skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see the reverse engineering skillset as not essentially different from low level systems programming, and as such it's very valuable even outside of "pure" security research.

I work as a Python programmer building scientific apps (so not security-related or systems programming at all), but at work every so often we're confronted with legacy code in binary form, or particularly nasty segfaults, etc. The thing with abstractions is that every so often the lower levels bleed through. At times like these, if you know your way around gdb, the ELF format, linking conventions, and can reason in assembly, you'll find yourself highly sought-after.

It gets even more fun when things work nicely on Linux and go haywire on Windows. Often there are no docs on Windows, so you need something who is ready to crack their knuckles, fire up IDA pro, and descend into the 7 circles of hell.
A Case for Superconducting Accelerators
the military "headset" is not the most familiar one to a lot of people, generally heuristics should be just as predictable as a machine. This is for example how it is possible to coordinate as a team and move while someone behind you is discharging thier weapon over your head, there is THE only procedure, not a selected procedure of equivalence. If you were to listen to radio transmissions when an aircraft went down, you should be able to predict what state the instruments and armaments of that aircraft will be found in, thus predict to i high degree what would be required for recovery operation, or if it is even worth risk of assets.
Oh the irony of posting this on medium. On my laptop the content is merely 30% of the screen - there's a big banner, pop up, and big footer. To boot to that 60% of width is dead white space too.
I'm excited to see the death a frankenstein medium.com has become - it's completely unreadable without postprocessing extensions.
it's ALL ABOUT POWER. the 800 pound gorilla is the lack of power IN martian orbit and moreso on the surface of mars. no nuclear reactor of any major size can be launched into orbit let alone deep space and solar panels get less powerful as you travel away from the sun. we can imagine a bunch of chemical energy technologies will be invented to be launched to mars and then reach its surface, but realistically a satellite with solar panels around venus can generate massive power , over 4.5 times the power of that satellite around mars according to basic solar irradiance calculations. and probably even more than that ,

people love the idea of touching down on a solid surface on mars, but why? especially when the prospects of launching heat tolerant robots to venus might open up a world of possibilities. i'd sooner believe longrun humans find a way to colonize a world with a tremendous amount of energy easily available to harness, than one without. and also, consider how much more of our attention mars has gotten than venus, isn't it maybe worth thinking about that venus might deserve some more attention , relatively speaking?

http://em01.powweb.com/sciencetoday/solar_constants_%20plane...

TABLE 2. Solar Irradiance at the Planets
Planet Solar Irradiance, W/m-2

Mean Perihelion Aphelion

Mercury 9116.4 14447.5 6271.1
Venus 2611.0 2646.4 2575.7
Earth 1366.1 1412.5 1321.7
Mars 588.6 715.9 491.7
Jupiter 50.5 55.7 45.9
Saturn 15.04 16.76 13.53
Uranus 3.72 4.11 3.37
Neptune 1.510 1.515 1.507
Pluto 0.878 1.571 0.560
The Cognitive Aristocracy
Show HN: BetterArgs – A string parsing tool to help build CLIs
Xnor’s saltine-sized, solar-powered AI hardware redefines the edge
the solution is my watch is always on and buzzes for calls :) and the center has a lot of different people to contact that can contact each other. (we have a little geographic redundancy here.)

but the reality of this is that, if you're on a transplant list, you basically won't be doing any significant/major travel or be unreachable for long periods of time.

i will say though, this depends on the organ i imagine. i think 1 hour is standard across the board, but lists/priority and other things change dramatically depending on which organ you need - kidneys are viable for longer than hearts, etc.

