skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my experience it's not just a blacklist, any non-blessed traffic is slowed down to a crawl (on the order of double digit kbps). This also applies to getting content from China.

(that said, it's pretty reasonable to assume Zoom is not throttled given how important it is in the buisness world)
If the user is supposed to enter arbitrary SQL queries, then it is already allowed. (SQL injection should still be prevented when using forms that do not say you can use arbitrary SQL code, though, even if it is the same database and even if it is read-only and all data is public. This isn't because of any kind of vulnerabilities, but merely to avoid bugs in the form in case a user enters something unexpected.) However, you may add some access restrictions to the database to ensure that it cannot be written (how to do that depends what database you are using; with SQLite, there is an authorizer hook, defensive mode, read-only mode (when opening the file), file permissions in the operating system, progress callbacks, etc). Also, if you are allowing users to enter arbitrary SQL queries, please link to the documentation so that the user is aware what variant of SQL is in use; there are different variants of SQL which have a few differences from each other. Being able to enter arbitrary SQL queries is helpful, but this should be done properly, which is by documenting this feature properly.

In other words: If the only query form is for the user to enter their own SQL query, then SQL injection is irrelevant. If it has such a query form but also has an additional form that does not use the user's own SQL query, then the additional form without the user's own SQL query should be protected against SQL injections, by passing parameters properly.

But there is another possibility too, which is to use remote virtual tables (which could then be accessed using SQLite on the user's own computer, with a suitable extension installed (I invented a "remote virtual table protocol", although possibly improvements could be made)). This allows the user to do such things as use JOIN queries with other data, create temporary tables, do their own formatting, etc.
Show HN: cRUL-like network tool to test server timeouts with ease
Zoom is no longer blocked in China.
The extension does not send your data anywhere. It only requests access to linkedin.com domain and all data stays within your browser. Nothing is sent to websites or outside your browser.

We don't collect any data and fully respect your privacy. The source code of the extension is not minified or obfuscated in any way so you can review it in your browser if you are sceptical.
Problem is, that's how they get away with everything.

They fix nothing, then wait for somebody to need them enough, or have compassion enough to handle their mess.

Basically here, they are saying: we didn't listen to all those competent people that told us we should have cleaned this system a long time ago because one day it will bite us back. We didn't think technical debt was a thing. It has always worked. And it's virtual. And IT is always exaggerating anyway.

Now it does bite them back, and do they take responsibility ?

No. They ask for competent people to have mercy and save the day because the situation is dire. Because this is special this time, unlike the other times.

This is completely not like with the health care system that never got fixed and now the medical personal is paying for it so that the people don't suffer as much from this mismanagement.

They will not pay more. They will no fix anything. They will not respect you more, change the way things are done, or take any responsibility for this. And in fact they will probably guilt trip you into give up your health to overwork on this with less resources and for less pay because it's an emergency.

A friend of mine works in an hospital right now. She has been at work for 15 days straight. They already told her she won't get paid for the days she was not supposed to work but did.

Then as a final fuck you, if this turns out ok, if the catastrophe is avoided, they will get the reward.

The nurses or the programmers ? They will be forgotten in a week. Nothing will change.

But for the mismanagers, their superior will thank them for managing this situation well. They may even get promoted and have more responsibility.

So you have the choice between saving the money of poor people now and reinforcing the suck of the whole system, of letting people suffer for a chance of a redo and purging the ones that lead to this.

This is a terrible choice to have to make.

Especially since we have the empathy to make us discuss this, while clearly they don't.
Show HN: Afctl – CLI to manage and deploy Airflow projects faster and smoother
I don't have this impression. Can you explain?
China Is Reopening Its Wet Markets. That's Good
When it comes down to costing them money to do the right thing, they don't.

The investigation outlined in this would have cost a lot of money.

The headphones won't turn off, but Bose refuses to make it right for the users

There are plenty of countries (outside the US) with powerful enough consumer protection agencies to force Apple to change it's practices (eg, the ACCC in Australia[1][2]). If this really is a widespread manufacturing fault we'd see them forced to act elsewhere.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/public-registers/undertakings-regist...

