skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really agree with 'collapse of human civilization; apocalyptic predictions due to fossil-fueled global warming, more like a rapid degradation in living standards for the vast majority of people on the planet, do to the known list of climate-related issues: decreases in agricultural production largely related to heat waves and drought, and infrastructure damage due to flooding and fires and extreme weather.

This is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, and the intersection of that and continued human population growth is likely going to put pressure on populations to migrate to more livable zones, and that will create the kinds of tensions like to lead to widespread warfare and possibly even genocidal actions.

Now, can some of this be technologically mitigated? Absolutely. It's entirely possible to run the global economy without fossil fuels. The major sources of replacement energy would be wind/solar/storage, and nuclear in some regions (massive expansion of nuclear is just not feasible, sorry enthusiasts, but that's the reality - there's not that much high-grade uranium ore around, breeder concepts are implausible, fusion is nowhere in sight, and the cost equation favors solar and wind in the vast majority of regions, from the equator descending polewards).

However, that would upend the economic status quo in a remarkable way. All the petrostates that live off oil exports and oil production would have serious readjustments (and this is non-ideological, it's true for the USA, for Saudi Arabia, for Venezuela, for Russia, for Iran, etc.).

Imagine if we got serious about eliminating fossil fuel use globally. Well, one obvious first step would be a ban on the international trade in fossil fuels, right? Who would agree to that? All the fossil fuel corporations I know of are planning on maintaining current levels of output for the next 30 years, as well.

Regardless, we could very plausibly reduce fossil fuel production in the USA by 3% per year if we also increased solar/wind/storage by 3% per year, while maintaining most of the current nuclear fleet. Then, in 30 years, the USA would produce zero fossil fuels. It's entirely doable with existing technlogy, but would require as much investment as say, the military-industrial complex currently gets.

As far as computer tech and programming, I really don't see that being fundamentally impacted; if there's an energy / material crunch then it will just become more expensive to buy a computer or run a datacenter, and it'll be more restricted to key uses (managing energy grids, running factories, etc.). However, running a chip production line off solar power is entirely feasible.
It's done now btw if you are curious.
Focus on knife crime, robberies, and poverty please. We can prevent kids from possible gambling after that.
What's in a name? Glimmers of evolution in naming babies, choosing a dog
> The gap between what used to be boring and not narrowed a lot. Of course there's still new non-boring tech, but somehow it all feels a bit less paradigm changing to me.

What about new tech that's boring by design? To me, that kind of feels why Go succeeded: it didn't attempt to solve all of the world's problems, merely become a relatively simple language that one can pick up and be productive in reasonably quickly, while also having a decent amount of batteries included.

Over the years, there have been relatively few major changes (generics come to mind, but those don't really break much old code at all) and it's remained somewhat stable/boring throughout the years.
As soon as you get something weird though, the rabbit hole is forever
At work the telecom guy was proud of the telephone number he gave me ("very easy to remember!" he said). Well, it turns out it was one digit off of the local Alcoholics Anonymous help line. I had digit "1" and AA had "7". I got a lot of drunken phone calls and voice messages. All depressing since they were asking for help. Figured it out after a few calls, but from now on I'll take the ugly telephone numbers.
I don't get this. My work email is on exchange, but I haven't used outlook for 15 years - I access web based exchange from firefox on my linux laptop
For locking down the machines so the kids don't mess them up. For pushing policy down when they need to change something. All of the stuff that's routine for an AD administrator.
So... I tend to think that social media deserves to be ranted about and that teh corporations are, in fact, Actually Bad, so I'm pretty forgiving of those parts. (And, in fact, I like that it gets duplicated in people's own little ranty ways -- it creates a nice document trail of the folk understanding of these issues) However,

> fetishizing of the early, rather exclusive and limited web

and

> the same enthusiasts bemoaning all the "terrible" websites by the wrong sorts of people

I will cede are quite real -- things like https://250kb.club/ hostile to images, everyone being convinced that even progressive use of vanilla JavaScript -- indisputably part of the idiom of the web -- is an evil... hell, we can count all of the "how dare you Wordpress" scorn...

the aestheticization of the technical foundations of people's expression seems like a great hobby for techies (explicitly, in [Gemini]) but a bad thing to have influencing actual ordinary people trying to use computers to do stuff.

[Gemini]: As a core principle! "A client comfortable for daily use which implements every single protocol feature should be a feasible weekend programming project for a single developer."
Towns choose to continue using lead pipes all the time and pay for water treatment that makes them safe.
What is the technology behind this? Did they just port over the game using pure JS?
Looks excellent! This is my major gripe with Stow as well.
Also curious on how it compares to Aerospike.
I can count on one hand the number of teachers that I had in high school that would be able to maintain the use of open source software for their classrooms.. one did (eclipse for CS AP) and the other was the web design prof who had a decent understanding of computers.

