skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In my opinion, the web standards have moved way too slowly and that is directly the fault of Mozilla, who won't let us have things like WebSQL due to their ridiculous insistence on having 2 independent implementations (as if we don't already have that for SQL and, as if there has to be 2 implementations of oxygen for air to be breathable...)

That's an interesting view on the problem.

If you recall, WebSQL not only didn't have two independent implementations, but it also didn't have specs (if you want to check, you can read the proposal here https://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/ and realize that it's missing all the important stuff such as what queries do).

WebSQL was a nice hack/proof of concept by the Google team, but it was formulated in such a way that pretty much guaranteed that you would eventually lose data and/or that your programs would break. That's the reason for which specs are needed, rather than just an implementation. Having two independent implementations is the only way known to humanity to ensure that the specs are useful.

> I don't trust Mozilla to do the right thing here or ever anyway. They're allegedly a group that fights for merit, freedom and openness but they consistently work against those things by rejecting the best ideas and by selling their users out to marketers. Honestly, I trust them less than Google or Microsoft

That's a shame. I don't think that anybody claims that Mozilla has always made the right choices – starting with Mozilla itself. However, Mozilla has consistently attempted to fight for the users of the internet. I don't remember the word "merit" ever being mentioned, though.

While Google (and recently Microsoft) have better PR teams (and lots of money to pay for them), their track record is not even close to being as good as Mozilla's.

> and since I don't like anything about Firefox anyway, I simply ignore it and build all my apps to target Chrome.

This is certainly your right. But this is also a way to ensure that Google can make all decisions for the web, without having to go through standards. You may have already witnessed APIs that work only for Google properties. I may be wrong, but I suspect that it's only going to get worse.
Truecaller is a spam blocking service that may help

https://www.truecaller.com/
We’ve been designing for sales.
You should read the book "Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick. It will really open your eyes as to what is possible with phones.
I left academia (Computational Neuroscience) to work in Data Science.

Some of my best friends stayed in and are now postdocs (I left the PhD with the consolation master).

I'm in Europe so the difference in compensation is nowhere near as big (tech pays less here and grad school pays more) but really it's about what you want to do.

If the compensation is the most important thing then you won't be happy in grad school, equally if the research isn't fulfilling you then you might as well work in industry and earn more.

My friends who are happy in research are those who are working on things they really love (in High Energy Physics etc.) and wouldn't exchange it for the higher salaries (and less freedom) of industry.

For me, it wasn't the pay that turned me off academia but the insecurity - you can study it for years just to be cast out of the field when you can't get a permanent position and in the meantime you continually have to move which makes serious relationships very difficult.

Basically it's a compromise - I think I made the right choice, but perhaps had I better chosen my field in grad school (maybe if I had stayed in Phyiscs?) I would have preferred to stay - I certainly wouldn't say industry is always better.
My favorite tracker-like DAW is Renoise: https://www.renoise.com/

Cross-platform, can use VSTs and samples, lively community, lua scriptability. It's pretty awesome all the way around.
I use this, and it lets many scam calls through / unmarked.
> Furthermore, outside of media companies and the HN bubble, people _do not care_. Your average person doesn't care about decentralization, preventing social media addiction, gamification, or polarization of online communities.

My parents, who are deeply not the HN crowd, are starting to care, and this is not my doing. They didn't two years ago, but they're starting to have the same sense of something being wrong that started to show up here 6-ish years ago. They're behind, but they're on the same arc.
They have stripped them of the enterprise certificate. This does not affect installed apps from the app store of course.

But still a clear statement from Apple.
with respect, as a non US citizen this whole article to me is deeply offensive. I/we are being targeted simply because we are second class citizens on the web. Good enough to have our data extracted by US corps but our rights are trampled on. This is the essence of it yet you're accusing me of flame-baiting? Please reflect for a minute on how just this is to anyone who has never (and will never) step/ped foot in the US. Simply saying what I say here might mean I'm being persona-non-grata and harassed at your airports[1]. All of you should reflect on this the next time you come shopping to Europe or take your SO on honeymoon to Paris, Berlin & Milan.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/28/mozilla_dev_and_cur...
If you already have an anonymous VPS you can trust then just get a couple more and chain them together instead of using TOR.
The distinction between UK/EU was obviously made among the teams themselves.

There happened to be a UK crew, and then another crew of Europeans, so 'team UK' 'team Europe' makes sense. If they were event eating/living apart, then the distinction was made on the ground, not by the author.

If there were a bunch of Swedes (Thailand is a disproportionately popular destination for Swedes) it might have been 'Team Sweden' / 'Team Europe' as well.

"I wonder why Europeans were so well represented."

