skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte

While true, that's not going to motivate anybody. Memory is not a very scarce resource, we're making more all the time, we can continue to make more, and it's reusable.

Moreover, memory that isn't being used is almost completely useless - the only thing it does is act as disk cache.

Better to use memory than CPU, as the latter actually consumes power (leading to climate change if not powered using renewables etc.) - although even better to use less of both.

A more effective argument would be to look at the number of users on low-end devices, and point out that, the more memory you use, the less these users are able to run your applications.

Not that I'm expecting companies like Slack to care - they design for the high-end user, and if your company forces Slack on you and you have an older device, there's nothing you can do, and they exploit that.
I disagree and having had two friends die to suicide this year already and many others on the verge, I wouldn't say this is that clear cut. After all, suicide by health neglect is a thing and easily gets wrapped up because somebody let themselves die from covid-19 and not call ambulance - so yeah. I'd not good news this one just yet.
First of all, I enjoyed reading this article. Second, it inspired me to write the following, with curious beginners as the target audience.

It was meant to be about the importance of reducing the computing power of recognizers / parsers / interfaces / meaning-makers, as the author brings up PEM, ASN.1, and X.509. It grew a bit. Enjoy.

<rant>

In my opinion security exists to facilitate trust, and security has a lot to do with managing complexity.

One of the most powerful security technologies we have is math. Especially math that is easy to do in one direction and very difficult to do in the opposite direction. RSA, Ed25519, Diffie-Hellman, and SHA256 all rely on this concept.

Another power tool is combining these cryptographic primitives to build protocols that provide e.g. authentication, forward secrecy, confidentiality, and integrity-protection.

When using cryptographic primitives directly it is easy to make mistakes. For example, before Ed25519 there were other similar signature schemes that, in addition to a message to be signed, required a number that must not be repeated for different messages, called a nonce. If this number was repeated, an attacker could collect signatures and combine them to get the private key. Ed25519 removes this sharp corner by essentially using nonce=SHA512(message) internally.

When designing a protocol like TLS, SSH, Signal, or WireGuard, multiple primitives of different types are combined to get the desired security properties.

Cryptographers work hard to combine primitives such that the resulting construction is easy to reason about, and ideally prove that the construction will only break if one of the primitives break.

Unfortunately this key insight is often ignored further up the stack. Many protocols, file formats, etc are unnecessarily complex. This makes them harder to reason about, which makes it harder to build a safe recognizer / parser / interface / meaning-maker for them. Complex parsers lead to incorrect mental models, which lead to security vulnerabilities.

If you are ever tasked with building a protocol, file format, or API, consider making it only as complex as it must be. We will suffer for a long time with the complex beasts that have already been standardized. Let’s not make more of them.

Remember that security, trustworthiness, understanding, and managing complexity are intertwined. Don’t use more complexity than necessary.

</rant>

P.S. If anyone is curious about Ed25519 I can highly recommend the following article: https://blog.mozilla.org/warner/2011/11/29/ed25519-keys/
At some (or perhaps more than one) point there was someone who was responsible for ensuring that the system put in place complied with requirements and that it was functioning as intended. They didn't do their job. They can point their finger any which way, but that won't absolve them of dereliction of duty.
This comment is romanticised nonsense which is consistently opposed by research.

Suicide rates are strongly linked to socioeconomic status. Being in the 1st decile for income gives you a more than double risk than being in the 10th decile (and the risk is still higher among even poorer people).

Article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S091750401...

Most relevant graph: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S09175040173003...
The first bizarre part to me about this fiasco is that accounting, as a discipline, is one that is designed to catch errors. Put it another way: it assumes errors will occur. This is why in shops, for example, you'll have manual stocktaking (ie let's verify what's in the store is what the computer thinks is in the store) and in any business you'll have reconciliation processes to find and remedy errors.

This highlights a key part of systems design. A key question you should be asking is: what happens when this fails? Note that's "when" not "if".

So something like Horizon should be used to flag cases for reviews. If a branch is found ot have a cash shortfall suggesting possible theft then there has to be a reconciliation possible to identify if the computer system was wrong.

Bugs happen too. How do they ever have confidence in the system and fix bugs if they can't determine if a given flag is a false or true positive?

But instead the system's output was taken as gospel with no possibility of verification. I'm of the belief that if you can't verify anything the system outputs, particularly for something in a discipline so used to verification as a concept, then that signal is worthless. The fact that convictions happened as a result of this is a crime. This is the UK and not the US so sadly that compensation will probably be limited to nonexistent.

