skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming languages extensively use this to reduce coding errors. If there was no redundancy at all in a language, then any random sequence of characters would be a valid program.

This is completely opposite to the philosophy of the APL-family languages, and those who have learned them seem to also argue strongly that the conciseness reduces errors and makes for higher productivity.

Probably the best example of redundancy in a programming language is unit tests.

Some of my worst experiences have been fighting unit tests that were "overspecified", i.e. testing for inputs which would otherwise be clearly impossible in the context of the whole system, with the result that any trivial change to the code can cause test failures that consume time to diagnose, despite zero change to the ultimate functionality of the system.
Well, the pathogen is not the reason but one of the reasons. The message is clear - if not one thing then another will get you. Again, I feel that this is a metaphor for expansionism in general, not necessary galactic expansionism in particular.

> But in Aurora KSR also decides to make the generation starship’s quantum computer evolve to become sentient. Now the obvious question to resolve is that machines wouldn't be susceptible to all the biological challenges that KSR listed, so why can't civilizations expand to other solar systems in machine forms? But KSR doesn't grapple with that at all, it is completely passed over.

Yeah, it was a kind of a gimmick. KSR is clearly more interested in societies and ecologies than AIs. And this is not a bad thing in my view.
I do not have an informed opinion on the different aspects of snaps, because I haven't had to deal with them at all.

That said, the feature "automatic updates whenever the system feels like it", is an annoyance for me, even if I can defer them. Typing "sudo apt full-upgrade" takes a few seconds.

I just use Ubuntu Server and get only what I need, which is available through the APT repositories. I have not noticed these repositories getting any smaller in favor of snaps and I am already using the 20.10 development branch. The Ubuntu Server installer does not install any snaps by default. However, snapd is there but it is trivial to remove it if one wants to. Chromium is the only "loss" I have witnessed and I also saw this mentioned in other comments. Note that there exists a really nice PPA, maintained by Pop!_OS, that contains quite a few packages, including Chromium.

I am wondering what security issues do snaps address that apparmor, whose purpose is security, does not. I also think it is unfortunate that we need snaps to deal with different applications / packages needing different library versions...
Fun idea! Two years ago on HN I said something similar: "We think repl.it is the C64 of the cloud era"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18279085
It seems slightly odd to me that it’s essentially an access log analyser, but you just assume everyone is using Nginx.

Also as it uses an embedded dB does that mean it can’t be scaled to multiple servers (unless you send all the access log data to multiple
Servers)?
Off topic but... anyone knows what they used for the rich text editor?

It uses React but I imagine there is some other library like ProseMirror here.
Most senior devs at FNG reach 500k and beyond (US and London).
My wife, son and I have had a weird experience like this. We were not test confirmed, but we are younger, so none of us had it that bad. We had a flu-like illness of coughing, tired, high fever. Then it subsided. Then a week or so later, I woke up in the middle of the night with shortness of breath. Felt like I had to mechanically breathe. Very unpleasant. Spent about two days or so like that, then was quite tired but could breathe a bit better. Then every week or so we will have another wave where we are pale, tired, headache and mild(er) shortness of breath. It feels like just recently we have come out of it, and we first had symptoms the second week of March.
Software that merely displays data is not typically a medical device, as long as it doesn’t transform or otherwise alter the data.
As someone who is just getting over the hump of actually getting people over a long period of time to use a app and give feedback.

I think the best thing I did was find someone willing to talk and test the app outa few times per week. When I talked to users and built and talked it didn't work as well as finding someone willing to look at a half finish product to test the product. I used them almost like product managers and I was a bespoke dev shop.

One since they help build it they more usually use it and will tell you what's broken. They are also are super willing to tell others about it since they have skin in the game.
Not quite on the enterprise wifi side, but I have been pleasantly surprised that iOS has alerted me when I connect to a wifi network with the same name, at a new location. So endpoints can play a part in this.

I’m not sure if there is some kind of MDM policy that would restrict locations that are valid for wifi use, but expect it is coming soon.
I'm not saying it's the wrong direction, it's just funny to observe.
I just mentioned basic security check but I don't know anything about corporate networks or how to manage them. One thing I know is that Microsoft has robust network directory service called Active Directory which "authenticates and authorizes all users and computers in a Windows domain type network—assigning and enforcing security policies for all computers and installing or updating software." So for example you could register all corporate access points to a Windows domain and no way you get connected to a wrong access point.
That was incidentally the exact question I was asked. (When I asked during the interview "I know you need to use a SUM window function but I'm not sure how you constrain it to the past 7 days", the interviewer replied "you don't know the BETWEEN syntax? Everyone knows that." And then the interview ended.)
Screen Size vs. Viewing Distance vs. Resolution
I used to set the append-only extended file attribute on important files

No one can delete the files afterwards, not even root, without removing the attribute first

It worked well with Mercurial, which is also append only. So I could commit as usually to my Mercurial repository, but it could not be deleted.

