skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, I thought the term was "cowboy coder," but maybe my vernacular is archaic.

Not to pile-on, but I don't understand the bizarre disparagement of computer science. There are far too many programmers, hermit or otherwise, who don't know what big-O notation is, which data structure(s) to choose in a particular scenario based on requirements, algorithm design, or the Church–Turing conjecture. I would also add variations of software engineering methodologies are obligatory knowledge of a professional programmer for situations like using strict, formalized waterfall development in life-safety systems. Credentialed Professional Engineers supervising and/or implementing critically-important code are also Good Things in such situations too.
WhatsApp, like the metric system, is a “literally everywhere but the US” thing. I’ve never once seen it used in the US.
You mean for cost-prohibitive homeless people? For people with decent incomes, 3-5 drinks a day is easily affordable. Beer is < $1.00/drink[0] and Trader Joe's sells bottles of wine for $2.00[1].

A single coffee costs $4 before tip most places I've visited in Austin.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/how-much-a-case-of-beer-cost...

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/21/two-buck-chuck-return...
I feel like we need to start differentiating between "public" personal information and more sensitive personal information (like social security numbers or other government ID numbers). The breach lists this info:

Name
Email
Location
Gender
Phone number
User ID

So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book. Honestly, at this point all of that information should just be considered public, because it obviously is.

If anything I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable, and that's really what people have an issue with, but I don't think there's a great answer to that. I mean, it's one thing to say the front of my house is public info because anyone can come by and take a picture, but it sure feels different when a high resolution photo (or heck, video feed) can be posted online that is instantly available to billions of people.
I was afraid that it meant HN depended on Facebook infrastructure somehow. If the explanation is "Facebook is more popular and people flock to HN when it's down" -- that is a relief. I don't think that is the best explanation, though.

But maybe it's a failure with wider scope than just Facebook's DNS. Or an attack that targeted both FB and HN (and others)? Wild speculation at this point.
Facebook Is Down, Along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus VR
I would assume because MS wants to have end-to-end quality control on links that are built-in to the OS.

This is the kind of edge case that would bother me to no end if I was an OS vendor because any ole program can install itself as a protocol handler. The last thing I want is to have happen is clicking something in the OS opens in a broken browser or doesn’t open in a browser at all. And the only browser I know for sure is there and works the way I want is Edge or IE. The alternative is what Windows used to do is bundle (and still does) is open up its own window in an IE webview.
There are VPS providers in the US that offer unmetered bandwidth. One quick example I could think of was Hostgator.

https://www.hostgator.com/vps-hosting
>> The problem isn't that the math is going to be changed so that the wraparound doesn't occur, but that the compiler is (eventually) going to do a larger scale optimization that silently removes your check to see whether a wrap around has occurred.

I don't need to check for wrap around, that's the entire reason for using that particular scaling for an angle measure. Same for calculating signed changes in angle diff = a - b just works.
Correct. Switch to Briar.
Would it be correct to say that FRP is about embracing effects while the regular effects systems are about trying to constrain them?
Can you clarify the "some remote" policy? Thank you.
Classic survivorship bias.
Happy to see one of my favorite composers mentioned here. One should listen to Snofrid-Op.29 (specially the last 3-4 minutes), The Bard-Op.64 and the The Oceanides-Op.73
Either many HN users are in glee over FB's potential demise

...or many HN users are also avid FB users (and now have to resort to backup sources of entertainment)
I keep getting non-dns errors from Hackner News as well. There appears to be some sort of broader incident happening?

It's not just lag, I keep getting the "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" page.

Edit: HN related thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749476
Just imagine the amount of stress on this people, hope the money really worth it.
Delta.chat is an instant messenger implemented over email. Alternatively, it's an email client that looks like an instant messenger.
No, American courts can order the production of any kind of records, and always have done so. Law enforcement goes to the court, shows "probable cause" regarding a current case, swears to the facts of the case, and the court orders some third party to produce the information. The third party is obligated to comply or contest. This is the legal process to which people are due in the phrase "due process of law".

The Section 215 powers you refer to move jurisdiction of certain matters from one court to another. That's perhaps not great but the main effect of it is giving law enforcement a more secret venue in which to seek warrants.
I don't find that reason convincing.

Recording videos in public is also often illegal in many places, yet all smartphones come with 2-7(?) cameras. The web browser lets you download pirated content from shady sources. You can post illegal text-based content (defamation etc.) in various apps. You could probably even cause some noise complaints with the alarm app.

And that's just preinstalled software.
My experience with Echopraxia is that it's significantly more confusing and complex then Blindsight. There are chunks of Blindsight that go over my head, but in general you can get the gist of it from context (and was rewarded on rereads as things progressively became clearer). Echopraxia somehow was not able to navigate the tension between ambiguity and outright confusion. I believe Peter Watts has acknowledged this as a problem in Echopraxia and spent a Reddit AMA explaining to readers what the plot was.

