jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I only know of many 'local' vulnerabilities, but those include remote exploits of Android that turn into local radio exploits.

Keep in mind that given my skills at the time, I was looking for the "easy" wins like boundary-checks and logic errors rather than what I would consider more advanced ones like double-free, use-after-free etc.

Given what I've seen of the QCOM assembly that faces userspace, I would say the likelihood that there are low-hanging fruit vulnerabilities in the protocol-facing side of the radio code is near 100%.

To answer your question, yes, "the complexity of the protocols" is what is stopping the majority of attackers IMO.
In fact, the first time you raise an A round, you get more employable, even after the business fails.

It's like the opposite of betting your life.

About the worst thing you can say is that there's an opportunity cost from not starting a different more successful startup or not landing a job that would be the envy of 99% of employed Americans.

You need a scanning electron microscope to see the violin playing the sad song for VC-funded startup founders.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying. I also see holes in some arguments.

1) I agree there's gigantic risk.

If I understood you correctly, you are saying great programmers should have less of the downside of risk with more of its upside.

2) Are you saying great programmers apply to this hot startup in pg's example, pass the interviews, and then refuse the job offer because the compensation offered is too low? If that's what going on, then pg provided something worse than a sketchy anecdote: he lied. He omitted the startup is low-balling candidates it wants to hire. Is this what you are saying?

Or are you saying there are people with the potential of being great programmers who went into other fields because the average compensation of competent (but not great) programmers is low (which may very well be true), and this is the main reason we don't find them?

Also a small correction in "There are any number of people who are capable." It's great programmers we are looking for, not merely capable.

Another in "highly intelligent, incredibly driven people". It's not enough to be highly intelligent and incredibly driven to become a great programmer. You may have aptitude for, but not interest in programming.

3) Is it possible for a great programmer to go into another field? Because if it isn't, maybe the opposite is also true. That you can't take someone from another field and turn them into a great programmer. It's probably as hard for a great programmer to become a great sales person as it is for a great sales person to become a great programmer for example.

4) On the effectiveness of extrinsic motivation of great programmers, we already know extrinsic motivation doesn't work in general. It shouldn't be hard to find research on this. A quick search points to the following. Please correct me if this impression of mine isn't true. I want to find the truth:

http://www.fatih.edu.tr/~hugur/study_hard/Intrinsic%20and%20...

You are suggesting extrinsic motivation of great programmers specifically is an exception.
I cut my teeth on Coherent. It had the best manual.
Do you wear a long-sleeve shirt? I used to have this problem when I wore t-shirts and worked in an air-conditioned office. Now I wear a long-sleeve button-down shirt with an undershirt and I feel much more comfortable every day.
When I first saw them I assumed Magic Cap was also influential in some early Android pre-1.0 concepts.

Rubin was an engineer on Magic Cap either at General Magic or when it was still Apple if I recall correctly.
You can say Julia is for everyone, but it's not informative. You could just as well (and just as uninformatively) say that Erlang is for everyone, or Rust is for everyone, or Haskell is for everyone. Each programming language has strengths and weaknesses that are the reason you use the language.

Julia's strength so far is fast numerical algorithms, and that's what most people seem to use it for.
Sure they do: consumers will pick the best last-mile providers, because in this model, consumers actually have the power to choose.
No sane person in the United States of whatever political party or creed

I reckon that describes less than half of those elected to office unfortunately, regardless of affiliation.
I don't have a dog in this fight and I'm not interested in an extended debate... but I don't think most of Mt Gox's customers realized that by letting Mt Gox hold their money they were effectively investing in a high-risk venture under extremely unfavorable terms.
This is the truest of all true things that are true.

Totally a first-world problem.

I share feedback with recruiters because I want feedback as an engineer. If they choose to ignore it... well, I'll have to find some way to deal with people trying to give me a job, I guess. Woe.
When a company pays out a dividend, it's stock price drops by an amount equal to that payment. Aside from the payments it will make for cleanup, it's not like BP is making any less money after this announcement, in fact it will now have an extra $7.9 billion that won't be distributed to shareholders. Those withheld dividend payments will accumulate into a large amount of cash on its books and that cash will get factored into the share price, so all things considered it should boost the price of the stock.

The canceling of the dividend was out of political necessity, not financial.
I get the name, but don't you think something that is easily digestible by people would be less of a risk? It can't be a good thing if you have to explain how to pronounce it to people. Don't handicap yourself with a risky name.
Clearly apple does the design and value-add but these are the people actually pushing the boundaries of machining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
There's a long series of posts detailing exactly how he did it.

http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/eating-well-on-1-...
I would be amazed if this works out well, but I wish them the best.

