skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's just kicking the can from "God" to "Aliens". Expecting sense from nonsense is the first problem here. This isn't even metaphysics, it's just amusing bullshit that was born from the classic:

Journalist: "So, is it possible that X is true?"

Scientist: "It's far more likely that A, B, C...Z are true, but we can't quite rule out X."

Headline: "Scientists discover X!"
I'm quite relieved that the trend for 'Steve Jobs was an asshole; therefore to succeed I need to be an asshole' line of management thinking is now dying out.
I think that successs had nothing to do with excuses and a lot more to do with "my groups inside of marketing had become dumping grounds for projects from both inside and outside of marketing – with everything being “priority one.” [...] We quickly put in a capacity/priority planning process."

I bet a hat that it was primary the prioritization and planning process that did the trick.
Look at the price now. I would encourage anyone trying to read into the future of bitcoin based upon daily min/max to learn about the difference between day traders and hodlers. At this point, hodlers have been through so many scares that there is very little left that can weaken their hand.

The volume this week is actually down. It is only a handful of people trying to intentionally spike the price, and trade off the news to turn a daily profit. The only suckers are other day traders, and hodlers actually suckered some of them by buying in the dip they created.

weekly volume:
https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/30d?c=e&r=week&t=...
I wish the web was still like that. No advertising, no tracking, there's not 5 mb of CSS and javascript, just information presented in a readable format.
Does this reflect poorly on the auditing industry? Kind of like with the ratings firms during the GFC. It seems that their poor practices have aided and abetted these frauds. Has their behaviour changed?
Would be interesting to see a "digital text" version to display short text messages the same way.
Just from the headline, it strikes me like a sound argument for an end to prohibition.
Americans aren't filing their taxes this year
I've tried to stick to "no excuses" ever since I watched Rising Sun in the mid '90es. When Wesley Snipes' character is late he starts making excuses to Sean Connery's character who promptly tells him to stop making excuses and "don't be late". It's not a very prominent quote from the movie or anything, but for some reason it just resonated with me. Perhaps because I tended to make a lot of excuses.
Is Quantum Key Distribution Worth Using?
Neither do I care about what happens in a couple of centuries. My main worry is that in a somewhat foreseeable future data of electronic communications can be used to construct a model of how a society of interest works to a degree useful enough to attack/control it.

So it isn't necessarily about what I am communicating or to whom I talk but the fact that it seems impossible for society as a whole the hide the details of its functioning.

I viewed pgp/gpg as a tool that could counter this. Convincing people to use it would've been an uphill battle but there would have been a slim chance of succeeding to a useful degree.
Window Maker 0.95.8 released
I've heard this from a lot of business-management types, but I've always felt they have the causality backwards.

It's not that "reasons don't matter", so therefore you can know your job is now in the executive suite.

It's rather that once you're an executive, you are (presumably) granted enough power and authority to actually fix problems on your own initiative, before they become visible to the people above you. So if a problem becomes visible to the people above you, it means you didn't exercise all that power and authority at your disposal to prevent that.

I think this causal direction is more useful, because it suggests that there sometimes still are "reasons" that can matter as justifications for failure—as long as those "reasons" are things outside of the reach of the executive's power+authority. For example, a COO won't usually be fired if an political/military emergency grounds all flights and so nobody's stuff gets delivered—because there's nothing they really could have done about that, no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.
The point is how the government pays for Medicare drugs.
The great thing about old news is there is often more recent updates.

Regarding Ramona Fricosu

"Fricosu's attorney claimed it was possible she did not remember the password. A month later, Fricosu's ex-husband handed the police a list of potential passwords.[3] One of the passwords worked, rendering the self-incrimination issue moot."

We have no way of knowing what would have happened ultimately.
Your personal guide to Software Engineering technical interviews
This is by no means ultimately decided yet.
Organizing. I am also building an autonomous kart as well: https://youtu.be/6buTfyvYd9o
In no way am I disputing the accuracy of the article, or the necessity for alarm and precautions. I will however say, that PIA sells the kind of services you might look for to combat such measures, so consider the source too.
This is an example of a dangerous one-size-fits-all silver bullet philosophy

First, this creates selection for a culture that punches below its weight. Never willing to stetch itself. Underperformers apply here.

Second, this is fine when you don't have external dependencies who you can't simply fire. You may have to work at the speed of an organization that doesn't share these values and this becomes the rate limiting step to your growth.

