skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a feeling simple vechicles (one computer, and maybe a powertrain computer) will be coveted in the near future.

I have a nineties dodge Dakota that I was going to just run into the ground. I never loved the truck, and used to think it was complicated to work on.

After looking at new vechicles, the nineties cars, and trucks are comparatively simple.

I grew up fixing my own cars, and couldn't imagine paying someone to work on my vechicles.

I don't like the complexity of the newer vechicles I'm looking at.

The wealthy will have no problem having a dealership spend 3-hours calibrating the sensors on a bumper, at $240/hr.

I couldn't imagine spending so much. Even if I had the money spending $2400 to replace a bumper is just crazy.

(A buddy of mine called me up, and let the price of his bumper replacement slip out. I told him they must have done more. Well, I looked up his make/model, and that is roughly the going rate. And yes, it went right on his credit card.)
This isn't surprising. At Blekko where I ran operations we did the math not once but twice (once when we got our series C to show that it made sense, and once when we got acquired by IBM to show why moving it into Softlayer was going to be too expensive). If you can build reasonable management tools and you need more than about 300 servers and a bunch of storage, cost wise its a win to do it on your own.

The best win is to build out in a data center with a 10G pipe into Amazon's network so that you can spin up AWS only on peaks or while you are waiting to bring your own stuff up. That gives you the best of both worlds.
> The men didn't feel they bore a moral duty to disobey, because these things just had to be done, or so they were told.

That is how they were raised. That kind of thinking was traditional and Nazi school system and propaganda were designed to produce people like that.

It is also not true that anyone would pull the trigger. Even in Germany were many people who having choice participated to the minimum or did not joined groups doing worst things when they could. It is interesting that another popular glib is that "ordinary people who don't fight back are responsible". But people who looked away or were passive should be better off morally then those who could not participate but did (not everyone could avoid such duty).
I'm more worried about Dianne Feinstein's reelection to the US Senate. While it is true that no senator other than Wyden has done much to help, I doubt we can find anyone who is doing more harm than DF when it comes to issues of our electronic frontier.

With people like Lamar Smith, we can hide behind excuses of gerrymandering but there are no such excuses for the Senate. How can we support anyone who backs DF?
I think that most code that is well defined and I understand well I can reason about as basically transforms of dictionaries. It's often but of course not always a red flag if I can't reason about it in that way.
It’s understandable that lot of companies stick with AWS only because of inertia (read laziness) when they will be better off it.
It's funny how irrelevant "identity politics" is to the topic, and yet you keep bringing it up.

I thought my example was quite apropos.

Most of marketing is based on pop science. That is, I believe that this so-called identification of (micro)generations comes from a marketing technique of identifying sub-populations that can be marketed towards. Gladwell gives an example of why marketing people try to do that. I then relate it with clustering, where there's a long history of finding good - and bad! - cluster centers.

Would you care to explain how identity politics provides a more meaningful interpretation than what I gave?

Or, for that matter, how it provides any meaningful interpretation, other than "talks about identity therefore must be associated with identity politics."

To be clear, I think that 'identity politics' can be meaningful. Consider the transphobic bathroom bills which sprang up last. That's a clear case of people using the formal political system to castigate others based on identity.

Similarly, when a security guard attacks someone who identifies as a woman and who was assigned female at birth, for using the woman's room because she didn't look feminine enough (on the presumption that she must be male), than that's an informal use of identity politics. (This is not hypothetical: https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-k... ).

But politics must somehow be involved for this to be "identity politics", and I just don't see it.
Are you against diversity? Because that's what the quota is there for.

Plenty of Indians can come to the US, we just want to leave room for others as well.
"...you pronounce 'own' as 'pwn', what gives?"
Smart meters. Since working in IoT on a "dumb" meter I figure the killer feature isn't automatic temperature and power regulation, it's knowledge. Once you know where and when you are using lots of power you can easily figure out a solution that fits your situation, rather than endlessly coddling an intrusive system.
This is not a huge surprise—China has very low rates of street crime, which is why the 'leave a bike anywhere' model isn't destroyed by vandalism.

Increasingly, as Chinese companies try to expand abroad (valuations are so inflated in China that diversifying geographically is very tempting, much like 80s Japan), they are going to stumble a bit due to less familiarity with other societies, e.g. [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/business/economy/ohio-fac...
Check out static by TJ: https://github.com/apex/static. This gives a similar feel to markdown documentation pages.
> And by doing this, provides a way for clients to verify if any user on the file storage server has this file. So if I wanted to know if your mozilla thunderbird has a mail I have the source to, I simply try to store this and get these duplicate records.

Yes. This is the reason you don't want this property (being able to deduplicate encrypted files)!

But you can provide it, while still providing meaningful security against other attacks.

