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Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news | I left Windows in a hail of Vista bugs, over a decade ago. I've seen it get worse and worse in that time, both in UX rot and anti-consumer "features".I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it's important people consider why they're still using Windows. It's not your friend. |
Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware (2018) | Wow, this is a great idea!
Looking at the video, looks like the latency isn't great; what kind of problems should be solved for this to have a ~100ms latency?Rewriting it in C/C++/Rust instead of Python would be one... Any ideas? |
My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies | Hiii everyone, this is my first time posting here! I have read Hacker News sometimes but only thought about sharing my own post after seeing Manara's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054) last month. I asked them if I can share this here and they said it was a good idea. :)I’m a 19-year-old Gazan female who participated in Manara last year and got internships at Google and Repl.it. I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! I got lots of questions about my experience when people heard about it on Facebook so I wrote this blog post to let other young engineers in Palestine and the Middle East know how they can get into amazing companies like this too. |
Ninth Circuit rules NSA's bulk collection of Americans' call records was illegal | You know what I don't get? There is no penalty for violating the highest law of the land (the constitution). How is it anymore than a suggestion or a guidline if government officials are not punished for violating it? And that is exactly how lae enforcement and intelligence community treat it.The US constitution needs lots of updates but this maybe the most important item -- manadatory prison terms for anyone acting on behalf of government who is found violating the bill of rights or any restriction set by articles of the constitution. |
IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax | This USA tax thing has always baffled me... it is the exact definition of why we pay taxes: for the government to provide services that are common to the country´s citizens.There´s nothing more common than tax collection: rich, middle class or poor. Why wouldn't citizens demand a public tax filing process? Even in Mexico we have an automagical tax filing process that makes:a) The great majority of the population who perceives a salary not needing to file taxes.b) For the rest of the people, those who don't do anything fancy, just click one button in a portal to do the filing, and everything is calculated by the tax authority.c) For the small percentage that do more complex things (I'll say it is between 5% and 10% of the population) still can do it in the portal for free, or hire an accountant. |
Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People | > Here’s how the hack went down: Two attackers accessed a private GitHub coding site used by Uber software engineers and then used login credentials they obtained there to access data stored on an Amazon Web Services account that handled computing tasks for the company. From there, the hackers discovered an archive of rider and driver information. Later, they emailed Uber asking for money, according to the company.Don't check secrets into VCS, folks! |
But life had other plans | Life finds a way. My wife had generalized tonic-clonic seizure for an entire year (non previous seizure history) without any cause being detected by multiple MRIs. She was taking increasing doses of Levetiracetam that somehow controlled the scope of the seizures but not avoid them completely. After a year of this, we go for another ER visit after the latest one and she ask, somehow randomly, to have a pregnancy test, it comes negative but, finally, the root cause of the seizure does appear on imagery, at that point a low grade astrocytoma. She went into major brain surgery to try to remove it and pathology confirms the low grade astrocytoma, and after a month of recovery, the oncologist recommends to start a chemo and radio therapy treatment.As the low grade astrocytoma is treatable and with high long term survival rate, he recommends that we might extracts some ovules if we decide to have another kid in the future, as the chemo had a high chance of infertility. We had one son, and being both on our middle to late 30s, we agreed.We go to her OG for this, and as he is performing an preliminary echography... a heart beat start blasting on the speakers, over two months of his negative blood pregnancy test, after major brain surgery, after major doses of meds of all kinds, she was, indeed, pregnant. We knew exactly when she got pregnant, it was 5 days before that ER visit. She "knew" it that day in the ER, that's why she asked for the pregnancy test (that, once again, came negative).She decided to have the baby, no matter what the risk for her it was, no matter what risk for the baby it was. Chemo was out the question and radio treatment was a high risk and had to wait for at least another month. 6 months later we had a healthy baby, who is now a healthy 10 year old girl.Sadly, some months after given birth to her, my wife had a relapse, the brain tumor came back, this time as GBM, a month after the girl second birthday, she passed away.Life found a way, tho, and my wife never had any remorse of the decisions we made and she would be proud of what her sons are coming to be |
A cab ride I'll never forget (1999) | Nearly 20 years ago my friend and I returned to his dorm building after a long long night out, only to discover we were locked out. With nothing better to do, we sat outside on the stoop and planned to chat the hours away until 6am when the doors would reopen.Before the dawn came, a man in his 80s almost walked past us. He stopped to ask for directions somewhere, maybe to a church. After our half-hearted attempt at giving him directions, he asked us a question. Small talk. And then another. And then the questions turned into statements (“my daughter also went to art school”), and then into short stories, then long stories. My friend and I — having nothing better to do at this early hour, and each recognizing this man wasn’t looking for a sermon but an audience — kept listening.The old man’s long stories turned into deeply personal stories; of hunting deer with his father, of losing friends in the war… He went on and on, pausing occasionally to stare a thousand yards past us and let a patient tear make room for another.An hour later, in a click, the man wished us a good day and went about his way. And with a click, the lobby door behind us unlocked, and we went on our way. We slept until noon and I mostly forgot what else happened the previous night, but I never forgot that early morning moment.Those of us who are lucky to reach that age will surely have endless tales and thoughts to tell, and I hope we’re all lucky to find an attentive ear, whether from a stoop-sitting stranger or a taxi driver. |
Hacker News API | This... is cool, but also kinda sucks for me. I've invested dozens of hours into writing an extremely complicated scraper for my Android version of HN.https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...The newest version (still under development, probably a month or two from release) adds support for displaying polls, linking to subthreads, and full write support (voting, commenting, submitting, etc). I'm fine with switching to a new API (Square's Retrofit will make it super easy to switch), but without submitting, commenting, and upvote support I have to disable a bunch of features I worked really hard on. Also it would've been cool to know this was coming about 3 months ago so I didn't waste my time.Anyways, quick question on how it works -- when I query for the list of top storieshttps://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=...it just returns a list of ids. Do I have to make a separate request for each storyhttps://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json?print=p...)to assemble them into a list for the front page, or am I missing something? |
Yarn – A new package manager for JavaScript | This may come off as a troll, but it's an honest question. I'm not a javascript guy. It's not a language I deal with at all. Why on God's green earth does it need as much tooling as it seems to have? Are people really making projects with dozens (hundreds? more?) of dependent libraries? Are there aspects of the language or runtime that reward multiple layers of configuration management? In short, what the hell is up with this ecosystem? |
Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup | After years of seeing developments like this, getting worse and worse, it fills me with rage to think about how clearly nobody in power at Google cares.I naively used to think, "they probably don't realize what's happening and will fix it." I always try to give benefit of the doubt, especially having been on the other side so many times and seeing how 9 times out of 10 it's not malice, just incompetence, apathy, or hard priority choices based on economic constraints (the latter not likely a problem Google has though).At this point however, I still don't think it's outright malice, but the doubling down on these horrific practices (algorithmically and opaquely destroying people) is so egregious that it doesn't really matter. As far as I'm concerned, Google is to be considered a hostile actor. It's not possible to do business on the internet in any way without running into them, so "de-Googling" isn't an option. Instead, I am going to personally (and advise my clients as well) to:Consider Google as a malicious actor/threat in the InfoSec threat modeling that you do. Actively have a mitigation strategy in place to minimize damage to your company should you become the target of their attack.As with most security planning/analyzing/mitigation, you have to balance the concerns of the CIA Triad. You can't just refuse Google altogether these days, but do NOT treat them as a friend or ally of your business, because they are most assuredly NOT.I'm also considering AWS and Digital Ocean more in the same vein, although that's off topic on this thread. (I use Linode now as their support is great and they don't just drop ban hammers and leave you scrambling to figure out what happened).Edit: Just to clarify (based on confusion in comments below), I am not saying Google is acting with malice (I don't believe they are personally). I am just suggesting you treat it as such for purposes of threat modeling your business/application. |
Elizabeth Holmes found guilty | This will sound weird but I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud. While we're a rare breed there are others like me out there. Still, even with this oddly specific marketplace being small, let me tell you, the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you're curious).Wish I had gone big on this one earlier, because I have a feeling this verdict is going to spice things up in the short term.All that to be said, if you've got any authentic Theranos gear hiding in storage please do let me know, I'm a motivated buyer.For those curious as one example: Nothing raises a few eyebrows more than a note written on Lehman Brothers letterhead with a Purdue Pharma OxyContin pen with the dosage pullout. |
OpenTF announces fork of Terraform | > We completed all documents required for OpenTF to become part of the Linux Foundation with the end goal of having OpenTF as part of Cloud Native Computing FoundationImho the best possible choice, and one that was easy to see coming when they announced they were joining "an existing foundation". |
Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI | Neat, https://github.com/openai/whisper - they have open-sourced it, even the model weights, so they are living up to their name in this instance.The 4 examples are stunningly good (the examples have speakers with heavy accents, speaking in foreign language, speaking with dynamic background noise, etc.), this is far and away better than anything else I've seen. Will be super curious to see other folks trying it out and seeing if it's as robust as it seems, including when confronted with audio speech with natural tics and uhhh's and uhmm's and everything in-between.I think it's fair to say that AI-transcription accuracy is now decidedly superior to the average human's, what the implications of this are I'm not sure. |
Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store | Imagine if Microsoft did this on PCs. a) prohibiting the installation of non-windows store software (sideloading) and b) insisting that all purchases done via apps give them a 30% cut. I think this is a ridiculous practice on the behalf of Apple. |
Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe | For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they're having major retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash. |
Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm | From https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92... (
"author_is_elon",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None).contains(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsElonFeature, 0L))),
(
"author_is_power_user",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsVitsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
(
"author_is_democrat",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsDemocratsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
(
"author_is_republican",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsRepublicansFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
) |
Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC | Yellen and the FDIC is in a tough spot. This is the important line, "Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law."Thus, on one hand, I'm glad they're doing this, as it should help prevent wider bank runs, and it ensures that banks are the ones that are actually paying for it.At the same time, this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.I understand part of this is human nature but I really wish we could plan for these entirely foreseeable events ahead of time so that it's not just cases of "selective justice" with regards to who gets bailed out. |
Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo | The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group." Wow, what a monster.The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point. Honestly, Google might have even been rational to fire him, due to the toxic situation created by the mass outrage. How incredibly damning of our society.A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.This is the closing of the American mind. |
Firefox 57.0 Released | Hopefully most of the missing extensions will be developed sooner rather than later. I have 15 extensions installed, 14 of which are "Legacy".The most critical one, Tree Style Tabs, has been converted. That was the key blocker that prevented me from seriously using Chrome. But many more remain; Cookie Controller, RefControl, some kind of Classic Theme Restorer equivalent (to get a menu bar back for Bookmarks, at a minimum), etc. |
Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code | How does this magic work? Does VS Code run completely in the browser? |
I resigned from Twitter | Twitter made me feel: some combination of violated, indignant, numb, inferior, empty, powerless, disappointed, embarassed, furious, annoyed, and infuriated. |
O.mg Cable | Wow! Is the trick that we now have powerful microcomputers small enough to fit into a USB plug? That's pretty incredible technology. How many years ago did this become possible? My IT security training is dated, I am aware of the risks of plugging in a random USB key, but just a cable from a helpful "coworker"? Yikes. |
Tell HN: Salary data is for sale | NOTE: It is possible to freeze access to your employment data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freezeThat being said, it doesn't stop employers from continuing to hand Equifax your data on a gold platter, and therefore does nothing to protect you from the inevitable data breach that will result in Equifax being required to give everyone affected $0.36 or one year of free credit monitoring. |
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? | Guys, even if everything in this paper is true, the material as it is might have limited applications.From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current density, not just current which is meaningless (and around 300 mA).This means you can't actually push big current through this thing (yet). You can't make a powerful magnet, and you can't make viable power lines, both applications that were the hallmark of "room temperature superconductor revolution".Of course, maybe one or a few more tweak(s) of the material and boom, it will give high J_c and B_c. I really hope it does, it would be super cool! |
XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet' | This is overwhelming. Even when you always hear the claims about we knew this was going on, somehow it is still shocking when you see it all laid out infront of you with screenshots and the capabilities described.I can see how they get HTTP information, since they would intercept at transit hubs - but how are they getting all Facebook private messages and Gmail?I was also looking for another unique ID that users are identified by - perhaps a machine or browser fingerprint or some form of intel that can 'glue' different browsers together and make a best guess if they are the same person (Facebook does this with device and user cookies) but couldn't find anything. It seems they rely solely on email addresses, IP addresses, cookies and HTTP headers.So if you are browsing via 16 tor circuits and a browser that defaults to incognito with session histories being wiped, they couldn't reconstruct your history.Users of PGP/encryption products being singled out is terrifying. The sooner we have the whole world using decent encryption tools, the better.Edit: Gmail messages must only be captured when they leave the Google network. They are the only provider to support server-to-server TLS: https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/346807239002169344/photo/1They must only be getting a slice of the Facebook chat data, since the transport there is also https.Facebook Messenger, on the other hand, uses MQTT, so it transmits and stores in plaintext. It has support for encrypted + signed messages with OTR if you are using an alternate client such as Adium or Pidgin.Really need to go out an audit all of these services and let users know which are better. |
Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B | Oof. I wonder what this means for Whole Foods culture and employees.If you don't know, John Mackey, the CEO / founder, is a major believer in conscious capitalism and of empowering his employees.Whole Food employees get paid pretty darn well with some crazy good benefits for their industry and line-of-work (UNION FREE most of the time too!).WF banks on them being true believers and motivators of the cause - including dedicating a fair amount of paid time to trainings. I've heard mix stories about how Amazon treats employees. I wonder how that will mesh.So I guess I'm asking:* What is going to happen with employee culture?* What is going to happen with all the "Fair Trade" deals WF has in place that might not be the most economical decision now?* Here comes store automation and hefty lay-offs?Source: Worked at WF for 3 years |
