skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This raises so many questions for me that are predicated on this being the case, but this is way out of my league so I could be off the mark. Incoming geeking about Universal Programming Languages.

1. If you can increase the performance of a language by adding language specific instruction sets to the processor, how much of a boost would we see on average?

2. Instead of building in instructions for say Python, C#, Java, etc, what if you built it in a language designed to create other languages I.E Racket? (I like Racket but another language that specialized in this would be fine). Since languages built on Racket ultimately compile to valid Racket code, you'll still get the speed up, and can program with the features and syntax you want (within reason obv constrained by the limitations of the base language).

3. I wasn't around for this, but isn't this what made Lisp faster on Lisp Machines? Since they had dedicated hardware for interpreting Lisp instructions?
I'm just halfway of the text and I'm already tippy-tapping like an excited toddler waiting for candy! This has the same hackish aura as the "story of Mel"
Why would that RAM have less latency? Do you have any sort of a source for why you think that?
Alcohol is the 3rd-leading preventable cause of death in the United States [0]. By no stretch of the imagination is it "broadly harmless"

[0]: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
One major mistake Google also makes is assuming that everything is web, it's not. Google have world class engineers, they have the ability to develop infrastructure that scales globally, yet they apparently can't write desktop application.

A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to download Chat". Well that just weird, but okay, I can uninstall Chrome afterwards, no problem. Imagine my surprise when launching Chat also launched Chrome. I disregard this as being something Chat just do on first launch. Existing Chrome however also closed Chat.... Okay. Uninstall Chrome then, that should teach Chat to no fool around with Chrome. Now Chat doesn't work, because what Google doesn't tell you is that Chat is now a progressive web app. The icon is pretty though.

Chat can be a web app all it want, but it doesn't get to launch Chrome, I don't want that abomination running all day. The current fix is apparently to install via Home Brew, that downloads a stand-alone app. Google claims the new version is stand-alone, but if it was to launch Chrome it's not really stand-alone is it.

What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.
to what my dude? is this data still accessible or is it being systematically wiped?
For me it varies a lot, I think it's very easy to think you are working when you are not. But also easy to work and not realise it.

I think a lot about Joel Spolsky's post [1] on the subject. It depends on what you are doing but I think in software development you need to look at effectiveness rather than time spent.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
I used to be a master at this, then UI changed at least 5 times. I slowly lost grip on it, defeated by wear and tear.
Wasn't there recently a story of a Lamborghini which wouldn't start because it didn't have a cell signal (it was in an underground garage)? Some sensor had been tripped, which made the car require network validation before it would start back up.

And don't Nest thermostats occasionally have an issue where they default back to somewhere in the 60° range due to a server connectivity issue?

https://support.google.com/googlenest/thread/20510237?hl=en

Doesn't seem like nonsense.

Other fun internet connected car reads:

https://www.wcpo.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/wo...

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306338-phone-app-rental-...
Presumably they're harder to shut down without due process via vague leaning on anti-money-laundering rules with payment processors.

Everything on that list depends on a relatively high volume of relatively low value banking transactions.
Here's Michigan's summary of what I believe to be the same incident: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Antrim_Fact_Check_707...

> ... tabulators did not communicate properly with the County’s
central election management system software when the county combined and reported unofficial results. Every tabulator recorded ballots correctly but the unofficial reports were erroneous. These errors can always be identified and corrected because every tabulator prints a paper totals tape showing how the ballots for each race were counted. After discovering the error in reporting the unofficial results, the clerk worked diligently to report correct unofficial results by reviewing the printed totals tape on each tabulator and hand-entering the results for each race, for each precinct in the county.

TFA takes a fairly conspiratorial tone;

> A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not
seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by
intentional errors in the system.

"Intentional errors" are neither defined nor substantiated in this report, which I find a bit suspicious. Hanlon's Razor applies here.

However the report does make some explicit claims about vote tallies including a photograph of some pieces of paper that claim to be the paper tallies differing totals; I'd be interested in seeing the government's response to this particular claim.

> There were incremental changes throughout the rolls with some significant
adjustments between the 2 rolls that were reviewed. This demonstrates
conclusively that votes can be and were changed during the second machine
count after the software update. That should be impossible especially at such a
high percentage to total votes cast.

