skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> By pushing to make Windows as idiot-proof as possible, Microsoft is zagging when it should zig. [...] Their only hope is to position Windows as the OS for people who want to get serious work done

Arguably that's what they are doing by making Windows as idiot-proof as possible. For all their accidental botnets, the home users forgetting or not knowing to keep their machines updated are one problem, sure, but let's not forget that the real villains in not keeping Windows machines up to date are all in Enterprise IT. There are so many people actively working to keep machines out of date in the name of keeping their jobs "easy" or "stability", and that should be a staggering statistic.

I've got a feeling the number of Fortune 5,000 companies that have contributed to botnets is incredibly underreported, and I've got a feeling the number of Fortune 500 companies that have only avoided that fate by raw luck and bubble gum is a lot bigger than people think.

> Telemetry

Enterprise loves Telemetry. They want your machine to spy on all your activities. They want to complain that you spend too much time on HN and accidentally glance at articles related to "Gaming" during work time because they have a cool HN discussion thread.

Admittedly, some are overtly mad at Microsoft for getting access to that data themselves and trying to use some telemetry to improve their products, but how many of those complaining are covertly excited that they get access to the same data in tools like System Center?

> User-hostile update policies.

Per above, Enterprises have shown they need to be forced to update too.

> Pushing a Microsoft account for desktop login.

Enterprises love accounts. It helps keep things accountable. (Terrible pun intended.) Your Microsoft account gets to connect to your Office 365 work account. They can send you reminders to your personal Microsoft Account via the Microsoft Graph to your home computer to get back to work, if you let them. With BYOD workplaces, your home computer can double as your workplace computer and you can be so productive with all your accounts communicating together in "harmony", personal and work.

For the users used to using an AD domain account every day at work, a personal Microsoft Account can make their home devices feel like a "real boy" with the nice things like profile roaming that their Enterprise AD accounts get (assuming the Enterprise doesn't turn off nice things with Group Policies and mismanagement, of course).

> These things are not office-user friendly

Except for Minecraft, these things are extremely office-user friendly. These are things Enterprises love. These are reasons why most Enterprises couldn't quit Windows if they tried.

(Even forced updates; as much as some companies are griping right now, soon it will be the new normal and corporate ITs will adjust. They'll continue to complain, having a nice scapegoat to blame in Microsoft for update failures, but they'll also likely enjoy the perks of the new regime eventually as they realize that tech debt of not updating was its own misery and less "easy" than they thought it was.)
All the traces go off to infinity. The dynamic equations need something to limit the variables to a finite range.

A plausible hack is to add a small negative cubic factor, like

Rʹ = −1.96R − 6.46J - 0.1R³
Jʹ = 1.28R + 9.48J - 0.1J³
oh look you have a reply https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/973951162536706049
Apparently people (the investor class) are upset that a company has the audacity to the invest in itself rather than pay out dividends.

The absolute horror.
While that does seem unfair, how airtight would that case have to be?

As outlined in another comment here, the CFO and CMO of Equifax appear to have dumped just as much if not more than this employee being indicted, however they're yet to be prosecuted, possibly due to less evidence.

Would James Clapper be able to either claim a different definition of spying (i.e. "We collected this information but only accessed it when relevant"), or to claim it was "necessary for national security" to lie?
C++ =/= C
This is the way the overall vast majority of businesses are started in the US, e.g. no VC money. The echo chamber of silicon valley is all about the need to raise money, which is just a false notion. Raising money is not evil but it is also not the only way to build profitable, sustainable and stable businesses.

I have done both, there are pros and cons to each side and both bring different headaches. My personal preference is not to raise money, but I am not against raising money either -- I am part of a startup now that raised.

A lot of the exceptions and premise of this depends on your idea and some ability to fund it until revenue comes in. Many times, you can use your day job to fund the business for now, get some traction, get some clients and work the angle to find what will sell. VC's will call people who do this non-committed and/or hobby/lifestyle businesses. There is truth to what they say of course, but in the end their point of view is also very self serving.

If I told you that you can build a $10-20M/year business with 10-30% margins in 5-8 years, owning 100% of it (or close to 100%) and enjoy life, would you be complaining? No most people would jump at that, and the people that don't are usually the outliers. Even wealthy people want to own these types of businesses because those businesses produce real returns consistently. But a VC would call this a lifestyle business because it isn't going to return to them the high value they need to justify investing -- which in all honesty is a fair position.

There are also alternatives to the VC highway of funding. High net worth individuals live all over the US and world, and almost all are interested in making decent investments with reasonable returns. Most small businesses that take funding in the US are backed by these people more than any other source (outside of family, friends). And the ownership these people take is fair given their risk/reward ratio.

