skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post, thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

BTW, on a side note, when you try and visit the blog's homepage[0] and scroll down to the bottom, you find a link to an actual (password protected) PDF file called Mango.pdf[1]. The author 'Alex' says the password for the PDF has been embedded in the page and it didn't take me a lot of time to figure the password out from the HTML source[2].

But when I opened the PDF, I was hit with this random string of characters:

cGJhdGVuZ2h5bmd2YmFmLCBsYmggZmJ5aXJxIHpsIHlodnR2IGNobW15ci4gQCB6ci
BiYSBnanZnZ3JlIGp2Z3UgbGJoZSBzbmliaGV2Z3IgcXJmZnJlZyBnYiB0cmcgbGJo
ZSBlcmpuZXEuIFZnJ2YgeXZ4ciwgYWJnIG4gaXJlbCB0YmJxIGVyam5lcSBmYiBodQ
o=

I tried to decode this using every available decoder, but it only throws up random result. Was wondering if any of you smart people here had any idea about this code.

[0] https://mango.pdf.zone/

[1] https://mango.pdf.zone/mango.pdf

[2] view-source:https://mango.pdf.zone/

EDIT: SOLVED IT!

As the commenters who replied to me mentioned, this puzzle is double-encoded. I think the trick is to figure out which decoder to use first.
talking on the phone can be nearly as distracting as watching TV in some cases. it's also illegal in a lot of places...
> Why?

You’d have to ask the driver developers. In my experience though, that crapware is the only way to configure the hardware since config files aren’t a thing in Windows.
> The question that the parent comment tries to answer is "what do we do so the backup driver does not watch his phone?".

We should do the same thing we do to stop regular drivers watching their phones.
I didn't believe this about basketball, since it accommodates 5x as many players, but it's true: a squash court is 62 sqm and a basketball court is 420 sqm. OK, you can't tile squash courts with no wasted space between, but you normally need some space out of bounds of the basketball court too.
Ah my bad, I thought you were the author of the Pastebin this thread is about.
> Else they will have just pressure to improve it to a point where it happens rarely and then stop there because its not worth the development cost.

As ever, perfect is the enemy of good. Are there currently zero fatalities on the roads because cars are 100% safe? Or have they been developed to an acceptable standard of safety?
But it’s not simple. It’s nothing like a “simple” VM.
Well, some people were surprisingly upset that in the game (set in a world where body modification was commonplace) gender selection, body shape and voice were not linked together, so players can mix and match.

Unfortunately when called out on it, the developer defended it as a simple development convenience.

That said, most cyberpunk is rather light on the social upheaval and philosophical questions, and are mostly just repeating the same questions from the 1980s updated where real life tech has already overtaken 1980s futurism.
The thing to remember here is that the only way to hide (real world) data in an image is to reduce the amount of data in the picture... a blur or swirl leaves most if not all data just in the picture (although distorted) Any filter that removes data (such as pixelate or blacking out / whiting out) can be used to safely hide this data... Just remember to also strip out any unwanted meta data (Exif-data) and do not use layers but a 'flattened' version of the picture.
Glasgow alumni here. The Haskell course was incredibly well taught, though the the free learning material for Haskell (e.g. learnyouahaskell) is of significantly higher quality than for most other programming languages.
I should take a deeper look, but at first glance most of its features seem to revolve around working with already existing documents—viewing, annotating, searching, signing, filling out forms.
As the article tries to state, the problem isn't that bad blocks can happen. The problems with md's bad blocks log are:

- Most of the time the entries don't correspond to actual bad blocks.

- It's buggy because it copies BBL between devices leading to another instance of "says the blocks are bad but they actually aren't"

- Once you've worked out that the entries are bogus it is still very hard to remove the entries or the BBL as a whole

- It's overly quiet in what it does. I monitor my syslogs but many people don't. There are many documented instances of people carrying entries in a BBL for years without knowing.

- Once MD thinks there is a bad block it renders that block on that device useless for recovery purposes. So in a two device array you just lost redundancy.

