skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These things are never spelled out in any plans. They're done piecemeal, by separate teams, incrementally over long development cycles.

One team implements 2FA, and they add a way for users to enter their phone numbers as a second factor. The engineers are fine with this because it's for the users' benefit, so they can secure their account.

Another team implements the mobile notifications, which a user has to turn on explicitly. The engineers there do this for the users' benefit, for those users that want notifications by phone. They're opting in, after all.

Sometime in here, the fact that the phone numbers are being collected for 2FA gets forgotten. This sets the stage for a third team, who is tasked with improving engagement numbers. They see that lots of inactive users have phone numbers associated with their accounts. Maybe they might be interested in something their friends are doing? So they try an experiment where they send a notification to these users, and a large percentage of them engage with it! That must mean that the users were interested in the notification right? After all, they opened the link or replied. So they roll it out to a wider audience, and the engagement numbers go up. Awesome! Pats on the back all around.

To be clear, I have no idea about how this actually happened, or if this is the right chronology, or anything else. It really doesn't matter, my point is that this is how this sort of thing happens in large organizations. No one has the whole picture, and in their own world view everyone thinks they're doing something good for their users.

But if you put them all together, and sprinkle in a little willful ignorance, you get Facebook spamming their users on their 2FA numbers.
Very cool! Can't wait to see that
I find this interesting because most indie video game companies to do this. I have friends who make lots of android and iOS games and they ask all of their family, friends and employees to rate those games. Just so they have a chance of being featured on the App Store/ Play Store. While it may be unethical, this is rampant in the industry, and would it even be fair for a developer to be prevented from rating their own game.
Sure, they will be biased, because they have every reason to but would it be any different from movie fanboys rating their favorite movies 10/10.

Here is the link to the original email : https://i.redd.it/x9cnf7lbrvf01.jpg
> but I've had my account since 2006 and despite the company's terrible practices, I'm really not interested in disconnecting for good at this time

This behavior does not encourage FB to self-correct.
I took Jeff's senior level Algorithms class at UIUC back in 2002. His lecture notes are really high quality and presented in a very engaging style. Definitely worth checking out!

He also gave some very difficult homework problems. UIUC lore has one student noping out in a pretty amusing way: http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/pikachu.html
No, it's not an illusion and it has nothing to do with facebook only relationships (I don't even know what that is). All the people I contact on facebook I have in person relationships with. For well over the past 3 years its primary function has been as an organizational tool for my close group of friends. Few of us update our status or regularly post on there anymore. They live in different cities, states, or countries now. Groups and events make a fantastic way to plan a vacation with friends and has all the interactive features you'd want for that sort of a thing (messages, RSVP, polls, etc) that e-mail simply can't give you, and the fact that facebook is completely ubiquitous among my friends make it really the only choice for the job (although I do suspect this is due to our age range- we are all mostly in our early 30's - I think if we were older or younger this would not be as true).

Until someone makes an organizing tool that can break the network effect facebook has with my friend group, I'll have a facebook account.
And to be honest, capitalism doesn't always need directly paid operatives. People whose livelihood depends on low taxes, less regulation, free trade, etc, will glady fund think-tanks, politicians, and media that espouse these values, not to mention, making TV appearances and op-eds themselves. It has the same effect of government funded propaganda, in my opinion.

I do agree it is a little more nefarious to have a foreign government fund these efforts, but how different is it from wealthy business owners funding think-tanks and academics who align with them politically? It's probably not as nefarious but it's just a matter of degree.
FPGAs cost 10x ASICs so this argument is unimportant. The reason for using ASICs is lower cost / lower compute resources.
In the Genesis Block he explicitly references the post financial crisis bailouts.
Hangouts has terrible performance and I won't force people into using anything FB related.
> What am I missing?

Quite a lot, I'm afraid. Please do read the Snowden leaks, it's extremely important historical data. For starters, all major US tech companies are PRISM partners.
Thanks for sharing this, good article
And here we thought Wikileaks leaking next to nothing on the GOP was a coincidence.
I think it's cost, mainly. Also, in my neighborhood of older homes it would be hard to get all the easements.

http://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/vo...
> to scrub historical information from the platform.

You know they never actually delete user data, right? They don't delete your data if you actually delete your account, much less if you just delete a post. They just stop displaying it then.
Well, of course it's not actually an ad blocker, it's a middle-ground between "ad blocker" and "no ad blocker". And to be fair, that does seem like something that some people are asking for.

