skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>not particularly difficult to intercept the call setup process from an AMPS
phone and swipe its identification numbers, allowing you to basically steal
someone else's cellular service. You can imagine that this was popular with
certain criminals with a need for untraceable but convenient communications.

and Kevin Mitnick https://www.cnet.com/news/q-a-kevin-mitnick-from-ham-operato...

"I was cloning my cell phone to random subscribers and dialing into computers from the cell phone."
Adjuvants are the 'extras' added to anything, not necessarily just vaccines, which help it in its action or make it more convenient in usage.

That could be thickeners or perhaps suspending agents to prevent the active ingredients settling too quickly on the bottom; that could be preservatives to stop it growing bugs; that could be ascorbic acid to prevent the active substance being oxidised and made inactive; that could be anti-freeze agents to prevent it freezing to become a solid.

A lot of the 'extras' listed in the ingredients of prepackaged food could be considered to be adjuvants.
spider on keybRDAOEUD
I got hired in a new company a year ago and we are in the process of migrating from TFS to git. It's quite disheartening to see the lack of skill with a shell. I'm being blocked from pushing and promoting the use of something else than Visual Studio's git pluggin because "other developers are not used to the command line". I proposed Git Extensions and it was more or less the same feedback, too different. It feels like an electrician being told not to use oscilloscopes because it's too hard for others in his team. At least they're in the process of migrating and eventually people will see the light, CLIs are powerful because of their versatility and therefore will server you for most of your career, while "learning" and IDE will server you 10 years at most.
It's still in beta so hopefully feedbacks would be taken into consideration :)
It's like most "open source" knowledge work on the internet. You can't really convert it into money directly, except via reputation. reputation leading to better SEO, better job offers, better ads on your blog, better speaker invites, better consulting gigs.
I'd say that true of almost all good advice. Good advice should probably usually be interpreted as "try to be the kind of person that would do this thing naturally."
I have been writing optimization solvers of many forms to solve problems in engineering for about 20 years. from "make excel do linear regression on some data" to linear least squares to some nonlinear methods, simulated annealing, bayesian methods, deep neural networks -- none of this is "a new kind of programming", it's "do a bunch of data munging, throw matrix at a function, get matrix back, interpret/plot."

there's really no other magic in it than that.
He drives a lot of traffic to their site
This is probably the best way to learn about pointers in C. The book "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" addresses this area very well:
https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/product/Bryant-C...

Debugging it is great fun as well.
Honestly I never heard anything interesting on either analog cell phones or cordless phones. Messing with drive-thru intercoms with our modified Icom W2-As was a hell of a lot more fun.
Maybe there enough black holes to hide the stars behind them.
I used git bash and it worked just fine.

But now you can use Linux subsystem for Windows. I don’t have much experience with this so I’m not sure how well it works in practice but most people seem to rave about it.
Bitsii Bridge
The particular goal of Bitsii is to make self-hosting accessible to everyone by being easy to setup, supporting all of Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and by including coverage for the essentials - data synchronization and home automation. The hope is to make self-hosting more accessible to the less technical and simpler and less time consuming for the more advanced. Come check it out, and if you're interested help improve and grow the solution...
As I wrote above, from technical side, it is the great cost of i creasing gray depth
That’s cool, I didn’t know that!
Alright, well said. Although I still don't agree that it'd be out of place to include citations in a personal essay, what you've said is fair too.
It'll just throw an error when COMMITing, most likely.
I entirely agree with you there is a time for the shell and a time for an IDE and knowing when and knowing both is a huge win.

My comment is more addressing the article where in the author mentions vim with no extensions and grepping. IMO that's often the wrong tool for the job (writing code). It can be a useful tool but there are often better tools for that job. Knowing when to use one vs the other and therefore knowing both is very useful.
There is a guy living in a house inside a tree with huge library. The first responder cells will call him by phone and he will check the library for what to do.

Disclaimer: All I know about this comes from Cells at Work/Hataraku Saibou.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cells_at_Work!)
I’m not a security researcher but I disagree with this rationale on a number of levels.

First, just intuitively it feels wrong. It’s like saying that if you need a $20 permit for camping, but if you get caught camping illegally the fine should only be as much as the permit. Clearly it should be more.

More specific issues:

- Who determines how long the hack took?

- A security researcher is guaranteed the $350/hour whether or not they find the exploit. The bug hunter only gets paid if they find an exploit. Thus, if you follow this out logically every bug hunter should really just be a contracted security researcher and the only bugs being uncovered would be the ones companies were paying upfront to find. In other words, freelance bug hunting is deincentivized.
Hundreds of people commented and how many tens of thousands read it first though? Reminds me of the moderation problem big tech companies face. Humans are prone to confirmation bias which means that when they read inaccurate information that confirms a bias it even further twist people's brains. For example, this article likely twisted thousands of people just a little further against Google even with though there was no good reason for it.

