skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am going to hazard a guess: you have not been exposed to some of the nuttier regulations within this space.

The regulatory demands in financial technology, and especially in those industries where both the regulators as well as majority of the players may not be technically literate, are effectively the anti-thesis of robust and reliable engineering. When the industry regulations demand that for every potentially disruptive action (recovering from an outage is very much potentially disruptive) there has to be a named individual - not even a role, but an individual - to sign off on every single release step... This is why an outage can last for hours. An engineer, or even a lead, is with high probability not allowed to sign off on an out-of-hours deployment. The fix might take 20 minutes to identify, 5 minutes to implement, 15 minutes to test, and 10 minutes to roll out. But until the organisation can get the named [supposedly responsible] person online, the fix must wait, unreleased.

And the irony? The wider dysfunction may be imposed by the regulations, but it has been requested by the industry at large. It is the result of the industry players, majority of whom are incapable (read: technologically illiterate) of interpreting prescriptive regulations. So instead of figuring out how to meet expectations and adapt their processes, they have been lobbying for the regulators to come up with highly descriptive playbooks and step-by-step instructions. These sequences then specify rules and requirements that allow technologically incompetent players to comply, even if they do not understand why they are doing the things.

And then these regulatory playbooks become the One True Way[tm], effectively forcing dysfunctional practices, but also actively preventing any process improvements.

It's cargo-culting taken to the extreme: "do this and you will not be found to be non-compliant, even if the quality is utter shite". The worst part of this all is that the descriptive regulations make every effort to strip engineers of their agency or decision power. Every "modern" best practice is explicitly ruled as non-compliant and hence effectively illegal. I use scare quotes around modern to highlight that these practices are by no means modern and have been known since ancient times. There are research papers from 1950's that explicitly endorse [rapid] iterative bottom-up approach as the only sensible way forward.

The finance industry regulations explicitly reject them because these studies assume that engineers can be trusted to know what they are doing.

So... to anyone wondering why finance industry jobs are generally thought of as soul-sucking: that's why. They are subject to regulations, expressly designed to deprive individuals of their agency.
Whereupon parts 2 through 5 promptly die out due to insufficient revenue and talent exodus.
The software that inspired our modern world (spoiler: Hypercard)
I believe the US could do more with antitrust oversight. The DOJ under Clinton was pursuing Microsoft up until 2001, when the new Bush administration carried through on a campaign promise and took the bite out of the investigation.

This isn't to point the blame just at conservatives, who have historically been of the mindset that the government shouldn't interfere with business. Democrats haven't spent much political capital towards those ends either.

For 2.5 years president Trump has been raging at Bezos because he owns the Washington Post, and that has extended to Trump raging that Amazon needs to be taxed heavily. Despite playing the social media angle for all it is worth, Trump has been claiming that Facebook/Twitter/Google have been filtering out conservative opinions.

So pardon me for being suspicious that now the DOJ cares about looking into all of these companies. I'm for anti-trust regulation, but not when it is applied selectively for political gain.
That's an interesting point. Yet, I'm not sure I fully understand what you'd expect would change with this?
That link defines what the IETF means by "rough consensus".

In this context, I think it just refers to "general agreement".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus
You are completely incorrect. The President can pardon before a prosecution even begins so long as the pardon is after the act itself[1]. He can also direct his Attorney General or US attorneys to drop a case because he is their boss and they serve at his pleasure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Garland
Scientist claims cyborgs will rule the planet within 80 years – with one caveat
Sometimes there aren't conferences, books, or courses. There are lots of problems out there without solutions you can take courses for. Board bring up, performance, and lots of problems that fall into the bucket of "machine learning" require knowledge, cleverness, and lots of persistence.

There's also the set of problems that are best learned at universities. Normally, one doesn't have time for a developer to catch up on their missing compilers or cryptography class (this is particularly a problem since perhaps a quarter of programmers have CS degrees, and a quarter of them went to a decent program). If I were asked to debug a clock skew problem on a particular VHDL design, it would take me a long time to learn enough to even approach the problem.
OK, one instance of students (who were clashing with far-right protesters who were armed) and the rest which aren't students, so a complete non-sequitor.

In that case I bring out all the right wing terrorists of the past decade.

