skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clicking around.

For example, setting your computer’s IP or gateway. Control panel -> Network -> right-click on the “IP interfaces” among a list of 5 abscon names -> Details -> Advanced -> Details -> And you can’t freely type the new IP, you have to use their fields with 4 numbers separated by dots.

Everything was like this. Installing Maven? You need to set a system property, it’s 15 clicks including 6 on a “Details” or “Advanced settings” button. They wanted to hide complexity behind “Advanced” buttons but they hid the wrong things, because each dialog was full of info you’d never use, and what you wanted was inevitably under the “Advanced” button.

Installing new software? Welcome to the installation assistant. We’ll guide you through the 20 clicks, including the mass-unticking of additional software we’ll inevitably select by default, notably the Ask Toolbar when you install Java. If you’re setting up a dev machine you had a dozen programs to set up, each of them requiring a dozen steps of a dozen clicks.
Good luck retraining people from some arbitrary department to fill the role of a PhD researcher, for example, on very short notice. Workers have specific qualifications so they are not freely transferrable.
I generally like rachels posts, but I don't know what the hell she's talking about here.
I use the Microsoft IE vm's to do IE testing in virtualbox and I have never had to install an update.
It seems most of the comments are about negative unintended consequences; but most positive consequences also might have been unintended.
For growing hashes, we can limit the growth of the search complexity by choosing to accept a more constrained range of hashes in each iteration.

Suppose H is an L-bit hash function and let H_n be the commit hash at the nth iteration. If we seek to generate H_n subject only to the constraint H_n+1 > H_n, the search complexity grows exponentially as you describe above.

But suppose we search subject to the additional constraint H_n < H_n+1 < min(H_n + k, 2^L) for some constant k. So long as 2^L - H_n > k, the search complexity for H_n+1 is only dependent on the constant k and the number of bits of the hash function, L.
Google's estimation for my country is always less than what is achievable if you stick to the speed limit. I guess they calculate it based on other drivers.
Google CEO: Company is genuinely struggling with employee trust
> What could have happened instead? Many things.

Yes, yes, many things, certainly. Obviously, fix-forward is very bad because of these many things.

As a highly compensated software engineer, of course I know what these things are, but, just checking, what would you say they are?
ECC was introduced in 1985, Curve25519 in 2005, and Edwards Curves in 2007

Post-quantum public key algorithms have existed for a while, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem (1978) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTRU (1996), the issue is settling on one that has acceptable performance and key lengths
I agree with ohazi's comment. I hate it when messaging systems are linked to mobile phones. This is true for most of them: WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

I much prefer a system that works independently from my phone. Throughout high school, this used to be Hangouts. Now it's been replaced by matrix+riot.im for me.
Pick N Drop – We pick up your laundry and drop off as required
As far as I know, Linux doesn't support library hotswapping any more than Windows does, so if you have a security update in libc for example, you can either manually restart all programs which use it, or reboot the system. Unless you do one of these, you don't have the security patch up and running, right?
No. Just because someone from north korea visited my website doesn't mean I have to comply with north korean laws. Otherwise you need to comply with laws from 200+ countries and need an army of lawyers+developers. Exactly the same with EU countries.
Except the fires are happening now. Telling PG&E now to keep power turned on in windy areas is increasing the risk.

The state would have a hard time being absolved of the _increased_ liability for such a thing.

In this case, while I completely understand the bigger picture, that would be the state telling them to make unsafe decisions.
Do you work for github or is there some other way to view commit hashes across the whole of github?

Also what happens if two unrelated git hashes collide on github?
I use both of these, but I think they're stupid.

I don't want some harebrained sync-to-browser-by-routing-through-my-phone-after-scanning-a-QR-code scheme that breaks whenever my phone is offline, or when I need to borrow a computer, or when I'm in a different country... I want a bog-standard client-server architecture with a fully featured client on my phone, desktop, and browser.

Everybody did this in the 90s, it's not hard... why has it gone out of style?
One thing that's different is that you'll be never forced to update on linux and you will never be forced to reboot, even on Ubuntu.
They're intentional.

They have considered a compatibility layer in the past:

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/wiki/POSIX-compatib...
This article fails to mention the consequences of the rush to push version B, rather than rollback to resolve. As far as I can tell the result met the needs of the business?
AFAIK general style guides don't recommend using thousand separators in numbers below 10000, so "variable #1,234" is not quite good, it should've been simply "variable #1234". "Variable 12,345" would've probably been OK, but then there's another semantic issue: thousand separators are only used in numbers that mean quantities, not identifiers. Long numeric identifiers like phone number or SSN are usually separated differently.

