skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article makes me irrationally annoyed by how lazy the author was. I was able to produce a test in under 5 minutes that disproves the article's core assumption:

> The Dropbox application uses a filesystem monitor to detect when changes are made by monitoring filesystem write events. This is, by necessity, a system-wide process. So DLP alerting that Dropbox is “acccessing” a new file shouldn’t be surprising.

THAT IS NOT HOW THAT WORKS!

Sorry, I am calm now. As someone who has spent quite a lot of time using Windows' File System Watcher functionality, I know that that is nonsense. Windows monitoring/watching is conducted at the kernel, when an IO operation occurs that hits a registered monitor it fires off an event (windows message) to that process to let it know, the process itself never accesses that file directly.

But just test it for yourself.

1) Download Process Monitor [0]

2) Start Process Monitor, turn off Registry, Network, Profiling, and Process events.

3) Set the include (included processes to monitor) to [whatever executable you build]

4) Build this (see examples section) [1] in C#/VB.net and run it

5) Set the process name in #4 in the include in #3

6) Write to a file in C:\ (that's the default in the example program/source)

7) You should see some Console.WriteLine() output indicating the file watcher is working. If not run as administrator.

8) There you go. As you can see, no direct file accesses to the file. The monitor events are fired as you can see, but the file remains untouched directly by your program.

The author could have done this. Why didn't they? It isn't like I had to even write one line of code or have some kind of specialist knowledge of low level kernel functionality...

PS - I don't know/care if DropBox is stealing your stuff. I just wish the article's author had at least fact-checked before they claimed that "that is how this works!!!" when in reality that is untrue. That is how it works for Anti-Virus because AV scans within files to see contents, it isn't how it works for most processes which just use the file watcher functionality. If DropBox chooses to look inside files, then why? There is no need for that.

PPS - If DropBox do have a system wide file watcher, that is just lazy. It will reduce system performance, and they could have just as easily set it up to point just to folders DropBox is configured to watch.

[0] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesyste...
And they don't have to steal the whole file at once, why not chunk it out and do bits at a time over a few days. This is tinfoil hat territory, but they'd still get the file and network traffic wouldnt be overly suspicious.
I think that a combination works best, but it looks like not many do a central SVN + local git setup. Any reason for that? Do you have bad time with that or what?

The central SVN is much better for tracking versions for release purposes, while the local git has all the benefits of working on one thing than switching to another.

Any thoughts?
Unless it's the name of a class, not a variable.
I suspect this article is saying lots of things that are true or mostly true, but with fluffy or nonexistent justifications. As pointed out by kens, the hardware is actually 20 years old, not 40.

Think of Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb: Outdated regulations slowed them down, but consumer demand is forcing the law to evolve. This back-and-forth is what lets tech companies move fast and break things without risking our safety.

As it is for those companies, it was also with early aerospace: Risks weren't eliminated. Rather, at first, risks were sequestered to advantageous subpopulations and taken by volunteers who, in theory, understood what they were about to do.

These issues screwed up HealthCare.gov and are screwing up the Department of Veterans Affairs and a dozen other agencies that need computers and software that work.

Probably true but lacks substantiation in this article.

To the author's credit, she's not a free market cultist in this article, and points out that other countries have better government managed air traffic control.
The ‘rampant fraud’ of Amazon sellers exposed
Unveilling Physically Based Rendering for All
> I call that filter bubble. I like using git for local commits, but 15 out of 20 persons here don't even take their laptop with them and I bet that 17 out of 20 won't touch code on the road. Maybe at home, if they have to. A decent centralized VCS would totally do.

Maybe your team isn't a bunch of road-warriors but networks still drop packets, servers get overloaded and many people work remotely using imperfect VPNs & ISPs. It's really easy to forget how much time that used to waste but switching to Git meant that we no longer had daily chatter when any of those flared up & people just got on with life.

That said, I'd love to see some focus on tooling which improves the painful parts you mentioned. I'd love to share binary data in Git and it's possible but painful. Similarly, the main selling point for Git on internal projects is the massive performance and usability wins over most of the competitors but there's no reason why that must be the case other than inertia on the part of the other options.
In what way does a program for women to get involved in open-source software even slightly resemble "segregation"?
I use the convention of the language or large code base I'm working with...

That said, I've found that the style isn't nearly as important as consistency. Generally speaking, an inconsistently styled code base is a sign that the developers didn't really care about their work...
https://twitter.com/salondotcom
Agreed, although I still find '_' to be a lot more clear.

