skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Readen – A New Way to Experience Books
Hi HN community!
I have been trying to read more books lately. Books are abundant these days. Even great books are easy to find. Ironically, I found it harder and harder to finish them because of all sorts of modern distractions.

I did some research and found that reading and listening at the same time might help you focus and even understand the content better. So I've built a tool to convert any book to videos using Google Text to Speech API. I have been reading books using this method for a while and it is working great for me. I hope it works for you, too.

Check it out: https://www.readen.co
That's a good policy. We currently don't deploy on Friday afternoons.
Perhaps add a <noscript> tag to your calculator - otherwise it is just a blank page with JavaScript disabled!
What happens if the ransomwares don't stop? Do you spend a bunch of money on investigations to see if some thousands of small towns or little agency somewhere kept if quiet because the cost otherwise is huge? Up the fines the tax payers will pay when they get caught?
You do have to be able to cast from a pointer to an appropriately-sized integer and back, however [1]. This makes the semantics fuzzy and ill-defined in some cases [2].

[1]: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2263.htm#q3...

[2]: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1621
Yup. Long ago, a high level person was fired. After that someone hit everybody's passwords enough to trigger account locks. It could only be fixed at the console.
> At Google, we hire great software engineers, and you are one of them.

That's a pretty presumptuous comment.
wikipedia article is usually a coordinated treatise edited and vetted by the community. there are usually links from the wikipedia article so readers can chase down breadcrumbs and primary literature references with relative ease.

You will find your dangerous prototypes link near the bottom of the page with a number of other references, and near the top in the right side column ["ads column"].

if you take a look at my recent submissions you will see a collection of articles all dancing around the subject of designing a device to snarph data from a display controller/driver chip or readable display panel.

for those that can read between the line they would just need to see the titles and understand exactly how to make such a thing, for those that need to read the entire articles there should be sufficient exposure provided for someone even someone green to put it all together with guidance here and there.
I'm also using two Dell Ultrasharps with a Surface Dock. I tried updating the driver but no luck for me.
Yep - plenty of people will prefer one platform over the other, such as yourself. But in the end the only thing that really stands to differentiate them is the network, not the app, as either one can duplicate the other’s functionality at the drop of a hat.
But it's such a trivial change...! What could go wrong?
This is great, no longer trying to get iTunes working in wine on linux, just play the music straight from the browser, and if you want a native app, Windows and MacOS has iTunes, no electron non-sense.
You might be right for private individuals, but it's much harder for a business, let alone a municipal government, to pay a ransom under the table and get away with it.
People have their own internal stories about how good they are, and all that feedback can be very painful.

It doesn't help that many comments are nitpicks and pedantry, made by people without much social empathy.

This is especially true when sending a patch for a high-level review of your proof of concept, and the next thing you know people are complaining about your formatting.
> It would be for the greater good

I'm not so sure. We're nearing an interesting equilibrium where insurance companies pay ransoms, thereby taking an interest in the security of their pool, while attackers probe for vulnerabilities.

Put another way, we have a pen testing group being paid by a digital security group. If the net result is better security in exchange for the insurance "tax," that could be a modest improvement.
Running "low and slow" isn't a tremendously good strategy for ransomware. Slowly encrypting data over time is more likely to get caught and stopped, versus "shock and awe".

I'm waiting until ransomware starts leveraging the encryption functionality in common backup systems. Not many sysadmins would notice if their backup encryption keys were changed-out for 6 months and deleted at the same time that the "encrypt all the data" event happened. (The only Customers I've ever worked with who were already doing air-gapped backup verification were regulated businesses in the financial sector.)
Why Climb Mount Everest?
I don't disagree, but I think Apple to could this a lot better than they do.

Imagine this alternate universe for a moment, app developers assign Apple, as part of their developer status, a non-expiring option to license in perpetuity their application for one million dollars by Apple Inc.

Apple adds an "application acquisition fee" of $50 on the sale of every iOS device. At the end of each quarter, Apple distributes a fractional share of the acquisition fee amongst all of the developers for whom it has opted to take their application. Those payouts continue until Apple has paid out $1M to the developer.

From the developer's perspective, if their App gets consumed by Apple they now get an infusion of capital to spend the time on the next big thing, so having Apple decide to incorporate their 'feature' into the Apple 'product' is a win.

From Apple's perspective its a win because they have a bunch of developers working for "free" trying to produce the next big thing, and only after the market has said "Hey, this is something worth paying for." Does Apple incur a forward liability which comes out of future revenue, not cash on hand, and without a specific due date. So easy to manage on an earnings call and when planning cash flow.