As an aside, this is exactly why electronic voting should be outlawed. You need paper ballots (that can be counted electronically) as a verification measure. And the fact that we even have to debate that makes me sad.
>the physical impact

You caught me. I didn't realize that the author having misused this above expression would point to how big a piece of trash the rest of the article would be. Had I done my due diligence, I wouldn't even have bothered commenting.
That's for sure. I don't know anything about this specific application but having worked in the shipping business and in commercial fishing I can attest to the problems with marine growth and corrosion, not to mention electrolytic issues for any contacting dissimilar metals that are immersed. Presumably all this is accounted for but I have to think the maintenance requirements for a long-term floating installation like this are no less than they would be for a commercial vessel, i.e. about 10% of the "hull value" per annum at a minimum.
Streaming services are kind enough to notify when movies are leaving their platforms...
> Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking.

Given that you know the keyboard has been fixed, is there a reason why you didn’t make it clear that you were talking about older machines and not current ones?

You make it sound like the current machines have the flawed keyboard, which is not true as far as I am aware.
I've read similar comments so many times. Am I the only one who thinks Google has become way way better than it used to? Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical.
Beta software: http://lightning.network/docs/ reports that the design of the network is still only in draft form, never mind the software! (those pesky details like routing, which are a difficult problem, are mostly elided in the documents so far)

The main lightning daemon, https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd is still beta, with plenty of warnings in the docs about shortcomings and potential loss of funds. I'm sure people use it, but the developers are very clear that it it is not to be trusted: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/saf... says that it is 'considered reckless to put any life altering amounts of BTC into the network' - how can anyone consider this to be production quality?

you can have third parties do the monitoring for you

Not your keys/monitor, not your coins! We're back to square one, aren't we? With just some dodgy software and additional complexity papering over the critical flaws.
Sovkhoz? That's what they called them in the soviet union.
>opaque byte strings

The point was to have something you (an average Joe) can share on the Internet, and that's definitely not byte string.

But the whole PKI thing is indeed very complicated. After such thorough analysis I was expecting some novel and simple solution like memorizable passphrase or QR code to scan.
Hairy Hooters ... owls of course!
I was under the impression that the individual kits are sold for much more in order to be able to fund subsidized kits for classrooms.
Coinbase Is Down ?
If you access coinbase from "price" url, will get "site can’t be reached".
I agree that the M1 doesn't look good for high performance computing right now or anything with poor ARM support. But strategically, I think Apple is in a good spot. For heavy computation these days, I always remote into another machine. With increased bandwidth and more efficient remote desktop protocols, I even do all my graphics-intensive 3d work remotely now. By focusing on low-power processors, Apple is making the laptop/tablet/phone experience better, and I could see them handling the performance issues via remote compute. It could be a very effective strategy (if it is their strategy).
Ayn Rand, Live from Los Angeles
There is I guess no reason except that it would be confusing. "select *" normally means select all the columns in the table, which is ok for ad hoc eyeballing smaller tables, where it saves you the typing involved of specifying possibly hundreds of columns - that syntax is not really ok for anything else.

But you are suggesting that the same syntax should be extended (by DBMS vendors presumably) to aggregate "group by" queries, where there is hardly any such efficiency gain involved; you absolutely need to specify the "group by" columns anyway, and you can simply copy that list over into the select statement. So you would achieve more confusion, and achieve almost no efficiency.

The only situation where your suggestion would make some sense would be if you routinely work with databases with tables that have many (hundreds?) of columns where a majority of these fields are included in "group by" statements. But these would be extreme edge cases in my experience. And the benefit would still be debatable.
Countering Microservice Disasters
Sorry - I should have added a smiley.

Journalists always seem to write these articles where they try to explain a broad market move with a specific piece of news.

In general I think they are mistaken. The market moves on its own. Had the annoucement of capital gains market happened 2 months ago when there was really strong upward momentum in crypto, then I think it would have been completely ignored.
Apply the same criminal liability that applies to boards, CFOs and CEOs for financial statements for all other statements?
Protecting against semantic URL attacks
Making Cybertruck Faster
Facebook app boss says “we’ve been working on audio for a long time”
Best Method to Hire a Hacker 2021
You might not really need to avoid using the term in a way that is understood by the general public. There are quite a few (United States) precedents for losing trademark if a term becomes genericized. For example: Asprin, Escalator, Flip Phone, etc.

There is a wikipedia list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
I can't imagine finding

VerbalExpression regex = regex()
.find("a")
.capture().find("b").anything().endCapture().then("cd").build();

To involve less "cognitive overhead" than

/a(b.*)cd/

For example, what is "anything"? (In this case, "anything" can be nothing.) Where does the capture group start/end? (In normally regexp syntax even naive brace matching will usually tell you.)
> I also saw a comment from the Gener8 team saying they are funding the payouts with investor money

That was my guess when the pitcher mentioned how much money the average user was getting - IIRC, he said something like £25-45/m, which sounded completely unrealistic unless some skulduggery was afoot.

> I wish they had asked how much had been paid out to-date and how much they had received from advertisers

Yes, these would be exactly the right questions to ask! The pitcher was very good, but I was still surprised at how willing the Dragons were to throw money at him without digging in to any details.
> Halo 2k19

Little did we know that they'd just use the same game over and over for years. Look at GTA 5.
That depends on the framework and docs. I just finished a project where the docs are actually decent. But for a particular feature it was smeared across 40 different pages in random snippets. It was not like this was some obscure feature either it was one advertised to work 'out of the box'.
I noticed this effect too, but then I considered it might be something related to actually becoming competent.

Do you think concert pianists bother to pull up lists of scales on google after the 10,000th hour of practice?
> But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area.

It may sound subjective, but that's a view that may not be shared by the rest of the world; not in the eyes of the law, legislators, prospective employees. An accomplice is an accomplice. Especially in 2021, if you can't accept some responsibility to interrogate what the side effects are of the paycheck you accept (even if you don't agree with it), you're going to have a very difficult time participating in public discourse.

You could risk giving the impression that you'd rather ignore any negative externalities of your own work due to your own selfish motivations, even if it comes at the expense of society at large. And many members of society at large may deem you a coward and a liar by omission (I can't say I'd blame them). Some of those members may be people you'll never work with, but some of them may be companies that are interviewing. It won't matter if you want to hand-wave that away by saying "maybe they just have different opinions from you" -- when you're taking the money, you're either taking the responsibility that comes with taking that money or not.

Your vocation is part of your civic duty because it forms the basis for how you materially contribute to the taxes that fund society. If the path by which you earn those funds is compromised, then incrementally, so too is your little equity slice of society. Do you think it's reasonable to accept your desire to bow out from that conversation altogether? Or do you think that such a request will sound immature, evasive and tone deaf, that it will only succeed in drawing suspicion and ire?

Rather than accuse me of undercutting your point, I'd ask you to consider whether your point undercuts itself.
But ripping CDs is not the only way of "owning" the media.

As another commenter said [0], you can buy and own media without ever touching a physical medium or waiting for the post service to deliver it.

I seem to remember at one point Apple was offering DRM-free music. This is pretty convenient for everybody. Yes, you have to buy it ahead of time and store it, as opposed to just streaming right away.

But it does seem quite easy to me. Go to the iTunes store, click buy, done. It may even sync automatically to your iPhone, so you can play it in your car, just as you would Spotify.

---

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914754
Show HN: Collaborative text editing in ~220 lines of JavaScript
In the last year or few, 99.03% of the spam calls that I've answered have been robo calls. So they're all but free to the calling org.

Prosecution and lawsuits could make it unprofitable.

Jail time would make it very unprofitable.

For example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law
Hope they add it to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
NMN Human Trial Suggests Improved Muscle Glucose Metabolism
I'm also staring at a Mid-2011 Sandy Bridge quad-core iMac that's been on my desk since May 2011.

It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3 Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all my customers (and their applications) are still native x86 only... for now.
One example is linking QtWebEngine (basically Chromium) which can sometimes take upwards of 64 GB of RAM.
What the military needs after Afghanistan
> This comment is romanticised nonsense which is consistently opposed by research.

Suicide rates fluctuate wildly over time though, so trying to understand suicide by looking at relative rates within a given year is going to give you at best an incomplete picture.
They are leveraging the connotation of "buy" to get you to give them money. If they used the words lease, rent, or borrow or explicitly stated the purchase may be for a limited time then consumers' brow would furl as they pulled away from the action button. That is bad for conversion. This is classic anti-market behavior.
Yes, it was indeed a typo. Thanks!
"not anywhere close to reasonable care about it"

I know right. And this whole climate change thing that everybody is freaking out about. It's probably like 50-100 years away! I won't live that long. It's definitely not anywhere close to reasonable to care about it.
Call me old fashioned, but I browse and search the documentation first. Starting from the index page. "pkix - Package pkix contains shared, low level structures used for ASN.1 parsing and serialization of X.509 certificates, CRL and OCSP."
Presumably East/West gives you better differential. IIRC there's 20 minutes difference between high-tide time of the east end of the Solent and the west end.

Merging the output from eg West Wales and East Anglia would give you a pretty constant supply.
seccomp should not be needed for a Wasm VM unless the host calls are unsafe, which is not the case by default (since no host functions are provided) or for WASI (since is alreay designed to be sandboxed).

Also, seccomp only works in the Linux kernel (not in Windows, or macOS)... so it's a no-go for a universal sandboxed VM :)
As the post office is such an old organisation (350 years), it used to have its own armed guard, has its own investigations branch and conducts its own prosecutions. The police wouldn't get involved because the post office was considered to have jurisdiction. Taken from this, which is a great listen: https://soundcloud.com/privateeyenews/page-94-the-private-ey...
I bought a new machine last year that came with 8GB and ordered a 16GB upgrade for it which didn't arrive for a few weeks. I literally just now remembered I've never got round to installing it.
Km Hesaplama Nasıl Yapılır?
I'm a Microsoft ignoramus, but aren't the MS Office things fully available as cloud services these days?
> `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog

It may not be with fewer and less heavy dependencies!
What if the orca ate all the seals!?
Thank you!
I have used Foldscopes with my students and had SO MUCH FUN!
What does "modern" C imply? AFAIK, there are not very many new language features; is it about organizing code differently than what one would learn from K&R?
How should I view a falling rate of suicide but rising rate of suicide attempts?

I am not sure that it is misleading, but agree it isn't the full picture. Naturally, I think the primary focus should be on decreasing successful suicide attempts, then on decreasing suicide attempts writ large.
True, indeed Finns tend to be fairly privacy conscious anywhere. But in owned flats people still do seem to be more mindful of their neighbours - less antisocial behaviour of all kinds. Of course it's hard to know how much of this is linked to ownership / sense of roots, and how much to socioeconomic factors.
> For example Walmart's HQ was built in a TINY SW Arkansas town.

I understand what you're saying here, but Walmart is a really bad example here. They started in Bentonville in the 50's as a tiny shop and the city grew with their growth - their decision to stay in "a little town in Arkansas" was organic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Walmart
Ok, but here's the rub: YOU said the M1 is three generations ahead of intel.

If I had a 3 generation old CPU I might consider upgrading, if I had a 5 generation old CPU I would certainly upgrade.

So, if you have a macbook that's >2 years old, I would upgrade, based on _your_ own words.

If you can wait for M2, sure, but by that logic you can always wait for the next big thing. You can always wait for the nVidia 40-series.

This was a multi-generational leap, and if you're considering getting a new device, this is a good time. Or you can wait for the M2, which has no specs, no known limitations, no release date, no price information and little other than imagined vague ideas that "it might remove the limitations and be faster".

I'm not even making the argument that M1's can run x86 programs as fast as Intel, but there is an argument there.

It's obviously up to the individual; but "the M2 might come" is a shit response to someone who is considering upgrading a laptop today.
Empathy from others is really important. There was a paper today about why chronically ill people kill themselves and the biggest reason is their doctors not believing them and trying to plying them with anti depressants instead of helping them with their real symptoms. It is a consistent thing you see before chronically ill people kill themselves, the belief that no one is going to help them now or ever (they are right by the way there is no one who is going to help them, their situation is likely never going to get better especially in areas with little to no research).

With the pandemic you can find someone else going through the same sort of thing, they will have empathy about their shared experience. For most people this level of isolation is temporary however, for the disabled this is their every day and they also on a day to day before the pandemic they didn't have this empathy from anyone, from their family nor their doctors. It is about the best it has ever been for the chronically ill, people for once have some empathy for what they are going through but I suspect it wont last.
I'm 200~ days into making a game/text editor hybrid (you're a tentacle monster with a magic mechanical typewriter). I've spent some effort making things accessible.

Some fun unexpected things occurred during this process. When I added controller support, it also created a kind of accidental couch co-op mode, where one person can do the typing while another moves around and handles the exploration/combat bits.

I'd love to support screen readers / do real-time text to speech transcription. Will have to research the meat and potatoes of what's involved there. Even if I can't accommodate every line item, this is a great resource!
It would be an extremely good solution if it worked as intended. In fact Openreach were not fully independent from BT for most of their existence, and they operated the network in a way which was extremely favorable to BT for a long time.

Thus, the two companies extracted an exorbitant rent for the formerly public goods they controlled. The fact that some of this rent went to inefficiencies of running two separate companies on an illusionary arm's length basis does not really improve matters.
Like pretty much any mechanical devices that lives submerged in salt water, I would imagine it's going to require some significant maintenance at some point.