skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What bugs me most for App Engine Standard is that under Java I need a custom ThreadFactory, when I want to use Standard Threads and use a Google Api. I need to copy the Environment into every new thread I create. Can't they fix that somehow?
(Currently, if you want to call App Engine APIs (com.google.appengine.api.*), you must call those APIs from a request thread or from a thread created using the ThreadManager API.)
(https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java/runtim...)

Basically the line is even incorrect since I can use my own ThreadFactory if I'm on a Request/Backend Thread and clone the Environment and copy it into each Thread.
Calling it "greed" ignore the complexities of the US healthcare system.

Let me ask, was the claim for $11K or was the amount paid $11K?
The act of verification (of suspected fraud) is not costless to the various parties involved. So say I keep getting inconvenienced by this verification because of my behaviour ("was it really you who made this request?") then someone should be accountable for all those false positives. "Parallel construction" creates an accountability. I know it usually means something more sinister -- but just symtactically it's a good description of the requirement.
Bluetooth might not be great. The max transfer rate is something like 24 Mbit/s (3 MB/s), and say a single RAW file is 20 MB, then you'd be looking at about 7 seconds of transfer time for each photo.

With high quality jpegs ~5MB it would be closer to 2 seconds per picture.

I think you'd need some kind of direct cabled connection for good perf for professional photographers.

Not to mention getting all the camera and app providers to standardize on a protocol and set of features.
"In east Asia it's customary for sick people to wear masks to avoid spreading disease via coughing or sneezing. A practice that ought to be adopted everywhere."

Toughen up people!

We don't eat food off the floor because it would probably give us a bad stomach. Eating "hygienically" is a practice that we have adopted.

Dogs eat stuff off the floor all the time. Have they evolved a more advanced immune system than ours? Or just kept it well trained?
I see this sort of thing a lot with comparisons between Amazon's products and their competitors. If all you're looking at is features and price, then Amazon looks like the winner most of the time. But having used both of these products, I'd go with an Apple TV over this without hesitation. The latest Apple TV is the only smart TV device I've used without having relatively serious bugs pop up on a fairly regular basis. The Nexus Player I had was so bad about this I really would have preferred having a DVD player and a Blockbuster to streaming...
This is very much my style.

I've found that my approach almost always boils down to "how can I make this obvious". This doesn't mean you can't have complexity, but it should be obvious how to use something, and hard (ideally impossible) to use wrong.

A great many projects fail this, or make assumptions about what obvious is.

A bit of a digression, but I have found that while I have started shifting towards more strictly typed tooling to facilitate this (the typing can often act as a guide which is easier to understand than prose due to consistency), the projects that tend to do this best are ones in the loosely typed languages.

My assumption is that in a language like Python, people are forced to think about what is obvious more because it's so much easier for users to do the wrong thing. As where when you have (for example) a Java system, people just assume that because the types are there, it's self-explanatory.
Google originally did this with the free IVR Google Voice offering, no?
While I see that as a valid issue in it's own right... I don't see the connection here, sorry.

Cruel and unusual punishment applies regardless of actual or claimed innocence, they could have totally done the crime and the punishment could still be unconstitutional.

This is not a catch-22 side effect of inflexible poorly written law, but an intentional side-stepping of built-in protections against abuse of power.
May I ask what were those reasons? I always hear why open plans are horrible, never why they're awesome —or needed.
You've got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says 'Sadism' automatically when he hears the word Punishment." And then one would have carte blanche. Mark did not immediately follow this. But the Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention? Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the N.I.C.E.; in the end, every citizen.

- C.S. Lewis - That Hideous Strength
Thank you for your time and dedication to edit my comments here.
I definitely would! One thing a lot of people miss in these discussions is that this isn't an either-or, and we should be using multiple different correctness techniques to increase our confidence.
The GNU vision of the desktop needs to be rebooted and more dedication and skill applied to it.

I got into a discussion on it on the emacs reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/701v90/guile_needs_a... but it seems a fair number of people have forgotten about or don't quite get it.
If you mean the moderators of HN, I'm one and all I consciously care about is saving this site from sucking with tedium. So if anybody is "actively policing" HN, they have figured out how to hack my unconscious and I wish they'd post how they did it. That would actually be interesting.

The problem with tedium is that it's human nature for us all to care most about the sound of our own voice and the sweet sweet beauty of our own words on the screen. We don't notice when we're repeating things that have been said millions of times because those lacked the flagship merit of it being me who was saying them.