My grandpa twenty years ago had some legitimate gripes with the other side of the political aisle. However, he has seen so many biased and false news stories that his confirmation bias has accepted as truth without critical thinking that he now believes the other side is literally made up of evil criminals intent on destroying the country.

The only solution I can think of is something like a libel law that makes anyone who publishes false information liable to anyone who reads that information... Basically, cut out the enormous amount of garbage produced by media and people chasing pennies. People should only publish things they firmly believe based on evidence to be true.
This misses the rather obvious issue of price. Building your own software is the cheaper option some of the time.

This is particularly true when you have to pay to add some missing feature you need. They will, naturally, try to ask for as much as possible to get what you want.
Before the internet, there was Ham Radio.

That let you send words, pictures, etc from one side of the world to somebody on the other side of the world with no corporation or government getting in the way.

The internet is merely a very poor imitation.
...plus ImageMagick has a myriad of options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) maybe?
I believe Bryant and O'Hallaron wrote a text book just for this course. You can always "optimize" it by reverse engineering the benchmark app and providing the correctly aligned blocks to the bench-marking application. It'll beat the standard malloc calls by several magnitudes if you were to do that.

This is one of the reasons why people write custom allocators - to suit a specific purpose where the allocation pattern is known well in advance.
I do cryo-electron tomography. Mostly of viruses. Many viral capsids (and other biological molecules) have underlying symmetry. We frequently take advantage of that symmetry when processing tomograms to increase our effective signal and get better images.

This looks to be a very nice teaching tool for when I have to explain to someone about how we can use symmetry to our advantage.
In addition to your other responses, I'll add this. There's not really a plausible mechanism that could cause problems to happen long after the fact. Although it sounds exotic, the mRNA vaccine is just using the same process every cold or flu you've ever had used, but in a more limited way since the proteins created by the vaccine cannot reproduce.

By 2 months all traces of vaccine are long gone and you're just left with an immune system trained to fight COVID (just like millions of people have already had happen naturally). So, while everybody has their eyes open, nobody can really explain the mechanism where something might happen.
Is it legal to do this? Post on Twitter that you've asked Company X for this bounty and if they don't pay it by Date X you'll post it on Twitter. If they don't pay it, post the bug on Twitter.

Is that as legal as posting the bug on Twitter straightaway, which as I understand is legal?
Beyond the point of using shell and scripts as replacement for IDE/development, knowing the shell also helps with general productivity. E.g. I need to remote to office desktop and instead of having to open my phone to read the 2FA pin, I just setup stoken on my desktop and wrote a simple script that invokes stoken and copies the pin to the clipboard. Mapped the script to a shortcut and now I can just press the shortcut from the login page and do Ctrl+V for pasting the pin. Small things like these become very easy once you know a bit of scripting and the time/effort saved over time adds up considerably.
By your thesis, there shouldn’t then be people who, having achieved greatness, fall from it because of a negative experience. But of course every field is littered with these examples, great people crippled by the loss of someone they love, an injury, or simply being unable to cope with some awful thing that happened to them in childhood. It’s practically a cliche.

Really, your argument is a fairly irrelevant appeal - because worse circumstances exist in the world (something so inevitably true as to be pointless to state), there is nothing to complain about. While it’s good to have perspective about where one is more fortunate than others, people deal with their own circumstances and not those of others, so it’s functionally meaningless to raise this point. Someone being abused by their spouse or grieving over the loss of a child can maybe take intellectual comfort in the fact that their lot is better than someone in a prison camp, but this kind of diversion does absolutely nothing to alleviate their circumstances.
I love the fact that shell gods exist :)

Honestly? If you can think of anything that needs to be automated, then write a shell script to automate it!
This isn't true. I was told by pg that the current round was closed, and to try next cycle. It was in '08, if I remember correctly. That was near the beginning of the YC program, but that's different from "never."

You know pg better than any of us here. Does /apply2 sound like an endpoint he'd make for the general public? The naming practically screams "special case."

Why don't we just ask pg? He'd reply to you. I trust pg implicitly. He's been many things, but never a liar.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with your points -- it would be dumb to reject their application due to timing, especially when you're getting such a strong signal from a YC founder that this application is worth paying attention to.
This only focuses on categories of risk that apply to low-risk software. As in, the risks are ordinary and largely a function of process and execution.

Ironically, it ignores the riskiest category of software development, classes of software that have never been built before or require necessarily bleeding edge software engineering. This is a very different kind of risk than “bad at software development”.
It differs from blackmail because you the sick person are the one requiring others to perform a service for your benefit. With blackmail (and generally extortion) you are threatening to take an action unless someone pays you not to.
> But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"

I think you're missing their argument. YouTube censoring doesn't prevent information from being published elsewhere.
Ask HN: If you merge PRs from GitHub bots do you own full repo copyright?
I basically automatically merge "security" and "dependency" updates from GitHub. Until today I never thought about the copyright implications. I want to maintain copyright ownership of my repos, so do I need a copyright assignment from GitHub? I think it's an interesting issue, because if you accept a contribution from a human author, they obviously have a copyright claim over your repo...but what's the situation with these bot commits from GitHub? Does GitHub have some control over my work in a copyright sense now, in that if I want to sell license exemptions for corporates, or sell ownership of the repo, do I need to get some sort of release, or assignment or permission from GitHub?
> Is it legal to do this? Post on Twitter that you've asked Company X for this bounty and if they don't pay it by Date X you'll post it on Twitter.

No, it is not legal. This is called blackmail. https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/white-collar-crimes...

Although as a non-legal expert, I'm not clear on how this is different from demanding that the company fix the bug or else you'll reveal it after ninety days a la Google Project Zero? Maybe what makes that non-blackmail is the promise of revealing it no matter what, but offering to delay up to ninety days?
It's only in Silicon Valley that earnestness, or the appearance or earnestness, is important. Here, you need to say "we're transforming patient outcomes and helping people achieve their best health." It's just not a requirement anywhere else I've worked. There are more billionaires outside of Silicon Valley than inside it, and very few of them have had to put up such pretense. They just say "we're starting a health insurance company to outcompete incumbents through better operational efficiency, delivering best-in-industry margins and double digit revenue growth."
Second, there are no 8 bit EPD controllers as of now a mortal can buy, which means grays look very bad.

Third, there are inherent physical limitations which make increasing gray resolution of EPDs quite hard. The precision you want, the slower would the refresh rate be.

For a digital picture frame, refresh rate isn't that important. In fact, a "gradual shading" on refresh might even make for a neat transition effect[1].

IMHO it's just the "cartel" (they like to keep the details of driving their displays confidential) of EPD controller companies who haven't produced controllers with more than 16 levels of grayscale, but the material is fundamentally analog and here is proof that if you drive the display directly, you can get at least 32 levels of grayscale if not more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284

With a bit of careful calibration, I believe far finer grayscale is possible.

[1] Although EPDs have been around for a long time now, I have yet to see the demoscene do anything with them --- a directly driven display naturally allows for a lot of effects due to it effectively being an "analog write-only memory".
This seems far too optimistic on its face. Even if COVID were to disappear tomorrow, real economic damage has already occurred. That damage isn't going to disappear just because it stops getting worse. The people who lost their jobs aren't going to start buying flights and hotel reservations for their next vacation, or even start going back out to restaurants.
> I can work with this. I add grep '^ D' to filter out any entries which were not deleted, and pipe it through awk '{ print $2 }' to extract just the filenames.

Best hope your file names don’t have spaces in them.

One of the downsides of the shell on Unix is that everything is usually text meant for humans so you have to spend an annoying amount of time dealing with delimiters that make it easy on the eyes but a pain in the ass.
I think that’s true, but that’s a reflection of what people considered important when they built it. It’s not the only way to build things.
How can it not be a competitive disadvantage? Auto insurance profit margins are very low, and I’m sure the actuaries have access to plenty of data about losses correlated with speeding.

If a speeding ticket did not result in higher losses (probabilistically, not in specific individual cases of course), then a person with a speeding ticket should be able to find cheaper insurance.

The other option is there’s highly qualified people who are decent enough at math to operate insurance companies, but not decent enough to realize they are mispricing an obvious variable.
There is a chrome dark mode extension. It can make any site dark mode. It does a mega job at GitHub slack and a myriad of other sites. I find companies giving only one dark mode counter intuitive.

With that extension I can set the exact darkness, contrast and other knobs. Every site adheres to that. That’s exactly what I want from dark mode. Uniformity across the web.
Jet Powered Volkswagen Beetle for sale: 550k
Principal agent problem is the only justification I have for supporting taxes and a central government. I haven’t really seen economists argue it...
Jet Powered Volkswagen Beetle for Sale
This was quite common back when. When a single-sided floppy cost about $5, it was a no-brainer to see if you could convert it to read the other side as well.

You only needed a piece of cardboard to act as a template and a one of those leather punches. My 20 floppies instantly became 40, saving me around $100 bucks.

A couple of years later, double-sided floppy drives arrived and we didn't need to make our 'flippies' any more.
Well, I suggested an option. That doesn’t mean companies have to choose it.

But to be honest, it’s somewhat surprising that companies are willing to take on the risk of unbounded financial liability if someone makes a mistake.
I more or less feel that way - I don’t have a lot of interest in churning out yet another feature in the never ending treadmill of feature development.
"True Minimalism"

No, true minimalism would be doing without this needless frame.

I actually think it's cool though I'd want one much much MUCH larger. My comment is mostly about the smug comment at the end. It's not minimalism to clutter your life with a superfluous gadget
You convert it to text in order to index it. If it becomes interesting in the future, you listen to the audio (maybe after getting permission from a judge in a secret court.).
That would lower the frame rate.
perhaps a third party both sides trust is hired to appraise the value
It’s Time to End the Bogus Bookcase Backdrops
More than once did I type ls -lah into a command prompt window to be sorely disappointed.
This is very useful, thank you. I had to zoom out to get an overview and the legend overlapped with the top left of the table. If it could scale to different sizes more clearly and smoothly that would be an improvement I think. But I understand if you don't intend to make changes, and it's also great as it is, thanks very much for releasing!
I worked at that studio for seven years and never heard any such thing mentioned even once.
> Value to customer and technical complexity of the solution are independent variables.

Perhaps I would rephrase my initial statement as: 'I often feel that my technical inexperience means I can't readily translate my planned solution for the customer's problem into a quality product through code.'

> None of that matters if you're working on the wrong problem.

100% agree with this.

To share a personal example, I was building a system to
provide medical workers feedback on whether they wore personal protective equipment correctly. The hospital wanted us to use computer vision/machine learning to automate their checking process. But when we went on-site, we realised that our camera setup, which provided workers a 360 view of themselves so that they didn't need to awkwardly turn to check their behind as they had to do with regular mirrors, was far more valuable than whatever machine learning model we had built. The real problem was actually how could we make it easier for people to wear PPE so that fewer mistakes would be incurred and thus less checking required.

I haven't managed to read all your posts but this one stands out to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356222. The practices you mention are all areas I want to grow in. In that PPE project, as I tried to onboard other developers, things like a lack of documentation and spaghetti non-modular code made it difficult to keep up with the pace of growth we needed. So my hypothesis is that being in an environment (BigCo or other Startup) where practices are being well-used to deliver a product will stretch my capabilities so that I can better execute on my own/in my own team.

In your list of suggestions, how would you prioritise what practices to learn? Or is it about identifying issues in whatever project I'm currently in, having the backlog of potential practices in mind, and then figuring out in real-time how to apply those practices to improve your product/processes
@dang could we get a black bar ?
A simple rule drives the evolution of useless complexity
I had a TV that did this exact same thing! Except I was given it as a color "monitor" for an Apple IIE. I would spend hours building my own antennas and spinning the fine tune knob to try to bring in far away signals.
The economy has contracted substantially. This report projects growth from this lower base. That will leave an output gap between where we would have been sans pandemic (if growth had continued normally) and where we are. That effects you describe make up that output gap.
Just because they are the most assigned textbooks doesn't necessarily mean that they are the best
I also had a range hood that recirculated air in my home (an integrated KitchenAid model with built-in microwave). I had no idea it recirculated the air until I started measuring PM2.5 in the house and noticed it would spike like crazy any time we cooked and didn't seem to change when running the range hood fan. There was a tiny metal grease filter in it, but I can't imagine these do anything for indoor air quality. Feels borderline unethical.

On my unit you can reconfigure it to vent out the back (if the unit just happens to align perfectly between the studs -- which mine didn't) or you can configure it to vent up through a duct. I had a duct run through the roof. My air quality is definitely better when running the range hood now; it still gets bad when I cook, but just less-bad than before.
Exaclty, I don't know how many times I've heard mention of Trump's Tweets in the news and elsewhere.
Suppose I come to you with a fair coin and say that I’ll give you $50 if it comes up heads and take $40 if it comes up tails. Good deal, right? Now I change the deal to 40% of your money with 5:4 odds and you can play as much as you like. You have $100 so it’s the same deal. There’s never a point where this looks like a bad deal, but you will eventually lose everything if you keep playing. On the other hand you will do well if you don’t adjust the amounts. There is a way to adjust the amounts safely, depending on a set acceptable probability of ruin (pr). Consider betting cash/log2(1/pr) at every turn. That reduces the gulf between the expectation of the log and the log of the expectation, but the probability of ruin still increases toward unity. As the timeline increases to infinity, the safe bet drops to zero.