skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bell Labs continued doing foundational research unfettered by marketability for a long time after the conventional story has them buried and gone. (To pick a personal favourite, B. F. Logan's work on Click Modulation is a bizarro-world stumble through arcane mathematics that pops out somewhere unexpected and valuable in the field of signal processing.)

Unfortunately, a lot of this research was buried in microfiche in university basements as Bell Labs' legacy was traded from company to company without a viable distribution mechanism. As a result, although this work is now all available on-line (sadly not in open-access form), there are still more forgotten gems in there than many researchers realize.
CES 2019 Question and Answer Session with AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su
This is a fascinating book.
It’s not capitalism when your risks have the government as a backstop. Failure is a healthy market mechanism; socialized losses only hurt investors’ ability to make capital decisions and consumers’ ability to have agency via their individual choices.
Prospective parents should be prepared for a surge in genetic data
They don't add that to companies most people will already recognize:

Airbnb: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ai...

Stripe: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+st...

Cruise: https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+cr...

etc.
Announcing Project Rome SDK for Android and iOS Version 1.0
Side note: This wouldn't get around cert-pinning? Even if a new trusted CA is installed on the system, an app implementing cert pinning still wouldn't trust this new CA. Seems that could be a wise move for Facebook's rivals that want to limit snooping.

Edit: on 2nd thought even if Facebook can't decrypt a particular app's traffic, just knowing how many requests it makes, how large they are, and how often, could still provide some useful insights into an app's usage.
> I'm struggling to understand why articles like this from NYTimes are pointed just only to Zuckerberg and Facebook as in they are the only ones who provide targeted advertising platform.

Facebook has a recognizable face that can make statements that can be critiqued, the ill-defined "many other companies" do not. Focusing on Facebook make the issue easier to understand, but the issues raised apply to all targeted advertising companies that try to justify themselves to consumers.
A fun though experiment for a bug like this would have been to test lists of emails against validating the ability to FaceTime call with the email and determine if it was used as the iCloud email address...

Had this bug gone unknown longer - then you'd have a list of all the endpoints you could spy on.
Apple should just pull their Enterprise certificate so the app stops working.
In any democracy, most people ultimately vote on what's put in front of them by somebody else. It can just as well be "vague generalizations".
If they refactored Firefox OS to be a ChromeBook competitor, sure. They heavily marketed their phones to the developing world markets.

I may be wrong, but I have a suspicion that Chromebooks only got a foot in the door in the education sector because they had such a large marketing machine behind it. I wouldn't mind betting money that Firefox wouldn't be able to get an equivalent foothold (even comparable to their browser market share right now with like-for-like hardware and form factors) just because their exposure for any given initiative is a fraction of what Google can summon.
Knitic – the open hardware knitting machine
Yes. The government is full of people who “follow the letter but not the spirit of the law”.
Totally agree. Besides, if we're talking semantics, shouldn't it be "people, not humans."

Yes, these users are human beings but outside of academic settings, who ever calls someone a "human?"
So it was derivative trash anyway.
Same here, I read it all one Sunday.. couldn't put it down.
It was just a SharePoint component. You can easily pirate it.
You're a professional "SEO guy" and still surprised that your four-month-old, 50-page, one-level-deep, affiliate-linking site is not outranking the hundreds of established review sites? Come on, man. If it were that easy...
The higher end of microcontrollers are getting affordable, true.

This does not change the fact that a smaller, less capable uC will always be cheaper.

Embedded system designs are typically cost-driven, hence cheaper (and therefore resource-constrained) devices will always be a fact of embedded-life, no matter how "powerful" uC become.
Designing a circular knitting machine from scratch [video]
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook as of 2014, so unfortunately all the same issues with Facebook apply to them too.
I don't have access to JPL's models obviously, but here's a simple student project 'reverse engineering' the rovers in some of the same tools JPL uses. Note the control diagrams towards the end. These are the very same languages that are used to design & program in all but a handful of cars, are used by every plane manufacturer, to name a few applications

http://www.multibody.net/teaching/msms/students-projects-201...

E.g. cruise control

http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/amwiki/index.php/Cruise_c...
Totally. Something I learned very early on was your big idea isn't as big or clever as you think (necessarily, but sometimes it is!), so it's worthwhile to canvas the office to first find out the history of why something is the way it is or why we don't currently do X.

Often you find it used to be done that way in the past and then they stopped doing it that way because Y. It turns up all kinds of interesting stuff that no amount of thinking will get you to on your own.

That would be my number one advice for those starting out.
> Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access

But how? I didn't knew this is possible to do on iPhones except really old models. If it is I'd love to know how.
Can someone else explain the story with "Ben"? Did he offend someone and thus get kicked off the rescue squad? I couldn't follow the reason why he was stuck sitting in a chair outside the cave.
GCD is fantastic and way better than everything on macOS before it, but it's still not a silver bullet (neither is Go).

Cocoa is incredibly fragile about the main thread, so you need to be super careful what runs in what queue. If you add KVO/bindings into the mix, it needs an extraordinary level of paranoia^Wdilligence.
AFAIK, yes. You would have to modify the application itself to disable certificate pinning.
I really hope not. Enterprise distribution has been hugely useful as an internal tool at just about every company I have worked for.

They seem to have broken the cardinal rule though. Namely the somewhat ambiguous "Don't use your Enterprise account to bypass the App Store."
I could be incorrect but I don't think camping is popular with people who live in the 3rd world. That's what I was trying to allude to here, hence my inclusion of the first world.
It opens with the most silly value proposition anyone could think of! "What if you could pump all of the Instagram photos of Banksy's artwork into a program that could pinpoint where the next one's likely to be?"

Then it is a simple image classifier with one dimension (graffit, not graffit).
The article is misleading; the app does not have root access, it has access to web traffic via a trusted root certificate. The app is distributed outside the App Store through the enterprise developer program.
No, you can do log-structured BLOBs which essentially given you version control in a simple manner with circular buffers.

As for variable-length configs, yes, but you should always be allocating the worst-case (i.e. defined maximum), hence no need for variable length.
All it takes is engineers to stop selling their skills to capitalists...
> when you're doing X vs. native is you're implicitly saying "X vs. the best possible situation."

Not really, any sensible benchmark would be "X vs. the most relevant point of comparison".
Any country could have anti-corruption laws, even Somalia has them. Doesn't mean they get enforced to same "ethical" degree as other countries. There's a lot of self-policing required to successfully bring corruption to justice and the offenders be held accountable. It's a lot harder to do than it sounds.
The authors site (https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/) is really annoying BECAUSE of the SEO content, there’s like a page of pointless text about each category and then each product has a bunch of text about it which is totally useless.

Is this really the best way that google can distinguish good from bad content? IMO google results are starting to become stale and it makes the internet feel a lot smaller, this is probably why. I know there are tonnes of far more interesting things out there but they seem to come up less and less now.
Actually I don't wonder what all the fuss is about, and for a reason you seem not to have considered. The history of science with a non-scientific agenda is by no means limited to questionable methods and questionable inferences drawn improperly from otherwise "good science." At least as often (if not most of the time), the goal of junk and pseudo science is not actually to assert a truth but to act as if there some reasonable question regarding a thing about which there actually isn't. For example, tobacco companies benefitted from and were primarily interested in perpetuating the idea that there was some genuine debate about whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, in the same way that certain capitalists benefit from the idea that there's a real question about whether burning fossil fuels causes the earth to warm and creationists benefit from a "debate" about whether evolution is real. To say that they're merely asking a question or asserting a point would be disingenuous in light of the historical record.

In any event I read the article. It's an interesting history lesson but a number of the author's points suggest to me that he either doesn't totally understand what he's arguing against or is deliberately misrepresenting it. I say that as someone who's done hard science research in the field.
Too bad every restaurant in the US that has tried to eliminate tipping has failed. Servers end up with less money, patrons end up paying more than with tips, and many patrons actually like tipping.
GitHub Actions for Elixir
why would they? they have never faced any real consequences for doing this and it's insanely profitable.
Here's a good guide: https://clearbit.com/books/data-driven-marketing/b2b-seo-con...
You know what? Systemd generally works for me. Sure there's teeth gnashing at having all my userland tools upended. I've frustration at the unit file specs. But it mostly works.

That, however, does not mean that systemd is anything other than a giant fucking dumpster fire. Looking at how Lennart interacts with other Linux devs, how he reacts to bug and security reports, looking at the lack of code review and the shoddy design decisions that get baked into systemd… it appears as if systemd mostly works through sheer luck. That sort of approach may be acceptable when you're talking GNU vs X emacs, but it's absolutely the wrong approach to such a critical piece of software.

The other thing I'm missing is any improvement. All of this upheaval has been for what? Assuaging Lennart's ego? Not good enough.

> You're free to hate it and some of that is certainly justified, but don't assume that the contrary opinion is based on uneducated or misguided opinions.

When the article being discussed consistently wrongly characterizes and dismisses technical arguments against systemd I think it's fair to say it's a bit more than misguided.

> As for the security issues I certainly place those in the dumpsterfire category and I'd like for the systemd team to handle them better.

Yeah, no. Security as an afterthought is a bad approach in general but it's even worse when you're talking about low level bits like PID 1, the kernel, boot loader, etc. This right here is enough reason to run, screaming far far away from systemd.

You know the best part though? I've had plenty of frustration with upstart (especially with features they've decided to remove over the years). None of this compares to the heavy handed, anti-social bullshit that seems to engulf systemd. Hell, I recently bought a replacement laptop. I even entertained the idea of a Linux machine. Systemd and its effect on Linux on the desltop was one of the top reasons I went with another MacBook Pro.
Brakeman security scanner no longer open source
MXroute is fantastic.

https://mxroute.com/
I'd be surprised if Apple got rid of enterprise distribution altogether rather than blacklisting Facebook's certificate.
Show HN: Chrome extension to add random hash to email addresses
While I'm generally all for opt-in and free decision making I think some lines should only be crossed in special circumstances. Similarly to medical procedures that are only legal if the patient is very clearly informed about all potential risks (and that includes even those risks that are really not that probable) by an actual human being and not by just clicking on a button. In the case of Facebook they would in my opinion need to state very clearly that there is an albeit small risk of a breach and all collected data could be made public ("for example you employer might suddenly know which porn websites you are visiting or what people you have googled")

Big opt-ins require big explaining because people can only truly make free decisions if there is an actual effort to inform them about what is happening.

Edit: so maybe this is a bit extreme because I realize that this might similarly apply to (for example) phone manufacturers. I still think that actually analysing the traffic is a bigger risk than simply providing the phone/browser to generate the traffic because of the centralized target that is Facebook.
It's worth noting that one of the main rules of these Enterprise accounts is that they are not to be used to bypass the App Store.

For example, we use them to distribute frictionless test builds internally.
Not sure what the issue is? At gaming.youtube.com there is a live tab, where you select the game, on youtube.com/gaming you select the game you care about, then click the live tab.
you have root. Might be inconvenient but hardly impossible to modify files to drop your own pinned cert in other binaries.
Maybe the ranking algorithm doesn't punish sites for having contextual information about links.
ReadMe (YC W15) is hiring – Help us make APIs easy to use
As a customer tipping culture is highly annyoing to me, I don't want to be upsold three times per dining at least. The attention given, coming form european non-tipping culture, just feels absurdly fake to me.

I feel sorry about this, but from my experience, the only other business that comes to mind, that is so build on 1-on-1 flattering "good choice sir" and selling attention to me is prostitution. I mostly don't need that much attention, when I just wand to have a beer or lunch.
Rails 6 just committed to shipping source maps by default in production
I'm emphatically not defending them here, but it may make sense from their perspective. They live and die by ad targeting and maintaining their monopoly power over social networks, both which requires large amounts of personal data. Knowing what apps teenagers have installed and how often those apps are used is instrumental in detecting an up and coming social media rival.

Further, their only major competitor in the ads space is Google, which has access to this information via Android and its control over the Play Store.

Plus, what are the teenagers going to do about it? Facebook also owns Instagram. I guess they could use Snapchat...
This all seems like a rerun of Uber - bad news on bad news compounding on bad news. Something is very rotten at Facebook and has been for a long time now.
Personal responsibility has a place, and it's important... But it doesn't scale to solve all problems.

Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.
Using computers to beat masses of the general public at horseracing in this fashion has been going on for well over 30 years. I first read articles about the gambling teams and data scientists behind them in Hong Kong in the mid 90's. The teams had data capture people entering realtime odds from the tracks at Sha Tin and Happy Valley and hired private tellers to enter thousands of computed bets moments before a race began from their offtrack locations in downtown HK highrises.

The thing that makes it easy to simulate but impractical to execute is that getting enough bets in fast enough and late enough to tip the odds to your favor to give you an edge while limiting losses is difficult to do. It's even harder to do without this wagering itself affecting the odds. For one there often just isn't enough money wagered on a race. In the heyday of the HK races you'd often have 100 million+ HKD wagered on every single race, much of that coming from the general population -- individuals going to the track. There are only a few big event races in the US or Europe that will attract that kind of betting pool. Even HK is no longer like that.
Better science? Better to whom? Better based off of what criteria? While I admire your bravery for supporting popular opinion, I think we could all benefit from being more open minded
Are we out of the Facebook crisis yet? Do they not realize this is really not helping their case?
>> It's extremely powerful, but it comes at a cost because it's nigh impossible to create diffs between different versions of Blueprints AFAIK.

