skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> rich parents would have hired tutors to teach their children the tricks, rather than paying people to actually take tests for them, which caused several famous people to go to jail.

I would wager over 95% of rich people do hire tutors (or send children to expensive tutoring programs). Since they don't get sent to jail, we overestimate the percentage of the latter.

The SAT is hackable. In my time, both the SAT and the GRE analogy questions had the same "flaw":

You are given 5 choices. Two of them will always have identical relationships - so neither can be the answer. There is always a nonsensical choice (something like "Dog : mathematics"), so you can rule that out. You're left with two choices. Even if you don't understand the question, you now have a 50% chance of getting it right.

Similarly, for quantitative questions, a number of problems are easily "solved" by working backwards. I don't need to know how to solve a quadratic: I just plug in the choices into the equation and see which gives the correct answer. This is so "common" that people consider the strategy as legitimate. However, the goal of the question is to see if you can solve a quadratic - not evaluate one.

A lot of quantitative problems tend to have at least one nonsensical answer. You can rule it out.

And so on.
HOWTO: Be more productive (2005)
The person who the original tweet was referring to (it's not private; they admitted it), just tweeted a GIF about "witnessing karma".

https://twitter.com/Prafulfillment/status/140093402468041523...

EDIT: Reply on HN by the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400221
FWIW, 'right to speech' != 'right to be heard' and 'freedom of speech' != 'freedom from consequences.'

Saying/posting something which quickly gets flagged into oblivion is freedom of speech working as intended. As is subsequent posts overcoming a flagging brigade...
Have you tried using a different theme? Or does that not help with making the tabs more obvious?
“We Will Make San Francisco Safe”, say Police Chief and District Attorney
I think you misunderstood the comment. It wasn't calling Postgres slow and half broken, it was making a stab at other home-brewed (NIH, Not Invented Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here) databases, calling them slow, half baked copies of postgres, implying that they should have just used postgres, but that doing so wouldn't get them promotions.
Does speak to a sense of entitlement some people have.
Everyone claims they like meritocracy. Then they realise Merit is smarts, hardwork and luck. And they don't have all those. So why would they actually want a meritocracy anymore than a non-king wants a monarchy?
What's the TL;DWWWW?

(Too Long; Didn't Waste a Whole Week Watching)
The author states:

>'The processor nominally maintained four separate stacks (one for each privilege level), plus a possible “shadow stack” for the operating system or hypervisor.'

Can someone elaborate on what the "shadow stack" is and what it's for exactly? This is the first time I've heard this nomenclature.
Bing does show wiki link first but no image results.
Duckduckgo does show wiki link first but no image results.
Google shows wiki link and image results.

I am in US. Could be just that Bing is still very subpar ...
Correction: this only applies event handlers, e.g. onclick='someFunction()'
> This was probably said about tabs vs windows when tabs first appeared in browsers as well

Tabs is a way to group related so windows which useful if you have many of them. And AFIR tabs in browsers was very welcomed by users, unlike today’s nonstop UI churn.
It'll keep the MIC funded and justify the further weoponization of space.
Sure, but some buying choices are more ethical and compassionate than others.
We're about to see the Streisand Effect in action.
I've removed the flags now.

That last bit breaks the site guidelines. Can you please review them and stick to the rules? We'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Bitcoin’s reliance on stablecoins harks back to the Wild West of finance
> What does he mean by using native YUV formats?

Your display uses 3 bytes per pixel. 8 bits for each of the R, G, and B channels. This is known as RGB888. (Ignoring the A or alpha transparency channel for now).

YUV420 uses chroma subsampling, which means the color information is stored at a lower resolution than the brightness information. Groups of 4 pixels will have the same color, but each pixel can have a different brightness. Our eyes are more sensitive to brightness changes than color changes, so this is usually unnoticeable.

This is very advantageous for compression because YUV420 requires 6 bytes per 4 pixels, or 1.5 bytes per pixel, because groups of pixels share a single color value. That's half as many bytes as RGB888.

When you decompress a JPEG, you first get a YUV420 output. Converting from YUV420 to RGB888 doesn't add any information, but it doubles the number of bits used to represent the image because it stores the color value for every individual pixel instead of groups of pixels. This is easier to manipulate in software, but it takes twice as much memory to store and twice as much bandwidth to move around relative to YUV420.

The idea is that if your application can work with YUV420 through the render pipeline and then let a GPU shader do the final conversion to RGB888 within the GPU, you cut your memory and bandwidth requirements in half at the expense of additional code complexity.

Wikipedia is a good source of diagrams and details that explain this further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV#Y%E2%80%B2UV420p_(and_Y%E2...
Boot2container
Other than causing a bunch of otherwise unnecessary updates for Windows users, what good was/is .NET? I've never seen the point, and it got even weirder for me when MONO came out.

