skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a quick question for you that's a matter of personal curiosity and one I think you might be delighted in answering: What sort of failsafes are there in a fly-by-wire system? Is it a matter of redundancy or another mechanism that ensures pilot inputs yield expected outputs?

I've really been enjoying the posts you shared relating to your time in aerospace. I think there are a lot of lessons the entire software industry should learn from...
You can get the same smell from the 99 cent set of black soft plastic measuring cups and spoons at Wal-Mart. I'm surprised anybody buys and uses those; no doubt it affects the taste (and possibly safety) of whatever they measure.
> Some times taking more time (and/or better coders) to do something 'right' vs. just hacking it together is the difference between failure and success

Maybe it's high time we start taking "not screwing over your customers" into account when considering what makes a success.
This is covered in the Cracked podcast titled
Flashbulb Memories
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cracked-podcast/id68...

I just discovered them last week. Worth a listen
I've noticed this with Skype. It's pretty funny: you'll not hear much for a few seconds, and then hear the other party speak really quickly, with all the pauses between words dropped out.
There have been plenty of other bugs that have caused issues with our system, hence the "jumping to conclusions".

On the plus side, the client does appear to be getting better, and the team working on it really care about the quality of their work, so I have high hopes for OS X Mail!
Of course not. But codes of behavior clearly exist. Even without invoking laws, people in a civilized society will patiently stand in line rather than attempt to fight for first place.

Money is similar: it does not exist, except in our imaginations. We invented the idea, along with ideas like "fairness", "justice" and "ownership". They are not perfect inventions, and they are illusory and ephemeral, but they nonetheless shape human behavior.

"You're not allowed to take what's mine" is every bit a product of an illusory code of behavior as taxation, laws, etc. It does not exist in nature intrinsically. If you honor other people's ownership and expect them to honor yours, you are participating in following these unwritten rules.
Is this your guess, or are you speaking from experience?
The end of coding
Public Privacy: Cyber Security and Human Rights
Might it have been made in China from auto scraps?
Still the best browser out there, esp. with Pentadactyl. I can't imagine browsing without the two together.
The day I remember is the day when the NSF announced their scheduled withdrawal from oversight of the Internet, and the corresponding end of the prohibition of commercial use of same. 1994?

You asserted a tight relationship between the existence of marketers and the existence of the web. The direct quote is visible above, but I see that it can be interpreted more than one way. Let's assume you meant to say that "the web would be radically altered if it wasn't an advertising medium". Then, we can agree.

You have a good point: the amplification of the good aspects of marketing is a worthwhile goal. It's not going away, so is it possible to make it suck less?

The problem with your argument, in my eyes, and the cause for my lapse into condescension, for which I apologize, is that your examples are so extraordinarily cherry-picked that they seem absurd to bring up.

Advertising, even at its best, is a distraction from my intent. This is generally a negative thing. It's pretty important, but I'm not so fragile that it's going to derail my whole afternoon. But it's not ingratiating, and it's not necessary. You were arguing for the "necessary" angle, and I think we won't reach agreement on that one.
This sounds like a political statement. Obviously those sorts of requirements do exist, but they exist for everyone and in most cases scale as O(1) and not with employee count. They might plausibly be a barrier to hiring a first employee. They certainly aren't causing unemployment. As an existence proof, virtually none of those factors changed across 2008-2009, when we saw the biggest swing in employment rate since 1928.
Admittedly, I'm not all that familiar with Singapore's model. But based on your description, it sounds better than where we're headed.

I fully agree that if we paid out of pocket for routine maintenance and minor "repairs," we'd have the makings of a superior system. Give healthcare a genuine price signal and stop asking, "why is healthcare so expensive?"

It's expensive for the same reason university education is expensive. Most of the time, someone else is paying.
The iPad Air Review
2013 Prius here. So, I tried it on the way home. A quick push of the button is ignored, but if I hold it down the car shuts off. It takes power steering with it though, so I don't recommend it under uncontrolled circumstances. I had to come to a stop to restart as well.

Of course, if the computer is busted, I'm assuming the long button press will be sent to /dev/null.
Detecting scam mails
Drone-Mounted Laser Weapons Are on the Way
Best capsule summary of the Economist's political position I've ever read: "The in-flight magazine of Davos Man." (from a forgotten and unfindable blog entry)
The point of the blog post is that employers need to learn how to do hiring and not expect to outsource hiring to companies that get rich off of productive companies being clueless about hiring. That sounds like good advice. As a data point, one of my all-time most-liked comments here on HN[1] is my FAQ about company hiring procedures. Yes, people who run companies that innovate and make new products and services still have to learn the timeless facts about how to hire good workers. There is no substitute for the head of the company having a firm, reality-based idea about how to add workers to the team.

