skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ProtonVPN Is a SCAM – Unveiling the Dirty Secrets of Proton and NordVPN
Absolutely dripping and oozing with all indicators this was a publicity stunt
Not to belittle his accomplishment, but it's the times of great hardship where the search for meaning flourishes. See Viktor Frankl. It is the gift hidden in the horror.
I did a Master in CS, worked as a developer for 5 years, then went back to do a Ph.D. I stayed with it for a year before deciding it was not for me, and went back to SW development.

My key reasons for not continuing with the Ph.D.:

- Many problems you study are chosen because you will be able to publish something, not necessarily because they need to be studied.

- You don’t need to be a (Ph.D.)student to learn - you can work and still learn

- A Ph.D. in itself doesn’t make you smart

- Narrow problems vs broad problems - I prefer to work on something where all parts need to be good enough, vs on finding the best possible solution to a very narrow problem.

- Having worked before starting the Ph.D., I could compare working in industry vs studying for a Ph.D., and I realized it was very stimulating in industry.

- Much better pay for 5 years

I've written more on why here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...
Because hackers have hearts and some of us have kids.
> I'd be interested in any opinions here about how to financially support this project. At the very least I'd just love to somehow make this my job.

One of the cases where developers still use text based browsers is in attempting to check accessibility of websites. For many large enterprises, there's a legal or contractual requirement to ensure a certain level of accessibility for users with disabilities.
> As most companies need to extract product data on a daily basis, waiting a couple days for your engineering team to fix any broken spiders isn’t an option. When these situations arise, Scrapinghub uses a machine learning based data extraction tool that we’ve developed as a fallback until the spider has been repaired.

I once worked on a spider that crawled article content and I ran into the same problem. I always wanted to try the following solution to it but never had the chance.

Assume you have a database of URLs and the fields you've scraped from them in the past (title, author, date, etc). If you ever fail to scrape one of those values from a new URL, here's what you do:

- Go back to one of the old URLs where you already have the correct value (let's say it's the title).

- Walk through the whole DOM until you find that known title. At each node you will have to remove child nodes except for text, to deal with titles like "Foo <span>Bar</span>" which you want to match against "Foo Bar". So this is going to be an expensive search.

- Generate several possible selectors which match the node you walked to (maybe you have ".title", ".title h2", ".content .top h2", etc).

- Test each new selector on several other already-crawled pages. If any of the selectors work 100% of the time, there's your new selector.

Any thoughts on whether something like this would work?
On the other hand, my friends getting the PhDs in subjects such as education (Stanford) and conservation biology (Mississippi State) have described it as the highlight of their life. After their first two years, they’re basically getting paid to do whatever they want. They audit classes. Apply to grants. Travel. And they write.

I wonder if they have family money.

This is actually not a snide comment. The people I knew who did a PhD and liked it had enough money, typically from families and sometimes from a spouse, to not worry about money, or five+ years at substandard wages. I worked part-time as a grant-writing consultant, so I was fine, but I saw financial privations all around me. To the point I wrote this: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...

Granted, science PhDs are often better funded and more lucrative post-degree, but even among people in the sciences financial factors often loomed.
Your comment is off-topic. The article is about pay equity, not gender diversity.
I would definitely pick up the phone and ask but you have to admit there's always the danger of being said a very firm "NO!" and some people might actually investigate who are you and take active measures to block any traffic coming from you (which is not very hard if you give them your email during the call).

So I would think most scraping services assume they will be refused when doing such requests so they never bother.
NYT coverage discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17481404
This is the million dollar question. If you want a long-term career in academic research, you pretty much have to strive towards running your own lab; you can’t string together 2-3 year contracts, scattered all over the globe, for your entire life. Even if you were willing to, there are all sorts of stupid institutional barriers to doing this. In particular, there’s a ridiculous bias towards funding recent PhDs and funding is very hard to find after ~4 years.

I would wager that one experienced researcher at $70k easily trumps 2-3 Masters students at $25k each. However, there are lots of mechanisms for funding studentships, but few for paying for experienced employees. The NCI had experimented with something like this, but there were maybe 100 positions total. This is a shame for many different reasons but seems depressingly unlikely to change any time soon.
And absolutely nobody was surprised.

I wonder what a donation of the equivalent value of that thing would have achieved?
That was the great opportunity for windows phone. It's still there - the other players still haven't caught up with the powerful windows ecosystem yet.
> For gaming, Windows is awesome.

Eh... kinda. It certainly has the best hardware available for the task, and is still open enough that developers need not get approval to distribute software for it, or create software for it, but one wonders how long that will last.

See: https://youtu.be/rWrHfGfzoOE?t=6757 for additional ranting. (from that time to the end, there are some unrelated Q&A).
If the adversary has the level of physical access required to pull this off you've already lost.
I'm not particularly fond of how OpenShift is put together, but it does seem like you're overreacting somewhat.

CoreOS is pretty well aligned with Fedora, so it makes sense for it to go there organizationally. And while it's inevitable that everything in Red Hat's orbit will have a clear path to OpenShift (and probably Ansible), I'm hopeful that this won't add any noticable overhead to CoreOS/CL itself.
One factor in this discussion on what do to about "idiots" is: if it weren't for those people who do "stupid things" and require rescue, the rescue organizations would have to hire people to simulate real rescue conditions.

There are always situations that require rescue that are not the fault of the victim. We thus need prepared rescuers, and the best preparation is real situations. The problem with a simulation is it is unethical to send someone out without enough food/shelter to potentially survive. Thus you never get a real race against the clock where you have to make life or death decisions without enough information.
It'll probably take place somewhere in the US and white wash it with white actors. Maybe they'll make one of the kids (a girl) Asian to give a little nod to the original story.
They actually went much deeper into the cave than they intended, trying to escape the flood waters (which had already blocked their way out).
As I understand it it's pretty controversial to promote fishing invasive species, because the concern is it could motivate people to deliberately cause the invasive species to spread.
What is your "mission"? $329 is a lot of money if all you do is use mobile apps and you already have a phone whereas for this new surface 399 gets you a computer where you have tablet functionality as well as full OS.

Surface is wonderful at showing and creating presentations :)
"When he dug in to find out why there was a discrepancy, he discovered that the manual measurements made in the '50s and '60s were off, in some cases by 20 percent to 30 percent."

I'd heard that during the war the US exaggerated the power of nuclear weapons but this is the first time I've seen evidence to substantiate the claim. Was the data high or low? I perused the article twice and couldn't find clarification.
And you're going to be hitting millions of hosts anyway, so all you have to do is rotate from one host to the next and randomize your worker queues. It might take a little longer but you will not blow up someone's aging server. Being a good citizen of the net means to take into account that even if you have gigabits of bandwidth to burn the counterparty may not (and could easily be on the sharp end of a bandwidth capped contract).
I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave.

My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent:

https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/...

This is the patent system working as intended. A magician revealing his tricks. Tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise to not compete with you for a while.

The patent system could work if patent clerks had the time to be a lot more discerning and reject any patent that is obvious or already known. But it takes a lot of work to do that and the deluge of patents makes it impossible to give each application sufficient consideration.

I think the general idea of patents is good, but perhaps it's impossible to execute it correctly.

Edit: Should have read the damn article. They address concern further below and also argue that patents are not revealing any secrets because pattent attorneys are not qualified to judge the merit of patents and because the way patents are written makes it almost impossible to reproduce their results, and sometimes patents are granted for utter nonsense, such as moving "through the fifth dimension".
When contact was first made, they had no idea how long they had been in there and asked "how long have we been here".

Sat in the dark, with no night and day, the bodies internal clock gets shot to pieces. They would have had no idea whether they had been there 3 days or 30
Especially in a place like Thailand where there is a lot of real poverty still.
Slightly, as well as removing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdeleting characters, but the picture invariably shows the keys used, so it will in any case reduce the complexity of brute force attacks by several orders of magnitude.
Stockton, CA set to be first in nation to experiment with Universal Basic Income
Show HN: EcomBurst – Promote your e-commerce store using AI
Sync is the primary use case for CouchDB (and PouchDB). It really deserves more attention for that IMO.

It's not ideal for a lot of other use cases, but where it fits it shines.
The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns?

Watched that episode with the South Vietnam veteran recalling that episode where he was left for dead (literally, by his own allies AND adversaries), crawled through the jungle for 3 days and only then felt the pain and smelled the nasty odor of the rotting flesh.
What's that saying, 'physical access is total access'?
If you are anticipating a 'no' then you definitely should ask for permission.

The only valid reason for starting a large scraping operation is because you can argue that permission would be granted anyway.
People can live over 60 days without food, so maybe that part isn't so unexpected.

