skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once I was hacking an android app to get free coupons. After some investigation I found out they decided to generate the same coupon for n-customers, the coupons were changed every day, the coupon was based on MD5 or SHA1 of generated deterministic value (based on customer ID and date). There were 32k possible coupons per day. App was checking if the account and coupon is valid on their server, but it was always valid as they used the same algorithms in the app and on server... The core of the application was written in C#, launched by Mono on Android.

Java was compiled correctly with ProGuard (code obfuscator), but C# code was compiled in debug mode. C# in debug mode keeps variable/class/method names as they are in source code, leaves comments in the binary, binary file is bigger and slower. You can decompile it to compilable source code, literally.

I managed to get incorrectly protected secret key (they used GPG to encrypt JWT to server lol), later I managed RE of their API, make my own app with identical UI and working coupons. This allowed me to get free coupons every day for next almost 2 years. There were several updates in Google Play since then, but they haven't changed the logic or anything, the app is still in debug mode and anyone can use it. What is interesting, they have also app for iOS which is not in debug mode. Consistency is the key.

After I stopped using their services, I checked their ToS that you have to accept before registering and they prohibit app decompilation, but I never registered and never before read ToS, so it's OK for me ;) I wanted to report the problem but they have literally no contact information, I spent a few hours trying to find their contact details, Twitter is dead since 2014, no contact@ email, no contact form on website... nothing.

Lesson for you: check if your apps are correctly compiled and secrets protected, there are tools for it. In my previous company we had a Jenkins job to test it before release.
What about Datomic Ions?
Did you mean "won't go faster"? This reads like an unmarked sarcasm.
Age of adulthood is 18 here as well, but you're a "limited adult" de iure (sorry, not exact translation, not sure how to translate correctly) between 15 and 18.

I didn't realise that US schools have lower age, though - but no one differentiates between the young ones and the older ones even though the majority should be older than 15, right?
I really don’t like that plan. It may not be bad, depending on what the noise is, but unless it’s done well it will be a new, annoying sound that I have to hear all the time.

I don’t see the safety benefits either. Cars going less than 20 mph are not particularly dangerous. On top that that, in most situations where you’re going less than 20 it’s the drivers responsibility to watch for pedestrians, not the other way around. (Parking lots, big streets in cities where there’s crosswalks every couple hundred feet, shared spaces where pedestrians and cars are in the same lane).

It’s probably more likely to let people drive faster through parking lots (as people hear the car behind them and move over) than create any safety improvements.
BLU Android Pie Update Release Date Schedule
Which would be reasonable if Panera bread had a protected Monopoly on bread selling, and great profit margins. The analogy breaks down but isps also way under invest in service and maintenance relative to demand. Because they can.
No, they're referring to real bagels (chewy, with a shiny exterior) as "Jewish", as opposed to fluffy-white-bread-roll-with-a-hole that is sometimes marketed as a bagel.
If you enjoyed this then I highly recommend reading "Learning to see creatively" by Bryan Peterson.

The book basically consists of him walking you through how he made some of his great photographs. What the location looked like, which angles he considered and why some worked better (compositionally) than others. It was really eye opening and completely changed the way I walk around and take photos! (from random snapshots to well considered compositions)

Highly, highly recommended.
Denmark is not so clear cut. Here SKAT, the tax system presumes citizens guilty and they have to prove their innocence. This can mean jail time too for the citizens
Target sdk is different from min sdk. The feature set you can use depends on min sdk.
Other articles talking about this technology mention the possibility of using clean energy (solar/wind) to desalinate water to facilitate the production of ammonia.
China announces 25% tariffs on $16B worth US goods
This Former Hacker Wants to Make the Internet a Better Place
why would you do this when regular autoscale could just be used instead?
Sounds more expensive than scaling up more servers on demand.
> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics

Having metrics is important, but thinking that metrics - any set of metrics - capture the whole of reality is delusional. And anyway, in the end you can always quantify your ROI in terms of money.
I just love this comment.

I'm going to steal it for my next training on how to design an API.

When you are a computer scientist, you want to think about your data structures so badly first. It fits your brain so well, and it's easier to understand a program from them than the rest of the code.

But it's a trap.
Thing is 86% of people in a recent China poll indicated they would use Google instead of Baidu. Baidu has the market share but not the love of their users.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo-google-...
I'm in the same boat, I find these benefits of a 60% keyboard to be well worth it. Desk space, and a large mouse pad seem to pay dividends, particularly with multiple monitors.
How is it a "narrative"? The widespread and coordinated use
of drug laws to persecute minorities is a matter of historical fact. Are you disputing the historical facts? Are you familiar with the rigorous academic research on this subject? You might want to start here [1]. Calling something a "narrative" doesn't actually change anything, let alone the facts.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/680751.The_Marijuana_Con...
Read 48 Laws of Power to understand why it doesn't work like that. The constitution, checks and balances, regulations etc are an attempt to engineer the natural forces of power into more productive directions, but, "there are no hard lines in nature", and all attempts to engineer hard lines will show strain at the limits, for example this square wave is actually a sum of curves: https://archive.cnx.org/resources/0d187381962fb659307c284776...

"A would-be reformer who wants to improve social welfare by changing people's behavior to a better equilibrium must take care to identify a social plan that is in fact a Nash equilibrium, so that nobody can profit by unilaterally deviating from the plan." Meyerson – full quote here: http://www.dustingetz.com/:web-3.0/
That calculation doesn’t include the salary of the person managing those EC2 instances. Lambda is easier to manage and costs less time than an EC2 box. SSH keys, backups, AMI base images, system updates , it all adds up. Ansible and terraform are so far removed from the core competency of any company that you really need to ask yourself, for any second you spend working on them: is this worth it? At almost no company’s scale* is it so.

Salary is a hidden cost people often forget. Or time spent by your programmer’s debugging infra; time not spent creating value. Frustration from having to deal with TF or ansible in the first place.

These are all benefits of a serverless solution which cost aware criticisms should at least try to quantify and take into account.

Signed, not-a-shill.

* I’ll rephrase: a significant amount of companies don’t have the luxury of being so swamped by requests they can saturate EC2 boxes and make the devops overhead (which, I’m arguing, is big but relatively constant/“sub linear”) worth the price difference (which scales linearly). Significant enough for these articles to have a raison d’être.
As an employer you can easily test anything you want during the interview, tailored to the job's needs and expectation: technical knowledge, working under pressure, soft skills, etc. Then why would you care about school marks when the candidate proves able on the interview?

It's because academic performance is by design an average of skills displayed over multiple years. You can't fulfill the expectations of all employers at once with a standardized test. The degree (and the marks attached to it) just show the average performance per topic over the years. How fast you can finish your assignment is an integral part of any academic program. That's why you get tight(ish) deadlines for any assignment, and exam times.

By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.

I'm not saying the exams become irrelevant, just that this kind of thing does more to discredit the image of women in STEM than a slightly lower exam mark. This just strengthens preconceptions that some groups need help to be equal. And it's backed up by universities and whatever science they used to reach this conclusion.
Stacked Borrows: an aliasing model for Rust
You can broil a steak in an oven and it would be ok. A cowboy steak could cause a major fire in something like this. I'd never waste a decent steak in a toaster oven. This sort of thing is for the person who had a windfall and is now looking for the very bestest everist possible things including the worlds most expensive toaster oven.
Gerald M. Weinberg has passed away
Creating a DSL for Music in Haskell and Clojure
Wikipedia entry for those who think, “The name sounds familiar, but...”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg
That might have been true of the original bone script characters, but over the millennia they have been stylized beyond recognition, and many new characters were created. Modern Japanese or Chinese is about as mnemonic as the typical icon set used in a GUI application.

However, most characters are composed of a few common components, called radicals, which can sometimes provide hints about the meaning. For example, the Chinese words 海 "sea", 波浪 "wave" and 渴 "thirsty" all contain the water radical ⺡. Similarly for 丝绸 "silk" and 缠绕 "wind around", which contain the thread radical ⺓.

Personally, I don't use any mnemonics, but I know someone who does, and he'd assigned each radical a memorable representation (e.g. the thread corresponds to Spiderman) and then he had a story linking a word to the components, so that 丝绸 would be about two Spidermen, one of which wraps himself in silk to use it as a ghost costume.
Many possible examples, but Dwight MacDonald's "Mass Culture" (1953) is a good start.

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...
That sounds good in writing, but it doesn’t seem to work in real life for some reason.

Two of the cities I’ve lived in have been places with several large businesses focused on a single non-factory industry. They could never get enough workers, so demand for labor was high and because of that so were wages.

The prevailing attitude among the very local teens (2nd generation plus) was “Why should I go to college when I can make $xx/hour working in the industry?”

Their parents also worked in the industry and thus didn’t push their children to go to college.

The mentality is so pervasive that at a community event I saw an industry table set up with a big banner reading “Why you don’t need college,” and nobody else thought that was odd.

The result is that most of the locals are pretty dumb. They make poor decisions in their personal lives, which has an impact on the entire city, it’s policing policies and it’s healthcare system.

Non-industry businesses are reluctant to move to those cities because they can’t find educated workers, so the economy can’t diversify.

I saw a tech startup hiring people straight out of high school simply because that’s all it could find. Not surprisingly, the company failed in under a year.

