skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I consider the HN community to be one of the most thoughtful I've found on the web, yet am stunned by how quickly a righteous mob is formed based on an anonymous, cartoonish, and IMO barely plausible account of what it's like to work for a large US tech company.

Having spent years working at multiple SV tech companies, where even the slightest tinge of a racist or sexist affront would land you in an office in front of HR and a company lawyer, I find this account to be very difficult to believe. Slanty eye joe? Please.

We don't know if this is a (poorly written) attempt to sink Uber (which I don't happen to care for) by someone with a short position and an evening to spare, or if it has been penned by an employee with a grudge.

Please have some credulity before parading your #deleteuber hashtags and morally superior posturing so the world can marvel at how virtuous you are. There has never been a more evil force in the world than an outraged, self-righteous mob inflamed by twisted anecdotes.

And yes, I've resorted to creating a throwaway account, fully expecting the flagging and down-voting groupthink brigade to be in force. If there's a shameful story here, it's more likely this disturbing human phenomenon, not an anonymous blog post, the veracity of which we know nothing about.
Xperia Touch Projector
> Sadly, it looks like Google is finally caving in to their pressure. Maybe someone like Mozilla won't.

All browser vendors provide the necessary bits for properly implemented HTTPS MITM, and have done so for ages (which are fairly simple, basically "allow local trusted certificate roots and ignore key pinning for them").
As a developer I'd also prefer to use QT. I actually enjoy C++ a lot and writing performant, pleasant apps. Slow bulky electron apps are the bane of my existance but maybe they look good to an over-budget project manager.
Well, it says in the article:

"Once operational Crew Dragon missions are underway for NASA, SpaceX will launch the private mission on a journey to circumnavigate the moon and return to Earth."

I don't know why people are arguing over whether they are landing or not...
I just see an ASCII interpretation of the TV channels my mom told me to stay away from.

Hey, I think I see a pair of @'s
Humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires, increased fire season over 2 decades
Toxicity at workplace comes from attitude like you are showing. You just called me stupid for holding a different point of view. I bet you are not such a great colleague either.

I do not think the stories out of Uber are any out of ordinary. These are same stories that came out from finance industry and Hollywood. Success attracts problems like this. There is nothing you can do about it other than wait it out.
Stan Honey is a legend in sailing as well as in technology.

He's won the Jules Verne trophy as navigator, fastest round the world (48 days). He's won the Volvo. PacCup with Nolan Bushnell. Rolex Yachtsman of the year (his wife Sally has won twice). He did the NFL line effects, same for NASCAR and NHL. He did the Americas Cup effects. He did Sailmail. Multiple patents.

And he's an incredibly nice guy. Dennis Connor is the best American yachtsman, but Honey ain't far behind.
I would worry less about this credibility issue. Uber management, Mike#2, HR and likely every Uber employee will know if these claims are true, and if so, who they refer to. Our opinion and our degree of outrage matters not at all.

If history shows anything, and despite what we may like to think, public outrage has very little impact on corporate reality. The key to enacting change at Uber is the company management and HR. Rest assured the people that matter will know if this story is true.
It's not nuclear explosions that cause cooling. It's the firestorms that they cause. So that would be a painful strategy. However, I suppose that it's possible to build devices that created SOX. The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides.
>As the most highly valued startup in the world, at $68 billion, Uber ...

At what point is it just a plain old company? Is Facebook still a startup? Is it just because Uber's #disrupting things or some cultural BS?
Basic filtering can be done via passively inspecting SNI headers and terminating connections to verboten hosts. However, that's not enough for some orgs, and some software works around it: https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/
Without an SSL MITM, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS's) are much less effective.

If you're using your company's network, then they have every right to monitor all of the activity on it. They're trying to protect trade secrets, future plans, customer data, employee records, etc. from attackers who would use that information to do harm to the company, its customers, and its employees. If you don't want your employer to know what you're doing, then don't use the company computer or company network to do it. And while you may think that you're too tech savvy to fall prey to malware 1) not everyone at your company is, and 2) no amount of savvy will protect you from all malware, especially ones that gain a foothold through an unpatched exploit. And there's also that whole other can of worms: malicious employees.
Show HN: Online Haskell REPL
Actually, nowadays GPS rarely is used by itself.

