skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not very intuitive, but it is true!

When you have a power source it needs two wires to make a current flow: a wire "out" and a wire "back". You're only part of the circuit if you're connected to both sides.

When the two wires are not connected to anything, there is infinite resistance between them.

If you grab one side then there's no path through you to the other side so no current flows: the resistance between the two wires is still infinite.

Due to Ohm's law, (V=IR), if the current through you is zero then the voltage across you is also zero. The hand touching the wire is at the same voltage as the rest of your body.

So you "float up" to whatever voltage the wire you are touching is at.

If you complete the circuit then current starts to flow. The shock you receive is related to the current that flows through you. However, even tiny currents cause a big shock because humans are quite sensitive to currents in the micro or milliamps range as that's more than our nervous system uses to move our muscles.
Launch HN: Alpaca (YC W19) – Commission-Free API for Algorithmic Trading
Hi HN,

Yoshi at Alpaca here. After introducing Alpaca API - the commission-free stock trading API the end of last year, we are now excited to launch Alpaca API for Algo trading, which includes a lot of new features that were requested.

Pls check out the new API documentation here: https://docs.alpaca.markets/api-documentation/api-v2/

More information on those features here: https://alpaca.markets/algotrading

- Commission-free short selling: Giving you the ability to run long/short or market neutral strategies.
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- Business account onboarding: This is for those of you who operate or are starting a proprietary trading firm or hedge fund.
King's Quest V, Space Quest IV, and Quest for Glory IV were also the last Sierra games I played to the finish (and enjoyed.)

After that, I felt there was a noticeable drop in the quality of the hand-drawn artwork, and soon after, the 3D-for-the-sake-of-3D hysteria that overtook the industry and we had to suffer through a few years of 3D games that were uglier than the 2D games they "superseded."

See King's Quest 8: Mask of Eternity (at your own peril. I'll spare you the link.)
By trying to fix the economy in one area and ignoring the effects of the fix in a bunch of other areas.
Or an HP Lovecraft story:
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx
On the other hand, this big pile of cleverness seems to be extremely successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns :)
Yep, it took me a little while to realise and appreciate it, but you're right. Now my son is a little older he wants to do things with me too, and that would be horrible to miss because I'm stuck in front of a computer instead.

I don't know where you work but as others have said - if you have a commute that's also valuable time you can use. I used to burn all of it on Netflix, but have recently started reading about stuff I want to learn/get better at.
PUBG Mobile ANTO Ban Hack Unlimited UCS
Ask HN: Bona Fide Checking Website
Is there a recognised, widely accepted, and reliable website in which a person can go to register, and check for someone's credibility, trustworthiness, or honesty? Something that could be used to gauge someone for online transactions of all kind.
Code Annotations for SourceHut
Wonder how long it would continue if we stopped injecting a trillion dollars a year into the system.
No fun allowed here on HN
Tutorial – Create a REST API with Node.js and Express
In my experience, there's a disproportionate reward associated with fashions in science. That is, the people at the forefront of a trend get rewarded professionally (tenure, positions, promotion), even when behaving in a way that is irresponsible theoretically or empirically. The skeptics, on the other hand, who carefully lay out the problems with the new research, and eventually point out the obvious flaws, get treated as sticks-in-the-mud, etc., even though they are eventually proven correct.

There are gains to be made through innovation, and I'm not arguing against that. Sometimes too, details are just minor details to work out. But sometimes the details matter and point to bigger problems.

The problems with fads in science are that the focus in academics seems sometimes to be on popularity per se rather than verdicality, and denialism about scientific fads as a phenomenon. This is pointed out in the article, and is one of its better points.

Someone else criticized the article for not presenting solutions, which is fair, but I think that's in part because effective solutions would probably require a huge shift in culture in academics. We'd need to return to more stable professional positions rather than the cannabilistic postdoc system in place now, with declining tenure; we'd need to focus more on groups of researchers and findings rather than celebrity academics ala TED talks; we'd need to put much more emphasis on a pattern of replications rather than single studies; etc. etc. Even then, I don't think the problem would entirely go away.
H265 encoding/compression tech is the best in the world right now - unless I missed something.
Thanks!

