skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you recommend the MacBook Air over Pro?
Hi - I am looking at getting a new laptop. I currently have a MBP, but as many of you have noted before, the keyboard is not ideal. I am interested in upgrading for the new scissor keyboard, but since the MBP no longer has function keys (i.e., just the touchbar) I am hesitant given all the bad things I have heard about it. I see the Air still does have function keys and has the new keyboard.

I don't do anything crazy on my mac. I have started developing using VS Code, usually have a ton of tabs open in firefox, and have other programs open. But I don't think I am doing anything too CPU heavy/crazy, so thought the Air might be a good choice.

Thanks for any advice!
That was after the edits/updates.
Depends on the language! In C, yes, you can write right past the guard page: https://godbolt.org/z/HnnNPU. Rust will insert a stack probe when necessary: https://godbolt.org/z/N8mGrz
I would prefer not to deal with "scaling up" for workloads that could run in a single process on commodity hardware.

I've mainly worked at companies that would be bankrupt if they used Python the way Instagram does.
PHP is fine too. Check out https://laravel.com/ and tell me that doesn't look like a joy to work with.
Simple Media Server with Go
Criticisms were/are made against NSA surveillances and in the case where government tried to silence such criticism (Snowden), opinions that support Snowden's actions were made and published, even made into books and movies, without repercussion. Bloggers that support Edward Snowden did not disappear. Movie directors and screenwriters are not made pariah by their industry or sent to Guantanamo.

This sort of whataboutism does not surprise me but it's getting tiring when made repeatedly in disguise of intelligent discourse. It's dishonest because the difference is blatant.
Didi says core business becoming profitable as China recovers from Covid-19
given that Apple has a secret police[0] group that was exposed during a previous iPhone leak, I don't know if the presupposition that Facebook has something similar is that outrageous.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-down-leaks...
Gunicorn is just a WSGI server, basically used to spawn a pool of webserver processes for your python backend. A python webserver is more optimal when used in multiprocess configuration (as opposed to multithreaded configuration, where python sorely suck at), and gunicorn will do that for you automatically, routing each http request to available worker process in the pool.
Does signal still require me to share a phone number?
Are there articles in China talking about how Google and Facebook spy on the content that all users send each other, including Chinese?
> The travel shutdown from China wad probably a random act of racism and not a coherently planned action

I think it was more about punishing countries that aren't so friendly. China and Iran got travel restrictions pretty quickly. Italy, South Korea and Japan took a lot longer.
I don't really get what the point of this post is. Is it really a dig at python? Python can handle thousands of connections in a single thread no problem with basic enough stuff.

Is what the author did supposed to be impressive? Is it supposed to make python look bad?

I don't get it. Seems like run of the mill stuff. Python might struggle at the same level of concurrency (was it like 15k?) but you can still do 10k connections easy enough iirc.
I can appreciate that, there’s just been enough confusion around the meaning of elimination that I feel a lot of people will just assume we’re done with it.

I don’t think the headline should be changed unless the article title changes, more just that if their goal is science communication I think they’ve done a poor job of it.

“New Zealand on the cusp of Covid-19 Elimination” might be a better term.

Also, our government hasn’t specified what threshold would be considered elimination so the latter part of that definition isn’t super helpful.
Oh wow, Zortech. I learned C in seventh grade on an ancient 486DX2 with the Zortech compiler (from a bunch of floppies which I got from the father of a kid in my carpool). Hacking analog clocks with the Zortech graphics library, writing my own linked list hash table for a color-coded version of “dir”...
Do you have an alternative proposition? Of course the government shouldn't be encouraging drug use (note the article says these are being PRIVATELY funded) , but if it were to make everyone go sober there may be many people who would choose not to stay, which would go against the stated public health goal of the program.

There may also be a large number of DT cases from alcohol withdrawal, which would force them to be sent to hospitals, another outcome I assume the programs goal is to avoid.
Map of the Median Rent by U.S. County
Don’t Democratize Data Science
Stores do a/b testing all the time, just by varying the products they carry.
I love how every criticism of hooks is like "if you don't take care to use them well, you get bad code".
Mini game consoles ranked [video]
How is it unfair to forgive debt? What? Other people don't affect you.
Got banned from Reddit for posting this. I didn't even give any opinion
Why not look at their recent actions instead?

On April 1 the CEO basically said they messed up and would pause all feature development and focus exclusively on security & privacy for 90 days.[1] They've also done weekly video AMAs that are summarised on their blog under the 90-Day Security Plan posts.[2]

They've made a lot of progress.

