skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think finding it unsettling is actually a good reaction. I think people get too encultured into simplistic views of the world. It's good to recognize how fundamentally deep and strange the universe is with respect to our everyday experience of it, if for nothing more than the sake of perspective.
Whatsapp made a huge effort to make sure you could use it from almost any device. FB less so. Not really much of a 'competition' in that sense.
Well, buying WhatsApp for 16B is a guarantee they're no longer a competitor and you have their entire audience. Your plan takes 3.5 yrs longer, and it has a high chance of failure.
By DRM he probably meant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
I think you misunderstood my point. The "modern" way seems to be to avoid SQL using either NoSQL or something like an ORM.

Personally I prefer to tackle this from the other side with stored procedures and service locators so my application code is free of SQL (aside from the service locator), and all my SQL is in .sql files.....
Youtube at the time had a massive marketshare in terms of video hosting and sharing (mostly because it was one of only a few which actually worked properly). Whatsapp is popular, definitely. But it's one of hundreds of messaging platforms, and I suspect it doesn't have anything like a majority share in the worldwide messaging space.

The similarities are of course that they're both defensive aquisitions - the money is justified not on its earnings potential but that it could be the start of a new social network that ousts Facebook. If that really is the case, $16B is well worth it. Facebook's aquisition strategy at the moment appears to be 'overpay for anything that could be the next Facebook to their MySpace'. It'll probably work, too - at least for the near future.

But that said Whatsapp is not very popular in Australia so I have a skewed perspective (current marketshare here seems to be roughly a 50/50 split between legacy SMS and Facebook mesenger).
"Comcast is getting paid by Netflix? I want to be paid by Netflix too!" -every other ISP
The babysitting one is harder than the plumbing, but bear with me.

For the plumber's contract, imagine sensors embedded in the pipes or the bathtub that could collect data suggesting that agreed-upon circumstances in fact obtain.

Now, if the agreed-upon pattern is something simple like a certain level of water flow, it's easy to see how a criminal plumber would be able to game that system and get out of town with the money (though they probably wouldn't be able to make nearly as much money as a good plumber would).

On the other hand, you can imagine a system of sensor-enabled plumbing parts made to fit with each other — shower walls, pipes, showerheads, faucets, etc. — then there could be a signature pattern in all the sensors that is much harder to fake than it is to just achieve honestly. The achievement of that pattern could then trigger the satisfaction of the contract.

Babysitting is a lot weirder, but you can imagine the contract working with some combination of factors like:

- the babysitter is in fact in the house, and maybe his/her movements fit some expected pattern

- the sounds made by the kid match the types of sounds they normally make (or have made with other babysitters)

- the kid is in bed by a certain time

- the kid (depending on how old he/she is) might actually rate the quality of the babysitter

- etc., etc.

This is one creepy world I just envisioned.
This actually has tons of applications. Low-power, high-bandwidth connections can enable the Internet of Things, always-on video recording (through things like Glass). This can enable having the internet everywhere.
This really shouldn't be a surprise ... the attack surface is too large, there are too many privileged people, not enough silos and ... it's the government. If they were more careful to get their money's worth, they'd find that they had to develop more stringent specifications, which would also lead to a more careful analysis of the problem.
Social Security pays the retired 10s of Ks per year so they can live comfortably after paying into the system for their entire career.

You think we should get rid of that in favor of a basic income of ~10k for everyone? That's going to suck pretty bad for the retired.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion if you do think that but the vast vast vast majority of Americans are going to disagree with you.
That is effectively what I was attempting to highlight. No minds read.

On the topic of tortured logic, I would love to know why you don't think the lawsuit[0] is about fracking when it involves water and the infrastructure that supplies it for those activities.

[0] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/water201402...
Apparently the NSA is a intelligence agency. [1] So they are probably not that blunt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsa
Handy! Thank you for posting this.
Thanks for sharing! I salute you for having survived this!
Promises are not optional
>if I own a device, No-one should legally be allowed control over it?

Then tech companies might start leasing out their devices: you technically don't own it, so you're not allowed to do what you want to it.

Not that the Right to Root wouldn't be nice, but the change in attitude has to come first. And we need to somehow convince the likes of Apple that their DRM is bad for business.
If it makes vim plugins less painful it has a huge benefit for me. I run almost completely vanilla vim in part because the plugin system is so awkward.
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3188816
Total refactoring without regression is rare. Especially in the wild.
" I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself."

