skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What technology are you excited or optimistic about?
It feels like Hackernews lately(?) reflects the pessimistic state of the world -- every technology related comment thread seems like a big list of complaints and reasons why the thing being discussed isn't actually any good.

I thought it would be interesting to see what things Hackernews is excited about in the world of tech. What are you looking forward to or optimistic about?
From the article:

>We’re going to focus on standalone VR headsets moving forward. We’ll no longer pursue PC-only hardware, with sales of Rift S ending in 2021. That said, the Rift Platform isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we've seen significant growth in PC VR via Oculus Link, and the Rift Platform will continue to grow while offering high-end PC VR experiences.

So, yeah. End of the road for the Rift. Oculus Link makes it redundant.
I never had an issue with authentication. My issue was a typo in sudoers (I allowed a user to view syslog, iirc, and had a semicolon instead of a colon) that prevented me from using sudo, as only my primary user was allowed to log in via ssh. Fortunately cloud vps still has vnc login, and I actually had a root password. Now I use a root shell to edit sudoers, so I can test it before dropping root.
Rift S is being discontinued, if you want a dedicated PC headset now you'll want to look at an Index or an HP Reverb G2.

But you can plug the Quest into a PC and use it as a PCVR headset. Oculus sells a 16 ft fiber optic cable for $80, but it works well over any good quality USB 3 cable (and even works over USB 2 now).

The downside of this is that it's more front heavy than a PC headset without all the standalone guts, and I'm sure there's non-zero latency for running the video stream over a USB connection rather than a standard video cable. It works pretty well though, I think the trade-offs are absolutely worth the benefits of having a standalone headset.
Climate change is a multiplier to almost any environmental issue you can think of.
True, perhaps I am wrong in my classification. Maybe not fair to say WaPo is conservative. And The Atlantic does give space to neo-liberal ideas. It’s very biased by how and which stories have stuck in my mind from these sources.
Really sad that they are getting out of PC based VR. That said, my rift has been sitting in a corner for a year. I was really impressed from a technical perspective and felt the tech showed great promise. Good for HTC I guess.
Not as long as Valve still wants to be a player in the VR device space. The Index has had an 8+ week wait to receive one for several months now because they keep selling out, despite the $1,000 price tag for the full kit.
I'm really curious to see an engineering presentation on the Quest 2, how it utilizes the XR2 hardware, and what it adds on top. From my understanding, the XR2 is capable of doing all the tracking on its own. The previous gen of hardware was based on the 835, which did not have SLAM on-chip, and thus Oculus' tracking algorithms were the big value-add over the competition.

And originally, Oculus was behind the curve on hadware implementations. The Lenovo Mirage Solo was the first 6-DOF headset, a year prior to the Quest, also running the 835. The Vive Focus was in the middle of the two. So, if the XR2 is doing the heavy lifting, it would suggest a big roadblock for competitor devices has been lifted.

So how much of the Quest 2 is above and beyond the Qualcomm XR2 VR headset reference design minus Facebook's services integrations?
If you follow in the forums (https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/) it is slowly happening. Signal will eventually not require phone numbers.
‘Good Enough’ Rules the World
I wonder how the FB leadership team thinks about this whole FB/Oculus integration. It is clear that they think adding a "social" component to Oculus is going to help the Quest gain traction.

But the question is, why does that "social" component have to be Facebook? With all the negative baggage a FB account carries with it, maybe the easier option would've been to let Oculus build its own social model, à la Play Station Network-style?
You're still missing what I'm trying to say, I think. I'm not talking about fatigue, or brief inattention, or anything like that.

I'm saying that the inattention was basically a given. Yeah, at some point the driver went and grabbed a phone. It may have been fiddling with junk in the car, or their fingers, or day dreaming to the extent they were unaware of the world around them.

Yeah, they grabbed a phone. Is that really any different from any of the above? I don't think so. Particularly considering how ingrained the reflex is to grab and fiddle with a phone when bored is. I wouldn't be surprised if they never consciously decided to pick the thing up.

