skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have patents 6418323, 7831208, 6850782 which cover using Morse code on a phone to send and receive text messages.

The advantage is you don't have to look at the phone's display when composing or 'reading' text messages. The phone can be in your pocket and you can send/receive messages without bothering others.

Obviously, it never caught on, but I thought it was a fun idea.
How is this relevant? Are you implying that the original blogpost indicated an overreaction on Susan Fowler's part?
Maybe because JPG bytes or more likely to be manipulated when sending around the web?
I live in the US. I'm fairly sure that the average user of public restrooms knows how toilets work. I think there are just a bunch of jerks who don't bother to flush.
I don't even know what to say to this. If your interactions with females are so problematic that you're now afraid to talk to them for fear of repercussions, I seriously doubt "women" are the problem here, which is what you seem to be implying.
The Rails app runs in one thread, the test in another one. There are no problems as long as you don't use the database from the tests, which would be against the spirit of integration testing anyway. Only browser actions, even to check if the assertions are valid. A little inconvenient but safe and true to what users will do and see. I never got any problems in that way.
> But people should use Signal instead of PGP for message encryption.

Signal the protocol or Signal the service? There does not appear to be a mature FOSS toolchain for the former that can replace gnupg and Thunderbird/Enigmail, and the latter is only available on Android and IOS smartphones.
And this is why I love HN. I'm a massive coffee nerd and I'd never heard of that. Thanks!
Please don't listen to/encourage this guy, he is a well known purveyor of false information, from Wikipedia vandalism to Reddit censorship. He is now trying to insinuate himself into Bitcoin as if he were some kind of expert not just a professional internet troll. 9:10 he is lying, confused or just being a jerk for no reason.
Good God. This is liability 101.
> If you're using a swap partition just for the sake of /tmp then it's the same difference, no?

No. The big difference is that regular filesystems try to do I/O to their backing device - heck that is their point, and what they do the vast majority of the time. tmpfs does not do any I/O. However I/O will happen when there is memory pressure by the swapper, but that is going to be rarer.

ie with tmpfs, swap is a spillover mechanism. With a regular filesystem, the underlying device is the primary mechanism.

Swap can also be used for actual swap on the occasions it is helpful.
>but I'm not familiar with any of the alternative tools they mentioned.

The tinfoil hat part of me has been seeing this push for the Signal protocol straight out of nowhere and am a little worried its being done by a state level actor who knows something about it that we don't. Its much younger than PGP and as such has had less eyes on it. I also don't think Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal's owner - Open Whisper, has the cred and trust Phil Zimmerman had, at least not yet. Its particularly worrisome as he seemingly is only known by a pseudonym.

I also would consier S/MIME, which is baked into most feature-heavy email clients including iOS, a practical alternative to PGP when the use case is email encryption. You and a friend can get certs easily, put them in your client via GUI, and be done with it. No command line skills needed if ease of use is the big complaint here. For the less technically inclined its a pretty good solution, pun intended.
The problem with the efficiency gap metric is that it incentivizes cooperation between the parties to generate "safe" districts.

You can turn it into an optimization problem instead if you try to minimize the wasted votes for the entire state. This ensures that you don't get states with districts that all have huge -- but equal! -- efficiency gaps.
There is no Constitutional limit. There is, however, a statutory limit (2 USC §2c) [0].

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c
... Who are colo'd in New York City.
LXSS (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) is an honest-to-goodness installation of Ubuntu running on top of Windows using the Linux subsystem. Cygwin/MSYS are more limited in comparison (or at least I have found them to be so).
this is great - thanks!
Would you care to elaborate what was so amazing about the dA community? I ask sincerely as someone who was never a part of the community. I've visited the site in passing a few times, so I know of it. But would love to hear the specifics as to what makes (or made) dA such a great place for you (and others of course!)
> having a stake in a company doesn't give you the right to act as an advisor to the board or management

Delaware's General Corporation Law § 220(b) gives shareholders inspection rights. These are generally interpreted to include consultation rights.

> You're aren't a worker or a consultant

You're not, you're an owner. You have a more direct right to information than at-will employees or contractors.
The problem you'll find is that job queues, message queues, etc are actually edge cases. You can implement them in a DB, sure, but to do so with acceptable performance will require deep knowledge of the storage engine, query planner, locking, and DB specific extensions.

For just one example: https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/1257/processing-data-...

