skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank for clearing that. I think I have to read the docs more carefully
I'm wondering if returning 418 is some sort of "off by one" error. Maybe their list of error codes are in an array, meant to send 500, but picked n-1 falling on 418?
Article: Query JSON Data Using Golang
Types of Content Writing and How to Create a Unique Content
If a security researcher comes from developer and/or system administrator background then he/she uses his/her experiences and habits to guess where to look first.

That's why it is always suggested to start from point zero to be a solid security researcher.
As I said, explicit fail-fast behaviour is what you want. It's far better that a bug manifest noisily and immediately, than that it go unnoticed.

At the risk of just re-stating myself:

In Java, if you attempt to invoke a (non-static) method on a null reference, it throws a `NullPointerException`. This is exactly what you want: it's immediately obvious to the developer, and to a user. No further damage can occur as a result of the bug. (Ignoring broader questions of exception-handling, of course.)

Java pretty consistently adopts this philosophy of runtime checks everywhere, even on production builds. C#/.Net does the same. It's a valuable feature for software correctness.

(Java's choice of exception name is curious given that Java has references and not pointers, but still, they have the right idea.)

C++ is the opposite: if you invoke a non-static method (or 'member-function') on `null`, you get 'undefined behaviour'. Anything could happen. Hopefully the program will crash with something akin to a 'segfault', but maybe it will do something disastrous.

Unlike Java, the C++ philosophy is generally performance first, and it does few runtime checks for you. C++ has its reasons, but this approach is extremely unhelpful for software correctness; it can make both bug-detection, and bug-hunting, much harder.

(Incidentally, GCC and Clang feature a `-fsanitize=null` flag which gives you Java-style runtime checks, presumably with a moderate runtime performance cost. This isn't in the C++ standard, though.)

Objective-C is somewhere in the middle: you don't get undefined behaviour, but neither does the system tell you when you've got a null-dereference bug. It just silently carries on, and you're left assuming that your code is working fine.

There's nothing at all special about GUI code. Fail-fast is still what you want. There could be any number of technical or non-technical reasons you've found OS X GUI applications to be more stable. Null handling is just a tiny piece of the picture.
The article mentions activities of 1 million bequerel per liter. That means every liter produces 1E6 helium atoms per second. There are about 1E9 liter of water (one million tons) and a year has about 3E7 seconds. So one could produce about 3E22 helium atoms per year or 0.05 mol (one mol is 6E23 atoms) or 0.2 grams or about one liter (density 1.79 g/L).

This is a back of the envelop calculation, but realistically you would have to deal with leakage so you get much less than a liter of helium.
Recently tried to login into PC Financial MasterCard online account. And got “your password is too long” error. What? Right! Password length validation on the login form!

I called CS and explained that this is impossible as I use a password manager and it worked just not long ago. They assured me that this was always the case and that I’m an idiot for forgetting my password.

They sent me to password reset procedure page.

The password procedure emails plain text temporary password, which then let’s you pick a new password.

When picking a new password, I tried to enter my old password that was too long, just for the heck of it, to see if it’d go thru.

Lo and behold, the system answered that I “cannot reuse the same password as previous 6 passwords”.

That’s banking-grade security right there.
You may be right. But it may not be a straight sha256. It could be a multi-round hash based on sha2. In the same way shadow hashes are default called sha512, but in reality it's a 5000 round version, so your price could be $250000 instead. (Or less/more)
How to Promote Mobile Racing Games
Sgdc
Other counterpoint: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/technically-beautiful
Andy Wingo uses delimited continuations to implement guile fibers https://github.com/wingo/fibers/wiki/Manual

It is a low level construct that can be used to build higher abstractions and things like coroutines. In a language like scheme they can also be a (costly) way to do early escapes.

If you are into nondeterminism they are also quite usable.

call/cc is being retired in favour of delimited continuations, which is a good thing.