Lisps, by not reserving '-', and following convention:

(println are-the-clearest-and-easiest-for-me)

Also see my other comment.
> The author mentions that you have to retain the whole history of a project. For one thing, storage is cheap. Another point worth mentioning is that you can make shallow clones with Git.

And for a third, it opens options which are not available without that. Annotating or bisecting with server round-trips every time is not really an option.
If we have fake sun and air which is indistinguishable from the real thing, why would you want the real thing?

I'm actually quite excited by the same reason -- if we can ween ourselves off of the sun with no side-effects, then that's one less roadblock between us and interstellar travel :D
Dropbox for Linux runs just fine as a user-mode program.

Besides, Dropbox does much nastier stuff than look at your files; it bloody hooks into your shell (Finder/Explorer) and manipulates the icons. It could decide to replace an .exe icon with the icon for a Word Document, for example.
Show HN: Android app that helps you fight your phone addiction: TimeUspent
> Anyone else remember the days when having your SVN server go down meant that you more or less had to wait until the server came back up before you could get back to doing things? (if you wanted a nice atomic commit).

That's now known as "I can't deploy because github is down". Note that the author proposes "local commits plus a centralized storage".

> The author mentions that you have to retain the whole history of a project. For one thing, storage is cheap.

Not in portable computers. I can get a TB, but that's it. I have build artifacts that clock in at about 300 - 500 MB and I'd version control them if possible. I can't, because that would fill my disk within a couple of month, so I have to push them to a server and somehow link them.

> Anyone else ever needed their own fork of something due to differing goals from the parent project, but needed to fold in upstream changes relatively often? That's by nature the sort of problem that a DVCS solves easily.

That's a strawman. The article does not argue that there's no use-case that's solved by git or and DVCS. It's just that not every use-case is solved by git. I'd even go out and argue that most use-cases are solved just as good by a solid centralized system with less complexity involved.

> Just because we haven't had tools in this space with wide adoption that are user friendly doesn't mean that we won't eventually.

I see a developer wedge his git repo with a pull + rebase about once a month. And then somebody needs to walk over and explain. DVCS fundamentally introduce complexity that is not always needed. And I doubt that the fundamental complexity can be abstracted away.
Other post from 6 hours prior has more discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614
Robohub Feb Digest now on line
> How much do you want to bet that a big company like Lockhead Martin is really good at using its political leverage to make sure the FAA doesn't impose fines in the contracts when projects don't perform up to key metrics?

Ding ding ding!

I watched Northrop do exactly that on a system. They used their clout to persuade the program office on a system to rate them more favorably than they deserved (truly, they were consistently delivering late but ended up with positive marks across the board). Fortunately, this resulted in a big shakeup once it was discovered and reported. Unfortunately, NG continued to hold the contract (no one else could, practically speaking) and all that really changed was the personnel in the program office. I was gone by the time thing got "fixed" so I have no idea if it's actually improved on that particular project.
Interesting about kiln. My interpretation was:

1) Rant about a problem specific to you...

2) Provide no meaningful guidance or solution... (Except move back to SVN to solve a problem I don't have)

3) Make it to the top of Hacker News?

4) ???

5) Profit?
Intercepting functions from statically linked libraries
I'm generally in favor of the flavor of the narrative: a takedown of libertarianism is very much something I enjoy watching, but this is a horribly written article. It's a cringe-fest even I had trouble forcing my way through. The quality of writing is very poor, the points seem disjointed and unrelated. Libertarianism isn't too hard to attack in its honest form, no need for a smear piece like this.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/09/fire-...
There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed:

Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to
Page’s open cubicle office for a review.

As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.

“It’s too slow,” Page said.

Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted.
It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.

“You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office,
he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds
for Gmail to load.

http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2...

It is quite plausible for people who being to obsess over a certain aspect to become overly sensitive to it. In my case, a lifetime of playing high speed video games makes it possible to notice things that others miss when it comes to things like framerates and microstutter in computer graphics. I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.
Introduction to AWS Lambda
This:
Git is so amazingly simple to use that APress, a single publisher, needs to have three different books on how to use it. It’s so simple that Atlassian and GitHub both felt a need to write their own online tutorials to try to clarify the main Git tutorial on the actual Git website.
Two of my favorite games when I was younger.

