skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand how you feel.

Keep in mind, a lot of what we do in software is either dull or not highly inspiring.

If your work is dull, you are most likely doing lots of intricate bug fixing or feature addition in constantly evolving frameworks. For instance, I recently upgraded an application written in a rapidly evolving javascript framework to use a different object model for integration and acceptance testing. There are patterns, but you can't just automate it. Imagine if the rules for english grammar, spelling, and punctuation change every six months, and your job is to go through Ulysses and Finnegans wake, line by line, and update it (some grammar rules will depend on how you changed a different sentence 8 pages ago). But here's the thing, the once you start the upgrade, the entire book is unreadable until you get it all right, and everyone who wants to read it is getting irritated that you're taking so long. If you're good at that, yep, you can make 150k or more a year at it. In fact, there's a shortage in this field at some vaguely undefined salary that can't be revealed because it's secret.

If what you do is mathematically interesting, you may be collecting privacy shattering amounts of information about people and using it to figure out better ways to get them to click on advertisements, or how to get them to stay glued to their screens. Or, you may accept that this is their life, that you're not trying to get them addicted to their screens, and that you just want those who already live this way to look at your screen rather than someone else's, kind of similar to how tobacco advertising was really about getting people to switch brands, not to start smoking, certainly not before they're old enough and haven't yet chosen a brand and/or are wise enough not to start smoking, certainly not that!

That may be grim, and there are good things to do as well. This isn't the only path to make money as a programmer. But do be aware a lot of what we do is boring and/or useless, if not actively harmful.
> protectionism

Why not? It works for so many other countries. Is it not a fundamental characteristic of government to prioritize its citizens over others? Without that, we've got a de facto world government with dissolved borders but that only benefits the rich and powerful. If we truly want to give equal rights and privileges to everyone on Earth we should make global governance explicit to make sure the poor and disenfranchised get fair representation.
I'm paying for better quality streams, not because I think the license holders get a cut of the profits.

If there was a similar legal IPTV service that got the license holders paid, I would choose that (even at a higher price point). My current alternative is Comcast which I have had nightmarish experiences with.

It looks like this is an industry that is finally maturing (with Sling TV and others) so it might be different next year.
A sweet suite if you will.
Show HN: Simple Game of Life
AFAIK a single character is 1 byte.

An A4 sheet of paper is 62370 sqmm. A good printer can print a 1 sq mm character. Therefore, at a minimum you have 62370 bytes * 2, so basically 0.12 of a megabyte, which is pretty bad.

However, say you store something on the piece of paper that uses the second from midnight as a translator, such that the contents mean something else, depending on which second in the day you read it. Let's also say this translation is not using a hash type function, but is completely arithmetic and the formula to do this can be stored on the back side of the sheet in its entirety. This would take the 0.12MB /2 (you're not using both sides now) and multiply that by every second of the day, until the next, so 86400 seconds * 0.06MB = about 5 gigabytes.

Honestly I think you could get into the zetabytes. There are other factors you could use that I haven't considered:

1. Smell of the paper

2. Electrical charge

3. Feel of the paper (who said we're not printing in three dimensions)?

4. Taste (you could use a single piece of paper formed from different types, which have unique tastes).

I think the main limitation is as you add more factors to increase the compression you increase the complexity and time in which it takes to decompress, or get the information back. I'm sure there's some sort of law on this.
Let's add in the orientation, in degrees of the piece of paper as well. Let's say you can reliably use all 360 degrees to permute the existing formula. Now you have 5 gigabytes * 360 = 1800 gigabytes. Let's just call this 2 terabytes.
Not that that does anything other than tell them you exist.

I'm working on renovating a property currently, have been for a year and a bit. It's uninhabited. There's no TV, no internet connection; just drills and saws. There isn't even running water.

I notified them that the property was unoccupied in response to their first letter, 18 months ago.

They said that they didn't believe me, and an enforcement officer would be over. One came while I was away and left a "I'll be back with bailiffs" note, and about six months ago, I had them show up on my doorstep with police in tow. The cops seemed highly bemused to have been dragged to a property which didn't even have windows at the time, never mind a bloody television. They left, he said not a problem, no more letters.

Since then I've collected about 15 more "we know you have a television!" letters from the doorstep there, and yet another note from a different visiting enforcement officer.

Based on this and a previous similar experience a decade ago, I can't help but conclude that they spend every penny they collect on arse-about-tit enforcement.

Whole system is daft.
They don't need other markets to succeed.

They don't "need" those markets but they want them. It will help to solidify China's position as the third superpower.

