skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To answer my own question, I've decided to look up the specs of Lattice Semiconductor's iCE-40 LM1K FPGA. This is very small, just 1k LUTs. But a lot of these "matrix multiplications" and Galois-field stuff simplify down into absurdly small linear-shift-feedback registers in practice (!!). At least for encoding (decoding is far more difficult).

With that in mind, these iCE-40 low-power devices are claiming to be of the ~10mA class, which puts them in the small microcontroller region. (Ex: RP2040 is 20mA, so we're already undercutting RP2040 let alone a proper Cortex-A level chip).

So... yeah. Okay, I see the use. But that's still a _lot_ of extra work compared to grabbing an off-the-shelf Cortex-A5, lol. But given the right power constraints, I can imagine that the $6 to $20 FPGA / iCE-40 would be more useful than adding a full size Cortex-A5 (or better) with SIMD / other such advance computational instruction sets.

Ex: I think I'd be able to program a LSFR for 8-bit Reed Solomon encoding (Galois add/multiply) that'd pair up with a standard microcontroller (think any ARM-Cortex M4 here), all for a total solution power consumption under 20mA going full tilt.

Since DDR2 RAM starts at like 100mA power consumption, there's a lot of FPGA+Microcontroller that you can fit before even the smallest microprocessors (aka: Cortex-A5) make sense.

----------

So I'm thinking that a small microcontroller that needs to write-only communicate over a noisy channel could in practice, require a Reed Solomon encoder (or turbocodes or whatever modern crap exists. I'm not up-to-date with the latest techniques). Reed Solomon encoder is 100% better on an FPGA since its just a linear shift feedback register.

Or heck, the matrix-multiplication to decode a Reed Solomon error correction scheme is surprisingly compute heavy, and might also be superior on an FPGA than the 10mA class uC.
> Not realistic when working on a code base where PRs are being squash-merged every hour and the code review lasts for days.

But if they collide, you have to resolve all the merge conflicts anyway, and then with rerere you should have relatively little additional work on the final rebase.
What if I want to develop applications using the latest dependency versions on a stable system? Are flatpak/docker/podman the recommended solutions?
The Earth becomes uninhabitable in about a billion years due to solar brightening, but your point certainly applies to far future civilizations in solar orbit.
I have DNS in one nostril (I guess, you don’t get in both anyway, do you?) and otherwise as well I am very allergic to dust etc. Somedays it’d be tiny amounts that’d be like thick traces of stubborn glue stuck to the nostril wall and I’ll keep blowing, inhaling steam, even spraying with saline (non steroidal) nasal spray jet and what not but finally I get tired and try to just get distracted.

It’s hell! I wish there was a simpler cure or non-addictive spray or just a pill that will make it go away.
You are right! Seems like it is not text-addressable which is why my ctrl+f searches failed.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding? For GitLab this should be doable by two different ways.

The first is merge trains, which merges requests one by one to prevent this exact outcome. You just have to force all deployments to be done via a merge request. That’s the downside.

The second being forcing a GitLab Runner to run one job at a time. Tag it as “deployer” then ensure all deployment jobs are marked as “deployer”. That runner will pick up deployment jobs one by one in order of first creation.
Monetizing Idle Linux Servers: Maximizing Resource Utilization
A company I work for have a significant number of Linux servers on premises that remain idle during nights and weekends. These servers are completely free (mostly proxmox) and not utilized during these periods. I am seeking suggestions and ideas on how this can be monetize or we can leverage this untapped resource effectively.

I believe that there must be creative ways to make use of these idle servers and generate some form of revenue or value from them.

I recall many years ago CPUs could be given out for the genome project....

Well, I image it would not be that hard to just have gitlab-ci/github-ci VM given out... but how?
As infrequently as possible! At uni. in the mid-70s I had a choice between batched Fortran on punched cards and interactive Dartmouth Basic on a Teletype with eight channel tape.

As a lowly undergraduate my Fortran deck had to be submitted to the operator as early as possible to have a decent chance of being run but I was never able to get the results until the day after.

After getting "Error in Job Control card 3" or something like that once too often I gave up Fortran and switched to Basic. I had to write more code but I could debug it much more easily and far more quickly with an edit-compile-run cycle measured in minutes instead of days.
By my estimation, the problems highlighted by the comment you replied to indeed started around the 70s. I think what happened recently is that the internet and social media came along as the perfect, but also terrible, solution to those problems.

I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
Worked for several years in that language--overall a very good experience.
On their blog post, they claim to use the "standard Apache CLA" which indeed does grant the license to the ASF... presumably they plan to modify the CLA to grant the license to Element... but I haven't been successful finding a copy of their modifications. The Apache CLA also contains a critical clause :

"In return, the Foundation shall not use Your Contributions in a way that
is contrary to the public benefit or inconsistent with its nonprofit
status and bylaws in effect at the time of the Contribution."