Sadly the personalities who dominate academia are increasingly anti-nerds.
All of which is pretty obvious. Of course we're spying on them, and I'm sure they're spying on us too. Somebody made one of the programs public, so of course we're going to promise to stop. What else is Obama going to say, "We're gonna spy on you and you can't stop us, nyah nyah!"? Thus the essential hypocrisy of diplomacy - that's obviously the truth of the situation, and it isn't going to change, but nobody can say it publicly. Clearly, he told them publicly to stop doing that, and through some back channel told them that he really wanted them to only obey the letter of that - keep on spying, just don't use this particular source in this particular way.
What Every JavaScript Developer Should Know About Floating Point Numbers
If Facebook stock is wildly overvalued then using it as currency is reasonable.
Building codes contribute to the problem. So does tech. Building codes are a scapegoat in the sense that SF would still have housing problems even without the building codes.
Or the newspaper just made it up. Per Wikipedia:

>> In the paper's beginnings, Springer was influenced by the model of the British tabloid Daily Mirror,[3] although Bild's paper size is larger, this is reflected in its mix of celebrity gossip, crime stories and political analysis. However, its articles are often considerably shorter compared to those in British tabloids, and the whole paper is thinner as well. Bild has been known to use controversial devices like sensational headlines and invented "news" to increase its readership. The policy of having a topless woman on its front page virtually every day has also been criticised by German feminist groups.
Haslam's Books of Doom
Seriously, totally uncalled for.

I would say that for the majority of people Vim is just working fine.

That 'guy' has been maintaining Vim for years and all he asks for is to donate to his charity.

Also, did you read his response? He doesn't say don't do it. Just wouldn't be easy and some current functionality may be lost. In his mind, it would be better to work on the current code base and do small changes. I would say that's an entirely reasonable response.

It's comments like this that turn people off from working on open source.
Directed against a government, maybe it's not 'spying', it's enforced transparency. And it's not a 'bug', it's a miniaturized digital whistleblower.
Maria von Trapp, last member of Sound of Music family, dies
Germany is not technically able to spy like that on the USA. The german agencies don't have direct access to american telefon lines and communication providers, and not to that amount of internet traffic, nor the technical equipment needed to search through data of that amount. And they don't have the rights to operate like that on american ground (in contrast to the rights the USA still have from after the war). There are american listening posts in Germany, not german listening posts in the USA.

Or do you think that if the BND asked the NSA to send over a few million of the collected emails from american citizens, they would happily do so? No, that is of course a one-sided thing.

The "of course they are spying on us" is FOX-rhetoric, and wrong.
I do hope the U.S. manages to completely isolate itself internationally. The U.S. losing it's allies and therefore effectively super power status would definitely be a positive outcome of all of this.
This article was well written and thought provoking, but the title should be changed to "Why Bitcoin Matters for Zimbabwe."

The current title makes the article sound like a generalization about all the economies in a continent.
Does that include the Galapagos islands or a server in someone's garage that gets slashdotted?

You can't really guarantee uncongested paths at all times to the "whole Internet".
FT has a huge and very strong mod team. Anything off-topic gets killed or moved to Omni pretty fast. Some of the individual forums are more heavily modded than others (United Airlines forum compared to Travelbuzz).

Flyertalkers also talk in code. "(23 Feb) UA 574 ord to ewr upgraded to 767 3 class" is a pretty typical thread title. The barrier to joining the conversation is high. That's nothing to compared to this gem from the trick-it thread (up to 31,000 posts):

> Were you guys aware that you can FD half by C1-C2 via northern star and then returning on the neutral longhorns that are the wholly owned sub of the airline named after me? Just discovered that today by accident. Pretty cool at times.
Hey - made this post to explain the term sheet. Would love any feedback.
That's the necessary step 1 to allow further enhancements
Invite HN: Free JavaScript training session for begginners
Hi all, I'm Tony, brazilian, web developer (backend) since 2000.
I have strong javascript skills and I want to train a little bit of english by giving a free Javascript training via Google Hangout to a small group.
The intended audience is people who already knows a little javascript and want to deepen their knowledge about it.

I'll talk about the following topics:

* Variables
* Arrays and objects
* Wat?
* JSON
* Functions
* Asynchronous programming
* Closures
* Prototypes
* This

It should take 2-3 hours, and it will happen someday in the next 2 weeks.
If you're interested, email me on tonylampada@gmail.com (and add "Javascript for grown-ups" in the subject) - I'll send you the more details as soon as I have them.
A related problem, or maybe the same problem in a different outfit, is the notion that my personal experience is enough for me to opine on all software everywhere.

For me there's a useful sort of arrogance, the "I could code that in two weeks even if I don't know the language" kind of arrogance. I say useful, because that had gotten me to jump into projects that I never would have dared touch.

But the dangerous side of that arrogance is, "I know enough to say what what these other people are doing is stupid". Every time I learn a new sort of software or a new domain, I am reminded that it's much easier to make bold pronouncements from ignorance than from knowledge.
You seem to be reaching to put the man on level ground with his peers. He is the CEO of a company that is partially responsible for many such installations sprouting up near other peoples regular homes. The man is complaining about his luxury mansion depreciating in value because of development.