Successful hiring is an outgrowth of successful management. Know what you are looking for in new workers--not just what they should be able to do the day they are hired, but what they will grow into as your company grows. Be clear about the difference between hiring clones of yourself whom you'd like to have as friends and a diverse workforce full of smart people who get things done.

As my FAQ says, use work-sample tests for all your hiring. Don't trust educational credentials, but rather verify. Use legally safe means to find out who is smart and can learn more on the job. (References and expanded details on these points are available at the link.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543
Wouldn't there be a huge time gap required in between the first and second view of the video? How are you going to charge people and pay amazon (for bandwidth)? Do you use Amazon Elastic Transcoder or ffmpeg?
you should put VentureBeat in there too
The percentages are quite high, but remember that they're starting from such a small installed base, so a jump in the hundreds of thousands makes a big difference.
Jaguar Cub: "A simple tool for great e-books"
Quick comment - the typo in the first bullet point is glaring: 'Prosessing' should be 'Processing'.
Is this specified in your position description? Because that's anything but standard.

I feel a lot of employers are exceptionally bad at communicating their actual requirement. Ironically, one of the sure sighs that your job description is bullshit is having a line that says "excellent communication skills". Anything about "fast-paced environment" too.
I've always been partial to transformers.txt (it's robots.txt in disguise).
Let me clarify the instability I'm referring to. I don't mean that a system of more than two parties causes chaotic policies in the country (actually, I'd bet against that). I mean that a system of more than two parties has a natural tendency to transform into a two-party system.
That is of-course dependent on the size and resolution of the source file. But, when it is being processed, a temporary video file will be streamed - with the text "Processing" written on it.
I imagine so - but if you spidered your site as part of the dist process (or just your video URLs) this could be neatly eliminated (and you could eliminate the transcode stage from the process, which is usually a pretty crazy stage.)
Why does Tim Cook keep talking about new Apple products?
It's not cool throw your upstream vendors under the bus.
A fake SaaS that does big data with your garbage and a keyboard that smells like cat piss, we're having so much fun in the tech community!
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter - Issue 50
Seems like a good place to use biometrics.
> It was reasonable to take the translation at face value

This has been bouncing around since 2005. The Washington Post did a story two years ago about how it was bogus - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-ah...

So they got six years of mileage out of this lie, I guess it was time to kill it after six years, right? Not really. Let me see if any news outlet has drudged it up this month. Yes, Businessweek/AP did...

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-10-11/new-iran-governmen...

'When the conference was first held in 2005, Ahmadinejad made his infamous remark that Israel should be "wiped off the map."'

So here it is eight years later and the major news outlets are still printing this lie as factual news. Even after it was authoritatively debunked by the Washington Post two years ago.
This was a fun read. My favorite post:

'''When you write that the "problem has been resolved," do you mean that when I open my computer it will no longer smell like a pack of well hydrated feral cats have used it for target practice resolved, or do you mean that you have resolved the mystery of what has caused the problem? Jus' 'asking.'''
Ahh thanks! I will correct it now.
Bad as I Wanna Be: Coordination and Consistency in Distributed Databases
Well with the planned dev/random support, this is going to kick ass.
I have to aggregate it from everywhere. For example, Le Monde diplomatique, Der Spiegel, New Yorker Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Spectator, New Statesman, any publication that actually prints names so you can check the bias of the author, or look at their other pieces to see if they are just party hacks or just making stuff up, especially when reading opinion pieces. I also have a Stratfor account that I mainly read for lulz and leak info on hacker tradecraft from :P

For specific information, I contact my foreign service located in the country I want info about, and sometimes other embassies like the UK embassy. Often you can just email them and receive back a surprisingly frank and accurate account on their economy and political situation. This is open to anybody generally. I was interested in setting up a small biz in Bulgaria so just contacted my countries' trade mission there and they sent me everything there is to know about the current situation there, including underground nightclub scenes in their publication about culture, I was pretty surprised how thorough it was.

When I get time I go on business school/university polisci dept websites and look at their press releases and research papers which come out steadily every week usually. Most professors write articles for the Guardian or other publications. The European, Australian, New Zealand, and Asian schools are the best, no pay walls.

Jewish publications typically write a lot about human rights status in various countries, so I check those too. http://www.cjnews.com/news/hungarian-filmmaker-fears-his-chi... is an article I found after my country decided to refuse refugee claims from Hungary, claiming it was 'safe'. No other media bothered to cover it hardly and just accepted the government's decree.
I enjoy Nick's work, but I am not sure how applicable it is to many software jobs:

People must stop begging for jobs

It’s time for people to stop thinking about jobs, and high time
to start thinking about how — and where — they can create profit.

