs was onto next was cloud-everything, which is still happening, just slowly. And Apple is executing poorly there, even as they wind down the creative capabilities of their hardware.
The First DJ Powered by Artificial Intelligence
The advice on FDE is misleading if not flat out wrong. It's NOT just to protect against media theft. It's also about "shit, the drive crashed. How do I destroy the data on it before throwing it in the trash?"

Same with replacing a smaller drive with a bigger drive. Yes, DBAN it, but that won't take care of remapped sectors.

It's easier to destroy an encryption key than it is to destroy the data.
The text editor component (i.e. the part people are most likely referring to when discussing performance) is completely different between Atom and VS Code. No relation at all between the two codebases. VS Code's derives from Visual Studio Online.
>>> A famous example of this occurred in 2011, when Neal Mohan, a senior Google executive, was considering leaving for Twitter. Some say he was offered a bonus of $100m in stock to stay at Google.

I imagine this has more to do with keeping company secrets within the company. It has to, right? Is one person really worth 100M?

I guess if an athlete is worth 400M over the course of his career to a franchise (thinking of an A-Rod), it makes sense in this case also.
The problem with OpenSSL is less about the language it's written in and more about the age of the project, discipline of the developers, quality of the codebase, and its prevalance - which leads to its vulnerabilities having a high impact. OpenSSL's code is a heap of trash and that's why it's vulnerable, not neccessarily because it's written in C.
Far down in this article, Apple co-founder Rod Holt explains what he thought it was about Steve Jobs that put him into the vanguard.

http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-jobs

Particularly the part where he talks about commodities and products, and the process and relations of production at early Apple.

I think what much of what Holt says will go over the heads of people not in the milieu of Holt, Proyect etc. Not all of it will though.

One reason I find the Holt piece interesting is everyone else seems to come at the question from the same angle. Holt does not, but more importantly Jobs did not. Also Holt was there when Apple was incorporated, and had a very thoughtful sociological Weltanschauung back then.

You can tell everyone comes at it from the same angle by the OP title. How Steve Jobs became a billionaire. People who start from that point, a desire to get insanely rich and spend money and be admired, will probably never get to be be billionaire. I don't think that they'll get it either.

Most people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page etc. don't seem to be focused on wealth. Even someone like Larry Ellison who seems to be focused on wealth gets more stirred up talking about engineering one of the first usable relational databases than he does about his billions.

The US is in such a homogeneous ideological fog that it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. Holt was around when Apple started, but was not a participant in what C. Wright Mills called the great American celebration, so I find his viewpoint interesting, and in my opinion, more insightful than any other I've heard.