skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My amature take on intelligent alien life is that humans as a technological society have developed extremely quickly, if other intelligent species exist and have a focus on technics, then I think it's safe to assume they've developed with as much speed. Continuing with that assumption, it seems extremely unlikely to me that other technological civilizations are at the same point in the timeline as we are, or slightly further ahead. I would imagine them to be massively further ahead. As such, they would surely know about us, but haven't made contact. Why not? I think this is a very important question to ask in the search for other advanced cultures.
Tom Petty Tribute – You Got Lucky
My thought would be that it would be at the source level. "98% of people find this source reliable", though that's certainly subject to the same biases.

Better systems might require more work to mark a story as false (such as how reporting a story as false currently works in Facebook.) Over time, Facebook can see on their end which domains are pushing fake news and choose not to surface unreliable sources on people's news feeds.
B-Trees and RUM Conjecture
Isn't this self contradictory? Instead of taking personal responsibility for a failed set of values, instead the author blames an "elite culture searching for victims".
Bigquery_fdw 1.1 (PostgreSQL FDW for BigQuery) with TZ Conversion and Casting
Once you tell them that the game represents the untyped lambda calculus, you'll probably need to lock them in their rooms to get them to stop playing, I assume.
How to grab attention for nothing. Could have reduced the trackpoint outer rim ..
My favorite is that they can't even QA the workaround instructions.

Restore the data that you backed up in Step 1

Backup is step 2.
I find these allegations are deserving of some scrutiny. The entire story is quite bizarre when you begin to consider it. The NSA is apparently leaking like a broken pipe with this information. And it's peculiar because this is information that makes our intelligence agencies look completely inept. That is a very good thing if this story is fake, but a very bad thing if its true.

It is stupefying that NSA contractors/employees would be genuinely copying classified information that is heavily related to national security, and then just loading it up on their personal Windows PC with no apparent encryption or access controls. For instance why in the world wouldn't they have OS level software restricting read access of a certain secure partition (or removable media) to a specific whitelist of processes? Or why wouldn't they use an airgapped machine? Then there are issues like the NSA being so anxious and happy to leak this information, and then them indirectly 'wink wink' confirming it publicly completely destroying the purpose of we don't comment on speculation --- when you start commenting on certain speculation, it indirectly says something about other speculation that you actually choose not to comment on. They're also seemingly unconcerned that somebody is leaking information that, if true, shows the NSA to be incompetent and also exposes attack vectors for enemy actors. There are also things like Kaspersky previously volunteering to provide complete source access to the government. Our government declined the offer. How does this make sense?

Since Iraq I have become much more critical of pretty much everything. Our media and our government lied to generate a case for war. And I feel lately that they are now trying to build a case for some sort of conflict, presumably cold, against Russia. Or at the minimum start Red Scare 3.0. I have no idea why they would want to do this, but I tend to abide Occam's razor, and this all being true requires a lot more effort than this just being "Yellowcake 2.0."
>You'd think the developer/QA that worked on that particular feature would have manually tested it at least once.

Or anyone else, it is seemingly not a hidden, elusive bug that can only be caught when a number of particular conditions concurrently happen.

According to Matheus Mariano (that seemingly was the first to find it and report to Apple):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408258

https://medium.com/@matheusmariano/new-macos-high-sierra-vul...

The only needed condition is that the Mac has a SSD, and in his words:

"I really don’t know how this went unnoticed by Apple (and anyone else). "
That anyone would be influenced in what MR scanner they buy due to Facebook advert is amazing. It would also explain things I hear from radiographers overseas. Wow. Are you able to state which vendors buy Facebook adverts (I assume you can’t)?
I remember a FOSDEM conf. where someone of PyPy said they were working with a very low budget, I bet they have no time to spend on fixing a very superficial bad impression. You don't come to PyPy just to try, you come to PyPy to boost performances of some existing projects.
For the MSSQL locking, you should probably change the transaction isolation level instead of using NOLOCK everywhere.

I think it's a horrible wart that you have to do that for every session, though. The default can't be changed.
Visual Studio Code 1.17 released
Google also has a similar process for some password resets.
Kaspersky was trained by the FSB (former KGB). (Putin has been quoted as saying "there's no such thing as a /former/ KGB officer").

So as a defacto agent of the Russian government, Kaspersky certainly considers the NSA (and other Western gov't agencies) to be an adversary.

Agreed that it's crazy that the US govt ever used Kaspersky software.

https://www.extremetech.com/internet/252421-russian-cybersec...

