Hacker News Reader

If you still use an SE you're instantly my friend. This is a battle worth fighting.

zkhaliqueon Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year

Hmm, I wonder how long it will last... if they invest more in automation.

zkhaliqueon For this metal, electricity flows, but not the heat

How about its use in computer chips? Maybe all those fans and heat sinks won't be needed.

zkhaliqueon Why Many Cities Have No Money

It's the same reason Greece was going bankrupt ... they couldn't print their own currency and run their own fiscal policy after they joined the Eurozone.

zkhaliqueon Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

If you have a deep stack you can bluff, but your chances of winning aren't high if you don't have the nuts after all. You can only lose so many times before it becomes the martingale strategy.

This especially doesn't work against multiple opponents.

zkhaliqueon LEDs may cause retinal toxicity at occupational domestic illuminance

Whew, I thought it said "LCDs". Are those safe?

zkhaliqueon Quoting command line arguments the wrong way (2011)

Oh brother, this is one of the reasons UNIX was much more developer-friendly.

zkhaliqueon Everything You Know About Public-Key Encryption in PHP Is Wrong

That sounds like the exact same two statements I hear over and over when it comes to PHP

"Doing X in PHP is a bad idea"

"Well it's only a bad idea if done by unskilled developers"

zkhaliqueon Unexpected sources of bias in artificial intelligence

Yeah, the word bias seems to be overloaded with many meanings. I actually wonder if there is any philosophical difference between the word "knowledge" and the word "bias".

But about machine learning... a system can learn from a set of outcomes which are the result of a "biased" system, that is to say tainted with an incorrect Bayesian prior which is not properly corrected, such as let's say courts in a racist society or whatever. It would learn the same bias. Because its goal is to maximize compatibility with the outcomes that the humans did. So it perpetuates those weights.

The problem is that we don't know whether the human decisions matched the reality. "Did the person commit the crime" for example. We might have to wait until more unbiased estimators for such activity come along, and throw away old historical data.

It's sort of like when Black-Scholes became a self-fulfilling prophecy for valuing derivatives, but only after it became widespread. The market started using Black-Scholes to value derivatives, so it became the best model to predict the value of derivatives. But until then, other models might have fit the historical data better.

zkhaliqueon Is democracy a failure? (1861)

Democracy isn't a failure, you just need a better voting system.

If people could rank their preferences then people like Bernie and Bloomberg would actually run without fear that they might "take away votes from Hillary" and therefore help Trump. In fact, the two-party syste would give way to something better. Only the party elites would NOT want this... but after this election, even they probably do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

zkhaliqueon AT&T reaches deal to buy Time Warner for more than $80B

Oh great, more Telco consolidation. First the banks are too big to fail after the Great COnsolidation of the 90s and 2000s, and now this. So we can have more arguments about Title I and Title II and more arguments about the illusion of choice when we have only two choices ... DT or HC, Title I or Title II...

zkhaliqueon An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Development [pdf]

TDD no, regression testing yes.

zkhaliqueon Workplace by Facebook opens to sell enterprise social networking to the masses

No need to impugn Zuckerberg himself from 2005 when you can talk about the company:

2006: http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?men...

2010: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/127409/faceboo...

2013: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047804/facebooks-new-face-re...

2016: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/business/international/fac...

zkhaliqueon The State of JavaScript – Survey results

I am going to mention our framework, since I think it's relevant, but it's not just a JS framework. It's a fully integrated platform:

http://qbix.com/platform

http://qbix.com/platform/features

Would like to get some feedback on it, from anyone who looks through the features.

zkhaliqueon The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

I would express the same sentiment about illegal immigrants. This is to all the people who support Donald Trump's rhetoric about deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. These people fled the drug gangs and violence that our war on drugs helped create (think fleeing ISIS) and came to work jobs no one else would take and make a better life for their family. Yes technically they broke a law.

If you're going to argue that we as a country of laws should deport them all back, then I hope you and your family never smoked pot because you broke a law. And since we are a nation of laws - including minimum sentencing laws which the prison industrial complex loves - how would you like it if they looked for you and put you in jail for a victimless crime? Drop your double standard. The Mexican immigrant is better than the potsmoker because they fled violence, wanted to make a better life for their family AND helped do the jobs no one else would. The potsmoker chose to smoke and helped no one except the drug dealers.

Plus we did that already, and it was a disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation -- an estimated 1.2 million US citizens were deported. Plus until 1965, immigration was unrestricted from Mexico and Canada so many of the 11 million broke a law by staying, but not by coming.

