skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm an American living in Taiwan and I am concerned about the risk of China's aggression in the region, even if it stops short of a full invasion of Taiwan. I do happen to think that an attack or invasion is more likely than many "experts" suggest publicly, and could come sooner than they expect.

This said, I found the author's language curious:

> ...and what appears to be an increasingly imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Does he even know what "imminent" means?

Some of his other arguments are incredibly hyperbolic:

> If the United States continues its high-risk policy of military brinkmanship with Russia and China, the outcome, however unthinkable, might be an Armageddon that results in the end of our nation.

The end of our nation? Are China and Russia going to invade the US? Are they going to annihilate the US?

This author believes that the threat of an EMP attack against the US is "very real" and that the US is losing "the nuclear arms race"[2].

While I certainly don't think it's unreasonable to consider dire scenarios, I'd also suggest that the author might be making a huge mistake in assuming that China and Russia are dangerous because they're stronger than the US when it's quite possible that they're dangerous for exactly the opposite reason[3][4].

[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/threat-emp-attack-ver...

[2] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-and-china-are-al...

[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/24/china-great-power-unite...

[4] https://www.rferl.org/a/us-intel-russia-declining-disruptive...
Second this, Becoming Steve Jobs is the superior book. It helped a lot that the authors had interacted with Jobs over decades and also had an understanding of business and technology that Isaacson was missing.

There’s also an old documentary about the founding of NeXT that does such a great job of showing what it was like to be in the room with him as a member of a small team, and this was before he fully “became” Steve Jobs. People underestimate how much meaning can be found in being pushed hard by someone with a clear and inspiring vision.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Udi0rk3jZYM
HN isn't political?

Might as well turn the site blue for how liberal it is.

Or, more honestly turn it red for how commie it is.
I don’t remember any other countries being mentioned
That jscontroller= stuff in the DOM is Google’s internal framework called Wiz. Easily one of the worst things I’ve used in my career. It’s like a hyper engineered Backbone.js. Working with it is so tedious that passionate web developers who might fix these perf issues burn out and leave. What’s left are promo-seeking impact farmers who don’t really care about these sorts of things.
Regarding the first point, when I deleted my Disqus account and swore off commenting on Reddit and forums, that energy and time went straight to the writing I actually wanted done. You're absolutely correct that some writers may write a lot, but it isn't directed to anything useful without some kind of routine. Definitely true in my experience at least.
It’s definitely active, just today I was listening to Dave Rupert talking about a versatile element for tabs widgets (and other things) that’s really making good progress.
Whoa! I predict that the 8-second sequence of up & down chirps (YT vid 10:28) will not be popular (primum non nocere) - unless the level is a lot lower!
I hadn't read the books.

If you think about it for about 5 seconds, it makes sense swords are the only thing that are effective against shields and the explanation about fast vs slow is very clear.
Twenty-year truck driver: America’s “shipping crisis” will not end
Almost nobody pays the estate tax.

>When a person dies, their assets could be subject to estate taxes and inheritance taxes, depending on where they lived and how much they were worth. While the threat of estate taxes and inheritance taxes does exist, in reality, the vast majority of estates are too small to be charged a federal estate tax—which, as of 2021, applies only if the assets of the deceased person are worth $11.70 million or more

(Investopedia; https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/12071...)
> In terms of difficulty, writing code is maybe on average a two out of ten.

I’ve never heard talented programmers say that
> Why should capital gains get favorable tax treatment over income

My take on this is that the capital gain was not actually generated all in one year, but by taxing it as ordinary income, you are putting it into a higher bracket as though it were all generated in one year.

As an example, say your father builds a successful company, and runs it well for 40 years before selling it for $10 million and retiring. By taxing the entire $10 million in one tax year, almost all of it is in the highest tax bracket, which is anything above $500,000 for single filers. But the actual average amount earned per year is only $250,000, which doesn’t reach the highest tax bracket at all.

There are ways to balance this, of course, e.g. if you did exactly what I did in my example, and applied the income tax bracket based on the average gain per year of the securities sold. Something like that would still take care of billionaires “paying their fair share,” since you would have to divide by a lot of years to get billions of dollars in gains into a lower tax bracket.
Manjaro on the framework (first time) and Ubuntu and Manjaro on the desktop.
If it's pin damage I'd be kind of surprised. USB C has smaller pins but for power there are four each of positive and ground, instead of just one.
Zero mention of SNARKs or Zcash? Fixed denominations? Why is this a good idea?
Basically what’s happening right now?
This is the problem I have with the sugar tax. It is typically per ounce. Normally the more sugar something has, the more expensive it is. The more expensive it is, the less the sugar tax effects the price. A bottle of coke goes up like 25 cents, but a gallon of ice tea had is outside doubled.
US has stationed troops on Taiwan, leader Tsai Ing-wen confirms for first time
I think Biden is a pretty moderate Obama style neo-liberal, but that's not really true of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or a lot of representatives in congress.