There are incentives for those African nations to help this happen as well. Beyond the local benefits of increased commerce, they are thinking about negotiating better rates for their natural resources than they currently receive from the west.
Sorry but if you want to function in the US, get a credit card. The rest of the stuff sucks but the lack of a CC is on you.
Most people wont buy something for money that they could have for free. Not just for utilitarian reasons. Although on one hand the logical consideration is do I value whatever I'm getting in exchange more than the money I am paying on the other hand the perception that someone is getting the software for free, adding 1% value and then charging you creates the impression that they are getting an overly large advantage out of the interaction and nobody likes this.

People would rather be objectively worse off rather than feel that they had been taken advantage of.

If we look at it from a utilitarian perspective having someone who didn't add much capture all of the commercial value seems to be pretty poor. If the feature he was adding was worthwhile I bet he could have been honest and convinced people to pay him to add it. Everyone would have benefited and paying him would have been worthwhile and necessary because while he couldn't have legally kept it closed source, he didn't have to write or release it at all.
> capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades

I don't think people realize how extremely true this is and how drastically different it will make the west look.
Congress was absolutely aghast when they found out they were being spied on by the three letter agencies, whenever they met with foreign representatives. But they don't care at all when it's applied to the general public, because they assume they'll have clout or connections to keep that at bay.

I've never heard anything come out of that above kerfuffle, presumably because there was some backroom dealing done to ensure it's not a problem for them specifically.
Or that just means that we still call the device in our pocket a "phone" for legacy reasons.
If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, VoIP etc, why not the phone app?
I see parallels between this and lobbying in the US government where lobbied officials will leave for a private sector position as a lobbyist or executive at say a $BIG_TELCO or $BIG_OIL company. Why shouldn't government professionals use their knowledge and expertise to get more leverage going into the private sector?

I think the biggest argument here is that sometimes the end goal becomes not the work that person is currently doing but the payout down the road if their actions line up in a certain way. If your goal at Google is to leave in three years and start a self driving car-company to get acqui-hired, you might for instance spend three years making lists of people to take with you or knowledge that won't violate NDAs or whatever. Though often times that might be acceptable, a.k.a. the 'you don't owe your employer anything' line of logic (which generally I agree with), sometimes it can become morally dubious if for example, it corrupts personal relationships or becomes manipulative.

And then finally you get the case of the Waymo guy who may have planned and conspired to steal information on his way out the door, ironically after having already gained multi-generational wealth.
And you realise that the browser has literally parsed the entier document object mode. If there's a semantic structure to be found, the browser knows what it is.

Again: why is cabapility-in-the-browser so impossible to provide?

Why isn't "search post" vs. "search comments" something scoped into a browser? If comments are a ... not entirely novel or unknown concept within Web design and activity, why are the abilities, say, to have browser-generated lists of authors, or search by author, or post/comment distinctions, or persistent reputations of commentators so that I can tell if @dredmorbius@news.ycombinator.com is just an asshat or a space alien cat who really knows where his towel is (and independent of whether or not dredmorbius maps to any particular known "real name")?

It's not like the question's just come up within the past 5 hours.

Really: Why is the browser so fucking limited in this regard?

https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
Remembered that I heard about this back in university but never looked into it. I had some spare time at work so I decided to quickly code it and see it in action.
https://www.wileyfox.com/the-brand

>UNRIVALLED PRIVACY AND SECURITY

>Choose precisely the data you wish to share; protect apps with additional PINs; prevent spam with Truecaller Integrated Dialler.

So their idea of privacy is privacy from everyone except the manufacturer (and "trusted" third parties)

>Of course, you can always root the phone and install custom roms. But this process takes some time and the development and compatibility with these roms is less than satisfactory.

Maybe he shouldn't have bought a device with such a small userbase?
Eh. I think it very much depends on what your problems are. If you want to stop eating fast food, but don't believe you can rely on yourself to food prep, plan, or cook, you can probably do a lot worse. Wanting more than something very straightforward from it probably isn't a recipe for success, though.
Thanks a ton for the support!! If you ever wanna connect more on it email me!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14265751
There's a criticism of Card and Kreuger that seems devastating, though.

They assessed Full Time Employment (FTE), a statistic which counts full time work as 1 'unit' and part time work as 0.5 'units'. That's really alarming, because we want to assess hours worked, and they used a metric that can't differentiate 30 hours / week from 10 hours / week. It's even worse because cutting hours while hiring more workers is a known way to reduce benefit costs and increase flexibility.

Neumark and Wascher redo the analysis using hours worked, and find a nonsignificant downward trend instead.

I don't think this settles the minimum wage question, but I've never heard a defense of Card and Krueger's result against this charge.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w5224
It's an AND not an XOR. You need both.

