skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's correct. In fact, if everything were AC coupled (signals and power) it would be easy to reverse 180 degrees. The original USB was to replace kbd/mouse 'PS2' connectors, and some audio devices - the original maxed out at 12 Mb/s raw. Given the mishmash of connectors at the time, USB even with 50% insertion rate success was pretty darn good. It seems much less good in hindsight. One does have to wonder why they didn't try to fix this when they went USB-C -- they did only half the job.
Encrypt it with a symmetric key, and then encrypt the symmetric key separately with each of your friends' public keys.
Blink is Chromium's rendering engine. It's separate from Chrome the browser application vended by Google.
I meant experience in the form of sensory perception, followed by inference and comparison. I suppose you mean experience that would be tinted by interpretation ?
What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude -Thomas Payne

I believe that is a much more apt comparison. The USSR was the 20th century's Sparta, and the U.S. was the Athens of the past 200+ years.
PS/2 seems entirely rotationally ambiguous without looking at the pins, or at least seemed so to the younger version of me. It still stands out as the most painful part of computing during my childhood.
Google's reason for wanting this is bullshit, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a beneficial move in general.
> The worst thing about all of this is that the irresponsible borrowers have in many cases come out on top. People earn more from their house than they do by going to work.

This more than anything made realize that the UK has a broken system, and hard work and talent don't really pay off. Most people who are wealthy in UK either had dumb luck (e.g. those who are able to retire off of their house values despite anything else they did in life), or cheated the system somehow (tax evasion/avoidance, unfair laws that benefit the few, etc.).

The rest of us suffer under oppressive income taxes and punitive walls (the standard allowance reduction, lack of joint tax burden for families), that make it very hard to ever climb out of the gutter.
Agreed. I ask it to see just how honest they are. I once had a female candidate say they undercut an employee because they were afraid they would take her job. I still hired her, especially because of that answer, and she worked out great.
My Nexus 6 regularly ate micro-usb cables, even the good ones from Anker. Eventually even the port failed and it could only be charged wirelessly. So far failure rate on my Pixel 2 and Pixel 4 has been nearly zero and the only cables to fail are ones I believe I tripped over. Perhaps it has gotten better? If you're still using a 5x you might want to grab a 3a or 3b cheap for an upgrade.
On seeing this tweet I wondered who would be the first to do it, and how long it would take.

Congratulations, from a fellow hacker - what's it been, 2 days? That's really impressive speed, especially considering it's nice looking.

A lot of people would confidently assume they could knock this out in a couple of days no problem, but it'd actually take them a few weeks at minimum. I had a post on the front page a few weeks ago on the topic [0], perhaps you saw it - I could learn a lot from you :-)

[0] https://boxci.dev/blog/why-it-took-12-weeks-to-ship-an-mvp-I...
Out of curiosity: Amanita poison I thought mostly attacked the liver and leads to death in much less than 6 weeks (more like a few days, maybe a week). So I assume the 6 weeks means massive effort in the ER to stabilize the patient without liver, maybe some advanced blood filtering?
The numbers are more or less similar to various competitors, but it's not a problem if you need pageviews, just need to get in touch.
Bare Metal Bullshit Packet is going to be my EDM group's name
By giving them the key?
Do you mean the halting problem in Turing machines?

Okay, we have a proof that a machine can't solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine, but we can build algorithms that solve it for some cases.

Now, can a human solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine? We obviously can't, either. Make the machine complex enough and we can't wrap our minds around it.
What are your opinions on autonomous team members? I understand that organization is important, but is it possible to have an organization with minimum red tape by setting goals and let team autonomously execute? Would that reduce management burden?
The right to move freely
Hey - icon set? What do you mean by icon set? :-)
Interesting, is this a universal thing?
"we lost the backdoor key and its in the wild" constitutes the NSA "discovering" and "informing" MS.
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Yes this will have a great negative impact for Google's adtech competitors who unlike Google do not have other means to spy on users such as Chrome, search engine, Accelerated Mobile Pages, Gmail, voice assistant and so on.

But Google really has no choice here due to aggressive campaign by Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft who boast with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention ( https://webkit.org/blog/8828/intelligent-tracking-prevention... ) implementation blaming Google as a company which does not value users privacy.
Google would lose privacy-conscious users otherwise.