The task was simply unreasonable. Uber should have foreseen this problem and implemented systems to aide and monitor their drivers.
This was a great read, thanks for writing it up. As another person mentioned I especially liked and appreciated the bite-sized tips at the end! Definitely got some insight & inspiration I'll be using in my own projects
At the end of the linked post they say rift is EOL.

It’s clearly dead and as someone who owned one it’s been clear FB hasn’t cared about it for some time.
It doesn’t matter. If PWAs were good enough on Android, and seeing that you would probably need to build a web app anyway. Why not just build a web app + iOS app and not build an Android app at all?
I know I wouldn't. I have stayed off FB -- active avoidance -- for a reason. Now that they have taken over the Oculus (I was an early Rift developer, and have the production Rift now) my journey with them is complete.

I don't trust Facebook and at this point I simply cannot imagine any possible action they could take to restore that trust.

It's a real disappointment. I admire the product and appreciate the contributions of the engineering team to advancing the state-of-the-art.
https://www.oculus.com/accessories/quest-2-elite-strap-batte... where is the battery in this thing??
They may not be exposing the data they're collecting to ad buyers today, but it's a safe bet they're collecting it. You can extract a lot of signal on ad effectiveness based on what people look at via head pose, and once eye tracking is in - nominally for foveated rendering, of course - it will be even stronger.
Several downsides

Say the iOS update has brand new features. Your app can't take advantage of those fancy new features and your users don't get them until next week either.

Possible marketing, usually Apple has categories in the App Store for apps that support the latest features or are ready for that iOS version. They could in theory do this next week I guess, but point is there's excitement today, and will be less next week.

Possible bugs in your current app that aren't fixed but exist only in the latest iOS. If you base your entire process on past experience you planned to release bug fixes for iOS 14 with a larger update and now those updates aren't available to a majority of your userbase.

Edit: removed a part that was inaccurate.
The fact that some apps are broken and users with auto-update turned on are now unable to use those apps for a week?
The parallel evaluation of IIR filters – An Implementation
You need to compile your app with the new version of Xcode to target iOS 14, and you couldn't do that until the GM version of Xcode was released yesterday. Meaning that if there's any iOS 14-showstopping bugs, depending on the type of bug, you wouldn't be able to get a fix out promptly. There's also the work of e.g. verifying that your app works as advertised on the iOS 14 GM, which also was only released yesterday.
avoid Node.js based applications altogether.

I ran into this recently. Firefox has a "packager" for putting together add-ons. It uses "node.js". All it really does is apply "zip" to some files. I tried to install the "packager" on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It had several hundred dependencies, and wouldn't run because of some version dependency in node.js for something totally irrelevant to the task at hand. Mozilla support suggested upgrading the operating system on the development machine.

I wrote a one-line shell script which zipped up the proper file types into one file to package the add-on.
There was a weird forum and twitter post[0] awhile back that maybe addresses this? Talking about additional ways to add contacts Moxie said

> there would be no phone number involved. Maybe not even a username involved! Nothing to add to an address book.

I know Moxie shows up on HN, maybe he could explain more? I'm very interested in this feature and I think HN would love to know more and if it helps solve the above issue (presumably it could).

[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/moxie-about-usernames/15...
1 week is completely arbitrary. If they had 1 week notice as usual there would most likely still be complaints because this is an unusual year...
Anyone who uses public transport can get a good idea of the percentage of noncompliance in their area. Here in Berlin, I see an average of four people not wearing masks or wearing them wrong on an average half-full train carriage or bus.
Its implicitly the wrong way because firefox tabs aren't emacs tabs which aren't vs code tabs which aren't i3 tabs.

