skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do nerds remember back in the day when many were calling out for Microsoft to be broken up? Into two parts: OS division, and Apps division.

The idea was that time and again Microsoft's OS division would anti-competitvely design internal APIs in DOS and Windows that its App division would leverage. There were also instances where Microsoft subtley broke DOS (and maybe even Windows, but definitely DOS) for competing applications. People used to talk about "undocumented" API calls.

In the end Microsoft's OS gained proper competition through the paradigm shift of FOSS, specifically with Linux. Microsoft helped a key competitor (Apple) off its knees and look where we are now – Apple has a mobile OS, Microsoft has none. Microsoft didn't board the internet/web train quick enough, didn't forsee how big search and social media would become (in fairness, a vanishingly small number of people did) and so now they have Google and Facebook to compete with. Amazon parlaying their experience from a building an at-scale marketplace to a cloud-computing platform took everyone by surprise.

Back in the day I lamented Microsoft's stranglehold on the software industry. They are still a behemoth but they no longer have the stranglehold they once had. Amazon has competition. Does Amazon unfairly leverage its marketplace monopoly to crush competitors? If they do, prosecute them. If they don't, out innovate and out compete them!

Will Google's stranglehold on search ever be broken? Maybe we'll have to think laterally. Like distributed open-source search. Will Facebook's hegemony over social media (FB, FB messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) ever be challenged? Do we have the luxury of finding out in a decade or two like we did with Microsoft? Microsoft never amassed the data on their "customers" that Google and Facebook and every Tom, Dick, and Harry do now.

Of all these companies I intuitively feel that Facebook should be broken up. Into its constituent social media parts, that is. Either that or legally mandate interoperability so that we can move to a federated social media landscape to encourage genuine innovation and competition. We need the global equivalent of the ITU but for social media.

Amazon are scary but that's only because they are bad-ass. If they break the law, fine. If it turns out in a decade that it hasn't been possible to unseat or challenge the enormous tech incumbents with FOSS challenges then maybe we ought to take a serious look at the economics, social dynamics, and network effects involved.

edit: clarity

edit ii: could people who have downvoted my comment explain why please?
Great comment! If you have any recommended resources and the time to share please do. Thank you.
A web page can function without JS, but a lot of things seriously aren't doable with just HTML5, no matter how hard you try.
Recoil – Retro Computer Image Library
Wat? My point was that they weren't even in the equation. Who cares what they charged if everyone went straight to the source instead?
You could do that (see Singularity OS [0] and Midori [1]), but recently it was discovered that it wouldn't work on modern out-of-order CPUs due to Spectre [2].

[0] https://research.cs.wisc.edu/areas/os/Seminar/schedules/pape...
[1] http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178
Yet and still there are dozens of apps that force subscriptions outside of the store. Why can I never find a documented case of Apple banning apps that require subscriptions outside of the App Store?
Four economic ideas economists have gotten wrong for decades)
> 1) Nixpkgs could be broken up into several package sets for better scalability. Eg, haskelPackages and pythonPackages could be broken out into separate repositories.

While this could happen, it's exactly what I hope won't happen, because in my opinion the idea that haskell or python packages are fundamentally different and can live in their own world is a fallacy. I spend quite a bit of my time fixing python packages on nixpkgs master and the number of times the fix actually involves making a tweak to a non-python library means I would forever have to be playing games synchronizing repositories. Also, gone would be the ability to make atomic changes across these boundaries.

Viva la monorepo.
Sounds like a great way to collect Mercury in your local neighborhood
Modeling Continuous Delivery
It is, but with this script it's a third party rolling their own crypto for you :D. OpenVPN should have good defaults instead.
That’s not true. I have used plenty of apps that have subscriptions but don’t use in app subscriptions including Sling, DirecTVNow, Linux Academy and Spotify.
Not the only one - there are probably dozens of us :)

I use Firefox for this purpose, not in private mode - I just let FF delete everything whenever I close it. It's not "100% stateless", as I still allow cookies and such while my browser is open (I use uBlock and Privacy-Badger to block out the worst), but whenever I close the browser I still have a "clean slate" whenever I reopen it.

There are definitely a few downsides (as much as I love the GDPR, the compliance banners are annoying), but together with a password manager, it's definitely a setup that works for me.
The link in the tweet is worth a read[1].

>My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you
aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and
side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express
purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system
implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI. Jason
Wright and several other developers were responsible for those
backdoors, and you would be well advised to review any and all code
commits by Wright as well as the other developers he worked with
originating from NETSEC.

