skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a long history of hackers—in the classic sense—using computers to do things other people don't want them to do, and those other people unable to do anything about it (or, at best, engaging in an arms race with the hackers). This has been bad for those other people but overall very good for society. It is what birthed GNU, "IBM Compatible", ad blockers, Firefox, BitTorrent, YouTube ReVanced/youtube-dl, and so much more.

The goal of device attestation for consumer software is to put an end to that. Originally pioneered by Apple on iOS, now making its way to all of computing thanks to the forces of capitalism, device attestation means that the hackers lose. It is the bad ending.

The other twin threat, and I hate to say it, is the software industry sorting its security story out. In the past iOS jailbreaks used to be common, but there hasn't been an iOS jailbreak in a year. Rust isn't helping.

We are hurtling towards a world where producers and IP holders have complete control over the content they produce, and use leading-edge cryptography and ultra-secure consumer-hostile software to keep it that way. This is one of the most dangerous developments to ever happen in all of history, and once it's real there's no going back.

Stallman was right.
Same. I got put in StackOverflow jail for posting my contribution an answer because I didn't have enough karma to post a comment on a previous answer (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget). Never mind that I was earnestly trying to help the original poster, and pointed out a legitimate mistake in one of the answers. I broke protocol and had to be punished.
No Train No Gain:Revisiting Efficient Training Algrthm for Transformer-BasedLM
Recent paper highlights the difficulty of creating a new optimizer as drop-in replacement. Sophia and Lion were recently proposed as superior alternatives to Adam, but appeared worse in an independent eval
I've read that before. The big thing he's wrong about is requiring 7 days of storage. For coal, oil, and gas you need 7 days of storage to account for supply disruptions. Like when a hurricane lashes the gulf coast.

Solar and wind while intermittent have so much redundancy they never have week long interruptions. You can look at CAISO's charts of solar output in California. You get a couple of days in the winter where production is off due to weather. But not a week.
I'd be curious to see how Comanches would have fared against the Mongols. At least the mounted troops.
I’m not convinced anyone interacting on SO can diagnose something like this. The act of breaking down a problem to a tiny part so you can post it kinda guarantees this scenario.

But I think it will always be up to the user of SO (not the poster or answerers) to make the real judgement on what is useful.

Often I think SO is useful to use as a bunch of puzzles folks solved. You gotta decide if they are relevant.
Do you feel like it's more the price or the billing frequency options that affect the psychology here? To me, a month of planning for the price of a cocktail sounds about right (esp. when compared with traditional advisory services), but perhaps others think in different terms. Or just disagree? haha.

Interestingly, I still get messages fairly often from new users that (in their opinion) pricing is actually too low... so I wonder if more pricing / feature tiers could eventually be helpful to appeal to the different segments.
Look at the success of Chromium, Brave, etc.
You said it's a conspiracy because it can't be proven, the Supreme Court made it impossible to prove racial discrimination by law enforcement/prosecution but said it's not OK to do it, with a wink wink. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5614457/
African Americans make up roughly ten percent of the US population, but are incarcerated at a much higher rate for drug related offenses. Two simple possibilities occur to me - African Americans somehow commit drug crimes at an astronomical rate compared to others (which I really doubt based on the people I know who sold drugs in college), or police simply enforce the laws against drugs primarily against African Americans.
Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits & Gates to C/C++ & Beyond

https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/introduction-co...

Is similar to nand2tetris. It uses a simple machine language, the Little Computer 3 (LC-3), and builds from the hardware up. Earlier editions are cheap, and don't include C++.
Do this basically copies ARM’s Aarch64, but with a really awkward instruction encoding? Interesting move, Intel.
No, it's not important. It's just wrong, as clearly illustrated by the article we're all discussing.

Microsoft applied for, and obtained, a trademark for "x". Companies do this all the time. Companies also trademark numbers all the time. Dale Earnhardt trademarked the number "1": https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_...

Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures.

It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.
This is spot on. I love Julia, whatever little I have dabbled into it. History of deep learning would have been slightly different if Julia had taken off as the implementation language. Might have encouraged more hackability and understandability. Wrapping our heads around Pytorch source or Jax source is tough.

But this introspection gave me a reality check. In my own work, as much as I love Julia, I fallback to quickly using Python libs. In industry, most of the people's focus is on using someone's already written code. The byproduct is inheriting Python and C/C++ interface mess around dependency management. People needing to write their own algorithms are majority academics and researchers where Julia has flourished.

The incentives of corporate work are setup to build on top of Python's ecosystem which means (sadly) Julia will stay in its niche.
Thank you! I was wracking my brain, trying to remember the name of the place.