It’s a shame that college is so expensive, and there should be a way to fix that. But in my experience, employers wanting degrees helps society ad a whole because it encourages more people to seek higher education who would otherwise be complacent.
The Status of Distributed Computing – July 2018 Update
Great response. You have correctly put the burden of proof on the claimant.
Why should drivers get the right of way and implicit use of all of the road? Why not people? Cars should be second class citizens to people on the roads, unless they are specifically highways.
So this is question I've wanted to ask for awhile.

Is AWS Lambda really "serverless", or is the server part just buried so deep in the stack that the app devs can disregard it?

And if it is truly "serverless", what mechanism is being used to "serve" the function calls? How is this radically different from say a REST-api that auto-routes function names from url POSTs and GETs?

I suppose I could look all this stuff up, but to be honest having a quick rundown of this tech stack here on HN sure would save me the time.

Thanks in advance.
This sounds like fraud, is it wise to be admitting to this publicly?
Continuous integration in projects using monorepo
Could you name them?
Anyone else please do too the X-wing sites you think are worthwhile. It's intersting to see different points of view.
No, but it's great story on how not to make apps with coupons. I've learnt a lot from it and you can too. Just look at the bigger picture of it how many antipatterns they implemented and how many things they did wrong.
A Theory of Mass Culture (1953) [pdf]
> in stead of stripped after the download (like with uBlock)

That's quite an erroneous statement, especially given how easy it is to verify.

You can see for yourself by using uBlock Origin along with your pi-hole: your pi-hole will see _less_ network requests with uBO (or any other similar blockers really).

Everything which is blocked by uBO will not be seen by your pi-hole, and this simple observation contradicts your statement.
The doctors in my family all graduated from med school with less than 20k total student loan debt. School was much cheaper 30 years ago
Okay. So the code was "leaked" on Github. How is the headline misleading?
I once read the quickest way to get a legitimate answer to your question on stack overflow was to post a bad answer. I think there is something similar to say about a blog post with bad information :) If you are wrong, at least there is a chance someone will point it out.
One could also use a data diode.
You don't need to start a war to drone one guy.
Love my topre keyboard. Would love to have another one just for my office. They are definitely pricey, but I vastly prefer the "soft clunk" of their feel for typing. Ideally I would like to find an ergonomic keyboard with topre switches, but I don't know if such a keyboard really exists.
It's the latter. The server is just abstracted away. As far as I know lambda is just docker containers running on EC2.
Yes, just figure out how to reverse one of the fundamental forces of the universe that may not actually be a force.

Then perform that on a scale capable of shifting the path of something that contains practically all of the mass of the solar system.

Far from "too boring", it seems "too implausible". Your "step 1" would be a huge leap in and of itself.
Data visualization caveats
I thought age of adulthood was 21 in the US? You can't drink till then or enter a lot of places alone?
Obviously it does have servers and is quite similar to the router you describe. It's also similar to the old CGI and FastCGI systems.

It's only serverless in the sense that you don't have to use servers as a unit of account; at no point do you have to say "how many servers are we paying for?" or "what sort of servers should we get/lease/instantiate on EC2".
Running on a sidewalk is terribly unpleasant, and has its own dangers. Sidewalks tend to be uneven, among other tripping hazards. And there is limited reaction time to anticipate motorists who speed out of driveways, bowling past the sidewalk but braking before they enter the street.
The headline is misleading because it implies the source code was already on GitHub.

If the source was not already on GitHub, then a "GitHub Leak" of that source could not possibly be caused by a software error.
It is serverless in the sense that the dev (or sysadm) doesn't have to worry about the server. You can't touch anything that affects the OS in any way, you only really give it your code and binaries to run.

In ways it's similar to Heroku but with a very different pricing model.
It almost certainly runs on servers, but from the developer's perspective, it doesn't matter. It could be hamsters on wheels. It's abstracted from you.

Lambda is just code execution. API Gateway is the service that maps REST API endpoints to Lambda function executions.
> In this case, the mechanism seems too general -- if I want to read all the outstadning tuples with 2 as the second elememt, that's possible, but seems rather hard

How is this any different than an SQL query with 2 in the second column? Tuple spaces seem like a RDBMS with a more restricted query model.
The problem is, your coworker need to modify the generated code.
The lack of options/failure of the political system does not disprove the narrative that there were/are racial motives behind some of the systems we live with today.

"It can't be whites vs blacks, politicians that black people voted for did it too".

When you actually write out your argument it doesn't make any sense. What if they were given two options, both of whom would have continued racist policies? There's also a phenomenon whereby politicians identified with a specific "outsider" group have a lot more pressure (and ability) to defy the interests or stereotypes of that group. H Clinton under a lot more pressure to be hawkish to defy weak women narrative. Obama under a lot more scrutiny about anything that could be seen as a handout to African Americans. Politicians from the left often ripping up regulations, because they sedate the left who would have prevented right candidates from doing it.

