skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New title: Security researchers did a thing. Article body: See title.

"Oh boy! A whole bunch of people are going to be really boned by a malicious app, but we're not going to let you know any details. Hey, do you bank on your phone? Ooooo you might be realllllly screwed. The competing platform is better and/or worse for thee pedantic reasons, says some random person you've never heard of and will probably never hear from again."

If you're not reporting the name of the company or apps involved, don't waste everyone's fucking time. It's even more egregious than the news doing the whole, "Something in your pantry could kill everyone you ever loved. Details after these commercials."

Sure it puts pressure on device makers to be on the ball with security updates, but at the end of the day there's nothing anyone can do. They don't tell you the symptoms of being infected, how to prevent becoming infected (don't click ads to prevent activating the virus, but do I just never install another app from here on out), or even what to do if you are infected (will a factory wipe work, or does it install to recovery, too?).

I submit the following similarly useful mini-article:

Something in 500,000 grocery stores is causing customers to experience explosive diarrhea. Local law enforcement is investigating, so we're not going to tell you what the item was. Oops! We mean itemS. I mean, there were a LOT of them. Dr. Flabenpoop of the Central Alabama Subcommittee for Safety of Food and Other Eatin' Things reminds consumers that eating is essential to remain among the living and excessive diarrhea can lead to dehydration and death. He recommends NOT experiencing excessive diarrhea while maintaining a balanced diet. He also notes that the two-fingered spotted wallaby cannot get diarrhea, which begs the question: Is it better to be a wallaby or a human? Or a stick? I mean, sticks don't poop at all, so they must feel lucky. Or sticky. But not sticky from poop.

That is the linked article. Both reports provide the same level of actionable information, the same who cares commentary, and same less than half-heartedly rehash of some inane comparison to pad the word count.

tl;dr - Zero useful information released by the research team, zero useful information in the article.
With freedom comes risk, I live in the USA and I want to be able to walk down the street without being monitored or tracked.

Along with that I must accept that petty crime is going to happen, because I am not the only one walking down the street without being monitored.

I think that crime needs to be reevaluated. There needs to be a good financial analysis of where the time and attention is best spent, they cannot find all crime all of the time (which feels like the goal)
This is a great use case.
Fair enough, I can see some of your points, but (obviously) I don't think they are entirely relevant, and my experience and view of Ansible is a different one.

Also, Ansible is only one backend for freckles, it's just the first one I implemented because of all the roles and modules already available for it. There will be a Terraform backend, and a Packer one, and a Kubernetes one too, probably. And I'm actually much more excited about the shell backend I have in mind, but that is much more work to create a repository of tasks for. You'll be able to just select one of those backends, or combine all of them.

The goal is for 'end-users' never having to deal with underlying backends and Ansible code and the like, if they don't want to. Those are just there to provide the building blocks end users would use to compose their provisioning/orchestration -- which they can do entirely in code. I hope to have a stable 'stdlib' of such tasks at some point, comparable to what is available in Pulumi, which people can just use without any other concern.

I don't know how Pulumi works under the hood, are you saying they basically wrap Terraform modules? If that's the case, that's not that different to how freckles works. With the exception that freckles can also be used for non-cloud things.
Yes! I work for a company that does just this: pull big gears on limited data and try to generalise across groups of things to get intelligent results even on small data. In many ways, it absolutely feels like the future.
I like spreadsheets because they are reliable and logical, unlike whatever trash programmers tend to use. Spreadsheets do what they say they do. Outputs are functions of inputs, like math.

Meanwhile software “engineers” are using programming languages that eschew logic, reject reason, reject mathematics, reject determinism, and do different things each time you run them.

Yeah I’ll take a spreadsheet over whatever ball of confusion software engineers are chasing their tail with.
Not sure where you’re going, but my take is that yes, the times for calling servers individually are over.

But we’re still touching the belly of our distributed systems with very pointed tools as part of the daily workflow. That’s how accidents happen.

The analogy is clear IMHO; just as we’ve long stopped fiddling daily with the DRAM timings and clock multipliers of the Galadriel and Mordor servers, we should consider abstaining from low level “jumper switching” on distributed systems.

Of course, this also happened thanks to industry introducing PCI and automated handshaking...
A couple of years ago they relied on Dropbox for having a online web vault. At some point Dropbox no longer allowed to use the public folder as a web server and the answer from 1Password basically was "if you want an online vault buy a subscription from us".

I had paid well over $150 by buying all their apps and they were forcing me to throw that investment down the drain because they didn’t want to spend a couple of cents a year on hosting my vault themselves.

