skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"we've decided to leave out the technical details of the breach in the blog post"

>"Our dedication to transparency, security, and the trust you place in us remains unwavering."

You are contradicting yourself here.

>"The source of this security incident was due to an uncaught error response in one of our APIs that didn't properly format the response before sending it back to the client. The response contained our internal admin tokens, which can then be used to access internal endpoints, which unveiled sensitive user information."

Why would you leave that out? Seems like it is vital information.
Well the belt& road initiative is probably trying to take care of that.
Yes, I run multiple fiber ISPs.
Very crafty. However my favorite computer prank style is almost immediately clear you're being pranked but making it very hard to find how the prank works. For example, coworker in the previous place I worked at, noticed his mouse moves on its own. Classic prank, right? He found the wireless USB dongle and removed it.

But it still kept on happening.

By the time he realized it was a patched driver he threatened to murder us all a couple of times.

I like this sort of prank because everyone is in the game, the victim included. They know they're being pranked and if it stops being fun you can end it gracefully.
There are a litany of problems with your thinking.

1) we brought nato next door to putin in Ukraine. That’s why there’s a war. Go read more about this if you aren’t sure why the war is happening. It’s quite interesting.

2) it’s impossible to keep some capability like that secret. Do you know how the Soviet Union got nukes in the first place? They ‘borrowed’ the technology from the USA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies

There is no reason to believe the USA could keep this info secret. And every reason to believe it would result in Russia / China finding out and then doing whatever is necessary to counter it = probably nukes in space if that’s their only option.

The main problem with all this, and why MAD probably still applies, is that even if one single thermonuclear weapon gets though, you’re totally screwed.
But I feel like Python is too complex and big to really like now. It was my go-to language in the 2000s as a kind of sweet spot: featureful/library-rich enough for getting things done, but not overgrown with decades of individually-worthwhile complications.

(Not saying it was ever my paradigm for elegant language design or that it's their job to conform to my taste.)
Surely if you want to predict how resilient ‘cashless’ societies are to systemic shocks, you could do worse than to to look at Ukraine, where I think it’s fair to say power and network infrastructure underpinning digital payments have had a challenging operational environment for a few years now, and people have every reason to flee to the most secure and trustworthy ways of transacting.

So what’s happening there? Reversion to a cash economy?

Not really.

> In 2023, most card-based transactions in Ukraine were cashless despite the full-scale war... cashless card-based transactions accounted for 65% of the total amount of card-based transactions last year, up from 61% in the pre-war year 2021.

https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi...

> In Ukraine, digital payments have become mainstream with 60% of payments with Mastercard cards being made digitally today, ... For five years running, Ukraine has ranked among the top 10 countries worldwide at Mastercard by the number of NFC payments using digital cards.

https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/202...
My understanding is that that situation happened in the past and not in a future in which Puerto Rico has an actual “cashless society,” is that not true?
Hmm, seems to not be available for my Pixel 6. The github looks very active but there hasnt been a release there (or Google Play or Fdroid) in over 2 years.
To keep eyes (or IRSTs) on a maneuvering stealth jet you're either going to need insane numbers of drones or drones that have similar performance to the jet you're tracking. The sky is a big place. Either way, if this kind of thing works at all, it's not going to work out any cheaper than the existing options.

Also, launch parameters for missiles are important. A missile fired from a drone flying at low subsonic speeds has far less energy, and is thus far less of a threat.
Pro tip: do it in a sane country where occupation is impossible.
Without power my supermarket also can't store its frozen or refrigerated goods safely, so that's about half of the store and notably the half which has mostly things shoppers might want immediately, if there's a disaster and I can't buy dishwasher powder I don't care, if I can't buy food that's a big problem - and much food is refrigerated whereas dishwasher powder is not.

Next, it can't light the store. In mid-summer you can probably use the parts of the store with some natural light for most of the day, the rest of the store is too dark to allow customers, as is the behind the scenes re-stocking etc., they also can't open the delivery bays which are electrically shuttered, and they can't operate the doors, the escalators or the elevators.

Now, I live in a major port city, so obviously in reality the power isn't going to stay off here, not for days, at home I've had a handful of short (< 2 hour) outages and one serious (~4-8 hour) outages in maybe 30 years living in this city. Anywhere with multiple supplies or backups is going to have even less problems.

I can buy that things are different in rural areas, but it seems to me that mostly you need backups for other reasons anyway, and both electricity and IP are great in those terms because they're so fungible compared to conventional backups.
> the position of your bed relative to your chair relative to your door

IIUC, the idea behind Feng Shui (traditional Chinese interior design) is that if your furniture is arranged in a logical way, it has a positive mental impact and is therefore conducive to allowing you to thrive. On the other hand, if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it can lead to frustration and clutter, which have a negative mental impact.

