skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's absurd that you have to press on a button called 'Customize' (which is really scary sounding for non-experts) to get any privacy in Windows 10. If users are brave enough to press this button they get a list of nondescript options that barely explain what kind of data is sent to Microsoft.

Microsoft should show always show all the privacy options to users and they should explain the pros and cons for each setting. Explain them that Cortana won't work anymore if they don't enable something, but also explain them that the NSA will be getting all their keystrokes if they do enable it.

Here in Europe we are not protected by US law against the NSA (although there seem to be all sorts of loop holes in the US too), so we should expect here that all the data that Microsoft collects is directly sent to the NSA. It's unacceptable that they offer a one click 'share everything with the NSA'-button when there is no matching 'keep all my data private'-button.

But the absolute worst thing ever is that they seem to throw away old settings after some updates. So even when I make sure that my parents computers are properly protected against Microsoft or even the NSA spying on them, I still can't expect that they will stay that way in the future.
He didn't report it, he gave an estimate. And as for "wouldn't trust a Brit", I'd trust anyone directly involved in it, regardless of nationality.
https://techjourney.net/download-official-windows-10-iso-via...

"Note that the file hashes (CRC32, SHA1, MDA and etc.) for Windows 10 ISO images created by Media Creation Tool are unique as time stamps and other factors are different for each computers."
Created a new account just to say this?
That issue has been perverted over the years. Even though the punishment was providing other possible defaults, the initial problem wasn't really about the system default. It was that IE was ingrained in Windows as part of the system. That prevented other browser from competing on an even playing field.
Being forced to type out what you're about to do for critical actions like "remove all my data" or "deploy to production" works in my opinion. A yes/no prompt doesn't because you can get trained to click past them without reading.
You can upgrade from every version of Windows and it'll still preserve many user settings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzkNtnaS04

So there clearly isn't a difference in philosophy. In fact, Apple is far more ready to make your past software investment invalid.
Yes. Safari is much more efficient on iOS
Private cars don't make money when they drive more.
I think if you are taking $250 from people you should sign an NDA.

From http://murder-board.com/faq#group_367 "Will you sign an NDA?" The sheer number of NDAs we would have to be beholden to would make our business impossible to operate.

They cite http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html but Graham is referring to asking VC's to sign an NDA. If you are a paid consultant (and $250 for an hour is a paid consultant) you should be willing to sign an NDA.
Mostly bad timing, as soon as one foot issue subsides I develop a knee issue. Need more yoga.
I love OpsGenie too, but this isn't really the best place for that discussion. Maybe you should write up your positive experiences with OpsGenie as a blog post and submit it to HN; particularly in the context of how to set up a notification system for ops, rotation, etc.
Love the hubris in using the CEO's first name.
A lot of plans (well, a growing number) are now offering a self-directed brokerage account so that participants can opt out of the preselected investment options and pick their own. You should ask your H.R. department about adding that as an option.
Is there a policy for what happens to ccTLD if a country changes its name or disappears?
You created an account to post this twice?
Simply asking the same set of questions to all candidates won't fix it, if the questions themselves have the effect of weeding out women.

The questions I asked were representative of things we actually had to do on the job, for instance: "write code to spider a web site." Does that unfairly weed out woman?
Hacking a “Smart” Sniper Rifle
To be fair if your attacker is the NSA you're fucked no matter what MS does.

Most people need better security to protect them from the US companies slurping all their data.
Well, except not with Window 10, and for the browser--a keyy application for most people. You now have to go and mess with it before you can get on with your day.
An acquaintance of mine is prepping for a cruise to do some sea-ice measurements. They'll be on the RV Sekuliak though, not an airplane.
Right. Also, the proportion of people who think water is a one-time use thing is depressing. They don't seem to have a clue that used water evaporates and falls as rain.

(yeah, there are exceptions in regions where they're using "fossil" water, but that's not the general case)
As an applied math person who does design and art off-hours, I found this article very pleasant to read, since it brings the two worlds together. Good find!
To be fair, they reset all defaults. For images, video, everything.

Google Chrome pops up a bar that takes you directly to the settings. It's literally two clicks to change it back.

Microsoft should have preserved the defaults, but I think Google's solution is preferable to a complaint letter.
Uber would just add a tab to their app.
The history of the Windows Start button from the guy who holds the patent for it
1. I agree, this would be preferable and a great step for the initial screener. But that leaves the problem of the actual interview—the studies that I've seen test written resumes, because it's possible to ensure that two resumes are identical except for one variable in ways that you can't ensure that two interviews are identical. But it's highly likely that the bias would carry over to any interaction with the candidates, though I don't have any studies on hand that prove it.

