jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> General Clapper praised the food; his hosts later presented him with a bill for his share of the meal.

Not only are they evil, but they're cheap too.

But the fact is that the hosts would have billed for the meal because the U.S. government asked to be billed.

The USG requires that officials traveling on business not accept gratuities, gifts, dinners, or anything above a certain value (which is about US$100 -- it gets adjusted for inflation, so it might be higher today).[1]

There is an exemption to allow acceptance of gifts of travel expenses of more $100 when officials travel outside the United States on business, but only if "such acceptance is appropriate, consistent with the interests of the United States, and permitted by the employing agency".[1]

In this case, General Clapper and his staff probably didn't want to deal with the question of whether it was "appropriate" or deal with reporting requirements, so they just asked for the bill. Or, their North Korean hosts, knowing U.S. policy, were proactive in making up a bill.

Either way, the NYT article should have mentioned the USG policy. If they can't get that little thing right, it makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the article.

[1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2010-title5/html/USCODE-...
>I almost never hear about a scientific study where they discover that men are better than women at something.

Maybe women are just better than men at everything?
Almost all (?) protection ultimately requires some kind of feedback that you can work backwards from, so it was always a losing battle for developers. In a similar vein, I remember having the Grand Theft Auto 1 demo. Because it was an open world, it had a time limit on how long you could play the game.

The countdown was displayed in red digits in the corner of the screen. I used SoftICE to set a memory write breakpoint on the video framebuffer at the location where the timer was displayed. That allowed me to locate the code printing out the timer. That in turn gave me the address of the timer variable, against which I set another memory breakpoint, which brought me to the routine that was counting down the timer. A 1 byte patch effectively disabled the timer and allowed me to play for hours.
Nim is very exciting to me. For a long time I've wanted to develop a viable HDL as an internal DSL in a modern imperative compiled language. Until I found Nim I couldn't find anything beyond C++ that would work (Julia might actually, I haven't tried yet), but Nim is just absolutely perfect. The custom operators, static params (a weak form of dependent typing), and the macros in particular makes Nim a perfect match. It also helps that the compiler is itself written in Nim and pretty easy to work with. It's exciting when a language allows you to solve a whole new problem that was just not feasible before.
Underwater hazard detection would be very interesting to explore, but for UBC SailBot's purpose (crossing Atlantic Ocean with surface vessel) overwater hazard detection seems more feasible with the technologies currently out there (radar, IR, AIS, etc). Do you have any suggestions for good technologies to explore for (horizontal) underwater obstacle detection? We have played with the idea of horizontal sonar, but not sure how feasible this is...
We need more articles like this, we need a flood, until all the non-technical people in my life take their privacy more seriously than they do at present.
More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.
Wolf damage to sheep herds in France is also paid for. There is still opposition to the wolf presence but I guess not being threatened with bankruptcy helps smooth some edges.

Also wolves help control the wild boar population, and those can be quite damaging for crops, so the economic impact of the wolf may actually be positive.

Eventually, someone is bound to be attacked thought, it will be interesting to see how policy is influenced when it happens. I can see how tigers can be a lot more polarizing.
You're right. I've added an enhancement item to the issues for this.
Note, CPython hasn't strictly been an interpreter for a long long time. It compiles .py files into .pyc files, then runs them. It also does a fair bit of caching. However, it's virtual machine doesn't do much optimization.

Yeah, it pre-allocates lots of common data-structures, and reuses old ones rather than using new ones if possible, and I think it might do some stuff with iterators ... but it's nothing like PyPy or a modern JVM.
I think I have a different definition for 'real-time'.

Pretty cool though for sure.
You're correct on both accounts. The existing bugs won't be that hard to fix but I haven't had a chance to do it. I've been sitting on this project for almost 10 months and I figured it's better off being released. It's not doing any good hidden away on my HD.

Hopefully I can find the time this week to fix them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920287
It's a cost benefit tradeoff, but I still think far, far more people routinely underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits than the other way around. In all the major systems I've worked on in the past five or six years, I've always gotten serious leverage making sure I'm working DRY, and thus able to do more with less, and in particular these past three years have A: involved me doing a project where if I had adopted this mindset it would have failed in the worst way possible, initial modest success followed by endless soul-sucking failure brought on by code debt brought on by DRY violations, and B: having the worst part of my day-to-day coding (and, correspondingly, the most expensive part for my employer) being the part where I have to deal with a large mass of non-DRY code. In fact my current project is basically replacing a clusterfuck brought on by a system that adopted the recommended approach quite extensively.

