skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've noticed similar things. I'm not sure how we really get to the point where technology is a force used for leveling the playing field and not a force used for exacerbating it.

You say that as though there exists a unifying driving force behind technological change that could choose to change direction, rather than a million people all acting independently or in loose groups. If you want to see technology used as a force for "leveling the playing field", start a company or a charitable organization to do exactly that. Or, failing that, pitch a convincing vision and to a lot of people who have such organizations. Or join one of the many organizations already working on that.

> But I do know that it's important for the people who care about these things to engage with it. I know we'll be even worse off if the tech people that care about how tech impacts the world and care about leveling the playing field drop out of the field.

The article artificially divides people into two camps: people who understand and don't care, and people who care and don't understand (as well as implying that the latter have only the best interests of the world at heart but are stymied by those darn technologists). That leaves out two much more relevant groups: the substantial set of technologists who are out to change the world (and not in the trite "by creating another social network" sense), as well as the people who understand technology well enough to level useful criticisms about its direction and seek to influence that direction (for instance, the EFF and the FSF).

There are plenty of people and organizations out there that are using technology to improve people's lives in numerous ways. More such people and organizations would always be welcome, but I personally find the bleak picture painted by the article quite unwarranted.
Always used to watch those cutscenes on youtube! Awesome app btw.
You forgot Meld: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/meld/meld-a-perfect-mea... ($129 pre-order)

To me, it looks the most compelling because it's both the cheapest and most versatile.

I backed both Pantelligent & Meld. But if Meld would have kickstarted first, I wouldn't have backed Pantelligent.
Magic SysRq-F
You think it has cured you even you know it is a placebo because there is a study that says it and you put your faith in it. The study itself is a placebo. A metaplacebo.
any chance of posting a screenshot of what's to come?
There were a number of Lemmings clones at the time. Troddlers being a favorite. However, there was so much activity around the Lemmings property itself at the time, that I conjecture the real reason we didn't see more exploration of that space was that the market was burned out on it, and then it was forgotten. Definitely a lot of potential in those mechanics.
This should be a basic requirement for all games. Even before I was married my mom would call or someone would ring the doorbell. And when I was a kid I had to go down to dinner or take out the trash.
The jQuery for windows that I found to have worked is AutoHotKey. But the syntax is something out of a morse code book:

#IfWinActive ahk_class LWJGL
{
*^=::
{
SendInput t
Sleep 150
SendInput %macro1%{enter}
return
}
}

This sends commands to a minecraft window (LWJGL is somehow what windows sees.)
Start and Make Stuff
> No one cooks turkey except on Thanksgiving

There are lots of people who cook turkey only on Thanksgiving, but it is far from true that no one cooks turkey except on Thanksgiving.
i posted this yesterday, but the top three reasons i didn't go with zenefits (not that it matters because apparently they are taking over the world):

1. sales people were pushy dickheads that implied i was wasting their time by re-scheduling their demo due to emergency client issues, when i am their prime audience - an overworked, underpaid, understaffed startup founder.

2. they couldn't articulate how they integrate with my payroll service. it was a bunch of hand waving and "trust us". unfortunately i know how technology works and i'm not going to "trust" anyone unless they have a well defined solution.

had i known i was supposed to give them my administrator login information, it would have been a non-starter anyway.

3. the fact that their business model was basically to take business from existing insurance brokers seemed a little lame to me. why can't i just pay for your services?
Yes, even my Atari could do that.
> why do you find it necessary to insult the people who worked on it

I insulted the work, not the people who worked on it. And I didn't gratuitously insult it, I've given further reasoning elsewhere in the thread: It's an obscure fork of a massive project, on an outdated version, with no chance of further support, no VCS, no discussions, no background and no author here to back any of it up.

It wasn't aggressive. It certainly was negative. But from what I've seen, this was never a space where your project will be cuddled. Nor is open source in general a place you get a free ride just because "you don't have to use it if you don't like it".

