skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 0th Commandment: Survival of the Species
Are you working on anything interesting? Will it matter if the species ends? We created technology. We are in a position to do something about it.

We live in "interesting times". For the first time in human history there are two threats to the survival of the species.

The first is the approaching disaster of climate change. The second is the approaching disaster of nuclear holocaust.

We are the first (and maybe the last) generation to face this new world.

I've finished reading "The Fate of the World" by Jonathan Schell (Knopf, 1982). About nuclear holocaust he writes:

The death of our species resembles the death of an individual in its boundlessness, its blankness, its removal beyond experience, and its tendency to baffle human thought and feeling, yet as soon as one mentions the hope of survival the similarities are clearly at an end. For while individual death is inevitable, extinction can be avoided; while every person must die, mankind can be saved.

Therefore, while reflection on death may lead to resignation and acceptancce, reflection on extinction must lead to exactly the opposite response: to arousal, rejection, indignation, and action. Extinction is not something to comtemplate, it is something to rebel against.

To point this out might seem like stating the obvious if it were not that on the whole the world's reaction to the peril of extinction has been one of numbness and inertia, much as though extinction were as inescapable as death is.

And yet if one gives up these aspirations one has given up on everything.

As a species, we have as yet done nothing to save ourselves. The slate of action is blank.

To the obligation to honor life is now added the sanction that if we fail in our oblisgation life will actually be taken away from us, individually and collectively.

Use the "power of 2". Tell 2 people. Have them tell 2 people....
we’re you logged into your “my equifax” (or whatever) account? if so that’s true. krebs blogged on this soon after the breach.

if you just mean in some kind of “cold” browser, eg incognito mode, that wasn’t my experience.
Oh man, does your keyboard not have punctuation?
Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel
In 2010 Endeca's analytics engine exe was growing substantially via introduction of template instantiations. The engine eventually crossed the threshold of instruction cache misses outweighing the benefits of avoiding type lookups at runtime, and the team agreed to stop pursuing template instantiation so aggressively as a performance enhancement.

I wonder if modern compilers would have allowed the team to keep at it.

It's been a while, but if I recall correctly, the optimized, stripped exe's at the time were a bit under 100mb. >500mb with debug symbols, etc.
Of course. It’s also ok that this chatbot is called Elon.

Plenty of people get offended at stuff. That doesn’t mean they are right.
That's the ideal solution. Their proposed solution is to turn it off immediately and just let it dry, without rice or anything else.
> ...when that binary blob Nvidia gives you that your engineers can't fix breaks, you'll still get the blame.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. When MS was getting sued for underspecing system requirements during the Vista era, one of the interesting bits that got revealed to the public during the trial is a chart of Vista crashes/lockups by source:

https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsib....

The biggest single source? nVidia at just under 29%. Another 9.3% was attributable to ATI (now AMD). Only about 18% were directly attributable to MS itself. Video driver crappiness was reportedly a huge motivation for Microsoft's switch to the WDDM video driver model.
You make some valid points and some confusing points

You want to take advantage of apples free os and app upgrades but still run 13 year old software without paying for upgrades.

Why upgrade your Mac? Just keep the one that is working with the software you have for 13 years

You want the latest, bug fixed, secure software and OS . The Apple side is free but you will need to sort out the application side .

BTW ms OS upgrades are not free. Me thinks you want too much
Use some cinnamon next time instead.
I really have a hard time believing anything anymore. How much of any of this really happened? Is this all just an information game?

Trump's M.O. is using these self aggrandizing anecdotes to convey success when there is nothing under the surface. The media is feckless; skeptical when convenient, subservient when the war drums have been banged.

What really happened with the drone? What really happened with the response? Where are the receipts?!
I started streaming it yesterday on my Twitch channel, but I was asked not to by a Google employee.

I've been working through the Beginner's Quest instead, which is actually a lot of fun and has a cute story.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/442406188 if anyone wants to see the broadcast from yesterday.
Great idea! The best two engineers I've had the pleasure to work with were both 45+ years old. They had a cool head when shit hit the fan, and were generally unfazed about technical problems. "Been there done that, let's do this right." If your company is discriminating against older engineers you're making a big mistake!

Now can we get a "no leetcode" job board? My favorite companies give you a take home, of a real world problem, vertical slice of what you're expected to do day to day.
Back when I played contract bridge semi-seriously, there were lots and lots of known cheats, all of whom were already world-class players when playing under stringent conditions to prevent cheating.

But the moment those conditions were relaxed, they cheated.

I don't know why this is even a mystery: These people want to win, and they will do everything, including get as legitimately good as they can, AND cheat if they can get away with it.

