skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love it when people write good docstrings for their functions. I always write them first and then finish the code. It makes it so much clearer what you are intending to do and helps cut down unnecessary comments.
As a German, I must disagree. It might seem that the situation with the German intelligence services is as bad as, for instance in France, but on closer observation, this is not true. There are multiple reasons:

1. Our intelligence agencies are not quite as accepted as those in France/UK/US. The general public has an unfavorable view, mostly due to history, but also due to more recent scandals. Mainstream newspapers are not afraid to create bad publicity for those services, unlike in most other countries.

2. There is currently a parliamentary investigation into the NSA scandal. Our government, which is complicit _and_ ideologically accepting of NSA spying is doing its best to drag its feet, but it still moves ahead. So far, it already has started raking up dirt on our own intelligence agencies.

3. Thirty years ago, Germany had two foreign intelligence services. One world-class service that had few rivals, ruthless and efficient, and one mediocre service, staffed by former Nazis. The mediocre service was the one of West Germany and is thus the one still in operation today. There are people in Germany today (some even in the parliament) that advocate the abolishment of our intelligence services on the grounds that they are an ineffective waste of money. I doubt that they will be completely abolished, even if the scandals here in Germany pile up higher, but it is not unlikely that they may have to face radical reform quite soon.

You are right that many people over here, especially within the startup scene, delude themselves about what our own services are doing. However, the average German techie has a relatively high chance of being educated on the true extent of the spying, because the CCC is reaching out in all directions to educate people, and is rather successful at that.

Because let's be honest. Most of us don't take the time to gather and mentally put in order all of the spy-scandal bits that have been published so far. We need some pre-digestion of the data and the CCC is doing that for us Germans. By now, even the German parliament is often inviting people from the CCC to explain the implications of cryptography and other technologies in parliamentary comittees.

EDIT: After re-reading my comment, I must say that it sounds a bit too much like "Hurrah for Germany". Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.
The parallel construction discussion is also very complicated. I should be clear: you're right, the comment made upthread about how noncitizens are insulated from the impact of US surveillance was not valid.
Google Compute Engine gets SSDs
https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data
https://data.lacity.org/data
http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset
I find this logic bizarre: "The US should also learn a lesson here. Because of the current, non-sensical immigration laws, Americans lost sixteen jobs."

I don't see the connection. You wanted to hire someone on a visa - not a US citizen. You couldn't, so instead of looking for one person within the country (possibly somewhere cheaper than where your business is), you decided to hire him and 15 other non-citizens.

I don't think that has anything to do with immigration law being messed up. That has to do with you making a decision to hire 16 people in another country.

That's not a bad thing, but it's just not what you're claiming it is.
Judging from your other comments, you can be fascinating and insightful, and I have much to learn from you especially in the field of programming. And yet your comment history is peppered with comments in a similar tone and attitude.

Judging from your timing, you've been waiting until I actually get a negative score to voice this opinion. News: I generally get lots of upvotes. It's generally beneficial to ask why in the context of each comment.

Resist complaining about being downmodded.

Amazing how differently the prediction of downmodding is received depending on the popularity of the position below it.

I started on HN in the days when people were actually discouraged from downmodding people they disagreed with. I also remember when pointing out when people were wrong or when something didn't seem to make sense was simply pointing something out, not "arrogance." Aside from my (entirely accurate) prediction of karma loss, please give specific excerpts and explain your perceptions of "tone" in this thread. I maintain that you are emotionally swayed by your dislike of my position.
No, he's upset that Snowden revealed that the government is doing things that affect his investments. His comments make it sound like the government is neutral or somehow the victim in this.
Yes. You get liquidity, meaning more investment is available for some companies - people who would have not invested now will invest. The spread is lower, benefiting buyers and sellers. Work is automated meaning market makers do not have to stand around on the NYSE or CBOE all day - people can sit in their offices, thinking up algorithms, backtesting them etc. (of course the quants doing this are not the same people who had been doing it usually).

The old time finance guys have no idea what a back-propagating multilayer neural network is and how it's eating their lunch, and there is resentment and suspicions of foul play. I am more suspicious about the suspicion. You can pitch a tent and set up a hedge fund like Renassiance or DE Shaw without the blessing of an investment bank, and perhaps the banks resent this, despite the fact that they're doing HFT as well.
You wanted to hire someone on a visa - not a US citizen.