When one puts their work forward, it's either to either receive criticism on it or popularize it. In either case, negative criticism is a good thing.

Like I said, I didn't criticize it just to be negative - if you go through my previous posts, you'll find that I try to be overwhelmingly positive, even to projects I find pointless. But this here is not "just pointless", it's a fork. Forks are divisive, and this is a fork which does not bring any net positives and which has no way of ever being merged back into the project, given that it's based on an outdated version and model of Qt.
>>I fail to see why complexity is a necessary result of increasing tax revenues.

Because increasing tax base also means increasing the sources which you can tax. In case of India, nearly all business men don't pay taxes. There is a lot of money exchanged through corruption at all levels, there is money exchanged through gifts, dowry etc etc.

Which is why the biggest reforms pending in India currently is to get everyone to have a bank account, so that they can be paid through a bank instead of handing out cash directly. Once the necessary infrastructure is in place(Bank accounts, connectivity etc), you can start reducing the supply of paper money and have people deal in electronic means. You can increase your tax base and cut a great deal of unaccounted transactions and tax them appropriately. You can also cut corruption since a transaction implies a source and receiver, who need to explain what they are doing when a transaction of money is taking place.
Awesome way to build a database of people's biggest problems.
Why is I/O always somebody else's code? (In my world, it's definitely not always somebody else's code, but I'm in embedded systems, which is an unusual environment.)

I mean, somebody has to be the "somebody else". What if it's you? Now you have to properly test the I/O code. (If you can get away with it never being you, that's fine, for you. Other people might not have that freedom, though.)

> In OOP everything happens somewhere else because anything can hold a reference to the variable and change its value right under your nose.

You're referring to a variable changing when it shouldn't. I don't think that's what the quote means. In OOP everything happens somewhere else because there's always another layer of indirection, and so the code that should change the variable isn't in the function (or file) that you're reading. This is why I say it's similar to your approach - the I/O is never in the function that you're reading. It still has to be somewhere, though. And the same thing that OOP does to the details of the computation (move it somewhere else), your approach does to the details of the I/O - it's not where you're looking, it's scattered somewhere else. For the same reason people complain about the effect of OOP in this regard, I distrust your approach for the I/O.
This specific example is nice although not truly universal.

An interesting startup idea would be a bluetooth thingy (kinda vague, maybe a necklace?) that when pushed becomes a TRUE universal pause button. Pauses my DVR, my car audio, my linux mythtv box, everything, silences my phone ringer, mutes the TV, shuts off the alarm clock, temp-mutes the smoke alarm if its currently going off, silence the oven timer, car alarm off if its currently sounding, you name it.

Sounds technologically possible although a huge PITA, which sounds like a great startup idea.

You might need to ram thru a whole new bluetooth LE broadcast protocol, maybe. Or just a blind beacon of "anything" thats sniffable (edited: whoops that wouldn't work so well with silenced burglar alarm systems).

I suspect this would sell pretty well once it gets universal...
Ironically, in the software job market for companies of say over 100 people, the desire to hire H1Bs is overwhelming due to the cheaper cost + lock-in.
Every election since 2000: "More people voted for {Bush, Obama} than any President in history." There's more total voters, so...
The thing they are doing in 10 where you can publish a regular website in the store is pretty cool, though.

You include some js and a manifest and your site detects if it's running in a store container and gives you access to the device...camera, disk, tpm. That's pretty cool.

I wonder how secure something like that can ever be...but its a neat idea.
> Like cruise control on your car, June continually calculates the power needed to maintain a constant temperature

So you say it has a thermostat in it, then?

> Food cooks faster while using less energy than traditional ovens

So you say it's a convection oven, then?

> June sends you a push notification when your food is done. And you can customize your alerts so you aren’t disturbed you when you’re away from home.

