skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because we decided as a society that it is. That's why say, the concept of minimum wage exists, and plenty other labor laws. The remaining question, legally, is whether Uber is offering drivers a "job", as opposed to a software platform that they can use to be self-employed as drivers (which is Uber's argument).

If Uber is offering jobs to drivers, then certain standards must be met to avoid illegal employment practices. Then the next question is whether or not Uber actually violates those standards. The answer might be that it doesn't, life can be pretty thought for people in many professions that we have actually deemed 'fair enough' work. But if the answer is that it does, then Uber needs to change.

If 'the sharing economy' is not actually creating employer-employee relations, then it might still need to be regulated (perhaps under different regulations than labor laws), depending what society thinks of the mechanism as a whole. For example, if drivers are self-employed contractors rather than employees, then what gives Uber the rights to fix their wages? Is there such a thing as minimum wage for independent contractors? Who is responsible for things like health insurance for Uber drivers? We have plenty of answers for these questions for the kind of independent contractor that makes $50 an hour, not for the kind that makes $17 a ride. But again, it might well be that the deal as it is can be actually considered fair, compared with for example being a street market vendor or a temp worker at a convenience store. I certainly have met plenty of part-time/retired drivers in the South Bay that consider the deal a fair enough source of extra cash. The point is that we haven't figured out whether or not it is exploitative and that is the sort of question modern developed societies can afford to ask themselves and weight against the benefit of 'it creates some value for some people and pays the bills for some others'.

Edit: I'll add that I use ride-sharing services often, want them to continue to exist in some useful form and am firm believer of 'default allow' as it comes to new business models. But that doesn't mean nobody is allowed to look into whether some new business practices are exploitative or not or that there can be no harm in allowing any voluntary economic transaction.
To expand on this - the Bulldozer FPU is supposed to be SMT, but the integer cores are single threaded; two integer cores share an FPU, making a 'module'.

This is apparently the same scheme that DEC used with one of the Alphas. It's interesting that as respected as (I think) the Alpha was, both Intel (Netburst) and AMD (CMT) tried to adapt aspects of the design and it seems that in both cases it hurt their respective businesses.
This is an example of actual events that are far more interesting than most WWII movies. I fear that scientists today just aren't that cool. That said, I'm not sure I would want to face similar calamity.
Oculus to Ship Virtual Reality Headsets in Early 2016
> As a young person my biggest concern with hiring old people is that exact attitude: this is just like $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH.

Leaving aside the (substantial) ageism issues here, it looks to me like your reading of the GP's complaint is incorrect.

It's not a judgment that $NEW_TECH is going to not catch on or otherwise fail because it's just like $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH.

It's the observation that much of the $NEW_TECH that catches on and succeeds for a time often turns out to offer approximately the same utility as $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH... and similar adoption costs, which we pay over and over again. We rent rather than buy.

There are counterexamples I can think of -- new tools/abstractions/practices I've adopted that have resulted in near order-of-magnitude gains. But the ratio of these to other $NEW_TECH that just sort of shuffles the dirt around... well, that probably approaches another order-of-magnitude relationship.

And there's also the argument about the aggregation of marginal gains (see Brailsford and the British cycling team); approximately the same utility isn't quite the same thing as exactly the same utility and I don't think that should be overlooked. In fact, I think one could put together a specific case that the GP is arguably not correct in making an even comparison between Powerbuilder and webapps on precisely such a basis.

Still, an aggregation of marginal gains approach only ends up helpful if the marginal and opportunity costs are low.

How often do you find that's true for $NEW_TECH over $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH?

And since we're being free with judgments about age here (generalizations, naturally -- not that you or I would ever let such general thinking affect our judgment when it comes to individuals)... do most young developers really have enough knowledge and experience to answer that question effectively?
Thanks. It's funny, I actually started all of this NOT using Git. I wasn't until I was about 3 months into the Python Geocoder I mentioned about did i start to use Git!
I like the structure of the game 2048 https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048 and I think it will be highly instructive for you since it implements the MVC pattern without using a framework, and you want to be framework agnostic. 2048 is simple enough that it's an accessible introduction to software design.

Daniel Janus wrote a great analysis of the source code and architecture; I highly recommend reading it: http://blog.danieljanus.pl/blog/2014/04/02/2048/
I was impressed by both of those papers which is part of the reason I decided to focus on Elixir for now.
Would the result be easily distorted by e.g. (human) bodies standing in-between, or certain materials (e.g. installing it in an art exhibition, but certain art installations use certain materials that can distort the beacon measurement)?
They're not even quantum.
The correct answer is "all of the above".
An Interview with Jack Crenshaw, Author of the “Let’s Build a Compiler”
Yeah man, many people do that. It's just hard because maybe 50 resumes come through and you breeze through twenty githubs before writing down who to call back.

