skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Apple doesn't allow side loading apps

HN readers might be surprised at the extent of modded-iOS-app communities (just like APK communities for Androids) that manage to exist within the meager 7-day signing window Apple allows a free-tier developer account. Tools like AltStore and ReProvision are the standard for sideloading and renewing (respectively) legitimate jailbreak-entrypoint apps:

https://github.com/rileytestut/AltStore

https://github.com/Matchstic/ReProvision

Even for un-jailbroken devices there are entire alternative ecosystems based around sideloading modded/pirated apps. They are obviously full of pirated stuff, usually work by abusing an enterprise cert from an endless list of Chinese companies (not insinuating anything bad, just firsthand experience), and they probably have some nasty malware mixed in here and there as well. Zero endorsement for any of these examples from the first page of a DDG search, but you get the idea:

https://www.tutuapp.com/pc/

https://iphonecake.com/

https://sideload.tweakboxapp.com/

https://ipaspot.app/

https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/04/spotify-up-tweakbox-users-...
Because they’re not communists. Just like the Nazis weren’t socialists. For a better example, the DPRK (North Korea) has “democratic” in its name, but they are very clearly not democratic.
> Use of the upvote and downvote are not standardized though, so people use those buttons with different reasons.

I think that strikes to the heart of why I question the value of keeping downvotes.

Without a clear guideline, it's a mixed signal.

Since that signal can be suppressive, it seems to me like in its current state, it detracts from open discussion.
Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
> Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles.

Maybe it doesn't apply to the cultural context of Beowulf, but from https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/bro-culture-fitness-chiv..., I got the impression that "bro culture" is a valid — and illmuninating! — lens through which to at least view the concept of medieval chivalry.
I was surprised that Orwell’s work wasn’t under more permissive copyright terms given his democratic socialism. I’m looking forward to his work reaching more people.
Can I jailbreak iOS 14.4, 14.4.1, 14.4.2 with checkra1n? Yes Cydia Download
The pay cut discussion is annoying, no one who works in SV makes most of their pay by salary.

If you’ve already locked in a Bay Area RSU grant you’re set to work remote in a no income tax state. That alone could make up the salary difference.
Rapture of the Deep (2003)
After seeing a one-star negative review for a mosquito electric zapper because it didn’t get rid of their roaches problem, nothing people do or say on internet will ever surprise me again.
Would it be possible to DPR these publications? I would assume that the funding agency retains a copy of the paper once published.
Show HN: Scanning the Web for Security.txt Files
I have! I love the speed aspect of it, but I'm less keen on the template language. I'd have to rework a lot of Liquid stuff that I've built up over time, then it looks like it'd be very hard to port out of Hugo down the road because as far as I know, that language is pretty specific to Hugo.

Hugo also seems to be more or less "take it or leave it" in terms of customizability, and I don't know Go. I've got a custom syntax highlighting setup that uses JS, which I imagine would be hard to integrate. (it was annoying to integrate into Jekyll too!)
I generally avoid them for reference books, but for novels since I very rarely re-read them. I'm willing to make the trade-off for convenience and (sometimes) lower prices, but I go into it eyes open knowing the risks.

I do worry about things like Steam though, which unless the game is available DRM-free from GOG, may be the only place you can buy the game-- or at least no different in terms of DRM lock in and risk of the platform shutting down than other platforms like Epic or Origin etc.
Every now and again as I play RTS (and other) games I imagine how the interface could be used in for business, engineering or marketing. There’s potential, IMO.

The test (as I imagine it now) is making work fun enough that my 13 year old self would want to do work.

At any rate, ideas are cheap. Prototypes and implementation are what matters.

We’re speaking publically but I would like to know what you imagine about when you think about this topic?
> wonder if the micro-management of parenting by popular culture can itself be seen as a form of over-parenting at a societal level.

Can you elaborate on this?

We are social animals so I guess this is behaviour that might be quite old. I'm going to go on a limb to conjecture that coddled kids aren't as productive, resilient or resourceful as their headstrong counterparts. Could it be possible in old times that "the society" needed resourceful and headstrong young people over those who can hardly wipe their own arse without their mother, especially in unstable political groupings (from clans to villages to cities to provinces to nation states)?

But the kind of helicoptering in the article is basically coddling a child to oblivion regardless of age which hampers the development of said child's potential. No one said anything about perfection. No one ever has. That's the unreasonable and impossible standard an emotionally unstable parent(s) may strive for thereby overcompensating on some imaginary 'specialness' in their children.
They’ve worked out how to do that from home. I’ve grown particularly good at popping their balloons. Zoom meetings are far more visible as they can be recorded and if they aren’t productive I make sure that is known.
Since even my dog dreams, it must be something very fundamental.
Trademark law could prevent me from pretending to be the restaurant. If they had a defensible trademark and time and money to litigate.

