skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you think QA engineer should know how to code and why?
Friend of mine is a QA engineer. I been asking him to learn to code to personal and professional benefits.

Just curious do you think a QA engineer needs to know how to code? If yes, then why and which language he should learn?

As a QA they get to work on applications devloped on different tech stacks. So which language would a benefit the most for a QA engineer.
Will the Google Glasses have better voice control than Siri?
I'd like to think it can get better, but the more and more I use Siri, the less impressed I am with voice control and commands.

How will the Google Glasses make it out in the world with the amount of noise pollution that exists? And it's only getting worse.
Thanks! Great suggestion, to us as developers its obvious because we've spent ages developing it so it's good these obvious things are pointed out to us
As long as they aren't trying to make the people who were wrong feel bad about it.

But that's precisely what gloating implies.
That's a fair criticism. I came this article it from a strategy perspective, and would actually like to know more about their operations.

I agree about Zenni Optical and Coastal Contacts --- they are basically pure price plays, while WP is aiming at a very specific customer segment and brand image/personality that's backed up by every interaction you have with them.
This looks pretty cool - As a heads up, I was going to tweet it, but the social buttons aren't working.

Why build out a tool like this instead of using pre-made solutions like Splunk, etc.?

Love the work you guys are doing on Streak!
Holy shit ... pricing is even 95 euros.

Any background on this - are they part of a group that specializes in copying success in other markets (e.g., Rocket Internet), or is it an independent startup?
If you linked your Twitter account to your Facebook profile then yes.
He's right that the Web belongs to no one, but the politicians of the world, for the most part, clearly still don't agree nor believe that.

It's too big of a single target to not constantly be the object of power grabs. So much of what we do, say, and transact now flows over the Internet or Web. The politicians will literally never stop pursuing legislation for controlling information systems of all sorts. If they have to do it at the edges first, then they will, that's how they always make power grabs when big grabs fail.

Eternal vigilance is the price to be paid to keep the Web free.
> GPL cannot compel you to open source your code or to give out security keys. They can seek damages against you if you violate the license.

FSF's stance on this seems to be different from yours.

Quoting from the blog post[1]:

>This fear is unfounded and based on a misunderstanding of GPLv3. We have not been able to come up with any scenario where Ubuntu would be forced to divulge a private signing key because a third-party computer manufacturer or distributor shipped Ubuntu on a Restricted Boot machine. In such situations, the computer distributor -- not Canonical or Ubuntu -- would be the one responsible for providing the information necessary for users to run modified versions of the software.

See the last line? So basically FSF is claiming that the private key must be divulged, just not by Ubuntu, but the OEM. What if the OEM is a Ubuntu partner? They would be in a bind, having to chose between divulging the key(and probably having it revoked when a rootkit starts using it) and throwing their OEM partner under the bus.

As you said, if the bootloader is easily replaceable with something with a more open license, why subject yourself to this possible headache?

[1] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot...
In my experience, I started by saying yes to everything and getting burned. Then as I got older, I learned to say "no" and how say/how not to say/how to imply "no".

At first it's hard, but people will learn to accept your "no"s and is a sign of respect when they stop questioning why you said "no". (assumption: no is backed up by reasonable and rational reasons)
Maybe they could MVNO on one or more networks, with favorable data plans internationally, and handle all sales/service on the phones as well.

If I could have Amazon customer service handle all of my cellphone needs, I'd be fine with paying twice what I pay Verizon or ATT now. The hardware would be largely irrelevant.
I've always been a bit sad about it, but everyone involved is probably a rational actor.

Computer science professors probably view a couple hundred dollars per MATLAB network license as a tiny expense on a $1m+ grant (whereas statistics grants are apparently often smaller), and they may be charged for it in departmental overhead anyway (removing the incentive to cut costs).

The type of people who could contribute either core code or toolbox type code to Octave often have an extremely rare quantitative skill set that is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, so there is a huge incentive to get paid to do similar work instead. There probably isn't much community recognition (to balance things out) for implementing a library in Octave. (Though, in the R world there are certain recognizable superstars like Hadley Wickham.)

Graduate students (who might work for cheap on these problems) are probably more focused on publications and networking.

As long as all of this is the case, Octave will always kind of just be a worse MATLAB that happens to be open source, so a new user choosing between them will probably just choose MATLAB by default.
I don't think the license says the keys are part of the source code. It says they have to provide information on how to run your own modified version of the software.