So this article has very little to do with the concept of bad blocks; it's about how md's BBL feature can be dangerous and why I don't want it enabled until it's fixed.
World's first C compiler written in arm assembly
"Information to be withheld should be black highlighted using a tool such as the word highlighter tool like this ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ and then printed off. This print out should then be scanned in and saved as a PDF."

Ministry of Defence redaction policy, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The real complication is that such markets' equilibrium point is hard to shift once it gets stuck in a low wage.

Currently there's a big oversupply of labor, especially for low-wage positions. ( https://economics.mit.edu/files/11563 ) And thus this becomes the classic coordination problem.

While minimum wage is necessarily problematic, because there are many who happen to have some time to earn a bit of extra by doing gigs - which is pretty efficient from a raw economic point of view, but it doesn't help those who are not in it for that bit of extra.

Basically we'd like to change the labor share of income for low wage jobs.

(I think a robust safety net and/or a Negative Income Tax UBI would be much better than direct minimum wage laws.)
Vid: How to Tech Like a Roman Emperor (Stoicism)
Oh, no, I shamelessly hijacked the post for my own nefarious self-promotion.
Hard to have authentic cultures when everyone is eating from the same VC plate and everything is located in the same few areas.
Implementing As-Safe-as-Possible, Misuse-Resistant Cryptographic Libraries
Saying it's an attribution error is circular. It's a conclusion, not a premise.

And I think it's wrong. If my car is on cruise control, that doesn't mean I can stop worrying about my speed. You can't always just blame the company because it's the bigger entity.
There is specific arabic word for it "Sadaqah" which means charity. Zakat is actually one of the Islamic pillar about charity to purifies. There is specific percentage or amount for different zakat. Zakat is the form of charity.
I agree on the slowness of the device. The Pinephone has been a huge disappointment for me in that regard. But I think that says more about the bloatedness of software in 2020 than the Allwinner A64 CPU in the Pinephone. Why does the old Nokia N900, with less RAM and a 2009-era processor, feel so snappy and responsive while still providing an interface that still seems modern today, but Phosh on the Pinephone has ragged scrolling and opening any new window takes forever?
You could sell the data to gamblers, as well.

Not sure if squash is popular in the same markets as sports gambling, but there's at least some opportunity there.
It isn't, his father has the same name.
If SpaceX can have a web app for their astronauts, I think so can you even if it's "mission critical". I just don't see any argument why a web app cannot be mission critical and work just as fine as a native app would.

Ok if you make an AAA-game title with extreme need of performance or if you make a database engine or something. This is however a very tiny minority of apps with extreme performance needs but again probably 99% of the apps on the appstore doesn't have those requirements and could be done as a web app.

I understand why you don't want code running medical equipment be dependant on some garbage collection or whatever, but no one is saying that we should use javascript for your heart monitoring equipment, unless it can fail and it won't kill you or hurt you physically.
I wonder if the Black Mirror episode was based on this crash.
Thing is, real life also provokes that same question.
>> It has never had a compiler / IDE that made it easy to write Windows or Mac applications.

Are you talking about the Eighties? GNAT is available for free since the nineties and the GPS IDE is available for free on all relevant platforms since nearly twenty years; even before there were IDE like alternatives for free.
It's a headless VM that runs on Hyper-V
WhisperGen have been making silent stirling cycle generators for many years. For technical details see the user manual for one of their products here: https://www.victronenergy.com/Manuals/WhisperGen/UserManual/...

(I have no connection with this company or its products)
Normal drivers have to drive, so they can't watch their phone. Requiring a human to do nothing while being attentive is simply not realistic.
Ask HN: How's Flutter for App Development?
Hint: try ROT13.
New tool for card sorting – open, closed and hybrid card sort
This reminds me of a trick I would do when I was the teenage “computer guy” for my family and neighbors back in the nineties.

