skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a tiny effort to tame the immense mutability of Windows, at least for the question of "what programs are installed at which version?", I'm using a combination of Chocolatey (an unofficial package manager for windows, https://chocolatey.org/) and Git.

I maintain a 'packages.config' xml file in a git repo that lists all the packages I decide I want to be installed and their versions. I intentionally don't list dependencies of the packages I want in this file, so I can remove a package later and I don't have to trawl through the huge list of potentially unnecessary packages now that I've changed what I want. I don't (typically) manage the version number listed in packages.config, I have a few scripts to help me do that:

install.ps1 has two uses: 1. install on a new system by cloning (or downloading the zip of) the repo and running the script, which will download and install the exact versions of the software that is declared in packages.config. 2. If I want a new package I can edit the packages.config to add the line then run install.ps1 (this second capability could use some UX work).

update.ps1 lists all of the packages that are currently out of date, gives you the option to update all of them, and then (regardless of which option you chose) rewrites packages.config with the currently installed versions. This allows you to use git to identify and manage the version differences between multiple windows installations and also upgrade all of them easily.

This doesn't configure any of the applications, but at least they're installed and they're the same version when you move from one computer to another. You can also quickly identify version differences between installations which makes debugging application version problems much easier. And you also don't forget what you have installed.
Pentagon wants commercial, space-based quantum sensors within 2 years
If I criticized my employer in the national media, I'd expect to be shown the door too.
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Remote: Currently remote, would like to remain remote.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Linux, Docker, Full-stack tech, API dev, VueJS, Python, Flask, Django, Laravel, Networking, AWS, Linux, CI/CD, Currently learning Rust and Golang, Web Scraping w/ Puppeteer, Requests, Beautiful Soup, Terraform

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stetson-blake-31635252/

Email: stetson@heliositservices.com
> You'd be surprised how many techies (especially the younger ones) don't see the above advice as being obvious.

It's only obvious if you've accepted the status quo ("at will employment", no worker protections). Many other developed countries have substantial worker protections [1], and I see questioning this as work towards progress in having those same worker protections in the US. Young folks haven't been ground down long enough by "The System" to accept that what is wrong is what will always be, which is awesome!

If your employer can fire you, and you have no recourse, for illustrating their abusive work environment (Amazon warehouses, in this case), that's a problem! What's more shocking (IMHO) are those who publicly comment that this is acceptable in a developed nation. The house is on fire, don't snicker at those trying to put the fire out.

[1] https://www.ituc-csi.org/new-ituc-global-rights-index-the (New ITUC Global Rights Index - The world’s worst countries for workers)

The ITUC Global Rights Index rates countries from one to five according to 97 indicators, with an overall score placing countries in one to five rankings.

1 – Irregular violations of rights: 18 countries including Denmark and Uruguay

2 – Repeated violations of rights: 26 countries including Japan and Switzerland

3 – Regular violations of rights: 33 countries including Chile and Ghana

4 – Systematic violations of rights: 30 countries including Kenya and the USA <-- We are here, ranked below 77 other countries
Other people have already given a lot of great advice, so I'll just add this bit:

Working on someone else's codebase—especially if it's an open source project with many different contributors over a long period of time—is its own distinct thing that has to be learned. Everyone has to learn how to do it, regardless of where their abilities as a programmer are. If you are adept (as it sounds like you are) at building your own software, then it can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you ("Am I actually any good at this?") when you try to contribute and simply can't grok what's going on, but if you persist, you will pick it up. Don't take your struggles now as a reflection of your abilities.
I think this might relate to what he discusses at the end of the very long Project Announcement blog/article. Something like there may be many different rules, but the one we find will be correct for us due to the framework we have for evaluating the universe (senses, math, etc.).
Microsoft's "Checked C" seems to be the last attempt to fix C security flaws.

From the outside, after Annex K adoption failure, WG14 doesn't seem to be willing to make C safer in any way.

Are there any plans to take efforts like Checked C in consideration regarding the future of ISO C?
> It's common to see a 10x reduction in LOCs going from CloudFormation to Terraform and a 10x reduction further going from Terraform to Pulumi.

I don't see this as such a terrible problem. The configurations may have more LOC's but there are not as many surprises. The dependency of declarable configuration makes it rock solid and favorable among operations teams who need to make these kinds of changes all the time.

> A key importance in how Pulumi works is that everything centers around the declarative goal state. You are shown previews of this (graphically in the CLI, you can serialize that as a plan, you always have full diffs of what the tool is doing and has done. This helps to avoid some of the "danger" of having a turing-complete language. Plus, I prefer having a familiar language with familiar control constructs, rather than learning a proprietary language that the industry generally isn't supporting or aware of (schools teach Python -- they don't teach HCL).

