skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am happy to send ANY HNer a free paper copy if you want to message me (kbe@mm.st). Thank you very much for any feedback or reviews!

Website: https://BlueScreenTheBook.com/

Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084GHLYSX

Free PDF: https://bluescreenthebook.com/book/BlueScreen.pdf

Free ePub: https://bluescreenthebook.com/book/BlueScreen.epub

Blurb: Peter Gustafson wants to save the world.
In the year 2984, Peter is an average kid with a secret; he’s a well-behaved tenth-grader by day but cryptographic entrepreneur and hacker by night. When the electricity mysteriously goes out in his hometown, Peter takes it upon himself to investigate. The adventure leads the young hacker to a large transmitting station and into a battle of wits with the greatest AI ever created. The machine requires a human to help "throw the switch" and give it full control so engineered the power outage as a test to lure its latest recruit, Peter Gustafson.
Definitely the Lazarus Forum as others have noted. In my opinion, it's a really delightful time capsule of how internet communities used to be before Facebook/Reddit. Insanely helpful and knowledgeable members that will answer any question, a bunch of eccentric characters, plenty of n00bs asking mundane questions, and the compiler developers themselves. Probably my favorite language ecosystem.

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php
> Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices.

I think it's also at least in part more commonly applied to those types of devices because they're generally more locked down than a laptop, leading users to risk bricking by trying jailbreaking them. Installing a custom OS on most laptops just isn't nearly as risky in terms of bricking potential.
On the one hand, I tend to agree with you. But on the other hand, I think there is a significant nuance - for many users going into recovery mode is beyond what they are comfortable doing with their laptop and so for all intents and purposes a laptop that can only be recovered that way is unrecoverable.

More generally, any issue with a computer can be fixed by a sufficiently skilled and determined user - maybe with some data loss. Even a broken firmware might be fixed by writing a new one, cracking the authentication mechanism, and building a custom rig to flash it to the chip.

It's all a matter of degrees and how much users can be expected to do which makes defining exactly what "bricked" means very difficult.
ACM Guide to Virtual Conferences Best Practices [pdf]
The first thing I always do is disable auto-updates. Auto updating does not deserve the level of trust we put it in it. Just a few months ago, Google's creepy invisible updater rendered people's Apples unbootable if they didn't have SIP enabled, which many people including myself have good reason not to[1]. Thankfully, I had already blocked Keystone Agent with an immutable folder.

This auto-updating treadmill we've been sold on is really beneficial for developers, but it causes some major problems for end-users.

I have honestly lost track of the number of times I have had an update cripple a device. My iPad got ruined, my PS3 lost Linux, iTunes removed p2p music sharing in a deceptive update, Cisco gutted residential routers and forced people onto their crummy new platform[2]... I could go on and on. And this isn't even counting Android. I had a friend lose Miracast support in an Android update, minutes before he had to give a presentation.

And those are all examples of updates functioning as intended, even though they are against the interests of the users. I can add more citations if anyone is curious.

So no, if you use your device for anything important, then don't update it until you've made a backup, and had a chance to read up on any potential problems. It really says something that in this day and age, I've had to become much more vigilant about backing up my data than ever before.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064663

[2]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/29/1425210/cisco-pushi...
I think this is the saddest part:

was meant to resolve issues created by the 10.15.4 update in late March

The "fix some bugs, add some new ones" trend has certainly gotten more common within the past few years. I still remember when the official advice was not to install updates unless you were experiencing the issues it was to fix, but that wasn't really applicable to security fixes, and now official advice seems to be "always install" regardless of security or indeed usefulness.
Read the Room
Huawei P40 Pro camera review
I'm sorry you had that experience, but you'll note that this isn't what I'm actually suggesting; my suggestion is Python or another dynamic language on any platform so long as it's standardized and accessible, for which I give the example of Ubuntu, but I also mention that Windows with Powershell is an option.
The Diplomacy of Food
I wrote a blog post on this a while back:

https://news.purelymail.com/posts/blog/2019-06-21-deliverabi...

