skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people have hypothesized that autonomous vehicles will drastically change the economics such that daily car sharing/rental will be cheaper than car ownership, and similarly convenient. This might in turn lead to a decline in car culture and personal car ownership. With a larger percentage of vehicles being owned by companies (or at least by individuals who are often loaning out their vehicle to the network), the distinguishing factors in the market may shift away from personal taste and lean more heavily on efficiency and safety and gadgetry.

A lot of hypothetical guesswork in there of course, but those are the kind of ideas I've heard lately on the matter.
I don't know, is this non-technical version of a brogrammer?
> If code theft causes a financial loss then why wouldn't prison be a possibility there?

The difference between stealing a car and putting it in a garage and stealing code and letting it sit on a flash drive in an office drawer is that the original owner of the car no longer has exclusive rights to use it, but the rightful owner of the code can continue to use their original property, often times exclusively. It's only when, as you eluded to, the stolen code gets used that a financial loss can be justified and I wouldn't argue against prison as a punishment.

But, I'm not really arguing that stealing code or any other intellectual property is _not_ wrong, but there really is a difference between the common analogy of stealing a car, which I think most people who do argue that position are trying to justify. I don't think that a person or company can truly claim a financial loss if they become aware of someone else or another company is in possession of their code until they have proof that the code was used either as reference or directly.
Christians tend to be the most vocal critics of Christians. The diversity of beliefs among the various Christian sects is vast, and many of them are deeply incompatible with each other, both on a strictly logical "my belief X contradicts your belief Y" level and on the level of how people interact. It is impossible to have a platform like this which pleases all Christians, so it has to pick some subset to cater to.
Hacking Team Breach Shows a Global Spying Firm Run Amok
I don't think they implied that the people are millenia old, the beliefs are. They are culturally engrained for a huge part of the population.
I'll use an analogy with "nanorobots":

When I was doing nanotech 10+ years ago, and people asked me when nanorobots were coming, I'd always ask them why they thought nanorobots would be different than, say, bacteria, or viruses? The constraints "at the bottom" (as Feynman would say) are quite high—and we're not really very close to being able to engineer at that scale. Heck, even making a robot the size of a grain of rice is a pretty daunting task, and a nanorobot would be built on a scale that's 10^12 to 10^18 times smaller (the cubic relationship is a real bitch), depending on what you mean by "nanoscale".

Engineering a "thing" to convert basic chemicals and sunlight into food is a pretty significant task. While I would bet that plants are nowhere near close to optimal, they're already solving the problem. Changing & rethinking an existing system is far easier than simply creating one from whole cloth.

If I had to guess, I'd say that "producing food from manipulating basic elements" using a piece of tech entirely designed by human hands, from scratch, is at least a couple of centuries in the future.
Ignoring the fact I think this is bad advice, I actually find 'naming' things to be good fun. I enjoy finding names for projects. Sometimes I won't write the first line of code until I either find a permanent name for the project or a good enough temporary one to name the code directory. Can't reason this really, but its definitely important to me to know I'm working on a named project.
> Yet people change religion all the time.

And people always believe they have God down this time. Someone wouldn't say, "Yeah, I really had God figured out ten years ago but then I converted to East Southern Pentecostal Community Catholicism. That was a bad choice."

> That leaves, people choose God.

The way Christians look at it, God is revealed, not chosen. If you choose your own God, then your God tends to look suspiciously like an idealized version of yourself (or what you wish you were). In other words, to the extent you choose God, you probably have it wrong. That being said, you can't judge people for seeking earnestly.

> And we can't call it coincidence that people of one culture mostly choose the same God.

One culture? Which culture? We're talking about a Brazilian social network. Is that the same culture as the mountains of Kentucky or the streets of Rome?

To be clear, I'm arguing that people should be free to earnestly search for God (or confirm lack thereof) in their own way. Claiming people choose God presupposes He (or she or them) is already a mental construct.
I think this is extremely unlikely. This is because the engineering projects we are talking about involve co-ordinating the regulation of dozens of genes (at least 40 in my project). To build the system we have to transfer in the components separately in many different plants and then carefully stack the changes using breeding techniques. The probability of this happening in nature would be infinitessimally small, especially because we have found that by taking only some of the changes you actually get a decrease in photosynthesis.
I don't think 2-3 partners is really low. I find it hard to imagine most people being successful at seducing a very large number of people. Probably in most cases it is <= the number of boyfriends the girl has had.

I could also point out that my church would consider 2-3 partners something akin to "running wild". One partner, one time could be a lapse in judgement. Multiple partners or one partner multiple times indicates a pattern.
>I think the software development industry should stop doing such a disservice to itself, and start funding more scientific studies in software development.

