skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What will determine Zuckerberg and FB's fate in the US is the extent and number of politicians that received contributions. If FB donated to many politicians' election campaigns, they may be able to walk away with a slap on the wrist.

Maybe tech companies should take a page from Boeing's playbook and set up offices in all 50 states
You can negotiate lower S3 prices if you're a heavy user. I assume the other companies will as well. By heavy I mean exceeding the lowest price tiers significantly.
We haven't used backpack (rucksack) sized radios for at least a decade. If by backpack you mean a typical hiking backpack you can get at REI, then yes I guess they are backpack sized.
Brilliant book that. The way he explains how a polished rigorous proof hides the process(compared with frontend and kitchen views of a restaurant) by which a mathematician has arrived at it changed my perception of how mathematics is done.

I notice the same phenomena in programming too. The final piece of code that works doesn't reflect all the failed attempts at solving a problem. This is why I tend to not delete/clear cells at all from my jupyter notebooks. :) It is always informative/fun to refer to them at a later point in time to relive that problem solving experience.

PS: In case you haven't, you should try Proofs and Refutations by Lakatos.

Edit: Fixed name of the book mentioned and added some text.
24/7 customer support: TIL
Easter special new song
That sounds horrible and fantastic at the same time.

But what was the toughest interview if that wasn't it?
That's not quite true. Natural selection is typically contrasted with artificial selection, in which individual traits are deliberately selected.

In the case of poaching, poachers are not intentionally trying to change the phenotype of the animal. They want to collect the horns/head/etc. The selection itself is an emergent side effect and, I would say, the natural result of a highly effective predator being introduced into the environment.
To answer your question, the debt holders take precedence over the equity holders like Bain Capital, and generally being an equity holder and having your equity stake wiped to $0 is not a good outcome for a private equity firm. Bain does have to pay off debts - that is what the liquidation of assets is being done for - to pay off debts to the debt holders. Bain doesn't get to keep those assets.
Could not disagree more. I am generally pretty liberal but get news stories from Breitbart, Fox news, etc all the time in my feed.

I like to read all sides so love this aspect of Google news. Heck I get negative Google stories from Google. Can't ask for more neutral.
I only used Google News occasionally, but these days I treat it as anathema. At some point I heard about an event I wanted to look up, tried Google News in hopes of getting the most current sources, and couldn't find it.

Whatever decisions were being made, it was preferring old articles on barely-related technology topics to something high-profile on every major news site. I don't know if it was my profile or simply a crappy algorithm, but having a major event 'vanish' like that made me permanently swear off the site. I didn't get the experience of a bubble, but I certainly got the sense that the content was non-representative, and curated for goals other than keeping me informed.
Or perhaps there is no correct way to write software and is very dependent on the problem domain and the type of application. I wonder how many projects went over budget, are incredibly over-engineered and ultimately failed because some senior developers read a book on DDD and went crazy with types.
Low-Latency Continuous Processing in Structured Streaming in Apache Spark 2.3.0
That makes it worse, not better.
The real problem that Google doesn't want to talk about is its monopoly (with FB) of the digital ad market, to the tune of something like 85% of the total market. As a result, from big to small publishers, specialty publishers, regional publications, etc are all struggling. Here's a read: https://www.medgadget.com/2018/03/google-serfdom-publishing-...
Even nerds understand that one painful social experience can have lasting negative effects.

It’s blinders. Plain and simple. I’ve worked with too many developers who will pander for money. A few that tried to shame me for not being on board (my life skills tell me calling someone a whore in a team meeting is a bad career move but it doesn’t stop me from staring at them and thinking it). When enough money is on the line principles get set aside. We like to think our cohort are above this sort of thing but the evidence clearly doesn’t support it.
I would love to see if there are any updates/trials going on in regards to hearing/deafness. Suffering from Tinnitus and hearing loss is not pretty.
Website redesign process: A UXers survival guide
So Thiel is playing 5d chess too? How about this: He has shitty political opinions and enough money to put them into action.

Your wishful thinking is just delusional.
Yeah it's all a ruse. The act of "rolling out new privacy features" was literally them introducing the features they'd use to capture as much data as possible. Tech people were screaming to anybody who would listen while those out of the loop looked at us as, you guessed it, crazy people.
To be fair, there are languages where typos and inconsistency naturally fall in the middle tier unless programmers invest silly amounts of time writing and maintaining unit tests to push them down into the third tier where they belong. I can't blame Rich Hickey if he doesn't think much about those languages, but it's an important qualification for people to make when they read this slide in the context of their own work.
You should check out brew and brew cask if you're on a mac.

You can install Chrome/Firefox from the command line, atom, etc. Very simple and convenient.
You forgot the preamble, "Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard - Just ask."