The Keybase acquisition is absolutely about helping to build a security team that can help them implement end-to-end encryption across 1000 person meetings. You can see that from this Twitter post[3] from Alex Stamos and this interview[4] with him.

[1] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u...
[2] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/category/announcements/
[3] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016
[4] https://cheddar.com/media/zoom-acquires-keybase-beefs-up-sec...
If all AC is running on solar power then would it be heating up the earth anymore than the sunlight would have on its own?
And yet in Detroit, the price of rent has increased while occupancy rates, incomes and population have decreased. This leads me to believe that the rising prices of rent on average in all cities in the first world is not actually a supply and demand issue. When the price for a mortgage is far above what the average person can afford, land prices start having little bearing on rent, and the reverse happens: rent prices start having a bearing on land prices.

Taking Cleveland for example, despite there being a massive surplus of housing units as you say, the average price of rent is 1123$, while the average household income is of only 26179$. This means that the average household pays 51% (!!) of their income into housing in recent years, while there is a surplus of housing.

I don't understand how this can be stated as supply and demand. It seems to me that rent simply increases so as to saturate the budget of the lower class, regardless of supply.

I would also observe that in most cities the average price of housing as a share of average income is steadily rising. This leads me to believe that what is actually happening is that prices of rent are increasing synchronously,
Yes we have cause to celebrate, but as we approach another lowered level of lockdown it’s important to remember that we are still battling this virus.

If the numbers ramp up again because people don’t take the precautions seriously then we won’t be celebrating anymore.
It's 100% instant on my computer. No delay from pressing enter and it opening.
One country? Brazil. 200 million people. We started lockdowns very early when there were very few cases. The usually very busy streets outside my apartment have been mostly empty for well over two months now. I've lost track. But not of the fact that we have a fraction of the deaths that the US has had. No thanks to the president here, but thankfully the vast majority of people here are ignoring him and following the advice of state and city leaders.
Did you ever reach out to the Apollo team to express this concern?
Not yet anyway - remember his “listening” campaign and seeming murmurs of entering politics. He’s still young, unlike Winnie the Pooh...
This is old news though, to most people using WeChat. For example, the same people documented similar findings last year: https://citizenlab.ca/2019/07/cant-picture-this-2-an-analysi... and three years ago: https://citizenlab.ca/2017/04/we-cant-chat-709-crackdown-dis...
Iirc there was always at least one old comic in these grab bags, and this was 30+ years ago so it was silver age, and the bags were transparent. I just thought it was a cool story, have mercy internet stranger! This person was around 23, spent his inheritance buying the store from a WW 2 vet and was out of business within a year.
> I feel a little more safe on some of the Chinese apps, as I know they have a stronger hand in their ability to stop hackers and scammers.

Hackers and scammers are no less prevalent on WeChat. Loads of people I know come in contact with them quite often. WeChat's monitoring isn't about stopping petty crime.
> Also, the fewer survivors, the easier the revolution gets.

That's oddly appropriate explanation of communist thought in the 20th century.
> Covid-19 was developed by the Wuhan research lab.

“Developed by” and “released from” are two different things. It’s a fact that the lab was studying bat coronaviruses. It isn’t a huge stretch that improper procedures could have led to one of those viruses getting loose. That’s a subtle, but important nuance. If an outbreak of polio happened a few miles from the CDC in Atlanta, wouldn’t it be fair to suspect that the virus could have escaped from the CDC? It’s also a strange coincidence as to how many deadly pathogens have come from China in the last 20 years. When was the last time some significant, world altering virus originated in Belgium? China has several. And all relatively similar.

It might just be a coincidence, but in my years as an NBC officer in the US Army, I learned that coincidences, especially in these matters, is pretty rare.

Was it intentional? There is no evidence to suggest it was. Was it negligent? Possibly. Is China benefiting strategically? Definitely. Draw your own conclusions, but I would trust even Trump more than I would trust anything coming out of China — and that’s saying a lot. China is not much different philosophically than North Korea. China still teaches in their schools that the Korean War was started by a US invasion. I lived in China for many years; amazing people, extremely hostile government. Imagine living in a place where your phones are tapped and your internet activity is fed to the local office of the Ministry of State Security where you can be subject to questioning over anything even slightly “disruptive.” I was questioned once because I had accessed a video (over VPN!) of the Tiananmen Square event. The principle of the school I was at called me to his office to ask me “to not do that again please.”

There is nothing in China’s character that would suggest they should be trusted over anything. They lie about air quality readings for f-ks sake.
I know this is not really scientific, but: Apple's business model makes me more likely to trust them over Facebook.
I definitely can imagine that after the Alice decision many patent lawyers would still intentionally try to push through applications contrary to the court decision - if there's a reasonable chance that it might get through, and you can afford it, why not try it? Any actual change in patent application behavior would come only when the Patent Office would assert that yes, they mean it, and they will deny these applications, and they did it only in 2019 (and issued the guidence along with it).

So yes, your suggestion that "it means Alice was somehow misapplied for 5 years and no one ever meaningfully contested it" seems quite plausible for me, it's not easy to meaningfully contest it (you need an actual situation where such a misapplied patent gets abused and gets contested) and it takes years to do so.
That's so well stated, /u/agentuitra. Thank you.
A passwordless server run by NSO Group sparks contact-tracing privacy concerns
I think the analogy to mechanical engineering is something like this:

A seasoned engineer notices that everyone is only building suspension bridges all of a sudden.

They point out that you can span a stream with some bricks or rocks and a bit of mortar, and are ridiculed.

Next, they build a highway overpass out of concrete pylons, and stress test it to 10x the necessary engineering load, and point out it cost 10% as much as a typical contemporary suspension bridge. That’s this article.
They will find a city for the next go-around that has more to gain and less nimby-ism. A Pittsburgh or a Detroit.
*Assumed to be lower.

What is actually happening we don't know. IT is dramatically changing everything. It's not all bad but it isn't all good either. I hate to give examples since it is really vague what goes in and what comes out and people tend to mistake an example for full coverage but... for example, we have no idea what drives suicide rates.
Somebody says this every single time something nefarious gets revealed. Confirmation lets debate move past "whether or not it's happening".
Mozilla actually had something similar to JSX at one point:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/E4X
You're absolutely right that past decisions focused on ease-of-use over security.

For evidence that they've changed their focus you can see their April 1 blog post[1] and the weekly video AMAs they do that are summarised in their "90-Day Security Plan Progress Report" blog posts.[2]

They're making a lot of progress.

The Keybase acquisition is about building out a strong security team that will help them implement end-to-end encryption in 1,000 person meetings, which currently isn't possible anywhere.[3]

[1] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u...
[2] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/category/announcements/
[3] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016
Partly b/c when Keybase was in due dilligence with Zoom they wouldn’t make any major decisions like that.

Now that the deal is done and appears to have been primarily an acquihire focused on adding E2E to Zoom, Keybase may be low enough priority for Zoom that open sourcing it is a viable option now.

Eg, it doesn’t sound like Zoom wants to allocate any dev time to Keybase, wants to stay focused on Zoom, and probably can’t sell Keybase without its developer team who are all working on Zoom now. So hopefully they’ll just open source it and let the community take over.
As a New Zealander my opinion on the government changed for the better after the pandemic. They listened to health professionals and implemented their advice. Far too many governments have industry in their ear overriding anything else. In a twist of irony, our economy is going to pick up faster than other countries as a result.
Danger is a tool we integrated into our Continuous Integration system that performs post-commit automated checks

You mean like the post-commit hook that Git offers out of the box? It's even named the exact same! I feel like we don't focus all this time on fast build test and deploy cycles only to then commit, navigate to some website to create a "merge request", wait for some fairy to allocate computing resources for trivial checks my computer could have done, only to get some pure noise "don't put this file here" comment and repeat the cycle all again.
> It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it".

It is also a bad misrepresentation of the point made by the person that you originally quoted.

Let me try an analogy: emacs is Olympic-sized pool, 50m long, 5m deep, with a 10m jump platform. It has been in use for decades by all kinds of people. Some new people see some amazing swimmers and divers using that pool and want to join. Problem is, they also don't know how to dive and are still learning to swim so they ask for a nice ladder on the corner and they want the pool to have one end shallow enough for people to stand on.

The developer is basically saying: yeah, getting in there is intimidating at first and we can do some improvements to help beginners, but we also need to find a way to get those beginners to get into the training program, train harder and dedicate themselves to diving, otherwise it would just be a waste of time and resources. Oh, and we also need to keep in mind that none of these changes should affect the people that are already training here for years.
Critiquing the USPTO is fine and welcome. But going to bat for Alice is a fools game.

Alice is an incoherent and disjointed holding (well several holdings). Which is no surprise because trying to craft a stable informative legal standard that limits or improves so-called software patents based on 35 USC 101 (subject matter/patentabilty) is inherently unworkable.

Besides, patent attorneys are usually smart enough to draft around Alice-type subject matter issues. There were so many early Alice rejections at the USPTO and patents invalidated in courts because they usually involved applications or patents that were drafted before Alice was decided. Alice changed the standard out from under them after they were filed or granted.

Patent attorneys familiar with software technology could/can easily draft around Alice limitations now that they know what they are.
That's still not a full answer, of course, your proprietary operating system or closed chipsets can spy on you.

Absolutism isn't helpful IMHO, there is no true security in this world only degrees of trust and risk. You can always go one step further in securing a product but the first step still matters.

I think there's real value in companies implementing e2e (and it's hard! it's super hard politically to get this done when the business sees little value for the effort and I know this because I've successfully fought to get e2e into a product).

The reality from my point of view is that it takes idealists inside to convince a commercial entity to lock themselves out of value (commercial surveillance) they could capture. I find a company's stance on e2e to be a valuable signal.
In truth when I was a teenager I sat down with vim and emacs one afternoon and tried both. At the end of that day I chose vim, because I preferred the default bindings of vim. Nobody around me used either, nobody around me programmed at all, but I had read online that the pros used or or the other.
> It's determined by the value of the property around it, and that property in aggregate is determined by the wealth of the jobs congregated there, and the concentration of capital located there.

The value of something is set by what people are willing to pay for it. I.e. supply and demand.

> Despite this, units cost has increased by about 700% during that time.

Average inflation since 1970 is 565%. 700% is within that, as inflation measurements are inexact and there are regional differences as well.
> This narrative of false equivalency is dangerous, IMO.

What's dangerous is convincing yourself that proprietary systems won't betray your trust.
How much of the old "A fractal of bad design" post would you say still applies? That one post showcased so many footguns right at the language level that it spooked me away from it forever.
Mmmmm. I set up a local kafka cluster serving millions of connections. I'm not Rachel by the bay though.
vi > emacs

If you disagree you're either just a troll or lying to yourself
> M is for meta, s is for super, S is for shift, A is for alt, H is for hyper.

But if we're going down that road, M is for alt really, and super wasn't always what Xf86 says it is (the windows/command key).

The mapping of keys is arbitrary, but the bindings to the symbols are documented and many defaults exist.
I believe the reason Rust dropped green threads was to get rid of the runtime system and become a more systems language.

Modern fast network code in Rust is based on async/cooperative multitasking distributed over num cpu worker threads which works very well.
You are being downvoted, maybe because Citizen Lab has already investigated Zoom before: https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

That report is one of the reasons why Zoom has such a poor reputation for security. The other being Zoom is largely Made In China software, so subject to the requirements of China's totalitarian government: to bolster domestic industries by stealing technology and R&D from around the world (by infiltrating companies, communication networks, computer servers and end-user devices using any software and individuals it has influence over, including hackers from Ministry of State Security and People's Liberation Army).

This is achieved through direct legal requirements to co-operate with Ministry of State Security corporate espionage (via China's 2017 National Intelligence Law), and more broadly through the China's attempts to switch the allegiances of all ethnically Chinese people through the overseas political interference organization called the "United Front Work Department" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTXPxWtl8Zw), and also through the Thousand Talents Plan.
I like the article overall. It’s definitely important to understand the differences between all three variable declarations. However, I think the article falls short when explaining how scope differs between var vs let and const.

It’s not that let and const are “locally scoped”, but rather they are block scoped. Whereas, var is globally or function scoped. This is a very important distinction, and makes JavaScript way more consistent to work with.

Some contrived examples…

In this example, x is globally scoped. Once the loop finishes, it persists. This means it can be accessed and even worst, modified outside of the for loop.

var someArray = [1, 2]
for(var x = 0; x <= someArray.length; x++) {
// do some work
}

console.log(x) // outputs: 3
x++
console.log(x) // outputs: 4

---

In this example, x is scoped to the for loop block. Once the loop finishes, it’s destroyed. This results in x not being defined when you access it outside the for loop.

var someArray = [1, 2]
for(let x = 0; x <= someArray.length; x++) {
// do some work
}

console.log(x) // output: x is not defined

---

Cheers!
They bought Keybase to bring on a strong security team as they try to build end-to-end encryption into 1,000 person meetings which is currently not possible with any solution.[1]

They'll either deliver that or they won't.

[1] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016
Pretty much given up on WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger etc... in favor of Signal.

Would like to see a similar analysis on Signal.
Certainly, I knew what I was getting into and my application actually fell under that category. But even storing glacier data is difficult if you can't store more than 5 things a second.

At the end of the day, I knowingly made the decision to experiment with it. I learned a bunch from it. Glad I did it.
That's not what the parent post said, or inferred. Don't put words in others' mouths please.
What does the new guidance say then? I'm curious to hear a counterpoint on the substance of the guidance from someone that might have the expertise to go into it. I agree with you on the EFFs article being substance-free and manipulative, and I'd like to know what the substantive counterpoint is from someone who can interpret the guidance.