skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
children's comedy novelist

Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis.

Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHack [1] (itself an icon of hacker culture).

[1] https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360
Newpipe often breaks and fdroid is slow to update...

there's also the Background video playback fix add-on for FF, works really well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/android/addon/video-background...
From the FAQ:

> Finally, there will be a commercial licensing option for everyone who cannot or does not want to comply with the GPL.
Java NPAPI is still maintained AFAIK, but not sure for how much longer.

And a few of my friends say that they have Waterfox deployed company wide because of NPAPI support, which means they don't have to still use an out-dated browser which is cool!
So you're running a local encryption library or app (not relying on server side JS code).

Do you disable auto-update, and risk running a broken version of the encryption library or software, or do you enable auto-update and risk a remote backdoor injection via the auto update?
I like your recommendation on the contract led approach. The active development community is definitely a big plus.
This is a great analogy. The scary thing is, there are countries that do only have one clock (totalitarian regimes that control the press), but that's worse than having multiple clocks.
See: Who Builds a Skyscraper without Drawing Blueprints? [0]

I think we do have the tools to build Skyscrapers in software. I don't think it's as expensive as it used to be but it is certainly more expensive than it is now.

The reason I think we've seen so much innovation in the last couple of decades in software is because we're getting away with building Skyscrapers with little, to no, regulation or oversight.

Great for profits. Not so great for insurers, democracies, and regular people who have to deal with identity theft and fraud claims.

Fortunately it's not like JPL in the 90s. Writing reliable, critical infrastructure doesn't cost nearly as much with the advance of automated model checking and interactive theorem proving tools. The skills to use those tools are more difficult to acquire than the ability to write a valid C program but I don't think every software developer will need to. If enough people in senior positions start insisting on their use I think we'll do well.

In the meantime... when you need to know whether you're building a shed in a yard or a skyscraper you can look to your local professional engineering society for answers. In my area they have classifications available just as they would at your local city hall for determining if you need a permit to build your structure.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRqE59VXT0

Update

There's also a handy reference guide called, the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge or SWEBOK which is regularly updated with the current state of the art. It's quite useful to be familiar with it at least:

https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
Which statement in their transparency report corroborates it?
This sounds sill, but I have a really serious question -- how accurate are the Bourne type films w/r/t how things are at these three lettered agencies? If you are to believe even half the movies, it seems the workers are burned left and right as regular consequences of seniors' political battles. Is that how it is?

I know this sounds silly, but i've been at big companies before (Fortune 10) and have seen some pretty ugly things (once, three reports of a manager alleged a sexual attack on a rival manager; rival manager is fired; manager who's people made the accusation gets promoted.)

Now I can imagine these types of political battles at three lettered agencies might involve false accusations that might land someone at jail. Is it like that?

I'd honestly love to work at the intelligence agencies and serve the country in a role better suited given my technical skills, but I dont want to end up in some shark tank.
I'm not going to get into the meat of the drama here but I do want to say, and I hope the protonmail team is reading, the value of protonmail for me isn't even in protecting me from state actors and whatever they're proud about for being in Switzerland etc.

The value of their service to me is primarily:

- they aren't mining my communication for ad revenue or the enabling of any convenience features which indirectly leads to ad revenue

- should someone (perhaps not nation state) gain access to their storage, that attacker can't see the plaintext of my past mail. Perhaps this doesn't stop them from monitoring incoming/outgoing unencrypted mail, but at least my life history is secure.

I guess they're trying to get this across with their marketing/branding but it always felt a little more over the top to me than the more practical feelings I have about it if that makes sense.

I know some people will say "go with google because their security team is the best" and maybe that's true but my threat model here is googles business model, not nation states. Would it bother me if I found out Protonmail was colluding with nation states etc, yeah, maybe enough to switch providers should one of similar quality exist. Now to read into this kerfluffle...

edited for formatting

edit post read (quote from Steigers second addendum regarding protonmail response):

> ProtonMail once again argues contradictorily and inconsistently. Every user of ProtonMail must still decide for himself whether the email service is trustworthy.