[Edit] Thanks for explaining it to me. I've missed a decade of computing.
As the article points out, 8086 was designed to be source-translatable from 8080, and DOS started life as a clone of CP/M-86[1], with identical system calls, so it makes a lot of sense that you should be able to mechanically translate 8080 CP/M software to run on DOS.

Z-80 software would presumably be harder to translate, although the x86 has additional registers and instructions you could use.

[1] the rumored easter egg of a Gary Kildall or DRI copyright message hidden in MS-DOS or QDOS was never found, sadly
The depth of Bill Gates' ties with Epstein
You can destroy your own private planet all you like.
Of course that makes the assumption that it's known and accepted that Microsoft censor the search "tank man" to some parts of the globe, and the accident is that the censorship applied to a larger than desired scope.

It seems unlikely that you could accidently censor something like this globally without trying to do it for at least one specific target demographic.

It's also plausible that the fault was brought in deliberately by a rogue engineer to raise the subject globally.
The tabloids can dodge some of the consequences see teh hacked off campaign in the UK
Thanks, it’s a bit more interesting:
http://mupuf.org/blog/2021/02/10/setting-up-a-ci-system-part...
The two agents in the case, Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, were killed in an exchange of gunfire during an attempt to arrest 55-year-old David Lee Huber, a suspect in a child pornography case. Huber also died in the incident, which means it isn’t clear who the FBI is attempting to locate.
One of my daughters finds almost all foods revolting. She accepts rice, ketchup, ramen, breakfast cereal, and most sweets. Sometimes she'll accept pickled beets. She doesn't tolerate veggies, fruits, most meat, most breads, and most restaurant food (including fast food).

We have convinced her to eat other foods, but she gags every time. I suspect she has an eating disorder. She has been seeing a therapist, but I wonder if she needs to see a different therapist who specializes in eating disorders. In any case, she seems physically healthy; she runs and plays and doesn't get hurt.

What's amazing to me is I was completely unaware of these kinds of disorders before she came along. I think she wants to eat veggies (because she really believes us when we say they are good for her), but her body strongly resists.
I'd fix it by skipping the talks and looking at the commit histories instead. Works for every PyCon and is quite instructive.
One of the challenges with Y'CbCr (what Carmack is calling "YUV") is that there are so many flavors.

He mentions 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. But he doesn't mention chroma siting. Or alternative sumbsampling schemes. Or matrix coefficients. Or full-range vs video-range (a.k.a. JPEG vs MPEG range). Heck, how you even arrange subsampled data varies by system (many libraries like planar; Apple likes bi-planar; etc.).

I'd love to see more support for rendering subsampled Y'CbCr formats so you don't have to use so much RAM, but it gets complicated quick.
My justification is the part you ignored. Take responsibility for the results of your actions. The way this is being discussed has had real negative impact on entirely innocent people. There are many useless things that can reported on that don't injure large groups of people. Sports scores, for instance.

And I'm not even saying don't report on it. I'm saying to take responsibility. If your goal isn't to support racism, stop reporting in a way that does.

As for the BART thing... Eh, I think a lot of what they said is nonsense, like attempting to justify their choice based on minor privacy laws. But I think they made one key point that's enough to justify their choice: releasing those videos to the media doesn't increase public safety. It increases public fear. Scared people are actively harmful for public safety. A terrified person pulling out a gun the next time several black teenagers get onto the same train car is only an escalation of violence.

You seem to be forgetting there's a middle ground between suppressing and sensationalizing. Did the lack of video footage prevent reporting on the BART incidents? Was the news suppressed? Was anyone injured by the lack of video? I can find no evidence of this happening. Everything I can see suggests that things ended up in a reasonable spot there. People who wanted to know about crime could find out about it.

So what's the middle ground on the lab leak hypothesis? Stop dredging it up like it's important to every media consumer. Every action you listed is a public policy decision, not a personal action. Report on it when it's important for determining public policy, not when you're scaring people for ratings.

And yeah, I'm aware that circumstantial evidence is fine in court. But when I see the circumstantial evidence, I don't see anything to outweigh the fact that zoonotic transmission has been the source of thousands of outbreaks in the past. That's one hell of a circumstantial hurdle any other argument has to clear. Any argument of the form "this time it's different" has a very high bar to clear.
It's monkeys all the way down.
If the CFAA doesn't apply to sys admins working at the highest levels of authorization, it seems to be a useless law. Foreign actors can simply hire sys admins to access whatever they want, no need for hacking.

I really do think the court has opened Pandora's box on this one. They should've voided the statute for vagueness if that was the concern. As it stands now, it has to be one of the dumbest laws on the books.
If you have an hour, this decade-old video blew my mind:
"Indistinguishable from Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

HN thread from a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175949
> Such code can (while the mere user cannot) do stuff like alter the internals of "read-only" system software, blow up the operating system internals or scribble all over the raw disk.