UNOS/OPTN is where you want to look for information on organ distribution - https://unos.org/transplantation/faqs/ "How does the matching process work?" and https://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/learn/about-transplantation...
Interesting. Not sure if it's a gag or for some sort of handwriting/stroke analysis. Or it could be a variation on the M&M contract clause (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/) to try to verify that they actually read the contract.
Time to go back to my neighborhood grocery store where when i need some product he doesn't carry i talk to him and he will have it a few days later. I used to love technology and that's why i choose this field but now i feel it asphyxiating and that makes me sad, perhaps i'm just getting old.
Tangential, but koa-router isn't even that great, been using koa-tree-router [0] instead. Fewer dependencies, no API oddities and long-standing bugs [1], faster. It's much younger (less battle-testing), and has no regex and multi-parameter routes, but is worth considering.

[0] https://github.com/steambap/koa-tree-router

[1] https://github.com/ZijianHe/koa-router/issues?q=is%3Aissue+i...
... blah blah petty self-serving bourgeois rambling blah blah
The TFA release date for China was almost one month after the rest of the world. Plenty of time to realize nobody really likes Finn,and adjust marketing accordingly.
Social Engineering Doesn’t Work? Blame the Genes
Burning Man purges one-percenter camp
Wow was MongoDB really that bad?
Google UX in general is atrocious. They keep changing the format on every product so you never know where to look. The use of dark patterns is especially horrible. I don't know if what they do is on purpose terrible, or someone just failed at their job, but Google and material design in apps is particularly bad at doing things for the user. Any time someone references Google or some other large corporation and say "see, they are doing it this way" I want to slap them.
I don't get them on my Sprint phone, somehow. My work phone is AT&T, it's constantly getting them (I want to have my Chinese coworker listen to a few of the Chinese recordings...) so I just leave it powered off most of the time. No big deal, maybe 4 legitimate inbound calls in 4 years, of which I missed 3.
I haven’t gotten any spam calls after enabling it on my phone number that I’ve had with TMO for 20+ years, nor have any legit calls been marked as spam. I suppose everyone’s milegage may vary.
Cilium 1.4 released
three main considerations for any mission:
seek opportunity, gain advantage, achieve objective.
If you pulled up crime statics on black people vs white people, you'd have similar damning statistics. Rather than prejudicing this "unknown Chinese" guy why not treat him as a person first and find out who he is, and what he has to say?
I’m not saying it’s the only factor just a single factor that people tend to overlook. But I think Porsche has a higher percentage of car enthusiast in addition to a higher quality build process. So the owners will take better care of the car, won’t drive it in poor weather etc, where a BMW is often a daily driver. Again, not saying it’s the factor just a factor. Like I just saw something that was “Here are states with the worst drivers” but the data was based on speeding tickets etc. So to me they should have really said “Here are the states with the most enforcement”. Ok, maybe not related at all.
Things work out nicely in this case, but that Tesla slammed the brakes long before a crash was certain. This is itself a hazard, and in other situations would cause crashes.
He's talking about a dead tree dictionary, not a piece of software. While I largely agree with you, adding a search bar to a book isn't possible.
That's true, I just feel the example is a bit dangerous. It could be really good advice in one context and really bad in another.

Also sorting a table is rarely more complex than filtering the data by some property, and although I avoid UI libraries, I can't think how one could get in the way.
Can you explain in more detail about “my schema is my app layer”?

EDIT: fixing autocorrect
I'm sure it could.. if you had the minimum hardware and a smart enough bot. It's always going to be an arms race.
Real World Reactive Programming – Do We Need Flux?
I see that too. In the 90s a lot of developers were self taught and were self motivated to solve problems. With recent hires I see a lot of people who probably did CS for a good career but don’t really care about the craft. If something doesn’t work exactly as it should they just give up.
biopatriarchy? Thats a new one for me today!
Yes/no.

Epub 3.x does support a substantial subset of HTML5. However, there are only a small number of core media types that can come with an expectation of working.

Atop of that, most styling can be expected to be ignored.

The CSS-section of the spec [0] lays out most CSS fits the spec, with a few exceptions, and a few additions, but that most readers won't make use of them. That is absolutely the case.