By "sharing the wealth" in that way, Apple can make better partners out of their developers than they currently do.
I’m sympathetic to my fellow product developers. As a user, I’m glad Apple adds features to iOS without charging for updates, and does so using a consistent and legible privacy/security model. Unlike on macOS, every “sherlocked” iOS app costs Apple App Store revenue, so they’re working against incentives to make a feature first-party. That suggests the decisions are at least motivated by a belief in doing right by users.

Still, I’d like developers to be compensated for being put out of business.
What happens to Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends? (2011)
Why? I've done it before. This was an in-house program with little in the way of security implications. Forcing the case on the password greatly cut down the number of problems.

Since then I have seen a better solution: Try the password, if it fails try it with the case flipped. If that works it's a caps-lock error, they know the password, accept it.
The point is there, though: hardware has more room to improve than software does, when it comes to IO-heavy tasks.
> Prevent users from easily writing and executing scripts to add functionality, like Greasemonkey.

Shortcuts?
Social empathy is a really important skill, especially when delivering feedback. However, the best way to improve as a junior developer is to welcome feedback, not panic.

I've seen junior developers welcome feedback or run from it, and I think that has as much to do with the reviewer as the author of the code.

On the flip side, I've learned almost as much from reviewing more senior engineer's code and just asking dumb questions or looking up functions in documentation that I didn't know about. I think there's huge potential to learn as the code reviewer.
Without even going into the merits of Spotify's playlists as you mentioned, one reason I would personally prefer Spotify over Apple Music even if we assume rest of the things equal would be to support a small player(compared to Apple). Apple, a company already well entrenched in so many fields controlling one more is something I would not prefer to see. They already are at a huge advantage in even controlling this market as owning iOS and iTunes makes it very easy for them to push their service.
I lot of people look at just one part of biology and totally ignore all the basics only focusing on aging reversal and living forever. First, autophagy is nice to have it done from time to time, not constantly. If you constantly activate it, then your cells will reach the Hayflick limit. So, you need to boost your telomerase... but then you can more easily get cancer.

The best strategy for me is lower metabolism, undereat, and reduce cellular damage and senescence. In some cases, senescence can be reversed (a friend of mine is doing a beta cell research at UCLA, and they've done that to some extent.) Of course, there are other strategies, involving stem cells, but I'm not familiar with that part - maybe they can compensate the negative effects of autophagy.
I have actually thought about this a lot and done some napkin calculations: using a set of about 93 characters the search space for 5 character passwords is about 7 gigabytes; combining all the possible passwords <= length 4 is only about 74 megabytes in comparison. I think that the entropy loss is insignificant.
Backup systems should not be executing the data they are backing up. It would be easy for the ransomware to get the backup system to make a backup of the ransomware. It's much harder for it to then execute itself on the backup machine/wherever that data ends up.

For a ransomware to propagate that way it would have to employ multiple exploits against unknown operating systems, and against computers managed by people who should have some idea about security rather than just the desktop of a random employee. In many cases you'll be backing up to storage provided by a 3rd party who simply don't even offer the capability to run code, or permanently delete data programatically.
The difference is hypothetical, because if enough people exit the active fund, even if the fund manager thinks it's a folly, eventually they have to sell whatever makes up the fund, and eventually those sells will push prices down. That's why crashes are fast and hard.

Yes in theory the manager can try to alter the composition of the fund by selling the stocks that are still going strong. But why would they? That just exposes them to known hazards even more.

So, probably the active funds will be the first ones to drop the small stocks first in a crash.
I’d say an attempt was made by Microsoft to render the web browser a feature of Windows. That didn’t pan out in the long run as (a) a web browser was a horrid file browser, and (b) IE just wasn’t that good.

Because they tried to make it a feature, it lost ground in terms of functionality and performance and users preferred a different option with a better experience.

That brings me to another point - you can make a feature into a product by creating a fundamentally better experience. It isn’t easy though and you can find the tide shift against you long run.
Cryptocurrency exchanges do fall under KYC in the US and only if you want to do certain things, like purchases over a certain volume or fiat withdraws. There's no reason someone in India, for example, would need to go through a KYC process simply to buy a small amount of cryptocurrency. There's also plenty of P2P networks like LocalBitcoins that fit this use case much better than an exchange.
> "I decided to make a counter-offer using insurance proceeds in the amount of $400,000, which I determined to be consistent with ransoms recently paid by other municipalities," Mayor Mitchell said during a press conference (image above). "The attacker declined to make a counter-offer, rejecting the city's position outright."

Because that's what they had an insurance policy for.
But why is it a problem that the app must be running to decrypt the silent notification? The user doesn't know about it and won't know about it until the app is opened, but then the app is already open and can process the notifications.

