skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you fire every other manager.

Except managers are "sticky", and generally aren't fired merely because they are less burdened. All jobs not just managers are in truth sticky, but in general the more status a job has, and the more high status interactions a job has the greater the difficulty in removing the position.

A lot of companies became much more productive on paper during the recession, not because they did massive changes, but because they were forced to finally cut some staff. Like a cheesy 80s movie they had the productivity inside themselves all along, but it took the need to trim budgets to expose that productivity.

Of course a lot of companies never actually really pared down things, or not enough to really boost their productivity. It just isn't simple to get that productivity to reveal itself, especially outside of an existential threat.
This is a great application of generally accepted software engineering principles (and some less common like "cleanup week"), but it would have been nice to see some real metric instead of some napkin graphs.
The permutation problem is not related to IR superoptimization itself.

The goal of an optimization pass is to improve the performance of an average, and that's exactly what the IR superoptimization does.
Take a look at FIRST robotics, if you haven't already. They have 3 different leagues. FTC (possibly FLL) might be the most relevant for a middle school. I'm not sure how big it is on the West Coast, but as an alumni of a high school team, it was definitely a big motivator for me and choosing a software engineer career.

It also incorporates a lot of different disciplines, from CAD to software engineering (programming) to mechanical design.

http://www.usfirst.org/
Why every organization needs a rebel
People could e-mail Thomas without clicking the link.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9955811
Three Months into Early Retirement
A cellular puzzle: The weird and wonderful architecture of RNA
I see the convenience, but that only works if you're willing to bare your soul to Google. If you want to have one identity for YouTube, a different identity for Gmail, and don't want Google to know where you are via Maps, that becomes much more problematic.
It can't have an explosive impact, because it has none of the drama of three guys strapping their nuts to a massive rocket, hurtling themselves into space, and becoming the very first to walk on the big white ball in the sky—where said ball has captured the imagination of every human that has ever lived, ever. You're not going to have every TV set in the whole world tuned into the launch day for a blockchain.

If this does have an impact at huge scale, it's going to slither into everyone's lives by coincidence, convenience, or accident, over time. I would not call that explosive.

Perspective, people.
Swift Whole Module Optimization
I'm actually enjoying the downvotes. It'll make this comment all the better when I link back to it in 5 years.
Status based economies are fragile.

There have been a few waves such as the Beatniks where people say eff status I want to relax. Electronics pushed that off for a while, but that treadmill seems to have slowed down. So, I expect the next wave of young people to accept they can live well on a 2 day a week job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatnik

Such is fine for 20-30 year olds without health issues or kids, but does not keep widget factories staffed or pay for pension checks.
This is an awful article. Let me count the ways:

1. You don't measure productivity by the number of hours worked. There are just different cultural norms at play and it doesn't make sense.

2. Comparing an economy that started out with low productivity and grew quickly to an economy that started out with high productivity and grew more slowly isn't really telling me anything other than the low-productivity economy caught up. Which happens, because it's harder to push the frontier than follow in someone else's footsteps.

3. The effect of automation is very hard to quantify because it tends to displace low-skilled jobs that don't pay much in the first place. But the social impact of this is huge -- you take the people at the bottom of the economy and take away the only jobs that were accessible to them. Social unrest is inevitable. This will likely impact the economy in negative ways in years to come, and we need to understand this.

Anyway, all around a terrible article. The author has no grasp of basic economics and seems to have cherry picked statistics that he thinks back up his claims. Has anyone created a "top 10 logical fallacies of data analysis"? Because this article would tick all 10 of them.
So research is too thin to assume any therapeutic use, but strong enough to claim real problems such as an increased risk of psychotic disorders and problems with concentration?
> Feel free to harbor whatever nutritional or moral beliefs you please, but when you force them on creatures with no voice of their own, you are suddenly less innocent.

