skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I worry that the "culture" argument has dangerous implications if true, as it can be used to discriminate on so many grounds outside of age: gender ("If I'm with a bunch of my bro's, why mess it up with a girl?"), race, language, disabilities, etc etc.

Well, yeah. Only it's not "implications", it's the reality of tech hiring. The hiring practices of many tech companies have been called racist, sexist and age-discriminatory (although I haven't heard anything with regard to disabilities). One of the first counter arguments for the accused company is "culture fit".

> I thought the "hacker culture" would be supportive of the idea that "if you can do the job well, let's work together on solving interesting problems," rather than the cliche "would I want to grab a beer with this person?"

That's great in theory, but it doesn't hold water in practice. People are people. The "hacker culture" thing might work well if people work together via a mailing list, but if it's a bunch of people that spend many hours together in an office, then the social aspect play a bigger role I think.
Generally speaking it doesn't include management (except for immediate dev management). It also doesn't include support or operations (in a software company that would include secretaries, security, cleaning staff, etc). It usually doesn't include capital expenses either, so depending on how you do the accounting, things like running the building is not included. From that perspective, the numbers can be a bit deceiving.

Depending on the area, the costs can swing wildly. I worked at Corel back when shrink wrapped software was a thing. Sales channels cost huge amounts of money. Even after that period getting your software into OEM builds cost a fortune. That's stuck in "costs of sales", usually. I've worked at companies where costs of sales was well over 50% of revenue. As you can imagine, there is considerable latitude for corruption ;-).

If you are running a service, "operations" often pays for compute infrastructure, but it depends entirely on the company. You might even have dev ops in operations so that can be misleading because you don't have a product without the service.

My experience has been that management, operations and sales takes 60-70% of revenue. The absolutely necessary expenses in operations usually amount to less than 10%. Capital expenses can be very large if they are investing in real estate or something similar, so that's a complete wild card. Sales and marketing are kind of linked because usually you have to spend more on one if you spend less on the other. How much you can get away with if you change the business model is kind of up in the air and I'm really speculating when I suggest that a free software model will be cheaper -- I believe it, but obviously have zero data.

It's worth downloading quarterly/year end reports from various high tech companies and reading them. It's pretty incredible how much information you can get from them. They won't break down everything exactly the way you want, but you can usually figure it out -- and often see pretty plainly where they are playing games.

Complete diversion: One of Corel's favourite tricks in the past (though not now, I think -- everything changed after they were sold) was to overfill the sales channel in first quarter. Basically they would "sell" the software to dealers, but would provide "refunds" for software that wasn't sold by the end of 4th quarter. So 1st quarter was always massively positive, while they were always massively (and somehow unexpectedly) in the red by 4th quarter. Executive stock options were granted 4th quarter and there was a trading window in second quarter. So the stock would plunge dramatically (one or two binary orders of magnitude) just before the stock options were granted and then rocket back up in time to sell them. They did that year after year after year (I was there for 5 years and it happened every time). The reason for the swings was literally written in the quarterly reports. In first quarter they would say "We sold $X, but this is subject to 4th quarter refunds". Then in fourth quarter they would say, "We experienced a one time loss from refunds in the sales channel". I swear nobody reads those quarterly reports... :-P
Rails is well know for this. Here is a nice page listing common ones: https://rails-sqli.org/
> Can we also agree that mounting and unmounting the efi filesystem is really easy ?

In a race-free way? No. In a way that fails safe? No.
Yep, part of the quality standard for medical devices is to have processes, and also processes to improve and change the processes. So theoretically there shouldn't be any doubt as what to do in a given circumstance when something fails, and that standards would rise as development matures. But in reality it's just a bunch of paperwork, and as far as the software is concerned, standard practices of unit and integration testing, code reviews, and strict compiler settings are more than adequate already.

Edit: It's all about documenting that those things have been done and signed off on, so keeping track of paperwork.
I wonder why when people are talking about some math discoveries, there's always someone who'll mention that truly marvellous proof by Fermat (or at least his Last Theorem). That has become repetitive and quite often without a link strong enough to justify expressed opinion.
Well I think that both Apple and Google have tried to do this with their respective newstand apps but I'm not sure how successful this has been.

