skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nice! A tl;dr with spoilers -- for a typical compression algorithm C(x), applying it over and over again C(x), C(C(x)), C(C(C(x))), ... we would quickly arrive at an input for which the compressed length increases. Here the author proposes C(x) which either equals x (no compression), or encodes a normal compression (e.g. gzip) plus a MAC'd counter. Applying C(x) on the latter case again would simply increment the counter, so an adversary who only issues a bounded number of compression requests gets "stuck" on a chain that contains no contradiction. (The attacker could try to get to y = C(x) with a large counter value without compressor's help but that requires predicting the MAC which is infeasible.) The requirement for C and D to share a secret (here, a MAC key) can be removed by replacing MAC with a VDF proof that you spent O(counter) sequential time producing the compressed output, so a computationally bounded attacker can't overflow the counter (in practice, 128 bit counter requiring ~2^128 time) and disprove the paradox.
Either way, "considered harmful" is a tired and unoriginal cliché. Using it twice in one title is just stonkingly uncreative.

I agree with most of the article but the title sucks!

Also I'm not sure how you wrote so much about using LLVM IR as a portable executable format without mentioning WebAssembly or PNaCl once!
Can MIT’s Tim Berners-Lee Save the Web?
Not related to the OP but I’ve had many issues with non standard vendors placing breaking changes in their patch/minor releases.
You think you’re updating to a relatively normal version and it actually breaks your entire production.

I’m looking at you, MySQL, docker, Mongodb, or harbor.

I’m not complaining, those are provided free of charge and we are happy when it works, but semver is really all that matters in this: either you adhere and it’s smooth sailing, or you don’t and then please don’t use semver-looking numbering.
There is a big difference between hacking a Coinbase client contact database, and hacking THE Coinbase account database.

The thing that might have been hacked could have easily been a CRM or email marketing system - possibly even via some 3rd party supplier.

Obviously there was no hack of the Coinbase accounting system - for the reasons you mentioned.
AppImage, Flatpack, Snaps... all seem to be largely reinventing the primary qualities, good and bad, of static binaries in a new and much more complicated form.

At least a container provides more function than mere bundling, but a lot of containers actually get used merely for bundling.
2 out of 17k? that's reassuring!
Every time I read one of these essays extolling the virtues of static linking it makes me pretty sad. Engineering is about trade offs, and sometimes it does make sense to statically link, but the fact that those trade offs are so lopsided on Linux has very little to do with dynamic linking vs static linking as generic concepts, and more to do with the fact that the design of ld.so is straight out of the 1990s and almost nothing has be done to either exploit the benefits dynamic linking brings, nor to mitigate the issues it causes.

On Darwin derived systems (macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS) we have invested heavily in dynamic linking over the last two decades. That includes features we use to improve binary compatibility (things like two level namespaces (aka Direct Binding in ELF) and umbrella frameworks), middleware distribution (through techniques like bundling resources with their dylibs into frameworks), and mitigate the security issues (through technologies like __DATA_CONST).

Meanwhile, we also substantially reduced the cost of dynamic linking through things like the dyld shared cache (which makes dynamic linking of most system frameworks almost free, and in practice it often reduces their startup cost to below the startup cost of statically linking them once you include the cost of rebasing for PIE), and mitigate much of the rest of the cost of dynamic linking through things like pre-calculated launch closures. It does not hurt that my team owns both the static and dynamic linkers. We have a tight design loop so that when we come up with ideas for how to change libraries to make the dynamic linker load them faster we have the ability to rapidly deploy those changes through the ecosystem.

As I explained in here[1] dynamic linking on macOS is way faster than on Linux because we do it completely differently, and because of that it is used way more pervasively on our systems (a typical command line binary loads 80-150 dylibs, a GUI app around 300-800 depending on which of our OS you are talking about). IOW, by mitigating the costs we drove up the adoption which amplifies the benefits.

And it is not like we have squeezed all the performance out of the dynamic linker that we can, not by a long shot. We have more ideas than we have time to pursue, as well as additional improvements to static linking. If you have any interest in either static or dynamic linking we're looking for people to work on both[2].

[1]: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=197081&curpost...

[2]: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200235669/systems-engin...

(edit: fixed link formatting)
That's a really interesting idea; I hadn't thought of that approach. My super long shot idea is that enough people would use app that a router company would be interested in licensing the node and app software and providing a self hosting solution for the common consumer.
If your compression algorithm worked for just one fixed set of data, then you could just store that fixed data in the decompressor and achieve infinity compression of the data to 0 bits.
I don't think she's advocating for such an overhaul, she's merely pointing out that it would be required.
DARPA's hypersonic scramjet achieves successful flight
After having been fairly close to a story that made national news some years back, and more recently been involved with an organization that gets/got a fair bit of local media coverage, I think I have a pretty good yardstick for accuracy or the lack thereof. The existence of some astonishingly bad journalism does not preclude the existence of the remarkably good; I can't damn them all, but I can say they're all worthless until I give myself a reason to trust them.