Who cares. OS stuff is easy to replace. The real problem is that it can also destroy any user data... just like every binary on Linux or Windows.
Buy a copy of Hacker's Delight.
If a species can master interstellar travel, then they can probably harness enough energy to change elements at the atomic level - alchemy. They won't need us for our resources or even earth. And if they did, they would have taken us already.
> That saves $50-$80 thousand per headcount.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but this is a wildly innacurate claim. Citations are requested on HN posts to avoid misinformation (though apparently nobody adheres to or enforces this rule anymore).

It only costs employers a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to obtain and maintain a US security clearance for employees [1]. It's not really a hurdle when hiring new talent without a clearance. In general, we hire military veterans not because of their clearance, but because of their tendency (not always, but in general) to possess high integrity, strong leadership skills, loyalty, niche skillsets, and strong work ethic.

1. https://www.taonline.com/security-clearances/hiring-cleared-...
As someone who writes lots of code that wrangles messy raw data inputs via DataFrames, the talk on Pandera type checking for DataFrames was very interesting. Dunno if it will work in practice for my use case, but I’ll definitely be checking it out.
the post is flagged, it's ok
this was one of the best xmas gifts ever given, i didnt even have to ask, somehow parents knew about it. just a couple years previous all the rage was BigTrak [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak]; but having a Hero took you from nerd to ubergeek, i remember an R2D2 shell being available from an ad in Computers and Electronics magazine.
For this first part, you might be better served IPMI, iPXE, watchdog and Clonezilla.
> Am I missing something? ... it warrants punishment.

The decision does not prevent punishment. It narrows the scope of how the CFAA can be applied. Had it been interpreted as broadly as the government asked, terms of service violations would be open to Federal prosecution. The EFF article lays out some particularly troublesome implications, like criminalizing the use of your work computer for personal matters.

> If I start selling off information about user to third parties (say journalists), how can that be legal?

It's not. The decision simply states that because you were given access, you can't be charged specifically for hacking. You would still on the hook for stealing and selling the data.
How do companies pay ransoms without bank accounts? Where does the Bitcoin come from?
Brings back so many fond memories. I was 5 when my family computer had Bonzi Buddy, and we loved it. We installed it every time we had to have our Windows drive reformatted (it happened quite frequently, as you can guess from our fondness for installing malware).

But hey, it used to sing songs and dance and stuff, and my mom could make it tell me to brush my teeth.
I am tired of governments deciding to not pursue justice because it would be more expensive, because of the negative impact on the investment climate and the litigation costs. Justice isn't meant to be profitable. Let's bite the fucking bullet and jail the people responsible for this kind of behavior
After watching this 2018 talk on typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWV8t494N88

and this one last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST33zDM9vOE&t=68s

and finally this one in 2021:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj_9TyT3V98

I think I'll finally start using type checking - it really seems to just eliminate a whole class of potential bugs; a class that is often not tested at that.
Yeah, I'm not an anarchist, so I am indeed advocating that the state use its power to achieve societal benefits, which is ultimately, one might say, backed by its monopoly on the use of violence. Property rights are not and should not be absolute.
> There should be a tinurl for website I can send people to that shows a simple list of all the ways personal information can be used.

I just now set up a small site for it at https://whynottrack.com/! It's open source -- GitHub link in the footer -- so anyone can PR changes / reasons / etc.
The flagging history of all the users who flagged that post was very consistent. There was no connection to any specific topic (nor between the accounts, that I could see). Rather, they have previously flagged stories about things like cryptocurrency, ransomware, covid lockdowns, $BigCo flamewars, and lots and lots of scandals involving such subjects as Florida, Katie Hill, and the Chicago Police Department. Also, most if not all were avid HNers, people who comment and upvote and in a few cases email us a lot.

The pattern seems clear that these users are flagging the more sensational kinds of submissions that tend to lead to predictable discussions and flamewars. There's room for competing opinions about which of those are/aren't on-topic for HN, given the site guidelines; if you or anyone want to understand how the mods look at it, I recommend the explanations at the links below. But clearly the flagging behavior in this case was in good faith.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I wish the device history from all connected devices would be captured forever and not just for the past few hours as is currently the case.
I love the story behind Charlie Cole's alternate perspective, where he had to hide his film in a toilet tank.
I think there's a solid online analogy for HIPAA data.

Certain employees at a hospital have authorization to pull up medical records as part of their jobs. It is extremely illegal for them to view records that aren't required for specific work purposes. If a nurse is treating Jane Smith in room 203, it's OK and normal for her to look at Jane Smith's records. It's absolutely not OK, and punishable with huge fines, for her to pull up her ex-boyfriend's records just out of curiosity.

However, it's not a violation of the CFAA for her to look at her ex's data. It's 100% against HIPAA, but she didn't have to break into a computer system to view them. She was authorized to access the system. She wasn't authorized (by virtue of her work requirements) to pull up those specific, but as a nurse, the system permitted her to without going around any login prompts or doing anything harder than typing "John Doe" into the search box.

That's the distinction that the CFAA cares about. It's about breaking into systems, or, at least, that's why it was written and that's how the SCOTUS just ruled that it was meant for. It's about access to the system in general, not access to a specific record in the system. There are other laws that govern those specifics.
You can point out a problem without having a solution. Part of the reason why this issue feels unsolvable is that people don't really care enough to do anything. A piece of journalism that makes people care more is a step in the right direction.
No, it’s not science violating like flat earth or unscientific like intelligent design. So from that perspective, it obviously shouldn’t be dismissed out-of-hand. It’s still so far out there in terms of an actual possibility that there’s no point speculating. Mundane reasons are far more likely, especially since extraterrestrials on our planet would imply extraterrestrials with a significant technological advantage - likely extrasolar (implying FTL) & able to evade all sorts of detection methods. Even if you think there’s a massive government conspiracy to conceal their detection, you’d be claiming this conspiracy is effective at hiding it from all sorts of academic telescopes/satellites/radars (these are extraterrestrials so they’d have to live off-earth).

In essence, the claim of “aliens” (particularly intelligent ones) is outlandish given our current understanding of the universe. Of course that could change in the future but speculating wildly about it now & reporting on it similarly is irresponsible.

And as for the lab virus theory, that’s a bad analogy. The zoonotic origin is more plausible but it’s probably like 2:1 or 10:1 odds against it being a lab escape. For aliens you’re looking at like 1000000:1 odds against.

Heck, humans from parallel dimensions seem more likely at the point where we’re wildly speculating without any evidence. Why is aliens the dominant theory?
The history in this case may not be the best teacher. The previous instances of wiped species happened when self control was not part of the setting. Space travel has a high bar to enter and is forcing any contender to achieve a high degree of self control. Any further action from someone like that will have to have either deliberate or unnoticed consequences.
neither did I - not using DDG again. Back to Google :(
> Subsidised for what exactly?

The cost of running the appstore, which are astronomical. Not just hosting and infrastructure, reviewing 10000+ apps a day is not free either.

> even free apps make Apple $99/yr in developer license fees

Hosting probably costs more than that if the app is popular. Not just the app, but potentially icloud, notifications etc. And 99 dollars is per developer, not per app.
Using a text editor to craft an eBook
I guess beings so strong and powerful that they would destroy us without a second thought, like we do to ants, would fall into the "Evil" category in my comment above.
> Microsoft Agent Wiki

I propose that the saying "there's an app for that" becomes deprecated in favour of the more comprehensive "there's a wiki for that"
The point is not so different than the point of the JVM.
Why? That answer is simple: power. Some countries are simply too powerful to do much about. Every time a country goes way out of line, it becomes a calculation of how important it is to stop it, versus how expensive it will be, both in direct and indirect costs. And because of this, powerful countries get away with stuff that less powerful countries would never get away with.

Don't look surprised. The US has also gotten away with stuff that a smaller country wouldn't have gotten away with. These countries can only be stopped by their own internal processes, but its own people. Not by foreign countries.
Agreed. When eligibility opened up, we drove 100 miles just to avoid potentially taking doses from people at risk in the metro area. Seemed like a good excuse to get out of the house for a road trip, as well as being the right thing to do.

We were able to schedule immediate appointments in an adjacent county populated by hardcore Trumpers. Upon arriving at the drive-through vaccination site, there was only one other car in the lot. No danger of cutting the line in that county.
Lol why Japan
Websites to Practice Your Front End Development Skills
> Foreign actors can simply hire sys admins to access whatever they want, no need for hacking

This is prosecutable under a myriad of existing laws. CFAA was specifically crafted to deter and punish hacking. As far as I know, that's still very much a thing.
Consider there is a war on drugs which has repeatedly proven that "increasing the friction" might actually make the situation worse. Broadly criminalizing any and all exchange of money to unauthorized tokens (any more specific definition of a cryptocurrency will be subverted) is likely to end up in that territory.
Can't really see why .NET doesn't have a place in that future. You can run it in the same dockerized setups as everything else.
When did public denunciations become popular in the US? I know they've been a part of the Chinese internet since the early days. It wasn't always so intense in the US.
Just curious: are there any Chinese nationals (in China) here in this thread? I want to understand the scope of censorship. What do YOU think?