Most of the speed from an ereader over a browser comes from these parts:

+ You can safely ignore most CSS, or all CSS and just use Author-Defined CSS profiles.

+ You can safely ignore any of the script tags you encounter, though they are part of the spec.

+ You don't need to support every media-type out there.

+ Most documents won't be HTML - they'll be the well-defined XHTML, meaning you need less cascading rules to transform the document into something well-formed.

[0] http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-contentdocs.html#sec-c...
SAT Solvers as Smart Search Engines
Sure you do. Putting your phone number on the collar is implicit consent (request even!) to be called if the dog is found.

The law is not applied by dumb machines. No-one is getting fined in the scenario you mentioned, just like no-one is being fined for calling a pizza place because they found their number on a menu. Behavior can be used to infer consent.
Is this at all confirmed?

I'd imagine they might have just seen Princess Leia/Han Solo as more recognizable on the posters for an audience that might not be into Star Wars as much as other audiences seem to be.
MongoDB by default is (was? It’s been a while since I’ve used it) schemaless, which means all of your data validation must take place in your app instead of the database. Your data integrity is then only as good as your weakest validation.

Edit: scheme/schema autocorrect typos corrected. Thanks!
Does someone have the time explain what NoSQL Mongo didn’t do that PostgreSQL does?

I guess I don’t really understand the structured SQL vs NoSQL when you aren’t accessing directly but via a program. I also don’t understand why they would have supported a NoSQL and object-relational at the same time at any point.
I eat plants because it's the best balance of survival and how much suffering I cause. If one day we invent an affordable pill not made of plants that fulfills my biological needs, and its production causes less suffering than eating plants, sign me up.

Then let's suppose this pill is a mash of different rocks (which we have to extract from the earth with all its consequences) but then we invent nano bots that change my organic needs to be fulfilled by the energy of the sun, then sign me up for that too.
> I know this comment is in jest, but please don't joke on Hacker News as you would on Reddit. Posts like this add little informational content, spawn a thread of joke responses, and take time away from hundreds of people who are here to read high signal commentary.

Here's a challenge:

Create a bot capable of generating and posting content like the above that's attributed to "zxcvbn4038."

The bot doesn't have to be able to get through spam filters or register itself. It just has to take the current state of a forum thread as (part of its) input and output a) content for a post and b) a position in the tree to insert it.

The human bot-author can then try to insert the content into the thread at the given position. If the post doesn't get detected as spam and can avoid downvotes, the bot wins.

The prize is the sheer joy of contradicting what I'm assuming is an HN mod:

> edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

Edit: added rule about avoiding downvotes to retain "high signal commentary."
JPL wrote a fascinating reflection on what engineering practices allowed this to happen. For any of you who have not experienced the NASA Knowledge Gateway, I would recommend. https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/1743
Google Duplex?
Hmm. You could take a subset of photos, label them on attractiveness, figure out the vector for your personal sense of human aesthetic, and then generate pictures of people that you specifically find beautiful. Sounds like a good business idea for... uh... ads.

(Or a service that makes you prettier in social media photos. Yay dystopia!)
When should startups have to start paying employees?
When do you think the law should require a startup to comply with minimum wage and similar laws? I ask this question because I see far too many companies run into serious problems for not complying with these laws and being devastated by the consequences.
It’s pretty overwhelmingly the case that at the earliest stages of a startup, the founders typically pay themselves nothing. They are working for equity.
The same is often true for the earliest “employees.” Often time they are treated as independent contractors, even though that’s not technically legal. The law probably requires that they be paid at least minimum wage, but the company doesn’t have the money for that. Instead, again, the work for equity.
It seems so unfair when a disgruntled early employee or even co-founder has a lawyer write a demand letter seeking $100,000 in unpaid wages and penalties. Everyone made an informed decision to work for equity. Everyone knew what they were doing. But the law doesn’t care.
And, worse, in California, certain people in a management capacity (like directors) can have personal liability for unpaid wages.
The usual response I hear to this is that the law is screwed up and way too employee friendly. These laws should be ditched and let people enter into whatever employment relationships they want. We’re all adults.
I see this as a cop out. If you look more broadly at the world of employer-employee relations, there is a long, dark history of ruthless employers using the uneven power dynamic to cheat employees. I don’t think most people here would like the stories that are likely to come out if you ditched basic labor laws.
The problem is it doesn’t “feel” like these laws should really apply to early-stage startups. My question is where one draws the line? And I’m curious what people think.
> The present world does not need more blue-collars, because machines do their work very well, it needs more scientists and engineers who will invent our future.