In my admittedly limited experience, non-DRY code still has huge costs that are easy to gloss over at first and a benefit curve that curves down way faster than anyone would like to admit. In many cases people can't even see how fast the curve is trending down because they've never even seen a properly-done product.... and I don't even mean "a product done to the pitch of academic perfection", I just mean a decently done product that isn't perfect, but we still put significant time into staying DRY and fixing DRY violations.

YMMV, of course. I suppose ultimately people following this advice has certainly advanced my career, as I clean up behind them...
P.S. The author of the post is Frederik Pohl, a pretty awesome science fiction writer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl
If you're marking used letters in a mask, why sort first?
You make a good point intuitively, but I still don't quite buy your argument.

The circle is continuously differentiable along its circumference. The fractal is not---it's still got a large number of discontinuities (offhand, it looks like the number of discontinuities is equal to 2^(n-1) after n steps).

The area enclosed by this curve approaches that of a circle, but the curve is not a circle: it cannot be described by x^2+y^2=1 because its derivatives are not equal to those of same.
The Guardian is probably the most often quoted publication in Private Eye's "Pseuds Corner", a regular selection of unintentionally amusing psuedo-intellectual writing.
I agree it probably would have been less expensive, but I'm not sold on the company necessarily believing that at the time.

> There is no way a recall coordinator with a global view of the company's welfare in mind would have made the decision to go forward.

When the information about the sensors and software first emerged everyone was saying there was no way any one engineer would have not spoken up about it... It was later relieved they outsourced the software development to $9/hr engineers. It wouldn't be surprising if their "recall coordinator" did not speak up for one reason or another.
Might explain why this record is being set in early January when the temperatures are cooler = faster charges but not too cold.
I think nowadays it would be fair to tell applicants what is expected for an interview in regards to dress. I've been judged for underdressing and for overdressing. Just can't win and it's unfair to expect someone to read your mind.
Hi Peretus, thank you for the kind words and for the feedback! Indeed, this is a great point. We'll fix it soon. Looking forward to your sign up :)
How exactly do you define sacking?

They pushed past armed guards, broke barriers, entered the chambers of an active joint session of congress forcing the entirety of the USA legislative branch and its Vice President at the very moment they were certifying a presidential election into a secure bunker.

... and you think that's "about as peaceful an outcome as we could possibly have hoped for"?

I genuinely don't understand. This is the kind of operation of government that is supposed to never be disruptible. If past mobs knew it was this easy then we could have had a zillion coups by now.

You're saying they weren't murderers I guess? That they didn't blow up the building or take hostages (though there is footage of a guy with zip ties that looks like he wanted to)? I mean, yeah, that would be worse. This is still unimaginably bad.
Is there a requirement to only use platforms that are available to all citizens? I imagine people can be blacklisted by ISPs and/or mobile carriers. Even a landline contract is not guaranteed, right? What they can't do is turn people away at various offices.

That said, I agree this kind of selective platform favoritism is (currently very minimally, but still) discriminatory. For example some people might not want to use Twitter for ideological reasons. (Let's say because it's a fucking cesspool that just generates tension.)
Ignorant comment of the day. Racing at high speeds though public spaces is incredibly irresponsible and highly dangerous to both you and, more importantly, the people around you.

You don’t own the road, you share it. You don’t get to put others lives at risk because you feel like it. If you decide it’s a risk worth taking, do it in a safe place, like a race track, so you don’t kill anyone else when you make a mistake.
This seems like a great approach! I'm glad you're aiming for something better, and I hope you're successful.
The problem with rotating displays is that LCD pixels tend to be taller than wider ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pixel_geometry_01_Pengo.jp... ), hence if you rotate a display it degrades the image quality. Cleartype especially starts looking horrible.
PG discussed this in this thread three years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100595
Tarsnap will support windows eventually. But seriously, if Tarsnap usage increases tenfold overnight, the service will collapse under the load the following morning. Making sure that the service keeps running smoothly takes priority over attracting new users.
I agree - universities often (depending on your degree) allow you the freedom to choose courses of various difficulty across various faculties to suit your interests and skills. This doesn't seem like a massive extension of that.
Yes, the Pocoo guys are awesome.
Release a new API that uses symmetric encryption instead of a one way hash. Use however many rounds are necessary to prevent brute force attacks. Gravatar keeps a list of generated keys, but not who generated them. The API accepts a key ID and encrypted email. That makes the keys convenient to generate and change. Deprecate the old API and turn it off some day.

I think that works, but I try not to think about crypto at three in the morning, or at all really.

EDIT: Also, a consumer site could implement this themselves with a simple proxy server. They could even open up the service to other sites.
What value does HFT create?
going to school.
Cool, thanks for the pointers.
Agreed, this is important, if only for confirmation value.