I don’t think there are any studies on this, but at least intuitively, it seems to make sense to me.

Example: if you put your desk directly in front of your door, it’s in the way and therefore will be an (unconscious) source of frustration every time you enter the room (because you have to walk around it all the time). In Feng Shui this is described as the desk blocking the ‘energy’ of the door; I find it useful to think of ‘energy’ as a synonym for ‘traffic flow’ in this context.

If you want to know more about this, check out the excellent YouTube/TikTok channel ‘Dear Modern’, especially his short-form videos. (no affiliation)
At the core, we are pure awareness devoid of any object (thoughts). We can direct this awareness which we call the art of attention. We're pure awareness and we decide to attend something.
However, to attend and receive information from the physical plane, we need appropriate instruments. Brains and its organs of senses are those instruments. If these instruments have fault, obviously we as awareness don't receive enough information and it seems our consciousness is reduced.
In waking state, we receive info from physical senses. In dream state, these senses are in suspended mode but mind is active in imagining the experiences in a virtual world and hence awareness has an instrument.
In deep sleep, even mind is in a state of rest and hence awareness has almost no active instrument. Still, we awareness does exist and thus we know that we had a good or bad sleep when we wake up.
Link to the teaching program?
How efficient is Boinc as a heating application? It's an important part of calcuating its climate impact.

Also, why old desktops only? Won't a brand new desktop running at 100% generate plenty of heat? Isn't the difference merely calculations per W?
I help maintain a user-facing ASP.NET project running .NET Framework 4.5 that uses jQuery 1.0 for most of the UI. We launched our first new feature using HTMX back in November and it worked out pretty well for us and we plan to continue using it moving forward.

I also work on a React site and I wouldn't want to move away from it unless someone dared to utter the word rewrite.
The actual open source OS (OxidOS is proprietary): https://tockos.org/
That absolutely doesn't say everyone should be poor.
Similar one I did to a colleague just this summer. Went into the menu of their monitor and turned green all the way up, red and blue all the way down. They spent a day trying to debug their Ubuntu, swapping out cables etc. and were about to go order a new monitor when I had to confess.
> Ask DALL-E 3 to make a picture with some text, and it will spit out 4 image. Usually 2 or 3 are perfectly spelled.

Yes, this is the 'miracle of spelling' (as https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10562#google calls it): for many words, larger models can manage to deduce the spelling somehow despite the tokenization. It may even fool you into thinking it understands spelling in general. But if you ask DALL-E 3 to generate a random string of ASCII, you'll quickly discover the limits to the 'miracle'.
> Thinking you know substantive law can be a dangerous thing for any lawyer who believes they don't need to bother researching.

This is always true, independent of whether one has gone to law school or not.
How about working in an IT job in a non-tech company or organisation?

A charity, academia (not researching yourself, but supporting research), local or national government, etc.
What do you not like about tech? I work in gov space sector and while it’s crazy bureaucratic and risk adverse, it’s a fulfilling mission and most people I work with are just excited to be working “in space” like their 12-year old self dreamed of.
>It is almost impossible for a human to perceive color red as colour blue.

Eh, you mean like humans seeing the color green as the color red? Not sure why red/blue matters at all in this case as stoplights are red/green, one of the highest risk of human failure color combinations!

Furthermore direct color encoding of safety controls tends to be coupled with shape or placement. Stop signs are octagons. Stop lights have a directional component.

If you're worried about an AI virus, I'd be far more worried about it just directly crashing the car, then induced confusion crashing the car.
I believe a civil war might be a real risk. Or big recession, both which might lead to unrest.. Never know what is the next political system when people are actually starving.
Yes they do. If you create a passkey Apple's way, you'll be unable to ever use it from any non-Apple device or operating system.
That lands on only a sitemap.
> These concerns aren't about people not using passkeys, quite the opposite

The person who I responded to said:

“this stuff is hard to explain to end users. This is the reason it's not widely used yet even on the handful of platforms that provide this option.”

They clearly think “hard to explain” is the reason why they are not more popular. That is what i responded to. You are making an orthogonal point about trickyness of account recovery. (One i largely agree with, but has nothing to do with the ease of explaining passkeys)
I have thought about doing something similar for heavily obfuscated JavaScript. Very useful for security research I imagine!
Ask HN: iPhone 6 Data Recovery?
I'm getting ready to clear out some old devices. I found one of my wife's old phones that was water damaged (iPhone 6). I tried some of the stuff that I've seen online about gently scrubing the logic board in anhydrous alcohol and stuff like that. But I haven't been able to get it to boot or do anything.

Is there a more advanced way to get to the data, like desoldering the storage chip and swapping it onto a USB? I'm guessing not, but thought I'd ask.
To draw attention to the motte and Bailey nature of this argument.

