skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
xdg-desktop-portal was created to allow applications running in a sandbox to access system resources. Nowadays, more and more, regular applications have to pass through this piece of crap to do their usual work, one which by design was never intended for them, but for flatpakked applications.

Oh the joy of going through the bluetooth pairing process for my controller, or physically getting up and connecting a physical wire to it, only for the system to wait until I'm in the game and touch the controller and immediately the game hangs because a pop up appears asking me if i want to give permission to my damn controller to control stuff. Or having to manually reposition my windows every single time, because a window knowing where it is is somehow "insecure"

I'm the one putting the software on there and deciding what to run. If I run it, then it's because I wanted the application to do what it does. If someone else is in the position of running software on my machine, they're already on the other side of the airtight hatchway. They can already give themselves the permissions they need. They can just click yes on any pop up that appears. Yes, the applications should be considered safe. Because the OS cannot possibly make any informed assumptions about what's legitimate and what's malicious.

To me it feels like I can't do certain stuff on my PC because someone else might misuse something on theirs. How is that my problem?
The Need for Secure Cloud Development Environments
In this article, I am discussing why organizations need Secure Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) for onboarding efficiently and securely diverse, global development teams. I review the benefits and challenges around this new approach to CDEs. Read how Secure CDEs are different from “standard CDE” like the ones from GitHub Codespace, GitPod or Coder.
I've never used ZeroMQ. How does it compare to MPI? I assume it is easier to use?
> Sometimes you can see a company is positioning itself for a great long term position before the entire wallstreet herd takes notice.

Well, the investment landscape is littered with the rotting husks of companies with great products. Wonderful, amazing products. They had incompetent management. Or the market for their amazing product never took off. Or there was a general downturn in the economy and they couldn't get cash when they needed it.

If the company has demonstrated itself a good investment, you can rest assured the wolves of Wall Street have already picked the carcass clean before you as a retail investor even get a whiff. They run analyses on factors you don't even know about to make their picks, and they do it in large number like you're never likely to see.

Even if you make the right picks, it's often the wrong pick. Consider if you had invested in Oxycodone a few years ago. It was a great product, brought simple, accessible, effective pain relief to the masses. Prescriptions were flying off the shelves like no other drug before it that wasn't a statin. I'm sure a handful of retail investors are smugly crying "inb4" but most of them are left holding the bag on that one. Hindsight investing is mostly a bitter strategy.
If there is a 'god equation' it will almost certainly include a+b=c because we use it all the time to describe "diverse biological systems with vast implementation constraints".

This article is lacking originality and insight to such degree that I susupect it is patentable.
That comparative is doing a lot of work.
> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it.

Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!
> #3) Penetrate and Patch

This is one of the reasons why I feel my job in security is so unfulfilling.

Almost nobody I work with really cares about getting it right to begin with, designing comprehensive test suites to fuzz or outright prove that things are secure, using designs which rule out the possibility of error.

You get asked: please look at this gigantic piece of software, maybe you get the source code, maybe it's written in Java or C#. Either way, you look at <1% of it, you either find something seriously wrong or you don't[0], you report your findings, maybe the vendor fixes it. Or the vendor doesn't care and the business soliciting the test after purchasing the software from the vendor just accepts the risk, maybe puts in a tissue paper mitigation.

This approach seems so pointless that it's difficult to bother sometimes.

edit:

> #4) Hacking is Cool

I think it's good to split unlawful access from security consultancy.

You don't learn nearly as much about how to secure a system if you work solely from the point of view of an engineer designing a system to be secure. You can get much better insight into how to design a secure system if you try to break in. Thinking like a bad actor, learning how exploitation works, etc. These are all things which strictly help.

[0]: It's crazy how often I find bare PKCS#7 padded AES in CBC mode. Bonus points if you either use a "passphrase" directly, or hash it with some bare hash algorithm before using various lengths of the hash for both the key and IV. Extra bonus points if you hard code a "default" password/key and then never override this in the codebase.
I stopped making assumptions about what terms people see as abstract and which they see as concrete when I found out not everyone understands a few as three.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/couple-few-several-u...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37722244
Scientists make DNA discovery that could help find pancreatic cancer cure
Intel's inconsistent SIMD support across its x86 chips seems crazy to me.

It's already a hard sell to get programmers to write architecture -specific SIMD code.

But Intel then made different subsets of SIMD instructions available on different models. And muddied the terminology by making "AVX-512" be ambiguous.