I can't find the article, but I remember reading that to get acceptable performance in SQL Server Service Broker it (under the hood) actually padded rows to ensure there was only one item per page on disk (or something similarly implementation specific to SQL Server).
My only problem with the YC rules are that some of them are pretty open to interpretation, although I trust the people making the judgment to be both competent and fair. (the standard catch-all "Generally behaving in a professional and upstanding way.", etc.)
Keep – A Meta CLI toolkit
If only there was something they could have done to avoid this. Like take complaints and allegations seriously for the past few years.

It's not like some really unpopular celebrity said "They're my favorite company" and people started to ditch them, they earned this themselves.

And since deleting the app and not using the service is the only real power users have... they're taking advantage of it.

Sounds like the system works.
> Deep Work, along with many other non-fiction "self help" books HN loves, could just be a couple of long blog posts.

Sure, they could be, but I would argue there is benefit to expanding them into longer books.

I haven't read this specific book, but have read several other "self-help" books and while the majority of them have shown repetitive themes, that same repetition is what ingrained the overall message the author is trying to disseminate. Reading a book over the course of weeks has a much more lasting effect on me, than probably any blog posts I've read.
That's an interesting point. Was Uber able to hide these issues from the VCs, or were the VCs aware of this? If they were aware, did they care? None of the possibilities reflect well on the investors.
Storj introduces a distributed blockchain-protected cloud storage service
I'm not really a fan of proportional representation and don't really have a dog in this race, but I'll point out something -

People have historically underestimated "tail risks" to institutions and social situations that they take for granted. I had an international relations professor once who was in the Situation Room on August 19, 1991; he worked for the Pentagon, and they had just finished their 5-year plan about likely force build-ups and military risks in Eastern Europe. Nobody had envisioned that there would be no Soviet Union, no Eastern Bloc, and no Cold War. It just didn't fit into their possible calculus; the Soviet Union had existed for 69 years, the Cold War for 46, and that was the entire adult lifespan of most of the people in the room.

I believe there's a non-negligible chance that within my lifetime, the United States of America will cease to exist. And furthermore, there's a non-negligible chance that the concept of the nation-state as a societal organizing principle may also cease to exist. People forget that the modern nation-state as we think of it - a strong central government with a monopoly on military power, public infrastructure, and a unified ideological worldview - is only about 150 years old. It actually post-dates the U.S. Constitution; many of the individual amendments (eg. the 2nd and the 10th) are remnants of a time where primary power resided within the States, and we literally were the "United States of America", not the "United States of America".

If this does come to pass, it's critically important that there be robust academic discussion of alternatives, and particularly alternatives to those aspects of the current system that are most problematic. Otherwise, we risk falling back on systems (eg. corporate feudalism) that provide safety & security but don't even bother to give lip-service to freedom or democracy, which I think would be a huge shame. We would not have an America without the ideas of the Enlightenment, which were largely developed in response to rising contradictions within Europe between the official institutions and the actual economic & social power on the continent.
The loops don't have to be pretty, just able to carry the current and the physical forces. You could punch the material out of sheet and use rollers to crudely form. I have no idea if that's worth any efficiency gain, or if just using sheet material is better, however.
How long have you practiced this?
Chromium OS is open source: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os. OverlayFS is in the upstream Linux kernel.

CoreOS is a very similar idea, and given that, we don't make builds of the container images available outside GCE.

Customers who need specifics of the OS (that they can't find them by just looking at the kernel config on the node) are welcome to ping us a support ticket.
It works, but there are a number of issues in the remote control protocol.

(note: I am developing a python wrapper for controlling it: https://github.com/fake-name/ChromeController )

I've been meaning to see about wrapping the C++ api as a python module, but not had time.
I think this open letter gives a very clear recommendation; have a truly independent investigation that leads to recommendations for change.
This comment does not really add much of anything. Besides that, Laravel uses Bcrypt for hashing. Not sure where Laravel developers use MD5.
Ματς παραμονής Βόλφσμπουργκ – Βέρντερ Βρέμης
Car startup Beepi sold for parts after potential exits to Fair&DGDG, broke down
Can you elaborate with specifics you'd like to see? Your initial comment is a top-level comment, which I take to address the submitted article. The article provides quite a few numbers (not surprising, given it's from 538).

Both this comment and your initial one lean towards people being able to dismiss anything that doesn't agree with one's beliefs as not being put in the correct context or with adequate seasoning. ("I suspect the numbers will be politicized and manipulated until they are no longer a good measure.", "we will need to take the numbers with a grain of salt and put them in context."). All stats and data in any field require this. The goal of good writing and analysis is that it presents the data in their proper context, whether it be physics, biology, computer science, or epidemiology.

