skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Threat actors are threat actors no matter if they are “conscious” or not.

Now are current electronic voting machines sufficiently reselient against modern threat actors - probably not.

Especially not in the US where mandating government issued IDs is seen a taboo (I understand why, but as a non-Americans it just seems odd to me) which means that much of modern cryptography backed by “something you have/are” is out of the question.

But the argument that machines are only intended to be reselient against “accidental” attacks is simply incorrect.

The airline industry is a good benchmark of how to manage threats against automated systems if anything a good argument would be that launching an attack against an airline is simply not cost effective while launching an attack against a nation state to sway an election is a completely different ballgame.

And the most important factor is that unlike say causing an airplane to crash you don't actually need to launch a technically successful attack against an election, the allegation and doubt alone can cause long lasting political damage and chaos.

So even if you manage to hack a single machine in a single district and nullify only a single vote the doubt that would be cast on the entire election process not to mention the candidates and the political parties behind them can last for years.
Yes, that's what GP is saying.
Too long did not read. But as I recall it most users do not understand that macros are foremostly tool to enhance compilation. It does not matter how shitty the macro execution is, all that matters is the end product, which is to be compiled. The syntax and code extension function is just annoying mess and regular users should not be encouraged to do that.
I really wish "a bike running a red light" wasn't seen as such a problem. In many places, pedestrian cross on red lights also. In other places, cars can turn right on red lights. In at least one state, bikes can use red lights as stop signs, and stop signs as yield signs.
It is easy run a red light on a bike (or as a pedestrian) in a safe manner, but it often isn't in a car.
I expect that it's role in the OS ecosystem is mostly taken up by projects like FreeRTOS.
Offtopic except for being about an old game being ported to windows:
https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ does that for Descent and Descent II. It's not a clone but actually trying to keep as much of the old game as possible. You'll still need a copy of the old games for the game assets though.
Does Pony have some analogous dodge for logarithms and square roots of reals, or for the gamma function?
(ml expert here)
This doesn't seem true. Neural networks are great at detection, so they should be similarly good at determining whether two objects are identical or not. The fact that their networks didn't do better than chance (as opposed to a "disappointing 10%" error rate") suggests that they trained their networks wrong.
Some futzing about with the Wayback Machine lead me to http://www.remedygames.com/files/DeathRallyWin_10.exe which was denied to archive.org and wasn't available there. Perhaps when remedy released Death Rally for iOS they pulled it?

I've tweeted @remedygames, but I don't want to pester individual employees for it. https://twitter.com/voltagex/status/1028283518336421889

I'm 90% sure that these hashes are good - via AusGamers

MD5 Sum:	81584602e6f809817e62cbce89178727

SHA1 Sum:	bda2a2230c01580ac779f3cf0f5954d234c8c78e

Aha: https://store.steampowered.com/app/108700/Death_Rally/ (remake) and https://store.steampowered.com/app/358270/Death_Rally_Classi... (probably DOSBox?) are probably why that file got pulled.

Annoyingly, 3DRealms used to sell a huge bundle of these games via their site, but that "ended" in 2016. Silly rights agreements.
What a shame. So many smart people and great engineers wasting talent on a socially useless and unproductive product.
PC case maker CaseLabs forced into bankruptcy and liquidation by tariffs
I believe the parent was subjective as well. I am curious as to why you appear to label just this comment. HN is for opinions as well as facts and I deeply value all of them. Particularly the opinions that politely challenge me.
Other than safety, that is.
Yes! I hate the expanding sections 'feature' on mobile Wikipedia. Just give me one long scrolling page with anchor links in a table of contents, like the way the web has worked since the 90s.
Congratulations You just won millions of dollars in the lottery,
Indeed. Java is in fact a sort of worst-of-all-worlds in that it's even possible to catch things that are really unrecoverable errors like StackOverflowException or OutOfMemoryError. To to uninitiated it might not like appear that catching these is that bad, right? In addition to the problems with finally clauses not necessarily running to completion under such circumstances catching these exceptions can cause extremely hard-to-debug deadlocks because object locks won't be released properly.

