skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is the best way to handle OTA firmware updates on low bandwidth?
The problem
All network-connected devices must support firmware updates for security reasons. This includes devices connected to LPWAN networks like LoRaWAN. For devices operating in remote locations, firmware updates can be done over the network to simplify maintenance requirements.
Typical microcontroller firmware ranges from tens of kilobytes to a few megabytes, and typical LoRaWAN download speeds are on the order of 10-100 bytes per second. Thus, firmware updates deployed through a LoRaWAN network must be as small as possible.

Some solutions
One way to reduce the size of the update is to modularize the firmware binary so that only part of the binary needs to be updated. For example, the networking stack could be stored in a dedicated area of the program flash and then updated independently of the rest of the firmware. The tricky part here is that the addresses of any functions called by the rest of the firmware must remain the same. This can be done using trampoline functions or by having a look-up table of function pointers. This method makes it easy to update large parts of the firmware but requires advance planning to modularize the code.

Another method, which allows easy updates to application logic, is to insert patch points into the application code. Patch points are function calls that check for the presence of binary firmware patches in a dedicate part of the flash memory. Normally these function calls return without doing anything, but if patch code is present, it will be executed.

The most general method is delta updates, in which a binary diff of the old and new firmware is used to perform a complete update with a smaller download. This is the most flexible option, but it can require a lot of memory on the microcontroller and the download size may still be unacceptably large.

Question
What are some other ways to implement updates with small payloads?
Trees are sometimes painted to keep beetles or similar pests off them - it's unlikely they painted them to help the drones.
Going to be pretty blunt with you here: holding them to a nebulous promise from 8 years ago, when the game wasn't even out of pre-production, is childish. The actual promise of the game has been updated and communicated over time. If you closed your eyes and ears to all the marketing material up till now and blindly focused on what amounts to a powerpoint slide from 2012, you deserve whatever disappointment you got.
Yes! My JetBrains Ultimate renews every November and I get a little giddy in anticipation of paying them for another year. It’s just such an amazing value. JetBrains is so good it’s like finding money on the sidewalk.
I am going to spoil this - it's not aliens. The gap between Occam's Razor explanations and THAT one is absolutely vast.
Consider what happens if China takes Taiwan and TSMC.
$130k to pay a single employee for one year. I don't know about you, but it's extremely difficult for most people to save up that kind of runway.
It only creates extreme inequality in both countries. In the wealthier country, managers make lots of money by outsourcing labor, causing the cost of labor in the wealthier country to plummet.

In the poorer country, it creates a class of ultra-rich businessmen who rule over the ultra-poor laborers (and those laborers must remain ultra-poor otherwise the jobs would flow back to the laborers in the wealthier country).

Not only that, but the poorer country isn't going to adhere to environmental standards of the wealthier country (absent coercion a la border adjustments), and so it basically becomes a way for businesses in the wealthier country to continue to enrich themselves by way of pollution (and otherwise mismanagement of environment).
In the article he suggests that wasn't really his experience and it's hard to argue with someone's experience. I also read him as just being bothered by the fact that he had never gotten a degree. Given that, and the way/circumstances under which he did it, it's hard to argue with just online enrolling for a semester and doing it.

From what I understand, it can sometimes be useful to have the paper. On the other hand, I'm sure you're right that a lot of the time in tech someone with 10+ years of experience probably doesn't add a lot by getting a credential like this--especially if e.g. there were significant opportunity cost to doing so.
> Mainly worry about not having a deeper knowledge of algorithms and data structures.

Why not just look at these then? As an example you could check out MITs algorithms and DS lectures on Youtube. An entire degree might be a lot of wasted effort.
I can imagine that every cloud hosting provider expands their fleet of machines, and also retires and replaces some of it.

If the expansion and replacement will mostly involve AMD and ARM-based solutions, I won't be surprised.

Of course Xeons are going to stay for a relatively long time, because some customers are deeply invested in them, e.g. relying on AVX512 heavily, etc.

I also don't think that Intel is going to go under. AMD was in the position of a second-rate player for decades, and had expensive failures, too (remember Bulldozer?). So I expect them to regroup and show us something amazing in, say, 5 years. But one thing they are.going to lose: their sweet big margins.
That I get. Habitus is important. But, here, there was no transmission of habitus, due to the online courses.
The problem with GDPR is the EU member states' cowardly lack of enforcement. You'd think that as soon as they had a stick as big and powerful as GDPR, they'd immediately start beating the big, worst offenders with it. Yet, how often have we seen headlines about "BigScummyCorp fined 4% of annual global turnover" in the news?

EDIT: Corrected, thanks, colejohnson66
Bugginess and performance are areas that can be fixed with patches.

What can't be fixed with patches is that the image of this game the developers sold to players was based on lies. There's a laundry list on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kcve8s/promi...
Broad statement, I don't agree with. Different personality types take wholly different things from the same content. I personally feel (and this may sound hubristic, but it isn't) is that the CompSci background raised me to a whole new echelon of depth of meta-knowledge and ability to problem solve large problems.
A PhD is about your research and publishing far more than your actual degree. I can't see how an online doctorate would work with today's remote learning options so would not imagine it would have much value
GitHub CEO: We’re nuking all tracking ‘cookies’ and you should too
Google went public early and with a share structure that insulated the founders from any pressure from the stock market.

Venture capital has nothing to do with what’s happened since.
Oof some engineer is working on machine-learning to deal with the knockback of shooting a gun from a drone. It's probably an interesting as hell problem, enough to distract someone from the fact that they'll be enabling cheap robots to shoot people.

It is so sad that we, humans in general, devote so many resources to devising bigger and better means of violence.
> Maybe I just expressed myself badly, so let my try again. I predict that Rocky Linux will not be a big success, and don't think doing a free-beer RHEL clone (CentOS as most users understood it) is a worthwhile endeavor, despite a seemingly large audience. Yes, giving good stuff away for free is popular (and I do believe RHEL is a good product). Because they're largely dependent on RH, who 1) appear not very enthusiastic about the idea of people running RHEL for free even without support, 2) can largely determine how expensive running a clone project will be. That's why IMO it's better to analyze if users really need a strict RHEL clone, or if what they want from it (xLTS, better tooling, commercial software compatibility, whatever) could be better developed on top of Debian, whose incentives seem to class less. People who really really need a RHEL clone: time to pay up or go with the Stream (it probably really not-so-bad).

> Now unlike you I have zero inside knowledge or experience, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. But I am willing to make a somewhat falsifiable prediction, that Rocky and similar clone projects don't have much chance of success. Maybe I'm all wrong and Rocky can with a handful of volunteers and some clever scripts, resurrect CentOS-as-people-understood-it. Or maybe some deep-pocket 3rd party with a better brand than Oracle will step up. We'll find out a year or so.

So, let's try this. I agree that Rocky will not be a big success, but completely because I don't think there's a major market demand for a RHEL clone in 2020. New deployments will end up being a container Linux distro with deployments inside VMs or containers. (RH)EL8 is relatively new with low-ish adoption. We still had customers on EL6 six months ago when I left. Institutional customers aren't likely to move to EL8 until EL7 is nearing the end of phase 3 support, since the costs involved in reworking their applications to work (and their build/config management toolchain to work with modularity+etc. This has nothing to do with Red Hat's stance, which was (for the 7.5 years I was there, and still, from everyone I know who's still there) very overtly pro-upstream.

Users don't need a strict RHEL clone. They need a life raft until they can move to containers. It's not worth re-training administrators how to use some other package ecosystem. Rocky will fail, but for these reasons
Not to mention a Unix (Xenix) used to be one of Microsoft's main products.
I read the whole review. I cannot find anything in there that matches what you said.
His Aghora book (the first one) includes the following assertions

that Sri Ramakrishna got throat cancer by wish of some female guru as punishment for wanting to learn Tantra out of turn

Abbottabad is hottest place in Asia (it’s Jacobabad near where my mom grew up)

Wajid Ali Shah died soon after he was sent to Calcutta by British

Confuses Shamse Tabrez and Shamsuddin Sabzawari (RA)
To me it makes more sense to learn widely early on as a junior. You’ll get a sense of what you enjoy and what you’re good at over the years. Then you can focus on what you like as you become senior and have a foundation.
I think this is the silver lining for this pandemic. Covid-19 is lethal, I'm not discounting that, but in terms of real lethality, this was a good test run to show that this approach works. (At least in my lay person's knowledge.) What really scares me are the highly lethal flu strains (I think H5N5?) The fact that we can produce a vaccine this quickly now gives me hope when we encounter a scenario like out of the movie Contagion.
Even if you can change it at will?
Note that Larian's been doing it for Original Sin and Baldur's Gate. It seems to have worked out ok for them so far.
The point is to test physics models.
No on takes The Guardian seriously... the sex and violence isn't what people are complaining about, TW3 had plenty of that and there plenty of kooks that complained that middle ages central Europe didn't had enough diversity despite the fact that it's a fantasy setting with a bunch of other races...
Strange, because chess definitely has elements of risk calculation based on your uncertainty. Without a computer, you cannot calculate all the lines ahead, so many decisions come down to trade-offs involving uncertainty. Colloquially, this usually is called "strategy", which involve decisions that are much longer term than calculated tactics, and therefore involve a great deal of uncertainty.

Tactics still dominate, but strategy leads to tactics.

