skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think RCS is a great idea and Google should be pushing it. In fact, I would argue that few other companies could make it happen in a way that Google can. RCS opens up a much larger world than a simple "chat" client does.
Always, always use a library unless you can’t.
See CockroachDB’s Living Without Atomic Clocks [0]. TrueTime [1] is a proprietary Google technology. Considering TrueTime upper bound uncertainty (< 10ms) [2], it may depend on Google’s network quality and breadth.

[0] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...

[1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
> Should it pay 10~15x more to be writing scripts at Google than to be frying burgers at some place?

What is this "should" you speak of?
but does it use encryption?
I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia.

I think Hong Kong's tech scene is mostly about blockchain/bitcoin now. Most of the tech jobs I found here are in finance. Taiwan has not a very good tech scene, but is an amazing place to live. Singapore has a lot of startup hype and some good startup companies. It feels more diverse than Hong Kong and Taiwan for sure.

Melbourne, AU has a good startup scene and many interesting meetups. New Zealand doesn't really have much of a scene going on, except in Wellington.

I may want to move back to a Western country. Which other countries have a good tech scene going on?
Why isn't Google doubling down on marketing Allo on Android?

They already have a huge ecosystem in Android, which no other company other than Apple has.
> Microsoft is among the OEM supporters, which raises the possibility it could bring support to Windows 10, but the company was non-committal when The Verge pressed it on that possibility.

If windows phone is dead I suppose this would "just" enabled some kind of SMS messaging on a win10 desktop ?
> Cutting your users off from communicating with their friends seems kind of drastic? Suppose that happened with email, the original federated network?

> Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.

Most people typically find an instance with people similar to them. Most of my followers/followees are on the same instance as me. While blacklisting an instance can be problematic, it's also probably not that big of a deal for most. Moderators are more willing to take actions like this when each user does not contribute to their bottom line.

> Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.

Hotmail and Gmail came about because running your own email is difficult (I used to run my own email). You have to setup SPF records, DKIM records, on top of which many mailers send non-standard mail out, which you have to make sure your rules accept these non-standard pieces of mail. Right now the ActivityPub standard is well defined, and most instances already follow the server-to-server API. Spam is also a huge problem in the email world because of the ease of sending an email. You don't need a mailserver to send mail to an address, but you need to setup an instance and have other users specifically follow you to send spam toots, or Fediverse messages. On top of this is a community interest in creating software (like Pleroma) that is easy to install and administer. All of these combined decrease the friction for lay (for multiple definitions of lay) users to run their own instance, which makes the gulf between a (not-yet-existent) commercial instance and a personal instance a lot smaller. While there will be a space for commercial providers which use ads or subscriptions to pay for their instances, the ease of personal setup makes centralization a lot less of a tendency for the Fediverse than it did for email.
The truth about oxygen masks on planes
The answer is, indeed, to "hire some AI guys". Many of your challenges are likely shared with your competitors, which means there's a market that some specialized "AI guys" can serve.

My employer does supply chain optimization, because many "average" businesses have supply chains that need to be optimized. We have specialized AI tools based on deep learning and differential programming, and we have human supply chain experts that can fit those tools to the specifics of a customer's situation.

I would say that despite our best marketing efforts, many of our customers don't know that we're doing this "AI" thing they've been hearing about.

The anti-pattern with "Do we hire some AI guys?" is that, if you have to teach those guys how a supply chain works, you've already lost. Pick someone who is already specialized in the problem you're trying to solve.
What fortunate timing indeed. That's just a kind reminder about what the interests of Google and Amazon are. Not those of their consumers for sure.

Also, especially Google have all the interest to let the Russians destroy Telegram. At this point I would be very suspicious of all other messengers that still work in Russia.

Edit: also Amnesty International is on it: https://twitter.com/amnesty/status/986955700550144002
We built a sourcing department to source candidates. A “recruiter” is a salesperson incented to close deals, not someone you want in the hiring process.
Jack-of-all-trades come in all shapes and forms; some are just average in many things, while some others are quite good in some areas, competent in some others and can also get up to speed in other parts if necessary. In small teams, these profiles are very useful.
Indeed it happened. Won't share, it is full of personal information (it is not even in English), some of the reasons they list include talks weird, too confident, looked at the clock too many times, too many previous jobs etc.

Rejecting for too high expected salary was a non factor basically (also they strictly did not try to negotiate that), lacking technical skills were rarely mentioned too.
I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia.
I think Hong Kong's tech scene is mostly about blockchain/bitcoin now. Most of the tech jobs I found here are in finance. Taiwan has not a very good tech scene, but is an amazing place to live. Singapore has a lot of startup hype and some good startup companies. It feels more diverse than Hong Kong and Taiwan for sure.

