skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe that this actually happened to me -- which tells me the 100,000 number is way too low. To be more precise: when we went to electronically file our 2014 return, it was rejected because our return had already been filed (not by us, of course). I (like 80+ million others) am a victim of the Anthem breach, and I have assumed that my fraudulent return was part of that breach. (Regardless, I have opted into the identity protection that Anthem has provided as restitution to victims of the breach.[1])

As part of clearing this up with the IRS, I had to verify my own identity and validate that the return that we (physically) sent was the true and correct return. After a whopping 2+ hours on hold, I ran a grueling gauntlet of rather obscure questions that amount to some flimsy shared secrets I happen to have with the IRS. Once my identity was confirmed, I learned that the thieves had filed a 2014 AGI that exactly matched my 2013 AGI. The IRS representative told me that this was unusual (that is, that they normally they just make numbers up), and it's clearly stupid (my return was flagged and didn't pay out), but it obviously left me concerned that someone had somehow located my 2013 return. With this latest revelation, it's now clear that this could have easily happened via the IRS itself.

Assuming that my experience is indicative of a larger trend, I expect many more similar revelations as the IRS picks up the debris from the 2014 tax season -- and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the true target of the Anthem breach wasn't in fact the IRS: this crime is just too damn easy to pull off and get away with. The bright side of all this: things very clearly have to change, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the IRS ends up issuing PINs to all e-filers this coming year.

[1] https://www.anthemfacts.com
Your observation about iOS vs Android is very narrow-minded, either deliberate or inadvertent. There are profound design language differences between iOS and Android material design. Claiming "flatness" is very shortsighted indeed.

A word on Windows 10, mobile or otherwise. It is indeed a mess, with almost no coherent design language, something that Phone 7, Phone 8 and Windows 8 actually had, for better or worse. Windows 10 throws many of the good design choices for a faux Android look, and a very bad one at that due to complete lack of consistency. Android also lacks consistency throughout, but at least a somewhat coherent design language exists now.

I do not wish to argue here. Do not take my wishes personally. As someone who wishes to only see good technology succeed, and I do not see this as good technology. I do not wish personal failure to anyone individual, and wish you personally all the best.
All of the technologies it references (e.g. Cocoa, SpriteKit, the various specific API calls it mentions) are all strictly OS X. I would have thought the name "Cocoa" is recognizable enough on its own to indicate OS X.
They aren't just releasing a product though, they are quite literally inventing an industry. Care needs to be placed into the execution, this isn't an MVP type scenario.
The whole point of the article is that you're wrong. And I tend to agree. Not trying to predict feature needs down the road is extremely empowering. Building you're unnecessary feature now is just as likely to increase the complexity of everything in the future as it is to be 2x easier to build now. YAGNI dramatically simplifies the answering of your question: if it's not needed now, don't do it.
So it sounds like the founders had already told your boss that he needs to reduce headcount, and you solved the problem for him, and also enabled him to do you a favor. Nice!
Looks cool. Any chance of adding f# to the list of languages?

[edit] There's a 'see more' link that I missed.
Yes, I think that's what I was trying to say, but you did a better job.
They took too many OS X anti-patterns such as the ever-present menu bar, for my taste.
Fair point. Making these decisions correctly is hard. I'm pretty sure this is one of the things that you slowly learn how to do with experience, that no amount of being smart or research can make up for.
The problem is not at all like restaurants. If a restaurant gives someone good food, they'll stop eating and buying today, but will probably be back tomorrow or later in the week.

With a dating site, if you're successful, you probably won't be seeing that customer again for at least several months, possibly forever. Sure, new people are entering the dating pool all the time, but the marketing effort required to constantly replenish your userbase at those levels of churn is incredible.
I started "working" a few hours a week teaching programming at my kids' school. When they put me on the payroll I was astounded by the number of forms I had to fill out. I counted 15 forms requiring my signature, no less than 5 of which required my SSN.

Lo and behold, there was a data breach of employee and volunteer records. Volunteers had to have background checks, which required the SSN. Thousands of people had their IRS return hijacked due to this breach. I personally know dozens of people who were impacted.

From what I've seen of their information security, I remain completely unsurprised that they had this breach and that to this date they have no idea how it happened.
These things help but of all those, I think the only common factor is the hard work in terms of making revolutionary contributions to science. I can name plenty of greats who lacked some of these other items but I can't think of any who just had it all come easy to them without putting the time in (correct me if I'm wrong which I may be, I have only begun to study the history of innovation)
These billboards publicly shame litterers using their discarded DNA
MITM attack on RetroShare
Visualizing High(ish) Frequency Trading in Bitcoin
i'm curious, is your opinion based on research, or is it just fanciful extrapolations from a starting point of 'Facebook and google were started by young people'?