Before even trying to assess the accuracy of a story, I have to take a step back and assess the competence of the source. Read some other stuff they've written. Is any of it on matters I'm well-acquainted with? Do they seem fuzzy on basic facts, or have clear and cogent explanations? Does any of it open my eyes to new perspectives even on things I thought I knew? Is the new story in a field they seem to have competence in?

Then, I look at the facts presented in the story in question. Assume I don't have my own sources for the facts, but I can look at how they're presented: Are they clearly explained and sourced? Do they have the logic wrapped in a lot of inverting layers (judge blocks appeal of injunction against measure that would've prohibited another activity, wait what? is that a green light or a red for the activity?) which they successfully unwrap for the reader, or are we left to fend for ourselves? Can I take some of the named sources and go look at their own writings and see if they're being quoted accurately?

Then I look at the emotional language surrounding the factual statements. Do they seem to have a horse in this race and incentive to push one side, or is their opinion merely a product of being informed about it? (I'm willing to accept that researching a story naturally produces an emotional narrative, and conveying that can be an important part of context, but the facts should shape the narrative, not the other way around.) Is there enough information that I can imagine the other perspectives that might surround these facts? Do I want to go dig some up?
Why do startups need blockchain?
Cryptocurrency was supposed to eliminate middlemen like banks and card networks and reduce transaction time and cost. At present, it is not doing any of that.
The middlemen (miners) are still required to authenticate and add the transactions to the blockchain. Since that operation is computationally expensive and there is limited processing capability, miners have to be incentivised to pick up your transaction for validating. It means huge transaction fees (gas fees) and if you want to pay less, your transaction can take anywhere from hours to days to process. It is a highly inefficient system.

When you move money from one account of a bank to another account of the same bank, all the bank has to do is change numbers against two accounts in its database. Since the bank owns and controls the database – there is no incremental cost involved. And often it is free and instant for the customers. Even when you move money across banks, banks have worked out authentication mechanisms and again, all they do is change numbers in their respective databases.

Things are different in the case of a blockchain. Since no central authority owns it, extensive computations are required before blocks of transactions can be added to the chain. That makes it expensive, slow and power-intensive. It is neither sustainable nor scalable.

Crypto-tokens are currently hot because people are buying them with the anticipation of selling them at a much higher price in the future. It's just another speculative asset. If a government or a central bank issues crypto-tokens then it is no different than fiat currency. Ideologically, a centralised crypto is not what Satoshi Nakamoto had envisioned.

Blockchain is another buzzword. It is touted as a cure to everything from poverty to climate change to alien invasion. First it was cloud, then it was AI now it is Blockchain and Web3. Why does a start-up need blockchain? What does it intend to store in a blockchain which it cannot store in a more traditional relational database? Is it decentralisation? If there is really one entity controlling the blockchain and making all the entries, it is not decentralised. A private blockchain is really pointless.

Blockchain is a very socialistic concept. Which is why it looks good in principle, but when you try to use it in real world, it turns out to be inefficient. Capitalists are in it to make a quick buck rather than actual usage. Capitalism is all about making money from anything, be it Che Guevara t-shirts or blockchain.

So, what are you planning to solve with blockchain?
I see a pretty obvious argument that this would be a content neutral regulation that serves the public good.
This is true, but only if I'm actually getting everything from the distro repository and I'm able to keep all of it on the latest version. In practice, I sadly tend to run into situations where I need stuff from other places.
Apologies. It seems like your link is your co-founder trying to promote his Hollywood startup, rather than an accurate assessment of how things are currently done in Hollywood.
Yes, something like that, except in my case you'd need a lot more than 50 hours to generate back the data.

Also I agree with your points, this assumes every participant to be honest when researching their slice, as per my edit.
Start building a consensus then Senator. Let's see some skin in the game rather than cheap platitudes.
More durable plastics are a problem, not a solution. Metal is recyclable
The report is from 2018.
I made my own silicon chip: Project Silicon Rider
Show HN: Sfizio-Homebrew Version Control Tool
Show HN: Futurecoder – A free online interactive Python course
I mean, maybe not on this scale, but this happens with checking accounts all the time. Wire the money to the wrong account #? Tough luck.
Wasn't it admitted that a major goal of Bill Gates was to be awarded a Nobel Peace prize? It came up from stories surrounding Epstein and why was Bill Gates in contact with him - for his influence, against the advise of his lawyers. I wouldn't be surprised $250M is part of that desire.
what does the labourer's perspective have to do with anything.

if there are a 100 dollars today and tomorrow there are 200. a dollars worth is halved right? or?

