skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The level of entitlement here is absolutely insane.

If the community cares about security then should this happen:

> Sure, but once you’ve forked, now you have a fork only you use, but which you know is more secure than its upstream for reason X. That’s an unstable equilibrium—you want others to know of your fork, and to switch to it, so that other downstream projects can also be more secure.

The community would move onto your secure fork and the author of said fork would become a maintainer. As Dave Rand, the CTO of AboveNet used to say to newcomers who used to say 'X should be done!' -- "Thank you for volunteering - you are now in charge of X."
I know a teacher but she still has a few years before she'll be eligible.
Startup Ideas 2020
That won't last forever. I know Mozilla and Digital Ocean just had layoffs.
The problem is that instructions are text. The sort of people who think the computer will magically know what they want are the kind who won't read or understand instructions.
I would also add here carbon dioxide extraction for carbon burning electricity plants. This carbon dioxide can be then used locally to grow new fuel for the plant.
It's funny—my experience is pretty much opposite. At a certain scale AWS will provide really world-class support beyond just troubleshooting. DO forwards you to (granted, fairly in-depth) documentation an expects you to read it and engineer your own solutions.
Engeneration is an interesting very high tech "teleportation" alternative:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f

You basically send your digitized DNA & personality copy to the target (needs to have reasonably high tech infrastructure already in place), where a blank body is grown & "flashed" by your personality. And voila, you are now walking the surface of another world couple light years away from your destination. (And you likely also now effectively exist at least twice, but oh well.)

There are serious ethical and security issues with this technique, but it might still be useful none the less. :)
I think Github (and other services that host OS software) needs something like "thank you box", that's just alongside Issues. Even if I am not able to contribute to some project I use and like (mostly because I don't have enough technical knowledge yet) very often I would like to - at least - say how much grateful I am for what this person is doing. There is some need for positive energy or gratitude, as we - who are happy - won't usually post an Issue saying that we are happy, everything is working fine. It seems then that there are only issues, and people who are angry or unhappy seem to be the loudest.
How else, we who are grateful but silent users - can help maintainers and contributor to know that there is large or even larger amount of people who are happy and even amazed by their work?
I’ve never seen any evidence of this happening in real life, but here on HN (and on Slashdot back when I read it) it’s common to see people insist that they would never hire anybody who _had_ any sort of certification. The reasoning usually goes something like “everybody I’ve met who had that certification was an idiot, so I can extrapolate that everybody who has it is also an idiot”.

Of course, there are people here who say the same about college degrees, too.
That’s fine. It’s even admirable if you to do that. But it isn’t and shouldn’t be mandatory.
on one side I completely understand the need for healthy market competition in tech industry. However, you have to realize the amount of innovation and products FAANG companies (and Microsoft) have rolled out -- it is unimaginable how we would be able to function equally efficiently both at personal and commercial level.

On personal level for example,
I use gmail/google search/rely on google to tell me weather and search news and do FX rate conversion, do some unit conversions, etc. I used to own android based phone and it made life simple to have gmail compatible app and the likes.

Similarly, I can use amazon for shopping, trying out / learning AWS and even get kindle to read ebooks should I desire. heck, amazon provides entire infrastructure to efficiently deliver my parcels --- better than my Government's mailing program.

- Similarly majority of Business world runs mainly on backs of Microsoft (when it comes to corporate tooling and computer OS).

- Even take example of Apple -- their products are worldclass and its integration with its own suite of products makes life so much simpler -- iPhone, iWatch, their storage offerings, etc.

Now imagine having to utilize products between dozens of companies instead of these giants who you don't know would be able to survive in long run. And those blaming these tech giants for lack of collaboration for a market standard -- sure, that is correct but remember it was much worse to integrate products and services among different vendors back in 1980s and 1990s when you had dozens of medium and large companies.
Unless grasshoppers are eating those components, that isn't relevant here at all.
"because the kinds of candidates I saw with certificates were generally inferior and couldn't code their way out of a paper bag"

Or in this case, because they are entry level and its their first programming job?
> That's an interesting assertion and frankly, crazy.

That's your quote. If you understood debt even at the level of a freshman in an econ 101 course or hell, if you've ever taken out a loan, you wouldn't have written it.

My assertion is as basic as saying the sky is blue. Want a citation for that?

Hint. Debt is used to purchase assets. Assets have utility. Depreciation is a thing. If utility is more than the cost of borrowing and depreciation over the timeframe of the loan, it's worthwhile.

And that's not even considering that governments can print money, so the consideration isn't can they pay it back, more like what's the cost to pay it back in inflation.
Seems pretty robust at the moment.
Agreed 100%. May I add one point?

