skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>arms export is a pretty sweet way (relatively) for a new country to get some nice cashflow.

Ukraine was delivering relatively modern tanks - T-84 - to Thailand about the time when they outlawed Russian language while its army still had the old T-64. Historic lesson - putting your army on modern tanks should be the first step while outlawing a language of a major minority - second - and not otherwise :)
A very nice reminder that there's no such thing as code without bugs.
"One might argue that ancient Greece and Rome had better societies or at least equal to what we have today"

In both Greece and Rome, slavery was legal and women had next to no rights.

Any society in the West today, with all its imperfections, is way better than anything in ancient Greece or Rome
Same as MS? Maybe they feel they have a better idea on who to trust and thus add and remove certificates as necessary. Maybe they want to sign their own hardware drivers (though, I think those don't use the system CA store). Perhaps they want to offer signatures to customers or software vendors and feel current MS provided CAs are lacking.

More mundane, perhaps there's a cheaper CA that's accepted by some trusts, but not MS. Why should MS be trusted more than $OEM?

OK, fairly weak arguments, but the freedom of doing so is important. Just as it is important that users be able to verify and undo and choose their root of trust.

The concept of a global root of trust breaks down pretty fast. And the OEM can already compromise anything anyways.
Not bad as these things go.
Yes, if this happens, please get this book and also another which describe all the atrocities that it lead to, so nobody in the new civilization ever tries to pull this shit off.
Yeah, I guess if your slaves are a million miles away and you don't see them, it will make you sleep better. Even pretend they don't exist.
By the same note... I haven't bought a sony piece of hardware in years (from what they did with CDs over a decade ago, and how they handled it)... this is a lot better in terms of a technical response, despite stupid upper management and PR response.

Even though the code isn't up to the standards of some.. (with full test coverage, etc)... having a relatively small utility that works is better than nothing.. and anyone here can fork and flush out the project.

I'm not quite sure why they are using other software checked into the repo as opposed to using nuget with restore/pull on build setup... Just the same, it's a decent move.

Putting Superfish and the software in question on the computer in the first place, far more of a bonehead move, but I doubt the people who released this patch are the same ones who decided to include it in the first place. This is how bad our personal privacy has been invaded...
Font Smoothing in Webkit and Firefox
Should is a strong word. Like it or not. lowest common denominator is what get the most eyeballs.
Other than my current rmbp, I've always bought a bigger/faster hdd/ssd and more ram, generally replacing what it came with... using a clean install. Given some of the disdain for their hardware the past two years or so, I'm less surprised by Lenovo's actions.... Which is funny in that I generally suggested their hardware to people in the past.
I've been pondering about this for some time and even more after the introduction of Siri, Google Now, and others. I've come to the conclusion that in the near future (artificially) intelligent personal digital assistants will become THE way majority of people will interact with the digital world. It will of course depend on how good and how quickly the assistants evolve, but the potential in productivity gains and transforming the way we live is too big opportunity to be missed. Imagine having a (real) person that would take care of simplifying and helping you with your digital and real life (calendar, meetings, notes, email, flights and other travel, anniversaries, even small research tasks like buy this or that etc.). It would help you immensely by saving time on the fluff of our daily lives and by allowing you to focus on what you deem important.

Therefore I think one of the most important open source projects of the next decade will be to build such a learning intelligent personal digital assistant. A Linux of our generation if you will.. Otherwise this opportunity will be lost to advertisers and others that have interest in steering movements and behavior of the masses. Does anyone know if such an FOSS initiative already exists?
As a hiring manager, working with other hiring managers, mainly on the interview side:

Job description: Write it out. Hopes and expectations. Be honest when certain experience doesn't really matter. Copy and paste general descriptions of the team's responsibilities are not enough. Be specific where specific skills are needed, and be general but guiding where job development paths are possible.

Speed: You're playing with people's lives. They depend on you for a job. Get your responses out quickly, and don't insist on interview upon interview. If you're not prepared enough in the initial interview to offer the candidate the position after interviewing all other candidates (within a week), make sure the second interview is for a well thought out alternate position. An organization that has 3rd or 4th placed interviews has no respect for a candidate, IMHO, or is poorly planned, or basically doesn't know what it is doing.

Don't make it a competition with 2 to X people in the same room, especially as some of who are in the room may know each other, or know of each other. You simply don't know the relationships of the people seemingly competing 'independently'. If you need to test team work with elementary school style tasks like how to a bridge out of 4 rolls of newspaper, and I don't think you do, do it with the existing team and the candidate, and analyze the team as much as the candidate.
Intro.js: a guided tour for your webapp
Virtually every smartphone comes with numerous pre-loaded apps.

Nothing in the quoted sentence suggests anything other than "people use the apps that come with their smartphone.
I would agree with you if most users understood the concept of trust as it relates to the root certificate store. Very few do, likely less than 1%.

