skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US maximum headlight brightness is regulated, but the rules and tests are written extremly poorly. The test is in a specific place at a specific angle, so there are a ton of headlights that can pass the test, but are far brighter everywhere else. Obeying the letter of the law while flaunting the spirit.

To make matters worse, due to the way the rules are written advanced systems that dim LED headlights specifically in the path of oncoming cars are not legal in the US. It's becoming common on high end European cars to not just auto dim but isolate oncoming vehicles from illumination while maintaining brightness elsewhere.

The key to good regulation here is to write rules about how much light can be experienced by oncoming vehicles of various height and driver positions and let engineers figure out how to meet it.
That's a surprisingly in depth newspaper article! Rather than another article about how chocolate is a "superfood", or debunking the "myth" of chocolate, this is a look at how our perceptions of chocolate are affected by industry driven science. The closing paragraphs give a flavor of the piece, telling of an social experiment that I'm surprised I hadn't heard about (or at least don't remember):

The role of the media in helping chocolate makers exploit our failure to grasp the complexities of nutrition science was laid bare in a 2015 exposé. German television journalists set up a three-week “study” in which they asked one group of volunteers to follow a low-carb diet, another to do the same but add a daily chocolate bar, a third to make no change to their diet. Both low-carb groups lost an average of 5lb, but the chocolate group lost weight faster. By measuring 18 different things in a small number of people, the spoofers made it likely they would find “statistically significant” but fake benefits of eating chocolate.

The “peer-reviewed” International Archives of Internal Medicine agreed to publish a hastily written paper within 24 hours of receiving it – for a fee of €600. John Bohannon, a Harvard University biologist and science journalist in on the hoax, put together a press release. Within days stories had been published in more than 20 countries. The Mail Online, Daily Express, Daily Star and Bild were among those that fell for it.

More about how that paper came to be here: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the_history_behind_the_chocolat...
It honours a limited but useful search syntax.

https://duck.co/help/results/syntax
It’s not about profiting, it’s about handing over data to a third party without explicit consent. And yes, I am aware that’s how the credit companies like Equifax exist, they should not.
Happy Tolkien Reading Day What Are You Reading?
Pardon the laymen’s questions, but my understanding of precision location is that it requires triangulation + accurate timestamps (the more accurate the more precise), plus with indoor the additional complexity of resolving signal multi path.
There’s no mention of the hardware or “system” requirements. Possibly all modern smartphones and laptops have the necessary hardware? It would still be nice for this to mention a high level summary of the system required to set this up. How many devices to coordinate the location discovery?
Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
So, how does it get mapped to physical space then?

As long as I am in "rssi tuple" space, I maybe know if I am in a place where I have been before, and I can learn the topology of the place in terms of "which places are adjacent".

But I can't put my location on a map.
How do they do the mapping?
Here's one for code that I always hoped would grow, but I'm not sure if it's been updated for a few years.

http://symbolhound.com/
They can buy it for what its worth to them, as a brand. Thats the nature of First Come First Served domains, with equal justification. Just because Nissan is big, does not mean they own the name entirely, over anyone else's prior rights.
Thank you for that great comment.

As expected on this site, most other commenters completely missed the point of the post, engaging in the usual trivia such as markdown vs RTF. Sad!

There’s dozen or so distributed blogging platforms now, I feel we’re close to the point where 1-2 could go mainstream. Maybe by this time next year?
Opening up iMessage to Android users would definitely reduce Facebook's collection of user data, since friends wouldn't be compelled to use FB Messenger. But yeah it's not in his business model.
Yeah, a friend told me about that a while ago. He was pretty freaked out and worried it might be some kind of psychosis!

Don't think you have to worry. I haven't had any issues with my mental health for 8 years, beyond maybe periods of high work stress, and it's appeared at night often since then.
Ghost has drafts, and the editor is fine for me (plain text markdown with instant preview). I think(?) it also supports multiple logins with permission management? I feel like adding a user requires an admin (no self sign up that I know of) but other than that, I think it might do what you’re talking about.

I use ghost for my personal site and I love it. (Not that I use multiple authors.)
Sparse – a Semantic Parser for C
There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those qualities back.
^this. As long as Google remains an advertising company with some incidental technology projects - they'll be hard pressed to ever fight internal culture/revenue enough to take meaningful steps towards privacy and security.

Just being able to write an app (code on the device) and deploy an ad (code on the Internet - possibility to run "code" like fonts, or trigger calls to site/unique.jpg) - would make preventing data exfiltration and/or tracking absurdly hard while continuing to cater to advertisers aka the paying customers.
Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up
It’s nice that Apple’s interests and my interests align. It always refreshing when a company puts a lot of effort into structuring their company in such a way that it aligns with users’ beat interests.
The history behind the chocolate hoax (2015)
If a company’s business model is aligned with statements by its CEO, I would consider those statements more valid, not less. Apple is putting its money where Tim Cook’s mouth is. That’s a good thing.
A thousand times yes. This has been over for almost two decades and he still won't stop. What a crank.
It used to work better.
In my case there it's not a problem with a good friends, but that I will lose access to some interesting people, who publish/discuss interesting topics on FB.
>So, how does it get mapped to physical space then?

don't quote me but i don't think it does. you basically go around and set up hotspots in rssi space that the server knows about. when other people enter that hotspot things happen. this isn't as silly as it sounds because for a lot of applications you don't need to know where you are in physical space but just what you're near (i.e. i put my tv somewhere, hotspot it, then when my phone gets near that hotspot it's near the tv).
It's a U.S. law, not sure about other countries.

I believe it's the Bank Holding Company Act:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/bcreg20080922b1.pdf
I once found a "sleep(1000);" in the middle of some hairy critical code -- something existentially important like payment processing. There was no obvious reason for it, it had been added without explanation, and the author was long gone from the company.

I didn't have the guts to remove it.
I'm not saying Google handles everything correctly. My comment was meant as an explanation as to why one person has a positive perspective of Google and a negative perspective of Facebook. Obviously if someone thinks Google is destroying the world, they're going to want to change my opinion/as many positive opinions of Google as possible, and I respect that even if I disagree.

To respond to your points quickly: I'd rather support a company with a moral stance I agreed with than one that was neutral. I think news media in general has a problem with sensationalism/optimizing-for-clicks/echo chambers, but I don't perceive that Google is particularly bad as an news aggregator. I think a lot of complaints about Google/Youtube overlook that most policy decisions about removals/demonetization are driven not by politics or agendas, but by advertisers, without which Google/Youtube would not exist. (And again, if you disagree and believe that targeted advertising is itself a net bad for the world, oh well.)

Personally, I think viewpoint polarization and the internet's enabling of echo chambers is the biggest problem facing the world. I know Google is often accused of making the problem worse, but I don't agree. Google News, for example, won't stop showing me Fox/Breitbart articles, even though they have to have enough data on me to know I'm super far-left.

Anyway, I did some searching (on Google, ha), but can't find any articles linking Google/Youtube usage to mental health problems, so I'd be interested if I'm wrong. The only one I remember seeing said Youtube had a positive effect on mental health. (https://www.psychalive.org/worst-mental-health-instagram-fac...)
He could have gone up to the top of Burj Khalifa instead. But, that wouldn't have placed him on the headlines. Also, he is running for governor. As far as I can tell from recent experience, he will win.
Most people aren't that naïve.

The problem is not allowing a company access to your data. The problem is how it's used.

Just because you allowed another company to handle your data should not give them carte blanche to do whatever with it they want.

This is exactly why Europe created the GDPR.. to prevent your personal data from being processed by companies in unintended ways, or sharing your information with 3rd parties without your consent, and heavy fines for breaking these rules.

Just allowing a company access to your data and giving up at that point is the attitude that people are trying to change, because that's not the way the world should work.
Sparse: a look under the hood https://lwn.net/Articles/689907/
Only had one lucid dream and it was pretty disappointing.

I woke and my light was on. I remembered that I'd definitely turned my light off - hey, this must be a lucid dream! So I looked at my hand for a few seconds and everything turned to white. Then I woke up, pitch black with my arms under the covers. The excitement of lucid dreaming woke me up!
> Are you saying it's irresponsible, then, to publish a novel whose plot revolves around the success of perpetual growth (or success of a civilization embracing perpetual growth)? Influential or not, we shouldn't censor media...

Would you respond to a critical book review by saying "we should not censor media"? Criticism and censorship are two vastly different concepts, you should not conflate the two.
Most real life implementations of "microkernels" end up being hybrids. NT started out as a micro, but Microsoft have been moving things (the graphics subsystem in particular) in and out of kernel space in the hunt for the optimal tradeoff between stability and performance.

Similarly i think the Mach kernel powering Apple's OSs are a "fat micro" where various things that should be in userspace, if one followed the microkernel orthodoxy, resides in kernel space.

Perhaps the only orthodox microkernel OS out there is QNX, these days languishing in the bowels of Blackberry's holdings.
Because not everyone uses Linux?
I had the impression that Uzi Nissan did not want to sell the domain regardless of the amount they would offer. The article says he told the following:

> “Fifteen million dollars. Do you understand right now that I don’t want to sell?”

From the manner of speech, I think he said a random large amount, not that he had any intention to sell the domain.
CBE?
pretty neat.

how robust are the fingerprints across devices i wonder and whether this has been experimented in with strong multipath effects (thereby confounding fingerprinting).

edit:

another interesting thing is that this is basically context sensitive hashing of tuples being done using ml classification techinques
Note: Above not valid in China
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, in my view. That way you get all of the new goodies soon after they’re released, and thanks to the automated testing there’s usually no significant breakage.
The corporation, including the US subsidiary, was still called Nissan even when they were selling Datsuns.
Dorothy: AR assistant for dementia patients
I may have to check my droplets... do you know if the upgrades automatic by chance?
Slightly better discoverability and easier “subscriptions” are the main values of Medium for me. I find syndication ok at attracting readers to specific posts but not great at getting people to keep coming back (even with rss available).
I worked at an international oil and gas company that put a high price on security in the early 2000's.

I was hired because the regular firewall/security sysadmins resisted installing tooling the director wanted that would allow them to be effectively 'monitored' doing their work on the firewalls distributed worldwide. In particular the director wanted to use Tripwire to alert when files were changed on the firewalls. He had tried to push this through 3 times before and each time it was rebuffed/scrapped one way or another.

As I went through the testing phase I took careful note of the security issues I found. When all was done I had 2 big holes I could not easily close. The first one was that from the management server (a simple Java app) you could click file/open and using the explorer window you could 'run' explorer.exe thus opening the Windows shell/GUI (as well as run command.com, notepad.exe). I closed all these with file permissions and other settings.

The final one was much harder though. You could, using the same file/open explorer window, open the log files of the GUI (with a notepad like functionality), and alter and save the logs again without notification (non-repudiation violation). The user account had to be able to write to that log for the entries to be created.

My solution was to create a long-running script in the background that would cat and empty all of the log entries every 2 seconds to another file location further limited by tight permissions only to the script account.

I deployed this in production for over a year and to my surprise it never stopped running (or more likely I thought, overflow and/or lock up the system).

My worst kludge...
From what I know, the reason they moved device setup to the kernel was to avoid flickering when the system switches from the boot screen to the login manager.
Ok, I can accept that. I can even accept that some people think game dev is sexy. And I'm willing to say that it's all on me for not understanding, but I just don't understand how game dev (especially if you read about how it really happens) is more sexy or glamorous than Salesforce dev?

My only guess is that gamers think games are way sexier than the way Salseforcers think about Salesforcing, and so maybe game devs get a little more hero status than Salesforce devs? Something like that?

Do most actual game developers think, "whoa, this work I'm doing is so sexy"? I don't know that they don't. I've just never heard it.

I'm sorry to all the sexy game devs I've slighted by these opinions. It is not at all my intention. Keep on with your sexiness.
Maybe not the weirdest but;

I was building the client library (wrapper) of an old external third party service we were running, for the our new system (re-write).

By the way, this old third party supposedly has REST interface which was added later, when REST was getting popular. So I needed to get all ABCs but couldn't figure out how because there wasn't any `GET /abc` for ABC but `GET /abc/<id> on the docs. So I just checked how it was done in legacy code.

Then I found a for loop 0 to 100 which was doing 100 `GET /abc/<index>`. It was working because ids were incremental and there were only less than 50 ABC records. Unfortunately there was no caching or `break;` after `404`. :(
Related, but sadly unavailable: http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
Yep - for home automation style stuff (which the author seems to have built it for - see the showcase section), having a full Linux distro is actually a real pain. I've taken to building my own stuff with the ESP series of microcontrollers, home made PCBs, etc - once it's built - it just keeps chugging along, unlike my original stuff I built atop RaspberryPis with Linux.
"Because of this, xbps-src is in fact not a binary, it is a collection of very intricate shell scripts that use standard tooling available on almost any Linux distribution to bootstrap a compiler, build chroot, and XBPS itself."

When he stepped away from NetBSD, I remember reading that it was because he wanted to work on a package manager.

It might be that the entire raison d'etre for Void Linux is a package manager consisting of shell scripts.

Not sure what he thinks of pkgsrc but IMO their work has made things so easy that, e.g., one can easily use a set of shell scripts instead of pkg-add, etc. I do this to save space on small systems. IME, the pkgsrc bootstrap scripts are a very reliable way to build a gcc toolchain. (build.sh as well)

One project I have had on the list for many years is to build Linux on BSD. Could it be done? Has it been tried?