He should listen to Exxon and other energy company lawyers and move away from progress if he doesn't like the smell or sight of it.
Many of the assertions made by the OP seem highly uncorrelated to the event being discussed, which is may really be a significantly outlying event as OP itself notes, though not astronomically rare of course.

>> “Yahoo! doesn’t have talent.” ... The two WhatsApp founders worked at Yahoo!

OK, so two people from Yahoo were talented. How does this lead me to any conclusions about Yahoo's talent overall (positive or negative)? Without any disrespect to them, I am sure the smartness levels of Whatsapp founders is not astronomically greater than those of other Yahoo employees to change the overall Yahoo averages significantly.

>> “Companies like Facebook have the best talent.” One of the WhatsApp founders applied for a job at Facebook and was rejected.

I am at a complete loss for this one. This rejection at best speaks to inadequacy of the interview processes.

>> “The best founders are relatively young.” The WhatsApp founders were in their mid to late thirties.

Let's say there is a probability distribution relating startup success with the age of the founders. You sample this distribution a very large number of times and find that for a very rare event, the founders are in mid to late thirties. Can you really draw any significant conclusions about the shape of this probability distribution from it?

>> “The center of gravity for consumer products has moved north from the Valley to San Francisco.” Well, that’s largely true, but WhatsApp remained headquartered deep in Silicon Valley.

I would assume that WhatsApp's location was not a criteria for the acquisition given that the locations considered here are relatively close by. Surely there would be correlations between a startup success and location within Silicon Valley based on talent pool available, startup atmosphere, etc., but again, the estimated probability distributions would not see a significant change from the new knowledge of this event.

>> “Mobile products should be delightful, beautiful.” ... apps should look nice, but at minimum, they should work to solve some problem ...

I wonder if the conclusion really needs this specific event to be seen as generally valid. It is quite obvious that the app should solve some problem, most probably even if it is a beauty product.

>> “Don’t worry about making money, just grow big.”

This one was an eye-opener for me given the scale of this acquisition, under the assumptions that this high a valuation was sensible and that this event is not actually astronomically rare.
Founders and VCs always ask themselves questions on how to monetize. Unless we are in an acquisition bubble, the relevance of this question partly comes under question.
I think the analogy to water or electricity billing is actually a very good one.

My electricity bill shows only X kWh per month. There is no "itemization" of usage. However I can purchase watt meters that can monitor power anywhere (including the main grid connection) if I decide the bill is too high.

I can definitely imagine a similar service sitting on the router or provided by the provider that does bandwidth accounting to deliver a picture of what is going on. I'm sure there would be many third party device manufacturers willing to do this traffic accounting as well.
Probably best not to trust the punks either.
I thought the title was misleading enough to warrant a comment. It makes it seem like the Helium-4 isotope is exotic. Losing Helium-4 to the atmosphere is an acceptable research cost. Losing Helium-3 is not.
In 2006 one of my teachers, Mr Etiemble, told us about a paper he's participated in to illustrate that no matter how good the security models can be at each level of abstraction, it only needs one piece of code that uses a vertical design to make the overall layers of security models worthless…

http://scholar.google.fr/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=...

N.B.: That article is really worth a read!

And then, as one could have expected at the time, TdR had a really strong reaction on the matter (can't find the e-mail for reference), saying that OpenBSD is anyway secure, except if you want to have "modern accelerated graphics" (or something less subjective, that's iirc)…

…and here we are eight years later, to finally have the OpenBSD guys show off they've done it. I don't know if that should bug me they needed 8 years to patch that bug that was not really one (as per Theo) or if I should be amazed by the work done to secure that incredible mess that is Xorg :-)

cheers and gg, guys!
I'm a bit confused by the article's blurring of design and prototyping boundaries. Is it reasonable (i.e. useful) to convolute wire framing with prototyping? I once worked as a prototyper for a design studio, and to them prototype meant an approximation of the product that could be used for critique and evaluation with users (so maybe a lofi paper prototype, deck-like click-thru prototype, or even a quick/dirty application).
Bigotry against whom? Do you mean racial, cultural, or something else?
So, You Want to Run a Young Coders Class?
No, the most cost efficient is likely to go out into the world and earn BTC (e.g. a job). It's just that it's a bit difficult to find people who have BTC to pay you with at the moment.
There's also Google's Blink, the Neo-WebKit.
This article claims that you can grep for the version number using otool and if it's not present the binary uses a different version of the library.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/23/apple_mac_os_x_10_9_...

Latest Dropbox (v2.6.5), Adium, and Skype are fine according to this test. Most of Apple's software appears vulnerable however.