There are also reasons to jump on the VC train but I have already written a book and I am sure others will point out those values.
Could you take your idea, but remove the actual moderation part? Every week or month, have a lowlights reel of the worst the mods had to sort through played at meetings. It couldn’t be four hours, and only the mods would moderate, but everyone would get a sense of what’s out there and what the mods are doing.
I think only psychopaths can see that... :o
The Phone That Works Without a Battery
See, I guess I'm funny about cabs. For my lifestyle, I mostly ride the MTA - buses, subway, etc. I plan based on that cost and timing. When I've had an interview and needed to take a direct above ground route, I always take a yellow cab. I also make it very visible to the driver that I'm photographing the driver's number and name before I enter the vehicle. I don't do Uber/Lyft because I don't trust their consumer protections as much as I do those from the City or the T&LC.

Of course, I also have a prepaid phone & I have no desire to waste my data on hailing a cab. And I prefer to pay in cash where possible.
Looking forward to ref types[0] and host bindings[1] so this stuff doesn't get too JS-specific. The former has seen a good bit of activity recently.

0 - https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types
1 - https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings
It could also be a reference to the comprehensive SQLite test suite (1) or the fact that it has been in production systems for many years, though it’s initial purpose does make bulletproof quite apt.

(1) https://sqlite.org/testing.html
"Russian spy case could spell trouble for Abramovich and Chelsea"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-spy-case-could-sp...

(pay-walled, but you can read the first para)
C is great and SQLite seems doing amazing leveraging its power. Yet I bloody wish there were alternative (yet 100% compatible on the file format and SQL dialect levels) SQLite implementations native to specific languages/platforms (e.g. .Net). In just so many cases the DB speed is the least priority while simplicity and portability are valued much higher (in these particular cases). Every time I build a humble desktop .Net app featuring an SQLite database it turns into in a ridiculous "try this, google a lot, try that, repeat, .... oh wow, it works!... oh, it doesn't" nightmare and even if it actually starts working nobody really knows how to deploy such an app on another computer (especially if it runs a different kind of OS) correctly.

SQLite is arguably the best of what has happened to the world of desktop/embedded databases ever yet lack of alternative (not necessarily this fast) implementations in high-level languages is its main problem IMHO.
PayPal fraud prevention makes it impossible to use, you are guilty until proven innocent. In a way Coinbase is in a collision course also. Not saying that it's entirely their fault but there should be an innovative way to offer a good user experience while following regulations.

Beyond this, GDPR is educating us. I wonder how US regulations/regulators were so flexible with this kind of companies but are so strict with their users.
Ask HN: CS students/graduates, Did you struggle with Math?
If so, how were you able to get by ? Did you feel like you were falling behind much ? Were you still able to grasp concepts like complexity and other such things ?

Thanks

Edit: I'm currently taking MIT OCW 6.006 (Introduction to algorithms) and some of the math goes a bit over my head but I'm still able to follow along (for the most part). However I've observed, especially during recitations, that most of the students tend to have a very strong grasp of the fundamental math concepts required to understand the material. I'm curious to know if there are any students who struggled/have struggled with this because it seems to me that CS students are math wiz-kids (from the outside looking in).
It's also a problem of how much you can ask a student to do. There was a time when the expected time to complete a "4-year degree" was approaching 6 years in the engineering-ish fields, and the tuition-check-writers got pissed and called their state legislators to put a stop to it. So adding some sort of multi-semester capstone project would have to be woven into what is already in place, but I would imagine it wouldn't entirely fit into the curriculum without increasing the student level-of-effort (meaning, all of the stuff being taught would still have to be taught, but in addition the extra bits special to the scale of the project would add to the overall workload).
I don't think for a second that if you're in exile because you're on Putin's bad side that you're ever thinking "oh boy should I walk down this road? I know theres hoodlums always messing around it". You're always thinking "Oh snap, did that guy look Russian? When will Putin send for me here? Am I safe?"