Because Europe is considerably more advanced in many ways than a place like Thailand - and also bigger and richer. The 'talent pool' for these things is going to be massively larger'.

To compare: Thailand is 70M people with 7K GPD per capita. It's kind of poor, not 'technically developed' is my nice way of saying they don't have all of the civic, academic, social, industrial foundations that other, richer countries do. And so a lot people in villages do not create the surpluses that say, a European IT consultant has to adventure in their spare time. I think also, that 'different sports for different cultures' - it might just be that 'caving is not a thing' in Thailand or he region.
Worse, this is not on the table to be fixed any time soon in MSVC, because the change would break ABI compatibility.

Every time someone says "just use a custom allocator," I sigh inside... it's so much overhead that almost no one does it, and even fewer do it correctly. :(
>can't prove a negative.

Then why do you assert it as being truthful?

The history of FB's data collection practices is replete with "harm".
I often wonder how long the artificial scarcity facade can hold. We need to find better monetization schemes than DRM. I'd gladly pay artists directly for their work rather than on a per-disc/media or stream basis. Of course I'm sure thats exactly what the record industry doesn't want.
std::map is usually implemented as a Red-black tree. Which is basically a B-tree with branching factor 2. This is less cache friendly than higher branching factors, so it's entirely expected to be slower than B-trees. On the upside, it offers stable pointers which higher branching factors cannot offer.
> Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content.

I remember I used to have to log in to read content back in 2013ish, but I don't have to do so right now.
Given the bumbling numbskulls who still manage to set off bombs, are we really that sure they're stopping anyone?
you mean Heisenberg?
Not the first one, but it's still not a frequent occurrence.

(So let's use this as a reminder that the same applies for SciHub and scientific papers, with extra suggestion to use SciHub anyway, as researchers were most likely paid already from tax money anyway.)
OOProxy – open sourcing a rust-based OpenID proxy
I did that for years, too :) On the Amiga, that's all I did music wise, rip modules (I still miss that) and listen to / look at them, first in trackers and then with EaglePlayer and DeliTracker and their visualizations. Then on the PC, I made painfully short stubs, like 10-30 seconds, for a long time, with FastTracker (painful because I just didn't know how to make them longer, they were little rhythmic or melodic figures I guess). Then I got into Renoise, and I guess for the most part sampled and looped things I liked, and added speech samples to that. If I count from the first moment I fell in love with Protracker at age 11 or so, and me making something I would call a song in my 20s, it took me over a decade to even begin sucking at music, before that it wasn't even music. And I feel I owe so much to the Amiga, and the people who made music for it, and cared about playing back music for it.
There were a lot of these runways across the Atlantic. I wonder how many at a time they staffed with people like the people you met.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_landing_...
They tried, but decided it was too risky when realizing that the recovery had to be done from the far side: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36097300
Not arguing about the point that Apple can decide what runs on your phone, but in this case Facebook was in clear violation of the terms of agreement.
And they only shut down their enterprise apps not the actual Facebook app.
While I agree, if you randomize the number that needs to be pressed to get by the prompt it could become a serious roadblock for most autodialer systems.
Indeed. The parent poster edited his comment which meant that my comment did not make any sense. See my other comment for clarification.
It does affect any internal apps Facebook has, though.
3 Secrets to Netflix's Success beyond Subscriber Growth
I think we might just be extra-sensitive to being lumped together with the actions of our government (even if that's not what you were intending) because this is a forum with many international members.
Sheryl should get the "definers" to cook up some new Soros conspiracy material to use as ammo.
The first one in the chain could identify you easily tho.
Right. I forgot to mention that we also used to be able to resize the browser to the width we personally found comfortable for reading. I guess that's something reader modes still have to rediscover.
I hear what you are saying and generally agree with your points. Like most dual use technologies though, nuclear for example, their are pro's and cons. I do think that there are enough benefits to pursue the technology though such as the potential to eliminate malaria, sickle cell, Huntingtons etc. I completely agree that there are risks but I think the technology is likely simple enough that those risks exist now regardless of institutional support so we may as well seek to get the most out of it.

Also I think the risk here is likely overstated, the genetically edited organisms still need to breed and populate to spread the edited gene. You cannot utilize this technology in weaponized form in something like a gas attack or wide spread targeting. If its an edited person, it would take dozens of generations to affect the general population and would likely be stopped in the mean time. So I am not really seeing the major risk.
Counterpoint: I hate having to track files on a hard drive, love pop music, and could never be bothered to buy a physical piece of media ever again. Don't yuck my yum, I think that's a better point.
>>Find a way to package the right thing so they can do it without having to admit they were wrong.