Most often you don't need them. Implementing things like generators using continuations is possible, but it is also a lot slower than built in support for generators.
I know you're being sarcastic, but with this particular software we offered support like that as well. 90% of the time the first level support (and eventually QA) would use this dialog and add in stuff like replication steps manually. It was much better way to triage and debug issues than the usual email with an "it doesn't work" title and an excel document containing a screenshot.

So add "it saved the company buckets of money" to the list of reasons this is a better approach.
Someone recommending a podcast on the occult and other related topics by a guy associated with the Village Voice. Within the last month!
> Do marketing and managerial skill add real value to a product/service, or are they at best a necessary evil?

That was not what I said - at all! Of course it adds value. Reading through it, it seems you entire reply is premised on something I did not even remotely say?

I edited the post and added a new last paragraph.
I found https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uj2ot/a_texas_ranch...
And it seems to be not that good of a joke.
I'd say the problem isn't so much about readability but about ease of doing certain things. Case in point: non trivial tables, with multirows/multicols, newlines inside cells, and so on
I'm surprised they haven't gotten more flak from large companies and governments about their telemetry.
Thanks, but I'm not planning to monetize it. If it gains adoption in its niche, that's enough for me.
JWT auth is now supported in Ably
Specifically regarding weight loss in this blog, I suspect the alarm clock had more impact than the scales. I was recently linked to a 2-hour discussion with a sleep research specialist who claimed people who have insufficient sleep tend to prefer more excessive calorie foods than those with good sleep habits.
Kyhuikhu
Collecting command line arguments is a HUGE invasion of privacy.

Imagine I ran a command "make.exe my-secret-project-name" or "make.exe process_gdrp_removal_request SOME_SSN".

And as the linked page admits, they really do collect all command line arguments, not just a white list of valid commands. Perhaps someone accidentally pastes an AWS API Secret into the wrong terminal window and it ended up as "dotnet.exe MY_AWS_SECRET". ("You will notice misspellings, like “bulid”. That’s what the user typed. It’s information").
For single issues - yes. If you have a large deploy base that you can't easily talk to, aggregate reports which can give you don't easy correlation results are much better. For example https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/home/product/Firefox results in much more stability for FF users. Asking everyone would not be possible.
How to Listen to and Delete Everything Your Alexa Has Recorded
Jgyde
Sure, Dennis Rader (BTK) did. He only resurfaced over a decade after his last murder because he started taunting police again, either because he got bored or he wanted recognition.
Show HN: Dataflow Kit – extract structured data from web. Web sites scraping
Nootropic Paradise or How Brain-Enhancing Drugs Are Changing the Workplace
> a global optimizing compile tends to be dominated by the O(f(x)) of the optimization passes

Really good point. Closure Compiler, at least historically, rejected many valid optimizations because they aren't common enough to justify growing the rate of number of passes.

> If you rewrote something like Closure Compiler in C, I doubt you could get more than a 2x-4x speedup.

Closure Compiler is written in Java. I don't know exactly where the state of the art of JIT is right now, but I would bet C wouldn't be that much faster.
You just need to use a machine model that takes into account the cost of address translation and the TLB. Check out https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0703 for some introduction to the topic.
And I'm not trying to make them sound simple, or to paint the world black and white. I was just trying to point out reasons for distaste other than "meh, it's not math, so it's boring".

Personally, I simultaneously appreciate just how hard those skills are (I like tech partly because it's much easier than dealing with humans at scale), despise the way those skills are most commonly used, and understand how some dabbling in dark arts is necessary to even have a fighting chance on the marketplace.

> What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.

> I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers.

Well, outright fraud is illegal, and therefore happens less often. But between that and being fair and straightforward there's a whole spectrum, and from my experience almost all companies lean far towards the dishonest side. Just listen to any discussion of marketing people about their strategies. Would you apply similar methods on your friends and family? Would you skinner-box your niece for extra change? Would you price-anchor your mother with a birthday gift?