Because frankly, most of the ideas contained in your post don't seem like they actually stand up to scrutiny. For example, your idea that "kids don't see the limitations the market has placed upon us" only makes sense if you believe:

a) that young founders don't understand existing markets; and

b) that old founders can't imagine a world other than the existing world; and

c) a failure to understand existing markets creates an advantage; and

d) a failure to understand existing markets does not create an offsetting disadvantage; and

e) an understanding of existing markets does not create an advantage; and

f) an understanding of existing markets only creates disadvantages.

Do you have proof of any or all of these?

Your arbitrarily chosen metric for success was a huge ($10b+) exit. If we do that, only ONE of the ten largest IPOs was a young kid (Zuck at FB), and even there, he wasn't reimagining a market per your thesis, he was doing something entirely new.

I really, really wish HN had a way to flag 'eloquently stated bullshit', because it's dangerous when people like you open their mouths. You confidently and eloquently say shit that's just totally fucking wrong, and you make everyone dumber. It feeds your ego and it kills the world. Fucking shut your dumb mouth.
Writing Finnegans Wake with a Recurrent Neural Net
If you're wondering whether or not this happened to you, one way to know is if you were able to file your own return. If your own tax return was rejected because it had already been filed, it means someone was able to attempt to file a fraudulent return using your identity. Of course, this is only assuming that they managed to submit a return as you at all. It's possible your information was taken but not used.
This is where https://libraries.io/ falls short. While the execution is really great (good job), the idea that a developer might be looking for projects in a wide variety of language/platforms at once is false.

Most of the time you already know the platform and want only to search for this platform, not all of them.

It must be a fun project to do still.
this trial will change nothing; whole financial system is a circus of stupidity. the "scandals" will never end. people will always try to game the system and that's normal. this guy is basically on trial for not being ethical.
Assessing Employee Performance: You’re Doing It Rong
I believe Overleaf offers this service. I haven't dealt with it myself, but I have friends who like it a lot.
I was thinking, that looks just like Select2 which I've used a few times and seems it's a more actively developed plugin, inspired by Chosen. Differences discussed here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13575531/what-are-the-di...
There's a lot of times where you know that something needs to be extensible, but you only know the immediate requirement.

From Martin's example, the team needs to support storm risk, and think they need piracy risk in the future. I'd suggest that they are 100% sure they need to support multiple risk calculations, they just only have the requirements for the first type now.

It's at this point you have several options, but by choosing something that is a bit more generic than the base case but without being an over-architected mess will save you a lot of time in the future.
Using your example:
Let's say I know it will cause a complexity burden in the future. Shouldn't we ask if that complexity burden and opportunity cost are outweighed by the expected benefits, rather than rather than simply relying on a simplistic rule of thumb of always deferring?

People are capable of (which, to your point is not the same as being consistently good at) making good calculations as to what is a waste of time.
I may be reading this wrong, but the only annoyance I would find with their toolchain is that it seems like their true source is the FontLab files which is not open source. The readme says that you should be able to edit the UFO files and generate the FontLab files from that, but it doesn't seem to be the process they are using. It would be nice for the UFO files to be the true source rather than a derived one.
So the IRS has a form you can send in to put a fraud alert or some type with them so I guess they will give your tax return special attention to see if it is really you next time.

Also - I'm confused - I have an e-file PIN. You don't?
Amazing news. Another success for the lab at Imperial. The team behind Surreal are really good from all the work I've seen. I used one of Stephen's projects for my masters thesis under the same supervisor (Andrew Davison) they all had and he was extremely helpful. Can't wait to see what they do next.
Your first point is a very good one. I live in a rural area and while those FarmersOnly.com ads are funny, there's also a lot of truth to them. It would be pretty difficult to meet someone in such an isolated, low density region. I can also see how someone who doesn't understand farmers and their responsibilities would have difficulty getting along with one.

