skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn’t really aware of computer viruses until the early 2000s when viruses such as Nimda and ILOVEYOU got a lot of attention so I find it interesting to learn that computer viruses were causing problems in the 80s when the world wasn’t half as connected as it was by the end of the millenium.

There’s not much technical details included in this news report video It mentions two logic bombs that are activated on Friday 13th and shows how one of these viruses (I’m guessing “Data Crime”) caused damaged to the UK’s Royal National Institute for the Blind which, at the time, was helping blind people use computers.

This Computer Knowledge article on the 1989 Datacrime virus [1] has more information:

> … on any day after October 12th, it would trigger a low level format of cylinder zero of the hard disk, which would, on most hard disks, wipe out the File Allocation Table, and leave the user effectively without any data. It would also display the virus’ name: Datacrime virus.

It looks like the 1989 “Data crime” virus was not notable enough to be included in Wikipedia’s Timeline of computer viruses and worms [2] – though the Jerusalem virus is included under 1987:

> The Jerusalem virus, part of the (at that time unknown) Suriv family, is detected in the city of Jerusalem. The virus destroys all executable files on infected machines upon every occurrence of Friday the 13th (except Friday 13 November 1987 making its first trigger date May 13, 1988). Jerusalem caused a worldwide epidemic in 1988.

I suspect the Wikipedia author meant “panic” when they wrote “epidemic” as they refer to this article on Computer Viruses by Rob Wentworth [3] which has a lot more information about the Jerusalem virus. Wikipedia has a substantial article specifically about the Jerusalem virus [4] which explains how it works and lists some of its many variants.

Regarding Data Crime, this NCSM India article [5] says that

> Data crime virus is similar to Jerusalem and was programmed to attack on October 13, 1989. Track zero of computer hard disc is destroyed and the contents of discs are rendered unreadable. This virus enters COM and EXE files and damages the hard disc. And antidote called ‘V Checker’ was developed by the American Computer Society. Fortunately the virus was located in March 1989 itself and the damage reported after October 13 was minimal. The Royal National institute for the Blind, UK was the worst hit and much data was reported to be lost.

This description [6] concurs with [2] and [5]:

> The DataCrime virus caused much panic around Oct. 13th 1989 when it was set to go off. Any infected program run on Oct. 13 or later in the year would format the first nine tracks of the hard disk and display the message

DATACRIME VIRUS RELEASED: 1 MARCH 1989

1. https://www.cknow.com/cms/vtutor/1989-datacrime.html

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_a...

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20131224165244/http://uanr.com/a...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_(computer_virus)

5. https://www.ncsmindia.com/chapter-5-computer-viruses/

6. https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/datacrim.shtml
How Tokenization Is Changing the Real Estate Market: Realio Review
ICO fines Ticketmaster £1.25M after failing protecting payment details
people have different opinions about things. What you think is awful, another may enjoy.
> Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society

Us city-people, yes. But there's enough people out there who are mostly self-sufficient, and there's even a bunch of urban preppers who would more than likely have a relatively easy time surviving complete industrial collapse of a nation.

(I say relatively easy because it would obviously be hard and unpleasant times for everyone, but for some that would be doable)
The standard Canvas API is probably your best option. So if some library claims to have better performance than Canvas 2D, I would love to see a benchmark on that. Anyone would assume WebGL is faster, but as you know "assumption is the mother of all fuckups". Let me explain.

A year ago, I had to make a proof of concept for drawing Gantt charts on a Canvas. Coming from a game development background, my assumption was that some things would be too slow on a canvas:

- rotating graphics

- drawing an insane amount of rectangles

- filling surfaces with a certain repeating texture

So I also included a benchmark of Canvas vs WebGL. The conclusion was that for most things, Canvas was faster:

- rotating graphics

- texturizing

- etc.

This really amazed me, because as an old school game developer, I know all limitations of 2D rendering. The thing is, all modern browsers heavily optimize their Canvas to the GPU. Even the older Edge. Do some heavy Canvas 2D drawing, and see your GPU usage spikes.

Plus, rendering text on WebGL is not as straightforward.

However, there was a tipping point when drawing an insane amount of rectangles (which basically become dots), where WebGL would take over.

So for this project, the simplicity of the Canvas API, the text rendering, and the performance were definitely a sure way to use that one instead of a more complex, slower WebGL.
What on earth does that have to do with this topic?
Turns out buying Sealand in order to continue to run ThePirateBay was over-engineering, as ThePirateBay is still alive and running today, albeit in a slightly different form than before.
Some HN'ers might be too young to remember the DeCSS [0] saga and, in particular, the t-shirts.