My guess is that customers may say they are more likely to purchase software online if they see it offline first, but very few actually do that. "Sure, that sounds like reasonable behavior, and I'm a reasonable person." You'll also get people to say things in surveys like "Yeah, I read privacy policies before signing up to websites". A full 78% of the population told the BBB they actively read those things, and 26% said they read every word. Those results should provoke gales of laughter from anyone here who actually checks their stats.

While the type of person who shops for software offline might pay more for it relative to an early adopting twenty-something who would prefer to pirate it anyhow, they do not pay so much more that it covers the retail markup.

Plus, selling software offline robs you of all the numerous ways you can play the retail game yourself, such as offering discounts, seasonal promotions, upsells. Not to mention opportunities to use analytics / email / etc etc.
I'm pretty blown away too. I've always assumed that "solid block of aluminum" really meant that these things were cast and then cleaned up, but I can't imagine how that would be cast... in any case, it really is nuts.
Very nice. I love how many projects you churn out, Jacob. And how good they look. It's inspiring. And humbling.
I coded up an app for this a few of months ago - http://findmycofounder.com
Don't forget that it's not only the lateral pressure you have to deal with, you have to have pipes that can not crumple under their own weight and simultaneously withstand extremely high torques due to ocean currents.
"Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make."

Ah, but here's the kicker: When it comes to valuing things, you can't help but choose. If you refuse to choose between the life of your $FAVORITE_PERSON and the destruction of the Sistene Chapel, then you have chosen whatever consequences arise when you refuse to choose.

The important thing is not the specifics at stake, which are quite silly here, but the fact that you have to choose. You can't not. You don't get to not choose because it's "arrogant" to choose. You don't get to not choose because "it's hard". You have to choose. Choosing to "not choose" is a choice and in whatever situation your are in constitutes some choice itself.

People in the real world have literally and truly faced the choice of which of their children they will save. They chose something. I imagine a non-trivial number of them were paralyzed by the logic you are applying and chose poorly as a result.

It may help if you realize that a dollar isn't just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one's family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They're not just scores in a game. They're human life.

(In other news, I consider white collar crime grotesquely under punished. Bernie Madoff may not have killed a man, but the damage he did in the aggregate adds up to at least one murder, in my book. He did not steal dollars, he stole life.)
Isn't this called top down programming?
I think most people on HN do not like top down approach.
Kind of hard to farm them, since they can jump fences pretty easily, plus you have to compete with hunters:

http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/RJ9830035.htm
Mixpanel is a great tool, and I think their niche is gaining popularity because start ups want an easy way to see their data. Data visualization is very interesting to me. Have you started working on a mobile component?
It's realistic in that it's one of the few viable long-term outcomes to the whole mess, the other option being annexation or proxy rule by China. China would probably be ok with a unified Korea as the lesser problem. The DPRK is not exactly helping China currently, except making them look good in comparison. But the problem with North Korean belligerence is that it serves as a strong motivation for militarization of the whole region. China may be hesitant of a unified Korean peninsula but on the other hand the continued existence of the DPRK regime gives excuse for a strong American presence in South Korea and could lead to escalations in the region the Chinese don't want (a nuclear armed Korea or Japan?) Also, a unified Korea would save the Chinese from having to deal with the mess of the North.
Yes, but most high-performance libraries are MRI specific.

I'm still searching for a good Net::HTTP replacement that runs on both MRI and JRuby.
I'm curious as to why you would call Java easier to deploy than Rails.

Having developed both Java EE applications and Rails applications, Rails to me was much more easier to deploy, without having to deal with installing Tomcat and going through the extensive server configurations.
See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1932107
We use Java, MongoDB, Hadoop and embedded Jetty at MetaBroadcast, we try to keep it simple: no enterprise bloat etc. We've not had any performance issues.
Once you go fully remote you don't really need employment contracts either - in Europe opening some sort of legal entity and invoicing your salary as an independent contractor will be more profitable and more flexible.
It was pretty obvious at the time - after the iPhone 6 with the round edges and ugly antenna colors, the comically giant 6 plus, then a few months later the first Apple Watch (which few people wanted because it was advertised as a notification device) - many people thought that Apple were on a downward trajectory because they've run out of Steve Jobs ideas.

Both product lines seem much healthier now - last year's redesign of the iPhones was solid and the watch looks much more attractive with all of the health features.
> They are able to choose to do those things because capitalism has created massive surpluses that allow people to survive on a relatively small amount of labor. This creates a surplus that can be directed towards leisure or given to the less fortunate.