It's not merely that i3 tabs lack features its that it lacks and ought to lack deep integration with the application.
They're working on it: https://mobile.twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217

As I understand it, the challenge is to do it in a privacy-friendly way, since your contact list of phone numbers is on your phone, but this has to live on Signal's servers.
Not saying don't do those things, but we need society-level action to really make an impact. To plagiarize the saying about the internet and censorship, capitalism is a self-correcting system designed to route around any "errors" like individual ethics/behavior that produce non-optimal profits according to "the rules" of the system. If you reduce the demand for coal because everyone chooses to pay the extra for solar energy, someone is going to scoop up that cheap coal and find a way to use it. You have to "change the rules of the game" to make any impact, and that's society/collective level action.
Which notifications option do I uncheck to stop being nagged to pay for Dropbox if it's close to full?
>They didn't. But the population is growing.

The population of Americans in their 20s/30s (typically the age of first time home buyers) has remained mostly static since 2000.

But hell, let's go ahead and assume that the population has grown in some unknown way. Why is my metro awash with perfectly fine $200k 2bedroom homes? The supply is there. It's the demand that has dwindled.
Until the next year or two when they come back again bigger from a unseasonably warm summer and unseasonably wet winter which grows even more fuel. And then again and then again and then again, growing worse each time until the forest doesn't grow back again at some point.
Indeed, awarding lots of smaller contracts instead of a few big ones would seem to be a good way to ensure more people get a piece of the pie.
It's the curved white chunk on the back
Fewer people are moving during this time period than a year ago:

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-09-16/the-t...

The media talk of diaspora, which is based on narrative and anecdote, needs to be measured and quantified before we can treat it as something that drives housing prices.
It's intermittently working now. Shows the server as Apache 2.4.18 / Ubuntu. Apache can page cache, but I assume they aren't using it. I don't see any typical CDN headers either.

Also, somewhat odd, they are bounding the browser-side cache to 10 minutes:

Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:19:13 GMT

Expires: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:29:14 GMT
VR currently has a innocence to it. I'm sure we'll see adverts like usual at some point
Well, I have a legacy Oculus account, and the Quest 2 will be obsolete before the grandfathering time has expired, so I am going to get the Quest 2. Hopefully a reasonable competitor will be available by then.

EDIT: never mind. I won't be getting the Quest 2.
Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/aktuelles_meldungen..., and the title accordingly. Thanks!
There was a period during which OpenSSL was maintained by a World of Warcraft guild.
Yes, the Postgresql source and associated docs. It's a well-structured code base that is easy enough to dive into, if you don't try to understand the whole thing at once. I'm slowly reading it in bits and pieces.

Here's a Github mirror so you can browse around: https://github.com/postgres/postgres

Note that the offical repo is at git.postgresql.org.
Did they say something about the FoV?

I have to admit, I would prefer more FoV instead of higher resolution.
Yeah, that's a good point. It's easy to get caught up in our little tech bubble :)
If its a popular app with lots of competition, if your competitors have a working app and yours is broken then people will jump ship and once that happens hard to get people to go through the hassle of moving again.

Though I'm not an mobile app developer just one of the things I can see as a downside.
On Android at least, the apps have to ask for permission to see your contacts.
Wrong. If every source file is "software" the copyright should not be removed from the source file.

There are even international laws about copyrights, and removing the original copyright is simply a violation even on the international level -- the original author has to remain an author. It is he who initially copyrighted the files. Your "working as you are familiar" doesn't mean a thing.
Covid-19 Can Damage the Brain
I think the theory is that there is enough proton degenerate matter to form a superfluid and hold a magnetic field, even if the majority of the star's matter is neutrons.
Windows has been getting worse and worse at this as it increasingly follows the bone-headed trends started by Apple and shitty web designers.
The planet is fine, but 99% of current species and a large number of current plants are fucked.
Such an interesting time!
Boeing's 'culture of concealment' to blame for 737 crashes
Charting the Covid Effect on Fintech
People jump at the words minimal and modern but "Private secure and fast" is never questioned makes sense.
By "dialog", they likely mean an API with which to prompt the user to add it, like they have for apps on the App Store.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pompeo-fight-battles-raptu...