The rest of the teachers and actually many of the students too were not technically inclined enough to be able to deal with the issues that can come up in open source software, and that would've for sure overwhelmed the like two IT dudes who were already busy regularly having to fix projectors and SmartBoard problems
OK, how often? Seems like a relatively infrequent issue, although at the scale of cell phones it certainly happens "often".

But you aren't really screwed, you can recover your accounts. You still know your password, you likely have an associated email, you may have even written down your recovery codes.
After reading through the post, I think that more, if not almost all, posts should be in plain text.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=OGvy0sJfSMo
FreeIPA combined with something like ansible will do it.
Fun fact: in the beginning of the 90's some Finnish telecom operators sold people short phone numbers, such as 050 1984. Today there exists a black market for these "lyhytnumerot" and if you want one, you'll have to pay thousands for it. But they exist and they still work.
I am a Java developer (unfortunately :)) but I don't think I will be running anything extremely demanding on my personal laptop. I might rent a VPS and ssh into it for a heavy stuff. Not sure about how much it would cost.
Aside nit-pick: I think is dangerous call anything "db" if is not safely stored with Acid.

People not read docs neither know the consequences of words like "eventual" or "in memory" and star using this kind of software as primary data stores, instead of caches/ephemeral ones...
For _school_ use the extra functionality is basically irrelevant. (Excel for some college level courses is an unfortunate exception.)
> Just wanted to follow up on my note from a few days ago in case it got buried under all of those e-mails about the flood. I’m concerned about how the Eastern Seaboard being swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean is going to affect our Q4 numbers, so I’d like to get your eyes on the latest earnings figures ASAP. On the bright side, the Asheville branch is just a five-minute drive from the beach now, so the all-hands meeting should be a lot more fun this year. Silver linings!

I... I don't think I'm psychologically prepared for tolerating the fauxptimism of corpospeak under the Slow Motion Apocalypse.
The prevailing advice seems to be “Hurry up and be profitable please.”
> what is its alternative?

Accepting that we won’t know everything (but also accept that there are things we don’t know yet and that will be known in the future, and that it’s ok to change your mind in the face of new evidence).

Actually, it’s not really an alternative to empiricism, but I don’t thing that empiricism has this particular weakness.
Slowing down the global economy wouldn’t benefit the elites. Still though they might have their liferafts planned that none of us are going to be welcome onto.
I used to work out at a gym in the same building as my job. During lockdowns I switched jobs to a company that doesn't have a gym in their office and is mostly remote. I bought a power rack that got shoved in a dark corner of my basement and find I'm working out more regularly now than I ever did when I had to go to a gym during my workday.
Nice project, congratulations. I think there's definitely a use case, and for those crying 'Youtube spam', it's going to get expensive quite quickly if that's your application. One thing I would say though, is that your pricing could be improved. I would take a long hard look at Loom's pricing. It's designed to encourage both use and virality. Which are both essential to scale up. Don't limit the free trial to 7 days, and increase the number of free videos and time limit. But restrict distribution and make the watermark the motivator to shift to a paid plan. Lots of things you can play with to test adoption and referral.
Don’t know why we just don’t give people a laptop and a login for the web services they need. If they can run a laptop at home just fine why does it need to be any more locked down than that for school work? And what policies do you need to just run a web browser? It’s not the NSA.
> I find the idea of having a file system full of links in it a bit odd...

Windows has the same concept of a PATH, which is where your OS looks for binaries. The difference is that Windows development is, most of the time, not CLI driven, especially if you use Visual Studio and other GUI tools.

Development in Windows is a completely different beast to Linux/Unix.
Non-profit here. Getting an E5 license is simply a no brainer. It’s insane.
I believe Zorin Grid will be exactly that! When I first heard about it, it appeared to be more education focused and now appears to target education and enterprise.

https://zorin.com/grid/
The voice of the Gods
Because they don't need to care about consequences. No matter how high the sea level rises, enough money gets you a higher place to stay.
That last link is so upsetting. Not just because of the racial composition, but also because of the assailant/victim ratio being 25/220, which means an average of 11 victims per assailant.
> maybe we should teach the students how to use tools that work without all this extra cost and nonsense.

Maybe we oughta collectively write better open source software if we want to opine on what schools should do? Gimp doesn’t have to suck, but it does. I say that with true love for gimp and admiration for the people who write it, and I can’t complain about it because I’m not helping write it. (But that is an option, you and I could contribute to gimp.)

Part of the problem is that neither of your analogies are relevant in practice. Gimp isn’t a cheaper less automatic Photoshop, it’s a tool that often doesn’t meet professional workflows at all, and certainly wasn’t made kid friendly. It’s not the same tool and can’t do the same things. Also my kids were taught both gimp and photoshop, and they hated gimp. (And adobe makes photoshop available to schools for relatively cheap, compared to retail.)

The analogy about the software being serviceable is not going to fly in schools. Submitting patches is not something teachers can do. Submitting bug reports isn’t either. So what good is a theoretical idea that the software is open? The only thing schools can do in practice is pay money for support. And money is the single biggest problem they have. Vague concerns about privacy and lock-in are just way down on the list of school & teacher priorities, right? I’m wildly in favor of having good open source software, of avoiding education market capture by for profit companies, and having insanely better privacy controls. Open source sounds awesome, but I think it needs to improve before we start demanding that people use it or teach to it.
Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces prevented 95% of wifi attacks
Loot boxes have been defined as “features in video games which may be accessed through gameplay, or purchased with in-game items, virtual currencies, or directly with real-world money”. They often appear as chests, crates, or card packs.

This definition is way too broad. It would move ALL RPGs into the category of “gambling”. The definition should be narrowed to only include real money transactions that can be (directly or indirectly) traded for loot boxes in game.

We don’t regulate gambling video games as gambling. The distinction we always make is whether or not real money is involved.
Cross Platform GUI in Go Inspired by Material Design
Not for long: https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography

The cryptographic implications of QC are absurdly exaggerated.

QC has no practical impact on symmetric (AES, ChaCha) or hash (SHA2, SHA3, Blake) algorithms. Impact is isolated to number-theoretic asymmetric ciphers of certain types (DH, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA, etc.) and even there practical attacks would require very large, fast, low-noise quantum computers. The link I posted above is to a project to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack, rendering the whole thing pretty much moot.
This is a very poor analogy. The benefit Linux is offering is marginal and even in terms of cost which can be recuperated or rather offset by hiring more professionals .
Particle counts increased what looks like quadratically with power/weight and volume increased linearly with power/weight.

The number of virions in these particles was not measured. So I think we have an upper bound of cubic growth, and since the air velocity also increased linearly, information about particle size given air velocity would also be helpful. I imagine that particle size at least goes down with air velocity, so I think more realistically, the increase in number of airborne virions increases somewhere between linearly and quadraticly.

>While aerosol particle emission is a major contributor to that risk, it is not the only one, as infection risk also depends on the concentration of the pathogen in the exhaled aerosol particles. So, ideally, others and we would have measured aerosol particle emission and the SARS-CoV-2 titer in aerosol condensates of infected, COVID-19 patients. However, we were unable to perform such an experiment safely.

Kind of a bad study, in my opinion. It is not impossible to get in vitro estimates for these quantities and include them in your analysis.
The website/game appears functional, from a few minutes of experimenting, with the main LCD starting a puzzle. What's the split between the hard-registration, and playing the game?

edit: After you complete the "first challenge", you you told to provide your email and wait. Not sure if the intent is to bypass this or something, and what's a game vs what's not?
And acid attacks
Why not both? It's not like the whole government is one dude and he can't do two things at once.
Guys, I am the author of the project. Would love to answer any questions you have. Meanwhile will try to do it by replying comments below.
The issue is figuring out which assets they have and are they the true owner. If you have assets distributed across dozens of banks and other parties who are holding them for you, this becomes incredibly difficult and rife for abuse, especially when you have other non-professional/non-traditional intermediaries holding assets for you, or for whom you are exchanging favors with.

Basically compiling the list of the assets they hold and verifying it is the biggest issue here. It is definitely not at all simple -- in fact it may be deliberately obfuscated for "reasons."
> $100-$500 is a drop in the bucket

My fully-funded doctorate's federal research grant (Brazil) pays around 450 USD per month (cf. Valores das bolsas no país [1]).

[1] https://www.gov.br/capes/pt-br/acesso-a-informacao/acoes-e-p...
I'd love to agree with this but almost every experience I've had with an open source project that has a complex GUI has been painful. Tried to switch from Sheets to Libre Office Calc and it's like going back to an incredibly buggy Excel, with a downgrade in UX/UI.

PS. Why is this post a .txt file? I can't even click the links.
MIT is not viral and it's what makes it so popular, you trade a copyright notice somewhere for the right to re-license to any license of your choosing, that makes it the opposite of viral if anything.

> And is copyleft really more ideological than permissive licenses?

They are equally as ideological, but copyleft is definitely "louder" in a sense since it actually forces people to play along.

> Copyleft still leverages copyright to its advantage, which can be seen as validating the usefulness of copyright

Copyleft is an unfortunate name but the fact that it validates copyright doesn't invalidate itself. In a way, copyleft leverages copyright to fight copyright, though that's not really accurate. It's fighting a popular usage of copyright.
What, exactly, makes Windows so bad you compare it to a “lead-laced watter supply”?
I'm no expert but aren't there literally dozens upon dozens of those? Nextcloud, Zimbra, Kolab, etc. for example? [1]
There are hundreds of companies that provide nextcloud hosting with support alone [1]...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software...