In this case it would be as simple as allowing the user to install their own key or disable secure boot. If an OEM didn't do that and pre-installed Ubuntu on the machine there is no way that Ubuntu would be required to reveal their private key, they did nothing wrong, the OEM is the one who violated the license and they are on the hook for damages.
Really? It's compatible with my Droid X.
Even if a snap judgement were right or did add missing perspective it would only be by chance, or only useful in hindsight. Such as the distinction between "knowledge" and "a true belief", armchair commentary is basically unproductive even in the cases where it looks good.
I say B. You look great. I never actually bought a pair of WP glasses; I did the home try-on and didn't find a pair that really worked for me.
It sounds like they detected it but since so many components failed at once, the action was to page someone to have a look. I'm not convinced they can't actually do this, but rather were gun-shy about programmatically pulling the trigger.

Back to AWS, the control plane failures are concerning, killing the ability to deploy new resources. It's expensive to have this kind of capacity pre-deployed and I'm sure it bit many folks.
That's true in all these discussions. You always have the option to simply stop selling your product, however for most companies that's probably a worse option than giving away the source code. I think that's why it's usually left out of the discussion.

It's like saying Americans will be forced to buy health insurance soon. They don't have to if they quit their job and keep their income below the poverty level, but that's not really a viable alternative for most, so "forced to buy health insurance" remains an accurate summary.
Air France Flight 447 Crash Final Report Released
Architect, chief engineer, principal, fellow. These all mean 'put out to pasture'. These are supposed to be positions of leadership, but with no direct reports there is no one forced to follow. Developers who already have to deal with the business bureaucracy are not going to listen to someone because of a fancy title that does more politicking than development.

Plus architect gives the image of a scarf wearing drama queen who throws tantrums.
Bmeet
Are You an Asker or a Guesser?
Hi s_henry_paulson, check the app store for an update, we released 1.2 last night, which should include Italian.

We've been short-staffed until very recently, stay tuned for more languages!
Interesting! I wasn't aware of that concept, but Wikipedia has a page on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

I only know the word from Sikh prayers in the sacred language of Gurmukhi. For instance, it's part of the Mul Mantra, in which it means "throughout the ages". As I'm not well versed in Punjabi or Hindi, I didn't know it had other meanings.
This is definitely the way forward.

In the past, the research has focused on re-creating non-trivial neural networks. However, the network is nothing without the organism - sure, you can examine the internal oscillations - but that hasn't led us anywhere. (See "Perfect C.Elegans" research paper, 1998). One can't debug without seeing the results, and that's the case with a neural network without the rest of the organism.

Why C.Elegans? It's the simplest organism with a nervous system (302 neurons), and the connectivity has been completely mapped. It's a hermaphrodite, with a fully-sequenced DNA. It's also one of the more studied organisms out there.
Even though I recommended the book, I completely agree with you.
This is a little weird for me. I've got a couple optometrists in the family who own their own practice. A lot of this article rings completely false. Kind of makes me wonder, when reading about other "disruptors" what information is exaggerated or missing.

Still, not a bad idea, especially for people without insurance.
Anti-social is much more precise. It is primarily a tool to specifically target marketing, experimenting with extra-relational flirtation, and maintain that high school sense of social competition that we were all so happy to depart from.

When developing I cringe any time a "social" feature gets involved. Rarely are people's lives enriched from it.
This is a great article, I hope you don't mind my submitting it to the main page. I was half-expecting it to forward me to past discussion.
I don't think you need to go through all the trouble. Some thing like the following should be enough:

oldJQuery = jQuery;
jQuery = mock;

//Run module

jQuery = oldJQuery;

Remember that IIFE's are basically equivalent to variable definition and assignment. The only reason we even have to go through the trouble of using them is due to JS not having block scope.
if Amazon's main goal is to drive content sales, I don't see why entering the smartphone market at this point is the best move.

Mobile payments.
Yahoo v. Facebook is reaching a "patent peace deal"
Same situation for me. Not to be "that guy" but I really do think their glasses are a bit too hipster for some. Nonetheless, I bought a pair hoping that they would grow on me but unfortunately they never did.

With that said though, the customer experience was fantastic. Very helpful and charming staff. I'd love to take a look at WP again if they ever added a few new styles of specs.
This is the kind of article I really needed to read 18 months ago instead of fumbling my way through it by myself.

It's amazing how few tutorials there are out there that fill in that gap between being a traditional web developer versed in .net / php and knowing the basics of javascript to being an actual javascript coder.

Most articles and tutorials around the web seem to target the beginner while most hacker news front page pieces target the advanced coder who already understands closures / prototypes etc and there seems to be very little in between.
Yep, we were sad about that one. The hardware is up to spec but there's something about the GPU driver that's causing the N1 to perform poorly.
I did not. I don't like doing that. It's really strange ... I was merely signed in to facebook at the same time.

edit: I wonder if anyone else is able to replicate this, though.
fwiw: I think you made the right choice. Work is sacrosanct. I hope the rest of the weekend with your wife was lovely, but losing your job likely would not have made her happy.

-- former military wife who spent many a birthday alone
I like software architects.

While every member of the team may be capable of strategic thinking in general, not every member of the team actually has sufficient domain knowledge to chart everything out.

