skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
at what point is it safe to say the best option for Uber is to burn to the ground and re-build?
Attention seeking behavior. Maybe a clever teacher asking students to create fake news to see how easy people are to fool. Boredom.

See -- Programmer Automates His Job Away for 6 years and then forgets how to program.

I don't think any individual aspect of the story is unbelievable, but when taken as a whole it stretches credulity.
I have been using nvAlt[1] for the past 3-4 years. It is well designed and it is easy to use. All the notes are in text format and can be synced via dropbox (so you can pick up these notes in mobile).

I use Evernote[2] to store notes with images.

[1]: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/.
[2]: http://evernote.com/
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by going on about downvotes. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html) and follow them when commenting here.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14507266 and marked it off-topic.
In our locality, unfortunately, Comcast is a monopoly. Is there a way to complain about ISPs (about Comcast) to FCC or another regulator?
Firing pins are pretty easy to swap out, though. Easy enough that this could be used to tamper with evidence or even frame someone. It doesn't really seem like a great idea.
It's either set the narrative based on evidence available or go off thousands of years of fables.

I'm fine with resetting the narrative as we learn vs making bad assumptions.
LinkedIn has never been a credible source for anything.
New method to rapidly deploy newly discovered bacterial CRISPR (Merck/May 2017)
Probably the physics model my brain uses to help me pick things up, walk around, and so on.
So maybe we should have bumper cars that only move 25 miles per hour, and never stop except at their destination?

I could actually see that working in big cities.
In the phrase "relative safety", the word "relative" is significant. An exchange high above ground level is less dangerous than one at or near it, because, as the article we here discuss points out, the former doesn't produce the kind of long-lasting fallout the latter does. But it would be a real stretch, I think a longer one than supported by the facts or any contentions made here, to argue anyone is actually trying to say there's such a thing as a nuclear exchange that is harmless.

As for looking to fund a desperately necessary overhaul of the US nuclear arsenal, our current president is not the first to do so; the program under discussion originates with his immediate predecessor, as the New York Times recently discussed: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/us/politics/trump-nuclear...
I just got hired on as developer #1 at a 150 year old company that has until me depended entirely on outsourced developers (at great expense and you can imagine what the codebase looks like).

I'm the first developer but not the last so one of the things I'll be doing will be setting the engineering standards going forwards, I might drop you an email.
I'm not sure I get what you mean from the timestamped section. It looks like either simple to make footage or real footage where they've dubbed over.

I think there are possibly only two actors, and only one for the vast majority of it. I think all the footage is just real clips, which is why it looks realistic.

edit - I jumped to a random section and it has Fallon talking about Russia making a situation more dangerous, but it's a real clip as there's coverage back in 2015 of him saying these things: http://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-10-08/fallon-russia-is-m...
Previous discussion (718 points, 262 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476421
The Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment has published their findings on each site's environmental concerns.

https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/titan-1-missile-compl...

Edit: Of course there's still risk. Plenty of obvious asbestos about as well as physically precarious flooring, deep standing water, angry farmers that don't want you on their land, etc. Lots of fun though :)
> Serious question: are there any tools that can scan a full website for unused code and unused CSS?

From my limited knowledge of your situation this seems like the last move to take. I would try the following, in roughly this order:

Serve libraries (Angular, jQuery) from a CDN to at least have the chance of hitting a browser cache on a visitor's first encounter with your site.

Use a minifier to strip all the unnecessary comments and whitespace (in addition to other benefits from minimization).

use gzip to compress the remaining minified files.

Those alone will likely significantly impact your load times. At this point, the remaining dead code should be relatively small and you can look into tools for surgically removing it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.

It doesn't make any sense that anyone would put a junior on his first day even close to a production environment, much less using a tool that can delete a database that btw you can't restore from a backup.

IMO this is either a false story, or this was done on purpose.

What if the company wanted to get rid of some data that would put the company in a difficult position in front of its shareholders or even the law? What if the lost data could prove that the CTO had made some other much bigger mistake that allowed hackers to get private information?

We will never know of course.
Battery storage: The next disruptive technology in the power sector
> Imagine for a moment being assigned to take a risk of developing a mortal condition.

What else would you call warfare?
Any thoughts? Found it through an announcement at Sigma-Aldritch [1]. As a side comment, Merck went on quite a aquisiation rampage recently.

[1] http://www.merckmillipore.com/DE/de/20170512_225124?ReferrerURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sigmaaldrich.com%2Funited-kingdom.html
The executive in question, Eric Alexander, the president of business in the Asia Pacific, then showed the medical records to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and SVP Emil Michael.

