skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. I noticed that many of the people questioned about info in the leaks don't answer the questions, but just state that the info was obtained illegally. Q: "The email says you did X wrong thing. Is that true." A: "That email was obtained from Russion hackers!" Q: "Maybe, but in any case, did you do X?" A: "Russian hackers are bad!"
I think you're very wrong in your estimates. We don't have the technology that allows for 1000 (variable-strength) connections per transistor with 100 billion transistors, not even remotely close, not at 1kHz, not at 100Hz. We absolutely don't know how to do that, even without the requirement to have it small.

If we did, we probably would have built something like that - Google or Apple would easily throw $100M at that project.

You're probably talking about IBM's TrueNorth (http://wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNorth), which simulates 1M neurons with 256 connections each. So yeah, it's the right direction, but it's 9 decimal orders of magnitude away from the human brain. And that was like a $10-20M project. If you just scale it linearly to 100 billion neurons, it will cost more than Google/Apple is worth.

Realistically, if improvements continue in the exponential fashion, maybe in 4-10 years it will become achievable without going broke.
Thanks for the link.

I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku6jVUJONZAm which is a recent lecture in which Matthew Fisher goes into some detail for a predominantly physics theorist audience. He doesn't actually finish his whole talk, but what he does cover is still pretty interesting to me as someone just trying to follow along with my rudimentary recollections of college quantum mechanics.

So {ortho,para}-pyrophospate is a big part of his grand hypothesis. This is analogous to {ortho,para}-water, something I hadn't heard about but which is apparently pretty famous, except with phosphorous instead of hydrogen. And as part of discussing this he mentions a study, presumably http://www.biophys.ru/archive/h2o-00011.pdf, that claims that passing water vapour through charcoal can change the ortho/para ratio from the normal 3:1 to 12:1 and then down to 2:1 for hours. That's just amazing to me, that liquid water can effectively remember a prior interaction for hours. Like that Japanese crank scientist's claims about water memorizing poetry or something, but, you know, actually real.

Fischer's proposed explanation is that ortho-water (and orth-pyrophospate) can't "sit still" because of the way that the aligned nuclear spins of the hydrogen (phosphorus) atoms cause the angular momentum to be quantized in a way that locks the angular velocity to be non-zero. And that discourages the ortho-molecule from being adsorbed or participating in catalysis -- measurable things which can clearly have biological effects. And from the nuclear spin, which is otherwise very long lived!

That's just crazy! Metastable water lasting for hours? I just smiled.

The other stuff may even be a red herring, but even this basic idea is so exciting if true. Here's a suggestive quote from the Russian article:

> Ortho and para water are expected to have notably different physical-chemical properties and, like ortho and para hydrogen, have different magnetic properties. The absence of the magnetic moment in para modification implies its complete insensitivity to the magnetic field, which could be of use in magnetic resonance imaging. The OP separation procedure realized is quite straightforward and may occur in nature—in soil, atmosphere, living organisms, and cosmic objects. The scope and the role of this phenomenon are yet to be studied.
> A pity that it made it to front page entry 1 already before really working on user needs.

The old free software dilemma: Do you wait until your product is polished, thus cutting yourself off all possible publicity? Or will you be vocal about your development efforts, and stand the complaints about rough edges, in order to attract helping hands?
For some reason, I was thinking about this the other day. But I have another reason, at least for the U.S. The east side is most likely to be older because people migrated from east to west.

The wealthier people would move to the west as the east side of town got more crowded and older.
> Copperhead is just a liberated Android for the most part, it just replaces Replicant.

"Liberated" to the extent that it removes Google stuff such as Play Services, yes. However CopperheadOS is not completely libre. They do include non-free 3D drivers, for instance.

I agree that Copperhead largely appeals to the same group of people, and it's much more actively developed.
You only have profit when you sell above what you paid for a stock. So earnings reports and these stock surges are a great time for investors to cash out. This can spark a larger sell off. I'm sure someone with more investor insight can give a better explanation but this is what I suspect.
It's the same with RAW image conversion software used for photography. I'd dump OSX on my MBP and never look back if Capture One or DxO Optics ran on Linux.

The open source alternatives are no where near as fast, they lag far behind supporting new cameras, their interfaces are ugly and difficult to use, etc.
But it's even more important than that.

People find it easier to use apps that have a familiar look and feel. That means less training, less troubleshooting, lower operating costs.
> women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men

For reference, what is this saying about how many of those that stop practicing are men?