The OSS maintainer should clearly, upfront, preliminarily, outline how do they govern the project: how much are they open to change the project's core values, how responsive on average will they be in terms of opened issues and PRs, roughly how often would they engage in technical architectural debates -- stuff along those lines.

I feel many people get toxic if they had unrealistic expectations -- and that's of course not okay.

But IMO the OSS maintainers can be a little more preliminarily proactive in managing expectations from earlier stages.
Seems you're right - https://www.wired.com/story/capital-one-paige-thompson-case-...

> Thompson's prior role at the company didn't lend her any insider access in this case.

Thanks for the fact check!
I'm not sure what you mean by safe in this context. A language that forces type casts to be explicit? That throws runtime error when invalid/imprecise cast is done?
If there aren't enough iPhone users to worry about, then why force us to replace all of our cables, chargers, docks, etc?

You can't have it both ways!

One year ago, there were 1.4 billion[0] of us, each with one or more (many more, in my case) cables, docks, cradles, etc. That's a lot of waste to churn up for "not enough iPhone users."

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202736/apple-devices-io...
Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money.

If they're close to being profitable (likely given their past fund raising, and how long its been), why would they want to sell more of their business?

They may also want to finally go public. 8 years is a long time to wait for a return. And it seems to me the stock market is tired of these unprofitable unicorns doing IPOs (at the moment anyway).
It's nice to see Microsoft embracing Rust.

I'm sure crustaceans would love to see if they can extend it's reach through their product range.
Well for one thing it would make me able to go around claiming that generally black people are criminals and rapists and that it continues to be so because the young here in my city are being sucked in to the "monkey see, monkey do" phenomenon because they have low emotional intelligence and distrust authority, blah blah. That is based on the past decade of my life and the observations I've made and the experiences I've had.

I of course don't go around claiming such because it's nonsense and stupid.
A popular vote would be awful.

Would incentivize just campaigning to get as many people to vote as possible in the highest density population centers, meanwhile most people don't even pay attention to politics and have no interest in it.

These people really should not be voting in the first place and a system which encourages vote harvesting even more than it already is encouraged is not a step in the right direction.
> Open source participants are volunteers and owe you nothing.

Equally, someone gets hit by a car while crossing the road. I don't owe them anything to go help them but society, morality and being decent are these unwritten rules that kind of do force you into owing something.

Yes, I agree, volunteers don't owe anything but there are some unwritten rules that when broken should be frowned upon and I'd probably go as far as saying should be held against them.

As a reader of this, you could be thinking, wow this sounds extreme but here is the easiest example I can give.

- Someone writes library

- Library comes insanely popular

- Author refuses to allow the community to take over original project

- Author wants to maintain status, ownership, etc

- Entire community now suffers because the author doesn't owe anyone anything

"Just fork the repo", is the most common response but let's be real, nearly nobody uses the forks and every other repo that uses this popular library is using the non-forked repo.
Digital Ocean is pretty similar to Vultr: they offer a straight easy API for starting up VMs and managing DNS (I've written a tool that uses both of their API[1]; been meaning to do a post on the differences).

It's kinda nice because you're just putting up VMs and there's not the type of vendor lockin you get with AWS/Azure/Google. That being said, DO is obviously trying to compete on that scale now. It has managed databases to compete with RDS, load balancers, and even managed k8s.

They want to be a real AWS alternative, but when you start building around these components, you get locked in. If they're laying off people, it could adversely affect startups thinking of building around their services.

And for people who think "Well I can just use another terraform provider" .. it really is not that simple at all. AWS/Azure/Google/DO are all very different. They have vastly different terraform providers/modules and you're pretty much writing an entirely new setup per each provider because of they way they handle firewalls, security, IPs, inbound-outbound, etc. The OpenStack API or any type of real standard has yet to emerge that branches all these offering. If you want "cloud" hosting (and most do because managing your own Postgres/MySQL clusters with backups and failover is a fucking bitch; especially if you're just starting out and want to get going fast), you need to realize you might need to be locked in very early in the game.

[1]: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/lib
Not to compare or anything. But I’m active at r/Golang and I find that the community is comparatively better there. I was shocked as to how would someone told anyone to never write a code again!

Maybe this because some members on Rust subreddit believes that they are more intellectual than others? It seems like a cultural thing, go people don’t bother to be seemed as smart or so and that’s possibly reduce the aggressive competition that naturally arise in places where intellect, high performance etc are very important metrics?
That's like asking bees not to sting. Corporations seek monopoly. It's just what they do.
I don't want to sound too blackpill, but anymore I really feel like political-party-based virtue claims - from both sides - are, by and large, expressions of virtue theatre that are designed to garner support.

