skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if you can reason about the code enough to come to a conclusion that seems like it must be true, that doesn't prove your conclusion is correct. When you figure something out about the code, whether through reason and research, or tinkering and logging/monitoring, you should embed that knowledge into the code, and use releases to production as a way test if you were right or not.

For example, in PHP I often find myself wondering if perhaps a class I am looking at might have subclasses that inherit from it. Since this is PHP and we have a certain amount of technical debt in the code, I cannot 100% rely on a tool to give me the answer. Instead I have to manually search through the code for subclasses and the like. If after such a search I am reasonably sure nothing is extending that class, I will change it to a "final" class in the code itself. Then I will rerun our tests and lints. If I am wrong, eventually an error or exception will be thrown, and this will be noticed. But if that doesn't happen, the next programmer who comes along and wonders if anything extends that class (probably me) will immediately find the answer in the code, the class is final. This drastically reduces possibilities for what is possible to happen, which makes it much easier to examine the code and refactor or make necessary changes.

Another example is often you come across some legacy code that seems like it no longer can run (dead code). But you are not sure, so you leave the code in there for now. In harmony with this article, you might log or in some way monitor if that path in the code ever gets executed. If after trying out different scenarios to get it to run down that path, and after leaving the monitoring in place on production for a healthy amount of time, you come to the conclusion the code really is dead code, don't just add this to your mental model or some documentation, embed it in the code as an absolute fact by deleting the code. If this manifests as a bug, it will eventually be noticed and you can fix it then.

By taking this approach you are slowly narrowing down what is possible and simplifying the code in a way that makes it an absolute fact, not just a theory or a model or a document. As you slowly remove this technical debt, you will naturally adopt rules like, all new classes must start out final, and only be changed to not be final when you need to actually extend them. Eventually you will be in a position to adopt new tools, frameworks, and languages that narrow down the possibilities even more, and further embedding the mental model of what is possible directly into the code.
It's called Streissand effect!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Not true at all. There are issues with making vaccines for some viruses that are well-understood and seemingly quite intractable. And what about HIV? We've spent far more resources trying to find a cure for that, and although some good treatments exist, there is no vaccine.
Help Build the Fever Map
This might be worth a read:

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...
Melanie Mitchell’s “Complexity: A Guided Tour” is a superb introduction to this area.

And while I’m plugging her books, her latest one is one of the best-written lay-audience books about machine learning and AI that I’ve seen. I strongly recommended it for anybody curious about the field, and also for people working in the area- her explanations are crystal-clear but not dumbed down in the slightest. It’s called “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for the Thinking Person.”
But what could possibly be more important than your immortal soul?
Everyone needs their cut. The original contracting company's probably charging $100+ an hour. They sub it out to another company for $75/hr. Eventually it gets to someone who actually does the work for $55/hr or less. They think they're getting a good deal, meanwhile everyone's getting screwed, from the employee to the government agency, due to all these middlemen.
I'm not sure which specific excerpt you're referring to, but I have a good idea of the many functions that libraries have come up with to sling characters from one buffer to another, plus I read your implementation and the man page snippet you linked above. I'm still not seeing why you can't replace the code between lines 881 and 902 with one of the appropriate copying routines; you quite literally have a source, destination, and length and you can fix up the last NUL byte right after the call. The standard library's function will be vectorized regardless of how your compiler was feeling that day, and it's probably smarter than yours (glibc, for example, does a "small copy" up to alignment before it launches into the vectorized stuff, rather than skipping it entirely if the buffers aren't aligned). And your function does have undefined behavior: you pun a char * to a ulong *.
Given that people survive it and then have large amount of antibodies, it seems likely that we can create a vaccine. While some viruses are incredibly challenging to make a vaccine for, like HIV and the flu due to the mutation rate. The coronavirus has a slower mutation rate than the flu. It may be the case that we end up needing yearly or every two year booster shots. But, the most frequent stumbling block for vaccine development is funding, which won’t be a problem for coronavirus. MERS and SARS both had promising vaccine research that were shelved because the infections died out.
I'm not who you asked but I've heard this story before. Like someone said it could be slander but I'm not sure. Googling it brings up all kinds of articles about the subject. https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/richard-feynman-physica...
We don't need a vaccine specifically. We need a treatment of one form or another that drops severity / mortality to acceptable levels. A vaccine is one option, but far from the only.
That simply isn't true - the amount of cost sunk into not achieving objectives was enormous. Destroying the Iraqi army was never going to be the hard part. And how you can say we "won" in afghanistan, even though the taliban still exist and will have a part of the future there, is just...wow.

> ...but winning the "peace" isn't relevant for USD to be dominant. For that, the US just needs to be able to destroy enemy armies - which it can do globally with impunity.