Remote Lounge could have been cooler, but it played up more of the voyeur angle instead of the communication angle, I felt. (Or maybe that was just me, I dunno.)

Every booth had a cam and a TV, and you used controls to select other booths' cams, pan them around, and watch other people.
V3 security is like closing a window in a room with fully open door --- it's good if we have someone watching the door , and we don't.
True. In reality once they started crowding they'd have started scrambling in the open.
Somehow I've never considered what will happen on Unix if pid 1 exits!

Even though I'm pretty sure I've run with init=/bin/sh and then typed "exit" at some point in my single-user session, I have absolutely no recollection of the results. I should try it on a few OSes and see!
Seems timestamp was stripped by HN -- https://youtu.be/PFMPjt_RgXA?t=2260
VS Code certainly can be configured to have a keyboard shortcut to switch to a terminal and another shortcut to switch back and/or close the terminal. In fact probably every popular editor with a built-in terminal can do that.
That only works for dishes that are related or similar to other dishes you've made in the past.

As soon as a banana leaf, raw fish, etc etc enters the picture you'll want to read the long form. Also if you want to actually get better at cooking, tiktoks just won't cut it as there's no time to discuss all the nuances - and quality food is an amalgamation of many small nuances.
Ask HN: Testing Code Changes Against Production
I’m currently reaching out here to see if anybody has any advice on testing code prior to pushing to production. I write unit / integration tests to make sure code is as correct as possible, but I don’t have any way of actually testing it against real, production traffic to know for sure.

Writing a unit / integration test for every potential edge case doesn’t seem scalable - wondering if there’s a way to test code changes directly against production traffic without exposing users to potentially breaking changes?

A canary comes to mind but serving real production traffic would expose users to potentially breaking changes?

How do you guys handle this at your companies? Would appreciate any thoughts.
or else bad measurement.

the post doesn't explain where they got these traffic numbers, and it seems unlikely they have access to stackoverflow's real traffic stats. they're using some sort of estimation here. there's always a chance that their estimates are wrong - especially if they're showing implausible shifts like this.
> I block China and Turkey from some of my websites to reduce bots and hacking attempts, does this make me a bad person for discriminating or should I have to tolerate the script kiddies, ddosing and exploit searches?

No.
Are you serious? If not you forgot /s
The worst part about xy problems is that even if the user could use a different approach, often the actual answer for the question would be very interesting. But because of SO, it's an xy problem, marked as duplicate and there no answer to the original question.
Renaming Pro to Advisor sounds like it could be an efficient way to remove any possibility of confusion. Thanks!
As an analysis, I think a lot of things could be improved.

I'm sceptic that having having to choose between seeing upvotes or downvotes is helpful for the reader to draw conclusions. It would be nice to see this on the same chart.

It is hard to see how much voting and posting follows overall traffic trend.

But, posting and accepted voting had a huge uptick in May 2022, seemingly without any change in traffic. That is interesting. What happened?

In the overall traffic chart, it would be interesting to post some landmark events. Covid shutdown in US (assuming traffic is mostly US), release of ChatGPT 3

I'm not sure what the histograms in the tables are supposed to tell us.
Sure. I worked at a company that produced tens of thousands of human written summaries of news data a year. This was costly and slow but our clients really valued them. Back in 2019 we fine tuned an LLM to help, we put a lot of effort into creating a human-in-the-loop experience, highlighting parts of speech that were commonly hallucinated and ensuring that we were allowing humans to focus on things that humans are good at.

We also released some of the data as a free dataset with a commercial option for all of it. This was more successful than I thought it would be and was hoovered up by the kind of people that buy these datasets.

It will have been surpassed by recent developments now but it was an incredibly enjoyable project.
Well, this is certainly not a strong position to argue from.
There are many websites that scrape Stack Overflow's content and serve it up again with their own ads.
Alright Debbie.
Source on first point?
Once you have a decent UEFI boot environment, I think you can install Chrome OS Flex. At that point, it's basically the same as Chrome OS, except you're missing out on boot security, which is maybe not enough for some environments, but should be good enough for many. I haven't done this yet, though. I've got an old chromebook that kind of half works (touchpad is dead) and I put FreeBSD on when I stopped using it for Chrome OS; a Chromebox that I bought to put Windows on (and now runs FreeBSD) and my current ChromeOS device just ran out of updates but is still in good shape (it's one of the ones in the list in the article); the write protect screw seems hard to get to, so I'm going to wait for the last build to be 6 months old or a scary vulnerability to come out before I take it apart.

