skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> how many engineering projects face regular enemy action? The last time somebody actively tried to compromise a system I was building was two weeks ago. How many engineers live like that?

Every bit of military hardware, or child's toy, for starters.

More generally, you cite anticipated harm from vandalism or car crashes as being part of the general environment.

It is far past time to recognize that the hacking environment in which we live IS THE NORMAL ENVIRONMENT, and these hacks ARE everyday anticipated harm.

Software does not live in a virtual vacuum of space. It is on the internet, and will likely be scanned withing seconds if unprotected. Even tall buildings are now designed after 9/11 to better withstand jetliners crashing into them. To follow your metaphor, most of the hacks are completely unsophisticated, the equivalent of a bridge falling because some kid came along with a can of spray paint, or a screwdriver and started pulling screws.

Let's also not pretend that other engineering disciplines doesn't also have to face real-world unpredictable and hostile inputs. Even children's toys have to be designed so as not to be hazardous from persistent, random, and clever unexpected attempts at use, misuse, and abuse from children.

The same thing for consumer tools, which have many design features to frustrate the unending supply of clever idiots out there trying to win Darwin awards and sue you if they fail (or their families if they succeed).

I've done both software and hardware, and your expressed attitude that software is somehow inherently more difficult or threatened is utter nonsense. The only basis for this is impatient project management where the key priority is to to ship yesterday because the management are idiots and think software is trivial.

These approaches to start slinging code, write it fast and change it often are useful only for prototyping. In writing real software, my first two steps are 1) understand your problem in depth, and 2) work very hard for a long time to avoid writing code (i.e., better architecture to simplify, separate dependencies, etc.++). After substantial effort is put into those, then write only the code that is necessary. I take a similar approach to manufacturing, understand it, design a process with minimal key elements, then build those.

Software is not a 'special snowflake'.
Momentum Dashboard Ported to Firefox
I don't know much about Japanese, but in written Chinese, the stroke order is less likely to be consistent. One of the challenges for early leaners of writing Chinese characters is to "get the stroke order right", and many, even sufficiently educated adults could struggle getting all orders right. Also, writing Chinese characters in cursive often requires different stroke orders for the same character due to aesthetic reasons, and the boundary between print and cursive style in hand writings could be very blurry. Therefore, I could see stroke-order becomes a very noisy, inconsistent and less reliable input.
For static analysis, OK. For a compiler, OK. But I want the static analyzer and the compiler to do that so that I don't have to - I don't want to have to think in set theory to program.

And in saying that, I see that I was probably unfair to haskellandchill's point. The claim wasn't that I needed set theory; the claim was that the tools needed it (at least, so it appears to me on re-reading).
Welcome to the Jungle (2012)
Groundhog Day: Amazon Updates Echo/Someone Rants About Privacy
I don't believe in this case the hack targeted any cards held on file, as the article suggests it may have been a hack of the POS software system that would allow the thieves to copy the info from the magnetic strip as it was captured in real-time and then clone the card.
I'd probably like to hop on a NetJets when I travel but I'm not planning to hold off on retiring until that's a reasonable option. Pretty much everything is about tradeoffs.
Show HN: Sitio, an imperative static site generator with React and browserify
Sounds like we are paying so much money for a for a big lie.
Google does this with everything that's not search.

I'm waiting for them to start subsidizing cars in exchange for putting lidar in them.
There is no iPhone 7s.
The school I work at sometimes takes some heat because we are relatively low-tech, so it's nice to see that there is some data to back up our intuition.
Good points!

Writing unit tests before code can help avoid mistakes in the interface design.

Perhaps similarly, writing formal specification could expose the holes in your domain understanding.
Note to non-Brits: NHS dentistry (and opticians) are a little different from the rest of the NHS, in that not everything is free and the NHS services are oversubscribed, so people tend to go private.
>It's entirely unfair to use 'but still' as any sort of argument here. Iceland is not a large chunk of the world economy, nor does it have a premier position as the world's economic nexus to protect.

A "premier" position based on bullshit ain't so premier.
Recovery and Why the Okay Counselor Is Not Enough
The nazi demo where people got killed would have been a non-violent event where stupid nazis outed themselves peacefully if the antifa hadn’t showed up, outnumbered them, and attacked the nazis, armed with bats and other weapons.

The nazis are shit too, no doubt, but it’s hard not to blame the antifa for the ultimate outcome.

Also worth remembering: the nazis were using their legal right to free speech in a legal demonstration. The antifas were illegally and violently obstructing it.

Don’t be too quick to pick sides.
There is a way to quickly disable face id, presumably you would do so in most situations when facing police.
How I explain Product Management to friends and family
So I ask again... Where's Cash's 2 factor auth.

All of the major wallets/traders use 2FA and all the hardware wallets have it too.