Maybe it was somehow a win in terms of profitability, but it sure made me reluctant to write code to exploit the new instructions.
> I have never seen any of these visual programming systems even be mentioned while trying to solve problems.

Unreal Engine’s Blueprints and Material Graphs are visual programming tools used heavily in indie to AAA games. So that’s one visual programming language used to solve problems all the time.
A lot of people : "hold our beers"
There is a streamer who memorised 1000 digits of pi, on stream, from scratch, in 11 hours. She used the mind palace method.

Here's the whole vod, if curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZqTIXCrC3g
Why is San Francisco the way that it is?
Berkeley researchers send 3D printer into space
I don't know about Switzerland, but this very famously was known to be the case in Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with...
Basically, you are confirming, what the original comment said. I now strongly suspect, that you have never used structured editing, which is where the issues with Python syntax are.

Where paredit for Python?
All-Inclusive Backlog: Beyond User Stories
Speaking of visual anything. I once ran across an experiment* where instead of leaving non programmers with the GUI, they encouraged them to experiment with a CLI to do their tasks. Guess what, everyone got more productive and preferred the CLI after they figured it out.

So do you have to waste resources on pretty graphs, or is it more efficient to stick a text based DSL in there for your non programmers?

Is the current fetish for meta meta meta programming a feature or a bug?

Can't you give your business analyst a BASIC like DSL that they can use to script most of their specific problems away? Like, you know the stuff in ms office?

Of course, to do that you need to unlearn your C++ and Rust and even python while designing the DSL :)

* With web search being what it is these days, I'm not going to even try and find a citation.

** Even what TFA is talking about can be considered a DSL. A DSL for debugging and software maintenance. They say it should be graphical, but a good part of the stuff that's mentioned would work as well in text reports.
Copenhagen to reward eco-friendly tourists with free food and tours
He will do morally much better, if he succeeds in funding the development of said cure, and in actually making it.

But he will be competing with more interesting propositions, investment-wise, in he form of subscription drugs.

Ergo, "why ?" is "probably because of money".
Ok, when can we meet? I have never seen it work, and, as said, I review 100s of project a year; everything ts is super slow so far. Maybe you have something.
I was up to 40 or 50 at one point (around age 18), but I don't think I can get past 20, now.
The Rise of Agentic Data Generation
Appreciate the rosettacode-like (chrestomathy) approach to documentation:

https://zguide.zeromq.org/
>That kind of lock-in can be a feature from the employer's perspective

And it can be a huge problem, as he has to maintain a complex visual DSL and teach it to every new employee. Locking employees in seems like a very easy way to make people miserable and unproductive.

An employer wants employers who are long term productive, giving them good tools and the ability to learn new things allows them to not hate their jobs. And an employee who knows basic programming is always an asset.

>And in my prior job, many people became BAs from a coding background specifically to get out of writing code. They can do it - they don't want to. They're happier in MS Office or similar tools.

I completely understand that. But there are definitely problems that need to be solved with programming and having people with the ability to do so can only be an asset, even if they aren't a full time developers.

In general I think it is pretty hard sell to teach someone a skill with no other applications. This is different if that person only wants to achieve a certain thing, then transferability is irrelevant. But if you want someone to learn something new, it requires for them to understand why they should learn. Programming isn't particularly hard, teaching someone a standard programming language and giving them the ability to use that in their jobs, instead of a specialized DSL is an enormous benefit.

If you came to me and told me you are going to teach me something which is totally different from what you yourself would do and a special way by which you have made something easy so that I can understand it, I would refuse. I guess that I might be projecting here, but I genuinely feel that many people would look at it the same way.
Two sexes (male, female), each with two variants (white throat, yellow throat), creating four genders (wM, yM, wF, yF).

Males and females need to pair or there will be no new sparrows. However opposite variants also need to pair or for behaviour reasons there will be no successful young.

For instance, wM-wF spend so much energy fighting with each other they fail to raise young.

The y variants are less aggressive but better with young and are the most popular mate choices. The y-variants are also monogomous while the w-variants are not.

The aggressive w-variants grab all the y-variants as partners. The result is that y-y pairs are rarely (never?) seen, even though they could produce young.

The article notes that yellow throats have different food strategies from white throats. This will also tend to reinforce alternate gender pairing.

An MF pair is going to bring in less food if both are going after the same sources (they might start fighting!) while if each has a different strategy the young are less vulnerable to food shortages should one strategy or another not produce at any given time.