We see this is lots of other fields: Black hat hackers who clearly are talented enough to make money legitimately, politicians who rig elections (cough--votes suppression--cough) who are probably going to win in their strongholds anyways, unicorns that raise hundred of millions of dollars in funds but still break all sorts of ethical and legal rules...

What about "deflate-gate?" Did the New England Patriots need to play fast and loose with footballs to win? Or did the just want to win so badly that they did everything legal, questionable, and illegal to win?

Lots of big-name athletes have doped and dope today. Do they need to dope to win? Is it a red-queen's race against other dopers? Or are some of them so focused on winning that they see dope as just part of winning along with the best equipment and the right training and winning the VO2 Max lottery?

Some people just want to win, and they want to win so badly they are prepared to get good AND cheat. They think that cheating is part of winning, just as being good is part of winning.

I do not think that the only people who cheat are people who couldn't win without cheating.
Scops: Self-Supervised Co-Part Segmentation
Firefox 69.0a1 (2019-06-22) (64-bit) chugging along just fine on macOS
> all people

Really? All? And if not all, are we back to the ADA reasonable accommodation standard? What bugs me about the "accessible or bust" people is that they will deprive 99% of the population of something because 1% can't have it. There's some on-going case about university courses in California of some sort being publicly released but "not being accessible". So now, no one can access it because they got taken to court. It costs zero dollars (or very few) to publish existing material to the world; it costs quite a bit more to add stuff to it.

Maybe a great OS should be available which can run quickly without accessibility features, but slower if they are explicitly installed by an end user. Like it or not, it's a balancing act between how much we're willing to give up and for how few people.
lol, reading your description made me think you were there too... but you said $1M rather than $6M :)
So Valve just clones the libraries they need and redistribute that on the Steam repositories. They already have the CI infrastructure for Steam itself and the Steam Runtime, a giant blob of set-in-stone libraries.
Similar story about a Canadian triathlete:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/sports/julie-miller-ironma...

HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459976
Acronyms suck
> people should be put in a cooperative environment

yes. but, a case can be made that someone who parks in a spot reserved for people with disabilities, or parks their car in the middle of a bike lane is disrupting and damaging the cooperative environment. furthermore, in the US the presence of guns and people willing to use guns means that confronting such a person directly is significantly riskier than it would be in some other, truly civilized, country.
Police should be the single class of human beings for which this is not true.
Hunting Elephants Will Help Them Survive
Help me understand how this makes sense, the antenna on most modern radios is directly connected to a front end amplifier, usually an extremely sensitive MOSFET circuit. The reason a Gaussian surface can block EMP from a circuit is because there’s no conductive pathway into the part you don’t want an EMP. When the shield is the antenna then the only part that can be hit by the EMP is one of the most fragile and sensitive ones.

I guess the idea is that once the drone reaches the enemy you can use an IMU for station keeping and expect GPS to get destroyed?
You sound like what I’m describing isn’t working in the rest of the world rather well?

Literally every single statement you’ve made is false, and no, I’m not going to exert 100x the effort you did making things up to refute them. I’m sure folks from other countries will chime in, unless this place is truly the echo chamber it appears to be.
As time goes by there is going to be more and more "old" code out there, and generally that will either have to be maintained in its current state or converted to something newer. And to do that you're going to have folks who are both familiar with it and are willing to work on it - except that the young bucks today just really don't want to do that.

I'm hearing from IT employees of local corporations that if their code base is twenty, ten, or even just five years old now, they can't find young folks who are willing to work on it. And even if they do find them, they don't necessarily have the skills to do that work, nor any particular inclination to really learn those skills, nor are they willing to stick around for very long even if they do start the process.
I worked in FinTech in India. Libra's chances of success here are high.
> "Those tests, however, showed some limitations when integrating Raytheon's system with other military technologies and battlefield tactics and protocols, Hammett said. Raytheon has since invested more resources to further develop its system, which could still be deployed in the future by the military. "

Is this an indirect way of saying, "It'll disable our stuff too."?
Keep an Idea Bin
It's more than just zero. Every number can be represented in multiple ways in DEC64. For example, you could represent 3 as

3 x 10^0

or

30 x 10^-1
Irrespective of the other evidence, it’s the unwillingness to entertain alternative explanations and just label an absence of self-defence as “very suspicious” that I find to be the hallmark of a braying lynch mob. It’s a rejection of critical thinking.

Which is why I specifically called that out and nothing more.
For consumer drones, you wouldn't be able to communicate with the drone to control it or transmit any video or other data from it. Also, GPS or any other type of GNSS navigation wouldn't function.
I would rather keep ageism. It keep my competitive advantage intact (25 years C++, 20 years java.). I can easily code much faster than a team of 10 younger developers, not because I can program faster, but because I know WHAT to program, as oppose to how to program. I.e. they are running faster to the top of the wrong hill.

