skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My reason to consider using this is that he’s the only significantly wealthy person fighting for equal AI access, when everyone else is building closed models and pushing for regulatory capture. I think he’s honest in recognizing the threat of having a few tech companies or few countries controlling our world through AI. Google’s Gemini was a preview of how the few big players might abuse their power and inject the bias of their employees into the AI influenced world this is becoming. I am not a tech oligarch but a random person, so choice and competition seem good to me?
It was absolutely, 100% deserved.
the time i spend with my wife and kids is what matters. work is just a means to provide for them. in fact im currently not working because i quit my job for a while to spend time with them full time. this matters more to me than service health metrics and kpis
> I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines, having been driven out of the organization years before.

Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.
I saw the xz repo is back on GitHub, Lasse and a new contributor were cleaning it up. They removed ifunc support and they committed code to generate test files into the repo, so that they can do test files without blobs. It looks like they're doing good stuff.
How well can LLM with evolutionary comp do blackbox optimization?
It means "home/house spirit" and from context sounds like they're referring to Google Home or Alexa.
The problem with "everything" is centralization.

In capitalism, this manifests as monopolies. But other systems have their own problems with the same root cause. Soviet newspapers were ... not exactly a fun or interesting read.
The difference is that you won't get arrested for buying a roided-up Jigglypuff.
I mean, we have legislators in their 30s in the US and we regulate tech like it's 80 year olds.
You can have a 2-3-4 right triangle if you can find the right axioms for it.
I have a scroll bar on mine. I am using the latest version of Firefox (124.0.2). It is the exact same scroll bar that is on this website, Hacker News.
The root causes are usually among:

Security teams are often staffed by people who have no operational experience, and do not understand the consequences of what they are recommending or even mandating. Often those staff are blindly following hardening guides or asking for every configuration switch to be flipped to "most secure" setting without having a good understanding of the threat model for the workload and without taking into account the tradeoffs between utility and operational cost. The level of advice can be on par with ChatGPT or worse, but it is taken more seriously due to the advice-giver's job title.

Security teams often have no "skin in the game". There are no real disincentives to stop them from asking for crazy or very expensive things and imposing high costs on other teams. In fact they are incentivised to do that very thing, because the only thing that covers your butt more than recommending everything possible, is recommending everything possible PLUS some things that can't be done with the time & budget available, leaving them able to say "we see you had $security_problem, well, we recommended $impossible_thing but you didn't do it" (e.g. say, $500k of DLP solution [with its own operational risks!] for a workload that only makes $1M a year). To be fair I've seen some good & practical security teams but once you get a bad actor / games player at management level that behaviour can become very sticky.

I have seen variants of this nearly everywhere I've worked, it seems very hard to get incentives aligned between the do-ers and the secure-ers.

The most practical workaround I've seen is to make sure there is a reasonable balance of political power between the various parties.

"Reasonable" can be hard to establish but is context dependent. You would expect "Security" to have more power in an F500 because the brand value, financial and legal exposure are high and individual dev teams aren't necessarily across or exposed to the full consequences of the damage they can cause.

In a startup you would expect "Security" to have much less power because the consequences of not shipping / misallocating effort are almost immediately existential.
I work for a large org with several offices across the country. You can work in a local team (i.e., immediate supervisor is in the office next to you) or in a remote team (i.e., your boss might be in another state, and team distributed amongst three locations). I've done both and am currently in the latter. We run weekly online meetings for the team, plus weekly project specific meetings. Then about every 2 months my boss and his boss fly over for an informal fireside with anyone in the team at my location. This approach seems to work well if not better than the local team approach. In both cases we are hybrid but in my case I have no reason, and thus no pressure, to attend the office more than once a week.
Learn CAD. LEARN welding. Try silver smithing. Muck with casting and 3D printing. Talk with people
2 Google Sheets backend stories:

- Needed to manage vocab learning content for 60 world languages, mostly being updated by a handful of university students and a bunch of remote volunteers. Google Sheets was our source of truth, with a nightly sync into MariaDB. We even wrote some callable scripts that could detect ambiguities and other common issues. Saved us a ton of tooling effort, and stakeholders found it cool that we could update content so quickly.

- Working on a new product, my boss found a Figma plugin that lets you wire up prototypes to a Google sheet. It’s report-heavy and we’re still building the real app, so to dogfood it internally I’m running a wizard-of-oz collecting data with a different tool we already built and dumping results into sheets and then sorting/filtering/calculating for all the needed views. Internal stakeholders get a real, clickable prototype with real values that closely approximates what the real product will look like. It’s been amazing!
From another angle: build systems.