It doesn't really prevent me from acting as a middle man. I'd need to be careful about using their trademarks and making it clear that I'm not connected.

The concept of first sale certainly applies, although health code makes it complex. There's also the concept of the right to refuse service.
I don't understand why trademarks are insufficient to prevent this. Why didn't restaurants file a class action lawsuit against food delivery services to stop misusing their names?

I think this law is great, but it kind of legitimises impersonation unless explicitly banned by law.
>Genuine question here: what's the better way?

One strategy that's been successful for me is skipping the technical screen and jumping to a narrowly-scoped paid assignment. If they do well, I give them a larger paid assignment, and we work our way up to regular work together. If they do poorly, I pay them for their time but tell them it's not a match.

I'll add the caveat that I've only used this to hire junior to mid-level developers for part-time or short-term work. I've never tested it on a full-time hire, and I imagine that would be more difficult.

I've never written in detail about hiring developers, but I've shared similar strategies for hiring writers,[0] illustrators,[1] and editors.[2]

[0] https://mtlynch.io/hiring-content-writers/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/

[2] https://mtlynch.io/editor/
I would highly doubt he would get rehired today at google first try. Leetcode is a different beast and things might not be all that fresh. Someone on the hiring committee might have said yes too many times this month.
Ask HN: Where to Meet the Replacement CTO for My Beta-SaaS?
I am the non-technical founder of a SaaS in that takes a cumbersome old-world coordinating and reporting process and brings it online.
It's not rocket science, but it's going to make a big difference to a bunch of non-technical people.
I hired a programmer off of Craigslist to build the Prototype version.
I was very impressed. In 4 months he built something uglyish but usable, strong on the database side, but his first time with the SaaS-side and not too knowledgeable about normal (normal for HN anyway) things like Mailchimp and tarsnap.
Anyway, the beta-test is being real-world tested, with user acceptance growing and more feature requests coming in daily.
The problem is in the last two months, progress has almost stopped--I won't go into the reasons, but I have a personnel problem and things are unlikely to get better in the near term.
We are tantalizingly close--perhaps two features away--from being really important to our little industry.
I know this is the perennial question on HN, but I'm looking for a lead to a CTO who has succeeded at SaaS before, and is looking to do so again.
Is there a secret list somewhere of folks who are both "passionate/competent developing SaaS" and "looking for my next project"?
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries are close to regular lion batteries but don't use manganese or cobalt and are much more durable. They have much higher discharge rates and can undergo around 8x the cycles, making their cost over time significantly better than regular lithium ion.

Lithium Titanate batteries have even more durability.

Both of these are fairly recent to being available commercially.
Currency has more than two functions. Transferring wealth is not the same as paying for goods, and storing wealth is not the same as holding a speculative asset class.

Bitcoin is volatile. Holding it is more like holding gold, not USD.

Bitcoin is very easy to move across borders. Moving it is much more like a bank transfer, than paying for a pizza.
I year ago, I got my ~first computer, a Pentium 2, to run the latest x86 Debian release with minimal effort. Half of what made it possible was that the P2 was the second chip to have 686 instructions, and that's the oldest supported target for Debian. It didn't hurt that the motherboard's 440BX chipset is popular with VMs, and the board had a USB port, so in many ways, it looks modern.
There's also Adobe Animate, which is a rebranding of Flash that can output HTML/JS
Ah yes my bad, off by 10x . Make it 15%. More, though as you say, not “enough more”
Reasonable in scope and protection. Unusual for California, but better for everyone involved. Great.
*standard tech
Expanding on the rule I've heard is when starting, buy the cheapest thing that won't kill/discourage you, and use it until you break it or you explicitly understand the limitations, so that you know what to buy and what qualities to look for.

I rarely am disappointed by this. When I started learning piano, I got a 100 dollar midi controller and connected it to my ipad or computer. It let me know that I wanted a quality digital piano as my next step.
Blog more, at least one quality post per month to improve my writing skills. Learn more about investing and taxes. Not sure on how to quantify latter.
Yep, at the end of the day the whole fiasco between Taiwan and the PRC isn't really about Taiwan. It's about US-PRC relations and who gets the final word in Asia. Taiwan is just a game piece.
For context, I currently have a 16 MHz 68030 machine with 24 MB running a recent NetBSD install, just as a lark.

For simple command line things like poking around the file system over telnet, it feels pretty much like a contemporary system. It can even run the Python REPL fine, though it takes a good number of seconds to start up. Apache is no problem and it can host a website, though I imagine it would crumple with more than a dozen requests a minute or so. Actually, the only real annoyance for that kind of work is that the machine's too slow to authenticate SSL keys in a reasonable time, so logging in takes forever and you can't host an HTTPS site.