Instead, you use A-GPS, which is GPS with additionally communication with a server for accuracy.
What we really need is that fast to start up apps for customer acquisition and then the long term downloads as an offering for the customers who want the speed.
How does subsidy-less solar match up against subsidy-less coal (honest question)?
Maybe so. But it arguably depends on firm type.
Don’t run code at import time
Ah that makes sense. They can still use a cloud based coding pad like most companies do
Is there any official source for this?
If he was falsely accused by Google then he could have filed a lawsuit against them to clear his reputation. It is fact very unusual for prior employers to badmouth an ex-employee, which is why firms usually limit their communications to confirming the fact of someone's prior employment between certain dates but not making any other public statements.
Probably when their operations are at least able to break-even, instead of burning through VC..
You could do one thing to prove the point about not defending leadership and not standing up for this kind of bullshit right away. It sounds like "Mike #2" ought to be sufficiently unambiguous for Uber employees to identify, so can you name that person?
Plane Slams into Home in Riverside, CA Live Stream
Core Ruby Tools
> vim mode in emacs

My reply was in context of that; since I have never used emacs, it wasn't immediately apparent to me what spacemacs might be like. I will, of course, Google spacemacs. :-) thanks for the tip
Hopefully federal. The FAA have proven themselves to be an excellent regulator of drones, striking an effective balance between safety and freedom. Many states wouldn't be nearly as sensible. We've already seen many local municipalities pass ordinances that completely ban drones and model aircraft; the FAA have stepped in to defend the rights of fliers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvrQx2GngNc
I have to state my reasons as a required field, AND wait for their "approval" to delete my own account? WTF is this shit.
same here

in german: when (for whatever reason) people dictate numbers i always insist on single digit dictation

my brain cant handle long series of "twoandtwenty, threeandforty"
No mention of how much time it took to compile? I don't know if my memory is faulty but I remember Turbo C++ to be much much faster than today's C++ compilers.
I hope its Donald Trump
But Japan has taken significant steps to prepare themselves for an earthquake, no? I'm not as confident about Seattle's preparedness. In five years of living here I can only recall maybe two times we were actively encouraged to review our personal preparedness plans. Any other information on the topic is something I had to find on my own.

In the process of drilling a tunnel over 100' under ground (because the existing elevated road can't withstand another earthquake) several older buildings began to shift at the surface. Downtown Seattle is extremely unstable and I'm not confident that the structures in the city are prepared for the type of quake we are about to face. Japan has had a lot of wake up calls and as far as I know has done a lot more preparation.

Before we spend a few billion dollars on a train maybe we should spend some of that cash on making sure our apartments and offices don't end up in Lake Union or Elliott Bay.
5 Benefits That Come from Self-Improvement
What's the best open competitor to Google?
thanks. that part i can understand but why do that?
You could setup the shield around Lagrange point 1 which has the advantage of not creating noticeable rings around the earth. This does not reduce material needed by all that much, but it does prevent kessler syndrome as your sunshade breaks down.

However, a much cheaper option is simply cover large regions of the earth with a reflective coating. Between those extremes are things like hot air balloons in the upper atmosphere.
I'm pretty sure he was a manager of a lot of people at search when he left.
Google Spanner – Horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database
Oh -- you will :-)
So is Administrator of NASA. I don't think being appointed AG makes you a politician.
I work at Uber. What happened to Susan Fowler and Amy is terrible.

To give another side of the Uber story, I've seen nothing but respect on my team of ~25 engineers. Only a few of us are women, but also only a few of us are the "white male" stereotype that you see in the press. Everyone I've talked to on my team is aware of and upset about the lack of female engineers in tech.

I saw Uber's CTO (Thuan Pham, a Vietnamese refugee) downstairs at Uber the day Susan Fowler posted her article. A woman who works at Uber came up to him, and asked him how he's doing. He said, "It's a tough time, but we'll get through it." She told him, "I'm sorry, I know how much you care", and gave him a hug.

Arianna Huffington is on Uber's board of directors. She's in charge of helping Uber employees "lead healthier lives". In response to Susan Fowler's article, Arianna has been holding personal discussions with employees about what we're going to do to stop this type of thing from ever happening again.

It's easy to stereotype a company, but at the end of the day you're talking about ~12,000 individuals. Many if not most of whom came from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm hopeful that these decisions didn't come from the top. It really may have been just a couple of individuals who did messed up things, and should/will be fired.
I bought $11,000 USD worth of BTC at $7. I sure wish I had held on to it.
Well, if you consider the watts produced per employee, it's probably a very inefficient use of labor!

I'm no solar hater--we have a 8KW system on our house.
Thanks for clearing that up. It's getting pretty hard to tell the difference.
Ask HN: Future of Uber
For the past couple of weeks, it seems like Uber has drawn a lot of negative press. Do you guys think this will actually affect them in the long run? Amazon gets a lot of negative press and it seems like it doesn't affect them at all.
camp 3 (I'm in this one): instead of spending money on humans in space, let's spend that money on robots in space. Once you don't have to deal with all the ugly details of keeping humans alive in space, you have a lot more budget for exploration, discovery, science. You can cover a lot more areas, and the likely payoffs are higher.

Growing crops in space has no real scientific benefits for the nearterm future. It's a "nice to have" not a "visionary" thing.
I don't think either of us know much about this, but I do know that docking with the ISS to unload supplies requires completely different equipment than doing a rendezvous between a lunar lander and a lunar orbiter for Earth return. (That's why I didn't say merely "docking".)