That's exactly the argument being made here for going vegan.
Why don't you trust Examine.com?
As a brute-force approach, perhaps you could send the video through otherwise identical patched and unpatched emulators and compare post-playback memory and filesystem states?

It's also probably possible to extend the patches to detect malicious input.

Someone could probably also create a video with a payload to hot patch libstagefright.
What Open Marriage Taught One Man About Feminism
Or maybe just a fair flat tax on all new goods and all services at ~8%.
Everybody always pays the same percentage: tourists, bajillionaires, hobos, you name it.
Here's a free idea to b2b startups: before you go into a sales meeting with someone, spend some pocket money putting your ad in front of them via linkedin / facebook.

They'll likely attribute it to "frequency illusion" and you'll gain a much higher profile in their eyes.

Then close it. :)
I don't understand this recurrent point: computer power is "wasted" almost everywhere. At least Bitcoin use this power to build a decentralized currency.
I think post-commit reviews are a bad practice. The point of code review is to prevent issues in the first place. If you have a privacy issue and discover that two days after you pushed the code to prod, that's not much fun.

And if each part of the review takes 2 days in the first place, there might be an issue with your code reviews (or your checkins are gargantuan).
Regarding the airhopper paper at least, I found something pretty interesting from Markus Kuhn:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf

"The two case studies presented in Sect. 4 and 5 analyze the compromising radio emanations first from a laptop LCD and then from a desktop LCD that is connected to its PC graphics card with a Digital Visual Interface (DVI)
cable. In both cases, the video cable used to connect the display panel with the graphics controller turned out to be the primary source of the leaking signal."
I don't know how anyone can read an article like this and still think seasteading can create a libertarian utopia.
Kepler452b.com
They still need to be fed objectives/missions or something. Hopefully you are not suggesting to release robotic serial killers with no strategic purpose, are you?
Or slavery in the United States. Yep.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-sla...
Well, here's a better idea : create a service which let's me do that easily.
QR codes are things that techies think non-techies actually use. "Grandpa doesn't want to type in some URL, he just wants to scan an image and be taken there!" Then marketing gets involved asking for the QR code that the techies told them "everyone uses" and its now a requirement on all posters and advertising materials. Now here we are.
Online food delivery ordering is about to overtake phone ordering in the US
Crap. It looks like I hit the "Go to Reddit and style it like HN" button again.
Mock yourself, not your tests
Kaleidos – Generative Art for Android
Why can't Washington build a website?
I spent a few days during the last Christmas holidays to create a fast line renderer for an old 8-bit home computer with a 1.75MHz Z80 CPU and a video memory layout that groups 8 horizontal pixels into one byte. I also started with a generic 'put_pixel' subroutine, but that was way too slow no matter what the outer code looked like, because the video memory address had to be computed every time anew, and a pixel could only be set through a read-modify-write (read byte from video memory, set a bit, and write the byte back).

I ended up with an unrolled loop for 8 horizontal pixels and self-modifying code which jumped into this loop similar to a Duff's Device, and at each increment in y a pixel-mask byte was xor'ed into video memory, and a new jump-position into the pixel-loop was computed for the next 8-pixel-mask.

This was even fast enough for rendering a (distorted) 3D wireframe cube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8kxJLUParo

The line rendering code is here (I'm sure there's even more optimized 8-bit code out there): https://github.com/floooh/kc85sdk/blob/master/test/line.s
So all of this happens to you six months ago, and now you're finally sharing it with HN?

BRB, getting the world's smallest violin out to play
If an attacker can get the process that's running the webapp.py to exec some abitrary bash command, that process has the ability to read its own /proc/$PID/environ . In general, you can read /proc/$PID/environ on processes that you own. At least I can do that on my Debian system:

pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ sleep 99 &
[1] 21340
pikachu@POKEMONGYM ~ $ cat /proc/21340/environ

XDG_SESSION_ID=5COMP_WORDBREAKS=
"'><;|&(:TERM=screenSHELL=/bin/bashXDG_SESSION_COOKIE=8571b679eed8952dd96ad28a54...<etc>

(I actually gave the wrong example in my previous comment. While it is true that giving the ENV on cmdline will show up in ps eaux, the more appropriate example is what I just explained in this comment.)
Not OP, but the title seems to imply the author hacked LinkedIn and got 120k out of it. Whereas the author simply figured out how specific he could use LinkedIn's ad targeting to impress someone who was giving out 120k.

