skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But how do you know? Even if you can flash new firmware, how do you know it is all the firmware? There may be a layer below what you can see, with its own CPU, memory, and firmware.

We have to differ here: First question is whether there is a deeper layer below and the other one whether there is additional hardware on the SoC which could also patch the (main) firmware (say: firmware update Over The Air (OTA)).

I can only give my personal private opinion on this topic:

The first question is much more easy to answer: Some instructions only work in some sufficiently privileged processor mode, so you can be pretty sure that if they occur in the firmware (and they usually will) you are in this mode. If you know the processor you can simply look up in the documentation of the processor whether there are other even more privileged modes (in particular for some hypothetical hypervisor). Often for realtime or microcontroller stuff older or cheaper cores are used which simply lack this capability. Since virtualization is complicated it is hardly used in firmware, in particular if there exist realtime requirements (often there will be), which are complicated to handle if you do virtualization. So you can in most cases be pretty sure that there is no hidden virtualization layer.

The much more interesting case is that there are other ICs on the SoC which could in principle patch the firmware or (much more often) access the memory (TLDR: this can be quite real). The good news is: This will usually be some specific part of the SoC and its existence can be seen or disproved if you are willing to decap/xray the chip (see for example the xray image at http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297). For these parts one can usually find signs in the firmware. For example if the firmware tries to communicate with another subsystem via device command or if the MMU is programmed to translate some virtual adress which doesn't seem to be backed by the chip memory (this could be some device memory) or if in the initialization code the firmware seems to try to send a patch to some device memory of another IC on the SoC. On the other hand, after decapping and xraying the chip and additionally finding no such dubious signs in the firmware, I would tend to believe that no such device exists.

TLDR: You can never be completely sure, but if such a layer exists, I'm very sure that one can find strong signs for its existence.
Do they need to do the updates to get the telemetry?

I imagine the updates will stop for older models about the time they decide that supporting that version of whatever hardware costs more than they get out of doing it.
Sorry for being rude.

It seems strange that there are a set of names associated with blobs of data (source code) but the tools for managing that name->blobs map (querying which names are mapped, removing a mapping from the map, etc.) are incomplete. The source code editor allows views and updates, but I don't see how I would do garbage collection, and one can't perform views or updates from the debugger, but is expected to refer to the names there (in the "compile" command, and possibly others?).

Also about the "compile" command in the debugger (which is what I meant), it's unclear what state is mutated when I type "compile level_1.cg" and hit enter--it claims to have compiled and loaded 361 bytes, but I don't see a location into which they were loaded (checking the memory tab shows 32 bytes that don't resemble a program binary... is there somewhere else I should be looking?). If I subsequently type "run", it claims "no valid compiled program loaded". Is the program that I compiled and which was reportedly loaded not valid? Or do the "compile" and "run" commands' output refer to different notions of "loaded"?

By inspecting the compiler, I mean seeing what it does and how. Is the compiler inside or outside the trusted codebase of the handheld trading thing? Is there a way to hand-craft bytecode?

I also don't really understand why "compile" would load anything into anything else. Maybe there's a more clear name for the command?

Or, if you can remove the entire command prompt in favor of a more streamlined read-edit-test workflow, that seems ideal in terms of intelligibility. I would suggest making the programmatical interface more prominent (present it as a first-class alternative to the Web one). Since the idea of the site seems to be demonstrating developer ability, I expect many users will be put off at the notion of using a Web UI to do significant amounts of programming; even JS coders don't live in the one-line REPL of a browser inspector.

How do I get to those docs? I browsed the list on the left of https://www.stockfighter.io/trainer/dox but didn't see anything that explained where programs are stored after compilation. The "Command Reference" mentions compile, but the relationship between compile/run/flash/vmload/vmexec isn't clearly described; is "run" simply a convenience wrapper around the others (excluding compile)? What does the "vm" prefix imply? Why does compile take an argument, but the rest don't? Is there utility in, say, compiling and flashing, but not vmloading, a program (e.g. cache invalidation if we can flash underneath a different running program)? Or is this needless flexibility?

I originally skipped the guided tour, figuring that since I'm familiar with machine-level debugging and AVR in particular it would be a waste of time, but now see that it explains some of the expected workflow, though it's mixed with explanations of basic architecture concepts.
P.S. you can assume that I've taken differential equations and graduate-level courses in computer modeling and simulation, if that helps.
Has anyone tried much with the aiokafka library for asyncio (https://github.com/aio-libs/aiokafka)?
A grant is a contract. Like any contract, YES it can be broken but think of the ramifications.

Would anyone join that company going forward? Would they be able to raise money from investors? Would their attorney drop them?
Google rolls out new design on search page
> I'd rather have some sort of standardized modular system where I can put my own tablet-sized computer in an appropriate place and have it get power, audio sync with the car's speakers.