The client has the keys to files stored by other users because the keys are the hashes of the plaintext, and the client can hash its own plaintext when it has the file.

(Note a trivial modification to this scheme, solely client-side, allows for certain files to be totally secure, with the cost of them being exempt from deduplication)
Ask HN: Design and requirements docs generation
As a developer I've always despised having to spend countless hours manually drafting , formatting and getting requirements & design documents reviewed. In spite of the obvious value of maintaining a knowledge base of instructions and information for the future developers of the app, I have felt there is a way this can be improved. So all those hours of manual effort can be saved both for the developer and the company. I was looking for already existing solutions or software that automate or enhance the experience of creating such docs. Is there something that exists of this sort? Has this field been amply explored as per your opinion? Any thoughts on a solution on Design & requirements docs generation?
> Buffett largely avoided tech because it didn't have a decades long track record.

He has been reading IBM's annual reports for the last 50 years.
Good point. There are ~20 millions people in the US illegally, so that adds another 6-7% to those numbers.
What do you mean by "the ones assumed when those techs and institutions were built"? Both Nazi and Communists institutions and techs were built for that exact purpose.
Now it all makes more sense. How sadly typical of the current climate.
No, a classical connection (e.g. the internet) is needed for quantum teleportation. This classical connection won't be faster than light.
H1b from India here and I think these rules are good. I am working in the US for the last 7 years and my green card (I-140) was approved 6 years ago. At the current pace it would take another 8 years to get my green card. It's hard for me to switch jobs, can't start any company, can't get promoted to management etc. There is uncertainty in almost all aspects of my life.

I am on H1b, I am not cheap labor. I get paid exorbitant amount of money for my skills. I seriously thought of moving to Canada, but because of our health issues with cold weather we could not move. I love this country, my life, prospects of success once I get my green card and quality of life that my kids would have.

But I am tired! I am so tired!
Dunno if it would work in your case but ... I've had fun mounting a ZFS file system using an entire EFS volume as the "physical" back end. You have to give up on writes actually being on disk when you think they are, but the payback is that's it's really kinda fast.
Nobody said they were clear of anything, just more secure than your average China-based service. (I have the top comment on that thread btw.)

I should also add that locked notes in iOS are end-to-end encrypted. Those are pretty easy to use for folks who are not "technically sophisticated"; you just unlock them with your face/fingerprint.

When you add that to secure keychain storage, iMessage (broadest end-to-end encrypted messaging system permitted in China), secure Siri data (imagine what a government could monitor if they owned the Alexa cloud)... Apple offers a significantly more secure service that is still easy to use by the general public.
What to make of it?

IOTA are rolling their own cryptography which immediately makes me run the other way. At least until I see some respected peer review that it's sound. This exchange makes me think that unlikely at best.

Don't buy a Volkswagen until they have run the other way!
Quote from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36202904

> But critics called Dr Wright's claim into doubt when it emerged that part of the evidence the entrepreneur presented in public could have been generated using a string of digits linked to a seven-year-old transaction made by Satoshi, accessible via a search engine.

"It was a mistake to agree to publish my post before I saw his - I assumed his post would simply be a signed message anybody could easily verify," Mr Andresen told security researcher Dan Kaminsky when he challenged the scientist over the matter.

Also

https://www.wired.com/2016/05/craig-wright-privately-proved-...
A previous government in the UK spoke a lot about evidence based policy, in reality it was evidence based policy that also happened to match their ideological outlook.

Perhaps our future AI overlords will have a different approach.
Irrelevant as on iOS Apple does not allow any other rendering engine other than Webkit.
Also doesn't help when the byline on their website is "Scalable, Decentralized, Modular, No Fees". Well, maybe 2/4. Having a central coordinator sounds pretty essential to their current design
Arctic temperatures soar 45°F above normal, flooded by mild from all sides
I'd like to challenge your implicit assertion that if due to knowing customer behavior patterns, scaling is predictable, therefore (this is the part I'm assuming you're implying) scaling is doable (or even easy).

The counter argument I have is that at different sizes of operations, completely new skills become important, so you and your staff are left behind.

Example: my previous employer became large enough in terms of hardware footprint (~>1M cores) that it started getting difficult to find commercial colo space. How good are software and systems engineers at electrical engineering? :)
Insecure links highlighter Firefox add-on
One Belt, One road is really taking off. South China Sea expansion with floating island bases and military protection of eco-depleting fish trawlers is soaring. they have rapid momentum, many talented people, good education, scalable infra and a powerful economy. they're building good relations and influencing a growing Africa, providing jobs and extracting industrial metals.

our economy needs all engineers fully employed, and as many more capable STEM immigrants as we can get our hands on. don't be lazy, don't be entitled, or America will be second-world, and our country irrelevant.
This is a great application for police motorcycles. Instantaneous acceleration, and long periods of completely idle. Couple it with being US made, and the police forces will eat them up.
IOTA Flaw Mails Leaked
Remember that WebGL is also a security nightmare. Shaders are fed to the GPU driver. The driver contains a compiler and compiles the shaders into the GPU specific ISA. The GPU that runs that code is a PCIe device with full DMA access.
What could possibly go wrong?