So in short, idk what 'less guns, murder' have to deal with the KGB. Btw, i don't think getting guns in the UK is an issue for KGB agents.
Best Event Management Software [Integrated Technology Stack Infographic]
This surprises and confuses me. As just one anecdote, I got an Uber from a ranch 50 miles outside of Austin back to Austin once.
Ask HN: What's the best way to create a subscription based Slack community?
In my research, I've come across launchpass.com and inviterobot.com. Has anybody here used either of those? Are there any other options?
Google’s Resonance Audio SDK goes open source
i had this situation before but i realized i missed a critical step: adding wpa_supplicant.conf BEFORE first boot of the pi0w.
Not saying it's the same issue, but i was scratching my head for a while there.
They haven't come to a decision as to whether that will be offered AFAIK. I really hope they decide to allow downloading the model.
It becomes illegal when you misrepresent facts in order to manipulate an equity, though that's not insider trading.
This is strikingly scale invariant. I know it seems insane to ask it of something that big, but could it possibly be an effect that is bootstrapping up from the smallest scales?
They have the incentive of their own citizens being exposed to nerve agents, polonium, and who knows what else. I don’t think “if brexit” is the spur it was last year either, given the sheer number of backbenchers who seem to be maneuvering for another referendum. Russian trade isn’t as valuable to the UK as EU, US, and CA trade either. Over it all, China is getting much more cozy with the UK (Hinkley Point anyone?) while Russia is moving away.

The UK doesn’t need Russia, long term, especially with the rise of China as an economic force.
> I evaluate it based on the nature of the logic and abstraction that needs to be used to follow it.

What do you think math is?

> The fact that you can approximate the location of particles with a math equation doesn't really feel to me that we're doing the same thing, even mathematically, that we were doing in Newtonian mechanics.

Huh? Are you referring to the fact that QM is probabilistic? That's not a simplifying assumption, that's a reflection of how the world actually is.
Russia has motive, means, and opportunity.

So do many other groups.

... it's entirely possible the decision to blame them is based on non-public information like travel records, surveillance data, etc.

Based on the information released to date, it's also possible that the decision is a naked attempt to manipulate the public.

I'd like to think that people would have become more skeptical of their government's use of "intelligence." Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Btw, this reminds me of this Henry Kissinger quotation:

"The attribute of greatness is reserved for leaders from whose time onward history can be told only in terms of their achievements."
I believe it debuted using real depth sensing as opposed to image based unlocking from a standard webcam.
As a former Big 4 accountant in SF, I see Pilot addressing a huge need for startups with a fresh technology layer. I'm sure customers will be happy to get back to building their companies!
Many of the subway stops in Manhattan are only hundreds of meters apart, so it is still an order of magnitude of difference.
Interesting topic to ponder! Sadly will be written off in our age of pseudoscientism. If you want to explore further there are definitely ways to temporarily induce this state!
Airbnb Isn’t as Mainstream as You Think. Can It Get There?
It doesn't sound like something non-state actors could manufacture easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9OOLBN0j7c

Makes me wonder what kind of people have devoted their lives to developing nerve toxins like this. Horrible.
mods, if this is bad just delete it but it is public info now so i think quite an interesting vulnerability.

Just had a very quick look over the relevant code bits... it does look like it would just be an attacker-specified domain.. i.e. the following code is used for the default (new mvc app) uses:

var callbackUrl = Url.ResetPasswordCallbackLink(user.Id, code, Request.Scheme);
await _emailSender.SendEmailAsync(model.Email, "Reset Password",
$"Please reset your password by clicking here: <a href='{callbackUrl}'>link</a>");

which alllll the way down buried within the mvc or kestrel codebase (i forget which) is plucked directly from the host header. As kestrel listens globally, then i'd guess that the attacker would just sub out the regular domain with mynastydomain.com, and it would send someone an email with mynastydomain.com/reset?link=xxx. To fix this as they've recommended you'd wanna validate the domain via middleware (or just regex the password reset link before sending it out) or just not use the inbuilt authentication functionality/helpers whatsoever to reset passwords (and/or hardcode your domain).

looking at the actual code fix itself, is quite interesting. Apparently the following special characters are allowed in valid domains:

// Matches Http.Sys
// Matches RFC 3986 except "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "=" and "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG which are not allowed by Http.Sys
HostCharValidity['!'] = true;
HostCharValidity['$'] = true;
HostCharValidity['&'] = true;
HostCharValidity['\''] = true;
HostCharValidity['('] = true;
HostCharValidity[')'] = true;
HostCharValidity['-'] = true;
HostCharValidity['.'] = true;
HostCharValidity['_'] = true;
HostCharValidity['~'] = true;

looking at the link generated, it is possible to close off the <a href='{callbackUrl}' by adding in a single quote on a specified domain (even after the fix)... before the fix i'd imagine you could cause potential XSS or something as "=" would have been valid, meaning that you can add an event handler. All of these would get stripped off anyway from all major email clients so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

* edit * reason i wrote this and went into so much detail is that looking at the (imo pretty poor) advisory, i'd be vulnerable to this. Whereas in reality i am not. Others using their own authentication schemes or hard-coding values everywhere (as opposed to using the helper functions to generate URLs) would also be ok, i think.
But it's not really a loss, but rather a continuing bet on the company's growth prospects. Reinvesting free cash flows at the expense of paying dividends is arguably one of the main reasons Amazon is the behemoth it is today. Investors "afforded" them that luxury because they believed in the potential.
Mods with too much time on their hands and a god complex.
Did you read my paragraph, I have a first hand example. Not being transparent is exactly part of this
posted elsewhere on this thread: https://libre.computer/2017/12/03/performance-and-power-cons...
Solving My Social Problem, with Software
At risk of being pedantic, his name was Hawking, not Hawkins.
Ask HN: My clients are hardware startups. How do I find them?
I run a hardware development lab based in an Eastern European EU member country.