Ironically, I stopped doing that, because it messed my backups up. When running the backups as root, some tools would add the flag to the backuped files, but then later backups as non-root could not replace the file with new versions.
Wait you already have the wpa preshared key? Why would you go the trouble of creating a clone network when you can already join the actual network and arpspoof at will?
When you install Google Chrome for a deb, it's already set to update through Google's own apt repository. Presumably Firefox could do the same.
Value based pricing is not about obfuscating your product.

If you manage to get extra revenues because the market values what you have you can invest the surplus to more better products.

The point is, you shouldn't dictate what users value your product, let the users dictate it.

"Imagine a world, where progress and invention would be something shared and done not out of greed but out of ability and ultimately generosity that would add to the grace of our race."

The first gotcha there is figuring out what exactly is the grace of the race. Most entities that successfully employ these sort of mission statements are dictatorships and the like and I'm sure you didn't mean that.

I think the first hurdle to get over is that world is complex and us people are not smart enough to handle all of that.
>Yes, of course if you have a formula that involves dividing by 2 or something you just include the number directly.

Or replace it with >> 1
What libraries are being used for testing in fullstack JavaScript apps in 2020?
The problem with that is you are fighting the platform. That's not a great place to be. Unless your disagreement with the platform's design is small enough you are likely to be better choosing a more appropriate platform.
My Background in Techn, Development and Design. Chicken Spirit Animal Symbolism
At least they do it with a bit of flair though: the thin blue "loading" bar works without JS!
Bogleheads:
https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Second/dp/...

Bernstein is also good
Imagine suffering a long depression because you're leaders spent the last 40 years preparing to fight a war that is already over. Leaving you unprepared to deal with a pandemic.
Thanks for doing the math. That’s a shame I thought I was on to something!
Or put more positively:

“I shipped a hard disk formatting utility that doubled as a word processor.”
Summertime 2100, and the living isn't easy – The Independent
Careful you're not allowed to talk about fascism here.
My company isn't that big. I work for one which is a vendor for a bigger one. I was a fresh grad when I joined. The clients complained about echo during skype calls. We didn't use headphones at the time and we'd have to constantly switch between mute and unmute. Some (senior) people didn't bother muting themselves unless someone superior to them was present on the call.

I talk to my manager, get an approval for a headphone and email IT. IT refuses. Since I persisted it got raised to the IT head. IT head calls me in for a quick chat and told me we cannot cater to the whims of every employee. I got told off that I should know my place as a new grad. I offered to use my own headphones, but requested an adapter since the mic/audio were on separate ports. Adapter costs Rs.300 ($4) on amazon. Headphones cost Rs.1000 ($14). Now my keyboard and touchpad sucks too. Overall I have invested more from my own pocket to work with this brick. What I learned from talking to others was that they just recycle laptops and give to employees. Say Emp N and Emp N+1 complain about laptops, they give them laptops which belonged to N-1, N-2. Basically the last laptop they received goes to the next person.

And yes I am stuck with a 4GB i3 Windows 7 (no budget to update windows) with an Ubuntu VM. Good luck running docker on windows. Not to mention the daily rite of passage (BSOD) after 10 mins of booting up.
The concern is that there's no simple way to disable auto-updates. If you want Ubuntu to turn into Windows, why not just use Windows?
Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?
on occasion i've had need to send faxes. most of the time i don't have access to a fax machine and so i end up paying some service that'll let me upload a pdf and charge me $10 for 50 pages.

what is it about fax technology that i can't just program my phone to send a fax? what are fax machines doing that i can't emulate in software???
Other languages (such as python) have install-time code execution. When you pip install a library, the library can run arbitrary code and of course has access to anything and everything via the python interpreter. The only thing protecting you is faith in pypi. How is compile-time code execution any different?
So your argument is that the term "real-time" didn't exist back in the mainframe and batch processing days, so we can't give it a technical meaning now?

Look, this is simple: literally all of our technical textbooks and engineering manuals agree on what "real-time" means.

If people were running around calling their smart phones "desktop computers", or "laptops", or "mainframes" you'd be very confused I think. Sure, smart phones and desktops these systems have a lot in common, even run a lot of the same code, and sure our phones have more computing power than mainframes back in the day, but overloading this term conveys literally no benefit and actually creates confusion.

