skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a commercial synthetic DNA producer in R&D. At the moment writing DNA is the slow part. There has been an almost Moore's law like reduction in price/increase in speed for sequencing, but so far synthesis has lagged. The state-of-the-art is phosphoramidite synthesis which has been around since the 80's. We have optimized and streamlined the process, but a single base addition (writing one 'bit') is still in the range of 100's of seconds. Also the length of DNA produced by phosphoramidite synth is limited to a couple hundred bases in most cases (although it's possible to extend that out to hundreds of bases at increased cost/reduced efficiency). So long DNA has to be stitched together from shorter strands. The other issue with synthetic DNA is quality so methods like microarrays are not necessarily the best (quality cannot be objectively measured on a per strand basis).

There are some interesting developments out there, like using enzymatic methods to synthesize long strands, but a lot of that technology is still in it's infancy.

I would be happy to discuss the field if anyone is working in it (or has interest)
I can't fucking believe that it's come to this. Every top social media company was (is?) funneling private data into a search interface presented to an agent with no need of warrants.

The trial should be the other way around - The People Suing the US Government. The top lawyer representing the people? Edward.
It is possible to do the same things in Pandas is many different ways. It is good to have this flexibility, but it is confusing for new users. On top of that the bracket operator ([) is overloaded in many ways.

Things started to make sense after I read a very good book on Pandas[1]. Reading a book is better than reading blog posts, because it is consistent. In contrast, reading small tutorials for every little thing is confusing, because every blog post is using a different way to do the same thing.

[1] https://github.com/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook
My handwriting is illegible (except by me for two weeks at most), I don't want to make a font that's just as impossible to read.
Can you trust your own hosting though?

Maintaining a single node just for a Bitwarden service isn't a "set and forget" endeavour. It is easy to misconfigure Linux to be insecure, most distro's ship with too much software, and auto-update is often inadequate to maintain a secure environment.

There's far too many compromised Linux servers out in the world that people set up "to do one thing" turned on auto-update and then forgot about for years. Botters and spammers love them.

This has little to do with Bitwarden itself and everything to do with how much knowledge and time is required to correctly run any internet accessible server. People are inherently lazy and it is very easy to get apathetic when it just continues to work, until something bad happens.
twatter.com seems to be doing fine.
This is about Milton reading and annotating the published collection of Shakespeare's plays, not Milton meeting Shakespeare in person. It doesn't have any bearing on the debate over Shakespeare's identity.

The title is a little misleading.
Hilarious, one of the foxes (a partner at Arthur Anderson) writes an article explaining that those chickens actually wanted to be eaten really and anyway how can it be his fault when any responsible farmer would use stronger locks to keep him out. I particularly enjoyed:

> They were indicted for shredding documents. These documents were drafts and other items that do not support the final product. All accounting firms establish policies for routinely shredding such documents.

See - all routine. Sure, your routine might not include being "reminded" to arrange for piles of documents to be urgently shredded once you hear investigators are coming but that's why you might some day be found guilty of crimes, whereas Arthur Anderson were "not guilty" after all the evidence was destroyed and their chums in the US Supreme Court reached in and overturned verdicts against them for destroying the evidence.

Now, one of the nice things in overseeing the Web PKI is that I don't care whether the auditors are incompetent or crooked, it's the same either way to me. I don't expect even their own bosses to do as much as slap them on the wrist for enabling fraud. If I'm relying on audit then I know I might as well toss a coin, I'm always going to be digging deeper than that to understand what was actually going on regardless of whether the auditors "forgot" or deliberately chose not to look.
I'm not sure how it's questionable, you can definitely put much more torque on the pedals when you can push down with one foot and pull on the other, for sprinting in a big gear or climbing.

The questionable part is, do people apply pressure on anything but the down pedal stroke when they're seated, and riding normally. At least for me, the answer is no.

But they're still nice to have, especially on a single speed or fixed gear. And for fixed gear, flat pedals are unsafe. They give you a lot more control.
I cannot imagine using Amazon search if they didn’t do this and let 3rd party garbage sit at the top of the rankings.
An attorney is a lawyer, though a lawyer isn't necessarily an attorney.

Why are we picking nits over this?
That looks awesome, thank you for sharing!
Aside from the financial aspect I've been thinking about the topic of living together with your long term partner recently.