You have heard all these myths. The fact is, immigrants have higher labor participation, lower crime rate than the native born population. Especially the illegal immigrants who are afraid of being caught by police and deported. Illegal immigrants do NOT get money from the federal government - if your city pays them take it up with your city. But they pay taxes like everyone else, including sales tax and property taxes. So they pay into the system and get nothing back. You want to deport them all and break up their families so you will end up picking crops, and think this is the way to bring jobs to USA?

zkhaliqueon IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

why weren't they ready before, according to you?

zkhaliqueon House Passes Employee Stock Options Bill Aimed at Startups

Meanwhile, the USA actively encourages companies to offshore their money with their tax code:

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

zkhaliqueon Allo by default stores all your chats indefinitely

Making the change does probably keep Google on the right side of the law. By keeping track of all messages, Allo conversations will be accessible by law enforcement with warrants – something that can’t happen on apps like iMessage or WhatsApp, both of which have run into trouble over not being able to give up information to authorities.

It should be the other way. There should be a law saying that a company must meet some hurdle to store personal information for a long period of time. At least disclose it publicly. It's so ironic that the EU cares about websites disclosing that they store cookies, but not that they store conversations indefinitely.

The law would put a chilling effect on storing personal information indefinitely. But, like carbon emissions, it will only slow the progress towards a future where all the carbon is released from the ground / all the data is stored and analyzed by AI years from now.

zkhaliqueon Acidity in atmosphere minimised to preindustrial levels

How about acidification of the oceans?

How about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?

zkhaliqueon US ready to 'hand over' the internet's naming system

They're leftie socialist rags compared to breitbart and nationalreview

zkhaliqueon US ready to 'hand over' the internet's naming system

Thanks. That cleared it up :)

zkhaliqueon US ready to 'hand over' the internet's naming system

Does this mean that ICE won't be able to do takedowns of domains as easily anymore?

zkhaliqueon The Solitary Vice: Victorian Views on Masturbation

Perhaps those who wanted more than that out of life had less genetic fitness than those who wanted exactly that out of life, so most people want that out of life.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how to explain the presence of homosexuality in a population when the theory of evolution predicts that any such trait (which leads to much lower genetic fitness) would have disappeared a long time ago. How does it stay at this level from generation to generation?

zkhaliqueon The Solitary Vice: Victorian Views on Masturbation

Why are so many comments and replies on this post downvoted?

zkhaliqueon A century of trends in adult human height

"Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, lower risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and higher risk of some cancers"

Didn't I read just the opposite in an article on Hacker News just a few hours ago? It claimed that researchers were mistaken in the past, yet the studies cited here are from the past 10 years.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/

More balanced:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

zkhaliqueon 9th Circuit: It’s a crime to visit a website after being told not to visit it

And you actually do this?

And this company is actually registered? Or it's all fake?

zkhaliqueon A practical security guide for web developers

I'm talking only about the httpOnly flag. It's worse than useless because it makes you think that you dodged some kind of bullet, when in fact that same class of attack can still happen: the attacker needs to craft a script to send the cookie to their server, so they might as well have that script execute the actual requests in the context of your authorized session, the same way that they'd do it if they had your cookie. They would write the script ahead of time. No real attacker would sit there at 3 AM making requests because their victim finally activated a script that sent them the cookie. Far more likely, that script is already pre-programmed to do what it needs to do. And if httpOnly cookies didn't exist, the people would care more about sanitizing their Javascript output to prevent XSS, which is the only correct way to prevent this attack.

zkhaliqueon A practical security guide for web developers

It is security theater. Real attackers don't sit there waiting for a cookie to arrive so they can start to craft their malicious authenticated requests. If they can write a script to steal your cookie, they can also write a script to execute the actual requests right there in your session. And httpOnly cookies do not prevent that at all. Security theater is worse than nothing because you think you're secure from XSS, when you should know better.

zkhaliqueon A practical security guide for web developers

One thing I totally disagree with: "Set secure, httpOnly cookies."

That is just security theater. It's worse than useless because it makes you think you're more secure, when you haven't prevented attacks are all.

zkhaliqueon Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

InboxSDK looks awesome. I took a look at it several months ago, and we want to build something on GMail. We're a little concerned about the licensing and availability of the library, though. Is it possible that a month from now you decide that we're competing with something you want to do, and stop serving the library for our app? What would be our recourse then?