Melbourne, AU has a good startup scene and many interesting meetups. New Zealand doesn't really have much of a scene going on, except in Wellington.

I may want to move back to a Western country. Which other countries have a good tech scene going on?
A New Course for Leanpub
Yes, there are some papers that suggest that adding graphene-like elements to for example concrete will make them stronger. I think that if we can find a carbon neutral process of creating graphene it could be a great additive and a carbon sink (finally making a useful product out of carbon). It can even be used to detect damages in concrete (electrical resistivity value reduces at maximum compressive load). Here is an interesting paper: www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/7/1229/pdf but there are more applications once you start looking.
Can anyone explain why I should be interested in RCS, though? It seems like it's more designed to let carriers try and stem the flow of customers switching to other options, and I don't really see what benefits it offers me.
A big shout here for Elm.

Compared to Haskell it has fewer features and is much simpler. Think of it as kind of a subset, but with nicer record syntax and error messages, and tightly coupled to the web.

The upside is you can learn it quick and understand other people's code easily. This makes it more fun to use and feel more productive. There is also a different culture - in Haskell things like template Haskell and Lenses are fairly widely used, but although you can in theory do some Lens stuff in Elm, no one actually does. To give you an idea, as a beginner your introduction to Lenses is this beast http://i.imgur.com/ALlbPRa.png. So that's probably an entire weekend to get your head around. (Big respect to Edward Knett though for creating this and dozens of other libraries) You can get your head around all of Elm in that time.

The downside is that you end up with more boilerplate than Haskell. For example there is no monad typeclass, so you have multiple definitions of "andThen" whereas Haskell you can always reach for the generic >>=

I'm working on a side project and having a lot of fun in Elm
They may refer to FoundationDB layers. [1] While Spanner may be built on a key-value store equivalent, Google does not expose it as a service.

[1] https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/layer-concept.html
It better does. Else, we'd be opening ourselves for a China-like chat ecosystem which is very dangerous.
And all my friends list could be shared with third parties with abandon!
Stock Market
What are some good sources for fundamental and technical analysis of share market?
So if you could build a perfectly efficient compiler that did not create any additional overhead, if the normal compilation took about a second or two (or any longer) to run locally. Then you would run waaay over the gas limit.
That also means such a thing would cost way more than 10 dollars to run.
SNI is used to allow the frontend gateway to select the correct certificate; it should be harder to block if the frontend gateway instead had a single certificate with all the domains it proxied (obviating the need for SNI).

Of course, that means the gateway must terminate the TLS connection for every site (and therefore be able to read its contents), whereas with SNI it could redirect the TLS connection itself to the appropriate server, while being unable to spy on it.

In practice what happened before SNI is that every SSL/TLS site used a dedicated IP, which makes it quite easy to block.
I've compared it to the industrious attitude of the 'wild west'. Except a bit less wild and bit more east.
The closest thing to a standards-based, non-walled-garden option that has the possibility of widespread adoption?
How is it possible that it works for taxes[0], but not in this case?

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
Ruby on Rails Developer Needed at Xanview Ltd in London, UK
I don't think you say you contact over some HTTP or HTTPS protocol, you just say that you contact over twitter or fb or some other product that is built on top of this :3 In the same way scuttlebutt is just the name of the protocol not the product.
The verge puff piece about RCS specifically called out that messages are _not_ end to end encrypted.
And let's talk about antivirus companies that sell clickstream data while claiming 'tracking protection'.

One of many:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150527005372/en/Mar...
RF AND PLASMA MATRIX
The study referred to in the article can be found at [1]

[1] http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30386-6
What has Google ever really marketed?

Google's basic strategy seems to be to throw shit on the wall and see what sticks.
Why, I have a good view from here :) And I can take great photos of scenery, now I do understand what the photos are showing is not something that everyone would love but still, those are photos, you can shoot the one making them but the scenery is not going to change by that, or we would just shoot all war journalists and there would be no more wars.

But joke aside, what is the issue, do you disagree?
Singularity flaw in double-hashing scheme for privacy-preserving record linkage
I am starting to believe that these "new chat projects from Google" are actually all the same one with a different name to keep, whatever work they are doing, alive.

I heard some time ago from the colleague who got an internship at Google that they have to release a new project almost every 3 months and then fight against other internal teams to do a public release. This way they — mostly interns — can justify a full-time contract. At the same time, because these projects also need a project manager, some high profile engineers help the interns in order to get bonuses and also to justify a change of responsibilities to, maybe, become full time engineering managers.