Therefore I believe it must be Microsoft's responsibility to be the singular default trusted entity for the root certificate store shipped to retail consumers as part of Microsoft Windows.

Your slippery slope argument fails because your "small step" would be immediately rejected by the vast majority of the Fortune 500, for starters. It just couldn't happen. It would be unworkable.
"One benefit of being the last one standing is that when competitors close, Schweitzer won much of their business, he says." --quote from OA

I have noticed this with electric organs (Hammond &c), (mechanical) pianos, film camera repair, vintage car maintenance. Legacy tech has a business model associated with it based on longevity! A few can consolidate and eke out the remaining volume aided by the discover-ability the Internet provides. Nice.
Agreed. I was actually expecting Apple to make a car before Steve Jobs said, and was hoping he would live at least until 2020's so he can play a big role in building the car.
> but how important is it to you to find say 5 people
> within the next month or two instead of the next say 6
> to 24 months.

YMMV but generally: really important. If you are at the point where you are looking for five heads, you likely have competition and investor pressure. If you're bootstrapped or have a significant moat, maybe less so, but when I've been in charge of tech at companies, ability to grow my team quickly has been a major KPI, and a reasonable one.

While I am led to believe that the easiest money is in SF, and there are some awesome investment partners, don't assume the best advisers are necessarily there; it's not been true for any of the three industries I've worked in, namely high-end fashion, recruitment software, and news/PR analysis.

Digging specifically in to recruitment, the fact that every recruitment startup appears to be another ATS (Applicant Tracking System) - by far the most competitive space, also the one where the established players will be some of your hardest to displace (the reasons are dull but real (ATSs have long tendrils in to all sorts of business processes)) - seems testament to my hunch that "fixing hiring" companies are being guided by advisers with little in the way of recruitment experience. Possibly I'm wrong, and disruption needs to happen from outside, but the prevailing view that the expertise in tech in SF translates to expertise in every thing seems suspect to me.
The History of Civilization (2007)
This is my favorite syntax highlighting library. The best feature is that it returns a continuation of the code being highlighted which means you can highlight code that's being streamed to you line by line. I couldn't find another library that does that.
The author makes variation in competitiveness out to be a bigger problem than it actually is. Even if one nation is always less competitive than the other (and I am not sure that Spain and Germany would be a good example here), this doesn't have to end up in a situation where one nation can produce a product for less and less and the other nation stagnates indefinitely.

> It’s pretty obvious that Merkel, or maybe her voters, aren’t European enough to accept the fact that Greece will never be able to repay it’s debt, no matter how much they cut their spending.

Most German voters are very capable of accepting this. They think reforms are necessary to prevent the problem from reoccurring, but they don't oppose a haircut per se.

> Far-outish-upon-Grandalf with 1000 inhabitants and a closed factory in the North of England just isn’t a good business for England. But the government still pays for social services, public pensions, roads and schools because the British voters accept that even though far-outish-upon-Grandalf is pretty screwed up, they are after all British and you can’t just throw the poor bastards out of the Commonwealth.

> Carolina is a piss-poor state that needs handouts from the federal government year after year. Last year South Carolina spent $2.34 for every $1 they collected in taxes. Courtesy of the federal government.

EU nations aren't like states in the US. It will be great if some time they become states in a union, but that time is not now. While they're still independent, though, each nation remains able to plan their budget and expenses independently. Sure, there is not much freedom to adjust the currency -- but each nation still has plenty of other tools available to make sure the deficit remains controllable.

I disagree with the notion that the Euro has to fail just because EU nations are not all the exactly the same. I see this crisis as a point where people finally start paying attention to their neighbors in the fiscal union around the Euro, and that should make future crises much less likely and should make the EU more resilient as a whole.
Agreed, IndexedDB delayed the mobile web for 4-5 years.

Mozilla should have just shipped SQLite early and focused of proper file APIs and threading so developers can use any database that can be written in javascript. It turns out that specifying a database API takes years, having people agree on it and implementing it takes some more.

Even today, as IndexedDB is implemented by all browsers, both Firefox and Safari have a quick and dirty implementation written on top of SQLite, giving us less performance on a reduced API. Chrome has LevelDB (which is awesome!) on the backend but the result isn't much faster in my experience. IE I don't remember.
> they're not HN content

HN is explicitly part of YC. If you disagree with that[1], there's always https://lobste.rs or Reddit

[1] I do, to a certain extent, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm actually far more interested in learning how to create firearms and ammo... As sad as it sounds, that's probably a more pragmatic plan.
> All else being equal, a Silicon Valley/San Francisco
> based startup is able to achieve a much higher
> valuation than an equivalent startup outside San
> Francisco.