Unfortunately there aren't any easy answers. You'll have to be persistent.
For what it's worth, since folks are mentioning other extensions, my full-featured tab manager extension, Tabli (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabli/igeehkedfibb...) provides a "Copy Window Summary" action that will copy all open windows and tabs to the Clipboard as a nicely-formatted Markdown table.
Tabli was a "Show HN" items about 5 years ago and is still actively maintained.
Of interest to HN crowd: MIT licensed, no cloud component, rigorous privacy policy (100% in-browser), keyboard shortcuts for most functionality.
I wrote a Medium piece with an overview of Tabli a couple of weeks ago: https://medium.com/@antonycourtney/taming-tab-hell-with-tabl...
For my personal domain, I use me@chrismorgan.info. *@chrismorgan.info will reach me, and occasionally I give out addresses with a different localpart, either privately (for things that require an email address and I grudgingly agree to) or publicly (for a particular project, for convenient automatic categorisation).
Right, I mentioned PSP because jailbreaking was specifically widespread for PSP.
So, it's a like a wiki? It reminds me of the note taking app in Gnome, Tomboy. Didn't have the cool lines linking things though.
Woah, was just reading the chapter where it described you in the Hatching Twitter book. Didn't know you hung out here too.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned datalad/git-annex. It might be relevant. It stores references to binary data in a git repository. And depending on the backend, like bup, it benefit from differential compression. And it is highly peer to peer, and has git-annex-sync[1], which will synchronize branches with its remotes.

Datalad is based on git-annex, and already being used for sharing large scientific datasets[2].

[1]: https://git-annex.branchable.com/sync/
[2]: https://www.datalad.org/
I thought it was just me!
Alexey Guzey's post is probably worth reading first: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
We need to pay to read this article?

"This is a free preview of a premium members-only post."
Opps, my bad.

Original article link [1], direct link to iRobot [2]

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/iro...

[2] https://code.irobot.com/
People who don't know what a file is need to take a computer literacy class before they can jump into something like programming.

An IDE is fine to hide programming related magic for a beginner, but if it needs to hide things like a filesystem, file extensions, navigating through advanced options in simple software like word and internet browsers, or how to use google to help diagnose technical issues, that person is in way over their heads.
> I think we should carefully figure out what skills should be taught, and what the best way to teach those skills are, keeping in mind that for a lot of first-year university students this may be their first introduction to using anything other than a web browser, office programs, and video games on a computer.

This is absolutely spot on. I used IDE Good/IDE Bad mostly as a way to get people to think about this, and clearly it worked :)
I received one of these without the password leaked a few weeks ago. I was surprised to see people were actually sending BTC to the wallet address.

You should google the wallet address and see others are self reporting the wallet address and scam on a wallet review/scam sites. Very helpful.
Isn't NAT managed by your router? Or do you mean the "public ip" for your home is actually a local ip inside your ISP's network?
> If so, the community should change their standard so that public disclosure doesn't happen until a week after the update is available.

The update being available is public disclosure! For an experienced reverse engineer, comparing the files before and after the update is usually enough to pinpoint the security issue.
> as a Berkeley student, I was a bit amused/confused here, what's the sarcasm in the parenthetical about?

Mostly a dig at the UCB faculty and admin, who act like they're better than the rest of the UC. (I'm a UCSD brat.)
I'll take a copy, thanks. Sent you my address on your website.
Doesn't matter what the security community does - The security fixes are often obvious enough in the binary delta (Comparing all of the changed files on one system to another) that cracking teams can discover the flaws that were fixed within 24h, and have exploits available in 48. That's what drives the pace of these updates - The very real fear that fixes reveal your hand to the malware community.
If you look at old LiveJournal the short posting form felt a lot like twitter. Here's what LJ content looked like on the day of that Flickr post:

https://brad.livejournal.com/2000/05/31/

(Edit: switched the link to match the flickr post.)
What everyone else said, but also, it's a particular kind of turned-into-a-brick: you can render something useless just by running a few hundred volts through it; "bricked" means that it's still functioning in some way, but because of a configuration problem it isn't listening to external input and never will again (because it also can't hear any input that might fix the configuration).
This auto-updating treadmill we've been sold on is really beneficial for developers, but it causes some major problems for end-users.

How so? If anything, I think it's just as bad for developers, who expect a stable foundation to be able to build on.
Here is one procedure for possibly recovering an affected Mac which cannot boot: https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-restore-bridgeos-on-a-t2-mac-...

It requires a separate, recent Mac, involves arcane combinations of specific ports, keys, and timings, relies on luck and voodoo, and ultimately may not even work.
And best complemented by Quercetin, however high doses may be required.
yeah kinda. I saw in a post that something similar is possible with a wiki and an add-on or something like that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788795
Paris too: https://johnknifton.com/2016/02/14/the-wolves-of-paris/
>the only software-based fault exploit
Plundervolt came out around the same time and is similar, the authors may not have known about each other.
Unfortunate name.

There's a large open source project named this way already, and it's an operating system.
This blog post says nothing about why Roam is actually cool. It seems like a waste of opportunity, given that it has reached the front page and it's not really telling anyone why they should use it.