I'm happy Biden won and I voted for him (well I voted for Bloomberg in the primary before it was obvious who would win and then Biden in the general), but it was looking scary there for a while. The democratic party is definitely more moderate compared to republicans (where all but a tiny handful are just trump loyalists), but that's a pretty low bar - they still have a lot of policies I don't like in addition to the woke stuff. Obviously this is a super flame-bait topic probably not good for HN so I'll leave it here. I just wish there could be principled discussion and legislating without tribal craziness. America is healthier with two reasonable parties to balance each other out.
Of course there are, someone needs to be there to nag about being no good and constantly correcting people. ;)
Well, first you'd have to find some place where it happened. I don't think there was much in that way, howls to the contrary notwithstanding. What people mean by the terms they throw around is a little inconsistent so I'm not going to hazard a guess as to exactly what the article writers think.
No one who did not come up through the dev ranks should ever be allowed to become a CTO. Period.
Seems like a huge deal for manufacturing.
The law generally defers to experts with recognized training and experience in the relevant field. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard
The government already has such power so let's quit pretending otherwise and use it for the public weal IMO.
Even if I was to buy that there's some theoretical argument that no dollar may be taxed more than once (which I don't), the income isn't the capital gains. It's not related in any way to the capital gains. A corporation may have enormous profits, and zero capital gains. It may have enormous capital gains, and zero profits. The capital gain has not been previously taxed.
Just wanted to say this was super inspiring, practical, unpretentious and to the point. My favorite HN read in a long time.
Wait, AWS sells dongles now?
> Is json code, too?

I’m amazed this is even a question. Of course it is! It’s explicitly defined as an interchange format. Its only purpose is as code.

> In an informal setting.

What formal settings are we supposed to be satisfying?

> If you are, for example, writing documentation, please refrain from doing so.

I respectfully decline this request.

> But that's entirely situational. A yaml snippet containing my list of groceries is not code.

> Yaml doesn't have to be classified as code to be testable. "We should have tests for our configuration files" is perfectly reasonable.

I mean this with kindness and sincerity, if a little incredulity: maybe your definition of code is ambiguous and warrants some clarification. To me, this isn’t a holistic definition but it certainly seems like a relevant starting point: if it has a syntax specification that machines can use, it’s code.
> Btw, what do you plan to accomplish by assaulting people who don't want it?

Endemic status of the disease, pretty obvious. It's still around but doesn't disrupt daily life that much, like other respiratory illnesses we've had to deal with all along. Curiously the people least willing to take the vaccine seem pretty confident in their ability to shut the border, but having a relatively porous border isn't actually that much of an issue with 100% vaccination.
We pretty much just use JSON exclusively, since JSON is also valid YAML (another bizarre design decision in YAML, but a blessed escape hatch for me).

That is, I suppose, a strike against YAML: we just "downgrade" to JSON and never have any issues.
I'd go further -- absent pressure, there is never any reason to trust anyone. The more pressure one faves, the more one has to trust people.
Depends on what you are working on. Coding gives you insights into things that you may / may not be able to achieve if you didn't code.

For example, we had to reverse engineer something that a vendor provided. The vendor simply provided a binary that was executed and provided some kind of output. Including the binary into our build was one solution but it was not ideal since it meant we had to install another dependency that was old and outdated (java 6). So the other solution was to replicate this in our own native language (Elixir).

When I throw that kind of work at my team, more often than not I'll get a "not possible" as an answer.

Me being me. I took matters into my own hands. I reversed engineered the binary and was able to re-construct the logic and re-wrote the thing myself in our programming language and incorporated it into our pipeline flawlessly.

Sometimes you just need to get your hands dirty.

Or sometimes you are tasked with something innovative and having the ability to code at least gives you a chance to explore things and come up with a first draft solution which you can hand over to your team to fully bake.

Coding is an essential skill and teaches you to think in ways you can't possibly think otherwise (at least for me).

If you don't code and claim you are good CTO. Well how would you know you haven't coded you cannot compare how you would do if you knew how to code. So the assessment is not a fair test.

Now someone who has coded 20 years of their life becoming a CTO but CHOOSES to abstain from coding to focus on other areas. That's someone I would be interested to learn from.
Pretty sure there are enough nukes to destroy the world a million times over, why would Russia and China attack American soil?
I don't think this is the case.

Without having written code, readcode, maintained code, thought about architecture you do not understand technology and can't be a tech leader. Only as a coder you can grok technology (I even organized "Coding for manager" workshops as CTO, business leaders thanked me for the insights they did get to better interact with technology or manage outsourcing projects).

Yes people are very important, yes software development is a people problem, yes you need to apply technology to business.

