skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I can see you can't use anything very effectively for early stage private companies, the information is low and the variance is high.

Even with perfect transparency for very early employees, predictions are pretty worthless. The only realistic thing you can do is make sure the shareholders agreement doesn't have any tricks in it and have a feel for the domain you are working in.
Yeah, that's what I meant. In general, Whatsapp/Oculus/Instagram source code is accessible (at least read access).

For the most part, the exceptions are acquisitions (but those get integrated eventually, see above) or some third-party IP subject to obligations.
Could someone explain to me why so many people on here fetishize scale? Scale is a constraint on a problem, and it affects the solution you come up with. I don't understand why solving problems around that constraint is considered cooler than solving problems around other constraints like uptime, performance, memory cost, etc. Does "Our API serves 234 million requests" hold more cachet than "Our medical device firmware runs 24/7 without crashing and takes up 12 MB of RAM"?
I recently switched in the opposite direction because I have a greater need of using Xcode than I have of compiling Android. I'll probably install and configure Ubuntu from scratch now that I don't have continuing need of stable toolchains on it. But, for now, I'm liking MacOS better.
This is pretty cool; as someone who is currently working on the second project (traffic sign recognition) for the Udacity "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree, using TensorFlow - it is interesting to me how it seems like the "standard" MNIST CNN can be adapted to so many other use cases.

For the project I am currently working on, I'm using a slightly modified form of LeNet - which isn't too different from the TF MNIST tutorial; after all, recognizing traffic signs isn't much different than recognizing hand-written numbers...

...but "driving" a course? That seems radically different to my less-than-expert-at-TensorFlow understanding, but that is only due to my ignorance.

I'm glad that these examples and demos are being investigated and made public for others - especially people learning like myself - to look at and learn from.
Of course I did not riot. I don't want to go to jail. That does not mean that I _co-operated_ with the move.

Explain to me again how the move was a success. You are assuming a priori that it was a good decision as long as riots don't happen, which they didn't, hence it was good. But why was it good regardless of riots/no riots? I don't see how. So a few hundred crores of black money were caught in raids. That is a drop in the ocean. A hundred times more than that is caught in regular tax raids every year.* It has done absolutely nothing to curb future corruption. What it has done for sure is to reduce spending everywhere and cut down on industrial production and employment.

You are welcome to believe it was successful, just like I believe it was a disaster. We'll find out at some point.

* http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/cash-crunch-rs-242-...

"Countrywide Rs 242 crore in new currency and jewellery worth Rs 15 crore has been seized. The amount is not abnormally high, as I-T sleuths annually unearth Rs 10,500 crore to Rs 11,000 crore in undisclosed income."
I guess I was looking at it from a long term community perspective rather than just brutality.

If in the long run you're a net positive to the neighbors you'll be "in" and life will be very good. Everyone loves the village blacksmith or brewer or fellow farmer or whatever.

On the other hand if you don't bring something to the table or just have a shopping bag of temporary loot then life will be much harder without the community.
Personally I think the most impressive thing here isn't that you created a self-driving MarioKart, but that you trained TensorFlow based on input screenshots of your desktop.

I feel like that could be a good next step - a ubiquitous neural net model that, after mapping inputs, will learn to play any video game that's on your screen.
Secure Mission Solutions, a Parsons Company | Junior System Administrator | Virginia | REMOTE

We are looking for a Junior-level Systems Administrator. Environment is VMWare, CentOS, SAN storage. Must have strong linux experience and good understanding of host & network security. Other skills: VMWare, SAN, PKI, scripting (bash, perl, python, etc). This is a 100% REMOTE, work-from-home position. Must be a US Citizen with Top Secret clearance or ability to obtain one.

If interested: aetebbe@securemissionsolutions.com or apply here: https://parsons.referrals.selectminds.com/jobs/system-operat...
Sometime between 0.42 and 0.91 the PDF export for very narrow lines ceased to function correctly.

I have to keep old versions around in order to produce cut lines for my laser.

Very disappoint. Perhaps 0.92 fixes.
"This fact: If the users do not control the program, the program controls the users."

That's not a fact, that's rhetoric.

The fact is that there is no system - absolutely none - which doesn't define how users interact with it, and set limits on what users can and cannot do with it.

FOSS doesn't solve this problem. At best it allows a tiny subset of technologically expert users some limited opportunities to make incremental changes and adaptations.

But it also creates some unfortunate side effects, including a perpetual ferment of hobby-quality unprofessional tinkerer code that doesn't have to deal with end user feedback because "Issue closed because I don't understand your problem and don't care about it anyway."