When I was doing upgrades, I would make the person in question replace a few parts themselves. Usually I would pull out one SIMM chip or PCI card, explain what it did and how it was retained, and then ask them to pull out and replace a similar part themselves.

I found that getting their elbows dirty went a long way toward perceiving computers as things that could be figured out.
Oops :[
If you're viewing a capture of a site, there's always a banner at the top of the page showing the original URL and when the page was captured, along with controls to view other snapshots. I do wish the banner had a "open actual site" button but it's pretty easy to copy the URL from the text box and paste it into your browser's location bar.
And that's exactly the kind of storytelling that works very well in cyberpunk. Back in the 1980s or early 1990s I heard it described as its morality not being black-and-white, as it generally is in fantasy, but many shades of grey (a phrase that took on a life of its own since then).
Scaling Jupyter notebooks across the world with AWS and Papermill
Go for backend web services.

Go in my mind is a replacement for java/c#

Rust is a replacement for c/c++
Do you see that much development for backend web services in C or C++?
I decoded it probably in the same way you tried, but I wouldn't call the result "random" in the space of possibilities. A random result of that kind of decoding would likely involve binary data that can't map cleanly to letters the way this did. You've just gotta go deeper!
Portugal:

- Online (with a citizen ID card reader)

- A fully registered Ltd company within an hour (that's the gov marketing slogan)

- Costs ~ 360 EUR
In Denmark the closest to LLC would be an IVS I believe, which is being phased out by 2021.

The Danish government values entrepreneurs, especially ones that keep 40,000 DKK in their company bank account.
I Mastered the Art of Ventilating My Home
How to Make Money Online Without Paying Anything: 7 Workable Ideas
> So the compiler with "zero dependencies" is a dynamically linked binary
> with dependencies on libpthread and libc.

And requires an OS to run too. That's another dependency! This and memory leak, seems
quite forced. Ad homminens doesn't help either.
This looks nice, and I might give it a try to transcribe the live Q&A sessions I am doing for the course I teach. My question is how well does it handle accents? My slight French accent often trips the Cortana-powered transcription that is integrated in PowerPoint, but I assume your models are a bit more complex than those.
I know, there are many great features in ADA, I just tried to first list those that seemed the most relevant to me in an embedded context.
Social democracies aren't perfect, they are just clearly better for the average citizen than whatever type of failed state the US is. By all metrics except Tomahawks per capita.
Underwater robotics PhD here. Completely seconded. Hardware is already complex. When the said hardware is mobile, complexity increases exponentially.
What amount does 'Steel Bite Pro' cost?
Steel Bite Pro You sure need to recognize what's contained in this astonishing enhancement. Steel nibble contains fixings that are intense, and all around contained with the adequate gracefully of spices that are steady of keeping the dental cleanliness at its best. The dynamic fixings incorporate; Berberine: a spice that contains against oxidant and calming properties and is useful in relieving dental maladies, for example, gum disease, which is clear because of plaque. It is a valuable home grown fixing that helps in the board of a few infection conditions. Berberine may cause more grounded pulses. This may help individuals with certain heart conditions. Berberine may likewise help control how the body utilizes sugar in the blood. This may help individuals with diabetes. It additionally may likewise have the option to eliminate microorganisms and lessen growing.

http://supplementstore4u.com/steel-bite-pro/

https://jpst.it/2hIOH
VC Guide (founders 'reviews' of investors)
Ada has that and many more features that help in creating great embedded software.
Surely someone in their thirties is just an adult, not a young adult.
The examples cited are how the courts pierced the LLC veil to satisfy someone's personal liabilities. This seems like it's unavoidable because no matter how you split it up, the courts will seize your assets to pay that liability - the effect would be the same if the courts just grabbed the owner's stake in the LLC's.

Your example is what most people think of - LLC's shielding each other and the owners.

I'm mostly pointing out that the parent comment's link is a bit of a boogeyman in that you could have a perfectly structured LLC system, and if you are personally criminally negligent and liable to pay, then the courts will still get your stakes in the LLC's.
Well, generally it is possible to produce a PDF where each page is one big vector (or even one big raster image for that matter). It would visually look the same as the one created from separate objects and text, but from my understanding with this approach it would be tricky or impossible to create a properly tagged accessible PDF.