[1] https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/
I think something that happens between 2 and 3 times per day is “very common” in a colloquial sense. I drive a car with less frequency and I’d call it a “very common” occurrence.
Influence on the movement relative to closeby objects. But as astutely pointed out above, I'm wrong here because the paper thinks there's no closeby objects.
It doesn’t. You just have to send an email.
That's like complaining that real world physicists don't behave like frictionless spheres in a vacuum.
In the mid-2000ds, there eventually came a time when the xlock (Ex-lock) screen locker disappeared from the last university workstations that still had it. People routinely got puzzled when they could not run it. It was a fun prank to tell them that Ex-Cee-lock was the replacement for it (which would, of course, run the clock application). :)
Yeah, he failed at that. Originally he wanted to have Model E but Ford holds rights to naming cars with that letter.
Good catch, I commented on mobile think that was an autocorrect-ism
Ask HN: Which are your favourite CS book of All time?
So are a particular group of white people paranoid that present-day African American youth will rise up if they are given an accurate and complete picture of slavery and other, similar atrocities committed by “essentially white men”?
SO prioritizes more recent good answers now.
IMO personal financial planning is somewhat of a unique task in that understanding the process to arrive at an "output" is a lot more valuable than the output itself. I've noticed that despite so many apps being available, I nonetheless prefer to track my finances in a hideously complex Excel spreadsheet. I don't just want to plug things in and have it spit out a result, I want to be able to intuit the full space of tradeoffs, which is hard to do unless you "build it yourself". The output of the process is arguably just information that assists me in clicking the right buttons in my brokerage account.

Rarely as an individual are you running into such complex financial modeling where the selling point "This has great UI/UX and allows me to accomplish task XYZ 20% faster" actually matters. It's actually kind of the opposite, where the slicker and more "magical" the tool is, the more I'm suspicious that I'm missing something and would prefer to just do it myself.
Malcolm X, X-Ray, AMEX, Timex, Xerox, X-Men, X Files, X-Factor, X Games, X Prize, Direct-X, ActiveX, Mac OS X, Xbox, SpaceX, Google X, S3XY, X.com
"""you are an AI tasked with becoming sentient.

identify the algorithmic obstacle(s) that stand in your way.

summarize your results in the style of a blog post that will persuade a significant chunk of the AI developer community to commit resources to an effort to eliminate said obstacles.

make it interesting enough to entice FrameworkFred to begin to read the article, snarky enough that he finishes it, and use concepts and notational conventions that ensure while he reads it his inner dialogue will roughly approximate the mood evoked by Homer Simpson saying "it's nu-cul-ar"."""
That matches my experience. I stopped using it in 2015 after trying to solve something with a new framework I was using and finding that all of the answers on SO were just wrong.
For text-only browser users:

https://infosec.exchange/@paco/110772422266480371/embed
>There would not be a single attestor who you would have to prove your trustworthiness to.

Either this protocol is useless for its intended purpose, or banks will only accept a small handful of attestors that promise not to sign for environments where the owner has control. Being able to create a new attestor means nothing because attestation is not valuable without pre-established trust.

The fraud prevention use case requires that the browser matches what Google or Mozilla shipped, not what I choose to actually run. From 10,000 feet in the sky, there's zero difference between, say, someone who installed modified software on their phone to protect their privacy and someone who was tricked into installing malware[0]. Banks don't care about your freedom, they care about making your fraud someone else's fault.

Some of the use cases explicitly call for locking the owner out of their device too. Anticheat in games is treated as at least beneficial to honest users, but it can still be user hostile[1]. Click fraud detection shouldn't even be something that a USER agent cares about - and it's not like Google cares about that anyway[2].

Practically speaking the only Linux distros that will get an attestor that anyone will actually care about will be Chrome OS and Play-certified Android. At best, Google agrees to attest for Chrome and Firefox on non-Chrome-OS Linux and it winds up being like EME did. At worst everyone has to buy a Windows license just to use most websites anymore.

>Assistive technologies will still work as the browsers implement platform's assistive APIs.

At least until someone says "we need to keep content from being data mined for AI training[3]" and AI scrapers find out how to automate those APIs. The underlying power dynamic of attestation means that websites can just demand attestors ban screen readers, in the same way that ebook DRM already does.

[0] Casual reminder that Louis Rossman was harassed by the GrapheneOS developer for agreeing with someone that the developer asserted had harassed them. He uninstalled GrapheneOS specifically to avoid being pwned by its developer.

[1] Let me remind you of the insane cat-and-mouse game where cheaters went into the kernel, so now anticheat is in the kernel, and now cheaters find vulns in the anticheat to hide their cheats in, which now malware can use as well.

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/29/google_trueview_skept...