Generally the issue should not be handled at the font level, it lacks sufficient context to make intelligent decisions and can never handle all possible cases. The font should just provide the required glyph variants and means to use them.
Knowing the code changes well and making the decision to push on or revert back cant be second guessed by arm chair observers.

And of course it shouldnt happen in the first place but hey shit does happen. No one has ever managed to figure that out, and testing isnt a silver bullet.
Death by push
You assume that is the only problem in the deploy. That assumption seems to have been correct. However, what if another bug had been found that requires a rollback from B to A? Now your rollback will result in a bunch of dead services until they are all on version A.

The best option when a defect in B was detected would have been to rollback so that you aren’t forced into a scenario where every fix has to be a fix forward.
Great question. I've been writing about this broad topic for a while. There are 50+ examples here: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/
I hope you enjoy reading them. (One of my favorites was on AVs.)
That doesn't mean the rest of the planet has to downgrade their experience to the lowest denominator.
Yes. Lying on the host's behalf should not be part of the deal unless it is specifically called out in the ad. Most people do not want to lie or be involved in illegal activity just to have a place to stay on a trip.
Nope.

I'm talking about having sensors next to each other. Very common in astronomical and medical (x-ray) applications at least.

Aligning multiple sensors next to each other has existed for at least 20 years, probably more.
I'd say this a good resiliency test. If anything, they should do this on purpose from time to time.
> I bike most places, and the number of pedestrians (and other bicyclists!) who can’t hear my bike bell is astounding.

I recently started to notice how many people - young and old - nowadays are walking on the wrong side of the road, i.e. in the same lane with other traffic in the same direction.

As a kid I always learned you should be in the opposite lane, so you can monitor oncoming traffic coming towards you, jump out of the way if needed. A safety measure (4 watchful eyes instead of 2).

I guess more than half of people no longer do that, and I wondered if that was also an effect of our self-centered, smartphone society: 'I can't be bothered to take note of you, but I expect you to take notice of me'.
Sounds like a salty QA worker who is mad the developers "got away" with doing things the way they shouldn't be done. I mean it sounds like version A with the bugs unable to handle inputs without dying.
I have verified the fact via ghtorrent [1] when the previous commit (with 12 zeroes) was introduced (Korean tweet with a simple script [2]). However I haven't verified the current commit yet, hence the "cursory" analysis.

On the git commit id collision, I don't know about the actual mitigation deployed in Github but they are certainly aware of the possibility [3].

[1] http://ghtorrent.org/ (Note that what I really used is a stripped down version with only commit ids, so this also contributes to a word "cursory" in my cursory analysis.)

[2] https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1131826418340356096

[3] https://github.blog/2017-03-20-sha-1-collision-detection-on-...
Hey, glad you like my writing!
AWS CN regions (there are two) aren't "government" regions, they are "China" regions.

https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/

China's government makes companies store Chinese data in China and under different privacy and security laws than other nations. In particular, China makes companies enter into joint ventures with a Chinese company and comply with laws related to CCP oversight. (Not saying I agree, just stating the facts).

It's the same as Apple's iCloud for China being under the control of a joint venture company based in China.

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT208351

AWS's "gov" cloud is a seperate set of regions in the US that are specifically for US government and contractor use and accounts in those regions are separated from the rest of AWS's infrastructure.

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
I don't think updating an application is really comparable to updating an operating system. The OS is vastly more complex.

Nevertheless, Firefox on Linux via package manager definitely requires a restart. Typically I know when Firefox has been updated because I get a window saying "your browser needs to restart".

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_get...
> Social: Many people have an expectation that sending a message entitles them to an immediate response.

This one honestly bothers me the most. “But I sent you a message! You didn’t respond, you could have been dead in a ditch!”.

Or, you know, I didn’t look at my messages for a few days. If you were worried you could have called any time.
Standard libraries are large and named in English. It's a lot more than a few English words.
Trying to Plant a Trillion Trees Won't Solve Anything
>I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio

You just convinced me to try out Krita again. I've had a lot of problems getting away from Clip Studio, each time it felt the options weren't ripe enough yet. I remember trying Krita a very long time ago and it was barebones, but sounds like it's had a lot of good development time.
If it did that's pure luck. It could have also had another bug. Rolling back keeps your service up. Pushing forward faster maybe gets your service back up, or maybe breaks it some other way.

When dealing with a complex system, roll back first, then figure out why it broke and how to fix it for the next attempt.
It looks like cryptography would benefit a dedicated programming language, aimed at verification and with other constraints such as "constant time" backed in the syntax of the language.

At least, maybe it would ease code review and introduction to cryptography.
I'm reliving my youth by programming assembly which is running on a real Z80 processor, driven by an arduino mega.
There’s one tech giant doing crypto right: Square
Microsoft beat expectations with strong Windows revenue
Instead of mobile phones, they should just switch over to IP via Avian Carrier.
Perhaps an evolution of the "true joke" that there are 1500 television channels and nothing to watch.
Too many details missing here to make any sort of conclusions. Yeah, of course bugs aren't supposed to make it to production. But they do. Is it easier to roll back than it is to roll forward? Usually it's not. How far along are things before you recognize what's happening? How critical is the service?

You can't draw life lessons from some vague description of "something" that happened to "someone". Continuing the rollout could very well have been the best option. Or not. Who knows.
India uses opaque legal process to suppress Kashmiri journalism
I grew up in the UK, and my first computer (shared with the family) was a ZX Spectrum.

The fact that we couldn't load games over hte christmas period, because the cassette player was broken, was the reason I started programming:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
You misread that "many things", which refers to hypothetical actions the team could have taken (and which the post immediately describes), not hypothetical outcomes of their actual actions.
Two explanations for variation in human abilities
There’s a classic theory in communication science by the German researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called the “spiral of silence”[1]. It basically says that people have an idea of the general public opinion on a topic, and in case their own opinion differs too much, they will stay silent in order not to be excluded from the group. This was classically seen with the negative result that the publicly acceptable opinion may not be the same as the majority opinion, as more and more people stay silent in a kind of spiral.

What we’re seeing today in online spaces is the possibility of people connecting online, forming their own bubbles of people with their own spirals – it has become much easier to sidestep the “general” spiral of silence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence
To be fair, the market share being dominated by Windows has a lot to do with history and strategic deals Microsoft made with the OEM's. Vast majority of devices ship with Windows.
> I would rather the military be less capable, because its current capability is being used for offensive, not defensive purposes.

Same here, that’s why I’m glad this contract went to MS instead of AWS, as I see the latter as being technologically better than MS’s cloud solution.
You don't "work in tech" if you spend 20% of your time working on a computer.

You spend your days in the vicinity of tech-related affairs, perhaps.
Facebook, Google, and Netflix are known to make better offers than Apple and Amazon (although those two are capable of great offers and have both employed thousands of engineers who became millionaires after stock appreciation).
This is a good article on that topic: https://www.wired.com/story/internet-made-dupes-cynics-of-us...

> The internet is increasingly a low-trust society—one where an assumption of pervasive fraud is simply built into the way many things function.
When I hear "It's one of those things that talks to other instances of itself" I think of a redundant, high-availability database.

Assuming every machine sends data to all its peers regularly, if I have a cluster of 10 A machines and upgrade 1 machine to B, and the A machines crash, that means I lose 90% of my capacity - likely making the sole survivor get overwhelmed too.

"Outages are OK, clients can always reconnect or try again later" isn't the usual standard HA databases are operated to :D
Tell me how ideas are brought up, prioritized, and implemented. What is the process? The answer usually tells me how nice it is to work there at a given position, and whether their process is stale and hasn’t scaled, or whether it’s inherently a top down thing and they don’t want to hire independent thinkers.
If you only consider keywords then sure.

But think about standard libs. All of those functions and types are named with English words.
I thought the same thing. It's obviously a bad situation, but getting A out of service and getting every instance on version B seems like pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat.

My guess is there is some detail missing that clears up why what happened was wrong. Sounds like A had a bug that rose to the level of being a security problem of the denial of service variety, so redeploying it seems like a terrible idea.
Or cross reference calendar events with directions lookups and actual arrival times, and if you’re consistently late then overestimate the time.
I don’t know if I’d say that the concept of states rights is abandoned, though it does seem to be discussed less.
But it shouldn’t be only central or only federal, but rather a constant friction over where ones power begins and the other ends.
That friction we feel from it indicates that things are working. You wouldn’t feel that friction if any one side has all of the power. You’d hear grumbling, but there’d be no court cases about it, no decisions to be made, because the side with all of the power does the deciding.

Both systems, fully centralized and fully decentralized both are flawed, which is why we have the balance at all.

I think what’s happening is that the authoritarians in both sides of the political debate are heard more often and more loudly than before, so they of course want whatever will get them their goals. But the US is still the US, so I’m not sure what this article is even attempting to say? Less federal power? In certain areas, sure, but a EU of North America? That sounds terrible and isolating. It also seems like it would only feed the tribalism that seems to be everywhere.