> The Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's statement is false. Our findings show
that the tabulator tape totals were significantly altered by utilization of two
different program versions, and not just the Dominion Election Management
System. This is the opposite of the claim that the Office of the Secretary of
State made on its website. The fact that these significant errors were not caught
in ballot testing and not caught by the local county clerk shows that there are
major inherent built-in vulnerabilities and process flaws in the Dominion
Election Management System, and that other townships/precincts and the
entire election have been affected

It's worth mentioning that for years prior to this election cycle, there were significant concerns raised in security circles around the integrity of voting machines, e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-a-data-security-expert-fear.... So I think that a lot of the points being presented here around general security/hackability of the systems should confirm the priors held by anyone that has a passing interest in information security. However some of the claims around specific anomalies in vote counts require domain expertise which I do not have to contribute.
you mean professionally run corporations like Equifax, Target or SolarWinds (published ftp password to github)?
And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
Yes, this 100%. I miss being able to talk to people like they're in the same room, with no detectable latency, the way that local landline calls used to work.

I think most people don't realize why phone calls suck these days; it just feels awkward and cumbersome, but it doesn't have to be that way.
What do multiple monitors have to do with having a dev env on EC2?

But on a similar note, I use VS Code's Remote SSH plugin to connect to an EC2 on one monitor and terminal + browser on the other. It's not my primary dev env, but it's great for experiments and side projects.
Which organizations would you recommend?
I think you forget how people make choices. One of the big issues is that if people are given the choice between an extra 3rd or 4th bathroom (that they use twice a year) and good insulation, most people will choose the 4th bathroom. That is because the bathrooms are considered status symbols while insulation is not.
Now the rational thing to do when building a house, is to choose the most energy efficient solution over any other options (e.g. a better kitchen), because more energy efficiency will allow you to afford the other upgrades sooner. However, few people make their choices like that.
This fight is already lost. It's already in "finally"-state. This is forward-looking feedback.
Everything you mentioned has nothing to do with UI/UX.
The question is not dumb, but I suppose the answer is simply a qualified "no", as in "we can't reach our targets by relying solely on our main/single property, so we need to find a way in the next X years to leverage it to meet them or we will close / be sold for peanuts / get fired (the management, I mean)"
In the 90's game publishers started to make things available via BBS, FTP, AOL and CompuServe and others. And it was already taken advantage of in quality control. Also "mail me a floppy."
In the context of example #2
Excellent article.

It seems to me (and this is somewhat off-the-cuff) that compilers have another option: integers which are cast from pointers have provenance.

That is, provenance is a taint: you can't clean it off through casting. So casting from pointer means the user can do integer-things like addition, but it means the compiler can't do integer-things like constant folding.
New version of Apple-1 DIY kits start shipping
Most new cars sold in Brazil, for over a decade now, can run on gasoline or sugar-cane ethanol, or a mix of both in any proportion. One can fill up with either or both without bothering informing the car, and when turned on the engine will quickly adjust to the mix present. AFAIK, that adjusting is mostly ML.
There's not really any magic to it, they just need to implement PCIe and include memory slots instead of hardwired chips on the package. There are other ARM systems that already do this.
I find it really hard to believe that a thin and light Macbook Air can be faster than a 12 core 3900X desktop for compiling large software projects.
So, what's wrong with using macros?
Without reading the article you can pretty much answer that question-headline with: because money.

Edit: I read the post and it's as guessed. (money)
I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook.

I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most.

Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
Motion Animation Framework for Swift
Linux is up and running? Maybe one should get a Macbook air then
I hate this argument, but here it goes: Google is a private company. Do they have a duty to the open web?

A bit more constructively:
Who are the stakeholders here in the "open web"?

> show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic

Agreed. AMP allows ads, so when the users open the site the original site can receive ad revenue. But the snippets Google shows on the search results page likely deprive the original sites from traffic.

However ... it's not like Wikipedia wasn't already "stealing facts".
Pointers are "just" integers (unsigned integers of a size, that is). Most languages treat them differently (C assigns them a type, and a stride with it), but that is usually on top of them being integers.