So you say I can disable the alert... that tells me dinner is ready... because I'm away from... um. Somebody didn't really think this one through, then?
I think this argument could have been made with Nodejs and React Native, but we've seen how those worked out.
for reference: https://github.com/ryanries/UniversalPauseButton/blob/master...
Why does my kitchen look the same as Don Draper's?
Now if only there was a Universal Skip Button for those games with unskippable credits, intros or cutscenes!
Now that I know the study is fake, does the whole thing collapse? :)
American Pharoah bettors leave behind $315,829 from Belmont Stakes
If the methodology works with arbitrary fluid droplets (not just water) there could be interesting work done from blood analysis to drug synthesis.
I also managed an ADP integration & second this.

Their engineers were really quick to respond to us throughout the process too.
Given the number of comments that I've seen from jerf, and the value of what he usually has to say, I don't think he's being "that one guy". I think he's commenting on what he perceives to be a genuine inconsistency in the article.
I've heard of this idea before and it sounds great. But I can think of a hack for it that could make the trip even worse.

"This is a coin. It's just a regular coin from my pocket, but I want you to carry, and know that as long as you carry this coin - for the rest of the night - you'll be safe."

(lean in close to whisper into the recipient's ear)

"But if you lose the coin...if you lose the coin, you're doomed, mate. Completely f*cking doomed."
GitLab CEO here, we're open to having someone add labels to snippets, feel free to send a merge request.
Sales Effectiveness is better than Sales Productivity
Chess grandmaster gets tricked into a checkmate
Very amusing. As far as the source, I suspect Madrigal is on the right track looking at literary people, as it smells non-technical ("shouted commands in Unix" rather than "shouted Unix commands").
The metric system has already been adopted worldwide.
Glad you like it. Always feel free to reach out, if you have questions or suggestions on the library. We're certainly open to PRs on the repo: https://github.com/intentmedia/mario
When you say you can't open it in anything but Windows 8.1...why would that be the case? There are project files for sublime and vs2013 on github...it's just javascript.
Designing a Mobile Experience – Text VS Icons
kilograms aren't a measure of weight.
The QWidgets API seemed to work just fine the last time I touched it. I'm not unhappy. I see no reason for a fork.

And I've never used QML, QtQuick and all that. I played with them a little, saw absolutely no point in it, and never really needed them. But the QWidgets API is nice, stable and very well documented.
I agree it was low, but I wonder if their contribution was larger in marketing and distribution of the game? Those were different times...
> incumbents like ADP have no incentives to share their data.

It's not ADP's data. It's the employer's data. The employer has decided to use it with Zenefits.
That doesn't just apply to multiplayer, though. OP said Diablo 3, which is multi OR single player. Many games now use those phone-home anti-cheating measures (or drm measures) even when you aren't actually playing with anyone else.
One of our resident designers/UX gurus at Magnet just penned a very interesting blog post, first in a series on design considerations for mobile apps.
Right, but they also interrogated Eric Holder and also Loretta Lynch about the use of not just surveillance, but hellfire, drones over American skies.

The FAA's legislation further opens up the skies for surveillance drones - sets the regulations and permanent airspace for it - though everyone is going to be excited about some silly delivery service.

Wouldn't the National Security Council know about this FBI program? They know about NSA mass surveillance. It's true that Congress is kept mostly in the dark about these programs, but the NSC gets some reasonable level of summary.
(About me: I was an early engineer at one of the fastest growing SaaS company on the planet. I had the privilege of contributing to our interview process that took us from 5 to 250 engineers. I'm now trying it from the candidate side: http://InterviewKickstart.com)

tl;dr

You have three choices:

1. Apply with a strong referral and/or

2. Apply to exactly the same kind of jobs/projects that you have had work experience in, and/or

3. Apply to a company that's hiring only one or two people a quarter (slow, careful)

A bit more

Everyone hates the tech interview process. Everyone. Including people on the other side.

