skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t know how to write it better. I never said Qubes should change their biz model or do an ICO. Full stop.

All I said is that their product would be great in the hands of a startup that focuses on a single hardware platform and does more marketing

That's strange, because the first sentence in your OP is:

Qubes would make for a great startup and, given the time, prob a very successful ICO.
Memory Leaks in Chromium
I built something quite similar to this for my brother, who plays Magic: The Gathering. He likes to build decks and test them before he commits to buying the cards in it, so he asked if I could help him generate printable decks to test with. Luckily, somebody has already compiled all of the Magic: The Gathering seasons and published it openly here: https://github.com/mtgjson/mtgjson.

My previous system was a hacky Python-based HTML pre-renderer that was annoying to maintain - I was in the process of rewriting it but have dropped off on development recently. You can see a WIP of it here: https://curtislusmore.github.io/mtg/
The Plot Against America
Too much of a generalization I think.

There is clearly something out of whack on public infrastructure projects, which have very little to do with "efficient capitalistic markets".

I'm not sure how you get from there to your statement about "local services" not being addressed by the market. It isn't clear what other things you think are broken. Mainly just suggesting that more specificity would clarify your point.
This article is about the complexity of software development.

The complexity of software itself (and hardware, as we have seen recently) is a much bigger problem.

More and more machines are playing a larger role in our lives and decisions; but we don't come close to understanding them. In about a decade, things will just "happen" with no clear cause (the actual cause being some emergent behavior of out complex systems), and we will revert to pre-enlightenment mystics and superstitions.
In a similar way I want an assistant in my phone, but I don't want it to be internet connected either. It's going to know the most personal things about me so I want absolute discretion.
I'm curious how SIP interacts with this. It's possible that the restore avoids touching anything protected by SIP. Though I hope not because then you wouldn't be able to snapshot before an OS upgrade and roll back if the OS upgrade is problematic.
Real and Legitimate Ways to Buy Bitcoins Successfully in 2018
If you accidentally change or delete a file from a file system, it is fairly fast to roll back that change by restoring that file from backup.

If you accidentally change or delete a file from a file system on a VM image, rolling back the change means restoring the entire VM image from backup. That may mean a multi-GB restore, even if the file is only a few kB (rsync won’t help much, as it still would require you to read the entire backup and the entire changed VM image)

With a COW snapshot, rolling back that accidental change can be even faster than restoring the file from backup, as it only means changing some on-disk pointers (of course, you would still need the backup, as that COW snapshot isn’t a backup; it would die if your disk died)
I agree with your points. In fact, I made the same argument about removing a Heartbleed/Spectre-related patch that caused issues for one of our applications - "the machine doesn't execute any untrusted code, so this patch isn't strictly necessary."
I didn't say that. I said they supply rental housing, which is a distinction. And that's 100% true. Landlords 100% supply rental housing. To claim otherwise is absurd.
More specifically, BIOS machines don't know what partitions are (nor partition tables), and it's only the first 446-ish bytes, not 512.
It makes sense though, right? Slashdot has always been the go-to source about SCO vs. IBM.
I install the GHC everytime I want to use haskell on the Cloud Shell. It takes literaly like 30 seconds.

The Cloud Shell is a Debian Stretch container, so it's easy to install packages as you will. If you want them to be persistent install them on your home folder and add the route to your env vars.
Yes ^^ this ^^, virtual machines have been a good way to learn how useful and easy snapshots are.

With APFS snapshots have come to the hardware level and that is really exciting.

But beware that this is not a backup. If you loose your main disk then you still might have lost your data.
Time machine can help very well here. Regular TM backups are a good way of protecting yourself against data loss.

Unless.. we're talking VMs again. In that particular scenario it turns out that VMs and Time Machine do not go that well together. VMware even advices you to exclude your virtual machines from VMs [0] and [1].
The problem is that your VM consists of large binary files that change over time. If TM makes a backup it will always see your VM as changed and start copying the virtual disk files. Problem is that if the machine is running that the risk is high that you end up with corrupt virtual disks in your time machine.

Another problem is that if your TM backup storage runs out of storage space. TM can delete part of your virtual disks. Another problem is that with VMs you run out of disk space really quick.

Anyways I'm getting off topic.
Probably because I wrote Vimalin [2] to backup VM's for VMware Fusion and counter the VM backup issues ;)

[0] https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013628

[1] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/10.0/com.vmware.fus...

[2] https://www.vimalin.com
I think there are a couple of different problems driving overly complex software.

1. Cargo-culting. The article talks about this, but one thing I've seen consistently over the years is that something new comes along, and people latch onto it like it's the solution for every problem, everywhere and you're stupid or outdated for not thinking the same. It's the whole, "RDBMS's are dead!" thing.

