skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post is accurate, fail2ban does suck.

But that's not a reflection on the fail2ban maintainers, the engineering work that's gone into building it, its usability, bugs or indeed anything else connected to its implementation.

It sucks simply because it's solving the problem in the wrong way. There is no sensible security onion, or defence in depth model for open ports in front of private systems.

If the technical solution for keeping private, or limited access systems actually and effectively private on the public Internet requires open ports, it's the wrong solution.

Unless we're running services designed for public and anonymous access, exposing technologies like VPN servers, SSH or any other software for private consumption to the Internet is a mistake.

When we do this we're putting out invitations for abuse and pulling the burden of security responsibility onto ourselves. I'd argue however, that unless it's a full time concern for us, we're close to the project or maintainers, and able to contribute security fixes to source code, we're probably ill equipped to directly handle that responsibility and remain dependent on engaging with the surrounding security eco-system to remain secure.

I'm not knocking those security eco-systems, I'm just pointing out that there's a time lag inherent on depending on best-efforts from third parties which creates windows of vulnerability, and open ports on infrastructure ALWAYS puts us on the back foot. From getting patches applied in a timely fashion to the time and convenience cost of updating ACLs each time IPs change. Even if we get the maintenance tasks right 100% of the time, we're still open to the risks of something outside of our control happening, like zero day being sprayed across open ports.

The U.S. Government correctly issued an executive order mandating Federal Agencies move to adopt Zero Trust principles just six days after the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021. Despite the marketing hype which has followed, if we take nothing else away from this motion, it should be that opening ports in our networks to access private systems using the public Internet is over.

There are at least 90 projects and businesses today dedicated to building modern private access technologies which allow secure remote connections and access to private networks without opening firewall ports. Many are commercial options serving businesses, but there are also lots of compelling open source offerings for non-commercial use too.

There's a directory of vendors and technologies here https://zerotrustnetworkaccess.info/ which attempts to dispense with some the Zero Trust marketing BS and instead focus on technical discourse, architecture and approach which some might find helpful.

Disclosure; founder of one of the businesses (enclave.io) with a commercial interest in this space.
Show HN: Signals Collector ETA data from mongo/Postgres to Kafka
Hello! As a software engineer I've become very frustrated with the state of the modern data stack and the state of data teams.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/draining-data-lake-part-1-3-p...

Many outputs of data teams are aggregated medium cardinality tables usually at the day grain. The modern data stack uses ETL tools to copy operational data stores to datalakes where the raw operational data is then refined, over multiple stages, into these aggregate tables.

After working in this stack for 3+ years, I think it has fundamental limitations and the approach lags decade+ behind software engineering best practices.

I created Signals Collector to provide a low friction way to collect and aggregate data at the source before loading into a datalake/datawarehouse.

The goal of signals collector is to be a verifiable, observable, and maintainable component in a software stack, able to generate aggregate data used for insights.

Signals Collector queries and aggregates data at the source (using postgres SQL and mongo aggregations and prometheus API + duckdb).

Signals Collector is MIT license. If you're interested in learning more or getting started with signals collector I'd be happy to jump on a call or support through email!

Thank you

Danny

danny@turbolytics.io
Lack of Salary Transparency Puts Job Seekers at a Disadvantage
It's probably the prestige. Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.
Dollar Kicks Off 2024 with Best Day Since March on Fed Doubt
How do you explain kenya and coffee then?
Lots and lots of people wanting to learn Rust and put their name on a long living project like core-utils (if this happens to succeed).
Not sure if you're being facetious, but if not, different Wozniak :)
No, you asked for a document completer, and got a suggestion. You're behaving like a typical XY problem asker, and getting angry when you don't get the answer you want. And they hardly "wasted your time", it took you maybe all of 10 seconds to read their comment trying to help you. What a weird behavior from you.

https://xyproblem.info/
Apple Store's new "magic" iPhone display stand patent published
For a year I commuted out of London, and it was wonderful — usually 1-4 people per carriage, almost always on time, very quiet. Returning to London was busier, but I always had a seat.

There is probably a political discussion based on when I did this vs. the sibling comment, but HN isn't the place for it.
iirc the 3GS was when I bought an iphone and shortly after they exploded in popularity in amsterdam. So that would also roughly line up (4 was 2010?)
Sean Barrett, the author of stb_truetype.h, has an interesting article about how stb_truetype does its glyph rasterisation.

https://nothings.org/gamedev/rasterize/
Been writing tech books now for over a decade, got about 8-10 under the belt depending on if you count 2nd and 3rd editions as new books.

Definitely not writing them for the money — that’s about $300 a month usually. Enough to buy a few knick knacks and some meals.

It’s more the notoriety of being a “subject matter expert” that counts.

