skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started "programming" in 1982 on a VIC-20, I taught myself C++ in 1991 and programmed as a hobby until I switched majors in University. Then I moved from Job to Job once I stopped learning/progressing. Along the way I made many contacts at a diverse group of companies.

I started at a medical device company reverse engineering MRI/CAT scan data for a 3D device used in brain surgery. Then I worked for a company that specialized in Bug Tracking and Project Management. Then a company that engineered optical archival storage discs with a 100 year life span. Then I managed a team developing a video keno/poker gaming machine that was available to the Nevada/Montana market. Then I managed a team in reverse engineering cell phones for forensic analysis. Then a medical company that made a continuous glucose monitoring system for critical care environments. After 1 year working on their firmware, I was brought back as a consultant to rescue the Software department as a Director of Software Engineering over product and manufacturing.

Through all these jobs I was well liked and since then have been contacted by people I used to work with for consulting work. And now I'm getting consulting work from other consulting job referrals.

I currently charge $180 an hour plus expenses, but come January 1st will be raising it to $200 an hour because of the inflation and the fact it's not stopping. In terms of stating new increased prices; through the years I've informed clients to have them tell me it's too much. Then 30 days, 9 months come back and just sign a new contract at the new rate. You have to be willing to walk away, you have to have money in the bank so you don't "need" their work, but would be happy to if they pay your going rate. Just be professional, explain that you could be making more doing work for another client and it's "just business".

I specialize in device drivers Windows and Linux, firmware, embedded RTOS and even desktop applications, mostly Windows but also can do some Qt on linux. My favorite language is C++ but frequently use C as firmware and linux device drivers are written in C. I also have quite a bit of experience managing, hiring, extracting and documenting software reguirments, architecting and implementing as necessary.

As for getting new clients, I tend to pick up a client for 3-6 months of work and still do work for them 6+ years later. In the beginning they get most of my time, later I end up sitting in on weekly meetings, reviewing their code/design, mentoring their junior level software engineers, and helping them to hire more as needed. I end up standing in as their CTO/director/senior manager as they usually don't have the funds to hire a full time one.
Asus announces first NUCs after taking over brand from Intel
> "Food security" is only one aspect though, that sounds like min/maxing things - and that has brought us excess nitrogen (fertilizer), mass extinctions and health problems (pesticides), food poverty (quantity over quality)

JFYI, pesticides in food are not linked with health problems. It's a more complicated story for people who apply pesticides, as they are exposed to 100-1000x greater amounts.

Fertilizer runoff is a problem. And it's being solved, modern fertilizer application practices (e.g. direct ammonia injection) try to minimize it.

> and ecosystem decimation.

Wait until you hear about what Native Americans did with the ecosystems on the American continent.

The current agriculture is long-term sustainable in most places. It's unsustainable only when there's not enough water available (e.g.: California).
Google zx: A tool for writing better scripts
For anyone confused by the comments here: https://pi-hole.net/
pirating software (movies, and music) is a term from the 90's by the MPAA, Riaa, and Games industry in attempting to link the act of simple copyright infringement, a civil non-criminal violation of the law to violent robbery on the high seas...

Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features.

Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.
Razor 1911 ! I had completely forgotten about them. They cracked games in the 1990s, and if memory serves well, there was a nice ascii art logo that came with games.

Apparently they’ve been active again since 2010, but in my ( much older ) mind, steam has made piracy mostly obsolete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911?wprov=sfti1
I would suggest to my peers, that the links you gave are "official channels," and are probably what you really want, as opposed to a rather rambling thread of comments.

I sort of want both. Official commentary moves the needle, but selfishly, I love the thread comments. People tell you what they really think, and sometimes go into a lot of detail as to why. It's an education for me.

I think IoT security is a huge issue, and I think that the solution could be that there are standard, open-source, open-license, free-to-use packages; maybe written in languages like C, that could be offered to the industry. These could enforce low-level compliance with security standards.

"Universal basic security" would probably be a major field of policy approach if we found ourselves with some huge disaster requiring a regulatory response. It's at least worth thinking about now, even if it goes beyond the scope of what the immediate regs can do.
Russia covering aircraft with car tires, potentially protect them from drones
Yes exactly

And why the price to filly party baloons has gone up 10x over the last 10-20 years..
Perhaps you should actually consider self-hosting? [0] As I said and predicted years ago? [1]

But as expected [2] every month, there is an incident and something at GitHub breaks and goes down. Maybe GitHub is gradually falling apart.

