skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Each team has their own budget and has to pay for the resources they consume, even if that resource is another thing in another US Government team.

What ensures this? No one.

Last I checked the Pentagon 'lost' billions. Various agencies aren't rigorous with the taxpayer's money, also their time horizons seem skewed (very little R&D to reduce various costs internally).

Nor are they a fair actor. How could a single inventor petition the govt to pay up? Don't say a lawsuit because 'national security' supersedes any petition.

Nonetheless, my main point is none of the above. My main point is why would a worker/inventor have any right over a technology? Their job is funded by taxpayers. In business, the same is true. 'Work for hire' is the concept/term. I get that they are trying to modify this to returning some money to the people but...if 150k is the limit, will this be a new minimum wage? Or does this limit account for inflation? Honestly, highly skilled workers (mostly) know their value to the market. I think it's a poor use of taxpayers money to give a % of an invention. Fire the bosses, be more nimble, there are plenty of alternatives to this degradation entering the equation.
Letter to the Editor: Small Modular Reactor Decision Made with Inadequate Info
I only do this for nginx serving content on http(s) ports, but of course technically if my host got compromised an attacker could do the same for ssh port. But at this point (having root) he/she would not have to do this (I don't use passwords) and I would be already doomed :)
Great to see, here's a YouTube chrome extension I made that shows the timestamp comments publicly

https://raven-points.herokuapp.com/
Yahoo was failing when their original founders were on board.

You can listen to some of the old Debug podcasts with Nitin Ganatra and Don Melton for some first hand accounts.
> What are you defending against

You’re defending against people who wrote scripts that only check the default port. Based on numbers that some others posted, that is actually quite a sizeable number, as they reported numbers of attempted connections on the default port to be orders of magnitude higher than other ports.
I believe that is incorrect. Assange is accused of helping Manning cover her tracks rather than extract the information in the first place. I.e. he was trying to protect his source.

In addition, multiple journalists have spoken out to the effect that encouraging sources to leak is standard journalistic practice.
One of the key tenets of software engineering is encapsulation: minimizing the number of parts of the program that need to care about X for any given X. Languages have lots of different ways to encapsulate different kinds of stuff from different kinds of code. Local variables encapsulate variables from other functions. Interfaces encapsulate method bodies from invocations. OOP encapsulates state from operations that modify it. You get the idea.

One pattern that most languages don't support encapsulating is this: Say you have a() which calls b() which calls c() which calls d(). d() needs to get some data from a(). The typical way to handle that is by passing that data as parameters through b() and c(), but that couples those middle-level functions to a() and d(). Any time you change the data a() needs to get to d(), you have to touch b() and c() too.

You could wrap the data in some opaque "context" parameter and pass that through b() and c(). That's an OK solution and is pretty common. But a() still has to opt in to that pattern, which means b() and c() are still coupled to the choice to use any encapsulation at all.

Dynamic scoping is a solution to this. a() can bind a value to a dynamic variable and d() can access it without it having to pass through b() and c() at all. It essentially gives you a side channel for parameters.

A more concrete example is trees of UI components. Pretty often you have some big top level UI component that has a lot of application-level business state. Down in the leaves, you have UI components specific to that application that need that state and render it. But in between those you have a bunch of generic UI components like list views, frames, tabs views, radio button groups, that have nothing to do with your app and just visually arrange the UI.

You really don't want to make a new frame widget class every time you need to pass a bit of business data through it into the thing inside the frame. So instead, what a lot of UI frameworks do is support dependency injection. A widget at the root of the tree can provide an object of some type, which makes it implicitly available to all child widgets (transivitely) of that widget. Children far down in the tree can request the object without widgets along that having to pass it along explicitly.

Dependency injection is essentially a re-invention of dynamic scoping.
The search engine built to make people click on ads (/tongue-in-cheek)
What? They absolutely will make them exclusive.

Can you play Halo on the PlayStation? No, for the same reason you can’t play Uncharted on the Xbox.

Microsoft will happily support Windows gaming, for obvious reasons. But the PlayStation for a franchise like Fallout or Elder Scrolls?

I will believe it when I see it. It makes little strategic sense to offer those titles on Sony hardware when Microsoft have their own console.
> was, until recently, out of the question. Now it's not.

