skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By analogy: think about how a preemptive multitasking OS with protected virtual memory means that a misbehaving user process cannot bring down the machine: the kinds of bugs in user programs in the time of DOS or Windows 3.0 that would destroy the world (e.g. a user process overwriting kernel memory, or a single-threaded user process failing to yield to the kernel) just can’t happen with a modern kernel.

The same kinds of security and safety guarantees that stem from the overall system architecture can exist in banking systems - that’s my point.

So yes, until everyone switches to Haskell we will always have bugs - but the kinds of bugs can be limited - as can the scale of their impact - with good system design.
As Covid-19 Symptoms Linger, Demand for Specialized Clinics Surges
An explanation of the solution to the Conway Knot problem
https://archive.vn/ochvJ
Yeah, I've had to explain to professional developers why them using a List was bad for their use case, they didn't know what else you can use apart from a List.

I've had to explain what hash maps are.

I've had to explain why nested foreach loops are bad.

I've seen code where the dev wanted to create a collection of Foo, they didn't know how many Foos would be in the collection so they made an array that was far bigger than they needed. They then added all the items to the Array one by one, then performed a loop which went round the Array starting at the end and on each iteration it would check if the last item was null. They then resized the Array by 1 item to remove the null entry.... The loop did this until it hit an item that wasn't null...

This in a language that has List<T> type...

They at least had the sense to write a comment saying someone needed to look into this as it was slow for some reason...

This wasn't a junior developer either, it was someone with 15+ years experience. This person would have no idea what Big O meant.

I've seen nested foreach loops with a database call in the inner loop!
By experience, I want to say : way too much. Journals and published articles looks like a research lab full of PhD working on their owns without access to all the previous results of the labs (good, bad and everything in between) and do not talk to others unless they have a 10 minutes seminar every six months to show some stuff quickly.
Sure there is! Shaves a few hours off the initial development time, adds a few milliseconds to execution time (this is scheme we're talking about), adds a few days to later development.
The larger issue with employers paying insufficiently is minimum wages that are too low. Federal minimum wage still applies for tipped workers, as far as I can tell, so employers are required to compensate the difference if workers make less. The same seems to apply to most states that have higher minimum wages, and in a few the minimum wage (excluding tips) is the same regardless of tipping.

EDIT: Adding a source, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
Both are very very disputable.
Look, this is just childish equivocation. A lot of words that are considered offensive also have (or used to have) other, innocuous meanings. What you're doing is like a child saying "Nah-uh, this word just means happy!"

A word is offensive in polite society because a population of people finds it hurtful, or because another population of people uses it in an intentionally hurtful way. Usually it's both. Innocent words can become slurs, and other slurs, over time, can become obscure and lose their power.

For example, the "n-word" in English obviously comes from the Spanish or Portuguese for the color black. Despite that, it's an offensive slur.

The older colloquial term in the English language for Romani people apparently comes from the word "Egyptian." There is no problem with being Egyptian. But many people find this particular word hurtful, and polite society is actively trying to retire it.

Maybe you have personal ideas about what "should" or "shouldn't" be hurtful, but I'm surprised that we don't seem to agree on how people actually use these words in reality. "Kushi" can be a slur even if your grandma's pet name for you was "my little Kushi" and you love that word to death.
> But that is besides the point, what you personally feel doesn’t really matter. Your previous comment is still incredibly dishonest.

If I say what I believe, it's not dishonest. It might be _wrong_, but it's not a lie.
I don't know the scale I plan on using it at yet. Matomo started breaking down at a few million pageviews a month.

Is it possible to turn off one click updates completely? I deploy as an immutable application container (I do the same for Wordpress; uploads are written to object storage and database is separate, the actual underlying code "can't change").
>>Slow-and-steady, carefully written software isn't tolerated within many product orgs these days.

The problem is that this works only for large clients and conservative problem domains (such as accounting) where things change at a glacial pace. Back in the day, only such clients could afford enterprise/custom software, so using a waterfall methodology to develop that software worked well enough. Took five years to deliver the final product? No problem because the set of requirements you collected five years ago and based your software on probably still apply at the time of customer sign-off.

Things have changed. Software has gotten much cheaper to develop, which means it has become way more affordable, and the types of businesses who need that kind of software are in heavy competition with each other and their problems and needs change at breakneck speed. So your best best is to have your own software development practices to match that speed.
The general public seems to be capable of setting up and maintaining a Nest thermostat. The only difference would be that data only goes down, not up.
I'm very confused. What does it matter, for running old software, whether a framework was a fad or not? And what does a "brittle" dependency even mean in the context of preserving software?

If you're trying to preserve software, you've got two options.