Hm. I wonder if some of the larger companies are doing that sort of thing and keeping it internal-only or using it for internal coding standards without publishing it in an attempt to gain competitive advantage?
It seems safe to assume that some fraction of sexually active teenagers were using condoms as their only form of birth control before the program was instituted.

It seems likely that some fraction of those will use condoms less when other forms of birth control become widely available. Among this group, this will still likely lower pregnancy rates, since condoms have a lower efficacy than other forms of birth control, but it could potentially raise STD rates.

My intuition is that the increase will be negligible, but others' intuition is different. It would be good to have some numbers on this so that we aren't guessing.
JavaScript Libraries and Tools for Working with Local Storage
HipChat vs. Slack, which is right for you?
It seems like that code just builds random-ish data that conforms to the wanted file format and then gives it incriminating names. For example:

[1] https://github.com/hackedteam/rcs-common/blob/38290d4eab2b2c...

[2] https://github.com/hackedteam/rcs-common/blob/38290d4eab2b2c...
How strict is their definition of Christian? Do you have to affirm the Athanasian Creed and indivisibility and coeternity of the Trinity as part of the signup process?
Greeks may have cut of their own nose to spite their face.

Given the minimal impact on world markets, it appears the smart money wrote off Greece a while back.
Graphic: OPM hacks and how long it took the government to acknowledge them
I wouldn't attack or persecute people just for believing in any god or none - only when, in the name of their beliefs, they want to harm others (usually, though by no means always, the weak and the minority). I think most antireligous folk would say the same.
That's a common theme for some of the FreeBSD folks.

Superstitious Users and the FreeBSD Logo: http://halfblog.net/2011/12/04/daemon-worship/

And the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310063
What if someone believes in a God who they think is telling them they need to go out and murder people, right now?
At the risk of stating the obvious, many crashes would not be affected by this:

CFIT (controlled flight into terrain). Sadly common, it's how Kennedy junior died and many others.

Stall/spin. Common on take off and landing and avoidance is a huge emphasis in training.

Visual flight into instrument conditions. If untrained what often happens is the pilot will end up in a spin/spiral into the ground or doing a CFIT.

Also, running out of gas or engine failure requires the pilot to activate the backup correctly. Sounds silly, but I recall a pilot crossing the english channel with her family and forgetting to switch fuel tanks which caused a crash. Human factors is a huge part of training - so for this to be effective it needs to be drilled into the pilot's checklist on engine failure. Also this is time taken away from finding an emergency landing field and trying to restart the primary engine.

I'd say an interesting comparison is the Cirrus SR20/22 which has a parachute for the plane. It gives you a great sense of security but that particular plane is the new "doctor killer" (a name given to the V-Tail Bonanza in the past).

Curious to see how this will be seen and used by industry.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9839112
No, but there is a drop-in plugin that adds a webserver and converts your webview to WKWebView: https://github.com/Telerik-Verified-Plugins/WKWebView

It has a few limitations, but it's quite nice for games.
Hi, as per what I said in the article: this is just one type of use case, I'd be interested in knowing other people evaluations as well.
Are you suggesting that Perl, like duct tape, leaves a horrible sticky residue that takes years to remove?
Ask HN: Google's Project Fi?
Anyone tried this? https://fi.google.com/about/

My invite came through. Curious if people have tried it, and what they think.
It's easy to say that this happens all the time, urge folks to call the cops, let them deal with it, and otherwise don't make a big deal.

So here's the thing: people have been calling the cops; the cops are ill-equipped to deal with this. The inherent structure of police agencies in the U.S. is oriented around physical communities and jurisdictions. More than 5/6 of the sworn officers are below the federal level, thus not easily able to pursue investigations across state lines.[1] but it's easier to push this conveniently to being a problem for the cops than it is to think and choose to act.

You could instead:

* lobby your congressperson and senators to start a federal reporting program.
* develop a set of tools that helps narrow the source of these threats, along with a toolkit of self-serve legal forms to demand IP information so victims can submit full evidence to police
* support EFF and others who are helping fight this
* stop blaming the victim

mholt, you ask how Astrocyte's is part of Jesse's problem. Here's how:

* Astrocyte is assuming that none of this has already been done.
* Astrocyte is refusing to do some research and learn about the current state of affairs before minimizing the concerns of people actually experiencing the problem.
* Astrocyte is demanding that victims prove they've met Astrocyte's standards before those victims are supposed to raise broad-based concerns publicly.
* Astrocyte is writing this off as an isolated thing despite it clearly being more than that.
* Astrocyte is doing so publicly while implicitly urging others to do the same.

Astrocyte is choosing to push this problem away and say it's not as big, as wide, as common, or as horrific as it is. That's Astrocyte's choice. People are responsible for their own choices.

