skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't quite understand this article. The author writes "Companies must be punished when they do wrong [...]", but then lists a number of companies who got caught doing wrong, but presents their fines as somehow problematic.

> The increasing criminalisation of corporate behaviour in America is bad for the rule of law and for capitalism

Is it the increasing criminialization of corporate behavior that's really the problem here? Or is the the actual corporate behavior itself?

> Financial firms rarely survive being indicted on criminal charges. Few want to go the way of Drexel Burnham Lambert or E.F. Hutton. For their managers, the threat of personal criminal charges is career-ending ruin. Unsurprisingly, it is easier to empty their shareholders’ wallets.

> The best thing would be for at least some of these cases to go to proper trial [...]. That is hardly in the interests of the regulators or their managerial prey, but shareholders at least should push for that.

So the author is concerned about government fines eroding shareholder value, but doesn't seem concerned that a lengthy public trial would also hurt stock prices or public trust.

I guess I just don't understand the author's worldview. When a big company does something seriously wrong and gets fined by the government, he doesn't seem to be bothered by the company's behavior, but instead he's bothered by the fact that the company is forced to clean up their mess.
Dan Savage on the Myth of “The One” and the Unsettling Secret of Lasting Love
They kept saying "it runs fast" which completely missed the point. The GUI toolkit was painfully slow, as was the JVM start-up. If they'd compromised on run-time performance in exchange for fast start-up and they'd re-thought the terrible GUI, it could have worked.
The Chart That Organized the 20th Century
Serious dogfooding of your own software I see! I still <3 IPA.
>should everyone be able to buy antibiotics and antivirals OTC without a prescription?

Of course not. But what does this have to do with legalization? Antibiotics and antivirals are legal and controlled, just like marijuana should be.
When talking about programming languages, "isomorphism" also brings to mind the Curry-Howard isomorphism between programs and proofs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_isomorphis...)...
Isn't that an example of what the article is about?

BigCo does something (presumably) illegal --> BigCo gets investigated by regulators --> BigCo settles out-of-court without admitting anything.

If everything's illegal and traditionally paid off out-of-court, things that are actually harmful/wrong don't get treated any worse than things that are more questionable.
Reading the examples, I had a hard time determining that the article was not being sarcastic. (Oil spills, violation of trade embargo on genocidal regimes, lying to investors, etc.)
I'm with you all the way up to "unremarkable". We're still trying to understand the brain, so any observation of change is probably interesting and helpful to our understanding.

I for one would love to see a long term study on the effects of learning to program on your brain. After long coding sessions I often find it challenging to communicate effectively with friends or to follow complex social interactions. It's clear to me that focusing on abstract ideas for extended periods has a short term effect, and I would have to guess it has a long term one as well.
From one side yes, it makes me nervous. It doesn't represent the "ideal" VR case where your hands can be detected no matter where they are.

That being said, for what they are aiming to achieve, having the FOV be just larger than that of the Oculus is a huge win. The LEAP takes a few frames to detect a hand when it comes into range, and another few to get the skeletal tracking right. By having a slightly larger FOV than the Oculus, that detection step can happen outside of the user's FOV.
I once found Introduction to Algorithms in one, in Boston. I was impressed.
That website is a prime example for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8237996

It's really just text and a few images, nothing fancy, an ordinary blog post - yet it freezes my browser for what feels like half a minute while it uses 100% CPU for rendering. What the fuck?!
Super Mario is no joke. Those mushrooms will alter the size of your cranial cavity.
To be fair, I could've used better wording there. I simply meant that Stellar just launched a few weeks ago. I'm not trying to deceive anyone. As others have said, I do mention later on in the post that Stellar is a fork of Ripple, and I even point to some Ripple resources for understanding how the consensus protocol works.

Jed McCaleb, the person you are referring to, was open and honest with the Ripple community, and actually donated a good amount of his XRP to charities: https://xrptalk.org/topic/2629-selling-my-xrp/. He left due to disagreements with the management team at Ripple, not as part of some "pump and dump" scheme. Most estimates indicate that so far he has not dumped much at all: http://crypt.la/2014/01/18/ripple-price-prediction-xrp/.

Compared to Ripple, I like that Stellar is being more honest and fair with their issuance policy https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/, reserving only 5% for running costs of the Stellar Foundation. I also like that they have created built-in inflation for STR and appreciate how well they are engaging with developers and other participants in the early-stage community.
> At other companies, I've seen people waste an hour and
> a half every day assembling people to go out for lunch,
> order, wait, figure out how to split up the bill, drive
> back. Much easier to just take that off people's minds.

Yes. I've seen this so many times.

Even in an ideal, imaginary office where everybody's super-efficient about lunch choices... having a great lunch area + choices under one roof means everybody's more likely to eat together.
Apple Event – September 9, 2014
It is official: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/apple-event-september-9th/
No.