Whatever the story behind the chat re-brands is, many will agree with me that this is becoming irritating.
So hire someone on a probation, and give them the boot if they don't live up to expectations in the first weeks?
Nordic Nasdaq outage as data center's fire suppression system breaks servers
Here's a video explaining WiFi backscatter. It really is an amazing concept even without doing HD video with it. All kinds of devices - I'm imaging home automation sensors - could become batteryless.

http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/
Postgres 11? Postgres 10 will only get bug fixes.

The version numbering was changed with 10
It's mostly a design failure once again, not a "stupid user" failure.

Those masks look like they should go over your mouth and like they would be uncomfortable to put over both of your mouth and nose. If it had a longer shape as opposed to a round bowl shape, I bet most people would use it correctly, without even ever having to listen to the flight attendants.

EDIT: Apparently almost everyone said the same thing I did replying to that guy's tweet. It just seems so obvious to me at first glance that the design is wrong. You can't "think" because of the high-stress situation and lack of oxygen. So the design should minimize the amount of thinking needed.

People put it on their chain because the design of the mask most resembles the form of the chin not that of the mouth+nose.
This reminds me of Theremin's Great Seal bug that was placed in the US embassy in Moscow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Years ago 1998ish(?), there was a fight to open up chat applications AIM, ICQ, YIM, etc. We had to have 20 apps to chat with each other.

Fast forward 20 years, and here we are again, FB Messenger, Kik, WhatsApp, Allo, Signal, Telegram, SMS, Slack, etc.

At least this appears to be a "standard" that everyone can use again.
Only being deprecated 1.5 years later?
The NPM ecosystem is on the extreme end of micro-libraries, so sometimes I will just inline a library's code into my project when the indirection of using a library isn't worth it.

For every library you use, you are now trusting everyone that has publish rights to that library and all of its transitive dependencies, so libraries aren't free.

Also, sheepishly, it's so easy to publish on NPM that I'll sometimes just re-implement a library with my creature features and publish it instead of making a case for them in the existing library's issues. Awful, I know.
> -Chronological feed

Isn't this asking for a bit much? /s
Public Speaking: 4 questions your audience have
High School Computing: The Inside Story
What is a cookies and how can u destroy it?
Hong Kong doesn’t tax capital gains so if you’re American you pay normal capital gains and if you’re not you pay nothing.
Now, if I were a cult leader (or fascist politician) and wanted some materials to convince my followers to give up mobile phones and other "fake news" spreading devices that would poison a believer's mind, this would be... godsend...

(Jokes aside, "government accidentally" parts is scary, somebody seems to be playing a pretty dangerous mass manipulation long-game here. Like in "let's 'leak' these to a journalist, the use this to cause hysteria about Y later when we need Z".)
Ahh in that case I completely agree with you :)
And also, its one of those things that's hard to learn on your own. On the other hand, do they cover defense against practical attacks in uni? As in, will you be told to roll your own crypto, and have the professor show you the timing attacks, etc.? Because honestly, the theory you can pick up on your own, in industry you just use a library, and I don't know how nice will OpenSSL devs be if you just show up as a crypto noob on their doorstep asking for mentoring.
They shut down what was used by the company which I forgot the name to harvest the data that was used by Cambridge Analytica.

I don't have the details, but it was mainly around app having access to a lot of your friends data as soon as you would give the app access to your Facebook account, without any concent from your friends
It's a philosophical issue, negative liberty vs. positive liberty.

Positive liberty is the distribution of responsibility to the collective (and managing/controlling the collective through central bureaucracy), negative liberty is distributing the responsibility to the individual, self organization, or stateful components in dev lingo.

Your error is that you're set on only one perspective, positive liberty, like many people in europe. GDPR is like that, instead of giving people the tools to protect themselves, and not leak data in first place, and educate them about voting with their wallets, they just take it from the individual and apply it to the collective.

That's the mindset of centralization. It's clear that decentralization efforts fail if you insist on distributing the responsibility collectively.
I almost always opt for a library as long as

1. It is still alive

2. It is on GitHub so I can easily read the source and look for issues

3. People star it

4. It has traction ie >10k downloads preferably >50k

5. It occupies a name that makes sense ie I’d rather trust using “redux-immutable” than “steel-porcupine”, since it unofficially lends itself to the “vetted one true solution”

6. Then I look at the source quickly and make sure it looks well done under the hood

7. Finally, if it’s particularly confusing, I might run a quick google check to see if there’s blogs about it on the internet explaining how to use the advanced features and check the date on the blogs (1-2 years ago = good, it’s mature)

If any of the above are too dicey and there’s no good options, I put the relevant code in a top level folder called “modules” (or otherwise) with the intention that in the future I might get to delete it if the package ecosystem gets more mature in that space. Sometimes I even get to polish those files up and actually publish them.
Why would people use Allo? It has almost zero additional (except some useless AI gimmick) offering comparing with Facebook Messenger.
Thank you for showing this. This is very interesting and somehow I never saw it mentioned yet.
> RCS opens up a much larger world than a simple "chat" client does.