Also, maybe S6 deserves a mention as another daemontools clone, with the added bonus that it may lead one to discover execline.

Nothing against runit. I use socklog and occasionally udpsvd by the same author.
They still haven't issued guidance on how to treat forks like BTC/BCH, have they?
Speculation: I suspect your initial comment drew downvotes because it's pretty insubstantial. Yeah, requests for notifications are a annoyance. Commenting on it isn't likely to promote any kind of worthwhile discussion, and whatever discussion it does engender is likely to be off-topic as well. While not always successful in practice, HN members do tend to value substantive, on-topic discussion.

Your second likely drew downvotes because it's explicitly against the site guidelines.

> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW, at least from its text color, it looks like the initial comment is non-negative. In my experience, things like this often balance out.
I never expected pine to upload my contact list (or email) to some third party server - or BitchX to steal my chat logs. Yet both programs could have done so.

The difference is that before Android, in the world of windows - we already had a culture of spyware bundled with freeware - as well as viruses/RATs - and plain malicious software -
that made it plain that simply allowing random code to execute in a context where it could read data and/or sensors (gps,mic,camera etc) would be a disaster.

There were to workarounds: stewardship (the Linux distro model, like software in debian main etc) or sandboxing.

Android chose too little of each, which essentially amounted to a false sense of security. And here we are.
The article explains it as if the nissan.com domain was priceless to Uzi Nissan.
And for a login page with what is effectively a form element with two input fields that IS is overkill.
Certainly. That just isn’t what was discussed in the original comment. If it’s about knowing lots of your neighbors then I would say I haven’t had that in California.
Hey HN

Check out a small app we developed to help early and mid level dementia patients to remember and navigate to meds/bathroom. Your feedback is much appreciated!
That's a long time to have a chip on your shoulder. I imagine you don't have a bank account nor buy anything except handmade crafts.
Seems like BrandonM's quote comes up all the time, but Joel Spolsky wrote in 2008:

“Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn’t that exactly what Hailstorm [2001] was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It’s a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

Has he made any public comment on synchronizing files / killer app in the intervening years?
They didn't align their business model in order to further privacy, though. It just happened to shake out that way. If Apple cared in the slightest about issues like this, they wouldn't make it impossible to control your own hardware when you buy an iPhone.
there can be serious performance benefits for i/o heavy workloads:
- removal of copies mandated by the user/kernel boundary

- lower control transfer overhead, up to and including becoming completely polled mode. interrupt, getting into the kernel service thread from interrupt, through the kernel stack, into epoll, and into a user thread takes some time

- use of device specific features without having to plumb them through all the various kernel interfaces

- native asynch removing overheads associated with i/o thread pools

- exploitation of workload specific optimizations that would be defeated by the kernel scheduler, memory management, buffer cache, and other machinery

of course you lose all device independence from your interface, any intra-process resource sharing provided by the kernel mechanisms. you have to deal with all the error recovery and safety issues yourself. but on some occasions its really worth it.
If you are walking down the beach and find a $20 bill on the ground, you are required to report it as income.

The only way that I know of that you can legally enrich yourself without paying taxes is via a direct gift and that’s because the giver pays tax instead of you.
Know when to hold, know when to fold.
why don't we just... link directly to the memo... https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-to-report...
The timing is less important if some of the transmitters or receivers are fixed.

GPS satellites are ambling along at 14,000 kph so they need pretty accurate timekeeping to get a precise position.
I see. Thank you for explaining. As for me macOS is just the dock, the global menu (both replicated and enhanced nicely in Unity, as well as in KDE though KDE global menu works with Qt apps only and Unity global menu works with Gtk apps only) and a BSD terminal :-) As for Mission Control - I have never used it on Mac but on KDE moving the mouse cursor to the top left corner of the screen shows all the windows in the manner looking a lot like the screenshot in the Wikipedia article for Mission Control. As for the Gnome 3 top panel - I agree it is the most pointless part of it, I wish it could host the application menu the way it does in macOS and Unity. The problem is Linux apps seemingly lack a standard for this so it wouldn't work with all the apps, that's why I've came to the conclusion I don't need a top panel at all.
It’s still ambiguous but the most straightforward way is to treat it as miscellaneous income, which is how I reported it.
Reminds me that Intel didn't include PCI on their Atom variants aimed at mobile devices, supposedly because it was too power hungry.

This in turn lead to Microsoft balking at supporting said hardware as Windows is deeply reliant on PCI (even the ARM SOCs powering the Windows RT products support PCI).

In turn Intel developed Moblin, that later merged efforts with Nokia's Maemo to become Meego. Later still foisted onto the Linux Foundation.