skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This must be the "Account Security Issue" Twitter e-mailed me about last week. I was wondering when they'd release more details: https://i.imgur.com/yjzMtLB.png

Transcription:

"SUBJECT: Twitter Account Security Issue – Update Twitter for Android

Hello,

We recently fixed an issue that could have compromised your account. Although we don’t have evidence that this was exploited, we can’t completely confirm so we are letting you know. You can learn more about this issue here.

Please update to the latest version of Twitter for Android as soon as possible to make sure your account is secure.

We’re sorry this happened and will continue working to keep your information secure on Twitter. You can reach out to our Office of Data Protection through this form to request information regarding your account security.

Thanks,
Twitter"

Edit: err, no, this appears to be something different still. Not a good week for Twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847198
Wouldn’t you want to roll out the most cost effective power sources to power sequestration, even if those sources were intermittent and required sequestration efforts (today only extant at tiny scale and thus amenable to engineering) to scale up and down with current power supply?

Because nuclear power today is both expensive and requires many years to build out, while renewables cost a fraction of the price and can be built out in vast quantities very quickly.
> Same thing as the NYT publishing an article about how the space program was about white supremacy. Same thing as the Times' 1619 project, which alleged that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery in the colonies.

Do you disagree with these claims because you think they're factually wrong, or because you don't like them ideologically?
If the deed is considered bad enough, it eclipses most other things: Jefferson Davis' obituary was also considered overly harsh by a segment of the population.

While Monson is obviously not Jeff Davis, his opposition to the rights of a minority hurt an awful lot of people.
I think there's a pattern here that's quite clear, in all parts of the paper. This article is certainly interesting: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/14/media/new-york-times-criticis...

One Times employee is quoted:

> the desire to "show and not tell" might be "well intentioned," but it is ineffective. "It puts a burden on readers and especially those who are maybe less savvy," the staffer explained. "And when the stakes are so high and so many people feel personally threatened and there's real danger in the air, the show don't tell approach feels inadequate."

Anyway, it's interesting to me that I have ideology in common with the author of this article. We couldn't have more different backgrounds.
An art dealer disappeared with $50M. 17 years later a documentary crew found him
Lifestyle is a threat to gut bacteria
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. There's a discussion to be had that stays on the right side of the flame line; let's have that.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21875566 and marked it off-topic.
There is an irony in a member of a church that had famously attempted to cover up all of the atrocities committed by its leadership, even going so far as buying forged documents it feared would expose the church to scorn — a church that goes after its critics in a way unrivaled by any other group, except perhaps the Catholic Church (and even then, pretty sure LDS has it beat), is complaining about an obituary in a secular paper not focusing on the party line, which in this case was “we were able to recruit a bunch of people to join Amway, er, the Mormon church” (that comparison is intentional), isn’t up to his standards.

Also, anyone who doesn’t think that this obituary is completely ordinary for publications like the Times is mistaken.

The obituary for John Paul the II saved the criticism for the end, granted, but look at the obituary for Cardinal Law [1]. And if anyone thinks that when Benedict dies (the Pope emeritus), the obit won’t lead with his controversies, I think they are wrong. It’s too soon to say what they’d lead with on Pope Francis, but I’m sure his controversies with the conservative parts of the church will be mentioned.

Journalists aren’t your friends. And the role isn’t to write propaganda, which is exactly what this guy wants from an obituary.

I’m sure the Deseret News was much more to his liking.

And that’s the other part of journalism. When it thrives, there isn’t just one source. There are many different perspectives that can be shared.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/obituaries/cardinal-berna...
If I'm understanding correctly I would like an obituary of Hitler to be comprehensive - because with a broader context we could perhaps understand how he rose to power. Or understand how a politician can be so charismatic that the people ignore the deaths of their neighbors.
I get a 404, found the article here https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/grandma-charges-christmas...
The question is, if you got rid of advertising, how do the customers find out about a new product from a new business?
We've made some pretty capable hardware at my job on top of the pyboard/micropython. We've outgrown it in certain cases but it's really powerful being able to build something for potential critical business needs (like one off testing platforms) without spending weeks rewriting drivers.
They have the ability to redirect traffic to government controlled devices that isps have to support (they sometimes have nice DNS ptrs like DPI in them). The isps have to speak bgp to the govt boxes and they can announce large swaths of IP space to be redirected.
Have you read the Equal Rights Amendment?