I simply believe that, as a society, we have way too low standard for business interactions. We allow ourselves to be manipulated at every way without question, and even praise the master manipulators who are skilled at what they do. I'd love for that to change, but I have no idea how to help - so for now, I just resort to expressing and explaining my distaste for manipulative practices.
Elon Musk didn't invent the idea of becoming multi-planetary, for safety purposes or otherwise. Sure he's advocated the idea, but I think it's a pretty natural thought to have when learning about dinosaur-killing meteors, the death of the Sun, etc. Lots of people have had the same idea for hundreds of years, some have fleshed it out more thoroughly with calculations, etc. It's perfectly possible to agree with those people without ever knowing about Elon Musk, much less "drinking his cool aid". Heck, it's possible to disagree with Musk/Bezos/etc. whilst being in favour of humans as a multi-planet species (e.g. disagreeing with reasoning, calculations, motivations, approaches, timelines, etc.).

PS: Elon didn't invent the idea of rogue AI either. Again, lots of people have considered this and calculated risks, etc. but his name keeps getting brought up as if nobody thought of this before. I've got nothing against Elon or his fans, but there seems to be an anti-Elon crowd who like to reframe in-depth discussions about some large, complex topic (space colonisation, AI, energy infrastructure, etc.) as if it's all about one guy, just so they can state their disagreement with that guy.
There's a lot of what we might call "uncritical claim reporting" going on, where a journalist accurately reports that someone said something without any kind of regard for how implausible that is. Lot of this going on in Brexit, for example. The "£350m for the NHS bus" which rested on at least three ludicrous assumptions.

Edit: let's have a look at https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1001158920663109632 - Andrew Neil is Chairman of the Spectator (important "serious" rightwing politics magazine) and a BBC presenter. He's accusing the NYT of "Stalinism". One of these has to be wrong.
Factor – A practical stack language
NPM is absolutely the worst package manager, apart from all the others I have tried.
Making text search learn from feedback
Hmm, in the example, I tried to change

show p ∧ q

into

show p ∧ p

(which should also be true). But it gives a type error.

I guess I better start reading the tutorials ...
I wrote my thesis using latex, and can with confidence say, no, it is not "working fine".

Maybe in the sense that COBOL is "working fine", so we should all just stick to that too.
Jeff Bezos Describes Moon Colony Plan to Relieve Pressure on Earth
Hujkfu
Perhaps the thinking is that it abstracts both the if branch and the else, and only one of them gets executed?
> I can't distinguish a loot box from a scratch card -- except a scratch card must reveal odds.

A lot of problem gamblers get in a bad way because they think that the only way to recoup their losses is by continuing to play until they win.

If you can't sell loot for cash, then it can't lead to this same kind of problem gambling because it's literally impossible to recoup your losses instead of merely unlikely. Therefore lootboxes should be regulated differently from actual gambling if at all.
Challenges in Large FPGA-Based Logic Emulation Systems
Why doesn't HN use responsive units?
HN works great on mobile, but on desktop it doesn't. Every time I open HN on my computer, I either have to make the window smaller to make the text readable or zoom.

The problem is that if I zoom, the line-width gets out of hand and it gets hard to read the comment threads.

If HN used a responsive unit instead of pt for font sizes, the site would become much more readable.

There isn't much difference in readability between 1 em and 10 pt in mobile, but there is a huge difference in desktop browsing.

To test out my ideas I've hacked together a 10 line custom css to demonstrate the concept.

@-moz-document domain(news.ycombinator.com) {
.comment {
font-size: 1.2em;
line-height: 2em; /* optional */
}

.title {
font-size: 1em;
padding: 0.25em 0.1em;
}

.subtext {
font-size: 0.8em;
}
}

I've also created a stylish theme on this CSS, if you want to test it or look at screenshots, you can look at: https://userstyles.org/styles/160671/minimal-hn-readable .

