skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you please stop banning all of my HN accounts?

The first 1k words of my Lisp book are up at https://gist.github.com/shawwn/06812ce37e4dbd49abab277aa836e.... Hopefully the submission will be welcome when it's ready. "Welcome" would include "being able to respond to comments," which is the main concern.

The hardest part is to know what to cut, or whether it's even interesting. It's also daunting trying to measure up to any work that came before. Most people won't give honest feedback, and there aren't many places to post Lisp topics.

I'm extending you a gesture of trust by asking you like this. I could have kept this account a secret. I'm also posting this in a collapsed comment thread, so it shouldn't damage the site. There is no reason to ban this account or to impose a rate or ranking limit.

If this account meets the same fate as all the rest, then (a) I have no idea what your goals are, and (b) I give up trying to change your mind. But at least I'm trying.
At least he didn't build any Autobahns.
Totally agree, that network of SMEs is a huge productivity multiplier
i remember DO has been promising to deliver custom image since like more than 5 years ago.

glad to see it finally happens
The other crazy thing is Apple keeps delivering these big increases. If this was Intel, you would get a 10% increase every year.
Yeah, I forgot the ORDER BY clause, but you get the idea.
Some of the sources are said to be government. That same government is forcing anonymous sources by coming down hard on leakers, both inside and outside. That may or may not be what's happening here but it's certainly possible.
FWIW:

When I was at an insurance company, I kept suggesting they introduce GIS because so much of the data is location-based. They kept blowing me off.

That's all I've got.
That's one the technologies being used in buildpacks v3. It's the key to very fast updates. But it's not the whole picture. Having a standard way to assemble the images means that the rebasing operation can be done safely.

We've also met to talk about buildpacks and have pre-existing working relationships with all the relevant folks in Google Cloud Builder and Google Container Tools teams through our work on Knative.
I can remember a specific time where I complimented a stranger. I was probably around sixteen or seventeen. A young lady was sitting in front of me on the bus and obviously quite nervous. I noticed that she would repeatedly dig in to her handbag, get out her makeup, make the smallest adjustment to her face, then put her makeup away again. She must have done this four or five times, putting the entire makeup box away and getting it out again each time. I told myself if she does it one more time, I’ll say something. Lo and behold she starts to get her makeup out again, so I tapped her on the shoulder. She spun round, and I said “You’re pretty enough.”
She beamed me a huge smile, sheepishly said thank you and wished me a good day when she got off the bus.
Is this Poe's law at work?
From 2016, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/repor...

> Apple has begun designing its own servers partly because of suspicions that hardware is being intercepted before it gets delivered to Apple, according to a report yesterday from The Information. "Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter," the report said. "At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips."
I believe the Bloomberg story. Why? Because of the fact that the chip was originally found on hardware owned by Elemental. Elemental would have been a great company to target.

My guess is that Elemental was specifically targeted because the cost of doing so would be pretty small and with nearly a 100% chance of success. Back in 2015, Elemental was nearly guaranteed to be acquired by one of the greats (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) because they had grown too large to be acquired by smaller companies but were also unlikely to go public on their own. The company was doing very well, plus they had government clients.

Knowing that Elemental would likely be acquired and infecting their hardware beforehand would have been pretty sophisticated but also an easy thing for a malicious party to do. Even if the hackers didn't know/plan for Elemental's acquisition, they still would have been a great target based on their government work.

(I'm not trying to fault Elemental; I would expect the same thing to happen at basically any small company that employs maybe 10 hardware specialists)

And if the story were fake, why would Elemental even be mentioned? It's too small and obscure to be of note otherwise.
Because when you design something, you design for different priorities, implicit or explicit.

.doc was supported / co-existed with .rtf and .txt at the beginning of Word.

Designing for interoperability, .txt and .rtf were good enough. Mac as the other major OS had an MS Office suite. Interoperability/importing WordPerfect was important.

Designing for backwards compatibility was a necessary for Microsoft supporting different OSs and legacy personal and business.

Designing for file size was very important. Most people that use Word don't use styles, so your HTML will be filled with inline CSS (and that didn't exist at the time), and filesize would definitely be impacted.

Designing for the page was important. Word was about printed / print-like documents. HTML struggles to do today what Word and other word processors have done for decades and continue to iterate on.

Designing for user experience really catapulted Word above competition. I used and liked WordPerfect but it was a blue screen DOS application. When I saw Word, I had WYSIWYG! And I had copy-paste. There was a time when copy-paste was a new thing for many users not in the *NIX/OS2/Amiga/Atari/BoOS world. (A year later I discovered Unix, and that's key also: design for discoverable features and platforms.)

So, what are you designing for? Figure that out, then pick your implementation method.
"Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything."

—Robert Rubin
???

China has far more to lose here. Companies losing money to cycles spent auditing hardware is trivial compared to companies permanently losing business due to loss of trust as a part or the supply/manufacturing pipeline.
Not really? If you have the ability to insert this bugged version into orders from specific companies why would you stop at just 1-2 major companies.
Why Will Quantum Computers Be Slow?
That isn't a level playing field with an even position. The employer can't get other employees (due to union-favoring laws) but the employees can get other employment. The closest thing the employer has to "get other employees" is to shut down the workplace, possibly outsourcing to a different country.
The other bullshit that has never been substantiated is the narrative that Saddam was working in collusion with Bin Laden. Despite the latter being quite vocal about his derision of Saddam's secularism and suppression of the Shia. But ask any average American today and "of course" they were in cahoots.
Android's GUI is made for touch. We saw with Windows 8 how people love when you put a tablet type GUI to a desktop computer
In general this looks great!

I assume the reason why many functions take non-const pointers as arguments (rather than non-const references) is because it follows the google style guide?
https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Reference_...

Cheeky question: have you Googlers thought about revising this guideline? It seemed weird to me when I read it years ago and it seems to be getting more and more unconventional. When I see a pointer argument in most C++ code now I would assume that passing a null ptr is not an error, but I see quite a lot of the code in this library doesn't check for null pointers inside the function body and would explode if you passed one in.

This doesn't mean I don't sympathize with the justification in the style guide: "References can be confusing, as they have value syntax but pointer semantics". If C++ had a non-null, non-reassignable pointer it might do a lot of what references do and be clearer, particularly for generic code. I don't really know, but references are what we have, they suit indicating the expectation of non-nullity, and it seems to me that the benefit of clearly communicating that expectation gets you more of a benefit than the confusion around semantics takes away.
Who else thinks this is another Vietnam, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein moment?
We need a way to get there from here. We will never reach Star Trek style society if we just continue as we are. I think we need to transition to socialist democracy. But how to start?
They can't run for public office though. Oh..wait..
the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.

The second best is today.
Yes, the only thing I learned is that Spolsky is kind of an ass.
I think you mean a beta of 1. A beta of 0 would mean zero correlation with the market
It's kind of weird to cite George Tenet in your claim since he's the one who famously told Bush they had a "slam dunk case" to convince the American people there was justification to invade Iraq.
Since Fall 2013 I've been reading HN twice a day – over coffee in the morning and in the evening after dinner. I am a nomadic contractor who works in the blue-collar basement of the IT industry, with several years experience in Silicon Valley, Portland and Austin as a datacenter technician, service reliability engineer, and general-purpose nuts-&-bolts computer guy. For me, HN opened a window on an entirely new dimension of the industry: the world-view of the elite class in venture capital and entrepreneurship. It's fascinating to read the same articles they read, to see the world through their eyes. I don't always agree with the ultra-capitalist weltanschauung on HN, but I think I understand it better, to a certain extent.

Aside from the politics, I have learned a great deal from HN about my own technical domain: the hegemony of the Linux operating system, advantages/limitations of RESTful APIs, python as the (arguably) preferred scripting language, and much more. But the best aspect of HN is, in my opinion, the continuous stream of commentary and discussion about books on a variety of topics. It was here that I discovered Joseph Frank's magisterial biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, which alone was worth the price of admission.

Overall, I consider HN to be an intellectual oasis in the chaotic desert known as the Internet. Many thanks to the women and men who develop and maintain this remarkable web site. Bon courage.
https://youtu.be/CpuN-yM1sZU?t=65
Frank Oppenheimer: Blacklisted Socialist and Founder of the Exploratorium
Passing your vision and dream to everyone is your most powerful move. Imagine for a moment what that would be like, what that would accomplish. This book is an amazing read for people in your position, https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/038...
That's the point of them. When the electricity is stolen from someone else and the generated coins go to you then all generated coins are profit. If they could generate one cent of cryptocurrency for less than one cent of electricity they'd just mine regularly.
A tree house, a free house,

A secret you and me house,

A high up in the leafy branches

Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,

Be sure and wipe your feet house

Is not my kind of house at all--

Let's go live in a tree house.
Why are so many people ignoring the fact that Supermicro was delisted from Nasdaq over a month ago with continued delays and specious excuses from the company. Something really strange is going on there.
Send a manifest and checksums as part of the transfer, then the receiving end can give a summary of what didn’t work.

