skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an Android developer, I don't want to have to ask for as many permissions as I do. I have 1 button buried on 1 screen that allows you to call customer support. 99.9% of users never click the button. However, I have to make every single customer accept the CALL_PHONE permission.

There are a bunch of permissions required for basics like autocompleting the users email for login, or checking the network state so you can adjust the app behavior based on connectivity.

Not to mention the incentives are all wrong in the Play store. Changing permissions murders your update rate, so you want to do it as little as possible. So when you are forced to add a permission, you grab a bunch of extra ones you 'plan' to use later to avoid having to get over that hump again. It's really awful.
> His current job is not relevant to the suit.

They probably are bringing it up since it's twice now that a high profile Yahoo executive has been sued for fraud.
I read the grandparent post as "People in Silicon Valley often have the unrealistic expectation that everything a previously-successful entrepreneur does will succeed. When their first try inevitably doesn't work, this poisons the well for subsequent refinement and iteration. As a result, previously-successful entrepreneurs are creating startup labs to set the expectation that everything coming out of it is an experiment and insulate themselves from the PR backlash of trying some dumb ideas to get to a good one."

Which is not at-odds with your comment, although as a previously-successful entrepreneur, perhaps you can speak to whether or not there really is that backlash and premature judgment that he posits.

(Personally, as someone without much of a brand name, I relish the freedom that gives me to try stupid stuff. There's no way I'd be brave enough to try my current startup attempt - which is really quite humble - if everyone expected me to invent the next big thing.)
It's certainly possible, but it's unlikely. The Lyft driver's own assets are likely small, and most lawyers suing the driver would rather settle for an amount within the $1 million insurance policy, rather than risk getting nothing by going to court to try to get more than the insurance policy.

Even many doctors don't have malpractice insurance above $1 million (depending on speciality and state) -- most policies are $100K-$300K/claim, $1MM-$3MM/all claims (http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/3/5/274.full). So Lyft is providing more liability insurance than many doctors carry.

If you're demanding absolute 0% risk for the Lyft driver financially, this would not cut it, but very little anywhere is absolutely no risk.
Sources? I've seen first hand the limits of the 'data' we had at school. Papers constantly citing in their experiments: "the largest real world graphs we are aware of are on the order of 1B vertices" (a twitter graph, from something like 2011. The other highly cited one is the live-journal graph).

There's a massive dearth of data in academia. This is also why you see people like Kleinberg working directly with facebook on network research.
Not even close. That same site says that Englebart first constructed a mouse in 1963, 5 years earlier than that demo.

http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/firstmouse.shtml

Englebart's work wasn't secret; various other people may have constructed their own mice after 1963, and yes, that sort of thing is interesting.
Map: Where Can You Find an Affordable 1 Bedroom Near BART?
I don't understand the basics of signal processing either. Any tips for good literature/videos about signal processing for image sampling like this?

> Looks like he made the classic log/linear error too.

It's converted from linear space to "gamma space" before writing the image, if that's what you mean:

> img = np.where(img <= 0.0031308, 12.92img, 1.055img(1.0/2.4) - 0.055)
Replacement Dell Inspiron 8600 Battery ( 5200mAh )
Replacement Dell Inspiron 910 Battery ( 4800mAh )
Programming languages in the modern sense are different to programming languages of, say, 20 yrs ago. If a language sits atop the JVM or generates Javascript, it's a "new programming language" in the modern sense but probably wasn't considered one previously. And nowadays, a "programming language" needs a visual IDE or plugin, rather than just a syntax, to be considered more than just a toy.
My wife and I spent hours looking at them when SF MoMA had an exhibition a few years ago and we both left the exhibit pretty frustrated. They just don't speak to me, whereas I could stare at a Jackson Pollock painting for ages. Well, de gustibus non est disputandem and all that...
So, at one point when I worked at Yahoo, there was an organization called, "SDS." Near as I ever could tell, there were consultants were were at Yahoo and also employees (double dipping in similar fashion) but that could have been my misinterpretation of things. There were a few people who were contractors, then employees of the company, and who's former company still had contractors working at Yahoo at the time. It's interesting to see this happen now, so many years since I've worked there.
Raspberry Pi Chromecast Remote
Isn't this the conventional way of converting variables which have been coerced to their numeric representations back to time/date classes?
I'll echo/amplify that last point, not that tptacek needs echoing here or in the infosec community. If you're able to do some real research and put together a paper then do it. It just gets better with age.