Third, if your company is a rocketship and you have a lot of leverage over your employees, you may be able to pull this, but in practice you're going to have to pick your battles. Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace.
The Hacker News – Cyber Security, Hacking News
Drugs are being cut with synthetic opiodes, so potent that literally an extra flake in your drug of choice will kill you, unbeknownst to the end user.

This affects junkies to occasional/recreational drug users.

Not sure about the US, but there has been significant overdoses and fatalities relating to fentanyl and other related.

It's a word of caution, you don't know what's in your drugs, it can kill you more than ever.
Facebook uses Quanta/QCT, Celestica, and Accton for a lot of their manufacturing. You can buy Facebook servers from companies like Hyve, AMAX, and Stack Velocity but they aren't really aiming at the mainstream server market.
Now what? Will there be more action than a blog post? This is a major criminal operation. If this has been found on multiple phones, tracing back the supply chain should reveal the common insertion point. That's a routine law enforcement job. The FBI has a "Cyber Division", and once in a while they catch somebody.
>In that sense, a prison is safer than being outside, too. Should I live in a prison instead then?

I mean... I see Android as akin to the situation in The Walking Dead that led to them living in a literal prison, so yes. I've always avoided Mac when possible, but in the mobile space I'd rather use those devices less, and less freely, but more securely. I'll explore my options on my desktop or laptop.
This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions.

One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do. Period. Full stop.

You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they will.

Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.

The commentor brought up an essay from 1899 that is still brought up in today's military training. It is clearer and more to the point of the fundamental need of people who can do what you ask and deliver what they say.

It's only three pages and it's wonderful. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard:

http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/m...

There's an extraordinary amount of laziness and entitlement in today's businesses; technology is no exception. It is truly rarer and rarer to find someone who will simply: "carry a message to Garcia."
This isn't really true at all. CEOs give excuses in their earnings reports all the time ('economic headwinds', 'unfavorable regulatory climate', 'manufacturing complications'). Sometimes investors will punish the share price, but only rarely does the board consequently penalize the executives, and only in cases of really severe screwups.
LOL @ HN is not a place for partisan battles.

Okay, anti-Trump Silicon Valley.

May the interest rates rise and your markets drain. :D
It's amazing what isn't legal to buy or sell in the USA, but you can easily buy from China and have delivered in the mail. $100 of testosterone powder which you can re-constitute and sell for $20,000 on the street here. Some of the more sophisticated resellers will even pack your order inside of a less conspicuous object.
>"There have been many volatility events."

Sure but I was speaking to the OPs assertion that this particular event is proof that it is not suitable as a store of value.

>"Several of the major volatility events in the past of bitcoin were related to Chinese government announcements or rumors regarding regulation/legality."

Right but this is to be expected given that China recently has been the largest market for Bitcoin by volume no? [1]

>" but that annoying need to convert to and from fiat in order to trade for other goods and services means that the governments still have a great deal of influence over bitcoin"

Is that any more annoying or any more inconvenient than having your hard-earned savings devalued by your government?

[1]http://www.coindesk.com/estimating-data-china-real-bitcoin-t...
Gravity waves don't "go through" the earth but rather the earth expands and contracts in space-time. This contracting and expanding of the earth itself, although minute, is the evidence and detection of gravity waves.
Android's network security model is atrocious, with full network access being in the "other" category that all apps get. You don't need to have root on a phone to go rogue and attack/analyze other devices, if the phone already gives your "no permissions" app full access.
The KDE project has 54 ideas for Google Summer of Code
Firefox works very good for me in this workflow. I have it set to open to previously open tabs and windows so that I don't have to periodically bookmark everything at the end of the day and Firefox doesn't crash on startup like Chrome if I have too many tabs open.

To better help me, I use the Tab Groups extension to group things into projects and used to use the Tree Tab extension to keep MMB tabs together, so that I can simply close all related tabs if I think that the topic I started MMBing on was not useful.

Current stats:
326 tabs, 1 window, 22 tab groups.
1.2GB of RAM spread across 4 processes.

[1]: http://imgur.com/a/8S77c
There's a certain level of orthodoxy in psychiatry now.. I have yet to see anyone try to get any information other than "let's try putting you on this extremely mood altering pill with side effects for a month". No attempt is made to find any real evidence other than anecdotal patient information. Maybe the science isn't there?
Author here. Snipcart is one option for e-commerce for static sites.

https://snipcart.com/
I had the same reaction. (1) they are a spy agency and (2) we had Snowden.

People who reacted incredulously to it online just reveal themselves to be uninformed, or politically motivated, in my opinion.

