skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it okay to lie to sell your product?

No.

Even ignoring the issue of morality (which you shouldn't), what happens to your company when the lie is discovered?
Customer service actually works on twitter. It seems weird, but it's a thing. Aside from that, "brand" isn't just some faceless megacorp, there are lots of other brands, including creators of all sorts like musicians, web comics, craft beer makers, and so on.
>"Data science" is a bizarre job description to me.

It is starting to smell like a marketing term, where "Big Data" is used to get executives with purchasing authority to be interested in no-longer-new tech by putting a shiny wrapper on it, "Data Science" is doing something similar with job titles - perhaps in an effort to get those who know better to buy into the hype.
Come on man... really... it's right there. javascript streaming asynchronous. I'm not sure how many more buzzwords you need. those earlier losers who built make, gcc, and other tools just didn't know what they were doing. And with newer tech, everyone who's not streaming asynchronous javascript is a dinosaur luddite.
Make has more natural built-in dependency management.

To write your workflow purely in shell scripts, you will invariably use lots of tests.

Also note that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can write Makefiles that call shell scripts (and shell scripts that call make)
Now lets see you find kernel32.dll and do it on windows when you can't make syscalls however you want =].

Good write-up it was well written and very understandable.
"he's from Texas and has never lived in California"

Mike lives at least part-time in LA and attended UCSD.

https://twitter.com/MikeJudge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Judge
Your tacit assertion is that if something wrong is done for years, and you find out it's done one more time, you shouldn't bother complaining about it. People like you have existed for all time, and will always exist, but your views truly don't matter: change comes because people continue to fight for what is right, despite the balance of years. Slavery on US soil had been legal and "normal" for hundreds of years, but that didn't stop people from "complaining" about it, and eventually changing it. Women's suffrage, same story. Wanton violation of our 4th Amendment rights in the digital age will proceed accordingly.
And about the what. What exactly am I looking at? All I can tell is it has something to do with the physics of light. What assumptions are made? What models are used?
In one of my previous roles as a software engineer at a local, independent office supply company, this would have been a compelling idea. They ran a small fleet of leased delivery trucks, and employed drivers hourly, so as a company there is an incentive to reduce delivery costs, and the benefits. At $29 per vehicle per month, it seems like optimized routes would pay for itself relatively quickly. You'd need only to shave a few hours and miles off the routes per month to cover the cost, and then anything else is pure cost saving.

However, I think there are some caveats. Drivers were given all items at the beginning of the day with a set of destinations and a deadline. As long as everything was delivered by the end of the day, everyone was happy. Sometimes there were exceptions, and multiple trips needed to be made, or certain customers needed to be given priority at the discretion of the sales rep. Obviously, the drivers aren't interested in optimized routes, as that would cut their pay, and other factors would override the initial route decisions.

Best case scenario, the company is at a point where they are having to turn away customers, and they are able to increase their revenue by adding capacity through optimized routes.
Allow me to clarify. The difference between a failed-state dictator and a benevolent one isn't how much money they have in their banks at the end of it, but how much they grew their nation/state/company/organization/brand in the process. I think it's fine for a CEO to be compensated in the billions if he does it by making his company billions more. It's a question of the relationship the CEO has with wealth- does she help to create it, or is she just siphoning it into her pockets?

It's not always clear, but I think it's an important thing to consider. The size of a CEO's bank account alone is insufficient information for a meaningful answer.
And then what?

It's got to be connected to the core competencies of the company, otherwise it's just a conglomerate and FB has shown zero signs that this what they intend to do. All of the language of the acquisition is that they will be using this tech to reinforce what they already do.

I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology.

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we're in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.

And that's why people hate this acquisition, because OVR could have been so much more than just yet another vehicle for FB to push social. FB social could have been just one aspect of what OVR could have enabled, now it's the only thing.
Wil je snel vermageren? Dat kan alleen door minder te eten en meer te bewegen
Unfortunately the first thing I notice is the fancy animation at the top of the page stutters when loading, and causes my browser to use far more CPU than this type of page should.
There's the obvious difference that there's no platform lock-in with these, and therefore there's choice and competition. Telephony, Internet, are open technologies without locking you in as a customer for any company.

Think back when we lived in caves. We shared stories, we shared cave paintings, we shared music by singing together, we had fun together, we explored and shared our curiosity, we created new things together. Most technology today is still just tools to do these same fundamental things, but in novel ways. Facebook wants to be the middleman in this. They didn't invent 'social', they brought it into digital world, they want to own it, and they want to monetize it.
This website breaks mobile safari. The bar at the bottom does not appear when scrolling up.
>The problem is the expectations for other car manufacturers are much lower in terms of safety.