As a user I really would not care if the 'read receipt' or 'is typing' notification is unavailable to an app while I'm not using it anyway. And when I'm using it, I don't see a problem with the app having to process some notifications in a different thread and update the UI accordingly.
Can someone enlighten me as to why a study such as this one may be undertaken without a control group? I mean, what's the point? If the study ends up landing on some exciting conclusions, not having a control group creates more questions than answers. Is there a budgetary constraint at play here or are researchers sticking their feelers out in all kinds of directions simultaneously trying to figure out which direction may be the most promising?
The best critical code reviews I've had focused on the design and completely ignored things like formatting.

On balance, formatting is an important part of code health. Hopefully, using auto-formating tools (gofmt and friends) should hopefully make code formatting issues not take up time in code review.
You talk about Snapchat like it went out of business.. it’s a publicly traded company worth $22 billion.
The OS/2 personality shipped? (For once in my career, I didn't ride the dead horse into the ground.) When I left, the performance group I was with was breaking up, and the Workplace OS was very far from a releasable state.

I assume DOS and Windows compatibility would come from the features in OS/2. My primary task was to write and run benchmarks comparing Workplace OS personalities to native code. Primarily OS/2 and AIX, which were pretty far along, but later Windows NT. Classic MacOS and OS/400 were mentioned, but I never saw any work on them. Taligent was dead as a door nail by that time (I did ride that project into the ground), by which I mean it had been converted to a C++ utility library.

We were just benchmarking and telling the devs in Boca Raton, "Non't do that. No, don't do that. Here's how you do it. Stop it." I don't know about the roadmap beyond the initial personalities.

Was OS/2 for PPC (are you sure it shipped?) well known for being hideously slow?
So Apple wants to curate an app store and demand a 30% cut, but they don't keep trash apps like you describe from sharing data. Then they get to play good guy and make their own app?

How is that not absolutely abusive? They abuse users by effectively lying about the quality of apps in the store, they abuse app creators by changing the rules to suit their whims, and they abuse their position as a monopolist over iPhone software to keep any real competition from sticking around.
Technically it is illegal in the US, at least if the kidnapping organization is labelled as a terrorist group. However, as far as I can tell, no one has ever been prosecuted under this law.
I definitely agree they can handle some things better. After all - why not try and buy out those little app makers to add more great talent? There’s a ton of PR/brand/goodwill to build there and it’s a total lost opportunity.

And interesting idea— I’m going to mull that one over!
It is impossible to uninstall the iOS apps, right?
I encountered the MLB.tv one the other day. I think they are a no special characters site.
Surprise: Next-generation virtual machines will help power multicloud computing
I've hit that, also. I finally gave up and did a password reset. In setting the new password I find the new rules precluded the password I was using. Apparently that was enforced by editing the input.

I've also set a password that wasn't accepted by the login box, it explicitly stated there was an invalid character.
Gig Work with Benefits: California May Expand Employee Perks to Contract Workers
I'm not sure I understand the point of your (2). If it means that you can't add functionality, then how can that functionality be added via an app in (3)? And if the functionality could be added via a script in (2), then would there even exist a market for the app in (3)? It seems like your sequence really should be:

(1) Make a platform that doesn't do everything.

(2) Sell apps to cover missing features.

(3) Improve your original operating system, rendering paid apps useless.

And that'll always work, at least until your operating system does do everything.
Well done Swift. Insightful language design.
If you work at Google and want to do some open source project on the side, the code is owned by Google and is under Github.com/google.

Not necessarily. See this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592993 - which is a child
comment of the one you linked to.
I've mostly worked for small industrial light manufacturers. First job I worked at they were always late with shipping stuff. And always taking stuff down to the UPS office after hours. After watching this for a few years I got the shop manager to adopt a rule. If it's not ready to be boxed up before lunch, it's not shipping today.

After they started enforcing that they got a lot more productive and started shipping on time much more often. Turns out the mad rush to meet an arbitrary deadline absolutely kills productivity.
I can't believe you guys are arguing over whether or not Facebook used to be a dating site and nobody has mentioned the "poke" button.
It took me hours to realize that all those beginner tutorials are based on v3 while I included current v5 and nothing worked.

I was litteraly unable to use the current version and went to implement v3 code based on tutorial and demo availability.

To this day I'm still planning to port everything to the current d3 version some time in the future.
And that would be a problem if having 'is typing...' and 'was read' notifications had to be pushed realtime to an app that was in the background. What is the point of those notifications arriving in the app when the user isn't using it.
That's an interesting point. While it's definitely true that any major unwind of that size will disrupt the market, there's some reasons to believe an ecosystem dominated by active investors would do better.

