skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I mostly agree with you, I'd like to play devil's advocate:

The Rust core team is relatively relaxed about the community's usage of `unsafe`. I say this because they do not seem to be interested in actively discouraging it's usage. i.e. `unsafe` is discouraged in documentation, not via tools.

"Hey please don't use `unsafe` unless you know what you're doing". Is like writing a comment in Javascript, `function(x /* int */) {`.

Ideally, the usage of `unsafe` should be discouraged by the compiler via friction. The compiler should, at the least, spit out some metrics after a compile cycle about the percentage of `unsafe` lines/instructions. Even more ideal, when the compiler detects an `unsafe` it would pause and ask, "Is Crate Z trusted [y/N]?". Cargo can then make this easy in Cargo.toml.

All of a sudden Crate writers need to think twice about their usage of `unsafe`, will users be willing to trust my code? is using `unsafe` here really worth the risk of adopting fewer users? is there already a library that solves this which is generally trusted?
> There's a Sci-fi story - I forget the name - where space travel is actually quite simple if you know the math to make it happen, and when a peaceful alien race visits Earth, the humans - with their thousands of years of armed conflict - kill the aliens and take their spaceships.

I think you might be thinking of Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken". They weren't exactly friendly, but they were quite surprised by Man's ingenuity.
I confess to having forgotten it became a novel after it was a novella :-) (I did read the sequels--with declining interest as I went along.)
I love NASA's work but I find it's websites are very messy and without a decent standard framework or layout. I really wish someone go to a GOV.UK job on them and get some decent standardisation going with them.
And here's the oh-so-predictable thread-shit on any topic where another country is cited for X to try and make it about how America sucks at X. And typically, it's all handwavy and histrionic and completely lacking in actual facts.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, except that I disagree that it's actually a rational choice based on facts, rather than an apparently rational one based on poor information and training -- again, none of the mitigations I pointed out are really expensive.

Let's take prod DB access: Im not saying make it super locked down, Im saying set your DB security group to only be connected to from your API security group, and set an email warning when an instance launches in that group. Doesn't stop your engineers doing it, but it makes it pretty easy to shout across the office "Hey, who is fucking with prod and why?" Takes like 30 seconds to configure on AWS.

There are serious questions about why your CEO can launch that instance though, and that sounds like massive policy failure. Again, restricting the CEO IAM from launching prod instances takes 30 seconds. (And all your non-engineer accounts should be IAM restricted!)

Ignoring that your probabilities don't work out, Id argue that the situation is really remove 5 bullets or add 1 chamber, and people pick the chamber purely because it's constructive, not out of genuine cost-benefit analysis.

"If I had 3 hours to chop a tree, Id sharpen my axe" -- I think startups are too hasty to chop, because that's being productive, right?
So inspiring
We could build something nuclear powered that would be able to do it. Project Orion or Project Daedelus would be able to escape the sun's gravity without needing a gravitational slingshot.

But we have decided for now not to build something like that.

Maybe in the next century at some point a nuclear powered spacecraft could be built in space that could start exploring other star systems.
So inspiring !! Packing my bags
Except that also serves as a placeholder for your turn to speak. I frequently find myself taking an extra second to think before I speak only to have my turn pass me by, because someone else started up right away.
I click google ads when I'm actually looking to buy something. I don't when I'm looking for anything else. I never click Facebook ads, as Facebook seems to think I'm someone I am very far from being.
Uber begins background collection of rider location data
Some updates actually make older devices go faster, anecdotally.
(As written now) I think it can be legitimate critic. Google really grew out of making a better search engine algorithm and all. Some of these businesses are essentially reselling things and not really focused on innovating the substantial part of the business. That can also work of course, but I can see why it's less interesting.
Something I noticed in that novel is that they still had incredibly advanced technology. The Lazy Guns alone hint at what they lost!

Maybe there's a reason Golter is where it is, and maybe it wasn't always there.
Math without borders
DevOps Engineer, I have two 27" Cinema displays.

Is it a bit much? Probably. Do I need it? Absolutely not.

Nobody was using the second monitor and my team lead didn't care.

So here I am. 17" MBP, and 2 27" displays.

It's glorious and excessive. But mostly glorious.
Nah. On Project Fi I had a nice, ritzy Nexus 5X which lists for $450. I moved to an SE. So pretty straightforward comparison.
The problem isn't the service being provided, that's well handled. The problem is that the development team is woefully underfunded, incapable of keeping up with maintenance, security fixes, new design, documentation, testing, etc.
They're called proprietary video drivers, and yes, they pass unknown commands, without user authorization (think DRM) to PCI(e) devices (video cards) all the time.
IMO it's not Xi that's similar to the current nationalism trend, his China IS the reason it exists. China today is the shining example of how economically successful a country can get by just focusing on the cold hard numbers - no refugees, no human rights, no foreign aid, etc.

