skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Declining updates in general weakens herd immunity.

No, declining security updates that are applicable in your situation and that actually work weakens herd immunity if the threat is contagious.

On my system, I'll be the judge of when that applies, not some external organisation, and certainly not an external organisation with a track record of both abusing an automatic update mechanism to push changes that their users don't want and pushing changes that break things.

Anti-telemetry and "update control" arguments kind of sound a lot like anti-vaxxer arguments.

Anti-vaxxer arguments are not grounded in science and evidence. They advocate not taking effective preventative measures by denying the existence of the harms those measures prevent.

Given that the risks from both bad updates and data leakage are well established, if anything I'd say the argument that we shouldn't care about controlling our own systems and uploads from them is the one analogous to anti-vaxxer reasoning.
Aren't Opera and Vivaldi just a re-skinning of Chromium?

If yes, then it probably won’t save you.

And here you have the actual problem with Chrome — unless you fork it and have resources to maintain that fork, its open source nature is absolutely irrelevant. And even if you manage to fork it, you’re not operating at Google’s scale so your fork will be irrelevant.

PS: I use Firefox on top of MacOS and works just fine for me ;-)
Superconductivity was against the accepted laws of physics, until it wasn't. It all may very well be a scam and should be watched with healthy dose of skepticism, but I wouldn't throw the idea out completely.
Meta: these angle brackets got interpreted into the link.
I think the point of the article is that by producing good quality code , that is delivering value in the mid/long term.
The smartest guy I went to school with works at the NSA.
That might be true. They're all incredibly complex beasts. I don't think it matters much for adoption in terms of embedding or forking to create a new browser; the engine internals can and should mostly be hidden behind an API.
Except it's the total energy that matters in this discussion of Earth limits, not the one per capita...
Yes,the idea is to use the Ghidra decompiler to ease reversing new parts of the FlashAir firmware.

The MeP-c4 datasheet is available at https://www.datasheetarchive.com/pdf/download.php?id=6693e80...

I had success compiling GCC with MeP support using git and the commit before the removal. Yet, I believe that FlashAir are not compiled with gcc.
> ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion

How does one store links like this? You'd need a bookmark file, which would sort of give the game away, I'd have thought. How do you make sure you notice when you visit a URL with the same readable prefix?
Why Advocate for Pull Requests?
This was my prof at the time who introduced me to this stuff he was working on[0], you can read more about his work on their site if you are interested.

[0] http://www.zia-lab.com/
Emergence of Exploitation as Symmetry Breaking in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
Makes sense. I’d still 1000 times over pay for a cloud/virtual server from some provider (even if only for a day) than trust myself to configure something like that 100% securely.
>can somebody else create a new one with the same address and receive all emails from the deleted account and possible take over all other accounts

Why would you care? You'd be dead...
How does it connect to the internet?
Funny how every time someone from a university asks you 5 questions for research or lets you click around in a prototype it needs forms and ethics review, but photographing random people and publishing it as a "dataset" is apparently fine?
Hail Eris.
Show HN: Confello – Discover Tech Events with your GitHub account
The watershed laughs at human borders.
Sounds like actually a team size issue. Two guys in their spare time can't create a codebase big enough to have severe agility or maintenance issues. But the moment you ask for a feature they can't handle in that very limited funding envelope, there's going to be an issue.
I am curious about your example. When you guys tell management about the best practices what is their response? What is their reasoning on not doing PR reviews, tests, etc ?
I'm also curious about this. Reinventing your own serialization and retransmission every time, instead of using proven technology does not sound like "decreasing" complexity. Same goes for using files and grep instead of databases in many cases.
Vivaldi also has profiles, added recently! (Uses Chromium)
>What about one of the companies here like Flexport

Flexport is the company I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that rejected me for an interview for not having a BA/BS.

>Hope all is well, Ryan! I wanted to extend a virtual wave and thank you for your interest in joining our team. You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the Customs Brokerage role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience in a broker role doing entries and customs classifications
Could rare earths be mined from sea water?
Bingo. Deanonymize the majority of users to the point where only privacy activists, power users, and grey/blackhatters are running adblockers, compile a comprehensive list of such users, and then either find another way to track them or straight up ban adblockers because "only the bad guys use them, what do you have to hide?"

Their concern about losing the ability to "personalize" ads smacks of NSA/GCHQ concern that they can't reliably track X percent of the population (UBO/pihole/etc users). Sure, Google makes a ton of money from ads, but with their stranglehold on the search, mobile, navigation, and video markets, do they really need to make such a controversial change just to squeeze a few extra million a year out of Ads?

No. There's plenty of other ways to make money for their business, there aren't many other ways to remain in good standing with and funded by the surveillance state. There's something else at play here.
People make jokes. Judges make jokes in court opinions all the time. They make jokes at trial in cases involving billions of dollars. And those are for general public consumption. Press releases are pretty much only ever read by reporters. People read them in the form of articles based on the press releases. Putting an Easter Egg in there, playing on a term created by a reporter, does not display an “utter lack of seriousness.”
I think there’s an aspect of your question that deserves sincere engagement, but I also think there is a very overblown idea of “the best in their field” and a misconception that if you were “good enough” to get hired into top private sector jobs, it somehow means you are better than peers.

For one thing, people grow & change. Out of some hypothetical cohort of peers in year X, some few may have been the “best” in science and engineering at the point of time when everyone was graduating college and getting jobs. Doesn’t mean they would still be the best 5 or 10 years later — in fact the best person from the cohort at that time may not even have ever studied computer science until later in life.

Even more importantly, top private firms like Google et al hire in a specific way that emphasizes a combination of rote memorization of facts and youthful resistance to burnout. While this may correlate with high skill in some age groups, for some types of work, it’s a very poor substitute for experience-based judgment and creativity, especially the stuff that cannot be mapped easily to rote memorization of computer science facts.

In this sense I’d guess the three letter agencies have employee skill about as good as most tech companies, with the exception that very junior employees are “better” on the rote memorization and burnout-avoidance predisposition at tech companies (and that agencies don’t care much about missing out on that overrated talent pool sector).

Many agencies also have long-time partnerships with professors and academic institutions that give them a lot of consulting support, often from literally world experts in things. Combined with FFRDCs that also have this type of consulting relationship and can often pay a little better to attract better talent, the agencies probably have no shortage of good talent.

The main question I have is why the agencies are able to pay such low salaries, sometimes even in urban areas, no bonuses, etc. I feel they have talented people who are massively underpaid.
you may have access to services/accounts that affect other family members.
Based on my experience with trying to buy hunting land, setting up a trust and leaving your property to the trust is a great way to stop your kids from "selling the family farm" after you kick it because there seems to always be one guy in every trust that wants a bigger percentage of the sell than everyone else which quickly turns into a real life example of the prisoners dilemma.

Castle estates are probably a few generations deeper than US land trusts which would make the problem much worse to deal with.
Most of this is a series of false choices. In fact

- tests can help show code quality improvements do not break anything

- you can have integration tests and unit tests at the same time; in fact, it is more of a spectrum than two rigid categories

- it's often possible to have simple code and test it

Generally speaking the more specific the question, the less controversial the choices are. It's typically not all that interesting to argue about how to test a particular algorithm, data structure, or service.

The hard part in all of this, from an engineering perspective, is just talking to folks, promoting good teamwork, actually showing the value of less obvious things (a passing test suite), and knowing what to do when technology choices become toxic to the product or team.
How is this trending on Show HN? The text is unreadable. The letters lock, unlock and rotate. Can there be a more user hostile way of offering a free preview?

From the Show HN guidelines:

> If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't do a Show HN.

There is clearly no way to try out this book. The "Show HN:" prefix should be removed from the title so that this post can belong to the list of regular posts.
Wow, this is so cool!!!
Bill Nye's documentary on climate change (2016)
Microsoft details 'Modern OS,' its vision for a future operating system
Women will never be able to program well... when will people understand that there are massive biological differences?
It's going to be hard to do anything with the projected 60% population rise by the end of the century, though...

Most of the environmental damage is down to our growing population gobbling up resources.

Of course we should do things to get results quickly but we also have to look longer term if we want to see sustainable results.
Thanks. I should have looked it up beforehand but the article definitely made me feel frustrated.
Indian Wedding Invitations – Wedding Cards – 123WeddingCards
Uber’s share price hasn’t increased since 2016 (or maybe 2015? On mobile.) The increase in valuation is essentially equal to the cash they’ve raised since then - 30 billion or so including a big chunk in the IPO.
Copy ~/Library/Safari to ~/Library/SafariTechnologyPreview if you're okay with overwriting existing settings of STP.
It's not that the shortages don't almost happen, it's that the free market is good at fixing them. If the warnings come, people will think they can make a bunch of money by mining, and they will invest in solving the problem.
I doubt it, if you had the exceptions you would write the exceptions, not the announcement.

Also, even if you think US is equally evil, there’s still a difference. US is #1 economy in the world. If tomorrow everyone will stop buying American gas, this might help American economy: will obviously hurt oil mining sector, but help everything else due to falling energy prices. Hollywood, software and internet companies won’t even notice.

Russian economy is very small, they’re smaller than Italy or Brazil, and they entirely depend on the export of their natural resources.

If your goal is to minimize global evil, and you must select from these 2, the pick is kinda obvious, doesn’t it?
not one mention of bitcoin in this discussion, which would seem to be the obvious connection between physics and economics
Ask HN: Would there be any interest for a digital privacy 'discussion group'?
I have been milling this idea over for a while - I personally would quite like a space where I can discuss topics such as privacy, encryption, cryptocurrency etc. with others. A special interest/advocacy group with healthy discussion.

Forums and comment sections are okay, but they don't really foster long-lasting discussion and relationships. I imagine the group would be hosted on something like Slack or perhaps IRC. Do you think this is something people would be interested in joining?
> "Effectively that means something like being able to translate between business requirements and academic language. "Oh, I need something that works on directed graphs, handles cycles, logarithmic in space, linear in average case time, resistant to adversaries, respects cache locality during lookup, and behaves deterministically."

Excellent comment!
I'd love to see a catalog of data structures that documented those characteristics; do you know of a good resource like that?
Swift handles both cases well:

var test = "test\u{1F469}"
var tset = String(test.reversed())
var tes = test.dropLast()

(The second line needs the extra ‘String’ to turn a sequence into a String; and yes, the names of the variable do not match their content)
Things can get a bit customized at either end of the spectrum, but generally each letter covers 15%, with A..D covering the span 100% to 40%.

So a B would be 70 to 85.
No, Google prohibits that.
Something I miss in Firefox, is that the webextensions `management` api does not allow to toggle off/on extensions other than themes. It's no secret that some of the most popular browser extensions require a wide range of permissions to work, while being useful only occasionally. This restriction prevents to have on Firefox a quick toggler without leaving the page like (author here) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extension-manager/...
Ncform Standard Components
i may not want my data destroyed.

and why bankruptcy? why not just change of status? company is sold, or goes public, or goes private, or just changes from llc to c corp, or CEO changes? there's far more things that can happen to a company besides bankruptcy which would cause me to want my relationship and data with the company to terminate.
I'm looking to build a saas app on AWS and was seriously considering using SQLITE db for each company. I was also looking at RDS (Postgres) but im really thinking with SSD this isnt going to be necessary. The only downside I can see is that i'd have to handle backups and provide read instances if that became necessary.
It seems to me that the software market is a "market for lemons"[0]. Consumers lacking a decent way to validate software quality don't believe you when you do in fact produce a high quality product as other firms who produce low quality software are making the same claims you are. Everyone assumes that virtually all software quality is bad, and if its going to be bad anyway why not complete the work quickly as well?

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
> But this is an archetypal example of how the media manufactures outrage and manipulates people’s emotions.

No, this is a journalist just doing their job, letting people know what's going on so they know what the hell "freedom gas" means next time a politician brings up that "inside joke."

I know HN has a low opinion of people who didn't focus on STEM in college, but they're not all out to get you out of spite. I think you're manufacturing your own outrage about someone taking the time to inform us about what's going on in the global arena.
> If you're well credentialed, tech-smart, greedy, and morally bankrupt, it's probably more lucrative to work for Google than the NSA.

Can confirm.

Went to MIT for EECS. Lots of us went to Google or trading companies.
Its absolutely imperative that you dont let anybody claiming themselves to be a programmer anywhere near a keyboard. Unplug them all now, unless you have all the safety precautions in place to catch any potential problem no matter how small or insignificant it may first appear. They will ruin your business. 100 percent guaranteed. Absolutely critical word of advice. Nobody should ever claim to be capable of being able to write any function in any scripting language. Only AI can write programmes in todays world. The risk is to high.
"We don't need the gold plated version, we just this to work and we need to ship it YESTERDAY"

If you try to explain they just say things like "don't write bad code so you won't need tests and refactoring"

My new rule of thumb is: don't work for companies without a technical co-founder.
Comparing Angular to React is comparing apples to oranges. It would make more sense to compare Angular to React based frameworks such as NextJS [0]. Those are "easy to get up and running" and offer "a very solid foundation that can be picked up easily by new devs starting on the project", as well.

