skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"retaliation is illegal"

I'm not sure what world you think we inhabit. Are we humanoid automatons? The whole welter of human emotion more or less always outweighs a programmatic injunction like "retaliation is illegal."

Companies are still people working together. They'll probably never be anything but people working together. It does not matter how protected the activity allegedly is; a giant embarrassment campaign run against your company, especially if in pursuit of a particularly feeble branch on the tree of political correctness, means you're out. Or, at least, things won't be pleasant for you. Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company. One can't write a law preventing that.
Some questions for the researchers, or anyone else who thinks this was okay:

1) Were public roadways and speeds of 70mph absolutely necessary to demo this?

2) What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early and had to swerve or panic stop, possibly crashing and injuring themselves or others?

3) Anyone notify the Missouri State Highway Patrol about this? They may be contacting the researchers with questions about this demo if they weren't consulted in advance.

4) What's the plan if they trigger a bug in the car software of the people they had tested this with earlier? The article mentions them tracking people remotely as they attempt to learn more about the exploit.

I could go on but why bother? In case any of you think this was cool or even remotely (no pun intended) ethical, I'd like to know if you have a problem with letting these two test this on a loved one's car. How about they remotely poke around your husband or wife's car and explore, as long as they promise not to intentionally trigger anything?

If I ever learned this had been tested on a vehicle I was in, I'd make sure this cost the researchers dearly.

EDIT: I've just phoned 'Troop C' of the Highway Patrol at their main number, +1-636-300-2800 and they seemed pretty keen to follow up. The fact that the vehicle was disabled where there was no shoulder, was impeding traffic, and the demo not cleared with them in advance has them concerned. I'm all for testing exploits and security research, but this isn't the right way to do it. And to film it and post it to a high traffic site is nuts.
People, and businesses, respond to incentives. The company probably did the economically rational thing here - the money they make from their remote-access features is more than the money they will lose for the insecurity.

Companies in industries that need to find ways to make secure software; it's not a hard problem if you're willing to throw enough money at it. But as long as customers don't care whether their products or data are secure, we'll get the security we pay for.
This is a good point, especially regarding what would happen at a company immediately after going from opaque to transparent on salaries.

However, the resolution is pretty simple. Employees can either accept the justification given by management or not. If they are disgruntled about it, they can try their luck at a different employer, or use the information to learn how they can get a raise. This last point is one of the benefits for employees—they learn what would get them more money at their current employer.

Example: person 1 makes 15% more than person 2, and now both are aware of it. Person 2 is upset and talks to their manager. They find out the reason is because person 1 has additional education/certification and a couple years more experience. Now person 2 knows they can pursue the extra education/certification and use it as leverage to get a raise, when prior to the transparency they would have had no idea and possibly gone awhile longer making less money.
I meant that from the American perspective, but alright.

> Protecting your country, friends and family from an aggressive, invading force?

And on the invaders' side? What exactly were the American soldiers dying and killing for?

> Ridding your country of a brutal, corrupt puppet dictatorship propped up by said aggressive, invading force?

How about just going for the dictators specifically? The Vietnamese people declaring that they will kill any dictator the US installs there might have done the trick, as opposed to dying by the millions fighting the vastly superior American military.

But it's not that simple either. Think of something like North-Korea. Any sane person there sees that what's going on is totally. fucking. fucked. up.

But even if someone thinks freeing people from the insanity there is worth dying for, what if his death didn't actually result in the insanity ending? .. Fear, is sadly what keeps mass-murdering tyrannical regimes in power.
If you're absolutely sure that you need a mobile app, and you say you validated that users say a mobile app is a needed as a solution for That Problem:
How about you write a minimum app for That Thing to do that one (or 2) main thing that your service does, but not everything. If that'll have a good number of downloads, then that's a good validation.
* A small product is also easier to outsource.
* I did tiny test projects with applicants before, and it worked well.
A visualisation of an asteroid's path of orbit which nearly collided with Earth
woo. goldmine! thanks! :-)
Libtins – A multiplatform C++ network packet sniffing and crafting library
Wow - now I feel foolish! :-) How many more years of unix use will it take before it sinks into my thick skull that, 99 times out of 100, the feature I want is never so obscure that it's not already catered for...
You can now remove your account. Since we don't send any emails yet, there is not option to disable email updates. But I will be pro-actively adding this option soon so that people can opt out before hand.
link to the spreadsheet?
Leaving gender out of this (which is a massive hand-wave on my part), HN skews very heavily towards people who bifurcate the world into two kinds: Entrepreneurs and little people (I am referencing Bladerunner, not persons short in physical stature).

Had this story been rewritten to describe the situation as Google (and other BigCos like Apple) erecting arcane and anti-competitive mechanisms to manipulate a market for talent, and the protagonist quitting to found a web-based startup to disrupt their 19th century attitude to business, we might be toasting her as starting the next Uber for people.

How dare those fat cats do dirty deals to prevent the ordinary person from sharing a spreadsheet! SecretSalary to the rescue!
> Google operates in a parallel universe called "California", where employees can share each other's salaries on a company-wide shared spreadsheet without getting fired.

So reality is a parallel universe ?
Tectonic Preview Available with Kubernetes V1
A lot of this is done in discrete math. You know, the actual probability is defined by this integral, but there is no closed form solution to the integral, so we do sums to find the approximate answer. Anyone can understand sums. And, it's probabilities, so the sums must equal one. Not that hard, right ;)

It sure helps to understand the integral equations, especially if you want to read the original literature. But realistically you are going to need to understand summing, normalizing, algorithms for clustering, and so on. You probably don't want to write your own numerical code anyway; someone else did it, and they handled all the edge cases that a naive implementation misses.

You can find PDFs of the James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani book "An Introduction to Statistical Learning" [1]. Scroll on through - there is nothing intimidating math wise. All the heavy lifting is left to R.

Jump in, the water is fine!

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm
Would anyone believe me if I said I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account? (Actually I think I have three Twitter accounts, never used, and no idea what their names are.)

Or might they believe me, and think I'm too odd-stream to rent their apartment or work in their office?
To me it seems to follow along the lines of VCs investing in things like npm, where they believe they might reap benefits indirectly down the line.
Slight variations in legal details don't make the article any more readable. Even the reasons why it can't be formatted otherwise stay exactly the same. The difference you're pointing out makes no difference at all.
Well self driving cars should be a load of fun. There will be calls to isolate critical components as well as demands they are accessible to the likes of Law Enforcement so they can disable cars remotely.

So it will take legislation to sort out as liability concerns needs to addressed as well as the demands of law enforcement. Don't think for one minute they will accept self driving cars they cannot disable all of them for "safety reasons". Similar how they excuse options to black out cell service in areas
I cant really see the need. If your already in the vehicle. . . . Seems to be completly asking for trouble.
The fact that she's a woman is neither here nor there... on the surface where it can be seen. Behind the scenes however, you have politics. When you piss people off that are in power, they find ways to make your life uncomfortable - that goes whether you're male or female.

To expect there will be no retaliation for pissing off higher ups would be incredibly naive. Even if what you are doing (strictly speaking) is legal and retaliation is illegal. You can't expect to not suffer any repercussions for pissing off those that ultimately are in charge of your pay cheque. That's just not how people operate - even if that's how the law (and society, on the surface) says they should.

It takes a long time for ideas and beliefs to become embedded in your culture - look at racism, look at sexism, look at the LBGT community. Gradually society is becoming more tolerant, more accepting and less judgmental, but we've still got a long road ahead of us before equality for all is anything more than a surface ideal that the younger generations long for.

Many like the status quo, they are truly uncomfortable with what change represents to themselves personally. Getting these people to accept that future generations ideals and beliefs are not their own, and are becoming the norm is a hard pill for them to swallow.

When a tiger is cornered and they perceive they have no place left to run, the only thing they will do is lash out and hurt you.
You can use Glade for GTK+ and QtCreator for Qt
I had the same thoughts. Testing the exploits on a open highway, at full speed, strikes me as needlessly reckless.

There is no excuse for this when there are plenty of lower speed locations available. They should have used a large parking lot or similar.
Development tools on linux continue to be great. A visual studio quality ide would be nice, but realistically I'd continue to use vim and the terminal.

What really irks me is the desktop environment situation. I haven't had a linux install in a couple of years and it seems that all of the desktops have gotten worse in the last few years. Unity continues to add on terrible features and follows the similar ui antipatterns and gnome 3 has. KDE4/5 are decent but very heavy. Xfce and lxde are great but you occasionally run into some weirdly missing features (no font manager -- why?) that make you pull in gnome/kde and question why you picked a lightweight desktop in the first place. I'm not sold on the tiling window managers, ya the tiling is nice, but they look terrible, require way too much config, and sometimes I just want to use the mouse damn it.
It's in the best interest of every company to pay as
little as the employee will take so every employee has
to stand up for themselves.

That's true, if the company culture you're looking for is a back-stabbing dog-eat-dog climb-over-his-corpse kind of a thing, which some companies undoubtedly are, and some of those I'm sure are financially very successful, but it's not how I want to spend my week.

Otherwise I kind of agree with you.
And its laissez-faire libertarianism.
5 Must-Haves When Deploying Apps in the Cloud
And related to that, CoreOS has launcehd a preview of its Kubernetes comercial platform [0]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/21/coreos-launches-preview-of-...
I guess, if you're willing to stretch the definition of unverifiable far enough that it becomes completely meaningless.
Oh, I wasn't really objecting to the content of what you said there... It's open for debate whether or not there's a better expression than "man hours".

I just wanted to point out that said debate would hinge on more than a narrowly semantic question about the meaning of "man".
I'm building a project currently to request for open source library ports from one language to other, and this feature is also available. Where you can input a Library, and it will list a similar libraries.

Though, thinking to spin it off as a separate app altogether. Anybody wanted to help?
Howdy! Happy to answer any questions about the project. I did a video guide as well, if you are looking for a walkthrough: https://vimeo.com/134043502
Isn't Canvas a classic case study of the Andreessen bundling/unbundling theory?

Canvas dominated the higher-ed market with a single, lean, focused, simple product. They unbundled the sprawling, unfocused Blackboard suite. Now Canvas is in the next phase: re-bundling.

1/The flip side of unbundling: Later on, the unbundlers tend to try to rebundle in the image of whatever they unbundled.

2/So Yahoo adds an ISP and Google adds email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes.

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/481554165454209027
The specific impulse of the fuel is going to be inversely proportional to the square root of the molecular weight of the propellant, which is why they use hydrogen. You can theoretically use air from the atmosphere but the machinery to do that at the sort of speeds required to get into orbit is very heavy, very experimental, produces drag, and doesn't work when you start getting higher. It makes sense for Skylon because the oxygen in a hydrogen-oxygen rocket is most of the weight and the combustion temperature of that mixture is a lot higher than you can currently do with beamed microwaves.
I can see law enforcement agencies loving this feature. Way easier than high-speed pursuits down busy city roads.

[edit] Though remote control would probably be sufficient, but they seem equally dangerous to me from the driver's perspective.
It's been long pitched as a safety measure to prevent high-speed car chases and car thefts.
To explain this using human-sized things, let's think about centrifugal force and centripetal force.

The latter is an actual force. The former is a "fictitious force" resulting from the mathematical transformation between fixed and rotating reference frames. If you are in a rotating reference frame, the force feels real, along with Coriolis and Euler fictitious forces. But to an outside observer in the fixed reference frame, there is only centripetal force.

Similarly, the article is describing a quasi-particle within a meta-material crystal that behaves similarly to a magnetic monopole. Outside the crystal, the behavior may be explainable by other means, but electrons inside the crystal can't tell the difference between the quasi-particle and the real thing, in much the same way that you can feel a centrifugal force when you spin around.

So even if Weyls do not actually exist, we now have a metamaterial that can fake it well enough to fool an electron.
It could, though. Right now, we in the US pro-gun camp are fighting some newly proposed ITAR regulations which, while probably aimed at the 3D/80% AR-15 receiver camps, would criminalize unlicensed disclosure of the sorts of basic data about weapons that's been freely published since forever.

See e.g. this http://weaponsman.com/?p=23824 Note the relatively innocuous data discussed (inner and outer machine gun barrel heating), and then skip to the bottom "A Note To Our Readers", these guys have consulted their lawyer on the matter. And the NRA (lobby for gun owners) take on it, which seems to be accurate: https://www.nraila.org/articles/20150605/stop-obamas-planned...
> But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table.

Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others.

For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domains of all other developers (we're talking about a large multinational here, with thousands of employees). You bet your ass we make a decent chunk more than most other devs, replacing any one of us would cost a ton of money and require over a year of learning about our stuff; replacing one of the devs who works on our main product? In half a year you could get someone to full productivity.

In other words: some employees are more expensive to replace than others, either shower them with €€€ or pay a much higher cost when they go work elsewhere.
It would be a interesting study to read if that is true. I could see the exact opposite be proven, as people who invest in trade skill don't the same energy and time to spend on negotiating and improving their social/political standing in the company. People have a limited number of hours on the day and focusing ones attention on one thing should naturally result in higher results in that area.
It seems rather clear from the article that many coworkers liked sharing salaries, so I am unsure where your "Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company" came from.
Pay shouldn't be biased by gender or ethnicity. Which is why I'm confused on why you want to see the salary based on these factors. What about reports of single vs married people? Or based on height? Or ugly people? What's the point on playing with these numbers?

Seriously, do you plan to negotiate your salary based on some factors that have less than nothing to do with the job itself?
The culture has to change from within. There is no reason why that information can't be shared among employees. As the user above you said, retaliatory action to that activity is in fact illegal. Just because the culture of where she works says it is not does not mean she is at all in the wrong for doing it, or that the retaliatory bullshit that was experienced was warranted - even if it was 'expected' as you say.

I for one side with the person who threw together the spreadsheet, not with Google who is trying to sneak by with not paying everyone equally.

Your assertion that the poster above you lives in a fantasy world for thinking that sharing salary information is a protected activity is frankly a nauseating attitude. One that I hope we all in tech can fix.
Or Wired could do some actual journalism and, I don't know, interview the original poster plus ask her ex-boss and Google for comments plus try and track down the mysterious other man?
I think you're right. And yeah, at least "crutch" gives that imagery of something being support whereas crust...
This really reads like more of the same story, I don't see these two narratives to be in opposition. For sure, one reads pretty angry at Google and the other is clearly pro-Google but the facts are much the same.
"Monad" is more like an adjective. "Option" is a monad, but, interestingly, the union type (A | null) is not.
Kill the Product: 3 Ways Great Product Managers “Flip the Boat”
Looking beyond listicles
I was wondering why they wernt in constant communication(didnt he say he had to grab his phone and ask them to stop?), wjy the f*#@ would you test this at speed?

I agree with you, i hope that the author was lying to make his story more interesting (hows that for a bad wish).

I completly agree with you, seems to have a total disregard for anyone elses safety.
Escape Dynamics is also developing a next generation system, which relies on the direct heating of plasmas flowing through aresonant cavity with a weight similar to that of the weight of the heat exchanger in a thermal thruster. The goal of thisdevelopment is to allow operation with specific impulse above 1,500 seconds, leading to propellant mass fraction below 50%,which is comparable to airplanes.

Interesting. But since your power requirements are basically your specific impulse times your thrust that'll up the power they need. Still, electricity is cheaper than rockets.
It is unfortunate that a large amount of the discussion is being distracted by the stringing-together-tweets thing. Yes, it was lame to do that, but isn't it more worthwhile to talk about the content?

I think most of us probably work at a company that discourages salary transparency (most people do in general). I think we could have a more valuable discussion about how our experiences compare/contrast to the content of the tweets, and save the "omg a bunch of tweets are not an article!" comments for when someone writes a blog post about that and shares it on HN.
They probably wouldn't sue a private person for using tweets however they want in a private context. A publication with millions (just a guess) of readers is something quite different.
Working Together to Filter Automated Data-Center Traffic
Wouldn't it be better to __try__ to create a global movement within the industry for employees to feed accurate data to glassdoor?

Sidenote: Most of the people around here knows glassdoor but i have worked with a lot of people who never heard of it..
Like most fields, it depends on your definition of "studied." If you want to push the envelope in theoretical non-applied research, you're going to want to learn analysis & measure theoretic probability theory. If you want to apply existing techniques, read (well-written) papers and code up the algorithms you find there, you can get away with undergraduate-level linear algebra & probability knowledge - Bayes' rule, expectations, independence, the general ability to think about random variables (and matrices thereof) as values that can be transformed and combined. And of course, you can fire up a classifier in SciPy without knowing any of this at all. But that's stretching the definition of "studied" quite a bit!

I personally went into a graduate-level probabilistic machine learning course with probability knowledge consisting of an undergraduate course that followed Ross http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-Models-Tenth-... - so there's certainly no need to have been a math major. But if you've never dealt with random variables whatsoever, you'll hit a wall following research from the last 20 years.
I was addressing the question of wireless access to vehicle systems, not trying to justify any particular feature that might be included in such an implementation.
Well, no. The ex-employee says management was pissed and hush hush.

The reddit comment says management mentioned it openly in one of their scheduled all-hands weekly meeting.

Quote: "Friend says the sheet was addressed a company all-hands meeting (it wasn't the focus of the meeting, apparently they have an all-hands every week and it was mentioned. Can that be right tho? Aren't there like tens of thousands of people all across the world? How can you have an all-hands meeting the world over every week? anyway...)"
Hear hear. There was a big discussion in a London radio station a week or so ago about that, since David Cameron wants to fight for equal pay across genders and have companies over 250 or so people publicise the pay gap across genders. Which by itself sounds a laudable thing but really unrealistic for many trades, and in particular software development. The demand is high, supply is low, and you can have people with less experience than yourself making more because they negotiated better. That has nothing to do with genders as you say - its all down to negotiation skills.