2. Shiny-new-thingism. This is slightly different than cargo-culting in that people don't necessarily think the new tech is the ONLY way to do things, it's just that people want to use something new because it's hot. Then people get deeper into it and realize that there are some unknown unknowns that bite them in the ass. This becomes more likely the more abstracted things are, and/or the more moving parts there are. It's not that old technology doesn't have that problem too, but there are more charred carcasses of other people's failures to learn from.

The other thing is, as a developer there is a strong urge to try to use new tech because 'hot tech' = 'higher pay'.

3. The business requirements were not well-understood when the project was started (and may still not be well understood). Sometimes you're told to start building X, but you find out over time you really should have been building Y, while the customer asks for Z (no wait, W!) and you never get the time to pay off that technical debt. This is probably the hardest problem to address and is a large reason agile caught on.

4. Bad software architecture. Maybe you inherit software that has a crapload of technical debt because of point #3, or maybe it's because the previous team made some really bad design decisions from the get-go due to incompetence/inexperience. So then your choice becomes, do you tear it all down and start over, or do you limp along and add to the skyscraper made of popsicle sticks and bailing wire? Oh, and there's no requirements!

So you're left performing software archaeology like Indiana Jones, trying to figure what it was that a previous civilization was trying to do. Then you have the horror movie moment where you realize, "This...never worked, it was wrong all along..."
I'd like to see that happen just once in my career.
> All you have to do is look at healthcare to realize this is (at least a) questionable assertion.

Healthcare companies are more profitable in the US than anywhere else in the world.

Yep, "most efficient private sector" still applies.
Data service has nothing to do with a GPS fix. Nothing at all. No data is used. GPS does not require any internet connection at all.
Nice app. I guess this is a perfect match for https://remotestorage.io/ integration. People would be able to save and tweak their card templates without worrying.
Is there a way to link to a number? Or enter a number to view the image?
Relevant Numberphile on generating prime pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQQ8IiTWHhg
> Then the most efficient planting pattern for that area is calculated using algorithms.

Code and algorithms you say?[0]

[0]: https://i.redd.it/ytdyqbyzjkky.png
Dunno about the rest of the metrics, but the relative rankings in "infrastructure outcomes" seem deeply off-kilter, based on my own experience (I work in infrastructure planning and have spent time in most of those countries). Would really like to see that measurement explained.
Is the "Firmware Restoration CD" sufficient to reset firmware to a known-good state?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201692
Generally, sure. As for aspirin, though, if you're a couple on a common low-dose daily regimen, that's 730 pills in just 1 year without a single head or body ache.
Right. I think it exchanged problems we know, for problems we don't know. And now we're learning about those problems. Or re-learning.

With respect to NVRAM boot entries, Apple has been doing this for ~30 years and across all of that hardware (three CPU architectures, at least three firmware and three or four filesystems) they have a single method of resetting the NVRAM called "zapping the PRAM" with command+option/apple+p+r at the boot chime. And that's because they know these entries can become corrupt for various reasons. And yet in 2018, what single uniform method exists for clearing stale or corrupt NVRAM information on non-Apple hardware?

Apple also long ago inserted a hint for likely boot device suspects into the HFS volume header, as a fallback for NVRAM in case it was incorrect or had been reset with zapping the PRAM.

With respect to the EFI System partition, Windows and all versions of OS X/macOS do not keep it persistently mounted. That volume is mounted on demand only during updates that require the contents of the volume to be updated, i.e. the bootloader and its files, and is then unmounted. I've always thought this was an incredibly risky as well as lazy thing on all common Linux distros that the EFI system partition is persistently kept rw mounted at /boot/efi.

Somewhat related is when /boot is a separate file system from root, it is also persistently mounted rw on Linux distros. The functional equivalents on Windows and macOS are not persistently mounted. I think it's a rather sloppy practice, but pretty much no one else seems to think it's a problem. You get a crash, and the dirty bits are ignored by read-only firmware and bootloader, so chances are it still boots, and then the dirty bit and any corruptions due to the crash are fixed by fsck during startup. shrug
Google and Qualcomm: Pixel-Perfect?
They seem like a chronic bad actor. I believe small claims court, BBB, CFPB are all valid recourses.

Better still - if you can make this a class action by eliciting similar victims to come forward, you may actually get them to change their ways. Right now it seems like they can simply fuck with you without consequence.