It Can Happen to You | Loving the progression here. Tomorrow, someone’s going to reduce the boot times of macOS by 90% by the same principle. A week from now, someone will prove P=NP because all the problems we thought were NP were just running strlen() on the whole input. |
I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service | The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.' |
Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics? | YouTube University. Seriously: watch 30, 50, or a 100 videos. You will develop an intuition for what is happening. THEN read books (some good ones already suggested in other comments) and you will learn the concrete theory.I want to emphasize the importance of developing the intuition behind the theory. It's vital, and the lack of intuition is why so many people find a complex, theoretical topic difficult. If they had spent time developing their intuition, then they would not struggle so much to understand and remember the theory.Last, you have to build stuff (this also helps with the intuition). Decide that you are going to spend $300, and start buying parts. Don't go to Radio Shack, because you will (in my experience) pay an order of magnitude more for the same part. Shop on Aliexpress (or sometimes Amazon or Ebay). Who cares if you have to wait 6 weeks for the part to come in... do it today and it will be here about the time that you are ready for it. Never buy just one of anything. You can usually buy 10 or 20 for the same price that you can buy 2 or 3.Most importantly: DO SOMETHING! Anything. Watch videos. Buy parts. Put things together, and then try to figure out why it's not working! Whatever you do, just don't stop. You will learn if you keep at it. At this stage for you, though, the most important thing is that you actually start. |
The new and upgraded Framework Laptop | I'm happy to answer any questions around this! We've been working on this since update since we launched the product last year, so we're excited to be able to share it today. |
Facebook Fraud [video] | I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my friends, and instead lets me focus on what facebook is actually valuable for: party planning. |
Dear GitHub | Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken, Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre,My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in.Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pain points are. Constructive criticism is an important of doing great work. I appreciate how specific and detailed you were in your feedback. Getting a good sense of specific problems provides a more fruitful beginning to a conversation than "it suxx0rs", so I appreciate that.I am still figuring out how GitHub fits together as an organization but I am happy to take a look into these issues and ensure they are considered in how future work is planned. We have a growing product team at GitHub that I know is passionate about solving the major pain points that rub up against our users. Obviously I can't make any firm commitments as I am not on the product team, but I can ensure the right eyeballs are on this. I also want to explore with my colleagues how we can be a little clearer about future feature and development plans to see if we can reduce some ambiguity.As I say, I am pretty new, so I am still getting the lay of the land, but feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any further questions or concerns about this or any other issue. I am at [email protected]. |
Goodbye, Clean Code | I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication,” and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often.There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat yourself!” Right?So you try to extract that boilerplate into a method, and it’s fine until the very next change. Then you need to start passing options and configuration into your helper method... and before long your helper method is extremely difficult to reason about, because it’s actually handling a dozen cases that are superficially similar but full of important differences in the details.I encourage my devs to follow a rule of thumb: don’t extract repetitive code right away, try and build the feature you’re working on with the duplication in place first. Let the code go through a few evolutions and waves of change. Then one of two things are likely to happen:(1) you find that the code doesn’t look so repetitive anymore,or, (2) you hit a bug where you needed to make the same change to the boilerplate in six places and you missed one.In scenario 1, you can sigh and say “yeah it turned out to be incidental duplication, it’s not bothering me anymore.” In scenario 2, it’s probably time for a careful refactoring to pull out the bits that have proven to be identical (and, importantly, must be identical across all of the instances of the code). |
Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users | Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again.Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to take a paycheck from Facebook even in the face of constant and horrific evidence of wholesale ethical violations and negligence. |
Shirt Without Stripes | This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things.Zooming out, the language field breaks into several subfields:- A large group of Chomsky followers in academia are all about logical rules but very little in the way of algorithmic applicability, or even interest in such.- A large and well-funded group of ML practitioners, with a lot of algorithmic applicability, but arguably very shallow model of the language fails in cases like attribution. Neural networks might yet show improvement, but apparently didn't in this case.- A small and poorly funded group of "comp ling", attempting to create formalisms (e.g. HPSG) that are still machine-verifiable, and even generative. My girlfriends is doing PhD in this area, in particular dealing with modeling WH questions, so I get some glimpse into it; it's a pity the field is not seeing more interest (and funding). |
We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won | Hey everyone, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare GC, here. Happy to answer any questions as we close out this chapter. |
RethinkDB is shutting down | Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Clearly there are some major problems that people re ignoring. If my favorite DB (I must mention Kx Systems once a month) folded, I could give you a laundry list of issues where things went sideways, but all I see is glowing praise and comments about the best tech not always winning (KDB knocks the socks off of everything, but I sure can give you a list of places it fails).This isn't meant to be harsh, but these are times to learn, not simply pat each other on the back. |
It’s time to give Firefox another chance | I was extremely skeptical of all the changes they were doing - I said it myself 100 times, "they're just building a Chrome clone, they're killing all the features I like in favor of speed".But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and integration performance issues as far as I could see), but there's a lot of work being done and it's only getting better.Their whole "Project Quantum" eliminated the UI performance issues that used to plague the browser and they're improving security sandboxing all the time.To those who loved the power and control like myself, they still offer a ridiculous level of configuration flexibility and extension APIs - while no longer as powerful as they were - are still better than other browsers on the market today. |
Raspberry Pi 5 | anyone could tell me how did you use raspberry pi? |
Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it | That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged.That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like they are “Working” even though I explain to them that as long as its work/business related I will expect to be able to call upon them in the future with this new knowledge.So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning? |
Draw an iceberg and see how it would float in water | I get interesting results if I draw a figure 8 (or a figure ∞). I wonder if it's treating one of the lobes as having negative density. |
Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account | The question I always have with this stuff is this:To attract developers, these platforms make some promises. A "review" process for supposed violations of TOS causing cancellations is always among them. But to me these "reviews" always seem either completely faked or some version of a lowest-level employee simply restating that the algo has made its choice and they are powerless.More incriminating is that every time a story starts to go viral, it seems a higher-up jumps in and instantly fixes it. (i.e. they can deliver a "real" review if they want to)Since you paid them money (which they never refund) and they promised you an actual review if something goes wrong (which they never seem to actually deliver)...How is this any different than selling a counterfeit product? Isn't this legally actionable fraud? |
