skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relevant bit:

> Update: Ist sogar noch krasser, wie ein Leser anmerkt:

> zu der Yubikey-Geschichte sei noch angemerkt, dass die aktuell sogar so dreist sind erstmal ihre Lagerbestände mit verwundbaren Keys abzuverkaufen anstatt die zu verschrotten. Hab neulich zwei von den Dingern bestellt (die teure FIPS-Variante!) und was bekomme ich geliefert? Die Keys mit der alten, verwundbaren Firmware. Hintergrund soll wohl sein, dass die zunächst Behörden und andere "priorisierte" Kunden mit den Keys mit der neuen Firmware beliefern.

Machine Translation:

> Update: It's even more extreme, as a reader points out:

> Regarding the Yubikey story, it should be noted that they are currently so brazen as to sell off their stock of vulnerable keys instead of scrapping them. I recently ordered two of those things (the expensive FIPS version!) and what do I get delivered? The keys with the old, vulnerable firmware. The background seems to be that they are initially supplying authorities and other "prioritized" customers with the keys that have the new firmware.
New textbook teaches students about matrix methods and their real world apps
That is a hypothetical concern, not a statement about reality. It is easy to construct "just so" stories for anything, but that doesn't mean they are true or meaningful.

I dont want to sound harsh but I see this type of thought quite often. I think it is a major irrational distortion to conflate possibility and theory for reality.

It is unclear if money targeted for environmental work has ever gone to mammoths, or ever will. Why should the mere possibility dictate anything or drive any action?
They connected the insufficient cooling to the rate of evaporation being too rapid:

"The air was so dry that any sweat quickly evaporated, resulting in little additional cooling ..."
I tried a few different avatars today and the latency is pretty impressive.
I think the main indicator of intelligent civilization would be burial sites and memorial monuments.

While 10s of millions of years of geological change would certainly make these hard to determine, an advanced civilization is likely to produce millions of these. Surely we would have come across some by now.
You’re definitely hired.
These ads remind me of the ones (not from Apple) that were being shown when car infotainment systems started coming out.

Cue the guy driving a carpool full of work colleagues who receives a text from his wife, which the car then reads aloud to everyone (I don’t remember it exactly, but this was the gist of it). Yeah, it makes a funny ad, but it also highlighted everyone’s exact reason why they don’t really want this type of thing.

In the AI cases, it’s about incompetent people being able to appear competent, while the people really putting in the effort are just suckers to be fooled.
Back when ChatGPT first released there was a common meme of people writing up a list of bullet points and converting them into a formal, verbose email via AI, and the receiver then using AI to summarize that email back down to a list of bullet points. I imagine a ton of current use of LLMs is something of this sort.
Does drinking water before meals help you lose weight?
My experience (not IBM) is that there was not free food that varied a bit and different groups tended to cluster. At a company I worked at for abput 13 years, the engineers and product managers tend to favor the pizzeria which was run by a local pizza shop.

I've never had free food routinely except customer briefing center or some other lunchtime work function. Rarely went out unless it were a short walk. (The brief time I worked in downtown Boston with no cafeteria is pretty much the only time I went out for lunch routinely.)

Per another comment, my sense is that brown bag lunches used to be more common and most people stopped doing that.
You’re definitely not hired. (But you’re not wrong, unless you were wondering who is going to clean the leeches).
But in most of them the people aren't smiling because their lives were miserable and they were too short to play basketball.
Great! Best of luck
History of Chemical Shark Repellents
I just read the book The Phoenix Project. It's over a decade old so some of the principles are obvious/quaint at this point, or perhaps not quite as applicable.

That said, one of the things that caught me off guard is the dressing down of the head of security by a member of the board. More or less, they were told what they did was clog the flow of useful work. The message conveyed is similar to this post.
In many ways a digital walkie talkie would be much better than an iPhone.