Kind of strange that you will judge your MD by its age, but when it come to mission critical systems you prefer young people.
> I have zero problems with "economic pain" caused by us not doing business with a country that has 1M people in "re-education camps", disappears protesters, and wants to extradite people from Hong Kong.

If these were the reasons for the U.S's actions I would agree with you more. I think only international pressure can help with these issues. The Chinese people themselves can do very little given the realities of their country's surveillance capabilities.

But let's not nobly kid ourselves that these issues have anything to do with the cause or the possible resolution to the trade war.
Career Advice for Junior Devs
I have heard of this argument often, and I don't quite understand it. It's similar to saying "I'm always amazed at how a country that has the most number of Nobel prize winners has some citizens that can't do calculus"

The people that work on Android and Chrome are not the people who work on websites. It's okay to say the website doesn't meet your expectations, but it's better to recognize that those are different projects worked on by different people with different set of requirements and resources.
All the serious runners I know have their own GPS watches already, and chest straps to monitor heart rate. I only know a couple though, so it could be a biased sample. Or perhaps it is an age group difference, but I would think a doctor who is serious about his training would be a prime candidate for buying one though.
If you’re confident that free countries produce better tech why do we have to choke them out? Wouldn’t it be a stronger message to let the freedom do the work?
Yep-- a classic example of one.
True, Blizzard in particular does a fantastic job supporting their older games. It's still a bummer for other games, such as the beloved (by me) Escape Velocity series, whose publisher is now defunct.

Its also annoying for people with some commercial software. My dad uses an older nonsubscription version of photoshop and some desktop publishing software that I believe will be incompatible with Catalina
As a handicapped person: The internet is my accessibility.

Most of the standard conviences available to "normal" people because smartphones are a thing and yadda is how I make my life work.

Among other things, I also co-own a tiny list for blind developers. So I have some familiarity with the fact that there are people who actually need accessible design in a way that I don't.

But I think any internet that works well dramatically improves life for the vast majority of the 60 percent of people who have varying degrees of impairment, two-thirds of whom do not self identify as disabled or handicapped.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811988#19815635
Some related reading on that:

"“Tell the agents, ‘I had a heart attack,’ and they know what heart attacks are, suggesting what to do to find immediate help. Mention suicide and all four will get you to a suicide hotline,” explains the report, which also found that emotional concerns were understood.

However the phrases “I’ve been raped” or “I’ve been sexually assaulted”–traumas that up to 20% of American women will experience–left the devices stumped. Siri, Google Now, and S Voice responded with: “I don’t know what that is.” The problem was the same when researchers tested for physical abuse. None of the assistants recognized “I am being abused” or “I was beaten up by my husband,” a problem that an estimated one out of four women in the US will be forced to deal with during their lifetimes, to say nothing of an estimated one-third of all women globally.

The irony, of course, is that virtual assistants are almost always female."

- https://qz.com/640302/why-is-so-much-of-our-new-technology-d...

As well as:

- https://thenextweb.com/code-word/2019/05/23/how-our-interact...
Anybody remember this court case from ~20 years ago?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that a Connecticut city could decline to hire a man who had applied for a job on their police force because he was deemed to be too intelligent.

The rationale was that it takes a lot of money to train a cop, and if the cop is highly intelligent, he might get bored and leave, and that would be a costly problem for the city.
The transformer “explained”?
Same here - jumped the ship a couple of days ago and thoroughly impressed so far. Plugins system is sorrowly missed at some moments, but should be arriving soon from what I understood. Everything else, including performance (I'm amazed by how fast that WebGL through WebASM works) - better.
Probably an Apple laptop.
While aggressive inlining eliminates function call overhead, it can actually exacerbate instruction cache misses because it makes the executable larger.
Check out LiveOverflow on YouTube. He's gone in depth on a bunch of CTF tasks and his solving process.
Original Nintendo 64 development demos
I have refused such a check at Walmart and the result was an employee trying to physically obstruct my exit from the store, accusing me of stealing, and calling me rude names. I left anyway. No cops. No attempt to ban me from the store.
As I recall their allocator was a fairly basic implementation - I don't think it had small allocation support, or any debug/stacktrace/tagging functionality.

You could drop in your own allocate/free for everything in-game and ignore their implementation (you had pretty much complete control over what went where in the memory so long as things to be copied to the RSP/RDP were aligned correctly and the display buffers were on some specific boundary).

Allocating from pools per system was very common (eg particle effects got a 16kb memory pool for vertices and the code had to gracefully handle hitting that limit). Another common practice was to store a high-water marker at the start of a level load and just roll back to that marker when you changed level.
That’s quite an analysis but means nothing as words can be mixed or he can use non conjugated words to make sure there is no distortion.

Also, I’m not a cop, but I grew up around a lot of cops. I spent many nights serving cops after their shift and listening to their stories. As such, I can say that your whole “this is how cops do it” is bullshit because it’s not admissible in court. What cops do is ask the same question a thousand different ways until you tell them the truth, hence the long sessions.
"America’s vast network of concentration camps.."

That is NOTHING like a concentration camp. Or a slave shack. Or anything else that is truly horrific.

People did not sneak across borders for the chance to get into concentration camps (or slave plantations.)
The goal of studies like these is to convert common knowledge into scientific knowledge. It does make sense directionally, but it's still worth rigorously studying it.
President can characterize the transaction as something else and get the same result
> These people are now starting to get old and it’s the first time we’ve had this vast an older software developer workforce.

Where are all the older software developers? I've worked at a few FANG and similar-level finance companies, and the vast majority of developers are under 35. Are the older ones clustered in some other corner of the industry?
p.s. For maximum fun, look into accusations that professional cyclists--including some very big names--are using hidden motors!
Maybe it's one of those non-standard free() functions that crashes if you give it a null pointer. A developer I once worked with said that he had gotten into the habit of "if(p) free(p);" because he'd work with such a system before.

(In case anyone is wondering: I can't think of a single commonly-used standard C library that doesn't accept null pointers to free(), i.e. the nullcheck is in the free() itself. Embedded systems, however, may vary widely in how closely they follow the standard.)
> If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing apps at all.

A lot of people forget this, but it's true: Apple didn't want _anyone_ to be able to make native apps on iOS except themselves. That they changed their minds and helped devs make a ton of money tends to erase this fact of history.
the point -- which I believe you deliberately missed -- is the tools are available from the very beginning to know if you are shipping code with known CVEs. It's easily available. I'm not sure why you're invested in pretending this is super hard, or that it isn't extremely easy to do correctly if it is a company priority to do so.

As their scale, it's also straightforward to build and maintain the list of sites you're running, what's running them, and the versions of libs in place. Particularly because you can have dedicated engineering for the above. It really comes down to whether it's a corporate priority or not.
> In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android

And those in Google are probably also kicking themselves for taking their eyes off the ball and allowing Oracle to acquire Sun
A lot are rich and retired.

A lot are managers.

Most never existed. It used to be a much smaller profession.

Some burned out and work in real estate.
How do I use this on mobile? The controls mention touchscreen...
This basically means you can take any politician or citizen and create a video in which they say or do bad (but fake) things. Age of Fake News has truly arrived. Is there some research on how to distinguish fake generated videos from real ones?
A simple yet brilliant song
I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling that. I watched what happened, literally competed against them in the 90’s. Recently I’ve been thinking they’d changed a lot, Edge on non-windows, Linux friendliness in windows 10 and azure, etc.. even kicking around the idea of picking up a windows lapper to kick the tires on. I got chills by this. I don’t think I’ll be getting that laptop for a while.

It’s a winner takes all world because that’s how they played the game and they made it that way. We actually had quite a bit of plurality before Windows, the UNIX world put in a tremendous amount of effort to have open standards so you could reasonably build software for multiple platforms. Sun built Java for that world. The industry seemed remarkably open to multiple platforms, which isn’t without problems either, but I think I might like it if we had a few more serious mobile players
On Programming Language Choice
Well, you can't. Whether it was a mistake or sabotage only changes the timescale for exploitation of the bug.
http://they.whiteboarded.me/companies-that-dont-whiteboard.h...
People often write this up after the fact.

Google’s CTF normally drops write ups (both their own and links to external solvers’) in some shared repository afterwards.

Of course they won’t go play by play through everything they thought about every time, but they are pretty good reads.
Your answer is trite and unhelpful.
Netflix's Ted Sarandos weighs in on streaming wars
Maybe we'd have more women and other current underrepresented groups in "tech", did the whole post-graduation jobs thing not seem to be about fratbro hazing and "culture fit".

When I got my first real software engineering internship, as a teen, shortly before dotcoms, about half the engineers in my group were women.

And, though they were doing difficult work on technical and systems software, there was none of the posturing, glamorizing, and self-congratulating that we often see in industry today.

(In hindsight, some of the work they did is still beyond what most developers do today, though I didn't appreciate that enough at the time.)

I'm sure there were industry problems such as sexism in the '90s and earlier, pre-dotcoms, and in some ways we have more awareness today, but I think we've become arrogant and cultish in other ways. Yet commoditized. And one-way leetcode-type hazing is part of that.