skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It should not be an acceptable practice to just insert a CD and indiscriminately install software onto a production machine.

Well, I can't even do that. First, generating a "CD" is too much work. Second, not sure who in AWS or GCP I would have to talk to to get a CD in their datacenter - and once there, how to read it without drives.

The equivalent of "inserting a CD" is pulling container images. And EVERYONE in engineering should be able to do that.

Why? Because, if you have sane processes in place, such code will:

- Be peer reviewed

- Be built automatically. Unit tests, integration and whatever else needed (load?) will run automatically.

- Go to some form of staging environment, where QA can do their jobs

- Get moved to production, possibly with a canary, blue/green or what have you, and automated rollbacks if metrics start to get funky.

> Nor should it be acceptable to just flip the switch and reboot the server

We don't care if said servers are cattle. We shouldn't even care if those servers are part of a primary data store. PG has master/slave and we setup a pool in front of it which will manage connections. Same for other SQL systems. Other data stores will be inherently distributed and will not care much if a node is lost.

> Indeed, months, sometimes years, can go by without having to power down and re-IPL the mainframe.

Yeah, but why do I care? I do care that there are enough active servers to handle requests. I don't usually care about uptime, and we actually actively terminate older ones.

> Security should not be the afterthought that it sometimes can be in the Windows world.

Windows world... Most servers are not running Windows these days. But even if they are, security has improved a lot.

> Ever wonder why there are no mainframe viruses?

I have never seen a virus in the wild on a server in the cloud. Not even worms, if the security team is doing their jobs.

> Oh, we may turn it on its side and tape a piece of paper on it bearing a phrase like “Do Not Shut Off – This is the Production Server”

Holy. I don't know were this guy has been working before, but this is really bad.

Ok, maybe PC servers won't be able to survive if the CPU goes up in smoke (but they are expected to survive if the PSU goes up), but nowadays, we don't care. Shoot a server, another will take its load.

> The bottom line is that today’s distributed systems – that is, Linux, Unix, and Windows-based systems – typically do not deliver the stability, availability, security, or performance of mainframe systems.

Says who? Most large companies created in the last decade are not running mainframes. The likes of Facebook, Netflix, even Google. And they are doing just fine. It is not clear that any outages could have been prevented by having a single point of failure, however robust it is.

Sounds like the author should move _away_ from mainframes and look into what's been done as of the past couple of decades.
How Cruise Self-Driving Cars Navigate Double-Parked Vehicles
Accessing from the US, I get an error as well.

This Netflix link seems to work though: https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-China-Hustle/80221646

Or on Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_china_hustle
Yeah I can't decouple articles like this from the market.
I am skeptical of the claims of superior mainframe security.

1. The IT Security Profession is young, in many ways, it's still in its infancy. I say this because today you can still get a B.S. in Computer Science without being taught secure coding best practices or having that be integrated into the curriculum. So given that the state of the art is young, and yet mainframes are quite old and have a reputation of being slow to change, how could they possibly keep up with best practices?

2. The mainframe world tends to be highly proprietary, even with proprietary protocols. I am skeptical that they adopted appropriate information sharing and training mechanisms, and how can they recruit security talent when access to the system is so closed? How would we even know of attacks if they are kept secret and not reported?
Trading in debt isn't an alternative to markets, it's a market with debt as the currency. Regardless, the "spot trade" as you put it is also older than nation-states, not something they created.
The thing is every tech transition has these compatibility issues, and people just make a choice whether to stand ahead or behind the curve.
What can I do that is moderately interesting with freedos? I've downloaded it a couple of times, but I never found anything useful to do with it. I'm sure I could play some games, or something. I really want to actually learn it.
Do I have to? Most of the time they're invisible behind the scrollbar. When I need something not visible, it shows up in search.

Sometimes I only have a vague recollection of what I want to revisit - then just figuring out something that was near it is enough, as after searching and activating some related tab its whole surroundings are now in view again.
> Many physicians have not yet cottoned to hand-washing, yet.

This isn't really true. They know it's important.

1) Have you ever washed your hands 12 times a day for a week? Think about what your hands would be like.

2) Washing hands properly takes somewhere around 2 minutes. That's a significant fraction of an hour--just spent washing your hands.

Given this, disposable gloves seem like a much better answer.
I think that's not the right way to look at it. You can still get copies of all your data, and share them with whoever you want however you want. The only thing Google's restricting is the ability to set up a seamless interface, because the lack of seams often tricks people into trusting third parties more than they should.
You could have decentralized with the original poster able to edit. Every post/thread could be like it's own git repo.
Politicians need wedge issues that won't upset corporate donors.
EC2 Instance Connect
If that's the case, hopefully, he can learn from the clear screwups like this that his team fails at keeping him informed. And hopefully he can still find people who can do more than flatter and kowtow, and get them to advise him.

I do think though that things are not as bad as in ancient China. I think people are trying to inform him, they are just not very good at it.
Youtube screws it badly because they think they know better than users.
If you was to do this in the UK, the TAX man would hit you up with IR35 and you would get taxed as if your was working for you former company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35
I generally don't think we can, but since "gerrymandering" was coined to describe an instance of it occurring in Boston during the presidency of James Madison, I think we have a clear signal in this one case.
Southern California Is America's Most 'Cost-Burdened' Housing Market
Auto drivers should drive a horse and buggy at some point. Horses don’t need gas and don’t crash on the freeway. Horses don’t just run themselves into trees ever. Car drivers don’t understand safe driving. Can you imagine bringing important business guests to a meeting in a car? Not on my watch. Horses are intelligent and cars are dumb. Horses will always be needed for critical deliveries that you just can’t do in a car.
It may not be a rental, but $20-30/month monthly installments isn't that different to most people.
Or USB 2.0 if you are using a USB-capable microcontroller.
> it seems at least plausible from the data that much of the difference in age groups (and, for that matter, partisan affiliation) could disappear if controlled for different identification rates among people's actual peer groups

This assumes that homosexuality is evenly distributed across age groups, something that is directly contradicted by the data. Your bias makes you think that this is caused by unacceptability of identification, but you would need to show that the change in acceptability has only affected younger generations.

As a counter-example, people who have worn LA lights sneakers are disproportionately under 30. It has become culturally acceptable to wear LA Lights sneakers over the last 15 years, perhaps older people are under-reporting their wearing of the sneakers?

> "How many Americans have ever cheated on a test?" and asking another set "Have you ever cheated on a test?" and then publishing an article about how "Americans Greatly Overestimate How Many Americans Have Cheated on a Test"

This metaphor seems directly contradicted by:
> the change in the acceptability of identifying as LGBT over the last 70 years is pretty profound,

The change in ever cheating on a test over the last 70 years does not seem pretty profound to me.

It's clear that your personal bias is that there is an iceberg of non-identifying homosexuals who still feel oppressed. Even in SF, the number barely reaches 15% [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
The users who want/need all those ports are pretty niche, even among power user developers and graphic designers. I think Apple did their market research on this.
> to think Jony Ive being even remotely responsible for the keyboard debacle seems preposterous to me

On the contrary, he is definitely responsible. First, because he was the head of design, and keyboards are part of the overall design. Second, because he pushed for or accepted the push towards ever thinner and lighter products, at the expense of almost everything else. And third, because of the push towards more uniform/beautiful/symmetric designs at the expense of functionality (limited ports, USB-C only, cursor keys on the keyboard).

He is very much responsible and I think what we saw from Apple in the last few years in the Mac lineup was below expectations. I've been saying for some time that it seemed like Jony Ive was running rampant within the company, not using or loving Macs himself, but deciding about their design, with no one in a position to say "No" (like Steve Jobs did).
I learned about Merklix trees (without becoming a cryptocurrency enthusiast)
Just read it again.

To me, it reads like this: Google is going to prevent users from storing users' data elsewhere. As if it's Google's data, not users'. Though with the free tier this as well may in fact be the case :-/
I'm not sure which segment in particular you have in mind, but whichever one, I'm pretty sure the answer is "no".

The big problem with that is that they are utterly enormous; all of their "traditional" niches combined are dwarfed by their casual user base. Creative professionals are just not a big market, comparatively; neither are folks who just want a great unix laptop. (And command line nerds in particular are becoming less and less welcome; this is why I'm probably typing on my last Mac.)

But the second problem is that, even if somehow Ives leaving meant that the scales fell from every Apple employee's eyes and suddenly they all wanted to put back the scripting languages, make machines specifically dedicated to running Pro Tools or After Effects and bundle every mac with a copy of 3 in Three, they still have a multiyear product pipeline. You don't turn that ship quickly.
If it was always possible to detect whether an ad was seen, wouldn't it always be possible to block ad-blockers?
There are thousands of protestant sects. Just about any generalization you make about them is going to be wrong. Many of them teach that the secular world is sinful and to be avoided.
How much does design impact what you are and are not allowed to do? Are you, as an engineer, required to use Macs, or can you use a PC as well?
> None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over.

Every design choice is a tradeoff and industrial design is about making the right tradeoffs. He did not make the right tradeoffs. He regularly sacrificed functionality for the looks, and preferred form over function. While I do respect many of the things he did, I am glad his time at Apple is coming to an end.
What We Learned Rebuilding Our Site from Scratch
I legitimately needed to use freeDOS a few months ago in order to downgrade the firmware on my BluRay drive, so I'd be able to rip 4K discs. It could only be done from DOS.
Unless you want to work specifically with FreeDOS, you might look at DOSBox instead. It's a MS-DOS emulator that runs in user space, rather than running as the OS, thus a lower barrier to entry.
If you ignore those damned TIGER imports, at least...
Pilots Flagged Software Problems on Boeing Jets Besides the Max
Both Canon and Nikon "pro" cameras take CF cards:

http://d810.org/recommended-sd-and-cf-media-cards-for-nikon-...

I agree with you that it's pointless to do that in 2019, but that doesn't change the facts.
So, they are more efficient with 10 passengers[1].

[1]https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july...
That's arguably more of a limitation than an advantage.

If your OPSEC is adequate, legality is irrelevant.

And if that seems shocking, consider that legality <> morality.
> "As a synthetic material, metallic hydrogen would also have endless applications. First off, it is believed to have superconducting properties at room temperature and is meta-stable (meaning that it will retain its solidity once it has been brought back to normal pressure)."

Will it burn? Detonate? Fascinating.
How about an app that just, well, sends the SMS texts to your email, as regular emails? A filtering rule would put them under a certain tag and skip inbox.

The upside of the design is that it requires only one, very clear, permission: send emails to a given address.
Isn't it the particulates in diesel emissions that are particularly more harmful than other internal combustion engines?

NOx promotes low level ozone, which is an irritant, but I thought by far not the differentially harmful portion of diesel exhaust.
Calculator users should learn to use a pencil and paper at some point.
Brave on Android has had bottom-bar for quite a while, it was the reason I switched from Firefox. I would switch back, but as there is no add-on support...
A big part of the problem is that many designers seem to really want to be artists, not designers, and they tend to want to pull design in an artistic (i.e. form-centric) direction.

A casual glance at Dribbble makes this pretty clear.
Also: what are those circular things that look like giant petri dishes about 14 miles south of the pass?

Edit: nevermind, I saw more further south that looked like crop fields, a bit of google-fu revealed them as center-pivot irrigation systems. Interesting trade of resources-- some loss of arable land due to the circular arrangement, presumably in return for lower costs of the irrigation setup. Still looks like some weird biohazard outbreak from the aerial viewpoint of google maps.
Its also important to remember that as humans we tend to vastly over-estimate the incidence of relatively rare things. We tend to think that something happens based on how often we encounter it, without considering the total number of encounters.

4.5% is about 1 in 22. 8.2% is 1 in 12. Even accounting for the fact that most LGBT people are as private about their sexuality as straight people are, its often enough that you're likely to encounter LGBT people on a frequent basis.
By far the largest denominations do not teach that.

I am sure 0.0001% of the world's 1 billion protostants like the handful of westbro baptists nut cases might believe that. You can find extremists in every religion.
It's called being an employee. With a bigger paycheck comes a bigger amount of career risk.

The employer makes the rules, the employees play the game.

I'm not saying that because I believe that's the way it should be, but because that's how it seems to be.
I was a "good person to know" because I could print off cheat codes and walkthroughs for any game, on a dot matrix printer over a 2.4kbps lynx connection.
And now computer UIs are ugly as sin and impossible to find the interactive elements. Meanwhile in the physical world skeuomorphism is huge with Chinese factories pumping out all manner of products that just barely match the appearance of real objects made of quality materials, woods, and fabrics, when viewed in a store or just a photo in an online store.
A lot of it is stamina. Both physical and mental. Rural peasants are really tough in a way that is extremely foreign to suburbanites.

My godfather (indigenous peasant in rural Mexico) spent some time in his youth carrying two 50-pound bottles of liquor on his back all day long up and down mountains over a rough trail. I get winded if I try to carry one of those bottles for a block of flat sidewalk. If someone asked me to strap two to a tumpline and hike up a mountain I would call them crazy.

He spent other years working on coffee plantations under thieving brutal racist owners. And continued working on his own small plots of land every day up to maybe age 70, even as his body was thoroughly worn out.

Now his grandchildren are white-collar professionals.