This little me is the arch-enemy of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It is the same in everyone and has nothing to do with pro- or anti-China, or pro- or anti-anything.
There are better ways to do search, hash keywords then you can just search the hashes
All I know is he makes good money off the blog, and his affiliate link disclosures (e.g. Betterment) are often poor (e.g. at the end of an article, which doesn't conform to federal guidelines). It also, of course, calls his judgment into question, though naturally he swears up and down he loves the companies that sponsor him.

According to this New Yorker article, the blog makes hundreds of thousands a year. So now his 'early retirement' is starting to look like 'smart career change for getting much richer.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/mr-money-musta...
I've actually seen a camera which runs some flavor of android. It was a few years ago at Best Buy, maybe it was a Samsung, but I'm not certain. My first impression was turning it on and waiting for it to boot which took some seconds. If you've never used a digital SLR, that might seem acceptable. My Nikon D80, from a decade ago, takes some number of milliseconds (like 400) to become fully functional from a cold start. Here's an article from 2007 touting the D3s startup time of 120 milliseconds. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/9148811427/nikond3 That's a cold start, pop in a new battery and go times. Waiting seconds, puts the camera into the toy category.

The other factor is updates. I've had that Nikon D80 for 10 years, never had to worry about updates and never had to hook it up to a computer. Why trade in something with a offline, baked-in firmware for a constantly moving security target, or worse, as we see in the mobile space, an OS and app landscape that will be abandoned after two or three years and left vulnerable.
It's a bit ironic to recognize him for his impact on the "open source world". "Open source" is a term that was introduced as a means to divorce the social implications of free software from the boring bits.

Here's a good article about the history:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler
Those who are interested in the nitty-gritty of keeping a semblance of privacy generally will not baulk at taking some hurdles to get there, nor do they expect their devices to work exactly like those within the walled gardens.

Now if there where a way to combine these two worlds - that of the 'it just works but it knows more about me than I do myself' and the 'it does exactly what I tell it do do, no more and no less' - it would be feasible to offer such a device to a larger section of the general public.

A stripped-down Android distribution - sans Google-specific bits, with some replacements where needed - which does over the air updates just like devices on the other side of the wall would be a good start.
It is interesting because different people and different countries seem to have different ideas about he purpose of the the justice system. Punishment/retribution, correction/rehabilitation, or protecting the public. Someone like this may not be guilty due to insanity, but still be a danger to the public for example.
There should be separate permissions for just photos vs photos with exif data.
I'm guessing you either live in the bay area/seattle or work at amazon.

I don't know anyone in new york who uses an echo. I've heard of a few people who got one when it came out but they all stopped using it after a day or 2.

Google will be the winner the personal assistant market because they have billions of people who use android, maps, gmail, drive, search, calendar, translate etc. If we ever switch to conversational interfaces they could be in the position to really hurt Amazon.
Your explanation lacks imagination.
His blog also nets him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I'm sure that helps him feel smug and safe in early retirement.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/mr-money-musta...
What do you mean with "auditable way of wiping data"? Just that there will be a log that the data was wiped, but the actual data is gone forever?

The reason I ask is that all "Big Four" auditors has been on my company that we need to be able to wipe customer data, but at the same time there are other laws saying we must keep a record of all data (financial) for many years. None of them can say what law will rule over the other one though since they are not compatable...
That's the thing -- the police can't legally compel you to provide them access to your device, but if they can get it without you having to give them anything, by, say, pointing the phone at your face, it's fair game. I don't have time to look up the court precedents about this, but that's my understanding of the current state of the law.
Didn't see any mention of DRM support. Are there any plans to support DRM packaging? Playready/Widevine/Fairplay/etc.
My dad was a navy nuke and said that the cost v safety v portability of fission was far superior to that of fusion. That was back in the 90s, so I wonder if it's still relevant, but a quick search [1] seemed to confirm the general idea.

[1] diffen.com/difference/Nuclear_Fission_vs_Nuclear_Fusion
I don't keep up with the latest material here, but there is some stuff I've picked up.

For one thing, it's probably not ordinary matter falling into the black holes. When ordinary matter falls into a black hole, it usually forms a bright, glowing accretion disk. We would see that with an ordinary telescope, especially given just how much matter would need to be accreted. (We're talking about dozens of suns worth of mass for each of these intermediate mass black holes!)

You can also have three-body interactions. A pair of black holes in a circular orbit at a decent distance will merge on a timescale of billions of years. But if a third black hole comes in and disrupts the orbit, it can knock those two black holes closer together, at which point the GW power gets much higher and the merge can finish on a reasonable timescale.