I don't know... plumbing, welder, underwater welding, glass blower for scientific glasses, etc.. are in need iirc.
Possible alternative headline: "Company weights in trade-offs of having two different database systems, decide to consolidate into a single one." :-)

They don't give too many reasons, but say that operationally it is gonna be easier for them to work with a single database than with two (no-brainer?)
He is obviously a well trained mathematician so reading his pieces (of which there are many) is akin to watching a tsunami come to shore---you cannot look away yet you know that this is a tragedy unfolding.

This said, his complaints about set theory would have been (probably) more convincing if he stated the axioms correctly. The Infinite Set axiom does not simply say that some nebulous infinite set exists it states the existence of a set with some very specific properties. His complaints about the undefined nature of a 'property' are also not above criticism: GB theory (equivalent to ZF) eliminates it completely.
I see two broad (but fuzzy) lines that can be drawn:
1) The requirement to pay at least minimum wage (i.e. not pay people in equity) should apply to anyone who is functioning in a traditional “non-exempt employee” capacity. This shouldn’t be all that controversial. People in these positions most typically earn less and for good reason have been the most protected under labor laws. Most founders and early employees are fulfilling roles that, with proper pay, would be considered exempt under labor laws.
2) Some sort of revenue or asset test. If you could pay your employees, but are not doing so, I have less sympathy for you. Investors are willing to put money into a company that will pay for reasonable salaries. So, even if your only assets come from investment (i.e. you don’t have enough revenue coming in), that’s not an excuse not to pay people.

But this doesn’t seem to be enough, does it? These two factors would say that any company that can’t afford employees can simply not pay anyone who would otherwise be an exempt employee. I don’t see that as sufficient.
There could be other criteria:
3) In addition to #1 and #2, the “employee” would have to own at least X% of the equity of the company
4) Or maybe just X% of the voting power of the company (even if not the economic ownership)?

Those are just examples.
Or maybe part of the solution is protection in terms of a liquidity preference of sorts. If a company has a less-than-stellar M&A exit, preferred shareholders (investors) typically have a liquidation preference that ensures they get their money back before anyone else shares in the merger proceeds. This seems sensible as a matter of investor protection – they put in $X million and understandably want to recoup their investment before other shareholders get a windfall.
This might mean, however, that an early employee who didn’t get paid in cash and only has common stock, might get nothing while an investor who put in a bunch of money is made whole. What is the rationale for the investor being made whole, but an employee who worked for free getting nothing?
The law could, for example, require that upon liquidation, employees who worked for free get a certain amount of money. (The law already provides a preference for wages in the bankruptcy context, but this is different. I’m imagining a situation where companies would be able to lawfully hire certain people for payment only in equity, rather than cash.)
I’m curious to hear your ideas. How do you change the law to match the reality that startups can’t usually pay employees at the earliest stages, while not ending up in a situation where unscrupulous employers can take advantage of employees?
Interesting that you chose statistics as your example. I've always considered statistics to be the one branch of math I've studied where intuition keeps pace with depth and rigour. The caveat being that I am by definition an amateur when it comes to any other branch of math.
Put in something that will say if you're calling about a kidney press 1 and then it rings.
Mediterranean diet study was hugely impactful.The science has fallen apart
> my scheme is my app layer ... MongoDB by default is (was? It’s been a while since I’ve used it) schemeless

https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aschema
https://www.carcomplaints.com/Toyota/Corolla/2010/recalls/

I drive a 2010 Toyota Corolla :') - the philosophy sounds great but the implementation is poor.
From reading the post it sounds like they want transactions for some of the functionality they’re trying to build. I guess Mongo still doesn’t have those.
I've been cold-called at my desk by a recruiter twice in the past couple years.