Astrocyte is part of the problem.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_Unite...
Ask HN: Quora for business
Hello,

Is there a website like Quora or StackExchange, but where businesses can post their problems - as businesses ?
Well, it's typically a multi-year degree program and not a 300 word blog post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering

Then you have Agile and XP and Scrum as either fast-flux Software Engineering (without all the "formal process/documentation" and instead use informal, but blessed, processes and immediate, undocumented, decision making) or anti-software-engineering depending on how you look at it.

Think: space shuttle or airliners, not social media. Sure, they still aren't perfect, but if you told me my airplane ran on Ruby I'd rather walk to my destination.
Since all my comments so far have sounded like I oppose giving out contraceptives (since I am very much a proponent of moral living), let me clarify. I think it is great to help lift people out of poverty. Since there is a trend among poor teenagers to have more unplanned pregnancies it makes sense to address that problem, and this is one possible step.

I do not think it should replace teaching abstinence. But I also don't think that teaching abstinence using scare tactics in school is all that effective. Religious and moral teachings are much more so. So it still comes down to the responsibility of parents to teach their children correct life principles.

Let the government give free contraceptives to at-risk populations. But also encourage parents to teach good morals.
Learn Wordpress with Free Video Tutorials in HD
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-06/piketty-germany-has...

I should think after WWI, Germans of all people would see the danger in driving a European country to ruin with onerous debts, but maybe everyone there just forgot about that after the little dictator just decided he didn't want to pay them anymore?
When naming things is hard, it's exactly the reason why you should stop, think, and find a good, fitting name.

If you have hard time naming something in your code, chances are it's because you have a nebulous understanding of that elusive thing. This is obviously bug prone. It's usually a good idea to spend a few minutes searching for a good, precise, descriptive name, and add enough comments if the entity being named is not a temporary variable.

Doing so not just makes later code maintenance easier, it tidies up your understanding and can even lead to finding a bug or another problem (happened to me more than once).
It seems absurd to me too, but I know plenty of people that do it at Amazon. Typically in positions that are paying $300k+, or people that are 75+% travel. I guess it's about the convenience of not having to park more than anything else.
> Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements

Not sure how that relates to what I'm saying about "the".

A minor note: the "is" in "Your house is big" is non-contractable, whereas in "It's raining outside" the "is" contracts, so they're really 2 different words.
What I like about this app is that there's context and history. I use Spotlight all the time for these conversions, but there's no way for me to keep the last calculations around for reference or reuse; I have to put stuff in a text editor for that, which is a lot more awkward.
Chicago seems to be a popular punching bag for ridiculous comparisons. I recall at the early height of violence in Iraq just after the US invasion hearing people say that the violence in Baghdad was overblown because it was still safer than Chicago.
Also, there are probably many nuances and facets of socialization that have yet to be created, discovered, exaggerated, detailed, organized, etc. Just because most people limit themselves to the physical world of body language, sensory percepts, the electronic-intellectual world of thumbs up, upvotes and personalized walls of media subtypes; that doesn't mean that's the end to socialization.

I think there is a lot of potential for creativity to be expressed, to come up with new ways to communicate.

The surrealists did automatic drawing with one another, and some folks at Google combined vast quantities of depersonalized data and individuated constructions of layered learning, to create surrealistic like images.
Does Science Diminish Wonder or Augment It?
PersonalHeroes is like Klout, but for being kind
Expecting at 36, I disagree with you. It's given us less time. There is no way to wait until you have managed away all the risks.
Didn't ICANN recently introduce a "steal your domain if you fail to click a link in our phishing email" policy? If so, they can't be trusted not to do something else crazy, like enact this other anti-privacy policy being discussed here.
Sure the rules can be different, but why should they? The reason for punishing is the harm done.

I'd also argue that stealing code is depriving the owner the control of the code. The property interest is in the code in the non-tangible sense. It doesn't matter that I still have a copy.

This is especially true for code that is confidential. A lot of the value of Goldman's code is that nobody else knows it. Otherwise you can predict their trades, which can cost them money.

I just don't get the idea that millions of dollars of hard work can be stolen and it isn't a big deal because it's not physical. But everyone is okay when you throw a kid in jail for stealing a pair of Beats that cost 20 bucks to assemble.
Every time some OpenSSL bug is announced, I remember my issues with TLS (I don't know if this bug is TLS-related or not).

Would be nice if TLS supported:

1) "hot" certificates with 24h ttl signed-off by a longer-living certificate on a more secure machine. Having 1-year certificate private key deployed on a web server is crazy. Especially since revocation does not really work.

2) Threshold multi-signature certificates for both CAs and end-user certificates.