Do you have anything to base this on?

Do you really believe the safety expectations of the Model S are much higher than those placed on companies building millions upon millions of vehicles for everyday people, families, police, ambulances, delivery and public transportation vehicles and race cars?
That's fine, we'll just wait. Currently I just use a relative's account. But the day will come when cable companies are not able to afford these premiums, it is only a matter of time.
The flow is roughly this:

1) Client: "Hey, I want to upload a file."

2) Server: "Okay, here's a temporary key good for the next <n> minutes. The file has to be named <blah> and can't be more than <x> MB long" (there are other restrictions you can set, too, IIRC)

3) Client posts the form to S3 including the temporary key as a field.

4) Result.
800 lines of assembler code basically means just 800 assembler (CPU) instructions - for a complete FAT32 filesystem driver? I really hardly doubt that unless seen. :-)

Any way to opensource that or anything else to comment on your shockinly few 800 assembler instructions? ;-)
"However, to improve things further, we provided an over-the-air software update a few months ago to increase the default ground clearance of the Model S at highway speeds, substantially reducing the odds of a severe underbody impact."

That is just so cool.
Why I'm Boycotting Mozilla Products
Just got our peek for https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com

It was surprisingly good! No negative feedback, and only positive feedback, though the tester wasn't our target market.
Very interesting. I didn't know a GNU APL existed. Looks like it's a quite recent, from-scratch implementation mainly by one author, with its first release only a few months ago, in September 2013: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-09/msg00014....

The author, Jürgen Sauermann, doesn't seem to have a web-presence; would be curious what else he's up to, besides singlehandedly launching a new APL implementation. Is it a hobby project? Motivated by an existing APL codebase? Part of a research project? He must have quite some experience with APL, since he wrote a PhD thesis on a parallel APL system 25 years ago: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307
I can't wait for AR similar to the show Dennou Coil to become a real. It seems potentially feasible to be a real thing even if at the time the show was made it probably seemed impossible.
I am not saying this is the drivers fault as, based on how the facts are presented here, is clearly GMs.

But- Are the deaths due to the drivers not adapting quickly enough to the loss of power steering? After all breaks and steer are still working?

I have driven a vehicle without power steering and it wasn't that bad, and the vehicles in question (Cobalts) are rather light.
Ah good to know. I actually did the UC transfer thing, when I did it those guarantees for he UC system did not exist.
The point Dijkstra was trying to make is that humans are inherently incapable of dealing with that kind of detailed complexity, and still reliably make useful programs. That's why he proposed that goto should be excluded from all higher-level programming languages.

In my comment structured programming refers to using structured syntax to generate goto statements, so you don't have to see them or implement them yourself. It should free the programmer of considering those alternative ways of controlling program flow. Presence of goto statement points to a flaw in the language design.

To answer your question:
Because the basic language I'm referring to, was on my TI84-plus calculator, and it only had an if-statement (no if-else!).
yawn

Another "breakup letter"...fascinating...
The government prints a lot less forms and booklets than it used to. You may remember you or your parents going to the public library or post office or IRS office to pick up printed forms and instructions, or receiving them in the mail. Today, in most cases, even if (like me) you still do your taxes on paper, you download and print the forms yourself. So the cost of paper and printing has been largely shifted to the individual.
A New—and Reversible—Cause of Aging
> But to be honest, if somebody waived $2b in my face I'd take it and skip off to a comfortable retirement in Malta without giving two shits about the community that supported it in the beginning.

Would you? Really? It is my understanding the Oculus folks were working on that partly for fun, partly because they have a purpose (the purpose being "VR gaming would be soo cool!"). Their idea of a "comfortable retirement" may very well be to continue working on the Rift. I would also be surprised if they didn't care at all about the community.

Seriously, what would you do if you won $2b tomorrow? I know I wouldn't retire in Malta or such, because it would quickly bore me to death. I would need to do something, and I suspect, so do you.
It's actually better to disconnect the ECU entirely if you can. There is a large wiring harness that brings 40+ wires together into one or a couple of plugs which you can undo in a few seconds.

Plenty of ECUs have been ruined by folks getting their exhaust welded when the people doing the welding don't really know what they're doing. Especially if they normally work on older cars which tend not to have sensitive electronics.
Spot on. The problem is that it's very difficult to conceptualize a merger of the two companies' products that ISN'T really, really unpleasant. Most people are already tired of and/or annoyed with Facebook and having it strapped to your face and watching everything you do in a "virtual reality" is very offputting. Facebook is linked to publication and noise, and it creates an aura of intrusion. When you post on Facebook, you are performing for your hundreds of acquaintances and friends. People don't want to feel like they'll have to be doing that every time they use an Oculus product, let alone one so intimate that you literally strap it to your face. I know no one who sits back and thinks, "I need more Facebook in my life".