I wonder if they are available from any where these days?
I spot-checked a few sections of this document to see how accurately they matched my own conceptions of the state of the evidence. Specifically, I went to areas where I knew there was active controversy, to see which side they took, but more importantly whether they had acknowledged the presence of a controversy at all. Keep in mind that I specifically went to spots where I expected to find trouble; I did not look at all the parts I expected to be fine, and given the length (571 pages), that's most of it. So please don't take this as reflecting too negatively on the paper or its authors; these issues can almost certainly be addressed in a revision. So, with that out of the way...

Part D, section 6 concerns sodium intake and its relationship to blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. This is an area of controversy; see for example Scientific American's "It's Time to End the War on Salt" (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-th...). This report could reasonably take either role, but it would be worrying if it did not acknowledge the existence of a controversy at all.

Scientific American cites a number of negative results on reduced sodium intake. I didn't have time to track down all of the, but I did track down a few, including a Cochrane review "Reduced Dietary Salt for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials" (null result, http://ajh.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/8/843.short); "Fatal and Nonfatal Outcomes, Incidence of Hypertension, and Blood Pressure Changes in Relation to Urinary Sodium Excretion" (opposite result, more sodium increases survival; http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=899663). It mentions the INTERSALT study, which, apparently, has a different result depending on who's interpreting the data.

This report doesn't cite any of those. It makes no mention of there being a controversy or mixed results regarding sodium intake. It says they conducted "a focused review of dietary sodium and its relationship with blood pressure as well as its relationship with CVD", but I don't think they did.

I didn't have time for as thorough an inspection as with salt, but a cursory look suggests to me that there are also problems with its presentation of omega-6 fatty acid, which some believe to be very very bad but which is barely mentioned.

I don't think this document is ready to be presented to policymakers in its present state. Presenting the appearance of consensus when there is none, is how nutrition got into this mess in the first place.
strongest known natural material
White Paper: Demystifying BGP
I once talked to an SAP consultant, and he told me he would often make some part of his code painfully slow on intention. So during review meetings, rather than endlessly discuss minute details and demanding arbitrary changes, people would complain about how slow it was.
"I'll see what I can do", the guy would sigh, go to his office, remove the offending code, and voila - everyone was happy.

I haven't had the opportunity to try this technique, but I have been waiting ever since for the moment where this might come in handy.
There's a lot of variability. In the U.S., since 1920, there have been periods of up to 20 years in which net stock market returns were negative. Ed Easterling's study was published in The New York Times a few years back (and I believe Easterling updates it periodically):

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...

That is, however, U.S. stock market performance. Other countries have seen much greater volatility and long-term downward trends. Japan's Nikkei average remains at one quarter of its 1990 high, and is at roughly one half its 1995 level:

http://www.intmath.com/exponential-logarithmic-functions/dow...

http://intmstat.com/exponential-logarithmic-functions/nikkei...
I was just thinking of regular old hydrogen fusion bombs aka thermonuclear bombs.
Police have no incentive to accurately price out earnings, and may not know about the details; rather, to overstate them to impress the court & press. I see a lot of this in drug cases - the police will say a bust resulted in a street value of $50k where the person only spent, say, $500, because they're using rounded up figures of the highest street price, and nothing at all realistic. Sometimes it's funny: yesterday I was reading a NZ article where the lawyer was trying to explain to the judge that just because his client was caught importing something like 100 doses of MDMA off Silk Road (cost ~$200, IIRC), his client wasn't a dealer - it was simply that because European MDMA is so cheap and there's overhead in handling an order & shipping it into NZ with decent stealth, few SR sellers will bother with small orders under 100!
For the record, I carry a journal and pen in my pocket all the time. Writing down phone numbers and notes, taking a log of my life, keeping cards from businesses. Looking back through them is much more enjoyable than looking back through a Wordpress.

http://shop.moleskine.com/FileLibrary/4be794eb3e094e59ac8a8f...
Never mind, I see a higher ranked comment got an answer to this. I see the concept of keys signing keys and gpg --list-sigs. (Still no idea who might be at the end of that chain that I could actually verify though.)
Has the Supreme Court made patent reform legislation unnecessary?
Do you think QueryBasicInformation is a mischaracterization of the word "access"?
Stopt: An App for Kids to Report Cyberbullies with Push of a Button
An argument pro underscore: they can be displayed with 50% transparency, making them visible, yet not interfering with the reading of the identifier as much.
Google+ as We Knew It Is Dead, but Google Is Still a Social Network
New language improvements in JavaScript
And isn't it just wonderful how I don't have to give any fucks at all?
Any stories with this happening? Seems unlikely to me because you can't be sure the same person is reviewing your app. Also developers seem to rarely get specific feedback for a rejection.
Wow, I am impressed SJVN was able to write an article that was not mostly speculation based and is actually a decent and quick read.
Previous (successful) attempts at reverse engineering: https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot13/workshop-program/pr...
svn isn't really a solution for binary files. It also requires workarounds. Sure it doesn't have the issue of every version of every blob but it still needs 2 versions of every blob. If you're on a game with terabytes of source data which is common for a AAA game 2x terabytes is not a win.