I understand the reason to want this. Having worked closely with developers, lack of familiarity with HCL makes it much less accessible. However, from an operations perspective, I am GLAD that HCL is a very limited language. No imports of libraries all over the place (in your infrastructure configurations, no less!).
Spelling it "dike" helps keep people's minds on the right thing. :)
Are these going to be submitted for appropriate peer review?
Eugene Weber's series of lectures "The Western Tradition".
@dang maybe these two threads can be merged. It seems the other one has a better source anyhow.
I'm a security researcher with a minor focus in SSO libraries, working on OIDC and SAML right now. I've discovered and reported some of the kinds of issues you're referring to. Both OIDC and SAML are fraught in implementation, but so are all login features.

Meanwhile: we're discussing Github, not a random cat-sharing startup. Github has one of the larger security teams in the industry. The parties implicated in Github SAML are Github, Okta, and Github customers, who do not actually have to implement SAML. Github SAML is not in fact a net-negative for security.
I think it's great that people are exploring software solutions to hopefully slow the spread of COVID19. That said, why would a court of law use Zoom for this... Are IT people not paying attention to the fact that Zoom is a Chinese company with major security and privacy issues?
Yes, but the only way to interop multiple scripts on a POSIX filesystem is to use UTF-8. I can forgive people for not realizing that filenames in POSIX are a weird animal: they are NUL-terminated strings of characters (char) in some arbitrary codeset and encoding, but US-ASCII '/' is special.

EDIT: Also, "considered UTF-8 by default almost everywhere" is... not necessarily wrong -- nowadays users should be using UTF-8 locales by default. Maybe "almost everywhere" is an exaggeration, but I wouldn't really know.
IIRC the data sent over the cellular connection is just summary information, it doesn't contain a full dump of the detailed measurements that will be stored on the SD card.
You might also find the hacks for diabetes pumps to create closed loops equally fascinating. That and all the projects around it like Nightscout [0].

[0] http://www.nightscout.info/
I had no idea Parallella had its own architecture.
From what I've seen so far, Activity Pub does allow multiple apps per use so individuals can choose an app of their liking. For example, I'm using Pleroma instead of Mastodon and the interop with Mastodon instances has been seamless. It's early days exploring for me, though.

This issue of bridging the IndieWeb and the Fediverse is fascinating. I'd think it would be more naturally collaborative, but there's a lot to sort out yet.
The bottom line is, there's no reason to request the non-HTTPS connection in the first place. And there's apparently no checks in the app to make sure it's connected to their real server.
Knowledge of the Future [pdf]
I’ve enjoyed the CDK. I looked at Pulumi, but settled on CDK because it’s AWS developed. As where I work is an AWS shop, I didn’t see many advantages to Pulumi, and I felt more confident in AWS continuing development and support, vs another 3rd party company that could go out of business.

Also I really have enjoyed the built in unit test tooling of the CDK. Unit testing my infrastructure code has been a game changer.
Wild that it's "noom" and not "nyoom", tbh.
NYC Based Startup Launches Growth Tool for SaaS Marketing During Covid-19
Crashlytics has been partially broken for 4 days[1]
but status dashboard shows "healthy"[2] for the whole week. Dear Google, do you actually care?

[1]: Partially broken: https://groups.google.com/forum/?pli=1#!topic/firebase-talk/nO-NCq7p2iQ
[2]: Completely healthy: https://status.firebase.google.com/
Exactly. If Amazon is the final arbiter of what's false or what's disparaging, then the policy is not valuable as worker protection.
I got the "Sierra Space Quest" bundle in a Humble Bundle or something. So I fired up Space Quest 4 like we had on my old Mac and was assaulted by the crappy DOS era color palate. Since I originally played the game on a Mac the graphics were really disappointing. On the other hand, the game played smoothly and quickly, very much unlike my old Mac LC. I know there are some quicktime[1] events in the game that were hilariously easy on the old Mac because it ran so slowly.

[1] The "Press X to not die" kind, not the Mac video format.
Eric says his theory is a work in progress, may be wrong and may even be fool's gold (his words). That's a ways off from claiming breakthrough. And I don't see him selling magic pills or some get rich quick scheme.

It seems to me he's just exploring ideas in the open. That's great. I don't see the problem.
In my experience, bitmap comparison testing is pretty hard to keep going unless you have a dedicated service for maintaining the bitmaps, updating them when needed, a nice reporting system that will shade the difference area, and people with enough time to review the results to figure out what the difference means and determine root cause. I'm sure some of that has become easier over time with off-the-shelf tooling, but since I'm still seeing bespoke systems out there doing it I doubt it's become turnkey easy yet.

It's also not something you want to do until the UI has solidified for that spot--which sometimes never happens, for some apps. It also has the issue that you can often only pixel-compare between two shots from the same rendering system--that is, same browser version if you're testing browser, same graphics drivers and rendering subsystem version if you're native, etc. Frequently that means testing against frozen reference environments that become increasingly less relevant to in-field behavior over time and are also a maintenance load to qualify and update.

