skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In my (somewhat limited) experience the kind of value that you get from reducing technical debt is not easy to explain to the business side, because it doesn't immediately translate into new features.

This is because, regardless of whether people agree on its definition, most of the things that fall under "technical debt" incur indirect or delayed costs for the business.

The managers have, at some point, a choice: We have $X. We can either spend some percentage on churning out products that directly and immediately make us money. Or we can divide it between that, and maintenance activities.

Choosing to neglect (or underfund) the maintenance activities doesn't cost the business anything for some period of time (the delay). And performing them does not (within the period of that delay) bring in any revenue. It is only a cost to them, it has no visible upside within their time horizon. By the time the costs start catching up, it's death by a thousand cuts. Usually they'll go from 100/0 dev/maintenance to 99/1, then 98/2, and so on. Then one day it flips from 80/20 to 20/80 and they realized they fucked up. But by then they've been promoted, so who cares?

You have to convince them, and perhaps they'll only learn by being burned (but I doubt it), that they should extend their time horizon by a month or a year so they can see the consequence of this decision. I've never succeeded in this.

At my previous job we were experiencing a massive number of retirements. Literally centuries of experience leaving every month (aggregated across all teams). No hiring process, without comprehensive training, could possibly keep up with this loss. But the retirements were always (for each team) just far enough over the horizon that they didn't realize the issues until after the retirement and the new hire floundered (due to lack of training/mentorship).
Every possible pun of the form ‘You put the X in Y’
Remembering Dark Souls with Angelica Norgren – PCGN TV S01E01
For long-running jobs which need to be killed after a timeout, and when you also need to ensure there is only ever a single instance, use something like this:

/usr/bin/flock --nonblock /var/tmp/${LOGNAME}.sleep \
/usr/bin/timeout --signal KILL 5 \
/usr/bin/sleep 10

Where your command goes in place of the "/usr/bin/sleep 10" (If this is not immediately obvious, to see it in action, open two terminals on the same host, and try running the above command in both at the same time.)
From what I remember, the evidence wasn't shaky, it was non-existent.
What you are trusting, when you trust a CA, is that it will only issue a certificate for a domain to someone it has verified as the owner. A self-signed cert could be from a man in the middle attacker.

An active MITM is a relatively more exotic threat than a passive observer. In the days when certificates cost money, there was a legitimate argument that you shouldn't need the whole elaborate active-MITM defense just to get protection against passive snooping. But now that you can get both for free... just use Let's Encrypt.
This is one reason the relationship between engineering and whoever needs the software should be "customer-supplier" rather than "boss-subordinate".

Because a restaurant customer ordering "a ribeye steak, and please don't wash any dishes" is absurd.
The network is best when you start by setting an example and then spread is. "Look, as part of my daily exercise I pick up a bit of trash every day. I'm in better health and look how much better my neighborhood is" This speaks more than someone needs to do something so I'm putting together a group to form a committee. Lead by example.
Much worse since COVID since every elevator has to have minimal separation for passengers, no more squeezing in like sardines.
Daycare and Healthcare for kids is cheap though. And you don't have to pay for good schools or move to another neighbourhood to get a good school. This far outweighs the cost of a car.
> I think you've misunderstood the issue a little bit.

I might be misunderstanding this. How does .bashrc get replaced in that example? You mean the hijacked remote returns .bashrc instead of boring-spreadsheet.ods? That means it is only a problem if you are in $HOME (but still a problem). Further, how does the remote complete the SSL handshake if it doesn't have the private key, and if it does, isn't that a bigger problem?
This is known as preference falsification (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification). It's something interesting to think about. I often try not to falsify my preferences, even if people don't like me because of them.
Interesting. Another thing I vaguely remember reading about Oberon was that any subroutine in the OS could be used from any program, or something like that, for high code reuse. I'm sketchy on the details. Read it quite a while ago, maybe in a BYTE article about Oberon. Not sure if that implies if all programs were in one address space, or what.
One look at your comment and I knew the line. There are a few of those moments, in that series. (The Wheel of Fortune's end, in particular, does it for me.)
I must have done something wrong because I got the inverse of what I would have expected.
Can't you buy hardware directly and then just put the carrier's SIM card?
These do not pretend to be free. You pay for them directly or through medical insurance.
I agree that we cannot make broad claims or assumptions about early hominin culture. However, some of these claims about the history of slavery are either incomplete or false.