[1]https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462
you should add an actual link to the thing you want to show.
Debugging in Production
You're correct (upvoted for that), it's my right and I decided long ago. I'm ok paying the price, also reaping the rewards of very fast page loading, zero tracking, and shutting off a huge vector for malware.

But others with less tech knowledge (which is 97% of the population I guess) are not in a position to make the choice and have to trust. Some people abuse that trust for profit. Other web devs are well-intentioned but clueless about the risks they put on the users.

Also I disable JS long ago because I knew that there would be unknown unknows, and bingo: (https://react-etc.net/entry/exploiting-speculative-execution...) "Exploiting Speculative Execution (Meltdown/Spectre) via JavaScript"

It's a matter of trust; trust is earned; the industry as a whole hasn't earned it.

Further reading:

Remember that there is no code faster than no code.
-- Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
-- Alan Kay

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[...]But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way---and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.
-- C.A.R. Hoare, "The Emperor's Old Clothes", Turing Award Lecture (1980)

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling --- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
-- Niklaus Wirth

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
-- David Gelernter, "Machine Beauty", Basic Books (1998)

Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it.
-- Alan Perlis

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.
-- Graham Bell

[...]Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
-- Brian Kernighan

Complexity is a sign of technical immaturity. Simplicity of use is the real sign of a well design product whether it is an ATM or a Patriot missile.
-- Daniel T. Ling

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
-- Nathaniel S. Borenstein
That's a well-placed cliffhanger at the end
likewise. I really struggle with the concept that all the feedback loops are positive and will lead to runaway change.

How will the warming of the Arctic affect plant growth? It seems logical to expect lots more plants up there as the permafrost shrinks and exposes more fertile country. Is that a optimism I can cling to? ;)
Nice list!
Indeed, IPsec isn't mentioned. (You can use WireGuard on OpenBSD nowadays.)

If you remember the OpenSSH Challenge Response vulnerability was found by ISS in 2002. OpenBSD's advisory can be found here [1]

This was the first remote vulnerability found in OpenBSD's default installation (which they used to advertise with). Back then, it was very normal to have all kind of bloated daemons enabled by default and vulnerabilities were found in C code and were easily exploited (no ASLR, on x86-32 for example).

Of particular interest is "section 6. Release Process" because it has details about how the OpenBSD team dealt with the situation at that time. Also, the patches are from 26 june 2002.

Now, if you look at [2] (source of FOIA documents), you can notice the date is 14 august 2002. This indicates the FBI's document is made after the vulnerability was known to the public.

What are the indications that the FBI knew about this beforehand? Is that the part listed on the bottom where they say contact X has administrative control over the internet host cvs.openbsd.org and Y has administrative control over the internet host ftp.openbsd.org? We don't know who these people were, who they worked for.

I remember there being some kind of feud between OpenBSD team and Grsecurity/PaX team (Brad Spengler aka Spender and a Hungarian I suppose by the nickname pipops). I always wondered about the relation of these, and the blackhat community. Who were these people with the gobble gobble memes, and the "Theo why is syslog running on port 514 I want to see SSH and nothing else"?

[1] https://www.openssh.com/txt/preauth.adv

[2] https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2019/07/19/Ecd74aeb090e0...
Sounds like there was a good business case for a consulting arrangement after you left.
Terraform Puppet Provisioner
The Netflix series based on it with Daniel Radcliffe as the doctor was a joy to watch.
20 C > 68 F

30 C > 86 F
There's an implicit assumption in this argument that the law as it stands is fine and not in need of changes itself.
He Built a $1B Business Where All 700 Employees Work Remotely
Virtual memory for a many-core NoC
As a happy Qubes user, the overhead in CPU is barely noticeable for Xen virtualization. One needs a lot of RAM though.
Free Free or open source Free?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_genealogy_softwa...

The main one that is open source is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramps

Improves with every release, but has a learning curve.
>I'm amazed by how little weight Americans seem to put on international competitiveness

Embarrassment of riches. There's an attitude in America that being in the lead is just the default state because America has been a leader in tech for decades now. Meanwhile most international multinationals are jealously guarded and protected by their respective national governments and are seen by the respective populations as their national pride (e.g. VW in Germany)

A good example is the vilification of the Silicon Valley tech scene by local governments (looking at you San Francisco) while every other nation is desperately trying to recreate it within their own borders - because who doesn't want thousands of high-paying / high-tech jobs in their region? Or how Amazon had their new HQ driven out of New York by local activists and local 'progressive' politicians.