> The case-insensitive file name lookup feature is supported on a per-directory basis, allowing the user to mix case-insensitive and case-sensitive directories in the same filesystem. It is enabled by flipping the +F inode attribute of an empty directory.

That's nicer than how Darwin handles it in that it doesn't force you to use it for the entire file system, although I'd be willing to bet this exposes some interesting bugs in applications, and I wonder if mixing case sensitivity inside a filesystem doesn't make them even more interesting to deal with.
This was on HN last year but nothing has come out of it:
http://www.ivelope.com/invite/RunItUpTheFlagpoleHackerSeaCha...
>>We won't get out of this as long as we see unemployed people as the plague

What are you talking about? "Management" sees unemployed people, especially those with actual skills, as a great asset. They provide a downward force on wages. It's only other laborers who see them as competition and a problem.
This assumes that criticism produces good code. If only it was that easy.
In my experience, this is not the case when both the reviewer and the reviewee are working together and want to find a good solution.

Rephrasing criticism is a pretty common technique not exclusive to code reviews and imho helps avoid a defensive stance which makes it easier to be productive.
This doesn't work with iMessage, because the carrier sees iMessage no differently from any other kind of data download. However, a friend of mine tried doing something similar using the <number>@txt.att.net (or equivalent for your carrier) email-to-SMS trick and wrote an Android app that parsed the messages. They promptly received a firmly worded email from AT&T and were forced to abandon the project.
Wow you really showed him. He surely won’t do it again (he will).
I’m not sure all types of money have this characteristic, but debt-based money in a fractional reserve banking system certainly seems to. The banks are perpetually insolvent because the time structure of their assets (loans) doesn’t match the time structure of their liabilities (“deposits”). At any time a bank run can bring them and the entire economy down. Sure, the government guarantees their deposits, but AFAIK they don’t provide anywhere near enough insurance. Not to mention the moral hazard it creates for banks to act recklessly.

It’s been a while since I read up on the topic, but the origins of fractional-reserve banking sound a lot like fraud that got blamed on the hard money that exposed it. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933550287)
> It literally doesn't exist yet it can run out and cause entire nations to go into chaos. Since it is literally a sociological experiment, are we going to get to the point where we fine tune the allotment such that we disable down-turns?

The idea isn't to disable them but make them less drastic. There will always be misallocations of resources that need to be corrected.
User Data Security Is a Breach
Our brain sculpts experiences in line with our expectations
And he hijacked the Hacker's Dictionary and proceeded to inject a bunch of his ideological words and definitions in, that in no way represent the hacker community around the early ARPANET and MIT-AI lab from which it came.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73...

And as if hijacking the Hacker's Dictionary wasn't enough, he tried to hijack and corrupt the very meaning of the word "hacker" itself, by presuming to define what a hacker is, by preaching to people about how to become a hacker, by blatantly misrepresenting himself as a great hacker and respected leader of the open source community, even though his programming chops are lackluster and outdated, his social skills are deceptive and manipulative, and his hacker spirit is mean, vindictive, and envious of RMS.

And then there's his death threat to Bruce Perens that he tried to excuse by explaining that he was only trying to "defame" him.

In 1999, Debian developer Bruce Perens published an "email threat" that he allegedly received from Raymond. Raymond then "clarified" that he only meant to defame Perens. From this we can assume that he is batshit insane and will fucking kill and or write to anyone that says anything about him or his software. If you are lucky you might get an O'Rielly book about you.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html

To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: email threat
From: bruce@perens.com
Date: 5 Apr 1999 22:48:42 -0000
Message-id: <19990405224842.2386.qmail@perens.com>

Today I received the following threat in e-mail from Eric Raymond. The message
was copied to the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group officers, who you may
consult regarding its authenticity. The police have been notified.

Because I know that Eric is a firearms enthusiast, for my own protection,
I feel the best strategy is for me to publicize the threat widely.

Thanks

Bruce Perens

> Damn straight I took it personally. And if you ever again behave like
> that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize
> the interests of our entire tribe, I'll take it just as personally --
> and I will find a way to make you regret it. Watch your step.

The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/bruce-perens-dead

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/2

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/3

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/4

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/5

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/6

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/7

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/8

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/9
Which special chars?
8675309 Pinterest's save button: https://devrant.com/rants/1329676/pinterests-save-button-has...

42: H2G2: The answer to life, the universe, and everything
Fans of this should check out MetalJesusRocks' channel on YouTube. He was a former Sierra Online employee and is one of the biggest figures in the YouTube retro gaming scene. Great video where he reminisces with a former employee here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0
The answer is the same as when this always comes up: mentally append "for realsies". The advice is meant to suggest that people not publish code or run services with incompetent crypto.

Nobody is saying not to learn and play. They're saying don't set off a rocket while staring down the engine. The reason why it has to be said is that the consequences of doing so when writing crypto are not so impressively immediate or dramatic, but just as devastating to the outcome (and maybe cryptographer, depending on adversary).

> Straight out of the CIA handbook is how you look when you repeat this bullshit ad nauseum.

The CIA does not care if you play with libsodium.
Yeah even putting aside demand (just because someone spent 50 years making one really good vase doesn't mean 50 years of pottery wouldn't be better even if the potter had to dredge all of the clay themselves instead of using apprentices or hired servants) it has been obviously broken since the Industrial revolution at least but had predecessor cases that pointed out it wasn't true. Aquaducts or irrigation canals alone snap it in half.

It goes from "effort to haul X ammount of water Y distance by N people" to "and it just flows after this constant work".
> In my entire career (25 years), I've never had a project that directed me towards learning Lisp.

emacs
Yeah I mean I agree with you on basically all of this, I just think this proves my point that to whatever extent languages are used, it's more about features of the language, not killer apps.

And yeah, saying the author of Numpy chose Python is a little weird, since it's mostly written in C and Fortran (IIRC) but I'm pretty sure it was made with bindings to Python in mind, as you say, so the point still stands.
On AOL we called it "punting", and the apps that facilitated it were the first reason I ever wanted to code.
Wish I could upvote this twice. A form on a secure web page covers both recipient authentication and secure ingress pretty well. Definitely way more approachable for both users and developers than encrypted email or other such channels.
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli...
FWIW the cool API here that PyNaCl exposes (but not every libsodium impl) is automatically selecting the nonce for you.
Another rathole to chase down. If I could emulate an 11/70 but connect a real decwriter paper terminal, I’d be doomed.
> developers often choose e = 3

Never seen this in all my failed life. It is basically 65537 everywhere I have seen RSA used. That actually led me to Fermat numbers and why they are used because it looked like a conspiracy to me.

I also never generated p,q or d manually and just trust some tools from some crypt-weirdos. So it is 1 parameter I have to remember, right?

I am only a user of RSA and would never implement it myself. But prominent web services mostly supply RSA parameters for their encrypted content. Some have shifted to ed25519, but it is still very rare in my experience.
Nice! I really appreciate the real-world testing and not just "proving" the NN can be fooled by running it against image files.

This always seemed to me like a huge omission in reports about adversarial attacks, sure it can be fooled with pixel-perfect changes of input data, but would it survive literally any "real-world"-like environment? I am quite surprised it does!
This advice is similar to the Hacker News Guidelines [1]

Such as:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

or

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

and

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Being kind doesn't mean being a push over. Rather, it makes it easier to achieve the goals you want.

None of these suggestions advise you to accept less-good code. Rather, it's all about making it easier to get better code.

I could have also just said "Can't you see that you are obviously wrong?" and left it at that. Would that have been better?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, yes, but look at how fragmented the Scheme community is. And then also, fragmentation between 3 dialects is still a good bit more fragmentation than most language communities have.
> > If you're not a cryptographer then you shouldn't be rolling your own crypto.

> How does one become a cryptographer then?

> Yes certainly don't use homerolled crypto in production.

That is the point. When the glib phrase is repeated it is to people who are working on production, or something that might be in danger of one day soon being in production (we've all seen things go from proof of concept to production with insufficient reworking, it happens far too often). In that context it is correct to be constantly restated.

If you are explicitly trying to understand cryptography, then hopefully you are aware of the higher level dangers while you are poking around the lower level details and until you are ready for prime-time you are able to keep your exploratory code from going anywhere near production, at least not without proper scrutiny.