I don't know why they didn't see it coming, but almost anyone would've been less creepy than Facebook. People would have still have concerns, but I think they'd be more optimistic if it was Google or something.
Deal with them, yes. Worry, no.
I’m referring to the mathematically exact result L/M. Sorry for being unclear.
Oculus probably did not expect people to be so short-sighted. If you acquire new businesses, they dont have to align with your current field of operations. Thats actually the main point of diversification.
What matters here is the sheer scale of resources available for FB to push absolutely _anything_. And one would expect at least somewhat intelligent people to understand this, instead of mindlessly raging and throwing utterly stupid arguments around about why this is bad.
> a python library to simplify things

That's basically scons. Give it a try, I've been using it for years to manage a fairly complex, unusual build process with minimal effort (less than 200 lines of Python code).

http://www.scons.org/
I don't understand. Why is this game over?
how to you track directory and file changes with shell scripts?
Not sure what you're getting at. =\ If you have anything thoughtful to bring up, I'd love to hear it and we could have a constructive discussion.
All your examples are charging the user for facilitating interaction rather than monetizing on information gleaned from surveilling the interaction. That's a substantial difference.

I would say that the walled garden aspect also makes it pretty substantially different from those industries. I think we all agree that if there was only one restaurant chain or one movie theatre chain it would be a pretty awful experience in comparison to our current reality. It would make financial sense to degrade the experience quite a bit for a relatively small increase in profit per customer. In telephony this experiment was already run and the answer was, yes, it was substantially worse.

So yes, Facebook really is that different from your example industries.
Show HN: rgb – like Threes/2048 but with colors
>It's the first TLD ever bought by a non-profit initiative

Really? I can think of at least one other, .scot, and there are surely plenty more.
Myself, I'm hoping for .blag
I don't know what the original author is talking about to be honest. When I use Facebook, my feed is filled with friends & family posts and the very occasional ad.

To really put it into perspective, I just opened my Facebook now, first ad is in position 5 in my feed. The next ad popped in at the 52nd item in my feed. I went looking for a third ad.. I decided to stop after the 200th item in my feed and I generally don't scroll down that far in a single sitting.

Sure, there are ads on the side, but I'm more or less blind to those ads because they're always there.

That's not to say it was always like this. Candy Crush ads and whatnot used to pop up all the time from certain people. That's why you can hide those. They quickly disappear.

I guess it must just be cool to dump on Facebook now.
This page says no:

"Sans serif is better for children learning to read"

Books produced for children are often printed with sans serif text as teachers claim that the simplicity of the letter shapes makes them more recognisable ( Coghill, 1980) , Walker, 2001 ). But studies with child participants have found no difference in their ability to read either style of typeface. ( Coghill, 1980) ; Zachrisson, 1965 , Walker, 2001 )

http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...
This is a classic example of an armchair CEO at work - has no clue what he is talking about, has no proof, no arguments, but presents his ramblings as facts.
I'll post half of it publicly and email you the other half.

Their management is known throughout the industry to be unethical. Some recruiters refuse to work with them, and you'll hear some amazing stories if you hang around New York. They've existed for almost 6 years, pivoted constantly and recklessly, and delivered next to nothing. They're great at using the founder's family connections to raise money and get partnerships, but they treat engineers like commodities and have extreme architectural instability. There's also one high-profile case of the execs spending months trying to ruin the reputation of someone after he left.

Ultimately, their true mission is fire teachers. That's a really terrible mission, if you ask me. Obviously, the engineers and data scientists (Knewton's management is scum, but they have good people at lower levels) are being told a different story about "democratizing education", but their real mission is to make teachers obsolete while making a few ed-pub incumbents (like Pearson) very wealthy.

They're really damaging the reputation of the ed-tech space. It's a shame, because there are some really good companies trying to advance the field, and they're struggling to raise money due to the behavior (and declining reputation) of a large no-longer-startup that has nothing to do with them.
http://scanlime.org/2013/04/zen-photon-garden/
Meh. If I am "notable", then the bar is set pretty damn low.
Yes. With the exception of telephony, each of those industries also delivers material/entertainment/comfort value. Telephony is just voice communication and benefits from a network effect and natural monopoly. Facebook has a far more sophisticated model of communication but is most similar to telephony.

The difference between Facebook and telephony is striking. You pay for a telephone connection. Other people pay for your Facebook experience to be mediated to their wishes. Telephony is p2p and we typically frown on operator intervention and worry about excessive centralization. Facebook could be p2p but is centralized and has heavy operator intervention.