3) CA certificates locked to specific TLDs (was there RFC about something like that already?) - so Russian CA cannot sign certificate for a Canadian TLD.

4) Ultimately, blockchain name pinning on DNS level.

The last three do not really relate to a case when bug in OpenSSL reveals a private key stored on web server.
Just so I can have another data point in my anecdote web. May I ask you if you mean 'abstinence till marriage', if you abstained till marriage and at what age you got married.
In tracking deaths by police, the tech world might beat Uncle Sam
But one of those functions processes data and the other gets data.
The post was for Clojure Gazette, and all Clojure programmers would be familiar with the threading functions.

I have to say, minimizing intermediate holding names makes debugging and writing clear code much easier. 97% of the time, I never miss the "naming tax".
Original link FYI:

https://x80.org/rhino-coq/
Are you sure it's a skirt and not a really wide belt? yeah yeah this isn't /. so there's no "funny".
"The average salary for a Front End Developer / Engineer with PHP skills is £25,246 per year. Most people move on to other jobs if they have more than 20 years' experience in this field."

The 2nd sentence is golden. How many people can claim to have programmed as a front-ender or PHP programmer (which launched 20 years ago) and then moved on to something else? And also suggest they were paid, at a maximum, £35k?! According to this fine piece of information, 'most people'.
Hear hear.

Computer Science mixed with human factors looks similar to psychology in the early 20th century (we clearly have mommy problems). The statement "there are only 2 hard problems" is cute and pithy but doesn't really match my experience over the last 15 years.

Most of my painful memories relate to: multi-threading, timezones (bloody timezones), migration a system from A to B tech (i.e. SQL to NoSQL), ensuring a distributed system does something once--and only once, refactoring a god object, delegating a problem to an uneven strength team, building a system where the team organization doesn't match the desired architecture, getting the right requirements, dependency management, and deployment. There are probably more but that's beside the point.

There is research to support some of my observations but it's hidden behind paywalls or has thin supporting evidence. Comprehensive studies are hard and a lot of the research uses only students as convenience subjects. There really isn't a strong connection between the research community and practice in order to provide the right measurements.

What I would like to see is adding support to GitHub for community research studies. There is wealth of pure code observations. It would be interesting to allow integration of survey tools and marry that to the code observations. It'll answer some of the problems but not others (i.e. the pain of maintaining a live service). And finally as part of the GitHub EULA this research must be publicly available.
How has no one mentioned the Joe Rogan Experience yet?
Edit: ... because it isn't a tech podcast. It's too early to read carefully. But seriously sometimes he has scientists and stuff on. The Aubrey de Grey one is pretty good.
Not sure they would either, though perhaps a use case for git_commit_amend [1]?

Regardless, sounds fairly implementation-specific. Think I just followed you on Twitter, happy to discuss further offline.

[1] https://libgit2.github.com/libgit2/#HEAD/group/commit/git_co...
It's also typically not an Engineering degree so maybe we should stop calling it that.
> Shocking.

Everything needs to be tested. How many treatments, therapies, and drugs seem like pure common sense and then turn out to be useless when rigorously examined or outright harmful?
Imagine Bob is a horrible anti-gay bigot.

What are our objectives? Changing Bob's mind? Protecting the victims of Bob's bigotry? Making sure Bob doesn't misuse (if it is misuse, it won't always be) our platform / software project / mail list to spread those bigoted views?

Shaming Bob doesn't seem to be the most effective way of doing that. If anything, shaming and ostrasizing may just mKe his views stronger.

I guess shaming does let people know that we strongly think that Bob is weong amd that the targets of Bob's bigotry are welcome on our platform / project / mailing list. But then a little rainbow banner would do that too.
No for fucks sake, the alternative to hot/cold wars is peace.

The idea that we have less dead when access to any kind of arms is heavily restricted, how about that?
I can confirm UK developer salaries are MUCH lower than Californian salaries - even Google pays their employees significantly less in the UK than the US for similar roles.

Contracting in the UK and London especially is much more lucrative.
You could also throw it up on Torcache, since that's basically its entire purpose: just a dedicated .torrent mirror.
It's a famous result that the people who believe premarital sex isn't wrong account for fairly little of the premarital sex. People do things they believe are wrong all the time.

I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must
hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or,
as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. [...]
I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction:
how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?
But years later it occurred to me that there was one man
to whom I had been doing this all my life -- namely myself.
However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit
or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been
the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why
I hated the things was that I loved the man.
Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that
I was the sort of man who did those things.

(Attributed to C. S. Lewis here: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/801500-mere-christiani... )
What's the problem? Just put the breakpoint on that line, then check the intermediate values (e.g. with PyDev, you can select parts of the expression to check their results).