It's like saying... Well there's safes and banks for cash but its something that not everyone "enables" but you and I both know they use it.
Please look into effective altruism. Relevant discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678952
I would recommend checking out the channel "Primitive Technology". It is a good example of quality YouTube content.
Every Payment processing system I have worked on did work that way, I did not need the card number to issue a refund only the AUTH Code
I live in New York, so, no.

While I agree that Google is in a stronger position to win the eventual personal assistant battle, I disagree with your original proposition that it'll be done through Android phones.

I think the potential for voice assistants is overhyped, but there is still potential there, and you can't achieve the same thing with a phone that's in your pocket/bag/whatever. Ask someone that uses one before you dismiss the product category entirely.
Usually, the productivity also increases over time so the price of the product will increase slower than the wages.
"system programming" is not composed entirely of things where GC presents a non-trivial problem.
Siri breaks up with Bing, for
The year of Linux.
Wow.

I've been advised by a dental surgeon to not take off my wisdom teeth because of this.

Did you receive warnings about it before surgery?
For comparison, the Planck length is 10^-35, so another 10^16 smaller again.
When has 2fa stop a bullet or knife?

Very little cash is stolen by pick-pockets or home burglars. People open their wallets because they fear pain, it doesn't matter how many locks are on the wallet.

relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/
Dogs adopt the strategy of "eat first, ask questions later" (as pack animals that eat garbage, carrion etc). So they are quick to vomit up something that causes trouble. Also they are more likely than humans to eat stuff that will kill them.

As for their immune system, inbreeding of dogs has caused all sorts of susceptibilities, though overall humans are a better vector for disease (density, widespread distribution, gregariousness, etc). Also humans worry about disease symptoms that dogs and other animals stoically ignore and thus the disease can go unnoticed by the human. (e.g. a bit of diarrhoea dribbling uncontrollably out your backside will probably concern you but a dog will just put up with it -- though an owner will likely object!) .
And an AMD CPU with Radeon graphics. Little more oomph than a Pi3, presumably access to more X86 software and access to the fruits of the labor of the mature dev community around full OpenGL, instead of OpenGL ES2 on the Pi.

RetroPie's fun, and a great piece of software. Something faster than a Pi3 would open up more systems for reliable emulation, and access to x86 software simplifies a lot of things.
To be fair, though, they're not the only project coming up in this space, and Go is a legit choice for systems programming.
> The problem with biometrics is not username vs password, biometrics are password.

Yes, that is the problem. No, biometrics are not password. Please stop spouting this nonsense? Biometrics are akin to username; they suggest your identity, but don't authenticate you. They should not be used as password because they cannot be changed, and cannot be kept secret. A password (or better, TOTP authentication) can be changed, and can be kept secret; a hardware fingerprint scanner (or face or iris scanner) cannot be changed, and can be faked by any semi-intelligent person or organization. Fingerprint can already be stolen and used in identity theft. We saw this various years ago in CCC when a German minister got his/her fingerprints stolen as a way to prove the insecurity. It is only a matter of time when the common people learn about how to trick face recognition and iris recognition. In the meantime, strong passwords and (preferably) TOTP is secure. Use that instead.

> Research in biometric security aims at finding functions of your biometric data that can be revoked and it's not privacy sensitive.

Cat and mouse game, and wrong premise: biometrics cannot be revoked. They're permanent.
> spends a quarter of its massive GDP on healthcare.

isn't most of it for wasteful reasons.

>There are many things wrong with our system

Many people are saying this often, seems like people have just surrendered and submitted themselves to organized skillful abuse by such systems. Wish we have more cumulative willpower than present.
You will still be liable for $50. And you again ignored my point about hardware wallets making theft a non-problem.
So, if I boil down your argument perhaps a bit too much: because everyone else pays a wage that requires someone to work 2-3 jobs to put a roof over their family's head and food in their bellies, it's morally right for Facebook to do the same thing?

Perhaps my own morals are jacked up, but something seems really wrong there.
Censys allows researchers to ask about devices and networks that make up Internet
I have look at more than dozen languages, probably more (as research in how build one).

So is not exactly according to me, but how is done in other languages. Anyway... try to design this, for example, and tell how you do it better ;)
How much was land back then? Far less. He'd be in that cycle if he came over now.
> We can see here that the hash index performs better than the btree index and the performance difference is in the range of 10 to 22%. In some other workloads we have seen a better performance like with hash index on varchar columns and even in the community, it has been reported that there is performance improvement in the range of 40-60% when hash indexes are used for unique index columns.

the link is from the post http://amitkapila16.blogspot.com/2017/03/hash-indexes-are-fa...
It is my impression (as an outsider) that web programming might be the hardest environment for formal methods. Yes, I could see formal methods proving that only valid HTML was ever emitted. But how do you prove that your layout aligns on Firefox 55.0.3?