The EFF, who successfully represented two defendants accused of publishing the DeCSS source code in the two main cases, has the details [1]:

> In Bunner, the [ DVD Copy Control Association ] summarily dismissed its claims after the California Supreme Court ruled that computer programs could be preliminarily restrained from publication only in very narrow circumstances. The California Court of Appeals ruled that those circumstances were not met in Mr. Bunner's case because the program was not a trade secret at the time it was published, but instead was widely available around the world.

> In Pavlovich, the California Supreme Court ruled that Matthew Pavlovich, a Texas resident who published DeCSS on the Internet, could not be forced to stand trial in California. The landmark decision laid out clear jurisdiction rules for claims arising from publishing information on the Internet. DVD CCA's attempt to seek U.S. Supreme Court review of the decision was also rejected.

Additionally, the one known author of DeCSS was acquitted in a criminal trial in Norway.

Obligatory EFF donation link: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/

--

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

[1]: https://www.eff.org/cases/dvdcca-v-bunner-and-dvdcca-v-pavlo...

--

EDIT: See also "AACS encryption key controversy" and the "free speech flag": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
Nut Tree
I2P Gitlab how to: https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/gitlab

Existing server: http://git.idk.i2p/zlatinb/muwire

Can't find the clearnet address
IIRC the EU is just a few cut powerlines on a windy day away from completely overloading and destroying most of the power grid.
>nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck.

Sheer luck is an odd way to describe "so much process and procedure and checks that when something does slip through the cracks it is correctly identified as anomalous and nobody gets nuked". Sure it might not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and near misses show where to improve the system but to pretend it's just "sheer luck" despite god knows how many man hours being spent on the problem is naive, hyperbolic and infantile.
"I think the more serious problem is the lack of applications like Microsoft Office, the Adobe Suite, the Affinity Suite, OmniGroup applications, etc."

I'd buy Affinity again if I could use it on Linux. I'm hoping that MS does port Office as it will make me stop wondering why I pay for Office Live (365 or whatever they call it this week).
The Bridge Across Avon Gorge
Which made every single glyph on my laptop a blank rectangle. I guess there's a reason people don't want to take on the responsibility for these critical packages; who knows what horrible workflows you'll break!

https://xkcd.com/1172/

I couldn't even begin to understand why the changes required the removal of this feature. But I won't complain, at least someone's doing the hard work.
I can understand if you want a particular modal there can be a delay. A quick look at the big box retailers near me show variety of refrigerators in different sizes are available today.
Distinguished Engineer.
> A 5 percent income tax for remote workers is justified primarily from the money saved between transportation and food, as well as the added flexibility working remotely creates.

But what about the additional costs for heating, water, power?
The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
"Stallman [...] really didn’t do much to solve the real problems" - I beg your pardon but when was he appointed with this responsibility?
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25057794
I’d rather align myself with the screen, otherwise I’m mostly constantly looking towards a slight right, which is a terrible twist for the spine.

It’s much easier and more comfortable to adjust my hands over a slightly offset keyboard.
Afaik a canvas interface is where you draw to a bitmap by issuing calls in a procedural style (eg web canvas, cairo graphics etc). This is in contrast to vector graphics where you build an object hierarchy to be rendered.
Europe’s Most Bombed Hotel
Understanding Kubernetes Autoscaling – A Primer
I feel it never was mine anyway anyway:
- The proprietary firmware blob to make gpu/video work
- Whatever happen on wifi/modem module that i cant control/know
- The Embedded Controller that i cant control or inspect either
- That code that allows the cpu to boot and initialize

That list could easily keep going.

At the end for me its about having alternatives what matters so i can pick what to trust and what to control fully, probably thats part the Freedom that software can give to a material/physical world that isn't ours anyway.
I'd say Mint with Cinnamon, since you can install the 20.10 Kernel from the Update Manager.
Here's a guide for gitlab and i2p https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git-bundle
I hate to break it to you but Google hasn't been the company you seem to think they still are for a very long time.
Let me counter with my own anecdote.

Every researcher I've met in the last 10 years needs some version of Linux to get their job done effectively. Largely because tools like Python/Numpy have replaced stagnated (due to years of monopoly) tools like Matlab and they are much easier to setup and use on Linux.

Mind you, I am not talking just computer scientists. Biology, physics, maths, all use linux based setups.
Actually, Firefox is going to start sending a CRL 4x daily in lieu of OCSP.

Chrome hasn't supported OCSP since 2012, and publishes CRLSets instead.

OCSP is considered bad by at least Chrome and Firefox due to leaking side channel information in exactly the way the article describes.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/21/crlite-part-3-s...

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/02/05/crlsets.html
We don't normally count each infection for AIDS or malaria - the numbers are often statistical estimates, not absolute counts as we get for Covid19. Even for just this reason alone, it's absurd to then come back and claim they are somehow less accurate than the AIDS or malaria numbers.