Embarrassment of riches indeed.
The only impact of not doing this is less sea level rise. The ocean is still going to rise significantly, thus the savings is likely less than the 10++ trillion this would cost.

Remember, this is also not a long term solution, it would need to be repeated over time.
Fixed. Also, here's a clickable one: https://learnawesome.org
On the shuttle, it looks like paranoia now, but let’s keep in mind the event occurred only 10 years after project Azorian was made public, which did exactly that.
It actually is an open source project. The github repository is here: https://github.com/cell-lang/. There's a link to it on the home page
https://aspietests.org/raads/index.php

Here you go. Good luck, it's 80 questions. (My pet theory is that going through all those questions is already an answer in itself)
That wasn't just any server, it was The Silk Road. The Icelandic authorities went through their own court process, though, getting whatever their equivalent to a search warrant is first, then turning over a complete image of the server to the FBI.
Thanks for sharing the theexclusive.org link. The trick discussed there is quite nifty. Here's a nice way to recall the lookup table mentioned there, in case, one forgets it:

- It is easy to remember that 0 °C = 32 °F because it is the freezing point of water.

- Every 10 °C interval corresponds to an interval of 18 °F. That's where the 9/5 in the conversion formula F = (9/5) * C + 32 comes from.

- Now it is easy to construct the lookup table: 10 °C = 50 °F, 20 °C = 68 °F, and 30 °C = 86 °F.
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BERT's success due to 'spurious statistical cues'
Serverless Patterns SACON.pdf
What a clever way that rack was - hanging like that. Love it and my head is spinning how I should do this with both my battlestation-PC, NAS, routers and everything.
> How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.

Strategy, logistics, own warriors who were not actually cowardly either and did actually fought and killed too. Also, military discipline is an advantage overall I heard. Soldiers eager to break it in order to get to few kills are oftentimes less of an advantage.
Anecdotally, my dear old Mum (now in her mid-70s) worked as a forensics investigator on the Snowtown murders (aka the "Bodies in the barrels" case) in the final stages of her career. She took some samples to the FBI in the USA as part of her work, and snagged me a cool FBI hoodie and t-shirt (well, I thought so anyway). Quite a morbid and disturbing business to be in, but I feel fortunate to have a parent is such a good role model; she completed her PhD around the age of 50, and had another whole career in scientific research and forensics after that. As I'm heading towards the same age it gives me some hope I can also make a sea-change.

I also learned, after asking some questions about the case, that sometimes you are better off being ignorant of the details. And that some people are really capable of terrible, terrible acts against others. :( Fortunately she had quite the grim sense of humour to help her deal with the cases she worked on.
-40 °C = -40 °F.

A related joke:

Saul: It's -40 outside.

Paul: Fahrenheit or Celsius?

Saul: When it's that cold, it's impossible to tell the difference.
I've always been of the opinion that Canada didn't really become a country until the Suez canal crisis. That was the first time that we took a principled stand on the world stage in defiance of the highly immoral actions of our mother country. We didn't merely quietly disagree with Britain and abstain from public comment. We loudly and publicly lead the international effort against Britain and its allies, and helped peacefully resolve the situation.

Mentioning the Suez crisis is actually relevant to this discussion. The architect of the Suez peace, Canadian foreign affairs minister Lester Pearson, had spent his First World War career (and nearly the entire duration of that war) as a volunteer field medic. He spent his formative young-adult years seeing the immediate aftermath of modern battles that result when leaders fail to engage in good-faith diplomacy.
1200km/year
Yes, including all of these.
>Nevin’s Law is currently more of an affectionate term for a rule coined by Google‘s Hartmut Nevin. At the company’s Spring Quantum Symposium this May, Nevin made the claim that quantum systems are increasing in performance at a doubly-exponential rate. This means, rather than doubling in performance with successive iterations as was the case with classical computers and Moore’s Law, quantum technology is increasing in performance at a much more dramatic rate. It took 50 years to go from punch card systems to iPhones: if Nevin’s Law is true we’ll see quantum systems increase in a fraction of that time.

What a character!
> In the end Microsoft's OS gained proper competition through the paradigm shift of FOSS, specifically with Linux.

Are you sure? Microsoft's monopoly was mostly on desktop PC operating systems, and almost all desktops are still running Windows. Most people have never heard of Gnu/Linux and wouldn't want or even know how to install it if they had. MacOS is exclusive to one luxury brand, and I really don't see it much outside of developers and college students.
Reelshot App – Edit videos in real time as you shoot them
You have to plank while speaking, in order to motivate people to speak succinctly. Obviously disadvantages people who aren’t physically fit as they literally don’t get to contribute as much!
Today, A '60s Skyscraper Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright Falls in Texas
I agree entirely.