We're a team of 10 engineers, and we offer full-stack engineering service to our clients (electronics, mechanical engineering, optics, prototyping). We can do mid-volume manfacturing runs, so the clients get a 'Made in EU' marked product when they do it through us.

We're well placed in our regional market, and we did some interesting international projects, but I want to reach out to western clients.

I'd greatly appreciate any ideas on how to reach hardware startups and digital agencies that would benefit from our services.
> 1. President Trumps response (and I am not a hardcore anti-Trumper) has been very weak. Many here are extremely disappointed.

I don't see fundamental difference from U.S. government killing its citizens without trial in drone strikes.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/us-justificati...
> Account limits that are different between accounts, e.g., number of ELB, ASGs, EIPs, etc. allowed.

ah yeah, I had forgotten that I had to go through our TAM to get the staging account set up with all the same limits so that it was an accurate reflection.

> "prod" is longer than "qa"

Ugh, painful.

> TF just wasn't designed to do app deployments

agreed, I've gotten more and more interested in cloudformation over TF (for AWS-only deployments) over the last two years of using TF.
I guess we just have to wait it out for a couple more years where windows would have suffered the same fate as Nokia and gone into the grave yard and Google upgrades their Chrome OS or Fuschia to be a desktop capable OS.

Starting to bid a slow good bye to Microsoft.

The moment they started forcing us into doing something that we don't want, their windows death cycle begins.

Also why does windows take that much space as it doesn't offer that much feature compared to the software size in GBs.

Has anyone seen those windows inside the VR, it is so dumb and stupid, y would anyone want to use windows in that way.

They have lost it.
Programming functionally forces you to approach programming in a fundamentally different way than what you’re used to.

It’s not a magic bullet. But what you learn can be used in other languages, especially things like Map, Filter, and Reduce.

I totally recommend experimenting with Clojure or Haskell and implementing a project with a pure approach & immutable binding, or as much as you can.
Their pricing seems to be on par with hiring a regular bookkeeper.
The other huge check on older wealthy players is “the world moves on”. Often the latter phase of their life they are collecting rent on outdated business models. That is profitable for many years, but not forever. Later generations often switch to a forward thinking competitor.

Combined with cognitive decline, that makes it hard for 150 year old tycoons to grow new revenue...

Although under capitalism (property law) rent-based revenues will typically grow large scale holdings even without smart development.

Not sure if/how those two forces add up.
Let's be honest, that's probably most of their thinking. Google has forgotten the "Don't" part of "Don't Be Evil".
Isn’t it just as suspicious absent dark matter? Seems just plain weird regardless.
How to Mock ASP.NET Core Identity?
I think it's useful.

Everything I've learned about web development over the last 20 years has came from a combination of personal experience and self guided education (assorted free content and paid courses).

Courses are fantastic because you get the benefit of having an entire curriculum planned out for you as well as support from whoever is taking or running the course.

Not only that but if it's a good course, it's usually filled with a bunch of context, real world examples and thought processes from the instructor. These things can't be learned without a ton of experience, so in a way you're getting projected in the future with knowledge that may have taken years for you to figure out on your own.
An introduction to DeepFakes
The real test will be if the CEO of Intel faces this same punishment[1]. Seems like this mostly gets enforced at lower rungs.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/intel...
Finally James Altucher can go back to doing what he does best.
Punishment when we have yet to assess guilt.
They still exist. Capital one provides this functionality that can be easily accessed via a browser plugin.
Having worked in the financial industry I am not surprised. You have to share a huge amount of PII just to process a transaction. The more you share the lower your fees per transaction which for a company like Paypal can mean mi(bi)llions.

The assumption is, the more data the less likely it is fraud and therefor the less likely there will be chargebacks.

Most of these are banks, customer service, and fraud prevention companies.

It's also worth noting that this list is of all the companies Paypal MAY share your data with. If you never opened a credit card in Germany and used it on Paypal it is unlikely to hit the German processor, for instance.
> guilty until proven innocent

I can’t see reversible payments between strangers over the internet working without that.

Let alone the tax/money-laundering reporting requirements.