How so? It's carrier-specific and thus limited to phones on carriers that support it. What about international messaging, etc.?

One of the huge benefits of Hangouts is that I can chat with anyone anywhere, phone or computer, America or Japan.
Compilers is definitely my #1 favorite course. Data structures and algorithms is my #2. I kinda have a love-hate relationship with data structures later on because I never feel I am good enough to say I love it. With compilers, I found only love (perhaps because I don't know enough about it to fear it). Compilers was taught by a very competent professor in my college. It was an undergrad 1-semester course in a liberal arts school, so I think it wasn't as hard as courses offered at other schools. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it immensely, it made sense of everything that I learned in those boring theoretical courses like automata and formal languages. It showed that little machines with very little memory and power can do amazing things. It showed why the ancient calculators with practically no memory can parse a very complicated math function correctly. I really found my fascinations being unleashed in compilers. I still remember at the very end of the course, with the people who survived the last assignment, our professor handed out to us the paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson.

I don't think it needed to be mandatory because I can see why some people don't like it. I believe people who get out of school to be web devs, for example, will not be needing it to be competent. But I really think the ideas in the courses are useful in real life in many cases. Later on, I even used what I learned in that course to make a poor man's HTML parser to translate rudimentary HTML to the instructions to write to the Adafruit thermal printer. So basically it makes the thermal printer a wireless one with an easy-to-use API that you can interface with from a phone app [1]. The code is for the Raspberry Pi, but was intended to run on an extremely limited uC that is embedded in the printer itself. I never had time to make the actual hardware but it works well enough for a Raspberry Pi right now. Without the stuff I learned in Compilers, that would have been impossible.

1: https://github.com/htruong/html-bt-printer
Use a library when:

1. It would take a significant time (> a few days) to write yourself.

2. The library is widely used.

3. The library has a history of supporting major versions, you don't want breaking changes to come with security and minor fixes.

4. The library is open source. Not always a complete deal breaker, but you need to think of long term costs.

5. You're going to use a significant chunk of the library, don't import a big complicated library for a single function.
Long time ago, Google chat supported XMPP. Later on that support has been cut off.

How do they expect people to trust this statement:
"We don’t believe in taking the approach that Apple does. We are fundamentally an open ecosystem. We believe in working with partners. We believe in working with our OEMs to be able to deliver a great experience,” ?
Like XMPP that Google abandoned? The solution is hardly to create a new standard, but improve in existing, perhaps rewrite them to address fundamental issues. But if it's meant to be used collaboratively, it should be developed collaboratively.
I don't think anyone doubts computers will eventually beat pros in Starcraft. I do think it will take quite a bit longer though, even with recent advancements seen in the likes of AlphaGo.

From a human perspective, Starcraft doesn't seem "harder" than Chess or Go, but it has more fluidity and ambiguity, both things computers struggle with. And the ruleset, as it were, is VASTLY more complicated.
Longer finnish article: https://www.hs.fi/talous/art-2000005648385.html

In short, a oxygen starvation charge designed to extinguish fires in the datacenter went off, but the resulting sound and pressure blast from the charge was strong enough to destroy roughly 33% of the servers in the process. Apparently it was non-SSD hard drives that went.

Operations have since resumed from a backup facility, but there were also some un-related issues in getting the backup system online.

Guess this is a somewhat known risk, but very interesting dilemma still to have. Better of course not to burn the whole place down, but to have even an accidental fire alarm risk destroying a significant amount of your hardware doesn't sound fun either.
Quality cheap VPS collection and comparison
Allo take up has been low, and there are better (or similar) alternatives. So they're not losing much.
> Ball pit, ladder, disco lights, slippery slide, rope bridge

you know how to party!
Why would any of those products get onboard, unless they’re already failing?
Actually, since my current side project needs good graph support I went looking for foundationDb graph and found this https://github.com/rayleyva/blueprints-foundationdb-graph may have to check it out.
> is for sale, but we see "Related Links: Subliminal hypnosis tapes Mind Control Pictures to Color"

yep, the "magic" of add-tech "getting smarter", we'll see more and more of these :|
Web interface to manage virtual machines with libvirt
Or for eight years: iPad.
https://www.amazon.com/Web-Was-Done-Amateurs-Reflection/dp/3...
Amazon Wins a Patent for a Marketplace Data Streaming Solution
Show HN: A Face-Detection Library in 200 Lines of JavaScript
My feeling is that the friction of learning a language has a large impact on the success and adoption of the language.

Something like this definitely reduces friction.