2. Also agree that an objective method would be preferable, thanks for the link. Great read. IIRC, in the study I link in the third bullet point, forcing the person reviewing the resume to create a rubric before reading any of them greatly reduced the biased results. Having an objective process goes a long way. The point in the link about confident interviewers performing better in the traditional hiring process is definitely true, and also tied in a roundabout way to gender, funnily enough (women tend to be less confident than men: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-conf...).

It's definitely not the only problem—the pipeline is obviously skewed dramatically—but I don't see any reason why tech workers would be exempt from the biases of the general population as they've been studied. Maybe the drive to hire more women would counteract it, like in your example—that's the reasoning under which minority quotas are implemented, after all. The problem of subconscious bias is that it's not consciously recognizable by its very nature. It's just gut feeling. I know a site that uses association to try to test it for you, if you're interested: http://implicit.harvard.edu/.
It would be fair to them because it would switch the customer from one Microsoft browser to another Microsoft browser which benefits both Microsoft and the customer. Rather than switching the customer from the browser of their choice to one of Microsoft's choice, which only benefits Microsoft.
Agreed. Right now it's a single shared processor emulated with cryptography and massive replication - but that's not an architecture that will get you supercomputer performance.

The work on that thread - getting Ethereum to supercomputer status - is called CASPAR and you can read more about the efforts to get a formal proof for it here:

http://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/Ethereum-+-Synereo/
Yeah, but that limit doesn't take into account the full costs to the system.

Your argument is like saying that common grazing land is okay because there's a natural limit to how many cows can be on it; the number of cows that can fit, or that can be watched by the available farmers, or any other limit that doesn't take into account how many cows the field can actually handle.
I am so with you. In my case I found out that I started going unstable if I tried to be all work all the time so - I stopped the insanity about 12 years ago and capped work and related activity at 40 hrs/week.

I have held two jobs in my professional career of 16 years and yet if I was out of a job tomorrow I likely could not get past this bizarre new interview process.

This is in spite of my having launched and supported four significant software products in platforms and languages that before that point I had never touched. All this in two very not-sexy niche industries that required specialized knowledge I did not have.

Did I mention that on a scale form 1-10 I realistically operate at about a 3? Take heart, until this year I have never worked with anyone that was better than I at this job. Of the two people that have the talent and evolving skills to surpass me - I trained them so there is that :)

Oh - I am also likely too old now (45) to even GET the interview without subterfuge.
Comet yields 'rich array' of organics
> but it makes forcing Edge as default a huge dick move on MS's part.

I suspect its a far less sinister reasoning for the change.
Thanks for your enthusiasm! Let me at johannes@cloudron.io know if you haven't received the invite. Looking forward to any feedback from your side.
It is a rogue CA that does not revoke compromised certificates even when presented with a proof of such compromise, unless the customer pays a revocation fee. If the customer does not pay the fee, StartCom provides trust (which is what CAs do; they say “we guarantee to the best of our knowledge that this server is the server it claims to be”) for websites which are known (by StartCom) to be compromised, defeating the purpose of having CAs in the first place.

After Heartbleed many certificates had to be revoked, and one person who did not want to pay the revocation fee had the idea of publishing his private key so that the certificate was compromised without doubt. StartCom refused to revoke it, and the page that explained the story has since disappeared mysteriously. The HN thread about it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7577290
Foxes will change their coats but not their ways.
Robot can leap from water's surface
Angie’s List Sues Amazon Local
Hey Jason, congrats on the great TC writeup! I think we may have mentioned this to you before, but Clerky is definitely all about automated record-keeping and management as well. If it was just about templates, I'd be sitting on a beach ;)
Thanks so much for the heads up and feedback!
Aurora found around brown dwarf beyond our Solar System
I'm guessing Chris knows Satya on some personal level.
I will, but what's interesting is that I keep getting bugged by PagerDuty sales people and today, just before I read this, I got an email with their "improved" pricing and "improved" service! Had to vent out, sorry!
Aquariums 'deliver significant health benefits'
It would be a valuable contribution to publish the difference between what your tool says JS should do, and what production interpreters really do with that same JS source.

I expect there is an open source test suite available.

While at Apple in 1995 I came across a common in our system software that said "MacDraw needs this". Apple had a lending library with every third-party product that had ever been published, but for QA and bug isolation only.

My job was mostly to isolate crashes that were stimulated by third party code. About half the time it was their fault; to the extent we possibly could we isolated it anyway by reverse-engineering their binaries. Apple Developer Tech Support would work with the developers to help them fix it.

Sometimes its OK to depend on undocumented behavior, sometimes its not. Embedded systems for example might never receive new firmware so if the release firmware complies with specification then that undocumented behavior is completely cool.
> do you have numbers suggesting how much road spending costs compared to revenue raised from gas taxes?