[2] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/apple-australia-gives-...
It’s rent in the sense of rent seeking. You control an asset and let others pay for using it, if they want to. Rent seeking is not a very good thing but it’s a minuscule part of Apple’s business model. I also can’t see how a small developer can find it unfair, 30% for access to the best mobile ecosystem seems a pretty good deal to me, and I’m a mobile developer. I can agree that it seems expensive to Amazon or Spotify though.
This online entry is a pretty good starting point https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/
Adafruit Thermal Camera Imager for Fever Screening
It’s not about the size of the fee, it’s about what you charge for.
I'm always amused by how often just being nice to people manages to unlock customer service doors. Listening to people in the offices I've worked in talk on the phone has been pretty eye-opening about how terrible, entitled, and just plain mean people can be when things don't go perfectly.

I'm sure there are bad customer service people out there, but I really wonder how often reports of bad customer service are actually just pointing out that the poster was a jerk. See also Yelp reviews.
I put a related question on Computer Science Stack Exchange a week ago. Linking it here in the hopes that HN users roll-calling here will shed some light.

Ref: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/122066/does-the-under...
> The US government has effectively delegated responsibility for the crisis to state governments

Because it is the state governments' responsibility.
Flour and sugar have been sold out everywhere I've gone since the quarantine started in the bay area.
Probably their new editor, Eclipse Theia which is basically VS Code with some Eclipse extensions. They claim it's more modular which allows it to run on desktop and cloud and under neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607
Show HN: Defe – Tech Feed Aggregator for Developers and Tech Enthusiasts
I'm starting to increasingly appreciate comments like this, because they appear regularly on both sides of the ideological divide, helping me keep my binary tree fresh and balanced. A few that go the opposite way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706668

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004

Sorry if that sounded snarky—I don't mean to pick on you personally, and I don't disbelieve you. But the perception is explicable by the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Only two of the FAANG companies get most of their revenue from ads, and all of those companies are weathering the storm rather well (except perhaps Google, but I can’t say for certain).

Facebook is struggling to keep up with site demand; more people are using it to communicate while shut in during this period of uncertainty.

Apple has enough cash on hand to not sell a single product for months - maybe years - and still keep paying everyone. But they have plenty of subscription-based revenue coming in anyway.

Amazon can barely keep up with demand to the extent that they are hiring 100,000 people and denying shipments of nonessential goods. (disclaimer: I work for AWS but have no inside information here; I read the same news stories everyone else does.)

Netflix is entertaining more people than ever who are stuck at home.

Google is, well, Google, and like Apple, awash in cash.

It’s not the FAANG companies we need to worry about; it’s the startups that were based on great ideas but needed the space and investment to incubate them but are now rapidly being depleted of oxygen.
Nice idea. You could even do this with all HTML5 videos possibly?
I was delighted to see that both idris and agda have JavaScript backends. Is there actually any productive use for that? Particularly looking at all the excitement around Reason .
Will Zoho’s Software Eat the World?
I have the QC35 and besides the noise cancelling they are crap. The bluetooth drops off when I'm sometimes only 8m away, the battery life is low, but the most annoying thing for me is the multi devices connectivity. They will connect to both my iphone and mac at the same time, but never in the way I intended to. A lot of times I need to turn off the bluetooth on the iphone, or turn the phones on and off several times, or desperately try to connect/disconnect the phones to the mac, do this a few times a day and see how it feels. There is no option on the phones to switch between devices, or even to stop multi connectivity, the phones know better and will connect to the device which is 'closest'. Good luck when you sit at the desk with the laptop and the phone on it. The only way is to use the Bose supplied app, which is full of dark UX patterns. Every time it asks me to create a Bose account, to connect my other social accounts, etc. And it doesn't even solve anything, do I really need to open my iphone and open the Bose app to turn off a connected device every time I start the headphones?

By comparison my Beats solo are much better, for range battery and connectivity, but they don't have noise cancelling.
Nuking Malmö is equivalent to nuking Copenhagen, and after that NATO is in the game.
Oops, missed it because of the lighting I guess. Still, why put the mini-documentary inline and not the original? It was also linked from the mini-doc, but that's indirect.
A git alias I use is "git preb", which stands for "pull with rebase". It rebases my commits on top of origin using a merge algorithm, which is smarter than the default which uses patches and often causes merge conflicts. Its definition is - iirc, typing this on my mobile - "pull --rebase -s recursive". Now I don't push any useless merge commits like "Merge origin/develop into develop".
I've been wondering about that. The last time I baked bread was 10+ years ago. At the time, I got professional results with just a pizza stone and a spray bottle of water. The water replaced the steam oven and did a great job of gelatinizing the crust. Unfortunately I don't think I can get a dutch oven during the lockdown.
Great idea! Made my first sourdough bread yesterday after a couple of weeks of trying to get a starter going, the process is a fun and interesting project, especially while staying at home, and you don’t need much to get started (flour, water, ideally a cast iron pot, scales). Tastes amazing and reduces social contact of having to go to the shops/bakery too :)
Small trial finds hydroxychloroquine is not effective for treating coronavirus
Flawless. It's connected to my work laptop and phone at work, and my personal laptop and (same) phone at home. Never gets confused, just "$device_name disconnected" when I leave one place and "$device_name connected" when I get to the other.