US citizen or not, they'll be paying US tax. As it is, the country has lost out on potential tax income from those employees.
Very odd, If you look into their twitter they promote other products called tesla.IM and peopledock on a site called http://yourstory.com.
Which takes you to SVYFT.com (couple name changes?)
They never mention their name changes in these "news" articles. I guess they are trying to get as many links to their site as possible.

Either way, I like the idea but I think they would have a better chance in this market if it was open sourced or allowed companies to install it on local networks.
Let developers make their own chatlets that they can sell and promote the product at the same time.

Almost reminds me of google wave.
There are a lot of novelties in the Snowden leak for people, like me, who are interested but try to stay on the sane side of paranoid.

First and foremost, it's evidence with details. Echelon was more or less an open secret for a while, but even then there wasn't much information available about how it was being used -- just that communications were being collected and searched. It's the difference between, "There are data centers monitoring internet traffic," and, "here's a slide on an NSA presentation for software that will give you any person's entire browser history."

Second, there's the extent to which communications systems were being compromised. Taps on undersea cables and major backbones? Sure. Direct access to data at Google and Facebook and elsewhere? That was surprising.

Third, there was the scope. The assumption was always that it was impractical for the NSA or other agencies to store a lot of data about every person. But, now we know they don't store it -- they just exploit other databases.

There are the methodologies: I might assume that "they" are infiltrating the communications systems of certain foreign states, but to find out that they were doing it in part by hijacking Cisco equipment in transit and chipping them was surprising, mostly because it seems like such a stupid tactic in the event that word ever gets out.

And, there's the not very small matter of the targets involved. Spying for the sake of the War on Terror and against enemy states and all that is one of those things you grudgingly accept as part of the real world. But spying on our allies? What are they trying to accomplish there? What are they trying to gain that's worth the risk of being found out and pissing off your friends?

So, for me, the Snowden leaks moved the NSA from, "spooky, secretive, well-funded spy organization filling a necessary role," to, "totally out-of-control freaks that lost the plot years ago and seem to have set their hooks into the topmost levels of government."
> Now, there are some rockstar CEOs — who oftentimes happen to be founders, such as Bezos, Steve Jobs, Reid Hastings — who have the ability to resist the pressure that the markets put on them.

Another possibility the author should consider: there are some CEOs who have the ability to convince human investors that their long-term visions are worthy and deserving of steadfast support.

What the author fails to address is the fact that not every chief executive has a great long-term vision, and not every chief executive is capable of persuading investors that he or she is capable of realizing such a vision. The implied notion that investors are somehow obligated to give the companies they invest in an arbitrarily long period of time in which to execute regardless of evidence of tangible progress is foolish.
I've been waiting for this for a long time. The Xbox One controller has many small improvements that build up to a noticeable difference over the Xbox 360 controller I've been using to play games like Watch Dogs on the PC. It's vastly more comfortable for extended sessions.
When you say "CCC", you mean Chaos, right?

If you want to assert that among all the major western governments, Germany is among the best when it comes to data privacy, and is leagues better than the US, I'll agree.

Where we run into friction is when we try to extend that into saying that the German government is categorically less culpable for SIGINT than the USG. I do not believe that; in particular, I think "jurisdictional arbitrage" (if I might coin a term) profoundly implicates all the governments of Europe (and Russia as well).

It's hard to argue that a country isn't culpable for some other country's SIGINT when they are themselves a customer of that SIGINT.
Fixing the PhD
Nah, it's also on Chromium on Arch. It looks like (via the requests panel) it's not loading news.css for some reason, even though it's in the source.
He didn't make a decision to hire 16 people in another country. He made a decision to partner with ONE guy that couldn't get permission to work in this country. Had he been granted his H1-B, then the 15 additional hires would have most likely been local. And then any future growth would have included local resources.

The decision was for the first strategic hire. All of the remaining hires were just an offshoot from that initial decision as to where to locate the new team.
I don't see how Apple could have gone for a Messages/FaceTime only solution. Even the most fervent Apple fan will have quite a few friends, relatives, or at least contacts who do not have an iPhone or a Mac.

So, they have to support phone calls and SMS, whether they want to or not.
Is the idea of "mainstream" really that vague to people? Rust is the opposite of what I meant by that.
More startups are in SV because of the larger amount of investment capital that is interested in software and the large amount of people to hire with very specific skill sets that you may be looking for. It's like thinking you need food first before you need oxygen, when it's the other way around.
Ashe and Shanley do more for the open source community in an average week than I suspect you've ever done in a year.
Because you said:

"Am I missing something, or did they just break backwards compatibility again?"