The four gender outcome seems to be in a sustainable equilibrium. If one is favoured, say wM-yF, then these sparrows would become like most other birds, with males having one colour pattern and females another.

Instead, behaviours have somehow distributed themselves across genders so a successful couple needs to match both if they are to raise the next generation of young.
The error budget in the pseudorange to the satellites has various factors due to relativity, but they are just lumped into the errors in the least squares problem that you solve to get the position estimate (as per the article).
So relativity is important, but you don't need to know much about it to solve for your position. Various flavours of long baseline/network RTK will need more sophisticated modelling though.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 to Feature Cut-Down GB202 GPU
> every piece of conceivable information (music, movies, texts) is in there, encoded

Borges wrote a famous short story, “The Library of Babel,” about a library where:

“... each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; these letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say.

“There are twenty-five orthographic symbols. That discovery enabled mankind, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and thereby satisfactorily resolve the riddle that no conjecture had been able to divine—the formless and chaotic nature of virtually all books. . .

“Some five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagons came across a book as jumbled as all the others, but containing almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language actually was: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic. The content was also determined: the rudiments of combinatory analysis, illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations. These examples allowed a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also posited a fact which all travelers have since confirmed: In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is “total”—perfect, complete, and whole—and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)—that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language.”

I've done the (simple) math on this -- in fact I'm writing a short book on the philosophy of mathematics where it's of passing importance -- and the library contains some 26^1312000 books, which makes 202T look like a very small number.

So though everything you describe is encoded in Pi (assuming Pi is infinite and normal) we're a long, long way away from having useful things encoded therein...

Also, an infinite and normal Pi absolutely repeats itself, and in fact repeats itself infinitely many times.
I think part of the problem is that coding projects can get really big - like millions of lines of code big. Not making a huge mess of things at that scale is always going to be difficult, but the approach of text-based files with version control, where everyone can bring their favorite editors and tools, seems to work better than everything else we've tried so far.

Also, code being text means you can run other code on your own code to check, lint, refactor etc.

Visual programming - that almost always locks you into a particular visual editor - is unlikely to work at that scale, even with a really well thought out editor. Visual tools are great for visual tasks (such as image editing) or for things like making ER diagrams of your database schema, but I think that the visual approach is inherently limited when it comes to coding functionality. Even for making GUIs, there are tradeoffs involved.

I can see applications for helping non-programmers to put together comparatively simple systems, like the excel example mentioned. I don't think it will replace my day job any time soon.
Minimum wage by contrast is $915 a week
Airbus, Thales looking at merging some of their space activities
I simply have to recommend Glamorous Toolkit to anyone interested in visual programming: https://gtoolkit.com

It focuses on the kind of visual programming the article argues for: Class layout, code architecture, semantics. It's one of the best implementations I have seen. The authors are proponents of "moldable development", which actively encourages building tools and visualizations like the ones in the article.
Is your skillset rare?
Good point. Yeah, this was a mobile-first app company, but web skills apply (React Native, etc).
When using structured editing, why does it matter what the syntax is? The editor is going to handle it for you anyway.

> Where paredit for Python?

I don’t know, go make it. But what would you imagine it to do? Moving blocks of indented code around is already easy without needing language-specific treatment.
>what exactly are you getting at here.

I don't disagree with you. I merely wanted to add that whatever anybody is saying left or right, it probably wouldn't have worked had he tried an actual coup. From a rational POV I don't really understand all the brouhaha.

Compared to a lot of other situations elsewhere, Jan 6th was a minor spectacle, nothing serious (see Yellow Vests protests in France).
Agreed! "What would happen if we were off by some tiny fraction" is a really interesting question to me!
My thoughts on the Expat vs Immigrant issue is one of permanence. Being an Expat is temporary as you're living in the other country until you return back to your home country or you become an immigrant and choose to stay. While being an immigrant is deciding to permanently move to another country.
Most of the time when I see people use the term woke it has nothing to do with hiring policies. Which is why I asked.
> Bad memory layouts are one of the biggest contributors to poor performance.

This will depend on the application, but I've encountered far more of the "wrong data structure / algorithm" kind of problem, like iterating over a list to check if something's in there when you could just make a map ("we need ordering": sure, we have ordered maps!).
Google: ...

Mozilla: How high?
The name makes it sound like it's only for the Bay Area, FYI.

Some more substantive feedback...

The sign-up gating makes it feel like a niche dating site, or possibly a fake site, since there are no examples, tedtimonials, listing of profiles in my area, etc.

