skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do we know that WhatsApp doesn't spy on messages?
Yesterday I was talking about WhatsApp with friends, trying to explain how end-to-end (E2E) encryption works. One of my friend (who is not a techie) said I was naive to believe Facebook couldn't see users' messages, considering its awful track record on privacy.

I was about to confidently reply something about how, with modern encryption, you don't need to trust the server to pass messages securely... but something held me back.

I was so sure about the system privacy, and suddenly I wasn't.

I know WhatsApp claims to implement the Signal protocol, which is considered secure (so far).

But some questions popped in my head:
- What's preventing WhatsApp from not using the protocol properly, or at all?
- What's preventing WhatsApp from, say, also send secretly the message to itself? Or a digest of it? Or just some keyword matches? You know, for "analytics"? Or to comply with obscure child porn laws?

I use WhatsApp every single day, so this thought makes me pretty uncomfortable. The more I think about it, the less I'm sure. What I find the most convincing is that, if such a backdoor existed, a WhatsApp employee would have leaked it on HN already...

What do you think? Do you trust WhatsApp on this?
I emailed him once too, he never replied.
Funnily enough I often have the opposite issue. I will sometimes start writing up a bug report, spend a couple of hours trying to get my thoughts down on paper, then give up because I have neither the time nor energy to finish. I kind of wish there was an option to submit a voice recording along with some code snippets :(
Back in the days there on Nokia S80 phone there was the infamous Phone class that had about 30kloc in the constructor ;-)
Back to Agile's Basics with Uncle Bob
Employer's NI is 13.8%, so multiply a normal 'pre-tax' salary by 1.16. Then again, the Americans are presumably getting health insurance so it'd be a wash.

I have a sense that Americans are just better at negotiating (taught to do it, and actually do it) than Brits. Anecdotally I know a whole bunch of people who could be earning a lot more (not only in software), but they have this sort of meekness that leads them to believe whatever number the other party says is what they have to take.

Individually that may not make up all of the difference, but collectively it probably does (e.g. the market depressing effect if most people don't bother).
What flags, specifically?
All the Best Technical Programming Practices in One Single Talk
Do esteemable acts on a regular basis. Start with simple things like holding the door for others or picking up what they drop. Let that evolve into an attitude of service; what can I bring to this situation that is actually helpful? Don’t seek recognition of any kind for such acts, the reward for doing the right thing is doing the right thing.
> but the convention in the UK is to report pre-tax salaries.

This isn't 100% true, you never see the employers side of national insurance for example.
Is it because they taste different?
Hospitals Give Tech Giants Access to Detailed Medical Records
>Netgear Managed Switches (for Business)⁰

>⓪ - the switches are Netgear GS-108Tv3

are we not allowed to use any sane method of doing footnotes? Who does this? Why would you even use footnotes in internet comments other than to specifically screw over anyone who uses a screen reader?
This was answered on the Gist in a comment[0] linking to a tweet[1]:

Things to do instead of shipping TLS certs and static private keys to consumer-grade routers you sell by the thousand:

Generate a unique keypair per device.

Use this keypair to communicate upstream, in a similar fashion to CloudFlare's Keyless SSL.

This keypair you generate on the device would need to be preloaded at the factory, unique per device, and the public key would need to be stored in a database.

When a TLS handshake comes in, you verify the entire request is signed by that keypair before signing it.

Delegated online signing for a TLS handshake isn't even in the top 10 engineering challenges for cryptography in the 2020s.

Oh, and, if you don't have connectivity to upstream and your need users to connect to configure something?

Fallback to HTTP reachable via port 80 on the private IP for the server.

[0] https://gist.github.com/nstarke/a611a19aab433555e91c656fe1f0...

[1] https://twitter.com/CiPHPerCoder/status/1219228544548720640
Use the “No Maintenance Intended” badge:

http://unmaintained.tech/
For background, read this fantastic blog post by the same author, Mohammed AlQuraishi at Harvard Medical School, from a year ago:

https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Teachers absolutely do take pre-existing knowledge of pedagogy, apply it, discuss it, modify it. There's tonnes of publications on the topic; groups form to reflect and promote ideas at every level from the single school to government.
Yeah, also people who are blind and use screen readers will have it spelled out char by char each time as its assumed to be an acronym.

Use bold, italics, text-marker effects instead.
I almost get the feeling that a lot of HN commenters actually pride themselves on writing terse comments devoid of emotion and sensitivity to the receiver/reader. Too often, I write such comments myself, as well. It seems to be part of a larger effectiveness trend, down to even keeping vocabulary as minimal as possible, and avoiding literature because it's too descriptive, a waste of time.