The decision I'm making, and this shouldn't be surprising given my initial comment above, is that I will continue to be a happy paying user. I agree the advertising is kind of misleading, but I always had the pessimist view that the service might give away more than their marketing/branding tries to let on, whether voluntarily/knowingly or not.

I am a little disappointed that protonmail didn't respond more directly to some accusations, I guess they might not want to if they're suing for defamation (according to Steiger?). Am also a little disappointed that both in their response and in their HN comment they said he "hid" something on the bottom which was clearly linked. Though I think he could have done a better job of highlighting the content of that addendum where it was relevant in the article, I wouldn't call it hiding given the link.

I would be happy to see the marketing/branding take a shift towards my more practical viewpoint of it and maybe this incident will encourage that. I have friends/family creeped out by google/yahoo but when they go to the home page for protonmail they tell me (in different words) that the branding is too tin foil hat. The value is there for them otherwise but hard to get past that.

Anyway back to work...
I'm really a fan of the new green deal, I am afraid that them trying to couple it with a jobs guarantee and universal healthcare will make it easy for the Republicans to make it look like a power grab.
I am a fan of both a jobs guarantee and universal healthcare, but those items are not nearly as important as decarbonizing as quickly as possible.
The perfect storm for Bitcoin is brewing
I just want to draw attention to something which we are glossing over, which is that saying economic growth has a very high limit and saying that it has no limit are very, very different claims. If the claim you're making is that it has no limit, then the counterargument is trivial: the universe is finite, it contains a finite capacity for information storage, therefore no matter how you define "economy" the answer you get will be a finite number.

But, I still see a lot of people who won't even concede the point in the case of unlimited growth. That, to me, suggests that we are looking at a deeper phenomenon than can be resolved via logical arguments.

Think about the responses that believers have when confronted with the argument that there is no god. That is not an argument they can confront objectively. They respond with anger, disgust, etc. You're not making a truth claim to them; you're attacking their happiness in the afterlife. You're suggesting that their grandparents have vanished into nothingness instead of being in heaven. No matter what the facts are, they can never accept such an argument.

I get the exact same feeling from all of you arguing for infinite exponential growth. You're not reacting as if this is a truth claim; you're reacting like I'm trying to take away your happy future, in which everyone is fabulously wealthy and everything continuously improves, forever.

Think about how it makes you feel to consider that economic and scientific growth may have a limit. Can you be certain that you are really objective on this topic?
European Jews make up a pretty consistent 25% of America's Nobel, Fields medal, and ACM Turing Awards winners. And they're about a third of the student populace at the Ivy Leagues and 30 percent of Supreme Court law clerks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
there is a lot more than that missing.
Explaining the national debt: why I’m not concerned
I use those but don't like prefer them over uBlock, as the former approach is a bit more heavy-handed.
Not to mention the sheer size and abundance of natural resources in America.
Where was this antitrust enforcement you mentioned when Google bought DoubleClick and YouTube, and Fb bought WhatsApp? Antitrust regulations aren't working at all, to the point other markets/nations might have to take steps to brace from the monopoly the US is breeding.
I'm thinking that we'd need an Originality Authority (like a CA), to act as the anchor. I assume anyone could just strip the cryptographic signature and then re-sign it with their own signature, and we'd need an authority to prevent that.

Upload your content, request a key you can sign with, the OA checks against previously registered content in it's database for originality (I can only assume this would be as buggy as Youtube's algorithm is today).
It's probably more lucrative to work for the NSA then Google.
I did not see much, they just have a rudimentary wrapper for instantiating java classes, calling methods and retrieving objects in `bdn::java::wrapper::Class` which itself is a wrapper around JNI.
This seems to assume that the tests will be higher quality than the problematic code in the first place. It’s actually commonplace to see tests coupled to internal implementation details of production code, which makes refactoring very hard.