1. The image of the enslaved Greek language tutor gives a misleading picture of ancient slavery. It's true Greeks and Romans seem to have divided their social world on language and religion rather than skin color. But the massive numbers of Carthaginians and Gauls worked to death in copper mines were almost certainly not seen as equals by their enslavers.

2. I may be misreading you here, but the claim that "it was the push for equality and human rights that made African slavery so toxic" is reversing cause and effect. Racial plantation slavery in the Canary Islands predated modern movements for universal human rights. It was slavery that made human rights a European-only idea, not human rights movements that made colonial slavery a racial institution.
It really hasn't. If it really had, then the meat industry would be tanking.
Fascinating blind spot isn't it?
Yes, like

make -n

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/make.1.html

In fact, the above man page shows that one long form of the -n option is named --dry-run :)
I think a fairly manageable path forward is underway which makes this a smaller issue than it first seems:

(1) Firefox already uses its own root store

(2) App developers can include additional roots in addition to the system root store: https://developer.android.com/training/articles/security-con...

(3) Chrome is migrating to using it's own store: "Historically, Chrome has integrated with the Root Store provided by the platform on which it is running. Chrome is in the process of transitioning certificate verification to use a common implementation on all platforms where it's under application control, namely Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Windows, and macOS. Apple policies prevent the Chrome Root Store and verifier from being used on Chrome for iOS."

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-poli...
HP also region-lock their ink like it’s a dvd or something.

As I discovered when my UK printer was accidentally shipped with US ink. The printer permanently locked itself and refused to accept any HP ink sold in the UK.

Will never buy anything from HP ever again.
BSD jails date back to FreeBSD 4, which was released in 2000.

Edit: I started questioning my memory of this, so I poked around some. Poul-Henning Kamp did the initial work in April, 1999, here is the commit:

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=46155

More details from him about it:

http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/jails/
Thank you for this comment. It matches quite closely with my thinking on the issue.

A generic term like “tech debt” is lazy and does not capture anything about the business value or decision making process that led to the code or would lead you to want to replace it.

For example in many organizations you make a completely justified business decision to put less time or more junior engineers on a project that isn’t that important. This isn’t tech debt, it’s a conscious decision made by completely rational people.

On the flip side, if that project that was of lesser importance becomes important again you can make another completely rational decision to go in and clean it up to make it faster/more reliable/simpler or whatever the goal may be.
Ah yes, "cgroups", according to notable no-nonsense kernel hacker Al Viro:

"it's not just badly written kernel/cgroup.c - the interfaces on both sides (userland and the rest of kernel) are seriously misdesigned. As far as I'm concerned, configuring it out solves my problem nicely."

That was in 2011, so things might have improved. What remains however is that cgroups was added to the kernel, by Googlers, for easier maintenance, but with an implicit understanding that no sane person would actually make use of it to do something important.

... enter SystemD.
Isn't this what happened to paetron? https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2020/08/patreon-loses-lawsuit-...
Cool, I was able to send you a message now without signing up myself, works now with your subscription!
I know it seems hard to believe, but (IMHO) the existence of a patent will in no way encumber (and will actually help) the production, distribution, and administration of this drug if it works.

Entities that actually have expertise and capability in clinical development of such complicated biologics get through this process by burning billions of dollars. These billions are provided by investors who must have some reasonable chance at making a profit (or at least not losing a lot of money). Non-profit enterprises simply don't have the money or the expertise. The government has no expertise in the development path. The U.S. gov't (through the FDA) has vast amounts of expertise in analyzing clinical trial proposals and data, but not actually running them.
Maybe IdenTrust will now offer an ACME compatible endpoint and offer signed, paid certs with their CA. Or another CA will.

I wonder whether IdenTrust imagined that a five year cross signed root ca would be too little a timespan to get wide adoption.

Btw... Wouldn't it be possible to just add a new root ca to android? Maybe an app could simplify delivery?
Next time do proper electronics recycling though. All modern electronics have rare earth and other materials that should not go in the trash.
Did you miss the part where the "universally accepted" root certificate is going to be universally rejected in 10 months?
I don't think Microsft Edge embeds its own root store on Android.
Yeah I've seen situations where basically a dev wants to take project in a direction and the manager repeatedly shoots it down until they quit or are fired. They will just argue that the manager is micro-managing and making technical decisions, but in reality it's just matter of how the business must operate and the dev is actually stepping on the managers toes.

