skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many, I would argue. Just a statement of fact, no judgement.

When I took advanced physics classes in 3rd year of undergrad, I was surprised to note that many of my very smart friends who were computer science majors had lost touch with high-school and introductory college math (particularly calculus) because of an immersion in different kinds of stuff for 2-3 years. Similarly, I've sat in on machine learning classes where CS grad students have little knowledge of probabilistic reasoning or linear algebra (both of which I would consider high-school math, or early college level).

It's not surprising that someone who's not written code for a decade will have a tough time jumping in to start programming right away. So, what's so special about math? It just so happens that some texts on functional programming use a different starting point to approach programming, with different pre-requisites. I wouldn't be surprised if people lose touch with these things after a decade of not using/needing them.
Was the Eurofighter Typhoon’s wing design stolen from the Mirage 2000?
This is something I've been wondering about. I recently interviewed for a full-stack dev position, and I felt I did quite well on all of the development questions. It wasn't a devops role - they had a whole separate devops position - but I got passed over for another candidate and when I got the news it was suggested that I should "get some devops experience" and maybe try again in the future. I thought that was weird. I know generally what docker/containers do and what purpose things like Kubernetes serve, I'd just never used them. I figured I'd be able to pick up whatever I needed for doing minimal devops tasks in the course of the job. Is it common to expect more than that from "developers"? This was neither a small nor a foolish company.
We were surprised to read this story and are not aware of discussions that would force us to change our product.

We believe people have a fundamental right to have private conversations. End-to-end encryption protects that right for over a billion people every day.

We will always oppose government attempts to build backdoors because they would weaken the security of everyone who uses WhatsApp including governments themselves. In times like these we must stand up both for the security and the privacy of our users everywhere. We will continue do so.

Will, Head of WhatsApp
Time is money.

Hopefully autonomous vehicles used on demand see many more hours on the road than our personal vehicles.
I don't write much Awk code any more, but at one time it was my favorite programming language, and not just for little one-liners.

A while ago I ran across a couple of my old Awk programs and uploaded them to GitHub. One is an implementation of Mark V. Shaney (the infamous Markov chain program), the other takes source code and prints it out in a nice "two up" landscape format on a LaserJet II, including graphical boxes to replace the ASCII dividers in comments like this:

//------------------
// Some comment here
//------------------

I wish I had a sample printout, but they are long gone.

Awk was the first language I used that had associative arrays built into the language, which made SHANEY.AWK almost trivial to write. Especially compared with implementations I saw in C and other languages of the day.

I think LJPII.AWK is a good example of how you can write a fairly substantial program in Awk and have it be (mostly) readable. (It was written for either MKS Awk or Thompson Awk, I forget which - so there are a few things in it that may not be available in a typical Awk today.)

https://github.com/geary/awk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney
That was Sven his bunker, not xent his bunker. Also, it was a Chinese guy who rented a room that secretly brewed the mdma. ( and caused the fire.)
Your interpretation is likely right. But it's interesting to consider the other. Maybe they can get metadata from the ciphertext, such as size. Or maybe they are just interested in other metadata such as time. Or maybe they have some cryptographic attacks, maybe involving extracting a shared key from the peer's phone, or key injection via sim spoofing.
The timing doesn't fit. Not a holiday sale up, just a THQ Nordic sale, if I remember right, and a small bunch of games... if someone wanted valve to bleed, they would have timed the attack better.

I believe this to be just a technical mishap. Steam store was responding with an error, now it just times out, meaning they took down the load balancer and cdn for the site to prevent collateral DDOS (when people keep refreshing the page to see if the service is up again)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Can Help You Believe in Climate Change
Pro or con of the union idea, I hope get they nailed for firing those two organizers. Firing someone and claiming poor performance makes me not want to support them anymore. I won't give them a cent.
Dave actually wasn't the one who pushed the button. I was the button-pusher in this particular outage :)

It sucks being the one who caused an outage, but having a culture where people put blame on the process rather than the person takes away a lot of the stress and naturally motivates people to solve the core issue as quickly as possible. The points in the post about psychological safety and underlying systemic causes of an outage are spot on.
Unfortunately, it is an API marketplace and I don't have any control over it. Is it a must for APIs? Do you have any other suggestion for listing API?
Wealthy incomers 'changing profile of London's most-deprived areas'
Adversarial networks are the common case.

In the other cases, where DNS is being used as a legitimate policy vector, the entity enforcing that policy should also have endpoint control, which they can use either to re-establish network policy (by disabling DoH) or to enforce policy more reliably at the endpoint layer.
Could you elaborate in the link between unlimited access and manufacturing truth?
So are you saying the backdoors will or won't be introduced to WhatsApp?
Along with the vote in process there should be a vote out process. The public should be able to force a vote of their representative at any time during their term and equally vote in their replacement.