That said, the self-interest is palpable and makes it hard to take this seriously, akin to a bottled-water manufacturer pushing for stricter standards on the purity of tap water. In fact it seems like the fact that the standards are set by an industry coalition (of which Google is a prominent member) rather than Google itself, is the only thing keeping this from being outright antitrust, in that Google is using one of its products to restrict the activity of its competitors.
Sounds fake to me. Any actual Chinese to confirm this? Just going by the "they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”" comment; China is a communist country, its about as far on the spectrum left past welfare state as you can go.
US Senator demands review of loot box policies, citing potential harm
I love these kind of things too and link to them frequently from my audio-themed newsletter (http://webaudioweekly.com). I'm particularly fond of Tero Parviainen's interactive explorations of generative music, for example: https://teropa.info/blog/2017/01/23/terry-rileys-in-c.html
Converting Assembly to Java isn't "tax reform" and nobody is going to pat you on the back for making an economically disadvantageous decision just because you believe it benefits your fellow citizens. If you want warm fuzzies and to get paid then look at contracting. That's how we fill the gaps when we get literally 0 applicants because the FTE rate for our dev positions is laughably low.

Public sector employers need to compete in the same job market as private sector employers. I can only speak about my department but we're hamstrung by bureaucratic and legislative inertia that is completely out of our control. I believe the mission of my department is an important one but if the private sector software market was more robust in my city and pay scales were just as disproportionate as they are now I would choose a private sector job 10 out of 10 times. The only ones here not constantly checking LinkedIn are the lifers that already have a fat pension and are reasonably close to retirement.
Particle Mesh IoT device pre-order
Should ship in July (!). Based on the Nordic nRF52840. $9 for Xenon (BLE+mesh), $15 for Argon (BLE+mesh+wifi(ESP32-S0WD)), $29 for Boron (BLE+mesh+LTE). I like that it has an onboard lithium cell charge circuit.

I ordered a Xenon and Argon to play with.

Shameless referral linkage, if anyone else wants to pre-order: https://particle.io/mesh?referral=MK92YF
Google’s Tech Initiatives in Africa
QDR-IV and RLDRAM3 are off-the-shelf parts. Go to any supplier like Digikey (https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/cypress-semiconduc...) and you can order yourself some high-speed RAM today.

An FPGA or ASIC would be needed to talk to these special RAM chips, but that's a problem that can be solved.

> I think it would be difficult for an FPGA to beat a $200 CPU and $60 MB that has 30-50 GiB/s RAM bandwidth.

Its not bandwidth that's the problem with a lot of these chips. Its latency. QDR-IV achieves 7.5 nanoseconds of latency, while L3-cache of Ryzen or Intel Skylake achieves 10-nanoseconds, while DDR4 has latency measured in 50nanoseconds to 100-nanoseconds, depending on the CPU that's accessing it.

So yes. An off-the-shelf QDR-IV chip will achieve BETTER latency numbers than your off-the-shelf computer, by significant margins.

Bandwidth is basically a solved problem with regards to ASICs or FPGAs: just add another channel. Talk to 10-chips, or 20-chips at a time to have 10x or 20x the bandwidth. Latency is the hard problem, which is why I'm focusing on it.
I don't usually stay at a place more than 3 or 4 hours anyways, so it's just a midway refill point for me. I usually work the rest of the day at home, or switch to a new place if I want to stay out.

Also, the amount to spend can scale with your budget; it seems more important to just to get up and buy something, just so you don't appear completely cut off from the rest of the world.

I normally get espresso drinks, but sometimes I'll get a normal drip coffee, which usually has a cheaper refill ($3 for the first, and $1 for a refill), and I'll tip on each refill.
The Terrifying Future of Fake News
I did some work for an electricity utility and they wanted to get the pole IDs described in the article into our database, alongside the GIS data. The client explained that getting the IDs was kinda difficult and there were several different data sources for the various regions they provided service to. By and by we found a guy there who knew how everything worked and promised he'd get us the data that we needed - which he did.