Also revenue I guess, for such a service is probably a good bit less than getting your readers to pay soley for access to your publication.
I've two side projects that I plan on working on in 2018:

- A "Travel Guide" for Physics, which collects the best explanations for any physics topic and sorts them depending on the required level of sophistication: https://physicstravelguide.com/

- A platform, where students and researchers can publish their notes: https://physicsnotes.org/
The Ledger Nano S hardware wallet can hold just about every cryptocurrency, including ERC20 tokens.
You say it like is a bad thing. If I compare two service/products/relationships/experiences which are equal in all but one attribute: delivery time, guess which I will choose..
Delivery time is an important attribtue and reduces (subjective) risk of no delivery.
And delivery time is an attribute which is measurable. In comparison it is hard to measure how bug free a peace of software is, or how healthy food is, or how successfull your relationship will be, or how good you can learn this new skill in a year.
It is not limited to any sex, you can just as well map male faces on male actors.

https://www.reddit.com/r/deepfakes/
Parallax mapping will not benefit from this, since the limiting factor there is performing a raymarch on a heightfield to find an exact intersection. At every step along the ray you need to test wether you are inside or outside of the heightfield. This means offsetting the uv coordinate (xy position inside the texture) by the ray vector, and then using that coordinate to sample the texture again, to check whether or not you penetrated the heightfield. The amount of texture lookups quickly becomes the bottleneck, especially on large textures since they incur cache misses. To give you an idea: for every parallaxed pixel on the screen the heightmap texture might be looked up several dozens of times. You don’t nearly get to subpixel accuracy before performance grinds to a halt. Parallax mapping is view dependent, so roughness mapping, even if somehow applicable would need to be highly anisotropic for it to work, which means a huge storage cost.
> Get out of your cube and go and meet CEO's and CIO and talk to them about their problems and what their goals are.

Implied in this statement is that the parent has a myopic perspective on the business world. Based on my read of his comment, I don't think that's fair - and moreover would question whether or not your perspective is as unique as you apparently think it is.

In other words, I think you're patting yourself on the back a little much for figuring out how to chew before swallowing.
I've used coconutBattery to check the health of the battery in my 6s and it reports the number of charge cycles and the maximum capacity. Is this data stored in the battery or the phone? Does replacing the battery reset the cycles counter?
I hate when cyclists don't yield to people going in or out of a tram or a bus. They mostly ring at you when you cross the bike lane from bus stop to the bus. Cars would stop in the same situation as this is sanctified. It happens from all the places next to Hauptbahnhof and it infuriates me, because there are far more passengers than cyclists. I know that is because cyclists want to maintain inertia, but it's just rude.
It could be just my experience, but homogeneous teams have higher churn rates.

What happens 6 months after 9 out of 10 juniors you hired want to become team leads? Or they dissagree on the technology stack?

The advantages of younger people are numerous however: you can pay them less, make them work longer hours, make silly promises they will believe (think Elon Musk fooling his employees he's going to Mars).
> . We weren't that talented, but one of the guys in our group was still able to get into the cameras in the parking lot of the CIA.

Well, by now, 16 years later perhaps you will have learned about the concept of honeypots.
The linked study does not support or address lie detection.
It is about attacks on AI face recognition. (Making it misdetect or not detect the subject.)
This is actual fake reporting. Unless author has made a critical mistake when pasting the link to the study.

I suspect based on the image he meant DARE:
https://doubaibai.github.io/DARE/

Which is somewhat less than impressive. The quoted "accuracy" is AUC which weighs all errors the same. It is also not a binary detector. For use in courtroom false positives are much more costly.

Remember this also says nothing about generalization power of the system. Nor how well humans could be trained to detect lies. (Untrained results were pretty impressive.)

Very overblown claims as of now.
Stop, Take a Break, and Just Think (The Life-Changing Habit of Thinking)
> The woman who gave the presentation services her company's contract with a tech company, that, let's just say, has a big share of the search engine market.

If you're being oblique to avoid libel, it's worth noting that libel law doesn't care about whether nor not you name an entity. It cares about whether or not you've identified an entity.

Google has been identified.
Want to go <3
Two of the most interesting books I've read this year are:

1. Man's search for meaning, by Viktor Frankl.
He was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded Logotherapy as a form of analysing one's life with the idea of finding meaning or living a purposeful life.
According to Frankl, such a life would mean doing important/meaningful work, enjoying nature in all it's beauty, loving and taking care of another person and being courageous when going through hard times. These are things that I personally consider part of the common sense package I had built-in when I was born, so this book kind of talks to my soul. I would recommend it to anyone who is highly self-reflective.

2. Stumbling on happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. This was an interesting read and the different studies described in the book made me think how would I react in a similar situation and I realised funny things about how memory works and how does our brain imagine future events.
We are a software development company from Nepal. We launched http://www.99leave.com/, a complete attendance and leave management system.
Meet the Founder Who Pledged 5,057 BTC ($86m) to Charity
Thanks for the article! I'm still trying to find the time to read it, but it looks very intersting and well written. I hadn't heard the term "strong generalisation" before either, but it's a nice concept that is often overlooked in discussions of machine learning.

