skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey it's not like there's script kiddies out there that like to send over militiarized and bored SWAT teams into unsuspecting houses for no reason at all. Oh, right.

https://news.vice.com/video/swatting

Because well-off suburban NJ needs a federally granted armored vehicle for... who knows what.

You and me both are terrified.
Translation: Want to beat Microsoft? This is how.
Yeeahhhh TOAST !!!
Tuplary.js code in brackets
You're right, it is an inductive assertion based off the quality of the piece and its focus, the author's profession and the author's background so I'm uncertain about that. I'm more keen on highlighting the fact that I think technology is getting scapegoated as the enemy in academia because two groups of people see the problem differently and are talking past each other.
I wonder if he picked Robocop city on purpose.
Cypress has shipped over 1,700,000,000 of these chips since introduction. Asking for PSoC Designer/Creator in another OS will probably be met with a very large shrug.
Actually one of the things that gives me the most hope is the fact that Godwin's law is so much less frequently invoked. I think after a couple decades of being able to vomit up the first thing on our minds, many people are learning to take a more measured approach online.
"The company sent me an eye-popping estimate for the size of the global security market in 2016: $244 billion."

This is in their pitch to Techcrunch. I'm pretty sure they mean executive protection and major event security if not more. Otherwise, how are you possibly going to turn this into a huge "opportunity"?

Personally, it seems like this company is one lawsuit away from complete shutdown. If a bouncer gets into a fight at an event and a person is hospitalized or worse, it seems like it's going to be lawsuit-hell for everyone involved.
Author here (late to the discussion, nobody told me my 2008 article was posted on hackernews...)

> If DWORD is declared, then your Mac code can use it fine.
> If it's not, then it won't even compile.

Correct -> as a WINDOWS programmer you think it's fine because it compiles just fine. The point is it then won't compile on the Mac, or on Linux, or any other platform. The whole point is if you want a 32 bit integer, use a cross platform 32 bit integer from the beginning. When a Macintosh programmer goes to compile, it will compile. ONLY IF you need to call a Windows specific call, then type cast or convert into the Windows specific type, and then you do it inside an #ifdef. But most all of the time Windows programmers seem to love their DWORDS and they use them all over the place, even for public APIs that some other poor Macintosh programmer has to replace later. Why not start with the cross platform version? What does a DWORD get you that "int32_t" does not? (NOTE: we make sure "int32_t" is defined and a 32 bit integer on all of our platforms, then everybody uses the same thing.)
Stop blaming consumers for the outdated business models of the media industry
Curriculum design thoughts at http://coderin90.com/curriculum lol.
does anyone know if Java can port a gradient boosting model from R
The biggest question I have is does Apple do user testing? Do they trust their small group of designers more than a small sample of the population?

This my biggest question for Apple's design team.
> I could go on and on. In about 2005, I decided I’d never again use Word unless I absolutely had to.

So you're saying you haven't really used Word 2013 then?
Having read some of Steve's excellent documentation already I'm sure the advice in it makes more sense than Strunk and White ---see http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
The PSoC has an internal switch fabric as well. You aren't just muxxing various blocks to certain pins (e.g. Pin 2.1 is either GPIO, SPI CLK, or UART TX), you can wire blocks to each other internally and then send the output or input to a large choice of pins on the outside.
congratulations! I haven't read it yet (I don't currently have journal access but I will on wednesday... looking forward to reading it).

EDIT: Never mind, it's available at the website, duh.
Author here (late to the discussion):

> He also basically ignored Macintosh and ObjectiveC

At Backblaze (my company) we write all lower level common libraries in 'C' and C++ so like a cross platform HashTable, and file I/O functions. It turns out ObjectiveC on the Macintosh is a PERFECT SUPERSET of 'C' and C++ so luckily all the Objective C code can call into our OpenSSL for encryption and can call into our base libraries for File I/O.
What the author (and really everyone in the Valley) is referring to as "luck" is that fundamentally the whole process is stochastic: there's an unavoidable randomness. Probability is involved. Now, mini rant here: whenever people talk about something being random there's a sense that it's COMPLETELY random: the probability distribution is uniform and anything can happen. Lottery tickets, throwing dice, flipping coins. And, not to put too fine a point on it, that is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY WRONG.

Saying there's probabilistic uncertainty in something doesn't mean the distributions are uniform. It just means given all the inputs you can't always predict all the outputs. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, the result can be one of many things. 1 or 0. Success or failure.

This doesn't mean you can't DO SOMETHING about it though, and that's precisely what people are doing. Figure out the patterns, cut through the uncertainty, and try to find your way to the promised land.

