skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone made a Nix thing that's supposed to check whether a new version of Chrome is available, and if so, generate an updated package.

While doing so, they found themselves needing some kind of "tryFetch" function that would return true or false depending on whether a certain URL is reachable.

But there's no such function in Nix. Why not? Because you're not really supposed to do stuff like that in the Nix paradigm which is all about determinism.

So... they really wanted to do it anyway, so they invented a clever hack, probably too clever.

What can you do in Nix? Well, you can make a package that downloads a certain URL and uses the downloaded result, provided that all the observable outputs of that package are deterministic. So after the package's build script runs, Nix verifies that the result matches a hash specified in the package definition. If the hash doesn't match, the package fails to evaluate.

So this hacker decided to make such a package that tries to download the Chrome update and results in the boolean information about whether the update was available. But the result needs to have the same hash in both cases. That's where a hash collision comes in handy.

So this hacky build script uses a couple of well-known PDF files that both have the same SHA1 hash. If the update exists, it gives PDF 1, otherwise it gives PDF 2.

The update script then depends on that hack package. It "installs" that package, and then checks whether it actually contains PDF 1 or PDF 2, and now it knows whether the Chrome update was available or not.
The architecture of an exceptional situation: part 2 of 4
Indeed there isn’t:

> Third, corporate directors are not required to maximize shareholder value. As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." (BURWELL v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC.) In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors.

https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
Can you explain how? I don't understand how a hash collision of two PDF files would help with this. Surely if it wanted to download the file at 'https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-of..., it would need the actual hash of that specific file?

edit: I just read mbrock's comment above which explained it perfectly. Didn't realize it was testing the url to see if there was an actual update available, I thought it was doing the actual update.
I think this is great advice. I'm not particularly lonely, being married and having two kids, but sometimes my wife and I don't do enough together. We instituted a regular babysitter night every two weeks, and we are required to find something and go out that evening.

But only passively saying yes to everything is not enough. I need to take action and organise something to do with her. And also take initiative to organise things with other friends. Sadly, those friends don't seem to follow this "as you wish" rule.
3D O-Symbols for KIDS orienteering maps
As you say, it's a controversial --and complicated-- figure to determine.

The problem is that there's a big range, which mostly reflects different routes of drug discovery. To take two contrasting examples:

1. A target and potential molecule are discovered and developed in an academic lab, following which a small lean biotech is 'spun out' to develop the molecule further. This biotech accesses funding, and spends an amount of money --usually in the low hundred-millions, but sometimes less-- running the studies and collecting the data necessary to approach approval. With luck and a following wind, they succeed, and their overall cost is low for the industry. (See the lower end of the table in [1]). If they fail, the biotech sinks without a trace.

2. A large pharmaceutical company need to continue developing new drugs to maintain its existence. It has a drug discovery operation or two, trying to find new targets and develop new drugs for them. There's significant attrition of these molecules here. Any promising molecules are taken into early-phase trials, where further significant attrition of these molecules takes place. Finally, if those studies are successful, the molecule heads to expensive phase III trials. Here, it's worth noting that the big players in pharma will have a combined R&D budget (encompassing all that we've mentioned here, plus some more) of multiple billions per year.

So for small single-molecule biotechs... Firstly the low end of the estimated development cost range ignores a lot of the discovery costs as they were borne by the academic lab. Secondly, the low estimates don't account for failure - as failed biotechs wouldn't be included in the estimates.

In contrast, the estimates for big Pharma do include their discovery costs, and can (in a decent analysis) also include the huge cost of multiple drug failures along the way to getting one drug approved.

Have a look at the linked analysis [1]. Rather than trying to estimate the cost of a single drug, it looks at the overall money spent on R&D versus new drug approvals in that time. (The methodology isn't perfect; but overall, it's probably a better picture of the cost of drug development across the board than a single-molecule estimate.)

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/the-co...
Looks like Dong Nguyen's company has been making some games since: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DotGears
>it’s like social anxiety, but for approaching strangers with a request

So... the same as regular social anxiety? The underlying "rationalization" (guilt for bothering people, fear of rejection) together with the proposed solution also seem pretty much the same to me.
A plausible theory but it smells a bit like the idea that women care more about how they will look when they are dead so they apply suicide methods that won't deform their face.

