skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is definitely very scary and I didn't mean to say that I would try to outsmart them because as you say, they do this for a living and I'm not a professional liar/spy.

However I think my case still applies in the sense that I would expect a lot of people to also buy a burner phone for a vacation trip just as a way to avoid loss in the event of a robbery, instead of as a way to try to outsmart border agents, so I would hope I would not be alone in giving them this reason as to why my phone is clean.

You raise a good argument though. If I'm already in secondary inspection I guess anything you give them or fail to give them will in any case be used against me, basically depending on the mood of the agent at that time.

I guess an interesting statistic to know (not that government would publish it willingly...) would be how many people that went through secondary inspection where denied access and how many of them were not.
I'd love those protections personally, but I have no such luck.
Show HN: Download YouTube movies directly to iPhone (with no extra app required)
More gravy for Initech!
Inside Nest's “smart home” data pipeline
Far from economic suicide. Based on the trade deficit [1], I doubt the EU can survive giving the UK a punitive trade deal. This is a great opportunity for the UK [2].

[1] https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/Trade%20deficit%20and%20s...

[2] https://econsnapshot.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/gdp-us-eu17...
Your comment is being downvoted for a number of reasons. I'd like to use it as soapbox for a moment.

One reason I left academia was the constant cycle of grant funding proposals followed by a flurry of publication followed by more proposals. These proposals often carried some requirement for language that, in my view, was a direct response to a certain kind of taxpayer, in order to justify on some tangible level the "need" for the research to be funded.

Basic science, and theoretical research alike deserve far more funding than they get. That a significant portion of our country views the funding model we have for scientific discovery as "beg[ging]" is one of the greatest failures we have as a culture.
Announcing Free and Automated SSL Certs
None of what you just said indicates that a better lock will make you a bigger target.

I think you're also drastically overestimating the resolve of locker thieves. No one's cutting locker hinges or dressing as a handyman as an excuse to bring in a rotary tool. It's not a bank heist. Locker thieves are casual thieves. I would imagine that the most common attack mode is to just shim cheap locks open. If thieves did begin destroying lockers, the gym would probably actually do something.

And obviously, yes, a guard is the ideal solution. I don't think I've ever been to a gym that did this, though. It's not worth it to them.
The point of all of this is social control by corporations and their owners and managers over the culture. Corporations hold most of the money and they only give it to people who distribute money according to what the owners and managers of the corporations feel is worthy because they do what the corporations want or more specifically what their owners and managers want. That locks out any sub-culture outside of social control and relegates them to lower/poorer levels of society, economically. That might control bad things, but it might also censor things which are not mainstream global corporate culture.
Class action.
Or, perhaps, it simply goes to show that finding people bright enough to outwit security and still being willing to blow themselves up is HARD.
What are you going to do, put a business in jail?

Hold the people who have made you promises and then failed to follow through responsible. Aka, your politicians. They are your backstop. What makes Goldman, GSK, Haliburton, or any of the other shady, scummy businesses out there responsible to you? They are responsible to the law on the books.

Our politicians are supposed to prevent business from screwing our society. Stop giving them an out. They failed, time and time again.
When you're mainly working with 32bit CPUs (or less) and the year of overflow is almost 50 years in the future I can forgive them for considering it was good enough at the time. Maybe they thought that by the time it was going to be an issue somebody else would've replaced it?

It's in the same bag as IPv4 "only" supporting a few billion addresses, hindsight is always 20/20...

Moreover even 64bit timestamps wouldn't be good enough for certain applications that require sub-second precision. PTP (the precision time protocol) for instance uses 96bit timestamps to get nanosecond granularity. You always have to compromise one way or an other.
Pentaquarks are also theorized to exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaquark
Building maintainable Angular 2 applications
While I am against Intuits efforts, what astounds me most is how LITTLE money is spent lobbying. A few million over a year is peanuts compared to the broader market opportunity. And the implication that Congresspeople are bought off by sums as low as "$32,000" since 2008 seems unlikely. Intuit and H&R may simply contribute to those they know already support their agenda.
A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo (2010)
> It seems like we're getting closer and closer to being in a situation where people who can should avoid going to the US at all.

For me already well past that point, no way would I travel to the US for any reason, work or pleasure.

I'm from the UK and I'm seriously contemplating getting out of here while the going is good as well.
Added the blog post link to the index page. Thank you for the suggestion!
10 Most Typical Events People Count Down to but Why?
I'm as cynical as the next person, but seriously, how successful could they be approaching legislators with the idea "Make the tax code even more needlessly complicated to support our business"? Short of outright bribery I don't see any benefit to a politician for supporting something like that.

There are a lot of complications in the tax code because with 300 million people there are a lot of special cases to account for. Adding additional complexity just for the sake of complexity seems like a non-starter.
It's not a casual factual comment - it is a guess on my end, clearly stated but you left that out in your quotation.
and, if we're lucky, Half Life 3?
Wideness of niche.

