skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
fork(2) is evil.

I used to think fork(2)+exec(2) was genius and much more versatile than the WIN32 CreateProcess*() functions. The last part is still true, but I no longer think fork(2) is genius. fork(2) was genius back in the 70s when it was easier to do all the spawning work in user-land, but it's not actually a good thing, not now.

The only sane way to use fork(2) is to use it very early on in main() to start worker child processes. Or to immediately exit(2) or exec(2) on one or the other (or both) side(s) of fork(2) without calling any async-signal-UNsafe code on the child side. If you're going to exec() on the child side, then just use vfork(2) -- it's much easier and safer. Even better, if you're going to exec() on the child side then just use posix_spawn(3) and be done -- let the C library / OS figure out how best to spawn the child process. (On some systems posix_spawn() is a system call. On others it's implemented in terms of vfork(2) or clone(2) called in vfork(2)-like manner.)

The irony is that vfork(2) has the worse reputation, but it really is fork(2) that is evil. fork(2) is the root of much evil Unix-land:

- there are fork-safety considerations galore
- so you can only call async-signal-safe functions
on the child-side of the fork (unless you're
quite certain of the parent's state at the time
of the fork, which is why it's OK for the child
to continue if the fork was done early in main())

- it's EXPENSIVE
- copying the RSS, or all the writable data, or
arranging for CoW -- all of these are expensive
nowadays
- it complicates accounting of swap / VM space
(JNI code that calls fork(2) in a JVM with a 32GB
heap... really slows you down.)

- it has terrible semantics as to signals

- every time something is added to what it means to
be a process... one has to think about whether that
should be inherited across fork(2) or not

fork(2) is evil. Do not use. Especially do not expose fork(2) in other languages or their system libraries.
Does she have $129 million to pay? That seems like an absurd amount for an actor to make.
> you've pretty much given up your rights to you contribution

That's not true. With most CLAs, you retain all rights to your submission. You just give the maintainer a very generous license. I haven't seen a CLA that requires you to give up any rights to your own contribution.

If the maintainer decides to switch to a closed source license, you are free to fork and maintain an open source version with your changes.

This is the difference to copyright assignment. If you produce something as contractor or employee, usually whoever pays for your work owns it, and you can't go and publish your work under an open source license.
The payouts aren't evenly distributed. A lot of the "hackers" are students and dropouts doing this to have something great on their resume.

This guy got $9,000 in 20 days apparently.

https://twitter.com/ratherbeonline
What makes the journals the hoax papers were published in different?
I love dates, especially ones that have not been pitted because they retain a lot more softness. Pitted dates are an abomination.
America's academics long theorized that abolishing all common ties between people would increase freedom, happiness, and equality. Pluralism has been touted as an obvious good for over 70 years now.

And while they were right that it's sort of nice to be able to believe what you want and "let your freak flag fly" so to speak. Without a common set of values, civic life has pretty much withered and died. What's left is ... Facebook groups?

Without a strong civic life or common values there is no reason for opposing groups to show mercy to one another. It's just full on war for control of society.

After this works itself out we'll make a great case study for future societies (maybe even future North American societies) on what not to do.
I pity Tim Cook
I note that the existing JSMESS emulator supports C64; for what reasons was VICE chosen?
https://gist.github.com/nicowilliams/a8a07b0fc75df05f684c23c...
I'm not sure this is necessarily a point in Apple and Amazon's favor. Also, as another comment here mentions, the "backing" in the title seems stronger than GCHQ's actual statement.
Starcity (YC S16) Is Hiring Software Engineers
Starbucks coffee drinks are to me what I’d imagine it would be like to gargle a sheet cake. Not just sweet, but cloying, and very fatty.
This notebook from fast.ai is more in line with what op mentioned. It starts from nothing but Python and slowly swaps out chunks of code with functions/classes from Torch/fastai:

https://github.com/fastai/fastai/tree/master/courses/dl1
Show HN: PRNGs and Todays Giveaway
I recently started "thisweek.club", a hand-curated weekly newsletter full of articles/blogs for Web Developers. You can check it out at that URL. I've linked below as well.