Oh my gosh yes!

The car should be the peripheral, not the main compute device.

Is it a big deal to plug in a 10-year old USB mouse into your computer? No, because that is a well-defined interface. Ditto for some other peripherals. This is what I'd like my car to be.

I don't think we'll see that anytime soon though. Unless everyone gets on-board with a Bluetooth standard that exposes sufficient functions to the phone/tablet to be useful.
I must work at the wrong places (non-Valley). Maybe that used to be common, but in recent years I don't see that for regular employees at all. Maybe for some layers of management.
I don't even want a modular computer slot - I just want a built-in 'remote' display panel & speakers. Just setup a peripherial that can be wirelessly or usb/lightning cable linked that also transmits the touch info back to my phone and plays sound.

Maybe a switch to flip the display to access direct car controls (but really just give me hard-buttons/dials etc for climate control and keep the consumer electronic part simple and separate).

Extra points if there's a standard for sending car control api calls back and forth to the phone, but 90% of utility could just be handled with a remote touch display.
The user interface for automatic driving is still in flux. The user interface for semi-automatic driving needs to be standardized. There was that episode a few weeks ago where someone in a Tesla rear-ended another car because they didn't know that in firmware revision 6.22 and later, a tap on the brakes disables automatic braking. This needs to be standardized before such cars start appearing in airport rental lots.
Two whole months (rolls eyes)? You think they did because of a sense of "family"? Maybe they didn't want employees leaving in this labor market and I'm guessing they didn't want to lay people off because others would take that as a signal to jump ship. Trust me, if things get bad, they'll let people go. Two months is not really bad.
I concur with your line of reasoning in your examples.

I was not arguing against applying such strategies, I was merely suggesting we shouldn't always use them – to make room for flexibility – as I was trying to avoid claiming complete equivalence between the business and personal sides.
No, that's not how it happened ;)
Not so sure, they're still adding a lot of features to non-AP cars despite the fact that they're not the latest & greatest any more.
Oh.

Yep, like "compile", that command is vestigial (the source editor used to live in a tab, and, ironically, the file saving stuff made more sense that way, driven from commands on the CLI).

Yep, I can make "load" do that. Give me a few hours, though! It's an easy task, but I'm tethered through my iPhone right now.
I don't think I trust the math that far.

That is, we could work out that we think the math works for a purely physical universe. But if we don't actually live in one, then we're speculating without any experience. It would be really easy to overlook something that means that the math wouldn't work for a purely physical universe. Worse, we might never know, because we couldn't see it (we'd be philosophizing and doing math purely in the abstract), and we could never find an example to look at, because the real math would say that such a universe can't exist.

I'm really reluctant to take such philosophy + math very seriously...
WOW... i mean PHP is nothing like C++. It is closer to some sort of dynamically typed C with classes. C++ is not just C with classes it is much much deeper language.
That being said, C with classes for web is not bad thing to be.

And yeah I HATE inclusion in PHP... it's a mess
Not true http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36478641
I was actually going to say I like the UI quite a bit at first glance. I haven't bit in yet, but overall I really dug the layout.
There are probably a zillion little bugs in that thing (I haven't used it in months) but if people really want it to work, I'm probably less than 4 concerted hours from making it workable.
It's unfortunate that they removed the second column. The clear distinction between "projects I started" and "projects I help with" was wonderful. And it only fits half as many now. Being able to pin repositories is nice, but not worth the loss of the columns for me.
They are still in their brand building phase so they get a lot out of generously supporting older vehicles.

Lets see if they are shipping high volumes in 2020 and still supporting 2012 cars.
However if you look at the trend Tesla has set from the start(as opposed to other mfgrs) it's been very positive.

Interesting. I'm curious about how Tesla will do given their very different commercial and technological models. However, I've never driven one, and the anecdotal comments about them that I've noticed have given me an overwhelmingly negative impression of their brand. Maybe what I've seen so far was just unfortunate and not a fair representation?
Somerville needs more highrises and more subway trains.
Cost of living is at least that much higher. Compare rent in San Diego (say, clairemont) vs Rent on the peninsula at equivalent house size. Easily 100% more.
Wasn't Netflix referring to cutting people when they became idle?

Their whole motto is "we're a professional sports team" so if you can't play ball (or there's no longer a ball for you to play with) then you're cut from the team. This was different from the family viewpoint where a company takes an employee and tries to grow them or find new work for them.

They're not really referring to "culture" fit, team compatibility, or even cutting assholes, just whether or not you can provide value to Netflix at that moment.
Spot on, in my view.
I have YubiKey Nanos "permanently installed" in each computer I use, as well as a portable one. If I lose all my computers, and my keys, and my phone... I guess I'll have to make a new Github account. It's all open-source anyway!
I appreciate the forthrightness in this blogpost. Not only have they owned up to mistakes, the thought process in dealing with it (whether you agree with it or not or not) is well documented.