With a data diode, the physical medium is probably a short run with no packet loss anyway.
Why China will beat Silicon Valley at turning AI algorithms into businesses
As far as I'm aware, legal experts agree there is no way to compel you to lie. Apple's general counsel has said on the record he doesn't know what Bloomberg are talking about, so how would they even verify this gag order was proper?

https://twitter.com/dnvolz/status/1048283980913684480

Note that he volunteered to be on the record, he could have said that off the record or made no comment at all.
Copy-on-write semantics can be pretty useful. You've built up a large in-memory graph and want to execute a destructive or long running query on the data set in the background (e.g., write it out to media when the main process MUST continue to service requests), you want to generate a snapshot core without exiting, etc. etc.

I don't classify these use cases are concurrency-after-development cases. Lots of systems use this to do interesting things.
Thanks for considering using libnop!

This library works well in an embedded context. I've personally used it on Cortex-M class micro controller firmware.

The serializer/deserializer does not require dynamic memory allocation. Whether or not dynamic allocation happens depends on how you use the library. If you avoid using data types that perform dynamic allocation (e.g. std::vector) and use (or write) Reader/Writer types that use static memory (e.g. nop::BufferReader/nop::BufferWriter) then you should be fine.

There are some nice tricks you can use to permit protocols that have convenient dynamic containers on the host and static versions on the embedded device:

https://github.com/google/libnop/blob/master/docs/getting-st...
https://github.com/google/libnop/blob/master/docs/getting-st...
https://github.com/google/libnop/blob/master/examples/shared...

Endianness is assumed to be little because the vast majority of hardware is little endian. There are utilities to convert here:

https://github.com/google/libnop/blob/master/include/nop/uti...

These are not currently used by the Reader and Writer types included with libnop for efficiency, but are available for you to use in your own Reader and Writer types if you really need it.

Floating point is a much stickier problem due to lack of standardization across hardware. The library does not address this automatically and just packs floating point types in machine order. However, the library provides tools to help address the issue. One approach that works well is to use a fixed point representation for the wire type -- a value wrapper type is convenient for automating this:

https://github.com/google/libnop/blob/master/docs/getting-st...

See the Fixed template in the example. This is especially handy if you have a micro controller without floating point support or you want to minimize the size of the payload at the cost of range and/or precision.

The library has a complete suite of tests and 97.9% line coverage according to GCOV, with particular attention to conditional and error paths.

We use the library for a few internal embedded prototypes. I have not tracked its usage outside of Google since its recent release.

Best,
C
If you think that kind of reaction is out of line, please kindly let me know where you keep your 1.6 million dollars. Thanks.
This wasn't really my experience... I went to school for CS, which involved using a bunch of open and closed source tools of different kinds. I wasn't aware of the distinctions between different kinds of open source, some of which fell within the OSI definition and some of which did not, I just knew that closed source stuff where I couldn't read the source was more annoying when things went wrong. I remember the moment much later when I realized that there was this whole (weird, to me) turf war over the definition. It still seems to me that the most straightforward definition of "open source" is just any software for which the source code is available (such that it is open, like a book).
Haha I had the same, returned it for a refund and ended up getting a much more expensive one from charjen, which actually works and doesn't block the WiFi. Seems a bit overpriced, but at least it works without fault now.
This is probably not possible because they want you to stay on their platform.
I've never heard this before but it describes my feelings very well. Thanks for sharing it.
Part of me wants to believe Apple and Amazon, but they're really under no obligation to tell us the truth. It's way more harmful for them to admit this happened.
In Pune, a metro city of India, we used to cross 5 lanes of a highway each side by crossing one lane at a time. You look at lane traffic, get a spot, cross that lane, then repeat 9 times.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD are different OSes though.
width in this context means number of CPU execution ports or how many INT/FP operations CPU core can perform at the same time
No, I am not. I'm saying that China's foreign ministry's response sounds a little like they're saying "we are [merely] retaliating in kind." NSA has been caught adulterating computers in export interdictions and maybe this is us catching China up to the same.

I didn't bring up trade wars at all, I don't think it's necessarily related (this kind of tradecraft was likely in the works for much longer than recent trade disputes).