My verdict leans heavily that suicide is always a failure in treating the underlying issue. Depending a bit on who you ask the wast majority of suicides is caused by untreated mental or emotional disorders, most commonly depression. A untreated disease which definition is the inability to feel happy and recover from feeling sad seems quite relevant in the context of suicide, and when we know there is a difference in treatment and see a difference in outcomes then that should be our first stop in our logical conclusions.
Web Intelligence Agency
Automate Production Settings for Oculus Go Store (Unity)
What scandals have they not addressed?
Actually, ANOTHER trend in software that annoys me is cloudifying things that don't need to be cloudified and even things where cloudification is more of a liability than an asset. An ssh client is something I trust with passwords that I type in on remote machines, private keys that unlock all kinds of security sensitive stuff, send back and forth pieces of code that are valuable intellectual property, etc. etc. -- I really really really, don't want that thing to start "calling home" under any circumstances, period.
> A potentially huge difference between the Purism Librem 5 and the Pine64 products is that Purism is emphasizing privacy and security.

Dunno, PinePhone is said to have physical switches too.

Also all you need for privacy is complete control of the OS, which you will have on PinePhone (complete mainline Linux support, down to GPU drivers). It doesn't matter what country the HW vendor is from if the OS/bootloader is fully controlled by the user.

Main thing that will hold PinePhone back initially is lack of suspend to ram support. There are some partial solutions (WIP crust firmware), bit it's not complete, yet. There's still time though.

PinePhone will be the first smartphone I'll buy, regardless of SW support, as I'd like to play with the HW anyway. I already had plenty of fun with other mobile Allwinner SoCs in form of a A83T based tablet, and A64 is quite similar to that and very familiar to me. So all the SW I already wrote for the tablet will be easily re-targettable for PinePhone.

It will be interesting to see how Pine64 will make it usable for regular people. But for me as a programmer, it's will be a very nice device that I'll be able to fully control and experiment with without any limits. Even the power management co-processor is fully user programmable and has support in gcc toolchain since gcc 9.1.
You could do that, but why? There's no motivation.
Gotta be prepared.
It's like, if you go to Australia you have to wear sunblock. If you go to the USA, wear adblock.
>I like to read tweets from accomplished people. Successful startup founders for example.

You can't get your Startup Founder porn from here or one of the other umpteen social sites? 60% of all social media seems to be from "successful founders" or "influencers". Hard to imagine anyone finds a dearth of that stuff.
An anecdote: my (not-IT) company does exactly this for out-of-band management... except, in one small satellite location, the phone company no longer provided any copper POTS lines; all they could do was an RJ-11 jack out of the ONT that was backhauled as (lossy) VoIP. So the modem couldn't be made to work.

My point being, it seems that modems are becoming less-and-less viable for out-of-band management.
Historically, the idea that a freer market and capitalism go hand in hand with democracy does have some merit. The fact that business became a more important factor for the power calculus meant that it was possible to challenge the autocratic status quo, and democracy was an alternative that was naturally favoured by many businesspeople at first because it promised a more meritocratic system.

Nowadays, the super rich have more power in practice than many of the autocrats who were thrown out by democratic movements of the long forgotten past, so their hubris leads some of them to work towards establishing autocratic structures again, believing that those will always work in their favour (newsflash: they don't, but that's another topic). Since capitalism alone does not put a check on this development, it is no longer a good ally of democracy. Still a useful tool when applied with measure and combined with other tools, but not an ally.
Location: Singapore
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes (EU/India/Asia) I am Indian Citizen
Technologies: React/Frontend Engineer
Résumé/CV: http://amitkolambikar.com/resume.pdf
Email:
It's not surprising at all considering NSDAP (name of the orginal Nazi party) stands for "National-Socialist German Worker's Party" (emphasis mine).
Sidestep regulations - if you build a system that doesn't allow you to do certain things (e.g. change balances at will), then the government cannot force you to do them.

But again - it's not about regulations. It's about interoperability. Centralised money transfer stuff is not new (PayPal? Banks?), the problem with it was always integration with other systems.

Also, if it's a centralised database, it's hard to build real startups on top of it. Look at what happened to startups building on top of Twitter APIs when Twitter decided to change them. If you build some parts on top of a public blockchain, it gives guarantees related to accessibility of those parts in the future.
Free GDPR and Website Security Test
So join a club. Clubs are great places to meet people. Find one appropriate for a hobby you have, or explore a new hobby.

Learn a new skill and meet people.
Just making sure you're aware of the discussion around Ghostery that's happened here on HackerNews, so you can make an informed decision:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15969525
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16809625
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617827
Thanks For Share this i love to use this
> Also, compared to a centralised database, you have an interoperability aspect - if it's just an organisation keeping everyone's balances, it's hard to make those balances interact with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem (e.g. how do you participate in an ICO, if the crypto balances are stored in one system, and token balances are stored in another? implement APIs for every single one of them?)