There's certainly an argument to be made for making software more open, but FOSS more or less nets out to a break even on the whole. It's certainly good to have around, but the suggestion that it's The Only Way Forward is more dogmatic than fact-based - not least because there's nothing in FOSS that selects for quality of user experience over quantity of development effort.
I feel like text is where the retina screens really pay off. I'm not even sure if I could notice the difference looking at photos. But a good font on a retina display is something I still notice, even after having used it for 2 years+.
Scaling this back up to the real economy, this means that UBI as transfer payments of cash from rich to poor will never have the intended effect. If the intent is to provide everyone with a guaranteed floor of necessary goods and services, the only way to do it is to take production capacity from the rich and produce the necessary quantities directly. If the U.S. collectively consumes 300 million metric tons of food per year, the federals tax Monsanto, ADM, et al. the 100 million metric tons of that Americans actually need to eat to survive, and tax Kroger, Walmart, et al. some of their distribution network to get it into stores, then issues everyone their ration coupons and tracks the redemption locations Kanban-style, so they can fine-tune the distribution. You get your one bag of cornmeal for free, but if you want a second bag, you have to get a job and pay for it.

That is considerably more administrative overhead than just cutting everyone a check. But it is the only feasible way to accomplish the intended purpose on a permanent basis without forcibly changing property ownership. If you're going to be socialist, even in part, you have to control the means of production outside of the normal market price system. Otherwise, the free market eventually routes around your mandates as damage to the business network. If you're not going to nationalize it like a communist, you have to give the existing owners binding production orders, like a fascist. It just so happens that America hates communism, is at least passably friendly with fascism, and saddled with loads of debt, so mandatory production orders would be how to implement UBI there. Countries with big sovereign wealth funds from state-owned natural resources can go the semi-communist route, buy shares in the necessary companies, vote as necessary to guarantee their supply, and take their dividends as a share of the production. I can't say which would be better for India, but I think fascist-style UBI would be more likely to work there.
Julian Assange Reddit AMA on Thursday Morning (1/5/17 9am EST)
I don't think you quite understand the comment you're replying to. By my reading at least, it's saying "hack" = "heist" and that "heist" is being used somewhere where "robbery" is more appropriate.

I agree that if you leave your door unlocked, it's a robbery but it's not a heist. Likewise, if you leave your database publicly accessible, it's extortion through technical means but it's not hacking.

> Is misconfiguring MongoDB really that different from e.g. installing a Wordpress plugin with a security flaw and getting hacked via that?

Yes. A service that is configured to be publicly accessible is very different to a service that requires active exploitation. Misconfiguring MongoDB is more like making your Wordpress admin page the home page and removing all login requirements.
Secure Mission Solutions, a Parsons Company - REMOTE - Systems Administrator, Full-time

We are looking for a Junior-level Systems Administrator. Environment is VMWare, CentOS, SAN storage. Must have strong linux experience and good understanding of host & network security. Other skills: VMWare, SAN, PKI, scripting (bash, perl, python, etc). This is a 100% REMOTE, work-from-home position.

If interested: aetebbe@securemissionsolutions.com
Interesting. I worked for a multinational, we had a (brilliant) German intern who worked in our FR headquarters, very long hours. Then she moved back to Germany in a local division, where she was always the last one closing the lights, by a long shot. It might be the effect of headquarter vs local company, perhaps, but 5pm is what I saw in most plants in Germany.
Actually Apples vs Apples
I know some people are going to be looking at this list to find potential places to go to. I urge some of you to be the change you desire. You might not be at place that currently have a great engineering culture, but you can become the origin and catalyst of that change. Read engineering blogs, papers, get new ideas and bring it forth to wherever you want.
stuck? i'm amazed at how negatively most europeans view "work".
Why what? What do they work long hours? I don't know, "culture".
How did we get from "bare minimum sensible testing" to "This is very awesome!"? Are things that bad on average?
> Shameless plug: We are hiring! https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE [French only]

Great, but for what position? This link is a multistep application form, and I am pretty sure others will find equally annoying to fill it up just to see the description of the job.
> Most basic economic theory will state that inflation is basically a monetary phenomenon.

Uh, no, that's not true at all. Monetary policy is only one of many factors that can drive inflation.

> Because claiming that UBI will cause inflation is not justified by an understanding of Economics 101

Uh, yes it is. MV = PQ is literally in introductory economics textbooks. Advocates of UBI talk about how it would encourage growth by "stimulating spending". Well, that's literally saying that it would increase both V and Q. And mathematically, we know that a redistributive policy cannot increase Q as fast as it increases V, which means that P increases. Hence, inflation.