I'd love to have a device where I can push a button and talk to my contacts instantly. No more "Siri, call Jane"... "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." "..."
This is how I did it. You don't realize how addicted you are until you want to stop. It's gross.
TSMC or its US subsidiary may have agreed to it at the time, but it sounds like the Taiwanese government has other ideas:

> "Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2nm chips overseas currently," [Minister of Economic Affairs] Kuo said at a meeting of the Economics Committee in Taipei, reports Taipei Times. "Although TSMC plans to make 2nm chips [abroad] in the future, its core technology will stay in Taiwan."

<https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-cannot-produ...>
The pilot should have figured it out especially since all the controls were working. It’s like he ejected from a $100 million aircraft because one of the screens went out.
Poachers aren't part of the natural environment. When people say "survive in the wild" they are typically referring to the case where the species' and its natural habitat are largely left alone by modern civilization. Any species could be wiped out if humans tried to do so, even humans.

Anyways, in this scenario we have the means of producing mammoths at will, so why would there be a market for mammoth poaching? If people do kill a mammoth, just add another mammoth. Technology works.
Defamation is when the information being spread is false. You're saying you trust them more because they're willing to say things that are false. That doesn't make sense.
I immediately pronounced it as “too doody”.
It's all about the money. When I worked in the offshore drilling business, we had some better caterers but we were paying a premium for them.
> Peruggia, meanwhile, was charged with theft and put on trial in Italy. During his testimony, he claimed that national pride had inspired him to steal the painting, which he believed had been looted from his native Italy during the Napoleonic era. Peruggia was mistaken—Da Vinci had brought the Mona Lisa to France in 1516, and King Francois I had later purchased it legally—but the patriotic defense won him legions of admirers. Even after the prosecution presented evidence that he planned to shop the painting around to art dealers and sell it for profit, many Italians still considered him a national hero.

Just the sort of nationalism that would lead Europe (and other nations) into the Great War only a few years later. The guy only served seven months. Nationalism begets poor outcomes.
> doesn't match my experience in Austin...where most people ate the cafeteria

Some hardcore eaters in Austin.
Flutter Engineering
Somehow I missed that. Thanks.
Just trim it out. Everything is a wing if you are fast enough.
Oh I have no idea, I’m just basically against bigotry and bullying, and basically in favour of kindness and inclusivity.

It’s up to every individual to find the value for themselves, and commit to working on themselves, whatever that looks like.

How about you, what’s your plan?
>that NIST has killed in competent circles

Just because this is my favorite soapbox - anyone that has to deal with passwords should go read NIST SP800-63B:

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

I was kind of shocked by just how gosh-darned reasonable it is when it came out a couple of years ago. It's my absolute favorite thing to cite during audits.

"Are you requiring password resets every 90 days?"

"No. We follow the federal government's NIST SP800-63B guidelines which explicitly states that passwords should not be arbitrarily reset."

I've been pleasantly surprised that I haven't really had an auditor push back so far. I'm sure I eventually will, but it's been incredibly effective ammunition so far.
Please define normality, in the meantime I'm giving a try :

Normal men have balls, balls make man attracted to women -> normal men get their attention grabbed by inadvertently looking at pretty naked woman.
To me it feels like the intended subtext there is "this stuff is meant to make your life easier sometimes, but we don't think it will revolutionize the world", which seems way more bearable to me than how a lot of companies are trying to push "AI" stuff.
That's also the desire of the majority of companies, not just Apple.
The chimps in a cage metaphor is a great introduction to a problem that exists in all software development. I call it the Walls of Assumptions.

When we write software, we answer three questions: "What?", "How?", and "Why?".

We write out the answers to "What?" and "How?" explicitly as data and source code. The last answer, alas, can never be written; at least, not explicitly. When we are good programmers, we do our best to write the answer Why implicitly. We write documentation, tutorials, examples, etc. These construct a picture whose negative space looks similar enough to live in Why's place.

No matter what, the question "Why?" is always answered. How can this be, if that answer is never written? It is encoded into the entropy of the very act of writing. When we write software, we must make decisions. There are many ways a problem could be solved: choose only one solution. A chosen solution is what I call an "Assumption". It is assumed that the solution you chose will be the best fit for your program: that it is the answer your users need, or at least that it will be good enough for them to accomplish what they want.

Inevitably, our Assumptions will be wrong. Users will bring unique problems that your Assumption isn't compatible with. While you hoped your Assumption would be a bridge, it is instead a Wall.

The Walls of Assumptions in every program define a unique maze that every software user must traverse to meet their goals. Monolithic design cultivates a walled garden, where an efficient maze may fail entirely to lead the user to their goal. Modular design cultivates an ecosystem of compatible mazes that, while less efficient, can be restructured to reach more goals.

---

The eternal hype around Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence is readily explained with this metaphor. The most powerful feature of Natural Language is Ambiguity. Ambiguity allows us to encode more than one answer into data, which means we actually can write the answer to Why; we just can't read it computationally. Artificial Intelligence hinges on the ability for decision to be encoded into software. I'm not talking about logical branches here: I'm talking about the ability to fully postpone the answering of Why from time-of-writing to runtime.

---

For the last year or two, I've been chewing on a potential solution to this problem that I call the Story Empathizer. So far, the idea is too abstract; but I still think it has potential.
You burn the leeches. And it's not an evil spell.
> The Macbook is a 2010 17" so it would have been pretty easy to upgrade and repair (socketed Ram and HDD, screwed in battery) but the age would have made this laptop not only unusably slow but it was also dead as a doornail. Its [sic] one of the still good Macbooks with the glowing apple logo.

This detail from the comments explains why they'd replace hardware rather than simply installing Linux as-is. I was a little perplexed until I saw this.
I care little for the “why” and more about the “how”.
> I like how he has the Apple logo light still working.

At the time, the logo was lit by the lights in the LCD. I had a friend who removed the display case and put rainbow plastic film in between to match the original six-colored logo.
Not sure why it took 2 days for the penny to drop but obviously given a sufficiently strong cable can repeat this on the Earth-L1 side and end up with an Earth-Moon tether. Would be interesting to find out how close to earth a currently available cable + payload mass would reach before it breaks. The delta-v between LEO and the lower end of the tether should be small and an elliptical orbit should be able to rendezvous with it.
I have felt the exact same about these ads ever since seeing them. I have no idea how these were approved by the company. They couldn't think of any other uses for these tools than forgetful slackers compensating? It's a depressing glimpse into the future.
OT: what's the current best way to run Windows (guest) on Apple Silicon (macOS as host)?

VMWare, UTM, Virtual Box, etc?
Was just about to say this. Super creative way to light up the logo.
Re dogfooding. I worked at Oracle back in the 90s, first in the team building the company's HR systems (specifically their payroll product), and then in the team building the company's CASE (computer-aided software engineering) products.

The CASE products were intended to automate away coding, and Oracle's HR products, with their gazillions of lines of code, and with the developers located in the same building and with a common senior management team, were the best possible opportunity for dogfooding.

However while I was in the HR product team we never tried in earnest to use CASE (except for the ER modelling tools). There was no real enthusiasm from the CASE team to support us and the tools as they were then fell far short of what was required.

Later, when I joined the CASE team, I learned that their narrative was that the company's ERP products (like HR) were so complex that they were not realistic targets for CASE (* cough cough bullshit * - and perhaps the sort of attitude that doomed the CASE products in the long term).

