skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
people in power vote with their wallets.
[...] If you want to be a neurosurgeon,
you must finish medical school. But the
tech dollars funding programmers are
saying something else.

Measuring skill/ability doesn't only produce a measurement - it produces a measurement with certain error bars.

Imagine two candidates for a job:

Candidate 1: "skill somewhere between 4 and 10, probably 8, salary required 5"

Candidate 2: "skill somewhere between 8 and 10, probably 8, salary required 9"

If I'm hiring a programmer, I might take a risk on candidate 1 as they're great value for money, and in the worst case I can always fire them and revert their commits.

If I'm hiring a neurosurgeon I'd go for candidate 2 for sure, because you can't revert dead patients.
The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.

How do people put up with this craziness? You all are talking about the rule of law while your congress is going to pass something many of them can't read, can't read in full, can't read with the help of aids, and can't disclose, and can't disclose even after it becomes law.

That's not law, that's tyranny.
The WSJ paywall doesn't appear when you come from a Google search link. So it will be the same URL, but because of the referrer, you'll see the full text.
Politics on this issue aside, think this through for a moment.

Would you care to share how you'd like to individually code the more than 10,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition in manufactured each year in the US, in a manner not easily defeated, on a surface that is launched at ~1,000 feet per second and is literally designed to deform as much as possible upon impact?
I agree about the value Maps/Waze style pooling of information. Also agreed that social (what your contacts like) recommendations might be useful. Leaving aside the possibility of implementing those in a P2P fashion, I'm just saying this is not all there is, and that is in fact a minority of the useful stuff.
Lot's of good stuff here. I especially like the double diamond operator, safer behavior. However that string of punctuation is terrible and I wish they would have changed the behavior of <> with a pragma.
The reason you don't get a reply (in the US anyways) is for legal reasons. If you say anything which could be even remotely (mis)interpreted as some sort of bias, your company could lose lots of money/time and potentially go bankrupt due to a discrimination lawsuit.

It's sadly safer to just not reject candidates at all. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Apple Watch Shows the Benefits of Engineering Perfection–and of Flaws
With the amount of ammo being produced, and then horded within this country, even if they found a way to make the new stuff traceable it would still probably be decades before old supplies dried up for everyone.
So, betterment (for example) offers something called betterment institutional where the advisor has to pay that same .1-.3% of AUM to provide those services to her clients.

This ends up costing the advisor hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

Or an advisor could pay someone like (future) you, who's familiar with Vagrant and knows the wealthbot platform inside-out, to implement wealthbot.io at her firm for a 1 time fee.

Seems like an easy choice :)
I guess that's the reason why they are accepting bitcoin.
> ... that's a minority view at best.

Not at all - go ask any devops/IT group running in small, medium and large businesses to replace their Microsoft tools with a competitor's (if you can find one) or FOSS tools and they'll laugh in your face because of how easy Microsoft makes things for them.

> But the tradeoff there is that it's often been slow to keep up with developments in the rest of the industry...

Considering that Microsoft kicked off Web 2.0 with the invention of XMLHTTPRequest and the iframe, I'd have to disagree.

Your whole argument is closed == bad and that's simply not true.
Why you should Not use MongoDB for your app?
absolutely, I guess only "kids" say things like that.

google and see what microsoft did initially, now it's basically doing "if I can not beat it, I'll have to join it". microsoft does what it is doing now not because it favors open source, but it really has _no_ choice, and time is running out fast.

Micrsoft has not really earned my trust, still in IRC I use "M$" for it, but I do welcome their changes, let's wait and see, that what real contribution it will do for the OSS community.
This is part of a trend of "quirky and random" app update notes, which has a two-fold purpose: to demonstrate "hey, we're a startup and we don't have boring bug-fix patch notes! ^_^", and to attempt to get viral on social media aggregators like Reddit. (given the amount of votes this submission has received, it seems to be working)

Case in point, Medium stole the joke from another app, whose submission received 6000+ upvotes on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/32sgrm/important_upda...
Startup Gets $50M in Quest to Build Better Drugstore
I was curious to see how something like this could "trash an installation".

It seems like the issue is that the Skype installation maintains a chat history. If this poison string is in your chat history, something crashes the client (presumably a procedure intended to linkify URLs in chat).

You can delete your chat history, but it is synced from the server on startup, at which point the client crashes again. That's why your only option is to downgrade to a version without the bug.
That's a great technique to get your client base to feel like you mean business. My guess is: There was never a "Peter".
Skype has bad quality from e.g. Thailand. Google Hangouts none of my clients (including myself) understand or can use. Still looking for a reliable and proper internet audio/video solution. I wonder if there's better solutions.
| That's probably not true.
*Citation needed
"Our business is based on selling products, not on having information about you. You are not our product."