Let's understand the process, by taking the most typical case, where a candidate with experience in X type of projects, is applying for a job with Y type of projects.

e.g. If you have worked on say Payment Systems' projects for last 5 years and you are now applying for Deployment Systems' role, then as an interviewer, how do I evaluate you? I don't know enough about Payment Systems to judge your work of 5 years in 45 minutes. And I can't presume you know enough about Deployment Systems that I can ask you questions built on my knowledge of several years.

I hence have the following options:

1. I ask someone about you. That's possible, but not systematic, because I need to find a person that I trust very well. It's much better if that person refers you. Hence your option #1.

2. I can hope that you and I have some project in common in the same domain. That's getting much harder these days, as programming is getting very vast. Hence your second option. Then I can evaluate your work and decide one way or another, quickly.

3. I can look at your work of a different domain and give it a proper evaluation. That's takes time, often hours and days. I can't spend that much time, when my goal is to hire 20 engineers a quarter (and hence interview 5x more). Not to mention that evaluation is also subjective, error-prone and contentious. Everyone has different ideas on design and code-quality. Add that to the fact that I need your work evaluated by everyone in the team, not just me. It just becomes untenable. Hence your third option (apply to a place that's hiring slowly).

Being human, hence, I have to fall back to the path of least resistance. That path is to find the lowest common denominator of our knowledge, which can be evaluated in a short amount of time. Yes, it's not perfect and it's still a bit subjective, but there aren't that many ways of writing quicksort <or insert your favorite question>, you know.

I hence ask you that question, begrudgingly, knowing fully well, that I'm myself going to be subjected to the same treatment when I go out interview. But at least now I know why, and I look for the best I can in the current process.

Humans.
[COMIC] True Story – Cyber Security Class
New io.js features that you may not be using
Mid-Year Business Check-Ups [video]
You can do a C&D through Apple, they will usually forward an email to the developer, but not sure how partial they are to enforcing a case.
> The point I would like to make is, exclusivity and organization would be a good thing for the altruistic tech community.

Agreed. Not in an elitist sense, but in the sense that no amount of excellence in technological skill excuses being a a terrible person who drives others away. Choosing not to exclude anyone from a community is still an exclusionary practice: it drives away people who aren't willing to put up with the worst anyone in that community serves up. So if you're going to end up excluding people no matter what you do, better to actively choose to exclude the awful people rather than leaving them around to drive away others.
Sure, the issue is that even if you don't use it, the simple fact that it is running in the tray may be enough for an anti-cheat to trigger. Just something to keep in mind.
> Did you know the Placebo Effect can occur even when you know it's a placebo? It's true.

Wait... a meta-placebo? :-)
[HOT] Corpse Runs Mystery – Obituary Videos 2015
I've paid people outside BofA without paying a penny.
Analysis of a Decision: Deciding vs. Influencing
Tessel real–time communication without Firebase
I don't feel like you need to give me credit for things on my reading list. Also, I might strike _The Practice Of Programming_ and _SQL For Dummies_ from the list; they make more sense in my reading list than they do in this list.
Nothing new.. If i can replace a security guard of my office for a cheaper more efficient, less error prone, robot/software instead of a human for half the price, WHY NOT! The exact same philosophy goes into "software is eating the world".
https://php.net/supported-versions.php

PHP versions offer 2 years of support + 1 year of security fixes. So it doesn't really make sense for a PHP project to offer longer support.
Have you tried SwiftyJSON ?

https://github.com/SwiftyJSON/SwiftyJSON
My comment was actually referring to jheriko. :-]
Is Diablo III single player? When I played it at the release, connecting to a remote server was required (which is a shame, btw. I will miss the modding community that Diablo II had).
I read this thinking, "This reminds me of Etherpad," only to reach the part of the story that describes Etherpad and how the author incorporated and improved on its ideas. Great piece.
They're not there for "no reason". For example, if I use a type defined in some external header, I definitely need to include that in the .h, so I might as well just include everything else.