For these reasons, some papers I've seen suggest that there might be large collections of black holes that are dense enough for three-body interactions to be relatively common.
Not on the list is ETLyte (https://sorrell.github.io/etlyte/), which I built so that an insurance company's corporate clients could vet their flatfiles before submitting them - it has worked very well across multiple files, with custom validations, and is very speedy (uses SQLite). As far as "non-techies" go, it's pretty straightforward, but confined to the command line, so I guess I need to get working on a web frontend for this :)
> Software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to.

I think this is unfair. Engineers usually have great (at least qualitative though often quantitative) insight into potential, cost, and complexity. The problem tends to be in getting that feedback back into "the room where it happens", the place where budgets are set, approvals are given, disputes are resolved, and performance is evaluated. In that room, there is usually a heavier presence by people who understand organizations, political concerns, messaging, and revenues. So when the cost and risk experts (the devs) are not in the room, of course we end up with overly complex, poorly understood products that chug along for a while and then become so massive that either:

a. the project collapses under its own weight

b. the project creates its own "gravitational pull" and starts pulling in resources to support itself; sometimes this is locked-in customers who cannot migrate away, sometimes this is locked-in enterprises who can't imagine how (and sometimes why) to kill it off
It's also a great way to go to med school.
I wish they would've went with the same subdomain. I'd love if the lite.* subdomain caught on.
> Am I/is the population willing to pay 1000% (10x) more for say, 2% to 1% (2x) improvement chance in the person fucking up my teeth?

As someone with permanent nerve damage from having my wisdom teeth removed that makes me look like a fucking stroke victim when I smile...yes, absolutely
Sneaky Pete is another Amazon Prime show that is excellent. One of my favorites.
There are currently possible ways for early employees in start-ups to cash out their stock options, which further incentivizes talents to work for start-ups.

EquityZen is a platform that lets start-up employees sell shares before IPO:
https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comm...
Wrong. In the US you may be liable for the full amount stolen if you fail to notice the theft in 30 days. Even if you report the theft promptly, the law allows your issuer to make you liable for the first $50.

Also you completely ignored my point about hardware wallets making theft a non-problem.
Pretty much this. Bitcoins are like carrying around cash. Most folks will not argue that you own it, since it's in your pocket, but if someone picks your pocket in a crown then there's no way you're getting it back.
I'm 59-year-old senior software developer in Minnesota and feel zero pressure... Didn't realize how fortunate that is.
> But he did cut a guy's head off. Would you want to live next to the guy who did that while not in control of himself?

Well, if he is considered sane by trustworthy professionals, then why not?

I can't see how it's different to live next to someone who is cured after 10 years of treatment, as opposed to say someone who was in prison for 10 years for the same crime (Where I live this would likely be considered more severe than the normal 12 years out after 9 though). Probably 18 or life, where "life" is often at least 18.

I'd prefer not to live next to that person, but there isn't really much I can do about living next to an ex convict, or in this case an ex- mental patient?
> Strangely though, the US enjoys lower prices for consumer goods like fashion brands, and consumer electronics. Nike shoes and a Sony TV will be more expensive in India than the US.

That's not strange at all. India has import duties on many goods, especially electronics.
skywhopper gets it exactly right!

I think the software development community needs to do much more to explain exactly this to the other communities that interact with us, the managers, program/process managers, users, etc.

We have to ensure people understand that the hardest part of software engineering isn't really the coding the software itself, but discovering what the actual problem(s) to be solved are and what is the constraint space of the solution(s). And I call it discovery because I assert no one, up to the point software engineers got involved, ever thought to detail exactly all those things.
If someone steals my wallet with my cash, its GONE.
We still don't have fixable printers though. Come on Rich, finish the job ;)
True, I think in 10 years we will have single payer or at least buy into medicaid as a start.
Trump's Tax Plan
I feel like this is part of why Brooks says build the first one to throw away, because you're going to.

People seem quite unable to imagine life with a program that doesn't exist. Building a more precise specification would be valuable if people were really able to evaluate the specification as if it were a program, but they don't seem to be able to do that. So we wind up building the whole thing to see if it's right, and it never is, but then we build the next one, and it's much closer.
I'm not an expert by any means, but from reading a lecture notes [1] on it, I think I have a decent idea.

Any gravitational wave polarization can be considered as a tensor. There are several constraints that reduce the dimensional of that tensor though. For example, it must be symmetric and thus reducing its dimension from 16 to 10. Further constraints reduce it to 6. For physically meaningful waves (under the most accepted theory of gravitational waves), all but 2 of those are 0. This leaves us with 2 polarizations of waves. One of the polarization applies only on the diagonal (of the tensor) and the other on the anti diagonal.

