skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't dig too deep on their website, but it appears that the only place they actually allude to what it is they're making is at the very bottom of the Team page.

Why is there not even a brief description on the landing page or an About page!?
I basically did whistle my way out the door because of this.

I worked as a contractor for a very large defense company. After a year, they offered me full time employment. I specifically asked if there was a "we own everything you make" clause in the employment agreement, but I was assured there was not. I went through about five digital form contracts, and when I got to the last one, it had the clause in there. I told the woman that I wanted to amend the contract and she huffed and told me they don't do that. I replied that I was promised that I would not have to agree to such a clause, and she told me that it was mandatory, so I could take it or leave it. I asked if there was anyone in HR I could talk to about this, and was told no. So I stood up and said "please escort me out the door, starting immediately I am resigning. At the gate, I would like the security guard to search my things." (it was a secured facility, and I didn't want anyone to claim I was stealing anything later.) She asked me if I was serious, and I said yes. I was berated for how much time and money was wasted on getting me ready for employment, and I replied I was promised repeatedly that I would not have to sign away my rights, and this was absolutely a deal breaker and I didn't appreciate being told repeatedly this would be honored until the very last minute. So really, my time was being wasted too. This really, really didn't go over well. My heart was beating like crazy the entire time. My former boss was furious, the HR person was furious. The security guard was cool about it though.
> Basically, governments are rational actors.

Citation needed. :)

There are two schemes that assure irrational governmental behavior -- dictatorship, and democracy. For different reasons, of course.

> Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil.

There's plenty of historical support for those views -- you know, evidence?
I'd like to add my own feedback. I believe volume control is an essential feature of a music player, even more so than play and pause. You'll find that many users of web apps riot without one. For example, on some flash game portals, games without volume controls get spammed with 1-star ratings. To many people, volume is more important than any other function.
Yeah, we need multiuser excel

Welcome to seven versions and seventeen years ago: http://www.techonthenet.com/excel/questions/shared.php
Worth pointing out that there is a pretty big drop in spec from an iPhone 5 to an iPod 5, the SoC is two full generations behind.
It's unfair to just say "Hey look. Youtube and Vimeo with billions of dollars and decades of experience between them decided to put a volume control. You should too." But personally, there should be a volume control. It is very common for multiple streams of sounds to occur in today's computing environment. I could have a Youtube video going for the visual component and some other music. Or, maybe I want to leave the speakers on at the maximum volume for notifications but not have this music completely blasting as a consequence. (This is not a far-out edge use case).

I love the minimal look and the thought that went into the design. I will definite check it out further. It will be interesting how you fit the volume control into the component which at the moment looks really well balanced and laid out. (ie. How you might improve the already-excellent UI by adding something to it)
From my limited experience of Unreal Script it was a pretty rough implementation of a language, it really didn't seem to provide any real benefits.

What I would have liked to see was better support for interactive development. When I was playing with it I still had the edit/save/compile/run loop to see my changes, that's not what I want. I use Common Lisp extensively and appreciate the power of a REPL, it's available in many languages now. This brings me to the next point of providing powerful reflection support so that I can easily explore the state of the application, as well as better debugging tools.

UnrealScript was just not a very good language implementation in my opinion.

So in my opinion removing it and exposing the C++ is a good thing. But not for the same reasons that most are touting, I don't want to code in C++. But now it should be a lot easier to build a reasonable Lisp on top of Unreal Engine 4, which is what I really want.
Get yourself to a shrink, seriously. Call it ADHD or whatever but it sounds like you have the drive, just a problem with focus.
I hear you. Look for volume control coming to the player in the next day or so.
Many of the naïve proponents highly praise the qualities of Bitcoin which are essentially money laundering.

Turns out transferring large sums of money anonymously isn't legal in most places in the world.
The important part of what I guess you could call algebraically structured combinators is that they must follow certain laws. A type system can certainly help enforce at least a subset of those laws, but you're right that you don't have to have one in order to make use of the structures.

Where you lose me is in saying both that a basic understanding of abstract algebra is helpful and that monoids are part of the "smoke and mirrors"; I'd consider monoids a part of a basic understanding of abstract algebra.
Yes, wondered why I didn't get that cool wave form. Oh well!
I don't know anything about the charges, but I have read from sellers that PGP turned out to be an insurmountable hurdle for Silk Road buyers, and so many, many people did not use it.
Thanks for the feedback! Appreciate you taking the time to give me the details, it'll definitely help me pass the info on to the right folks so we can make the Office Online apps better.

Rendering related feedback:
I definitely hear you on these things and they're all on our radar (typing and active cell lagging switching and editing quirks in PowerPoint)

Features:
Commenting feedback - will pass that on
ToC - do you use headings/styles or outline view in the desktop version to create this? Is the navigation pane in Word what you're looking to see or the actual ToC?

