skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So many things wrong about this move by Disney. Terrible to see Julian Castro pushing for H1B increase. I hope the technology sector worker takes heed. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and all corporations are out to keep wages low using whatever legal means possible, even illegal as the Steve Jobs/Eric Schmidt agreements show. $100K+ salaries is too much for the 1% and their investors to sustain so they'll bring in the foreign workers through these visas to replace 40+ year-old tech workers (age discrimination?). The federal government doesn't care. It is too busy trying to work out the TPP which no doubt, is another win for these corporations. The tech sector workers need to unite to maintain the gains they have made. The last time Americans had access to this quality of life was working for manufacturing plants. Unions helped maintain that lifestyle until over time, the 1% removed those protections and unions started dying off. Once again, we have an opportunity to maintain a high quality of life but we need to unionize. If you hate the word union, then use community. We need to form a community of tech sector workers to protect our gains. We cannot let these corporations get away with this without us making a move. Show or not, Gawker writers know that bloggers are easily replaceable what with all the English majors American universities are churning out each year. To protect their jobs, it makes sense to unionize. There's no reason why a 30-something year-old writer should live with the fear that any day, a fresh out of college individual can easily take over.
> Yes, you can encode arbitrary Turing machines as differential equations.

That's neat! Do you have a reference?
Show HN: AngularBeans
Smartwatch biz Pebble says smartwatch biz Apple won't approve its new app
Taxes. Vanguard's LifeStrategy and Target Retirement funds were not meant to be tax efficient.
I don't think many people dispute whether espionage in general is a practical moral good (or at least neutrality)... In the sense that we live in a world where foreign governments keep secrets that can be dangerous to the survival of other governments.

I mean, in an ideal world we wouldn't have spies... But we also wouldn't have police or military.
See also a very nice video from ClojureWest about queues in system architectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0

The queue are everywhere - your messaging queue, the threadpool, the hardware threads, and other layers of the stack and APIs you use. The video adds the interesting detail that as you add more tellers (workers) you learn of impending disaster only in the outlier p99 (or higher) latencies; by the time your p85 latency rises, you're already about to stall out.
Somehow it just became strongly associated with UNIX?

Or UNIX became the embodiment of the concept of "run anywhere"?
I'm not saying "Yay tyranny!" and to characterize my position thusly is, frankly, shitty discourse.

I'm saying, "Ooh, look: teeny, tiny step back from the level of tyranny we had yesterday. Nice!" I would hope anyone who hates tyranny would see merit in that.

Now, yes, if that's all we get, then being pissed and — more importantly, doing something about it — is warranted. But I choose to look at this as a first step, while you and others appear to regard it as appeasement and a pat on the head.

Not much I can do for you there.
Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Rust, AngularJS, Express, Java, Git, jQuery, MongoDB, MySQL, C++, PHP, Backbone.js, CoffeeScript, Chart.js, D3.js, Famo.us, Grunt.js

Résumé/CV: https://goo.gl/Y5D6zl

Email: john [at] zhang.io

I'm a 2014 Vanderbilt Engineering grad and just graduated from Hack Reactor. I've been programming since high school and placed first in Vanderbilt's ACM programming contest freshman year. I've worked with startups all throughout college, but I wanted to write production code and move to SF so I went to Hack Reactor. And I also wanted to show that I can pick up anything, so for my thesis project I learned Rust and implemented HTTP/2 features with my team. I'm ready to hit the ground running in any team.
Ask HN: Cheap places to stay in the Bay Area?
I am part of an Irish start-up and I am going to be in the Bay Area for a number of meetings with my co-founder from the 14th until the 27th of June. We have teamed up with another start-up, another 2 guys and are looking to find cheap places to stay for the duration of the trip. Our current best option is hostels in downtown San Fran for around $40 a night. Anyone have any ideas or offers? We are an open and easy going bunch.
WatchKit for iOS Apple Watch
When the World Trade Center towers were being planned, the builders discovered that nobody really knew how much sway occupants of tall buildings could tolerate. Wind tunnel tests showed that the (relatively) light buildings would sway more than expected and the builders feared that any publicity about this would scuttle the project.

They began conducting two secret research programs. One investigated methods of dissipating energy to reduce sway. The other determined how much a room could move before occupants noticed it.

This second investigation was conducted under the pretense of "free vision exams." Participants were led into a room that was (unbeknownst to them) mounted on rails and moved by hydraulic rams. The amount of simulated sway was increased until somebody spoke up.

The engineers eventually determined that the sway could be brought within acceptable (though still detectable) levels by installing viscoelastic dampers between the floor joists and the building's perimeter columns.