This is an area where the design of Java/JVM is badly screwed up.

[1] JVM, really. It's pretty unavoidable on most (all?) JVM languages.
And if anyone is interested in knowing more about Factor, this tutorial is pretty good, from basics to the web development using Furnace (Factor Web Framework) - https://andreaferretti.github.io/factor-tutorial/ :-)
Yeah, but Medium is bringing the login wall to my face and asking me, in an (IMO) obnoxious way, to pass to the other side of the wall, again and again.

No biggie, I guess, but it adds up.
Not at all.

There is a world between every single string, array and numeric operation being a possible source of memory corruption and being forced to explicitly write unsafe code.

I have been using mostly safe languages since the 80's.

They only get in the way of cowboy programming, which is a very good thing for anyone that praises quality in software development.

C would no longer be around if companies got properly sued for each CVE exploit.
Hiw many years has it been, and Wikipedia Mobile still has the bug where pressing Back loses your downwards scrolling, since all sections contract momentarily (moving your page position upwards).
I joined a popular video games forum back in about 2000 which, at the time, had some industry folks. Everybody was generally very polite and reasonable but as time went on and more people joined the forum it became more and more tense and the industry people got berated for their games or their commentary and slowly left.
The quality of discourse degraded to the point where there was an outright rebellion against a certain set of trolls who weren't being "dealt with" which led to a mass banning and an exodus that included me.

Most of the refugees wound up at another forum which repeated almost the exact same pathologies over the course of the next few years. I eventually left that community as well.

The conclusion I came to was that I was not gaining anything valuable from my interactions on these forums. I also suspect that pure online interaction that is not backed by in person interaction is ripe for serious problems. Knowing someone in person and interacting with them on some routine basis is a huge bulwark against mistreatment. It's much harder to mistreat someone you have to face in person again soon.

My online interactions are now very limited. I may share an opinion or an answer and I'll read and appreciate the same from others, but I refuse to get into an argument with people that I don't know. I don't think it's edifying to me and I suspect it may not be edifying for most people.
Show HN: Write the Classics – Tool to help you break free of writer's block
It is very limiting to believe that "rules are unabiguous" and should be followed to the letter. Rules are often (partly) wrong, not completely adapted to a situation, etc.
Let's remember that "rules" used to make homosexuality worthy of a prison sentence, drinking alcohol was sometimes illegal too.
Behind Hollywood’s A-List Bidding War for a McDonald’s Monopoly Article
> software voting machines are actually better against accidents than the paper machines they replace. ... It ignores the solution, which isn't to fix software bugs, but to provide an independent, auditable paper trail.

XKCD is not an essay, where this may in fact be the ultimate belief of the comic, there’s only so much space in a comic.

The comic is right that this implementation is bad, and the quote above agrees, it’s the paper audit trail that’s the fix.

I actually agree that software could, emphasis on could, make the voting system better by simplifying the interface to the ballot. For example, in San Francisco we have ranked choice voting, this creates a complex ballot, I think it’s a better system than winner take all balloting. This creates a complex voter form, though. A good UI/UX on a computer could make this simpler and less error prone, but it should be backed up by a paper ballot.

Paper ballots can’t be as easily hacked, and require larger orders of corruption to pull off. Not just a single hacker getting in and changing some numbers, but a group of people working together to change the paper record. This makes them important for auditing an election's results.

That being said, are computers in this context worth the cost, that can probably be determined by the error rate of paper ballots.
Understanding HTML Form Encoding
PL = perl, maybe. Quoting Larry Wall:

(A little context first. The topic was "Perl, the first postmodern computer language," which explains the reference to Windows still being "Modern age" and bringing up "pm" as an extension. He mentioned "D" as a possible name of a successor to "C" but it didn't exist yet. "D" did show up 2 years later though.)