Totally agree to that. I think a lot of people who supported the ban here have no idea of what Pandora's box they opened.
Everywhere I've played would call that as a string bet
Dude is also the best long-form interviewer on YouTube, bar none, and not afraid to invite controversial people and ask them controversial questions. He can peddle Viagra for all I care, I'm still going to listen to his interviews. But not if Spotify has any "editorial control" over them.
What I do appreciate about TLV-style formats is general-purpose debugging tools. When all you have is a bitstream where field lengths are not multiples of 8 bits and are variable based on the actual value being encoded (looking at you, MPEG), the toolset to debug streams ends up being non-trivial.
The second wave is likely when public port scanning services such as shodan re-scan your host. (I wonder how hard it would be to fingerprint and subsequently blackhole shodan et al's scanning traffic)
> Botnets and fast networking stacks like DPDK have made port scanning the entire Internet a much more viable proposition than 20 years ago

True indeed, yet even today I have seen little evidence of scanning beyond standard ports (pretty much the same as in the past). Criminals are opportunistic by default and tend to go for low hanging fruit (standard ports, with standard server config). I certainly did see in increase on standard ports. Even while full range scanning has become more feasible, I have not seen much evidence of its use.
I wouldn't argue that it's not "fascistic", except in the sense of semantic gamesmanship, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that it's not illegal. The law is like a billion lines of Javascript, written by high school students, over decades, without even a single unit test, with the server running continuously.

"Legal" consists entirely of the opinions of lawyers, who are literally trained in law school to see both sides of every problem and construct a defense either way. I suspect the DoJ would have no problem constructing a brief that it's legal.

Ultimately the decision rests entirely with more lawyers on the court, and if they happen to be predisposed, there is no higher power to tell them otherwise. Even a flagrant, direct contradiction of the text is completely irrelevant.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how that applies in this case. I just have little doubt that it already has been.
Every software engineering job I've had was stress-free. In 10 years, I never had to do overtime. Quite frankly, if something can't get done in 40 hours per week, that's not my problem. That's the company's problem, and I will work on that problem in the hours I agreed to sell to said company.
Ask HN: Elegant way to store chain of custody in DB WITHOUT BLOCKCHAIN
Hi Hn,

I'm building a tool to aid tracking cuttings of rare plants I've started cultivating via tissue culture during covid. For those who are interested, I've also started cultivating clones of endangered and rare redwood trees.

For a while I had a spreadsheet that I used to track the provenance of tissue samples from the field all the way through my lab processes into new sprouts / saplings. This quickly became a mess and broke down when I accidentally erased my sharpie markings when sterilizing lab equipment with isopropyl / bleach solution.

Postgres seems to be a horrible option for this kind of chain of custody problem. In essence I would like to have a system that can easily query the chain of previous "tissue sources" from a current sample. It seems like a proper "graph" database might be a better choice? Also, I understand that a tree or static data structure would be ideal for this - however I really prefer to use a database of some kind for this.

Ideally, I'd like to have a system that can generate info and store it in a pdf417 qr code that will be printed and affixed to samples, saplings, files etc in order to tie a digital record to each physical step of growing a plant from tissue sample to tissue culture and later to an actual plant with roots.

I'm a somewhat green developer and the front end of this problem is quite simple - however open to any cool ideas or request for collaboration!

Thanks!
You nailed it w/ your comment about how different today's most common public forums w/ leaders are run.

I also enjoy how, in that Q&A session, he lays out a ton of what Apple would actually release in the subsequent decade.
Exactly. There's some good stuff, but the show has also become a podium for pseudo-intellectuals to pawn off bad ideas and completely misrepresent fact without being challenged.

People also eat up the "you can make up your own mind about what people say" argument. But, what fraction of a percent of people have the time to go out and do their own professional grade research after a controversial guest? What percentage of that can even effectively perform objective research? For me, the whole point of a media platform like that is to do some of that filtering for me or present a balanced view so that I don't get taken by some guy spouting complete BS without getting called out for it.
Seeing Like an Algorithm
You say "equivalent salary" but compared to what? You mentioned FAANG above so I assume that? Unless you're ignoring total compensation, that's not right. You're going to have a much lower base compensation at CIA labs than FAANG. The $150k extra might only match FAANG, and would probably take years of effort to get it at the CIA.

I imagine if you're talented enough to work at CIA labs you could land a much more lucrative and guaranteed FAANG compensation package instead.
> This isn't dynamic scoping; this is just a global variable with a stack of values.