Devs will also just argue that doing some UI related changes are pointless even though managers have requested them repeatedly and clearly prioritize them. I've seen all forms of recalcitrance.
It'll be there forever (compatibility), but the problem is there's not a lot of overlap between 1.x and 3.x/4.x. I think people are better sticking to the 3.x core profile. Shaders just aren't that hard and fixed function is a really outdated way of thinking.

Generally I'd also say stick with 3.x (rather than 4.x) unless you need tesselation shaders.
My favorite metaphor: bridge and road maintenance. Every now and then you have to fix potholes and repaint the bridge. Sometimes in order to do this you have to close some lanes to traffic. If you don't do this, you will accrue more and more potholes, and the bridge will start to rust. The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes to fix. If you ignore the problem long enough, the bridge will collapse one day with very little warning.
A Review of Where Is My Flying Car?, By J. Storrs Hall
I do appreciate they mandate paperswithcode.com
The other points are valid but...

> They said they'll refuse to show up to meetings

There's usually FAR TOO MANY MEETINGS. This is even more prevalent the more bad managers and engineers exist. Talking and assigning 'action items' is a good way to deflect attention from the fact that you have no clue what the heck you are doing. And bad engineers get shielded by the collective (as long as they can show some work done on their "action item", or indicate that they are blocked because of someone else).

If you actually have good engineers, they will see the meetings for what they are and start pushing back.
Yeah but those don't go for $25
I suppose my response to these kind of posts falls somewhere in the middle. Looking at somebody's vacation pictures doesn't make me specifically jealous to them, but it adds to the generalized malaise of being at the tail end of the bell curve. Sure, intellectually you realize you're probably average, but I think it erodes away at your subconscious.
The letter (initially written by professors from Johns Hopkins and Harvard) is addressed to university administrations across the country, for one thing. For another, university administrations might consider the opinions of university faculty; DHS is for now likely to say, "talk to the hand."
In reality most of your neighbors are not cooking meth. They are normal people who want the best for themselves. They might not know how to make things better, but they too want it. (they might also disagree with you on what makes things better)
The first cars were slower than horses however that is no longer the case. The prototype is not the point, it’s what can be achieved from developing the technology. It will eliminate bottlenecks in places too tiny to place a modern fet
Was that the one where you could just squeeze the bag between your hands, too?
> git-diffable, and therefore versionable

You can get this behavior with a SQL database like mysql that has a text dump format. I"ve used this quite effectively to keep relatively small (but important) databases in a git repo.

I can definitely appreciate the advantages of an export format that is explicitly designed to support this (e.g. outputting each field on its own line, perhaps using an explicit label in front of it) but even the out-of-the-box format can often be quite effective.
Mystery radio burst spotted in Milky Way for first time
Yeah, that hardly seems equitable.
There have to be a bunch of serial founders reading this thread, right? Would someone please found a company to make it unnecessary for individuals to own printers? Even in a pandemic?

Kinkos exists, but they do it really shittily. You have to go into a ginormous store filled with surly employees (and these days, covid probably), their prices per page are outrageous, oh, and to print you end up using their scary doubtless malware-laden windows machines in store. Screw that. Why not, like, Amazon locker for printing? Send a print job or several print jobs somewhere from home, have it land in a locked mail slot, go to the place and enter a code to pick it up.
Does this actually disagree with what he said? OP said Trump doesn't put in the effort to persuade (aka, get McConnell to focus on his agenda) and used his bully pulpit ineffectively (aka, putting enough pressure on McConnell to act). That seems to square with your thoughts.
Alphabet's Project Amber uses AI to try to diagnose depression from brain waves
Scientists Weigh in on the Great Trekking Pole Debate
Here's one more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Tiger
If someone accuses you of anything at work, never apologize. Never. It implies an admission of fault.

This is a warning for anybody reading who might take the horrible advice in this article. Your job likely isn't worth losing over microaggression accusation bullshit.
IdenTrust's buisness also spans to managing private CAs for companies, which includes managing the HSM and private keys. Also, the companies who hire IdenTrust and similar companies are not that involved in technology. Also, security experts who can manage this safely is a tad harder to find and requests higher wages than your standard IT staff.

TLDR: yes, but some companies wants another company to manage their certs.
Recently there was a browser zero-day observed in the wild that operated by MITM'ing HTTP connections and injecting the payload into the response. You're thinking of HTTPS as protecting what information you send, but it also protects what you receive; with an HTTP connection, anyone in the middle can make your browser receive anything they want.
Mayastor: Lightning Fast Storage for Kubernetes
Until your spam rate goes above 0.2%, then the same team will chase you. We fixed the issue on our end and I'm glad they enforce the threshold.
Exactly, or like Philip K Dick's UBIK, where the protagonist has to pay his door before it lets him trough.