Water of course is a different story..I believe after 48 hours severe dehydration sets in...after 3 days...kaput.
> loads into memory ~30Mb

Is that the asciinema player, or the "video" it plays? Either way: I thought part of the point of asciinema was that it compresses better for terminal capture? Just how much data was stored by that particular session?
> built around the idea of a write never failing.

What am I missing if I think this sounds like a very interesting thought experiment, but completely disconnected from reality?
Didn't Gibson profited enough from their acquired IP? Surely they have to compete at some point and not just own idea forever doing nothing but moving shareholders property.
Most importantly, engineers and idea-makers behind original solution made more than enough profit since CakeWalk and Oberheim were produced. Poor Gibson can't buy right IP at the right time so they can do nothing and not make anything new - who cares.

>some of them might risk it for some new idea that if not received well bankrupts them personally

Owning IP exclusively forever doesn't change this at all. If IP is good then you can defend it for a some time to make profit on edge.

>It's happening all the time

Not with synthesizers/software/ee developers because of IP expiring too soon.

>now imagine getting a perfect clone maker to the mix, selling "legends" for cheap that might be good enough for 90% of users;

Imagine what all these people could do now! They could produce new innovative things.

Imagine Gibson was shit and would make shit new software that would cost as much as possible and own IP forever. That's easy to imagine because IP rights holders pushing hard for this change. That's sucks for everyone but Gibson since they get $ doing nothing. They cn also easily fire anyone involved in this innovation and prevent them from working with anything similar.
Working with Legacy Code: Cooleaf Refactor Case Study
Code that learns your face in under 10 seconds
Why include one? Including an Xbox One controller will increase the price $60 for... what? You won't be able to run Xbox games on this device. While lots of PC games do include controller support, this isn't universal, and most of them are third party and aren't great for pack-in. And it dilutes the messaging of this as a portable device.

I'm not dissuading you from your tablet gaming dream, but hook up an Xbox One controller to this and you'll get the experience you're proposing.
Or use a language where fully utilizing all CPU cores is transparent, like Elixir? There's zero complexity, you basically add 4-5 lines of code and that's it. Honestly, not exaggerating.

I've done several very amateur scrapers in the last several years, I am never going back to languages with a global interpreter lock, ever.
It's odd that you admit you don't know what went down but are still passing judgement.

Even if he did, he didn't interfere or impede rescue efforts and gave them a tool they could possible use in the future. It's cool and a nice thing to do, and doesn't really seem like a big deal.
Calling for prison without knowing much is very harsh.

We don't know if the coach led them in or if he just followed them.

We don't know how far in they went initially. Maybe they just went a bit inside the cave and then increasing water levels forced them further in.

At least he stayed with the boys. Imagine if no adult had been there.

Blaming the coach for the death of the rescue diver is completely uncalled for. There is causality, yes, but it was hardly foreseeable to the coach - if he really led them in - that they would get caught by flooding and that as a result of that a rescue attempt would be launched in which a diver would die.
I've had the same idea, it kind of sounds like the obvious thing to do...

That said, i haven't found a need to do that yet to verify the idea itself.

Maybe that is similar to what they do using their "ML approach" mentioned?
Exactly. If the adversary has a camera pointed at your keyboard, they can even possibly attempt the more radical (and indefensible) “I literally recorded what you typed” attack. Scary stuff.
> I think some CS/engr programs actually have built-in expectations of doing internships with industry, which seems really backwards to me

Why do you think this is backwards? Industry often has more resources for research than academia does, so doing an industrial internship is usually a way to supercharge your research and get better data and try more things.

How is that backwards?
12 Frameworks for Mobile Hybrid Apps
"low latency"

USB2 has low enough latency for gaming mice and keyboards, and the various embedded display port interfaces (USB-C alternate mode, thunderbolt) have no more latency than desktop DP.
> I think the general idea of patents is good

Also, there may be a fundamental difference between physical inventions, where patents seem to make sense, and mathematical theorems (and computer algorithms), where patents do not make sense at all.
I run VS code on the older surface pro 4 and it is fine. Electron isn't that slow.
I'd argue that since Apple is removing all of the ports, and everyone else is following suit, there's an untapped market for big, fat, x86 phones with usb-c ports and 3.5mm jacks and maybe even sd card slots.
The authors summarize as:

> ... there is no empirical evidence that [patents] serve to increase innovation and productivity ...

This seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding as to what purpose patents serve. The public benefit of a patent is that the information is public -- inventions which might previously have been kept secret are instead put into the light where others may use them. The cost to the public of patents are that such use must be deferred out of respect for the temporary monopoly granted to the patent holder.