Is it tied to HN or hacker/startup culture, SV mentality? To pride oneself on being an effective robot? No care in the world except building the next great thing, damned be everything else? Maybe it's about the types of people attracted to computers? I hear the same kind of response daily at work, I mean, generally, we're not known to be the most socially intelligent group.

Thanks for your work BurntSushi, Andrew, ripgrep is great.
It is because they don't decide with logic or thinking but feelings. They fall for the soldier cult or lies to chhildren quaint notions of friendly local police officer and the generic corporations always bad and you get that moronic result.

That or way too much faith in the democratic process without extensive oversight and power. Either way it is the result of taking lies to heart when we are up to our necks in them at best.
Yes. I'm in. Would be fun
The Trouble with Typing Type as Type (2015)
I appreciate the point the author is making, but why is this a problem of the api provider? And why would api providers be incentivised to implement the solutions to this problem?
"I used SoftICE extensively from 96-00'-ish ... to the extent that as a teenager I had single-step dreams and dreams where I tried to hit CTRL-D.".

That.

wrt everything stopping while using SICE, I remember looking at the windows clock and seeing 02:00AM , and thinking "I'm still on schedule", turning my head and seeing the sunrise from my window. Look at my watch: 06:20AM. Woops!
Libc qsort() isn't quicksort in several of the popular libc implementations. For example, it's (usually) a merge sort in glibc. http://calmerthanyouare.org/2013/05/31/qsort-shootout.html
Can you elaborate on why bubble sort is fast on huge dataset?

Also, If counting based sorting algorithm is faster in practice , why we are not seeing more of it in database system?
> Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another

Sounds literally like every other white collar job, or in fact ideally any job ever. I agree with OP, we devs are sometimes a bit too full of ourselves, when in fact mostly we have simply just another engineering work. I used to think that way too when I was young, naive and inexperienced.

My wife is a doctor, and when I compare, we have it too easy considering our compensation. When was the last time your bug killed a human being / destroyed their health for good? When was the last time when you got dragged into court for a bug you submitted 3 years ago and jail with permanent loss of license was a real option? Getting 25$ for 12-hour weekend nightshift?

Instead we have remote work, digital nomads and people humble-bragging about 400k FAANG compensations being at the low end and barely livable.
Immuteble describes data, whereas an API call is more like a function call, in which case we'd call the property "referential transparency", which means, a function always returns the same result for a given input value.

"referential transparency" makes up half the definition of a "pure" function, with the other half being the absence of side effects.
Andrew (burntsushi) is a tech leader. He's got a huge heart and a whole lot of grit. I see him enduring as a high-profile open source project author. How many battles a day does one accept before reprioritizing life decisions? One too many strained interactions takes a toll on anyone. No matter how much grit someone has, everyone has a limit defining how much is worth enduring.

Andrew should not have to deflect burning arrows fired in his direction on a regular basis, and when they are fired he needs be able to cut them down before they make a mark. Further, while he has developed the required skills, his counterparts haven't. I remember an interaction I had with Andrew where he mistook something I said as a flaming arrow and acted accordingly. Realizing this, I immediately considered how what I said could be misinterpreted and did not take offense to his reaction. His situation is far different from mine and he's fighting battles I can only imagine.

For his sake, and that of others, there needs to be a concerted effort to address the difficulties that open source authors are dealing with. In an organization, an employer facilitates various types of training to help employees navigate challenging situations. Ethics and professional conduct are learned, as well as conflict resolution. I've taken such training a number of times and continue to learn from them. There is a huge chasm between knowing and doing, though, so hands-on training is required to internalize these skills.

I propose a concerted effort to provide "soft skill" training for the technology community. Users and authors of open source will benefit. I realize that this alone will be insufficient but it is one concrete step that can be taken in the immediate future to begin to address challenges that many people are having.
N2O4/UDMH rocket explosion for comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqW0LEcTAYg
Then there is the false sense of security coming from a skilled player deftly obviating tech debt.

Until that player departs, and the team is buried.
And policing jewellery districts reduces the crime statistics :-)

In London "Hatton garden" has the highest crime rate due to all the jewellers and smash and grab raids using scooters.
Probably cheaper to do that then have to follow up on any robbery. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Show HN: A weekly newsletter of firearms training near your location
I've been a subscriber of HackerNewsletter for a few years now and recently started wondering why something similar didn't already exist for the firearms industry. (TLDR: most firearms trainers are great at what they do... but rarely allow you to subscribe for email notifications of upcoming courses, etc. The majority of their "marketing" is done through their Instagram pages.)

In my own case, I wanted to be able to find courses that might be near whatever location I might be visiting for work on a particular week. So, a couple of weeks ago, I started scraping their signup pages in an effort to organize the courses as best as I could. Over the past few weeks, I've focused my time on pulling in more courses, adding structured data tags for SEO purposes and doing small PPC tests. Overall, I'm seeing a ~20% conversion of a visitor-to-email-subscriber.