When thinking of the "test pyramid" and why, for example, UI tests are at the point due to high fragility vs. low specificity vs. high effort to triage and maintain, I'd put bitmap testing at the very tippy-top on an antenna above the pyramid. They're useful, but have a large hump to set up, a long tail of rather heavy maintenance, a failure could mean almost anything under the hood, and they churn like a mofo during any flow or visual refactor whatsoever with no possible way to abstract them to mitigate that.

At that point, it's not really about the usefulness anymore, and more about the opportunity cost of not doing something different with the time. I think they're usually pretty questionable unless you're actually testing a rendering system where the bitmap is the primary output. A custom-rendered component ancillary to the application probably wouldn't meet that bar in most cases unless it were complex and central enough to merit the operational risk and stable enough to mitigate the same.
Thanks. Not GCP related, but would you say Pulumi is similar to AWS CDK?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/home.html
>that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.

One could argue that, in some aspects, it has substituted it.
Please propose a system of distributing goods that is more "moral" or "fair" than the "highest bidder wins".
Our preprints are currently in peer review (for different journals, I should add).
Nothing terrible has happened yet.
TLDR; They treated patients who presented with low blood oxygen by lying them on their belly or side and giving them oxygen through a nasal tube. No machine required. In many cases it worked perfectly.
Unicode is complicated because the languages it needs to handle are, alas, complicated. UTF-8 is super simple. It's a variable-length encoding for 21-bit unsigned integers. Wikipedia gives a handy table showing how it works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description
I actually already have the option of disabling it (it has an airplane mode), but it spams me to turn the network back on.

I just kinda gave in, to be honest. They're going to get the data anyway, and it is valuable to the doctor. I just don't need the device manufacturer to be storing it.
Qualitative and Quantitative Research: A Quick Guide
That's why we need labor unions. When you are alone, speaking up gets you fired and maybe also persecuted by the company. When you are together, a company has a much tougher time dismissing your concerns.
Not really Frankenstein, War of the worlds where not a Whig view of history.

Only early plup SF Gernsback etc had that view
One of those exposes a pretty clear bias in Renaissance painting subjects.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere, people (or the general sentiment) on these discussions seemed to be all in favor of firing those who hold unpopular / conservative personal opinions, but now disagree with firing those with liberal opinions.

If that's not viewpoint discrimination, I don't know what is.
Same issue with Fennec 68.7 on a Gemini PDA running Android 8.
> Basically WTF-16 is any sequence of 16-bit integers, and is thus a superset of UTF-16 (because UTF-16 doesn't allow certain combinations of integers, mainly surrogate code points that exist outside of surrogate pairs).

If WTF-16 is the ability in potentia to store and return invalid UTF-16 without signalling errors, I don't know that there's any actual UTF-16 system out there to the possible exception of… HFS+ maybe?.
Tom Nook's Chromebook
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 2.0 Win">

Awesome!
The Taiwanese flag was replaced with some generic triangle. Taiwan sovereignty is considered a very “delicate” issue by the Chinese government, which is to say the language and depiction of it is greatly censored, both at home and abroad apparently.
> What was shown and downvoted changed greatly from that point in time.

Which is exactly why the moderators frown upon comments that mope about astroturfing - they add nothing but noise to the discussion. Any weird voting biases will even-out over time. If you suspect astroturfing, send an email to the mods instead of degrading the quality of conversation.
How to Remotely Manage Virtual Teams in 2020
No, the media tends to report the most sensationalized numbers, not the most accurate numbers. I rely on World Health Organization type stuff, not "the news".
When you appeal an argument to a higher authority, in your case the law, it's an attempt to shutdown further discussion. In other words, it's not an argument as to the merits of the points being made. You're just not addressing the points at all and appealing to "a higher authority."
Yes, in just about any Western jurisdiction that isn't the US. The degree of loyalty expected from a rank-and-file employee is not very high. If you're a high-level executive it's different. Great power, great responsibility and so on.
Of course the powerful can use their powers for evil, we have to criticise them for it.
> Unix paths don’t need to be valid UTF-8

Yet, your shell will treat them like UTF-8 just as well. As will the standard library of almost every programming language, as you noticed.

If you open one such file in most text editors, they will render whatever is in it as UTF-8. If you use text manipulating utilities, they will work with it as if it was encoded in UTF-8.

It's mostly the Linux kernel that disagrees. Everything else considers them UTF-8.
That's great and all.

But if the man decides to distill his current progress into a high-level overview so that a relative layman can understand the team's progress and the implications, then it demonstrates he is aware of an audience and their perceptions, otherwise he wouldn't waste his time writing the summary/blog post.

