skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In which we see a difference between EU and US law. US antitrust law exists to protect the consumer. EU antitrust law, evidently, exists to protect other competitors.
Looks like the winning team hacked the hackathon by finding a solution to the problem of "how to win a hackathon" in a clever way. I say well played. If the judges accepted this PDF entry, and it was within the rules, then it's very bad sportsmanship for the other contestants to say they didn't deserve a prize. The fact they didn't write any code makes absolutely no difference at all. Hackathons are about finding solutions to problems, not writing code.
Europe is targeting Google under antitrust laws but missing the bigger picture
How do you feel about this quote from the article?

“Imagine if your vehicle registration fee was done the same way,” Mr. Bankman asked in a recent interview. “Imagine if the state said, ‘Go to your car, find your VIN number and then look at this table that has different tax rates to find out how much you owe.’ If they did, people would probably need to hire an expert for that too.”
Flights. Mail. Cloud services. Office suite software. Etc.

Imagine that you search for "orlando new york flight" and the first result is rigged to be Google Flight Search. Or you look for "cloud database" and Google Cloud SQL is first.

Google is trying to get into a lot of markets, and its dominance in search could give its many other ventures an advantage.
The issue is that Google is default on Chrome.

I'm not convinced that's an issue. A user has to specifically choose to down the Chrome browser for free. At which point it defaults to Google search, and you can trivially change it to use another search engine. The "issue" sounds really thin to me.

Their charges against Android are coming soon, they've launched an official investigation into Android app bundling as well.

So, what relevance does that have here then?
Have you watched The Layover on the Travel Channel? Its format is similar to what you describe.
Yeah, I didn't see that there was a previous post; sneaky. In any case, that just accentuates my point, really. Were this more automated, the businesses wouldn't need to file either. If forms were handled more like an API, i.e. filed when expenses/income happens, it would all be live info.

The government bitches about the digital age stealing their income, but they're not even trying to adapt. Nobody anywhere should have to "file" anything. The very act of buying and selling means it's already on file somewhere, and that means a live view is possible.

Unless you're using computers from 1960...
Smart dust is here
> The Constitution was clearly written by people fearing a new tyrannical government (see 2nd amendment).

The original text of the Constitution was written by people tired of the failings of a weak government and wanting to replace it with a much stronger one. The bill of rights, including the 2nd Amendment, was written to mitigate the fears of a significant but somewhat less prominent faction that feared that without the express boundaries it provided, a stronger central government would become too strong.
Hmm, that doens't sound bad.
I don't remember (nor fully understood) why it was that complicated at google. At a wild guess it's ultimately connected to google's choice to keep all company code in a single humongous repo, which required a lot of later creativity to keep P4 from collapsing under the weight...
Millions Invested in Estonian Startups After Boom in Tech Industry
For background, my last few years experience were in Scala and I'm now writing golang systems.

Item 1:

Both golang and scala communities are large enough now that you aren't dealing with lack of community as an issue. There are very bright people working in both communities and there is a lot of passion for the languages. Unlike something like Java or Php, if you are working in one of those languages it is largely because you want to be. That said, I'd say both communities suffer from an abundance of arrogance that is above normal for other languages.

Item 2:
You can learn go in a couple of hours. Its warts are obvious on casual inspection and typically if you aren't doing something the "go way" you will pay for it. This usually isn't a practical problem but occasionally the "go way" leaves you stuck.

It took me a solid year to learn Scala to the point I would call myself competent. I still have zero degree of confidence in dropping into an existing Scala project for the first time. Part of that is a design decision as there is "no" Scala way. Part of that is the community itself has a large contingent of language tinkerers who will try out experimental features. But I've never seen a problem that couldn't be solved in a Scala code base in an "elegant" way. Incomprehensible is also easier in Scala.

Item 3:
I doubt there is any way to predict this and it is largely not the way I would choose a language.

Personally, golang the language irritates me like crazy. I do like the simplicity for small web services or cli tools though. If something starts approaching the "bash is too much" here, I happily do a quick golang program. This is more a function of the go tool chain than anything else, but if golang has proven anything, its that the tool chain matters.

Conversely, I doubt I will ever write a system again in Scala. I'm glad I did, and learning Scala made me hone some development chops I wouldn't have otherwise, but it isn't something I love programming in (even though it doesn't irritate me like golang does).

My advice would be to learn Scala, but that is largely because I think paradigm shifts are more long term rewarding than language/framework shifts. Golang hasn't taught me anything I didn't already know and if you do need to learn it for a job or something it isn't hard to do.
> ...Apple...they want you to interact with your stuff...

I don't think you really made the case for this. How exactly do you equate using pinch-zoom to "interacting with my stuff" rather than "interacting with Apple's software"?

