skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That white paper is scare-mongering garbage, and I don't say that lightly. Some of the horrible things TikTok is supposedly doing:

* Using Java reflection (which almost everyone does)

* Webview (many of your apps are just thin webview wrappers)

* Log device information (uh, logging things like the OS version for diagnostics and metrics is perfectly normal)

The paper uses the word "monitoring" appearing in a debug message as evidence that the app is built to spy on users. Here's the log message that they want to claim proves TikTok evil-doing:

AFlogger.afInfoLog("Turning on monitoring")

Uh, the word "monitoring" has plenty of perfectly innocuous uses, e.g., monitoring memory use. If this thing really were trying to monitor user behavior in some sneaky way for the CCP, why the hell would they log about it, in English?

In another section of scare-longering, these "researchers" try to cast asperations on the app calling the Java equivalent of system(3) to run a subprocess. Uh, so what? That's also a fairly common thing to do on Android --- people use it to, e.g., run logcat for diagnostics (logcat filters the logs to only ones from the running UID, so there's no privacy leak).

In yet another section of scare-mongering, the document suggests that TikTok's use of MD5 is some kind of deliberate back-door. No, it's probably just like every other use of MD5 these days: some junior developer who hasn't kept up on the recent MD5 attacks.

Yes, TikTok ignores TLS errors. That's just shitty programming. But like the MD5 thing, I'm going to chalk it up to just shitty coding, not some kind of deliberate spyware backdoor. This code would certainly not pass my code review. But I see no evidence of malice. These are errors that junior developers make everywhere.

There's also a SQL injection. The researchers haven't shown that the inputs to the SQL query are unsanitized, and even so, injecting SQL from a UI text book to the local SQLite database is no big deal. The user owns the device! It's certainly not evidence of some kind of nefarious backdoor.

On top of all of that, the app is sandboxed, like every other Android app. Even if there were some ultra-mega remote code execution facility wired directly to Xi Jinping's desk, there'd be minimal risk, because the app couldn't look at the rest of the system! This whole analysis is aggressively, painfully, and conspicuously stupid. All this article tells me is 1) TikTok's software engineering team is too junior, and 2) people really, really, really want to believe that the app is evil.

This execrable article is one of the worst security reviews that I have ever read, and I've read a lot of them. It makes me yearn for the days of Colin Powell bullshitting the UN about Iraqi yellowcake. At least Powell didn't make 6th grade writing and logic errors.

This is "so if she weighs the same as a duck...she must be a witch!" level of analysis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5iMhHCGuOI
There is a lot of Perl 5 code around though. Improving 5 (in a backwards compatible way) therefore provides a lot of value.

But a Perl 7 which is not focused on retaining backwards compatibility with 5 is worst of both worlds. Existing code bases will not upgrade, and nobody will start a green field project in it when Raku (not to mention Python, Ruby etc) is available. It would be dead in the water.
Ever since John Bogle created the first index fund about 50 years ago, the advice of simply put your money in, don't try to time the market, and divide between an allocation of stocks and bonds based on your risk tolerance has performed far better than anything else. This includes periods where the market has been very over-inflated. If you had the worst possible timing and put your money in around the absolute peak before the 2008 recession, held throughout the crash, and left it in for a while, you would have more than doubled it a little over a decade later.

It may be hard to realize, especially at times like this when the market doesn't seem to reflect reality, but when investing on a long time frame the best advice is always simply to put your money in and to not try to time the market. On a long enough time frame, it will all come out in the wash.

The key, of course, is "on a long enough time frame". If you think there's a reasonable chance you might need the cash in two or five years, then you should either significantly reduce your exposure to equities like the S&P 500 or eliminate it entirely. The question then, of course, is what do you put your money into? Well, there are plenty of options. While the S&P 500 returns around 9% before inflation, you have a number of options that are lower returns, lower risk. For that, you have the entire spread from a savings account (1% right now) to short term Treasuries (2%ish right now) to various kinds of bonds. The simplest way to get, say, 50% of the reward for 50% of the risk is to have (for example) 50% in SPY and 50% in Treasuries.

Whatever you do, good luck, and I highly recommend the Bogleheads forum for good advice on any situation.
Python is horrible language for absolute beginner. I recommend Javascript over Python.
If the USA destabilizes, the last place I want to be is Central America.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I need to convince a few family members to ditch SMS... unfortunately some businesses (like apartment buildings) still use SMS to communicate, so it’ll probably be a while before we fully move away from this medium.
I mean, if this goes through essentially what will have happened is the president used the power of the state to get a foreign company to sell control of a valuable product to Microsoft at what will almost certainly be a firesale price. If I were Microsoft, I wouldn't be complaining!
I agree that Bitcoin isn’t a smart investment due to volatility. However would someone be similarly criticized for suggesting someone start or work for a startup? To me they have a similar risk profile.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...
my hot stock tips free of charge $NXRT $VVNT $ALRM $NVDA
> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly

Sorry, but are we in the same country?
We're currently printing, and will be printing more money.
This is not investing advice. I'd put it in crypto or gold, or foreign stocks which are not undermining their dollar.
Not always, but if you want them to take over the surrounding text color, it's the only way iirc.
For example, when I do a selection, the selection follows my cursor on every frame. I don't have cameras that fast, but the end to end latency on a keypress seems to be mostly from my keyboard controller and the transport.
The split would likely be Douyin (TikTok China) vs. TikTok for the rest of the world. The business is already structured that way- ByteDance operates Douyin directly but TikTok operates through a subsidiary.
This is essentially admitting that the free market lost and doesn't work anymore. Because the free market has clearly decided that it likes TikTok, even enough to share its data with the company.

I don't think people realize how significant this might be.
I've seen many creative ways people used to get a job. Like with any problem out there - there are lots of solutions. Just sending a resume is only one of them, the most obvious.
US is doing with China what China did with them. American VCs and business men used to criticize and mock Chinese government for it. Since US is following the footsteps of China, I wonder whether Chinese will be doing what US VCs did?
Navigation does not work. What does it do with Google Sheets?
The hottest investment in the next year I think is going to be secluded properties away from large cities, especially if they come with fiber internet (think Montana, Idaho).
Gotta like a guy who's present, working, driven, and competent. That'll deal with the first 65% of the issues (security eg. housing, food, decent education for kids etc). But that last 35% is very different kind of tough and it does not succumb to "work harder bark louder." For an interesting example in film consider [0] with HG Wells
and P. Newman. Ultimately the son is accepted by the father, but at what cost? Balance is ... the toughest master of all.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Just skimming some of the replies here makes me think you will get better advice on the Bogleheads forum [1]. Despite the minimalist appearance it is actually a great place to get sensible financial advice. I would start with the wiki page on managing a windfall [2], then search through older replies to similar questions. This kind of question gets asked there a lot, so there should be some recent threads.

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/
[2] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall
There is no way news searches are worth $40 per potential customer. Assuming every single person in Australia searched for news on Google.
The United States hasn't had a lockdown. Small sections of the US did, but mostly people didn't take it as seriously here as they did in a number of other countries. We basically wasted the money because we only took half-hearted measures.

This is a hundred year pandemic. The worst pandemic since the 1918 flu. We save up during the good times just in case we need it during the bad times. So yes, spending wealth accumulated over the past decades is necessary now.
Not a Rust user but this all sounds remarkably painful. Is it common? The only other compiled, type-safe language I use regularly is C# (via Unity) and I don't recall this level of upheaval.
I'd say that information theory is our physics. The worlds we create are still constrained by math.
That may well be, but that's not the spirit. Instead, "if we all resisted more, we'd be free of that crap".

Granted, this is the tragedy of the commons. By acting in one's own interest: get a good score, people poison the well for everone: everyone must work and self-censor to keep a good score.
The reality is, that in the current space market, if you don't have some way to produce launches for yourself, your gone have a bad time.

The GTO market, long the stable of many big rockets, is slowing and not gone pick up.

At the same time every government tries to prop up its domestic industry. One the few commercial launches, beating SpaceX on price is just not gone happen unless you simply fly with a massive lost, you need a couple of years ramp at least.

The other big thing it government launches, SpaceX and ULA are very established and its pretty unlikely that Blue will get deep into these anytime soon. SpaceX is gone continue to have most commercial Space Station buissness. ULA and SpaceX will likely again be selected for the military over the next couple years.

One of the reason SpaceX does Starlink is that it is an amazing driver for scale and re-usability for their rocket buissness. This year alone SpaceX without Starlink does only a few launches, not enough, and this is a year where most others did very few launches.

Blue and Bezos will have made the same calculation, you simply can't New Glenn sized rockets without that.
I like Perl, and I think that changing the defaults is a sane thing to do. Starting a new script with dozens of "use strict", "use v5.30", etc is less than ideal and it's easy to forget something and shoot yourself in the foot. Almost 30 years will pass between Perl 5 and 7, and going back to the old values is just a matter of adding a few lines at the beginning of your old script. It's not a mess like the whole "Python 2/3" ordeal that was deeply more complex and painful.

Heck Perl in the last 30 years has been even more stable than C. I remember when gcc and clang switched from a default of GNU89 to GNU99 and it broke several packages who didn't set or check for the right flags; nobody bitched about it and just went on to fix their Makefiles.
So tiktok, aka the CCP, are actively trying to sway the US election. I recall the past 3 years were spent hearing people lament about foreign interference in our democratic system. But now the ACLU says it’s ok? Which is it? Pick a side.
You’re totally right, edited my post with this info. Thanks!
I’m not sure billionaires are the problem with respect to income/wealth inequality. We’ve always had mega-rich families, but what’s driving the anger against wealth inequality now?

The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is the pulling away of the upper middle class from everyone else. I think that’s the real source of anger against inequality. I don’t think most people really care that there is some billionaire out there. All billionaires combined earn just 1% of all income, so it’s not like they’re sucking up a huge part of all income. People get mad when they feel like they’re competing for real world resources, and there just aren’t enough billionaires to do that. But the Facebook engineer making $500,000/year? They’re the ones buying up the houses and driving middle class people out of neighborhoods.

I’ve been listening to the new New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents”: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/podcasts/nice-white-paren.... The first couple of episodes talks about the conflict between lower income Black and Hispanic parents and high income white parents in a Brooklyn neighborhood school. I think when people get mad about income inequality, for the most part they’re reacting to that sort competition for limited resources in American neighborhoods. And the “rich people” that are competing for those resources aren’t billionaires, but the upper middle class.
> We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices.

We still are. I asked about "which specific business practices are these", and was only pointed out to ad hominems, entitlement, and one sided arguments.

Feel free to continue discussing that on the different parent thread. I'm interested on multiple views on this.

> You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices

No. I couldn't care less about nvidia, but when somebody acts like an entitled choosing beggar, I point that out. And there is a lot of entitlement in the arguments that people are making about why nvidia is bad at working with others.

Nvidia has some of the best drivers for Linux there are. This driver is not open source and distributed as a binary blob. Nvidia is very clear that this is the only driver that they support on Linux, and if you are not fine with that, they are fine with you not buying their products. This driver supports all of their products very well (as opposed to AMD's, for example), its development is made by people being paid full time to do it (as opposed to most of their competitors which also have people helping on their drivers on their free time - this is not necessarily bad, but it is what it is), and some of their developments are contributed back to open source, for free.

People are angry about this. Why? The only thing that comes to mind is entitlement. Somebody wants to use an nvidia card on Linux without using their proprietary driver. They know this is not supported. Yet they buy the card anyways, and then they complain. They do not only complain about nvidia. They also complain about, e.g., nouveau being bad, the Linux kernel being bad, and many other things. As if nvidia, or as if the people working on nouveau or the Linux kernel for free on their free time owes them anything.

I respect people not wanting to use closed source software. Don't use windows, don't use macosx, use alternatives. Want to use linux? don't use nvidia if you don't want to.
I recently bought muni bond funds and SLV to hedge on inflation. PMO pays a nearly 5% dividend which is tax free. I'll take that over a 1% savings account (with taxes) any day.
Doubtful. Bill Gates has been spending a lot of his time looking for ways to spend his wealth to help humanity. He’s not close to running out of wealth either.

I sense that you’re looking for a denialist argument against this concept and potentially in bad faith. “If it’s not possible to actually cash out on 1B every two weeks then discussing the things we’d do with it is pointless.”
Enjoyed reading you two in the thread above.

I agree with most of what you guys are saying. Here's a wiki post I wrote, outlining a kind of theory for what consciousness actually is, that attempts to explain some of the 'mechanics' of it, or a description of what memory itself actually is.

https://quanta.wiki/u/WClayFerguson/theory-of-consciousness
Thanks for posting this.
I'm curious how this differs from Uber/Cadence, and Temporal (https://www.temporal.io/) which is a fork of cadence.

They're both also distributed workflow scheduling and state management
I’ve seen first-hand how the density of talent and capital in Silicon Valley supports these “mafias” in the tech world. Coronavirus is causing a short-term exodus as people “temporarily” uproot for other cities. I’d like to think that they will take parts of the ecosystem with them, because it would be healthy for the Valley to have a real competitor; but I just don’t know if it’s possible.
They already are. There were revelations just this week that Google has removed conservative media from search results in what would appear to be a direct effort to interfere in the 2020 election.
I like the ability to find files/resources using a popup incremental search dialog rather than hunting for them in a conventional project treeview, which takes me ages. For example ctrl-shift-r in Eclipse, or alt-shift-o in Netbeans. This is how I open files 90% of the time when working on Java projects at work.

The ability to select code structurally. For example, select the function I am in, the current div, the current for-loop etc. Very helpful when working with long, deeply nested html files. It's horrible trying to eyeball the closing tag of a nested div while you are trying to drag-select it over several pages.

I love any feature that insulates me from project configuration and the build process and lets me focus on coding.
My disagreement is that, in the phrase

> tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation

you're using "understood" when it should actually be "cared about" which is substantially different. Also,

> the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users

I'm part of the tech industry and at the same time a non-English speaker and multilingual users, and I'm not oblivious to my own needs. The problem is not that tech people don't understand, it's that business decisions don't take multilingual users into account.

This differentiation is important. Rephrased like this, it becomes apparent that this is a matter of policy, not literacy. It becomes possible to imagine (though I'm not arguing this) a scenario in which apps with a sufficient number of users could be required by law to accommodate multilingual users.
In the classic sense of an SCM ‘branch’ you would be correct, however with SwiftUI you don’t need a branch to support MacOS. At worst you need a few #ifdefs.
They should rewrite everything in python so they need 10 times as much hardware. The economy is stagnating
Hire a good CPA they'll be able to execute strategies to reduce your tax burden and shelter the amount you pay on what it is earning you with what you do decide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superstores
I think this tool only working for popular languages like european and some asian languages. None of the middle eastern languages are checked at all.
> If ARM-based chips can be "orders of magnitude" faster than x86, they'll already be dominating datacenters.

Raw compute performance is the wrong metric for measuring data center worthiness. The correct metric is performance per dollar.

ARM in the DC currently suffers a lack of ARM-specific code optimizers and has to play catch-up in this regard. Amazon recently focused a squad of engineers on adding ARM 64 optimization to the Zend Optimizer in PHP 7.4 to an incremental effect, but then as some cruft is removed on the PHP 8 roadmap, that gain is around 15% in raw performance. Combine that with 20% lower pricing for comparable Graviton2 EC2 instances, and you’ve got a significant cost motivation to migrate to the ARM platform.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/improving-performance-o...

Expect AWS to dedicate engineering resource to similarly bring projects like Python, V8, LLVM, etc. into the ARM-future.
Now that's a coincidence... Just 5 minutes ago I was checking out the Bootstrap 5 alpha site (which is really great; just check out what it offers) and stumbled upon the Bootstrap icons project! Great stuff!

Many, many thanks to the developers!
Perl6 became Raku, a whole different language, something that should have happened since the very beginning instead of putting on a totally different project the label "Perl" and thus funneling in a truckload of FUD that only harmed the language.
Kinda funny such a package exists. I was looking at the source and to be fair the author states "I created this in 2014, when I was learning how to program.". The project is archived.

Anyways, source seems to be as such:

'use strict';

var isOdd = require('is-odd');

module.exports = function isEven(i) {
return !isOdd(i);
};

Then we look as the is-odd package and we see the following:

'use strict';

const isNumber = require('is-number');

module.exports = function isOdd(value) {
const n = Math.abs(value);
if (!isNumber(n)) {
throw new TypeError('expected a number');
}
if (!Number.isInteger(n)) {
throw new Error('expected an integer');
}
if (!Number.isSafeInteger(n)) {
throw new Error('value exceeds maximum safe integer');
}
return (n % 2) === 1;
};

It's kinda sad that JavaScript needs so many lines of code to figure out if a number is even, but understandable due to its dynamic nature. Not even sure how many lines the is-number package contains, but I'm guessing it's more than 2. And who knows, perhaps is-number has other dependencies?

I'm no web dev, but I feel it'd be nice if there was some modern, statically typed language integrated into every browser that would be a viable replacement of JavaScript.
What if most of the marketing is useless in the first place? And most of the data are useless too.

How would they know?
Blue Origin is not amazon.
One can assume they already are. By virtue of having a disproportionate representation of one political party within their ranks (which they do), you can argue that a lot of their decision making (however benign/simple/small) will fall in line with that parties platform, or end up promoting that party in some way.

Right now from my point of view, it absolutely looks like the big social-media companies like Youtube/Twitter/Reddit/etc are actively purging large conservative opinions/voices in anticipation for the US election coming up. It's downright Orwellian that we allow them to have such a huge impact on political elections under the guise of "community standards". Those same community-standards that are touted for protecting the vulnerable are acting as camouflage for political meddling.

As for Tik-tok, I'd ban it just for the degenerate social impact it's having on a large section of our youth population. Ditto for gang-glorifying, misogynistic rap music.
1) python3 -m venv venvname

2) source venvname/bin/activate

then you do everything in the virtual environment...
Show HN: I visualised genre co-occurrence in the TMDB 5000 Movie Dataset