(I'm aware that at least Chrome does some syntactic checks on the shader syntax)
Yes, my annual numbers are off. 5000/week is about right for two shifts, or 250,000/year.
I was confused for a long time by the "un" (yes) and "uun" (no) in my beginner's Japanese textbook. It turned out that the spelling was more or less conventional (could have been "n" and "nnn") and that it was really the intonation that made the word (falling and dipping). IIRC this simple nasal yes/no is used in several Asian countries.
Here's one datapoint, from building the single JS entrypoint for this simple demo site: https://exogen.github.io/layup/

First build:

Parcel: 23.9s, 422K output size
webpack 4: 9.6s, 399K output size

Rebuild (cached, no changes):

Parcel: 900ms
webpack 4: 1400ms
I would bet that Omega Speedmaster, Rolex Bubbleback, an IWC ingenier, or older Rolex submariner will still be in style 50 years from now.

My favorite watches are all made before I was born, and I'm getting up there. Certain watches are timeless.
> stolen and found in Africa

That was unexpected. How do they end up in Africa? Sounds like there is an interesting story there. I can see teenagers stealing them, throwing them from a roof, vandalizing them, but how in the world do they have the dedication to ship them to a different continent. I guess it could be "a challenge" to impress their peers.
As a participant in the SHA hash function contest who broke one of the 51 Round-1 SHA-3 proposals and who worked on security proofs for another SHA-3 proposal I can say with some authority that using the sponge construction and showing statistical properties of the transformation function is not sufficient to ensure security. Of the 51 Round-1 SHA-3 proposals all of them passed statistical tests and at least one round of
review by NIST yet 33/51 were broken.

A more general point is that you should never roll your own crypto and if you must then it should be submitted for peer review by cryptographers before using it in a security critical application.

I know this is a pretty standard way to carry a technical conversation in the crypto community, but this is a pure and unadulterated argument from authority. I don't think other fields of computer science get away with this bullshit (you can't invent anything new unless you get a blessing from "the community").
With HDMI-CEC, your TV can receive the IR signal and pass the instruction back to the AppleTV through the wire, without having to place the unit in sight.
May I suggest this free and open resource: https://thebookofshaders.com
Are there examples where this model has been abused to steal real data?
> Can someone clarify this for me? Are OpenGL/D3D buffers that get stuff memcpy'd into them by the CPU actually "slices of GPU memory," or are they more often reserved driver memory that eventually get DMA'd to the GPU?

The answer is, as with all things OpenGL, it depends. You might get back a pointer to GPU memory that you can directly write to, or you'll get back some chunk of system memory the driver has.

The ARB_buffer_storage extension improves matters as you can almost guarantee that you'll get GPU memory, and you can keep it mapped for the entire lifetime of your application (the old buffer APIs wouldn't let you keep it mapped during a draw call). The downside is that you're now responsible for synchronising access to that data.

But as for "is it quicker?", maybe. DMA transfers aren't free, they take time to setup. Usually they need to operate from a limited pool of source memory. If the driver has to take a local copy of your data to copy it (which it will do for every glBufferData/SubData call), then you might as well copy it yourself, GPUs aren't hurting for PCIe bandwidth these days. In addition, you can use a separate thread/CPU core to do the copy, since unlike every other OpenGL call, mapping memory and memcpy'ing doesn't require an OpenGL context.
What did they expect ? Criminality is high in France, and higher in Paris.
Close all windows and open them again. Oh my..

EDIT: http://wdell.com/humor/stalledcar.html
That’s because other fields of computer science can either prove or demonstrate that their solution works. Cryptography almost never has solid proofs, and demonstrations prove nothing.

When you’re working on something where “works great” and “completely broken” are almost indistinguishable, the only way to even have a hope of avoiding the second one is by having a lot of smart people bang on it for a long time.
So that's what's going on when I've nudged the universal remote when using the AppleTV. Cheers!
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Annual Letter: Things to Learn
FB uses colo facilities as POPs because that's where the eyeball networks connect. It's strictly a latency/connectivity play.
> The client has the keys to files stored by other users because the keys are the hashes of the plaintext

Personally I find only people explicitly authorized have the key to be the whole point of security. And you're suggesting this as a solution to the problem that organizations providing file storage could see what files you're storing.

Under this scheme, it wouldn't just be that organization, but everybody who is a client, that could see what files you're storing (or at least verify if you're storing a particular file or not)

So I find your assessment:

> But you can provide it, while still providing meaningful security against other attacks.