In the course of all that, he should realize that his own tone is very off-putting and maybe workshop it a bit? Because otherwise it seems very self-indulgent, a bit of mental masturbation in the large, and that itself is a huge red flag.

It is for others to point at someone's work and say, hey, this is huge. If a person says it themselves, then you are right to have serious reservations or skip it.
This is what I've got using chimp pics:

https://imgur.com/a/hkG0rJg

https://imgur.com/a/YZ3oWUm
I was _just_ thinking of https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html and https://sso.tax/ as I was writing my comment!
> I'll choose whatever encoding I like, thanks.

If everyone chooses whatever encoding they like, then the charset being used has to be encoded somewhere. The problem is, there are lots of places where charset isn't encoded (such as your filesystem). That this is a problem can be missed, because almost all charsets are a strict superset of ASCII (UTF-{7,16} are the only such charsets to be found in the top 99.99% of usage), so it's only when you try your first non-ASCII characters that problems emerge.

Unicode has its share of issues, but at this point, Unicode is the standard for dealing with text, and all i18n-aware code is going to be built on Unicode internally. The only safe way to handle text that has even the remotest change of being i18n-aware is to work with charsets that support all of Unicode, and given its compatibility with ASCII, UTF-8 is the most reasonable one to pick.

If you want to insist on using KOI-8, or ISO-2022-JP, or ISO-8859-1, you're implicitly saying "fuck you" to 2/3 of the world's population since you can't support tasks as basic as "let me write my name" for them.
Does anybody know if this can emulate composite output from a CGA card? Or are all CGA graphics going to be trapped with the horrendous eye-searing Cyan/Magenta combo everybody remembers?
Hi,
I worked on this project and have a couple comments to address the issues people are raising.

- There are established medical protocols to treat COVID-19 patients with BiPAP machines, including the addition of a viral filter to mitigate aerosolizing the virus. People are using these protocols now and we link to them from the site.

- There are two separate firmware hacks presented. The first one modifies ~20 bytes and provides UI access to BiPAP code left in the existing binary, which would allow the more common CPAP machines to fulfill the same limited function. The second is a PoC of a 'full ventilator' mode.

- The manufacturer's CPAP and BiPAP lines have identical mainboard designs and a near identical array of sensors, which provide realtime data including tidal volume calculations. This project exists as a PoC to show that it would be possible - simple, even - for the manufacturer to convert CPAPs to BiPAPs via an OTA update - or, with significantly more effort, to fully featured ventilators. It is likely that they are reluctant to acknowledge this is possible in fear of destroying the market for the BiPAP machines.

- If you are a SleepyHead/OSCAR developer, or have access to an AirCurve S10 and an ST programmer, I would love to talk.
What about this study? https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.ab...
Who does that approach ultimately favour? Isn't it a good thing that people can speak out about things they think their company is doing wrong and try to improve it?

I have some sympathy with your view but doesn't that end up marginalising people who stand up for things?
Why choose Druid over clickhouse?
Relatively few people frequently look at different Han languages, and relatively few people are looking at txt files containing Han characters (and I expect those that do are typically running with their OS locale set to one of the Han languages?).

Enough CJK HTML content is tagged and heuristics are mostly good enough that incorrect font selection isn't a massive issue on the web, and AFAIK most major word processors include metadata in the file that suffices to distinguish language.
They are not there to treat COVID-19, but to lower the "day to day load" of hospitals, so the hospitals have more capacity for COVID-19 patients. At least that's what they said on PBS Newshour.
Show HN: Register for D-Wave's Quantum Powered Protein Design Webinar (Zoom)
Just reading some of the jobs on Upwork and freelancer make me wonder how any one gets anything accomplished.
Normally tech employers don't fire people for complaining about company policies, and it's almost always news when they do. A general sense of shared cause and cameraderie is part of the way the industry is "supposed" to work, and part of that is a culture of reasonably open discussion of this stuff.

But Amazon can't have that now, because the only resolution that they can see here is either victory or complete capitulation to a hostile union. And in the process their alienating their engineering class too.
Has Mario Broth seen this?

https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog
There does not seem to be a long term negative impact on hard hit countries. Hong Kong lost 15% of its population in 1968 due to a virus but had about 10% growth in the each of the following 5 years.
There's some truth in this, but you extrapolate too far. 1) UX is a bigger problem than the lack of financial incentives in the system though the two are related somewhat 2) There are audiences in these ecosystems, and I think monetization will find it's way in appropriately somehow. It's not impossible, by my estimation.
Well, yes. But putting the array argument(s) first is the more natural order, in my opinion. And it is surely odd that only one order is allowed in this context, when otherwise C is happy with changing the order of parameters to be whatever you like.

Plus, of course, there may be existing code using such functions, with parameters in the order that would become impossible if this syntax were disallowed.
This is a really interesting project considering Pocket is built in and developed by Mozilla. I wish you the best of luck.