Tardigraves and some lichens can live most anywhere it seems. And then life forms get more advanced and their range of terrain generally implodes in size, even migrating birds usually don't cover more than one continent at any given time.

Then suddenly despite being just another big ole thing you'd expect humans to be trapped in a dinky little African savannah by a river, but no, here we are under the ocean and covering the planet pole to pole and under ground and in the air and in space. If its not possible to live there we import stuff and live there anyway like Antarctica or space.

No species has a range as large as us, not even close, other than little microscopic tardigrave critters, and maybe rats. And our internal and external parasites I guess. You don't see alligators in the arctic or polar bears in jungles or whales in space stations or dolphins in grasslands.

There is one interesting bean counter type trait where you do something with the ratio of brain mass to body mass and add a correction factor for total mass, and we kick butt on that one.

Another one is information bandwidth, we can transmit a couple K visually per second via reading and a good fraction of a K per second via speech and no other animals even remotely come close. A human toddler transfers orders of magnitude more data before kindergarten than the entire lifespan of most animals, and as far as humans go toddlers rate as pretty dumb.

I'm sure if ants brains were not so small in an absolute sense and if they could communicate as many bits per second as humans can they'd be teaching us a thing or two about math and physics, but ...
Meh, we'll just redefine time_t as (signed) seconds since 2000 or so and subtract 30 years in seconds from all timestamps ... ;-)
How DevOps Can Embrace Machine Learning Today
Hide the (ACF) WordPress Plugin Settings Unless User Is an Admin
If anything I imagine guys like Ritchie never thought we'd be using a Unix-based system so far in the future. Back then OS's were a dime a dozen and the future far too cloudy to predict in regards to computing.

>but I think a 68-year horizon is more than most systems being built today have.

That's a lot of time, especially if we see Linux breaking into the mainstream about 1995 or so. That's 43 years to worry about this. Meanwhile, we saw Microsoft break into the mainstream at around 1985, which only gave us 15 years to worry about Y2K.
After so many years, I've learned to not click on the maximize button at all. Just double click the title bar and it will fill the screen.
Couldn't you engineer the little core to take the fat instruction it can't process and instead do many small instructions to get the same end result? I am specifically thinking of AVX here, and it seems like it would work.. but perhaps there are other instructions that would not be so easy to unroll.
> I mean, I feel like we should've seen this coming

I would say so, considering it's not their first time doing this:

https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mil...
Decent price for the non-Pro model. Might get one.
That's my struggle with this - it feels like living in constant fear of something going awry and a bout of extreme anxiety every 6-12 months.

I'll take my impostor syndrome and constant medium-high anxiety thank you very much.
A lot of what H&R Block sells is experience in filing taxes, not just knowledge of how to do it.

I have complex multi-country taxes to file (Canadian living in Canada, but with some income the IRS says is American income). H&R Block have a guy who has handled this exact kind of tax filing hundreds of times before. If I make any mis-steps in filing, the IRS is going to demand I give them thousands of dollars.

I'm not paying H&R Block $600 (CAD) to fill out a piece of paper, I'm paying for the time and experience of someone who won't screw it up and knows how to fight back if the IRS has a problem with it.

The root cause is that our tax system is overly complex and it doesn't need to be. We need to address that rather than build software to help make the complexity continue.
Have you ever actually done your taxes by hand? The 1040EZ is supposed to take 7 hours. Back when I did paper taxes and couldn't do the 1040EZ, the 1040 long form took me about 20 hours to do, slightly beating the IRS estimate of 22 hours.

The government has all the information about me. Why do I have to gather it all up and tell them again?

A friend in Finland tells me it takes him 10 minutes to approve the tax documents prepared for him on a Finnish government website. Why can't we do the same here?
Hubble’s glittering frisbee galaxy
I'm author of that tool. It allows iPhone/iPad users to convert list of YouTube URLs to RSS feed, compatible with native Podcasts application.

This feed works fine also with other podcast/videocast apps on any iOS/Android device (tested on few Android apps also).

All videos added to that feed (feeds are editable) are automatically downloaded to phone/tablet.

By default, 360p video is downloaded, but user is able to change quality to 720p (if available) on 'edit feed' page.

My future goals:

- give users ability to personalize cover+description of newly created feed, then this feed could be sent to 'Apple Podcasts Connect' as new videocast

- support Youtube playlists/channels, not only direct video links

- support other video hosting services (like vimeo etc)
You've got it backwards. This update streamlines the product line, along the lines of what Steve Jobs did.

There are now 3 iPads: the iPad, the iPad Pro, and the iPad Mini. The differences are as clear as they ever have been for Mac lines.
If this was an attempt to avoid large batteries used in attacks, you could just bring 10 cellphones with you, or have 10 people on the plane bring several cellphones or something. This is about bureaucrats covering their asses, not actual safety.

If you think this is somehow a good idea, require your government to mandate the airlines to provide a reliable, free method to store your electronics that does not involve paying to check a bag (because you don't have to pay to bring a laptop today, so there is no reason to gouge customers now). If you don't demand specific changes they will think you're a push-over and never change the policies.
What's going to happen to all of the nice employees maintaining HR Block and Intuit's tax filling products?

Should they go become used car salespeople and McDonald's fry cooks?
I've been thinking about the same since 9/11. While they comb through small liquids and nail files in all cabin baggage I can walk into a plane with several Ampere-hours of tightly packed energy in my backpack.
I've had every MBP (or equivalent) Apple has made going back to the Titanium Powerbook. I was worried after all the noise about the 2016-2017 rMBP (the new thin one). I bought the non-Touchbar version; it's the best Macbook I've ever owned. But then, I've said that about basically every Apple laptop I've bought.

I do not doubt "staingate" is a real thing. What I doubt is that it's a harbinger of declining quality. There have always been things like this on every Apple product. The first generation of Intel Macbooks had (frankly: gross) case discoloration problems so bad an aftermarket sprang up for products to cover the parts of the case your hands rest on.
Would it be less gross if she were not a woman? When other CEOs make decisions that ruin a company, they get critized too. Steve Balmer was a frequent object of ridicule. Other women execs such as Sandberg aren't treated badly -- the enthusiasm for tearing Mayer down comes from the fact that she was lauded as some kind of exceptional executive when she was really just a lot of high minded talk backed by questionable decisions and a slew of pointless acquisitions at ridiculous prices. She was positioned as some kind of ultra-woman when she was just mediocre at best (within the Yahoo context.) In my mind, Mayer earned every cent of criticism and someone like Sandberg has earned every cent of praise.
It's not really that wow. There's always a lot of judgment involved in admission of visitors. It's never been an entirely fair and transparent process.
> Just a week or two ago I had a prospective company tell me that, in order to hire me, I would need to sell them the entirety of my personally-developed IP and dissolve my interest in my own company.

That's unusually awful for an employment agreement. Most employment agreements claim everything developed by the employee on company time and resources, and many claim everything developed while employed, but this is the first time I've ever heard of an employment agreement demanding all past work. Good call on just leaving; not worth even negotiating with a company that tries to pull a stunt like that.
I've always gotten the black ones because I find it makes video look better, but I was considering a white for my next phone because if you use a black one as a GPS mounted on a car window, the sun on the phone will cause the phone to overheat and shutdown. I guess I won't now...
The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
The one and only time I have ever checked a laptop in my bag, it was destroyed by the TSA. My bag was opened and my carefully packed and padded laptop was placed on top of my clothes in my soft-sided luggage with a note on top saying my bag had been inspect. The screen was completely smashed upon arrival.

What are my alternatives now? Can I overnight my laptop via FedEx or something?
If they did it from everywhere at once too many people would complain and they would remove the restriction. This way it can be incrementally added everywhere with less push back.
Wow, that's really nice. At Google, they basically told us, "There's the standard IP rule where you own anything that you work on in your own time that doesn't compete with our business... Of course we pretty much do everything, so good luck finding something that we can't claim."
Searching for an Existing Ecommerce Site (Secure) for Partnership
Hi.

Not sure if this is appropriate for "news.ycombinator" but it might generate comments useful for others.

We're working on a project with a normal customer/ecommerce need. However, the project isn't funded, so there's no real $$$ for a serious secure/back operations to deal with the payment issues. [The site won't go live unless a minimum of 4-5K (paying) customers commit]

Ideally, we'd like to find an existing commerce operation, with an already secure/established process for handling payment/security/etc that we could pay a fee to, to then hook into their operations.

So, any thoughts from the group on how a startup can/should handle this kind of scenario??

Searching for an Existing Ecommerce Site (Secure) for Partnership!

Thanks!

(ps. and again if this isn't appropriate for ycombinator, our apologies!)
Starts around the 18min mark in the video.
The leader is good. The leader is great!
This article gives some credence to the idea it may be a protectionist tactic since it does seems to address any threat: https://skift.com/2016/06/28/u-s-airlines-set-to-lose-major-...
It is. You can find a list of crashes because of a fire in the cargo hold here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

Search for "cargo hold" to see the number of planes that have gone down due to an event in the cargo hold.

This ban is simple, it is to hurt DBX air carriers which EU and US air carriers have complained about for a long time. DBX based air carriers have newer planes, better service, better food, and shorter legs. This eats into first class and business class revenue of major EU and US carriers.
Wow, that's...really something. I do have a bit of a quibble with one of your assertions though:

>It would not even be possible to ascertain the original authorship of most form contracts that cross my desk.

