skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing you might be mixing up is population vs individual. If you hold some sort of hiring process where the skill tested is similar to that tested in marathon running, then yes, Kenyans will tend to do better as a population. That does not mean you should actively discourage everyone else from applying. Your process should be blind to race/class of applicants, if some race/class does show a higher affinity towards specific skills, that will be the natural outcome of your process.

TL;DR - Don't hire only Kenyans, that's discrimination. You might end up with a lot of Kenyans if you hire only marathoners, but that's not the same.
Specifically we were talking about "good engineers" and my experience is sadly different from you. Also from my experience >50% of developers are cargo cult developers.

It's more like playing piano, some have the ear for music and some don't (I haven't although I love Mahler ;-) And putting a lot of effort into learning to play piano, many people are not becoming the equivalent of "good engineers".

I'm holding workshops "Coding for managers" to C-level and VCs. I agree with "You don't have to be born a genius or super special to do it", many people are astonished when they write their first code.

Incidently I will give a workshop here inhouse today to non-programmers.
Interesting in this context that they killed the groups app so as to bring people back into the main app.

Makes me wonder if the real reason is that so many people got sick of "normal" Facebook when all they wanted is to use groups that engagement suffered and they needed to bring everybody back.
Many nephologists are still upset with cloud (computing)
I’ve personally seen this in action, and it leads to all sorts of issues in engineering where the team output is really what matters.
Let's say i'm collecting a simple yes / no piece of data such as... did this user open Google Chrome today. Every day my analytics engine sends the data back up: yes, no, no, yes, yes, yes, no. Someone could look at this data and know whether you used Chrome or not on a given day, but when Apple sends the data up it randomly flips the answer for a certain number of data points in such a way that the flipping effects will cancel each other out at scale and the overall stats will be more or less the same. Now, even if I were able to look at all the data your computer sent up about your Chrome usage I can't actually be sure which days you used Chrome because I know some of the answers are flipped. The more changes get made, the more privacy the user has.
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This can be easily worked around. In a previous CTO role we started talking about development costs coming out of sales commissions, and the problem went away.
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Civil forfeiture has nothing to do with carrying limits.

Rather, they permit officers to seize any amount they believe may have been involved in criminal activity.

Such as this[0] yesterday, which was less than $1000.

The complication is that the onus is on the owner: the money is guilty until proven innocent.

If an officer makes the assumption that you were on your way to buy drugs, they can seize the $100 in your wallet.

[0] https://streamable.com/3dvge
I don't think groups was that successful, was it?
Oh I know, I have a fiesta ST myself for weekend driving and taking to the track; it's amazing. In fact I find it far more fun to drive than some much more expensive sports cars (specifically a F80 M3 owned by someone close to me). While it doesn't have anywhere near the driving joy it still doesn't hold a candle to the M3 on faster tracks.

For reference, the trackday club I belong to is doing a weekender trip to the nurburgrink in late october: I'm not taking the fiesta for that (also I don't want to drive 800km in it to get there).
Let’s say you wanted to count how many of your online friends were dogs, while respecting the maxim that, on the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dog. To do this, you could ask each friend to answer the question “Are you a dog?” in the following way. Each friend should flip a coin in secret, and answer the question truthfully if the coin came up heads; but, if the coin came up tails, that friend should always say “Yes” regardless. Then you could get a good estimate of the true count from the greater-than-half fraction of your friends that answered “Yes”. However, you still wouldn’t know which of your friends was a dog: each answer “Yes” would most likely be due to that friend’s coin flip coming up tails.

Source: Google's RAPPOR project

I pointed to some open source repos on my blog post from 2015 https://www.quantisan.com/a-magical-promise-of-releasing-you...
Backdoors in software is one of those nightmarish scenarios that disturbs you until you just think about something else and kind of temporarily forget it (like nuclear war, killer bees, climate change or asteroid impact). Open Source just raises the bar but in no way solves these problems (for example OpenSSH's roaming feature/bug, OpenSSL and Heartbleed). In computing one can quickly become paranoid: software buttons for switching smartphones off (are they 'really' off?), always-on microphones, webcams (granted, you can cover it), blobs in your smartphone and home router, downloads from http://download.cnet.com (note the lack of https), winscp, putty from www.putty.org (again, no https, which is not even the actual site, but nevertheless the first result from Google). In Linux the landscape is slightly better, but do you really trust all those packagers? Do you really understand each line of code when you "git clone foo; cd foo; ./configure; make; sudo make install"?, and in X11 you can easily make a key-logger without even being root! [1]. And not even full disk encryption can protect us (Evil Maid [2]).

That's one of the reasons I'm skeptical of the Ethereum smart-contract concept. In theory it works, but in practice I'm not sure at all. The DAO heist was one early example of security bugs in smart contracts, but I fear they will become more common when malware developers turn to "contract-engineering".

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/301646/linux-keylogger-witho...

[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/evil_maid_att...
It's going to be a bit trickier than that, because power is usually distributed as 3-phase, not single-phase.

So that's 3 different offsets, depending on which phase any given light is wired into.

Plus that's probably going to be slow enough to cause visible flicker.
$14 billion company cannot convert what the servlet API gives into a method call on a certain object + a bit of reflection to update methods & print them into form elements. Super complicate!

If the $14 billion can't do that then they certainly cannot protect data.
One shame in much economic teaching is its detachment from empiricism. I had the fortune of good professors, mostly in finance, who forced us to model real markets (and in some cases collect new data). In any case, I don't see someone who misses the Chapter 1 disclaimer finding better value in starting in the deep end.
> There is only one way to be sure: review the code you download and intend to use. Or get it from a trusted source that did the review for you.
Can AI detect homosexuality from a facial image? And should it?
The hackerspace I help run did a lot of work to rekindle the interest in amateur radio in the area by running free HAM courses; it led to a few dozen new licenses over last two years. If you are active in a hackerspace, consider running something like this too.

Personally, I'm planning to take an exam in literally 28 days from now. In my country there's a group of HAM operators training regularly for emergency operations (EMCOM), and I'm interested in participating in that.
That may be a better analogy than you intend. The problem with cars is that everyone suffers the consequences of your driving. In fact, you may have the least exposure to the carbon monoxide, pollution, or even accident risk. Pedestrians, cyclists, property owners, and other drivers are all at risk of your driving.

For that reason, societies tightly regulate car ownership and driving. More so than phones: I don’t need a license to use a phone, nor do I have to register my ownership or have it regularly inspected.

But technology these days has this same characteristic: Others bear the costs of your decision. Every device connected to the internet is a DDOS vector.

I don’t want you deciding whether to keep your device up to date with the latest security patches, because if you (and a few million others) don’t, GitHub is down for me.
Or get an IDAS-LPS, CLS or UHC filter (either on the lens or as a sensor clip on). Or stack a bunch of images with proper dark substraction. If you stack enough light sub frames you can efficiently reconstruct dynamic range. Of course the ETTR advice is good too, but you can go much further even with consumer equipment.
This comment is a great example of why one should triple check anything they intend to post to HN.
Why Deal Value Is Such an Important Sales Metric
Emacs 25.3 released
I think Hacker News has perfectly fine UI but horrible UX. Sorry if i got those definitions wrong. I think the colour scheme etc is perfectly fine but the actual functionality of this site is horrendous.

- There is no search function anywhere

- Go back far enough in the news listings and it just stops. No explanation. https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=15

- To find the formatting guide for posting comments you have to go through the FAQs?!

- Update a comment and you get redirected to the same form with no message.

I really don't get why a site who's target audiance is web developers and hackers has such terrible functionality on their site. Is it because we are really meant to be reading our news through a REST interface?
> This is an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs.

> Enriched Text mode has its support for decoding 'x-display' disabled. This feature allows saving 'display' properties as part of text. Emacs 'display' properties support evaluation of arbitrary Lisp forms as part of instantiating the property, so decoding 'x-display' is vulnerable to executing arbitrary malicious Lisp code included in the text (e.g., sent as part of an email message).

> This vulnerability was introduced in Emacs 19.29. To work around that in Emacs versions before 25.3, append the following to your ~/.emacs init file:

(eval-after-load "enriched"
'(defun enriched-decode-display-prop (start end &optional param)
(list start end)))

> Gnus no longer supports "richtext" and "enriched" inline MIME objects. This support was disabled to avoid evaluation of arbitrary Lisp code contained in email messages and news articles.
Simultaneously, people overestimate the costs of threads, and underestimate the efficiencies they provide. At extremely high loads, they become an issue, but it's quite rare. And at normal loads, threading is (IME) often simply more efficient than typical async solutions in practice, probably since a thread gets synchronized access to its internal state and consistent ordering of execution (almost) for free, whereas async code needs to (usually) reimplement that in user mode.

People have taken the notion that threads are slow in some circumstances and made the conclusion that threads are slow, period. But that's simply not true.
Ask HN: Why do password managers in FF/Chrome fill in hidden fields?
I recently found out that FF and Chrome fill in saved passwords in hidden fields. Although I understand that this will only be done on a 'trusted' domain, I regard this as a vulnerability. Besides that, it breaks web applications that use hide password fields for other uses.
How is it possible that I can't find any specific info about this, except for a Wordpress ticket asking for a workaround?
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/33699
Here's something I've wondered about a lot, but haven't been able to find a definitive answer: Isn't ISO pretty much software gain control? Why ever increase the ISO on the camera instead of just taking photos at the native ISO and then post-processing the photo to a higher exposure? That way, you don't store the blown-out pixels (if you do overexpose).
This is going to become a huge problem.