For one thing, I have no idea how they got my desk number (they knew my name), as that's supposed to be internal-only information, so that was an unpleasant surprise.

For another thing, I'm of that population that strongly prefers text-mode communication over phone calls.

So making an cold call to my work was a great way to get a "fuck off" and blacklist that recruiter. I wonder from what business culture they come from, and what their success rate with that method are, to make that approach seem viable.
“And the trades' apprenticeship model would probably work better for most programmers than the alternatives.”

Make the bootcamps longer and more rigorous and you are there.
> There is the matter is that blue collar professions slowly become extinct because they are replaced by robots and automatic machines. Now whole factories are ruled by a few engineers and skilled technicians. This is good because no industrial work should be done by hands more than once. And that is especially true in programming, because in programming non-creative work can be automated very easily. The present world does not need more blue-collars, because machines do their work very well, it needs more scientists and engineers who will invent our future. Likewise, the world does not need more low-skilled programmers (even though they are not blue-collars in any sense) because they will be replaced very quickly by smart machines and programs. Instead, the world needs more high-skilled programmers, true engineers, who will change our life, making it better, safer and longer.

Engineers can be idealists, too.
I feel like the React Native fad has come and gone. Even FB is using their own server-driven UI solution nowadays, which allows clients to be dumber while still rendering native components.
Interesting, I thought I had seen it mentioned somewhere (Twitter, I believe?) that hooks would only be available on v0.60. Excited to see them integrated so fast!
I'm fairly convinced of that, a couple times I "press one to speak with a sales representative" and it immediately hung up on me. Or "press three to be removed from the call list" and the volume of spam calls drastically increases.

I actually just finished a couple weeks of zero spam calls and it was wonderful...if not a bit on the lonely side
This looks like it will be extremely useful for people generating plausible-looking Twitter sock puppet accounts.
Bare minimum, how come? Most standardized image processing datasets have very low resolution images.
Backblaze Cloud Backup Gets First-Ever Price Hike to $6 per Month
That sounds interesting, source?
Retailers: All We Want for Valentine’s Day Is Basic Security
What better way to refute elitism by mentioning “even janitorial work”; the job so derided by ostensibly successful people that it is the stand-in trope for “low-status employment”.
would like to see:

unit tests that prove 1M connections in Go
When I was working at AT&T, there was a different kind of kickback scheme at play.

AT&T --> Primary Vendor (B) --> Another Vendor (C) --> H1B/others who work as contractors for C.

Hiring managers and C have some sort of arrangement, wherein managers get paid in cash by C. Primary Vendor (B) takes a cut for $3 per hour per candidate. Even (B) knows what is going on, but does not care as long as it is easy money.

Anyway, one such scheme got busted when I left that place. AT&T fired three employees over this--two of these employees are brothers. The gist of it was that (C) was controlled by wives of two of these employees. And that (C) was placing 90% of candidates in AT&T NJ. This had raised suspicions--and other primary vendors complained about this. So, AT&T found the conflict of interest--that (C) was controlled by wives. And one of the wives was working as a contractor for one of the brothers. Because of this, they terminated all three.

Another company I am aware of, is doing this in the bay area. Here, the primary vendor is itself controlled by a dad of one of the managers at company D. This son at D pays in cash to the prospective managers, when their candidate is picked up.

One company I worked at, had a different kind of play: primary vendor's hot recruiter was involved with one of the hiring managers. Eventually, this led to the termination of that said manager.

Lots of things go on behind the scenes.
Reddit transparency report details government data requests