7 times more likely than what? I haven't read the article yet. Any given individual is how likely to 'stop practicing' after a rejection? 10% if man, 70% if woman? 1% if man, 7% if woman?
Or just disable WebSockets on about:config, which should be done anyway.
That company likely has culture issues then? I've never even heard of anything like that before. I've heard people say that their HR doesn't understand them or what they do, but this is taking it to another level.
We're trained on an insane amount of training data though. It could simply be a matter of more training data required.
I have only failed one technical interview in my life, and to be honest I did not fail it, I took the confidence route which put off the 20 something lead I was interviewing with and mentioned that I was a keynotes speaker at IBM Impact on the coming transition to Javascript based applications. He took this as an affront and challenge (to be brighter than the IBM speaker guy to his team) and ensured that the interview was a miserable experience, but that is neither here nor there The only reason I toot my own horn is to relay the following observation.

The point I want to get to is: I have a buddy who I have dragged along with me (many times staking my reputation on his abilities), to every engagement I go on and this guy could not pass a how to use Microsoft Word interview. He has Aspergers and locks up and fails miserably in the interviewing process, but the honest, reality is, he is 10 times the developer I am, the guy sees patterns instantly and has a knack for code organization. He can master a new technology in a week and is hands down the best developer I have ever met.

That being said, over the years watching him has lead me to the conclusion that it is indeed the ones they hold faith in the technical interview are actually the ones that are the most stove piped and only see the world thru their limited experiences. It should be classified as a form of confirmation bias.
I don't mean the entire JSON structure. Go ahead and parse that; leave the individual values opaque.
i call it fair. Why does having a business qualify you to pay taxes but having a property does not?
"Unlimited Vacation" is sometimes used to mean "no vacation" or "very limited vacation". But I don't think that's actually the way many employers think about it.

It's more often a way to say "no accrued vacation". That's important in California, when you leave a job, your employer has to pay out unused and accrued vacation. That can be a big liability to keep on the books, so you can remove it with an unlimited vacation policy.

So it's just an accounting thing.
"Symbols of status matter, but the symbols aren’t your car, house, or clothes." What are the symbols that matter?
The problem is that basically no startup pays competive salaries.

Total salary/benefits at GoogFaceSoft comes out to almost twice as much(seriously) as you'd make at the average SF startup.

It is fine to argue that you should demand fair pat, as long as you realize that you are basically saying that everyone should only work at Google or facebook or Uber.
Copy is Ctrl+C in your browser, in your notepad, in your IDE, but it's Ctrl-Shift-C in your terminal.

Paste is Ctrl+V in your browser, in your notepad, in your IDE, but it's Ctrl-Shift-V in your terminal.

Now copy a bunch of IPs from your AWS page into terminal to ssh into them for an hour or so.

Fuck that shit, I'm getting a second mortgage for the MBP and a set of 19 dongles.
You don't need to have a mental illness to be extreme right like https://twitter.com/ogamita seems to be.
I love listening to them while playing a good videogame... perfect combination of total mental immersions.
> an amazing paired-down version

FYI, and no judgement: the word is "pare", meaning "to trim" or "to cut down".

Also seen in "paring knife" :-)
That is definitely the approach I would use.

Something like:

"The company went through a series of restructures and down-sizing, and I got caught up in that. They mostly kept the junior staff and a lot of the senior developers were let go."
The "Random" subroutine looks surprisingly simple
You can pretty easily run Windows natively on a MacBook Pro. I've been using a MacBook Pro as my full-time Windows machine for about seven good years.
On my team there are two people with CS backgrounds (one PhD, the other MS). There are a couple of PhDs from the physical sciences and one from a more Software Engineering academic background. Without exception the guy with the SE background produces generally better quality code. The CS guys are not arrogant, they know their CS stuff, but their ability to develop software is... underwhelming.
I guess we have differing opinions. For me, that phone call gives me more information than what I give them. I can grill the technical sales on specific questions based on what they say about their product. If they let me chat with the devs, I'll be even more impressed. The way I see it.. If you're at the level of trust where you'd consider running a "random" executable on your machine and give it access to your source code, then what difference does it make if they have your email?
Hm. I'd say happiness, influence, and respect. Maybe those aren't symbols. Maybe I just liked the way that line sounded as I typed it.
I agree that the fundamentals are important. In my opinion, half of the coding interview is having strong foundations in CS, and the other is being able to clearly convey that.

I'm still in university, but have managed to intern at a few a places so far and found the critical parts of each interview to be nearly identical. Microsoft and Google asked questions that boiled down to basic data structure problems, and Dropbox asked a simple backtracking problem. The problems weren't ones I had specifically prepared for, but were ones that I could break down because of my foundations in CS.