I think we need to tweak the HN stylesheet for desktop users. With high-dpi screens becoming more and more present in our lives, the old pt method will cause us problems. And the solution is so simple: we can just switch to em's.
Thanks :)

You mean provide a widget for native apps? That sounds interesting though right now I wouldn't know how to start (we don't have much experience in app development). Do you have any recommendations on how to do this?
Update: We received a lot of great feedback so far and are working on some improvements already (one-click opt-opt from all apps, "decline" button option for consent notice, grouped display of trackers for websites with many of them). Stay tuned :)
Increasing the Value of Startups in the United States from Seville
Seville is said to be the best city to visit in 2018 according to New York Times and Lonely Planet. You might not have heard about it, or maybe you have, but what's cool is that there is a growing startups ecosystem in the city, even of companies working side by side with American entrepreneurs from incubators like TechStars or Angelpad. So if you have an idea and funding, you may want to take a look. https://medium.com/commite/we-are-able-to-increase-the-value-of-startups-in-the-united-states-from-seville-9262bebef903
I don't think that such a clear-cut distinction based on motivation or general intent can be made. There are political factions in the US whose goals are quite similar to those of more left-leaning factions in the EU.

In general, you could probably say that the EU is more left-leaning than the US because two of its major powers - France and Germany - tend to be more left-leaning as well as Scandinavian countries, which from a US perspective are sometimes considered almost socialist (though that's not exactly true).

While more left-leaning factions in general seem to favour the rights of the average citizen over those of corporations this isn't unanimously good or a clear distinction either. In some ways, the EU is a good example of the road to hell that's paved with good intentions. Its regulations often are so complex that - intentionally or not - they favour big corporations because they're too difficult to implement for smaller companies. Being an entrepreneur for instance is - very broadly speaking - more difficult and unusual than in the US, simply because employment in a big corporation pretty much is the assumed default model in the EU. Anything that deviates from that is more difficult to accommodate in the existing legal framework.
You're into games of chance. Whether it's a gambling problem I can't say, but yes, you're gambling sometimes. True fact.
> If something is "apples to apples", the sales work is to mud the waters.

... obviously unless you happen to work for the company with the good (or least bad) apples, in which case your jib is to spread the word that good apples exist.
What's so hard about linking to someone reliable on the subject? Like, not infowars, wikileaks, or youtube?
It's not, it's a loud minority that's especially vocal on HN. Mostly people who have read 1984 too many times or have lived in a totalitarian state and worry about the slippery slope.
I would be interested to hear if this is a workflow that suits people that write mathematics papers or other complicated TeX documents. My TeX code is very macro heavy (I know some mathematicians who define almost everything through macros so that they can rewrite the paper quickly) and, as a result, I've never really seen the benefit of unicode mathematics.

To go one step further: I think writing Greek letters (or, for that matter, any Latin letter that does not have a standard mathematical meaning) is an anti-pattern in mathematical prose: I think it is much, much better to write \coercivenessSymbol than \gamma or the unicode variant for the same reasons I would not name a floating point number gamma.
But aren't hard things going to be hard to do?

There are things that, if you did them in a GUI, would be multiple steps down the tree of menus. It seems natural to me that they require multiple commands.

