skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately for Mozilla, the reality is that Google, with its combination of large marketshare, aggressive timelines, and wide platform penetration (on both their own first-party and others' third-party platforms) had accomplished more in enhancing the capabilities of code loaded by the Web: they develop all sorts of APIs to expose native platform functionality inside Javascript running inside the browser, ship them in Chrome, then submit most of them to W3C and evangelize their merits. The most trashy ones they deprecate in two or three years, replace it with a different, incompatible take, and remove support for it in a few versions.

The author's 'Lessons Learned' section reads as a wishful vision of web browsers themselves, which, is both surprising in its lack of differentiation, and yet simultaneously ambitious in its hopes of being able to culture a... what's the word? 'platform'? 'ecosystem'? 'environment'? where well-executed server-side technologies interact with thin but slick clients; how is this different from the existing web and its browsers again? Does the point then become to offer a FOSS low-level system OS on top of which a browser can run? Isn't this one of the few successes of B2G, yet also operates in a space entirely dependent on the whims of hardware vendors, and competes with the likes of Tizen, Sailfish OS, AOSP, and the Linux kernel itself?

The retrospective is interesting: a dissenting opinion from an inside source, and it definitely sheds light on some important details that were glossed over or ommitted from the more 'political', corporate communiqués. But the conclusions are unsatisfactory: the preferred outcome reads less like "Boot to Gecko" than "Boot Only to Gecko", which sounds a lot like Chromebooks. The difference being, of course, that Google has a diverse (if frequently culled) selection of web-accessible services that together can be used as a computing and browsing platform, feeding search and browsing metadata and usage habits to Google thanks to the power of defaults. What could Mozilla have offered in this space to realistically take on the exact same frenemy with a larger warchest?
And yet people are still asking "why is this on HN?"

They're so focused on work that they can't take the time to realize they have tunnel vision.
It does not belong on the front page is my contention.
Newspapers once took the space and time cat pictures do now.

So of course it belongs.
I would've thought that the difference between "vote" and "vote as a shareholder" would have been obvious enough, but just to make it clear: I don't consider it a good thing if the only people with a say in things are the ones who have money. This is the difference between a democracy and a corporation.

I find it really unsettling how many people on HN seem to need this distinction explained.
The point being made is that a cop is not ever going to need to use Uber, that they shouldn't use Uber, and that (if for some reason they get all the way to court having used Uber as the basis for their evidence) they should have known that they shouldn't use Uber. Further, if they did need Uber, it would be by way of tracking the app's use from the suspect's phone directly.
and I thought you were just being a snob.
> Are they actually too big to fail?

Enron's peak valuation was $70bn. Worldcom's peak was ~3x Uber's ($186 billion).
I can save people a lot of time: It's not about the information on the medium, the .wav file the algorithm produces. It's about the context in which the information is presented.

AI-generated music will go along with generic food and other products. Listen already to the generic soundtracks on most Kickstarters. It works because they're paired conspicuous consumption. Just use the phone app "SoundBot" to make a generic chord progression with 1/8th note rhythms.

"Compelling" (a la Magenta) art and music will have to understand the context, have a perspective and understand what is ineffable and attempt to convey it. That's an unbelievably large machine learning task, having essentially no boundaries and with very little data to source from.

Nevertheless, as a company, Amper may create some useful musical man/machine collaboration tools.
"blocks them from the service" doesn't quite capture it right. It doesn't tell them they are blocked. It displays fake cars circling that never show up.
Thanks for trying to explain it to me - but I still don't get why I shouldn't find a friend in the US to get the paper issues mailed to them (to throw them away, or read them) and still only pay half of the price.

Probably the same thing as every geo-location access (i.e. Steam prices often equalling 1 USD = 1 EUR) - but I've never seen such a severe disconnect.
you may have summoned him

ATM as Roko's basilisk is a fascinating idea...
Alternative view: The government has lost the consent of the governed, but people are so engrossed in other stuff that they don't do anything about it due to how painful the upheaval would be.

In other words, it's tolerated rather than accepted.

Roman poets would call this "bread and circuses".
I think this probably counts as an iceberg-scale problem. It's like taxes; avoiding them by gaming the system in every way you can find is unethical but not illegal. Actively deceiving people (with fake updates to the app) and collecting and acting upon PII to screen out public officials is getting into criminal conspiracy territory.