At least the article makes it clear who needs to be fired next -- for both not immediately firing Alexander for gross misconduct, and (just as egregiously) not adamantly refusing to even consider looking at a rape victim's private medicate records in the first place.

Nevermind the legal and criminal implications of that latter misstep; this is a matter of pure and simple human dignity.
Did anyone offer him/her a new job? Or pro bono legal help?
> but Apple seems to have access to the encryption keys

Of course, no one claimed that iCould data was E2E. They also need to decrypt the data in order to serve it to their users.
The oldest Homo sapiens: Fossils found in Morocco date back 300,000 years
There's nothing wrong with preferences. It's why I don't care much for Debian-based distributions (Debian/Ubuntu make some weird choices, IMO, some for historical reasons and some because it's just the way they do things). Although I will counter that Arch is substantially less "manual work" than certain other popular distros, like Gentoo! Likewise, much of the Arch wiki centers on third party software--and sometimes more advanced installation options like mdadm, etc. (Although I will concede that the latter is much easier to configure under Ubuntu during installation; the difference is that under more manual distros, you're essentially forced to learn the tool at an earlier stage.) To be honest, I don't think it's a matter of "better" options for learning/manual installations as much as there are different options (Gentoo is more manual; LFS would be "better" in terms of understanding ground-up distributions).

Please don't take me as being contrarian! I just happen to really like Arch. I'm also fond of Gentoo and FreeBSD, and begrudgingly use Ubuntu for situations its better suited for, because sometimes you don't want to upgrade to the newest version of a package (Arch's recent OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.2.x can cause some issues).

Anyway, I appreciate your opinions! Everyone's different and has different preferences for different reasons (past experiences, patience levels, familiarity, etc)--and that's a good thing! Arch certainly isn't for everyone, but I think it fills the rolling release without long build cycles (with just the defaults, please) niche quite well. However, I still recommend Ubuntu for newcomers or for people who simply don't want the headache!
This is pure nonsense. WebAssembly is no more obscure than asm.js or minified JavaScript. "Binary" versus Unicode-enabled minified and transformed "source" is the same thing.

You can get text out of WebAssembly as well as you can get text out of minified JS.

Further, users don't care about this. It's literally just developers. Open Source / Free Software is a super valid discussion to have, but I highly doubt any non-technical user cares.

Amusingly, pcwalton brought up this discussion recently:
https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/872151997473972224
Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story
As a very general answer, JS webapps will typically be slower on the first load because they require an extra step to show the content.

Subsequently loaded-pages or resources can be significantly faster in webapps however, as they can request (or generate) exactly what they need.

The problem of slow initial loads is being addressed by tools like React by offering server-generated pages on the first load, and then transitioning to JS-based loading for subsequent loads. This offers the best of both worlds.
I think the GP means the OP's father survived long enough for OP to be born, so from OP's perspective it looks like his father had good genetics. The selection bias is that none of the children of those who died early would exist, so only the children of those lucky enough to live a long time could say their parents must've had good genes.
Tslint-config-prettier: use prettier with tslint with no conflicts
The problem is, it exists. I've seen it plenty of times. It's particularly bad for women in male dominated fields. They have to be aware of it and on the look out for it so they can deal with it. If you continually assume the good in people, when sexism is a common occurrence, you get fucked over. Repeatedly.

There's a female engineer on my team. She started at roughly the same time as a male engineer. Similar levels of experience in the past. Both are quite good. But she's better, especially in several specialties. They sit near each other - and you have to walk past her to get to him. I see people day in and day out walk right past her to ask him about the things that she is a subject matter expert on, that he is not. People that don't have a real background with either of them, where it is widely know that she specializes in this specific thing. It's constant. I'm the most tenured engineer on the team, so people come to me frequently for things - I know it's because of my tenure. But she knows more than I do in these areas, so I refer people to her on the more in depth things. And a good portion of them then walk right past her, and instead ask the male engineer. She also constantly gets dinged by people for giving short and to the point answers - something that he and I do not have a problem with, despite having the same general style of answering questions.

Should she chalk this up to something else? Assume that all of these repeat occurrences are due to some other root cause? Her technical chops are not in question by anyone that actually works with the tech involved - she's undisputedly talented there and has been vital in cracking several major problems. Yet this keeps happening.

Should she ignore it? Should the rest of the team? Or should it be acknowledged and talked about, so people that are (almost certainly) doing this unconsciously can reflect on it and try to modify their behavior to be less biased?