There's still a lot of improvements that need to be made (ie, better filtering/searchability on the site, etc) but I wanted to share here to see what advice I might get.

It's taken me 10+ years of tinkering with Rails to get this far so go easy on a noob. :)

Direct link: https://pewpewtraining.com
Here it is:

> The analogy with technical debt is that each new fix or development is like a new block coming in, which you need to integrate with the existing code. If you hack it in a quick and dirty way, it’s like leaving holes in the Tetris structure: you’re making life more difficult down the line.
Haha you’ve got a point. I have ruled out companies for their hiring practices before, so I guess that would be par for the course.
That is not my interpretation of the EUPL, which defines "Derivative" as software "based upon the Original Work or modifications thereof". I don't think that including this could reasonable be considered as that.

I could add a clause about it to make it unambiguous, perhaps, but it strikes me as rather redundant as it seems fairly clear to me, unless I missed something?

> Monetizing open source projects is incredibly difficult, and simply pasting a GPL or EUPL license text into the project doesn't make them easier to monetize

Sure, I don't disagree with that. But as mentioned non-copyleft includes the risk of a certain kind of abuse that I don't really want to take, either.
It's a Beauty and a Beast New Render Surfaces of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5
I didn't say people dreamt of becoming "white-collar slaves" or "9-5 drones". I said a lot of of sceners dreamt of working with software development - which of course includes games. The general notion was more along the lines of late-night hacking sessions to put the finishing touches on the magnificent game that would earn you fame, fortune and street cred, not writing API specifications in Word Perfect.
But do you see something equivalent withheld from your paycheck in the US? Not that I noticed, when I was working there.
Pure also means no side effects, which isn't, strictly speaking, what OP means :)
Is hitchhiking “free transportation”? What about walking?
Depends if you want to go back to the 1920's when private security guards could carry tommy guns
congrats! mind sharing your story?
Fair enough. It's not a big gap.
The Thinkpad T22 shipped with 128MB or 256MB RAM out of the box, which ought to be enough for an Alpine Linux install if nothing else. It's sad though that its specs are not enough to support a reasonably-modern OS in a more straightforward way. We should not have to rely on old bootleg Win98SE or the like to make this first-class hardware useful.
For those unaware of cryo-EM (cryogenic electron microscopy), I highly recommend reading into it. A structural biology renaissance is upon us.
There's some work happening in the blockchain space because people are starting to create their own smart contract languages. I don't know of any other space seeing so many 'new' languages being created in such a short space.

I've seen jobs advertised by teams developing Cardano, Tezos, and Ethereum. It's worth looking at their project pages, seeing which teams work on it, and then checking their careers pages. I know IOHK have been hiring in the space although that's specifically functional compilers - however nothings up on their careers pages right now.
The way you define focus sounds a bit strange to me. Focus is indeed needed for programming - that's why you need to be in the zone when coding - but it's the focus we refer to usually.

As we live in a frantic attention economy now focus is indeed very valuable as dealing with the ongoing bombardment with distractions is truly expensive.

Just think about all those remote workers getting reminded all the time that some new Slack, Flock, Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, e-mail messages arrived.

All the companies above make money by hijacking our attention and forcing us to focus on the work we do for them for free instead. Imagine us focusing at the code instead.
Eh are we reading the same article series?

> Luanda Leaks
An investigation into how Africa's richest woman, Isabel dos Santos, acquired her fortune

How Angola's state oil firm was left with just $309 in its account
Published: 19 Jan 2020

Revealed: how Angolan ruler's daughter used her status to build $2bn empire
Published: 19 Jan 2020

The diamond deal that rocked Angola
Published: 19 Jan 2020
How to Improve Service Level in a Call Center
>My take was that she seems to have a similar background to a typical Russian oligarch.

This is a fairly accurate assessment, based on the pillaging of resources, borne out of a privileged position. The usual pilfering of other assets such as telecoms, banks, apart from oil and diamonds, there is a litany of dodgy loans, stakes in foreign companies, expensive art collection, super yacht, a sprawling property portfolio and more, as is de-rigueur for anyone looting a country, is also mentioned in the article.

The Luanda Leaks are the subject of BBC Panorama tonight at 2030 GMT.
I use "golden goose" example.
>so multiply a normal 'pre-tax' salary by 1.16

I don't follow the logic of this. The amount of your quoted salary that you get to keep (for a typical SE salary) is going to be somewhat higher in the US than in the UK. (Not massively higher - Americans often inaccurately apply the stereotype of high tax Europe to the UK.) Whether the deductions are for employee or employer taxes is moot from a financial point of view.
perfect example of how the "well, i have nothing to hide" response to privacy concerns underestimates the scope of the issues involved.
Ask HN: What is good enough C/C++ benchmark suite for sorting algorithms?
Of course, this is a very broad topic. Nevertheless, is there a ready-made set of tests that shows the advantages and flaws of well-known sorting algorithms in the context where the std::sort or qsort() are used?