To me it's a big problem and I don't think anyone has good answers. I once pressed one of my tutors at university (I did an AI Masters) with a question about it. In the end he kind of put his hands up and said that the final arbiter of your system's performance is your client- if they're happy with your model, than that's that. That certainly does not satisfy me. On the other hand, of course, the success of some machine learning systems "in the wild" is indisputable (say, AlphaGo and AlphaZero etc).

Don't be too worried about the maths. I'm doing an AI PhD and my maths was never very good either (although to be fair it's a GOFAI subject, so it's a different kind of maths). You learn to read the maths in papers and understand what's going on- slowly and painfully at first, but you get there in the end. Besides, if you're good with the code, you can use that to help you get your head around the hardest bits. I still have trouble with calculus, but I once implemented an LSTM network in pure python ish (no frameworks, besides numpy) for one of my classes at uni. I think it even worked properly. My tutor was duly impressed anyway.

Thanks again for the links to the papers I hadn't read and that nice little article- and good luck with your research :)
A Commercial Reuse License Can Be the Best of Both Worlds (2016)
Salesforce consulting services
I like that story, too, but note that the actual quote was:

"I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Diophant...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem#Fermat...
Agreed about the customs officials - travel to the US is no longer pleasant.

Concerning government officials, for a few years I lived in the same town as the prime minister of the UK. I used to see them walking about town or in shops, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, but never with any security escort. The CCTV cameras there are mostly private ones in shops, as far as I can tell.
That sounds really cool. I'd like to check it out.

Now that you've been through it, would you do it again? Or stick to a more traditional architecture?
Iirc beos did have a POSIX layer.
Stopping Plastic Pollution with the Power of Bubbles
Many still spend vast sums on fundraising even with healthy recurring donations - it just means they spend more on prime-time TV advertisements. Charities should not be trying to sell their services along side perfumes, car insurance and supermarket advertisements - single-use "things" - they should be going for the long term organic growth by fostering a great reputation for efficiency ("good done" per unit currency).
Drawbacks I experience:

- Vendor lock-in: although I try to minimise this and have a clear picture of where the lock-in lies, it is very much present.

- Cold/warm start: this is somewhat annoying. I haven't set up keepalive requests yet, but they feel like an ugly hack, so I'm not sure if I'm going to or if I will just suck it up.

- Security/monitoring: having fewer functions make this less of a worry, but it's still difficult and it's clear that there's not much of an ecosystem and best practices.

- Debugging: this can be really annoying. I can usually avoid this by having a proper local testing setup (see below), but when that doesn't cut it, this gets annoying.

Drawbacks I haven't really experienced:

- Statelessness: this is probably due to not splitting up my code in too many functions, and thus not having that much complex interactions, but this hasn't really been a problem for me.

- Execution limits: haven't run into them yet.

Drawbacks I've managed to contain:

- Local testing: I'm writing Node Lambda's. Since they're just stateless functions, it was relatively easy for me to write a really simple Express server, transform the Express requests into the API Gateway format, and convert the API Gateway response format back into Express format. This works fine for local testing, and reduces the effects of vendor lock-in. That said, I do do a lot of the request parsing in the Lambda function itself, rather than letting API Gateway do this.

- Deployment: this is actually pretty sweet. I'm using TerraForm which, although it's a bit immature and thus cumbersome to set up, has been getting the job done and allows me to easily deploy new copies of the infrastructure for every branch of my code.

- Remote testing: as mentioned above, deploying it for every branch I have allows me to see what it's going to look like in production.

Hmm, perhaps I should turn this into an article sometime...
Actually Happened (not a movie plot)

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/kellimarshall/clips/A...

"The late Fred Astaire 'dances with' a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. This controversial ad, okayed by Astaire's daughter but protested by his widow, inspired "the Astaire Bill," which was passed in 1999 to 'eliminate the exceptions and place the burden of proof on those using celebrity images, forcing them to show that their use is protected by the First Amendment.'"
Anybody here going?
The other key component of serverless is the pricing scheme: pay for what you use; don’t pay for provisioned capacity. This has a huge impact on how you design systems as you no longer have to consider throughput (besides account limitations that you can raise without cost), only latency. You can even treat lambda like an async queue which will never accumulate a backlog.

Interestingly lambda seems to make async IO technologies like nodejs less compelling, because throughput capacity isn’t really relevant anymore.
is it based on saas??
For all we know it could be Bing!
> I don't know if the world is getting a shittier place. But it surely is getting less reliable.