I've also linked to an article I wrote explaining a little bit about random number generators, and it briefly speaks on PCGs. It was a fun article but a lot more depth could have been gone into it. That's a goal of mine for later, is to go a lot more into researching and explaining RNG/PRNGs, what options are available and what works now.

Issue #1 will be sending out today at 6PM EST to subscribers. One subscriber will be selected to receive a paperback copy of High Performance Web sites and a paperback copy of RESTful Web APIs.

Check the links out and let me know what you think. I appreciate your time!

https://medium.com/@jessehorne/the-rng-i-wrote-to-pick-weekl...

https://thisweek.club/
There is a shop in Turkey which originated the recipe for Turkish Delight. They're still open.
In this case, there's relatively little ground for misunderstanding or exaggeration. There's either a malicious chip or there's not. I suppose in the "worst case" scenario, there could be a malicious chip, but some other government than the Chinese put it there.

However, reading the statement from the Chinese government in response to this story, which never actually denies the incident and instead complains about being victim to such hardware hacking themselves, that's not the impression I get: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Scaleway's Object Storage
You can't claim "overvalued" unless you have a model that tells you what the price should be. That's all the difference there is, really.

Everyone telling you that housing prices in Silicon Valley are "overvalued" really are saying "it's too expensive for me". But they have no data to back it up, so they're declaring something with no proof or evidence. In order to do that you need a model to show you what a fair price should be based on the model, and how the market has deviated from that model.
Just to throw some extra info into the mix, Australia's media [1] is reporting that the Australian Department of Defence and Bureau of Meteorology also had contracts with Supermicro. The current Australian Defence Department statement:

A Defence spokesperson said the department was "aware of recent media reporting involving the unauthorised implantation of microchips within servers, used by United States corporations, in the production of Supermicro microchips".

"Defence will continue to work with the ACSC [Australian Cyber Security Centre] to continue to monitor the situation," the spokesperson said.

And from the Bureau of Meteorology:

The Bureau of Meteorology said it does not comment on security matters.

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-10-05/supermicro-mal...
Mobile Ad Formats Lab #4 – Interstitial Ads
Apple is not Apple Inc. in China, it is Apple Computer Trading (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. SuperMicro will have its own subsidiary/subcontractors to handle their operations in China.

As having worked for a subsidiary of a large multinational company in China, I can tell you that a lot goes on that you might find surprising. Middle management and those involved with establishing the deals with subcontractors would often have arrangements to make money through various means, such as through IP transfer or property theft. The subcontractors themselves are Chinese companies.

At our place a lot of shady things were going on and were, thankfully, found after a number of years. The global HQ had to step in and fire around 1/3 of employees working at the China branch.

Now, there is no reason to suggest that this was related to any government policy or request. But it should be clear by now that the CPC are not exactly opposed to shady things happening to foreign companies. My point is that this is an an environment where something like this can happen quite easily, especially when a lot of technology companies have close ties to the state.
I don’t know what you mean by the first question. The implication was that this was a bit of a drift net attack. Compromise a few lots, then wake them up a few months later figure out where they are. Most aren’t useful, but if you got the right batch, some might end up someplace interesting.

I would assume the reason why no one noticed outbound traffic is because it’s dormant.
> Why wouldn’t a company notice any of the outbound traffic using firewalls?

The attacker could use this to escape AWS/shared computing sandboxes/containers in order to attack their peers. Exfiltrating the data stolen could be easily hidden in something that looks like legitimate customer traffic.
I do not agree with the sentiment that all CLA are evil.

Yes, CLA that transfer all ownership to the project are bad. But many CLA are in place to protect the project from bad actors. For example companies suing the project because an employee has submitted code that he wasn't allowed to make public.