Edit to add: The reason I'm pushing is that there needs to be some agreement and common understanding if people are to move forward and discuss issues constructively and work out effective solutions. While varying perspectives are important and valid, continuing to rely on this (as it seems to increasingly be) as a reason to disagree with people to the point of standstill is preventing us from finding agreement on what what problems are and how they should be addressed.
So instead of efficiency gap, measure inefficiency excess?
When git signs a commit it pipes the entire commit, including the message at the end, and all headers to git. Then it goes back and adds the signature in a new gpgsig header.

I often see people getting this wrong in HN threads. Probably because that's how signed tags work.
> I have better things to do with my time than to work for no pay :)

Are you serious? If everyone thought like that, the world would be a much grimmer place with no volunteering work, let alone open source software or open projects such as OSM.

I understand that it might seem futile to contribute to a huge project (mapping the physical world) when few other people near you are helping, but please tell me you aren't serious about having something better to do than volunteering work in general.
Yeah but I feel like HTML GUIs are the antithesis of Rust. Granted, it may be the best option at the moment.
Wow, lotta founders showing their true colors in this thread re: contempt for their investors.
Maybe the claims made by Susan Fowler are accurate and honest, maybe they aren't. This is why there are investigations. We want the truth, not a bunch of opinions which may or may not be credible.

The author seems to be claiming that Eric Holder is not suited to run such an investigation. Seems reasonable to me. Uber should find someone else.

My problem with the author is that it's pretty apparent conclusions are being drawn without actual evidence.
Maybe massive attrition is the goal.
Encourage employees with lots of unvested stock to quit to reduce dilution.
Since earlier hires tend to be higher up the chain, creating a culture of insubordination and winner-take-all politics makes it hard to "vest in peace".
Seems like lemmatizing the text before it's rated by humans (during the training of the model, that is) would get around a healthy portion of the grammatically-induced scoring differences.
That's the whole point of the letter, the investigation being conducted is a bunch of insiders with vested interest in protecting Uber. It's baloney.
I don't have a pet precisely because I try to see things from its (theoretic) perspective. I love cats, and would have one in an instant if I were home more. But as it stands, the poor thing would just be locked in a boring house by itself all day. Still occasionally thinking of getting a young sibling-pair; I used to have a couple who annoyed the crap out of each other all day, which seemed to work well for keeping them entertained.

My experience with cat people is that they are all over the map in terms of personality. Given that >30% of households have one[1], that's what one would expect, I think.

And if your cat genuinely randomly attacks people, that's likely a sign that something is very wrong. The cat likely was abused when young, is currently abused/neglected, or is in pain. There are some breeds that are moodier than others, and if they aren't taught that human skin doesn't resist claws as well as their fur, they'll scratch when telling you they don't want attention. But that's different.

[1] http://www.aspca.org/animal-homelessness/shelter-intake-and-...
Yes, I'm mainly talking about generative adversarial models, which have proliferated greatly.
Allow employees to sue as a class for cases of sexual harassment. Currently, Uber's employees are bound to confidential, bilateral and binding arbitration.

Next, deputise an ombudsman to whom every employee has a confidential and direct line. This ombudsman reports directly to the CEO and the Board. They should have a large amount of authority surrounding recommending dismissal of any employee to the CEO; whenever a recommendation is made, it should be copied to the Board. In return, the ombudsman should carry a significant amount of personal liability in connection with sexual harassment at the company.

This is how compliance works at many financial firms, and it's very effective. Compliance officers are deputized by the U.S. Treasury for anti-money laundering purposes. This makes them personally responsible if something goes wrong. It shows.
What should be the default?
I've said before that after long thought I think the right way to deal with gerrymandering is to increase the number of districts (and therefor make them smaller). The primary problem is how would we fit all those extra people on the Hill? Also that I imagine there would be some muathmateically based demographic issues due to the center of the country getting more seats than the coasts which could be offset in a few different ways.

The size of my district is larger than most states! It was also gerrymandered in 2003 by the R's seeking to regain territory from D's who had a suprising grip in Texas up until the late 90's.
Ask HN: What is an efficient strategy to retain skills with minimum investment?
My observation is that a technical skill requires a certain time investment in order to master during which process the brain adapts by forming linear pathways in the form of neural networks. These pathways may fade away without regular activation, much like a road might fall into disrepair without anyone using it. Restoring them to their previous state may take effort proportional to the time spent not having used the skill, except in the presence of a related skill.