Very dubious indeed, especially given the context of securing centralized file storage, where the whole point would be to deny others access.

I mean it's a true statement, because you don't specify what "other attacks" are.

I posit that given that this system leaks the plaintext of your files I find it strictly worse than just giving Dropbox or Microsoft access to my files.
There's another bike company here in (SE)Asia, OBike. They're pretty big, and aggressively fundraising. I told my wife, "I can understand that people want to Uber-ify everything, but this is very different than Uber concept, so I think it won't work in the long term."

The main difference is.. who's looking after the vehicle.

With Uber, the vehicle is typically owned by the driver, so the driver has interest in making sure the customers (riders) don't vandalize it. Not only that, it's in the driver's best interest to keep the vehicle maintained.

With these bike sharing companies, nobody except the company owns the bike. And since nobody is watching over the customers, they don't feel the need to behave.

You can say, "Just force them to put deposit, and if the bike is damaged, deduct their deposit." Well, how do you know if the bike is damaged by them, and not random bypassers?
Actually, the IETF would often issue BCPs to go along with RFCs, because people do need to be told the right way to deploy things in the presence of foot-guns.
The "of course there are spikes" is the whole reason I'm commenting in this thread. If there are spikes (if spikes are the norm) then the article that has been posted is not news. News is something anomalous, no?

Not news: "there's been this major spike the last few days! (oh btw, there have always been spikes)"

Sort of news: "there's been this major spike the last few days! the severity of the spike is fairly unprecedented, it happens once every 50 or 100 years"

Worrying news: "there's been this major spike the last few days! these have been happening more and more frequently. they have been getting more and more sever. increase in frequency is X%, the increase in severity is Y%. these increases have been going on for Z years. this falls outside climate change variability by V%.

Alarmist news: "there's been this major spike the last few days! omg, climate change!"

That Danish data set you linked to. Have you have noticed that the numbers jump around at the edge of the year? Check out the break between 1999 and 2000. I can see by eyeballing it that the winter temperature has been somewhat (not significantly) more erratic (not higher) than the model which is 1958-2002. How much more erratic though? I don't want you to interpret the data for me using your words, I want the percentage differences themselves. I'll make up my own my mind about what words to use to describe the variability if that's okay with you.

Here's what it says, “Calculation of the Arctic Mean Temperature
The daily mean temperature of the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel is estimated from the average of the 00z and 12z analysis for all model grid points inside that area. The ERA40 reanalysis data set from ECMWF, has been applied to calculate daily mean temperatures for the period from 1958 to 2002. From 2002 to present the operational model (at all times) from The ECMWF is used for mean temperature calculations.”

So we're getting one number for everywhere north of the 80th parallel? What are the 00z and 12z analysis?

The document they link to explaining the methodology leaves me with more questions than it answers: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/documentation/arctic_mean_temp_da...
I'm surprised... Cologne, Germany has dockless bike rental for more than a decade, but none of the operators complain about excessive vandalism.
Culturally it shouldn't be to different from France.

The DB bikes were pretty sturdy though - I typically referred to 'renting a tank'.

There were some rumours the Chinese bike rentals were only after their customer's data, since none of their models could've been profitable. Maybe they gathered enough and are on their way out?
Dumb stuff have always been better. Most of the smart things are useless.
Was about to make this exact comment. Endless forms to fill out to move a network cable.

Buuuut at my current workplace I am starting to see some slowdowns in doing AWS stuff as "departments" get more involved.

Like the "cloud team" does the account but networks must provision the VPC, and there's a "gateway review board" that gets involved if you define a new network egress or ingress etc etc.

I feel like many of the early advantages of cloud in enterprise are going to get eroded as the paper pushers catch on and "add value by defining process".
What is version control: centralized vs. DVCS
You may dislike the listing of authority, but he's right, and you're kind of misconstruing what he's saying. You can "invent" all the crypto systems you want, you're just foolish to do so without proper review, because there will be flaws.
They absolutely are a technology company, but compute (EC2) and storage (S3/Glacier) is a utility, like power supply. This wasn't the case back when you needed capacity planning, but today with dynamic provisioning and cheap storage, it is.

No one tries to build their own power station, or make their own laptops. They're better off using engineering resources on higher order stuff, unless, like Dropbox, the margins / TCO you are getting on your storage is an absolutely huge deal.
IoT is built on a cruddy stack. Nobody in their sane mind would design it like that from scratch. The problem is technology is much more pervasive compared with earlier eras, and without careful future proofing you end up stuck in a lot of unfortunate designs that cannot be gotten out of, and more and more is thrown into the pit making it worse and worse.
The best PC games of 2018 so far
Obligatory: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161

I wonder if at one point we'll end up with a crisis that will make us see excessive complexity as a bug on its own.