Excel-Word linking - were you updating a few charts that automatically updated in Word or tabular information?

Re:signed in not getting names: sounds like this may be a bug, will have to check with the team

page layout - you can now update the margins in the editor without switching to view, but I definitely can see it's not an ideal situation to switch between the two

re:appearing as guest when commenting - this may happen if you have certain privacy/strip info settings on the document itself (we respect the setting the document gives us, and I forget the exact setting)

Other follow ups - was this a group project for school/uni?
Haha coming back later to see the responses to my comment is funny. It's a timestamp on internal documents not many people see, it's fine.
Google updates TOS to clarify email scanning process
0.25 = 0.25

1 - 3 + 2.25 = 4 - 6 + 2.25

1^2 + 2(1)(1.5) + (1.5)^2 = (2)^2 - 2(2)(1.5) + (1.5)^2

Since a^2 - 2ab + b^2 = (a - b)^2

(1-1.5)^2 = (2-1.5)^2

1 = 2

QED.
walking the walk. Literally.
Ouch. We didn't have a Linux machine around to test that case but we will definitely look into it. Right now Chrome is the best supported for our player.
Of course it's possible to write correct C++ code, just like it's possible to write correct assembly code. The point is the extra care required: every piece of code needs to be very carefully authored to ensure it's correct, to avoid the myriad pitfalls.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555435.
>and "VP8" is a standard not an implementation (libvpx is an implementation).

It's apparently called "libvpx" internally, but the project page refers to it as "the VP8 video codec, a high quality, royalty free, open source codec". http://www.webmproject.org/docs/vp8-sdk/index.html

>So the original comment was not clear, but in the context of Mozilla pushing VP8 as video standard for the web it would be very strange if the original poster had meant implementations rather than standards.

No one on this thread besides you has said anything about standards. The original comment included "proprietary codecs vs vp8" on a list of positive things Mozilla has done, which also included other implementation-specific things like "javascript performance".

>Unless Mozilla are advocating that everybody use a specific implementation of VP8, but that would be hugely hypocritical and inconsistent after their war against WebDB/SQLite.

Mozilla is, in their own browser, using a codec (read as: implementation) which isn't proprietary. This has two positive effects: it keeps Firefox from becoming proprietary; and it also helps push other browsers to implement the same video format (either using the same codec or not), which helps increase the format's marketshare, meaning that more videos on the Web can be viewed using a non-proprietary codec (implementation).

>In a world of submarine patents and patent trolls your definition of proprietary is meaningless because any software could become proprietary at any time when a previously unknown or unenforced patent starts being enforced.

It's not meaningless, it's just somewhat fuzzy. I think you're committing the continuum fallacy here. A piece of software which I can only use if I pay the patent owner a million dollars is clearly proprietary. A piece of software which is more than 20 years old is clearly not proprietary (unless it's proprietary for copyright reasons), since any patents would have expired. In between are some gray areas, but that doesn't invalidate the overall concept. As a practical matter, it's useful to only consider software proprietary on patent grounds if there is a specific patent holder who has asserted a specific patent against it.

>Additionally, it's a definition that is very location specific - many of these software patents are not valid or recognised in most of the world. I don't have much interest in the US legal system being forced upon me by people obsessed with US patent law when I'm not a US citizen or resident.

So, you think it doesn't matter if people in the US can't see videos on the Web without paying for a patent license as long as it doesn't affect you directly?

>Nokia have actively brought cases against HTC over some of those patents.

Wikipedia mentions that a German court ruled against Nokia.
Toyota has recognised that if you only have robots then innovation stops, because you forget the skills that the robots are replacing.

Experience in manipulating materials, and doing it manually, is a valuable thing. Toyota isn't going to start replacing robots with humans, but the humans need an in depth understanding of what the robots are doing, so they can then improve what the robots are doing. The best way to learn what the robots are doing is to do it: get in there and watch how the metal flows, how it reacts to heat and so on.

This has the potential to be an engineer's utopia. Presumably the valuable thing isn't what the "gods" make (the robots make the stuff that sells for money), but what they learn during the making process. Thus the "gods" are free to work on things that won't immediately sell. Imagine a job where the brief was "make whatever you like, just be sure to learn a lot while you do it". It sounds like Toyota is rediscovering the golden era of the Industrial Lab (Bell, IBM, ... ).
I've been out of the SF "scene" for a little bit so this is the first time I've ever heard of Clinkle.