To be transparent is quite a difficult thing. You expose yourself to so much scrutiny.

Godspeed Joel as you and your team bounce back from this slight setback. We all fall. how we get up is what matters.
The CIA will surrender to the IRA.

Obama and the atheist CIA wake each day and ask, "How can we fuck God, today? I
know! We'll make nuns perform abortions. We make homos dance naked in Russian
churches in front of old church ladies. Isn't that hilarious? We'll make a
complete mockery of marriage because, after all, niggers don't have fathers and
that's not fair. My wife, Michelle, wants there to be no cupcakes for school
birthdays because of single moms. We'll make God hated... just for pedophiles
and crazy insane sand-niggers. We'll drink fetus soup with the Queen and
celebrate the end of births. We'll make having children pedophillic. We'll
make every five year old African girl learn how to put on a condom. We'll make
churchs no longer tax exempt. <Giggle> We'll make all the conservative sons
into liberal atheist homos. <Giggle> Will bring in Mexicans to ensure
democratic votes. We made whites have no children because they covet money.

Jesus advocated capital punishment. Matthew 18:6 Mark 9:42 Luke 17:2. He said
to put a millstone around the neck of anyone who corrupts the youth and throw
them in the sea. Obama made the youth covet the money of the wealthy."

The IRA is like the NRA, but for computers. The CIA wants all code in the cloud
under their lock and key. They want to ban compilers and make people think HTML
is computer programming. They want to evaporate desktops so you have no local
computer, just massive cloud computers.

God says...
stances cyclamens froze confidant's boggles Libyan's tearjerker workingmen lockjaw's degeneration lackeys dodger ascendancy's ordained submit Proteus's bookstore's entryway's gunners prating picky carbonates freethinking Guallatiri clapboard's Serra's ushering abutment's paginates touted faith Debbie's
Buffer overflow. Oops!
That they needed the employees to continue to work so that they could later get rich with their hugely disproportionate equity stakes?
no problem, they will simply go to jail

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/04/11/red-light-robin-hood-...
> moronic drivel

^ why I downvoted you.

> how can you bring less than your whole self to work

This means basically wanting to be somewhere else rather than at work. i.e., their culture is one of being dedicated to work when you're at work; at least that's how I understand it.

> poor English

This is not uncommon colloquial English. “Team” and “family” here act roughly like “mind” does in the term “theory of mind”—basically nonspecific nouns.

> I don't care about my job…

Sounds like you are a poor fit for the culture they are trying to build. Presumably you would not enjoy working there. That does not make their concept of how to manage their company moronic, nor an explanation of it drivel, however.

Your comment is blazingly condescending toward a post that is clearly very well thought-out and considered, based solely on your disagreement with Buffer's approach to organizing their team and company. That seems wholly unnecessary, particularly since you present zero actual evidence of Buffer's approach being objectively worse, just your opinion that it is.
I'm enjoying the podcast you recommended. Thank you.

I've liked some of the work by Sam Harris, as well.
Netflix recommendation engine worth $1B per year
They had concrete and plausible answers for "What do you know that the pros do not?", and were willing to test the correctness of their answers scientifically. And they have the resources to fund those tests without risking their personal financial health.

I'd give the same answer for someone who wanted to write crypto, and I'd expect much of HN to do the same. We absolutely need more people writing crypto, including crypto for fun. And the existing crypto written by "experts" is often ridiculously insecure. Please, do spend a weekend reading some book and putting together some crypto code to learn how things work. But do not proceed to encrypt your bank account credentials with them and stick the encrypted file on the public internet.
Thank you very much for the clarification. Would it be possible for you to share with us the list of the few dozen courses that will not migrate to the new platform?
Anything smaller than a 15" screen feels cramped to me these days. I'd like to see it in person before passing judgement, but the specs don't really seem worth the premium price to me. For that kind of money, you can get into a pretty nice Macbook Pro.
we always talk about 3rd party platform risk for startups and to me Buffer is the prototypical example of one. If Twitter has a bad day they can cut off their API access and they'd be dead (ok they support Facebook and others but that's still 1/2 of your core)

So it seemed quite absurd they'd spend so much on things like retreats when they have so much risk.
I'd like my car computer software to be re-copied from ROM every time the car is started. The ROMs will only be updateable by someone who has physical access to the car so they can push the physical "write enable" switch.

I.e. not a software "write enable" switch.
> "you did skip over my most interesting question"

Actually I found the question banal, and skipped it intentionally. I prefer discussion of ideas, not appeals to authority.

