skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't the first time I've talked on this. I've had some experience with bluetooth on Linux, and as a radio guy. The answer is there are problems from Layer 1 to Layer 7, needless complexity, and design by committee.

Bluetooth is an EXTREMELY complex radio protocol on Layer 1. It's like a mating dance between scorpions in the middle of a freeway. High chance something gets messed up.

Layer 1 keeps drastically changing too. Bluetooth 1 and 2 use completely different modulations, and are not backwards compatible. Bluetooth 3 simply was an extension to 2. "Let's agree over Bluetooth 2.0 to use WiFi instead." Bluetooth 4, while much simpler, uses an entirely different scheme.

Instead of a "general purpose" wireless network like WiFi, Bluetooth tried to be application specific. Except the only profiles everyone wants are mice, wireless audio, and fitness trackers. If you look at the application layer spec, it reeks of design by committee. Everyone haphazardly jammed their pet projects together, and there are redundant and vestigial parts everywhere.

The Linux side of BlueZ is abysmal. Honestly, I don't even know how anyone does anything with Bluetooth on Linux besides a mouse and keyboard. And barely even that.

As much as I hate on the protocol, the Layer 1 spec is truly ahead of it's time, in some areas. Watching two radios frequency hop, and negotiate to avoid a congested wifi channel was unreal.
Having officiated the same kind of union between Ember and D3 in a few different ways, I have to agree - let Ember handle rendering, and D3 handles dynamic data binding. I've been working on an open source Ember library based on these concepts:
http://locusenergy.github.io/ember-sparkles/#/sine-wave
this, tech is lifting more and more people out of poverty. It's still not great but compared to feudal times where basically everyone were peasants except for a small nobility we are doing well and it will get better with time.

This is also why I don't really support universal health care. UHC doesn't fix the supply/demand problem, but I think that AI/ML and other tech will, making health care affordable for everyone in time. I would rather the government invest trillions in R&D to actually solve the problem as opposed to a stop gap like UHC.
“Who has your back?” – WhatsApp scores low on EFF's privacy rating
fuck you, it is not on mac
If you want anonymity, you use Tor.
fuck you, it is not unreliable on Mac, get a fucking mac and iphone
There are some chrome extension that do it for you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-c...
Nice point of view!
It sounds like all these copyleft-warriors (like Stallman) could litigate. Isn't it what they are for?
IMHO, better way to think about it is that humans claim they want not something they really want.
The technical reason is they do not travel through walls that well, so they would make very bad bands for things like radio stations or cell phones.. so why not give it to people to use for local devices.
Out of curiosity, can you elaborate?
I am currently in the process of developing a BT based embedded system, and in my experience Bluetooth is extremely resilient to the crowded 2.4 GHz space. It has very good and fast frequency hopping, so it maintains a connection even in the presence of several WiFi access points covering all but a small portion of the 2.4 GHz band. We ran a test in our office which has many access points and laptops/phones, and even an alarm system that uses 2.4 GHz. At a distance of 10m between central and peripheral (with several dry-walls in between) we didn't lose a single bit over a full week of continuous data transmission at several 100 kbit/s.

There are limits of course. At some point the 2.4 GHz band is so saturated nothing low power gets through. But so far, I am pleasantly surprised by the reliability.

All this was done using BT 4.2 though, so maybe that helps.
Thoughts on Software Architectural Thinking
It was a euphemism, though I don't know how much RedHat would like you swinging around a binary build of RHEL, but IANAL
Though I find the sentiment appreciable, how the author persevered, goes to show that good backups always are always needed. Backups are only backups if you test them...
Do not have a computer. Just leave it at home. Nothing else works.
Possibly leveraging existing C++ experience.
How Ben Silbermann Relentlessly Kept Going and Built Pinterest
its Open, duh.