Because an API that provides security for free is a laughable proposition.
What is suffering if you don't have nerves to transmit pain?
The big argument I'd make against this is that, before the App Store, most people didn't buy software at all. They used their web browser, maybe their office suite, and that was it.
(which is already sold out in the online store)
Ask HN: Why Pelican or Hugo?
> ...that I always write my letters in a language they can understand, etc.

And more importantly, with legible handwriting! The FBI has limited resources and we wouldn't want them to waste time deciphering your handwriting only to learn what you've said to your lover, while a terrorist's handwriting goes unanalyzed.

I like this line of reasoning, that we must modify our behavior to enable surveillance. It switches things around from the traditional perspective, which is that we're doing extra things to increase our privacy, to instead be that we're doing extra things to decrease our privacy (using weak crypto, no crypto, adding and removing ssl here, etc).
Out curiosity: why are you avoiding node?
>> This makes no sense. The source code of what I did will still be around, and still be attributed. Dying doesn't make my work disappear into the ether.

Yes it does, unless someone keeps it online or somehow available. But again, just because it technically exists somewhere doesn't mean a user of the derived work will know how to find it, nor what parts that work are actually covered by your code prior to finding it. You are starting to sound like someone deliberately not getting the point of this.

I see a valid need for "permissive" licenses, but the legitimate reasons are rarely cited by proponents of the licenses.
2017 State of Rust Survey
I'm still a little irked that Google constantly reminds me to add a phone number as a backup for my email account. I already have google push login, OTP, as well as backup codes.

This proves that the phone can be more a liability in the face of much better technology.
Short answer: "scripting"

Longer answer: programming isn't necessarily a job where you build things. I'd argue it's more generally about communicating with and controlling computers. And computers are increasingly where our lives are spent and/or tracked.

I learned to program when I was relatively young, and I've spent my whole life witnessing people doing mundane tasks that a script could have easily automated away. It's everywhere: doctors' secretaries copying forms, grocery clerks scanning through shelves, office workers manually editing excel documents, etc. The reason these tasks remain un-automated is because programmers don't do these jobs; programming is considered a profession rather than a basic skill. I showed my friend's secretary how to easily automate a task she spent hours a week on, but she felt like the solution was foreign and rejected it. That one script could have made freed up 100s of hours a year to do other things, but she didn't get it.

In a world where business people are looking to "disrupt" a lot of jobs through automation and consolidation, I think there's room for people to help automate away parts of their own jobs and share in the wealth (with more free or recreational time). I believe this is how a lot of people will keep jobs in the next 20+ years.
I love how people are attacking those who tried Soylent and didn't like it lol. How many of you guys have invested in Soylent and now worried it's not going as you've planned?

It's 2017, and people still prefer to eat food with friends and families. Soylent sure changed the world!
You can get shared space in a WeWork for about $350/month. Includes coffee, water, great internet, and if you're like me and enjoy interacting with humans, it does the trick. This is my preferred situation these days. Plus, when you travel, you can use WeWorks around the world (for a nominal fee).

I even made a video about it: https://youtu.be/912WN4gUBCs

Edit: I'm not affiliated with WeWork (aside from being a customer). I just like their business.
Related:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory
I don't understand your question: why would they not?

The only reason against it I can see is a short term one: if PR were seen to add a Party X congressional delegation, Party Y might try to block statehood.
I have personally seen atleast 20 iphones (family and friends) progressively slow down over each iOS update.

I'd challenge anyone to take an iPhone 4S, for example, with iOS 5 vs iOS 9 and tell me they're equally fast. Whats worse is Apple intentionally blocks you from going back to the 'factory state' on a device you paid hundreds of dollars on.

>When iPad sales slump, one explanation is often that everybody's old iPad is still working great and people have no reason to upgrade.

Yes, that sounds about right.
It varies greatly, and the figures generated by third party studies are almost always lower than the self-reported figures. This article [1] from 2012 reports per-drug pharmaceutical R&D spend ranging from $3.7B to $11.8B. It's not the most transparent cost analysis.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-tr...
The problem with SS7 is that trust is assumed. Mobile carriers that have roaming agreements will have either a direct link or via a hub. So what happened here was the network of the foreign roaming partner was used to redirect the SMS traffic on the victims carriers. Would not be surprised if it was an inside job.

With ss7 you can do fun things like query the last location update/logged in base station for a mobile phone, due to roaming carrier x can query for customers on carrier y in another country. If you link up to one of the roaming hubs you can pretty much get the location of anyone with a mobile phone. Feature phones included.
I agree with you.

For everyone else, I just want to add that there is a place for things like Soylent, beyond the marketing. We're most likely not going to be able to continue our current method producing food cheaply. I could be wrong but things like Soylent will probably be the future that mitigates this issue for a lot of people.
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordonline/videos
That's how things used to be in the UK.