Pretty easy to say "we don't do this" when it's not even a significant part of your revenue stream.

Sort of like if Zuckerberg said "Our business is based on selling advertising, not on selling premium, high markup shiny things".
Any links to the actual video?
There's a thing I call Amiga Game Disease. It's a thing on many platforms, especially now, but it was prevalent on the Amiga way back when. It's when a game is pretty much a tech demo with a thin game wrapped around it. Take something like Shadow of the Beast. Beautiful to look at, and really showcased the Amiga's power. Nothing looked or sounded quite like the Amiga version of Shadow of the Beast, and the various ports to lesser systems certainly couldn't keep up.

But it was pure, frustrating, junk from a gameplay perspective. The controls were clunky and shit was always popping out of nowhere and killing you. I kept dying at the first "boss", a skeleton thing on a throne that looked like it was made of some bigger creature's jaw. What I didn't know at the time was that there was a gryphon I had to defeat by punching the crystal orb it was bouncing; defeating the gryphon would temporarily grant me the power to shoot hadoukens, and the skeleton thing was only vulnerable to the hadoukens. (If you used up your hadoukens before defeating the skeleton thing, well, sucks to be you.)

And it's just full of stuff like this. The game doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how to play it or what its goals are. Plus it was a pioneer in unskippable cutscenes: moving from one place to another -- like going in a door or something -- entailed staring at a still image while adventure-game-style flavor text scrolled by and no key or button press could dismiss it. And once you die, that's it. You have to start all the way from the beginning. The game could be cleared in half an hour -- IF you knew where everything was. I guess it got replay value by surprising you with deadly enemies and obstacles you couldn't see coming and making you start over each time a new thing bit you in the ass.

But we all remember Shadow of the Beast -- indeed Amiga users look back fondly at it -- SIMPLY BECAUSE OF ITS GRAPHICS AND SOUND.

Sword of Sodan was the same thing: clunky and repetitive, but WOW LOOK AT THOSE HUGE SPRITES.

So yes, "good graphics = good game" is a thing, and it's because of the market, not because of the execs.
I also use some google products but if you're worried about the big prying G eyes and looking for a self-hosted replacement I guess sovereign is a good (and easy to deploy) starting point ....

https://github.com/al3x/sovereign
That is correct, iMessage is encrypted, however they still have your metadata (who you're speaking with, timestamps) and because of how iMessage works (asymmetric cryptography with multiple public keys managed by Apple), it's easy on Apple's side to attach a new public key and device to your account such that anybody can then listen to the messages sent to you. And so, because you can't settle on a specific public key with the person you're talking with, the model is kind of broken, although it is better than nothing.

XMPP / OTR is a much better option for encrypted chats. It's fairly user friendly as well. Unfortunately big companies owning chat services are not fans of open standards.
what is this nonsense?
Google’s plan to spread the Internet with massive balloons is coming to America
There are plenty of reasons why virtually all international negotiations are conducted in secret. For one tiny example, imagine the effect on the markets and perhaps worse the effect of markets on the negotiations.

If the process were made transparent then the negotiations would simply take place somewhere else.

Just remember, when you see a "public negotiation" of a treaty of some kind, that the actual negotiations took place well in advance of any announcements and in complete secrecy.

Do you think nuclear arms control treaties are negotiated in public? Which do you think is more important -- negotiations that could result in the end of the world, or negotiations over tariff policy?
Not that I disbelieve you, but do you have a reference?

It was my understanding that no amendments were allowed to USA FREEDOM, which still leaves the barn doors open. But perhaps I misunderstood something about the version of USA FREEDOM that was current at the time of the vote, so I'd like to read more about it.
For smokeless powder, decades, my father is still reloading shotgun shells with paper casks of Hercules (now Alliant) gunpowder that were bought before WWII he thinks (if not, right after, the trade dress looks maybe too modern for pre-WWII, unfortunately the codes they are stamped with aren't easily decoded). And ammo made during WWII is still good, albeit normally made with corrosive primers.
etc. including but not limited to fundraisers and otherwise raising money for political campaigns, "awards" for championing a certain issue, and of course having a third party pay for meals or other personal perks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#...
In reality using Apple products reduces your privacy. How ?