It is that unreliable.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526334

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320925
So, his father "owning a share of an emerald mine in an african country" is apparently what consists of not owning an emerald mine? Also love the assertion that your family being wealthy could not possibly have helped you in later life. I would believe that to be mostly true, since Errol himself is not exactly fond of his son, but Elon also called the following "accurate":

"Errol said that Elon "once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket." His brother Kimbal was with him when the two brothers sold two of the gems to Tiffany & Co. for $2,000, according to their father."

The idea that $2000 from an african emerald doesn't help in america is laughable. For millions of americans, that would put food on the table, but for elon, that kind of support is why he could drop out of college and participate in the dot com boom to become very wealthy off of paypal.

Meanwhile your average american could not drop out of college in the 90s and become very wealthy, simply because they did not have the option of failing and going home if things went south. Having a rich family is a boon, even if they never send you a dime.
The article describes “type 3” bad ideas like demands to work out new mathematics:

> “Work it out” is generally a demand to invent new mathematics, but sadly, mathematics doesn’t work like that.

E2E + a backdoor for a particular police department isn’t the sort of bad idea that requires new mathematics.
Opinion: We’ve reached a turning point with AI, Stuart Russell says
I absolutely agree with you. Just like with nuclear reactors the responsibility lies with the people that build and operate them, not with the reactor itself.

I take issue with people that are prepping to shift the blame on the reactor, or in this case the ai, just to absolve themselves.

They are already fighting tooth and nail for the right to steal our intellectual property, because apparently ai can think on its own (it wouldn't need our data if it learned, it could read a book and "know" the programming language, as we all do), and now they are warming up senile politicians to the idea that if something has gone wrong it was due to the ai having a mind on its own.

Well, it doesn't. And in the wrong hands this tool is indeed dangerous, and we already see the dangers in action. But it's the people that are guitly of its actions.
Didn't Microsoft published a Word document from a "pirated" Word release in the past?
a no-no under the DMCA regardless of underlying ownership

The "regardless" part is wrong. It is permissible for the owner of the software to include software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software. Why would you think that the software owner isn't allowed to do that?
Cannot read the article but the title reminds me of the quote: `There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics` [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
Huh, I swear I heard in a positive context before. But English in not my native language, so my feel on the nuance of this expression is probably a bit off.
> Essentially I'd like to build a docker image of code from a repository, and deploy and run it

Presumably, you're running it based on some input. Jobs are the right paradigm if this input is periodic (for example, processing a batch of items in S3 every few hours).

Otherwise, you may want to consider a Worker: https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/docs/concepts/services/#wo... which can be connected to an SQS queue and activated by publishing messages to the queue.

Lifecycle management is a matter of using the delete commands:

svc delete
job delete
env delete
app delete

To de-provision.

https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/docs/commands/app-delete/

Hope that helps!
Sounds like broadcom to me.
I'm not saying people shouldn't wing it, but some people clearly think they (or other parents) can control more things than are practical or healthy. You should try to be a responsible parent, but knowing how much you need to worry about individual things isn't easy. It's not practical to do everything various people say you should do. One expert will advise the opposite of what another does, and over times people flip flop back and forth. In the end I don't see how it couldn't involve some level of winging things.
Possibly weird idea: federal firmware escrow. The OEM gets to put a stamp on their product after submitting firmware source/keys to the FCC. When the OEM either declares the product not supported or provides no updates for X length of time, the files are automatically published to a public repository. Perhaps there is an appropriate license which says essentially that it is almost public domain, with an exception (or fee?) to use it for any purpose other than supporting the lifetime of an existing product.

As others have stated, free software is one way of giving the public ability to keep things up to date but that's almost like the government saying people are allowed to clean up pollution. It doesn't put any pressure on companies to behave better.

Another issue is build-ability of open source code. If an OEM submits firmware source and keys to a third party, even regularly, who really knows whether it is actually functional and complete. Automated tests or sample hardware are possible ideas but have their own failure modes and could be difficult for to implement solely for this purpose.

Another weird idea for the above. If one requirement was deterministic builds, then in addition to source/keys, a suitable toolchain to build could also be required such that the repository stewards would only need to run exactly what the OEM provides, and if the checksums don't match then it means they are not in compliance.
This is great for hackers but doesn't it make IoT devices incredibly insecure for normal users who wouldn't even know their device has reached end of support?
Maybe a better example is to refer to the marginal effects on mortality caused by vehicle pollution, whereby simply by driving the vehicle causes harm to others, without necessitating a direct consequence of the behavior itself (such in the case of a crash). If say, one in every 10,000 trips resulted in a crash, it would be a bit absurd to say each trip I drive results in 1/10000 of a crash, whereas emitted pollutants is discrete and measurable.
Author here.