How many people work two plus jobs? How many have to do gig work to make ends meet? Capitalism has created massive surpluses and free time, for the capitalists.

> Its true there are a handful of susbsistence level societies that do not rely on capitalism for anything but they are in danger of being assimilated and exterminated.

By capitalists looking to exploit them.

> While I disagree with you that is an accurate statement of the facts; surely you can see that allowing concentrations of wealth is a social norm that you consider to be a problem.

No, it isn't a social norm. What definition of social norm are you even using here? It is a direct consequence of capitalism.

> The material conditions that result from capitalism are widespread prosperity; conditions deteriorate when the oligarchs convince you to allow them to use the government to redistribute the wealth of the middle class.

Half the globe lives in poverty. More and more in the US are living in poverty. Wages have stagnated while productivity has increased. There isn't widespread prosperity by any definition. You've been watching too much PragerU if you honestly believe this.
As the maintainer of Dokku, I'd love to hear more about what you think we can improve here. It is certainly an abstraction over basic Docker commands, but so are other schedulers and platforms.

That said, any feedback is more than welcome.
That's not particularly inaccurate, but I get your point. Two things being true doesn't mean that any story you spin linking them is true.
The WIV published lots of gain-of-function research, but all by genetic engineering and not serial passage. Ralph Baric's group has published on coronavirus gain-of-function by serial passage though:

> We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation.

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

So it doesn't seem implausible to me that the WIV would bring up a similar program. The lack of any public record doesn't seem like it requires any conspiracy to me, just for them not to have published yet (especially since they only got the BSL-4 lab where they'd likely be doing that work in 2018).

I think I probably understated the plausibility of a genetically-engineered origin in my comment above, too. I've just re-read Andersen's reasoning in the Nature article, and it's based heavily on the dissimilarity of SARS-CoV-2 from previously-known viruses. But we know the WIV had a private database--for example, RaTG13 was allegedly collected in 2013, but not published until after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

Honestly this whole area of research seems terrifying to me. Regardless of whether it's eventually shown to have caused this pandemic or not, I see no indication that this work is delivering any benefit commensurate to its risk. Many prominent epidemiologists vocally opposed the lifting of the 2018 ban on funding of gain-of-function research (e.g., Marc Lipsitch at Harvard), and I agree with them.
Actually it started with Dennis Miller far before that. SNL really pioneered this genre.
networking, mentoring, Be a protege, evengelise your work, volunteering work not asked/expected from you.

Also be polite, respect others and smile.

Simple it may sound but it is often lacking for whatever reasons.

Also, don't confuse it with politics or playing game... it is as important as being smart and hard-working...

Nash, http://joday.com
> (And I don't even buy games anymore because I've learned my lesson. Now I'll just make any game I want to play.)

That's an interesting attitude.

I rather play nethack, than write it.
Oh, definitely. Noise is often a symptom of wasted energy in a mechanical process.

And even producing noise with a speaker is rather inefficient. You need hundreds of Watt input for single digit Watt output in the interesting frequencies.
Questions like this can work in a phone screen if you have a shared virtual whiteboard. Otherwise it is painful for the interviewer to try to transcribe code as the candidate thinks of it and says it alout.

There is also the common problem where candidates google for answers or at least seem to google for answers during phone screens.

The problem with asking truly challenging coding questions during an interview is that they are often too challenging to finish in the time allotted. Frequently challenging coding questions require an ahah moment or domain knowledge. For example if an interviewer asks a candidate to invent an advanced algorithm on the spot what is being measured? If the candidate gets the answer right they might be really smart, they more likely have been previously exposed to the idea, or they got lucky. If they got the answer wrong the interviewer must judge them on their ability to communicate their thought process during their attempt - but from that the interviewer didn't learn if they can code.

You shouldn't be disappointed that interviewers don't know straight away that you aren't a charlatan. You should instead be disappointed by the fact that there is such a high number of successful charlatans in our industry.
Not really, the lights on large roundabouts are pretty dynamic. You have lights to stop people going further round the roundabout, coupled with lights to stop people coming on to the roundabout. But traffic flow is pretty continuous.

When setup well, it couples the good points of a roundabout with the good points of a basic intersection.

They're usually seen though where you have maybe 7 or 8 roads coming together. If you didn't have stop lights, people from the smaller roads would never be able to enter the roundabout.
Under the fair debt collection act, all you have to do is tell them to stop calling you. Seriously. Just say something to the effect of "under the rights granted by the fair debt collection act, I'm informing you that you are calling the wrong number, I am not the person you're looking for and to please never contact me again" if they do, you can sue them for up to 10k for violating it. You have to do it with each distinct debt collector though. Check clarkhoward.com for more information.
> You not only could have been a programmer, you still can.