[0]: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/
> The only reason I can see is in ensuring that text is losslessly convertible to other UTFs

As other top-level comments and the article have mentioned, different systems still use different internal representations, but all modern ones commit to being able to represent Unicode code points, with no automatic normalization. To that end I suppose that in terms of reasoning about the consistency of data in different systems, it is better to use code points than the actual size, which is left to the implementation.

The possibly better alternative would be to use lengths in UTF-8, but that might seem arbitrary to some. Perhaps counting code points is useful in that it gives a lower bound on the length in any reasonable encoding.
How to implement backpressure and load shedding?
And you hear stories about people being very afraid to reboot 30 year old mainframes / minis, so when moving buildings they are kept powered on, connected to ups...

Reboots are good because they test that your OS still works and you can make observations about which update broke what. They should be fast and painless though.
Node_modules Is a Cancer
I just scanned my home directory and discovered thousands of node_modules directories filling-up my disk. Many of these are in dot config directories but it seems every bit of software these days contains the obligatory node_modules directory chewing-up tens or hundreds of megabytes. With Ruby I have a single .gem directory and Node itself has a global node_modules directory so why this need to re-download half of npm.org every time?
The need for a standard, service mesh API
Another gripe I have with Firefox (which I only use on the Lubuntu laptops I have) is that when it wants to update it insists that you restart it and won't let you open another page until you do.
Just Google it! ... oh wait. (See the problem yet? For a significant part of the world, Google is Internet, or at least keeper of all the gates)
If I had only read this comment and didn't look into the PDF, I'd have thought it indeed have some appalling typography -- as opposed to some minor nitpicks I wouldn't even care about...
“simple, standardized, plain-language software source code licenses”
they have dozens/hundreds of systems in different languages run by different teams. nothing was gdpr compliant 2 years ago. there's been a cost to move to that compliance. changing systems you don't have to is also inefficient. you'd need to weigh the delta between the inefficiencies, assuming that 'efficiency' was the primary goal in the first place.
Paging #notacop
If, as a company, you actually care about tailgating, there is no "challenge" aspect. There's a barrier that lets one person through at a time at most, and you remove any and all social aspects to it.
> Warning Signs That a Bubble Is About to Burst

Multiplication of people writing frantic click bait articles about how bad the current state is.
Science tells us rest is vital. So why do we glorify sleep deprivation?
Ffpass: Import Chrome Passwords in Firefox
I'm wondering if Google degrades performance on its properties, like youtube and gmail? I use Chrome for GSuite and that's all. I'm fine with FF's performance on YT, but I'm not very picky about such things.
At my current company it’s basically the roadmap.
Do you know any "absolute minimum you must know about Unicode" articles that do go into enough depth?
6 seconds is an eternity with modern technology. That's seriously unimpressive.
Most interesting refactorings change the boundaries and count of abstractions, which usually does break unit tests.

Unit tests are great at the leaves of the call graph, and things which are almost leaves because their dependencies aren't at any real risk of change. The further into the stack you go, the more brittle they get.
Privacy exists regardless of death.
> Python became the second-most beloved programming language (behind Rust, which is the language people most love telling you they’re learning aspirationally.)

As an aspirational Rust-learner (well, I've read the first chapter of the book) this is spot on. :P
LibreOffice Online in 2018
I don't know how much different they need to be from Chrome/Chromium to not be affected (and if some built-in blocker like in Opera still will be fine), that's why I'm asking :) There is also Safari, but I would rather cook my CPU with FF than use Safari.
wouldn't you have to know about the person in question first before you can 'indirectly' make the connection?
I chuckled at first, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched. This is a story of a startup founder backed by y-combinator, who posthumously provided inspiration for a memorial bot[1]

WhatsApp (Android) stores it's backup on Google Drive by default; by using this data, it is more than possible to create a bot and resurrect someone in the digital domain.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...
CDC and HSS agencies get lists of banned words: transgender, fetus, diversity