skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An already built container is reproducible in the same way that a binary artifact is reproducible. Nix is reproducible to its core, including hash integrity of every tool used to execute the build. Anybody should be able to build a bit-for-bit identical copy from scratch.

It's quite an ambitious goal, and I'm still surprised it succeeded. Unlike docker, nix can't be naive about what's being built. For example, it has to understand the specifics of python and python packages, and build its own infrastructure instead of using the existing tools like docker.
Netscape, 1998: "And I keep thinking to myself, Microsoft is going to pay some jackass lawyer $200 and hour to find out that we hate our cafeteria food, don't like the security posters, had a sucky newsfeed, and think ``Navigator'' was a cooler name than ``Communicator''." [1]

Just because you don't think you have anything interesting doesn't mean a competitor isn't going to subpoena it years later.

[1] https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
Unless the channels you’re on amount to at least one Bible-length document per day and you’re trying to index multiple years of content, the storage requirements for an index aren’t going to be a problem.
There was an effort in the 70s that got shut down by the Reagan administration.
But there's no political pressure to do so.

There's no code that allows the engineer to say "no" and disable his management from going to the next engineer to say "yes" to that.

Building codes don't allow for that. If your building is prone to collapsing, then nobody is going to sign off on that, because they will be liable.
All tax is ultimately paid by the end user. Do you prefer to have 20% more expensive iPhones, that is the actual question.
Hasselblad’s new medium format camera
Slightly off-topic, but couldn't help but notice on the Projects list a really cool version of the London tube. Unfortunately it seems it's from 2014 (there's even some quote from Boris as Mayor), so probably scrapped by now?

Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.
But they aren't exchanging it for cash, they are exchanging it for future profits ("They’ll pay us (...) from the company’s future profits") - which they would get anyway. No?
Now let's talk about the inherent lack of a good centralized identity service, the danger of the majority of IRC servers and clients being written in C and the inefficiency of the protocol itself for applications like high latency links? We might also talk about the lack of important modern features like basic negotiation of client encoding capabilities and what an absolute tire fire DCC-based features continue to be due to the "just link to an external website" mentality that stifles all discussion of replacements?
My experience in very poor metropolises across the plamet is that it's an entirely simple problem to solve. My experience in some of the most expensive cities on Earth is that providing housing for the poor devalues the only nestegg most people have and is widely railed against by the masses.

Its a Ponzi scheme first and foremost, housing simply cannot outpace wages, it's impossible.
When it all comes crashing down is someone elses problem though hey :)
I expected the same (complex project structure, too many files, difficult to read, etc), but I love everything about this library. Easy to read, concise code, in two simple files. Very well tested, both by automated tests and the real world. Sticks to the Unix philosophy: does one thing and does it well.

Can you imagine how many billions of time this code has been executed? I love software like this.
I think there's probably some crossover point that makes it more expensive to house people for longer amounts of time with more space required on a train, compared to burn a bunch of hydrocarbons to boost them to 800kph and get rid of them as soon as possible. Not sure whether physics make cheaper pricing possible as long as externalities aren't fully factored into the price of fossil fuels (i.e. flying gets more expensive and trains stay the same).
Using apps for free. I use the app "1 second everyday" quite extensively. My friend tried it out on iPhone and lo and behold, a lot of the free features I take for granted on Android are paid features on iOS. What a strange result of the different perception of willingness to spend on the two platforms. (Or perhaps it's the result of having a more open app platform?)
Aircraft, hospitals, hotels — a million complex bespoke things are built every day. Cost and time projections are inevitable.
After doing some digging, it looks like there's some people working on a new spec for IRC version 3. One of the additions is the ability to request chat history from the server. Though I'm not sure when it will be implemented since it's been on the table for 4 years now.

https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/milestone/4/
Pale Moon: This is rumor control, here are the facts – Summer 2019 edition
Faroe Islands and Norway catch more whales than Japan [1] but for some reason don't receive nearly the same level of outrage.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whales_Nordic.png
> Currently the Intercity/RailJet trains are more like a downgrade to what was available before.

I strongly disagree with this. I really like the railjet. My issue is that it's still on an elevated platform which is super annoying if you have strollers. But in terms of comfort I think it's their best product yet. I definitely prefer that over the compartments that were there before.
Broadcom isn't really against anyone making their own firmware (and people have tried, but haven't gotten much further than booting). As for the parts that can never be open-source:

1. The decoder blocks, H.264 and H.265, Broadcom/RPT can never release the source code to this without violating potentially thousands of patents worldwide.

2. The GPU of the Pi runs a ThreadX RTOS, which is licensed, runs on "billions" of devices worldwide, and can never be open-source without being sued for, well, huge amounts of damages. (The GPU blobs will never be open for this reason, but perhaps a mostly-complete GPU firmware NOT based on ThreadX will be released someday by the community, but I wouldn't hold my breath).

Also, you know the Pi's new OpenGL driver? All it does is convert the OpenGL commands and stuff into commands for this proprietary ThreadX GPU software.

3. If you think this isn't great, it's still better than the Pi's competitor boards, which have missing gaps in functionality, proprietary blobs which don't work well or even at all, and open-source implementations that currently just suck. (Read Hackaday's Pine64 Un-Review to see what I mean. It's improved a bit since then, but this is why "Pi-killers" haven't caught on.)
This design is wonderful and it reminds me a of 21st century version of this: https://www.belmond.com/trains/europe/venice-simplon-orient-...

Train travel can be absolutely luxurious in a way that a plane or self-driving car could never be. You don't even need to book a $3,000 historical reenactment to get a taste. On a whim, I once booked a 1st class AVE train in Spain for an extra $10 and ended up with bottomless wine/champagne and a several course dinner for 3 hours. Would I ride a chicken bus for 7 hours through Honduras? Sure, but there are points for style too.
The low amount of thought that goes into investing tons of money blows my mind. When I was younger I assumed investors did tons and tons of homework and had all kinds of domain experts, etc., but then I too got out in the real world and saw how it really works.
This does not relate to what I wrote. She was a dick. That does not reflect on you in any way. End of.

Edit: and I'm really sorry you had to go through that.
Are you living in a world without netsplits?
Nobody, but it's not about that. It's about trade secrets, access keys for e.g. AWS, git; it's about private information that can be used for social engineering or extortion. If a malicious actor can take over someone's account they could do even more convincing social engineering and access confidential information.

If you think "I have nothing to hide" you're lacking in imagination.
I see nothing wrong with sustainably farming whales like any other animal. Certain species have been endangered and those should be protected, but responsible consumption of traditional foods is an important way to preserve culture.
I love this blog. When I read it I find myself repeatedly smashing the table with my fists and shouting "YES! OH MAN, YES!".
I can attest to this. I work in a very large monorepo with tens of thousands of commits. Even files that aren't changed often have regular updates - usually repo-wide CodeMods. This makes the blame less useful and the history quite noisy. I figure the robots.txt parser's history would be in a similar state - not very useful or interesting to read.
I would assume this article was "paid for" (perhaps not directly) by someone with a vested interest. E.g. a competitive vendor with a better security story, or whoever is having their legacy lunch eaten by Slack.
A variation of this argument always seems to come up in discussions about privacy.

Yes, 99.9% of what you do or say in your daily life is likely of no consequence. But every now and then you may do or say something that could be used against you, and someone who has many years worth of data collected on you can probably find quite a few such bits of info.

Among all of your internet "transactions" probably less than 0.1% are with your bank, for instance (sending your credentials, etc). You want end-to-end encryption and good security to protect that 0.1% of your data, not for the other crap.
This is a good point, although I'm not sure how it transfers cleanly. Hiring lawyers seems to have two elements lots of people desperately don't want to import to hiring software devs.

First, the credentialism in law is extreme and getting worse. It used to be that most states would at least let you sit the bar freely; these days becoming "self taught" or even "correspondence course" lawyer is usually prohibited by law. This is sort of understandable given the stakes of malpractice and the difficulty of judging quality, but it also implies that the bar isn't an adequate measure of skill, and creates a limited supply of law degrees at extremely high prices.

Second, the desirability of lawyers is basically exponential: there are schools with graduates commanding $1,000/hour rates while other capable attorneys go unemployed. For law, this again makes some sense: lawyer-hours are not usually additive, most clients can't judge what they're getting, and buying a bad legal 'product' is usually revealed in the form of a massive expense after it's too late to fix. Software has shades of this with the "10x programmer" stuff, but only security and maybe architecture design actually reproduce the 'too late to fix' issue. Paying a CMU programmer 10x what a state-school programmer gets isn't usually going to be an effective strategy.

Hiring programs like lawyers would probably lead to fewer screwups, but I think it would also waste a huge amount of money and expertise. And I'm not sure that splitting the difference is a coherent option.
I wouldn't care. I imagine our company wouldn't be too happy about the data now available to its competitors.
It doesn't have to reach its end game goal immediately. It's an iterative process of slowly gathering people together, showing others that there are at least some people who care, technologists seeing the demand and creating products, rinse and repeat. Until one day you hit the phase transition point and then boom... Change.
I mean, the article is generally right but they immediately get a detail wrong:

> Right now, Slack stores everything you do on its platform by default — your username and password ...

I would be extremely surprised if they store plaintext or even encrypted passwords. Maybe the author means usernames/passwords sent in messages, but that's not unique to slack.
Agile has fallen into the hands of big consultants. Now the focus is on process, with more meetings and presentations than ever before.
The nature of those discussions is quite different. I'm making jokes about our API, not world-known wrestler :)
Electric cars grab almost half of sales in Norway
If I am another company competing against Apple and paying my share of taxes, then yes.
In Academia lots of this software is built by doctorate or postdoc students with limited contracts - they are gone after a short while. In many other places the people writing software outside of IT departments are typically staying longer with the company.

Question now is: which is better? In one case there is a single "God" in the other it's passed on for generations, while everybody mostly cares about their research and not long term maintainability.
It depends on the information that’s flowing in them. If they are under compliance purview then they might have to retain or at least archive years worth of information.
>Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead?

News flash: You're being that guy.

They have a far more legitimate claim because they administer the majority of the geological zone known as the Amazon Basin, and have since long before Amazon the company was a twinkle in Bezos' eye?

I mean... I'm hoping you were being tongue-in-cheek... Nowadays it seems to be getting more difficult to separate the jokers from those who just haven't quite thought through things long enough before posting.
Note that "scientific" whaling by Japan hadn't stopped during that time frame; I put scientific in quotes because its scientific value was discutable
Easy - I don't give a damn and have no expectation they won't be leaked.

To be clear, when I use Slack I assume private chats will remain private, but if they don't, well... screw it. It's not like I paid for it so how am I entitled to anything?
No vendor can promise they won't get hacked. What if your Linux OS got hacked due to a zero-day bug and all your DB data was leaked?
http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/learn/
> I haven't run a virus scanner in 15 years,

https://i.imgflip.com/34p4uf.jpg
What hardware did you have now?
I grew up in Central Europe and used the hell out of night trains. It is really one of the best ways to get around, if available.
> An autogyro is a small, helicopter-like aircraft made famous by the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.

I though it was made even more famous by Mad Max 2.
The Oliver North doctrine.
Because there is only one Japanese federal government and Abe is supporting whaling at around the level of $50 million a year?

Most Japanese may support whaling, but don't actually eat the meat. The government has also been requiring whale meat in school lunches which has upset parents who don't want their kids eating whale meat, for either ethical reasons or the sheer amount of toxins that accumulate in whale meat.

Blaming the government is much more useful than blaming the public - policy can be changed, their position is articulated in press releases and documents. Trying to capture the diversity of the Japanese population and hold it accountable is an exercise in futility and is just muddying the waters.
Where are you getting this % from?
This is the sort of code you write a binding to and call it a day, since the entire point is to absolutely precisely match the behavior of this code, which is basically a specification-by-code. You can never be sure a re-implementation would be absolutely precisely the same in behavior, so it's not worth doing.
agree 100% - it's difficult with some industries to enforce this, but it's important not to dismiss culture and keep it alive.
Apple's "gross margin" is 38%, so there's definitely a gap somewhere. https://finbox.com/AAPL/explorer/gross_profit_margin
Maybe add a #SocialMediaOnStrike hashtag to show them you really mean business. This time.
OTOH... you really don't have much of a say if you're on a free plan. You're free to leave if you don't like their conditions for the free plan.
In the US, “owning” land doesn’t mean what it sounds like. The combination of taxes + imminent domain law means landowners mostly rent it from the government with the ability to ask permission to develop it into something.
I think maybe the point they're trying to make is that comparing a software development project that may include a number of unknowns to buying a pair of jeans where there are probably very few if any unknowns is fallacious and a waste of time.

That said, I don't think it's black and white. Some projects, making a simple web site that follows whatever Squarespace template is popular and filling it with some relevant content can be a pretty simple project, even to the point where the buying a pair of jeans comparison makes more sense.

The problem, I suppose, is when you believe strongly that every project can be accurately priced up front. Not every project is a moonshot, but some truly are and it's not always obvious up front which ones are.
A single, shared key?

Granted, I don't know much about encryption, end-to-end messaging, or otherwise, but it seems like a Very Hard Problem to solve for something like Slack.
> Does anyone really believe that Apple only made £33.7m profit?

Apple as a whole? Definitely not. Apple as in the UK division? I don't even know. Which is to say: also definitely not, but I don't even know if "profit" for a division of a company like that is a well-defined term. Profit is money received - money spent, but they don't make the phones in the UK, they don't design the phones in the UK, so how much should they have made?
I’d guess the number of times a password has been shared in a private channel/direct message is a number with quite a lot of 0s behind it.
So, I think this is a problem and that encryption and data security policies and audits would be a good thing. But your parent's point also resonated with me. This isn't a shocking expose of some giant new problem. Protecting proprietary communication has been a problem for as long as organizations have existed. It was a problem when the solution at Los Alamos was safes in offices, it was a problem with memos, it was a problem with faxes, then emails, and now, yes, Slack chats. It's a problem, people should work on it, but it's not news.
If they don't store the password encrypted or in plaintext, how would they be able to authenticate you? It must be stored somehow, either plaintext or encrypted (preferred).
> 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots).

