jwise0

Something seems wrong about the dates in this article. The article has a byline for today, but the bill was proposed in June 2015, and would have an effective-of date of the first of this year.

nysenate.gov indicates that it's still in committee: http://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/a8093 ... hopefully dead there.

edit: from the Ars Technica article, it's been reintroduced -- see: http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A08093&term... . The EFF thinks it'll not get anywhere, though.

What a truly incredible sound, with incredible sound quality, too. I highly recommend that everyone drop what they are doing, put on headphones, and listen to that. Just when you think it cannot get any better, it does!

I assume that the reason why this is being downvoted is because people disagree with the "for money" premise. (I wish downvoters in this case would comment, rather than simply downvoting!) Flytenow was operating under the provision that allows a private pilot to take a "pro rata share" of costs from a passenger, for a genuine "common purpose".

I think that Flytenow, by their advertising, probably failed the "common purpose" test, but more than that, it failed the duck test -- it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck. It looked like using a private pilot's license for commercial activity.

As someone with a pilot pilot's license, I think the FAA and the judicial branch made the right call.

A year or two ago, I came across the following post on teaching young kids how to apologize:

http://www.cuppacocoa.com/a-better-way-to-say-sorry/

The thing that struck me about it is that in the process of explaining the core of what makes a meaningful apology to children, it does a really nice job of reflecting where, exactly, most public (and, really, private!) apologies tend to fall down.

A good addition to this article.

Twitter's response seems pretty untrue. Specifically, they say:

"Beyond just disclosing our workforce representation statistics, we have also publicly disclosed our representation goals for women and underrepresented minorities for 2016, making us the largest tech company to put hard numbers around its diversity commitment."

Are they unaware of Intel's diversity initiative? Intel has set hard goals for 2020, and is continuing to track metrics yearly [1].

To claim that one is tracking the state of the art, and simultaneously be so unaware of what the state of the art actually is, is a sign that an organization is languishing, regardless of what the subject is. In this case, the subject is diversity, and the organization seems to still be Twitter.

There are ways to avoid these kinds of issues: if you run an organization that you want to build a diverse workforce in, I recommend that you hire a diversity consultant. (I believe that Clef, for example, did approximately this, and got staggeringly good results.)

[1] http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel...

I downvoted this, but I'd like to explain why. It's not reasonable to expect people to go and get VPNs of their own unless we, as technologists, make it so completely trivial that it's the default. If you ask the average person whether they need a VPN for public wi-fi, they will give you a blank stare. If we believe that it is something that they need, it's our fault that they don't know about it. And, if we believe that they shouldn't need it, it's our fault for not building secure solutions to begin with.

This is either a failure on our part to educate, or a failure to build secure systems, or a failure to regulate the people who would do these things. But either way, it's our failure -- not a failure of the users.

That was, in fact, quiz 9. I have ROT13ed my answers to avoid spoilers.

Any answers to quiz 9? The best I got:

H4 vf n QENZ; W3 vf na FQ pneq; C2 ybbxf yvxr WGNT; H2 vf ANAQ synfu; H5 vf na nccyvpngvba cebprffbe; H13 vf n iert; abg fher jung H1 vf

This is a great post, and really enhances my otherwise-rudimentary knowledge of the failure physics of NAND flash. Program disturb, in particular, is something that I didn't really have a good understanding of.

It looks like the author submitted this; if you're reading, I wrote an article a while ago [1] with some of my reverse-engineering of a NAND flash part, and I'd be interested to see which parts you think are on point and which parts seem totally wrong. I'm looking forward to your next article about device management!

[1] http://www.joshuawise.com/projects/ndfslave -- HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133450

The title from the article is somewhat less clickbait: "A Company Copes With Backlash Against the Raise That Roared"

It looks like they have taken the Steve Miller Band approach [1] to users who are also creditors: http://blog.homejoy.com/faqs/ . Hope you didn't have a gift card!

[1] i.e., hoo hoo hoo, go on, take the money and run

His post evokes FDR's speech some days before the 1936 election, in which Roosevelt says: "We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. [...] Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred."

Varoufakis, and Greece in general, are in a somewhat different position right now than America was immediately after the First New Deal. On the other hand, if Varoufakis is right, the differences may not be as great as I imagine...

"I don't really understand this article [...] I don't know anything about this issue [, but I think] that the primary cause was [something other than what the medically trained doctors who examined the patient published the paper suspected...]"

Indeed, rhabdomyolysis is commonly found in Army recruits and CrossFit athletes. But clearly the doctors had found evidence in this case!

There was a comment that I found particularly insightful a couple months ago about a disturbing trend in HN commenters posting when they had marginal knowledge on a subject, extrapolating often-incorrect data from their own knowledge base that looks good on its face, but falls flat under inspection. Please, resist this urge! It will make HN a better place for everyone.

Please read the original thread. This was already reported as: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435

It is El Paquete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

The pervasive misspelling concerned me. If the basic details are wrong, what chance is there of the actual cultural details being right? It seems like the author does not speak fluent Spanish, which makes it difficult to trust their understanding of how el paquete actually travels.

Discussed previously on HN (before his death) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8403451

There's a reason why they say that "you're not dead until you're warm and dead"!