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
One additional tip: if you hold your baby by the thighs and let them learn to balance their torso upright for a few minutes a day starting at about 5 months, within a month or two they should have enough strength/balance to sit up on your shoulders.

Personally I found carrying a baby on shoulders a heck of a lot more convenient and comfortable than carrying them on my chest. Also then the whole time you are walking around the baby is further strengthening their muscles and improving their balance.
Hell, I'd even pay for delivery. At the rate most humans use non-office printers, it would probably be worth it to pay 10 bucks once a month to have someone just drop a print off by my door.
https://time.com/5137272/condoms-at-olympics/
I think words chosen can still affect content and persuasiveness. I've heard Jack Ma speak in person and the most convincing bit was a segment where he switched back to Chinese.

That said, I agree that Jack Ma is far from as technical as Elon Musk, and still consider his spin-off of Alipay (Ant) from Alibaba to be very questionable from a corporate governance standpoint.
To be fair, they probably can anyways, since the site willingly handed over their keys to Cloudflare, or rely on some Google CDN, host on EC2, etc.

It’s the second or third tier nation state actors that you can really make a difference with.
Demon planet.
Yes, and some indication that the hand squeezing got you more juice than the machine.
But if your talking about system virtualization, System 370 invented that way before FreeBSD invented jails...and speaking of jails..even chroot on BSD came before that, but he is talking about cgroups.
Where I live these upscale cafes and restaurants are owned by extremely wealthy restaurant ownership groups. Their attempts to seem local are little more than virtue signaling, and the money backing them has crushed whole city blocks of small local businesses in favor of their sterilized Instagram-aesthetic places where the food is 2x the price for half the flavor.
The west coast sounds like a paradise for developers. Makes me wish I had moved...
The man-in-the-middle can self-sign their own certs and present it to you as the site's own self-signed cert. Unless you have some way to verify self-signed certs out-of-band, they're useless.
One of the key management tricks at any company is to compartmentalize the work enough such that no individual cog feels that they are doing anything wrong, regardless of the overall outcome. Companies also spend a lot of money on internal communication/propaganda to get employees in line. I'm sure the comp packages don't hurt either.
I have been GitHub Actions ever since they released, but used to use TravisCI before that. There were one or two projects where I used CircleCI and it seemed more mature that TravisCI.
so great info
I've seen these popping up in NYC but never used one: https://www.printwithme.com/
> Some ass from another department constantly talking on the phone 9 to 5.

Dude, that guy's job probably relied on him being on the phone all day - he's just doing it. It's not his fault that you can hear him, it's your office manager/designer.

Some of us really do have to spend a huge chunk of our day talking to other people on the phone, zoom, etc. There's n other way to get our jobs done, and if they don't give us private office space to do it in, then we have to do it in the open space they do give us.
An apt piece. These tendencies in Big Tech lay bare the mechanism that pushes towards legibility because it's literally easier to code. It's worth some thought for programmers that we have to gravitate towards problems that can be solved by a tabulating machine (or a CRUD API).

For the record, I'm strongly against these companies having free reign over markets and societies, but opportunistically sympathetic towards them sometimes counterbalancing arbitrary government actions. Of course I'd prefer having sane governments controlled by the public, but that is a pipe dream in most countries.

>And yet, very few people emigrate from highly legible countries in the United States and Western Europe in order to live in more informal ones. Meanwhile, many people around the world do choose to immigrate to those hyper-legible societies.

I don't think this is completely accurate. Really old republican democracies, mainly the US and Switzerland, seem to have less legibility than more modern, centralized and top-down states (model: France). There are more independent local institutions and old privileges of the populace that no autocratic government managed to remove. Things like guns, lack of compulsory IDs, local direct democracy, electing small local officials. Mind you, I'm not saying that the US is some civil rights paradise in practice (in fact, I'm happy to not be living there), just that it has more historical mess to counteract easy legibility and centralization.

I'd say that the Eastern Bloc tends towards even more legibility than Western Europe, because totalitarian regimes (and even earlier, reactionary monarchies) have destroyed organic, grassroots social institutions. People were taught to resist bureaucracy by petty cheating, not by conscious political action. (This is slowly changing, maybe.) Even moreso, of course, mainland China.

In short: people immigrate to societies with high standard of living and rule of law. Both are loosely correlated with legibility.
Gunshot Detection Technology Helps Police Arrest Albuquerque Woman