> Okay, let’s see. "pm" is an abbreviation for Perl Module, which is why, of course, we use ".pm" is the extension for a Perl module. It used to be that we used ".pl" for Perl code. People still do use ".pl" in Windows, but that’s because they’re all still stuck back in the Modern age. Anyway, there’s a funny thing about using ".pl" for the Perl extension. People used to argue a lot about what the next language after C would be. Everone knew that the previous language had been called "B", after the first letter in BCPL, which came even earlier than B. The two proposed candidates for the next language were "D", because that’s what comes after "C" in the alphabet, and "P", because that was the next letter in BCPL.

> Well, as you can see, it didn’t work out either way. One of the successors to C was C++, which is a cute pun on the autoincrement operator, but makes it an absolute pain to try to figure out what the proper extension for a C++ file should be. .C? .cpp? .cxx? I suppose as a postmodern person, I shouldn’t mind the diversity, but somehow I do. I suppose a little inconsistency is good for the soul.

> Anyway, the other successor to C gobbled up two letters instead of one. Which is why many Perl scripts have the extension, ".pl", finishing off BCPL. It’s a pity, in a way. Now there can never be a language named "L". Perhaps it’s just as well. Quite apart from the annual yuletide puns we’d get on "noel, noel", there’s also the problem that people would have confused the language with lex, which already uses a ".l" extension. Since lex had already taken it, noel was available. So to speak. Sorry.

https://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html/
Java also did this ("Java is a blue colar language"†) and was wildly successful. You might not like it either.

† http://www.win.tue.nl/~evink/education/avp/pdf/feel-of-java....
The platform should be disregarded because it's a rotten platform.

This particular article can further be disregarded because the GitHub project README is practically the same content without all the stuff that Medium does to be annoying.
Sometimes it is non-urgent non-important communication about something which makes the poster excited, Sometimes its status of the work they were doing Mostly stuff which if required at all, could easily wait till business hours. I understand that they might not explicitly expect any responses. But the timing of the posts makes me nervy - ungodly hours - and esp coming from higher ups. Is all that innocuous?
For us it took 4 days.
We should fear the use of killer drones like in Venezuela
Wow, I must have hit a nerve cause this kind of ad hominem arguing that you're doing is unusual for HN.

People saying the NSA was working with hardware vendors to purposefully insert backdoors in routers were called crazy too before the Snowden leaks. I guess you haven't been keeping up with the news or do you think the Snowden leaks qualify as baseless conspiracy theories?

"A 2012 TAO budget document claims that these companies, on TAO's behest, "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks and endpoint communications devices used by targets".[1]

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations
I follow everything you're saying. As I have said many times already, I have no problem with convention 2. But don't use field theory to justify convention 2, because it's mathematically incoherent and unnecessary. I broadly agree - there is no reason to be involving field theory in programming language design.

I don't take issue with division by 0 - you can do that in mathematics just fine! I take issue with defining that division and calling the consequent system a field when it's not a field, and acting as though everyone else is wrong. The author invited this criticism when they loaded in the full formalism of field theory without needing to.

If the author had just stated they wanted to define division by zero that wouldn't be a problem. I have no idea why they felt the need to pull in abstract mathematics. I'm not disagreeing with their point, I'm taking issue with the strange and incorrect way they defended it.

Note that in my top level comment I specifically said, "Mathematics does not give us truths, it gives us consequences." I will happily agree with you that there is usefulness and coherence in a definition of 0. There is no canonical truth about the world regarding that matter. But a direct consequence of defining any division by 0 is that you cease to have an algebraic field.