Pointers "point" to (are addresses to) bytes, as he said. If you want you can pack data to a resolution of a bit, and some languages help you do that as well.

You can also do whatever you want with pointers (in some languages, ofc), like do bitwise operations on them. Aliasing them can be useful as well, in more then one way.

Why not just get rid of pointers ? You know you can.

Also, a byte is 0 .. 255. The hardest problem; naming things, and off by one errors.
Because anyone interested enough in this topic to do any cursory research -- as opposed to just being an insufferable fedora on the internet -- will realize it's not limited to just one company.
Yes. Luckily that is an external monitoring tool, but they do allow ‘transactional’ monitoring, so some folks could have login info saved.

The two sites I monitored w/ that tool, we used it to determine when a 3rd party account’s login info has expired.

So, I would expect my saved credentials to be invalid, but that is just my anecdote.

The rest is just simple uptime and response time monitoring of specific URLs, which we publicly expose anyway, so no threat there.
It's not just shady stuff. Recently, on a customer's Windows server, antivirus software randomly decided to permanently delete some our DLLs (!). We weren't doing anything remotely shady; it was a normal ASP.NET Core app.
Show HN: Play Secret Santa on the Blockchain this year
The narrative in this story did get confusing. But there is a purpose to it: the story of Mrs. Rodríguez took place around 2014-2017, whereas Luciano Garza's was July of this year. It's rare that the news department (i.e. as opposed to the New York Times Magazine) will run a feature closely detailing a years-old event, not without an obvious hook to why the story is being told now. Likewise, Luciano's kidnapping and murder, sadly, wouldn't merit such an indepth feature without an obvious tie to broader events.

Writing about both murders in this article made sense, IMHO, even if the transitions between narratives weren't always completely clear. Part of the reporter's angle was that Mrs. Rodríguez's highly publicized fight impacted how people reacted to Luciano's kidnapping, for better or worse.
This also describes video games to an extent.
> This makes them feel unsafe at work.

I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.
Russia's hacking/software capabilities have always fascinated me. I might be out of the loop, but it very much feels like this "online cold-war" is very one-sided towards Russia, which is ridiculous given US capabilities. Though, this could be attributed to the US simply not getting caught.

Nonetheless, everything I've read points to Solarwinds conduct being borderline negligent. For example, they not only told customers to ignore inaccurate checksums but they also failed basic server security.
Cloud computing and brain-computer interfaces.
I love Simon Sinek! I'd also like to throw in my bid for this book as a great book into copy and product positioning:

https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning...

I know I kept that article super short and sparse but hopefully I get someone to think more critically about how they are doing their copywriting.
It's going to be an interesting decade. ARKG is probably the least understood of them all.
Tech billionaire Larry Ellison has moved to Hawaii
Meta-question: are software standards generally becoming more security-friendly over time?
Two approaches are: "as much written and asynchronous communication as possible" (the Indian model) and "give the team their head in most respects, accept the risk that you may need to regroup" (the Chinese model)

Part of the competitive advantage of NYC and London as financial centers is that it is easy to teleconference between those cities. It is already surreal to me to watch the stock market open in bed at a hotel in San Diego and isn't hard when I am still on east coast time, but it's a lot harder to work from the west coast to london, never mind points east.
Don't some of the higher powered cars in Japan have a GPS system that won't allow them to exceed certain street limits?

Places that have some roads with unrestricted speed probably wouldn't be a candidate for non-GPS blanket restrictions (Germany has the autobahn, Montana has/had some roads posted as 'reasonable speed').

There is also the argument against both types of restrictions that some situations can warrant excess speeds. If you are speeding to a hospital because your neighbor has potentially life threatening injuries from being run over by a tractor, most states have a clause that allows you to break the laws to avoid greater harm in situations like this.

The best answer I know of so far is to increase driver test requirements in the US. Many European countries have more stringent testing with lower fatalities per million miles, even when comparing US interstates to the German autobahn. The number of drivers I witness who make bad decisions or don't know the law is quite high.
At least they're breaking the things they paid for, not the ones I paid for.
The "Copy II PC Option Board", yeah. I knew a guy who had one, and it definitely could handle a lot of stuff that you normally couldn't. Interestingly, you really wanted an early-era board because they were forced to water down the later revisions so they couldn't copy newer protection schemes.
Just want to be clear that the site has no affiliation with Ark Invest. It is a third-party.
> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.