The only craft SpaceX has that can land on Earth or the Moon is Dragon. I am pretty sure Dragon does not have enough delta-v to do a full propulsive landing on the moon (no aerobraking available) and then return to orbit. And they definitely don't have the tech to re-fuel in lunar orbit for the return to Earth. None of this equipment exists.

Not to mention that this would be a totally new lunar strategy, since the Apollo mission returned to earth in the lunar orbiter (Command Module) rather than re-fueling and returning in the lunar lander.
At my workplace we need to use middleboxes like this for 2 reasons

-our commitment to our customers and regulatory compliance requires we know where customer data is at all times. It would be lovely if all employees could be trusted with data at all times, but the reality is some employees will steal information, as google found out with Levandowski. That's google's own information though; they don't have a regulatory requirement to report the breach, whereas the data I protect requires full disclosure legally.

-malware is increasingly using https to communicate with C&C. Many malware families now install a trusted root cert so they can exfiltrate data on less monitored 443 rather than 80. When (not if) devices get compromised we need to know what the attacker got.

I would love to not need to do this because it's a privacy mess and breaks applications all the time, but there simply are not better tools to serve as the last line of defence against data loss.

iOS has mostly solved this problem through a combination of not running unsigned code and APIs where MDM can draw a corporate data barrier inside the phone, but while desktop OSs remain there will need to be some form of this.
The amount of potential methane locked away in the Siberian and Canadian permafrost is frightening. However the amount of potential methane locked into the continental shelf seabed is down right terrifying.

If these two sources of greenhouse gases begin to form a positive feedback loop humanity is going to feel a world of hurt. It would lead us down a climate change road which we cannot recover from.
I'm getting an unexpected error occurred. Here is the sample financial data I am using: http://pastebin.com/W6PJfG3f
The fact that you allude to it suggests you can fathom it in some way. Maybe you don't want to but clearly bad actors can exploit insecure systems and that's especially easy from the inside.
2FA Architecture – The privacy threat of modern Internet [pdf]
How are you sandboxing it?
In Praise of Idleness – Bertrand Russell [pdf]
Right, it's a business-related question. $100 to me is worth a lot more than it is to him, so I just wondered whether what I'd be getting would be worth what I'm spending. If the response is anything like the Ben Horowitz example above, I'm thinking no.
Asian Last Names Lead to Fewer Job Interviews, Still
Still, you can get rid of most of the velocity for a Mars landing using aerobraking alone. To land on the Moon you'll be bringing all of that delta-V with you as fuel. Landing a Dragon on Mars already takes a lot of propellant: https://youtu.be/ZoSKHzziLKw
I'm Iranian American, you are being hysterical. This story is blown out of proportion and you are treating it like we are on the verge of Hitler rising up from the grave and donning the red white and blue.
Glory to Arstotzka!
> This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.

Shocking that it's been this long. There is an entire generation that hasn't seen man make it into deep space.
I agree on wariness regarding the usage of the word "caring".

My usage of "care" here is equal to "notice". To make it easier for myself, I imagine an anthropomorphic universe gallivanting around and notice one of its agents doing something that could possibly exert an effect (either null and non-null) and bless it with that effect after spinning the wheel of probability.
How Do You Compete with 4M Apps? Think Retention
There are nearly 2000 engineers at Uber, with people coming and going every week. I'm not even sure I know the /team/ the author is writing about.

Practicality aside, how stupid do you think I would have to be to start a massive witchhunt against somebody who has had allegations made against them by an anonymous person?
> I'd probably just remove the really low-end AMD setups anyway.

If you did that it seems like you would easily cut out the best low end configurations. For a while the AMD athlon re-makes were the best low end options. Last time I checked they weren't as cost effective. But they were the best bang for the buck for several years. New athlon + SSD + 4gb ram was a solid machine for <$250.
This is great! But I couldn't find any way to learn visually?
Maybe, but I don't see anything in the FAQ which says you have to do that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
"However, to say that an allegation must be reported when taking a new job is pretty harsh"

If you are an executive, who is expected to be the face of the company, yes, yes you should disclose anything at all that could look bad to the company.
I liken the idea of alpha readers to the popular tech concept of failing fast. Why not fail early in front of a smaller audience (with a chance to pivot and improve) than wait to fail late and run out of runway (or motivation).

In my case, I thought I had told a different story than the alphas perceived, so, in truth, I hadn't told the story I set out to. Making changes was a natural part of the process to correct issues "lost in translation" as it were.

PS: rooftop conversations sound awesome, by the way.
Thank you for posting this. I love this idea! It could demonstrate one's personality in an unexpected way.
Try French, where you eventually have to start doing addition, multiplication, or both...