The only interview I've failed was my first one. The interviewer asked me to implement a Gaussian blur on a small whiteboard; between not knowing the algorithm and not having enough room, I flopped pretty hard. There wasn't a realistic way to prepare for this question, it was just one of those things you had to know at the time.
Psychic who has predicted accurately the election outcomes
Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
Pilgrim – a combination of a bookmarklet and web-crawler
That won't work because you'll be adding noise to your own data. You'll have trouble searching through your own data-sets for "real" stuff. If you do something to designate what's real, you're just back to square one.
Challenge HN: What can we do about this?
Read this article about a patent troll and wondered, can the HN community do anything to prevent these types of entities from plying their trade?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-biggest-filer-of-patent-suits-wants-you-to-know-it-invented-shipping-notification-1477582521
!!"It's the JS way"
Windows is the better OS. Microsoft never dropped support for power users. They give you options to do everything that you want to do, way more than macOS. It's also got the better business model. That's why every business in the world runs on Windows and not on Apple's OS.
What sucks about team sports is that few people who play at a high level care to play with someone who can't keep up. So you need to do something to get to a certain level at least. I play soccer and basketball weekly, and I think the extra workouts do help with my performance on the field and court.
I don't think the virtual esc key is going to be an issue. The placement actually seems more convenient than the current esc key location.

I am going to miss a regular USB port and MagSafe.
Twitter:

> Whoops! 1.7 release rolled back to 1.6.1 due to issue downloading definition files for IntelliSense
You need both.

Whatever experience you have, it won't get you through the door if you give less than a single sentence as a cover letter.

Whatever cover letter you have, it won't get you through the door if you have no experience in your resume.

Have some experiences + have a few sentences cover letter. That's the magic recipe. If you have any less than that, you're going with a disadvantage.
Thats not a bad suggestion. Thanks. I wish there was an alternative to glassdoor where people could get this type f information out there, both good and bad. I am kind of put off by the whole look, feel and experience of glassdoor. Its a great idea though.
The fact that there're more Russian/Indian woman I think is because they are from immigrant families where husband is a developer. I'm developer and I met my wife at work back in Ukraine. But if you look % of woman developers in Ukraine, it's the same as in US.
A lot of my friends taught their wifes to become QA\developers after they moved to US and wife's profession didn't transfer to US well. Imho, entering IT is not that hard even without prevous experience, you do need to put hours to learn/practice, but unlike many other professions you can do that by just sitting at home and spending couple hundreds on books/video courses.
Applications Now Open for Early ‘Landrush’ .blog Domains
Download EFF’s New, Improved Mobile App
I'm suspecting parent is referring to the Iran-Iraq War, though I may be mistaken.
I was thinking the same thing. Nobody uses OS X for the command line tooling. I think in most cases the Linux "equivalent" is usually better.

It's a good first step, though. It'll be interesting to see how well they can get GUI applications running.
Slack's open letter to Microsoft
Why would they say that?

They could simply point out all the things that you can do on Windows that you cannot do on macOS because Apple will not let you.
The funny thing is that ad money doesn't just fall down from the sky, it comes from us. That is to say, it comes from people buying advertised products. If the person viewing the ad doesn't buy the product, they are contributing no more money than someone who didn't view the ad at all.

Lets say a person is a user of ads, i.e. they buy products because they see them featured in ads. This person would derive value from those ads, and would not enable an ad-blocker. If they did enable such an ad-blocker, it would be because they realized they wasted too much of their money on things they don't need, and wanted to limit their spending.

Now lets say we lived in an ad free society. Products a person buys would be cheaper - since the company selling them would no longer be paying for ads (talk about extortion). All we need to do is create a system where the money you would save is funneled back to websites.

Ads are not a good system for funneling this money. Ads reward the websites who can gain traffic from those most willing to waste their money. Ads also reward websites who can reload the page the most frequently. Ads reward pages that have as much free space on them as possible for displaying ads. Ads reward those websites whose creators care the least about workmanship and design.

We need a system that gives control to websites and users alike. The current system - sans ad-blockers - only gives control to advertisers. Websites should be able to set their prices based on their costs. Users should be able to analyze these prices and choose the websites they think deserve it. Ads cannot fulfill these properties, and need to be replaced.
A School Administrator in Indiana Works to Protect Student Privacy
I don't know. I went to an Ivy league college, and though I ended up pivoting and only getting a minor in CS, I was in and around the CS department for a long time. There were a lot of absolutely brilliant people there, in the CS department, that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag, even after ostensibly studying computer science and programming for years.

I don't know what it is, but there appears to be something intrinsically different in people that really grok computers and those that can't. Flying spaghetti monster knows, there were people that could run intellectual circles around me, but their brains just locked up and started stuttering trying to understand pointers.
dupe, please check before submitting!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12855291
Why the Government Must Disclose Its Exploit to the Defense in the Playpen Cases
Recommend following the link at the bottom: http://inconvergent.net/generative/

Very nice work. My favorite is this: http://inconvergent.net/generative/trees/
A Bit More Transparency in Patent Lawsuits
Congress Needs to Clarify That Password Sharing Is Not a Federal Crime
The disturbing Facebook scandal we're all ignoring
> Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.