Its very nice to hear people say that something you put out years before has influenced their work, or given them a good starting point. I'd wager that if you've spoken at a couple of those top conferences you'll have little trouble finding any work you'd want.
Because of iOS's sandboxing, it's really hard for apps to get info outside of their own "container" of sorts, so it doesn't matter much if they can access the Internet. Keyboards from third parties are an obvious exception to this, so these require explicit permission to access the Internet.
If they are USB then they support HID
Vapnik is philosophically not big data. SVMs are data efficient, at the cost of O(n^3) partitioning algorithms. His work has been more about maximizing the utility of the data you have.
> The reason you sign packages is to ensure that the file you want and the file you get are actually the same. If you have a secure connection to the trusted host of said file, you don't need to worry about that.

HTTPS provides a secure connection, in theory, but what if AMO is itself compromised? They are just a 3rd party host for the EFF's extension, after all.

HTTPS or not, the only way to check that the code you get from AMO is the same code the EFF gave AMO, is to check it against the EFF's signature.
he was focused on making stuff that actually looked good on people's walls

I'm sure you have A/B test data to prove this claim :-)
Rob Pike: Concurrency is not Parallelism [video]
> It is pertinent to note he is CIO of yahoo as there would probably be repercussions to yahoo if he gets convicted

They may even drop him before/even-if-not convicted. It's bad PR for Yahoo to say the least. (and it's unlikely that such a bold/public claim will end up being completely meritless)
Or more tersely use := and = to distinguish them.
> No charity is required. Infact it is profitable to hire this guy. What is required is getting rid of pointless constraints.

Pointless constraints like being a reliable employee?

> Part time? You get a talented developer for 30 hours a week, paying the same hourly rate as everyone else.

Why would you want a part time engineer if you can have an (at least!) equally talented full time engineer?

> Working from home? Depending on the role he may be even more productive than those in the office.

If you want an employee that can work from home, there are plenty of them that won't be sick half the time.

> I have just two more words to say about it: 37 Signals.*

What does 37 Signals have to do with anything? There's nothing to indicate that cargo culting a small aspect of their company's working model has anything to do with creating a similar outcome.
it happens all the time. multiple (larger) companies i've worked for have had these scandals come to light.

the shady LLC or sometimes offshore corporation just recognizes it as normal revenue.
"...able withdraw more money than they had in their account...Most so-called ACID databases — for example Postgres, MySQL, Oracle or MS SQL Server — would not have prevented this race condition in their default configuration."

The author didn't really show that this was true. He obviously understands isolation well, so I would tend to believe him, but it would be nice to see an example.

In a simple case (not sure that it matches the exchange's case), postgresql in any configuration will prevent this problem:

CREATE TABLE account(
id int8,
balance numeric, check (balance >= 0)
);

No matter what concurrent activity you have going on, it's impossible (as far as I know) to end up seeing a balance less than 0. That's actually true in any isolation mode that postgres supports (read committed, snapshot isolation, and truly serializable).

Does someone have a counterexample, or more details about the case at the exchange that would not be solved by postgres?

I'd also like to point out that the postgres's implementation of true serializability performs quite well and there isn't much of a cost to using it over snapshot isolation.
I think when you're a developer across a product, it can seem like you're just building features / fixing bugs with no real human connection to the "why" of your actions.

I don't know if you can ask your management, but as a total outlier solution, you could try to spend some time listening to CS calls that come in. You didn't even have to participate on the call, just listen.

Ive found this greatly increases motivation as you actually start to see the need of why you're doing what you're doing. Most products / businesses are not really going to change the world that much, but hearing how something you built is actually helping someone's life can be very rewarding.
I think he/she means that companies like Google, Apple and Tesla are all US-based, not to mention crazy/niche stuff like Oculus. Europe-based high-profile tech companies (like Nokia and Skype) seem more like outliers than the norm. The US seems to be the "technology king", so to say (disclaimer: I'm not an American).
I think these type of things are going to continue to grow. As people become more mobile and move around the country, to get together for holidays they have to travel. And travel has become increasingly painful, especially around holidays. Between the TSA, flight delays, and uncomfortable seats, I've cut down on my air travel quite a bit.
Mark Zuckerburg was offered multiple millions for his earlier business than Facebook...which was his third, not first, business. And yes, starting a business is in fact very easy. For a variety of reasons, I'm technically on my eleventh business...so three of them, all bootstrapped. The idea of raising money is appealing, as it would potentially mean not having to balance between client custom consulting revenue and working on product in my, "Free time." However, until you launch, prove the market, see real results, etc, it's all just a very nice sounding hypothesis.
This is amusing and then impressive (and still safe for work).
We use Slack. You obviously can't track between timezones (if you're asleep & they're awake), but like others said, you need to measure results not time.

If you don't trust your team, you've hired the wrong people.
Plus ten internets to you sir, may this comment go viral. We've been reviewing the article as a team...but, this simple fact had been missed. My cheeks hurt from laughing right now.
Thanks for your input. I disagree with a lot of Hacker News on syntax though. Syntax can be learned and is not a hurdle for anyone who is seriously into programming, but I believe it keeps people away from programming who would be interested otherwise. I also think that readability is more important than writeability since maintenance is so important with any big project, and syntax is a piece of readability (though only a piece).