And this is just one of many examples I've witnessed over the past decade+. Sexism colored glasses for women are a basic necessity if you have any interest in trying to get what you deserve.
At this point (and really, long before this point) any ethical engineer would have left this company. Those remaining are tacitly condoning this type of activity, and should take a long hard look at their priorities.
Worst is, the executive should have been fired on the spot as his actions were not only unethical but possibly illegal. Instead he paraded them around for at least a year sharing them, which makes the whole executive tier basically complicit. It's practically impossible for Uber's core to be fixed at this point it seems.
Ask HN: What keeps you up at night? What do you worry about?
Just generally speaking, what do you worry about the most? Family's safety & health, finances, work, etc.?
> This is, of course, quite OT, but what is it with the trend towards dark color schemes?

IIRC, on emissive displays (e.g., pretty much every computer display), light on dark produces more eyestrain with extended use, especially in dark environments.

This is less pronounced with reflective media like paper (at least, in most practical scenarios; you could contrive lighting scenarios with a similar problems, but they don't usually occur accidentally.)

OTOH, Pharo has a very good light theme, even if it's not the default.
There's a fascinating book called "How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb" [1] that delves into exactly how they made all of those photos, and movies. It's really not as simple as one might think.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Photograph-Atomic-Bomb-Peter-Kuran/dp...
Not Everything Needs to Scale
For one thing, the reason that options/shares aren't traded widely in earlier stage companies is regulatory. If you have too many investors, or something, you have more regulatory overhead to deal with. Small companies don't want to have 5000 investors for this reason. However, I personally know people who have sold their vested options at a significant profit in very early startups (just after an A round).

Options are worth more than cash IF AND ONLY IF you have insights and evidence that the company is going to outperform the current valuation of the company, after being adjusted for risk.

For example, if you see that it is the best team ever assembled. Most startup CEOs says their team is the best ever, but if you interact with the team for a bit and see it is probably true.

For example, if the company needs you really badly, and they are able to give you options based on a valuation that based on current information is a huge underestimate. For example, a drug company that found out yesterday that they got their FDA approval for their new blockbuster drug, and for some reason they need to hire you very badly. This is iffy because they are probably not able to offer any options if they are already far along on being acquired.

Overall, there are certainly startups where the signals would be available to someone thinking of working there such that they would be able to determine if it is likely that options have a promising expected value. I think this is going to be a very low % of startups where that expected value is even remotely close to what you would get at a large company, and very very few where it would be much higher.
Misclassifying employees as contractors: why the risks outweigh the savings
If this doesn't convince those doubtful about the depth of depravity among Uber's top leadership, I honestly don't know what will. Can you imagine the scene? Kalanick and pals in some luxurious office, discussing strategy over the medical records of a rape victim?
Eric Alexander, the president of business in the Asia Pacific, then showed the medical records to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and SVP Emil Michael

In short, it's a tone-at-the-top problem, these things are always tone-at-the-top problems. Why is upper leadership still there?
Facebook is planning to move WhatsApp off IBM's public cloud
You assume a great deal of basic competence on the part of everyone at a relatively high level in our industry!
It's another data point, and must be assessed relative to other data points. Some details of the origin of our species are better known than others, and thus some are more or less likely to be 'reset'. The evidence for African origins, for example, are overwhelming and will not likely be 'reset'. The precise dating of the origin of homo sapiens - if that is even possible - is still in flux. This is the scientific process - science as error correction mechanism.

Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade is a great book reviewing the recent science on our species from about 100k year ago to about 10k years ago. It provides the overview and context that you dont get from a NYT article such as this.
>Externally enforced behavior is not "morals".

That's a new definition then, because for millennia morals were derived from exactly those "externally enforced behaviours": from religion, society, culture, etc.

The personal codes someones makes on their own can be anything and everything ("shit on everybody to get rich" is a perfectly valid code that millions use). Nobody would call that "moral" though -- because precisely morals are those beyond the individual whims (though whether an individual follows them its their choice).

Personal principles someone follows are only fit to be called morals if they follow an extended, external, moral code. Which might change over time, and be culture-specific, but it's not "whatever I say".
Right - not just an engineer-agent of the marketing dept
I'd say likely never. The company should be dismantled in its current state, to be sure, but very little is worth keeping for a rebuild.

The kind of corporate culture that encourages and permits this and other scandals, that Uber cannot seem to stop having, is not worth preserving. Let the market fall to its competitors - the entry barrier isn't particularly high at this point anyways.
Nah, it's not feasible to know the printer model if you want to identify a laserprinted dollar.

A few variants at most.
> Sure, but dilution without representation can be a big risk for a regular employee.