The idea of TDD (mostly lost to hype and consultants) is that you change _EITHER_ the tests or the code in each operation. This allows you to use one as a control against the other. If you change both, you prove that different tests pass against different code, which is substantially less useful. Unfortunately if tests are coupled to internal state, getting code to even compile without modifying both sides of the production/test boundary is difficult after a refactor.
And if that had been the only benefit then of course the whole program would be questionable. You asked for examples for the moon program and LHC, and you were given them in ample supply. If they aren't satisfactory in budging your opinion, this flow of discourse puts the burden on you to say something intelligent, and cherry picking only a single, and perhaps least relevant example doesn't really accomplish that.

There's no lack of material demonstrating that NASA's accomplishments contribute more to the economy than they drain in tax dollars [0] and it's difficult to ignore the volume & leaps of technical advancements achieved by earlier missions. You clearly have a different view though, so perhaps sharing that in a constructive way would be more beneficial than posting shallow comments that obviously ignore the information you requested.

[0]https://www.thebalance.com/nasa-budget-current-funding-and-h...
> can be compelled to release it

Yes, but the point that they are contending is whether they _voluntarily_ provide this data.
I remember many years ago a journalist at The Register asking Tim Berners-Lee how his semantic web proposals were going to deal with spam.

TBL again, just didn’t get it, because he didn’t see the world through a social lens. The problem of “tag spam” was already pretty prevalent when the question was asked.

Same article has Bill Gates completely correctly predict the death of VHS and DVD and them being supplanted by something like Netflix/Amazon Video. He was plenty visionary, he just had a technologists lens.
From reading the iOS code there is already a number of bugs that will have issue, including but not limited to the iOS handling of text inputs. You won't get events / onchange firing correctly for autocorrections or when Chinese chars compact themselves. Seems like a very cool project anyway, there is a lot you could learn from react-native's approach to native components.

Edit: not to mention no support for text areas, will be interested to see that abstraction :)
This is a really good read for stats people, this paragraph in particular kind of freaked me out:

> After 100 years of projected extinctions, the global composition of mammals and birds is predicted to shift to smaller (permutation test: body mass observed mean = 70.3 g, body mass projected mean across runs [minimum–maximum across replicates] = 64.1 g [63.4–64.7 g]; P ≤ 0.001), faster-lived (generation length observed mean = 4.27 years, projected mean = 4.22 years [4.21–4.23 years]; P ≤ 0.001), more fecund (litter/clutch size observed mean = 2.51, projected mean = 2.55 [2.54–2.56]; P ≤ 0.001), more generalist (habitat breadth observed mean = 3.23, projected mean = 3.32 [3.31–3.33]; P ≤ 0.001) and more invertivorous species (diet observed mean = −0.00032, projected mean = 0.0012 [0.00087–0.0014]; P ≤ 0.001) (Supplementary Figs. 5f and 7). These shifts are relatively large for the species pool and temporal scale investigated, for example, Davis et al.10 showed that current median mammal body mass is 14% lower than during the Last Interglacial (~130,000 years ago), while we predict an extra 25.2% (23.9–25.8%) reduction in median mammal body mass over the next 100 years from the current level. These declines in body mass equate to a reduction rate of −0.00011% per year between the Last Interglacial and now, compared to a predicted reduction rate of −0.25% (−0.24 to −0.26%) per year between now and the next 100 years.
> This is only natural. Where the customer doesn't value software quality they will hire cheap (not very good / not very experienced) developers.

Well those abstraction wankers usually do not come cheap. So from customer's standpoint they have hired experienced and well paid programmers but the result is still crap.
Yes, that's how I do it too. I have a bunch of Firefox icons in my top panel (Gnome), each one with a different profile. Setting this up is as simple as parent says. You can change the icons too.
No such thing as a free lunch. Nobody is forcing you to use their service either.
Basically everything except the fact that it doesn't eat huge amount of RAM. I can't stand iOS either, so not being able to sync tabs/bookmarks between my devices is probably the biggest drawback.
I don't see why not? Go has a string type that contains arbitrary bytes, interpreted as UTF-8. This seems to work as well as anything else. If there are non-codepoints and it matters, you just have to deal with it (for example by printing an escape sequence or Unicode replacement character).

https://blog.golang.org/strings
Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct. If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem.