Please note that this scenario would arise only after the disaster happens. These people have to make a decision before that. There is no concept of a blame before a disaster, only accountability. For a simple reason that it has not happened yet.

Now if a room full of engineers said NO in consensus, and you still go ahead and say YES. Then you either know something they don't which in case you must mention what that information is, and get it reviewed from those engineers who don't have that information. Then vote again, make the YES/NO decision appropriately. Repeat until there is consensus between both you and them. If not take complete responsibility for making that decision, because only you know why you are making that decision.

Decisions this crucial are not left to gut feeling and Rambo level on-the-field thinking. There is a reason you have a panel of experts/engineers sitting.

You don't make any decisions in reality. You only iterate the process of arriving at YES/NO once all the data and scenarios are reviewed.

Situations like these happens when managers/administrators think they are kings with veto to override decisions at whim.

Even at the very highest levels. Including that of Prime Ministers and Presidents, governments are largely run by expert panels and commissions, with politicians only give policy directions. And manage things based on recommendations.
That would be getting into serious fraud, arguably criminal under CFAA. Normally Apple isn't interested in prosecuting these people as its just sideloading, which is some minor copyright violations and a security risk in their view, but if Facebook did it after having been banned themselves, having a written statement from Apple that these apps were violating, and then they go and pay a third party or deliberately make a shell company to defraud Apple? That could provoke a total business embargo between the companies which would suffocate FB.
They don't need to be very fast... the NSA is known to sit on vulnerabilities for years.
Yeah. This is so much like greylisting for email, but simpler. Greylisting has been around since at least 2007 and most spammers still don't bother getting around it.
>Science is above this.

Yes, thats probably what Nazi thought too. Above the cost of human life.
Why genetic tests matter for autistic people
That would be really awesome. Do you have a source as to why this would work ?
Nobody said there is anything wrong with making money, that’s a straw man. The reality is that taking venture funding has forced these companies to compromise what made them useful in order to chase revenue for investors.
“Who knows if React will be used 5 years from now?”

It will be. I work on an application that still uses JS libraries from 5-10 years ago, simply because refactoring to use a new library is usually unnecessary (or even counterproductive). There will always be a need to keep applications like that running.
Rather: If you want to improve something, it helps to measure it.
Millipede
560+ Free CS Courses You Can Start in February
"First, they're almost certainly not making that deal from an informed position"

After spending an hour reading similar comments to yours, I have to ask this question.

How informed should the user be? What qualifies as an informed user? This is getting into some dangerous territory because it because implies so some sort of contract literacy.

>The second issue is that MITMing all network traffic on a phone will necessary scoop up the user's credentials, as well as private messages and metadata from that user's friends and family.

Do they not already do that with access to Facebook Messenger and Instagram? Why is this not screamed from the top of every hill?

This data collection is also different because they literally say it is for research.( They are protected legally, unfortunately)

>Given all that really hot data, what incentives are there for the data collector to act responsibly and protect that data?

Hmm how about getting fined?(The issue is how much should they be fined and the answer in my opinion should be similar to how the SEC prosecutes for insider trading: fine on top of whatever
you made, to strongly discourage you from doing so again or jail them.
The problem is not as bad as IE, for sure.

However, Chromium is just as much a strategic asset for Google. If Google were to decide to have APIs that work only for Google properties (hint: they already do), they can introduce them in Chromium and none of the Chromium-based browsers can reasonably decide to go in a different direction.

Now, if you recall, Google/Alphabet has interests in many pies around the world. It's not very hard to imagine how Google/Alphabet could introduce APIs that would let them leverage their web monopoly towards other fields. Think credit cards, banking, shopping, wearables, DRMs, cars, ...

Again, just as in the Microsoft era, I don't know that Google will do that. But just as in the Microsoft era, it's a question of how much power you are willing to put in the hands of a single monopoly.
As others mention, facial recognition won't help in this case (because masks). I'm partial to sentry guns, though.
> When on a 1Mbit/s WiFi connection in Greece, my vanilla app loaded in 4 seconds and started rendering after ~2 seconds, while the React/Redux app took 50 seconds to first render!

This is the thing that baffles me about the SPA/framework trend, regardless of connection speed. The whole pitch for React/Vue/etc. is that they're supposed to make for more responsive interfaces. And yet, whenever I actually use an app written in React/Vue/etc., I find myself marveling at how slow it feels. Even on a desktop PC with a fast connection, I spend so much time staring at progress bars and loading spinners as all the various bits and bobs of the interface get pulled down and rendered. I don't know whether pages that are rendered server-side are empirically faster, but they sure feel faster, because after a brief (usually < 1s) wait the whole page just, you know, appears, fully rendered and ready to go.