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/05/debunking-the-myth-th...
This is probably the most cogent criticism that can be leveled against ethereum right now- The performance constraints for ethereum dapps are pretty extreme. There are indeed plans to solve the problem you describe (read posts on blog.ethereum.org mentioning scalability) and these problems are probably solvable, but a working system remains far off.

That said, I think ethereum dapps are going to be substantively different from traditional apps people are used to- I think there's a lot of opportunity in this type of system for people who don't take the mindset of "This system is bad at running existing app X therefore it is bad for everything."
You should attend meetups @ Red Hat + network, ie: http://www.meetup.com/Raleigh-Red-Hat-User-Group/
Obvious arbitrage possibility is obvious, and being exploited by new companies (WeWork for $10b valuation) themselves -- if you're better at evaluating startups than big dumb landlords, you can profit here. And there isn't a shortage of capital to play this game.
This is not some random guy but another CEO.
Is there any plan to allow the service to point at one's own DO or AWS account? That would remove one more privacy concern some folk seem to have.
There certainly are other ways. It is a shame the world isn't a better place. Turn off your computer and get out there and get it done. Complaining because a company needs to align its investments with future growth doesn't help. Many companies only make plans for the next several quarters. It's actually refreshing when one does research that will pay off in a decade.
I think it's mentioned in other comment threads, but IIRC, you can go to pretty much any firehouse and ask for sprinkler cap for a hydrant
Hear hear. Of course the cloud is not necessary for good speech recognition. There is no magic there, it's just servers running against a corpus that gets updated often. No reason why this couldn't be done locally, and text queries sent out for non-local requests (such as, what's the weather gonna be).

But I gotta say, I have the feeling that the pendulum is gonna swing back pretty soon. I'm noticing more and more (regular) people being fed up and creeped out with the massive harvesting that Google, Facebook and Microsoft are doing. Opportunity awaits!
Former U.S. Dep. of Treasury official to provide policy expertise to Ripple
io.js is great, but there are some definite advantages to compiling down to es5.
Everything makes actuarial sense if they charge you enough...
This is a great analysis and the argument makes perfect sense in every respect. The only thing I find dubious is the idea that the bust is 2-4 years out. I think if you polled most SF commercial landlords, they would tell you that they expect most of their startup tenants to start having difficulty paying the rent in no more than 18 months. It would be interesting to see some actual data on this. After all, there's not much benefit to demanding 5-year leases if you think that (a) prices are going to keep going up for 3 or 4 more years, and (b) your tenants are mostly going to be solvent for at least that long. If the landlords really believed the bust were 3 or 4 years out, given the sub-sub-sublease problem, they'd take startups on 1-year terms at a MUCH higher rate than established tenants who could negotiate modest discounts on longer-term leases. The evidence presented suggests rather strongly that most landlords don't expect these startups to be in business in 2 years, and I agree.
Good Luck. But all that redness in the site makes me trust you guys less. You guys need to change the color scheme which oozes out more welcoming and trustworthy feeling.
Maybe. And I get that as CEO's they can be regarded as peers, but if you're going to call this a "letter", I think it would have been better to use either full name (which is how it's signed BTW), or Mr.
You're a bit misinformed. If you've got a decent GPU, there's nothing stopping you from firing up the mining software and earning some ether right now. In a few days you'll also be able to buy it on exchanges.
What Happens One Hour After Drinking a Coke
Having just installed windows 10: disabling the browser change is well hidden. There's no customize "button" or link, there's a bit of text with no decoration or underline that's lighter and appears greyed out that says "customize" on a screen filled with text. The chances of a user discovering this unless they're actively hunting for this (like I was) are close to zero.
There's an even bigger elephant in the room: software is a non-scarce, non-rivalrous (possibly even anti-rivalrous in that utility increases with usage) good. Per-unit software sales and most standard proprietary software business models are deadweight losses that rely on unsustainably preserving artificial scarcity.

The technical community has mostly accepted that file sharing is a reality that requires rethinking business models, and that DRM is an act of desperation to put old strategies on life support by restricting playback device manufacturers.

But for proprietary versus free software, many remain outright hostile.

Business models for privacy-respecting user-centric free software are possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...