And... no, they didn't, the Xbox One controller (per the linked article) is backwards compatible with PC games who use the 360 controller. So you ARE missing something, something you could have discovered easily by reading the article you're commenting on.

So... you were clear, you were just wrong.
Yep, I think Dreamhost just lost me as a customer.
Aquifers laid over EPA Toxic Release Data
There's some good discussion of it on the netsec subreddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/27dhcn/openssl_secur...
The odd-eighth spread pricing scandal was also something that was hidden from public view for decades, and it had a far more profound impact on the fairness of the markets!
This comment isn't even wrong.
I took a coursera class on ChucK music programming language. I recommend to designers and musicians to have a look at it as well.
Reminds me of this (seen in /usr/bin/fortune):

Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long
walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They
then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy
health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old,
not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find
only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the
others who have tried it.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Why computer architecture matters: series of articles on tight loop optimization
An unforced error on Techweek's part, and reasonable to call them out on it.

The tenor and severity with which they are being called out is a bit out of whack. It's mostly out of proportion with an unintentional mistake, which probably results from emotional factors and political haymaking. It's also a mistake because of a poorly and too-generally written policy, which I am also calling out. Please re-read. That poorly and too-generally written policy is in fact my main point.
Super excited about this! Can't wait to use it on our prod servers once its available for ruby!
Very nice! Congrats to Brian and the Rollbar team for releasing a super-useful feature.
I would be careful before you throw the "incompetence" word around. Remember this library was written by some of the best cryptographers around, and has been the standard for a very long time -- because, generally, it does it's job very well.

If you actually look into these "ridiculous engineering decisions" you will find very good reasons why they did things the way they did.

With that said, of course it may be able to be done better. All code can be done better. Remember the OpenSSL team was severely underfunded, and severely understaffed. So it's not fair to label them as "incompetent" one bit.

It's very easy to be an armchair quarterback.
Glad to see the dynamic language folks reinventing core dumps ;)
So the problem with traditional buy and hold investing based on fundamentals is that it's very slow. I don't mean slow in terms of latency and distance to servers, I mean that financial returns accumulate slowly. Investing in the market as a whole will return roughly 10%-15% depending on the year. This beats what most individual day traders and money managers can do, but is nothing close to what a well positioned HFT trading firm can make.

"Sophisticated" trading strategies exist because the finance industry has focused itself on one goal to the exclusion of all others: Make as much money as possible. It doesn't matter if it's a zero sum game or if the most fit companies are being selected based on research in a darwinian process. A rational actor is going to chose 30% over 10% every time.

The bottom line is that predicting the success of a given company is hard. Predicting what the other actors in the market are going to do is also difficult, but is much easier by comparison. Asa participant in the market you want to be in Keynes' newspaper contest, not in the business of making broad predictions about the future. As a member of society we'd prefer that capital be allocated to the firms that will use it to our most benefit. I don't think anyone wants to use the law to change the current system so that it is more useful to society. A lot of people are also unhappy with a lot of finance being in its own bubble of "irrelevance". This is a decision that we're all going to have to make about how we want the financial markets to work. Things seem to be working out ok now, in a general sense, so change might be a long time coming.
I don't think this can be construed as mismatched user/provider expectations, or users "not understanding" the EULA.

Insidious.
Distribution of Scores in Poland's HS Exit Exam
Not only that, the US lost their contribution to the local economy: they won't buy groceries, pay landlords or buy from the local car dealership. There is a huge missed opportunity there.

I just don't get why the US wouldn't want qualified workers to get in the US. Singapore had this lesson learned well.

Disclaimer: I'm on H1B myself.
I agree . I am far from an expert but I did not understand the connection between HFT and companies making bad long term decisions for short term. He said himeself that HFT firms don't care about the actual companies anyway.
11-Year-Old Makes An Unbreakable, Spill-Proof Cup For Her Ailing Grandfather
This is neat, but it sure could use heck of a lot better index page.

Here's an example of the output: http://www.patrickmeenan.com/progressive/view.php?img=http%3...
From your citation:

It is markedly different from most mainstream cars due to its fibreglass bodyshell and compact three-wheeled platform which allow it a special taxation and licensing class under British regulations.

Also, the Morgan I linked to is British and is very capable--far more so--as a piece of engineering.