App distribution is a major issue for the platform that I ran out of space to really talk about. Those driver-like things are largely extension APIs, but they were once the domain of the now deprecated "Chrome Apps." Both the Apps and Extensions are delivered via the Web Store, but I feel like there's a steady move to deprecate all system-customization on the platform.

If you want to use some non-optimized apps in a VM though, you can use the Gnome Software store or the Google Play Store.
> I appreciate the rebuttals below, apparently Helium is important in the usage and production of MRI, IC fabrication, and cooling nuclear reactors. Pushes a reconsideration of the sell off, plus the possible resurgance of steampunk.]

Also: liquid fueled rockets and space systems. Being able to nuke the other guy or space supremacy depends upon having helium. Maybe not that much.
Surely this means the government will lower taxes and interest rates. Right?
> Incline Village is the closest you can be to the Bay Area and still live in Nevada.

Factually, no, its not: Stateline, NV on the south shore of Lake Tahoe is 15 road miles closer than Incline Village on the north shore. About similar drive time, though.

Incline Village is swankier though.
I'm in the unfortunate position that I'm in this maintenance nightmare at work. Though I solved this specific issue months ago. There will be many like it to come.
"S Mode" is still a thing. On top of what you listed it also enforces Edge as browser and Bing as search engine. I'm not kidding: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-and-w...
I think it's startup people, rather than software people. You don't see as much of this kind of discussion in other software developer forums.

Building and running a business is its own field of expertise. If you think software people talk a lot about it, you should hear your average MBA!
That’s great, glad to know there’s been plenty of scrutiny over this

At the same time, we’ve had regulatory capture in a bunch of industries for decades and it seems there isn’t much the public can really do about it

The public being able to see what’s going on, for months/years/decades doesn't necessarily mean they are ok with it, it might just mean they are powerless
I think this has a lot of potential
https://www.modular.com/engine
I agree my off the cuff syntax is probably not great, but I do think there's benefit to a more native version of json_agg that doesn't return strings/json, but typed data.

The "start queries with from" is because you get easier and better auto complete and error detection for queries when the tables being used are declared. When you start typing "select some_field" there's basically no way to have good auto complete or correct until the from clause. IMO there are more philosophical reasons too.

Views and CTEs have their place, but also have their shortcomings. That I don't think this solves. But I also don't think they really fill the gap I'm thinking about either.
Yeah, good point on the importance of FOSS focusing on subtasks... because FOSS isn't going to be spending $150M+ training a model any time soon without something like government backing.
I’m in the same boat. I got in the world of extension development last year, and oh my, what a crazy mess. Apart from browser compatibility, I was really hoping for some product to help out with the operational stuff.
This is not new: https://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718...
This is nonsense. The same assertions can be said for, I'm an engineer, level 2, so here's the yearly salary.
More power to you, but I stopped charging by the hour a long time ago. I charge minimum by the day, and offer a discount if you buy a week. I still bill for my time, but I avoid haggling over how many hours something took, and it also saves me the trouble of tracking my hours.

You book me for a day, you get me for the whole (at least) eight hour day, however you want to spend that time. You book me for the week, you get me for at least eight hours each day for a week.

I also do by the project billing, where I estimate how much work something will be, and pay on milestones. That requires a lot of up front work defining the deliverables in a way that avoids scope creep, but I also build in an overhead for scope creep so that I can "comp" them some deliverables that weren't covered, and everyone is happy.

But the most important part is that the price is always agreed upon up front.

The biggest issue with hourly billing is that neither of us knows how much the contract is worth until afterwards.
>consumers do have the right to expect to receive a service they've paid for. And it is not our responsibility to make sure the delivery services are paying the drivers properly.

This is absurd. Why doesn't an american have a responsibility to their fellow man to avoid companies that mistreat their workers? What kind of entitlement is that? Don't you have any solidarity for your fellow human workers?
will lower taxes and interest rates. Right? (MEME)
I’m aware. But it wasn’t because people are tripping over scooters like they do in cities without parking spaces. In many Canadian cities, accessibility groups are fighting rental scooters because of a perceived risk of tripping hazards when dedicated street parking zones can easily alleviate this risk.
To add to previous similar comments, I think that one of the best ways to ensure that security updates are provided is to ensure that manufacturers either commit to continuous security updates, or after a minimum sunset period during which they provide security updates (e.g. 5 years), they agree to provide source code as well as build and deployment instructions, so that the community can take over. It must be possible to build the source code using a freely available toolchain. Furthermore, they must agree to provide links to these communities through their support pages for these products, so that users can be made aware of new third party firmware.