There was a long discussion in the forum. I moved to LastPass. The UI is not as good but it does the job and it’s free now.
Courting controversy, scientists team with industry to tackle oil palm
I actually _do_ care enough about "slickness" to be prepared to pay for it. I want to be able to keep my encrypted password db off other people's computers though - using 1PW's cloud service requiring Dropbox for multi device sync is not what I'm after...
I’m in total agreement. It’s the most important app I use and I’d pay 5x the $60 a year I spend on the family plan without question.

I used 1PW with Dropbox for years and and years and it was a great solution — but I trust 1PW more than Dropbox to protect my stuff (and certainly more than I trust myself to setup and maintain a secure sync server), and I love 1PX. Also, the Windows app is lightyears ahead of where it was (the Windows Hello support is great), which I never thought I’d say.

Yes, I know other solutions are cheaper, but I have been a 1PW user for 12 years and I want to ensure it’ll be there for 12 more.

Plus, for me, the UX matters. I don’t just use 1PW for passwords, I keep software license, secure notes, all kinds of stuff in it. I’m not a fan of the subscriptionfication of course of everything, but this is one product I’ll make an exception for.
> It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns.

I get sports fandom that's fundamentally arbitrary and/or fictional. I mean that's been with us since at least Rome, and probably before. Happens naturally on the school yard, even. I'll gladly join in. It's fun.

What I don't get is pro sports fans who don't seem to be "in on the joke", the way, say, your average pro wrestling fan is "in on the joke", so far as the framing narrative of their sport and team being fiction. The kind who will get actually-mad over the stuff, or start fights and spend the night in jail over it. But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe.
More likely anyone who have an active O365 subscription that includes teams even if they only have that subscription because thats the only way MS is selling access to the traditional desktop office application that they need for some decade old workflow.

While the press have been blinded by MS's nonsense "we L..... Linux" campaign nobody seams to have noticed that their office department is playing the same dirty games MS got fined over a decade ago in forcing every office user to obtain a O365 subscription and putting a tremendeous amount a presure on their SME customers to obtain the full O365 stack which include teams(which MS insists is replacing skype for business).

Remember also that MS marketing is almost 110% tailored to the now aging set of SME admins that entered the market doing the transition from big iron to winNT networks in the 90ies and who depend on MS Certified courses and books for all of their formal IT training and that SME market where those Teams deployments comes from, if you have an Teams subscription and a "i only know the MS stack" mindset you are not going to deploy stack no matter how much more your users prefer it to Teams.

And the "We love linux on Azure" marketing is exactly that narrow, the same day it was announced MS killed of any feature they ever had that made it easier to integrate Linux* into wintel networks, making it clear to all but the clueless that it's only about headless linux guest running comodity web frameworks running inside azure or hyperV then any change in MS attitude towards competitors and that was forced on them by the fact that the webdev market was/is dominated by OSX clients and linux servers.

*SFU and RFC2307 support was dropped along with the teams/skype clients for linux the same week they started raving about linux CLI's being usable from windows clients.
A bit short on details. What exactly was it about this spreadsheet that made it hard to recreate in a programming language? Personally I find this hard to believe unless one of the key deliverables is "pretty much every parameter to this calculation must be tweakable by the user with the results being visualised instantly".
1Password actually has a feature for this called Travel Mode:
https://blog.1password.com/introducing-travel-mode-protect-y...
I'm on the Catalina beta and the Safari Extension for 1Password 6 doesn't work (Apple only allows extensions from the App Store starting with Safari 13 - so it's not really AgileBits fault).

I chose to migrate to storing everything in iCloud Keychain instead. I understand why companies want to move to the subscription model, but I can't justify spending $36/year for an app to store my passwords.
Amazon warehouse jobs aren't just physically demanding. I agree that one can study hard after half a day spent on some physical effort. Instead the problem is that Amazon pickers are under constant stress all those hours to meet targets far more demanding than most other jobs. I would expect that constant mental stress to leave people so frazzled at day's end that they would be unable to hit the books and concentrate.
Aha! As far as persisting calculations, this makes sense. I guess in my head I was thinking "pure" data where everything opened was precomputed. Forgive my ignorance about database solutions, but do they not implement something similar?

But now you've got me thinking, it would be nice if libraries like Dask could allow for flagging of symbolic operations like this to be written to disk for quickly saving metadata where intermediate steps don't explicitly need to be saved.
Ask HN: How can I make a dashboard that doesn't suck?
We have an client-facing admin application at our company, and are struggling to create a good, practical design for our dashboard (home page).

The users don't seem to mind what's on it. So how should I design one? Are there any methods or good resources for making a good one?
Gaming is still better on Windows.

It's improved greatly with Steam's work on Proton, at a guess I'd say at least 75% of my library is now playable with no extra work from my side.