Actually I created some improvements to a quicksort-based algorithm and it work pretty for target scenarios (i.e. faster than std::sort, that based on introsort). So I want to check/estimate these improvements on a good suite of test datasets to get a better picture of the pros and cons.
> I would love an ML-ified scheme

From my brief experience with SML, it felt a lot like typed Scheme with different syntax (it even has call/cc).

Maybe there’s room for a coffeescript-like sexp syntax for SML
You have a link to the corresponding paper?
It seems to me that ignoring the claim would be irrational unless checking it is not extremely hard. The fact a claim is made by a known huckster affects our perception but says nothing about whether it is true or false. Outside purely theoretical exercises in logic, there are no liars who are guaranteed to lie in every single claim they make.
For now I found the Christopher Swenson's collection (https://github.com/swenson/sort) . This is more than nothing, but it is clearly not enough.
(By the way, one day I sent a picture of a dress to my sister-in-law on WhatsApp. She told me that Instagram sent her an ad 5 minutes later, with the exact same dress.

It was so unlikely to be random that I checked right away to see if pictures were safe.
It turns out that pictures received and sent are shared within all Facebook apps - Facebook, Messenger, Instagram -, at least on iOS)
The idea (if I understand it correctly), is that you can get a signed API resopnse from anywhere, and the public key from the signer to verify the legitimacy of the data in the API response without having to call the API again.
> You cannot walk for more than 500 meters at a time to switch between two stops.

Edit: plenty of the other rules outlined would rule out hitchhiking
So it's ok for police to guard a NFL game, but not the movement of millions of dollars of goods?

How does the police draw the line on what work to accept?, do you apply and then a committee decides?

Can a police officer do this after his/her regular job?

Laws for "peace officers" don't have a start time and end time (ie 9-5), they are police 24/7.

Or let's just avoid all these stickey edge cases and say "if you can pay xyz / officer / hour they will guard your event,stuff etc.
I suspect this is a native ad. In the jewelry world, people move massive amounts of jewels in and out of tuscon arizona during the largest show every year. They come from around the world. Tiffanys on the other hand, moved it 50 feet. Major players make multi million dollar deals in Tuscon. Does stuff get stolen occasionally? Yes. Usually semi precious.
Advanced full screen debugger?

Was cool seeing it go into DOS interrupt handlers
Drone.io for me, simple and dockerized
Execution performance is one measurable factor among many that I happened to use as an example.

The problem with bias is that it’s self-serving and lingers well past a first impression, like a compounding problem. Any bias exists to cognitively qualify a subjective decision in the absence of stronger criteria. The self-serving nature of bias is that it typically exists as a form of insulation filtering whereby things less like the person, or their proximity of comfort, are discarded for perceptions of compatibility.

Compatibility sounds important when building a team, however that factor is unmeasurable and often poorly defined in any existential capacity. Instead this is often an unspoken means of eliminating competition, diversity, and insecurity from a person(s) tasked to make a personnel decision without the soft skills to warrant such.

In my experience in the military you don’t need interpersonal compatibility, either real or perceived, to build an excellent team that cares for each other and achieves high performance.

Since the problems resulting from bias linger past a first impression the consequences of such are continuous. If, for example, bias is heavily present on a team a candidate who survives selection there will face frustrations moving forward when confronting or challenging the perceptions of the bias present. That person will be limited in career mobility internal to that organization.

> There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality

That depends on who defines quality and how. At just about every place I have ever worked developers define quality in a way that is utterly foreign to business concerns or product quality at the end user. Without some highly specific written definition of quality I find it’s an excuse to reinforce like-minded opinions.
> The transport must run regularly, not just as a one-off event.
> 1. Is the most racially diverse country in Europe

I haven't been able to find any reliable statistics about this, and it probably depends on how you define "race".

> 2. And which just elected a government with a historically huge mandate, partly because the opposing party was plagued by accusations of anti-semitism?

This is just bizarre. It would be far more justifiable to argue that some people voted for the government partly because they wanted to end Freedom of Movement, to reduce immigration into the UK. Discussing why these people wanted reduced immigration is more complicated, though since there's no real economic grounds for it, the main possibilities are misinformation (fuelled by certain media, because it sells well), scapegoating and xenophobia.

Also, what about the 32 % of people who voted for Labour despite it supposedly being "plagued by accusations of anti-semitism"?

In any case, since elections are never about one issue, drawing these sorts of conclusions is dangerous.
> Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist.

Unfortunately, children being used for smuggling stuff or as bombs on legs is nothing new :'(

Humans are cruel.