I agree other things beyond syntax are more important though, but I think I have enough interesting pieces of ideas that I want to put them all together and see what the big picture looks like. Perhaps it will stay a toy language, or perhaps it will grow beyond it. Some of those ideas I haven't written down here either. One in particular that gives it hope for evolving beyond a toy language is a way to write small wrappers around C code to link it into Kitten code, so with a small amount of effort all of the impressive Microsoft libraries should be accessible for Windows computers at least.

I'll have to check out Scala, I don't know much about it. Also a couple languages I am really interested in right now are Nim and Crystal, a lot of my ideas share a lot with those two newer languages, a more static-y compile to C language than most newer languages.
Queue final fantasy style bazaars where people stand around all day yelling "SELLING X FOR Y".
"Lately, however, a new formula has begun to take hold, one that challenges the very idea of how a business should be built. It plays out quite differently: you start a business, your business experiments with lots of ideas, many ideas fail but some succeed, you turn these ideas into new businesses, and the formula repeats on its own. Or at least, you hope it will."

Where I am confused/interested is how the investment/ownership works in this case. So if I start a company, discover a great business/product and then create another company around it, I would assume that the investors in the original company would get the same percentage in the new company?
I remember when this was called carpooling. Weird to put the branding on it. But these days nothing counts unless it's in service of some corporate brand.
Gas turbines are in fact used for direct electrical generation. In a combined cycle plant, the waste heat from the gas turbine exhaust is used to generate steam for a steam turbine.

For example:
http://www.cpsenergy.com/services/natural_gas/natgas_generat...

Gas turbines are useful for peaking load, because they can be started and stopped quickly, relative to pure steam turbine generation.
Michael Brown IMO
> Everything else is pretty much a dude screwing around with getpixel/setpixel

That's not very constructive. Can you point where he did that? For reference, source code is here: https://gist.github.com/Reedbeta/893b63390160e33ddb3c.

> without understanding basic signal processing.

I got the impression he approached it from visual pleasantness point of view. Which is more than perfectly valid when generating images for people to look at. In that business, if it's fast to compute and looks visually good to human eyes, it is perfectly acceptable to do a slightly "wrong" thing from signal processing point of view. At least until we have infinite computing resources.

I didn't read the source code, but judging by the article and images, he did appear to understand signal processing and sampling theorem. He appeared to look for a better sampler for a scan-line (think Pixar Renderman) or ray-tracer renderer (think POV-Ray).

My take is to have per pixel adaptive sample count as a function of standard deviation in certain sample radius larger than a pixel. Oversimplified, the higher the deviation, the more samples should be taken until the contribution is below some adjustable threshold. For example in a real ray-tracer you probably want to consider other variables as well, such as computational cost per sample. Ultimately the problem in visual renderers is how to get the best visual quality for computing resources available.

> Looks like he made the classic log/linear error too.

I can't see any telltale sign of doing linear processing for log space data in the images themselves. They all look correct. Retina / high-dpi display? Make sure your web browser is not resampling the images linearly in log space! Or worse, your monitor or graphics adapter, in case you're using a non-native resolution.
A number of power plants in the U.S. generate electrical power by burning natural gas in a turbine.
I expect they will refund . . . or you can do a charge back by contacting your credit card company and explaining you didn't authorize the charges . . . in the future they should think about using a pre-paid card for in game/app store purchases . . . and explain to their son the value of money . . . maybe relate what he spent to the mortgage or family's monthly income.
"Commercial" is only expensive because higher mileage is higher risk. If you aren't doing a lot of miles per year, it won't be more expensive. Lyft's insurer probably has some mileage math worked into the premium. Or Lyft self insures and knows exactly how much mileage they are covering.
The University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection
God, I'm a lonely programmer.
I really want more things like this to exist, but I can't say exactly why or what I would use them for.

I feel the same way and have enough spare cash to back it. Twald's explanation makes some sense, but really I think this is the essential part: "That means that we can explore completely new user interfaces, ones that are perfectly designed for the person and their needs," because I translate it to mean, "We don't entirely know what'll end up happening."

I'm happy existing in that state of ambiguity, however, and for $100 it seems worthwhile to find out what the future might hold.
(speaking just to size, not RPM:) The square-cube law causes the burning gasses in a larger cylinder to bleed less heat away into the water jacket compared to a smaller cylinder. This is the primary reason why the largest diesel engines in the world are also the most efficient.

