skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Canadian consumers need to open their eyes about how their beloved local retailers and their government are guaging them shamelessly. Canada and US has pretty much no difference in infrastructure in transportation, yet Canadian consumers perioidically pay 10% - 20% more than average Americans on consumer goods. Canadians must start demanding to know why this happens from their retailers and governments of all levels.

Whether you like it or not, for vast majority of people, consumption power is THE most important indicator of quality of life, NOT healthcare, NOT social welfare system and NOT even democratic political system. People's ability to buy things at will is what regular people care about the most. And yet, this issue is never on the table. I fail to understand why.
Others here have touched on some of the issues with the headline number, such as quality of jobs created, full-time employment rate, the real unemployment number (counting discouraged), and the labor force participation rate.

Another aspect to the current situation that really bothers me, is that we're only starting to claw down the real unemployment rate after five years, approximately just in time for the next recession to hit. GDP growth has basically been falling for three years now. Getting slammed with another recession, with 11% real unemployment, is going to hurt a lot.
> a trip into the Grand Canyon

GPS needs a very good view of the sky, from lots of angles, to work well. Lots more work to do to do it reliably outdoors with patchy-or-no GPS.
Unlimited Accessories
I'll happily help debunk a teensy bit more - I just left Spotify where I was an Agile Coach for 3 years. At least by the time I left, there weren't any teams in the company really "using scrum", some teams may have kept some pieces that worked well for them (regular development intervals for instance) but I don't think any of them were falling into the traps or anti-patterns mentioned here. There are 80-something product development teams, each one gets to choose and evolve the practices best suited for them, etc.
genuinely do not deserve their asking price

Deserve has fairly little to do with it. It's a market. There is a market clearing price. You appear to not want to pay it. That's fine. People do not want to work for you. That's also fine. You being surprised that people are not prioritizing your offers given that you do not pay market wages, that, that makes me scratch my head a little bit.
> Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS

Well, that's one I can personally tell you I've had problems with in the past.

> even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k

And also this one. That's even back around the timeframe I was actively doing Perl development while using win2k.
What's Trader Joe's problem? Isn't this a good thing for them? They should be paying the guy!
The WHO defines 3 drinks/day for men and 2 for women as "high intake." Meanwhile among those who recommend daily alcohol intake for health, the typical recommendation is 2 drinks/day for men and 1 for women - a difference of 1 drink.

Does anyone have any insight on this small apparent difference between "healthy person" and "drunkard"?
But this has block overhead too. Why not just use a smaller block size?
I want one to tag along after my child as she plays outside, with a voice channel and geotracking (video channel only when she asks for it). True helicopter parenting.

Quadcopter parenting and all the interesting applications will require major improvements in battery capacity:weight ratio, though.
I can understand doing this as part of your job to test a system but isn't it reckless for people to do it just to test their own phones? You're taking up one of a limited number of phones lines for 10-20 seconds, potentially leaving someone in a life threatening situation unable to get through in the only 10-20 seconds they have the opportunity to make the call in.
Partial list of ethical concerns in the video game industry
Do people here not predict and counter downsides of their actions? Is this how they work all day, with an attitude of, "Hey, it'll be fine"?
I was just looking the other day to see if I could get Trader Joe's sunflower seeds online. Their sunflower seeds are far and away the best I've found. I buy 10 bags at a time whenever I'm at their nearest store that's 30 minutes away.

I can understand how there would be a niche market for their products in areas without direct access to the stores.
I tend to include them in git in a maintenance folder. After they've been used once, I put an exit command at the top that references the issue number so that they can't be accidentally run.
Drones that fail to ID themselves will be shot down on sight.
Yet, people get very upset these days when one performs a trick in a high level language to perform optimization. It's heart breaking to see how much folks utilized every resource they had back then, today, we just waste it. Computers are getting faster, but we are not seeing the results because we have excess. Constraints can be very good, it make's folks resourceful.
I didn't want to put too much speculation in my comment, but you're right that there are a ton of things that individuals could do with drones.

Here's a movie plot attack: A week/month/etc beforehand, plant 4-8 drones a half-mile downrange of the airport a VIP is scheduled to fly out of. When their plane takes off, trigger the drones to fly into the the plane's turbines. A fully-loaded plane with no working engines would quickly stall and turn into a fireball on the ground. You might not even need explosive payloads for this to work.
I saw things being saved to /tmp, and kept expecting a turn for the worse from a sudden reboot...