Sure, except that nobody wants to do that for some abstract reason of "fairness", so the problem needs to be mitigated another way.
Copyright Office Sets Trap for Unwary Website Owners
>The military comment sounds like its excusing sexual assault as inevitable and is honestly pretty offensive to military members.

He wasn't proposing a policy here, and he wasn't even defending sexual assault here. He was just pointing out what was happening in the military. Pointing sexual assault is not sexist.

>He didn't say cartels. He said "Mexico".

Yes. Mexico. In other word, people from Mexico, which includes both good and bad people (the Cartels are from Mexico too). Saying that Mexico have both good and bad people is not racist.

>And some I assume some are good people suggests that the base case for Mexicans is that they're rapists and murderers.

No, it suggest that the base case for Mexicans is that some of them are good people, and some of them are bad people, just like every other race out there.

>Shutdown of Muslims entering the country was the phrase. Not that we should vet all religions equally.

Mexicans are not Muslims. Mexicans will be vetted too. They can come in, but they must come in legally (through the vetting process). And once the vetting program is setup, everyone will be vetted. He said many other things, however, you seems to be ignoring everything else he said, and focusing only on one specific quote, which can be taken out of context easily.
ZNAPS[1] looks pretty cool, but I haven't gotten something like them for the phone/tablet chargers in the car, office and multiple rooms at hom, because I'd occasionally have to pry out the magnetic piece in order to use more ubiquitous Lightning cables. USB C will be far more ubiquitous than Lightning or either of the two versions of MagSafe, and far, far cheaper. Few people have more than one or two MagSafe chargers because they're pretty expensive, but if you want the convenience of the magnetic connector, adding one of these things to a USB C charger once they come out will still be cheaper than MagSafe.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1041610927/znaps-the-9-...
Ballot Propositions Matter to Voters
They had to rollback the update:

> Unfortunately, we needed to roll back the 1.7 release of VS Code. One of the great new features in 1.7 is the automatic acquisition of typing files when writing JavaScript and TypeScript. These typings files drive the IntelliSense (code completions) experience in the tool. The feature was so great that we started to overload the npmjs.org service. The right thing to do in the short term was to revert the release.
If you had already upgraded to 1.7 you would have been prompted to install another update and you should now be at 1.6.1 again. We apologize for this inconvenience and we're working hard to make both short and long term fixes to bring you a great editing experience in VS Code.
They could follow the model of phone companies: they only 'give' you a phone if you sign up for a x year contract, may let you pay some sum up front, and cut off your use if you stop paying.
You don't "just have strong foundations in CS," you also have strong foundations in interviewing, whether you consciously developed those skills or not. The problem is that those interviewing skills aren't really relevant to the job, so they shouldn't be part of the interview.

I once had a candidate who completely bombed the interview, one of the worst interviews I've ever done, but he had a great portfolio. I took the risk and hired him on instinct and he turned out to be an amazing frontend developer who just doesn't do well when he's on the spot standing in front of someone. Years later I recommended him to someone else who was hiring, with the caveat that "he's going to bomb the interview," which he did. The guy called me back and said, "I can't hire someone who did that badly on the interview" and I told him, "do it, you won't regret it, I promise you." He did make the hire, and it predictably went great.

Interviews work well for salespeople because interview skills and sales skills overlap a lot. Interviews don't work as well for engineers because interview skills and engineering skills overlap very little. It's just a large injection of noise into the hiring process.
I think Apple design has an anorexia thing going on. They are making things thin for thinness sake.

If Apple made dedicated "pro" cameras I think they would make them so small you couldn't hold them without your finger getting in the way of the lens and ditch the memory card in favor of wifi "because it's the future".

(Please resist the urge to point out that pro photographers sometimes use iPhones cameras.)
I continued ranting FWIW:
https://dalliance.net/vPre2/phone-keyboards
> [...] The manual page for pselect, for example, even admits that it's not compliant!

Where does it say that? I'm running 10.12.1, and the man page for pselect(2) looks like the one from FreeBSD. I could believe that pselect doesn't actually behave as documented, having run into my share of macOS bugs.

> [...] Porting stuff to macOS is about as painful as porting to Solaris or AIX, which is to say not very painful [...] The biggest headaches with macOS are the bugs.

Agreed, though AFAIK all commercial UNIXes are buggy in one way or another, and I don't know if macOS is worse in comparison. Autoconf exists for a reason, even though few if any really like it.
Leading Amidst Change: Why Strategy Matters
Sure, if you wanna buy when $MSFT is the highest it's been since the dot com era. Right about five months ago would've been a good time, though.
Sounds like a wild ride (no pun intended).