This kind of hard manual labor is as demanding as any high-level sport. It takes years of (mental and physical) training to be able to handle it without falling apart.
Apple needs a 'refreshed' vision in hardware design. It's beautiful, but not the most practical. This 'soft exit' to me is for the best.
That's one of my go-to examples as well. I mean, even excluding porn and soft porn, the vast majority of Western media is likely illegal in Saudi Arabia.
You just have to live in poverty, one way or the other.
Was an avid user of kpxc for a year. The auto type feature did not feel secure compared to other pwm's. It requires the username input field to be focused, and if the wrong field is focused (click didn't take?) or otherwise changes mid-type it spills your credentials into the input and sends them. Other managers seem to at least try to validate the entry types.
I wonder, how would this work on, eg an ebay auction or another site where the same content is available at lots of different URLs?

The same auction is available at, eg

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/1992-WIDGET-THE-WORLD-WATCHER-NI...

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/113314026367

https://www.ebay.com/itm/113314026367

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113314026367

, and probably limitless other URLs.
Sure, you are pointing out his failings, but I’d say his successes outnumber his failings.
High precision, high volume, low labor input manufacturing is much harder than you'd think and not exactly what China's economy specialized in until it became an explicit focus of the central government. The electronics and computing world outsourced everything to Asia back when those sectors were dirty and labor intensive. Manufactured items such as ballpoint pens (particularly the ball and tip which we the biggest stumbling block for China) were made with processes so highly automated and done so with decades of gradual refinement that there was no natural incentive for existing companies to invest in Chinese production facilities. Certain manufacturing niches were so competitive and easily optimized in the decades before global outsourcing became the rule that there were practically no benefits to moving production overseas and without the sort of "free" knowledge transfer that comes with such a move, there was no economic case for Chinese industrialists to try and build native capabilities from scratch.
> When I do presentations in my department's conference room, I just AirPlay to the AppleTV connected to the projector.

That's, uh, great if there happens to be an expensive AppleTV connected to the projector.
> The internet was FUN, while still being ridiculously useful and efficient. The information of the entire planet was at our fingertips and available instantly

It was more efficient than the library, but finding something that takes seconds today could have taken hours. There were lots of dead ends.

Sometimes you just had to try searching for the same thing next month.
> Parts of AWS are down right now, as I understand it.

I haven't heard about this, production looks fine. Even if that's the case: the key point being "parts". A meteor can blow up a whole AWS datacenter, and your production systems should still survive. There may be a blip while capacity is provisioned. If you _really_ want to be safe and invest the engineering resources, you can deploy across regions. Or even clouds.

Try that with a mainframe.
Thanks that helps.
However this is for an indoors-only setup right?
That has nothing to do with textual type annotations. That is just Pythons lack of static type checking.
The 5C was a 32-bit phone released at the same time they started moving to 64-bit. That’s a device with a built-in “use by” date.

Design-wise, I really wanted one. Technology-wise, I couldn’t justify it.
The hard work you guys put in is always appreciated, FF in all its forms has become truly the best browser there is. That being said, how on earth was Reader Mode prioritized above adblocking?

As it stands, adblocking is "post MVP"[1][2]. QR code scanning, however, is somehow part of the MVP. This doesn't make sense to me: there are many apps that launch the default system browser when scanning a URL QR code. You can easily get by without that functionality in the browser.

The comments in this post should be sending you really loud signal: technical users (the type of people who install preview software) don't consider a browser without adblocking MVP. You are drastically underestimating the significance of adblocking extensions.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/96
[2]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/2622
[3]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/113
Well, it's APL, but uh...

https://github.com/Co-dfns/

AMA: Explaining my 750 line compiler+runtime designed to GPU self-host APL (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797797
I don't recall a lot of people crying about the loss of a DVD drive. That was the moment where everyone outside techdom was forced to realize that everything goes over the network.

Also, as someone who still has a iMac with an optical drive, their failure rate (Apple or any other brand) has always been atrocious.
> Americans' estimate of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times Gallup's more encompassing 2017 estimate that 4.5% of Americans are LGBT, based on respondents' self-identification as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

I would have guess it was around 10%, because I’ve read that number from several sources before, so 4.5% is a surprise. Today I also learned that the 10% number I’d read has been pretty controversial in the past. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-...

Looking at Wikipedia’s article, higher numbers among youth globally seem to be a common trend. I would expect it’s not the population changing, but the stigma being shed. I wonder if it will take a few more decades before the numbers stabilize enough to be trustworthy...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orien...
Thinness has practical benefits (there are also downsides, of course), it's not purely an aesthetic concern.
There is no correlation between "full page navigation" and "not passing users' passwords around". Full page navigation is only needed for on-premises auth servers that require a redirect, and the server can easily tell which users need it as soon as the username is typed in. Give them the redirect they want. Everyone else gets a better UX.