For years their argument against the West was about why we spend so much time and resources trying to push our ideals to others, when we could take a practical path and be more successful economically
Too many assumptions about my opinions being made from my statement (which I agree I didn't substantiate). I'm making a more broad critique of fed.

We should have a federal reserve, but one who doesn't engage in central planning and has a healthy respect for the efficacy of free markets. If they raised rates fully in 2011-2013 they would've been heros, now they've completely distorted the global economy because prices simply cannot reflect information about the economy when money itself so widely fluctuates.

Money is a measuring stick, plain and simple. Economic activity can be thought of as scientific experimentation, except the results of these experiments can't reliably be measured when the measuring stick itself changes widely for political, and not fundamental reasons.

I'm not really making an argument for institutional changes, just that the people currently occupying the fed are benevolent morons.
Err, they forget visa, inter-hub (eg. to/from airport), intra-transit overnight hotel expenses. These would add about 25-50% to the quoted prices, IMHO.

I personally think cycle-touring with camping equipment is the best way to travel long term on the cheap without relying on couchsurfing and similar systems. I've done longer trips in Australia, China, France, Romania and Taiwan but always stay in hotels. It still works out pretty cheaply since you see loads of cool stuff between towns and food/etc. always costs less out of major centers. Another benefit is scheduling - leave when you wake up, stop where you please. No more sync-with-the-bus-departure, alarm-clock hassles. Try it!

For inter-continental, couple your bike and camping equipment with a second hand oceangoing yacht. You can get very decent vessels under USD$100,000, and the best place to buy on the used market seems to be Florida.
Amazing idea, I love this.
"HDDCryptor not only targets resources in network shares such as drives, folders, files, printers, and serial ports via Server Message Block (SMB), but also locks the drive. Such a damaging routine makes this particular ransomware a very serious and credible threat not only to home users but also to enterprises."

http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/b...
> I think you have unrealistic beliefs about how things work.

Do I? What percentage of VC money goes to people living in areas where $50k would be a good year's salary? It's practically 0. YCombinator won't even invest in companies that won't move to the valley. http://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q21
Are college towns pits of income inequality?
-4, that's a bit harsh. :-o
Common sense: Everything that moves eventually stops.

Science: LOL no.

Common sense: When you drop something heavy, it falls faster.

Science: Not really.

Common sense: The sun circles us: it rises in the morning, and then sets in the evening.

Science: Turns out you got that backwards.

Common sense: Animals are the way they are, they don't change.

Science: Actually they do.

Common sense: Either this thing called "electron" passes this slit or that slit. Come on, they can't pass both slits at the same time, are you freaking kidding me?

Science: Well, you're not gonna like this, but...

Common sense, not even once.
This is moronic.

- Psychotherapy can take years to work. Three months is nothing.

- What in the fuck?

- lol yeah sedate your spouse. Careful you don't get ripped off! Mother's little helper should be cheap.

- get your prescriptions from a black-market psychiatrist. nothing could go wrong.

- has this ever worked

- It's not; it's highly addictive and very likely causes brain damage with regular use -- like every other pharmaceutical in its clade.
source: https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/80338926299332198...
> Instead it gives the most resources to the pages in all of the databases which are accessed and used the most.

And that's not acceptable when dealing with setups where each database needs predictable performance, and some of them may see heavy traffic while others don't.

> Just be aware that your usecase is far from typical.

I don't think there is such a thing as a "typical" usecase in this area based on what I see as part of my consulting work, but this is common enough that I deal with it regularly across a wide variety of clients.
I thought NTP was a protocol, not a piece of software. Is the article conflating them, or is there only one single implementation of it that everyone relies upon?
Yes, this. Location services. Good luck keeping that off if you use any maps for navigation. Google accounts... Good luck using Android apps securely without the Play store.

I tried rather hard but was ultimately unsuccessful in using Android in any convenient way and not allow Google to track everything I do. If you have any suggestions I am still all ears!
When the cost balance makes the new house cheaper than a retrofit.
Pointing out that Android is insecure is about as newsworthy as pointing out that the sun will rise tomorrow.
You should have a look at books about the TRIZ system, such as this one

And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0964074028/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_

It is rather hard to describe quite simply, but I would try like this: TRIZ is about all of the patterns and heuristics found in the invention of mechanical engineering elements. It purports to provide an algorithm for innovation, but you don't have to accept that grand of a claim in order to find the content fascinating.
4M gmail addresses with passwords leaked (large html file, 150megs)
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... - I'm very curious why the NHS need access to your browsing history, along with everyone else.
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/. I think that will have exactly what you're looking for.
Yeah, I've definitely developed an aesthetic taste for code cleverness. Like, one time I was writing some python and using third-party code that expects a list of user-provided classes. It was really annoying and I kept passing it a bare class which made things fail. I ended up making a class that behaves like a list containing itself, and it completely "fixed" the problem. That really shouldn't be production code, though.
I'm not sure why this is so badly downvoted. Maybe the forced "covered in shit" metaphor was over-the-top but otherwise this is spot on.