The case of Anna Bågenholm [1] is similarly fascinating. She was in cold meltwater for 80 minutes before being pulled out, and made a ~full recovery. Her core temperature was around 56 degrees when they began resuscitation. It is truly amazing how effective hypothermia is at preserving bodily function!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bågenholm

An analogous feat [1] is being attempted in Pittsburgh by Tom7. He has lots of interesting graphics that he automatically generates from the data [2], which data-driven folks might find interesting, anyway. (Tom7 has been previously seen on HackerNews for other things, too. [3] [4])

[1] http://pac.tom7.org [2] http://pac.tom7.org/graphics.shtml [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8722192 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5526670

I was a very happy dspam user for about three days -- SpamAssassin's accuracy on my setup is terrible, and dspam performed pretty well (and increasingly so with training).

Then, dspam started segfaulting, and none of my e-mail was delivered. I looked into what was going on, and it appeared that the dspam hash database had somehow become corrupted; and since dspam is completely unmaintained these days, it was unlikely that whatever bug I tripped upon would ever be fixed.

Sigh. I also would like to hear user reports about rspamd! I am getting sick of the false negative rate that I'm getting from SpamAssassin.

I upvoted this comment because I really like the idea of "I built this because I wanted to". I like the idea of Show HNs as an "I made this thing for me, and not for any other reason". Thanks for posting your project!

I think the point of this article is precisely the opposite.

Writing off people who "find refuge in hate" as being "small-minded" is an easy temptation to give into. But, the subject of the article I think provides a very effective refutation of that. I don't know anything of the article's subject beyond what is written about him in this very article, but I imagine that he was raised into anti-Jewish sentiment, or grew up in an environment filled with it; that's the usual origin story for people who join hate movements, anyway.

I liken a hate movement as being more akin to a cult. Cult leaders, we can surely condemn; but is it really reasonable to permanently write someone off who's been indoctrinated from birth as being "small-minded"? Societal pressures are very powerful things.

Arguably, Jay-Z's point was that when he had 99 problems, the K-9 was not one! There's a good discussion of this in Mason's wonderful dissection of 99 Problems [1]. It's on PDF page 16, or section M. (I was actually kind of surprised at this ruling, because I thought this was pretty well settled law.)

[1] http://www.slu.edu/Documents/law/Law%20Journal/Archives/LJ56...

The article title on HN seems particularly misleading. It seems that the submitter is trying to imply that Ms. Pao is hiring in a way that is discriminatory (i.e., that would make it harder for people of some gender or race to join the company). The full context of the quote is:

> Ms. Pao, who said she wants to stay long-term as Reddit’s CEO when a one-year interim period ends, said she has removed salary negotiations from the hiring process because studies show women don’t fare as well as men. She has brought in well-known Silicon Valley diversity consultant Freada Kapor Klein to advise the company. And she has passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team. “We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,” she said.

It's eminently clear from the rest of the quote that she is not doing anything untoward or illegal, or even particularly unethical; a headline that paints her actions in that way seems misleading.

I'd suggest instead: "Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: “We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,”"

Or, to use the original quote, and simply replace the rephrasing with the original content: "Reddit CEO Ellen Pao "passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team"".

This story I think very neatly points out the difference between verification and validation -- and why it's important to have both of them in a testplan for anything new.

In short, verification asks the question: "does it do what we designed it to do?" For instance, if you have a reference encoder of some kind that is a verbatim translation of a specification, and a high-performance encoder that is designed to squeeze every last drop out of the system, you can verify the high-performance version by comparing the output to the reference; if they're the same, then you know that the high-performance version, at least on some level, works as designed.

If verification compares the design against the implementation, then validation asks the question: "is the design what it needs to be?". The story that xiphmont told here is a validation issue: the implementation is perfectly correct, but it's the design that isn't what he'd hoped for! Although verification often takes more of the time than validation, in my experience, validation often seems to take quite a lot more creativity than verification.

Thanks to Monty for writing this up, and providing such an illustrative example of the difference! It's a useful distinction to have, especially when looking at errors that escaped testing and made it to production.

You have to be an app developer for that to work: /me/threads is accessible only to developers of an app, and there is no permission that you can grant to an app to make it work. Otherwise, you get:

  {
    "error": {
      "message": "(#298) You must be a developer of the application", 
      "type": "OAuthException", 
      "code": 298
    }
  }

You get this even if you try to use the Graph API Explorer tool to view /me/threads.

I still wonder when https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications will go away.

A quick comment on why I submitted this ...

This will substantially change the way I interact with Facebook Messenger, and irritatingly so. For the past as long as I remember, all of my IM services have shown up in one client (naim; then Pidgin; then Adium). I'll now be forced to either use the Facebook web client (and, in doing so, feed the mis-tuned reward system in my brain that stimulates itself from seeing the notifications icon light up ...) or use a poor approximation of a keyboard on my cell phone.

It's irritating when a service that I use gets shut down. But, the thing that's truly irritating to me is that I don't even have the option of not using it: I'm locked in still by network effects, and Facebook know it.

As far as I understand, no. (A request for an API to write a desktop client was the top "most-liked" comment on the Messenger-platform blog post, which is how I found out about this.)

Looks like it got syndicated to The Kernel from the original ... here's the original:

http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-c...

And here's the HN discussion from last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935

The thing that I find particularly notable here is not that they stuck the key on GitHub, but that they are trying to subpoena GitHub for a list of everyone who accessed the gists in question. If allowed to do that, then that sets a precedent that's worth considering...