It is like the first two rules of optimisation:

Rule 1: Don't.

Rule 2 (for advanced programmers only): Don't yet.
The last thing you should start with is "it's all in lobsodium". You didn't understand the point. "how do you get Alice's public key, but that's hard with any sort of public key cryptography." That sentence makes absolutely no sense, it's a public key, why would it be hard to send? The problem is people are like "just use product X, you don't have to understand it". Marketing wanketeering is what makes crypto more difficult in the first place. No one gives a shit about shipping your product. "Just use libsoduium" is an easy way to add to the problem.
Why? A 100 dollar bill, is a reciept that promises to buy you 100 dollars worth of value. Previously that value was tied to gold, but now it’s a more flexible notion.
More batteries, without there also being more electricity made.
The point is you shouldn't avoid implementing best practice security because it will "never be on the network".

And quite frankly, deliberately shipping a product with gimped security, especially when it comes to OpenSSH, is kind of not very excusable and has nothing to do with "stability".
Running out of money is what happens when a company goes bankrupt. Which happens more often during recessions.
Your comment is factual untrue. Most advice is actually removing reviewers emotional reactions in exchange for more factual statements. The only watering down is that it gives benefit of the doubt to reviewed code where difference of opinion may be the issue.
This comment reminds me of a rant I listened to once about implementing bsddb. It went, basically: Everything you need to know to correctly, reliably, use bsddb is somewhere in their documentation. But the chances you have of correctly using the library, without reading, understanding, and remembering every line of that documentation, is basically 0.

Which I guess explains why RedHat had corruption issues with their package database for, what, a few years before they figured it out? If RedHat needs a few years to get it right for a core component of their core product, who can be expected to?

This RSA discussion makes me wonder if it is in the same boat.
First rule about code reviewing is that you don't tell someone how you would've written it, but rather try to point out pros/cons of current vs proposed approach. It's as easy as that. Every time I see a piece of code I don't like I ask myself: why do I not like it?

I've gotten PR reviews with people literally writing "I don't like this" even after I wrote a very detailed technical argument about my reasoning. My only approach to that is to remind them that I really don't care about their personal preferences, because no discussion will come out of them addressing none of my technical arguments and instead relying on what their personal preference is like.
I like the Swiss ones, because they get the three prongs in a more compact design than the bigger European round plugs, and are easier to pull from the socket than the harder force needed to pull European ones. They Swiss 3-prong plug is as large as the European 2-prong one.

In a wall outlet the size of a European single socket (outlet?), the Swiss one gets three sockets.

The UK one is supposedly safer, but it's enormous...
No, for several different reasons.

It is often hard to tell the difference between great code and bad code. I've written code that was fast and very flexible, at the expense of being complex - the flexibility turned out not used at all (after 8 years in production I'm confident it never will be), so on hindsight this wasn't great code - but if the flexibility envisioned had been used the complexity would be required and the solution would be great. I've seen code that cleverly handled multi-threaded issues such that can't be understood or modified by anyone without breaking - but it great code because it abstracts the threads so nobody else has to understand them.

Second, when you first start on a project you don't understand it all. We want to grow your understanding and bring you in as trusted contributor. Setting the right tone in those first days makes all the difference in the question of will you contribute more code or not.

Last, most open source projects are essentially unmaintained. Almost any contribution is better than that, even if the code is bad, if it works at all...
The threat aspect of this is, indeed, largely a red herring. The relevance here is the current lack of robustness in the face of ambiguity. The line between images that are properly identified and those that are not is very complicated, not well characterized, and (to some extent[1]) implementation-dependent. One might say that this is true of people too, but people have various higher-level skills for detecting and resolving ambiguity.

[1] As this study found adversarial images that affect a number of different implementations, there is some implementation-independence, which may be helpful in solving the problem.
It's not really a surprise for anyone who's been paying attention to financial news though, and especially not for the DB bankers who have been spending their time at the pub these past weeks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-01/empty-des...
I'll just say that if you think Linus' comments are bad, there are much more (needlessly) rude people in LKML.

Linux might be incisive but he's often right and it's usually about an impactful issue. Some other people are just gratuitously more rude and/or obnoxious.
Google joins Dish in talks to create 4th mobile carrier: sources