One, you can preserve the binary and run it with emulation. For webapps, this means preserving a deployable image. Your faddish/brittle dependencies are 100% irrelevant, because your image includes them already, right?

Or two, you can preserve the source code. Which for any project is going to involve a mess of complicated tooling that dates to when the project used to be compiled. But if you're intending to preserve something for the long term, you should preserve the dependencies too -- e.g. node modules or whatever. Or else you're gonna have to track down the packages used on a certain historical date, just like you might have to track down some random specific version of a Borland compiler that ran on a certain version of an OS.

I don't really see what's all that different.
Every other city in the country has figured out rail transportation. The FAA could have been pacified if there was any political will to find a real solution. Blaming the FAA because they rejected one design is pure bs.

GM most definitely ran a campaign through the '50s and '60s designed to increase the use of buses as a replacement for street cars. That's not anywhere close to debatable and LA was not the only city that went along with it.

And if you're going to continue to claim that corruption is not the driving force behind these decisions then I would love your explanation for BH doing everything in their power to prevent and delay a rail line because they didn't want homeless people to be have easy access to the area. It's all about money, not the common good. Nobody here is planning for anything other than their own pocketbook.
Do you have a breakdown of "Common Reasons For Startup Failure" by total funding amount bracket? Is there a trend?
This is probably good personal advice. I guess.

Ignores the larger structural issues. Again.

- Share you data.

- Cite your sources.

- Sign your work.

Maybe call these three simple rules pre-filters.
> it's all driven by a product mentality that favors rapid iterations and technical debt to run business experiments on customers.

Which is in turn driven by a venture capital industry that cares only about massive growth and nothing else.
It’s not nitpicking. Almost all states recognize the legitimate use of violence for self defense, even if the specific methods permitted vary on a state by state basis. Thus if your definition of a failed state is one in which the government doesn’t have sole right to violence, then you end up with the rather absurd position that all states are failed.
I didn't care especially for the technical details, what I like about this article is that the first thing they mention is the success criteria of the project (hopefully it was done at the very beginning, before any implementation). Then on top of that, they created an automated tool to verify such criteria automatically and objectively.

This is a great approach and unfortunately I don't think many (most?) software projects start out like that.

Not defining conditions of victory and scope creep are possibly the biggest risks in software projects.
That's pretty much the total opposite of what's happening right now. Uber (and the recent group of "tech but not really" unicorns in general) have if anything burnt hundreds of billions of VC/PE money thus directly subsidizing the costs of hundreds of millions of users, for very slim profits at best.

Yes, it's because they are expecting future returns on their "burnt" money. But considering the risks, the enormous amounts involved, the meagre margins involved even in a market dominant postion and that there are still no signs of profitability or even positive cash flow, I don't see how this can be seen as just a wealth transfert from society to the wealthy. Even in their best case scenario, they will be able to get meagre returns from perpetually capital intensive, low margin businesses. That's far from obscene wealth extraction imo.

Sure, some early VCs made tons of money off of this new era of unicorns, but that was pretty much all coming from other VC or private equity that have had to keep the money pump going.
This is naive. Violence is the last resort. If the stakes are high enough and you’ve tried everything else, violence is the only remaining option.

Sometimes actions don't need to be acceptable, they just need to be impactful.
I absolutely love the vision of software technology in the Fire/Deepness books. The "zones of thought" concept dovetails nicely and lets him expand on those ideas, too. Highly recommended reading (for that and a bunch more reasons).
> because we know the number of deaths

We only know estimates of the number of deaths. The correct number lies somewhere between the official number of covid19 fatalities and the total number of deaths during the same period, because one hand you have excessive mortality and on the other hand you have changes to the baseline due to changes in behavioral patterns. Excessive mortality are higher than officially recognized covid19 deaths and serve as a more accurate proxy for real covid19 deaths, but at the same time the baseline mortality might vary as well.
Ask HN: How to find high quality workplaces for developers?
While I have had a few great individual colleagues over the years, I've never worked with a great overall team or engineering department.

If you have successfully found a great workplace for you as an engineer, how did you do it?

For me, "great" means a team that consistently values quality, puts reasonable effort into application design and maintenance, and makes thoughtful decisions related to project goals and end-users.

I'm open-minded about specific technology choices. I do not expect people to work overtime, or to have exceptional passion for their jobs. I'm not demanding elite talent. Just that everyone is competent and makes an honest effort.

Have you used any concrete techniques to identify teams like that?
The way I understand this, this only removed data that was not synced to cloud. I assume the files were not synced and they were not backed up anywhere (or there would not be so much fuss).

I can sympathize but, honestly, I think it is a fault of person who thinks they can get away keeping precious data on a single drive/device and then fault anybody and everybody if something happens to it.

Drives do fail but so does the software. Storing data on a single device and single drive is basically saying you put almost no value on that data.
GitHub and Gitlab: yes.

Gitea: I don't know.
> impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written.

What laws, don't you have freedom of association in USA? Just create a group, what is stopping you?

Speaking as an ignorant European.
I can see this journal being 10x-20x the size of normal journals
The argument is not "Marx therefore bad," it's that this is a useless observation. You've selected axioms that necessitate your conclusion. It's like me saying "the most moral thing anyone can do is preventing a human death, and therefore everyone here is immoral because they're writing comments on a message board instead of flying to an impoverished country to feed a starving child."

That's true, given the predicate. I don't know why it would be relevant, since -- just like with your comment -- nobody has conceded this definition of morality. The conver preceding is not obviously rooted in Marxist class struggle, so I'm not sure why you're framing it thus (whether you use the words or not.)

Your argument depends on everyone agreeing that, unless a person's basic need for house and food are totally met first, anything they do in pursuit of those needs is compelled and not voluntary. This is not an agreed upon predicate.
Another Uber security guy was hired by Tesla and somehow came up related to the Gigafactory drug running stuff:

> Tesla then hired a new senior manager of Global Security named Nick Gicinto. He was told that Gicinto and team were “spying on Tesla employees using devices to monitor emails, cell phones, and data communications from Tesla employees. Hansen expressed concern to his supervisors regarding what he believed was illegal conduct.”

> In fact, Gicinto and his team allegedly used these same tactics at Uber under Jeff Jones, former head of security who was also hired at Tesla with another security employee Jacob Nocon.

> In a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court, District of Northern California, Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies, Inc., (Case No.:17-cv-00939-WHA). Jones, Gicinto, and Nocon all “allegedly engaged in numerous illegal methods of investigations such as wiretapping and hacking.” These behaviors are all outlined in the “Jacob’s Letter” filed in this case.

https://patriotssoapbox.com/business/tesla-whistle-blower-al...
> It can happen for instance when someone pays money to another individual under the mistaken belief he is liable to pay the amount. And in the event, such a transaction does transpire, the law imposes an obligation upon the recipient to pay back the money in full.

Can you imagine if a company like TurboTax had to pay back the money they charge people that legally should be able to fill for free?
Finally!!! This should be fun.
as did apparently many others :-/
> However, I overwhelmingly don't want to pay for their healthcare or food stamps because they aren't earning enough money.

So you response is to support a solution where they can't earn any money because it's not enough money? Congratulations, now these people are idle and you're now paying even more to cover their needs whereas previously your taxes only had to cover some of their needs and they could participate actively in the economy, working their way up to better opportunities.
Something like a fleet of Hindenburg zeppelins? Fighting fire with fire?

Maybe because there’s no fleet of airships, and they would make poor water delivery vehicles. They’re slow, for one thing. The Hindenburg could lift 10,000 kgs in addition to its own weight. That’s about 2,600 gallons of water. An Olympic-size swimming pool holds 500,000 gallons for comparison. A C-130 supertanker can carry 19,600 gallons, 7.5 times a huge airship’s lifting capacity, and can get to the fire and back to refill a lot faster.

This might make a good tech interview question for people who already know how many piano tuners work in Chicago.
On the Death Anniversary of Aylan Kurdi
Ask HN: How to correctly compare small city salary to a big city salary?
During these times of the pandemic, since most jobs are going remote and companies are offering salaries depending on your location, I was wondering what would be the right way to compare the salary you make living in a small town vs the salary you would make in a big city. My specific case is a bit different. I have an offer for $x in a small city and a second interview lined up for a job located in a big city. If given an offer, how much money should I ask for given that I already have an offer for $x in a small city.
If you have multiple gigs then at least one of those gigs should provide basic benefits such as insurance. What gig is better at doing it than the gig powered by a megacorp?
It's easily doable by running a virtual machine. If you have an OS compatible, it will run out of the box. Now try to do that with one app that depends on one of the cutting edge development stacks of say, 2011... Good luck telling me how you can run it as easily as I can tell you about the last version of Netscape for instance - just run a Win98 VM and voila, you're set.
A14X Bionic to Be ‘Nearly on Par’ with 8-Core Intel Core I9-9880H
There's a 6 as well.

6) Realizing that Big O doesn't matter when you can guarantee your data is always small.

Maybe this is more like 4.1 or 5.1, but it certainly does come up.
Something like four years ago I wrote a command-line tool in Rust to interact with a service I wrote (not in Rust). Then I left that company for a new job.

At a recent happy hour, I learned that despite nobody there having much of a clue about Rust, they were able to clone the repo, build it, and run it based on a short wiki page I left behind. I thought that was really cool, and a great validation of the care the Rust project takes around dependency management and backwards compatibility.
The train that is currently under construction will connect the airport terminals to a cab stand and car rental station less than a mile from the airport because LA taxi drivers threw a shit fit when they suggested building a train into downtown and Santa Monica.

This is false to the point of being deliberate FUD.

The LAX people mover is $4 billion because the FAA requires a fuck-ton of care to be taken so that construction and the people-mover itself doesn't interfere with the operation of the airport. It is a 2.25 mile system with 6 stations: the terminals, the rental car facility, the parking lots, the metro station, and two employee-only facilities.

The shuttle you speak of will only operate for 2-3 years, between the parking facility (expected completion 2021) and the terminals, while the Peoplemover is built out to the terminals (expected completion: 2023).

LA taxi drivers had literally no influence over the design of the airport or public transportation to it. I don't understand the bizarre logic required to think that a few hundred people making just above minimum wage have the political leverage to block a multi-billion dollar project.
Slightly different than what you're describing, but same concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbtvTuivJu8
> I can guarantee you that a game will need a scripting language.

Embedding a scripting language (e.g. Lua) seemed to be very common around 2010, but I get the feeling that it's much less common today.

Has the use of embedded scripting languages in games declined over the last 10 years? Any particular reasons?
If the ransomware attack doesn't exfiltrate any data I wouldn't think you'd have to disclose it. For this case, isn't it impossible to prove that the hackers didn't keep this data and sell it? Even if the hackers were fully cooperative with Uber, there's no guaranteeing that. In that case, I would think you'd have to notify the public.
Uber/Lyft drivers don't badmouth it.

Would you if some random person, who for all you know could be an Uber/Lyft employee, and even if not, is someone who uses Uber/Lyft and therefore is likely happy with it, asks you a question about it?
Why not? If you made a backup product called "Windows Backup" (or more relevant to this example, a collaboration product for Microsoft Office called "Office Duck"), Microsoft will definitely go after you for trademark infringement. Why should it be any different for an open source project with a registered trademark?
US government built secret iPod with Apple’s help, former engineer says
t's easily doable by running a virtual machine. If you have an OS compatible, it will run out of the box. Now try to do that with one app that depends on one of the cutting edge development stacks of say, 2011... Good luck telling me how you can run it as easily as I can tell you about the last version of Netscape for instance - just run a Win98 VM and voila, you're set.
Two VCs on how to build a relationship before you send a pitch deck
This is a great find. I bet there are similar bugs hiding in many hosted mail platforms.

I always wanted to test MS365, but never got around to it. IIRC if you don't configure DKIM, they'll still sign messages using your x.onmicrosoft.com perma-ID. I remember being surprised those signatures show as valid when received in GSuite since the DKIM signing domain is different than the sending domain. Does that have something to do with ARC sealing? It should be impossible, right?

I could be totally out to lunch though since I noticed that when trying to diagnose broken DKIM signatures on a domain.

I'm also skeptical with half the planet having SPF records that point to Microsoft or Google. The dependence on domain validation after that is what makes me think there could be a lot of bugs of this class hanging around.

I bet shared hosting is a massive disaster in this area too.
I sure hope not. At my last gig we kept a suite of jQuery, Backbone, ko, and/or Angular1 apps happily chugging away with almost no extra support burden.
Yes, if there is a federal investigation you cannot conceal or refuse to disclose details.

There isn't a clear answer on proactive reporting. Depending on the type of business you have, what data you hold, the scale of the attack, etc. Some specific professions have mandatory reporting laws that may cover individuals that work for you. (see https://www.lw.com/thoughtLeadership/LW-ransomware-attacks-w... for a detailed answer)

The generally accepted best practice is that every ransom attack be reported to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

In the specific case of Uber, the incident involved scanned passports. The law is pretty clear that you have to report any compromise of passport data to the State Department.
I've also worked with Joe. Great guy and one of the pioneers that implemented bounty programs at massive scale.

Puzzling case, as the hackers apparently moved on from Uber to hack other companies. Not something within Uber's control.
So Apple leverages a monopoly (iOS) to gain another monopoly (App Store). It seems like an apples/apples comparison to me.
Gumroad Super Creator Daniel Vassallo and the Art of Small Bets
Is Human Life Extension Possible?
Paul Krugman comes to mind. His extremely wrong prediction about the Internet, or about the impact of Trump’s election on the economy, have not caused him to lose any stature: he maintains his NYT column and high readership. ...

A telling sign of this group is that they often shy away from providing testable predictions, which could be unambiguously disproven later....

By definition, we know that Krugman was wrong, because he made testable predictions.

I'm a scientist, and the first thing you learn from doing science is getting used to being wrong about things. If you fire everybody who is ever wrong, you'll have nobody left worth listening to.