I worry that this is going to become one of those platforms where women get hit on and men don't get any hits / find any activity partners. If you're one on one matching, it seems like that's a concern maybe worth addressing upfront?

Meetup usually has great hiking and riding groups, in my experience, and local bike and run shops have groups too. Some of them are women only.

Those approaches also offer an easy way to meet people interested in the same activities, but without the romantic tension/ambiguity of forced one on one matches. Their model makes it clear it's about community and group activity, not just the one other person you got matched with.

By contrast, it's not clear to me what your service offers. Is it trying to be a dating service? A friend finder like Bumble BFF? A group event finder like Meetup? Either way, it would help to make that clear, and to provide clear examples of what happens after sign-up, using real profiles and matches if at all possible. I'm not going to sign up first just to find out the basics.

As someone who enjoys the outdoors, I'd love to meet more people. But this app feels a bit too high on the "might meet a potential creep" factor (and I'm a middle aged man) since it doesn't really do anything to address trust and safety.

Just my 2c. Hope that wasn't too harsh! Would love to see this grow into a community.
I guess we think about risk very differently.
> As pi never repeats itself, that also means that every piece of conceivable information (music, movies, texts) is in there, encoded.

may I interest you in the difference between *irrational* numbers and *normal* numbers?

look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville_number - no repeats, but minuscule "contained information"
I imagine that you'd want to use fixed-point arithmetic when it comes to these things, right? Floating-point numbers are good enough for a lot of things, but the precise thing they're bad at is dealing in high precision at multiple orders of magnitude, which feels like a thing NASA would kinda need.
> By having a fixed percentage portfolio you are forcing yourself to sell high and buy low.

Yes, and the things you sell high are the ones that performed well in the past, so you'll have less of those in the future, which is what I said. I'm not thinking about anything backwards.
Did you write down all the digits? Excellent.
The grievance regarding 2020 election starts and ends with Democrat-favouring changes to indirect voting that were allowed due to the covid panic and arguably moved the needle enough to let Biden win. That’s what stealing the election refers to. It was not fair to Trump and him challenging the result is justified.
The Firefox source code's 'StaticPrefs' system (as of Firefox 128)
> Any sufficiently advanced program has non-planar dataflow graph.

For some reason this reminded me of the elevated rails coming in the next Factorio update. Maybe visual editors need something similar? Even Logisim can distinguish between a node (three or more wires join) and two wires that just cross without interacting.
Holy shit okay, I might have to reconsider using firefox. This is hard to argue for.
No one ever bothered to open up this site on mobile.

My personal pet peeve with websites of desktop-focused applications.
Nearly all AT&T subscribers' call records stolen in Snowflake cloud hack
Looks interesting, would love to check it out. One major point of feedback however: did you disable the scrollbar? Please don't do that. Don't mess with your users' browser. Also, you didn't set a favicon which made it very difficult just now to find your site again between my dozens of other tabs.
> every piece of conceivable information (music, movies, texts) is in there, encoded.

So that means that if we give a roomful of infinite monkeys an infinite number of hand-cranked calculators and an infinite amount of time, they will, as they calculate an infinite number of digits of pi, also reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare et al.
I suppose because that’s what

“atan(1) * 4”

casts to double?

- I wonder if this cast is always correct in C [ie.: math.h], no matter the datatype and/or the number base?
In reality, almost nobody wants to work with intelligent people. Most highly intelligent people don't want to have to compete with other people who may be more intelligent than themselves. Not everyone gets to play the game of 'meritocracy.' You have to be a good actor first and foremost.

Especially as you get closer to the big money, the theatrics, double-dealing, sabotage, and dirty games. etc... increase by a huge factor. It's very hard to find a company of intelligent people. I've worked for maybe 15 companies in my career and out of thousands of people, I met maybe 3 intelligent people. Intelligent people aren't interested in helping out the like-minded. They'd rather surround themselves with 100 idiots they can easily manipulate. They don't need another intelligent person around them.
I don't see how riscv can be anything but worse than Arm in this regard. With Arm at least Arm Holdings has some nominal power to steer towards sanity (devicetrees, systemready etc), with riscv it's again full freedom for vendors to make their own bespoke crap.
I can't even read the article because the cookie banner won't close. What the hell.
Yes, it is posted in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962470
I wonder how the debugging experience is, it must be pretty difficult to generate correct source maps.
Likewise. I just memorized what my 10 digit calculator showed me in high school.