skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it would be straightforward to extract the data from these ROM images. (See the "Pulling Bits from ROM Silicon Die Images" article currently on the HN front page.)

I extracted some of the data from the ROM, but it wasn't anything obvious. I didn't spend a lot of time examining the data since it's probably something like microcode for an undocumented IBM control processor. The extracted data did let me verify that the 9 bits were 8 + parity.

To extract the bits, I made a simple JavaScript program where I click on the transistors. For a small amount of data, this is faster than performing image processing and setting up automated analysis software.

One problem is that once you get the bits, there are a lot of uncertainties. Is a transistor a 0 or 1? What order are the bits in? Are the addresses left to right or right to left? So you end up with a bunch of cases you need to consider, rather than a nice hex file.
> These "customers," who have zero coding skills or software expertise, take advantage of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model to gain sophisticated capabilities

> Incredibly, many of these operations look and function like authentic businesses. "They rent office space, they have development teams, data architecture teams, help desks, phone support, and people that negotiate ransoms with targets"

What a crazy world we live in, where criminal organization have a quasi-normal corporate structure and even manage a "customer" support team
Empty capitalist rationalizations that only serve to rationalize systemic faults.

People dont care about such rationalizations. If things go way down south in a society, extremism and chaos takes over, and all those people who were rationalizing such systemic inequality end up finding themselves in hot water. From the decline of Roman Republic and then fall of the empire to French Revolution, from religious/nationalist extremism taking over countries and persecuting such opulent classes to whatever societal collapse you pick from history.

In contrast to the people in earlier millennia, we now are able to identify problems. And we can fix them. That is what we should be doing - not rationalizing the systemic fault by inventing justifications that advertise the existing systemic fault as 'natural'.
Good job!

Though I would have added a unit test to iterate over complete 2^64 set of values and compare the output to Double.parseDouble().
The idea behind it is sound. Its a massive timesaver to be able to live-review apps as part of merge-reviews.
Why Do We Call These “DuPont” Connectors?
> Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms

This feels very true... the majority of my searches go like this:

1. Search with all relevant terms with some parts that should be exact combinations in quotes => nothing or BS results

2. Remove words that Google is fixating on without context => no or seemingly unrelated results without search terms at all

3. Reduce specificity to 2 or 3 words, topic and subtopic (trying to locate context only and search the rest myself) => sometimes ends me on sites where I can then just browse for the result i'm after

4. Worst case reduce to single search term to find huge context sites and manually search myself. Sometimes at this point I just give in and manually navigate to other sites where I know I can manually browse and narrow down context myself and then try to find what I'm looking for... it really feels like a curl web scrape and grep would work better than Google at this point (yes I know google "site:", it's doesn't work properly anymore).
I have a cat that is always ravenous for anything edible, even if it's not exactly typical cat fare, e.g., my leftover salad, berries, etc. Trying to search for "can cats eat X" after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost pointless. There are so many spammy sites for every value of X, and I have no idea if it's a sophisticated problem to systematically exclude this type of useless content, but Google's top results are chock-full of sites that all seem to follow the format below, where the question is not answered at all:

Is it safe for cats to eat X?

Cats are mischievous and we love them.

X is not typical cat food. Let's go over some background on X before we answer the question.

Cats are obligate carnivores.

Thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe or buy these products!
I started writing down the search queries for such bad results from different search engines to publish one day a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'.

But this needs to be public effort to create any meaningful action from search engines.

How many of you would be willing to contribute to such platform by submitting your bad search results?
I used to play Nethack within Emacs using nethack-el. It was really useful being able to bind a shortcut to something that could copy the map and append it to a text file with a note. :)
There is no such thing as altruism, at the species level. It's all selfishness (of the genes) all the way down. Read Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" to better understand human behaviour as shaped by millions of years of evolutionary forces.
That article legit mentions Austria as one of the top 10 innovative countries in the WORLD.
How can anyone take the ranking seriously?
After Starship, Elon has stated he wants an upgraded Starship with double the radius: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-the-next...

After that, orbital infrastructure: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1373132222555848713

And possibly nuclear propulsion? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1153378777893888005

Not to mention colonies on other planets: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1373735946244431873

Most of that is pretty long-term though. I suspect Starship will remain a commercially viable platform for quite some time after its inception.
Founders of venture-backed startups, how many rejections did you get?
As a first-time founder raising for first (seed or pre-seed) round, how common is rejection by investors? On average, how many investors would you have to speak with before you can get a "yes"? What have you learned from those rejections?
Exactly my point! Google + reCaptcha is one of those things that says "if you're a good Google conformist and fall in line with our needs for data collection we can use to make truckloads of money, here's your ticket to the I'm A Human express train for using the internet!"