Therefore, using field theory to defend a system which defines division by 0 doesn't make sense. It's not that the system is "wrong" for some meaning of wrongness. It's that you shouldn't be trying to pigeonhole field theory to make it work, because you don't need to.
As Food Allergy Rates Grow, Connected Tech Creates Safety Net – ReadWrite
This article is literally the first I've heard of this bill and I'm now strongly in favour of it. Lucky California!
Long term? Probably a reduction in cancer rates among humans, and likely an increase in crow cancers.
Implementing a clone of OpenBSD pledge into the Linux kernel (French)
> That’s because they’re quasi-government entities or related, and above the fray.

No, they’re not. If anything, the distinction should be more clear for these entities than other private businesses who could at least be contracted by the government. Political campaigns are entirely private marketing arrangements. The extent to which they are “quasi-government” should be perfectly obvious in light of their intentions, which is to become elected in the future. Even if the candidate is serving in office, that office’s duties and the campaign they run are separate projects. There is no blurry line here.
GitLab is now running on GCP
Actually if your embedded system will stop keeping a patient alive if you crash and the zero value doesn't cause any harm then you don't crash.

There are lots of situations where it makes sense to keep computing even if you suspect the input data is wrong. It's not really good practice to always be crashing. You need to decide how to handle the bad input on a case-by-case basis.
> He could've just said all people tho.
Corporate takeover defense strategies related to Tesla going private
I found this article interesting. There is a lot in the article I found to be related to Tesla for example:

"If management wishes to protect shareholders from a "dinosaur" with an outdated business model or core product, the correct stance may be to defend the company to the end. Such an acquirer, whose own growth is in decline, would bleed the acquired company and dilute shareholder value."

And many other points in there are similar.

If you are unfamiliar with what a hostile takeover bid is you can read here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hostile-takeover-bid.as...
Nice one! I don't remember all that much from reading the Mask-RCNN paper last year and have not seen many implementations so it's nice to be presented with this Pytorch implementation.

From what I recall about Faster R-CNN, the Regions Of Interest (ROI) are pre-determined via Selective Search, right? So I presume you would need to do the same thing with Mask-RCNN? I think this is the part I am the most confused with since I have never implemented Selective Search myself. Could you point me to introductory material on it?

Lastly, I can see the author of this work has read my blog post on understanding SSD MultiBox - glad it helped in some way :).
> I bet there are terrorists who are not always interested in safe flies.

They are not the typical customer, though.

> In contrast to voting, the majority of a (democratic) society wants to have a reliable and trustworthy way of voting.

Honestly, I'm not even sure to what extent that is true. Give somebody the opportunity to vote twice (illegally, but with the guarantee of not being caught). How many people would refuse, arguing that their voice is not worth more than anyone else's and that it would break the system?
What is the value prop of a stack-based language?
Pure CSS animation
How to Confront Your Fear When You Trade
It’s still fairly easy to have subtle memory leaks in JavaScript code due to the way closures can keep variables in scope indefinitely.

https://blog.meteor.com/an-interesting-kind-of-javascript-me...
BRB, telling the compliance team that SSL inspection is morally indefensible. I'm sure they'll be happy to turn it off.
Who wants to be extradited to the US ? Nobodoby, especially russians !
"It was a privilege to serve you and we are so very sorry things turned out this way."

http://caselabs-store.com/
Could it just be the materials they are made from, layers in a certain order of certain sediment? Probably.
Missed the point, so badly.

There is nothing smug about the comic. It expresses horror at democracy subject to haphazard, ill-informed choices and malicious negligence.

Hanging chads were a result of a previous rush to faulty technology.

The fact is that voting machines are thrown together from faulty components with faulty design choices by badly managed companies with no evident care for their responsibility to the public.
Hi, not sure if you're still reading this, but I thought some more about your question.

It makes me realize, computers-in-the-simulation aren't really important in my argument. What really matters is that the people in the simulation discover some way of making observations about microscale events. It could just as well happen that, say, they make many observations of sterile petri dishes and eventually notice "soft errors" in the petri dishes (e.g. spontaneous infection occurring due to real cosmic ray hitting simulating computer). So the inhabitants move their petri dishes into a vault, etc., and check whether that was enough to protect the petri dishes.