That's not really an issue of IRC itself, but the IRC network you are using.

Running your own IRC server would solve that issue - ngircd for instance supports authentication using PAM or inspircd can directly perform authentication against either LDAP or a SQL database.

And doesn't IRCv3 SASL authentication + only allowing registered users into the channel pretty much solve the issue as well?
Transcendental Meditation works well for me
You can find open-source firmware attempts by the community, but they haven't gotten much farther than booting the Pi.

I'm just saying that if RPT tried to write their own firmware, they could be in big legal trouble, so I wouldn't expect any open-source firmware from RPT anytime soon.
In Europe it is standard to have silent cabins, especially on first class.
ricky J my man. I just started on this life style after a solid 10 years of office action. Some cubical and some open. I'm not sure it can work for everyone but for myself (software / data analyst) it rules. I can focus intensely, peace and quiet. No co-workers talking you to when you have your giant headphones on.

However some folks thrive in more social situations. Not sure it works for them. For myself it has been great. That is just the work side of it. On top of that I am home with wife and kid an infinite amount more than when both parents worked and kid was in daycare.
I've been a professional developer/engineer/programmer/whatever for 15 years. That doesn't seem stupid to me.
Again, purely from the thinness issue, ( and not the keyboard )

The current 2016 MBP design were likely done in 2014/2015, with Intel's roadmap pointing to 10nm in 2016 and 7nm in 2019. Intel over promised on 10nm super low power capability ( Well may be that is still true, but no one know it couldn't yield ), and you would naturally expect 7nm with EUV to be better.

The 2016 MBP design had 45W TDP for CPU in mind, Imagine the 2016 MBP came out with 10nm, and updated with 7nm this year. That is easily an 8 Core CPU with much better IPC. Even the 10nm Icelake offered 20% IPC improvement, who knows what Intel Promised for 7nm.

So I don't think it really was an overreaching issue. Intel had a 3 years delay in delivery, and now looking likely at 4 years as 45W 10nm wont come until 2020.
VAT is technically paid by companies. They will love to sell their products for 20% less.
> Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.

I would assume they are pretty much set in stone. I was in a mock model they had standing around at Vienna central station. They got the budget and are currently ordering the trains.
Diving into the MongoDB 4.2 Release (The Small Print)
> The system registry is no longer backed up to the RegBack folder starting in Windows 10 version 1803

> This change is by design, and is intended to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows. To recover a system with a corrupt registry hive, Microsoft recommends that you use a system restore point.

> If you have to use the legacy backup behavior, you can re-enable it by configuring the following registry entry, and then restarting the computer: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Configuration Manager\EnablePeriodicBackup
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1

The issue being not that they stopped doing it but that they failed to properly communicate it to the users.
I sill have a 2008 Mac Pro (the last good one) and it actually was priced in line with equivalent Dell or HP workstations.
Writing software is design, not manufacturing [1]. Do companies know accurately in advance how much it will cost to design a new nuclear power plant, aircraft carrier, or jet engine?

[1] http://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour2...
Gold price drops and shares gain as trade talk hopes rise
Object matcher library for Kubernetes operators to avoid unnecessary updates
There is a law in the UK that defines exactly how transfer pricing works, in order to prevent abuses.

Is your argument that Apple is breaking this law, or that the UK law is simply poorly drafted? If the latter, have you contacted your MP?

I understand your concern about their profit margin, what I'm curious about is why you think any answers lie with Apple and not some branch of the UK government.
I worked on a project a while ago that used this as a feature. They were worried about a Freedom of Information request for chat archives (UK Govt linked) so intentionally didn't pay for Slack, so most of the message history wasn't available if a request came through.
You're not concerned that they're making up the revenue in a different way?
Namecoin is a great project. One of the issues however is that it introduced a .bit which essentially meant it was a new system/tld. Furthermore, the existing stakeholders in the naming system (domain owners) did not have an easy way to join the system without risk of losing their name or being sold their own name at a high price.

Handshake mitigates this by replacing the root zone entirely and, in addition, allowing existing stakeholders (.com, etc) to continue to own their existing assets.
I recently setup a Prosody server and gave out accounts to my friends and family. Seriously folks, it's dirt simple. XMPP rocks!