skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well remember that this was a few years back so things were a lot different from today.

1. gchat (or "Google Talk" I think?) was a nice simple app that was replaced by a rebranded one that had different functionality and a UI that was either different or flakey/slow/unreliable (I forget all the details). I later learned that actually we were all duped by google - gchat itself was only turned off completely very recently, but at the time they managed to convince us that we had to use Hangouts instead. In any case, the whole thing was annoying enough that we left because ...

2. Whatsapp was starting to be very widespread and was a natural replacement for us as most people either had it or could quickly get it (you just needed a phone number and nearly any sort of phone, many feature phones support it) and it had a simple chat-only interface.

3. FB Messenger was not a separate application at the time, it was integrated in the FB app iirc and you still had to be a member of FB and add any contacts as "friends" to communicate. At the time it wasn't seen as a general-purpose chat app by _anyone_, just a way to talk to your FB contacts.

Hope that makes sense. If you're curious about the gchat->hangouts switch, I'm sure a quick search will turn up a few disgruntled articles - there were quite a few people who were annoyed. It probably didn't help that Google were in the habit of dropping products, so a few people may have assumed that they'd do the same with the chat app.
Facebook is/was important step in the evolution of our understanding for social interaction and what is import as information and what not. The complete exhaustion of the moving force behind FB is needed for us to transcend into the next hyper-dense digital-society.

There's a saying that 'many things fly, only few are edible', and understanding FB is fundamentally understanding this principle.

I doubt the service will ever completely disappear, but its high time it gets marginalized (at least in developed societies) the same way TV is marginalized as FB is essentially the same programmed stream of bullshit, that you don't normally need in your life.

Understanding what the author understood in his article is a cathartic moment, that besides other things, has something to do with the conscious decision to actually consume what you want and not what you were given. This means focus.

Dropping out of FB and similar means of "social presence" is essentially taking back control over where you are going in terms of information being consumed by oneself.

Of course it will feel liberating to not feed oneself with irrelevant information. It doesn't mean stopping being social, but re-evaluating what socialization effectively means.
The entire approach is called differential security, as in the headline of the thing we're commenting upon ;-)

But, as someone mentioned, if the coin comes tails you should answer with another coin flip, not "yes".
Ask HN: Become a Cryptocurrency+Blockchain thought leader, anyone interested?
Please forgive my cold outreach efforts. The reason I’m writing here today: Me and a bunch of like-minded+motivated folks have been building a community first platform, HelpTap where members get directly connected on chat based on their expertise/interests to share instant answers/advice and in turn, get rewarded(in tokens) for the help provided.

Ahead of the launch, we’re looking for genuine people in the blockchain space who’re open to sharing their knowledge with the rest of the world which brings me to my request: Is there anyone here who wants to become an early adopter/thought leader on our platform to genuinely give/get help ?

In return, other than token rewards you can also expect a lot of recognition and network growth from our end.

We understand that the blockchain space comes with its own baggage of noise, clutter, spams and scams, which is why we’re going for an invite only signup till we can absolutely restrict the noise found everywhere else and deliver the best possible product and user experience.

What do you guys think? Sounds like something anyone here would be up for/doesn't mind checking out?

Here’s the link to the platform for those interested: https://helptap.com
How can mobile apps help in boosting revenue during the festive season?
Flying United is a choice. In fact, some companies do suffer lasting harm from bad behavior (Volkswagen comes to mind). Being an Equifax product is not a choice, just a symptom of being a pawn in today's mass-surveillance world where (we are told) privacy and security are illusions.
Is there anything you can do to get closer to your customers and find out what you should be addressing to make them stickier? Can you find a defensible segment of the market and tweak your positioning/offering?

Would it be worthwhile to find out from those who have churned what features they miss now that they are using Salesforce. Perhaps you can port some functionality and get a larger addressable market among Salesforce customers?
AWS has built up a very substantial enterprise sales force. Basically, there was a limit to how much and to whom they could sell based on waiting for people to click on their website.
Not if there was a proper optimization pass while compiling.
It seems to me that if someone is truly an expert, they should already be able to manually manage their certificate authorities if they want to.
It's just a list stored somewhere on their computer, after all, and at least 2 major browsers are open source and can be forked into a private repo for personalized development.

What I see in this thread looks more like an insidious middle: people who think they are experts, but are asking browser providers to do the development to change the entire product and provide a nice friendly UI.

This seems like an area where the old maxim applies that if you have to ask for help, maybe you're not as expert as you think you are.
Benchmarks: GHCJS (Reflex, Miso) and Purescript (Pux, Thermite, Halogen)
For your second point, what in your opinion would be the right statistical test to apply?
You are absolutely right about the generation gap between the two groups. I'm middle aged and one of the younger people at my ham radio club. I will say that some of us older folks have some computer skills, though. And many of them want to acquire maker skills but aren't sure where to start. Maybe that is my next local project.