And then there's the irony of coinbase being a middlemen in a market that aimed to remove the middlemen
This seems so open ended so as to be fruitless - We aren't going to peruse 300 page UNDP or 50 page CBA methodological reports to define the issue, then jump into the data sets themselves on this forum. But they exist, and they're easy to search for if you want to satisfy yourself.

This just isn't the place, nor is that the point of the assertion.

If you have a particular observation or set of data which contradicts what I'm saying maybe I can be more helpful.
The analogy falls down a bit, because while rats are born rats, a hacker is first a person. People can witness people becoming examples, and decide not to do that. That said, problems can arise, due to national borders, limited jurisdictions, and differences in access to socioeconomic resources.
You’re of course right about passive keyless entry and perhaps the GP has that confused with other features that do require an internet connection.

Anyway, even if it isn’t autonomous, suppose a car has a smartphone app that allows you to turn on the heating before getting in. And then someone exploits that and gains control over the heating. They could then proceed to drain the batteries or the fuel tank by leaving it on over night, let’s say.

Not exactly a threat to national security, but still a major inconvenience.
Facetiousness aside, this is where I hope car crashes would get to. They should be so rare that they do make the local news. They should be so rare we can treat them like airplane crashes and investigate each case to the same degree.
Shockingly incorrect. From the kernel, to the BSD subsystem, to the graphics layer, these are all dramatically different things between the two operating systems.
New testing process exposes security flaws in five languages developers use
> Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.

Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.

The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed 100,000+. The Second Gulf War, 400,000 deaths, 100,000+ from direct killings. The Syrian Civil War is 400k and counting.

The rejoinder, I suppose, is that Canada and Spain is a first-world example and none of my are. I don't buy it. First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict. Second, because Pinker's example is a silly one; both because war over flatfish would have been a money-loser and because Canada and Spain are NATO signatories operating under the nuclear shield of other nations. Shooting war between NATO member states is regularly described as a nightmare scenario that would escalate nuclear tensions worldwide; Pinker is naively or dishonestly equating "owning no nukes" with "lacking nuclear defense".

Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.

As for nuclear weapons being "disproportionate to any strategic goal" and "for all practical purposes a bluff"... I hope to god he's right, but tactical nuclear weapon use is back on the table in Russia and strategists don't seem to agree with him.
Then it is not "entirely" Facebook's fault, as you suggested. Such hyperbole obscures rather than illuminates truth.

Do you have any empirical evidence to back this "pandemic" claim of yours? Or is that just a feeling you have?
Would you do that? I am also interested.
Prioritize time carefully, read, and stay in tech. Use agendas to control and limit meeting time. Work with tech at a high level involving architecture and directions, then hand off sub-projects to your direct reports.
Yes, but what car?
It isn't about "enfficiency innovations". You always have to make tradeoffs between the collective and the individual, the private and the public.

Allowing private companies to extract economic rents from the public is good for the private sector, bad for the public. And vice-versa.

Take social expenditures, for example. The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad.
The Subway Is Next Door. Should New Yorkers Pay Extra for That?
> What control did you have with an old PC BIOS that you now are missing with UEFI?

I had a PC with a BIOS once. It didn't seem as slick as the Kickstart I'd used for the previous decase on my Amigas. It was also much less configurable/programmable than the OpenFirmware that came on my subsequent PC. My current machine uses libreboot, which is fine but I much prefer OpenFirmware.

tl;dr "BIOS vs EFI" is a false dichotomy, and "it's better than BIOS" is pretty weak praise for a boot system.
I rarely here them expressed as examples of society "working", but rather as examples of society progressing. And like most things, progress is rarely equally distributed, but that doesn't mean it's not being made overall.
Hmm. I get that except the part about "without having to worry about honouring the dollar payments." Wash trades aside, as soon as they buy Bitcoin from someone else, they have to give them something.

Or really, since it's all accounting entries in the exchange's database, what it means is a number in that trader's account needs to go up. If the Bitcoin price is high, this number has to go up a lot. And they'll expect to cash that out someday.

I don't see why Tether makes this any easier or harder? The basic security flaw is using an untrustworthy exchange.
Benchmarks: Deep Learning Nvidia P100 vs. V100 GPU
> I don't think you actually understand anything about the example code you posted.

This doesn't add anything to the conversation. If you want to discuss my post, I'm happy to discuss. You're clearly upset that I didn't praise Common Lisp, but things like that don't lead to useful discussion.

> There is no special "complicated sublanguage" - the backquote[1] is an extension of the quote shorthand notation[2] for list literals. It is for building data structures and has nothing to do with "sublanguages" or macros. There is no special syntax for macros in Common Lisp.

I've never seen anyone write macros using only s-expressions. True, you don't need to learn any special syntax to do it, but that's not how anyone writes macros.

> When it comes to templates, I wouldn't call anything from this list of D examples[3] elegant.

How is that is relevant to my comment?
How to limit presidential authority to order the use of nuclear weapons
Why Cops Pulled This 18-Year-Old Girl Off Train
Ask HN: What skills are needed to be a Quant?
What skills are needed to be a Quant?

For example:
1. I love math

2. I can code in C/C++

3. I love going through data sets and finding patterns, etc.

What financial background must one have? What other subject should one study by reading books?
The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad.

> Well, maybe not the Swiss.

Yep, reasonably true.
I looked and noticed this post has been submitted several times (not a complaint): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=zachaysan.com

Then I noticed he'd recently published an article on Zero Width characters being used for fingerprinting which got some attention on HN in the last 30 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16046329
Then leave Facebook and encourage others to do the same, rather than forcing your views on them.
> had become a woman with thoughts and opinions differed to yours.

If your daughter came home from college a neo-nazi would you say the same?

What if lots of your neighbors sons and daughters were also coming home from college neo-nazis?

I'm not so sure you would agree that they had grown up and developed their own opinions.
We enter public sector with the expectations of the private one. Every public sector worker 'deserves' to be high middle class, which today is defined as 300k+ income easily, and we strive to have as many public sector workers as possible.
ehh… Sure, TianoCore extended by AMI/whoever is not that tiny, but it's still not a full multitasking multiuser kernel.

But EFI can be implemented by others. Including U-boot! Which is really lightweight.
Fuck You, Hacker News
That's all I wanted to say.
Scientists work to automate quick translation of obscure languages
Can you use this for encryption? Make the decryption key the prime number generated by this, and you unlock it by pointing the camera at the right thing?
Agreed, that is the best book O'Reilly ever put out. An example of how grown up Engineering books should be written.
Mac'n Beez

It's all about branding.
Well, alright, but without a way to measure one man's overengineering is another's appropriate design.
I'm disagreeing with your point that users are expecting more of software. Their expectations have changed in some ways, but not really in any that makes software significantly more complex.

To shorten my last post, it's poor development practices and a lack of foresight from upper management that makes software too complicated. You could make an interface that looks like it's from the mid 2000's(garbage by today's standards) and people would still use it if it works well and is reliable.

Look at HN. Do we need more from it than it already provides? If it was up to the average upper management, the backend would need constant retooling for every feature request from different departments, 12 forms of analytics, newsletter signup forms in between posts, job alerts, a mobile app with a nag message on mobile pages, single sign on from Facebook and Google, share buttons, a waffle iron, etc. None of which the actual users and even the developers ever wanted.

EDIT: Some people might point to Slack as an exception to my argument. Indeed, Slack looked very nice compared to the competition when it first came out. But what made it a killer app was that it took the best of the IRC experience and made it a universal experience between devices and browsers. Plus it can use a company's SSO. When it first came out, it was also not very complicated. I remember when it didn't have reactions or threads, but it was a breath of fresh air after having come from using things like HipChat and Gchat, both of which were pretty dreadful.
How does Vimalin backup in-use virtual disks, or deal with the large binary files that have only small differences?
The CL9 Core Remote
> We lose the ability to think like that

It's worth noting with near 100% certainty that aggressively shaking a stop sign is illegal in probably all jurisdictions. Especially if it looks like it is shaking uncontrollably. Now I'm not getting mad at the kid, but there is a very good reason your adult brain doesn't automatically think about shaking that sign (and then commanding your body to go do it).

The kid, if faced with a police officer after the event, will of course get off free. They didn't really do any damage. But adults know that shaking that sign so hard could cause real, expensive damage, and that aggressively attacking public safety infrastructure is a bad idea.

It's a good thing that your brain knows about the sign. The kid is learning about the sign for the first time maybe, but you know about it. You know what it is and the value of a human life that it might save if it is not ripped down and requiring repairs.
"The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress." Just to echo the commenter, I don't think Pinker is stating that humans are progressing in general - he is just stating that violence is decreasing. I also agree this is a measurable metric, that Pinker does well to argue for.

If he claims things "are getting better", I think he says that "violence is decreasing", where "violence" is a measure of worseness.

If we want to talk about progress, though, we would have to define what progress really means. Will Durant (from "The Lessons of History") says progress is more like the increasing ability of mankind to control his environment. If so, I would think there is some evidence for that.

In terms of social injustice, Will Durant also makes an argument that there will always be this. Power is always concentrated to the few (that's just how it works in order to have organization), and those not in power will always have some level of injustice. The amount of people in power and their motives can change depending on the era/civilization/society.