"According to emails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek (and confirmed by Kaspersky Lab as genuine), Kaspersky’s ties to the Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) are much tighter than have previously been reported. It has allegedly worked with the government to develop security software and worked on joint projects that “the CEO knew would be embarrassing if made public.”
>And unless you can cite any evidence that college is an indicator of subservience, I maintain my position that such a claim is insulting.

Some things don't come with stats, figures and evidence. People either feel them or they don't.
Took a quick skim of the README. I have a general question for these web-to-PDF services. Is the priority to honor the page styles as set forth in a print.css-type file? Or is it to be as close as a screenshot as possible of a webpage, which is what I think the majority of laypeople would expect.

One of the small things I've recently let myself be bothered by is how divergent HTML/browser snapshots from web.archive.org, archive.is, and Google cache can be, even for relatively simple pages. I've already given up on trying to make (not even sure if it's a good idea) HTML look nice as PDFs.
I fail to see any reason behind proclaiming 2035 as the deadline within the article. The author could have very well said 2030 or 2040 and it would have been the same article.
However, this study indicates that ZFS is excellent at detecting on-disk corruption but does little to protect against in-memory corruption:

https://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/zfs-corruptio...
> You just wrote that in response to a comment by one of the BOOM and BOOMv2 creators.

Oh. Oops.. :)
I think there are 2 components to look at articles and comments.

I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I recall preferring /.'s articles from 15ish years ago (compared to what /. and HN have today). Maybe that is a reflection of the news at the time, my age, the communities' interests, or a combination of the above.

With HN, I wish I could filter Valley specific news ("Zucktown, USA"[0] would be a recent example). HN aims for news for both Jobs and Woz types, where I think /. was really focused on just "News for Nerds, stuff that matters." That's all I really wanted.

So in terms of articles, I don't know what to believe. But I know that HN's community is more civil than /.'s, and this is one of the few sites on the web where I read the comment section.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398430
Some genius decided they had to rewrite it. The current iteration looks like an intern shitshow rewrite, this bug included.
> that's your responsibility as a reader

I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable?

Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking?

> Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions about things which I find are certainly not absolute.

Billions of citizens fact-checking every single news is not cost effective. It will be good to have a minimum of quality, and then you can apply any correction to the inherent bias of that medium. There is a difference between someway biased information and bullshit.
Tilt sensitive dynamic comic
Show HN: Hacktoberfest Checker
From reading the article, I don't believe the statement "We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035." An alien civilization broadcasting via radio at the same moment we're looking could be very unlikely.

[Edit] Who's to say that we're going to broadcast via radio for thousands or millions of years? What if, in 300 years, we discover a much better system? Then we can reasonably assume that a 400 year radio burst is the sign of a species developing intelligence. We can also reasonably assume that SETI chose a poor indicator in their search.
The Hacker News Enhancement Suite does this, plus other things.

It's not compatible currently with Hacker Smacker, but fixing that takes one line of tweaking.
Optical drives are really a niche item these days, dropping it is understandable, especially considering the disproportionate space requirements of a drive. But ethernet, that is something I don't want to lose. Not because I can't get internet otherwise, but for getting access to restricted networks, or some quick troubleshooting etc.
All I want is an ordinary RDBMS with SPAAS (Stored Procedures as a Service) that return a binary blob of tables, nothing else. I don't want noSQL, I don't care about cloud objects, I saw Firebase and didn't like it, I don't want JSON as a result, I don't care if noobs don't know who CODD is, they will learn it the hard way sooner or later.

Oracle is the living god of RDBMS and they should take advantage of that yet they don't. It has nothing to do with AI, ML, NN, or any other word du jour, just plain tables lightning fast.
Why didn't they just use a new socket number for this? Even something like LGA1151B would have made this clear and easier to search product.
Don't compose non-standard semantics: negative one
Agreed - something I've personally seen drive such a thing in some people are plans/checklists/etc (nothing wrong with having these) where the recognition of severity is overriden with checking as many boxes as possible in an 8hr day as is required.
My apologies - I read your meaning as 'we are falling behind the Russians!'