Comments like these make me want to ask people who make them: how did empires ever fall, then?

The US army isn't a perpetual motion machine. It requires soldiers, equipment, and technology.

* 71% of young people between 17-24 are unfit to serve, 31% of that is due to obesity alone

* Equipment requires a strong manufacturing base, much of which has been decimated since World War 2, the skill required for that workforce simply doesn't exist.

* Cost. US military equipment costs are extremely high. The cost proposition is almost always a losing one for the US in any long term war.

Greater generals have overcome greater differences in strength than between the US and China. Pride comes before the fall.
Well, you're right about Bernays getting too much credit. It's just at the same time he was a major player as well.

After re-reading your comment, I think we are on the same page, more or less. But Lippmann was writing about the very same work and propaganda that Bernays actively participated and "invented" during his time at CPI. Lippmann saw how it played out in 1917-1918, so he wrote about it. Bernays later wrote his book, but it wasn't journalistic work, he wrote from direct experience.
People don’t survive HIV and it mutates incredibly quickly.
Anything to the right of Rust on the type safety spectrum... F#, OCaml, Haskell, etc. Compile-time guarantees of runtime type safety are :100: when dealing with money and other critical things.

Search for "jane street ocaml" and "standard chartered haskell" for examples of companies using languages with good type systems in financial code.
I see lots of ways to mitigate requesting the keys from disclosing much information:

- could set the false positive rate higher than the chance of encountering a case in the wild (which makes it smaller)

- phone could be programmed to sometimes randomly request keys even when the filter doesn't match

- keys could be distributed across many static mirrors and your phone could pick one at random if the filter matched
The US. Who doesn't know this?
There’s a staggering amount of hubris in this notion...
This is an awesome idea, I had one yesterday that was similar but for a different purpose: LastMessage.to/<someone>

After reading this article:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/us/costa-luminosa-passengers-...
"Kevin and Ryan Sheehan will never know whether their father heard them say goodbye on speaker phone."

My thought was to create a place where you can leave your last message to someone or to the world.
Covid-19 Daily Sentiment Survey
Why is it surprising?

The government literally said “stop what you’re doing” to 80% of the businesses out there.

I’m honestly surprised it’s only 20M people unemployed.
C and Java are going to be around forever.
We don't have enough pilots to fly them. And against the type of opponent that could overcome F-35s, Classics wouldn't stand a chance. And the cost of maintaining them, a dual stream training pipeline, armaments, etc, would significantly detract from other capabilities (like AEW&C, ISR, unmanned jets, training & readiness, etc).

F35s are undeniably costly, but criticisms on the capability front usually come from the uninformed lunatic fringe (like APA), who are really the equivalent of climate change deniers, and groups with an axe to grind (Boeing would prefer to make more Super Hornet sales).
> I've always thought that the possibilities of radioisotope thermoelectric generators were under-utilised. They would be amazingly practical for off-grid living.

RTGs are good for low maintenance, which is why they are used for unmanned space probes, unattended lighthouses, etc.

> I wonder how far an EV could travel with an RTG in the trunk.

About the same distance they could with an inert mass of similar mass in the trunk.
Oddly, that reminds me a lot of early game consoles! You'd just set up some sprite registers, or send some commands to music sequencer hardware, and then those would go on and persistently do things on their own while the CPU got on with the "business logic" of running a game.

It's funny how it was the systems in the middle (minicomputers, like the PDP-11 where C originated) that did everything on the CPU, whereas the systems on the high end (mainframes) and low end (microcomputers) both split the work out, for different reasons: mainframes pushed IO out to independent coprocessors for multitenant IOPS parallelism (can't make any progress if the CPU gets an IO interrupt every cycle); while early microcomputers pushed IO out to independent coprocessors to retain the "feeling" of real-time responsivity in the face of an extremely weak CPU!
That was honestly a great read. Would love to read the same article but rewritten for today's context. Thanks for sharing it.
> Once you care enough, anything's possible.

People should bring back sigs, so that can become a meme.
I sure will! Thanks.
As an example (the only case that I've identified personally), if your curious, I have a (windows; Intel q6600) box that I use for gaming occasionally. Single player game I like, Total War: Shogun 2, runs at about 55 fps (benchmark) pre-Meltdown/Spectre/etc. Now it gets ~22 fps. I can use https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm to toggle some mitigations to get it playable again.
The ensemble was effective in delivering an emotional impact. Its not often that a tech demo makes me feel such a range of emotions, moving me through profound sadness and hope. It left an impact far greater than typical marketing videos, giving me the subliminal impression (of which I am consciously skeptical) that this technology was meant for legit art.
The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back
Fair enough; just thought I'd mention it because the lack of such bookkeeping seems to attract attention as well.
I would rather just enable this stuff, honestly. Which I think is the point.
The “read only” nature of PDFs is a feature, not a bug. The idea being that once you distribute the PDF, it can’t be changed, and thus has more “truth” than something editable would. Even now PDF is considered an acceptable format for legal documents where Word docx is not. Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs.
The inherent presumption is that software engineers are engineers in that sense of the word. How I wish more were.
Life Sciences Observations
I don't think anyone has actually bothered to a microarchitectural side channel in practice yet.
Yeah. That's why I'm doing stuff with Rust atm. I'd prefer TinyGo, but this seem to be working "ok" for now.
It's not a lot for any individual American.