On Windows it's still 100% though.
Ask HN: Why is Python good choice for AI?
Yes, that's it. Thanks!
> You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right?

Right. And this was a mistake by Mozilla: they tried to make an OS, and a browser and interact/negotiate with 3rd-party phone vendors. I did not care for FirefoxOS-based phones indeed because they where "same old ridden-with-firmware black boxes".

Mozilla makes a good browser, they'd rather keep doing that.

Purism is a different story. It seems they understand that some folks appreciate open hardware, privacy-focused designs. Cool, one ingredient for the success: check. But in order to be a successful product, the phone has to be useful out-of-the-box. And if the hardware company will attempt to make a whole "native" software stack, they will fail the same way as Mozilla failed at being an OS-company and HW-facing company: not enough resources.

So, how about Purism makes a great hardware (+ drivers), and integrates exactly three apps: 1. a phone app that is able to make/receive calls, 2. a short-text messaging app 3. and a blazing-fast browser to access the world. Done. Basics are there: I can make calls, I can receive/send messages, I can access email, slack, hail uber/lyft, use web-based maps/navigation, listen to online podcasts/music, use web-based calendars, etc. A phone I could use everyday.
All those standards have loopholes that allow you to use tools without certification provided you do the due diligence necessary. I know because I used to develop safety critical software using tools whose only merit was that they were in use before the standards required certification. Basically you run a standardized testsuite and write a document. You don't even have to pass all the tests, you just have to document why test failures don't affect the safety of your product.

Since many people are interested in using Rust for such applications, there are efforts underway to stabilize the compiler and do the necessary paperwork so that not every company needs to do it themselves.
Meanwhile <side rant> open any document in Photoshop with a few layers and effects and the computer grinds to a halt, no matter the specs, no matter the year, through the ages. New hardware comes out? Booya, new Photoshop XYZ -> let's put your fancy hardware on its knees, begging for air.
Hostyoself: Server in a browser – host from your computer, your phone, etc.
how have I lived my entire life without knowing about this?
> How on earth is MSFT supposed to maintain comparability for quintillions of iterations of hardware across millions of machines with no data on what works and what doesn't?

Isn't this the same problem they've faced for decades, and largely successfully managed before the telemetry?
Another possibility: there's nothing particularly "conservative" about the corporation as a created entity. That was an invention of Congress and the courts, and Congress could decide it should be diminished or even go away entirely. Fewer corporations would mean fewer victims of corporations...
> Rails. Django, Postgresql, and MySQL

These are much harder for non-programmers to use than Access. With Access, almost completely non-technical people can set up their own database and make the queries they need to answer their own questions. With Postgres accessed from a general-purpose programming language, non-technical people need to hire someone to help them with every basic task.

As far as I can tell Access has nothing to do with making websites, so it’s unclear what Django or Rails has to do with anything.
What 1PW recommends for people feeling unsure is a separate browser profile [1] just for 1PX. An Electron-based thing isn’t a bad idea tho.

[1]: https://support.1password.com/1password-x-security/
They do have a standalone license, they just don't make it well known.

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/92275/how-do-i-...
Same. I had paid for all their apps (mac, Windows, iOS, Android) and after Dropbox disabled the web server on the public folder 1Password’s solution was to subscribe. They didn’t even offer me meager discount.
But how do you handle sharing? The main issue with Excel, and its main downfall, is the sharing of data and versioning, with person X has an older version of person Y by a few hours and needs an email of person X to keep doing her job.
> C++ is continuing to lose the market it once had.

This is an amusing remark. The number of C++ programmers is growing faster than ever, C++ discussion boards are busier than ever, and attendance at C++ conferences is higher than ever, and the growth rate is increasing. The number of C++ programmers is growing at a far, far greater rate than of Rust programmers.

It's the difference between fads and real trends. C++ is where the hard work gets done.

The language had a renaissance in 2011, and is no longer what it was. Moving to a better language is easier than ever, because C++ is that language. C++14 is better than C++11, C++17 is better than C++14, and C++20 will be way better than C++17.

Talk about safety is misplaced. Modern C++ is as safe as any language you can name. Of course there are (literally!) many billions of lines of old code, most of it nothing to write home about. But it's overwhelmingly easier and safer to modernize it than to rewrite it. Save rewriting for C, where it makes the most difference; then, rewrite it incrementally in C++, keeping it fully functional at all times.

The safest code is code you don't have to write at all, because it's in a fast, powerful, well-tested library you can just call. C++, overwhelmingly more than other languages, is focused on enabling powerful libraries you won't be tempted to bypass, for speed or because it might be a PITA to use. As a direct consequence of that focus, we have the libraries.