Imagine an AI that generates songs. Imagine it generates millions of songs.

What are the odds some of those songs will accidentally and independently "copy" features deemed distinctive and commercially valuable in existing songs under copyright?

Is this deliberate creative copyright infringement surrounded by noise, or is it the result of an aggressively fast random search of a limited symbol space - and what is the difference?

Copyright law is going to have to change. It's either going to have to become irrelevant, or it's going to have to support hybrid not-quite-patent not-quite-copyright IP protection of generative/creative processes/personas, either manual or automated.
Not sure the title really conveys the right message here, genuinely thought I was about to read some kind of porn parody.
"3. Buy a domain name (this step is crucial)"

Fantastic
Hello Coralreef - about the escrow for BTC. Yes, there are such services. Typically used for large transactions
Invest in companies doing road maintenance.

Electric cars are heavier, and will cause more wear and tear on roads.
How a deep network of transformation bots is porting native Ios Apps to Android
There also Spark for Java

http://sparkjava.com
Some of my best stories are from the passengers who remembered me, and he ones who called me back.
Yeah, there's a few services that are hard to use due to requiring phone number verification. Ironically, twilio was one of them. I just don't use these services, but if I absolutely needed to, I could figure it out. I ended up using a lot of bitcoin and other cryptos recently.

When I sign up for something I usually use a fake number.

I think a decent compromise will be using another prepaid cheap phone, although building my own phone would be pretty cool too (lots of hobbyists doing that now)
IANAL too (so this is not legal advice), but I don't think that's hard. California maintains an online list of "foreign" (out-of-state) corporations registered to do business in California. [1]

It appears to me that Equifax can be sued in California by serving their local representatives in Sacramento.

CORPORATION SERVICE COMPANY WHICH WILL DO BUSINESS IN CALIFORNIA AS CSC - LAWYERS INCORPORATING SERVICE
2710 GATEWAY OAKS DR STE 150N
SACRAMENTO CA 95833

[1] https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/
My response to What was your first operating system?
I also deleted facebook app from my mobile 2 weeks ago. And I feel better. Although, sometimes I could not resist and open facebook in chrome but still it feels better. And i agree to the point that these days I get a lot of unnecessary notifications. It sucks!
Those problems are already solved by async I/O in platforms other than Linux.
Why? Because sales people are good at sales! Their whole job is negotiating the highest possible compensation for the value they provide.

Apple doesn't need sales people to move millions of their products into "the Enterprise," and neither does any other company with products as good as theirs.

It's just that most companies make shitty "Enterprise software" and then try to push it with aggressive sales tactics.

There's more than one way to succeed, and making great products is a lot more interesting than a cocaine-powered salesforce.
Maybe they are collecting enough data about you that they don't feel the need to bother you. Are you signed in to Facebook in your primary browser? Do you have the mobile app running in the background?

Since I've signed out of Facebook on my PC and kill the mobile Facebook app while not using it, I tend to get multiple push notifications per day, most of them asking if I know some random person.

My girlfriend, who is on Facebook daily, has never seen any of these notifications.
> IO models need lots of data

To draw supply and demand curves to just find the equilibrium also requires quite a lot of data. And if you aggregate, then it's not even clear what these curves are and what is the equilibrium.

> where the market computes the table for you

I am not sure what you mean by that. How is supply-demand model better? What it gives you in those situations?

Also, I should add: Blatt's IO model (if you want to call it that) is not an econometric (meaning statistical) one. I am not familiar with IO econometric models, so I cannot say how it is different. And it's kinda underdeveloped, too, unfortunately though understandably.
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Not necessarily hard. For example, perfect monopoly is as simple a model as perfect competition. Often it is closer to the truth. So why is it not used more?
Bear in mind that the vast vast majority of apple's customers have 0 interest in sideloading apps- if you're apple it makes a great deal of sense to trade off security for the masses against a few power users who can't sideload apps occasionally here and there
That's not true. Old mercury and sodium lights are much easier to filter since their emission lines are narrow. LED often has a very broad and spiky spectrum, which makes it almost impossible to filter. (Source: astrophotographer). You can buy reliable light suppression filters for sodium/mercury (google CLS or UHC filter), but not LED
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The best way is just defect density. How often do vulns show up? How serious are they? It's always a judgement call of course.
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advice before you get hellbanned: jokes like this are frowned upon and against the forum culture. Best to giggle to yourself instead.
Show HN: A simple color converter lives in your mac menu bar
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Developer Tools visual refresh coming to Nightly
The sort of hypothetical security vulnerability here is likely to depend on undefined behaviour (buffer over-runs, subverting parsers, etc etc). Just another reason to continue moving over to safe languages, especially for the lower level bits of our stacks. HTTP is big and complicated, I'm much happier exposing Rust/Go/C#/... to it than I am exposing C to it.

