skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article:

> That program, which he described as a “shell” around the computer’s whirring innards, gave inspiration—and a name—to an entire class of software tools, called command-line shells, that still lurk below the surface of modern operating systems.
> This is exactly the kind of dumb mentally the government wants,

Is this supposed to be an argument?
Because, as shown by SGX, it doesn’t work. And if it did work, it would lead to a whole new magnitude of the malware problem - malware protected from you by hardware.

The right way to do it is the other way round: have a trusted hypervisor and run your untrusted OS in it. See TrustZone for example.
I don’t find this convincing at all. Proposed system is incredibly privacy-conscious, with all the control of self-reporting left to the user.

Let’s not stop this initiative that protects health and safety of societies that can trust their health authorities— and there are many.

We should be vigilant and try to stop autocratical implementations or misuses of the system. But it seems that even that will be difficult considering how the system is designed. And if governments can compel you to install some app on your phone, no amount of stopping Apple / Google will help.
Definitely. In fact this game is a great way to keep an active link with your friends that are geographically distant.

Teamwork in the game is absolutely vital. It's possible to go lone-wolf style but more challenging :)
I have a dossier of drawings/sketches on ideas for apps/websites. An idea comes to mind, I start writing and drawing. I keep all of them. Every now and then I go through them and add a couple more pages of drawings, notes, something I read, some new technology that will solve one or another problem, something that can be combined with something else.

Seeing Jack's drawing and reading the description on how Twitter took 5-6 years from "idea" to first implementation shows that this system/method works (at least it worked for him). I do not claim I will design the next twitter-size-business, but hey, it is a mental exercise.

I believe that many in this forum have the imagination, methodology, discipline to build on an idea, and we see plenty of "Show HN" to prove this right.

If the invention of toilet paper has an equally exciting story.. (I read about it a few days ago)(not exciting imho)(great thing for humanity though!)
Same exact thing could be (and was) said about terrorism and the patriot act.
Published keys are 16 bytes, one for each day. If moderate numbers of smartphone users are infected in any given week, that's 100s of MBs for all phones to DL.

That seems untenable.

It's a lot, but untenable? If 300 million report as infected, that's 4.8 GB, coincidently the size of a DVD. So 2 hours of Netflix, 1 hour at 4k. Very easy to cache this data close to the edge, too.
You are starting from the premise “we must implement this feature”
Wait until this fellow hears about Apple's "Find My" feature:

> In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple devices even when they're offline, allowing nearby Apple devices to relay their location to the cloud. That should help you locate your stolen laptop even when it's sleeping in a thief's bag. And it turns out that Apple's elaborate encryption scheme is also designed not only to prevent interlopers from identifying or tracking an iDevice from its Bluetooth signal, but also to keep Apple itself from learning device locations, even as it allows you to pinpoint yours.

* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/the-c...

* https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/06/05/how-does...
That's been also done via cameras in the past: https://augustcapital.typepad.com/news/2012/08/e-commerce-st...

But it's likely wifi pings and bluetooth details would be added to the mix these days.
https://discordapp.com/invite/6qAqyRp
Yes. People on reddit are too boring serious and straight to the point. Here on HN we can have a link about some programming language and we start discussing about physics, the Universe or cats. Much more creative. :)
I thought it would be about how every single successful person had it better than their unsuccessful peers and some stuff about US and China.
Please mention some of the "good" that went by unseen for example during the last 30 years.
F1 legend Sir Stirling Moss dies, aged 90
> one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.

What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.

> Have you watched the lectures ?

I attended the 2005 version IRL.
Social distancing is bringing drive-in theaters back to life
This guy is wrong about the Apple/Google contact tracing program.

As created, it’s opt-in only and does not report matches to a central authority.

This guy says, yeah, but the gubment could abuse the tracing mechanism for things besides an epidemic, force your phone to report matches centrally, and force the removal of the opt-in part of it.

...except, if a government can pull those off, they don’t need this new contact tracing platform. These assume the government already has deep, control of the details of the operating system.

In other words, this contact tracing platform has nothing to do with his privacy concerns.

There are always people who see a tragic pandemic and just see a chance to use the concern and attention to highlight their own cause. And then there are the ones who fight against the efforts to mitigate the suffering to promote their cause, like this guy. Whew.
It greatly helps Apple that T2 is a separated chip specially designed to do one function well, that is to do crypto in a secure way even in presence of physical attacks. How to do that has been known for quite some time. For example, modern SIM cards or cards for satellite tv are very secure and a physical attack is possible if one is willing to spend like over 100K per card.