Based on the Element blog-post as well as comments they have made here... I doubt they plan to keep that clause in place.
Did you know you can set up an OpenVPN tunnel with no encryption or authentication?

I'm sure for someone out there that's a make-or-break feature, but for the vast majority trying to use OpenVPN it's a massive, insecure footgun. (Hell, how many bugs have protocol negotiation led to in OpenVPN/SSL/etc?)

Compare that to Wireguard that just says... it's encrypted. Full stop. Carry on.

A lot of this tooling and technology was developed in a different era with different priorities. Security, and especially network security, was not such a huge focus 30-40 years ago. Priorities have shifted. The operating environment is a lot more homogeneous (when's the last time you dealt with a layer 2 protocol besides ethernet?), while the risk of poor security has grown immensely.

It's absolutely fair to critically evaluate these features and determine which can be removed to simplify and improve the products for the vast majority of users. If a small fraction of users stay on sudo, but the majority are able to move to a more secure option... that's a win. This is exactly what Wireguard provides versus OpenVPN.
Look at the latest iteration of Army doctrine. It says it’s meant to refocus us on being able to fight peer or near-peer nations. It’s very clearly targeted at China alone.
I think there's plenty worth talking about here. Like the opinion that the previous internet, where everyone could be rude and not worry about offending others, was arguably better.

I actually agree that the old internet was better. I'm not saying you shouldn't be banned from Twitter/X if you start using racist slurs online, but the way SJWs stalk people online is unacceptable, imo.

Why is it bad? It gets to the question of why we censor people on platforms to begin with. Is it to affect the discussion as a whole or keep the platform pleasant? I'd say trying to influence the societal discussion by censoring people is a form of evil. We censor people (which is evil) because it is the lesser evil when their posts are disruptive. When you go SJW and stalk people, it shows your motive is not to protect the platform but to silence the target, which is imo an evil motive. Silencing bad speech is still evil because you appoint yourself as the decider of good and evil. Neither should the collective majority be the decider, as history is rife with examples where the collective majority was wrong. Thus I believe engaging in censorship is inherently evil, and must be justified by some other good so that censorship is the lesser evil.

I also agree that there is an irreconcilable conflict between the values of open source and social justice.

Open source software must be usable for any purpose, good or evil. The goal of open source is not "justice" but rather "freedom". We must be able to use software "for any purpose" and a key there is self-determination and non-interference. SJW tendencies do not get the whole "leave me alone and let me decide" idea that is at the core of open source.
No you can definitely use globs in DuckDB.

And no you don’t have to know the exact parquet file. You would treat the Hive partitioned data as a single dataset and DuckDB will scan it automatically. (Partition elimination, predicate pushdown etc all done automatically)

https://duckdb.org/docs/data/partitioning/hive_partitioning
It's the Internet: All the "debunkings" have also been "debunked".

From the article...

Monogamy is the corollary for the debunking of love.

That's very silly. Love is much more than marriage.

"Church" foibles is the corollary for the debunking of Faith.

That's also very silly. Faith is much more than church or religion.

In other times and other cultures, spiritual insight removed the roots of suffering.
I was/am a fan of duckdb, but I recently discovered a bug in 0.9.1 where a fairly innocuous query was silently returning wrong results (issue 9399 on github). That made me much less confident about duckdb and how well tested it is.
Maybe it was a one off, but with postgresql for example I don't think I personally encountered cases of simply incorrect query results.
I think squash merges are a last resort heavy-handed tool for dealing with developers who refuse to clean up their commit history before merging. Most developers can do better by hand.

Git history should tell a simple, understandable story of each change. For example: 1) refactor existing code, 2) add feature. Or 1) add missing tests, 2) refactor existing code, 3) add feature.

But since you're working on the fly with imperfect knowledge, it doesn't happen in such neat steps. Refactorings and behavior changes end up interleaved in your raw git history, so you need to do a little bit of cleanup by hand in order to present a simple story in the commit log.

Of course if you have developers that don't do that and instead merge dozens of commits that just say wip, wip, wip, lol, fml, wip, wip, lol, yolo and you can't fire them or get them to change, then squash merges ftw.
I lugged around my favorite boxes of programs on cards for years, I even had big, full sized tapes, see [1], containing more programs I had written.

[1] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/tapes.html
every job I've had it was a process to get more than 2wks at a time; it was fraught with peril. I only got it through once or twice and my manager was not happy with it. That said, I usually get ~2wks per quarter.
I still find it hard to believe that fully-async working style is more productive in the long run. My experience with it was that the pace of synchronous collaboration and decision making is about 5X faster than async. A group of engineers or a product team standing around a whiteboard in physical space is going to win the day every time IMO.