I do need to reread Echopraxia though, and perhaps my opinion will change after that. Blindsight was brilliant enough that it deserves the extra effort to appreciate.
Facebook down? Current problems and status. – Downdetector
My ISP's DNS server went down a few minutes after the Facebook outage, presumably because all the residential customers' devices keep querying.
It looks like a great solution to attest I have a FIDO key without exposing who I am. But how do they know I'm a human? Because I have a FIDO key? Seems like one human can buy many keys.
Activision has a big problem beyond its culture crisis: its games
To boldly go where, now, a lot of men and women have gone before.
To point 2, of the 99[.5]%:

https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/22/joe-biden/...

So Biden says in July a number which was valid 6 weeks beforehand, before Delta became much more prevalent (feel free to fact-check me there), the PDF in the WaPo URL is from late July. In your conspiracy theorist mind this talking point (he's an old geezer politician using an almost 100% number to shock...) means the government is manipulating statistics across the board.

Yeah ok mate, believe what you want.
It could be more than that. Vodafone broadband Internet (used to be UPC) is down in all of Czech Republic since about an hour. Their website is down (vodafone.cz), their mobile Internet seems slow. Coincidence?
Nobel Prize Awarded for Research About Temperature and Touch
Yeah, 8chan definitely weren't bad actors and Cloudflare definitely didn't have to make a PR statement about booting them from their services.
So, the problem is (mostly) that the sweet spot is so small, you need to have the lenses extremely close to your eyes. The lenses adjust left-right to accommodate eye spacing, but NOT forward/backward. So the only way to get the lenses closer to your eyes is to tighten the head strap. So the VR experience is actually pretty cool, but it comes at the expense of your face getting squished.
You've provided evidence that supports my position.

Different McKinsey teams were hired by different entities to do different things.

To the extent that those teams are not related or coordinating, that's understandable and not a breach of ethics.

An Accenture division can be helping to the IRS build tax compliance software while another division help companies write tax minimization software.

There are only a small number of 'Big Accounting' firms, and they all have overlapping interests.

Banks to similarly.

McKinsey, Goldman, Accenture, all the big accounting firms are always working with 'Big Pharma' and 'Government' at the same time and all of the parties know this.

While we do need to be wary and cautious about backchannel information passing etc. - the notion that there's a breach of public interest as it is being presented is hyperbole.
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are the iPhone Al Capone.

There's no technical reason software needs to be distributed this way. It's only greed.

I hope this mounting evidence leads to a single verdict from the DOJ: "no more app stores" for common computing devices.

(Please don't rehash the video game console argument.)
Hammer Factories
But your friend groups would probably be able to migrate to Signal/Discord/Hangouts/etc quite quickly if WhatsApp were to disappear, no? WhatsApp has the network effect on its side by way of existing, but that could change quickly if given a push.
I don't think Versammlungsgesetz is likely to be relevant to Congress. It's a regular event with paid tickets (primarily restricted to a somewhat limited audience), access control etc, not a public event open to all. Versammlungsgesetz is more relevant for public protests and such, which everyone can just go to (which in turn have stronger legal protections).
> beneficiaries of your standard are the actual farmers, labs, and retailers

Yes, this has been our entire focus.

> hacking some glue scripts together

We're talking about, literally, two simple JSON data models and some specifications in YAML. We don't have some mature venture-funded thing -- we have a farmer funded thing that's basically glue and some zip-ties.
quoting my earlier post:

> in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness.
And broke everything
This tweet seems to confirm it is a bgp issue...

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1445063880963674121?s...
The Honolulu office is getting ready for a long night :)
> Getting a rise out of the easily-offended is as old as time. Your Mom jokes go back centuries. Satirizing those who take themselves so seriously that they take offense at words and images is downright Shakespearean. Late 20th century stand-up comedy relied on inducing offense. Andrew Dice Clay was particularly good at this.

Sure! I don't believe anybody can object to these historical claims.

The problem is as old as satire itself: if the only people listening to your jokes are the ones who genuinely believe the positions you're lampooning, you're no longer the comedian. You're now either a fool or a willful pundit among fools.

Shakespeare is deeply funny because he knew his audience was overwhelmingly poor & common Londoners; people aware of England's class system receptive to irreverent treatments of nobility. "Get thee to a nunnery" is funny because the commoners are laughing at the portrayed impurity of the nobility; it's transgressive.