I don't have any social media accounts, but I know some hams do engage there.
This guy has been talking about it for a while, see: http://www.timewellspent.io/
Other systems (Windows and I think Solaris, but some more obscure systems likely do this as well) can do asynchronous disk IO, but it's not perfect, either.

I think the main reason Linux doesn't really do it is that asynchronous IO is an intrusive change and there would be just too much work to implement it in all the file systems etc.; i.e. "not worth it".

Many applications which are not OK with synchronous disk I/O seem to find thread pools good enough: reasonably easy to implement, reasonably portable, usually performs ok.
This is where I would mention that I'm running Cyanogemod, rooted of course, with Protect My Privacy (PMP) installed.

http://www.android.protectmyprivacy.org/

While I really like non-Google Android + PMP in theory, the reality is that this solution is extremely complicated, limiting, error prone, buggy and probably not worth it.

So I concede that Apple is the better choice, but nevertheless, persist in my futile efforts to make my 1+ somehow work securely.
Already been done - it was the subject of Ken Thompson's Turing award paper

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358210/reflections.pd...
It doesn't really protect privacy, unless your first coin is highly biased toward the random answer. You can still infer that there is a higher likelihood that this individual is a dog. A few 60-70% reliability inferences on various dog related characteristics and you can identify a dog with 95% chance.
I tend to like sparklines. They can be pretty useful on dashboards and for reports. But this implementation, in my opinion, is not as visually digestable as the JS implementation [1]

[1] https://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/#s-about
Here's my approach. Whenever I see a post that I don't like, I simply unfollow the person who posted it.
Anything collected might break privacy, because that information may be something sensitive. Differential privacy relies upon obfuscating reported data in a statistically meaningful way.

Accordingly, you need to analyse aggregate statistics only, add random inaccuracy and apply data binning, anonymise reports. And you need to calibrate the noise. The latter is what the paper seems to be mainly focused on.

> We call for Apple to make its implementation of privacy-preserving algorithms public and to make the rate of privacy loss fully trans-parent and tunable by the user.

"Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis" is about the matter.

- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/calibra...

- https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F11681878_14....
Ok well the broader point still applies, right? You can edit Firefox's CA list if you want to.
some companies do suffer lasting harm from bad behavior (Volkswagen comes to mind).

Volkswagen is basically back to it's pre-dieselgate sales levels. Admittedly its stock price is still quite a bit below it's pre-dieselgate high, largely due to the still unknown factors surrounding possible future fines.
> Do any actual respectable, academic or working economists make these arguments though?

I like this question. I try to use it on myself. It gets to the core of some of our responses. I.e. we should opine with evidence when we can. But I would suggest one slight change.

> Are any academic or working economists who make these arguments in positions of power?

I'd say yes. E.g. economists working for The Heritage Foundation for example.
"Do any actual respectable, academic or working economists make these arguments though?"

I believe working economists are more nuanced and critical than what filters through the medias and politicians. I've been trying to teach myself some economics. For instance, I read Mankiw's "Principles of Economics", a widely-used introductory college textbook and I find it balanced. The author tries to convey different points of view and warns the reader about the limitations of the field.

Actually, I've even found Milton Friedman in "Freedom and Capitalism" to be more critical of capitalism that I'd have expected (e.g. concerning monopolies and externalities, I read it a while ago though).
Are you accepting UK-based applications?
The end of the article said that family got stuck in the attic and the water rose higher than the roof, drowning them all. That's why.
I feel like this needs to be repeated over and over. In theory, encryption and smart contracts and bitcoin are mathematically sound and "you can't argue with the math!"

But the theory is written into real programs by humans, who make mistakes. The math is unassailable until, oops, it isn't, because someone forgot a bounds check!
We can add or remove root certificates for OS, it's just deliberately not easy.
> (edit: I tried some ascii art to illustrate but HN deleted the spaces and ruined it.)

Prefix each line with two spaces to enter monospaced code block mode.

Like this.
Selenium IDE’s Successor
If teaching is indeed universally bad (which I doubt but lets go with the idea as a thought experiment) - then surely the issue must lie with training/the accepted teaching methods?
The rate of computation is obviously very similar for threads and async, but the rate of multiplexing is not. Switching between processes or threads takes more time than switching between fibers/coroutines. So the general observation that for massively multiplexed workloads fibers/coroutines are lower overhead is generally correct, but the more interesting question is of course "what qualifies as a massively multiplexed workload?" ... I'd argue most kinds of web application servers don't.
I posted it because you said "no-one seriously claims" and the EU is doing just that. They don't even try and justify it in the document (there may be supporting documents, they aren't referenced so I don't know).