Perhaps if a company has reached series A and developed a lot of in-person trust and communion, they could successfully start expanding to a remote situation.

I really think it just depends on the work that's getting done, and the nature of the collaboration and decision making that's required.
>it a achieves nothing we don't already have terrestrially

Sorry, but this is a very first world, urban perspective. Please have a little empathy. I live in the US and have only one choice for internet from home and it is lousy. Starlink has been a dramatic change for us. This is the situation for many, many people in the US and around the world.

Starlink is absolutely offering something that is NOT available terrestrially.
See if you can update to binutils 2.41. That one contains the bugfix.
By thinking about things that were not applicable to the problem domain says Guy Steele in "How to Think about Parallel Programing: Not!": https://youtu.be/dPK6t7echuA?si=W6HvDKOLrNh9TQMl&t=254

It's a fantastic talk in its own right, but the first bit about fitting a program onto a punch card by self-modifying the code involved (and just how much thought was about fitting-the-program, and how little relatively is involved in the-purpose-of-the-program) is quite eye opening.
depends on the manager and company. before working in software Yeah i thought taking a lot of time in US like that was unheard of. That's also how i watched my parents manage their time. Working in software though, I feel like even up to 4 weeks has been normalized because so many people from foreign countries like India go home to visit family and the trip is a big one to take.
> some encoders (H264)

What H.264 encoder are you using that does not have a scene change detection option?
I don't know what "chaos for social good" is supposed to be, but I am intrigued. Would you care to expand on that?
Yes, but i'm not advancing a particular theory -- only, at best the criteria for such a theory.

The fashion for these theories is predictive power -- but this is unscientific when applied to complex systems of this kind.

The error of marx et al. was to suppose that dialectical materialism is a possibility -- this mistakes the kind of phenomenon that history is --

we have learned, after marx, that maxism isnt even a possible theory

today, we need to show we have learned these lessons
Just turned on the grayscale, take it for a spin.

I'm not surprised the good features are hidden behind Accessibility. I'd argue most other features on a phone are designed for someone else's benefit. Albeit cleverly disguised as benefits for the user.
Yes. I do most years.
I also quite liked the linked article about why decongestant medicines don't seem to do anything!

https://archive.ph/0eT0e
The headline feels incorrect. From what I remember Epic v Apple was a split decision where both Epic and Apple got some ruling in their favour.

Wikipedia seems to agree:

> Rogers did rule against Apple on the final charge related to anti-steering provisions, and issued a permanent injunction that, in 90 days from the ruling, blocked Apple from preventing developers from linking app users to other storefronts from within apps to complete purchases or from collecting information within an app, such as an email, to notify users of these storefronts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple#Decision

The didn't get everything they wanted but that's a big win.
To be fair to OpenAI, Musk determined that OpenAI had irreparably lost the race to Google and proposed that he be made CEO [0]. Musk's public complaints about OpenAI being profitable were years[1] after he had decided to abandon OpenAI.

> But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.

> And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.

> Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.

[0] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034?s=20
> Implementations of big number math can and does contain bugs. (I used to hunt for those via fuzzing, which turned up an amazing number of them.)

I'm curious, can you give some examples what kind of bugs did you discover?
the existence of the Loch Ness monster can be ruled out by simply surveying the lake. There is a differences between things that can be falsified and those that cannot.
IMHO `--fixup` commits and `--autosquash` rebases make rebase much easier.
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> Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations.

This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
I've not heard it forbidden but mainly speak to your manager to ensure that things are scheduled well enough.
Remember this: if you finish a game at all, you are well ahead of the crowd. Best of luck.
Show HN: OpalOPC – OPC UA Vulnerability Scanner
Hiya HN,

A client in the automation sector was looking for a tool to test the security of their OPC UA servers. All I could find was either mere PoCs or otherwise hard to grasp and use for an OT person in a corporate setting [0-3].

Therefore I set to create one myself. First, I invented different things to check in servers, categorized them, and approximated a CVSS score for each. Then I created an easy-to-use scanner program that does the checking and outputs a pretty HTML report.

The scanner contains both GUI and CLI. It is free for non-commercial use and for commercial use if your organization's yearly turnover is less than $1M.

It is still early in development, and I got multiple new checks and other things to add to it. There may be bugs lurking in there as well.