4chan's humor is transgressive, and I love it. But vc's claim to continuity with that tradition doesn't bear scrutiny: scrape away the thin layer of racist language, and there's no wit or insight. That's why only racists find it funny, and why vc finds himself in the company of & doing the work of fools.
I find it hilarious that HN assumes that MS or any company should devote effort to supporting users who hate all their core products and only use Windows begrudgingly. Why even bother, if you could leave you already would have.
They are dangerously close and may be crossing the line with these moves

mostly unavoidable bing integration, mostly unavoidable edge integration, unavoidable teams integration, bing rewards in the start menu

I'd expect lawsuits to follow in the coming months and years if they don't take some steps back

the marketshare they retain in the desktop space still places them in the classical monopoly position ( > 75%)
> the people with physical access is separate from the people with knowledge of [...]

Welcome to the brave new world of troubleshooting. This will seriously bite us one day.
> So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book. Honestly, at this point all of that information should just be considered public, because it obviously is.

With a phonebook (at least back in the day), you didn't risk having your account exposed and sold for a few dollars. Nor did that risk someone getting access to thousands, if not more, bank accounts or whatever through automation. In addition, a phonebook is easy to opt out of making things public. Facebook gives you the illusion that you can opt out of this data being public.

Edit: opt of -> opt out of
But positive social value was gained
Some preloaded apps work (like YouTube, Firefox), but stuff like settings, the lobby, etc., are very slow or display "Unable to Load" messages. Any game that relies on your friends list seems to freeze for a while, then try to carry on.
In the mid 2000s NIH was flat funded, and lots of alcohol research went out the window. I worked at a place that did alcohol research at large (mostly mitochondria/liver systems biology stuff). Mostly the idea from funders was that alcoholism is not a disease, and funding should be moved to more pressing things like cancer/diabetes. I would say half the surviving labs moved on to metabolic issues in disease, and the other half did translational medicine based on their research. This was a huge blow, caused a few retirements and closing of several labs. I had to lay off a couple of my friends (technicians).

It is surprising the alcohol industry is going to such huge lengths, and I can't remember ever hearing of such things. It would be a huge blow to your credibility at the time I was in science.
It seems like it; I have stumbled upon traders that are willing to help each other. Some traders sell membership for the members to receive "trade signals." They won't bother making a business model like this if you can monetize on discord.
>Rep. Johnson: Does Apple treat every app and every developer the same?

>Cook: “We treat every developer the same. We have open rules. It’s a rigorous process. Because we care about privacy and quality, we do look at every app before it goes on. We apply these rules equally to everyone.”
In PuTTY, Scripted Passwords Are Exposed Passwords
Is anyone else seeing knock-on effects at the other major public DNS providers? I'm seeing nslookups sent to 4.2.2.2 and 8.8.8.8 intermittently timeout if the hostname does not belong to a major website. CloudFlare DNS (1.1.1.1) doesn't appear to be impacted. For example:

[root@app ~]# nslookup downforeveryoneorjustme.com 4.2.2.2
;; connection timed out; trying next origin
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

[root@app ~]# nslookup downforeveryoneorjustme.com 1.1.1.1
Server: 1.1.1.1
Address: 1.1.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: downforeveryoneorjustme.com
Address: 172.67.166.187
Name: downforeveryoneorjustme.com
Address: 104.21.91.48

[root@app ~]#

Perhaps DNS queries are skyrocketing and overwhelming some of the major public DNS servers.
True, but my last paper phone book did not have 1,500,000,000 entries.
EU stands for European Union, meaning you are open to remote positions from Europe?
also, shout out to the Buf guys:
https://buf.build/ocpx/protocol/docs
> Due to the way the programmer’s ranking system works, an average company will have a big crowd of inexperienced people and very few who can tackle complex problems. For this reason, the vast majority of software is written by the ones who are still learning the ropes.

I wonder if another reason is just that it’s such a growing industry. The number of CS grads each year are growing, and I know tons of people who sidestepped into the profession from other degrees as well. The number of jobs too. If the job market is twice the size it was a decade ago, half the employees are going to be new no matter what. Perhaps hilariously, that huge demand means high wages, means more early retirements, means fewer senior people too.
Outside of emergency scenarios, they can forgo the treatments they don't feel are well enough explained, so I'm not sure "don't have" is entirely accurate.
Please provide an example of where Brooke Binkowski is egregiously and utterly incorrect. She's a hero to me and I'm leery of having hero's.
Wouldn't tiered matrix spaces be a good solution for this problem?
I like managed DB offerings because most of my projects rarely have the budgets for dedicated Ops people.

I'm worried that our infosec folks are about to kibosh IBM Cloud as a dependency on our projects (and when my projects started Cloudant had good Azure support still, sigh) and I'll have to scramble to figure out PouchDB replication endpoints again.

I did consider trying to bootstrap "Pouchserver" in an Electron deployed version of some of my apps. It's mostly just too bad that you can't count on Peer-to-Peer discovery to work at all in corporate environments.

At this point I have a half-baked notion of trying to build some sort of custom storage replication in CosmosDB. Like I said it's tantalizingly close to matching the CouchDB replication protocol and I keep hoping if I stare at documentation long enough something will click that there will be a really easy "hack" of a solution.