What Intel is trying to do is to allow a general purpose secure computing with minimal extra cost. This is relatively new and as various bugs demonstrates may not even archivable. I.e. it may be possible to create provably secure chip, but its cost will make it a niche product.
A similar sort of exercise might be to just install Arch Linux to a working desktop or some other use case.

Arch Linux puts responsibility for the install on your shoulders based on your needs and decisions.

In the end, you get a VERY up-to-date installation of linux, without needless bloat, and it stays that way due to rolling updates.
It’s opt-in.
This guy invented the datagram?!

How in the world is this not recognized earlier? He got awarded in 2003, but that is still way too late.

I think we should have a list in which all stories of underdeserved computer scientists should be displayed. Alan Turing's example is a well-known one. I still can't believe how he was treated. But apparently he isn't the only example of being underdeserved.
5 times a second? That seems excessive, and a waste of power.
In a previous life we we also able to identify the owners of anonymous (burner) SIM cards.

Even crooks and anarchists lead very predictable lives.
App based on this technology has started working here at Bharat (a.k.a. India ) ( population 1.3 Billion ).
I hope the government uses it wisely.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.goi.aarogy...
Because we don’t want to pay 50% in taxes.
That's how I learned web development in the 2000s. I downloaded stuff at school on floppy disks and took them home to inspect them. I had cool gifs, midi files, html files and I had Home Site 4.0 which had a great documentation about HTML and some basic JS.
This is no better, because you are not saying anything of substance. There is no engagement with fact or reality, just pure emotion and intuition. While this is good enough for some political offices, it is not typically good enough for HN comments.

If you can show the claim to be wrong, you will receive tremendous accolades, and perhaps fame within certain communities. If you just have suspicions, that's uninteresting and not useful.
> It is unclear to me whether the C libs include TCP.

The exercise states that you have a Linux kernel and there is a network connection. If the kernel does not have TCP, but only offers a raw socket, well, then you have to write down a very simple TCP stack.

But if the kernel does have TCP, the exercise boils down to writing a very simple HTTP client, a very simple DNS resolver and a bare bones XZ decompressor and tar reader. From there I'd grab myself https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/static/xbps-static-lates... then execute

./xbps-install -S --repository=https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/current -r / base-system

and call it a day.
This is basically agricultural era thinking peppered with laissez-faire ideology.

In 1700-hundreads you could drop average household with some seeds and few tools into the forest and they would go on. If there was village around with 50-100 people their productivity would probably double. Connected to organized state and trade it might increase even more.

Today >95% of the value from work comes from the infrastructure and society around people. Marginal improvements to aggregate education levels improve aggregate incomes and productivity. If your country has higher educated lazy bums than some other country, it creates value and wealth and you are freed to do marginally more demanding and valuable work for yourself. Getting even lazy bums go trough college can easily flip into net positive due to slightly better lifetime earning and health.
>" About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.

There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope.

There's your situation. What do you do? "

I would swim, do some sunbathing, eat coconuts, do some fishing and generally enjoy the situation. No work, no stress, nobody to bother. :)
I'd argue twitter made POTUS not the other way around
This seems to misunderstand or dismiss a lot of important details about the proposal.

> The current specifications allow phones to learn when and where they were in contact with another device.

That's over simplifying it massively. First the spec clearly states that no location data is recorded, since the location is not necessary for the application of contact tracing.

> By pushing a button on one phone, by reporting it as infected, all other phones that were recently in close proximity reveal themselves to the central server

This is not true, they clearly state that matches with a Diagnosis key is not uploaded to the diagnosis server.

> The current specifications allow phones to learn when and where they were in contact with another device. It is unclear whether the actual identity of that device is also revealed.

This is just not true, they make it abundantly clear in their specifications, that the identity of the device is never revealed.

> A company could install Bluetooth beacons equipped with this software at locations of interest (e.g. shopping malls). By reporting a particular beacon as ‘infected’ all phones (that have been lured into installing a loyalty app or that somehow have the SDK of the company embedded in some of the apps they use) will report that they were in the area.

This is not how this works, this is not how any of this works! It is highly speculative and extremely unlikely that any random APP will have access to the tracing key to make that even remotely plausible.

This criticism is obviously written by somebody who has not read the specification[1] or did not understood key aspects of it.