I think perhaps they don't want to say "All these people are X, all these Y". They even have to say "just because we say there are no races, doesn't mean there is no such things as racism".

It would deny science to say anything but "Phenotype and some behaviours are genetically inherited, and breeders choose based on those, therefore people geographically separated are different."
I think this is entirely dependent on the context of that particular E-mail. Email has evolved quite a lot.

A good example is a newsletter from say, Quora or Medium; Newsletters usually have links to a story or a news feed article. If this was done using plain text, the link would be one long mashup of characters, because they usually include an authentication token or something like that. In this case, using an html link or button is clearly the better option.

HTML is like structured text for web pages.
All the other tech giants are in the business of selling your data to advertisers. Apple is in the business of selling their stuff to you.
There are several predecessors with the same idea of using a font that represents numbers as a graph: FF Chartwell [1], Chartjunk [2], Datalegreya [3].

[1]: https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/

[2]: https://nsfmc.github.io/chartjunk/

[3]: http://figs-lab.com/datalegreya
Show HN: Drawzee Now – iPad app with onboard machine learning
Paper Machine Doctor Blade
Beware of more phishing attacks in Austria at Raiffeisen Bank
How about the basics? Talk about Apple's idiotic insistence that user IDs be E-mail addresses: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-use...
You can't do that with normal read/write and select/poll/epoll, but you can either use aio (posix) or io_submit (linux-specific).

In my opinion, a big issue with these is that asynchronous i/o requests can not be used with select/poll/epoll, but rely on other notification methods instead. AIO can use unix signals (ugh) or thread notification (see sigevent(7)) to signal completion. io_submit uses io_getevents to read events about completed I/O requests.

From a userspace programmer's point of view, it would make much more sense if io_setup() would return a file descriptor that could be used with select/poll, and io_events would be read() from the fd.

Currently it's impossible (?) to have filesystem i/o in the same select/poll loop with your network i/o because of this issue. This is why libuv falls back to using threads and synchronous i/o to provide "async" i/o.
Because when you wait a little bit and work on something else for a while, original requirements will change and you don't need to refactor at all.
The point is a very simple one. People who appear similar, or have a similar cultural background (and hence belong to the same "race" in American terms) are often no more similar genetically than two randomly selected members of the population.
Undercover in a Toronto factory where a temp worker died
For remote identification we have for example post ident:

Article is in english:
https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postident/identifizierungsv...
I guess so, but most people use Swish for p2p transactions (i.e. “you pay for everything and I’ll swish you my share”). Some places take Swish, but mostly small businesses who haven’t got a ‘proper’ card payments infrastructure in place.
You're on a YC website. They are open about looking for founders who do these kinds of things.

Keep in mind that YC invested in a startup that was running a service that added malware to software installers and when people called them out on it Paul Graham defended it and said they were doing nothing wrong because there was a tiny "pwn my machine" checkbox in the installer, and if people didn't uncheck that then clearly they wanted a load of malware installed.

I've been writing comments about this kind of thing on HN for years. This one was 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051099
I gotta say, I just bulldoze through and get the damn software built at great personal cost in a whole range of ways. I always complete the project.

The hardest thing is not writing the code - although that is extremely hard - the hardest thing is building something people want to use.
Durable has a very specific meaning for I/O and is just not correct here.

POSIX does intentionally not specify any durability at all (e.g. a no-op fsync is explicitly permitted).
A Brief Introduction to Machine Learning for Engineers
Except that some RSS feeds only give you excerpts of the story lest you visit their page (looking at you Reuters!)
>>> How would you propose to prove it? And what would proving accomplish since many folks already believe it?

Gather a paper trails. For starters, screenshots of the page + emails and communication with the company.
The problem is that this information can be used for identity fraud. You should really find a solution for that problem.
> Public education by state rankings show that New York spent the most per pupil at $20,610. The next top five are District of Columbia ($18,485), Alaska ($18,416), New Jersey ($17,907), Connecticut ($17,745) and Vermont ($16,988).

http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/pu... https://archive.fo/DeBGH

A teacher's salary in New York isn't good enough but you can at least afford rent if you're smart. The reason why I tolerate laptop and iPad spending is because I don't know if/how we can cut costs and still get better results. Thus, when I see something that lets students learn without a one on one with a teacher, I imagine it saves money.