I highly doubt this statement is true if given Documents X, Y, Z et al are given stringent, professional forensic examination for remnants of markings. Maybe not every single one, sure, but enough in a Universe A of legal examination would, I firmly believe, uncover quite a bit more than meets the eye.

My point is that what you've noted is not an "IP-free zone" it's simply an un-tapped market for "fiscal compensation by way of derivative IP torts" - once the financial motivation is strong enough and there's evidence that can be garnered to show willful infringement...IP rights don't just go away because nobody is pursuing them.

If the Prenda Law fiasco can serve as a Gutter Dweller example of IP enforcement, this is a much more clear cut, deep pocketed scenario that should give every single law firm pause. As much as I'm entertained by cannibalistic feeding frenzy behavior, Law Firm Representing Law Firm(s) vs. Law Firm(s), would, no doubt, be a basic drain on an already over-burdened legal system.

TL, DR: Never underestimate the temptation for tort cases when there's a large pile of money at stake
For affected IBMers... find a new remote gig!

https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job
Whether you believe in the Citizen's United decision or not, companies are still groups of people. People, alone or in groups, have the right to speak, and to petition the government.
Good Vibes ChillOut Mix
I really don't understand why certain airlines (almost exclusively Middle Eastern based ones) are affected but American and other airlines are not. If laptops are a risk, what makes someone stop them from taking a United flight vs Emirates?
I believe the cheaper, albeit slow performing Android phones are revolutionizing the developing countries. People who could never afford a shiny Apple phone and its ecosystem are thriving due to Android.
Free web development courses part 2 – Source: Udemy.com
I'm sorry to read it. My condolences. It will likely take a long time for those emotional events to slowly abate. Dogs are the best
To find diamonds or to scan workers for smuggled diamonds?
IBM ran 128 bit virtualized architecture on top of 1988 chips.
No, you make it time_t (unsigned) seconds since the epoch. That pushes the problem out 70+ years and doesn't break any binary APIs.
I fully understand the distinction, and I think you're the one conflating two different things. How exactly am I supposed to interpret "wrong" in your original comment? Without context, that usually refers to morality, not legality. Furthermore, you used the word "wrong" a second time to describe elected officials going against the public interest, which is legally right. I see no way to read your original comment other than saying it is not morally wrong for businesses to lobby in this way.

But then afterwards you concentrate entirely on legality. If you just wanted to say that it's legal for businesses to lobby like this, I don't disagree, but I don't see how that position is described in the original comment, nor do I even understand the point of making that comment, since I think we all already know that it's legal.

If you did indeed mean to say that it's legally allowed but morally reprehensible, then we are indeed in agreement and I don't think there's much to say here.
What Is SRE and What Do You Need to Become One
Up in Canada this little company made SimpleTax. Our family + friends used to use other paid solutions, but this was actually free. Great to see people helping other people =D

https://simpletax.ca/
I personally have a utility installed that adds a Windows-esque "snap" functions, including maximization. That green button's behavior is a usability nightmare.
Having your Pi and eating it – talking maths with Eugenia Cheng
Not in the same way. There was no experimental evidence for the Higgs field before the Higgs was observed. These new particles arise naturally out of parts of the Standard Model that are already experimentally tested.
Filing is always free. Online filing costs money, but you can always mail in a paper form. If everyone did that, the IRS would pretty quickly want to make sure people can file online easily and cheaply.

Stop using HR Block and Turbo Tax. For most people, taxes are not very complicated. The IRS publishes detailed instructions that literally explain what every box means and what should go in it for every form. Just read it, fill it out, mail it in.
Yes, you have to get new clients, that is always a risk. Proper structuring of payment schedules and IP transfer helps with invoice payment. Also, having long-term relationships with clients also helps there. I would hope you carry some sort of insurance in the case of life taking a sudden left-turn, but perhaps you don't. Ideally you financially plan enough to cover something like that.

I've been a contractor as several points in my life and loved it mostly. It is sometimes stressful making sure everything is on track, but the freedom of not depending on any one client and the difference in income that allowed me to work less If I wanted was great.

I currently work as an employee and also like the benefits it provides and the people I work with. But, I also know that ultimately companies now days have very little loyalty so my mind never lets me think of being an employee as some absolute guarantee of stability.
Using a 64 bit timestamp will only move the problem 292 million years forward, so probably the best solution is to use a variable length field.
I think the threat of domestic terrorism on US flights is probably overestimated (and I think a lot of domestic TSA is bordering on security theater), but I don't feel the same flying internationally. I trust everyone far, far, far less; and for me, I consider the extra security layers a welcome addition.
I think alt clicking on the maximise button "maximises"
There were fortunes made in 1999 doing similar work.
A month's severance is a lot cheaper than paying for unemployment benefits.