But he told me an interesting story - the utility had about 50,000 power poles in their network. But due to various historical reasons and how their assets were digitized over the years he reckoned there were probably about 1000 of them that were on their maps, but that didn't actually exist anymore. And interestingly, he thought the inverse was also true; that there were perhaps 1000 poles out there that weren't on any of their maps. Big ten meter tall poles, some probably carrying live cables - didn't know they were there.
If you give people the reasonable expectation that pictures drawn on your property will not be erased in the near future, I don't think it's unusual for you to be held to that expectation. Not all liabilities are written on paper with a signature at the bottom.
I'm pretty sure even then they don't actually delete your data. They just make it impossibly for you to reactivate your account.
And need to.
The scheduled hard fork is announced weeks in advance, and high-profile clients like exchanges are "strongly encouraged" to upgrade. If you run your own XMR full node on an old version past the fork date, you get a bright red warning message telling you to get the new version.
It sounds like the real owner of the walls was the guy setting the schedule of who and when gets to paint said walls. The owner that holds the title to the building has been reduced to one of the artists, if that, who should have known better than to decide what to do with what is actually his own property.
Just get multiple phone numbers. It's easy these days and totally worth it. They're only $1 / month and being able to keep your real number separate from all these BS sites is great. Plus, for 2FA social engineers aren't going to get you just by working your network.
Show HN: Board game reviews hub, tracking 60 sources. Tokentile
You should judge the coverage based on the credibility of the WSJ newsroom (it's high) as well as the reporter (also high) rather than on who owns the publication. Especially if you have no evidence of them interfering with the newsroom.
What skills should a senior engineer have?
What technical and non-technical skills would you consider a developer needs to have, to be a great senior engineer, whatever the definition of that term might mean to you. Follow up: what advice would you give someone to get on that path?
It's communist in name but it sounds to me closer to state capitalism in practice.
I'm about a third of the way building my K2. Really hard to justify the expense of the kit but is the mother of all kits to build and the end result will provide a lot of satisfaction. I've just started testing the first of the boards and was surprised when it just worked (i.e., turned on and no smoke was visible).
I met Rusty at Linux Conference Australia 2017 (In Hobart)

We were in the same dorm, and he borrowed some of my toothpaste.
You make a reasonable point.

That said, all the countries you mention have strong track records of human rights violations. So really China's not surrounded by good company on that issue, and maybe the takeaway should be more that we should be cautious regarding these countries and how they might try to influence discourse on US campuses rather than saying "well a bunch of corrupt governments are all doing it, what's the big deal?".

As far as "what's so special about China"- the sheer volume of its population (and thus of its population studying abroad) as well as the fact that it is (or is close to being, depending on how you want to draw your lines) the world's leading economy are good starting points.

I'm French, went to grad school in the US, and did not see any of my countrymen protest on campus because the history department was teaching about the war of Algeria and they weren't happy about it (nor did I see Catalonian students protest that the geography department treated Spain as a single country... you get the point).
Also as in "simulation codes". I associate it with physicists and Fortran programs, rightly or wrongly.
Apple’s HomePod: Paying $350 for a speaker that says “no” this much is tough
My previous jobs:

What worked for X (200 people in engineering) didn’t work for Y (8 people in eng) didn’t work for Z (1600 people in eng.)

What worked in isolated teams didn’t work in cross-functional teams didn’t work in cross-domain teams etc.

You find what works for your specific setup, and stick to it. If it doesn’t after a few iterations, you change it. Rinse, repeat.

Current setup that works for us:

- Company-wide broad initiatives for the coming year, prioritized.

- Quarterly planning for teams with goals and projects aligned with company initiatives.

- Our team has week-long sprints, with a retrospective every two weeks. Issues are prioritized by technical and product leads of the team, so at the beginning of the week we know what the most pressing issues are, and how many of them we can take on (and complete within a week).

- Once a month there’s an all-hands were all teams in our domain discuss their progress on their projects/goals (because that may and will affect dependent teams).

Is it perfect? No. Does it work for us? Yes. Do people question this? Yes, and we make adjustments as we go along. Is it agile/scrum/kanban? I don’t know and I don’t care :)

—————

tl;dr

- Prioritize your shit on all levels (company, department, team)

- Select whatever processes you want to go throught the prioritized list

- If processes don’t work, adjust/change them
Oh god, don't give them any ideas. We already have an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies (the IC consists of 16 at the moment), don't make it worse.
For this kind of workload it makes sense to optimize the DRAM array topology to the problem at hand, which you cannot do on GPU. That obviously means that you cannot use ready made FPGA devboard (which usuallly have quite narrow memory interfaces) but you have to design your own board.
Anytime I read about the Harlow experiment I just want to cry.
>Is there such thing as a scientific definition that states unambiguously where any one race ends and another begins"

No, that's why it's in scare quotes.
You may feel that from a human rights perspective China is morally inferior to the US. This has no bearing on whether you're better off being spied on by one or the other. If you're located in the US, the US government has an extreme amount of power over you and China has almost none; it's obviously better to be spied on by China. If you're in China, the logic reverses.
Microsoft for Startups
FTA: "Wolkoff has been singularly unrepentant."

A book comes to mind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(novel)

Like the protagonist in the book, the owner had plenty of chance to smooth it over or explain his actions but decided his actions and rights were arbitrary. The courts would likely have seen things his way, but in the end if he's going to phone it in, they have power as well.
> and not where it can have direct contact with people.

Could you expand on that? My elementary school had a playground structure made of old utility poles. Other than getting pitch on our clothes, they didn't seem particularly hazardous.
The EFF received quite a few bitcoins early on, which it redistributed.