I'm still not quite sure they do. Have they made any waves before the layoffs started?
This is a common behavior among many libertarians/ancaps (although still a minority). They tend to believe that they can live outside the law. And it's sad, because they usually don't harm anybody with their little misdemeanors. It usually looks more like a child reveling against their parent's arbitrary laws, than a crime for which they should go to jail or even prison.

Adam Kokesh would be a very good example. [1] [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kokesh
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/activist-adam-kokesh-rep...
I still don't personally understand the value of any of those sites/services, although I recognize that apparently a lot of other people do.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll bring this up to my teammates that work on that part of the product.

In general, if you're trying us out and see something you don't like or doesn't work, the bottom right corner should have a button that lets you give us feedback (and yes, we are looking at it, even though there may not be a response).
I have many sources of audio, and their volumes vary dramatically. Unless I want to adjust the global volume every time I switch audio sources, adjusting each source once and having it stay correct makes more sense.

Think of turning up your system or browser volume for a quiet song, and then viewing a loud flash video. You might hurt your ears or disturb someone. Adjusting only your music player for songs without ruining your volume setting for some other source gives you a finer control.
Shopping and Open Wifi
OnTheLime
There's some good answers to those questions here: http://www.withouthotair.com/

I'm optimistic about renewables. Photovoltaic solar is already cheaper than retail power and competitive with wholesale in many markets. The issue now is grid storage. Battery tech is currently improving at around 7% a year, so I think we'll see electric cars go mainstream in the next 5 years and decreasing reliance on centralized power generation shortly afterwards.
I think the broader point being made is that practically anyone could come along and write code that then gets widely deployed. They just have to pick the right project, build up a bit of trust, and then submit a subtle but intentional bug. It's scary how easy it might be. It's not very clear how to defend against this.
You also have to emulate an analog signal. With a digital display pixels can go from on to off just like that, however, I doubt that an analog signal really does go from on to off in a perfect 'square wave'. Even then those coils in the electron gun have things like hysteresis to contend with.

As for that blurring, on green screen monitors there were no rgb arrangements in the phosphor, it was continual. The blurring was for persistence in a time when refresh rates were orders of magnitude below 100Hz.

There was also the small matter of interlacing. Kids today have no idea what that is but it was standard for low refresh rate applications such as a VT terminal.

All considered a drop in font is not really up to the job, even if really well designed.
Heartbleed and the Internet of Things
I don't think version 24 and earlier supports Web Audio API, according to what I found with a little digging so it's not your code.
And the philosophy of Rust is, what if we encoded that "care" into the language itself? That, to me, is a clear win. It is, to me, good systems language design: codifying decades of hard earned "best practices" into the language semantics itself.
A friend of a friend of mine's experience answers your number 1 question:

He wasn't very good at aiming, apparently. When he shot the bullet into his head, probably in a drunken stupor, he missed his brain and lived... probably still wanting to shoot himself and succeed, but being physically unable to do so at this point he just lay there until someone found him.

By the time he recovered in hospital from the wound, he wanted to live! Albeit with a very disfigured face, which I thought would be a hinderence to an already depressed individual, but he sees it differently and we're all glad for it!
Son, this is factual pseudo-science.
What might appear to be irrational behavior to you is just due to people making decisions based on different information, differing priorities and a different decision making process informed by different life experience. If someone's decisions appear irrational to you, you just don't possess enough data about the information they have access to, their priorities and the world model in their head.
Perhaps china is tougher on their Women than their men?

>It has been found that suicide makes up for about 30% of deaths of women living in rural China.

Wow... that must be pretty bad for them living out there. Can you imagine living in a place where there was a 1 in 3 chance you'd off yourself before dying naturally? Wow... just wow.
We do have flash fallback but no one's got time for that :)
Yes. But for example, the amount of nuclear fuel that is extractable is enough to power us for >>1000 years, even if it would be used replace all other forms of energy. Such as using nuclear to make artificial gasoline.

I think that would be enough time to figure out fusion. Or put wind and solar everywhere.

But we seem to be stuck, paralysed in our fight to solve everything with impossible requirements.

Fight AGW, NO nuclear, and keep the standard of living (or even increase it). All at the same time.

Personally, I would rather relax the second requirement.
Maybe most C++ applications are low-value as attack targets, so no-one has bothered to find all the corner cases that make them blow up.

The fact that applications like browsers and operating systems (which are known to be high value targets) have a lot of effort & resources put into security but still have attack vectors makes the "C++ is secure" position fairly indefensible.
Maybe your boss is paid to have some clues about how you spend your time at work?