Got some secret insight on supply demand, that the general public is unaware of?

I would sooo like to know :-)
Would you find interesting a movie in which people shoot at cardboard figures instead of each other?
I was thinking about this as I cleaned up and managed all my backyard river rock landscaping.

I over water the front yard and porch plants, but almost forget about all the backyard plants because of the landscaping. They get watered still — it’s just they definitely look they need before I go out there.
Highlights:

- 100% free and open source (https://github.com/alexmojaki/futurecoder), no ads or paid content.

- No account required at any point. You can start instantly. (You can create an account if you want to save your progress online and across devices. Your email is only used for password resets. You can sign up separately for email updates on the home page)

- Runs in the browser using Pyodide (https://pyodide.org/). No servers. Stores user data in firebase.

- 3 integrated debuggers can be started with one click to show what your code is doing in different ways.

- Enhanced tracebacks make errors easy to understand.

- Useful for anyone: You can have the above without having to look at the course. IDE mode (https://futurecoder.io/course/#ide) gives you an instant scratchpad to write and debug code similar to repl.it.

- Completely interactive course: run code at every step which is checked automatically, keeping you engaged and learning by doing.

- Every exercise has many small optional hints to give you just the information you need to figure it out and no more.

- When the hints run out and you're still stuck, there are 2 ways to gradually reveal a solution so you can still apply your mind and make progress.

- Advice for common mistakes: customised linting for beginners and exercise-specific checks to keep you on track.

- Construct a question that will be well-received on sites like StackOverflow: https://futurecoder.io/course/#question

----

I'm obviously biased but I honestly think futurecoder is better than Codecademy or any other similar website, without even counting the fact that it's free. For example, here are some drawbacks of Codecademy:

- Still on Python 3.6 instead of 3.9

- No interactive shell/REPL/console

- No debuggers

- Basic error tracebacks not suitable for beginners

- No stdin, i.e. no input() so you can't write interactive programs, and no pdb.

- No gradual guidance when you're stuck. You can get one big hint, then the full solution in one go. This is not effective for learners having difficulty.

Unless you're looking for something targeted at children, I believe this is the best way for any complete beginner to start learning programming. That's obviously a bold and subjective statement so I'm keen to hear other opinions and feedback. What do you think futurecoder needs? Videos? Quizzes? Gamification? These are all possibilities.

------

I posted futurecoder here over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24020906

It's had a major overhaul since then, including the switch to running in the browser with Pyodide, signup being made optional, and a whole bunch of major new features (e.g. IDE mode, question wizard, Parsons problems, friendly tracebacks, linting, auto-installing imports, and multiple choice questions) and course content. While there's plenty more to do, futurecoder is no longer a 'work in progress'.
In some cases it's required such as if you're using a closed-source library that doesn't provide a static version or if you're calling LGPL code from non-GPL-compatible code.
On the more general Vinge theme, his "True Names" novella is probably overlooked compared to his novels. But, along with Varley's "Press Enter" (written about the same time) is a really good early take on the "Net" and its intersection with the real world.
I think its pretty telling about the state of defi.

That a CEO of a defi project thinks that threatening to make people pay the taxes they should already be paying is some sort of leverage.

If I were running the IRS I'd be looking at Robert Leshner to make sure he's paying all the taxes he should be on his crypto given that he thinks that threatening to report trades to the IRS(that he already should be doing) will make people return their crypto gains:)

It's extra rich that this same person told congress that they couldn't possibly report to the IRS these trades as thry don't have the proper KYC docs for traders, but when those traders have "his" crypto all of a sudden he can find out who they are:)
Can you suggest practical ways to actually ignore those people?

It seems every online community these days is full of people hyping up a crypto project for financial gain.

I tried to curate my sub Reddits and still can’t escape it in the comment threads.

Even Product Hunt is just a launching ground for NFT projects these days, crowding out interesting other product launches…
>"Having said that" ... https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37

I didn't expect anybody to get the joke. Congratulations ;-)
I read an interview with Vernon Vinge where he said he had this whole story arc with Ravna planned out that he expected to take five books in total. It’s been 10 years since the last Zones of Thought book… Although, it was longer than that between book two and book three.
Download Firmware Samsung Galaxy S8 (SM-G950F)
What, pray tell, constitutes "necessary" in art?