Makes it even creepier. He was willing to dox people for social cred, before he realised the data had financial value.
This is OT, but perhaps you could join a structured exercise or sports group, like an ultimate Frisbee team or CrossFit. Having a regular group you can meet up with is usually pretty feasible without Facebook. It's good for you (don't go overboard and hurt yourself) and good for making friends.
Gosh, I miss Uncle Dan's chain emails about how terrible Bill Clinton is. . .
What does it mean when they say "Stood Down"?
I looked at Notion a while ago as part of my ongoing quest to find a good Markdown editor. Notion isn't aiming to be that, but like a lot of products in this space, it can kind of do it depending on what exactly you're looking for. Anyway, I went back to Emacs for Markdown, but the idea of Notion (for its actual intended use case) still seems really cool to me.
Toxicity also loses gamers.
To any engineers reading this who are now working at Facebook, you have a choice to make:

Stay in the organization and work to turn it away form casual misuse of personal information. Prevent an Orwellian future of machine-learning assisted, personally targeted messaging preying upon our fears and insecurities. Stand up and speak out against the performance of unethical psychological experiments on unwitting participants.

-OR-

Leave now.

This is one of the important moral issues of our time. To stay on the sidelines is unacceptable.
Bias? Google is now paying the infrastructure cost for channels like Alex Jones as no advertisers to generate revenues for Google.

But in the name of free speech Google allows on YouTube and foots the bill. What could be more unbias?
Having been in construction for a while, the only difference in attitude is they get overtime. It was well known that you work the first 40 hours just to get to the big money of overtime. There was plenty of bragging about how many hours you worked and how few days it took to frame a house (our record was 2.5 days on a small cookie cutter house we built a dozen times before).

It was also known that you could get a union jobs that paid a little more per hour, but because there was no overtime you made less money (you were not allowed to work overtime, not to be confused with they would illegally cheat your out of your overtime). At the time I couldn't have paid my bills on union a union paycheck, but after overtime I could pay my bills.
Yeah its mostly the battery that hasn't really reduced much in size over years. Most of the other stuff is the display, antenna etc and general "soldier proofing".
While I haven't dealt with that precise situation, I know from experience that it is more likely that your friend (deep down) does recognize their own mental health issues, but confronting that will require them to change their perspective on the things they have valued for years.

When I was being abused, I knew deep down that it wasn't right. All my friends told me so. But recognizing that abuse meant I had to change how I view myself and my experiences for months (if not years) before, and that's really hard. It's easier to live in a delusion that everything is okay.

If they are as depressed as you suggest, they probably don't have the energy to reframe their entire experience around the facts you are presenting to them, regardless of how believable those facts are.

You cannot 'save' your friend from their self-destructive behavior, and you should stop trying. Instead, do your best to acknowledge them and make it known that your friend can trust and rely on you. Hopefully, your friend will reach a point in their life where they have the energy to start working on becoming healthier, and you can be supportive of them then.

I suggest looking at this WikiHow article that deals with a similar issue: https://www.wikihow.com/Help-Someone-Who-You-Think-Is-Cuttin...
My point is that:

[1] It's not my problem if others get irate because I'm at the speed limit.

[2] It's not dangerous to be at the speed limit, it's dangerous to be over it. And you're not likely to hit someone going at the speed limit if you're dangerously speeding, you're likely to hit the median or an oncoming car, and more likely to get killed doing so (much greater speed differential than between the speeder and the person going at the speed limit).

[3] There is only a differential if you are passing, and that is easily managed by waiting for a sufficient gap in traffic.
If you're a certain kind of asshole - the kind of asshole who finds a certain kind of management role attractive - the reward isn't system efficiency, product quality, or even just product shipping, the reward is in the sense of power that comes from bullying economic inferiors who depend on you for a pay check and can't answer back to unreasonable demands.

It's drama, it's danger, it's excitement, and it's probably fuelled by a coke habit.

If you enjoy that kind of power you'll happily kill a company to experience it.

Games dev isn't unique in this kind of toxicity, but it's more pressing because projects are often huge group efforts with massive resources and long time scales where most of the work is done by young and relatively inexperienced employees who are motivated as much by the games scene as by a pay check.

In the same way that #MeToo called out sexual harassment and abuse, we really need a corporate equivalent that calls out toxic working conditions created by insane management.
ChargeBee Raises $18M Series C Led by Insight Venture Partners
I'd hazard to say (and a lot of this is from some undergrad time in an architecture program) that's an additional factor with younger devs.

Undergrad college teaches you to lie to yourself about your productivity.

In the sense that time is equated to value (rather than work product being value). Which I think infects a lot of things.

If the game can't be delivered on schedule, and butts-in-seats time is perceived as valuable by a company, then instituting death march crunch hours seems reasonable.