What the author's describing using the language of social science and valley speak is the same thing that the machine learning/AI/robotics community learned in the past few decades. They started out with formal logics and rigid rules, and they learned that to succeed in a random world, you have to embrace the randomness. Build it deeply into your systems and processes and all of a sudden you start performing better than your wildest expectations.

Model, measure, evaluate, pivot, repeat. That's pretty damn familiar. What's it describing? A closed loop control system. Change the terminology a bit and you're talking about a Kalman filter with a feedback controller. What's a learning algorithm but a way to fit patterns to noisy, partially random data?

And that's what this is all about. Luck doesn't mean it's all random, just that you can't control everything. And being good doesn't mean you eliminate the randomness, it means finding the patterns and making randomness work for you.

Is there randomness in poker? Sure. Of course. But there's a shit ton of skill too (I know, because I don't have any of it). Don't confuse a poker game for a game of dice.
When I open a CSV file in Excel 2013, it correctly delimits the file.

You may have non-standard CSV files (or at least delimited files that are not properly escaped)
Care to do a write up of what you're doing as far as fraud prevention goes?

Sure, but only high level. I would hazard a guess that fraud prevention is a lot more complex for us at https://www.kraken.com/ ... dealing with many cryptographic currencies and conventional currencies spread across probably over a hundred legal jurisdictions is not easy. We likely have to consider far more factors than these guys. We have recently added two more quants from programs highly regarded in the conventional finance industry to our team, plus we have over seven figures of investment in legal and training programs in the area. We also use R.

Basically, it's inputs (behavior), processing (metric extraction, risk model), output (boolean choices, statistical cluster membership, etc.)... where a series of such outputs may feed in to a heirarchy of scores for different elements within a system. Some applications may be real time, others after-the-fact.

At a high level, which is mostly where my involvement is in hiring people, fraud prevention is not dissimilar to spam or intrusion detection: you can basically use a combined, constantly tweaked set of inputs to a Bayesian-style scoring algorithm. Inputs include both static rules and statistical anomaly detection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Thank you! Our article is open access on ScienceDirect here: http://bit.ly/SKzPgO
I would request that Mr. Andreessen ensure that the companies that he invests in are transparent & ethical with their interactions, particularly with the US Government.

Drones can be a wonderful tool to empower us. They can also be a powerful tool to enslave us. Skynet anyone?

Some sort of effective regulation is probably necessary. Not the kind of regulation involving a former/future Drone Manufacturing executive/lobbist being the chair of the regulatory body.
It's gone. HN needs a caching system.
Xbox comes to mind....
Why doesn't your congressman?
Your tax advice is that if an S-Corporation brought in $80k and incurred $65k of legitimate, legal expenses, that the proprietor should run something more than $15k through payroll because of the "going rate" for developers or for some other reason?

I can't help but notice that your quoted text says "most of the PROFIT distribution" rather than "most of the GROSS INCOME distribution" The company can't pay out more than it brought in.

Obviously if you don't have $65k in expenses then you can't claim them. But, working as a contractor can have a lot of expenses - travel, office rent, utilities, etc. Giant corporations claim these expenses, a single-person company is entitled to the same deductions.

In 15 years of business I have been audited twice by the IRS with very minor amounts due (< $500) and nothing to do with deductions or expenses. The reason I bring it up is simply to illustrate that I'm not just lucky or flying under the radar. One time it was my mistake of a missing payment in my records and I simply paid the amount due. The other time was the IRS's mistake and I successfully contested it. If I had anything to hide I sure as hell would not be contesting an IRS audit for some small amount of money. My point is that I am in no way hiding or trying to sneak around tax codes. I do not encourage anybody to do anything illegal. I only encourage anyone to claim the maximum amount of legitimate deductions that they're entitled to claim. I also highly recommend having an accountant handle it for you who knows the tax laws and ensures that you are operating within them.
I do think it has predictive power, in the narrow areas in which it can be applied. I think if you're a media executive and you've seen what's happened to the NYT, you know that newspapers aren't the only media vertical that is going to face the problem of disruption. Thinking behind it is probably what's driving deals like the purchase of Maker Studios by Disney[1] - if Disney just wanted to innovate they would have just invested in better digital content delivery. Buying Maker acknowledges that lots of lower quality content producers can acquire the same audiences as high quality large budget Disney productions like Hannah Montana.