I'm extremely surprised their lawyers signed off on it. Maybe they're libertarians though, I've heard some really odd arguments that turned out to be predicated on various 'natural law' theories.
Finishing the gender role revolution (i.e. men also take care of home and the kids, not getting drunk with coworkers every night) and ensuring that income security for the younger generations is at least as good as for the older generations would go a long way even without immigration.
Who is cutting onions in here!?!
You don't have to study its effect system in detail, there's not much to it. Instead of IO a you have Eff e a, where e is a record of effects, using PureScript's records support. The neat thing is that statements in the Eff monad tend to get compiled to x; y; z in the resulting JavaScript, which is great, you don't pay a performance penalty. Check out the source code in this demo: http://chrisdone.com/toys/elastic-collision-balls/ There is still some overhead for currying, but there's a lot of room for decurrying saturated calls.

You might be happy to hear there is a PureScript native compiler. I'm also averse to JS things, I use PS but don't use the node-based tools to build it.
I agree with your statements at large, but considering Uber was not aware of any active investigations, they're under no obligation to assist police in enacting a sting.

I'm not suggesting that it is, as there are semantically many problems with it, but an argument could be made that this is more of an extension of one's fifth amendment rights to remain silent than it is evading the law. Starting a company to drive people around is (depending on one's interpretation) either presumptively legal or presumptively illegal. Let's assume that many people view it as the former. Is it silly to assume that Uber might have anticipated the Portland government's assumption that it was the latter?

What if it were considered legal in every municipality worldwide except for Portland? That doesn't make Portland wrong or right, but at the same time, it doesn't make Uber wrong for the assumption that someone might find it to be presumptively unlawful.

I think that there are plenty of valid reasons to hate Uber, but anticipating a law enforcement response to something Uber deemed presumptively lawful seems like a pretty rational set of actions.
If you're holding your own as a CV developer in embedded systems, call yourself a developer; you've earned it!

(Fellow Mech E degree holder here, but I've never worked a day outside of computing...)
> they had version control that tracked all changes everywhere at all times, even changes that were not saved in any file.

No. The file system did auto-versioning, so you could generally recover recent history of a file, but there was nothing that "tracked all changes everywhere".

Well, ZMacs (the editor) did have unbounded 'undo' functionality, and you could even select a function and undo changes to that particular function, even if those weren't the most recent changes to the file. Maybe that's what you have in mind.
Yes. We were happy when the border control releases folks detained at airport after the immigration ban.
Newspapers have never strictly published cold hard news, ever. Unless you're talking about ap wire reports or meeting notes from your local town council. Editorials and op-eds have existed since the dawn of newspapers. Not to mention birth announcements, wedding announcements, and of course many people's favorite obituaries.
But what is that financial security for if you might not be around to enjoy it?

It just hammers home for the that being ultra-frugal now so that you can live it up when you retire misses the fact that, well, you might just die one day and never have those experiences you put off in the name of saving money. You should live life as you go, not by putting it all off and saving it up
>I'm pissed that now the only option for a viable open source mobile OS I have is Google

No one is forcing you to use Android and there are many alternatives. Additionally, there is no need to use Google services when setting up an Android phone. To be "pissed" that the only option you have is Google just reinforces my belief that Google should have closed sourced it from the beginning. The amount of entitlement some people think they have for an OS that is given away and costs millions to create is bizarre to me.
Is there evidence these have been used to harm anyone?

Not that I wouldn't like a world with no more blobs (or at least reproducible-build signed blobs). But I use a ton of software I don't have time to review. Why is solving this more important than, say, looking for RPC holes in docker?
>Both serve effectively the same purpose; to ensure that the physical owner of the machine never has full control of said machine.

That is the end-result, yes, but that wasn't the purpose: the purpose was to allow companies to keep track of their laptops--to remotely push out firmware updates, to inventory the hardware/asset list, etc. It was a convenience feature, essentially.

Of course, the end-result, as stated, is that you've got a complete black-box second processor that can do whatever it wants, even when your device is off.
Does it feel like there have been a bit more 'hit pieces' about Snapchat recently? Is this typical around IPOs?
This is entirely appropriate coming from a newspaper. What you missed never existed in the first place; there was never a time when newspapers solely delivered the latest news.
> How is state not a huge corporation?

Um. A state is a place that happens to constitute the jurisdiction of its government. A corporation, huge or not, is a legal entity chartered (in the U.S.) by the government of a state (q.v. supra).
Breaking News: Love, Gratitude, and Hope are More Important Than Anything Else Today
It's really a super obvious idea. The cost of any new building in a major city is almost entirely location. A $3,000/month studio in Brooklyn would go for $500 outside of a rural city -- so why would a developer purposely build shitty housing when the rental price wouldn't be appreciably lower?