I'm 27 which I guess counts as an adult but I certainly clearly remember that everything explicitly marketed towards kids or other varieties of "dummy" always felt forced and condescending to me when I was younger.
I see that the exploit sets an ntp-server with shell code in backticks. ok.
But imagine the router did not have this exploit: Why on earth can anybody connect to that port and configure the NTP server?
How is authentication for TR69 supposed to work??
Article doesn't bother to mention that there are completely different projects which implement NTP servers with varying levels of functionality (openntpd, chrony, ntpsec, ntimed). And while the pool.ntp.org system is a nice scheme, it's hardly a global necessity. You can fairly easily get a stratum 1 server going on your own infrastructure. IMHO, too much of NTP relies on GPS, but that's a separate matter.
The funny this I noticed is that Chip and Arduboy are funded by the same accelerator.

https://hax.co/companies/next-thing-co/

https://hax.co/companies/arduboy/
Sure, I could elaborate, but the below comments do a better job than I could have.
try Sphero, its a fun robot to learn with.
As I said, I just don't get it. (That isn't a criticism of them, it is an admission of my limitations.) I will likely continue looking into it, but, for the moment, other avenues seem to fit my goals more readily.

I do very much appreciate your reply, as well as any other constructive replies here.
That's an extension to let you use Google's DNS servers and still have CDNs work.

Without it the functionality described above will just work - it's only when you are using an unusual DNS setup that the extension is needed.
Fine. Cronyism.
Embodied energy is certainly worth considering, but major retrofits of homes built in the 60's or earlier are hugely inefficient and result in a home that looks better, but performs no better energy wise. You CANNOT retrofit to Zero Energy with out significant cash outlays or at all.

Putting a new carb and a dash mat on a 70's Oldsmobile will not justify the embodied energy argument. Melt that sucker down and build a Tesla that lasts 3x longer, can be powered by the sun and is better for you in the meantime.

Our homes are also much healthier for the owners, with proper ventilation, filtering, and low/no voc materials.
Bullshit. Midtown to EAV area is maybe 30m unless there's some major breakdown (which, like every train system, happens). Train south from midtown to Five Points, transfer to east line to Inmann Park and take one of 3 bus lines to your EAV destination. I do this several times a week.
Wow, they still have the software boxes sitting on the shelves, still in shrinkwrap? That store is a veritable time capsule, no doubt filled with collectors items!
There's a fair chance that you're meeting an increasing number of liars, then, as research (have a google) clearly shows that 'honestly' often precedes a lie, or at least shadings or untruth.
There's OpenNTPD which is maintained by the OpenBSD/OpenSSH developers. It has been poorly criticized for its focus on security rather than absolute precision, but it's more than adequate for most peoples timekeeping needs.

http://www.openntpd.org/

It has privilege separation, sandboxing and if your OS/distribution uses LibreSSL it implements HTTPS constraints.

http://man.openbsd.org/ntpd.conf.5

http://man.openbsd.org/ntpd.8

http://man.openbsd.org/ntpctl.8
I think familiarity is a key factor here, and I think your examples highlight that.

!! seems slightly arcane to me, and I'd rather write some function like to_bool() to make the intent clearer, but I imagine if you're used to it !! is immediately obvious, and to_bool() would be confusing because it's not !!. (And conversely, if to_bool was part of a standard library and widely used, !! would seem arcane.)

I don't think either technique has any real practical advantage, and the real trick is writing your code for the people who need to read it.
When you have a large group (like 6+ people) renting a house outright via airbnb is usually better. It also lets you hang out together in a living room. Also you have more location flexibility.

Private room airbnb is probably not the best deal.
Negligible, a few tens of cycles of extra overhead.
Just answered each comment as it came, trying to defend a good submission against nonsensical snark.

If you don't like sub-threads I suggest you get an HN-reader than can collapse comments.
Your point is well taken.

I agree, in reality, "the market" thinks the CEO ought to be rewarded more, (I agree with the principle but not with the current levels). However if a CEO destroys billions of dollars of value, he gets a golden parachute or a new title. The employees get a pink slip.

If the CEO creates billions of dollars of value, the employees sometimes get a (tiny) bonus (medium bonus for bankers).

But what really is the value of Twinky to society compared to the life of a human being? (millions of $ vs $0?) And that is the fundamental place where I think we disagree.

I have a strong disagreement with the main tenet of this line of reasoning (this might become a strawman argument): that maximizing profit and financial success (or jobs) is the desirable goal for society. If you look at it in the sense that society should be organized such that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", maximizing profit (or jobs) is perpendicular if not antithetical to the pursuit of happiness, at least for the many.