I use a CLA in an open source project. But it does not transfer ownership. It just states that the contributor is allowed to make the contributions and accepts the license.

https://gist.github.com/Pro/7d90e84b0765e7aa9068667e3418ef52
At the very least, they're laser focused on certain topics and take sides, which can indicate a huge bias in investigations they are pushing as neutral and correct. (I didn't flag the article though, and I'm unable to tell if they are really biased since I didn't follow their topics thoroughly)
I'm pretty sure that hasn't stopped the counterfeiters in other cases where there's only one provider and items are being sold directly by the manufacturer through Amazon. I think it would be fascinating if someone were to set up and provide through FBA sales of some of those products.
TWDS1 was free many times, and has been included in Humble Bundles for years, so these numbers don't reflect actual sales or desire to purchase the game at full price or even on sale, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Japan's is about the same.
How so? If anything the CLAs I've seen are much more explicit that your code may be distributed as part of a future closed-source version of the project than, say, the MIT license is.
Ali Muhiddin Haci Bekir in Sirkeci is the defacto choice - their store still looks exactly the way it must have looked in the early 1900s. Cafer Erol in Kadikoy has a very nice storefront and a LOT of variety, and pretty decent hard candy ("akide") too. Divan is more of a western patisserie and has many locations, but good. Cemilzade is the off-beat version of Haci Bekir, also in Kadikoy. A lot of options: pomegrenate, saffron, twice baked, clotted cream ("kaymak"), coffee, coconut, pistachio, almost any fruit imaginable etc etc.

Just don't get the boxed stuff, and get a lot of variety of flavors. Also I seem to be the only person who hates the rosewater, but maybe that's just me.

For baklava, it's really a labor of love and there's a lot of great old and small shops. Gulluoglu used to be great and is still quite OK, but feels a but mass produced now. Smaller options are Köşkeroğlu, kafadaroğlu etc, but I don't know if it's worth seeking out especially - just duck into whatever small shop that seems busy during the day.

Probably what might be a better experience is trying /unfamiliar/ desserts: Kunefe is crispy shredded puff pastry with cheese in it, doused in syrup, served HOT with pistachio on top. Tulumba is the turkish take on churros. Halva is made of tahini and sugar, and is getting more popular in the US. Kazandibi is pudding that's been caramelized / burnt at the "bottom of the pan" - traditionally the gelatin in it comes from chicken breast (you can't taste it). More often it's now the "fake" version, still delicious. Lokma is turkish fried dough. Kabak tatlisi is made of pumpkin. There's so much to try, just get the stuff which you don't know what it is.

One thing to remember is that Turkish sweets are quite sweet - you're only meant to have one small piece. Of course that won't stop many of us from getting a whole plate :-) Usually you can ask for a half portion at a shop.

Finally if you're near Kadikoy, hit up Ciya too - regional foods from across Turkey that you can't find in many other places.

Hope you enjoy your trip!
Pretty much. Pedantically speaking, you can't transfer all rights. Urheberrecht always stays with the author. But Urheberrecht isn't copyright. (Over)simplified, it codifies who owns the copyright of a work initially, and that owner can transfer the copyright.
Or read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18149011 here where it is argued out that a copyright assignment is not the same thing as a contributor licence agreement.
I use Trello. It's not great at taking notes, but it's very easy to get data into it. Each list and item within a list has an email address, and you can shoot PDFs, web pages, etc., to those from anywhere without special software. It also "spatial,"[1] which is hugely helpful in being able to find things. I've tried a few other things but I don't like them. One Note is glacially slow for notebooks hosted online. And I can never find anything in Evernote.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/
We could do all of those things if anyone were to come forward with actual, physical evidence (i.e., a board).

But so far no one has.
We're an MS shop for office apps and I like OneNote and how it integrates with everything else and when I open it up I enjoy using it.