Besides, in my mind it's the logical place to put it: the header file is almost like the "spec" or the "coversheet" of a .c. It includes the name, the authors, possibly a description of what it does, a list of functions and datatypes, so why not a list of dependencies as well?
> Any tips on convincing a recruiter to set me up with a phone call to the hiring manager first?

Play hard to get...

First, it's helpful to know what level of recruiter you're dealing with, flip the interview on them-- what's their relationship with the Hiring Manager? Are they in-house or a 3rd party firm? Do they have a tech-specific background? How long? What other searches are they working on? Then (assuming the recruiter is a seasoned professional, make a friend); offer you may be able to help them with referrals to your network.

Try this word track-- 'I get calls like yours a lot. The role sounds interesting. But my process to evaluate potential opportunities is to 'always' do a brief phone-screen with the Hiring Manager first. I'm not a prima donna, but I've found this ultimately saves everyone's time and energy. Feel free to share my profile and background notes with him. If you still want to move forward; I can be available for a call Friday morning @ 9:30am"
Check Driver Status in Your Computer Using Driver Booster – AnsMachine
HGST 8TB Drives – Helium Makes Them Fly
Prototyping with Living Hinges
They sort of are forced to by community pressure. If they don't they lose status, and are sent fewer patients, politicians criticize them, etc, etc.

They lose money on the actual procedures, but make it up in other ways, so it's worth it for them in total.
aka "Windows users discover our CTRL+Z" :) Been doing that very often during Ludum Dare where the best games have usually very fine gameplay and very poor everything else, like lack of pause or progress save - surely came handy.
What's the median wage of those jobs?
But again, there is no shortage of engineers as the article says. The only problem is the quality. Atleast from what i saw in India people just take computer science as a degree because it pays more, not because they love to code.. There is a problem with this kind of people. People who LOVE what they do always over take people who dont.
Computer solves 120-year-old biology problem
It works until you run out of consumers with cash, at which point it no longer works.
Seems that managed VM's are the future of App Engine. Looking at their feature matrix, it appears that the primary benefit of old-sandboxed apps is that they launch within milliseconds, versus minutes in managed VM's (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/). I'm only now learning about their capabilities. From what I understand, they allow arbitrary environments using Docker files. How else are they different from normal compute engine VM's? Is it because they are spawned and load balanced? Does that mean they are more analogous to Docker on Elastic Beanstalk?
If technologists shouldn't try to change the world, who should? I guess we should just roll over and do whatever the politicians and bankers want, they've done such a brilliant job so far.
Exact same for myself, even if the design is very broken in FF Dev Edition.[0]

[0] http://i.imgur.com/CRAl9h4.png
When you try to open the Visual Studio project files, it gives you an error that you need Windows 8.1 installed. That's lame.

I'm aware I can open the .js files in a text editor, but that's like saying I could work on a C# project by just editing the .cs files in a text editor. Sure that's possible... but I would rather use the IDE.
Ah. That's a big leap from very little data!
One advantage might be the ability to support multiple platforms. Using the technology group formerly knows as the "web stack" you could build a version of your app for windows desktop, ubuntu desktop, browser apps, mobile, and probably others.
Great timing on the post. I'm a Python(2) user who is always on the lookout for the next language to jump to since I'm never moving to Python3. With Swift on the server and iOS, and being a very pleasing language similar to Python, this will be what I study next as I look to migrate off Python2 as it dies (which itself may take a while).
Thanks for posting this.
I noticed that the ITIF report contains this recommendation:

5) Complete trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts."
Dinosaur blood cells extracted from 75M-year-old fossil
"It's kinda lame you need an OS made in the last six years at least to run this."

Isn't this kind of like asking why Docker doesn't run on a Linux kernel from 2009? Windows 7 is six years old, don't be shocked some of Microsoft's newer things might use newer platforms.

Guess it's good they're giving folks a free upgrade.