[1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/
And finger
I confirm what hombre_fatal says.
Lucky for us, this game is a passion project, we are not looking for any profitability. Truth is, if we were, we would have had to give up a long time ago. Server/domain costs are split among 6 admins, all development work (code, design, images, admining, moderation etc) is based on volunteer work from passionates.
Though we do have many players who asked to make donations, but we never accept any so far.
The game will ALWAYS remain 100% free with no pay-to-win and no ads.
Ding ding ding. It’s sad how quickly we forget that we live under dragnet digital surveillance. We haven’t even really internalized it.
I have been lucky thus far, I suppose. Before I run the updates, I disconnect all peripherals (Bluetooth devices, external monitors) and even close out all active applications.

The two events are likely unrelated but so far has not failed me.
It's a very complex issue with many elements.

E.g. the EU has been critising Germany's early 'tracking' on one or the other path for decades, some changes have taken place with a new school type introduced a few years ago, but getting schools/cities/.. to switch to this has been an uphill battle. While German students are expected to finance themselves, those from low income families get financial support (a loan with very favourable terms that only has to be paid back if the student reaches a certain income threshold after their studies). The problem that low socio-economic background youth don't study is not primarily a financial issue; much more a matter of aspirations and the tracking you mention. There are ways to switch tracks but it's not the most obvious choice for students.

But it's also a matter of what is prioritised: in Germany (and Austria, Denmark, ...) vocational education is much more important and also much more respectable than in most other countries. What is on each track also differs, e.g. in Germany you could study IT/software development etc or you could do most of these also on a vocational track and most often right away have a job afterwards. Nursing is in Germany a vocational profession, in the UK you'd pursue a bachelor's at a university for it. In Spain many youth go to university because they don't have any other real options to choose from; and graduates leave university there often with zero practical skills (improving in past years but not easy). Lithuania has a higher education rate that is above 80% and they are actively trying to reduce it as you just can't use that many higher education graduated and need the vocational professionals as well.

So, complex issue. Not everyone needs to have a higher education degree (and much less does everyone want one). Too few or too many tertiary graduates is both not ideal. But do students need to end up with debt around 100k (US) or even just 30k (UK) if they choose tertiary studies? I don't think so.
Except when you need to, it's not working, or creepy bugs won't let you do it. Do try it on Lazarus for Raspberry Pi for example (you can do it on a virtual machine if you lack the real device). You'll see what I mean.
"People that were not placed into Gymnasium at age 8 are set on a course where, once they turn 18, do not get to go free Uni; they simply are not allowed to go to Uni at all!"

I lived and worked in Germany and eventually moved back to Canada. When I would hear people talk about how university here should be free like Germany I would often think, well if university was like in Germany, you might not be going, but not because of money.
I'm not arguing in good faith? Your point was that using national stats was inaccurate as GP could've been in a state with a lower proportion of whites. However, due to how averages work, it was just as likely that GP was located in a state with a higher proportion of whites than the national average.

Then, when I actually bothered to check GP's profile and found out that apparently GP works at a college in Virginia and communicated that fact to you, you started throwing around accusations of "bad faith" and checked yourself out of the conversation.

You then added to that with an accusation that I am somehow (despite saying nothing even remotely like this) worried about whites being replaced or similar nonsense. This was compounded by your assumption that I am even white to begin with, or that I even live in the United States.

I think some self-reflection might be worthwhile. Projecting your own failings onto others is never a good way to have a conversation.
And "stamps" are just like your standard email client filters.

So basically, a better filtering system and a domain whitelist.

And also some emailcoins to send them (PoW).
Corona virus has no respect
I can see that too. You end up possibly supporting a bug-compatible interface or other nonsense.

Amusing but unrelated I looked to see if that law was on wikipedia and clicked on this thinking it might be another spelling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yhprum%27s_law
Related: does anyone know a solution how to add the spatial navigation feature from Opera 12 into Firefox?
Operators currently have handset location data, based on cell tower triangulation. I imagine many will store this, but this may vary by network. The absolute minimum you need, in order to run a network, is to know the current location of the handset, so you can route calls to it. Historical data isn't required for delivery of the service. I imagine in countries with weaker privacy laws, data like this can be used like we saw with the "tracking spring break beach-goers heading home".