First as mentioned before, active investors have discretion. There's strong reason to believe that as the sell-off's happening that they'd move into the most dislocated stocks. That acts as kind of a negative feedback loop. It wouldn't stop a market-wide selloff, but would keep things more balanced between single-name stocks vis-a-vis the rigid rules governing passive index managers.

Second, by definition active funds are more differentiated from one another. Passive indexing produces a mono-culture with analogous ecological risks to what we see in nature. The typical active fund only holds about 50 positions at any given time. So, on the whole while active investors in aggregate hold 0.3% of their portfolios in Chubb, at an individual level most funds hold zero. And some minority may hold 1%, 5%, 10% or more of their assets in Chubb. So if one fund fails, that's less likely to spread contagion to every other fund in the universe.

In that type of unwind scenario, some funds will do pretty decently, and some funds will do horribly. But the point is there will be a dispersion of results. That makes the market as a whole more robust. Panicking investors are more likely to re-allocate their capital from the bad funds to the good funds, rather than pull all their out in a flight to quality.
Nah, it’s not out of business, but the point about there not being much of a fundamental differentiation from Instagram that gives it unique value stands.

That may change over time as these things aren’t set in stone of course.
As of iOS 10, it became possible to hide many first-party apps. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221

In iOS 12 this evolved to actually removing them from internal storage. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094
Everyone is different, and some people have a harder time with critical feedback than others. It could be that they have different past experiences, or that they just have different personalities.
Is it actually true that FAANG hire the best, top 1%?

Seeing the products they create, I am not convinced.
I’m 30 pages into the book. It hasn’t grabbed me yet.

Worth finishing?
I worked at one (horrible) place where we explicitly only deployed on Friday afternoon.

The logic was we have fewer users over the weekend, so if something goes wrong, fewer people will notice.
Yes you can implement C in other ways (I've worked on a C JIT that abstracts from this flat memory model, for example) but come on we all know this is how C works on most machines most of the time and they shouldn't need to add a lot of disclaimers that it could theoretically be done a different way when they're just trying to raise awareness of how things work in practice.
If you really want to game-theory this out...

Why not enact into law a limited immunity for any such ransomware that (a) only charges a modest amount for decryption; (b) never exfiltrates private data to elsewhere; (c) after payment, reveals all security lapses that allowed penetration?

From a certain perspective, ransomware identifies & forces correction upon institutions that have been careless with their security or backups. Truly nasty attackers could do even worse: stealing & reselling data, or leaving silent long-term compromises in place to bleed targets more extensively.

So, carving out an safe harbor for "uncontracted vulnerability discovery & remediation" via the payment of modest ransoms could be a socially-efficient policy, aligning incentives of many participants: targets, the customers of targets, and grayware authors.

Perhaps, the whole process could be automated even without explicit support from lawmakers: leave an appropriate crypto balance, on the systems at risk, in a conventional place. It'd mean: "If you can see this, we know we've screwed up – but we're OK with you taking this amount, and no more, if you close the hole behind you & leave us a note of what we did wrong." Viewing the movement of that bounty on a blockchain would be a public disclosure of the compromise, and gray-hat actors that confined their activity to the collection of such bounties wouldn't need to fear criminal prosecution.

(Hmm, maybe we should just put private-keys controlling small bitcoin-balances into any free-form fiels of our records with typically-careless institutions – so we can independently sense when our private data has been accessed by dishonest actors – whether institution insiders or hackers.)
Scratched an itch, simple idea, elegant implementation, and useful! I love it :)
You said there was no sbrk syscall, and there is.
All depends on what "api_result_t" is, right? If the API's result is a bucket of scalars, then passing the pointer could be perfectly fine. Same if api_result_t contains a pointer to a buffer, and the call just makes the buffer pointer point to a previously allocated block.
A few reasons ago, you became able to “delete” default apps. IIRC that was initially cosmetic, but I think maybe they are actually deleted now?
If only they were the only ones! Consorsbank (BNP Paribas) also has a limit of 5 chars, and comdirect even has a limit of 5 decimal digits. The IT security incompetence in banks in .de is just insane.
Of course they have money, just not a lot of it. They use cash and mobile credits, both of which have drawbacks like value fluctuation and the inability to accumulate savings. There's a good argument to be made that these populations stay in poverty, at least in part, because of a lack of access to banking.
There are a lot of parallels between what Microsoft did with IE and what Apple is doing with basically the whole App Store. Apple will either eliminate competition with their apps or use their position as the iOS creator to make their own apps better integrated (namely Apple Music). Apple also makes it impossible to install any software except what they've signed in the App Store.

Seems to me to basically be the same case.
Pretty cool! Heads up that your login with Facebook is still setup for Development mode so it currently isn’t functional