I may not have been clear in my original comment, but I wasn't blaming Firefox for the pain points; just pointing them out.
> As a buyer I might be inclined to wait for the pandemic to pass and for prices to revert somewhat to the mean.

The opposite force (motivating you to buy now) is that interest rates are very low, and that will probably change in the future.
We’ll checkout out our webflow setup to see if there’s anything we can do there to prevent the burger menu from getting messed up. Thanks for the tip.

We don’t offer on prem currently but there’s a discussion a few comment threads up.
So the taxpayers are on the hook if it fails and kills people then they get exclusive rights to produce it if it succeeds and set their own price. Isn't that a neat racket?
> Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional.

I thought the main issue here was Google directing searchers to its own services and scraping data from non-Google websites to present on its own pages? It's declining search result quality is certainly an issue, but I don't think this link is about that at all.
The intention of this newsletter is to provide a nice set and setting for people who happen to be tripping or microdosing at the time.

I will be moving these to Saturday soon. Thanks!
I've lived most of my life without a credit card, never leased a car, never gave owning property much thought. Got some student loans when I was young, but that's about it for my credit history. This is all a result of me living responsibly within my means. Rental referrals are just about the only leverage that an ex-landlord would really have over me. You can duck collections pretty much forever if you don't need credit
Thank the media for slandering the company, accusing it of perpetrating genocides, political strife, Russian election hacking conspiracy, etc... The reason they do this is being scared of liability, not a top-down desire to control.
This is not good news. Stallman is great at writing free software. He's an absolute liability at being a public advocate for it.
Agreed, I have issues daily with Google:

* shows results despite having zero actual matching results

* ignores parts of the query even if they are surrounded in quotes

* gets completely thrown off by keywords (and, or, etc) and symbols (=, ;, etc)
Amen to this blog post. Quality inter independence with other is more important than financial independence
> Even worse when your romantic partner has different goals in life, as happened here.

What stings (as I can't help but empathize with the author's feelings) in reading this blog is that it sounds like they were very aligned five years ago, but she discovered a gradual growing miscontent only once they tried the early-retiree life.

Not sure if there's a possible fix there, other than trying to compromise (only one of them working, which would probably just lead to more growing apart)
Yeah. Cosmopolitan values are pretty fragile they might as well be a lie. For one thing they need an absurd level of wealth to maintain without which they disappear and leave a vacuum that can only be filled with base instincts.
Many people talk about Java, Go and similar, contrasting it with Scala, but I think it misses one crucial point. Java and Go are in many ways "done" languages. They evolve very little. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Go changed significantly since 1.x. Java hasn't been evolving almost at all until recently, and the changes introduced now are still conservative, and it will take ages before the ecosystem catches up and actually makes good use of what's introduced in Java 11+.

On the other hand, yes - Scala is in many ways a research language. It's got a number of novel features, starting from the blend of FP and OO, through implicits, ending with metaprogramming. The dark side of introducing features that other languages don't have, is that they sometimes need polishing or complete removal. That impacts the compiler (which evolves as well - compiling Scala code is much more complex than the rather straightforward translation of Java to bytecode) and high-level language features alike.

The bright side is that software engineering is very far from being a "done field" (or at least I refuse to believe it is such). There's a lot to be discovered as to how we can write code that is readable, performant and - yes - maintainable.

"Wait, but if you said Scala is a research language, is it safe for business usage?" Yes - while Scala has a research side to it, it also is a language used successfully in many companies. It has a lot of libraries that are maintained, the language authors pay a lot of attention to binary compatibility (with well-defined limits - you know what to expect!).

Businesses have benefited from using the newest available technology in many fields, and I doubt software engineering should be different. Of course, you shouldn't be reckless - but using technology from 20 years ago "just to be safe" isn't always a recipe for success.

Yes, you can build great systems with Java and Go. Same is true for Scala. And yes, you can build totally unmaintainable systems in Scala, but in Java and Go as well.

Finally, a side note about OSS. I don't think it's fair to expect anybody to maintain any kind of library in any language for free. You like the library, it solved your problem - great, you can use it for free. But if you want it maintained above what the library author donates, either through their time or through corporate sponsorship - well, you can't have any expectations here. I'm sure a lot of these migrations problems could be solved, given a reasonable business offer.
A few people ITT seem to think FI people just do nothing all day. I'm kinda wondering if you folks know of anything but work.
filter is obvious at a glance, where all loops look similar. Generating a wall of boilerplate is easy, the problem is that we can’t just ignore it and read a summary. Essentially I’d like to decompile Go to what could have been written in a powerful language.
Hey Thomas, I would have thought you would have said that at this point JavaScript or Postel's law were probably the dominant source of exploitable vulnerabilities. You're right though, Zig is weak to them, but it's not all or nothing as with C. It's a spectrum, and having spent some time with the language, I think that for Zig's goals, it makes the right set of trade-offs.
Smart Referer is even stricter than this new policy if you don't use the recommended 'Lax' setting. It will block referers even on the same domain but to different subdomains, if you want it to.
Not necessarily.