That is, patents don't increase innovation or productivity -- that is by design. They are just a means of harnessing the innovation and productivity of individuals and encouraging them to make their work public instead of keeping it a secret. So it seems to me that the paper is arguing a strawman rather than making a useful point.
Bayer just built a better mousetrap – to secure our food supply
I would never choose mongodb after using it. Postgres has never failed me in a decade, where mongo is huge pain in the ass in the last year. Honestly the concept of schema less is stupid. You just eventually have to implement SQL to the documents. It's an obnoxious waste of time.
Any further information on this? Last I looked (which was a while ago), the infrastructure like HTML parsers seemed surprisingly tricky in Elixir.
Spark is significantly more efficient than Hadoop.

I don’t know about your specific workload, but i’ve seen quite a few Hadoop setups that were at 100% load most of the time, and were replaced by relatively simple non Hadoop based code that used 2% to 10% of the hardware and ran about as fast.

I didn’t spend much time evaluating the “pre”, but at least one workload spent 90% of the 100% on [de]serialization.

It’s not my link, it is Frank McSherry who is commenting in this thread - I hope he can chime in on why he chose this specific example - but it correlates very well with my experience.
One can easily attach a long tele lens to one of these cameras, so one could capture passwords through windows. Specialized IR lenses are expensive, but regular lenses can do a good enough job.

Edit: my bad IR doesn't go through most glass material. Still, laptops are commonly used in public, and through lenses or otherwise, your password can be leaked. That's worrying enough to stop the "physical access means total access" adagio in this thread.
Sure. My point is that just "being the change you wish to see in the world" is nowhere near enough for actual change to happen.
I agree. I think that all patents aren't created equal. We'd have less issues if software patents were only valid for like 5 years. You still have protection but you get rid of a lot of the trolls and the IBMs of the world having 10K patents. For more physical things, the protection can be longer since it takes longer to recoup your investment.
I am also a big fan of Ubuntu Server and Mark Shuttleworth. The guy does not get the proper credit. He's basically running a charity for hackers and startups yet, for some reason, is not very popular on HN.
Physical access is often considered total access in the infosec community.

It implies the ability to, with enough prep time ahead of the actual physical access, inject malware through a physical interface (USB flash drive, rogue peripheral/HID, directly interfacing with an existing HID device), among others.

Edit: and in this case it includes planting cameras and other recording devices which can be assumed to have effectively limitless video/audio resolution.
Well I suppose the most pressing problem is that we will create conditions such that we ourselves are not longer able to survive, or at least some significant portion of us will not. Rising sea levels and increased extreme weather events will also cause substantial financial loss, even if you don't care about the loss of natural wonders.
7am alarm every day (even weekends). Most nights asleep before 12pm. I shoot for 1030-11pm.

I found that getting up at the same exact time every day was much more stabilizing than forcing myself to go to bed at the same time every night. Once I got used to waking up at the same time, falling asleep around the same time came naturally.

If something out of the ordinary happens, or I stay out on a Friday/Saturday night, I stick to my 7am alarm and then nap to catch up as needed.
I've had a couple of work experience students work on my teams. I started them off with manual QA and, as they learned our product, I asked for their help reviewing documentation and tutorials.

Having fresh eyes learn the product and then focus on user experience yielded some great insights. From there, most of the time, we slowly moved into user support. Afterwards, I'd assign special projects depending on personality and interests. One had a really amazing knack for front end design, so she ended up rebuilding most of our support site. Another was just a brilliant, compassionate writer. She rewrote most of our tutorials and translated many of our support materials into French. A few months in and she had advanced enough to become my replacement's most important resource. I still can't quite believe her growth over a short time.

In retrospect, I don't think the particular tasks matter as much as the mindset. I gave them important tasks that they could handle and, as they learned more, I gave them more. And, I know that our entire company trusted them. Finally, this only worked because upper management completely supported me.
Maybe someone can help me out on a question I've not got a clear answer on: is it better to build your artefact (jar file in this case) and put that in the docker image, or is it better to put everything you need in the image (source files, dependencies etc) then build the artefact from within the container?

Seems to me like the first approach (compile outside then put artefact in container) is the most sane/sensible approach and the one used here in Jib, but I have seen people advocating the build-in-container approach as better (self-contained, repeatable and so on).

Any benefits to the build-in-container approach that are compelling?