However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.
Twitter Has Started Researching Whether White Supremacists Belong on Twitter
The conversation wasn't about the MSM, but still...

> Nearly 100% of the mainstream media was against the person who ended up being elected.

Including Fox News and other right-leaning news outlets? I would suspect that for people who voted for Trump their news content was close to 100% in support of him, with negative news and polling basically either ignored, minimised or re-framed as being another sign of "the elites" being contemptuous and/or scared of Trump and by extension his supporters.

Why would you assume that people are consuming political news they don't like when every indication is that they don't? You even say this yourself later on in the post:

> Instead people who are partisan focus exclusively on one side and simply pretend the other does not exist.

When you consume content that is unabashedly partisan in nature you are far less likely to subject it to any kind of critical analysis, and even small amounts of reinforcement from other sources you align with can give enough credibility to establish a particular "fact". See pizzagate or the Q-anon conspiracy theories for instance.
It'd be too easy to fake, just replace the sensor in an approved camera with your own data feed.

And that's assuming it wouldn't be somewhat trivial to dump keys from one or more cameras on the market to create a an easy tool or resignvideo.com... which is a massive assumption.

As the movie industry has already seen, cryptography doesn't help you when you push out the keys to everyone. It'd be about as effective as DRM is at stopping video piracy.
[tinfoilhat]
Given that Chrome now became Google's weapon against adblocking, how long until it starts refusing to use Pi-hole specifically?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430
[/tinfoilhat]
Related, Dan Luu has a great article [1] where he looks at software hiring/organizations from the "market for lemons" angle.

[1]: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/
I think it is visibly faster. And there are still some nice classical addons that you can install using the addon archive. Together with the newer addons.
I don't quite understand this. The GPL gives the end user the rights to the source, to modify the source and to redistribute the software (modified or otherwise), as long as they make the source available. It doesn't say it has to be available through the exact same mechanism that you received the software in the first place, nor does it say that you have to release your changed software through the same mechanism. IANAL, so I definitely could be wrong, but as long as your GPL software links to the code, eg on Github or somewhere, and provides all of the source including your modifications there, any other restrictions the App Store enforces should be irrelevant to the GPL, right? (Unless the app store says you can't link to external source code, or something, of course)

What am I missing?
> Someone has to pay for all this stuff.

What stuff? Clickbait news and freemium games? I don't think anybody has to, or even should support their existence. I think the viability of their business models only undermines premium content.
Water flows downhill, ignoring man-made political borders.
I maintain that it is a widely-propagated misconception that Firefox containers can be used to replace Chrome profiles. Here are my notes from when I investigated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688651

I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:

- New tabs do not inherit current container

- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)

- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.

- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.

Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.

As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
I love the opening sections of this article, but the end left me feeling wanting.

> the best teams both create much less cruft but also remove enough of the cruft they do create that they can continue to add features quickly. [...] They refactor frequently so that they can remove cruft before it builds up enough to get in the way.

In my experience in several large teams over 20 years, this is not a great summary of what actually happens. What actually happens is accumulation of customer requirements. We build new features and the old features that don’t fit easily with the new ones are not allowed to be removed. Everyone on the team wants the old features removed, and at the same time, the team reaches consensus that doing so would alienate loyal customers and lose business.

The decision is to avoid financial risk, not to drop software quality. The new features are also required, and so compromises and complications arise from supporting both. This is the main source of what is being called “cruft” here. I’ve seen truly great engineering teams, I’ve never seen engineering teams good enough to withstand conflicting requirements between old and new features. I don’t know what the solutions are, but I’m suspecting the thinking on solving this these days is planning a year or two ahead, publishing the deprecation schedule of old features. This takes a certain kind of management that is willing to sacrifice a few dollars today for the bigger picture, it isn’t easy to find.
No idea haven't worked at Facebook for over four years