Triangulated location data is far from precise however. It would let you determine roughly where someone is, but nothing like accurately enough to do contact tracing or infection monitoring. You'd also need to start storing historical location data on a huge scale, but it would be accurate to a few hundred metres typically. Not ideal for contact tracing.
Huge discussion about this topic one-two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834959 (805 points, 459 comments)
Insane to do an online masters for 30k. I see the ads everywhere and I just can't imagine who really wants or needs that - and then you apply for jobs and get refused because it's "just" an online masters...
As someone who leads the operations of a small magazine publisher, I've found the publishing world murky to say the least. We're using Ingram Spark but I had no idea about Ingram Aerio. This opens up so many possibilities.
British racing great Stirling Moss dies aged 90
The rendering reminds me of typeset math from the 60s. Not a fan.

Instead of trying to come up with a compromise on rendering, a better idea might be simply not rendering your entire blog on one page... A plain HTML page with svg images weighing in at a shocking 2.6MB is not gonna load “instantly” anyhow. You can keep the source in a single markdown file if you wish, but there’s no reason you can’t split up the posts during processing, and that’s a much easier technical problem than this math rendering compromise.
It is a good thing because historically it has mattered what ethnicity people are. It still matters because there is a narrative pushed by some that we are a meritocracy but in fact social mobility is very low. This is not just about ethnicity, but ethnicity is definitely a part of poverty in the USA for instance, and ethnicity is visible.
It's insane such a nonsense claim was made here. Really. Why would anyone take it seriously? Make the case it should be taken seriously in the light of what we've found in the past few years. Please.

Such a substanceless assertion can be dismissed without further analysis.

If we don't like how awful the reputations if silicon valley companies are with respect such claims, having a tantrum about it doesn't change much.
Maybe you could call that broke, but that isn't bricked.
>" So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope.

I mean speedrunning the Linux situation itself. Start with a minimal system and get yourself to the point where you can do something meaningful (like reading cat pictures on Reddit). "

I'd rather do something useful or at least pleasant. I don't have an infinite amount of time and I don't like to waste it.
I'm using Linux on MacBook for three years now and it feels just as comfortable as on macOS.
Note: In China it's private businesses, not the government, that force people to install the tracing apps on their phones before being let into their establishments. The same thing can and probably will happen here : get tracked or be denied service.

The government doesn't have to do anything.
All hard details, i.e how to implement UX for end user are not there. PGP and friends was a complete failure for casual user.
I can answer this a little, for sensible reasons (the team I run at new job was entirely on Macs) I gave in and chose the 16" Macbook Pro over the Thinkpad/Fedora I'd have defaulted to normally (since my personal laptop is a nicely specced T series I still use that for personal stuff at home).

Simply put the touchpad on the 16" Mac feels like its from the future, recognition is perfect, multi-finger gestures are consistent and always recorded so you can flip around between workspaces and after a day or two it becomes so ingrained that it gets out the way and you stop even thinking about it, it becomes fluent in a way other touchpads don't.

On a recent Thinkpad with Linux I just use the TrackPoint, I've never gotten the touchpad to be more than merely acceptable.

Frankly I still prefer working on my Thinkpad at home on my stuff but the touchpad on the Mac has ruined every other touchpad I interact with entirely.

Generally I like the Macbook and OSX as someone who hadn't ever touched it til a few months ago is a pleasant OS for development, there isn't anything in there I really hate, it feels like a linux distro with a nice DE/UI mostly.

Oh and I really like iTerm2, that's a really nice piece of software.
Show HN: See what Hacker News thinks of the book you're looking at on Goodreads
I once had this problem and the worst part was that I was getting worried thinking about those things.
The best you can do is to cut the information that you take in and specially things that are out of your control.
Focus on things that matters to you or affect your day to day life.
This is a small extension I made to combine my love of Hacker News book recommendation threads and hate of Goodreads community reviews.

It uses the Algolia search API to find comments that match the title and author of a book page on Goodreads. Initially I wanted to use ISBN numbers but there are too many comments mentioning books on HN that don't use the ISBN number and for some reason Amazon links are rarely indexed without truncation by Algolia, which means the end bit of a long Amazon url that contains the ISBN isn't searchable.

The hardest part of this extension was figuring out how people write book titles. For instance, most people don't seem to write out full book titles rather they write out the title minus any subtitles. Because of this, if you search for the exact Goodreads title on Hacker news you won't find that many comments, and what turns out to work much better is searching for books without any subtitles.

Also worth mentioning that this is similar to https://hackernewsbooks.com/ (which I enjoy a lot) except instead of seeing HN's favorite books you see all opinions good and bad, and you can also see them directly in Goodreads.

You can download it for Chrome [1] or Firefox [2] or see the source code on Github [3].

Hope you like it :)

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ohkekgnmihdgcfflhe...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-reads-...

[3] https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads