skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who have worked in bank IT, I have some questions.

So these days there's very little physical money. Most of my "wealth" is just entries in various digital ledgers. My bank says I have $XXX and my brokerage says I have $YYY and my retirement account says I have $ZZZ.

Let's go with the bank account case. Is it possible that a catastrophic accident or attack could wipe my balance down to $0 with no way to recover? What if a data center was nuked? What if two data centers were nuked?

How much redundancy is in the system? Are there third-party agencies that track private bank ledgers? How hard is it to take them out too?

Ever since I read "The End of Alchemy" (a great book, btw) this thought has haunted me.
Any content site.
I'm not sure how citing a single example counters my point, but I'll bite: Searchers aren't the customers of Google, and we have no shortage of stories on HN about Google abusing or potentially abusing their monopoly.

To return to my point: healthy market competition involves providing value for the consumer. In a healthy market there are low profit margins because high profit margins indicate a change for competition to enter and undercut. Companies competing and failing or falling to competition are not (necessarily) a sign of problem, as an above poster seemed to be saying.

However, companies seeking to find ways to prevent competition or deny it via network effects ARE a sign of an unhealthy market. And companies (as cited by the article and most of the tech-buzz-startup scene) are all about trying to grab that advantage and hold it. Logically the consumer is the one that ultimately suffers, per the very premise of healthy market competition.
My company app screen record everything (using repro.io). I've tried to talk with my superiors but they don't care. Is there a way to report the app to Apple?
The provided links are not working.
Now this is Fuck You Money.
There have been times I've wanted to templatize my configuration but I don't want to do it with text-based templates but templates within the configuration files syntax (be it yaml, toml, or something else). Not sure what this is called, I've been calling it "structural templating".

So far the only things close to this are

- Azure pipeline's syntax: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/proc...
- Something called Jasonette: https://docs.jasonette.com/templates/
- Something called Jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

Azure Pipeline's approach I think is closest to what I've been looking for.

Anything else in this space?
Ya, there's some real danger here with regard to precedent, but I agree, in both of these cases, the world is much better off without Gawker and AMI.
That’s usually an issue with the head unit or a weird interaction between the phone and the head unit. My old car used to auto play Music when it connected no matter what the source was on the head unit. My new one is better about not auto playing and respecting the last app.
Interesting attempt to blackmail someone (who in this case happens to be, you know, the richest man in the world), with information that is generally public already. All that would have been added were a few additional pictures. How much extra public embarrassment is going to come from that?
But would you trade the amount of time spent at Pinterest before IPO with the experience you gained at Gumroad? Tough call, given the professional and personal growth you gained from it.
Paraphrasing (probably Nietzsche):

"There are only 3 kinds of people: the poor that wants to be rich, the rich that wants to continue being rich and the idealist, that using his ideals wants to be rich."
The stagecoach refers to their origins as an armored car/delivery service.
If I am understanding him correctly: If defer were statically scoped, that is, if it were scoped to curly braces, you would "know" at compile time when and if a defer is going to run (relative to that scope). That is, a defer boils down to just "at the end of this scope, run this code" and nothing more, and all the compiler has to do is move that code/function call to the closing curly brace. (Similar to how a C++ compiler knows when to run a destructor for an object.)

However, by having them be function scoped, this isn't so anymore; e.g, a defer occurring in an if() statement needs to happen at the end of the function, but only if the if occurs. If you loop over a defer, we need to accumulate those. (And the golang tour even explicitly calls the behavior out.[1]) So, instead of just running the defer at the end of the if / inside the if statically, we need to push the defer onto a runtime stack of yet-to-be-run defers that we'll evaluate at the end of the function. This now has to happen at runtime, not compile time, and makes the function compilation more complex, and requires a stack somewhere to push this stuff onto.

From a compiler writer's perspective, I would agree w/ the parent: this seems much more complex, and runs counter to golang's otherwise simple design philosophy.

[1]: https://tour.golang.org/flowcontrol/13
Sticking to the car washing analog: If you decide to stay local and pay $10 for a car wash so you can feel better about yourself, realize that you haven't improved the lot of the person in the tent city at all. They would probably be better off if you'd "exploited" them...
Well that's not true.

Chaos engineering and AWS weren't real things when they started building the company. And the system they have now doesn't resemble much of it was once.

Truth of the matter is they invested more in their infrastructure, but that's because their business plan required them to grow on the back of technological advances. Banks, it's seems, do not. Or maybe they do, and the some of these start up banks will usurp them.
An Area of Psychology Where Most of the Results Do Replicate
It’s amazing how many people in Trump’s inner circle love quoting mob movies, calling people “rats” and “stoolies” but can’t seem to get down even the basics of being a half-decent criminal. I mean, Roger Stone literally told people to lie to Congress via an email.

One can quote mob movies all day but that doesn’t make them a smart criminal.
I would argue that Marijuana has become why more potent over the years. My 70 year old Aunt was visiting CA from TX last year and she and my mother used to smoke a small bit of pot in the 80s. We visited a friend that has some (not my cup of tea) and she wanted to try it. She said it kicked her ass. That is antidotal, but it has been repeated over and over by various people over the years.
But what person without means is going to be the target of tabloid blackmailing?
Here's a POSIX compliant portable getopt() routine I wrote which uses this style. Is this hard to read? Note that it's several times shorter than every other implementation I've ever seen, and if I do say so myself I think it's eminently readable.

static int
u_getopt_r(int argc, char *const argv[], const char *shortopts, struct u_getopt_r *K)
{
K->optarg = NULL;
K->optopt = 0;

GETOPT_ENTER;

while (K->optind < argc) {
K->cp = argv[K->optind];

if (!K->cp || *(K->cp) != '-' || !strcmp(K->cp, "-")) {
break;
} else if (!strcmp(K->cp, "--")) {
K->optind++;
break;
}

for (;;) {
char *shortopt;

if (!(K->optopt = *++K->cp)) {
K->optind++;
break;
} else if (!(shortopt = strchr(shortopts, K->optopt))) {
getopt_err(argc, argv, shortopts, K, "illegal option -- %c\n", K->optopt);
GETOPT_YIELD('?');
} else if (shortopt[1] != ':') {
GETOPT_YIELD(K->optopt);
} else if (K->cp[1]) {
K->optarg = &K->cp[1];
K->optind++;
GETOPT_YIELD(K->optopt);
break;
} else if (K->optind + 1 < argc) {
K->optarg = argv[K->optind + 1];
K->optind += 2;
GETOPT_YIELD(K->optopt);
break;
} else {
getopt_err(argc, argv, shortopts, K, "option requires an argument -- %c\n", K->optopt);
K->optind++;
GETOPT_YIELD((*shortopts == ':')? ':' : '?');
break;
}
}
}

GETOPT_LEAVE;

return -1;
}

Here's macro magic, the complexity of which is more than made up for by the readability of the core code:

#define GETOPT_ENTER \
do { \
static const int pc0 = __LINE__; \
switch (pc0 + K->pc) { \
case __LINE__: (void)0

#define GETOPT_SAVE_AND_DO(do_statement) \
do { \
K->pc = __LINE__ - pc0; \
do_statement; \
case __LINE__: (void)0; \
} while (0)

#define GETOPT_YIELD(rv) \
GETOPT_SAVE_AND_DO(return (rv))

#define GETOPT_LEAVE \
GETOPT_SAVE_AND_DO(break); \
} \
} while (0)
I recently rewatched Demolition Man, and it got a surprising amount of things right.
The problem I have with most super rich people is that they consider genuine risk far less important than potential embarrassment. E.g. they won't dare taking a stand politically because of the chance that someone will go public with some scandalous nonsense. Bezos on the other hand seems willing to calculate differently. I have to say, this has changed my opinion of him a lot in his favour. On the very remote chance you're reading this Jeff, good on you!
I’m glad not all tech billionaires are sterile robots
The class pay gap: why it pays to be privileged
Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail
And how do you know the congestion level of the cell?
With LTE you can deduce it from RSRQ, but that won't tell you if congestion is happening at the next hop.
Wait, are we seriously saying HTML and CSS are "useless knowledge" for web development. Wheat is a horrible analogy... it's like trying to be a cook without knowing how to use an oven. "Ovens are useless since George Foreman grills came out." You probably could cook most things on a Foreman grill, but that doesn't make you a good chef.
Putting Solar Panels on Water Is a Great Idea–but Will It Float?
63 to 95 years old? Hell, the first month I moved cross-country (at 22) I got really, really sick and couldn't get out of bed to buy groceries. After the third day I considered asking my estranged dad (who I was getting away from) to fly cross the country, or asking my landlord for help, or calling the hospital or 911. I literally had NO idea what to do. I wasn't dying I just couldn't stand up without barfing or getting dizzy.

It was incredibly scary for a young kid trying to find a job and start a new life. I immediately saw the value in the door-to-door checkup services for the elderly.
Like "we use cookies, agree/disagree" irritating waste of space legislation that means nothing beyond the borders of wherever it was legislated?
Yeah, and he makes a great point - if he can't fight back against this sort of thing, then who the heck ever could?
Also on iOS 12.1.2. I have never encountered this. I usually play audio in my car with either Pocket Casts or Spotify, and iOS reliably picks up on my last used app. I also have the Apple Music app deleted—maybe that plays into it?
I guess it’s a lot cheaper to increase pressurization than to give every passenger a reasonably sized chair.
Gawker didn't try to extort Hulk Hogan or Peter Thiel. The situations aren't comparable.
And it doesn’t stop there. The money certainly isn’t vaporized as with a failed business.
Windows 10 is abandoning cruft, but that hasn't seemed to help with product quality. (Maybe they shouldn't have eliminated the separation of test and Dev)
If you can make a truly enormous stack array you can sometimes skip past the end of the stack onto the heap (or another section of memory). Then any writes to the array which the program thinks are going to the stack are actually going to the heap. This is sometimes known as stack clashing.
Because of the metaphor used in the opening sentence, I cannot assign it as reading for my high school students. Too bad!
> They are threatening to post photos of him sexting.

Is a photo published in a disreputable magazine significantly worse than the information already out so far which already got people thinking about him sexting anyway combined with losing custody of ~70 billion dollars in the coming divorce? I'm not so sure. Their privacy was already thoroughly invaded before this latest development.
Whenever I reflect on the "state" of the web the whole thing seems like such a mess.

I can't help but feel that the web's progression to what it is today (framework/spa/webapp overload) was more or less a cobbled together solution using technologies that were never really designed or equipped for the task. The browser has become, quite literally, the kitchen sink--it's how we access nearly all of our applications, and today it's less common for an application to provide a native OS implementation than it is for it to provide a counterpart in the browser which has worked out fine, but is pretty insane when you think about it.

HTML/CSS/JS were never intended for making complex application UIs. The world has done a great job at coercing them into doing so anyway, but I can't help but indulge in alternative histories at times and wonder what things might've been like if javascript never hit the scene.

JS is such a double edged sword--it's great because it has a very low barrier of entry. On the other hand, the same accessibility tends to plague it with misuses, abuses, and overreliance.
Ask HN: How did you go from idea to product to first 100 customers
Far too many people only see successful companies, but rarely do they see the struggles that occur early on. I would love to hear about how you went from a simple idea, product to fighting for your first 100 users.

You don't have to be generating millions a year, if you're even generating $1,000 a month, I would love to hear about your journey. I know there's websites like https://indiehackers.com, but I'm interested in hearing from others.
Yeah, nullable types are one thing. Go's null interface is another:

https://play.golang.org/p/N_3BiUOkRJo

It's probably the first and last to have this quirk.
Oxfam workers can use prostitutes. It was specifically in their code of conduct.

It's societies normal colonialism of disallowing what's legal at home for the natives and allowing what's illegal at home, minimum wage and child labour issues to let the natives make us sneakers.

The context is, the article is garbage, they quote 3 random headlines the got from the news and think they have a theory.

For the Oxfam 'story' if you bother to get to the real bit (read original reports) it's much more nuanced.

In part it involves whether a girlfriend of staff who might also be a sex worker should be allowed to Oxfam functions. There is no clear answer.
Out of curiosity: With all your custom hacks... is it still up to date? One of the biggest things that scares me about widely used web platforms is that they have widely known vulnerabilities. I tend to prefer a bit more home-spun code when I can manage it.
a raw YAML file is readable with your eyes. A Json file needs to be prettified before you go thru it. Json is good for APIs but is not made for readibility.
In 2009/2010 my wife accidentally made a charge to PayPal that was linked with our Wells Fargo checking account. Since we weren’t planning on that charge happening from that account, there was an NSF fee and Wells rejected the charger. Understandable, right?

Except then PayPal made a few more attempts for god knows why and each time Wells Fargo kicked an NSF fee our way.

Now, PayPal shouldn’t have repeatedly attempted a rejected charge. But, Wells Fargo shouldn’t have allowed those attempts. They just couldn’t help themselves to that $35 NSF fee though.

We fought it to no avail. With all the NSF fees and interest (and fees they added to fees while we fought it), what started as a $300 transaction ultimately cost us over $1200.

Wells Fargo is now and was in 2009/2010 a criminal enterprise.
Agreed. Very thoughtful and interesting.
Spanner is slow as hell
Borges gets extra points for having infinitely long books in his magical libraries. If you ever flip from a page, you will effectively never see that page again.
Big Health launches Daylight, a new program for worry and anxiety
Community Advocate for GitLab here. We can't share that data publicly (also because it's hard to track since many are on open source core), but we do have over 100k orgs using GitLab
That steps way the hell and gone past my creepiness threshold. Being able to justify it in your own head as being "for [the users'] benefit" doesn't change the fact that there's a shitload of raw data there that the users wouldn't voluntarily provide if they knew about it.
Well in this case there's no money involved really.
It's just a fuck you.
Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmailing Him
Apparently AMI and David Pecker's non-prosecution agreement for the Michael Cohen stuff is contingent on them not continuing to do crime. So i guess that's out the window now.

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093654471157170177
There is (was?) a A380 flight with Emirates from Dubai via Bangkok to Hong Kong, and back, and you could buy tix for that last segment BKK–HKG for about 200 USD, or 300 USD business, or 400 USD first.

Cheapest way to get a shower at 35k feet (without miles wizardry), I’d think! (And who doesn’t want to shower on a 2 hour flight... :-)
"How would you even come to that conclusion?"

The parent comment had a parallel construction where the drug was the odd one out, having legitimate value in some contexts. One implication of that might be that the commenter was unaware of the legitimate value, because if they were aware, they could have avoided the unsatisfactory parallel.
I've been playing with the trading platform Alpaca[1] and wrote some code that essentially pulls trade information (each tick) for a handful of tech companies I am interested in. It's a lot of data, but once I have the data stored, I'm now thinking... Ok now what? I have volume, price, time, and a lot of other metrics.

Not sure where to go from here honestly. Should the code evaluate the data in real-time for each trade, or wait to the end/start of the trading day and do some evaluations then make a decision?

Obviously, I am not going to be able to compete with the big boys using really sophisticated code (written in a low level language like C), executing in colocation right next to the exchanges, running Apache Hadoop and Spark. Still, I am interested in just tinkering with simple algorithms with the data.

[1] https://alpaca.markets/
The main argument here is about the resiliency of the bitcoin network. Whatever your talking about has nothing to do with it.
It's a good thing that platform providers are locking down this sort of thing.

The problem is a culture of 'it's ok, everyone else does it, the world runs on it, maybe things need to change, but we need to find an alternative equivalent first.'

No.

It was always wrong. It was never justifiable. Permission was never requested, only assumed.

If you are recording my screen without making it abundantly clear up-front that you are doing so and why, and without allowing me to decline without providing any additional identifying information, you are automatically unworthy of my trust, not only now but forever. The people who thought this was acceptable are unfit to make such decisions, now and forever.

In short: fuck you and your advertising.