On the one hand, they'd be worth quite a bit today.
On the other, without ways of getting more people interested in bitcoin, they might have just stayed an interesting experiment and be worth nothing.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/thank-you-bitcoin-comm...
Back when I had the Facebook app installed on my phone, if I didn't open it for a long period the "so-and-so posted an update" push notifications would eventually slow to a trickle and ultimately peter out altogether. But if I so much as touched Facebook, the floodgates would re-open and I'd be spammed with them throughout the day, until the process repeated and they died away again.

In a weird way Facebook ended up conditioning me to avoid using it.
I'm not sure that diversity is what we should be striving for in our reporting. Right now, you can get 50 hot takes from a million different outlets. The vast majority are optimizing their headlines and writing for clicks. They manufacture outrage because it is what will bring people to their site. You can easily find an article to confirm whatever views you have on a particular news event. I'm not sure this is a good thing. There is nothing that requires a digital news outlet to have any journalistic integrity. There are plenty that have had stories thoroughly discredited but are still spread around on social media.

I'm not saying that centralized news is better. I don't remember much of that. I am saying that people have a very difficult time determining what is factual and what is not. Diversity in news may not be a good thing for democracy when we bombard people with information and options and tell them to sort it out.
I'm not sure it is quite right to jump to this conclusion. Heart disease and auto accident ('unintentional injury') loom high for probable causes of death for that age group.

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_o...

That said, suicide is third highest on that list when you only look at things that could be sudden.
Not to mention, with the NSA, the primary concern should be transparency and whether what they're doing is legal/allowed by the constitution. With China there are real national security concerns.

We can have discussions and concerns about the NSA while also recognizing foreign nations pose an equal or worse threat. At least with the NSA there is some hope of reigning them in when they overstep.
My point wasn't about decentralization. It was about hashrate providing security. That's all.

(Since you talk about decentralization, being GPU-mineable doesn't necessarily increase decentralization either. Bitmain could put 100 MW of GPUs into mining some random coin.)
I left Facebook. But mainly because I realised that it's a real poor way to keep in touch with anyone. Gives you the feeling that you are keeping in touch when in reality you are just sharing photos and quotes in a medium that's very noisy with adverts.
Bay Area to LA but in general too; many grads leave the LA area, so it's not a hard sell to get them to come back after they pick up some experience. Bay Area just happens to be the biggest consumer of fresh graduates.
The thing is since I am in the US, the Chinese government has very little power over me compared to the US. Since I am a US citizen, they also have very little interest in me compared to the USA.
Concerns may differ for those in a different position than I am. My industry isn’t a target for espionage.
> GOP Women Frustrated by Trump's Approach to Abuse Charges
> 2018 Congressional Elections Loom as Referendum on Trump
> House Panel Launches Probe into Trump Aide's Employment Amid Domestic Abuse Allegations

Oh, wow, point taken.

I always forget about VOA because the government doesn't promote it inside the United States. BBC and even NHK have a much higher profile than Voice of America does in America.
Majority of products like that i.e. SDK/libraries, are using fixed price. I'm sure some can get away with royalty but that's rare.

Somewhat related: as someone who likes the idea of Sciter and tried to use it, I had a hard time figuring the basics out and I think the best way to improve your business would be:

1. Improve documentation, especially add step-by-step tutorial for beginners. The first article should not be "Engine architecture" but "Step-by-step guide to build your first application with Sciter".

2. The SDK (I tried both Windows and Mac) is super confusing. Multiple executables, not clear what does what.

You should have separate versions for Windows / Mac / Linux because bundling all platform executables into one increases confusion.

There are plenty of samples but no clear way of how to even launch them. I spent way too much time figuring this out and had to write an alias for the sciter executable to make this bearable (i.e. alias sciter='/Users/kjk/Downloads/sciter-sdk/bin.osx/scapp')

There's a mish-mash of files that can be run directly and those that are imported by the main code.

Ideally, if the sciter launcher in SDK is launched without arguments, it should ask to load a sample from a file (pre-positioned in the samples folder) or allow drag&drop sample files on a window or list samples and allow launching them with double-clicking.

See how rebol-view does it http://www.rebol.com/download-view.html

3. Improve stability. The app crashed on some samples. Not a good first look.

Sciter is a great technology, but the experience of evaluating it is bad. I would imagine at this time improving that would be the best way to make it more popular.
It's difficult to explain succinctly. SAFe is the embodiment of the kind of enterprise bureaucracy that agile was rejecting. Take a look at the principles espoused by the Agile Manifesto:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

* Working software over comprehensive documentation

* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

* Responding to change over following a plan

Now imagine what the exact opposite of this would look like, and then take a look at SAFe.