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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg | In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presenting totally new information about the world, how can that be verified against other information that - by virtue of something being new - cannot be verified by other preexisting sources?If the fact checking process is limited to verification based on other information that is currently available, and if the fact checking process cannot distinguish between factual information and the opinions people hold as a result of that information, the outcome will be an inevitable echo chamber that reinforces currently dominant views or whatever preexisting biases are present.In short, fact checking is hard and there is a reason why reputable publishing outlets have their own internal fact verification processes before something gets published (including safeguards and retractions, because they make mistakes too), and why news is separated out from opinion-editorial pages... even if it is in style to add opinions (read: “perspective”) to every article. |
Tony Hsieh has died | When a prominent person in their 40s dies and there's no information released as to the cause of death, it's always a challenge not to make assumptions. |
Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act | I have a need for Zoom, virus or no, but the point of the article is why I don't give them money. Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me? That's just going to be a strong "no". As the final paragraph of TFA says, either charge more or give away less for free. But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible. Because they're skeezy. You don't want to appear skeezy, do you, Zoom?So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? Why am I hearing the hell out of it lately? Outstanding PR department?EDIT: thanks for your answers to “why use it, then?” Because “it just works” seems to be the summary, which hoo boy, one cannot say about a lot of the competition. |
Firefox Replay | As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop. Gnu is happy to live under c:/MSYS2, and ‘linux’ part was never good at desktop-home hardware anyway. These 1.77% are barely justified as an option, imo. |
Firefox 70 | Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the first release party!I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Google.So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the ecosystem.Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist.Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest discussion on this issue.Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm.News, social media, browsers, etc.If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else.If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt.Same thing for browsers.Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). |
uBlock Origin works best on Firefox | Honestly, I can't really browse on my phone anymore. I'm... spoiled by FF + uBlock and I can't tolerate all the distractions.Will we ever get enough traction on either blocking mechanisms or stop shoving ads everywhere? Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-less internet?P.S. I'm on an iPhone, blockers failed me so far. Thanks for the suggestions fellas. |
Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity | I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum.Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someone who can fit it. That isn't a support model. |
Wacom tablets track every app you open | It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capable via top universities, to be just another cog in building a toxic monstrosity this industry is becoming just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich. |
Apple does not keep the 30% commission on a refund | More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. I don't mean this in a judgmental way, when I saw this posted I thought "that doesn't sound right, but I guess if it has so many upvotes on HN it must be true".It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 |
Light Table - a new IDE concept | Am I the only one who wants to see multiple, proportional fonts in editors?Sure, I want to keep the methods themselves in monospaced font, but can't I have the method declaration in a larger size, and comments in a proportional serif?There is a wealth of design experience out there in communicating things better and more quickly with typography, so why do we not take advantage of that in our IDEs? |
Accidental Google Pixel Lock Screen Bypass | I went to buy a phone maybe two months ago. Before I had my current Google Pixel 6, I used a OnePlus 3T for six years, and even then I only stopped because I sat in a hot tub with it on. At the T-Mobile store, I announced to the salesman that I would be back to buy a Pixel 6 when they had it in stock, and a man pulled me aside and privately asked me why I wanted to buy a Pixel.He explained to me that he was actually working in the hardware division at Google and that the team that he was managing was responsible for some parts of the Pixel's design. But he added that he had never actually talked with anyone out "in the wild" who owned a Pixel or made a positive attempt to buy one. He went on to explain that most of his team didn't use a Pixel either - they were all pretty much using iPhones, but some were even using Samsung devices.I understand that this was someone from the hardware team and it doesn't necessarily reflect on the people who work on the Android OS, but I feel silly for not having taken what he said into consideration when I finally bought a phone. If the people working on a device don't even want to use it themselves and can't figure out a compelling reason for anyone else to use it, shouldn't that have been a strong signal to me that I shouldn't have selected it? But I did, and I've been regretting it since. Great camera though. |
Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me” | For those who haven't yet, I'd highly recommend reading "Steve Jobs", the biography by Isaacson. It portrays pretty much all of these events like Woz describes them, and is a very complete portrait of Jobs. Woz' status at HP as referenced isn't really covered, but his actions during the Apple I and II launches are pretty complete.EDIT: I'd like to point out that this book covers everything, up to Jobs death, and is about Jobs, not Apple. There's obviously a lot about Apple, but a good amount about Pixar ,NeXT, and Jobs' personal life as well. A great biography IMO, but it's not much about technology. |
Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels | "[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'"HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess."http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/06/hunter-s-thomps... |
Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups | this announcement is huge in multiple ways:1) they just ate every other 3rd party "secure" backup services lunch just like they did to the Hi-Res music industry.2) details of what they backup securely, besides photos (which is top priority for me): iCloud Drive: Includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents, PDFs, Safari downloads, or any other files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive.3)BUT, perhaps the BIGGEST news here is that Apple is making a backup statement to what they've been saying for years and what they've recently gotten negative attention on: They don't want your data. They're not Goodle/FB/Amazon. They're giving you 2TB+ of space and you can encrypt it to the point that you'll lose your data and they don't care -- they don't want to mine your data, they don't want to know what you store on there, the don't care to scan your pictures with AI 20 different ways, they don't want to monetize it, etc, etc., just pay them money for their service and transactionally they give you only thing that you want in return -- reliable, secure, private service.seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone/os/service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river. |
Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83 | I've not followed Nimoy's career post the end of Star Trek. If I wanted to start now to understand it what highlights should I look for? |
Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust | > After digging through the Go source code, we learned that Go will force a garbage collection run every 2 minutes at minimum. In other words, if garbage collection has not run for 2 minutes, regardless of heap growth, go will still force a garbage collection.> We figured we could tune the garbage collector to happen more often in order to prevent large spikes, so we implemented an endpoint on the service to change the garbage collector GC Percent on the fly. Unfortunately, no matter how we configured the GC percent nothing changed. How could that be? It turns out, it was because we were not allocating memory quickly enough for it to force garbage collection to happen more often.As someone not too familiar with GC design, this seems like an absurd hack. That this 2-minute hardcoded limitation is not even configurable comes across as amateurish even. I have no experience with Go -- do people simply live with this and not talk about it? |
Zoom terms now allow training AI on user content with no opt out | Thankfully nothing like this is in Jitsi Meet’s TOS: https://jitsi.org/meet-jit-si-terms-of-service/It never ceases to amaze me how companies choose the worst software! |
Standard Ebooks | Editor-in-chief here, happy to answer any questions! |
Apple previews Lockdown Mode | With this announcement, Apple are saying "we will protect you from state actors", which is a role usually performed by states. Apple is saying "we operate at the same level as nation states; we are a nation-state level entity operating in the "digital world": It's a flag-raise.It's the first such flag-raise I've seen. Security researchers talk about protections from state actors all the time, and there are tools which support that... but this is the first public announcement, and tool, from a corporation with more spare, unrestricted capital than many countries. It comes at a time when multiple nation states are competing for energy and food security; and Apple are throwing up a flag for a security-security fight (or maybe data-security). This is not just handy tech, it's full-on cultural zeitgeist stuff. Amazing. |
Introducing unlimited private repositories | 1. Take a gazillion dollars in funding on an over-hyped valuation,2. Go through significant organizational changes that end up with the departure of a co-founder (and more suits in the building).3. Notice that a significant segment of your growth (VC-funded startups) are running out of money.4. Switch to a user-based pricing to generate more revenue for investors, but spin it as a freebie "Hey! Look at the cool unlimited shit! No, no! Don't pay attention to the fact you're gonna be charged 3 times as much as before for the same service".The bottom line is that GitHub is free to do whatever the heck they want; if they believe that charging per user is going to make more (financial) sense to them, then they can go ahead and do it.But I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as a positive change. Most coders understand basic maths. |
The Tyranny of the Marginal User | I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it. |
John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence | This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics)As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. He's clearly the type that is happiest when he's deep in a technical problem rather than bureaucracy, and he likes moving fast.On top of that, he likes sharing with the community with talks and such, and ever since going under the FB umbrella, he's had to clear everything he says in public with Facebook PR, which clearly annoyed him.He's hungry for a new hard challenge. VR isn't really it right now since it's more hardware-bound by the need for hard-core optical research than software right now. With the Quest, he (in my opinion) solidified VR's path to mobile standalones. It's time to try his hand at another magic trick while he's on his game.John's the very definition of a world-class, tried and true engineer/scientist. He's shown time and time again the ability to dive into a field and become an expert very quickly (he went from making video games to literally building space rockets for a good bit before inventing the modern VR field with Palmer).If there's anyone I'd trust to both be able to dive into AGI quickly and do it the right(tm) way, it's John Carmack. |
I've Just Liberated My Modules | The fact that this is possible with NPM seems really dangerous. The author unpublished (erm, "liberated") over 250 NPM modules, making those global names (e.g. "map", "alert", "iframe", "subscription", etc) available for anyone to register and replace with any code they wish.Since these libs are now baked into various package.json configuration files (some with 10s of thousands of installs per month, "left-pad" with 2.5M/month), meaning a malicious actor could publish a new patch version bump (for every major and minor version combination) of these libs and ship whatever they want to future npm builds. Because most package.json configs use the "^1.0.1" caret convention (and npm --save defaults to this mode), the vast majority of future installs could grab the malicious version.@seldo Is there a plan to address this? If I'm understanding this right, it seems pretty scary :|[1] https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules-... |
Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL | > This is a dumb change. No part of a domain should be considered "trivial". As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that "www.domain.com" and "domain.com" are two different domains...What ISPs teach their users anymore these days? Why the heck do we want to go back to that?Time for a modicum of historical perspective.If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general.At EVERY STEP in that journey there has whining and griping from the more technically advanced folks (like all of us on this forum). They zero in on the negatives, the tradeoffs that come with simplification. They don't see the positives because they're technically advanced enough and don't benefit from simplification (or so they think).Then after the griping whines (sic) down and they realize the world didn't end and the downsides really weren't that bad and we move forward towards a better, simpler, more usable web.Like, who actually runs separate HTTP servers on example.com and www.example.com anyway? Everyone is hyperventilating over contrived "the principle of it all" examples. Bottom line, Apple & Google are putting usability above technical pedantry. That's the right priority for mass market technology products. |
U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly | Google definitely needs anti-trust scrutiny. The timing is suspicious though. Could political motivation be at play here?And why didn't Facebook get sued too? They're just as anti-competitive. Was there an implicit protection agreement reached at one of those private dinners Zuckerberg had at the White House?And what about Amazon? There's a whole laundry list of anti-competitive practices happening with their online sales and marketplace. |
The rule says, “No vehicles in the park” | I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended.To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.(To be clear, I think content moderation rules are often difficult to figure out when to apply. I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.) |
Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies | These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already.Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit. At this point, all the advertising profits are sucked out of the web by Facebook and Google. The rest of the industry, including publishers are just struggling to get by while two trillion dollar behemoths throw them scraps. |
The first conformant M1 GPU driver | "Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…"Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the past 10 years).If i weren't an iOS dev, i would have ran away from the apple ecosystem a long time ago. I love their hardware, and loved the brand back in the 80s and 90s when apple was about creativity, putting humans first before machine, etc. But what this company has become is just a corrupted mess of greed behind a curtain of politically correct marketing videos. |
Being sued, in East Texas, for using the Google Play Store [video] | People will mention the problem with patents but I see another, perhaps bigger, problem:We do not have equal access to our judicial system in the United States.If you have money, you have the power to legally hold people with less over a barrel. That exploitable inequality is poison for a well functioning society. That is the problem that needs solving. |
I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit | I ran a website for youngsters several years ago.
