skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Binary vs Text Mode for File I/O Operations
Many of the problems started there: the departure of Forstall, Steve Jobs getting so sick and dying, departure of many important roles at Apple and moving Ive to the head of design in the digital part, in my opinion brang the company to a disadvantadged position. In opposite, Google moved quickly and cleanest with Material Design taking Android phones to a new level Apple couldn't reach. Nowadays iPhones are the minority in every market.
Yes, LSD needs to be legalized. I can and will do whatever drugs I want, fuck the moralists.
In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance.

What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features.

Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s
> No back button.

Swipe from the left edge of the screen, or tap the chevron in the top left.

> The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel).

The lock screen hides historical notifications. You can scroll down to see them.
What are your server costs?
I've been meaning to plant a tree in Manhattan for a while http://joshuaspodek.com/how-to-plant-a-tree-in-new-york-city.

If anyone here wants to do it with me, email me and let's do it. I have zero experience in it.
I agree. When I open an app, it's because I want to do something. That something is not "reading release notes". This kind of bullshit is why people don't read warnings but reflexively close pop-ups to get the damn machine to shut up and obey their orders.
Do You Use an iPad?
I have seen kids using it for educational apps. As a working professional, do you use an iPad? What are your usecases?
>It requires an understanding of fascism to recognize that "make America great again" is a fascist resurrection myth

Well, way before fascism was even a thing countries had great periods and bad periods. Wanting to make your country back great has little to do with fascism - even if it was one of the 100+ slogans the actual fascists used.

If only that was what Hitler was after, to merely get Germany back up, instead of e.g. take over neighborhood countries, exterminate the jews and other minorities, stifle free speech and politics, etc...
> As someone who grew up in a developing economy, I find this view extremely patronizing. Usually, what happens is that a local company fills that demand gap.

...which means if a western subscription services wants to compete with a cheaper local equivalent, they need to charge a comparable local rate. That’s not patronising, this literally how all businesses work when having to compete with regional price differences.

As for the rest of your post: it sounds like you have a proverbial axe to grind. I’d be the first to agree that there are some serious issues with some of America’s domestic and foreign policies but none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation (and some weren’t even remotely based on reality)
I never got how people could even get past Mac window management or rather lack of window management. They've never had a Maximize function and they always pushed that stupid Zoom functionality instead, which every window implements differently. Then they moved onto making Full Screen the default which I find utterly frustrating as I wait for some junior programmer, who chose a Macbook, swiping furiously to find that lost window. Many other times, they'll put the pointer too close to the top of a full screen window and window chrome will expand downwards to get in their way.

And that's just one tiny facet of a single set of features that they got terribly wrong. There's so many other things wrong with Macs, macOS, iPhones and iOS... I could go on for hours and hours detailing these things.

Despite all of that, like you, I will happily recommend a Mac to beginners because they do have system stability down to a science. I also use an iPhone and I recommend them to everyone since they're just safer and more secure than Android as far as I have seen. I'm hoping one day I can stop giving Apple money though because I don't want to support their shit attitude towards power users. I used to only buy used iPhones, but now I stay about 2 or 3 models behind their current offering (and I buy them at a deep discount - my new iPhone 8 was only $350 with no contract from Boost Mobile which works just great for my needs).

I'm really hoping my iPhone 8 will be my last iPhone because the task switching shortcut for the newer home button-less iPhones is very finicky from what I can tell experimenting in stores. Maybe they'll bring the home button back one day or I'll finally switch back to some other mobile OS.
Yeah he admits how he is a prankster but then fully expects people to believe his explanation of a 60 second video clip without any other context than his interpretation?
> When Amazon has a hundred million subscribers to a service to ship in two days, it's reasonable to ask whether that's a monopoly.

No it isn't. It's not reasonable at all because you're arbitrarily defining a slice of the total market they do well in as "the market"; it's intellectually dishonest and not remotely reasonable.

This is exactly the same dishonest tactic as a company putting out a job ad that's so specific that only one person could possibly fit the definition: the one they've already chosen to hire and the ad is a sham to fulfill a legal requirement they're doing an end run around. You don't get to define the market ala-carte to target a specific company like this. The market is online sales, it's not online sales that ships in 2 days.
Doctors Are Not Gods
Dude even race is a largely cultural designation.