I work full time and then put what I learn from the job into the books to share it with the world. No point hanging onto the knowledge and hoarding it all dragon-like.
Provision (YC S22) is hiring a fullstack software engineer
I know quite a few authors making a living without paying for any ads, but it's definitely a different type of effort. You have to really hone in on social media, getting large review teams, etc to get visibility for your books without ads.

IMO someone starting out is probably best off not spending money on ads. They have too many other things to perfect as they learn, which can only be done by publishing over and over. At least with fiction, you're looking at building a backlist - it's not a "write one breakout book and live off of it forever" kind of thing. After a few books published it can make sense to start setting an ad budget, and using ads successfully is a whole other learning curve to dive into.
Nothing. Send USDC to Circle, Coinbase, or any centralized exchange for a fraction of a penny. Swap to USD for free. ACH transfer to bank for free.
Take a look at the two Timefold (continuation/fork of OptaPlanner, open source Apache License) quickstarts for vehicle routing:
https://github.com/TimefoldAI/timefold-quickstarts/tree/stab...

We regularly answer questions on StackOverflow if you run into any issues with it.

Disclaimer: I am part of the team behind OptaPlanner/Timefold.
Absolutely! When I wrote for Manning, a print book that sold for $45 netted me a huge $4.50 — 90/10 split. Ebooks were 50/50. Guess the print guys all gotta take their cut.
Apollo Computer is notable for having had a UNIX compatible OS, written in a Pascal dialect, as was Mac OS (migrating to C++ later on).
> where safety built in from the start

Don't worry, in 30 years people will write the same thing about using Rust, assuming that Rust will still be in use 30 years from now.
I think this had already been attempted by the now-discontinued project [Kerla](https://github.com/nuta/kerla).
Show HN: Build a Google Analytics in Go
My 2nd Go course is officially out. For that one, I use a more hands-on approach. In the course, we build a full website analytics tool from scratch to deployment.

The technology used is Go, TypeScript, Docker, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse.

I wanted to demonstrate why Go and ClickHouse for analytics can perform decently for high volume / high traffic sites.

The dashboard is a CLI with bar graphs, pie charts, and data tables.

The link has a 30% discount, and I fully adhere to Purchasing Power Parity, so it's possible to get a fair price based on country.

I hope this sounds interesting. I had a great time building the course and using the analytics on my side projects.
Open infrastructure was too vague. An open payment standard, like OpenID/OAuth/FIDO.

There should be a standard, distributed payment system, it should be easy to switch providers, and it should be easy to make payments without going through all these proprietary systems.

It won't ever happen because there's nothing to gain for whoever builds it. And it needs to be build by the platform owners, precisely those that don't want it because they have their own payment systems (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, etc).
Strongly agree. The "Why should I use this?" posts piss me off to no end...

As someone who often learns by perusing both toy and production projects, almost any kind of code or language idea can be useful to me for learning, so I'm thankful for those projects.

Doesn't matter if it is production quality or experimental, or if the quality is good or bad. The funny thing is that HN has this meme about "the scientific process also being about negative results", but when it's software, people immediately treat it like a product, as if having more things in the world was a negative thing.

I will forever upvote those projects and star them on Github. And I am grown up enough to figure out by myself what they have to "offer".
I would also add James Aspnes' Notes on Data Structures and Programming Techniques (<https://cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/223/notes.html>, CC BY-SA 4.0).
Yeah, near victim of residential fire here.

1960s house with aluminum wiring here.

Bare minimum you must do when buying such a house is to recheck every wirenut in every box.

Replace all wirenuts with zinc-based lugnut if any copper wire touches aluminum wire. The Bare minimum effort.

No time? Invest in cheap ($60) 32x32 pixel infrared sensor and look for a heat producing wiring box. This one caught one that completely melted the wiring conductors.
Reasons to grow and keep big muscles
Python has its own set type not based on hashmap/dict, and that's been the case for years.

The set implementation points out some of the differences, at https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Objects/setobjec... :

Unlike the dictionary implementation, the lookkey function can return
NULL if the rich comparison returns an error.

Use cases for sets differ considerably from dictionaries where looked-up
keys are more likely to be present. In contrast, sets are primarily
about membership testing where the presence of an element is not known in
advance. Accordingly, the set implementation needs to optimize for both
the found and not-found case.
In the end of the 90s I was 11-12 years old and used this to crack a copy of the video game SiN. I didn't really know what I was doing, but followed random tutorials for generic game cracking. They guided me through the w32dasm disassember, finding code referencing the "input your cd key" string, finding related jmps jumping to this part of the code, noting the address, opening up the executable in hiew and mulling them out.