This isn't a latte; this is just an espresso with steamed milk added to it. :)

What you describe basically is how dynamic scoping is mechanically implemented under the hood.
Cap and trade was effective in ending the emissions of ozone depleting gasses in the 1980s and it's kind of cool to see legacy automakers buying carbon credits from Tesla effectively subsidizing their own replacement, but I really think putting a price on carbon helps to reduce the difficulty of having to worry about who is administrating the carbon market. It's much simpler and harder to game the system if governments just put a tax on fossil fuels at their source. Then the regular markets will decarbonize without the need for administration of a complex regulatory scheme.
Trump administration has completely bungled the pandemic response. There was no reason they could have gone out to all of the American N95 mask/respirator manufactures and told them to expand their production and the government would buy an excess or else they would nationalize their production lines. If all of the extra masks were not used, it would not like were not going to need a huge mountain of N95 masks sitting in government storage for the next 5 years in case COVID-22 makes an appearance. Even in 2029 when those masks expired (Assuming they have a 10 year shelf life) and they have to be thrown away, it would still be a good investment to have them sitting around just waiting, just in case.
This administration just has no ability to see into the future at all.
If you are open port on 22, you will have logging problem even the service on 22 isn't a ssh daemon.

If you are open port on 80, someone will try /wp-admin on your server even it is a nodejs application.

Whether it makes sense or not, whether it is possible to success or not do not matter. Most scanner just default to do this.

The problem isn't password logging, because they can't success. The problem is log spam.

If you open service on these, you are going to have log spam from random ip source.
I started programming on an amateur basis in 1984, professionally in 1997. I'm 52 now. My experience is that coding has become more and more interesting and pleasant. In the early days, I had to deal with under-powered languages that either couldn't do certain things or that made them very difficult. Then I encountered languages that were much more pleasant to use, but had other problems such as not scaling well to team-level development -- sometimes even I couldn't figure out what I had been doing. Languages are clearer now, they make thinking about problems easier, and while this issue has not disappeared, it's less bad for me than it used to be.

For me, tools, including languages, do matter. I can well imagine that programming in Java would be soul-deadening (although Java is still better than some languages of the past).

Incidentally, I am not dunking on languages of the past. Lisp has been around for a long time, as has Smalltalk or Haskell or ML. Many of those languages were not accessible to anyone without a mainframe or expensive workstation. This situation has improved greatly in the past decades, which to me is another reason to prefer coding today versus the past.

Obviously, most of us are not able to cherry-pick our toolset for work. We use whatever our employer says to use, or whatever the demands of our project require. This may be part of why many people find coding to be an uninspiring experience. Also, the problems that people work on might be dull, it's hard to get motivated about a basically tedious problem.

Last, it's worth acknowledging that some people just don't love coding all that much. It's hard to imagine doing really well at something you don't deeply enjoy day in and day out. And your passion can change over time: you might really enjoy something in one part of your life, and not derive much joy from it at another part.
Sorry, I caused offence and will be more careful.
It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales.

This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.
> Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15 years ago, almost everything about software development seems better to me. I find developing software to be easier, more consistent, and less frustrating than it used to be. Good development practices—things like testing, CI, coding standards and so on—seem more prevalent than they used to be. It's easier to get code out to production than it ever was. Everything in the ecosystem—like tooling, libraries, and services—feel far more open, consistent, and accessible than they used to.

All true points.

As an individual developer, if you are working on what you want to be working, we are in a great time. You can pick from a selection of outstanding tools and we have, for all practical purposes, access to infinite hardware.

As a developer that's part of a team... it sucks. Expectations are getting ever more unrealistic - probably because so many things are quickly done, but other things are just as slow or even slower. Most people's jobs consist of wiring together 150 libraries across 30 'microservices' (which are rarely microservices, but often distributed monoliths) and that's after spending a lot of time bikeshedding on what the tech stack is supposed to be like.

At least the UML craze seems to have died down.
The phone provider knows, within a certain margin of error.

I would expect (not welcome, but expect) that that data is available to law enforcement. Not random commercial companies who want to sell me stuff.

What's described in the article is creepy as fuck, using spyware to literally spy on everywhere we go and everything we do, for financial gain, for sale to anyone.
> Now relax and enjoy some Scissor Sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHv0jW4p_xA

Going out of your way to offend me. Nice. "Tolerant".
How many people are involved in processing that vast ecosystem of intermediaries? It's a wild amount of inefficiency. Every major city has giant buildings filled with people pushing numbers on spreadsheets to make those products work. They're extremely inefficient. And to interact with those systems, you need to go through a middleman like a brokerage.

I think the analogue is Ally bank, which is known to give the largest returns on savings accounts, currently yielding a whopping 2%. Compare that with a crypto-ecosystem lender like Nexo which is yielding 8-10% on the same asset (USD).