People act like the only point of narrative work is to tell a story and advance a plot, forgetting that some of the greatest novels, plays, and movies of all time have creaky plots and barely-there stories, and plenty of "unnecessary" stuff.
It's very strange as a threat because it doesn't make sense from an incentives standpoint.

"Pay me 20 million dollars or you'll have to pay 8 million to the IRS."

That's not a difficult calculation.

It also makes the money sound more legitimate. If this was theft or hacking, I'd be afraid of criminal proceedings. But I'm not afraid of paying the IRS money when I can easily afford it.

The whole thing speaks to the CEO's worldview in a very bizarre way.
You can opt out of Facebook. Opting out of your government is another deal, though. Also, your government control (to a large degree) Facebook and other organization.

Government matter. Facebook is just another corporation.
Movies in general have been in decline for a while and theaters have of course not had a lot of business in the last two years. But even before Covid, a lot of the business was changing and it has more to do with economics than with morals.

A few things stand out:

- DVD sales and rentals are no longer a thing. In the top days of rental videos, and straight to video movies, Sex was a key way to compensate for otherwise mediocre production; that and outrageous action. Preferably both. Also DVD sales were the bulk of movie revenue. So even the stuff that was shown in the cinema was actually optimized for that. With all that gone, it's just a lot less attractive and necessary to spend money on spicing up movies a little as that used to be mostly about beefing up rental and dvd sales.

- A lot of that stuff has now moved to streaming. There are now award winning movies that go straight to Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. And of course streaming services still provide access to plenty of on screen sex. Sex sells and when half your audience is male and the other half has their own needs on this front, basically you get specialized material for both groups. Netflix uses a data driven approach to figuring out what to serve. Apparently, sex sells ... monthly subscriptions.

- We've had the whole me-too movement and a large amount of scandals around abuse of actresses in the movie industry in recent years. So, naturally the cost and risk of on screen sex has gone up a quite a bit. There are ways around this of course.
There's a big difference between being smart and being knowledgeable. Smart is the ability to process information and make deductions. Knowledge is information itself.

Or, to put it the other way, stupidity and ignorance are two separate things. All of us are ignorant of more things than we're knowledgeable about -- even the geniuses among us.

Get a really smart person to talk about something that they have little special knowledge about, and they aren't going to seem any smarter about it than most other people.
It's not thoughtful, it is hyperbolic. That's not what is going on here and this is not crypto in general. These are smart contracts which the vast majority of crypto users have no involvement in.
> And that's too bad. Sexiness and tawdriness are both fundamental parts of the human experience and should be celebrated and explored on the biggest screen possible. There shouldn't be any shame in watching onscreen shamelessness.

I don't think that's true. At least, not the "sexiness and tawdriness" that was shown in most of the "old" movies. The article seem to argue that movies were better when they showed sex on screen, but I don't think that's true either. I think what happened is that we shifted from one warped perception of sex to another. Considering how culture and history tend to work, that's probably a cyclical movement and we may get more sex on the screen at some point in the next ~50 years.
Plants are sentient.
Yes. If you've never had a clashing Debian package build before, you've not been paying attention. I've made it my mission in life to try to get people more aware of linkers, and the fact that when you build something the one way it works on your system it doesn't mean it will work that way on someone else's.
Yeah. In that scenario the distinction between dynamic and static linking is moot. In both cases you need to update the container image and when you do you only fixed that container image and you still need to update all the other images
Yes, I see that argument as well. 1A doesn’t say “Congress may pass laws abridging the freedom of the press only when they serve the public good” but has rather stricter/broader prohibitions.
A compressed file is distinguished by being a valid gzip file with a valid hash. Such a file won’t compress a second time, so the length will remain unchanged. Then, decompressing twice will also generate the same output.
Wikipedia is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science fiction and have a fun time.
Funny. Sure seems like the “long covid” of government bureaucrats.
They do, people trade in phones for credit towards an iphone all the time.

Doing it without the meagre compensation they give now would be deeply unethical, Tesla tried something like that recently when a story emerged that someone was quoted for full out of warranty battery replacement for a broken cooling hose fitting on their cars battery and they refused to give any core charge even though the battery itself was still fully functional (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8-OkfCcRAo).
I don't think the discussion is around "art", considering the examples given in the article. It's mostly about mass media.
I expect opinion pieces opining on objectively verifiable facts to support their statements with objective evidence. This piece simply asserts with zero evidence that sex scenes are less frequent in recent movies, and then speculates at great length why this might be. But because the piece has done nothing to prove its initial assertion (i.e. sex scenes are less frequent), any further discussion predicated on this assertion being true is inherently meaningless.
Yeah, there is a very big difference between having a strong grasp of a particular domain of knowledge and being generally intelligent: that is, able to reason and make logical inferences in the absence of knowledge.