I've been married for many years, but I can easily see myself using Tinder back in my single days. Once you get out of school, meeting people is a lot more difficult.
Any technical company that John Carmack approves of buying must be legitimately badass. Many people thought Oculus had already created the VR platform of the future, but they've only just begun, there's a mountain of work to do before VR becomes the dominant form of computing. Oculus will have to buy some of these companies because there's no other way to hire the people they need.
IRS: Thieves stole tax info from 100,000 people
Most dating sites also end up being a very one-sided battle. That is, most of the women are sitting around waiting to get a torrent of messages and most of the men are sending messages to basically every girl that they see. They play the numbers game, and it's all about how big of a net you can cast. I don't foresee any dating site being more successful than the current heavyweights until they can get rid of "fishing" so women aren't unmotivated to go on the site and men aren't wasting their time sending the same message to 1,000 different people.
Being naive - in the sense of looking the world through the eyes of a child - is one of the best qualities in a founder because startups are so counterintuitive.

How many grown-ups with lots of industry experience said no for young Microsofties, Googles or Facebooks?

- A social network for college students? What a stupid idea!
It doesn't need to be a vacuum, and this problem has been thoroughly covered in the original paper.
Edward Tufte already called for the demolition of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is still alive and well. It won.

The truth is PowerPoint is a very effective tool and you used it properly. If you are ignorant, lazy or stupid, no great tool can help you.
A high performance WebSocket client library for the Swift language
Could Jony Ive's promotion at Apple actually inch him closer to the exit door?
Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States of America, so most likely he didn't care too much about this region. Granted, he may have been afraid of not being able to maintain it because of a naval inferiority, but I don't think expending in America was amongst his priorities.
>Ideally a workplace should provide a way to develop people, a stable income and clear goals.

Why? Employers hire people because they, the employers, have goals (possibly very unclear), and their goals require more work than they can do alone as one person, and so they hire people to whom to delegate the work (this can happen recursively). Employers really aren't concerned with personal development or the employee's income as a matter of necessity, only if they happen to be unusually humane and personable, or the labor market happens to be unusually tight.
Scratch works real well for teaching kids to code. There is a bunch of fun programs for them to do that doesn't even feel like programming.
From https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-131.htm :
"Without the Intel payments, Dell would have missed the EPS consensus in every quarter during this period."
Ask HN: Where to learn more about marketing and B2B Sales?
What are some good resources, recommendations, or anecdotes on how to get into this? I've been working on my startup on the backend code side of things but am struggling with the marketing/sales side.
> You incorrectly assume that when the star collapses there is already an event horizon

I made no such assumption. You don't need an event horizon to dilate time, just a massive gravitational field, and something resisting it.

When the sun collapses either the outer layers experience a repulsive force of some kind from below (a bounce perhaps, which is already theorized for supernovas, or maybe neutron degeneracy), or the outer layers accelerate to nearly the speed of light, either way they dilate time, and from the POV of an outside observer take an infinite amount of time to collapse.

Because of this dilation the rate of light output (as seen from outside) will drop and the sun will "turn off" - i.e. it will look [almost] identical to a black hole, except without the physics breaking singularity or event horizon.

One visible effect will be extreme red-shift of the light, which will look (to us) like a very distant object hubble-red-shifted by distance/time.
Yes, but that's a side effect of native already having better UX and more capabilities.

"That is, of course, if the standardized platform had all the capabilities and great UX of the proprietary platforms. This is where the web often falls short, and the companies behind proprietary platforms have some very sweet incentives to keep it that way, i.e. developer lock-in and maintaining complete control over the platform's direction."

Given the choice of a standardized platform that offers the same UX and features, would anyone still choose to develop for proprietary platforms?

That ideal standardized platform doesn't exist right now, but the web is getting closer and closer to being that platform. It doesn't make sense to give up all the progress we've made so far and resign to native when the web is already almost there.
Bluetooth Fitness Trackers ‘Threat to Privacy’
> the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism

China had meritocracy long before Europe, with public exams open to anyone for civil service in the empire.
I love how these types of articles always bring out the architecture astronauts with all their pronouncements of "it depends" and whatnot. How hard is it to understand the notion of "building what you need, and not what you don't"?
If an economy is propped up by personal debt, things can (and have) exploded, yes.

But when not fueled by personal debt, you generally want faster spending, so that potential productive capacity gets used instead of left sitting for lack of demand.

Taxes: You definitely want to reduce loopholes as much as possible, and a sufficiently generous basic income would reduce the need for a lot of tax breaks, yes.

It is observed, however, that the very wealthy spend proportionally less on goods and services; most of their income gets reinvested. Good for them, but it leads to a positive feedback loop.
I once read somewhere that there are decks for verbal presentation and decks to present summary information for offline review. Conflating the intended purpose causes issues and that's always stuck with me as good advice.

Personally, I like to use Powerpoint as talking points and just go with the flow for the remainder of the conversation.
And very few people watch full-length 45 min. videos of presentations even when they're made. Views drop off after 3-5 mins.