Given this ARM machine is probably ~100x faster, if you're willing to add some swap for flexibility, I imagine it'd be usable for a wide variety of low-memory tasks.
I think this is just a practical matter: the legal system is not as accessible as you might hope it is.
Compile-time Huffman coding compression
Looking at 4chan as an example, although in theory masked the discussions defaults to a specific and recognizable tone and specific ways of argumenting or joking.

Giving a mask gives you a new contextual facet of a person, but hardly the truth. Few are those who can even know the truth about themselves. I don't know if I do.
>since browsers will soon be removing Flash support entirely

My assumption is that if you manually install an older Flash plugin that it will work.
Just following up:

Part of what I forgot to express here is that the work is important, and I do care deeply about my coworkers - I've been at this job for 6 years, and half of my team has been there since I started. In some ways, it makes it better, because I can be proud of what we're doing. But it also makes it harder to take time off or set those boundaries, because I know that every day I'm not on call, somebody else has to be. Every day that I'm not doing work delays improvements and makes the rest of the team's lives harder.

I try very hard to stop my normal workday at 8-9 hours and to not put in extra time on the weekends, but it's difficult to balance my own needs with both the needs of my co-workers and also with the demands of the work we're doing.
The Best of Edw519 (Ed Weissman). A Hacker News Top Contributor
Well, the rebels claimed that the covid tests were crap, numbers were being exagerated, government took the opportunity for more control, lockdowns are not necesarry, experts were short sighted idiots, thanked the anti-vaxers for not making vaccinations obligatory, gave everyone shit for not taking the streets and fighting authority.

Then the lawful people claimed extreme situations require extreme measures, experts know best, high numbers are because stupid people don't follow the rules, etc.
In my (pedantic) understanding, the Amiga doesn't suffer from aliasing, because it uses a period register used to divide a very high frequency (rather than a frequency register), and always spends an integer number of clocks (output samples) on each input sample. However, it suffers from imaging (a reconstruction artifact) due to using a stair-step (zero-order hold) as a reconstruction filter. And IMO reconstruction artifacts sound worse (not harmonically spaced) when the sampling rate isn't an integer multiple of the note's frequency (the note pitch's period isn't an integer number of samples).

Aliasing (a sampling artifact) is an issue in synthesizers which run at low/fixed sampling rates and sample waveforms to produce output (often using frequency registers). This includes modern software synthesis, and also hardware like DS (ZOH, samples, almost like Amiga), N163 (ZOH, short wavetables), Yamaha (FM on sine waves, IDK the details), and to a lesser extent SNES (Gaussian reconstruction, samples).

Reconstruction artifacts (extra frequencies at x * fundamental, may exceed sampling rate) are different from sampling/aliasing artifacts (frequencies are taken modulo the sampling rate). But they can combine (like on DS hardware).
> Why is there so much aversion to proving one's abilities? Programmers today feel they shouldn’t have to do whiteboards, or hackerrank, or take-homes.

Because it doesn't necessarily prove one's abilities. Each of those items have pretty obvious flaws:

- Whiteboard: Usually idealized problems requiring specific knowledge that is easily looked up, but not necessarily in one's short-term memory. Whiteboard is generally not the tool one uses to write code. It's very easy to bomb these sessions despite being competent.

- Hackerrank: Easy to cheat. Usually toy problems with idealized properties, i.e. they don't have the dirty edge cases you see in real world development. This also tends to be just a first-pass filter for getting an phone interview or maybe on-site.

- Take Home: Easy to cheat. May run afoul of existing employment agreements. Requires a pretty large up-front time commitment, and IME does not actually avoid the on-site whiteboarding sessions anyway. It's more of a first-pass filter.

> How does a prospective employer evaluate someone’s problem-solving and programming chops?

That's the million dollar question. As an industry we just don't have a good system for identifying competent developers. My personal approach is to stick with folks I've already worked with, who have a long track record of delivering. That doesn't scale at all and is not very good for folks just entering the industry.

I truly wish we had better answers and I support anyone trying to build something that explores the problem space. It's nice to have diversity in hiring practices.
Right, this was the first problem: “i386” distros actually pretty much all went 486+ some years back. So that severely limits the ecosystem. While you can always go back in the archive and get a bare kernel, I wanted a full system with init, package management, etc.

The card is (unsurprisingly) an ISA slot, an Intel EtherExpress 16. I forget exactly where I was with it when last I poked at this earlier this year, but the promising thing is I have it worked in MS-DOS 6.22 without issue. There are some utilities from Intel that I found that write EEPROM on the card to setup its IRQ and all of that, which is how I got it working in DOS.