I feel like I own my Microsoft products way more than my Apple products. Whenever I use Apple's stuff, I feel just like an apartment renter who isn't even allowed to control my own thermostat.
Damnit. I'll double-check on my side too and update my answer accordingly. I don't want people to think they're safe if they're not!
Yes, it makes no sense at all. It's akin to a business which provides you services asking you to prepare an invoice yourself, then sending you an invoice along with a fine if you missed something. They already know everything relevant about you (except perhaps donations and such, which you can fairly easily tack on) so I don't see why anyone would prefer the current mess that we have to deal with. It doesn't help that state taxes are non-uniform and weirdness often results if you live in one state and work in another, for example.
Suspects Behind Nazi-Loving Android Malware Arrested in Russia
Do people still use foursquare or is this about something else? I don't know anyone who still uses it. At work, I once remember a time when people were competing for most check-ins at the coffee place across the street, or even our building itself.

Now, nobody ever mentions it.
The problem is that people don't have control of what services they use. The vertical integration model, used quite successfully by both Google and Apple, is specifically designed to make it unfavorable or impossible to use competitors.

At least under the US definition, the practice of "tying" is illegal when you use your monopoly position in one market to try to monopolize another market. By using Search to prioritize promoting their other services, they are trying to capture other markets through their dominance in Search. This is what the law was written to prevent. Most of my issues stem with how they do this in Android though, which is a separate investigation the EU is conducting.

Google's Search behavior hurts consumers in a lot of ways. Since Google is the front door to the Internet, effectively, particularly in Europe where their market share is nearly uncontested, being an unfavorable result in Google prevents you from adequately competing. Being "penalized" by Google Search for any reason can put you out of business.

And Google is now trying to exact their will on the entire Internet through penalizing sites in Search as a means of activism. For example, choosing to penalize sites for not using HTTPS, or penalizing sites for not using "mobile responsive" design, which has at best, subjective appeal.
Thington
But wouldn't "reasonable" comments trigger an "oh crap this person is like me" alarm?
To Promote Diversity, Apple Increases the Number of WWDC Scholarships
Deploying this sort of thing in production on the other hand seems to be a Windows specific idea.
You'd like to toss out all of the women-focused (and I'd guess minority-focused in general) programs, but I'd be curious how much the people for whom those events/groups are intended generally feel.

I think it's safe to say they sprung up in response to a market need--they didn't just come out of nowhere, for no point, and suddenly gain a lot of traction (because nothing does)--so how well do they work overall?

I, unlike you, am not interested in dismissing them all, because I have seen lots of times how young white dudes get to run the show, and end up dismissing everyone who doesn't look like them, regardless of so-called merit.

So I wonder...how much was this one an isolated "done wrong" event?
You're being downvoted but your right. It's unfortunately hard to not sound like a crackpot on this sort of issue, because there are a lot of relativity-is-wrong crackpots.

As far as special relativity goes, the aether ends up being equivalent to a having preferred rest frame. It's not wrong, but it's unnecessary. You still have the light speed limit and length contraction and time dilation and all the same math (which is an unfortunately post-hoc insight), they just take on a different philosophical character. PhysicsForums has a good summary [1]:

> Both BU and LET use the Lorentz transform, etc., to make all of their experimental predictions, and therefore they are scientifically indistinguishable, making the same experimental predictions in all cases. Because of this experimental equivalence, there is little if any serious ongoing debate between the two in professional physics circles (although the philosophy literature does have ongoing debate).

For me the intuition pump for BU=LET was reading The Strange World of Classical Physics [2]. Notice that, by the end, as more things are considered, it's sounding more and more like relativity...

All that being said, I agree with the PhysicsForums policy. It's a pointless debate. Switching between BU and LET might give you some intuitive understanding, but day to day you end up using special relativity because it's a lot more mathematically elegant. Plus I have no idea how you'd make the aether work with general relativity.

1: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-the-pfs-policy...

2: http://www.aetherambler.net/strange.htm
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102588909?trknav=homestack:topnews:7

additional info
[Duplicate] (except this is using the mobile subdomain)

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380232

Mods, is it possibly to merge these two discussion?
You can at the Gravity Bar [0] but with this route you don't pass the entrance so it's all good :)

[0] http://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/Index.aspx
I see no mention of Kibo, who was an early (Usenet) presence projection who also (2005ish) eventually pretty much disappeared. I wonder if it's the fame or the sustained effort after fame has peaked. It seems exhausting.
We still have embedded 8-bit. Expect embedded 32-bit approximately forever.
Let's be honest, the tax code is used as the means to influence social/economic decisions, without having to impose any laws. Even take gay marriage as an example...many states do not allow it still, however; because the IRS has said you can file married filing joint as a gay couple...as long as you were married in a state that allows so, even if you re a resident of a state in which it's illegal, you're good to go. This by itself pretty much made gay marriage legal nation wide. This is just an example, not that gay marriage should or shouldn't have been made legal, but should it be done in this way... using the tax code instead of ratifying the actual laws. It's a long, dark road we have started down with this method, and something needs to be done about it.
Ahh yeah, that should have been obvious. Thanks!
Seems to be how many Federal forms work: Fill out this form accurately, under penalty of perjury. We already know all this information, but reserve the right to prosecute you if your answers don't match ours. Don't forget to sign.
The "issue" with regard to the browser wars in 201x has always been thin. That idiotic "ballot" thing that European Windows users had to deal with? Yeah. God forbid a modern OS come with a web browser.
Of undocumented Chrome features and unreadable W3C specs
Estonia is like a peacock – small in size but full of impact in appearance
The author writes: "After deliberating, the judges announced a new “Most Inspirational” category" but this category is not new. The author seems to have misinterpreted the course of events. Based on clicking the blog's twitter link, this is the hackathon attended by the author:

https://2013.spaceappschallenge.org/location/new-york/

https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/location/new-york/

https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/location/new-york-ny/

And the project in question that didn't deserve the award, in the author's opinion: http://aekblaw.wix.com/asteroidascent

they also have a sample curricula http://media.wix.com/ugd/57f674_99d136685bfe400f80022bc3652e...

and a code repo https://github.com/spaceappsnyc/asteroidascent
It is largely not a problem for that because Scala's incremental compiles are reasonable and test time dominates build times in either case.

The speed of the go tool chain becomes a huge asset when it comes to integrating with other tools. This allows freedom to use the environment you as a developer want to use. Being able to work exclusively in vim/tmux after years of needing intellij to be productive is a breath of fresh air.
On Windows, the linker has an option to do that.
The problem isn't primarily the government's thinking around computers or technology. It's the lobbying standing in the way.

Obama could force Congress' hand via an executive order, to get the ball rolling on tax reform. They would dive in to begin fighting for their interests rather than be left behind. He won't do it because he's just as susceptible to lobbyists as any of the other major politicians in DC.
You're talking about a company that, within the last year, lost its CTO/first employee, COO, head of bizdev and head of PR, whose top early investors (Union Sq Capital and Andreessen Horowitz) sat out the last round, and that the press (including TC) were openly talking about running out of cash in 2013.

My only point being, no need for Yahoo to dump negative PR.
Do you pronounce smt88 as "S-M-T eighty-eight" or "smart-dude-who-knows-his-shit eighty-eight?"
ok great idea thanks!
What is a Search Engine? Is this some kind of legally regulated category that says you a) must only return Web results and b) in the form of 10 blue links?

Should a search which a search engine knows the direct answer to (word definitions, the current weather or time, etc) send you to another site for the answer. Why are "search engines" prohibited from direct answers, but voice agents like Siri allowed? Is there something fundamentally different between a text box and a voice input?

Likewise, if a search engine has indexed data and can return deep links to other sites formatted differently, why is that different? For example, if you search for "Playstation 4" and Google simply returned the first 10 hits (Amazon.com, eBay, Walmart, etc) as a page of 10 blue links like it did in 2006, instead of formatting them in a nice box at the top of the screen with summary price extracted, would this still be illegal? Why is it legal to display organic search results as blue links, but if you display them in a box and call it "Product Search", it's suddenly illegal? This makes no sense to me. The only difference between the Google Product Search box at the top, and displaying the links is simply better visual presentation.

The world has moved on from ten blue links. Mobile devices have even more constrained real estate and network latency pushing the need for summarization and smart presentation even further. A new class of consumer expects these devices to almost act like intelligent agents when answering queries.

Is the European Commission saying it will be illegal to build JARVIS or the Star Trek computer, because a smarter search that doesn't delegate to other niche search engines, and instead returns direct answers, is unfair competition?

At the heart of this seems to be the idea that Google search should return links to other shopping comparison engines instead of direct links to Amazon, et al. That frankly seems like a good way to hurt customer experience. If you have a good product comparison engine these days, you're probably going to end up as a native app anyway.

By the time this EU case winds down (Microsoft's took a decade), the traditional web search engine might not even exist anymore.
> What would be a viable way for Google to fix this that doesn't hurt users?

If they are prioritizing Google Shopping results, as is alleged, stop doing that or otherwise biasing search results to favor Google products.
Do you have evidence for someone being branded sexist for merely not bending over backwards to prove that they aren't?

Serious question. I have never seen it.
I didn't know about patio11's podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kalzumeus-software-podca...), subscribed! Great article.
Building an Open Product for Power Users
The salary was an exaggeration, and really doesn't mean anything. What is $100k in SF? At the end of the day, aren't you better off making half that in a less expensive area?

What bothers me most is the idea that coding is just a random skill that anyone can pick up over a weekend just by reading an O'reilly book. There is a push to make coding look easy, "anyone can do it, why not you?" "Let's teach it at school, even a 4th grader can pick up python". The goal is clearly to increase the supply and help tech companies drag wages down. But coding is not easy.

I may be foolish but to me developer is a creative work, akin to writing a book, or a song, or painting. Not everyone is gonna be good at it. Would we say "yeah writing poetry is easy, just go to a poetry camp for 4 weeks"?
Maybe they should include LinkedIn integration to avoid awkward encounters.
Not when you take into account that the tax form needs to include instructions, and any necessary tables.

> Flat isn't the simplification -- elimination of the billion deductions is the simplification.

If you have deductions, it isn't a flat tax. "Flat" typically implies both rate and lack of deductions.
I personally would like to see a distribution have a mixed policy -- dynamic linking against core libraries that are part of the default / basic OS install, and static linking against low usage libraries. That way, you keep the "update one library package to fix a bunch of programs", yet you also reduce cross dependency issues by limiting the number of library packages a given program is dependant on.
I assume there was a skip button on it, but it was a terrifying thing to be hit with. Even if it maybe picked just your top five skills to ask you about and offered to let you add more with a list or something. It's probably the appearance of the size of the thing.

But some of the hyper-detailed profile options may be better to ask people to add to their profile post-registration, so you can get people into your site as quickly as possible.
> The percentage of people who save money by itemizing deductions is extremely small

I don't know where you're getting that. The only number I can find on it is an unsourced assertion that more than 60% take the standard deduction [1], which still implies that on the order of 1/3 of taxpayers itemize. Hardly "extremely small".

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/tax-tip-choose-standard-deduc...
I also used Turbotax this year, and like every year at the end when asked how the process could be improved I made a similar, albeit less convincing, argument to FreakyT's. This is my 4th year of telling Turbotax I hate them after using them.
Have you used tripwolf? It covers everything that I'm aware of wanting
Another day of software development
They are technical issues that become competitive issues because of the presence of a strong, vertically integrated competitor. And I highly doubt Samsung's ability to create a competitive ecosystem; they have had the chance across a number of product categories and failed.

Developers having to do work is absolutely a competitive issue: it's erecting a barrier to entry through regulation because it drives up the cost of developing an Android app. For many developers, it would likely drive the cost beyond the point of feasibility.

And the market is likely at the point where even if the restrictions were relaxed, companies wouldn't take advantage of them because the market has already settled on Google and Apple. But if they were relaxed, it would likely be the end of Google's support of AOSP, which would further hamper the ability of OEMs to develop their own platforms / ecosystems.
Possibly, but it's also an opportunity to flex their social graph and entice other services to use it.

I think that's more in their interest than buying Tinder outright.
How about this: NO

The IRS needs to go away. It is an organization responsible for the execution and enforcement of the enslaving of the American people.

Our tax system has devolved from "let's collectively pay for our expenses" to a system using financial punishment for behavior modification. Freedom my ass.

The other problem is that, through attrition, people have become comfortable with taxing just about anything, even farts:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/11/republicans-warn-of-a-fede...

Not only do we have to kill off or massively reduce the size and influence of the IRS, we need serious controls on how government spends our money. Government is huge beyond belief and grotesquely inefficient. Of course, the crown jewel of this and what probably brought it home for a lot of people is the ridiculous cost and mess that the Obamacare website became.

How should we pay for running the country? A flat tax is one idea. A consumption tax is another.

I personally think that no government should take more than 20% of your money. In our case this would include state and federal added up. Government needs to be the most frugal, efficient and effective enterprise in a country, not the most wasteful, inefficient and ineffective organization, which is what we have.
No, but then I don't use either Google Search or Amazon for much online shopping -- mostly, I go directly to an appropriate (more focused than Amazon) retailer, though sometimes I use Google Search to find a retailer if I'm searching for something where I don't already know a set of retailers to check.
Tangent: please use progressive jpegs when appropriate. That is image backgrounds, images necessary for navigation etc. Or actually, when in doubt just go progressive.
The 'Rocket Man' of NASA
Understanding Nokia’s Plan to Buy Alcatel-Lucent
I can see that perspective from one angle. But I still come back to the fact that it's trivially easy to not use Chrome or Google search. There is no barrier (such as cost or method of delivery like in the old days of the browser wars) to prevent a user from making the switch.

And wouldn't this all be an issue for a company like Amazon as well? They are a marketplace, yet they also make tablets, e-readers, have a video-streaming service. Aren't they using their position as a online retailer to push their products in other markets over other company's products?