If you use Google's products(and who doesn't use Google Search ? ) , Google already knows plenty about you. And even if you don't use Google products, Google knows plenty about you, since it's tracking software is installed in large percentage of sites, etc.

And if you add machine learning on top of that , the amount that Google knows about you is great - even if you use Apple's products.

In reality, by using Apple's products, you don't gain privacy , you lose privacy - now two companies know a lot about you, instead of one.

Also this exposes your data for security bugs from both companies - thus making it easier for third parties to go at it.
Ultimately the environments are 3D images being generated from a 2D dataset. How is it not 3D? A cube is a 2D square that's been extruded into another dimension. It's not 2D.
Free Cloud Computing quizzes
As others have mentioned this isn't particularly newsworthy, you've been able to make guns at home since forever. Its a rifle of course, and rifle ammunition you can't make at home, but as others have mentioned you can make black powder weapons in a completely untraceable way (from making your own black powder, to casting your own lead ball shot) but we're not worried about a bunch of home hobbiests fielding a Napoleonic infantry. They don't mention how you can make a gun out of a stuff you can buy past security at an airport [1].

Its just click bate. Next up, 'I made an untraceable battle tank at home with some steel pipe and an arc welder!'

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsem22DkIjw
It still is though.
"If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes"

'Liberal arts education' has become a code word for drinking to excess five nights a week and cheap casual sex with classes you can just show up to occasionally and pass. Actual literal liberal arts education is available in very few places but might be just as valuable as STEM for those who really get it.

"MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test"

That is in very little dispute. To investors and employers, elite university admission is an IQ test and graduation is a test of social class values -- it's a test of whether your family is stable and wealthy enough to support you financially, emotionally, and socially through four years and not interrupt you by needing you to support them financially, medically, or as free child care. Smart people from stable upper middle class families are valuable employees while the practical stuff you'd learn at MIT, especially in CS, is very easy to pick up on the job.

"Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school."

Note that those are non-market jobs. You can't pick your own Supreme Court; you have to deal with the one politics subjects everyone to. You can't pick your own neurosurgeon just because he's good; you have to take one of the ones the state licensing board, state courts, and insurance companies choose for you. And people with political power like to support the process of educational hoop jumping for various reasons -- some of them good.

Customers, entrepreneurs, and investors risking and spending their own money are more interested in results than pedigree. That's why the lightly regulated software industry sees so many dropouts succeed. Dropouts do well in construction trades, agriculture, and other less bureaucratic credential dependent industries, also.

Industries like Wall Street, where the primary source of income is scamming politicians, pension fund managers, regulators, and the public, depend even more heavily on pretty credentials than regulated industries like law and health care. Ivy league degrees are really valued on Wall Street because perception is so much more important than results.
Software bug linked to Airbus triple engine failure
TextSecure and RedPhone review
For me adding money taints the leaking process. Now its not whether someone has moral qualms with something they ate witness to but rather, is there potential for personal gain in revealing something.

I think WikiLeaks is setting a poor precedent with this and framing it as "donors" rather than WikiLeaks itself paying is quintessentially disingenuous.
It's still bad, but it's improved a lot from where it was.
Quitting your job to work full-time on your startup
As a successful recent college dropout(3 years ago co-founded a company), my only fear is on what's next(on my career).
b

Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that.

Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.
I don't think the article makes that mistake, there are plenty of non-graphics examples: AI / simulation of thousands or RTS units, motion controls, companion apps.
Paying people to divulge information about illegal activities is perfectly legal, yes - leaking classified government information, however, is not. One thing is not like the other. It's not about paying people to share information, it's what kind of information, and which laws protect said information.
╯‵Д′)╯彡┻━┻
The enthusiast, survivalist, and cheapskate community have been refilling their own cartridges for decades. Police your brass and clean and refill. It's not quite as easy as I'm making out, but it's not rocket science.

> Just regulate, and mark with ID, the bullets. Or if that starts being circumvented with diy bullets, control the propellant, and mark it with isotopes or whatever.

Gunpowder, primer and bullet. The latter is relatively easy, you could make your own. Good luck successfully regulating that.

As for the powder and primer, you can bet your bottom dollar that homebrew solutions for those would improve rapidly and drastically if the need should arise.

The current ghost gun setup hasn't formed in a vacuum. It's been fashioned around what's available. Change the climate and things will evolve in a different direction.

Perhaps if things do go "your" way, we'll see 3D-printed caseless ammunition with CNC's bullets in an actively-cooled electronic firing rifle. The 3D-printed propellant produced by custom-made yeasts or something.