Concerning the property of the tooling: if I bring my personal stapler to work, it's enough to taint everything I staple as my own property? how do we decide the property of the company paper I stapled with my staples? You can say it's reputed being the company property because you're on work time in company premises, but the whole principle of reputation is that you can bring a proof against (the stapled paper is your house insurance contract for example).
Shrem himself didn't use Silk Road; he bypassed his own company's AML process to help a known SR user exchange BTC.

Here's the criminal complaint: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2014/01/Faiell... There may be more detail in the indictment but I haven't seen it.
I put the info on the depreciation worksheet. I used a range of 11.5-13% per annum based on observed values for the Roadster, and to be conservative, used 13%.
What are some problems where Deep Learning shines? Does it outperform other algorithms on those problems? Is there an understanding of why?

Context: I have some background in statistical sorts of machine learning algorithms and am genuinely puzzled by this "deep learning" phenomenon and why it's catching on.
Here's an idea that I've been toying with for several months now.

Many modern laptops have an mSATA port in addition to a regular 2.5" SATA hard drive. If you install a tiny SSD in the mSATA port and move your OS to the SSD, you can enjoy the speed of SSD without giving up the capacity of the hard drive.

But what if you installed a large (480GB or 960GB) SSD in the mSATA port and used it for all of your storage needs? Then the regular hard drive becomes completely redundant. But TSA agents are not known for their tech savvy, so most of them will not realize that you're not even using the regular hard drive.

So put a decoy OS on the regular hard drive, with no encryption whatsoever. All the encrypted stuff goes on the mSATA SSD instead. Prior to the trip, configure your BIOS to boot from the regular hard drive, and dislocate the mSATA SSD just a couple of millimeters in its slot so that it's not even recognized. When the agent boots the laptop, all he's going to see is a clean OS that takes up the entire hard drive, and even if he takes a disk image, there will be nothing suspicious on it.

Now you only need to make up some story along the lines of your computer crashed last week and you had Geeksquad reformat it but you didn't have time to copy all your family photos back from the external drive at home.

Well, now that I've spilled the beans on HN, they'll probably try to pull my mSATA SSD the next time I try to enter the US. Shit.
my favorite of his stories, and that's saying a lot
Strong work. Not everyone has the will, nor the financial wherewithal, to do such a thing.
Trying to manipulate structured data as text makes about as much sense as parsing XML with a regex.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
> it won't help us colonize the space, it won't help us reach Singularity sooner, it won't help extend lifespan and do other meaningful things

Would you have said the same about Paypal? Because if you did, you'd have been wrong. Plus, among the set of technologies/companies that are discussed on HN, not that many are directly related to the goals you mentioned.

Perhaps Bitcoin is wasteful due to its Proof-of-Work system but you have to consider how wasteful the alternative is. How much human capital is wasted in operating the deposit banking and payments industry? How much land and resources are wasted to physically secure cash in bank vaults and move it around? How much efficiency is lost to high transaction fees or lack of access to the banking system? How many services which haven't yet been invented would be enabled by a distributed ledger? I'm not saying Bitcoin would wipe out those industries completely but it could certainly make parts of them obsolete.

I think it's wrong to dismiss the technology just because you dislike its community. The web was once a wild west as well.
Your proposal is essentially what my friend, Travis, did on the 2nd tab of the worksheet, which is a cash flow model.
Does anyone know what this company actually does?
I wish this comment were further towards the top. Our system is clearly set up to pump the rewards for innovation into the pockets of founders, executives, and investors, but not so much inventors and builders. I don't think it naturally has to be that way.

What if people got nontrivial amounts of stock for their inventions, instead of the couple grand or pat on the back most companies dole out? Would that help reinvigorate the hard tech industry, which is losing people [1] to creating the next Instagram-meets-Yelp-but-for-kittens?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-y...
I find nothing as pleasurable in this world as seeing people in the wrong get upset that they are in the wrong.

Thanks for the entertaining story! And sorry to hear of your mental anguish.
Good. Another look at any code after a long period often yields various degrees of improvements due to a different perspective at the later date.
Using FTP Sites to Download Drivers and Software Faster
Manual work is being brought back so as to help develop experts.
At Microsoft we don't have these contracts. You are free to work on whatever after hours (with your own equipment and not using company resources).
The last time I saw a company leverage marketing in this way was when Silent Circle shut down their 4 month old email product in a well-publicized 'stand of solidarity' with lavabit. People didn't really care as much about that one.
Although I have issues with anyone that would buy Nazi memorabilia (I am not Jewish, but I am human), I agree that his intent probably isn't to take this small sword he bought and go on a stabbing spree. That won't matter though; the moment a pre-trial services officer sees this thing in his house during routine searches that are usually a condition of federal bail, his bail will be revoked at a minimum, and he may face new charges.

He's going out of his way to thumb his nose at the Court; they tend to frown on that.