Fantastic article though - I've learned a couple of things from it, thank you.
Must port this to windows - there is DOKAN and CbFS (commercial) that are basically FUSE for Windows...
Whoah, I had no idea that CarPlay was software. Does that mean it can be loaded onto any after market system with the right specs? How would they deal with the different hardware targets if that's the case?

Edit: On second thought, it looks like they're partnering with manufacturers so is Apple also providing their own version of the HW as well?
Even when you do have weird metadata, it's easy enough to retrofit archive formats to handle it, which Mac OS X did years ago. Disk image distribution is a complete anachronism now, and it's odd how persistent it is.
The headline is inaccurate: no smuggling is involved.

Trader Joe's is a great brand name: they sell OK products and have developed an incredibly loyal customer base. Pirate Joe's is trading on that popularity.

I'd love to understand the business logic behind Trader Joe's response to this. It's not like they'd have to open up a full national operation. Franchising in Canada is fairly simple and straightforward, so it's hard to believe that licensing Canadian franchises wouldn't be a more profitable approach to this than suing Pirate Joe's. There may be hidden costs, but clearly things like creating Canadian-compliant labeling is a pretty small barrier.

So as a business strategy:

a) refusing to operate in a territory where there is demonstrable demand for your products

and

b) spending oodles of money suing people who are fulfilling customer demand for your products in that territory

seems like the least sensible thing to do. It would be interesting to see the economic reasoning behind it, which has never been clearly explicated ("Trademark protection" clearly won't suffice, as this article points out.)
This is why some states have chosen to go with a single PSAP for the whole state - Cellular E911 has a couple problems, one - the geolocation features of cell phones is best effort, and if it fails, the best the company can do is guess from which site/sector the call is coming in on to route them to the correct PSAP. Two - the cellular networks on whole are best effort, cellular as a technology cannot be as reliable as a wireline hookup, period.

In the future, I believe the move to VoLTE will make E911 more reliable, as it will enable more location data to be sent from the handset at the time of call, but until then, the most reliable way to get geolocation data to a PSAP is to use a landline, period, the landline telephone, is and will remain more reliable, consistent and predictable than any of the technologies replacing it.

As far as why the carrier couldnt be reached? likely calling the wrong place - Sprint FWIW is and has been in the midst of a forklift network upgrade for a couple years now, its just wrapping up now, but parts of the network have been partially non-functional for hours or days at a time - I know however that regular e911 drive testing is a part of test and turnup, and the planned maintenance process for Sprint.
Hobby planes have been around for a long time. Wouldn't this have happened by now if it were such a risk?
You might want to filter the GIFs being shown on the front page, guys.
jnsk: you are shadowbanned (but solid point)
Looking forward to clouds of warring aerial nanobots, a la Diamond Age.
> I wonder how much more annoying this was back in the days before cell phones? With my cell phone, I was able to send text messages to the friend who was going to pick me up in Tacoma, updating him on our progress so he could do a good job of figuring out when he actually needed to be there.

In the days before cell phones, trains still stopped frequently enough, and for long enough, at stations with public phones that you could let people know, and, in addition, the frequence of late arrivals of trains (and the same is true of aircraft) was such that it was fairly common practice to call the destination station (airport) and inquire about the expected arrival time of an incoming train (flight) if you wanted to mitigate the risk of hanging around and waiting.

If anything, the age of near-ubiquitous instant communication in your pocket has made things like this more annoying, because its shifted people's expectation of control and knowledge.
People do this on Amazon all the time.

Trader Joes: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=trader%20joes

Ikea: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?field-keywords=ikea

Both on .com and .ca. Note the huge markup.
That does look very similar. Thanks for sharing.

What's really different about these is that you don't need all the ceremony of designing routes and controllers for anything other than navigation. Need to add a phone number to a contact? Don't make a whole controller and route. Just write a function that updates the database and call that function from the client code.

And, if you care about separation of concerns, I think you can just put the RPC calls in a separate module. But, really, it's so little code, I might not even do that.
Microsoft Windows keylogger edition
D3.geo.zoom now supports smooth animated zooming
Cemetery management system
Yes, that old corporate shill, Consumers' Union, clearly accepted huge sums of money from Pioneer and Apple in exchange for a biased review.
You only need to do that if you're stupid frankly, all you need to do is insert dialing rules that if 911 call send the BTN/main number, if for all other calls send station DID - often this is done on the carrier side - so you should only need to place calls from one phone for the whole site. It's wholly impractical to do this as well for any site with more than 20 phones, I had customers with sites that has over 1000 stations on them.
> Similarly, there are instances where the program jumps into the middle of an instruction.