It's a legitimate argument that could have been made (As the capabilities of both countries are obviously different), but not one that I've seen convincing evidence for.
It's the iOSification of OS X. Sadly the whole OS is going in that wrong direction. I would like to know how many folks are working on MacOS vs iOS. Would put things into perspective.
I really don't get why they have allowed this crippled GUI for so long. I understand that they want to make it simple for low level users, but that seems like a bad excuse in this case as low level users aren't even going to use Disk Utility, just like they aren't going to use Automater. It shows a blindness to their market, i think. Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac when it's time to upgrade. The tech support is night and day, and problems are easy to fix thanks to built in, easy to use screen sharing, a robust OS, and well rounded modern hardware. At the same time I'm not a unix guru, I don't know Bash that well and when I'm forced to use it I spend a lot of time reading. I hate that they keep hiding more and more commands behind Bash precisely because it makes it significantly more difficult to do what I'll call "prosumer IT". One of the things that really sold me on Macs was when Disk Utility managed to repair a USB that was completely bricked on my windows machine. As of MacOS Sierra, I now have use bash to fix corrupted drives as they aren't displayed in the GUI. Such a pain and such a step backwards.
It is now officially acknowledged by Apple (though they don't seem like treating it as a bug):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15410953

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208168
Yes, the NSA and other Five Eyes agencies go after foreign ISPs.

There are strong legal protections keeping the NSA from spying on Americans without very strong evidence. Lawfare has covered this extensively. Here's an example from Wittes (even stronger because he's basically a neocon). https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/911231805302480896
Most of the mainland Chinese were second-class to the communist party insiders back then and couldn't even travel around China without special permits.
Well right. It protects against silent bitrot on the hard drives. But it does this by caching and checksumming in RAM, so now you need to defend against bitflips in RAM.

It's not that ZFS without ECC is completely unsafe... it's just not as safe as it could be. ECC RAM becomes the next biggest concern once you've addressed on-disk bitrot.
It has nvidia graphics though, that does not bode well
A key decision for any sentient species would be whether to broadcast one's existence or snoop around quietly first.
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We're a ventured backed gaming startup located in South San Francisco comprised of game veterans from across the industry. Ideal candidate would be someone with experience running a corporate web presence, who appreciates a flexible schedule.

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Get Started with React – free interactive tutorial
I'm a fan of the Apricorn Aegis encrypted USB drives (FIPS 140-2). In assessing the risks around critical offline storage, my primary concerns are that the data has an adequate backup, that no one vendor is entrusted solely with data protection, and low barrier of accessibility as that the solution will actually get used.

The 8GB Aegis drives are around $80. Unlock is performed via PIN entry. The drives are small and have a sliding case to protect the PIN pad, making them pocketable. The hardware is capable of wipe upon failed unlock attempts. Pairing these drives with a software-encrypted filesystem reduces the likelihood that a single-vendor fault could allow bypass and data access. This is a strong option for primary always-on-hand instances of offline data, which could be paired with some other secondary backup option from another vendor (like paper in a safe, HSM or additional encrypted USB keys).
Oh, that's nice!

It's not currently compatible with Hacker News Enhancement Suite. Quickest solution I found was to change a line in findCurrentUser(), but just FYI. It would've been a deal-breaker for me.

Looking forward to playing around with this :).
Redesign was a contributing factor to what's been coming for a long time. The main problem was that the community had an extremely limited say in moderation of the content.

Puny 5 mod points once every few months is not a way to instill a sense of belonging. Imagine being able to upvote a post or a comment on HN only once a month, and passively watch random stuff of questionable quality float up the rest of the time. That ruined /. for me and I suspect I wasn't alone in that.
I don't think it's about the hole. Someone decided:

- users would have a better experience if the mouse was wireless

- if left to their own devices, users will tend to leave the mouse plugged in and use it as a wired mouse

so they solved that contradiction by taking away the option of missing out on wirelessness.
I couldn't disagree with you more.

To make this statement is akin to saying that the opinion of experts is useless. This is exactly what has lead to the flood of conspiracy theories, malicious mis-statements, and general degradation of the media commons that has put us in our present state.

I do not have the infinite amount of time necessary to fact check the flood of bullshit in social media, much less deliberate BS in politically motivated media. I rely on curators and fact checkers, experts and analysts to winnow the very narrow set of confirmable facts and conclusions from the vast sewer that you would prefer.
Government drone copies NSA malware onto a system with Kaspersky security software installed for the purpose of detecting malware.

Brilliant
Looks like you joined about 5 1/2 years ago. I'm surprised you think you're part of Group #2.

Before what date do you think people can be group #1? Or are you ascribing the group number to contributions rather than date of joining?
Think they are looking for the next thing with #18c cause the are so late to the game they cant just be a faster AWS Me2

that wont do it
Yup. Here's an article on issues with contractors and the way the US gov't hires:

https://20committee.com/2014/11/24/how-many-snowdens-are-the...
Because I'm used to Ctrl being the outermost key on desktop keyboards
Optimizations were less important for gcc's popularity than you might think.

One of the key features of gcc was its portability across many architectures. Cygnus was one of the first companies to support free software. Among other things, they received income from companies who wanted gcc to run on new chipsets.