In seriousness though, the author is not a infosec expert so I would take the advice with a grain of salt.
The Dos and Don’ts of Work Email, from Emojis to Typos
Has anyone ever gotten strongSwan clients (or IPSec VPNs in general) working on not-Ubuntu? It's poorly documented and pretty shit in general, it was a huge headache and I gave up on algo after several hours of trying to get it working.
Sorry I chuckled a bit when thinking about Spanish government listening at all and then acting on some pro-people policy. The Spanish government have relatives in the bigger corporations, it's called "puertas giratoria" (revolving doors), just look at the lists: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerta_giratoria_(pol%C3%ADtic... . Current government has strong ties with the biggest ISP in Spain (Telefónica/Movistar).

Luckily we have something different going on; it's legal to share 3rd party content among people, so Copyright for individuals basically doesn't apply and torrenting is pretty much legal (though you might be taken to court anyway). But Net Neutrality as it depends on the ISP just does not make sense, it's not a matter of whether it's possible or not. Also, people have much more urgent things to fight for; if someone wants to do something about the Internet in Spain the fight is right now around copyright (we're trying not to lose this due to US influence).
The Android APIs That Can Improve Your Working Efficiency Exponentially
This is the case if Facebook is only classifying it, but if it's using those likes to determine which subset of friends see your content then it becomes self-reinforcing. E.g. do your friends see all 10 posts, or do they only see 5 because the first few people to interact with the other 5 were family members?
Probably not since they would anger a lot of corporate users.
It's worth pointing out that without id's engine licensing business that depended on other companies NOT following the Carmack school of thought, it would've been harder to justify writing a new engine for every game.
Ask HN: How to search documents, notes, email and code across online services
Over the past few years I've switched between github, google drive, dropbox, gmail, workflowy and various other services as the "primary" repository of my personal documents, notes, designs, ideas, todolists etc. Now when I want to find something, I have to search all these services. I really wish I could set up a sync to a local drive and search absolutely everything using good old Unix tools like grep, but I don't see how. Also, it would be great to be able to search photos and videos by date and tag.

Does anyone have a good solution to this?
Good point, it looks like they have a decent path forward and hopefully they take good advantage of the new nodes and the available room for refining the uarch.

Socket compatibility would be wise, I hope at least the Zen+

I'm hoping they soon get back to competing aggressively at high-end HPC too, perhaps they could spend some area on Zen+ on better FP SIMD, or even flexible width SIMD (though the latter would be more realistic on the 7nm successor).
Wifi and Bluetooth rose to consumer attention around the same time, and bluetooth appealed to people who weren't necessarily 'techy' since it was adopted heavily for car hands-free kits. Businesspeople outfitted company cars with it soon after it was released for legal reasons.

I wouldn't say adoption was lower than wifi, in fact bluetooth was probably more rapidly adopted because, since it's linking simpler devices, it's cheaper (wifi needs the whole TCP/IP stack underneath it), but you're probably right in that it has seen less investment in error robustness than wifi - momentary loss of voice through your handsfree is usually tolerable, wifi dropping a large number of packets is not.
May be that he doesn't follow his own best practices every day. Got to be careful that we don't let that undercut the usefulness of the advice.
Wal-Mart Will Punish Its Suppliers for Delivering Early
> IMHO WebAssembly solves that better but I also need to admit that they could already learn from Java.

While that may be true of the language Java, WebAssembly's jump instructions are not without their annoyances too. For example, the JVM bytecode requires your stack to be precise when jumping, WebAssembly just cares about the most recent piece. If you expect your jump targets to have the same stack layout, WebAssembly makes the impl handle it. I had to account for this and other differences in my compiler [0].

0 - https://github.com/cretz/asmble#control-flow-operations
Glad to have done so!
Keys and pens have fine details that would be pretty impressive to scan accurately.
Here is more from tfa:

>'Andrew Shepherd, professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds, agreed. “Everyone loves a good iceberg, and this one is a corker,” he said. “But despite keeping us waiting for so long, I’m pretty sure that Antarctica won’t be shedding a tear when it’s gone because the continent loses plenty of its ice this way each year, and so it’s really just business as usual!”'
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/giant-antarcti...
Why use GraphQL? Why not simply expose one endpoint that takes a sql data parameter, queries the db and return the result set as json?