At this point, I feel our intelligence agencies were founded to counter moves by major foreign powers. And every day Russia is allying itself more with the Republican party.

It's a classic divide and conquer strategy spread out over a hundred years. First, attack from the left w/communism. Then, the right with fascism.

I have to feel intelligence agencies are the free public's allies at this point, and now I see why Obama and Clinton were so fearful of encryption. I'm not sure whether Clinton's idea of a Manhattan-style project on breaking encryption was right or not. My initial reaction was no way. I wonder what that would look like. Quantum computers?

Now, it appears bad actors have leapt to the top of government and the DOJ seems to be sluggish in building a case against them. Perhaps they can't gather evidence as quickly due to encrypted chat apps and hidden money transfers like Bitcoin.
> Some of the more sophisticated resellers will even pack your order inside of a less conspicuous object.

Or like every merchant on Alphabay? lol, @ "some"
Machine Translation will soon start taking a big bite out of generic professional translation work (we've already seen Google Translate replace the sort of translate-by-dictionary-lookup tasks often used by small businesses in the absence of better options), but will also serve as a productivity tool for more specialized (usually industry-specific) services.

I don't think this will cut into the translation work of longer prose (fiction or non-fiction) just yet, but we will see some pressure on some translators to up their game in terms of translating between cultural contexts, the sort of thing that makes these so amusing:

http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=5672
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/25-things-british...
Having worked at a few places in my career now, I've found two dominant styles of management. Either you trust your team, listen to their "excuses", and try to help them unblock themselves (and come up with learnings to increase future velocity), or you _don't_ trust your team and constantly hold the stick above their heads. The former style lends itself to cautious team growth and views each employee as having a valuable skillset, emphasizing low churn. The latter seems to engender a hypergrowth strategy, where employees are seen as "resources" rather than important cornerstones of the company.

Consider the following. Asking for help ends up blocking other employees _also_ laboring under their own deadlines, which incentivizes most employees to ignore requests for help.
The case for why we need friendly AI
Hah, you've never seen what would happen to Chrome on similar workloads. But yes, your RAM usage is spectacularly high compared to mine beacause I have 326 tabs open right now (90 something loaded in memory) and FF is using 1.1 GB (750+180+170+40 MB) of RAM.
>> It's a word of caution, you don't know what's in your drugs, it can kill you more than ever.

People aren't very selective at what they stick up their nose or in their veins. Your average cocaine end-user is the 14th person who's had their hands on that particular drug. Chances are it's been cut with who the heck knows what at every step along the way, since everyone wants to maximize their profits.

When you get a package of what-should-be drugs from China or Colombia or anywhere, who's to say what's actually in it? The FDA isn't testing that stuff. If you think it's heroin and there's even a little fentanyl mixed in it, your last use could be fatal.
$500 million per year is roughly what I get, too, but 500MWh/year is very different from 500MW, which is what I think you meant to write since the OP expresses its conclusion in MW.
Ok, fine. Betsy DeVos has no qualifications for running education, and yet she is the head of the Department of Education. The only significant things she's done in this regard are a failed voucher program and contribute large donations.

Scott Pruit is the head of the EPA, and organization he sued multiple times.

The only qualification Tillerson has is none. He was the CEO of Exxon Mobil and made large donations.

The ACA replacement plan breaks every promise Trump made and largely favors the wealthy. It's nothing more than a tax cut disguised as a health care law.

We can also get into the ties with Russia, the antagonistic relationship with the media, the conflicts of interest with ihs business, the ethics violations, the outright lies and delusions.

I suspect you're a Trump supporter so you've swallowed Trump hook, line, and sinker. Ergo this response is pointless.
Google Cloud PostgreSQL create dialog screencap
You'll be surprised how many people don't know that you can use IMAP with desktop clients. I'm not saying about the parent comment but just sharing an anecdote.
Extreme tiredness is similar to drunkeness, in most respects, to me.
This is a piece of positioning. It's not so much Blank giving any serious solution to the solution of 'no accountability' as him saying 'look at how tough and uncompromising I am.' He literally says he thinks 'creating a culture' is the same as 'I hung a sign on the door.'

Well no. A lot of management thinking (5 Whys etc) has gone into breaking down problems into micro-blockers.

If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.

'No excuses' cultures tend to, far from raising accountability, attract the kind of mediocre performers who want to be told what to do, don't want to stretch themselves (as they're frightened of failure) and are looking for the next person to throw under the bus. No thanks.
A growing trend is to mine Bitcoin in Venezuela, where the electricity is hugely subsidized, mining can pay better than something like being a doctor, and you can get food sent in from Miami (since your income is in a widely accepted currency.)