> "they are fascinating if only from the perspective of enlightenment regarding the life or teachigns of jesus"

They're both on the later end of the spectrum, though still early enough that I took the time to read them (in English). They both present views that are consistent with a few other writings (the most famous being Thomas) and at odds with the majority of writings from that era (everything from the canonical writings to the Didache, Clement, Polycarp, and Barnabas.)

I don't see reason to treat them as particularly accurate or insightful. They fit the standard late-Gnostic pattern of "secret knowledge" -- teachings that were supposedly passed down from the only one disciple who heard them but hidden from others, presented as almost entirely dialog between a small group with little narrative structure, without place names or names of "bit characters" or other connections to any sort of actual history. If you're already inclined to believe early Christianity was corrupt and distorted, they certainly fit that narrative, but they don't stand up well to critical analysis.
The salary is peanuts compared to what that CEO gets compensated.
Know of a collection of yet-to-be-made iOS ideas?
I am curious, because I have some app ideas I would happily share with people if they needed a concept from which to get started, but is there already something like this? A place where people submit not-yet-created apps that are open to whoever wants to put in the effort?
Show HN: Serverless Messaging App Built with AWS Lambda and Twitter Digits
Does it beat a decent modern thinkpad?
I find this an interesting, if cynical response. It's as though there is no possible set of actions that would be enough.
Sadly these are the exact reasons why it won't be modular. They can force you to buy a new car just by stopping support for its operating system.
My colleagues and I built a production-ready iPhone messaging app with a serverless backend. We used Twitter Digits and Cognito for login/user management, API Gateway + Lambda for backend compute, and DynamoDB + S3 for storage.

We had an overall good experience, other than some complications with Cognito/Digits. Happy to share any lessons learned or answer any questions!
This is a bit of a tangent, but could you expand on that? I'm interested in getting CarPlay in my next car, but I'd like to know what some of the limitations and downsides are.
Typically if you don't pay the employees then you will have no employees ;)
The comments so far all seem focused on the language Joel uses (family, etc). While that may be fair, if you simply change those terms into whatever you think is more accurate, this is a very, very good piece of insight into the perils of growing too quickly, as well as an (as usual) extremely transparent look into how a company that is reasonably successful adapts.
Consumption as full cannabis products.
In take-home income right? They still have sizeable ownership of the company and vesting.
> The cheaper car ($66K base price) has a software block on its battery which limits its range to 208 miles on a full charge

Is that really true? Are the batteries otherwise identical and you can get stranded with plenty of reserve power?
Ask HN: Advice on how to avoid overwhelment as a lone developer
Hey HN,

Recently I'm experiencing overwhelment and burnout on a project.

I'm a self-taught full stack developer, and mostly work on my own projects but with occasional freelance work.

Last year, however, I took on a project with a family member in need of a developer to overhaul an ageing web app written in Webforms / C# (then unknown to me).

I accepted after he was let down a couple of times. Financially it is a below market rate but I have minimal living costs, and it is more than my own projects typically bring in.

After learning the framework, good progress was made after some intense months of work, launching a much improved frontend app. Now i'm close to finishing the backend, however a backlog is building, with some advanced functionality required.

On some days i'm fine and work well, on others its too much for me. The list of things that need doing often consume my mind when i'm not working. Now i've feel like i've lost the ability to discern if the project is too big for one person, or whether i'm just not doing it effectively enough.

I'd like to have someone else on the project with me to help out, but i've been told the budget is too tight to hire anyone right now.

I haven't forced the issue, because if truth be told, I do fear hiring someone, as its something i've only tried a few times before with limited success. Because of my introverted nature, I don't know any other C# developers. Due to the budget constraints, I also fear picking the wrong person or using up the budget too quickly without getting enough done.

I don't want to abandon the project, as that would leave a family member in a bad situation, and I've gotten used to having some financial stability. However, mentally I often find myself overwhelmed and anxious, mulling over various options.

Have any of you dealt with similar issues, or fears about taking on help. How did you overcome them ? Or should I be more mindful and just do the project step by step?
You're right, two months isn't bad, but it was a sacrifice, something people in this thread seem to just assume isn't done by management.
Cue the food industry crying about massive increase in costs (to track, but also to drop cheap ingredients sourced in PR-unfriendly ways).
This is the sort of thing that economies of scale bring when paired with a lack of effective competition. If there's effective competition, then some company can and will cut into all the other companies' sales by selling a fully-unlocked version of their hardware at close to the price of the locked version.
Perfect - thank you. There are probably a whole heap of legal and other bureaucratic areas open to this approach - will keep an eye out.

Car park fines being one obvious one. Claiming for late train arrivals (seriously)
Making R&B in 30 minutes (GoPro POV)
We Swedes too, for that matter.