So it seems to me that, if you can make progress on formal methods in your environment, you're not picking low-hanging fruit...
As someone who has been stopped/questioned/detained before domestically and internationally (as well as at border checkpoints) as well as mugged, I can assure you that touch vs look is pretty much the same (definitively not light years in difference). The solution is to be proactive. If you are going to walk down the street in an at risk area, you hit the power button five times. If you are about to go through a CBP checkpoint, then do the same. When you go to sleep, do the same (admittedly TouchID is more susceptible here than FaceID).

FaceID / TouchID are a "convenience" to be used when you are comfortable with your surroundings. Can you be caught off guard even when you are paranoid? Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed in life, except death and taxes as the saying goes!
Someone should plot them to get an idea of how worse things are getting but it feels like we had one major data breach nearly every week for about 3 years now.
I'm going to go with 'Attention Farmers' to stay thematic with the Cows. :-)

Attention Farmers put out Click Bait to attract Data Cows which they then milk for Data that they can resell.
I'll take a shot at this. Essentially they're saying that they've found evidence that alternative theories about gravitation (non-Einsteinian theories) that are strictly simpler (like classical Newtonian gravity) are not consistent with the observations.

Here scalar means that the field that describes the phenomenon can be described as a single scalar value at each point of space, like density, as is the case of sound waves.

Vector is more complex; although "charge" is a scalar, electromagnetic waves do not propagate by inducing charge in the surrounding space, but by propagating through the free-space Maxwell equation (that is, where the charge density is zero). So the polarization of an electromagnetic wave can be described by a single vector at a point, and the measurement of the magnitude of the wave will depend on how closely the measurement axis corresponds to the polarization axis for a polarized wave. For a general wave, it can be described as some linear combination of the orthogonal polarizations.

Although "tensor" is a general linear object of which vectors are a subset, in this case of gravitational waves, we require a 2-tensor to describe the polarization of the wave. Effectively that means the polarization (the strength of the signal with respect to a given detector) can only be described by two independent vector that describe the evolution of the wave. Since the three detectors (Ligo Hanford, Ligo Livingston, and Virgo) are not exactly aligned with one another, it should be possible to get good evidence that the polarization cannot be adequately described by the superposition of two orthogonal vectors, but instead two independent pairs of orthogonal vectors.
Seriously? Wow I did not know he'd gotten that far. I mean, part of me thinks "good for him" for overcoming serious mental illness. The other part worries.
And? I was simply refuting the comment "..I can't say I have heard of anyone physically disabling their laptop's microphone". I know people who do this, not just Zuckerberg.
Perhaps it should be taxed by number of conditional branches then?
This method of compressing integer arrays in differences and then reducing the number of bits for each difference, is very efficient for many applications. We used it many years ago at a startup to compress and realtime render vector maps for mobile devices.

Not only made it the data really small (we could fit all the roads of a country like Germany in 5 MB), it was also blazing fast to decode. Our vector map renderer used to do the vector map decompression on the fly, while doing coordinate transformation, and rendering to the screen. That was really the trick to get realtime zooming and panning vector maps on ~100 MHz ARM CPUs with tiny data caches of the time.

We even took that compression scheme a step further from byte-bound to bit-granularity. Above article made me wonder, how our old scheme performs on today's CPU...
> It's the extreme end of the situation, to be certain, but extremes are a great place to examine any system.

Although there's some dissent, in law the typical expression you hear is the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law
Our understanding (I work at an agency) is that you must keep the data that you is part of a contractual agreement. Purchase histories are a typical example of data you may not wipe.
I would think it better for Facebook to pay a living wage, and push to lower the cost of living so they can then pay less, instead of paying less and letting their employees hope that the situation will somehow solve itself.
This is indeed fast and simple, since the pshufb instruction allows unpacking of bytes into multiple zero-padded words in one step. This technique uses a precomputed table of shuffle patterns, so it's a short sequence of instructions to fetch control information for each 4-word sequence and apply the shuffle given.
I ate a $2000 pizza – and I want it again
Some locks with open designs are difficult, or impossible to pick.

In this amusing video this guy goes over details of different locks, and explains why they are not all created equal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsJZ_kKjXcE
Simple: it can cost up to $300,000 to become a dentist in USA. It probably costs 100x less in India.

Before dentist charges for that first X-ray he or she is already potentially a few hundred thousand dollars in debt...

Folks would charge a thousand dollars for X-Ray if they could get away with it.

Welcome to capitalism.
> is completely unactionable.