The juxtaposition of gay marriage ruling and rapture in his speech is, to me, identical to saying "burn all gays".

The irony is this ideology is about as anti-Christian as it gets. Jesus had very few nice things to say about wealthy people, and yet Christianity Inc. loves to sell Americans on the idea of prosperity theology. The book of Job expressly states it's bullcrap. This is why I consider it a cult, they aren't that serious about the religious aspects at all, they just like the parts where some people are rewarded (physically taken to heaven, i.e. the rapture) and their non-believer enemies are all murdered.
I haven't checked this case but often the compiler will elide the copy. However for cases like this you want it to be very reliable to guaranteed so it would be nice to get that support.
I agree that being a game platform would be enough to be profitable, though their biggest dream must be to be the ultimate gatekeeper/taxman to what goes into your eyes. Aside from injecting thoughts right into your brain, what is more important than a screen that blocks out everything else you see? (phone, laptop, and TV are worth zero when you're wearing goggles).
Python 4 FAQ
They’ll have control of your vision, literally.
Looks like it's been done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494871
To be fair, this seems reasonable. There has to be a line that is drawn. Having everyone wearing full body pods isn't feasible.

If you honestly feel like you need a full body pod, maybe you should seek a different mode of transport.
Sure, if they're statically compiled with no non-kernel dependencies whatsoever. Once Linux userspace gets involved it is a shitshow.
I have a Quest and I can tell you that for me (and at least for people like me) the real value is in social games/experiences. I have a hard time going through a solo game (although I haven't tried Half Life Alyx yet) but social stuff are amazing! Everyone should try to play settlers of Catan in VR (it was only available on the Go unfortunately) which was insane!

At this point I just want more of my friends to get a Quest so that I can hang out with them in VR. I already communicate with these friends via facebook so for me it's natural that this would work out perfectly.
FWIW I've passed this note along to our sync team but I don't have a ton of insight here.
The controversy around Tim’s Vermeer is missing the point
I wish the article discussed how this was done in light of the fact that aircraft development usually takes decades. I’m willing to bet it was done by a different group of people under new management?
You want the Pimax 5K then. It claims a 200 degree FOV.
If they've got eye tracking, they know basically how your visual cortex behaves – and hence how to put stuff where you look at it. That'll get infuriating very quickly.

They'll also know what gets your attention, what doesn't… unless you can control your saccades, that'll leak a lot of information about your mind-state while viewing Facebook-controlled media. They could, if they wanted to, blackbox reverse-engineer bits of you via controlled-input attacks.

VR headsets are basically the most creepy thing they could be tracking my behaviour with – perhaps second to the smartphone, since at least I can take off the VR headset.
>I’d see involving more skin in the game as the solution

like holding family members hostage? Or perhaps violent mutilation on failure? The financial route has been ramped up as far as can be imagined - $100m's are paid to CEOs to fail, and to wreak the economy, society and the planet at the same time.
Talking Tech and Holograms with Mark Zuckerberg: MKBHD [video]
This gets a really poor review from Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/review-we-do-not-reco...

The downgraded controllers and the awkward IPD adjustment system are the deal breakers for me.

From the review:

The takeaway: Bullet points for this review
A better screen, both in pixel resolution and refresh rate.

90Hz, but when? Facebook isn't clear about higher frame rate support.

More powerful wireless-VR hardware, which powers nifty under-the-hood tricks.

Less battery life. You'll barely exceed two hours of gaming on a single charge.

A cheaper, flimsier headstrap. You can pay more for a nicer one.

A baffling change to the "IPD" slider. Only certain skulls need apply.

The controllers are the same... but worse. I'm a bit shocked by this one.

The F-word. Yeah, we'll get into that.
I would like to add that one of the reasons I’m a paying subscriber of Dropbox is because it’s independent of all the major other providers. Shared storage is a commodity provided by Microsoft and Google, and it’s important there is at least one major other provider.

Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows. Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.
If Facebook is going to be the market, and I believe it will be judging by what's out there right now, VR on the whole as a market is dead to me. Since the facebook linking account news I've removed all VR news blogs from my RSS feed. I don't need to know about what's happening in the industry anymore.

If the only way to avoid Facebook is to not play, I'm not playing. It's just that simple.
I've probably had a dozen people with glasses use my headset. None of them seemed to have any issues with visual quality, though a couple had issues with comfort. The Quest comes with a spacer for glasses. That works fine 90% of the time, but some people's glasses are too big and can hit the lenses in the headset. This can be uncomfortable and (more importantly) it can scratch the lenses in the headset.

If you have glasses, I'd recommend getting some lens protectors for the headset. They're usually around $10 and take a minute to apply.
to counter cloudflare's js gatekeeping:

University Hospital New Jersey hit by SunCrypt ransomware, data leaked
By Ax Sharma
September 16, 2020 01:39 PM 0
uhnj

University Hospital New Jersey (UHNJ) has suffered a massive 48,000 document data breach after a ransomware operation leaked their stolen data.

Established in 1994, the University Hospital is a New Jersey state-owned teaching hospital that provides medical care to residents.

The hospital runs on a $626 million budget and has over 3,500 employees, 519 licensed beds, and over 172,000 annual outpatient visits.

Sensitive info leaked after a ransomware attack
The SunCrypt ransomware operation has leaked data allegedly stolen from UHNJ in a September ransomware attack.

SunCrypt is a ransomware operation that began its activities in October 2019 but was not very active. Over the past few months, they have become much more active since releasing a dedicated leak site.

While BleepingComputer has not corroborated all of the attacker's claims, the data seen by BleepingComputer does appear to belong to UHNJ.

Of the 240 GB of data allegedly stolen from University Hospital New Jersey, the attackers have leaked a 1.7 GB archive containing over 48,000 documents.

Alleged data leak for University Hospital New Jersey
Alleged data leak for University Hospital New Jersey
This data leak includes patient information release authorization forms, copies of driving licenses, Social Security Numbers (SSNs), date of birth (DOB), and records about the Board of Directors.

UHNJ Data leak
UHNJ Data leak
Shown below is a partial image of one such record leaked in the dump, with PII redacted:

An example patient information release form
An example patient information release form
If you have first-hand information about this or other unreported cyberattacks, you can confidentially contact us on Signal at +16469613731.

Employee infected with TrickBot prior to the attack
A source in the cybersecurity industry has told BleepingComputer that an employee of UHNJ was infected with the TrickBot trojan at the end of August.

When a computer is infected with TrickBot, it usually leads to a full compromise of the network with ransomware eventually being deployed.

TrickBot has historically been known to lead to Ryuk ransomware attacks and an occasional Maze ransomware attack. Now TrickBot is predominately pushing the Conti ransomware.

While Maze denies any affiliation with SunCrypt, the SunCrypt ransomware operators have told BleepingComputer that they are part of the Maze Cartel.

Furthermore, when infecting a victim, SunCrypt will connect to an IP address previously associated with Maze infections.

The SunCrypt operators may have also partnered with TrickBot to provide access to compromised networks, such as the network of UHNJ.

BleepingComputer has reached out to UHNJ multiple times but did not receive a response to our emails and calls.
I grew up in a small rust belt city. 40 years ago there were reasons to live there: factories with union jobs and an entire local economy built upon them (financial services, a hospital, bustling main street, etc). All that's gone now. It's not that I wouldn't be content like my parents were, it's that it's fundamentally not the same city it was back then.
> That said, my rift has been sitting in a corner for a year

Same. When "Half-Life: Alyx" was released, I started the motions of setting up my Oculus with the sensor towers, remembered how tedious it was, and promptly put it back. Sounds like the Quest 2 solves all of that.
Apple Helps FBI Track Down Floyd Protester Accused of Firebombing Cop Cars