From the same page, we see that total expense is 617B or about (617 billion/18 trillion) three percent of GDP. I'll be honest. I have no earthly idea whether this number is too big or too small or if that's even the right question.
So earthquakes can happen anywhere now? Sounds kinda scary. Hope they will find better methode to find out about this before they happend.
This might be enough for photography, but the speed of light would probably push this above 1 millisecond for the area that needs to be dark for large telescopes.

But engineering the light sources to be astronomy-friendly and nature-friendly in general seems like a good idea. Basically limit things to the red-orange part of the spectrum. It worked for sodium lights.
> The real URL will appear in the browser address bar anyway before the user gets the chance to disclose any information

Which is already too late for anyone compromised by a drive-by download attack.
Just tried Rambox. It's good, very convenient.
Agile Principles Work, Until They Don't
We are bloody apes for heaven's sake.
That really isn't from The X-Files, it's from a TV series called "Aquarius" (I looked this up because Duchovny's bouffant baffled me!).
And even after pushing out chip reader terminals and cards with chips, banks in the US refuse to institute mandatory PIN code entry on all payments with the chip - as its everywhere in Europe. So nothing really changed.
> I’m convinced the most likely backdoor code in curl is a deliberate but hard-to-detect security vulnerability

Evil organisations and/or big government agencies are probably working on finding vulnerabilities and using them without reporting them.

That sounds more efficient and impossible to spot or prove, than trying to implement backdoors directly.
For Hegel this form of Skepticism/Pessimism is one of the "moments" of Spirit.[1]

[1] http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7d5nb...
New capacity can be wind and solar, which is getting cheaper than conventional power in a lot of places.
Show HN: Using Google Sheets to create a survey chat bot without a server
Developers Need to Start Paying Attention to Licenses
Mostly. Going back a ways to companies like Digital Equipment Corp., sales commissions weren't originally used--or at least they were limited. The theory was that you wanted to form long-term partnerships with customers, not encourage selling things they didn't need, etc. This was a minority practice though and DEC itself eventually abandoned it.

Although it's not directly related to commissions, as others have touched on, sales is generally a very performance-oriented culture. You don't hear about the challenges of interviewing for sales because it's really pretty simple. You often hire based on past performance and, if you hire someone who doesn't make quota for a quarter or two, you get rid of them. A useful quote is: "I've never met a sales manager who has trouble firing people."
ah man.. i just needed to clean my monitor of coffee reading this. :)

Samsung, really? :D weeping angel rings a bell?
They may cause harmonics, but the underlying sine wave is solid like a rock (well, at least concerning the ENTSO-E over here in Europe, other grids may be more fragile).
Swish is mainly used for transactions between individuals, and informal places like yard sales and flea markets. The main problem with Swish is that it is much slower than contactless payment as a transaction probably takes ~30-60 seconds from when you open the app until the recipient can verify that they've gotten the money. This makes it quite unsuitable for high volume places.
Diminishing returns of static typing
> 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?

Another question is: what are the odds that a future song will inadvertantly copy one of the computer-generated songs?

Given that there are only a finite number of notes and chords, that some note-sequences are more "musical" than others, and the computer can easily generate billions of songs, one can imagine a musical copyright troll (like a patent troll, but with copyrights):

1. creating a large number of songs on a computer

2. writing software to detect similarities between new songs and the computer song collection

3. shaking down songwriters/artists for profit

> Copyright law is going to have to change.

People have been saying that for some time. My own take is that it will change when it no longer suits the rich and powerful.
After Ubuntu dropping out (officially, at least), your best bet is probably LineageOS: https://lineageos.org
The bank the identity thief borrows from does suffer and is the one on the hook for the money at the end of the day. So they are kind of accountable. It's the leakers like Equifax that are not.
Just use ublock origin in advanced mode and disable third party everything. Most sites look completely broken until you find and enable their one cdn (and only that!), meanwhile 100 other requests stay blocked. Save those rules as you go and it's easy browsing from then on!
Ask HN: What are the top static websites?
I am looking for inspiration on user-friendly modern "static" website design. What can be more inspirational than most frequently visited static sites!? Please list some of those top ranked or most frequently visited static websites.
> address the dream of measuring teacher value, by measuring changes in test scores against changes in lifetime income.

Of course, combined with the premise of this article, such measurement will incentivize teachers to turn students into sales-people :)
How do you know the egress filter is legit?
Literally every western country that isn't the US.
Finally! I can feel like I actually have gigabit fiber!!!
1. We have the list of things and it seems it will take 2 years to implement 80% of them

2. Defensible segment is what we are looking for, but to be honest it is quite hard to find. Recently we've transitioned from SMB to Enterprise customers and got some deals, but overall NPS score is low among larger clients.
If you know the conference info you can add it via a PR. I am sure they would appreciate the updates.
And with electric cars being told when to charge, you can flatten out fluctuation in production.