Good Econtalk on the subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/jim_epstein_on.html
I'm of two minds on this.

As many of the commenters on the original piece note, the idea of a "no excuses culture" will be familiar to anyone who's familiar with the culture of the (U.S., anyway) military, and generally speaking it works quite well there. It helps cut through B.S. and keep everyone focused on the idea that results are the thing that matter, which is important when results can literally mean the difference between life and death. And while it can sound to an outsider like a cruel standard, I personally found my exposure to it freeing -- it means not having to deal with the blame-seeking and post-hoc litigation of small mistakes that we all have to struggle with every day in other contexts. So in that respect, I'm all for it.

The thing is, though, in the context of military culture "no excuses" isn't a stand-alone principle the way it's presented here. It's embedded with a bunch of other, complimentary principles that help sand off its roughest edges.

An example would be the principle that responsibility flows uphill: leaders are responsible for failures of their units, even in cases where the failure is entirely due to mistakes by subordinates -- mistakes that they may not even have known were being made. (Because why didn't the leader know those mistakes were being made? It's their job to train their people to do the right things, and to make sure they're actually doing them.)

This compliments the "no excuses" idea, because it limits its usefulness as a tool for powerful people to push ones farther down the food chain to do unethical things. You're responsible for the things your people do, so there's a strong incentive to make sure not just that they get results, but that they do so in ways that you would be comfortable being judged by.

Without that, "no excuses" becomes a kind of blind eye standard -- "get results, I don't care how." Which can put immense pressure on the person on the receiving end of that directive to cut corners, fudge evidence and cross ethical lines if they have to in order to get those results. And if they do, the leader can then feign innocence: "I never told them to do those horrible things!" Well, yeah, but you put them in a position where the horrible things were they only things they could realistically do. You set them up to fail.

So while I applaud the general idea, I worry that in the absence of complimentary values "from now on showing up with an excuse the day the project is due will cost them their job" becomes just one more way for bad managers to push blame that should rightly go to their own incompetence down down the org chart.
Yes, both problems can be solved by the same sampling technique, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ray_tracing

In theory, upping the resolution will also remove the need for spatial anti-aliasing, though it's not efficient. Distributing rays in time feels a bit different because what you're really trying to do is integrate over an interval of time. So I'm not sure I agree that they are the same thing.
Ohhh that's great! Good luck with your projects. I think it's great for the industry to encourage smaller players to join, even if it's just to win some prize money.

Do you have any long term hope that bigger companies will join self driving competitions like yours?
Could you say some more about paid networks? Which networks are you a member of, why and how did you join them?
Huh, mine respects my hosts. That's how I set up adblocking before they brought extensions in.
Sounds great, if the boss is not somehow magically delivered from being a responsible party, and as long as the boss's reasons for not meeting commitments are not considered somehow different and therefore "not excuses", i.e., acceptable.
So I wrote something on how to price your product
...especially when you're starting out. There's a lot of contradicting wisdom and business gurus on the Internet, so I wanted to give my $0.02 and help out. Do give it a read and let me know what you think because pricing is such a vibrant topic.
One day you'll make the time.
Quite. More often it's a case of 'You really fucked this up. Here, have a $1.94m bonus.'
No, I think the OP is correct.

My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome.

In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault.

The world gives us endless obstacles between us and our goals. If you want to make excuses, there is never any shortage of them to be found. But if you want a thing to happen, at some point, you just have to decide that "The buck stops here" and not accept excuses.
I'm a Loan Officer (Mortgage Banker) with IT experience (5 years) Ran my own IT consulting firm for a year before giving it up. It was hard to do it on my own. I had 4 clients under contract doing both the Technical side and sales side.

Let me know if you would be interested in working together. I would be interested in being a salesperson.

Certainly qualified to do so, originating mortgage loans in 11 states.
If Uber had independently come up with the same ideas then there wouldn't be a case.

The real issue is that the guy "stole" the trade secrets and gave them to another company. No doubt he signed an employment contract with Google saying he couldn't do that.
Really interesting. Is it possible that you'll remove the "one build at a time" restriction at some point? I'm imagining builds across a large org some of which would need to be run in parallel. Or am I misperceiving things in one way or another? Thanks!
> But Forrest Mars had the secret, and the Mars bar was born. It swept the world, the first ever chewy bar. And very soon 600 million were being eaten every year in England alone. That is 10 per year, per person.

What was the secret?