Imagine you're a gig worker who makes $2500/mo. $750 goes to your apartment, $500 goes to taxes, $200 goes to your car payment and auto insurance, $200 goes to groceries, $180 goes to your cell phone and utilities, $120 for some credit cards you make minimum payments on, another $120 for gas, maybe $150 for clothes and entertainment.

That leaves you with $280/mo in disposable income. Requiring Obamacare will extract $80-$120/mo for the lowest level of coverage that has high deductibles and is generally useless. You could pay another $100/mo and get the next level up, but your ability to save for anything at all is now completely gone. All you can look forward to is a few hundred dollars on your tax return.

Health care must be free to make sense in this context.
It wouldn't call it a pivot. Same hardware but with an extra attachment. And a software adjustment to handle the new positioning.
Or Perl 6.
> In a way, I can't be too mad at the Web because it made me realize I want nothing to do with consumer-grade tech. That side of the industry seems to revel in half-solutions and commoditizing developers.

I had a somewhat similar realization. Actually it made me drop out of high school and completely forget about going for comp-sci and a career in IT. Working in IT is still a possibility but if I do it, I will do it on my own terms (or at least in very good company). In the meanwhile, I'll keep programming as a dear hobby so I can focus on what I think is good and right.
It's not a question of migrating anything. The first thing IFTTT does with the password is make an API call to get the API token, and then supposedly throw the password away.

This is literally a request for them to change the name of an input field, and make one less API call. I'm happy to drive to their office and implement it myself if they feel they lack the resources.
Elaborate about which part—Google Maps app being obnoxious? The linked article makes a strong case for that—common actions are a number of slow steps, the information that people are actually looking for is missing or difficult to discern, etc. Or that I can use it? That's because I don't live in one of the 8 cities that Citymapper supports, whereas Google Maps works on, I dunno what % of the world, but I'm guessing it's pretty high.
It can be helpful to know the following.

The magazine the economist is owned by The Economist group

"The Economist Group is 50% owned by Pearson PLC via The Financial Times Limited. The bulk of the remaining shares are held by individual shareholders including the Cadbury, Rothschild, Schroder, Agnelli"
source: Wikipedia

The news paper will sometime push the owners selfish agenda which may or may not be in the readers best interest.
DNA from hagfish being used to synthesize bulletproof slime
Is dementia common among programmers? I'd never heard that before
Cool, but still pretty useless. I'd like to see leap tackle a useful situation, perhaps commercial. I can think of dozens off the top of my head and none involve a consumer controlling a PC interface for which we already have multiple superior options.
Ask HN: What good books have you read to learn more in tech?
I know we learn best by doing, but reading can help cover some concepts that I may miss as I build projects. I'm taking some intro to CS classes and am open to suggestions on what to read in my down time.

I'm focused on learning some foundational concepts of CS and data analysis. I work with a company that has a distributed computing platform. I'm sure you experts out there can point me in a good direction.
The point isn't that the companies were or were not doing something wrong, it's the opacity of the entire process--it's almost Kafkaesque. The government accuses them of a crime, gets a payout, and everything gets settled hush-hush. No one knows what exactly about their conduct was illegal or how the fines are being used by the government.

I'd say there are two reasons the status quo isn't beneficial. First, it provides no feedback to the greater business community as to what is illegal vs what is not and how enforcement is going to go about. The opacity denies the market information to adjust. Second, it allows the government to do what Microsoft did to Android and hammer people in private to great benefit without the greater public knowing the charges or claims being made. Regulation should be transparent, even more so with large amounts of cash involved.
But for how much ?
FWIW, I've seen some people attach a small convex mirror to the edge of their monitor to avoid this kind of surprise. I'd expect this is just trading audio distractions for visual ones, though.
I'm a little confused about what I would be learning here. What exactly are the "tools, methods and frameworks" which is being taught, and are there any prerequisites before I can jump in?

It looks like the only way I can look at the curriculum is by joining sliderule...which I don't want to do, yet.
Plugin was written early on and there are only 24K users. Therefore it's ok to provide worse security to those 24K users. -> This does not make sense to me given how many of those users will have the same password on their email and IFTTT is going to store it.
I've never seen a truly useful application of hand gestures to control a PC. Great for short demos, though.
The Windows world needs an standard application sandbox for Win32 applications like iOS, Android, Linux (docker) and FreeBSD (jail). WinNT has the functionality inbuilt since NT 3.1 but the Win32 shell doesn't expose it.
Here are the critical skills for DevOps engineers
This is super weird, but I just saw the clip of this from Scrubs, this morning. Interesting to get the back story in such a short time span.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbXbBoRKLVU
>for the sole purpose of incriminating me

Right, do you actually believe it has nothing to do with national security?
Also it is funny how the home countries who have made intelligence deals with the US get a free pass. This is self fulfilling. Why don't you change your own country? Because you could actually do something, you know instead of just complaining. Maybe that is why?
> Crimea? Always was Russian. Once given as a "present" to Ukraine.