Sometimes -- that's all you get ( a twenty second look), so make sure to explain your story in the cover letter.
yup, me too. we went a step further and used a reaction with copper to create a thin layer of gold on the surface, then dissolved the gold, then extracted the dissolved gold.

the teacher did a spiel about keeping it secret and how we would all be millionaires, then we did the math at how the .000001 gram of gold (or whatever it was... probably less than that) was worth almost nothing compared to the cost of expended chemicals.

oh well.. off to history class.
You think security domain experts don't have the "right" to "bitch" (or perhaps, say, "inform") about potential security problems?

I understand you're trying to "get things done" but crypto is an area where you have to tread carefully, and talking down or ignoring people trying to inform you about security flaws is only encouraging the development of insecure software.
Gold and mercury form an amalgam, so you would still have had something that looks like a big hunk of metal. I suppose you wouldn't have known whose gold that was, but the fact that you had a large chunk of gold-mercury amalgam in the lab would have been not so good.

Edit: Looking at some videos, it appears you could get something that looks like regular mercury. I'm wondering how much mercury you would have needed to solubilize a medal. They may also not have had that much on hand, HCl and nitric acid are way easier to find.
Don't get your hopes up about AVX-512. Apparently, full support is not coming until Cannonlake: http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-sky...
Ask HN: Could .html replace .doc?
Microsoft's strategy under Nadella seems to be a continuation of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It's welcome at first as interoperability between platforms and devices is nice for the end user, but once it's time to Extinguish, what choices will we have to Microsoft and the Office platform, etc., being that much of our information will be stored in those formats.

Anybody wanting to compete with Office has to offer support for .doc, but how about establishing new, non-Microsoft formats?

If a group of competing companies appeared, would their best bet be to work together to create software that uses HTML as their document format?
> Objective-C...Certain printable characters aren’t allowed to be specified with a hex sequence

!who's bright idea was this?
Yup, it came off as an insulting the audience, negative and paranoid.
>But statements like this are one of the reasons people are reluctant to get help. My problem is bullshit. I'm weak. What will people think? Regardless of whether the "reasons" or problems are real (to you) or imagined bullshit, people do kill themselves over it.

How does that change what I wrote? Is it the "to you" qualifier? As if things can't be objectively BS as reasons to commit suicide?

People kill themselves over all kinds of BS and not just by suicide. This includes nationalism, religion, and even as idiotic things as "dares".

In fact Tim in the article even admits about his own situation being BS. And it didn't take some huge experience to make him see that, or treatment, or medication: just a phone call from his mother.

Empathy is understanding that they feel really bad -- it doesn't mean justyfing the causes of that feeling too.

If you want to help people you need to make them see the BS-ness of those things (e.g. a failing grade), not overdramatize them as legitimate life-ending situations for them out of misguided empathy.
Google should have a central support forum and try to focus all the questions into one place.

StackOverflow should not be on your support list at all, for the reasons raised. Having said that, Google should still be on SO answering questions that end up there.

What Google needs to understand is that its long standing public reputation that it has built is an organisation that actively tries to avoid providing support - ever since Google started it has tried to avoid support. That is now the reputation that Google carries into its efforts to woo the developer community.

Google has to be extraordinarily good at developer support to dispel the baseline assumption that developers have that Google really (genuinely) wants to avoid dealing with support questions.

There's a level of cluelessness to Google's support strategy that is concerning. Why, for goodness sake, would it EVER look like a good idea to push support to StackOverflow? Who is doing the thinking behind that sort of decision? It is self evident that Google's support interests and StackOverflow are not the same thing. It's the sort of decision made without really considering the detail, and that is the point about Google's support - it's an afterthought. Kind of like washing the dishes after dinner is eaten - has to be done but we're not enthused about it.

And in the end, lack of support is a showstopper for using a cloud computing platform. If the support looks sketchy then it just isn't worth risking your business by using that platform.
Ask HN: Up to date network security books
I recently came across a stack of free older books on network security:

Cryptography and Network Security - William Stallings
Network Security Foundations - Matthew Strebe
Counter Hack - Ed Skoudis

I am fairly new to the world of network security, but as a developer am interested in learning more. I'm guessing much of the foundational stuff in these books is still mostly relevant but was wondering if anyone can suggest any newer up to date books in a similar vein?
Regardless of police motivation, ethics or behavior, citizen oversight of police activities just makes sense.

In my opinion there should be an officially instituted oversight board with open meetings and elections in every municipality and county in the US. I'm betting we would see a dramatic reduction in the problems caused by police and might just see a drop in crime as well. The average citizen certainly doesn't want police to be unable to do their jobs. But the concerns on accountability and how the jobs are being done is growing.
Empathy is feeling bad for those in that situation.