It's so jarring to use anyone else's Bluetooth products after using them. It's so smooth.
Notes about Google CloudSQL for Postgres
Show HN: SecAlerts – Weekly vulnerabilities and version releases in your inbox
I have both Sony WH-1000MX3 and the much cheaper Sony MDRXB950N1B, and I prefer the latter for it's rendering of bass sounds. MX3 has better noise canceling but listening to electronic music with heavy base on the 950's is so much more fulfilling, feels like being at a concert. Maybe I am just a bass freak.
I think that's true, but it's also true that the distinction between curious conversation and ideological battle is a useful and actionable one, and that's basically what the site guidelines are staked on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Are you using Haskell by any chance?
Wow, this is even worse than ReCaptcha. And I hoped for something better.
The one annnoying thing is that, while they generally work well without the app, there's one button that can function as either:

- activate Google Assistant or Siri

- disable noise cancelling

Given that I don't have the app, I can't use the former anyway. However, to set up the button for the latter functionality, I have to use the app.

In other words, I can't turn off noise cancelling, and have a useless button on my headphones.
Simple ventilator plans open sourced by Rice
Oh come on. It's always the good users who worry about this.

(I looked at your comments and the ones I saw are not only fine, they're exactly what HN is for.)
After you start with Clojure, I can recommend doing the problems on http://www.4clojure.com/. I had a lot of fun doing the problems and learning from solutions from others.
I don't understand your point but I relate to the idea of hiring more Lisp moderators.
I switched from Bose to Sony and haven't looked back. The capacitive controls on the headphones are crap but I never really use them so it's not a big issue for me. Rock solid for music and getting work done.
Hmmm. Sounds like every other mission critical emergency project in dire need of leadership, design and development. Perceived need way ahead of actual need, and legacy hiring practices (degree Requirements for legacy coders with 10 years experience and a degree, ha) not realistic to effectively recruit talented resources.

Job interview should include - what’s the definition of a legacy system?

Has anyone ever seen an emergency mission and time critical project where the SDLC WASN’T the first thing sacrificed for expediency? And the second is QA & testing - their delivery date remains fixed while development slips and slips.

The point is, if you don’t have leadership that has been there done that, knows what is coming, is solving tomorrow’s issues (like finding and hiring resources) so when the project gets to that point, the resources are there and ready, then you are in the false start phase that will continue until you admit it, and begin again with refreshed plan and clear minds.

Most SDLC’s do not recognize the false start as a very important first phase that must happen when a time critical emergency project is the only thing that can save the day. How long that phase lasts is dependent on how long it takes you to bring in the right leadership team to take control and begin anew.

Since they are in panic mode with the Governor pleading for “COBALT” programmers you know this is in the Coming off the rails / false start phase.

Some things you can’t short circuit around and luck out. not on really important stuff.

It takes some good minds with excellent experience to noodle out what needs to happen, how to make it happen, line up the political and technical ducks and make it happen.

This is a technology project using a rock solid mainframe programming language, COBOL. Don’t belittle it. Many of the nation’s largest banks still use COBOL based systems to process their mission critical applications, so quit whining about old mainframe technology being so obsolete.

Those of us who have been there fully understand there are no longer many or any users who understand what entire systems do anymore - because those legacy systems have evolved over the years, projects all justified by headcount reductions in the user community. That means all that knowledge is now encapsulized within that cobol code in those legacy systems.

So. If someone needs help responding to critical needs that were not anticipated (like an increase 100 or 1000 or 10,000 times the workload - New Jersey?), technology alone is not going to solve your problem, not quickly enough. You need many more people to do the processing of paying the unemployed until technology can catch up and take over.

Pay me now or pay me later I always say.
If you don’t believe my predictions, Call me when you become enlightened and I can help you then.