If I run a company, I’ll hire you to do work that pays off more
than what I pay you to do it. Today, virtually no employer knows
whether hiring a person will pay off. That’s why you need to know
how to walk into a manager’s office and demonstrate, hands down,
how you will contribute profit to the manager’s business. That’s
right: Be smarter than the manager about his own business. Stop
begging for jobs. Start offering profit.

Because if you can’t do that, you have no business applying for
any job, in any company.

I haven't seen too many software development positions in large companies where you can walk into a manager's office and demonstrate you are smarter about the manager's own business than he is.

I know more about your specialized domain than you?

I know more about design for your specialized domain
than you or your designers?

I know more about the algorithms developed in your
specialized industry than your engineers?

I know more about database design used in your
proprietary application?

I know more about the customers for your specialized
domain and their needs than you do?

And I'm supposed to be able to claim that for any software development company I interview with regardless of industry?

I enjoy working in software, and I think I am pretty good at it, but one aspect I enjoy is that moving from company to company I learn about new domains, new industries, new algorithms, etc.
I once had a stellar wind, about near blew the doors out my house...

So you see, probably does not work so well.
"Classically liberal" from a European viewpoint at least varies by country, but is generally considered as close to the political centre compared to e.g. libertarianism.

In many countries it would evoke social liberal ideas, in others it would evoke more conservative liberal ideas, but most will be found to the left of our conservative parties an to the right of our socialist parties (and often to the right of our social democratic parties). Overall, the "gravitational point" of "classically liberal" parties is probably centre-right.

So from a European point of view, it is a "useful descriptor" to the extent it places someone in a fairly narrow range in the political centre vs. for example "libertarian" which today tends to evoke firmly right wing populist or laissez faire politics (despite the existence of plenty left wing libertarian ideologies, such as left-communism, minarchism or libertarian marxism, but these are rarely described as such, and in Europe at least rarely self-identify as libertarian).
GSW Launches OpenGeoSci Map-Based Search Engine (300,000 maps)
Baristas.com Sells For $45,000
The answer is that we shouldn't be doing these things, but that the 50 years that have elapsed since the peak of the Cold War, in which both the Soviets and the US had influential voices espousing preemptive nuclear strikes, is in world-historical context the blink of an eye, and it's going to take time and effort for us to shake off the strategies and positioning we (often foolishly) adopted to win that war.

Except for the UN thing. While I agree that the UN is used (on all sides) as a fig leaf, we haven't waited for countries to disobey the UN as an excuse to attack them, but rather used the UN fig leaf as part of a justification for wars that had already been decided on. In the case of Iraq II, that was a grave mistake on our part, but the mistake has little to do with respect for the UN. The UN is simultaneously important and undeserving of much respect.
+1 Using Heroku Postgres as an example gets you a lot for free, e.g. WAL-E disaster recovery.

Also farming out a piece of infrastructure and having a secure stack doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
Our application also had problems due to this. Would have been nice to receive a phone call or email.
What is saving these days aside from "We've bizarrely held your changes since the last time you clicked this button shaped like an antiquity aside just in case you wanted to risk losing them all by navigating away."?
It's not a language talent gap, as learning the ins and outs of a new similar language is not a big deal. It is the talent gap of all the other related tasks that go into engineering and development.

Yes these can be learnt by a motivated junior developer reading books and the like, but they can be taught and explained better and faster by a senior developer.

Case in point when I started at a real programming job, I already knew how to program pretty well, but it was the other organisational and system design concepts that I needed help with.
That’s essentially the day-age view, and surprisingly few creationists subscribe to that (and no young earth creationists do so). It doesn’t change that even if you believe in day-age creationism, you’re accepting something that has no more basis in reality than the various creation tales in the Vedas do.
America is young, and this is no special time in history either...

As a non-expert I was/am unsurprised by the content of these leaks whose 'revelations' in the broad sense are mere common sense - but more surprised that they happen at all. Are Americans so discontented? Apparently so...
Yesterday when some apple users said their Macbook battery life had been impacted by the Mavericks upgrade the consensus on HN was that "people blame all kinds of problems on software upgrades". When some Dell users say their laptops smell funny, then Dell has a QA problem.
This is brilliant. Now, instead of using random quotes, please take the IMDB quotes and make anigifs of them :)
Most of the old, classically liberal parties in Europe that formed the start of liberalism as a political movement fits politically from well left of Obama to pretty much where he is.
Reminds me of my sisters Volkswagen beetle. It's got some material under the leather that smells exactly like crayons. It's impossible to get rid of. Not as bad as cat piss but really strong. Gives me a feeling of nostalgia every time I'm in it haha. Google "Volkswagen smells like crayons" and you'll find a lot of VWs in the early 2000s have the same smell.
From the initial description on the article page, I was expecting an ad-hoc connection protocol letting devices interact with each other. It looks to me like they are connecting devices on the local network rather than going to the cloud first (or at all).