I am re-evaluating the whole concept that couples eventually living together needs to be some kind of long term relationship default or goal. I love my personal space and having an apartment to call my own to come home to. I also love having my boyfriend visit, sometimes for days at a time. I'm not completely against eventually moving in together, but am kind of unsure when or why we usually consider it to be some sort of inevitable goal of a successful relationship that is progressing. Can't we just live separately, enjoy our own space, and see each other whenever we want? Maybe gradually the time we want to spend together will increase, and then nothing is stopping us from doing that. And maybe we'll go through a phase where we want more personal time, and then we'll still have the option to do that, too! This way we could see each other simply because we want to, not because we happen to live in the same apartment and don't really have another option anyway.

Of course this becomes more complicated if the couple chooses to have children, but as someone who intends to stay childfree I guess I just don't see much of an incentive to move in together 'permanently'.
That creates a horribly perverse incentive to never fix the counterfeit problem, and should be illegal on that basis alone without even considering the anticompetitive aspects.
@easyDNS: Is that an old ongoing case? Everywhere in the document they're using 2016.

It seems quite funny that they started that in 2016 and using a judgment from 2017 in 2019...
mmm yeah... he troll'd the left about assange for a minute, too. and now assange is drugged out of his mind & incommunicado.

i'd not expect much from the US prez in terms of protection for weaklings like Assange & Snowden. better if they had some power to offer in trade, but who has that type of power?
Retail stores absolutely take on more product liability than marketplaces do.
I agree this is a problem, but what "JavaScript" compiler/language technology isn't changing rapidly? 3 years ago we were using JQuery.
I've really enjoyed watching Rik build this library. Congrats, Rik!
Germania (City)
Yeah, I want him to design a key that he can't open. He has pretty much shown that he can open any key, even those that have alarms in them.

Honestly I just want a few grams of explosives in my lock, wired so that they kill anybody attempting to pick the lock. Passive defenses are never enough.
Why not? If I search and find a reasonably priced product that fits my needs that is a success. Squeezed vendors is just how the world works, do you think Walmart just sits back and lets its suppliers dictate pricing or promotion?
It's tough because it would require literally every single person caring more about a nebulous concept of "humanity" and "longevity" than they would themselves, their families, and the next 40 years of world issues. A seriously smart human race would self-limit birthrates to replacement rates and focus efforts on long-term survival mechanisms (asteroid monitoring and redirection, wildlife and environmental management, wide-ranging health care, etc.) but it's so hard to get people to get on board.
Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it's their own name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.

Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement.

Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.
Supermarkets purchase the inventory from suppliers so they have an incentive to move everything that's in their stores. It costs amazon nothing to host 3rd party inventory so they get to prioritize whatever maximizes their profits, including screwing over their top sellers.

A better analogy would be a walmart in a small town hosting a bunch of small business to showcase their products, then kicking out the top sellers and replacing them with a store brand version. You could argue that those producers should just open their own store but most people won't go out of their way to a different store to buy paper towels.
Indeed. It's possible to do good faith work and simply be wrong.
Web Development Merit Badges
What adtech is in Android?
Yes.

The crystal in your microwave's CPU clock circuit will drift, and so will the time-of-day derived from it until you set the time again, if there is no external reference. The benefit of using the incoming 50/60Hz AC signal as a timebase is that the power station is responsible for controlling the long term frequency to avoid drift so it can be used as a very reliable reference.
This is why I will continue to buy 1k iPhones and 3k laptops. Apple is really making the surveillance inc companies afraid.

edit: spelling.
Hi! Would it be possible to add something like GIMP's "Color to Alpha" filter to Photopea?
>Grocery stores re-package goods like rice, beans, paper towels, etc. to compete with their vendors all the time.

That was the original point I was arguing against.

My point is that grocery store is not a good analogy because Amazon is not the same as a retail store, they are a combination store and marketplace.
Someone voluntarily leaving (even illegally) is not in the same class as public figures being kidnapped off the street. One is an individual matter and the other makes everyone feel unsafe.
Engineering costs, inspection costs, a lot of stainless steel tanks and tubing, a lot of stainless steel valves/clamps/misc attachments, a lot of stainless steel welding that needs to be certified, redundant failsafes, various safety devices/monitoring systems, etc. I'm sure some bribes are buried/hidden in these costs as well, such as if you allow this oil refinery we'll use your construction company and you can over charge us so any payoff is legal.
> "I never understood how leftist and heavily "progressive" ideas automatically get a free pass as being fundamentally correct..."