You don't see disruption everywhere, for example Google and Facebook are hardly 'disruptive' as companies, but I think in the right cases the theory has predictive power and is a necessary tool in the belt of people who work in technology.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/business/media/disney-buys...
How exactly do Alice and Bob use entangled electrons to win CHSH game with higher than 75% probability?
Nice, they have both Windows and Linux support. I got a Papilio Pro some time ago and it's fun to play with. There's also a few other boards based on the same Spartan 6 series with more gates/ram and cheaper.
Interesting, thanks for the feedback. I definitely plan on adding an off switch for Markdown, and will only be going through implementation if it doesn't impact speed/usability in a noticeable way. The plan is to make it a minimal implementation (i.e. keyboard shortcuts only) and barely something you would notice you had.

The reason I'd like to add it is because having switched over from TextEdit and Evernote, the one thing I miss are the Cmd+B,I,Us etc.
Original author here....

This is why we do not use wchar_t as a cross platform type. We like "char *" with NULL terminated Utf8 strings, which works really well on all platforms. Unfortunately on Windows, some of the core API still take Utf16 (2 bytes per char). Since it is a Windows call it must be in an #ifdef anyway, and so IMMEDIATELY BEFORE calling into the Windows call at the last possible moment we convert the string from Utf8 to Utf16. It sounds like a pain, but after you have wrapped all your OS specific calls (like File I/O) you're calling the higher level anyway, and it was completely worth it.
Ironic how most of the criticism of "disruption" now comes from Progressives and the Left. It's very strange to see them defending the staus quo, such as taxi cab medallions and anti-sharing laws like no sublease clauses in rental agreements. It is almost as if they are now "conservatives" trying to defend a world view from the last century.
OK, AFAICT there is no bounds checking. When you want to read a message, you give FlatBuffers a bare pointer to the start of the message -- no size. So you can't use this to read data you don't trust I guess.

Which is an OK trade-off for certain situations (like reading your game data from disk). But... not for any kind of secure network protocol.

Maybe I'm missing something, though. I've only been looking at this for a few minutes.
I did a quick google and found http://www.ahla.com/content.aspx?id=35603 which says that 40% of guests are on business and 60% are leisure travelers. This data is for the the USA for 2012.
The USB plug and chip on the left appear to convert USB to serial for communication with the device, so there's probably a bootloader sitting on the PSoC to accept new user code over serial. All PSoCs can reflash themselves from internal code.

There's also a spot for the traditional MiniProg device on the lower right for erasing/reflashing and advanced stuff.
Hi! Thanks for the feedback.

1) I'm working on implementing Markdown and will be using friendly headings once we sort that out.

2) I love this idea! In fact, it's been on my wishlist for some time now -- I plan on shipping it this week. I've been calling it "Snapshot Backup", but I think "Archive" is a much better word for it. Thank you :)
It's true. This is why websites like Twitch.tv are extremely popular and profitable as well.
I haven't used FlatBuffers, but based on the description it sounds like a {competitor to,clone of} the SBE format used for low-latency transmission of financial data: http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2014/05/simple-binar...

Many of SBE's unusual properties (such as permitting new fields only at the end of a structure) are designed to maximize performance during streaming decoding.
Process you described produced permanent hot corners that couldnt be disabled (lower right one still cant, even in W8.1) and hardcoded inconsistent WM_SYSKEY acting differently depending on application you run (ignores bindings when Task Manager has focus).

Less choice is never a good strategy when it comes to UI.

btw there is a way of killing home button altogether for surface, might be useful for Gabe
http://www.surfaceforums.net/forum/microsoft-surface-faq-gui...
Welcome to the lowest common denominator. No sarcasm, no cynicism, it simply is what it is.

If you want something more, there's a ton of that, too. On the internet, the LCD doesn't have to crowd out the "better" stuff (for whatever personal definition of "better" you may like)... there's bandwidth enough for all. Which eliminates the biggest reason to hate it.
Original author here:

No, we use 'C' and 'C++' on Windows PCs, and we use 'C' and 'C++' and 'Objective C' on the Macintosh. Objective C can call into 'C' libraries just fine on the Macintosh. Objective C can also call into C++ just fine on the Macintosh.

The distinctions are very important to us. :-) Objective C cannot compile on Linux or Windows, but 'C' and 'C++' can compile on all three platforms (Macintosh, Linux, and Windows) using the default development environments on all three platforms (GCC on Linux, Xcode on Macintosh, Visual Studio on Windows).
The Legacy of GOAL
What really bothers me about this type of thinking is the assumption that every team is equally talented & motivated. I might go as far as saying the talent/intelligence landscape is somewhat homogenous but having been around early stage startups for years now there is definitely a power law distribution of motivation & organization. It's a lot easier to say you will do anything to succeed and act the part and struggle and listen to your investors like they're bosses and let your startup die out while going through the motions than it is to be relentlessly resourceful. It also benefits to be self critical and unattached to an ideal of a product in a way to allow your product to be what your users respond to rather than some stubborn vision.