Not about justyfing their stupid reasons as legit.

Note (and everybody sidestepped it) that I specified that I'm not talking about the clinically depressed.
DO rocks but it's missing one feature: curated images. I imagine a LAMP ninja is able to setup a server that has most security and performance tweaks cooked in. Make that an image and let devs copy it. I've had a few Droplets hacked b/c all I did is what DO wants clients to do: click, build from image, use. Obviously best practices were not followed. I am a dev, I don't have the time nor interest on becoming a web server expert as well.

B/c this missing piece I now moved into a different direction: static sites/apps hosted on S3 that haul the dynamic data from a parse.com account, and I even have Cloud Code on Parse for those little needs that must run server-side.
How did you figure out the underlying condition?
You're brave - talking long term on HN! But so right, in my view.

One of the benefits of the long term view is that it forces you to address sustainability, so you focus on real revenue.

Our startup is now 6 years old. We decided early on that chasing funding meant focussing on the wrong thing, and that we would suck up the pain of little income and slower growth. Being able to focus on the product instead of investors was great, but that slower growth also turned out to be healthy. It meant a better relationship with our first customers, which lead to more useful feedback, a better product, and organic growth that this year will give me 4 times the best salary I ever earned before.

And it's still fun - as well as the financial compensation, we still control 100% of the company so we can do things our own way. We employed one of our support people in a city hit by a devastating earthquake; we carried an agent for a few months while she escaped an abusive marriage; we make a sizeable donation to a kids' charity in lieu of sending out Christmas cards.
I have been thinking of what happens if exceptions to price fixing laws was allowed.
Unsure how you derived that interpretation. Yes, of course the releasing agency would be the ones liable.
> Gold and mercury form an amalgam

Sure, but if you have a sufficient amount of mercury, that amalgam will remain invisible to the eye as Mercury is not translucent - and you can just write "mercury" on the flash and you can be sure no-one will dare to touch it.
Am I the only to think that sheet metal is quite cheap to bend?
Recently I saw a conference presentation from an 80 year old who had just created a new CPU on an FPGA and ported a graphical operating system onto it :-) https://twitter.com/lukego/status/436558489910255616
Google Answer, Google Code, iGoogle, Google Reader, Orkut, Wave, Health. Pretty sure they are more... Every 6 months their is an announcement about something like that OR about something that has radical change like Angular 1 to 2 which is really changing. Stability is not something Google products offer to their customers.
That's only true for Intel Skylake mobile/desktop CPUs. I find desktop and mobile offerings too unreliable for anything serious, due to lack of ECC support. Data corruption on non-ECC systems has bitten me more than once. I've learned my lesson.

Skylake Xeons — the only Intel chips I'm interested in anyways — on the other hand will support AVX-512. The software I'm writing already has rudimentary support for AVX-512. The prospect of processing 64 of 16 bit elements per clock cycle per core is pretty exciting. 32x per instruction (512/16) and 2x comes hopefully from dual issue.

Besides, we're talking about AMD chips here, aren't we?
I have a hard time believing that Github commit history actually factors into the loan process. Is the typical customer of a service like this likely to be a programmer, let alone even know what Github is? Also, is there data that shows that someone with a long commit streak is more creditworthy than someone without a Github profile?
>I agree these are just claims, but when I look at the something like the following it is hard not to see the power that comes from simplicity.

What simplicity? That's even more complex to state than the traditional imperative solution, that's also closer to how mathematicians would write the equation.
Did you at least get reimbursed eventually?
You can't just download the app and start driving. There is an application process. The issue is they are duopoly as far as smartphone hailed transportation goes and as a driver if one already has you locked into a car loan it's a very limited choice and a bit of a sharecropper like situation. It isn't like being a software engineer where there are dozens of top firms competing to hire a limited pool of talent. How would you feel if your home loan for example was tied to your employer and your salary was adjusted by your employer every 4-6 months based on what they felt was fair.
It's not that different from other questions. It had to know that Barack meant Barack Obama because of the connection with the presidential category; it had to know that llamas are pack animals; and it had to know that "Obama" rhymes with "llama", and that a category with rhyme in the name probably needs a rhyming answer. I think that's extraordinarily impressive, but standard compared to what it does for other answers.

We were just shocked because it answered before we could even think the question through, and it happened in front of us. It's an irrational thing, but being physically present for the act makes it more impressive.
"combined with the fact that it would be simply stupid for a company who makes their own OS to run anything but that OS"

Why would you assume that? There are a ton of things that linux does better than OS X - and it would be extremely stupid for any company regardless of size to not use the right tool for the job. For example, even IBM uses, sells, and supports Linux instead of AIX or OS/360 on their line of servers and mainframes. I think that your assumption is just really old fashioned.