Talk about Java or C# as "better" languages makes me laugh. The number of bugs is proportional to the lines of code. Such infamously prolix languages provide fertile soil for bugs, even neglecting their poorer library support.

Rust is an interesting modern language that is relatively good for writing libraries in. It is a sound choice anywhere that the alternative would be C, Go, or Java, provided tool maturity and coder availability are not serious concerns. It is a somewhat risky choice, because it is still far from clear whether it will still be growing in five years, but so far so good.
Actually keepass (i.e. .net app) or keepassx/keepassxc (Qt fork)?
One major drawback of using spreadsheets is that it is harder to spot calculation mistakes. A famous/infamous recent example is the Reinhart and Rogoff incident in 2013, which involved their heavily cited paper "Growth in a time of debt". When a research student named Thomas Herndon tried to replicate the paper's findings, he found, after a careful inspection of the Excel spreadsheet the two Harvard professors used, that the spreadsheet was ridden with errors. Some of them were even in principle rather trivial, such as mistaking the sum of one column as the sum of another. The incident was widely reported in many business newspapers. Paul Krugman had also commented on it on New York Times.

Had the steps of computations been written as a program, it might be easier for the authors to discover their mistakes. With a spreadsheet, if you put formulae inside data cells, you need to click all these cells one by one to see if the formulae have been input correctly. This is tedious.
Adversarial Objects Against Lidar-Based Autonomous Driving Systems
That probably depends more on the listener than on the story!

I played MUDs for several years, at the same time that I was learning the ins and outs of programming. I developed some plugins for a popular third-party client called MUSHclient. The game I played also had a somewhat proprietary first-party client, and they used a spare Telnet option (one left unassigned by IANA [1]) to pass data from the server to the client to drive some extra graphical widgets on their client. I got involved in developing plugins that made use of that data, which led me to learning how to negotiate that option with the server and get the data I wanted.

I eventually started developing my own MUD client, which is where the Telnet stack came in. Now, writing a Telnet stack is just something I do when I learn a new language. It's just large enough of a project to exercise some architectural and API-level concerns.

[1] If you're curious, all of the formally allocated Telnet options are documented here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/telnet-options/telnet-optio...
What I realy like about password safe is that you can drag passwords into text boxes. Most password manager copy your password into the clipboard where every local application can access it. With drag and drop only the designated application will be getting the password.
Or maybe we all learnt about the bystander effect and were inoculated against it! :)
I have a brother in law going through this process. Having young kids seems to be enough motivation to work more after brutal overnight shifts. He recently immigrated to the US.
I recall reading about some archaeologists who studied the bones of early American colonists. Their skeletons all showed signs of extreme, sustained stress. They basically worked themselves to death and died young.
Which is not that big of a deal if the updates aren't there to fix wormable holes. And in the area of safety, you can encourage people to update their machines by imposing dramatic fines for non-compliance.
I think both could be true. Consider T to be the likelihood an individual will intervene, N the number of individuals, and P the probability of an intervention.

N, T = 1, 0.5 then P = 0.5

N, T = 10, 0.2 then P = (1-.8^10) = 0.9

Basically, the likelihood of an average individual to intervene may decline as there are more people, but the likelihood that at least one individual does intervene increases as crowd size does.
The mobile app is free, but creating entries on the mobile app is a paid feature. Either with a subscription, or by buying the "pro" features. Or at least that's how it is on Android.
The problem is people don't want to admit what needs to be done before it's too late.

When the gas crisis hit, it put enough money into the Japanese car makers that their next generation of cars weren't just more fuel efficient than what Detroit was producing, they were actually competitive on multiple levels.

Suddenly the Big Three had to compete, but there was a problem. They had promised their workers wages and benefits they could only provide when they didn't have viable foreign competition. More competition meant lower volumes and lower margins.

There are only two options in that circumstance. Either everyone tightens their belt or the companies fail. But nobody wanted to tighten their belt. The unions wouldn't give back what they negotiated during the time when the American automakers had no competition. So the companies slowly failed, and with them the region.

The alternative might have been that most cars were still made in Detroit, and people there made middle class wages, just not upper middle class wages. But they chose bankruptcy and unemployment over accepting that, and that's what they got.
The problem with iCloud keychain for me is that I don't only use Apple devices, otherwise it might do the trick (except for TOTP 2FA stuff).

I'm trying Bitwarden now and it seems to be ok. Maybe it's time for a change.
Bangalore-Startups-Companies-List
I'll give you Lua, but can this compete with LuaJIT?
Yes for example in password spray - attackers often try just < 20 passwords. If your account is high value they could try a lot more.