So plain old espionage, executed for whatever the needs of the day might be.
Somebody in another thread discussed the hack as a brute force strategy where the attackers compromised a lot of hardware without knowing where it would end up. If that’s the case, then I’d imagine that you could audit a bunch of this hardware from various places in the wild and see if any of them have the “extra” hardware. My understanding of the situation may be mistaken, however.
It's a blog announcing a new feature for their platform. It's not like they are taking an ad out on the New York times.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18152812 and marked it off-topic.
I wish there was a filter to remove all the crap private-label items. If only
They’d say ‘no comment’ in that case IMHO
Seems like the GIL is still a very modern problem with ancient solutions not yet realized by python runtimes. What you want is threads, but you can’t use them. Bummer. Other language runtimes don’t have that problem.
Great album, but it’s not Purple Rain or Thriller, because I don’t really want to spend the rest of the month explaining the n word, among others, to my kids. Ah, well. It’s a problem comparing music across genres, as they said.
As an ex-apple employee, all I’ll say is this means basically nothing. Everything was on a strict need-to-know basis and a condition of your employment was respecting that. I would be very surprised if more than a handful of Apple employees even knew what exactly what was purchased from Supermicro, so a random sample of employees absolutely would know nothing about this. Unless senior means Senior Vice President, it’s meaningless.

That being said, SVP level people did categorically deny it, and I can’t see them doing so unequivocally unless they really believe that will hold up on the court of public opinion for their entire tenure there.
Well "dentist" is just a fancier way of saying "toothist" so "tooth doctor" doesn't sound too bad.
This horribly written series of articles should be titled "How technology could not prevent a hospital from giving a patient 38 times his dosage".

- The system's dosage caps were disabled

- The dosage was never double checked since "technology is so accurate", ignoring people still make mistakes when using it

- Vast swaths of alerts are regularly ignored rather than fixed resulting in them being ignored

But more than anything already listed... the nurse didn't question giving someone 38 pills beyond "must be dilluted" yet the article pushes the focus to how technology led to the error? I just can't see how this title was chosen beyond clickbait considering it has statistics included showing how this system has been more reliable than the classic solution.
THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF STOCK LANYARDS
If you're interested in the question you posed ("why do we have a decentralized money police?"), in part it is the consequence of a series of historical accidents, but you can get a pretty good answer from the book "Treasury's War."
I bought one of these home-DNA tests years back to give to a relative as a Christmas gift. After I read the ToS I immediately threw it out in the garbage instead. Don't remember the exact phrasing but IIRC it basically made you agree that they own your data. No thank you.
Because at the time, the US intelligence community had a lot of credibility.
Big claims require equally big evidence and big sources, otherwise it's he said/she said. I'm doubtful about the story but not against it entirely until more evidence and sources can be presented. If not, it smells like clickbait trying desperately to get traffic, and they just flushed their reputations down the drain.
I was excited about this, but it was mostly worthless. The equivalent of a "how to write a great paper" guide explaining font size, where to put your name, to include a table of contents... And that's it.

Nothing about what to write and how to write it? This is the hard part.
It was very well known that G. W. Bush was itching for an excuse to finish what his old man started.

See the PNAC documentation, if nothing else. You don't need to be a card-carrying member of the Illuminati to understand the personal and political dynamics that existed between Saddam's administration and Bush 43's, or to foresee what was likely to happen.
Yeah they do. But a $1T valuation implies a crazy amount of cash flow growth. They're top-line is increasing at 20%-30% per year right now but how long can that continue
>A senior security engineer directly involved in Apple’s internal investigation described it as “endoscopic,” noting they had never seen a chip like the one described in the story, let alone found one. “I don’t know if something like this even exists,” this person said, noting that Apple was not provided with a malicious chip or motherboard to examine. "We were given nothing. No hardware. No chips. No emails."
> When this happens, the chip could short-circuit power lines

No chip design would ever do this. The chip would incinerate itself.

> superimpose a signal on the power-lines to notify the rest of the system

The rest of the system i.e. the BMC already know that something weird is up.
The proof of work's intent is thus. For the most part, anyways. At equilibrium, the optimistic miners seem to always drive up difficulty beyond a neutral investment.
Ten years ago is a better time to plant a tree than today. In fact, today is the worst time in history to plant a tree.
When was the last time you saw a Native American? How often does that happen?

Why do you think there are so few?

Why don't most people in America partially look like natives in a continent that used to have millions of them?

Use your goddamn common sense. Your revisionism is offensive.
Pedestrians already have this theoretical right. In Montreal, it's heavily used. And it's fine - if you wanted to get somewhere quickly, after all, you would walk!
Having worked at Amazon; one of the things I respect a lot about Amazon is that they not competitor focussed - they really do not spend much time thinking about competition; they are maniacally customer focussed. I am sure Amazon is really working on upping the game on faster delivery whether is 1 day prime for large number of SKUs or same day.