The idea behind it is nice, but as written it is an absolutely terrible bit of law, rife with unintended consequences. We already saw what happened with prohibition; opposition to the ERA is the right choice.
I think the author is thinking more of someone who is insisting they cannot proceed without being given training, versus someone who is doing everything they can to keep up and could benefit from some training to stay on top of things.
I get the feeling that you have a very ingrained idea of what it means to practice journalism and what it means to be a journalist. All of what you wrote goes against the basic principles and ideals of journalism, so I wonder if you mean that current journalism is not living up to it's ideals (I.e. it's a temporary gully) or if you mean it's systematic within the profession?

Either way, what way do you propose that normal citizens get the investigative information needed to participate in a democracy if we don't have journalism? What's the alternative? Or if there are outlets practicing journalism in the way that you'd approve of, which are those?
RFCs: a 50th anniversary dive (2018)
Please don't be a jerk on HN. It's possible to provide information without that; please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I had the same thought. I'm a NYT subscriber and while I'm not always the most careful reader, it doesn't seem to me the paper covers Mormons who are not Mitt Romney nearly often enough for there to be a stereotypical take
> notice how dumb journos are when they cover subject matter

This is a key takeaway that, I suspect, everyone who has ever been interviewed, covered, or quoted in the press feels.

Every time you see a story in the general media that grossly misrepresents a subject you know well, remember that feeling. Because for every other topic covered, I guarantee there is a domain expert feeling as you did.

I’m three for three in terms of regretting journo contact. Whether it was the local rag or a national broadsheet; misquotation, glib misrepresentation and sheer fabrication are inevitable results.

Corollary: reserve your greatest mistrust for anyone that openly and actively courts the media. They are well aware of the outcomes and are manipulating the game. This includes your in-house PR team and most elected officials, including the ones you voted for.
> don’t get upset if it’s mentioned

The objection isn't that it was mentioned but that it became the entire story.
The link is to the introduction of the project. Coming up on a year on, the first 365 RFCs are complete:

https://write.as/365-rfcs/table-of-contents
Things Disney should keep in mind when making the next Star Wars trilogy
US people, you might already be fully aware of this but your medical system is completely totally utterly fucked if shit like this is even possible. Sort your shit out and come back amongst the civilised countries [from the healthcare services point of view]!
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873889.
Remembering artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year
Release Trinity on Christmas. Does That Make It a Christmas Movie?
You Shouldn’t Have to Buy a Book to Understand ‘Star Wars
"But I don’t want to go among nerds,” HN user catalogia remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all nerds here. I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd.”
“How do you know I’m a nerd?” said they.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
This is true of almost everything human created.
Not this, please. The internet can't handle it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876278.
Christmas is one of the biggest days of the year for hackers
Wow, umh, hmm

This and technologies like it sound like something that could literally save the planet. If this sort of thing could be used for trucks, it could be used for trains, ships and stationary engines.

As far as I can tell, the approach involves recycling the CO2 into other fuels and I assume eventually burning everything in a fashion that creates other pollutants but I assume much less CO2. I assume that at greater cost, you could just sequester the CO2 also.

So what's stopping this?
> Some conferences even pay for babysitters for speakers.

That is a REALLY great idea.

Do some conferences also pay for babysitters for the children of speakers, too?
"Either way, the paper's story is "correct" -- but it causes a crapload of harm to the application developer, who only wanted to make a dollar by providing an equal-and-opposite value, and never intended for these things to happen!"

They themselves took the risk when creating an insecure product. There are two ways companies can botch up security.

1) Introduce a bug that can be exploited by intelligence agencies. These happen sometimes and they're just a fact of life.

2) Design a crappy protocol. If you want to lock yourself out from your users contact's you must by definition implement strong, authenticated end-to-end encryption, and open source client with reproducible builds. That's the only way.

Once you've done that, any vulnerability will be a bug, and those are okay, they can be fixed when found.

The problem here is ToTok developers didn't do that. They didn't even try.

Now, as for metadata, VoIP capability makes Tor-routing by default impossible, thus we have need for two secure messaging apps on networked TCBs: Signal for E2EE VoIP, Briar for anonymous messaging.

Networked TCBs can not be made unhackable, thus you can't expect privacy from remote endpoint compromise, but that's again, OK, because it scales less, and is a fundamental limitation.

So no I do not agree with you because they could've done a LOT more but chose not to.

So here's what we know:

ToTok is not E2EE, thus we know for a fact their server has access to user data. The only way for NYT to independently verify the company is handing out data from the server, is to either obtain documents (which might never happen) or hack ToTok server to see such processes taking place. Which is illegal.