One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards.
Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email/IP/or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles.Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would stream chunks over TCP so the slowness feeling was even more real).Worked like a charm. Few days after the recalcitrant would no longer come on the website.I called this “moderation by degradation of user experience”, and was pretty effective like the solution described in your post.Think about page load if you need to restrain visits. |
DDoS Attack Against Dyn Managed DNS | Out of curiosity, why do caching DNS resolvers, such as the DNS resolver I run on my home network, not provide an option to retain last-known-good resolutions beyond the authority-provided time to live? In such a configuration, after the TTL expiration, the resolver would attempt to refresh from the authority/upstream provider, but if that attempt fails, the response would be a more graceful failure of returning a last-known-good resolution (perhaps with a flag). This behavior would continue until an administrator-specified and potentially quite generous maximum TTL expires, after which nodes would finally see resolution failing outright.Ideally, then, the local resolvers of the nodes and/or the UIs of applications could detect the last-known-good flag on resolution and present a UI to users ("DNS authority for this domain is unresponsive; you are visiting a last-known-good IP provided by a resolution from 8 hours ago."). But that would be a nicety, and not strictly necessary.Is there a spectacular downside to doing so? Since the last-known-good resolution would only be used if a TTL-specified refresh failed, I don't see much downside. |
A GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy | Why do people in ML put imports inside function definitions? |
Instagram's Million Dollar Bug | Thank you to everybody who cautioned against judgment before hearing the whole story. Here is my response: https://www.facebook.com/notes/alex-stamos/bug-bounty-ethics... |
Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres | The Guardian example was heavily used by MongoDB as a case study to pitch their database to others in 2011:https://www.mongodb.com/customers/guardianhttps://www.mongodb.com/presentations/mongodb-guardianhttps://www.slideshare.net/tackers/why-we-chose-mongodb-for-...And reupping my previous, three-part series on MongoDB:On MongoDBNoSQL databases were the future. MongoDB was the database for "modern" web engineers and used by countless startups. What happened?https://www.nemil.com/mongo/index.html |
TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence | This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library designed to make it easy to do exactly these things, and to scale them with your available computing power, along with libraries of the latest tricks in neural networks, machine learning (which is pretty close to "statistics").As a bonus, it has built-in automatic differentiation so that you can run gradient descent on any algorithm — which means that you can just write a program to evaluate the goodness of a solution and efficiently iterate it to a local maximum. If you do this enough times, hopefully you'll find a global maximum. There are a variety of other numerical optimization algorithms, but gradient descent is very simple and broadly applicable.And it runs in IPython (now Jupyter), which is a really amazingly powerful way to do exploratory software development. If you haven't tried Jupyter/IPython, google up a screencast and take a look.I'm just repeating the stuff that's on the home page in a different form, but this is a really big deal. Most of the most significant software of the next five or ten years is going to be built in TensorFlow or something like it. (Maybe Dan Amelang's Nile; see Bret Victor's amazing video on the dataflow visualization he and Dan built for Nile recently at https://youtu.be/oUaOucZRlmE?t=24m53s, or try the live demo at http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/high_contrast.html, or download and build the Nile system from https://github.com/damelang/nile.)Apparently the Googlers think that too, because among the 39 authors of the white paper are several shining stars of systems research, including some who may be up for a Turing Award in the next decade or two. |
Welcome, ACLU | Although I think the American Civil Liberties Union is incredibly valuable and I'm glad they have a lot more money now to fight for the American people, I'm questioning all of this.Where was the outpouring of funding when black people were being gunned down by cops from West Coast organizations? Where has YCombinator been as our own impoverished African-Americans are getting slaughtered in the streets of Chicago? Why weren't we funding the ACLU to help these people? I haven't seen Google talk about this, or AirBnB offer support to widows of veterans whose spouse commits suicide and has left them with nothing.I feel for immigrants from war-torn countries, especially having been there myself. Maybe I'm too cynical and look at these moves (AirBnB, Uber, Google, etc...) as marketing moves. I wish we cared more about homeless people, people in West Virginia and Kentucky who have lost their jobs and got drenched in opiates without any protests from anybody, or veterans who can't pay their VA bills. Idk.I know this comment will be unpopular, and that's ok. I tend to care more about those who I feel (whether true or not) are being left behind because that's who I am. |
Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try | Most of the comments here are about using or not using Firefox, depending on it's features as compared to primarily Chrome. However, for me, it is not about being better or having more features at all - it is because I like Firefox and want to support Mozilla and believe that Google should not control the web. It is somewhat similar to the free software vs. open source debate - one should use free software not because it is better, but because it is the right thing to do (I understand that not many people agree with this philosophy, which is fine).Having said that, all sites which I regularly use work perfectly for me in Firefox with acceptable performance. So I never found a reason to switch at all. Rarely, I come across a website which is "best viewed with Chrome"; my default action is to close that site immediately. |
Microsoft Coffee | Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :) |
Visualizing Algorithms | Author here, ask me anything. And don’t miss the related work section at the end — there’s a ton of links there to inspiring work. |
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know | As an SRE Manager, this is causing me a hell of a headache this morning.In 30 days a bunch of images we depend on may just disappear. We mostly depend on images from relatively large organizations (`alpine`, `node`, `golang`, etc), so one would want to believe that we'll be fine - they're all either in the open source program or will pay. But I can't hang my hat on that. If those images disappear, we lose the ability to release and that's not acceptable.There's no way for us to see which organizations have paid and which haven't. Which are members of the open source program and which aren't. I can't even tell which images are likely at risk.The best I can come up with, at the moment, is waiting for each organization to make some sort of announcement with one of "We've paid, don't worry", "We're migrating, here's where", or "We've applied to the open source program". And if organizations don't do that... I mean, 30 days isn't enough time to find alternatives and migrate.So we're just left basically hoping that nothing blows up in 30 days.And companies that do that to me give me a very strong incentive to never use their products and tools if I can avoid it. |
YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube | The internet promised so much, but is being ruined by corporations and governments.I can't help but feel the ruining is accelerating.I hope the infosec community can come up with some kind of decentralized way to actually share free speech. If anyone is capable, they are.The discovery problem is an illusion. If you build it, they will come. |
Please do not attempt to simplify this code | The comment:code ratio is higher than anything I write or that I’ve seen.However, it does give me some comfort. When it’s not gamed, do other HNers also feel that a high comment:code ratio probably indicates quality?There are reasons why this may be the case. (More thought, more time and a large team etc)I don’t advocate using this measure to reward anyone because it would be gamed immediately. |
FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign | A few years back I got audited, and it was called an "electronic audit" by the IRS. Which basically meant that they had their computer systems scour a bunch of the bank records and discovered that I had forgotten to claim a 1099 for some contract work I had. OK, so they sent me a computer print out and they had cross checked everything on my return electronically, my property tax deductions, my stock dividends so on and so on.Ok, so if they can do all that automatically for an "electronic audit" why am I filing a return, just run that thing and send it to me and I can file an exception if there is something on it I disagree with.I think the answer has already been identified in several other comments here, a heavy lobby effort on the part of Intuit, H&R and whoever else to keep it tricky and complex so you have to buy their B.S> software or services. |
Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank | After watching The laundromat, I think it's big news.Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth, and why they're trusted to do it. This can't be secure or safe. I'm curious about the diplomacy and the political implications of this.What if their office get robbed? What if the island gets attacked? What if one of those shady bank defaults? What if one of the people who manage it suddenly die? I mean apparently there is a long list of why it's risky, and I don't understand how this is even legal at all. How do you wire all this money to such a small place, and how can they trust so few people to hide so much money? I have so many questions. |
Which Emoji Scissors Close? | I really enjoyed this. It is very similar to "Please, enough with the dead butterflies!" [0] I'd like to see a list of everything like this. Similar to Awesome falsehood [1] but not quite.0: https://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies... ( HN 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 HN 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 )1: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood |
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file | I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?" Just a quick control-S and I'm there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year, or the year before, on this day, in seconds.I just type note (maybe some text here)
and it cracks open Emacs on the notes file, adds a timestamp, appends the optional text, and then I can just type or paste something in. Nearly frictionless, that's key. Great for writing those miserable annual reviews, too (easy answers to "what have I worked on in the past year?")I use plain old notebooks (simple blank sketchpads, or something bound like a Moleskin/Lecchturm) for meetings, interviews, walking around datacenters and so forth where a keyboard is awkward and anyway, drawings.I've tried the EverNote/OneNote/etc. apps and none of them were as convenient or as easy to use, or as portable. |
TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS | It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need to add attribution". |
The worst programmer I know | It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience.Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently write 5000+ lines per code per week, regardless of how many features they actually ship and how many bugs they introduce.As a team lead and engineer who has managed some complex projects, the idea of someone writing over 2000 lines of code per week terrifies me... That's over 100K lines of code a year. Think of the unnecessary complexity. There is a very good chance that the same feature set could have been implemented with just 10K lines of code, less buggy and in half the time though that would only amount to 380 lines of code per week! Management won't like that.I tend to think that the dev who can churn out thousands of lines isn't thinking deeply enough about the long term direction of the project; all the code they're writing is essentially throwaway code. |
Easter egg in flight path of last 747 delivery flight | I find it just really endearing that at companies, regardless of how many other issues they have or the dysfunctions and bland corporate culture, there are people who keep the pride of purpose and "olden days / traditions" in their memory and do things like this. Or are able to call on institutional memory of something bygone, that reappears once in a while. (whether it's a big gesture like this or small cultural day-to-day manifestations).You wonder how pockets of this survive when top management comes and goes, who sometimes only know the company as just some logo or another corporation to be managed, and when workforces go through rounds and rounds of potential layoffs where such knowledge and initiative is generally lost.Maybe it also helps to be a company that has at least something to do with hardware that leaves a physical history :) |
“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this” | I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read online the government does deep packet analysis and uses machine learning to find heuristics to guess which TCP connection or UDP stream is likely being used as a VPN. When they think there is a high probability a VPN is detected, they simply start dropping all the packets.Encryption is not enough. You need to disguise your VPN traffic to make it look like standard HTTPS sessions (since they don't block HTTPS). For example in a traditional HTTPS session, if the client browser downloads, say, a 500kB image over HTTPS, it will send periodical empty TCP ACK packets as it receives the data. But when using a VPN that encrypts data at the IP layer, these empty ACK packets will be encrypted, so The Great Firewall will see the client sending small ~80-120 bytes encrypted packets, and will count this as one more sign that this might be a VPN.That's why people in China have to use VPN tools that most westerners have never heard of: obfsproxy, ShadowVPN, SoftEther, gohop, etc. All these tools try to obfuscate and hide VPNs. I have a lot of respect for all these Chinese hackers like clowwindy who try to escape censorship, as it takes more technical prowess than you think to design a VPN that works in China. |