It worked! I thought I was a genius. Now I'm amazed how I almost randomly got it right.
I’d add (for fiction the only market I have exposure to):

- the editor: if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books. Many people seem to think editors are just marking up your punctuation. In reality they are more akin to product managers in software. They help set the tone of the books and ensure that the vision is adhered to.

- which leads me to copy editors. The traditional publishers employ all the best ones. You can hire independent copy editors but their quality is a crapshoot. And you don’t find out until it’s too late.

- the sales rep network. If reps like your book they will get it in front of people. Independent of marketing the boots on the ground factor can make a huge difference.

Now, you won’t necessarily get any of these benefits going with a publisher but you can’t get any of them self publishing.
As per the linked content, the game is not released. It is in fact the first released footage of it:

"In case you’re wondering about the game: what you’re seeing (for the first time) is Sphere Spectacle."
But we can also say that China, which is not a democracy, dramatically increased their middle class [1]. This is not an anti-democracy advocacy but I think we should understand the big picture. In this context, we cannot see democracy as an static thing and try to evolve.

[1] "The Evolution of Middle Class Chinese Outbound Travel Preferences: An International Perspective": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262789226_The_Evolu...
Well, I think you are wrong, and that would actually be the real way forward: an assembly written kernel using a worldwide standard ISA, aka RISC-V.

Of course, it would have not to abuse any preprocessor, because moving the issue which is the complexity of the compiler dependency to a preprocessor complexity dependency would nullify everything.

Doing that in rust, is just doing the mistake of linux all over again, actually even worse, since rust syntax is much more complex than C with gcc extensions.
Path dependency in life (by TheJollyContrarian Blog)
Hi everyone,

A few years back I liked Nassims Talebs writing about path-dependency in life. When recently Navals podcast made me circle back to the topic, I tried to find good books about the field and stumbled upon this blog (TheJollyContrarian), which I liked.

There don't seem to be any references to it on HN tho - am I the only one?

Best, Thorsten
Fortunately, politics are totally sane everywhere else in the world.
Rather that adding more fine grained locking, would there have been another way? In particular I wonder of the problem domain of QEmu could have benefited from a thread per core architecture. Do guest OSs try to pin high tps devices to singular cores these days, and if so could than provide a natural way to shard the IO workload?
Depends where you are. I agree with you, but I live in London. London and the rest of the UK are different countries.

We have wonderful things like Thameslink and the Overground network. When I visit my in-laws up north, it's not quite like that.
I practice a "1 strike you're out" policy.

As soon as I get a single unwanted notification from an app, that's it, I kill all its notifications privileges. Any other annoyances, and the whole app gets uninstalled. My attention and focus are too valuable a resource.
The official repo moved to Github in 2014:
https://github.com/sebastianbiallas/ht
Is this is sincere question? Or just thinly veiled marketing that you have a feature that a radio doesn't? Because you have to admit that a simple radio is absolutely your competition. If you have features that people should know about that make your solution the better one, just state them.

Marketing works when it is simple, concise, and honest: "I have product X that resolves problem Y, with features Z, and want people to be aware of it."
I mostly agree with your comment, but the source code of of many GNU coreutils is quite gnarly. It's ancient code (from my reference point as a 35yo) developed at a time when coding style was different and a much smaller community maintained it.

I think it's important for free software that people coming into the community are enthusiastic to maintain it. It took the wind out of my sails a little when I realised the GNU code base, while it produces critical tools I use every day, is written in a way that I found extremely (unnecessarily) terse and "clever". Tracing how different combinations of flags are handled is not much fun. Documentation is helpful for the user, less so for the tinkerer who is trying to understand the stack.

If this project manages to hit parity with GNU coreutils, and my distro(s) provide support, I'll switch to it purely on that basis.
Memory safety isn’t why containers are considered insufficient as a security boundary. It’s exposing essentially the entire Linux feature surface, and the ability to easily interact with the host/other containers that makes them unsafe by themselves. What you’re saying about VMs vs containers makes no sense to me. VMs are used to sandbox containers. You still need to sandbox containers if your kernel is written in rust

Even just considering Linux security itself: there are so, so many ways OS security can break besides a slight (you’re going to have to use unsafe a whole lot) increase in memory safety
It makes sense.

Do you have any advice to someone who would start writing fiction books?

I write a lot but only for myself. I don't care about money but I would like to persevere to some day be able to produce quality works in my own language.
Java as well: https://github.com/pengisgood/jdk-source-code/blob/master/sr...

EDIT : and Rust: https://docs.rs/hashbrown/latest/hashbrown/hash_set/index.ht... (this is used by the default implementation of HashSet).
Guide to FDX API and Leading Data Providers
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Breaking the Tyranny of Obviousness
> I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs.