Also, without codifying nerd identity how do you expect the bullying to end?
Sure, ping me on the e-mail address listed on the support page.
Nice to see the recent burst of writing activity from PG. Also nice to see people here putting it through the paces. Would expect nothing less.
In the USA, colleges are in an arms race with each other to attract students. In some ways it is like cities trying to attract professional sports teams or big corporate headquarters: each college tries to outdo the other ones with fancier and fancier extras and services. That results in more administrators to run things.
> 5% of all websites (The actual numbers are 1-3% less)

Source?

It's not even clear whether this means

- 5% of servers running

- 5% of registered domains

- 5% of user traffic
Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit?

That aside, I can't fathom any other sense that amounts to "my scientific and programming expertise is required to build this ad business, and I feel a duty to do it".
Phone removal happened in waves. The most recent wave was about 6 months ago. Fba phone numbers went to amazon owned phone numbers with giant extensions
Slack has the worst text editor under iOS 13. I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated by the keyboard disappearing when I want to select and copy or paste text... If the keyboard stayed open like in every other sensible app, I wouldn't have such frustrations editing text, but leaving text edit mode, Apple makes it impossible to edit text with touch at that point...
People will likely create an app for this, not realizing they're contributing to the culture creating situations like this.
Can't they use dlopen to find libc?
This is a pretty weak security mitigation since any ROP attack will typically achieve return-to-libc anyway, but yelling at people who make syscalls directly is good.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. In a lot of situations a plain yaml file is good enough for templating, and people seem to prefer writing those over json, for several reasons. Then, there are a lot of situations where templating yaml files is good enough. So, I do think having tools to do that sorta thing is good.

With more complex system like for example Kubernetes those solutions start to not be good enough any ore, which is why things like jsonette are being adopted. And sooner later 'real' languages. Which, evemtually, will help develop abstractions that have a simple enough interface so we are able to use plain key value pairs for config again. And so on.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's not black and white, and a lot of the solutions that appear in this space have a good reason to exist. Well, obviously, since someone took the time to solve a problem they thought was not solved well enough with existing tools.
As discussed on /r/crypto, short messages are also problematic because they expose the cipher to slide attacks. With very short messages, it's easy to find a P=F(P'), C=F(C') pair. You collect a bunch of them to reveal the full state of the key (or enough to make messages intelligible).

I like designs like this just as teaching models (which I think was part of the point of designing it). Slide attacks, which I've never played with before, are really neat; my attempt to distill the idea is that, in ciphers with repeating round/key structure, by hunting for pairs P=F(P'), you can effectively reveal a single iteration of the round function. In designs like this, iteration is meant to shield the weak round function from attack; the slide attack collapses security back down to a single application of the round.
This really implies that the same tree-root architecure evolved independently in different lineages of plants.
In my understanding, no. It's improved but not fully "fixed". Unfortunately that's as far as my understanding extends.
In many cases, having soft deadlines works. You can double check and do code reviews for ever, it is never perfect and we can always think of a better way. Regardless of the experience of the engineer less time to complete a task means prioritizing making code just work, over making code optimal.
Curious questions are great, but please don't cross examine. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I like the idea a lot, but execution not so much. Frankly I'll probably end up throwing together a script in Lumo or something, that will accept Lisp expressions and feed JSON structure to them. (I'd use Fennel, but JSON has actual null while Lua... doesn't.)

This may come off as a little snarky but, you should totally give this a try and post the result on HN.

I say this because I both love jq for its functionality, but also have deep frustrations with wrangling it. I really encourage any attempts to improve it.

There's definitely room for a better jq - I would 100% try a version of it that was as simple to install, use, and just had a slightly easier to use language.
I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.
If you can provide a staticly linked binary, its already game over as far as these protections are concerned.

They are designed as a protection against stuff like ROP and other memory based, zero information attacks that hit already running processes.
Just as a side note for those who think that it is the first step in recognizing the benefits of microdosing for healthy people, that study shows nothing.

First, it just shows that it is safe. It is expected, LSD is one of the safest drugs out there. I don't think there is a single verifiable instance of someone dying from LSD poisoning, even considering massive overdoses. And because we are talking microdoses, it is not like people are going to experience traumatizing bad trips.

The real question is whether microdosing LSD is better than a placebo and we don't have the answer yet.