The Bailey: ‘cashless payment is fragile and a single outage would lead to riots in the streets’

The Motte: ‘internet and power outages happen and are annoying’

Evidence for the easily defended motte position does not defend the outrageous Bailey.
OK, the cartoon images here https://www.boost.io/docs/ especially the court case are freaking adorable! :D LOL I love it!
I want to research this route more but the camera is an important component to me. I suspect their is a model of phone from 5-10 years ago that has a an under-the-radar stellar camera and I would find "perfectly adequate". ("perfectly adequate" is my favored state for most tech solutions.)
> I make my own open source FPGA switches, 6 and 12 port 10 Gbps SFP+ up to 100 Gbps QSFP28.

How big is it physically? I don't really get it from the link.
How about you tell me more about how ""The UK power grid is
remarkably resilient"?

Because those are not the facts I am looking at. We just made it
through a winter where the UK government put a 30% probability on
rolling brownouts due to gas instability and put additional blackout
emergency plans into place for the first time since the 1970s "Winter
of Discontent".
This! And their bmc is trash and openbmc only ships on few boards (arm ones iirc)
The Perl Journal had that flavor too. I hardly ever read it because I had no interest in actually coding Perl, but it was great to see this kind of culture on the magazine rack at Borders or wherever.
Professional Music Studio Picture Timeline
Combat has been about controlling resources. When labor or attention is now considered a resource, how does combat change how it looks? You can’t necessarily conduct the same tactics to secure a rubber plantation like you might to secure a mindshare of a population. Maybe you lean more on propaganda instead of actions that might diminish the quality of the labor/attention pool from loss of life. You could gradually shift their labor pools to enrich your own companies, shift their public discourse to discuss products created by your own companies, and you’ve effectively captured the population without a shot fired or them realizing what has even happened.
A favorite of mine is the MonteCarlo Programmer Font [0]. I used it as my terminal font for a couple years.

[0] https://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/
Agreed. Shipping earlier and often gives the project lots of traction and makes it easier to prioritize features and to correct system requirements.

When I'm asked, I often suggest taking the opposite route, though: build the UI first, then the backend to support the UI, and finally, the database schema that best models the business. In my experience, this approach makes it easier to spot edge cases while also making clear what the deeper layer should really support.
One plausible way to rewrite such a program would be to make it more modular. It's already likely all those rules are separated in modules and it is (allegedly) possible to call routines in different languages from COBOL code. You can, then, start writing those rules in Java, Python, C, or Rust (there is a Rust for z/OS!).

OTOH, you now have a more complicated and, perhaps, more brittle business-critical application you need to tend to.
Frozen Russian Assets to Finance Ukraine: Collateralization Not Confiscation
Why would it do that, if the legal system is not already fining them for noise violations?
We (west) already have a credit system that cash hedges against — a charity my parents look after woke up one day with no bank account, because the bank had not received a reply to a letter they'd sent to who knows where.

If I were a coffee shop I'd take cash just as an operational hedge against that kind of thing, let alone "the government has banned coffee shops" tail risk.
Recreating classic games with a bare MCU (2023)
Ask HN: Python library for robust URL retrieval with workaround strategies?
Background: I'm scraping various URLs, but (as expected) encounter issues with some servers blocking the scrapes, leading to errors like timeouts or 403 forbidden responses. Currently, I'm using the requests library, but for problematic URLs, I've noticed switching user agents or using different tools like pycurl or wget can sometimes bypass these blocks.

Question: Is there a Python library that automates these workaround strategies, attempting multiple methods to successfully retrieve a URL?
I would like a tool similar to this, but for refactoring in a human-readable way instead of minifying. Some tool to automatically look for duplicated css code. In theory, it seems easier for css than for actual programming languages given the simplicity
There was a very good This American Life episode in which a teenaged fan visited Piers Anthony in the 1980s ("Just South of the Unicorns," https://www.thisamericanlife.org/470/show-me-the-way). Per the Gizmodo summary:

It’s an interesting story about the relationship between authors and fans, and how mundane fantasies can sometimes be more powerful than magical ones. It’s also an ultimately uplifting look at how Anthony, through his books and his advice, helped a young man through a particularly challenging time in his life.

As a young SFF reader in the 1980s, I enjoyed the Xanth series to a point but got much further into his earlier hard-edged science fiction, specifically Chthon and Macroscrope.
It doesn’t even have to be dark matter, most of the (non-dark) galactic mass is in the galactic plane and the sun oscillates up and down passing through the plane as it orbits the centre.
Air defense rockets came about because they were an improvement on crew controlled flak cannons. Now adays though it would be pretty trivial to create a flak autocannon that uses machine learning to absolutely mow down clouds of drones in a few moments.
well websites ad-tech have been very able to track mouse movement/location, characters pressed (but not submitted) for 15 years at least; people are fine with this fact too (even if its 1 or 2 monopolies that phone home - and then share data lol)

android's have done similar for a very long time; customers have known about it, and turn a blind eye cuz its a new-shiney
"Pinnipeds evolved about thirty million years ago. They showed up first in the colder parts of the northern hemisphere, then in the Antarctic, then in temperate zones."