I think computers are probably the best way to quickly get the idea across, but it could definitely generalize.
Quantum Computing in the NISQ Era and Beyond – John Preskill
As a pedestrian walking on already crowded sidewalks, I loathe sharing the sidewalk with scooters - even entirely people-powered ones.

That extra speed makes them scary and dangerous, and the people riding them never seem to be considerate of the people they’re sharing the sidewalk with. Not quite as bad as bicycles on the sidewalk, but approaching the same category.

IMO we should be repurposing roads not aggressively to make room for cyclists and other modes of transportation like scooters.

If scooters are too slow to be safe in the bike lane, make an additional scooter lane and remove some free automobile storage on public property - which is not in fact a birthright.
Electric transfers can occur anywhere, so again what exactly does bitcoin bring to the table?
Found ringing rocks at the top of jagged limestone mountains in Vang Vieng, Laos a few months ago. Here's what they sound like: https://streamable.com/yj916
I can't say if it's complete or work in progress, but here is a demo: https://github.com/sunfishcode/simplejit-demo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlebox

The nature of TLS is that nobody in the middle is supposed to be able to read what's encrypted, and that either end can detect if traffic they receive has been modified in transit.

Of course this is incompatible with corporate (especially financial) networks where employers have legal/compliance/noseyness reasons to want to make sure their employees aren't doing things they shouldn't (sending corporate secrets to the NYT, having their corporate knowledge siphoned out by malware, spending all their time on Facebook etc.), and repressive regimes (where, for example, Erdogan wants to know if you're a member of the Gulen movement) - Bluecoat and Cisco, for example, do a lot of business in the Middle East and China.

They'll typically act as a man in the middle for TLS traffic, re-encrypting traffic using either a compliant root CA or a corporate CA that all employee machines have been made to trust. The nature of Enterprise Software is that these devices will have poor, incomplete or outdated implementations of TLS with the result that, for example, a lot of them didn't know what to do with draft TLS v1.3 traffic and just dropped it on the floor as invalid.
Tedder – a scrum Git branch manager
Short much?
A trick to ensure you don't divide by zero in C with minimal overhead(that converts zeros to 1) x/(y+(y==0))
I only skimmed the RFC, but it seems like the SNI can be send either in the extensions in the client hello, or later in the encrypted extensions.
Bitfinexed would like to have a word with you. If Bitfinexs wash trading or printing Tether as fast as they can to prop up the value of BTC isn’t mucking about in the currency you’re using, I don’t know what is.
The slides are in English.
It's a fucking sad day when suggesting that Electron is reason not to use something, will get your comment completely removed.

Hurray for the Kool aid drinking hive mind eh?
Why "exceptionally" high? The programmers you are hiring are (or should be!) bright, they learn new things fast, and OCaml is not very difficult to learn.

At any software company you have to learn new things. Every company has its internal development stack and custom software, unless the company literally isn't a software company at all or is doing something so unoriginal and dull that you wouldn't want to work there.
You were mentioning elevators crashing in the first place.

But anyway elevators are quite frequently out of order, and I don't know how often it's a software vs mechanical vs administrative (ie "security check") problem. I just know that, in all instances of elevator crashes I know of, the problem was a mechanical one, not a software one.

> ...which is not to say that it can't be fixed. My contention is that software engineering is possible, it just isn't fun or easy for inexperienced coders to do, and therefore not valued by the current software industry.

It's not that it's not fun, but it's incredibly expensive, and usually not worth the cost.
The Flourishing Business of Fake YouTube Views
> using human body parts for constructing religious instruments.

That’s not far off from the current western use of relics. I’m glad the Italian government hasn’t raided the Vatican and turned it into a museum or government offices. The idea that this would be defensible because Catholics have retained medieval practices— well, I hope that’s plainly absurd to anyone reading this.