AWS services explained in one line each | Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider? |
Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple | Apple's going to be fine. Steve's most extraordinary work isn't the Mac, the iPhone or the iPad. It's rebuilding Apple in his image. It was creating organizational culture and habits that mimic his weird brain, like their aggressive software prototyping to prove that things work well and feel good.Fuck, I'll miss him, though. I'll miss the way he got up there each and every time like he was selling you your own personal Jesus in a box. Not out of hucksterism, but because he really was that excited to share what he and his people had been working on. Excited to do things better. Excited to solve problems in a way that was far more tasteful, more satisfying, than anything anyone had bothered to try before. Maybe he'll still do announcements as his health allows – but maybe that would send a weird message.He's a man who was lucky enough to find out exactly what he did best – and to seize upon it with every cell in his body.I'm a better person for his example. The resurrection of Apple was one of the most enjoyable things I followed in my childhood. No matter how you feel about his approach, this is a guy who loves his work with an intensity that couldn't be faked and won't be soon matched. |
Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000) | We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of staff reported that their mouse would stop working between certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later.On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others it would stop working between those hours.The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast days, but on sunny days this strange behaviour would manifest again.Turns out the problem was related to the mouse being a cheap mouse. The case had very thin plastic.The mouse was a ball mouse, and it worked by shining an LED into a sensor on each of the X and Y axes. On sunny days the sun would completely overpower the sensor due to the plastic case being very thin and on overcast days it would not. On sunny days the mouse would only work when the sun had moved around the sky to cast a shadow over where the mouse was being used.Perfectly logical but baffling at first. |
This electrical transmission tower has a problem | This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue.With proper engineering and maintenance, PG&E could probably reduce the frequency of fires significantly, but there's always going to be a non-zero risk of fire, both from power lines and other sources, and it seems basically inevitable that one of them would have started another fire at some point. If this failure hadn't happened, and the same fire had happened a year later due to an "excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line, or someone's house catching on fire), would that outcome have been any better?PG&E does ultimately have some responsibility, due to the fact that they were the immediate cause, but it really seems like people want to blame PG&E for the entire situation while avoiding the much harder truth: that this area will likely never be safe without significant policy changes (if ever). |
Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? | Most fun: Pat Pattison, Songwriting, Coursera. Very good lectures, very good material, very well presented. Teaches a lot about writing song lyrics in just 6 weeks, breaks it nicely down to steps and recipes. I used to think that the best feature of MOOCs is the automatic grading and feedback from programming homework, but in this course, for the homework songwriting you gave and got feedback from 3-5 random people in the course, and it was not only useful but this feeling of togetherness with strangers was even better than getting instantaneous feedback from a bot for programming homework. Shows that teaching art scales to MOOCs as well.Nicest: Andrew Ng, Machine Learning, Coursera. Interesting topic, well-planned material, very well avoids going into the mathy details, but still conveys a feeling of understanding of the topic, so accessible to a wide audience. (Martin Odersky, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Coursera, was almost equally nice, but had some rough edges in the first run.)Most interesting: Probabilistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller, Coursera. Very interesting topic. I took the first run of the course and it had lots of rough edges. Needs a lot of work to apply the lectures to the homework. I haven't seen such a demanding course since I took quantum mechanics at university.Best organized: Jennifer Widom, Databases, Stanford. This is not the flashiest of a topic, but oh boy was it well organized. Runs like a clockwork. Everything in the lectures is relevant, everything from the lectures is applied and tested in the homework, there is lots of homework (but still not enough to make you remember SQL,XPath,XQuery,XSLT for the rest of your life if you don't keep using them), weekly homework has a nice progression from simpler things to medium difficult things, and the web environment is well designed, and gives wonderful feedback and guides you to get your queries correct. |
Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do? | I think there's also something to be said for passive processing.Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work. |
Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet | If Google were actually serious about Net Neutrality, they would use their insane market power to protect it.How? Well, a simple statement saying "any ISP who abuses net neutrality will have their customers cut off from Google products". No Google search, no YouTube, no Gmail. Have those requests instead redirect to a website telling the customer what their ISP is doing, why Google won't work with them, and how to call to complain to the ISP. Make the site list competitors in the user's area that don't play stupid games.Is this an insane idea? Yep. Would Google come under scrutiny because of their now-obvious market power? Oh definitely. And Google would probably lose money over it. But it would certainly work.People don't get internet, and then decide to use Google. They want Google and then get internet for that purpose.edit: an hour later, fixing an autocorrect word |
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News | I guess it is a perfect opportunity to thank dang and sctb for their unobtrusive and friendly moderation efforts.The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it. |
Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video] | NASA's ability of succeeding at landing things successfully on the first try on foreign bodies since 1969 is mind-blowing.Meanwhile, SpaceX takes half a dozen tries before managing to do the same on a fully known environment on Earth. |
Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge | Good. Very good.This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products, either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy [1] to make financial products. Especially because proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to have cryptocurrency.Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins.I don't think there's any precedent for banning classes of financial products for environmental reasons, but it's time to create one.[1]: In addition to environmental reasons, there's probably also economic ones. Mining burns through other scarce resources such as chip production capacity, although the true impact there is unclear. |
Stripe Atlas | I just checked the prohibited businesses https://stripe.com/de/prohibited-businessesI am fine with most of them being prohibited but at some points it's getting quite restricted:1. Virtual currency that can be monetized, re-sold or converted to physical or digital products or services or otherwise exit the virtual world4. Sexually-oriented or pornographic products or services9. Engaging in deceptive marketing practices
(here: who decides what is 'deceptive')14. Age verification15. Age restricted products or services
(which are the most products/services)50. Centralized travel reservation services or travel clubs |
Merry Christmas, HN | In case you're homeless and living in your car rejected by everyone you love because you can't stop drinking, but temporarily holed up in a roadside motel over Christmas with a case of vodka... that was me. It gets better. I now have 5 years sobriety, but I'll never forget that despair I felt and how my mind was in a loop thinking about killing myself.I've put a temp email in my profile in case you want to reach out. I can't tell you how to stop drinking because it's different for everyone, but I know one small step is knowing you are not alone and recovery is possible. |
AWS us-east-1 outage | I worked at a company that hired an ex-Amazon engineer to work on some cloud projects.Whenever his projects went down, he fought tooth and nail against any suggestion to update the status page. When forced to update the status page, he'd follow up with an extremely long "post-mortem" document that was really just a long winded explanation about why the outage was someone else's fault.He later explained that in his department at Amazon, being at fault for an outage was one of the worst things that could happen to you. He wanted to avoid that mark any way possible.YMMV, of course. Amazon is a big company and I've had other friends work there in different departments who said this wasn't common at all. I will always remember the look of sheer panic he had when we insisted that he update the status page to accurately reflect an outage, though. |