Another was that gcc was designed with multi-language support from the start. The original release only supported C, but C++ support can shortly afterwards. (Originally added by Tiemann, one of the founders of Cygnus.)

TCC is not designed with the same portability or multi-language support in mind.
Very nice job, I like the diagrams and the description.

Noticed this bit "block size which is typically 512 or 4096 bytes" and was wondering how would the application know how to align. Does it query the file descriptor for block size? Is there an ioctl call for that?

When it comes to IO it's also possible to differentiate between blocking/non-blocking and synchronous/asynchronous, and those categories are orthogonal in general.

So there is blocking and synchronous: read, write, readv, writev. The calling thread blocks until data is ready and while it gets copied to user memory.

non-blocking synchronous: using non-blocking file descriptors with select/poll/epoll/kqueue. Checking when data is ready is done asynchronously but then read, write still happens inline and the thread waits for it to be copied to user space. This works for socket IO in Linux but not for disk.

non-blocking asynchronous: using AIO on Linux. Here both waiting till data is ready to be transferred and transferring happens asynchronously. aio_read returns right way before read finished. Then have to use aio_error to check for its status. This works for disk but not socket IO on Linux.

blocking asynchronous: nothing here
Well, first, this is my opinion.

I do agree that they are dedicated to AI and voice and will make that central to their search offerings.

What I haven't seen from them is dedication to one particular version or variation of anything for more than a few years. It was Google Talk, then what Hangouts, and now Hello, which is also how you talk to bots, but if you want to talk to the Assistant, that's OK, Google.

I don't want hardware were the API is just shutdown because they 'retired' this and went on to something new.

The YouTube use-case sounds useful, particularly with Chromecast, and I wish I could do that with Alexa, but then giants must always butt heads.

As far as snips, I prefer to have more control of this type of solution, but building-your-own-airplane takes time that $50 on an Echo Dot does not. (Google had no similarly priced offering at that time.)
I, along with a lot of people, joined HN in 2008 after Techcrunch wrote about it. That's pretty close to "Group 2 joins" and yet 9 years later HN persists!
If it was on the side, people would keep it plugged in all the time - like one does with a mouse. That's against the creative vision of the team who designed the mouse.
I'm not sure about your first claim but I have found a number of Snopes articles making binary (or qubit) assertions that were very obviously full of grey area or were simply wrong depending on context.

The worst offenders were typically politically slanted (as would be expected in any human run system or ideological subject) but not only that as many academic subjects are full of internal debates with varying priorities depending on context, which made me question the utility of relying on 'trusted' 3rd-parties like Snopes for fact-checking.

If the fact-checking sources are as editorialized or based on the author's worldview on what is 'true' then it's just as bad as the root source. What then is the point?

The utility is that they offer a bit of extended research on specific claims, which larger articles or speeches often can't go into for the sake of brevity, lack of research, or occasionally (and likely less so) intentional deception. Their utility should not be fact-checking in any absolute terms.

4chan has had useful research on a number of occasions, that have gone beyond other journalistic sources, but more often the motivation is not the truth but entertainment and like any open forum has it's share of conspiracies. It should neither be entirely dismissed or given some inherent 'authoritative' credibility. This is why context matters, a context currently beyond the scope of machines, and too dangerous for a few 'trusted' humans. There's no absolute authorities on a general internet-wide scale.
I shouldn't have used vehicles since they are a special case in some states. At the federal level, taxes on barter income match my description. [0] Taxes are still zero if the company can claim the fair market value of the services they offer you equal the value of your clicks.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc400/tc420
> possible discovery would be have to be made (if they exist).

...and if they want to be found.
I took a peek into calcite some time ago and was disappointed. The project seems to be overly bureaucratic, and the code quality quite low. (Side note, I've noticed a steady decline in quality of Apache projects for at least the past decade or so.)

I wanted to perform some introspection on queries in-flight, and potentially re-write them, but this seemed like an awful chore with calcite. One, calcite didn't implement my dialect -- it looked non-trivial to add new dialects. Two, going from query to parse tree (with metadata) back to query doesn't seem to be something that's intended to be supported.

Calcite is really a replacement frontend with its own SQL dialect that you can tweak the compiled output (SQL, CQL, etc.). It has its own worts and is not generally applicable to other projects. It works well within the Apache ecosystem but I don't envision much adoption outside of it (especially non-Java, like Postgres).

If you were writing a Tableau replacement, you might consider using Calcite to generate your queries. I don't see many other use cases.
Putin is screwed the minute Trump leaves.