Title is definitely a bit misleading, but at the end of the day, you gotta do what you gotta do to get the clicks.
> But out in the wider public, there seems to be a perception that chips will get "twice as good" every year into perpetuity.

I'd think people in the wider public have no clue as to exactly how much faster computers get every year. Considering that software usually gets slower at about the same rate as processors get faster, I'd imagine many people would think the increases in speed are much smaller than they actually are.
Flee the Jungle Guides Shoppers Away from Amazon
> How about for those factually innocent of the charges they face?

For them, I'm ok leaving the punishment at _1x_. :)

You're not being realistic. Structuring the court system so that the most expensive option to the public is also the option with best expected outcome for the one selecting options is obviously inefficient. And an inefficient justice system is a bad justice system. Many of the problems with the justice system today stem from lack of funding and you're just proposing to make the situation much worse.
This isn't too surprising considering curcumin is a mitochondrial uncoupler[1][2]. For the curious, another example of a mitochondrial uncoupler would be 2,4-dinitrophenol, which is currently being looked into as a potential anti-Alzheimer treatment[3]. Cool stuff.

1: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19715674

2: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1567840/

3: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16754295
The size of the jump buffers on ia64 terrifies me. X64 on windows is bad enough, but ia64 looks horrible. Was it a performance problem?
The rate is in fact significantly lower: http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Health-News/turmeric-spice-cur...
While at unversity, I worked at a hospital in the pharmacy, often covering the 3rd shift (11pm to 7am). There were a number of employees who had worked 3rd shift for decades and as a running joke, they kept a bulletin board with every single study that showed the negative health impacts of night shifts -- literally dozens of scholarly articles about what they were doing to themselves.

The hospital maintained a decent premium (~15% IIRC) for night shift hours, but it was clear to the employees that they were making a tradeoff on their health to work at night. It's a tough problem since sick people don't wait for regular hours to crash or require care, so someone needs to be there. Maybe better coverage from split shifts?
Or you can colour a QR in by hand (I did this to test the concept of storing 128bit salts on custom credit cards).
http://imgur.com/ClCeHAj
Show HN: CLI for bulk uploading custom emojis to Slack
Apple, Microsoft, Google and others commit $140bn to address climate change
It's different research, and yes.
Engelberger also 'fathered' service robotics as well as industrial robotics.
Neither do I, but I don't expect their prominent politicians to deny the facts, or average German people to discuss the 'controversy' about the concentration camps. Or for people to state that a lot of bad stuff happens in war, so you know people should just forget about the nazis and stop having a problem with it, and anyway it was so long ago, you know?

Some things are just inappropriate to say, it's about sensitivity.

In general there's not really a time limit on at what point it is appropriate to start expecting Jewish people to forget about concentration camps. And in the same way I think that there should some reasonable level of education about the events here. Just so that people know about it and know when not to say hurtful things.

It's something that should be taught and remembered and learned from. And whilst it's also not appropriate to continually labour the point, I also don't think it's at all appropriate that the average Japanese person really knows little to nothing about what happened, to the extent of denying it in some cases. You don't really hear many justifications or downplaying of nazism from average German citizens, but you really do hear downplaying of it all here.

There are so many people in Japan absolutely incredulous that anyone in China or Korea should possibly still have any kind of problem with the war, whilst not being aware of the things that happened.