that's pretty easy to explain: liberalism is grounded in inclusivity, and conservatism in exclusivity, which is a tension that lives in each of us. and from a young age, we are educated that sharing and caring for others is good, and being selfish is bad. we tend to equate things that are good with being correct.

note that progressivism doesn't lay on this spectrum at all, as it only advocates progress over stagnation (a different facet of conservatism).

the philosophical positions of these ideologies are different from their political implementations, of course.
We did this too at my first job, and I also included SOM and MOM for start and middle.
Boeing’s Board to Weigh Engineering, Safety Changes Following 737 Max Crashes
> In many countries, soliciting business there makes you subject to its jurisdiction and laws, regardless of where your business is based.

That line of reasoning always sounded tautological to me. "Law X from country A says that by doing Y you are under jurisdiction of country A", but for "law X from country A" to apply to you, don't you have to already be under jurisdiction of country A in the first place?
Of course, that’s the whole point. But you can build inertia. Take a look at Europe where there’s tremendous protesting going on regarding Climate Change, and we slowly see some change in for one, public opinion and two in policy making. It’s slow and painful and frustrating but you gotta work and not always blame the ‘global elite’. I know it’s hard to build inertia, I failed in court, I failed at building companies. But we all have to try and not put the blame on someone without doing anything.
Apples are red because of quantum mechanical effects, but that doesn't make them computers.
Obama should have pardoned him
I write golang at my dayjob and rust by the night. Rust has the same with rustfmt. Run "cargo fmt" on your working directory and you're done.

NB: When I was writing C++, we had clang-format setup to do the same for the C++ code. This advantage is in no way unique to go.
I like to believe there's an alternate-universe America where it's Ed Snowden who is filling stadiums to hear him speak, and Donald Trump who has been exiled to Russia. It feels more like the America I grew up believing in.
But the definition of 'tech savvy', or its equivalent, is ever changing. In the mid century it was transistors, wires, even assembly. My father, for example, is able to wire up about anything. He once made some AC power to car cd player box that resembled, in my head, some makeshift movie bomb. He could rebuild engines, and about anything come to think of it. I have none of those abilities. I'm sure that made him savvy in his day.

And in our old age, tech will look nothing like it does today. Largely I think we'll be in the same predicament.
Why would someone see 100% CPU and say there’s nothing to be done? CPU is the part we have the most control over. In my experience it’s the opposite where you can’t get people to engage you or their own brains. We aren’t CPU bound, nothing to do!

I’m interested to know what you think that CPU is fully engaged doing if it’s not making progress toward a solution?
>Go was designed at Google to be used internally at Google

That's not true, expect in a pedantic way. Google was "designed at Google to be used internally at Google" only in that:

(a) a few people at Google, on their own, designed a language (mostly based on an older Plan 9 language some had helped built) - not at the request of Google execs, nor as an explicit company-mandated project to create a language to solve Google's problems. It was almost on of these "20% spare time" things.

(b) these people added the features that they thought, as far as they were concerned that would be nice for programming Google style stuff. Those were based on their ad-hoc (and quite idiosyncratic) intuition and personal experience, and not some special research into programming at scale, or from involving the company at large at it.

Go was designed at Google, but not "from Google", if this makes sense. E.g. a few googler's building a language on their own initiative and among other work is not the same as Google, i.e. some higher-ups, saying "we need a language of our own that's a match for our developers' challenges" and the company devoting resources for this.

Google has 2 language projects they really put money on, Javascript as V8 and Dart. They built a top notch specialist team, spent lots of money for promotion and branding, built an IDE and developer tools for both, etc.

Apple has had Obj-C and now Swift like that, MS has C#, etc. Those are language projects with a big weight of the companies behind them.

Golang was not like that, but, according to all official accounts and recollections, a grassroots project, by a small team:

"Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code as its output. By mid-year the language had become a full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a production compiler. In May 2008, Ian Taylor independently started on a GCC front end for Go using the draft specification. Russ Cox joined in late 2008 and helped move the language and libraries from prototype to reality."

It was never officially intended to be "Google's development language" or had a major push from Google. Since then, and after the first few years, Google seems to have devoted more money and time to Go, and several Google internal projects have adopted it, but Google is fine with C++, Java, and Python as well.
Thanks but your tip is invalid in most EU regions as the employers here like to "see workers on the plantation" as my ex boss put it.
> The correct fix is to fix getrandom() to not block when it's not appropriate,...