My learning was that dogfooding is an awesome strategy, but sometimes much harder to embed in a development team than one might think.
Interesting idea. I strongly suspect that there are programs out there that expect that setenv changes the environ array (and they do not treat it as an opaque pointer passed to posix_spawn/execve). With a per-thread setenv, we would need a per-thread environ variable as well. Unfortunately, that's not really compatible with POSIX because environ is not declared in a header. Instead, programmers are expected to write a declaration

extern char **environ;

into their sources, and that declaration is incompatible with environ being a thread-local variable.
No BS – Remove buzzword and corporate fluff from text
That was actually put to the test, by really thinking hard about it, around 2018, or so.
By serious scientists, not van Däniken types, or similar.

The conclusion was that we couldn't tell, between slowly milled between mile-high ice-shields and fluctuations of seawater-level alone.

Maybe, just maybe there would be the chance of some monument surviving buried in the center of a 'kraton', but why?

Do we build monuments there, now?
Isn’t that just artificially creating new diversity?
There is no such thing as "human error."
> until someone hooks up Linux to an LLM and being CLI driven it would have no problems doing this

I appreciate your enthusiasm but man you're over complicating stuff. Beside LLM hallucinations, you would have to type to the computer everything you want to do. I can rotate page with one click, move them to another part is doe with a single mouse drag.
VMware Fusion and Workstation Are Now Free for All Users
> More or less, they were told what they did was clog the flow of useful work.

Similar to seeing IT as a cost rather than a benefit.
If history is any indicator being from a rich family is a big contributing factor to later success. The more famous Impressionists for example were mostly trained as lawyers.

Chasing money robs an artist of time and generates added expenses that require more money. By this car to drive to work. Drive to work to pay for this car.
Also just to be clear, the article is not arguing that sports gambling should be banned, just easily accessible sports gambling on your phone.
Quantum annealers (like DWave) can solve optimization problems efficiently. But they can’t run general quantum algorithms such as Shor’s algorithm, that requires a general quantum computer (like what IBM and Google are doing).
You're right, I just mean more on the UX and tech side of things. Government software UX is typically atrocious. Some of it is well-founded and just outdated, though.

But, there are some nice efforts taking place within the government to modernize and standardize tech and UX. digital. Digital.gov is killing it lately. https://designsystem.digital.gov/
Sunny's. I know it was actually a dance bar. I hung out a lot at Rooney's and sometimes the OMI.

On the one side of Sunny's was a gym. On the other side was a Sears catalog showroom. Above the Sears were two apartments. My friends and I lived in one of them. I was a music major, as was another one of us. The other two were graphic design and communications, respectfully.

The Sears was at the end of the street, at the start of which was the police department. It was a one-way street, so the cops were always traveling past. My understanding is that the Sears eventually turned into a topless bar, after the Sears showrooms went out of business.

Where did you work at the school? I worked for a short time in the food service. I waited tables at the Topiary Tree. I also was part of the wait staff for events at the president's house.
Probably because they'd potentially be blocking "legitimate" users
A theory about a previous advanced civilization must first and foremost explain how and why it skipped using all the obvious under-your-feet materials and fuel sources in its initial phase.
Why are Toyota's the choice of terrorist organizations?
In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World
> "I don't think that's the question"

It is, though. The parent asked, "Don't we want companies like Meta to be responsible for misinformation?"

I am responding to that question, so yes, that is the question.

> "And were people sent to the gulags because Facebook banned discussion of it?"

Must there be gulags involved for free speech to be suppressed?

And yes, it did hinder discussion of the lab leak theory. Dozens of news outlets suppressed this theory, even mislabeling it as a conspiracy theory and ostracizing those who held it.

> "They aren't, and never have been. But you do seem to want government to be the arbiter of what's true"

Wow, either there is a serious miscommunication here or you are deliberately misreading my post. I don't want government or social media companies to be the arbiters of what's true. I don't want the current or future administration mislabeling critiques of the government as "hateful" or "misinformation". Nor do I want Zuck, Pichai, or any other tech company suppressing speech because it is unpopular, hateful, or misinformation. We cannot entrust government or corporations with guarding our rights to free speech.
I agree, and they also present AI as something accessible to regular people for their everyday minor situations. "Huh, if the office knucklehead can use this to write a professional sounding email, maybe that could help me make my decent emails even better."
I really don’t get the argument that we shouldn’t be kind because some people ‘don’t really mean it.’