2. https://nextcloud.com/providers/
My understanding:

OLE 1.0 in the Windows 3.x era (which was a predecessor to COM, but not yet COM, and an evolutionary baby step between DDE [passing data through Windows messages] and COM) did not use "the" Registry but more complex DLL VTABLEs and INI files.

Meanwhile the NT Registry was built for the NT Kernel settings store, and primarily just the NT Kernel.

But COM did think to use the Registry as a central store of COM component registration. In part because the Kernel may need to call COM components sometimes. Largely because COM relied on it, the NT Registry was then backported (sideported?) to Windows 95.

So yes, I agree with you that my understanding is that COM is largely to blame for the inflation of the NT Registry from "just a Kernel data store" to something larger.

But my understanding is that while COM still needed a central registry, the Registry was never intended to replace INI files. That was a combination of accidents/mistakes by general developers at the time:

1. The Windows 1.x to 3.x INI reading/writing functions developed for a single user operating system had an unfortunate default to reading/writing files out of the current working directory which in Windows 3.x was still often C:\WINDOWS (but sometimes the application's install directory)

2. Windows 95 (correctly) added permissions restrictions to C:\Windows and C:\Program Files and asked developers to start using User folders instead (such as %LocalAppData% and %Documents%)

3. The INI APIs stopped working by default because they still defaulted to C:\WINDOWS or application folders for backward compatibility with Win16 apps.

4. Developers misunderstood this to mean that INI files were dead (because of those bad defaults causing the APIs to "glitch"/not work as expected/not work at all in Win32 apps)

5. Developers saw COM registrations going to the Registry and thought that was the replacement for INI files (in part because OLE 1.0 had used INI files in that registration way)

6. Because the Windows 95 Registry was already a weird port/fork of the NT Registry there weren't enough eyeballs on it from the NT Kernel team to try to push the brakes hard enough against the accidents/mistakes above

Certainly the cat is more than out of the bag this many decades later. But the moral of the story is that the Registry as used for application configuration (as opposed to mostly Kernel configuration) is an unhappy accident. Unhappy for the NT Kernel team that tried to optimize the Registry for Kernel operations only to see it flooded by application developers. Unhappy for application developers because it made install/uninstall more complex, baroque, and ugly than it ever needed to be in Windows 95+. Unhappy for users in how messy the Registry can get (when not sandboxed) and how easy to accidentally corrupt it can be when trying to "clean" it.
The Scholar’s Stage: A Primer
> The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is impossible, please study how the very same thing happened with electricity, planes, cranes, trains, ships, automobiles, lifts, food processing, buildings, and, for that matter, driving a car.

But the people responsible for the Colonial Pipeline are not Software Engineers. SWEs are just workers. Why don't we start to hold the people accountable who extract wealth and give orders? Power and responsibility should go hand in hand.

SWEs _want_ to engineer, make things more performant and secure. They _want_ to say No to unnecessary features. This takes time, trust, money. What about the owners? The board? The executives? They make the decisions, want fast growth, more features, less expenses, software to be a commodity and engineers be interchangeable. Managers and sales people, who buy and sell software packages with fancy names on them to get a promotion, don't do the soul sucking work of integrating with a buzzword driven hodgepodge. Shouldn't they be held accountable first?

With that out of the way...

The example in the article is the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. A cyber _attack_. Are bridges, toilets and buildings generally built to withstand arbitrary hostile attacks?

But Lack of understanding of how decisions in the IT industry are made, ridiculous examples and bad analogies aside: I still think there is a good point hidden in there somewhere. Namely that good engineering takes time, investment, auditing, standard processes and a strong technological foundation. But we are not there yet. Nobody is laying the foundation to get us there. It's just iterations upon iterations and layers upon layers, features upon features.

Before we can even start to think about licensing SWEs, we need to start thinking _very_ long term. Much of the SWE effort is funneled into short term monetary gains, while fundamental technologies like OS's common file formats, browsers, firmware and all that stuff is rarely reconsidered and just patched over continuously. The foundations are _inherently_ insecure and the mindset is wrong. Familiarity and productivity often take precedence over simplicity and robustness. Everyone thinks they are entitled to telemetry and other user data and most software is closed source. How do you reason about black boxes? How do you trust them?

Also who will do the licensing? The people who tend to push for these things while shitting on other software practitioners don't inspire much confidence IMO.

I have so many questions...
DF also has a noval eviction algorithm that combines LRU and LFU which could be great for caching use cases.
ScyllaDB and Seastar was my insipration when I thought about the architecture for Dragonfly