Nothing new there.

My question is what form should this activation take that is time-efficient for a software engineer and how often should it happen?

Clafirication: By skill I mean an API, a programming technique like Dependency Injection or a smaller language like SQL, anything that requires non trivial investment over a period of time.

Problem definition:
An engineer spends 150 hours over a few months mastering a reasonably complicated API. This could be by working in a project, reading a book, asking questions on StackOverflow or anything related.
A couple of years pass before the engineer has a chance to work on a project that utilises that skill. The degree to which different people will have the retained the skill obviously will vary, although for the purposes of this example, let us assume that the engineer finds they need to spend a weekend (8-16 hours) refreshing it.

Could the engineer have deployed a long term retaining strategy in those two years that would have allowed them to hit the ground running in their new project and what form would that take?
I suspect you would see the same behaviour even with a hash function that is not vulnerable to length extension attacks.
My understanding is that protecting against length extension is about hiding the internal state of the cipher in the result hash, for the purposes of protecting a secret in the plaintext. But if the state is the same between each document, and you have access to the whole plaintexts, I don't see why length extension would play a role.
How's Lyft doing these days?
"According to The State of Javascript survey, only 6% of responders that have used coffeescript before said that they would consider using it again."

Nit: the calculation seems wrong to me.

- Used it before, would use again: 6%

- Used it before, would not use again: 25%

- Therefore, "responders that have used coffeescript before said that they would consider using it again" shall be: 6% / (6% + 25%) = 19.4%
I feel terrible for the employees there who aren't part of the mess that management created.

Not so much for the management or investors. This industry (it's mainly in the Bay area and "startup culture" in general, but it exists outside it as well) is rife with intolerant, sexist, ego-driven boys in adult male bodies. It's well past time to correct that problem.
Fowler's post shed light on Uber's serious internal problems -- no doubt. But going public with a post like this erodes founder-investor trust. It's across the line.

Publicly condemning the internal culture the post depicted would be reasonable, even helpful, but trying to "expose" Uber's leadership for showmanship and posturing ('hiring' Holder who was ostensibly involved long-before the Fowler post) to mitigate the pr fallout is counterproductive. Don't kick your founder when he's down.
Bravo to Mitch and Freada Kapor for going out on a limb like this. Uber has been toxic for years and everyone has remained silent. Every PR crisis has been swept under the rug and nothing has apparently changed. Hopefully an investor speaking up in this way will finally prompt the board to treat the problems in Uber seriously and have a truly independent investigation done.
I'm a former uber s/w engineer. I've been with uber for nearly 2 yrs and most of the article content are valid. Employees voicing out genuine concerns will be met with severe rebuke. This will be swept under the carpet sooner or latter. For customers, the quality and experience of their ride is the only thing that will matter. This won't even affect their business.
Gerrymandering is considered a bad thing, but one might reasonably ask why we ought to care about geographical subdivisions of voters at all, why not just allow a pure majority vote within a broader administrative unit.

This is, incidentally, the argument behind eliminating the Electoral College.

But the fascinating thing about the EC is that it's basically a custom "consensus algorithm" that is intended to prevent large disparities between the political power of states with very large vs very small populations.

This has the effect of increasing the political power of voters in remote regions, and decreasing the political power of voters in states with large populations. In effect, what we consider "consensus" in the EC system is different than what we'd consider consensus in a purely majority-vote system.

Congressional districting is an attempt to do the same thing at the state level... Consensus requires more than just appealing to the largest numerical majority. Interests that correlate with geography get slightly more political power than they would in a purely majority-vote system.

As we know from cryptocurrencies, changing the consensus algorithm is a hot topic, and there is always a group of winners and a group of losers.

Gerrymandering creates voting blocs that make it more likely that the bloc will elect a candidate that strongly supports the bloc's interests, but it also reduces the impact of the bloc's views on elections held in nearby blocs.

How this plays out in any specific scenario is largely the result of historical accident, but I'd offer the argument that allowing states to change the consensus algorithm for their own voters is not necessarily bad for anyone outside of that state.

I support the Electoral College because I think that without it, the issues that Americans considered at the national level would be very strongly dominated by the concerns of the most populous urban centers, which would lead to even more fractiousness between urban areas and "flyover" areas.

So states that tinker with their own consensus algorithms are potentially helping (but likely hindering) the ability to achieve stable consensus. This is a bad thing, but not something that should be prevented by Federal law. We should let them make their own mistakes and let more enlightened states (if any exist) lead by example.