Reminds me of the not so extreme but still considered alternatively beautiful and horrendous Duff's Device in C, where one entangles a switch/case in a while loop:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device
Oculus and diversity on BlinkPopShift
Good point, but I think this hasn't happened because almost nobody is a psychopath, and most psychopaths are incompetent. If I believed otherwise, I wouldn't speculate about these things publicly.

Also, it would be hard to pilot multiple RC planes or helicopters simultaneously. Any attack that requires people cooperating is much less likely.
A question I genuinely have is whether these figures are something to go by or only relevant if you're in SF/SV, and I suspect it's the latter. It would be nice to work out a scale to more-or-less approximate how far these numbers take you in other cities (though I suppose you could just use a cost-of-living calculator, but there are other considerations in tech IMO).

But even adjusting for the cost of living, I'm glad I see figures like this because it shows how ridiculous some offers are. I got an invitation to apply in Los Angeles last week for webdev, with the bottom set at $40k and the max set at $70k
Merkle's Puzzles
Its crazy to me how this would even happen. I just imagine an upper manager/exec going "Man, if we could only just jam existing WiFi hotspots and force people into our own for absurd prices. Yeah that doesn't sound the least bit illegal whatsoever."
Looks like dat reached stable alpha
Have you considered that you simply aren't willing to pay compensation commensurate to the skills you think you need? Or, alternatively, have you considered that you are seriously overestimating how interesting, challenging, or complex your problems are (and therefore are not looking for the correct kind of talent)?

To me a "hit the ground running" salary is about double that, because that's what I got when I started my current job "hitting the ground running." I don't have a CS degree and have absolutely no formal training in algorithms or data structures, either, but I manage to do quite well in my research oriented role.

Edit: I also am not working for any of the well known major tech companies.
See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dil...

In particular the part about "efficiency innovations" vs "empowering innovations"
Dude, this comes as no surprise to me--I appreciate the market forces in action. For some others, there is continued surprise.

I am a bit curious about the long-term effects of the market's actions here, evaluated from a "Did we really, truly, optimally allocate resources?".
While "crunch time" might not be a good thing in software development, it's essential to a growing business.
Ideally, one should be helping the community instead of "hacking" it.
Trader Joe's is a privately held company and doesn't franchise (http://www.traderjoes.com/about/general-faq.asp#Franchise).

Seems like starting to franchise would not necessarily fit with their long term growth goals.

I'd assume this is mostly just about brand control. A store selling their products that they don't control will not necessarily have the experience they want for their brand. Even if they can't shut it down, just harassing them can prevent the store from growing very large and causing issues with their brand perception.

That said more media coverage around this could paint Trader Joe's as a bully and be more damaging to their brand than an unauthorized seller.
What if Pirate Joe's does not handle perishable food properly and makes people sick. This gets reported as "Trader Joe's X is making people sick!" when in fact it was because of Pirate Joe's poor quality control (for example).
Supposedly, container ships will be moving to CNG/LNG for fuel when they move to fully autonomous operations, as propulsion systems using natural gas as a fuel require substantially lower maintenance than current bunker fuel propulsion systems. While not renewable like solar or wind, running these ships on CNG/LNG would be much, much cleaner than the fuel they're currently running on.
Is there a meaning of life?
It's hard to believe, the claim is that is uses Reddit's search functionality to find connection addresses. I've never been able to find anything using Reddit's search.
No, it's a spectacularly bad thing. Unfortunately most dev cultures assume that it will always be necessary. In pretty much all cases it's a management failure.
Emerging Languages: A Look at the Last Five Years
Ask HN: What can I do to be a viable developer?
I returned from a year-long trip around the world a few months back. I worked as a lead developer for just over 4 years before leaving. I've spent the past 3 months applying for jobs primarily posted here but also from recruiters.

All that said, after many phone interviews and a few final interviews, nothing has panned out. I can recognize at this point that I'm not at the entry or mid-career level of working for the Googles and Dropboxes of the industry.

My question is what can I do to improve myself and get to that level? When given an assignment, I can accomplish it, but during an interview technical questions are my folly. I'm willing to put in the work, and if I must aim for companies that aren't as technically strong I will do so. I just need to know where to set my sights.
It's more sensationalist than crazy. The only worthwhile point is that the FCC should get around to looking at the location accuracy requirements for indoor usage.