Agreed. @graeme if this is a career path that still interests you don't let the fact that you're no longer an 18 year old undergrad deter you. I was in my early 30s when I decided to switch careers and become a developer.
I noticed a couple of minor issues and thought I'd post them here rather than making issues on github since the author is reading.

First, desugaring doesn't treat the shebang line of a file properly for executable python scripts on Linux. If the first line is, for example, '#!/usr/bin/env python', then the desugared file has three imports at the top of the file and the shebang line after those imports. It would be nice to preserve the shebang line as the first line (and maybe also to make the desugared file executable if the input file was executable).

Second, the desugaring doesn't ignore commented out lines, as I discovered on commenting out a line like

#ps.p("my test: " + foo)

before noticing the optional label parameter. Trying to run a file with that line or desugar it results in an IndexError.
| the defiant antihero of the Easter story

That feels like quite a stretch. Pilate is an important figure in the story, but antihero? He largely is the state actor “just trying to keep the peace” and giving in to the religious leaders to make that happen.

Seems more like a real politik type of character of his day than anything to my memory. Keep the tax revenue flowing, don’t require more legions to be brought in, keep your governorship.
Sometimes when I read stories like this (which I'm glad that it's being exposed) and the recent NYT article about cramming school in China, I wonder if they are just printed to make American feel better.
You make a lot of valid points. I totally agree with you on the (lack of) validity of the Tiobe rankings. However, it is my impression that PHP's popularity seems to be stagnating. I remember noticing a decrease for PHP in another language popularity benchmark recently, but couldn't find that reference anymore. It is really hard to measure language popularity objectively, but as a response to a parent poster claiming PHP is imminently disruptive my opinion remains that language popularity metrics don't support a sudden increase in popularity. If PHP would be on the verge of disrupting something those metrics should be noticeably going up.

An interesting metric would be Google Trends[0], which shows a steady decline in search volume for "PHP" while the graph is a lot flatter for e.g. Python[1]. I don't think the number of Github projects for PHP is a great metric, because I think the Github community isn't representative of the typical PHP user, whereas it is virtually part of the DNA of e.g. Rubyists.

You're right to say that plenty of good hackers use PHP, but not because they think its a fun language to work with. You make a point out of PHP being the right tool for the job in certain scenarios, but in my experience it seldom is. Others have already made the point that cheap hosting isn't exclusive to PHP (consider e.g. cheap virtual/cloud hosting like AWS and Heroko). I can imagine using PHP for quick <10 line hacks when convenient[2] or to maintain legacy code and customize open source applications like Wordpress. Rewriting every line of code in existence using the popular language du jour simply isn't realistic. However, that doesn't make PHP the right tool for the job for fresh, non-trivial projects.

You're also right that good developers who happen to write PHP tend to get paid well. My point, however, is that there is a lot of cheap labor available that is able to write PHP (most of whom aren't good developers). This makes it a great fit for those customers that like to pay minimum wage for software development.

I understand your frustration about people bashing PHP, because in a way it is a silly example of elitism in this community to look down on PHP and its community. However, while I at least try to remain somewhat reasonable about it, my tone in regard to PHP is based on a long list of negative experiences that are presumably shared by a lot of people on HN.

[0]: http://www.google.com/trends?q=php

[1]: http://www.google.com/trends?q=python

[2]: In fact, I recently wrote a

<?php print_r($_POST); ?>

deployed on my Macbook's Apache server to quickly test some Clojure code making HTTP POST requests.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PekcT72-PGE/SK3PTKwW_eI/AAAAAAAAAG...

Amusing, felt obligated to share the link to save people googling like I did!
My SSD has been the single biggest win for hardware for me in the last decade. Dell quoted me $600 on putting one in my new laptop. It would be cheap at twice the price.

In addition to my perhaps unprofessional weakness for playing games, the huge win for me is that it slashes boot times for hefty programs, most noticeably the VMs that I do all my development in and, of course, browsers. Chrome boots practically instantaneously -- I often have to wait for my wireless to come up so that it has something to do right after a system boot.

My other suggestion, which combos well with SSDs and is ridiculously cheap to implement these days: get more memory. I have 8 GBs. If there were a convenient option for getting 16, I'd be all over it -- I never find myself thinking "Dang it all, I have too much stuff in memory, why don't I page out some to disk".