Not to mention the lack of luxury housing isn't going to convince Mr. Yuppie to move out of NYC. He's just going to jack up the price of a semi-dilapitated brownstone (or turn a faux-victorian into a hacker house in SF).
If you believe the content inappropriate for hacker news, you can flag it.
This Wild New Supersolid Is Three States of Matter at Once
> Palm built theirs for 2009 top-end hardware, and it turned out that the hardware just wasn't quite enough to run a browser engine for the entire UI

I owned a first-gen Palm Pre, and this was not my experience. It had plenty of problems, but the UI was always responsive and pleasant to use. (More pleasant than I find Android today, on much beefier hardware nearly a decade later.)
But a lot of people in their 40's say they should've spent more time building a stronger career when they realize they're fucked because they're stuck in a job they hate for the next 30 years.
Correction:

* Nintendo Switch is running software from the FreeBSD Kernel
I don't know if this is something you want to do, but I have a full time development job with no more education than High School and attending one of those Bootcamps. So technically you don't need any degree at all to break into this field. That said, it is much harder to get into larger companies (FB, Google, etc) without a degree. As well as certain subsets of the industry (I won't be able to get into some jobs that needs fluency in algorithms or low level languages). So it's a trade off. But if you really really want to, you can get in on the merit of knowing what you are doing, work a couple of years, and be right up there with the rest of them.
That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that set of circumstances. It would take me more time/length than a message board comment to work through the ethics of that, but point well taken.
Historically a lot of restaurants and retail establishments in the US had minimum charges for credit cards. My anecdata is that this is far less common today (Brooklyn notwithstanding).

There's also just been this psychological shift that makes it generally OK in most places to put that $3 salad on a credit card. I'd never have done that 10 years ago. Now I routinely charge my lunch or a cup of coffee.

I don't know how much of this is changes to credit card fee structures and how much is that it's just become a cost of doing business many merchants now feel they have to put up with.
I think it's a much easier pill to swallow than laziness.
There's lots of talented writers doing high school essays - all the best writers that you have read wrote high school essays too.
It's not exactly like HN is flooded with this kind of story, the last similar one I can think of was about Mohammed Bzeek and that was a couple weeks ago. It's a friday, some of us (me!) are probably counting the hours at work and appreciate a heartfelt story. I can appreciate the occasional step outside the norm.
I suspect that at some point a self-upgrading AI will have to choose between limiting its potential or losing a piece of its identity.

Would altering oneself beyond recognition be a form of suicide?
Did you read the whole thing? Or, like, the title?

I mean, if you are really too hard-hearted to understand that life can end suddenly, and that you should cherish your connections with others, then I pity you.

And if you don't see how a reminder to lift your head up from your work once in a while is relevant on HN, then this story is precisely for people like you.
Maybe get a court order?
Your nation's goverment (whatever that is) is ultimately answerable to you, with very few exeptions.[1]

Some corporate entity is not.

________________________________

Notes:

1. As the saying goes, politicians rule at the pleasure of the votors, tyrants rule at the pleasure of the assassins.
- Glad I can help. Feel free to ask more questions -- I love this topic.

- The rigor in most Japanese universities is in the entrance exam. It's quite tough and is a decent filter for intelligence and study skills. STEM degrees in Japan can sometimes be rigorous as well.

- I would humbly argue that most US degrees (not sure about Europe) are not terribly rigorous outside of STEM fields and STEM-wannabe fields like economics. I have two degrees from two Ivy schools and many professors as friends, so I think I have a decent feel for who has to study hard to graduate and who doesn't.

- The schools are definitely a hiring pipeline, with the main factor being gaining admission. There are two problems with this. First, the average quality of entering students has fallen rapidly in the past 25 or so years. As such, a degree from any school not called Tokyo University has decreased in value and prestige by quite a bit. While a big Japan megacorp may have been willing to hire 20 graduates from a second-tier national university in 1985 (because they were high value-add individuals), they may only see 5 graduates in 2017 from the same school with the same level of value add. Second, there are just fewer salaryman jobs available today. As such, schools that used to be a strong part of the hiring pipeline are now only mariginal parts of the pipeline. Many parents and students are very frustrated by this. Japanese megacorps have started leaning much more on low-prestige temporary workers to replace the missing warm bodies that they are not hiring (compared to the past). These temp jobs are terrible for Japanese society since they are relatively low wage jobs with low stability and low prestige -- it's almost like not having a job other than the fact that you have to be at work. As I have said in another reply, I hope the youth of Japan get sick of this and rebel -- the older generation is massively screwing the younger generation in a gaping societal generational divide.
Imagine murder is illegal. But some guy thinks it isn't and does it anyway.

He puts bodies in acid, hides them in concrete, and so on.

Now this kind of behaviour is likely to mean the authorities will take a lot longer to find murderers. Murderers will get away with it from time to time. And a lot of resource needs to be spent just to find the criminals.

We do tend to be more forgiving with crimes where the criminal confesses, and rightly so.
> And I just don't understand how anyone can maintain that farce when the last year has shown that it's a genuine challenge even for the US FBI to unlock a mobile device without the owners say-so

Difficulty? Yes. But the FBI is not the NSA, they don't specialize in such attacks. It's like asking your plumber to do heart surgery. So they commissioned it to else who does, and boom, they had access.

Strong cryptographic security shouldn't have a pricetag any lower than "we feed all the hydrogen in the universe to black holes to harvest enough energy for the computations".

And phone security is orthogonal to baked-in firmware signing keys. The only change you need is allowing the user to add their own signing keys maybe with the caveat that all data in the protected keystore gets destroyed in the process. Then you have freedom and secure boot in one package.
The signing keys are the issue, not the ring -1 management code.

> If you truly believe that physical access is a trump of any security then you can never trust your hardware anyways, as it is exceptionaly hard to prove it conforms to a spec.

Here are some simple steps

1. compel a manufacturer to create a spy-firmware, signed with their signing key
2. get access to a device for a few minutes
3. patch firmware that exfiltrates the data once the device is unlocked by the user
4. return device to user / to where the user placed it

This is assuming strong encryption keys. If it is only protected by an unlock code your steps look like this.

1. acquire device
2. a) compel manufacturer to create a firmware that bypasses "delete on unlock failure" feature
b) unsolder chips, apply silver needles to flash controllers so you can
read/restore internal key storage whenever it gets wiped
3. enumerate all N-digit pass codes until it is unlocked

As you can see hardware security does not save you when the strong keys are on the device and the user only enters a weak key.
Similarly hardware security does not save you if a hostile entity got access to your hardware.
Show HN: A starter Go web application
I discussed this with the CEO a while ago on Twitter https://twitter.com/minliangtan/status/447658322544439296

I think their best bet would be to have someone at the company work specifically on Linux issues. Dell did this and made a handsome return on their investment.

I currently use a Dell Developer XPS, but would definitely consider the Blade as a candidate for my next laptop if they were good about Linux compatibility in their next release.
I don't really think so.
With OOP you can easily replace whatever part of the system you want.
Obviously if you have written OO code, not if you have written a mixed procedural-spaghetti code in an OO language.
You "just" write an implementation for your interfaces that makes all the unit, integration and acceptance tests green.
With procedural programming you have no interfaces and more importantly testing was non-existent.
Seriously, I thought that in 2017 the advantages of OOP over procedural were obvious, I fell like that I have time-traveled to 15-20 years ago where it was still debatable.
Docker image to make timestamped backups to Amazon S3
It got to the front page because everyone else clearly disagrees with you.

I'm not sure how you think HN works, but it's not editorialized.
Phoenix 1.3 is pure love for API development
> Here, the cops are asking the uber app where the drivers are. They know or have probable cause to believe the drivers have committed crimes (again, the sting part is just about having a very clean prosecution, it's not required or necessary here). Uber deliberately lies about where the drivers are, with the purpose of protecting them from this investigation.

You have a point here. Though I don't think they were lying about the locations of actual drivers when inserting ghost cars.

But before you were saying that merely refusing to send drivers to cops is obstruction. Why is that obstruction, but refusing to sell drugs to the cops is not obstruction? Picture an alternate version of the app that wouldn't schedule pickups on those phones, but never lied.
Their attempts will be just that. There's a SHA256 signature required to verify the ME code - no signature, no boot (or boot for 30 mins less commonly). They won't share the keys with just anyone.
I hate the moral outrage against gentrification. It's natural to desire something that good but, somehow immoral to express that desire.

Venice and the south side of Santa Monica used to be kinda a sketchy place to live and had alot of crime though, it was on the beach.

Crime went down (as it did all over LA) and went from an undesirable place to live to a desirable one. When people express that desire by actually moving themselves and their businesses there, the people that were previously there are outraged.

I get being mad at market rates going up in your neighbourhood; it's basically a selfish desire to keep things as they were for yourself. Especially if it goes so far as to move you out of your neighbourhood but, to make it moral as if these people who naturally moving to the best place they can find for a price they can pay are somehow trying to personally inflict evil on the people that already live there is silly.

One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. We live in a capitalist society. Real estate is one of the largest markets there is, literally trillions of dollars in value. Even small changes in value can have huge effects.

There is no simple solution. Even if Snap, Inc. did move to a suburb in the valley somewhere, they would lose a significant, expensive chunk of their workforce. The young, mostly childless employees of Snap, Inc. are exactly the kind of people that love living in Venice. Everyone loves living there, how do I know? The rental prices in Venice are astronomical. People already have sacrificed alot to live there, they aren't going to move to the valley. They are going to keep their friends and their short commutes and move to a company in their neighbourhood.
if you want to collapse the japanese way of life then opening up immigration is probably the fastest way to do that.