But talking about the article, suppose there is a scheduled maintenance that will affect service, and there's no way around it. What exactly should the telco do? There's not a whole lot they can do. Yeah, it's bad if the service is unavailable, and generally, no one wants that to be the situation. But somehow trynna make it out to some terrible secret is silly.
To put that quote in context of who said it, you don't sympathize because you're not a gay black woman who gets called "Halle Berry" by her white, straight, male co-workers. I believe in the Tumblr world, an animated "Check your privilege" GIF would be inserted here.
Gravity map uncovers sea-floor surprises
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Medallia is hiring for a full range of positions, both technical and non-technical. Our engineers are tackling once-thought-to-be-impossible data challenges, our client teams are working with some of the world’s best brands, and our sales and marketing teams are selling into an explosive market.

We’d love to talk:

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So, for example, a "hole" in a semiconductor lattice is emergent, but a phonon is quasi?

I suppose we would call an L4 Lagrangian point an emergent phenomenon and not a virtual mass (just because it can be orbited). For one thing, if we did a surface integral around the L4 point, of the gravitational field, we would find that there is no mass there; the net flux is zero.
From the conclusion:

> Now, to be clear, I’m not saying you should immediately refactor all your Rails applications to use monads; I’m just using Ruby as a tool to explain an interesting idea about programming, not giving you a best practice for all your Ruby code. However, it’s good to know about techniques like this! And in some cases, by applying the power of monads wisely, we can untangle nested callbacks, make parts of our code more reusable, and generally make our programs better.
Your observation appears to be consistent with a declining rate of people who want a job but don't have one.
There's also going the be a new competing canal in Nicaragua to be started in December this year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal
3 pints a day of any high carbohydrate beverage is probably a bad idea. No alcohol required.
Fine, I'll bite. I have no idea what the hell the author's talking about. S/he keeps it deliberately vague because failing to do so would mean "the Thing gets in and it is less about The Thing than what The Thing happens to be finding in the weakness in human beings".
Then s/he lists some troubling trends with the things enables (i.e. by "pointing at the thing" rather than naming it explicitly).

I don't really see any point to this writing style though (unless the only point is so the author can feel clever). I'm going to guess though that anyone who understands what the author is getting at already has the same interpretation of "the thing" as the author and thus already agrees, that anyone who would disagree with the author (if the post were less vague) will continue to disagree, and that anyone who could be swayed is left in bamboozlement.
True. One thing you could do is have the drones map out areas using models and maybe even a few physical root points for them to base it on. Mapping it themselves something like this Dyson 360 vacuum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oguKCHP7jNQ
FWIW, the landline tends to work because of the amount of manual processes that go into setting up the line in the first place.
ARM Tips IoT Focused “Mbed OS” for Cortex-M MCUs
The power of the class action suit is that you don't need to call everyone up. You just need a representative group of clients (which can be quite small) for standing, and evidence and justification to convince the judge to certify a class.

Most folks are not aware they are in a class until they get a letter from the losing company with their $9 check or whatever is left over after lawyer's fees.

Edit: forgot a word
Interesting perspective! I think the analogy to refactoring is also apt. Keeping tools sharp is good, but (quickly, in my opinion) hits a point of diminishing returns. Refactoring is even better but also eventually hits that point (much less quickly).
Most of it was due to "business cycle"?

What does that mean?
It’s very easy to take down a drone. And I don’t mean shoot it down with an assault rifle. You could even take it down with a sophisticated slingshot once it’s in a low altitude. And in order to tase or spray someone it has to get really low. These things are very slow and not that agile.
Interesting - carriers need to ..track callers to within 50 meters horizontally and 3 meters vertically

This poses a problem in dense urban areas with high-rise buildings. The private sector companies mentioned in the article who "zipping ahead" of carriers can provide an altitude using things like wifi tracking, but that still needs to be cross-referenced to an actual floor number. (Keep in mind some buildings don't have a 13th floor, etc.) Barometers in phones don't work well indoors either...

So, this may be a case where an FCC regulation is next to impossible to meet, unless someone can figure out how to map altitudes to actual building floor numbers at scale. Seems like that would be pretty labor intensive effort...
Monads are useful even in imperative languages. They're just a context with a way of specifying how actions get chained together. Scala, Swift, and a number of other imperative languages have adopted monads (like Maybe) to great effect.

Conversely, the state monad (for example) has seen less adoption. Probably because it's a little difficult to grasp, and imperative languages just rely on mutable state for a similar effect. The state monad provides some nifty extras above and beyond variables as they appear in imperative languages, but you can't argue with the low learning curve of throwing a value into a variable and mutating it.

As for the article, I really like the API presented here. I'd worry about the performance penalty of sprinkling method_missing throughout my code, but the code clarity is phenomenal.
For those who haven't watched it, Captain Phillips is a great movie to understand a bit more about sea piracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film)