Before this, we didn't have hard evidence that the large scale collection was grabbing content of non-suspects in addition to the to/from data.

I'm not sure what rationalization is left to hide under, but I bet that people will still try to say that this isn't so bad.
That's interesting, what was the software?
Tool Tip:

If you ever see an old journal article like this and you want to extract the data check out g3data:

Description-en: extract data from scanned graphs
g3data is used for extracting data from graphs. For example, graphs
are typically published in scientific journals without tables of the
actual data; g3data makes the process of extracting these data easy.

http://www.frantz.fi/software/g3data.php
> We are not resending the original email. We are sending a new message ...

Yes, and that's exactly what spammers do. They know better than to send the same message more than once, but they certainly won't abandon an address they know to be valid (no bounce).

The first might say, "Our automated analysis tool has detected that your computer has been infected. Click this link for a repair."

The second might say, "We're sorry -- your bank has reported a hacking attempt and we need you to change your password. Please enter your login ID and your old and new password."

The third might say, "Is your wife no longer happy? Try our miracle ..." (use your imagination)

Spammers might be intellectually challenged people, but they're not perfectly stupid, on the ground that nothing is perfect.
I'm looking forward to seeing how Front stacks up when ready! :D Email clients seems to be a strange place where you can get acquired before you even launch... so maybe we'll never see a public product if you innovate too much! :D
It's not easy, it's just totally unregulated. Meaning it's easy to "be a programmer."

Want to be a real engineer? There's a professional body for that. Doctor, lawyer, electrician, etc.? Same. Not us programmers.

The big difference between us and them is liability. Nobody expects software to work. Thus nobody gets their pants sued off. Thus we don't need professional accreditation; we're not vetted.
> and it's the rules that need changing

Why? The shareholders & execs were free to impose stricter compliance and risk rules. They chose not to.

As long as you don't have contagion spreading to the rest of the financial system then who cares. The new rules put into place re: bank capitalization after the GFC seem to have worked here. Shareholders & execs are taking the hit, the rest of the banking system doesn't seem to be affected, and everything seems to have worked as it's supposed to in this case.
https://status.stellar.org/
The problem with Q&A sites of any stripe is that the "good" content gets generated early. People ask meaningful questions and get meaningful answers.

But there's less of that than one might think. It rapidly reaches the state where the questions become highly specific (e.g. diagnose a medical condition, fix a bug, solve a personal problem, homework questions), repetitive, or argumentative. The Q&A format just isn't very good for long-term growth.

So there probably is good content on Y!A. (I like to think I contributed some myself.) But that quickly becomes swamped under a vast morass of unanswerable questions and poor-quality answers.

Nobody seems to have found a good solution to that. StackOverflow seems to be doing best, but at a cost of keeping its community small (small enough to fit in a single rack) and highly focused. Having a continuously changing technology helps -- but on a more general Q&A site that rapidly degrades into arguing about politics.
Arxiv-Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06294
They sure look good on your resume.
I used Python and taught my 10yo son by working with him to design a text adventure game. While we were doing it together, he was engaged and enjoying it. His ability to understand and learn was never a challenge.

The challenge was that actually programming was apparently not his interest. He was more interested in story and puzzle design, and as he got older those interests expanded while programming just completely fell away.

Most people could program if they wanted, assuming they had an adequate teacher. But if they do not have the desire and drive, then it's not going to happen.

Edit - now I also recall that before the Python game effort, I got him started on Scratch, gave him a goal to make a simple Mario clone, and left him to it. A day later, he had made good progress but quickly lost interest and no longer wanted to work on it or talk about it.
The Desktop UI paradigm has definitely matured, and requires only some fine tuning here and there. Mostly with graphics and not design.

What Microsoft really need is a Window strategy. Where is it heading. Its source of revenue in the future. Its longtime programming framework, library, API Strategy etc....

I believe they have WinUI 3.0 now? What happened to WPF, UWP and WinForms? And they are moving all of the Outlook Apps to Electron for cross platform development. [1] And just look at .Net. Have they finally settled on .Net Core now?

May be because I am on Mac so I am confused. It is not Apple are perfect, but looking from the outside either Microsoft doesn't have a clue or they just dont care.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-replace-its-many-...
So is he 10x or how much?
There is a leaderboard. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders It does not include mods though.
Reminds me of tin whiskers which can happen in electronic solder and cause shorts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
It's better to drink distilled water than contaminated tap water, though.
decade tops? it started from just after world war 2, and lasted until around the plaza accord.

Most people won't remember it because it's too long ago
I get a kick out of cancellation of internations social networking site cancel threats:

You still owe €32.85 for your Albatross Membership subscription. Your payment has been overdue since 05 Feb 2020 and we have sent multiple emails to notify you.