Yes, you'd have to setup db security to allow those db commands to run only selects and restrict which tables are allowed to be queried.

How can using a new json query language, without any server libraries targetting relational databases be better than that?

How much work would be envolved to implement this on the server side and for what, exactly? to allow frontend devs to query without exposing separate endpoints?

Client-server applications should not run business code on the client. The only code that should run on the client is the UI's.

Sorry, this is simply wrong.
You should see how most of the rest of China lives
> Objects created indirectly get the new functionality through their prototype

Except most parts of the DOM in most engines is implemented in C++, not JS.

<whatever>.prototype is a JS-ism. But the DOM is not defined in terms of JS. It's defined in terms of a language-agnostic set of interfaces. So when poking around and seeing things like NodeIterator.prototype within JS, you're seeing them because the browser is presenting it to you in a way that kind of resembles the way things work for that runtime. <whatever>.prototype (when <whatever> is some DOM interface) is a byproduct of that behavior. But that those interfaces get implemented is the only essential characteristic of the DOM, and the docs should reflect those interfaces, not the weird and tangential byproducts of how the DOM gets projected into a JS runtime.
It seems like you can learn a lot of that by building a game without using a game engine at all.
Maybe a UI that works for all types of browsers, devices, internet speeds, as well as handling accessibility tools such as screen readers?
This is a dysfunction in the patent and legal processes that cannot be fixed by even more dysfunctional tactics deployed against the NPE. The rules against champterty (buying a cause of action) have been relaxed considerably to the extent in many jurisdictions of being a dead letter, and the litigation financing industry seems to have a better sound bite.

At least half of the problem is the "American Rule" of rarely shifting legal fees, which if you dig a bit you will find is of recent vintage. Back in time, for example in Massachusetts, there actually is a law for shifting legal fees as costs as a matter of course; the catch is that the fee is very low (even at the time it was enacted) of about $2.50 per case, which partly reflects inflation and partly antagonism toward legal fees.

I wonder whether a compromise solution would be to require a deposit for costs of a percentage of the demand for recovery like 2.5% of $34mm, which post-suit you could figure how to divvy up. That would make the demand more meaningful, and provide a tangible incentive to the plaintiff to think a little harder about pricing low-probability lottery-ticket-type litigation.
Actually disagreeing with the author here: As someone who did a bit of OpenGL/GLSL in their spare time building a game engine, I think it's not that arcane. You will have to come across the basic rendering pipeline pretty quickly if you look around a bit and don't just drone along with the tutorials, and from then on out it's pretty obvious what you load all those buffers for and how the shaders work in which order throughout the pipeline. (that being said, early openGL with separate state machine calls for each vertex were a little weird, and the current implementation is much closer to the underlying functionality)
Vulkan is great when you want to wring every last bit of performance out of something. OpenGL ES is a much more straightforward API and will get you something that runs practically anywhere.

Most people don't care about tiled vs immediate mode GPUs when they're starting. They just want to get pixels on the screen and there's a ton of resources out there on OpenGL ES. Once you've got your feet under you(seriously, you need to understand matrices, texture formats, shaders, and a host of other things) then look at Vulkan.
Ask HN: Why don't governments plant more trees to capture carbon?
With all this concern about global warming, we should be capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in solid form. China has some innovations about this - but why not use the same organisms that have been around for a billion years?

Trees capture carbon and store it in their trunks and branches. I understand that eventually trees die and some of the CO2 may be released back into the atmosphere. But that will be decades in the future AND more trees will spring up by that time.

The "technology" is already here -- why don't city/state governments simply agree to work to increase the amount of trees and algae? Why not motivate the populations to plant more trees and algae?