My guess is that three-wheel regulations were originally set up for motor-cycles with side-car. These evolved a seperate lineage of both engineering and regulation. For modern examples, see: Can-Am Spyder.
I actually find it very refreshing that he is so up front about it, and he's absolutely right that the programs that Snowden revealed have been more or less an open secret for many years.

Probably we have to consider that he was saying this on CNBC, which is a financial news channel, and in that context he had to represent his interests, which include all the people who's money he is managing. I suspect in another context his views on this would be far more nuanced.
> Good, descriptive commit messages

All of the examples given in the image going that heading I'd say are mediocre at best.

The code changes should tell you what has changed, if I'm looking back through your commit history what I'm usually trying figure out is why you've changed something.

A ticket number is often the single most useful thing, ideally followed why a very brief what you've changed and as much information on why you've changed it as you think would be useful.
I am so tired of clueless pundits talking about HFT...
Thanks for the clarification. /S
Dragonfly BSD 3.8 released
> The purpose of the "speed" is to elicit information.

Not quite. HFT uses information that you probably don't have, and acts on that information using software and hardware that you probably don't have[0].

You can obtain that information and that software/hardware - it's just expensive (high barrier to entry)[1].

As explained above, HFT exists because portions of the market are not perfectly competitive in the economic sense[2], but that's always been the case (and arguably was more so before the advent of computerized HFT).

[0] It's not so much that you don't have the information - it's that the latency is too high for most players.

[1] At least some portion of these costs are very real - the cost of maintaining low-latency connections between exchanges, colocating hardware, etc.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
I haven't listened to that presentation or read the PDF, but from what I read about it I would bet that 'evolve' refers more to the time until the official release than to the time after that. Of course the language will evolve, but it will be slower and shouldn't do so in incompatible ways.

Until official release, though, Apple may make huge breaking changes (change keywords, tweak the grammar, maybe drop a feature or two. For example, do we really need trap on overflow for integers in what, in the end, is a compiled language?)
Three words on this "race to irrelevance": lead versus leave.

Our society is in a state of secessionism. Much of the escalating economic inequality comes from that impulse. The rich of yesterday (1945-73) saw themselves as leaders of the society. The rich of the new Gilded Age (1974-2014+) have given up and just want to escape it. They want private schools, country clubs, and closed social networks. They don't want to lead the masses, they want to leave them.

Silicon Valley has been making its secessionist impulse visible of late, but HFT and "high finance" show a different secessionist tendency: the desire to get outside of any given industry or company and "float among" them as a financier. The brightest young people are being told not to join the regular economy with the proles, but to become part of an elite system of hedge funds, private equity shops, and overcapitalized "startups" whose products are meaningless other than advertising expenses to get middle-management positions, 10 years earlier than otherwise, for the founders.

The smartest people have given up, sadly, on leading. This makes "leave" the attractive option. If you become a management consultant or investment banker, you don't have to commit to one industry or business. You float around until you make friends who can place you at high levels.

After spending 8 years in a number of places but much of it in "the real economy" I can't say that I blame the leavers. The leavers are now ahead of me, career wise, as venture capitalists and the like; and there isn't much out here in "the rest of the economy" to lead. Perhaps paradoxically, the world ends up being run by leavers, because average people don't want to be led by the highest level of talent; they want leaders they can relate to.
I guess I'm of the opinion that for some things, surely not everything, but for some things, there's more than one person in the world that can do the job.

The freedom lover inside me gets your point though.
One of the revelations has simply been the capability level. The estimated computing and storage capacity of the NSA has long been treated as something of a growing constant in privacy equations and concerns that were waved off as tinfoil hat syndrome ten years ago happen to be absurdly commonplace.

And that is a reason that foreign countries should be concerned about doing business with american companies. There are questions as to whether major players were complicit or were infiltrated, but it was foolish not to expect infiltration at a minimum.

Anyway, fuck Marc Andreesen. He's on the wrong side of history if he thinks that the massive surveillance apparatus recording us through our social media apps should have been kept secret so that his portfolio would continue performing as expected.

That is the psychological profile of a traitor and he deserves a sound kick in the balls for using his influence and media reach to say this sort of nonsense.

I wouldn't accept investment money from him after this.
I'm not much of a console gamer but I own both systems and occasionally play the newest hyped game on them, finish it, and don't touch it for months, but in imho they new one feels a lot better in my hands. I think it has a lower profile, is somewhat smaller, and is definitely lighter.

The 360 controller just feels like a brick in my hands now.
Could Mr. Colebourne have done this work on JSR310 without an IP assignment to Oracle?