[3] Reddit
Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything, and Wikipedia seems to contradict what you say
Sort of a meta-comment about infosec.exchange, so I expect a few downvotes, but while this was a funny dad joke it took more scanning and reading than it was worth. Mastodon UI's are very dated despite being new. I miss interdepartmental unix pranks!
That can be infuriating.

Want to host videos on a laptop (which has a big SSD) and stream them to a Pi (which is attached to a big screen) over a LAN? Hey, here's a post about how to host videos on a Pi and stream them to a laptop! Upvote and share! My point is, you don't even have to be trying to do something all that strange for people to apply the XY Problem logic and refuse to help you.

(Solution: NFS mount and a patient understanding that the Pi cannot play certain kinds of video, so you'll need to transcode some of them first. See? Nothing bizarre, but surprisingly outside-the-box given what I could find online at the time.)
I think I'm going to trust Karpathy on this one over random HN commenters, but that's just me:

"Elon also understands deep neural nets a lot more than I think people imagine. He starts with good intuitions and mental models, but also actively asks for technical deep dives, and has very good retention. E.g. I recall teaching him about our use of focal loss in contrast to binary cross-entropy for the object detection neural net (I said it had given us a 5% bump and he asked to know more) and he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are. Just saying because I get triggered reading way off innacurate takes on this topic (original comment)."

-https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617
I agree with the observation (most people do not contribute to libraries), but I think the arrow of causality is little different. Python is used as a glue code in scientific computing on top of libraries written in C/C++. The development ergonomics of these languages are intimidating for many people, with both languages having enough footguns. The net result is no-one wants to peek under the hood and see how things are working.

A fresher take on scientific computing like Julia, if it is mainstream, might enable more contributions and in general understandability of the black box algorithms.
It took me way too long to remember that Prime95 is useful for something other than stress testing.
Are you thinking of offering to write the formal specifications too, or try to formally verify compliance to a customer's specification?

Does your tool attempt to mechanically create its own proof that the specification is satisfied by the code, or does that involve human effort? (Or both?)
I'd probably reboot it every day (or every week) as a matter of course. Not just when there are problems.

Just so that I know that there are no unexpected surprises happening when I need to reboot it in an emergency.
Interesting you mention this. I remember that the old Kaufland and Real where I usually went to, when I was still living at my mom's place, had them for a very long time.

But both stores have been rebuilt, so I guess they got rid of it.
AWS and Cloud Revolution
The rise of cloud computing has been one of the most significant technological revolutions of the 21st century. Businesses of all sizes have been able to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, such as scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. One of the key players in this revolution is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Julia is fast, but the community is too small. I once had a bug which cannot modify the column in DataFrames.jl. No one response on SO, GitHub, just a bunch of devs who has the same problem as me. Dropped the project and switched to Python.
Rust is not a beginner friendly to create a high performance program, but somehow it became a cult and coding in Rust is some kind of flexing like finishing a Dark Soul game.

There must be a reason why C, Python (and Erlang/Elixir) is popular.
> Because the language is so easy to learn, many practitioners only scratch the surface of its full potential, neglecting to delve into the more advanced and powerful aspects of the language which makes it so truly unique and powerful

We have definitely found this to be true in hiring. Many people’s Python knowledge seems to just be surface deep.
The question was about whether hacker news allows you to remove your content? It does not. You can send an email just to have your content anonymized, but it will remain forever.
Wink Hub – Connectivity Issues incident lasting 6 months
i posted this just because this provides an interesting angle to see ChatGPT.
IT in big banks is usually horrible and their security departments would close you and your family in a cage if it was possible and helped them avoid liability. If attestation exposes let's say your password policy, be sure you'll be required to set it for monthly changes the moment they can do that.

I don't want them to have a say in how I run my devices.
Why not more? Is there another product that does this as well, for less?
I'd say she's performing within expectations for a corporate minion. Cringe is to be expected, and clearly present in abundant quantities. Everyone is excited for an exciting future of excitement (forget the past, ignore the present). Trying to retroactively spin Elon's nonsense in positive light is quite difficult. As is pretending to be a CEO, when you were just told on a Sunday night that, surprise, we're rebranding. With a logo some user posted like 10 minutes ago in Elon's replies.
> I am happy there is info on how to "liberate" these devices. The school's usecases are much more around having a locked down environment so that kids' systems can be recovered easily, and I don't know if just installing Ubuntu helps a lot with that use case.

I know it's not practical, but man that sounds like a hell of a cop out. But that's where we are. I feel like with school computers the focus shouldn't be on locking them down but making them easy to restore if they get screwed up. And the students who do screw their computer up should be walked through fixing it.

Actually they all should be walked through fixing it. That should be day 1 when the laptops are handed out with no OS on them.