What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.
No longer publicly traded: https://www.solarwinds.com/company/press-releases/solarwinds...
Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).
Trolls exist, but so do racists and misogynists. We don't know which of them it was, but it's not a stretch to guess the people who found racist and misogynistic insults funny were in fact racist and misogynist.
This is true, but it would be like trying to correct someone and saying "No AirBnB didn't by Company X, Greylock did!"
That's indeed tricky: if there's a for loop inside the guarded block which generates many defers, a stack would have to be created to handle them somehow.
Doesn't explain the poor UX for its existing / inbuilt apps such as Google, Gmail, Drive, etc.
Can someone explain why using quotes is a thing that has to be added? Like, it treats words separately by breaking up the search string into tokens using spaces as a delimiter. Is the OP implementing this himself? I would have imagined there's a standard library for converting search strings into a structured query.
Reddit Swallows Dubsmash, TikTok's Closest Competitor
It's not a straw man, and you didn't answer the question. Rephrased, do you believe that all the choices you have made are the same as they would have been if you had been free of outside hidden influence? Do you believe that is true for everyone's choices?

Of course we make our own choices, but the question is whether those choices are completely ours, an expression of full conscious agency, free of any polluting influence. And for all our choices, both the ones we think hard about, and the ones when we're exhausted and our attention is split.

Do you believe "personal accountability" extends to accepting the blame for someone else's manipulative intent?
Nice. Now we just need a way to share links from mobile to desktop and we have made a full circle!

Thanks.
> I've never witnessed a need to "swap out" an entire layer. Have you?

Many times, but the code assets (and the examples) are not ones that I can share. Feel free to dismiss it, if you like. I won't lose sleep over it.

What I can share, is that I have written frameworks in technology that is either deliberately "low-tech," or that is something that I know will probably not age particularly well, so I make it easy to replace. One example that I can give, is the BAOBAB server, that I wrote a couple of years ago[0]. It has four layers, and the ANDISOL layer[1] is the one that acts as a programmatic façade to the SQL-based database layers, below. It is explicitly designed to be the "swap out" point for the system.

In reality, I would suspect that this would only be the first part of a swap that would eventually replace the BASALT layer[2], but it would allow a graduated, incremental replacement strategy (I have done these a number of times. They are not for the faint of heart).

For example, when I talked about adding a command to the API, I just added one a few days ago, where I added a call to return a fast list of user IDs and display names[7]. I needed this for a "look-ahead" text entry autofill, in a social media app that I'm building on top of BAOBAB.

I could have easily added this to BASALT, and that would have been that. It would have been fast, quite safe, and wouldn't have required the elaborate nested submodule synchronization that is required when I tweak BADGER[3].

The problem is, that the command was a low-level SQL call, at its heart, and those belong in BADGER or CHAMELEON[4]. They certainly should never be exposed above ANDISOL.

So I added it to BADGER, then implemented a "pass-through" in CHAMELEON, and in ANDISOL (what is exposed to BASALT). Since BADGER is nested inside of CHAMELEON, which is nested inside of COBRA[5], which is nested inside of ANDISOL, which is nested inside of BASALT, I had to bump each of their versions, and update the submodule (I despise Git submodules) chain for each.

This is a fairly trivial example, but I take things like modularity, and domains fairly seriously. Also, it's a good way to keep security[6] fairly high.

This may not have answered your question, but it might help you to see how I work.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...

[1] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/...

[2] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/...

[3] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/...

[4] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/...

[5] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/...

[6] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/BAOBAB/PDFs/Security.pdf (Opens a PDF File)

[7] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/baobab/commit/d8316a1b...
Well my company never had anything to do with SolarWinds and I expect getting calls from our customers tomorrow anyway.

Had the same with Citrix hack that was going around, we never had any Citrix but at we got at least ten calls.
Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
We (the public) have not been provided evidence that this was Russia. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Some anonymous people claimed it's Russia. That is meaningless.