The reason to oppose it can't be "I can't afford it". It's more "those bastards don't deserve it". And that's not how mature adults should think about things.

Compared to the impact the federal government has on all our lives, it's nothing. If it resulted in 1% better governance, it would be a really well spent $15.
Ah MicroFocus where enterprise products go to die a very slow drawn out death
Eh, that depends on your code.
This view that market knows the best is actually quite misguided. Market does prices assets correctly after long enough period of time but it oscillates and bounces a lot before that happens. It's wrong to say that any point in time market knows the best and current price are exactly the fair price. If this was true, asset prices simply don't keep swinging 10% for days on. Gold isn't worth $100 at 9 AM and suddenly becomes worth $70 at noon.
I've used (in PHP) TCPDF (was FPDF) and FPDi, FPDI extends TCPDF to import the PDF original (used as a background/template) and then TCPDF can write content (text, lines, shapes, images, etc.) on top of it.

Using fillable PDFs... A lot of PDFs I encountered didn't have fillable fields or were those provided not as large as I needed to fill properly, so mapped the content on top of the PDF ignoring any forms. (might not be possible if the forms preform some other function than just to populate the form)

Initially I would identify fields and create a form content database/array.

Overlay a grid on the "template PDF" with the TCPDF (point measurement is the PS/PDF standard) and hand determine the field location coordinates. (Making an HTML overlay won't cut it you need precise measurements.)

Add in some paging logic for handling multi page data, etc. and have it put it all together.

...

But PHP isn't one for signatures, so Python would be best...

Looking at resources like I've done in in PHP, you have to use two libraries - one to import the pages (with PYPDF2) and then to create the content on the imported page (pyfpdf). Looks like they are exclusive, bso you create content, then merge pdf template with content PDF.

Someone wrote an example:
https://gist.github.com/dwayneblew/79da32727358b502f6ec

This should get you closer I think.
Postel's Robustness principle seems pertinent, along with "The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness Principle".
https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....
It is true that the underlying technology used to write the code to begin with should be less forgiving. If you use a strictly typed, compiled language instead of PHP, you would have no choice but to fix a lot more of the errors because it would not compile otherwise.

Once it is running on production though, things are quite different. You need the right combination of errors being well reported and gracefully handled without aborting or breaking the rest of the functionality unnecessarily. At that point people are relying on it to get their jobs done and they will usually find ways to work around the errors and even the corrupt data this might result in so they can keep meeting their deadlines while the programmers work on fixing the problem. This is much better than those same employees not being able to do their jobs or getting payed to stand around and do nothing. I guess this attitude is largely driven by the practicalities of where I work. If the employees that rely on the code to work get behind or can't complete their work on time, our company is nailed with thousands of dollars in fines as per the contract agreements we have to agree to in order to get the business/contracts to begin with, and then our customers can't bill their customers, so they are not happy.
That's what I'm saying—you don't have to "hope." You can look at what information you've provided to the compiler through your code, and deduce from that, what optimizations are possible to make on that code.

From there, you just have to know whether the compiler you're using supports those optimizations. If it does, and your code should have them, but it doesn't end up having them—well, that's a bug in your compiler, and you should report it as such!

If there were a clearly-more-efficient query plan possible to generate for a query of a particular data model in an RDBMS, and your RDBMS failed to come up with said query plan, you'd consider that a bug in your RDBMS, no? Well, same thing here.
Can you expand on that a bit more? Is the set running and updated locally or centralized?

If local, does it solve the size issue?

Thanks!
One could say that second-order cybernetics has never been more relevant. Sometimes you see so far ahead that it takes time for your vision and its implications to fully become apparent.

Second-order cybernetics defines not only today's technological substrate (especially obvious in cybersecurity and risk modeling) but also contemporary culture.
I may have missed it but I can't see any mention of the battery life - surely that's one huge aspect.
People are not going to be 'dropping like flies'. I doubt anti vaxxers jump for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Finally a decent use-case for blockchain and nobody is paying attention. Seems to make a lot more sense to reconcile location and proximity from a shared user-controlled anonymous ledger.
This is excellent news. Many open source projects have been working on this contact tracing approach for a while now and have been asking Apple and Google to provide this kind of support.