Currently building most libraries usually involves executing a series of highly complex byzantine scripts, requiring turing-complete environment. This gives attacker an endless attack surface, and when the build process is hijacked - well, the opportunities are there.

Moving to a declarative build process with only a limited state machine as an executor would help. Requiring all source blobs being reproducible might also be something to think about.
All the boosts had queued with cheaters.

I do agree though that this could have false-positives. Right now anyone marked as guilty a moderator had went through and looked at stats or a demo if not sure.

Which boosted ones looks skeptical to you?

Im wondering if i should have information about who reviewed the report and have something written up in steps taken for proof. Thoughts?
Agreed, I think the doomsday prepper angle makes it seem absurd. But take a step back and this is an INCREDIBLE display of technical capabilities of a single person. It crosses a handful of domains in terms of designing, building, assembling, configuring a Thing. Plus the background detail on component selection. And the writing is tight too.

I build things that roughly resemble this (low volume, custom, solving use cases that are too niche for an industrial offering to be created), for money. I'd hire this guy in a minute to outsource things to or collaborate with, so I see the project as a kind of personal resume.

IMO he should find a specific scenario where something along these lines would be valuable. One I am personally involved in is marine electronics diagnosis. Primarily NMEA2000 networks and the devices on them, and the same devices on Ethernet. It's too much detail to go into, plus I'm on a flight after spending a week in Vegas for a trade show, but with just a little bit of reconfiguration work this could be a Thing that higher end marine electronics techs would really dig. Then I think you could also delve deeper into the considerations put into the design and component selection details.
Billy Mitchell isn't even in this database.

(Kidding. I know that's not quite what this site's for.)
Yes and no, but mostly no. This would prevent simple use of ifuncs in this way, but it's important to understand that the author of this could inject arbitrary code into the library that ends up in the address space of a sensitive process. At that point, all bets are off: it could remap the GOT as writable if it so chose, or (this is mostly here for the EDR people will certainly bring it up after reading this) if trying to do that is flagged as "suspicious" or the OS gains the ability to block such a transition, the injected code can subvert control flow in hundreds of other ways. It has arbitrary read/write, code execution, everything: there is no security mitigation that can stop it. If it so wishes it can leak private keys and send them to the attacker directly. It can spawn a shell. Trying to design protections at this stage of compromise is a fool's errand.
The other side of the coin for something like Clojure (lisps, really) allow tiny teams to manage large domains - so the team can't scale to a large number of programmers, but a 5-man army is viable because that is a small enough team to curate the individuals members for quality and they get a lot done.

But the author's rankings look extremely reasonable. All companies have management problems and some languages cope better with that than others. Another way of interpreting this is "What costs does the language impose on programmers doing something novel" - usually novel is a bad sign for long term success.
In the original post he mentions that he purchased the containers specifically for the purpose of the donation, so it's likely that the containers sat full for years after being donated and were only incidentally re-used.

He also mentions that the person who originally accepted the donation was pushed out of the VCF organization, and did not have a say in the material being disposed of.

There is a possibility here that the containers sat for years after they were accepted, no one was left who knew why they contained a bunch of papers, and so they thought it wouldn't be a big problem if they disposed of the papers. Being a supposedly archival organization, however, if this was the case it would have been very poor judgememt.

I'm the kind of person who keeps random marketing materials from obscure gadgets from 40 years ago, so I can feel the pain of these documents having been lost.

That being said, once a donation is made, in general, is there an obligation to uphold any wishes of the donator? I guess there is, in many circumstances.
Lacan is a massive charlatan, and him being taken seriously at all in any context indicts the entire idea of HN being a high quality discussion forum.
This same scenario has played out before around the world with either Google or Facebook saying they will pull out, but every time they’re still there. Search seems to be the one service that they won’t shutter
Then it truly says something about the rest of humanity that even with tuberculosis, Orwell was a brilliant and insightful commentator on the state of the world who grasped many basic truths that elude many people even today.
I didn't provide an opinion, or any suggestions, I am just asking to clarify if it is implied or not.
Yes, they can be evidence that invalidates a patent if they qualify as prior art.
Jason Scott appears to have said:

- He donated some stuff.

- He was told the papers were tossed.

That's not conjecture. It could be false, but why would Jason Scott decide to lie about being told this? That just makes no sense. The best thing I can think of is that there was some severe communication breakdown, but if that's the case this is really not a good response, because it implies that Jason is intentionally just making shit up and I don't understand why anyone would assume that.