At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes.

It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
"Unintentional" as in "pretty sure it was an old copy-paste from another app and we forgot to take that line out" :) I don't like the scroll locking myself, even when applied "correctly".

Hopefully the site is at least navigable now on Mobile Safari. We will be revisiting the mobile experience soon. Had not been focusing much on it since the app is form-heavy and doesn't lend itself well to mobile, but for the marketing site we certainly need to focus on it more...first impressions are very important, and a broken page is not a good one! Thanks for your feedback.
> you can't rob people of their problems

This is a remarkably insightful phrase (I'll be stealing it for my own use ;-) and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment.

I think its core message goes way beyond the dating domain and even the wider domain of similar services you describe - it's actually a great perspective on the general startup scene and speaks to a very deep philosophical question - at what point is solving what we may naively define as 'problems' actually to the detriment of people's ultimate quality of life? In fewer words: if everything's easy, what's the point?

I won't attempt to discuss that here, because I'd need to think a lot about it before I do :-) But thanks for the comment and giving me a new perspective to think about.
yeah this happened to me last year
A variation of Inferno set in Silicon Valley where the ghost of, say, Douglas Engelbart[0], leads the Young Founder through the descending layers of tech hell (all the way to Ring-0) would be amazing.

Dante's Inferno is truly scathing and quite gossipy. Such bitterness would transition well to the current ecosystem, methinks.

[0] Or any SV old time luminary, really. I pick Doug because of his visionary potential.
Because politicians don't all belong to the same ideology and different camps have competing goals. This really isn't that complicated to understand.
'Term of protection' == 'any valid copyright claim it might once had had or been eligible for if properly registered, as opposed to the questionable claims of the current licensors'. I don't want to type all that out every time, and I don't want to make a possibly-inaccurate claim that it was never ever in copyright because I haven't checked all the primary sources for myself.

That's why I referred you to external sources for the lawsuit, because I don't want to make definitive comments about the legal merits of either side's case in this thread - it's been a few months since I even looked through the complaint.
Quite a contrived scenario, but, no. Just build the feature you need and move on. No need over-analyzing.

See? I didn't have to get trapped in your pretty much un-answerable pondering.

Following the rule crystallizes a lot of decision-making. It's very empowering when you don't have too many objectors.
The engineering to do a 5 mile section is pretty straightforward. It's only 5 miles long (25000 feet) and around 250 joints.

1. Giant foundations and just handle the thermal stress by not letting anything move

2. Figure out the slip joints really well to soak up the ~125 feet of travel and still hold a good vacuum

3. Figure them out OK and just install extra vacuum pumps since there are only ~250 joints

4. Try out some/all of these options on 500 feet of tube in parallel to see how it all performs and don't make a final decision on the whole 5 miles until you have real cost numbers

The other thing I'll mention is that you don't need the steel to be continuous in order to hold a vacuum. You need the inside face of the tube to be smooth in order to not jerk around the vehicles, but all the sealing could be done on the outside with clamp-on seals. If the average continuous tube piece is 100 feet long and the max thermal expansion is 0.5% then you only need a half-inch gap between the tube pieces.

If your air bearings are say 3 feet long each and divided into 10 sections internally which are fed through orifices so that no one section can rob all the pressurized air flow then you're never going to lose more than 10% of your bearing force and you should be able to glide right over these 1/2" gaps with no problems. And if there are some problems a few accumulators (plain air tanks or pressurized bladders) inline with the supply lines would probably increase the momentary recharge capabilities enough to negate the problem.

700mph is 1000 feet per second or 12 inches per millisecond. That means a 1/2" gap is crossed in just 40 microseconds or so.
A Complete Analysis of Why We Age
Its actually more common than you think, people can be pretty naive. These people create a fake company name and website and then post "work from home" jobs listings on monster.com.
Making decisions by flipping a coin also simplifies them dramatically -- it doesn't mean it's optimal.

I think your reply captures both the appeal and the danger of YAGNI well. While I think it's often a good heuristic in practice, it is just a heuristic and it can be badly abused in cases where future needs can be accurately predicted today. Saying "But can they really ever be predicted?" is a cop out imo, because in some cases the answer is yes.
Well, maybe someone who happens to be Jewish will turn out to be a blood thirsty dictator in the future and destroy the world, and that person would have never been born if his ancestors had been killed by the nazis. It's really far fetched, but one could argue lots of things by making assumptions about changing the past.
The 1962 Playboy Town House
Justices Clash as Supreme Court Expands Power of Bankruptcy Courts