I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone | I’m a long-time small phone Android user. But after the Pixel 5, I have not been able to find a suitable small Android replacement. The Pixel 6 is gigantic, and the Pixel 7 looks like it is also destined to be huge. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve resorted to using an iPhone Mini, biding my time and hoping desperately that some Android OEM would step up.But it’s increasingly clear that a small premium phone is not on the roadmap. So I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. My goal with https://smallandroidphone.com is to rally other fans of small phones together and put pressure on Google/Samsung/Anyone to consider making a small phone.I have a very specific set of skills and industry connections that I have acquired over a long career in the hardware business (my first startup was Pebble). I will put them to use in our shared quest to get the perfect small Android phone. If no one else builds one, and enough people sign up...maybe I will be forced to make it myself.If you want a small premium Android phone, this may be your last chance (ever?) to help bring back the phone category that we love. |
MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch | HDMI, SD Card, and MagSafe. Things people on the internet inclusive but not limited to HN said they will never come back because the future is USB-C.Now I just want to know if the new keyboard has more key travel distance back to the like of MacBook Pro 2015.In case anyone wants to know the thickness difference.MacBook Pro 13" 2015 - 1.8 cmMacBook Pro 13" 2016 - 1.49 / 1.55 cmMacBook Pro 14" / 16" 2021 - 1.55 / 1.66cmSo basically even the new 16" is still thinner than the MacBook 2015 era. Which I think vast majority of people were happy with.Edit: Both 14" and 16" have 254 PPI, up from ~220. Apple tends to stick with same PPI for a very long time. So this is interesting. 3456-by-2234 or 3024-by-1964 is 14:9 Ratio. So somewhere in between the old 16:10 and 3:2 which is current trend of Lenovo and Surface Laptop. |
Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to | As someone who works with a lot of people new to machine learning, I appreciate guides like this. I especially like the early slides that help frame AI vs ML vs DL so that people can have a realistic understanding of what these technologies are for.For my part, one of the biggest realization I had after many years of applying machine learning was that I got too caught up in the machine learning algorithms themselves. I was often way too eager to guess and check across different algorithms and parameters in search of higher accuracy. Fortunately, there are new automated tools today that can do that automatically.However, the key piece of advice I'd give someone new to machine learning is not to get caught up in the different machine learning techniques (SVM vs random forrest vs neural network, etc). Instead (1) spend more time on translating your problem into terms a machine can understand (i.e how are you defining and generating your labels) and (2) how do you perform feature engineering so the the right variables are available for machine learning to use. Focusing on these two things helped me build more accurate models that were more likely to be deployed in the real world.Feature engineering in particular has become a bit of a passion of mine since that realization. I currently work on an open source project called Featuretools (https://github.com/featuretools/featuretools/) that aims help people apply feature engineering to transactional or relational datasets. We just put out a tutorial on building models to predict what product a customer will buy next, which is a good hands on example to learn from https://github.com/featuretools/predict_next_purchase for beginners. |
Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com | Ted from Namecheap here.I cannot speak to GoDaddy's practices. However, I can say that for Namecheap, this is not something we would ever even consider doing.In my experience though, lookups are more complex than most think. We are querying so many different sources to give you availability status, some of which are less reliable than others. For example, with smaller TLDs like .ai or .is, lookups may be less reliable than a well-oiled machine like Verisign, which operates the .com and .net TLDs, among others. As a result, sometimes with a less reliable registry, there can be false positives, resulting in the registrar showing a domain as "available" when it is actually registered.In addition to registry connection reliability, there are also many different aftermarket sources that registrars often pull from. You know when you see a Premium domain (registered and usually higher priced) in search? That could be coming from any number of 3rd party aftermarket platforms, which also can have varying reliability and/or stale listings.Lastly, you have to consider that some registrars handle the "drop window" differently than others. If a domain deletes and is removed from the zone, ergo, becoming available again, some registrars have a buffer period before they show it as available again.It does not appear that Felons.io had ever been registered before, which makes this case pretty strange. |
Sublime Text 3.0 | I honestly can't believe I'm saying this, but: can you please enable me to buy a new license for 4.0 even though it may not even be on the road map yet? Or switch to / enable a subscriber model which is paid yearly and gives access to all upgrades?I rely so much on sublime for my day to day work and I fear the $80 or whatever I paid for it whenever ago is too cheap for the amount of value I'm getting out of it, and I'd hate to see this magnificent piece of software fall by the wayside because of an unsustainable business model.Of course, if the business is perfectly sustainable then you know, carry on as you where. |
We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly | Pretty bold. A lot of people are saying this wont work, but speaking from my own experience, you'd be surprised what companies are amicable to when it comes to business.Im an engine mechanic by trade, and our shops handle bids for cash strapped local governments that outsource their motor pool maintenance. We do things like fire trucks and police cars, but we were working on a new regional idea as a "service center" for municipalities that purchased MRAP combat vehicles for their police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAPWe all, especially the veterans I work with, hated this idea. MRAP's are for combat, not police work, and have a dangerous propensity to roll over in city streets or escalate already violent situations. 14 of us sent a signed letter to the owner and senior management detailing our major concerns and heard nothing back for about a month. Then out of the blue we got a call for a meeting with 3-4 very senior managers at a local irish bar.They paid for dinner and tried to explain how the business would be extremely lucrative. we would all see major bonuses, we could hire more workers, and grow the business faster than just large truck repair. It took 3 very emotional hours, but we eventually talked down a handful of people from making a very wrong decision.for a week after, we were all sort of stunned that it actually worked at all. Tire cages meant for MRAP tires were cut up and turned into random parts holders, or as new hangers for air lines...one even replaced our mailbox post. |
How journalists use youtube-dl | I left a comment about my own non-infringing use cases of the tool earlier — and I think it’s important that the non-infringing use cases get mentioned.Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright? Most of us weren’t distributing anything, but I think most of us were aware this was at the very least a grey area, if not outright infringement.I’m a huge fan and user of youtube-dl and think this action from the RIAA is ridiculous (though not surprising — I’m a little surprised it took this long) and that the law over this stuff is absolutely bonkers — but the commentary and false pretenses about not just how we use the tool but the purpose for why the tool was built is incredibly disingenuous.It was built and designed to download content that the creators or sites that host the content either didn’t want people to download or outright didn’t allow. The program has support for username/passwords for TV Everywhere SSO’s for premium services. There are ways to tunnel in via a proxy to avoid region block downloads. Again, I’m a huge fan, and I’m someone who absolutely used these features, but let’s not pretend the purpose wasn’t exactly what it is.That doesn’t make the RIAA’s actions any better or anything — but I really dislike pretending like we weren’t all using the program for the exact purposes the complaint laid out, or that they use case wasn’t the primary reason this tool existed. |