Internally Apple does use Linux, just as Microsoft uses a blend of OS's - supporting Linux on Azure, for example. I read that they actually use Linux as a host for their Hadoop service on Azure.
I believe that is because many people don't want comment section in Hacker News turn into the one in Reddit, which consist of mostly jokes, pop culture references...things that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.
Yes, I didn't quite grasp GP initially, but it simply appears to be using a GA to find an optimal syntax tree (code) that has the desired properties. From the GA perspective, wither the cost/fitness test involves executing code or not seems like just a detail of the GA optimization step.
VoxieBox Displays 3D Images Just Like R2D2’s Message from Princess Leia
And I don't believe that they only started using unix operating systems not their own "nowadays" - when OS X was too immature during development and its long maturation what did you think they were using?
They may not actually be going home. They may be going to a second job or school, seeing their kids for an hour in the evening, and then going to bed worried about paying bills.

Low-wage jobs are their own cyclical trap, which can lead to not enough resources to improve your situation and apathy towards your day-to-day life. You can easily get stuck in a rut.
“How Old” on Android
People put on masks.

Illustration: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mo7Y7akC7BQ/T52i2awn7iI/AAAAAAAAAK...

Society doesn't like sad people.
Not to mention I find 90% of those custom UIs look horrible and cluttered compared to Google's original design.
Tea with Harold Bloom, for His 45th Book
Is there a word like serendipity that means "found as a joke" instead of "found by a fortunate accident?"
Zenefits CEO publicly rescinds an offer on Quora
Finally read this paper a couple of days ago. Even though i thought i already understood the concepts of higher order functions and laziness, and had used them on my every-day programming, the paper was still quite enlightening.

One of the things i hadn't considered before is how much laziness can help to build modular code. The last section in the paper, about implementing the minimax algorithm, is a great example of this. The `evaluate` function is first naively defined as a simple chain of a couple of functions that iterate the tree of all possible game positions. Then a series of improvements are applied to it (e.g. pruning the tree to allow the algorithm to work on infinite trees, or ignoring branches that cannot yield favourable moves), but what's really nice is that thanks to lazy evaluation these improvements can be implemented as independent functions that are just "plugged in" the chain, without having to modify the original functions. For example, the original function that generates the whole game tree doesn't need to be changed to implement pruning.

I'd really recommend the paper to anyone who might be wondering "why all this fuss about functional programming?". It's not only very accessible, but also full of beautiful code examples solving very practical and concrete problems. I personally felt a bit sad having to "back" to the imperative programming world in my every-day job after reading it.
> things that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.

There may be a diversity in palette for this matter, even among the same people at different times.
It seems like the total dickishness quotient went down over the last 5 years. Airbnb gave my favorite on-site interview, and they were chill with my lack of degree. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit: disclaimer: i work at airbnb
Please tell me more about this free market. Can you point to an example?
Let's just say they solve particular case(s) of problems via quantum annealing techniques and be done with it ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing ... there is no doubt in the future going to be other ways to solve other problems but in the meantime the technique works.
Somewhat relevant: http://danluu.com/empirical-pl
I prefer to think that we live in times that are less interesting (in the Chinese proverb sense) and that demand less derring-do and intrigue of our scientists.

I'm sure that if a portal opened up and parallel-universe-Nazis-lizards (or whatever) began to invade, we'd see just as much heroism and inventiveness from everyone.
Do you think that people who are not clinically depressed (or suffering similar symptoms as part of another diagnosable illness; e.g. hypothyroidism, hypogonadism, inborn errors of metabolism, (pre)diabetes, sleep disorders, Parkinson's disease, dementia) compose a substantial portion of people who experience suicidality? If so, can you identify any empirical evidence supporting that belief?
We're in this mess because cloud providers don't give you all the functionality you need to solve things properly.

It's only a matter of time before they do, until then...
Couldn't you make it that you can buzz in anytime, but there's no advantage for buzzing first during the question reading (if two people buzz, randomly pick one)?
They sold Xserve rack mounted macs for many years. They stopped doing it, presumably because the market was not worth their attention.
WordPress 4.2.2 Security and Maintenance Release
Ack, we ran up against a "celebrity" reader in the final rounds of a Quizbowl tournament who didn't stop reading reliably when the other team buzzed in. I don't know how, but the other team was really good at taking advantage of this, buzzing in before the reader had given enough information to answer the question, and then answering after he'd finished the sentence. Our team got steamrolled.
Bill C-51 passes in House of Commons