That aside, using Inkscape for parts of the doc looked like an interesting idea. I checked and unfortunately the API seems limited. There is a Python plugin system but I don’t think it is possible to create a solution that works entirely headless on CI boxes without having to invoke Inkscape GUI.
Coming from Mac and Linux, I sometimes need to use Windows and I'm always surprised how they managed to make it so incredibly difficult to use and bloated.

A minimal version of Windows along with a good package manager and a UX closer to Windows 2000 (or at least without the whole Control Panel / Settings App confusion) would be amazing.
Signal.NotifyContext: context cancelation with Unix signals coming to Go 1.16
Not really. Under HyperV both the Windows and Linux kernel run subsidiary to the HyperV hypervisor, so in that sense Windows itself is "just a virtual machine".

The work in TFA describes patches to make the Linux kernel communicate with the hypervisor (sharing information like used memory pages). In my book that's pretty sophisticated.

EDIT: The work appears to be available on Github
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/commits/linux...
As described in another post Ada has features to avoid the problem Rust want's to solve in most cases. You can e.g. allocate varable length arrays on the stack.
This discussion reminds me an awful lot of Don Normans example regarding human error:

> Air Force: It was pilot error - the pilot failed to take corrective action

> Inspector General: That's because the pilot was probably unconscious.

> Air Force: So you agree, the pilot failed to correct the problem.

We can go and blame the driver all day long but that will not actually solve anything. Was it neglect? Probably-maybe, I'm not a lawyer. But that is not the point. Why did the driver look at her phone? How can we prevent that? What other, similar failure modes are there?

We did this dance with pilots, truck drivers, forklift operators, life guards, factory workers and god knows how many more. It is frankly quite disappointing that HN is overwhelmingly like "this time, we'll just blame the operator!"...
That's a long standing problem with MySQL, DDL statements (ALTER TABLE and such) where not atomic until version 8.0. This required some serious work on InnoDB as you can read some details at https://mysqlserverteam.com/atomic-ddl-in-mysql-8-0/
We can discuss morality endlessly. We have (collectively) agreed to use the law to assign guilt and mete judgement -- this the court case will bear out eventually. What's left is the problem itself abstracted from the particulars of this case. And the best approach to solving this kind of problem, as evidenced by the aviation industry's miraculous safety record, is to consider the concept of assigning blame as out of scope because it shouldn't be the basis for our safety precautions. In this context, blame is something that distracts you from the real cause and can prevent you from looking more closely. Blame is a kind of 'bottom' argument which in practice is wielded to dismiss alternative perspectives and refuse to integrate their ideas.
Thank you. Tried that as well, still throws up a string of letters and numbers. But the frequency this time seemed a bit more consistent, so the trick is to apply some sort of frequency analysis, I guess. Still on it.

BTW, are there any more of such 'puzzle hunt' websites where you could play around and sharpen your decoding skills? Thanks!
If this idea sounds great but the Tor part is a bit much for you, have a look at tailscale.com

It sets up WireGuard (also feat. NAT hole punching) in a mesh between your devices. You can static route things to it using standard firewalling/iptables/etc if you feel the need too.

It's basically having a LAN but you're on the LAN even when you're not at home.

Edit: Hahaha. I discovered Tailscale myself through this thread, left the tab open..
I didn't encounter any problems with vanilla clang on Windows for building projects (installed with "scoop install llvm"), in fact I was surprised that it worked out of the box, even for code that extensively uses Windows APIs). I suspect that it requires a MSVC toolchain installation, or at least the Windows SDK installed, but since everything "just worked" I didn't dive too deeply into what's actually happening under the hood.
I'm sure you meant Go 1.16?
One of my apps, Black Highlighter [0], uses the photo library permissions to display your library to actually pick a image to edit in the app, and also to write your edited images back to the library. This is the main functionality of the app, and it's what people want to be able to do. I'm not doing anything nefarious with people's images, I'm just… building an image editor. Can I use other methods to let people pick an image? Sure. But until iOS 14, they were a demonstrably worse experience. Even still, it's a bit odd, because the initial screen of the app becomes a big blank view with a button to display the system photo picker.

I did my due diligence and I added a new button to use the new iOS 14 system photo picker months ago, when Apple first announced these changes. But until today at 11am, I could not ship those changes. Period. Nothing I could do to have a version available for users any time before today. In under 24 hours, I have to update my CI system, generate a build, check to make sure nothing broke, submit for App Review, and hope I get approved.

But wait! I also have two other apps that have iOS 14 functionality. So I've got to do those as well. And these are just my side projects. I have a day job, doing the same kind of work. And I'm the iOS CI "guru" there, so I've got to do the exact same thing… make sure Xcode 12 is updated on all our build agents, get actual builds out of them, submit to the store, etc.

All of the privacy work is done. It's been done. But the difference between ≈24 hours to get final builds out the door and a week to get final builds out the door is huge when you've got multiple different projects to handle. Especially when App Review is eating several of those hours all on its own.

So guess what? My projects are going to fall by the wayside, in favor of my day job. Is it a big deal? Who knows. Maybe I'll get some bad reviews. That'll suck a lot. Did it need to be this way? Absolutely not. Apple could have given us the week that they normally do, and everything would have been fine. Instead, they gave us a day, and that's just not enough time. So apps people use and like are just going to be broken for a few days, and there's not a thing developers can do about it.

###

[0]: https://blackhighlighter.app
the last line of the comment you replied to gave a pretty good example: If you have tools build in tech X and just want to wrap them in a UI to make them usable on a phone. (similar to how Python ships with Tk bindings for UI: no, its not pretty, but it's an UI and thats what you want sometimes, without learning something big or worse a different tech stack)
For example this project: https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl
Agreed. Google Cloud started charging me for services I clearly didn't use, and I was very scared of doing a chargeback. It was only after weeks of back and forth and getting explicit directions from Google to do a chargeback (they don't issue refunds) that I finally did it. I took screenshots of the emails of their communications in case they do ban my accounts, so I at least have some proof that they told me to initiate the chargeback.
There are two layers to that encoding. When you see a random string of characters and numbers ending with one or two equals signs, think of base64. Then when you see something that seems like word groups with spaces, think of rot* (* = 13 being the most common version) encoding.
Yeah so lets continue throwing money on a company that actively prohibits you as a developer to actually make your game for the web. /s

By giving money to apple and by continue to build for their platform only ensures that this will remain true in the future as well.
In Portugal there is an interesting law regarding this: The instructor/examiner is always liable for an accident during driving lessons/exams, except if the accident resulted from an action where the learner disobeyed a direct order by the instructor. In that case the learner takes responsibility.
I'm pretty sure all of your politicians have axes to grind, for different reasons.
>Hopefully we can strike a balance between leaving only your direct descendants better off and leaving everyone in the next generation better off.

You're thinking that taxing the wealth of a billionaire is guaranteed upon death. Therefore from your perspective there are two options: taxing the wealth or not taxing the wealth. Except taxation is the exception, not the rule.

If you know your wealth will disappear then you will try to get rid of it before it can disappear.
With the estate tax there is a strong incentive to just hand over your wealth to your children before you die or by spending it all on donations so the government can't take it.
>a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse

That's the most surprising thing I've read today. I assumed it was destructive.
But holding individuals accountable for their actions.

A better system would have spotted this person was watching their phone not the road, but it would still have held them accountable and (at minimum) fired them!
Key word in that sentence: had. I picked up Ada essentially because it seemed to me a more actively maintained Pascal. (I've since learned that Free Pascal/Lazarus might not be as dead as it first appeared.)
Hippocampal harms, protection and recovery following regular cannabis use