TCN Coalition is an umbrella group for open source projects who have agreed on a common protocol, which Apple and Google are also following fairly closely. I am one of the developers for CoEpi, a member of the TCN Coalition.

https://tcn-coalition.org/
Are you trying to paraphrase the parent? I disagree with the person you are responding to, but I feel you severely misrepresent what they actually said.
These are some of humanity’s most important photos, because they show segregation, war, and famine. Bringing them to life arguably increases their impact.
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...

Page 64.
Please don't, it makes it annoying/hard to read on mobile( it doesn't wrap)
The Coronavirus Is Showing Us Which Entrepreneurs Matter
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...

It is alleged here on Page 64.

This is testimony of his ex-wife - take that as you will.
> This isn't a red state: They collect plenty of revenue.

Part of this revenue collection (tax policy) is why corps are moving en masse, the recent largest example is Honeywell's relocation to Charlotte. NJ's latest tax hike has actually caused them a net loss in revenue.
f# and .fsx/fsi scripting
Show HN: Monitor Celery Workers on Heroku
How the Privacy-Friendly DP-3T Contact Tracing Algorithm Works to Stop Covid-19
Common Lispers have had the ability to write CUDA kernels (with shaders) on-the-fly with a DSL in cl-cuda for many years now. See,

https://github.com/takagi/cl-cuda

Cupy (a project in which takagi is/was actively involved) also has the ability to compile kernels in the Python REPL, but the kernel code needs to be written in C and passed in as a string (pyOpencl can do the same for OpenCL). In fact, not too many years ago, the kernels for gradient descent, max pooling etc. were all entirely in Python in Chainer. Projects like JAX take this to another level by having the ability to transform the bytecode of a restricted class of Python functions straight into CUDA kernels.

I can't speak much about Clojure/Neanderthal, but I'd advise the people to stop dissing projects they are not familiar with, least of all using silly benchmarks like the above.
Huh. Could "would of" be a regionalism? I sometimes say "woulda", but don't write it.
In 1976 we rushed a vaccine without adequate safety tests (formal clinical trials) and more people were hurt by the unsafe vaccine than would have been sick without the vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
Are you a Linux Systems Administrator? If not, stfu.
The Warburg Effect: How Does It Benefit Cancer Cells?
https://www.toyota-tech.eu/HYBRID/HVDM/EN/DM32B0U_Revised_20...
Burning Man cancelled this year, will move online
I've picked up working on this if anyone needs any help configuring.
Agreed. "Flattening the curve", at least in its original meaning, has to do with the new case total. Additionally, it is very hard to detect recent changes in a state's results on the cumulative chart.
Those are ex-USN (or shudder original USMC) F/A-18s, that have seen very hard use. I wouldn't be happy flying in one. In contrast the RAAF Hornets are almost mint.

I don't know about using them for drone target practice though, Loyal Wingman (ugh, what a name) only got to WoW the other day. More likely advanced tactics development for manned aircraft.
I agree re: your comment on hosted provider support. Extensibility is a major benefit of Postgres, and there is a lot more untapped potential (e.g. even just for custom data types), if only major providers supported it better.

FWIW, from having looked into this, there are two main challenges:

(1) Security - How to avoid the customer becoming superuser by using specifically crafted extensions. In practice this is mostly a defense in depth scenario, since you're running inside a VM already anyway.

(2) Maintenance / Support / SLA - If customers load a broken extension and that causes the server to crash, does the provider still give an SLA? Where to draw the line / how to evaluate this when support tickets get opened?

Both of these could be solved (I think) if there was a better sandboxing mechanism.

Really the issue here is that once you're at the C extension / shared library level, you can do pretty much anything, and thats really hard to support as a Database-as-a-service provider.
Yes, and the foundation for much of it the NFA, could be kicked over tomorrow. Its precedent is really weak (miller) or as you point out racist/financially disadvantaged.
> SEA also speaks English

South East Asia’s a big place, and outside of some of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore, English is bad.
My understanding too was that there was a middleman involved in collecting and distributing the keys, to avoid people spamming the system. You want to be 100% sure it's a positive, and not put the trust in the user. Otherwise random people could just say they have it. The local government would have to submit the keys as you mention and act as moderators for that region.
Which workaround you use?
> Long only is actually a pretty terrible choice if you want a "solid" portfolio with risk hedging.

What if, in exchange for being one of the most powerful people in the most powerful nation on earth, you don't get to participate in the same wealth building schemes as everyone else?

Instead you get a hefty salary, and the people who say "Nah, I'd rather get rich in the stock market" are probably not the ones you want wielding all that power anyway.
Ugh, historically the civil rights activist is the one who would have been denied that right...
This is always a risk, but it can be a calculated risk.