You must be awful at Christmas. "I'm glad you enjoyed your present. Give it back now."
The most interesting thing about this is that it's being held at a different venue this year, and apparently one that has historical significance. Per MacRumors:

> Performing Arts at De Anza College in Cupertino, the same location where Steve Jobs introduced the original Mac 30 years ago.

Let the insane speculation begin!
Indeed :) It's got great performance, glad I chose Lapis to build it. Handling millions of requests and tens of of thousands of payments on a 10 dollar VPS.
And many non web apps happily use RESTful JSON APIs too.
Its fairly apparent in the way they write and structure the article too. It starts from an assumption, "marijuana = bad". Although they honestly may not be aware of it. They make sentences like:

"Marijuana use is often associated with motivation, attention, learning, and memory impairments. Previous studies exposing animals to THC show that repeated exposure to the drug causes structural changes in brain regions involved with these functions"

Which implies, but doesn't actually state, that marijuana use makes you "less motivated, less attentive, unable to learn, and memory impaired" in the long term (ie, not just when smoking) and then finish with:

"This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences"

Without actually showing "bad" in any of the results, just "change".

Admittedly, anecdotal evidence of the "stoner" stereotype from most folks on the street might say that (while smoking) those are probably true. I'm all for folks knowing the risks of things they choose to ingest. But I'd rather we can choose, and most of the people smoking might also say they don't mind.
Dokku?
I think they have it wrong. Super cavitation doesn't have a 'bubble of air' around the vessel. It has a vacuum. And steering is not the unsolved problem they present. Just poke vanes out into the water enclosing the cavity, like the Russian supercavitating torpedoes do.
I find it odd that they say that when most of their examples of big corporate penalties involve criminal acts.

I say, let's stop treating companies specially. If somebody works for a company and commits a crime in the course of their job, they should be penalized just the same as if they did it on their own. If the company is somehow responsible themselves (because no individual worker had enough of a hand in what happened to hold them responsible directly), let's apply the same penalties to the company that we'd apply to a person who did what they're accused of.

OK, we can't really put a company in prison. But surely we could enact similar consequences. A person in prison can't easily meet with the public, can't really communicate effectively, and can't really carry out business (or at least they're not supposed to). When appropriate, let's put companies "in prison". If their crime would put a person in prison for a year, shut the company down for a year. They can resume when they've completed their sentence, just like you or I can.

Bank of America's $17 billion settlement looks huge. But it's about a year of profit for them. Imagine if you or I committed a crime of that magnitude, and all we were asked to pay for it was a year's worth of savings. Not even a year's salary, a year of our savings. No, you or I would go to prison, be cut off from our friends and family, and be prevented from working for years. Even after regaining our freedom we'd have a tremendously difficult time putting our lives back together. Let's do the same for BoA. Ten years of no business, then you can go back to doing what you were. Oh, you have a tough time resuming your business after a decade on hiatus? Boo freakin' hoo, that's how it works for the rest of us slobs. As it stands, I'd bet they made a profit on their criminal dealings even after paying the settlement.
I'm a backend engineer at Citymapper. Just to let everyone know that we're hiring... https://citymapper.com/london/jobs
Ok, now I see your point.

However, I think that you can't negotiate a 56kbps link ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.90_%28recommendation%29 ) over a cell phone.

Ordinary copper telephone service has enough bandwidth to transmit a full range of audio signals, in fact more than the voice can produce or the ear can hear. Modems exploit this fact.

But cell phones employ lossy compression, and if I understand correctly, one of the "first things to go" are the higher frequency noises. Why transmit what the ear can't hear?

Oh, somebody smarter than me has addressed this question: http://superuser.com/questions/748154/use-a-smartphone-as-a-...
The problem is that the fines are arbitrary, settled out-of-court, and apparently paid at least partly to the people imposing the fine. And backed by the threat of being completely put out of business (no matter how disproportionate that would be), even if you don't think you did what you're accused of (rules can be fuzzy, so the court might not agree).
I've met plenty of non-profit privacy activists who share Mike's pessimism about web of trust authentication.
Disney Research Patents ETH Zurich's PuppetCopter
As of my writing this we're six top-level comments in and already a full third of them miss the point of the article, going on to complain about The Economist advocating not punishing companies for malfeasance. For their benefit as well as for the benefit of this comment section as a whole, here's a quick summary of some of the article's central points:

* The article compares the practice of public attorneys demanding settlements in place of public indictment to extortion:

"The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details)."