I am not saying anything regarding the papers having been tossed, and I would like to believe your version of the events where they were not. However, Jason having apparently been told the papers were tossed is fully 100% compatible with that also having not actually happened, and presumably you weren't the one to communicate with Jason in that situation, so how exactly do you know?
The measurement became the target. Hope we have brake and tire dust particle measurements soon.
No this group wastes so much time trying to relive the 70's and 80's they're missing an even greater paradigm shift unfolding right here and now. Someone has to say enough with the tinkering already. It's a waste of time. Yesterday's people are dead. Not relevant - dead and gone. That party's over, move on. This is not healthy
> a new contributor

Jia Tan, is that you?
Other than folks generally lamenting the situation there are quite a few who seem to have their knickers in a twist.

There are a number of people who seem to need PR training, or basic human decency training in relation to this topic. The original post, and this one were very civl and dry (here's my story with plain delivery). The responses being so... charged is not not a good look. It makes the groups and people responding look, well, like assholes, to be blunt about it.

If your running a "vintage computer festival" you might want to change your name based on the behavior of other people speaking on behalf of their VCF...
Do you call that NPR story proof of a bias worse than what happens at other institutions? Or because it's biased in the direction that doesn't align with your views?
what do you want to make and what are your goals?

i brought several consumer electronics products to market and did all the engineering work.
While this is happening, I don't think it's happening at a large enough scale to matter or long enough timespan. Most people burn out after a year or so of working multiple jobs. It's posted all the time in /overemployed.
And when a thousand people who disagree with your position start harassing your employer to fire you, what then?
The BBC...?
Have you tried hydroxyapatite? Just curious. (The chemical name is hydroxyLapatite, but it's usually spelled without the L in toothpastes. There's a heated debate about this on the wikipedia talk page.)
I remember 10 years ago the smog was quite rough on summer days. It's still there, but it seems less grim these days
Great; I don't care about "design" as you're using it.

That entire field is somewhat unserious because it conflates engineering and actual usability with fashion, and often can't distinguish between the two.

That's exactly why I'm saying focus more on the modularity.
Most pros have aim around 90. Anything going over 95 is absurd and highly unlikely. Some of the matches end up being “head v head” or HvH where it’s all hackers and so may the best cheat win. A bit of this is contextual.

Also a lot of cheaters you’ll see have like aim in the 90 range and < 30 utility. That is a huge smell as well. You typically have that aim after thousands of hours and with that comes knowledge on utility.
California Supreme Court to review rooftop solar net metering
Those aren't the only two options. Shall we make sure to criticize the law of all 192 remaining member states of the United Nations every time one country's legal system comes into focus? Wouldn't want to leave anyone out.
I am also excited for less cars specifically modified to sound like loud farts driving around all night!
Right now not much. If you do play Counter-Strike you could use it to cross check and give yourself sanity.

In my post I mentioned a matchmaking service. So having this database will serve as a filter to prevent having to play with these toxic players.
This is one of the most significant computer security events of all time. A genuine backdoor-- not an accidental vulnerability, a backdoor-- created by a very sophisticated, very-likely state-backed, actor who used a combination of social engineering and multiple clever points of indirection to get a vulnerability into a common library. There will be many more articles about it in the months and years to come, and I don't see what's wrong with that as long as they are providing new information.
Competes with devs selling you their own save edits ("cash shop" purchases)?
I read your comment and your blog post and I still don't understand what happens when I put a link to a sheet in the text box and click Go.. what happens? You say your inputs and outputs are all in the sheet.. ok.. what does the button do?
Are you just calling some API and giving it the sheet as the input, and then writing the output of the call back to the sheet? So then these Single Button Apps are just API endpoints that you're calling with sheets instead of json or, say Postman (if you want a nicer UI)?

I think I'm failing to see the point here :-/
That particular command isn’t really different than pacman or apt.

Most of the time, though, with Nix, you don’t install stuff that way. In Nixos, there’s a configuration.nix file, and you add the package you want to to that file (along with all the other system configs). Then you effectively “rebuild” the OS based on that configuration, and a snapshot is created. Since this configuration is just text, it can be version controlled and backed up to GitHub or something.

If your hard drive crashes or something, you can reinstall Nixos from the config in like fifteen minutes.

If you just need the program temporarily, you can do “nix-shell -p neovim”, which will create a temporary shell where neon can be executed. Once you exit the shell, the binary is unlinked and will be eventually garbage collected.