You're often left making decisions on the basis of, well, maybe if I do this I'll be able to poke my rook through later, but maybe they'll win counterattacking the file I'm leaving.
> I suspect having "Sat on Google Committee" is a pretty nice résumé item

Absolutely. I'd take it. I'd probably try to undermine the effort, but I'd still take the position!

I think the era of subversive engineering is dawning. We've had wave after wave of high-profile resignations and data leaks in the name of ethics, only to see their position filled with two worse candidates: a hydra of corruption!

How soon until ethical engineers realize protests don't work and start to corrode monopolies from the inside out? (like when Agent K jumps down the throat of The Bug in MiB.) Is that in itself ethical? That's a tough question, we'll know it when we see it?
JetBrains is a profitable company. It has been around for 20 years. Can we please stop calling 20 year old companies startups?
Hm, they may be rule lawyering, then... preferring certain sellers over others, and applying the rules in an inconsistent way to benefit favorites while squishing people they have something else against. All this is speculation on my part, of course, but wouldn't surprise me if accurate.

TIL Amazon comment regulation is apparently run by reddit mods.
I'm in my 40s, working in higher ed, and I feel exactly the same.

As I've gotten older, mission matters more. I don't care about selling ads, I don't care about winning the stock option lottery, and I don't care about chasing only the shiniest newest tech. I care about getting stuff done efficiently with boring tech and helping people solve real problems.

Is higher ed perfect? Certainly not. But I feel like I'm contributing to a broader, useful mission. If I ever leave higher ed, it would almost certainly be for a non-profit or government job.
Testing the world’s best APUs: Desktop AMD Ryzen 4750G, 4650G and 4350G
Show HN: Drop-In Voice Control for Your Webapp
*searching high and wide :)
The comparison to the bad old days when the IDE answer was always "Install Eclipse and this set of poorly maintained language plugins" is night and day.

The dollar-a-day I spend on the Jetbrains all-products subscription more than pays for itself.
It wasn't clear to me that the other comments were starting from "know how to code," which is why I made my comment. If OP spends time honing their coding abilities then by all means learning more about git is a great plan.

I am really surprised by your comments about git at "regular" companies. If all we are talking about in this chain is understanding workflow and how to rebase, cherry pick, etc. then I completely misunderstood the discussion.

I have certainly gotten myself into some hairy situations. Since I avoid making massive commits, if things get too bad I have always been able to quickly resolve the issue by just doing a clean clone somewhere else and moving my changes over. As a last ditch effort it works quite well and does not take too much time (or stress :) ).
What's your crisis story when everyone panicked but it all ended well?
Inspired by several software crises I've been noticing this week (started with Google on Monday - for the ones that have noticed too) I'm wondering what have you guys been through in your entrepreneur life?

(I'm still "waiting" for the day it blows up in my face, I've been able to dodge from every crisis so far - but I'm curious to know what stories you guys have to share)

This GIF collection on this website represents it quite well: https://startupgifs.com/tags/production-is-broken
Why don't they see demand lasting? They think Moore's law is going out with a bang?
> As the late great Alan Kay once remarked

Alan Kay is still alive.
Apple is applying opt-in rules to everyone except themselves. You can't opt out of data collection for Apple apps and that data will power Apple ads.

If this isn't anti competition I don't know what is.
The game looks gorgeous on PC. Probably doesn't look as good on the consoles.
The paranoid conspiratorial tone of TFA is a symptom of what's wrong with the Internet and therefore humanity:

> The big brands that are ultimately at stake (Sony, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD) all talk about “demand exceeding supply”. Oh, really? [New paragraph.] It is a rather evasive explanation, without any communication about the actual state of their supply and production lines…

The dark secret? Not only is demand GREATER THAN supply, but supply is — wait for it! — LESS THAN demand! OMG, they've been covering this up the whole time! And not only that, current events and world affairs are contributing to this situation! When will the sheeple wake up?!
For anyone who is wondering, the school he listed (Western Governors University) is unfortunately not ABET accredited as far as I can tell.
There were more than four drones in the simulation.
I mean sure, Google put the gun to every website and said “We are using our monopoly power to ensure your business will fail if you do not conduct business as we see fit”. Really, really positive way of bringing about change.
Company Makes Real Milk Without the Milk
Yes, watch any of the Azerbaijan drone videos on Youtube. They decimated the conventional (tanks, vehicles, bunkers, artillery,) Armenian forces with "relatively" inexpensive Turkish and Israeli drones. A real object lesson about the future of warfare and the need for airborne countermeasures. A swarm of inexpensive drones like in this video, each one carrying an explosive charge, could easily overwhelm a traditional military position; in a forest, in a bunker or cave, behind fences, inside buildings. Hardly a toy.
Seconding this. I've only ever worked at "stable small businesses" and I recommend them as (broadly) the least-toxic category. Few enough people that you get treated like a human, you can have human discussions and bring up human issues, you can build human relationships. But you also don't have the immense pressure of VC breathing down your neck, of growth-at-all-costs, etc.
That's a lot of words to say "it's a broken product".
Powerful electrical events quickly alter surface chemistry on Mars
+ Interesting follow up by Jason Wright @Astro_Wright