But it is clear for me how all this anti-thirdparty cookies situation will go further: server side third party ad trackers -- this will bypass Same Origin Policy and will pose a privacy and security threat for users and websites even more than todays third party frontend ad trackers.
I broke countless keyboards and mice (and not a few motherboards) due to PS2 rotation
I'm not sure how to respond to your post as you've made my point: The songs Mercuriadis has purchased the rights to are not passive income for him. See my response to your sibling poster.
Senator calls for an investigation of the ad-blocking industry
The thing is sometimes hard things are actually easy because there is a simple solution that hasn't been tried because people haven't worked on the problem because it seems hard and they don't feel smart enough.

The trick is to recognize these situations.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was run by US Public Health Service which is currently part of the HHS. The FDA was founded in 1906, although it has earlier origins, which is well before the study was begun.
RJ-45 and USB ports are exactly the same width. If you plug in a USB port blindly, you can feel it make contact with the sides of an RJ-45 port.

I found this out trying to fix someone's printer. I even un- and re-plugged the cable and it still wasn't detected. It wasn't until I actually looked at the back panel that I noticed the printer's USB cable was plugged into an RJ-45 network jack.
The world seems to be a bunch of subatomic particles bumping into each other, not 'will', wonder what Schopenhauer means?
25-pin din parallel port connectors were D-shaped and invented in the 1970s. And there were directional connectors that long predated that.

USB's rectangular is simply a horrible oversight. Comparing it to PS2 is pretty lame. What about comparing it to nearly every other connector out there?
I suppose it was already being exploited by another nation. Now its toasted. Glorious!!!!
If they sell products to high school dropouts, do they also hire high school dropouts?
We have an internal website with user-maintained groups/content. Every week, you get an email with major updates from the teams you want based on the important information they've been telling themselves. That's been useful for culling and focusing the information flow to each person.

In my experience, newsletters don't work well for internal communication. As you said, keeping the content relevant to a wide readership is too difficult. It does, however, work well as a recognition mechanism. A team seeing it's achievements blasted out to the company is very motivating, even if they are the only one's who notice it.
Good review.

A related good piece of advice I got early in my career was to do the tasks no one else wants to do. Less risky than "do the hard things". You quickly become invaluable and those tasks become less painful the more you do them.
I built a little app for myself just because I wanted timestamps and geostamps: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chronible/id1397942944
Sounds like Fry's Electronics.
Hey! I think you'll have to wait until the thing is done and then you can buy it from Amazon and other bookstores. Couple of months, I guess.

The publisher is in charge of choosing the excerpts, but I'll feed that back to them.
My girlfriend and I travel, near and far, with scant to no planning. If we don't speak the language, we learn a little first, then more as we go. We keep an open mind and don't shy away from meeting new people. The more we improvise, the more fun we're likely to have. Our empathy expands and we return with fresh ideas. It becomes addictive.
Here’s my problem with panpsychism: I don’t understand why it isn’t immediately self-refuting via Ockham’s razor.

What I mean is, my understanding is that panpsychism posits that all matter has some degree of consciousness somehow, i.e. even an atom has a little bit, humans just have a lot more. Fine. But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being. However this property agglutinates, it has to be something more than just “amount of matter”; it has to be some function of which matter and how it is arranged.

But that’s just the materialist position! “Matter can make conscious systems if and only if it’s arranged in a particular way (possibly, but not necessarily, meaning a way that involves simulating a Turing machine)” is materialism. At that point, the fundamental quanta of consciousness is an unnecessary addition to the theory that can be discarded with no difference.

I fully grant that I’m a programmer with very little philosophical background, but I just don’t get what the panpsychist hypothesis buys us that we didn’t already have.
People trying to save scents from extinction
Go at Cloudflare
I did some research into this a few months ago, and it turns out you're right.

If a company is serious about learning about its customers and how they use their products, then it invests in Adobe Analytics.

If a company is looking for something that's free, quick, and "good enough," then it goes with Google Analytics.

Just like if a company is serious about advertising, it hires a professional ad agency. If it's looking for something cheap and "good enough," it go with Google AdWords.
Ask HN: Budget phone for timely security updates?
My Google Pixel is now (~15 mo after purchase, new) no longer receiving security updates. This phone was a gift; I generally buy used phones with long lives ahead of them. Google offers only $25 to buy-back a perfectly functional phone as credit toward a Pixel 3a.

The 3-yr lifecycle for security updates and lack of replaceable batteries appear to have killed off the used market for phones that receive timely updates. New phones appear to impose a substantial security tax: (Pixel 3a: $400, 28 months to end-of-life, iPhone 8: $450, comparable-or-shorter life?)

What are good budget options for ensuring a secure mobile digital life?
Bpftrace – high level tracing language for Linux
Just the images on the front page, guess a bit bigger than icons!
I agree that the Firefox change is recent, but not Safari. Safari has had 3rd party cookies disabled for many years now.
It’s sexual, and therefore probably not a good expression to use unless you know what you are doing.