All this to say, there are definitely a ton of bad startups out there, people who see an easy fundraising landscape, take advantage of connections or even make them. Or people that get to a certain point and don't really want to face reality. Instead of floating all the platitudes we float about there being lots of talented teams, it would be nice to see some honesty. That a lot of startups have a founder or two that isn't that dedicated but is there because he/she isn't sure what else to be doing. That a lot of startups are a vanity project of one of the founders and the founder doesn't have the modesty to actually sell to users/potential employees. That at a lot of startups there is friction between the founders that puts the product in danger because they have equal-ish power but between them lack a coherent vision for the future.

And a lot of these companies with bad foundations have brilliant founders. Just because companies are founded by smart people doesn't mean they have a strong foundation. That is something we should be honest about. This isn't to say that it doesn't take luck, but there is a lot that helps to get right that a lot of startups aren't getting right off the bat.
What more info you would like to know? We already have SVN in place. We are developing asp.net web app, and currently i manually migrate changes to release branch and publish from that branch.
Looks good! I'm looking forward to reading it.
I'm not just making up a cause for worrying about free hotspots...It may have been conspiracy talk but there has been discussion about the ethics behind them before. I think it's worth discussing what people are doing with the power to control people's access to internet, especially when it seems like Comcast is just shoving them into peoples homes.

Fact: Once you have a XfinityWIFI added to your device and wifi turned on, you are automatically connecting to these hotspots.

Lots of customers don't understand the implication of this, which is that Comcast knows where you are located.

Fact: You can see a lot more information about devices connected to the an internet access point if you control the lowest routing layer. Just try hooking up a router into another router, and try seeing the devices connected to the first router on the second.

Giving Comcast control of routing the internet connection available on your property is allowing them to see details about devices in the area, which they would not see if they were simply providing you a single connection to a router that you own. Sure, plenty of providers had wifi built into their modems (all those crappy 2WIRE things), but at the very least the customer is able to set a password and control who Comcast is able to see is near their property. With this service it just seems like Comcast is making all it's customer's homes a tracking point for everybody else.

Why should customers be able to access the internet at random locations based on where other customers live? Isn't that what a mobile data connection is for? Sure, the more hotspots available the better, I guess, but if comcast wants to provide access to the internet it should create a technology that can do it without using other people's property/land/estate, and without being able to gather useful information about peoples' locations and maybe more detailed device and network traffic information.

Also, I don't know much about analyzing a single network interface for internet traffic from multiple users, like what we hear about the NSA doing at major internet hubs, but I assume a lot of work needs to be done to filter through information like that. I admit I don't have enough knowledge/experience/evidence/facts about networking, even though I did study computer engineering, but I will make an assumption (at least educated?) that if you have control over the lowest layer of routing you can get a lot more information about the activities taking place on the clients.
Monopolies can only happen with a large and determined government to reinforce them. Actual monopolies are exceedingly rare, and nobody has ever provided me with an example where the monopoly power was not in part or wholly provided by the government. No monopoly can overcome the power of technological innovation and the desire for lower cost goods and services in even the medium term.

Monopolies and planned economies are two sides of the over-sized/too-powerful government coin.

I'm all for stopping monopolies from forming, but the solution to that is not anti-trust style laws, but a focus on preventing the conditions that allow monopolies to continue.
Women as Background Decoration – Tropes vs. Women in Video Games
Ayup. Sorry. And the PSoC1 barely deserves the name '8-bit', it's a bastardized version of 8051 that Cypress calls M8C. It's nasty.
They had plenty of feedback on numerous ms forums of people asking for a way to disable or rebind home button, they ignored all of it.

Currently the only way to influence it is to delete registry key

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SurfaceHomeButton]

and kill all physical buttons completely.
Because, at least in the US, hotels have liberal cancelation policies. In addition, the hotel never really knows what kind of work will be required after a guest leaves...or exactly what time a guest will leave, so the order in which rooms are turned around is not known beforehand. And letting people into their rooms at check-in time or even before is a bigger deal for travellers.

In addition, there are frequent customers who may need a last minute room and companies (such as an airline when a flight is cancelled or overbooked or delayed) that may need a block of rooms on short notice.

An airplane on the other hand is a public space, and the individual has much more limited control over much less space...trash an airline seat and you're probably going to jail.
yes, famous corporate 'mistakes were made, but not by me'
If you are a javascript developer than you can start with libraries available on Github. I started with a small plugin called jPulse, few days back i sent a pull request to an yeoman plugin. Easiest way is by looking into the projects that you use yourself, that way you will have an understanding of how everything works, and you will be in a better position to contribute
yeah its pretty random but apparently does 4mi view per vid. imma join ur ranks.