Del.icio.us | Not to rain on the parade, but serious question: are bookmarks actually useful anymore?It's funny, I'm trying to remember when I simply stopped using bookmarks. 5 years ago, maybe? 10? I'm not entirely sure. I used to have elaborate folder hierachies of bookmarks in my browser.But at some point, I realized anytime I needed something, it was faster to just type a keyword or two in the address bar. Either it was there in my history, autosuggested, or my search engine would find it. So maybe it was when Chrome debuted the Omnibox?I suppose it was around the same time I started primarily accessing files on my computer/drive with search (Drive, Spotlight) rather than navigating folders.A few years later, I stopped organizing my 1000's of tracks into playlists by mood/theme, because now I can just think of a single track I'm in the mood for, and start a Spotify Radio based on that track.In other words: I no longer extensively curate, because you just don't have to anymore, beyond a kind of bare minimum (a few project folders, a mega "favorite tracks" playlist).So I guess I'm just curious: Delicious was wonderful when it existed. But even if it were brought back, is it a service people need anymore? Or have we moved on to a new paradigm? |
I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time | >I chose the name SerenityOS because I wanted to always remember the Serenity Prayer.Whats with operating systems and religion |
A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize | When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve. People often seem to think of unions as being purely blue-collar operations, and this just isn't true.For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.And it's strange, because the other major industry in California - the film industry - is heavily unionised, and you just don't see that happening there. You have vocally supportive multi-millionaire card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild to name a few. None of these unions are limiting the work their members are carrying out.This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. SAG, the DGA, and the WGA aren't guaranteeing hours or limiting pay: they're simply trying to curb abuse in what it a very abusive industry, and putting in place procedures to protect members and resolve grievances.And they don't always get it right, and I don't pretend that Hollywood is a perfect utopia of worker relations, but I think it's pretty undeniable that the industry is a much better place with the unions around. |
$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog | You have to be crazy brave or crazy ignorant to do this kind of analysis and share it in the USA.At a minimum his name will now show up on the no-fly list for the rest of his life. If he realized this, I am in awe. |
Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it | I'd like to share this post[0]:The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times.The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" and end up doing 3-5 hours more, do that with your other tasks too! "just one line of code", "just one tutorial", "just one rep", "just one line of reading/writing".We all have this amazing mental tool that we've been honing for years, the tool of self deception. Time to use it for good and not evil.Copied from:
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/cdir3g/trick_... |
Compare Webb's Images to Hubble | Downvote me to hell, but as a person who has zero understanding of what differentiates Hubble from Webb, the pictures alone just aren't doing it for me. I was excited to see something completely new given 30 years and 10 billion dollars and instead I feel like I'm seeing what looks like an enterprise upgrade and feel slightly disappointed.What am I missing? |
Facebook is an attack on the open web | I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions).The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I don't really get invited to those anymore. It's also harder to organize events where you casually invite people you don't know as well.It's also occasionally annoying not being able to dig up a certain photo you wanted for reference. Even if you have a copy of the photo somewhere, if you don't have it hosted online then you can't really bring it up to show it to someone.Still, frustrations aside, it's 90% great, and I recommend everyone try it for themselves. |
Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down | When I announced the launch of 70 Million Jobs on HN back in 2017, it proved to be one of the most widely read and discussed posts ever on the site. I was totally blown away. Once again, I am struck by the incredibly sensitive and supportive tenor of the reactions to my news here.For some context, besides having a criminal record, I was/am a solo founder who somehow talked his way into Y Comb. Perhaps most surprising is my age: I'm 68. To my friends I grew up with, I'm f'-ing Steve Jobs. To you guys, you'd no doubt see me as the bumbling great uncle at Thanksgiving that isn't allowed to touch the TV remote control.So it's all been pretty weird. (wanna see it get weirder? google me and check out my past)As you all know, doing a 2-sided marketplace is always tough. But imagine if neither side of your marketplace was convinced they wanted your product. Chances are you keep your distance from such an undertaking ("Build something people want," my YC t-shirt says). I build something arguably no one wanted, but I knew they needed. Does that make me a schmuck? Probably.But to those who've never gotten close to someone with as record--particularly someone with a different color than you, who was brought into an unfair world from Day One, someone who wanted the same things as you, but never quite figured out how to get there, I'm here to say that some of these folks are the most honorable, humble, appreciate, hard-working people you could imagine. They just want a peaceful life, to take care of their family and get a good night sleep.So that's where the mission comes in, and that's when zealots are born. The truth is, I have nothing in my life other than my work. No wife, no kids, no home, nothing. But the satisfaction I got from helping these heroic folks, and the smiles I'd see on their kids' faces when they were reunited, meant/means the world to me. If you don't have something like this in your life, I urge you to find it. Your karma will thank you for it.I invite you all to ask your questions and continue to opine. If you have something to share that isn't merely an attempt to win an argument, I'd appreciate your taking the time to email me. More importantly, if you're ever in a position to hire someone with a record, take the chance. Life is too short not to take chances. Richard |
How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team | This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, then they must not want me to read their content.Please, let's end this scourge by closing more tabs and not driving more traffic to these sites. |
Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community | Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up:I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity.They told me, "Just use a friend's phone to verify. As long as they don't try to verify on Discord in six months it should be fine, we won't check again".Their official answer to identity verification was to impersonate someone else! |
Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week | I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing. |
US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data | Throwaway account.I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public has zero idea how much personal location data is available.It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually not in software but by contract, one gives gps data to all the others as part of the bill of materials.This is then usually (but not always) "anonymized" by cutting it in to ~5 second chunks. It's easy to put it back together again. We can figure out everything about your day from when you wake up to where you go to when you sleep.This data is sold to whoever wants it. Hedge funds or services who analyze it for hedge funds is the big one. It's normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go. This isn't fantasy, it's what happens every day.Almost every web/smartphone mapping company is doing it, so is almost everyone that tracks you for some service - "turn the lights on when I get home". The web mapping companies and those that provide SDKs for "free". It's a monetization model for apps which don't need location. That's why Apple is trying hard to restrict it without scaring off consumers. |
Show HN: Web Design in 4 minutes | This is a pretty nice demo of the process of turning a basic page into a "design" (in the sense that applying positioning, spacing, contrast, and things like typography is visual design - I might call it layout instead).However, if you run Chrome's Accessibility Audit (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/accessibility-deve...) on this page, you get warnings about low contrast for 100+ elements and a link to https://github.com/GoogleChrome/accessibility-developer-tool....So although you claim black text is harsh on the eyes and gray is more comfortable, it in fact is not - it just makes it harder to read. The very first time you load the page and see black Times New Roman on a white background is actually a better user experience for a larger number of people, purely from the point of view of legibility.Try having someone with less than stellar eyesight look at this page. Or someone who's trying to read it on a smartphone outside in sunlight or with the brightness of their screen set at less than maximum. Design isn't about what looks nice, it's about what works well - pages that a portion of your audience cannot read don't work well. |
Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up | There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid.And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google.
They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked.Their executives are clearly failures.