You can make an argument that increasing the monetary supply at the correct rate would offset the increase in prices, or that the impact on unemployment rates would factor in, but at that point you're moving way beyond Economics 101 and far off into the realm of contested and unproven research conjectures.
> I had the then reviewed as "best" smartphone pre-iPhone, a Sony top of the line one with a stylus. It was crap. Have also played with the Nokia communicator and others. Also crap.

I strongly disagree.

> Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we can see if that was the case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II

The difference between these devices and the iPhone baffles me to this day. Yeah the iPhone had a better UI, but it didn't even have 3G, Apps, IM, MMS, Copy&Paste and a whole load of other features. You couldn't even open a socket or ping a machine with it.

> Features are nothing without the form factor and usability.

Again, I strongly disagree. Features are everything, while a sleek UI is worthless if you know your way around the apps you care about.

Unrelated to the iPhone, I consider the trend to "dumb down" UI such that untrained users can have pleasant user experiences without prior knowledge to be annoying and misguided. Obviously that's what the market wants, but I find it frustrating when apps or services are lacking features that people have been taking for granted for 20 years.

> [...] The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were beyond crap.

I'm willing to concede that the browsing experience on the iPhone was far superior to all other smartphones at the time. However, I would argue that even on the iPhone the browsing experience was kinda crap, as there was no mobile web to speak of in 2007 and the usability of desktop sites on mobile was hit and miss.
All parents have some time when they keep thinking about worst case scenarios.
>Savings from shuttered entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, ACA subsidies: $938 billion

You're proposing eliminating the health care of 120 million people? What we really need is universal, single payer health care.
Motorcades also put on out an air of legitimacy, even when they're completely fake https://youtu.be/N3zKuLgH_l8
It's just a matter of speed, but there's no need to invoke the Church-Turing hypothesis.

One of the first things proven[1] about BQP is that it's contained in P^#P, which is contained in PSPACE. That means a Turing machine can simulate any quantum computer with only polynomial space (but possibly very slowly).

[1] http://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/S0097539796300921
JSON and bencode
Are there any technical reasons that JSON could be superior to bencode?
Slightly tangential to the post:
Does anyone know how to make diagrams (watercolor style) like the ones in OPs article and blog?
your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month

Where I work (software/hardware for research) the basic principle is actually not different: boss doesn't really care what I'm doing as long as I'm not unhappy and the stuff which needs to get done gets done in time. Sure there are no fixed periodic deadlines or money-based quota, but the same principle nonetheless. I wouldn't want to work in another way because of all the freedom it gives you. I do see the same 'drawback' regarding carreer opportunities etc but the older I get the less I care. I earn enough money to sustain my lifestyle so yeah I'm definitely not going to work my ass off just to earn a bit more or get a better position, as I know that won't make me any happier anyway.
It would help if NYC would actually encourage not to drive. I was recently there with 3 people in the car and compared driving & parking in Manhattan vs. parking outside and taking a train in. In many cities (Amsterdam as an excellent example), you get cheap, secure parking lots outside of the city that you can combine with a train/subway ticket. In NYC, this would've been much more expensive than parking for 3 days.
Search. You can use quantum annealing for unstructured search.
OS X Dooms Apple (2000)
TedPage: Inkscape Snap
In this podcast the host records a call with one of these IRS scams.

http://tomwoods.com/ep-729-the-real-story-of-the-epipen-fias...

Starts at 11:58. It's quite entertaining.
Just configuring all of the plugins with good key bindings takes a fair amount of time. Just one of the things that SpaceMacs provides.

After a week or two with SpaceMacs I tried to start from a plain emacs and build up my own config, but I gave up. Just too much hassle for me.

I probably would not have enjoyed SpaceMacs if I had used emacs at all before. But I switched directly from Vim with no prior emacs experience, so for me it's a perfect fit.
The high security convoys in Central London are the most insane thing I've ever seen, n.b. the occupants of the last two unmarked vehicles in this convoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E72KpO4JIM
It is only nearly a superset because it contains all the features of C except for a few like implicit pointer casts.
I hear it every day with my 4G Moxee X1 sitting next to my Technics stereo. Anyone downvoting you must not realize this sort of interference is UBIQUITOUS and can be triggered even by someone with loose spark plugs in their engine.
Grumpy: Go running Python
> Here's a neat idea: wouldn't it be cool and save a lot of time if the compiler did this for you automatically, from the start?