It would be more impressive if Jack can sell his first tweet, once on each major platform. Now they are somewhat fungible, non fungible titles. If one is worth more than the other, why?
> Gangs also have begun encrypting backup systems, including cloud storage services such as Office 365 and Drop-box. Although 56% of the firms surveyed by Sophos regained control of their data through backups, that window appears to be closing. "[Cybergangs] have realized that the ransom demand becomes powerless if you have a full backup set in place and you can revert to it,"

This is why our backups at work write to a storage bucket with permissions such that they can create new files but not delete old ones. I'd definitely recommend this approach to everyone who can afford the storage space.
And therefore, all social interaction that's left.
Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade.

A lot of people say this is because Google is worse at returning the desired search results for various reasons (algos, ads, spam, etc). I've come to suspect it is more deliberate on the part of Google.

I've said it before, so I'll belt out the chant again: "Google doesn't make money from providing the right search results. Google makes money from keeping you searching for the right search results."

This is especially true for the vast majority of people on the internet who do not know there are any (better or worse) alternatives to Google.
Programmers can't be trusted to do this kind of free-form reasoning correctly, as attested by the unending stream of security vulnerabilities arising from undefined behaviour in C and C++ codebases.

The push for safe languages is motivated by pragmatism, not theoretical purity.
A better comparison is with US, China, or Russia. And yes, it doesn't look very good. The rollout has been slow for a number of reasons, from actual resistance in some countries to the well-publicised shenanigans with manufacturers. Also, Europeans export a significant portion of their vaccine production, unlike others.
google search results are nothing but content farms and other mostly useless shit unless you search for things that are STEM-related or academic-related.
I’ve switched my team over to Linear (https://linear.app), which is definitely a “faster Jira alternative built for remote teams” as well.

I’m sure you’re aware of Linear, how do you differentiate yourself? I’d be really interested to know. Huge congrats on the launch!
Is this any different from the mafia in many places?
"If you dont want to pay your dues to your feudal lord as a serf, become a lord yourself"

That's what you are saying.
Does that include all the supply chains required? You have to deal in EROEI not specific process steps.
M1 MacBook Air

Apple M1
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, Azul Systems, Inc., 16+36

parsing random integers in the range [0,1)

=== number of trials 32 =====

FastDoubleParser.parseDouble MB/s avg: 492.324205, min: 479.57, max: 516.26

Double.parseDouble MB/s avg: 111.509085, min: 110.63, max: 114.65

Speedup FastDoubleParser vs Double: 4.415104

Apple M1
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, Azul Systems, Inc., 16+36

parsing integers in file data/canada.txt

read 111126 lines

=== number of trials 32 =====

FastDoubleParser.parseDouble MB/s avg: 483.642065, min: 420.43, max: 502.15

Double.parseDouble MB/s avg: 104.347746, min: 99.03, max: 116.91

Speedup FastDoubleParser vs Double: 4.634907
Alerts have been 95%+ off for years. Sometimes it's nearby, but it doesn't go to the 2nd floor where bedrooms are. I don't do social media or slack either.

It's just a way of living where you don't give other people a free 24h real time option on your attention.
For my money, yandex.com now has the best search results.

Beware though, yandex allows NSFW by default. You have to enable safe/family search. This is the opposite of Google and Bing, so it could get you in trouble at work. Those crazy Russians.
I think the parent comment's point is that Firefox is worth celebrating because they're making this (and other changes) with no ulterior motive other than championing user privacy. But with Chrome, the user privacy improvement is a biproduct of Google making profit-oriented decisions, and not the focal point of their change.

I'll happily celebrate Google making a privacy-oriented change that's actually intended and not a bi-product, but this isn't such a case.
LOL

medical research and sicentific breakthought were made without capitalism

capitalism actually destroy everything it touches

capitalism prevents innovation if old dated systems generates profits

what works better is things brought to life by people with passion, no matter what system is currently in place, be it capitalism, socialism, communism, populism etc etc etc

the people is what drive inovation and delivery

capitalism is here to make sure those people don't gain too much power, and to make sure we can control competition in order to maintain power and profitability

profits >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> everything >>>> you, the people
I don't know how well it handles units vs. Google but it does convert as you type, say "5inches" immediately shows it in cm but you can keep typing "5inches in m" and it'll do the math too.
Well, the UK is prioritising getting as many people a first dose as possible, so the number "fully" vaccinated in the UK lags behind the EU.

Jury is still somewhat out about which method is better, and who will finish first. I'd put money on both reaching 70% of eligible people vaccinated with both doses around the same time.
if you use double quotes you only need "See them more than my" lyrics. Though if you do "see them more" you get "Further Than the Stars" song instead.
Europe should start attracting VC money instead of all the grants that just waste EU money. As much as it's trendy to look down on VCs, they are outperforming EU government innovation budgets.
I think you're reading too much into informal phrasing. And a reasonable person would suspect prostitution or coercion.
I think this is a real strategic challenge for Gitlab; I think the answer is "the features never stop", and that is OK, as long as you understand their target customer/market.

I first started thinking hard about this when they recently cancelled their bronze tier subscription. Gitlab is clearly ducking out of a brawl with Github for the individual/consumer $5/month tier; that makes sense as there is no way Gitlab can win by taking on the incumbent on their own turf. Instead Gitlab seems to be shifting focus to targeting larger enterprise customers; those who are fine paying $20/mo or ideally $100/mo for a one-stop solution to the full SDLC. (The counterargument here would be that they _are_ still targeting the $5/mo customer, they are just trying to replace a $5/mo Github subscription plus a $10/mo CircleCI sub plus a $10/mo Jira sub etc. -- I'm not sure I see that end of the userbase being as amenable to bundling though).

The largest enterprise customers will keep asking for more boxes to be ticked, because it's usually easier to add features onto your existing solution than to stitch multiple solutions together, and because the more features/config options you have, the more complex configurations/requirements you can satisfy. However that means you get feature bloat, and pricing becomes more challenging; you need to charge more for "all the features" tier, but as you broaden the offering, fewer customers actually want to pay for everything. "What do we keep in the $100/mo tier?" is a challenging question to get right as the feature-set grows.

As you get into enterprise sales, you start to need more customization/unbundling. Before I moved back to Github I paid Gitlab $20/mo per engineer on my team and would never dream of jumping up to $100/mo, but would absolutely have paid more for a la carte access to certain features from the $100/mo ultimate tier. (For example I have no interest in their issue tracker, but I'd love to have been able to use their DevOps / Kubernetes tooling).

I believe this sort of a la carte pricing is less developer-friendly because you tend to need to talk to a sales person vs. just having the developer sign up, but then I don't believe that "developer first" is your sales strategy in enterprise; see Okta vs. Auth0 for a good example:

https://auth0.com/pricing/
https://www.okta.com/pricing/#customer-identity-products

Auth0 keeps it as simple as possible. Even within customer-identity (their competitor to Auth0) Okta has way more configuration for add-ons like MFA, SSO etc.

(I know @sytse / Gitlab folks post on here regularly so I'd love to hear their feedback on whether I'm completely off-base in how I'm thinking about this stuff!)
Indeed, life should not be a grind.
*in their foreign influence ops

Fixed that for you
Even if you could parse a double in a single cycle, it would take 292 years to run through 2^64 cases on a 2GHz machine. https://www.google.com/search?q=2**64+%2F+2GHz&oq=2**64+%2F+...

Also, while there are only 2^64 distinct double values, there are many more string representations than that. For example, "1" and "1.0" are the same underlying value, but a parser needs to be able to handle both.
Not just for images. Bing seems to be a lot more closer to what Google search used to be a few years ago. Anything related to torrents or streams is pretty much impossible to find on Google. Any news not spouted from mainstream sources, gone from Google. My default search deck nowadays is a mix of Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Well, Hungary is in EU and they seem to be doing much better than the rest.
Time in the market > timing the market.

As long as you don't put more than ~30% of your money into a single asset (e.g. a house), then you're pretty certain to always make money in the long-term.
I haven't heard of Axios before - how would you characterize it? Looking at the website I can't quite tell if it's an aggregator or how they generate content, and if there is any particular leaning to what they host.
Britain is one of the fastest vaccinating countries in the world. Maybe THE fastest (they're over 50% adults vaccinated already), ignoring smaller countries like Israel who don't have to worry about scale quite as msuch.

Britain erred on the side of faster rollout: many countries criticize them for rushing AZ's vaccine approval process actually.

Because Britain somewhat rushed the vaccine rollout, its probably not a fair comparison to other countries. USA vs EU is probably a better comparison (but maybe not, because USA has a *dominating* industrial base and can physically make more things than most other countries)
I think the EU is ordering and distributing the vaccines for the member states in order to do it even and fair (not sure how this works out in reality, though).