UK copyright law was aimed at counterfeiters (seedy Joe who sells knock-off T-Shirts, CDs and tapes down the local pub).

Now with the Digital Economy amendments, we have an extremely vague mention of "violating copyright".

Are you violating copyright when consuming, or just when distributing? The act does not say.

I expect there will be a few test cases to work this out but in the meantime, the press is having a field-day by promoting the worst case scenario for even minor infractions.
Peter Watts' Blindsight is a great read that explores this topic. In short, an alien space-faring species is discovered that seems extraordinarily intelligent, but not conscious. There's a couple more twists exploring consciousness I don't want to give away but it really makes one wonder - what if high intelligence doesn't require self-awareness?
The prizes seem pretty low to me: $15k top prize for several months of work requiring a skillset that can easily land a 150k-plus-per-year salary. And no guarantees you get anything for your efforts.

Edit: on the other hand graduate students and postdocs are notoriously underpaid and often have a lot of freedom in how they spend their summer time. I guess that is the target competitor pool?
Same reaction to the taste here, and same reaction to the flavour packs. I threw my flavour packs away.
As a 3rd party observer with no stake in either the US or China, I wonder how the USA would react if China was the #1 in the world economically, and exporting Facebook, Boeing, etc. I imagine we'd see some American protectionism.
Last July, NIST called out SMS 2FA as insecure

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/nist_is_no_lo...

Second comment: SMS should have been removed long time ago considering the SS7 problems. Better to use a secure token.

Is the bank taking responsibility and covering the loss for their customers?
Edit: I had an idea for an improved sms 2fa, but comments gave persuasive reasons why google authenticator was better. Thanks for the comments!

Idea basically is a 3FA system where bank sends you a one-time 6-digit number. You then have to translate that number using a user-seeded cryptographic hash function. This secret function is your third factor which translates the received SMS code into the value you'll input at login.

Analysis: Security would increase; but ease-of-use would decrease, especially in regards to how a user would reset their password if they lose both their password and their program that calculates the cryptographic hash.
Extracting value through code is not an inherently positive moral exercise.

It may improve the world. From my perspective code that is built to extract value eventually attempts vendor lockin to create a long term revenue stream.
Latest commit ac65174 on 18 Oct 2016. Is it still maintained?
>> I'm not a lawyer, that byline seems to be misleading. Property owners ARE innocent until proven guilty. In civil asset forfeiture the PROPERTY is charged with a crime, not the owner.

When the property is seized from the owner and sold at auction I don't think the property has been punished in any way, but the owner has been subject to seizure of property without cause. We agree, it's absurd.
we should forbid click bait titles on HN, it's an insult to the audience's intelligence

Clickbait title are so common we think they're normal titles.... Here's how he did it: you create a craving for an answer then you offer a solution for that craving. "here’s how it was" ==> that's the trick
Also "here’s how" should never be used in a title, we all know that the title's subject IS what you're going to talk about.
a pre-click bait era title would have sounded like: Learnings after using Haskell for 5 years
Ah, that makes sense. But it still seems mostly benign to me: it accelerates the transition from non-obvious demand to purchasable product, thus doing better on the "I wish this product existed" metric.

I can see how it's effectively leeching off the efforts of those entrepreneurs who are trying to get pre-orders, but, as long as they haven't started building the product, it's a relatively small amount of work lost, in setting up a kickstarter page.
How WhatsApp Works Without Internet
SMS as a 2nd factor represents an engineering trade-off. Prior to its introduction, the only people who had access to 2FA were people who got $60 tokens from RSA. It blocks against certain classes of attacks, but is vulnerable to others (like malicious or insecure carriers).

Now, Apple users can use their fingerprint as a 2nd factor (e.g. for Apple Pay), but fingerprints have the unfortunate property of not being rotatable if compromised.

And there are FIDO U2F security keys, but you still need to issue $18-$50 tokens to each user, and you need host application support.
You dont even need to buy a $18 hardware token. You can use a software TOTP token (ie. google authenticator)
The people who make argument like yours simple sound like "ignore problem, everything will be fine".

A company that does not move to cheaper labour will go bankroupt and a new all China company will simply take over. So you have unemployed anyway.

The typical solution to this is that you start walling of these industries with tarrifs or to subsides.

What you eventually have is a huge sector of the US economy that lives of the higher prices and/or taxes of the rest of the population while everybody has lower standards of living.

Once China started institutional reforms there were only two possibilites, these jobs were payed for by other americans or they go away.

Also, most americans only had these jobs because the US was able to export lots of these manufactures.