There’s more, but the tl;dr is that can make stuff a lot more declarative while also allowing for stuff to be more ephemeral.
How do you tell the difference between someone being boosted by a cheater, and someone playing with their friend, who they don’t know is a cheater?
I think the distinction to me is whether there is reasonable doubt. If a player has a VAC ban, sure, not much doubt there. But queuing with cheaters seems murkier! I’m not sure how you’d prove boosting by watching a replay, but I could be missing something.
lol I watched a documentary on that guy not too long ago. There’s competition for everything…
> the tables are marked as read-only once dynamic linking completes

Alas this won't work. Dynamic linking is lazy, there's no moment when it's "complete". The correct function pointers get loaded and inserted into the table (in place of stubs) when called the first time, which can be arbitrarily far into the future. In fact in most large library ecosystems (gtk apps, etc...) most of the linked functions are never called at all.
The use of trie structure to compare strings without hardcoding raw, searchable string values is very inspired.

But yes, some black hat had a really really bad day: being so close to owning any ssh-enabled recently-updated box and when they can finally see a finish line it is just poof... gone in a day. It was two years of effort from at least one guy and more likely a team.
Optimus for indoor data collection and model deployment, Tesla for outdoor.
Join a device company that makes software as an accessory to their hardware. Then you’ll understand the true pecking order.
I'm infinitely thankful most people don't think like this. History is a treasure.
> What is this obsession with the past and the early days of computing? The reason why people don't cherish these types of things is they are rational. Technology is about tomorrow. It's not about yesterday

This reply hanging off a thread about prior art is telling.

As surprising as it may be, the past can tell a lot about the future, as the past was present at a point, and the future is now.

Take an example about AI. This past couple of years isn't the first time that AI had been a hot topic. Look back to the late 80's -- there was a lot of research into it and lots of predictions about how the world would change -- but that didn't happen. It definitely didn't affect the general public as has today. So why is that? Looking at the different circumstances between the past and today (i.e., increase in computing power, availability of networks and broadband, general availability of computing devices, etc. etc.) could then be used to predict the future.

Looking back at the past can give hints about what the future may hold.
Taboola and Outbrain should be the subject of a Department of Justice inquiry. Their whole business model seems to be facilitating scammers.
Awesome. I think your priorities are right. When it's time, I hope you can find work that provides both means for your family and personal satisfaction
Protobuf uses a bunch of variable length encodings. Here it's decoding a TLV format, but the length is itself a variable length integer (and seems to be a kind of tag-value encoding?) where you basically get 7 bits per byte telling you the value, and the leftmost bit tells you whether there's another byte. So if you mask with 0x8080 and get zero, then it was a 1 byte (7 bit) integer.

If 0x8080 is not set, then the tag-value record is 2 bytes. Left byte has tag. Right is value. Then they're masking with 0x0700 to get the type of record, which should be LEN.

So if it's a single byte LEN record, they can take that single byte as the length (they mask with 0x00ff, but really it's 0x007f. They already know the 0x80 bit is zero, and the value is contained in the least significant 7 bits). Otherwise they have to do some fiddly logic to decode the variable length integer to figure out the length (length here being the L in TLV).
I once worked with a person whose spouse was very good at fixing important industrial machines. Such machines were way too import to worry about commercial flights and expensive hotel rooms. A typical service call meant a private jet to the nearest executive airport and black car service to/from the factory.
> It's a tough problem to try and fund local news. There is civic value for one's community to have a platform for providing a check against corruption by various institutions—yet in practice, oftentimes not enough for most local residents purchase subscriptions.

Philanthropy and donations seem to be making headway here.
The name of the law is neither here nor there in the end (most laws have useless names really) and you don't have to possess an explanation of why it's covered under that law to be given the perspective that it is. On that front though, and following the link to the body of the law, a shortened version might be: The saves are encrypted and proprietary. As a result modifying them to get rare items runs afoul into the "trade secrets" verbiage. Selling work based on such trade secrets then falls under the unfair competition definition and is what results in said penalties.

My stab at the likely background reasoning for having these rules (i.e. not explicitly written into the law but rather why the law might have been made) is something along the lines that the guy made money off of devaluing the rarity of IP the company was supposed to have control of distributing through their proprietary means.
I think the biggest complaint about NPR having a bias - any bias - is that it's publicly funded.
I hope so too.

I haven’t touched the brake pedal in months. Tyres would be interesting too monitor.
You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..)
The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for example you want to lock certain resources.. you may fail..
If housing isn't a problem in Japan, why do they still have pod/capsule hotels and apartments?