I have seen people praise Roam because of different features. Some say the ability to link concepts bidirectionally allows them to create the wiki they always wish they had, only now they can look at every single context where a topic has been mentioned. Others love the ability to use logic constructs to query chunks of text depending on their tags and content. For me personally, it's the ability to reference any fragment of the text so that it lives in multiple places at the same time. Hence, I can reuse ideas in different contexts. Alternatively, if I'm looking at a specific idea, I can tell where it's being drawn upon.

I have been using Roam every day for the last 2 months, and it has completely changed my note-taking habits. I have always strived to digitize all my thoughts, but for me, it never felt like I was fully engaged with my note-taking, Roam changed that. Because the main view is a daily page, it invites you to pour everything right there, relieving you of the duty of having to think if something's well placed under a hierarchy of folders. If you link your thoughts, then your thoughts will not get lost.

A cult is a cult when the members can't shut up about the cult and Roam is making a lot of noise right now.
If you need E2E encryption, you shouldn't use email.

If you think I'm saying no one should still be using email (the collection of standards and protocols, that is) then you are correct.
Why there are so many girls in comments on twttr
"Bricked" is relative, depending on your skill level.

For some consumers, if recovery mode doesn't work that might be the end of line.

However, there are more advanced users that can access the storage via another system and fix it there, hook up via serial port or JTAG and flash new firmware, or even desolder and replace chips.

On the far other end of the spectrum, there's going to be people that consider "doesn't show the normal UI after I press the power button" as bricked.
> "What makes the CLI interface to the compiler more essential of an abstraction than a GUI interface to the compiler?"

Build and CI systems don't go through a GUI IDE, making it required for developers to understand the CLI anyway.
To be fair, we were gonna do this anyway.

73
Are you advocating standardized tests as a hiring process? Have you actually hired people this way? How many? How well does it work? Does it actually solve any of the problems the article at the top was talking about, or any of the comments up to this point?

Other than the writing tests, math and science standardized tests fail to predict college and especially graduate school performance very well, and it gets worse for predicting career performance. Standardized test scores absolutely correlate with SES, according to the testing agencies themselves.

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R160...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X209021...

If you think Ivy League racial bias is immoral, why do you believe that “merit”, which is racially biased in the US isn’t immoral?

Graduates from Ivy League schools represent only a tiny percentage of people, and what you’re actually referring to is Harvard, not even the whole Ivy League, a lawsuit at one single school brought by people with a political agenda against Affirmative Action. This was your argument for dismissing credentials and claiming they’re a weak signal. Are you reconsidering this point of view? That seems like really thin evidence for the strength of signal that credentials do or do not provide. If you believe that standardized tests are a strong signal, and standardized tests are used for college admissions, then doesn’t it follow that gaining the degree credential is at least as strong a signal as the standardized tests you advocate?

I don’t know anything about the anonymous blog post you’ve linked to, but it’s not a scientific source, nor a meta-study, and it appears to be cherry picking and have an agenda. I certainly wouldn’t blindly adopt the “inferred” conclusions you read there, just because it all seems plausible or convincing to you. Claiming that money doesn’t affect IQ or merit or outcomes doesn’t even pass the smell test, there’s strong evidence that being poor hampers ability, even stronger if we’re talking about extreme poverty.

There are pretty well known, well documented problems with cultural bias, in the US and globally. Financial inheritance and pure financial advantage are real; money can and does overcome the disadvantages of low IQ. Being rich has immense advantages in every way. If you are convinced that social biases don’t affect merit and that being rich doesn’t influence merit dramatically, you’re certain that poor people must be poor due to IQ, and you aren’t at all curious about why some smart people believe “merit” might be a subtle way to perpetuate the ideas of Social Darwinism, then we should probably stop here.
Yeah, I'm not so sure. Security is about ensuring certain guarantees. If your configuration language is Turing complete, it's easy to get into a spot where you simply can't be certain of the final state of your system. That's not secure. Turing complete configuration language might be an instant red flag, like "perpetual motion" is to physicists.

It's possible to ensure termination of Turing complete languages by rejecting certain programs, but the work required is not something you'll find in a config file parsing library.
[RELEASE] OBD API Written in Kotlin
"Software Build Processes" is now a field in its own right. There's not just a compiler. There's a build process, a dependency manager, a package manager, a source control system, tools for updating the files those use, etc. It used to be just "make", but now each language has some kind of package management system. Crates, wheels, eggs, containers, boxes inside of boxes - it's complicated.

This is all trade-school stuff, really. It's like learning how to wire electric power, with wire size, type, and color rules, fixtures, grounding, and in the US per the National Electrical Code. There's little academic content there; it's just a mass of detail. Not too hard if it's written down and the documentation is current. Which it won't be at many companies.

An argument against teaching the details in college is that students will need to know the one they're using in great detail. Knowledge about unrelated build systems doesn't transfer much.