* It points out that this process bypasses the regular justice system, which ought to progress by both legislation and precedent-based case study:

"Perhaps the most destructive part of it all is the secrecy and opacity. The public never finds out the full facts of the case, nor discovers which specific people—with souls and bodies—were to blame. Since the cases never go to court, precedent is not established, so it is unclear what exactly is illegal."

* It further argues that this government-dominated settlement process places all power in the hands of the attorney, thereby undermining the rule of law by introducing an element of arbitrariness and politics to what should be governed by blind justice:

"This undermines the predictability and clarity that serve as the foundations for the rule of law, and risks the prospect of a selective—and potentially corrupt—system of justice in which everybody is guilty of something and punishment is determined by political deals."

* It does not argue that companies should not be liable for misdeeds, in fact it acknowledges the fact:

"In many cases, the companies deserved some form of punishment:...[followed by some examples]"
Is cost a major deciding factor?
I get to choose when I go to HN. I just closed a bug I'd spent the better part of the week on, I'm fine with relaxing.

In an open office I lacked the ability to choose interruptions. I still remember Dipesh coming over, slamming his hands down on my shoulders, to ask "what's up buddy". You could hear the stack falling out of my brain. He just wanted to chat.
This a million times.

For me visual distractions (even if it is just people walking) are a lot worse than noise. I can tune out the chatter but whenever I feel or see movement around me, my head snaps to attention to find out what it is. Some evolutionary thing most likely
Yes I was being imprecise. I suppose I'd combine writing and language. English's pronunciation rules are suboptimal, I think. It just happens to be that way by accident.

By designed, I mean "if modern scientists and engineers designed" versus more primitive people sort of making stuff up and folks adding on. With an explicit goal for efficiency; not aiming to necessarily "look nice".

When I look at Hangul, I see a rather simple underlying set of principles. It seems to logically build up. Compared to say, the Cherokee one, which, by looking at it for a minute, doesn't appear to have any structure. It seems like they're more-or-less random symbols. Maybe there is some deeper design there but it isn't apparent at a quick glance.

But is Hangul's choice of symbols the best representation for human minds for reading? And for writing or algorithmically dealing with characters?
For fun: Stripe's CTF3 included an implementation of Gitcoin in which the work wasn't actually semantically valuable contributions to a repo, but rather brute-forcing the commit message until the commit hash meets a certain criterion.

https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups/tree/master/stripe-ctf3/le...
That's really cool! Do you expect to have something out soon?
Well the narrative that "the entire West works together on intel" doesn't work very well does it. What are people supposed to do, hate the entire West?
At least they have the option of buying it (if they have the money). The prior issue with health care was that, in lieu of working for a large enough company, those who needed it couldn't buy it at any price.
The horrible thing is that the pain of user interface latency never gets any respect, and everything either has: 1. network latency (the "cloud"!), 2. stupid GPU eye-candy, or 3. plain-old bad design (everyone should read _Programming Pearls_ and the sequel sometime.)
I don't really have much interesting to share other than "ditto", except only once did I get something like a "3 month salary" payout. Another time there was an exit but the stock ended up so diluted that I was "underwater" (except due to some bad timing I also got hit with AMT on fictional earnings that took a few years to even out on) and a couple of other times the company simply failed to exit in any way.

Working for startups can be fun, but always treat your equity as a lottery ticket because that's all it is (worse in a lot of ways since the rules behind lotteries are pretty solid whereas there are a number of ways companies can fuck you when it comes to equity even if you "win); if you trade a lot of salary for those tickets, you're being a fool.
This isn't a bizarre flaw. We favor routes with higher frequencies, as typically users don't want to take routes immediately.

(I work on Citymapper's routing.)
The company I work for puts every engineering hire through "the U", a 3-9 month training program (depending on developer aptitude), geared towards bringing all engineering hires up to a relative even ground, with regards to the necessary skills to be a software engineer here.

The training is always in flux and adapting based on feedback, and has pretty consistently turned out developers that are able to jump in and start developing in any given team. Developers then gain further domain specific knowledge through mentorships and regular 1-on-1 meetings with team leaders and mentors about goals and progress.

Overall, it works pretty well based on my interactions with other developers here.
End-to-end is a browser extension that doesn't work on Android.
The whole American justice system has become one big extortion racket, from top to bottom, and whether it's big corporations or the little guy, who gets threatened with tens of years in prison, and must "settle" for the plea bargain, so the US gov gets an easy win.
[campusdata.org member here] - if you're working on something similar at your school and want to join forces, join the mailing list is at campusdata.org.
I'm glad to hear that. (one of the developers here) But what do you mean exactly by "worked"? You mean you have tried the implementation on blocksignit.com ?
We would love to be able to solve those problems, but we need more humans!