Also, if you want to look for the died of/died with difference in AIDS or malaria, Malaria and HIV are huge epidemics in similar areas, so there is a good chance that many people die of malaria and AIDS at the same time - did the malaria kill them, or the AIDS? Most of the people dying of malaria also have problems with malnutrition - does that invalidate the fact that malaria killed them? HIV is often correlated with drug use - I think it's more than likely that a few people counted as AIDS deaths were also overdosing on something. You can find all sorts of correlations.
I think this is the right approach. Use one language to rule them all, integrate the whole UI related stack into it, from backend to frontend, and drive the integration by well defined protocols (data/types).

Python seems to be a sensible choice. Others, that are already almost there, would be JS, Rust, Clojure, and I think people do similar things in Haskell as well.
What we don't really understand is the lethality of the second and third order effects. People who can't be fed (because industry has collapsed) don't just sit and die peacefully. Foraging is unlikely to work, since our natural ecosystems are not large enough to support large-ish human populations and would soon be destroyed by overuse (damage to them from the actual nuclear war being beside the point). A huge immigration crisis in the rest of the world could have its own highly disastrous consequences.

Finally, I wonder how bad the effects on reproductive health would be from the various radiation effects be? Humans who had trouble reproducing, with a much degraded medical system might face further downstream problems from that. Same thing with animal species, which might cause more food troubles.

Point is, there is significant survival trouble just from a violent collapse of civilisation, that estimating the probability of human survival is fairly impossible. Finally, if humanity becomes so critically weakened, even (by today's standards) minor disasters might become extinction events.
Block weights, sledgehammer levers, captains of crush grippers, fat grip barbells/dumbbells; even a large bucket of water and a pair of pliers. Brookfield's books are considered canonical, and everyone who is anyone (I'm not anyone) in grip is on grip board[0]. I was first made aware of it looking at this dude's geoshitties website[1], which is mercifully still around and a great beginners resource.

To sell you on it a bit: if you've lifted for ~10 years you've probably hit your biological peak on the big exercises, and you've gone into some kind of maintenance mode, or are concentrating more on strength endurance, or rotating through peak efforts on different kinds of strength, or working around inevitable injuries or whatever. Either way, a man gets bored, and a large part of the appeal of strength training is the feeling of making progress. Various forms of hand strength; there's basically infinite potential there. Leonardo used to bend horseshoes, and it's a seemingly impossible feat I think most men are capable of with some training. It's also something available to old people who might not be able or willing to pull 5 wheels on the deadlift any more. You can, of course, injure your hands or forearms, but your chances of being crippled by it are fairly low. The other thing about it; you can train a fair amount (unlike big lifts) without blowing out your cortisol, but you get that intense triumphant grrrrrrr ogre nerve energy from doing it that you do after a max effort lift. Also it looks cool and chicks and small children dig it when you do seemingly impossible feats.

Anyway, peasants who hoed their crops and lifted bricks all day were fucking STRONG in the hands. Probably stronger than most nobles in that regard.

[0] https://www.gripboard.com/index.php?/forum/7-workout-reports...

[1] http://www.geocities.ws/ltgodfrey/lever.html
>There will always be a market where footprint and performance per watt are not issues.

Unfortunately even that is gone. If you need multiple cores, Pref Watt Scale up with each core adding to it. Unless you want absolute single thread performances. But even that Apple seems to be winning.

We have enter the age of TDP Computing.
The argument make sense and I ran across it a few times before, but I'm using OpenVPN via TCP on a daily basis and never had issues. I don't know how much better the connection would be via UDP, but TCP works like a charm as far as I can tell.
>Please don't assume we all live in California.

Same here, although at least there's sun on weekends for me (if it isn't cloudy). Looking out the window, and being outside on the weekend with a winter hat and long sleeves is probably not allowing a lot of vitamin D.

I'm wondering if there's something like a good lamp that gives UV light without being too strong.
The first part of the book is available online:

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

The exact quote that stunned me being:

"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
Seeking for a Technical Cofounder
Currently seeking for a technical cofounder for my C2C startup. Wiling to share equity 40:30 while leaving the other 30% for future investors. CTO will have to work full time. If interested please contact me @ travelflights0@gmail.com for more information. Additional experience in Ux/UI design will be welcomed and also I’ll like to see past projects you’ve worked on.
Why other countries tolerate this spying on their citizens? Why Apple, Google, and Microsoft products are still allowed say in Europe?

Do European politicians understand that they and their descendants are owned by another country?
The exceptionally good touchpad on the macbooks are almost half the reason you’d buy the machine in the first place.