So I agree I'd rather see some whistleblower reveal documents, but we can't hope for that to happen if Signal etc. are blocked in UAE. If this leads to unblocking of more secure messaging apps, perhaps we'll see the evidence you need one day.
The crowd on HN ranges from people born after the millenium to those that cut their teeth on 8 bitters and even older people.

I started out on the KIM-1, I think you mean the 6530.

Your comment above reads a lot nicer than the ones preceding it, and yes, they needed IO and memory but without them that IO and memory would have never happened and the processors were the flagships of their respective companies.
The Worst Hacks of the Decade
does this actually count as mass transit?

i am not surprised its hardly mentioned, as it is only useful to a tiny percentage of the population of 1 region.

as a case study, it boils down to being a nice benefit of working at one of a select few large, highly successful companies.

can this service be replicated effectively anywhere else? by anyone else? even by the same company in a different region?
my initial answer to all of the above questions is no.
You don’t have to tip-toe around a sensitive subject in order to give the reader a meaningful look at what’s going on. The article does a good job listing information that was important to help understand Monson in context. You can do that and also address the issues the obituary talked about. But judging everything in terms of a narrow set of political issues doesn’t educate the reader. It’s not good journalism. (I’d love to read the New York Times obituary of the founder of Bangladesh. I wonder what it would be like, viewed through the narrow political lens of a liberal New Yorker. Would it lead with his views on abortion?)
Genes and family are biggest predictor of academic success, study suggests
Most cybercrime doesn't involve computer hacking
I watched the first part of his lectures on category theory. Keep in mind I'm the furthest thing from a mathematician you can find.

The feeling I'm getting when learning category theory is that if there was a formal theory for how to design programs. Category theory is it. Application is therefore not straightforward... You have to get really creative and think really hard to see the insights that category theory has to offer.

The notion of a isomorphism and a functor and lifting was directly applicable to programming after I learned about it. Here's what happened:

In postgresql there are specific library functions for dealing with specific types of json structures in the postgresql library. If your json blob doesn't fit the structured type parameter that the library function accepts you have to do some very awkward joins to convert the json into the right format which can cause massive slow downs.

I use the notion of two isomorphic objects and the opposing functors between them to convert the json into a string functor. Then I did string manipulations to convert the serialized json into a different form of serialized json then re-lifted the serialized json back into the json functor. The converted json type fit the parameter of a library json function and thus the result was a query that executed 10x faster then the other implimentation.

If I didn't know category theory the code would look absolutely crazy. I cast json to a string, replace a bunch of characters in the string then cast it back to json. The notion that a string can contain another type as a functor and the notion that string manipulations operations on serialized json have an isomorphic equivalent in "json space" was what allowed me to creatively come up with this optimization.

Note that the json equivalent morphisms I needed do not actually exist in the postgresql implimentation but because of the isomorphism that exists between stringified json and actual json I can build the json morphisms I need by composing two opposing functors and a string manipulation operation.

The thing about this though is that it's debatable whether or not you would actually need such "creativity" in a language that wasn't as terrible as SQL.
It stands, third year in a row! Arsonists are busy burning cars.
I'd probably keep biking if they stopped the plan because I'm used to it now and really like it

I actually miss my ride to work when I'm on vacation.

In my case I wanted to sell my family's second car. I established the habit by taking a month to "prove" to myself that I could live without it.
Whitewashing is hardly the only alternative. A more complete picture, including all these things, is also possible.
You just said I was right lol
Knuth's 25th Christmas Lecture – Pi and the Art of Computer Programming
Asshole managers who copy Jeff Bezos are just this tech generation's version of asshole managers who copied Steve Jobs that we had to deal with 20 years ago.
Just use Firefox. The fact that these posts are even needed says everything about the choice you’re making.
This is a super cool idea I hadn't hear before. Can you share any good references?
I recommend running a serverless stack so you can avoid getting hung up on infrastructure shenanigans. It's super cheap too. React SPA via CreateReactApp using cloudfront+s3 to host the HTML+css+js and API gateway ->lambda backend -> w/dynamodb to store your data and you can get something cool and useable going. In that stack you can mix and match other UI tiers, swapping vue, angular or polymer in for react.

I recently completed a proof of concept with both polymer and react on the above stacks, probably going to do angular next. There were some annoying things in the area of error reporting being unclear from AWS' stack, but once I figured out that CORs warnings from the UI tiers accessing the API gateway usually mean a self inflicted typo in my url it was pretty smooth sailing.
Even if that's the case, it isn't elitist to suggest we privilege cheaper modes of transport.

Your scenario cannot scale by definition (used)

Your scenario has no answer for the externalities.