A durable IoT device could last decades, but few companies building these products will survive as long as the devices, let alone support a device they are no longer profiting from. As long as they are supporting the device with security updates, it's fine for the firmware to be proprietary. But, when they decide to cut support for the device, they should be willing to ensure that consumers who have purchased this hardware and are still using it won't become victims, and that the overall Internet community won't end up harboring botnets made of living dead ewaste.
Nathan -- thanks for your work on this issue. I'm the ceo/co-founder at Seam (YC S20). We're building an API for IoT devices. I have many, many thoughts for you.

For Seam, we purchase, set up, and test many individual devices and systems in our lab in San Francisco. During the course of this work, we discover quite a few interesting things. When possible, we work directly with manufacturers on addressing the more concerning problems we find. We maintain an internal device database (partially available here https://www.seam.co/supported-devices-and-systems) where we keep track of our findings on devices we test & integrate. One area that I haven't seen addressed here is data-storage jurisdiction. imho, that might be one of the more concerning aspect.

happy to have a chat; my seam email is in my hn profile.
The UL example is one where it would be hard for improved security to happen by itself. UL was founded to solve for fire risk when insuring buildings. It received funding from underwriters that would benefit from the label.

I don't see any particular entity benefiting from security labels - it's a problem of the "commons" where you generally need government intervention of some sort of.
> MRI

Is this actually the case anymore? I had the vague idea that fancy modern superconductors now allowed these to run on liquid nitrogen.
I get what you're saying, but on a strictly legal standpoint, everything Hashicorp is doing is by the books...all previous versions of Terraform will remain under the old license and everyone can still use Terraform without fearing a future lawsuit, as long as they stick to those version. So no one made any legal missteps here, neither the users nor Hashicorp.

I think its the ethical side, rather than the legal side, thats more complicated...the contributions from the community contributed to the Terraform "brand" that got bigger and bigger, and now Terraform is attempting to secure their monopoly on capitalization of the brand when previously there was an implicit understanding that the "brand" was open-source.

However, you might also argue that there was an implicit understanding on Hashicorps side that the community wouldn't build directly competitive projects when they held the lions share of the funding on the contribution/maintenance side...

I think the whole thing is pretty complicated - is Hashicorp leeching off of the contributors or are the competitive contributors leeching off of Hashicorp? Honestly I see both sides.

The beautiful thing is that its totally legal and acceptable for OpenTF to do their own thing and continue Terraform under their own terms...so either way we get to see this play out :)
Vint Cerf and I shot that proposed anti-dd-wrt regulation down thoroughly: filing here:

http://www.taht.net/~d/fcc_saner_software_practices.pdf

Substitute IoT for router in everything we wrote there on page 12-13 and that seems to be a starting point everyone around here has come to think is necessary. I would prefer not to summarize such a large filing here.

Also Dan Geer wrote extensively on these topics at the time.

Of late I have been strongly suggesting that software be at least "built in america": https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/an_upgrade_in_place/

I care most deeply first - that the front doors to our houses, the home gateways, are properly secured, kept up to date, and have ipv6 and bufferbloat fixes on them.

IoT devices belong on their own vlan...
Gave WASM a try and ran into problems exposing connections to a SQLite database I wanted to connect to locally. Has anyone done something like that before and can point to good resources?
Interesting turn of events to ask Hacker News for their opinion :)

Someone I know wrote an interesting opinion piece on this [1], which might be relevant to this discussion.

[1] https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/iot-we-need-to-get-a-grip-on-t...
No, they didn't have such a high incidence of events prior to the tech layoffs. something material has changed.
> WEI

Link so people don't need to go looking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36875940
> Branch protection doesn't allow merging without a passing test-suite.

https://github.com/opentffoundation/opentf/pull/243

EDIT: and just to point out. If you have 1 PR with 19 commits that break the test suite. The last commit fixing it doesn't matter as you will be hitting one of those 19 commits at some point during a bisect.

>Could you expand? You choose a sensible commit message on squash, while the PR's commits become fairly irrelevant at that point.

It's optional. Nothing prevents you from just adopting whatever the PR said initially. Turning it on doesn't automatically make it better.