The intention being that politicians are aware that they must be consistent with their words and actions throughout their term otherwise they will lose their seat.
I think this is actually doable — the GFS data this project pulls from has a lot of levels, see for example here https://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/filter_gfs_0p25.pl?dir=...
Google doesn't make any money off Google news.

This is a remarkably naive take.

If Google provides a service, they make money off it.

In 2008, during one of the many legal battles Google has waged over Google News, Google estimated that they made $100M off of people using Google to access news. Clearly that number would be some factor larger now. Because the more people who rely upon Google for a service, the less they end up elsewhere. The more Google controls your eyeballs and is likely to capture your ad clicks.

It's the same reason Google scrapes the web and provides the top answer in their answer bubble. It's "free" and it also robs viewers from ever going to the sites actually providing the information.

Or do you think Google puts all of that engineering effort, endless lobbying and legal fights with the news community...because they're just so benevolent?

Even ignoring the captured attention, this also enables Google to prioritize news sources that are more Google friendly (e.g. use Google ad networks), and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.
They literally stay only the turn around time in commercial aviation in busy operations. At least that is the goal. And of course maintenence and repair.

And an airframe is used over decades. Add some serious safety factor and you are up there at 90000.

But since the 737 max grounding, NGs have seen more usage. So bad news for Boeing. And heaven forbid another grounding - there will literally be not enough physical planes to fly in the skies.
Complying with Encryption Export Regulations
Well it depends if you have an extra 25 yeas of life whats the price of that seeing your kids / grandkids grow up ?
Probably during a sale the techinicians would be a lot more prepared for a possible downtime and ready to fix it, now it could be more of a surprise? But yeah, could also just be someone clicking the wrong button.
Let's say Google has a user on the Google News page and has a couple of levers they can pull to control if that User clicks through to read the content or only skims headlines and some snippets.

Given that there are no ads on Google News and Google makes money from most online ad sales, what reason would Google have to limit click throughs?

Clicking on am article gives Google more data and increases the chances that Google will make some money from ad sales.

Google definitely wants Google News to be the starting point for news reading habbits, but Google definitely also wants it's readers to click through and view news articles.

There are plenty of anti-competitive practices by Google to address. This simply is not one of them and arguably does more to shore up Google against competitors given that Google has a stronger ability to force publishers to grant Google access. Publishers already had full opt-out control over how Google uses their content and smaller aggregators were free to ignore those meta headers. Now smaller aggregators must convince publishers to opt-in or face legal consequences.

This law is just simply idiotic unless your only goal was to help Google News compete in Europe.
Do you have an argument that would be persuasive to people not in the alternate universe where resolvers weren't configurable?
https://i.cbc.ca/1.5299276.1569615441!/fileImage/httpImage/i...

Not sure what's going on in this picture. Can I hazard a guess - the "tracking device" is a cheap smartphone?
Ok, but can you imagine such a person being interested in this book?
I used to struggle at dtrace until I realized it was just awk for a probes instead of regular expressions.
Apple would've very likely patched it a long time ago if it was patchable, since the newest devices' ROMs don't have the bugs anymore.

Having a completely 100% untouchable ROM is very valuable. Yes, this kind of exploit being permanent is the downside, but then they don't have to worry about the modification fuses being misused in any way ever.
While the publishers are dying their slow death, the free, peer to peer internet died much quicker.
I love the incredibly vague job title "Member, Technical Staff" I had at Sun. It could cover anything from kernel hacking to HVAC repair!

At least I had root access to my own workstation (and everybody else's in the company, thanks to the fact that NFS actually stood for No File Security).

[In the late 80's and early 90's, NFSv2 clients could change their hostname to anything they wanted before doing a mount ("hostname foobar; mount server:/foobar /mnt ; hostname original"), and that name would be sent in the mount request, and the server trusted the name the client claimed to be without checking it against the ip address, then looked it up in /etc/exports, and happily returned a file handle.

If the NFS server or any of its clients were on your local network, you could snoop file handles by putting your ethernet card into promiscuous mode.

And of course NFS servers often ran TFTP servers by default (for booting diskless clients), so you could usually read an NFS server's /etc/exports file to find out what client hostnames it allowed, then change your hostname to one of those before mounting any remote file system you wanted from the NFS server.