Perhaps I’ll take another swing at it and document more precisely what the issues are and what I’ve tried so far. I wrote up the acquisition, repair, and resuscitation of the machine on a series of posts on my blog under “Project 386” beginning with https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/04/26/project-386-part-1/ so I have intentions of adding some more posts.
Your "why" is totally arbitrary. Shelf life? Why not dollars? Apple could say it should receive extra protection because it loses 1000+ dollars every time an unauthorized MacBook Pro or iPhone 12 is sold outside of the channels that it controls. (I don't believe that is entirely true, but it's how Apple would argue it) Whereas unauthorized food deliveries are dealing in the tens of dollars, and further, the restaurant is never totally cut out of the loop, since previously-consumed food can't be resold.
> That’s very insightful. Thank you. Some more questions since you are the person which shows up for esp32 and nim in the whole wide world :)

You're welcome. lol, no one else did it so there you are.

> Did you try out the esp-idf 4.3 release yet?

No, my work requires stability so I haven't tried any of the new esp-idf releases. Nesper does compile with 4.2 if you pass the flag for it, but it's not well tested. If none of the major API's have changed 4.3 should work.

It would be good to wrap the mqtt aws service. Don't know if I'll have time for it though. But it's really not too hard to wrap using `c2nim` on the header files. PR's welcome! :-)

> Do you have any thoughts on Freertos vs Zephyr whilst using Nim?

I would like to try Zephyr sometime. FreeRTOS is used by AWS and the esp32 so it seemed a good start.
Government spending isn't the problem, it's who gets the money.

In the US I see it all going to established players. Which is fine for stuff like finding a COVID-19 vaccine. But is a total disaster for promoting innovation.

I have a computer engineering degree and have watched nothing of interest happen in semiconductor manufacturing for over 20 years. Yes we have blue LEDs now. Yes we have fast video cards. But if you look at single-threaded performance per clock cycle, it's been stuck within the same order of magnitude since the Pentium got 20 stage instruction pipelines and huge caches (which in hindsight were big blows for SIMD and MIMD).

It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream.

So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors today, but things look a little different to me, watching them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.
Systemd by itself comes with this wonderful analysis tool.

Systemd-analyze security
Systemd-analzye security <service>

There it details what capabilities, and restrictions are in place for a given systemd service. From there you can edit the service to restrict even further as required if you want.
I didn't mind renting videos and I don't mind "renting" ebooks for an indiscriminate amount of time. The convenience is worth it, having to store every book you purchase comes with costs too.
FWIW, most of Orwell's works, including essays, have been available for many years at https://orwell.ru/

These include "Such, such were the joys", referenced in the Guardian article when it states: "Neither will anyone be allowed to trespass on all the material that came to light post-1950 and which Davison painstakingly assembled in his compendious George Orwell: The Complete Works (1998). This includes Such, Such Were the Joys, the notorious account of his tribulations at a character-forming Sussex prep school, first published in the US in 1952 but not issued in the UK until as late as 1968, for fear of libel proceedings."

That essay is here, and has been for a long time:

https://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys
I am surprised that flash wasn't made into a interactive video format. At least for flash 2.0 content. Fk action script 3.
How about trusting candidates' experience? If they say they have 20 years of experience in X and you hire them, you'll know very quickly if that was a lie. Those tests are so insulting to the relationship you're pretending to want to build. Why would I bother putting false information on my resume that has the potential to get me hired and get tested daily? Isn't that why there's a probation period?!

I have 20 years of experience in X but prove it? Why's the burden on me to prove what I've already told you? Are you saying I'm a liar? If my date of birth is on my cv do you expect a birth certificate to validate that information too?

Anyway, that's always been my philosophy - hire on facts and fit, fire quickly if anything was wrong - and it's been pretty smooth. The great thing that it does is it prevents testing for futile thing that you will never use in your position and that are just elitist criteria or vanity wishes.
I do gig-to-hire too. Works a treat! I've found loads of talent this way, up and down the skill chain. But, for a CTO like role the gig has to be 3mo or more.
Hi there, lead-dev of CheerpX for Flash and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. If you are curious about our tech, feel free do drop questions here or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti
Surely the reasoning is “since the vaccine is only 95% effective, it is prudent to exercise caution until we reach herd immunity, because you might be one of the 5% who aren’t immune”. But clearly that does pertain to the efficacy of the virus, so I don’t think I understand your meaning.
what does Zynga do these days .
It seems a stretch to assume he actually wrote any of the books with his name on the cover. Ghostwriters are cheap, and writing takes time.

That’s not a dig, it just seems like a poor ROI.
I’m not complaining, and my feelings aren’t hurt.

I’m laughing at you.
My Experience at Apple
Sure, but that’s not actually a commission from the restaurant. The restaurant earns the same amount regardless of if it was true takeout or GrubHub (for folks that haven’t opted in to being partners).