I'm not a cryptography expert, but this suggestion doesn't look right.

Edit: IMO the main problem is the lack of a forward progress guarantee for entropy generation, even if there are suitable sources for entropy in the system.
> your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content

Any resources detailing this? It's the first I've heard of it.

> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.

True, though the iPad is actually somewhat faster than a physical book, in my experience.

> you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).

At least in my experience, the time required to flip a page is at least identical to (greater than, in most cases) that of a modern e-reader showing the next page.

> With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.

> E-reader have more friction.

I simply can't agree with this. A well indexed ebook is easy to follow cross references in (such as footnotes), you can do an actual search on the content, and the lack of weight is something that can't be understated.

A specific example: I went through the "Physically Based Rendering" book a few years back. I simply can't understate how painful it was to deal with the physical book. It was the size of a large text book (it was a large textbook), heavy enough it never left my desk. More specifically, it was always flat on the desk, making it difficult to read.

It also had glossy pages that, to this day, want to stick together (not to mention being challenging to write on). Finding content in it that wasn't a chapter title included going to a glossary with a ton of page numbers, and flipping back and forth constantly (see comment about sticky pages) to see if page N was the one I was looking for.

There was no 'proprioception' between myself and the book, there was no convenience, there was only inconvenience. Even the authors recognized this, providing a digital copy of most of the code so you wouldn't spend all day typing code.

An e-reader version of the book could only have provided a better experience.
I think their point is simply that "it's their store" - and to be brutally honest, I agree.

Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:

Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.

Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.

Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.
Snowden should be brought home, given a medal, and put in charge of the NSA.

—Richard Stallman
I agree they align incentives, but there's a large degree of cynicism/skepticism and lack of understanding of how profit sharing is calculated among the workforce. I've worked places where the message that makes it to the represented employees is a far cry from what was presented in the union negotiations. E.g. The end employee thinks they're losing their pension when in reality, they're not, new employees wouldn't be getting a pension.

I talked with a guy who worked 42 years for the same company and was on the bargaining committee when a work stoppage occurred. He said they always thought the company kept two sets of books - the ones they showed the union and the actual books. Nevermind that he worked for a F500 company which was publicly traded at least half the time he worked there, and he worked for the largest facility in the company, driving much of the revenue for the company.

You also hear things about "the company going after tax write-off so they don't have to pay workers as much" when that write-off they're mad about is a standard cost of doing business deduction in the same way payroll is...the company is making a donation to a community organization or buying supplies, but they'd reduce their tax bill by just as much if they paid the money out to employees in the form of profit sharing, bonuses, or higher wages.
Why don't you learn how the world works so you can confidently write to the intern “pls fix” because that was easy to call bs on
COUP scooters (popular in Germany and Spain) use Bluetooth for unlocking it before starting the drive. Not sure what is the reason for that vs. unlocking it through internet connection though.
It's an arm twisting move to force give out the name. Once they comply the will move to the next link of the chain and try to twist that arm. It never ends.
Numbers every computer engineer must know
The double entry book keeping operation when a bank issues a new loan, is [debit loan, credit deposit account] creating deposit money.

When a loan is securitzed (sold) by the bank, the DBE operations are:

[credit loan, debit deposit account of purchaser]

and the purchaser now owns loan. At this point strictly money has been removed from the banking system, but in practice the bank then recreates that money with a new loan (as above) because they are now within their regulatory lending requirements, and can issue a new loan. They can continue this indefinitely until the market for securitized loans dries up, which is effectively what happened in 2008.
Those legal bills are nothing to FB. The stress, even if fully compensated etc, on the owner would likely break anyone after a couple of "exposures"
As a software guy I have to point out that often software "engineers" overbuild and abstract the wrong stuff, doing stupid things like making everything a layer. There is way more bad code written by professional software engineers than by EEs, who tend to be more results oriented.
At least in the U.S., it does not. There's actually a reasonably decent Wikipedia article discussing the case law on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
How did the kerning turn out?
Collecting data on hardware devices, or anything else people pay money for should never be considered reasonable under any circumstances.
Most books, especially non-fiction have incredibly small marketing budgets. Often it's up to the author to self-promote the book.
Monogram: A Modular Productivity Tool for Creative Pros