But it’s a somewhat eloquent term, in a way.

(It refers to getting sexually aroused, but only mildly)
Gifs? Don’t low quality animations make it hard to read?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicko_van_Someren

Excerpt:

"Van Someren has published numerous papers in the field of computer security. In 1998 he co-authored a paper[13] with Adi Shamir introducing the concept of key finding attacks. A statistical key finding attack was used by van Someren to locate the signature verification keys used by Microsoft to validate the signatures on MS-CAPI plug-ins. One of these key was later discovered to be referred to as the NSAKEY by Microsoft, sparking some controversy.[14]"

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

Excerpt:

"The Microsoft Windows platform specific Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (also known variously as CryptoAPI, Microsoft Cryptography API, MS-CAPI or simply CAPI) is an application programming interface included with Microsoft Windows operating systems that provides services to enable developers to secure Windows-based applications using cryptography. It is a set of dynamically linked libraries that provides an abstraction layer which isolates programmers from the code used to encrypt the data."

===End Excerpt===

Observation: MS-CAPI -- would seem to be, prima facie, similar to Linux's OpenSSL...
A friend and I had the same need for an email diary service in 1998. DailyDiary [0] has been online ever since :)

[0] https://dailydiary.com
I like Eric Weinstein and he is obviously brilliant, but sometimes he comes across as liking the sound of his voice a little too much--or too theoretical. For that reason, I really enjoyed the interview with Tyler Cowen--Tyler challenged Eric on some things that made for an overall excellent conversation.

But, yea - there are not a lot of interviews out there with that kind of access to Thiel, so it was greatly enjoyed.
Update: My site now has a text-only version, and it even works with just cURL:

https://anderspitman.net/17/curlable/

Thanks for all the feedback!
It was the plan, and the most common result. But no, it isn't universal. For one, not all usb cables even include a logo or marking for the top of the cable.
"I hoped the article would explain also why the above happens"

If I had to guess, I'd suspect that it's because there are a couple of ways to get it wrong when plugging in a USB drive or cable. You can get the orientation wrong but you can also accidentally put it in at a slight angle and have it catch. In the later case, just slightly adjusting your approach would get it in, but because you know that there is a chance of you having got the orientation wrong, you automatically assume that that was what happened and flip the orientation instead and end up flipping it back when you realize you were right the first time.

I suspect that the reason we make that assumption, that we got the orientation wrong and not the angle, is that that's actually what happens the majority of the time when we fail to insert a USB connector. We discount the angle problem because it happens so infrequently, and when it does happen we just get the impression that we got the orientation wrong, twice, which is something that sticks with us. Hence, the sense that there is a paradox about the orientation of USB connectors.
> "Extremely inconvenient to the powers that be" sounds like "major story" to me.

Doesn't have to be, it could be already broken stories without potentially dangerous or personally identifiable details redacted. Or any of a number of other things. All we have here is speculation, and speculation is not a very good way to determine the nature of an organization.
The beneficial move would be for Chrome to accept the industry-standard choice of letting users easily block all tracking and fingerprinting... including Google's.

But that wouldn't be good for Google. This is the exact reason an ad company should not be allowed to own a web browser.
It's a great idea to have a template for writing secure Electron apps, but this particular template should only be used with caution. I don't think it has been reviewed or endorsed by the Electron team as actually following those best practices, and I see a few issues just skimming from my phone:

They're trying to expose IPC to the renderer in an unsafe way. See their discussion on this GH issue https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/21437 (referenced from the main readme as blocking some features they want to implement)

On their "building a secure app" page they complain about Electron's quick release cadence https://github.com/reZach/secure-electron-template/blob/mast...

> The trouble that I've found with electron, is that their release schedule is crazy, with only a few months before each major release. We know that electron is a young framework, but it is hard to keep up so quickly!

Electron releases quickly to pull in critical upstream security fixed from chromium.
That reasoning is explained pretty thoroughly in the best practices documentation https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/security#17-use-a-curre...

I haven't looked at their implementations of the other security best practices, so these might be the only red flags, but I'd still recommend against just blindly copying the template without understanding and verifying the best practices they're attempting to implement.
IMO: Old browsers will still send UAs, since obviously they’re not going to update for this change. New browsers should support enough of the web platform to obsolete this practice going forward.
Planet Scale SQL for the New Generation of Applications – Episode 115
Can someone explain the technical details around this? Specifically:

1) How are writes/updates propagated to all other containers/hosts? Is this based on the assumption that the containers will only read from the database, and not write to it? And that any writes being made externally, only need to be deployed to new containers, and it is fine for existing containers to read stale values?