And even if it is, the goal here is to treat Alzheimer patients, and that LSD proves effective doesn't mean healthy people will get benefits. A good example would be ADHD, which is treated using amphetamines. While these drugs will make healthy people high and overexcited, it will help ADHD patients calm down and focus.

I am very happy that LSD gets some serious attention, but it doesn't mean it is some kind of panacea.
This is true, for some crazy attempts at 'minimalism' companies will hide all settings in the OS settings app settings directory, which involves sorting through a very long list of apps and other menus to find it.

The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.
Evolution is content with a very long iteration cycle and a very high failure rate.

Human engineering is much more efficient - building things we understand, we accomplish in decades what takes nature millions of years or is straight up not viable.
dlopen is a dynamically linked function, so they would have to find that too. Its location will also be randomized.

Note we are talking about exploit code here, i.e. you have just exploited a buffer overflow, not ELF code loaded in a well behaved fashion.
If you link against libc, that’s the only place you can enter the kernel from. If you statically link that is relaxed to “system calls can come from anywhere on your code”. The former has stronger protections, obviously, but as far as I can tell you still have protection from “wild shellcode in a RWX region can make syscalls”.
This is a flag in the ELF binary section headers, if you don't want it, flag your entire binary as "syscalls allowed".
I did read the article. There is a bank. It is not behind fintech, which predates it.

(Also, the original title said "The".)
Iirc, FBA phones hadn't been available for two years, it's MF phone numbers that got proxied to Amazon phone numbers six months back. Then 1-2 months ago FBA addresses vanished.
The Apple Mail client in iOS 13 has terrible half-thought out UX. Open a message you get a bar on the bottom with a trash icon and a reply icon. It is laid out for right handed users only with both icons on the right side. The icons are adjacent and the delete operation requires no confirmation. The reply action is actually the menu for all of the mail actions. Why it is reply icon rather than the more common "…" ellipses icon when it does not actually reply?

Besides being extremely buggy, the UI for the new Reminders app is even worse. I can't imagine the iOS 13 UI would do well in user testing at all. I can only assume they didn't do user testing.
Forgiveness for me would be a matter of being able to show love and compassion to someone even after they had done us wrong.
Music (on iOS) has become so obtuse to use.

To enable/disable shuffle after selecting a song, you must tap a bar near the bottom (which gives no visual indication that it expands); once expanded, you must then tap an unlabelled button with a “list” icon. This will show your upcoming queue, but also holds the control for shuffle and repeat. These are also unlabelled, but at least the icons are fairly unmistakable.
Then your helpful conceptualisation isn't so helpful unless you already know what a monopoly is.
Correlation vs Causation
Why wouldn't you just Google it? It would have taken you two seconds and then you'd have known all about control centre and how to access it.

Besides, none of those gestures are actually necessary; you could have gone settings app > Wifi > turn wifi on/off.
There are better solutions for that such as an ordinary notification.
Good question. I started working right after what we call "middle school" in the Netherlands which translates to high school I think. During the daytime I would work my job and in the evening self-study for the "Open University" we have here.

I lived with my parents during this time and could save up money as a buffer. Thanks to that support I could financially bridge these past years of development without worrying too much. Also: keeping expenses as low as possible. My product is old school and so are my computers.
I don't have much to complain about the usability of the software, but they are making hardware that should not be made.

I'm the unfortunate user of a MacBook Pro company laptop with 8GB RAM and just two USB-C ports.

This sort of hardware should not be made anymore. The memory is insufficient (my laptop is always paging) and the USB-C is forcing me to always carry a dongle, not to mention that just two is not enough considering that one of them is used for the power cable.

It really feels like the people who designed this laptop never actually had to use it.

I wish they would be forced to use it for a while to get a feeling of how crappy it is, so they stop making such terrible hardware anymore.
The coupling here is specifically the lockstep of the kernel syscall ABI and libc.
As written, you seem to be implying that the current issues aren't real. They certainly are and affect people now.
I think a more useful link is https://get-ytt.io/, which includes an interactive playground.
1984 is a great book, but I wish more who invoke it had read it or understood it.
Isn't this just evolution versus revolution?

Most of the time new products evolve from the current state. Sometimes there's pent-up demand/frustration/hostility that allows for a clean break to a new solution (even if that solution has just as many problems, at least they're not the same problems).