I'm pretty sure its much easier to make a single request to a single well defined server, as opposed to connecting with a swarm of peers, downloading the entire blockchain, verifying it, and computing your balance by traversing the entire history.

Its not like there is some universal "blockchain API" that computers come from the factory ready to understand. Specialised code has to be written to deal with every new cryptocurrency.
For many apps I'd ask if it really needs to be local. I've had some success with compiling my application to a pile of javascript and then it's possible to go from there to "works offline" functionality, at which point you have a de facto local application that just happens to be opened by putting a particular URL in the browser.
Mocking AWS with Moto Python Library
Would they do those same sorts of things, yes. Would it be described the same way, no.
Facebook's blockchain will most likely be a consortium of corporate validators. In this case you could say that the blockchain is "just" a normal distributed append-only hash-linked ledger with public verifiable records, but nowadays the more concise term for that is "blockchain."
I guess that makes sense - distance between bus stops in a city is usually relatively standard, it's a good unit of distance to think of.
Everyone is susceptible to propaganda, including you and me. Democracy is based on information, so if you mess with that information, you can most definitely have a noticeable effect.
The propagandists exploit the asymmetry of resources and time between them and you. They can lie easily, they have all the time and money to craft careful lies. You don't have all the time and money and domain knowledge to figure out each and every one of their carefully crafted lies.
Not to mention other more sinister tactics like tracking you, finding out your biases and using them against you with targeted propaganda campaigns.
The Form Is Never Neutral
Although collisions have been found for both SHA1 and MD5 (and the latter are much easier to generate), as far as I know it's still extremely difficult to generate a file with a given hash ("preimage attack")... I wonder if that property might make it useful for some things, since generating collisions even for MD5 is still much more time-consuming than verifying them, and generating a colliding pair means that finding another block with the same hash is still near-impossible.
Email the Author
This will probably be great for people who trade a lot of cryptocurrencies. In some countries crypto-crypto trading is free from taxation. When cyclic crypto bubble bursts and multi-year downtrend starts, you have to sell those cryptocurrencies for USD and pray exchange does not go bankrupt/hacked/exit scam or withdraw and pay taxes. Right now there are some forms of stable coins issued by private companies with no guarantee of buying back issued tokens. Very unstable market. FBCoin may change this. I believe first customers will be cryptcurrency exchanges.
Location: Singapore/India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: YES (EU/UK Preferred)

Knowledge / Skills: React/Frontend Engineer

Résumé/CV: http://amitkolambikar.com/resume.pdf

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitkolambikar/

Email: amit007kolambikar (at) gmail (dot com)
> currently for MacOS only

Fail
Windows Based Pentesting OS for Hacking:- Windows 10 Black Spider
The real danger to democracy is a populist appeal to uneducated and ignored majority via mass and social media, which is an ultimate winning strategy just because of numbers. And this flaw is fatal.

Democracy is supposed to run in societies where educated people of culture amount to more than 50%. Otherwise it is a disaster.
Haroset, being made
from wine, definitely contributes to the stains. YMMV.
Nvidia's Quake II RTX Released
I wouldn't naturally think about summing lists in reverse so it becomes more cognitive effort to understand the code. I've seen plenty of termination condition bugs on reverse iterations that might back that up.

A related thought is how modern code clean-up tools are doing things like reducing if-nesting e.g. turning this:

if (open)
{
stuff();
close();
}

into this, with early returns:

if (!open) return;

stuff();

close();

My feeling is that the first more naturally represents the idea I have of the behaviour and the second, like your reverse iteration, is an encoded version of that idea. I feel I have to make an extra cognitive step decode and reassemble it to create an idea of the behaviour.

I suspect the further you stray from the natural idea, the harder the code is to read, validate by eye and the more likely errors are to crop in. I'm don't know how subjective this is. I generally don't have a strong feeling about early returns it's just I have been noticing the slightly greater cognitive effort they are causing me compared to the logical chunking that nested-ifs provide.
> screen-capped

People are upset that others are taking screenshots of their public posts?
Money and political power transfer naturally to each other.

In authoritarian countries, the ruler is usually superrich billionaire. In the western world there are limits, but they work better to one direction than another.