https://twitter.com/Astro_Wright/status/1339966008279351296
Royal Shakespeare Company to stop using Tchaikovsky's skull in Hamlet
This is a little extreme, of course. But there's probably no reason an ordinary motivated person can't get the same education that a college takes 4 years and charges $80,000 for (or more!) in 2 years and $10,000, especially if they combine in-class and on-line.

We just need schools and accreditation organizations to take a new look at things.
> TIMTOWYTDI

what?
> Instead of seeing CSS as an annoying way to 'style' pages, see it instead as a visual programming language for constructing visual guides (UI's) for your user.

> You don't 'style' pages, you 'construct' and 'architect' them. It sounds weird to use these words, but they have a massive effect in changing your perception of what you're doing. And that has a massive effect on your impression and willingness to learn how to do it well.

I honestly don't understand what this means (I read the corresponding blog post but am still confused, unfortunately). Could you expand, possibly?
> anodyne

It's pretty rare for me to run into a (non-technical, niche) word I'm not at least somewhat familiar with, thanks!

anodyne (adjective): not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.
>>I mean barren in the sense that it fee lifeless, due to nonexistent AI

I just don't understand that point. Many times so far I've just been walking around and admiring the place, it feels like the most realistic city I've ever been in in a video game. There's just so much stuff happening everywhere, I could probably forget the story and walk around and admire it all.
What's the state of the art with regard to silent flying drones? Is it possible?

As scary as these things look, a silent drone fleet would be truly terrifying. Imagine hiking along and turning around to that.
I'm pretty sure ageism in tech boils down to this point. People who have been in the industry longer have better nest eggs and can simply leave at any point, so they won't crunch for you.
> By choking off in-app ad revenue, they force developers who want to monetise towards paid and freemium apps.

If you write software that is supported by advertising, you are selling your software to the advertisers. If you aren't paying for software, it's not written for your benefit. If you enjoy ad-driven software, it is, at best a happy coincidence or altruism on the part of the developer.

What ad driven software has done is rob developers of good quality paid apps of the ability to charge a reasonable price for their goods. So we have a market place filled with mediocre to terrible ad supported apps. The few developers who do spend the time and effort make good quality software get constant complaints about pricing and charge more than $0.99 for software that actually does what people want.
That’s fair. I was also a math major so perhaps my concentration was a lot more theoretical in nature.
Normal companies =>

//HACK ALERT: Fix Big Sur update problem
if ProductVersion = "11.1" &&
RequestedProductVersion = "11.0.1" {
RequestedProductVersion = "11.1"
}
I don't fully understand this mentality. We don't look at everything we want to accomplish and say"what's the fastest way to get there?" a 4-year university degree certainly isn't if you want a job, money or credibility. The journey is amazing; I have 2 undergrads and a MSc not because of the material benefits, but because I absolutely loved school, especially the second time around. #3 grad school was a little disappointing but that was due to my expectations. I'm now near 50 and thinking about starting my PhD as a quasi-retirement project. Maaybe I'll go to school with my kids!
Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500k confidential docs from UK firm's customers
From first-hand experience, however, bootstrapped companies often don't have a ton of cash in the bank. They can quickly fail if there's an adverse event (COVID, for example).

You can also get crushed by well-funded competitors who can innovate faster than you due to larger team sizes, salaries, etc.
How we use our own product at GitLive (devtool)- A junior developers perspective
Studios fall into the habit of making the same game with a different skin.

Witcher 3, despite being a great game, had a lot of the problems Cyberpunk is getting blasted for. Boring, repetitive combat, "loot everything" inventory management - lots of useless garbage available to collect, very unsatisfying and boring MMO-like crafting system.

But the difference is - W3 could always fall back on its incredible setting, story, music, and memorable characters that we met in previous games. And the main quest + DLC stories were quite good as well.
With Google Chrome as the most popular browser and Google that earns a lots from Google App Store all we can expect, and what I actually see, is that open web development is blocked. Open web is almost perfectly capable to serve apps on the same quality that native ones. But without a strong competition to Google Chrome we might never experience the full benefit
Intel are also miles ahead when it comes to software and documentation.

Intel's optimization guide alone is about 1000 pages long, AMD's isn't as good and they've been at it for decades now.

If you have the money Intel aren't as competitive any more, but for the middle ground where you don't have the budget to bring up your own software it's not the same calculus.