From this background, I interpret "we find that the data strongly favor pure tensor polarization of gravitational waves, over pure scalar or pure vector polarizations" to mean that the polarization was not purely of the diagonal polarization and was instead a combination of the two. Alternatively, it could be a property that the tensor representation is more robust to noise or that a non-standard theory is correct and the polarization doesn't fit cleanly into the accepted theory.

[1]: http://eagle.phys.utk.edu/guidry/astro616/lectures/lecture_c...
So now we're 49 years away instead of the proverbial 50 years we've always been at?
Ah, "public safety" measure. The naming & shaming is a byproduct or unforeseen consequence. The military calls such "collateral damage".

What is the purpose of such database? It falls or stands on recidivism. If there is a way (e.g. medical cocktail) where the chance of recidivism is close enough to 0 just like the average civilian there's no practical need for any "special" register. This stands on the premise that the sex offender actively uses their medical cocktail as prescribed.
I'll be the contrarian and ask why this is surprising? Of course if an application has been granted access to files of type X, the application can access those files and read / parse / write / etc those files and the data contained within them.

As a user, I'd be pretty annoyed if I used Instagram, FB, Camera +, or one of the many other camera or photo editing apps on my phone and they did not have the ability to read and write the location data.
Any licensee who adheres to the terms and conditions is given permission to modify the work, as well as to copy _and redistribute_ the work or any derivative version

That redistribute there is what undermines any business model that depends on selling licenses for GPL software. If you sell your 100-line code for $1bn, there is huge incentive for the customer to sell it themselves at a lower cost, undercutting you.
Maybe I'm a little ignorant on how/why companies store this sort of info. Someone at work informed me that Target storing CC numbers at least made sense when you needed to make a return. But at a Sonic Drive-In? I'm not returning my burger+shake combo.

What is possessing Sonic to keep the number any longer than the period it takes to receive money from the CC company? And why is this period any longer than the 20 or so seconds it takes to process the card at a machine? Are all of these magnetic-only or do they store CC numbers with chip cards as well?
+1

And importantly, when to use a deadbolt, or deadbolt + steel frame door, or a safe. All of which are well understood but can be implemented depending on when circumstances warrant. i.e. tool shed vs bank vault.
But if someone steals your credit card and buys $10,000 worth of stuff, you're probably getting that money back.
So I'm pretty ignorant to the history of personal identity/credit breaches, but for those who aren't, is this only getting to get worse? More and more companies are holding more and more data, to the point that these breaches seem to affect so many people. I entered the credit card game pretty recently, and almost immediately I'm affected by the Equifax breach. As a young person, this doesn't make the future of privacy/security seem so promising.
Interesting hypothetical: maybe the state should pay someone with an open mind (like you) handsomely to have him as a new roommate and keep an eye on him.
It is a failure
Sounds more like an argument against cash, than an argument for Bitcoin...
No they aren't.

When did cash get 2 factor auth?
If WhatsApp traffic is encrypted end to end...how can Delta detect the contents of the message I'm sending, size?
I think this paper is quite wrong, and has already been shown to be wrong by all the people who have successfully applied formal methods to their projects.

We believe that, in the end, it is a social process that determines whether mathematicians feel confident about a theorem — and we believe that, because no comparable social process can take place among program verifiers, program verification is bound to fail.

This overlooks the fact that the verifiers aren't black boxes; people trust the TLA+ tools and Coq and Isabelle and PVS because the principles by which they work are well understood, and on top of that, these tools are all open source. (If someone developed a closed-source verifier, they could still leverage this trust by making their verifier output proofs in a format that could be checked by one of these.) So while the individual proofs generated in a software verification are probably not going to be checked socially -- they're mostly just not interesting enough -- there is still a social process operating at the meta-level that gives us confidence in them.
The author implies that there was a real public opposition against the GDPR.

Is this really the case? All I've seen is praise.
The README contains commands that seem to require access to the developer-mode shell. Perhaps in the future though.
Sure, so don’t ignore your finances for a month.
Not Ontario, the case was in Manitoba.
Slightly off-topic, but

> After the incident, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals attempted to run an ad in the Portage Daily Graphic comparing the killing of McLean to the consumption of animals

WTF peta?
"Alexa play bloodline on netflix on fire tv"
instead of just "play bloodline".

UI fails are not limited to guis.

Yes it IS technicaly feasible to figure out that you are alone in your room and that you want to play movies on your default app + device.
No strong AI needed for that yet.
http://thinkinghard.com/blog/IdentityTheft.html (2005)