That's an interesting sequence, given that the continents then were about where they are now.
(Author) Yes, it’s in the page linked in the section — and the maximum memory is 10240 MB, so that’s 5.8 vCPU < 3 physical CPUs.

Good point about 2 Mbps vs 2 MBps, I’ll update that. Forgive me for the typo!
I don't see what point you're trying to make here.

Are you saying that you would not give anyone else food?

So you accept that no one else will give you food?

Basically all transactions should stop?

Or are you saying that transactions should not bother being counted. Everyone just takes what they say they need wherever they can find it?

What is the guiding argument or thesis here?
Fallout was supposed to be satire. In general, be suspicious of somebody selling you insurance against the apocalypse. The very transaction implies they aren't as concerned as you.

It also speaks about the disconnect the future vault-dwellers feel about the world, as if they expect their place in the world will remain static. Looking at the Roman empire's fall, it was less cataclysmic than an orderly retreat by the Core from the Periphery [0], leaving local elites in charge of protection and development when the legions left. This means a current slice of high-elite is leaving physically and economically critical infrastructure abandoned to another elite to take up. A smarter elite would be building redoubts along these strategic lines rather than disconnecting entirely.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23756480_Cyclical_D...
Not sure why this is down voted, I use marshmallow serializes with DRF. Marshmallow serializes are more flexible and the learning curve isn't high.
What are you fed up with? It seems that would be needed to determine if the problem you have is either fixable within tech or if you will be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire by going to something else.

Without knowing anything else, go to law school.
One more example, the phrase "consistently bad is better than inconsistently good"

Sometimes you have 10 modules that all need the same update to be better. Updating just one module, while that module might be a lot better - breaks consistency and makes the codebase harder to understand overall. It is worse, even though that one module is better. Though, updating all 10 modules at the same time might be just impractical and super risky. It can make sense to do that in phases and do just one at a time. Sometimes the effort for the one module will take a few weeks. Holding all that up for most of a year does not make a lot of sense.

At the same time, trying to do it all across the whole code-base all at once, at some point that is no longer even refactoring:

"Refactoring isn't a special task that would show up in a project plan. Done well, it's a regular part of programming activity. When I need to add a new feature to a codebase, I look at the existing code and consider whether it's structured in such a way to make the new change straightforward. If it isn't, then I refactor the existing code to make this new addition easy. By refactoring first in this way, I usually find it's faster than if I hadn't carried out the refactoring first." (https://refactoring.com/)

Of note, sometimes that initial refactoring should land as its own change first. Though, that is a philosophical disagreement that is okay to have. Some reviewers want you to fix up existing problems in code you touched, and they want that in the same diff as the bug fix and/or feature update. Other reviewers want those updates to be completely separate and done one-by-one.
How could it be done better?
> What do you not like about tech?

I feel that it's no longer about making quality products, but more about milking money by any means, even if immoral and/or obviously (self-)destructive. It may have been like that for some time already, but I wasn't able to realize that before.

It seems to me as if we've become the machine that we wanted to build.

I would love doing something that's more "down to earth". Optimally, in some sector that is involved with treating people with respect - "as if" they were real human beings. An alternative would be working outdoors and being nearer to nature in general.
Not quite. Dark matter is the hypothesis that the discrepancy between theory and observation is due to a form of matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically. So we can't see it, and thus "dark".

There are other competing ideas including a family of modified Newtonian dynamics models, but nothing comes as close as explaining the observations as dark matter does.

There was a paper recently that showed that the discrepancy may be the higher order terms from general relativity that is often neglected because they are believed to be small - but that idea still needs to be proven to work for a large variety of cases.

The observations in question for this Dark matter hypothesis include the rotation velocity of stars in galaxies and a few other things like gravitational lensing.

Dark energy is a different discrepancy with theory. It's a term that we have to add to Einstein's field equations to account for the observation that the universal expansion is accelerating instead of slowing down. Again there are competing hypotheses, like non uniform density on the largest scales, but nothing quite explains everything as dark energy.
To Delay Death, Lift Weights (2017)
Only Java is unstable because it’s not following Apple’s rules. Everything else, including the apps that follow the rules, are stable. That’s how it’s always been for the Apple ecosystem.
8x8 tiles; most characters fit in 7x7 to allow for 1px between characters
As suspected, no point. (nothing was validated or invalidated)
Yeah, but the throughput will be incredible.
Any reason you dont just use an ad blocker? I havent seen an ad on Twitter... ever?

And yes, this includes mobile.