Congrats Dropbox | Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :)And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with!Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :) |
Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public | Hey everyone. Happy to answer any questions about this. Basically, we think that LinkedIn profiles don't do a good job of showing engineering skill (especially for self-taught people or people from non-traditional backgrounds). I'm excited to just build better support for showing side projects and GitHub contributions. LinkedIn profiles have become the default engineering resume (despite the fact that most engineers are not particularly happy with their LinkedIn profile). But there's lock-in. I hope that we have enough scale to be able to chip away at this. |
I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115 | There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here:===The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.===Advance congratulations to Jennifer. This is amazing. |
New iPhone SE | As a current iPhone SE user, here's my assessment:Pros:* Feature set in terms of processor, camera, etc., is exactly what I want* Continued presence of Touch ID is a huge plus, I don't like Face ID* Price point is, admittedly, fantasticCons:* Lack of headphone jack is still unacceptable* Form factor is, candidly, still too big for my tiny hands* Color schemes aren't as nice as the SE's (can I contribute to COVID-19 research without getting a bright red phone?)I will be considering this phone, but skeptically. Would be ideal for me to be able to physically hold one before buying, but not sure that'll be possible (maybe I can borrow somebody's iPhone 8). |
Nebraska farmers vote overwhelmingly for Right to Repair | Honest question: what would be the rationale to prevent farmers from repairing their machinery themselves instead of through the manufacturer (in this case, Deere)?To my mind, from the point of view of the "user" (i.e. the farmer), that can be seen as somewhat monopolistic.I tried to find similarities between this situation and that of Apple not letting users tamper with their hardware, but it could be argued that the latter makes a bit more sense given that most of their customers, statistically speaking, are not necessarily tech enthusiasts who know their way around hardware, but in the case of a farmer, I'd imagine most would be perfectly capable of messing around with the internals of a tractor, albeit some software-heavy parts would of course prove almost impossible to "repair".EDIT: Grammar |
Show HN: Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game | Gameplay feedback: Mohawk (helicopter) and Prowler (stealthy) don't seem worth it.
The helicopter dies from a single stray rocket, random spam and attacks from behind. Alt+arrow for strafe worked in DooM because field of view always pointed away from the player. Here, strafing is hard to get used to.
Since there are already 2 keys for ability, why not make one of them "strafe left" and the other "strafe right" ?
Also, because helicopter lacks a clear point, it's harder to aim.Stealthy Prowler is very slow and not especially fun to play. To the point that only effective way to play is to cloak after every rocket fired. You crawl towards a victim, then shoot at close range, then recloak. Visual notification is quite subtle, there's no sound and you end up mashing the ability key never quite sure if it already worked. So it kinda works against newbies... but sneak attacks are also effective with Goliath (the fat one) and Tornado (multifire). So I don't see the point. And here's the kicker: advanced players see it because they play (and aim!) by radar. This is an issue when fighting away from the crowd.Thoughts on upgrades:
- I would appreciate a kind of "laser sight" upgrade. Each level would render a laser line in front of your plane, and the line would get longer with levels. |
FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up | I'm always curious how a bug like this ships. I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure. But even before then. Some engineer wrote code for FaceTime that has it open the microphone before the call is accepted. And transmit the audio over the network before the call is accepted. Who did that? And why? I'm not suggesting malice but I do wonder at the lack of defensive programming. |
Let's Encrypt Root Trusted by All Major Root Programs | Glad to hear this! Let's Encrypt is such an amazing resource -- it single-handedly caused a leap in internet security as well as removing what was essentially a artificially inflated (IMO) barrier to entry (for most people) to getting certs.Has anyone set up the new wildcard certs? If so, who did you choose as your DNS 01 Challenge[0] provider? I currently do DNS through a local provider and they don't have an API so it's been out of my reach. |
NanoGPT | Wow, fun to find this trending on HN this morning! I am currently also working on the associated video lecture (as the next episode of my video lecture series here https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html ), where I will build nanoGPT from scratch and aspire to spell everything out, as with the earlier videos. Hoping to get it out in ~2 weeks or so. |
EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf] | https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix... is our attempt at Matrix to spell out what a catastrophic idea it is to backdoor end-to-end encryption (and to provide an alternative proposal in the form of using decentralised reputation to mitigate abuse. We're kicking decentralised reputation work off in earnest tomorrow, so watch this space to see how it goes).I guess we'll be weighing in on the EU proposal as well as the 7-eyes one. |
Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer | Admittedly, my first days as a junior programmer were before some of you were born, but I'm thinking of a particular format here...Learned as junior: If you report an OS bug or some other deep problem, seniors will not believe you and assume you're making excuses for your own bugs and lack of understanding.Understood as senior: If a junior programmer tells me they found a system-level bug, I won't believe them and will tell them to go figure out what's wrong with their code.Learned as junior: Legacy code is hard to read.Understood as senior: Legacy code that I wrote myself is hard to read.Learned as junior: Technical skills matter most.Understood as senior: Communication skills matter most.Learned as junior: New tech solves old problems.Understood as senior: New tech creates new problems. |
Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin | To defend Google a bit, it looks like the change is being put in place so that users would have more privacy – by stopping extensions accessing all active URLs.In essence they are copying what Apple did with Safari and their content blocking APIs. In this model, content blockers provide the browser with a set of blocking rules and the browser executes them against pages during render & load. Ad blocking can occur and privacy of what the user is viewing is retained.Sure it's more restrictive and yes will likely break existing adblockers, but it's probably a better model for the future.There will be arguments that you "can't do what is necessary" to create effective adblockers. That's incorrect.... I've created such an adblocker [1] using the Safari methods and its efficient, effective and high performance – including loading some sites 2x faster.[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/ |
Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help | I'm having similar issues, and i think i found a way out: stop playing their game. Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code. Don't worry about deployment with k8s, just copy the Python script to your production folder and run it. Fuck all that shit about git branch naming conventions, or how you're supposed to use an object factory, just do whatever you want in the moment, bit by bit, until your software works most of the time then use it. Forget configuration, just hard code values for now. Don't worry about documentation, just do it.Your expectations, and the expectations of others, are your enemy here.At least, that's what got me out it. I'm still disillusioned with the world but it's manageable if I can realize I'm making a difference to my son and wife every day, and that's what counts for me. |
Total Cookie Protection | > Total Cookie Protection makes a limited exception for cross-site cookies when they are needed for non-tracking purposes, such as those used by popular third-party login providers.Would be great to have some more details about it: in particular, how do I turn it off if I prefer to add any exceptions manually.Edit 1: Mozilla Hacks blog [1] has a bit more but still doesn't answer the question:> In order to resolve these compatibility issues of State Partitioning, we allow the state to be unpartitioned in certain cases. When unpartitioning is taking effect, we will stop using double-keying and revert the ordinary (first-party) key.What are these "certain cases?"Edit 2: Reading on, there's this bit about storage access grants heuristics [2] linked from the blog. But is that really it, or is there a hardcoded whitelist as well? If so, it'd be great to see it.This bit in particular is ambiguous in how it's supposed to work exactly (who's "we" here):> If we discover that an origin is abusing this heuristic to gain tracking access, that origin will have the additional requirement that it must have received user interaction as a first party within the past 30 days.1. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/introducing-state-partitio...2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Pri... |
Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content | This is the result of out-sourcing juristic work to private companies:If we treat Android, Window, Twitter, Facebook, as public spaces/goods, then private companies should not have a say in what is allowed/not-allowed on their platforms. This is work for the courts and police to decide and enforce.If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy. They have every right to kick you out if they don't like your face. It's their property. You are a guest.I think we need constituted digital public spaces and platforms with:- democratic footing (users are in charge)- public ownership- division of power (politicians =!= judges =!= police)- effective policingIn such a system it would be for independent courts to decide which Apps can be distributed
and which not. Those courts would be bound to a constitution/body of law, which applies to all parties a like.Yes, this will be expensive. Yes, you will have to give up some privacy.
But you will be a citizen in a society, and not a stranger playing in a backyard.Maybe the current platforms can be coerced into a system which approximates the above.
But I have my doubts.
I hope in 200years people will have figured this out, and will look back to this age as the digital dark ages. |
Google engineer writing Amazon reviews on USB-C cables that don't work | I see no reason why to buy anything but Anker.I once tried to purposely destroy an Anker MicroUSB cable (bought a 5 pack that had three 3ft, one 6ft, one 1ft, didn't need the 1ft), by grabbing the head of it with clamping pliers and yanking the fuck out of it with the cable wrapped around my hand, and bending it to near 180 degrees repeatedly for about 5 minutes.I could not kill it without straight up taking wire cutters to it, which I decided not to do.The cable still works perfectly, and sits in my junk drawer for when I need to plug something into the front of my case and leave the thing sitting on top of the computer.Literally any other brand? Most I would have been able to rip the head off the cable after the first few yanks, the few that survived that would have broken the wire pairs inside either from that or from the repeated 180 degree bend.Remember those original Monoprice USB cables we all bought and loved back in the day? Those didn't survive that abuse, and Monoprice cables have only gotten worse then. And the AmazonBasics USB cables (that I recommend for non-MicroUSB cables (only because Anker doesn't make them, only MicroUSB, Type C, and Lightning))? Don't survive that level of abuse either.Anker also has the best damned USB chargers for walls and cars I've ever seen (heaviest USB chargers I've ever had, no coil whine, doesn't EZ-Bake itself, shuts off completely when nothing is plugged in), they're just perfectly glorious. |
Why Lichess will always be free | > There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the past.While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly. If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users.If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly. |
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) | Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all".Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. And as for Qt, Qt has existed for over two decades - if its massive "Beatles walking off the plane" moment hasn't happened by then, sorry, it's not gonna.But now? People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are excited about the Desktop again - Electron is so good it's single-handedly revitalizing the platform that
two of the largest tech companies in the world are behind, yet couldn't do.That is a Big Deal. |
TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free | I am the developer in charge of CalFile, the free filing software that everyone asks for here for state of California.https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/ways-to-file/online/calfile/inde...I am pushing so hard to make it better and more useful to more people, like being able to add capital gain that is not currently supported.these are the push backs that I am getting:1. Last time they tried to do what all of you ask, a ready return. TurboTax and others hired bunch of lobbyist and put so much pressure on people here and killed the project. People are still afraid and don't want to do too much to grab the attention of their lobbyist!2. Use of CalFile goes down every year and if trend continues, it would be killed in the near future.when you have your Federal return it is much easier to pay a little more and file your state tax with it too.