Quatre-vingt-douze = four times twenty plus twelve = 92
I find that if I use GPS/Nav to get somewhere, I have no real awareness of where I am or how to get back. Having spent the large majority of my life without a smartphone (or a mobile phone of any kind) I don't really like that feeling.

If I look up where I'm going in advance, or use written instructions, I can generally backtrack to my origin without too much difficulty.
King didn't say to take any of their advice about how to fix the thing they think is wrong. He said that if they all think it's wrong, you need to change it. You still figure out for yourself what kind of change to make. (Maybe I'm making up that last part -- I haven't read his book. But it's how I think about feedback.)
Small companies often work differently, but this has been like this for as long as I can remember in larger companies (and I'm very nearly 50). Usually there is a budget allocation for raises. Managers rank their workers in ordinal fashion. It's often set in quartiles, lowest quarter is placed on the "must improve" list, second lowest gets no raise. Third lowest gets moderate increase (unless they are hitting the top of their band). Highest gets large increase/band increase. Often these sorted D level groups are mixed up in the C level and at the margins D levels can argue that their employees deserve to be bumped up to the next level (which is why it pays to document all your progress for the year -- it gives your manager ammunition when they compare you to other groups). Finally there are X spots for band increases/exceptional performers (which get paid above their band rate, but do not increase in band because their current function is essential to the team).

Like I said, in large corporations it literally pays to have a politically savy manager and to have documented every single thing you've done during the year. Bonus points if you've condensed it down in a presentable fashion.

I had a friend who made it into management in a large corporation. He decided to do things differently. He told his entire team, "Tell me how much money you want. I will tell you what you need to accomplish to get it." He documented the hell out of what his workers did. His team killed all the other teams -- just steamrolled them in terms of productivity, so he got everything he asked for. Made a lot of enemies, though ;-)
Urinals MUST count. Assuming that women's bathrooms have more sit-down toilets than men's, we are biased. It is unfair and sexist to allow female dominated companies more than their fair share of project managers!

/s
His YouTube on writing speculative fiction is simply amazing.
I wonder how much infrastructure is really required to properly support Alexa like capabilities for an individual. Does Amazon really need all of our recordings on their hardware in their data centers? Is it conceivable that we could own that hardware as well?

I realize that training data is important and I assume the recorded data gets used for that purpose but does Amazon need to keep it forever? How long do they need it? Can I own and posses the hardware and pass off the learning alone?
This is pretty great. I do have a few issues though:

1. Your part picker seems to remove some symbols; for example if you change your video card to the 'Sapphire Radeon RX 480 Nitro 4G', then click the link, you'll see it's actually the Nitro+ 4G, which is a different product.

2. When typing into the autocomplete box, once your string matches no items the list returns to 'show all items' rather than 'show no items', which is more sensible (along with an indication to the user that their search found no results).

3. Searching seems to be alphanumeric; typing 'Nitro+' into the search box shows you results for 'Nitro'.

4. It doesn't work in Safari; I'm not sure why or how much work it would be to fix, but it would be nice.
Airliners used the same basic system for a long time... and it was, in fact, an airline incident that lead the US gov't to declassify GPS so trans-oceanic flights could be tracked better.

To this day though, when I pilot starts up an airliner, they fire up that old system as a backup, its programed down to the gates at the airports, so they set their departure gate and as soon as they start moving, it tracks, through gyros, the whole flight. There can be a lot of drift in the system though, which is what lead to KAL007 being shot down by the soviets, killing almost 300 and prompting Reagan to declassify GPS to prevent that same kind of thing from happening again...
+1. I work in regulatory compliance at a financial firm. My current firm doesn't do this because we don't originate trades, but when I worked at a hedge fund, all forms of electronic communications were MITM'd & recorded for regulatory reasons (and to monitor for IP theft - we did sue a soon former employee after he emailed source for a quantitative model to his personal gmail) primarily to combat or defend against insider trading.
Review of Eureka 96H Quick up 2 in 1 Cordless Vacuum
I don't really like "systems" for ranking and scoring people in general, but just as an exercise in systems design here, what about this for a strategy?

1. Each manager gives their people an absolute score

2. A meta-manager checks in with all managers over the course of the year and keeps tabs on performance of a randomly selected group of people (some scalable fraction of the total workforce. As this number goes up you could hire a few more people to do this job).

3. Each meta-manager looks for obvious goofy scoring discrepancies (how can person A have a lower rating than person B?).

4. Each manager is on the hook to defend those ratings in the face of scrutiny to justify why they rated Tony Terrible better than Andy Awesome. This expectation of accountability prevents them from inflating their scores too much.

Sort of like QA for management assessments.
Gemini PDA Android and Linux keyboard mobile device
are we in global warming or global cooling? it seems the scientists or the media change this around every now and then, which in turn they now call it just climate change.
Android Mockito Tutorial – Verify