As another developer who's old enough to remember the CENTER tag, I'm open to the idea that this is just incipient old-fogeydom on my part. But whenever I hear people start talking about how much more responsive SPAs are, it sounds a lot like the old gag: "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
I posted it here already and got almost 200 upvotes, but this time there is also Chrome version published.
I'm guessing you haven't worked at a large corporation, especially one that explicitly says they value speed over correctness. My guess is the team involved in the research app got hold of the enterprise certs, and the teams on the other apps were unaware.
> Should start-ups or FOSS monitor social media for security reports? Don't they define reporting processes of their own?

If they do have Twitter and other social media accounts for support then I think they should.

The story behind this particular report seems muddled quite a bit and the history of the report is quite weird. Maybe they wanted to have dibs on the report as Apple does not have a bounty program?
> the blog post titled Lock-freedom without garbage collection, which demonstrates that one doesn’t need a language with a tracing garbage collector to write fast lock-free programs. The secret sauce is a technique called epoch-based garbage collection, which is much different from traditional garbage collectors and is easily implemented as a library.

I'm not sure where there is a focus on lock free programming needing any kind of garbage collection. Garbage collection is just for heap allocation and there are already lock free heap allocators. Memory allocation isn't, in my experience, a major difficulty of lock free data structures.
> Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential

How does flooding my feed with dozens of questions about what the probabilities of different subsets of the faces are when rolling a die (e.g. what's the probability of getting an even number or greater than 5 when rolling a die?) help drive traffic, clicks, and ad potential?
This seems entirely legitimate. Facebook were using Apple's support for enterprise distribution based on having a corporate certificate on your device, designed to allow distributing internal apps that don't make sense on the App Store proper, to distribute an app to their users - presumably because they knew it wouldn't make it through the approval process for doing distribution using TestFlight, which is what is meant to be used for this sort of app release.
Because at the end of the day, the human brain is wired to recognize "that could have been me", no matter how hard you try to rationalize it away.

And at a certain point, it's guaranteed to be you. Not today maybe, but it will be your head on the chopping block.
The interesting thing about Netflix is that they are very upfront about their hiring culture: no internships and no hiring of developers without at least five years experience. They are upfront in the fact that they are liberal when it comes to letting people go and pay way above market rate to compensate for it.

I'd rather deal with a company that puts all of its cards on the table like Netflix does rather than an implicit forced attrition process that is described here.
Facebook's Onavo Protect app (which this is a reskin of) was banned by Apple in June. I don't think they can claim ignorance here.
It's actually a musician role I'm auditioning for. Bassist. I'm also kind of worried about carpel tunnel, but I've still yet to pass the audition. :-)
I don't like how this was articulated because giving someone enough drugs to 'knock them out' is extremely dangerous in any circumstance.

There are so many things that could have gone wrong during that time, my god man ... random diver dudes (i.e. non medical) giving needles putting people out - this was as dangerous as anything else.
How Redux Works – Part 2
It's in progress :)
It's the same for me. Any time I see a call from my phone's area code, I know it's 99% likely to be spam (the other 1% is a recruiter, who I also don't want to talk to because they're trying to get me to take a job back in that same area code).

Having a phone with a far-away area code is actually really useful just for this reason, I've found.
Yes. While they were justified this time, it is possible that they won't be justified in the future. Management now is not management then. Anything that outsources control of this level to a third party is a business risk for a company of any size. We need better solutions.
Microsoft guy: Mozilla should give up on Firefox and go with Chromium too
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department
If nothing else they could issue an iOS update that permanently bans the trusted root certificate, erases all apps, and directly blacklists the Facebook certs. Heck, they could even block connections to facebook servers at the MAC layer if they wanted to. And they could require users to install it to get future updates. Of course, that would never happen.
The main difficulty with cross platform native apps is that nobody's willing to pay for C++ devs with UX experience anymore. Electron makes such things possible even at the expense of code quality and performance - but by that point you simply won't care.
I always wonder who's doing that and why. Quora does pay people to write questions, but the pay is supposed to be tied somehow to the quality of the answers. Maybe it's more a quantity thing, as dozens of people jump in to give answers to the basic arithmetic questions in my feed.
I am 100% sure this is an exploit related to PDU mode SMS messages. Tons of phones of different brands are probably vulnerable to variations of this attack.
Well, I pity the fools that assume that their communications are private when they are using SMS, FB Messenger, or Hangouts. If you want your info to stay private, do not send it to untrustworthy parties via untrustworthy means.

Even if you stick with apps like Telegram or Wire (my choice), you have to have in mind that your phone might have a keylogger on (looking at Xiomi and Huawei).