Basically, it's way more complicated and your argument doesn't hold water.
Their success is due to corruption and the lack of competition they are afforded. They barely do enough aside from collect money to avoid being displaced, despite how protected they are. Our ISPs suck terribly.
> If you think the absolute mark is an appropriate criteria then yes, that should be it.

Not absolute mark. Just the same standards.

> If you are looking at ability to apply oneself as being the criteria you have to examine a lot more.

Which is fine with me as long as the same criteria is applied equally.

Equal being the key here.
Who is going to lend tens of thousands of dollars to an 18 year old with no income, no assets, and no credit?
The same way you disagree with anything unilaterally. By yourself =)
The article is total SWJ crap. I have worked in the legal biz, have relatives who are attorneys. 99.9% of the people who come through the courst are guilty. The courts are extremely lenient with sentencing unless there are extenuating circumstances. In my state, bail is offered to all by law, even the most dangerous offenders (who then often go out and re-offend, including committing murders). If anything, the system isn't tough enough. People who can't make bail and stay in jail? You have to realize that that is the only jail time they will see for often very violent crimes.

The system is a mess, yes, but it is not as unjust as depicted in that article. I keep hearing all these comparisons to China and think that is also so tone deaf. China is a place of no justice whatsoever. Any serious crimes in China result in a sentence of a bullet in the back of the head. There is seriously no comparison to US justice, even the worst jurisdictions.

Let me explain something else while I'm here, too: The US wouldn't have so much damn crime had the liberals not insisted upon allowing so many millions of illegal immigrants into the country. That act alone was reprehensible and so far beyond the pale of ethical governance. The breach of public trust by those looking to import humans as a political weapon is astounding. They don't care about the plight of those people, they just want to jam up the system and thereby break it, which has worked quite well.
I’m not sure how it was handled in Florida (where the infamous chad incident happened), but in at least some other states it was more electromechanical than electronic.

FWIW, the place I voted during that election was straight up mechanical.
"Serverless" means you don't have to manage the servers or the infrastructure. AWS(or whoever) abstracts this part for you.

And yes, in some sense, they do abstract this away for you, but then you just have different kind of problems. So your efforts just shift towards other difficulties presented by such technologies. But I digress :)
Cause probably many people (including me) assumed that "Github leak caused by bad ios" was the reason why snapchat's code was leaked.
> I've seen just API Gateway costing more than entire infrastructure costs of similarly sized websites.

Do you mean Api Gateway + the lambdas?

API Gateway is $3.50 per 1 million API calls received plus data transfer ($0.09 per GB or $90 per Terrabyte). What kind of API were they serving that was racking up those large bills?

Typically you would serve static content off s3 + cloudfront, and just the API off the API gateway/lambdas.
I wonder, does converting ammonia to hydrogen absorb energy or release it? (Ie is it endothermic or exothermic?)
These negative posts always show up on top when something even remotely positive about android is posted.
Way better than any Office alternative but also extremely sluggish on my machine. I just use it to read csv files and even at that it's abnormally slow.
RWE would like to shut down a few coal power plants that are no longer profitable in the current distorted market. But the government, the very same technically illiterate government that fouled up the market in the first place, declared that to be illegal, because the plants are "relevant for grid stability".

> Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.

Right, the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world, except for Diesel powered islands, is good for customers.
+1

In college, I did well on math exams precisely because I had a strong understanding of what I was doing. I did not mechanically follow a recipe for a solution like some other students did.

The result was that I usually took the entire exam period (right up to the last minute) to finish, but I usually had a perfect score or close to it. I outperformed high scorers who had completed the exam 30 mins before me by almost 10 points.

The only exam that got the best of me was the first linear algebra exam, which was a lot of mechanical matrix multiplying. I only completed 3/4 questions before the time was up.
Setting that scale is nigh on impossible though. Young people with zero in assets and incredibly rich parents (asset-rich not income). Young people with no assets and poor parents but massive future earning potential (academic or sports stars). Old people with massive material wealth in the value of their houses who will be incredibly unwilling (and make a great newspaper headline) to move it.
> You can completely recover from bankruptcy

No I don't think you can ever completely recover from bankruptcy. I'm often asked on applications for things 'have you ever been bankrupt'. It is a permanent matter of public record that you are a bankrupt.
Looking at the process as a whole, it is burning - or at least oxidation. Starts with NH3 and ends up with H2O and N2 (preferably not NO2). The energy liberated from the bonds is the same. The amount of energy available at the wheels depends on a lot of fine details of how it's used.