Probably nine times out of ten people are looking for a better buggy whip. Without any other information, improving what you have is statistically the better bet. You have a very strong predictor, but no guarantees.
I don’t use IRAs mainly because they aren’t liquid. I can’t withdraw without a penalty.

An IRA is not necessarily tax advantageous because gains are taxed as income when withdrawn, which is higher than capital gains. The choice to use IRAs is not straightforward. It's also hard to plan for any of this because tax rates can and do change. Capital gains and income tax rates may change, so I generally prefer to pay taxes earlier than later where possible.

I have generally found it more financially rewarding to focus my time on increasing income rather than on finagling my finances to save money. Same reason I don’t own a credit card just to get the cash back or other incentives.
Senior Engineer Jobsearch: Land your dream offer in 100 days [pdf]
And then WebAssembly will ruin all these efforts.
All I want for Christmas is a Buchmann-Meyer pattern
Anything that needs 3 coordinated fingers is surely an accessibility hurdle.
There are easier ways to leak libc, such as reading from the stack or the GOT, but these would require more work than a simple ROP chain.
Thank you for the link. I found barrkel’s comment[1] particularly moving:

> A non-authoritarian government is an historical anomaly. It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care. Please start caring.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847789
sure... but html is not easier, if not harder. can't bother to get printing correctly either. i will take PDF any given day.
I wrote a "bot" myself in the form of a network simulator for general and load testing of the server. If players were to automate the game I'd be more than happy to make a special server where we could show off their work. Making an agent navigate an open 3D space and performing planned tasks would make for an impressive demo for all parties involved.
Your time scale and etymology are wildly off, or else your experience is confined to a very limited geographic region.
Interestingly enough, Eddy Cue's org consistently puts out the crappiest software while operating with the biggest ego (internally).
WebAssembly should not be making direct system calls anyways.
I didn't like the analysis because markets are mushed together. Amazon market share for cars and books is different. It is meaningless to analyze the monopoly impact where monopoly is defined as the whole market for all us goods. They have to be broken out or corrective action will be postponed for too long.
Bayes theorem, and making probability intuitive
Share the code !
I’d play the devils advocate re. it being a “trap”. People get bored of things. Changing UI for the sake of changing UI is a sensible business decision if it scratches the customers’ novelty itch. At least a good short-term decision.
The point of doing this is not to protect against people bringing their own bad libc.
My intuition on the slide attack vs. human cipher argument is that the cipher is only ever run by hand; there's no way to generate plaintext/ciphertext pairs automatically, because no computer system ever runs it. Humans won't generate enough message pairs to make the attack feasible.

(I haven't though this through carefully, just spitballing).
not gp, but wouldn't that "don't show again" checkbox they mentioned fix this problem?
Even if you don't want to read the book, the Wikipedia articles on it and its concepts are fantastic reads:

Main article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

Themes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Themes

------

More links to articles on concepts from the book:

Big Brother: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...

Doublethink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

Thought Crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

Newspeak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Telescreen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

(Several more linked in the main article)

------

It's easy to draw parallels between the concepts of the novel and the state of the world today, and technology plays a huge part. It's incredible. And frightening.

For instance, you can, to an extent, equate IoT and smart home devices with Telescreens. It's not hard to get access to these, and suddenly, you have a window into the most intimate parts of someone's life. Keep in mind, none of this is regulated.

In many lesser developed countries, people are persecuted/prosecuted for their beliefs and opinions: Thoughtcrime.

The Chinese government is essentially Big Brother, what with constant surveillance, authoritarianism, complete lack of privacy and people being given "social scores" by computers that analyse their actions, and these scores deciding what they are and aren't allowed to do.

Newspeak: Seen in many, many nations, but for example, concentration camps being called "re-education camps" in China. Here's a list of real-life examples: http://mattjennissen1.weebly.com/uploads/7/1/0/7/7107262/rea...

And so on...
Many recent updates have actually reduced bloat. One of my apps shrunk by more than half as Swift libraries moved into the system.
> while operating with the biggest ego (internally)

Source? I know the apps are horrible but I haven’t seen much to make it seem like he’s specifically more full of ego.
Alternatively: let developers do what they want!

The dozens of us on Linux are excited and entertained that we're now the leading desktop experience.