No body even knows CalFile exist because we don't have a marketing budget to promote it.3. Even people here buy the argument that free software exist and people could file their taxes for free. |
OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming | I'm one of the core contributors for OBS. Our website traffic has more than doubled over the last couple of weeks due to the COVID-19 situation - when we released the v25 update we accidentally killed our site due to a cache stampede after purging the CDN (oops).We're seeing all kinds of new uses, especially users who are integrating the OBS Virtualcam plugin to do presentations and other content sharing with apps that only support webcam input. |
Mozilla Lifeboat | It's very weird that Mozilla is laying off 25% of its workforce while at the same time spending oodles of cash on its Fix The Internet incubator. I'm not a business major; maybe this is normal. |
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? | Lots of the internet is fun and weird.https://pouet.net is the unofficial home of the demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself.https://dwitter.net needs no commentStack Overflow has answers like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454Half of tumblr is totally out there.I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet. |
Fred Brooks has died | I have fond memories of attending his "No Silver Bullet" lecture only a few short years ago.A favorite quote of mine from MMM: "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures...." |
Your Computer Isn't Yours | Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges.These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy and people have resoundingly responded that neither do they.I would suggest that the users here are probably some of the best suited in the world to help smooth those rough edges and even surpass the features and usability in the privacy respecting alternatives I just hope we collectively notice this before it's too late. |
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar | This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :)A few notes:- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;- US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;- May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) but I consider omitting the whole DST thing a major missed opportunity. :)Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. I believe they still maintain some Internet presence but mostly gave up on promoting it. Good luck breaking 1000+yo habits. |
Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension | I manually unfollowed almost every friend and every page I followed a couple years ago. My feed is now a very limited selection of gaming and media posts that I enjoy immensely. No politics at all and almost nothing in my feed from actual individuals that I know. I ended up enjoying Facebook again, even if in a very different way.It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours. |
Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus | Here is a source in Russian [0] saying that Apple is asking Telegram to remove messages that de-anonymize Belorussian police members, rather than blocking channels outright. I don't know whether their source is reliable, but here is the relevant snippet (google translate):> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online. Without going into the moral weeds, from the terms-of-service point of view that's basically griefing, no?So this is a very curious quandary Apple finds itself in. Let's assume that griefing Belorussian law enforcement is a good thing. But at the same time griefing people (regardless of whether they are bad/good/chaotic neutral) is against the TOS.So what do you do if you are Apple?[0] https://tjournal.ru/tech/221326-apple-zayavila-chto-ne-trebo... |
Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU | We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.This will only hurt people actually fighting for their rights, and this needs to stop. |
I started a paper website business | Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc. I'd say this story refutes that one. |
Ask HN: Gmail account security | They also do this thing now where they block [1] smaller browsers (even ones using the latest version of chromium) under the guise of security. According to their docs they're fighting MITMs by generally disallowing any browser they can't identify (so the big few).If you're not on a whitelisted browser by Google, you can't log in (effectively, use) any of their properties.This feels very anti-competitive to me. Notably all the whitelisted browsers are either theirs (Chrome) or sell them their search traffic. I'm building a browser for research [2] and have to frequently find workarounds. I'm not quite sure who I'd contact to get on said whitelist either...[1] https://imgur.com/a/DASVkhl (here is the issue in the Vim browser and Min browser)[2] https://synth.app |
Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers | On the whole, all these scandals in manipulated research have deeply shaken my trust in many of our scientific institutions. It's clear by now this isn't the case of a few bad apples - our scientific institutions are systemically broken in ways that promote spreading fraudulent results as established scientific truth. |
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked | You will find lots of such examples of a feature which you personally find very important and wonder why such a simple thing is not supported yet. I guess everyone has such examples. And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows.For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration is still not implemented. I implemented it a while ago for Xorg, which is outdated now, and also the maintainer was not happy with my approach. It's now a long outstanding proposal for libinput, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/7 / https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/405 (original bug report from 2010: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29905).Anyway, I guess there are actually not too much people caring about this feature. And the intersection of those who do and those who have enough free time and knowledge to implement this is just empty.Btw, I don't quite understand the comment about KDE. It sounds like the the author claims that KDE lacks other relevant features. But comparing Gnome vs KDE, it is quite clear that KDE has much more features. This is never a complaint I heard about KDE. |
Obama Commutes Bulk of Chelsea Manning’s Sentence | Seven years is still a long time for whistle blowing. I'm glad to see she is still getting released though. It's important to note commuting the sentence is not a pardon. Chelsea will still have this conviction for the rest of her life.I know there is a lot of controversy with Manning compared to Wikileaks et. al. as far as not redacting documents or using a discriminating news source to filter them. Still, I oppose state secrets and the Hillary e-mails are actually very chilling when you start reading through them. I still side with Manning. Too many of the Snowden documents were redacted with critical information (like which hardware encryption chips were compromised by the US government). No one has the actual Pentagon Papers outside of very specific news agencies. Manning gave the entire story to the people .. and I find it more sad that we didn't see more outrage and change from that release.I also see another message here. Obama is trying to leave a positive view of the Democratic legacy with this lasting memory. It helps people forget about the predator drones, secret kill lists, continuation of torture, NSA spying and the expansion of war, military and the American hegemony throughout the world. I wish people would see this manipulation; this handout to the left to keep them angry at the incoming administration and not at the government that continues to spy on them and kill people without trial in and endless sea of never ending conflict. |
The Framework Laptop is now shipping | Framework Founder here! I am happy to answer any questions on the product. |