Essentially, the only reason the scenario has any sort of standing is because it's based on the idea that commuting by personal vehicle is inherently better than public transport. Which is true for most of the US but is not true for most of the places which actually don't a priori assume personal vehicles are inherently significantly better for transport.
> liberal New York politics

I would:

a) imagine something called the NY times to be somewhat skewed to NY.

b) It’s only liberal in America. In any other first world country, it’s right wing.
Because of strategic challenges, Reusable Scalable Intelligent Systems will be developed by 2025 with the following characteristics:

• Interactively acquire information from video, Web pages, hologlasses (electronic glasses with holographic-like overlays), online data bases, sensors, articles, human speech and gestures, etc.

• Real-time integration of massive pervasively inconsistent information

• Self-informative in the sense of knowing its own goals, plans, history, provenance of its information and having relevant information about its own strengths and weaknesses.

• Close human interaction using hologlasses for secure mobile communication.

• No closed-form algorithmic solution is possible to implement the above capabilities

• Reusable so that advances in one area can readily be used elsewhere without having to start over from scratch.

• Scalable in all important dimensions meaning that there are no hard barriers to continual improvement in the above areas, i.e., system performance continually significantly improves.

A large project (analogous to Manhattan and Apollo) is required to meet strategic challenges for Intelligent Systems and S5G (Secure 5G).

See the following for an outline of technology involved:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3428114
Fun fact, you can still buy new 6502 hardware from William Mensch's company. The elegance and simplicity of the core makes it virtually embedded computing "dust" in almost everything we use.

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
In a way, that's kinda what the article is about. In a different perspective, the author is saying that journalists these days are just telling us what we want to hear, or whatever controversy sells.

The idea that the leader of the Mormon church is a misogynist and a homophobe, that he stood in the way of LGBT rights, well, that's a story that sells these days. That goes against my own moral values, but that's not the be-all end-all.

This is a man who lived until he was 90, and accomplished Amazing Things within his niche social institutions and also in how that social institution impacted the world around it. Ninety Years of life and accomplishments, and yet his obituary by the New York Times was minimized into the social controversy of the past five years.

I would stand totally opposed to this dude on a moral level, but I can't help but think that's kind of sad.

The author's issue isn't about the fact that the news covered this controversy. The author's issue is that this man's obituary spoke nothing about his actual life, but only the controversy.

It'd be like if Elon Musk, in the years before he died, came out as a raging racist homophobic misogynist, or whatever people think is controversial in that future. And his obituary in the NYT talked about how he was a shitty controversial person, instead of talking about SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of his actual accomplishments in his Life.

If you accomplished great, impactful things that changed the world for the better, should that be absolutely invalidated if you were an asshole by the social/cultural/moral standards of the time period in which you died?
I think you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd received any packages through their fulfillment services. Literally every single driver I've had has lied about attempting a delivery, usually multiple times, then flat out lied and said the package was delivered. The package will then show up 2-3 days later, defeating the purpose of paying for prime or faster shipping.

Customer support for these issues is kafkaesque.

"Hi I have not received my package which says it was delivered at a time when I was home"

"Let me check the tracking, sir it shows that you have received the package"

"I have not, no delivery was attempted"

"Yes you are right you will receive your package shortly"
It's not funny if you think that http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is more or less mandatory reading on HN.

I would like to see some data point towards the success related to open source involvement. I'm sure outliers exist just as there are people doing really well with their solo AppStore app or with their niche website.

And I'm saying this as somebody involved in open source: better to see it as a hobby done out of passion. Any other benefits are random/luck and except if you get to feel some passion for a highly sought out niche (hello Machine Learning) you shouldn't expect anything out of it. Entering into it with the expectation of building your career, traveling the world, etc is going to lead to disappointment.
I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.
> Journos think they have everything all figured out before they even investigate. They just need to investigate enough information to slap it into their story as if they were a algorithm automatically writing a sports story from the game stats.

That’s unfairly broad and in my experience, untrue. And to the extent it is true, I would argue that is largely because we have moved to a model that rewards journalism for writing the things people or publicists want to read, making it harder for investigative work that ruffles feathers and makes it challenging to even do the work of learning.

And although I won’t argue that many, many journalists aren’t subject-matter experts in their beats, the good ones are. More to the point, many more are willing to become experts and talk to experts.

And for what it’s with, “what’s the deal with [foo]” was my go-to question when working on big stories when my full-time job was a journalist. I’m a naturally curious person. I want to learn as much as I can about as many things as I can. And maybe I was lucky, but my editors certainly didn’t have a problem with me pursuing those stories — even if I wasn’t able to do as many of them as I would have liked.