It also doesn't help you manage collisions by locking every UNMERGABLE binary file so you know before you edit if someone else is or has already edited the file.

I know you can set local options to make it lock the files but that feels more like a workaround.
You seem to be mixing up different concepts.

The BIOS runs outside of the OS and helps all the parts of your computer speak to each other.

This is why the process is a bit more involved than just running an update from your OS's update manager.

The "binary blob" that's referred to when talking about GPU's is the huge piece of software that you have to download and install in order to make you graphics card able to use all of its features. Some graphics cards won't even use a display's full resolution without the correct driver.

This is different to the CPU in that there is no big downloaded driver sitting between you and it.

If you really want to understand where everything sits, you should check out a book or search for information on Computer Architecture.
Wasn't this approach taken with good reason though? So the effort to get code running on multiple GPUs was a reasonable? Remember the days of when games would only support select GPUs?

Sure you could have a standard like i386. But isn't it the case that there is a lot more innovation happening in the GPU architecture space making this very difficult?
Dependencies and vendoring in Go
I've made some changes to the scripts and pushed all to a github repo:
https://github.com/5orenso/javascript-module-performance

Please test it and it will post the results to my API which was made in a hurry :)
Business Card replacement using Beacon
Judging from the first time around, they give people just enough SDK to get started, and then develop the SDK in parallel with the community releasing products.

About two years ago they were telling people to unzip a file in their home directory and put arm-none-eabi-gcc in $PATH:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130416000246/http://developer.g...
I wonder how kebab-case would do. When available, I prefer it.
Sure, networks drop packets and sometimes break down. But the number of issues with a solid office network is fairly low. Glass fiber, gigbit to the server. Folks don't work via VPN. I'm not pretending that the "road warrior" and remote worker use case isn't well served by git - but the "office worker tied to a desk" use case still exists. And from what I see is that it's more dominant than we'd expect.
Now let's hope lock-in proponents won't sabotage this effort.
This seems to touch on the biggest problem I have with libertarianism. Things which require constant maintenance are fixed in spurts. Some wealthy Hondurans may eventually decide that the situation with their roads is annoying and worth fixing, and may offer to fix the problem at a reduced price which reflects their personal interest in the matter. Until then, they will have crumbling roads. Infrastructure is best served by constant effort, and there is no will to act on the part of people with money. The solution to that problem seems to be a real blind spot for them.

That said, I respect their stance on personal responsibility, which is something I think liberals neglect. I don't mean to pick on them too much.
Show HN: OpenSSL Cookbook 2nd Edition
Does London use pay as you board or proof of payment for buses?

Here in Chicago, I think boarding delays significantly contribute to bus bunching (or at least make it worse).
May I suggest that you're starting from the premise that your kid is willing/able to learn programming

That is precisely why I put #2 in my list.
One of the aircraft in the US Presidential fleet, SAM 970, had a fake temperature control knob on the conference room desk. It was installed for then-VP Johnson, who was something of a control freak and who kept coming up to the cockpit to fiddle with the temperature. (The knob actually sent a signal to the pilots, who would adjust the temperature in the general direction that LBJ had tried to adjust it.)

Source: learned during my employee training at The Museum of Flight. http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/boeing-vc-137b-707-12...
First thing came to my mind as well, hasn't Steve Jobs already said the same thing in 1990? It's too obvious in today's world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8
I am a remote iOS developer. Beyond demonstrating that you have the necessary skills, you need credible evidence you can work effectively as a remote. For me, that was previous remote work and working as an independent consultant.

This will be something that they will try to evaluate, so it's best for you to be ready with proof that you can do this (even better -- proof that you already did it, with references).

Some timezone overlap is also important -- even if they don't say it is, you are setting yourself up for failure if you don't have some.

The tech you list is not the part you should try to work on for remote (beyond what you'd do for any job). It would be a far better use of your time to do a consulting gig (OF ANYTHING) where you weren't in the same geographical location as your client.

Incidentally, I found my job via StackOverflow, using an RSS feed on remote jobs. There were several a day with tech all over the map.
Thats no moon... its a space station!