Some people in politics really do care; but at least in the US, it's hard not to look at the state of things and come to the conclusion that the system lends itself to corruption that goes so deep that nobody with any real influence has a vested interest in "virtues" outside of using them to curry favor with the general public.

Again, I apologize for how jaded this sounds... but it's really hard to feel any other way.
Off the top of my head, safety and taxes.

Ride hailing is regulated, in part, to ensure that people aren't being taken advantage of. It's also regulated to make sure that taxes and fees are being properly collected.

Taxis and private bus services weren't always regulated, but they became regulated because they took advantage of their customers. Similarly, regulations are placed on ride hailing to that passengers get what they paid for and there is at least some accountability.
Great set of links. I like to add the easier stuff, too, to get people started.

If you like distributed systems, Hillel Wayne's book on TLA+ will let you see how model checking can easily spot errors that are hard to test for:

https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484238288

Spin has been used in similar ways for a long time:

https://spinroot.com/

Alloy is a model checker that has a GUI for exploring models. It's more focused on exploring structures. Their site links to a book, Software Abstractions, that will teach you a lot of concepts without needing a strong, mathematical background.

https://alloytools.org/about.html

Pamela Zave used both Spin and Alloy to find errors in real-world protocols:

http://www.pamelazave.com/compare.html

If focus is programming (esp low-level), SPARK Ada lets programmers annotate code with the expected behavior before that's fed into provers that confirm or refute the code operates that way in all situations. Barnes and Barnes wrote a nice book teaching both it and Praxis' Correct-by-Construction method for software development:

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/High-Integri...

Many people don't make it through the stuff teaching formal proof in Coq and so on. It's really hard with few gains along the way. TLA+, SPIN, Alloy, and SPARK Ada are much more accessible with a higher work-to-reward ratio. Those easier results might justify further investment in learning the hard stuff.

Those wondering about how formal methods are used in a lot of situations might like our list on Lobsters. We have a number of professionals and enthusiasts there who stay posting both historically significant and cutting-edge work.

https://lobste.rs/t/formalmethods
What if the shoes were nothing more than adaquate, and the marketing alone increased the athletes performance? It is already a very self-selecting subset of many elite athletes with the inherent bias that brings. But shoes are only going to improve, and soon other brands will be an advantage. I see this as no different to tires in auto racing getting lighter and grippier as materials science progresses. This offers us some insight; The way auto racing deals with the problem is to make the manufacturer provide tires/shoes for the whole competetion. Its brilliant marketing, and the advantage issue is solved.
Should be, but for some reason that escapes me, I remember that not being the case.
If you're referring to formal verification tools (which help programmers mathematically prove that their program has certain properties). Then it doesn't need to extend into all the edge cases. Usually if the machine tells you it can't create a proof you add more checks to your code or pick the properties so that they're easy to prove. There's no need for completeness.

If you're referring to anything your parent mentioned, those tools already exist.
Markets at their highest, a 10% deduction on corporate tax rates? Sounds good.
As we get closer and closer to “no need for cash”, I find with food delivery I always want cash around for tips because it is the only way to know for sure what happens with the money. I shouldn’t have to do that.
In my country, the stock market is at an all time high, even though gdp growth is at a 13 year low and unemployment is the highest in 40+ years.

Stock markets often don't reflect the actual state of the economy
I want to add two (maybe very) controversial comments.

1). It should be considered RUDE to contact a solo maintainer in any way relating to the project (email, issue, pull request, etc.). You should ALWAYS fork the project and use the forked project on your own terms.

Most people write their projects, on a whim, on a Saturday, for a bit of fun. They do not want to be shackled to a hobby for the rest of their lives.

2). Opening an issue and opening a pull request are IDENTICAL requests for effort.

Think I'm wrong? How many people were so incensed by this renegade maintainer that they FORKED the repo?? Why didn't people FLOCK to the safer fork? Why did people still care about the original repo??? The answer to those questions underlie the fundamental problem of open source. No one wants to do the work. People want to work on what they're passionate about. But they don't want the responsibility of ANOTHER FULL TIME JOB.

An issue is a request to write "native" code. A pull is a request to maintain "foreign" code. I have never had a large, successful open source project. To date, I've had one repo with ONE issue and ONE pull request. Both required more effort than I ever wanted to give.

I have stopped opening issues completely. If a project is maintained by one person, you will never hear from me. Large projects with paid maintainers will receive issues because I believe it the only appropriate time to do so.

---

Here is a simple flow chart for contributing to a solo maintainer's open source project.