Of course I'm pissing into the wind here, but whatever, if I've convinced even a couple of people to be more precise with their terminology, I'm fine what that.
We have lots of small companies with 1-3 employees sending a handful of messages a month, to big multi-national corporations sending many thousands of messages a day.

For the big companies we're typically a crucial part of their business and they typically require several integrations and other specialized modules which have upkeep. So we charge a bit more for the software. On the other hand, they typically have a very high message volume so they get a decent message volume discount.

For smaller companies the software is typically a bit cheaper, but with a significantly higher per-message cost.

Then of course there's negotiation for each contract which would make "web prices" rather moot anyway. Maybe a company wants lower fixed cost but can accept a higher per-message cost, as messages are often directly linked to their revenue, or vice versa.
Springer Nature offer free access to 500 essential textbooks
Berkshire Hathaway 2020 Annual Meeting Livestream
The only guarantee that the Debian project makes is that the stable branch is the security team's main priority. In practice, I've found that unstable and testing usually get patches pretty quickly.
If you do get an offer, and choose not to take it, that's dodging a bullet.

If you don't get the offer there's no bullet to dodge, right?

</pedandtry>
Microsoft has had its share of giant fuckups too, although from memory they seem to be more recent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

I've been writing code for about as long as him, but because I started with Asm, which makes one become really careful with buffer sizes, doing something like making one thing larger would not be done without carefully looking "down the line" to see if any further changes were required; and they almost certainly were. That's not to say I haven't corrupted files before, but fortunately nothing quite as catastrophic as wiping the disk.
I Accidentaly Wrote a Compile-Time Executable State Machine
Honestly I don’t really understand the end game of disinformation campaigns like this.

It’s one thing to spread propaganda in order to influence elections and get a crooked bureaucrat into power that can enrich some corporate buddies. But it’s another to deceive people about a global health crisis. If you’re successful, people go outside and trigger a second wave of infections - lots of people die and we’re back to square 1. Economy will still be fucked.

What am I missing here?
If there's no feedback, you can consider the lexer and parser separately as languages.

- The lexer recognizes a set of strings of characters.

- The parser recognizes a set of strings of tokens (as returned by the lexer)

But those two languages will have different power in general, so, like Jim points out, when you say something like "Python is context-free" or "Haskell context-free", it's not clear what you're talking about. And it's really false under any reasonable interpretation.

So you can consider them separately, and make a precise statement. But if there's feedback between the two, then you can't do that anymore. The theory doesn't tell you any properties a that the (lexer + parser + feedback mechanism) possess.

That is, regular languages and context-free languages have all sorts of properties proven about them, including ones that let you write code generators. You don't get any of those properties when you have ad hoc feedback mechanism between the lexer and parser.

----

Someone could come up with formalisms for specific types of feedback.

I think OCaml's Menhir has done some of this, but I don't remember the details off hand.

They have written parsers for C (CompCert) and POSIX shell and addressed some of the gaps between theory and practice. I don't use it but they're at least tackling the right problems.

But note that C uses a specific type of feedback (the lexer hack), which isn't identical to what other languages use. So you would have to come up with a formalism for each one, and probably nobody has done that.
It sounds like your comment defends "Forced office work" (which is an absolute), and many companies absolutely don't allow for "sometimes" WFH.
This is business, not saving human lives. Remember, whenever a company pays you something, you're leaving money on the table - they're still making a profit overall, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this! Same goes with buying, of course - any car discount you fail to negotiate, is profit for the dealership.
If you haven't seen it, check out Dr. Jim Yong Kim's article in the New Yorker: "It's not too late to go on offense against the Coronavirus" [0]. Dr. Kim led the World Health Organization's fight against AIDS in Africa. He's also fought many other epidemics around the world for thirty years.

In his article, Dr. Kim says that any one tool isn't enough. We need to use a full five-part response to end the pandemic: social distancing, contact tracing, testing, isolation, and treatment.

Contract tracing alone isn't enough (as we saw in Singapore). Neither is social distancing (as we see in the US). Dr. Kim shared that in his experience we need all five parts to end an epidemic.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/its-not-t...
My gut feel (yeah I know) is modern day free markets are at best 80% free and usually around 50. From structural inefficiencies to unintended regulation effects, things rarely work the way the Topsy and Tim description says.
This is a good way to target individuals too. If know someone uses wireguard and has it set to automatically connect except when on their home wifi, you can pretend to be their home wifi to lure them into a false sense of security.

I would contend that this is a problem with wireguard. It shouldn't be trusting the name of the wifi network.
Have you considered Laravel Spark?

https://spark.laravel.com/
The average engineer doesn't pull in 300-400k either
It's a way to capture them away from the office.
How do you develop a business connection and market your service as being more valuable that the wide abundance of free materials, engineering blogs, research papers, etc., in this space?

