skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i don't think i was the first or the only person to point out the similarity of this data collection program to google's street view program and related legal/policy/privacy issues that arose with it.

as engineers, we often end up offering people choices that aren't really choices. for my grandmother's ISP-provided wi-fi access point, adding no_map to her SSID isn't a choice she's prepared to make, and i don't think those are reasonable expectations for the average user.

when people suggest otherwise, i think that part of what they seem to be arguing is that the technical problem they're trying to solve--often for commercial gain--is more important than being respectful of other people. people shouldn't have to know how to hide their SSID or add "no_map" to their SSID to stay out of large databases by default.

my view is that the world is a better place when information sharing is consensual, even when it's otherwise legal to obtain that information. i think that's a better world than one in which we tell people to hide their SSIDs or add "no_map" to them. i'm interested in building software and systems that respect people and their devices.
Very interesting that they used the engines from the Soviet moon rocket from the 70s (?). The N-1 looked a great rocket, pity it never flew.

Even the massive arms for lifting the rocket into position are impressive for the N-1.
>Linux on the desktop on the other hand...

Will happen when Microsoft's ability to strong-arm hardware manufacturers using restrictive OEM licenses is diminished.

MS actually seems to prefer a scorched earth policy (destroying the laptop/desktop markets entirely) to allowing Linux to gain anything more than a token foothold.

We can see this by the way they scuppered 'desktop linux' by co-opting and ultimately destroying the netbook market in 2007 (by enforcing OEM licensing terms that crippled netbook specs - prohibiting giving them anything more than 2GB of RAM for instance).

We can see it again by the way they pushed UEFI / secureboot on manufacturers - a clear attempt at creating Windows lock-in that largely worked.

2007 would have been the year of the desktop were it not for this anti-competitive behavior by MS.
It's depends where are you. We are in Latin America (invited), we are so far away to have any chance to create a great network from here, and moving to SF (or any place in USA) first without a network is almost impossible and very expensive for us.
Maybe if antirez doesn't want to read others simplistic responses on Twitter, he shouldn't make simplistic statements on Twitter. It's clearly a medium that doesn't convey nuance very well. There was a great deal of misinterpretation and talking past one another on all sides including his.

This was actually a continuation of a conversation that has been going on for several days, starting with an issue even more serious than 99th percentile latency - data loss due to a broken replica-repair strategy. Some very clueful people have pointed antirez at useful literature on the topic, and made specific suggestions to avoid the problem, only to be met with silence or excuses for why throwing away data was actually OK. Is it any wonder that they're frustrated with him, and ready to interpret an ambiguous statement like "the 99% percentile is bad" in a more negative way than he intended? For him to cherry-pick one exchange and present only one side only continues his own pattern of making constructive conversation almost impossible.

It's not a Twitter problem. It's a people problem.
Pitching a Means to Automate Data Processing, Xplenty Raises $3M
I've localized my apps exactly the way the post is and it's not so easy.
Localizing is necessary and inevitable, but it's not so cheap as this article are saying. There are another costs the article are completely ignoring.

If you do iterative and lean development, localizing using freelancers website will really slow down your release cycle. This multiplies your fixed costs you spent running your small company.

Another point, you'll also need to pay others skilled translators to verify the quality o the localization.

In my case, after localizing it, the numbers of user increase just a few. If I would spent this money on marketing and development, I'm sure that I could get better results.
We can't do that. Localizing is more than translating.
There is a pretty distinct and active Meteor community, though from the outside it's hard to tell how much of that is just people who are interested in it because of the hype (kinda the problem MongoDB had) vs people who actually use it and know what they are doing.

I wouldn't say the wait for 1.0 is a good indicator of stability or success, though. Node.js is still at 0.x and so is React. AngularJS took a long while to get to 1.x but is now actively working on 2.0.

Many developers are cautious about when they dare calling a product 1.0. Until the idea that "if your code is in production, it's already 1.0" gained some ground, there was barely any code on npm that wasn't stuck in pre-1.0 land.

The real indicator is how much time passes between minor or bugfix releases. Ideally the latter should happen fairly regularly and the former not too often. If Meteor hits 2.0 anytime soon, that could be a worse sign than if it sticks with 1.0.x for "too long".
That was fun. I just discovered that I know nothing about good patterns for survival in Game of Life.
Microsoft Security Essentials hasn't been testing as well as competitor AVs now for a few years. Also, MSE has been deprecated and replaced by Windows Defender, even though it seems that only the name has changed.
Peer to peer payment apps compared
Learn how to code. It's not impossible. You need to understand how to code if you want to run a IT company. Regards!
Isn't infinite scrolling a memory hog?
"those dirty pirates"

There is an interesting analogy between "dirty pirates" and teens in malls.

Pretty much everyone younger than myself has had the experience of mall security severely hassling them as a teen or even as a young adult, pretty much just because their rentacops have a license to be jerks. Well, here I am a rather well paid dude with fat stacks of cash, but the mall doesn't want my type there, so it never even appears on the radar anymore. Malls are dead to anyone younger than perhaps 40. Not surprisingly they're generally not doing so well financially. Lots of dead / dying malls across the country.

If a company hates their primary and future customers enough, eventually those customers WILL go away permanently.

With B+N it might be location based or racial harassment etc because my screaming little kids (is there any other kind?) and I shop there and they don't mess with me. Then again I pass for a non-minority middle aged reasonably well dressed middle class dude. I suspect that is the key to their unwritten harassment policies.
wow, yesterday I was taking about localization with my friend. I could not convince him to do it immediately. Now it should be easy. Thanks.

Will update with the data once done.
I happened upon this website as a result of a Google search re. yesterday's failed launch of the Orbital Sciences venture to resupply the ISS, and this URL appeared as the first search result. I've read your site guidelines, as well as the many comments on this news page, and as a lay person I humbly offer this question, which I hope someone will answer: Why was there no escape rocket atop the rocket's payload module? Was it considered cost-prohibitive? Thanks for your time. Cordially, Steve Logsdon.
Post Script: I hope you won't think it patronizing of me to observe that I found the apparent erudition and literacy of the contributors to this web page to be most impressive.
After doing some poking it looks like you can access `this.userId` in the server-side publish and Meteor.methods functions. That's enough to prevent a lot of client-side tampering
All Things Pivotal Episode #4 – Pivotal CF 1.3 – What’s New?
That's the big draw of piracy for me as well - not that I can get out of paying for stuff, but that it's easier (by a mile) than trying to get it the legitimate way. Example: a few weeks ago, I wanted to catch up on The Strain before that night's episode. Went online to try to find a legitimate way to watch it, got blocked because my cable provider (Charter) wasn't on the list of blessed providers. Same story at Hulu. I wanted to watch it, and watch the ads, so they could get their revenue, because that's how the economy works. But they wouldn't let me, so I turned to PB and, after <5 minutes, had the full episode ready to watch with 0 advertisements.

Piracy will continue until there's an easier way to acquire and own content.
I presided of over a Migration from DB2 to Oracle. All of the operations were CRUD.

However the DB2 database had materialized views that were crucial to the business.

Porting those over was non-trivial. Oracle returned a different value for null fields than DB2 (empty strings for null strings vs actual null in one case) did so various portions of the code would fail seemingly randomly.

Some of the constraints didn't map quite as cleanly as the others.

And we haven't even started on the performance tuning and how your schema affects them.

Sure you may be able to port all or most of your schema and queries over to another database but you'll have a lot of work to do after that verifying that nothing is broken and your performance is still acceptable.

SQL is not even close to a guarantee of portability.
It results in fewer HTTP requests.
"You make a good argument, but you forget one thing - app compatibility. There are two dominant platforms, and they're both based on ARM."

Android can be compiled for x86 (and in fact there are even gadgets deployed with it on the market¹) and the applications for Android don't run native. Consider therefore that there aren't any issues like those faced by other architectures when were trying to compete with Intel desktop monopoly.

¹ http://www.utok.com/en/700-series/utok-i700
The first Encrypted email with true self-destruction) released today
How Much Do You Cost per Hour?
I've had fairly good luck with [1] for iPhone apps on my very low budget. For decent enough quality, the translator has to be familiar enough with the context (e.g. someone who had translated apps, uses apps, and most importantly understands what your app's features/demographics are.) Work with your translator to give them enough background information. Just translating a word like "music" in isolation may lead to subpar results.

[1] http://www.icanlocalize.com
Windows has runas and has since Windows NT 4.0. Maybe you should educate yourself instead of making incorrect snarky comments?
Reddit Gets into Crowdfunding with Redditmade
MSE has been merged into Windows/discontinued. It will not install or run on Windows 8.
In that one the gyroscopes (all 3 of them) were installed upside-down, and what's truly facepalm-worthy was that the guy who did that decided to force them into place:

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/proton_glonass49.html

investigators simulated the improper installation of the DUS angular velocity sensors on the actual hardware. As it turned out, it would be very difficult to do but not impossible. To achieve that personnel would need to use procedures and instruments not certified either by the design documentation or the installation instructions. As a result, the plate holding the sensors sustained damage.
I'm way late on this, but I also think considering the network effect of efforts make direct learning from mistakes more...interesting. There are individuals on the team that very clearly were not responsible for the failure, others somewhat responsible, and perhaps a few directly responsible. This would correlate nicely with your continuum above..
Oulipo: Mathematicians and writers that use constrained writing techniques
Conway's Game of Life is my goto "learn a new language" project. It covers most of a languages surface. data structures, conditionals, loops, stdlib. And the rules are just complex enough to get a sense of how the language works.
Your point is wrong from the beginning: I don't have to explain my privacy concerns, and neither do the others who don't know what an SSID is. "Privacy" should be the default and without need for justification, not the other way around.
Ahh somehow i missed that blog over the years. Its the kind of things Jon Ronson should do a piece on.

I found his public facebook feed recently. Whole thing is madness. People/friends/family seem to think he really is some kind of big shot. He posts pictures of T-shirts with CEO written on them etc. To me it is and always has been an investment scam.
I agree, this isn't a failure when trying something new, we have done this hundreds if not thousands of times. It should have been a routine mission, failure should not be accepted.
Thanks for letting me know that is super weird - I don't see that error and I don't recognize it. Are you browsing in some non-standard way I need to account for (weird browser or something?)
I really hope it's not a stupid idea, because that's how we translate our product :) - http://utalk.com

We have a web app that two translators use initially independently to translate our entire corpus. The app then asks them to select the best option where there are mismatches (they can also enter a third alternative). There are a couple of rounds of this.

Finally an editor has access to all rounds of the translation in an editable table (http://i.imgur.com/zPJp0sz.png) where they can see who has inputted what, and wether things have been marked as 'acceptable' or 'completely wrong'.

This works well on most of our short/simple strings.

It also helps that we have two voice actors who are also native speakers come in and record the script, where any further errors or better translations can come up.

We do this because we're translating with different goals than the majority of translation purposes. We need to focus on translating for speech at relatively low volume and for those learning a non-native language. Most translation shops focus on written language for native speakers, high volume, speed and cost.
May I recommend using percentiles over the average? Reporting the 50th, 75th, 90th, 95th and 99th percentile is much better at describing the situation. Even better is to report a histogram or a kernel density plot of the the observed values.

Averages tend to be a notoriously bad indicator on their own because they don't describe anything about the distribution. This is obviously not a normal distribution, and even if it was, you need to report some kind of variance measurement as well. Otherwise it is hard to say anything about the shape of the distribution, let alone make tests for statistical significance.
"devices are already storing SSIDs to do an active scan" - Not mine, although I would readily acknowledge that I'm in the minority and this is generally a truism.

And thank you for acknowledging privacy concerns over publishing the wifi database, although I'm personally still concerned whenever that information gets aggregated systematically, even if it's internal to Mozilla.

One way I think about privacy for data like this is respecting people's intentions. When most people set up wi-fi, I would argue that their intent is almost never to help Mozilla or Google precisely locate phones or IP addresses; it's to connect wirelessly to the internet. More to the point, it's hard to find out someone's intention without asking them. Kudos to Mozilla for getting people to wardrive consensually; but that may still not make me feel much better if I'm just someone with wi-fi.
I have use cases like a) Only power the 3G module and bring up ppp when I am within certain GPS coordinates.

You could create targets for all of your states, and use a small daemon to switch between them (using systemctl isolate).
White House’s unclassified computer network hacked
How You Can Help Reduce CPU Usage in Mesa
Same here. B&N is "my" bookstore but I only buy eBooks to read on the plane. Lending and borrowing books is nice way of connecting with friends. You can technically loan (some) ebooks in the Nook ecosystem - but only for 2 weeks and you have to add them to your "group" or something.
ToroDB – Document-oriented JSON database on top of PostgreSQL
That sounds pretty cool actually. What sort of skills, tasks will we need to level or do?
I am currently in a big slump and totally lack motivation. I decided to try this out. Am I mistaken or is the sign-up sheet the only thing up currently?

If so, I would recommend you include a message in your automated reply saying that we would receive an invite soon or something on those lines. Currently, I got

> Thank you for signing up for in.do!

which seems to indicate that I am successfully enrolled in the service. However, the main page prompts me to share this with others. While I would definitely share this with others if I find it useful, why would I share something that is for now just a sign-up sheet?
HN hasn't changed. Endless, meaningless 'discussions' about non-issues that mainly reflect the inability of socially-inept and newbie programmers to understand the world around them.

To fill their lives, they leave paragraph after paragraph of text. It's fun to watch, but I hope things improve.
Yargh... yet another launchrock signup page without any information.
Bear in mind not all Steam games come with DRM. It is required for things like the Steam marketplace though, which can often add a lot to the game.

Kerbal Space Program was quite reluctant to launch on Steam as they didn't want to add the DRM, once they found it wasn't required (or Steam relaxed the rules) they did so and now sell it there and on their own store.
That's a pretty great image. I'll have to remember it for next time someone asks why is all this so hard and can't we just use WGS84 for everything.
Google Hangouts now lets you make free one-minute international calls
I would agree that iteration through thought is not necessarily a useful constraint on a medium by itself. In the case of twitter, however, it is merely a product of the 140-character limit for each message. If, during a stand-up debate, your opponent was allowed to interject after every sentence, you would get much the same. That sounds incredibly annoying and counter-productive at first, but the form of the debate would adapt over time.