In safe languages, backdoors must be far more explicit, so we close off the likely scenario posited here.
Quick explainer about intraslab/intraplate subduction zone events (a slab is a subducting plate):

There are two major classifications of crust on earth: oceanic and continental. Oceanic crust (mostly basalt/gabro) is quite a bit more dense and thin than continental crust (mostly granite). Both float on the more dense mantle like big rafts, but the much thinner and denser oceanic crust sits ~3 km lower on average, creating ocean basins. In fact, the cold oceanic crust (and its attached subcrustal lithosphere) is in some places more dense than warmer mantle at depth; this density contrast is part of the convection cells in the mantle that drive plate tectonics.

When an oceanic tectonic plate converges with a continental plate, the denser oceanic plate slides underneath, at a subduction zone. (edit: I tried some ascii art to illustrate but HN deleted the spaces and ruined it; I fixed it in a comment below.)

There are three types of earthquakes that happen in oceanic plates in subduction zone environments. The first, most familiar and strongest are subduction zone or 'megathrust' earthquakes, like Tohoku (Japan 2011). This is an earthquake caused by the release of stored energy due to frictional locking between the downgoing oceanic plate and the upper continental plate.

The second type is an 'outer rise' event. These are almost always small (M~6 max) and not very damaging. This is caused by the flexing of the oceanic plate as it gets ready to dive down (@stephengillie, this is the stress you're asking about).

These types of earthquakes are easily observed because they're shallow and relatively well understood.

The third type of earthquake is what the Mexican event was; it's an earthquake that happens within the subducting (downgoing) slab/plate at depth (see diagram in comment below). It's not clear exactly why these happen but the pattern of energy release is consistent with vertical(ish) contraction and horizontal(ish) extension, i.e. normal faulting. The best explanation for why a downgoing slab would be contracting vertically and extending horizontally is that it is slowing down as it descends, probably due to a decreasing density contrast between the cold (but warming) slab and the mantle around it. So basically the downgoing slab is buckling like a train would if the front train cars slammed on the brakes but not the back train cars. Actually the best way to visualize this is to think about dropping a flexible rubber sheet (that is more dense than water) into a pool. It will continue to sink in the pool but more slowly than in the air above, and will buckle at the interface due to the buoyancy contrast.

But (unlike at the surface) we can't directly test this hypothesis because we don't really have any data on the velocity field to see if there is a deceleration of the downgoing slab (plate). Many of these deep intraslab events, particularly at 100-700 km depth, are thought to be associated with density changes in the downgoing slab as it undergoes mineralogical transformations to thermodynamically restabilize in vastly different P-T conditions.
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There are lots of companies offering software to do exactly what you describe, that is, statistical analysis of telemetry as a way to detect anomalous behaviour e.g. LogRhythm
This photo always illustrated a lot for me about WTC 1 & 2 composition: http://www.rumormillnews.com/pix4/wtcTowers-night2.jpg
Could I ask, what's so bad about going into the attic? Surely that's just one of the easier ways to get out onto the roof?
Not so much. Components make this simpler than ever.

import { Button, Dropdown, Slider } from 'antd' //bootstrap, materialdesign,...

const Header = () => (
<div>
<Button primary>Home</Button>
<Dropdown ... />
<Slider ... />
</div>
)

render(<Header />, document.querySelector('#app'))
What are you doing to use this amount of energy? I DO have an always on computer, an old fridge, a laundry machine (no dish-cleaner, though, I do that by hand) and electric water heating. I use ~290kWh/month in a 2 person household. That costs me to around 80 Euros / month. Most of my consumption stems from the electrical water boiler and stove (daily cooking).

In Germany heating is most often and depending on where you live done with gas, oil or district heating plants (in cities). Electrical heating has pretty much been phased out (you'll find electrical "storage" heaters in very old apartments only).
Agreed. However, this is unfeasible/impractical. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Are there any commercial or non-profit organisations that maintain lists/repos of audited and trusted software with their checksums? It seems like there would a demand for a package manager like that.

I suppose some Linux distros have pretty OK repositories?

I wouldn't trust npm, pip, gem etc. though.
There are many unrespectable economists in professorial positions and used to advise government policy (see those of Reagan, Thatcher et al), so sadly yes. Furthermore, the politicians or political advisers who ultimately make government economic policy tend to have at most a BA in economics, hence have been indoctrinated in the most simplistic of these dismal ideas without the benefit of more sophisticated epistemological thinking.
Read the first link, it's about the court case.