I have to agree with your overall comment though. Travel, dispersed friends and families, etc guarantee we wouldn’t handle being split like the EU, and it’s crazy, IMHO, that the original author really sees so many differences between states that they outweigh the similarity of vision.
The updated version of the program, when pushed to servers, crashed the older version of the program on other servers which had yet to be updated. Rather than rolling back to diagnose and understand the cause, they charged on updating all the servers.
Right. But if North Korea states that a company that is affiliated to you and present in their country will be fined if you do not comply then you have two choices : comply and avoid the fine and not comply and pay the fine (in NK).

The US did that recently. They do not like Iran and decided that US companies will not make business with Iran.

But that was not enough. Any company or country which does will also be punished. Either through their companies on US ground, or through taxes, or through US Dollar trading restrictions.

This is why I said that strong countries can bully smaller ones that way. If this was NK who started that nobody would care. But everyone listens to the US threats (or China, or to some extend Russia or the EU)
It is still cheaper than hiring in US.

Even if you pay half the amount you pay avg (let's say 60K USD) in US, that will be very very good amount for an Indian living in India (30K USD/year is very good for living in India).

So, if you expect good work and don't want to pay even the amount which is equivalent to what an entry-level developer in US might get, then you will never get good developers.
GDPR is a total failure: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190521/17425842255/one-y...
Tough. If you really need an H1-B, then apparently you had best not lay off those people, hmmmm?

The calculation is up to the people in charge. Suspending H1-Bs simply tips the cost benefit ratio.
This might be a stupid question: why is the fact it’s a _suffix_ tree important? (as opposed to building a similar structure with prefixes)
This happens way too often and ruins my trip by making me feel anxiety over something I have little control over. Unfortunately doing anything about this isn't in Airbnb's interest until it starts costing them customers.
I'm afraid given the lack of awareness on what exactly UPI is (without considering usage) and the ability of politicians to kill projects for bribes, it may be eventually replaced by the wallet model. Corruption is a huge issue in India which contributes to loyal users eventually leaving the platform. Zomato, Swiggy and UberEats have had huge growth over the last year but I see a lot of regular users (office goers, bachelors living alone or with other bachelors...) thinking hard before ordering food. The number of quality restaurants are in less ratio and there is only a subset of them being consistent. A huge portion of this quality restaurants offer cuisines not Indian (Thai, Chinese, Italian, American..) which is not preferred routinely. My guess would be, growing up most are accustomed to Indian cuisine and the cost factor. Majority of the restaurants cater to offers and provide cheap food and lack basic hygiene and food preparation standards. This "restaurants" (most of them have now converted to takeaway only) should have been closed after inspection(s) but bribe and stay alive. This startups have enabled this restaurants to thrive and profit just by providing cheap food and cutting costs (waiters, restaurant space...). Most of this "quality restaurants" have always had delivery options and so this startups are not providing much value to them or consumers. Unless better food preparation standards are followed along with it being transparent loyal customers will be a tiny minority and majority will try to exploit the offers and leave. This is amplified (anecdotal, not verified statistically) by health issues of frequent users due to poor quality food.
From experience with an app that doesn't auto-update, I know that the only thing that gets people to upgrade is a critical bug that affects them.

People generally keep using old versions of software for years. 90% of users don't care about new features or performance improvements or bug fixes that don't directly affect them.

So I understand what they did. If they indeed introduced a version C that had a workaround to avoid crashing A, then they would have never gotten rid of A. No matter how hard they pushed C, some people would just continue to use A.

But if A starts crashing, and there's an update available that fixes the issue, that's a really good motivator to get people to upgrade.

Sure, it'll suck for everyone for a short while, but it'll soon be over once everyone has upgraded.

And, as a dev, I also know that crashes are not the most serious kinds of bugs. They are usually easy to diagnose, and people realise that something is wrong right away -- much better than a bug that silently corrupts data, or a bug that causes subtly incorrect behavior.
It doesn’t need to be so much more. It does one thing and does it well. Doing more things would distract me from the book I’m trying to read. I have a 2013 kindle on which I’ve read nearly 20 books this year.

I have a few complaints - I wish the device wasn’t so slow or that the e-ink display didn’t take so long to update. I wish the keyboard had autocorrect because I’ve come to rely on that quite a bit. I wish it would use a USB-C cable so I could carry around fewer chargers.

But otherwise, I’m pretty happy.
I think cable is really a zombie now, Netflix and every other streaming service is destroying them.

And as a consequence of that, I think that the libs were able to do uncle Rupert a favour and cut away the cross media rules (completely ignoring the fact that IP streaming of entertainment isn't local news / news), but I could be wrong.

Just waiting for Netflix or someone to buy the cricket and footy and crush channel 9 and foxtel.
Love this shell. Sensible defaults make it so quick to get up and running too.