Yes, but when the project started the only existing compiler that met all requirements was C (also C++, although that was not chosen, by reasoning I disagree with). We are in a domain where we derive material benefits from the low-level control C gives us (we have a bunch of highly specialized memory management and I/O), and are not willing to accept GC pauses. There's a common sentiment that we would have used Rust if it had existed when we started, but it didn't so we didn't and so it goes.
Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own) that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report, you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's actually done.

Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem for a solo developer like you though.
The average calorie intake in India is 2360. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...) The minimum recommend is 1800.

That means either a vast number have an adequate calorie intake or there are a few "Bill Gates of calorie intake" in India. I think the first is more likely.
It used to be that easy, but assholes have been scamming the system's goodwill by calling anything with four legs a service animal. If it's considered a service animal there is no pet fee, so it's becoming more popular on airplanes and hotels.

The Washington Post actually just wrote this up:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/tripping/wp/2016/12/27/w...

> To further complicate matters, it can be difficult for staff members to identify a true service dog. Although pet owners can easily buy unofficial documents or apparel, these papers and emblems have no bearing on ADA compliance: The law does not allow public accommodations to require certificates, licenses or other physical proof that a dog qualifies as a service animal. Yet the ADA does not permit questioning a person about the nature of his or her disability.

The general issue is that it's a much less big deal to let a scammer through than to accidently hassle someone with a legitimate service animal (big fine!).
There have been several years in recent times where there have been 0 deaths by Police shooting in the UK, a country of about 60 million. Last year there were 4, so far this year 1: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/deaths-in-police-custod...
It seems indisputable that sustained harassment is a problem for some significant number of women online.

I'm asserting that such harassment is worse than what I faced back then, and that what I faced then was pretty unusual.
Yes, it is generally understood that the FCC rulings on WiFi jamming continue to permit WIPS/WIDS systems that actively mitigate rogue APs that appear to pose a security threat, and broadcasting your SSID without authorization would be a good example of this.

There was quite a bit of talk about this in the WIPS industry after these fines, and while I don't think the FCC has really made a clear clarification on the issue, the vendors have all put out statements that are similar variations on "it's okay for matching SSIDs" and I don't think there has been any contest to this. Vendors do recommend that you be careful that active mitigation will not impact APs operating off your property, implicitly even if they are broadcasting your SSID.

In general I think the FCC is taking an intent approach to this, from the security side - their rulings on WiFi jamming cases have generally specifically mentioned the lack of a reasonable security justification.
Unfortunately, that would probably have the reverse effect: The 3% would put in way more work, while "good" customers would be more likely to abandon. The 3% are willing to endure endless tedium for their conspiracy theories.
Raise taxes on the wealthy (yes, including Silicon Valley programmers). It's really that simple. People just don't want it to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZwiQd-0xqQ [0] is Nick Yee's talk that he mentions in the first couple of minutes (that he says "destroyed his entire presentation").

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023242/The-Gamer-Motivation-Pr... is the GDC version, though I imagine they're exactly the same, with the slides at http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022959/The-Gamer-Motivation-Pr...
Although there is some truth in this, this is not the full picture.

I believe that Usenet has been replaced mainly by mailing lists, not by blogs.

Having long-text conversations through blogs is possible, but mailing lists and (what's left of the) Usenet are better suited - the same way as IRC and instant messangers are better suited for chats than email, although you could chat via email as well.
It seems like a good companion for Practical Common Lisp
I should probably have said, my email address is in my profile!
I disagree, twice.

Technically, yes, all communication is manipulation, but I'm concerned about the intention of communication/advertising. Although some ads could only be informative, the vast majority exist not to inform, but to disinform/mislead. The proportion of ads advertising new products/services (as opposed to simply reinforcing existing brands) is miniscule.

There already exist many services that allow exploration of new products. Things like ProductHunt and similar websites, various blogs, online communities like FB and HN, ...). Advertising is a net loss on the economy - it's a zero-sum game (people's attention is finite), so the more money my competitors spend on ads, the more money I have to waste on advertising as well, and I can't improve my product!
1. The AI in games has access to internal representations of game state and does not have to recognize it from pixels on screen. This is a massive difference.

2. The logic is usually a bunch of (human-authored) scripts consisting of if-else spaghetti.
I believe he uses Paper - https://www.fiftythree.com
Cool! Thank you, that will be useful.
You are probably getting down-votes because it's not a comment that contributes to the discussion. And to a lesser extant, because general-purpose computation has no monopoly on the word "computer."
ITT: People bitching/moaning about a 5GHz ~$90 high-IPC core being disappoint, when in fact it is an engineering marvel.