Offering communications services for free and then attempting to 'monetize' the interactions that you mediate is distasteful.
Show HN: Deviating Percolator
A first-principles implementation of arithemetic in Python
Loved the idea of sliding and matching tiles but wanted something without numbers. Dumb it down even more they said. So I made a quick iOS version where you need to combine matching colors which then shatter for points.

I tried actually having different colors combine but there was no limit on which tiles could match without confusing players as to why something like red and cyan couldn't mix.
Yes, of course it’s possible to exhibit errors if you change the problem (though it should be noted that the source of error here is entirely in the fact that l is not representable). As soon as you allow representation error, of course, your tolerance-based approach goes out the window; what if the representation error in l and m is larger than your tolerance accounts for?

If I wanted a correct bound for your revised problem, I would require that l be an upper bound on the true value (by forcing it to be rounded up earlier computations, for example) and that m be a lower bound on the true value. Then the simple computation delivers a correct result regardless of the magnitude of the error in l or m.
Right now you could buy some auroracoins on cryptsy, try to sell them elsewhere and they would not be accepted because cryptsy and the seller are on different forks.
2014 Guide To Developer Learning
Thanks for the link :).

Scons is awesome but for what I use Python for (minification of web assets, automatically running image optimisations) it's taking a sledgehammer to a walnut.
Why is that unfortunate if you know it has nothing to do with what they're building?
A power steering rack & pinion is rather different than a manual rack & pinion. In my experience when a car loses power steering it's a real pain. Especially if you're used to power steering. Having it drop out could feel like the steering wheel has locked up.
Make is a very under-appreciated tool. I think it gets a bad rap because many people's only exposure to it is in large projects (where Make has some issues) or when coupled with autotools (which is rather ugly).

If that has been your only exposure to Make, you should take another look at it, and consider using it for your next small- or medium-sized project.
"I know I have tested this shellcode against a vulnerable machine..."

In your article you say arguments to syscalls via interrupt 0x80 are passed in registers.
That sounds like Linux and Microsoft.

Have you tested this against a vulnerable machine that passes arguments on the stack?

I think I read somewhere that this is how UNIX handles arguments.
I was thinking about the nature of numbers after reading this[1]. It occured to me that you could implement them in software. I couldn't get the idea out of my head so to calm myself down I just decided to get it done.

It lacks elegance in certain places (it uses loops, there is definitely a nicer way out there of defining zero-ness, and the Number.one etc variables are a bit ugly), so feel free to fork it and beautify it (or add features).

[1] http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guide...
If you bookmark https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr for your starter page, the News Feed will go into "Recent Stories" mode, featuring everybody in reverse chronological order, equivalent of Twitter's feed.
Because presentation of the idea matters.
I 100% support eat24 in their decision. Facebook is ridiculous now. I requested my "facebook archive" 2 days ago and still have not received my email confirmation with the download link. As soon as I do, I'm deleting my facebook profile as well. Goodbye Facebook. I hoped you would learn from mistakes, but I see you haven't.
you're pointing out 'fragmentation' in the windows market because of all the varying hardware, and it seemed you were saying it was equivalent to the android world. it's not, because you generally could change hardware on a windows system, but not on an android device.
I read a bit through the forum discussion and the part I find fascinating is that new cryptocurrencies, with low hash rates, are seen as targets ... and that there are high-hash-capability persons and organizations that will attempt to "break the bank" so to speak ...

Which leads me to conclude that any new cryptocurrency would need to be launched by an organization that had the computing power to defend the currency (assuming it follows resource-intensive mining paradigms like bitcoin et. al)

Can anyone comment on this interpretation ?
Ah cool I see that now, thanks :) It would have been the kind of bug that only bothers you once in a while, that's why I pointed it out.
That's generally the case, yes. As one example technologists seem to like: California invalidates noncompete clauses at the level of state law, not through requiring every engineer to individually attempt to negotiate the noncompete clause out of their contract.
I pointed part of this out:

> it provides reasonable conservative bounds

It is the technique of backwards-error analysis that is naive, not the resulting bound. A “naive” method is not “simple” or “dumb” (or “aggressive” or whatever you think the opposite of “conservative” might be). It is simply a method that doesn’t use some a priori knowledge that’s available for the specific problem at hand. Backwards-error analysis is a naive technique in that it doesn’t benefit from specialized theorems of floating-point that allow one to establish tighter bounds, like the one I proved.
Highly dependent on # of friends and # of other pages those recipients follow. A brand new user account following just the university page is 100% guaranteed to receive a posting from the university page, that probability goes down as number of friends or pages increases.