You can try it on a practice target I setup for that purpose (Try not to hammer on the server too hard): opc.tcp://scanme.opalopc.com:53530

All feedback welcome and encouraged. Thanks! :)

[0] https://github.com/scy-phy/OPC-UA-attacks-POC
[1] https://github.com/abirke/opcuapen
[2] https://github.com/secure-software-engineering/opcua-scanner
[3] https://github.com/COMSYS/msf-opcua

Nmap was a source of inspiration for the CLI version.
So then have voluntary arbitration, rather than mandatory arbitration agreements.
The challenge is that those costs were not understood when these extractive heavy industries were stood up, and large parts of our legal and governance systems were set up to ensure that those industries could exist, presumably to enrich all of us (e.g., the mineral rights system). By the time the costs were understood, the owners of those industries had accrued enough capital from their operation to actively fight off challenges to them for decades.

The tragedy is obvious, but I think it's an important example as we move forward with other dramatic and potentially disastrous technological changes. What happens if we discover conclusively in 15 years that observing recommendation-algorithm driven social media for more than an hour a day causes dementia? Would we move quickly to ban it, or would we endure a protracted fight with Meta, TikTok et. al. about our "right to scroll" while the damages accrue?
> accidentally typed gcaa and amended someone else's commit after fixing a merge conflict

You could try reverting the first commit on the HEAD once you finish the rebase. This is of course assuming your branch and the last commit don't touch the same files.
Racket has a strong respect for back compatibility, so it should work in the current version. There has been a lot of improvements in the compiler (in particular changing the "back end" from C to Chez Scheme) but it's stil back compatible and sligthly faster.
At least they won’t have to look at those awful things anymore.
Yep, intermediate commits on a branch tend to be completely worthless. I'd much rather have "git blame" point to the commit that contains the entire change together.
I lost patience with the various git commit cleanup tools and now I just go nuclear. I use git diff > output.file, make a new branch, get apply output.file.

Fresh clean branch, no commit history, create pull request.

I'm not convinced there's any value to incremental commit messages. This simple, clean, and undoable as long as I keep my initial branch
Why would you need to sell them? Many companies pay dividends.
Discuss HN – Open AI – GPT4 Turbo and 128K Tokens
This is going to be eating the entire current LLM Landscape.
> Is there an unspoken rule/etiquette to take no more than 2 consecutive weeks of vacation?

No, as long as you give your manager the heads up with enough notice, so they can find someone to cover for you, you can use all your vacation in one shot.

Note, at least with me, this means no more vacation bridge days, and more consideration needing to head out early, etc.

Also, if we are at an unlimited vacation org, this means you only have 1-2 weeks of vacation left over.
You don't have to fall back to that. It isn't possible to know all the issues facing national attention. Someone puts in a good/scary story about something and it is really hard to see why that story is wrong. Often the story isn't even wrong, it is just not the complete picture and the evils of what the story misses out on are even worse. There are a bit over 500 people with power in DC, they cannot possibly debate all the possible issues that come up.

China learning from US contributions to Risc-v are not a good thing. However the obvious proposed solution wouldn't stop China from learning (it might delay them a few months, but they have plenty of smart engineers who can figure this out), and so will harm the US more.
Is your company an “unlimited PTO” organization or do you have contractually guaranteed days off?
I have a few ideas.

1. We've entered the full on "Oh shit, you don't need to be a hacker to do computer crime" phase of computer crime. Smash and grabs, just pay some disgruntled employee for their credentials, hire people to do the tech bits you need done - you don't have to be a 1337 hacker to get involved with this stuff. So they may not care or even be aware of much forum opsec.

2. Does Russia care about Russians ripping off other countries? How hard do you have to try to hide it if you just dump the username and move on when you're found out because there's not any repercussions from local law? I don't think anybody is going to go to Russia and get them any time soon.
Sounds like six vs half-dozen. Why does it matter if somebody amends vs squashes?
There's no reason to believe that what Evans found was the mythological Troy (note the "mythological"). Maybe it was the city called Wilusa by the Hittites, or maybe it wasn't, and maybe Wilusa was Troy ("Ilion") or maybe it wasn't. There's no way to know for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad#Hitti...

Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient as the Iliad, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question

As to Schleimann, he was certainly all too ready to "discover" elements of the Homeric epics. For example, "the mask of Agamemnon":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon

Or "The Jewels of Helen":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...
Does windows still have to show that menu when you install of alternative browsers? Maybe like that?
Yeah I was really perplexed by that line. I had to stop and scratch my head.

Maybe they mean, "brighter than daylight ambient light levels indoors"?
Nice to see no one agrees on how to use git correctly.
If you are asking if there’s a general unspoken rule in US that everyone knows but you are not aware of - no, there isn’t one that I personally ever heard of.

But it’s not exactly unexpected that you may need to negotiate something with your specific employer. It sucks tho.