The vector is simple ... reform the logging industry, provision more government-owned land and start planting!! Give tax breaks to businesses to build and maintain parks.
He reached enlightenment and so has returned to samsara to guide the rest of us.
yeah, a lot of work for little payoff.

l2tp makes authentication palatable.
I would dispute "meaningless" since it's a good description - "someone in tech behaving like a fraternity brother". As for evoking an emotional reaction, that's what writing is for, I think.
How is it related to Bluetooth?
There's no absolute answer to the "build vs buy" conundrum. A lot of us are biased towards "build" and its useful to recognize that bias in our decision making. But the "buy" side often has hidden costs. In the author's case, which involves targeting multiple platforms, the "buy" side gets more attractive. In general you are deciding whether to code on platform X or on platform Y built on top of X.

Fashions come and go, and if you invest heavily on top of Y it may become "obsolete". Will you be willing to stay on Y when the developer/community has abandoned it? You may have to reinvest to port onto Y', while X remained somewhat stable.

The higher level the platform, the more likely you are to hit surprising limitations late in the process. Your role gradually transitions from technology producer to technology consumer.

Programming an AVR chip in C gives you a great feeling of space and power because the platform is so clean, while using Arduino you rapidly hit limitations and spend your time getting around them. Higher level platforms tend to make the easy things easier and the hard things very hard.

I wouldn't rule out the subjective factors. For many of us building is more fun than sorting through what others have built. The brain works a lot better when having fun, which is why MBA-style decisions about programming don't always work.
To add, the US Department of Commerce puts out a great graphic [1] showing how the spectrum is split up. The only bands available are labeled "Amateur" in a greenish box.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/United_S...
good find, thanks for taking the time
Can we do SSL locally though?
http://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/samsung-knox-...
But I want the number to be green :(

Fair point, I think I've been accidentally gamified when it comes to the pagespeed test. Good call.
Girl Dies from Synthetic Opioid She Bought Online. How Police Cracked the Case
The FCC and other government bodies (ITU) in other countries tightly control the radio spectrum to prevent interference. There are a few bands that are set aside for general use called the ISM bands (industrial, scientific, medical). In those bands you can emit RF that might interfere with other devices. So you can run stuff like wifi, cordless phones, induction heaters, and microwaves that emit RF energy that can cause interference without a license (subject to some restrictions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_band
Ask HN: 3 serious Net Neutrality questions
I'm hoping that HN can provide me real answers to three outstanding questions I have regarding net neutrality:

1) Why aren't existing anti-competitive regulations sufficient to protect companies from ISPs targeting their traffic (i.e. blocking VOIP traffic because you have a competitive service)

2) Why are peer-networks bad? If Netflix is going to use 30% of my bandwidth as an ISP, doesn't it make sense to pull that off of my regular infrastructure?

3) If Net Neutrality is only about preventing "data discrimination" and classifying ISPs as common carriers- why are there HUNDREDS of pages of regulations? This may be my most ignorant question, but it scares me that the FCC's approach to "protecting" my internet experience is hundreds of pages of rules.
Right, I just meant in response to GP that said they didn't want buisinesses that wanted/needed much of their ML built for them. Google might be okay with that too.
Good advice. I have a similar anecdote.

When I was 18, I worked at a produce clerk at a middling grocery store. Day after day of stocking fresh fruits and vegetables while watching the same customers (and even my co-workers!) come in and eat the same horrid prepared slop really motivated me to lose weight.

I lost 50 pounds in 2 months.

And also, speaking from experience, please, never attempt to lose 50 pounds in 2 months; my lung popped. Fortunately, I survived.
Wow. In Germany law grants you at least 24 vacation days per year - and sick days can't be included in that!
And by extension the price system in general, the mode of production we live in prioritising the maximisation of short term profit over care for the environment in future or even presently.
I wish more people knew about Pritunl: https://pritunl.com/

It is a 100% open source front end for OpenVPN.