I'm not at all sure if this test is definitie however.
I've had the same issue. It's pretty simple and you identified it. You're working too much. Cut back on hours and eventually your body will refresh and you'll feel energized again.
Honeywell: I remember it because I bought the 'programmable' one for 199. It was a pain to program, separate programs for cooling and heating, a pain to set right and it looked, well like a beige box on my wall.

When I moved and they had an ancient thermostat it was easy to pay $50 more than the above just so I could control it with a phone. Setting the program is much, much easier than the Honeywell.

I think they bought best for the team as much as the product and I hope nest does sprinkler systems next in their pursuit of solving first world problems.
Facefeed
It should say ifdefs, not typedefs. Inline ifdef directives everywhere is a real nightmare.

The very first commit in neovim includes this log:

- Process files through unifdef to remove tons of FEAT_* macros
That is how the Internet works. You used multiple networks' property just to reply to my HN post. I doubt you paid all those networks, and I doubt that you could realistically use the Internet if you had to pay every network that stood between you and the websites you like to visit. Why should Internet companies have to pay your ISP when you do not have to pay theirs? Nowhere in the design of the Internet is your connection differentiated from an Internet company's connection.

Really, the point of the Internet is that you can communicate with other Internet users without having to worry about what ISP or network they are connected to or what arrangements govern that connection.
> This proposal's purpose is to ... expose all traffic using the http:// scheme to your ISP, exactly as it is today.

Isn't that a semantic requirement of HTTP, though? Half of the "tech" in the HTTP/1.X spec is to allow for caching of resources and responses by proxies, allowing anyone between the client and server (e.g. your ISP) to act as a CDN.

HTTPS/1.X effectively throws that away by doing end-to-end encryption. It's a trade-off: we gain the surety that all the responses are coming directly from the peer, rather than anyone else... but the web becomes 90% less cacheable, because the only places things can end up cached are between the client and the HTTPS pipe (i.e. the browser cache), or between the HTTPS pipe and the server (i.e. "reverse proxies" like Nginx.)

The current workaround for this, when you need caching for your Big Traffic on either ingress or egress, is to do what amounts to purposeful self-MITMing of your HTTPS session: to terminate HTTPS on a caching proxy, that holds the certificate of your client/server, and acts as if it were you, while itself doing another HTTPS session for "the last mile" to connect to you. This is what companies do when they deploy their own CA-cert to their networks, so everyone's access can be proxied through their own system; and this is what services like Cloudflare do when they sit "in front of" your server while not being a part of your company's VPN at all.

Basically, HTTP2 codifies this workaround, and calls it HTTP.
This is awesome, thanks for the link! (And the visualizations help a ton, especially for the t-test... it's been a while since I took any stats courses and the terminology always puts me off a bit but the graphs make sense.)
Users in richer nations upgrading to newer generations of Android and iOS devices has resulted in a huge number of used devices ending up in developing nations. These devices are extremely inexpensive, yet still quite capable.

How are Firefox OS and these near-unusable devices supposed to compete with the imported used Android and iOS devices that are far more capable?

When somebody in a developing nation can get a 2 or 3 year old device for $25, and it runs Android or iOS, and it gives a pretty good experience, I just don't see why they'd subject themselves to the comparatively poor experience of a equivalently priced Firefox OS device that gives a worse experience.

And it wasn't Firefox that "dethroned Microsoft's browser monopoly". It was very clearly Chrome's doing, thanks to the 40%+ share of the market it now holds. Firefox played second fiddle, only ever capturing approximately 30% of the market at its peak. With Firefox likely accounting for less than 20% of all browser users today, it's even more apparent that Chrome is mostly responsible for IE's loss of popularity.
So you don't support things like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
Is it not clear that my approach is to 1. map out the idea (wireframing) and then 2. hack together a prototype?
Inside The Netflix/Comcast Deal and What The Media Is Getting Very Wrong
ah, yes. It even says it right there in the article. Thanks!
Who runs these sensors? What happens when the person who runs the sensors breaks their end of the bargain?
Well i guess you'd call this explanation for a not insignificant number of listeners the possible beginning of a 'cloud religiosity'.

http://youtu.be/ApQlMm39xr0
Question: If Comcast is such a monopoly that everyone here keeps repeating ad nauseam, why hasn't it been broken up ATT style yet?
For simple tests you can reverse the mathematics to get good estimates of how many observations are needed given a goal for your desired power and tolerance for false positives. Asking for greater power makes your test more sensitive ("buys a bigger telescope") at the cost of increased sample size. Asking for fewer false positives ("cleaning the lenses") costs similarly.

For more sophisticated tests, ones less likely to be seen in an A/B scenario, you might not be able to reverse the mathematics and get a direct answer, so often people will run simulation studies to guess at the needed sample size.