On the other hand if a company values actual results, and a game can't be delivered on schedule, then it has to make a very different decision: push the schedule or increase people assigned to the project.

I'd argue that the end result of crunch is usually pushing the schedule anyway (because either more work can't get done, or sleep deprived work has more bugs), but I can see how the two perspectives would look very different to management. And explain a lot of dysfunction.
While we saw there some Smalltalk development UIs, I was clearly missing some 'modern' Visualworks screenshot with the classic 4 slot upper part and the large code window below (similar to the System Browser on slide 3):

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XO7l9e-ukCI/UKSshW0IKRI/AAAAAAAAF...
Thank Satoshi we have Monero et al. Although we might run into the same problem as regular drug dealers: only the idiots get caught, i.e only the ones using BTC/non-cryptonote get caught.
Observing that the root of the problem is an eternal influx of young people who think the only fun programming job is in gaming isn't putting the onus on them. You can't solve the problem if you refuse to understand it because the real problem offends you. I'm perfectly happy to put the onus on the businesses abusing these people, and to suggest even some regulation may be called for.

However, on the flip side, it is vital that we, as in, we programmers and people posting on HN, understand the problem properly so we can address it to the extent we can. I've done what I can on HN and places like /r/programming to discourage people from monomaniacally focusing on gaming, thinking that the only other thing anybody ever does in programming is relentlessly program useless CRUD apps for banks or something. The truth is that while not every programming job is good, there's a lot more interesting jobs out there than just gaming, and a lot of gaming jobs suuuuuuccccckkkk, and the truth that you need to tell young people thinking about getting into programming is that your odds of landing an interesting job are actually way better if they do not monomaniacally focus on being a "games programmer". The reality of the games industry is that not only are you likely to go on crunch time for months at a crack, you're likely to be doing it on some licensed Disney crap game, not even the AAA game you're dreaming of.

(I have no problem with people taking risks. If they insist on rolling the dice for the games industry, hoping they can make it, more power to them. But I want people to take risks with as much information as possible.)
Replacing the take-home coding challenge with something sensible
I think you completely misunderstand why people build fences or walls around their homes.

House wall:
- keep pesky neighborhood kids from running through it and ruining your grass
- keep your neighbors from being able to see you while youre swimming in your pool

Border wall:
- attempt to keep Mexicans from immigrating into the country illegally

I fail to see how these use cases are at all similar. Please, if I missed a use case for a house or if your home is constantly being attacked by barbarians let me know, but I don't think anybody in California builds a wall to "defend" themselves.
I like Google News to browse, but their forced news-on-every-android-chrome-new-tab is the reason I've uninstalled Chrome and gone to Firefox. I was surprised, Android Firefox is actually a pretty competitive browser these days!

Hooray anti-competitive cross-subsidies.

(edit: I tend to block cookies on desktop so I guess they don't have too much profile to tailor news)
Can't think of anyone I would trust more. Can you? Who?

Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all about Google and free speech.
That's because what's called 'debiasing' is not actually removing bias but adding another opposite one at the superficial layers we can actually notice.
I too think this is the reason. It does, however, allow for cool domains like https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
The UK is no better with Bowman (better off with map and Nokia) and the latest farce around replacing Airwave/TETRA with civilian 4G.
Makes me wonder if we will see a Zapier IPO soon. It's a crowded space, integration as a service, and in need of consolidation. Zapier doesn't have MuleSofts enterprise street cred because IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there.
There is a giant difference here in the fact that the data acquired for CA was through a third party. Data obtained through the Obama campaign was through the Obama app.
Yeah, anyone who has spent much time in Real Companies will know that this is completely predictable and that it occurs virtually everywhere. Don't give them the data if you don't expect them to harvest it.

This is true for basically everything, even stuff that is typically acknowledged as sensitive. I've consulted for big financial groups whose customer service reps had completely unfettered access to SSNs, birthdays, and everything else they had on millions of customers. I would not have been surprised in the least to learn that some programmers in the company, either acting on their own behalf or acting at the request of a superior, were taking samples of this data for "unofficial" use.

Maybe the takeaway is that the SV brogrammer is not quite as special as he/she thought, and not exempt from the temptations that afflict the rest of us.
I like your mindset:)
JDK 10 is now available for download
The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue.

Using wide scale warrant-less data collection with an unspecified secret sauce, however, is questionable in its legality. Is this what voters intend their government to be able to do?