Should you write code on your job? No. From my experience - at least this was the case with me - under a certain percentage of time of coding you do not understand the system, implicit assumptions and are not very productive. I've brought down a multi-million user website as a tech leader because I thought I could still write production code :-)

Nevertheless I love love love coding and still write code every day in my spare time. Currently I write Rust code to understand the concept of the borrow checker as somethings other languages do not have (after 40+ years of coding).

Gladly all my CTO coachees have been coders, none of them write code in their day-to-day job.
No, it's not. Plenty of other people in the thread have explained the contigencies in the legislative text that mean that Sweeney's claims about it are at best misleading and at worst outright wrong.
Anything that you can point me to on how this would work? Or care to have a conversation some time? I've been working on a decentralized market place for setting up supply chains and have come to the conclusion that credit system or mutual credit on the ledgers would be quite useful. It would also be a means of moving beyond current capitalism.
Your mother could easily pay higher property taxes with a home equity line of credit. She probably should also be using that HELOC to fund a more comfortable lifestyle -- she probably needs that money more than her heirs do. (I'm assuming, given that you're posting on HN).
Inconvenient truths. There are differences between sexes? Shocker!
True, but central bank regulations could compel many entities to behave in certain ways effectively creating that control.
No need to apologize.

I tried to provide feedback based on my understanding of the project’s intent.

My bad.
TBH it was super impressive stuff at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/19970102114017/http://www.real3d...

Solid 60FPS in 1994 on the system's debut (and probably most famous) title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAcMqFTkAs8
This is a weird stance to take. What speed is allowed in your opinion? 1 month in the "dev ranks"? 1 year? 10 years?

Why gate something based on anything other than ability to deliver?
After the Koch and Dinkins admins, NYC had descended into a high crime city and it was thought it was 'endemic' but then Giuliani was elected (before he went off the rails) and cleaned up the city in one administration, so much the citizens hired him again. So, it's possible with the right recipe of Mayor, DA and Police Commissioner to do it pretty quick --but the citizenry have to have "had it" with crime, so they elect a tough on crime admin.
One time I got the CTO fired because I exposed the fact that he literally didn't know how to use a computer. To be fair, he had other issues as well. But they hired some big exec from Yahoo and never asked him anything during the interview. He was there in name only.

The actual CTO was my boss and definitely a strong coder but was deathly afraid of Java annotations for some reason. It was too "black magic" for him as he preferred to define all his Spring stuff in pages of XML and log into the servers directly to edit code in production. He also had anger issues and once slammed his fist into a metal cabinet, verbally assaulted employees and flirted with all the interns (despite being married with a kid).

The view from the office in downtown SF was excellent and I think that you should write code to be a CTO. The job isn't just about managing people. It is about having product vision. You're not going to develop as good of products if you haven't done it before yourself. Sure, there might be a few super stars out there who can do all this anyway... but that's why they are stars...

Keep it weird though.
> "wouldn't a pair of cheap cameras do this better?"

That's part of where they've gone (though the cameras are far from cheap) as well as RF, with some AI magic sprinkled on top.

I wouldn't suggest doing drone defense, but smaller-scale asset protection might be more approachable. There's what, 3000 local governments in the US? I'm sure a lot of them have had a tractor stolen from a road construction site. Or maybe if they lease their equipment you could sell a solution to the leasing company.
No. They evolved to become fat and became rhinoceros
That is a different matter since the airwaves are a scarce resource that can't be used by everyone at the same moment, therefore it has to be regulated somehow.
As an example, take the FM radio spectrum from 88 to 108 MHz; each channel has to be separated 100KHz from the next and previous ones, therefore one can have maximum 10 stations in 1 MHz, and that spectrum is 20MHz wide. The total is 200 "slots" in which fit all transmitters. Now thankfully at these frequencies radio waves don't propagate easily beyond line of sight, compared to HF which benefits from ground wave and sky wave propagation (allowing for example foreign stations reception), so -roughly- each moderately distant city can have its own 200 frequencies free of interference from the next city (state, country).
Still, we have only 200 possible stations in a place where there could be thousands of people willing to set up their FM radio, which of course is not possible. Hence the need to regulate the resource.
> In the group that took the drug, 11% needed hospitalization or an extended ER stay, compared to 16% of those on dummy pills.

Is that really promising? Very close to margin of error if not within.
> Unless you think there is a correlation between the IQ of people who are turned off by Musk and Tesla hype antics (and "faking it till you make it" kind of process) , then there is reason to believe that Tesla is in a better position to attack the problem and not Waymo.

I certainly think that the smartest and most ethical engineers in the SDC space are turned off by Musk and Tesla.

I'm sure there are plenty of unethical engineers, like Anthony Levandowski, who will do whatever Tesla needs, though. After all, Facebook still employees many of the best engineers in software.
OPAQUE was chosen because it was new and had the new "no precomputation" property. Which can be added to better PAKEs by adding an OPRF vs just sending the salt. OPRFs can be added without adding an extra trips to the protocol.