It wouldn't be overnight, but it might be unstoppable.
It is, but that's pretty useless unless Google also knows so that it can send you the relevant updates.

It's shortsighted to say that just because (example implementation) my device polls their server for $team, that it is the same as "google knowing" I like $team. The interface does not need to be authenticated, or keep logs. There is just a slippery slope between monitoring for diagnostics and abuse that incremental business value very quickly slides into tying team-specific view counters and a favorite team to my user identifier.
This seems illegal. Any lawyers here?

Two reasons:
1- Offering money for someone to commit a crime. If somebody obtains the details illegally, Wikileaks would be liable for that.
2- Interfering with the executive branch's negotiation of a treaty is definitely illegal, though not necessarily always enforced. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_the...)

All that said, Wikileaks probably doesn't care. They already leaked a ton of US gov't classified data, so why would more indictments matter?
You generally don't want to do this, because it perverts the incentives. When you offer cash for something that should be done out of some sense of morality, you turn it from a terminal value ("I do this because I want it to be done") into an instrumental value ("I don't care about this but I do it because I want the reward"). You'll start getting much more noise with the signal because of various "entrepreneurs" who smell the occasion for a quick buck. There's ton of psychological/sociological research which shows that people generally get funny in the head when you substitute social incentives for economic ones.
I hope it's meant ironic. It's just a movie and a link pointing to a non existing page which contains an image...
Advanced Tools and Scripting with PowerShell 3.0 Jump Start
Schimdt quote is taken out of context and it is not the whole quote.
When you're comparing your user engagement to Google+, you know things are not going well. They don't call G+ a ghost town for nothing.

Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice for long blog posts?
Yahoo will stream an NFL game this October
For a more basic introduction:

https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/en-US/training-cours...
Another thing to consider is as soon as the details are public, we will be assaulted by ad campaigns by various interest groups which this negatively effects telling us why it will ruin our lives. While the general Hacker News population may be too smart to be swayed from reason by these ads, ads like this exist because they work.

A portion of the public will be swayed by the plight of the American Pipe Layers Union or whoever is potentially going to lose a little bit of business as the ads, like others of their kind, will provide them with a partial picture of the deal and telling them why this is horrible, without providing enough context for them to come to a different conclusion.

Some portion of the public outcry when something like this becomes public will be due these special interest groups effectively buying the opinions of the public by telling them what to think in the same manner they usually do.
You would be surprised. Several companies have a big data-problem even with small amount of it. :)
> 1. iMessage and FaceTime data is encrypted.

That doesn't really mean anything though. Apple still can decrypt your iMessage data. Besides you don't actually know - you are trusting Apple when they say they can't decrypt your messages. Given law enforcement situation that is most certainly false.

>2. Having my data and not letting anyone else benefit from it is 100x better than what most tech companies are doing. Also they don't have 'all' my data. They take what they need to improve my experience. Other companies hoover up everything they can because they need it to sell.

But Google isn't selling your data to anyone else either - the only parties benefiting from it are Google and you. Where is the proof that Google is selling your data to 3rd parties? Likewise you can give Google the data you feel like giving - no one is forcing anything on you.

>> "They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X."
>To improve the spotlight user experience. They're not selling my data and I can easily disable it.

This is getting tiring - how is this any different from what Google does? You seem to implying that because Apple makes money from hardware today they won't sell my data tomorrow. I gave specific examples on how that is not true and how that could not be true tomorrow. Problem is you are starting with a blind faith in Apple - once you do that everything starts to sound logical even without any facts to support! If you drop blind faith in either Apple or Google you'll see that it is all the same - Google isn't selling your data to 3rd parties as much as you would love to believe. They are just benefiting from it. And that _could_ change tomorrow. Same with Apple.
For the author's comparison of The Sims to the Facebook Flash game of The Sims -- one thing he doesn't discuss at all is that by using 3D models The Sims allows you a crazy amount of customization in creating Sims and their surroundings, compared to what's possible with the hand-drawn vector graphics of The Sims Social.

Which kind of undermines his point. The Sims Social isn't a game that made different choices in graphics, it's a different kind of game with the Sims brand thrown on it. It's not just about MOAR GRAPHICS, what you're capable of doing with graphics informs what kind of gameplay experiences you can create for players.
Would be funny, but I doubt Obama has access or much of a say in the matter, and he himself would get arrested and sued for leaking secrets - the president is not above the law.
LHC arrives at the next energy frontier
How the Guardian is counting every person killed by US police
" it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. "

IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death.
This is a topic I rarely see discussed.

A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence.
Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison.