skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought I’d share this here to spread more attention to the practices of FlightSimLabs, a flight simulator software shop.

The short version is that they included an executable in their installer that when run would extract passwords saved in Chrome and presumably phone them home. Their reasoning was that this was purely for DRM reasons. They claim that this password stealing tool would not run for legit/valid serial keys.

This was only discovered by someone on reddit recently, and since this has been public the developers have claimed they’ve removed the password stealing malware from their installer. They have again made statements saying that this tool was only used against pirated copies of their software. Not once have they apologized and their users for the most part don’t seem to care.
Ask HN: An idea for a video compression algorithm
Yesterday, over a nice bottle of wine, I had this idea for a video compression algo. I'm far from a media compression expert, so I'm hoping someone here can chime in.

It's well known the fact that our brains make assumptions and predictions for stuff we see. Basically, it's said to have a physics engine, capable of predicting the next position of an object, based on current position and physics trends (like speed, acceleration, etc), so it's kind "predicting the future". This is all done, so to offload our brain from processing so many "useless" frames.

If our brain does that, why can't we create similar video compression schema? For instance, say we have 30 frames to encode under a second (30 fps), we could come up with a model where the encoder would only keep a few intermediaries frames, and decoder could predict the other ones based on some encoded physics metadata.

Does that make any sense ?

I did some research and found this paper (from 2002):

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1000006

So likely there are video encoders using this approach.
More and more of this type of "trolling" for political influence is being automated. RIght now the bots are fairly easy to identify but they will become more sophisticated as some machine learning types get to work on them.

I think this has already rendered Twitter especially useless as a barometer of public opinion, it is really a barometer of bot activity for the most part when it comes to politics (I'm thinking of the #ReleaseTheMemo stuff.)

I am not sure how resilient Facebook is to bots, or if it is heading down the road that Twitter has taken.

The rise of bots really destroys what was developing as a means of mass empowerment. Basically any political movement (such as the Arab spring) that starts on Twitter or Facebook now you have to suspect is being run by influence agents, rather than real people.
The U.S. Leads in Artificial Intelligence, but for How Long?
Well, it's been counted that way since the 2nd bush administration
Crowdsource it. Run the exact same experiment on more cats.
I just got rejected in a hiring process at Nubank (a sexy fintec from Brazil that uses clojure a lot) because I used a database for the take-home code challenge they sent me (writing a REST API). Since I'm a Python developer who knows little about concurrency in clojure and I would not like to use locks, I thought it would be better to delegate these things to the database.

Apparently I was supposed to use a global shared collection instead of a proper database because they want to see if I'm able to map/filter/reduce.

Recruiting is such a gamble - I have this former colleague that I've introduced to functional programming and he passed with flying colors at Nubank's recruiting hoops. I would not say I'm smarter than him but he would agree that I know more about our trade.
Here's one. There's plenty.

https://www.theringer.com/2016/8/9/16046698/anonymous-twitte...
Are there projects we can undertake to intentionally hit those walls and measure ourselves?
It was mostly co-incidence and some luck.

After a few thousand sweaters the next one is probably similar to one that you already made so I got bored and ended up burning out. That left me without desire to work on anything computer related, I bought a farm in Canada, moved there and ended up working on a windmill.

The websites I was running still contributed some income so I wasn't particularly worried about running dry.

Making the windmill required some tools, one of which was a computer controlled plasma cutter that I could not afford ready made and so I ended up cobbling it together. There was a little bit of software involved in that but nothing that occupied me for more than a few days.

The windmill design process involved rather more software but still it was peripheral to the rest of the work.

Then, in 2007 after returning back to NL I invested in a bunch of start-ups and at one of those a co-investor asked me if I wanted to do technical due diligence for a colleague, which turned out to be Endeit Capital, a well respected Dutch VC. One thing leading to another we are now working together for a decade+ and they've sent me lots of other customers as well so I'm nearly full time busy with this.

In the intermediate I also ran ww.com/camarades.com until enough money came in through the DD's that I no longer needed that income, I sold of all the assets in 2015.
That's an excellent point, and this topic was specifically dealt with in the article.

> Just 2 percent of the neutrons will be intercepted by test modules for investigating tritium production in lithium, but 98 percent of the neutron streams will simply smash into the reactor walls or into devices in port openings.

It kind of sounds like they're not sure if breeding will work in this kind of reactor design. If not, I guess D-T fusion is just off the table as an option generally? If that's true, this technology track simply doesn't work for the purpose of energy production.

Maybe I'm being too unfair? Maybe these test modules are exactly what's needed, maybe a larger area of the modules would have costed too much. That just seems like a strange argument. I don't feel like I can make heads or tails of this. It just feels suspicious.
Right, so instead of poiting me to a discussion or an opinion piece, you linked me to the HN guidelines. How nice of you.
What they don't tell you is that at the Institute for Advanced Study the poor assistant had to use the same filing cabinet for his list of duties, to do list, and all of Von Neumann's correspondence and papers.

While up at Harvard the assistants were given separate cabinets to make their lives easier. But woe betide the poor assistant who tried to put a file in the wrong cabinet!
This probably doesn't really help you, but for "Web application and routing layer. Ring/compojure don’t do it for me.", I really love bidi and yada (both by juxt) as a very pleasant routing/web app layer. I also really love the re-frame app architecture, but its for clojurescript frontend only. So far, my backend needs have been very simple, but I would love for a re-frame-like system for backend too, that would be pretty nice IMHO.
or upvote :)
Have you ever tried medication? For me personally it's even worse when working for others. Even went to the therapist, but she said they don't prescribe stuff like Adderall (don't even have it), and solution is just therapy in form of talking, which had zero effect (she asked questions I asked myself when I was 15). Really curious about Adderall.
H0 is no preference, H1 is preference for either clockwise or counterclockwise. In this test with N=1, there was not enough evidence to reject H0.
How is the money?
Some cases off the top of my head:

- Infrastructure configuration stored in JSON. Query could reference other JSON files, or the JSON file itself (loops would need to be considered).

- Declarative reactive programming, e.g. platforms like IFTT. You might want to take certain actions based on data in a JSON post. The IFTT GUI would create JSON config files that its server side parsers can safely use without eval'ing code to decide which action to take.

- Adding conditional logic to jsonschema form generation. Recently I've built a questionnaire renderer in react that renders forms based on jsonschema. The user creates forms with a GUI, which compiles them to JSON, and then the renderer knows how to render. Conditional logic (e.g. question B is required if question A === true) can be quite limited when constrained to pure JSON. Something like this could help with that.

The nice thing about declarative syntax is you can build a GUI to generate it, so users never use the JSON itself, but you can store it in a database, safely execute rules based on it, etc. without requiring programming from the user.

That said, there are usually better ways to accomplish this, like in pure JSON for example. Mongo syntax achieved this, with declarative operators like $or{}, ${sum}, etc., but it can be quite cumbersome.
Free monitoring for startups
"They" has become more common in contemporary usage, I agree, but the fluidity of the english language allows for any of the above. "He" is still common enough that the dictionary still records "he" as being gender neutral. There is really no wrong answer here as far as english is concerned.
that american only see thought american eyes, but I already know that before HN.
Show HN: Free design / developer articles and tutorials
I really enjoy GitLab and I've used it for five years now. I really like what GitLab is doing with the community version: free with all the features that makes sense for small to medium sized companies, or just a group of people.

Thank you for an awesome product! :)
5+ years here. Definitely not looking back to go to an office.
After doing the DN thing in Asia for a year, I bought a farm house in my home country in Europe and moved over here. Being able to live in nature instead of in a city is an amazing, life changing experience. I often have people over visiting me - either friends or couch surfers. Planning to AirBnB the barn as well, which I converted into a nice big loft. I don't feel much lonely - I can always chat with neighbors - everybody knows everybody here in the village. Or I can drive to the city whenever I feel like.
I love the fact that I've never used an alarm clock (except when I need to catch a flight or something). And yet I am always getting up earl and full of energy. I often nap during the day, which I love, and would be hard to do in an office. I sometimes disappear for a couple of hours to do some work in the garden. And I sometimes check on work on weekends. Overall, the flexibility about how you spend your time and where you live is what makes remote work worth it. You also need the discipline though.
For some definition of "choose", a significant part of the choice is imposed from external forces, not freely decided. You're saying that you're OK with people not offering the more lucrative jobs to some people just because they're women, paying less for comparable works that are traditionally done by women, and men expecting that their wives - mothers - female relatives will adopt caretaking roles in addition to their professional careers; i.e. you're OK with the societal factors that make a high percentage of women put up with less income.
I don't follow Russian news much at all, but there's something much deeper going on than simply roomfuls of people astroturfing websites.

Twice, I've followed the trail of stories which were either false or misleading, and both times they led to Irish journalists who definitely seem to be real people.

Both of them almost exclusively tweet about Russian issues and are 100% pro-Russian on absolutely any issue. You can go down their Twitters and you won't find a mention of corruption, political failings, doping or anything else negative.

https://twitter.com/27khv

and

https://twitter.com/DanielleRyanJ

I really don't know what to think here. Obviously there are contrarians on any issue, and journalism is tough to get ahead in - if RT are going to pay your salary then people could be tempted into a pro-Russian leaning - but to be completely polemic in your views. I just find it suspicious.

[Edit: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/398857-hungary-orban-media-dictator... here was the article that Danielle Ryan wrote about Hungary in Russia Today. I don't know a single person in Hungary who would agree with what she writes there. Not even among Hungarians who actually voted for Orban, nevermind among expats. The Hungarian government has posters up right now warning voters that the EU wants to "install millions from Africa and the Middle East." It's racist fear-mongering in the extreme and universally condemned. But somehow we've got an Irish girl throwing her weight behind the government while paid for by Russia?]
Diversity: A Managerial Ideology
Imgp multi-core batch image resizer and rotator v2.5 released
A 12700-ton church was moved ~850m in 70s Czechoslovakia to make space for coal mining [0][1]. It wasn't in use during the move though. :)

The rest of the town was demolished, and a new one (with same name) was built nearby. Mining has stopped since and there's a giant lake in the old town's area now.

There are several videos about the event, but most of them with Czech commentary only… Still, it's interesting to at least skip around the video [2].

Aerial map of the location: https://en.mapy.cz/s/2pntC (you can switch to 19th century map via the "change map" button).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Assumption_of_th...

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/moved-church-of-most-kos...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maIddhfONrI
> so I got bored and ended up burning out. That left me without desire to work on anything computer related,

I've been finding myself like this lately :( Sadly, I can't afford to buy a farm but working on a windmill sounds awesome! I've lately spent a lot of my time learning sleight of hand and magic illusions, but I don't expect I'll ever make any real money out of it, I'm just not a natural showman. I'll stick to software since its the only real marketable skill I have, but it is rather frustrating. I do love Clojure, though, but there's not much Clojure work where I am.

Thanks for sharing your story, its inspiring.
"We’ve drilled the ocean floor for oil and gas, scarred it with trenches for communications cables, poisoned it with old radioactive waste and chemical weapons, and polluted its remotest corners with a blizzard of discarded plastic. So, is mining a step too far?"

"I put that question to Sir David Attenborough at the launch of his series Blue Planet II. When he sees our video of the giant machines being readied in Papua New Guinea, he is aghast. “It’s heartbreaking,” he says."

This sums it up for me. Our greed is sad.
Is it really? If we go back to the roots, lisp is made of what John McCarthy calls the Primary S-Functions which are atom, cons, car, cdr, and eq (a.k.a =).
Of these five, clojure only has two (atom and eq)
FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) has a lot of problems right now, and rewriting CoC makes me think they put effort into completely wrong places.

Hey FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) developers have you patched spectre and meltdown already? Have you fixed your communication issues with security researchers who stopped notifying you of serious bugs? No? Oh I would hug you to cheer you up, but it's now allowed now.
Secure and untampered voting.

In centralized server (server in AWS), the gate keeper can tamper the voting records (UPDATE voting set your_champion_voting = 100).

With smart contracts on top of Ethereum, that is impossible.
Working alone is sort of like having ADHD. When I'm grinding on something, pomodoro is pretty useful. Really any kind of discipline works here.

It's not 10/10 though; for some kinds of tasks (math oriented ones) you need to get into the zone; combinations of oversleep and undersleep seem to help with this. Also blocking internets. I used to go to the Cal library (I don't have wifi access there) to concentrate.
>This is a good point, which is why my argument rests on the claim that more women will want to go into STEM if they are going to feel more comfortable in those positions. In my view, it all comes down to why you think women aren't in STEM.

So, doesn't the post contradict this? Less women are in STEM in countries with BETTER equality.
A few of his stories were explicitly exploring how these three laws were simplifications used to explain the system to a layperson, and exploring the cases where this difference was important.
Technology isn't the issue. Technology gave me an ereader that lasts for a week on a single charge and lets me carry around a couple hundred books. It's a large part of the reason why I'm reading 80 books a year.

How creators and consumers of applications, websites, and content USE technology is the problem.

Many consumers spend zero time thinking about the outcome of their technology use. Too many creators spend all their time thinking about only ONE outcome of their technology use.

When someone identifies a problem, it's easy to blame "technology" and not the market and social pressures that created it. If people have "forgotten to read" it's their fault, not Instagram's.
How Digital and AI is redefining customer experience and business models
This is exactly what I was wondering also. It says Quorn is "processed," and in general I understand that processed means bad in the context of starchy foods. But... Is that what Quorn is? Is the argument being put forward that it has the same negative traits as other processed foods? I honestly don't know if that's intended as the explicit argument or if it's just being used as a weasel word.
Node.js Developers
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
Out of interest, where is that quoted sentence from?

My understanding is that while this tool aims to catch undefined behavior, it also tries to keep going when it encounters implementation-defined behavior. I think you can choose a concrete target platform (CPU/OS/compiler) to model, at least you can do that in Frama-C, which tis-interpreter is based on.

So if you specified, say, x86-64 Linux with GCC as your platform, and you happen to be mostly sure that x86-64 GCC on Linux generates code as they expect, then that's fine.

It makes no sense to interpret C code independent of a model of a target platform. There is just too much implementation-defined stuff.
Chrome refuses to load this due to an HSTS error. Any mirrors?
>>And this can be "totally incomprehensible to anybody but the author".

It always is.

Code isn't magic, so you have to write whatever logic you would write in one language in another, for any application you would write.

The only exception if your language provides abstractions on which you can build on. For example in Perl, you can do a lot of file operations and regex work without libraries. In Java you might need a library, sometimes a combination of libraries, whose documentation one might have to read.

Same goes with lisp too. The only difference being, every once in a while one might discover a way to do large patterns of code through simple ways using macros.
you insane-shamed ze
You can write good code in Lisp, but isn't it wiser to choose a language/technology that drains less organizational resources for herding cats?
One thing jumped out for me. No integer overflow. In my embedded work we use that all the time. We represent angles as a int16_t or uint16_t where you can add and subtract angles and never have to worry about a discontinuity at 2pi because 2pi=65536.

Is this a hack that should not be allowed? I don't think so. Every processor made (that I'm aware of) in the last 30+ years has used 2's complement arithmetic. I don't think overflow is a bad thing, I think C made a mistake in calling it "undefined". They had to because when the language came along there were other options fresh in peoples minds.

I've also worked on systems in asm that had saturating arithmetic, and that has it's own nice use cases. My preference is still to have the rollover. People can implement bounds checking when they need to.
This should be part of the .editorconfig solution...
Node-FLIF Version 1.0.0 is released – FLIF image compression using Node.js/npm
Cubesat 101 [pdf]
Cold shower after waking up early sounds like a great way to start the morning and improve discipline. I think I'll attempt starting this plus adding a short run after the shower. I'm sure I'll be able to conquer the day easier after breaking through that early resistance.
I agree that my self-discipline trainable and improving it is the best solution in the long run. There are a lot of things that I need to do but don't want to do, getting that discipline muscle strong will help me do those things and improve my life in many ways.
Some things that might help you:

I've noticed that the real money is usually to be made on the intersection of disciplines rather than by going deep into a single discipline.

So maybe it would be an option for you to branch out into a different field that intersects regularly with software, possibilities such as hardware or legal are most obvious.

That will give you something new to sink your teeth in while at the same time allowing you to re-use your old skills and knowledge to good effect.
Is the same true of Musk who was an A round investor in a company already founded by Eberhard and Tarpenning?
I have had similar challenges when working on side projects or boring tasks at the day job. It is tough to say if it is just procrastination or something else.

I think if you have a very creative mind, you may just enjoy the design part of the process instead of the actual work.

I have tried many different methods, the one I am trying now is using an app to implement the GTD method. So far it is working well.

Previously I have tried to plan things out the night before and be able to just hit the ground running. It works well, but having more of a running list of next actions with GTD seems to be a better fit.
>You now have to spend an extra moment to consider another point of view.

Stop right here to consider every other possible point of view.

>Because men have not been historically a target of oppression

In some cultures it's men who were hunted for witchcraft and men were burnt alive or drawn. You just offended them. Also in our culture men go to war, men die and fight wars. That's pretty quite oppressing that politicians have no problem sacrificing men. Consider that point of view.
In Rust, you can make your intent explicit by calling `wrapping_add` instead of using `+`.
I'm not so sure. What's happened to the ocean floor is a tiny, tiny fraction of what we've done to the land. Its just invisible, which in my mind lets people's imaginations run free. A few cable trenches? We've got two or three crossing the lot my house is on, not to mention 3 billion other people's lots. Mining? This ocean-floor stuff won't be a patch on what the US has done to the southwest, nor what Russia's done in the Arctic. As for landfills, every city, town and berg has one. I can't dig a shovel of dirt from my field without finding a plastic fragment.

So, not to say its all good, but its just so remote from what should be our true concerns.
It has broadened my horizons immensely and enabled me to think differently about various problems
Why should rural New Yorkers be paying for NYC’s MTA funding?
English is a fluid language. The original commenter could have even correctly used 'Buhurah' instead of 'He' if most people would understand that it meant the author of the article. Although, unlike 'He', which is commonly used to refer to people of all genders to the point that it is recorded in modern dictionaries as such, 'Buhurah' is likely to leave people confused as to the subject matter.

The fact that you were able to successfully recognize that the person who used 'He' was specifically referring to Julia Evans without having to question that person means that the message was conveyed quite succinctly and the subject was perfectly understood, which is correct from the perspective of the english language.