Since your Albatross Membership subscription is a legal contract, it can only be terminated by following the proper cancellation procedure. Withholding your payment for a service you subscribed to is not equivalent to cancelling your contract.

If your balance remains unpaid, we’re legally required to follow a debt collection process and additional administrative fees may apply.
it's more likely to avoid due diligence because by the time it reaches that scale enough people have underwritten it through rounds and other methods of approval that it's likely to continue to be green checked without due diligence. Even more likely then a barebones startup as it has rapport.
Composition API *
https://v3.vuejs.org/guide/composition-api-introduction.html...
In countries with single-payer health care, it seems reasonable to use some funding from taxpayers on diseases that aren't considered to be profitable by the existing for-profit medical research companies. i.e. the medical research market is not providing what is needed by the population, so supplement that market using taxpayer funding. In the USA though, that doesn't seem feasible, but perhaps you could reach out to patients in Canada, the UK, Europe etc and through them get taxpayer funding from outside the USA.
> Edit: Lots of people are saying you can't share contact without revealing your identity. Does a 1-click link not solve this issue? If I post a signal.me/#one-time-code/jdjkerfe2r3rfwseffre5ge5g then I don't see how that would reveal my identity.

Well, if you're under attack, the 1-click link will reveal your identity to the first person to click on the link. But that's entirely different from what you're asking for, which is to reveal your identity to a specific person designated by yourself, regardless of who sees your link first.

The reason people are telling you you can't reveal your identity while staying anonymous is that those are opposite concepts. But if you're not trying to preserve your anonymity against the same person you want to reveal your identity to, you're on the much simpler problem of communicating in a way that is resistant to eavesdroppers. You don't need anything from Signal; you need an encrypted channel of communication with your counterparty.
https://www.duffelblog.com/2012/10/wikileaks-releases-mirc-t...
What sort of change?
This can't be real, can it?

> So. The only thing that holds Fibery 1.0 release is slow accounts registration. Currently we can handle 2-3 accounts creation per minute...

> Not really. We also setup the new cluster for every account. Manually.

https://twitter.com/fibery_io/status/1197162343882543104
Key points: Excite's CEO passed on purchasing Google for $750K + 1% of Excite's stock because as a condition of the acquihire deal, Larry Page demanded Excite's tech stack be replaced with Google's. While the financial terms of the deal were acceptable to both parties, the deal fell apart due to Larry's request: Excite tested Google's search results against theirs and at the time found no material difference warranting such a drastic change in their business.
What all these frameworks are trying to achieve is standardisation of UI, so that people get a familiar set of controls across applications and platforms (and for developers too!). But we have so many standards now! (Queue relevant xkcd).

I think this is where browser companies (Mozilla perhaps?) could be doing a lot more. Instead of adding endless new features to CSS and Javascript - which only give us more options to create even more standards - why not work on a standard UI library that ships with the browser? ActiveX tried this, but it was mostly limited to Windows and it died with IE. Java Applets tried this but security. Flash was great while it lasted, but security, and it's mostly gone now anyway.

I think we have learnt enough about how people use the web, and how we develop for the web, to begin a concerted effort in standardising web UI once and for all. I want a standard set of widgets that ship with the browser, that I can theme, but that behave predictably, that don't require importing of CSS and JS, and that do not require insane levels of layout logic to do what was achieved on windowed desktop environments decades ago.
When I was younger, it was a fun hobby to help people with.
I'm a diehard Emacs (+evil) user, and I tried VS Code for a few months. It really is quite good. Here are the few detractors that brought me back to Emacs as my primary editor.

Lousy macro support from the Vim emulator. Evil is still leaps-and-bounds above anything else (possibly Vim itself).

Flexibility of split windows. I like to view multiple files side-by-side. From my experience, Emacs and Vim have the best support for split panes; whereas VS Code and JetBrains editors have the worst.

VS Code has nothing like Magit. In my time with VS Code, I would keep Emacs open in another space for git.
This was a fascinating read. She was 75 when she visited the north pole, and 79 when she went to the south. And she had to learn how to ski first. Not only that, she was a breast and lung cancer survivor, and only had half her lung capacity.
I've tried those already. Evil, Spacemacs, Doom. All except Doom have a misbehaving Escape key, Spacemacs needs as long to start up as one of the Electron-based editors.

In the end it comes down to this: I don't need Emacs. I've tried to find a feature that I really want and that's worth it to switch for(yes, I also tried org mode). But I'm comfortable with my Vim setup, I don't need an email client or web browser in the text editor.