Building some data link avionics software that needs to be DO-178B Level C compliant and operate within the parameters specified by the EuroControl Link 2000+ initiative? Not every hacker off the street will be able to come up to speed on the implications of all of that in short order. Someone with fifteen years experience in the same or similar technologies will be able to plan the system and guide the more novice programmers.

But it likely depends on what software you're building. If you're building web applications that cull together lots of common-knowledge ideas, then having an experienced individual plan it out for you might not be as needful.
Hey Sean,

We looked into a lot of logging solutions and couldn't find a solution that fit our requirements. In particular,
1) at the moment we don't run any servers (even virtualized) ourselves, and we're loving not having to worry about that level of infrastructure. Splunk and most other logging solutions would have required running a VM just for the daemon (either proprietary or syslog).
2) the total cost of developing Mache was significantly less than even a single 500 MB Splunk license.
3) most other solutions that we looked at really want to treat logs as lines of text data. App Engine logs provide more metadata, and we didn't want to lose and have to reconstruct that data.
Good feedback, work in progress!
Newly Released CIA Documents Show 9-11 Warnings Before Attack
Look,

(a) you screwed up the numbers. You should not be comparing, in this hypothetical scenario, 1.33 with 1, but rather 1/(1 - 0.33) with 1.33, which is instead 0.1625. That is, "these people who don't understand the numbers involved" in the above article includes you. :P And the article above does not make the pretense that this is a uniform problem affecting all of the consumption of the poor; rather just that certain deals may be irrationally treated because of how they are phrased. There is no mythical 33%-across-the-board discount for the poor at stake here; at best it's a 16.25% discount available in very limited circumstances.

The real point of the original article was that many people seem unable to determine the difference between 1/(1-0.33) and 1.33, which is only a 16% increased-cost gap

(b) It would be very tough to make these economics work out in the present market where even 5% returns seem overoptimistic. Suppose you could reliably convert a poor person into a rich person (and I'll take a modest $200k/year income to define "rich"), by giving them $5k per year and making sure that they spent it on "the right sort of thing," banks could probably do it.

I mean, just imagine making this pitch to a poor person: "I'm going to make it so that in 10 years you are earning $200k/year, and then I will take $20k of those every year for 20 years -- so that you only earn $180k/year -- as payment." To a poor person that's an unbelievably sweet deal. They would take that offer and might even offer a much larger cut of that salary to that bank. Suppose that with oversight the cost to the bank is as much as $10k/year, of which $5k goes directly to the person and $5k is administrative losses in making sure people don't misspend the money. From the bank's perspective that's a 10% return on investment, which is not amazing but not too shabby. Even if it only works 50% of the time, in today's economic climate that easily beats treasury bonds as investments go. It's in the bank's financial interests then to lift people out of poverty with this mechanism.

I don't see any banks doing this, and while it may be possible I would guess that it takes much more money to do it.
Pretty neat idea. I wouldn't mind having one of these to back up my Documents folder with Time Machine if I'm on the go. However, I'm not sure how practical it would be for any other use considering how slow the write/read speeds are and how little (comparatively) a MicroSD card can store.
Building Tight Game Systems of Cause and Effect
I'll bite. I consider myself a decent developer (but then, who doesn't?). I don't know what you mean by "bloom filters" or "priority queues" without Googling for them. I feel pretty confident that if they were the best solution to a problem I was having, I would find them through research.

Why did you pick those as "basic subjects" for a "junior engineer"? Are they important to your particular area of work?
This is an awesome answer, thanks so much for doing the research here. So although the time of outage was much shorter this time, what I'm concerned about was that they seem to have violated their "AZs are totally separate" claim again, which would point to a still-lurking fundamental problem. Happy to be corrected here if I'm wrong.
Yes, they would have the ability to compromise all PCs (ARM, x86).

Notes, though:

* All BIOS-based PCs and many ARM-based PCs (as well as other CPU-based units) are currently vulnerable. As others have noted, this is not a very active threat vector compared to, say, Flash bugs and infected software ("...to view this p0rn, you have to install this codec" - bam! you are pwned).

* Ability to bypass the key signing via a stolen key is necessary but not sufficient for an attack. You also have to get (trick) the user into installed infected boot-type code. The advantage is that you can then install rootkit-class software, which is very very hard to detect and eradicate.

* People with "powerful" keys take extensive measures to protect them. Having said that, people with "powerful" keys have slipped up, which causes a lot of problems. Examples: Microsoft's key (an old one) was hacked and used to sign the "Flame" virus, Mozilla's private key revealed, the RSA key token hack.

References:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57446466-75/flame-virus-sp...

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/252766,comodo-hacker-reveals-m...

http://blogs.computerworld.com/17995/rsa_securid_hacked_2fa_...
You have to set boundaries and expectations, so before leaving on break tell the boss "I will not be online this weekend at all no matter what. Period. Have a nice weekend."