It has one of the slickest interfaces in open source history, and supports numerous features you'd expect from enterprise VPN solutions (SSO, 2FA, etc).
The current estimates take that into account. Continually claiming "technology will solve it" eventually fails to basic laws of physics, and cannot be the solution to every problem.
Binctr: static, unprivileged, self-contained, containers as executable binaries
Sure, but I was addressing the areas where the Zen arch is clearly not beating Intel. Database, java, etc. are areas where the initial benchmarks indicate that EPYC is quite competitive.
> Watching two radios frequency hop, and negotiate to avoid a
> congested wifi channel was unreal.

Exactly. As I said in another comment, we did a test in a very busy office space and didn't loose a single bit of data @ several 100kbit/s over a week transmitting continously. We could see it hopping on the sniffer.
For me, the biggest problem with BT is that BT audio is almost entirely unbuffered. I wear a set of BT headphones connected to a fitness watch (Polar M600) when running. When the BT connection from the watch to the headphones is briefly blocked by part of my sweaty body (think arm movements when running), the BT signal is interrupted and the music cuts in and out with every stride. If BT audio could be buffered for 15-20 seconds, this would not be a problem.
While the average quality of life in the western world is still currently higher than the global average, there have been recent data points in the US that globalization has drug certain subsets of the US down to 3rd-world levels of life quality[1][2]. Globalization is desirable on many levels and happening, and it is already beginning to pull down on the bottom end of western society (and similarly, pull upwards on the bottom end of non-western societies).

What we're getting is globalization (which essentially causes equalization across geographic/national boundaries) without wealth redistribution (within national legal boundaries), which means that while the global average scales are slowly equalizing, there will continue to be a vast split between the rich and poor everywhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_County,_West_Virginia...
[2] https://www.sanders.senate.gov/life-in-mcdowell-county - "Men in McDowell County have the same life expectancy as men in Namibia"
About the web design: please value readability a lot more; now it is quite difficult to read the text with that background. Besides that, Processing was really fun to play with back when I did, I wish you the best as well!
What's the proper solution to this if you need to run a legitimate service? (I'm in this spot where I'm trying to verify if old links in emails are still correct).
AFAIK, there are not so much unlicensed frequency ranges that are available almost worldwide. 2.4 GHz was initially reserved to use in microwave ovens that can cause interference in that range, then spread-spectrum technologies (such as used in wifi) that are not sensitive to noise from ovens became cheap so this frequency range became useful for that.

Other popular unlicensed range - 443 Mhz has much lesser bandwidth so it's popular for slower data transfers, i.e. in doorbells and temperature sensors. Also AFAIK it requires larger antennas because of longer wavelength.

5 GHz wifi is only recently started to become popular because, I think, there are some problems in implementing such high frequencies, or because it's more affected by walls and furniture.
Done [0] and done [1]. Though, the latter one at least, isn't really in a production state because compiling the JVM stdlib takes hours in Go.

0 - https://github.com/zxh0/jvm.go

1 - https://github.com/cretz/goahead
However, as we are all now beginning to discover, the employment of ‘feedback loops’ are creating one of the most mind-boggling new capabilities for automation. This is not hyperbole, [...]

Always glad to see references to Hofstadter's work, but this sounds like hyperbole. I don't think that mere feedback loops are "strange" enough to invoke his name. I think the idea refers to loops in systems which are heterarchical. I don't think there are any interesting crossings over different layers of abstraction here.

Interestingly, these ideas have been around for quite some time. For example, the work of Warren McCulloch (and Walter Pitts) predates Hofstadter's thought in this space. Relevant passage from his 1945 article, "A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets":

"[..] three heterodromic branch­es link the dromes so as to form a circle in the net which is distin­guished from an endrome in that it is not the circuit of any drome but transverse to all dromes, i.e., diadromic. The simplest surface on which this net maps topologically (without a diallel) is a tore. Cir­cularities in preference, instead of indicating inconsistencies, actually demonstrate consistency of a higher order than had been dreamed of in our philosophy."