StableLM: A new open-source language model | I tooted this yesterday:Selling access to LLMs via remote APIs is the “stage plays on the radio” stage of technological development. It makes no actual sense; it’s just what the business people are accustomed to. It’s not going to last very long. So much more value will be unlocked by running them on device. People are going to look back at this stage and laugh, like paying $5/month to a cellphone carrier for Snake on a feature phone.Web apps:- Need data persistence. Distributed databases are really hard to do.- Often have network effects where the size of the network causes natural monopoly feedback loops.None of that applies to LLMs.- Making one LLM is hard work and expensive. But once one exists you can use it to make more relatively cheaply by generating training data. And fine tuning is more reliable than one shot learning.- Someone has to pay the price of computation power. It’s in the interest of companies to make consumers pay for it up front in the form of a device.- Being local lets you respond faster and with access to more user contextual data. |
It's time to head back to RSS? | I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur (https://newsblur.com/) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back.p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on. |
A few things to know before stealing my 914 | > Depress the clutch as you would in any car, and pull the knob from its secure location out of first gear. Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed gear teeth machining themselves into round cylinders.I was confused by this until I searched for "Porsche 914 shift pattern" on Google Images. I guess it's a dog-leg gearbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-leg_gearbox). |
Hello, GitHub | I’m going to be a bit contrarian to “the sky is falling” posts on HN and say: I think Microsoft is handling this really well.1) They’ve acknowledged the skepticism around the acquisition.2) They’ve expressed their commitment to keep GitHub an independent platform (like they did with LinkedIn.)3) Nat Friedman, although I was not familiar with him prior to this, seems like an ideal candidate to run GitHub.This, overall, is giving me a more positive impression of Microsoft. Now what remains to be seen: Will they follow through on these commitments? Will they continue to listen to the community? |
Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption | Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy in this case). |
What Happens When You Send a Zero-Day to a Bank? | There needs to exist a legal entity/non-profit or company that acts as a shield and/or escrow for these kinds of situations. Basically, as a researcher you can have them deal with the company/organization for you, including dealing with any threats, collecting any bounties due, and such. The company could have domain expertise of the industry, laws, and generally be a force against these companies -- the analogy would be a lawyer.This is for cases where you want the credit but still want the protections afforded by being somewhat anonymous. Similar to WikiLeaks but more focused on allowing the company or entity to solve their problems and representing fairness on all sides. |
All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware | Isn't this hackernews??So many "but what if this and that and this..." & "and yeah let's see if it can handle X & Y"This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars!
That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..."Don't we have to start somewhere??
Aren't there supposed to be a big user base here who understands that it's an evolutionary process - we build the plane before we build the rocket before we shoot people into space?Oviously the perfect self-driving car is still some way off, but I for one am thrilled this race is on! |
The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written | I'd argue that Google Search is much more sophisticated than Stuxnet. Windows is much more sophisticated. Linux is more sophisticated than Stuxnet. The list goes on.We tend to ignore the sophistication of things we are familiar with, and hype those that surprise. But that's not a fair measure of anything. |
FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote | Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates. The main gist of the the new regulations is the classify broadband access as a utility under Title II of Communications act. This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US.Reading comment threads, a person new to the issue might get the impression as if the US government just nationalized comcast. I'm finding it hard to believe that the regular HN crowd has suddenly turned virulently anti Title II. This definitely smells like a coordinated campaign to spread FUD. |
U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation | Can someone explain why America has reservations? From what I know, Native Indians had this land almost 2+ centuries ago. Why have a special, looks like an autonomous, region and special treatment to people that are a few generations down from when this happened?How far back into the history should we go? |
The Chaostron: An Important Advance in Learning Machines (1961) | How does this post have so many points (350+ right now), yet no comments? |
John Perry Barlow has died | JPB on meeting a partner on an evening when he was due to roast Steve Jobs at a NeXT Expo.https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/transcript#act3 |
David Bowie Has Died | I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.~ David Bowie, 2002 |
One Bad Apple | NCMEC has essentially shows that they have zero regard for privacy and called all privacy activists "screeching voices of the minority". At the same time, they're at the center point of a highly opaque, entrenched (often legally mandated) censorhip infrastructure that can and will get accounts shut down irrecoverably and possibly people's homes raided, on questionable data:In one of the previous discussions, I've seen claims about the NCMEC database containing a lot of harmless pictures misclassified as CSAM. This post confirms this again (ctrl-f "macaque")It also seems like the PhotoDNA hash algorithm is problematic (to the point where it may be possible to trigger false matches).Now NCMEC seem to be pushing for the development of a technology that would implant an informant in every single of our devices (mandating the inclusion of this technology is the logical next step that seems inevitable if Apple launches this).I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. The NCMEC seems to have decided to position itself directly alongside other Enemies of the Internet, and while I can imagine that they're also doing a lot of important and good work, at this point, I don't think they're salvageable would like to see them disbanded.Really curious how this will play out. I expect attacks either sabotaging these scanning systems by flooding them with false positives, or exploiting them to get the accounts of your enemies shut down permanently by sending them a picture of a macaque. |
Thanks, HN: You helped discover a disease and save lives | (There's a shout-out to HN in the article.)Two years ago, HN was the first to pick up on a post I wrote about my son's preliminary diagnosis via experimental exome sequencing:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038113Two years ago, he was the only known NGLY1 deficient patient in the world.By spreading the story, we've found 16 cases worldwide.We've organized.We've found preliminary treatments.Clinical trials are in the pipeline.In some cases, we've saved the lives of previously undiagnosed patients.And, these children's cells are turning into gold mines for the basic science of glycobiology.From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the entire small but optimistic NGLY1 community,Thank you. |
India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps | India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box, there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.At the very least, the government should audit the algos and make sure China can’t arbitrarily alter ranking results. |
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