Why not? What makes their representation undiffable?
You can have a good idea from a bad source. It doesn't really affect the quality of the idea.
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https://www.reddit.com/al6hym/

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https://www.reddit.com/al6hzd/

https://www.reddit.com/al6hzr/

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Absolutely.
Similar The Tenth Man rule that I got from one of the Erik Meijer's talks, who got it from World War Z novel, which probably took it from Argumentative Theory:

> if nine people agree on a particular course of action, the
tenth person must, in the context of the strategy, take a
contrary approach so that all alternatives can be considered
Without exception, whenever I've tried to report bugs to technology related companies, I always get some kind of arrogant, snotty backlash from the person on the other end. It seems like only half of the time, they actually bother to listen to or carefully read what I'm saying. I get the distinct feeling that I'm being quickly pigeonholed (and blamed) and facts don't matter.
I think culturally facebook could never make the transition with any sort of customer confidence, but I really think they could offer a paid facebook with no ads and more transparency on the data. People would pay $10 a month for that. I mean, slanging user data and social manipulation tooling to any guy with a stack of cash is probably way more lucrative, but a move like that would even sway me a bit to wonder if they could turn around into something that isn't cancer.
Sunk.
Walgreens, CVS test teeth straightening, cleanings in some stores
One the face of it, this is the most mature gesture out of a corporation in recent memory.
Washington state law is very clear that Labor laws cannot be superceded by arbitration clauses, and that employees, including contractors, cannot waive their labor rights.
For most of its existence, every single Email Outlook sent was unacceptable. As per RFC. It was so bad we had to ban Outlook users from mailing lists.

None of this has stopped businesses from sinking deeper into being dependent on MS products.

People will complain, crack jokes, and then sign up for more of that Microsoft.
I expect that the formal answer is that you should be running that within the service framework (be it systemd or other). My answer is: if you want POSIX-like behavior don't run it on Linux.
I can name two things missing besides opt-in and compensation:

* selected user's age;

* proper disclosure.
Yes, I know what the enterprise program is for; this is a clear violation of those rules. But Facebook is not getting root access to your device, as the title of this post and the article claims.
and yet Apple comes up with some of the biggest privacy blunders in their offerings.
True. This thread convinced me both bottom to top and top to bottom is necessary. But I do think that ignoring bottom to top leads to temporary fixes, or illusions.
As others have mentioned Xerox PARC, I also recommend the "PARC counterpart" to this book titled
"Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael A. Hiltzik. It was a beautiful summer read, full of amusing anecdotes and written in a laid back style while still conveying lots of information about the environment in PARC.
I mean, I dislike broken AMP pages as much as any other user. But from the perspective of Google management, a broken AMP page is a bug report that you file with the relevant engineering team. An interstitial or aggregation page that some third-party puts up is outside of your control, and so you disincentivize it with product incentives.
Sure but I don't see how that makes a democratic crisis inevitable. The implication seems to be that democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible which I don't think is true. They are in fact complimentary in my opinion. What better way to regulate a capitalist economic system than with a democratically elected government?
As I've mentioned elsewhere in other threads, this app doesn't actually obtain root access (that is, it's not a jailbreak); the article/title is confusing a "root certificate" with "root access".
Cool. I will give this a try in the near future.
Would joining FB as a Privacy Czar or whatever be a job one should rightly wish on a highly competent privacy person, or is it a new form of torture in Hades alongside Sisyphus and others?
I don't agree, I think money is a fairly poor incentice for increasing the level of community and might even do the opposite and make it too profit-based. I think everyone should be putting the extra effort on treating others with care instead! That increases the feeling of community.

Got those lovely nuggets? Buy there again, tell their manager how great the service was, and be a great customer. Also, treat better the next person you interact with, don't just offset your morale to paying some dollars and then be an asshe...
If you go around calling users "humans", people will think you are an android (lower-case), robot, or space alien; or somebody who believes they are one of those.
Agreed. I'm curious if FB just doesn't have to play by the same rules? It would seem like the loss of FB Research's Enterprise cert would be a major pain for them.
> Surely the best measure of whether a politician speaks for the people is whether he or she is elected.

There’s more to it than that. For example someone could be elected though not desired by the majority (as has happened in US presidential elections a few times, and also happens in various places where more than two candidates vie for a seat).

Also there Re situations where the majority will egregiously violates the rights of minorities.

Or when there is a muddy signal, where Brexit is a good example: some people wanted any possible Brexit, others wanted it assuming certain conditions that are now clearly not going to happen; what is the popular will in this case?

I’m not saying that being elected isn’t the most important element, but it’s not only not sufficient, but it can actually be wrong.
I respectfully disagree with 1/3 direct-value payout in tech consulting. My experience is 77% paid to the employee. If you have to consume 2/3 to cover overhead the employees are effectively subsidizing a very expensive business model. This leads me to believe there is a dichotomy between the value of IC and management. eg. top heavy.