Just for example, I run a team of 10 machine learning engineers at a large ecommerce company. We mostly do NLP and computer vision, some time series forecasting.

I cannot imagine ever paying anything close to $25k for consulting advice, that’s just bananas to me. We recently purchased licenses to use the data annotation tool prodigy from the spaCy creators at explosion.ai. That was ~$4000 and the decision whether to build our own data annotation system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of business documentation, RFCs, approvals, NDA processes, etc. It was deeply non-trivial to procure that, and building our own was a very serious option we pursued with tech specs and prototypes and everything.

Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which practically grows on trees today, is just totally unrealistic.

It makes me suspect the real target customer for you is not companies with actual ML engineering teams or ambitious data-driven projects, but more like someone looking for McKinsey-lite. Some place that has no serious ML use case beyond drop-in pretrained models and sees $25k as the cheaper path to rubber stamp certification that dissolves internal political feuds. Most likely just selling super cookie cutter NLP models as if they are advanced and represent some sexy leap forward for a company with a couple junior data scientists. Algolia or just some drop-in Elastic tfidf search is more than enough for these companies. Spend the $25k on an intern who can tell you anything you need to know about neural network frameworks.

In reality, the 4-5 ML engineers you already hired are very likely more knowledgeable than the freelance consultant you might hire. They can tell you much more about state of the art and simultaneously know the specific integration path in your company’s web service and data ecosystem. Those folks won’t be wasting time prototyping - they would be pursuing a more efficient way to get the answers you need than advice from a freelancer, even if that freelancer was Bengio for pete’s sake.

I just cannot see the value prop here except for the usual story of paying for consulting as a virtue signal / credential / politics kind of thing.
Off topic:

Annoying that this is totally unreadable even at 300% zoom on an iPhone 11 Pro.

I feel like a set of people refuse to learn proper HTML/CSS as some sort of statement, not realizing their laziness renders their work unavailable to the visually disabled.

HN behaves similarly poorly.
If they make it automatic and unmanageable by default, they can sell those features back to us tomorrow as an enterprise edition or a private Snap store.

It’s the same thing MS did with Windows 10. You buy the product, but have to pay again if you want any semblance of control. Us normal users are now test subjects for the real customers. Look how non-enterprise Office 365 customers are on a monthly cadence for forced updates and the expensive plans get SAC or better.
I agree, but I'd expand grandparent's point with saying that every survival game is a role playing game, because if you don't take your role seriously survival doesn't matter.
The Power of Exhibitions
Driving through Las Vegas, you would hardly know there was still a mandatory quarantine. Stores and restaurants have big signs saying "Open", the roads have normal traffic, and there's normal sidewalk activity too. Yet, the Governor is regularly on TV talking about how the state is still in quarantine and the plan to gradually reopen. What is true is that casinos are shut down and large public activities, like concerts and sporting events, aren't happening. I won't speak to the morality because people have wildly different opinions, but the reality is that a lot of people refuse to quarantine any more.
True! They did had that concern. They considered both shutting down the whole enterprise over it and did the math to assess the risk and found it unfounded.

Our friends in Wuhan? Crickets. And puff pieces in the US media attempting to politicize the issue and keep the gravy train going.

> When Teller informed some of his colleagues of this possibility, he was greeted with both skepticism and fear. Hans Bethe immediately dismissed the idea, but according to author Pearl Buck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton was so concerned that he told Robert Oppenheimer that if there were even the slightest chance of this "ultimate catastrophe" playing out, all work on the bomb should stop.

> So a study was commissioned to explore the matter in detail, and six months before the Trinity test, the very first detonation of nuclear device, Edward Teller and Emil Konopinski announced their findings in a report with the ominous title "Ignition of the Atmosphere With Nuclear Bombs."

> "It is shown that, whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions."

[0] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/09/12/the_fear_th...
You are not realistically going to be bottlenecked at 500MB/s unless you load few large files.
I've previously had a Pocket subscription and switched to Bear Pro to track bookmarks but neither is perfect. I would be happy to offer feedback each week as you build out your app.
The finance company I worked for simply didn't use wifi at all. Everything was done over ethernet.
Paying off technical debt in Osm2pgsql
So the attack is:

1. Have access to their computer to retrieve the wpa key.
2. Create a clone of the wifi network, spoof a bunch of sites and hope to catch one that doesn't use http.

Why can't I replace step 2 with: Install a root kit since I already have access to their machine.
It's likely all/mostly custom. Quip is saleforce's Word/Docs competitor. (It's pretty good, tbh.)
> if you actually need something to survive you'll figure out how to get it without having to be sold to.

And if you don't know what you need to survive?