I was glancing at the documentation of RxDB's "GraphQL Replication" in case it gave me ideas. It's a huge departure from CouchDB replication, but maybe it is time to assume that CouchDB replication is not going to be easy moving forward anyway. (At least not without an Ops budget for it.)
WhatsApp and Instagram are both in FB infra. As I understand it, Instagram is fairly integrated with FB services; when I left in 2019, WhatsApp was less so, it was mostly WhatsApp specific containers running with FB's container orchestration on FB machines dedicated to WhatsApp (there was and probably is some dependence on FB systems for some parts of the app, for example the server side of multimedia is mostly a FB system with some small tweaks and specific settings, but chat should be relatively isolated). Inbound connection loadbalancing is shared though.

FWIW, WhatsApp (on phones) should be resiliant to a DNS only outage, the clients contain fallback IPs to use when DNS doesn't work, and internal services don't use DNS as far as I remember.

At one time, WhatsApp had actually separate infrastructure at SoftLayer (IBM Cloud now), but that hasn't been in place for quite some time now. When I left, it was mostly just HAProxy to catch older clients with SoftLayer IPs as their DNS fallback.
hugops for the engineers having to deal with this. It's incredibly stressful and I personally feel like they deserve some empathy, even if I don't like Facebook.

I wonder if maybe part of the lesson will be to run the root of your authoritative DNS hierarchy on separate infrastructure with a separate domain name. Using facebook.com as your root is cool and all but when that label disappears it causes huge issues.
Agreed. It's very clear on McKinsey's website that they dp work for pharma companies.
> ... "AI can't do X" until we actually achieve X and then the goalpost is moved.

This gets said often but I don't think anybody whose credible in the field actually makes statements like this.

Take Chess for instance. In the IBM "Big Blue" documentary from ~2004, they quote journalists as saying "AI can't play Chess as well as humans but if it could, then AI would be solved." Why did the techniques from Big Blue not seem to go anywhere?

I know for a fact that scientists _were not saying this_. The Lighthill Debates on AI specifically talk about why playing games well doesn't really prove anything. [0]

I do agree that OCR has improved greatly by AI but this feels very niche. Somebody mentioned defect anomaly detection in another comment and I was not aware of this. All useful for sure. Still, this doesn't amount to anywhere near the hype that was announced earlier last decade. Moreover, the economics in AI are mostly awful despite everybody's seemingly best efforts. [1]

Even if its useful in some vague sense, it's not necessarily economically useful. Amazon has ~10,000 people working on Alexa. [2] Have they turned a profit on these endeavours? I understand they can absorb the costs but its not clear to me how the economics will work out here.

ML models haven't even been useful in places where statistical methods have reined supreme such as Renaissance Technologies and other hedge funds. No large companies are using neural networks in a significant capacity to my knowledge.

Another big tell for me is the lack of any consumer products in the space. Where did they go? why are they missing? This is what I mean by "everybody is competing for the top 20 or so customers."

This is compounded by the unstructured nature of most data. Most databases are still terrible, especially at the few institutions large enough to have it and large enough for it to make a difference in their business. There should be more focus into this problem if anything. A well tuned and structured database will be many times more useful than a fancy model that needs constant retraining. But I guess its not as cool so nobody cares.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03p2CADwGF8 -- highly recommended, with many of the arguments still resonating today.

[1]: https://a16z.com/2020/02/16/the-new-business-of-ai-and-how-i...

[2]: https://qr.ae/pGJUKk -- couldn't find a better source offhand.
The title doesn't really match the advice.

The advice is separate from the number of successful people you follow online. The advice is simply to follow through with the tips you see from the successful people you follow with some tips on how to do that. Very meta.

I do find a bunch of irony in the dissing of self-help books, when you could copy-paste this entire article verbatim into like half the self-help books out of there and it'd fit right in.
Is this why facebook is down?
Agreed. It's very clear on McKinsey's website that they do work for pharma companies.
In the mid 2000s NIH was flat funded, and lots of alcohol research went out the window. I worked at a place that did alcohol research at large (mostly mitochondria/liver systems biology stuff). Mostly the idea from funders was that alcoholism is not a disease, and funding should be moved to more pressing things like cancer/diabetes. I would say half the surviving labs moved on to metabolic issues in disease, and the other half did translational medicine based on their research. This was a huge blow, caused a few retirements and closing of several labs. I had to lay off a couple of my friends (technicians).

It is surprising the alcohol industry is going to such huge lengths, and I can't remember ever hearing of such things. It would be a huge blow to your credibility at the time I was in science.

I do enjoy the author trying to look at both sides at the end.
You don’t think the security/trust argument has any merit?
Yep.

We've come full circle, where techies are rediscovering the original hatred for the Oculus, that it is tied to a social media walled garden, for some reason.