Still I never seem to actually use it... Maybe I'm just not a note taker other than the odd post-it note.
Not to be a dick but it’s “thou”
ConnectedText – The Personal Wiki System
This.

fork(2) is evil. It is no longer needed.

Use posix_spawn().

If you need to spawn child worker processes sharing state with the parent, then pass that state via pipe and tell the child about it via a command-line option. Or something like that.

fork(2) should absolutely be deprecated.

vfork(2) can stay. It's hard to use, but not actually harder to use safely than fork(2), and has much better performance (no copies, no CoW). vfork(2)'s reputation as nasty is undeserved.
You can put a lot of tsvs across the border of IC and grind up to them, hoping that the wire will bond to at least one of them. And if you do bonding by hand, you can bond right to the metal if the oxide below is thick enough.
What would have made you believe Apple if they said it ?
They are also not going to ask you for iTunes gift cards
Because it’s common knowledge China is a communist dictatorship that engages in censorship, kidnapping, torture, forced confessions of enemies of the party. Just look at the history of the last 100 years and the history of the CCP. Or talk to anyone who is Chinese and not brainwashed.
Lost in Occupation: How Google Maps Is Erasing Palestine
I could not disagree more. Prime Video is by far the best user experience for me, and Netflix is by far the worst. I can't stand how Netflix displays related results when they don't actually have a particular result in stock. I cannot stand the auto-start feature where if you're browsing and idle too long on one item, it will start playing a trailer or synopsis. The sideways scroll under different heading is horrible (this is bad on all of the services).

Amazon's search works so much better and feels less algorithmically personalized (something which I believe is a horrible anti-feature in all of these services). And because Amazon can support letting me buy or rent content that isn't stocked in the Prime Video service, the search results are _so_ much more useful to me. Often in Netflix, I just want to know _if_ they are carrying a certain title right now or not, and don't want to be presented with alternatives that are "similar in spirit" to whatever I was searching.

I also find that the "continue watching" section on Netflix frequently does not appear as the first row, and there are all sorts of "trending" or "critically acclaimed" rows that I have to scroll through to get back up to the "continue watching row" at the top. While on Amazon, this section is always at the top, and automatically updates with shows that have released a new episode since the last time I signed in.

Netflix already feels like an outdated brand to me, like it's the cheap way of doing a streaming platform. I get it that network-specific apps like NBCSN sports apps and HBO Go, etc., these probably will suck because it's a network that is probably utterly incompetent at investing in technology.

But Netflix really disappoints me. I think in the long run, Netflix will not be remembered as fondly as it is now, though we all benefit from the huge bidding war on talent creating great shows.
True, tight hamstrings are a contributing factor, but not the sole reason for IT band issues. If rolling out your IT band is a painful experience, it's an indication that you're improperly loading your legs when running—it's a form issue.
It is usually implemented as vfork()+exec/exit.

Some OSes implement posix_spawn() as a system call. IIRC NetBSD has had that, and Solaris 12 has it too.
A disorganized collection of text files, often (but not always) in Dropbox, and random pieces of scrap paper.

I've tried fancier solutions over the years, including Tomboy and Evernote (and maybe even Google Keep, for a few minutes), but none of them have had sticking power.

Ultimately, my note-taking needs fall into two categories:

1) Something I can paste text into, where said text is best kept plain. (Word processor formatting would just get annoying, and cause endless problems, especially if that text is a code/command-line snippet.)

2) Something I can scribble on, where the content is likely to be some sort of sketch/diagram/chart with annotations. Most software note-taking solutions would fall flat on their head here, because its not what they're designed for.

When I was in school, I actually found that taking notes on a computer only worked in liberal arts classes. In STEM classes, handwritten notes were almost always easier.

FWIW, I recently picked up a reMarkable tablet as another way of attacking the "scraps of paper" problem (and as a nice offline PDF reader). Its generally nice, but still doesn't quite have the resolution to match a fine-tipped pen/pencil annotating a diagram without being close enough to the limit to drive one OCD crazy. (But it is getting fairly close.)
What restaurant was it in Kirkland?
+1 for Quiver.