Like - the whole point is fostering a comfortable work environment, where drama like this doesn’t happen, because people are careful of how they interact with others.

A ‘supposedly’ supportive environment filled with backstabbing and gossip is in fact not a supportive environment, so why bring it up as if it’s somehow a ‘gotcha’ or even related?

Do people really not understand what a comfortable, supportive environment populated by kind caring coworkers looks like?
There are so many of us doing this, haha. If you work at a big enough company or one with poorly documented APIs, it's just faster to reverse engineer the existing apps/UIs.
The Cost-of-Living Crisis Explains Everything
A bigger problem is that, so far, Apple Intelligence is truly awful. It's like they tried to put Siri into more places without making it any smarter than it was 10 years ago.
This is the subject of a fun little ditty on Vulfpeck’s upcoming live album:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7ahw2jhpdE
In the third sentece of the piece, it says:

> "This exploration is purely for educational purposes."
Because using "say cheese!" hadn't been invented, so no one knew that they should smile.
Hear me out. Try, just once, imagining those people who want to leave but can't like you might imagine an alcoholic who wants to stop drinking but can't. Or a teen who wants to stop binge eating and purging but can't. Addictions come in all shapes and sizes, and this attention/information addiction is new enough to where many don't have a defense mechanism for it. Likely most of us will develop strategies to maintain healthy habits and, indeed, some of us have. Some never will.

It's not ridicule that people with addiction need. It's help.
Weight loss drugs took over Instagram
I don’t like it but Apple—like other firms— aims at making money of the masses.

The truth is there are a ton of folks like this. As long as there’s an ad campaign that gives them permission to offload a human experience to a tech company they’ll feel ok doing it. That’s gross but it makes people more and more reliant on apple’s latest feature and so keeps them locked in their ecosystem. I see why Apple does it.

People who know better look down on this but there’s lots of folks with money who don’t know better.
Why does this notion persist? Water Pater wrote a famous essay on the painting in 1869. My impression is that it made a pretty big splash in the English-speaking world, at least: much later, W.B. Yeats used a sentence from the essay in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
The argument "is it worse than X which is already allowed" is a nice legal argument, but it is completely unmoored from the reality that now you have twice the actual damage to society.

If I invent a new addictive substance that has the same risk profile than alcohol but doesn't displace it, alll ivve managed to do is create another new problem of the same magnitude. Rinse and repeat until your "standard" wrecks society.

There is a very actual example with COVID: "it's just the flu". Well, even if it were true (it isn't, BTW), we now have two "flus" knocking off our workers, fragile citizens and healthcare...
How about just "Don't allow advertising period"?
Back during the dot-com era, I created and wrote the story concept for a sci-fi Flash animation called Zeek [1]. It eventually aired on the Locomotion TV channel [2], which was later acquired by Sony. Several members of the team had experience working as illustrators with DC Comics.

It's important to highlight, especially in 2024, that Flash was the way to create this type of animation back then, as streaming was prohibitive for most internet connections around the world.

[1] http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html (as SWF) and in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zeek+locomotion

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotion_(TV_channel)
Face-likeness affects breaking time in continuous flash suppression
Debugging third-party goroutine leaks
Uranus Might Have Experienced a Freak Event When Voyager 2 Visited
I guess as a company I would agree that it's fine to implement a useless control to get a customer. As a tax-payer...not so much. We spend so much money (at least in the U.S.) on garbage.
I had a similar experience with Airbnb a few years ago and it was the final straw for me. Terrible company.
That's something we've been considering! Right now I'm wrapping up my masters degree and will finish in April (fingers crossed). Once I have more free time, we're going to look at other ways to expand the podcast, including audience participation. We've gotten that request from a few people.