Clever politician may be able to get millions, but rarely hundreds of millions and never billions. Billionaires however can turn their money into politics. Only direct middling for political campaign is limited. Superrich can create institutions, whole universities, think tanks, academic positions, grants and lobbying groups. Even political parties.
The most logical thing for Facebook would be to create something similar to the Chinese payment systems Alipay and WeChat Pay, bound directly to your Facebook account and maybe even issuing credit to some accounts. Completely different from a pseudonymous cash-like cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Tether.
Vox has much more interesting and detailed takes on this issue. See for instance the current season of their Future Perfect podcast, and this episode in particular:

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/future-perfect-3/e/6138...

A few articles that go through the same information as summaries or interviews for those who don't want to listen to the whole thing:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federal...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/29/18629799/federa...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/1/18629859/judge-r...
I am curious if there are any counter-views published out there. Softbank is undeniably big and heavily invested in the VC basket. Is there public analysis on how well the larger entity is protected to down-valuation of their portfolio of startups?
fair call, considering it's all permissioned, to pathetically argue the point I don't really care much for:

I guess you could claim some sort of providence of money movements using a git like system but realistically I think it's likely the marketing department had far more to do with the decision than the engineering dept.

You only have to look at wechat's dominance thoughout Asia to realise whatapp could get absolutely blown away by the all-in-one messenger/payment system if it took off in the West.
Have you transferred money across borders to an individual lately?

Actually yes.

From Switzerland to my brother in Belgium. It was transferred on the same business day at no expense to him or me. Look up SEPA[1] for details.

Just because the American banking system is the complete shits this does not necessarily apply to the rest of the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
That's how you end up with unmaintainable solutions and code-bases which die under the cost of just trying to keep the system running, and because they lose the ability to evolve.
What Is Byzantine Fault Tolerance?
> Nazism has brought about a lot of changes, but I don't think we can lay this one at the feet of Aryans trying to escape their compulsory reliance on unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate Jews.

Hmm... Sounds like hate to me.
Probably depends on what you define as 'addressed'...
If I insult another user on Hackernews, how is Ycombinator resposinble for that?

Your example is a difficult one because only the person who the derogatory comment is aimed at can decide whether or not they're insulted. Whether or not something is insulting is up to the person it's aimed at. The same goes for things like negative comments, stupid comments, copyright on a derivate work, etc. Whether those things are actually bad is a matter of opinion, and each party probably takes a different position. Consequently it's different situation, and not really relevant here.

A better analogy would be if I were to invent a piece of plain text malware and posted it in a Hackernews comment. Would YCombinator or HN have any responsibility to remove it, or should they just let it sit there? I contend that when something is actively harmful the publisher has a duty to protect visitors by removing the content or limiting it's impact. (And HN has some awesome moderators who do exactly that in very extreme cases, plus users here can flag things to hide them when there's a consensus, so it's not really like HN is completely free of 'censorship')

Plenty of people take the opposing view that platforms shouldn't get involved. There are two sides to most arguments. I'm slightly on the other side to your position.
There is no objective definition of good. To someone you're a good person. To someone else you're as bad as a nazi. That's the real slippery slope: from benevolent censor to malevolent.
Why divert food to machines? Growth, competitiveness.

Why make inedible seeds? As a safeguard.
The companies don't want that, because they are afraid of losing control over their "users" as the latter become more technologically literate and realise there are better alternatives.

You can already see some of this in things like DRM and adblocking, and of course the various walled gardens.

Mainstream software is all about keeping users blissfully ignorant and consuming.
I honestly don't think this is true. For one, Japan is not shutting down its power plants. It is restarting them (or at least the one 6 km from where I live claims to be -- although they've been shut down for something like 10 years because they can't get their act together). Everything I hear from inside the country says that nuclear power plants are slowly going to be coming back online.

Secondly, while Japan can't currently produce enough through renewables, you would be surprised at the pace at which renewables are increasing. I pay something close to 30 cents per KWh right now. At that price household solar is basically a no-brainer. I haven't seen a single new house in my area built without solar panels for at least 3 years now. You can buy solar panels in any normal hardware store now (and it's the absolute first thing when you go through the doors). Sun and wind are abundant in Japan (especially the latter, given the amount of coastline we have).

Hydrogen vehicles are going absolutely nowhere in Japan. It ain't going to happen. EV charging points are absolutely everywhere. I live in the countryside in an apartment (my town has a single main street to give you an idea of the size). We don't have charging access at the apartment, so I charge my Leaf at charging points exclusively. We've gone on road trips up into the mountains. There are charging points everywhere. There is literally nowhere that I can't go as far as I can tell. Japan is gearing up for EV.
The backlash from banning GitHub links would be magnitudes larger than JSFiddle.