As is the assumption you won't be forced to touch your finger to the phone. I can assure you, if someone wants into your phone bad enough, they will break your fingers if thats what it takes.
I'm all for sleeping, eating well, exercising and meditating but the laundry list of drugs seems insane. Most of them are harmless or maybe even mildly beneficial but he doesn't mention any of the side effects of drugs like modafinil or lithium.
Are there any plans for allowing hash indexes in uniqueness constraints such as the ones created for primary keys? It seems like a good fit for an index that is specialized for equality checks.
Yeah, if I keep my credit card in a safe and never use it, no fraud is going to happen. If I use it to pay for things multiple times a day, this happens. It's not like if there hasn't been bitcoins stolen in the past.
yes, that is the intended response

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
>The reasonable alternative is single-payer health care. Insurance is for catastrophic things, not for regular maintanence. Using it to pay for penis pills and birth control only makes it more expensive. Pushing for insurance to cover more things is only making the fees go up and their profits greater. Insurance shouldn't cover your regular checkup.

I really hope that the dissident right and progressives can team up on this. We can offer every American access to quality, cost effective, non-discretionary care for less than we currently spend on the ACA's contorted cross-subsidy and insurance profit guarantee scheme.

We could offer everyone access to no-cost healthcare and cap the expenses at something like 10% of our GDP with a fully empowered rationing feature that gives us the best QALYs for the money. We'll have to fight past the views of extremists but it would go a long way to making the U.S a better nation.

And it would permit a separate completely private, minimally regulated healthcare system for those who wanted it.
The only grumbling I've heard is from people whose careers involve ever-cleverer ways to sneak marketing analytics past unwitting users.
> it is more efficient to optimise for conversion rate than to deny valid but incompetent or "unable to provide all the details" consumers.

And that's not a big problem even that it is not nice. The problem is when your company lends money to someone that says it's me. And it becomes my problem. Why?

The company wants a lot of conversions, so it has a low entrance cost. Then that company should pay for that problem, not unrelated third parties.

> Low trust versus high trust society is the thing you need to understand here.

For me, that's just one of the reasons.

Sweden, for example, is a high trust society. But companies are trying to play fair because they are going to be punished otherwise. Isn't that fair?

But, of course, in a society with a lot of corruption, and cheating, and low trust. Companies are going to defend themselves more. As they risk will get more fraudulent transactions that real ones.
God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger
Claim was $11K, insurance paid $11K, but only after trying to not pay for two years and the doctor asking "nicely" for me to pay the whole thing.
I'd like to add:

-malpractice insurance
-administration/documentation costs

The procedure price in the US has to account for filing the claim, issuing the patient an EOB, then going through the adjudication process, then finally billing the patient for the copay/deductible payment, a percent of which will likely have to be written off.
Project: Loom (delimited continuations/coroutines, tail calls for the JVM)
The "big money" I want is about 50% more than what I hear they're offering to new grads. I've seen new grads take an entire day to do something that I can do in about 20 minutes.
There's a difference between walking past someone in the street, and being in a scenario where they hypothetically have access to you 24/7
As it says in the article, this should get better once chips become standard. At that point, the chip will be doing something like an encrypted transaction with the bank, so listening in on any stage of the transaction shouldn't matter (not that I have any details on the process).
Oh wow. Facebook and instagram _already_ have access to this collection of location data then. This feels increasingly uncomfortable.
If a minute to build and link half a million lines of C++ is “astronomical”, then sure. Try to build that on your local box, then get back to me. Go exists solely because Rob Pike had nothing better to do, and a lot of googlers hate Java.
Ugly is kind of irrelevant when it's plugged into the back of the TV. The back of most TVs are ugly anyway!

I don't think the device will fail from hanging, as it's static, but it will almost certainly put strain on some varieties of HDMI connector, depending on orientation, and may be prone to falling out. One solution might have been an adhesive velcro pad to attach the device to the TV.

In any case, it's pretty impressive to offer 4K in a device a fraction of the size of the new Apple TV, and powered only from the HDMI port. Now all they need is more than a couple of dozen titles in 4K!
Oh nononononono.
There's also a way to break in your house whilst you're gone or asleep. In the former case, if the device is in your house, would you've disabled FaceID? In the latter case, would you've disabled FaceID? Would you've disabled FaceID when you were going outside (with your device) and you'd be busted then? Answer in all these cases: Of course not.

So a PIN alone would've been more secure. It'd have cost the government more effort to crack. A strong password or TOTP would've been a better solution. Pref. 2FA w/both.

You could use FaceID as 2FA, but then people need to keep in mind that its a very weak chain in the 2FA. They still need a strong other factor ie. a strong password.
Well spotted - missed that!

Though I think the "and don’t care to" part is a little harsh. I do care, though mostly fail. Sometimes I find it difficult to get useful information from the domain experts, and it doesn't help that domain experts often keep subtly changing the meaning of the concepts we've been working with, until nothing is left of the original and the whole system is a bit of a mess.