Wish it was as good on the alternatives. Hopefully it works 100% out of the box, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
The Mac mini contains a laptop-grade CPU, RAM and mainboard that lacks expansion.

The only thing that makes it not a laptop is the form-factor.
All your recent comments are dead. Don't bother. It's unfortunate that contrarian opinions are silenced but this is the result of another walled garden
> What's even the fucking point?

To make you use Microsoft Store.
Peter Turchin's "cliodynamics", discussed several times previously on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Peter%20Turchin

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cliodynamics
A preview of the upcoming Waterfox third-generation release is now available
Tesla is not all electric vehicles.

My Twizy and Ioniq haven't got a single touch of data gathering neither a SIM card/wifi connectivity.
LazySSH – A jump-host SSH server that starts machines on-demand
I can hardly understand the motivation of the corporations keeping to invest in DRM and software activation bullshit tech despite it's obvious it is going to be cracked inevitably (and quickly).
> life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

Not at all. Many organisms would still find it easy to survive in a post-nuclear-war world and would eventually evolve to fill the roles of those that went extinct.
> In other words, it is perceived as harder because people make it harder.

If by "people" you mean "Linux Desktop developers". They have taken relatively simple things and abstracted them two or three times until they are so complex and fragile they need special programs and standards to automagically manage it all for the user. As soon as you step outside the box of what they expect (hey, why can't I install a program on a different disk than my OS?) it is revealed for the Goldbergesq garbage pile it is.
Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.
Next laptop for me is going to be from a company that explicitly supports linux. Probably dell or lenovo.

A lot of people like to rag on Ubuntu. I agree with some of the criticisms. But the one thing they have done right is broker partnerships with hardware vendors like dell and lenovo.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem...

https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-laun...
I don't see anywhere in the article that it's no a near extinction event. Just it's not exactly an extinction event.

The article mentions that most human would die just from food production capacity collapse. Just not exactly all of us.
Wigner tells the story of John von Neumann and “two bikes and a fly” puzzle
VSCode is getting better w/o me doing anything, almost magically. I did three attempts to switch to emacs because I assume it would up my mechanics in the long term, but VSCode strikes a balance of being comfortable and powerful enough, and the community around it is very active.
I just started to learn about DJing, and the recommended software is Serato.

The lite version, you cannot use your own mp3s, but it has support for streaming services.

Spotify was removed months ago, but Tidal is available.

It is just so easy to create content now, the signal to noise ratio is pretty low.
One thing I like about the rationalist community is they tend to focus on what is factually true, instead of the metadiscussion of what a person's hidden motives are which consumes so much of the rest of the internet.
> Without the ability to grow up playing with system level software, combined with the software industry's unwillingness to pass on institutional knowledge to younger generations, I fear we are already on a path towards a civilization that loses a lot of the technological capability we currently enjoy.

Gen Z here. I tried to give manufacturers the finger and try to play with systems level software on modern PC's and ended up retreating after realizing, among other things, just how much modern computers are not for hackers. Everything feels like a "undocumented" (by which I mean the documentation is likely only accessible to OEM's and those with large business deals woth them) mess. Even when it is available, I'm too scared to touch it. I found something I wanted to try to to hack around with till I saw the license agreement I had to read in order to access the docs. I couldn't parse out the legalese, especially regarding open source works and I'm not consulting a lawyer to figure out if I can post some project I might hack together online under an OSS license. The few things that do get open sourced are incredibly half assed and you can still tell they're designed for corporations, not hackers (i.e. edk2)

Conversely, I have an old IBM XT compatible luggable sitting in my closet. The manual for that has the full BIOS source llisting. Nowadays I mostly just hack around woth old non-PC devices, but for the most part computing just isn't fun for me anymore.
The goal of DRM is and always have been to lock users inside a platform, not to prevent piracy. It gives companies market power because users cannot easily switch to a better alternative without losing their entire digital collection.

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/faq#copyright

> DRM is not about limiting copyright infringement. Such an argument attempts to make DRM appear beneficial to authors and is based entirely on a (very successfully advertised) misrepresentation of DRM's purpose. To illustrate the absurdity of the argument, consider the nature of file sharing: to obtain a copy of a file without permission, downloaders go to a friend or a file sharing network, not a DRM-encumbered distribution platform. If DRM existed only to prevent unauthorized sharing, every distribution method for that particular piece of media would have to be distributed by an uncrackable DRM-encumbered distribution platform, which is impossible on its own. So long as one copy becomes available without DRM, countless more are easily produced. Industry proponents of DRM are well aware that DRM is not a copyright enforcement mechanism. DRM is only marketed as a copyright enforcement mechanism to mislead authors into tolerating and even defending it.
Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.

It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.