They might not be amazingly profitable. However, the reality is, the programmer is heading the way of the musician and the artist.
Who used HIS full name in the signature. At the very least he should have use MS CEO's full name.
My problem with OpsGenie is yet another company monitoring critical infrastructure, often for customers using AWS, which is itself built on AWS. Sigh.
You can report it to Stack Exchange:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200178/167210

I just reported this one.
I don't see an explicit mention on taking on the fiduciary role or not (there's a "taking care of compliance" mention as part of "Automated Administration"). A company I've considered (forusall.com) explicitly calls this out as "We take on the fiduciary role". If you're doing the same, it'd be great to make it clear!
It's quite common in US to refer to people by their first name perhaps an attribute of low context culture. I particularly like it having come from a high context culture as it reduces friction and gives people the confidence to voice their opinions irrespective of their social strata.
"There was discussion in reddit about an article about Moto on how its going to change the way mobiles are purchased. One of the top commented reply was about people not willing to buy $400+ mobiles."

Motorola is not going to change the way the vast majority of mobiles are purchased in the US, which is through carriers. No matter how many comments an article might have had on Reddit. Emerging markets (specifically: India) might have lots of people buying phones online, but the US has a long-established system which is extremely resistant to disruption. According to ComScore [1] in May 2015 Apple+Samsung had over 72% of the installed base of smartphones in the US. No reason for that to change in any hurry.

Observation: don't use the number of comments on articles on Reddit as a metric of anything except the number of comments on articles on Reddit.

[1] http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Re...
While I understand this frustration (I've asked the same question myself many times), I feel that we who understand these topics have a duty to try to explain an assist those for whom the computer is still a "sufficiently-advanced" magic box. I'm sure most of the people in the medical profession are regularly frustrated having to explain for the Nth time why we should all eat better.

The scientist who discovers new laws of nature and the engineer that assembles simple pieces into complex and useful tools have only finished half of the process. The other half is explaining these news ideas to everybody else, so they can actually be utilized (and maybe inspire other discoveries and innovations). This was one of Feynman's greatest talents - taking the time to explain the important parts of a topic, in a way that was a lot more accessible.

I generally feel that if an audience is not understanding something (and assuming there were no trivial issues such as lack of time), the fault lies largely with the teacher. While have also met with limited success in explaining these issues, I keep trying in new ways. Pedagogy is a hard problem, but I personally have learned a bit by studying those that seem to have successful methods (such as Feynman, Sagan, Burke[1], Vi Hart[2]).

As for this specific problem of businesses collecting massive amounts of personal data (and the associated "free (as in beer)" culture), I suggest showing people the talk by Aral Balkan that I linked at the top of my previous post. He has given variations of the talk before, but this recent version is particularly good at explaining the entire picture, from simple gmail/facebook doublespeak, to the "free" culture that has taken over the tech industry, the internet.org style imperialism masquerading as "helping the poor", and more. This talk has been more successful than of the explanation, essays, cartoon, or videos that I've used in the past. YMMV, unfortunately.

[1] http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hdg0b

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gZ5rsAHMl4
What kills it for me is the `Command + number` shortcut - that triggers bookmarks instead of tabs (like in Chrome or FF), a setting that can't be overridden :/
Commuting turns a $102,157 salary into $86,819
This is not rolling back the clock. Here are some important points to the debate:

1. Windows 10 users are upgrading from 7 and 8.1, these versions were heavily shipped with bloatware. If it took away default browsing from Firefox, it also took away volume control from OEM Volumizer 2010.

2. Your browsers like IE, Mozilla and Chrome might have Malware toolbars installed. Nobody can deny that it is far too common on Windows PCs. If it opened the infected browser the first thing after update, how secure is your PC now?

3. Microsoft has taken deliberate steps to make Firefox the default browser easier. The is an entire section now in Settings that lists 8-10 typical apps like browsers and one can easily set Firefox to default from there. It is not like old days when you had to go fidget with individual settings of each browser.

4. If you were savvy enough to put FF as default on Win 7, you are savvy enough to change it on Win 10. People not as savvy need a robust unbreakable solution.

5. The XYZ browser you were using might not be fully Windows 10 compatible. It is absolutely weird to expect default apps to remain same after a major upgrade. The cannot give individual vendors like Mozilla or Google special treatment here, nor can they take responsibility for their development cycles.

6. It's not bad for users. They aren't defaulting on IE7. Edge is fantastic.

7. In 2015, browsing should be considered a core OS feature that cannot be broken for upgrading users.

8. Microsoft had a weird history of over preserving user settings. It didn't leave them any place good. They still remain the most backwards compliant in any aspect.

9. Windows 10 does preserve old settings for extensions it doesn't support out of the box.

But the biggest point left out in this debate is that Microsoft has made it as easy as mobile to change default apps. I fail to see how this will not help Mozilla.
We were trying to play off the 'murder' board name, but we were worried about that ourselves. Thanks for the feedback!

Also, in case anyone is curious as to the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_board
JSCS 2.0 — JavaScript Code Style
What's the hottest Bengali song right now or recently?