2) Is there anything special about SQLite that enables this design? Or would someone else be able to do the same thing with a config.json file that is then read and parsed by each instance of the application?

3) I'm presuming that latency is vastly improved because real-time network requests are avoided. Can the exact same result be achieved by eagerly prefetching the config data at startup? Deploying a complete copy of the SQLite database to all containers, is in essence doing the same thing.

4) How does this solve the problem of "major incidents were happening all the time"? Is reading from a RDS (or similar) database really that fragile?
> it would be trivial for microsoft to prove it by just signing a message or anything with the corresponding private key.

It would also be trivial for Microsoft to call up the NSA and say "they're ON TO US and it looks bad to our customers, can you please sign this message?" That is, the test you suggest proves nothing-- you can't prove that only you hold a private key.
Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence – Public Books
> "the systems won't even be around in 2020!".

I think in many cases the thinking is: s/the systems/I/
now do gauge invariance
I like seeing general analytics about a site because I am nosy so I enjoy seeing "This blog post was visited 300 times" type information.

But I would hate to start seeing "You, personally, have visited this site 14 times" start cropping up because it would remind me how much information on me is available. Intellectually I know this data exists in Google Analytics, but actually seeing it would creep me out.
I often am thankful that I work with software and not contracts. Could you imagine writing software where the instructions are not guaranteed to work the same each time, and there is no way to test before going into production?
The pharmaceutical industry is full of unscrupulous bastards, news at 11.
Using Deliberate Practice to Level Up Your Python
See xkcd: Ten Thousand https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ and be enlightened
Google to phase out user-agent strings in Chrome
Free RDP&VPS cracked liste 2020
You may want to check Countly as well (https://count.ly) - one speedy option is to deploy using Digital Ocean https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics .. Countly is a perfect fit for both web and mobile, so in the future if you want to track your mobile apps as well, it is the go-to solution.
Sort of.

You can't lie that you do support something, but you can lie in the opposite direction. And for sites that legitimately need that feature to function, you don't get much benefit -- if a site genuinely needs Chrome's Native File access, saying that you don't have it just means the site won't work.

But there's a grey area past that, which is that sites that don't need a feature, but are just using it to fingerprint, can have that feature broken without repercussion. If a news site requests Native File Access, and I say "I don't support that", then whatever.

This puts engineers in an interesting position. You can't just break your site whenever the full range of features that every browser supports aren't available, because:

A) You want to support a wide range of browsers, and if your news site doesn't work with multiple browsers you're just losing potential market.

B) A fingerprinting metric that just rejects every browser that doesn't support everything is not an effective fingerprinter. At that point, we basically have the corse-grained approach you're talking about.

The problem with this approach is that when a site requests capabilities, you need some way to figure out whether or not they're actually required, and whether or not you can lie about them. Permission prompts are... well, there are probably UXs that work, but most of them are also probably too annoying to use. In practice, I suspect that manually tagging sites is not an insurmountable task -- adblockers already kind of do this today.

One thing to push for with Client Hints is that it really, really needs to be an API that's interceptable and controllable by web extensions.

The same thing is true of fonts today -- if you lie and say you already have a font that you don't, congratulations, your text rendering is broken. But you can still lie about not having fonts, and you can still standardize your installed fonts to a smaller subset to make your browser less unique.
$15.6k is generous considering the license requires them to pay $0. If the author of libcurl wanted to profit from it, then he wouldn’t have picked a license that allows it to be used for free with basically no restrictions.
A Basic Guide to Elasticsearch Aggregations (2019)
Equinix has long been in the cloud game. Most public clouds have at least some presence in their data centers or using their global network backbone. I do believe this is their first venture into direct to consumer cloud sales assuming they retain Packet's business model.
Here's an article on Green Mountain from Inside Higher Ed. It contains a little more detail.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/24/green-mountai...
They're not getting rid of cookies; just third-party cookies.
Apple refuses government request to unlock Pensacola shooting suspect’s iPhones
Interesting insight. I would say that most of us s/ware engineers don't live in SV though, and often a salary bump truly is a tempting and significant incentive. But I'd like to think ICs are being better accommodated now (I know we are, in some more progressive places).
It's also the reason why credit card benefits are worse in Europe, as I believe there are restrictions on what the card companies can charge for transaction fees.
where i paint over with bright nail polish to make it easier to see (and also have seen the usb symbol on the wrong side)
Indeed. Google Chrome's statements about the dangers and risks of blocking third party cookies is classic FUD. And it's solely about protecting their own data collection.