Theoretically, the 14-cylinder Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C could be even more efficient if it were instead a gigantic single cylinder. There must be some other engineering or economic limitation which prevents us from manufacturing 25,000 liter cylinders.

edit: example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law#Engineering_exa... "Watt recognized the problem as being related to the square-cube law, in that the surface area of the model's cylinder surface to volume ratio was greater than the much larger commercial engines, leading to excessive heat loss"

edit2: There is also a square-cube law with aerodynamic losses related to piston speed (how fast the air gets sucked into the engine: "pumping losses"). The slower you spin the engine, the lower your pumping losses are. However, I believe this plays a smaller role in affecting efficiency than the heat losses. (also, this engine is turbocharged, which changes things a bit).
One of my coworkers has a Griffin Powermate[1]. It's corded and the software is a bit clunky but is quite similar, although it functions a bit more like a mouse.
[1] http://store.griffintechnology.com/powermate
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Fearing the Machine
The other reason is that the screw speed for a large vessel is about 100 RPM. It is better if the engine can drive the screw without a reduction gear that would decrease efficiency.

http://www.gizmag.com/go/3263/
I think that's backwards reasoning. If the engine ran more efficiently at 200 RPM, they wouldn't install a transmission, they'd just use a smaller screw.
Although Groovy 2 brought type inference it isn't used much, so Groovy's main use case is as a dynamically typed language as was originally intended by its creator.
Strongly agree.

I order most of my books chronologically. In the far top-left are English translations of works from ~5000 years ago. They're so remote that, though bits and pieces of them survive as faint echoes through the centuries scattered across a hundred peoples, these are dead cultures. These pre-date early dates for the composition of the Torah by better than a millennium. Some of the authors were as ancient to Homer as Julius Caesar is to us. Their literature is often quirky and even alien to a modern reader.

The broad strokes, though? The themes, the underlying humanity of the characters and the author? Rarely do they not feel entirely familiar.

Honoring, pleading with, boasting to, daring, threatening the gods. Terrified of death and eager to make a lasting mark on the world. Writing propaganda, hagiographies, libel and honest praise. Teaching and exploring. Full of doubt, hope, love, hate, pride, jealously, and a sense of justice.

Funny, clever, evil little humans.

Just like us.
It must be nice having friends. I don't have friends in the sense that I do things together socially with them. I have acquaintances.
worse yet, a lot of times the fleeced company sweeps it under the rug. the $X00,000-$X,000,000 that they they were screwed out of isn't worth the hit the stock price takes as the market judges the existing leadership for not catching it sooner. I personally know of a case where a VP did this with contractors to the tune of ~$1.5M at a mega-bank. Just got fired, no pressed charges, no civil suit. Too embarassing.
Immobilier: qu’est-ce qui empêche les Français d’acheter?
It's almost as if their priorities aren't the same as yours.
Compares one ship to another, first engine is described in terms of kilowatts and the next in horsepower. Talks about cargo capacity in terms of TEUs (shipping containers, I guess) rather than gross tonnage, which is the way we've always talked about ships forever.

I know nothing about ships but I suspect this is the shipping equivalent of Information Week.
Looks like the original article's title has been changed: now it says "sues former exec", which is a critical part of the story.

Mods, can you change the title accordingly?
In this situation, addons.mozilla.org is the hypothetical man in the middle so https doesn't protect you.
Solved by flexbox
People should read Rob Pike's "The byte order fallacy," which was already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3796378

http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/04/byte-order-fallacy...
I wonder how Netflix discovered this. Was the new IT director going to end those contracts before receiving the same offer that his predecessor got from the vendor? If so, the smart thing for Netflix to do would be to try the same with all their vendors before going public with a lawsuit.
We have a few products in mind that would instantly add value. Think about your feet or objects and surfaces around you like a table. Why not use them? Why not blend technology into natural things that use more senses than just your eyes and a reduced form of haptics.
Yes, but can it run Docker?
tl;dr

The Netflix suit says Kail, who joined the company in 2011, arranged Netflix
contracts with IT service companies Vistara and NetEnrich, and then pocketed
commissions of 12 percent to 15 percent of the monthly fees Netflix paid
each company.

Netflix says it paid the two companies a total of $3.7 million from 2012
until Kail’s departure, which would mean he could have collected between
$450,000 and $560,000. The suit says he funneled the payments to “Unix
Mercenary,” a consulting company he controls. Netflix said Kail approved all
payments made to vendors.

if true, that's pretty damn shady. And stupid, frankly -- was $0.5m worth fucking your life up? I bet that's about his annual salary. I have to be honest: risking destroying my career, or jail time, for my annual salary isn't even a tiny temptation. You have to get up in the low millions before I need to think about it before saying no...
Aubrey de Grey, 'A response to Kyriazis'
This is one of the reasons why I like to include debugging a problem with a couple of levels of indirection for in-depth technical interviews.