Until then, good luck.
PS: A legacy system is every system in production!
Funny just saw this comment on reddit. Related https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/comments/fuuuy...
Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects
Reworking StringIO Concatenation in Python
The qc20s are earbuds, it's been my experience that they die more often. Partly from being in bags and pockets, and part from the wire-bud connection breaking down. Part of the reason I only buy mmcx models, so you can replace the wire when it wears out
COBOL Is Trending on Twitter
> Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing. That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

In absolute terms, perhaps. But if you are moving away from taking jobs out of self interest, and into doing something for the public good; you might as well check out https://80000hours.org/ and pick the job that has the most positive impact.

My guess is that working any kind of 'normal' programmer job and giving 10% of your income to an effective charity would beat out enduring the bad boss in New Jersey.
I'm late to this thread because for some reason I only just noticed it. Thanks for the nice comment! It's fun to hear from someone who is just curious.

I do think of writing about HN, but not a blog post, because I can't think of a good reason. I don't enjoy writing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431262), at least not that kind of thing. Somehow I maneuvered myself into a job that is basically being a writer...of that kind of thing. Writing because you enjoy it, or were born to do it, is the best reason; failing that, it could be a means to an end. But what end?

I do intend to write about HN in a different way. There are core moderation topics I've been posting about and returning to for years now (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang). I'm inching my way towards distilling those comments into mini-essays, or discrete paragraphs, about the principles of HN: what kind of community we want HN to be and how to get there. I think there's an opportunity for a step change if we become more conscious as a group about what we're trying to be and why.

The "why" is critical because the rules here can seem a bit lame if you think of them only as constraints. Many creative minds are the sort that don't see why they should respect arbitrary constraints. For such people, the way to win them over is to derive the rules from first principles: to show how it's in their interest to follow them because that's the way we get to have, and keep, an interesting community over time. That's what I try to do in moderation comments, at least on good days: not to scold people, but to persuade them.

My intention is to distill all that commentary into a series of posts that can form sort of the case law, or midrash, or zoography, of the core topics around HN community. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I already do that by linking back to previous moderation comments using specific keywords. Some examples:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There are at least a dozen of these. My idea is to consolidate that material into little essays that interpret, explain, and basically act as hermeneutics to the site guidelines. Then maybe, in the future, I won't have to type out a whole new comment on $topic; I can just link to the canonical explanation. In other words, I intend to write more in order to write less! Other than that, for learnings and patterns about moderating HN, your best bet is to lure me with the right kind of beer. Or just ask a question here.
Stremio and popcorn time. It's netflix for torrent. No popups or animation. I think there is one banner somewhere, but it's so discrete I don't even remember.
Aren't less people dying overall though? People aren't out driving as much or taking other risks.
Obviously the signal-to-noise ratio of those that have a bad episode of C19 is much greater than those that just feel unwell or are completely asymptomatic.
All the Covid-19 Startup Discounts (list updated daily)
Sharing failures seems like the best way to make progress. I mean we're talking about SCIENCE here. If we don't have a comprehensive list of what does not work, that's just going to make progress so much slower.
I have been baking sourdough for 2+ years and I don't think people should take the timing too seriously. Yes it's good to loosely follow a schedule but if you don't the bread will still turn out fine. I don't think I've ever followed the exact same schedule twice. A few times I flat out forgot about the dough and shaped it hours after I was supposed to, and it still came out amazing. Sourdough is very forgiving. The most important thing in my opinion is mix it thoroughly in the beginning and to do the stretch and folds properly so the dough has strength and can hold it's shape for the later bulk rising.
And that's why H1B is a sham. They should just auction off those visa slots to the highest bidders.

(The auction would also give politicians a nice incentive to find ways to increase the revenue received.)
I wonder if minimalism is better understood as 'enough' rather than 'less'. A carpenter can have no more tools than the they need, even though that may be hundreds of tools.
Same answer as always: audience acquisition. This guy has nearly 500k followers on Twitter so more people will see his idea if he just posts a tweetstorm there. If you just post a link to a blog most people won't click through and fewer people will join the discussion.

But here's an unrolled version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1246445485860118528.html
So, my wife has been making bread a while and it was always 'chewy'. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but there was no crust to the bread. After researching, the consensus was that the lid helped keep the steam in and brown the bread. You only leave it on for half the bake, typically. But the difference between bread on a stone and bread in a proper enclosure is truly night and day.

Thinking through not having access to a proper dutch oven, water would probably work but I'd think you'd still need a cover of sorts, even if makeshift foil.
They aren't asking for so much. They want:

1. understanding the language (COBOL)

2. IBM mainframe experience (JCL, DB2, VSAM, SDLC)

3. credentialed (4-year degree)

Note that SDLC is a layer 2 network protocol in the SNA stack:

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