> the right thing is WebAuthn.

True, but if a good PAKE is added to TLS (it won't) then your logged-in sessions are protected by needing to solve a DLP for every password guess (ie "quantum annoyance", a property of a good PAKE). This does assume quantum computers become a thing.

> WiFi (WPA3)

They used the worst PAKE available. They even used the wrong class of PAKEs (balanced vs unbalanced (or augmented "aPAKE")).

> and it's an improvement over prior approaches.

No, it was broken but maybe it's fixed? The original version is basically "WEP 2.0" and they likely have backwards compatibility because "oops, we published a spec with a known to be broken PAKE... but it was an IEEE PAKE, don't blame us".
I have the honor to be,

your obedient servant,

-dsr-
This is not new. A lot of discussions on Twitter.
This mostly helps with avoiding hospitals. But didn't yet see studies to reduce mortality.
I'll take my chances with the corona. Don't want SSRI
If you're going to assert that the expenses aren't focused on Wikimedia's services, you should have proof that backs that up. The foundation is quite transparent about their operations, and as a former employee, I can attest that what they provide publicly matches my experience internally.

You could complain about how they're using some of that money to support the projects (the community teams historically have produced relatively little of value), but it's expensive to pay for a highly experienced engineering department, legal department, etc. For a site with the level of reach they have, they do a very good job of doing it with a relatively low cost.
That's a problem for the 2020s, then.
You don't pay estate taxes in 2021 unless the estate is worth more than US$11.7M
i740 all over again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010541
But that will make error handling more verbose.
I was team SPAKE2 based PAKEs, but I now know that SPEKE based PAKEs are better.

P.S. SPAKE2 is a balanced PAKE vs augmented PAKE (or unbalanced PAKE) like OPAQUE and SPAKE2+ (and SPAKE2+EE).
For reference, official rules are https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:RSSELF
For almost every US person, it IS a world without an estate tax. Nobody pays that in 2021 without an estate worth more than US$11.7M
I have low hopes for P=NP. I really don’t see how you can solve for example the TSP exactly to guaranteed optimality without utilizing all of the useful available information. Approximation approaches show that by discarding information you give up optimality guarantees.

There must be something in information theory to help with proving that to construct a solution to an NP hard problem you need at least that much information.
A better answer is to use time+locale for things that are supposed to happen in the future and UTC for things that happened in the past.

The reason is that things that happened in the past will have a specific moment on the arrow of time at which they happened, and UTC is as good as anything else for putting a consistent label on the arrow of time.

But, for things that are going to happen in the future, you have no way of knowing if two "time labels" that right now point to the same moment on the arrow of time might have some change that causes them to point to different moments. In this case UTC removes the ambiguity about the timezone that the time is in, but it adds ambiguity about which moment in time you're really talking about.

Let's say you want to schedule something for 9pm local time (UTC-3). So you schedule it for midnight UTC. Then your timezone shifts to UTC-2 and your appointment moves to 10pm. That's likely not at all what you intended. It's also why you need to pick a "master" timezone when you're sending invites to multiple timezones and let the rest of the times be derived from the "single source of truth" time.
https://archive.ph/lw5Pt
> These mirror-image molecules are manufactured from synthetic D-amino acids strung together in the same way as their left-handed counterparts.

This sounds like a prion? Scary! Could someone who understands the nuance better explain the difference?
Yeah, it's all client side. Which is why I was able to just leave and forget about it for so long. Was hosted on an S3 bucket. There's tons of libraries out there that does client side compression/decompression. Just search through github! :-)
Why did they not alpha/beta test? Or is that against the Apple culture? Did they really have to publish an entire line publicly ?
50% sounds crazy (and unsustainable). The women I've met in tech tend to, on average, have the same ambitions as their male counterparts - they chose this as a job/career, as opposed to having an actual passion for IT. A far cry from "my group of people" who grew up with BBS's, modems, demoscene, internet in the 90's. And I still try to hire only people who have a generic interest in computing and throw graduate resumes in the bin. Even if you discard the "passionate" ones from the equation you should end up with a ton more men, simply because of generic interest in STEM fields. Perhaps it's due to government incentives or something?
A lot of this has morphed into the unfortunately named FAST framework, which focuses on web components rather than react. However, they have both Microsoft fluent and unstyled flavors, in case you just want to style things yourself and not look microsofty
Open IP over VHF/UHF Part 5
I dislike the endless scrolling. It's a constant source of frustration when you think you have now almost approached the end of a discussion only to discover it goes on and on ...
This is long known by skeezy sales.people and they often include "thanks" as part of their signature. Thereby completly devaluing the meaning to the point i now aaaume it is disingenuous whenever i see it