1. A problem has been discovered.

2a. I do not know how to solve the problem.
-> Move on. Don't reach out to the maintainer in any way.

2b. I can write a fix for this problem but I don't want to maintain this project in its totality.
-> Move on. Don't reach out to the maintainer in any way.

2c. I can write a fix for this problem and I want to maintain this project in its totality.
-> Fork it. Don't reach out to the maintainer in any way.
> It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you

Imagine if the linux maintainers took this attitude.

This attitude severely undermines the credibility of opensource.

If users of opensource libraries can't have confidence that those libraries are written correctly, we might as well all go back to commercial software.
Dudes, why don't you just fork the repo and run with it. License looks good.

It doesn't matter if code is full of secbugs, author doesn't like patches, or whatever. Code is open source. You can't make it look like your vision. Fork it.

Of course, no one in the mob appears to have had the wherewithal to do that.
> Number of early-bird signups: 4750/5000 maximum

Looks like a static line in the mailchimp web page, so "5000" - "4750" => "250" spots left

How do you prevent mailchimp from recording email addresses?
Security isn't a special license for being nasty. Criticism is fine, even with some urgency due to security being important.

But software done for free by volunteers carries no obligation of a legal or even a moral kind, whatsoever. This is completely different from selling software or doing work for hire or donations. There a moral and often even legal obligation exists.
Well, in theory, it should be impossible to complete these specific certs without having the background general knowledge in the first place. In theory.
IKEA Bans Single-Use Plastic Across All Stores Worldwide
I don't buy this comment at all.

I've worked with hundreds of Data Scientists, many new to the industry and they all know that R and Scala are important and popular languages for ML.

Majority of Data Engineering today is using Spark, which is written in Scala and even when you write Python code using it you can't escape Java/Scala internals being exposed.
They're not shutting down or winding down. I am guessing that they hired a lot of people to start building an AWS competitor which is a steep battle (even with funding) and goes against the grain of DO philosophy - keep things simple and target DO for small-medium businesses (sub-100 employees).

Investors went into DO thinking of a AWS/GCP/Azure unicorn, but after 6 years it appears to be a small rainbow pony than an almighty unicorn. This restructuring appears to be a realization of what happened with that vision and how it panned out, I may be wrong though.

I personally love DO, I don't want to deal with AWS complexity for basic needs. Minimalism and simplicity certainly has value.
Ask HN: Less culturally loaded terms for “Master/Slave”“
I'd like to move us away from those terms and would love to hear from others what terms they have come up with. There is "primary/secondary" but it seems long and doesn't type nicely. What ya got?
Revenue Multiples in B2C
What a surprise, yet another case where letting companies do whatever they want leads to them serving themselves to the detriment of everyone else!

Simple solution: if a unit is vacant for 12 months, the city gets to use the space for housing the homeless.

I suspect this wouldn't house the homeless, because property owners would do everything in their power to not let this happen. Instead, we'd quickly see rents drop so that supply actually connects with demand. Either way it's better than what we're seeing.

But I'm sure the HN crowd will demand that we pay the rich to do the right thing, since incentives are the only way we are allowed to do things and have been working so well so far.
That sounds more like a recipe for missing the window of opportunity, that should over time fix all our environmental & resource issues once and for all thanks to the (in comparison to Earth) limitless resources of Earth.
I've worked with Rust only rarely, and never built anything real from scratch with it myself, so I'm curious: what tools are available to assess the safety of dependencies? I agree with you in principle that "you are responsible for your dependencies", but how would you go about doing that for a large complex dependency like this?
totally. I mentioned this in another comment but it feels like a skill floor/ceiling thing to me.

AWS/etc heavily reward you for investing time/money/etc but can be a bit more difficult to get started with without investing resources immediately, whereas DO is very easy to get up and running on but can be difficult when you encounter anything more complex.
Has a break up ever worked historically? The US telecom industry is not a great example of competition.

I'd much prefer laws preventing user lock in and lowing the burden of starting a competitor to these companies.
And they can feed a stream of your dissident/criminal thoughts to the state thought police. Win-win.
EM redshifts alone would invalidate that hypothesis. It doesn't matter how fast you travel, EM redshifts follow specific laws that we cannot see breaking at any point observed in the universe.

It is more likely that physical laws have localised variations that we cannot tell from any discernible distance. Maybe pockets of vacuum do shit that we cannot fathom and if we observed it, we'd break the code for reality.
The Deli Hustler
I do it all the time:

apt install python3 python3-pip python3-virtualenv

Python packaging is one of its worst warts, but the Python runtime itself is very easy to install.