I cannot imagine hearing anyone from Germany say without ill intent that they still don't understand why the events of the war are such a big issue for people that actually experienced it.
Isn't the supply side of this being neglected? This article (and tbh a few others I've read on it) feels as if they're trying to say the following, but in 500 words: "They couldn't increase revenues enough."

The piece of this equation that I'm much more interested in is the cost side. By handling the training & bookings all in-house, it just feels like they couldn't get a low enough unit cost per job. Especially in something as low-skilled (read: low-margin?) as house cleanings, it sounds like what actually happened was that Handy couldn't get costs down low enough to deal with the true market equilibrium.

While I'm not disagreeing that the legal fees from lawsuits may have made the next round of funding a challenge and was likely a heavy drain on cash on hand, I think jumping on the 1099 vs employee debate is a bit of a cop out.

It's another company failing to launch a double-sided marketplace, which sucks for all parties involved, but I'd be really really interested in reading about what actually broke.
An easy way I incorporate it into my diet is by taking it in capsules (you can buy them on Amazon).
You'll want to disable auto MMS retrieval in whatever your default SMS/MMS client is. And thank you for mentioning Messenger -- we just updated the post to include instructions for it as well.
Trollyology, cute.

Soft AI requires stricter rules to follow than hard AI. Strict rules for self-driving cars are fairly straightforward (for the most part), as reasonably clear information on how effectively a car is being driven is readily available to the driver.

What strict rules would you follow when designing an AI with the means and authority to kill?
Mail to bkase at highlig.ht bounced back. Are you sure the mail address is correct?
To make this clear: Productivity is not declining. The growth of productivity is slower than it was in the past, but it's still growing. The first graph here is annualized growth rates, and you'll note they're all positive: http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm
To see things happen around you, SparkView(Vine+Tinder)
Trailer for “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” Documentary Released
Yes, I think Bot-assisted humans would be far more effective than either one alone. Imagine the cunning of a human brain, enhanced with the senses and reflexes of robotics.
This article encouraged my to look at why my life was so expensive.

1/3 of my expenses are related to living in Boston. Rent is 2/3 of my total expenses, and 1/2 of my rent is only because of the city I live in, if I chose a cheaper city or lived 15 minutes further away, I could have the same house for 1/2 the rent. Of the remaining 1/3 expenses, many of those are cost-of-living related as well.

Location is something that's never really going to get cheaper, because location is fundamentally scarce. You can have as many cities as you want, but you can only have 1 SF, 1 Boston, etc. I don't want to live in a city, I want to live in Boston. And that's expensive compared to other cities around the world.

I think this is a testament to how cheap technology has made our lives. 100 years ago, things like clothes and food were a much more significant part of lifetime expenses. And as technology continues to improve, location is going to continue to eat up a larger portion of total expenses.
Cybersecurity: Taller walls, deeper moats but the front gate is unguarded
This brings back memories. At Progeny Linux Systems we helped HP get Debian packages working properly on ia64.

We had one of HP's first generation Itanium servers to test on, and man, was that SLOW.
That's funny, I thought I left a comment here yesterday. The gist of which was that fair use didn't have a word count limit, if you steal all of a joke, you've stolen. I left a link to fair use in Wikipedia, as I remember. This is another similar story, from the news today. For those creating web sites, it's something to remember; just copying something small doesn't mean you're protected by "fair use."

http://www.allgov.com/news/unusual-news/lawsuit-accuses-cona...
Ok, url changed to that from http://www.theindiantalks.com/breaking/former-president-apj-.... Thanks.
I have the book but haven't opened it yet. Can someone who has comment on whether the proof assistant is tightly integrated with Scheme or whether it might be possible to implement it in another language such as Clojure ?
Eight other former employees pleaded guilty to felonies for their conduct: http://www.newyorktheftandlarcenylawyersblog.com/2012/05/man.... E.g. at least two pleaded guilty to falsifying business records.

It does not look like a single "rogue employee" but multiple employees in the department. Of course that doesn't mean anyone at the top is to blame, but one can see why the prosecutor would draw that inference.