I bought it years ago. I've never looked back. Such a great notebook.
That’s my main takeaway from all of this- Elemental is great at their job and didn’t just do a half assed attempt at an audit. They actually did what they were hired to do. I wonder how rare that is.
Would you say EA is having a net net positive impact on culture and the world?
> That is a good question, did the Chinese target specific customers, identifying the relevant sub-contractors and modify these boards?

Why not go read the story? It addresses this question and many others HNers are asking now. It's actually a fairly detailed story, although annoyingly short on technical detail (which could have been because their sources refused to go into much detail).
> I am slightly cautious that this hoax is itself a hoax and no actual hoax papers were published by actual academic journals.

This is apparently the original account of the hoax. They had to call it off prematurely because they started getting media attention from places like the Wall Street Journal. I think the hoax is real.
European and American brands have higher quality standards than Chinese brands. Whether the manufacturing happens in china or elsewhere is completely irrelevant to the actual quality of the product.
Whither the Software Artist?
(Not a lawyer)

The license does have consideration.

You provide some code. The other entity (the project) provides attribution and other things depending on the specific license.

Promissory Estoppel only comes in to play if one side doesn't provide anything of value, and so the bar of consideration isn't met. But to my knowledge, licenses already meet the bar of consideration, so promissory estoppel doesn't matter.

Money isn't the only thing of value. The exchange of one good or service for another good or service is still consideration, no matter what. And "attribution" and "the promise to hold harmless" are of value.
I read that, and it isn’t exactly a scathing critique. He appears to recognize at least some value in it.

Do you by chance consider yourself a conservative?
The seminal paper on this topic seems to be Anticompetitive Effects of Common Ownership[0] by Azar et al, and there's a whole chapter on this topic in Radical Markets[1], a recent book by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. Both are worth reading if this is a topic you're interested in.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427345

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...
I hadn't noticed. Thank you!
just in time for the weekend. :P
In general, your new corporate overlords usually spend the first fiscal year trying to figure out what to do with you.

So wait for the first full fiscal year after the deal closes, or the second if its late enough in the year.

Then you will hear logic like, “We’re not going to tell you what to make, but we won’t pay for that,” as if that’s different or even better than just setting the agenda.
My catch-all note taker is a Rhodia notebook with four different Lamy fountain pins, each with a different color ink. For digital stuff, I use Simplenote on mac, iOS, and Android and Resoph Notes (synced to Simplenote) on my Windows work laptop. I only just learned of Dynalist and may give that a spin but doubt that it will unseat Simplenote in my system.
TweeDF – Easy PDF reflow app
Well, “Data Scientist” has been appropriated by the overflow of PhD’s w/o any actual stats or computational backgrounds and few academia prospects, so I guess you need to create new job titles for thise who are going to do the actual work.
There are WAY too many compelling thinkers in the world to read to justify any of my time sifting through Hitler's writings hoping to find some nuggets that are not "100% genocidal rubbish".

I'm imagine he advocated for exercise and a good diet at some point. Why we need to try to find something useful the man said is utterly beyond me.
Hum, it could be to prevent that someone from having a place on top of the first result for hacker news.
Your comment leaves the impression that IBM mainframes, not to mention high-end Unix systems from Sun, IBM, and HP, commonly had problems that would crash the machines and had no better availability than my desktop or perhaps a $3K server.

Perhaps it was meant as hyperbole, but it would be interesting and valuable to hear some of the nuance from someone with your experience.

IME talking to people, many, especially mainframe operators, would disagree. My direct experience with mid-range Compaq/HP servers has been excellent - it's hard to remember a box going down unless I commanded it to. I don't think I replaced any except due to age or warranty expiration.
tax free? how?

You mean you can pay only cap gains if you hold it versus income tax?