How sure are you that that's true, and if you are, why do you think that is? Is it really so hard for a founder in - say - Vegas - to get on a plane to SF frequently enough to neutralise any location advantage? If so, sounds like a massive opportunity for a VC to get some really cheap deals (and hence my skepticism).
Umm, if you're using Facebook, it should be fairly obvious that you are giving your information to Facebook. Yes, I call that an informed consent.
> how is Chrome gonna determine a legitimate deployment?

Terms and conditions. The corporate version can not be pre-loaded on computers sold at retail unless explicitly ordered by the customer.

> Just ship a patched version

Again, T&Cs. I believe it's already a license breach to distribute a modified or patched build of Firefox unless the branding is stripped out -- this is why Debian shipped Iceweasel rather than Firefox. The same probably already applies with Chrome/Chromium.
Not to mention that, now that decent 1 bedrooms in commute friendly areas of the city cost $3500, the first $70k [1] of salary is a straight passthrough to the landlord.

[1] at a 40% tax rate, 3.5k/0.6 * 12 = 70k
If that was true, salaries would be high everywhere. They're high in SF because of competition for workers, and because of the high cost of living.

Here's an open secret: companies willing to allow remote working are able to hire in a -fraction- of the time it takes to hire onsite, and often substantially cheaper.
> Same as MS? Maybe they feel they have a better idea on who to trust

How would the consumer know who they're trusting?
I wouldn't use Objective-C as success for anything, given that it is unavoidable in the Mac platform.
That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking, but I didn't want to overstate how much better 5 people starting NOW at a higher rate is than 5 people starting soonish for a lesser rate.

I'm not surprised at all that there are probably better advisers outside of Si Valley for many industries. I'm a little surprised about recruitment, but not shocked at all for fashion or news. SF doesn't really have much in the way of those industries.
> In this case Windows Defender and Lenovo's own tool remove the app + certificate. I think that's certainly "enough" as we're not dealing with malware which has trashed the system in other ways.

You don't know that for sure. Hence, reinstall. Also, why not use a Libre operating system? I've never had my GNU activation fail.
I'm not familiar with the study mentionned, but i don't understand why, in theory, the southern states couldn't lower salaries to have productivity gains ( since pay raises have been the major reason for the loss in the first place).
> We’re going to ignore the corporate market because price isn’t really a deciding point for them. They’re not trying to minimize cost, they’re trying to minimize risk.

This seems like a legitimate point at which to stop and reflect on what market you want to be in :-)
Well, Linux is probably designed to be fault tolerant in the face of disk failure, since that is expected in servers.

I think it really comes down to how the software stack is layered and abstracts over the disk.
A million miles away? Farther than the moon? Sure. I'm confident they don't exist.
> Now that I think about it, the real problem for me seems to be monads.

A very good quick explanation of Monads is given in the first long answer (number 245) at

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28139259/why-do-we-need-m...

Comprehensive introduction:

https://wiki.haskell.org/All_About_Monads
You can build condos in Candlestick Point, but how are people going to get to work?

So where I live (Pune, India), we are also having an huge surge in population due to people moving in for new jobs. We don't really have a housing crunch.

Unlike SF, you are allowed to simply build new housing societies as needed (more or less). Here is NIBM, one of our outskirts, about the same distance from Koregaon Park as Candlestick Point is from SoMa: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8cMeVTIMAEMyzk.jpg:large

Strangely, all these terrifying issues like people being unable to get to work simply don't happen. They take two wheelers, auto rickshaws, or 6 seaters. Housing societies sometimes provide shuttle buses.
... or they could develop badware for Ubuntu.
I've never thought about this with TV, but I've definitely felt it with the radio. There's something about being tuned in that feels like I'm connected to others, or part of a community. If I switch to listening to my own music (even if it's still through an online service like Spotify), it feels disconnected.

I'm not sure how useful this feeling is, and so it may die out, but I wanted to acknowledge that you're not the only one to notice it. :)
I kind of miss the old days when Apple was strictly a computer company.

Undeniably, they've given an amazing contribution with the iPhone and iPad, but Watch, TV, and car are a little too much IMHO.
The theory I've created since being an expat is:

The United States government spends an extraordinary amount of money on stuff that's not really tangible, everything from gargantuan military to corporate level subsidies and interest payments on debt. The ways taxes are now collected have shuffled the obvious burden to individuals earning more than about $640K per year in real wages. The United States has, for decades, ignored & postponed maintenance, repair, and upgrades to infrastructure like Water, Sewer, Roads, Bridges, Rail, Power, and Communication and public facilities like schools, parks, and libraries. The United States is not number one. Not in any of the important metrics about societies that actually matter to regular people.