Why is this sort of bullshit even allowed to be technologically possible? Because someone profits. Screw their thumbs until it isn't. You want to make money from the people using your software? You get it from them, specifically from them, by providing a worthwhile product. You should be punished for selling them to someone else.

Unless you can teach them the value of that which you ask in exchange for your product, you are committing fraud.

You don't get to benefit from the information you siphon from people who don't understand the value of it. You know exactly what you've done and always did; no second chance is warranted.
Yep, so true. Any decent config file that will be seen/edited by a human needs comment support. And any file that will not be seen by a human could be json (or whatever).
I believe that hydrogen is being looked at a bit, but it presents some significant safety concerns since it needs to be compressed pretty substantially to get good energy densities. It's my general impression that the safety concerns outweigh the usefulness for the time being.

Right now, my organization is focused on a number of hybrid electrical approaches with the main goal being to minimize losses by using the descent phase to charge batteries that are then used to assist in climb on the next flight.

I haven't heard about the EasyJet proposal before. I'm looking for more info, but I can't find enough to form an intelligent opinion yet. Interestingly enough, it seems to be a YC backed company that's developing the vehicle.
How does one appear in the Google News carousel?
Yeah, that was more open and shut (court orders them to do something, they refused. Play stupid games win stupid prizes)
> Many language require strings to be quoted

The languages we're comparing here are JSON and YAML. The latter does not require quoted strings, except in ambiguous cases. (And even then, actually, it technically isn't required, though it is usually the easiest thing to do.) The absence of these quotes makes the syntax get out of the way of the reader, and makes YAML comparatively easier to read.

> comma requirements inane is an opinion, not an objective fact.

I boiled it down to a simple statement, but disallowing a comma at the end of repeated grammars means that adding something to that line causes unnecessary noise in the diff. For example, say I add a single item to the end of a JSON list. The diff I would love to see is:

[
a,
b,
+ c,
]

which makes it rather straight-forward to the code reviewer / reader of the diff that we're simply adding a single item c. But JSON's grammar forces this diff:

[
a,
- b
+ b,
+ c,
]

which makes it harder to see what the semantic change is, because simple syntactic changes are now clouding the picture. Also, I find that people's mental model of the task ("add item to end of list") causes them to forget that they need to add a comma to the item above it, resulting in syntax errors down the road.

(Better diff tooling can help here, but often I find we have to work with the most primitive of tooling; if the grammar can lend itself towards such simple tooling, s.t. that tooling is more effective despite its simplicity, why not? And here, we can: grammatically, whether the list ends or does not end in a comma is rather meaningless, and JSON (and for a long time, JS) were pretty alone in this opinion. Most other languages allow that trailing comma. The only other one I can think of is SQL.)

> You're not saying anything about the readability of one versus another, you're just listing gripes you have about JSON.

The gripes I have about JSON don't apply to YAML. Hence, that's why I prefer using YAML, which was the original question.
It's missing one important part for config files. It's tedious to write by hand.
> existing U.S. law... contains endless procedural barriers to the achievement of basic justice

This is one of unfortunate problems with the law in the US, but not the only one.
I see, and stand corrected. Must presume this is as long as they never get desperate (a la Yahoo).
It's not a good return on investment because the underlying asset hasn't appreciated 7.5%/yr some 8 years later. I am not a valuation expert but as a small business I'd estimate a 3x EBITDA placing the valuation at 2.34MM. The investors presumably owned a fraction of that.
How can they publish photos which they don't own the copyrights?
I've personally used FullStory.com to debug some especially spurious bugs in many a browser. I do with it was opt-in only but I haven't seen such a system.
I personally hate ads with such a passion that I subconsciously stopped to listen to US podcasts more and more and mostly found European podcasts which offer to pay/donate instead.

And especially German podcasts found a way to send them money without paying fees like patreon or paypal does so that even small amounts like $1 make sense.
Something like this?

www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-09/wells-fargo-opened-a-couple-million-fake-accounts
> human-readable

technically yes, practically maybe not so much, especially with e.g. CDATA sections
This title should probably be changed to something useful. There is no indication of what it might be in the original title.