Search on webmail is instantaneous. It was not on MTAs last time I tried. I remember someone always struggling to find old mails with his MTA while gmail would find it quite quickly.
That's called smurfing and is bound to get you flagged as a money launderer.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smurf.asp
The culture around memory safe languages is a positive improvement for programmer zeitgeist. Man though the overreach all the way to "always safe forever" needs to be checked.
That's pretty terse, and it doesn't answer my question.

Like, let's extrapolate that you mean "Apple and Sony profited from FreeBSD and didn't contribute back, and that's bad". Let's assume that the strongest possible version of that statement is true.

How does that ever translate to "a Rust port of GNU coreutils under MIT license is bad"? If Apple and Sony haven't contributed to GNU coreutils in ~30 years, they're not going to start now, MIT alternative or not. There's not going to be an Apple executive who's thinking "We've held out as long as we could, but now we're going to need to start integrating coreutils in MacOS and contributing changes back... wait, no, these Rust suckers released a MIT version, I guess we can keep being greedy!".
Why I didn't play this harpsichord sooner
2 things:

first, absolutely fascinating topic, and solid write up. i skimmed through certain bits but am wondering: "Turns out, the survey was off a lot more than any of us expected" did you mean off from the title, or the surveyor's work? (also, since you're in Canada, allow me to quote Les Stroud: "if you sweat, then you die" sweating is actually the easiest way to get cold heh, you brought sweat up in the same paragraph)

second, i'm a musician who lives in Anchorage. i'm a recovering programmer. a good friend of mine is a recovering surveyor, and he runs Trapper Creek music festival up here, 15 years and counting. since you said you mounted equipment on a mic stand you just happened to have -- wondering if that event you were planning for was music related :-D
I used to be on Reddit a lot. Small niche communities had a lot of great content. Then Reddit deleted my app for me and I stopped using Reddit altogether. Once in a while I end up on Reddit through a link in search results but I don’t just browse Reddit any more.
Around the globe twice? No need to go through Ghana. It will save you one circumnavigation.
I think one can even say that an authoritarian government is a more stable "state" than a benign one, and that due to entropy, all sufficiently perturbed governments decay to authoritarianism unless sustained by some external inputs. The input, in this case, being the activism of those who don't want to be surveilled.
In a corporate context, is there any risk or downside associated with making a specific contribution to GPL code which doesn't also apply to MIT/BSD?

The only downside I can perhaps think of is a strategic one: endorsing the use of GPL in general and contributing to a healthy copyleft ecosystem, which may be disadvantageous to a giant corporate like Google.
> I regret to say it, but it's true: most of today's programming consists of regurgitating the same things in slightly different forms. High levels of reasoning are not required.

But that's basically what engineering (, and medicine, and law, and all sorts of professions out there,) has always been about. Engineers build railways and bridges based on the same proven principles in slightly different forms, adapting to the specific needs of each project. Their job is not to come up with groundbreaking inventions every day.
There's one direct train between Exeter St Davids - Aberdeen every day Mon-Sat, in each direction.

It takes something like 10½hrs. If you join the train at Plymouth (the start of the journey) it's 11½hrs, and the longest possible train journey you can make in the UK without changing.
Unlike varispeed's unfortunate experience my commute is indeed very chill and consistent! Train that I catch comes in full, unloads, a total of maybe 50 people board, leaves. Coming back in the evening is a bit more crowded, but it's very rare that I don't get a seat. I use that time to work or read and can enjoy the wonderful English countryside as a background :) Almost the opposite of what a dear friend has to experience in his reverse commute from Cambridge to King's Cross.
I do believe that the advertising-funded models definitely are not to be depended on, and social media has suffered a lot because of that. I also think that the enforcement of that responsibility does fall in HR, but maybe DEI is also needed for that. Some of the time you're dealing with civil rights cases and other times you're seeking out diverse, non-traditional candidates to add to your company's perspective. It doesn't even have to be race-specific it could also be class-specific.
Most new authors are subsidized by their day job. It’s a huge moment in an authors life when they start making money exclusively from writing. A moment most never get to.
And how much does it cost to get USDC from Euro and then back to USD on the other end?

Let's be honest, if it was cheaper and faster, it would be the standard, right?
How does the existence/adoption of a Rust version of coreutils under MIT make that more likely to happen?
It is the process that makes it hard and expensive. Even bringing this to court costs money.

Extracting money from normal people is nearly automated.
Crewe does take the shorted route - Stafford, Trent valley, then bypassing rugby.

The cheap trains do the same route and just stop along the way. The ticket itself is valid for say journey into Birmingham, soend the day, then continue via Banbury to Marylebone. I’ve done that myself several times, but it’s a minor flow compared to the direct train.

Manchester to London - at least pre covid, had 3 trains per hour, one via Crewe which was slightly longer, the others via Stoke.