So, thinking about the average Joe who's paying way more than his parents did in taxes and what does he get for it in return? Not a lot that is visible or even desirable (after all, he's not yet retired and receiving any benefits from Social Security or Medicare) and meanwhile all those things that are desirable and/or visible are in a state of disarray, disrepair, or disrepute. Even the phrase "Good enough enough for government work" has been twisted into its opposite at this point.

Overlay all that on to how obviously disconnected the American political system is from regular Americans and the end result is an alienation which manifested itself in folks not liking to pay taxes.
Sure 380 euro netto is still too high as minimum wage, these HH folks!!
In my opinion it's irresponsible to use highlighters like these. At least when you use them like advertised. Why does no one bat an eyelid at letting the clients handle the highlighting?

The highlighting (lexing) could (and should) be done ONCE at the server. Imagine some high traffic blogs with hundreds of millions of hits combined - all these clients downloading the highlighting libs + lexers for 50 different languages that will never be used on the blog anyway. The wasted energy here is probably even measurable.

Cons when letting the clients handle syntax highlighting:

- Much slower load times

- Wasted energy

- Can fail because of JS crashing

- Noscript users won't get any highlighting (and your blog targets technical users, right? They are more likely to use no script)

- Slow mobile devices will have a harder time loading the site (or depending on javascript engine - failing highlight)

- (if no site optimization is made) the client will download lexers for languages not used on the blog

Cons when the server do the lexing ONCE:

- NOTHING

Note that this rant isn't targeted at Highlight.js. It's a good highlighter - I use it myself at my blog. Except I use it on the server via a CGI script. It took me no more than 2 minutes to set up.
Can you please tell more about your setup? Why a handful of browser plugins were not enough in your case?
America does almost everything exceptionally well, but my understanding is that recruitment can be added to the list of: cellphone service; airlines; consumer banking; Internet provision; justice system... (ironic for the country that gave us such marvels as the iPhone, Boeing, Wall Stret, the Internet, and the U.S. constitution)
How's this different from what palantir is doing?
The EU's competition authority has actually launched an antitrust investigation into this in January 2014: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm

It's a really complicated issue though, but hopefully, geo-restrictions will vanish at some point in the EU, either by legal or political force.
Not hard to raise funds in London...if your startup is in FinTech. Everything else mind...

I've read good things about Berlin, but by-and-large investors in Europe are far more cautious and more heavily taxed than the US.
Instagram is used a lot to promote similar products in Turkey as well. In fact people try to create popular accounts and get advertisements for different products. I see promotions so often in some comic accounts I follow, bothers me sometimes.
Android Screen Orientation
> It is buying market share, without making anything with the money.

Erm. Yes, it's doing something with the money. Buying market share.
I agree, Chinese simplification was extreme, whereas the Japanese simplification tried to retain the idea of the original character. Possibly, an additional political motivation of the simplification was to make it harder to read old literature. This was the same regime that launched the cultural revolution.
>You reload the OS, from scratch, with non-OEM (that is, generic) OS media. Otherwise you will lose.

Good luck getting that from Lenovo.
Totally agree. With Siri, Google Now and Cortana soon controlling most devices, we are in desperate need of a FOSS AI assistant, one that "thinks" outside of the "corporate AI scheme". BTW that would also benefit those using GNU/Linux, *BSD, and Unices - where the corporate AI's will probably never land anyway.
"Few e-commerce specialist investors in Europe seem to be waking up to the mind-boggling potential of e-commerce in Southeast Asia, at least beyond Singapore."

That's because there are huge barriers to overcome for e-commerce in Thailand.

1. Lack of access to bank cards and credit cards that work online. Most people bank here with paper books. This is why 7-Eleven pay (cash for vouchers that work online) and other offline solutions have taken off.

2. People don't trust banks, the sellers and most importantly the Thai postal service to get the item to them. Sure you could use private couriers, but they are prohibitively expensive.

3. It's hard for Companies to find payment processors. Paypal operate in Thailand but are more stringent that other countries because of the fraud that goes on here.
Please elaborate? What about it? (Seriously, I'd like to know what the current perceived issues with winsock are, I'm a bit out of date with Windows security)
When it comes to SSL/TLS, "on all platforms, [they] use NSS's libssl to handle the SSL connection logic... [and] ... platform specific APIs for certificate verification."
Yes, "It needs to do this because of the various corporate web filters and anti virus tools that MITM connections too." <-- this has to go away the sooner the better. Even corporations with a large interest in MITMing their employees (mostly banks, mil, gov) should realize, that this is bad security practice and will lead to all sort of other problems

Banks... imagine the irony.
There's another much simpler option: Greece can go bankrupt, default on it's loans, and start over without the burden of unrealistic debt keeping them in poverty. It can remain in the Euro and everyone can move forward more - perhaps with more prudent lending standards.

Yes, some investors will lose that money. They were happy cashing their cheques when things were going well. Investing is a business with a risk of loss.