The CEO's happiness might be perfectly served by the current system, but what about the worker's? Also, what was the cost of the failure of the (previous) management teams to the CEOs vs the employees?

I confess that I've only read about "working" alternatives to the current system in fiction.

As the article points out, we are running out of jobs. Maybe now would be a good time for a rethink before we hit the crunch?
I understand what you mean, but I think it goes even further than a bicycle. At the risk of abusing the comparison, a bicycle will let you do what you already can do, move about, just a little bit faster. By contrast, what I think the article is talking about is doing something fundamentally new that you couldn't do before.

It's clear that overtime human beings can think about things that they didn't used to be able to think about. We can bootstrap our brains in this way, because it is all cumulative. Explaining the Internet to someone from the Middle Ages would be almost impossible, but it wouldn't be that difficult for someone from the 1950s who only understood telephones.

So this phenomenon of bootstrapping into new kinds of knowledge is clearly real and powerful. It's very useful and quite meta to think about how we could do that faster or better.
It isn't at all rare for a bankrupt company to have many millions, even billions, in assets. It might be more unusual to have hundreds of millions in cash on hand, though.
It's likely that being a better programmer shifts your rating scale down in general. Becoming better at anything doesn't just make you better at doing the thing - it also makes you better at seeing mistakes and areas for improvement. Like, I remember watching jazz education videos by Hal Galper, and one of the things he mentions is that there's a moment where you start feeling like everything you do is terrible, and that this means that you're getting way better because you're now hearing the things you've always disliked about your playing.
We didn't quite get to the size where we needed that before we sold off the dial up business (for a pittance; we contributed to accidentally set off a price war in our market with incumbents with deep pockets - it was no fun, but I learned a lot)
> You realize that you traded Google no longer tracking your every step and key press with Apple tracking your every step and key press, right?

Apple exerts substantial effort to NOT relay unnecessary information to their servers; spend some time in Wireshark and you will see.

> And because iOS is closed source, you know even less about what is being tracked than you did with Android.

Don't get me wrong, AOSP is open source and that's great, but Google Play Services (which you need to use to use the Play store) and friends are completely closed-source. The iOS kernel is open source; it's a pretty similar situation either way. This is not a good argument IMHO.
That's the dreadful "call to action" popups every SEO "guru" recommends you to add to your Wordpress site:

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2015/09/16/10-popup-calls-to-actio...

I do hate and actively block them.
lol the name of my consulting company
Stretch your calves and hamstrings. Thoroughly. No, really, try it.

For the longer term, work on building up ab strength, which takes the load off your back muscles a bit. Those of us who sit all day long tend to have very weak abs.

You might want to book an appointment or two with a physical therapist - not ongoing weekly treatments, but they should be able to show you exercises that are safe at your current level of conditioning and make sure you're using proper form. Without those two things, you run the risk of exacerbating your existing injury or causing a new, worse one.
It sounds a little defeated, but hasn't nuclear war been inevitable since the invention of the nuclear weapon? if no, why not?

It's strange how distant the idea of nuclear war seems to my mind when I try to imagine the perspective of someone who lived through the Cold War.

It's even more strange to imagine my own country as being a nuclear instigator. Metal Gear Solid is the closest I've come to nuclear doctrine, and in that game the US is there to stop a terrorist nuclear threat and protect deterrence, not keep the nuclear option on the table and potentially flush deterrence down the toilet. It causes some dissonance.
It's kafka-esque, kafkaesq.
I've seen quite a few Shopify store owners in a group on Facebook mentioning that they've had good results using Facebook ads.

I've only used Facebook ads to have a bit of fun and boost a picture of my cat[1]. He got a couple of likes after I'd spent about 50 cents, which pretty much achieved my goal.

[1]https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/12184708481998...
Classic NTP is hardly the only game in town. For example, see the NTPsec work in progress: https://www.ntpsec.org/ which I'll probably transition to someday, maybe even get an el-cheapo GPS receiver now that I'm not effectively living in a basement.

And I've personally be using chrony for a while, although my needs are significantly less than whatever level of accuracy it provides. There are some other clients out there as well, such as OpenBSD's OpenNTPD, although I have a vague memory of it having issues of precision, congruent with the distribution's focus on security.
http://www.devdoc.consulting/
I'm not sure I completely agree and/or I misunderstand.

Compilers are still not used for many compute intensive applications that have been around for a long time. On both CPUs and GPUs the fastest gemm, convolution kernels, md force field calculations (and many more) are all hand written assembly and are at least twice as fast, sometimes much more, than compiled Fortran or C code.

"In the end, they want and need the optimizing compiler to catch up and be able to optimize it well for the architectures." This hasn't happened, as far as I can tell, for the compute intensive kernels I just mentioned. With every new architecture we write new assembly.