Then there's the machine learning parallel universe, with notebooks and YAML.
Eclipse seems to have carved out a popular niche in the field of embedded C and C++. (JetBrains, please take note.)
Japan is said to have tons of ECMO machines. I don't know how often they use them because that doesn't appear in the reports from the ministry of health, but it is worth noting that close to TWO months after people deboarded the Diamond Princess, there are STILL EIGHT of them in ICU, and 48 more still hospitalized, some of which were in ICU at some point.
The JDK comes with a powerful memory leak tool.

$ java -XX:StartFlightRecording:settings=profile MyApp

$ jcmd MyApp JFR.dump paths-to-gc-root=true filename=dump.jfr

$ jfr print --events OldObjectSample --stack-depth 64 dump.jfr

The tool will list objects on the heap, their path to the GC roots and allocation stack trace. That is usually sufficient to solve the memory leak. No need to create a large HPROF file or upload data to a server. Everything can be done in the shell.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/13/troubleshoot/troub...

Sensitive information, like credit card numbers, will not even leave the Java heap.
While the legislation introduced by the Australian government is certainly worrying and should never had been enacted, I've always operated under the assumption that if any government agency around the world really wants to get to my encrypted data or traffic, they'll likely be able to use/abuse some sort of loophole in their current processes and laws anyway.
Hey! I've just released a lightweight and developer-driven API to query and parse OBD commands.

It's written in pure Kotlin and platform agnostic with a simple and easy to use interface, so we can hack our cars without any hassle.

The installation and usage guides are in the repository.

I've been using this API in some personal projects for several months and decided to release it to the public now.
Looks like youtube account has been restored. Update from the medium article:

>> UPDATE: We’re back as of 8:39pm EDT April 11, 2020!
I received the following email from YouTube:
Hi there,
After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is once again active and operational.
If you forgot your password, please visit this link to reset it:
<snip>
Sincerely,
The YouTube Team
List of Easter eggs in Tesla products
But they do have a special advantage right now simply because their hedge removes a lot of the pressure they would get right now from the low prices. They have less incentives to cut production right now because they have hedged their output for a while so they can't be pressured as much at the negotiation table. Why would they want higher prices in the short term when it will only be at their disadvantage because even a huge production cut would not drive prices above the strike price of their puts anyways. It would only favor unhedged producers.

Also, It doesn't matter if their hedge costs as much as what it earns them over the years, the advantage they have right now is still real. And while yes, hedging is a common form of insurance in the oil industry, I don't know of any other oil producing state that hedges so much of their production.

So what I meant in my comment is that the revenue stability they have right now but other oil producers don't gives them an outsized negotiating power versus a country like for example Angola, that really cannot afford to not cut production if the Saudis demand it.
I basically agree with this. This is why, at the end of the post, I recommend Python in a Ubuntu environment, where the "build process" is a single step (`python my_program.py`), and packages can generally be managed with `apt`, which is a standard tool representative of a large class of tools, which are likely to be used at some point by a large fraction of CS students.
I might be misreading the paper, but it seems like that this is due to an unfaithful implementation of the hardware that allows for undervolting occur with the right mix of instructions, P-states, and software, rather than a fundamental design flaw?
Basically the equivalent of shipping a chip with the operating voltage set too aggressively so that the right sequence of instructions trips it up.
Question: under Linux is it possible to reserve a block of the hard-disk such that the application can definitely append only write in that block?

My understanding is if you're developing a filesystem or working with persistent memory, assuming this kind of control may be necessary; otherwise you're probably just confused.

That being said, it may well be that only appending helps the filesystem (eg. ext4) to keep the file contiguous. So if that's your angle, you probably want to learn more about your filesystem of choice.

-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extent_(file_systems)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allocate-on-flush

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/349769/linux-dax-di...
I typed this in using an IBM terminal with an APL ball during my first year of Comp Sci at Penn State Delaware Valley campus in 1976. I also typed in Trek-76.

There's nothing slower than tying in APL code using a hard copy terminal. At least we had an APL keyboard on the terminal - I think it was a dedicated terminal. Sorry I don't recall the model.

I never did get to think in APL - if you've never used it there are lots of specialized characters, some that do a ton of operations with one character (arrays for example).

Anyways it's in the wayback days of PL/1, Snobol, Cobol, BASIC and Turbo Pascal.
Author here! The Roam part is free. This is an edition of a newsletter that has three short things - the Roam part is first and here in full.
I can't seem to be able to find a link to it right now but there was even this one project/website that dumped the bindiffs for each Windows Update and their disassembly.
Seems like it - when i posted my comment the post had 3 points and mine was the only comment. Good to see that it eventually sparked some interesting conversation!