But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themselves mansions etc.Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship? |
Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business | Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there:Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make sure the business is an acceptable risk, not doing anything illegal or against their terms, etc. So you’re more likely to be declined initially, but if you’re lit up, you should be good for the future because the underwriters actually saw the deal and approved it.While I haven’t worked for these other companies, a lot of experience seems to show that Stripe, Square and PayPal operate differently: they light up ANYONE, and then only underwrite when the account hits a critical threshold of revenue. So it’s easy to get an account there, but if you scale up, that’s when you’ll be scrutinized and potentially terminated. It’s a very unethical practice because it ends up hitting businesses at the worst possible time, when the termination or suspension causes a huge financial hit.So basically, always have a backup processor and use these web based services at small scale to prove out your model, but NEVER rely on them as your sole payment solution. |
You Are Not Google (2017) | The big issue I think we miss when people say "why are you using Dynamo, just use SQL" or "why are you using hadoop, a bash shell would be faster" or "why are you using containers and kubernetes, just host a raspberry pi in your closet":The former examples are all managed! That's amazing for scaling teams.(SQL can be managed with, say, RDS. Sure. But it's not the same level of managed as Dynamo (or Firebase or something like that). It still requires maintenance and tuning and upkeep. Maybe that's fine for you (remember: the point of this article was to tell you to THINK, not to just ignore any big tech products that come out). But don't discount the advantage of true serverless.)My goal is to be totally unable to SSH into everything that powers my app. I'm not saying that I want a stack where I don't have to. I'm saying that I literally cannot, even if I wanted to real bad. That's why serverless is the future; not because of the massive scale it enables, but because fuck maintenance, fuck operations, fuck worrying about buffer overflow bugs in OpenSSL, I'll pay Amazon $N/month to do that for me, all that matters is the product. |
OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit | I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years and he's for sure a measured and reasonable person who cares about not doing harm. Although I don't know Miles, my understanding is he has similar qualities. If they're gonna be for profit, I feel this is really important.Edit: Well, I guess these tweets explain the beef well -https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1606642155346612229https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599291104687374338https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1096987465326374912 |
Responsive Pixel Art | Hello this is Marcus, the guy who did the resolution independent illustrations. I just uploaded the current version of the site, so it will no longer freeze, when the image gets to small. I also updated the Tantalos image.I am currently a bit blown away by the reaction to this. I finished this over a year ago but didn’t manage to make it public till now. I presented this at a meetup in Berlin yesterday and someone asked for an online version, which I postet to Twitter — then things escalated quickly.So because a lot of people are asking: I am currently redoing my completely outdated homepage. The new one will include an in-depth explanation of what is actually happening there, what’s the idea behind it and how I want to apply this to actual web design to make resolution-independent work more easy and less restrictive for both designers and developers.Until then I will try to answer some questions here …Scalable Greetings
Marcus |
Docker cannot be downloaded without logging into Docker Store | Would it kill companies to be honest and upfront about these sorts of issues? I feel like "Hey, we're unable to pay our bills unless we can better monetize our product" comes across a lot more honest and trust-worthy than this "We're improving user experience! Trust us!" pride-and-accomplishment nonsense that everyone keeps regurgitating. We're not preschoolers, the Internet can spot marketing slogans a mile away. |
Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App | Given the fact that most people are already maxed out on apps on their device with just things like facebook and youtube, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to install your app just to try it out. With a progressive web app if they like your app they can add it to their device home screen without installing via the app store and without using up space on their device. Also don't need to pay Apple $100 a year but you have the same benefits as a native app. Now with wasm you can even include native performance from a progressive web app. |
John McCarthy Has Died | Unfortunately it's true. I just heard back from Peter Norvig, who says "He died peacefully in his sleep last night." |
Sunsetting Python 2 | Python 2 to 3 (at least by 3.3 or so) was one of the easiest transitions I've ever done. There's a library ("six") to help, and in almost all cases you can write 2-and-3 compatible code, which means you can go piece-by-piece. (Unless your manager makes drive-by commits of py2-only code, months after you all agreed that all new code should be py3-compatible, and then leaves town for a multi-week vacation...)Dependencies? I helped upgrade a couple third-party modules, too. That's part of the job. If you choose to use a dependency, you're vouching for it. That means if the current version of the language no longer supports your favorite library, you need to fix the library, or find a new one. If we switched from phillips to torx, and your favorite tool brand didn't make torx drivers yet, you've got to either convince them to start, or switch brands. Professionals don't get to use this as an excuse to badmouth torx, and stick with phillips.If people spent half as much energy upgrading as complaining, this would have gotten done 5 years ago.Apple took only 3 years to go from first announcing a new CPU architecture to releasing an x86-only OS. 2 years later, Rosetta stopped working, so there was no way to run old apps on current hardware at all. That's got to be one of the advantages of proprietary systems. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have no choice. People complained a little but they got it done. |
Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says | Over the past decade I've had to deal with a lot of executives and security people who don't actually understand security all that well. Or at all. (Not that I'm a security expert, but that hardly makes it better when even I can see that something is nonsense).Right now I know of at least half a dozen products that are marketed as having E2E encryption but do not actually implement this (no, I'm not going to out them. See second to last paragraph as to when to be wary). In part because executives, marketers and salespeople don't know what it means. And in part because when explained what it means they will insist on their own definition/interpretation and demand the product is marketed as E2E.It is also important to note that quite often you are not dealing only with the company that makes a product, but the regulatory bodies that can pressure companies into complying with their wishes.As for Zoom, I don't understand why people trust them or still use their product if they are at all concerned about security. It makes very little sense. |
We only hire the trendiest | I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process:- adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool.- openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting.- resourcefulness -- has this person found ways to keep learning after college and has he/she continued to up his/her game.- desire to ship -- does this person have a deep desire to produce work that will be used by others.- desire to grow -- does this person have clear career growth goals. Ideally these are not tied to titles or bossing others around, which are negatives.- rationality -- can this person admit to being wrong and speak about it authentically... can I imagine this person admitting to being slightly wrong and even very wrong about something and handling it gracefully.- territoriality -- does this person seem territorial or speak about issues of proudly defending turf in previous positions? Doing so is a negative.- poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness? This is a big warning sign and an instant do not hire. |
Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds | There's another reason why touchscreens are used. It breaks up one of the "long poles" in the project schedule.Hardware buttons and switches have to be designed, tested, re-designed, and validated very early in the process of designing a new model so that there is time to figure out how to manufacture / source all the parts, how they integrate with the rest of the car's systems, and how they'll be wired and assembled. Just imagine what the impact would be if late in the process a new feature needs to be added! Pretty much forget about it, add it in the next major model refresh.With a touchscreen all those dependencies go away. The hardware team just says "there's going to be an iPad sized capacitive touch screen here for climate/infotainment, and another custom sized display here for the instrument cluster". The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated. |
Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers | Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know. |
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds | Wow, I'm glad this was posted.I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s.Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem.For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happens to not be be necessary for Facebook to be a successful business.Go to a developer conference by one of the big tech companies, and speakers generally aren't talking about doing good things for the user. They'll use euphemisms like "increasing engagement". There's concepts like "permission priming", psychological tricks to get the user to do what you want. There's books written about how to maximize app addictiveness. It's stuff that mildly screws over the user, and it guides the product designs that affect the lives of billions of people. It's not good. |
A Protocol for Dying | This whole thread reeks of death acceptance culture. HN readers show off how cool they are for accepting death instead of discussing how we as a tech community could help cure these diseases or at least give more people an option of being cryopreserved.The really unpleasant truth is that if we as a society began doing serious focused R&D on these life-threatening diseases earlier, the OP and many others wouldn't have to die.But we didn't. Enjoy marketing your mobile apps until cancer suddenly makes you rot away. |
Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor | Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in?Don't get me wrong---I'm as happy as the next guy about this. VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE, if they take 25% of their VS engineering mantra to this it will be better than almost anything else.But where does it end? I am clearly so not in touch with my inner mba. I just cannot even think of how what they are planning in the long run, here.What's going on? Have they lost their minds? Is there a secret master plan? How realistic could that be? Is this the red giant to their eventual white dwarf?Just... what?! |
Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract | If you’re on macOS and just want a good and convenient image editor, I warmly recommend Acorn. The Muellers (owners of Flying Meat Software) have put a lot of effort to make it feel like a really solid Mac application. The price is good and from time to time they offer discounts. The whole experience reminds me of using good old Paintshop Pro back in the late 90s (^_^)Other options are Affinity Photo from Serif Ltd and Pixelmator. IMHO Acorn has much better GUI though. (FWIW, Affinity works fine on Windows too.)I realize that some people need the features from Photoshop and then I guess they have to pay the “Adobe tax”. But if you’re not a photo/graphics professional, you can come a long way with the above options.AFAIK there are also lots of good alternatives for Illustrator and InDesign. |
Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast | CenturyLink, in particular, but also Comcast, has brought this upon themselves...They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services.I'm thinking of back in '98 when QWest was rolling out DSL, the would only connect you to a central office. They refused to put DSLAMs in the pedestals, because if they did that they had to allow CLECs to do the same and CLECs could start "cherry picking" service locations for DSL. One very rural community ("Ruby Ridge?") had to sue to get the right to put in DSLAMs. DSL was dependent on how many wire feet you were from one of the two central offices in town.Compared to my inlaws up in Saskatoon Canada: Similar size city, they deployed DSLAMs in the remote terminals and ran fiber to them and used the copper to the house for the last mile and covered the whole city.Remember, the telcos got a $2 billion rate hike to enable them to deploy fiber to the home by the year 2000. Except for a few small trials (I used to work at QWest), they just pocketed the money, no large scale fiber buildout was done.Until Fort Collins passed the "we are going to build out our own fiber network", Comcast was really dragging their feet on upgrades. You can get gigabit now for around $100/mo, if you commit to a year. I'm just sitting on 120mbps for $90/mo, because people the next neighborhood over are getting door hangers saying the city fiber is coming soon. |
Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer | The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly.You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job.So let me give one advice: you are not producing code, you are engineering code. Some will find solutions that the others will not find. Thats where the 10x programmer thing come from. The guy who wrote bittorrent said something like the following: "I've written bittorrent in a way you would never have thought about".You think John Carmack was the only one trying to make 3d games when Doom came out? Thousands of programmers where trying to. Does that make him a 10x programmer in your opinion? Or more like a 1000x? |
NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide | It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time.That aside, let me re-make a point I keep making:Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone on the whole Internet for the adoption of modern TLS with forward-secrecy; they are the world's foremost deployers of ephemeral-keyed elliptic curve cryptography and of certificate pinning, both of which ensure not only the security of the traffic running over the network cables into their data centers, but also minimize the impact of a compromised long-term encryption key or the compromise of the CA system by a state actor.Not only that, but Google launched a high-profile effort to encrypt the communications inside and between their data centers.I hope a couple years hindsight will put the importance of Adam Langley's work (and that of the rest of his team; he's just the best-known member of that team) at Google into sharper relief. |
Why Raspberry Pi Isn't Vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown | This is great, but remember that it covers Meltdown, not Spectre. Meltdown is the more immediate disaster, but Spectre is the more batshit vulnerability. You really want to get your head around:* The branch target injection variant of Spectre if you want to get a sense of how amazing this vulnerability is: you can spoof the branch predictor to trick a target process into running arbitrary code in its address space! This is crazy!* The misprediction variant of Spectre if you want to get a hopeless feeling in the pit of your stomach, since the implications of mispredict are that certain kinds of programs are riddled with a new kind of side channel we didn't really grok until last week, and no upcoming microcode update seems to be in the offing.You could probably use the same Python conceit to illustrate the other two attacks; someone might take a crack at that.(I'm not disputing that the R-Pi's aren't vulnerable to Spectre). |
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products | [I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade. |
My Experience at Apple | Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.Unlike others, I actually find this story fairly believable.When I first joined Apple, straight out of college - a good program, top three in the country - I was abused similarly. I joined a team that was on a project behind schedule.Our manager was a brusque, no-nonsense sort of dude. But he clearly had anger problems. On the team were 2 senior engineers, me, and a junior engineer that had just completed his internship and was on a work Visa.As the project got closer to the deadline, and the scope increased, the manager got agitated. In our team meetings, he would start yelling at us. People down the hallways would stare at us with those "looks." In our 1:1s he told us we might not have a job if our product doesn't ship on time (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)The two senior engineers decided they'd had enough and quit the team. The manager told us to work overtime (no overtime pay, but we had to for fear of our job). He promised us that if we did it that we would get a month of vacation on him, and that he could secure it for us.The product released. After countless nights of overtime we did it. Our manager left, our guarantee of a month of vacation evaporated, and for the next three months, us two junior engineers were left on 24/7 primary/secondary on-call for a critical service. It was a nightmare. Calls at 3 AM, 6 AM, on weekends.Our manager got a promotion and is fairly high up at Apple now.Horrible experience. I left for a new company that pays me nearly double. |
American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time | No... make daylight savings time permanent instead.As the paper states, the biggest problem is with the transition.The paper also argues that standard time aligns more naturally with our circadian rhythm... but doesn't bother to compare that with the psychological benefit we get from hanging out with friends in daylight after work in the summer, or the psychological benefit of it not being dark when you go home and have dinner with your family.I totally get that people who wake up early in the winter prefer standard time... but it really seems that for the population as a whole, permanent DST is the better option. And implementing it is so easy: once we're already in DST in the summer... you just never "fall back" to standard in the fall. |
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