This is very similar to a platform I've been building lately. Even the idea of a 'server' and the capabilities of that server are similar (though I only started building the server yesterday).
Well, at risk of going on a bit of a tangent here, realistically my experience in every field is that a distinct minority of jobs ever get filled through formal job advertisements. The vast majority of hiring happens through referrals and networking.

Bringing it back to tech specifically, in my (anecdotal) experience people are rarely bothered by lack of knowledge of a specific framework assuming that the candidate has experience in something similar, or more generally if it is safe to believe that the candidate can get up to speed and contribute in a reasonable amount of time.

At this point we are of course just comparing anecdotes. I will also note, though, that there are a lot of very different subsectors within tech, and hiring practices vary widely between them. In accordance with the venue I am here mostly referring to startups (including late-stage startups).
What a fascinating word game.
Have people used Datomic? What has your experience been like?
How exactly do you think having built-in AES primitives solves a problem for browser crypto? Content-controlled Javascript still controls how those primitives are used.
The last time I ordered a Dell product it arrived and would not boot. Did absolutely nothing. Was completely DOA. That put a bad taste in my mouth. Their displays have treated me well though, and their server products are great.
World’s First Bitcoin ATM Arrives at Coffee Shop
Hard to blame software upgrades for urine smells on new laptops.

I also think users are probably better at diagnosing "The keyboard smells like piss" than software implications on battery life
Also knowing what you can contribute to their business is much easier than knowing what you can contribute that they don't already get from one of their current employees.
I understand the subtext of your comment which has
subsequently provided me with a degree of positive
emotions.
The Art of the Simple Blurb
With all the articles about how terrible just about every company is with hiring, do you think maybe the "talent shortage" is a misnomer and side-effect of companies being outright terrible at judging "talent"?
Was it a software upgrade that caused the laptops to smell like cat piss?
Well, it is not a "talent shortage" except in HR. It is a "credentials shortage."

Here's the thing. I don't have a CS degree. I can program financial systems pretty well, but I am not a CPA either. I know enough about these things to have intelligent discussions with accountants and CS experts.

However I engineer frameworks for building accounting systems. I can do this self-employed. Nobody asks me for credentials. People find the software and they come to me for services. I also provide database consulting.

However from time to time I get job offers. During tough times I have inquired about them only to find out that I am "not qualified."

So I am "not qualified" to do a job for which they will pay me less than what folks pay me otherwise, largely because I do not have a piece of paper saying that someone else says I passed some classes. So I don't care, get back to running my own business, and work on growing that.

Excessive credentialism is a problem here. Companies don't know how to recruit, and they expect HR to do the wrong things. Resume-screening by HR is the single biggest problem in employment in the US today.
Pricing link also goes nowhere.
Fascinating. I was shopping for new sneakers the other day and was shocked at how many people over the last couple of years had reported new pairs of New Balance shoes having exactly the same "smells like cat urine" problem (see: http://ask.metafilter.com/182458/Something-peed-in-my-sneake..., http://reviews.newbalance.com/9328/M990/new-balance-new-bala..., http://www.zappos.com/product/review/7944390/page/1/start/5, or just Google "new balance odor").

The prevailing theory is that it has something to do with the glue they use when assembling the shoe. I wonder if the same glue is hidden in these laptops somewhere...
What do you expect from a user calling themselves YHWH?
Yeah, that's why I no longer use US or European manufacturers ... ;)
A bit nitpicking but that's a different statement than saying the earth is 6,000 years old. "Humans in their present form" is a very vague statement. You could take it to mean god imparted the knowledge of agriculture upon humans which had a hugely transformative effect on mankind which made modern humans what they are today. Or you could say god imparted the biblical knowledge of right and wrong and that allowed humans to become what they are today. Hell, it could even be interpreted as true by evolution believing religious people with a poor understanding of the timescales evolution operates over.

I'm very skeptical of the idea that around half of the people around me think the existence of the earth or humans are less than 10,000 years old and I live in an extremely religious state (Utah). Mormons aren't known for being creationists though so perhaps my personal experience is unusual.
Hi! Could you please explain this a little more!

Thanks