Christchurch shooter, Charleston church shooter, Charlottesville car attacker, Bundy ranch hostages, pro-Trump agitators in the Berkley protest you list, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Colorado planned parenthood shooting, Layfayette trainwreck shooting, Norwegian Brevik mass shooting, Comet Pizza and many Q-Anon related murders, it goes on and on.

It appears the right wing is increasingly violent and radical, which has many people worried.

Fascism starts with violence, anyone who recognizes the threat posed by right-wing terrorism understandably would want to stop it before it goes further. The world has seen where that ideology has taken us before, unfortunately it seems to be fading from collective memory.
Here are the mandatory links to the NCC whitepaper [0], and HN discussion [1]

[0] (large PDF) https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whit...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507283
Why not? I do contract work for a big, public company, they have dozens of QA testers and every path is available for them (becoming a dev, analyst, manager, ... I've seen all).
It's not even just an entry job for CS grads, many become senior testers as well and don't want to move to a dev position.
Some mirrors/other posts

(Paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-depart...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/doj-reportedly-to-open-broad...

https://apnews.com/e334256d27254a28a3b5d6db041ec5b1?utm_medi...
> Because a nice fella from the security team at RIM will give you a call on your personal cell phone one late night and tell you that they know what you’re doing and to stop it.

I don't know if anyone else has this reaction, but I find this to be a great alternative to the litigiousness that is normally reported.

> So I stopped that night.

...and good on you for allowing "not suing" to be a successful option. (I'm taking no position on the behavior BEFORE you got caught, but once you were, you didn't "force" them into more extreme options)
Microsoft Doesn’t Want You to Use a Local Windows Account
Author here. Thanks everyone for using Poli. I am happy to answer any questions!
What If Responsible Encryption Back-Doors Were Possible?
With Kraft's passing and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it is valuable to reflect on the many ways the space programs of several countries have substantially contributed to our work now. There is an elegance and structure to the work of mission control that is such a useful guide for how to deliver and operate technology.

It is sad to lose such talent and vision, but good to know that what he and his team created is so readily available to us now.
The Cap for Smartphone were $400.
I listened to that podcast as well and have listened to Thiel/Weinstein talk about tech and science stagnation in past podcasts. If you listen to Thiel, he'd say that going into any engineering field in the 80's-2000's was a bad idea EXCEPT for computer science.

I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated.

I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).
I imagine you could make a convincing counterargument that Big Tech has done plenty of great things for developers at large. We could look to the historical example of Bell Labs under the ownership of AT&T, which brought us the C programming language. Today we could look to examples like Google's Material Design, the Go and Dart programming languages, or Facebook's stewardship of React.

You can take the cynical view that people at Google are just trying to get people to click on things, which, true, is their primary business model. But you can equally say that employees of Google (who work on Search) are trying to provide a good search experience to everyone around the world for free.

Tangentially, for Amazon, they deliver some of the best customer experience I've seen. I can start a Live Chat session at 3 AM (with a human) when I have a problem. It's not just getting people to buy crap.
> Please replace it with something better, either use Classic Shell or Start is Back, but stop using that shit.

Classic Shell is dead, long live its successor Open Shell [1]

[1] https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
> [Regarding CAS-es:] Another example is pretending that floating-point numbers are the same thing as real numbers.

What kind of lousy CAS does not support arbitrarily precise numbers? For example Fricas/Axiom/Scratchpad gives arbitrarily precise results.
That was my understanding as well.

Do you know/think/recall if that change a result of the Bush administration having a more lenient stance towards regulation, or was it a result of one administration almost always reacting to the prior one?
Their video platform was based on lies and junk metrics. People still spent millions and in many cases revamped their entire organizational structure around video only to see it fail.
I've never encountered anything like that (or maybe didn't read the signals?), if anything people are usually impressed by the fact that I'm self taught if they knew me beforehand. I've never felt like it's held me back in my career, but I do feel the lack of some of the math background sometimes.
I honestly wish you all the best, and hope that works for you.

Just please be aware that after you've delivered, you loose power for negotiation. Therefore I would probably rethink the timeline choosen for agreeing on a reward "then I can say how much I want to be compensated for..".
It's not hard to imagine him snapping a picture with his phone.. you know, just in case.
The cubicles aren't really covered by the website, but I'm always struck by how little privacy is afforded by the dividing walls in toilets in the USA.
Depends on your definition of fun.
"The trick to avoiding Lyme disease is to do a "tick check" everyday and get them off of you asap."

I wouldn't be so confident about the effectiveness of tick checks.

Baby ticks can be smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, and can still infect you with Lyme disease. They are very difficult to spot, especially if they're under your hair on your scalp, for instance. It's doubly difficult if you don't have a partner that's willing to thoroughly look over every part of your body that you can't check yourself.
Some of the best and most impactful AI research comes from Google DeepMind or Facebook AI research. Those ad clicks are subsidizing a whole lot of scientific advancements.
When the career antitrust officials at the FTC recommend antitrust action against Google back in 2012, it was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut that action down.

>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.

The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...

I'd say the bribes for both parties had been working as intended.
Crispr: Strict European court ruling leaves food-testing labs without a plan
Sadly, it's terrible to use some clean tap water for processing poo, it uses a lot of energy and resources to clean that water afterwards.

Dry toilets/compost make a lot more sense
That's fake competition. The fiber is still a natural monopoly and needs to be regulated to prevent the owner from imposing evil upon all the "competing" ISPs.
Except legislation requiring backdoors will either exempt systems used by government workers of a certain level, or provide much higher penalties if those workers experience a breach.
Interesting to see RSA portrayed as a foe of the government and a thorn in the NSA's side here, knowing what's been reported about their involvement with "Project Bullrun."

Leash and collar indeed...
We actually do teach her to use please. It just wasn't part of what I was talking about. :)
Are you saying a good ad manager shouldn’t try to do measurements though? That seems like a cop out. Why would you be making the big bucks if you can’t control for all this noise?

Ad campaigns are super expensive. If I were an exec at a company managing a campaign I’d want to see solid metrics and impact on sales, otherwise what’s all this money for?

In other words, if you can’t tell the difference between spending the money and not, don’t spend it.
> You should always be willing to speak your truth

Pet peeve: there is no "your" truth or "my" truth. There is "the" truth. It has many facets, and can be difficult to grasp fully, but it either is true or it is not.

My point is that people need to have the legal and social freedom to be able to say controversial things that might be true. That, in order to explore and discover the truth, we must risk offense.

>I guess the question to me is "where do you draw the line" and the answer seems to be pretty obviously "you let people draw their own line" in like 98% of situations.

Unless I've misunderstood you, "letting people draw their own line" sounds a lot like freedom of speech. More precisely, our freedom to hear the ideas of other people and draw our own conclusions should not be abridged just because someone may be offended by that speech.

If you agree with that assessment, then you and I are fine.

I will agree that not every thought is appropriate to voice in every circumstance. There is a need for setting bounds on "polite" conversation. However, not every is (or should be) polite conversation.
> Google -> Probably something involving Android...

Hopefully IE^h^h Chrome as well.

> Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.

Don't count on me for a book, but otherwise I think I agree to a large extent.

I still don't trust them though, and from time to time they tend to remind me not to let my guard down.
It somewhat works in Japan because you can't register a car without having a dedicated parking space.

In the US, an apartment complex in an ordinary suburban neighborhood would swipe all the on-street parking and probably people's lawns as well. Those home owners expect nearly exclusive use of the street parking for their guests.
Thank you for following the Principle of Charity, (maybe better than I did.)

Of course you can find good-old-fashioned amateur porn out there. It might even be useful! But, as you said, in a vacuum: It's now your mental model.

Bob and Alice uploaded a porn video where Alice is on top, and now Chuck just knows that's how sex works.

It wouldn't be so bad if Chuck went through the next few years of life thinking that. One day, he'll meet a girl and learn that sometimes the man is on top.

But: You know what's out there on the front page of the most popular porn sites. Pornhub. Xhamster. Not exactly wholesome amateur love making.
exactly my thought as well.

Whenever Facebook releases something we should all directly worry about what their real motives are.
The royalty are based on a percentage of the Wholesale price of Laptop, and since Apple's Laptop are on the higher end, which means their royalty will be higher.

Not to mention Smartphone, Tablet, and Other devices each have different royalty rate. Which means you cant use the same terms for your iPhone and use those for your iCars.
> Without a human in the loop, our current autonomous technologies are woefully inadequate for determining whether or not something smells like a trap. Our enemies are going to learn how to knock these things out of the sky with a $200 SDR and a power amp.

If AI can beat humans at strategy & bluffing games like Starcraft & poker, why couldn't they defeat humans at detecting & defeating anti air traps ?
Historically, scientific progress has extremely rarely been made by companies. Most of the time, it's the result of academic research. Most researchers typically have neither time nor inclination to build a company/a product based on their own research, and having great research is no guarantee that the company/product will succeed. So the way research results become visible is typically through publications and teaching.

When companies hire graduates who have learnt from researchers, some of these graduates end up in position to "innovate", quite a few years after the actual research has been done.

For instance, I'm going to talk about the field that I know best: programming languages (to keep it simple, I'm not talking of VMs or compilers, just the languages). Pretty much everything you see in Java, C#, Python or Go dates back to the 70s (with broader testing and quality of life improvements, of course), Swift gets a few improvements imported from the 80s, but not that many. The only industrial languages that seem to have real innovations are F#, Rust and Scala, which are three cases in which the actual researchers managed to convince (or found) a company to support the language.

Anyway, it's really, really hard to measure scientific progress, and if you look at companies to try and gauge it, you're looking at stuff that is typically quite old.
I imagine this would be the most effective split-up.

If the ad business is required to let other search engines compete on the same terms as Google, it will remove the largest barrier to entry for small companies on search.
Best Bathroom Sinks 2019 (Top-Rated Reviews)
The interface does look a lot like Cilk, which is a definite plus as that is an absolute pleasure to use.

This however offers a lot more configurability than Cilk (or at least more accessible configuration). Whether that’s a curse or blessing... I guess we’ll find out! :)

Also, have you looked into implementing Cilk-style reducers at all? [0]

[0]: https://www.cilkplus.org/docs/doxygen/include-dir/group___re...
> There is if the people in the DOJ suffer from identity theft and get their bank accounts cleaned out because some nefarious people exploited the backdoors

People in the DOJ have more options available to them if they choose to try to find or punish an identity thief than the general public.

Also, the direct fear of not being able to do your job because of strong encryption is more focused than a nebulous fear of possible identity theft.
One of the best and laconic HN replies I've seen in a while. I do security engineering as part of work and I retort with "anyone who justs says they do security or this is a security thing" is doomed to failure or someone worth avoiding.
Are they just talking about the extended kalman filter? If so it is funny that there was such a big conceptual gap between the linear and linearized versions (i.e. a few years gap). Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Casting such a broad net with the word "doubt" suggests that all questions are argumentative. But in fact, almost none of the questions listed here are necessarily expressions of doubt or the basis for an argument. They are expressions of seeking understanding, which is a designer's job.

A designer who is not a question machine can only ever put lipstick on your product, not really make it better.
FYI, this spreadsheet does not use words like income, profit, loss, expenditure, etc. in the same way that businesses and accountants use the terms. Be very careful if you're communicating these numbers to other parties - they may not interpret the words in the same way you intend them.

Example: Cash flow is not the same as profits/losses. If you buy a $1M CNC machine for $1M in cash, your profit is $0 but your cashflow is -$1M.

Example two: Expenditures are different from expenses. The date you agree to buy (and are legally contracted to buy) a $1M CNC machine may be different than the date that those funds leave your bank account. (And those dates may be different than the dates over which the $1M CNC machine depreciates and eventually breaks down.)

Issues like these two can cause a business to run out of cash, even when then business is making a legitimate profit. This is why an income statement detailing your profits & losses is not enough - you also need a cashflow statement.
Well, only if your code and your libraries do not share state.
Skin Effect
They two different questions. One is asking if you are you able to, the other if you are willing to. I don't teach my daughter to correct people outside the house, but I do want her to speak properly when out there.

It's the same as everyone knows what she means when she says "libary", but I correct her to pronounce it "library".
Indeed, and the fact that unskilled engineers with good business skills can and always climb to the top proves my point : those success stories happen because the kid is a good salesman not because he taught himself software engineering.

This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.

Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".

That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.
That's true. I guess I tend to just use those as examples/documentation at the start, and then when I want to automate the process, I do it more in an all-at-once way (with a Python project or something) rather than incremental additions to a bash script. Do-nothing scripting does definitely sound like a technique I should try out. I'm not a huge fan of bash for stuff beyond a list of short commands/steps, though.
The UI is not configurable at this moment. You can embed the full screen view in an <iframe> and then adjust URL parameters to select which report to load.