Any time one agency wields immense undocumented powers of surveillance and another agency has a big question mark on a case, humans will be tempted to go the route of parallel construction. That under-table information sharing, to me, is a debate the American people need to be considering.
If you're dealing with large companies, it is. You should assume that. I have no doubt every major company in the world is covering up some serious crimes constantly. And FB has been egregious and it has been covered by the news. Also, why do you expect German laws to protect you from an American company?
The ideology of regulation and big government = bad is more important than any amount of evidence to some.
It's no secret that 3rd parties can get access to your facebook data though. there's been apps asking for permission to access your facebook data for years. That's the whole point of the facebook developer platform.

Do we know what data was harvested? Cause if its data that's supposed to be private then yeah, that's some murky business. If its public info, or info that can be accessed if you give an app permission to log-in, then is that really a "breach"?

I mean, it's terrible and CA was definitely misusing it, but if I install an app and it asks for permission to use my location and my contacts, and I grant them, is that a break of trust and a breach of the law on the Apple/Google front? What should Apple/Google be doing to protect my privacy?

Legit questions here; I do hope something is figured out and less people fall into this kind of trap. I've heard of Android games whose purpose actually is to harvest a ton of personal info. Apple seems to veto its apps better, and maybe that's the solution-- Facebook should veto 3rd parties better (Google should too, before something like this hits the fan).
>>>>hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's

Woah, can you give some sources on Bitcoin being used to pay for attacking NGOs? Do you mean DDoS or do you have specific links on that?
Good article. Is there a comparison with other platforms in cost or performance that can be shared? Would love to know more.
In math-land, logic-land.
Do you mean "proof and refutations" ?
You sound like a jaded professional, but keep in mind most people are not working mathematicans and never will be, so anything they hear from the pros they're going to take at face value. When it comes to the general layperson, I think popularizing the idea that math is all "months of flailing around, trying to understand one thing" is more unhelpful than portraying it as the pursuit of beauty and simplicity, even if it's more true on a practical level. If you bring up the word beauty in reference to math, most people are a little surprised you even would link the two concepts, let alone get the impression that pursuing clever little proofs is all there is to it. Better to start by giving people get the idea they might enjoy it, and let them find out it's not all about elegant proofs in undergrad or whatever.
Ask HN: Alternative to Facebook events?
The only thing that keeps me active on Facebook is the amount of small local events that are posted only there.

Is there any alternative to promote, ideally one that can copy an event to FB automatically?
The Echo has amazing potential for toys. There's already a large selection of "speaking" toys for boys and girls of all ages, from dolls to board games. All would profit from an Alexa-like technology level. But unless you want your children to order a few pounds of ice cream from Amazon Fresh, you would have to remove the Amazon store part from the kid's Echo (or have much better voice recognition).

It would be beneficial for Amazon in the long run (making people more at ease with voice assistants), but I doubt that this would be the reason for Amazon to buy ToysRUs
New Way to Share Design Assets – Pixelify
To those like me, not familiar with the term "sausage factory":

"An unpleasant process, especially one that is hidden from public view, that is used to produce a widely consumed product" - Urban Dictionary
.. and if this thing is done with SDR technology (which apparently was the original aim of the program, don't know if they have backtracked since), presumably the DSP's and FPGA's are going to be larger and significantly more power hungry than bespoke ASIC's.
If you're an American, then you can gain (indirect) access to GDPR protections by transferring ownership of your Facebook account to a citizen of an EU member state. They can then withdraw consent to track personal data from Facebook for that account and/or send a subject access request.

Taking this action violates the Facebook ToS and will result in your account being closed.

Checkmate?
He almost destroyed JC Penney
The Correlation Between Wiretapping and Terrorism
Then it's just random chance. People usually don't like that sort of thing, outside of literal lotteries.
I used to feel this way, but the benefits of a good type system far outweigh the drawbacks IMO. A lot of runtime errors caused by dynamic types get pushed back to compile time, which is a much safer and easier time to deal with them. Nowadays writing code without type checking feels like building a house on quicksand.

There's also the self-documenting aspect of strongly typed languages: for instance, if I look up the documentation on a javascript API, I have to hope function parameters have been specified well, otherwise I just have to guess what should be passed in or dig through the source. With a strongly typed language I probably get that information as part of the autocomplete hint.

And good type systems can be powerful tools. In Swift for example, the protocol system is powerful enough that I'm sure it results in writing less code overall, not more.
Physical hacking can only happen to one car at a time.
"Human" is harder to dodge though.
Private or incognito mode doesn't do all that much. Better to use Ghostery in addition.
With practice, it's easy to make meaningful predictions down to that granularity. For example, Tetlock finds that with the superforecasters in GJP, their exact percentages are important enough that merely rounding to the nearest 5% or so makes their overall performance significantly worse. (This isn't so mysterious if you think of it in terms of frequencies: predicting a NK nuke test at 5% rather than 10% may seem specious at first, but surely there is a big difference subjectively between 'every 20 years' and 'every 10 years'?)