You don't have to worry about being fired for that because 1) boundaries are healthy and 2) they obviously can't operate without you so they wouldn't dare fire you for having a personal life.

Even worse, the more of yourself you give 24/7 to the business, the more the boss expects that of you, and gets disappointed when you slack down to 23/7. Establish firmly that you can give 110% during business hours but also you have a personal life that doesn't belong to the business.

If the business can't operate continuously without you then the boss either needs to invest in more staff or prepare to suffer the consequences. It's not your fault and don't let anyone guilt you into working 24/7 because they're not investing in enough staff and infrastructure for true 24/7 coverage.

So customers be damned? Perhaps, but that was your boss's decision when they failed to hire a full staff, not your fault.

What if you are the boss and owner, is it still customers be damned? What's the point of having the freedom of being your own boss if you don't use that freedom? So sometimes you say "no" to customers and partners, they are adults, they will get over it.

Your job is not your life. Believe it and live it.
The part no one mentions is that Cisco advertised these routers as cloudy all along, so the firmware update just delivered the already-promised features. People who bought these routers probably didn't quite realize what a cloud router means, though.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-news/31723-...
Yep, that's correct, critical sections of the pipeline are coded in assembly. Also, Word Lens only works with Android devices that have NEON support.
> A lot of this article rings completely false.

Such as?
Ask HN: Does News.YCombinator.com use any open-source ML algos?
Serious question here, I see incredible stuff like this being done with JavaScript all the time, but I have never come across a tutorial or anything of the sort that even touches on things like this, where do I start learning how to use JS to manipulate webpages in this way???
I've worked in places where "architect" was nothing more than a title given to senior developers to soothe their egos so they didn't notice they were underpaid. I've all seen architects who didn't code, preferring their ivory towers of UML diagrams. Neither of these types are effective.

A real software architect is a force multiplier: you help teams be more productive through your contributions, be it design, code, mentoring or leadership. Rather than being the team showboat, a good architect is the guy that helps everyone else be even better at their jobs.
I agree. One thing that isn't mentioned is that all of Warbly Parker's frames are plastic, as opposed to the titanium (and other) alloys that you find in the brick and mortar stores. Moreover I just don't see enough variety of styles at Warbly Parker.

The article just feels like submarine PR that's disconnected from reality. There are better online glasses stores.
Would doing a kickstarter be useful for these folks?
To be fair, it looks like it was fixed for a while, before resurfacing in 2006 and being ignored for the next 6 years.
Sounds like you're a Debian sort of guy, then. That's fine- but, understand that the reason Ubuntu is at the forefront of "Linux on the desktop" is because of its willingness to compromise.

You can never have everything; Ubuntu cares more about things that lead to adoption (i.e. usability), Debian cares more about purity.
> And remember 4chan gave us LolCats, Memes, Rage faces etc.

4chan gave us a voice. We are now legion.

Shared culture, sure - but it showed us there was an "us" to share that culture among. Its real effects are much, much larger.
Because you get functions to deal with collisions, positions, size, etc. for free. Instead of reimplementing everything on top of the canvas element.

Of course frameworks will help with that. But by the end of the day, the hardware accelerated rendering system will be so good, I'm sure we gonna be able to render thousand of particles with the DOM.
We ran into performance issues on the N1 that made for a very poor experience. In testing, the N1 oddly worked fine when we replaced the stock firmware with Cyanogen. That would have really confused users though so we had to blacklist the N1.
US smartphone plans are $70+ a month. I don't think you really mean that. Or if you do, you're in a tiny, tiny minority. Obviously there's room for someone to do it better, but no one is going to pay $3000 for a two year phone contract.
We haven't blacklisted the Droid X. Can you let us know what kind of problems you're seeing?
> $1,200/month or less gets you your own private room in a shared apartment in NYC, Boston, or just about anywhere else.

$1400/month gets a one-bed apartment in Mountain View. I used to pay $700/mo for a private room and bathroom in a 2 bed apartment in Mountain View. Those prices seem over hyped.
Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Even Known"
I like what I see, it shows you got balls. In the comments people applauded your efforts, simplifying arrays with array literals is a win, see?

It is not about making it a completely different language, just about simplifying it, making our lives easier.

What's wrong about dropping the dollar sign for variables?

What's wrong about objectifying a string so our editor can popup all string functions on 'name'.?

What's wrong with using key:val instead of key=>val?

Saving one char at a time is a win, we are lazy beasts, you know it.
Open Source Micro E-commerce (+API +CDN) Example, installs with a single command
True. But regardless of the official title, somebody still plays the SA role.
Hey, just thought I'd let you know that the Twitter availability lookup doesn't seem to work correctly. Even for usernames that are available, it's notifying that they are taken.