The whole story is told in the 2003 book City in the Sky, which is a fascinating read.
You can build a physical Turing machine and describe its behavior using Newton's equations of motion, then do a change of variable t -> 1/t. The value at 0 gives you the result of the computation. Q.E.D
Many, many more people view him as a traitor for exposing legal foreign intelligence programs. He obviously did it for what he thought were valid reasons, but that does make it right.
whoa, this is really cool- I especially like the images results.

It took me a minute to realize the image results even existed though- maybe there's a way to make it more obvious what you can do (like a walkthrough or interactive tutorial?)
> I'm not a lawyer, but if he wants to argue that he's innocent or that the law is unconstitutional, it seems like the courtroom is the right place to make that argument.

You should know that he would be legally barred from doing so under an Espionage Act prosecution.

https://freedom.press/blog/2013/12/if-snowden-returned-us-tr...

https://freedom.press/blog/2014/01/sen-schumer-wrong-snowden...
Yea, a bot that just runs your Vanguard account like betterment/wealthfront would but without their fees would provide a huge amount of value to people.
it would have been delicious initially :p
Kubernetes is not an externalized borg. They are completely separate products that do more-or-less similar things. Similarly, dataflow is completely new code that does similar things.

As far as I know, GCS, bigquery, and bigtable actually are externalized offerings of their internal equivalents.
Cooperation between GCHQ and the NSA certainly didn't end post-9/11.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04...
I couldn't agree more. Comcast is a great example of customer service handled perfectly via Twitter in my opinion. I can get Comcast issues resolved in minutes via Twitter compared to hours trying to explain it over the phone.
Did he release secret US Army and Navy documents?

Was he hired to secure them, but then stole them?

Isn't this treason?

Let him come back. If there is enough evidence against him, then he can stand trial.

If he is innocent; then the government won't be able to prove a case against him.
It's sad but true. Downvote for truth.
Why a Manufacturing Startup Is Doable
Yeah I keep getting surprised that people I meet have no idea who Snowden is, haven't heard of mass surveillance or propaganda operations, aren't aware of the huge national security push being made by the United States across essentially every region of the globe, and aren't following national security legislation including the recent Freedom Act and 215 sunset.
At last count, Last Week Tonight as at least eight investigative reporters on staff. Even though it's couched as "entertainment" it's more in depth than most other "news" programs out there.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/29/last-week-t...
> People with the monolith mindset will not be able to do it.

That's like saying "people with the phlostigon mindset will not be able to electrically insulate your house." Of course they won't, but why are you letting them touch your house in the first place? Designing components for the possibility that they'll be used in a distributed context is just proper software engineering—it's just thinking quantitatively about cohesion and coupling, really—and is to be expected of a proper software engineer.

...but that sounds crazy, right? I mean, we both know how hard it is to hire a proper distributed systems engineer. That's the implicit complaint you're making here.

Well, but wait—why is it hard? I don't think it's an intrinsic thing. Distributed systems aren't any more complicated than calculus or graph theory. It's not like we couldn't make the proper design of them a required course in colleges.

Thus, I would say it's hard precisely because people (including curriculum planners) think that there are only the two alternatives: either up-front-designing a monolith with low operational costs and fast iteration, or up-front-designing a formation of distributed components with high operational costs and slow iteration. The second alternative is obviously bad anywhere but at scale, and we need very few engineers that can operate "at scale", so it ends up not being seen as a required skill.

But, obviously, those aren't the only two options! If you have the engineers with the skill to design distributed systems, and then have them start off your software design as a "distributed system all in one process", then you get the best of both worlds: low operational overhead, fast iteration from the start (redrawing the service boundaries when you're still at the experimentation phase will be painless as long as you use a framework/language/platform that abstracts away inter-service RPC), and a design that organically "anneals into" a proper set of services, instead of a big ball of circularly-dependent mud.

But, again, you need actually-competent engineers.
Most idiots do what they're told, and with IQ rates proportional to population, the USA has the 3rd most idiots of any country in the world.
Kind of the hardest bubble to notice you're in though right? Especially in the age of social media.
But still accurate.
Magic Leap Teases Augmented Reality SDK
Here's a hypothesis, although I don't have the data to back it up:

When you bring foreign workers in, you have to train them, teach them skills, work culture, etc, that local workers already have.

I would assume this leads to a situation where the job market simply becomes more saturated. Even if H1B regulations require giving above the prevailing wage, over the long term, job market saturation will suppress wage growth through more contention for limited positions, and they may in fact be saving themselves money by paying the higher wages to essentially "Water down the soup"
Does Go need native endianess? (2011)
How Not to Crash #6: Properties and Accessors
I am not at all implying that commenters on HN must avoid having ideologies. There is nothing at all wrong with being opposed to capitalism; many productive HN commenters are.
Nope, I tend to go straight to the comments to HN and Reddit threads for context, criticisms, the likely important relevant information.
related: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Facebooks-architecture
Both were supplied when we first announced the SDK! See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-aws-sdk-for-go/
I think it's a matter of scale, rather than quality - we obviously use languages and frameworks and patterns at Google.
Start up/Product industry is growing in India. But its no where close to providing jobs for India's population scale. Beyond that the new breed of start ups are extremely elitist, and tend to hire only from the best of the colleges.

In short it makes sense to play the start up game in India, only if its your own start up.
Can one reasonably believe that acceptance of transsexuals in the U.S. is a much bigger deal than NSA surveillance?
>I think the primary impact has been the complete erosion of whatever goodwill the United States had among the citizenry (n.b. not the governments) of her allies.

The DESERVED complete erosion.

I fixed it for you.
A couple of videos of the signing in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iDAkEpCmBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnAofkVHZOQ
Exactly, this will fail just as fast as a single cipher when your users inevitably use 'password123' for their password.
One way to view this is companies have 2 buckets to allocate costs to:

1 - Ongoing operations

2 - Investments

Investors care about margins (% of sales) on ongoing operations, but tend to view investments with a "Return on Capital" (% of assets). Note that margins are on flow, where as ROC is on a fixed asset. The idea is that if you know the margin and growth of a business, you can come up with a long term value estimate. (If you're interested, I can write more about how this calculation works) It's also worth noting that this isn't the "optimal" way to make spending decisions. Good companies know that it's worth treating all expenses as a "Return on Capital" basis rather than purely optimizing on margins. (This can be called EVA or Economic Value Added)

What the article captures is the essence of good leadership and management. You can't be 100% long term - investors would never know if the money is being well spent. You can't be 100% short term - you'll never invest for the future, and will get crushed when the future arrives.

There is one caveat... If a company decides that it can no longer innovate, then the "Stop spending money, and return money to sharedholders via buybacks so that they can invest it elsewhere" actually does make sense. (Move capital from IBM to companies who need it to grow)
Welcome to the voice menu from Hell. We used to do that with AT&T Voice Power cards back in the day.
6 Coolest Features of Cocoatech's Path Finder OS X App
[React] Mixins Are Dead. Long Live Composition
I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask if you think that because you've had very, very few people without a degree apply for that kind of position? Your ad is ensuring that you'll never see the people that have learned it. As a self-taught programmer, I don't apply to listings with this requirement, even if I have everything else they're looking for, because it's just as much an indicator for me as it is for you. I just want you to be aware that you're excluding a very special niche group that could do wonders for any business.
Surprised no one has mentioned it!!
I really hate people advocating micro services/libraries because they just migrated and "everything got much better". No, everything got much better because the known/actual problem domain changed and system is re-adjusted accordingly. When you start with very little knowledge of the problem domain, any fine-grained architecture is premature optimization, and what you really want is to rapidly expand your understanding of the problem.

Projects can fail in many ways, not trying to understand the problem better and not trying to re-adjust after are typical pitfalls. Migrating from monolith to micros is just a natural transition between SOME stages, and it shouldn't happen until you hit those stages. You may hit those stages very early, or sometimes never.
hah well all analogies break down if you peck at them long enough. Twitter should have enabled developers to create great things on their medium vs trying to be both the platform and the app creator.
>Isn't this treason?

Is "treason" against people and organizations who failed the country and abused the constitution still treason?

Let's not forget that the revolution for independence was also treason to the British crown...
In Japan, anytime you hand someone cash in personal life it's rude not to put it in an envelope. Examples includes gifts or paying your Japanese teacher.

The tray avoids passing cash hand to hand. 20 years ago, clerks (or taxi drivers) would be visibly surprised and slightly shocked if you tried to hand them cash. But that's relaxed a lot now. Tourists hand cash to clerks and the reaction is slight if at all. Taxi drivers often exchange cash hand to hand. It's still more polite to use the tray but less strict.
Phone metadata collection is Constitutional under Smith v. Maryland.
It doesn't help that every technology company uses their data on you to determine your interests and then just shows those thus keeping you in a feedback loop never exposed to other ideas or types of information.
He should be allowed to testify and defend himself.

The prosecution can present their evidence.
Show HN: Currated list of products for hackers to get paid to test/hack
I'm pretty sure https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/430/705 covers your first case, and https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment covers your second.
But did you read to the end and see how everyone involved behaved in the aftermath? The opposite of what you seem to be implying. And honorably so.
Sometimes it cannot. Would a jury in the South in 1850 condemn or free an abolitionist?

That's the problem with justice in full -- it's not just the law, and it's not just the majority opinion.

The first can mostly determine compliance (with its code), the second can mostly determine popularity or prevelance of a sentiment.

And they can do that only given all the facts (which they wont, e.g. how this information was used, special service people can just lie like they did to congress etc), and without undue influence from outside.

For something like Snowden's case (or the slavery example), who controls the media and public discourse is quite an important factor on any jury, that's in effect even before they got selected.

All that, of course, if anybody believes that there's a thing such as justice in general, and that while some things can be relative, something like slavery being bad is wrong whether the majority of people in an era thinks its ok or not.
I agree, banning canaries would be a first amendment breach.
Actually, it is right what he did. Given how much dirt has been exposed do you really think there was another way to do this? What Snowden did is a prime example of civil disobedience: sometimes a country needs to be called out on what it's doing is wrong, no matter what the laws say.

That said, whistleblowers are in for a rough time and usually get acknowledged for what they did when they're either too old or dead.
That seems reasonable. I can think of many human/organizational/rule reasons that would force the breakup of a monolith representing many separate-but-related concerns.
Not sure where the link is going, but check out http://gitprime.com for details.
Where did I imply or state that?

Nowhere!

What does that have to do with security updates and reboots?

Nothing!
The people I'm jealous of are the people who can listen to 128kbps and below - at that point I can't enjoy the music because I fixate on all the compression artifacts.

I prefer to keep FLACs (lossless compression, so just like a WAV except smaller) myself, just so I can re-encode to my lossy format/bitrate of choice without incurring generational loss. 320kbps is probably clean enough but who cares, disk space is cheap.

But for listening, 320kbps MP3 is A-OK, I don't know whether or not I could ABX it but I don't hear enough artifacts to trigger me. For more situations where size matters, I use V0 or V1 (depending on what I'm playing it on and the type of music). At V1 I start hearing a few artifacts in tough passages, but it takes an enormous chunk out of the filesize relative to FLAC.

I used to have an iRiver H320 - with replacement firmware (RockBox) I could even play FLAC on it. I eventually replaced the 20GB HDD with a 16GB CompactFlash as a ghetto SSD, used to get like 20 hours of battery life on it. It could also do optical out, recorded in MP3 or WAV, and was super easy to change parts on. Great player for a hacker. I used it daily and hard for probably 7 years before the screws would no longer grab, I need to get it back out and see if I can get it going again.
So you argue (at the risk of putting words in your mouth: "you can't compare USA and USSR prison camp systems because the work conditions are hugely different".

Then I respond: "but the systems are similar in the way they both grabbed unprecedented levels of citizens, and possibly the justice of their convictions".

Why are the dots you've decided to connect the right ones, while the dots that I think are important are just playing a game?
Since the legislation is missing whistleblower protection (a fundamental flaw) there is no way Snowden can make any arguments in a U.S. court, at least not until the legislation is fixed. Unconstitutional or not, the law is just broken. It's painfuly obvious, and I can't fathom why fixing it isn't a higher priority (for example, wouldn't politicians who want votes promise to work for such reform now, after the Snowden debacle?)
Like a filter bubble?
I remember these being common in Canada at least as late as the mid-1980s. Usually branded with a credit card logo.
If Snowden came back to the U.S and got released, he wouldn't be the whistleblowing platform he currently is.
This is like saying, "A self driving car is a bad idea, because the user might enter the bottom of the ocean as their destination.".
In the end, they probably couldn't have asked for a better outcome. Collection continues, warrants are still unnecessary if you go about it the right way.
> Isn't this treason?

Treason requires actions directly aiding a wartime enemy. There's a reason the US has prosecuted (let alone convicted) less than 40 people for it, and there's a reason they passed the Espionage Act, which is what Snowden was charged under.
I launched such a website circa 2008. While a lot of people fantasize about working on a startup on the side, most actually cave because they don't like ideas from anyone else than themselves.

Basically, motivation is hard to get if you are not 100% a believer in the vision. So shopping for other people's visions usually fails.
It's easier to understand, and easier to have a visceral, attention-grabbing (and, more importantly, attention-keeping) reaction to.

That's what appears to matter most in American "news" reporting.