> Sure, you can buy assets that don't have real profit streams attached and lend them to short sellers, but I have no idea why anyone would think that revolution would be a net benefit to them...

That's one of the profit streams my stock broker uses. Why shouldn't it be available to me?

The reason why you don't have access to any of these money-making "institutional" products (like lending stocks, underwriting insurance, or serving as a market-maker) is because they require a lot of administrative overhead. When you replace them with smart contracts, you democratize all of these services.

In a few years, it will be common for people to buy/sell/lend/insure all kinds of assets (physical, virtual, derivatives) from their phone without a middleman.

You can do it today if you're an advanced user with enough money to overcome the currently high transaction costs.
This is because the labour market demands people build resumes, not software.
Unless you're old enough to remember when everything was named .NET (e.g. Office.NET, Windows.NET).
This isn't like a brand of beer or car that you don't like going under. Facebook has deep effects on all of us, even if we never use it. They don't wait for you to create an account to start gathering data about you.
Using CGNAT while not offering IPv6 at all is professional malpractice.
11 billion for an "idea" isn't sane. The hydrogen tech doesn't exist and possibly never will. Other auto manufacturers are struggling with it. As to the electric truck? Others are far ahead.
Yeah but you don't live in the valley
Kubernetes is amazing when engineers need it.

Kubernetes sucks when managers need it.
Thats actually clean. Throw in some PHP, more JS transpiler code, and CSS frameworks into that screenshot and were talking.
> If we can charge a foreign reporter with espionage for the mere publication of something we consider secret

He’s not being charged with espionage for “the mere publication” of secrets. He’s being charged with actively assisting a leaker in bypassing security systems: illegal conduct that took place in the US.

The attempt to gussy this up overlooks how Assange, if he did what he’s accused of doing, clearly crossed the line. The rules in the US are already very liberal here. If you’re really just publishing materials you got from a leaker, you’re protected. Going even further and saying someone should be protected even when they actively assist a leaker in obtaining materials illegally is a huge step further.
MCAS does not typically activate at all. It only activates when the flight control systems think the plane is nearing a stall, the flaps are up, and the autopilot is off. Most commercial flights should not come near conditions triggering an MCAS activation.

It activated in the two crashed flights (and the earlier flight by one of those same planes) because of bad data from an AOA sensor leading the flight control systems to think the plane was about to stall.
I think "the next Hitler" would in fact use this data to come to power, much less use it to retain power.
You mean, like COBOL jokes?
Give Factorio a try
Every once in a while you do collect some fun stories.

I remember vividly one training session where they explained to us that if an attractive woman approached us, it wasn't because we were particularly interesting. And if that happened we should notify the security group immediately.
Isn't this argument of "technically correct" semantics exactly what Milton argued for the nikola truck rolling down the hill? Why pillory him and not Elon for the same?
If a tragically large numbers of people are really unable to consider two sides of an issue it implies that democracy itself is not viable. Even Spotify's execs answer to the board, which is elected by shareholders, are they somehow immune from this fan worship?
Google is still a young company for it’s size. Ethically it’s been getting worse over time, which makes it’s current state less meaningful long term than the direction it’s headed.
A seemingly obvious approach would be to try to get GPT-X to generate candidate proofs and then get a tool like Lean to validate them. Which presumably doesn't work or else I suppose the article would have been about that...
here you go https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fcXAKN9VJOJ22AdGhI-1...
“Simple blog”... install node.js and Angular to get started. LoL.
> Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used to have.

Thank you. I have nothing else to add. I just needed to read that today.
Or one may compare it with the way journalists collaborate with sources. In fact, it has been discussed in the hearing how Assange behavior is exactly what journalists do to get access to privileged information.
I'm at the end of my software development life cycle, but I've got the opposite perspective on java vs javascript. There's just so much boiler plate and unnecessary typing to implement solutions in java relative to javascript. The amount of stuff I can accomplish per line of code is significantly higher than any other language I've worked with, with possible exception being python.
It's hard to lend any more credibility to Troy Hunt's blog post than your typical YouTube shill. The eyes are still rolling. I understand Troy's reasoning is sound, but NordVPN is _still_ the same entity who markets widely on social media platforms, mainly using strategies that include spreading FUD.

Yes it's technically safer, no you probably don't need one, yes the advertising is largely misleading/fearmongering, and yes these VPN providers would love if it became common "knowledge" that all Internet users should pay a VPN-tax on top of their ISP bill to stay safe online.