> What HSBC did went - as far as we can see from the outside - right to the top and required a lot more than a rogue employee.

What about HSBC went to the top? The only thing from the indictment that was a policy from the top was not classifying Mexico as a "high risk" country for money laundering controls purposes. There wasn't even a "single loan officer . . . [who] joined the prosecution against the bank only to relieve the pressure on himself" willing to testify that a higher up made that classification decision with specific intent to profit from money laundering.

If there had been a witness like Mr. Yu in the HSBC case, the government would've settled for a lot more than it did.
Mobile payments account for 20% of Starbucks in-store transactions
Best way would be to join the USDS "reserves"--they sometimes ask people to come for 2-3 weeks to do an evaluation of a government project. If you can get time off from your job, or you're switching jobs, I think that's a high impact way to contribute without necessarily joining fulltime.
They specifically address areas where the default to pre-commit review, for the reason you just called out:

We switch to pre-commit reviews instead of the usual post-commit review flow if the potential errors/mistakes are costly and can cause significant problems. Some examples of such cases are:

Touching code which deals with privacy and anonymity of users.
Touching a core abstraction since a lot of other code might depend on it.
Touching some parts of the infrastructure where mistakes can cause a downtime.
Awesome - thanks for the link!
I agree. However, a post like this has multiple purposes, non-the-least is a dictum about their culture and what they value.
Can you shed some light about what could go wrong?

I remember reading about this HMAC/"no database" technique and thinking it was pretty cool.

Is it because you may want to encode more fields than just expirationTime, but also (say) lastLoginTime and such, so the GET URL would get awkwardly long (and possibly break in some email client), or is it something more fundamental than that?

Cause I thought that using the HMAC as a primitive was the right way to get hash-based authentication right, as opposed to messing around with actual cryptographic hashes.
Mostly because the government itself is changing the way it procures software. For example:
http://www.federaltimes.com/story/government/acquisition/201...
https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/06/15/agile-bpa-is-here/
Nintendo official manufacturer was Gradiente, but both NES and SNES had a crazy amount of non-licensed clones, and some clone manufacturers still exist (yes, you can buy a new NES and SNES in Brazil, along with new pirated cartridges)
You get a nice phishing attack :)
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0
That's true. Something like stabbing would be harder to detect though. It could look almost as benign as a close handshake.
Hawking, Musk Warn of AI Arms Race
Extreme ad micro-targeting as a service? Sounds awesome.
By the time you've said "Why is it so terrible to be punished for exercising your right" I would hope the answer would already be apparent. Being punished for exercising your rights is the opposite of having those rights.
All governments can agree that they don't want the chaos of proliferating, unregulated autonomous weapons

The US is not going to give up this capability. It's still not quite fully signed up to the landmine treaty.

We know how this will go: automated colonial "antiterrorism" enforcement. Like drone strikes today, only lower cost. Entire populations kept in line by the robots that hunt in the night. Objecting to the death robots and organising against it will be considered evidence of terrorism and result in your death, along with anyone who phoned you recently enough. Deployed from Turkey to Tripoli.
US and Canada deny entry to children from in-vitro fertilization born abroad
Show HN: DuoQuiz: Android trivia game I've been working on after work
I've spent the past 4-5 months working on this Android trivia game in my spare time. Would love some feedback, thanks!

Google Play link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.versuslabs.duoquiz
Anti-NYC hacker takes New York magazine offline
Solid basic idea: systems enable you to go fast with high quality. It's not always a tradeoff, folks, and the long-term benefit of quality is more speed. It's a clear winner.
It's tricky to say, right? Diagnoses across the whole Indian population is much, much more difficult than it is in the US.
Not the most striking though, look at wild bananas: https://dokmaidogma.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/musa-forest-...
Hi Prah, I had a question. How are the questions graded? Are they essentially uniting tests?