It is, because everything is being optimized into literal minimum viable products. That's how competitive markets work - whatever aspect of your product or business you can cut out to save money and thus get ahead of your competitors, you will cut out, and then your competitors will cut it out too, in order not to get outcompeted by you. This race-to-the-bottom phenomenon is fundamental to how competition works, and the result is that products gradually lose quality.

It's the reason why your grandfather's washing machine probably works 'till this day, while you have to fix your new one every year, and will probably replace it in five years. "Building to last" is a good example of a quality that the market economy optimized out over time across pretty much all products in all sectors.
There are states where you can drink in public places. CT comes to mind. Not all public places, but most.
Impossible: they renamed it to Files some time ago.

If you want to keep laughing, they also renamed Epiphany to Web.
Thanks for this - I've just installed it.
Well, the macOS kernel exposes a stable C++ API (IOKit) to third-party kernel extensions.
Well Uber is finally being treated as a taxi company in the EU.
Take a look at Bitcoins historical prices. I call what we’re experiencing right now the “Third Rise.” At the beginning of each, I thought there was no way the price would double or triple. Yet each time it did. I’d suggest if looking at history before you make such strong statements about Bitcoin’s price possibilities.
You may already know about Hatsune Miku[0]. I imagine it's only a matter of time before we see this kind of thing in film too.

[0]: https://ec.crypton.co.jp/pages/prod/vocaloid/cv01_us
Also, while I'm sure it's there for practical reasons, the per article price makes me very uncomfortable. There's this split second decision that I make as open an article - is it worth my time? To ask "if it's worth my money?" before every read seems less than ideal. For instance if my music service asked me a penny for every song I play, I'd probably end up listening to a lot less songs than I do.
Only 4 days ago this was posted:

http://codesuppository.blogspot.nl/2017/12/iota-tangled-mess...

Next to that I found this great article in the comments:

https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...
What exactly do you think it’s meant to do? Amazon even lists web application backends as its first use case example in a recent article. All those things are necessary in production.
I have a friend who’s born in Xinjiang and she told me this kind of control goes far beyond just surveillance, physical control, ID checks and whatnot. In a very Orwellian way, it also extends to control of the mind. Schools, government agencies, and local companies have to have their students and employees routinely recite propaganda about “ethnic unity” and relevant official policies and conduct routine tests to make sure these things are memorized.

Big Brother isn’t just watching you, it’s also trying to sneak its way into your mind.
Somehow I never consider to solve a problem by delegating it to government or society. My first thought is always: there must be a technical solution for this. Even government and society are going to be solved by technology: crypto/blockchain or something which will evolve out of it.
How do you imagine a camera honeypot at the CIA parking lot? They'd still be leaking a lot of information if the image was true.
That being said, microexpressions have gone a long way already. But indeed,

> [...] whoever is the pupeteer needs to be a good actor himself

Example: https://youtu.be/jSJr3dXZfcg?t=212
The sunk cost fallacy: Devs describe how it almost destroyed them
BitPay Now Charges Two Fees to Complete Bitcoin Transactions
I’m on mobile at the moment, so please bear with me. There are several features that AuCTeX + evince gives me that I have not seen together in many other solutions:

* ability to invert pdf colors for night time
* synctex support
* ability to also easily switch to other pdfs that I’m referencing
I'm a prime member for nautilus for 2 years now. I can't support all the good journalism sites I visit. But that doesn't mean I (or you) shouldn't support any. Just pick one.
Just did the same. It’s one of the few sources of quality content, and voting with your wallet makes sense.
If you read my original comment you'd see that the contract would specify whether you accumulate sick days faster or there is a cut off at a 40 hour week. The only they they need is to ensure that employees accumulate sick days at the rate mandated by law.

Again if the law mandates that then they have to pay that. They are free to implement something in their app to stop you working more than 40 hours a week if they want to.

Yes there are companies where you can choose your shift. There are companies where you choose where you work. I'm sure there are companies that allow both already. Also just because you do something new doesn't mean you suddenly don't have to follow the law. I can't say I'm the only company that allows employees to work from wherever they want as long as they wear a propeller hats therefore I don't have to provide sick pay.
Looks nice! Pretty hefty website lol
Also the externalities that are never mentioned: bloat and poor performance unnecessarily takes up user's resources, frustrating them and preventing them from doing other things on their machine simultaneously, and also unnecessarily wasting electricity. Multiply that by the number of users of the software, and suddenly all that talk about "optimizing for developer time" starts to sound like "I'll save $100 for myself by inflicting $100k in externalities".
Its something related to prettify and auctex; unfortunately im on mobile atm.
Talent Shortage in Southeast Asia: Understanding the Challenges
Weird machines, exploitability, and provable unexploitability