The advantage of developing a thought in tandem with somebody is that the compromise happens more naturally. You rarely need to 'concede' a point or prove somebody wrong, since you can influence the way the point is made in the first place, pointing out flaws in their reasoning or facts as they happen. Conversely, the other can do that for your reasoning. The result is that, rather than adjust your thinking in a few big steps, you adjust it in minor ways with every sentence. It takes time and practice to get used to this, but it can be very productive and enlightening.

On the other hand, I would never avoid long-form debate either. Both have advantages and disadvantages, just as both have mediums where they work and mediums where they don't. Twitter isn't conducive to classical debate, just as hackernews isn't conducive to the iterative thought development style.
What kind of app have you localized?

The increased downloads will allways be relative to the downloads you have in that spesific market before the localization.

It is true that you'll have to spend time doing it, which translates into money. However, I claim that you can do it using only three hours, plus the time it will take you to adjust the screenshots (it will normally be a design job in addition to just changing the text.)

These translators are good at their job. IMHO you won't need to double check their work with other translators.

"If you do iterative and lean development, localizing using freelancers website will really slow down your release cycle."

How come? Because it's freelancers you have reached through a website?
What about Guile?
A Day with Project Ara, Google’s Modular Phone
Commented above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8526930
I'm not sure why it's relevant that you're 2 front end developers? Literally anyone can learn how to program.
xaviel, an example quest would be to create a mobile app UI on behance and get 5 likes and 20 views. This would then reward you experience points in UI design.
With no human lives involved, I guess the cost of the payload is insignificant compared with the rocket, maybe even with the escape rocket.
That's a cynical view. How about: people of every age and level of experience bring what they have to the discussion, and learn from one another. You could do that too, by gently adding your experience to the mix. Doing it without disaffecting your peers gives you extra points.
Yesterday I had to update my rarely used Windows partition and install some software for work.

Virus/Firewall updates, Windows updates, Java updates, repeated forced reboots (four times in total) and playing hunt and peck with all these 'suspicious behaviour' popups, remembering to untick the 'install dodgy toolbar' checkboxes.

I'm starting to feel that a decent package manager is the main reason I continue to use Linux.

/rant
Thanks scriptdevil for pointing this out, I will update the text. It is for now, an email signup.
Of course I do. Make this "opt-in".

Using SSID naming conventions to do this is just dishonest: most of the people who will be scanned won't know what an SSID is. Even if they do, and do have the competence to change it, how many of them will know about this convention? More than this: how many "home network owners" know that their networks are being scanned and georeferenced? This opt-out scheme is ridiculous and plain "hand-washing" - they obviously don't expect people to use it.
> What is a function?

> A function can be seen as a machine that takes in value and gives you back another value. It is what we use in maths to map numbers (input) to other numbers (output).

That's absolutely wrong (mathematically). A function is a relation between two sets, where one value from the first set is related to at most one value from the second set.

It's kind of weird to read discussions on how "functions in programming languages are weird because they're not functions in the mathematical sense", but then you see how for most people a function denotes a machine that performs work in time (all physical concepts), rather than the idealised mathematical definition. Doubly weird when the author is someone trying to explain calculus and has presumably sat through a lot of high-level mathematics classes.
The thing that kills me about Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Borders, etc. is how they are slowly expanding the toy section of the stores. It's pretty much gotten to the point where they are stocking so few books I want, there is no point in making the trip. I would go in hopes of getting the book now instead of waiting a couple days for shipping.

Every-time they said, "Sorry sir, we don't have that book in stock, but we can order it for you" I would excuse myself from the conversation, load up the amazon app while walking, and have it ordered before I had my car door open.
For added effect, add a couple lines to set volume to max and play a loud high-pitch sine wave 400ms before image is snapped. The purpose of this is two-fold: hilarious portraits (albeit, at the cost of one's eardrums) and skinnerian conditioning resulting in improved code checking habits. Always analyze code before running it.
Agreed! It's important to get them to understand how your app works. Ideally they should download your app, read comments, blog posts, everything that relates to it.

It will make it cheaper and better.

Interesting website. Do you get to communicate directly with the translators?
No surprise. The pedantic nature of your complaint is common on HN.

I found the post to be perfectly clear. Perhaps you are looking for more information, and found it elsewhere, but it doesn't affect the quality of the post at all.

In my day, posts like yours would be considered'trolling'. If you have complaints with the article, communicate with the author. Why subject everyone to your random complaints?