Well, it's a big risk to everyone that doesn't get voting rights, right? Not all investors get voting rights, do they?

In some way, an employee sits between a non-voting investor and a voting investor. They don't get to vote, but they do have some control over the outcome of the company (ranging from small to large, depending on the number of employees and responsibilities of the person in question).
Get Started Using WebAssembly (WASM) with Guy Bedford [videos]
Protip: It's not.
Nah, this is pure Hanlon's Razor right here: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Despite the negative press Uber is growing, revenue is growing, and the average Joe doesn't really care about any of this as long as his ride to work still costs less than a taxi.
Responses to your downvoted post:

"It can't be selection bias because OP only has one father."

Come on, folks. It is selection bias, because we wouldn't hear a "my dad survived" story if his dad didn't survive. Otherwise known as "survivorship bias," which is a form of selection bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
>there is actual competition in the Home assistant/automation market, where there is none in the ISP market in much of the US.

What is your definition of an ISP? A cable company?

Dish is an ISP, the four major mobile operators are ISPs, Verizon even has fiber service in some areas. In most of the US, you have about as many choices in ISPs as you have in Google Home/Alexa/iWhatevers.
How to avoid picking the wrong technology just because it's cool
This is repulsive conduct and it's unbelievable any of these people are still attached to the company.

Unfortunately it's all too believable.
But that's what exciting about science. It doesn't claim to come with ready made answers about our surroundings, humans discover things on their own.

Sometimes humans get things wrong, and there is no shame in being wrong with science, it's part of the process, unlike "other domains" where people can or will never admin they are wrong, while still using the product of science every day, in contradiction to their own "science".
>the perspective of the person on the stage should somehow color what we all learn from the Facebook post.

What if you knew she was guiding his PhD thesis? That he was her student. What if he had conversations with her before this topic trying to understand her theory?

What the person on the stage was feeling does matter.

Ms. Talkington is entitled to her interpretation of the event. But, to say that interpretation is correct, by itself, in all circumstances, is not accurate.

> The point is simply to listen and try to understand another point of view.

Just simply listen? why? why am I being denied to have an interpretation and opinion and be able to voice it?

Ms. Talkington did and I fully support her in her ability to have an interpretation and speak about about it and act upon it.

I claim the same and will not let it be infringed upon.
You sound very sure of this, what's your source?

As far as I've read, the iCloud backups have always been encrypted at rest, and Apple is apparently working on improving it to the point where they do not hold any decryption keys to the backups [0].

That's why, when you set up a new device, up until now it would not have your message history - because the message history can only be decrypted on devices that are already-authorized. If you restore a backup in its entirety, that includes the message log and the encryption key, but if you set up the device as "new", you only get the newly received messages - since it needs your password to decrypt the backup, it had no way to decrypt the message history from backup on the cloud and only sync that down to the new device (which always bothered me in terms of convenience). I think they're working on improving the usability of it in upcoming releases though.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/25/apple-working-on-stronger-icl...
27 Machine Learning, Python and Math Cheat Sheets
I agree that "1=2" would maybe cause more confusion. How about "x + 1 = x + 2".
Please don't troll here. On HN, if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't post.
Isn't science marvelous? That fact that it adapts as new evidence is revealed is critical. The confidence you mention is not confidence that a final answer has been reached but rather, based on the current evidence, an answer can be formulated that is consistent with that evidence available at that time.
> Why are you mansplaining

Please don't troll here. On HN, if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't post.
Yes, the Bell Labs transistors gave us cheap digital computing, and the Bell Labs work on solid state lasers to light optical fibers gave us cheap data communications of the Internet. I'm still not fully clear on what gave us the much higher disk recording densities, but IBM's giant magneto-resistive disk heads may be all or nearly all of it.

But, now, with cheap, powerful digital hardware, lots of powerful software, from BIOS booting to operating systems, relational database and much more, e.g., mobile, the cloud, maybe IOT, there should be some really good opportunities for solid, low risk, high value projects from small teams, even solo, sole founder-developers.
I decided a while back that Uber was a horrible company and they will never have any of my money.

And the shit keeps coming. At some point hopefully others will make the same realization.
Yes, agreed though you must also take into account the idea of the "straw that breaks the camels back".
This is common nonsense.
Those people who have stake in new language push
and disparage and those that have stake in the old
contrast. It's the old 'not broken' argument but your
emphasis are particularly egregious in association and
I don't believe you have done any real work other than
posting.
Reduced brightness at maintained contrast.
99% of these companies don't have a significant market share in their respective niche.