And yes, TFTP and NFS and this security hole you could drive the space shuttle through worked just fine over the internet, not just the local area network.]
There is nothing wrong with landfill or incineration. Unlike metals, recycling plastic is not economic. So converting it to energy by incineration is a pretty good option. In the future if the oil supplies will dwindle it might be economically viable to recycle plastic and then people (or maybe robots) will excavate those landfills for material. It is us taking care of the future generations. Isn't it what all those Gertas of the world want?
> The idea is that genocide mongers will tick "yes", so the US can deny their visa.

You have failed to understand the system.

The idea is that they will tick “no”, and that then even if their crimes can't be proven to the criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) necessary to impose imprisonment, capital punishment, or other criminal sanction they will then be subject to civil sanction for immigration violations, including deportation and bar from future legal entry, on the lower standard applicable to those non-criminal sanctions.
The Myth of US Military Infallibility
sounds goood. can you please shoot Maria an email (maria@listle.io) about this?
Agree. The title of this post is dangerously deceptive and should be changed. The linked source does not claim or substantiate any backdoor.

>"will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police"

So far, all the article is saying is that ciphertext will have to be shared. Anything about decrypted messages is speculation at this point.

(It would be very bad if a backdoor will be forced.)
Absolutely.

I'd argue, if somebody has written their own interpreter and compiler, leveraging the interpreter at compile time first for constant expression evaluation and then something more sophisticated for partial function evaluation is a lot more intuitive. You can kinda climb a hill of difficulty rather than be teleported to the top and wish them luck.

(To be totally fair i keep trying to open the pdf, but the browser tab locks up. So maybe my observations are meaningless)

_edit_

There is no royal road.
but some roads are perhaps longer, but a little easer to travel.
One flight a day for 90,000 flights is 246 years. You are right.
> The keeping safe argument from government is indeed preposterous. As if that was their mission to keep us safe. Why are they allowing our nature to be destroyed in favor of money/economy?

I don't think it is quite as simple as this (I'll preface this with saying I don't think we should have backdoors and that I wish we had STRONG encryption everywhere). I think the problem is that different departments have different goals. It is very clear that the CIA and NSA's jobs would be easier if there was a magical tool that let them backdoor in and no one else. The police and FBI would have an easier time doing their job if encryption wasn't a thing. That's definitely true! The issue is who is watching the watchmen? That's why we need checks and balances (specifically by people that understand the tech). These departments are so focused on their goals that they lose track of the fact that introducing backdoors actually creates more work for them (and thus actually makes their lives harder). But as humans we're always focused more on the task at hand and less on the over arching tasks (we're notoriously bad at dealing with large scale multifaceted problems). It all really comes down to these departments thinking "if we had this tool it would be possible that we could have stopped this" (which possible is the key word, because we've seen that they can't. There's just too much data. You're just adding more hay to the haystack). The failure really is at the checks and balances stage, that those watching the watchmen don't understand the motivations nor the consequences, and thus let them do as they please. Agencies running the checks and balances are supposed to be suspicious and critical, not friendly. But these agencies aren't getting the funding nor can they attract those that are tech literate, so there's a feedback loop that is only getting stronger. What I'm trying to say is that there's this long chain and things are broken at many stages and that if a single stage was fixed there would be significant improvement. Basically solving at any single stage will help stop the feedback loop.

tldr: The intelligence agencies should be smart enough that they would know that backdoors will backfire on them. But they clearly aren't. There's also a huge failure at the checks and balances stage where these agencies are getting approval which creates a feedback loop and without solving this the problem will continue to grow.
.kp – North Korea TLD
>Pretty well? People make small rockets as a hobby all the time.

That's pretty far detached from real rocketry.

A similar metaphor for computing would be the allowed use of a LeapFrog system, rather than a computer.

'My cryptography hobby is going pretty well, I just practiced a Caesar cipher on my LeapFrog.'

(neither a LeapFrog or a model rocket being a practical equivalent to their big relative.)
That's cool too, but there's something awesome about seeing the whole circuit down to the multiplexing and discrete LEDs. Granted addressable LEDs like the ws28xx do pass data in a cool way, and allow awesome and somewhat easy projects.
Sounds familiar...

Ohh, right: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864
They're wedging the bale to insert a tracker in it. The trackers look something like -

https://images2.opb.org/c_limit%2Ch_1000%2Cq_90%2Cw_640/news...
Ocean noise can harm marine ecosystems
For sure we take it seriously. The best way is to email hn@ycombinator.com if you see a problem.

In the case of that post, the submitter had emailed about it and we suggested that title as more informative than the original. Happy to hear feedback if we got that wrong!
> Those apps that provide end-to-end encryption are a problem

Are they though? There will always be a means to communicate without surveillance. Backdooring encryption is fundamentally incompatible with privacy, and will be abused - at scale.