(Not that LaTeX is perfect, for sure. Admit I only glanced at this. But after trying a bunch of things that the author asserts are simplifiers, I've not found one that is as capable. All too often they make super simple things that are already simple, and then fall back to LaTeX for the rest.)
The problem is, the market isn't static, but dynamic. You play an iterative game. It turns out that spending more money on spreading the word about your apples has better ROI than spending that money on ensuring you actually have the best apples... And even if you achieve best apples and best marketing, think of just how much money you had to spend on the marketing part. How much better still would your apples be if you didn't have to play the zero-sum game of advertising? How much better everyone's products would be?
I totally disagree with this article.
Just a Man Giving the Best Massage of Life
Gfgf
Once there was an Desktop-Environment called KDE 3. It has this Interprocess-Communication called dcop. Around that time there were serious attempts made to reach a similar level like AppleScript. There even were plans to recreate the Wokflow(?)-App from MacOS. But then KDE4 came, DBUS replaced dcop and things became a complicated mess. Today DBUS is still used, but the spirit to externally automate your apps seems to mostly gone, and remaining abilitys are just a shadow of past promises.
Don't the independent operators have insurance?
Apple Will Go All-OLED in 2018
Modern JS engines can be significantly faster than Perl in many workloads. Perl’s closest performing neighbours are Ruby, PHP and Python.
That's right, but it doesn't mean that you have to be a consenting victim in these developments.
I guess what's amazing about this is that a 51% attack on Bitcoin could be achieved by a relatively modestly sized company. More worrying I guess is the prospect of somebody with a suitably powerful botnet attacking the network for 'free'.
Israel's $10B Island Project Sparks European Interest
Design Patterns for betting app developers
Kuyy
China's [...] willingness to execute people for corruption

I read a fascinating (although very cynical) book a few months ago, and it said something very interesting about corruption.

If an autocracy needs to buy the loyalty of the army/police/government officials, instead of paying them cash the autocracy can simply turn a blind eye to corruption. That means you don't need to spend your own money to bribe them - and if any of them display disloyalty, you can simply have them executed... for corruption!

So you always have to be wary when you hear a regime is cracking down on corruption - it may be they're simply cracking down on disloyalty, while retaining their private pro-corruption stance.
The law calls that a complex lottery. But it's still a lottery, and the UK law on lotteries is very simple: No for-profit lotteries.

You can (and at least two big companies do) make money from operating a lottery on behalf of a charity, but you can't run a lottery where the profits themselves go somewhere other than a "good cause" such as a charity. And the UK has tighter regulation than the US of charities so it's harder to have a "charity" that basically just puts money into your own pockets.
Even TOTP is not a good 2fa system for a bank login, at least if that account allows you to send money somewhere: TOTP codes do not differentiate by transaction type, so if a fraudster has taken over your computer, it can wait for you to login using TOTP and then send a wire transfer in the background (using the same TOTP quickly enough if necessary or just asking you to log in again, pretending your first code was wrong).

That’s why proper banks should use 2FA mechanisms that will ask the user to confirm the transaction on a second device (e.g. photoTAN or similar).

Of course, this won’t help against attacks if both devices are compromised or you are using the second factor device to access the system, but it’s still better than TOTP.

And, of course, TOTP is still way better than SMS 2FA or no 2FA.
Totally biased opinion, but I think you should check out https://github.com/mokies/ratelimitj if you are Java based.
Jghdjgh
If trucking is less profitable, maybe we ship more things by train. That's a lot better for the environment too.
> ...must issue plastic cups to curb broken class everywhere. Will we have to go back to glass...

I'd say multiple-use polycarbonate is a better substitute. It has the rigidity of glass without the brittleness. What it lacks is hardness (it scratches rather easily) so these containers probably won't last as long as glass ones before they need to be replaced.

> ...The current deposit fees on plastic bottles are too low, once you're earning enough money it doesn't make any financial sense to return them.

Then thrash them, fine. As long as you don't toss 'm out of your window but put them in the bin when done with them they should end up in some recycling process, paid for by the deposit fee you waived. This does imply that the deposit fee balance should go to these purposes instead of ending up as a profit statement somewhere.
Why not allow the user to specify the level of optimization?
They even have a term for that: Servicewüste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servicew%C3%BCste
Gbjklfj
It violates GDPR because it defaults to enabled. GDPR states that data collection should be opt-in.
He mentions he'll update the blog post with a link to the talk he gave once it's online
Sure it is, right up until either a) we ruin it, or b) the universe decide to throw an large asteroid at us and wipes us all out.
Not exactly what you have asked for but you can find the LaTeX sources of the book at https://github.com/ds26gte/tyscheme with instructions of building a PDF version.