> Yes, quality is everyone's responsibility.

It isn't fair to expect someone to advocate for quality of something they can't see, and product can't see code quality. So, yes, someone in engineering needs to advocate for it.

Here's a post I recently read about how the lack of code quality, among other things, nearly ran a good business into the ground:

https://www.groovehq.com/blog/almost-walked-away

I have been in this situation myself (as have other commenters) and it's a balance between paying tech debt and moving product forward. Learning when to sit down and pay it, and how to communicate it, is an important part of being a software developer. Can't say I have mastered it.
It's not "package metadata", it's the complete instructions for building an entire operating system in an automated way.
> There’s only one extensive app store for android

This is incorrect. F-droid is quite extensive.
Tetris Turns 35. Lets Build a JavaScript Clone
> the monorepo approach doesn't scale

Citation needed.
this french one is awesome

https://www.gouvernement.fr/gouvernement/le-systeme-d-inform...

They are simulating a meeting to define how to announce that the resource is gone! :)
This issue no longer applies since Googlebot now runs the latest Chrome: https://searchengineland.com/google-will-ensure-googlebot-ru...
People at MY company are all happy with everything about the new MacBooks.
I wouldn't think so, simply being melted doesn't mean it's released, but the decay processes triggered by the melting and now apparently wildfires will start eating into it. It's likely very difficult to predict what proportion would eventually be released and over what time frame.

However it wouldn't take much in the grand scheme of things to negate any reductions in CO2 release we manage to make as a civilization, more or less maintaining the total current CO2 release levels indefinitely. That's a pretty worrying scenario by itself.
Usually the older ThinkPads last longer than 5 years, or at least long enough for the tech to become obsolete.
Ask HN: How to think about the safety of Home IoT devices?
I am currently working on a hobby/amateur IOT product ecosystem for my personal use but would wish to extend it to an actual product. How to think about safety of these devices? For example, while building a smart switchboard what kind of redundancies and contingencies to add-kill switch for the device malfunctioning, manual physical buttons, etc? Are there any books or other resources on safety of IOT devices? This kind of things would have been discussed in industrial automation.
>So no - I don't expect non-US corporations to take over.

I do. Why not? It took a little over 2 decades to move the entire high-tech electronic supply chain to Asia, and now Apple couldn't manufacture iPhones in United States even if they wanted to. The problem is that at that scale, once inertia takes over, even if you see it coming there will be nothing you can do about it.
At least there's genuine-ish choice now. Chromebooks, Apple desktops and laptops, Linux desktops and laptops. Not to mention that Windows has stiff competition in the server space.

But I take your point.
The many-worlds interpretation is a good way to reason about quantum mechanics (certainly better than giving some special status to the experimenter), but it's meaningless to ask whether those other worlds really exist or not, not just because it's un-falsifiable, but also because if one defines "existence" to include alternate worlds, then every possible state of the world exists. If everything exists, then it's no longer a useful property to talk about.

One can replace many-worlds with an idea similar to relativity: you can only make statements about the universe from the perspective of a particle within that universe. Things entangled with that particle are "real", and one can make statements about them, things not entangled with that particle are not real.

When dealing with composite observers like ourselves, it's possible for a particle to be entangled with only part of the observer. Since entanglement propagates quickly, this is only a temporary inconvenience, but there are certainly some metaphysical questions to answer about that interim state.
Something that never made sense to me is why people think of Quantum Mechanics (the non-relativistic classical one) as fundamental. While some of its principles certainly are, clearly QFT (quantum field theory) is fundamental. From the perspective of quantum field theory there really is no observer just different field that couple to each other. Something like a measurement can in principle be described by a complicated interaction of fields (think of shining light at a double slit). The big mistery is I would rather say why the path-integral formulation of QFT (of which the principle of least action is the classical limit) agrees so well with reality.
Exactly what we German did with the big automobile companies. It's incredible unhealthy. Once you start listening to their every whim, big corps start to rely on politics to solve their problems. Obviously it's then that they stop to perform, like a spoiled child.
Ohh intel is awesome
You just listed 30+ countries and regions yourself and proved parent's point.

I'm sure they weight a ton or more when combined.
Reverse Engineering, how YOU can build a testing library in JavaScript
Angular Architecture Patterns and Best Practices (That Help to Scale)
What does "plank" mean in this situation? Dict doesn't seem to help.