For any real cases, the security services have a multitude of other ways of getting the information they need regardless - for example, they could gaining physical access to the target's phone and backdoor/bug it, or swap it out with a backdoored/bugged one.

The real problem with backdooring or outlawing encryption is that it lowers the bar to entry for governments - it makes it too easy, and such sweeping powers will be abused.
For me the meaning of DevOps has shifted from "developers and operations working together" to "operations picking up developer tooling". As more and more administrators become familiar with the new workflow I expect them to transition from mostly relying on manual testing and scheduled drills to writing automated tests for infrastructure fail-over, backups, firewalls, etc.

I'm not a big fan of YAML the format but I'll gladly put up with it for the valuable content that's encoded in those files - the entire system described in a transparent accessible manner at an abstraction level which enables the developer, the network guy, the server guy, the storage guy, the architect and the security guy to have a meaningful conversation.
There is no antivirus in Chromebooks.
I've used a lot of JSON. It's OK. No comments, not many data types. But the spec is only a couple pages, and I've never been in doubt about how something should be escaped, or parsed. I could probably write a bare-bones parser in an afternoon, if I needed to.

I've tried to work with YAML a few times. The tree structure and extra data types are great. Everything else is a huge pain. There's at least 3 versions of the spec, and the latest one is nearly 100 pages. The parts I need are always in some "extension", so there's even more that I need to support. It has a system for serializing native Objects, so you have to be careful with untrusted data because there are some interesting security issues. It's so complex, I have trouble knowing what to quote, or how. It's not feasible to write your own parser in any reasonable amount of time. Worst of all, every parsing library is slightly different, so (not unlike SOAP) you kind of have to know that it's going to be parsed with (say) PyYAML.

Complicated configuration is indeed a problem in any format, but YAML makes even simple things complex. From the beginning, I really wanted to like YAML. Unfortunately, I think their goals (human-readable text, language-agnostic, rich data types, efficient, extensible, easy to implement, easy to use) are impossible. You simply can't achieve all of them at once.
Well theoretically it already is, given you normally have multiple authors and reviewers. It's just done poorly, just as a code review can be done poorly.
I like it in principle, but it can also be really annoying and fussy. A lot of the time with Rust (perhaps because I'm no good, but still) I find myself fiddling around with some inane difference between two types I don't really care about (for instance, whether a function pointer is boxed or not). It gets so distracting that I often do the bulk of the work with the linter switched off, just so I can actually think about what I'm doing without having to go down a rabbit hole just so an option is turned into a result in some bit of the code I'm probably going to delete anyway.

I think a combination of the explicitness about performance implications, the focus on safety, and the whole lifetime thing leads to Rust being, if not specifically complicated to write, at least extremely fiddly. Which is great if you're in some kind of hot spot where you need all that control and safety. But when you're just trying to add two strings together to make some random error message, it's actually really annoying having the language purposefully complicate things just so you realize there's going to be an allocation. It leads to a really weird distribution of effort, where I spend about half the time on important stuff, and the other half on things that are so trivial and irrelevant to both performance and user experience that I'd be totally happy if they were just all dumped on the heap and cast through void pointers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
What is the benefit of ClassDojo? Instead of simply making notes about students in a notebook, teachers use ClassDojo so that... what? Parents and students can be notified in real time of how many POINTS they got? How is that at all beneficial, let alone beneficial enough to justify inserting a private, for-profit company between students and teachers.
Turn on "showdead" and you'll find objectionable content here too.
Mods, please fix the post title. The idea of a backdoor is speculation that is not substantiated by the article.

"will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police"

So far, all the article is saying is that ciphertext will have to be shared.
the obvious reasons would be, to be reachable in case of emergency and as an alarm clock.
Map shows the vulnerability of old and new housing stock to rising seas
Ask HN: Throwing in your lot with a single company?
I currently work for a company that I like. I like the people I work with, our domain is very unique and interesting, there are lots of interesting challenges to solve and I have a great work-life balance. It's small, but it's been around for a couple of decades so it's unlikely to go under.

Here's the problem: it's very unique. The domain itself is something almost nobody else does, for various reasons, and the product is even written in an in-house language. We don't use many industry-standard technologies or practices.

It feels like every year I stay here, I'm becoming more valuable to this company but stagnating in terms of the industry at large. My general programming skills are certainly growing, but it's hard to put that on a resume. On the other hand, I was told at my last performance review that I'm seen as a rising leader in the company.

Is it terribly risky to stay here for the foreseeable future? It's been 3 years now; I'm starting to get a bit anxious about falling behind on industry standards. I do some side projects to keep in the loop, but there's something to be said for real-world experience. Should I move on before it's too late? Or am I worrying about nothing?